The Ninth Circle

by R. M. Meluch

  Merrimack’s new XO was jaunty Commander Stuart Ryan from Oz. Everyone called him Dingo. During the war, Dingo had commanded a small ship at the siege of Palatine charged with drop-kicking Rome’s power stations out of planetary orbit.

  Dingo Ryan stood up, eyed his captain head to heels. “Captain, you’re going to kill someone.”

  Other personnel on deck stood up even though they’d been waved down. They didn’t salute. They bowed.

  “Mister Ryan, brig the lot,” Calli said.

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  A civilian transport ferried the captain to the main station of Port Campbell. She appeared at the governor’s residence on the arm of her husband, baby-faced Rob Roy Buchanan. Rob Roy had shaved for the occasion, so he looked even younger.

  Rob Roy looked like the victim of an overdone rejuvenation. But he hadn’t been through rejuv. Ever. Rob Roy was not a line officer. The Navy didn’t rejuv his type. Anyway, if Rob Roy Buchanan ever went through rejuv, they’d be handing him lollipops.

  Calli’s dress shimmered cobalt, emerald, and gold. The slit in one side of the long skirt flashed a leg bracelet of laced gold from knee to ankle.

  Governor Kidd beheld his guest at the door and clapped his hand over his heart as if it had stopped. “Empress Calli!”

  The captain had picked up the nickname when she accompanied Romulus on a regrettable date just before he became Caesar. It was the kind of name that sticks and never comes off.

  Conversation stayed on a civilized course during dinner with the governor. Only after dinner, while shooting billiards and sipping brandy in the parlor, did prickly subjects come up.

  “What really brings Merrimack this way,” Governor Kidd asked, lining up a shot.

  “Our destination is a planet called Zoe,” said Captain Carmel.

  Kidd looked up from the table. Commented, “Oh, you really are headed out to the woop woop, aren’t you?”

  The planet Zoe was well away from any trade route, and it was off limits for settlement. That made the world interesting only to scientists.

  Kidd took his shot, chalked his cue. “Shame about the sapient natives there. Can’t build a single hotel. Can’t do anything with it. And it’s a pretty planet.”

  Kidd missed his next shot, either to be polite, or he just wanted Calli to lean over the table. Calli was certain that the governor could have run the table. He won the set, despite his attempts to let her win.

  “I appreciate your making time for us, Captain Carmel. Everyone was afraid to take a ship out of its station before you got here.”

  “Traffic will keep moving after we go,” Calli predicted.

  “God, I hope so. Sooner or later they’ve got to realize the leopard can only be in one place at one time.”

  “Leopard?” said Rob Roy.

  “Leopard.” Governor Kidd crossed his parlor to activate a holographic image. The image displayed was a giant leopard on a star field, as viewed through a ship’s porthole.

  The beast was vivid, spectacular. Its bloody mouth moved in a silent roar over a kill.

  “Ferocious picture,” said Rob Roy.

  “Isn’t it?” said Kidd. “They pirated it.”

  The governor pointed to the belly of the beast where the Xerxes—which was projecting the leopard hologram onto the star field—was visible.

  Disconcerting to see the shape of the U.S. President’s ship painted in leopard spots and flying a Jolly Roger. A fiery circled IX shone on the ship’s standard.

  “Did the ship that took this picture survive?” Calli asked.

  “No.” Kidd shut off the projector. “They’re a thoroughly bad lot, The Ninth Circle. Doesn’t matter that half their victims are the wrong sort—no one you’d feel sorry for. Still, it’s a gruesome thing picking up human remains from the vacuum. And the other half of their victims are responders. And that is twelve degrees past wrong. They have a large arsenal.”

  Calli asked, “How did they get a large arsenal?” A Xerxes only carried defensive weapons. To protect itself from pirates.

  “The Ninth Circle kill anyone who tries to arrest them, then they gut the ship. So they have police-grade weapons now. There’s an obscene bounty on them, so there’s no end of lowlifes who want to collect. Gunrunners have tried to take them. So now the pirates have a stash of guns. The Ninth Circle do not respect the Red Cross or a white flag.”

  “Who are they?” Calli asked.

  “Trace evidence says they’re human and they’re male,” said Kidd. “They’re all XY chromosomes. Six of them are similar enough to be altered clones, so someone made these men, but their precise DNA prints come up with no record.”

  “Means they’re Roman,” said Calli.

  Rome was notorious for human cloning, and Rome did not share its DNA database with anyone. No record in the universal bank always meant the individual was Roman.

  “Rome denied these men are theirs,” said the governor. “Rome has no record of them either.”

  Calli became very still. She murmured with a chill, “They’re damnati memoriae.”

  Damned in memory. These men used to be Roman. Rome hadn’t just erased them. Rome pretended they never existed.

  Governor Kidd said, “They are Roman? You mean Rome lied to me?”

  “Not exactly,” Rob Roy said. “And not exactly. Rome disowned them retroactively. If they’re damnati, Rome really doesn’t have a record anymore. These men aren’t just dead to Rome. They were never born.”

  “That would make sense,” said the governor. “Except there is one more pirate. His DNA print is in the universal system. Information on that one is blocked. The ident comes up classified.”

  “Classified?” Calli echoed. What the hell? “Classified by whom?”

  “You. The CIA.”

  “Don’t ever refer to me and CIA in the same breath,” said Calli.

  “Your side,” said Governor Kidd. “The United States of America.”

  Arguments and accusations flew around the expedition camp’s fire pit like flaming arrows. Glenn expected the expedition might actually burn Dr. Minyas at the stake at any moment.

  Glenn skipped dinner rather than join that group.

  She found Aaron Rose in the relative quiet behind one of the LEN ships, checking his latest vintage. A white wine this time. He poured some into a shallow pan to give the camp goat a taste.

  The nanny’s thick tongue lapped hesitantly.

  Dr. Rose looked up on hearing Glenn approach. He nodded sideways at the nanny. “She likes the red better.” He poured a splash of white wine into the bottom of a glass for Glenn.

  Glenn gave it a swirl. It was clear with a slight amber tint and fruity smell. She tasted it. Paused.

  Dr. Rose read her face. “Too sweet?”

  “Yeah,” said Glenn. She passed the glass back to him.

  Aaron Rose lifted his heavy eyebrows. “More?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  Dr. Rose topped her glass and passed it back to her.

  The nanny goat nudged her pan for a refill.

  All the while angry shouts carried between the ships from around the fire pit at the center of camp.

  Dr. Rose swirled the wine in his glass. “Can you taste the DNA?”

  He’d caught her trying to swallow. She spilled some wine down her chin. “Oh, you snot.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I don’t understand the shrillness of the arguments over there,” Glenn said. “The results of the life code analysis are either true or they’re not true. It will all shake out. The facts aren’t going to change in the next ten minutes or the next ten million years. Why is everyone screaming?”

  Dr. Rose, with a few glasses of wine inside him, was taking on a rosy serenity. The angry voices might as well have been bird songs. “You really were never in academia, were you?”

  “Flight Leader Salvador!”

  Marines’ heads turned. Team Alpha had just arrived at Taz Station in Port Campbell for R and R. They were getting
their bearings when Colonel Steele came striding down the concourse in dress blues, his hat tucked under his arm. He was red in the face.

  Cain Salvador snapped to attention. “Aye!”

  “Flight Sergeant Delgado!”

  Carly snapped to. “Aye!”

  “Flight Sergeant Fuentes!”

  “Aye!” Twitch went rigid.

  “Flight Sergeant Blue!”

  “Aye!”

  Dak waited with his aye ready, but that was the end of the roll call. The colonel was barking, moving off swiftly, “With me!”

  “Sir!” Dak cried. “You didn’t call me!”

  “Enjoy your liberty, Marine,” Steele said back.

  The selected Marines fell in behind Colonel Steele at a very fast walk.

  Dak blinked, left out.

  Asante clapped Dak on his beefy shoulder. “Better them than us, no?”

  Rhino said, “No. I want to go where they’re going!”

  Asante said, “I don’t know about you, but I don’t wanna spend my time out of the can on duty.”

  “I do,” said Rhino. She trotted after the chosen Alphas. “Colonel, take me!”

  “I have my team, Flight Sergeant,” said Steele.

  Cain, Kerry, Carly, and Twitch followed Steele out of sight. None of them crabbed. None of them looked back.

  They hadn’t even looked surprised.

  And they didn’t say anything when they returned to Merrimack at the end of their scheduled liberty.

  They came back to the forecastle as if nothing had happened.

  “Where you been?” Rhino cried.

  “Special assignment,” Cain said.

  “Why not us?” Asante asked, starting to feel slighted. He, Rhino, and Dak had gone clubbing in Port Campbell.

  “Well,” Carly said. Sounded like she was stalling till a likely excuse came to her. “You’re the new guys.”

  “I’m not!” Dak said. “What about me?”

  “Dak, you can’t keep your mouth shut,” Cain said.

  Rhino was not taking the exclusion at all well. “Why was I left out? Is someone telling lies about me behind my back? What are they saying? Why not me?”

  “You got liberty,” said Kerry. “Why are you skunking?”

  Dak, Rhino, and Asante kept grilling Carly, Twitch, and Kerry over where they had gone. Rhino was not going to let it drop.

  Cornered, badgered, Carly blurted, “I got married, okay?”

  Twitch’s eyes went round.

  Carly said, “Now shut your mouths.”

  “Frer!” Asante slung his arm around Twitch’s broad shoulders. “We gotta have you a party!”

  “No!” Carly snapped. “I’d have told you myself if I wanted a fred-ding party.”

  “I got a marriage proposal in port,” Asante said, a side thought.

  “How drunk did you get her?” said Cain.

  “We were both sailing,” said Asante. “I let her down easy.”

  “Frer,” said Cain, “there ain’t no down easy from ‘do you wanna marry me.’”

  “I told her I’ll never get married. Told her I can’t say till death do us part. I’d immediately think one of us is gonna die.”

  “Yeah,” said Kerry Blue. I’ve had that thought myself.

  “I am mortally embarrassed for you, Melisandra,” Izrael Benet said. The director and the junior xenozoologist had returned to the scene of the crime, the medical hut, where Dr. Sandy Minyas ran her incendiary analysis. “This is a mistake.”

  “Look at the results for yourself, Izzy,” said Dr. Minyas. “Does this or does this not say DNA?”

  “It does,” said Izrael Benet, not looking at her report. “Because it’s a mistake. You need to know that. I’ll tell you what happened. Your sample was contaminated. You’re holding an analysis of your own skin cells or some organism you breathed on your sample.”

  “I was careful,” Dr. Minyas said. “There is no contamination.”

  “Then that bacterium is a Roman plant. Or a mutation of something one of us carried here. Or a hoax created by someone who has never respected us and has no right to be here.” That last was probably a reference to Glenn Hull Hamilton. “There is no way in logical hell that your bacterium can be a specimen of independently evolved DNA.”

  “Never mind any bacteria.” Dr. Minyas dangled a long mammoth feather in Benet’s face. “This was the subject of my analysis.”

  “It’s an uncorroborated analysis,” said Director Benet. “You messed up the routine. It was a contaminated sample. You analyzed your own thumb. It’s a mistake.”

  “The analyzer has a memory,” Dr. Cecil, whose equipment it was, suggested another possibility. “The counter needs to be reset. The analyzer had no idea what it was looking at and reported the last recognizable thing it saw.”

  Dr. Benet nodded to that. He faced Sandy as if the matter were settled. “You didn’t try to announce this, did you? Please say you didn’t announce this to anyone.”

  Dr. Minyas glanced upward. “May have mentioned it.”

  John Farragut showed up on the Roman capital world, Palatine, in person, with baby daughter and pregnant wife in tow. The admiral was on vacation.

  Palatine’s planetary horizon guard allowed the civilian spacecraft to land at Nova Roma’s spaceport, but the imperial palace denied John Farragut’s request to see Numa Pompeii.

  Consul Aban Pompeii Afrikanus received him instead.

  “Caesar does not give audience to midlevel American admirals,” Aban explained to Farragut.

  “He’s not here, is he,” Farragut said rather than asked.

  “Not for you.”

  “For anyone?”

  “The emperor is about his duties,” said the consul.

  “That wasn’t a yes or a no,” said Farragut.

  “Caesar is everywhere.”

  Virtually, Numa really was everywhere. He made regular res casts to his empire. But there had been no authenticated reports recently of Numa Pompeii in the meaty flesh.

  Since John Farragut was on family holiday, Aban took him and Kathy out to the country to shoot skeet.

  A great crater pocked the wide field. “Pardon the disarray,” said Aban.

  Farragut guessed the crater was American made.

  “Looks like the ones we got back home,” said Farragut.

  Earth and Palatine were close to each other on an astronomical scale, with a mere two hundred light-years between their star systems. The journey between them was not a day trip by any means, but neither was it a voyage to the edge of the galaxy.

  Mad Caesar Romulus’ war had left both worlds scarred.

  Skeet flew over the crater. Consul Aban held baby Patsy on his hip while Kathy Farragut took the first shots. She was a lean, long-limbed, athletic woman, a couple of decades younger than her husband. Her abdomen was slightly rounded.

  Farragut spoke aside to Aban, “Numa doing all right?”

  “The emperor is well,” Aban said. “I will tell him you inquired.”

  Mad Romulus had reigned over the drunken rout that was the war against the United States. Caesar Numa was stuck ruling the hangover. There was nothing glamorous in cleaning up. An inevitable dissatisfaction set in when interstellar communications and commerce were not restored fast enough.

  “He’s in Perseus space,” Farragut said.

  Aban non-answered, “Were Caesar to visit the far arm of the galaxy, and I am not saying that he is, it would be his right and duty to do so.”

  The citizenry might be fickle, but Numa’s governors and officers were loyal unto death.

  “Caesar is the defender of the entire empire,” Aban added.

  “Especially those worlds that used to be Romulus’ secret recruiting grounds?”

  “All worlds,” said Aban.

  Farragut noted that the consul didn’t specify all Roman worlds.

  A clay pigeon broke apart.

  “Nice shot, Madam Farragut,” Consul Aban called, just as both his and John Fa
rragut’s resonators chimed at the same moment. Emergency messages. The emergency code overrode the callers’ signal blocks.

  Farragut and Aban exchanged brief stares of surprise.

  “This better not be war,” Farragut said, reaching for his caller.

  “Amen,” said Aban, reaching for his. “Your wife has the gun.”

  Farragut’s signal was from Carolina Base. Advised him to pick up any of the galactic news feeds.

  “What’s this about?”

  “DNA.”

  Farragut tuned into a harmonic. Was greeted with the caption: God didn’t rest on the seventh day.

  Kathy walked over to him, her target rifle over her arm. “What is it?”

  “World’s upside down,” said John Farragut.

  His caller showed images from the miracle planet at the edge of the galaxy where aliens shared the same genetic base code as all life on planet Earth.

  Kathy pointed at the screen. “Make it big.”

  There was no point trying to keep it private. The news was literally everywhere. And Farragut could see that Aban was watching the same news. Different images, but the same story.

  Farragut changed his caller’s playback from screen image to life-sized holo.

  Golden mammoths walked over the crater.

  Farragut glanced back to where Aban had enlarged his own news-feed to life-sized. “Looks like a big ol’ stuffed animal!”

  Aban had foxes.

  They forced him to smile.

  Those images had been around on nature programs since the first scientific expedition to Zoe. They were headline news now.

  Now they were kin.

  Farragut felt something like awe.

  Okay, it was pure awe.

  Until awareness slithered forward from the back of his mind of the reason why he had sent Jose Maria de Cordillera and the battleship Merrimack way out to that perfect world in tearing haste.

  A sense that he had sent them too late.

  Something wicked was already there.

  Every major media source across the human-explored region of the galaxy carried the report of the discovery of independently evolved DNA on a planet at the outer edge of the Outback.