The Ninth Circle

by R. M. Meluch

  Dingo considered this for several moments. Said, “I bet you’re right.”

  Captain Carmel and Commander Ryan accompanied the ship’s Legal Officer, Rob Roy Buchanan, to Colonel TR Steele’s compartment to supervise the opening of Steele’s private locker.

  Rob Roy lifted the universal key.

  “No.”

  The three officers turned.

  Outside the hatch stood Flight Sergeant Kerry Blue. She appeared strangely calm, her face clear. She hadn’t been crying. She stood with her weight on one foot. Kerry Blue never came to attention or even to ease unless you ordered her.

  Kerry Blue told the captain, the XO, and the Legal Officer, “He’s not dead.”

  That the colonel and the flight sergeant had an off reservation relationship was common knowledge. Everyone knew it. It was everyone’s secret. No one reported it, and there had been no under-the-deck grumblings of favoritism. Morale was high among the Fleet Marines, so Captain Carmel chose not to know about it either.

  But now Kerry Blue was holding up an official proceeding, and it was time to put the Marine in her place. “Flight Sergeant. This is not fair to the colonel’s next of kin. They need to know.”

  “His next of kin knows he’s not dead,” said Kerry Blue.

  Calli turned to her task. She nodded to the ship’s Legal Officer, poised at the locker. “Pop it.”

  Rob Roy took the universal key to TR Steele’s locker and opened it. He looked through Steele’s personal effects.

  Marines who had wills kept them in their lockers. Rob Roy found Steele’s. He expanded the legal document.

  The lawyer’s eyebrows lifted as he read.

  The XO read over Rob Roy’s shoulder. “Right, then,” said Dingo.

  Rob Roy closed the will, replaced Steele’s things into his locker and closed it for the voyage home.

  Calli, standing back at the hatch, questioned, “Mister Buchanan?”

  Rob Roy said, sounding faintly surprised. “The colonel’s next of kin knows.”

  Calli turned around toward the corridor. Kerry Blue had already withdrawn.

  Calli turned back to her officers and let herself look astonished. “Since when? When did this happen?”

  “From the date on the certificate, we were in Port Campbell,” said Rob Roy.

  “It’s an Ozzie contract,” said Dingo. Sounded as if he approved.

  “Mister Ryan. Have Mo check the Marine over.”

  “You think Kerry’s ill?” said Dingo.

  “I think she’s lost it,” said Calli.

  “Because she thinks Steele is still alive?”

  “Because she thinks she knows Steele is alive.”

  Rob Roy demurred. “Doesn’t mean she’s crazy. Tales of psychic connections between loved ones are universal. They’ve never been proved. But.” He ended with a shrug.

  “I don’t believe in it,” Calli said.

  “Well, we know we don’t have one,” Rob Roy admitted. He could read Sanskrit better than he could read Calli’s mind. “But I can’t insist it doesn’t exist. Jose Maria believes in it. Smart man, Jose Maria.”

  “Jose Maria believes in the biblical God,” Calli said.

  “It doesn’t matter what Kerry Blue or my Aunt Martha believes,” said Dingo Ryan. “Steele is either dead and we’ll never find him, or he’s not dead and we need to find him now, now, now.”

  Calli had to reconsider. Even throwing out the idea of a psychic connection, maybe a degree of doubt was still in order. “That man has died more than most. He may even hold some kind of record. I don’t want to count Steele out if there’s any hope at all. But really. What are the odds?”

  “The odds?” said Commander Ryan. “The odds say Adamas really carked it this time.”

  Calli’s nodded. Whether Steele vanished because of accidental equipment failure or intentional sabotage, the end was the same. Kidnap was an unreasonably exotic idea.

  Calli ordered, “Have the boffins tear the colonel’s crate apart. And I want the displacement gear sifted down to nanite scale. I’m not ready to declare. And what the hell, we already know his next of kin can wait.”

  37

  MERRIMACK was still in orbit around Zoe when Lieutenant Glenn Hamilton received a summons before the captain.

  Glenn had been dreading this review. Afraid she didn’t mask it well.

  Dingo Ryan was glib enough. It wasn’t his career on the line. He winked as if he knew something. “So you went native ashore, Hamster?”

  Oh, hell. Was that what the captain told him?

  “No,” said Glenn. “I went human.”

  Dingo said, “That never really works among aliens.”

  Glenn kept her mouth shut, her lips pressed in a tight line. It had not been her finest hour.

  Glenn left the command deck and marched toward her doom.

  Merrimack was alive around her. Hatches banged open or shut. Water trickled in the conduits. Boots clanged on ladders. Lifts hissed. Voices murmured, shouted, laughed. So many voices. Glenn Hull Hamilton loved this ship. She was going to miss it.

  After what Dingo had said, she was pretty sure she was getting a reprimand for her actions on world. The delay in Merrimack’s departure would give her a place to go if she wanted to quit rather than take a reduction in rank. Had to be why Carmel hadn’t left orbit yet.

  Glenn entered the briefing compartment. The captain was there and waiting. There was no Marine guard inside the hatch. That was a good sign. It meant no one was expecting Hamster to go parabolic when she received the news. And there was no Rob Roy in here. Absence of legal counsel was a great sign. Glenn hoped it was a great sign anyway.

  Calli bade Glenn sit across from her at the table.

  Glenn sat, rigid. The captain passed a data capsule across the table.

  Glenn took it, questioningly. “Sir?” It had a Navy seal on it. Had to be a reprimand. An official one at that.

  The captain said, “I’m making an assumption here. I don’t want that to look like I’m pushing you out the air lock.”

  Glenn saw what she had in her hand. Not a rep. Far from it. Captain Carmel had made an official recommendation for Lieutenant Glenn Hamilton to be given her own command.

  That meant a transfer to a ship that didn’t need a xenolinguist.

  Patrick had been holding her back.

  Patrick was staying on Zoe.

  There was nothing holding her here now.

  Be careful what you wish for.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Cal gave her head a minimal shake. “You’re ready. You’ve been ready.”

  Glenn displaced to the LEN expedition camp.

  The LEN scientific expedition were allowed to stay on world for now—by leave of Caesar Numa and under Roman supervision.

  It was before dawn in this time zone. But Merrimack was leaving. It was now or never.

  Glenn had signaled ahead. She told Patrick to meet her at the edge of the sleeping camp.

  Patrick’s eyes did the quick head to foot when she thunderclapped into existence on the landing disk.

  Patrick saw his wife was in uniform. She hadn’t brought any belongings with her. He didn’t look awfully surprised. He did look awfully disappointed.

  Glenn stepped off the disk. She moved in close, laid her hand on Patrick’s chest, her head bowed. She told him what he already knew. “I can’t stay.” She had to whisper, because her voice didn’t work.

  “I don’t want a divorce,” said Patrick.

  “I don’t either.” Tears burned to get out. She was not going to cry. “I don’t want to separate, but that’s what’s happening.”

  “I don’t want a legal separation,” said Patrick.

  Glenn sniffled, lifted her head. “Neither do I.”

  “This isn’t going to work,” said Patrick.

  Glenn nodded silent agreement. Probably not.

  But there was no need to force it.

  Patrick said, “The pack keeps asking for you.” />
  He had been out with the foxes again.

  Glenn said, “They get over their losses quick.”

  “They keep asking.”

  “Patrick, don’t you make me cry.” She held in her tears.

  It was still dark. She looked up to the half starry sky at the rim of the Milky Way. Patrick followed her gaze. He said, “Make up a constellation with me?”

  “Um.” He’d thrown her off guard. She said, “Okay.” It was something to keep her from crying. Glenn pointed out the groups of stars she and Nox had already named. “There’s Akela. That’s Nag and Nagaina. That’s Zam-Zammah. Those are Nox’s. There’s the Merrimack. Statue of Liberty. And that’s—okay that’s an ice cream cone.”

  “An ice cream cone?” Patrick chided.

  “I felt like ice cream,” Glenn snapped, almost crying, almost smiling.

  “What about that group of stars.” Patrick pointed. “From big blue there to that tight pair five degrees down, over to the reddish cluster.”

  “I don’t think we did anything with that,” Glenn said. She sniffled.

  “That’s not taken?” Patrick said.

  “No. That’s yours. Give it a name.”

  “Glenn Hull.”

  She caught in her breath. She couldn’t think of anything to say.

  Patrick was pointing up. “And how about those stars. Next to you. The five red ones. Are those taken?”

  She shook her head.

  Patrick named them. “That’s Princess.”

  Glenn threw her arms around him, cried into his ear, “Patrick, don’t let the clokes take over Zoe. Don’t let those monsters take root on this world.”

  She was not sure how she expected him to do that. There had been too much talk of letting the surviving clokes stay on Zoe.

  She felt Patrick’s palm on her back. He said, “I thought I’d put the clokes’ fate into the paws of whose world this is.”

  Glenn pulled back, blinked at him. “The foxes?”

  He gave a shrug. “You know what they say. Dig up a clutch of cloke eggs you stop the clokes for a day. Teach a fox to dig—”

  Glenn gave a wobbly smile. “You don’t need to teach a fox to dig.”

  “Teach a fox to dig up ugly ugly bad bad . . .”

  You stop them forever.

  Anyone who wanted to preserve the clokes would need to relocate them. Zoe was not going to sustain cloke life.

  Tears broke out. Glenn smiled, sniffed. She held him tight. Her fist closed on the back of his shirt. “Patrick Hamilton, I am going to miss you.”

  As Merrimack left the Zoen star system, Glenn brooded over the lost soul that was Nox.

  Nox had done evil ghastly things, and she had no business feeling fond of him. At some point she knew she would decompress, get her head clear, and find the ability to loathe him. For now she felt loss and waste.

  What was a devil but an angel gone wrong?

  “How does one become so twisted?” she wondered out loud.

  She was killing a bottle of Kentucky bourbon with Captain Carmel and Rob Roy Buchanan in the Captain’s Mess. The bottle had belonged to another John Farragut.

  Rob Roy suggested, “When you cast people out from society, they’re going to exist outside of society. You make them outlaws. Punishment may make the victim feel better, but as far as teaching a lesson to the offender or making an example of him, punishment accomplishes the opposite of what you like to think it does. Jesus had the right idea, but the Old Testament is so much easier to follow.”

  “There was a lot to the man,” said Glenn. “I would have thought Rome could do more with him than toss him out as trash.”

  “Yes,” said Calli, her voice hard. “You would think.”

  Glenn told Calli, “The Xerxes didn’t need to crash into the Ark. Nox didn’t need to ride the Xerxes in. He didn’t need to be aboard.”

  “No, he didn’t,” Calli agreed.

  “He could have bailed.”

  “He could have,” said Calli.

  He could have. “But we didn’t see any life craft from the Xerxes. Ambassadorial ships have great escape boats. The pirates didn’t use them.”

  Rob Roy recounted the facts. “Antimatter detonated inside the Ark. We saw the Striker fly out. And there is no chance the pirates were somehow aboard the Striker.” He paused on that one. “Is there?”

  “No,” said Glenn and Calli together.

  The Striker was physically too small.

  And after more consideration Calli questioned, “Why the hell would Numa sacrifice the Xerxes?”

  “He didn’t,” said Glenn. “Not on purpose. I’m sure he thought the Striker would win the tug-of-war with the Xerxes.”

  “The patterner lost?” said Calli, eyebrows high. “That doesn’t fit the kind of patterner we both know.”

  Now that she thought of it, Glenn had to agree. “Augustus would never have lost that battle.”

  Patterners never lost their grip. Not accidentally. When a patterner lost, he had a reason.

  “And even after the Striker lost its hold, the Xerxes might have survived a collision with the Ark,” said Calli. “I don’t know why the Xerxes detonated. There was no need for that either. A Xerxes’ containment system should have survived impact. I think.”

  But it hadn’t survived. It was an incontrovertible fact that antimatter had detonated inside the Ark.

  That meant the pirates committed suicide and took the alien Ark with them.

  “Maybe Nox’s Circle just wasn’t that familiar with the ship’s controls,” Rob Roy offered. “Or maybe they wanted to go out with a big bang.”

  The Xerxes was a valuable piece of equipment. The patterner had tried to salvage it but couldn’t overpower pirates hell-bent on freedom or death.

  The patterner tried to stop them.

  Patterners don’t lose.

  A new thought struck Glenn. “Why was there a patterner at Zoe?”

  “I’ll do you one better,” said Calli. “Why is there a patterner at all? I never expected Numa Pompeii to let another patterner be constructed. Ever. You’d have thought Numa would have learned better from the last one.”

  Glenn nodded into her shot glass. “Nobody wants another Augustus.”

  “Amen,” said Calli. She downed a shot. Drew a breath with an inward hiss.

  “The pieces still don’t fit,” said Glenn. “The picture is wrong. We’re missing something.”

  Calli circled back to Glenn’s first thought. “Nox did not need to ride the Xerxes in.”

  That left the question: So did he?

  The patterner Cinna turned to his brothers. “Welcome to the band of the officially dead.”

  The pirates of The Ninth Circle had never expected to be breathing while dead.

  Faunus’ thick brows contracted. He took count of his brothers. Nox, Pallas, Nicanor, Orissus, Leo, Galeo. All of them were here in the control room of their Xerxes, Bagheera.

  Faunus turned to the thing that looked like their late brother, Cinna, with a vertical knife hole stabbed in the front of his tunic. Cinna was wearing black, so you couldn’t see how much blood was on him. He appeared as a slender youth, handsome as all of them used to be, no more than seventeen. His black eyes were as old as the sphinx guarding the Great Pyramid.

  Faunus spoke. “What just happened?”

  “A show,” said Cinna.

  Even now all the Bagheera’s monitors displayed images of the clokes’ FTL Ark continuing to erupt from internal detonations, turning the parts of the Ark that survived the initial antimatter blast inside out. “Not that,” Cinna added, watching the exploding images, his face smooth as dark marble. “That’s not a show. The death of the alien Ark was real.”

  “Where’s the Striker?” said Nox.

  Cinna nodded toward the images of multiple explosions. “In there.”

  Wreckage from the alien Ark spewed like galactic shrapnel. The flashes would have blinded the brothers if not for the radiation filters built into
the Xerxes’ viewports.

  The Striker had made the suicidal plunge into the Ark and released antimatter into the heart of it.

  The Xerxes was solidly underfoot.

  Leo blinked at the continuing explosions. “I thought it was going to be us.”

  Cinna said, “It was meant to look as if this ship went in.”

  “Looked like it from this angle,” said Galeo. Shuddered.

  Nox shut his eyes. He could still see the lights of the titanic alien ship hurtling close, fast, its mass filling the view, obliterating the stars, heaving up like the ground at the bottom of Widow’s Edge. Nox, his brothers, his leopard, were going in.

  The Xerxes plunged into the Ark.

  Flashed the most fleeting energy signature of a Striker as it came out the other side.

  Leaving the Striker at the heart of the Ark to open its antimatter containment core.

  To all appearances, it was the Xerxes that died in the suicide plunge, and it was the Striker that got away.

  “Everyone would expect me to escape,” said Cinna. “Patterners have that reputation. And the leopard needed to die.”

  That part of the show, the death of the leopard, required a sacrificial lamb, something that could penetrate to the heart of the alien Ark and make an explosion on a magnitude of a Xerxes. Cinna had to sacrifice his Striker for that.

  Cinna had controlled his Striker by resonant command from on board the Xerxes Bagheera.

  A res signal on a secret harmonic was undetectable, untraceable. Resonance left no trail.

  Being at point zero of the antimatter release, the Striker left no debris to tell a different tale.

  “If the leopard had to die, why not just send the leopard in?” said Faunus. “Not complaining, mind you.” He was happy to be breathing. Astonished, but happy. He still had his machete too, and that was astounding.

  “A Striker is aging technology. This ship,” Cinna knocked on the Xerxes’ control console with a black-gloved hand. “Is the latest. Caesar wants his patterner to have the latest.”

  There it is.

  So that was why Nox and his brothers were still here. For the moment.

  It hadn’t been feasible for Cinna to ballast the brothers along with his doomed Striker. They wouldn’t fit in it. The Striker was a one-man craft.