The Ninth Circle (25 page)

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Authors: R. M. Meluch

BOOK: The Ninth Circle
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Their flag, the Jolly Roger.
Their standard, a bastardized travesty of a Roman standard. Not an eagle. Theirs was a blood red metal circle with the Roman numeral set inside it.
Their motto underneath it was written in blood,
Lasciate ogne speranza
. Abandon all hope.
So all would know who they were.
The Ninth Circle of Hell.
PART TWO
 
Patterns of Chaos
 
15
 
“Y
OU JUST
NEED
TO INTERFERE, don’t you,” Director
Benet spoke over Glenn’s head. “It’s a compulsion with your kind, isn’t it.”
They weren’t questions, so Glenn didn’t answer. She wasn’t feeling well.
Benet turned on Patrick with less rancor, more disappointment. “You were not supposed to talk to the aliens.”
“Then why did you bring a xenolinguist to study the language?” Glenn said. She sneezed.
Patrick murmured aside to her, “I’m supposed to spy on them.”
“The term is ‘observe,’” Benet said tightly.
Glenn’s stomach cramped. She retched. She hadn’t eaten for a while so nothing came up.
“Perfect. Just perfect,” Benet said. “You brought that on yourself.”
Patrick hummed something at Director Benet. A fox word. It didn’t sound kindly.
Glenn shut her eyes. Dizzy. She felt Patrick’s arm wrap around her back, his other arm slip behind her knees. And she was rising.
A couple weeks among the foxes, hiking, dancing, playing ball, had made Patrick stronger than he’d ever been on board
Merrimack
. Patrick carried her to the physician’s hut.
The camp physician, Dr. Cecil, was surprised to have a patient. He usually only monitored his colleagues’ blood pressure and bone density and treated the odd broken toe or insectoid sting and sunburn.
Patrick asked the physician, “How can this happen? How could Glenn catch a bug on an alien planet?”
“She can’t,” said Dr. Cecil. He tucked an intradermal blood analyzer into the crook of Glenn’s elbow and made her hold it there. “Alien microbes can’t infect us. If she ingested a microbe, the microbe itself is nothing. But these symptoms may be from a toxin produced by a microbe.”
Cecil retrieved the analyzer from Glenn’s arm. Reported, “It’s not a toxin.”
“I don’t care what it is,” said Glenn, curled up on the table. “Can you treat it? I’m inside-out here.”
Cecil’s face appeared tight, his mouth a straight line. His eyes flickered between her and Patrick, as if reluctant to speak in front of her. Finally he directed his answer to Patrick, “I can’t treat hypochondria.”
Patrick sounded pissed. “My wife is the farthest thing from a hypochondriac you will ever meet.”
Dr. Cecil looked down on Glenn, “Obviously you ate something your body can’t process. You shall just need to wait it out.”
“This is nothing we ate,” said Patrick. “She caught something.”
“Caught?” said Cecil, his thin brows up, one corner of his mouth higher than the other.
“A virus,” said Patrick. “You know. A germ.”
Cecil moved his head side to side in a giant no. “Can’t. Can’t happen.”
“Did!” said Patrick. “She’s calling Yul.”
“She is drunk.”
“No, she is not,” Glenn croaked.
“Histamine reaction.” The suggestion sounded from the adjoining room. Cecil’s colleague, Dr. Wynans appeared in the doorway.
“Smell her breath,” Patrick told Wynans.
Just to humor him, Dr. Cecil leaned in for a sniff. His head jerked back. He had to admit, “It almost smells bacterial.”
Dr. Wynans did not risk a whiff for himself. He told Glenn, “It’s most likely an overgrowth of your natural bodily flora.”
Dr. Cecil had a clinical argument against that idea. He and Wynans withdrew from the examination room, debating the matter.
Glenn thought they were going to do research or consult with someone else.
They went to lunch.
Glenn was waiting outside the dining hut with a data bubble when Doctors Cecil and Wynans came out, their teeth slightly darkened from blueberry cobbler.
“Here.” Glenn slapped the data bubble into Dr. Cecil’s hand. She coughed into the crook of her arm, though she really wanted to spew in his face. “I did my own analysis.”
Cecil looked puzzled at the thing in his palm. He held his hand out quite far for someone so certain that Glenn was not contagious. “How exactly did you ‘run your own analysis?’”
“I hawked on a specimen slip and asked the medical diagnostic analyzer to screen for microbes. How else do you run an analysis?”
Dr. Cecil let the data bubble drop to the ground. “When you let a monkey crank the controls of a sensitive sophisticated piece of equipment, this is what you get. SISO. You put alien genetics in there, you are going to get skat.”
Patrick stooped, retrieved the data bubble. He activated it and expanded the report in the air before them. “This looks awfully coherent for skat. It says she has a bacterium of unknown taxonomy,” Patrick said. He looked pale.
Dr. Cecil chose not to look at the enlarged report hanging in the air. “The analyzer doesn’t know what it’s saying. When a computer program doesn’t find a referent, it will grab the last coherent thing it had in its machine brain and give you that. Errors fall down.”
His colleague, Dr. Wynans, examined the results with more interest. He had to take hold of Patrick’s wrist to make him hold the bubble still so he could read the image quivering in the air. “No, Cecil. This is weird.”
“It is alien,” said Dr. Cecil. “Naturally it is ‘weird.’”
“The report says ‘unknown taxonomy,’ not just ‘unknown,’” said Wynans. “This implies a terrestrial organism.”
“There you are,” said Cecil. “She didn’t pick it up here.”
Glenn had dropped into a crouch. Her voice was hoarse. “I don’t care where it came from! What’s the treatment?”
Dr. Wynans beckoned her to the medical hut. Patrick helped her walk. His hands felt clammy.
Wynans logged the new bacterium into the data bank and told Dr. Cecil that he was taking naming rights. “Unless you insist it’s yours, Cecil?”
“No. Go ahead,” said Dr. Cecil. “Please. It probably has a Roman name already. After all, Rome created it.”
Wynans stepped back from his console, surprised, concerned. “You don’t really think so?” said Wynans. “Germ warfare is against international convention.”
“When has convention ever stopped Rome?” said Cecil. “Romans love to tinker with what should be left alone. Remember, Rome created patterners.”
A patterner was a monstrous creation of Frankensteinian proportion. A patterner was a human/machine interface endowed with an inhuman ability to synthesize vast amounts of data of disparate types. The ability came at a cost. Great cost to the individual patterner. A great cost to the many failures it took to create one that survived and functioned.
“Even Rome stopped making patterners,” said Wynans.
“Only because patterners were loose cannons,” said Cecil. “Not because the process was unethical, unconscionable, and downright macabre.”
Wynans dismissed the suggestion that Glenn’s sickness was a Roman invention. “More likely this microbe is actually an innocuous terrestrial bacterium that has mutated under the alien sun. The Cordillera protocol can devise a treatment in no time.”
“That’s good,” said Patrick, just before he heaved up a bacterial colony onto Dr. Cecil’s workstation.
 
The brothers had left the Phoenix system far behind them.
Bagheera
sped toward another star system, a Chinese colonial world, to strike terror again.
For now they relaxed on a virtual beach.
Bagheera
’s antechamber had transformed itself into a deserted seashore at sunset. The ship’s walls had vanished into a wide horizon. A yellow sun sank into the sea, leaving velvet blue darkness behind it. The brothers felt as much as heard the sound of open sky and open water. Gently lapping waves ridged the sand. A slight breeze carried the smell of salt air and exotic flowers. Palm trees nodded behind them.
“Where is this?” Galeo asked.
“Don’t know,” said Leo. “The program is called Sunset Beach.”
“It’s some fantasy place,” said Orissus.
“It’s Earth,” said Nox.
Nox was from Earth. He should know.
“You’ve been to this beach?” Pallas asked.
“No.”
“Then how can you tell it’s Earth?” said Orissus.
“Moon,” said Nox with a backward nod. A luminous orb was rising huge and full behind the palm trees.
Galeo twisted round to stare. “Look at that!”
“That’s too big to be a real moon,” said Orissus.
“No, Best Beloved. That is
The
Moon,” said Nox.
Natural evolution of a star system normally resulted in planets forming with several small satellites circling them. Phoenix was typical. The planet Phoenix had a whole necklace of moons in its orbit. All the other planets in the Phoenix star system had multiple small moons around them.
Earth’s moon was exceptional, even within its own solar system.
“That is Luna herself,” said Nox of the giant shining disk rising behind the palm trees. “That’s why in the Old Empire the Moon was a goddess, and she was singular.”
Romans never forgot where they came from.
The capital of the Roman Empire was currently the planet Palatine. But Rome’s real home, her birth world, was Earth. Her true name was Terra, the place where the she-wolf suckled her sons, Romulus and Remus.
The Empire failed to recapture Old Rome in the recent war.
The brothers had been cloned, cultivated, raised, recruited, and trained on the colonial world Phoenix, a long, long way from Palatine. They hadn’t fought in the war.
Except for Nox, they had never seen Earth.
This was their first voyage outside the Phoenix system.
They were never going back.
“Has anyone else ever been killed at Widow’s Edge?” Nox asked.
“No,” said Pallas. “Couldn’t happen.”
“Couldn’t?” said Nicanor. “It rather
did
.”
“Because it should have been impossible,” said Pallas. “The net
always
deploys. There’s a motion sensor in the cliff face.”
“I didn’t know that when I jumped,” said Nicanor.
“I knew there was a net,” said Faunus. “I would have been a lot more scared if I’d known it was Russian roulette.”
“I wouldn’t have let you jump if I’d known it was Russian roulette,” said Nicanor. He shuddered. “I never heard of anyone dying before.”
“Why did the net fail for Cinna?” Leo wondered aloud.
Pallas guessed, “Jammed. Broke. We should have checked the equipment before we sent Cinna over.”
“Don’t ever say ‘should have,’ O Best Beloved,” said Nox. “Never look backward. That river you see in the rearview? That’s the Rubicon.”
“Did you know there was a net, Nox?” Pallas asked. Then rephrased, “Did you know there was
supposed
to be a net when you jumped?”
Nox had to think. He shut out the sounds and images of gentle surf and beautiful moon.
He was back on that dry desert height. His brothers standing behind him, waiting. Ahead of him, that fatal-appearing drop.
“Not yes,” Nox answered.
Not exactly no either
. “I was trying not to think anything. I had a feeling
something
was going to happen in between my leaving the cliff and the ground smacking my bones out.”
He had been cocooned in that blessed inability of young men to conceive of a universe without themselves in it.

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