Authors: R. M. Meluch

The Ninth Circle (5 page)

BOOK: The Ninth Circle

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“
I
would feed you to the animals,” said another guard.

Nox nodded.

“You are a faithless coward. You
ran
.
Then
you turned around and abandoned your brothers.
Now
you’re here lying to us to save those cowards. How low can you get?”

I’m finding that out. It’s rather amazing, really.
It was like a free fall through broken glass.

The interrogators were still digging for others. The main inquisitor was trying to trip Nox into betraying his accomplices.

“I’m not covering for anyone,” Nox blurted. His voice didn’t sound sincere even to his own ears. He sounded guilty as all hell.

One of the inquisitors saw red.

Truly. The purple-faced man popped a blood vessel in his right eye. Nox had never faced a gaze more baleful than that angry red-smeared eye.

“There was no one else,” Nox insisted. “It wasn’t a hazing. It was murder. I was alone. I killed Cinna. I swear.”
Oh, how obvious was that?

The Eye spoke in a strange soft voice, a dare, “You swear?”

“I do.” Nox nodded down.

They all turned away.

One guard gave the Eye a surreptitious gesture and a murmur, “Eye.”

The man wiped his eye, saw the blood on his fingers. Gave a low snarling mutter, something like, “Sure. Why not?”

In the next moment a holographic image formed in the dark shed. The floor vanished, became a windy cliff high above a sun-parched flatland. Nox was suddenly looking down on eight young men. The scene was a vulture’s eye view of the Widow’s Edge.

Or a satellite’s view.

Video. They had a video from orbit.

Nox’s despair was complete. They knew. They knew. They stood him up here and let him lie his brains out.

The holographic video played out. There was Cinna’s leap. The impact. The brothers’ scurrying retreat.

The image vanished.

An afterimage of brightness colored the darkness within the shed in red and green splotches.

The bloody Eye glowered at Nox. “You are not really Roman.”

Oh, it goes lower still
. They were going to throw that at him. Nox was willing to absorb any abuse for what he’d done, but not that. Now he was angry. “I am Roman,” said Nox. His voice had gone to sandpaper.

“It makes no difference now. Confess. You are really a U.S. mole, aren’t you?”

Nox hadn’t thought he had any blood left in his face, but he felt it draining away now. Then it returned in a rush of heat, and he roared at the inquistor, “NO! Rome is my mother, my father, my world! I am Roman!” He rocked with his heaving breaths. Regretted his volume.

The inquisitors ignored the outburst.

“You have a choice, Yank. You can go home. Or you can stand judgment with your squad.”

Shock numbed him. It was the last thing he expected.

They were offering him his life and freedom.

The hazing wasn’t the huge crime. Causing his brother’s death was fairly huge. But the worst, the unforgivable, was running away and leaving Cinna behind. Brother betrayal was the lowest.

Nox had turned around to go back to his brother, but only after he’d already made the wrong decision. Rome didn’t want anyone like that in her legions. Especially not under the current scrutiny from the home world. Nox had expected his punishment to be doled out in stellar magnitudes.

Yet they offered him an out.

He could go back where he came from.

Crawl back to his father.

Not ever
.

They didn’t want him to be Roman.

Go home
.

He felt light-headed in his wrath. He looked from the Eye to the other men and back.

His voice shook with indignation. “
Domni
, I
am
home.”

P
ATRICK’S SLEEPY VOICE sounded mumbly in the dark, “Where you going, babe?”

“Control room,” Glenn whispered, tucked her shirt into her trousers. “Go back to sleep.”

Glenn made sure she was awake for the drop to sublight on approach to the Zoen star system.

Spring Beauty
was no
Merrimack
. She had minimal inertial compensators with which to sidestep Newton’s first law.

At minimum, any faster-than-light craft’s inertial field kept the ship’s innards from bulleting out through its hull when the ship deviated from a dead-straight line.

Stouter force fields, like
Merrimack
’s, could withstand antimatter warheads.

The
Beauty
’s force field was adequate to deflect space clutter. It was not designed to stand against space weapons.

Manny, the pilot, assured Glenn there weren’t going to be any warships where they were going. “We’re in the bloody Outback. Traffic is thin here, even for outer space. This is good coffee. Thanks.”

Glenn nodded. She slid into the copilot’s seat and cradled her own cup of coffee in her hands.

The pilot said, “It’s not as if space is choked with LGMs waiting to pounce on us traveling faster than light.”

“Of course not,” Glenn agreed.

The pouncing would be within the star system while they traveled at sublight speed.

And Glenn was not worried about little green men. “Tall, bronze, and arrogant men are more my concern.”

“Romans?” Manny said, surprised. “You don’t really think there are Romans out here?”

Glenn tilted her head, neither yes nor no. “
Ubiquitous
is a Roman word.” She had to assume that Rome knew about the planet Zoe. Zoe was the most Earthlike world ever discovered.

Always assume Rome knows.

Glenn had a professional paranoia regarding the Empire. She still had the wartime mind-set of an officer of a space battleship recently at war with the Roman Empire. Two years was too long for a peace to last.

She watched Manny go through the approach routine. Nothing to do really but monitor the ship’s programmed flight.

At the star system’s edge, the
Beauty
’s engine whined, surged to full. Speeding up or slowing down, it took as much power to pass the light barrier either way you went.

The ship’s engine peaked. Stars appeared in the forward viewport.

The
Beauty
’s engine quickly wound back down. Momentum carried her swiftly into the star system.

A distant yellow sun loomed ahead of them. Steadily shining bright dots that were probably planets appeared above and below it.

The ship executed a gentle quarter roll.
Beauty
had entered the system on an oblique. The lazy roll brought her on plane with the local planetary orientation—-a position that made sense to humans accustomed to viewing images of laterally arrayed planetary systems.

Through the forward view screen, the planet Zoe took center stage.

Hanging in the star-specked blackness, the world appeared as a hazy blue-white marble, growing larger and larger. With the planet’s yellow sun in the background, Glenn could almost imagine the
Spring Beauty
had turned around and gone home to Earth. Until she saw the moons.

As
Spring Beauty
turned, the two moons passed into view from behind the planet. The pair twisted around each other, as tight as conjoined twins. A hazy dumbbell-shaped halo surrounded both of them as they swapped atmospheres.

Glenn had been told that the tidal effect between the lunar pair and Zoe was roughly equal to the tidal draw between the Earth and Moon.

Expedition notes described Zoe as an Earthlike world orbiting in the Goldilocks zone of a singly formed G2V star.

The notes didn’t do her justice. Zoe was beautiful, glowing blue and green, draped in cotton white.

“I never get tired of that view,” Manny said.

They were gazing out the forward view screen, sipping coffee and listening to the quiet stirrings of waking brains behind them within the ship. Then, without prelude, a loud
crack!
jarred everyone. Splashed coffee over Glenn’s fingers.

Felt like something struck the ship’s hull.

Several overlapping voices sounded from aft, “What was that?”

Someone—it sounded like Dr. Rose—moved forward to the control room yelling, “Hey! Manny! Fly us
around
the asteroids.”

“I didn’t fly us into that,” the pilot said.

“Then explain how we hit it.” Aaron Rose braced himself in the hatchway.

“
It
,” said Manny, “hit
us
on the beam.”

“How in the help me mama!” Dr. Rose dropped in a reflexive duck as another
crack
rang through the hull with a metallic scraping.

Any spaceship’s forward inertial screen deflected debris from its path. You never hear the forward strikes. This noise came from farther down the fuselage, where the
Beauty
’s energy field was thin.

Still another
crack
banged at the hull. Hard one. Sounded like there should be a dent.

Sounded like there should be a
hole
.

But cabin pressure hadn’t dropped. Not noticeably. Even if there were a slow leak, Glenn would expect a warning signal from the ship’s internal systems.

Glenn got up from her seat, reached around the pilot, and redistributed the ship’s energy field—such as it was.

Manny stared at small hands—not his—moving the ship’s controls. “What are you doing?”

“We’re under attack.” Glenn hip-pushed Manny out of the pilot’s seat.

With more sense than ego, Manny slid into the copilot’s seat without much resistance.

Most civilian pilots never needed to redeploy inertial settings. Manny would have learned how, of course, but it was dusty knowledge.

Manny seemed to recognize expertise when he saw it and deferred to it.

“Can we jump to FTL?” Manny asked.

Magical thinking, that. They both knew a jump to FTL with the ship in this condition could turn it inside out.

Letting the vacuum in
, they called it on
Merrimack
.

“I think it’s too late for that,” said Glenn. “We’re hurt.”

Glenn pushed
Spring Beauty
’s speed up and maneuvered one of her exterior hull cameras outward to pick up the incoming objects.

The objects had fallen in behind the
Beauty
, chasing her now.

They were not asteroids.

The chasers were more like demon-possessed cannon balls. They looked like miniature Roman killer bots.

The old Roman killer bots were black orbs that carried antimatter loads. A killer bot would have destroyed the
Spring Beauty
on impact.

Dr. Rose, crouching in the control room’s hatchway, yelped, “What are those!”

Little green men
, Glenn thought. She said, “Aaron, I think you should go aft.”

She would have liked to grab one of the attacking orbs for identification, but this was not the
Merrimack
.
Beauty
didn’t have a hook.
Beauty
barely had a force field. Best
Beauty
could do here was survive.

Poul Vrba stomped forward to the control room, stumbled over Dr. Rose getting in, and shouted, “Get us out of the asteroid field!”

He saw Glenn in the pilot’s seat. Shouted louder, “What are you doing there!”

Glenn told Vrba, “The asteroids are chasing us.”

“What did you do to provoke them!”

Glenn ignored the question. She jinked the little ship hard.
Beauty
did not jink well. Glenn’s stomach lurched sideways.

Vrba caught his balance. “You did something! No being with the level of intelligence to achieve space travel would just attack a stranger without trying to communicate first!”

“This is their first communication,” Glenn said, trying to line up an entry into atmosphere.

And realized Vrba was right. She really was provoking the orbs. They didn’t want
Spring Beauty
in the atmosphere.

A second flock of orbs converged like hornets from the starboard. They glanced off the ship’s inertial field as Glenn pushed the ship’s nose down—down according to the ship’s internal artificial gravity.

Vrba ordered the pilot, “Do something!”

“Whatever she tells me,” Manny said.

BOOK: The Ninth Circle

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