The Ninth Circle (56 page)

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Authors: R. M. Meluch

BOOK: The Ninth Circle
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Glenn spied the thick vulpine tail swinging from the shoulders of a clot of bearers. They had taken a fox this time.
They passed into a patch of the red lights, giving a glimpse of the head lolling back loose and lifeless. And recognizable.
The dead fox was Princess.
30
 
A
WALL OF RED descended over Glenn’s eyes.
A wall of noise filled her head.
“No!”
Blood roared in her ears with her own raw scream. She felt something deeply rooted yanked out of her. Glenn grabbed up the wicker shield before her, seized a machete from the nearest pirate’s hangar—Nox’s—and charged out screaming.
“That’s my baby girl!”
Glenn flew at the clokes, crazy angry. She slashed down every cloke within reach in a mindless rage, then chased the others. They went springing into the forest depths. Glenn charged after them, reeling back at times from the force of thrown nails that stuck into her shield. She caught her footing and forged ahead, screaming.
The pirates did not exist. Danger did not exist. Hurt, rage, and sorrow were all that existed.
 
The pirates stared after Glenn startled, amazed.
Patrick dashed after her. He tensed, expecting a shot in the kidneys from angry pirates.
OgodOgodOgodOgod
. The muscles in his back tightened. They felt solid and shrinking.
Not sure why he wasn’t gunned down.
The path before him was black. He followed the grief-charged screaming.
He tripped over messes of carved clokes.
Then blundered into a warm lump and fell across it. It was furry. He’d found Princess.
He picked her up. She weighed maybe a hundred pounds. Her fur was soft, her body warm, limp.
A funny mist descended over his eyes looking at her. No pirates were chasing him. He was lost.
He turned his face up toward the treetops. Through the lacy fronds he saw the glow of starlight. Where the highlands rose the sky was perfectly black. He trudged, heavy footed with his heavy load and heavy heart, upward.
Glenn’s raging screams had turned to gasping ragged bleating.
Princess weighed mightily in Patrick’s arms. He tried to call, “Glenn.” A weird broken sound came out of him. He hiked through underbrush. Tears glinted on fur in the starlight.
“Glenn!” he croaked.
Thrashing of brush and snapping twigs sounded nearer.
Glenn found him. She moved like a lost waif.
She had already dropped her polymer shield somewhere. She dragged the machete at her side.
Patrick set Princess down. He took Glenn into his arms. She cried on his chest. There were scratches and nicks in her skin. Her frictionless clothes held no blood. There were burrs in her short hair. She stank.
Patrick kissed her forehead.
Patrick took up his burden again. He needed to take Princess home. Glenn walked ahead of him, hacking out a path with the machete back to the vale where the forest parted and the stream tumbled down from the highlands.
They had to stop every hundred yards and rest. It was a long trek up to the highland meadow. They could not know where the tribe had gone, but they trusted somehow that they would find the foxes.
In the light of dawn, Patrick could see that Glenn had been grazed by cloke nails. The caked blood had to be hers. Clokes didn’t bleed.
Glenn washed off her own blood and the cloke gore in the stream.
At the high meadow, the foxes found them.
The two tribes had come back together. They milled, agitated. A cry went up from both tribes on seeing Princess.
Patrick set Princess down, his arms sore, his back and knees aching.
Rogue came forward. He nosed at Princess’ lifeless body. He keened, utterly bewildered.
Hamster, who thought she was all cried out, sobbed.
Princess’ Daddy sniffed her. He smelled something hateful on her. Snorted. His hackles lifted up.
Mama-san rubbed Princess’ fur with aromatic herbs to get the cloke stink off.
And already dirt was flying as foxes augured out a grave.
Glenn watched the arcs of dirt. She breathed, “Oh, no. So soon.”
Rogue nosed his mate. He gave a strange little cry that seemed to beg of her,
Wake up
. There was a question in it, an upturned note.
Please?
The hole was quickly deep enough to hide her from predators.
Rogue stood up on his hind legs and walked away into the forest.
The others curled Princess’ body into a shape to fit into the deep round hole. Her legs wouldn’t stay curled. The foxes gently folded them back up and tucked them into her belly.
The body relaxed again as if exhaling, uncurling. The motion was eerily lifelike. Princess was eerily, starkly, absolutely dead.
Foxes patiently moved back in to refold her so they could lower her into the hole.
Hamster stepped in. “Wait.”
She was sure they didn’t understand her word, but there was no hurry here. The foxes sat back on their haunches, their muzzles bowed to their chests. Waiting.
Glenn combed through Princess’ belly fur to find the puckered navel that was the opening to her pouch. The opening was tight, becoming stiff. Glenn pushed her fingers in, and worked her hand inside. The pouch entrance closed around her wrist in a tight ring. She gave a careful grope.
Princess’ skin still held a tepid vestige of living warmth. Glenn’s hand found and closed around a warm little body. It was fuzzy. No bigger than a hamster. It squirmed in her palm.
She pulled the tiny baby off its teat. The mouth closed on her fingertip, sucked. Glenn pulled her hand out through the tight opening, trying not to squeeze what was in her palm.
She brought it out into the light. The bluish eyes were covered with a thin membrane. Its toothless mouth opened wide. It made a tiny noise, an unhappy yowl that was barely a squeak. It exhaled baby smell. Squirmed, helpless.
The foxes moved back in, recurled Princess, and settled her into her grave.
Glenn ran into the forest after Rogue.
It was easy to follow Rogue’s aimless crashing. His forepaws flailed. He was not walking. He was falling forward by lurches, stumbling into trees and thorns.
When Glenn closed the gap between them, Rogue finally noticed her behind him. He turned. Looked like he’d been flogged.
Glenn didn’t know how to speak to him. She hummed an upturned
hm?
She could have been saying mumble socks for all she knew.
Rogue came to her on all fours, his head lowered, ears back, tail firmly between his legs, submissive. He sniffed her feet. He stood up and sniffed her wet face. His whiskers tickled.
He sniffed the baby in her hands.
Glenn had seen couples pass infants before. She gestured toward Rogue’s pouch.
Rogue took the baby in his paw and slipped it inside his pouch. He took a moment rearranging things in there. He withdrew his paw. The pouch opening contracted shut so it looked like a navel. Rogue combed his fur over it with his claws.
Glenn turned to go. Rogue followed her docilely back to the tribes.
The burial was done by then, the earth stamped down, the rocks piled over top. Princess was safe from predators. And that was the end of concern for the dead.
Glenn washed in the cold stream. Her tears ran hot. When she came back out to the meadow, the foxes were already dancing.
They lived in the moment. Foxes shook off sorrow and got on with living. Rogue danced.
The line beckoned for Glenn to hop in.
Patrick shouldered her, “You should go.”
“I-I can’t,” said Glenn. Knew she should. But she couldn’t. “Go for me.”
Patrick got into the line.
Glenn could not dance. She wasn’t a fox. The loss lodged in her human heart. She sat, hugging her knees, rocking, grieving and angry.
 
Toward sundown it occurred to Glenn just how reckless she’d been. She and Patrick had escaped from the pirates. But without landing disk or displacement collar or com, they could go nowhere.
“We need to go back to camp,” Glenn told Patrick.
He agreed. “They could hurt the others.”
Worse, they could hunt us down and hurt the foxes.
 
“Scientists collect specimens for study?” Glenn said, returning to the LEN expedition camp at daybreak. “I got you a specimen.” She slapped the dead cloke down like bagpipes retrieved from a peat bog, its arms and legs jutting in every direction. Its body wheezed.
“Study that!” she said.
The pirates stared at her, astonished.
“What!” Glenn yelled at all the staring faces. She stabbed Nox’s machete into the ground.
Director Benet hissed at her, “You stupid bitch! You could have got us all executed!”
Nox took a step forward. He retrieved his machete from the ground. He walked up to Glenn, the blade held vertical. “I knew you’d come back.”
Glenn said quietly, almost surprised, “I didn’t even know I left.”
She had been out of her head. She knew what that phrase meant now.
Lost it. Just lost it.
She felt a sudden revelation. Her anger, back when she’d been passed over for the XO spot on
Merrimack,
had been entirely out of line. Someone made the right call there.
I shouldn’t be XO. I should be shit-canned
.
She turned away from Nox and the machete.
She hadn’t known she had that unbridled savagery in her. It was gone now. It left a deep hollow behind it. She could only hurt, hurt, hurt for her baby girl. Only close her eyes and she could see those big shining black eyes and bright innocent smile. She couldn’t look at wildflowers without crying, because she wanted to braid them into Princess’ fur.
She knew people lost themselves in a strange land. Her latent maternal instinct surfaced here. She never knew she had one at all. She had imprinted on a pretty young fox who became her daughter.
And lost her.
Even the pirates gave her a wide berth.
Nox murmured, “The female of the species is more deadly than the male.”
Loss had transformed her into that most dangerous of creatures, a bereft mother. Hell had no fury like it. A woman scorned didn’t even come close.
 
Dr. Patrick Hamilton had made a life of talking to aliens. All he wanted to say to the clokes was drop dead.
His wife was in their tent, hugging a pillow, trying to sleep. His wife, who never cried, sobbed her heart out for the loss of their pretty baby princess.
Patrick got up from his worktable.
The LEN camp stood on a narrow plateau of level ground set into a rise between the river in the low land and the highland meadows where mammoths roamed and foxes played.
The stream that ran outside the LEN expedition camp cut a rocky passage from the highlands down to the wide river below, where clokes buried their eggs in the muddy banks.
Patrick loaded himself like a pack mule with audio equipment. He emerged from his work hut draped with leafy camouflage netting. He looked ridiculously like a furtive bush. He glanced around for pirates and crept out between parked spaceships. His light footfalls sounded like cymbal crashes to his own ears.
He crossed the dirt perimeter and walked out from under the energy dome.
He hiked through thick tangles of late summer brush to the rocky stream. He started once more up the rocky ascent.
By now he was starting to recognize stones and trees.
And he stumbled upon a pirate.
It was Nox, crouched quiet as a forest creature at the streamside. He was shaving with a dagger. His hair was wet.
Scared fearless, Patrick kept hiking. His survival instinct completely failed him. He was on a mission.
Nox’s head turned slowly as Patrick, the walking bush, climbed past him. The expression on Nox’s scarred face looked like odd disbelief.
Patrick nodded up at the route through the steep narrows ahead of him. His voice came out a growl. “Nox, if your pirate ship is hidden in this pass, you might think about moving it.”
Like a mouse telling the baddest kitty in the litter to move its furry ass.
Patrick expected he was about to leave this world as Poul Vrba had, smiling from his throat. Yet he couldn’t make himself care.
My wife is crying.
I’ve never done anything for her.
Our daughter is dead.

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