The Twice and Future Caesar (5 page)

Cinna spoke tightly, “Pretty
much.”

C
INNA
SEIZED
N
OX
by the torn suit and hauled him into the ship's medical compartment.

Formerly an ambassadorial craft, the pirate ship
Bagheera
was a Xerxes type spacecraft. It carried excellent diagnostic equipment, but this was an exotic problem. Cinna needed to jury-rig the analyzers to look for microbombs.

The other six brothers crowded at the chamber hatch, waiting for the prognosis. They were keeping their distance, and they had their personal fields activated. Some microbombs were programmed to detonate under standard detection procedures.

Cinna pronounced, grim. “We didn't escape.”

The brothers exchanged uncertain glances. Of course they'd escaped. All eight of them were here.

Galeo fidgeted with his neat red goatee. “What's the problem?”

“Nanites.”

Leo drew back sharply. He backed into Orissus and Nicanor who shoved him forward again.

Leo had a positive horror of nanites. Leo saw nanites under the bed, in every drop of water. The others ragged him mercilessly about it. Leo recovered in a moment and gave an annoyed laugh. “No, really, Cinna. What is it?”

“Nanites,” said Cinna.

“Verily?” Galeo tried to scoff.

Cinna glared at him. Cinna was always serious.

Nox, from the exam table, said, “I'm fine. See? No raving. No visions.”

Romulus' nanites only affected Romulus. And his sister Claudia. The nanites had really slammed Claudia.

These nanites weren't doing anything. “They screwed up,” Nox said.

“Do not underestimate the Romulii,” Cinna said. “Just because they are a bit insane, doesn't mean they aren't very, very clever.”

“So are we,” said Nox.
A bit insane and very, very clever
. “We'll get through this.”

“I don't think we will.”

Coming from Cinna, that was a death sentence.

“Why did the nanites target me?” Nox asked. “Is it because I wasn't born Roman?”

“No. Because you're the one who got who got himself scratched in the dungeon,” Cinna said.

Nox craned to look over his shoulder at the scratches on his back. Hell, they didn't even feel infected. “Why didn't these things just kill me immediately and be done with it?”

“That's an interesting question,” Cinna said. “It needs answering.”

“He's a Trojan Horse,” Leo said.

“Yes,” Cinna said. “I believe he is.”

A graveled voice sounded from the back of the group. Orissus: “Get him out of here.”

Nox said, “Maybe I'm not the right carrier. That's why the nanites aren't doing anything.”

“They're doing something,” Cinna said.

“What can we do for Nox?” That was Nicanor. Stuffy martinet Nicanor. Nox suddenly loved the hell out of him.

Pallas suggested, “Numa has the resources to help Nox if he wants to.”

Graveyard snorts all around. Even Nox snorted.

“We can't go to Caesar,” Faunus said. “We failed our mission. We didn't kill Romulus.
Merda
, we didn't even
find
Romulus.”

“Numa Pompeii won't let anything with nanites near him. He'd kill all of us first,” Nicanor said. “Or, more simple, just order us to die.”

“Am I contagious?” Nox asked.

The brothers were keeping their distance. Leo was standing just about in the next solar system.

“Somewhat,” Cinna said.

“How what?” Nox yelped. “Which what!”

“I'm not sure,” Cinna said. “Those scratches are how the nanites got inside you. What they're doing now, I don't know.”

Cinna reached behind his back for the cables implanted in his spine. He plugged them into the base of his skull. His face relaxed. His irises, already black, looked like hollow pits. He connected the cables in his forearms, then made a last connection with a port to
Bagheera
's data array.

He was only in for a moment. Then he pulled all the connections apart. He announced, “Do not kiss Nox good-bye.”

Nox took a breath of relief. “You mean I'm going to live?”

Cinna reworded for his brothers, “I mean don't anyone kiss Nox when you say good-bye to him.”

“Oh,
merda
.”

They would be saying good-bye. From a distance.

Leo asked, from out in the corridor, “What are you going to do, Nox?”

Words stuck in Nox's throat. How was he to know the answer to that? “You mean besides crying like a little girl? I HAVE NO IDEA!”

Cinna was watching the instrument readouts. He made an ominous little sound in his throat.

“What?” Nox snapped.

“Give Nox a strong sedative,” Cinna ordered Pallas.

“Tequila,” Nox requested.

“Something faster acting than that. Pallas, haste. We need to slow Nox's pulse—fast. The nanites are circulating. And they're oscillating.”

“I'm guessing that's bad,” Nox said.

Cinna waited until after Pallas administered an intradermal sedative to respond. “It's . . . ominous. Something will happen when all the oscillators sync-up.”

The sedative was already slowing Nox's blood circulation. Nox asked fuzzily, “What happens if they sync?”

“There's no
if
. Synchronization is a mathematical certainty. Each oscillator affects all the others. When two oscillators with different periods pulse at the same time, they lock together in the same rhythm and they do
not
fall out of step with each other. Eventually, all the oscillators
will
sync-up with one another. Then it's not good. We could be in danger.”

“What about
me?
” said Nox.

“You?” said Cinna. “No question. You're done.”

“Keep them from syncing!” Pallas cried. Those were words Nox tried to say, but he was too slow to form them.

“I can't,” Cinna said. “They're mingling in Nox's bloodstream. They're in different phases now, but every time one pulses in the vicinity of another, they lock step. It's a symmetrical bond. Sooner or later all the oscillators will pulse together.”

“So what happens when they are all synced?”

“I'm pretty sure they blow up.”

“Get them out!” Nox cried.

Cinna's hesitation was disturbing. When he spoke, it was worse. “We don't have the equipment to extract nanites.”

Nanite extractors were exotic specialized equipment.
Bagheera
was created to be an ambassadorial ship and, though it was exceptionally well supplied, it didn't carry anything like nano-synthesis equipment.

“And we have damn little time. While Nox stays on board, we are all in danger.”

Nox asked in a drugged calm, eyes swimming up to Cinna's beautiful face, “Are we pitching Nox out the air lock, Little Brother?”

Cinna turned his opaque gaze down to Nox. “That
is
the plan. Yes.”

Orissus brought a life pod to the medical compartment. Nox obediently rolled into the thin-membraned sac. He thought to ask, “Why am I doing this?”

Cinna closed the sac three quarters of the way around him. He left it open over Nox's face.

Nox's brothers, in full containment suits with personal fields activated, carried the life pod to the air lock. Leo wasn't one of the pallbearers. Leo opened the air lock and stepped way aside to let the bearers step through.

The brothers placed Nox in the air lock. The last person Nox saw was Pallas, who nodded encouragingly, stupidly clinging to hope. “It'll be okay.”

The life sac closed over Nox's face. It was dark in here. One of his brothers had given him a bottle of tequila. Nox hugged it like a teddy bear.

He felt a pressure change with the air lock shutting, sealing him off.

He knew when the air lock opened. His life pod lost contact with the deck. He heard the swish of expelled air. And that was the end of external sound. His life pod ballooned out, stretched taut.

He floated, weightless, alone with his own breathing, his own pulse, and the soft whisper of the air circulator.

There was no light. Dammit, they hadn't given him a light. Nox floated
against the smooth confines of the life pod. He touched against one side, and slowly bounced to the other side.

This isn't a life pod. It's a body bag
.

He'd been tossed into the vastest of all oceans. The pressure was minimal. He felt puffy. Heat distributed unevenly, forming uncomfortable cooling eddies around him.

The membrane that separated him from eternity seemed so fragile. It felt as if it might tear at a thought.

How long do I have?
He'd asked that before being cast outboard.

Cinna had answered.
Best you not know
.

His heart beat slowly. That was the drugs. It was hard to panic with a heartbeat this slow. All his little oscillators were joining up and flashing together in greater numbers. He felt his own exhalation through his nostrils against his upper lip.

He would have liked some sound. Music. A voice link. Someone to talk to. They'd sent him out with a com tuned to the international emergency channel, but no one was talking to him.

He heard his sluggish pulse brush at his eardrum. Sounded like little pairs of breaths.

He smelled his own fear. Claustrophobia crept through him in the black heart of infinity.

He gave a slow-motion kick in protest.

A noise formed in his throat. It would have been a scream if he had the energy.

Bagheera
lurked, dark, cloaked in perfect stealth, monitoring the tiny life pod from a distance.

Bagheera
didn't carry the facilities to clean the nanites out of Nox, but as Cinna told his brothers, “Someone out here
does
.”

The U.S. Space Battleship
Merrimack
carried a hospital bigger than that of most terrestrial cities.
Merrimack
had nanite scrubbers.

Normally hunting anything in space was like trying to find a needle in a pine forest. But Cinna knew where
Merrimack
had been a few terrestrial days ago.
Merrimack
gave away her position when she sent Caesar a resonant hail.

Merrimack
was nearby, astronomically speaking. Not a coincidence. The Americans were hunting the same installation the brothers had just found.

With the lifepod in tow,
Bagheera
raced at threshold velocity to
Merrimack
's last known position. Cinna gambled that he would find
Merrimack
still in the Indra Aleph star system, wandering in the wrong pine forest.

And here she was, cruising at sublight velocity. But even now, the space battleship was gathering in her drone scouts, perhaps making ready to leave.

Merrimack
was a big plot with a distinctive shape. There was only one other spacecraft like her. Her upper and lower sails were swept back like fletching on an arrow.
Merrimack
's wings were not wings for flying, though they gave an impression of flight.
Merrimack
had wings like a building had wings.
Merrimack
was as aerodynamic as a skyscraper.

The pirate ship set Nox's life pod adrift across the
Merrimack
's path with a white flag and an SOS beacon.

Cinna murmured a benediction into the void. “Good hunting.”

12 January 2448
U.S. Space Battleship
Merrimack
Indra Aleph Star System
Perseid Space

Merrimack
moved at sublight speed through the Indra Aleph system. Her drones had turned over a lot of rocks, searching for the one Romulus was hiding under. There was still more space to cover, but Captain Carmel was starting to think the Roman had thrown her a bone.

“I've been played. Dingo. Bring in the drones and get us back on our previous course.”

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

The drones were coming in when Tactical sang out, “Bogey! Directly in our path.”