The Ninth Circle: A Novel of the U.S.S. Merrimack

by R. M. Meluch

  Sector Primus watched over the base of Legion Persus.

  The Sector Vigil looked over Observer Six’s shoulder at his readouts. “What do you see?”

  Observer Six pointed to one satellite image. “Action on Widow’s Edge.” He blew the image up bigger for the Vigil to see.

  The satellite eye that fed this image focused on a cadre of ’phebes—seven young men dressed in gens colors and one clad in burlap drab. That would be a tyro.

  “Looks like a hazing,” said Six.

  “That’s illegal,” Observer Eight said from his own station.

  Silence gripped the control room and extended for several heartbeats.

  There wasn’t a man or woman in the room who had not been hazed.

  There were two different kinds of unlawful acts in the Empire. One kind meant Don’t Get Caught. The other kind meant Don’t Do It. Really. Just don’t. Ever.

  Hazing fit into the former kind. Hazing was done all the time, because the tacit corollary to the law of Don’t Get Caught was Don’t Damage Your Victim.

  Senior Observer Gemma tsked at her station. She spoke laconically, “Bad boys.”

  Observers Two, Seven, and Eight left their stations to gather around Observer Six’s station to watch the tyro walk to the edge of the cliff.

  Behind the tyro were six tall, gorgeous youths who looked just like him, five of them dressed in bronze and black tunics, black cargo pants, and black boots. Bronze and black were the colors of gens Antonia. These boys were from the Legion base of Legion Persus.

  The sixth youth was shorter than the others, blond and fair. He wore a black and bronze knee-length tunic without trousers. A gust of wind flashed his jockstrap,the modern equivalent of a loincloth. That man had to be adopted.

  Satellite surveillance carried no audio, but the video was good enough for the observers to see the mouths of the ’phebes moving in a chant. Jump! Jump! Jump!

  The Vigil knew this one. About two-thirds of the way down the cliff, a hidden net pops out of the rock face and slows you down to a stop just above the ground. Then the rope holding the net bounces you back up to where you left your last meal. And if you’ve hung onto your wits after the bouncing stops, you laugh and yell, “Again!”

  Senior Observer Gemma covered her eyes and returned to her own station. She sat, hunched her shoulders forward, and shuddered. “Gaah. That is still a long-ass drop.”

  The Sector Vigil angled the satellite’s cam down to find the net mechanism hidden in the cliff face. There it was. Just as it had been in his day.

  Observer Six moved the satellite camera’s focus back up to the tyro’s pallid face and closed in tight enough to see the pinpoints of sweat form on his brow and quickly vanish, carried away by a sere wind. Widow’s Edge stood over dry country.

  Six asked no one, everyone, “Is he going to jump?”

  The Sector Vigil said, “Of course he’ll jump.”

  Seven: “No. He’s talking. He’s weaseling his way out of it.”

  Six: “Five denari says he doesn’t jump.”

  Eight: “Nego! He will. He has to. I got your five.”

  Gemma raised her hand, not looking up from her own station. “I’m good for ‘he jumps.’”

  Seven studied the tyro’s face uncertainly. His brows met. “You think? You’re on.”

  “Plant it,” Gemma said.

  The other observers slapped their wagers on Six’s console.

  Six offered a side bet, “He’s going to piss.”

  There were no takers for that action.

  Cliff-dwelling creatures dropped from their crags, spread leathery wings wide, and soared on the thermals.

  Cinna hesitated on the windy height. A silicate sting in the dry air bit his cheeks. His tunic and his trouser legs fluttered. He tried to force a calm tone into his voice, but a thin note of panic cut in. “This is pointless. I understand if I refuse, then I am not whom you want, and I deserve to die. But when I do obey, I will prove my devotion, but I’ll also be dead and no use to you.”

  “You are assuming this is all about you,” Orissus said, cold.

  Nicanor said, “Ever think this might be our trial. We can’t afford to be soft.”

  “There are things more important than you,” Pallas said. “Jump.”

  Cinna looked straight down. Oh, bull. This was a loyalty challenge. There was a catch in here somewhere. He had to stop looking down. And don’t stand here too long. Longer made it harder.

  Fear of heights was hard-coded into a gene that most human beings carried. Fear of heights was a survival trait—to keep you from doing something like this.

  The rational mind could overrule instinct. Trust must overcome natural fear. That’s what this was about.

  Cinna resolved to take that step.

  Fortune favors the bold.

  So said the mind. The body was in full revolt. The hard-wired terror in his lizard brain subverted his conscious will. His legs were turning to gelatin.

  A balk showed fear and distrust. He needed to get this over with before terror trickled down his leg.

  I’m freezing up. Too much thinking. Go.

  The ground below was so very far away.

  Go. Just go.

  “There he goes!” Observer Eight crowed as the tyro stepped off the cliff edge.

  “Pay me,” said Gemma, still not looking, at the same time as the Vigil’s hand slapped down on the console with a victorious, “Ha!”

  “Get stuffed.” Seven sulked his way back toward his own station.

  Six groaned.

  Observer Eight snatched up the pot to divide among the winners while the jumper plummeted.

  It was an eternal way down. The youth was still dropping. The camera tracked him all the way.

  The Vigil shuddered, watching.

  Gods, that’s terrifying.

  Gravity was strong on Phoenix, but the air was thick. The Vigil was not sure what that did to terminal velocity. It was still fast.

  Abruptly the sour mutters of the losers and cackles of the winners cut off, and all the watchers jerked straight up like a stand of vibrating spears with a collective shout, “Shit!”

  Nox spat a mouthful of windblown dust into a rubbery bush while his brothers leaned over the cliff edge, watching the fall. Faunus whistled a descending note.

  Nox heard their sudden gasps.

  Faunus’ whistle sputtered short.

  Nox’s brothers convulsed. Clogged wordless sounds gurgled in their throats. They backed away from the edge.

  When they turned around for Nox to see, their bronze-toned faces were nearly white. Their wide eyes and open mouths told Nox that the net hadn’t deployed.

  A delayed sound of impact traveled up from below.

  “No,” said Nox. It had to be a joke. They were playing him. “No.”

  But not one of them broke character.

  Nox silently coaxed them, Come on. Somebody crack a grin. Anybody . Faunus!

  Jovial Faunus looked ill.

  Okay, they got him to bite. His brothers were razzing him. Had to be. Just had to be. Nox marched to the edge to see for himself.

  Way down below lay a red spray like a lopsided flower. The compact pile in the center had to be the broken body. It was very realistic.

  And there was nothing joking in the sounds of his brothers’ ragged breathing behind him. Nox turned toward them.

  The white line around Faunus’ lips. Leo and Galeo’s constricted pupils. Those were hard to fake. Tears welled in Pallas’ eyes.

  Nox stared at them blankly. The sick feeling rooting in his gut was unacceptable. He needed someone to make it stop. Step back a frame. Make this not real.

  Nox turned round again, looked down. The horror was still down there, stark, simple, finite.

  No.

  Someone—Nicanor—grabbed Nox by the back of the tunic, dragged him back from the edge.

  And then they were all running.

  The running didn’t seem to have a start. Just
suddenly they were all doing it, racing down the path, back the way they came.

  Nox’s heart pounded in his aching chest. His pulse roared in his ears. His thoughts jammed into a ball and unraveled.

  He was falling behind the others. His brothers were titans. Nox, not a natural brother, was the runt of this litter, at a shrimpy six foot tall. He was the ugly duckling.

  Nox was not as powerful as a Roman-designed son. There was no stigma to adoption here. Once a family accepted your pledge, you were in. And Nox’s tall, bronzed brothers considered him one of their own.

  Another one of their own lay back there, broken at the foot of the cliff. Cinna.

  Nox’s breaths drew in harshly. He tasted dust.

  Skidded to halt and turned around.

  Pallas glanced back, stopped and yelled, “Nox! What the hell!”

  “I need to go get him,” Nox cried.

  “He is dead!”

  “I know. You go. I can’t just—” He cut himself short. There was no way out of this. None. He started over, “There’s going to be an inquest. They’ll need to hang this on someone. I’ll take the hit. You were never there! Go! ”

  Nox didn’t wait for arguing. He was already running again, back to where a side path forked off. The path that would lead him to Cinna.

  Nox ran. Not so much a run as a controlled fall, moving so fast he could scarcely get each foot down in front of him to take the next step as the ground came up.

  By the time he got to level ground, the muscles in his legs felt solidified. He kept going, hauling his legs forward as though he were dragging and dropping tree stumps.

  He closed his stinging eyes. The image came back, as if imprinted on the insides of his eyelids. A pile of bones at the bottom of the cliff.

  His eyes flew back open.

  He saw his future. There was nothing in it.

  He hadn’t just hazed Cinna, which was a crime. He hadn’t just failed to save Cinna from the danger he’d put him into. He’d run away. He left him.

  Even though Cinna wasn’t going anywhere, Nox felt an urgent need to get to him.

  The broken pile of bloody bones just shouldn’t be alone.

  “Deus! Deus! Deus!” Observer Six cried.

  The whole of Sector Primus Surveillance Center focused on one subject only.

  Gemma pushed away from her own console to come over to Six’s monitor.

  Wagers fell from hands as if the money were bleeding on them.

  Observer Six gawked at his monitor. “They dropped him!”

  “They left him!” the Vigil breathed.

  “Can’t be,” said Gemma. The thought was beyond Roman comprehension. She wedged her way in with the Vigil to see the satellite image. “They’re running to get him. The path winds around to the bottom. They’re going back.”

  “No they’re not!” Six cried, close to hysteria. “They left him!”

  He angled the camera wider over to the cloud of dust. The seven surviving ephebes were running down the wrong path—the one that led straight away from the cliff and away from the dead man.

  The Vigil commanded, “Six, keep a tracker on Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Gemma, call a skyhook to go get Humpty Dumpty.”

  The Vigil paced the compartment, treading on the fallen money, rage banging inside his skull. Cowards! Cowards! Cowards!

  Bleary-eyed, the air knifing his lungs, his throat raw and dry, Nox cast about the flat land for his brother. His muscles shook with dehydration. He couldn’t find Cinna.

  This was the place. The foot of Widow’s Edge. But Nox couldn’t see the body. There ought to be an obvious bloody mess.

  He called out for Cinna.

  Which was stupid because Cinna was dead. Nox had seen the blood spatter from the cliff top.

  He spied a dark shadow on the sun-baked dirt, and he stumbled closer. As he drew near he saw the dark color was not a shadow.

  He had found the blood. All the moisture had seeped into the thin layer of dust on the parched ground. It looked nearly black.

  But where was the body?

  Nox walked a helpless circle, bewildered.

  His hands lifted and fell to his sides, useless.

  He dropped down to sit in the middle of the bloodstain on the hard ground. He leaned over his knees, his head hanging forward. He raked his hands back through his dusty blond hair.

  Shit shit shit.

  A disk of bright light fell on him from above, brighter and hotter even than the sunlight, blasting away any shadow. He heard the hovercraft and a loud voice through a bullhorn: “Halt in the name of the Empire!”

  Halt what? Nox stayed in his sit. He lifted his hands over his bowed head.

  3

  A THUNDERING RUMBLE shook Glenn Hamilton awake, rattled all the gear in the ship’s lockers, and sent tremors through the deck.

  Sounded like grinding rocks in an avalanche. It was a sound you never want to hear on a ship traveling faster than light in the middle of the big black empty between stars.

  Glenn patted the mattress beside her. No husband. She was alone in the bed.

  Another wave of crashing booms sent her scrambling under the rack to retrieve emergency life sacs for herself and her husband. There wasn’t a proper spacesuit on board this crate, and any second the hull was going to rip open to the lightless, airless, flash-freeze of perfect vacuum at way below nothing Celsius.

  She’d been told that it was not the cold that kills you. Freezing required the presence of other matter to conduct the heat out of your body. She didn’t believe it.

  But she did know for sure that eyes and lungs and stomachs and guts ruptured in zero pressure.

  She didn’t know how much pain you felt when dying like that. Didn’t ever want to know.

  Glenn scrambled for the sleep compartment’s hatch.

  Abruptly the noise shut off.

  A sheepish laugh carried through the thin partitions of the ship. “Sorry! Sorry!”

  Glenn dropped into a crouch, let her forehead rest against the compartment’s hatch. She growled, hugging the his-and-hers life sacs. She knew that voice.

  Patrick. Her husband.

  From another sleeping compartment someone else called a sleepy scold, “Less decibelage is required!” Sounded like Aaron Rose, the xenoaerologist.

  Glenn never trusted LEN spacecraft, never imagined she would be traveling on one in the company of an international scientific exploration team. She felt much safer on board the space battleship Merrimack in the middle of a firefight with Romans than in this flimsy civilian box.

  This ship bore the typically benign League of Earth Nations name Spring Beauty.

  Through the vents Glenn could see lights going on outside her compartment. Feet shuffled and clomped on the ship’s single deck. Apparently the scientists were assembling out there in the common area.

  The other xenos would want to see what Patrick, the xenolinguist, was up to so loudly in the middle of ship’s night.

  Wide awake now, Glenn threw on a T-shirt and cargo pants. She pulled her sleep-tossed hair back into a tail and went out too.

  The deck felt neutral in temperature under her bare feet.

  She smelled popcorn.

  The ship’s scientists collected around Glenn’s husband, all of them asking variations on the same question with more or fewer expletives, “What was that?”

  Patrick looked sheepishly pleased with himself. He loved an audience.

  Patrick’s audience was an odd collection of human beings. Intellectuals tended not to alter their natural looks. They could be defiant that way. About half the people on this research vessel looked less than attractive, lacking vital color, muscle tone, a decent haircut, a bath. Glenn wondered if some of them were marking territory with their scent.

  Patrick stood out because he was good-looking, tall, with a nice build, not muscle-bound but in reasonable shape for a slender academic. His soft, dark brown hair was trimmed and usually clean.

  If Patrick Hamilton
were an animal, he would be a young stag, aesthetic, soft-eyed, handsome.

  And he froze when scared.

  His quirky manner didn’t put off the she-brains on board this bus. Dr. Hamilton was among his own kind here.

  “I’ve been listening to Zoen mammoths,” Patrick said. They talk.”

  “Apparently,” said Dr. Rose, not delighted.

  Aaron Rose was a puppy-eyed man of middle years and razor intellect. His hairline was in retreat and closing in on outright desertion. Dr. Rose could be a real snot. Glenn liked him.

  “Where’s the popcorn?” asked Glenn.

  Patrick passed her the bag.

  The other xenos wore sleep-deprived dubious scowls. The ship’s team leader, Dr. Poul Vrba, said what the others muttered, “Talk? Really?”

  Senior xenozoologist Dr. Peter Szaszy challenged Patrick. “Why hasn’t anyone ever heard those kinds of sounds out of my mammoths before?”

  “No one ever tried buggering them before,” Dr. Rose muttered. Got an elbow in the kidney from Dr. Maarstan for it. “Who’s got the popcorn?”

  Glenn passed the bag.

  “Where did you get this recording?” Dr. Szaszy demanded, defensive.

  Peter Szaszy was one of the original explorers of their destination planet, Zoe. The mammoths were Szaszy’s project. Patrick was trespassing into Szaszy’s field of expertise. That was a major breach of brain etiquette.

  “I got it out of the database,” said Patrick. “First expedition. This is your own bubble, Szasz.”

  “No,” Peter Szaszy said. “There is no such noise on my recordings. Mammoths don’t make sounds louder than a peep. That’s not my audio. You jammed something in there.”

  “It’s your bubble. And the sounds are on there,” Patrick said, boyish. Not endearingly boyish. An irritating I’ve-got-a-secret kind of boyish. “I just enhanced them a little.”

  “A little,” Szaszy said, vindicated.

  “No, no. The volume is true to life,” Patrick said. “All I did was bump up the frequency a couple octaves to transpose the sounds into the human audible range. The mammoths are communicating on wavelengths so long that their vocalizations literally go in one of your ears and out the other without registering—which is pretty much normal for you anyway.”