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

by R. M. Meluch

  “Is the ship radioactive?” Calli asked.

  There was a quick conference with Ops. Tactical answered, “Negative radiation. It’s a hydrogen powerplant. No hydrogen in it now.”

  Calli ordered, “Mister Ryan. Have Wraith strip the powerplant out of that. Keep the engine in tow. Bring the rest of the spacecraft inboard for analysis.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “Commander Ryan, organize a sweep of the debris. None of that makes planetfall.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Captain Carmel turned to the specialist at the com station. “Mister Dorset. Where is my Hamster?”

  Red Dorset had been hailing Lieutenant Glenn Hamilton since Merrimack entered the Zoen star system. “Have not been able to make contact, Captain. I can’t get Dr. Hamilton either. I do have a very angry man named Benet. He keeps telling us to go away.”

  Thunder cracked under a cloudless evening sky. The claps erupted at ground level like shelling.

  Xenos poured out of their work huts and tents. Explosions sounded all around them, but nothing fell from the sky. No dirt sprayed up from the ground.

  Director Benet had not shared with his colleagues Merrimack’s intent to send a landing team down. He’d thought his refusal was enough to keep them away.

  Now the displacement disks came blasting out of thin air in preparation for the Marines’ arrival.

  The thin metal disks split the air with a bang and settled to the ground.

  Benet ran about, shouting at the sky, “No! No!” and to his team,” Get that! Get that!” while he gathered up landing disks as quickly as he could. He carried six of them like a stack of dinner plates. “Throw them out!” He ran toward the annihilator.

  Most of the expedition team—those who weren’t hiding in the storm shelter—didn’t want to touch the things.

  Manny the pilot picked up a disk. Lights on the disk’s rim turned green. Instantly a hundred-kilo Marine materialized with a bang on top of the disk.

  Marine and disk fell hard. An oof and a snap from underneath the disk was probably a rib of the man under him. The Marine scrambled to his feet.

  Other bangs sounded as Marines appeared on other landing disks.

  The disks in Benet’s stack showed red lights. He shoved his stack into the annihilator. He came stalking out of the recycling hut, head aggressively forward, shoulders back, lower teeth bared, indignant. The whites of his eyes flared at the Marines.

  The medical doctor, Cecil, knelt on the ground, tending to Manny, who lay gaping and gasping like a landed carp.

  Benet pointed down at Manny and shouted at the Marines, “What did you do to this man!”

  The nearest Marine answered, contrite. “Sat on him, sir. He was under my LD.”

  Director Izrael Benet turned round and round, seeking the ranking officer among the invaders who materialized inside his camp.

  He singled out Commander Ryan, the only formal one in the group. The one in Navy blue. The rest were in mud green and rigged like an assault team.

  Commander Ryan looked rakish even in dress blues. Maybe it was his off-center mouth and inverted crescent eyes that always seemed to be smiling. He had a wide, high brow, wayward hair, no earlobes. His ears were set so close to his head it gave him a feral look.

  Director Benet advanced on Ryan and demanded, “Why is there a ship of death on my roof?”

  Commander Ryan said, as if it were obvious, “This world is under extraplanetary attack.”

  “Mrs. Hamilton’s mythical attack ships?” Benet said, dripping contempt. His eyes raked the XO up and down, taking in the commander’s braid on his cuffs and shoulder boards.

  Izrael Benet was an imposing, forceful man. He was not accustomed to facing down so many men taller, bigger, more forceful than he. Even the women Marines looked like attack dogs. Still, Director Izrael Benet had his position of superior authority.

  “You planted those spaceships here to give you a pretext to come to Zoe. There are no extraplanetaries here!”

  Commander Ryan’s wolf-brown eyes flicked skyward. “Not upstairs,” he agreed. “Not anymore, thank you very much.”

  Izrael Benet didn’t understand, but he wouldn’t touch the bait. He played his ace. “In peacetime the League of Earth Nations has jurisdiction over any Earth presence in a LEN protectorate. Since you are here, your ship of war will accept the LEN flag.”

  “I’m not giving odds on that happening,” said Commander Ryan. “Where is Glenn Hamilton?”

  “I want green armbands on all these people,” said Director Benet. “Now.”

  “Glenn Hamilton?” Commander Ryan repeated.

  “They were contaminating the environment,” said Benet.

  With the kind of stillness that falls just before you need to run to the cellar, Commander Ryan asked, “Where are Dr. and Lieutenant Hamilton?”

  “We had to confine them,” said Director Benet.

  Colonel Steele had his sidearm out in an instant. His Marines followed his lead.

  Most of the civilian expedition members had never been in the presence of drawn weapons. They flinched, moaned, froze, backed away toward cover.

  Commander Ryan said, “Right, then. Who’s going to show me where my officers are?”

  A xeno came running, shied at all the drawn splinter guns. He hissed at the expedition director, “Izzy! They escaped!”

  “They—?” Benet started.

  Commander Ryan asked, deadly gentle, “Escaped from what?” He guessed they were Glenn and Patrick Hamilton.

  Steele gave a hand signal. Weapons cocked in brute unison.

  Benet bellowed to everyone cringing around him, “Stand your ground! They are not going to open fire on unarmed civilians. Who let the prisoners out?”

  Benet looked around for a guilty face. It was tough to tell the difference between terror and guilt.

  A serene, cultured voice sounded from behind him. “I did.”

  Director Benet and Commander Ryan turned toward where the racing yacht Mercedes sat in the half ring of boxy expedition spaceships.

  A slender, dignified figure holding a wineglass advanced from the yacht’s open hatch. He presented an elegant silhouette, taut and sleek as the black and tan Doberman bitch at his heels.

  Jose Maria de Cordillera.

  Behind him, out of the star racer Mercedes, stepped Patrick Hamilton and Dr. Aaron Rose also holding dessert wineglasses. Glenn Hamilton left her glass at the dinner table.

  Jose Maria strolled toward the Marines, as if this were a congenial gathering, not a powder keg in a high-ox atmosphere. He visibly took note of Steele’s insignia, then nodded a greeting. “Colonel. Congratulations.”

  TR Steele had been a Lieutenant Colonel when last they met. He was wearing the full bird now.

  Steele grunted.

  Jose Maria turned to the young man in dress blues with three rows of braid on his cuffs. “Commander.” Jose Maria offered his hand. “We have not met. Jose Maria de Cordillera.”

  “Heard about you, mate.” Commander Ryan clasped Jose Maria’s hand, gave it a quick strong shake. “Stuart Ryan. Call me Dingo.”

  Ryan turned his head sharply to Benet and said, “Not you. You call me sir.” Ryan looked to Glenn and Patrick. “You right?”

  Glenn nodded. “Sir.”

  Steele gave a silent signal. Weapons audibly uncocked.

  Benet’s glance moved sharply from Colonel Steele to Commander Ryan. He demanded, “Who is in charge here. You or you?”

  “Not you, mate,” said Dingo.

  Benet flung an arm wide at the surrounding Marines. “Get them out of here. Get them out, get them out. No! You are not doing that!” Benet pointed at two Marines who were belting protective personal fields onto Patrick and Glenn.

  “They’re leaving!” said Benet. “You’re all leaving.” He stalked around the Marines, arms waving as if shooing geese. “Go! Go!”

  Then he marched up into Steele’s face, “Move!”

  Steel
e might have been guarding Buckingham Palace for all he reacted.

  Glenn spoke softly so Benet would have to stop shouting to hear her. “Dr. Benet. These men aren’t hostile. This action is defensive only. Whether you accept it or not, this planet is under invasion.”

  “Oh, I admit we are under invasion,” said Benet. “From you!”

  “We are not the only space invaders in town,” Glenn said evenly.

  Benet made a show of perfect stunned outrage, his eyes round. “You dare call us invaders?”

  Glenn threw a pointing hand out to her right. “I was talking about those.”

  At the camp perimeter, in the growing darkness, they were just visible. Eyes. Many eyes, in sets of three, craning on their stalks.

  Those did not belong here.

  Director Benet stared back. His mouth fell open. “Oh, bugger.”

  21

  ON FIRST SEEING THE ALIENS at the streamside in the highlands, Glenn and Patrick had run straight back to the meadow to warn the foxes. They’d found the foxes already sniffing the air for themselves, their hackles raised, their muzzles wrinkled up at the stink, their tails bottlebrush stiff. They turned questioning eyes to Patrick.

  Patrick clenched his fist before his mouth, as if closing his muzzle shut, which in fox sign-speak meant, sensibly enough, shut your muzzle and be quiet.

  Patrick hummed to them. All ears pricked up and forward, intent.

  Then the foxes melted away through the underbrush and disappeared into the forest, away from the stream.

  Glenn had asked, “What did you say to them?”

  “I said, ‘Smelly black thorn bushes crossed the river. Ugly ugly. Bad bad. Go.’”

  What they had seen there was here now.

  Just beyond the dirt perimeter, at the periphery of the camp’s minimal lights, the aliens stared.

  They looked like rotten sponges perched on spindly tree roots.

  They were muddy black. Each had three eyes, each eye set on a mobile eye stalk. One eye extended from the being’s putative chest, another extended from its midback, and the third eye attached like a very skinny off-center neck from the top of the thing’s flat, flexible slab of a spongy torso.

  Positioned next to the top eyestalk was an orifice that opened and shut. One could guess it was a mouth because the aliens had no discrete heads.

  Two multijointed arms attached at the top corners of the alien torsos where arms ought to connect. Thin wiry strands of hair at the corners made the creatures look as if they were fraying at the edges.

  The aliens couldn’t be said to have hands because they had no palms. Their arms terminated directly into fingers. Two digits extended from the end of one arm, three digits from the other arm, and all of the digits looked opposable.

  Three multijointed legs were set tripodally at the bottom of the alien torsos. Glenn and Patrick hadn’t gotten a look at their feet the first time, but they had seen three-toed tracks, the toes splayed at 120 degrees from one another. The tracks ran all along the streamside.

  The closest person to the camp perimeter turned around to face the watchers in the forest. She was a Marine. Flight Sergeant Kerry Blue.

  Kerry said, “Oh. Hello, ugly. You must be the space invaders.”

  Three projectiles bounced off Kerry Blue’s PF with a clatter and ricochet zing. Kerry dropped to the dirt, hands to her head.

  In a moment, alive and in full voice, Kerry shouted, “Who’s shooting?”

  With a snakestrike flick of a spindly alien arm, two more projectiles came at Cain Salvador’s face and bounced off of his personal field. Cain blinked.

  “Nails,” he said. “They’re throwing their fingernails.”

  The alien had thrown its nails with so much force that the Marine’s personal field deflected them. The creature had flicked first its three-fingered arm at Kerry, then its two-fingered arm at Cain. Its fingers moved now like a spider, nailless.

  Asante Addai moved in closer, head down, squinting between the trees. Night was falling. “Fark! They are ugly.”

  Carly Delgado picked up one of the projectiles that struck Kerry’s PF. She dropped it. “And they stink like nothing on Earth.”

  Asante’s face wrinkled against the stench as he tried to talk without breathing. “Gug. Is that them?”

  The alien flipped over into a handstand, its three legs in the air. Asante jerked back. “Ho! Look at that!”

  The three legs flicked. Asante flinched, blinked, as a barrage of toenails from all three legs bounced off his personal field right before his face.

  “They’re throwing their toenails!”

  Several quick movements showed between the trees in the darkening forest, like flicking twigs. A rain of nails came flying out toward the camp.

  Dak Shepard, standing farther back, where the thrown projectiles began to lose velocity, got a smattering of nails moving slowly enough to pass through his PF. Yelled, “Hey!”

  Kerry Blue picked up a nail that had bounced off her energy field. She held it up for Colonel Steele to see. “Sir?” she asked, like a dog waiting for permission to bite.

  A LEN xeno ran between the Marines and aliens, waving his hands. “No! No violence!”

  Asante spoke, cross. “No. Hey. They started it, frer.”

  The man was the expedition’s xenosociologist, Helmut Roodoverhemd. “They feel threatened by us! We are strangers on their world!”

  “It’s not their world,” Patrick called from a safe distance. He made sure his PF was energized just the same. “Those things are every bit as Zoen as I am.”

  “They are strangers here. They have come to study—as have we. Don’t hurt them,” Roodoverhemd implored. He turned and moved slowly into the forest to say hello to the visitors.

  “Watch it,” Patrick warned. “They take specimens.”

  When Patrick and Glenn had first seen the aliens, the aliens were grabbing small animals, squeezing them dead and shoving them into bags at the streamside.

  The aliens here were carrying their bags now, but these bags were empty.

  “It’s easy to love what is beautiful,” said Roodoverhemd. “We are strangers to them. They are intelligent. They crossed the stars. They must be made to know we mean them no harm.”

  Roodoverhemd seemed to have—as so many xenos had—a professional self-loathing that drove them starward, far away from their own kind, to commune with things better, purer, more natural than themselves.

  Dr. Roodoverhemd approached the strangers. He held his arms up in imitation of the contorted way the aliens held their multiply articulated arms.

  Jose Maria cautioned from a distance, “I would not.”

  His dog leaned into Jose Maria’s legs, standing between her master and the aliens, trying to herd him backward. She barked toward the forest.

  “Would not what? Try to communicate? They’re not viruses, Don Cordillera,” Roodoverhemd called back. His gaze remained fixed on one of the aliens, trying to hold its three-eyed gaze. “If they are spacefaring, then they are civilized.”

  But even Director Izrael Benet, looking like a man slapped suddenly sober, said, “Take a shield, Helmut.”

  Benet offered the xenosociologist one of the lightweight mesh shields made of clear woven polymer that were stacked at camp’s edge. Roodoverhemd refused the offered shield, offended. “What kind of message does that send?”

  Sticklike arms flicked, too quick to see. Fingernails hit like bullets. Roodoverhemd jerked around in the air, twisted. Fell.

  Colonel Steele bellowed, “Man down! Man down! Fire at will.”

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  Marines opened fire into the trees. Tags and splinters tore through the foliage. Nothing cried out in pain.

  The xenosociologist, lying on the ground with three deep wounds, was not bleeding. He looked pretty damned dead, but you don’t ever assume.

  Against the barrage of splinters, a mass of the stilted things advanced and converged on the body. Spongy-bodied, stick-armed figu
res bore the dead xeno up.

  Patrick cried, “They bagged Helmut!”

  Surviving aliens—and there were way too many of them for the number of shots fired—spirited the body away at a lurching gallop into the forest depths.

  Watching from under the camp lights, Patrick muttered, “I warned him they take specimens. Did he think they were going to ask him to pee in a cup?”

  Steele thundered, “Get that man.”

  Cain shouted, “Sir! Either we are really bad shots, or the splinters are passing straight through the targets!”

  Steele roared, “Hand to hand then! I want that man!” And he charged forward to lead the pursuit into the alien woods.

  Staying behind in the LEN camp, Commander Ryan took a hail from Merrimack, which would be able to detect the shooting from orbit. Calli’s voice sounded over his com, “Commander, what is your situation?”

  “Hell, sir. We have a right regular old cluster down here.”

  Into the woods. Dark.

  Kerry Blue’s night vision switched itself on. Heard other Marines baying like bull mastiffs. The aliens didn’t yell. Of the aliens she heard only the thrash of leaves and snap of twigs. There was also a squeak of something she almost stepped on.

  She caught glimpses of the aliens’ tottering gallop and their handsprings.

  Her splinter gun was turning out to be no good against those spindly, quick, dark targets. She wasn’t allowed to bring a beam weapon into the oxygen-rich air. Damn that.

  Unless she struck a hard part of the alien, and there didn’t seem to be too many of those, her splinter shots were passing clean through.

  The aliens jumped like spiders. Big spiders. Anyone who had been in the Hive conflict reflexively reached for a sword. She reached more than once.

  Saw one alien spring end over end like a bad gymnast.

  The things were torqing her off. Made her feel inept. Her protective field buzzed. One of those things had nailed her PF again. She screeched. “I want my sword back!”

  Twitch Fuentes and the other guys had the right idea—run in and tackle the bastards. Just grab a leg or three, swing ’em up and beat them to death against a tree. Make sure they spent their nails first though.