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

by R. M. Meluch

  The distribution of the ships was confined between latitudes thirty-seven degrees North and South, except for one ship crashed in the arctic. That one had gone thoroughly wrong and was strewn across kilometers. The aliens’ target zone appeared to be the tropics.

  “These ships might have been the vanguard,” Commander Ryan suggested. “The scouts made it. The mothership didn’t,”

  Tactical said, “Or maybe the mothership didn’t like the scouting report and kept going.”

  Calli asked, “Are these ships the sources of the low-level radio signals we’ve been detecting?”

  “Negative,” said the com tech.

  Tactical said, “The shipwrecks are inert.”

  “Yes, you did tell me that,” Calli said, pacing.

  Dingo Ryan asked, “Could the radio transmission have to do with our pirates?

  “How could they? The pirates just got here,” said Calli. Then, “Mister Dorset. Raise the LEN camp.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” said Red Dorset at the com.

  When Director Benet responded at last to Merrimack’s hail, Captain Carmel advised him of the presence of pirates on the world. She suggested the director put up a defensive dome over his LEN expedition encampment.

  Director Benet refused. “This is a scientific expedition site. I know you’re creating a pretext to come back down here. But honestly. Pirates?”

  “The pirates are real,” said Calli.

  “And they’re not here. Do not unleash your thugs anywhere near here!”

  Benet broke the connection.

  Man’s as mean as a low-level bureaucrat, Calli thought. Said aloud, “I want to get a look at one of those shipwrecks. This one.” She pointed at the site of the wreck two hundred and fifty klicks from the LEN expedition camp. “I want to set troops down here without being detected.”

  “Detected by the LEN or by the pirates?” Commander Ryan asked.

  “Either,” said Calli. “Both.”

  “We don’t know where the pirates are,” said Commander Ryan.

  “And I don’t want them to know where we are. I have to assume they’ll be alert for displacement rifts.”

  Traumatic insertion of matter into an atmosphere was as stealthy as a thunderstorm.

  “And Swifts and SPTs and drones don’t have stealth capability,” she added.

  “The pirates don’t have a large staff,” said Commander Ryan. “We might be able to slip a small craft down. We don’t know how vigilant they are.”

  “Assume they’re bloody brilliant,” said Calli.

  “Then they will know the moment any ship enters atmo,” said Commander Ryan.

  Colonel Steele had been listening from the rear of the command deck. He answered before he could be asked, “I don’t see any way to get Marines down to the target site quietly.”

  “Neither do I,” said Calli. “So we won’t be quiet. Colonel Steele, you’re going to fall.”

  The Swifts were going down in a meteor shower.

  The boffins measured the optimum point of atmospheric entry and ran the operation through computer simulation five hundred times with varying air currents. The boffins guaranteed touchdown within fifteen klicks of the target, but no closer than two.

  They factored in the precise measurements of the Swifts, including their limpet nets.

  Because particles physically cannot adhere to a frictionless inertial field, the Swifts’ inertial fields were encased in filament nets embedded with fine grains of particulates, which would burn off during descent.

  The particulates were chosen to be clean-burning. Nothing incendiary was to survive to touch Zoen ground. The objective was to cloak the falling Swifts in shells of fire without setting a fire on the ground.

  “This will make for an interesting view from the cockpit,” said the operation engineer at the preflight briefing.

  Interesting.

  Kerry Blue and the pilots of Red Squadron listened. Interested.

  “Your Swifts overheat in atmosphere. Most of you know that firsthand. We’re starting you out with your internal temperature low—you and your Swift. It’s going to hot up fast,” said the briefing officer.

  The boffins were calling this landing Operation Fried Ice Cream.

  “You will be in free fall the entire descent. Keep your hands off the controls. Your inertials will engage a hard stop at ground level. We have programmed the engagements into your Swifts. Do not switch to a manual operation. No unscheduled mining operations, Flight Sergeant Blue.”

  The boffin raised his voice to make sure Kerry was paying attention.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Kerry Blue muttered, arms crossed. “Sir.”

  Bury one Swift one time and they think you’re a gopher for life.

  Calli waited on the command deck for the drop.

  She assumed the LEN and maybe the pirates would see this.

  She was hiding her Marines in spectacularly plain sight.

  The LEN might be able to tell that the meteor shower was not normally falling debris, but only if they had instruments in place specifically looking for such things.

  “What about the pirates?” she asked, wanting reassurance.

  “The pirates are not going to be able to parse the difference between falling rocks and intact Swifts with sand on their noses,” said Dingo Ryan.

  “Unless they have a patterner,” said Calli.

  “They don’t,” said Dingo.

  “Neither do we,” said Calli. She remembered Augustus with a shudder. The name was almost an obscenity.

  Augustus had been a Roman patterner. He’d been enormously useful, and the most intentionally offensive being ever to tread these decks. The patterner was dead. Gloria in excelsis Deo.

  The Swift pilots got a marshmallow’s eye view of the campfire.

  Over the res com Calli could hear Marines going down in flames. The pilots sang-chanted the latest of a long line of songs titled “Fire.” Thumping out a jungle beat on their consoles, punctuated with grunts. “Fiiiiii-yuh! UGH!”

  Across the command deck Calli could catch covert toe-tapping and head-bobbing in time.

  The pirates of The Ninth Circle spent the night locked inside Bagheera, parked on the Zoen ground. The Xerxes scattered its passive signals, making the ship effectively invisible. The brothers waited to see if anything descended on them.

  The Xerxes’ defensive systems watched Merrimack and watched for any displacement rifts planetwide. The sensors detected some meteors. There were no ships coming or going from the LEN camp.

  In the morning the brothers ventured outside.

  The oxygen-rich air was easy to breathe. The gravity felt normal to them.

  They belted on personal fields. No PF could protect them against a beam of the strength Merrimack could send down. Merrimack could drill a hole in the world. So the brothers’ survival strategy was not to become a target in the first place. These PFs were equipped with scatter tech. They could elude Merrimack’s sensors, giving her nothing to shoot.

  The visual scatter tech of a PF was not as perfect as the ship’s visual scatter. With the naked eye Nox could still see where his brothers were, though he couldn’t tell what they were, unless he already knew. They appeared as blurs in the air, like waves of heat over a fire.

  The brothers sat down for breakfast outside, near a purple sticky vine that waved in the air, trolling for winged insectoids.

  The air smelled summer sweet. Alien sounds like birdcalls were cheery. Crawling insectoids were irritating. The purple vine was doing all right with the flyers.

  The brothers, except for Nox, had grown up on an alien planet, so they were accustomed to drinking water from running streams without a second thought for infectious microbes. Nox drank too, but he thought first.

  By afternoon Nox heard one of his brothers clearing his throat a lot. The throat-clearing turned into bouts of coughing.

  “Who is hacking up a lung?” Nox asked the spectral shapes around him.

  The cougher thr
ew up.

  “That’s Faunus,” came Orissus’ voice.

  By afternoon, Faunus had a chorus behind him.

  Pallas, Nicanor, Leo, Galeo, Orissus, and Faunus were sneezing, then retching. All the brothers were sick.

  Except Nox.

  They sat under a broad-boughed tree. They turned down their personal fields’ visual scatter so they could see each other.

  They looked abysmal.

  “Nox! You’re okay!” said Orissus, surprised. Resentful. “We all have it! You don’t!”

  Nox said, “It only makes sense that if one of you caught it, you’d all get it. You’re all the same guy.”

  Despite their individual designer traits, Pallas, Nicanor, Leo, Galeo, Orissus, and Faunus were clones of the same man.

  “Do you think this is American germ warfare?” Leo said, his eyes watering. “You know. Maybe the Yanks came up with some disease to target Roman clones?”

  Orissus hawked, spat. Growled, “Could be. You know the Yanks wouldn’t design anything that would target a Yank.”

  Nox leaned forward and threw up.

  “Though I could be wrong,” Orissus said.

  “It was a hypothesis,” said Leo.

  “Then we’ve caught an alien virus,” said Faunus. “That’s not supposed to happen.”

  Pallas swallowed painfully. Said, “It did.”

  Galeo bent over his knees, talked into the ground. “So what do we do?”

  Nox spat, stood up. “We do what we were sent to do.”

  25

  KERRY BLUE SLID BACK her canopy. It got snagged halfway back on the limpet net.

  The net dispersed heat, so it was cool to touch. Kerry unlinked it to make a hole for her to get out of her Swift.

  She climbed out of her cockpit, laughing. Looked around to see where everyone else was.

  Great big lake over there. No bubbles that she could see. Nobody landed in that.

  A voice in her headset sounded like Big Richard. “Can we do that again?”

  The colonel was barking at them to call in by the numbers.

  They’d come down in daylight into an area that couldn’t decide if it was field or forest. The rolling land was covered with high grasses of green, red, brown, and yellow, with clots of gray tree-ish things throughout.

  Dak had come down in a stand of trees. He assured everyone loudly that the trees were thorny.

  The air was warm. Kerry got out of her flight suit, then snapped her displacement collar back on. She tucked her landing disk into her field pack to bring with.

  Not sure why they were lugging displacement equipment. They had orders to call for rapture only in the direst emergency.

  Kerry pulled out the old-style camouflage netting from the Swift’s storage compartment and draped her Swift. She mustered with the others at the colonel’s coordinates.

  The Marines were pretty well scattered, so mustering took a while.

  They looked out for clokes, but there was nothing like a rotten stick-figured sponge in sight.

  Tall grasses nodded in the yellow sunlight.

  Asante Addai pulled up the coordinates for the cloke shipwreck on his omni to get oriented. With his eyes focused on the handheld, he pointed. “We need to go that way. South.”

  “Into the lake,” said Kerry Blue.

  “What?” Asante looked up from his handheld.

  “There’s a BFL in the way,” said Carly.

  Big lake. Very big. Actually it was more like an inland sea.

  “Yes. Yes, there sure is,” said Asante seeing that now. “Good news is the shipwreck is on dry land. Three klicks as the crow flies.”

  “That’s just wucking fonderful,” said Cain. “How far is that in dry miles?”

  “More like eight klicks around the lakeshore.”

  Colonel Steele got off the com with the Merrimack. He ordered his squad, “Bring your gear. Move out. We’re hiking around. This way.”

  Steele took first point. Kerry Blue took ass-end Charlie. She was usually found in the farthest position from the colonel when they were on the ground. Wasn’t fooling anyone. But her comrades appreciated the charade.

  The lake had shrunk from some past age, leaving a high, heavily forested and thorn-vined ridge around it.

  Below the ridgeline lay a wide, flat shore of pebbled sand. The going was much easier down there, so that’s where they hiked, with the Old Man yelling at them once every klick not to bunch up.

  Faces appeared up on the ridge, peeking between the gray trees. The faces had pointed muzzles and bright black eyes.

  “What are those?” Kerry pointed up. “Are those foxes?”

  “They look like foxes,” said Asante.

  The pre-drop briefing said that the foxes were not aggressive toward humans. That was good because there seemed to be a whole tribe of them up there.

  After a while, a trio of foxes came scampering down the incline. They were youthfully sleek. One was jet black. The other two reddish gray. They had huge claws.

  The Marines were carrying swords, but no one felt an impulse to reach for his.

  Steele had been issued a language nodule, but it didn’t seem to be working. The foxes came up to him humming the damnedest mash up of off-key notes, but the nodule was not translating a word.

  The three creatures ran rings around the Marines like dogs playing, then they ran toward the steep slope and looked back, as if expecting the Marines to follow.

  The Yurg tried throwing a stick, but the foxes didn’t seem to understand the concept of fetch.

  “Stop playing with the animals,” Steele bellowed. “Keep up the pace.”

  They continued their march toward the crash site.

  The foxes acted increasingly frantic. And they were definitely trying to lead the Marines away from the shoreline.

  Walking was easier on the lakeshore than up on the wooded ridge. Asante checked his omni for any activity that might have set off the foxes. He didn’t see anything threatening.

  The foxes abandoned them. The trio threaded up the incline and disappeared with their troop into the trees.

  Dak Shepard hiked in the shadow of the steep ridge rather than in the sunlight at the water’s edge. He set his pack down to adjust his boot. He’d picked up a thorn from somewhere.

  A sudden splat! made him jump, lose his balance.

  A tree, way up on the ridge, had dropped a soft-skinned bright orange pumpkin in front of him.

  It splattered with an overripe stench.

  Off to his right, an arc of water lifted. A silvery dart came at him—a dart more the size of a bus—opening up vast jaws as it came.

  Dak dove out of the path of the oncoming mouth.

  The lake serpent snapped up the pumpkin and writhed backward to the water.

  Asante checked his omni. “That has to be a scylla.”

  Dak cried, “I don’t give a—”

  “Look out!” A silver blue-white flash just below the surface made the rest of the squad move away from the water’s edge.

  Another scylla, or the same scylla, came arrowing up onto the beach. Rows of razor teeth showed inside the mouth that seemed to be a third of its endless body. It snatched something in its massive jaws and pushed the length of its eternal self back toward the water with its wide front fins.

  Dak chased it, yelling, “It’s got my pack! Get it! Get it! Get it!”

  The squad filled the lake monster’s head with exploding splinters. The beast died in the shallows.

  It took all of the Marines to drag the thing up the beach, except for Asante who set his omni to watching out for other scyllas in the water.

  Apparently it was every fish for himself. No one came to help this scylla. No one came to eat him either.

  Dak’s pack was not inside the huge jaws.

  “Oh, crap, he swallowed.”

  Cain cut the scylla open with his sword, starting at its throat. He kept sawing down. And down. He had to hit stomach sometime.

  “Are you s
ure this is the one that got your pack?” said Cain, sweat running down his face. “You better be sure.”

  The Yurg took over sawing. He came to a big bladder that might be a stomach. It was undulating.

  “Ho! Look at that!”

  The Yurg sliced the bladder open. The inside of the bladder was entirely ringed with row after row of teeth. Even with its brain demolished, the scylla’s stomach was still chewing on pungent orange pulp. And on Dak’s field pack.

  The Marines used shovels to fish Dak’s pack clear of the teeth. They left the stomach, still chewing, at the water’s edge.

  Steele led the squad away from the lakeshore and up the steep embankment to take their hike through the trees on the high ground.

  And they picked up their entourage of foxes again. This time it was the whole fox troop—maybe thirty of them—and they wanted to play. They frisked alongside the Marines, sniffing, bowing, running circles.

  Asante looked up scyllas on the omni. He read aloud, “‘Fresh water aquatic carnivore.’ Hey. Get this. ‘Scyllas have been known to pull themselves thirty meters up the beach to get a stink pumpkin fallen to the ground in season.’”

  “Really?” said Dak, sour. His pack reeked.

  “You know? I don’t think that thing was going for your pack,” said Asante. “I think it was after the pumpkins. Your pack was collateral damage.”

  “I don’t care!” said Dak. “How close are we to the spaceship?”

  “According to this, we just passed it.” Asante lifted his hand, signaled the column to halt.

  Dak stopped. “How far past?”

  “You and I are past it. The rest of us aren’t.” Asante turned around. “I should be looking at it.”

  “We walked over it?”

  Asante backtracked ten paces. “We’re here. Yurg, you’re standing on it.”

  Yurg looked down. “Not.” He stomped on solid ground.

  Asante beckoned the rest of the column to come forward.

  The trees were thinner here and smaller.

  The foxes didn’t like this place, but they were not so emphatic as they’d been on the lakeshore around the scyllas. Here they held their tails over their noses. They didn’t like the smell.