The Ninth Circle (30 page)

Read The Ninth Circle Online

Authors: R. M. Meluch

Dak, Rhino, and Asante kept grilling Carly, Twitch, and Kerry over where they had gone. Rhino was not going to let it drop.
Cornered, badgered, Carly blurted, “I got married, okay?”
Twitch’s eyes went round.
Carly said, “Now shut your mouths.”
“Frer!”
Asante slung his arm around Twitch’s broad shoulders. “We gotta have you a party!”
“No!” Carly snapped. “I’d have told you myself if I wanted a fred-ding party.”
“I got a marriage proposal in port,” Asante said, a side thought.
“How drunk did you get her?” said Cain.
“We were both sailing,” said Asante. “I let her down easy.”
“
Frer
,” said Cain, “there ain’t no down easy from ‘do you wanna marry me.’”
“I told her I’ll never get married. Told her I can’t say till death do us part. I’d immediately think one of us is gonna die.”
“Yeah,” said Kerry Blue.
I’ve had that thought myself
.
 
“I am mortally embarrassed for you, Melisandra,” Izrael Benet said. The director and the junior xenozoologist had returned to the scene of the crime, the medical hut, where Dr. Sandy Minyas ran her incendiary analysis. “This is a mistake.”
“Look at the results for yourself, Izzy,” said Dr. Minyas. “Does this or does this not say DNA?”
“It does,” said Izrael Benet, not looking at her report. “Because it’s a mistake. You need to know that. I’ll tell you what happened. Your sample was contaminated. You’re holding an analysis of your own skin cells or some organism you breathed on your sample.”
“I was careful,” Dr. Minyas said. “There is no contamination.”
“Then that bacterium is a Roman plant. Or a mutation of something one of us carried here. Or a hoax created by someone who has never respected us and has no right to be here.” That last was probably a reference to Glenn Hull Hamilton. “There is no way in logical hell that your bacterium can be a specimen of independently evolved DNA.”
“Never mind any bacteria.” Dr. Minyas dangled a long mammoth feather in Benet’s face. “
This
was the subject of my analysis.”
“It’s an uncorroborated analysis,” said Director Benet. “You messed up the routine. It was a contaminated sample. You analyzed your own thumb. It’s a mistake.”
“The analyzer has a memory,” Dr. Cecil, whose equipment it was, suggested another possibility. “The counter needs to be reset. The analyzer had no idea what it was looking at and reported the last recognizable thing it saw.”
Dr. Benet nodded to that. He faced Sandy as if the matter were settled. “You didn’t try to announce this, did you? Please say you didn’t announce this to anyone.”
Dr. Minyas glanced upward. “May have mentioned it.”
 
John Farragut showed up on the Roman capital world, Palatine, in person, with baby daughter and pregnant wife in tow. The admiral was on vacation.
Palatine’s planetary horizon guard allowed the civilian spacecraft to land at Nova Roma’s spaceport, but the imperial palace denied John Farragut’s request to see Numa Pompeii.
Consul Aban Pompeii Afrikanus received him instead.
“Caesar does not give audience to midlevel American admirals,” Aban explained to Farragut.
“He’s not here, is he,” Farragut said rather than asked.
“Not for you.”
“For anyone?”
“The emperor is about his duties,” said the consul.
“That wasn’t a yes or a no,” said Farragut.
“Caesar is everywhere.”
Virtually, Numa really was everywhere. He made regular res casts to his empire. But there had been no authenticated reports recently of Numa Pompeii in the meaty flesh.
Since John Farragut was on family holiday, Aban took him and Kathy out to the country to shoot skeet.
A great crater pocked the wide field. “Pardon the disarray,” said Aban.
Farragut guessed the crater was American made.
“Looks like the ones we got back home,” said Farragut.
Earth and Palatine were close to each other on an astronomical scale, with a mere two hundred light-years between their star systems. The journey between them was not a day trip by any means, but neither was it a voyage to the edge of the galaxy.
Mad Caesar Romulus’ war had left both worlds scarred.
Skeet flew over the crater. Consul Aban held baby Patsy on his hip while Kathy Farragut took the first shots. She was a lean, long-limbed, athletic woman, a couple of decades younger than her husband. Her abdomen was slightly rounded.
Farragut spoke aside to Aban, “Numa doing all right?”
“The emperor is well,” Aban said. “I will tell him you inquired.”
Mad Romulus had reigned over the drunken rout that was the war against the United States. Caesar Numa was stuck ruling the hangover. There was nothing glamorous in cleaning up. An inevitable dissatisfaction set in when interstellar communications and commerce were not restored fast enough.
“He’s in Perseus space,” Farragut said.
Aban non-answered, “Were Caesar to visit the far arm of the galaxy, and I am not saying that he is, it would be his right and duty to do so.”
The citizenry might be fickle, but Numa’s governors and officers were loyal unto death.
“Caesar is the defender of the
entire
empire,” Aban added.
“Especially those worlds that used to be Romulus’ secret recruiting grounds?”
“
All
worlds,” said Aban.
Farragut noted that the consul didn’t specify all
Roman
worlds.
A clay pigeon broke apart.
“Nice shot, Madam Farragut,” Consul Aban called, just as both his and John Farragut’s resonators chimed at the same moment. Emergency messages. The emergency code overrode the callers’ signal blocks.
Farragut and Aban exchanged brief stares of surprise.
“This better not be war,” Farragut said, reaching for his caller.
“Amen,” said Aban, reaching for his. “Your wife has the gun.”
Farragut’s signal was from Carolina Base. Advised him to pick up any of the galactic news feeds.
“What’s this about?”
“DNA.”
Farragut tuned into a harmonic. Was greeted with the caption:
God didn’t rest on the seventh day
.
Kathy walked over to him, her target rifle over her arm. “What is it?”
“World’s upside down,” said John Farragut.
His caller showed images from the miracle planet at the edge of the galaxy where aliens shared the same genetic base code as all life on planet Earth.
Kathy pointed at the screen. “Make it big.”
There was no point trying to keep it private. The news was literally everywhere. And Farragut could see that Aban was watching the same news. Different images, but the same story.
Farragut changed his caller’s playback from screen image to life-sized holo.
Golden mammoths walked over the crater.
Farragut glanced back to where Aban had enlarged his own news-feed to life-sized. “Looks like a big ol’ stuffed animal!”
Aban had foxes.
They forced him to smile.
Those images had been around on nature programs since the first scientific expedition to Zoe. They were headline news now.
Now they were kin.
Farragut felt something like awe.
Okay, it was pure awe.
Until awareness slithered forward from the back of his mind of the reason why he had sent Jose Maria de Cordillera and the battleship
Merrimack
way out to that perfect world in tearing haste.
A sense that he had sent them too late.
Something wicked was already there.
 
Every major media source across the human-explored region of the galaxy carried the report of the discovery of independently evolved DNA on a planet at the outer edge of the Outback.
“Zoe,” said the com tech as the bulletin came in to
Merrimack
. “Isn’t that where we’re going?”
Because her XO was somewhere in port on liberty, Calli had her Chief Engineer issue the recall of all her scattered personnel.
Flight Leader Cain Salvador received the recall while on patrol.
His two flights, Alpha and Baker, were broken up into vics of three all over Port Campbell. Cain sent to all: “Red Squadron, this is Alpha Leader, pack it up. Find your best way home.”
“No, wait, Cain. I got something.” Sounded like Dak Shepard.
Cain answered, annoyed, “Alpha Two, what do you
got?
”
“Looks like a dinner plate,” Dak sent. “Or a hub cap.”
Alpha Five: “Qué?”
Alpha Six: “What’s a hubcap?”
Cain: “Red Squadron, this is Alpha One. Pick up the plates before you head to ship.”
Rhino: “I am not the wait staff. If they’re throwing dishes they can go get them themselves. We got a recall, Cain.”
Cain: “Rhino. You weren’t at the siege of Fort Ike.”
Rhino: “Don’t rub my nose in it.”
The Voice of God from on board
Merrimack
: “Red Squadron. This is Wing Leader. Pick up the plates.”
 
Calli’s XO returned to the command deck bruised, cut, sporting two black eyes and a broken-toothed smile.
Calli had promised the port governor there would be no brawling. She beheld her XO, mortified. “Commander Ryan. You did
not
get into a bar fight.”
Dingo gave a cheery jagged grin. “No, sir. Friendly game of rugby.”
The exec’s teeth would have to wait until the ship was underway.
Mack
would be running hotter than normal. Zoe, a planet no one heard of, was suddenly the center of galactic attention. Calli wanted to get there before it became crowded.
“Are we all here? Colonel Steele?”

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