The Ninth Circle (39 page)

Read The Ninth Circle Online

Authors: R. M. Meluch

Dak turned them over and over. Yelped, “Where’s its fragging head!”

“What? You lost it?” That sounded like Dickus Maximus.

“It don’t got a head! Where’s the head!”

Voices in the dark. “Head’s gotta be in the body.”

“You mean they have their heart in their mouth?”

“No. Their head up their ass.”

“Look at this thing! I don’t even wanna know what
that
is.”

The aliens weren’t wearing anything like clothing. They looked like stick toys assembled by an unwell mind.

They did have eyes in the back of their heads. No. That wasn’t right. They had one eye behind them but not exactly in the back of the heads. They didn’t have heads, not apart from the body. They were like gorgons that way—everything in one bag. Except it wasn’t a bag. More like a sandwich of really coarse, soggy black bread. And they had fewer legs. A lot fewer legs and only one mouth. Kerry thought that was a mouth, up there next to its top eye.

Twitch had caught up with the crew carrying the dead xeno. He got a tree branch, hollered bloody murder, and wielded his branch like a shillelagh, beating the aliens away from Roodoverhemd’s body. Twitch called for help. “
Ayúdame
!”

Kerry and everyone else ran in to help him. Forgot about trying to shoot anything. Just glom them with anything you could grab. Rock. Tree limb. Another alien.

“Colonel! We got him!”

Steele called everyone to fall back.

Twitch, Dak, Asante, and Rhino hefted up the xeno’s body onto their shoulders to bear it back to camp. Roodoverhemd wasn’t that huge, but gravity was strong here. Kerry walked backward behind the bearers as rear guard, brandishing a log against any chasers.

Carly carried an alien arm she’d carved off. “Anyone want this?”

Cain glanced her way. “Bring it.”

The Marines returned to the LEN encampment, four of them carrying the civilian Roodoverhemd. The xeno was thoroughly dead.

Steele saw Kerry Blue with them. He died every time she went into action.

She’s a Marine. You can’t shelter her.
Best he could do was surround her with veterans. Cain. Twitch and Carly. Dak. Geneva. Asante.

Steele walked up to Director Benet. Spoke in a quiet raspy growl. “We don’t leave a man. Not even yours.”

Then he glanced over his Marines. “Blue, you take a hit?”

Kerry wiped scratches on her brow. She hadn’t known or cared that she was bleeding. “No, sir,” she said. “Thorns.”

The two camp medical doctors took custody of the dead man. A lift hovered the body to the medical hut.

Kerry moved over close to Commander Ryan. Everyone called him Dingo, so it seemed safe to ask him, “Sir? I thought these guys were all kinds of smart?” She meant the LEN scientists.

Commander Ryan hesitated. He said carefully, “They are highly educated people.”

“Yeah? Well there’s more common sense in a bucket of doorknobs.”

Dingo swallowed down a smile. He placed silencing finger to his lips to say be quiet. A man was dead. This was not the time to say anything.

Flight Leader Cain Salvador presented himself to Colonel Steele. Cain’s chest heaved with big breaths. He mumbled to himself first, a comment, “Really like this atmosphere.” Then he said to the colonel, “There’s not much substance to the sponge things. Splinters mostly pass right through them. Sir, I am
not
that bad a shot, but we detonated a lot of dirt. We’re carrying the wrong weapons.”

Steele nodded. He’d done the same.

They were all becoming aware that Flight Sergeant Asante Addai reeked. More than the rest of them. Asante had stepped into some foul-smelling mud. Afraid it wasn’t mud.

A young corn-fed looking she-xeno assured him, “That is what you think it is. And those?” She pointed at moving strings in the mud on Asante’s left boot. “Those are worms.”

Asante went running back to the woods to find something to scrape off the crap. “Why me!”

“It’s usually me!” Kerry called after him. She hiked a pant leg, checking for worms.

Commander Ryan took a call on his com from the captain. Calli told him to order the return of Colonel Steele’s troops to the ship immediately.

Dingo puzzled. “Sir? We’re good down here. Situation under control.”

“Not up here it’s not,” Calli sent. She didn’t sound happy. At all.

Dingo read the smug expression on Director Benet’s face.

“Damn, Captain,” Commander Ryan muttered into his com. “They went over your pretty head, didn’t they.”

“Affirmative.”

Director Benet announced that the League of Earth Nations itself had issued the order that
Merrimack
must accept the LEN flag or leave the star system. Any persons on the ground must respect the authority of the expedition director.

Izrael Benet announced, “I will not allow hostile aliens on this world.”

“You’re expelling us as hostile aliens?” Glenn said. “What about those hostile aliens?” She gestured toward the trees. “The ones that killed Dr. Roodoverhemd. They can’t stay here!”

Director Benet spoke. “Actually, it is you, Mrs. Hamilton, who cannot stay here. We never had trouble before you arrived. We order you to leave. At once.”

“I’ll get my gear.”

Already the loud bangs of Marines displacing back to ship echoed off the ring of LEN ships.

Night had fallen to full darkness.

Glenn packed her things. She wished she could have seen the foxes one more time. But they were gone, on their way to another, safer meadow far away from ugly ugly bad bad.

Glenn snugged a displacement strap around her assembled stuff. She took a stand on one of the displacement disks and snapped a displacement collar around her neck. She didn’t know if Patrick was getting the heave-ho too. She would know soon enough. She could not endure Benet’s smug face one more time. She hailed
Merrimack
to displace her aboard.

“Stand by, Lieutenant,” the D-tech sent.

There was a pause. Glenn waited.

Again, “Stand by.”

A longer pause.

Then, “Stand by, Lieutenant.”

A very, very long pause.

I
T WAS PAST MIDNIGHT, but most of the xenos were still awake, gathered round the fire circle, fearful, mourning the death of their colleague.

Glenn stepped in, took a seat next to her husband on a bench. Patrick’s arm fell naturally around her shoulders.

Benet noticed her. His back stiffened, imperious and personally offended. “Why are you not gone?”

“I—” She faltered. This felt worse than she ever could have imagined. “Can’t. I’ve been sacked.”

“Oh, you liar.”

Glenn blinked. A lot of people blinked.

“I beg your pardon,” Glenn said.

Director Benet stood up. He went to his office hut and got on the com. Everyone could hear him yelling. Calling down the LEN authorities. Promising reprisals. Demanded the captain of the
Merrimack
remove Glenn Hamilton from the planet.

Captain Carmel advised Director Benet, “Glenn Hamilton has lost her commission. She is not an officer of this ship or of this Navy. This is a space battleship. No one has authority to order a Naval vessel to take civilians on board except under an SOS. A LEN vessel brought Glenn Hamilton to Zoe. She may leave the way she came.”

Kerry Blue was bottled up in quarantine with the other returning ground troops in the Displacement department on
Merrimack
, waiting her turn to pass through decontamination. They were going through one by one. Returning troops never had to go through this before.
Merrimack
wasn’t equipped for it in numbers.

Kerry Blue sat cross-legged on the deck and played poker.

“Your forehead looks nasty, Blue,” said Rhino. She tossed her ante into the pot. They were playing with potato chips.

“Does it?” Kerry tossed in her ante. “Stings.”

“Looks like an infection,” said the Yurg, dealing.

“Can’t be,” said Kerry. “MO told me I can’t catch alien diseases.”

“These aliens have DNA,” said Asante. “Who dealt this crap?”

“DNA?” said Rhino. “Honestly?”

“What does that mean?” said Kerry.

“Means we can catch diseases,” said the Yurg. “That’s why we’re stuck in here playing these awful cards. Asante, did you shuffle?”

Asante said, “Blue, are you in or you out?”

Kerry wasn’t looking at her cards. “I have an
infection?
Does this mean I can’t sleep with anyone?”

“What do you care?” said Rhino. “Who you been sleeping with?”

“Nobody,” said Kerry Blue. Threw down her cards. “I’m out.”

Captain Carmel had
Merrimack
’s own xenoscientists analyzing the wreckage of the alien orb that had slammed into
Merrimack.
They found the spherical hull packed solid with equipment. There was no compartment that might have housed any kind of pilot. The xenos had harbored a lingering fear that they would break the spacecraft open and find an intelligent ant colony inside. A dead intelligent ant colony.

But all was well. The orb had been operating from an internal program. Its guts were splayed across the xenos’ work space.

Weng and Ski were as happy as a couple of xenogeneralists hip deep in xen.

“Gentlemen,” said Calli Carmel surveying the whole of the disassembled alien craft, “What is it?”

Ski stammered. Dr. Sidowski had trouble putting words together around Captain Carmel. She was very pretty.

“Can tell you what it’s not, sir,” said Weng.

“And it’s not . . . ?” Calli waited for the blank to fill in.

“Roman,” said Weng.

“Terrestrial,” said Ski.

“Local,” said Weng.

“Do we have an age on these vessels?” Calli asked.

“No, sir,” said Weng.

“Not yet,” said Ski.

“I want to know who is driving these spaceships and from where. I need you to give me an idea when they were manufactured and how long they’ve been here. Then trace them back to their planet of origin.”

She already knew that the orbs’ control system was a program of an unknown operating system. She had sent that part to the cryptotech Qord Johnson.

Calli asked her xenogeneralists, “Are the orbs connected to the extraplanetary aliens my Marines met on planet?”

“Likely,” said Ski.

“Definitely,” said Weng.

When Weng and Ski said the same thing, you had to believe them. “How so sure?” Calli asked.

“They signed their work.” Weng held up a curved piece of the orb’s hull. On it was etched the outline of a three-toed—or fingered—appendage.

Flight Sergeant Delgado had brought the xenos a severed alien appendage. It didn’t have any nails on it because the creature had thrown its full arsenal before it got severed. But when Ski and Weng reattached the nails, the handprint matched the pattern on the orb.

The alien arm, which looked exactly like an alien leg, was multijointed. “The skeleton is not bone,” said Weng.

“Which is to say it’s not calcium,” said Ski.

“They are not native to Zoe,” said Weng.

“You’re sure?” said Calli.

“These creatures aren’t DNA-based,” said Ski.

“And everything else from the planet
is
,” said Weng.

“What’s the biochemistry of this?” Calli pointed a long finger at the alien arm.

“It’s a new one to us,” said Ski.

“Organic,” said Weng.