The Ninth Circle (63 page)

Read The Ninth Circle Online

Authors: R. M. Meluch

 
“I’ll turn us around back to Zoe,” said Leo.
“Why?” said Nox.
“
Why?”
Nicanor asked back.
“Why,” Nox. “Why go back to Zoe?”
They had all assumed they would return. They forgot there was a choice.
Pallas considered. “What are you suggesting? We go on our merry pirate way?”
“
Gladiator
is back at Zoe,” Nicanor said, like a reason to go back to Zoe.
“
Gladiator
is back at Zoe,” said Nox, like a reason not to.
“We don’t have any orders,” said Faunus, following Nox’s lead. “We could keep running. We wouldn’t technically be defying Caesar.”
“You want to run?” said Nicanor.
“We’re not Roman,” said Orissus. “Numa never said we were Roman. He said we were pirate garbage. Right, Nox? Why would we go back to him?”
“That was my question,” said Nox. “We need not walk into Shere Khan’s mouth.”
“So we have heard from Mowgli,” said Nicanor. “Who else?”
Leo was considering the logistics. “If we don’t resonate, Caesar can’t find us.”
The Xerc’s prox alarm sounded.
Leo convulsed at his station. “How in hell—!”
“Caesar found us,” Nox guessed.
“Oh, of all things buggered!” Faunus roared. “How does he
do
that?” Starting to think Numa had supernatural powers.
“That’s how.” Leo pointed to the monitor that interpreted the sensor readings into a visual image.
It wasn’t
Gladiator
.
The ship closing on the Xerxes was a Roman Striker. It was black and bronze. Antonian colors.
“A Striker is a patterner’s ship,” said Leo.
“There are no patterners,” said Nicanor. “We stopped making those.”
We
. He meant Rome. Nicanor still thought of himself as Roman.
“Apparently Rome made one more,” said Nox.
An Antonian one.
“Hook!” Leo cried.
“We don’t have a hook,” said Nox.
“I mean
him!”
Leo cried. “
The Striker has a hook on us!
”
It was a partial hook. A full hook would have cooked both ships.
The tiny Striker had latched onto the larger Xerxes and was reeling itself in.
“Kick him off!”
“I don’t know how!”
“Maybe the ship knows how,” said Nox. Yelled at the overhead, “
Bagheera!
Defend!”
Heard and felt a physical clunk of ships touching. The system monitor on Leo’s console lit up the indicator for the lower starboard dock.
“He’s here. He’s making hard dock.”
Sounds carried through the deck of the Striker’s hatches opening. The patterner was trying to board.
Bagheera
’s hatches would hold against the intruder.
All the brothers saw the green light on Leo’s monitor.
“Outer hatch opened!” Leo bolted straight up from his seat at the control console.
The seven of them barreled down to the lower level.
Bagheera
must fry the intruder in the air lock. He must.
But already the brothers heard a voice from the far side of the hatch—the voice sounded like one of them—demanding the Xerxes to recognize him in the name of the Empire. The patterner did not give his name.
Without introduction, the voice of the traitor leopard
Bagheera
intoned: “Welcome.”
The brothers fanned out, crouching in the compartment adjoining the dock, daggers drawn and ready.
Measured footsteps passed through the air lock.
Leo stole a quick peek through the hatch, then drew back horrified, his bronze face gone ashy. “No. Oh, no.”
“What!”
“Screw everything!” Leo cried in a whisper.
The footfalls advanced toward the inner hatch. Leo shrank in terror, yelling, “Shut it! Shut it! Shut it!”
“What the hell
is
it!” Orissus snarled.
Nicanor leaned to see through the hatchway. His face slackened. “It’s Schroedinger’s bleeding bloody cat!”
The patterner stepped through the hatchway onto the inner deck.
It was Cinna.
PART THREE
 
Full Circle
 
34
 
C
INNA. IN THE FLESH.
He was younger now. Looked seventeen and beautiful. His eyes had black irises and a bottomless stare. Dark loose curls wreathed his young face.
The brothers had all been good-looking until they’d scarred themselves and made themselves terrible, but even among good-looking clones, this man was an Adonis—except for the inhuman cables protruding from his forearms and behind his neck.
He might have been any clone of theirs, as they were all clones of a single Antonian man. Still, there was no doubt. Not even for an instant. Each and all knew, immediately knew, against every impossibility, that this was Cinna.
Even though this was not possible.
“It takes decades to make a patterner,” Leo blurted.
“That may have been true decades ago,” said the handsome Cinna-thing. He had a smooth deep voice.
“Technology marches on,” Galeo murmured faintly.
None of the brothers could understand where Cinna’s new body came from. They really didn’t want to know.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men hadn’t had Caesar Nu-ma’s resources.
Cinna asked his brothers, all of them, any of them, “Did you really run?”
They had dropped him and left him for dead at the bottom of Widow’s Edge. Last thing any of them ever thought was that Cinna would come back to haunt them.
Did you really run?
They all hesitated in choking silence.
Nox answered, “We could have medaled.”
Pallas told Cinna, “We are working for Caesar.” As if that would save them.
Cinna appeared to consider this. Said finally, “Then only one of you will die.”
The brothers exchanged glances in hollow shock and disbelief.
Pallas, who did believe, asked as calmly as he could, “Why does anyone need to die?”
“All for one,” said Cinna. “One for all.”
Nox stepped forward. He looked Cinna dead in the opaque eyes. “Then I will be the one.”
“No!” said Leo and Galeo at once, as Faunus cried, “Nox! No!”
“You can’t,” said Pallas.
Nicanor shouted, angry, “No! Not you! Not any of us!”
“You murderous cur!” Orissus bellowed at Cinna.
As Cinna looked from one shouting man to another, Nox shoved his dagger up Cinna’s diaphragm into his heart.
The patterner folded to the deck.
There should have been more blood.
Nox withdrew his dagger, wiped off his blade and his hand on his own tunic, furious. “Oh, for cryin’ tears. Did anyone
not
see that coming?”
The brothers shook their heads. The pattern had been plain a long way off.
“They don’t make patterners like they used to,” Leo said.
The patterners of yore had been nearly unstoppable. Unless they wanted to be stopped.
“Numa’s not going to like us killing his patterner,” said Galeo.
“Then Numa should have told us!” Pallas shouted. “You okay, Nox?”
Nox looked like he might pass out. His face was waxy, as if he himself were bleeding. His arm felt sticky up to his elbow. “Doesn’t feel any better than it did the first time round.
Dammit, Cinna!
” he cried at the body.
I killed my brother. I killed him twice!
 
Merrimack
caught up with her Swifts around the dead cloke home world. She brought the squardron inboard.
The orange sun was catalog number PB (for Perseus Benthus) 41X1900X12. The planet didn’t have a name. But everyone on
Merrimack
called it cloke world.
Cloke world shrieked. Stones and sands scoured exposed bedrock. Muddy skies roiled in constant violence of thunder and lightning and lashing winds.
Merrimack
’s instruments scanned the world for technology and population centers.
The industry was built above ground, caked with soot and cold except for the nuclear plants. One of those gaped, cracked open from an apparent earthquake.
Under the surface the world was riddled with warrens of bunkers and tunnels.
Men couldn’t fit inside the tunnels. These tunnels were larger than the naked dirt passages on Zoe and lined with conduit. They were big enough to send drones through.
The drones found no bodies. The clokes’ hollow bones decayed quickly, but the drones could still find traces of the larger bones, enough of them to say there had been clokes down here. A while ago.
Scanners found a wreck of some kind of vessel on the surface. Huge one. The thing’s crash left a long wide path of destruction behind it stretching a quarter of the way across the continent. It had been a giant ship or maybe an orbital construction platform that came down. An enormous hot crater of lethal radiation marked the place where it finally buried itself to a stop.
A search on another continent turned up less industry and cruder tunnels. There were mounds of cloke nails and hollow bones on the surface, the bodies decomposed, as if masses of the beings had poured out of the ground to die.
“It’s starting to look like the clokes on Zoe are the only ones left,” said Dingo. “I guess we can’t drive the little squigs out after all.”
“Yes, we can,” said Calli.
“But they have nowhere to go.”
“They can come home.”
“Home is a little bit dead,” Dingo pointed out.
“Not my problem,” said Calli. “They killed their own world. Or maybe they just let it die. Dead is still dead. They figured out how to get to the stars. They could have cleaned up their home, but they decided to cut and run instead. Here’s the bed they made. Stick ’em back in it.”
Dingo didn’t argue too hard. “I’m not in love with them, Captain.”
Standing at the rear of the command platform with the Marines, Glenn Hamilton thought,
All the people like us are We, and everyone else is They
. It was something Nox would have said.
 
Nox washed his hands of Cinna’s blood. He changed into a fresh tunic. He threw the bloody one into the annihilator.
When he came back out, he found that
Bagheera
had cleaned the deck, and the brothers had moved Cinna’s body into one of the other air locks.
It looked like they intended to send their brother into the Deep. Nox guessed there was really no other choice.

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