Authors: R. M. Meluch

The Ninth Circle (64 page)

Galeo despaired. “I am the proverbial dead horse. Why does Fate keep beating me?”

Nox told him, “Get up. I need you.”
And oh, fug, I sound like Him. That other guy named John Farragut
.

The words always worked. Galeo rallied. He grasped Nox’s hand hard. “I’m here for you,
frater
.”

“Do we say something over the body?” Pallas asked.

They looked to one another.

“Does anyone believe in anything?” Orissus asked.

“Us,” said Nox.

Nicanor nodded. “He was one of us.”

They said their good-byes in the air lock, their regrets, and withdrew into the Xerxes one by one.

The last one left, Nox knelt down and kissed the patterner’s forehead and murmured. “We did wrong by you, O Best Beloved. Shit, Cinna. Why did you let me kill you again?”

Nox’s throat closed up. Cinna’s hand was gripping it.

Cinna’s eyes opened. “You’re right,” Cinna spoke to Nox’s bulging eyes. “There wasn’t anybody who didn’t see that coming.”

Cinna rose, holding Nox’s throat closed, talking conversationally, “Doesn’t being in The Ninth Circle of Hell require you to be dead?”

Lieutenant Hamilton hadn’t been given back her command duties. Still, it happened in the middle of ship’s night—the Hamster Watch—that
Merrimack
’s drones discovered a res chamber on the clokes’ home planet.

Chief Engineer Kittering advised the captain and the XO as they converged on the command deck, “The cloke resonator is not sending. It
is
receiving something.”

Resonance had no age. It existed in the right now. That the res chamber was receiving something now meant the message was being sent right now.

“Who is bloody sending?” Commander Ryan demanded.

Captain Carmel asked, “Is the message coming from the clokes on Zoe?”

“That is the problem, sirs,” said Kit. “It’s not any cloke talk we have on record from Zoe.”

“A different language?” Ryan asked.

“It’s not cloke talk at all. Clokes click. This is just intermittent noise.”

But the res tech spoke Calli’s worst fear: “The message is arriving in packets.”

Relativistic distortion affected resonant messages when the sender and receiver were not both traveling FTL.

Resonant messages only smashed together in packets when the receiver was in normal space-time and the sender was traveling faster than light.

The res tech said, “The cloke resonator on the planet is picking up an FTL source. It doesn’t have a compensator to separate the instants.”

Commander Ryan immediately ordered the helm, “Take us to FTL.”

“Destination, sir?”

“Don’t care. Around the block. Just get us FTL.”

All became clear when
Merrimack
made the jump.

The resonant signals expanded.

“Confirmed,” said the res tech. “The sender is moving faster than light.”

He transposed the frequency of the message into the range of human hearing, then put it on audible.

It was clicking.

Somewhere, right now, there were clokes traveling faster than light, sending messages home.

Calli spoke low, “More than one. More than one. More than one.
De Eendracht. Mayflower. Niña, Pinta,
and
Santa Maria
.”

“Sir?”

“More than one. We are dealing with an entire planet. On any naturally evolved world, there is more than one nation. Their levels of technology are not always in synch. There is
more than one cloke ship out here
! More than one nation. More than one era. This planet
did
develop FTL capability while their generational ship was slogging away in sublight transit. There is another cloke ship. Where is it?”

“We have its resonant signal,” said Dingo significantly.

Calli knew where he was going with that. She headed him off. “I will not ask Numa Pompeii to give us the source on a res pulse.”

Her husband, the ship’s Legal Officer was on deck. He murmured very low, “Pride, Cal. Pride goeth.”

“I am not asking Numa for anything,” Calli said.

Tactical spoke up. “Don’t need to, sir.”

Sentinels at the edge of the Zoen star system had picked up a new plot. A ship had just dropped out of FTL outside the farthest orbit. Its profile fit no known nation.

“IFF?” Calli demanded.

The com tech said, “It’s clicking.”

Tactical said, “Plot is on approach vector to Zoe. ETA fifty-six hours.”

“Type of craft?”

“Vast,” said Tactical. “It’s another Ark.”

C
APTAIN CARMEL SET the
Merrimack
on course back toward Zoe at moderate haste. At this pace, the battleship would beat the Ark to the planet with days to spare.

A signal came in from the League of Earth Nations headquarters with orders for the
Merrimack.

“Take the message,” Calli ordered Red Dorset at the com station.

“They won’t talk to me, sir. They want you.”

“Then let’s have it.”

A voice like an assistant God issued from the com: “Captain Carmel, you will not go near the alien spacecraft. And your weapons will not fire.”

My weapons fire very well
.

“I have no intention of going ‘near’ the Ark,” Calli said. “
Merrimack
is on course to Zoe. If the Ark comes to Zoe while I am there, know that I will prevent the invaders from off-loading on Zoe. You do not command my weapons against an alien invader.”

“Why do you assume an invasion? Why can the ship’s passengers not be there to explore and to talk?”

“They brought a moving van.”

Admiral John Farragut picked up a resonant hail on the personal harmonic Glenn Hamilton used to hail him.

It wasn’t Glenn Hamilton.

Admiral Farragut didn’t show shock at the face on the screen. Surprise, yes. The major emotion coming through the resonator was concern.

He saw a face like his own, a couple of decades younger, colored and scarred, with beads and feathers woven into the same blond hair as his.

Admiral Farragut greeted the pirate with a nod. “Nox.”

That left Nox momentarily mute. John had addressed him as he would have demanded. Nox had expected his older brother to insist on calling him by his birth name. But big John conceded that fight straight up.

John Alexander had the touch. Not too many cow pies that man ever stepped in. And when he did, it was a big splashy stomp with a purpose. He was the favorite son. The first. The best.

Nox wanted to hate this man. And couldn’t.

“John.” Nox nodded in return.

John Farragut didn’t say anything off course. He went straight to the heart of things. “Is there anything I can do?”

Nox shook his head. It was too late for miracles.

John tried again, “Why are you calling?”

Nox said, “I haven’t the damndest idea.”

He’d found the admiral’s personal harmonic among Glenn Hamilton’s things in her tent. Nox did not know his brother well. They had only met a few times. Nox had come into being only after the eldest Farragut son left home to save the world.

“Where are you?” John asked.

“I am absolutely nowhere,” Nox said. “Headed home.”

Big John could be naïve but he was no idiot. He knew which home Nox meant. The place everyone goes at journey’s end. Nox saw the fear cross John’s face. “Don’t.”

Nox twisted a hard smile. “You know how they say it’s never too late to turn back on a wrong road?”

“Yes.”

“They’re wrong. Ever read
Lord Jim
?”

Apparently he had. He said, “You don’t have to die, Nox.”

“But you know I do, O Best Beloved. I’m kind of looking forward to it.”

He saw big John trying to talk, with nothing to say.
He does know it
.

And there are the tears. Big John Farragut was an unrepentant crier. Nox didn’t know how he got away with it, but no one ever called him weak. Nox couldn’t even say John Alexander Farragut wasn’t Superman. Because he was.

Even Superman can’t save me.

Nox had no idea why he called. He’d thought something would come to him. Nothing did.

“Good-bye, John.”

Merrimack
was still two hours outside of the Zoen star system on the return journey from the cloke home world when Tactical’s coffee went splashing through the deck grates, the cup rolling.

“Captain!” Marcander Vincent sang out. “Found your pirates!”

He posted images on all the monitors.

“Where?” Calli demanded.

“Just sublighted at the outer edge of the Zoen system. Near the clokes’ Ark.”

“And we can
see
him?” said Dingo. They shouldn’t be able to see the Xerxes unless he wanted to be seen. “Has to be a decoy.”

“He’s got company,” said Marcander Vincent.

“Company other than the Ark? What kind of company?” Dingo leaned in to see the one-man waspish ship with the Xerxes. “Is that—?”

“A Roman Striker, sir.”

“Bulldust!” said Commander Ryan. “Rome made another patterner?”

“Or Rome wants us to think they have,” said Calli, who didn’t believe it.

Tactical reported, “Striker and Xerxes are moving in lockstep. The Striker has a hook on the Xerxes.”

“I didn’t think you could get a hook on a Xerxes,” said Calli.