The Ninth Circle (70 page)

Authors: R. M. Meluch

The patterner tried to stop them.

Patterners don’t lose.

A new thought struck Glenn. “Why was there a patterner at Zoe?”

“I’ll do you one better,” said Calli. “Why is there a patterner at all? I never expected Numa Pompeii to let another patterner be constructed. Ever. You’d have thought Numa would have learned better from the last one.”

Glenn nodded into her shot glass. “Nobody wants another Augustus.”

“Amen,” said Calli. She downed a shot. Drew a breath with an inward hiss.

“The pieces still don’t fit,” said Glenn. “The picture is wrong. We’re missing something.”

Calli circled back to Glenn’s first thought. “Nox did not need to ride the Xerxes in.”

That left the question: So
did he?

The patterner Cinna turned to his brothers. “Welcome to the band of the officially dead.”

The pirates of The Ninth Circle had never expected to be breathing while dead.

Faunus’ thick brows contracted. He took count of his brothers. Nox, Pallas, Nicanor, Orissus, Leo, Galeo. All of them were here in the control room of their Xerxes,
Bagheera
.

Faunus turned to the thing that looked like their late brother, Cinna, with a vertical knife hole stabbed in the front of his tunic. Cinna was wearing black, so you couldn’t see how much blood was on him. He appeared as a slender youth, handsome as all of them used to be, no more than seventeen. His black eyes were as old as the sphinx guarding the Great Pyramid.

Faunus spoke. “What just happened?”

“A show,” said Cinna.

Even now all the
Bagheera
’s monitors displayed images of the clokes’ FTL Ark continuing to erupt from internal detonations, turning the parts of the Ark that survived the initial antimatter blast inside out. “Not that,” Cinna added, watching the exploding images, his face smooth as dark marble. “That’s not a show. The death of the alien Ark was real.”

“Where’s the Striker?” said Nox.

Cinna nodded toward the images of multiple explosions. “In there.”

Wreckage from the alien Ark spewed like galactic shrapnel. The flashes would have blinded the brothers if not for the radiation filters built into the Xerxes’ viewports.

The Striker had made the suicidal plunge into the Ark and released antimatter into the heart of it.

The Xerxes was solidly underfoot.

Leo blinked at the continuing explosions. “I thought it was going to be us.”

Cinna said, “It was meant to look as if this ship went in.”

“Looked like it from this angle,” said Galeo. Shuddered.

Nox shut his eyes. He could still see the lights of the titanic alien ship hurtling close, fast, its mass filling the view, obliterating the stars, heaving up like the ground at the bottom of Widow’s Edge. Nox, his brothers, his leopard, were going in.

The Xerxes plunged into the Ark.

Flashed the most fleeting energy signature of a Striker as it came out the other side.

Leaving the Striker at the heart of the Ark to open its antimatter containment core.

To all appearances, it was the Xerxes that died in the suicide plunge, and it was the Striker that got away.

“Everyone would expect me to escape,” said Cinna. “Patterners have that reputation. And the leopard needed to die.”

That part of the show, the death of the leopard, required a sacrificial lamb, something that could penetrate to the heart of the alien Ark and make an explosion on a magnitude of a Xerxes. Cinna had to sacrifice his Striker for that.

Cinna had controlled his Striker by resonant command from on board the Xerxes
Bagheera
.

A res signal on a secret harmonic was undetectable, untraceable. Resonance left no trail.

Being at point zero of the antimatter release, the Striker left no debris to tell a different tale.

“If the leopard had to die, why not just send the leopard in?” said Faunus. “Not complaining, mind you.” He was happy to be breathing. Astonished, but happy. He still had his machete too, and that was astounding.

“A Striker is aging technology. This ship,” Cinna knocked on the Xerxes’ control console with a black-gloved hand. “Is the latest. Caesar wants his patterner to have the latest.”

There it is
.

So that was why Nox and his brothers were still here. For the moment.

It hadn’t been feasible for Cinna to ballast the brothers along with his doomed Striker. They wouldn’t fit in it. The Striker was a one-man craft.

The brothers had been left in place, on board the Xerxes, for the duration of the show.

Now they were excess mass.

They were all armed. They could try to kill Cinna a third time.

Cinna touched gloved fingers to the vertical slit in his tunic at his midriff. His face looked pinched. He told Nox, “This does not feel good.”

Nox asked, “Do we get the grisly revenge now?”

Cinna’s inhuman eyes moved across each of his brothers in turn. Nox. Pallas. Nicanor. Faunus. Orissus. Leo. Galeo. Cinna answered, “Are we still a squad?”

T
HE DRY PALE SKY was hazy over Sector Primus on the Roman world Phoenix. Small moons stretched overhead from horizon to horizon like a string of broken pearls. Satellites gleamed hard bright white like daystars. Imperial Intelligence could be watching.

One could hope.

But the patterner told the brothers no one was watching. “There will be no deus ex machina,” said Cinna.

Nox waited with his brothers in a level area halfway up the massif. Gray contorted trees hemmed in a circle, and there were flat rocks inside the ring on which to sit.

Cinna was calling them up one by one to the Widow’s Edge. Orissus had gone first.

Orissus had been hard on Cinna when Cinna first joined the squad. Orissus was always hard.

At the snap of twig from the path, Nox, Pallas, Nicanor, Faunus, Leo, and Galeo stood up, expectant.

Cinna came back alone. Orissus was nowhere to be seen.

Cinna stepped into the circle of trees. He called up Nicanor next.

“Where’s Orissus?” Faunus demanded.

Cinna kept his silence; his basilisk glare fixed on Nicanor and waited to be obeyed.

“Well, then,” Nicanor said, stepping forward, chin up, back regal. Nicanor was the lordly one of their number. Nicanor followed Cinna out between the twisted gray trees. He walked with great dignity.

No one sat back down.

The brothers’ talk turned to murmurs. “He’s fucking with our minds,” Faunus said.

“It’s working,” Leo said, nerves unraveling.

“Cinna never liked Orissus,” Pallas whispered.

“You don’t think he really made Orissus jump,” said Galeo.

“I’m trying not to think at all,” said Nox.

Faunus whispered, hardly louder than breathing, “Do we kill Cinna?”

“Already did,” said Nox. “Twice.”

They hushed.

Cinna came back alone. He pronounced the next name. “Galeo.”

Galeo turned a three-sixty, as if there might be another Galeo in the circle. He cast lost looks to his brothers.

And followed Cinna out between the twisted trees.

The brothers stopped talking altogether.

It took longer this time. That was a good sign. Maybe. It took longer to reel up a netted jumper than it did to let one fall. Did Cinna really let Orissus fall?

The net deployment used to be automatic. No one ever dropped.

And where was Nicanor?

Cinna came back alone again.

He regarded each of the four remaining in turn.

He looked so very young. He looked so very old. His face was line-less, with little expression. The look in his eyes was something between a basilisk gaze and a thousand-yard stare. His black eyes moved from Nox to Pallas to Leo to Faunus. He looked past them, through them.

He nodded at Leo.

Leo threw back his head and howled. Cinna waited like the grim reaper. Leo followed Cinna, still giving voice to raging howls. The sounds diminished as the two climbed away to the heights.

Nox found himself reaching for the sounds. He needed to hear Leo. At last he was listening hard to only the gritty wind.

Nox, Faunus, and Pallas remained.

Faunus sat on a rock. He’d taken up a stick and was jabbing at the dirt with the end of it.

Pallas stood by a tree, its scaly green foliage so dark it was nearly black.

Nox tried to collect his thoughts. Then tried to obliterate them. He needed to make his mind a perfect blank. The universe was unfolding, not perhaps as it should, but the way it was hell-bent on unfolding.
It is what it is. It will be what it will be.

Cinna came back—alone—to collect the next brother.

Faunus’ patience tore. He jumped up from his rock, threw his stick aside. He bellowed, “Me! Take me!”

“Very well,” said Cinna and turned to lead Faunus away.

Nox and Pallas clasped hands as if arm wrestling. They squeezed bone-mashingly tight, in case it was the last thing they ever did. They released. And waited.

After a lifetime, footsteps approached. Sounded like a single set.

And so it was.

Cinna appeared between the trees, alone.

He faced the two who remained. “You.”

Cinna pointed at Nox.

Pallas cursed.

Nox advanced to his fate. He looked back to Pallas. “Be seeing you.” Pallas’ face was tight. He gave a single nod.

Nox marched up to the height in Cinna’s footsteps. He did not hear any voices from up there.

Because no one was there.

He arrived to only the wind on the lonely summit.

Winged creatures circled on the air above the hardpan. They were rot-colored carrion eaters. Phoenix’s equivalent of vultures.

Nox looked over the edge. He expected it by now. Funny how that didn’t lessen the sense of shock. Horror still knotted his guts. He swallowed hard and stinging. Rasped, “Oh, you son and heir of a mongrel bitch.”

Cinna had earned his revenge, but Nox could still resent him for actually taking it. Nox blinked fast. Refused to cry. He backed away from the edge.

“It’s still broken,” Nox said, his voice rough.

“What is broken?” said Cinna.

“The net’s automatic deployment is still broken. We didn’t know it was broken when we sent you over.”

“It’s not broken now,” said Cinna. He held up a switch. “It’s manual.”

Manual. And Cinna had let them all drop.

“We didn’t drop you on purpose,” said Nox, resentful.

“End’s the same,” said Cinna.

Yes, the end was the same.

A song started playing in Nox’s head, a gentle Christian hymn, all out of place. It was the wrong damned circle. Nox’s loved ones were not in the glory. The musical loop had started in his brain, and he couldn’t get it out of there.

His voice came out hoarse. “You got a switch, FDG? Don’t net me.”

The patterner looked curious. “FDG? I don’t know that one.”

“It’s Americanese,” Nox snapped. “Stands for Dead Guy.”

Nox turned toward the brink.

Cinna spoke at his back. “Do you actually want to die, or is this an attempt at reverse psychology?”

“This is no reverse nothing. I’m running away again. Just drop me.”

“If it
is
reverse psychology, then you lose,” Cinna advised him. “No one disobeys a Farragut.”