The Ninth Circle (12 page)

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Authors: R. M. Meluch

BOOK: The Ninth Circle
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A string of small moons stretched across Phoenix’s night sky in their phases like broken pearls. Nox and his squad of pariahs slept out in the open in the badlands. Dry winds lifted fine dust and scattered it over their bodies.
The former Antonians had been disenfranchised retroactively.
Damnatio memoriae
. Damnation of memory. They never existed. They were not on the deme rolls. They had no
gens
. No family. They could not hold land. They had no rights, no country.
They were simply
not
.
Disconnected as the wind.
They slept outside, hungry.
All their intangible assets had been seized.
Faunus owned a small hover for getting around, but it couldn’t carry all seven of them, so they hadn’t traveled far from base.
They had no credit.
Nox had coin.
They had talked about going to one of the spaceports on Phoenix, one of the foreign ones, where they might buy things with coin and not get spat on.
For now they were hoarding their money and using their survival training to scavenge in the desert. Finding work without going into slavery was going to be tough.
Nox touched his blood-crusted earlobe where they’d ripped out his ID capsule. He felt its loss like a missing limb.
He wanted to go back. He wanted to be whole. He wanted to be Roman.
Never look backward or you’ll fall down the stairs.
He turned his head. Leo lay next to him on the hard ground. Leo was awake too. His eyes were open, gazing up at the moons. He asked wistfully, “Hey, Nox, what’s it like having a mother and a father?”
“Nothing you can’t live nicely without,” Nox said. “What they don’t tell you is you’re just a pedestal for your sire’s galactic ego. I’m not going back if that’s what you’re thinking.”
Leo stayed wistful. “Anything is better than this hole.”
“No,” said Nox. “This is my hole. I dug this
coiens
hole.”
Galeo turned out to be awake too. He rose up on one elbow to look across Leo to Nox. “Going back is worse than the ninth circle of hell?”
“That’s another thing they don’t tell you,” said Nox. “Hell has a subbasement.”
“You’re an American, aren’t you, Nox?” Nicanor said.
“No.”
Yes, he was, and they knew it.
“You could go home,” said Nicanor.
“Fuck you.”
Why weren’t any of these guys sleeping?
Pallas rolled up to sit, elbows resting on his bent knees. “Why don’t you go, Nox?”
“Yeah,” said Leo. “You were born in America.”
Nox sat up. “Are you going to keep throwing that in my face?”
“No, that’s not what we mean,” said Pallas. “We mean you have somewhere to
go
. Why don’t you?”
“I can’t.”
“They’d execute him,” said Orissus. “He’s a traitor.”
Nox said, “I am not a traitor. Getting born in the States wasn’t my choice. I
chose
to pledge to Rome.”
“Well, the Americans will think you’re a traitor,” Orissus said. “They would execute you if you went back.”
“No, actually they wouldn’t,” said Nox. “I’m just not going.”
“Nox has a mother and a father,” Leo told Orissus.
“Rome is my mother and my father,” said Nox.
“Not anymore,” Orissus said. “So says Rome.”
“I am Roman,” Nox said. “So say
I
. I am what I make me.”
“And we made ourselves buzzard cud,” said Faunus.
“Yes, Best Beloved,” Nox said, deflating. “We did.”
“What do we do now?” said Galeo. “Fall on swords?”
They didn’t have swords. Rome took them.
“Too late. That won’t redeem us in anyone’s eyes,” said Pallas. That door had already shut. “It would be another act of cowardice now. No use hurrying out that exit.”
Nox felt the universe crapping on his head. It was time to stop whining, excusing, blaming.
Pick up your cards and play your coiens hand
.
“I’m with Pallas,” said Nox. “Dying is not my first, second, third, fourth, or fifth choice.”
“So where does going back to your parents rank?” Leo asked.
“It’s not even on the list.”
“But this is hell,” said Leo.
“Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven,” said Nox.
They stopped talking. Nox’s blustering words sounded great, but they were hollow. Meant exactly nothing. The words were fine-smelling bullshit.
Yet they echoed over and over in Nox’s mind, spinning in a loop.
Reign in hell.
Reign in hell
.
8
 
A
FTER NIGHTFALL THE FIFTY-SIX MEMBERS of the LEN expedition sat, gathered around the fire pit at the center of camp, talking, acting as if all were clear. As if the things that nearly killed the new arrivals weren’t still upstairs.
Glenn kept glancing toward the sky, flinching whenever she saw a meteor.
Sandy Minyas toasted marshmallows on a ten-foot pole.
The flames leaped bright and fierce in the oxygen-rich air.
“Hang onto your eyebrows around the campfire,” someone warned the newcomers.
What eyebrows?
When Glenn stowed her gear in their tent, she’d discovered that her eyebrows had jumped ship sometime during the
Beauty
’s descent. Their absence gave her a young, astonished look.
Her red-brown hair had been singed ragged as a hornet’s nest. She sheared it off. Now she looked like a young astonished Marine recruit.
Patrick talked shop with his colleagues around the fire and ate marshmallows.
Glenn walked to the edge of camp.
A wide perimeter ring of sanitized dirt isolated the camp from the surrounding native growth.
No one was afraid of alien infection. Human infection required the Zoen pathogens to have DNA. Even without a xenomicrobiologist in camp, the explorers knew there was no such thing as alien DNA.
The dirt perimeter was there to protect Zoe from invasive terrestrial species.
DNA was a robust structure. Theoretically, terrestrial species could compete with native species for basic resources. Local life was carbon-based, so there could be competition for the same proteins, sugars, ni-trogenated soil, and habitat.
Terrestrial life could disturb the natural balance. So the expedition maintained a buffer zone and kept its hydroponic vegetable gardens sealed in greenhouses inside the camp.
They stopped short of raising fences. The campfire deterred most animals and birds from invading camp. The native animals were unusually wary of fire. Given the ferocity of blazes in this atmosphere, it was a good instinct to have. Predators would not approach, which was fortunate, as Zoe had some big ones.
Woven polymer shields, something like riot gear, were stacked near the camp perimeter. The shields looked like rigid spiderwebs, but they weren’t sticky. Expedition members used them to confront native animals that wandered into camp and to shoo them back out.
Glenn carried a heat stick with her with which to brew a single cup of coffee. She found herself a nice granite boulder at camp’s edge, sat down, and gazed up at the half starry sky.
You only found skies like this at extreme galactic north or south or here on the Rim. Half the sky was deepest,
deepest
black, pricked by a few lonely lights. The fuzzy dots in the darkness were other galaxies. The other half of the Zoen sky was heavily spangled and glowing with the full host of the Milky Way.
Another bright streak across the starfield made Glenn shrink on reflex. Felt like an idiot for doing it.
Nothing she could do now except wait for
Merrimack
. Or for the sky to fall.
A motion made her look lower.
Thought she saw something in the trees but couldn’t make it out. She had removed her implanted gunsights upon taking leave from
Merrimack
. The gunsights contained night vision filters. She could have used them here. She’d forgotten how truly dark planetary nights could be.
Glenn gave an old-fashioned squint across the cleared perimeter into black foliage.
She made out the little treetop acrobat. It was a squirrel-bodied, possum-tailed, big-eared, huge-eyed thing. Seemed to have a ferret’s nose for a party. It wasn’t alone. There was a whole troop of them in the night trees, bouncing through the springy boughs. Looked like they were having fun. But who could tell with aliens? For all Glenn knew, swinging and bouncing could indicate aggression and fear.
She had brought a splinter gun with her on this journey. She kept it hidden, holstered across her back under her jacket. Didn’t feel any need to draw it.
Abruptly the tree ferrets scattered, and Glenn heard footsteps approaching behind her.
The walker came to a stop at her shoulder, standing close enough for her to feel his body heat. She didn’t turn. She knew his scent.
Patrick had come out to find her. Glenn thought he was going to ask her to come back to the fire, and she prepped a retort. But with insight Glenn didn’t know he had, Patrick reached his hand down to her and said, “We don’t need these people. Let’s jump this ship.”
She craned her head around to stare at his offered hand. She looked up into his soft brown eyes. Asked, “Don’t you want to stay with your colleagues?”
“Any of ’em thank you for saving their screaming faces?”
There had been an awful lot of screaming when she’d landed the
Beauty
.
“No.”
“Then fornicate ’em.”
His hand waited, palm up. Glenn was touched. She set aside her coffee and put her hand in his. She rose. Their fingers interlaced. They crossed the dirt perimeter and wandered away from camp into the alien forest.
 
Tired of wallowing in self-pity, of blaming their fate on everything and everyone, Nox, Pallas, Nicanor, Orissus, Faunus, Leo, and Galeo agreed they would take their evil luck and make a stand in their new home in hell. They put their fists in a circle. They wanted to call out some kind of team name but didn’t know what they were.
They were traitors and cowards.
“We’re bottom feeders,” said Nicanor.
“Yeah?” said Nox. “Let’s feed off the bottom. We will be pirates.”
Nicanor said, “Do we not need a pirate ship in order to be pirates?” Might have been sarcastic.
“Of course we do,” Nox said. “We need to get off this world. Phoenix is Roman soil, and I won’t prey on Rome.”
That part sounded good. It fell to Leo to ask the question so obvious it sounded dim: “How do you intend to get a ship?”
“Same way pirates always get their ships. We steal one,” said Nox, then added, “Not from Rome.”
Phoenix was a Roman colonial world, but it had a cosmopolitan population. Non-Roman ships came and went out of Phoenix’s international ports daily.
“Oh. Sure. Of course,” Orissus said. Definitely sarcastic. “
How?
We can’t get near enough to a spaceship to hijack one. No one will give us passage. No one will even let us aboard. We have no nationality. I bet they don’t even let us in the
coiens
spaceport.”
“Think you could live on a Xerxes?” Nox asked.
Orissus snorted. “Sure. Why not?”
The Xerxes luxury transport craft was the highest of high-end nonmilitary spacecraft. The Xerxes was fast. It was beautiful—when you could see it, as the Xerxes was also stealthy and viciously armed for self-defense.
It was not Roman.
Products of Rome’s largest manufacturer, PanGalactic, had issues with tracking and control.

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