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Authors: R. M. Meluch

BOOK: The Ninth Circle
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Wide awake now, Glenn threw on a T-shirt and cargo pants. She pulled her sleep-tossed hair back into a tail and went out too.
The deck felt neutral in temperature under her bare feet.
She smelled popcorn.
The ship’s scientists collected around Glenn’s husband, all of them asking variations on the same question with more or fewer expletives, “What was that?”
Patrick looked sheepishly pleased with himself. He loved an audience.
Patrick’s audience was an odd collection of human beings. Intellectuals tended not to alter their natural looks. They could be defiant that way. About half the people on this research vessel looked less than attractive, lacking vital color, muscle tone, a decent haircut, a bath. Glenn wondered if some of them were marking territory with their scent.
Patrick stood out because he was good-looking, tall, with a nice build, not muscle-bound but in reasonable shape for a slender academic. His soft, dark brown hair was trimmed and usually clean.
If Patrick Hamilton were an animal, he would be a young stag, aesthetic, soft-eyed, handsome.
And he froze when scared.
His quirky manner didn’t put off the she-brains on board this bus. Dr. Hamilton was among his own kind here.
“I’ve been listening to Zoen mammoths,” Patrick said. They talk.”
“Apparently,” said Dr. Rose, not delighted.
Aaron Rose was a puppy-eyed man of middle years and razor intellect. His hairline was in retreat and closing in on outright desertion. Dr. Rose could be a real snot. Glenn liked him.
“Where’s the popcorn?” asked Glenn.
Patrick passed her the bag.
The other xenos wore sleep-deprived dubious scowls. The ship’s team leader, Dr. Poul Vrba, said what the others muttered, “
Talk?
Really?”
Senior xenozoologist Dr. Peter Szaszy challenged Patrick. “Why hasn’t anyone ever heard those kinds of sounds out of my mammoths before?”
“No one ever tried buggering them before,” Dr. Rose muttered. Got an elbow in the kidney from Dr. Maarstan for it. “Who’s got the popcorn?”
Glenn passed the bag.
“Where did you get this recording?” Dr. Szaszy demanded, defensive.
Peter Szaszy was one of the original explorers of their destination planet, Zoe. The mammoths were Szaszy’s project. Patrick was trespassing into Szaszy’s field of expertise. That was a major breach of brain etiquette.
“I got it out of the database,” said Patrick. “First expedition. This is your own bubble, Szasz.”
“No,” Peter Szaszy said. “There is no such noise on my recordings. Mammoths don’t make sounds louder than a peep. That’s not my audio. You jammed something in there.”
“It’s your bubble. And the sounds
are
on there,” Patrick said, boyish. Not endearingly boyish. An irritating I’ve-got-a-secret kind of boyish. “I just enhanced them a little.”
“A
little
,” Szaszy said, vindicated.
“No, no. The volume is true to life,” Patrick said. “All I did was bump up the frequency a couple octaves to transpose the sounds into the human audible range. The mammoths are communicating on wavelengths so long that their vocalizations literally go in one of your ears and out the other without registering—which is pretty much normal for you anyway.”
Dr. Melisandra Minyas gasped excitedly. “Oh, I get it! Of
course
! The heads! The
heads!
”
Dr. Minyas was the junior xenozoologist on this expedition. And she was too, too perky. Had orange-blond hair. Freckles. Looked young. Maybe actually was young. Looked like she breathed country air. Her given name was Melisandra. She went by Sandy.
Patrick nodded like a proud daddy. “The heads.”
Glenn made a stab at polite interest in her husband’s work. “The heads?”
Patrick spread his arms out as far as he could to each side to indicate size. “The
heads
.”
The mammoths’ heads would of course be, well, mammoth.
“Those giant heads act as sound chambers,” Patrick said. “The size of that head was my clue that there is more to mammoth communication than those few bird chirps Szasz has on record for mammoth speech.”
“Speech?” Dr. Szaszy repeated, his brow tight, questioning the linguist’s word choice “
Speech
. Not animal sounds? You think my mammoths are sapient?”
“Nah,” said Dr. Rose with a mouthful of popcorn. “This is really a recording of Lowell’s stomach, isn’t it?”
“I haven’t looked into the sapience of Lowell’s stomach,” Patrick said. “But I know the mammoths are saying a lot more than Szasz thought they were. And they’re doing it over distance. Just like Earth’s elephants.”
Glenn asked, “Elephants are sapient?”
Patrick passed on the sapience question and said, “Elephants communicate by low-frequency sounds.”
Sandy Minyas nodded knowingly and added, “Same as giraffes.” She took a stance at Patrick’s side with a bright smile, letting everyone know that she and Patrick were of a mind.
There really is such a thing as time travel,
Glenn thought dully.
I’m back in high school
.
Glenn recognized the animal behavior playing out here. Sandy Minyas fluttered her knowledge at Patrick. This was how brains flirt.
Doesn’t even care that I’m right here with a ring on
.
Patrick responded to Sandy’s stroking. “Exactly.” He smiled down at her. Patrick liked short women. His wife, Glenn, was short.
And the ring can go out the air lock with you, darling
.
Sandy said, faux coy, “I didn’t know you were a xenozoologist too, Patrick.”
Glenn was closer to thirty than she was to twenty years old, and she was not about to play games with a junior naturalist or anyone else.
You catch him, dolly, you can keep him.
Glenn went back to their compartment. The ship was nearing its destination, and she wanted to finish sleeping.
She was an outsider on this voyage.
Patrick’s colleagues didn’t know it, but Glenn was a thug. Military.
Glenn Hull Hamilton served as first lieutenant on board the United States Space Battleship
Merrimack
. She thought she should’ve been first officer by now, but she’d been passed over. Again.
She had no hope of ever becoming the exec of a space battleship without holding an independent command first. She knew this.
She also knew that whatever ship she could get for her first command would not be the kind of spacecraft that carried a xenolinguist, so she had never requested a transfer.
The space battleship
Merrimack
had been Glenn and Patrick’s home for six years. For six years Patrick served as xenolinguist on board a ship that talked with her guns. Patrick was effectively a spare part.
Glenn knew Patrick wasn’t happy on the
Mack
. So it was only fair that the two spend their six-month leave where Patrick wanted to go.
Which brought them aboard the League of Earth Nations ship
Spring Beauty
bound for a planet named Zoe. Patrick was useful on the scientific expedition. He was valued.
Glenn was baggage.
Planet Zoe lay in the farthest part of the outermost arm of the galaxy in a region known as the Outback.
People showed their true colors far from home.
Glenn was afraid of her own colors. She wasn’t fond of Patrick’s either. Glenn was afraid this was the seven-year gnaw in the gut. Afraid she’d fallen out of love with him.
Everyone on
Merrimack
said Patrick was a lucky man to have Glenn. No one on
Merrimack
said Glenn was lucky.
She was starting to see why everyone asked, “What does she see in him?”
What does she?
She had stalled her career for this man.
She lay down on their bed.
This trip will either be the thing that breaks us apart or the journey on which I finally murder him.
 
Four guards hauled Nox into a wooden shed at the edge of the Legion base.
Inside the shed was hot, the air thick.
When his eyes adjusted to the relative dark, Nox saw in one corner of the shed a bloody tarp draped over a heap on a table.
A bloody boot hung out from under one side of the tarp, dangling over the edge of the table at a broken angle.
The guard nodded at the covered heap and asked Nox, “What is this?”
Nox answered, “I’m guessing that’s my brother, Cinna Antonius.”
“What happened to him?”
“I killed him,” said Nox.
“And how did you do that?”
“I pushed him off the cliff,” Nox said. He felt detached, as if he were controlling his body from a distance, above and apart.
“Anyone with you?”
“No.”
“These things are usually done in packs,” the guard said.
These things
. They suspected this was a hazing. Nox caused his body to form the words, “This was personal. I hated him.”
“You want to reconsider that statement?”
“No. It wasn’t a hazing if that’s what you think. It was murder.” He felt an inward wince hearing himself volunteer the idea of hazing.
Too much?
He suddenly felt like he was four years old again, when he’d gone into his father’s den sporting a cut on his little chin and announced, “
Daddy, I wasn’t playing with your razor
.”
He fought to stay detached.
“You pushed him,” the guard repeated Nox’s statement back at him. No credence at all in that voice. “Why did we find you looking for the body?”
Keep digging, Nox, you’ll hit bottom eventually
.
“To hide it,” Nox said. “I didn’t want to get caught.”
“You took long enough getting down from the cliff.”
How do you know that?
This man wasn’t a guard. He had to be an inquisitor in guard’s clothing. Maybe the others were intelligence officers too.
“Yes. I am a coward,” Nox said.
Stand up front and flap your arms wide enough and hope they don’t look for anyone behind you
.
“We know you are coward,” the inquisitor said, dismissive. “You ran away. You came back to get the body. That won’t save you.”
“I know.”
There would be no breaks here. Nox didn’t deserve any. Imperial Inspectors had been through here recently—high-ranking men from the Roman capital world, Palatine.
The military installations on Rome’s outer colonies like Phoenix had served as secret recruitment centers of Mad Caesar Romulus.
Apparently the new Caesar was shortening his leash on Romulus’ Legions of the outer worlds.
Caesar Numa demanded the utmost loyalty from his armed forces.
Caesar Numa’s agents were hardliners. Whatever happened to Nox would not be simple.
Legion Persus had to make an example of Nox to show Caesar how hardline it was.
The inquisitor said, “Do you imagine you’ll get the sword?”
Nox’s spirits actually lifted for one futile moment. There was honor in a sword. But the inquisitor wasn’t offering.
Nox lost his sense of detachment. He was firmly, horribly in the here and now. He said, “I would like to. I don’t expect it, no.”
“You’re not getting it.”
“Yes,
Domni
,” Nox acknowledged.
“In Romulus’ day we knew what to do with the likes of you.”
In Romulus’ day?
That would be what, two years ago? Aye, those were the days
.

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