The Ninth Circle (9 page)

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Authors: R. M. Meluch

BOOK: The Ninth Circle
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“John!” Glenn cried when the admiral’s image appeared before her.
Admiral John Farragut greeted her with a smile to light planets. “Hamster!”
His blue eyes and soaring spirit radiated energy across the resonant link.
Glenn never thought that man would ever touch ground. But John Farragut got himself stationed on Earth.
She loved him. Always had. He was the road not taken. She and he were never meant to be. Glenn was a career officer. John Farragut needed himself a girlie girl to give him home and hearth and little Farraguts.
They had each chosen their own road. Had she to do it over, Glenn would make the same choice again. But in this moment she clung to the happiness in John Farragut’s eyes, the affection in his voice.
The bright blue eyes squinted in concern, and he leaned sideways to look past her. “Where
are
you? I thought y’all were going to Zoe.”
It shouldn’t surprise her he knew where she was going. John Farragut always kept track of his people.
“We made it. We’re here. We’re on Zoe. This is our ship.” She moved aside to give him a better view of the devastation of
Spring Beauty
’s control room.
Glenn had slipped away from the LEN camp to contact him privately on the
Beauty’s
resonator. She knew the admiral’s personal res harmonic by heart.
“This planet is under invasion,” Glenn told him.
His immediate question: “Are you safe?”
“Yes. We were attacked on approach. They haven’t followed us down.”
John Farragut put on his admiral’s face. “Roman?”
Glenn hesitated. “Maybe. I don’t think so.”
She told him her story.
At the end, he asked, “Did you report it?”
“That’s the trick, isn’t it? The local authority is the LEN. This—” she flicked her hands at the wreckage around her—“is a LEN vessel. This planet is a LEN protectorate. The LEN
knows
.”
“What’s the LEN doing about it?”
“The LEN isn’t addressing it at all. According to the LEN, I drove us into a cluster of space rocks.”
Even Manny the pilot hadn’t spoken in Glenn’s defense. The pilot had clammed up entirely, not about to cross the people who hired him.
“I’m so mad I could cry.”
“You’re not a crier.”
“I may start.”
Sliding into self-pity was easy. She shook it off.
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you . . .
Glenn played back the
Beauty
’s camera records for John Farragut. She didn’t need to narrate. The admiral had been in enough furballs and knew the difference between blundering into natural objects and coming under attack.
At the recording’s shattering end, he said, “Nice landing.”
“I’m proud of it,” Glenn said. “The LEN are charging me with hijack and suing me for damages to the ship.”
“Shoot ’em.”
“Aye, aye,” she said. Thought,
I love you
.
“Take me for a walk.”
Glenn dislodged the res chamber from its console and carried it out of the ship, imager-side out, for a tour around the wreckage.
She stepped carefully through wilted, charred vegetation. The ground was seared black underfoot. But already the forest was closing back in to heal the wound.
As Glenn circled around the ship’s stern, Farragut’s voice under her arm sounded, “Ho. Back up. What’s that?”
Glenn stepped slowly backward until Farragut said, “Stop. There. Bring me in.”
Glenn moved the res chamber closer to an odd piece of wreckage wedged into the ship’s fuselage. It was black, metallic, curved. It looked manufactured. It wasn’t anything that belonged to the
Beauty
.
“Looks like you got a bug in your teeth,” Farragut said.
“I’m setting you down,” Glenn told him. She propped the res chamber against a fallen tree, then stepped into the picture and tried to wrestle the large metal shard out of the
Beauty
’s fuselage. She couldn’t budge the fragment at all, much less pull it free.
A chuckle sounded from behind her.
“I can hear you, John!” It pissed her off that he thought she was cute. She kicked the metal. That only jammed her shin.
She stalked back to the fallen tree, picked up the res chamber and brought John Farragut close up to see the thing stuck in the
Beauty
.
Farragut spoke the obvious. “That’s not a meteorite.”
The metal was an oily shade of black, clearly manufactured, fashioned in a curve, bearing an artificial design shallowly etched into it, almost like a talon of a clawfoot from a piece of antique furniture.
“Local make?” Farragut asked.
“No. There’s no manufacturing here. No industry on this world at all. No commerce. Honest to God, John, ‘Edenesque’ is the word that comes to mind. Except for these.” She swatted something small and pincered on her arm. “The native sapience is primitive. I was thinking the orbs were someone’s mock aliens. But who would do that?”
Farragut dismissed anyone’s first thought, “Rome can do better than that.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“The League will say it’s ours.”
“No doubt,” said Glenn, then, just to be sure, “It’s not the CIA, is it?”
Farragut’s immediate expression of reassurance turned suddenly hesitant. He’d been about to dismiss the idea of U.S. involvement. Didn’t.
“I’ll see if I can get someone to talk to me,” Farragut said. “I don’t think that’s one of ours. You probably have a first contact on your hands.”
First contact used to sound exciting. Glenn gave a sorry smile. “Those never go well for us.”
“Whose flag is on the ground?”
“No one’s. Kiwi drones were the first explorers on world. They turned up a sapient native species. The planet’s been flags’ off ever since. The only feet on the dirt are international scientists. And one scientist’s wife.”
“Is anyone in orbit getting this treatment?”
“There’s no one in Zoe’s orbit. This is the back of beyond. The LEN puts their ships on the ground. There are only six of them. The
Beauty
makes seven.”
“And none of them noticed these things on their way in?”
“No. This is the first time anyone was attacked coming or going.”
“What hit you could be the vanguard for something bigger,” said Admiral Farragut.
“Nothing followed us down,” Glenn said. “I don’t know how to read that. They’re hostile, they can get between stars, but they can’t shoot and they can’t land? All they could do was ram. I’m afraid they’ll try to ram us on the ground next.”
Farragut told her, “I’m sending someone.”
 
Flight Leader Ranza Espinoza reported to the ship’s hospital for a physical. Her leave had been cut short. She sat on the exam table, cooling her bare heels and twiddling her toes, waiting for permission to get dressed and return to duty.
It could not take that long for the medics to figure out she was healthy.
Ranza was built like a line backer. Big shoulders. No hips. Gap teeth. Bushy hair. Silver-gray eyes.
She crossed and uncrossed her bare toes. Listened to the ship around her. The metal partitions were thin. Sounds carried easily, and
Mack
was never actually quiet. Now she was all kinds of loud. And it wasn’t just the shouting on all decks. Supply barges clunked against the wings. The ship’s displacement chamber cracked away like a thunderstorm.
Dock doors clattered as transports arrived and two companies of the 89
th
Fleet Marine Battalion stormed aboard like they were taking a beach.
Ranza could hear the
Mack
’s new XO from the land of Oz calling out in his best American Old West voice: “Stampede!”
Real smartass, that one.
Since the war, the Marines had been deployed in the U.S. Pacific Northwest on reconstruction detail. Finally they were coming home.
The 89
th
Battalion’s home base in Kansas was never home like the space battleship
Merrimack
was.
Merrimack
was bound for the edge of the galaxy. Best speed. Unless you wanted to get reassigned, you got your ass back on her today. You miss the boat this time, you can kiss
Mack
good-bye for the rest of your tour.
The lowing of livestock in the lower hold meant this was going to be a very long trip.
Heavy boots clanged against deck grates at a run, with shouts of “Clear ladder!” just before the thump of a duffel bag dropping down the shaft and the squawk of someone who didn’t clear fast enough.
And why weren’t the medics clearing Ranza out of this exam room so they could poke at those guys?
Ranza curled her toes. Sniffed antiseptic smells. She banged on the partition with the side of her fist. Called, “Hey! Yous guys forget me or somethin’!”
Didn’t hear nobody hurrying on the far side.
They forgot her.
Ranza called louder, “I’m havin’ a heart attack in here!”
In no real big hurry a med tech sauntered in. Young. Snotty. He turned his back to her, fed something into the database. He glanced over Ranza’s stats, then eyed Ranza with a gluey smile. “Had fun ashore I see.”
Ranza never liked the guy. She knew the type. Only in the service to line up a position in the private sector. He looked at her with the kind of sleazy, smarmy attitude that insinuates something.
“Can I get dressed?” Ranza said.
“I guess.” The tech shrugged with one shoulder. “You flunked the physical.”
“Did not.” Ranza sat straight up, her muscular arms akimbo, broad shoulders spread their broadest. Did he want to see how many med tech curls she could do?
“MO will be right with you.” The skinny tech walked out.
Ranza threw a specimen jar after him. Pity it was empty.
She’d been spending her leave on Earth, most of the time with her three kids and her mom—who was raising Ranza’s three kids. And Ranza had had some fun.
Uh-oh
.
That was it, wasn’t it?
The moment the ship’s Medical Officer, Mohsen Shah, stepped through the hatchway, Ranza cried, “Don’t tell me I got VD.”
Mo gave a slow sideways nod. “V yes. D no. You are being pregnant.”
“No!” She guessed it was a little late to be using that word. “You mean to tell me that son of a bitch was shooting live rounds?”
“Yes. Is there being something you are wanting to be telling me about this man?”
“Not really,” said Ranza.
“Let me be speaking plainly—” Mo began.
“You can
do
that, Mo?” said Ranza.
The gentle placid Riverite doctor could meander all over the park before he completed a thought, and by the end of it Ranza often forgot what he was supposed to be saying.
Someone else answered. “I can.”
Ranza turned to the other guy who had just entered the compartment. “Oh, thank God.” An interpreter.
Rob Roy Buchanan. The ship’s tame lawyer. Straight talker. Nice guy. Late thirties. Looked a whole bunch younger. Rob Roy was a long, tall reed with a slouch like a teenager. His rank was lieutenant, but he wasn’t a line officer. He was
Merrimack
’s Legal Officer. Most of the Marines called him the First Mate because he was married to the captain.
It didn’t occur to Ranza right away to wonder why there was a lawyer in her examination room.
“Look, Mister Buchanan,” Ranza started, “tell Mo to just inc the little zygote and lemme get back to work. ’Kay?”
Naval regs did not permit little passengers to serve on board space battleships. And Ranza didn’t want any kid of hers in harm’s way either. That was why God invented incubators.

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