The Ninth Circle (15 page)

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Authors: R. M. Meluch

BOOK: The Ninth Circle
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“For a Roman.”
Not approving. “Why would you give any child of mine a Roman name?”
“Sir? She’s
my
child.”
And here we go. The back went stiff. The familiar glower returned to the blue eyes.
And just as quickly faded. His Honor backing down.
It was terrifying.
“Who died?”
“No one. No one died,” said His Honor. Didn’t seem surprised by the question. With some reproach, he asked, “I can’t come see my son and my grandchild?”
Yes. When entropy reverses itself and time runs backward. When little Miss Muffet invites eight-legged guests to tea. When all the laws of nature break down.
“You’re always welcome, sir.”
His Honor talked for a while. About family. And when he decided it was time to go, he gave his son a huge heartfelt bear hug on his way out, his eyes tight shut. He thumped his son on the back. “My boy. My boy.”
Immediately he was gone, Admiral Farragut contacted Central Intelligence. “Can I get a personal data excavation—off ledger?”
“Since it’s you, sir,” said the agent.
Admiral Farragut said, “Can you find out if my father is dying?”
 
The chart on Patrick’s omni spiked.
“Uh-oh.”
The mammoths’ lazy shuffling became restive. Ropy tails switched. Ears flapped. Trunks lifted into the air.
The bull Long John held his ears straight out to the sides.
Moving shadows swept across the highland meadow. Glenn looked up, shaded her eyes against the sun.
The silhouette of a wide wingspan circled the meadow. Then another. More of them in soaring spirals.
At first Glenn thought the lowest one was diseased, because of its naked, peeling head, but they were all like that. All of them had featherless heads, sloughing skin, and tattered rags of black feathers.
Back home, a naked head indicated a carrion eater. But there was nobody dead here on the meadow.
The circling birds had large horn beaks with hooked ends. They circled, croaking. More and more of them.
They spiraled up instead of down. The highest could see for miles up there.
Or be seen.
The mammoths picked up sticks and clods of dirt with their trunks and threw them up at the ugly birds.
“Tattler,” Patrick named them. “Air jackal. Oooh, nice shot.” As a dirt clod found its mark. The bird folded up in midair and tumbled tail over beak.
It recovered with an ungainly flapping before it could touch ground, where mammoths were moving in, seeming intent on trampling it.
Glenn was confused. “Jackals? Why are they gathering? No one is dead.”
“Yet,” said Patrick.
“Will they attack?”
“No. If tattlers don’t find carrion on their own, they get someone else to kill something for them. The tattlers find a buffet and call in sabers to kill it so the tattlers can feast on leftovers.”
“Mammoths?” said Glenn, incredulous. “
Anything
can spot mammoths. They picked mammoths? Why not pick something easy, like Bengal tigers?”
“Mammoth babies,” Patrick said.
Chubby, chunky, clumsy, plump mammoth babies cuddled together, crying pitiably. Their mothers tossed their heads, frantic, squeaking.
Glenn looked up at the ominous birds. “What does this mean?”
A roar sounded from the tangled vegetation beyond the meadow. Another roar, very leonine, answered from the trees bounding the opposite side. Another roar of something hidden circled behind the herd. Roars kept repeating from the six o’clock, nine o’clock, and twelve o’clock positions.
The chart on Patrick’s omni was scribbled nearly solid. He pocketed it and took Glenn by the hand.
“Means we’re about to be attacked by sabers.”
10
 
M
AMMOTH TRUNKS LIFTED and lowered. Mammoth ears flared straight out.
The sabers were moving in a wide semicircle. Glenn couldn’t spot them but knew where they were from the movements of the mammoths’ eyes.
Glenn had her splinter gun out. Of course she brought her gun. She had it on her always, slung across her back under her jacket, out of sight. As Patrick was with his omni, Glenn was with her gun. She slept with her gun. Even though it was coded for her exclusive use, she never left her weapon where anyone else could get it.
She wasn’t wearing gunsights. Targeting would be tricky here.
But the target sounded big.
Patrick was the expert on Zoen creatures, but Glenn was the expert in combat. Patrick listened to the saber roars and whispered, “Are they herding us?”
“I think,” said Glenn. The sabers had the mammoths hemmed in on three sides. The open direction would feed them down into the stream where it tumbled down the steep rocky vale in the direction Patrick and Glenn had come.
That had been a hard slippery climb with treacherous rock walls on both sides.
“The predators are trying to spook the mammoths into the pass,” said Glenn, frightened for the herd. “The mammoths won’t be able to maneuver in there. Patrick, they’ll kill themselves on the rocks.”
“I think my mammoths are smarter than that,” Patrick said. It sounded more like a wish than a belief.
But the mammoths did refuse to be herded.
The hembras were gathering up their young and hustling them into a tight group right here in the open meadow. All the adults formed a defensive circle around them, tusk-side out.
Patrick nodded up at the horn-beaked tattlers. “Tattlers have a symbiotic relationship with sabers. The saber is the only thing that will attack a mammoth.”
“Sabertooth cat?” Glenn asked, gripping her gun, trying to get a look at what roared from the underbrush.
“More saber. Less cat,” said Patrick just before a thick trunk encircled him and swung him up into the air and deposited him into the middle of the defensive ring with the babies.
Another mammoth shooed Glenn back there with him. The big living hose pushed her along with a stern touch,
move it, move it
.
When the trunk stopped pushing her, Glenn was trapped inside a circular wall of colossal feathery asses in the company of the keening babies. Tree trunk legs shifted and stamped. Mammoths snorted. Ears flapped. Skinny tails twitched.
The tattlers circled lower, uttering harsh squawks.
A baby mammoth looped its stubby trunk around Patrick and tucked him between its forelegs and hugged him, shivering.
Patrick pushed downy feathers out of his face. Said, “I think I just became someone’s dolly.”
Glenn moved around the ring, peering out through the forest of moving legs.
She spotted a motion of large shapes at the tree line.
They burst into the open.
Through moving legs and waving feathers, all Glenn could see of them at first were the sabers themselves, dirty ivory horns, straight as lances, flying at the mammoths.
Mammoth heads tossed, brandishing stout tusks.
The sabers stopped short of the thrashing tusks. They dodged, circled, feinted again.
The predators were bulky. Muscles like living building blocks moved under gray skin. Outsized heads seemed to be all mouth. They wielded two sabers. One saber jutted from under their tiny eyes, the other, stouter saber extended from their wide, armor-boned chests.
The chilling crash of tusks against sabers made Glenn drop into a crouch. Snarling and thrashing thundered from all sides. Glenn caught glimpses of retreating sabers.
The mammoths repelled the first charge.
Glenn had a horrible feeling that the sabers were only testing. They stabbed to find a weak point.
And they edged back in.
Glenn couldn’t get out of the living fortress. The mammoths pressed together, side to side, swaying, crushing weights.
Glenn dropped down flat on her belly with her splinter gun aimed at ground level.
She looked down the barrel, trying to line up a shot for what might come. The mammoth legs were in constant motion. Their long feathery coats waved between Glenn and the targets.
The sabers paced with abrupt turns, in and out of view.
Glenn had no shot at all.
She jumped back to her feet. She holstered her gun behind her back, ran up to a mammoth haunch, seized two thick handfuls of feathers and scaled up its rump.
The ropy tail slapped her. She crested the mammoth’s rear, and crawled up its back onto its neck. She hooked one arm over the root of one ear to keep it out of her way, and she set her sight on a saber. Fired.
The saber flinched as the splinter pierced its hide and lodged in its ribs. The saber snarled at the sting.
Glenn pulled the second stage trigger.
The splinter splintered.
The saber convulsed upward, all four feet off the ground. Its body twisted in the air and dropped to the ground. Frothing red blood ran from its mouth.
There was nervous commotion all around, mammoth and saber. The sabers held their tiny ears flat back, a very terrestrial gesture of fear. The mammoths acted confused, scared. They did not break ranks. They were already in the position they assumed when they were scared.
Glenn took aim at the biggest saber in her view and stuck a splinter into its ear. The saber pawed at its ear, shaking its head. Glenn pulled the second trigger. A piece of skull and fur burst outward in a red iron-blooded spray.
Overhead, the tattlers squawked. The sabers roared confusion, anger. The mammoths squeaked.
Glenn’s mount rolled its trunk up. The trunk rose before Glenn like an enormous serpent, then the nostril prodded Glenn questioningly.
Glenn petted the giant nose away. “I’m working here.”
A saber sprang up under her mount’s lifted trunk. No time to aim, Glenn pulled two triggers in quick succession. The splinter caught the leaping saber in its open mouth and immediately detonated.
The saber’s throat ruptured out of its neck. The saber fell thrashing on the ground coughing and gagging. It clipped one of its own pack in the ankle with its facial saber.
Glenn’s mount flinched as the blood spattered its trunk. The mammoth forequarters lifted off the ground and came down to crush the wounded saber. The mammoth shook its head, tusks waving. Knocked Glenn off-balance. She slid downward, where massive sides pounded together and huge feet stamped craters in the ground.
Glenn clutched at the mammoth’s ear to stay aboard. It took two hands. Her splinter gun slid away and dropped amid the stamping mammoth feet.
The ear waved. Glenn lost her grip on the ear. She grabbed at anything. Feathers. Thick handfuls of feathers. She shut her eyes, grunting, hauling herself up the moving wall hand over hand. Glenn pulled herself back over the crest of the mammoth’s neck, and she clung to it, tight as skin, until the sabers dissolved back into the gray-green trees.
The two biggest mammoth males charged out of the circle to give chase. The hembras closed ranks behind them and stayed that way until the males returned. Then they all joined in stepping on the dead.
The males shook their tusks at the sky where disappointed tattlers circled, braying.
Glenn climbed down her mammoth’s butt. Her hands tingled. All her nerves felt like they were sparking.
She found her gun. It was completely embedded in the ground within a mammoth footprint. She wedged the gun loose, moved apart to find a place to sit down and pick out the dirt.
A mammoth nose ruffled her short, short hair. The animal seemed to know Glenn was responsible for the exploding sabers. Making that connection had to indicate a certain level of intelligence. Glenn gave the trunk a little stroke and expected it to go away.
The mammoth kept snuffling and nudging her. Another joined in, prodded her with its trunk.

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