The Ninth Circle (44 page)

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Authors: R. M. Meluch

BOOK: The Ninth Circle
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“It’s—I think it could be a cloke ship,” said Marcander Vincent.
“Say again.”
“A cloke ship
wreck
actually.” Marcander Vincent brought up a visual of the target. It had the look of a fuselage, mostly buried, with vegetation grown over it.
“Antimatter containment?” Calli asked.
“No. No radiation either. It’s inert,” said Marcander Vincent. “Actually, it could even be a Nissan hut for all that.”
It couldn’t be local make because there were no manufacturing facilities on Zoe.
Commander Ryan agreed, “Cloke ship. Has to be. Would have been launched from our giant unidentified cylinder on a near pass by the star system.”
The immense rotating continental ship might be a cloke ship. It might be the carrier that launched the orbs. It might be the carrier that launched this unidentified craft. It might be none of those. It was five light-years away and retreating. Calli said, “Do we have a data feed back from our drones on that carrier yet?”
“Negative,” said Commander Ryan. “The drones are barely underway.”
“Where is this?” Calli tapped at the image of the shipwreck on the planet.
Computer-enhanced images did suggest a spaceship rather than a metal hut. The images also suggested a harsh landing. “Is it near the LEN camp?”
“No, sir,” said Tactical. “This is on another continent.”
“Then it didn’t bring the clokes,” said Dingo. “Not the lot I met anyway.”
“Are there any more of these?” Calli asked.
Now that he knew what to look for, Tactical located eleven of the alien craft scattered across the globe. None of them were putting out energy. All of them were more than half buried, and they were completely derelict.
The distribution of the ships was confined between latitudes thirty-seven degrees North and South, except for one ship crashed in the arctic. That one had gone thoroughly wrong and was strewn across kilometers. The aliens’ target zone appeared to be the tropics.
“These ships might have been the vanguard,” Commander Ryan suggested. “The scouts made it. The mothership didn’t,”
Tactical said, “Or maybe the mothership didn’t like the scouting report and kept going.”
Calli asked, “Are these ships the sources of the low-level radio signals we’ve been detecting?”
“Negative,” said the com tech.
Tactical said, “The shipwrecks are inert.”
“Yes, you did tell me that,” Calli said, pacing.
Dingo Ryan asked, “Could the radio transmission have to do with our pirates?
“How could they? The pirates just got here,” said Calli. Then, “Mister Dorset. Raise the LEN camp.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” said Red Dorset at the com.
When Director Benet responded at last to
Merrimack
’s hail, Captain Carmel advised him of the presence of pirates on the world. She suggested the director put up a defensive dome over his LEN expedition encampment.
Director Benet refused. “This is a scientific expedition site. I know you’re creating a pretext to come back down here. But honestly.
Pirates?
”
“The pirates are real,” said Calli.
“And they’re not here. Do not unleash your thugs anywhere near here!”
Benet broke the connection.
Man’s as mean as a low-level bureaucrat
, Calli thought. Said aloud, “I want to get a look at one of those shipwrecks. This one.” She pointed at the site of the wreck two hundred and fifty klicks from the LEN expedition camp. “I want to set troops down here without being detected.”
“Detected by the LEN or by the pirates?” Commander Ryan asked.
“Either,” said Calli. “Both.”
“We don’t know where the pirates are,” said Commander Ryan.
“And I don’t want them to know where
we
are. I have to assume they’ll be alert for displacement rifts.”
Traumatic insertion of matter into an atmosphere was as stealthy as a thunderstorm.
“And Swifts and SPTs and drones don’t have stealth capability,” she added.
“The pirates don’t have a large staff,” said Commander Ryan. “We might be able to slip a small craft down. We don’t know how vigilant they are.”
“Assume they’re bloody brilliant,” said Calli.
“Then they will know the moment any ship enters atmo,” said Commander Ryan.
Colonel Steele had been listening from the rear of the command deck. He answered before he could be asked, “I don’t see any way to get Marines down to the target site quietly.”
“Neither do I,” said Calli. “So we won’t be quiet. Colonel Steele, you’re going to fall.”
 
The Swifts were going down in a meteor shower.
The boffins measured the optimum point of atmospheric entry and ran the operation through computer simulation five hundred times with varying air currents. The boffins guaranteed touchdown within fifteen klicks of the target, but no closer than two.
They factored in the precise measurements of the Swifts, including their limpet nets.
Because particles physically cannot adhere to a frictionless inertial field, the Swifts’ inertial fields were encased in filament nets embedded with fine grains of particulates, which would burn off during descent.
The particulates were chosen to be clean-burning. Nothing incendiary was to survive to touch Zoen ground. The objective was to cloak the falling Swifts in shells of fire without setting a fire on the ground.
“This will make for an interesting view from the cockpit,” said the operation engineer at the preflight briefing.
Interesting
.
Kerry Blue and the pilots of Red Squadron listened. Interested.
“Your Swifts overheat in atmosphere. Most of you know that firsthand. We’re starting you out with your internal temperature low—you and your Swift. It’s going to hot up fast,” said the briefing officer.
The boffins were calling this landing Operation Fried Ice Cream.
“You will be in free fall the entire descent. Keep your hands off the controls. Your inertials will engage a hard stop at ground level. We have programmed the engagements into your Swifts. Do not switch to a manual operation. No unscheduled mining operations,
Flight Sergeant Blue
.”
The boffin raised his voice to make sure Kerry was paying attention.
“Yeah, yeah,” Kerry Blue muttered, arms crossed. “Sir.”
Bury one Swift one time and they think you’re a gopher for life.
 
Calli waited on the command deck for the drop.
She assumed the LEN and maybe the pirates would see this.
She was hiding her Marines in spectacularly plain sight.
The LEN
might
be able to tell that the meteor shower was not normally falling debris, but only if they had instruments in place specifically looking for such things.
“What about the pirates?” she asked, wanting reassurance.
“The pirates are not going to be able to parse the difference between falling rocks and intact Swifts with sand on their noses,” said Dingo Ryan.
“Unless they have a patterner,” said Calli.
“They don’t,” said Dingo.
“Neither do we,” said Calli. She remembered Augustus with a shudder. The name was almost an obscenity.
Augustus had been a Roman patterner. He’d been enormously useful, and the most intentionally offensive being ever to tread these decks. The patterner was dead.
Gloria in excelsis Deo
.
 
The Swift pilots got a marshmallow’s eye view of the campfire.
Over the res com Calli could hear Marines going down in flames. The pilots sang-chanted the latest of a long line of songs titled “Fire.” Thumping out a jungle beat on their consoles, punctuated with grunts. “Fiiiiii-
yuh
!
UGH!
”
Across the command deck Calli could catch covert toe-tapping and head-bobbing in time.
 
The pirates of The Ninth Circle spent the night locked inside
Bagheera
, parked on the Zoen ground. The Xerxes scattered its passive signals, making the ship effectively invisible. The brothers waited to see if anything descended on them.
The Xerxes’ defensive systems watched
Merrimack
and watched for any displacement rifts planetwide. The sensors detected some meteors. There were no ships coming or going from the LEN camp.
In the morning the brothers ventured outside.
The oxygen-rich air was easy to breathe. The gravity felt normal to them.
They belted on personal fields. No PF could protect them against a beam of the strength
Merrimack
could send down.
Merrimack
could drill a hole in the world. So the brothers’ survival strategy was not to become a target in the first place. These PFs were equipped with scatter tech. They could elude
Merrimack
’s sensors, giving her nothing to shoot.
The visual scatter tech of a PF was not as perfect as the ship’s visual scatter. With the naked eye Nox could still see where his brothers were, though he couldn’t tell
what
they were, unless he already knew. They appeared as blurs in the air, like waves of heat over a fire.
The brothers sat down for breakfast outside, near a purple sticky vine that waved in the air, trolling for winged insectoids.
The air smelled summer sweet. Alien sounds like birdcalls were cheery. Crawling insectoids were irritating. The purple vine was doing all right with the flyers.
The brothers, except for Nox, had grown up on an alien planet, so they were accustomed to drinking water from running streams without a second thought for infectious microbes. Nox drank too, but he thought first.
By afternoon Nox heard one of his brothers clearing his throat a lot. The throat-clearing turned into bouts of coughing.
“Who is hacking up a lung?” Nox asked the spectral shapes around him.
The cougher threw up.
“That’s Faunus,” came Orissus’ voice.
By afternoon, Faunus had a chorus behind him.
Pallas, Nicanor, Leo, Galeo, Orissus, and Faunus were sneezing, then retching. All the brothers were sick.
Except Nox.
They sat under a broad-boughed tree. They turned down their personal fields’ visual scatter so they could see each other.
They looked abysmal.
“Nox! You’re okay!” said Orissus, surprised. Resentful. “We all have it! You don’t!”
Nox said, “It only makes sense that if one of you caught it, you’d all get it. You’re all the same guy.”
Despite their individual designer traits, Pallas, Nicanor, Leo, Galeo, Orissus, and Faunus were clones of the same man.
“Do you think this is American germ warfare?” Leo said, his eyes watering. “You know. Maybe the Yanks came up with some disease to target Roman clones?”

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