Authors: R. M. Meluch

The Ninth Circle (17 page)

Camiciarossa spoke: “
Bernini
. Register Knox as friendly.”

A scanner light moved up and down the two people within the air lock. Nox held his breath.

A soft chime sounded. The inner seal relaxed. The ship pronounced: “Registered.”

Nox closed his eyes.

The hatch opened for them. Camiciarossa showed Nox around the spaceship.

The overheads were higher than on military ships. This was a luxury transport for important persons. The control room was well ordered, black and steel, elegant, efficient.

The galley was sleek, clean, equipped for a master chef. The food stores were low, as the ambassador was currently in residence at the embassy.

The physical sleep chambers were small, accommodating only a very large bed and dresser. But the confines could transform themselves into illusions of anything you wanted—mountains, beaches, kingdoms under the sea.

Nox was more interested in the technical achievements than the amenities. Camiciarossa showed off the machine’s engineering mastery—the helm, the sensors, the communications center, the water recyclers, the air scrubbers, the engines, which were custom built for each Xerxes, the inertial-field generators.

“What is threshold?” Nox asked.

“I can’t tell you.”

Nox gave him a conspiratorial smile. “It’s fast, isn’t it?”

Camiciarossa had to suppress his own smile. “It’s very fast.”

He showed Nox the arsenal of serpent’s teeth. That name sounded better than “killer pencils,” which better described the missiles’ look. “Serpent’s teeth” better defined their effect—fast, penetrating, lethal.

“They will rip through most inertial fields,” said Camiciarossa. “
Bernini
is not an attack craft, but he could defend himself if he had to.”

At tour’s end, the consul said, “I’m sorry I can’t take you up for a fly around.”

“Oh, God,
please
don’t apologize!” Nox said, honestly horrified. “You’ve been amazing.”

Nox reached into his pocket. Knew this wasn’t going to go in easy. He would get only one attempt.

Nox didn’t carry a pocket knife, as most American men did. But he was in civilized guise, and he could carry a pen onto the ambassador’s spacecraft without setting off alarms, even though a pen was the instrument of a notorious assassination in recent history.

Glenn turned her head, dreadfully slowly, to look over her shoulder.

She saw the teeth first. Pointed teeth. Uppers and lowers on display in a wide vulpine smile. White. Gleaming.

The fox had very large eyes.

Glenn edged her hand toward her back, reaching for her splinter gun.

Patrick hummed.

The fox’s head jerked back. Its muzzle pulled down against its snowy chest. It looked surprised. The fox barked, jumped up, and dashed around the hollow in a tight, tail-chasing puppy circle. It sat up on its haunches on the trunk of the fallen tree and cocked its head.

The teeth were still all there in a big smile. The black eyes gleamed.

Was that the look of hunger? Curiosity? Challenge? Thrill of the hunt? Alien fear?

Patrick climbed out of the root hole and performed a kind of salaam—a big full-body bow that brought his forearms to the ground and his butt up in the air. On Earth it was universal dog language for
Do you want to play
?

The fox’s forepaws were armed with massive curved black claws. Before Glenn could react, one paw shot forward, batted Patrick in the chest. The fox darted away in bouncing leaps. Glenn gasped, “Patrick! Are you—?

All right
? she meant to say, but Patrick was scrambling to his feet, unblooded, brushing her off, and dashing after the fox. “I’m it!”

The white tip of the fox’s tail gave a wag and flick in retreat. Might have been an equivalent to sticking out its tongue.

If we are prey, this opens a new category in predators playing with their food
.

Glenn crawled out of the hollow, brushed off dirt and bugs, and followed Patrick and his playmate out to the clearing, her gun at her side.

Immediately she was surrounded by curious faces and twitching noses.

She felt a nose up from behind, right in her crotch. She fought the reflex to hike a mule kick at it.

Patrick made his way to Glenn’s side in the throng of foxes.

He was intact, his hair tousled, face flushed. A fox stood up on its hind legs, stuck its nose in Patrick’s ear, and gave him a good sniff. Then it stuck its nose in Patrick’s face, nostril to nostril, and inhaled.

It showed all its teeth.

Sometimes a baring of teeth really was just a smile.

Glenn got a nose up her armpit.

Giant claws picked at her sleeve without cutting it, just curious.

A furry muzzle found its way down the front of her shirt. Her hands closed on reflex around its head. Her fingers curled in the fur behind its ears.

The head leaned into her touch.

And I’m giving a fanged alien intelligence an ear scratch
.

She didn’t dare show anxiety. But didn’t dare assume the aliens were harmless.

Patrick was long past daring. Patrick was already family.

Patrick tussled and rolled and boxed as Glenn hung onto her heartbeat. Patrick kept getting up unscathed.

The foxes were apparently smart enough to know that the strangers were breakable. And so far they were choosing not to break them.

A fox sniffed Glenn’s face.

“Hello,” said Glenn.

The fox drew back. Blinked huge eyes. It opened and shut its mouth. Another fox turned its head over sideways, as if thoroughly perplexed by the sound.

“Hello,” Glenn repeated.

One fox pawed his muzzle as if he had something stuck on it. The other rolled all the way over, as if Glenn might sound different when viewed from upside down.

“Hello,” Glenn said again.

The foxes hummed to each other. One touched Glenn’s mouth, its big claws pulled back, its black footpads on her lips. If the fox were human, Glenn would say it was perplexed.

It really did seem perplexed.

They can’t form words
. The foxes didn’t know how she was making these sounds.

She realized,
They look perplexed because they’re perplexed
. Body language was crossing the alien barrier.

And possibly the foxes looked friendly because they actually were friendly.

When Patrick found his way back to her, Glenn pulled burrs from his hair. She said, “These creatures didn’t build the spacecraft that attacked us on the way in.”

“No,” Patrick had to agree. He turned his face up toward the sky. “Means they’re not alone.”

The consul’s body had scarcely fallen to the deck when Nox was shouting, “
Bernini
! Emergency dust off! Execute!
Ora!
”

The Xerxes obeyed in an instant. Hatches sealed. The ship lifted off the ground in full stealth mode and shot skyward in a panic rising. The emergency command did not allow time for directions, they just told the ship to get aloft and
elsewhere
fast without hitting anything.

Nox expected to be slammed to the deck with the sudden liftoff. But the inside of the Xerc was staid and stately as an ambassador’s reception room. The only thing Nox felt was the disconnect between the inner stillness of the ship and his view out the portal. It was like watching an action video.

He pounced on the ship’s communications station and shut everything off. Phoenix’s ground and sky controllers were not hailing him yet. The controllers didn’t even know the Xerc was airborne.

Hands shaking, Nox disabled the res chamber and the auto SOS sounder. He stepped over the consul’s body. Skidded in the blood.

He dashed through the ship, scouring all systems for anything that might be used as a tracking signature. He disabled the displacement collars, the landing disks, the displacement straps, and the displacement chamber itself. Turned off the emergency sounders in all the life pods and life craft. He rifled the private compartments for personal communicators and threw them in the annihilator. He pulled the ambassador’s workstation out of the bulk, turned all its systems off, and removed its batteries.

He ran back to the control room to find out where in the world he was.

The Xerxes hovered like a hole in the air high over an ocean on the dayside of Phoenix.

Nox instructed the ship to no longer respond to the name
Bernini
. From now on the Xerxes was to respond only to the name
Bagheera
.

Nox purged all users other than himself from
Bagheera
’s registry. He fed the biometrics of his brothers into the ship as registered personnel.

He executed a passive scan for possible searchers. He detected no frantic activity from any base on planet. The satellite eyes would have seen nothing alarming. If they were focused on the compound between the Italian Embassy and the Italian consulate, they would have seen the Xerxes appear out of its cloaked state. They would have seen the consul board the Xerxes with a guest. They would have seen the Xerxes disappear as it returned to full stealth. There were no further visuals for them to detect. As far as they could know, the Xerxes was still in the compound, invisible.

None of the Roman Legion bases were showing alarms. None of the orbital defense stations were launching anything.

Nox knew they were going to start up—any heartbeat now. The Xerc would undoubtedly miss a scheduled call-in. Nox needed to get off world as soon as inhumanly possible.

He had already told his brothers where to be.

Now attend and listen
!
I’ll either pick you up, or my death will be on the news
.

This was going to be a flying grab.

Trouble was, Nox was ahead of schedule. Would his brothers be at the rendezvous coordinates now? Would they come at all?

Be there, be there, be there
. Nox did not want to be alone on this side of the Rubicon.

The place of rendezvous came into visual range. It was a lonely stand of gnarled gray knot trees at coordinates of nowhere in particular. There was no reason for satellite eyes to monitor this place at all, much less be watching it at this particular moment in time.

Nox saw nothing at the rendezvous coordinates.

No police. No watchers.

No brothers.

Nothing but bedraggled trees, rocks, and dust.

No
.

Then, at the instant of despair,
There!

Pallas.

And behind the bleached tree skeletons was Nicanor.

Among the rocks were Faunus, Orissus, Leo, Galeo.

Nox’s chest unknotted. His brothers had come. They were there, waiting.