The Ninth Circle (57 page)

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Authors: R. M. Meluch

BOOK: The Ninth Circle
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He continued upward.
Nox’s bemused expression hadn’t changed as Patrick passed him.
Patrick climbed one step. Another step. Balanced on a rock. Shifted his load of audio equipment.
Audio equipment
.
Oh, hell
.
I’m carrying audio equipment.
Sometimes the smartest people could be the dumbest.
Patrick could not contact
Merrimack
with the equipment he carried. But could he expect the pirate to know that?
I just murdered the whole camp.
Another step.
Starting with me.
Nox’s voice sounded at Patrick’s back. “You’re letting the jungle in.”
The words startled Patrick. The unexpected insight of the pirate. The man was insane, not stupid. Nox knew exactly what Patrick intended.
Patrick tried not to react. Faced forward.
Don’t acknowledge. Just keep climbing
. His back tensed. He waited for a machete to cleave him open like a side of beef. He did not want to know what that felt like. Should have thought about that a minute ago.
Nox’s voice sounded behind him again, not closing in, still crouched at the water’s edge. “Jungle favor go with thee.”
31
 
A
RUMBLING DISTURBED the expedition camp. All the xenos felt it in the ground.
A “Quake!” someone whispered.
From the surrounding forest animals yelped, barked. More took up the calls. Sounds of alarm lifted. Flocks of winged creatures rose from the trees. They passed over the camp in mixed flocks, headed away from the highlands, down toward the river.
“I do not think so,” said Jose Maria. His dog stood with her ears up.
The nanny goat bleated and yanked on her leash as if to choke herself.
The rumbling sound didn’t have the timber of grinding bedrock. It was the pounding of hooves, paws, and many many feet. Insects swarmed in rising clouds.
“Stampede!” someone shouted.
Snakes, monkey squirrels, furred and feathered creatures scampered through camp. But the loudest roaring came from the direction of the stream. The vale was where all the highland animals were descending, fast.
“This is possibly a fire,” said Jose Maria.
A rush of panicked animals funneled down the vale, all charging down toward the river below.
“They’re trying to get down to the river!” Dr. Minyas cried.
“Oh, my God! Fire! Fire!” Not sure who was screaming that.
Nicanor, Pallas, Orissus, Faunus, Leo, and Galeo collected together around Nox because Nox was as serene as a hurricane’s eye.
“Is
Merrimack
trying to flush us out with a ruse?” Pallas asked. “Or should we be running.”
Nox said quietly, “There’s no fire.”
Sabers and antelopes, fleeing side by side, seemed to think there was a fire. Night-flying monkey squirrels flew in broad daylight, their giant eyes slit-lidded against the brightness.
Benet shouted, “Where’s the fire? Who started a fire?”
“We haven’t found it yet, Izzy,” said Dr. Rose, checking his shaking instruments. “Stop yelling. Wow, look at that.”
Overlapping echelons of majestic birds passed over.
Dr. Rose noted the direction of the wind. It was coming out of the highlands, from where the animals fled.
“If there’s a fire up there, it will spread this way.”
The expedition members begged the pirates to allow them to take shelter inside their ships.
Nox told them, “You break any hatch seal, I’ll burn you myself.”
Many of the xenos noted that the pirates weren’t running for their lives. They wore no displacement collars that could blink them to a place of safety. The pirates weren’t afraid.
Jose Maria de Cordillera and his dog had climbed on top of his Star Racer
Mercedes.
That would not protect them from fire, but it got them out of the way of the torrent of beasts that were now galloping and bounding through camp.
The pirates collected a few bottles of Dr. Rose’s wine, climbed up to the flat topside of one of the spaceships in the half ring, and settled down to watch the parade of strange creatures.
“Damn, there goes our tent,” said Nicanor blandly.
Most of the xenos climbed atop other ships and watched. Someone brought the goat up. They scanned the horizons for fire.
No plumes of smoke appeared. The only smells were of animals.
Mammoths came lumbering down from the heights, their long golden feathers waving, their short tusks lifting and lowering. They raised their trunks, squeaking.
Herds of glass deer ran through the camp, their transparent flesh revealing their organs and bones, their hearts beating very fast.
Boxcar mice snaked along the ground in long segmented chains like toy trains, nose to tail.
Armored land squid pelted along backward, and furry little bellows voles propelled themselves in high arcs, jumping breath to breath.
From their high shelter atop the ships the xenos could see over the treetops, down to the wide river, where animals of all kinds muddied the water.
The beasts stomped on the riverbanks.
Glenn climbed up the ship where the pirates were gathered. Her eyes were red and hollow and wet. There was a meek set to her shoulders that were always so proud. “Nox? Do you know where my husband is?”
“He’s doing just fine,” Nox said, and moved over to make a place for her. “Have a seat.”
Glenn sat down between Nox and another pirate, the nice one, Pallas.
“You need to see this.” Nox tilted his head toward the lowland.
Down in the wide river crowded with creatures, predators and prey milled together, none particularly hungry. Giant flightless snakemouths—birds with powerful legs like ostriches, their beaks able to unhinge to swallow prey whole—didn’t snatch anything from the assembled buffet. They jostled with the sabers, slipping in the sediment. They trampled the riverbanks with their hooves.
Mammoths’ wide feet sank into the mud under the weight of their gargantuan bodies. Water swirled brown around their tree trunk legs.
Anything buried in the riverbanks was obliterated and washed away.
 
By nightfall still no flickering glow of fire appeared up on the heights. No waft of smoke carried down on the wind.
Strange animals wandered through camp, disoriented.
By dawn it was clear that there had been no fire.
The animals started returning to the highlands at a more leisurely pace than they had left. Many of them strayed into camp.
Xenos with polymer shields guided them around the compound.
The creatures couldn’t smell the gas fire at the center of camp, but they bolted as soon as they saw it.
Patrick stole back into camp. Not many people had noticed that he’d been gone. He stowed his sound equipment inside his tent, which was still standing, though there were many strange animal tracks around and through it.
The tent flap moved. He gave a guilty start.
It was Glenn, looking curious.
She seemed to guess that Patrick had said something to the mammoths.
Patrick had broadcast a message, very loud. Up in the high country he’d blasted on wavelengths between eighteen and twenty-three meters, too long for the human ear to detect.
Glenn whispered, “What did you
say
?”
“Fire.”
There hadn’t been a fire. Not now. Not in ages.
So how had he known what to say?
Glenn said, “You know the mammoth word for fire?”
No one had been monitoring mammoth lo-fi speech long enough to have ever heard mammoths utter that particular word.
Patrick shook his head no. “I said it in elephant.”
It wasn’t so much a word. It was a literal note of panic that provoked an instinctive reaction, a fear written on one’s genes.
Patrick sounded the alarm. The mammoths led the charge. Other animals took up the call in the audible ranges, which sent everyone rushing down to the river.
To trample the clokes’ seeding area.
Glenn threw her arms around Patrick. She clung to him tightly.
Patrick put his arm around her. He felt tall.
I am the man
.
“Now I can dance,” said Glenn.
In the evening Glenn danced the hora around the fire pit. It was a white gas flame in the pit. Still, the light caught the red in her hair and made the civilized young woman look purely savage. Hers was a defiant, angry dance.
Glenn said, “I need to teach the foxes this one.”
Nox met Patrick’s gaze across the fire pit.
Patrick had not told Nox anything of what he’d done in the highlands. But Nox knew. He’d let the jungle in.
Nox closed a fist that said
well done.
Director Benet was calling the stampede an ecological disaster—because of the crushing of the cloke egg deposits on the riverbanks.
Patrick’s back stiffened straight up. “What hole did you excrete that idea out of, Izzy? The clokes are an invasive species.”
“The clokes are endangered,” said Izrael Benet. “We must protect any other clutches.”
“Endangered?” Glenn said. “We have no evidence of that. The planet could be lousy with them.”
“It’s not. We would have seen them on the global surveys.”
“Why do you think they deserve protection?”
“
Why?”
Benet said back, as if she’d asked why he should keep breathing. “They’re infants.”
Glenn fought to keep the shrillness out of her voice. “Infants? You call those infants? ”
“Nymphs,” said Benet. “Eggs.”
“And you would let them
hatch
?”
“We must protect them. We must let them live and breed. Or else what
are
we?” Director Benet declared and stalked away from the fireside.
The answer to that question came from behind her, murmured into Glenn’s ear for only her to hear. “Pirates.”
Nox was there.
Glenn turned, lifted her brows at Nox, questioning.
Nox said softly, “Your man had the right idea. It’s just that a bigger mammoth is required.”
Patrick’s stampede had taken out just one clutch. There were more. There had to be a lot more.
“Got one?” Glenn asked. She thought her question was ironic.
Nox may have nodded.
 
There was a saying on
Merrimack
:
If anything’s gonna happen, it’ll happen on the Hamster Watch.
Lieutenant Glenn (“Hamster”) Hamilton was not here, but the middle of ship’s night on board
Merrimack
would always be the Hamster Watch.
There had been a wildlife stampede two days ago. The LEN encampment had caught the edge of it.
Merrimack
’s Intelligence Department sifted through the recordings of the event for signs that any human beings might have slipped out of camp under cover of the chaos. They turned up nothing. They also analyzed the patterns of animal movement, searching for any evidence of creatures avoiding an invisible Xerxes-sized object. That also turned up nothing.
Now Chief Engineer Kit Kittering had the deck. She was expecting a quiet watch.
Commander Stuart (“Dingo”) Ryan, the XO, was in the maintenance hangar, which doubled as a rec area. He had a V-mask on. From outside Dingo seemed to be shadow boxing. From his own point of view, Dingo was in the ring with Ali, who floated like a butterfly and stung like a jackhammer.
Dingo was collecting his virtual teeth off the deck when his V-helmet abruptly went blank and an oh-so-polite voice advised him that this program had terminated due to the ship’s elevated alert status.

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