The Ninth Circle
Authors: R. M. Meluch
Table of Contents
R. M. Meluch’s
TOUR OF THE MERRIMACK:
THE MYRIAD (#1)
WOLF STAR (#2)
THE SAGITTARIUS COMMAND (#3)
STRENGTH AND HONOR (#4)
THE NINTH CIRCLE (#5)
Copyright © 2011 by R. M. Meluch.
All Rights Reserved.
DAW Book Collectors No. 1565.
DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.
ISBN : 978-1-101-54806-6
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Nearly all the designs and trade names in this book are registered trademarks. All that are still in commercial use are protected by United States and international trademark law.
First Printing, November 2011
DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED
U.S. PAT. AND TR. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES
—MARCA REGISTRADA HECHO EN U.S.A.
To Jim, as always and forever.
PART ONE
Man Without a Country
1
T
HE BLOOD ON THE WALL was way too crimson. Didn’t really look like blood. Looked more like cardinal root extract.
HE BLOOD ON THE WALL was way too crimson. Didn’t really look like blood. Looked more like cardinal root extract.
Cinna was alone in the barracks in the dark before dawn with the gory writing on the wall. His seven brothers were gone, their bunks in order, inspection-ready.
The savage red scrawl issued coded instructions. The references wouldn’t make sense to anyone outside Cinna’s eight-man squad, except for the last line, triple-underscored and all in caps:
TELL NO ONE!!
TELL NO ONE!!
The slashing underlines dripped a bit.
The mission took Cinna outside. The Legion base was dark. Cinna’s night vision switched itself on.
All was quiet, the air warm, dry, still. A slight dust haze dimmed the stars. The rustling of Cinna’s drab fatigues and the crunching of his own footfalls sounded thunderous to him.
At the specified coordinates, between the privies and the recycling building, Cinna moved a flat rock to uncover a scroll. New instructions. And a warning to obey precisely and tell no one on pain of hideous death.
Cinna’s heart lifted.
Finally!
After weeks of treating him as an outsider, Cinna’s brothers finally deemed him worthy of a hazing.
Cinna hurried back to the eight-man hut and washed the faux blood off the wall. That was the first instruction.
He wasn’t sure how his brothers had managed to paint the wall and slip out without waking him. They must have dosed him.
What were brothers for?
Brothers were for getting you into trouble.
The second instruction bade him slip out of the Legion compound under the wall.
Do not pass the guard shack. Do not get a pass
.
.
Cinna’s nerves buzzed. Felt great.
He set off, hugging the perimeter wall, to the north end of the compound. In the blackness he found the designated escape route. He’d stepped in it.
It was a rainwater outlet. Dry as a bone now.
It hardly ever rained here. Maybe once a year. At those times the Legion compound became a forty-acre wading pool.
The egress was a shallow opening cut under the massive limestone block. Looked like a dog dug it. Cinna eeled himself under and out.
He ran all out across the flat hardpan of the surrounding badlands. He needed to get to the foothills in time.
Be quick about it
, the instructions read.
Miss the appointed time and you know what happens!
, the instructions read.
Miss the appointed time and you know what happens!
Cinna didn’t know what happens. Maybe he was meant to assume the implicit deadness in the line.
His brothers would kill him? Not bloody likely. But he knew he would wish he were dead if he didn’t pass this challenge. He needed to prove himself to these guys and become one of them.
Technically Cinna was already one of them. The Legion had assigned him to this squad. All but one of the squad members were variations on a single Antonian clone. And that one exception was not Cinna.
Cinna was the tyro on this squad, a year younger than the others at an age when a year was an eternity. He wasn’t a boy, but he wasn’t fully a man in Roman eyes. He was what Rome called an ephebe, a youth of eighteen or nineteen Terrestrial years of age. Cinna had just turned eighteen, just joined the training unit of Legion Persus. He had missed the war. So had his brothers. They were all sour about that.
He wasn’t truly in the squad until his brothers said he was in. Right now they were still “they,” and Cinna was still that new guy.
Cinna couldn’t say he was desperate to belong. There was no desperation in it. It was a thing he must do, and he wanted it done. Now.
His brothers were waiting for him at the edge of the salt flats. Looked as severe as the rocks behind them.
Out here the land rose straight up in a natural battlement, testament of a violent creation. The Roman colonial planet Phoenix lay quieter now than when the volcanic world first thrust the Dragon’s Back from the seabed and cooked off the waters.
Cinna’s brothers looked like him. And maybe Cinna was vain, but he thought his brothers were magnificent.
They were bronze-skinned. Tall. Built lean and hard and all in proportion. They looked at him with the same dark, dark eyes as he looked at them. Their dark hair curled more or less.
Clones were always given individual traits for recognition and accountability. Cinna and his brothers were similar but not exactly the same. And Cinna still couldn’t keep Leo and Galeo straight.
He had to wonder if the reproduction designers already knew the name of the subject clone when they doled out its distinctive genes. Did they know that Faunus was going to be a Faunus when they gave him that barrel chest, that wicked sybaritic face, and those curls? Surely they had to know he was going to be a Faunus when they gave him those curls. That head of hair was just begging for a vine wreath to crown it. Who but a Faunus could wear one of those?
Pallas was a regal, refined name. And Pallas the man was too civilized. He had a gentle look, a gentle air. His basic features were the same as the others’, but he had been drawn with an airbrush. Pallas was someone’s idea of ideal male beauty, and that was fine for Pallas. Cinna was glad that wasn’t he. Cinna’s own looks were of a sharper, rougher cut, and Cinna liked it that way.
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