The Ninth Circle Read Online Free PDF Page A

years ago? Aye, those were the days .
    “ I would feed you to the animals,” said another guard.
    Nox nodded.
    “You are a faithless coward. You ran . Then you turned around and abandoned your brothers. Now you’re here lying to us to save those cowards. How low can you get?”
    I’m finding that out. It’s rather amazing, really. It was like a free fall through broken glass.
    The interrogators were still digging for others. The main inquisitor was trying to trip Nox into betraying his accomplices.
    “I’m not covering for anyone,” Nox blurted. His voice didn’t sound sincere even to his own ears. He sounded guilty as all hell.
    One of the inquisitors saw red.
    Truly. The purple-faced man popped a blood vessel in his right eye. Nox had never faced a gaze more baleful than that angry red-smeared eye.
    “There was no one else,” Nox insisted. “It wasn’t a hazing. It was murder. I was alone. I killed Cinna. I swear.” Oh, how obvious was that?
    The Eye spoke in a strange soft voice, a dare, “You swear?”
    “I do.” Nox nodded down.
    They all turned away.
    One guard gave the Eye a surreptitious gesture and a murmur, “Eye.”
    The man wiped his eye, saw the blood on his fingers. Gave a low snarling mutter, something like, “Sure. Why not?”
    In the next moment a holographic image formed in the dark shed. The floor vanished, became a windy cliff high above a sun-parched flatland. Nox was suddenly looking down on eight young men. The scene was a vulture’s eye view of the Widow’s Edge.
    Or a satellite’s view.
    Video. They had a video from orbit.
    Nox’s despair was complete. They knew. They knew. They stood him up here and let him lie his brains out.
    The holographic video played out. There was Cinna’s leap. The impact. The brothers’ scurrying retreat.
    The image vanished.
    An afterimage of brightness colored the darkness within the shed in red and green splotches.
    The bloody Eye glowered at Nox. “You are not really Roman.”
    Oh, it goes lower still . They were going to throw that at him. Nox was willing to absorb any abuse for what he’d done, but not that. Now he was angry. “I am Roman,” said Nox. His voice had gone to sandpaper.
    “It makes no difference now. Confess. You are really a U.S. mole, aren’t you?”
    Nox hadn’t thought he had any blood left in his face, but he felt it draining away now. Then it returned in a rush of heat, and he roared at the inquistor, “NO! Rome is my mother, my father, my world! I am Roman!” He rocked with his heaving breaths. Regretted his volume.
    The inquisitors ignored the outburst.
    “You have a choice, Yank. You can go home. Or you can stand judgment with your squad.”
    Shock numbed him. It was the last thing he expected.
    They were offering him his life and freedom.
    The hazing wasn’t the huge crime. Causing his brother’s death was fairly huge. But the worst, the unforgivable, was running away and leaving Cinna behind. Brother betrayal was the lowest.
    Nox had turned around to go back to his brother, but only after he’d already made the wrong decision. Rome didn’t want anyone like that in her legions. Especially not under the current scrutiny from the home world. Nox had expected his punishment to be doled out in stellar magnitudes.
    Yet they offered him an out.
    He could go back where he came from.
    Crawl back to his father.
    Not ever .
    They didn’t want him to be Roman.
    Go home .
    He felt light-headed in his wrath. He looked from the Eye to the other men and back.
    His voice shook with indignation. “ Domni , I am home.”

4
     
    P ATRICK’S SLEEPY VOICE sounded mumbly in the dark, “Where you going, babe?”
    “Control room,” Glenn whispered, tucked her shirt into her trousers. “Go back to sleep.”
    Glenn made sure she was awake for the drop to sublight on approach to the Zoen star system.
    Spring Beauty was no Merrimack . She had minimal inertial compensators with which to sidestep Newton’s first law.
    At