by David Weber
Rufus and the guards directing him marched toward the Commander who stood slim and aloof with the bulkhead behind him and the legion in front-the one with no more volition than the other.
The blue figure glanced toward Niger and perhaps spoke something into his ears alone. The young legionary raised the shield over his head, holding it by the lower rim so that the soft highlights of the boss were toward the Commander. The shield wavered a little; Niger steadied it and himself by backing a step to the sidewall and bracing his shoulder there.
"Our own weapons-those of my guild," said the Commander as his shimmering eyes swept the legion again, "are of greater destructiveness than even this demonstration will prove. Nevertheless, watch the shield which your fellow is holding."
While the Commander spoke, his hands swung forward a black cylinder slung behind him, visible but unremarkable in this interval that held so many remarkable things. The cylinder was about the length and diameter of the Commander's forearm. The irregularities on it, including the handles by which the Commander raised the device to his shoulder, gave it the look of plumbing which should have been decently hidden behind stone facings or molded bronze.
The guards holding the other Pompilius cousin halted near the Commander-behind him, actually, now that he was facing the side-but the blue figure ignored them. There was a glitter in the air above the cylinder, something that could have been static electricity but suggested an image of the shield toward which the cylinder was aimed.
A jet of light so cohesive that Vibulenus thought it was a fluid spurted from the cylinder to the shield. The boss exploded in a fountain of green sparks as the flash-heated metal burned in the air. Niger was one of a hundred men who screamed in surprise. He flung the shield away from him as drops of molten bronze spattered twenty feet in every direction.
The shield hit the floor, walking on its rim in a slow pirouette before clanging down on its convex face. The hole burned through the boss was large enough to pass a clenched fist. Strips of wood glued to form the shield's core sprang outward at the edge of the burned metal so that they looked like ravelled ends of rope.
Pompilius Niger bolted back into the mass of legionaries from which he had been taken. None of the guards tried to stop him-but Rufus found, when he made a similar attempt, that his arms were still held firmly.
"When I or any employee of my guild give you an order," said the Commander with his usual cool precision, turning toward his audience again, "you must obey instantly and utterly."
He released the cylinder. It snuggled itself to his back, out of the way but quickly available at need.
Charred wood and burning felt created a musty reek in the atmosphere as the shield continued to smolder.
"He wasn't carrying it outside this building, though," said the file-closer thoughtfully, while his fingers gently kneaded the muscles of Vibulenus' shoulder.
"The shield will remain here after this assembly," said the Commander. "I had intended to have your fellow carry it among you himself, but I underestimated the effect our weapons would have on warriors of your- cultural level."
"Little bastard," whispered Clodius Afer because the Commander's voice in his ears had hinted at amusement.
"Maybe they can't use anything but, but maces outside this ship," the tribune murmured to the veteran. "Maybe their gods would strike them down for violating that law."
Though why would there be such a law?
"Almost the whole of the ship is yours to roam as you please," continued the Commander, "except when you are summoned for training or assembly. This bulkhead-"
He stretched out one delicate, overfingered hand to tap the shifting pastels of the bulkhead behind him "-is my territory and that of my crew and guards. You are not to attempt to enter it, and you are not to approach within three feet of its surface. If you do- watch closely, now."
Vibulenus was watching the Commander's hands, expecting one of them to reach back for the cylinder. The blue figure did not move at all.
Two of the guards flung Pompilius Rufus toward the bulkhead.
The boy did not thump against the lighted metal because his body disintegrated in the air with a tearing crash.
The Commander winced an instant before the noise erupted behind him, and his shoulders hunched against the sauce of pulverized body spitting back into the room.
There was a barrier three feet from the visible wall. The momentum of Rufus' body carried him against it, and the young legionary splashed across the plane of contact as if he had fallen from a high cliff. Bone and muscle, as fluid and finely divided as the blood with which they merged, squirted sideways in a vertical tapestry behind the Commander, thinning and disappearing ten or a dozen feet from the center of impact.
Occasional globules overloaded what was an almost instantaneous process of digestion. Those caused the pops and sputters that threw droplets as high as the ceiling and as far as the middle rows of men watching the demonstration.
The tribune's forehead felt damp. He wiped it with his palm, then wiped his palm on his tunic, telling himself as he did so that it was sweat.
He felt no urge to attack the Commander. In fact, his guts were filling with ice water and his legs began shaking so violently that he was afraid he would fall down.
"This is not something I or my subordinates do, you understand," said the Commander in the chill tones of nightmare, his words heard clearly throughout the Main Gallery despite the gasps and cries of the men assembled there. "It is something that happens automatically to anyone who steps close to the wall. Only those whose nerve patterns have been keyed into the- mechanism of the ship-can survive."
There were smells in the air besides those of the burning shield. Partly the addition was the choking sharpness that near-striking thunderbolts left at the back of a man's throat-but there was charred flesh in the air as well. Something lay on the floor just outside the partition between death and life which Rufus had limned with his body. Vibulenus could not be sure, but he thought it was the heel of one of the boy's feet, sheared off because it did not have quite enough momentum to carry it across the barrier on its own.
"Now," the blue figure concluded, pausing for a perfect smile toward the assembly which stirred like a wheatfield in a fitful breeze. "Go and relax. We are already under way to a new engagement."
"What's he mean by that?" Clodius Afer demanded querelously. He gave Vibulenus a rough shake in an attempt to get his attention. "We can't be going anywhere. We'd hear it. Wouldn't we? Sir?"
The Commander turned and manipulated the hexagon on the wall. The invisible barrier did not affect him, except that one of his feet slipped a trifle in the slime Rufus had left at the demarcation line. Light twinkled within the hexagon and the door drifted open. His bodyguard, pair by pair, shuffled through the portal behind him.
Gaius Vibulenus could not understand the words the file-closer was throwing at him in a desperate attempt to deny what he had just seen. The tribune's mind danced with a montage of images, from the first moment he realized the guards were throwing his friend toward the wall, to the flash of richly-saturated earth-tones as the legionary disintegrated.
"Sir, please tell me we're not moving," begged Clodius Afer.
The younger man blinked down at the file-closer's hands. They gripped his shoulders but no longer tried to shake him into a response. He was a Roman citizen and an officer. He had his duties.
Taking one of Clodius' hands in each of his own and lowering them, Vibulenus said, "I think probably we are moving if he says we are, Gnaeus. I don't understand how that is either, but perhaps we'll learn. We have a lot of things to learn, I think."
He looked at the bulkhead and the door closing with another flicker behind the last of the guards. His eyes were again able to see what was there, rather than what had been happening there in the recent past.
He had a duty to Pompilius Rufus, also. Some day he would fulfill it.
"Get up now," repeated the voice in Vibulenus' ears. "This
room is about to be cleaned."
The tribune snorted and turned his head on the pillow, thinking in muzzy error that he could muffle the intrusion that way.
A jet of cold-very cold-water from the ceiling played the length of his spine.
Vibulenus leaped up, screaming and certain that he was being burned alive. The water from what looked like an ordinary rivethead splashed momentarily on his chest, but he did not connect the spray with the beam from the Commander's weapon which had devoured him as he slept.
There were half a dozen other men in the room. Those who had started to get up at the summons were staring in bemusement at Vibulenus and two others, prodded by separate spikes of water. None of the men were known by name to the tribune, though he recognized a couple of the faces. He did not know how he had gotten here, but the pounding of his head told him that he had been drunk at the time.
"Leave at once," ordered the calm voice. It would have passed for the Commander speaking, but Vibulenus did not imagine the Commander concerned himself with housecleaning. "Other rooms are open for your use."
The studs which had jetted cold water were now wreathed in steam, and the temperature of the room was already beginning to rise as the Romans stumbled out.
It had been an odd room, now that Vibulenus was alert enough to notice it. The floor was spongy, but its covering and the cushioned banquettes seemed to be of one piece with the walls-which were metal.
The only opening was the door into a broad hallway. That should have made the room stuffy or close under the circumstances, but the wastes voided by sleeping drunks were merely a whiff, not a suffocating reek.
"Pollux, but I need a bath," Vibulenus muttered. Out in the hall he couldn't blame the odor he smelled on his fellows.
"Follow the blue dot in the ceiling to the baths which have been provided for your comfort," said the voice.
The tribune jumped and looked around uselessly. There was a pulsing blue dot on the ceiling, right enough. "You there," he snapped to a legionary who had exited the room with him. "Did you hear something about the baths?"
"Hah? Nossir," said the other, giving a glance at the russet border of Vibulenus' tunic, marking him as a member of the equestrian order-and making the young tribune flush by recalling his mind to the garment's stains. "Good idea, though; if you know where one is?"
Something spoke to the legionary's hopeful question, and the man's eyes flickered up toward the blue dot. "All right," he said cheerfully. Nodding to Vibulenus, he strode off down the hall.
The blue dot preceded him; and the tribune, grimacing, followed an identical dot that waited until he stepped toward it before it slid on. There were other men in the hallway, some of them wandering with puzzled expressions but most seeming to follow beads of varicolored light, just as Vibulenus was. He vaguely remembered that Clodius Afer had said something about wine as the Main Gallery lowered itself after the assembly, and then the two of them had gone off after a bead of orange light.
The ship contained huge areas of open space, making it more like a city than it was a vessel. Most of the rooms flanking this hallway were similar to the one in which Vibulenus had awakened, twelve feet to a side with an eight-foot ceiling and no furnishings except for the cushions built against all four walls.
A few had doors shut flush with the passageway. One of these slid upward as the tribune passed, puffing out a wisp of steam and humid air. He paused-the dot of light halted a half step farther onand peered in. The room was of the standard pattern, glistening now as steam cleared in tendrils sucked rapidly toward the solid walls. It was clean and ready for occupancy; as, no doubt, was the room Vibulenus had occupied until being turned out.
The bead of light made a right turn down a cross hall long enough that the tribune could not see to either end. The hangover was only a dull shadow of the way battle injuries had left him feeling. Nonetheless, he saw other figures only as blurs. Afterwards he thought he remembered being hailed by name-but he could not be sure.
He would have stumbled past the paths, had not the voice in his ears said sharply, "This is your destination. The dot will go no farther with you."
Alerted if not truly alert, Vibulenus stopped at the open doorway beside him. It was twenty feet wide, opening onto a circular bay that was larger than any room he had seen aboard the vessel except for the Main Gallery. Despite its size, it was thronged by soldiers, many of them bearing the deep scarlet dye of healed injuries.
"Discard your garments here," said the omnipresent voice as Vibulenus took a puzzled step within the bay. "New clothing will be issued as you leave."
There was a shallow bin beside the door, empty; but as the tribune paused, a legionary with less compunction wadded up his own tunic and tossed it in. The garment melted into the bottom of the bin, leaving it empty again.
Shivering with youthful embarrassment, Vibulenus pulled off his tunic and promised himself that he would never again drink more than he could handle. The men around him were not slaves and social equals-the former beneath notice; the latter in no better state because of partying. These were social and military subordinates to whom he must provide an image of irreproachable dignity.
"Choose a location along the wall," said the voice.
The tribune stalked straight ahead, pretending that he did not see any of the other Romans and that they, as a result, could not see him.
"Hey, d'ye see him?" came a fragment of conversation, overheard but unprocessed until minutes later. "Right up't' the front knocking shit outa them bastids, and him without even a helmet!"
The ceiling was the usual eight feet high, the only dimension in which the gigantic vessel seemed less than generous by human standards. Nude men, some of them talking to one another with animation, were passing back and forth through the center of the room. The wall to which Vibulenus had been directed was unusual only in that it was curved, but the soldiers already standing within arm's length of it were in separate capsules whose boundaries were displayed by the water which leaped and sprayed within.
The tribune walked to the first open space he saw, ignoring the men who jostled him on their own slanting courses. Embarrassment about his condition kept Vibulenus from fear of undergoing a process strange to him.
Some of the men in this bath were hanging back in concern, watching cylinders of air glint to enclose their fellows before sprays from the floor and ceiling converged on them. Many of the common legionaries were so unsophisticated, however, that they had not seen a seagoing vessel before Crassus sailed his army from Brundisium. This bathing arrangement was only one more of the unique circumstances they had learned to expect since they left their farms in the Campania.
Gaius Vibulenus knew enough to be afraid; but to his boy's mind, dissolution like that of Pompilius Rufus was less to be feared than his present loss of dignity.
Somebody stepped in front of him to the space he had chosen, but the air around the soldier next to that place lost its sheen. That legionary sauntered away from the wall with a refreshed expression; his skin was flushed and gleaming as if from an expert massage. Vibulenus took his place without hesitation.
There was a ping that could have been in his ears instead of being heard by them. Everything in the room as a whole was now glimpsed through a surface that was perfectly clear but did not pass light in quite the same line as air did. Vibulenus remembered the way the Commander's face gleamed and wondered if that were from the same unknown cause.
"Standard?" asked the voice.
Vibulenus looked around, surprised out of his fuzzy internal dialogue.
"Or do you want to give instructions for changes in the standard cleansing program?" prompted the voice. It had a peevish tinge at such moments, unless the young tribune was imagining the tone from memories of house slaves skirting insubordination under similar circumstances.
"Fine, that's fine," Vibulenus snapped, flushing again. "I'll have the same that the men have."
Before the tribune could wonder whether he had co
rrectly inferred from the question that he was being offered something special because of his rank and class, needles of warm water with a slight astringence began to scrape grime from his body. It was like nothing he had ever felt before, but it was effective; and the steam that clouded the invisible cylinder around him sheltered Vibulenus from eyes more effectively than his mind could do.
As a way of cleaning the body, this "bath" was at least as effective as the system with which Vibulenus was familiar. The sprays varied in termperature and were firm enough to knead his muscles like the fingers of a masseur. There seemed to be an ingredient added to the water which took the place of the olive oil with which the tribune would ordinarily have rubbed himself, then scraped off in combination with the dirt and body grease from his skin.
So it wasn't the result of the bath that bothered the young Roman, only the process. He had expected a social event-sitting with half a dozen others around the water vat in the steam room; racing a friend across the pool in the cold room; and at the very least, being oiled down by a slave in the warm rooma task no individual could effectively perform for himself.
Instead, Gaius Vibulenus Caper was more alone than he had ever been in the eighteen years since he left his mother's womb… excepting only what had happened to him in the Medic's cubicle; and this bath was too similar to that event to be comfortable.
The sprays became bitingly cold, then shut off. Blasts of hot, dry air wrapped Vibulenus for a moment, and the voice said, "New clothing will be issued to you at the exit from the bath."
Probably the ping Vibulenus thought he had heard before did have something to do with the invisible shield, because when he heard the sound again he was back in the room with no distortion. The air was cooler than the flows which had dried him, and the atmosphere had a freedom of movement that would have gone unnoticed except that during the bath the tribune had felt that he was circumscribed.
The shimmer of a cubicle next to him ceased without a sound the tribune could hear. It reminded him to step back into the room, to give space to anyone else who wanted it. What were the bath hours here? Were there bath hours? Was it daylight now?