by David Weber
"So you see, sir," Niger went on with the enthusiasm of invention, "what we need to do is stop the ramp right where it is so they can't pour fire on it-"
"And see if the cursed place weathers to dust any time soon?" Clodius Afer interjected.
"No sir," the watch officer said in a tone of injured simplicity. "We can reach the wall from here with a ram or a drill, if it's long enough. If we use that tree-" he pointed at the long bole Vibulenus had already noted "-for instance."
"It'll-" said the centurion.
"And," Niger continued with uncharacteristic determination, "if we cover the outside with bronze sheeting so's they can't burn it up no matter whether they try all night."
"Hey," said Clodius Afer in surprise. "You know, sir, that just might…?"
Vibulenus grimaced, wishing he could be more hopeful about what was, after all, a more imaginative notion than any the Commander had offered. "No," he said, "even if it doesn't sag too much over the distance-" Twenty unsupported feet; the tribune knew from the Greek architect superintending construction on his family's estate how much a beam would flex, and this one covered besides with a heavy layer of metal… "-then they'd snag it with ropes from the top of the wall, and we'd be too far away to save it."
"What we really need," said Clodius Afer with gloomy thoughtfulness, "is one a' them lasers the Commander's got. Suppose we could ask him just the once, to turn the trick?"
The short answer to that was no, you cursed fool-the Commander's guild wouldn't have bothered to buy them from the Parthians, buy Romans who knew how to lock shields and use a short sword, if there'd been a chance of using the guild's own weapons. But Vibulenus would not have said that to a friend; and anyway, the implications of the question showed that the non-com had an idea that was still unclear to the tribune.
"Do you think the lasers could tear a hole in those stones?" Vibulenus said doubtfully. "I didn't think it was that…" His voice trailed off as he tried to remember what the shield looked like after the bolt had struck it. That hadn't been so very long ago, except that… everything got mixed up between, between battles. They fought, they regrouped on the ship after the guild traders landed in their even larger vessel. And then the legion drank and slept and played in the amphitheater with whatever fantasy struggle was going on there now. Injuries that the Medic had repaired aged to true healing, sometimes with traces of scar tissue: the tribune's left biceps still had a twinge from the stab wound he couldn't remember getting in his first melee.
And then, when the deep red dye had faded from the flesh of even those who had been most seriously wounded-those who had been killed, and whose eyes never lost that awareness-everybody woke up in the morning, and the Commander was briefing them for another battle, at another place where the air was wrong and the sun was wrong… and nobody was sure any longer what was right.
"Right" was not getting your skull smashed by a ton of rock, and not being engulfed in a fire so hot it burned your bones to a pinch of lime.
"Gee, d'ye think so, sir?" Clodius Afer said, breaking in on the tribune's memory of flames shooting higher than the screams of the men they encircled. The centurion's brow furrowed as he made his own attempt to visualize the laser demonstration. It kept getting mixed up in his mind with what had happened to a kid in his century, Publius Pompilius Rufus, scarcely even blooded…
"No!" snapped Afer, crushing that train of thought with his vision of the present situation. "No," less forcefully but still firmly enough to surprise the men beside him; "what I mean is, they couldn't pour their fire on us if we had that laser. And peckin' through the wall, then-Pollux, that's no problem. The mortar they're set with at the base, that's been burned to Hades. The stone're big enough but that just means you've got a hole you kin crawl through first time you get one clear."
"Yeah," agreed Niger while Vibulenus was still grappling with the unstated part of the equation. "Hot as everybody is after the first time, I betcha four men with picks'd have a block out in a couple minutes easy. Then she's kitty bar the door."
"Mustn't forget there's gonna be another layer behind the facing blocks," Clodius cautioned the junior non-com, professionally analytical now that he had begged the initial question of the laser. "Maybe fill, too, but that'll be rubble, and anyway, we tear a hole big enough and the fuckin' tower falls in, makes us a better ramp right damn through their wall than anything we're gonna build from the outside. Baby! Then we gottem."
To Vibulenus, it was all a variant of the discussion that began. "If that camel-fucker Crassus had had sense enough to march us along the river instead of trying to cut across the fucking desert…" Hindsight was a useless waste of breath, and preplanning that started off with an impossibility was worse. That wasted not only time, the one commodity besides frustration which the legion had in great plenty just now; it wasted thought which might otherwise have been put to useful purposes.
But he still didn't see…
"Gnaeus," said the tribune, interrupting Clodius Afer's description to his admiring junior of the way the legionaries should deploy after they had breached the wall, "how would the lasers keep them from pouring down fire? When they stick their spouts through the embrasures, they're still under cover behind the stone. Lasers wouldn't do any more than the archers did. Unless maybe they curve, do you-"
"No, no," the centurion said, harsher than he would have chosen because his dream was being assaulted from false grounds. Clodius had already convinced himself, at least for this moment with friends, that a deputation from the legion would convince the Commander to break the rules-in a way that would mean his death and the immediate dissolution of his trading guild by investigators of the Federation. "Sir, you see, the stuff burns, right?"
Vibulenus started to lift his jaw in agreement with the rhetorical question, but the centurion was already hastening on to cover his lapse of respect by saying, "And they've got, who knows, hundreds of gallons of the stuff up there-" he cocked his eyebrows to the breastwork beside him and the lordly tower beyond "-maybe thousands.
"Now," his voice sank with the beauty of the thought it was about to express, "what if all that fire-piss was to light up on top the tower instead of when they pour it down on us? How'd you like to see that, Gaius, see all them bastards jumpin' every whichaway and burnin' like fuckin' night games at the Circus?"
"I'd like that a lot," said Vibulenus slowly. Indeed, he could imagine it even as he spoke: the bolt of sudden light ripping apart the spout, scattering blazing fluid among the defenders and the open vats which they prepared to pour down on the legion. The fire would go where arrows could not-nor the laser beam itself, directly. That was very good thinking.
"But," Vibulenus went on, "there's no way we'll get a laser. The Commander himself doesn't dare carry one when he's out of the ship. You know that."
"Maybe," said Niger, hopeful even though both his superiors had lapsed into glum silence, "we could get the artillery to do it? You know, shoot a firepot into the battlements?"
As if supporting the suggestion, a pair of ballistas slammed missiles leaving smoke trails toward the fortress. One pot sailed into the hidden courtyard. The other splashed its contents in a great oval of flame onto the wall it had failed to clear. The blaze was lambent anger against the black stone, streaking and then shrinking into a score of orange hotspots that continued to sizzle around unusually large globs of pitch.
"Naw, not accurate enough," explained the centurion, thumbing in the direction of the fortress as if he or his companions could see it. Their ears and past experience told them as surely as direct sight could have done what had been the result of the ballista shots. "Especially with firepots, since they're lighter 'n stone and they wobble when the fluid shifts."
His listeners lifted their eyebrows in agreement. The smoke trails from the weapons that had fired held their corkscrew shape even as they drifted downwind, dispersing.
Niger's lips pursed, however, as he followed his own line of thought even while ceding the trut
h of what Clodius Afer had just said. "Well," he offered hesitantly, "if they don't hit it the first time, sir-and I don't guess they would neither-what's to stop they keep trying until they do?"
For a moment, it looked as if the senior non-com were about to snarl an angry put-down instead of giving the suggestion a proper reply. Perhaps if Vibulenus had not been present, that would have happened, but the tribune's expression of something between agreement and expectancy calmed Clodius Afer.
With a smile instead of a bark of haughty dismissal, he said, "If I can see the chance, lad, you can bet your hopes of a woman that this lot we're gettin' wiped by'll see it if we draw a line to it, plinkin' away with firepots.
Mayhap they do already and they store the shit down a floor with a layer a' stone between the tubs and anything we could touch with the splash if we did hit."
"All right, I see," said Vibulenus who at last did understand what had been so obvious to the centurion that it took him this long to realize what he had to explain to his juniors.
The tribune was smarter than the older man-either of them would say-and was certainly better educated. But Clodius Afer had the habit of looking at military problems and military solutions, putting himself in the other man's boots. At one time or another he'd been on the other side of most problems during service in Lusitania and Gaul, besides the catastrophic last thrust into the Parthian domains.
For some problems, there is no satisfactory substitute for experience. Learning that had been a valuable piece of experience for Gaius Vibulenus.
"Now, I don't think they're worried about that yet," the centurion continued, glowing now from the approval of his social and military superior. "The way they poured the stuff down the first time, they weren't takin' time to haul it up any distance-and why would they bother? They're no more used to our artillery than we are to their cursed fire! But I guess they're smart enough to learn."
Niger spat angrily beyond the edge of the guardwalk. "Learn quicker 'n some folks does, I reckon. Or else we wouldn't be buildin' right up't' the wall for another bath any time they get good and ready't' offer it."
Bows snapped faintly from the top of the tower. The missiles, moving in several flights as the archers pumped their cocking levers, quivered in the sunlight as they arched upward. When they dropped at last, it was almost vertically. They had been aimed at the teams laboring forward, dragging the hundred-foot timber that had been brought so far with such effort-and would blaze with empty magnificence in a few days or weeks, along with the remaining material of the rebuilt siege-works.
Even with their height advantage, the defending archers were unable to get much more than a furlong's range from their bows. The breeze scattered the light missiles terribly, so that only a few of the dozen or more launched even landed on the track smoothed onto the surface of the ramp for transport.
Though the wood was soft, one of the bolts flopped back after it struck point-first, lacking the slight momentum that would have enabled it to stick. With poison, of course, it could have left a dangerous wound on bare flesh or-possibly-the tougher hide of one of the draft animals. There was little chance of that, since the drivers had already halted fifty feet back of the zone of danger.
"Sure wisht we could borrow that laser," said Clodius Afer with a sigh.
"We won't get that," said the tribune, his voice calm but his mind dancing with a sudden thought as blazingly splendid as the flames which had destroyed the siege works and twenty-seven men.
"Not that," he repeated, "but by all the gods, we will get something as good."
And before either of the non-coms realized his intent, Gaius Vibulenus had ducked down the steps to the gallery which led to the rear-and to the means of putting his idea, all their idea, into effect.
The shimmering surface of the Commander's face flowed and distorted as he drank something that was not ration wine from his goblet. "I don't see how this could possibly work," he said with less than his usual detachment. "Is this something you've used on your own planet?"
Vibulenus was familiar with the word "planet" from the astronomical poetry of Aratus, which had formed part of his education. It was nonsensical in this context, so he ignored it and said, conscious that not even the friendly eyes around the circle held belief, "Sir, this is not a familiar technique for us-" He glanced to his side and got shocked disavowal from Pacuvius Semo, the tribune nearest to him, in place of the smile of solidarity for which he had been fishing.
They were all in this together, thought Gaius Vibulenus with an icy memory of spears-fantasy and real melded together-swishing toward his brain. Whatever others wanted to tell themselves.
Loudly, coldly, certainly, the tribune who was no longer as young as he looked continued, "Nor is the problem a familiar one. However, anyone who has seen a smithy in operation will know that the apparatus will work. Common sense indicates that the result will be what we desire. What you desire, sir."
"Nonsense," said Rectinus Falco forcefully, and the chances were better than half that he was right. Hades, that he was right on either assumption, the mechanics or the result of their successful use. But nobody was going to guess that by looking at Vibulenus' boyish, supercilious expression.
There were fifteen Romans in the command group, the five surviving tribunes and the senior centurion from each cohort. The legion's first centurion, a balding, glowering veteran named Marcus Julius Rusticanus, had held his post throughout the period of service beneath the Commander. Several of the other cohort leaders were recent promotions, since their rank and the deference afforded them were owed to courage in battle-which came with a price, even when the Commander's vast, turtle-shaped recovery vehicle roamed the field after victory had been won.
The Commander was the same man or not-man who had mustered them when they awakened aboard the ship which became their home. The Medic since the third campaign had been a turnip-shaped creature, shorter than the smallest legionary, with broad hands and fingertips that spread like those of a tree frog.
But they saw the Medic only at the end of a campaign, unless they were so badly wounded that their fellows bundled them on wagons or stretchers to the vessel. Nothing, including the recovery vehicle, left the ship between the time the legion disembarked and the victory they were landed to secure.
The Commander shared the legion's exile from the ship during a campaign, but he could not be said to share any unnecessary danger. The Commander lived a full half-mile back from the fortification, in a dry-stone blockhouse which had been erected before work on the first siege ramp even began.
The command group met in the courtyard of the blockhouse, rank with the smell of the lionlike mounts which were stabled there every night. While the Romans squatted supporting their backs with the stone walls, the Commander sat primly upright on a stool. Two of his bodyguards stood to either side of him, and a further pair glowered beneath raised visors from behind the stool.
Falco began to rise to take the floor, half way around the circle, but Vibulenus did not relinquish his position. The meeting was one he had called-requested, at any rate. Begged, if you will, of the Commander who, like any reasonable slaveowner, made an effort to accommodate the wishes of his chattels when that did not require unreasonable effort.
"Sir," Vibulenus continued. His voice cut the air like a swordblade while his own imagination told him that the wind blowing across the wall's jagged top was robbing his words of all life, all power. "The technique will succeed. Whether or not it does, the cost of the attempt is negligible. There-"
"The beam that our colleague proposes using," cut in Rectinus Falco, holding himself erect with his chin and chest outthrust in a posture as much theatrical as rhetorical, "is one of the few decent timbers remaining to us. The bronze that he would have us use-"
"Is available," said Vibulenus, and no one in the courtyard, even the speaker, could doubt the power of his voice. "And timber will be in much shorter supply the third time we build the siege works, a certain result if we procee
d in the current manner for the next week or even days. Therefore, if your worship will-"
"You are-" interrupted Falco, twisted by anger from the Commander to speak directly toward his rival instead.
"If your worship will give the order," Vibulenus continued in a snarl as piercing as the sound of the Commander's laser cycling, "I will carrry out the necessary arrangements so that the fortress can be stormed after the wall is breached."
"How droll," said the Commander, sipping again from a goblet that shone as if studded with a thousand jewels. The liquid within was visible, rolling sluggishly; its color changing from blue through amber, depending on how the light struck it. "This isn't really covered, but I don't see how the Federation could object to it."
Ballistas loosed against the distant stronghold. The sound of their discharge was barely a whisper on the breeze, but the sharper crack of balls demolishing themselves on stone was clearly audible.
"All right, Tribune Gaius Vibulenus Caper," the Commander said, stilling with his words the remark that Falco, still standing, was about to interject. "The estimates of success through starving out the garrison have been revised downward again, and at this particular stage in my career I cannot afford…"
His voice paused. He might have gone on, but Falco, driven by anger to a courage equal to anything his rival had displayed on the battlefield, burst out, "Your worship, there is a cost which our colleague is-passing over. I will not say-" but with venom in his tone he said it "-choosing to obfuscate." He glanced from the Commander to Vibulenus.
"Go on," said both together, the blue-garbed Commander interested; the taller tribune puzzled. If there were a point Vibulenus had missed in the triumphant structuring of his notion, then he deserved whatever punishment he received for wasting the Commander's time on a-nearly-disrespectfully determined presentation.