by David Weber
"Where am I?" the tribune repeated at barracks-square volume, striding out of the egg-shaped room in which he had awakened. The room beyond was the yellow-orange of clean flames, a circular hall into whose sidewall bulged eleven man-high convexities-the twelfth was the opening through which Vibulenus stepped.
"Hey, hey there!" yelped the other, skipping back from the tribune. "That's no way to treat the fella who's saved your life, now. Look at yourself and think what ye were before I put the new tissue on ye."
Vibulenus had not been angry, only disoriented-and perhaps as dangerous as the figure in blue seemed to think he was. That thought gave him pause. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, grimacing away the brief mixture of emotions he felt when he saw the whole limb was stained a red which only time would fade.
"Look," the Roman said, feeling for the first time that he dominated a guild employee because of his greater size, "I'm not angry with you, my man, but I need to know where I am. Are you the new Medic?"
A tunic with a narrow red border flopped from the ceiling, making both parties jump and then relaxing the atmosphere.
"Naw, I'm the Pilot," said the blue figure, bending to pick up the tunic and toss it to Vibulenus. It was not an act of friendship, exactly, but at least a form of accommodation. "He gets the walk-ins, I drive the meatwagon and fetch home the ones like you."
He looked at the tribune and sucked in his lips to express wonderment. "Don't believe I ever brought in anybody like you exactly, though. Just look at yourself."
"You guide the blue turtle that chooses the dead?" Vibulenus asked. All his muscles were drawn tight as he pretended to concentrate on dressing. At least the linen garment would cover some of the terrible stain on his new flesh.
"Sure," said the Pilot. "The recovery vehicle, the meatwagon. This your first time back in it, fella?"
"I suppose so," Vibulenus said. That was as close as he could come at this moment to acknowledging what had just happened to him.
He shook himself and straightened, back proud and jaw thrust out. He was Gaius Vibulenus Caper, notwithstanding anything that might have happened to him in the immediate past. "These others, then," he said with an imperious sweep toward the convexities in the wall. The opening through which he had stepped was now a sideways dome, though there had been no sound or motion behind him. "They're more of us- soldiers-being, that is… cured?"
"Would be if you hadn't been the last," the Pilot agreed. "Depends some on just what we're talkin' about, you know-clean cut or a smash, how many wounds and how long before pickup. With you-" he paused and sucked in his lips again. "Well, you know, fella, you were pretty near the bottom of the prognosis list on all counts. Took damn near a day to dig you out after the wagon located you. Bloody lucky, you are."
"Yes, I see," said Vibulenus' mouth alone, because his mind was busy filing data without looking at it. Now just now.
"All right, fella," said the Pilot. "We're gonna be in normal space till who knows when, given how you and the others got torn up. But there's some new twists in entertainment this run, so go on and get started."
A section of floor rotated a quarter turn and opened onto a helical ramp downward. The ramp's slope looked too steep for a walking man, but Vibulenus had learned long since that angles and dimensions on the vessel were not always what they seemed.
"You must be very skillful," said the tribune as his foot poised above the ramp.
The Pilot met his eyes for a moment. Then they slipped away. Without any further attempt to retrieve the facade of superiority, the blue figure said, "Skill? Are you kidding? I can juggle five balls in the air, d'ye know? That takes a lot more skill than watching a console to see that the hardware's doing its job."
"Which," he concluded bitterly, "it always is."
"But…" Vibulenus said. The questions in his mind were too confused to articulate, but by drawing his right index finger the length of his left arm-hairless and colored Pompeian red-he communicated everything he needed to get out.
"Look, fella," the Pilot said with a sneer intended more generally than for the Roman who was its immediate target, "you couldn't whack off somebody's head with your bare hand, but you use a sword and it's no sweat, right?"
Vibulenus lifted an eyebrow in agreement, though his arm ached with the remembered effort of swinging his sword. Heads didn't just fall off, and an armored enemy was no mere log to be hacked at until he fell. "Go on," he said, waiting for understanding to come.
"Well," the Pilot continued, "live cargo like you could never handle it, but just about anybody from a Class One planet-anybody who could feed himself-can run the medical repair station, or the ship. Blazes, me'n the Medic 'r crosstrained so if I croak in the middle of a Transit, that don't matter shit't' the guild except they don't worry about a pension. We don't get longevity treatments like you valuable cargo do."
"I see," said Vibulenus, who was beginning to do just that. "As you say, I'd best be getting back to my fellows."
He had been correct about the ramp. It felt like a level surface as he walked down it, though he slitted his eyes to avoid disorientation from the room he was leaving.
When Gaius Vibulenus stepped out of wall into the corridor beside the baths, there were over twenty soldiers nearby. He knew most of them at least by sight, now, and Decimus Pacuvius Semo-another tribune- almost walked into him.
"Gaius-"Semo began as both men threw their hands up a fraction of a second after they had stopped short of one another.
Semo's tunic bore the broad stripe of a senatorial family. He had been the legion's ranking tribune in Parthia, and in a way he still was-though here it only meant that he and Falco were the Romans usually in the Commander's entourage rather than roving among the line troops.
For all his heredity, Semo remained a plump, pleasant fellow who looked and acted more like a well-bred freedman than a mover and shaker of the Empire. The two men had always gotten along well together; it was without hesitation that Vibulenus said, "Decimus, do you chance to know where the centurion I was, you know, in the gallery with-"
"I have to…"the other tribune blurted. Returned on his heel and strode away from Vibulenus with his legs moving more crisply than they had ever managed during training.
Vibulenus blinked, looking at the man almost running from him. Then he noticed his own hands, stained, and raised them to touch his face. The skin everywhere he touched himself had the tenderness of having been scraped too hard in the baths.
Everyone knew he was dead; they could not look at him and doubt it. Men were shying from him with the wordless distaste with which they would have stepped around a pile of feces in the roadway.
Vibulenus swayed for a moment. Physically, he was as weak as if he were between bouts of relapsing fever. The mental control that kept him upright lapsed. If he looked around him, he saw the faces of those who refused to see him; if he closed his eyes, he would fall as he might fall in any event.
On the corridor ceiling ambled beads of light, cool and pure and non-judgmental as they guided Romans. "Direct me to the centurion Gnaeus Clodius Afer," the tribune demanded so loudly that several men glanced at him in surprise.
"He is in the Recreation Room," said the ship in the Commander's voice-or perhaps the Commander spoke only through the vessel. "Please follow the-" a pause "-yellow dot," which popped into existence so sharply demarcated that the tribune's ears supplied an accompanying chime which did not really occur.
Head high, back straight, Gaius Vibulenus strode off to find the man he hoped was still his friend.
The chance that brought Clodius out the portal of the Recreation Room was so unexpected that he recognized Vibulenus instead of the other way around. Of course, the tribune had been walking in open-eyed blankness in order not to take any details of expression on the faces of those with whom he shared the corridors.
The centurion was in animated conversation with two of the legionaries who had been in the assault force, Pompilius Niger and a fi
le-closer named Helvius. He raised both his hands in a gesture, looked past them, and said, "W-Gaius! By Castor, you did fuckin' make it!"
The cry shocked Vibulenus and the two other legionaries. Helvius looked up and muttered a curse, while Niger only froze.
"I was…" said Vibulenus.
Clodius caught his companions, one in either hand, and rasped in an undertone through his broad grin, "He saved your butts, boys." He stepped toward the tribune. When Helvius tried to resist the pull, his biceps went white at the fringes of the centurion's ferocious grip on his arm.
"Hello, sir," said Niger with the hopeful stiffness of a pupil who fears his response may have been the wrong one and thus bring him a beating.
"I was hoping I'd be able to find you-" said Vibulenus.
A large party of soldiers jostled their way down the corridor. They pushed past the tribune without remark or reaction because he was part of a group instead of a lone outsider.
"Hoped you'd catch me up on things," Vibulenus concluded.
Clodius released his companions, took a step closer, and threw his arms around Vibulenus. The centurion's ox-like strength was all, despite his good intentions, that kept him from springing away from the tribune at the instant of contact.
The younger man became light-headed as the breath was crushed out of his lungs. His knees, already quivering, gave way and he could scarcely clasp his hands behind the centurion's broad back.
He felt better than he had ever felt before. He was not just alive, he was a member of the human race.
"Man, you had me worried, sir," said Clodius as he stepped away but kept his palms on Vibulenus' back to steady him. "You weren't hardly breathing when we got all that rock clear and handed you up to the turtle."
He looked back over his shoulder. "That's true, ain't it, boys? He wasn't hardly breathing?"
Both of the other soldiers raised their eyebrows in cautious, silent agreement. Niger's expression became even more fixed.
Sometimes the best thing was for all parties to tell a lie and stick to it, thought the tribune-and bless a man like Clodius Afer who had enough experience to know what those times were. He slapped the older man's shoulder in camaraderie but also as a signal that he could stand unaided again.
"Yeah, Gnaeus," he agreed loudly, "it hurt like blazes when you were picking me up. I tried to swear at you but the words wouldn't come out right. Guess that's a good thing, since you were doing the best anybody could already."
"But I thought-" said Helvius. He rubbed his balding scalp with a hand whose back curled with hair.
"Say," said Vibulenus, only partly so that he could silence the puzzled legionary. "There was another fellow in the gallery with me, a centurion. I wonder if he made it?"
"That's how," Niger said, suddenly animated. "He was in the gallery, Gnaeus. That's why we were able to, you know, find him."
The centurion nodded in distracted agreement, but his lips were pursed to form an answer to Vibulenus' question. "Well you see, sir," he explained, "the shed was broken up so bad I don't guess anybody thought of it being there to begin with. So long as it lasted long enough to give you the edge, that's fine… but there wasn't anybody else down there the turtle thought we need bother diggin' out, you know?"
"A friend of yours?" Niger asked, and he reached out to grip Vibulenus forearm to forearm.
"Don't even know his name," the tribune said. The corridor and his companions withdrew as his mind superimposed the face of the grizzled veteran as he had first and last seen it.
"Just a soldier doing his job," Vibulenus' lips said. "Just like the rest of us."
"Well, you know," said the centurion, gesturing up the corridor in the direction the three non-coms had been headed when Vibulenus met them, "not everybody makes it, sir. That sure hasn't changed."
"No, I guess it hasn't…" the tribune agreed while he remembered the blue figure in his bodyguard of living iron, prancing daintily toward victory as men were crushed beyond locating on the ground before him.
"Say, but in there," said Helvius with a nod to indicate the recreation room from which they were all walking, "they've got bears and dogs fighting with spiked gloves on. I like it a lot better than the one they had last, the crabs and jellyfish."
"I didn't have gloves," said Niger. Both he and the file-closer were glad to skirt the subject of which they would be reminded until the stain faded from Vibulenus' flesh. "I had a little short sword and a buckler. I think it's only the bears have gloves."
"Glad you're back, sir," Clodius Afer murmured from close to the tribune's ear. In a normal voice, he continued, "You know, draggin' those rocks outa the wall I thought was the hardest work I ever did, but-" He paused, because as he spoke the words he realized they were false. He had been so directed on the task that he hadn't been conscious of how hard the job was.
"Well, anyway," the centurion concluded lamely, "that wasn't a patch on gettin' them cursed blocks off you. Don't know what we'd have done if it weren't the shear legs was right there from slewing the log on target."
"All personnel will gather in the Main Gallery for an address by the Commander," said the voice of the ship. Up and down the corridor, soldiers started and missed a step or jerked their heads around in a reflexive search for the speaker. "Follow the red dot."
All the other guide beads blinked out, including the mauve one that Vibulenus assumed they were following according to a request made before he met the non-coms. The ceiling began to stream with red dots, moving at a comfortable pace in the opposite direction.
"Oh, bugger it all," snapped Clodius Afer, but he turned around in the middle of a stride because the habit of discipline was so strong.
"Couldn't we…?" suggested Helvius, gesturing in the direction they had been going. He was a bigger and possibly stronger man than the centurion, but his deference was as much a matter of relative personality as rank.
"Come on," Clodius ordered, not harshly but with no sign that he was interested in a discussion, His stride swung his three companions into the broken, ground-covering pace of a route march. "We'll do their business and then we'll take care of ours. This is the army, after all."
The tribune opened his mouth to ask what "our business" was.
Before he could get the question out, Niger laughed and said, "Well, guess the edge's off now, but yesterday the first time, it didn't take longer 'n to walk in the room and walk back. I'd figure the Commander could wait that long."
"Yeah," said Helvius, "but yesterday was the first time in a long time any of us had a woman. Today I want it to be worth waiting for."
Vibulenus tried again to speak. No sound came out. Although he continued to stride along with the others, his body had become as hot and weak as it had been in the first moments after his awakening.
The Main Gallery was familiar because the legion mustered in it before every battle. This was only the second time they had gathered for an address by the Commander, though, and recollections of that first assembly vibrated at the back of the tribune's mind. He was afraid to look at Pompilius Niger squarely in case that surfaced memories which the other, judging from his continued banter, had suppressed.
There had been losses. Vibulenus surveyed the room from where he stood at the front, just short of the stolid bodyguards and the deadline which they marked.
It was less evident during pre-battle musters when the room shook with the clash of men moving into ranks to don the equipment they had just been issued from otherwise featureless walls. You couldn't even estimate numbers under those conditions. Besides, the glitter and sway of equipment bulked out the sparseness of the troops wearing it.
Vibulenus had seen the returns. The legion had lost eighty-three men before the start of its operations against the fortress, and the fortress had not come cheap. His fingers kneaded the muscles over his ribs, whole to the touch… but he could not bring himself to look down and see the stain which only natural healing would leach from his flesh.
Lights gli
ttered in the bulkhead behind the guards. The forward door, unlocked by its spinning hexagon, drifted open and the Commander minced through with steps as precise as the tailoring of his suit.
"Why," said Clodius Afer, "d'ye suppose that one-" he gestured, and for a moment Vibulenus misunderstood his subject as the Commander, not the door "-moves, and the rest, they just, you know, melt away and melt back in the wall?"
None of them had an answer. Before somebody decided to fill the gap with empty speech, the rear of the Main Gallery began to tilt up unannounced.
There was commotion this time, but no panic. Not only were the legionaries used to the rising floor from pre-battle musters, they also were familiar enough with the ways of the vessel in general that moving walls did not suggest to the crowd that it was about to be swallowed.
"Fellow warriors," said the Commander in his voice that everyone heard with a clarity equal to the polish of its Latin diction, "this is both a joyful and a sad occasion for me."
A door dissolved open in the left sidewall, so close to the tribune that he could have touched the pair of mace-bearing toads who clanked through it at the head of a short procession.
Helvius was startled into a blink. Niger froze and the centurion, with a curse of real fury, leaped backward and knocked down two other soldiers in his haste to put them between him and the bodyguards.
Vibulenus stepped in front of Niger and squared his shoulders against the grip of the creatures in articulated iron. He had no idea of what he thought he was accomplishing, and his muscles seemed to have the pellucid weakness of clear spring water.
The guards ignored him, save for the one who stepped fractionally to the side in order to avoid the tribune.
Behind the first two pairs of them, four other bipeds walked. Their lack of unison and crispness was disturbing to eyes that had for a long time seen only soldiers moving in the unconscious rhythm with which soldiers walk.
All four wore the blue bodysuits of guild employees, but none of them had familiar faces. That too was disturbing, at least to Vibulenus, who wondered how many others there were whose presence aboard the vessel he had not suspected.