by David Weber
Three of the newcomers were frail, of races similar to those of the Commander or Pilot. The fourth was a shambling, stooped figure as tall as the spearmen the legion had met in its first battle for the trading guild. He did not push a floating cart in front of him the way the others did, and his face had the same sheen that marked the Commander-but not the Medic or Pilot.
"Your skill under my direction has been noted with approval at the highest levels of my guild," continued the Commander as the procession, closed by another quartet of guards, moved toward him. One of the figures angled off to slide his cart against the corner of the side and end walls. The barrier did not react to the inanimate object, but the figure was keeping his hands carefully out of the invisible demarcator.
"In your case," said the Commander, "the guild has responded by providing you with females expensively modified to best suit your own physiology. I believe many of you have already sampled this reward."
The slight figure beamed coldly toward his audience, who cheered and howled furiously… though there were a few catcalls as well. Not everyone had found the lack of females to be a hardship.
The tall, stooped figure halted beside and slightly in front of the Commander, who went on, "My reward has been promotion into the merchant service much earlier than would have been the case if my record as your commander had not been so exceptional. I will transfer to the trading vessel which has joined this one, and which has brought with it my successor in your command."
He gestured toward the tall figure. The wrongness of the Commander's hands was a shock even after it had become familiar. The new commander at least had the normal complement of fingers.
The remaining blue-clad employees-flunkies, slaves- had pushed their carts against the rear wall, in the center and at either corner. All three turned, watching the Commander. The line of guards remained as stolid as the bulkhead behind them.
The employee at the central cart spoke to the Commander. That is, his lips moved though no words could be heard.
The Commander straightened in obvious anger with his ears twitching, but he edged forward another six inches instead of blasting the underling with a response. He paused there, his eye on the employee. Only when that person gave an abrupt handsignal did the Commander continue, "Give your new commander and his successors the same skill and courage which you have displayed for me, fellow warriors. Then you will know that my guild will continue to make every effort for your comfort and security, no matter what the expense."
There was a hum in both the ship's structure and the-voice: the mechanism, whatever it was that carried words directly to the ears of each listener at whatever distance. Both the blue-clad officers turned with settled anger behind the sheen of their faces.
Before they spoke to the nearest flunkie, the hum scaled up through bat-high frequencies into inaudibility and the barrier began to glow.
Vibulenus had been mentally alone ever since he slid between Niger and an unmeant threat. The barrier's amber radiance brought the tribune back from that internal world in which he had been staying because much of him did not believe that he was really alive. The barrier was always a presence in the memory of the legionaries, but the only previous time that it was visible was when it snarled and converted Rufus into smeared color.
This soft light was monochrome and not immediately threatening-though, like a sleeping lion, it did not seem harmless either. The flunkies and the two officers were outside the amber curtain, but the score of bodyguards with their backs against the wall appeared to have been washed with bronze.
"I will now hand you over to my successor for a few words," said the Commander, returning to his audience with the false pleasantry-not so much oily as adamantine, unscarred by any vestige of real emotion-that always marked his contacts with the Romans he commanded. Had commanded.
The tall officer's head hung forward on his neck like that of a horse. He was not an ugly man. He was not a man at all, any more than the bodyguards were men, but it was in the voice of the Commander that he said, "Fellow warriors, I was pleased to be appointed to the direction of as exceptional a group as you. I will continue to follow the example of my able predecesor."
He nodded sideward at the smaller officer. The gesture was unexpectedly quick for a skull so large; it increased his resemblance to a horse.
But he was now the Commander.
The color of the barrier had shifted imperceptibly to a soft green, an ugly color that reminded Vibulenus of scum on the pond that caught the runoff from the sheep byres at home… at home.
"Now that the key to the barrier has been changed," the voice said as the tall officer's lips moved in a different rhythm, "we are free to depart on our next assignment. Because some of you sustained severe injuries during the course of the assignment just completed, we will remain in normal space longer than usual to ensure proper healing. This is only one more sign of the care which my guild shows for you."
There was a tiny pop in the ears of the assembly. The barrier faded the way iron loses its color as it cools- swiftly and without perceptible stages. The flunkies relaxed and began to slide their paraphernalia away from the bulkhead.
"That means," the tall officer concluded, "that you have all the more time to enjoy the comforts provided for you, including the females. You are therefore dismissed to your pleasures. I look forward to our association."
He stepped backward, through the barrier. Lights twinkled as the bulkhead door opened behind him.
To Vibulenus' surprise, the flunkies and the old commander did not exit through the barrier. Instead, they fell in behind pairs of shambling guards to return through the door that formed itself in the side of the gallery. The rear doors were already open and streaming with soldiers, more than willing to obey an order to enjoy themselves.
"They really changed the lock," said Clodius Afer, who had moved up to the tribune's side unnoticed at some point during the address. "He couldn't go through it himself now."
The old commander was noticeably careful to keep the armored bulk of a guard between him and even sight of the men who had been under his direction. When Vibulenus caught his eye, the slim figure ducked his head to ignore the contact. They were no more than a pace apart when the blue-clad officer skipped out of the room. The guard who had shielded him followed impassively.
"Bet his bosses don't need a sponge to wipe their ass so long as he's around," Clodius muttered.
"What do ye figure we do now, boss?" Helvius asked the centurion. The four of them were almost alone now at the front of the Main Gallery while the remainder of the legion shuffled out the rear. "Now," said Vibulenus clearly, "we go see the women." He wondered how badly the lower part of his abdomen had been injured, but nothing in the world would have caused him to lift the hem of his tunic now and see what was dyed red.
"Bad as when they first announced it," grumbled Clodius. "Line'd slimmed down by yesterday, and we'd be fine now 'cept for them making such a point in the assembly."
"Well, it moves real quick, the line does," said Niger.
That was true, for they had continued to advance at a walking pace even after they reached the end of the line of soldiers intent on using the women.
"How-" Vibulenus began. He meant to add, -'much farther are the rooms?' because the corridor curved and it was impossible to see the front of the line. But there were no landmarks on the vessel and possibly no fixed locations, so his companions could have no better idea than he as to how far they had yet to go.
Instead, the tribune said, "How many of the girls are there, then?"
The non-coms looked at one another with an unexpected furtiveness. "Sir," said the centurion with his eyes fixed on a point on the wall, "I couldn't rightly say, but it's a good number. Thing is, I like't' keep the lights down, you know, and-and anyway, it's the part of a woman that's the same that's important, not whatever little ways they may be different."
"That's so," said Helvius with a ponderous lift of his eyebrows. "By Apis and
Osiris, that's just so."
"Look, just what-" Vibulenus said, falling into his tone of command without precisely intending to do so.
Clodius interrupted him, or at least thundered on when they began to speak together, with: "There, all right, there's the door."
The speed troubled Vibulenus. The line was moving as fast as men could pass two at a time through the open portal at the end of this corridor. Sure, horny soldiers… but not that horny by now, the men who had been alert for the three days he had spent in the egg-shaped room unconscious.
Unalive.
Thinking about that took the tribune's mind off immediate questions. His companions seemed happy enough to leave him in bleak silence, though Niger muttered something uncomfortably to the centurion.
The legionary directly ahead of Vibulenus stepped into a cubicle the size of those in the Sick Bay. Instead of a door closing, the opening dimmed as if curtained with silken gauze. The soldier did not move, but either the floor or the whole cubicle shifted to the left with him. Simultaneously, the identical unit in front of Clodius Afer slid to the right and the diffraction smoothed from the air. The cubicles were empty.
"Go ahead, sir," said Clodius Afer. He paused, then stepped off a half beat behind the tribune.
Vibulenus was familiar enough with the ways of the vessel that he did not expect to feel concern now, even though it was not the crib that he had expected. The cubicles' similarity to the Medic's array, and the baggage that memory brought with it, froze him into quiescence. Without the centurion's request, he might not have moved at all, though it was without fear that he obeyed what his mind took to be an order.
The screen that appeared behind the tribune did not affect the muted lighting he perceived within the cubicle. Instead of a feeling of motion sideways, the wall in front of him seemed to slide upward. He stepped into the room beyond, small but not the closet he had more or less expected. Military brothels were no more spacious than barracks accommodations.
The room was lighted by what was little more than a red dot in one of the upper corners, but it was enough to show that the woman reclining on her left arm was full formed and had hair long enough to spill over the edge of the couch. "Hello," she said in a throaty, feminine voice. "You must be one of the tribunes, huh? I'm Quartilla."
"I-" said Vibulenus. He glanced down at the striped hem of his garment, almost black in this light. It was a sign of social rather than military rank, but no member of the equestrian order would be serving as a common soldier. She was sharp, which made the business all the more confusing, and her Latin was far too good for anyone but a true Roman.
"You can come sit down with me if you like," Quartilla offered. She sat upright with a seemingly effortless sway that brought her knees around and lifted magnificent breasts while her dark hair swirled behind her. She patted the couch.
In a-business-like this one, serving the needs of men whose lust would turn to fury if frustrated by delay, there couldn't be leisure. There should have been a pimp outside the entrance of the crib, itself doorless to hasten the operation. Here of course there was no need to collect the money, a sesterce or two, in advance, but one of the toadfeced bodyguards should have hulked at the entrance to prevent jostling and to jerk out of the crib any soldier who made excessive demands on the whore or her time.
There was no jostling because there was no significant delay. And there was clearly no concern about time…
"How can they do this?" Vibulenus asked as he seated himself gingerly beside the woman. His intellectual curiosity was competing with his body's requirements.
His full erection proved that he need have no concern about that aspect of the repairs made to his body, and the dim, colored light hid the stain on his flesh.
"Are there so many of you?" he continued, reaching around the woman's shoulders. He was sure that if he touched her breast as he first intended he would lose at least his ability to hear her answer. She was wearing a garment after all, a hard fabric that fit like a second skin but which had enough irregularity to whisper when the tribune stroked her hair against it.
"Time passes more quickly in these rooms," Quartilla said, running a chubby hand over the skin of Vibulenus' throat and the neck of his tunic. "Aging too, of course, but that doesn't matter to you. Don't worry, we won't be disturbed."
She kissed the tribune's mouth while her gentle hand drew him to her. He cupped her breast-foil, of course, but not as heavy as expected-and wondered whether he could get out of his tunic.
The breast was covered by minute hard nodules.
"W-," Vibulenus said. He fumbled for her other hand, the one that was reaching under the hem of his tunic. "Wait."
He took a deep breath-it had no effect on his sudden dizziness-and asked, "Quartilla. What are you wearing?" With difficulty he raised his eyes to meet hers.
"Nothing at all, sir," the woman said, smiling as she moved her body again with amazing fluidity. Her knees spread wide and she rocked back on the base of her spine to lift her vulva. "What would you like me to wear? Anything can be provided."
The light was faint, but it was so close to being a point source that it threw a reticulated pattern across the female's skin when she moved. That net of shadows was caused by the tiny roughness the tribune had felt. Now that his eyes were adapting, he could see that Quartilla was covered by Vibulenus leaped to his feet, instinctively ready to strike the female if she tried to hold him. "Light!" he shouted. "Give me light, curse you!"
The walls glowed white, relegating the red bead to merely a decoration in the corner. The lighting was normal and thus dazzling to the tribune at this moment, but he had no difficulty in seeing that Quartilla was covered with translucent scales.
The underlying color of her flesh was pale green. The scales gave it a metallic luster.
"You're…" Vibulenus said. "You aren't…" He didn't really have the words to complete either attempt.
"I'm not of your race, no," said Quartilla, tucking her feet beneath her fleshy buttocks. The movement was utilitarian, not seductive, but it seduced the tribune despite himself because it was made with perfect economy and physical control.
She looked down at herself with dispassionate appraisal. "But I look a lot like I ought to, don't I? I didn't used to, you know…"
"I thought you were a woman," Vibulenus whispered. The light he had demanded was a pressure squeezing him and turning each pulse into a hammer blow in his temples.
"Oh, I'm much better than that," said the female simply as she met his gaze again. Her eyes in the bright illumination were a little too large, a little too round-or were men's eyes different from women's, so that he was mistaking as racial details which were only a matter of sex? How long had it been since he had seen a woman?
"I can give you a good time, tribune," Quartilla went on, not boastfully but with the flat assuredness of Clodius Afer discussing his century. "You and any number of your friends, in ways that no one of your own race could manage."
She shrugged. The gestures lifted her breasts in brief arcs that damped themselves quickly. Her nipples were small and erect even now. "They aren't real," Quartilla said, touching one breast as she gave it a critical glance. "Weren't-what I was born with, you understand."
She met Vibulenus' eyes again, and added with a fierceness she had not before displayed, "A lot of this body's like that, different, and I know that they-that I don't think the way I remember I used to. But they started with good material, tribune, and I don't care- the Ssrange eat their prisoners, except us they sold to the trading guild. I don't care!"
"Yes, they bought us too," said Vibulenus, his mouth making conversation while in his mind memories of lust wrestled with awareness of the scaled monster before him. Neither image was a reality, but reality has no emotional weight.
"I think I'd better go now," he said, and part of him did indeed think that.
Quartilla shrugged sadly and said, "I understand," as if she possibly did. "The men," she added, stretching ou
t one plump leg and staring at the toes as she wiggled them, "usually keep the lights down, you know?"
She looked up with as much hope as she was willing to chance having disappointed. "It could be really nice, you know? I'm here to make it really nice."
"Get me out!" shouted the tribune in desperation, clamping his balled fists against his eyes.
"If-" said Quartilla.
"Out!" Vibulenus screamed. He turned and tried to batter at the door through which he had entered. It was already open, and his fury carried him into a corridor.
He sprawled there, weeping, for some minutes. He was trying to remember home, but the closest he could come to that was yellow-gray dust blowing across the plains of Mesopotamia and within it the deadly shadows of Parthian archers.
Even that memory was better than the ones which crowded it: the tower collapsing with so loud a roar that the sound bludgeoned a man groggy before the stones ground the flesh from his bones; and a green thing with scales and a sad smile, which brought Vibulenus to full sexual arousal as he lay screaming in the corridor, avoided by the soldiers who hurried past on their own errands.
BOOK THREE
THE TWENTY-SEVENTH CAMPAIGN
Sir," said Clodius Afer, centurion pilus prior and leader of the Tenth Cohort, "I think we've got a problem. Three of the boys've deserted."
"Fuck," said Gaius Vibulenus. He ducked his head and shoulders into the water. The chill shrank his steaming flesh away from his body armor, and the current sent thrilling tendrils of water down his backbone.
Either the stream or the news cooled the tribune more than he expected, because when he raised himself his torso was shivering spasmodically. The swollen yellow sun that had baked them throughout the afternoon's bloody work seemed now to glance off his breastplate with no more power to warm.