by David Weber
The vision of the three deserters continued to hang before the tribune. That calmed him more than did his grip on the coaming, though he was clinging fiercely enough to dent copper. The sky retained enough ambient light to limn the grosser features of the landscape, but it took some moments before Vibulenus recognized the circle glimpsed through the ghostly torso of Helvius as the sinkhole. The hole seemed to be the size of a medicine ball.
His arms began to shake although the backs of his hands ached with the violence of his grip.
"What are we-" started Niger, less cowed or less controlled than his fellow centurion.
Magenta fire pulsed in stroboscopic succession from the underside of the other hovering vehicle.
The air slapped after each bright surge, but the pulses followed one another a dozen times a second, faster than ears or eyes could detect the separation. Vibulenus' bowels started to loosen at the low-pitched hum, while the green complement of the laser flux rippled across the back of his eyes when he blinked.
The pulses slanted, not toward the cave mouth as the tribune expected but rather into the rock wall nearby. The limestone split apart in gouts of white, glowing chunks-not molten, but burned to raw quicklime that gnawed everything it touched with a caustic vehemence.
Over the flux ravening against the surface lay the image of the deserters, looking up in puzzlement as the cave trembled with the twelve-a-second pulses.
"Stop it!" Vibulenus screamed. Though he turned to the Commander, he could not escape the vision of Helvius, frowning not in fear but curiosity at the sound filling his strait universe.
The tribune must have reached out, but he was not aware of the movement until one of the toadfaced guards thrust him back with the head of his mace. The dull spikes pressed hard enough to break the skin over Vibulenus' breastbone before the Roman's body returned to immediate reality.
The ground exploded as the laser's slow gouging into refractory limestone brought it at last to a stratum through which ground water percolated. The liquid flashed to steam in an instant that shattered the whole face of the sinkhole. Pieces of rock the size of a house lifted from foundations that had held them for fifty million years, then toppled toward the center of the sinkhole.
It must have felt like an earthquake deep within the cave, because Grumio looked up, shouted something, and tried to rise but hit his head on the stone ceiling. Did they think the guild was blocking the entrance to their cave? Helvius dropped his sword and shuffled two steps forward in a crouch, his hands lifted to protect him from the rock he could not see.
The cave roof split, letting the magenta flux play on the interior. Vibulenus screamed, but his mind transferred the sound to the open mouths of the victims dying below.
Grumio was in the beam's direct path. The first pulse gnawed his body to the waist. His legs vaporized microseconds later, before they had time to fall. The legionary's iron hobnails burned with such white sparkling intensity that they looked dazzling even through the coherent pulses of the laser flux. The steel of his sword retained its shape for the instant it took to fall through the beam-belt gone, scabbard gone, and expensive ivory hilt in gaseous mixture with the hand that once wielded it.
The left arm flopped free, shriveling but not in the flux. Its bandage flashed a brilliant reflection of the beam which had vaporized Grurnio.
Augens had started to rise and was not in the angled beam, but his helmet was. Bronze, gaseous or molten depending on how close it was to the center of the flux, spewed in a green flood from the impact of the light.
Reflection from the cave floor, burned white and heated to thousands of degrees by the pulses it absorbed, vaporized the legionary's feet and crisped his legs and lower body to glowing cinders. The rest of him toppled into the flux which devoured him so completely that only splinters of calcined bones reached the floor.
Unlike his companions, Decimus Helvius had time to understand what was happening to him.
The blaze behind the centurion threw his shadow in troll-like distortion down the path of his attempted flight. The beam was angled away from him, deeper into the cave, and it seemed for a moment that he might escape.
Helvius lunged forward, aided by the light though his calves burned black and the bronze studs dropped from the holes they had charred in the leather that protected his thighs. Then the cave roof collapsed onto him.
The laser continued to play on the rockface for some further seconds. Even with his eyes closed, Vibulenus could see his comrade's right foot charring in the dazzle reflected as the flux ate its way far beneath the cave.
The sky-shaking hum ended as the crew of the other vehicle shut off their weapon. A moment later, the echo from the ground ceased also. A violet nimbus around the gunvessel dissipated more slowly, as did the white glow and sound of crackling rock at the point of impact.
Vibulenus sat down. He was crying, though the fact humiliated him. When his eyes were shut, his memory reviewed the instant of destruction, but his overloaded retinas continued to pulse bright green, shrouding the horror somewhat.
"All of your fellows have watched the display," said the Commander in satisfaction, "but I'm glad you three were present at the scene, so to speak."
The rush of wind past Vibulenus indicated the vehicle was moving again. He thought of taking his hands away from his face and turning into the airstream to dry his eyes… but that would have meant turning toward Falco, which was unthinkable.
"There will be those who believe the scene was generated by a machine and didn't really happen," the Commander went on. "You'll be able to convince them that it was real. After all, we don't want to have to repeat the demonstration.
"This has been too expensive already."
Neither of the centurions had made a sound that Vibulenus could hear, so he had no idea of what they were thinking. For his own part, he thought he needed a woman.
And for the first time, he was willing to accept one of the creatures which the guild offered in place of women.
"I want Quartilla," the tribune said to the ship. His companion at the head of the line, a file-closer, looked at him curiously but stepped into the doorless alcove without saying anything.
Vibulenus followed, feeling a cool touch across his body as the blank wall appeared to open before him.
He had no idea of whether the vessel would or could deliver him to the female he requested. He had nothing to lose by the attempt. What he had to gain was tenuous, but sex is a game of the mind even if the mind sometimes plays to the body's prompting. The tribune had had personal contact with Quartilla. That made her a person, even if it could not shape her into a human being.
"Oh," said the figure on the couch. Then, "Ah, tribune… would you like the lights higher?"
"Quartilla?" Vibulenus said hesitantly. "You remember me?"
"You're Gaius Vibulenus Caper," the female said. "The ship told me after the other time you were here."
She paused. The lights had not gone up-Vibulenus did not know whether or not he wanted them to-but his eyes had adapted enough to see that her lips wore a smile of sort.
"I remember everyone, tribune," Quartilla concluded. "Not always their names, is all."
She was sitting on her feet with her back straight and her knees flexed together to her right side as before. Vibulenus seated himself so that his left thigh was almost but not quite in contact with those plump knees and said, with a bitterness that shocked him as the words came out, "Everyone? I find that hard to believe."
Quartilla winced, but she replied without any sharpness of her own, "Everyone is different, Gaius Caper. Every soldier, every centurion, every tribune-every crewman. I can understand how the situation would bother you. It's-part of my job to understand the things that bother men."
"Look, this is-" the tribune said. He bit his lips and, steeling himself, laid his hand on the female's knee.
"I didn't come to fight," he went on, momentarily so focused in his own mind that he was oblivious to the texture of the skin he was touching
. It was warm, perhaps marginally too warm; soft as only a woman's could be; and as smooth as thick cream. His expression changed and the words he had intended did not follow through his open mouth.
Quartilla smiled without the sadness, an impish expression that transfigured her by accenting her rather small mouth when the muscles of her cheeks curved up. She did not speak an order, but the walls glowed an ofF-white just bright enough to fade the red dot into a tint in its comer.
Not only was the female's skin smooth, it was a white in which only a painter could have detected a touch of green.
"I asked for further changes," Quartilla said with quiet pride. She cupped her full right breast and lifted it as if she were a farm wife displaying a prize melon. A tracery of blue veins marked the surface that was otherwise as pure as polished marble. "So that I could better perform my duties. I hoped you would come back."
Nothing better concentrates the mind than lust. It was in that knowledge that Vibulenus had driven himself to this attempt, certain that darkness and his tunic would shield his mind from certainty and that lust would overcome memories of revulsion.
There were no longer any physical cues to wrongness; and for the rest, Quartilla had been a person already.
The Roman threw off his tunic with a violence that was willing to shred it if the garment tried to resist his convulsive efforts. By Styx on whom the gods swear, she was a woman!
On her and in her, Vibulenus was able to forget the other men and the hint of crewmen who were not men.
And he was able to forget even Helvius and his two companions for a brief time, perhaps as long as it had taken the trio to die.
BOOK FOUR
THE LAST CAMPAIGN
"This operation," said the Commander, a squat figure who could have passed for Clodius Afer a distance if they exchanged garb, "is beneath me in its simplicity. I protested, but my superiors informed me that I have been tasked for the operation because of their desire for haste. I-I and yourselves-were best positioned of the units at a proper level of technology. Further, the job of ground preparation has been botched-"
"Oh-oh," Vibulenus muttered, resting his hand on the mail-clad shoulder of Clodius Afer. The pilus prior's angry sneer showed that Clodius knew as well as the tribune who was going to pay for the fuck-up. Not the folks in colored skin-suits who were responsible, oh no.
"-and though the personnel responsible have received reprimands," the Commander continued, audible throughout the Main Gallery despite the clash of weapons and equipment still being donned by many of the legionaries, "it was deemed necessary to task a unit disciplined enough to accomplish the task unaided. Thus I was assigned."
"Fine with me," Clodius Afer whispered, "if the smug bastard decides to handle the whole thing himself. Pollux! He's the worst we've been handed yet."
"Young, I'd guess," said Vibulenus, who still looked eighteen years old-unless you met his eyes, which were as old as the eyes of the Sphinx. "And 'worst'… worst covers a lot of things besides this."
He always mustered with the Tenth Cohort, standing in the front rank to the left of Clodius Afer-and by extension, to the left of the entire legion. The right was the place of honor, the sword flank; the place where the first centurion and the eagle standard marched.
But a soldier didn't fight long without a good shield, and the Tenth had been the legion's shield through every battle it fought. They'd struck some shrewd blows of their own, besides.
It was not mere chance that the Tenth Cohort was down to two hundred and ninety-seven effectives, well below the average of the nine others.
"Individual members of the hostile force," continued the Commander, "are of intermediate size and strength."
"What're we?" grumbled Clodius, rubbing his face under the hinged left cheek protector. There was no visible scar there, but tissue beneath the skin was knotted from the time an axe had glanced off his shield rim.
When had that been? Battles merged with one another and with the fantasies the tribune played in the Recreation Room. He wondered if Quartilla could still remember every man she had known. He had no idea of how many times he had killed…
"Their armor is rudimentary," said the voice in the Romans' ears, "and their weapons, though iron, are so crude that their main effect is to permit my guild to deploy you against them rather than tasking a unit at a lower level."
Vibulenus caressed his left forearm where he, too, had knobs of hidden keloid that the Medic had never been able to remove. "Wonder how he'd like a stone point rammed up his bum?" he muttered, angry despite himself to be lectured by someone who knew only at second-hand about matters that were bloody memories to most of those who listened.
"The terrain is rolling," said the Commander, "and the soil coarse with no vegetation of military significance."
He paused for thought, then added, "the average temperature is lower than that of the planet where you were purchased, but the conditions for the immediate future are well within the region which you find comfortable."
"What the…?" said the pilus prior. Vibulenus squeezed the armored shoulder again, for the benefit of one or both of them.
"Do your duty to my guild," concluded the Commander, "and we will treat you well. You are dismissed."
The doors in the rear of the Main Gallery never opened when the legion mustered for battle. Instead, the entire wall slid downward. The broad corridor by which the men had entered was gone, and the Main Gallery gaped through a hole in the vessel's outer bulkhead.
"Cohort-" roared Clodius Afer as he turned with a squeal of hobnails on flooring that was harder than iron.
"Century-" echoed the remaining centurions in the cohort, while their fellows in the rest of the legion did the same. In mustering for battle, the First Cohort formed up in the rear of the gallery so that it could lead the way out.
The breath of air sucked into the Main Gallery when the walls slid open was cool and dry, a good temperature in which to march in armor. You were always too hot during actual combat, but in cold weather a man could die of the shock to his system when victory or a wound let him cool off suddenly.
"About face! shouted the sixty centurions in a unison gained through long practice.
In the big room, even that clashing movement was unnaturally muted, but the air itself stirred. Crests fluttered and the lighting picked out glints from steel and polished bronze. Trumpets, followed by horns, blew; and the First Cohort stepped off on its left foot.
Except for a sky as pale as goat's milk, Vibulenus could see nothing of the place they were expected to conquer. The ranks of men striding forward fell into silhouette as each left the gallery and the ship besides. It occurred to the tribune that the legion began each battle with an uphill march, since the Main Gallery was sloped for them to hear the final address by the Commander.
They might profitably dispense with the address to avoid the climb. Sometimes-and this was such an occasion-it seemed they would have been better without the address even if they had to climb a steeper slope to miss it. Why did they put young fools in command of veterans?
And again… Gaius Vibulenus Caper at eighteen had been a joke as a military tribune. He'd known it then and gods! when he now remembered that past, he cringed with knowledge of his callowness. But he'd seasoned into something in time. He'd seasoned into a leader.
Third Cohort was moving in its blare of signals. Why couldn't all the ranks step off together, keeping the separation they had while standing at ease? But experience proved that the legion would bunch and tangle unless the deployment were sequential, though the gods alone knew the reason.
Vibulenus wondered if he were going to die this day. Better to watch horsehair crests wave against a pale sky and to think of the legion as a machine that maneuvered on many legs.
Clodius Afer had walked up to what was now the cohort's front rank, shouting crisp, vicious orders about the alignment of his men. There were still legionaries within arms' length at the tribune, but he felt very much alone at m
oments like this when anything he did ould put him in the way of the non-coms who had real jobs to perform.
The Commander and the guards who always flanked him-no matter who the Commander wasmarched off through a sidewall of the gallery. Their mounts were stabled somewhere in the ship that Vibulenus had never seen, though it was not in the forward section behind the protective barrier. Falco and the third surviving tribune, Marcus Marcellus Rostratus, were part of the entourage.
Those who led in battle were punished for it. Safer far to ring yourself with guards like mobile fortresses and let others do the fighting. Vibulenus fingered his sword hilt and fingered the scar on his left arm… and he tried to concentrate on the rhythm of marching feet instead of the ragged point of a spear swelling until it was too close to be focused by his eyes.
"Cohort-" ordered the pilus prior. The Main Gallery had thinned so that the troops ahead of the Tenth Cohort, all in motion, were spaced like stakes set out in a vineyard for the grapes to climb.
"March!"
Would he die… and if he died, would he awaken in the belly of the ship weak and red-dyed and living again… Yet again?
"Vesta, bring me home," whispered the tribune as he started to follow the legion to its latest exercise in blood and death.
The door, invisible until it opened on the wall beside Vibulenus, passed Quartilla.
None of the marching legionaries looked back, but the tribune stumbled and almost fell to the floor when he forgot that he was in the process of taking his first stride. "Quartilla!" he gasped. "What are you doing here?"
The woman started and would have jumped back, but the door had already solidified behind her. She bumped it, then recognized Vibulenus and relaxed enough to lower the hands she had raised clenched to her lips.
"Oh, Gaius," she said. "I'm sorry-I should have waited a little longer, shouldn't I?"
Her nod past him caused the tribune to look over his shoulder at the rest of the legion, disappearing up the sloping floor at the rate of two steps a second. Emptying, the Main Gallery was beginning to take on an air of sinister preparation. "What are you doing, here?" he repeated with changed emphasis and a note of urgency rather than surprise.