by David Weber
That happened after every battle, but the present frequency was many times greater than the usual number of accidents. Even the stupidest legionaries had long since learned that they could not sneak aboard with a knife or gold coins.
"What the fuck's going on?" Clodius Afer asked with his eyes narrowed by a frown. He leaned his shield- battered beyond conceivable salvage, but brought back because that was part of duty in the veteran's mind- against the wall and began stacking the rest of his equipment beside it. The amount of gear already deposited proved that, as the three expected, most of their fellows had already processed through.
"Maybe they've got a faster Medic," Niger suggested without particular interest. "Or maybe, you know, more booths." He touched his lips with a finger, this time as a delicate probe of his own injury.
"Maybe," said Vibulenus as he led the way down the aisle. His body was mottled with blood and bruises now that his clothes and armor no longer hid the price he had paid for the knob of high ground. "And maybe things have dome a little unravelled, what with the Commander down. He was brand new, so I don't guess the guild has a replacement ready."
There were three bodyguards at the head of the moving column. Their armor was stained with gray dust pounded from the gravelly soil, and the calf and knee of one suit had bright scars showing that warriors had hacked at it.
The iron-clad toads were no less stolid than before… but the tribune could not look at them without remembering their fellows crumpled with feather-pointed native spears catching sun at each interstice of the armor. He smiled, though part of him objected that the toads were only dumb animals, not humans whose self-satisfied arrogance would have been worthy of his anger.
'Didn't really mind seein' 'em croak," said Clodius Afer, echoing the thought from a half step behind Vibulenus. "That's what frogs're supposed to do, right?"
Both centurions laughed, and Vibulenus joined them.
"Move on through," said the Medic. "No, not the booth, cargo-" a legionary had started to tramp from habit into a cubicle "-straight on to the gal-"
The alarm chimed.
One of the toad-things blocked the side passage with his mace. The studded head of the weapon had been used in earnest recently enough that not all the residues had dried.
"Pollux!" shouted a soldier with no tunic but a cloth-wrapped bundle in his arms. "This isn't-"
One of his companions pulled him back and pointed to his feet. In the legionary's haste and disorientation, he had forgotten to take off his boots with their S-pattern of iron hobnails. That-and that sort of confused error- explained why the alarm kept ringing.
"There's a special address by the Commander," said the Medic by rote. His face, his tone did not seem bored. Rather, the blue-suited guild employee was abstracted and very possibly frightened. "Move on through, straight into the gallery."
"Well, if that isn't…" Niger muttered angrily. "Don't mind tellin' you, I was lookin' forward't' something being done for this lip."
The three men stepped around the legionary stripping off his boots while his friend held the bundled loot. Vibulenus and his companions had left all their garments at the other end of the hall, but Clodius held his bull-roarer and his fellow carried the knapsack of-be generous: honey-by its straps.
The centurions intended to leave the objects near the cubicles and carry them into the ship when they were through with the Sick Bay. Now, brazenly, they carried their gleanings past the bodyguards who did not know to care, and the Medic who knew not to speak.
"I wouldn't have thought they could fix him up so quickly," Vibulenus muttered to himself, "the Commander. Not that the wounds were so extensive…"
But it took a long time to come to terms with the fact you've been killed. Maybe it took more time than even the gods had.
The scene in the Main Gallery was chaotic but chaotically cheerful. Legionaries, a number of them still wearing tunics among their naked fellows, milled and boasted and compared their loot. Almost all the men had at least superficial wounds, but slashes and bruised muscles were too much a part of normal affairs to dampen spirits significantly.
The change in routine put life in the air the way fair day made a country hamlet sparkle. The legion had just turned near disaster into a victory as stunning and sudcjen as defeat had promised to be. With that behind them, nobody seemed to think that this "special assembly" could be any form of bad news.
Nobody except Gaius Vibulenus, who had been studying the guild with the mind of a man whose family owed much of its wealth to land bought from neighbors whom Sulla had executed…
Soldiers have nothing to teach a good businessman about ruthlessness.
"Sir," said a heavily-cheerful voice. "You'll know, won't you? What've they got going on?"
Vibulenus turned to see that it was the first centurion, Julius Rusticanus, who was hailing him.
It was surprising that Rusticanus was no worse mauled than seemed to be the case-scores of cuts on his limbs and several on his face, but able to talk and move with only the half-hidden twinges that might result from wounds received before the guild bought the legionaries from their Parthian captors. The point of the right flank, where the first centurion stood in battle, would have been enveloped instantly by the native army and cleared last of all by the Tenth Cohort's counterthrust.
A tough man, Julius Rusticanus. But then, they all were by now. Even the tribune who looked like a youth with more lineage than strength of character.
"You're looking all right for somebody at the sharp end, First," Vibulenus said in real approval. Nobody was indispensable, but the first centurion's combination of education and battle-bred experience could not have been equalled in the legion. "But Hades, no-I don't know, I'm not sure anybody does, in a blue suit or not. They're stirred up over losing the Commander, that's sure enough."
"He got chopped?" said Rusticanus. His face went neutral; then, as he judged his audience, broadened into a smile. "Well, that's a terrible thing to happen, isn't it?"
He saluted and stepped back into the crowd, bending some of his particular cronies close to hear the news. Men on the right flank would have had no way to learn of the command group's massacre. For that matter, only a few hundred of the nearest legionaries would have been close enough to see the incident or its aftermath.
"You forget," Vibulenus said as he and his two companions drifted by habit toward the front of the gallery, "that other people don't know things just because you do."
"What do I know?" asiced Niger, misunderstanding the tribune's mumbled statement.
"You know," said Vibulenus instead of correcting the error, "how to make mead." He patted the knapsack, finding the leather surface squishy but not, thank Fortune, stickily permeated with that awful juice. "Among other things."
There was a sudden commotion from the rear of the big room, catcalls. The tribune turned and caught the flash of a yellow bodysuit beyond a sudden motion of Romans toward them.
"Hey, what ye got there?" somebody cried distinctly. The edge of hectoring command in the voice would have been familiar enough to civilians in barracks town, meeting a squad of legionaries recently spilled from a bar.
"Come on," the tribune ordered curtly, shouldering his way toward the trouble. This could get out of hand real fast-maybe already had. Why had the cursed fool decided to walk a gauntlet of killers loosened by fatigue and victory? And where were the guards who always accompanied guild employees in the presence of soldiers.
That was easy to answer: dead on the field, enough of them, and this fellow with his yellow suit and apparatus floating before him ignorant of what a bad pair of mistakes he had just made at his life's risk.
"Get the fuck outa the way!" snarled Clodius Afer, clubbing soldiers to either side with the staff of his bull-roarer. Niger used the side of his fist to equal effect-neither centurion needed to be told what happened to legionaries who angered the trading guild.
The tribune and his companions were not alone. Non-coms including Ju
lius Rusticanus converged from all sides on the guild employee, forming a shoulder-to-shoulder wall facing out against the gibes and half-meant threats. It wasn't that the centurions and file-closers were less ragged than the legionaries they backed off, or that the jostling, cat-calling mob did not understand that they were playing a dangerous game.
But the legion was a hierarchy, and the common soldiers had the right to be irresponsible in every activity which that hierarchy did not deem to be their duty. The problem with externally-applied discipline is that it can only be specific; and it tends to eliminate self-discipline throughout the general behavior of the men it governs.
No matter here. The troops were only rowdy, not in a state of suicidal mutiny.
"What're you trying to do, citizen?" Vibulenus snapped to the guild employee, sure that the situation was under control. "Trying to get up front?"
Conceivably the fellow hadn't meant to enter the Main Gallery at all. He had the slightly purple complexion and stocky build of the current commander, a racial type as different from that of the first officer the legion had been given as either was from the Romans themselves.
But he didn't know Latin. To speak, Vibulenus leaned over the dull-finished cart the technician pushed in front of him. Instead of replying, the fellow cringed away, colliding with the back of a centurion too solid to notice the impact. He was utterly terrified and obviously understood the tribune's curt questions as a bloodthirsty threat.
Pollux! Maybe one of the guards down in front would be able to translate.
Somebody shouted, "Hey, prettiest, how'd you know I was lookin' for you?"
Quartilla touched the tribune on the arm to get his attention, then gabbled at the technician in some barbarous language or other.
The fellow looked as if he had been offered water in a wilderness. He gabbled back, making gestures toward the ceiling with his three-digit hands.
"He says," Quartilla relayed, "that he's supposed to disconnect the barrier so the Commander can come aboard." She smiled. "He says a lot of things besides, but you can probably guess them."
"All right." Vibulenus ordered. "Well walk him down to the front, now."
There was a hushed area in his immediate presence, a result of the abrupt way the tribune and non-coms had asserted authority. Quartilla had appeared in that rebound from raucousness to embarrassment; fortunate timing, though the tribune felt sure that she could have handled without ugliness whatever situation developed. For that matter, now that he looked around, he could see that other females as well had joined the legionaries. What in Hades' halls was going on?
"Move out, boys, keep it moving," said Julius Rusticanus. When the protective screen of Romans began to move and the technician did not, the first centurion reached around the fellow and began pushing the floating cart himself. The technician gave the choked equivalent of a yelp and scuttled along after his gear.
"What are you doing here?" the tribune asked Quartilla in as much of an aside as the ambient noise and his greater height permitted. Men made room for the unusual procession, watching avidly, treating it-like everything else since they reboarded the ship-as a form of entertainment.
"We can wander when you're outside the ship," the woman replied. The smiles and armpats with which she greeted soldiers were as effective in clearing onlookers from the path as the tribune's own lowering sterness. "This time there wasn't an order to return, and we just… came along with everybody else."
Vibulenus had not known that the women could even leave their cubicles until he saw Quartilla before battle this morning-a lifetime ago. He thought of that meeting and missed a step because his muscles forgot to move.
"There," he said loudly, using volume of sound to dim memories with which he was not ready to deal. He made a sweeping gesture to inform the guild technician if words could not do so. They were through the clumps of legionaries-who had nudged closer to the barrier than was normally the case. Four bodyguards, stolid despite the froth and scratches on their armor, were spaced across the front wall, but Roman soldiers were willing to stand within the circuit that could be swept by the long maces.
The technician jumped backward when he raised his eyes to the bulge-eyed, broad-mouthed visage of the nearest guard, even though the creature glanced at him with no more interest than he showed in anything else around him. Quartilla clucked out a direction and the guild employee lunged forward after a moment's further hesitation.
"What's wrong with him?" Clodius Afer asked, freed of his self-imposed duty now that the yellowsuited figure was under the protection of the bodyguards.
"He's not familiar with any of this," the woman replied with a smile warm enough to make the tribune's fists clench despite him. "Usually he'd never get off his own ship except on home leave."
"Used to scare me too, didn't they?" said Vibulenus, relaxing as he tried to recall a part of the past which he had surmounted.
"Well, why's he here now?" said Niger bluntly from the tribune's other side. The technician had slid his cart against the bulkhead and was making cryptic gestures at the end that extended back of the barrier. "Thought they never let that down, the… you know."
There were subjects that would never be safe, even for someone whose mind had compartments as rigid as those of Niger's. Vibulenus squeezed and released his friend's shoulder.
"They've had to replace the Commander on an emergency basis," the woman explained. She was speaking with a familiarity regarding the crews' routines which Vibulenus could understand easily enough, if he let his mind consider it. "They don't have a barrier key available, so they'll clear the lock instead of replacing it."
The leavening of women in the big room was too slight for Vibulenus to get a good view of any of the others. Like the sand grain in the heart of a pearl, they attracted their own covering-in this case, soldiers in expectant circles. No harm done, even in those groupings where the women were practicing their trade under field conditions.
Like Quartilla, all the females the tribune glimpsed in the Main Gallery would have passed unremarked on a Capuan street. It was possible to forget what they must have looked like once, the way you forgot that an adult acquaintance had been an infant in past years.
The barrier lit itself in bands of light that started as a transfigured lime green and expanded toward the violet end of the spectrum in stages as distinct as those of a rainbow. There was a high-pitched crackling like pork fat being fried.
Niger turned his face away and swore.
For a moment, the plane of the barrier disappeared but the armor of each of the guards was surrounded by a ghostly nimbus. The pair nearest the center of the bulkhead were closely wrapped in sheathes of blue and indigo. The guards toward the opposite sidewalls were trebled in bulk by billowing softness of red light, causing some of the nearer legionaries to push away abruptly.
The guards themselves did not at first react, but the one nearest Vibulenus turned his bulging eyes to stare past the glow of his mace head.
The room popped, a sound that perhaps came from the ship's communications system instead of a physical part of the Main Gallery. The auras snuffed themselves. The guards snapped their heads straight again before a flicker of lights in the hexagon pattern announced the bulkhead door was opening.
The Commander, flanked by two more bodyguards, strode through the dissolving sidewall next to the tribune's party instead of coming from the ship's forward section.
He wore a yellow bodysuit which covered his fingers instead of leaving his hands bare, a quicker clue to status among guild employees than the shimmer before their faces which Quartilla said was a barrier against bad air. Vibulenus recognized him: he had been their first commander, the one who purchased them in Mesopotamia.
Quartilla wore a tunic of many layers, each diaphanous by itself. The tribune did not realize that he was gripping her shoulders until the layers of fabric began to shift greasily beneath his pressure.
The pilot stood in the bulkhead doorway, holding a laser. T
he tech who had just released the barrier pushed his cart through the opening and almost collided with the crewman because both were more intent on the legionaries than they were on matters closer to hand.
The Commander had all his former nonchalance. "Brave warriors," he said in the voice which was that of every commander, "you have won a victory with the skill and courage which I learned to expect when you were under my command previously. My guild thanks you for your continued progress beneath its tutelage."
The door in the other sidewall opened as if it were composed of rime ice melting in the sun. Motion drew the usual attention, half a dozen yellow-clad techs, one of them floating a cart before him. Then there was a surge of panic from that corner of the gallery-not at the remaining survivor of the bodyguard, but because the armored toad was leading one of the carnivores he and his fellows rode in battle.
The creature did not wear its blanket of iron scales, though there were patches in the bristling fur over its withers and shoulders where that armor must have rubbed. The slotted disk was on its chest, whining eagerly and so firmly implanted that no straps or chains were necessary to hold it in place. Instead of a saddle or other riding tack, the beast wore a broad metal collar with a shackle through which was rived the cable by which the guard led the creature along.
"Castor and Pollux," muttered Clodius Afer. "That's bigger'n the ones they ride, right?"
Vibulenus shrugged, but he suspected the pilus prior was wrong. The great brindled carnivore was rangier than it appeared when its armor bulked the smooth tuck of its belly; but seeing the beast in a structure of human scale, even one as large as the Main Gallery, gave it an impact that it did not have when surrounded by open sky.
"A hyena," said Niger, searching back through memories of beast fights in the arena.
"Haunches're too high," the tribune objected; but for the rest, the centurion's description was a good one.
The creature, as unaccustomed to the circumstances as the Romans were, jerked at the cable and clopped its long jaws shut in a spray of saliva. Despite the size of the bodyguard and his metal-cased grip on the lead line, the carnivore threw him off balance. Men scrambled even farther back in an effect like that of a pond rippling.