by David Weber
"You heard the tribune!" roared the first centurion to the mob of men who had done no such thing. "Turn around and move out!"
Obedience was so quick and so complete that Rusticanus could begin marching immediately toward what had been a solid clot of men at the moment his leg swung forward. Vibulenus fell in step beside the senior non-com, marveling at the way discipline made of soldiers something greater-or at least different-than their numbers alone.
The Medic gave another startled squawk. The tribune glanced behind him and saw not only Clodius and Niger, but the soldiers who had been even nearer the booth as well-following because Rusticanus had said the tribune had ordered them to do so. The guards halted, no longer concerned, but the Medic had enough initiative to wonder what was happening.
The sudden, accidental display of his authority made Vibulenus tingle with pleasure, but there was a frightening core of responsibility within it also.
"Sir," said Julius Rusticanus even as the tribune's mouth opened to prod him, "I think…" He rubbed his bald scalp fiercely. "Sir, if you come to the Rec Room, you can see it for yourself. That's better than me trying to tell you."
Presumably they were marching in that direction already as they followed an orange bead out of the Sick Bay and into a cross corridor. The floorplan of the ship normally did not change between embarkation and landing; but even when fixed, the maze of corridors was so complex that it was easier to ask for a guide bead to your destination than it was to grope along without one.
"These men came from Recreation?" asked Vibulenus, gesturing with spread fingers toward their entourage instead of giving a nod. The motion of walking was more than he could comfortably accept, and a good brisk shake of his head was likely to drop him to the floor in blinding pain.
He didn't imagine that anything so badly required his presence that it couldn't have waited for him to be refashioned into comfort by the Medic's cubicles. The first centurion-whose freshness and clean tunicproved he had at least been to the baths-thought it was that level of emergency, though. Rusticanus was a solid man and had the information, so the tribune would be a fool to second-guess him.
"Yessir," Rusticanus answered. "A lot stayed back though, and I just hope they kept the lid on." He paused, rubbing his scalp, before he added, "Figured I'd better come fetch you myself, sir, so's you'd know there was a rush."
"Good judgment, First," Vibulenus said, grinning wryly in his mind. He should have been pleased at his own accurate and self-sacrificing response to the situation. Instead, he was thinking that if he were a little less dutiful, he wouldn't feel like a gladiator being dragged out of the arena on a hook-and he'd be better able to deal with whatever the problem was.
The soldiers ahead of them turned into the Recreation Room, slowed by the number of men already standing inside. The circular, domed room expanded when all its couches were full, so the tribune had never seen it overcrowded. Now, though there must have been at least a thousand men packing the aisles and open areas, only a handful were actually lying back to enter the room's fantasy world.
"Move aside!" bellowed the first centurion. "Move aside for the tribune!" Soldiers obeyed by leaping onto the couches, the only space available. Many of them shouted, some cheering Vibulenus but others calling messages of anger uncertain in the confusion. What in Hades was going on?
The tribune sat down on a couch, started to swing his legs up, and quickly decided to lay his torso down first. The strain of balancing his upper body while trying to lift his legs with his belly muscles had sent sheets of white fire across the back of his eyeballs.
"Easy does it, Gaius," said Pompilius Niger from the next couch with a grin that opened the cut in his lips. He reached across with one broad hand and lifted the tribune's feet onto the couch. The two of them, and Clodius on the tribune's other side, lay back together. Vibulenus found the battling animals of the Recreation Room-a different set every voyage-to be a splendid way to sharpen his skills as well as a matter of amusement. No doubt that was what the trading guild had in mind when it provided this "game" at what was as surely great expense as the gladiatorial shows with which politicians paid for votes throughout Rome's Latin-speaking domains.
Real drill with weighted swords was the only way to develop muscles for battle, but timing and judgment could be taught better on the mental fields of the Recreation Room. Pain was the penalty for misjudging an opponent's strength or speed: instant, agonizing pain that was wholly real until another dream figure finished you off. Learning that sort of lesson on a physical battlefield was likely to cost your life-permanently, despite the magic of the trading guild. Certainly it took you out of action when your friends might need you.
But lessons in tactical maneuver were more important, at least for the tribune, than training in the physical aspects of battle. Though the contending armies were marshalled from animals and were often equipped in equally silly fashions, their tactics were those that could be applied to bodies of men.
Vibulenus could not change the movements and dispositions of the armies: those proceeded according to some higher law, just as the legion in the field was commanded-if not led-by a figure in a blue bodysuit. But the game aspect of the situation, the certainty that no permanent harm would occur to his real flesh, let the tribune study the fantasy battles with a detachment that carried over.
That morning he had pulled a cohort out of line, changed its front, and smashed a new threat without panic-because he had so often in his mind been a participant when the wheels came off a maneuver in the face of the enemy.
The first feeling Gaius Vibulenus had when his consciousness entered the fantasy scene was physical relief. The Recreation Room did nothing to alleviate his injuries the way the Sick Bay or even a bath would have; but by isolating the tribune from his body, it deleted the body's pain for the time being.
The next feeling was incredulity. Almost at once it became anger that hissed like a red-glowing sword being tempered in an oil bath… but he directed his mind downward, into the action, because he had come here to get information.
The animals on one side were spearmen who carried huge shields and rode to battle in wagons. They were more manlike than not, but their skins were purple and they had long feathery appendages in place of ears.
The animals on the other side were Roman legionaries. This battle was the first one the legion had fought on behalf of the trading guild.
Vibulenus directed his consciousness into one of the giant aliens. Vagrantly he considered entering the mind of a Roman, of poking and sampling the memories of a fellow who might lie on the couch beside him. The thought squeezed the tribune with nausea even though he did not at present have a stomach to turn. As suddenly he was a warrior with a harness of bronze bangles, more ornamental than protective. He gripped the rope frame of his jouncing chariot with his left hand; in his right was an iron-headed spear half again as tall as he was. The cartwheels and the hooves of the team threw up reeds and mud and water as the vehicle lurched out of the swampy depression at the valley's center.
The slope above them held the hostile army which was advancing like a single monstrous creature.
The driver hauled back and left on his reins, swinging the chariot to a broadside halt in front of the enemy. Two of the other warriors vaulted from the vehicle while it was still slowing, slamming Vibulenus off balance in their haste to plant themselves on the ground.
Fools. That's exactly where they would wind up-at the leisure of a burial party.
The part of the tribune's mind that came with the body he now inhabited did not understand the army that was tramping down at him. It glittered with metal, each warrior dressed in the trappings of a great chief. But those same warriors moved as a single serried mass, each front-rank champion advanced only a long stride in front of the followers arrayed behind to his right and left.
It was not a wedge formation. It was the edge of a saw sweeping toward Vibulenus.
He strode off his vehicle, heartened by the
rumble of the bronze gongs in each of the cars lurching toward the enemy. Now free of the need to stabilize him, his left hand gripped the shield and swung it in front of him. The strap's friction irritated his neck despite the leather throatlet he wore against that problem, but his muscles made nothing of the shield's weight. The consciousness that was a Roman tribune remembered that the shields of hide on heavy wooden frames weighed around a hundred pounds apiece.
That same mind also knew the way to break the Roman advance, to smash the legion's integrity so that the mass of light-armed thralls on the hill behind Vibulenus and the other champions could nibble clots of Romans like nodes of sand in the surf. He opened his mouth to shout orders to his immediate companions, and the rain of javelins washed the words back down his throat.
Vibulenus' shield was like a section of leathern tower. Its lower rim was only a handbreadth off the ground, but it was tall enough that he could duck his head and broad shoulders to safety without lifting the shield higher. Javelins were the weapon of thralls, a part of him thought, not of warriors who dared challenge The javelin that struck the upper edge of his shield buried its point in the frame and did not penetrate. It slapped the shield back against Vibulenus' skull hard enough to dizzy him for an instant, and one of the three other missiles went far enough through the center of the hide to prick his left biceps.
The second flight was already arching down.
The chariot overturned with a crash behind Vibulenus, throwing sod and bits of broken wheel against his calves. He lunged forward, away from the touch and toward the real threat, the ranks running forward as they drew swords much heavier than the knife in Vibulenus' sash which he used only to silence the screaming wounded.
The weight of javelins clinging to his shield dragged its edge against the ground and made him stumble. His toes hurt where they stubbed the shield rim, and the javelin hurled by a strong man scratched both his left arm and his chest as its point slammed several inches through the thick leather.
That did not make the body's consciousness afraid: he was a warrior, a champion who met the best each enemy offered and slew them, knowing that he would be slain in turn some day. But the near escape made him respectful of missiles that were more than the stone-weighted ox-goads his own thralls hurled.
"Lock shields!" the tribune's mind ordered through the warrior's lips. Normally, champions would duel before the weight of reinforcements to both sides made the engagement a general one of armies and shield walls. But this was not a normal battle…
Oxen bellowed in terror as three of them dragged the overturned chariot and the yoke-mate which was interested only in biting off the javelin that quivered in its haunch. The warrior who had stepped off with Vibulenus was still all right, though a javelin with a bent shaft dangled from his shield face also.
The pair who had jumped from the chariot a moment earlier had been off balance when the missiles struck. One was down his face, a javelin at belt height beneath him and three more fanning from his back which he had turned in staggering away from the first. The remaining warrior was upright, but only because he leaned on his grounded shield to take the weight off the right thigh from which a javelin protruded.
If they, even the four of them, had been able to lock shields and match their long spears against the swords of their immediate opponents, strength and armament would have taken them through the legion like a thorn in an ox's thick hide. Only for a time, no more than minutes-but they were champions, warriors who lived for the glory of dying on the heap of their slain. By robbing the hostile advance of its momentum and turning the ranks inward, Vibulenus' fellows and similar knots of warriors could disorganize the legion into a milling body of men.
Individually, each of the spearmen in the chariots being lashed toward the battle was more than a match for a legionary, despite the latter's armor. But the chance of fighting on those equal terms had been drowned in the rain of javelins, and in the personal code of the other warriors who did not have the mind of a Roman tribune to direct them.
All that could matter now was individual combat, death or survival. Gains Vibulenus Caper would be alive at the game's end; but the test was real, and the pain would be very real.
What came within range of Vibulenus' spear was no longer an army moving in lockstep but rather a handful of individuals with alien faces framed by helmets forged all of metal. The one squarely fronting Vibulenus raised his shield as he judged the angle of the spearhead and let his sword drift back to take a full-armed cut as he ran into range.
Vibulenus stabbed overhand at the center of the Roman shield, knowing that the boss was reinforced with bronze-and knowing also that his strength and stout spear were enough to smash through all resistance.
The Roman lurched backward, losing his sword and his footing as the iron spearhead broke both the bones of his left forearm. Others jumped aside, thrown off balance as they tried to close up their ranks. Like all participants in Recreation Room fantasies, the wounded man had been shouting in Latin. The screams with which he now assessed his severed arm were even more universal.
Vibulenus shrugged to settle his shield strap, remembering that the equipment was awkwardly heavier than it should be because of the javelins dangling from its face. If the pentration of the Roman missiles had shocked the warrior's mind, then he had taught the nearest Roman how effective a broad-bladed spear could be when thrust by a strong arm.
He jerked his point clear, splintering plywood from the vermilioned shield face, and felt all the way up his forearm the shock of Clodius Afer's chopping blow against the spearshaft.
Vibulenus hadn't recognized his first opponent, a soldier who had died too long in the past for his face to be a memory* But these features were those of the man on the couch beside him, disconcerting because the image Vibulenus fought did not yet wear the transverse red crest of a centurion.
And this time, the military tribune had far more combat experience than the veteran file-closer brought to the battle.
Vibulenus swung his spear sideways like a cudgel. The instinct of the warrior whose body he shared would have been to withdraw the weapon for another stabbing blow, but the tribune's mind knew that would be quick disaster. Clodius Afer, quicker and armed with a cut-and-thrust sword, would be inside the warriors shield and disemboweling him in a fingersnap.
But the file-closer did not expect a spear so heavy that, clubbed, it could slam aside a legionary shield and dent a bronze helmet in sending the wearer splay-limbed and unconscious.
Swords chopped at Vibulenus' left side, but the shield covered him there andfettow warriors were running to his support. A Roman, charging through the ranks at a dead run, tried to jump the sudden sprawl of Clodius Afer's body. His boot clipped the file-closer's flailing arm so that his knees bent and he skidded down on his back.
The Roman's round shield was flung sideways, no protection at all, but Vibulenus knew the breastplate had been cast from bronze heavy enough to turn his spear at the slant with which it would receive the thrust. He stabbed instead for the face, white with terror. It was only as his point slid beneath the helmet's lower rim that he realized the eyes through which his broad blade was cutting were his own.
Vibulenus screamed. Even after he leaped from the couch in the Recreation Room, he could feel his hand tingle with the bones crunching in his own image's forehead.
Pompilius Niger wrapped his strong arms around the tribune's chest and shouted through the bleats of revulsion, "Sir! Sir! You're here again!"
Vibulenus let his body sag against his friend while he mastered the terror and fury of his mind. There were staring faces all around him, but the expression of their own emotions had blended into a general concern for the tribune.
For their leader.
"So that's what the bastards've thought of us all along," said Clodius Afer in a harsh, deadly whisper. Both he and Niger must have lifted their heads back into reality as soon as they understood the incident around which the Recreation Room had woven it
s current game. "Like dancing bears… or frogs!"
The disgust in his voice reminded Vibulenus of how much his friend hated smooth-skinned amphibians. Certainly there was something in the current revelation about the Rec Room-and about the legion's status-to horrify and enflame every Roman aboard the vessel.
And it was the duty of Gaius Vibulenus Caper, military tribune by the whim of Crassus and leader of the men around him by the will of the gods, to keep that flaming anger from exploding in a suicidal fashion.
Calm again, so frigidly controlled that his mind did not notice the way his right hand-spear handwas quivering, Vibulenus used Pompilius Niger for a not-wholly-needful brace as he stepped up onto the couch on which he had recently lain. Rusticanus said something, but the tribune ignored the words. He already had enough information to deal with the immediate situation, and this was not the time for long-term planning.
But by Jove and the Styx, the guild would pay: for this, and for everything.
"Fellow soldiers!" shouted Vibulenus, words that he and no creature in a blue suit had a right to speak. "You will not raise your voices, you will not attempt to damage the ship or the crewmen or your fellow soldiers because of your distress at what you've seen here."
The snarling response from the faces lifted toward him was unplanned, instinctive.
Vibulenus raised his arms with his fingers spread in a gesture of forcing back the anger by sheer dint of personality. The men quieted, his men.
"You brought me here to see this," the tribune cried into the feral silence, "and I have seen. Now, leave the matter in my hands."
He could feel the hatred boiling in the domed room, even without the growls and the anguished voice nearby which called, "No! We gotta kill the bastards!"
Vibulenus chopped his arms sideways and back, stilling the tumult again. "I give you my word," he said in a voice as clear as light dancing from the edge of his Spanish sword, "as a Roman, and as the man who fought at your head on more fields than any of us can remember… this will not pass unchallenged. "I swear it to you. I swear it to you." He waited a moment, then dropped his arms. The sounds that exploded into the room where no less bloodthirsty than those of moments before-but these were cheers.