Ranks of Bronze э-1

by David Weber

  The mutineers were completely out of their depth now. Quartilla knew no more of life in the forward section than the Romans did. She could pass through the transport system the crew used within the main body of the ship, but forward was entered only through the bulkhead door which they had just forced.

  A blue-suited crewman leaped into the hallway-the Pilot, not the stocky, mauve-faced fellow who was now the Medic. Behind him was a room of floating dodecahedrons, some as thick as a man was tall. Each facet was a different picture, most of them mere swirls of color. Together their light shadowed the crewman's face without hiding the scowl of manic rage or the laser he was raising to aim.

  The practice sword did not spin with the glittering beauty of Vibulenus' own weapon, saving the Commander on the gravel field where last they fought beneath a sun. It flew true, though, smashing the guild employee backward into the drifting shapes that eddied to avoid his touch.

  The Pilot's face was bloodied and his shoulder possibly broken, but his life had not been risked by a sharp edge-a result as important to the tribune as the fact the laser had spun away from the impact.

  "Got 'im!" bellowed Clodius Afer as he raised a dagger-a real one with a hilt fit for two Roman hands, part of some bodyguard's equipage-to finish the job in a fury as red as the blood from the scratches torn across his chest and arm.

  "No by Hercules!" the tribune screamed, tackling his berserk subordinate because he knew no words could now restrain a man whose rage had overwhelmed weeks of careful, mutual planning. His hands locked on Clodius' right wrist, and the pause in which the centurion threw off the hindrance was time enough to reinstate training and sanity.

  The walls here were real enough to slam Vibulenus back toward Clodius when the pilus prior shook free. The tribune had been pounded worse-even in his men's scramble to attack the guardbeast-and the amount of adrenalin singing in his blood at the moment would have permitted him to ignore amputation, much less a few more bruises.

  "We need him-" the tribune cried, as much to the dagger as the man who held it.

  "Pollux sir!" Clodius Afer was shouting, bloodlust melted on his face into a mask of horror. "I swear I didn't-"

  The wall behind the tribune dissolved. The Medic stood in the broad opening. Behind him was a room whose air seemed filled with bright fracture lines, as different from that in which the Pilot sprawled as either was from any room Vibulenus had seen before.

  In the Medic's hands was a laser.

  The crewman could have burned the two Romans in halves before they reached him, but Vibulenus and his centurion were the killers in this tableau of mutual surprise: the Medic was paralyzed by the face of death while the soldiers were unaffected by the black reality waiting at the laser's muzzle.

  The tribune threw himself at the crewman's knees. He was off balance and facing the wrong direction, so his target was just an estimate of what he thought his hands could reach. Either the laser would carve him with the deck for a cutting board, or he would jerk the Medic flat after the weapon had disemboweled Clodius Afer in a gush of sparks and blood.

  There was always a cost but it didn't help to consider what, while you were paying.

  The Medic displayed lightning-quick reflexes despite his sedentary background. He tossed the laser down as if it were hot, bouncing it off the lunging Clodius Afer by chance rather than by intent, and dived squealing away from the Romans.

  There was chaos near the entrance to the forward section. The screen of light to one side of the aisle had vanished. Instead of furniture-or the marsh the tribune had half expected from the wizardry of the vessel- the bodyguards had been living amidst a rocky environment similar to a windswept knoll in northern Mesopotamia.

  The barracks area was littered now with equipment and bodies. Some legionaries screamed or moaned, struggling to cover their wounds or pawing feebly at the hands of friends trying to help; but the quintet of guards visible were dead, pulped by Roman clubs and hacked with edged weapons the guards themselves had no time to use.

  Death did not save the toad creatures from further attack. Legionaries were still pounding at bodies which were beginning to flow over the landscape on which they sprawled.

  Fighting might be going on in the other half of the billet-men ducked in and out, ignoring walls which they had learned were only cosmetic-but if there were still guards resisting there, they could not be a threat to the mutiny any more. The legionaries who were struggling through the bulkhead door, now in total disorder, ran toward Clodius and their leaders for want of battle nearer.

  Vibulenus scrambled on his hands and knees to catch the wailing Medic, also on all fours.

  "ClodiussavethePilot!" the tribune screamed behind him in a single breath, knowing that only the pilus prior was likely to have enough presence of mind not to treat the dazed crewman the way the guards were being handled. He had given orders and explanations, clear and convincing in the moments before the attack. Men balked of a chance at the real fighting were going to pound away their prebattle fears-together with their only hope of seeing home-if there were no one with discipline in place to stop them.

  The Medic buried his face in his crossed arms. Vibulenus sprang on him like a dog on a rat.

  "Don't!" the crewman wailed in Latin. "Don't! Don't!" He was stockier than Vibulequs and possibly as strong, but the fight had been stunned out of him by the homicidal intent he saw on the faces of the Romans rushing toward him.

  "Where's the Commander?" the tribune demanded, shouting to be heard over the uproar. He rose awkwardly to his feet, dragging the Medic with him as an unresisting dead weight. Vibulenus' back now ached with memory of the trampling haste of his men determined to join in slaughtering the carnivore.

  "I've got this one, Gaius!" cried the pilus prior, who clutched the Pilot to his chest as if they were lovers. The crewman was either struggling or writhing in pain as fractured bones grated under the centurion's grip; but without the hand which Clodius held out to stop his subordinates, pain and life would have ended abruptly for the Pilot.

  "The Commander!" Vibulenus shouted. "The Commander!" He began shaking his captive.

  Men, clumsy with the shields they still bore, clustered around their leader. The lines in the air felt like cobwebs, but they formed again like designs in smoke when a soldier passed through them. Some of the legionaries swatted at the figures, then drove their way back out of the Medic's room when they had time to appreciate its uncanniness.

  The stocky crewman was whining syllables that were not Latin if they were a language at all.

  "The Commander!" Vibulenus shrieked, jerking the blue figure back and forth in fury and frustration.

  Quartilla, with a bruise on her cheekbone which became a pressure cut as it mounted toward her hair, squeezed between legionaries to touch the tribune with one hand and the Medic with the other. "Let me," she whispered to Vibulenus; and, in a fluting trill which seemed to be a language after all, began to speak to the captive.

  The Medic pawed Quartilla gratefully with his three-fingered right hand, but his eyes were unfocused and his left hand stroked the tribune with the same limp thankfulness. In Latin, though he seemed unaware of both his language and his audience, the crewman said, "He's at the end, of course. Me here, the Pilot across, him at the end."

  A dozen legionaries at once began battering with practice swords on the wall which closed the corridor leading from the bulkhead door. Two men shouted for space as they stamped forward, carrying the ten-foot, iron-headed mace which had belonged to a bodyguard. They crashed their makeshift battering ram into the wall. It rebounded out of their hands, sending the nearest legionaries hopping. The wall was unscarred.

  "Get us in," said Clodius Afer to his own prisoner, his voice a low growl more threatening than the dagger which he now recalled and waved before the Pilot's face. The fingers of the centurion's left hand were wrapped in the fabric covering his captive's chest. The bodysuit did not tear, but where the material was most' strained, its color becam
e a glistening, silky green.

  "Unlock it, bastard," Clodius ordered in a voice like stones sliding, while he turned the Pilot deliberately to face the blank wall.

  "I can't," the Pilot said in what started as a choked whisper but quickly built into a terrified babble, "because it's only him from inside as controls it!"

  "Clodius!" shouted the tribune who saw death in the pilus prior's rigid face an instant before the dagger lifted.

  The weapon poised in midair. It was forged in one piece-blade, hilt and crossguards-massive and dingy gray except for the edges and the scratches on the hilt left by the iron gloves with which its normal user gripped it.

  "Sir?" said Clodius Afer pleadingly; but the fact that he had bothered to respond at all meant that he understood the order and would obey.

  The Medic had recovered himself enough to be sure of his surroundings and to talk to Quartilla in his melodic birth tongue. His face quivered with terrified animation as he made frequent one-finger gestures which were not attempts to point at anything in the immediate environment.

  "He's telling the truth," said the woman when Vibulenus dared glance away from his pilus prior. A single legionary continued to hammer vainly at the corridor, but all the others hung in restless anticipation, waiting for the information or the event which would give them a goal again.

  "There's no way into the Commander's quarters except through that door," Quartilla continued, "and it's controlled by the Commander's voice. There's no way out either."

  "He says," said Clodius Afer, pushing toward the invisible door through men who scurried from his authority and from the anger in his eyes. The wrinkling grip across the front of the bodysuit made the Pilot seem shrunken in on himself as the centurion dragged him along.

  "He says!" the pilus prior shouted as he stabbed the dagger into the center of the blank wall.

  Blood scabbing across Clodius' right shoulder was jeweled with bright, fresh droplets as the muscles bunched beneath the skin. There was a thunk and a musical twang that would have been loud even in a room not hushed like this one.

  Clodius' arm was numb to the elbow. He fell back a step, eyes widened in surprise. The dagger hilt was still in his hand, but the blade had snapped off at the crossguards and lay, still quivering out nervous tones, on the floor of what had been the Pilot's quarters. He dropped the iron hilt.

  "No," said Pompilius Niger in a voice of unexpected certainty. "We'll use this."

  The junior centurion had a bruise across the forehead where his shield had caught him while it blocked the carnivore's kick. He had lost or abandoned the practice weapons. What he now carried in his rough, capable hands was one of the lasers with which the crewmen had tried to face the mutiny.

  The Medic trilled something that was an oath in any language. In desperate Latin directed more toward Vibulenus than it was the woman-authority taking precedence over mercy at this moment, though the reality of the situation was not what the crewman perceived-he said, "Please don't let him-if he touches the wrong thing, all of us, the ship even."

  Men made way for Niger the way they had for Clodius, but this time the threat was in his hands instead of his face. In hot blood, most of the legionaries would have charged the beam weapon with the same reckless abandon the tribune and pilus prior had shown. Now, though… nobody wants to die after a battle, and memories of the laser demonstrations were still bright and terrible.

  "Everybody move back," said Vibulenus, raising his voice to quiet the babble. Another problem occurred to him-his duties did not end with mutiny, unless the mutiny itself were ended-so he went on, "Fifth and Sixth Centuries, return to the Main Gallery. Keep people out, and tell them I'll make a full report as soon as we've mopped things up in here."

  And might the wish father the result.

  There was a stir and more obedience than the tribune had really expected. The ship was uncanny in many fashions. Familiarity did not help legionaries understand how the walls moved or carts floated through the air.

  But these were familiar occurrences now, whereas the laser still commanded the awe which a nearby thunderbolt would receive in the legion's Campanian homes. The order provided an excuse to get away from something that even brave men would prefer to shun.

  Clodius Afer had no visible qualms. He strolled back to the tribune and Niger, flexing the numbness out of his empty right hand. The Pilot, who was trying to hug his injured right shoulder, had no more control of his movements than would a dufflebag in the centurion's grip.

  "Now," said Clodius to his captive in a tone of catlike menace, "why don't you tell us how to make this work?"

  The two crewmen looked at one another with mirroring expressions of blank-eyed terror. The faces of the Romans around them ranged from expectant to ravening, with Niger's features the worst for their demonic calm. The junior centurion pointed the laser at the Medic's chest. His hands began to prod the bumps and knurlings on the weapon's surface.

  "Don't!" shrieked the Pilot. "If you fire it here, you may strand us in normal-"

  The pilus prior slapped his prisoner. His calloused palm cracked like a ballista firing, and the Pilot flopped stunned against the grip on his chest.

  "I'll tell you just how to do it," said the Medic in a voice of manic calm. He spread both his hands, vaguely purple where they extended beyond his suit, toward the laser. It was the gesture of an adult placating a raging child-or of a suppliant before his god. "But please, don't touch the controls until I show you."

  "Give the laser to Quartilla," Vibulenus decided aloud.

  Clodius looked surprised, while Niger looked as if nothing could surprise him. With no more hesitation than if he had been asked to deliver it to the tribune or one of the other men, he handed the woman the tube with excrescences molded into it instead of being welded on. An article of plumbing, a length of foundry scrap… except that it burned like the heart of Phlegethon, and that made it useful.

  "Please…" said the Medic in a voice that was quiet though not calm, the way a cat in ambush is quiet. "If you will point the other end-yes, like that, goodlady-toward the wall, the door."

  Groggy, stunned enough that immediate consequences did not terrify him, the Pilot said, "You know what happens if she hits the navigation bank. Is this where you want to spend eternity?"

  Clodius slapped him into a daze again.

  The Medic made a swallowing motion higher in his throat than a Roman would have, then continued, "Now, goodlady, slide the piece just above the trigger-where your index finger is-back."

  "Which piece?"

  "Either side-yes, that's fine, it slides, yes, goodlady. Now-"

  Vibulenus was wondering why the Pilot had spoken in Latin to his fellow. Stunned, yes; but under the circumstances, probably because they had no other common language.

  The guild could achieve wonders, miracles-but it had a cheeseparing attitude that reminded the tribune of wealthy men at home who served fine wine to their immediate companions at dinner, but sent lees and vinegar to the lower tables. The Commander's duties required universal fluency, but those of the crewmen did not.

  Quarfilla spoke all the ship's languages.

  The laser's pale beam struck the door in a dazzle that could have been the tribune's sudden anger.

  Startlement lifted the woman's finger from the trigger instead of clamping it there. Even so, the microsecond pulses had blasted cup-sized depressions in an ascending line across the face of what had been a blank wall. The material which had shrugged off a ram and a steel point slumped at the touch of coherent light. Bits which sprayed from the surface left sooty trails behind them as they sputtered through the air.

  "Don't!" shrilled a voice. "Don't do that!"

  Vibulenus spun around, keeping his grip on the Medic only by reflex. The words had come from The words had come from just beside the tribune's ears. The Commander had spoken, rather than someone in the immediate vicinity.

  There was momentary silence except for the curses of a few men, close enou
gh to the door to be burned when it spattered on them. The yellow-green surface of the wall was angry pink around the cavities and dull gray at their heart. It looked like pustulant worm damage on the skin of a fresh pear.

  "Again," said the tribune softly, and Quartilla steadied herself over the laser tube.

  "Wait!" bleated the voice. "I'm coming out! Put that down, I'm coming out!"

  A legionary who had been smothering sparks on his thighs grinned and straightened. He cocked his practice sword back in an unguarded fashion that would have gotten him killed on the battlefield or knocked silly by an automaton in the Exercise Hall.

  "Not without orders, ye fool!" snarled the pilus prior. He shook the Pilot as he would have a swagger stick. The loose-limbed crew member moaned softly in response, but the abashed soldier lowered his weapon.

  "Put down the laser!" demanded the Commander's voice.

  "Quartilla," said the tribune in a voice that crushed other sounds with its glacial power, "on the count of three I want you to begin burning the door until I tell you to stop. One-"

  "Wait!"

  "Two-"

  The wall dissolved like most other doorways in the ship. There was a line of what appeared to be smoke where the laser had cut, but it settled out of the air quickly as a handful of gray dust. The Commander, with his arms crossed in front of his face, stepped through it.

  He was wearing a blue bodysuit again. Even had he wished to, Vibulenus could not have avoided remembering his first sight of the slim figure. The Commander had watched Parthian guards driving their Roman prisoners onto the vessel that was intended to be the only home the legionaries would know for the rest of their lives. The figure in blue had watched with the detached interest of a cattle buyer.

  And it no longer hurt to realize that the Commander had thought of himself in just that fashion, a human who bought and managed animals.

  "Glad to see you, Your Worship," said Gaius Vibulenus in a kittenish tone. "Most glad to see you like this."