by David Drake
Tracks of dazzling orange began to tear pavement apart and rake the philes that leaped across its length. A phile whose legs and haunches had been vaporized continued to crawl on its elbows toward the disabled raft. The expression on its dying face could only have been delight.
Covering fire from the other survey craft could not slow the tidal motion of the philes. Waves of activity were visible in the far distance, surging toward the first chance of prey in days, weeks. And the downed craft already boiled with ravenous life even if no more philes arrived to fight for a purchase among their frenzied fellows.
Fragments of armor plate glittered in the air. The philes were tearing it away so violently that the raft seemed to have exploded. The orange energy-beams ripped a brilliant, useless circle just beyond the fallen craft. Beasts shriveled away like insects in a flame, but if they survived at all, they survived to tear deeper into the vessel.
One of the crewmen was dragged out to dissolve in seconds among the claws and teeth of countless starving philes. It had been a bristly octopod like the one who led RyRelee to the Coran's chamber.
The survey craft disintegrated in an orange flash. The point of view rocketed upward with a suddenness that might have been simple reality instead of a result of editing the transmission. The city gleamed for a moment, purified by distance of the unchecked hordes of starving philes that now were its sole population. In another instant the exploding thermonuclear device transformed the distant city into a gorgeous pearl, expanding across the surface of the planet.
The next image was from farther away still. It took a moment for RyRelee to realize the scale. The small sun glowing against blackness had been a planet. It had been Doronin before the Cora cleansed it once and for all.
"That could be Earth in a hundred years or less," said the Coran. "You must track down the phile and destroy it, emissary. And you must act very quickly now. Should this phile be a male, then once it is destroyed our concern regarding this world will be allayed. However, should this be a gravid female like the one that got loose on Doronin. . . . Then, if there is any indication—any suspicion at all—that she may have produced a brood, our only recourse will be to sterilize the entire land mass and hope that other cultures will develop from other regions of this planet.
"So you understand, RyRelee, the extreme importance of your mission on Earth."
"Yes . . ." said the emissary very softly, his thoughts already totally absorbed in his mission.
But he was thinking that fate plays strange tricks and that it was fortunate the Cora themselves lacked telepathic ability. An agent in this dangerous profession often reaped wealth from clandestine operations of his own, and there were fortunes to be made through smuggling beasts for blood sports, if one had all the right connections. The starship that had crashed on Earth had been acting under RyRelee's orders before the disaster, and RyRelee knew with certainty that the escaped phile was a gravid female.
His real mission would be to make equally certain that it was kept alive without the knowledge of the Cora. Earth would prove a perfect breeding ground, and fate had given RyRelee the chance to make good on a scheme that had almost fatally miscarried.
Chapter Four
It waited in its burrow beneath the river bank, waited patiently for its wounds to heal—patiently, for it watched the boats pass up and down the Tiber, and it knew it was only a short matter of time before its red dreams were fulfilled.
It had learned a great deal from observing these soft-skinned bipeds who appeared to be the dominant race of this world. To an extent, it no longer regretted its capture during its initial few hours on this world, when the bipeds had surrounded it, dazed and injured, and had renewed the captivity from which it had only just escaped in the explosion of the metal ship. The bipeds had sheltered and fed the phile—or lizard-ape, as they named it in their various tongues—much the same as its previous captors had done. This had given it time to regain its strength, and to assess the dangers of this new world.
The bipeds themselves posed no real threat, except in their numbers. The phile had already proven to itself how easily they died; their flesh was better than the brief sport their struggles offered, and their bodies should provide excellent hosts. Their weapons were far more primitive than those of the race who had taken the phile from its homeworld, and considering how slowly these soft bipeds moved, the only real danger lay in being cornered or surrounded.
The phile shook with rage as it remembered that one biped who had pursued it this last time. It had touched that biped's aura, recognized that this one was different from the other naked-skinned creatures—another species, perhaps, and trained to kill for its master as the phile itself had been trained. The phile was certain that this one biped had accepted the personal challenge of stalking it—that this one had been responsible for the lower-species quadrupeds that had been sent in pursuit. That last one had provided interesting sport—it was almost the phile's superior.
The phile angrily regretted that it had not destroyed the bipedal hunter as well when chance had twice permitted. The arrival of reinforcements with projectile weapons had saved the hunter once, and at their next encounter the phile's judgment had accepted the fact that, crippled from its wounds inflicted by the large striped creature, it would probably have sustained fatal injury from the biped's weapon. While it felt certain it could have killed the biped despite such a wound, the phile obeyed the urgency of a more basic instinct—the only instinct more basic than its need to kill.
Perhaps this one hunter would offer combat again. The phile hoped it would. In the meantime, its egg sacs were growing full within its abdomen. It was time to seek out a secure lair—and the other things it must have to nourish its brood.
* * *
By the second nightfall its shoulder had healed sufficiently to restore function. The phile had had to align as best it could the bones broken by the mauling it had suffered from the large quadruped. It had been enough for the fragmented ends to knit rapidly. There was pain, but the phile recognized pain without any emotional component—pain was no more than an indication that warned of momentary physical inadequacy. The phile had healed more quickly than it had dared hope—even the gashes in its scaled flesh were no more than smooth lines of scar. The unnaturally benign climate and the lighter gravity of this world made it a paradise beyond the phile's dreaming, if the phile had ever indulged in dreams beyond the need to wrest survival from every deadly moment.
It was hungry now—terribly hungry. This world's pale sun had risen and set twice now since the phile had last eaten its fill. The few insignificant life forms it had caught and devoured from its burrow could not resist starvation for a metabolism that required its weight in flesh at close intervals—even if the egg sacs were not distending its flanks, demanding sustenance.
The phile had made its plans while it rested. It had already observed that the bipeds here required more than natural means of light in order to see, once their sun had set. As one of their slow-moving surface conveyances plodded upstream in the starlight, the phile chose the moment and slithered noiselessly into the river. The currents were almost stagnant compared to those of its home planet, and it swam easily despite the physical density that would have let it sink to the bottom.
It crossed the distance as certainly as an arrow pierces the sky. Its claws easily locked into the porous substance of the vessel's hull, and for a moment the phile rested and let its senses explore the craft. There were many bipeds here, and there was not one whisper of alertness from them. That was good.
That was very good.
As silent—and as fleeting—as a shadow of a bat against the moon, the phile lifted itself over the rim of the surface conveyance, and part of the rage it felt toward the hunter who had stalked it was quickly slaked as the phile had its will with those it found on board.
Chapter Five
As he grew older, Vonones found solace in the creature comforts his slowly accumulated wealth could now furnish hi
m. While the heavyset body of his youth might now be taking on a veneer of softness, nevertheless Vonones had not forgotten that he had attained his wealth through hard work. Thus Vonones made a point of being at his office in the main compound at dawn, whether or not a new shipment was expected.
The escape and destruction—Lycon swore it was destroyed—of the sauropithecus a few nights before had been an ordeal. But Vonones had suffered worse, and thanks to Lycon he had avoided real disaster—though he would have to increase his prices on this shipment to offset the losses for the lizard-ape and the tiger, not to mention payments to Lycon, Galerius and his men, and bribes all around. He'd come out of it with a whole skin and would still turn a good profit, and that was what really mattered, although Vonones knew he would see the lizard-ape in nightmares for the rest of his life.
What happened when Vonones reached his home on the Caelian only proved how badly that near-disaster had shaken him. The messenger Vonones had sent ahead from Portus had given his house slaves hours to prepare for his arrival. Vonones had bought a new mistress, an Egyptian, just before he left to meet the shipment at Portus. She had used the time in preparation to make Vonones' first trial of her particularly memorable.
Having quite forgotten her after the business of the lizard-ape, Vonones was not thinking of anything but bed when he walked into the bedchamber, stiff with dust and fatigue. She was waiting with one hand poised on the inlaid headboard and the other arm raised to balance the curve of the first. Light from the twelve-wick oil lamp glittered on a headdress of silk and sapphires—the only garment the woman wore. She had also donned a set of long false fingernails and dusted her limbs with lapis lazuli, thinking the blue shadowing would increase her exotic air.
Vonones screamed and ran.
Sleep had been long in coming that night, and the equally startled Egyptian—Vonones had summarily ordered his servants to wash and scrub her till her skin was a shade lighter than when he bought her—decided she would never understand the eccentric ways of Armenian merchants.
When Vonones' litter stopped in front of his office, his staff were in the midst of the job of unloading. The wagons had been brought into the courtyard by the main gate. It would remain closed until the last of the beasts had been transferred to their holding cells. Any other technique chanced the escape of a predator and bloody chaos in the streets of the neighboring Ceronian District. The dealer wanted no more such escapes, not even of a peacock. At the moment, a hundred or so ostriches that made up a major part of this shipment were being transferred to the corral in a flurry of wings and curses.
The deputy compound manager swirled toward Vonones with an entourage of clerks poised over waxed tablets of accounts. "Excellency," the deputy called, "there's a serious discrepancy here! A tiger, according to the bill of lading . . ."
"Yes, I know about the damned tiger. Cross it off," Vonones said with a scowl. "And the other one too—the sauropithecus. They both died in transit."
"The what?" said the deputy. Clerks flipped pages to find the unfamiliar term.
"Pollux, give me a moment to look the compound over before you bother me with the accounts," Vonones snapped to change the subject.
The ostriches had been bundled for transport with their legs, beaks, and wings tied shut. A nearby slave had cocked his head to listen to Vonones, intent on learning further details of the events that had sparked so many rumors. When he cut the twist of papyrus rope holding the bird's legs, he nicked a leg as well.
The bird squirmed instantly upright. It kicked sideways with its right leg, even as the handler turned his attention back to his work. The clawed toes ripped across the man's belly too suddenly for the victim to cry out.
Vonones swore bitterly. The clerks and deputy scattered like quail from the eight-foot apparition with bloody claws. The injured handler writhed on the ground with his hands pressed against his torn abdomen. His fellows sprang up from their own duties. One ran for a net.
Vonones uncoiled his whip in a fluid arc behind him. The ostrich cocked its right leg again. It stood sideways to Vonones, but one black eye glittered at him with cold purpose.
The lash snaked out and around the bird's left ankle. Setting himself, Vonones yanked back on the whipstaff. He might no longer have the shoulder muscles of his younger days, but the weight he had put on was finally an advantage to him. The ostrich flopped back onto the ground. Handlers leaped onto it from three sides.
Vonones dropped the whip when he was sure the bird had been immobilized. He backed away, breathing hard and dusting his hands. A pair of litter bearers belatedly stepped between their master and the commotion that had been a threat moments before.
"That's all right," Vonones muttered, thankful that he was still good enough to make such bodyguards superfluous. "That's all right." He felt better for the incident. It had given him an opportunity to exorcise the helpless terror caused by the lizard-ape's escape. It was uncertainty that melted a man's nerves, not simply danger. It was a relief to return to familiar tasks and familiar dangers. He turned to where his men were seeing to the injured slave's wounds. More expense. . . .
The main gate of the compound began to swing open. The deputy manager ran toward it, shouting. Vonones himself snarled toward the gatekeepers: "Not while we're unloading a shipment, damn you! I'll have you all fed to the crocodiles if so much as a rabbit escapes!"
A column of horsemen in glittering armor rode through the gateway four abreast. The deputy dodged out of their way, but the newcomers made no attempt on their part to avoid him.
There were twenty horsemen in the troop. All but their tribune were huge men whose hair was red or blond where it spilled from beneath their helmets. They dismounted. Every fourth man acted as horseholder while the remainder kept their hands on their weapons.
The officer in charge—a tribune named Lacerta whom Vonones knew by reputation—wore a breastplate of gilded bronze. In low relief upon it was molded a scene of nymphs yearning upward toward the figure of Jupiter enthroned. "You," said Lacerta, pointing toward Vonones. "Do you speak Latin, boy? Go fetch the merchant Vonones."
"I speak Latin," said Vonones. He drew himself to his full height, although he was even then no taller than the Italian-born tribune. Vonones was twice the tribune's age as well; boy was purely from the assumption that the man in leggings and a coarse tunic had to be a slave. At that, an aristocrat like Lacerta might have used the same form of address for a man whom he knew to be the compound's owner. "And I am Gaius Claudius Vonones." He wiped his damp hands on his thighs.
"You're wanted," Lacerta said with a quick one-fingered gesture over his shoulder and out the gate. He frowned. "Get a horse, will you? You'll slow us up too much if we have to tie you to one of the saddles and let you run."
The troop of horsemen would have silenced a human crowd, but it had little effect on the compound's normal cacophony. Even the handlers were forced back to their normal duties by the nervous uproar of the beasts. Three men carried the blood-splashed ostrich to the corral and flung it inside with its fellows. The deputy manager and his clerks hovered between a desire to hear what was going on and a well-founded fear of being noticed. The Germanic horsemen glared about them with pale eyes and disdain for what they saw.
"I am a Roman citizen!" Vonones blurted. He managed to keep his back straight when he heard Lacerta's command, but his voice shook. He was imagining himself alone on an island. Every time his heart beat, the surf washed the shore a little higher.
"A Roman citizen, merchant?" the tribune said in an amused tone. He gestured daintily toward the big men he commanded. "These aren't, you know. And since the one whose orders we obey is divine, I don't suppose he's going to be much swayed by the fact that you became a Roman citizen when your master struck off your chains."
Amusement hardened into a sneer as frigid as the eyes of the armored Germans. "Don't try my patience, freedman. You've the count of ten to get a horse."
Lacerta leaned slightly forward and tapped
the god enthroned on his breastplate. "Our lord Domitian told me to bring you alive. But I'm not sure that he'd really care."
Chapter Six
Lycon's bedroom had a window on the light shaft of the apartment house, but it faced west and was six stories beneath the roofline. Lycon stretched, letting his fingers play in the pool of sunlight that had finally reached the bed. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he was used to night work and its corollary, sleeping by day. As he grew older, he required increasingly longer periods of recuperation—and a day and a night like the recent chase would have wrung anyone to exhaustion.
The door was closed, but Zoe must have heard the bronze bed creaking as her husband stretched himself on it, and she looked in to see if Lycon were awake. She was nursing their youngest, Glauce, who at three months of age was older than either of the couple's three previous daughters had lived to be—or two of the boys, for that matter. Still, they had two sons to survive infancy—Perses, who could be heard bouncing his ball in the next room, and Alexandros, who was as fine a young lad as a father could wish to have.
"Well, don't hang back there, Zoe," Lycon said, bleary-eyed. He thumped the bed beside him. "Come, let's have a look at you and our little one." Glauce had been born during his absence, and the beastcatcher had forgotten her name for the moment.
Zoe flashed a distracted smile as she lay down beside him. There was an aura of nervousness about her, and she half-heartedly returned Lycon's kiss. Now that he was sober enough to recall it, Lycon realized that Zoe had also been acting oddly last night when he arrived home after stopping over in Ostia to reminisce and forget recent events with Vulpes and a few cronies. He continued to smile, while his belly tightened at the suspicion that Zoe might have taken a lover during his constant absences. If she had, he could not blame her—but neither would he forgive her.