by Rob Steiner
“Are the Terran strain coming to destroy us?” The woman's voice and the whispers of the infectees sounded fearful.
“They do not know you are here,” Cordus said. “They think they destroyed you already.”
“Yet you are here,” the woman said. “They will find us soon. We are all that is left. We have been reduced to this. To feed on our own kind. It has driven us mad.”
“You were already mad,” Cordus said. There was no sarcasm in his voice, only sadness at stating a simple, heartbreaking fact. “You were incompatible with humanity. You drove them to…this.”
The woman stared at Cordus. “Perhaps we erred. That is irrelevant. We do not want to die.” The woman cocked her head. Then her voice, and the whispers of the infectees, said, “We cannot let you tell the Terrans we are here. We cannot let you leave this cavern.”
51
Lepidus and Appius methodically checked each door and room in the vaults with the heat sensors built into their helmets. They found nothing. Their infrared filters let them go through the corridor without lights to announce their presence. When they met no resistance, Lepidus began to wonder if the Liberti had somehow left the vaults through a different exit.
Then the howling began.
Lepidus and Appius trotted down the corridor toward the howling as fast as their EVA suits allowed. Lepidus had read intelligence reports on Cariosa and knew they were strong for people with a virus that destroyed their humanity. The chilling shrieks could not have come from the throats of sane humans. Lepidus could not fathom why the gods would curse people with such an affliction. But then, he reminded himself, the gods did many things he could not fathom. It was hubris and blasphemy to assume he knew how to run the universe better than the gods.
Lepidus and Appius reached a door with a stairwell beyond. Lepidus aimed his pulse rifle down the stairs, but did not see any targets. The shrieks were definitely louder and coming from the bottom of the stairwell. Lights flickered from the bottom; he turned off his helmet's infrared filter to see their varied colors.
After switching his infrared filter back on, he descended the stairs while holding his rifle in a firing position. Appius didn't say a word and followed Lepidus with the same posture. If he feared what made the inhuman screams, he did not show it. Lepidus nodded in satisfaction. The screams would test any man's faith in the gods and obedience to his commander. Appius was performing admirably.
They had descended two flights when the screaming stopped. Lepidus paused and then raised his hand to stop Appius. The screaming was a horrid, animalistic cacophony moments ago, but had ceased as if switched off. Lepidus frowned. Like any soldier, he hated unknowns, and this whole situation stank of unknown.
Lepidus listened for a moment, turning his external audio up. He still heard the soft hiss of his air filtration system. With a flick of his eyes, he filtered out the hissing and enhanced the sounds coming from down the stairs.
Voices, accompanied by what sounded like whispering.
Lepidus motioned Appius forward.
Kaeso stared at the emaciated woman, his fists clenching, waiting for the screams and attacks to begin again. He glanced at Lucia, who continued aiming at the woman.
“We are not here to kill you,” Cordus told the woman. “We only want to copy your sacred archives.”
The woman cocked her head, as if listening to someone behind her, but no sound came from the animated corpses. “Why?” she asked, along with the Cariosa whispers.
“We want to hurt the Terran strain,” Cordus said. “This information will prove the Consul and Collegia Pontificis are like golems controlled by the Terran strain. You know how Roman culture worships the Consul and Collegia. You know that if the Roman people knew this, things would go badly for the Terran strain.”
The woman cocked her head again. “The Roman people will not believe. They are too conditioned to believe what the Consul and Collegia tell them. Our hosts built this archive to convince the leaders of this world, and they could not even do that. Our strain is Keeper of the Archive. We failed in our mission. The Roman people will not believe.”
“Enough will believe. Things may not change tomorrow, but they will change. It may take months or years, but the truth will spread, and not even the Consul or Collegia will stop it.”
The woman stared at Cordus. “You want to destroy my species. You fear us.”
“No,” he said, “we just want to be free to make our own decisions, to make our own mistakes. We do not want to be drawn into your wars. Your own archives show what happens to your hosts. I do not want that for my people.”
“My species cannot survive without hosts,” she said, Cariosa whispers echoing her words. “These bodies will soon fail. We need new hosts.”
“Your strain is not compatible with humans,” Cordus said. “You can survive in them for a while, but their physiology will eventually reject you. Look at what has become of you.”
“We need new hosts,” the woman repeated. The longing in her voice—the voices of all the Cariosa—chilled Kaeso. They all stared at him, Lucia, and Cordus with ravenous, feral eyes.
Kaeso was impressed with Cordus’s poise while arguing with a creature from a nightmare, but he saw the debate as pointless. The Muses and humans wanted diametrically different things: Muses wanted humans to be hosts, but humans didn’t want that. Compromise was impossible.
But the conversation was useful so long as it kept the Cariosa busy while the files uploaded, and saved pulse charges for when they needed to blast their way back to Caduceus.
Kaeso glanced at the timer counting down the minutes until the data uploaded to Caduceus.
Keep them talking five more minutes, kid.
The woman’s eyes widened, and she bared her rotting teeth in an inhuman scream. The Cariosa around her screamed, and they resumed their attempts to cross the support beam.
Cac!
“What happened?” Lucia yelled, then fired several pulse shots at the Cariosa on the beam.
Kaeso turned to Cordus, but the boy shook his head. He glanced at the timer on the terminal. Three minutes.
He looked at the infected woman again. She gathered herself up and leaped toward him, along with other Cariosa. But like the others, she fell far short, and her body shattered on the sleeper cribs and Cariosa bodies below. At this rate, Kaeso thought, he wouldn’t need to blast his way through the Cariosa to escape. They’d just kill themselves trying that jump.
He was starting to feel better about their chances when he saw flashes from the door a hundred paces behind the Cariosa.
Pulse flashes. The Romans were coming through the door.
52
Lepidus and Appius crept down the last flight of stairs to a half-open door at the bottom. Through the door, several emaciated people stood motionless and staring off to the right. Each whispered words to one side of a conversation. Lepidus could not hear the other voices clearly, but he determined they came from the right. Beyond them, a vast cavern was alit with flickering lights.
Cariosa. How did they survive the bombardment and irradiation? Have they been living down here for two years? There must be a source of food and water—a meager source, judging by their appearance. It must lie beyond the door in the cavern.
The Consul's voice crackled in his ear. “Lepidus, have you found my son?”
Lepidus flicked his com to silent. Sensors pressed against his throat above his vocal chords, then he whispered, “Not yet, my lord. But I have visual confirmation of Cariosa.”
The Consul paused. “That is impossible.”
“I see them right now, my lord. They’re ragged and starving, but they have the hairless bodies and swollen necks.”
The Consul’s voice rose an octave and lost its usual serenity. “I was told the planet had been irradiated. That nothing could live, not even that damned virus!”
The Consul’s uncharacteristic anger surprised Lepidus. After a startled pause, Lepidus said, “I cannot speak to that, my l
ord. All I can tell you is what I see.”
“Lepidus,” the Consul growled, “you will find my son within thirty minutes. Because in thirty minutes, I am going to drop half my antimatter bombs on your location. I will rid the universe of the Cariosus, because my generals are too incompetent to do it for me.”
“My lord—”
“Thirty minutes, Lepidus.”
The channel broke, leaving Lepidus confused and frustrated. The Consul's decision made no sense. Why was he so quick to shatter a continent without giving Lepidus a chance to find the boy? If Cordus was a traitor, death was a necessary punishment. But what if he wasn't and Lepidus could not find him in time?
Then it is the will of the gods that he should die, Lepidus told his faithless doubts.
He motioned Appius forward and tightened his grip on his pulse rifle.
When he descended the last stairs, he saw what made the flickering lights. It was a massive holographic globe in the cavern’s center with a running video inside. The video’s clarity was stunning in its three dimensions and color, and Lepidus marveled at how such a projector could have run unattended so long.
Then an image stopped him.
Ancient Roma burned. He could make out the walls crumbling under the blasts of old gunpowder cannons. Fires raged on the Capitoline Hill. The Senate House and the old Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus lay in ruins.
The view swerved to cheering legions, all wearing the bronze-colored armor and helms from the days of Marcus Antonius's ascension. They waved muskets in the air. Lepidus realized he viewed these scenes through the eyes of another person. The person turned his gaze back to Roma and spurred his horse toward the broken gates. Streams of dirty refugees flooded from the burning city, hollow-eyed and fearful, but the man ignored them. While the refugees looked on him in fear, the soldiers along the roadside cheered him. The man waved as he passed.
The perspective shifted, and the man now stood in front of a younger man dressed in the purple and gold robes of the Consul. But Lepidus knew this man was no Consul, and he instantly recognized him as Octavian Caesar. Octavian spoke soundless words to the man whose perspective Lepidus shared, but then the man's hands shot toward Octavian's throat. Octavian struggled against the powerful grip, kicking and beating at the man’s arms. His face turned blue, his eyes bulged, his tongue flailed until he was still, his sightless eyes staring past the man who killed him.
It was the historic assassination of Octavian Caesar by Marcus Antonius. Why was this re-enactment playing here? And from the eyes of Marcus Antonius?
More images flashed by from the same perspective. Marcus Antonius performed a strange ritual on what looked like pontiffs dressed in black robes, though Lepidus could not be sure considering they dressed in dark blue now. They were in a candle-lit room with walls covered in Egyptian hieroglyphs, while a pontiff sat in an old wooden chair, his arms and legs strapped down.
It was the same set-up as the room where the Consul interrogated Marcia Licinius Ocella.
Marcus Antonius cut his wrist. Blood spilled into a bronze bowl held by a priest in Egyptian accoutrements. He then dipped the knife in the blood, turned to the pontiff, and plunged the knife into the pontiff's chest. The pontiff gasped, then his eyes glazed and his head slumped down. The images shifted, and Antonius performed the same procedure on another pontiff, and then another. He stabbed nine altogether.
The scene shifted. The nine pontiffs Antonius had stabbed, all alive and wearing the same serene expressions as today’s pontiffs, stood in the hieroglyph chamber dipping scrolls into large bowls of blood. After the scrolls were soaked through, they laid the scrolls out flat to dry. The scene shifted again, and the pontiffs wrote on the dark red scrolls with a stylus and white paint.
Now Marcus Antonious and the pontiffs stood in the Forum reading the scrolls. Lepidus recognized the ritual. It was a Reading of a Missive of the Gods. It was how Roma gained the technology and wisdom that made it great. After the Consul and the Collegia Pontificum spent days in prayer, the gods would convey their wisdom on the scrolls, and then the Collegia and the Consul would read the Missives to the people.
But the scrolls only turned red when the gods touched them, and the “ink” was written by the finger of a god.
Not the Consul or the Collegia.
This hologram was some blasphemous re-enactment. Lepidus ground his teeth. Cariosa were insane, but he had no idea they were so depraved they would create a video insinuating the most sacred Roman ritual was a lie.
Lepidus decided he would facilitate the meeting of these Cariosa with the gods. Let the gods punish their souls for this blasphemy.
“We're going in,” he whispered in his com to Appius. “You clear the left, I'll clear the right.”
“Acknowledged,” Appius whispered back.
Lepidus centered his pulse rifle's targeting laser on the nearest Cariosa head and fired. The man's head exploded in a spray of blood and tissue. Lepidus acquired a new target and fired. Other Cariosa fell from Appius's fire. Lepidus charged forward.
He stepped through the door, turned to his right, and faced a screaming Cariosa horde. With a flick of his eyes on his helmet display, he switched his rifle to fragmentation shot, and blasted away at the Cariosa leaping at him. Behind him, Appius's rifle destroyed the Cariosa coming up the stairs from the cavern.
Lepidus never took pleasure in killing. But this time he gave a savage roar as he blew apart the Cariosa. These inhuman savages had defiled Roma's most sacred ritual with their mockery of the Missive. It was the gods who gave Roma her wisdom and guided her people to greatness. These Cariosa bastards had no idea what faith was or what it was like to fight for a cause greater than themselves.
Cariosa came at him, one after the other. Lepidus destroyed them all. He mowed them down, his point-blank fragmentation shots cutting them in half. Legless torsos grabbed at him with bloody hands as he advanced, but he gave them savage kicks that sent them off the walkway and into the cavern below. He was an instrument of the gods, like the rifle in his hands. He would kill them all for their blasphemy.
He came to a section of the walkway that had fallen way. There were no more Cariosa in front of him. At least none standing. The walkway was covered in the grisly remains of Cariosa ripped to shreds by his fragmentation shells. He was out of breath, and sweat trickled down his forehead. He only now realized he’d been screaming the whole time.
He whirled around and saw Appius methodically killing Cariosa who continued to rush up the stairs towards them. Only a couple dozen more Cariosa came up in frenzied madness. Beyond them were no more.
Appius can handle the rest, he thought.
Lepidus calmed his racing heart. He felt ashamed. Not at the Cariosa massacre, but at his loss of control. He was surprised that horrible, blasphemous video affected him so. He had not lost control like that in years.
Not since the day he killed his wife.
After he shot her, he had retreated to his quarters and broke down into rage-filled sobs. He had prayed to the gods; asked them why. No answer came that day. It was the closest Lepidus ever got to losing his faith. But after a fitful sleep, Lepidus awoke the next morning at peace. The gods had taken away the pain and left in its place a devotion to them he never had before the battle. He realized he never would have found such faith had the gods not decreed the decimation through their Missive. It was a harsh punishment, but a necessary one, for it enabled Lepidus to do all the things for Roma’s glory that he never would have done had he refused the order.
“Drop your weapon, Praetorian.”
Lepidus turned slowly toward the broken walkway and the control station twenty paces beyond. He’d been so focused on slaughtering the Cariosa that he never noticed the people in EVA suits crouching behind the control station panels. Each panel was pockmarked from Lepidus's fragmentation blasts. Someone in an EVA suit aimed a pulse rifle aimed at Lepidus. It was Caduceus’s pilot.
“Appius, get up here,” Lepidus whispe
red, then he smiled and turned his voice to external audio. “Lucia. Is the Consular Heir with you?”
“Drop the weapon or I drop you, Praetorian.”
“I think you would have dropped me by know if you really—”
Lucia's rifle flashed. A charge slammed into Lepidus's helmet, knocking his head backward. Lepidus fell into the soft, wet remains of the Cariosa he'd just slaughtered. The shot stunned him. When he regained his senses, he glanced at the streak on his helmet where the charge hit. The armored faceplate held.
Before he could stand, a fragmentation blast hit the control station, and Lucia ducked behind the panels. Appius rushed up to Lepidus and tried to help him up, but Lepidus waved him off, grabbed the pulse rifle he dropped, and stood on his own.
He stooped to one knee and aimed at the control panel, waiting for Lucia or anybody else to dare look around the corner.
“I think it is you who will drop your weapon, Lucia,” Lepidus said.
53
Kaeso blinked away the stinging sweat in his eyes. While crawling along the support girders beneath the walkway, he clenched his teeth to stifle his grunts of effort. He figured he was twenty paces behind Lepidus and his backup. Any closer and they’d hear him climb onto the walkway behind them, but any farther and he risked giving himself away when he approached from behind. And he wouldn’t have the energy to attack after the brutal hand-over-hand crawl.
As soon as Lepidus started shooting near the door, Kaeso quickly explained his plan to both Lucia and Cordus. Afterwards, he lowered himself over the side of the walkway and onto the support girders beneath. They were set diagonally every six feet, one end bolted to the cavern wall and the other to the walkway’s outer edge above. To get from one girder to the next, Kaeso had to crawl hand over hand along the I-beams beneath the walkway. It was a short hand over hand crawl, and Kaeso avoided looking down at the infectee bodies on the cavern floor. He made the crawl six times before reaching the last support girder. His forearms and hands trembled with the effort.