The Centurion's Empire

by Sean McMullen

  Vitellan wondered if he had met her before. Something about her was comfortingly familiar, yet something else was unsettling as well. She moved too easily, she was too confident. Most of the others left after a few minutes, but the woman and one physician remained behind with a guard.

  She was speaking with the physician when she pointed to the guard and seemed to rub at her finger. Something made a loud, muffled clack. A wet, red patch appeared at the center of the man's sternum. His eyes bulged with what might have been horror or disbelief, had he not already been dead from shock. As the physician gaped in horror she struck his neck with the edge of her hand and he collapsed immediately.

  The woman scooped up the guard's fallen gonne and clipped something to the handle, then she called to the other guard. Her voice was level, with no alarm at all. As he appeared she fired at his head. It disintegrated with a sound like a heavy book being dropped, and his body collapsed across that of the physician. The girl vanished from Vitellan's field of view. There was a soft sputtering outside the ward.

  She returned, now wearing a white coat. He noticed that two fingers of her left hand were bleeding where the nails had been.

  "Do as I say when I release you," she whispered in Latin. It was odd, awkward Latin, but Latin nevertheless.

  "Are you with Jacque Bonhomme and his followers?" asked Vitellan.

  "No, I'm here from Durvas, your village. Will you do as I say?" she demanded.

  "Yes, yes."

  She pointed a gonne at a box on a trolley by the wall, and it burst into shards and smoke from the stuttering fire. The buckles of Vitellan's straps popped open at once. He felt stiff and fatigued as he sat up, but his rescuer touched a rod to both of his legs. It hissed sharply, and the skin tingled coldly where it had been. The leaden feeling in his muscles melted away within moments.

  "A miracle wand!" he exclaimed softly.

  She shook her head. "A physician's tool. The, ah, philter in it is not really good for you but we're desperate. You're-probably loaded with implants."

  "Implants?"

  "Mechanisms, engines within your body that call to your enemies through false hairs. Never mind, we'll scrub you when we get out. Quickly, get into that physician's clothes—yes I know he's a mess. Just do it!" She rolled the dead guard off the physician. Beneath his blood-spattered white coat the man was wearing creaseless checked trousers and a blue striped shirt. His shoes were slightly large for Vitellan, but the woman packed soft paper inside for a tight fit. She was quick and efficient, as if she might have done such a thing every day.

  "My name is Lucel Hunter. If we live through the next ten minutes I'll tell you more. Come, do exactly as I say and trust me."

  She pressed another tube against his skin. Like the others it hissed, leaving a cold, tingling sensation. "What is that?"

  "A disease to counter, ah, a sleeping potion. Like I said, trust me."

  Out in the corridor were three more bodies. Lucel stripped a coat from one. There was a neat red spot between his eyes.

  "No holes, no blood, close enough fit. Put it on and button up to hide that blood on the shirt—no, buttons work like this."

  Vitellan glanced about fearfully. "I gleaned from their strange French that unseen eyes watch me."

  "The unseen eyes have been blinded for a few minutes. I am not alone in this rescue, I have friends who are busy in other rooms."

  They had descended three floors by what Lucel called fire stairs when something like a huge bull began to bellow.

  "That's an alarm—something like a trumpet. One of my agents in the security center has frozen the doors to your ward, so the guards will be busy trying to break in there for at least another minute."

  "Frozen them? With ice?"

  "Not ice, and my agent's not human either."

  The fire doors were still free as they emerged into the foyer. Lucel had the gonne under her coat.

  "Nobody can leave," a guard ordered as they approached the entrance. The words were intelligible to Vitellan, but only just. Through vast glass walls he could see that it was night outside, although lamps on thin, high pillars blazed with a wondrous intensity.

  "What is wrong, Monsieur?" asked Lucel. "What is the alarm? We have to go—"

  "Just stay here, Madame."

  She motioned Vitellan to stand to one side with her, and as the guard turned away she pointed her left thumb at the sliding door and squeezed with the fingers of her free hand. There was another loud clack, followed by a blast like a thunderclap as the door shattered. Lucel led him crunching through crumbly glass, spraying death from her gonne into the nearby guards. As they ran out into the night several of the bystanders produced gonnes of their own and opened fire.

  "This way, down that street, stay beside me and keep your head down."

  The air was full of sharp crackles and angry wasps seemed to buzz all around them as they ran. People screamed and flung themselves to the ground as Vitellan and Lucel left the square in front of the hospital. They dashed down progressively darker, narrow streets until she suddenly pushed him through a door. Two men began to strip Vitellan's clothes off. Something roared like a lion, and the room swayed and began to move.

  A huge waggon drawn by lions, Vitellan told himself, but it was probably nothing strange for this century. He was given new clothes and helped to dress in the strange fashions with even stranger fasteners. Over to one side Lucel was stripping the skin of her face away. His senses overloaded beyond bearing, Vitellan vomited up his soup.

  "Give him a scan and an EMP burst to kill anything obvious," Lucel told the others. "The rest can wait." She switched back to Latin. "Vitellan, we are breaking your invisible chains, but we both need new faces as well. Did you see me strip my face off just now?"

  "Yes, amazing, I—"

  "And you and I are getting new faces right away. Just do as you're told, and don't struggle." One of the men held up something like pink baker's dough on a piece of cloth. The face felt like a scalding wet towel being pressed against his skin, and the itching was almost unbearable as it cooled. The men touched up rough edges as the enclosed waggon lurched to a stop and the lions became quiet. The skin beneath the mask still felt numb and heavy, and itched unbearably at the edges.

  "Don't touch!" snapped Lucel as his hand came up. "A good face, but it's still soft and easily marred. You'll only have it for an hour. We are at a place called the Gare du Nord, it's a type of port for ships that sail on land." At the Gare du Nord they walked past signs that included the words est, chemine de levitation magnetique de l'est, and maglev eastern lines, but the words were meaningless to Vitellan. In spite of this the place was more familiar to him than anything that he had seen for the past ten of his waking years. The Rome he had last seen in 79 a.d. was a bustling, crowded jumble of people like this, although the smells and sounds here were sharp, harsh and alien. Numerals and words glowed from murals—and the face of Jacque Bonhomme stared triumphantly down from amazingly uniform rows of portraits!

  "The Luministe guards are already watching the lines going west," Lucel said in Latin, "but we're taking a line east."

  "Lines?"

  " 'Lines of Magnetic Levitation to the East' is the best translation that I can manage. Magnetic means ... oh never mind, they're sort of roads."

  "Roads? What is this place?"

  "Think of it as a port for now."

  "Roads from a port? I don't understand. What city is this?"

  "When you were born it was Lutetia, founded by the Parisii tribe and then taken over by Rome. It is now called Paris."

  "Paris ... I passed within sight of Paris in the late spring. * It was nothing like this." Lucel strode on for a moment, but a puzzled expression showed through the amazingly flexible skin of her mask.

  "What was it like when you last saw it?" she asked.

  "Much smaller, and there were fewer people about. The Black Death and the wars with England had killed many."

  "What year was that?"

 
"The Christian year of 1358. Nothing is as it was then. I must have slept five or six thousand years for changes like this to have happened."

  Lucel shook her head as she produced what she called passport cards from her shoulder bag. She talked to a woman behind a counter, then told Vitellan to look into a distorting mirror for a moment. The woman waved them on, and Lucel led him down what seemed to be long piers.

  Vitellan kept reminding himself that this was a port. He tried not to gaze at anything for too long, everything was meant to be commonplace to him. They entered a part of a pier that was almost deserted, and hurried along to an opening in a long, gleaming white and blue building with that same word est painted on its side. They entered a door with curved corners, and Lucel hurried her charge along a narrow corridor with a glowing roof and square windows. She guided him through yet another door, and it slid shut behind them with a soft hiss.

  The room was small, but opulently fitted with cushioned seats of something like green kid leather, and there were polished metal fittings that Vitellan did not recognize. A middle-aged man sat waiting inside. As Lucel flopped onto a seat, Vitellan realized that a lamp-studded landscape of amazingly regular and uniform buildings was moving past beyond the window. Each building blazed with light, the very sky was swamped by the light and the stars were not visible.

  "Cutting it fine, Lucel."

  "We're here and we're breathing. That's all that matters." "The cabin's secure."

  "Well, so the fuck it ought to be. Now get a webcap onto Vitellan here. He's coped with this century pretty well so far, but he'll need an imprint suite if he's going to get much further without drawing attention." She turned to the Roman and spoke in Latin.

  "Vitellan, this man is George Norton."

  "I am grateful for your help," Vitellan said, dragging his eyes away from the lights beyond the window.

  "How are you finding all this?" Norton asked in passable Latin, his face all neutral speculation. "You were last awake during the Hundred Years War, I believe. Have you had any imprints yet?"

  "Imprints?"

  "Memories added to your mind to help you learn a skill or language."

  "Memories of a language? I don't understand."

  Lucel sighed. "It's like sex, you can't really understand it until you've experienced it." She turned back to Norton.

  "He was pretty bewildered when I took him through the fighting."

  She ran her finger along a strip below the window and it clouded into a bright milky white. As she drew her gloves off Vitellan saw that the thumb and two fingers of her left hand were bloody pulp where the nails should have been.

  "Just talk, I need to disarm," she said.

  Norton and Vitellan remained silent as Lucel pressed her right thumb from the sides. The scarlet nail fell off onto an open handkerchief. "That's the heavy one," she said with relief. She repeated the process with each of the nails on her fingers.

  "Those things are like little catapults, Vitellan," Norton explained.

  "More like tiny bombards, or even hand-gonnes," observed Vitellan.

  "Gonnes—guns! So, you know guns."

  "That's right," said Lucel. "The first gunpowder weapons were being used by 1358. Vitellan, these false nails of mine can't be detected by, ah, the guards and their machines, but it hurts to shoot them, as you can see." Norton took something from a leather bag. "Peppare Gas Action TR," he said as he tossed the weapon onto the seat beside Lucel. "It won't hurt so much to use it."

  Lucel went on cleaning and dressing her injured fingers. Vitellan reached over to the gun.

  "Leave it," snapped Norton, already pointing another snubnose gun at his head. Vitellan turned and stared at what to him was an incongruously small weapon. Lucel stretched out her leg and flicked the tip of her toe into Norton's wrist. The gun fell as he yelped with pain.

  "It's paralysed," he gasped, convulsively rubbing his right hand.

  "Pinched nerve. Give it a few minutes, you'll be fine." Norton glared at her. "He went for your gun." "His move was just curiosity. You acted like the dangerous amateur that you are." "But—"

  "Pick it up, Vitellan. It can't shoot unless a safety catch is released."

  The Roman turned the gun over in his hands. Norton massaged his wrist. "Get the webcap ready for him," Lucel ordered. "I can hardly use my hand."

  "Well try! All this strange tech must be driving him crazy."

  Norton began to unpack luridly colored cables and slick black boxes with rounded edges from his bag.

  "A history lesson may help," Lucel said as she stretched a skin-simulation dressing over her thumb. "This is Anno Domini 2028, Vitellan. It's not even seven centuries since you were last frozen."

  "But the changes—"

  "Yes, I know. A couple of hundred years after you were last awake the world started to change more rapidly than anyone could have imagined. At first people concentrated on getting back to the level of your Roman Empire and the earlier Greek states, then it went way, way further. The most incredible machines and sciences were developed."

  "Like this thing we are on? It's like a wagon*the size of a ship that moves like lightning."

  "That's a good description, amazing for someone straight out of the fourteenth century. You're very adaptable, you know. I thought you might see all of this as magic and miracles."

  "At first I was tempted to think that," Vitellan admitted, then he raised a hand to his temple as if he had just remembered something important. "Has Rome—that is, does Constantinople still stand?"

  "Constantinople?" echoed Norton.

  "The Byzantine Empire's capital," explained Lucel. "In a way it continued Roman rule after Rome itself fell. I'm sorry, Vitellan, it fell to the cannons of an Islamic army in 1453."

  Vitellan shook his head and took fast, deep breaths to stifle the emotions welling up in him. Rome's continuity had finally been snuffed out 95 years into his future of yesterday, and 575 years back in his past of today. For him the tragedy was real and sharp, yet it seemed such a foolish thing to grieve about.

  "Where are we going?" he asked to distract himself.

  "A city called Moscow. After that, we are booked for Japan."

  "Moscow. Ah yes, a long way to the northeast. Is it still threatened by the Tartars and Mongols?"

  "Not for a long time. We'll be there in a few hours."

  "Hours! I was told that the journey takes months. What principle moves this land-ship?"

  "Ah, that's a tricky one. It's the principle that makes lode-stone align itself to the north."

  "Lodestone?" wondered Vitellan wearily. "How will I ever comprehend all this? It will take as many years as I have left to live."

  "Not years, only days," Norton said, flexing his fingers. "Our people will, ah, change your brain so that you can understand everything that's going on. We'll start as soon as you're asleep."

  "I doubt that I could sleep for many hours."

  "No problem," said Norton, touching a tube to his neck. There was a sjiarp hiss, then Vitellan slumped limp in his seat. Vitellan slept as the maglev train continued its ice-smooth dash northeast. Norton spread a black webcap wide with splayed fingers and fitted it over the Roman's head. The webcap was linked to an ALD tutor. He patched the leads from the language module to interface a larger metal box with gray plastic casing. After taping the edges of the webcap to Vitellan's skin he methodically pushed several dozen elec-trostaples into his scalp. He plugged the cable from the webcap into the gray box and checked the readings that flashed up on a small inset screen. Five staples needed reattaching, then the screen returned an array of options in green lettering. He keyed English for Tourists, Moscow

  Stopover, and a customized option named Modern Streetwise, all from Microsoft.

  "That's it, Lucel, by Moscow he'll have enough savvy to pass immigration," said Norton. Lucel broke the seal on a plastic pack. "He'll need to profile as an English tourist: face, eyes, and fingerprints. He also needs the implants scrubbed out of his body as w
ell if we're to get to Moscow at all."

  "That's a go, I'm ready."

  Norton used a hypodermic syringe to inject nano-homers to search Vitellan's body for the pulse-damaged implants and any others that had survived. It would take half an hour for the homers to report. He now held Vitellan's eyes open while Lucel swabbed them with a preparator before bonding on holographic retinal mask overlays. His facial mask peeled off like something out of a surrealist nightmare, and Lucel stuffed it into a jar of solvent where it slowly dissolved while she unfolded a new mask.

  Norton's nano-homers began to report on the implants to which they had bonded. Nine electronic implants had been disabled by the EMP coil back in Paris, but another fourteen of the bio-mech type were detected by the homers while Vitellan's new face and fingerprints were being attached. Getting them out would be slow work. Twenty-three injections with a wide-bore needle and micro-grapple would take another two hours. Each implant extracted went into a woven monomolecular matrix case, and they varied in size from coffee bean to pinhead.