The Centurion's Empire

by Sean McMullen

  Lucel began with the fourteen bio-mechs first, as they were still active. While dropping number eleven into the case Lucel noted that two and five had dissolved and were now just a murky color in the solution.

  "Probably just something to slow him down," Norton speculated. Lucel shrugged and began probing for number twelve, which was deep inside the left ear.

  "Tricky, tricky," she muttered as she worked.

  "We should be doing scans on each of the implants," Norton said as he held up the case and examined the extracted implants and their mock-hair antennas.

  "Then you do it. Away from here."

  The case jumped from his hands with a dull thud and fell to the floor of the compartment. Norton backed into a corner as Lucel checked a display.

  "Implant ten has exploded," Lucel said as she looked down at the case.

  She turned back to Vitellan. Norton remained huddled in a corner.

  "The chemicals from two and five would have stopped the catalytic timer on the explosive in ten," he said in a thin, detached voice. "We'd isolated it, so pow! How did you know to take it out before these last three?"

  "Sheer luck."

  "Fucking hell!" he exclaimed, his face looking like wet chalk. "Uncontained it would have killed all three of us." Barely breathing, Norton stared at the woven filament case on the floor. One internal cell was blackened from containing the blast.

  "Get it together, Norton, I need help. The other implants could activate at any time." Number twelve came free just as the monitor reported that thirteen and fourteen were giving off a slight amount of heat.

  "Beacons," said Norton. "Now that implant ten has exploded the Luministes want to track down what's left of the body."

  "How long before they activate?"

  "Two minutes if they're the old fullerine interlock model, fifty seconds if they're the new Hoichi line."

  "Should I cut the antenna hairs?"

  "That may trigger an explosion, or a toxin release."

  "Then I need two minutes each," she said as she inserted the needle again. "Why do they take so long to switch on?

  Anyway, why didn't the EMP fry them back in Paris?"

  "When dormant they're only nonconductive organic goo and a catalytic timer. They're designed to survive an EMP, then generate organic conductors for their electronics later."

  "Damn, then they're going to go off. Fourteen will transmit for at least three minutes before I can pull it. We're in for another fight without any backup—"

  "Who's dropped the ball now, Lucel? Just stand back a moment." He held up an EMP generator and looked at .his watch.

  "Forty-seven, forty-eight..."

  As he fired the generator over each of two crosses on Vitellan's skin, there was a faint crackling sound. Lucel glanced at the display readings.

  'They absorbed energy. Something had generated conductors in there."

  "Then they were Hoichis," said Norton, perspiration dripping from his chin in spite of his smile. "I nailed them just as their electronics formed up into bioconductors. No need to panic."

  "No more than when implant ten blew. Okay, let's get the wreckage of thirteen and fourteen out, it might be toxic." Thirteen was just below the skin in the outer thigh, fourteen was in the small of his back. Lucel drew them out, working slowly, and visibly more relaxed. Norton locked implant fourteen in the case just before 8:00 p.m., Paris local time. He stared at a monitor as Lucel lay back for a moment's rest.

  "The sensor in the case shows that a couple of the other organics were beacon implants," said Norton. "They've just begun transmitting but the Faraday cage in the case is holding the signals. It's a wonder that the explosion didn't take them out. It's a good, tough case."

  "That's all the active implants," said Lucel with her eyes closed. "Do you still want to keep them for your techs to play with?"

  "I've lost interest," he said as he attached an acid flush to the dock on the side of the case. A twist to the right armed the trigger, a twist to the left released it. The implants dissolved as the acid seeped through the internal membranes. Lucel touched a dermal ram against her own skin, and was swept back to fully refreshed clarity. She removed the last nine disabled implants from Vitellan at a more leisurely pace, then began to pack up.

  "Moscow in fifty," Norton reported as Lucel armed another der-mal ram.

  "Then I'll take forty."

  Vitellan had memories of memories as he sprawled in black nothingness. Enclosed chariots without horses to move them, ships as big as fortresses, silvery birds the size of triremes, and images dancing in colored windows. There were people in their millions rushing about in cities that stretched away to infinity, heavily armored men bouncing like thistledown over gray deserts, and gleaming, angular demons that assembled strange chimeras of machines and jewelry. He awoke to what nobody had warned him about: the nausea and vertigo of postimprint therapy. Norton sat forward with a dermal ram as the Roman groaned.

  "You'll cheer up after this," he said as he touched it to his neck. "How do I sound to you?"

  "Like—like an echo."

  'That's the imprint working. Notice that we're both speaking in English?" "Ah ... yes."

  "Imprints are not long-term memory," Lucel said as she sat up and stretched. "At least not unless you use them a lot and have plenty of booster sessions. You have to speak, read, and think English when-ever you can for the next three months or most of it will fade. The same applies to the tech and culture in your imprint. Tell me now, what's this?"

  "A machine pistol," he replied after an imperceptibly short delay. "Short recoil, tumble-shot."

  "How does this train move?"

  "Magnetic levitation using superconductors."

  "What will you say at immigration in Moscow?"

  "I'm David Taylor, a British network analyst with Bristol Composites."

  "Why are you in Moscow?"

  "For a holiday. I shall be staying with my friends Hal Major and Carmen Bolez at the Holiday Tolstoy."

  "Good. Your imprint had some Cyrillic capability as well, to help you with signs and basic Russian. Just relax, nothing is going to be hard."

  Vitellan leaned back and closed his eyes. There was a feeling of weightlessness in his head, as if someone else was controlling his body. Americans landed on the moon in 1969, America was discovered by Columbus in 1492, and Columbus was an Italian working for Spain. Antarctica was discovered by the Roman navigator Decius. some time late in the fourth century, and a Roman time ship carried several dozen Romans, frozen, into the modern world of 2026. First Bonhomme, now more Romans, he thought. Not only was he of no value in this century, he was not even unique. The Romans had been the rightful owners of his freezing elixir,

  lat was for certain. He also noted that they had been dis-overed two years ago, but for some reason had not yet been tiawed.

  "I feel as if I'm falling headlong," he complained. "My iead is full of things that I've never learned."

  "The secret is not to think about what you know, just use lie memories as you need them. When you fought with a word did you stop to think what your instructor taught you lefore every move?"

  "That would be a good way to get killed."

  "Yes, and the same applies here. You have the skills you leed to pass immigration as David Taylor, British citizen. Trust me."

  loscow, Russia: 7 December 2028, Anno Domini

  t was just on midnight, local time, as the maglev glided ilowly through the outskirts of Moscow. Streetlights and se-:urity floods lit up angular, drab buildings and bare trees inder the season's early snow. Some walls were splashed vith gaudy letters and symbols.

  "What is Koshchei?" asked Vitellan, testing out his new mprint-based skills on a graffiti word in Cyrillic.

  "It's the name of one of the gang conglomerates, it marks i turf border," explained Lucel. "Koshchei the Deathless was a Russian folk-magician who could not be killed because his soul was hidden outside his body. The Koshchei gang has a similar organization, a loose,
adaptable structure hat is very hard for the police or its rivals to pin down. It was modeled on the old Internet, or so they say."

  "Internet? The Internet entry is ... very confusing."

  "The Internet was—look, don't worry about it for now. In a few hours you'll get a cyclopedia imprint with a lexicon overlay. You could go demented trying to collect words at random."

  The maglev track was built high above street level, reminding Vitellan of a Roman aqueduct. The suburbs were all yards, cranes, and warehouses near the maglev tracks, scored by streets and freeways sprinkled with light traffic. The cars seemed like dark bread rolls with gleaming eyes.

  In the distance were higher buildings whose facades were largely in darkness. Vitellan said they looked like the cheap, multistory housing of ancient Rome, and Lucel confirmed that some things had indeed not changed in two millennia. Several buildings were fire-blackened shells encrusted with snow.

  "Gang protection dispute," Lucel explained as they passed one.

  "Even more like Rome," Vitellan replied.

  Moscow immigration was slower than usual, but not difficult to get past. The fighting in Paris had caused a routine tightening in immigration inspections, but Lucel and Norton's weapons and bio-electronic kits had already been removed from the maglev's cabin by a contract agent from the Street Duma gang—who was also on the Vostok Maglev payroll. They booked into a Czarist-revival style hotel built in the late 1990s. Their weapons and other luggage were in the room when they arrived. Norton checked the room for monitors, cycling a portable scanner through all usable frequencies, then probed for passives. The reading was clean, but he still set up a standing-wave cloak to muffle their words to outsiders.

  "I'll just step out and take the ambience for an hour or so," said Norton as he packed his gear. "It's only ten p.m., Paris time."

  "Stay out of trouble," said Lucel, her eyes wide and face blank.

  "So who looks for trouble?" Vitellan lay down on the bed when he was gone. "Anything you want from the bags?" Lucel asked as she began to strip.

  "How could I?" said Vitellan, feeling desperately far from anything familiar. "I came with nothing."

  "Good, because you and I are not coming back here. Norton will have a holiday with two other tourists who will come back here with him. They'll have our faces and names." She pointed to a pile of clothing beside him on the bed.

  "Change into those, then we'll be out of here."

  "I don't understand."

  "There's a bit of nightlife near the maglev terminus. Lots

  THE LtNIUKlUIN i tnriic

  101

  if hyped-up passengers are always arriving with their body locks lagging."

  "No, no, I mean that we arrive at a hostelry—ah, hotel— o late at night, then we leave without a moment's rest. That eems to be suspicious."

  "We're on the run, Vitellan. When we eventually sleep, it vill be in an imprint clinic." Vitellan sat up. His eyes lingered on Lucel's taut body md unfamiliar underwear as he picked up his own change >f clothing. No woman that he had ever known had had a >ody like that. Strong, hard, somehow shameless. Warrior, issassin, and seductress all in one. Again he broke free and Irifted through desperation for some seconds. Less than a lay had passed since he had been revived, yet he had faced he world with three faces and three names already.

  "Vitellan!"

  His head jerked as if cracked like the end of a whip, ^ucel sat beside him on the bed, putting an arm around his shoulders and stroking his head.

  "Vitellan, just hold together and don't try to think about ill this. It will slow down, it really will. I promise."

  "You can't know what this all feels like," he moaned. "All [ have is fragments of understanding."

  "That's okay. The imprints you have are just customized from standard Microsoft cards that you can buy anywhere, they're only meant as something to hold on to. Soon we'll have some much fancier work done to your mind, and after that you should feel a lot happier. Come on, I'll take you to a couple of bars to blur our trace."

  "Bars—ah, taverns?"

  "You've got it. Just look tired and smile a lot, like a typical new arrival. I'll do the rest." The Lyakhov Clinic overlooked one of the many Gorbachev Parks scattered across Moscow. It was after 2:00 a.m. when Vitellan finally laid his head down to sleep in a small, antiseptic ward. Almost at once Lucel was shaking him awake. As he sat up he saw that winter sunshine was lighting up the room. He had slept like a dead man for many hours.

  "Breakfast time, Centurion. How have you liked your first day in the twenty-first century?" Vitellan shook his head and rubbed his eyes. "Better than an outbreak of Black Death, but almost as dangerous as fighting the Scots."

  "Go to the soccer games and you can still fight the Scots—no, don't ask, that was a joke." Vitellan and Lucel breakfasted in a dingy but pleasant cafeteria on the second floor of the clinic. At first she had to show him how to use forks to eat, as they were not in common use when he had been awake previously. The Roman gazed through the window at the snow-shrouded park as he ate. Cooking fires curled up from a huddle of pipe and plastic hovels near the middle of the park, and two figures swathed in rags and insulation patrolled the paths. They carried guns, he noted.

  "Rapid-fire guns, machine guns," said Vitellan, fishing the information out of his hastily applied imprint.

  "Ancient AK-47 Kalashnikovs," said Lucel, touching a telefocus on her dataspex. "They'd get a good price from any American tourist collector."

  "Are they gangs too?" asked Vitellan.

  "Those are snow bears, communes of homeless folk that squat in the parks during winter. The authorities tolerate them because they clean up the trash and patrol the parks. You find them everywhere—France, America, and Britain too."

  "A plebeian militia?"

  "If you like, yes. They chase off the vandals and perverts better than the police ever could. In return the police leave them alone."

  "For all your progress and inventions, the poor are still with you."

  "It's called the market economy. The Russians adopted it late last century, thinking that it would give them the good life on a platter. They got quite a surprise."

  Vitellan had been admitted to the clinic as Clint Padros, citizen of the USA and tourist. The imprint analyst did a detailed scan for gates and imprints, taking until late in the afternoon. Lucel was present the entire time, unobtrusive but

  tttentive. The sun was down by the time the analyst dismayed a suite of diagnostic graphs and figures on a vallscreen, and he whistled at the complexity of the imprint ayering on Vitellan's brain.

  "These are the coordinates and decrypted keywords of the jrimary imprint gates and data domains that I have identi-ied," the analyst explained as he gestured to one of the columns. "These in red are protected by blankout loops, so

  /ou're going to have to get separate keywords to open them ap in an unencrypted form. A deep scan will do that, but it would take time and a lot of money."

  "That's quite a lot for one head, but it's not unexpected," Lucel observed with a blank expression.

  "We could crack the second-layer encryption, but not in less than a week."

  "We can't wait. What's in the gated areas that you can restore easily?"

  "Some general living skills—not the sort of thing that people usually gate out. Gates were developed to blank out trauma from accidents, torture, rape, or obsessions. Who would want to blank out. . . look at this here: riding a motorcycle?"

  "Well, patch it back in, it may be useful. Anything else? Anything ... interesting?"

  "No bio-implants, but nearly two dozen have been removed within the past twenty-four hours. We have also mapped evidence of a good facial rebuild some years ago, about 2022."

  "How are his imprints?"

  "He is nearly all implants! The last brain I saw with even a thousandth as much layering belonged to a banker from Kiev. He had been imprinted all to hell and beyond to learn Japanese etiquette, language, and culture in a hurry.
He's still in therapy, as far as I know."

  "But Clint is fine?"

  "Fine is . . . optimistic. Functional, perhaps. Beyond that I would be wasting words."

  "What about stability? Are the imprints stable?"

  "Yes, amazingly so. He would have had to be under continuous imprint therapy for at least six years to get that sort of imprint bonding, though. This is the strangest profile that I have ever seen, it must have cost millions." The imprint analyst folded his arms and sat down in his chair. "I'll be honest. In my opinion he has been in some crazy experiment and you are trying to get some of the damage undone before the compensation hearing begins. Is there big money involved? We do quality work here, and are very discrete. Need I remind you in which country imprint technology was pioneered?"

  Lucel took a deep breath and raised her eyes to the ceiling, as if tempted.

  "Just do a stabilizing booster for those three little Microsoft imprints that he got a couple of days ago, then layer this full cyclopedia." She handed a card to him across the desk.

  The analyst put the card into a reader and brought the index up on the wallscreen. "Yes, no problem at all. Remember, though, if he wants to retain the cyclopedia for more than a fortnight he will have to take a course of stabilizing boosters from a portable unit every day for at least three months."

  "Not a worry. I'm very methodical about that sort of thing."

  "There is a risk from such haste," said the analyst, spreading his hands wide as if to give all the responsibility to Lucel.

  "Just do it, now. We'll stay the night here." She was staring at the wallscreen, scanning it with the sensors in her dataspex.

  Lucel slept in the clinic but left early the next morning while Vitellan was still in imprint treatment. He was un-wired by the time she returned in the afternoon with a hired van, paid for with a black market credit key. She drove him to a supermarket parking station only a few blocks away. Hidden in the back of the van she peeled their faces away, swabbed the skin with solvent, then bonded on new faces.

  "You are about to go flying," she said as they stepped out of the van.

  "Fly, as in an aircraft?"