The Centurion's Empire

by Sean McMullen

  "Boarding now," said Lucel, taking Vitellan by the arm.

  The moving walkway took them along a transparent tube that reared up to the side of a SOMS. Vitellan had an idea of the thing's size from his imprints, but not the experience of approaching something so large.

  "Will it never stop growing?" he whispered.

  "We're "going to America," Lucel explained curtly. "By this machine it's only an hour away," America. The man who had visited Hadrian's wall in 160 a.d., when it was a state-of-the-art military installation, began scanning the cyclopedic subset of his imprints.

  "By common usage, 'America' is a generic term for the USA," he said after a few moments.

  "Sorry, you're right. Try scanning Houston, Texas."

  They stepped off the walkway and were greeted by smiling flight attendants. Vitellan glimpsed faint brown streaks on the carbonfiber-ceramic skin of the SOMS, then they were inside a vast, low auditorium of golden brown carpet, dark green seats, and rows of blue overhead lockers. Brown, green, and blue were the flag colors of Ecosphere, the Earth-Nation movement. It was one of several international power groups, and the youngest except for the Luministes. Vitellan sat down carefully and drew the belt across himself with the caution of a beginner under instruction. Lucel flicked on his tray screen and selected the view from a camera near the nose of the SOMS. Being in business class, they sat isolated in a pair of seats. Other passengers filed briskly aboard. Most were in casual clothes, middle-class Russians escaping the Moscow winter for resort ranches in the American Southwest.

  "Anything I can get you?" The attendant spoke Russian with an American accent.

  "We're fine, but my friend does not like flying," Lucel explained, and she threw the girl a flicker of a wink. "No fuss, please."

  "Oh, I'm sorry. We have a range of mini-imprints that can help."

  "No, thank you. It would affect his cricket, and he has a corporate match scheduled." When she had gone Vitellan turned to Lucel.

  "An imprint really would have helped."

  "Contact with an imprinter would also have relayed a few important IDs from your brain to the Russian Federal Airlines database. Some things have to be done from experience, and this is one of them."

  "Cricket," he said, going straight to his imprints. "Bat and ball game of English origins. Popular in countries of the former British Empire and currently increasing in popularity in the United States—" Lucel put a finger to her lips. "It's considered geek to vocalize your imprints."

  "Really? That was not in my imprints."

  A flight safety video played in the top right corner of all tray screens. The SOMS began to turn. Vitellan could see the snowfield rotating before the nose camera, but it was so smooth that he felt no sense of motion. A melodious announcement declared to the cabin, "Prepare for takeoff. Counting down . . . three, two, one." The sudden crush of acceleration was alarming rather than uncomfortable. Lucel switched to the tail camera view a moment before the ramjets cut in, but the airport was only visible for moments. The runway and countryside plunged out of the screen, and were replaced by a white nothingness of cloud, then the mottled gray top of the cloud layer. Imprints flung reassuring background to Vitellan: the hydrogen-fueled ramjet-rocket hybrid was the best and safest transport technology in history. The tail camera now showed the clouds below through shimmering but smokeless exhaust. There was a dull, rushing rumble and a slight vibration to hint at the power that they were riding, but otherwise the background music from the screen unit was easily audible.

  "Once you get over the strangeness this is not so daunting," he remarked, more to himself than to Lucel. Lucel switched on a local standing-wave cloaker in her breast pocket. "We can talk in private now, and I can tell you that the worst is yet to come."

  The transition from ramjet to rocket configuration was no more than a slight lurch, followed by an increase in the G-force pressing them into their seats. Vitellan's screen now showed breaks in the distant cloud, and mountains below that. He became aware that the pressure forcing him back into the seat was lessening. "One minute to Zero-G," the melodious, reassuring voice of the unseen captain announced to the cabin.

  "You will feelhelpless, as if you are falling out of control," Lucel warned. "Just relax, don't try to fight it."

  "My first flight," he said, trying to find words to give majesty to an experience that the other passengers seemed to regard with indifference.

  "Not so," Lucel corrected him. "Your frozen body was flown from the Swiss Alps to Durvas in a tiltrotor transport after you had been dug out of the ice. You are, however..." She studied a cluster of numerals that she had conjured at the bottom of her screen. "As of now, you are the first citizen of the Roman Empire to fly into space. Congratulations." She reached over and shook his hand.

  "Space?" he asked.

  "Sorry, check your imprints."

  Vitellan found himself hanging in his straps. Lucel held a plastic card before him, then let it go. It floated before his eyes, there was no longer an up or down. He groped for help among his imprints and found breathing and relaxation exercises. After a few minutes he was unclear whether they really worked, or were just a useful distraction. He began to methodically work through the imprint subset on space.

  "We are traveling over the North Pole," Lucel said as she switched his screen back to the nose view. "Then we'll pass above Canada. It will be night below, so you won't see much."

  "And Japan?"

  "Not this time. We're landing at Houston, an American city. You may have scanned your imprints for it already. When we arrive we can have breakfast. It's time for that in Houston."

  Vitellan closed his eyes. Food was very low among his priorities just then. Gradually he adjusted, trying to distract himself by playing with a weightless pen and pad. Lucel brought up a view of space on her backseat screen, giving them a vista of fathomless blackness and brilliant, steadily gleaming stars. Vitellan felt a slight pang of disappointment as the SOMS bellied through the air, and the sensation of down returned to the floor.

  Houston, Texas: 8 December 2028, Anno Domini

  The landing was an alarmingly fast approach to an expanse of patchwork lights, yet the SOMS aligned itself precisely with a white strip and was embraced by magnetic buffers that lined the maglev runway. It was before dawn, and the screen showed low, softly contoured terminal buildings bathed in floodlights, and a maglev shuttle track that ran above ground.

  "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Houston," the captain said in English, then in Russian.

  "Watch what you say, I'm putting the cloaker off now," said Lucel. "By the way, we've gone back to this morning." Vitellan was astounded. "You mean this machine travels backwards through time?"

  "No, it just happens to be morning in this part of the world. Check 'time zones' in your imprints." After the experience of the flight Vitellan was bursting to tell everyone what he felt and what a marvelous thing it had been, but as they left the flight attendants merely smiled at him with the bored politeness that Roman shopkeepers had displayed two millennia ago. The terminal was little different from that of Moscow South Orbital, and the maglev shuttle traveled too fast for him to see anything more than a dark blur of trees, gardens, and buildings. He looked up to see that Venus, Jupiter, Mars, and a half-moon were lined up across the sky, as if in a great, triumphant procession. They were a welcome scrap of stability in a world hurtling along like a driverless chariot. Lucel had intended to keep Vitellan at a ranch near Huntsville, which was to the north and only a few minutes by air taxi. It was also a discreet resort, specializing in the accommodation of those who wished to remain out of sight. She did not contact the ranch until they were in a hired van and clear of the airport terminal. Vitellan listened to the argument with interest.

  "Why can't you fly straight out in a tiltfan cab?" came the voice from the descrambler.

  "Don't they teach you anything about security? In the city we're one in a million. In the open air we'd get scanned, targeted, and charred
about a minute after we locked on to your beacon and began to hone in." Someone whistled at the other end of the connection.

  "Lady—look, apart from the resort, this is a ranch. We raise cattle and run a few megawatts of solar cells, and we got enough firepower to hold off a gang of roadspikes or aggressive paparazzi until the law flies in. That's all. If you've got serious bogies after you, you'll need help from a serious team."

  "Then have a team flown in," Lucel snapped. There was a few seconds' silence. "Can you keep on hold till this evening?"

  "Can you be more precise?"

  "Twenty-one-fifteen, local time. Like I said, if you want Core A security, you have to plan in advance. Trusted contract kev-skins take a few hours to round up."

  Lucel broke the connection.

  "Looks like we do Houston for the day."

  "What is 'do' in this context?"

  "Play tourist, once I've contacted some very discreet people about a gun and some street money. We'll visit the Johnson Space Museum, teach you to drive this van in the quieter streets, go to the World Three Mall at sunset and have a fish curry at the Rajah Talmas—or do you want to catch some sleep in the back of the van? It's night back in Moscow, and your body is on Moscow time."

  Vitellan did not answer immediately. "That flight that we took," he began, then paused for lack of words.

  "The suborbital?" Lucel prompted.

  "Yes. To you it is nothing, of no more consequence than ... than a journey from Ostia to Neapolis by ship."

  "I know what you're trying to say, but after another century all this will be just as quaint."

  "Your technology and your society move too fast. Don't you appreciate the wonder of what we just did?"

  "The unfamiliar is easy to wonder at," Lucel replied after some thought. "Your life is a wonder to me. You fought in the Hundred Years War, you were a friend of Alfred the Great, and you saw Pompeii destroyed by Vesuvius and exchanged letters with Pliny the Younger. According to Dur-

  vas oral tradition, your father even spoke with Jesus Christ and did crowd control at one of his sermons."

  "My father spoke no Aramaic, so when Christ spoke to him he didn't—"

  "Oh Vitellan, that's not the point." Lucel sighed. "To me your life is a wonder beyond my wildest dreams, but anyone can do a suborbital flight for the price of a ticket."

  "My life? I was there for some great events in history, that's all. What was the first Mars landing to you?" That caught Lucel off-guard. "I—it was, well, boring I suppose. Okay, I admit it, to me Mars footfall was just half a dozen anonymous spacesuits jumping about on pink sand. Space travel doesn't interest me, I've never been higher than a suborbital hop."

  His argument confounded, Vitellan ran his fingers through his hair and watched the other traffic for a time. Most were fuel cell and solar panel boost models, bisected teardrops like their van. A few were the driverless autocab wedge types that he had traveled in back in Moscow. Old high-rise buildings stood out like sky-blue crystals, while more modern buildings were hidden beneath a dense matting of trees.

  "We cleared forests to build cities, now you turn cities into forests," he said with incomprehension. 'This century is just too much for me. If I stay awake for the next twenty-six years until 2054,1 will probably see more changes than in all my twenty centuries."

  "Will you ever stop traveling through time?"

  "Everyone asks me that, and I always say perhaps: perhaps I would want something different. I was a hero from a more advanced civilization when I was awake during the Dark Ages and the Hundred Years War. I had arts of fighting to teach and advanced scholarship to revive. In this century— I'm just a helpless curiosity. All of a sudden I am afraid to return to the ice. In a hundred years more I might be so out of place that they will keep me in a cage. I don't know what to do. For the first time in my life I know that I have no value as a centurion, and that my scholarship has only historical worth." Lucel sensed that they were being tracked as they walked through the World Three Mall, just after sunset. It was an open-air market beside the old Astrodome, and although it was packed with shoppers and tourists she noted an imperceptible pattern in the way that some people around them were moving. For a moment she followed something overhead, her eyes flickering up while she faced a stall and spoke with Vitellan, then she drew her Darington TS-17

  smoothly and fired. Nobody in the crowd noticed the soft thump of the shot, but a pigeon that had been flying in lazy circles exploded in a yellow splash of burning fuel and electronics that fell into the market, setting hair, clothes, and stalls' awnings alight. Lucel had the gun pocketed before the screams had even started. She took Vitellan by the arm.

  "Hurry. They want you alive, but they'll still hurt." "Who does? What was that thing?" "A monitor bionic, built like a bird. It was following our conversation."

  "It was a hundred feet away."

  "No problem, since about twenty years ago. I wonder how much it caught? You were talking about Roman Empire cooking styles just now—okay, they know who you are. Quickly, in here."

  They stepped out of the crowd into a sportswear shop. Lucel knife-handed the sales assistant in the midriff without breaking stride and they hurried into the storage area at the back. She pushed a stack of cartons over behind the inner door, then shot out the lock of the roller door opening onto the delivery lane.

  "That'll hold them for ten seconds or so, especially if the shopkeep hits the scream button." As if on cue, a siren began whooping somewhere behind them. "Good boy. We may have an extra twenty seconds now." They emerged from the lane into the swirling crowd of the mall again. A police tiltfan was already overhead, and many tourists were crowding in to watch what was going on. Lucel slowed to scan the crowd.

  "We should be getting away," said Vitellan.

  "There will be a vector scan from another monitor bionic looking for bodies moving away from the shop. What I need is—there!"

  She squeezed off a shot from the hip, and the left arm of a whipcord-thin Chinese in a hibiscus print shirt shattered at the elbow. He dropped silently, paralyzed with the pain and shock, but those around him shouted and recoiled. They were a team of five, not expecting to be stalked by their quarry. They would withdraw, call in more teams to deal with what they now thought was an opposing team. Lucel and Vitellan stepped into a bar and took the stairs to a balcony.

  "Good view from here," she said as they sat down at a table. The open-air balcony was part of the upstairs bistro. "Give it a little longer."

  "What are you waiting for?"

  "I stuck a distress beacon to a garbage skip over at the entrance to that lane. When it goes off my contacts will know that we need an emergency pickup. With luck our admirers down there will also be totally focused on the skip for a good thirty seconds."

  "It's my fault for talking carelessly."

  "You've done well to adapt as far as you have," Lucel replied, staring abstractedly at the crowd. Dirty plates and cutlery remained from the previous diners at the table. Vitellan picked up a steak knife. It had a stiff blade, and was surprisingly sharp. Lucel was counting.

  "... four, three, two, one, now!"

  Nothing happened that Vitellan could see or hear, but the police tiltfan suddenly turned and descended. A blaze of yellow speared down at the skip. The mall flashed white and the skip shattered in a concussion that they felt rather than heard. An incandescent ball of fire and smoke erupted out of the crowd, and debris hit the tiltfan. It plunged into the fireball of its own making, its cockpit raked by fragments from its own missile's blast. The explosion of its crash seemed more real than that of its missile, and turbine fragments from the shattered fans scythed through the crowd like monstrous shuriken.

  "Shit, maybe they really are trying to kill you!" exclaimed Lucel in disbelief at the carnage. She scrambled up from the floor, dragging Vitellan after her. "Come! Every vector on someone's monitor screen will be pointing away from this area now. We'll never be spotted."

  "But the beacon—"<
br />
  "My transmitter was not a beacon to home on, it only alerted my contacts that they have to rendezvous at another prearranged emergency point."

  They hurried around the balcony and down the rear stairs. The sirens of real police tiltfahs were wailing in the distance, and a scatter of bystanders had already summoned the courage to abandon their cover and flee. The police tilt-fans passed overhead, casting cones of light through the smoke. Lucel was wearing her wraparound dataspex again, this time with customized enhancements tuned for layered night vision using infrared and enhanced visible spectrum images. They stopped at the loading bay of a darkened office block, and Lucel pulsed the roller door open from the modec of her dataspex. Beyond was a black rectangle of darkness.

  "Quickly, in!"

  "I can't see in the dark," Vitellan said as he shuffled forward, groping blindly.

  "No need, I'll guide you. This is a transfer point, we won't be here long."

  The door rolled down again. Vitellan counted his heartbeats in the darkness and listened to distant sirens. Light leaking from outside outlined a brickwork pattern of stacked boxes. Brooms, grapples, discarded packing . . . Lucel's body heat radiated against his arm through the tears in his shirt, yet her hand was cold on his wrist. He counted three hundred heartbeats.

  "I thought the Luministes wanted you alive," Lucel said, as if the attack had somehow been Vitellan's fault.