The Centurion's Empire

by Sean McMullen

  "Would you mind fucking off, I'm trying to get dressed," she suddenly snarled. Vitellan stood up.

  "All right, but you will not see me again. I leave for Durvas tomorrow. I have a lot of imprint therapy to be done there."

  "Really? So, after all we've been through, it's bye " She held out her hand. "Just one last warning," she said as they A

  shook hands.

  "Yes?"

  Her fingers snaked forward and stabbed into a pressure point in his wrist. Pain came as a blue bombflash behind Vitellan's eyes and he dropped to his knees in shock.

  "Trust nobody," said Lucel as she pulled a T-shirt emblazoned with LIBENS VOLENS POTENS over her head. Lucel discharged herself from the clinic within the half hour. She left through the front entrance, and security cameras followed her as she walked from the foyer carrying a shoulder bag with the few personal things that came with her. A gunmetal-blue, roach-profile suncab glided into the field of view, summoned by her call to Transit Southeast. It raised a wing of solar panels and she stepped into the reclining seat. A moment later she was sealed out of sight.

  "The job is to Eastwood, not the airport," the security regulator reported to Baker from his screen.

  "Not surprised," replied Baker's hologram head from beside him. "How are her implants?"

  "Loud and clear."

  "Good. Now I want you to post their code profile to this netboard address."

  The. regulator sat back in surprise at the letters suspended before his face. "Foxhound? That's not a clean shop, that's the undercoat gangs."

  "Just do it."

  "Okay, okay. Can I patch through to you when the police holos walk in here asking questions?" "That won't happen." Lucel left the suncab at the Eastwood Mall, a Latino marketplace. The gangs had taken over the district early in the century, but by 2025 their structures had evolved into warlord-style district councils that provided services and protection, and even attracted business with their economic stability. The crowds were more exotically dressed than in the condo and civil areas of town, and there were more weapons being carried openly, yet the incidence of violence was lower than outsiders realized. A system of truces and alliances kept feuds under control, and what had once been protection money now amounted to something like municipal rates.

  The buildings were poorly maintained although the roads were well swept by the pickers, who also collected the garbage. The area was like the gangs themselves, surviving on the by-products of society, a remora that neither harmed nor hindered its host city. Graffiti was left in place, a symbolist newspaper and roadmap on the very buildings themselves. It was not a culture of polish and shine, although exquisite little gardens and courtyards could be glimpsed occasionally through half-open gates.

  Most of the people that Lucel passed smelled stale, and the cars were filthy: some external authority was restricting the water supply until a new contract could be agreed to. States within states. There was no mediating body for state/gang disputes and transactions, so they were settled by barter and embargo like medieval fiefdoms. The world had unified internationally only to fragment locally.

  Lucel passed the headquarters of the area, which was a squat bunker of concrete blocks streaked with oxides. The blocks were angled upward to deflect the blast of any car

  bomb, and there were drop-moats and gardens filled with blocks to prevent any vehicle from reaching the walls. The windows were narrow and featured heavy blast shutters. At one end was a stained, pitted area the size of a tennis court, evidence that the bomb-proofing had done its job. Gang-gang confrontations seldom resulted in outright war, but terrorism was a common method of diplomatic pressure.

  The crowds swirled around Lucel, people who were fawning yet assertive, respectful yet intrusive. Some begged for spare change while others tried to sell credit and goods. Some of the kids waved and pointed their guns at passersby, but both Lucel and the locals knew better than to flinch or reach for their own weapons: it was only bravado. Lucel was doubly safe, because nobody tried anything with someone wearing dataspex. You never knew where the images were being transmitted, or who was storing them.

  A beacon at the focus of her dataspex map guided Lucel until she came to a shop front overhung by rust-caked steel shutters and pulsing electronic warnings to any dataspex sensor within range. Her key interlocked with one of the transceivers and executed an encryption match, then her visor glowed green with an acceptance. She walked through the hologram of a door without breaking stride. Nobody greeted her inside; there were only two rows of booths on either side of a strip of aqua carpet. The color clashed disconcertingly with the flaming red of the booths and the yellow walls and roof. Shanty decor was always ruled by the use of what was at hand.

  Shimmering electric inversion fields warned of which booths were occupied as Lucel made a selection and spoke a code from memory. The booth sealed itself into a bank-level security mode, then the connection was made. She noted the lightspeed delay of a satellite link.

  "Bonhomme nodal," declared a blank-faced holographic bust that materialized before her.

  "FreeView Latin," Lucel replied. "Patch me to Crusader TY03 on my entry code key." Moments later the holographic face assumed detail. Eager, anxious detail.

  "FreeView! It's been a very long time between reports."

  "So? Are you giving me a redundancy deal?"

  "You were told to report back weekly."

  "Lift my cover for the sake of Luministe bureaucracy? That's the best joke I've heard in months." The hologram froze for moments which extended into more than a minute.

  "Very well, give us your report."

  "Please?"

  "Ptease."

  "You screwed it. The body that you abducted from Durvas was a modern with the Roman's total overlay."

  "Total? That would take years, cost millions plus."

  "Whatever. The real Roman is back at Durvas and well out of harm's way, as I'd reckon."

  "So there's a total overlay of the Roman walking about with some expendable modern's body."

  "The modern is Lord Wallace's son. The word is that the overlayed modern is being flown back to Durvas on a private scram."

  The hologram froze again, this time for three minutes. Lucel leaned back and began cycling through muscle-tensing patterns. By the time the hologram of the Luministe came back to life there was a sheen of perspiration on her skin.

  "Most of what you speculate is in theory feasible but technically front of edge. My advisory pool has done a total project cost estimate at up to ten billion pounds, mostly on processing and data storage: whole brain image transfer and stabilization is not cheap. Why did they do it?"

  "Paranoia? Who knows? Durvas has that sort of money, and a lot of the development work is returning profits."

  "Ten billion pounds for one Roman's life? The Japanese manned landing on Ceres had a smaller budget."

  "Vitellan is more than just a life. He's been a focus, symbol, idol, god, and military savior for the Village for nearly as long as the Christian church has existed. Their dedication has nothing to do with reason or economics."

  "What about those closest to the overlay Roman? The white coats in the clinic? Are they vulnerable?"

  "Yes and no. They do what he says, but it's only because he has a line of credit from Durvas."

  "You're sure of this?" "Can you do better?"

  Areas not controlled by gangs, condos, or civils were to be avoided. The civil police were as concerned with avoiding lawsuits as with keeping order, and without stable infrastructure the flow of informa-tion ceased. As Lucel walked into the Blacklight border area the short-range, low-power Village implants in her body groped for bandspace on ill-maintained, overloaded, and vandalized transponders, then were lost to the Foxhound monitors. They went into a holding pattern while they waited for her to emerge into a more reliable part of the city, but she stayed out of contact for two hours. Every fifteen seconds the implants polled for a transponder while drawing power from her body sugars.<
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  "Got her!" the operative contracted from Foxhound by the Village exclaimed as Lucel's implants responded to a poll. His supervisor was sitting just across the room, lounging in black denim shorts and a T-shirt with the Foxhound logo on the front. Instead of getting up he materialized a holographic head with red skin, horns, and a goatee beard.

  'Two hours," he observed. "They could have done anything to the 'plants in two hours."

  "None look sick. Going in to suck datafiles, and ... it looks good. Full audio record."

  "Hell 'n shit, how did her friends miss them when she was scanned?" asked the devil-head, its brow furrowing. "Maybe they're some new tech with evasion cycles to fool the field detectors. Maybe they didn't scan her at all—nan, that's shit. What type of 'plant are they—same as before?"

  "I can't tell their brand. Signals look the same whether the hardware is junk or gold stamp."

  "How about encryption checksums?"

  "Ah ... same. That's a hard one to fake at short notice."

  The devil-head added a pair of shoulders and shrugged.

  "Okay then, I'll bite. Prepare a presentation for the client. I'll pull back and raise him now." Vitellan's holograph solidified in what he saw as a featureless room. The Foxhound supervisor appeared, having dressed his hologram in a dark blue combat coverall and holstered rail pistol, trimmed twenty pounds from the waistline, straightened its hair, and dissolved the stubble from its face.

  "Where is she?" Vitellan asked.

  "In a five-acre compound on.Waugh Drive. It's the Yakuza embassy to the local gang cells." "And what is she doing?"

  "Just staying in the grounds. She's lying about in the gardens near the pool, and we're recording a blood sugar boost right now so she's just had a meal. No alcohol, though."

  "That would be right, she doesn't drink. Pipe the sound effects from earlier in here." The Roman's holograph sat in midair with his arms folded. While Lucel had been in the shielded booth, the implants had stored a half hour of speech. As her conversation with the Luministe contact was played back his frown became deeper.

  "She betrayed me and now she's settled down for a holiday, courtesy of the enemy," said Vitellan. "Hey mon, that's women for you."

  Vitellan suggested that Baker and he have masks of each other's faces made up for when they went to the airport. They would walk into the chartered scramjet together, then a man with Vitellan's face would leave. A net message to Durvas would be that Baker was flying across to verify that the medical facilities were ready and that his body was unharmed. Durvas agreed, and so did Baker.

  "I want privacy on the flight, I want to be by myself," Vitellan insisted as they were driven to the airport in a limo-length suncar. "No movies, no meals."

  "That's cool, but why?" asked Baker.

  "I need to be with my memories while I still have them. You couldn't understand."

  "No, I guess not."

  At the airport the SkyPlaz security guards went as far as the access gate. The interior of the scramjet was furnished as first class, and there were only ten seats. Baker gestured to the back of the cabin as they entered. "There's a bar and pantry," he began. Vitellan turned, slowly and casually, then drove his fist straight up into Baker's jaw. Baker collapsed. Vitellan hurriedly changed clothes with the doctor, then dragged him to a seat and strapped him in. He took three of the trank darts that had been removed from his own skin at the clinic and pressed them into the flesh of Baker's forearm.

  "Five hours to sleep, or so the lady said," he muttered to himself as he peeled the Baker-mask from his own face. The man with Vitellan's face sat in a window seat, head against the bulkhead, apparently asleep. The slight rupturing of mask dermalic under the chin was not visible. Vitellan stuffed the remains of his own mask into an airsick bag and dropped it into a dispenser, then he left the scramjet. He told the ground crew to seal the door and stood watching until the scramjet was moving away from the terminal.

  The two security guards were waiting at the gate. They expected to see Baker with Vitellan's face, and so were not alarmed to see Vitellan without a mask. Baker's gloves had been too small for the Roman, so he kept his white hands firmly inside his trouser pockets as they started back for the limo.

  "Need a Coke, meet you there," said Vitellan just as a flight call blared out from speakers directly above them. His accent was nothing like that of Baker, but the terminal was noisy and chaotic. The SkyPlaz guards nodded and walked on.

  Vitellan took out Baker's wallet and bought a cap, sunshades, and a brownout jacket. He stepped into the washrooms. Another quick change had him transformed again, but as he emerged he could see that the SkyPlaz guards were already back and peering about nervously. As he walked briskly from the terminal he heard the rumble as the chartered scramjet was boosted into the sky on its way to Britain.

  Vitellan made for a rank of cabs. Hire scabs, fire caps, he thought, groping for terms in his imprint. Words were missing, others were confused. Facts were scrambled in some places. First moon landing: Juri Gargarin, British astronaut in 1996, reported the imprint, yet Vitellan had real world memories of accessing it as Neil Armstrong, American as- tronaut, 1969. A terrifying qualm washed over Vitellan and he panicked. Most of his English vocabulary had vanished, and much of what was left came from his time in the fourteenth century. He would sound like Chaucer's Wife of Bath telling her tale if he spoke to a cab's autonic, and he doubted that the machines would cope with that. He continued on past the rank of cabs in the bright sunshine. Was his imprint really fading, were they all telling the truth after all?

  Vitellan groped for the fourteenth century, spent vivid seconds at the siege of Meaux, then languid seconds in the arms of the Countess of Hussontal. Imperial Rome was just as clear: the scent of bread baking and olive oil spilled from a broken amphora as he walked past with his father. The symptoms were consistent with what Hall had told him, but ... the clinic had supposedly been giving him boosters every night to fix the commercial imprints that Lucel had arranged for him. Maybe they had stopped the boosters after selling out to Durvas—or the Luministes. His imprint would be stable, but the commercial imprints would be fading!

  He walked out to the public carpark, with no idea of where he was going. How long to fade an imprint less than a month old? In my imprints, maybe, he cursed to himself. Make me look like I'm fading, trick to frighten me. He explored further, found many areas still intact. Memories of real experiences were as clear as ever, everything from the 6th of December stood out as starkly as his memories of Vesuvius erupting. A tall, bearded roadspike in an old-style impact jacket approached him.

  "Wheels to your car, mon?" he drawled.

  The remains of the Streetwise imprint flashed a warning to Vitellan: mugger; activate personal beacon and move back in a confident manner; suspect offers ride to car in large carpark then demands wallet.

  "Lost... car," Vitellan managed to fight past his tongue. The roadspike blinked deliberately. "You lose a car or you needin' a cab?" "Lost. No fly."

  "Hey, you missed your flight. Is that it?" If any security monitor is recording this I can't afford to sound like I just stepped out of the fourteenth century, Vitel-

  Ian had decided. Only one man in the entire world would talk to a potential mugger in Old English, and the Luministes would be onto his trail at once. Maybe if he slipped in some Latin words he might sound as if he was a modern Italian, Vitellan speculated. "Losting anger est, profecto."

  "Los Angeles! LA, you missed a flight to LA. Is that it?"

  Vitellan glanced back to the terminal building. Have to get away, anything. Los Angeles was obviously a place some distance away.

  "Los Angeles. You take?"

  The roadspike whistled and put his hands on his hips. "You real or what? That's, say, sixteen hundred miles or more." Vitellan took out Baker's wallet. The clinic preferred to be paid in untraceable currency, so the wallet bulged with banknotes and unsecured smartcards. The roadspike's eyes widened beneath his black shades.
/>   "Ticket!" said Vitellan firmly.

  "Hey mon, you got a ticket with me, no problems," he said, taking Vitellan by the arm and waving at a chrome and solar-gunmetal Harley layback with a gasoline engine. "This here's the wheels." Fifteen miles away the Doberman carrying Lucel's implants glanced up briefly as a little scramjet streaked across the sky, noisily laboring to gain height.

  The North Atlantic: 17 December 2028, Anno Domini

  Vitellan's chartered scramjet climbed and went transonic over the Gulf of Mexico, flew west, then turned north for Britain as it reached the Atlantic. As it passed the Newfoundland coast it was at ninety thousand feet and Mach 6, riding its own Shockwave. The orbital air traffic control center was having hardware problems at the time, and all atmospheric traffic had been ordered to fit into more generous safety profiles than usual.

  Far below, a Boeing Surface Effect Transport the size of a ship was lumbering, along at 400 mph, just above the water. A small wedge dropped from its underside and flew clear,

  hugging the waves at subsonic speeds until it was lost amid the general Atlantic traffic. At two miles distance from the Canadian Navy patrol SET Janus, the wedge suddenly' dropped its turbines and lanced into the overcast sky on a hydrogen-fluorine rocket. The Janus detected the weapon at once and went into red alert automatically. The ELTY

  targeting control computer reported that the missile had locked on to a small scramjet within three seconds of acquisition by the Janus, even before the operator had determined that the threat was not to the Navy SET. At the sixth second she had opened a channel to the scramjet.

  "Scramjet, transponder Kappa Delta 174, this is Canadian patrol skimmer Janus. You have an intercept locked on. Unknown origin and accelerating. Switch to your AT jammer and evasion override."

  "Wha—hell and shit! Incoming confirmed!" replied the alarmed voice of the pilot. "Evasions locked in, jammers live." The chartered scramjet's computers took milliseconds to calculate the options for escape, then it banked left and went into a shallow dive, dumping fuel into the denser air and raising its Mach number by one. The interceptor continued to close, but now more slowly. The Navy patrol's tracking radar locked on to it and coordinated with an orbital laser platform of the UN Anti-Terrorist Authority.