The Centurion's Empire

by Sean McMullen

  "Black Prince? Are you absolutely sure?"

  "There's no other way, Bonhomme's timer is already counting."

  The quarter-mile drop to the chamber where Vitellan's body was being kept took less than a minute. Lord Wallace had a suite of offices and living space down there, far beyond the reach of any macro-attack from terrorists. The screen room was nothing more than a narrow cubicle with two chairs separated by a laminate film partition—a deeply inset partition that would not blow out should there be an explosion on one side. Anderson was still wearing the spare security uniform as he entered and sat down. Again he was scanned, but this time it was only ultrasonic resonance, a newly developed check for covalent lattice explosive disguised as bone or muscles. Lord Wallace entered the other side of the cubicle, carrying a holoboard. His face was tight with fury. The gaslift chair depressed slightly as he sat down, Anderson noted. He was no hologram.

  "This is all that we have to show the world in 2054," Lord Wallace said, coming straight to the point as he thumbed the hologram board into life.

  Vitellan's body materialized in the space between them, bisected down the middle by the laminate partition. It was not healthy looking, even to the casual glance. The skin was a murky, soiled white with a chaotic tracery of red hairline scars. His head was hairless, even his eyebrows and lashes were gone.

  "Yes, that's how his realware looks," said Anderson. "Not a pretty bear, is he?"

  "He's all that we have now," replied Lord Wallace. "I want a complete cosmetic job on him, electrostim workouts on his muscles, and enough sunlamp to get his skin back to the way it was when he came out of the ice."

  "But he's a vegetable."

  "As I said, he's all we have, and Black Prince must be put

  into operation now if we are to get the credit. Bonhomme's timers will soon fire unless I stop them, and I have no intention of doing that. We can leak data that the Master was revived, ran Black Prince covertly, then was injured and had to be refrozen."

  "Good enough for Abe Lincoln, good enough for us," agreed Anderson.

  "The Village Corporate and several guards have seen the overlay Master and even spoken with him, so he was known to be revived. The overlay is now at the bottom of the Atlantic, so the body down here is once again the one and only Vitellan. After Black Prince I shall be frozen with him, traveling as his escort, and we shall both be revived in 2054." Lord Wallace held up a datacard, slowly and reverently, as if it were a powerful magic talisman.

  "I have medical advice that fetal brain tissue transplants can restore enough function to the Master's body for him to open his eyes and say a few preprogrammed words like 'I die happy, two thousand years old. I name Lord Wallace, who stood beside me against Jacque Bonhomme, as my successor in the Frigidarium of Durvas.' I shall then name you as my escort through time, William, and we shall both become immortal."

  "A berth in a commercial cryochamber would be simpler," sighed Anderson, weighed down by years of subterfuge and plotting. His limbs felt heavy, his joints stiff.

  "Bah, do that and you arrive in the future as a nobody with an investment account: no contacts, no friends, and a whole industry dedicated to fleecing yokel time travelers of their capital. If we travel to the future in the Master's place, we have the entire infrastructure of Durvas behind us. We'll arrive in the future as legends, people who fought beside the Master himself."

  There was no single trigger within Anderson's microim-print. The faces of Vitellan and Lord Wallace; "2054" spoken with Wallace's vocal profile; the greater air pressure deep in the shaft; even the periodic EMP pulses and ultrasonic resonance sweeps focused on the marshal to destroy any Trojan builder-implants. It was a whole-environment trigger, designed to ensure that Lord Wallace was close by

  when it activated. Anderson hooked his feet behind the struts of his chair and gripped the edge of the seat as he leaned forward, as if to listen.

  The marshal tried to let go, but nothing happened. My bones, they've changed my bones into destabilized covalent lattice, he thought, no longer even in charge of his own breathing. How did the scans miss it? I'm dead, but they've failed. When I explode the laminate will hold, the back of the cubicle will be blown out instead. Lord Wallace is safe ... William Anderson died, still sitting with a calm, attentive expression on his face.

  Multiphase biological nano-mimics in his blood, in an undetectable form when he had been scanned earlier, transformed his blood sugars into energy cells. At the same time they also transmuted his nervous system into organic conductors and semiconductors wired into a tuned circuit and oscillator. The periodic, circuit-destroying EMP pulse from the security unit actually brought it all to life.

  The blast of microwave radiation from what had been Anderson was unimpeded by the laminate partition. Lord Wallace felt a sudden flush, but did not recognize what was happening as an attack. By the time he thought of escape, alarms were already whooping. He lurched for the door and hammered his fist against the release button, then collapsed. Anderson's body was bent to focus on Lord Wallace's seat, but it also pointed to the floor near the door, exactly where Lord Wallace now lay. A security team high above at ground level activated a mobile handler, which arrived within a few seconds.

  "Don't move him, we need a medic at the controls!"

  The words sealed Lord Wallace's fate. His body lay there for another fifteen seconds while the husk of Anderson poured microwave radiation into it, then burned out. The medic assessed Lord Wallace through the handler's sensors, then lifted his body and took it to the very intensive care unit that had treated Vitellan's body just after his skull had been crushed. It was soon apparent that Lord Wallace was beyond the help of even the most advanced therapies of 2029. Anderson's body had all but dried out, and steam from

  his tissues filled the cubicle. He was a curved husk, charred black but still gripping the chair and hissing softly. Like all high-tech assassination techniques, this would be its only use. Microwave shielding would be added to laminate screens all around the world by the end of the week as agencies learned of the trick.

  The two most senior surviving members of the Village Corporate hurried across the university and into the Durvas Technology Park to a mock art deco building that was the wellhead of the Deep Frigidarium. As they walked, a gaggle of assistants and technicians fluttered around them with oxygen tanks, masks, and items of protective clothing. Guards moved aside, already aware that Durvas had suffered yet another catastrophic intrusion.

  "It was a very sophisticated attack," Icekeeper Gulden reported to Lord Wallace's ashen-faced deputy, Dellar. "The marshal was probably abducted during the night and dosed with multiphase nanoware programmed to rebuild parts of him in a second or two on some key or key combination."

  "But his wife noticed nothing. Anderson said as much himself, I heard him say that on the monitor tapes when he had a link to Lord Wallace from the shafthead."

  "A team from the Durvas clinic is at her house at this very minute with a mobile lab. Initial scans suggest that she was imprinted too, according to what is coming in on my dataspex. Of course she noticed nothing! She couldn't!"

  "So the assassins might have been calling in every night for weeks to nanoform him into a pop-mold human death-ray."

  "Very likely, Sir Peter."

  Like the authorized successor to any absolute dictator, Sir Peter Dellar had little real experience with the exercise of authority and all its realities. At that moment he also had a very real sense of his mortality as well. Burgess, the new marshal, met them at the entrance to the wellhead, already in protective clothing and carrying his helmet. His hair was soaked with sweat, and he smelled faintly of charred flesh.

  "I was just coming to get you," he began breathlessly.

  "Well I'm here, brief me as we descend!" snapped Dellar,

  angry and exasperated with the continual failures of Durvas security. "Gulden said that they turned the marshal into a human microwave dish and murdered Lord Wallace. How did our scanners miss
the trigger imprints and implants?"

  "Given a few hours we would have found the triggers, but they're tough to isolate and Lord Wallace was impatient to see him. Something about a black prince, it's on a monitor tape, but—"

  "Black Prince is a codename for a campaign Lord Wallace was planning with the Centurion against the Luministes, that's all I know about it."

  "The Centurion! That's the other—"

  "What can you tell me about the microwave weapon?"

  "It's not very hard with the right nanotech. The human body is already close to being a chemical power plant driving an electronic network. Rewire it a bit, then key it off at the right time and you have a one-shot microwave cannon. The Centurion—"

  "Forget the Centurion, he's safe in Houston, safe from the Luministes and safe from your incompetence!" Dellar shouted.

  "The Centurion is down there in an intensive care unit!" Burgess shouted back, stabbing his gloved finger downward.

  "If you don't know that as the deputy head of the Village Corporate then you have no right to flounce about tossing rocks at me when I'm up to my earlobes in sewage. Do I make myself clear?"

  The security OIC at the elevator doors would let nobody through without their protective gear being checked and sealed. Dellar was annoyed at the delay, but had become more subdued after the deputy marshal's outburst. Nobody was in a mood to flaunt security and safety regulations after what had just happened.

  "How the hell did they know when he'd be staring at Lord Wallace?" Dellar muttered as technicians sealed the seams of his suit.

  "I'll write a report when I'm good and ready!" snapped Burgess.

  Icekeeper Gulden came to Dellar's rescue.

  "For a start, go down a quarter mile to the Deep Frigidar-

  ium and the air pressure is greater. That probably keyed the process off and primed other triggers. The screen of the interview chamber down there is transparent to radiofre-quency radiation to allow hologram dialogues, and that is the key weakness. On the other hand I'd be surprised if there were less than a thousand other trigger scenarios in the imprint that Anderson was given."

  Dellar turned to Burgess. "Deputy Marshal, why didn't your people bring down the shutters as soon as the temperature rise was detected?" he asked with as much diplomacy as he could put into his voice. Chinless wonder, Burgess thought to himself with detached resignation. "With respect, Sir Peter, the procedure is that Lord Wallace had first right of cutoff. The monitor record shows that Anderson seemed to be just sitting there, listening attentively. Lord Wallace suspected nothing until he began to cook."

  At last they were cleared to enter the elevator and descend to the Deep Frigidarium. They dropped the quarter mile in uneasy silence. The air was rated safe as they stepped out of the elevator, but a reek of charred flesh met them as soon as they removed their helmets. Dellar dropped his helmet, seized a railing and retched.

  Vitellan's body was lying in a biosupport maintenance unit in the actual vault of the Deep Frigidarium. The unit was running on battery power, and could remain totally isolated for up to a month. There was no master code to open the vault, however: that was shared between Lord Wallace and Anderson. The vault's lock triggered a variety of traps and alarms, including a hydraulic system that flooded the chamber with nerve gas. A team of security technicians and a contract bomb disposal squad were hard at work breaking through the security systems. The engineers who had designed the systems were there too, as telepresence holograms, offering helpful advice.

  "Deputy Marshal, it will be dangerous down here when the locks are finally drawn back," the OIC of the team reported to Burgess. "There might be any number of trap devices that we missed. The marshal may have added extra systems that the original designers don't know about."

  "Then we'll seal off our protective gear and stand ready," Burgess replied. "I don't want anyone else but Sir Peter, the Icekeeper, and me to go near the Master's bio unit."

  The vault finally yielded its treasure early in the afternoon. The three executive members of the Village Corporate entered the vault alone and examined it carefully. There was a frozen cadaver in a cryogenic store with a dermal mask and scars applied to make it resemble Vitellan. That surprised them, but it was hardly surprising that a decoy mockup of the Centurion would be kept to fool potential assassins. They unbolted the real Vitellan's biosupport unit from its base and slid it onto a trolley. It was brought to the surface under a shoot-to-kill alert and hurried over to the intensive care facilities of the technology park's research clinic. There Gulden began the first of a series of ultrasonic scans, prior to bringing the body up through a full-consciousness revival. He stopped almost as soon as he had begun.

  "The cranium!" he exclaimed. "Nearly half of the cranium is empty!"

  It took some time to deduce the truth about the condition of Vitellan's body. It had been skillfully reconstructed after some terrible accident, but it was not until records were brought up from the Deep Frigidarium that the details were filled in. Forty minutes after the explosion a skygrap-ple had been brought to the scene and lifted the slab, but the body had been unfrozen and biologically active at the time it was crushed. The slab had descended, smashing his head to a bloody mush of brains and broken bone barely three inches thick. Three quarters of an hour after the explosion the body was in a cryogenic chamber and being chilled, but it was a desperate and futile act.

  Dellar noticed that the director of surgery's name was on the report, and he sent Burgess to fetch Cassion at once. Burgess reported back that Dr. Cassion had vanished, and that all of his records had been removed or destroyed.

  "I want security checks done on the entire Village Corporate," said Dellar between clenched teeth. "Every single member, all seventeen of us."

  int. _uiniwiiwii ii —

  "I initiated just that from Dr. Cassion's consulting rooms," reported Burgess, "starting with you" Vitellan would have stood a better chance of surviving a bullet through the brain. A battery of ultrasonic scanners slowly assessed the body's damage. Quite apart from his head injuries, both feet, one arm, his liver, his right lung, and all the ribs on his right side had been crushed so badly that Cassion had been forced to do experiments with anesthetized pigs to develop new techniques for rebuilding severely crushed bones and tissues. While the surrogate Vitellan was watching Lucel being rebuilt in a biosupport unit in Houston, the Roman's real body had been in a similar unit thousands of miles away across the Atlantic. Cassion had managed to work miracles, and using calcium bone matrix grown at the injury sites the skeleton was slowly rebuilt. The soft tissue damage was easy to repair by comparison, and required only a series of grafts and transplants.

  Vitellan's head was an order of magnitude more difficult to even begin work upon. Rebuilding the skull was comparatively straightforward, and the upper spinal cord, pituitary, cerebellum, midbrain, and thalamus were not badly traumatized, being deep within the brain. Unfortunately the buffer that had saved them had been the cerebral cortex, which had ruptured and flowed like cream cheese underfoot in places.

  It was early in the morning as Gulden concluded his briefing to Dellar and Burgess, and it had more of the sound of a coroner's report than the assessment of a critically ill patient.

  "Much of the braincase contains sterile gel encased in a membrane grown from the body's tissues on a vat template," Gulden concluded. "The other brain tissue is in a number of low-temperature storage vats in the Deep Frigidarium." The time was 4:30 a.m., and the marshal and Icekeeper were looking haggard.

  "Where was the main damage to his brain?"

  'The cerebrum is forty-seven percent rebuilt, and that portion has been returned to his skull."

  "Is that enough for him to be, ah, viable?"

  "Yes and no," said Gulden, almost playfully. "There is

  some control from the brain over body function. The main problem is that even if the skull had been undamaged, the tissue shows signs of massive oxygen starvation—about a half-hour's worth. The pre
vious best was a stockbroker who was revived after eleven minutes facedown in the family spa. He is still alive, and has his self-awareness and some memories—" "But?"

  "But his IQ is down one hundred points." "So the Master is dead."

  "Well. . . nothing is quite so certain. What is left of the cerebrum does show a surprising degree of activity—

  considering."

  "Dammit, a beard will grow on the face of a corpse, but that doesn't mean that it's alive! Is anyone home in that body?"

  "The body is biologically alive. The brain is functionally dead. Is that sufficiently blunt?"

  "Yes. Marshal, do we have any idea at all when and how this happened to the Centurion?"

  "The Icekeeper's tests on the body indicate anytime between late October and late December. We saw the Centurion's realtime holo at that Corporate meeting, so the injuries were probably inflicted in the second half of December." Dellar clasped his hands behind his back and walked over to the wall of glass laminate that looked out over the city center of Durvas. Distant lights twinkled serenely, in fact nobody in the small city yet knew about the second attack. Durvas Security had a charter that allowed it to handle most police functions, but a full report was due to be filed with London soon, and then all hell would break loose.

  "This city, the Village itself worldwide," Dellar said with his back to them, "it's founded on the life of the Roman time traveler. Lord Wallace was only one of his servants, just as I am. Now that I am in the supreme chair, I learn that Vitellan's brain is pulp! It's just twenty-six years short of the two thousandth anniversary of his birth, when he's due to be revived before the world. Why me? Am I to preside over the presentation of this corpse? How can I explain why we can't do what a lot of filthy, hairy barbarians did successfully back in the ninth century?" The marshal turned to Gulden. Frederick Gulden, like Burgess, had been isolated while a deputy, but far from being intimidated, he came to his new position with fresh ideas and enthusiasm.