The Centurion's Empire

Home > Other > The Centurion's Empire > Page 38
The Centurion's Empire Page 38

by Sean McMullen


  With his heart pounding Vitellan slowly drew the point of the roadspike's knife along the skin of his neck. Blood was sticky on his fingers as he ignored the pain and probed. A small, soft bead came away, and it had a fine hair protruding. Had she suspected all along, or did she just want to be sure of finding her green sidekick if he goofed off? Vitellan flicked the bead across the loading bay and beneath another garbage skip on high wheels. Nothing happened. He waited. The skip was close, too close. He wanted to move to somewhere further away, but that was too risky. He wondered if Mattel had already homed in on him, and was already watching—

  A shattering blast lifted the skip into the air, and it crashed down again, half across the pile where Vitellan was buried. Shredded plastic and a snowstorm of foam packing eddied down on the still summer air. Security dogs barked somewhere and footsteps padded across a gravel walkway. Vitellan's ears were ringing, he was buried and blinded by rubbish. The improvised pilum was nowhere at hand, but he still had the knife. Footsteps padded through foamed plastic, the Luministe agent was inspecting her work, probably puzzled and wary at the lack of Centurion splattered all over the loading bay. Six of those ballistic fingernails were left to her. Unlike the set that Lucel had used in Paris, all of Mattel's nails were explosive. A foot came down cautiously beside his concealed arm.

  Vitellan swept Mattel off balance, then burst from his cover and sprawled over her, stabbing down into her back with his knife. The knife bounced back—another coverall of that damned gossamer mesh, he realized. Mattel squirmed around, catching him a glancing blow with her fist. Vitellan closed again. Stay too close for her to use her nails, his instincts told him. She head-butted, and he reeled back. Her head was covered in a mesh-armor mask which stiffened to protect her from any sharp blow and felt like solid rock to Vitellan. She put a foot against him and pushed him free, then click, click, she armed a thumbnail. Vitellan grasped a length of plastic laminate and flung it as Mattel fired. The nail flew high and blasted brick rubble from a wall, showering Vitellan with fragments. He fell heavily, losing his knife. Mattel armed the other thumbnail and began to back away to fire. Vitellan staggered after her with another piece of laminate, thrashing at her hands as she tried to fire the thumbnail, keeping them apart. She seized the end of the laminate strip in both hands, flicked a foot up into Vitellan's jaw, then pulled the plastic laminate toward herself as his grip slackened. She pulled too hard. The fingers of her right hand were curled around the end of the length of laminate as it thudded into her lower chest. Her armed thumbnail was protruding slightly.

  Even the terrorist's armor mesh could not withstand the explosion that resulted as the covalent lattice within the thumbnail collapsed. Mattel was blown in two, but was held together like a burst rag doll by the mesh at her back. Vitellan was flung back ten feet into a pile of packing and cardboard, and was unconscious when the police arrived. He was still unconscious when the death of a notorious terrorist was credited to him on the night's newscasts. Lucel arrived on the first available SOMS flight from Los Angeles. Vitellan did not regain consciousness until the next afternoon.

  "You are recovering well, and you have a visitor."

  It was a soft, firm voice in the blackness, and Vitellan suspected that it belonged to a medical software agent.

  "Am I seriously hurt?" he replied in his thoughts.

  "Your condition is not rated as serious, but you can only be allowed to full consciousness as a holographic projection. Will you accept that option?"

  "Who is my visitor?"

  "Lucelene de Hussontal, she said to tell you." "Yes, yes, I'll be a projection." He found himself floating out-of-body as a holographic bust above his intensive care unit. Lucel was sitting at a console nearby, examining newscast images of the scene of Vanda Mattel's death.

  "Lucel."

  Her head jerked around as if she did not expect him to appear so quickly.

  "Vitellan!" she exclaimed, jumping to her feet. "How the hell did you kill her—I mean, are you all right?"

  "I don't know, and probably not, in that order," he replied. "Am I alive? Death seems so hard to pin down in this century."

  "You have a concussion and very minor brain damage,

  but that can be fixed by some imprint therapy and neural gating. In decreasing order of importance you also have a hairline fracture of the skull, perforated eardrums, knife wounds to the shoulder and throat, nine broken bones, and eleven lovebites to the chest and neck."

  Vitellan's holographic lips hung open, and his translucent green jaw worked without producing words. Lucel folded her arms and smiled. She shook her head.

  "No hard feelings, Vitellan. Nobody likes competition, but like I said, it was war. In war, anything goes and by the way, we won."

  "Was Jilly—I mean, was she your teacher?" he asked, tactfully fishing for another subject.

  "Vanda? Yes, she was, she really was. She must have thought I was sending you two here as a scheme to check Melbourne for some showdown. Maybe she thought the Mawson Institute was involved. We'll never know now."

  "The Mawson Institute was partly destroyed last November."

  "Yes, but they had a disaster contingency site set up somewhere south of the city. The switchup computers of their network were online within fifteen minutes of the blast. The surviving staff took a bit longer to come out of hospital and trauma counseling, but the place is open for business again."

  The hologram head turned about, as Vitellan examined his surroundings.

  "How long will I be like this?"

  "Another four days, just to be safe. Meantime you can go anywhere by telepresence, you're wired into the network. The Durvas Icekeeper wants to speak with you, and the Village Corporate can be trusted now. You're safe."

  "Safe? What about the Luministes?"

  "Have you been following the newscasts on Bonhomme?"

  "Until a few minutes ago I was not in a fit condition to do the news.V

  "And before that you were otherwise preoccupied— sorry, I couldn't resist that. Bonhomme still lies where he fell, and it's five days now. The Luministes are having something of a theological crisis."

  Lucel explained Icekeeper McLaren's role in the whole complex affair, how he had founded the Luministes with Lord Wallace, stolen billions in research funding, effectively murdered Robert Wallace, and been responsible for countless other acts of terrorism.

  "And all of this so that he could transfer my mind from a dying body into that of Robert Wallace?" asked Vitellan.

  "That was apparently his sole motive. He was the most brilliant, resourceful, fanatical, dangerous, and loyal Icekeeper in the history of Durvas."

  "He would have got along well with a man named Gentor, but I—I would not have sanctioned any of what he did for me. I would rather that my Icekeepers were all like Guy Foxtread."

  "The 1358 appointment," said Lucel automatically. "For what it's worth, Icekeeper Gulden is the current appointment, and he seems to be as steady and reasonable as you could wish."

  The holographic face frowned.

  "A steady and reasonable Icekeeper? A pious and holy devil would be more believable." Bonhomme had not arisen on the third day after he had shot himself. Blood congealed and darkened where it had splattered and spilled. Nobody approached the corpse on his own orders, and the Luministe security guards enforced those orders strictly. Telecameras showed insects moving about on the exposed tissue, and the eyes of the world watched as they fed and laid their eggs. Luministe clergy misted insecticide over the corpse, but refused to approach it. After six days there had been no resurrection, and even the media began to lose interest. After ten days the signs of decay were embarrassingly obvious, and the Luministe Supreme College of Light met to pronounce on what to do. The crowd in the Atlanta stadium had dwindled, and the substantial police presence was wound down to a token force. The College proclaimed that Bonhomme may have meant fifty days, that he had mispronounced "fifty" as "three." The faithful maintained their vigil. The mayor, c
oroner, chief of police, and owners of the stadium disagreed. Oddly enough it was a group of armed sports fans that finally liberated the stadium in a vigilante action that was probably sanctioned from within the government. There was a brief but bloody exchange of gunfire around the corpse. When the authorities were finally able to reach the remains of Bonhomme, the decay was fairly advanced—aided by the heat from the powerful lamps trained down on it. The coroner pronounced him dead by his own hand.

  As Bonhomme was being scraped off the stadium floor, Vitellan was discharged from the Royal Melbourne Hospital. He was unsteady on his feet as he and Lucel strolled hand in hand along the Southbank complex beside the Yarra River some hours later. It was another hot evening of late summer, and thoughts of how he had strolled there with JiUy/Vanda only days earlier scuttled back into his mind as fast as he could crush them. The place where her thumbnail-missile had blasted the jogger had been scrubbed clean, but the marks stood out and people stopped to point as they strolled past. Lucel had booked them into the penthouse suite of the same hotel whose bar window he had escaped through, and kept suggesting that he must be getting tired all through the evening.

  Vitellan had been sharp with medications and enforced rest, however, and even after two hours of intimacy with Lucel on the huge circular bed he was still wide awake.

  "That was important to me," she said as she lay with an arm draped over him in musky dampness beneath the sheets. "I want to have a time to remember when you are all mine, even if it's only a day or two." Vitellan pulled her close, and she clung to him gratefully.

  "I don't understand. Why only a day or two?"

  "You have a secure Village again, and Icekeeper Gulden can be trusted. You've been exchanging a lot of encrypted traffic with him, I notice. Do—do you want to return to the ice? There are still twenty-six years to go before you turn two thousand years old."

  "Do you want me asleep and frozen?"

  "No. Who do you think I am, an Icekeeper?"

  Vitellan laughed, and Lucel joined him in spite of her mood.

  "I wish to stay awake, perhaps for many years. I should have stayed with your grandmother of twenty-eight generations ago, but leaving her seemed to be the right thing to do, for her own sake. I want to stay with you now."

  "Because I give her back to you?" whispered Lucel, pressing her head against his.

  "Because you give love back to me, Lucel."

  "Love. I'm a lot to put up with for just love."

  "Peace, too, belonging, companionship, a friend, a worthy opponent, a teacher—"

  "A lover who doesn't bite?"

  "That too. To me, I'm back in the summer of 1358 in France, lying in a castle bedchamber, but this time there is no reason to flee. I really do want to stay with you."

  They were up at dawn the next morning, but they stayed in the spa bath for an hour before having an early breakfast sent up to the suite. The current fashion in leisure wear was cutaway designs over tinted UV bodygauze, but they were both carrying scars that would attract stares, so they opted for white aircell tracksuits.

  "We look odd, young heads on old fashions," Lucel remarked as they waited for a tram beside Princess Bridge.

  "If I wore the appropriate fashion, I'd be in a toga and sandals," Vitellan reminded her. Melbourne's center was an enormous pedestrian mall, patched with lawn, fountains, gardens, and sculptures. In a bizarre reversal of its former role, the central business district had become an exclusive residential and tourist area, from which people commuted or telecommuted to work. People ate out, more often than not, and restaurants were everywhere. Vitellan paused before Deciad Grills, noting that it was open for business, and that the owner's name was Greek. Inside, it was fitted out in molded fiberglass to resemble the interior of the Temporian time ship. The symbol from the Quintus scroll was above the door and on every menu.

  "Have you ever wondered about this?" Vitellan asked as he and Lucel sat waiting for their coffee to arrive.

  "Symbols from the Deciad cover of Quintus. You mentioned it back in LA."

  "An ancient mason's code, you would call it a triangula-tion. One point is the symbol for mason, another is the symbol for tunnel. They are each at the points of a set of dividers."

  "Quintus and the Temporian time ship. Only two points for a triangulation?"

  "It's a riddle, like the symbols over the door to my Frigidarium. A grave without a corpse, and a corpse without a grave. Rufus, my mason of the first century, explained it to me. The Frigidarium is not a grave nor was my body a corpse. The riddle is that I was still alive, although buried."

  "And there is a 'riddle' here, too?"

  "Yes."

  "The sides of the triangle are not defined, only the base," she said, stroking her chin. "What do we have for the third point?"

  "The hinge of the dividers. Remember, the Temporian time ship had fifteen more cells for frozen bodies than occupants."

  "There were divisions among them, there is evidence of fighting within the chambers," said Lucel, still unconcerned rather than puzzled. "Some must have died and been dumped into the sea for the seals and skuas to eat."

  "Without the hinge, the dividers are useless. Without Decius, what are the Temporians? The time ship is built like a fort, it cannot be entered without proper tools. Suppose Decius had returned to find fifteen of his supporters expelled, huddled outside and slowly freezing to death. They had all drunk the Oil of Frosts, they could all be frozen and revived. There is a small range of mountains at the hinge-point: some of the ice there may be nonglacial and suitable for preserving bodies. Decius might have returned to the raft to scratch these symbols on the Quintus scroll's casing, then led his people inland to scrape out—"

  "A time ship!" exclaimed Lucel, immediately wide-eyed. "Another Temporian time ship!" Vitellan put a finger to his lips as a waiter arrived with their coffees. He was wearing a cotton toga, which was admirably suited to the Melbourne summer.

  "Have you ever been to the time ship?" Vitellan asked him.

  "No, but the owner has. He renamed this place Deciad Grills last year after he got back from Antarctica." "Nice decor," remarked Lucel.

  "Yeah, it gets the crowds in, but I hope he lets us wear suits instead of these bloody togas in winter." When he was gone Lucel stabbed at the Deciad symbol urgently and lowered her voice.

  "We'll have to check this at once, Vitellan," said Lucel urgently. "At least some of those Romans may have survived."

  "I told Durvas some days ago, over the telepresence net. They are planning a joint expedition with the Mawson Institute."

  "You told everyone but me?" exclaimed Lucel. The waiter looked around, then hastily returned to folding paper napkins.

  "Lucel, Lucel, please," said Vitellan soothingly. "I have been looking forward to a few quiet days with you for so very long. Last night we talked about each other and our plans and love for hours. If you had known about the second Temporian time ship, could you have talked about anything else?"

  Lucel drew a deep, sharp breath, then gulped a mouthful of coffee.

  "Yes, I see. Sensible." Her words were remote, neutral.

  Vitellan put a hand on her cheek, then looked into her eyes and kissed her. The change is there, I can see it, he thought sadly to himself.

  A n t a r c t i c a : 9 M a r c h 2 0 2 9 , A n n o D o m i n i

  Antarctica was still a rugged place for tourists to visit. Lucel and Vitellan dashed from the SOMS through a snowstorm to a waiting ice-transit, and from there the journey to the Hotel Temporian took longer than the suborbital flight from Australia to Antarctica. They spent the period that was designated night in the hotel, although Lucel wanted to go straight out to the excavation site.

  "Neither of us are archeologists," said Vitellan wearily as he lay sprawled across the bed, still wearing insulatives.

  "I don't trust the Luministes, you know what they did to the Temporians in the original time ship," Lucel said sharply as she paced the green carpet. "We'll have to be on guar
d this time."

  "No bodies have been found as yet, so there is nothing to guard," grumbled Vitellan. "When we have something to look at, then we go there. Agreed?"

  They slept badly. Lucel was restless, and she kept Vitellan awake for much of the time. By the breakfast call there was word from the excavation site that promising ultrasound profiles had been detected, but excavation would take at least five hours more. Vitellan suggested a tour of the Temporian time ship.

  "I don't believe you, Vitellan!" muttered Lucel, grating her teeth and shredding her napkin. "These people have traveled sixteen centuries. They're Romans like you, yet you don't seem to care!"

  "I care," said Vitellan with a disarming shrug. "When they are revived I want to be there, but just now they are frozen bodies, and that's nothing new for me. I've been one myself for long enough."

  Lucel and Vitellan did not take the official tour of the museum, but went straight down to the caverns of the time ship itself. There were no others down there as they walked the ancient passages. It was better presented than Vitellan remembered from his virtual tour, but that card had been made many months ago. As the designer of another time ship, Vitellan took a keen interest in the technology. Lucel remained a curious mixture of boredom and nervous energy. Vitellan paid particular attention to the frozen, murdered bodies.

  "The evidence of the intrusion has been cleaned up," Lucel explained as Vitellan bent over to examine the ice in which one of the bodies lay. "The holes in the ice Gina Rossi drilled have been filled. The damage that she did is all within their brains."

  "Considerate of her to leave them as good museum exhibits," said Vitellan as he straightened. They took the elevator back up to the museum and went to the coffee shop. A panoramic window looked out over the frozen sea, and everything was still and crisp.

  "The weather's good, that will help the diggers," said Lucel as they sat drinking their coffee. Vitellan agreed, then looked across at a group photograph on the wall. He noted the date, and that it was of the museum staff. A case with one of the frozen Temporians was the centerpiece of the photograph.

 

‹ Prev