The Centurion's Empire

by Sean McMullen

  "Is Gina there?" asked Vitellan, pointing to the wall. "I think I remember her from the vid, the one near the center."

  "Ah, yes, the one standing to the left of the case."

  Vitellan stared at the photograph, then nodded slowly.

  "Of course, I have—"

  "Just a moment!" exclaimed Lucel, suddenly staring at something on her dataspex. "They've found them! All together, seventeen Temporians. They're separating and extracting them now!"

  Lucel already had a tiltfan fitted out and ready for the flight inland. Vitellan went with her to the hangars and sat patiently in the observer's seat while she hurried through the preflight check, then began bringing the motors up to operational temperature.

  "They're not going to run away," said Vitellan as she revved up the fans and the machine lurched into the air.

  "I can't understand why you're so calm," she retorted.

  The tiltfan entered the coldlock of the hangar. Double doors slid shut behind it, double doors in front opened onto blinding Antarctic whiteness, then they surged out on four columns of air. The tiltfan quickly gained height in the clear, cold air, and Vitellan looked ahead to a cluster of hills. Almost at once Lucel began the descent. The site of the time raft was marked by a scatter of red tiltfans and tents, and two spidery ice-cutting handlers stood idle beside a geometrically regular gash in the blind valley's ice. Vitellan noted a row of oblong blocks covered in yellow insulative near one of the cranes, and Lucel steered the tiltfan for these as they came in to land.

  Each of the blocks of ice containing the Temporians' bodies was on a pallet. Vitellan walked across the compacted snow past two deferential guards to one of the pallets and lifted a corner of the yellow insulative. He stared at some- thing dark and indistinct beneath the surface of the frozen block, then went across to the edge of the excavation. Lucel joined him as he stood staring into the remains of the time raft.

  "I've ordered that the pallets be loaded into my tiltfan at once," she reported. Vitellan turned to see an articulated handler lift a pallet with firm but gentle efficiency and stamp across to the tiltfan.

  "How many trips will you make?" Vitellan asked as he watched.

  "Just one. You don't seem very interested, Vitellan. There are cameras recording all this, you know. You're part of this too, people want to share your feelings in this moment."

  "I think my feelings are fairly obvious," he said as he turned away again.

  Lucel stood beside him for a moment, unsettled by his strangely detached mood, then she strode over to the tiltfan and waited there as the last of the pallets were loaded aboard. She was revving up the engines and preparing to leave when Vitellan finally came back.

  "You have to stay here and examine the site and reports," she said, barring his way to the cabin.

  "Do I?" he asked. "What I've seen already is enough. I'm just a tourist."

  "Please, love, the tiltfan is heavily loaded as it is. I mean if s safe, but I'd rather you went back in one that's not so close to the limit."

  "If that's the case we should split the load. I don't want you in danger," he said as she walked him to the hatch.

  "Vitellan, I know what I'm doing!" she shouted impatiently. "Now please go and see Gulden. He wants to show you how the last man awake, probably Decius, rigged a snowdrop to cover himself. He also thinks that one of the women may turn out to be Helica."

  Vitellan shrugged, then turned and walked clear to where Icekeeper Gulden was waiting with his team of archeologists. They said nothing but exchanged nods and watched as Lucel's tiltfan lifted sluggishly from the ice and slowly gained height. Now Gulden and Vitellan walked straight to a

  smaller tiltfan that was revving up, and they strapped in beside four armed security guards. Still not a word was exchanged. The second tiltfan surged into the air and rose clear of the low, desolate peaks. Ahead of them Lucel's tiltfan was a tiny red hyphen against the blue sky, high above the ice. A puff of smoke burst abruptly about the distant aircraft, something flew clear, then a roiling ball of fire blossomed in midair. Debris rained down to the ice, followed by a parachute of red and white concentric circles. The second tiltfan descended, pacing the parachute until Lucel landed in a puff of powdery snow. Vitellan jumped to the surface with Gulden as Lucel was unbuckling her harness. The guards followed.

  "Vitellan, how did you get here so quickly?" she panted.

  "Roman efficiency," he replied tersely.

  Lucel nervously brushed at the snow on her parka. "I only just managed to eject in time, there was a bomb aboard. Some Luministe leftover cell must have detonated it remotely."

  Vitellan and Gulden drew their rail pistols together.

  "Vitellan?" she gasped, spreading her hands wide rather than raising them.

  "Don't move, Lucel, don't make this harder than it needs to be," he warned.

  "Vitellan, you've lost your senses, I—"

  Gulden fired as she began to reach for Vitellan, and she convulsed as a covalat-edge, charged needle tore through the monomolecular mesh bodysuit beneath her clothing arid raked her nervous system with pain. Vitellan fired another, then Gulden fired again. Lucel toppled to the snow, as rigid with shock as a bronze statue. The Icekeeper took a webcap from his pocket and pulled back the hood from Lucel's head as Vitellan covered him. A few seconds later she was safely in an induced coma, and the guards lifted her into the tiltfan.

  "You were right," said Vitellan as he and Gulden stood watching.

  "I am not proud of being right," Gulden replied, the rail pistol still in his hand, "but the Luministe records that I de-encrypted were accurate. Her mind is still focused by those obsession imprints that she was given. 'Kill all false prophets from the past, and kill all time travelers except the true

  jrophet,' they say. She might have been able to tinker with :he vectors so that you are the true 'prophet' instead of Bon-lomme, but the Temporian Romans have no such protection. It's not Lucel's fault, they had not been discovered in 2024 when the imprint work was begun on her." "Are they safe?"

  "Safe?" exclaimed Gulden indignantly. "You ask the Icekeeper of Durvas if frozen bodies in his care are safe?" Vitellan was used to dealing with Icekeepers. "Well, are they?"

  "Our ultrasonics have located seventeen profiles, all about a hundred yards from our dummy trench. Now that my worst fears about Lucel are confirmed and she is under control, we can start the real work. Do you want to be there for the real excavation, Centurion?"

  "It will be a great moment, and I seem to be drawn to great historic moments. Yes, but let us get Lucel safely away from here first."

  D u r v a s , B r i t a i n : 1 9 A p r i l 2 0 2 9 , A n n o D o m i n i

  An official announcement was made that the Centurion of Durvas had been revived successfully for medical checks, but apart from some limited interviews he was kept distant from the journalists and their cameras. The media people did not mind unduly. As was expected, events in Antarctica tended to dominate the networks: news of the find of a second Antarctic time ship had been released. It was hyped up like the landing of a UFO. The Temporian Romans would be ambassadors from an advanced but alien society, and their effect on human society would be studied as as an example of

  "first contact." They also presented an opportunity to study how humans adjusted to really long-term time travel, travel so extreme that no familiar societies were left when they were revived.

  "They are a vaccine," explained Gulden as he and Vitellan walked in the garden of Gulden's hobby farm.-Spring had taken a firm hold, and the background greenery was swamped with flowers.

  "And what is the disease?" asked Vitellan.

  Gulden gestured to the sky above.

  "Read any history of first contact between civilizations. Even if those in power on the weaker side are able to fight back, there are always those who turn traitor and support the invaders. They are the Luministes in the picture, they sell their own people into submission to gain power under the invader. Our world needs practice
in dealing with such times and changes. The Temporians have no power, no weapons, no home world to give them backing, so they are safe enough. The next shipload of intelligent aliens may not be without such backing."

  The commnode cheeped on Gulden's wrist. He held his hand up, then slipped his dataspex onto his face. After only moments he removed them and turned to Vitellan.

  "That's the Durvas Clinic. You're needed there."

  "Lucel?"

  "Yes. Come this way, I have a tiltfan ready over there behind the barn."

  The tiltfan lifted with a deep, authoritative hum of engines, and Gulden brought it up to a transit corridor level before setting the pilot beacon and selecting the coordinates for the Durvas clinic. He did not switch to autopilot. The act of piloting was something to hide behind while he talked with the memories of a man born nearly twenty centuries earlier.

  "There is practically no hope for Lucel," Gulden said as he stared through the windscreen at the English countryside four hundred feet below. "The paranoia against all but her chosen time traveler, you, has been imprinted too deeply, and on too many levels."

  Vitellan drummed his fingers on the shockcell padding beside his seat, staring down at the patchwork of fields and tracery of roads.

  "McLaren could transfer my mind to another brain, yet you can't undo a mere obsession? Is that what you are saying?"

  "Yes."

  "Please explain, I find that unbelievable." Gulden waved his right hand in a little circle. "Were I to botch the landing at the Durvas Imprint Clinic and hit a wall

  rery hard, how much do you think it would cost to restore his tiltfan?"

  Vitellan consulted the cyclopedia imprint. "It sells for a juarter million pounds, so ... perhaps a third of that?" Gulden laughed softly. "Three or four times that, Vitellan. Surprised?"

  "Yes!"

  "I'll explain. Tiltfan components are stamped out very efficiently in the factories, but a mangled wreck has to be bent sack straight again, then panelbeaten until the dents are gone. Torn sections have to be welded, missing bits have to be replaced or filled with bondfiber, and many parts just have :o be discarded altogether and replaced. It's intensive work, and expensive work. After a serious accident it's easier to salvage what parts have survived, break up the rest for recycling, and buy a new tiltfan."

  "But Lucel is not injured."

  "She is riddled with gates and stabilized imprints. We have removed one, but it took a lot of sweat. The rest would take longer than her expected lifetime to clear. We could take whole blocks out, filter them for anything suspicious, then return them as an imprint."

  "Then do it."

  "The risk is that we shall remove too much of the legitimate Lucel. A lot of gate-pattern memories are the real her, and after six years of therapy you would be left with a pale reflection of what was once Lucel. Something like a shy nine-year-old, someone who would grow into a woman again, but almost certainly a different woman from the one you knew."

  Within minutes the tiltfan was descending into a pattern of landing lights on the roof of the Imprint Clinic. Vitellan and Gulden descended to the maximum security ward where Lucel was being held. She was drowsy with sedation, but fighting to keep herself sharp.

  "They give me no lines or news," she said as she sat with her head on Vitellan's shoulder. "Information is my life, Vitellan. I can't go on like this."

  "You're in the middle of heavy imprint therapy. You must be kept calm and relaxed."

  "But why bother with this therapy? I understand what was done to me, I know that I have keys to attack any frozen time traveler other than you, but now there are none left. I'm safe to be with."

  "But there are thousands of modern people in cryogenic storage."

  "My imprints don't cover them, they have to be from tt» distant past."

  Vitellan said nothing. Lucel began to pace the ward, her arms folded behind her back.

  "If I need therapy, it can only be because the frozen Temporian Romans have survived," she concluded quickly. "You probably colluded with Gulden and set up an elaborate hoax to test my reactions. If you had to do that, then it must be because there are other time travelers. If I must still be restrained, it must be because the blocks of ice on the tiltfan contained wax dummies or modern cadavers. The real Decius and his companions are probably still in the ice." Vitellan sat on her bed, hunched over and hopeless. "What do you want me to say?" he asked.

  "Nothing. When I let the Luministes do this to me, I thought that only you and Bonhomme would be involved. With all these others around... I'll continue to have obsessions to vector on them. I am only in control now because you have not confirmed that the others are still alive. Imprint therapy is the only answer, Vitellan. I may not be totally in control, but I'm no fool."

  They stood together and kissed. Lucel stared into Vitellan's eyes, and seemed to peer into his thoughts.

  "This feels like good-bye, you seem so sad," she protested.

  "Gulden says the procedure is dangerous," he admitted, his words halting. "You may wake up ... not quite yourself. He was quite blunt about the risks."

  Lucel clenched her fists, and muscles rippled impressively along her forearms.

  "I shall not say good-bye, Vitellan. You fought for your identity and won, so I can do it too. I'll be back as me, just you wait."

  When she was fully sedated Gulden brought a touchboard

  to Vitellan as he sat watching Lucel's sleeping body through a window. As the procedure commenced there was nothing physical to see, and as the hours passed there was nothing more for Vitellan to do but watch the steady rise and fall of his lover's chest. When Gulden finally approached him he was not smiling.

  "It's worse than I could have imagined," the Icekeeper reported. "Some sort of irreversible random placement has been used, something developed privately that we have no documentation on."

  "Couldn't you do anything?"

  "We did indeed repair some gating, but it barely scratched the surface. Now I need a decision on how to proceed, and an authorization to do so. One way is to begin removing the gates and imprints individually and hope that a faster technique is soon developed. Another is to try filtering blocks and reimprinting Lucel with herself. That will take no more than six years, but she will not awake the same woman. The third course is to keep her confined ..." Vitellan gazed at her sleeping body and shook his head.

  "She is very resourceful. Sooner or later she will escape and begin stalking the Temporian Romans, nothing is more certain. The fourth course is to kill her."

  "I never said—"

  "Of course not, but someone had to say it. There is also a fifth way to cure her."

  "Another way? This is my specialty, I doubt that I have missed any alternatives."

  "She can be frozen until all the Romans are dead, so she would awake in a world where there are no triggers to make her dangerous. Anyway, in a few decades there may be imprint techniques that can reverse the Luministe imprinting in a matter of weeks, rather than years."

  "You are talking about fifty years, or even more."

  "Hah, a mere trifle. In the meantime Durvas can set up a research foundation to develop techniques for repairing such imprint damage. As Centurion of Durvas, I hereby order it."

  A refinement of what was once known as Oil of Frosts was administered to Lucel before she was revived. Vitel- Ian watched from the observation room, then came in as she opened her eyes. He was wearing a clinic gown himself.

  "It failed," said Lucel.

  "I haven't said a word," replied Vitellan.

  "No, but you are wearing an Alpha-level security badge, and you only need to wear one of those when visiting an extremely dangerous patient. If I'm still dangerous, then Gulden and his team failed."

  "You are right, of course," Vitellan admitted. "Dr. Gulden has just given me the results of the exploratory scan. Wait fifty years, or a hundred, and a therapy will be developed to reverse your obsessions and vector keys. You will have to be frozen until then."<
br />
  Lucel turned away from him and stared at the wall.

  "You were right to snatch a few days of playing lovers with me, Vitellan. Dammit, I'm like a race car, tuned up to all hell but burned out after only a couple of hours of com: petition. Was it all worth it?"

  "Was I worth it?"

  "If you were not, nobody else is."

  "That's not an answer."

  "It was not meant to be."

  Vitellan sat on the edge of the bed and put his arm around her shoulders. She turned back and flung her arms around him at once.

  "It's said that adjusting to a new century is a real bitch," Lucel whispered. "Who said that?"

  "Some Roman I know, a real charmer. He's had a lot of experience."

  "Good, good. He'll be there to help out when you wake up."

  "What?" she cried.

  Lucel sat up and seized Vitellan by the shoulders, her bloodshot eyes bulging with incredulity as she looked him up and down.

  "Yes, the gown, the, the . . . You would do it, you really would." She hugged him again, convulsively. He stroked her hair,

  his eyes closed and bis mind blank, savoring the minutes that would soon slow into years. r

  "You need to key a legal release into the bedside console," Vitellan began, but Lucel reached out and batted out a pattern before he could say any more.

  "How long have we got?" she asked.

  "A minute, an hour, a day if you like. You have to stay in here, of course, but where you stay, I stay."

  "It's a cage, cages suck. I wouldn't make my best friend stay in a cage and you're my best friend."

  "It doesn't have to be so frantic, Lucel."

  "Yes it does. Don't underestimate me, Vitellan, I know what I am. I know that there might be surviving travelers from Imperial Rome out there. We've been through all this before. Maybe I blew up a tiltfan loaded with frozen wax dummies, maybe it was all a hoax to activate the psycho circuits in my head to show what I can do." She placed a finger on his lips as he parted them to speak. "Don't tell me anything, lover. Right?"