by R. M. Meluch
“Roma Nova, sir,” said Icky Iverson.
More to the point, Ranza Espinoza said: “Under the Coliseum, sir.”
A Roman prisoner in the cage across the corridor offered, “If they fit you for armor, you’re going up there.” He nodded up at the ceiling.
“Don’t listen to them, sir,” said Ranza. “Those guys’ve been torquing us around with that skat since we got here.”
“If it’s skat, why are you here?” the Roman called. “This is Death Row.”
“ ‘Cause they don’t got nowhere else to put us,” Ranza shot back. “Rome don’t got prisons.” The prisoner smiled ironically, gave the heavy metal bar a flick with his finger. “Hm. Verily.”
Steele turned to grip the bars. He watched the Romans watching him from behind their bars. “I thought Rome didn’t keep prisoners.”
“We’re not prisoners.” The man grinned and spat. Didn’t quite make the distance across the corridor to the American cage. “We’re gladiators.”
Steele gestured down the corridor at the other cage of sorrier Romans. “What are they?” The gladiator gave a disparaging glance toward the shabbier men. “Dead,” he answered.
“Scum,” said another gladiator.
“Crabs,” said another.
A flat surly voice from the slum answered, “You’re exciting me, O Big Strong Gladiators.”
“Those are criminals,” Ranza told Steele. “Bottom of the birdcage.” Steele looked at the gladiators in their cage, then at the scum of Palatine in their cage. “What’s the difference?”
“Gladiators fight each other. The scum get fed to something.” The animal noises from somewhere in these catacombs pressed to the fore of Steele’s attention.
“Gladiators take an oath,” said a gladiator.
“Yeah,” said Ranza. “To endure burning, beating, killing, bludgeoning, buggering—”
“Ho!”
“Okay, I added that last one,” Ranza admitted.
“They swear to take that all?” said Steele.
Ranza nodded.
Steele shrugged. Those were all good things to happen to Romans.
The duty of a prisoner was to escape. Ranza had been taking note of things about their surroundings. One of the first things she noticed was there were no cameras down here.
Steele didn’t believe it. “There have to be cameras.”
The Romans chuckled at him. “This place does not exist.”
Steele could not see any sound recorders but could not afford to think there were none. There had to be listening devices with American POWs down here. He asked if the Marines had been interrogated.
“No, sir.”
That sealed it. “They’re listening,” Steele told her.
After that, Ranza and Steele conferred under cover of a cloak. Gladiators hooted and offered to pay to watch what he and she were doing under there.
While the Marines tapped a cover of Morse garbage. Any Roman surveillance would think there might be embedded messages in all the junk. At least Rome could not afford to leave the cryptic messages unanalyzed.
Tapped nonstop nonsense:
Claudia is a cow.
Claudia is a sow.
Claudia is a bowwow.
Claudia is a meow.
It would give the Roman cryptos something to chew on while Steele and Ranza plotted an escape. The code was all crap and the Alphas could keep it up till the Claudias came home.
... slut.
... mutt.
... butt.
Under the cloak Ranza and Steele communicated silently in a combination of signs and lipreading. Steele did not trust whispers.
Ranza told Steele about the guards. They were almost all automatons. Not many human guards. Ranza had seen one or two.
She told him that the human guards never approached close enough to the cages to be grabbed. The guards carried shockers—contact-type shockers—in case some klutz of a guard dropped his shocker and it fell into a prisoner’s hands, it couldn’t be used against the guard. Unless he was idiot enough to come within arm’s length of the cage.
A guard had been grabbed by the scum while the Marines were down here. Automatons had come to the rescue real quick for that. But if a brawl broke out, no one would come.
Automatons were stationed at all the outer doors. There were no patrols. Automatons did the feeding. Automatons emptied the crappers. Ranza told him the criminals had a deader in their cage. He lay dead in there all day. Automatons fed and emptied the cage but left the stiff. A human guard came later. Didn’t notice the body till the inmates demanded it be removed. The guards made the prisoners stand against the far wall, and they brought down more automatons before they opened the cage and dragged out the corpse.
How does the automaton know who is guard? Steele asked.
Ranza shrugged, guessed, Signals from an implant?
Steele considered what could be worked around that piece of information. He pressed his fingers to his ears to keep out the tapping so he could think.
... hag.
... rag.
... bag.
... drag.
...gag.
On top of the Morse, other Marines kept up a cover of whispers for Roman surveillance to pick up. The Roman spooks would eventually sift out the whispers from the Morse and all the other noises, and figure out what the Americans were saying in secret.
Then the Roman cryptographers’ next task would be to decipher what “My dog has fleas” was code for. And how much wood would a woodchuck really chuck.
———
At night—at what the Marines assumed was night—the lights went out. No warning. Just sudden darkness. It ended any covert conversations under the cloak.
Bioluminescent mold or lichen on the ceiling gave off the faintest pale green glow so the underground chambers were not totally black once the eyes dilated.
The jailers had provided mattresses for the POWs to sleep on. The Marines kept their mats stacked against the back wall when not in use. They dragged the mats out to the floor as soon as their eyes adjusted to the dark.
Carly shared a mat with Twitch. Ranza kept to herself, and no one bothered Ranza. The men beckoned Kerry Blue as she tiptoed through the reclining bodies. Most of them knew her too well. There was an assumption that being with her once conferred a lifetime membership. She picked her way through them, dropped down on a mattress near the wall, to lie back to back with Colonel Steele. All the men sounded a disappointed, “Awww.”
Steele snarled low into the wall, his back to her. “Not a bright idea, Marine.” She stayed where she was, back to broad back. Whispered, “Sir? It’s a cage full of men.”
“They’re Marines.”
“So are you.”
The colonel had no business ever touching her. Ever. And that had not stopped him. He growled, “As you were.”
28
THE WORDS VIRTUS ET HONUS were chiseled into the back wall of the gladiators’ cell.
Strength and Honor.
Ranza had found a small stone which had crumbled out of the floor, and decided she wanted to write Quantum coiens pignus on her cell wall with it.
Big deal.
“Tell me how to draw that,” Ranza asked anyone. Cain started spelhng, “Q—U—” Ranza interrupted, “But how do you write that in Roman?” Cain was confused. “Quantum coiens pignus IS Latin.”
“I mean the letters,” said Ranza. “Don’t they write in those squiggles?”
“No. Just use Roman characters.”
“I don’t know Roman characters,” Ranza tried to tell him again. “Urn,” said Cain. “They write the same as us.”
“No shit?” Her silver-gray eyes blinked surprise. “Romans use our alphabet?”
“Uh,” Cain started, changed his mind about what he was about to say. Said, “Yeah. Q—U—A—”
Ranza scribed the letters with her stone into the wall as Cain dictated. She muttered, “Dang, those lupes staled everything from us, didn’t
they.”
Every day the gladiators were let out for exercise in small numbers in the company of automatons. POWs were not.
The Marines traded taunts with the gladiators. In spite of the insults, you could tell the gladiators regarded the American POWs as several steps above the Roman scum in the other cage. Those were something you scrape off the sole of your sandal. The POWs were soldiers, and therefore honorable. They were just on the wrong side of the war.
The noises from above started early this day, sounds of lots of people climbing bleachers. Festive voices. Music. Vendors hawking goods.
All the sounds funneled down here.
The prisoners watched a giant lizard float past on a heavy lifter through the corridor that divided the Americans from the Romans. The beast was fourteen feet long not counting its eternal tail. The great expanse of its rough skin was mottled green, brown, and dark red. A thick squat horn topped its nose like a small pyramid. Its wide feet were three-toed like a dinosaur’s.
The lizard was chained to its platform, but so lethargic it didn’t seem to need restraints. It took no interest in the humans. The Marines could not see its teeth. Didn’t want to. The thing looked smelly and wasn’t.
“Local life has an opposite thing going,” said Kerry Blue. “Opposite orientation. To its protein. That’s why the lizard doesn’t stink to us and we don’t smell tasty to him.”
Her cellmates looked at her strangely. “How’d you know that, Blue?”
“Something Darb told me.” Tears sprang suddenly to her eyes. She dashed them away before they could escape. “That’s why on some planets we can’t eat anything.” Her face wrinkled up. She did cry.
“Darb?” said Steele. Jealousy in the name.
Kerry’s arms hung uselessly at her sides. “He was like everybody’s weird brother. Came out with these strange bits of information. Like in comedy everyone gets married. Tragedy everybody dies.” She wiped her face with her sleeves. “I’m gonna miss him for a while.”
Ranza said, “I’m gonna miss him.” Cole Darby was her outboard brain.
Soon automatons, more of them than usual, trooped down to the dungeon. They passed the Americans by and stopped at the criminals’ cage and ordered the prisoners against the back wall.
An automaton opened their cage. The dirty Romans—and these were, literally, dirty— cringed.
You didn’t like those guys. They were Roman and they were slime. Still something moved in the gut, made the breath come shallow, drummed at the nerves to hear the names of human beings called forward for execution.
An automaton called a name. Terror showed in all the men’s eyes. No one answered. Then you noticed, because an automaton was picking one up, the tiny capsules on the stone floor in the passageway.
The automaton that picked up the capsule walked into the cage and down the line of prisoners. Some of the men had bloody ears.
Apparently the prisoners had dug the thin capsules from their earlobes and pitched them out to the corridor.
The automaton found a match, perhaps to the blood. The machine being seized the prisoner and dragged him out screaming and thrashing.
A gladiator cupped his hands around his mouth and scolded, embarrassed, from his cage, “Not in front of the Yanks!”
Five other prisoners either came as their names were called or got forcefully collected.
One of the damned let himself sail away into a euphoric hysteria. He smiled and blew kisses back to the ones left behind, his eyes glassy. Another vomited. His cellmates offered comfort: “Don’t do that in here! Who’s going to clean that up!”
The automatons shut the cage and took the condemned away.
When the automatons came back for the gladiators, the chosen stepped forward proudly when called. Those were led out in chains rather than in the grip of automatons.
When they were gone, the underground cell blocks took on the quiet sullenness of a death watch.
Ceremonial trumpets blared from above.
A tumultuous cheer, and thunderous chanting: “CAESAR CAE-SAR CAE-SAR.”
Steele’s artic blue eyes lifted. “Is that prick up there?”
A little later, raucous jeering signaled the appearance of one or more of the condemned criminals in the ring.
Then, not from above, but from somewhere in the underground corridors, sounded the clanking of stout chains, a tremendous roar, a pounding and splintering of massive wooden doors.
Kerry whispered, “That thing’s down here!” The noise was coming from the direction the lizard had gone. Not lethargic anymore. It sounded enraged. Angry huffing and puffing and hissing built up to another roar.
Then came the sudden sound of chains rattling out. A huge door opening. Great limbs thrashing, claws gouging, the beast launching itself up a ramp and out.
Shrieks and cries from the crowd, the voices full of fear, awe, and blood thirst. Drumming pandemonium reverberated down below. Noises of horror and disgust carried downward, followed by cheers and fervent applause.
There was a smaller sound amid the din, very close. A voice of a single someone right above the Marines’ heads. Whimpering against their ceiling became a soul-curdling scream. Then a roof-shaking thwomp!
A rain of splintered sawdust and sand filtered down from the ceiling.
Kerry Blue shook the grit out of her brown hair. The lupes had taken her hair band away from her for some reason. She moved over to crouch next to Steele, who was blinking sand from his eyes.
And it went on. You couldn’t talk. Because you couldn’t think. Just listen to the sounds.
After a while, the giant lizard floated back through the corridor the way it had come, lazy on its lift, breathing deep and slow. Its yellow eyes showed no interest in the aliens behind the bars.
Much later, after all the noise had died away, automatons returned some of the gladiators to their common cell. The men were clean, shaved, and dressed in fresh tunics. They collected nods of recognition from their cellmates. Apparently you got taken care of if you won.
Some time in the middle of the night Steele became aware of Kerry Blue tapping Morse against his hip with her forefinger.
Kerry tended to get her d’s and her u’s mixed up, so she ended up telling him: I love you. He had no choice but to tap on her hand: I love yod too.
Two nights later, a screaming and howling and banging carried up from the dungeons to the guards’ chamber on the ground level.
The brawl down in the cages sounded like a hoax. The human night guard was too smart for that. He waited an hour or more after the sounds died away to wander down to see if anyone had been killed. If the deader was someone scheduled to die in the morning, he would need to pick a replacement.
He did not turn on the underground lights, as he did not want to disturb the animals. He carried a lamp to review the cages.
He found the body. It was fish-belly white, in the Americans’ cage, lying against the bars.
And there was a skinny American woman, all the way through the bars so she was standing in the corridor— except that her head was caught between the bars.
The large male body lay right where she could spit down on it. There was a long gash in his head, crusted with blood, and a bloodstain on the stone floor under him.
No problem with him. Someone else could clean that mess up on the next watch.
The woman was a problem. She turned her head at the guard’s approach. Friendly as a badger, that one. She cocked a leg, ready to kick.
The guard brandished his shocker. He ordered the American prisoners to get back against the far wall. Then told the woman to squeeze her skinny ass back inside.
She gave a feral snarl. The bars prevented her from angling her face around to look at him, and her dark hair was in her eyes. She kept her heel up and ready to clock him if he came up behind her.
The Romans caged farther down the corridor told him to leave her like that. They goaded him: Take her! Take her!
The guard was not getting sn
ared in this. He was smarter than that.
He tried to keep his distance and still get a better look at the woman. He was not altogether convinced that she couldn’t get her head the rest of the way through those bars. Maybe if she left her ears behind.
From the look of her, he guessed she might do just that.
He touched his shocker to the bars at the edge of the cell, hoping that would carry through and stun her. But the weapon didn’t activate against metal.
He wished he could just kill her. Unfortunately he did not have the authority to kill U.S. POWs. And explaining the need for deadly force against a female that size would not advance his career.
“Call for reinforcements!” the prisoners cackled.
“You need automatons! Lots of them!”
“Help! Help!” someone called in falsetto.
There were dogs bigger than she was. He was twice her size.
He made sure the other Americans were still against the back wall, before he quickly, gingerly darted in from the side, near the bars, out of the striking line of her waiting heel, and jabbed her with his shocker.
Even before she dropped, he felt a very large hand close on his ankle and pull. He fell harder.
The Romans prisoners howled and clamored like baboons, calling for guards, in earnest this time.
The Marines reached through the bars and pulled the guard’s body close. They’d got very lucky. The guard’s head had smacked the stone floor hard. He was unconscious or dead.
The Yurg’s body had cushioned Carly’s face-first drop straight down. Kerry supported Carly’s head as the Yurg got out from under Carly and rose to his feet.
They had chosen the Yurg to be the deader because he was a very pale guy and he had the longest arms. His head wound was only a slice which he had cut with his own thick thumbnail, sharpened against the stone wall. It was a shallow gash, but a scalp wound bled like a son of a bitch, and he had looked frightening.
Steele gouged the recognition capsule out of the guard’s earlobe.
The guard’s blood on Steele’s hands, the guard’s capsule, and the guard’s control unit won him an amazing green light on the lock of their cell door. The Marines stared at the miracle.
There was a moment of breath-holding before the opening of the door.