"Sir," said Clodius Afer, centurion pilus prior and leader of the Tenth Cohort, "I think we've got a problem. Three of the boys've deserted."
"Fuck," said Gaius Vibulenus. He ducked his head and shoulders into the water. The chill shrank his steaming flesh away from his body armor, and the current sent thrilling tendrils of water down his backbone.
Either the stream or the news cooled the tribune more than he expected, because when he raised himself his torso was shivering spasmodically. The swollen yellow sun that had baked them throughout the afternoon's bloody work seemed now to glance off his breastplate with no more power to warm.
"What do you mean?" Vibulenus demanded as his palms scrubbed fiercely at his unlined, boyish cheeks and forehead. "There isn't any place to desert to that the crew won't find them."
The stream was so clear that the soldiers' boots could be seen against the gravel bottom. The spillage dripping from the tribune's face left whorls on the current, grime and sweat, red blood and most especially blood the color of drawn copper. The corpse against the bank, its arm tangled with a root, had bled out so completely that the water tumbling past was as pure as that upstream.
"Well, you know Helvius, sir," said the centurion. "He gets an idea and you can't shake him out of it." He looked around instinctively to see who might be within earshot. No one was. Vibulenus was almost alone in using the stream to wash instead of struggling for position at one of the water carts. Habit. . . . The carts were always there after a battle, so there was no need to search for local water — or even to remember the creek you battled your way across an hour before.
"Pollux and Castor," the tribune muttered. He was too exhausted to control his bouts of shuddering, and he felt that his body was on the verge of wracking itself to pieces. "Let's get, get out of here," he said and began to walk carefully out of the stream, feeling flat stones slide beneath his hobnails.
Clodius offered the younger man an arm in something more than comradeship; though the gods knew, the centurion had been in the hottest part of the fighting. Even if unwounded, he should have been weary to death.
Perhaps he was, but his job wasn't over after all — and neither was the tribune's.
Together the soldiers slogged to the bank. Pompilius Niger, who had taken Sixth Century when Clodius got the cohort, was waiting there trying to look as though he were not a conspirator. His hand helped Vibulenus up the knee-high step that had momentarily looked insuperable.
He hadn't been this wrung out when he stumbled into the creek to cool off. He'd have said that he was getting old if his reflection in the water did not give the lie to that thought.
But he was getting old. His mind knew that, even if his body didn't.
"All right, what happened?" the tribune said, slapping the front of his armor to shake out dribbles of water trapped between the bronze and his chest. His studded leather apron had a clammy feel as it brushed his thighs. Whatever had possessed him to splash back into the creek?
Most of the enemy who had fallen in the water had been washed away by the current. There was a straggling rank of them just up the bank and beyond it, those who had stumbled at the edge of safety or paused when they thought they had gained it.
There was no safety for those in flight from the legion. Bare backs drew swords the way iron filings slid toward a lodestone.
"The sinkhole where we hid last night?" Clodius said while Niger pursed and unpursed his lips.
"Go on," prompted the tribune.
The Commander, who had six limbs — arms or legs as he chose to use them at the moment — had sent the Tenth Cohort on a roundabout course to what he had chosen for the battlefield. It had been a nervous journey, with no local guides and only the Commander's word that the hostile force would not ambush them.
The Commander would lie in an instant, for any reason or for none at all. Vibulenus knew that; but he also knew that the guild would not throw away a tenth of a legion's strength. The vessel itself and the floating, sentient paraphernalia it sent out in the aftermath of each victory proved that the Commander could have the absolute knowledge of the enemy which he claimed.
That put him one up on Crassus; and they, the survivors of the legion, weren't the men Crassus had led to disaster either — not any more, not for a long time.
"There was that cave off the back of it," the centurion was saying. "Some locals tried to hide there with their herd when we come up."
"And I told you to keep to blazes out of it," the tribune agreed. "Some of those places go down forever."
The peasants herded leggy beasts that looked more like donkeys than sheep. Their terror when the cohort blocked passage from the sinkhole was evident in the way they grunted and flicked their ears at one another, but they had nothing to fear.
The soldiers of the enemy were squat figures, somewhat shorter than the Commander's bodyguards but built along the same lines. The peasantry was nowhere near as bulky, either from race or from diet, and some of the females might even have been attractive if you got used to ears the length of a man's hand.
"He's been wanting to get away for a long time," Niger interjected. "He even said it to you, sir. He didn't think it was leading anywhere."
"Did he figure he was going to be consul if we got back home, then?" Vibulenus snapped.
His anger was always close to the surface now. Here it had the advantage of sending a surge of warmth through his shaking limbs. The willowy shrubs fringing the creek had been trampled flat or leafless during the fighting. Their bare silhouettes marked but did not block the huge sun which was bloating into a red oval on the horizon.
"If we were home," the tribune said, arguing with himself rather than his listeners or even his memory of Decimus Helvius, "he'd have died on campaign, or on a farm. Now, well, there's fewer choices but the payoff doesn't have to be anytime soon." He looked up from the hands he had clenched in front of him.
"He could have raised sons," said Clodius simply.
"Well, he can't fucking do that here either, can he?" the tribune blazed. "If we ever get back somewhere I recognize or somebody recognizes, then we'll talk about ransom or maybe even running. But not here."
The stars above them as they bivouacked in the sinkhole the night before had proved to anyone who cared to understand that they were very far from home indeed.
The battle had gone according to the Commander's desires and perhaps even his plan — though probably not. The hostile force had marched straight toward the sinkhole, apparently intending to laager a camp there, instead of arraying themselves against the nine cohorts which were counterfeiting the entire legion.
That wasn't by plan either: the enemy was moving in utter ignorance. Their scouting was quite as abysmal as that which led Crassus' army, and so many Roman armies before his, into disaster. Though Vibulenus had lived through a major intelligence failure, it was not until he became used to working for the guild that he realized how valuable knowledge of hostile dispositions could be.
That didn't help when you were in command of four hundred men, and almost ten thousand heavily-armed opponents were headed for you.
"I thought I saw Helvius during the fighting, though," the tribune said in puzzlement. He fingered his dripping scalp and remembered that he needed to pick up his helmet, tossed to the stream edge when he decided to duck himself. No need to look for his shield: it had been literally hacked to splinters by the swords and axes of the enemy.
"Oh, he wouldn't desert us," said Niger in real surprise. "Nor Grumio and Augens neither. But afterwards, I saw them jogging back toward the sinkhole and I knew what that meant." He paused, then added, "I was looking for bees, you know."
"That's who the others are, then?" Vibulenus asked struggling with the pin under his right shoulder that would unlatch his body armor. It caught with an inch or more still within the interlocked tubes of the breast and back plates. "Grumio and Augens? And you think they'll try to hide in the cave in the end of the sinkhole."
"Yeah, that's right," said Clodius.
"Here, I'll get it," said Niger, reaching for the recalcitrant pin with short, strong fingers. His hands and forearms were drenched with alien blood that fell deeper into orange and red as it dried and scaled away.
"Leave it," said Vibulenus, batting away his friend's hand when he had meant only to block it with his own. "Let's go find the cursed fools before the crew decides it has to."
The little Summoners with blue beacons atop were beginning to drift over the field, calling men back to the ship. There would be no immediate alarm, but the sight was enough to spur the trio back in the direction from which they had marched that morning in battle order. Vibulenus' legs were weary, but his arms were so weak that they flopped like wooden carvings unless he made a conscious effort to control them.
The enemy's course had eliminated any chance of striking their army from the rear while they were heavily engaged with the rest of the legion. To cower in the sinkhole would have meant massacre by missiles hurled down unanswerably from the rim.
Vibulenus had marched the cohort out to a hillock with enough wood to shade them. They stood there, bristling like a bronze-flanked hedgehog, while the hostile force broke against them in furious waves. The legion, double-timing to the clash of weapons regardless of the heat, smashed into the attackers' rear with nine times the force and a hundred times the effect that the Commander had planned.
The tortoise which chose the badly wounded and the repairable slain was still hovering over the hill the Tenth Cohort had defended.
"They wanted us to come along, too," Niger blurted suddenly.
The older centurion struck him a fierce blow in the ribs with the heel of his hand, driving the breath out despite the leather-backed mail shirt. "Shut up and move," he growled.
"Why didn't you?" the tribune asked, pretending that he had not felt an impulse to slap both the centurions for hiding the plan from him. They of all the men in the legion should have known better!
"Sir," said Clodius Afer in the embarrassment the tribune had hoped to spare him by ignoring the dereliction, "we thought we'd talked 'em out of it. And you had a lot on your mind just then. We all did."
"Don't know what I could've done to change their minds if you couldn't," Vibulenus said. Nor did he, now that he thought about it, which made his initial fury all the sillier. He grew angry too easily, now. He hadn't always been like that.
They skirted another straggling pile of bodies, all of them hostiles when alive. The victims wore helmets and most had, besides their ironbraced shields, body armor: scales sewn to leather, or a plate (often cast in a fanciful shape, bestial or geometric) strapped to their broad chests. The few who fought naked did so as a statement of courage like the Celts, charging at the front of the army and gnashing their teeth as if they intended to gnaw through the Roman line.
The enemy had been ill informed and ill commanded — all the chiefs, bright with gold armor and capes of brilliant scarlet, had been in the front rank, facing the lone cohort, when the remainder of the legion began butchering the force from behind. But the enemy had never been negligible, soldier by soldier, and there was Death's own plenty of them.
Without the volleys of javelins which fouled their shields and dismayed troops unfamiliar with missiles of such weight and accuracy, the native army might even have been able to reform after the first shock had worn off. It would have been a tough fight for the legion; and just possibly a losing fight.
Sometimes Vibulenus speculated in the darkness about what would happen if they were ever defeated.
The enemy's baggage train stood where the troops had abandoned it to attack the Tenth Cohort. A few legionaries were poking through it, from curiosity or even a desire for loot. Some habits were too deeply ingrained to be eradicated by repeated proofs of their pointlessness.
The teamsters and other noncombatants among the baggage were of a physical type with the peasantry. They had so little initiative that they had simply waited, with no attempt to laager their wagons, when the soldiers boiled out of the train to attack the waiting Romans. They seemed scarcely less apathetic than the gangs of neck-chained slaves attached to the back of some of the wagons.
The sinkhole was half a mile from the battle site. Vibulenus had not noticed the distance when he marched the cohort out in close order after a chilling discussion with the pickets who had rushed in breathless with news of the enemy. Everyone had been too frightened — he had been too frightened — to feel fatigue.
It was a staggeringly long way back; he regretted not taking Niger's bloody-handed help in stripping off his body armor. "Publius," he said as thinking about the hands cast his mind much farther back along the path of his history with the junior centurion, "if you just possibly did find some bees and some honey, how in the name of Faunus do you suppose you'd get it back in the ship? Or them back?"
There was a commotion behind them in the baggage train, cause for a glance over the shoulder but not concern. Several vehicles from the merchant vessel, looking like slightly larger versions of the water carts, were gliding among the wagons. They carried half a dozen passengers apiece, men or not-men of a variety even wider than that of the legion's successive commanders. Each individual was clad in monochrome, but the selection of single colors ran the gamut from violet to a red so dark it was nearly black.
"Oh, it wouldn't be hard, Gaius," said Niger as rolling ground dropped them out of sight of the train and the field. They were not tribune and centurions at the moment; and Niger, too, was happy to return to the terms of boyhood.
"You see," he explained, so intent on his subject that he would have stepped into a flat-stemmed, spikey bush had not Clodius steered him aside, "the guards at the Medic's check, they don't care about anything 'cept fighting or pushing in line."
"Or," Vibulenus said tartly, "if somebody tried to slip contraband into the ship proper after they've gone through the Sick Bay. I've seen them collar people doing that, and sometimes it meant another trip through the booth to get fixed up."
"Niger, if you don't watch where you're going," the pilus prior interjected sharply, "you'll fall down the fuckin' side. And by Apis' dick, I'll let you lie there. If you can't talk and walk at the same time, shut the fuck up."
"Sorry, sir," the junior centurion answered, abashed. They had reached the sinkhole. While the trail winding down its side was occasionally wide enough for three or four men abreast, it was never regular enough to be safe for someone talking over his shoulder instead of keeping his eyes to the front.
"Here, I'll lead," said Vibulenus as he stepped ahead of his companions. He was feeling human again, tired but human. The leather backing of his body armor was clammy and beginning to chafe. As he walked down the steep incline, he tried again to pull the locking pin. It came without effort, and he flopped the breastplate wide against its left-side hinges.
"Yessir," said Niger and cleared his throat. "I mean, sure, Gaius, that's right — they grab guys with contraband. But not because they see it but because they're told about it."
"The Medic?" Clodius put in from the end of the line where he was apparently able to hear well enough.
"Naw, he doesn't care," the younger centurion replied. "No, I figure it's the whole ship, you know? It watches. But all it sees is metal, so you try to get in with gold, you get grabbed. Lots of guys bring in jewels, though, sometimes stuck up their ass but even open in their hands."
Vibulenus hadn't known that. He paused at the bottom of the trail to strip off his armor and prop it against a rock, watching Niger with interest. It seemed to be his day to learn unexpected things about the men he helped to lead but did not command.
"Sure," said Clodius, sealing the statement without room for doubt as he followed the others into the lumpily-flat bottom of the sinkhole. "But all that crap disappears when we march out after the next muster. They must, I dunno, give everything aboard a real goin' over whenever we're out. So it's really just there till we go into Transit. Whatever the fuck that is."
"But sometimes we got a couple months aboard before that, right?" said Niger. "That's time for mead to get enough of a bite to be worth doing, you know? I don't mean it'll be the vintage you bring out when your son gets married, sure . . . but it'll be mead, and that's all I'm after. Just something, you know. To remind me of home and all."
Vibulenus was picking his way along the track to the cave at the best pace possible under the circumstances. They had lost direct sunlight even before they stepped within the sinkhole, and now the sky above, though clear, was beginning to take on a rich maroon tinge that scattered very little sun into the natural pockmark.
Ground water had dissolved a pocket in limestone. When that bubble in the rock had reached the surface, or an earthquake had shaken the area, the roof had collapsed to leave a sheer-sided valley a quarter mile in diameter and a hundred feet deep. The channel cut by the water at one end still ran down into the earth, probably as deep as the stratum of limestone itself.
The floor of the sinkhole was covered with debris from the roof and windblown loess trapped by the sides. Rock fragments, gorse-like vegetation, and quantities of droppings from the animals corraled here made the footing difficult even before the trio of Romans reached the cave.
A hundred yards down its sloping throat, the cave would be pitch dark even at noon on Midsummer's Day.
"Helvius!" the tribune shouted. The trio could be anywhere, not even within the cave. He stumbled forward. Breaking your neck here in the darkness might be as effectively fatal as having your spine hacked through by a slope-browed swordsman. "Helvius! Will you at least come out and talk to somebody with sense before you do this!"
"Careful here, sir," said Niger, whose night vision seemed to be better than that of Vibulenus. The throat of the cave dropped away slickly, but broad steps had been roughed into one side. The other side. The sky still looked bright if you looked at it directly, but that was by contrast with the lumpy blackness of everything on solid earth.
There didn't seem to be any peasants around — the sound and smell of their herds was unmistakable — but that made little difference. When the legion was to work with local auxiliaries, the men mustered out with the ability to speak the necessary languages as long as they kept their helmets on. Here they had been operating alone.
So, for that matter, had the enemy: a force of heavy infantry moving across the face of the land more as conqueror than defender. The politics of what they did at the guild's behest sometimes bothered Vibulenus, but he never had — the legion never had — enough information to decide whether or not they really agreed with the choices the guild had made.
For that matter, he had never been sure why they were invading Parthia. It had something to do with the Kingdom of Armenia, he'd been told, a Roman ally . . . or with rivalry between Crassus and the partners in his political machine, Caesar and Pompey, if you listened to other opinions. He'd been scared green himself — gods! but that had been a long time ago — but he'd have been just as scared if he were being called up because Hannibal was at the gates of Rome again. Nothing political in fear.
His father might have had doubts about the expedition, but the Vibuleni had made a very good thing out of farming taxes in the Province of Asia and weren't the people to decry military adventurism in the East. Besides, a family of their stature had a duty to the Republic, to act as exemplars for lesser folk in taking arms to Rome's glory.
The tribune's fingers caressed the bone hilt of the sword which he had learned to use so much better after he left Rome's service than he ever had before.
As for the "lesser folk," the common legionaries and the non-coms who had fought their way up from that status — so far as Vibulenus could recall, their major concern had been whether the King of Parthia drank from gold cups or hollowed jewels, and which would bring more from the merchants who trailed the army to buy its loot. After a time, they all had more pressing concerns — heat and thirst and the arrows that fell like rain — but those were not political either.
And besides, by then it was too late to matter.
"Decimus!" called the pilus prior, a hand on both Niger and Vibulenus to keep them from trying to descend dangerously farther. The cave had only a slight average slope, but descents when they came tended to be abrupt. "Marcus, Gaius. C'mon and talk for a minute so we don't fall and kill ourselves, all right? It's just me, Niger, and Gaius Vibulenus — you know he's all right. No tricks, just a little talk that can't hurt nothing."
There was a clink from the darkness, metal on metal, and a murmur of voices made ghostly and unintelligible by the acoustics of the cave. The tribune opened his mouth to call further demands, but Clodius forestalled him by touching his cheek with the hand already resting on his shoulder.
The next sound was the one they had come to hear, the scrape of hobnails on slippery rock and the muttered curses of the men climbing back up the slope.
"A bull to Hercules for this," said the tribune under his breath. Though the problem hadn't exactly been solved yet. "I don't like to think how the Commander'd react if he heard about a desertion."
They thought the first silent flash was heat lightning, but then the little Summoner floated beneath the rim of the sinkhole and the light spinning on its top threw patches of blue against the walls instead of the empty sky.
"Return at once to the ship," it called, its voice faint but recognizably speaking in the tones of the Commander. The illuminated swatches of rock grew fainter and broader as the beam's rotation slid it along more distant curves of the wall, then snapped back to brighter immediacy.
"Return at once to the ship," the Summoner ordered as it continued to descend toward the mouth of the cave.
"Helvius, wait!" the tribune cried as the faint blue reflection let him run forward down the slope. The figures he glimpsed thirty feet in front of him disappeared around a bend of the water-gouged corkscrew into the limestone. The forearm of one of the men was bandaged; the white fabric flashed like a flag charged with the dark smear of seeping blood.
"Return at once to the bzzrk!" said the Summoner as Clodius Afer drew and cut at it with a single motion and perfect timing. He was a good man with a javelin, thrust or thrown, but with a sword the pilus prior showed nothing less than artistry.
The little egg looked metallic, but it crushed like a pastry confection when Clodius caught it with his swordedge. The blue light rotating on top blinked off, but there was a bright flash of red that seemed to come through, not from, the casing of the Summoner. It crumpled to the ground, leaving behind it a glowing nimbus and a smell that combined sharpness with something that made the soldiers gag.
"It's all right, boys!" the tribune shouted, plunged into darkness with the memory of a shadowed drop-off to halt him. Ahead of him faded the clattering boots of the deserters, more familiar with the footing or more reckless. "We've shut it —"
Not sound but a light froze Vibulenus' tongue. Something drifted over the edge of the sinkhole the way the Summoner had, but this was huge and all ablaze with light as pitiless as the spear which had reached for Vibulenus' eyes when he was a frog.
"Stand where you are!" ordered Rectinus Falco in a voice amplified into thunder.
As an afterthought or a false echo from the screen of light, the Commander added, "Gaius Vibulenus Caper, Gnaeus Clodius Afer, Publius Pompilius Niger: remain where you are or you will be counted among the number of deserters and treated accordingly."
The harsh light glinted from sweat and bright metal on Vibulenus and his companions. They looked at one another because at first the lighted object was blinding. The notched edge of Clodius' sword winked. There were steaming black smears across the blade where something like tar had been carved from the belly of the Summoner.
Moving slowly, though he could not be surreptitious in the glare that bathed him, the pilus prior shifted the weapon behind him and began to wipe the steel firmly against his mail shirt to clean it. That probably wouldn't do much good, since the remains of the little device lay smoldering at his feet. Still, Clodius Afer had spent long enough in the army — and in life — to know that the best way out of an awkward situation was to deny that it had happened — even if you'd been caught with your cock rammed all the way home.
The object descended as regularly as if it were connected to a gear train instead of moving with a drifting, wind-shaken look as had the Summoners and even the water carts. The light blazed from its whole outer surface, twenty feet at least in length and broad though not particularly high sided. Because the light was so extensive, it smothered the shadows that it would have thrown if it were a point source of the same intensity. The shadings that gave life and individuality to a face, even in the bright sun, were erased. The three men looked like a flat painting of soldiers caught in the uncertainty that precedes death.
The object touched the ground, or came within a finger's breadth of touching, just outside the cave mouth. Vibulenus climbed up the path to rejoin his companions. Flow rock, limestone dissolved and redeposited by water, gleamed in opalescent beauty on the upper surfaces of the cave, but the stone had been rubbed dull generations ago wherever it was within reach of a hand.
Helvius and his companions were gone, but the red transverse crest from a centurion's helmet lay on the cave floor near the twist that carried the cavity out of sight.
Their eyes adapting (and reflections from neighboring stone surfaces) gave the Romans a view of the object, the vehicle, that had caught them. It was open-topped and held half a dozen figures — two of them from the Commander's bodyguard, unmistakable in their hulking, iron-clad bulk.
Vibulenus passed the non-coms with two further crisp steps toward the vehicle. He braced as if reporting to a consul on parade and said, "Sir! We believe that three of our fellows were cut off by the enemy and took shelter in this cave. I beg a delay of the recall order for myself and the subordinates who are here under my orders so that we can rescue men who were wounded and confused. Until the third watch, sir, if you please."
Midnight would be time enough. Ten minutes more, by Hercules, would have been enough without the Summoner's interruption.
The light dimmed abruptly. The vehicle's rounded sides still glowed brightly enough to illuminate the ground nearby with the intensity of a full moon, but the light was no longer a barrier intended to blind a marksman taking aim. Rectinus Falco got out by swinging his legs over the side.
The tribune with the Commander was dressed for parade: helmet and breastplate polished, the straps of his leather apron freshly rubbed with vermilion, and his crest combed to perfect order. He didn't look as though he had just survived a battle, and in a way he had not. Falco had accompanied the Commander during this engagement as with all those in the past.
The last of the horses had disappeared — not died, at least not on the ground — ages ago, so many operations in the past that Vibulenus could not remember which one. There were always enough snarling carnivores to mount the Commander's entourage, so Falco rode one of those and rode it with the same panache that he had shown from early childhood with horses.
And now he rode with the Commander in one of the guild's incomprehensible vehicles. Not very different from riding in the ship itself, perhaps, but it was different in Vibulenus' mind — and in Falco's, he was sure.
"Throw down your weapons," the shorter tribune ordered. "They'll be gathered up later."
Falco either read something or thought he did in the motionless figure of Clodius Afer, because he then added at a higher pitch, "None of you act like fools, now. Remember that there aren't any restrictions on the guild's weapons now that the battle's been won."
"Yeah, now that we won the fucking battle," said the pilus prior in a voice as emotionless as the one he would have used to describe a brick wall.
Vibulenus had thought the non-com might set his sword down carefully in what amounted to an act of dumb insolence. Instead, Clodius tossed the weapon some distance behind him in the cave where its smeared, tell-tale blade clanging out of sight. He was not a man who stopped thinking in a tight place.
The tribune unbuckled both his crossed waist belts, the heavy one that carried the sheathed sword and the slimmer belt with the dagger which he could not, at this moment when it was inconsequential, remember even having drawn in battle. He would hate to lose the sword, though, sharpened often enough to change its balance and as uniquely natural in his hand now as the feel of his hair when he ran his fingers through it.
He wrapped the belts around the sheathed weapons as he heard the harness of the two centurions thud to the ground behind him. "Here," he said, offering the bundle hilts-first to the other tribune. "You take it."
"Not me," Falco said, kicking the side of the vehicle as he started backward. "Just drop it."
The lighting changed again. This time the vehicle's sidewalls became blankly metallic while its interior was suffused with light that seemed to cling instead of emanating from a discernible source. Besides the blue-suited Commander and his pair of guards in the stern, there were two — persons. One looked to be a man; the other had six limbs like the Commander himself. They wore one-piece garments of bright yellow which matched the color of the vehicle now that it was no longer a source of white light.
"I think you can keep your sword, Gaius Vibulenus Caper," the Commander said with the air of unctuous paternalism that was always a part of him — whether he had four limbs or six, and whatever the features of the face behind his mask of air. "You won't do anything foolish. Get in the wagon, now — all four of you."
Falco winced to hear himself lumped in with his rival and the two non-coms, but he obeyed as sharply as if he had been spurred. The motion he made to board, scissoring one leg over the side, then the other, provided a model that Vibulenus could follow more easily for the greater length of his legs.
Vibulenus boarded without the least outward hesitation, because he did not want his companions to make any mistaken moves. The two guild employees in yellow held lasers like the one that had fried a shield in an instant's discharge.
There was no problem. Clodius grunted as he came over the side, and Niger was too close behind him to take the hand his senior then turned to offer.
Vibulenus sat down because Falco did. The seats were three abreast, backless, and to the tribune's first thought so uncomfortable that they must have been designed for bodies not of men.
He seated himself facing the Commander, but even as he opened his mouth to continue his argument the seat began to shift beneath him. The hard surfaces flowed, shaping themselves to his buttocks, and a support extended itself to midback with an animate smoothness that almost caused him to leap to his feet screaming.
What saved Vibulenus from that and the possible overreaction of guild employees with lasers was his awareness that the same thing was about to happen to the centurions — his men. "Clodius," he snapped, "Niger — the seats will move when you sit down. Don't be alarmed." By speaking the words as a duty and as a tribune, he was able to restrain his body's instinctual terror before his intellect could overcome it.
Vibulenus looked back over his shoulder at the non-coms, and by that chance caught a glimpse of his rival in unguarded rage and frustration. Falco knew about the seats — of course; and of course was waiting for them to humiliate Vibulenus in front of friends, enemy, and the Commander.
Vibulenus did not smile, but it was with the air of a boxer coming off a victory that he faced the Commander again and said, "Sir, these are valuable men, a centurion and two front-rankers. If you'll let us go after them with a torch — a, ah, your lights would frighten them more, I'm afraid — then I'm sure we can have them back aboard the ship in only a few hours."
"They're deserters, Gaius Vibulenus," said Falco. "The Commander knows that, of course. And if he didn't, I would have told him because it's my duty to the guild to inform him of what's going on in the legion."
The vehicle they sat in began to rise with such rock-like steadiness that it seemed the wall of the sinkhole was dropping away while they remained fixed to the ground. The lighted interior made it easier to forget what the vehicle was doing and concentrate on the Commander, whose six limbs were curled before him like the petals of an unopened rose. The face behind the shimmer could almost be that of a caterpillar. . . .
"Sir," Vibulenus said, "it was a hard fight, a cursed hard fight, and that's sent more people than these three off their heads before. If —"
The Commander waved the tribune's earnestness to silence with the rosette of six fingers terminating one of his middle limbs. "My guild expects losses, military tribune," the alien figure said in perfectly-modulated Latin. "They expect me to minimize them, that's all."
The vehicle lifted vertically over the rim of the sinkhole and continued to climb at a 45° angle while the keel remained parallel to the ground. The wind past the tribune's face told him what must be happening, but he kept his eyes resolutely fixed on the Commander. Tight places did not especially concern Vibulenus, but heights were another matter.
"I'm rather glad this happened, in fact," the Commander went on calmly. "We were bound to have trouble at some point, when it sank in that you really wouldn't be going home. This incident is about the right scale — if there were a hundred of them, I suppose we'd have to do something different. And they have a better hiding place than any of the rest of you can imagine finding."
Vibulenus was dizzy. His mind was screaming, never see home! and trying to force its way out of the body that held it and smothered it like honey trapping a fly. Never see home.
"I suppose they thought they couldn't be seen through the rock?" said the Commander, speaking past Vibulenus toward the centurions behind him.
"We don't think they were planning anything," said Vibulenus sharply, saved again from his own terrors by the need to keep his subordinates from damning themselves by a thoughtless word, "Probably it was spur of the moment — head blows during the battle, dizziness from heat."
He was shivering and clammy as he spoke, babbling to roll through the multiplex punishments that his mind imagined the guild using on the deserters. "But of course, we wouldn't know or we would have prevented this trouble."
Falco snickered.
"No trouble, military tribune," said the Commander as the vehicle halted in the air.
They were within twenty feet of a similar craft, dark except for orange lights bow and stern like the lanterns of ships sailing well-traveled routes. In the glow from the vessel in which he rode, Vibulenus could see that there were half a dozen yellow-clad forms in the other vehicle.
The interior lighting faded or was replaced by an image like those of the mythic battles in the Recreation Room. There was no fantasy in this, however: Decimus Helvius crouched within walls of stone which were hinted rather than being fully limned. He held a naked sword in his hand, and the expression on his face was the stony determination the tribune had glimpsed that afternoon when the enemy, shouting in anticipated triumph, charged up the hill at the Tenth Cohort.
Behind Helvius squatted Grumio and Augens. The former's left biceps was bandaged — his shield must have been hacked off his arm during the fighting. Augens had no obvious injuries, but he had set his helmet between his knees and was squeezing the bronze with a fixed intensity that suggested he was in pain.
Neither of the common legionaries was looking toward Helvius or the open end of the passage. After a moment's surprise, Vibulenus remembered that none of the deserters could see anything in the lightless cave.
It could have been a trick; but it was easier to believe the trading guild could see through stone than that it would bother with trickery so pointlessly elaborate.
"No trouble," repeated the Commander in oily satisfaction. "The rest of your fellows are gathered in the Main Gallery to watch the demonstration, but I thought you might as well see it with us."
The image of Helvius turned and said something unheard to his companions.
"You should realize, Gaius Vibulenus Caper," continued the Commander's voice, "that if you had not proved yourself to be an unusually valuable asset of my guild, you would be viewing the demonstration from the ground where we picked you up. But no asset is so valuable that it will be permitted a second lapse in judgment as great as the one you made tonight."
The voice laughed. Technically, the laugher was "correct," as the Commander's diction always was; but instead of humor, the sound had the mechanical hollowness of blood dripping from the neck of a slaughtered hog.
"Since we're here," the Commander added, "you can watch over the side as well."
The tribune thought no, I'm afraid of heights, but his tongue could no more have articulated the words in this company than he could have flown home by waving his arms. Without speaking, he stood and leaned over the side. The vehicle remained as steady as an unsprung farm cart.
The vision of the three deserters continued to hang before the tribune. That calmed him more than did his grip on the coaming, though he was clinging fiercely enough to dent copper. The sky retained enough ambient light to limn the grosser features of the landscape, but it took some moments before Vibulenus recognized the circle glimpsed through the ghostly torso of Helvius as the sinkhole. The hole seemed to be the size of a medicine ball.
His arms began to shake although the backs of his hands ached with the violence of his grip.
"What are we —" started Niger, less cowed or less controlled than his fellow centurion.
Magenta fire pulsed in stroboscopic succession from the underside of the other hovering vehicle.
The air slapped after each bright surge, but the pulses followed one another a dozen times a second, faster than ears or eyes could detect the separation. Vibulenus' bowels started to loosen at the low-pitched hum, while the green complement of the laser flux rippled across the back of his eyes when he blinked.
The pulses slanted, not toward the cave mouth as the tribune expected but rather into the rock wall nearby. The limestone split apart in gouts of white, glowing chunks — not molten, but burned to raw quicklime that gnawed everything it touched with a caustic vehemence.
Over the flux ravening against the surface lay the image of the deserters, looking up in puzzlement as the cave trembled with the twelve-a-second pulses.
"Stop it!" Vibulenus screamed. Though he turned to the Commander, he could not escape the vision of Helvius, frowning not in fear but curiosity at the sound filling his strait universe.
The tribune must have reached out, but he was not aware of the movement until one of the toadfaced guards thrust him back with the head of his mace. The dull spikes pressed hard enough to break the skin over Vibulenus' breastbone before the Roman's body returned to immediate reality.
The ground exploded as the laser's slow gouging into refractory limestone brought it at last to a stratum through which ground water percolated. The liquid flashed to steam in an instant that shattered the whole face of the sinkhole. Pieces of rock the size of a house lifted from foundations that had held them for fifty million years, then toppled toward the center of the sinkhole.
It must have felt like an earthquake deep within the cave, because Grumio looked up, shouted something, and tried to rise but hit his head on the stone ceiling. Did they think the guild was blocking the entrance to their cave? Helvius dropped his sword and shuffled two steps forward in a crouch, his hands lifted to protect him from the rock he could not see.
The cave roof split, letting the magenta flux play on the interior. Vibulenus screamed, but his mind transferred the sound to the open mouths of the victims dying below.
Grumio was in the beam's direct path. The first pulse gnawed his body to the waist. His legs vaporized microseconds later, before they had time to fall. The legionary's iron hobnails burned with such white sparkling intensity that they looked dazzling even through the coherent pulses of the laser flux. The steel of his sword retained its shape for the instant it took to fall through the beam — belt gone, scabbard gone, and expensive ivory hilt in gaseous mixture with the hand that once wielded it.
The left arm flopped free, shriveling but not in the flux. Its bandage flashed a brilliant reflection of the beam which had vaporized Grumio.
Augens had started to rise and was not in the angled beam, but his helmet was. Bronze, gaseous or molten depending on how close it was to the center of the flux, spewed in a green flood from the impact of the light.
Reflection from the cave floor, burned white and heated to thousands of degrees by the pulses it absorbed, vaporized the legionary's feet and crisped his legs and lower body to glowing cinders. The rest of him toppled into the flux which devoured him so completely that only splinters of calcined bones reached the floor.
Unlike his companions, Decimus Helvius had time to understand what was happening to him.
The blaze behind the centurion threw his shadow in troll-like distortion down the path of his attempted flight. The beam was angled away from him, deeper into the cave, and it seemed for a moment that he might escape.
Helvius lunged forward, aided by the light though his calves burned black and the bronze studs dropped from the holes they had charred in the leather that protected his thighs. Then the cave roof collapsed onto him.
The laser continued to play on the rockface for some further seconds. Even with his eyes closed, Vibulenus could see his comrade's right foot charring in the dazzle reflected as the flux ate its way far beneath the cave.
The sky-shaking hum ended as the crew of the other vehicle shut off their weapon. A moment later, the echo from the ground ceased also. A violet nimbus around the gunvessel dissipated more slowly, as did the white glow and sound of crackling rock at the point of impact.
Vibulenus sat down. He was crying, though the fact humiliated him. When his eyes were shut, his memory reviewed the instant of destruction, but his overloaded retinas continued to pulse bright green, shrouding the horror somewhat.
"All of your fellows have watched the display," said the Commander in satisfaction, "but I'm glad you three were present at the scene, so to speak."
The rush of wind past Vibulenus indicated the vehicle was moving again. He thought of taking his hands away from his face and turning into the airstream to dry his eyes . . . but that would have meant turning toward Falco, which was unthinkable.
"There will be those who believe the scene was generated by a machine and didn't really happen," the Commander went on. "You'll be able to convince them that it was real. After all, we don't want to have to repeat the demonstration.
"This has been too expensive already."
Neither of the centurions had made a sound that Vibulenus could hear, so he had no idea of what they were thinking. For his own part, he thought he needed a woman.
And for the first time, he was willing to accept one of the creatures which the guild offered in place of women.
"I want Quartilla," the tribune said to the ship.
His companion at the head of the line, a file-closer, looked at him curiously but stepped into the doorless alcove without saying anything.
Vibulenus followed, feeling a cool touch across his body as the blank wall appeared to open before him.
He had no idea of whether the vessel would or could deliver him to the female he requested. He had nothing to lose by the attempt. What he had to gain was tenuous, but sex is a game of the mind even if the mind sometimes plays to the body's prompting. The tribune had had personal contact with Quartilla. That made her a person, even if it could not shape her into a human being.
"Oh," said the figure on the couch. Then, "Ah, tribune . . . would you like the lights higher?"
"Quartilla?" Vibulenus said hesitantly. "You remember me?"
"You're Gaius Vibulenus Caper," the female said. "The ship told me after the other time you were here."
She paused. The lights had not gone up — Vibulenus did not know whether or not he wanted them to — but his eyes had adapted enough to see that her lips wore a smile of sort.
"I remember everyone, tribune," Quartilla concluded. "Not always their names, is all."
She was sitting on her feet with her back straight and her knees flexed together to her right side as before. Vibulenus seated himself so that his left thigh was almost but not quite in contact with those plump knees and said, with a bitterness that shocked him as the words came out, "Everyone? I find that hard to believe."
Quartilla winced, but she replied without any sharpness of her own, "Everyone is different, Gaius Caper. Every soldier, every centurion, every tribune — every crewman. I can understand how the situation would bother you. It's — part of my job to understand the things that bother men."
"Look, this is —" the tribune said. He bit his lips and, steeling himself, laid his hand on the female's knee.
"I didn't come to fight," he went on, momentarily so focused in his own mind that he was oblivious to the texture of the skin he was touching. It was warm, perhaps marginally too warm; soft as only a woman's could be; and as smooth as thick cream. His expression changed and the words he had intended did not follow through his open mouth.
Quartilla smiled without the sadness, an impish expression that transfigured her by accenting her rather small mouth when the muscles of her cheeks curved up. She did not speak an order, but the walls glowed an off-white just bright enough to fade the red dot into a tint in its corner.
Not only was the female's skin smooth, it was a white in which only a painter could have detected a touch of green.
"I asked for further changes," Quartilla said with quiet pride. She cupped her full right breast and lifted it as if she were a farm wife displaying a prize melon. A tracery of blue veins marked the surface that was otherwise as pure as polished marble. "So that I could better perform my duties. I hoped you would come back."
Nothing better concentrates the mind than lust. It was in that knowledge that Vibulenus had driven himself to this attempt, certain that darkness and his tunic would shield his mind from certainty and that lust would overcome memories of revulsion.
There were no longer any physical cues to wrongness; and for the rest, Quartilla had been a person already.
The Roman threw off his tunic with a violence that was willing to shred it if the garment tried to resist his convulsive efforts. By Styx on whom the gods swear, she was a woman!
On her and in her, Vibulenus was able to forget the other men and the hint of crewmen who were not men.
And he was able to forget even Helvius and his two companions for a brief time, perhaps as long as it had taken the trio to die.