David Weber - Ranks of Bronze

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 boxer coining 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.