David Weber - Ranks of Bronze

In the big room, even that clashing movement was unnaturally muted, but the air itself stirred. Crests fluttered and the lighting picked out glints from steel and polished bronze. Trumpets, followed by horns, blew; and the First Cohort stepped off on its left foot.

Except for a sky as pale as goat's milk, Vibulenus could see nothing of the place they were expected to conquer. The ranks of men striding forward fell into silhouette as each left the gallery and the ship besides. It occurred to the tribune that the legion began each battle with an uphill march, since the Main Gallery was sloped for them to hear the final address by the Commander.

They might profitably dispense with the address to avoid the climb. Sometimes-and this was such an occasion-it seemed they would have been better without the address even if they had to climb a steeper slope to miss it. Why did they put young fools in command of veterans?

And again… Gaius Vibulenus Caper at eighteen had been a joke as a military tribune. He'd known it then and gods! when he now remembered that past, he cringed with knowledge of his callowness. But he'd seasoned into something in time. He'd seasoned into a leader.

Third Cohort was moving in its blare of signals. Why couldn't all the ranks step off together, keeping the separation they had while standing at ease? But experience proved that the legion would bunch and tangle unless the deployment were sequential, though the gods alone knew the reason.

Vibulenus wondered if he were going to die this day. Better to watch horsehair crests wave against a pale sky and to think of the legion as a machine that maneuvered on many legs.

Clodius Afer had walked up to what was now the cohort's front rank, shouting crisp, vicious orders about the alignment of his men. There were still legionaries within arms' length at the tribune, but he felt very much alone at moments like this when anything he did ould put him in the way of the non-coms who had real jobs to perform.

The Commander and the guards who always flanked him-no matter who the Commander wasmarched off through a sidewall of the gallery. Their mounts were stabled somewhere in the ship that Vibulenus had never seen, though it was not in the forward section behind the protective barrier. Falco and the third surviving tribune, Marcus Marcellus Rostratus, were part of the entourage.

Those who led in battle were punished for it. Safer far to ring yourself with guards like mobile fortresses and let others do the fighting. Vibulenus fingered his sword hilt and fingered the scar on his left arm… and he tried to concentrate on the rhythm of marching feet instead of the ragged point of a spear swelling until it was too close to be focused by his eyes.

"Cohort-" ordered the pilus prior. The Main Gallery had thinned so that the troops ahead of the Tenth Cohort, all in motion, were spaced like stakes set out in a vineyard for the grapes to climb.

"March!"

Would he die… and if he died, would he awaken in the belly of the ship weak and red-dyed and living again… Yet again?

"Vesta, bring me home," whispered the tribune as he started to follow the legion to its latest exercise in blood and death.

The door, invisible until it opened on the wall beside Vibulenus, passed Quartilla.

None of the marching legionaries looked back, but the tribune stumbled and almost fell to the floor when he forgot that he was in the process of taking his first stride. "Quartilla!" he gasped. "What are you doing here?"

The woman started and would have jumped back, but the door had already solidified behind her. She bumped it, then recognized Vibulenus and relaxed enough to lower the hands she had raised clenched to her lips.

"Oh, Gaius," she said. "I'm sorry-I should have waited a little longer, shouldn't I?"

Her nod past him caused the tribune to look over his shoulder at the rest of the legion, disappearing up the sloping floor at the rate of two steps a second. Emptying, the Main Gallery was beginning to take on an air of sinister preparation. "What are you doing, here?" he repeated with changed emphasis and a note of urgency rather than surprise.

Quartilla wore a suit patterned with irregular polygons of solid color. Instead of following the curves of her body as did the monochrome suits of guild employees, her garment seemed to have been constructed of flat panels as oddly shaped as the swatches of color- which they did not recapitulate. The form beneath seemed tightly confined as well as distorted: save for her face, the woman looked twenty pounds lighter than she did when Vibulenus visited her room.

It was the first time that he had seen her clothed.

"Well, the Pilot…" she said. The tribune could not tell whether she was nervous because of the way he might react to the news or if she feared one of the manifestations of the guild would punish her for talking. "He… I can't enter the crew space, you know-" she waved a hand, each of whose fingers were a different color, toward the forward bulkhead "-and he doesn't like to come any distance into the cargo section. So he has me meet him here, when the… When it's going to be empty."

The tall Roman said nothing. He was not even sure what he thought, except that there was a block of stone in his stomach as large as Etna and as cold as February dawn.

"It's mostly just the humanoid ones, you know," said Quartilla in a nervous attempt at reassurance.

"I've got to go," said Vibulenus with the clarity that resulted from his mind forcing words through lips from which it had become disassociated.

"Yes," she said, though he was not hearing her because now his entire body was stone. "And be careful, Gaius."

The tribune's intellectual part marveled that his body began to run toward the opening in the hall without him needing to direct the tensing and stretching of each separate muscle. Bodies were wonderous things. Minds were what got men into trouble.

He caught up with the rear rank of the Tenth Cohort just as they strode into the chill sunlight.

The sun was a green dot, low enough in the sky to cast the shadows of the enemy array halfway across the stony field to the Roman lines. Vibulenus shivered.

"Funny how it looks different depending on where you are when you see it," Clodius Afer muttered, to himself but with a sideglance at the tribune. "The sun, you know. Stars too, it seems sometimes."

"Yeah, I'd noticed that," said Vibulenus, wondering how far the Commander was going to march them across the front of a hostile army. For that matter, who in Hades was going to close their flanks? Even in extended order, the legion formed too narrow a front to match that of the mass slowly accreting toward the east.

Hercules! there were a lot of the bastards.

"Really wouldn't mind bein' back home," said the pilus prior in what was almost a whisper.

"Yeah," said Gaius Vibulenus, who did not trust himself to say more.

The ground was of gravel averaging about the size of walnuts: unattractive, but solid footing. Hobnails sparked on it as the legion tramped along in a column only six ranks wide. The normal front rank was at the moment the left flank of the column, while the file on the right side would form the rear rank when the legion halted and faced left-toward the east and the enemy a half mile distant.

Unless the enemy attacked while the legion was still moving sideways. That wouldn't be a disasterthey were veterans, after all. But it would be one more cursed thing along with being outnumbered ten to one and being commanded by a kid who didn't know his mouth from his asshole.

A horn blew.

"Cohort-" roared the pilus prior.

"Century-"

One trumpet, that carried in the command group, sounded and all the other trumpets in the legion joined the piercing note.

"Halt!" bellowed the centurions, and the legion crashed motionless. Sparks shot from beneath boots and from the pointed iron ferule of the javelin each soldier carried in his right hand.