David Weber - Ranks of Bronze

Vibulenus let his shield slide off his left arm and quiver against the soil on its concave face. "I'm- Pollux…" He had a bruise beneath his ribs where his diaphragm had thrust against his bronze armor in desperate attempts to draw air into his lungs.

"I'm fine," he said, straightening to keep the cuirass from pressing flesh already abused. "Gimme… you know, help me up."

Suddenly the two men were in the wake of the battle again. They were alone on trampled gravel with discarded equipment, bodies crumpled like waste rags, and a few legionaries hobbling but determined to catch up with the action despite their wounds.

It felt amazingly good to stand up again. He could breathe without his equipment pressing in ways that made his lungs scream… but without the legionary's steadying arm, Vibulenus could not have stayed upright.

The sky was thunderous with the trading vessel's descending bulk, and the body-recovering tortoise already loomed over a shingle ridge in the direction of the legion's own ship.

Vibulenus nodded his companion forward; it would be pointless to try to talk until the trading vessel was grounded and silent. Did their own ship sound like that when it landed and took off…?

The tribune's spur-of-the-moment response to the encircling native army had been successful beyond his conception. All Vibulenus had intended to do was to block the enemy's flanking motion and take the pressure off the portion of the legion which already had screaming warriors on three sides.

But the soldiers in the rear ranks, though leaderless, were no cowards. They had turned defensively to meet a threat from what should have been the direction of safety. When the cohort swept past them in formation, they fell in behind the attack and multiplied its weight. Warriors, checked by the resistance of the command group, fled the rush to heavy infantry as abruptly as they had attacked. Most threw away their meager equipment. Those who did not were hacked down atop it as legionaries caught any who were in the least burdened.

And all the time, the legion's original front continued to butcher the natives before it, though swords grew dull and arms ached with the motions of slaughter.

Falco lay on his back, but his head was turned to the side by the weight of the javelin's shaft. His remaining eye had rolled up in the socket as blank and white as that of an unpainted statue, and his face was frozen into an expression of terrified disbelief.

"Wonder if he saw it coming," said the surviving tribune in a normal voice that not even he could hear over the roar of the descending trader.

Probably Falco hadn't. You don't really see anything in a panic like that, only the image of fear your mind creates for you. The image could have been anything, a warrior or the gravel as his mount fell or even the enveloping fury of a laser putting paid to a deserter's account.

Death was a point of blue steel, its edges polished smooth by a Roman hand that morning.

Rest, Publius Rectinus Falco, in whatever torments the gods adjudge you to deserve.

Several of the carnivores were still twitching in their iron blankets, dead to all but reflex that made their jaws clop and clawed feet slash at emptiness.

Their riders were utterly stilL Vibulenus had wondered if the bodyguards had the tenacity of life that marked real toads, the ability to thrash for hours after being mangled. Not these. Their bodies were feathered with scores of native spears, thrust into the joints between the hoops of their armor.

The Commander was still alive.

At one time, he must have attempted to clamp shut the gouges in his legs, because both his gloved hands were slimy with his thick, dark blood. Now he only babbled sounds jmintelligible even in the hush that followed the trading vessel's landing.

Vibulenus knelt-caught himself with his hands so that he did not topple flat himself. Moving was tricky; every time he did something different, he chanced total collapse.

The Commander's lips began to move slowly, as if he were still speaking, but no sounds came out. His eyes pleaded beneath a surface glitter that no longer seemed protective. Now it aped the glaze of death.

Which would shortly follow from shock and the blood loss that were natural results of the guild employee's wounds. The extensor muscles of both thighs had been slashed across, disabling him as effectively as hamstringing and with a far greater mess. The blood vessels that fed the powerful muscles were severed also, leaking out the Commander's life.

The tribune started to unknot the sash at his waist. His fingers did not work properly, and there was neither time or need to be delicate. The fallen weapon he picked up to cut the silk into a pair of tourniquets was his own sword.

"Just hold on." Vibuleenus said to the man-putatively-he was working to save. "You'll be fine. Death just gives you a different outlook on life."

"The turtle's coming, sir," said Titius. "S'pose they can load him in like they does us?"

"Why not?" said the tribune offhandedly as he tied off the right thigh. The Commander went limp, his head rolling back on the gravel from which he must have been lifting it so long as consciousness allowed. "It all comes down to the same thing, doesn't it? Whether we wear blue suits or bronze armor."

It did not occur to him to phrase the last sentence as a question.

"Lookit this sucker," Clodius Afer bragged. "Tell me you ever saw somethin' this ugly!"

"It'll do," Vibulenus said, more or less in agreement, as he surveyed the bull-roarer that the pilus prior had captured.

The sounding piece was about the size of a man's forearm and carved intricately from a single bone. Each of the holes through which air swirled to make the sound was fashioned into the likeness of a fanciful mouth.

The disquieting thing was that the result looked somehow as if it might be a miniature of a living creature… and that thought was unpleasant even to men who had become used to the toad-faced bodyguards.

"You oughta pick things up yourself, sir," said Pompilius Niger with what the tribune supposed was meant for a cheerful intonation. The junior centurion's lips were so badly swollen around the cut that the words he lisped would have been indistinguishable from moaning by anyone less familiar with Niger than his companions were. "Adds a little, you know, interest to things."

"Found my sword," Vibulenus said, drawing the weapon an inch or two from the sheath to indicate it. He had cleaned the blade as soon as he had leisure and the opportunity… using Falco's sash as a wiping rag. He did not have a stone to resharpen the steel. That would be done within the ship-by the ship, perhaps- after the tribune stacked the weapon with the rest of his equipment in the hall to the Sick Bay. "What have you got? Teeth for a necklace?"

Some of the men had been doing that lately. The ship stayed ripe with the miasma of putrefying alien flesh for a week or two after each of the past several battles.

"Better, sir," said Niger with a grin. He patted his bulging leather knapsack. "I found honey. Near enough!"

A bright yellow car howled past a hundred feet in the air. Crackling discharges played in its wake. Vibulenus' mouth opened and his body trembled between the choice of fight or flight… but the sizzling corona was not a weapon, only a sign of someone from the trading vessel headed in a great hurry toward the soldiers' destination-their ship.

The legion's transport always looked mountainously huge when the Romans straggled back to it; but even after so many battles, Vibulenus had no clear picture of what the vessel looked like when they disembarked. It was usually dark then, near dawn; and the ship was behind them-but it would require only a glimpse over a shoulder as he marched out…