David Weber - Ranks of Bronze

"Good judgment, First," Vibulenus said, grinning wryly in his mind. He should have been pleased at his own accurate and self-sacrificing response to the situation. Instead, he was thinking that if he were a little less dutiful, he wouldn't feel like a gladiator being dragged out of the arena on a hook-and he'd be better able to deal with whatever the problem was.

The soldiers ahead of them turned into the Recreation Room, slowed by the number of men already standing inside. The circular, domed room expanded when all its couches were full, so the tribune had never seen it overcrowded. Now, though there must have been at least a thousand men packing the aisles and open areas, only a handful were actually lying back to enter the room's fantasy world.

"Move aside!" bellowed the first centurion. "Move aside for the tribune!" Soldiers obeyed by leaping onto the couches, the only space available. Many of them shouted, some cheering Vibulenus but others calling messages of anger uncertain in the confusion. What in Hades was going on?

The tribune sat down on a couch, started to swing his legs up, and quickly decided to lay his torso down first. The strain of balancing his upper body while trying to lift his legs with his belly muscles had sent sheets of white fire across the back of his eyeballs.

"Easy does it, Gaius," said Pompilius Niger from the next couch with a grin that opened the cut in his lips. He reached across with one broad hand and lifted the tribune's feet onto the couch. The two of them, and Clodius on the tribune's other side, lay back together. Vibulenus found the battling animals of the Recreation Room-a different set every voyage-to be a splendid way to sharpen his skills as well as a matter of amusement. No doubt that was what the trading guild had in mind when it provided this "game" at what was as surely great expense as the gladiatorial shows with which politicians paid for votes throughout Rome's Latin-speaking domains.

Real drill with weighted swords was the only way to develop muscles for battle, but timing and judgment could be taught better on the mental fields of the Recreation Room. Pain was the penalty for misjudging an opponent's strength or speed: instant, agonizing pain that was wholly real until another dream figure finished you off. Learning that sort of lesson on a physical battlefield was likely to cost your life-permanently, despite the magic of the trading guild. Certainly it took you out of action when your friends might need you.

But lessons in tactical maneuver were more important, at least for the tribune, than training in the physical aspects of battle. Though the contending armies were marshalled from animals and were often equipped in equally silly fashions, their tactics were those that could be applied to bodies of men.

Vibulenus could not change the movements and dispositions of the armies: those proceeded according to some higher law, just as the legion in the field was commanded-if not led-by a figure in a blue bodysuit. But the game aspect of the situation, the certainty that no permanent harm would occur to his real flesh, let the tribune study the fantasy battles with a detachment that carried over.

That morning he had pulled a cohort out of line, changed its front, and smashed a new threat without panic-because he had so often in his mind been a participant when the wheels came off a maneuver in the face of the enemy.

The first feeling Gaius Vibulenus had when his consciousness entered the fantasy scene was physical relief. The Recreation Room did nothing to alleviate his injuries the way the Sick Bay or even a bath would have; but by isolating the tribune from his body, it deleted the body's pain for the time being.

The next feeling was incredulity. Almost at once it became anger that hissed like a red-glowing sword being tempered in an oil bath… but he directed his mind downward, into the action, because he had come here to get information.

The animals on one side were spearmen who carried huge shields and rode to battle in wagons. They were more manlike than not, but their skins were purple and they had long feathery appendages in place of ears.

The animals on the other side were Roman legionaries. This battle was the first one the legion had fought on behalf of the trading guild.

Vibulenus directed his consciousness into one of the giant aliens. Vagrantly he considered entering the mind of a Roman, of poking and sampling the memories of a fellow who might lie on the couch beside him. The thought squeezed the tribune with nausea even though he did not at present have a stomach to turn. As suddenly he was a warrior with a harness of bronze bangles, more ornamental than protective. He gripped the rope frame of his jouncing chariot with his left hand; in his right was an iron-headed spear half again as tall as he was. The cartwheels and the hooves of the team threw up reeds and mud and water as the vehicle lurched out of the swampy depression at the valley's center.

The slope above them held the hostile army which was advancing like a single monstrous creature.

The driver hauled back and left on his reins, swinging the chariot to a broadside halt in front of the enemy. Two of the other warriors vaulted from the vehicle while it was still slowing, slamming Vibulenus off balance in their haste to plant themselves on the ground.

Fools. That's exactly where they would wind up-at the leisure of a burial party.

The part of the tribune's mind that came with the body he now inhabited did not understand the army that was tramping down at him. It glittered with metal, each warrior dressed in the trappings of a great chief. But those same warriors moved as a single serried mass, each front-rank champion advanced only a long stride in front of the followers arrayed behind to his right and left.

It was not a wedge formation. It was the edge of a saw sweeping toward Vibulenus.

He strode off his vehicle, heartened by the rumble of the bronze gongs in each of the cars lurching toward the enemy. Now free of the need to stabilize him, his left hand gripped the shield and swung it in front of him. The strap's friction irritated his neck despite the leather throatlet he wore against that problem, but his muscles made nothing of the shield's weight. The consciousness that was a Roman tribune remembered that the shields of hide on heavy wooden frames weighed around a hundred pounds apiece.

That same mind also knew the way to break the Roman advance, to smash the legion's integrity so that the mass of light-armed thralls on the hill behind Vibulenus and the other champions could nibble clots of Romans like nodes of sand in the surf. He opened his mouth to shout orders to his immediate companions, and the rain of javelins washed the words back down his throat.

Vibulenus' shield was like a section of leathern tower. Its lower rim was only a handbreadth off the ground, but it was tall enough that he could duck his head and broad shoulders to safety without lifting the shield higher. Javelins were the weapon of thralls, a part of him thought, not of warriors who dared challenge The javelin that struck the upper edge of his shield buried its point in the frame and did not penetrate. It slapped the shield back against Vibulenus' skull hard enough to dizzy him for an instant, and one of the three other missiles went far enough through the center of the hide to prick his left biceps.

The second flight was already arching down.

The chariot overturned with a crash behind Vibulenus, throwing sod and bits of broken wheel against his calves. He lunged forward, away from the touch and toward the real threat, the ranks running forward as they drew swords much heavier than the knife in Vibulenus' sash which he used only to silence the screaming wounded.

The weight of javelins clinging to his shield dragged its edge against the ground and made him stumble. His toes hurt where they stubbed the shield rim, and the javelin hurled by a strong man scratched both his left arm and his chest as its point slammed several inches through the thick leather.