David Weber: Ranks of Bronze

Now he sprawled on his face, legs tangled beneath the forepaws shredding the knapsack. The strap had fouled his wrist as the beast snatched it away; that slight contact had been sudden and forceful enough to spin the Roman and drag him toward the slayer.

Quartilla swung the pack she carried.

The side-arm motion had an authority which belied the sausage-like plumpness of the woman's limbs; her delicacy of touch might have been expected by any of the men who had shared her couch. The knapsack struck and gushed its contents over the slotted medallion whining on the creature's chest.

The flashing power of the mounts with which the guild provided its command group came at a price in food and the oxygen needed to convert that food into energy. The same homeworld gravity which built the creature's muscles held an atmosphere dense enough to support their physiologies. They could no more breathe unaided the ship's air or that of any of the worlds on which the legion fought than a human could survive in the atmosphere of Mars.

The supercharger, which rammed air into the creature's lungs at the density which they required to function, filled with mead. It stalled out, shrieking.

Clodius Afer dropped his shield. His left hand jerked the tribune clear while his right swung the heavy practice sword fast enough that it managed to whistle on its way to the joint in the carnivore's forelimb.

Pure honey-sap-would have been too thick to flow into the compressor with the necessary abruptness; a fluid thin enough to drink would have been spewed out the side-vents of a unit intended to operate in heavy rain without discomfort to its wearer. The half-worked mead, gummy with undissolved sugars in an alcohol mixture, smothered all chance of oxygen reaching the creature's lungs as surely as immersion in a lake could have done.

The beast spun, slashing for the non-existent opponent who covered its nostrils. The pilus prior's blow struck with all the veteran's strength and the mass of his dense club behind it, but the carnivore did not notice the bone-crushing impact in the midst of greater pain. A paw flung Clodius aside with long cuts on his shoulder, because that happened to be in the path of the creature's panicked thrashing.

Bare feet and gray, fifty-pound shields battered past the tribune as the cohort charged unordered. It was a bad idea, but a soldier too disciplined ever to fight on his own initiative is as useless as a warrior too rigidly honor-bound ever to avoid combat. Practice swords arced in curves, smooth-edged clubs that shone greasily in the bulkhead's deep glow.

Vibulenus' perception had become a packet of still pictures without a clear timeline to connect them. The images were not jumbled-each was crystalline in its sharpness. Claws meeting in his knapsack, breaking a line in the skin of his hand but not tearing off that hand; Clodius rolling clear, his hand scrabbling for the sword he had dropped and a smear of blood on the floor beneath him; Pompilius Niger, six feet in the air, with a surprised look on his face and the clumsy shield flat against his chest where it transmitted the thrust of the carnivore's kick.

And Quartilla, palming the doorlock as light glinted in response and men with demonic expressions battled a monster behind her.

There was a sword beside Vibulenus, visible in flickers as shadows and feet scissored across it. The tribune hunched his shoulders against the knees and shield rims that struck him as his men surged toward the fight. He gripped the swordhilt and tried to lift the weapon. A legionary was standing on the blade.

Vibulenus' frustration transmuted itself into strength so abrupt that the legionary was levered against the backs of his fellows with a bleat of surprise. The tribune dodged-and wedged, by brute strength-through men concentrating on the dying guardbeast instead of the real goal.

The lockplate flashed, silhouetting Quartilla's palm momentarily. The door began to float inward.

"Tenth to me!" screamed the tribune as he slammed past Quartilla with a lack of ceremony which he suspected was the only thing that could save the woman's life.

He was correct.

The light within the corridor beyond was lemon yellow and bright only to eyes adapted to the red/infrared of the Main Gallery. The bodyguard reaching for Quartilla's throat was naked, but his fingertips were armed with unexpected claws.

The bodyguard's reach was almost as long as Vibulenus' arm and the sword extending it, but "almost" was the margin of survival. The tip of the practice sword ended its overhand chop between the bulging toad eyes. Clodius Afer himself might have been proud of the accuracy of the blow and the muscle behind it.

The bodyguard was seven feet tall and, without his armor, as ropily powerful as the carnivore on watch. The edge of the practice sword was too rounded to cut, but it was an edge nonetheless. It focused the inertia of the blow in a line which caved through the bones of the victim's flat forehead.

Vibulenus' weapon rebounded. The bodyguard staggered backward, bleeding from its ear flaps and with both eyes jouncing at the end of their optic nerves.

"Rome!" shouted the tribune as he darted forward. Shouts merged behind him into a single wordless snarl.

Naked, the bodyguards looked less like toads than they did in their armor. Their legs were shorter than a man's, much less a toad's, in comparison to the length of the torso; the bodies were rangy without iron hoops to bulk them out; their skins were smooth and the color of polished bronze except for the hands, feet and faces of richly-marked mahogany.

The bodyguards came from both sides of the corridor, through what appeared to be partitions but were only screens of coherent light. Their duties were too deeply ingrained for the creatures not to fling themselves into battle without hesitation; but they were unprepared, and the soldiers who spilled forward after Vibulenus had dreamed of this moment for weeks.

The tribune's headlong rush took him past the rooms nearest the door where the guards were billeted. There was fighting behind him, but there was no lack of men to handle it. He was running for the main chance in the desperate hope that he would recognize it if he stumbled into it.

The mutineers were completely out of their depth now. Quartilla knew no more of life in the forward section than the Romans did. She could pass through the transport system the crew used within the main body of the ship, but forward was entered only through the bulkhead door which they had just forced.

A blue-suited crewman leaped into the hallway-the Pilot, not the stocky, mauve-faced fellow who was now the Medic. Behind him was a room of floating dodecahedrons, some as thick as a man was tall. Each facet was a different picture, most of them mere swirls of color. Together their light shadowed the crewman's face without hiding the scowl of manic rage or the laser he was raising to aim.

The practice sword did not spin with the glittering beauty of Vibulenus' own weapon, saving the Commander on the gravel field where last they fought beneath a sun. It flew true, though, smashing the guild employee backward into the drifting shapes that eddied to avoid his touch.

The Pilot's face was bloodied and his shoulder possibly broken, but his life had not been risked by a sharp edge-a result as important to the tribune as the fact the laser had spun away from the impact.

"Got 'im!" bellowed Clodius Afer as he raised a dagger-a real one with a hilt fit for two Roman hands, part of some bodyguard's equipage-to finish the job in a fury as red as the blood from the scratches torn across his chest and arm.

"No by Hercules!" the tribune screamed, tackling his berserk subordinate because he knew no words could now restrain a man whose rage had overwhelmed weeks of careful, mutual planning. His hands locked on Clodius' right wrist, and the pause in which the centurion threw off the hindrance was time enough to reinstate training and sanity.