David Weber - Ranks of Bronze

"Wait!"

"Two-"

The wall dissolved like most other doorways in the ship. There was a line of what appeared to be smoke where the laser had cut, but it settled out of the air quickly as a handful of gray dust. The Commander, with his arms crossed in front of his face, stepped through it.

He was wearing a blue bodysuit again. Even had he wished to, Vibulenus could not have avoided remembering his first sight of the slim figure. The Commander had watched Parthian guards driving their Roman prisoners onto the vessel that was intended to be the only home the legionaries would know for the rest of their lives. The figure in blue had watched with the detached interest of a cattle buyer.

And it no longer hurt to realize that the Commander had thought of himself in just that fashion, a human who bought and managed animals.

"Glad to see you, Your Worship," said Gaius Vibulenus in a kittenish tone. "Most glad to see you like this."

The Commander lowered his hands, and gods! but it was good to see the terror on his face.

The Commander's personal quarters were a forest- not a glade on a Campanian hillside, but no stranger than a score of woodlands through which the legion had battled. Trees with willowy trunks rose in gold-barked splendor above the level which Vibulenus could see through the doorway. Tendrils hung down, fringed with blue-green foliage that marched along the twigs in connected rows like an eel's fins instead of being separated into leaves. The air had a sulphurous tinge, not quite unpleasant. Several of the trunks were six feet in diameter.

"Throw your traps down, you two," said Clodius Afer, nodding his clenched right hand toward a pair of legionaries."Hold 'im by the elbows, just hold 'im-but no mistake."

He looked in surprise at the Pilot who dangled in his big left hand. "Here, two more of you take this one-and the Medic, too. Pretend you're good for something beside scratchin' yer butts."

As he spoke, the pilus prior let his gaze wander across the guard billets his men had cleared. Tired soldiers squatted on the deck or braced themselves against rocks designed for the comfort of inhuman forms. Where they could, they avoided the remains of the toad creatures who had lorded over them for-how to measure the time? But avoidance was not always possible, and some of the men were too weary to care that the surface beneath them was greasy.

Clodus grinned, and the men grinned back at their bloody centurion. Their mutual pride glowed like a hot furnace.

"This all can be forgotten," said the Commander. Either his control or the ship's communications system kept his voice calm, without the tremolo of fear which the tribune had hoped to hear. "For the sake of my career, you see, so you need not doubt me. The- damage-" he wriggled his short, pointed ears "-can be assessed against the recent battle, a mere entry error in the damage report. It will be all forgotten."

"No," said Pompilius Niger. "It won't be forgotten. Lots of things aren't forgotten." He reached out slowly.

Vibulenus poised to act if needs must, but the bovine, childish-looking centurion only drew the tip of his index finger down the face of the Commander. The guild officer shuddered but could not draw away against the grip of the strong men holding him.

"I'll never forget Rufus, your worship," Niger added with the gentleness of a chamois whisking over a swordblade.

"Bring him into here," said Vibulenus, walking toward the Commander's quarters as he spoke. "The Medic- both of them, bring them too."

The tribune's right hand hurt from the strain he had not noticed when he was gripping the crewman. He felt a momentary hesitation-mental, not quite transmitted to his body-before he stepped through the doorway. In this place there could be deadfalls-or the vessel's dreadful equivalent of them, invisible partitions that would sizzle away the blood and bone of an intruder.

But Quartilla was at his side, and if he paused she would be the first into…

A forest in which the air was unexpectedly warm and dry, and where several of the trees shot up to a height of several hundred feet unless that were an optical illusion. No snares in the doorway, no lethal barriers.

There was nothing which suggested the guiding or working of a ship either.

"What does he have to do with making the ship go places?" the tribune asked without looking over his shoulder. He was bending his right fingers back against his wrist with the other hand. "The Commander?"

"He just…" the Medic said. "I mean, I think he just orders him-"

"What are you doing?" demanded the guild officer in rising inflections that pierced like the voice of a senile woman. "You're safe now if you'll stop this mad-"

The voice cut off.

Vibulenus turned. No one had touched the Commander. Niger was pointing a finger at the blue-suited officer's face and smiling.

The Medic reached out toward the Pilot's head to steady and direct it. The slighter-bodied crewman was standing upright again, but his face bore mental and physical vestiges of the punishment he had received.

"Hey!" said the soldier holding the Medic's right elbow. He jerked his captive back sharply.

"Tell us," the Medic begged his fellow. "He doesn't set any controls, does he?"

"Him," mumbled the Pilot. He tried to rub his face with a hand but was prevented by the overzealous legionaries gripping him. "He just tells me it's my fault the other bastard got cut so he has to take over this zoo again. Have me demoted, he says."

"Your choice, Publius," the tribune said softly to Pompilius Niger. "He was your cousin."

"Yes," said the stocky junior centurion.

Niger had been staring at the guild officer. Now he reached out to the crewmen, talcing each man's chin between the thumb and forefinger of a hand. The Medic froze. The Pilot struggled reflexively; but he could not move his head against the two-finger grip, and the attempt brought him back to full consciousness.

"Now…" said Niger, letting his eyes travel from one crewman to the other. "We're going to give you a demonstration of why you will obey every order which Gaius gives you, without argument or hesitation.

"We call it crucifixion."

The Commander began to scream. The screaming went on for a long time.

"This was the last unit, sir," said Julius Rusticanus at the doorway of the Commander's quarters.

"Very good, First," said Gaius Vibulenus, giving the first centurion an upward nod which exhaustion kept from being as crisp as he would have liked,

Quartilla, empathetic or just lucky in her timing, began to massage the tribune's neck and shoulders. The black certainty of the laser still lay across the woman's lap.

"March them out then," Vibulenus continued, relaxing visibly, "and await further orders."

"Century-" Rusticanus roared.

"Century!" repeated the centurion of the particular unit, Sixth of the First, in a pale echo of the first centurion's incomparable bellow.

"March!" Rusticanus ordered, and bare feet slapped the floor as the century exited the forest scene in close order and perfect step.

Every legionary aboard had now been brought into the Commander's quarters for a view of the price men had exacted from-not men. Most of the centuries filed in and out in boisterous good humor, but Rusticanus had set his own stamp on the conduct of the First Cohort.

"Sir," he said as the men marched toward the exit into the Main Gallery where most of the legion already waited. "I-I'm very proud to serve under you. You did… you did what you promised us you would."

"Thank you, First," the tribune said, feeling pleasure tingle beneath his skin despite his weariness.

"But you should have had me with you-" his broad hand gestured around him, fingers spread "-when."

The first centurion made an about face as sharp as a surveyed angle and marched out after his men.