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BOOK FOUR
THE LAST CAMPAIGN

"This operation," said the Commander, a squat figure who could have passed for Clodius Afer at a distance if they exchanged garb, "is beneath me in its simplicity. I protested, but my superiors informed me that I have been tasked for the operation because of their desire for haste. I — I and yourselves — were best positioned of the units at a proper level of technology. Further, the job of ground preparation has been botched —"

"Oh-oh," Vibulenus muttered, resting his hand on the mail-clad shoulder of Clodius Afer. The pilus prior's angry sneer showed that Clodius knew as well as the tribune who was going to pay for the fuck-up. Not the folks in colored skin-suits who were responsible, oh no.

"—and though the personnel responsible have received reprimands," the Commander continued, audible throughout the Main Gallery despite the clash of weapons and equipment still being donned by many of the legionaries, "it was deemed necessary to task a unit disciplined enough to accomplish the task unaided. Thus I was assigned."

"Fine with me," Clodius Afer whispered, "if the smug bastard decides to handle the whole thing himself. Pollux! He's the worst we've been handed yet."

"Young, I'd guess," said Vibulenus, who still looked eighteen years old — unless you met his eyes, which were as old as the eyes of the Sphinx. "And 'worst' . . . worst covers a lot of things besides this."

He always mustered with the Tenth Cohort, standing in the front rank to the left of Clodius Afer — and by extension, to the left of the entire legion. The right was the place of honor, the sword flank; the place where the first centurion and the eagle standard marched.

But a soldier didn't fight long without a good shield, and the Tenth had been the legion's shield through every battle it fought. They'd struck some shrewd blows of their own, besides.

It was not mere chance that the Tenth Cohort was down to two hundred and ninety-seven effectives, well below the average of the nine others.

"Individual members of the hostile force," continued the Commander, "are of intermediate size and strength."

"What're we?" grumbled Clodius, rubbing his face under the hinged left cheek protector. There was no visible scar there, but tissue beneath the skin was knotted from the time an axe had glanced off his shield rim.

When had that been? Battles merged with one another and with the fantasies the tribune played in the Recreation Room. He wondered if Quartilla could still remember every man she had known. He had no idea of how many times he had killed. . . .

"Their armor is rudimentary," said the voice in the Romans' ears, "and their weapons, though iron, are so crude that their main effect is to permit my guild to deploy you against them rather than tasking a unit at a lower level."

Vibulenus caressed his left forearm where he, too, had knobs of hidden keloid that the Medic had never been able to remove. "Wonder how he'd like a stone point rammed up his bum?" he muttered, angry despite himself to be lectured by someone who knew only at second-hand about matters that were bloody memories to most of those who listened.

"The terrain is rolling," said the Commander, "and the soil coarse with no vegetation of military significance."

He paused for thought, then added, "the average temperature is lower than that of the planet where you were purchased, but the conditions for the immediate future are well within the region which you find comfortable."

"What the. . . ?" said the pilus prior. Vibulenus squeezed the armored shoulder again, for the benefit of one or both of them.

"Do your duty to my guild," concluded the Commander, "and we will treat you well. You are dismissed."

The doors in the rear of the Main Gallery never opened when the legion mustered for battle. Instead, the entire wall slid downward. The broad corridor by which the men had entered was gone, and the Main Gallery gaped through a hole in the vessel's outer bulkhead.

"Cohort —" roared Clodius Afer as he turned with a squeal of hobnails on flooring that was harder than iron.

"Century —" echoed the remaining centurions in the cohort, while their fellows in the rest of the legion did the same. In mustering for battle, the First Cohort formed up in the rear of the gallery so that it could lead the way out.

The breath of air sucked into the Main Gallery when the walls slid open was cool and dry, a good temperature in which to march in armor. You were always too hot during actual combat, but in cold weather a man could die of the shock to his system when victory or a wound let him cool off suddenly.

"About face!" shouted the sixty centurions in a unison gained through long practice.

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 would 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 was — marched 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 righting. 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 wondrous 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 disaster — they 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.

The ground looked flatter than the Commander's description of it ("rolling") but the tribune could not see the left flank of the enemy when the halt gave him leisure to observe them. In fact, the Commander had marched them so far across the front that the entire eastern horizon was filled with a line of shields whose garish colors were muted by the light behind them.

All the vegetation the tribune could see was the same variety, a gray-skinned plant whose center was a squat trunk the size and shape of a large wine jar. A dozen leaves two handbreadths wide and as much as twenty feet long trailed across the shingle from each trunk, covering much of the ground despite the sparseness of individual plants. The legionaries did surprisingly little damage when they trampled the leaves with their heavy boots, but the cool air filled with an odor like that of bergamot.

There did not seem to be any animal life except the other army. The region raised a right plenty of warriors, if it did nothing else.

"Cohort —"

"Century —"

"Left . . . face!"

Scrunch — crash! as slightly over four thousand men turned on their left heels, then slammed their right boots down in unison. Their capes and the crests above their helmets waved like the lovely, languid fins of a reef fish swinging into position to strike. Vibulenus looked at them, turning his back on the enemy, and his heart thrilled within him. He was no longer afraid.

"Dress right —" shouted Clodius Afer, his voice as strong and no huskier than it had been when he started bellowing commands. A pause while the junior centurions echoed him, then: "Dress!"

The Tenth Cohort glittered as every man stretched out his right arm to the side, gripping the javelin against his palm with his thumb.

The ranks began to shift to their right as each man edged away from the extended fingers of the man to his left. The motion became increasingly pronounced as the men on the cohort's right compensated for the few inches that every one of the fifty men to their left had closed up improperly during the march.

Cursing, the pilus prior of Cohort Nine continued the process. The legion wriggled to its right with a peristaltic spasm like that of a slug advancing.

Or a snail; a bronze-armored, steel-fanged snail.

Clodius Afer began striding between the files of his cohort, shouting in what was only partly-feigned nervousness. "Come on you fuckers, what d'ye think this is, a fuckin' defaulters' parade? They'll kill yer fuckin' asses if you don't dress those lines! Second rank, shift right, yer not bum-fucking the first rank, you're ready t' lock shields with 'em!"

Each legionary stood with three feet of empty space on all sides of him: room to cock back his javelin or to swing his sword without fouling a comrade; room enough to stride forward and lock a shield wall with the rank ahead if the enemy advanced in a phalanx of its own.

It was not quite a parade formation, because irregularities in the ground skewed the array the way dense forest curves over the surface of a hill. But a parade is a purpose unto itself, sterile and emotionless. Here the legion breathed and its spearheads, sharpened as well as polished, quivered with restless animation.

There was still no one — no cavalry, no light infantry, nothing to close the legion's left flank. The hordes of the enemy would be all over the Tenth Cohort as soon as battle was joined, as sure as dead men stink.

There was a noise from the enemy lines greater than the whisper of equipment. Voices drifted toward the Romans on the light breeze. Warriors holding short staves upright were walking forward from the hostile mass.

Standard bearers, Vibulenus thought, or heralds . . . but it was not until he realized that the warriors were swinging their staves that he understood what the sound was.

There was a rope at the upper end of each staff and, spinning at the end of the rope's arc, a bull-roarer visible only as a shimmer in the air at this distance. The noisemakers had an angry drone, peevish in the upper registers and distinctly threatening in the lowest bass.

There were at least a dozen of the signallers being advanced from the enemy's front. They were not — could not be — tuned to identical frequencies, and the disharmonies and near harmonies that resulted raised hairs on the back of the Romans' necks the way the growl of a big cat could do.

The storm of battle was about to break over this arid plain; and unless there were immediate changes, the legion would be swept away in torrents of its own blood.

"Sir," said the pilus prior from unexpectedly beside the tribune, "who's supporting our left flank?"

Vibulenus' heart jumped when someone else broke into the mental structure he was building and all the delicately-balanced probabilities crashed down into the one gut-certainty of disaster.

"Nobody," he snapped, wholly an officer and not a man for the moment; a tribune of this legion and by all the gods its leader, whoever the trading guild might appoint to its command. "They've gotten greedy, and we're not going to let 'em get away with it. Order the men to ground their shields and kneel while I straighten it out."

He strode through the six ranks, oblivious to the looks of nervousness or curiosity which the nearest soldiers flashed him. Just now they existed only as statues, thoughtfully offset to provide Vibulenus a slanted path between them.

"Prepare to kneel!" bellowed Clodius Afer. It was not a standard command, but if he ordered "Prepare to receive cavalry" from the drill manual, the ranks would close up before kneeling with javelins slanted over shields.

The legion's depth was almost no distance at all to the strides of an angry man. That fact penetrated, and it formed a blazing backdrop to the tribune's icy resolve.

A trumpet from the command group gave the preliminary advance signal with a long clear note.

"Kneel!" ordered the centurions of the Tenth Cohort. The rank and file legionaries dropped as though the trumpet had made the ground settle beneath them.

That would make the Commander sit up and take notice, thought the tribune with satisfaction as he stepped through the sixth rank and into sight of the command group — to the rear, as always.

Behind him, the enemy was beginning to chant in unison with the pulses of the bull-roarers.

Vibulenus started to jog toward the command group, almost as far away from him as the enemy lines had been. The bodyguards oiled their armor but did not polish it, so they sat on their powerful mounts like dark lumps which turned to watch the tribune with the inanimate fascination of toads.

About and beyond them glittered the legion's silver eagle standard and the silvered bronze trumpet and horn, all carried by Romans on foot. The signallers were lowering their instruments and looking toward Vibulenus — more accurately, looking at the cohort kneeling on the flank which had caused the Commander to delay the concentus of all horns and trumpets to order the attack.

There was one figure more, a Roman in gilded helmet and breastplate who spurred his mount so savagely toward Vibulenus that pebbles spurned by the beast's pads rattled on the armor of the guards and their own mounts. The Commander had sent Lucius Rectinus Falco to learn what was wrong with the left flank.

And by Hercules, he would learn.

The carnivore that Falco rode had a pace something like that of a horse cantering, but when the clawed forepaws reached out, the creature bowed its chest so that it nearly scraped the ground. The motion by which the beast recovered, arching its back, would have pitched off any but the most expert of riders — and Falco was that, give the little swine his due.

The Commander and the toad-things of his bodyguard supported their feet in steel loops slung from their saddles — stirrups — which made an amazing difference in ease of riding at anything above a fast walk. Falco disdained them, continuing to ride Roman fashion with only the pressure of his bent legs on the beast's heaving flanks to keep him astride. Thus mounted, he rode with a verve that the guards were too heavy to equal and the Commander — all the commanders — had too much caution to attempt.

Vibulenus halted. If a messenger were coming, he had no reason to run himself into heatstroke while his equipment pummeled him. Some of the rear-rank legionaries turned to check furtively on what was happening behind them.

The carnivore closed the gap with astonishing speed. It was ridden on a hackamore that left its jaws free to rend from eye-teeth to shearing molars, and the lips were already slavering. Though of rangy build, the beast must have weighed over two thousand pounds even without the added mass of its draperies of scale armor. The tribune was not conscious of being afraid, but by instinct his left arm swung the shield so that the blazon of triple thunderbolts on its face was squarely toward Falco.

The hind claws of that cursed brute flung gravel as much as twenty feet in the air when they scrabbled for purchase.

Falco realized at the last moment that he was going too fast to skid to a halt directly in front of his rival. He tugged the reins and his mount's head to the left at the same time he pulled back with enough strength to mottle his knuckles with the effort. The pebbles that he had intended to spray across Vibulenus rattled instead on the backs and helmets of the soldiers of the rear rank as the messenger skidded to a halt.

One of the men, a centurion by the transverse crest, leaped to his feet while the mounted tribune was still trying to bring his carnivore under proper control. The non-com — Pompilius Niger, by Pollux! Of course, Niger had the Fourth Century now — thrust at the beast's snarling jaws with his shield boss, making the creature start and very nearly upsetting the rider for all his skill.

"What?" Falco bleated as his mount pawed halfheartedly at the shield and Niger cocked a javelin to stab for an eye if things went further.

"Falco!" Vibulenus shouted, stepping forward to seize the other tribune's right knee and deflect his attention back to where it should be. Niger ought to have had enough discipline to ignore being pelted with rocks . . . but they were, all of them, keyed up, waiting for slaughter and wondering whose it would be. "Centurion, back to your duties!"

"Vibulenus," said Falco as he slapped the hand away from his knee, "the Commander will burn you to death by inches. Why have these fools squatted down in the very face of the enemy?"

His voice was husky with emotion and the effort of controlling his mount.

"Lucius Falco," said the tribune standing, "tell our commander that if we engage like this, they'll be all around us. We can't win if we're being pressed from three sides."

The effluvium of warm dead meat bathed the carnivore, rolling from under the blankets of armor covering the beast. Its breathing slowed from the quick gasping of the first moments after its run. During each of the intakes that filled the creature's great lungs, the whirr of the slotted disk on its chest picked up to a racing whine.

"You don't decide tactics, tribune," sneered the tribune in gilded armor, his leg moving up and down with the rise and fall of his mount's chest, "And you don't give orders."

"Falco, listen to me," said Vibulenus in the high carrying voice that compelled attention. "Tell our commander that we'll fight for him, but we won't let him throw us away. We went that route once, with Crassus."

He paused as arrows in his mind shot toward him from all sides, but memories of Parthia no longer froze the tall tribune. He continued, "If he doesn't get us cavalry to close our flank, or at least some auxiliary infantry —" he realized now what the Commander had been hinting about the failure of preparations "—then we form a square and march back to the ship. Otherwise we'll be killed for nothing."

Clodius and the Tenth Cohort would follow him, even in the likelihood that they would find sealed hatches and perhaps lasers when they reached the ship. Would the rest of the legion march with him also? Possibly; very possibly. He had led them before, taking the only position from which men could really be led — one step in front of them.

"I thought you were a hero, little Gaius," said Falco, and the bitterness of truth was so clear in his voice that it overwhelmed the sarcasm he had intended. "Are you afraid to die after all?"

Nothing could disturb the calm of leadership that enveloped Gaius Vibulenus at this moment. There was no room for anger, no room for personalities; no room for anything but what conduced to the result of getting support for their flank.

"Afraid to get my skull split, you mean, Lucius?" Vibulenus asked as his right hand moved. "I don't know. Are you?"

Falco looked at where his rival's hand now rested, and looked at the millennia-old eyes in Vibulenus' eighteen-year-old face. "You'll pay for this, you arrogant bastard," the rider whispered with all the venom that his fear let pass.

"Tell him, Falco," said Vibulenus steadily. "Tell him we need something to keep them off our flank and rear while we grind through their front."

Falco jerked his mount's head left and kicked the beast's haunch to tighten the turn. Its iron-scaled hindquarters brushed Vibulenus' shield as the creature broke into a racking trot, then its canter, as the rider goaded it back toward the command group.

"Thank you, sir," said somebody.

Vibulenus shuddered and took his hand away from his sword. He had been gripping the bone hilt so fiercely that the muscles ached all the way up his forearm. Not in anger. If he had chopped Falco down, hacked through the helmet and skull until the Spanish steel of his blade was nicked by his rival's sneering teeth, then it would have been done coolly to demonstrate to the Commander how serious was the demand for support.

The trading guild understood that sort of demonstration.

Vesta, hearth and hope; bring us home again!

Vibulenus strode again through the kneeling ranks. He paused only for a moment to grip Niger's hand, though neither of the childhood friends spoke. The fragrance of the sprawling local vegetation accompanied the tribune and calmed him somewhat. Now that he was thinking again as an individual, he was terrified by what he had done . . . but there was no going back.

And anyway, he had been right. Execution by the Commander could leave him no more dead than disaster in battle would. He had seen enough of the guild's philosophy by now to realize that it would make no attempt to recover and revivify those who had failed it, whatever excuses the dead might have been able to claim.

"Awaiting further orders, sir," said Clodius Afer in a voice so neutral that it was disquieting.

Gaius Vibulenus had to remember that the actions he took affected hundreds, thousands, of other men; even after he was thinking again as a fearful individual and not the tribune — more than tribune — who had given the orders. "Either," he said in a voice that steadied after the first syllables, "we'll have some help over here soonest, or we march back to the ship and discuss matters at leisure."

Or you watch me burned to charcoal and a puddle of bronze, his fear added silently.

The tribune looked toward the enemy whom he had ignored through the minutes since they ceased to be the primary threat. The Romans' actions and lack thereof appeared to have confused the hostile chieftains as well. The signallers had drifted to a halt, midway across the gap that had separated the two armies. All but one of the bull-roarers were silent, the wielders leaning on their staves, panting with the exertion they had undergone. Individually, the figures seemed to be tall and gangling, with skins whose color approached bright orange.

And gods! there were hordes of them.

"Maybe," Vibulenus said to himself aloud, "he can shift a cohort from the right to give us some depth. Six ranks isn't enough, not on this flank."

"They want us to come out," said the pilus prior with a nod toward the hesitating foe. "They aren't used to this."

"That was what happened the first time," said the tribune, voicing a train of thought wholly inappropriate at the present time. "The, you know, the first battle we fought for this guild? Those big fellas with the carts, they expected to fight a civilized little battle. Then the loser'd withdraw behind the screen of light troops and everybody'd go home."

"I'm not looking forward to this neither," said the centurion; and when Vibulenus processed the words, he too understood why he had been babbling about the distant past. He had survived that past.

There was a stir around the command group. Eight or ten — ten, half the contingent — of the Commander's bodyguards suddenly rode toward the left flank at a shambling trot. They sat their mounts ably enough with no squirming or slipping in their saddles, but because of their size and featureless armor they looked more like howdahs than riders.

They carried their maces upright, waving ten feet above the saddles like papyrus stalks when wind sweeps up the Nile.

All the warmth and strength drained out of the tribune's body. His clammy fingers touched the hilt of his sword, wondering whether to defend himself with the weapon or fall on it . . . and whether the guild would revivify him for punishment if he tried to forestall them by suicide.

Clodius Afer had remained standing when he ordered his troops to kneel. Now, looking over their heads toward the armored riders, he said in a raspy, carrying voice, "Boys, it may be there'll be a little trouble in a moment. If we put our spears up the belly of those overgrown dogs from below, then we can take care of the prettyboys ridin' 'em in our own good time."

"I don't want —" Vibulenus started to say before it struck him that he couldn't keep these men from trying to defend him — and that he didn't want to call them off anyway. They'd been together for a long time, he and the legion. Maybe this wouldn't be the worst way for it to end.

The toad-faced guards rode past the flank of the cohort. Instead of reining their beasts across the face of the kneeling unit to arrest the tribune as he expected, they fanned out to extend the line of the legion by over three hundred feet. As the nearest of the riders halted his mount, facing and snarling at the enemy, he turned stiffly in the saddle. His mace head dipped in the direction of Vibulenus, then rose again in what could only be a salute.

"Get them on their feet again," said the tribune in a rush of triumph and relief that elevated him beyond human concerns. "We've got a battle to fight."

"Cohort!" shouted Clodius Afer. "Fall — in!"

Hidden by the scrunch of gravel under hobnails, the pilus prior muttered, "And just what're they doing, you think — sir?"

"They're the unit guarding our left flank," Vibulenus said, watching armored men rise from the stony soil like the crop Jason sowed with dragon's teeth. Shifting their grip on javelins, adjusting shields and raising reflections on the bronze bosses and edge reinforcements from the light of the greenish sun.

There was nothing in particular in the eyes that met the tribune's as he scanned the ranks: neither hope nor resignation, not curiosity or fear. They were experts who knew what the present job entailed, and knew that they could handle it.

"Not exactly a regiment of cavalry," grumbled Clodius in a husky whisper. "Ten of 'em. How's that going to help?"

"He gave us half of what he had," the tribune remarked with a detached shrug. "We'll call that a win. Anyway, they'll keep the natives off our backs — they look so mean."

The bull-roarers were beginning to spin again across the field.

"Mean? We'll give 'em mean," said the pilus prior as he strode away, checking the dress of his lines again.

The bodyguards must be bitter, the tribune thought, ordered to take a place in the line where they might see real action. Maybe it'd be good for them.

At least it might get a few of the bastards killed.

The command group's trumpeter blew his long preliminary call again. Bronze ranks of legionaries, their plumes and javelin points trembling, interrupted Vibulenus' view of the figure in the blue suit who was probably watching the Tenth Cohort in nervous anticipation.

The Commander had turned out to be willing to learn from people who knew more than he did about the situation. That put him a notch up on Crassus and more than one other Roman consul.

"Signallers!" Vibulenus called as he strode across the front of the cohort toward its right, where he would find a place between the files of the Tenth and Ninth Cohorts. "Sound the attack!"

It was not his place to give that order. But, as when Vibulenus had the cohort kneel and take itself out of the battle, it was the fastest possible way to send the Commander a message he would understand.

The part of Vibulenus' mind that considered practical things expected two or three of the signallers to be able to hear his command — and perhaps none of those to obey him. Instead, all the horns and trumpets of the Tenth and Ninth Cohorts blew the concentus. His voice carried — and it carried authority to every legionary that heard it.

By Hercules, they were men and were soldiers; and so was Gaius Vibulenus.

"Cohort —" roared Clodius Afer, picking up the tribune's intent.

"Century —" from multiple throats.

First the horn and trumpet from the command group, then the signallers throughout the legion joined the concentus.

"Forward — march!"

The legion crashed off toward another enemy at two steps a second, while four thousand right arms readied javelins. The left flank was a half stride ahead of the remaining cohorts; and that wasn't a bad feeling either.

Vibulenus settled his shield so that the point of his left shoulder took some of the weight. He drew his sword, the same fine Spanish blade his father had bought him so long ago. Its bone hilt and the calluses of his right hand had shaped to one another over the years, and the blade — though frequently sharpened — was poised and balanced to slash a life out.

As it had done hundreds of times already.

The enemy began to chant in high-pitched voices, so many of them that it sounded like a chorus of frogs in a swamp swollen by springtime rains. The sparkling crunch of gravel beneath hobnails was the only noise the legion made in reply, but to the ears of a trained soldiers the sound of that disciplined advance was more terrible than any amount of barbarian yammer.

The tribune's grin and the edges of his sword flashed toward the enemy.

The equipment the guild supplied was solid enough, helmets forged without weak spots and shields whose laminations did not split if they were dropped. But there was no craftsmanship in that produce, no soul, as there was in the Spanish sword.

Sometimes it seemed that the guild did not realize even that its soldiers had souls.

The natives came on with mass but no discipline, the way surf bubbles across a strand.

"Heads up!" warned a front-rank centurion as a score of light javelins snapped from the hostile lines in high arcs. They must have been using spear throwers, because no flesh-and-blood arm could have cast a missile so far unaided.

"Company comin', boys," said Clodius Afer. "Don't lose your dress." The coolness of his voice and the unconcern for anything but his cohort's orderliness were more calming than any blustering encouragement could have been.

Vibulenus felt a sudden urge to empty his bladder. That too was calming, because the feeling had become a normal part of his life.

Being on the edge of battle was almost as normal as eating, now.

One of the darts howled down, short of the tribune but so close that he swung his shield instinctively to cover it. The missile was no more than three feet long, a shaft of something like rattan with a small iron point that shattered on the ground. He kicked the shaft as he stepped past it with the disgust that he would have felt for a snake in his pathway.

"More on the way!"

The warriors had surged around their fellows with bull-roarers. The sound continued, but Vibulenus doubted whether the signallers could long continue to spin their noisemakers above the heads of the armed warriors. Their shields were painted in geometric patterns, each unique. Some of the leaders gnawed on their shield rims as they shambled toward the legion.

It was about time to give them something else to chew on.

Vibulenus ran two steps ahead of the front of the legion with his sword raised. Waves of flame and melt water undulated through the nerves in his skin, breaking in turbulence at the hidden scars which the Medic could not remove.

The signallers would call for the first volley of javelins, but not all the legionaries would hear the bronze tones over the crunch of their own advance. If that initial flight were to be launched simultaneously for greatest effect, then there had to be a visual signal as well.

Gaius Vibulenus had just volunteered himself as visual signal, because he wasn't willing to order any of his men to take the risk instead. His men.

The tall officer twisted his head and shoulders backward as he jogged toward the enemy. The shadow of his horsehair plume waved across the boots of the soldiers raising their left legs a little higher than usual to balance the javelins cocked back in their right hands to throw.

The whole left side of Vibulenus' body crawled with fear of the enemy he could no longer see.

"Hit 'em, boys!" he shouted as the horns blared and the sword in his hand swung down in an arc turned green by the light of the virid sun.

A dart flew over the tribune and thudded into the shield of a file-closer, just as the front two ranks broke into a run and hurled their javelins at the enemy a hundred feet away. The shadows of three more native missiles merged with the tribune's shadow; he staggered with shock and pain.

One of the darts struck near the boss of his shield, penetrating the three plies of wood but only bulging the felt backing. A second came down in so high an arc that it missed the shield and glanced from his shoulder where the attachments of his body armor formed a double thickness of bronze. The iron gouged a bright streak into the polished cuirass but did only cosmetic harm.

The third missile hit Vibulenus in the helmet at the same point he had been struck, ages before, by a spearman in a misty valley. The dart had been hurled as hard and flat as possible for a native arm aided by the additional leverage of a spear thrower.

There was a flash of ringing deadness in the tribune's skull, and his body started to go slack.

"Rome!" shouted Clodius Afer as his left arm, shield and all, encircled the tribune who was his friend and comrade.

The native ranks exploded with the death of hundreds of their leading warriors.

"Sir?" said the pilus prior as legionaries rushed past them, lifting their heavy javelins from behind their shields. "You're all right?"

"I'm all right. . . ." Vibulenus mumbled, an echo rather than an answer, but use of his lips and tongue gave him volitional control over the muscles of his body as well. He straightened and finally realized that the centurion had been holding the entire weight of his armored body until then.

The multi-throated chanting from the nearest portion of the enemy lines changed to screams as heavy javelins and the lighter missiles from the center ranks of the legion hammered the natives like wheat in a hail storm.

Vibulenus felt his head, using the back of his right hand because he had not lost his grip on his sword. His helmet was gone, but the bone beneath was solid and he could feel the pressure of his probing with both hand and head.

"I'm fine," he said, slurring the words. "Let's get 'em."

Blood from the pressure cut on his scalp dripped on his sword as he lowered his hand.

"Rome!" Clodius repeated with a nod and a feral smile as he headed for his proper place at the front with long, swift strides.

The tribune followed, though every time his right heel met the ground his vision dimmed with pain. He tried to force his eyes more widely open, as if the muscles of the lids could somehow press back the waves of pain.

The native shields were long and narrow, so the first good look Vibulenus had at the enemy he was fighting came when he strode past a native body with wide-flung limbs, pinned to the shingle by a javelin through the base of the throat. The corpse was thin with almost the angular slimness of a praying mantis. The orange cast of its skin was accented on the face and arms by rouge. The only clothing worn by the goggle-eyed corpse was a string of animal teeth that might have been intended as some sort of rudimentary body armor.

The shield beside the native's body would not have been protection even if he had interposed it between him and the Roman javelin. It was leather-covered wicker, barely sufficient to stop light darts like the one which still hung unnoticed from the tribune's own shield. This was going to be as easy as any battle could be.

Which was not to say that it was going to be easy.

The advance paused as the two front ranks of legionaries locked shields, compressing the enemy with sword points. A soldier in front of Vibulenus grunted and took a half-step backward. The tribune leaned against the legionary's shoulders and pushed, giving the man the thrust he needed to counter the weight of natives literally trying to crawl over the Roman's shield.

The legionary used his impetus to stab over the upper curve of his plywood oval. Resistance collapsed, squealing, and Gaius Vibulenus stepped into the gap opened by the advance of the soldier he had aided.

A dozen Roman javelins wobbled overhead, hurled by the rear ranks when the armored backs in front of them had stopped moving. One of the missiles cleared the friendly lines by less than it should have, thudding into the native that Vibulenus was even then preparing to stab. That was a stupid blunder, inexcusable in veterans of their experience. After the battle he'd parade all the rear ranks with gravel-filled packs until they dropped unless some individual came forward to take his punishment.

The tribune's scalp, bare and bloody, tingled with emotion at a cellular level. Had the javelin wiggled a handbreadth lower in the air, its point would have split Vibulenus' skull like a pickaxed melon, ending his duties and his life beyond help of the Medic or the gods . . . if there were gods.

Hercules, shield a soldier from harm.

The natives were packed too tightly to use their weapons properly. A warrior stabbed overhand at the tribune's face with an all-iron spear very different from the darts which had fallen on the legion's advance. Instead of a shaft, this stabbing weapon was forged in one piece with two double-edged blades joined back to back by a rod no longer than a sword hilt.

The warrior's face was painted in quadrants — red, green, blue and a yellow turned fiery by the tone of the skin beneath it. Vibulenus ducked and raised his shield in the same motion. Wood split and the spearpoint reached an inch through the felt backing: the natives might be skinny, but they were not frail.

Instead of trying to slash around the edge of his opponent's buckler, painted in the same pattern as his face, the tribune stabbed directly at the center where the four colors met. Spanish steel slid through leather and the wicker frame with little more delay than it had made of the paint. Even dazed by the blow to his head, Vibulenus' eye had correctly gauged the flimsiness of the equipment beside the sprawled corpse.

The warrior screeched as the sword grated through the bones of his hand. He would have jumped backward, but the press of his fellows was too great.

Vibulenus put all his weight behind the swordhilt. His point met ribs and drove on into the chest cavity. His opponent cleared his own weapon with a hysterical jerk and flailed behind him with it. The victims he slashed down fell too late to provide him with any space but that he died on.

Shouting, the tribune leaped into the gap, joined on the carpet of squirming bodies by a legionary who had retained a javelin for thrusting.

His head did not hurt. The memories — Pompilius Rufus . . . Helvius in coruscating death . . . a centurion with no name, no legs, and no hope but the false one of Gaius Vibulenus — they were still present, but flows of molten glass insulated the tribune from that greater pain also.

There should have been a place other than battle where he could be free of pain, fear, and all-consuming hatred for his fate — as well as for the guild which was that fate. Vibulenus had found no other release its equal, though.

When he drank, it turned memories into nightmares until he awakened drenched with his own sweat and vomit. The fellowship of Clodius and Niger, friends as no one would have been his friend under circumstances his birth made normal, were constant reminders of other men who had died around him, beside him, even for him . . . and for no human purpose.

A soldier shouldn't talk of love and should never think of it . . . but for all that, Vibulenus found something not far from peace occasionally in Quartilla's arms. But there were memories in that, too, and knowledge of what she was as surely as he was a Roman and a soldier. The only purity he found in life was in slaughter. He knew the feeling did not come from a healthy mind; but it was no less real for that.

For now — Vibulenus chopped overarm at a warrior who had interposed his own stabbing spear. Steel bit deeply into thin iron, but the native expertly spun his weapon like a whirled baton to bring forward an undamaged blade. The tribune punched forward his shield, knocking the enemy shield aside, then swung low. His sword cut its own depth in the warrior's shield rim and stopped only because, nearer its tip, the blade had crunched into the native's femur.

Vibulenus brought the iron-bound edge of his shield down as he stepped over his fallen opponent. Bones and teeth splintered at the blow; and another warrior, with a clear look at the tribune's torso, thrust with all his strength.

Vibulenus pitched backward off the quivering body which his hobnails gouged. There was a dent in his breastplate, centered and between the fifth and sixth ribs. The iron spearpoint had doubled back for three inches. While the warrior tried to swap ends for another stroke, a legionary crushed his face with the ferule of a javelin.

The natives' blood was pale, and it had an odor like that of raw wool which struggled with the scent of trampled vegetation.

The tribune, half supported by a soldier whom he did not bother to thank or even look at, staggered back to his feet. Every time he drew in a breath there was a sharp pain where the spear had struck him; but even if it were a cracked rib rather than a bruise, he could still function.

He could still kill.

The fighting was beginning to open out now that the nearest surviving warriors had experienced enough of the legion's onslaught to press away from rather than toward the swordblades. A knot of the enemy had been cut off on a hillock twenty feet in diameter and no more than three feet higher than its immediate surroundings.

The warriors stood in a ring, shoulder to shoulder. Perhaps because there were no others immediately behind them to foul their strokes, the circle was defending itself ably. The height advantage permitted the long-armed natives to strike down at the eyes of legionaries attacking them, and that too contributed to the hillock being bypassed instead of overrun.

The soldiers fighting here had won many battles since they marched away from Rome; and these were the men who survived.

Titius Hostilianus, the soldier who had taken out the native who speared Vibulenus, paused to consider the defended hillock. There were twenty or so warriors here, and at least half of them bore shields painted solid blue in distinction to the multihued array of their fellows. A legionary lay at their feet. He had bent the stabbing spear when he fell on it, but its black iron point still projected through the back of his neck and spine.

Titius nodded and started to edge around the hillock. Vibulenus halted him with the flat of his bloody sword.

"Kill that one," ordered the bareheaded tribune, pointing the weapon toward the center of a blue shield four feet away.

The native snarled like a furious cat. His spear rang on the sword, forcing the tribune's arm down.

The shank of Titius' javelin had bent the first time he stabbed with the point. He scowled at Vibulenus, then eyed the native who flashed his blade through the empty air in threat.

Grunting, the legionary hurled his javelin. The ferule's four-sided spike tore through the shield and the warrior's throat.

Gaius Vibulenus jumped into the gap, even as the native pitched backward. The Roman's shield thrust the warrior to his left sideways, off the gravel knob, and a sword slash hamstrung the native to his right.

Warriors turned, crying out at the sudden threat in their midst. A spear cut the tribune's left thigh and another wedged its point in the crack of his clamshell armor, breaking one hinge and gouging into his right armpit despite the resistance of the spreading bronze.

Everything was white pain. He swung about him like a blinded bear, striking but not harming his assailants. Then he stumbled to his knees in the midst of orange-skinned bodies, Niger supporting him by one shoulder and Clodius Afer by the other.

It had taken the nearest soldiers only seconds to clear the hillock once the ring was disrupted. Thanks to that and to armor with which the natives had not dealt before, Vivulenus had no wounds that were not superficial.

He hurt as if he had rolled naked in nettles.

"Are you fucking crazy?" wheezed Niger. One front tooth was broken, and his face was cut from his upper lip to the left cheek guard. When he spoke, he sprayed blood as well as spittle. "What're you fucking doing?"

"Needed the height," the tribune mumbled back. "Had to be able to see." And speaking the words, he straightened his legs to use the vantage point for which he had risked his life.

It was hard to concentrate on what he had to know as an officer in the midst of battle. It would have been easier to block severe pain, a limb crushed or the shattered-glass jaggedness of breathing with an arrow through the lung. Vibulenus felt instead that ants were crawling over him, gnawing and dribbling a poison from their tails that made his flesh burn and veins throb.

Courage can overcome agony, but it has too diamond-like a focus to deal with amorphous discomfort.

Vibulenus squinted, not because of the sun — which was too high now to interfere — but so that he could direct his attention where he wanted it. His vision kept flashing nervously from the battle scene as a whole to the centurions supporting him: Niger stolid, despite the cut in his face, but Clodius Afer visibly worried about the tribune's mental and physical state.

"No, it's all right," Vibulenus muttered. "It had to be done that way."

When he had spoken the words, which were not a lie if understood in more than a strictly military sense, his mind reasserted the control it needed and cooled his body to a support which did not intrude.

The ten cavalrymen on the legion's left had held. The relief of seeing the armored riders hulking in place like so many fortresses, their visors raised to display the horror of their features, jellied the tribune's knees for an instant so that he sagged again into the grip of the two non-coms.

It did not seem that the natives had made any attempt to attack the armored riders. The fear of monsters mounted on other slavering monsters would have worn off in time, but the crushing advance of the Roman infantry had left no time. The bodyguards were walking their beasts forward to keep pace with the legion. The warriors before them were beginning to stream away from the battle, able to do so safely because they were not anchored by contact with a foe who would slaughter them from behind.

The central mass of the copper-skinned enemy, as far as Vibulenus could see, was struggling in panic. Roman shields pressed back the warriors so fiercely that those who knew how assured was their doom if they stayed were, nonetheless, unable to flee.

Rising to his full height, craning his neck — he should have had a horse, but he would not have accepted one of the carnivores available even had it been offered — Vibulenus scanned the undulating ranks of the legion.

Success had disordered the Roman lines somewhat; but because neither pursuit nor severe irregularities of terrain were involved, the rearmost pair of ranks had retained cohesion. Even more coolly reserved was the command group, its members visible more from the height of their mounts than because of the tribune's low vantage point. Falco; the Commander; and the ten remaining guards jutted up above the eagle standard, while the trumpeter and hornblower were hidden by the waving crests of the legionary infantry.

The Commander had retained the guards whom he had not sent to the left flank. What in the names of Jove and Hades was going on at the legion's right?

"Prepare to disengage the Tenth Cohort," said Gaius Vibulenus with such startling clarity that he could be heard by everyone within spear's length of him despite the sounds of battle. "We will reverse to the right flank while developing any hostile threats to the legion's rear."

"Threat?" said Niger, stepping up on his toes to see what had led to the unexpected order.

The cackling triumph of thousands of natives sweeping toward the command group from the right flank was more answer than the tribune had time to give.

"Get the trumpeters and standard bearers, Niger," said Clodius Afer in instant decision. "I'll see what I can do to the front and send some non-coms back."

Men promoted for courage were going to drift forward in battle, even if they would be of greater military benefit keeping control of ranks as yet uncommitted. Usually that stiffening of the front line came at very little cost. In the present circumstances, where the cohort had to execute a complex maneuver from the rear, lack of centurions and file-closers in the disengaged ranks wouldn't make matters any easier.

"About face!" Vibulenus shouted as he stepped off the hillock, stumbling on one of the tumbled native bodies because his foot had not lifted as high as he intended.

Niger slapped the tribune's shoulder in friendly benediction as the two childhood friends went off on separate errands of slaughter. The non-com's round-faced boyishness contrasted with the taller officer's youthfully-delicate features; and both visages contrasted even more with the hard-souled men who lived beneath the skin.

"Form your cursed ranks, you chaff-brained loafers!" Vibulenus shouted as he continued his staggering path back through the cohort. The pilus prior had not bothered to assign the tribune a task because there was no need to do so: Vibulenus was going to lead them from the cohort's new front. "About face, the fun's behind us now, boys!"

The tribune sheathed his sword to free a hand, stripping off blood on the sheath's tight lip because he did not have time to wipe the blade first. It was a bad way to treat a faithful weapon, but there wasn't any slack just now for human beings either. He physically rotated the nearest legionaries as he passed them, men who were nervous about turning their back on enemies but were unwilling to cold-bloodedly ignore an order so baldly put.

A few of their fellows followed the example and shouted orders. Then, as Vibulenus stepped through the sixth rank, two of the cohort's trumpets began blowing the four-note recall signal.

One of the rear-rank soldiers was a Capuan named Hymenaeus. His extraction was such that when he turned and saw what was happening, it was in Greek that he blurted, "Zeus bugger me fer a heifer, here they come!"

He started to walk out, hunching to loosen his mail.

Vibulenus blocked the soldier with his shield. "Wait for it, curse ye! We're going to do this as I say."

Because to meet the new threat piecemeal would mean disaster for the cohort, and for the legion whose only hope was the cohort.

The command group was no longer a study in disinterested aloofness. The Commander's bodyguard had reined its mounts to face the right flank. One or two of the guards had enough skill to bring up their beasts lurchingly onto their hind legs so that their forepaws could ramp in the air.

That had been enough to keep the natives back on the left flank . . . but the enemy that the Commander's own party faced was quite different from warriors in the chill dawn, trying to decide whether or not to attack monsters out of nightmare. The warriors who had boiled around the legion's right flank unhindered had both momentum and quick victories — legionaries cut down before they changed front — to enspirit them.

A carnivore sprang forward, goaded by its rider or the presence of blatant enemies. It caught a native and tossed him in the air, his chest and shoulder crushed and a blunt wedge cut from the wicker shield to match the pattern of the beast's jaws.

The natives gave back. Their front, twenty or thirty warriors across as they encircled the right of the legion, spread like water flowing against a brick on a smooth table. They flanked the short line of guards as they had flanked the legion itself . . . and then they attacked the mounted creatures from three sides with sudden wild abandon.

"On the command, Tenth Cohort will pivot on the left file!" Vibulenus instructed as he ran the length of the cohort's new front. Actually, only the previous sixth rank had faced about uniformly, though more and more of the men closer to the old front were obeying the trumpets. Non-coms grabbed by Clodius Afer rushed through lines of common soldiers, snarling and cajoling in an attempt to rebuild a formation disordered by contact with the enemy.

"Prepare to pivot," the tribune ordered in a voice barely audible for his wheezing. He had just run three hundred feet, the cohort's frontage, to reach the file that formed the open right flank of the unit's new alignment. Already exhausted by battle and emotion, he was scarcely able to breathe, much less speak.

The men nearest to him were the ones who must start the pivot and march a five-hundred foot arc while the cohort's left file merely turned on its left boot. They could hear him; and anyway, they would follow.

"Forward!" the tribune croaked and swept his sword out in a glittering curve.

Striding like a bronze-clad automaton, his hair bloody and windblown, Gaius Vibulenus led his men toward the enemy. His personality was again submerged in duty, but the body controlled by the tribune's intellect had very little strength left to offer.

Vibulenus could only pray — pray, and trust as experienced a team of non-coms as ever graced a cohort that there would be troops to support the single rank which marched at his side. He could have looked back over his shoulder, but he knew his feet would spill him if he did not watch his path. In a way, it did not matter whether he led a cohort or a rank: he had no choice but to carry out the maneuver as best he could, with however many men he had available.

Ahead of them — his pivot completed, Vibulenus was now leading his men at right angles to their original alignment — the surviving bodyguards pitched like ships in a storm of coppery bodies.

Two thousand right-flank legionaries, the first five cohorts, were tightly surrounded by native warriors. The light equipage that made the natives easy prey for the legion head-on gave them the speed to sweep like cavalry through gaps in the defenses.

Rear-rank soldiers faced around and locked shields when they recognized the new threat, but here the advantage was to the natives who had momentum and room to use their weapons while the legionaries were suddenly compressed by a double threat. The legion bristled like a hedgehog, its swords and thrusting javelins drawing blood from the yelping warriors . . . but there was no weight behind the Roman jabs, only fear, and there were ten natives for every one who fell.

"D'ye call that a fuckin' rank?" shrieked Clodius Afer from hearteningly near the tribune. "Slow it down, Piscinus, you're not runnin' fer a fuckin' bar!"

The cohort's front was thickening with men who sprinted, gasping, to squeeze between legionaries already in position and lock step with them. Centurions, file-closers, watch clerks: possibly the bravest men in the unit, certainly the men to whom an appearance of courage was most important. In battle, the two were apt to amount to the same thing.

Pompilius Niger edged between the tribune and the man to his shield-side. The centurion's swarthiness had been deepened by the flush of exertion, and blood from his cut lips splattered his forearm with oval markings. "No problem disengaging, sir," he gasped cheerfully. "Bastards run like chickens soon's we backed and let 'em go."

The native blood that swirled and thickened on his sword, his hand, and his arm to the elbow was yellowish and anemic by contrast to the spray from his lips.

They were a hundred and fifty feet from the swarm of enemies engaging the command group, thirty double paces measured from left boot-heel to left boot-heel. A few of the warriors who had been concentrating with mad intention on the mounted force now turned to see the Tenth bearing down on them in lockstep.

It was time.

"Charge!" cried Gaius Vibulenus, and lost the hard-bought rhythm in which he had been marching when he stumbled into a run. His headache was almost a relief, because it distracted him from the fire that throbbed in the pit of his stomach every time he drew a breath.

The world in ruddy flames, and a granite fortress falling like the stage curtain of eternity. . . .

"Let's take 'em boys!" bellowed the pilus prior from the center of the front rank, and the cohort surged forward as if it had not already crashed to one victory this morning.

The eagle standard fell with the Roman carrying it.

Only two of the bodyguards were still mounted, trying with desperate mace-strokes to protect the Commander and Falco between them. Falco had his sword drawn, but the very size of his armored mount prevented him from using the short blade to any effect.

The face beneath the gilded helmet was white with a fear Vibulenus had known only once: the moment in the Recreation Room when a ceramic spearpoint plunged toward his frog eyes.

The mounts of the bodyguards leaped simultaneously, not in snarling attacks but because spears had been thrust beneath their armored skirts. One of the toads managed to keep his seat for a moment despite the arch of the carnivore's back. Then the pain-maddened beast twisted, grasped its rider's right leg in its huge jaws, and flung the bawling guard in a twenty-foot pinwheel that ended in a crash of ironmongery and spraying gravel.

Falco turned his head as if he intended to interpose himself between the Commander and the warriors who had been temporarily disarrayed by the death throes of the carnivores. Instead, he shouted something to his mount and slapped the beast's haunch ringingly with the flat of his sword. The carnivore leaped over the kicking body of one of its fellows even as the Commander's own mount went splay-legged and spilled the blue figure on the bloody shingle.

Falco was hunched forward, his weight aiding his mount's graceful arc toward the Tenth Cohort and safety. The javelin thrown by a Roman desperately trying to break up the clot of natives intersected the gold-gleaming tribune at the top of the arc.

The carnivore struck the ground at a gallop in the direction of the ship. Falco tumbled backward, turned by the momentum of the javelin which projected from his right eye. His helmet sprang away like a bit of glittering waste stained green by the ill-hued sun. The iron point poking through the back of the tribune's skull had knocked away the gilded bronze.

The natives pausing to complete the slaughter of the command group looked up to see the front of the cohort sweeping toward them as a wall of bronze and iron and vermilion. The legionaries who had not been engaged were models of ferocious precision, their crests straight and the leather facings of their shields marked only by red dye and the lightning flashes blazoned upon them in gold.

But interspersed with that orderly threat were the men who had turned the front rank into a killing machine during the initial engagement. Clodius Afer's crest had been sheared to half its length by a slashing blow, and several other soldiers, like Vibulenus at the post of honor, were helmetless. Their shields were hacked, spangled with ripped facings and the dangling weapons they had blocked. Bosses and reinforced shield rims were rippled with the dents and stains of the crushing blows they had delivered.

And everywhere was blood; on the swords and the equipment, and in the eyes of the veterans who grinned at another chance to kill.

A few warriors broke and ran, panicked by a sight more terrible than the carnivores and toad-faced monsters they had just cut down.

The Commander stood up suddenly, his garb a synthetic blue cynosure among the shaded variance of animal dyes. He took two steps toward the cohort, bleating a cry for help more universal than Latin.

A warrior on the verge of flight turned and offhandedly slashed the blue figure across the front of both thighs. Either the blade was sharper than iron had a right to stay during a long cut, or the muscles in the blue suit were soft as milk curd. Great wounds gaped like mouths opening to the bone before they vomited blood over the Commander's knees. He fell backward, still screaming, because the muscles that should have kept him upright had been severed.

The native who had chopped the Commander down leaped over the sprawling body, making his escape into the mass of his fellows. One blade of his spear trailed droplets of blood dark as garnets.

Another warrior eyed the twenty foot distance between him and the Tenth Cohort, then raised his own weapon to stab straight down into the Commander's wailing mouth.

Vibulenus flung his Spanish sword overhead.

The weapon was still blade-heavy after — who knew how many? — sharpenings, and the tribune had never been trained to throw even a knife balanced for the purpose. It flew straight, but the fat part of the blade instead of the point spun into the native's forehead.

That was good enough. The warrior's hands shot up. His shield flew in one direction, his spear in another, as if they were pins struck down by the sword which caromed away from the impact in a splatter of blood.

Clodius Afer, straining a half-step ahead of the legionaries to either side, decapitated the native with a sweep of his own blade. The man was an artist, thought Gaius Vibulenus as he sprawled face down on the gravel, played out from exertions rather than the score of wounds which for now he had forgotten.

For a moment the tribune could not move. His torso crackled with dry yellow fire, and he could not tell whether or not he was breathing.

The patter of stones and startled oaths brought Vibulenus around to present awareness. He remembered where he was a moment before his shield slapped him, lifted by a foot that trampled its inner rim. Men were striding past, on their way to finish a battle and another native enemy. The tribune was debris in their way, to be avoided if possible because he had been a comrade — but an obstacle nonetheless to men who would prefer to save their remaining energies for the foe.

"Sir, y'all right?" demanded a soldier who took Vibulenus' feeble attempts to shrug off his shield as a request to be lifted. Because the man — he was Titius Hostilianus; the whole cohort must have shifted to its new front after all — had only one free hand and that after dropping his sword, he jerked the tribune brutally into a sitting posture. "You all right?" he repeated anxiously.

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 unintelligible 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. . . .

Battle was still a matter of anticipation. Every time, even though there had been so many, even though the fantasy fights in the Recreation Room had multiplied reality by a score of visions that seemed real while they were being dreamed. Neither battle nor sex brooked any rival when they had engaged a man's emotional attention.

"Now where in this place d'ye figure to find honey?" Clodius Afer was asking with a sweep of his arm. "I've seen drill fields as looked like a garden compared to this."

"Found," said the other centurion. He paused beside the barrel stem of a plant whose spreading leaves had been trampled to rags by hundreds of sets of hobnails. Kneeling instead of bending, so that the buckled lid of his knapsack remained level — it was not fluid tight — he stabbed the stem with his dagger and made a quick circular motion as if he were boning a ham.

The blade withdrew along with a plug of the stem. Behind it oozed a thick green fluid in such quantity that it must have come from a reservoir instead of being intracellular sap.

"See?" said Niger with muzzy brightness. He wiped his blade with an index finger and stuck his tongue between blackened, swollen lips to lick the green sap. "Just like honey."

"I'll take —" said Vibulenus, planning to continue, "—your word for it." But why not?

"I'll take a taste," the tribune said, dipping his own fingertip into the cavity rather than licking the digit which Niger offered him. The sap tasted sweet . . . and perhaps it even tasted like honey. The last time Vibulenus had tasted honey was too distant in time and incident for him to remember.

The sticky fluid had a smell like old bones, however, which he doubted had been true of honey.

"Well," said Vibulenus. He avoided the grimace which would have been insulting, but he wiped his finger carefully on the pebbles to cleanse it of the vile goop. "I wish you luck with your mead. It'll be . . . interesting, you bet,"

"Wonder if that was the Commander bein' brought back?" suggested Clodius Afer as he shifted his loot. "Wasn't the tortoise picked him up, I hear, it was some little yellow bug from the trader. Like that one went past."

The expression on the pilus prior's face hinted that he wished he'd taken something less bulky, perhaps the spinner alone without the heavy shaft and line of the bull-roarer. It had been an exhausting battle for all of them; and under the guild, the legionaries did not have the lines of slaves that would have carried the loot they did not comprise.

Vibulenus looked at his friend, trying to remember how he had thought of Clodius when he first knew him. The pilus prior looked to be the same veteran at the height of his powers as was the file-closer who had cowed and angered a boyish tribune named Vibulenus. Clodius was that man physically . . . and perhaps in mind as well, more or less.

Certainly more nearly the same man than the tribune was; but the tribune hadn't been a man, only a boy, and he had aged a very long time since he first fought in the line at Clodius Afer's side.

Gains Vibulenus, eighteen years old, drew his sword and almost lost it as he jumped down. A warrior thrust at him, and only Clodius' quick sideways chop kept the spear from taking Vibulenus through the chest. . . .

It was also hard to remember that men who had been side by side so many times, and through so much of the battle just completed, had not been together in the immediate aftermath. The pilus prior had led the sweep mopping up the right flank, while Vibulenus had knelt at the Commander's side when —

"Yes, it was a flying wagon from the trading ship that picked the Commander up," said the tribune as the three of them resumed their ambling pace toward their own vessel. The great doors already swarmed like the entrance of an anthill, shimmering with the forms of legionaries happy in their victory. "The tortoise came by, but it ignored him. They — I guess they don't expect commanders t' be hurt."

Killed, Vibulenus guessed with a great deal of experience on the subject, by the time the vehicle with six panicky figures in yellow suits had arrived. The tourniquets could not prevent shock, and blood loss from the wounds had probably proceeded beyond hope of recovery by the time the tribune had bound the limbs off.

"You know," said Niger, who had been sucking at his finger off and on with a contemplative expression, "they didn't pick up the bodyguards a'tall. I'd have thought they might be alive, some of 'em. Fixable, anyway," he added with a nod toward the tribune.

The three of them did not discuss the aftermath of the tower's collapse, so many . . . battles; what was a year? — battles ago. They had all received wounds since then, but none so serious that they could not stagger to the Sick Bay with the aid of friends.

"They can replace people to stand around and look ugly," Clodius said. "Wouldn't be surprised they could replace people to wear blue suits and stick their thumbs up their ass . . . though I dunno, prob'ly they've got a different kinda medic on the big ship, a veterinarian I shouldn't wonder.

"But anyhow, they can't replace us. Because nobody's ever been as good as we are."

Instead of clapping the senior centurion on the shoulder with a boastful echo of his own, Niger smiled oddly — the distortion was not solely a result of swollen tissues — and said, "Falco was there too. I guess they don't pick up the ones they can't, you know, help."

His voice paused for a moment. The scrunch of the trio's boots, in unison by habit, was the only sound the men made for several seconds. Then Niger resumed, "Mostly it'd bother me, you know, anybody I'd been together with so long. Even ones I don't rightly know. It'd be like it was —"

"Could've been you or me," said Clodius Afer, who kept his eyes straight ahead.

"Like that, yeah," the junior centurion agreed. "Only it isn't, you know? Nothing about that bastard has anything to do with me or anybody I care about. Alive or dead. The vultures around here —" there had been nothing in the local skies save the wagons after the traders landed "—can have what they want of him."

Vibulenus laughed harshly and said, "As much epitaph as he deserves." But in his heart he knew that he and Rectinus Falco had been shoots from the same vine, and the way they had twisted was the choice of the gods alone.

From habit, the soldiers began to strip away their gear as soon as they reentered the vessel. The hatch was the same one by which they had disembarked, but now the hall to the Sick Bay lay beyond it instead of the Main Gallery. Like the fact that the sun rose and set — used to rise and set — the internal workings of the ship had ceased to be matters for comment. None of the soldiers — none of the surviving soldiers — had enough philosophical bent to waste energy trying to explain the inexplicable.

The line was moving faster than Vibulenus expected. The aisle was scarcely half full even though the trio of friends had been among the last Romans to drift back to the vessel. Men were piling up their equipment for the ship to process at leisure, then walking on without the usual delay.

The Medic's voice could be heard. Though his words were unclear, they did not appear to be his usual singsong about clearing and entering the cubicles. Over that and the shuffling murmur of men moving came repeated clangs from the device that warned someone was trying to carry metal into the vessel proper.

That happened after every battle, but the present frequency was many times greater than the usual number of accidents. Even the stupidest legionaries had long since learned that they could not sneak aboard with a knife or gold coins.

"What the fuck's going on?" Clodius Afer asked with his eyes narrowed by a frown. He leaned his shield — battered beyond conceivable salvage, but brought back because that was part of duty in the veteran's mind — against the wall and began stacking the rest of his equipment beside it. The amount of gear already deposited proved that, as the three expected, most of their fellows had already processed through.

"Maybe they've got a faster Medic," Niger suggested without particular interest. "Or maybe, you know, more booths." He touched his lips with a finger, this time as a delicate probe of his own injury.

"Maybe," said Vibulenus as he led the way down the aisle. His body was mottled with blood and bruises now that his clothes and armor no longer hid the price he had paid for the knob of high ground. "And maybe things have come a little unravelled, what with the Commander down. He was brand new, so I don't guess the guild has a replacement ready."

There were three bodyguards at the head of the moving column. Their armor was stained with gray dust pounded from the gravelly soil, and the calf and knee of one suit had bright scars showing that warriors had hacked at it.

The iron-clad toads were no less stolid than before . . . but the tribune could not look at them without remembering their fellows crumpled with feather-pointed native spears catching sun at each interstice of the armor. He smiled, though part of him objected that the toads were only dumb animals, not humans whose self-satisfied arrogance would have been worthy of his anger.

'Didn't really mind seein' 'em croak," said Clodius Afer, echoing the thought from a half step behind Vibulenus. 'That's what frogs 're supposed to do, right?"

Both centurions laughed, and Vibulenus joined them.

"Move on through," said the Medic. "No, not the booth, cargo —" a legionary had started to tramp from habit into a cubicle "—straight on to the gal —"

The alarm chimed.

One of the toad-things blocked the side passage with his mace. The studded head of the weapon had been used in earnest recently enough that not all the residues had dried.

"Pollux!" shouted a soldier with no tunic but a cloth-wrapped bundle in his arms. "This isn't —"

One of his companions pulled him back and pointed to his feet. In the legionary's haste and disorientation, he had forgotten to take off his boots with their S-pattern of iron hobnails. That — and that sort of confused error — explained why the alarm kept ringing.

"There's a special address by the Commander," said the Medic by rote. His face, his tone did not seem bored. Rather, the blue-suited guild employee was abstracted and very possibly frightened. "Move on through, straight into the gallery."

"Well, if that isn't. . . ." Niger muttered angrily. "Don't mind tellin' you, I was lookin' forward t' something being done for this lip."

The three men stepped around the legionary stripping off his boots while his friend held the bundled loot. Vibulenus and his companions had left all their garments at the other end of the hall, but Clodius held his bull-roarer and his fellow carried the knapsack of — be generous: honey — by its straps.

The centurions intended to leave the objects near the cubicles and carry them into the ship when they were through with the Sick Bay. Now, brazenly, they carried their gleanings past the bodyguards who did not know to care, and the Medic who knew not to speak.

"I wouldn't have thought they could fix him up so quickly," Vibulenus muttered to himself, "the Commander. Not that the wounds were so extensive. . . ."

But it took a long time to come to terms with the fact you've been killed. Maybe it took more time than even the gods had.

The scene in the Main Gallery was chaotic but chaotically cheerful. Legionaries, a number of them still wearing tunics among their naked fellows, milled and boasted and compared their loot. Almost all the men had at least superficial wounds, but slashes and bruised muscles were too much a part of normal affairs to dampen spirits significantly.

The change in routine put life in the air the way fair day made a country hamlet sparkle. The legion had just turned near disaster into a victory as stunning and sudden as defeat had promised to be. With that behind them, nobody seemed to think that this "special assembly" could be any form of bad news.

Nobody except Gaius Vibulenus, who had been studying the guild with the mind of a man whose family owed much of its wealth to land bought from neighbors whom Sulla had executed. . . .

Soldiers have nothing to teach a good businessman about ruthlessness.

"Sir," said a heavily-cheerful voice. "You'll know, won't you? What've they got going on?"

Vibulenus turned to see that it was the first centurion, Julius Rusticanus, who was hailing him.

It was surprising that Rusticanus was no worse mauled than seemed to be the case — scores of cuts on his limbs and several on his face, but able to talk and move with only the half-hidden twinges that might result from wounds received before the guild bought the legionaries from their Parthian captors. The point of the right flank, where the first centurion stood in battle, would have been enveloped instantly by the native army and cleared last of all by the Tenth Cohort's counterthrust.

A tough man, Julius Rusticanus. But then, they all were by now. Even the tribune who looked like a youth with more lineage than strength of character.

"You're looking all right for somebody at the sharp end, First," Vibulenus said in real approval. Nobody was indispensable, but the first centurion's combination of education and battle-bred experience could not have been equalled in the legion. "But Hades, no — I don't know, I'm not sure anybody does, in a blue suit or not. They're stirred up over losing the Commander, that's sure enough."

"He got chopped?" said Rusticanus. His face went neutral; then, as he judged his audience, broadened into a smile. "Well, that's a terrible thing to happen, isn't it?"

He saluted and stepped back into the crowd, bending some of his particular cronies close to hear the news. Men on the right flank would have had no way to learn of the command group's massacre. For that matter, only a few hundred of the nearest legionaries would have been close enough to see the incident or its aftermath.

"You forget," Vibulenus said as he and his two companions drifted by habit toward the front of the gallery, "that other people don't know things just because you do."

"What do I know?" asked Niger, misunderstanding the tribune's mumbled statement.

"You know," said Vibulenus instead of correcting the error, "how to make mead." He patted the knapsack, finding the leather surface squishy but not, thank Fortune, stickily permeated with that awful juice. "Among other things."

There was a sudden commotion from the rear of the big room, catcalls. The tribune turned and caught the flash of a yellow bodysuit beyond a sudden motion of Romans toward them.

"Hey, what ye got there?" somebody cried distinctly. The edge of hectoring command in the voice would have been familiar enough to civilians in barracks town, meeting a squad of legionaries recently spilled from a bar.

"Come on," the tribune ordered curtly, shouldering his way toward the trouble. This could get out of hand real fast — maybe already had. Why had the cursed fool decided to walk a gauntlet of killers loosened by fatigue and victory? And where were the guards who always accompanied guild employees in the presence of soldiers.

That was easy to answer: dead on the field, enough of them, and this fellow with his yellow suit and apparatus floating before him ignorant of what a bad pair of mistakes he had just made at his life's risk.

"Get the fuck outa the way!" snarled Clodius Afer, clubbing soldiers to either side with the staff of his bull-roarer. Niger used the side of his fist to equal effect — neither centurion needed to be told what happened to legionaries who angered the trading guild.

The tribune and his companions were not alone. Non-coms including Julius Rusticanus converged from all sides on the guild employee, forming a shoulder-to-shoulder wall facing out against the gibes and half-meant threats. It wasn't that the centurions and file-closers were less ragged than the legionaries they backed off, or that the jostling, cat-calling mob did not understand that they were playing a dangerous game.

But the legion was a hierarchy, and the common soldiers had the right to be irresponsible in every activity which that hierarchy did not deem to be their duty. The problem with externally-applied discipline is that it can only be specific; and it tends to eliminate self-discipline throughout the general behavior of the men it governs.

No matter here. The troops were only rowdy, not in a state of suicidal mutiny.

"What're you trying to do, citizen?" Vibulenus snapped to the guild employee, sure that the situation was under control. "Trying to get up front?"

Conceivably the fellow hadn't meant to enter the Main Gallery at all. He had the slightly purple complexion and stocky build of the current commander, a racial type as different from that of the first officer the legion had been given as either was from the Romans themselves.

But he didn't know Latin. To speak, Vibulenus leaned over the dull-finished cart the technician pushed in front of him. Instead of replying, the fellow cringed away, colliding with the back of a centurion too solid to notice the impact. He was utterly terrified and obviously understood the tribune's curt questions as a bloodthirsty threat.

Pollux! Maybe one of the guards down in front would be able to translate.

Somebody shouted, "Hey, prettiest, how'd you know I was lookin' for you?"

Quartilla touched the tribune on the arm to get his attention, then gabbled at the technician in some barbarous language or other.

The fellow looked as if he had been offered water in a wilderness. He gabbled back, making gestures toward the ceiling with his three-digit hands.

"He says," Quartilla relayed, "that he's supposed to disconnect the barrier so the Commander can come aboard." She smiled. "He says a lot of things besides, but you can probably guess them."

"All right." Vibulenus ordered. "We'll walk him down to the front, now."

There was a hushed area in his immediate presence, a result of the abrupt way the tribune and non-coms had asserted authority. Quartilla had appeared in that rebound from raucousness to embarrassment; fortunate timing, though the tribune felt sure that she could have handled without ugliness whatever situation developed. For that matter, now that he looked around, he could see that other females as well had joined the legionaries. What in Hades' halls was going on?

"Move out, boys, keep it moving," said Julius Rusticanus. When the protective screen of Romans began to move and the technician did not, the first centurion reached around the fellow and began pushing the floating cart himself. The technician gave the choked equivalent of a yelp and scuttled along after his gear.

"What are you doing here?" the tribune asked Quartilla in as much of an aside as the ambient noise and his greater height permitted. Men made room for the unusual procession, watching avidly, treating it — like everything else since they reboarded the ship — as a form of entertainment.

"We can wander when you're outside the ship," the woman replied. The smiles and armpats with which she greeted soldiers were as effective in clearing onlookers from the path as the tribune's own lowering sterness. "This time there wasn't an order to return, and we just . . . came along with everybody else."

Vibulenus had not known that the women could even leave their cubicles until he saw Quartilla before battle this morning — a lifetime ago. He thought of that meeting and missed a step because his muscles forgot to move.

"There," he said loudly, using volume of sound to dim memories with which he was not ready to deal. He made a sweeping gesture to inform the guild technician if words could not do so. They were through the clumps of legionaries — who had nudged closer to the barrier than was normally the case. Four bodyguards, stolid despite the froth and scratches on their armor, were spaced across the front wall, but Roman soldiers were willing to stand within the circuit that could be swept by the long maces.

The technician jumped backward when he raised his eyes to the bulge-eyed, broad-mouthed visage of the nearest guard, even though the creature glanced at him with no more interest than he showed in anything else around him. Quartilla clucked out a direction and the guild employee lunged forward after a moment's further hesitation.

"What's wrong with him?" Clodius Afer asked, freed of his self-imposed duty now that the yellow-suited figure was under the protection of the bodyguards.

"He's not familiar with any of this," the woman replied with a smile warm enough to make the tribune's fists clench despite him. "Usually he'd never get off his own ship except on home leave."

"Used to scare me too, didn't they?" said Vibulenus, relaxing as he tried to recall a part of the past which he had surmounted.

"Well, why's he here now?" said Niger bluntly from the tribune's other side. The technician had slid his cart against the bulkhead and was making cryptic gestures at the end that extended back of the barrier. "Thought they never let that down, the . . . you know."

There were subjects that would never be safe, even for someone whose mind had compartments as rigid as those of Niger's. Vibulenus squeezed and released his friend's shoulder.

"They've had to replace the Commander on an emergency basis," the woman explained. She was speaking with a familiarity regarding the crews' routines which Vibulenus could understand easily enough, if he let his mind consider it. "They don't have a barrier key available, so they'll clear the lock instead of replacing it."

The leavening of women in the big room was too slight for Vibulenus to get a good view of any of the others. Like the sand grain in the heart of a pearl, they attracted their own covering — in this case, soldiers in expectant circles. No harm done, even in those groupings where the women were practicing their trade under field conditions.

Like Quartilla, all the females the tribune glimpsed in the Main Gallery would have passed unremarked on a Capuan street. It was possible to forget what they must have looked like once, the way you forgot that an adult acquaintance had been an infant in past years.

The barrier lit itself in bands of light that started as a transfigured lime green and expanded toward the violet end of the spectrum in stages as distinct as those of a rainbow. There was a high-pitched crackling like pork fat being fried.

Niger turned his face away and swore.

For a moment, the plane of the barrier disappeared but the armor of each of the guards was surrounded by a ghostly nimbus. The pair nearest the center of the bulkhead were closely wrapped in sheathes of blue and indigo. The guards toward the opposite sidewalls were trebled in bulk by billowing softness of red light, causing some of the nearer legionaries to push away abruptly.

The guards themselves did not at first react, but the one nearest Vibulenus turned his bulging eyes to stare past the glow of his mace head.

The room popped, a sound that perhaps came from the ship's communications system instead of a physical part of the Main Gallery. The auras snuffed themselves. The guards snapped their heads straight again before a flicker of lights in the hexagon pattern announced the bulkhead door was opening.

The Commander, flanked by two more bodyguards, strode through the dissolving sidewall next to the tribune's party instead of coming from the ship's forward section.

He wore a yellow bodysuit which covered his fingers instead of leaving his hands bare, a quicker clue to status among guild employees than the shimmer before their faces which Quartilla said was a barrier against bad air. Vibulenus recognized him: he had been their first commander, the one who purchased them in Mesopotamia.

Quartilla wore a tunic of many layers, each diaphanous by itself. The tribune did not realize that he was gripping her shoulders until the layers of fabric began to shift greasily beneath his pressure.

The pilot stood in the bulkhead doorway, holding a laser. The tech who had just released the barrier pushed his cart through the opening and almost collided with the crewman because both were more intent on the legionaries than they were on matters closer to hand.

The Commander had all his former nonchalance. "Brave warriors," he said in the voice which was that of every commander, "you have won a victory with the skill and courage which I learned to expect when you were under my command previously. My guild thanks you for your continued progress beneath its tutelage."

The door in the other sidewall opened as if it were composed of rime ice melting in the sun. Motion drew the usual attention, half a dozen yellow-clad techs, one of them floating a cart before him. Then there was a surge of panic from that corner of the gallery — not at the remaining survivor of the bodyguard, but because the armored toad was leading one of the carnivores he and his fellows rode in battle.

The creature did not wear its blanket of iron scales, though there were patches in the bristling fur over its withers and shoulders where that armor must have rubbed. The slotted disk was on its chest, whining eagerly and so firmly implanted that no straps or chains were necessary to hold it in place. Instead of a saddle or other riding tack, the beast wore a broad metal collar with a shackle through which was rived the cable by which the guard led the creature along.

"Castor and Pollux," muttered Clodius Afer. "That's bigger'n the ones they ride, right?"

Vibulenus shrugged, but he suspected the pilus prior was wrong. The great brindled carnivore was rangier than it appeared when its armor bulked the smooth tuck of its belly; but seeing the beast in a structure of human scale, even one as large as the Main Gallery, gave it an impact that it did not have when surrounded by open sky.

"A hyena," said Niger, searching back through memories of beast fights in the arena.

"Haunches're too high," the tribune objected; but for the rest, the centurion's description was a good one.

The creature, as unaccustomed to the circumstances as the Romans were, jerked at the cable and clopped its long jaws shut in a spray of saliva. Despite the size of the bodyguard and his metal-cased grip on the lead line, the carnivore threw him off balance. Men scrambled even farther back in an effect like that of a pond rippling.

The Commander's ears quivered in a gesture of irritation as he noted the beast's restiveness. Then, as his eyes swept the assembly again before resuming the thread of his discourse, he saw Quartilla in the front row.

For a moment, the face of the guild officer contorted. He turned and shot an unheard order to the Pilot which brought that subordinate erect in a terrified brace, the ready laser slapping down alongside his thigh. Even after the Commander turned back in apparent calm to the waiting Romans, the Pilot held himself stiffly and continued to swallow hard.

"Because of matters which cannot properly be blamed on you," the Commander said to the assembly, "there has been some temporary disorganization in the operations of this vessel. Let me reassure you that this will not affect you warriors in the least. Because of my experience and the success with which I moulded you into one of my guild's most valued assets, I have been requested to take over again as an interim measure."

His ears twitched. "Even though my rank would normally put me well beyond such duties."

"We were supposed to be recalled to our own quarters as usual," whispered Quartilla from the tribune's left side. "Somebody forgot."

Simultaneously, Clodius snickered on the other side, and said, "Bastard was handy and got stuck into the slot with no more ado than I'd make on latrine detail. And he ain't half pissed, is 'e?"

The squad of technicians from the trading vessel had stepped between the Commander and the door behind him. Two of them were lifting from the cart a U-shaped staple that seemed to be a fair weight for them. The bodyguard with the tethered carnivore waited nearby. The beast seemed willing to squat on its haunches, but it was making rumbling complaints in the back of its throat.

"I have called you to this extraordinary address," the Commander said, "to assure you that nothing else about the circumstances is extraordinary. Your privileges and duties as assets of my guild remain the same, and the discipline which I will enforce will be as harsh as is required for your own long-term good."

The technicians had set the staple legs-down on the floor. After fussing with it for a moment, they stepped back. The Commander glanced aside with an ear-twitch that showed he resented the way his subordinates drew attention away from his rhetorical periods.

The staple ejected angry green sparks and a hiss that could have come from a snake big enough to swallow the Main Gallery whole. The technicians winced, but only in reflex. The Commander leaped forward with a startled cry, and when the carnivore leaped upright it pulled its handler flat on the floor with a crash.

"Well. . . ." said Clodius Afer, who — like most of the Romans near the front of the assembly — had jumped slightly at the fireworks. They had been close enough to other things to which the crew had subjected the legionaries that they did not panic, just start reflexively the way the techs did.

The Commander, who did not expect to be surprised, had just shown as little control as the animal, slavering with its hackles up as two more guards grabbed its lead line.

The staple was cool and silent, now that it had tacked itself to the floor. The techs were packing up their tools in seeming innocence, oblivious to the glare the Commander threw them as soon as he recovered his balance. It was just possible that the team of workmen did not realize how startling the flash and hiss had been to their superior.

Vibulenus began to laugh. Quartilla pressed a palm firmly over his lips.

The Commander spoke to the guards, the ship directing his words so that only echoes of angry grunting reached the tribune. The group on the tether led — even three of them together lacked the strength and weight to drag — the carnivore close enough to the staple to loop the line through.

One of the yellow-clad technicians clamped the end of the line back against itself. The fellow was being very careful to keep the guards between him and the carnivore.

"There will be another brief display," said the Commander, facing the assembly as if he had not lost his composure after all. The communications system accurately reproduced the breathiness that accompanied the way the guild officer's chest heaved. "Do not be alarmed."

The pop and sparkling as the line welded itself was so minor that only the comment made it remarkable. The technicians quickstepped out through the bulkhead door, trying to ignore the laser in the hands of the Pilot as they moved past him.

"Some of your comrades are undergoing emergency medical treatment," said the Commander in a return to his planned speech. "It is up to you to convince them that the rules which have always applied continue in force during my interim appointment. While the ship remains in normal space, the forward portion of the Main Gallery will be kept off limits by our friend here."

The Commander's arm made a coy gesture that filled Vibulenus with revulsion. Did he think they were children? Or mincing aristocrats maundering to one another while slaves pampered their bodies? He should spit out his instructions, treating them as soldiers and pretending himself to be a man!

The trio of guards still held the tether. Their armored bodies were interposed between the beast and the Commander, though the guild officer could scarcely be at risk from an animal whose like he had ridden to battle many times in the past.

"Our friend," continued the Commander in the oily manner that was as much a part of his position as the shimmer that filtered the air he breathed, "has been treated to react in a certain way to any assets of your race who come within his reach. Lest you —"

The Pilot stepped from the doorway with a set expression, gripping his weapon so fiercely that tendons stood out on the backs of his hands.

"Your Worship!" shouted Gaius Vibulenus as his soul froze and his body stepped forward into the cleared area where he had no friends or fellows. The acoustics of the big room drank his voice, but not so fully that the dainty figure in yellow could not hear him.

The tribune's hands were raised and open, a sign of supplication and in any culture proof of peaceful intent. A guard lurched forward, holding his mace out in bar.

"You have wisely chosen a creature whose savagery and power were demonstrated to us all today," Vibulenus said, still shouting. His mind considered the risk that other Romans who could not hear him would take this as some suicidal call to mutiny — and obey it.

That risk was the lesser one.

"Who could not have been amazed," the tribune continued, gesturing rhetorically as his chest halted at the mace shaft, "at the way these terrible creatures wreaked havoc among heavily armed opponents whose skill and courage threatened to overwhelm us? Not even the bravest of us would dare approach such a creature as this."

The carnivore snarled and gave a tentative pull on its line as it peered past its handlers toward the Roman. Vibulenus wondered whether he had halted inside or outside the arc the beast could lunge on its tether.

That risk, too, had to be disregarded.

For a moment, the Pilot leveled his weapon at the tribune. Then he pointed the laser at the deck and hopped backward, into the doorway again. The crewman had been drafted into duties beyond his normal competence. Now that the script had gone awry, the Pilot had either to improvise or to withdraw.

The Commander's duties did not permit him the option of withdrawing. He glanced behind him, nervously aware that if the carnivore lunged toward this nearest Roman, the cable would slice across those standing in the way.

"This assembly is dismissed," the Commander said sharply, driven to decision by the personal risk which grew if he should vacillate. "Leave at once and report to the Sick Bay for normal processing."

There was immediate movement toward the rear of the gallery. The sudden dismissal was just one more circumstance in a disorganized day.

The Commander's lips moved, and the voice in Vibulenus's ears said, "Not you, Gaius Vibulenus Caper."

Two guards advanced in response to orders grunted to them alone. They forced Vibulenus back a step as if he were a spiderlet ballooning before the wind. Rather than resist their effortless advance, he skipped ahead of them, keeping one outstretched hand on the mace helve to show that he was not trying to escape.

"Slow down, fish-face," snarled Clodius Afer as he and Niger — Niger blanching yellow beneath the wind-burn on his skin — stepped toward the guards on the balls of their feet.

"It's all right!" the tribune cried, sliding between the creatures in armor and the friends who would rescue him. "We're just getting away from the, the hyena!"

Maybe. Existing on the ship was like fighting a war. Unless you intended to plunge in and slog forward, come what may, you needed to anticipate what everyone else would be doing long before they decided. And you could assume that not only would communications break down, but that everyone would put the worst possible face on whatever anyone else did.

Vibulenus didn't think his anticipation was very good. But he'd have bet his hopes of homecoming that he was the only one aboard who tried.

Quartilla touched an arm of each centurion though she did not try to hold them. "They're getting him away from the beast," the woman was saying throatily. "Careful or you'll put him in danger."

Maybe the tribune wasn't the only one on board who tried to think things through.

The Commander strode beyond the arc of his — watchdog's — tether, permitting the bodyguards to release it. When they exerted themselves, the toad-things exuded a sweetish odor with a tinge of ammonia behind it.

Freed, the carnivore immediately relaxed. It strolled across the front bulkhead at the limit of its cable, sniffing at the deck which clicked beneath its claws.

"I want to —" the guild officer began. He glanced at the centurions and Quartilla, then beyond at other soldiers staying to watch the show in the knowledge that the mob ahead of them would not clear for some time. The Commander's ears twitched; he turned toward his expectant bodyguards.

Quartilla opened her mouth, but neither Clodius nor Niger would be ruled by a woman in this.

"I would appreciate it," called Vibulenus in a tone of icy command, "if you men would go about your business while I confer with my superior."

The face of the pilus prior went professionally blank. Niger, more boyish in spirit as well as appearance, blinked like a dog who has been kicked for jumping up to greet its master. Then both minds reasserted themselves and the men stepped away, still held by Quartilla. Clodius Afer was wearing a grim smile.

"As you were saying, Your Worship?" Vibulenus prompted with an expression as supercilious as that of one campaigning politician meeting another.

Close up, the Commander's face seemed to be tinged with jaundice. Whether that was true, or an accident of reflection from the yellow bodysuit — or possibly just something within the tribune's mind — was beyond Vibulenus' reckoning. His lips, which were more nearly circular at rest than a human's should have been, pursed and paused. At last the guild officer decided to say, "We have noted with approval your actions on the field today, military tribune. My guild was very pleased with the loyalty and dedication you showed, as well as a level of initiative unexpected in an asset."

Even without the hinted motion of the Commander's ears, Vibulenus would have known that "initiative" was an attribute with risk when it appeared this far down the chain of command.

"My guild seeks to reward proper behavior," the Commander continued. He was absurdly slight when viewed from so nearby. The strength and technique which Vibulenus had gained from untold battles and drills would permit him to snap the childsized neck before either of the guards, slowed by their armor, could intervene.

"Is there some particular reward you would like to receive?" said the voice that did not come directly from the Commander's lips.

"Your Worship," said Vibulenus as his mind took over before his body began to tremble at the risk he was accepting, "I would like to lead my fellows home and arrange the recruitment of new legions of full strength for you."

That was ridiculous — Romans enlisting as mercenaries for foreign traders! But if the guild let them march home, then the aftermath could be dealt with somehow, some way. . . .

"That's ridiculous," snapped the Commander. "If you can't —" He started to step back between the bodyguards who flanked him.

"Then, sir," the tribune continued without hesitation or evidence that he understood his rebuke, "perhaps you could arrange that one of the females be withdrawn from —" he licked the lips that had just gone dry "—general duties and place her at my service. The woman Quartilla."

He did not dare to look behind him to see whether she was in the room or even within possible earshot.

"You want one of your own?" the guild officer said with amusement, shifting his weight back onto his leading foot. "Very interesting."

His dainty fingers made an uncertain gesture at the tight legs of his garment. "If I were to be abandoned to this wretched duty for any length of time, I'd make a study of your behavioral patterns for my own amusement."

Vibulenus' tight smile was a mask that waited for an answer that he dared not anticipate.

"Yes, of course," said the Commander. "We grant your petition. Now, go on and carry out your duties, remembering that the eyes of my guild are on even the least of its assets."

The slim figure turned and strode through the bulkhead door, giving a wary glance at the carnivore who paced before it in guard. The toad-things followed their master by pairs, without audible summons.

Only after the last of the armored monsters disappeared into the forward section of the vessel did the Pilot leave the doorway. The portal closed, sparkling like lightstruck dew.

Gaius Vibulenus Caper turned, feeling disoriented by the complex of emotions which eddied through him.

It takes time to clear a structure of four thousand men, even when the entire back wall gapes open. Quartilla and the two centurions had obeyed Vibulenus' order, but they were still within fifty feet of the tribune when he turned around.

The three smiled when Vibulenus' head-to-head discussion ended without sudden violence. Niger waved at his old friend and Clodius Afer called a comment which could be heard only in its cheerfulness.

The woman stiffened while her ears received a message which others did not. She looked at Vibulenus, returning to them at the slow pace which his stiffening wounds required. Then, unexpectedly, Quartilla began to run across the front of the Main Gallery, away from the tribune.

"Quartilla!" Vibulenus called. Niger put out a hand, but neither of her immediate companions made a real attempt to stop her. The woman was even fleshier than his Roman ideal of feminine beauty, but her bulk was more muscle than fat — and unlike the men, she had not just fought a grueling hand-to-hand battle. "Quartilla!"

What would have been a wall in the far corner, if a soldier ran against it, dissolved into a doorway in time to pass Quartilla. An instant later it was again gray metal, or at least what passed for metal on the ship.

The tribune carefully joined his companions.

"What got into her, Gaius?" asked Pompilius Niger as he gripped hands with his childhood friend.

"Better question'd be why all the good-time girls were loose t' begin with," said the pilus prior. "Not that I care." He patted the tribune's shoulder gently with an iron-hard palm. "Sir, you . . . Aw, fukkit, I'm glad to serve with you, that's the size of it."

Vibulenus' height made it easy for him to drape his arms over the shoulders of both other men. "Good to serve with you guys, too. Hercules, with all of us." He nodded toward the back of the gallery, still crowded with legionaries, and started his own companions moving in that direction toward the Medic and the baths.

"But you know?" the tribune added in a voice whose mildness deceived neither of his hearers, "Sometimes I don't think a great deal of the folks we're serving for."

They were nearing the head of the line to the Medic's booths when they heard the shout from down the hall, "Does anybody see the tribune? Gaius Caper?"

"Oh, fuck off," mumbled Clodius Afer, but he was grumbling at the situation more than he was the searching legionary. A blow turned by the mail covering his right biceps had gone unnoticed during the battle, but the muscle had begun to swell into purple agony as soon as the pilus prior sheathed his sword.

"It can wait," Vibulenus muttered; but maybe it couldn't, and he stepped aside to look in the direction of the summons.

There was less of a crush awaiting the Medic than the Tribune had expected. Given the option of obeying the Commander's injunction or not, many of the men with lesser injuries had gone to the baths, the bars, or the women instead.

Even Clodius Afer and his companions had detoured to a hall of sleeping rooms which the pilus prior designated the Tenth Cohort's barracks area. The Tenth had been doing that after the past dozen or so battles, and the rest of the legion had followed suit immediately.

There was no lack of space within the vessel, and the trading guild obviously did not care whether or not accommodations were organized; but it was good for the men to have something they could treat as home, and it was good for a unit that fought together to keep its cohesion out of battle as well.

Among other things, it gave the troops a place to stash their loot under guard for the days or weeks until the vessel "entered Transit space"—and all the soldiers awakened together to be marched against a new enemy.

"Has anybody seen — sir, there you are! We need to talk to you, I'm sorry."

"Of course, Marcus Rusticanus," said the tribune. It wasn't one man searching him out, it was the first centurion with an entourage of at least twenty other soldiers. The latter began babbling excitedly to friends and acquaintances waiting in line while Julius Rusticanus approached the tribune — with a salute.

The Medic called something nervous but unclear in the clutter of other sound. The two bodyguards became restive also, if not actively hostile. They stepped toward the gathering which completely blocked the aisle, brushing Romans aside with their iron shoulders. Swearing, softly, Clodius Afer turned to face the new threat.

"Outside," Vibulenus ordered in instant decision. He wished he felt better — and his physical condition was less a burden than the way his stomach dropped in black spirals whenever he thought of Quartilla.

"You heard the tribune!" roared the first centurion to the mob of men who had done no such thing. "Turn around and move out!"

Obedience was so quick and so complete that Rusticanus could begin marching immediately toward what had been a solid clot of men at the moment his leg swung forward. Vibulenus fell in step beside the senior non-com, marveling at the way discipline made of soldiers something greater — or at least different — than their numbers alone.

The Medic gave another startled squawk. The tribune glanced behind him and saw not only Clodius and Niger, but the soldiers who had been even nearer the booth as well — following because Rusticanus had said the tribune had ordered them to do so. The guards halted, no longer concerned, but the Medic had enough initiative to wonder what was happening.

The sudden, accidental display of his authority made Vibulenus tingle with pleasure, but there was a frightening core of responsibility within it also.

"Sir," said Julius Rusticanus even as the tribune's mouth opened to prod him, "I think . . . ."He rubbed his bald scalp fiercely. "Sir, if you come to the Rec Room, you can see it for yourself. That's better than me trying to tell you."

Presumably they were marching in that direction already as they followed an orange bead out of the Sick Bay and into a cross corridor. The floorplan of the ship normally did not change between embarkation and landing; but even when fixed, the maze of corridors was so complex that it was easier to ask for a guide bead to your destination than it was to grope along without one.

"These men came from Recreation?" asked Vibulenus, gesturing with spread fingers toward their entourage instead of giving a nod. The motion of walking was more than he could comfortably accept, and a good brisk shake of his head was likely to drop him to the floor in blinding pain.

He didn't imagine that anything so badly required his presence that it couldn't have waited for him to be refashioned into comfort by the Medic's cubicles. The first centurion — whose freshness and clean tunic proved he had at least been to the baths — thought it was that level of emergency, though. Rusticanus was a solid man and had the information, so the tribune would be a fool to second-guess him.

"Yessir," Rusticanus answered. "A lot stayed back though, and I just hope they kept the lid on." He paused, rubbing his scalp, before he added, "Figured I'd better come fetch you myself, sir, so's you'd know there was a rush."

"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.

That did not make the body's consciousness afraid: he was a warrior, a champion who met the best each enemy offered and slew them, knowing that he would be slain in turn some day. But the near escape made him respectful of missiles that were more than the stone-weighted ox-goads his own thralls hurled.

"Lock shields!" the tribune's mind ordered through the warrior's lips. Normally, champions would duel before the weight of reinforcements to both sides made the engagement a general one of armies and shield walls. But this was not a normal battle. . . .

Oxen bellowed in terror as three of them dragged the overturned chariot and the yoke-mate which was interested only in biting off the javelin that quivered in its haunch. The warrior who had stepped off with Vibulenus was still all right, though a javelin with a bent shaft dangled from his shield face also.

The pair who had jumped from the chariot a moment earlier had been off balance when the missiles struck. One was down his face, a javelin at belt height beneath him and three more fanning from his back which he had turned in staggering away from the first. The remaining warrior was upright, but only because he leaned on his grounded shield to take the weight off the right thigh from which a javelin protruded.

If they, even the four of them, had been able to lock shields and match their long spears against the swords of their immediate opponents, strength and armament would have taken them through the legion like a thorn in an ox's thick hide. Only for a time, no more than minutes — but they were champions, warriors who lived for the glory of dying on the heap of their slain. By robbing the hostile advance of its momentum and turning the ranks inward, Vibulenus' fellows and similar knots of warriors could disorganize the legion into a milling body of men.

Individually, each of the spearmen in the chariots being lashed toward the battle was more than a match for a legionary, despite the latter's armor. But the chance of fighting on those equal terms had been drowned in the rain of javelins, and in the personal code of the other warriors who did not have the mind of a Roman tribune to direct them.

All that could matter now was individual combat, death or survival. Gaius Vibulenus Caper would be alive at the game's end; but the test was real, and the pain would be very real.

What came within range of Vibulenus' spear was no longer an army moving in lockstep but rather a handful of individuals with alien faces framed by helmets forged all of metal. The one squarely fronting Vibulenus raised his shield as he judged the angle of the spearhead and let his sword drift back to take a full-armed cut as he ran into range.

Vibulenus stabbed overhand at the center of the Roman shield, knowing that the boss was reinforced with bronze — and knowing also that his strength and stout spear were enough to smash through all resistance.

The Roman lurched backward, losing his sword and his footing as the iron spearhead broke both the bones of his left forearm. Others jumped aside, thrown off balance as they tried to close up their ranks. Like all participants in Recreation Room fantasies, the wounded man had been shouting in Latin. The screams with which he now assessed his severed arm were even more universal.

Vibulenus shrugged to settle his shield strap, remembering that the equipment was awkwardly heavier than it should be because of the javelins dangling from its face. If the penetration of the Roman missiles had shocked the warrior's mind, then he had taught the nearest Roman how effective a broad-bladed spear could be when thrust by a strong arm.

He jerked his point clear, splintering plywood from the vermilioned shield face, and felt all the way up his forearm the shock of Clodius Afer's chopping blow against the spearshaft.

Vibulenus hadn't recognized his first opponent, a soldier who had died too long in the past for his face to be a memory. But these features were those of the man on the couch beside him, disconcerting because the image Vibulenus fought did not yet wear the transverse red crest of a centurion.

And this time, the military tribune had far more combat experience than the veteran file-closer brought to the battle.

Vibulenus swung his spear sideways like a cudgel. The instinct of the warrior whose body he shared would have been to withdraw the weapon for another stabbing blow, but the tribune's mind knew that would be quick disaster. Clodius Afer, quicker and armed with a cut-and-thrust sword, would be inside the warrior's shield and disemboweling him in a fingersnap.

But the file-closer did not expect a spear so heavy that, clubbed, it could slam aside a legionary shield and dent a bronze helmet in sending the wearer splay-limbed and unconscious.

Swords chopped at Vibulenus' left side, but the shield covered him there and fellow warriors were running to his support. A Roman, charging through the ranks at a dead run, tried to jump the sudden sprawl of Clodius Afer's body. His boot clipped the file-closer's flailing arm so that his knees bent and he skidded down on his back.

The Roman's round shield was flung sideways, no protection at all, but Vibulenus knew the breastplate had been cast from bronze heavy enough to turn his spear at the slant with which it would receive the thrust. He stabbed instead for the face, white with terror. It was only as his point slid beneath the helmet's lower rim that he realized the eyes through which his broad blade was cutting were his own.

Vibulenus screamed. Even after he leaped from the couch in the Recreation Room, he could feel his hand tingle with the bones crunching in his own image's forehead.

Pompilius Niger wrapped his strong arms around the tribune's chest and shouted through the bleats of revulsion, "Sir! Sir! You're here again!"

Vibulemis let his body sag against his friend while he mastered the terror and fury of his mind. There were staring faces all around him, but the expression of their own emotions had blended into a general concern for the tribune.

For their leader.

"So that's what the bastards've thought of us all along, said Clodius Afer in a harsh, deadly whisper. Both he and Niger must have lifted their heads back into reality as soon as they understood the incident around which the Recreation Room had woven its current game. "Like dancing bears . . . or frogs!"

The disgust in his voice reminded Vibulenus of how much his friend hated smooth-skinned amphibians. Certainly there was something in the current revelation about the Rec Room — and about the legion's status — to horrify and enflame every Roman aboard the vessel.

And it was the duty of Gaius Vibulenus Caper, military tribune by the whim of Crassus and leader of the men around him by the will of the gods, to keep that flaming anger from exploding in a suicidal fashion.

Calm again, so frigidly controlled that his mind did not notice the way his right hand — spear hand — was quivering, Vibulenus used Pompilius Niger for a not-wholly-needful brace as he stepped up onto the couch on which he had recently lain. Rusticanus said something, but the tribune ignored the words. He already had enough information to deal with the immediate situation, and this was not the time for long-term planning.

But by Jove and the Styx, the guild would pay: for this, and for everything.

"Fellow soldiers!" shouted Vibulenus, words that he and no creature in a blue suit had a right to speak. "You will not raise your voices, you will not attempt to damage the ship or the crewmen or your fellow soldiers because of your distress at what you've seen here."

The snarling response from the faces lifted toward him was unplanned, instinctive.

Vibulenus raised his arms with his fingers spread in a gesture of forcing back the anger by sheer dint of personality. The men quieted, his men.

"You brought me here to see this," the tribune cried into the feral silence, "and I have seen. Now, leave the matter in my hands."

He could feel the hatred boiling in the domed room, even without the growls and the anguished voice nearby which called, "No! We gotta kill the bastards!"

Vibulenus chopped his arms sideways and back, stilling the tumult again. "I give you my word," he said in a voice as clear as light dancing from the edge of his Spanish sword, "as a Roman, and as the man who fought at your head on more fields than any of us can remember . . . this will not pass unchallenged.

"I swear it to you. I swear it to you."

He waited a moment, then dropped his arms. The sounds that exploded into the room where no less bloodthirsty than those of moments before — but these were cheers.

The tribune was shaking with reaction, but the injuries and malaise he had brought from the battlefield were gone. He had thought slaughter was the only thing that could take him wholly out of himself, but he had been wrong.

He stepped down.

"What do you want us to do, sir?" demanded Rusticanus in a husky voice while Niger, wrapping the tribune again in an arm, babbled excitedly, "What're you going to do, Gaius?"

Vibulenus looked from one man to the other, taking in the way other soldiers were pressing toward him from all sides with hopes, advice, and congratulations on their lips.

Clodius Afer grinned sardonically, but it was his back and spread arms which provided the tribune with breathing space.

"Out," Vibulenus said, nodding toward the nearest doorway because he knew his voice might not be audible in the commotion.

"And then," he added for himself alone, "we plan how we're going to go home."

The soldier ahead of Vibulenus cycled sideways. "I still think —" the tribune heard Clodius Afer grumble as they stepped together into the paired cubicles.

"Quartilla," said Vibulenus, and he walked into the woman's room through the dissolving wall. "I need to talk to you."

Clodius had insisted the tribune should go to the head of the line on the basis of planning needs if he were unwilling to pull rank — and he had the rank, had earned it, so there was no reason not to claim its perquisites.

Vibulenus had refused on the grounds that they were all in this together, however you defined "this" . . . and that there was no real haste, that he'd processed through the Sick Bay, eaten, and drunk already.

And all that was true, to the seasoned veteran Gaius Vibulenus Caper at any rate. He smiled at how the boy-soldier Vibulenus Caper would have reacted to the notion of eschewing the honors due his rank — the boy who had not yet fought beside his men in a hundred fields, fought and died. But the real reason he had not cut in at the head of the line to the women was cowardice. There was solace in the thought, a psychic mudwallowing in the fact that he was afraid and that he was giving in to that fear — somewhat.

He was here in the room lighted by a bead in the back corner, and Quartilla was facing him.

Vibulenus hadn't been a gallant — Carrhae and capture had come too soon for the boy to have developed polish even if the inclination were there. There had been a woman during the season he spent in Athens attending lectures by the philosopher Aristaneus. An Argive of good family, she claimed . . . a Carian from some nameless crossroads, Vibulenus had suspected even then. Everything about her was as false as the red of her hair, and Vibulenus' passion had been false as well — a boy's nonsense modelled on the poetry of Catullus and Theognis, and it hadn't prepared him to really care.

"I would have discussed it with you first," the Roman said softly, "but the offer was spur of the moment and there wouldn't be . . . time."

He was standing with his back straight and his hands gripped firmly so that they would not wash themselves in his nervousness. He was not skirting the discussion of his plans to take the ship home to Campania: he did not even remember those plans in the crash of personal emotions which, as always in a human, managed to claim precedence.

"You. . . ," Quartilla said. She patted the couch beside her. She wore wristlets and anklets strung with tiny bells which sang at every movement. "Come, sit down, of course. You — must have been very brave for the guild to allow you. . . ."

The tribune sat very carefully and faced the woman, because he forced himself to do so. "Brave's easy," he said, meaning physical courage. He was blackly amused at how much easier it was to face spears than it was to face the fact that he had blithely destroyed a relationship that just might mean more to him than life did.

"Everybody was brave," he went on, able to make his tongue function even though it was dry and his mouth was so dry he thought it would crack. "Either they were pleased because I was smart enough to pull the pan out of the fire when they fucked around —"

Vibulenus took a deep breath. "Or else," he went on, letting the words tumble out in their own time, "they liked the way I tried to save the Commander's life. Which was a stupid mistake, and the more so if it earned me the chance to make a worse stupid mistake. All I can say about either choice was that I did what I did; and I — wish I hadn't."

"I'm a slave," said Quartilla.

"We all are," Vibulenus broke in savagely. "We're less than that."

She waved him silent in a silvery murmur from her wrist. Apart from the bells, she wore nothing on her body — though her hair was piled around crystalline combs which refracted the dim red light.

"I'm a slave," she repeated, "but I can forget that, usually, with the part of me that lives." Her hand gripped the tribune's, and her eyes demanded that he meet hers. "Do you understand?"

He gave an upward nod of assent, afraid to speak but filled with sudden hope that it wasn't over, that there was something between them still to salvage.

"I'm good at what I do," Quartilla said with fierce emotion that was neither anger nor very far apart from it. "I have my pride, and maybe that's because of what they did to my mind after they bought me, the guild, but it's all I have. You had the right to make me your personal slave, Gaius Caper, you earned that and I'm very pleased for you.

"But why in the name of the god you worship did you decide to exercise that right? Why did you rob me of all the little fantasies that left me free in my own mind?"

"I thought. . . ," the tribune said. He turned suddenly away and slammed the wall with his fist in a blaze of self-revulsion.

He hadn't thought. He had wished and acted on the wish, unwilling to consider anything but the way he wanted his world to be structured and arrogantly certain that his power to choose also gave him authority over the outcome of his choice.

He didn't want to die now. He wanted to have died that morning, before he had time to speak to the Commander and claim the reward which destroyed more of his life than remained.

There was a whisper of bells. Quartilla set her hands on his shoulder blades. Vibulenus let his shoulders loosen, but he would not, could not, turn around. He hid his face in the crook of his right elbow and squeezed back his tears of frustration with the muscles that enabled his sword to shear through simpler problems.

"Gaius," said the woman gently, "you could have asked that you never have to fight again. Yourself. They would have granted that, you know. There are twenty of us, the females, but they have only one of you among so many swords."

"Quartilla," the tribune said as he turned with his eyes still closed, "I will not — fail to think again." He did not offer to undo what he had done, because he could not change the past, change his words. He would ask the ship, the Commander, that the woman be returned to her regular duties; but that would not change the fact that he had made her a slave, of his whim or anyone's whim.

"Truth," he said in a flat voice, "isn't as important as perception." He wasn't even close to considering whether he could live with the situation he now perceived. For now it would be enough that he be permitted to try — that she permit him to try.

Quartilla smiled as he met her eyes, but it wasn't a particularly happy smile.

He didn't, now that he was aware of externals again, remember when he had stood up. His knees were quivering and he wanted very badly to sit down again, but —

"We'll either get through this," said Quartilla gently, "or we won't. And 'won't' could be a very long time for both of us, the way things are."

She took one plump hand from Vibulenus' shoulder and gestured toward the couch. The tribune read the gesture in his peripheral vision, still afraid to break the eye contact he had regained. He sat or collapsed, and Quartilla curved gracefully down beside him, her breast wobbling momentarily against his elbow.

"I want to change the way things are, Quartilla," Vibulenus said. "I want to take my men home, and I need your help."

"Gaius," said the woman with new concern in her eyes. "You can't go home."

"And just now," the tribune continued, without recognition that he knew something had been said in the interval, "I want most of all to think that you'll forgive me for what I did."

Quartilla slid her left hand from Vibulenus' shoulder to the back of his neck. Her fingertips toyed with his scalp while her free hand plucked open the knotted sash of his tunic. She smiled again.

Vibulenus knew that he was not being given an answer, however much his body was willing to believe otherwise.

But he knew also that the woman was willing to try to work through it; and that was perhaps as much undeserved mercy as he could have accepted anyway.

The sweat of Tenth Cohort in sword drill overloaded the Exercise Hall's ventilation system with an effluvium made bitter by fatigue poisons. Men grunted, and the clack of practice weapons was supplemented frequently by the duller sound of a riposte getting through to human flesh.

"Up, Decimus, up," snarled Clodius Afer as his swagger stick — which looked like, but probably was not, vine wood — prodded the legionary who had just been knocked down by a head blow. "You're favoring your right hip, and that's why he's coming over your guard."

Decimus' duelling partner, a gray, featureless automaton like the hundreds of others in the Exercise Hall, waited with its sword crossed over the face of its shield — both pieces of equipment equally-gray extrusions from its body.

"Yessir," the legionary muttered, though his eyes were crossed, and the only movement of which he seemed capable was to clench and unclench his hand on the hilt of his practice sword, formed from the same material as the automaton. It was heavier than a real sword, and — though its edges were rounded and slightly resilient — a blow from it could send a man to the Sick Bay easily enough.

"Let's get him checked over, pilus prior," said Gaius Vibullenus, threading his way a step behind Clodius through the ranks of duelling pairs.

His own temple throbbed in sympathy with the blow Decimus had taken. The Medic had assured him that there was no organic injury — the booths would have seen to that. But something in the tribune, his mind if not his body, remembered the blow it had taken in the ancient distance.

"Cohort," roared Clodius Afer, "at ease!" He would not have had to raise his voice, because in this room a unit leader spoke directly to all his men as if he were the Commander. Battle practice for a pilus prior, however, was not limited to exercise in swinging personal weapons.

At the Roman's order, all the automatons froze into their upright position, waiting for another command to reactivate them. Soldiers who had kept moving on adrenalin knelt, wheezing and supporting themselves on the shields which, like all their practice gear, were overweight. Drill had to be harsher than the real thing, because real battle could not be halted save by victory — the victory of either side.

"Good drill, boys," the pilus prior said mildly, this time letting the vessel's communications system do the work. "File-closers and watch clerks're responsible for getting whoever needs it to the Sick Bay. Rest of you, stack arms and dismissed."

"Yessir," repeated Decimus in the hubbub. He was still playing with his sword hilt on the floor. The file-closer from that century clumped over, swearing softly.

"Not bad," Clodius Afer said to the tribune as men streamed past them. "They're good. Pollux, they're the best."

"Stacking arms" meant carrying all the practice equipment to the wall at the distant end of the Exercise Hall where the smooth gray surface would reabsorb the helmets and body armor, swords and shields. With dismissal as a spur, the men moved as fast as their exhaustion would permit them — and that prevented their muscles from cramping as they would if allowed to cool suddenly and completely after that level of exercise.

"They'd better be good," Vibulenus answered grimly. "We've got to make our play soon, before the ship goes into Transit. And if we try and it doesn't work . . . they won't let things be. The Commander won't."

"Nobody in the whole fuckin' legion won't be willing to try, sir," said Clodius Afer, flexing his swagger stick gloweringly to the curve just short of breaking. "Nobody said there wasn't a risk when they swore us in, did they?"

"In Capua," the tribune said, with a bitter smile because he remembered little of the city save its name. Would he recognize his father's face?

"In fuckin' Capua, and that's where we're goin' back," said the centurion in what was more a soldier's prayer than agreement.

"Let's go take a look," Vibulenus said, shrugging. Today neither he nor the pilus prior had donned equipment themselves, but he thought he might return later for some individual exercise. His mind alone could not burn off the nervous energy with which his plans filled him. "Quartilla'll join us there."

"I swear those dummies, they hit harder every time," said Pompilius Niger, jogging drunkenly from the wall where he had dumped his gear. He was not gasping, but he drew in full breaths through his mouth in between phrases. "You guys willing t' head for the baths with a fella been doin' some work?"

Vibulenus briefly surveyed their surroundings. None of the hurrying legionaries showed any particular interest in the three of them. "We're going to the Main Gallery, going to take a look. Wouldn't mind another set of eyes if you're up to it."

"Sure, why not?" agreed the junior centurion. He put a hand on the shoulder of each of his companions and sagged there momentarily, miming total exhaustion. "Sure. You know," Niger continued, setting the trio a brisk pace through the door, "if enough of us stare at it, maybe its teeth all fall out, hey?"

"That still leaves the claws, don't it?" Clodius noted dourly.

"Guide to the Main Gallery," said Vibulenus to the ceiling, and a red dot appeared.

"Thing is," Niger went on, his breathing under control and a serious frown on his face, "we do need to. . . ." He touched his friends' shoulders again, though without looking up from the floor. "Look, guys, if we don't do something, there's going to be trouble. Maybe not just now. But sure as shit, when we wake up after Transit and they issue real weapons — somebody's going to put a javelin through the Commander."

"Gonna try, anyway," the pilus prior agreed.

"And then," Niger concluded morosely, "I guess we can all figure out what's going to happen. Might be wrong on details . . . but it won't be a detail sort of job the guild does on us."

"We're going to do something," Gaius Vibulenus said flatly. He spoke with the absolute certainty he felt, although he could not have explained why he was so certain. Not quite.

"You know," said Clodius Afer, after a few moments of tramping forward during which all three men remembered laser blasts, "I didn't know the girls were still loose on the ship. I mean —" Suddenly it didn't seem to be a safe topic of conversation after all. "—you mentioned Quartilla, you know."

"Ah, that's right," said the tribune. He corrected his mumble after he got out the first few syllables, but he fixed his eyes on the guide bead. "Ah, Quartilla's status, that changed. And I was going to change it back, you understand, but she thought it was good just now that she could come and go. . . ."

"Sure, I understand," said Clodius Afer. What the pilus prior did understand from the emotional loading in his friend's voice was that they'd better talk about something else.

"Wonder if they close this place and steam it down like the little rooms," said Pompilius Niger, turning into the Main Gallery and supplying the perfect change of subject. Vibulenus had continued to walk past the bead at which he had appeared to be staring.

"The way they move it around," the tribune said in a subdued but reasonably normal voice, "they may be able to turn it inside out and shake it clean."

The echoless nature of the Main Gallery expanded its great real size into the ambiance of a twilit plain. The floor was level, and for a moment nothing at all moved within the black volume.

The beast rose, haunches first, and stretched in silhouette against the forward bulkhead which was the only source of light.

"Good, I was feeling lonely," said Clodius, but there was a grim tone overlaying the joke.

They walked in unconscious unison toward the waiting beast. The forward bulkhead quivered with a red glow so deep that it felt brighter than human eyes could perceive. The creature began to growl. Though the room's noise-deadening acoustics must have absorbed the physical volume of the sound, the hatred behind it was projected like a volley of missiles.

"Got slack in his chain, the bastard does," observed Niger. They were walking gingerly now, as if they stood on glass or eggshells. "Hopes we'll come maybe a step too close to look at him, he does."

The side entrance opened and closed soundlessly, but the motion took the men's attention as well as that of the giant hyena. The beast turned only its head and, after a moment of observing Quartilla's quick-footed figure in silence, began to growl again.

"Milady," muttered both the centurions, glancing away in at least the semblance of being embarrassed as Vibulenus and the woman kissed demurely.

Quartilla wore sandals, a tunic, and over that a dark blue woolen stola. The garments were chaste and had as much the appearance of being Roman as she herself had of being human.

"That's gonna be a bitch t' deal with," said Clodius with his eyes on the pacing, growling carnivore only twenty feet in front of them now. "And I just don't see any choice."

"Unless you could, ah, lady," said Niger as his tongue and words wrapped a sudden idea clumsily. "I mean, maybe it'd let you get past it t' the door since you're not — I mean, maybe you're like the Commander or the guards to it and it'd let you be?"

"I'm not," said Quartilla with a smile that replaced a blank expression as soon as Vibulenus' hand reached over to squeeze hers. "It wouldn't swallow down pieces of either one of us, Publius, but it wouldn't hesitate to bite those pieces out."

"Wouldn't help anyhow," muttered the pilus prior. The older veteran scowled as he watched Vibulenus step cautiously nearer to the tethered carnivore. "Only use to getting the door open's so the rest of us can get through. Which we sure don't do while that's still standing there, grinnin'."

Vibulenus was close enough to really hear the growls now, and the hair at the back of his neck rose in response. The whine of the slotted disk on the carnivore's chest was a waspish undercurrent to the deliberate sound, doing what it could mechanically to make the Roman even more uncomfortable.

There was a loop of slack in the cable, cunningly or even intelligently hidden behind the creature's pacing feet, but the mark of its claws in an arc of the flooring provided the tribune with an accurate deadline.

If he stepped within the jaws' length of that line, he was dead.

This close, he could feel the pressure of the carnivore's exhalations. Its breath did not stink, exactly, but its odor was of something darker than the vegetation-based smell of any animal of similar size in Vibulenus' past experience.

"You can fix the lock?" Clodius Afer asked from closer than the tribune had realized.

"Yes," Quartilla answered simply. Then she added, "I've — never touched the bulkhead, of course, because of the barrier. But I've seen the pattern lighting up before the door opens, and I've seen crewmen tap out the same pattern in the hexagon there when they open it from this side. It never changes."

"Well, I figure," said Niger, "that we take the practice equipment from the Exercise Hall, like we planned. I don't care how mean this bastard is, there's enough of us t' put him down regardless."

The carnivore suddenly, leaped to the limit of its tether, snarling rage and crashing to a halt with its hind legs on the floor and its foreclaws slashing the air above the Romans and Quartilla. The centurions broke back instinctively, one of them sweeping the woman away more swiftly than her own muscles and training could take her.

Vibulenus stood his ground, lost in observation that freed him from the panic that experience had taught him was false. He had come here many times since the day they had last reboarded the vessel.

"That won't work, don't you see?" snarled the pilus prior in anger that he could direct at his subordinate instead of his own fright. The tribune's three companions were picking themselves up from the floor, throwing concerned glances toward their leader. Even the carnivore had subsided, flopping down and beginning to gnaw the staple to which it was attached.

"Well, have you got a better idea?" Niger snapped back. "Piss on it and hope it shrinks and goes away, maybe?"

Clodius, offering a hand which Quartilla accepted for the sake of diplomacy, said, "Well, the trouble is, if we have a full riot out here they'll for sure be waiting if we come through the door."

He nodded toward the bulkhead and its geometric design. At this point, the senior centurion was even more embarrassed at taking his anger out on a friend than he was for the way he dodged away from claws that could not have reached him anyway. "Sure, we can take it out . . . and sure the price'll be cheap enough for what the payoff'll be. But no way I see it bein' quick enough and quiet so's it does us any good."

"Niger," said Gaius Vibulenus.

"Gnaeus," said the junior centurion to Clodius, "you may be right and —" he raised his hands to bar angry protest "—I figure you are, that's how I read it too. But —"

"Niger," the tribune repeated as he faced around again. For a moment he seemed to glow with a transfiguring thought. His companions gaped and fell silent. Even the rasp and whine of the carnivore's frustrated attempts on its tether ceased, leaving only the keening disk on its chest to compete with the Roman's presence.

Vibulenus said, "How is your mead coming along?" His words were as distinct as they were unexpected, penetrating his hearers as clearly as if he had tapped into the vessel's communications system.

"It's . . ." said Niger, pausing to swallow and to collect his thoughts. The tribune gathered the others to him as he began to walk toward the doors in the back of the big room.

"It's shaping up fine, Gaius," Niger continued. "Added some more water this morning. Doesn't have a real bite, yet, but if we don't Transit for another week, two weeks it'll be plenty good."

"It'll be plenty good sooner than that, my friend," said Vibulenus. He put an arm around Quartilla's shoulders and pulled her close, but he did not look at her for the moment. The tribune's eyes were turned toward the nearing exit, but his mind was focused on a red future.

"Sir?" said one or the other of the centurions.

"Pilus prior," said the tribune as they stepped into the hallway, "we'll give the men the remainder of the day to rest. I want to use the Tenth Cohort."

"Of course, sir," replied Clodius Afer. He sounded more shocked that any other unit could be considered for the operation than he was at the implication that the operation was about to go on line.

Quartilla's body shuddered reflexively, but she immediately squeezed herself to a closer bond with the tribune.

"We'll proceed to the Exercise Hall as usual," Vibulenus continued. His companions were following his lead, but he was simply walking — moving his body so that his racing mind did not bounce off its physical trammels. "Pick up practice equipment and carry it to the Main Gallery. March here with it."

"We'll need to inform the men," said Niger, sketching his own mental picture of the operation and the duties he would be required to perform.

"Non-coms the night before," replied Vibulenus decisively. "Common soldiers by their centurions as we exit the sleeping room. No noise, no fuss. Especially no cheering. There'll be plenty of time for that when it's over, and I want us to be leading the cheers."

Though the alternative wasn't unacceptable, noted the part of the tribune's mind which was willing to consider all possibilities with an icy logic. Because if the mutiny failed, the leaders who planned it were certainly going to gain freedom of a sort.

"Open your mouths again," said Niger in a low voice to the pair of soldiers babbling as they entered the Main Gallery, "and I'll choke you with your teeth."

Vibulenus was terrified. Not of death — death would be a release. He was certain that he was about to fail in front of his men, in front of his friends.

In front of Quartilla.

They had marched to the gallery six abreast, each century forming a file. As the cohort entered the big room, several of the centurions fell out to check the order of their men before running to the front of the column again.

The beast guarding the bulkhead began to growl deep in its throat. The sound was caressing, almost welcoming.

Clodius Afer began to growl back, rubbing the smooth blade of his practice sword against his thigh as he led the cohort from the right hand corner.

The men carried swords and shields, but the helmets and body armor of the same dense gray material had been abandoned in the Exercise Hall. The centurions, Clodius Afer strongly with the majority, had decided that the additional burden would be more of a hindrance than any benefit the dummy armor would confer. Nobody thought there was a chance for a soldier who got squarely in the path of a bodyguard's mace or the jaws of the carnivore here.

As for a laser — it should be quick, which was as much as anyone needed to think about that possibility.

"The quicker, the better," muttered Vibulenus, who had also paused beside the entrance to take stock of the situation.

Quartilla, who understood part of what the tribune meant by the comment, smiled and fell into step beside him as he paced to overtake the head of the column.

Vibulenus and the woman did not carry the practice gear that was about to get combat use. Instead, they each bore one of the leather knapsacks into which Niger had divided his "honey" upon return to the vessel.

In order for fermentation to proceed, converting sugars into alcohol, the honey had to be thinned with water. The greased leather packs were not perfectly watertight, especially along the seams, but they provided the best container available within the legion's portion of the vessel. They were sticky, and the reek of the original contents (which Niger continued to call honey) had not been improved by what was, after all, a process of decomposition.

The knapsacks were what Vibulenus needed now, and behind him every Roman on the ship.

The tribune started to laugh. It felt good to be moving, even toward the carnivore stretching with the deadly intensity of an all-in wrestler preparing for his bout.

"All right, sir?" asked Niger, jogging to the front of the column.

The Main Gallery had the aspect of a battlefield at evening. The single understrength cohort debouching into it emphasized, rather than filling, the room's emptiness.

"I was just thinking, Publius," said the tribune. "That we might win."

"Sure, sir, we're with you," the centurion replied — to what? What did Niger think he'd been told? — as he slipped back to deal with a confusion of voices at the rear of the line.

The formed cohort had inevitably swept up legionaries from other units who had been walking the halls on their own business. These confused, excited hangers-on were causing the commotion which Vibulenus had feared and which Clodius Afer's troops had themselves avoided. File-closers and another centurion besides Niger silenced the unarmed audience with whispers that ranged from warnings to threats.

The carnivore stepped delicately forward to the end of its tether and reached out with a forepaw. Then the beast turned and circled back around its staple. It had determined the zone within which it could kill, like an expert gunner ranging his ballista at the start of a siege.

Well, Gaius Vibulenus knew what that zone was also. He paused just beyond it and undid the thongs closing the knapsack's flap.

The beast remained huddled between the staple and the bulkhead whose door was invisible save for the pattern forming its lock. An optimist might have said the carnivore had retreated in fear of the armed cohort being halted by handsignals behind the tribune.

Vibulenus knew better than that. He understood the growls that the creature could not suppress for all its wish to entice its prey closer; understood the appraising glint in its eyes when it turned them toward the Romans. The beast was not sure that it could kill all the men about to attack it; but it was looking forward to an opportunity to try.

Oh, yes. . . . Gaius Vibulenus Caper knew just how the creature felt.

Quartilla stepped to the tribune's side, and he snarled, "Back, by Pollux! Don't be in the way now."

There was a rasp of orders muted by the gallery's acoustics: Clodius opening his unit into a twelve man front by bringing the half-files forward. That was an ample frontage to deal with the carnivore, and it retained some semblance of order for the moment at which the woman, Fortune granting, opened the bulkhead door which would pass no more than two men abreast.

The tribune placed every element of his surroundings in its proper niche on the gameboard of his mind — himself as well, because his body was a primary piece in the exchange that was about to begin. Then he stepped forward, into the carnivore's range, swinging the knapsack of half-worked mead.

The beast was faster than Vibulenus dreamed. All of his planning had been based on subconscious recollections of the way the carnivores moved on the battlefield — carrying heavy, iron-clad riders and wrapped in several hundredweight of armored blanket. The creature had been bred in a place where things were heavier; and under conditions like these which men thought were normal, its speed was almost reflex quick.

Vibulenus had no time to use the knapsack for a weapon as he intended, but it saved his life anyway by providing a target for the claws which could easily have crushed into his chest from both sides or slapped his head against the sidewall while blood spouted from the stump of his neck.

The knapsack exploded in a sticky geyser — honey dissolved in water already slightly alcoholic with decay products from the bacteria which the mixture supported. It splashed the ceiling thirty feet above and bathed the jaws and shearing teeth which the beast slammed down on what it thought was a victim.

Vibulenus had intended to retreat as soon as his presence brought the carnivore out in a lunge. The knapsack, heavy with its fluid contents, would propel him backward while it sped to its target.

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.

The walls here were real enough to slam Vibulenus back toward Clodius when the pilus prior shook free. The tribune had been pounded worse — even in his men's scramble to attack the guardbeast — and the amount of adrenalin singing in his blood at the moment would have permitted him to ignore amputation, much less a few more bruises.

"We need him —" the tribune cried, as much to the dagger as the man who held it.

"Pollux sir!" Clodius Afer was shouting, bloodlust melted on his face into a mask of horror. "I swear I didn't —"

The wall behind the tribune dissolved. The Medic stood in the broad opening. Behind him was a room whose air seemed filled with bright fracture lines, as different from that in which the Pilot sprawled as either was from any room Vibulenus had seen before.

In the Medic's hands was a laser.

The crewman could have burned the two Romans in halves before they reached him, but Vibulenus and his centurion were the killers in this tableau of mutual surprise: the Medic was paralyzed by the face of death while the soldiers were unaffected by the black reality waiting at the laser's muzzle.

The tribune threw himself at the crewman's knees. He was off balance and facing the wrong direction, so his target was just an estimate of what he thought his hands could reach. Either the laser would carve him with the deck for a cutting board, or he would jerk the Medic flat after the weapon had disemboweled Clodius Afer in a gush of sparks and blood.

There was always a cost but it didn't help to consider what, while you were paying.

The Medic displayed lightning-quick reflexes despite his sedentary background. He tossed the laser down as if it were hot, bouncing it off the lunging Clodius Afer by chance rather than by intent, and dived squealing away from the Romans.

There was chaos near the entrance to the forward section. The screen of light to one side of the aisle had vanished. Instead of furniture — or the marsh the tribune had half expected from the wizardry of the vessel — the bodyguards had been living amidst a rocky environment similar to a windswept knoll in northern Mesopotamia.

The barracks area was littered now with equipment and bodies. Some legionaries screamed or moaned, struggling to cover their wounds or pawing feebly at the hands of friends trying to help; but the quintet of guards visible were dead, pulped by Roman clubs and hacked with edged weapons the guards themselves had no time to use.

Death did not save the toad creatures from further attack. Legionaries were still pounding at bodies which were beginning to flow over the landscape on which they sprawled.

Fighting might be going on in the other half of the billet — men ducked in and out, ignoring walls which they had learned were only cosmetic — but if there were still guards resisting there, they could not be a threat to the mutiny any more. The legionaries who were struggling through the bulkhead door, now in total disorder, ran toward Clodius and their leaders for want of battle nearer.

Vibulenus scrambled on his hands and knees to catch the wailing Medic, also on all fours.

"ClodiussavethePilot!" the tribune screamed behind him in a single breath, knowing that only the pilus prior was likely to have enough presence of mind not to treat the dazed crewman the way the guards were being handled. He had given orders and explanations, clear and convincing in the moments before the attack. Men balked of a chance at the real fighting were going to pound away their prebattle fears — together with their only hope of seeing home — if there were no one with discipline in place to stop them.

The Medic buried his face in his crossed arms. Vibulenus sprang on him like a dog on a rat.

"Don't!" the crewman wailed in Latin. "Don't! Don't!" He was stockier than Vibulenus and possibly as strong, but the fight had been stunned out of him by the homicidal intent he saw on the faces of the Romans rushing toward him.

"Where's the Commander?" the tribune demanded, shouting to be heard over the uproar. He rose awkwardly to his feet, dragging the Medic with him as an unresisting dead weight. Vibulenus' back now ached with memory of the trampling haste of his men determined to join in slaughtering the carnivore.

"I've got this one, Gaius!" cried the pilus prior, who clutched the Pilot to his chest as if they were lovers. The crewman was either struggling or writhing in pain as fractured bones grated under the centurion's grip; but without the hand which Clodius held out to stop his subordinates, pain and life would have ended abruptly for the Pilot.

"The Commander!" Vibulenus shouted. "The Commander!" He began shaking his captive.

Men, clumsy with the shields they still bore, clustered around their leader. The lines in the air felt like cobwebs, but they formed again like designs in smoke when a soldier passed through them. Some of the legionaries swatted at the figures, then drove their way back out of the Medic's room when they had time to appreciate its uncanniness.

The stocky crewman was whining syllables that were not Latin if they were a language at all.

"The Commander!" Vibulenus shrieked, jerking the blue figure back and forth in fury and frustration.

Quartilla, with a bruise on her cheekbone which became a pressure cut as it mounted toward her hair, squeezed between legionaries to touch the tribune with one hand and the Medic with the other. "Let me," she whispered to Vibulenus; and, in a fluting trill which seemed to be a language after all, began to speak to the captive.

The Medic pawed Quartilla gratefully with his three-fingered right hand, but his eyes were unfocused and his left hand stroked the tribune with the same limp thankfulness. In Latin, though he seemed unaware of both his language and his audience, the crewman said, "He's at the end, of course. Me here, the Pilot across, him at the end."

A dozen legionaries at once began battering with practice swords on the wall which closed the corridor leading from the bulkhead door. Two men shouted for space as they stamped forward, carrying the ten-foot, iron-headed mace which had belonged to a bodyguard. They crashed their makeshift battering ram into the wall. It rebounded out of their hands, sending the nearest legionaries hopping. The wall was unscarred.

"Get us in," said Clodius Afer to his own prisoner, his voice a low growl more threatening than the dagger which he now recalled and waved before the Pilot's face. The fingers of the centurion's left hand were wrapped in the fabric covering his captive's chest. The bodysuit did not tear, but where the material was most strained, its color became a glistening, silky green.

"Unlock it, bastard," Clodius ordered in a voice like stones sliding, while he turned the Pilot deliberately to face the blank wall.

"I can't," the Pilot said in what started as a choked whisper but quickly built into a terrified babble, "because it's only him from inside as controls it!"

"Clodius!" shouted the tribune who saw death in the pilus prior's rigid face an instant before the dagger lifted.

The weapon poised in midair. It was forged in one piece — blade, hilt and crossguards — massive and dingy gray except for the edges and the scratches on the hilt left by the iron gloves with which its normal user gripped it.

"Sir?" said Clodius Afer pleadingly; but the fact that he had bothered to respond at all meant that he understood the order and would obey.

The Medic had recovered himself enough to be sure of his surroundings and to talk to Quartilla in his melodic birth tongue. His face quivered with terrified animation as he made frequent one-finger gestures which were not attempts to point at anything in the immediate environment.

"He's telling the truth," said the woman when Vibulenus dared glance away from his pilus prior. A single legionary continued to hammer vainly at the corridor, but all the others hung in restless anticipation, waiting for the information or the event which would give them a goal again.

"There's no way into the Commander's quarters except through that door," Quartilla continued, "and it's controlled by the Commander's voice. There's no way out either."

"He says," said Clodius Afer, pushing toward the invisible door through men who scurried from his authority and from the anger in his eyes. The wrinkling grip across the front of the bodysuit made the Pilot seem shrunken in on himself as the centurion dragged him along.

"He says!" the pilus prior shouted as he stabbed the dagger into the center of the blank wall.

Blood scabbing across Clodius' right shoulder was jeweled with bright, fresh droplets as the muscles bunched beneath the skin. There was a thunk and a musical twang that would have been loud even in a room not hushed like this one.

Clodius' arm was numb to the elbow. He fell back a step, eyes widened in surprise. The dagger hilt was still in his hand, but the blade had snapped off at the crossguards and lay, still quivering out nervous tones, on the floor of what had been the Pilot's quarters. He dropped the iron hilt.

"No," said Pompilius Niger in a voice of unexpected certainty. "We'll use this."

The junior centurion had a bruise across the forehead where his shield had caught him while it blocked the carnivore's kick. He had lost or abandoned the practice weapons. What he now carried in his rough, capable hands was one of the lasers with which the crewmen had tried to face the mutiny.

The Medic trilled something that was an oath in any language. In desperate Latin directed more toward Vibulenus than it was the woman — authority taking precedence over mercy at this moment, though the reality of the situation was not what the crewman perceived — he said, "Please don't let him — if he touches the wrong thing, all of us, the ship even."

Men made way for Niger the way they had for Clodius, but this time the threat was in his hands instead of his face. In hot blood, most of the legionaries would have charged the beam weapon with the same reckless abandon the tribune and pilus prior had shown. Now, though . . . nobody wants to die after a battle, and memories of the laser demonstrations were still bright and terrible.

"Everybody move back," said Vibulenus, raising his voice to quiet the babble. Another problem occurred to him — his duties did not end with mutiny, unless the mutiny itself were ended — so he went on, "Fifth and Sixth Centuries, return to the Main Gallery. Keep people out, and tell them I'll make a full report as soon as we've mopped things up in here."

And might the wish father the result.

There was a stir and more obedience than the tribune had really expected. The ship was uncanny in many fashions. Familiarity did not help legionaries understand how the walls moved or carts floated through the air.

But these were familiar occurrences now, whereas the laser still commanded the awe which a nearby thunderbolt would receive in the legion's Campanian homes. The order provided an excuse to get away from something that even brave men would prefer to shun.

Clodius Afer had no visible qualms. He strolled back to the tribune and Niger, flexing the numbness out of his empty right hand. The Pilot, who was trying to hug his injured right shoulder, had no more control of his movements than would a dufflebag in the centurion's grip.

"Now," said Clodius to his captive in a tone of catlike menace, "why don't you tell us how to make this work?"

The two crewmen looked at one another with mirroring expressions of blank-eyed terror. The faces of the Romans around them ranged from expectant to ravening, with Niger's features the worst for their demonic calm. The junior centurion pointed the laser at the Medic's chest. His hands began to prod the bumps and knurlings on the weapon's surface.

"Don't!" shrieked the Pilot. "If you fire it here, you may strand us in normal —"

The pilus prior slapped his prisoner. His calloused palm cracked like a ballista firing, and the Pilot flopped stunned against the grip on his chest.

"I'll tell you just how to do it," said the Medic in a voice of manic calm. He spread both his hands, vaguely purple where they extended beyond his suit, toward the laser. It was the gesture of an adult placating a raging child — or of a suppliant before his god. "But please, don't touch the controls until I show you."

"Give the laser to Quartilla," Vibulenus decided aloud.

Clodius looked surprised, while Niger looked as if nothing could surprise him. With no more hesitation than if he had been asked to deliver it to the tribune or one of the other men, he handed the woman the tube with excrescences molded into it instead of being welded on. An article of plumbing, a length of foundry scrap . . . except that it burned like the heart of Phlegethon, and that made it useful.

"Please. . . ," said the Medic in a voice that was quiet though not calm, the way a cat in ambush is quiet. "If you will point the other end — yes, like that, goodlady — toward the wall, the door."

Groggy, stunned enough that immediate consequences did not terrify him, the Pilot said, "You know what happens if she hits the navigation bank. Is this where you want to spend eternity?"

Clodius slapped him into a daze again.

The Medic made a swallowing motion higher in his throat than a Roman would have, then continued, "Now, goodlady, slide the piece just above the trigger — where your index ringer is — back."

"Which piece?"

"Either side — yes, that's fine, it slides, yes, goodlady. Now —"

Vibulenus was wondering why the Pilot had spoken in Latin to his fellow. Stunned, yes; but under the circumstances, probably because they had no other common language.

The guild could achieve wonders, miracles — but it had a cheeseparing attitude that reminded the tribune of wealthy men at home who served fine wine to their immediate companions at dinner, but sent lees and vinegar to the lower tables. The Commander's duties required universal fluency, but those of the crewmen did not.

Quartilla spoke all the ship's languages.

The laser's pale beam struck the door in a dazzle that could have been the tribune's sudden anger.

Startlement lifted the woman's finger from the trigger instead of clamping it there. Even so, the microsecond pulses had blasted cup-sized depressions in an ascending line across the face of what had been a blank wall. The material which had shrugged off a ram and a steel point slumped at the touch of coherent light. Bits which sprayed from the surface left sooty trails behind them as they sputtered through the air.

"Don't!" shrilled a voice. "Don't do that!"

Vibulenus spun around, keeping his grip on the Medic only by reflex. The words had come from —

The words had come from just beside the tribune's ears. The Commander had spoken, rather than someone in the immediate vicinity.

There was momentary silence except for the curses of a few men, close enough to the door to be burned when it spattered on them. The yellow-green surface of the wall was angry pink around the cavities and dull gray at their heart. It looked like pustulant worm damage on the skin of a fresh pear.

"Again," said the tribune softly, and Quartilla steadied herself over the laser tube.

"Wait!" bleated the voice. "I'm coming out! Put that down, I'm coming out!"

A legionary who had been smothering sparks on his thighs grinned and straightened. He cocked his practice sword back in an unguarded fashion that would have gotten him killed on the battlefield or knocked silly by an automaton in the Exercise Hall.

"Not without orders, ye fool!" snarled the pilus prior. He shook the Pilot as he would have a swagger stick. The loose-limbed crew member moaned softly in response, but the abashed soldier lowered his weapon.

"Put down the laser!" demanded the Commander's voice.

"Quartilla," said the tribune in a voice that crushed other sounds with its glacial power, "on the count of three I want you to begin burning the door until I tell you to stop. One —"

"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.

Clodius 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, taking 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.

Clodius Afer assumed a full brace, looking at a knob of tree-trunk, and asked, "Further orders, sir?" in a raspy, impersonal voice. He did not want to prod his friend, his leader; but until the operation was complete, the pilus prior would be wound up tight as the springs of a catapult.

He knew very well that the operation was not over.

Niger's century was on duty in the forward section, half of them sprawled in the outer area while the remainder wandered in the glade which formed the Commander's quarters. Their centurion sat crosslegged with his back to a tree, smiling faintly but not speaking except to briefly answer direct questions.

He could not even be said to be watching the Commander, though he was not looking anywhere else.

"All right," said Vibulenus in a sharp voice intended to rouse his own mind as well as bring those around him to attention. He stood up and pointed his index fingers at the crewmen tied to daggers driven into one of the giant tree boles. "You," the tribune demanded. "Where is the ship controlled from?"

The Pilot winced with trapped-animal panic — he might have been dopey with the pain of his ribs and shoulders. The Medic craned his neck to see the other crewman. Because of the trunk's curve they could not see one another's face without straining.

When the Pilot still said nothing, the Medic flung his gaze again on the Roman tribune and said, "It's in his quarters, the whole thing, but you can't work the controls yourselves, you know —"

"Yes, we know," said Vibulenus with a vague smile at the fellow's desperation to prove he was indispensable. They already knew that; the tribune himself did, at least.

Niger stood with a mechanical rather than fluid grace, each joint of his close-coupled frame moving by small increments. There was certainly a way to provide the Commander's quarters with real furniture, but it was not worth the bother of learning — and very possibly, it was under the Commander's control alone.

The junior centurion put an arm around Vibulenus' shoulders and hugged him. Quartilla, standing at the tribune's other side, laid her fingers on her lover's biceps, and the troops of the century on guard began to move closer to hear what was about to happen.

"We can set a course for a lovely world," the Medic said, nervousness speeding his voice so that the words tripped across one another. "Anything you want, whatever's lovely to you. And —"

"You'll set our course for home," said the tribune. "For Capua. For —"

"No." said the Pilot.

They had all been ignoring the slimmer crewman in his silence and his daze. Vibulenus moved to his side for a better view of the fellow. Niger, a non-commissioned officer again, made room through his crowding soldiers with a snarled order and a shove that could have moved oxen.

"There's no home," the Pilot went on, meeting the tribune's eyes with a bright terror which proved he understood well the temper of the men around him. "We can take you — many places, almost anywhere, places the Federation will never learn about. But if we take you to Earth —"

"Look at him," said Clodius Afer to the captive. He swept his arm to the side, clearing by his authority a path as wide as what his junior had managed with physical effort. "Look at him!" the pilus prior shouted.

The Commander was on a tree facing his two subordinates. The undergrowth which might have interfered with the view was gone, trampled down or hacked away. The shimmering filter of air before the guild officer's face was studded with sweat like that of a human. When he moaned, the droplets shuddered and occasionally splashed down onto his suit where they vanished in the fabric.

A number of the soldiers had gleefully helped, but no one had disputed Niger's right to drive home the daggers that pinioned the Commander to what had been part of the luxury in which the guild kept him.

His arms were outstretched, and his fingers twitched beneath their blue covering. The daggers by which he supported his upper body had been driven through his wrists, where the network of sinews and bone could accept a strain that would have torn apart the lighter structure of his palms and let his torso slump forward.

The Commander's legs were flexed sharply at the knees and turned to his right side. His feet had been drawn up to provide a cushion of sorts for his buttocks. Then the third spike had been hammered through both heelbones and deep into the wood beneath.

The slight, blue-clad figure was alive and would remain alive for a considerable time before shock or suffocation carried him off. The blood which dripped with spittle from the corner of his mouth was only from the way he bit himself while gnashing his teeth in agony.

"What's your Federation going to do with you," said Clodius Afer, his voice harsh but no longer shouting, "that's going to be worse than that?"

The Commander whimpered.

"You don't understand," said the Medic who was closing his eyes tight and then reopening them, not blinking but more an unconscious attempt to wring visible reality into a more acceptable guise. He was almost whispering, but he got somewhat better control of himself when Vibulenus looked back at him.

"You've been gone," the crewman explained, "not the time you've been awake on the ship or on the ground, but all the time the ship's in Transit, too. Do you understand? You haven't been home for thousands of your years. There isn't any home left for you."

Quartilla stroked the tribune's back, her touch sensuous, this time for its power rather than its delicacy. "Yes," she said in answer to the question her lover has not needed to ask aloud. "He's telling —"

She paused to rephrase. "He's not lying."

Existence was sand, rushing down a slope to bury the soul of Gaius Vibulenus Caper in tiny, harsh realities. Everything they had fought for, everything he had promised these men who trusted him —

He had promised them a chance to live free and live as men. Whatever else home might be was less important than that.

"We never thought it would be the same," Vibulenus said. His voice stirred echoes even from the rough boles of the synthetic trees. "It wouldn't have been the same if we'd marched back from Parthia with all the loot of Ctesiphon in our baggage — home would have changed, and we would have changed even more."

"All right," said the Pilot in a voice like twigs snapping. "Cut me loose and I'll take you to what you think your home is."

Quick hands moved, anticipating Vibulenus' nod of assent.

"I warn you, cargo," said the Pilot as his face worked against new pain as his injuries were jogged. "You don't understand what you're doing."

"Perhaps we don't, guild crewman," said Gaius Vibulenus. His right hand and those of his two centurions gripped each other in a knot as tight as that which Alexander cut at Gordion, and the soft warmth of Quartilla beside him was hope itself.

"But we understand that we are Romans."

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Framed