by David Weber
The descending ship dropped below the ridge, toward the canyon in which the legion's vessel already waited. For a moment, the thunder was redirected upward and the ground quivered in trying to absorb the noise. Then it muted to a growl and ceased entirely. The silence that followed was so complete that Vibulenus could again hear insects buzzing in his hair, where the tree with which he had collided had sprayed him.
"What's it mean, sir?" begged Clodius Afer. The prospect of battle had made the file-closer tense and irritable, but he was a veteran of other wars. What he had just seen was an object the size of the Circus Maximus, descending slowly through the air as if it were a feather and not something that could hold a hundred and fifty thousand human beings. "What's going to happen?"
"I don't know, Gnaeus,'' the tribune said, using the file-closer's first narne because he knew in his guts that there was no rank or class at a time like this. "But if we wait long enough, maybe we'll find out."
And if what the Commander had said about agelessness were true, they would be able to wait a very long time.
"All right, next lot," said the man whose blue body suit identified him as one of the vessel's crew. In fact, he would have passed in Vibulenus' eyes for the Commander, save that his garment did not cover his skull and there was no shiny surface between his face and the outside world. This crewman called himself the Medic, a diminutive of the word for doctor-medicus. The word was understandable though not a linguistic formation familiar to the legionaries before flashing, headsized floating machines summoned them back aboard.
There was a gassy wheeze; four doors opened in the wall of the room. Romans who had entered the cubicles nervously a moment before stood, bemused and wrapped in dissipating steam. Some of them were working limbs or kneading parts of their bodies.
"Come on, come on," the Medic snapped from behind the piece af furniture-it looked like a writing desk-at which he stood. "Keep it moving or I'll be here all fucking night. And so," he added in an afterthought, "will your buddies."
The four nude men stepped out into the hall proper, still more focused on their own bodies than they were on what the Medic or anyone else might say.
"Hercules!" muttered Clodius to the tribune at his side, "Look at Caprasius. You saw how they near lifted him and his leg into the booth in two loads."
Caprasius Felix, a front ranker of Clodius' century, had run into a cutting weapon of some sort during the battle, wielded with enough strength to sever the bone of his right thigh. Somebody had slapped a tourniquet on the wound, but neither that field expedient nor the amputation which was all surgery could offer such a case was likely to help the victim long.
Two of his fellows had carried him, unconscious from shock and as pale as the belly of a dead fish, into the booth as the Medic directed. Now…
"Well, he's limping," said Vibulenus.
"What in Hades," Caprasius was muttering as he walked toward the marked exit, past the quartet of toad-faced bodyguards who kept order as the returning legionaries processed through the medical check on reentering the vessel. The injured man was clutching his right thigh with both hands. Suddenly, he took the hands away and tried to kick that leg high in the air.
There was a three-inch band of paint or discoloration, bright Pompeian red, around the thigh, but there was no sign of the wound which had gaped to splintered yellow bone. Caprasius stumbled and fell sideways when muscles caught in a way he had not expected, but he was rolling again to his feet before his friends could help him.
"Hades," he repeated, grinning like a man reaching the head of a prostitute's queue. "It works, by Hercules, it fuckin' works."
Others of the soldiers leaving the booths also bore patches of red. They looked like wounds, but in feet the stained areas had borne fresh wounds-and did so no longer. A Sextus Julius-one of several in the legion, a First Cohort non-com, Vibulenus believed-was massaging his scalp as he walked along. Half of it was hairless and colored deep red; but when he had entered a cubicle, his skull was partly exposed and the flap of skin he tried to hold in place included the ear on that side.
"Will you bleeding come on?" the Medic pleaded. "Next lot, move it!"
"Move," boomed one of the armored toads acting as proctors, reaching out with his long-handled mace. The four Romans at the head of the line moved with more or less haste, away from the spiked knob rather than toward the cubicles.
Nothing to be afraid of, Gaius Vibulenus lied silently as he hopped forward. Then he said aloud, "Nothing to be afraid of, men," turning his head toward Clodius Afer who was walking stiffly beside him.
Oddly enough, that worked. The young tribune strode firmly within the cubicle nearest the seated Medic. Acting like an officer to others made it easier to act like a man within yourself-even though you knew you were a coward and you were so frightened that your eyes didn't focus as you stepped close to the back wall of the booth and the door began to shut.
"Just get bleeding in, will-" the Medic whined to someone else, the words amputated by the door sealing.
The legionaries had stripped under direction of the Commander's guards in the long hallway stretching from the vessel's entrance to this room and the Medic. No one seemed to care about the cohort or rank of the men being ordered into groups of four: those who straggled back to the vessel first had run through this process hours before, and there were still a thousand or more soldiers behind the tribune and his immediate companions.
A blood-warm mist of water with an astringent odor sprayed Vibulenus from all directions. He jumped, but the spray at once relaxed the throbbing veins of his head. As the temperature rose, his left arm began to lose some of its sharp stiffness as well.
Vibulenus' right hand unclenched. The booming guards had insisted that the Romans pile every scrap of clothing and equipment against the wall of the broad hallway, saying that every man's belongings would be returned at the proper time.
That was unimaginable, but probably true: when they mustered in the Main Gallery before marching out against the feathered warriors, Vibulenus had been issued the sword his father bought for him-lost irretrievably to some Parthian, he would have guessed. That sword, the only relic of his previous life, would have felt good in his hand as he stepped into the cubicle.
The water felt better. The booth had a diffuse light source, so he could see the grime and scabbed blood wash away from his body. Something else was happening as well, or perhaps the heat was affecting him after the wounds and-when he had eaten last?
The light was pulsing with his heartbeat. Instead of becoming dizzy, he was weak-too weak to stand, but the solid walls of the booth extended limbs to grip his body in a dozen places. His stomach lurched momentarily, but though the spasm passed it was followed by the surge of well-being that usually followed vomiting during delirium.
Vibulenus would have screamed, but he didn't have that much control of his muscles any more. He was no longer conscious of the water spray, but his scalp and left biceps felt so hot that there was no discomfort. He was wax, melting into oblivion and glad of the fact.
The liquescing heat ceased, leaving behind only the damp ambiance of the warm room of the baths. The light was normal again, and the tribune's head began to sag as the cushioning supports withdrew into the wall. Something pricked the skin above Vibulenus' heart before the wall reabsorbed the chest support. He staggered forward, but instinct threw his hands out to save him against the back of the booth.
The bandage was gone from his left arm, and so was the pain that had gnawed him even when he held the injured limb clamped firmly against his chest. His torn skin had reknitted beneath a coating-a dye, apparently- of brilliant red. There was only a tingling in the muscles to suggest a shard of flint had been rammed deep within them.
The door hissed open. The last of the steam dissipated; there was no drain, but the spray with the bandages and other sludge from Vibulenus' body had been borne off somewhere. Fingering the side of his scalp, now hairless but no longer cut and swollen, the trib
une stepped out of the cubicle as the Medic tiredly repeated, "Come on, next lot."
Clodius Afer bolted from the adjacent booth with his face set in the same mask of fear it had worn when he entered.
"Down the hall," rumbled one of the guards. The creatures were wearing their helmet visors down. Not, the tribune suspected, for protection, but rather to cushion the shock the Roman captives were receiving already. There had been none of this the first time they were marched aboard the vessel in Parthia; none of this that any of them remembered, at least. But then, they remembered nothing.
Vibulenus looked at the squat figures who had spoken, visualizing the features behind the iron mesh. The bodyguards were taller than most men-most Romans, at any rate-but it was the breadth and the neckless solidity of their bodies that made them look remarkable when covered with iron. Their strength was in keeping with their appearance, for their armor weighed more than a man could lift, much less wear, and they wielded maces on ten-foot hafts with the ease of a centurion brandishing his swagger stick.
The guards, and the various implications the young tribune drew from them, did not affect Vibulenus' present buoyancy at being suddenly whole, no longer wracked by staggering pain. He clasped his left arm around the shoulders of Clodius Afer, keeping his grip despite the non-com's attempt to shudder away when he saw the patch of red dye next to his own skin.
Clodius' legs and forearms were so tanned that pocks of new skin showed up pink in places that he had received minor cuts and abrasions during the battle. None of his injuries had been so severe that the process within the booth had left him with red stains like the tribune and Caprasius Felix.
"Gnaeus," Vibulenus said, "don't be-" He started to say "afraid" but realized as his tongue touched the word that the veteran would hit him, rank be damned. "Don't be angry because they've cured your pain."
"I don't understand," the file-closer whispered, but his calloused right hand reached up to grip Vibulenus' arm to him.
"We'll understand later," Vibulenus said with the confidence of health, not reason. Together, they led the remaining pair of men from their group toward the doorway at the side of the hall. "For now, it's enough that we don't hurt any more."
He looked up, at the toad-faced monsters to either side of the door. "Soon we'll understand," he said, and this time he spoke more in prayer than belief.
"All personnel, report to the Main Gallery for an address by your commander," repeated a well-modulated voice. "The red pulses lead toward the Main Gallery."
"They ought to let us form in centuries," said Gaius Vibulenus as he looked around at as many of the legionaries as he could see milling in the Main Gallery. The room was huge, with a smoothly arched ceiling that showed no sign of the groins and coffers that should have been required to carry the stresses. "I'm going to bring that up at the next command group meeting. This is absurd."
"This tunic don't feel right," said Clodius, pinching out the breast of the garment which had dropped at his feet from a wall dispenser as he left the Sick Bay. The file-closer peered down his nose at the tent of fabric between his thumb and forefinger. "Isn't… I dunno. Don't scratch the way it ought to, you know?"
"All personnel, report to the Main Gallery for an address by your commander," said the voice.
It sounded as if the words were being spoken a few inches from both of the tribune's ears simultaneously. He no longer jumped and looked around, but the effect still shocked him. Some legionaries covered their ears- uselessly, Vibulenus suspected-and hunched lower in growing fear at every repetition. Clodius Afer seemed to ignore the words, or at least their strangeness.
"Maybe it's Egyptian," the tribune said, trying to speak over the last of the announcement. The vessel was huge, even though it did not compare in size with the ship that had thundered in after the close of the battle. As soon as the announcements began, scarlet beads appeared in the ceiling of all the rooms and hallways. They flowed to the Main Gallery-to here. "The linen, I mean."
If it was linen. If it were even cloth. The walls and ceilings of the vessel were metal, totalling more metal than Vibulenus had ever imagined could be in one place; but sometimes the surfaces took on other semblances, as when the sheer wall opened to deposit garments, or ceilings that had been smooth and unremarkable glowed with light to guide the legionaries toward the assembly.
The floor of the Main Gallery was large enough to have held the legion fully equipped before it marched to battle. With the men-with the survivors-stripped to tunics, there was no hint of crowding, so that legionaries could stand in groups of their closest fellows or wander nervously, looking for somewhere to alight.
One of the latter was Pompilius Rufus who, before Vibulenus could speak, called, "Sir! Sir? Have you seen Niger?"
Clodius and the tribune dipped their chins together in denial as the young soldier paced over to them.
"I was just saying they ought to muster us properly," Vibulenus offered. "Issue standards to the standard bearers so that everyone would know his place."
"He insisted going looking for a cursed beehive," Rufus muttered, oblivious to the disembodied summons as well as to the tribune's conversation. "I thought, well, if I go back, then he won't stay out long… But I don't see him."
"You know," said the file-closer, looking down again at the fabric covering his own broad chest, "The tunic feels funny, but it fits me. Yours wouldn't." He nodded toward the much slimmer tribune and added in an afterthought, "Sir."
"Niger!" Rufus shouted, through the megaphone of his hands. The acoustics of the room absorbed the sound so completely that the shout was lost in the buzz of conversation only ten feet away. A few men turned, then turned back to their own concerns.
"Let's go to the front," Vibulenus said. He was feeling increasingly restive, and there was nowhere else to move that made a difference… except back out of the gallery. What result would defiance have?
"What d'ye suppose they do when people don't come back when the little lights tell 'em to, sir?" Rufus asked miserably.
Vibulenus put his arm around the shoulders of his childhood friend. "Strait rations," he said as the three of them maneuvered toward the front of the gallery where they would have a somewhat better view of the gathered soldiers. "Maybe a flogging. Don't worry-the Commander says we're valuable." He began to believe the words as soon as he had spoken them.
"What I mean is," the file-closer continued, completing his own point, "you muster by rank and file so's you know who's there and who isn't. But if you know that already, and I guess they do or they wouldn't be dropping clothes the right size outa the walls, then you don't need that kind of order."
"I don't-" Vibulenus started to say before he realized that he could think of no objections to the veteran's formulation. Who in the name of Hercules were the Commander and his entourage?
"I guess the Commander must be a god," said Clodius Afer, tilting his head to peer at the curving surface of the ceiling eighty feet above. "D'ye suppose we're all dead after all?"
"Castor!" Rufus blurted. "He is."
The three of them had reached the area closest to the front of the Main Gallery where ten of the Commander's bodyguards stood with their maces held crossways at waist level. There was no door in the bulkhead behind them, but a Hexagonal outline the size of a man's chest stood out against the shifting pastels that colored the partition.
The very presence of the toadfaced guards was enough to clear an area of almost twenty feet between them and the nearest legionaries. Facing the wall, and as separate from his fellows as from the armored non-men, was the waxen-faced figure of Arrius Crescens-the legionary whom Vibulenus had seen stabbed through the belly so fiercely that the bloody spearpoint burst through the links of mail in back as well.
Crescens was so still and blank-faced that the tribune thought he might in fact be a simulacrum, a death mask worn by a dummy in some unfathomable alien rite. While Rufus and Clodius started away, the young officer began to walk cautiously toward the fi
gure of the dead man.
It was a dummy. There was nothing to fear.
"Crescens?" Vibulenus said, extending his hand slowly toward the figure's shoulder.
"I suppose," said Crescens, turning to Vibulenus with the deliberation of an ox dragging a cart. "Except I'm dead. They all say that."
"Yeah, you are," whispered Vibulenus, uncertain whether he had mouthed the words or only formed them in his mind. He continued to extend his arm until the fingers touched the slick fabric of the legionary's tunic and felt the bone and muscle shifting beneath.
"You think I don't know it!" Crescens shouted, slapping the tribune's hand away and glaring at him as if he was on the verge of further violence. "I felt it go in, didn't I? Hercules, mister, it was like fuckin' ice all the way up me! And ye know what…?"
The legionary leaned closer and reached out to grip Vibulenus' wrist, the hand he had just struck away. The pores of the dead man's face were large, and the unnatural pallor of his skin magnified their relative darkness into freckles.
"I couldn't see any more when that big fucker pulled the fucker out agin," Crescens said. He held Vibulenus' palm against his belly, against a large knot in the muscles that felt like cartilage beneath the fat. "I could hear the edge of it grind agin my rib bones, though."
"You needn't let that bother, my man," the tribune said in his clear, detached voice. He stepped back, inexpressibly thankful that Crescens released him. The red dye on the legionary's belly made a splotch noticeable beneath the fabric of his tunic. "We've all noted how amazing the Commander's surgeons must be. My own-"
Vibulenus fingered his dyed left biceps, but before he was finished, he was stuck by the absurdity of comparing his recent wound to the way Crescens had been transfixed. His lips twitched silently for a moment. Then, almost without input from his mind, his mouth said, "You weren't actually killed, you see. Just wounded and repaired."
