by David Weber
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 payoffll 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 y
ellow 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.
