by David Weber
The Commander lowered his hands, and gods! but it was good to see the terror on his face.
The Commander's personal quarters were a forest- not a glade on a Campanian hillside, but no stranger than a score of woodlands through which the legion had battled. Trees with willowy trunks rose in gold-barked splendor above the level which Vibulenus could see through the doorway. Tendrils hung down, fringed with blue-green foliage that marched along the twigs in connected rows like an eel's fins instead of being separated into leaves. The air had a sulphurous tinge, not quite unpleasant. Several of the trunks were six feet in diameter.
"Throw your traps down, you two," said Clodius Afer, nodding his clenched right hand toward a pair of legionaries."Hold 'im by the elbows, just hold 'im-but no mistake."
He looked in surprise at the Pilot who dangled in his big left hand. "Here, two more of you take this one-and the Medic, too. Pretend you're good for something beside scratchin' yer butts."
As he spoke, the pilus prior let his gaze wander across the guard billets his men had cleared. Tired soldiers squatted on the deck or braced themselves against rocks designed for the comfort of inhuman forms. Where they could, they avoided the remains of the toad creatures who had lorded over them for-how to measure the time? But avoidance was not always possible, and some of the men were too weary to care that the surface beneath them was greasy.
Clodus grinned, and the men grinned back at their bloody centurion. Their mutual pride glowed like a hot furnace.
"This all can be forgotten," said the Commander. Either his control or the ship's communications system kept his voice calm, without the tremolo of fear which the tribune had hoped to hear. "For the sake of my career, you see, so you need not doubt me. The- damage-" he wriggled his short, pointed ears "-can be assessed against the recent battle, a mere entry error in the damage report. It will be all forgotten."
"No," said Pompilius Niger. "It won't be forgotten. Lots of things aren't forgotten." He reached out slowly.
Vibulenus poised to act if needs must, but the bovine, childish-looking centurion only drew the tip of his index finger down the face of the Commander. The guild officer shuddered but could not draw away against the grip of the strong men holding him.
"I'll never forget Rufus, your worship," Niger added with the gentleness of a chamois whisking over a swordblade.
"Bring him into here," said Vibulenus, walking toward the Commander's quarters as he spoke. "The Medic- both of them, bring them too."
The tribune's right hand hurt from the strain he had not noticed when he was gripping the crewman. He felt a momentary hesitation-mental, not quite transmitted to his body-before he stepped through the doorway. In this place there could be deadfalls-or the vessel's dreadful equivalent of them, invisible partitions that would sizzle away the blood and bone of an intruder.
But Quartilla was at his side, and if he paused she would be the first into…
A forest in which the air was unexpectedly warm and dry, and where several of the trees shot up to a height of several hundred feet unless that were an optical illusion. No snares in the doorway, no lethal barriers.
There was nothing which suggested the guiding or working of a ship either.
"What does he have to do with making the ship go places?" the tribune asked without looking over his shoulder. He was bending his right fingers back against his wrist with the other hand. "The Commander?"
"He just…" the Medic said. "I mean, I think he just orders him-"
"What are you doing?" demanded the guild officer in rising inflections that pierced like the voice of a senile woman. "You're safe now if you'll stop this mad-"
The voice cut off.
Vibulenus turned. No one had touched the Commander. Niger was pointing a finger at the blue-suited officer's face and smiling.
The Medic reached out toward the Pilot's head to steady and direct it. The slighter-bodied crewman was standing upright again, but his face bore mental and physical vestiges of the punishment he had received.
"Hey!" said the soldier holding the Medic's right elbow. He jerked his captive back sharply.
"Tell us," the Medic begged his fellow. "He doesn't set any controls, does he?"
"Him," mumbled the Pilot. He tried to rub his face with a hand but was prevented by the overzealous legionaries gripping him. "He just tells me it's my fault the other bastard got cut so he has to take over this zoo again. Have me demoted, he says."
"Your choice, Publius," the tribune said softly to Pompilius Niger. "He was your cousin."
"Yes," said the stocky junior centurion.
Niger had been staring at the guild officer. Now he reached out to the crewmen, talcing each man's chin between the thumb and forefinger of a hand. The Medic froze. The Pilot struggled reflexively; but he could not move his head against the two-finger grip, and the attempt brought him back to full consciousness.
"Now…" said Niger, letting his eyes travel from one crewman to the other. "We're going to give you a demonstration of why you will obey every order which Gaius gives you, without argument or hesitation.
"We call it crucifixion."
The Commander began to scream. The screaming went on for a long time.
"This was the last unit, sir," said Julius Rusticanus at the doorway of the Commander's quarters.
"Very good, First," said Gaius Vibulenus, giving the first centurion an upward nod which exhaustion kept from being as crisp as he would have liked,
Quartilla, empathetic or just lucky in her timing, began to massage the tribune's neck and shoulders. The black certainty of the laser still lay across the woman's lap.
"March them out then," Vibulenus continued, relaxing visibly, "and await further orders."
"Century-" Rusticanus roared.
"Century!" repeated the centurion of the particular unit, Sixth of the First, in a pale echo of the first centurion's incomparable bellow.
"March!" Rusticanus ordered, and bare feet slapped the floor as the century exited the forest scene in close order and perfect step.
Every legionary aboard had now been brought into the Commander's quarters for a view of the price men had exacted from-not men. Most of the centuries filed in and out in boisterous good humor, but Rusticanus had set his own stamp on the conduct of the First Cohort.
"Sir," he said as the men marched toward the exit into the Main Gallery where most of the legion already waited. "I-I'm very proud to serve under you. You did… you did what you promised us you would."
"Thank you, First," the tribune said, feeling pleasure tingle beneath his skin despite his weariness.
"But you should have had me with you-" his broad hand gestured around him, fingers spread "-when."
The first centurion made an about face as sharp as a surveyed angle and marched out after his men.
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 rharp 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, what-ever'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 hot 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 Vibuenus' 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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