by David Drake
She looked at me. "Matt?"
"Yeah," I said.
"I think this is it."
My face and eyes were hot. "Yeah, it probably is."
"I thought I'd get more time, but it's okay," she said, "it really is okay."
"Sure," I said, knowing it wasn't, knowing she didn't have to die now, at this time, in this way.
Her head fell to one side, and it was over. I didn't bother to check for a pulse. The flow of blood picked up unnaturally, the nano-machines continuing to work, and I backed out of the room.
Jim came through the front door just as I finished explaining the situation to the 911 operator. Ignoring the operator's instructions to stay on the line, I dropped the phone and tackled Jim, taking him down hard. I hit him in the stomach and the face, then sat on his chest and pinned his arms. He spit blood and didn't resist.
"It didn't work, Jim. You killed her."
He looked genuinely sad, but I didn't care how he felt.
"I had to try, Matt. She wasn't going to do anything, and at least this treatment had a chance of working. The nano-machines should have been able to find and destroy the cancer cells. I really thought they could do it."
"Maybe they could have, but they didn't. They also destroyed her."
"I couldn't just let her die," he said. "Can't you see that?"
"No, dammit!" I screamed. "I don't see that at all. It was her choice, not yours."
"She was making the wrong choice," he said. "I couldn't let her do it when I knew there was a chance I could save her."
"It was her choice," I said. "Hers!"
I grabbed his throat with my left hand and began to squeeze. He tried to buck out from under me, but I kept him pinned, kept slowly increasing the pressure. I wanted to kill him, and I wanted to do it slowly.
"I'm the one holding you down, Jim, so I think I'm the one who gets to make the choice right now. How do you like it?"
I squeezed more, and I could see in his eyes that the lack of air was starting to really hurt him. I wanted so much to finish it, to crush his throat and kill him for what he did, but I didn't. I forced myself to let go of his throat, and then I stayed on top of him until the police arrived.
* * *
I looked again at the dead man and shook my head. "Why help them, Jim? What's in it for you?"
"I suppose I could say I helped them because they saved my life," he said, "but you'd know better than that." He leaned against the pool table that held the dead man. "I helped them because I knew I'd get a chance to steal this technology. Do you have any idea how valuable this technology will be once I perfect it? How much it could do for us? Imagine the possibilities. Want to know what your lover is really feeling? This can let you. Want to know what it's like to play in the NBA All-Star game? Now you can, even if you'll never be that good."
"What about the people you infect with these things?"
"Once I get it working, they won't suffer at all. I doubt they'll even know."
"That's not the point, Jim, and you know it. You can't just take control of other people's lives like this. They get to decide; not you."
"No, Matt, they don't. None of us gets to decide much of anything. Haven't you learned that yet? Governments decide to fight wars, and people go off and die. Companies that leave toxic materials where their employees work and ultimately cause the deaths of those people decades later are making fatal decisions for those people—and the people never even know it. Drivers who aren't paying attention kill other drivers who never had a choice in their fate. It happens all the time. This technology will be just one more way some people won't get to make choices."
I raised the gun. "No, Jim, it won't. It's wrong. I can't stop all the ways that people don't get to choose, but I can stop this. And I will."
He pushed off the table and walked toward me. He stopped six feet away.
"What are you going to do, Matt? You couldn't kill me before, and you can't kill me now. Oh, I believe you can kill, but you can't kill me because I won't fight back and because we're brothers, two of a kind."
"No. We were brothers. We haven't been that for a long time."
"Maybe not, but you still can't kill me, and you can't stop me without killing me." He turned his back on me and headed over to the table that held the computer. "Get out of here. Go tell them you couldn't find me, and let me get back to work."
"Jim."
He stopped and turned. "What?"
I pointed the shotgun at the ground in front of him. "You may be right that I can't kill you, but that doesn't matter. I don't have to kill you to stop you."
He opened his mouth to speak, but I could not hear what he said over the sound of the shotgun blast. The shot tore up the concrete in front of him, ripped small holes through his legs, and threw him backwards. He lay on the ground, his legs a pulpy mass, bleeding heavily, screaming.
I yelled over the screams. "You'll only suffer for a while, Jim. The aliens will fix you up; they've done it before. And when they're done, they'll take you away, because they can't afford to have anyone working on this stuff on Earth anymore. They may be back with this technology, but that's tomorrow's problem, and we'll have time to prepare." Shock was clearly setting in, and Jim had stopped screaming and was now whimpering in pain. "You'll be working for them for a very long time."
I grabbed a couple of vials from the rack, retrieved the gym bag from under the basket, wrapped the vials in the sweat towels, and put them and the shotgun in the bag. Our best hope was that the alien guild rules would keep this technology away long enough that we could figure out how to deal with it. I knew some researchers, some former colleagues of Jim's, whom I thought might be trustworthy enough to try. It wasn't a great chance, but it was a chance.
Greg was lying facedown on the ground beside the car, all of his arms spread, R.C. standing over him and holding a very large shotgun against his neck. Both of the disk weapons were on the ground behind R.C.
"Feel better?" I said to him.
R.C. smiled. "Much."
"Good. Now let him go."
R.C. raised an eyebrow.
"He and I have a deal. Don't we, Greg?"
"Yes," Greg said.
R.C. backed away, and Greg righted himself.
"Jim is inside. Call your people now, because he's hurt and you'll need to repair him."
"What about our materials?" Greg asked.
"Everything is inside."
"Did he succeed?"
"No. He said he still hadn't made it work. There's a dead man in there whose body is proof that Jim's telling the truth. You need to get rid of that body, too."
"Did James Peterson tell you what he was doing for us?"
"No," I said. I handed him the weapons. "Now, keep your part of the deal and get him out of here."
Greg put the weapons back in his suit and went silent for a moment. "A small ship is on the way and should be here momentarily. Though we dislike landings, we must conclude this affair quickly. You are done. You should leave."
"You'll take him away? You can take him anywhere you want, as long as it's not on this planet, but you will repair him and take him away?"
"Yes," Greg said. "We have found humans useful in many situations. Even though we cannot use him on this planet to continue his work, I am confident we will find a use for him elsewhere for a very long time."
I nodded and turned to R.C. Greg headed toward the building where Jim lay bleeding, and R.C. and I walked off to his truck. I felt the disturbance in the air before I heard the ship's very quiet approach, but I didn't look back to watch it land. I'd done what I could and what I should, and for now that had to be enough.
THE THREE WALLS—
32nd CAMPAIGN
S. M. Stirling
"Sir," Gnaeus Clodius Afer said. "Exactly which bunch of these fucking wogs are we supposed to be fighting, anyway?"
Gaius Vibulenus squeezed his hand on the mail-clad shoulder of the man who commanded the Tenth Cohort. Clodius Afer wore
a red transverse crest across his helmet; he carried a staff of hard twisted wood rather than the two javelins the enlisted men bore, and his short stabbing sword was slung on the right from a baldric rather than the left side of his military belt: a centurion's gear. Gaius Vibulenus's Attic helmet had a white plume, and he wore a back-and-breast armor of cast bronze hinged at the shoulders. The Hellenic-style outfit marked him as an officer, a military tribune.
At least, it had when the legion sailed out of Brundisium to join Crassus's glorious conquest of Parthia. He'd been able to wear it because his family were wealthy landowners in Campania and politically well-connected; one more gentry sprig gaining a little military experience to help him with the cursus honorum to office, and hopefully a share of the plunder. Militarily he'd been a joke. The actual work of the unit was done by men like Clodius Afer. Since then, things had changed.
Hercules, but they've changed, Gaius Vibulenus thought, looking down the hillside where the Romans stood at ease and waited for the aliens who'd bought them from their Parthian captors to decide what they were going to do.
I'd like to know in more detail too. Usually they just march us out of the ship, we kick arse, and then we march back. He didn't like it when things got more complicated than that. The last time they'd gotten really complex . . . that had been the siege. The siege had been very bad . . . .
To blank out the memory of ton-weights of stone grinding through his body Gaius Vibulenus looked over his shoulder, towards the group who would send the legion into action. The hulking presence of the Guild Commander was half a hundred paces away, surrounded by his monstrous toadlike guards mounted on their giant hyenalike mounts. The seven-foot spiked maces the guards bore glinted in the light of a sun paler than that the Roman had been born under, with a pinkish tinge to its yellow. The banded iron armor they wore creaked on its leather backing, and the scale-sewn blankets that protected their mounts rustled and clicked. The Commander—this Commander, there had been a dozen of as many different types—was himself as large as his hideous bodyguards, and dressed in the inevitable blue jumpsuit with the shimmer of a force-screen before his face. His hands dangled nearly to his back-acting knees, and when he was nervous claws like so many straight razors unfolded from the insides of his fingers. They were thin and translucent and looked sharp enough to cut the air.
Compared to him, the natives of this low-technology world were positively homelike, much more so than most the legion had fought in the service of the . . . creatures . . . who'd bought them. The group around the Commander were fairly typical. Almost homelike . . . if you ignored the fact that they had greenish feather fronds instead of hair, and huge eyes of a deep purple without whites, and thumbs on either side of their three-fingered hands. About half the delegation arguing with the Commander were females, their breasts left bare by the linen kilts that were their only garments—four breasts each.
One of the guard detail standing easy behind the tribune pursed his lips. "You know, some of them wog bitches, they're not bad looking," he murmured. "Wonder what they're shaped like under those kilts?" A couple of the naked attendants with collars around their necks, probably slaves, were male and equipped the same way as someone from Campania.
"Silence in the ranks!" Afer barked. In a conversational voice: "Sir?"
"It's a little more complex than usual, Centurion," Vibulenus said. "The . . . Guild—" he'd always wondered if that Latin word was precisely what the creatures who'd brought them meant "—is supporting the rulers of a kingdom southeast of here. They're in the process of conquering this area we're in, and they're facing a rebellion that they can't put down."
If the Guild used its lasers and flying boats, putting an end to the uprising would take about thirty minutes. For some reason Vibulenus had never even begun to understand, the Federation the trading guild served forbade the use of weapons more advanced than those of the locals of any given area. If the natives used hand-weapons of iron, the slave-mercenaries of the Guild had to do likewise. That was why they'd bought the Romans; the legion was very, very skilled with those tools, and had the discipline to slaughter many times their number of those who were less so.
"And we're supposed to pull it out of the pot for them, right," Afer said. "Well, that's familiar enough." His eyes lifted over the ranks of the Roman legionaries appraising the local help they'd be working with. "That'll be their lot, eh?"
Vibulenus nodded; the remark had been a conversational placeholder. The legion often had to work with local auxiliaries and it usually wasn't any pleasure . . . but it was as necessary here as it had been back in the lands around the Middle Sea, since Rome produced little in the way of cavalry or light missile-infantry. For instance, under Crassus they'd depended on Celtic auxiliary cavalry from Gaul to keep the Parthians away while they marched through the desert of Ctesiphon.
"And that didn't work all that well, the gods know," he murmured.
Afer nodded, understanding him without need for further words. They both remembered it more vividly than most things since: the dust and the thirst, the glitter of the mail and lances of the Parthian cataphracts whose presence forced them into tight formation . . . and the horse-archers darting in, loosing their clouds of shafts. Shafts thrown by their horse-and-sinew composite bows with enough force to slam the point right through the leather and plywood of a shield, forcing you back a pace with the whipcrack impact and leaving the triangular head of the arrow on the inside of your shield. If you were lucky; right through your mailcoat if you weren't, and your body lay with all its blood running out on the alkaline clay of Mesopotamia . . . .
Vibulenus shrugged off the memory and looked at the locals. Many of them drove chariots, not much different from the ones immortal Homer had described, except that the pair of beasts which drew them had feathers rather than fur, and blunt omnivore fangs instead of a horse's grass-cropping equipment. They looked like big dogs or slim bears with the skins of pigeons, or at least that was as close as you could come to describing them in Latin. Each cart carried three of the beasts, a driver in a kilt, a spearman in a long coat of iron or bronze scales and carrying a big rectangular shield, and an archer. There were more feathery plumes on the helmets of all three. Their infantry . . .
Well, that's what we're here for, he thought. The infantry were a rabble, some of their spears only fire-hardened wood at the business end, none of them with much in the way of armor. The slingers and archers might be of some use.
"Gaius Vibulenus Caper," the Commander called.
Vibulenus sighed and adjusted his helmet. "Time to get the word," he said, and strode towards the toad-guards.
* * *
"Hasn't it ever occurred to these dickheads to ride the bloody things?" someone snarled.
Apparently not, Vibulenus thought.
The enemy were a huge shambling clot pouring out of the distant woods and across the lowlands. Their crest was cavalry—a line of chariots, not much different from the ones the Romans'—the trading guild's—allies used.
Gaudy, though, Vibulenus thought critically, looking at the enemy vehicles. Two of them collided as they swept in one-wheel-down circuits that were probably designed to show off the driver's skill. And I've seen better coordination in a tavern brawl.
The allied war-carts sweeping in from the flanks to meet the enemy were fairly uniform, and they moved in squadrons of four and larger units to horn and flag signals. Those of the enemy were decorated with feathers and paint, plumes and gilded bronze and silver, whatever their owners fancied or could afford—and the skulls of enemies past nailed to their railings. The skulls looked less human than the faces of the locals did alive.
Arrows flickered out. Vibulenus's eyebrows rose. A good two or three hundred yards, and they hit hard when they landed—that was almost as good as the Parthians. Chariots tumbled into splintered wreck, their passengers flying out like rag dolls with their limbs flapping until the bone-crunching impact. Others careened away driverless, or stopped as their beasts
were injured—unlike horses, the local draft animals seemed inclined to fight when they were hurt, not run away. It was all as distant and safe as matched pairs in an arena in Capua; a few of the troops were even calling out hoc habet and making gestures with their thumbs.
