Birds of Prey

by David Drake

Calvus broke in. The bald man spoke in an Eastern language, one which the agent could not precisely identify. Calvus’s free arm flared in broad gestures as he spoke.

  The clerk’s face blossomed in amazement and understanding. Perennius had not been on the verge of losing his temper. To the agent, rage was as much a tool as his sword itself was, and he used it only where some good might result therefrom. Here, the clerk was being as helpful as he could be—though it would not have been a fortunate time for the soldier properly responsible to return to the desk. The anger building behind the agent’s hard eyes was evident enough, though; and the clerk was at least as happy to achieve understanding as the others were.

  Calvus turned back to the agent. “The Senior Centurion’s chamber,” he said in Latin, “on the fourth floor, northwest corner.”

  “Three flights to lug him,” Perennius muttered with a moue at Sestius. Surprisingly, the comatose man seemed to be getting a little of his color back.

  “That won’t be a problem,” said the tall civilian as he led the way to the outside staircase.

  Calvus’s words were no more than the truth. Though the injured soldier was a solid man with the weight of his equipment besides, Calvus mounted the stairs at a brisk pace without suggesting the agent help him with his burden. It should not have surprised Perennius after the way the stranger had launched him onto the balcony. Intellectual awareness differed sharply from his instinctive reaction to Calvus’s apparent frailty, however.

  “We’ll want the first—” the agent had begun to say, when the door to which he was about to direct Calvus opened.

  “Hey,” called Gaius, natty in a fresh tunic and polished brass, “I’d about given up on—” He paused when he realized that the men ahead of his friend were actually accompanying him. “Blazes, Aulus,” he said as he stepped back, “you started the party without me?”

  “It was a party I’d have liked to have you at, buddy,” Perennius said grimly as he shut the door behind him. “See if we’ve got any field rations in there, will you…? Because I’m starved, and we’re not going anywhere until Lucius Calvus here has explained a few things.”

  The tall man arranged Sestius carefully on one of the beds. “Give me your cloaks,” he said, stripping off the woolen formality of his own toga. Calvus’s skin was the same old-ivory shade wherever it was visible, legs, arms, and face. In the same matter of fact tone, he continued, “The creature you killed is from another world. There are very few adults on Earth at present—six, only five now, we are quite sure. There are millions of eggs, and the creatures can breed in their larval forms. They dissolve rock and crawl through it. When they all become adults simultaneously, there will be more billions by a factor of ten then the Earth ever held of humans. They will sweep us into oblivion unless we stop them now.” With neither haste nor waste motion, Calvus tucked his own garment around the shivering centurion. He reached for the cloak of the dumbfounded Gaius.

  “Aulus, what on earth—” the younger man blurted.

  Perennius stopped him with a raised hand and a frown of concentration. He was trying to blank his mind of preconceptions so that he could really hear what the tall stranger was saying. The words did, after all, make internal sense. It was the way they fit—failed to fit—into the world that made them absurd.

  And a tripedal creature four feet tall, with tools and a voice that could have come from a millstone … that did not fit Perennius’s world either. He was professional enough to believe that it might be his world that was wrong.

  “Who are you, Lucius Calvus?” the agent asked softly.

  The tall man sat on the edge of the bed. His fingers massaged Sestius’s forehead. The contact seemed to reduce the centurion’s spasmodic trembling far more than it should have done. “I’m a traveller,” Calvus said, his calm eyes on the older Illyrian. “An agent like yourself, Aulus Perennius.”

  Perennius slammed the heel of his hand against the closed door. It crashed like a catapult releasing. “Do you think I don’t see that?” he shouted. “Whose agent, damn you?”

  “Mankind’s,” said the man who called himself by a Latin name. “But I came from another sort of distance, Aulus Perennius. I come from a place fifteen thousand years into the time that has yet to come.”

  Gaius threw up his hands. “Blazes,” he cried to the ceiling. “Aulus, are you all drunk? Him babbling nonsense and you sitting there serious as an owl like you were listening!”

  “How are you going to stop them if you didn’t bring any weapons?” asked the agent. He did not raise his voice again, but the taut malevolence in it sent a shiver up Gaius’s back. Perennius had not liked the world that Fate had shown him, but it drove him to helpless fury to feel all the certainties draining away from even that. There were few things that Aulus Perennius would surrender without a fight. Reality was not one of those things.

  “We knew we could find a weapon here, Aulus Perennius,” said the calm, seated figure. His hands continued to stroke the injured centurion. “We knew that I could find someone like you.”

  Gaius seized Calvus by the shoulder. The young courier was a good-sized man, but his attempt to shake the seated figure was as vain as if he had tried to shake an oak. “My friend isn’t a weapon!” Gaius shouted. “He’s a man, and men aren’t just things!”

  “Let him go, Gaius,” the agent said quietly. He was not really watching the scene. He had a task to perform, five creatures to kill in Cilicia if they did not come to meet him earlier. Perennius was considering ways and means of accomplishing that task.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  When the sunlight through the clerestory windows touched his left eye, Perennius blinked. On the bed next to him, Gaius said in a chiding voice, “You didn’t sleep all night, did you?”

  Perennius turned sharply toward his protégé. “Sure I did,” he lied. “Ah—didn’t keep you awake, did I?”

  Gaius chuckled as he got up. “Oh, not a bit,” he said. “Like with my brothers. You share a bunk as often as you and I have, you don’t notice how the other fellow tosses and turns any more than you do yourself. But I also know you well enough to know you weren’t sleeping.”

  There were two beds in the room, because a centurion was expected to travel with at least one personal servant. The two Illyrians had dossed down in one of the bunks, leaving the other to Sestius and the traveller. Calvus had said the body contact as well as the warmth would be good for the injured man. The centurion could not well be moved, and the agent would not have allowed Calvus out of his immediate reach even if the tall man had shown a desire to leave.

  “Oh, well, you know how it is,” Perennius said as he got out of bed. “I need a while to think about things before I go off and do something. A mess like this, blazes—it’s better than a week at the sea-side.” He stepped to his baggage and began searching for clean clothes. Nude, the agent’s body was ridged with muscles and scar tissue—puckers, the thin lines of cuts, and the knotted, squirming lumps from the time he had been beaten with a studded whip.

  “Do you like the sea, Aulus Perennius?” asked Calvus as he also stood up. The traveller was still dressed in the wool tunic he had worn under his toga. The centurion was stirring and grumbling on the bed beside him.

  Professionally bland, the agent looked at Calvus and said, “No, as a matter of fact, I never had much use for the sea. Except as something to get over. Which I figure we’ll do this time, little as I care for the idea.”

  “Blazes!” Gaius protested. He peered from the folds of the tunic he was shrugging into. “After what happened on our way back? Look, it’s a lot safer to hoof it, even the way roads’re likely to be in Cilicia.”

  “Maybe true if we were alone, the three of us,” Perennius said. “But we’re going to need a couple squads at least for the job. Archers, slingers … and I don’t give much of a chance of Odenath or Balista, whichever’s boys we run across, letting a body of troops march through Asia. Even a small body of troops.” He smiled grimly at Calvus. �
�A better chance than that your rescript from Gallienus would get us anything but a quick chop. Maybe you could come up with something by the Autarch instead?”

  “Odenathus, you mean?” said the tall man. He was as serious as Perennius had been sardonic. “Yes, if that’s necessary. It will delay us considerably, though; and I think delay is to our disadvantage, now that we know the Guardians are aware of me.”

  Gaius laughed. Perennius did not. “No,” the older man said uncomfortably, “we’ll enter at Tarsus on forged orders from Palmyra, some song and dance. By the time somebody checks back with headquarters, we’ll be long gone.” He barked a laugh of his own. “Or long dead, of course.”

  “Let me come with you,” said Quintus Sestius.

  The three others looked at the centurion. Sestius was poking fixedly at his welded mail. The night before, he had not really been aware of what had happened to him. “Look,” he said, “I come from near Tarsus. I can help you a lot. It’s not a province that outsiders get along in real well.” In the same defensive tone he added, “Maximus is dead, isn’t he? I remember him being right in front of me, and then … that was him on the floor, I guess. It was his cloak, so it had to be.”

  Sestius had thrown off the wrappings that had kept him alive until his capillaries contracted and brought him out of shock. Calvus now bent and retrieved his toga without speaking. He had set the objective, but it appeared that he was going to allow Perennius full responsibility for the means of achieving that objective.

  “Ah,” the agent said. Except for Gaius himself, the troops for the operation were an anonymous rank in his mind. He was not opposed to Sestius being one of them but … “Look,” Perennius said, “Maximus likely wasn’t the last to take early retirement because of this thing, Sestius. It’s going to be dangerous.”

  “Herakles!” the centurion spat. “And what isn’t now?” He stood abruptly so that the unwelded back of his vest rustled on the leather. “Listen, sir—I joined the Army because it’d be secure. Nothing’s secure now, nothing … but if I could be home again, with my kin around me, then at least there’d be somebody to trust, somebody.… Sir, take me along. I’m as good a man as you’ll find, and I know the territory. And when you’ve done what you need done, just … turn your head. But I’ll stay with you until then, I swear I will.”

  Perennius listened without expression. An Imperial soldier was planning desertion aloud and proposing to make the agent himself an accomplice in the plan. But Perennius had a task now on which he could focus. He could use that task as a set of blinders by which to shut out every other flaw and cancer in the Empire … and if the centurion’s proposal was as sincere as it sounded, there was nothing in it to intrude on the present mission.

  “All right,” said the agent. Gaius, prepared for violence, sighed out a tiny breath in relief. Perennius found a scriber and one of the blank tablets he kept in his wallet. He sat on the corner of the bed and began writing in firm, rapid strokes as he continued, “Gaius, I’m giving you this note and the orders recalling me. Between them, they ought to get you to Marcus. If you can get through the mob inside without acting like me, fine. But remember, we’re in a hurry, however much fuss you have to make.”

  “I couldn’t act like you, Aulus,” the younger man said with a grin. He was lacing his right boot, braced on the footboard. The tips of its iron nails winked where the rust had been polished clean.

  “Sure, anybody can act like me,” Perennius said. He began to work the signet ring off his left little finger. “Just remember that everybody you meet in a place like Headquarters is more afraid of a scene than you are. Blazes, boy, you’ve got the right—this is all on his Majesty’s orders.” He tossed Gaius the tablet, signed and sealed. “Or are you going to let some jumped-up pretty boy in silk make you cool your heels because you’re afraid to raise hell?”

  “Here, take this too,” the agent added more gently. He handed his pass to the courier as he had said he would. Gaius waited uncertainly, ready to lace his other boot as soon as he was sure that nothing else was going to be flipped to him. “I won’t bother to write down what we need, you tell Marcus personally and he’ll dictate the orders. First—”

  “Sir,” Sestius interrupted, “I should be on duty now myself, and—”

  “If you’ll hold your damned water,” Perennius snapped, “you’d hear that you’re going along with Gaius. I’ll get the Director to release you from your duties as of last night.” He frowned. “Your buddy too, Maximus. Might save inquiries that wouldn’t do us any good, damned paper-pushers. But first—” he continued, turning back to the courier who jumped up from his boot laces—“I want letters to the Prefect of the Fleet at Misneum and whoever the hell his lieutenant is at Ostia. Full cooperation, he’ll understand. Make sure they’re countersigned by Respectabilities in the right offices so that we don’t get a lot of crap when we’re ready to move. While you get the paperwork going, Lucius Calvus and I—” he nodded to the tall man—“are going to see whether we can find what we’ll need in Ostia.”

  The agent rose from the bed and began to buckle on his equipment belt. “That’s the first thing we do when we leave this room,” he said as he fingered the empty slot of his sword scabbard. “After I replace some hardware I figure we’ll need.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Just a moment, gentlemen,” said the usher. “I’ll see if the Tribune is free.”

  Perennius had been quite honest in saying he did not care for the sea. Ostia was no beach resort like Baiae, either. It was a working port, and it stank like one. The breeze drifting through the colonnades of the old Customs Station was ripe with spoiled goods dumped into the harbor along with the burden of the town’s sewer system. Still, the agent was feeling unexpectedly cheerful. “You know,” he said in a low voice to his companion. “I wasn’t counting on being able to see anybody officially until Marcus got some orders cut. All I figured we’d be able to do was look around and probably buy some information for a cup or wine or two.”

  The reception room in which they waited was dingy. It seemed to be used to store old Customs records, judging from the seals on the dusty document cases stacked along one wall. The naval contingent at Ostia was under the Naval Prefect at Misenum, one hundred miles south on the Bay of Naples. The vessels here were attached to the Customs Service, and their command staff was housed in a corner of the Customs Station. Ill-housed, not surprisingly, and furnished with cast-offs from their senior partner.

  Calvus looked around the room. Monochrome stucco was flaking from the walls which were not covered by boxes, and some of the marble bits of the mosaic flooring had worked loose from their concrete bed. “I mention this because it may be necessary for you to know it, Aulus Perennius,” the tall man said. “I can sometimes influence persons to fall in with a course of action. Especially when the emotional temperature is low, or when the other person is very excited and considering the desired course of action himself. The course I desire.”

  It did not occur to Perennius to doubt what the other man was saying. The agent’s skin flashed cold and his right hand curved over the grip of the sword he had been issued only hours before. “Now, tell me what that had to do with me being here,” the agent said softly.

  The hands that had lifted Perennius without effort remained crossed in Calvus’ lap. His eyes were alert but fearless as they met the agent’s. “That ability had nothing to do with you,” the tall man said simply. “I don’t want—could not use—anyone who needed prodding to act. I told you, Aulus Perennius: I was not raised to handle weapons.” Calvus grin was brief and unreal. “My weapons have to handle themselves.”

  Shoes slapping down the hall and a burst of voices discussing insect netting drew the attention of the waiting men to the doorway. A plump man in his mid-twenties stepped into the reception room, calling one last objection over his shoulder to someone unseen. The newcomer had a curly beard, well-trimmed, and wore a tunic with the two thin stripes of equestrian rank. He nodded to
Calvus and Perennius before seating himself on the wood-framed couch facing them. A layer of dust lifted from the couch pad, provoking first a curse, then a sneeze. When he had recovered himself, he said, “All right, gentlemen, Terentius Niger at your service. Nine chances in ten, what you need isn’t in my department. This is the Naval contingent, not Customs. If you’re the lucky tenth, I probably can’t do a thing for you either—you know that those bastards won’t issue gauze curtains for my office? You try and work there some night when you can’t read a document for the gnats in your eyes!”

  “I’m Aulus Perennius from Imperial Affairs,” the agent said, watching the young tribune stiffen. The agent saw no reason to hide his identity or that of his office. “I realize you won’t have received the orders yet, but it would help us a great deal if you could tell us what major naval units are available here—and of course at Portus.” The administrative offices had remained at Ostia when Portus, the artificial harbor for heavier vessels, was constructed adjacent to Ostia some two centuries before. Perennius had learned not to be over-specific when trying to learn something from a bureaucrat.

  “Major naval units available,” Niger repeated. He grinned bitterly. The tribune was young enough to hope that by being frank, he might be able to get word back up the line to where it might help correct the situation which he deplored. “How about jack shit?” he said bluntly. He leaned forward in his couch. “You know how quick Rome’ll start to starve if the grain supply from Africa is cut off? Weeks if we’re lucky! And that’s if nothing happens to the warehouses here.” He waved his hand in a dramatic, ring-glittering circuit in the air. “The only things to stop pirates from sailing right into the harbor and burning it down around our ears are the gods, may they continue to preserve us, and my twelve customs scows. There’s half a dozen light galleys laid up in Portus, but they haven’t been in the water since Commodus died—and I couldn’t crew them anyway.” Niger grimaced and added, “Besides which, my Marine contingent just got drafted into a Field Force legion. Now you two tell me—is that a safe state for the capital of the Empire?”