"Got 'im!" bellowed Clodius Afer as he raised a dagger-a real one with a hilt fit for two Roman hands, part of some bodyguard's equipage-to finish the job in a fury as red as the blood from the scratches torn across his chest and arm.
"No by Hercules!" the tribune screamed, tackling his berserk subordinate because he knew no words could now restrain a man whose rage had overwhelmed weeks of careful, mutual planning. His hands locked on Clodius' right wrist, and the pause in which the centurion threw off the hindrance was time enough to reinstate training and sanity.
The walls here were real enough to slam Vibulenus back toward Clodius when the pilus prior shook free. The tribune had been pounded worse-even in his men's scramble to attack the guardbeast-and the amount of adrenalin singing in his blood at the moment would have permitted him to ignore amputation, much less a few more bruises.
"We need him-" the tribune cried, as much to the dagger as the man who held it.
"Pollux sir!" Clodius Afer was shouting, bloodlust melted on his face into a mask of horror. "I swear I didn't-"
The wall behind the tribune dissolved. The Medic stood in the broad opening. Behind him was a room whose air seemed filled with bright fracture lines, as different from that in which the Pilot sprawled as either was from any room Vibulenus had seen before.
In the Medic's hands was a laser.
The crewman could have burned the two Romans in halves before they reached him, but Vibulenus and his centurion were the killers in this tableau of mutual surprise: the Medic was paralyzed by the face of death while the soldiers were unaffected by the black reality waiting at the laser's muzzle.
The tribune threw himself at the crewman's knees. He was off balance and facing the wrong direction, so his target was just an estimate of what he thought his hands could reach. Either the laser would carve him with the deck for a cutting board, or he would jerk the Medic flat after the weapon had disemboweled Clodius Afer in a gush of sparks and blood.
There was always a cost but it didn't help to consider what, while you were paying.
The Medic displayed lightning-quick reflexes despite his sedentary background. He tossed the laser down as if it were hot, bouncing it off the lunging Clodius Afer by chance rather than by intent, and dived squealing away from the Romans.
There was chaos near the entrance to the forward section. The screen of light to one side of the aisle had vanished. Instead of furniture-or the marsh the tribune had half expected from the wizardry of the vessel- the bodyguards had been living amidst a rocky environment similar to a windswept knoll in northern Mesopotamia.
The barracks area was littered now with equipment and bodies. Some legionaries screamed or moaned, struggling to cover their wounds or pawing feebly at the hands of friends trying to help; but the quintet of guards visible were dead, pulped by Roman clubs and hacked with edged weapons the guards themselves had no time to use.
Death did not save the toad creatures from further attack. Legionaries were still pounding at bodies which were beginning to flow over the landscape on which they sprawled.
Fighting might be going on in the other half of the billet-men ducked in and out, ignoring walls which they had learned were only cosmetic-but if there were still guards resisting there, they could not be a threat to the mutiny any more. The legionaries who were struggling through the bulkhead door, now in total disorder, ran toward Clodius and their leaders for want of battle nearer.
Vibulenus scrambled on his hands and knees to catch the wailing Medic, also on all fours.
"ClodiussavethePilot!" the tribune screamed behind him in a single breath, knowing that only the pilus prior was likely to have enough presence of mind not to treat the dazed crewman the way the guards were being handled. He had given orders and explanations, clear and convincing in the moments before the attack. Men balked of a chance at the real fighting were going to pound away their prebattle fears-together with their only hope of seeing home-if there were no one with discipline in place to stop them.
The Medic buried his face in his crossed arms. Vibulenus sprang on him like a dog on a rat.
"Don't!" the crewman wailed in Latin. "Don't! Don't!" He was stockier than Vibulequs and possibly as strong, but the fight had been stunned out of him by the homicidal intent he saw on the faces of the Romans rushing toward him.
"Where's the Commander?" the tribune demanded, shouting to be heard over the uproar. He rose awkwardly to his feet, dragging the Medic with him as an unresisting dead weight. Vibulenus' back now ached with memory of the trampling haste of his men determined to join in slaughtering the carnivore.
"I've got this one, Gaius!" cried the pilus prior, who clutched the Pilot to his chest as if they were lovers. The crewman was either struggling or writhing in pain as fractured bones grated under the centurion's grip; but without the hand which Clodius held out to stop his subordinates, pain and life would have ended abruptly for the Pilot.
"The Commander!" Vibulenus shouted. "The Commander!" He began shaking his captive.
Men, clumsy with the shields they still bore, clustered around their leader. The lines in the air felt like cobwebs, but they formed again like designs in smoke when a soldier passed through them. Some of the legionaries swatted at the figures, then drove their way back out of the Medic's room when they had time to appreciate its uncanniness.
The stocky crewman was whining syllables that were not Latin if they were a language at all.
"The Commander!" Vibulenus shrieked, jerking the blue figure back and forth in fury and frustration.
Quartilla, with a bruise on her cheekbone which became a pressure cut as it mounted toward her hair, squeezed between legionaries to touch the tribune with one hand and the Medic with the other. "Let me," she whispered to Vibulenus; and, in a fluting trill which seemed to be a language after all, began to speak to the captive.
The Medic pawed Quartilla gratefully with his three-fingered right hand, but his eyes were unfocused and his left hand stroked the tribune with the same limp thankfulness. In Latin, though he seemed unaware of both his language and his audience, the crewman said, "He's at the end, of course. Me here, the Pilot across, him at the end."
A dozen legionaries at once began battering with practice swords on the wall which closed the corridor leading from the bulkhead door. Two men shouted for space as they stamped forward, carrying the ten-foot, iron-headed mace which had belonged to a bodyguard. They crashed their makeshift battering ram into the wall. It rebounded out of their hands, sending the nearest legionaries hopping. The wall was unscarred.
"Get us in," said Clodius Afer to his own prisoner, his voice a low growl more threatening than the dagger which he now recalled and waved before the Pilot's face. The fingers of the centurion's left hand were wrapped in the fabric covering his captive's chest. The bodysuit did not tear, but where the material was most' strained, its color became a glistening, silky green.
"Unlock it, bastard," Clodius ordered in a voice like stones sliding, while he turned the Pilot deliberately to face the blank wall.
"I can't," the Pilot said in what started as a choked whisper but quickly built into a terrified babble, "because it's only him from inside as controls it!"
"Clodius!" shouted the tribune who saw death in the pilus prior's rigid face an instant before the dagger lifted.
The weapon poised in midair. It was forged in one piece-blade, hilt and crossguards-massive and dingy gray except for the edges and the scratches on the hilt left by the iron gloves with which its normal user gripped it.
"Sir?" said Clodius Afer pleadingly; but the fact that he had bothered to respond at all meant that he understood the order and would obey.