Ranks of Bronze

"Come on," the tribune ordered curtly, shouldering his way toward the trouble. This could get out of hand real fast-maybe already had. Why had the cursed fool decided to walk a gauntlet of killers loosened by fatigue and victory? And where were the guards who always accompanied guild employees in the presence of soldiers.

That was easy to answer: dead on the field, enough of them, and this fellow with his yellow suit and apparatus floating before him ignorant of what a bad pair of mistakes he had just made at his life's risk.

"Get the fuck outa the way!" snarled Clodius Afer, clubbing soldiers to either side with the staff of his bull-roarer. Niger used the side of his fist to equal effect-neither centurion needed to be told what happened to legionaries who angered the trading guild.

The tribune and his companions were not alone. Non-coms including Julius Rusticanus converged from all sides on the guild employee, forming a shoulder-to-shoulder wall facing out against the gibes and half-meant threats. It wasn't that the centurions and file-closers were less ragged than the legionaries they backed off, or that the jostling, cat-calling mob did not understand that they were playing a dangerous game.

But the legion was a hierarchy, and the common soldiers had the right to be irresponsible in every activity which that hierarchy did not deem to be their duty. The problem with externally-applied discipline is that it can only be specific; and it tends to eliminate self-discipline throughout the general behavior of the men it governs.

No matter here. The troops were only rowdy, not in a state of suicidal mutiny.

"What're you trying to do, citizen?" Vibulenus snapped to the guild employee, sure that the situation was under control. "Trying to get up front?"

Conceivably the fellow hadn't meant to enter the Main Gallery at all. He had the slightly purple complexion and stocky build of the current commander, a racial type as different from that of the first officer the legion had been given as either was from the Romans themselves.

But he didn't know Latin. To speak, Vibulenus leaned over the dull-finished cart the technician pushed in front of him. Instead of replying, the fellow cringed away, colliding with the back of a centurion too solid to notice the impact. He was utterly terrified and obviously understood the tribune's curt questions as a bloodthirsty threat.

Pollux! Maybe one of the guards down in front would be able to translate.

Somebody shouted, "Hey, prettiest, how'd you know I was lookin' for you?"

Quartilla touched the tribune on the arm to get his attention, then gabbled at the technician in some barbarous language or other.

The fellow looked as if he had been offered water in a wilderness. He gabbled back, making gestures toward the ceiling with his three-digit hands.

"He says," Quartilla relayed, "that he's supposed to disco

"All right." Vibulenus ordered. "Well walk him down to the front, now."

There was a hushed area in his immediate presence, a result of the abrupt way the tribune and non-coms had asserted authority. Quartilla had appeared in that rebound from raucousness to embarrassment; fortunate timing, though the tribune felt sure that she could have handled without ugliness whatever situation developed. For that matter, now that he looked around, he could see that other females as well had joined the legionaries. What in Hades' halls was going on?

"Move out, boys, keep it moving," said Julius Rusticanus. When the protective screen of Romans began to move and the technician did not, the first centurion reached around the fellow and began pushing the floating cart himself. The technician gave the choked equivalent of a yelp and scuttled along after his gear.

"What are you doing here?" the tribune asked Quartilla in as much of an aside as the ambient noise and his greater height permitted. Men made room for the unusual procession, watching avidly, treating it-like everything else since they reboarded the ship-as a form of entertainment.

"We can wander when you're outside the ship," the woman replied. The smiles and armpats with which she greeted soldiers were as effective in clearing onlookers from the path as the tribune's own lowering sterness. "This time there wasn't an order to return, and we just… came along with everybody else."

Vibulenus had not known that the women could even leave their cubicles until he saw Quartilla before battle this morning-a lifetime ago. He thought of that meeting and missed a step because his muscles forgot to move.

"There," he said loudly, using volume of sound to dim memories with which he was not ready to deal. He made a sweeping gesture to inform the guild technician if words could not do so. They were through the clumps of legionaries-who had nudged closer to the barrier than was normally the case. Four bodyguards, stolid despite the froth and scratches on their armor, were spaced across the front wall, but Roman soldiers were willing to stand within the circuit that could be swept by the long maces.

The technician jumped backward when he raised his eyes to the bulge-eyed, broad-mouthed visage of the nearest guard, even though the creature glanced at him with no more interest than he showed in anything else around him. Quartilla clucked out a direction and the guild employee lunged forward after a moment's further hesitation.

"What's wrong with him?" Clodius Afer asked, freed of his self-imposed duty now that the yellowsuited figure was under the protection of the bodyguards.

"He's not familiar with any of this," the woman replied with a smile warm enough to make the tribune's fists clench despite him. "Usually he'd never get off his own ship except on home leave."

"Used to scare me too, didn't they?" said Vibulenus, relaxing as he tried to recall a part of the past which he had surmounted.

"Well, why's he here now?" said Niger bluntly from the tribune's other side. The technician had slid his cart against the bulkhead and was making cryptic gestures at the end that extended back of the barrier. "Thought they never let that down, the… you know."

There were subjects that would never be safe, even for someone whose mind had compartments as rigid as those of Niger's. Vibulenus squeezed and released his friend's shoulder.

"They've had to replace the Commander on an emergency basis," the woman explained. She was speaking with a familiarity regarding the crews' routines which Vibulenus could understand easily enough, if he let his mind consider it. "They don't have a barrier key available, so they'll clear the lock instead of replacing it."

The leavening of women in the big room was too slight for Vibulenus to get a good view of any of the others. Like the sand grain in the heart of a pearl, they attracted their own covering-in this case, soldiers in expectant circles. No harm done, even in those groupings where the women were practicing their trade under field conditions.

Like Quartilla, all the females the tribune glimpsed in the Main Gallery would have passed unremarked on a Capuan street. It was possible to forget what they must have looked like once, the way you forgot that an adult acquaintance had been an infant in past years.

The barrier lit itself in bands of light that started as a transfigured lime green and expanded toward the violet end of the spectrum in stages as distinct as those of a rainbow. There was a high-pitched crackling like pork fat being fried.

Niger turned his face away and swore.

For a moment, the plane of the barrier disappeared but the armor of each of the guards was surrounded by a ghostly nimbus. The pair nearest the center of the bulkhead were closely wrapped in sheathes of blue and indigo. The guards toward the opposite sidewalls were trebled in bulk by billowing softness of red light, causing some of the nearer legionaries to push away abruptly.