“Their weapons are two-stage,” Calvus said. He did not coin new words, but his use of familiar ones was disconcerting. It was rather like hearing a priest using his sacerdotal vocabulary to describe hog farming. “An ionizing beam, polarized in three dimensions, that provides the carrier in any liquid or gas. Then – ”
Sestius’s armor had been of wire links, bent to interlock each with four other rings. It was not an expensive vest. The individual links had not been riveted into shape. Now the front of the vest was no longer a flexible mesh but something as stiff as a sintered plate. There was a hard weld at every point where metal touched metal. Close up, Perennius could separate the odor of burned leather from the avalanche of stenches with which the varied butchery had filled the night. The mail vest was backed with leather to spread the weight of the links and of blows upon them. As the metal flowed and fused, the leather had charred beneath it.
” – the secondary beam, a high-current discharge, travels down the carrier precisely like a thunderbolt,” Calvus was saying. “It destroys the controls of sophisticated equipment. And, of course, it destroys life forms . . . but their own body casing, though natural, appears to be totally proof to current, at least at the frequencies their weapons discharge it.”
“Blazes,” the agent muttered. He understood nothing of the tall man’s explanation. The reality was clear enough, though, the flash and bodies seared to powder in the instant. He did not think Sestius had been alert enough when he awakened to really look at his companion. Maximus had nothing recognizable as a chest or face. His linen tunic was yellowed below the waist, completely missing above it. A chain and gold medallion shimmered on the blackened husk. It had been so hot that the minted features had lost definition.
Calvus had already acted on the agent’s plan. He was prodding the creature’s instruments onto the cloak of the figure incinerated on the balcony with it. The second body was human, probably female from the breadth of
pelvis exposed when a point-blank discharge fried away flesh. The torso pulverized when Perennius leaped onto it. The bare skull was shrunken to the size of his two fists clenched together. The agent wondered vaguely what they had been struggling about, the woman and the creature, the Guardian. Blazes, though, there were more more important questions than that to answer.
Perennius sheathed his dagger and gripped one of the creature’s limbs. It was hard-surfaced but pliant, like a length of chain. The agent’s back crawled. He kept his face impassive as he reached under the slick, conical head with his other hand. He heaved the carcass over the railing. “Somebody’s going to get a good sword in the morning,” he muttered, “but they’re going to get a surprise along with it. Let’s get out of here.”
The three men stepped out of the room by the hall door Maximus had forced to intervene. Calvus was supporting the centurion with an arm around his shoulders. A fold of the tall man’s toga shielded Sestius’s face from the remains of his companion.
Under his breath, Perennius muttered, “Told the bastard to wear his armor.” But nothing could erase his awareness that the young guard had saved the life of Aulus Perennius in a situation the agent’s boastful assurance had gotten him into.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The water began to sizzle and hiss almost as soon as the cloak hit it. Perennius levered the stone sewer grating back with a grunt.
The tall civilian touched him with the arm that did not support Sestius. “I think we’d better step back,” he said calmly. He suited his own action to the words.
The agent moved aside at once, though the request had surprised him. He had chosen to ditch the alien paraphernalia in a street grate a few hundred feet from the barracks. Steam-blurred light was flooding through the cuts in the stone trough. The hissing built into a roar, then a scream. “Let’s move on,” Perennius shouted, afraid that the noise would attract the official attention that he thought they had avoided when they left the brothel unchallenged.