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 yellow-suited 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.
The guards themselves did not at first react, but the one nearest Vibulenus turned his bulging eyes to stare past the glow of his mace head.
The room popped, a sound that perhaps came from the ship’s communications system instead of a physical part of the Main Gallery. The auras snuffed themselves. The guards snapped their heads straight again before a flicker of lights in the hexagon pattern announced the bulkhead door was opening.
The Commander, flanked by two more bodyguards, strode through the dissolving sidewall next to the tribune’s party instead of coming from the ship’s forward section.
He wore a yellow bodysuit which covered his fingers instead of leaving his hands bare, a quicker clue to status among guild employees than the shimmer before their faces which Quartilla said was a barrier against bad air. Vibulenus recognized him: he had been their first commander, the one who purchased them in Mesopotamia.
Quartilla wore a tunic of many layers, each diaphanous by itself. The tribune did not realize that he was gripping her shoulders until the layers of fabric began to shift greasily beneath his pressure.
The pilot stood in the bulkhead doorway, holding a laser. The tech who had just released the barrier pushed his cart through the opening and almost collided with the crewman because both were more intent on the legionaries than they were on matters closer to hand.