Bare feet and gray, fifty-pound shields battered past the tribune as the cohort charged unordered. It was a bad idea, but a soldier too disciplined ever to fight on his own initiative is as useless as a warrior too rigidly honor-bound ever to avoid combat. Practice swords arced in curves, smooth-edged clubs that shone greasily in the bulkhead’s deep glow.
Vibulenus’ perception had become a packet of still pictures without a clear timeline to connect them. The images were not jumbled — each was crystalline in its sharpness. Claws meeting in his knapsack, breaking a line in the skin of his hand but not tearing off that hand; Clodius rolling clear, his hand scrabbling for the sword he had dropped and a smear of blood on the floor beneath him; Pompilius Niger, six feet in the air, with a surprised look on his face and the clumsy shield flat against his chest where it transmitted the thrust of the carnivore’s kick.
And Quartilla, palming the doorlock as light glinted in response and men with demonic expressions battled a monster behind her.
There was a sword beside Vibulenus, visible in flickers as shadows and feet scissored across it. The tribune hunched his shoulders against the knees and shield rims that struck him as his men surged toward the fight. He gripped the swordhilt and tried to lift the weapon. A legionary was standing on the blade.
Vibulenus’ frustration transmuted itself into strength so abrupt that the legionary was levered against the backs of his fellows with a bleat of surprise. The tribune dodged — and wedged, by brute strength — through men concentrating on the dying guardbeast instead of the real goal.
The lockplate flashed, silhouetting Quartilla’s palm momentarily. The door began to float inward.
“Tenth to me!” screamed the tribune as he slammed past Quartilla with a lack of ceremony which he suspected was the only thing that could save the woman’s life.
He was correct.
The light within the corridor beyond was lemon yellow and bright only to eyes adapted to the red/infrared of the Main Gallery. The bodyguard reaching for Quartilla’s throat was naked, but his fingertips were armed with unexpected claws.
The bodyguard’s reach was almost as long as Vibulenus’ arm and the sword extending it, but “almost” was the margin of survival. The tip of the practice sword ended its overhand chop between the bulging toad eyes. Clodius Afer himself might have been proud of the accuracy of the blow and the muscle behind it.
The bodyguard was seven feet tall and, without his armor, as ropily powerful as the carnivore on watch. The edge of the practice sword was too rounded to cut, but it was an edge nonetheless. It focused the inertia of the blow in a line which caved through the bones of the victim’s flat forehead.
Vibulenus’ weapon rebounded. The bodyguard staggered backward, bleeding from its ear flaps and with both eyes jouncing at the end of their optic nerves.
“Rome!” shouted the tribune as he darted forward. Shouts merged behind him into a single wordless snarl.
Naked, the bodyguards looked less like toads than they did in their armor. Their legs were shorter than a man’s, much less a toad’s, in comparison to the length of the torso; the bodies were rangy without iron hoops to bulk them out; their skins were smooth and the color of polished bronze except for the hands, feet and faces of richly-marked mahogany.
The bodyguards came from both sides of the corridor, through what appeared to be partitions but were only screens of coherent light. Their duties were too deeply ingrained for the creatures not to fling themselves into battle without hesitation; but they were unprepared, and the soldiers who spilled forward after Vibulenus had dreamed of this moment for weeks.
The tribune’s headlong rush took him past the rooms nearest the door where the guards were billeted. There was fighting behind him, but there was no lack of men to handle it. He was running for the main chance in the desperate hope that he would recognize it if he stumbled into it.
The mutineers were completely out of their depth now. Quartilla knew no more of life in the forward section than the Romans did. She could pass through the transport system the crew used within the main body of the ship, but forward was entered only through the bulkhead door which they had just forced.