A blue-suited crewman leaped into the hallway — the Pilot, not the stocky, mauve-faced fellow who was now the Medic. Behind him was a room of floating dodecahedrons, some as thick as a man was tall. Each facet was a different picture, most of them mere swirls of color. Together their light shadowed the crewman’s face without hiding the scowl of manic rage or the laser he was raising to aim.
The practice sword did not spin with the glittering beauty of Vibulenus’ own weapon, saving the Commander on the gravel field where last they fought beneath a sun. It flew true, though, smashing the guild employee backward into the drifting shapes that eddied to avoid his touch.
The Pilot’s face was bloodied and his shoulder possibly broken, but his life had not been risked by a sharp edge — a result as important to the tribune as the fact the laser had spun away from the impact.
“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.