“I can’t,” the Pilot said in what started as a choked whisper but quickly built into a terrified babble, “because it’s only him from inside as controls it!”
“Clodius!” shouted the tribune who saw death in the pilus prior’s rigid face an instant before the dagger lifted.
The weapon poised in midair. It was forged in one piece — blade, hilt and crossguards — massive and dingy gray except for the edges and the scratches on the hilt left by the iron gloves with which its normal user gripped it.
“Sir?” said Clodius Afer pleadingly; but the fact that he had bothered to respond at all meant that he understood the order and would obey.
The Medic had recovered himself enough to be sure of his surroundings and to talk to Quartilla in his melodic birth tongue. His face quivered with terrified animation as he made frequent one-finger gestures which were not attempts to point at anything in the immediate environment.
“He’s telling the truth,” said the woman when Vibulenus dared glance away from his pilus prior. A single legionary continued to hammer vainly at the corridor, but all the others hung in restless anticipation, waiting for the information or the event which would give them a goal again.
“There’s no way into the Commander’s quarters except through that door,” Quartilla continued, “and it’s controlled by the Commander’s voice. There’s no way out either.”
“He says,” said Clodius Afer, pushing toward the invisible door through men who scurried from his authority and from the anger in his eyes. The wrinkling grip across the front of the bodysuit made the Pilot seem shrunken in on himself as the centurion dragged him along.
“He says!” the pilus prior shouted as he stabbed the dagger into the center of the blank wall.
Blood scabbing across Clodius’ right shoulder was jeweled with bright, fresh droplets as the muscles bunched beneath the skin. There was a thunk and a musical twang that would have been loud even in a room not hushed like this one.
Clodius’ arm was numb to the elbow. He fell back a step, eyes widened in surprise. The dagger hilt was still in his hand, but the blade had snapped off at the crossguards and lay, still quivering out nervous tones, on the floor of what had been the Pilot’s quarters. He dropped the iron hilt.
“No,” said Pompilius Niger in a voice of unexpected certainty. “We’ll use this.”
The junior centurion had a bruise across the forehead where his shield had caught him while it blocked the carnivore’s kick. He had lost or abandoned the practice weapons. What he now carried in his rough, capable hands was one of the lasers with which the crewmen had tried to face the mutiny.
The Medic trilled something that was an oath in any language. In desperate Latin directed more toward Vibulenus than it was the woman — authority taking precedence over mercy at this moment, though the reality of the situation was not what the crewman perceived — he said, “Please don’t let him — if he touches the wrong thing, all of us, the ship even.”
Men made way for Niger the way they had for Clodius, but this time the threat was in his hands instead of his face. In hot blood, most of the legionaries would have charged the beam weapon with the same reckless abandon the tribune and pilus prior had shown. Now, though . . . nobody wants to die after a battle, and memories of the laser demonstrations were still bright and terrible.
“Everybody move back,” said Vibulenus, raising his voice to quiet the babble. Another problem occurred to him — his duties did not end with mutiny, unless the mutiny itself were ended — so he went on, “Fifth and Sixth Centuries, return to the Main Gallery. Keep people out, and tell them I’ll make a full report as soon as we’ve mopped things up in here.”
And might the wish father the result.
There was a stir and more obedience than the tribune had really expected. The ship was uncanny in many fashions. Familiarity did not help legionaries understand how the walls moved or carts floated through the air.