There was momentary silence except for the curses of a few men, close enough to the door to be burned when it spattered on them. The yellow-green surface of the wall was angry pink around the cavities and dull gray at their heart. It looked like pustulant worm damage on the skin of a fresh pear.
“Again,” said the tribune softly, and Quartilla steadied herself over the laser tube.
“Wait!” bleated the voice. “I’m coming out! Put that down, I’m coming out!”
A legionary who had been smothering sparks on his thighs grinned and straightened. He cocked his practice sword back in an unguarded fashion that would have gotten him killed on the battlefield or knocked silly by an automaton in the Exercise Hall.
“Not without orders, ye fool!” snarled the pilus prior. He shook the Pilot as he would have a swagger stick. The loose-limbed crew member moaned softly in response, but the abashed soldier lowered his weapon.
“Put down the laser!” demanded the Commander’s voice.
“Quartilla,” said the tribune in a voice that crushed other sounds with its glacial power, “on the count of three I want you to begin burning the door until I tell you to stop. One —”
“Wait!”
“Two —”
The wall dissolved like most other doorways in the ship. There was a line of what appeared to be smoke where the laser had cut, but it settled out of the air quickly as a handful of gray dust. The Commander, with his arms crossed in front of his face, stepped through it.
He was wearing a blue bodysuit again. Even had he wished to, Vibulenus could not have avoided remembering his first sight of the slim figure. The Commander had watched Parthian guards driving their Roman prisoners onto the vessel that was intended to be the only home the legionaries would know for the rest of their lives. The figure in blue had watched with the detached interest of a cattle buyer.
And it no longer hurt to realize that the Commander had thought of himself in just that fashion, a human who bought and managed animals.
“Glad to see you, Your Worship,” said Gaius Vibulenus in a kittenish tone. “Most glad to see you like this.”
The Commander lowered his hands, and gods! but it was good to see the terror on his face.
The Commander’s personal quarters were a forest — not a glade on a Campanian hillside, but no stranger than a score of woodlands through which the legion had battled. Trees with willowy trunks rose in gold-barked splendor above the level which Vibulenus could see through the doorway. Tendrils hung down, fringed with blue-green foliage that marched along the twigs in connected rows like an eel’s fins instead of being separated into leaves. The air had a sulphurous tinge, not quite unpleasant. Several of the trunks were six feet in diameter.
“Throw your traps down, you two,” said Clodius Afer, nodding his clenched right hand toward a pair of legionaries. “Hold ‘im by the elbows, just hold ‘im — but no mistake.”
He looked in surprise at the Pilot who dangled in his big left hand. “Here, two more of you take this one — and the Medic, too. Pretend you’re good for something beside scratchin’ yer butts.”
As he spoke, the pilus prior let his gaze wander across the guard billets his men had cleared. Tired soldiers squatted on the deck or braced themselves against rocks designed for the comfort of inhuman forms. Where they could, they avoided the remains of the toad creatures who had lorded over them for — how to measure the time? But avoidance was not always possible, and some of the men were too weary to care that the surface beneath them was greasy.
Clodius grinned, and the men grinned back at their bloody centurion. Their mutual pride glowed like a hot furnace.
“This all can be forgotten,” said the Commander. Either his control or the ship’s communications system kept his voice calm, without the tremolo of fear which the tribune had hoped to hear. “For the sake of my career, you see, so you need not doubt me. The — damage —” he wriggled his short, pointed ears “—can be assessed against the recent battle, a mere entry error in the damage report. It will be all forgotten.”