Falco smirked down from horseback. Vibulenus felt a rush of loathing greater than anything the face of the guard had drawn from him.
“I demand to know why we are here,” he cried, speaking loudly because the intake whine of the disks on the guard beasts added to something like a howl. The disk on the breast of the Commander’s own mount was connected to the beast’s throat by a short metal hose, and similar rigging seemed to lurk beneath the armor of the other mounts. “We are Roman citizens!”
“You are here to fight, Roman citizen,” said the Commander. There was a high squeal, the sound of an axle with an unlubricated bearing, but it came from the Commander’s slight body as his bellowed order to the guards must have done. “To fight for my trading guild on worlds where the Federation does not permit weapons of higher than the local technology.
“And you fought splendidly, Roman. Superbly.”
The Commander wore body-covering tights whose fabric was the same shade of blue as the mobile fountains. His face was the only part of him which the suit did not cover, and the flesh there returned sunlight in a direct reflection like that of metal or glass when the angle was right. The hands that gripped the reins, and the feet that rested on the pegs which the Romans were learning to call stirrups, each seemed to have six digits beneath the soft blue cloth.
“I don’t —” the tribune said. “Understand,” Vibulenus would have continued, but that would be pointless. “Where are we?” he asked instead, the timbre of his voice rising with desperate emotion instead of rhetorical effect.
“That doesn’t matter,” the Commander replied simply. Probably that answer would have done as well for the other statement, the one Vibulenus had swallowed. “You won’t be asked to do anything unfamiliar to you. Anything —” his six-fingered hand gestured broadly toward the wrack of bodies lying on the far slope, giant warriors strewn like driftwood storm-tossed on a beach “—anything but what you do so well. And —” the Commander withdrew his hand and straightened in the saddle “—you will become immortal.”
The sun glittered off a variety of new facets as the Commander’s face drew up in what might be a grimace. “That is,” he added, “your bodies will not age. Not ever again.”
His lips did not move when he spoke. The flawless Latin of his statements came from a black embroidery on the fabric covering his throat.
There was another sound in the air, like the suction wheeze of the beasts’ equipment, but louder and from above. Over it, Vibulenus shouted, “Will you send us home? We can pay you. Rome will pay you a rich ransom.”
As she had not ransomed the soldiers of Regulus, captured in similar ignominy, but even a slave could hope, could pray. . . .
“Release you?” the Commander paraphrased. He squealed again, in apparent humor. “Oh, no, Roman. You’re far too valuable for that. And now, I must report to my superiors. You’ll be given further details when you’ve mustered aboard the vessel for your next assignment.”
The roar from above was expanding into echoing thunder beside which the warriors’ vibrating bronze sheet faded to pale mockery and even a true storm would have been inaudible. Vibulenus looked up as men all over the valley were looking, shading their eyes with a hand or simply gaping in open-mouthed wonder.
The young tribune had guessed that they had come to this place in a ship, a vessel that sailed upon land as those with which he was familiar sailed on water. The thing that roared a hole in the sky as it slowly descended was a ship like that which the legion had marched aboard in Parthia, but it did not slide over the land.
“What —” the tribune began and paused when he realized that, even if he shouted, his words could not possibly be understood. Some legionaries were throwing off their helmets so that they could clamp both palms over their ears.
As if he were speaking within the tribune’s skull, the Commander’s voice answered the incompleted question: “Now that we have defeated the king who refused us trading rights, the trading mission can go ahead. But move aside, tribune, or you’ll require a full physical rebuild yourself.”