“So you see, sir,” Niger went on with the enthusiasm of invention, “what we need to do is stop the ramp right where it is so they can’t pour fire on it —”
“And see if the cursed place weathers to dust any time soon?” Clodius Afer interjected.
“No sir,” the watch officer said in a tone of injured simplicity. “We can reach the wall from here with a ram or a drill, if it’s long enough. If we use that tree —” he pointed at the long bole Vibulenus had already noted “—for instance.”
“It’ll —” said the centurion.
“And,” Niger continued with uncharacteristic determination, “if we cover the outside with bronze sheeting so’s they can’t burn it up no matter whether they try all night.”
“Hey,” said Clodius Afer in surprise. “You know, sir, that just might. . . ?”
Vibulenus grimaced, wishing he could be more hopeful about what was, after all, a more imaginative notion than any the Commander had offered. “No,” he said, “even if it doesn’t sag too much over the distance —” Twenty unsupported feet; the tribune knew from the Greek architect superintending construction on his family’s estate how much a beam would flex, and this one covered besides with a heavy layer of metal . . . “—then they’d snag it with ropes from the top of the wall, and we’d be too far away to save it.”
“What we really need,” said Clodius Afer with gloomy thoughtfulness, “is one a’ them lasers the Commander’s got. Suppose we could ask him just the once, to turn the trick?”
The short answer to that was no, you cursed fool — the Commander’s guild wouldn’t have bothered to buy them from the Parthians, buy Romans who knew how to lock shields and use a short sword, if there’d been a chance of using the guild’s own weapons. But Vibulenus would not have said that to a friend; and anyway, the implications of the question showed that the non-com had an idea that was still unclear to the tribune.
“Do you think the lasers could tear a hole in those stones?” Vibulenus said doubtfully. “I didn’t think it was that. . ..” His voice trailed off as he tried to remember what the shield looked like after the bolt had struck it. That hadn’t been so very long ago, except that . . . everything got mixed up between, between battles. They fought, they regrouped on the ship after the guild traders landed in their even larger vessel. And then the legion drank and slept and played in the amphitheater with whatever fantasy struggle was going on there now. Injuries that the Medic had repaired aged to true healing, sometimes with traces of scar tissue: the tribune’s left biceps still had a twinge from the stab wound he couldn’t remember getting in his first melee.
And then, when the deep red dye had faded from the flesh of even those who had been most seriously wounded — those who had been killed, and whose eyes never lost that awareness — everybody woke up in the morning, and the Commander was briefing them for another battle, at another place where the air was wrong and the sun was wrong . . . and nobody was sure any longer what was right.
“Right” was not getting your skull smashed by a ton of rock, and not being engulfed in a fire so hot it burned your bones to a pinch of lime.
“Gee, d’ye think so, sir?” Clodius Afer said, breaking in on the tribune’s memory of flames shooting higher than the screams of the men they encircled. The centurion’s brow furrowed as he made his own attempt to visualize the laser demonstration. It kept getting mixed up in his mind with what had happened to a kid in his century, Publius Pompilius Rufus, scarcely even blooded. . . .
“No!” snapped Afer, crushing that train of thought with his vision of the present situation. “No,” less forcefully but still firmly enough to surprise the men beside him; “what I mean is, they couldn’t pour their fire on us if we had that laser. And peckin’ through the wall, then — Pollux, that’s no problem. The mortar they’re set with at the base, that’s been burned to Hades. The stone’re big enough but that just means you’ve got a hole you kin crawl through first time you get one clear.”