“You guide the blue turtle that chooses the dead?” Vibulenus asked. All his muscles were drawn tight as he pretended to concentrate on dressing. At least the linen garment would cover some of the terrible stain on his new flesh.
“Sure,” said the Pilot. “The recovery vehicle, the meatwagon. This your first time back in it, fella?”
“I suppose so,” Vibulenus said. That was as close as he could come at this moment to acknowledging what had just happened to him.
He shook himself and straightened, back proud and jaw thrust out. He was Gaius Vibulenus Caper, notwithstanding anything that might have happened to him in the immediate past. “These others, then,” he said with an imperious sweep toward the convexities in the wall. The opening through which he had stepped was now a sideways dome, though there had been no sound or motion behind him. “They’re more of us — soldiers — being, that is . . . cured?”
“Would be if you hadn’t been the last,” the Pilot agreed. “Depends some on just what we’re talkin’ about, you know — clean cut or a smash, how many wounds and how long before pickup. With you —” he paused and sucked in his lips again. “Well, you know, fella, you were pretty near the bottom of the prognosis list on all counts. Took damn near a day to dig you out after the wagon located you. Bloody lucky, you are.”
“Yes, I see,” said Vibulenus’ mouth alone, because his mind was busy filing data without looking at it. Not just now.
“All right, fella,” said the Pilot. “We’re gonna be in normal space till who knows when, given how you and the others got torn up. But there’s some new twists in entertainment this run, so go on and get started.”
A section of floor rotated a quarter turn and opened onto a helical ramp downward. The ramp’s slope looked too steep for a walking man, but Vibulenus had learned long since that angles and dimensions on the vessel were not always what they seemed.
“You must be very skillful,” said the tribune as his foot poised above the ramp.
The Pilot met his eyes for a moment. Then they slipped away. Without any further attempt to retrieve the facade of superiority, the blue figure said, “Skill? Are you kidding? I can juggle five balls in the air, d’ye know? That takes a lot more skill than watching a console to see that the hardware’s doing its job.”
“Which,” he concluded bitterly, “it always is.”
“But. . . .” Vibulenus said. The questions in his mind were too confused to articulate, but by drawing his right index finger the length of his left arm — hairless and colored Pompeian red — he communicated everything he needed to get out.
“Look, fella,” the Pilot said with a sneer intended more generally than for the Roman who was its immediate target, “you couldn’t whack off somebody’s head with your bare hand, but you use a sword and it’s no sweat, right?”
Vibulenus lifted an eyebrow in agreement, though his arm ached with the remembered effort of swinging his sword. Heads didn’t just fall off, and an armored enemy was no mere log to be hacked at until he fell. “Go on,” he said, waiting for understanding to come.
“Well,” the Pilot continued, “live cargo like you could never handle it, but just about anybody from a Class One planet — anybody who could feed himself — can run the medical repair station, or the ship. Blazes, me’n the Medic ‘r crosstrained so if I croak in the middle of a Transit, that don’t matter shit t’ the guild except they don’t worry about a pension. We don’t get longevity treatments like you valuable cargo do.”
“I see,” said Vibulenus, who was beginning to do just that. “As you say, I’d best be getting back to my fellows.”
He had been correct about the ramp. It felt like a level surface as he walked down it, though he slitted his eyes to avoid disorientation from the room he was leaving.
When Gaius Vibulenus stepped out of wall into the corridor beside the baths, there were over twenty soldiers nearby. He knew most of them at least by sight, now, and Decimus Pacuvius Semo — another tribune — almost walked into him.