“All personnel will gather in the Main Gallery for an address by the Commander,” said the voice of the ship. Up and down the corridor, soldiers started and missed a step or jerked their heads around in a reflexive search for the speaker. “Follow the red dot.”
All the other guide beads blinked out, including the mauve one that Vibulenus assumed they were following according to a request made before he met the non-coms. The ceiling began to stream with red dots, moving at a comfortable pace in the opposite direction.
“Oh, bugger it all,” snapped Clodius Afer, but he turned around in the middle of a stride because the habit of discipline was so strong.
“Couldn’t we. . . ?” suggested Helvius, gesturing in the direction they had been going. He was a bigger and possibly stronger man than the centurion, but his deference was as much a matter of relative personality as rank.
“Come on,” Clodius ordered, not harshly but with no sign that he was interested in a discussion. His stride swung his three companions into the broken, ground-covering pace of a route march. “We’ll do their business and then we’ll take care of ours. This is the army, after all.”
The tribune opened his mouth to ask what “our business” was.
Before he could get the question out, Niger laughed and said, “Well, guess the edge’s off now, but yesterday the first time, it didn’t take longer ‘n to walk in the room and walk back. I’d figure the Commander could wait that long.”
“Yeah,” said Helvius, “but yesterday was the first time in a long time any of us had a woman. Today I want it to be worth waiting for.”
Vibulenus tried again to speak. No sound came out. Although he continued to stride along with the others, his body had become as hot and weak as it had been in the first moments after his awakening.
The Main Gallery was familiar because the legion mustered in it before every battle. This was only the second time they had gathered for an address by the Commander, though, and recollections of that first assembly vibrated at the back of the tribune’s mind. He was afraid to look at Pompilius Niger squarely in case that surfaced memories which the other, judging from his continued banter, had suppressed.
There had been losses. Vibulenus surveyed the room from where he stood at the front, just short of the stolid bodyguards and the deadline which they marked.
It was less evident during pre-battle musters when the room shook with the clash of men moving into ranks to don the equipment they had just been issued from otherwise featureless walls. You couldn’t even estimate numbers under those conditions. Besides, the glitter and sway of equipment bulked out the sparseness of the troops wearing it.
Vibulenus had seen the returns. The legion had lost eighty-three men before the start of its operations against the fortress, and the fortress had not come cheap. His fingers kneaded the muscles over his ribs, whole to the touch . . . but he could not bring himself to look down and see the stain which only natural healing would leach from his flesh.
Lights glittered in the bulkhead behind the guards. The forward door, unlocked by its spinning hexagon, drifted open and the Commander minced through with steps as precise as the tailoring of his suit.
“Why,” said Clodius Afer, “d’ye suppose that one —” he gestured, and for a moment Vibulenus misunderstood his subject as the Commander, not the door “—moves, and the rest, they just, you know, melt away and melt back in the wall?”
None of them had an answer. Before somebody decided to fill the gap with empty speech, the rear of the Main Gallery began to tilt up unannounced.
There was commotion this time, but no panic. Not only were the legionaries used to the rising floor from pre-battle musters, they also were familiar enough with the ways of the vessel in general that moving walls did not suggest to the crowd that it was about to be swallowed.
“Fellow warriors,” said the Commander in his voice that everyone heard with a clarity equal to the polish of its Latin diction, “this is both a joyful and a sad occasion for me.”