The vehicle they sat in began to rise with such rock-like steadiness that it seemed the wall of the sinkhole was dropping away while they remained fixed to the ground. The lighted interior made it easier to forget what the vehicle was doing and concentrate on the Commander, whose six limbs were curled before him like the petals of an unopened rose. The face behind the shimmer could almost be that of a caterpillar. . . .
“Sir,” Vibulenus said, “it was a hard fight, a cursed hard fight, and that’s sent more people than these three off their heads before. If —”
The Commander waved the tribune’s earnestness to silence with the rosette of six fingers terminating one of his middle limbs. “My guild expects losses, military tribune,” the alien figure said in perfectly-modulated Latin. “They expect me to minimize them, that’s all.”
The vehicle lifted vertically over the rim of the sinkhole and continued to climb at a 45° angle while the keel remained parallel to the ground. The wind past the tribune’s face told him what must be happening, but he kept his eyes resolutely fixed on the Commander. Tight places did not especially concern Vibulenus, but heights were another matter.
“I’m rather glad this happened, in fact,” the Commander went on calmly. “We were bound to have trouble at some point, when it sank in that you really wouldn’t be going home. This incident is about the right scale — if there were a hundred of them, I suppose we’d have to do something different. And they have a better hiding place than any of the rest of you can imagine finding.”
Vibulenus was dizzy. His mind was screaming, never see home! and trying to force its way out of the body that held it and smothered it like honey trapping a fly. Never see home.
“I suppose they thought they couldn’t be seen through the rock?” said the Commander, speaking past Vibulenus toward the centurions behind him.
“We don’t think they were planning anything,” said Vibulenus sharply, saved again from his own terrors by the need to keep his subordinates from damning themselves by a thoughtless word, “Probably it was spur of the moment — head blows during the battle, dizziness from heat.”
He was shivering and clammy as he spoke, babbling to roll through the multiplex punishments that his mind imagined the guild using on the deserters. “But of course, we wouldn’t know or we would have prevented this trouble.”
Falco snickered.
“No trouble, military tribune,” said the Commander as the vehicle halted in the air.
They were within twenty feet of a similar craft, dark except for orange lights bow and stern like the lanterns of ships sailing well-traveled routes. In the glow from the vessel in which he rode, Vibulenus could see that there were half a dozen yellow-clad forms in the other vehicle.
The interior lighting faded or was replaced by an image like those of the mythic battles in the Recreation Room. There was no fantasy in this, however: Decimus Helvius crouched within walls of stone which were hinted rather than being fully limned. He held a naked sword in his hand, and the expression on his face was the stony determination the tribune had glimpsed that afternoon when the enemy, shouting in anticipated triumph, charged up the hill at the Tenth Cohort.
Behind Helvius squatted Grumio and Augens. The former’s left biceps was bandaged — his shield must have been hacked off his arm during the fighting. Augens had no obvious injuries, but he had set his helmet between his knees and was squeezing the bronze with a fixed intensity that suggested he was in pain.
Neither of the common legionaries was looking toward Helvius or the open end of the passage. After a moment’s surprise, Vibulenus remembered that none of the deserters could see anything in the lightless cave.
It could have been a trick; but it was easier to believe the trading guild could see through stone than that it would bother with trickery so pointlessly elaborate.
“No trouble,” repeated the Commander in oily satisfaction. “The rest of your fellows are gathered in the Main Gallery to watch the demonstration, but I thought you might as well see it with us.”