“I remember everyone, tribune,” Quartilla concluded. “Not always their names, is all.”
She was sitting on her feet with her back straight and her knees flexed together to her right side as before. Vibulenus seated himself so that his left thigh was almost but not quite in contact with those plump knees and said, with a bitterness that shocked him as the words came out, “Everyone? I find that hard to believe.”
Quartilla winced, but she replied without any sharpness of her own, “Everyone is different, Gaius Caper. Every soldier, every centurion, every tribune — every crewman. I can understand how the situation would bother you. It’s — part of my job to understand the things that bother men.”
“Look, this is —” the tribune said. He bit his lips and, steeling himself, laid his hand on the female’s knee.
“I didn’t come to fight,” he went on, momentarily so focused in his own mind that he was oblivious to the texture of the skin he was touching. It was warm, perhaps marginally too warm; soft as only a woman’s could be; and as smooth as thick cream. His expression changed and the words he had intended did not follow through his open mouth.
Quartilla smiled without the sadness, an impish expression that transfigured her by accenting her rather small mouth when the muscles of her cheeks curved up. She did not speak an order, but the walls glowed an off-white just bright enough to fade the red dot into a tint in its corner.
Not only was the female’s skin smooth, it was a white in which only a painter could have detected a touch of green.
“I asked for further changes,” Quartilla said with quiet pride. She cupped her full right breast and lifted it as if she were a farm wife displaying a prize melon. A tracery of blue veins marked the surface that was otherwise as pure as polished marble. “So that I could better perform my duties. I hoped you would come back.”
Nothing better concentrates the mind than lust. It was in that knowledge that Vibulenus had driven himself to this attempt, certain that darkness and his tunic would shield his mind from certainty and that lust would overcome memories of revulsion.
There were no longer any physical cues to wrongness; and for the rest, Quartilla had been a person already.
The Roman threw off his tunic with a violence that was willing to shred it if the garment tried to resist his convulsive efforts. By Styx on whom the gods swear, she was a woman!
On her and in her, Vibulenus was able to forget the other men and the hint of crewmen who were not men.
And he was able to forget even Helvius and his two companions for a brief time, perhaps as long as it had taken the trio to die.
BOOK FOUR
THE LAST CAMPAIGN
“This operation,” said the Commander, a squat figure who could have passed for Clodius Afer at a distance if they exchanged garb, “is beneath me in its simplicity. I protested, but my superiors informed me that I have been tasked for the operation because of their desire for haste. I — I and yourselves — were best positioned of the units at a proper level of technology. Further, the job of ground preparation has been botched —”
“Oh-oh,” Vibulenus muttered, resting his hand on the mail-clad shoulder of Clodius Afer. The pilus prior’s angry sneer showed that Clodius knew as well as the tribune who was going to pay for the fuck-up. Not the folks in colored skin-suits who were responsible, oh no.
“—and though the personnel responsible have received reprimands,” the Commander continued, audible throughout the Main Gallery despite the clash of weapons and equipment still being donned by many of the legionaries, “it was deemed necessary to task a unit disciplined enough to accomplish the task unaided. Thus I was assigned.”
“Fine with me,” Clodius Afer whispered, “if the smug bastard decides to handle the whole thing himself. Pollux! He’s the worst we’ve been handed yet.”
“Young, I’d guess,” said Vibulenus, who still looked eighteen years old — unless you met his eyes, which were as old as the eyes of the Sphinx. “And ‘worst’ . . . worst covers a lot of things besides this.”