Hercules, but they’ve changed, Gaius Vibulenus thought, looking down the hillside where the Romans stood at ease and waited for the aliens who’d bought them from their Parthian captors to decide what they were going to do.
I’d like to know in more detail too. Usually they just march us out of the ship, we kick arse, and then we march back. He didn’t like it when things got more complicated than that. The last time they’d gotten really complex . . . that had been the siege. The siege had been very bad. . . .
To blank out the memory of ton-weights of stone grinding through his body Gaius Vibulenus looked over his shoulder, towards the group who would send the legion into action. The hulking presence of the Guild Commander was half a hundred paces away, surrounded by his monstrous toadlike guards mounted on their giant hyenalike mounts. The seven-foot spiked maces the guards bore glinted in the light of a sun paler than that the Roman had been born under, with a pinkish tinge to its yellow. The banded iron armor they wore creaked on its leather backing, and the scale-sewn blankets that protected their mounts rustled and clicked. The Commander—this Commander, there had been a dozen of as many different types—was himself as large as his hideous bodyguards, and dressed in the inevitable blue jumpsuit with the shimmer of a force-screen before his face. His hands dangled nearly to his back-acting knees, and when he was nervous claws like so many straight razors unfolded from the insides of his fingers. They were thin and translucent and looked sharp enough to cut the air.
Compared to him, the natives of this low-technology world were positively homelike, much more so than most the legion had fought in the service of the . . . creatures . . . who’d bought them. The group around the Commander were fairly typical. Almost homelike . . . if you ignored the fact that they had greenish feather fronds instead of hair, and huge eyes of a deep purple without whites, and thumbs on either side of their three-fingered hands. About half the delegation arguing with the Commander were females, their breasts left bare by the linen kilts that were their only garments—four breasts each.
One of the guard detail standing easy behind the tribune pursed his lips. “You know, some of them wog bitches, they’re not bad looking,” he murmured. “Wonder what they’re shaped like under those kilts?” A couple of the naked attendants with collars around their necks, probably slaves, were male and equipped the same way as someone from Campania.
“Silence in the ranks!” Afer barked. In a conversational voice: “Sir?”
“It’s a little more complex than usual, Centurion,” Vibulenus said. “The . . . Guild—” he’d always wondered if that Latin word was precisely what the creatures who’d brought them meant “—is supporting the rulers of a kingdom southeast of here. They’re in the process of conquering this area we’re in, and they’re facing a rebellion that they can’t put down.”
If the Guild used its lasers and flying boats, putting an end to the uprising would take about thirty minutes. For some reason Vibulenus had never even begun to understand, the Federation the trading guild served forbade the use of weapons more advanced than those of the locals of any given area. If the natives used hand-weapons of iron, the slave-mercenaries of the Guild had to do likewise. That was why they’d bought the Romans; the legion was very, very skilled with those tools, and had the discipline to slaughter many times their number of those who were less so.
“And we’re supposed to pull it out of the pot for them, right,” Afer said. “Well, that’s familiar enough.” His eyes lifted over the ranks of the Roman legionaries appraising the local help they’d be working with. “That’ll be their lot, eh?”
Vibulenus nodded; the remark had been a conversational placeholder. The legion often had to work with local auxiliaries and it usually wasn’t any pleasure . . . but it was as necessary here as it had been back in the lands around the Middle Sea, since Rome produced little in the way of cavalry or light missile-infantry. For instance, under Crassus they’d depended on Celtic auxiliary cavalry from Gaul to keep the Parthians away while they marched through the desert of Ctesiphon.