The Centurion's Empire (26 page)

A hand-held gonne, then, but where was the smoke of its fuse? Could it be that—no, impossible.
Vitellan saw white columns beyond the sky-blue blankets of his bed, and there were two men in dark, finely tailored
jackets beneath open white robes with colored, oblong brooches pinned to their chests. Perhaps one of the men was a
woman, Vitellan wondered, his or her grooming was subtly softer. They walked away, and the one with the warrior's
bearing walked past again, alert for anything unusual. His gaze scanned across Vitellan's face.

"His eyes are open!" the warrior exclaimed, jerking his weapon up to point at the Roman's head. A hand-gonne, there
was no doubt of it. Vitellan thought his words familiar, but missed their meaning. Perhaps it was a dialect of French, of
which he only had a smattering. There was a patter of approaching footsteps.

"How did he wake so quickly?" asked the woman. "It should not have been for another day."

"The devil gives him strength," said the guard.

The people in front of Vitellan were milling about in confusion, and he was confused as well. He had survived another
plunge through time, but this was all so unfamiliar. Where was the bath of warm water? His chest was not at all painful
from the pounding to restart his heart and breathing, yet he was alive. How had these villagers revived him without
pounding his heart back into action? If it came to that, his stomach was not hurting either. After a decade of pain
Vitellan was now quite unsettled by its absence. Sweet scents like the perfumes of a strange pomme-d'embre hung on
the air.

The architecture was sharp and clean, the walls were flawless white. Almost. . . Roman! Had civilization returned to the
styles of the century of his birth? He was lying in a bed. It was soft yet supportive, the blankets were clean and pale blue,
and their weave was very fine. Glowing dots winked on the sides of glossy boxes draped with colored strings and cords.
Unfamiliar insects chirped sharply in time with the lights. Have I slept too long, Vitellan wondered?

More people arrived to mill about in front of him. Most wore robes like open white togas over dun-colored jackets and
trousers. They have the bearing of senators and their guards, Vitellan speculated. One of the women clothed in white sat
on the bed and peered into his eyes while holding up a light that blazed like a speck of the sun.

"Salve," Vitellan whispered. "Quid est—"

"He's speaking Latin," she said, looking up at someone behind him.

"Bonhomme must be told," said a man.

"Bonhomme is in Santiago, he flies back tomorrow. This was not expected."

Vitellan could glean crumbs of meaning from the distant descendant of the French that he had heard in the fourteenth
century. Their manner told him a lot more. They were brusque, unfriendly, and suspicious. A horrifying thought crossed
the Roman's mind: they kept saying
Bonhomme.
These people might think that he was Jacque Bonhomme. Had the
events of... God in Heaven, only last night, become a great legend over the centuries that had actually passed? Had he
been revived as the monster of St. Leu ... or had Bonhomme been discovered and revived first, and gone on to start a new
uprising of Jacquerie?

The sheets and blankets were stripped back, and Vitellan saw that he was naked. More people came to attach green pads
trailing orange cords to his limbs. His muscles began to work involuntarily. Once he got over the initial shock the effect
was quite pleasant, something like a long, languid stretch. None of those tending him spoke Latin, but their French had
something in common with its fourteenth-century ancestor. By concentrating he began to deduce more and more
meaning from what was being spoken around him.

"I have word that Bonhomme is returning," someone said to one of the guards. "His suborbital lands tomorrow
afternoon. A squad of his Inner Security will take over at the change of shift and remain until he arrives."
The guard made an unfamiliar gesture, but it had the crispness of a salute. Was Latin as dead as Etruscan by now,
Vitellan wondered? No, one of the, the . . . physicians, perhaps, had definitely recognized his first words as Latin. The
physicians returned to remove the massaging pads and help him from the bed. At first Vitellan's knees buckled with
every step, but his strength returned quickly. Too quickly. His other four revivals had been much worse than this. They
kept touching little tubes to his skin, tubes that hissed and left the skin tender. When he finally ate, it was sitting up at a
table. The soup was filled with shredded meat and vegetables, yet his stomach did not revolt at the solid pieces or hurt at
all. No pain in his stomach ... he began to take almost sensual pleasure in being free of that pain.
The guard changed as he finished the soup. There were

five newcomers, two women and three men. Each carried a gonne, but they had more of the barbarian's swagger than the
crisp discipline of the previous guards. Two of these guards followed Vitellan and one of the white-robed men into a tiled
room where he was washed and scoured by a pair of metal arms that protruded from the wall. A hose that moved of its
own accord, like a silver snake, drenched him with hot, steaming water. Before being returned to bed Vitellan was
dressed in a green robe that was laced up along the back. He sank to the pillows with relief, exhausted with the strain of
merely walking and eating. He was strapped to the bed, and the bindings were strangely soft yet unyielding. His arms
were left free, but the buckles that opened to the touch of the physicians remained inert to his fingers.
Now Vitellan noticed a new woman among the guards— above average height, but with an easy grace of movement. She
had dark, slightly wavy hair in a pageboy style, cut so that it could never cover her eyes. Hers was a big smile, an easy
smile, she seemed something of a harlot, but more than that. She blended in by putting people at their ease, rather than
by being suspiciously nondescript. Her figure was just a little thin to draw admiring glances, and she wore a pastel-blue
skirt—mid-thigh and loose, like that of a Roman youth.

Vitellan wondered if he had met her before. Something about her was comfortingly familiar, yet something else was
unsettling as well. She moved too easily, she was too confident. Most of the others left after a few minutes, but the
woman and one physician remained behind with a guard.

She was speaking with the physician when she pointed to the guard and seemed to rub at her finger. Something made a
loud, muffled clack. A wet, red patch appeared at the center of the man's sternum. His eyes bulged with what might have
been horror or disbelief, had he not already been dead from shock. As the physician gaped in horror she struck his neck
with the edge of her hand and he collapsed immediately.

The woman scooped up the guard's fallen gonne and clipped something to the handle, then she called to the other
guard. Her voice was level, with no alarm at all. As he appeared she fired at his head. It disintegrated with a sound like a
heavy book being dropped, and his body collapsed across that of the physician. The girl vanished from Vitellan's field of
view. There was a soft sputtering outside the ward.

She returned, now wearing a white coat. He noticed that two fingers of her left hand were bleeding where the nails had
been.

"Do as I say when I release you," she whispered in Latin. It was odd, awkward Latin, but Latin nevertheless.

"Are you with Jacque Bonhomme and his followers?" asked Vitellan.

"No, I'm here from Durvas, your village. Will you do as I say?" she demanded.

"Yes, yes."

She pointed a gonne at a box on a trolley by the wall, and it burst into shards and smoke from the stuttering fire. The
buckles of Vitellan's straps popped open at once. He felt stiff and fatigued as he sat up, but his rescuer touched a rod to
both of his legs. It hissed sharply, and the skin tingled coldly where it had been. The leaden feeling in his muscles
melted away within moments.

"A miracle wand!" he exclaimed softly.

She shook her head. "A physician's tool. The, ah, philter in it is not really good for you but we're desperate.
You're-probably loaded with implants."

"Implants?"

"Mechanisms, engines within your body that call to your enemies through false hairs. Never mind, we'll scrub you when
we get out. Quickly, get into that physician's clothes—yes I know he's a mess. Just do it!"
She rolled the dead guard off the physician. Beneath his blood-spattered white coat the man was wearing creaseless
checked trousers and a blue striped shirt. His shoes were slightly large for Vitellan, but the woman packed soft paper
inside for a tight fit. She was quick and efficient, as if she might have done such a thing every day.

"My name is Lucel Hunter. If we live through the next ten minutes I'll tell you more. Come, do exactly as I say and trust
me."

She pressed another tube against his skin. Like the others it hissed, leaving a cold, tingling sensation. "What is that?"

"A disease to counter, ah, a sleeping potion. Like I said, trust me."

Out in the corridor were three more bodies. Lucel stripped a coat from one. There was a neat red spot between his eyes.

"No holes, no blood, close enough fit. Put it on and button up to hide that blood on the shirt—no, buttons work like
this."

Vitellan glanced about fearfully. "I gleaned from their strange French that unseen eyes watch me."

"The unseen eyes have been blinded for a few minutes. I am not alone in this rescue, I have friends who are busy in
other rooms."

They had descended three floors by what Lucel called fire stairs when something like a huge bull began to bellow.

"That's an alarm—something like a trumpet. One of my agents in the security center has frozen the doors to your ward,
so the guards will be busy trying to break in there for at least another minute."

"Frozen them? With ice?"

"Not ice, and my agent's not human either."

The fire doors were still free as they emerged into the foyer. Lucel had the gonne under her coat.

"Nobody can leave," a guard ordered as they approached the entrance. The words were intelligible to Vitellan, but only
just. Through vast glass walls he could see that it was night outside, although lamps on thin, high pillars blazed with a
wondrous intensity.

"What is wrong, Monsieur?" asked Lucel. "What is the alarm? We have to go—"

"Just stay here, Madame."

She motioned Vitellan to stand to one side with her, and as the guard turned away she pointed her left thumb at the
sliding door and squeezed with the fingers of her free hand. There was another loud clack, followed by a blast like a
thunderclap as the door shattered. Lucel led him crunching through crumbly glass, spraying death from her gonne into
the nearby guards. As they ran out into the night several of the bystanders produced gonnes of their own and opened fire.

"This way, down that street, stay beside me and keep your head down."

The air was full of sharp crackles and angry wasps seemed to buzz all around them as they ran. People screamed and
flung themselves to the ground as Vitellan and Lucel left the square in front of the hospital. They dashed down
progressively darker, narrow streets until she suddenly pushed him through a door. Two men began to strip Vitellan's
clothes off. Something roared like a lion, and the room swayed and began to move.

A huge waggon drawn by lions, Vitellan told himself, but it was probably nothing strange for this century. He was given
new clothes and helped to dress in the strange fashions with even stranger fasteners. Over to one side Lucel was
stripping the skin of her face away. His senses overloaded beyond bearing, Vitellan vomited up his soup.

"Give him a scan and an EMP burst to kill anything obvious," Lucel told the others. "The rest can wait." She switched
back to Latin. "Vitellan, we are breaking your invisible chains, but we both need new faces as well. Did you see me strip
my face off just now?"

"Yes, amazing, I—"

"And you and I are getting new faces right away. Just do as you're told, and don't struggle."
One of the men held up something like pink baker's dough on a piece of cloth. The face felt like a scalding wet towel
being pressed against his skin, and the itching was almost unbearable as it cooled. The men touched up rough edges as
the enclosed waggon lurched to a stop and the lions became quiet. The skin beneath the mask still felt numb and heavy,
and itched unbearably at the edges.

"Don't touch!" snapped Lucel as his hand came up. "A good face, but it's still soft and easily marred. You'll only have it
for an hour. We are at a place called the Gare du Nord, it's a type of port for ships that sail on land."
At the Gare du Nord they walked past signs that included the words est, chemine de levitation magnetique de
l'est, and maglev eastern lines, but the words were meaningless to Vitellan. In spite of this the place was more familiar
to him than anything that he had seen for the past ten of his waking years. The Rome he had last seen in 79 a.d. was a
bustling, crowded jumble of people like this, although the smells and sounds here were sharp, harsh and alien.
Numerals and words glowed from murals—and the face of Jacque Bonhomme stared triumphantly down from amazingly
uniform rows of portraits!