The Centurion's Empire (31 page)

"You will feelhelpless, as if you are falling out of control," Lucel warned. "Just relax, don't try to fight it."

"My first flight," he said, trying to find words to give majesty to an experience that the other passengers seemed to
regard with indifference.

"Not so," Lucel corrected him. "Your frozen body was flown from the Swiss Alps to Durvas in a tiltrotor transport after
you had been dug out of the ice. You are, however..." She studied a cluster of numerals that she had conjured at the
bottom of her screen. "As of now, you are the first citizen of the Roman Empire to fly into space. Congratulations."
She reached over and shook his hand.

"Space?" he asked.

"Sorry, check your imprints."

Vitellan found himself hanging in his straps. Lucel held a plastic card before him, then let it go. It floated before his
eyes, there was no longer an up or down. He groped for help among his imprints and found breathing and relaxation
exercises. After a few minutes he was unclear whether they really worked, or were just a useful distraction. He began to
methodically work through the imprint subset on space.

"We are traveling over the North Pole," Lucel said as she switched his screen back to the nose view. "Then we'll pass
above Canada. It will be night below, so you won't see much."

"And Japan?"

"Not this time. We're landing at Houston, an American city. You may have scanned your imprints for it already. When
we arrive we can have breakfast. It's time for that in Houston."

Vitellan closed his eyes. Food was very low among his priorities just then. Gradually he adjusted, trying to distract
himself by playing with a weightless pen and pad. Lucel brought up a view of space on her backseat screen, giving them a
vista of fathomless blackness and brilliant, steadily gleaming stars. Vitellan felt a slight pang of disappointment as the
SOMS bellied through the air, and the sensation of down returned to the floor.

Houston, Texas: 8 December 2028, Anno Domini

The landing was an alarmingly fast approach to an expanse of patchwork lights, yet the SOMS aligned itself precisely
with a white strip and was embraced by magnetic buffers that lined the maglev runway. It was before dawn, and the
screen showed low, softly contoured terminal buildings bathed in floodlights, and a maglev shuttle track that ran above
ground.

"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Houston," the captain said in English, then in Russian.

"Watch what you say, I'm putting the cloaker off now," said Lucel. "By the way, we've gone back to this morning."
Vitellan was astounded. "You mean this machine travels backwards through time?"

"No, it just happens to be morning in this part of the world. Check 'time zones' in your imprints."
After the experience of the flight Vitellan was bursting to tell everyone what he felt and what a marvelous thing it had
been, but as they left the flight attendants merely smiled at him with the bored politeness that Roman shopkeepers had
displayed two millennia ago. The terminal was little different from that of Moscow South Orbital, and the maglev
shuttle traveled too fast for him to see anything more than a dark blur of trees, gardens, and buildings. He looked up to
see that Venus, Jupiter, Mars, and a half-moon were lined up across the sky, as if in a great, triumphant procession.
They were a welcome scrap of stability in a world hurtling along like a driverless chariot.
Lucel had intended to keep Vitellan at a ranch near Huntsville, which was to the north and only a few minutes by air
taxi. It was also a discreet resort, specializing in the accommodation of those who wished to remain out of sight. She did
not contact the ranch until they were in a hired van and clear of the airport terminal. Vitellan listened to the argument
with interest.

"Why can't you fly straight out in a tiltfan cab?" came the voice from the descrambler.

"Don't they teach you anything about security? In the city we're one in a million. In the open air we'd get scanned,
targeted, and charred about a minute after we locked on to your beacon and began to hone in."
Someone whistled at the other end of the connection.

"Lady—look, apart from the resort, this is a ranch. We raise cattle and run a few megawatts of solar cells, and we got
enough firepower to hold off a gang of roadspikes or aggressive paparazzi until the law flies in. That's all. If you've got
serious bogies after you, you'll need help from a serious team."

"Then have a team flown in," Lucel snapped. There was a few seconds' silence. "Can you keep on hold till this
evening?"

"Can you be more precise?"

"Twenty-one-fifteen, local time. Like I said, if you want Core A security, you have to plan in advance. Trusted contract
kev-skins take a few hours to round up."

Lucel broke the connection.

"Looks like we do Houston for the day."

"What is 'do' in this context?"

"Play tourist, once I've contacted some very discreet people about a gun and some street money. We'll visit the Johnson
Space Museum, teach you to drive this van in the quieter streets, go to the World Three Mall at sunset and have a fish
curry at the Rajah Talmas—or do you want to catch some sleep in the back of the van? It's night back in Moscow, and
your body is on Moscow time."

Vitellan did not answer immediately. "That flight that we took," he began, then paused for lack of words.

"The suborbital?" Lucel prompted.

"Yes. To you it is nothing, of no more consequence than ... than a journey from Ostia to Neapolis by ship."

"I know what you're trying to say, but after another century all this will be just as quaint."

"Your technology and your society move too fast. Don't you appreciate the wonder of what we just did?"

"The unfamiliar is easy to wonder at," Lucel replied after some thought.
"Your
life is a wonder to
me.
You fought in the
Hundred Years War, you were a friend of Alfred the Great, and you saw Pompeii destroyed by Vesuvius and exchanged
letters with Pliny the Younger. According to Dur-

vas oral tradition, your father even spoke with Jesus Christ and did crowd control at one of his sermons."

"My father spoke no Aramaic, so when Christ spoke to him he didn't—"

"Oh Vitellan, that's not the point." Lucel sighed. "To me your life is a wonder beyond my wildest dreams, but
anyone
can
do a suborbital flight for the price of a ticket."

"My life? I was there for some great events in history, that's all. What was the first Mars landing to you?"
That caught Lucel off-guard. "I—it was, well, boring I suppose. Okay, I admit it, to me Mars footfall was just half a dozen
anonymous spacesuits jumping about on pink sand. Space travel doesn't interest me, I've never been higher than a
suborbital hop."

His argument confounded, Vitellan ran his fingers through his hair and watched the other traffic for a time. Most were
fuel cell and solar panel boost models, bisected teardrops like their van. A few were the driverless autocab wedge types
that he had traveled in back in Moscow. Old high-rise buildings stood out like sky-blue crystals, while more modern
buildings were hidden beneath a dense matting of trees.

"We cleared forests to build cities, now you turn cities into forests," he said with incomprehension. 'This century is just
too much for me. If I stay awake for the next twenty-six years until 2054,1 will probably see more changes than in all my
twenty centuries."

"Will you ever stop traveling through time?"

"Everyone asks me that, and I always say perhaps: perhaps I would want something different. I was a hero from a more
advanced civilization when I was awake during the Dark Ages and the Hundred Years War. I had arts of fighting to teach
and advanced scholarship to revive. In this century— I'm just a helpless curiosity. All of a sudden I am afraid to return to
the ice. In a hundred years more I might be so out of place that they will keep me in a cage. I don't know what to do. For
the first time in my life I know that I have no value as a centurion, and that my scholarship has only historical worth."
Lucel sensed that they were being tracked as they walked through the World Three Mall, just after sunset. It was an
open-air market beside the old Astrodome, and although it was packed with shoppers and tourists she noted an
imperceptible pattern in the way that some people around them were moving. For a moment she followed something
overhead, her eyes flickering up while she faced a stall and spoke with Vitellan, then she drew her Darington TS-17

smoothly and fired. Nobody in the crowd noticed the soft thump of the shot, but a pigeon that had been flying in lazy
circles exploded in a yellow splash of burning fuel and electronics that fell into the market, setting hair, clothes, and
stalls' awnings alight. Lucel had the gun pocketed before the screams had even started. She took Vitellan by the arm.

"Hurry. They want you alive, but they'll still hurt." "Who does? What was that thing?" "A monitor bionic, built like a
bird. It was following our conversation."

"It was a hundred feet away."

"No problem, since about twenty years ago. I wonder how much it caught? You were talking about Roman Empire
cooking styles just now—okay, they know who you are. Quickly, in here."

They stepped out of the crowd into a sportswear shop. Lucel knife-handed the sales assistant in the midriff without
breaking stride and they hurried into the storage area at the back. She pushed a stack of cartons over behind the inner
door, then shot out the lock of the roller door opening onto the delivery lane.

"That'll hold them for ten seconds or so, especially if the shopkeep hits the scream button." As if on cue, a siren began
whooping somewhere behind them. "Good boy. We may have an extra twenty seconds now."
They emerged from the lane into the swirling crowd of the mall again. A police tiltfan was already overhead, and many
tourists were crowding in to watch what was going on. Lucel slowed to scan the crowd.

"We should be getting away," said Vitellan.

"There will be a vector scan from another monitor bionic looking for bodies moving away from the shop. What I need
is—there!"

She squeezed off a shot from the hip, and the left arm of a whipcord-thin Chinese in a hibiscus print shirt shattered at
the elbow. He dropped silently, paralyzed with the pain and shock, but those around him shouted and recoiled. They
were a team of five, not expecting to be stalked by their quarry. They would withdraw, call in more teams to deal with
what they now thought was an opposing team. Lucel and Vitellan stepped into a bar and took the stairs to a balcony.

"Good view from here," she said as they sat down at a table. The open-air balcony was part of the upstairs bistro. "Give it
a little longer."

"What are you waiting for?"

"I stuck a distress beacon to a garbage skip over at the entrance to that lane. When it goes off my contacts will know that
we need an emergency pickup. With luck our admirers down there will also be totally focused on the skip for a good
thirty seconds."

"It's my fault for talking carelessly."

"You've done well to adapt as far as you have," Lucel replied, staring abstractedly at the crowd.
Dirty plates and cutlery remained from the previous diners at the table. Vitellan picked up a steak knife. It had a stiff
blade, and was surprisingly sharp. Lucel was counting.

"... four, three, two, one, now!"

Nothing happened that Vitellan could see or hear, but the police tiltfan suddenly turned and descended. A blaze of
yellow speared down at the skip. The mall flashed white and the skip shattered in a concussion that they felt rather than
heard. An incandescent ball of fire and smoke erupted out of the crowd, and debris hit the tiltfan. It plunged into the
fireball of its own making, its cockpit raked by fragments from its own missile's blast. The explosion of its crash seemed
more real than that of its missile, and turbine fragments from the shattered fans scythed through the crowd like
monstrous shuriken.

"Shit, maybe they really
are
trying to kill you!" exclaimed Lucel in disbelief at the carnage. She scrambled up from the
floor, dragging Vitellan after her. "Come! Every vector on someone's monitor screen will be pointing away from this
area now. We'll never be spotted."

"But the beacon—"

"My transmitter was not a beacon to home on, it only alerted my contacts that they have to rendezvous at another
prearranged emergency point."

They hurried around the balcony and down the rear stairs. The sirens of real police tiltfahs were wailing in the distance,
and a scatter of bystanders had already summoned the courage to abandon their cover and flee. The police tilt-fans
passed overhead, casting cones of light through the smoke. Lucel was wearing her wraparound dataspex again, this time
with customized enhancements tuned for layered night vision using infrared and enhanced visible spectrum images.
They stopped at the loading bay of a darkened office block, and Lucel pulsed the roller door open from the modec of her
dataspex. Beyond was a black rectangle of darkness.