Strength and Honor (38 page)

The lock on the door opened to the medic’s touch. The verification must be in the medic’s ear.

The automaton kept hold of Steele through the door. The medics stayed inside the white room.

The automaton took Steele down the corridor at a walk for sixteen feet to a set of steps. A human guard joined them there and down the steps to another passageway.

Coming to a turn in the corridor, Steele had to wonder where the hell he was. He had gone from a sterile medical facility to—

I’m ‘still under the Coliseum.

He was back in the familiar dungeon corridor, just not approaching from any direction he had ever come unhooded. The automaton walked him past an alcove where weapons lay stacked in haphazard piles like trash—swords, morning stars, double axes, maces, elephant pikes, and U.S. beam cannons. A US cannon was not useful to anyone until it was recoded to its bearer.

Because his hands were held fast in the automaton’s grip, Steele had to lean his head to the automaton and brush his temple against the android shoulder so he could find out if his sighting bracket was still attached there, outside his eye socket. It was.

The human guard noticed the motion. Said something snide to him in Latin.

“Huh?” said Steele.

The guard pushed an American language module into his language port at the base of his skull and said again, “Good luck trying to find your own weapon in that heap.”

As Steele approached his cell, he saw with a dull and sinking sensation that there were more people in it. Almost a dozen. Had no one escaped?

Immediately he looked for Kerry Blue.

When he got closer he saw that, besides Dak Shepard, Ranza Espinoza, and Icky Iverson, the other Marines were not the same ones who had been here before. These were from Echo Team.

“Ah, hell,” said Steele. The Marines looked round at the sound of his voice. Acted like he’d returned from the dead.

On
Merrimack,
Mister Hicks at the com had been monitoring public Roman com channels. He reported: “The Romans are going to pit an American against a gladiator in the Coliseum.”

Farragut erupted. “They can’t!”

“They say they can. They say he died trying to escape capture. They revived him for a proper execution.”

“I don’t give a damn what they say or if that makes any legal sense. That’s bullskat.”

“And you know it won’t be a real fight,” said Hicks. “It’s going to be an execution, because the American is untrained. But he’s a legate so he deserves the sword.”

“He’s a
what?”
Farragut suddenly felt very cold, a suspicion creeping up his spine. “They claim they have an American legate. A Legion Commander. What is that in American?” Gypsy looked to Farragut, “A Legion equates to what? A battalion?” Hicks said, “They’re saying they have the Legate of the U.S. Legio LXXXIX Bullmastiff.”

“Oh, for Jesus.”

Under the Coliseum, the criminals were taken out early in the morning on game day, so they could be put to death first. You heard the monsters roaring as they were prepped for the feeding.

Guards in full regalia came for the gladiators later.

At the same time, Steele was also taken out of his cage. “Where am I going?”

A guard nodded up, “Arena.”

“The lowlife get the animals,” a gladiator told Steele. “You will actually face a Roman gladiator. That is a sign of respect, Yank.”

Farragut played these honor games, but to Steele the enemy existed to be destroyed. He spat on the floor of the corridor. “Animal’s an animal.”

The gladiators girded for battle. Steele was left barefoot in his unbelted tunic. The gladiators were instructed to swear their oath before Caesar.

“I’m not swearing that,” said Steele.

“Neither do the animals,” said a gladiator.

Ran;>a yelled through the bars. “They can’t do this! You can’t do this! There are rules for treatment of POWs.”

A Roman guard spoke to Steele instead of Ranza, “You died. You’re ours.” A lift carried Steele up in chains between two guards. Stout gates parted to sunlight and universal booing. The two heavily armed men in ceremonial armor walked Steele out to the center of the arena in chains.

Steele craned his head around to look behind him. They had left the automatons behind at the lift. Those did not enter the ring.

The enormity of sound hit him like an ocean wave. Mass emotion sparked the air like a physical current.

The space seemed all the grander for being walled in. The shape gave it a sense of moment, focus, energy, like a stadium or a diamond or a cathedral. The tiers of seats, the crowd took on the presence of a single Roman monster.

Steele blinked in the sunlight at things he had not seen in the dark during the escape. All the bright colors, the painted stucco and statues, the black and red marble walls. The fabulous buntings flying. Caesar’s gleaming golden eagles. And there was the head prick himself ensconced in his gilded box. No Claudia at his side.

At the center of the arena, one of Steele’s ceremonial guards unlocked his chains. The heavy cuffs fell away from his wrists. The other guard dropped a short sword at his feet, and the two backed away, their shields locked. They were not his opponents. Steele stood alone and amazed. Unchained. Life was suddenly possible.

He picked up the sword, put it through a few experimental passes to heckles from the spectators. They weren’t there. The blade was everything.

The gladiator sword was shorter than he was used to, better suited to stabbing than slashing. Steele was a slasher. He would need to get closer to his opponent.

A trumpet blare sounded from a rank of long thin
cornu,
heralding something. A massive gate opened. A gladiator advanced from shadow.

Big guy.
Big
guy. The way Rome bred them. Tall as Augustus with a lot more meat on him. He held a short sword, the
gladius,
same as Steele’s, in his right hand. He held a rectangular shield, a stout one, on his left arm.

He had a helmet. That would limit the Roman’s peripheral vision, if Steele could ever get to his periphery. He wore full armor, a cuirass of metal-clad leather round his chest, front, and back, a tabbed leather skirt round his thighs and nads, and metal shin guards.

All that equipment ought to slow him down, but Steele couldn’t count on that. That was a big damn Roman.

The gladiator lifted his sword to Caesar and the crowd. Too much space between them for Steele to dash in with a surprise stroke.

Steele, in his rough tunic with only a sword, probably ought to run, but there was nowhere to go. And Steele was not inclined to run from anything. Certainly not from a Roman.

He eyed the shield. The gladiator would use it. It made him feel safe. He would try to feel out his opponent before striking. The Roman had the time. He was not naked.

As Farragut would put it,
he’s not going to swing at the first pitch. He’s going to take one to see what you’ve got.

Steele charged in high, at a slight angle, eyes on the man’s sword side. Made the gladiator commit the shield across himself, and lift his sword up for a counterstrike across his own shield.

While Steele shifted at the last instant, lunged instead toward the gladiator’s shield side and down low.

Steele’s left knee hit the sand as a pivot on which to swing himself round with the sword under the Roman’s shield, slashing from the back. He sliced the gladiator’s Achilles’ tendons through to his anklebones.

Steele rolled away as the big man went down in a howling heap. The crowd rose in a tsunami. The great sea of Romans erupted booing. Caesar was booing.

Steele scrambled to his feet, gingerly danced in to stab the gladiator under his helmet, up under his jawbone to finish him. The crowd cheered that. Even Caesar clapped his hands wryly.

Steele tugged the shield off the heavy, rubbery left arm. He found the sword which the gladiator had dropped, and kicked that behind him. He looked round to see if anything were running at him from behind. Clear, he picked up everything—the shield, his sword and the gladiator’s sword—and he retreated to the far side of the arena.

From another gate strode not another gladiator but a man dressed like the grim reaper carrying a spear instead of a scythe. This was supposed to be Hades. The figure proceeded out slowly. Steele waited for him, but Hades did not come for Steele.

Hades strode out to the fallen gladiator. He poked the body with his spear to make sure he was thoroughly dead. Hades wore skeletal gloves, which made his fingers appear very long and bony. He gestured to a slave to take the body away.

The slave was dressed like Steele in a rough tunic except that the slave had a belt. The slave came out with a meat hook, which he plunged up into the gladiator’s rib cage and dragged him off the arena floor by a rope through a tall gate.

The sign over the gate read
Portia Libitinensis.
The death gate. Steele recognized it now. It had been dark when he had come out that way.

He dropped his shield, sprinted across the sand behind retreating Hades, to an alarmed wave of sound from the crowd, and snatched the spear clean out of Death’s hands.

He could have killed Hades right there, but Steele darted away again. He got what he wanted from him. The crowd was laughing. Steele returned to his little arsenal. Now he had a spear, a shield, and two short swords.

The crowd sounds subsided to confused muddled noise. Steele sensed a quandary here. That was not supposed to have happened. It was meant to have been Steele going out on the meat hook.

Now they had a dead executioner and a still living victim standing in the way of the next act of this circus.

Caesar gave a shrug and an impatient gesture to someone else in his box, who relayed instructions over a com, perhaps to backstage. Or under stage as it was here.

Steele picked up the spear, tried to get a feel for it and gauge a distance from which he could get a realistic shot at Romulus.

The sand in center stage heaved, fell back in a cloud of dust. A screeling sound of sand in a winch set the teeth on edge. The sand lifted, spilled from the great wooden trap door in the arena floor as it opened. Out from the depths burst an alien thing.

Like a cross between a prehistoric wild boar, a buffalo, and an angelfish, with a short thick coat of violet-gray hair and black bristles. A stand-up mane lined its highly arched, narrow back from head to broom tail. The Romans had tipped its four tusks in polished copper, filed dagger sharp. Angry little yellow eyes gleamed in the sides of its massive head. The tiny eyes squinted against the flying grit on the wind. The pig didn’t like the sand either. It sneezed, then folded its enormous head back to rub first one eye against its bristly side, then the other eye on the other side. It blinked. Teary eyes found Steele.

Steele crept forward, jabbing with spear and sword, circling round the snorting animal, which turned with him, keeping its tusks toward him, until Steele felt the wind at his back. He dropped the sword, reached down, grabbed a fistful of sand and threw it into the little piggy eyes.

The head folded back with a sound between a squeal and a roar, as the creature tried to clear an eye. Steele snatched up the sword again and charged at the blinded beast with both weapons. He buried the spear into the high crest of the neck, then slashed down the slab side of it with the sword.

Blood, red and warm, gushed free. Then Steele was airborne without his weapons. The beast’s dying convulsion threw Steele high.

He landed in a hard roll, quickly scrabbling away from the creature’s thrashing final throes.

Steele got to his feet and walked—because nothing was chasing him—back to his little arsenal, which consisted now of the gladiator’s sword and shield.

The man with Caesar in Caesar’s box, possibly the ringmaster of this show, was looking nervous and perplexed. Caesar gave another shrug. His gesture seemed to say: What else you got?

While the Romans were prepping another opponent, Steele dragged his sword and shield over to the shade at one edge of the arena under a box of women, the kind who, in collective, you call a bevy.

You would never find Kerry Blue in a bevy.

Steele had learned back in his hellion youth that women who decorated their eyes like that liked bad men. He reached up a thickly sinewed, bloody arm and beckoned, demanding in American, “Give me your water.”

And down into his hand dropped a water bottle. He drank. Poured some in his eyes, rinsing away blood and sand.

Heard the gates open with a collective gasp from the sea of spectators.

A long fat eel, big around as a Swift’s fuselage and three times as long, glided on finlike membranes that lined its either side. Pale, translucent, some color of flesh, it glided low across the arena, spitting sand clouds out underneath it in fans. The crowd was shrieking in terror, the lower boxes pulling back in their seats.

Steele dropped his water bottle.

The thing didn’t seem to see him, and Steele couldn’t see its eyes. Couldn’t tell how it was moving itself. Seemed to be sucking up sand and jetting air and sand out its underside gills.

He watched it float across the arena, glimpsed its underside. Saw a slit like a manta’s mouth, filtering, grazing. The eel happened over the dead pig. Paused there, but passed over. Too big.

Still the eel managed to rake the top layer of hide off it in passing, then it turned, trolling for something closer to bite-sized.

Steele dropped his shield and ran all out toward a gate.

The eel in languid pursuit passed over the tall shield where Steele had left it in the sand.

The monster seemed to hiccup with a grinding sound, and glided onward, leaving the shield behind, its surface scraped.

The gate was locked of course. Steele flattened himself against the gate set within its slight recess, which at least got him off the grazing field.

But the eel, frustrated with the pickings in the sandy arena, turned itself over sideways and came gliding around the curved wall, making a circuit, its mouth sucking.

Steele’s hiding place was fast looking like a deadly mistake. His recess in the wall was turning into a vertical food trough.