Strength and Honor (36 page)

Steele’s artic blue eyes lifted. “Is that prick up there?”

A little later, raucous jeering signaled the appearance of one or more of the condemned criminals in the ring.

Then, not from above, but from somewhere in the underground corridors, sounded the clanking of stout chains, a tremendous roar, a pounding and splintering of massive wooden doors.

Kerry whispered, “That thing’s down
here!”
The noise was coming from the direction the lizard had gone. Not lethargic anymore. It sounded enraged. Angry huffing and puffing and hissing built up to another roar.

Then came the sudden sound of chains rattling out. A huge door opening. Great limbs thrashing, claws gouging, the beast launching itself up a ramp and out.

Shrieks and cries from the crowd, the voices full of fear, awe, and blood thirst. Drumming pandemonium reverberated down below. Noises of horror and disgust carried downward, followed by cheers and fervent applause.

There was a smaller sound amid the din, very close. A voice of a single someone right above the Marines’ heads. Whimpering against their ceiling became a soul-curdling scream. Then a roof-shaking thwomp!

A rain of splintered sawdust and sand filtered down from the ceiling.

Kerry Blue shook the grit out of her brown hair. The lupes had taken her hair band away from her for some reason. She moved over to crouch next to Steele, who was blinking sand from his eyes.

And it went on. You couldn’t talk. Because you couldn’t think. Just listen to the sounds.

After a while, the giant lizard floated back through the corridor the way it had come, lazy on its lift, breathing deep and slow. Its yellow eyes showed no interest in the aliens behind the bars.

Much later, after all the noise had died away, automatons returned some of the gladiators to their common cell. The men were clean, shaved, and dressed in fresh tunics. They collected nods of recognition from their cellmates. Apparently you got taken care of if you won.

Some time in the middle of the night Steele became aware of Kerry Blue tapping Morse against his hip with her forefinger.

Kerry tended to get her d’s and her u’s mixed up, so she ended up telling him:
I love you.
He had no choice but to tap on her hand:
I love yod too.

Two nights later, a screaming and howling and banging carried up from the dungeons to the guards’ chamber on the ground level.

The brawl down in the cages sounded like a hoax. The human night guard was too smart for that. He waited an hour or more after the sounds died away to wander down to see if anyone had been killed. If the deader was someone scheduled to die in the morning, he would need to pick a replacement.

He did not turn on the underground lights, as he did not want to disturb the animals. He carried a lamp to review the cages.

He found the body. It was fish-belly white, in the Americans’ cage, lying against the bars.

And there was a skinny American woman, all the way
through
the bars so she was standing in the corridor— except that her head was caught between the bars.

The large male body lay right where she could spit down on it. There was a long gash in his head, crusted with blood, and a bloodstain on the stone floor under him.

No problem with him. Someone else could clean that mess up on the next watch.

The woman was a problem. She turned her head at the guard’s approach. Friendly as a badger, that one. She cocked a leg, ready to kick.

The guard brandished his shocker. He ordered the American prisoners to get back against the far wall. Then told the woman to squeeze her skinny ass back inside.

She gave a feral snarl. The bars prevented her from angling her face around to look at him, and her dark hair was in her eyes. She kept her heel up and ready to clock him if he came up behind her.

The Romans caged farther down the corridor told him to leave her like that. They goaded him: Take her! Take her!

The guard was not getting snared in this. He was smarter than that.

He tried to keep his distance and still get a better look at the woman. He was not altogether convinced that she couldn’t get her head the rest of the way through those bars. Maybe if she left her ears behind.

From the look of her, he guessed she might do just that.

He touched his shocker to the bars at the edge of the cell, hoping that would carry through and stun her. But the weapon didn’t activate against metal.

He wished he could just kill her. Unfortunately he did not have the authority to kill U.S. POWs. And explaining the need for deadly force against a female that size would not advance his career.

“Call for reinforcements!” the prisoners cackled.

“You need automatons!
Lots
of them!”

“Help! Help!” someone called in falsetto.

There were dogs bigger than she was. He was twice her size.

He made sure the other Americans were still against the back wall, before he quickly, gingerly darted in from the side, near the bars, out of the striking line of her waiting heel, and jabbed her with his shocker.

Even before she dropped, he felt a very large hand close on his ankle and
pull.
He fell harder.

The Romans prisoners howled and clamored like baboons, calling for guards, in earnest this time.

The Marines reached through the bars and pulled the guard’s body close. They’d got very lucky. The guard’s head had smacked the stone floor hard. He was unconscious or dead.

The Yurg’s body had cushioned Carly’s face-first drop straight down. Kerry supported Carly’s head as the Yurg got out from under Carly and rose to his feet.

They had chosen the Yurg to be the deader because he was a very pale guy and he had the longest arms. His head wound was only a slice which he had cut with his own thick thumbnail, sharpened against the stone wall. It was a shallow gash, but a scalp wound bled like a son of a bitch, and he had looked frightening.

Steele gouged the recognition capsule out of the guard’s earlobe.

The guard’s blood on Steele’s hands, the guard’s capsule, and the guard’s control unit won him an amazing green light on the lock of their cell door. The Marines stared at the miracle.

There was a moment of breath-holding before the opening of the door.

Everyone tensed. This next move would trigger the alarms. Had to. This scheme could not be working this well.

Steele pushed.

The cell door swung open with a tired creak.

There could be silent alarms, but the Marines wouldn’t know that unless automatons came marching down.

The gladiators yelled bloody murder. The criminals beckoned sweetly with crocodilian smiles for the Americans to let them out. They could help, they said. They could show the Americans the way out, they said.

The Marines ignored them except to stay beyond grabbing distance from any of them.

Dak pulled out the rope they had made from braided strips of mattress covers. It had been stowed under one of the mattresses. The Marines had been careful to stack the mattresses good-side-out during the day.

Kerry Blue and Twitch Fuentes gently maneuvered Carly back through the bars. Twitch carried Carly out of the cell, Ranza seized up the guard’s lamp and they all ran.

“Wrong way!” the Romans tried to tell them.

It was the wrong way if the Marines intended to get to a door. But they knew there were automatons by all the doors.

The Marines were going out the death gate.

Kerry Blue had always been good at getting men to brag. At a stray mention of a “death gate.” Kerry’s expression of repugnance got the Romans to pile detail upon gross detail, with vivid descriptions of what went through the deatii gate, and exactly where the death gate was.

The Romans talked enough for the Marines to kluge together a rough layout of this subterranean labyrinth. And the Romans had volunteered information like, “You can’t escape from the arena. It’s not like old Rome. The lowest boxes are seven meters up.”

Okay, that means we need the rope to be longer than twenty-one feet. Thank you very much.

Ranza covered the lamp with her shirt to dampen the beacon as they moved stealthily through the labyrinth. The other prisoners kept up their clamor, but apparently no one believed them.

Twitch hissed,
“Mira!”

Ranza turned the light to a dark alcove where, piled like trash, was a collection of things taken from prisoners upon capture. There were U.S. landing disks and displacement collars in the pile.

For certain there would be displacement jammers in effect here, and there were no corns in the pile with which to signal the
Mack
anyway.

The Marines did not want to be weighed down by something they probably would not be able to use. Still they grabbed a few displacement sets just in case God and the
Merrimack
smiled on them.

They proceeded to a primitive lift made of wood and operated by chains and a pulley. Ranza doused the light entirely. The Marines hauled themselves up to ground level, and stepped out to another wide tunnel. This passage smelled of chlorine.

The Romans had cleaned the stones with bleach.

Kerry whispered, “This is it.”

A lot of horrible stuff came this way. The Romans dragged the dead out of the arena through here. The Marines dashed out the death gate into moonlight.

They stood in the wide bowl of the Coliseum, a vast pit open to the sky. Insects, night birds, and bats flitted in and out of the high archways. Pennants stood listless in the idle wind. Underfoot was sand.
Arena
was Latin for sand.

Two moons gave the Marines double shadows. They moved back to the wall and proceeded like a line of rats out of moonlight into deep shadow.

Dak tied their braided rope onto two of the displacement collars to weight the end. He passed the line to Cain.

Cain swung the weighted end in circles to gather momentum for his toss. He let the rope fly at a high column in the first row of boxes seven meters up.

The line struck the side of the column. The weight of the landing disks caused the end of the line to loop several turns around the column.

Perfect.

“Quick!” Ranza sent Kerry Blue up the rope first. It was supposed to have been Carly, who was lightest and quickest, but Carly was still unconscious. Kerry scrambled up as if all their lives depended on it, and pulled herself over the knee wall. She got hold of the rope’s counterweights and kept them in place so the rope would not unwrap from the column.

With the top secured, Steele held down the bottom of the line and sent the Marines up one at a time.

The rope was amazing. They never should have got away with making it. No guard ever searched their cell. Romans continually fell into the trap of relying on automatons. Their disdain for low tech was unforgivable in a people who lost sixty-four Legions to the Hive because of that disdain.

The Marines were feeling extraordinarily forgiving just now.

Cain and Yurg were next up, so they could help others get over the top. The Yurg carried the lamp between his teeth.

Twitch, wearing Carly Delgado draped across his shoulders, came up next. Cain hauled Carly up from Twitch’s shoulders, then the Yurg helped Twitch over.

Twitch immediately gathered up Carly again, took the lamp, and set off through the rows and aisles of the amphitheater, scouting a way out.

He was not looking for a door. There were seventy-six of them. He could expect automatons and alarms at every one of the seventy-six.

On the second level at the outer wall on the moon-shadowed side of the Coliseum, Twitch chose one of the many open archways that framed large statues. This one looked like the goddess Diana.

Twitch turned off the lamp as he drew close. He gently settled Carly on the floor between Diana and the arch, then traced his route back so he could show the others the way.

All but four of the Marines were already over the knee wall by the time Twitch returned. Icky Iverson was climbing the rope.

Down in the arena. Colonel Steele glanced up. He noticed Kerry Blue up there at the knee wall still holding the counterweight down. He growled low at Cain, “What is she still doing here? Get her out of here!”

Cain turned his head aside, whispered, “Beat it, Kerry, I got this.”

Twitch beckoned Kerry to come with.

“Behind you!”
the Yurg shouted, making everyone jump.

Down in the arena, Steele turned. The shot tore into his chest. Kerry’s screech tore the night sky,
“Thomas!”
Steele spun round, one hand still clutching the rope. Lost his grip. Fell on his back.

Kerry’s face appeared over the knee wall, screaming.

Ranza dropped to her knees at Steele’s side.

Icky rotated on the anchorless rope, skinned his knuckles on the wall, slipped. Avoided landing on Steele, and fell into Dak Shepard.

Steele’s blue eyes were round in shock or death. Steele’s hand lifted, zombielike, from the sand to point at Kerry Blue, the eyes staring at Cain behind her, bloody mouth moving. Repeating his last order.

Romans charged across the arena. Dak hurled the dangling end of the rope up and over the wall, out of Roman reach. Yelled at the Marines up there: “Go! Go! Go!”

Twitch reeled in the rope faster than he thought he could move. He unwound its weighted end from the column. Cain pried Kerry Blue away from the knee wall, and dragged her at a run behind Twitch with the others into darkness.

29

^C
OULD NOT SEE A DAMNED THING
for her tears and the dark. Kerry Blue just kept hold of Cain’s hand and ran the way he pulled her. Twitch was out in front, leading them up steps and through the black passageways of the Coliseum. The blackness broke to a patch of midnight sky through an open archway. Framed by the arch was the hard silhouette of a woman, larger than life, holding a bow and arrow. Statue.

Kerry glimpsed movement around the statue’s plinth, of people hiding there. She almost cried out a warning, but then recognized the figures as Marines.