The Centurion's Empire (53 page)

Vitellan took the fire escape. He pounded down, four steps at a time, jumping six to the landings, counting floors. A door
clacked open high above him, then boomed closed again. Was she coming or—express mode in the elevator, she probably
had a key for it. Know the battlefield. First floor has a lounge and balcony overlooking the Southbank plaza. Vitellan
slammed the release bar down on the first-floor fire door and ran for the balcony bar. An alarm began
blaring as he entered, and the doors to the open-air balcony automatically shut and locked. Vitellan flung Mattel's
bodysuit and sandals aside, swept the glasses from a granite top table and tried to lift it. The table was bolted down.
Hands seized him.

"What the fuck do you think—"

Vitellan drove his elbow back into the man's nose and wrenched at the tabletop again. The filigree alloy base snapped.
He flung the marble top at a glass panel and it burst in a hailstorm of glass pellets. Vitellan crunched through the debris
out onto the balcony and vaulted the stone railing. He had expected the twelve-foot drop but not the pedestrian who broke
his fall. Vitellan limped away past concrete and tile tubs of palms and cycads. Up on the bridge, blue and red lights were
flashing and people were hurrying about. He began limping for the edge of the river when a passing jogger in a dark blue
tracksuit exploded with a sound like a heavy rock dropped into an iced-over pond. Vitellan ran, dove into the darkened
water, then doubled back and swam along beside the embankment. Somewhere behind him an explosion reverberated
through the water. He surfaced to breathe then dove again, crossing the river in the shelter of the arches of Princess
Bridge.

When he emerged from the water on the northeast side of the bridge Vitellan was dripping water but still fully clothed
and wearing his joggers. Sweat from a hard run, nobody should notice, he thought hopefully. He climbed the steps to
Swanston Street. Police lights were flashing, people were milling to watch whatever was going on and speculating about
the explosions. He walked quickly down to a T-intersection facing a mall. Cars were waiting for the lights to
change—and at the front was an Australian version of a roadspike on a Harley-Davidson. "No problemo," Vitellan said
under his breath as he walked out across the road and between the cars.

The roadspike's jacket had incoming losers stenciled on the back. Vitellan caught him from behind in a headlock and
used his weight to twist his victim and the bike over to crash to the roadway. With a kick to the roadspike's face that he
hoped would be adequate, Vitellan turned and wrenched the

still-idling Harley upright, gunned the engine and engaged the gears. He roared off against the red light and a traffic
camera flashed to record the violation.

"Fucking bastard!" bellowed out behind him, and something heavy and painful struck his right shoulder.
With little traffic sense and some confusion about what side of the road Australians drove on, Vitellan made a difficult
and unpredictable quarry for the police as he entered the Swanston Street Mall and weaved his way among the
screaming pedestrians and clanging green tramcars. Police ran to bar his way, then scattered as he charged them.
Laser-lit fountains, trees hung with fairy lights, buskers, and even a Morris dancing troupe passed in a surreal stream of
light and music.

"Morris dancing, last saw that in May 1358," he said to himself as he passed the floodlit museum. "Museum; statues of
Saint Joan on a gelding and Saint George on a stallion out front, museum means end of the mall, one mile more and
there's a big university and I hope that tourist imprint knew what it was telling me."
Sirens seemed to be everywhere as Vitellan pulled into the grounds of the University of Melbourne and ran the Harley
into a stand of bushes. As he limped away into the maze of buildings and gardens he realized that a short knife was
lodged in his shoulder. With some effort he managed to reach around and pull it out. His shoulder was throbbing more
noticeably now, and it hurt like fire to move his arm but he hefted the knife gratefully.

"At least I'm armed, and at least I'm left-handed," he tried to reassure himself as he limped across a lawn. "And she
can't track me—oh shit!"

He realized that Vanda was sure to have put a beacon on him, if only through blind paranoia. Where to hide a beacon?

Tracksuit? Shoes? He entered an underground carpark, ignoring a challenge from the automated security system. After
three cars he saw an unzipped tote bag with jogging gear visible. The butt of the roadspike's knife shattered the window,
and he limped out into the darkness again with at least five different alarms blaring and shrieking behind him. He
stripped and changed into the stolen gear amid dense

bushes near the library while university security guards ran about with torches. The tracksuit and joggers were slightly
big, but still a passable fit. He noticed the lights of the guards were moving away to the east. That was where he had
abandoned his stolen bike; they had probably found it and were waiting for him to try to use it to escape. Vitellan
dropped the bag in the loading bay of a building in the Faculty of Medicine, then broke a laminate plastic slat from a
packing case and crawled back to wait behind a garbage skip.

Leave bait, stalk the stalker: he repeated the words to himself as he tied a strip of cloth to the end of the slat. It had
roughly the weight and dimensions of a pilum, he noticed as he tied the knife to the other end. Vanda Mattel has seven
of those explosive nails left. Two had been expended and one was in his pocket, in the tracksuit. He hurried back to the
bag and retrieved the false fingernail. Back behind the skip he untied the knife from his improvised pilum as he
struggled to recall a demonstration that Lucel had given him as they rode the maglev to Moscow. Squeeze the sides
together until it clicks, then push down in the middle until it clicks again. That arms it. Push down in the middle a
second time to disarm. To launch ... to launch? No matter, no launch was required. He cut a groove in the end of the slat,
armed the nail and jammed it in. Now he was ready to fight.

Vitellan waited. The knife wound in his back ached insistently, but had stopped bleeding. The city beyond the university
seemed to be alive with sirens, and police drones whispered overhead several times. The last surviving centurion of
Imperial Rome cowered beneath flattened cardboard and foamed plastic packing, his infrared image smothered from both
the drones and Mattel's dataspex. Vanda Mattel. Not an hour ago they had been in bed together, he could scarcely believe
it. He fingered the lovebites on his neck. His fingers touched something soft beneath the skin. A little cyst? A little cyst,
just below one of the lovebites.

With his heart pounding Vitellan slowly drew the point of the roadspike's knife along the skin of his neck. Blood was
sticky on his fingers as he ignored the pain and probed. A small, soft bead came away, and it had a fine hair protruding.
Had she suspected all along, or did she just want to be sure of finding her green sidekick if he goofed off? Vitellan
flicked the bead across the loading bay and beneath another garbage skip on high wheels. Nothing happened. He waited.
The skip was close, too close. He wanted to move to somewhere further away, but that was too risky. He wondered if
Mattel had already homed in on him, and was already watching—

A shattering blast lifted the skip into the air, and it crashed down again, half across the pile where Vitellan was buried.
Shredded plastic and a snowstorm of foam packing eddied down on the still summer air. Security dogs barked
somewhere and footsteps padded across a gravel walkway. Vitellan's ears were ringing, he was buried and blinded by
rubbish. The improvised pilum was nowhere at hand, but he still had the knife. Footsteps padded through foamed plastic,
the Luministe agent was inspecting her work, probably puzzled and wary at the lack of Centurion splattered all over the
loading bay. Six of those ballistic fingernails were left to her. Unlike the set that Lucel had used in Paris, all of Mattel's
nails were explosive. A foot came down cautiously beside his concealed arm.

Vitellan swept Mattel off balance, then burst from his cover and sprawled over her, stabbing down into her back with his
knife. The knife bounced back—another coverall of that damned gossamer mesh, he realized. Mattel squirmed around,
catching him a glancing blow with her fist. Vitellan closed again. Stay too close for her to use her nails, his instincts told
him. She head-butted, and he reeled back. Her head was covered in a mesh-armor mask which stiffened to protect her
from any sharp blow and felt like solid rock to Vitellan. She put a foot against him and pushed him free, then click,
click, she armed a thumbnail. Vitellan grasped a length of plastic laminate and flung it as Mattel fired. The nail flew
high and blasted brick rubble from a wall, showering Vitellan with fragments. He fell heavily, losing his knife. Mattel
armed the other thumbnail and began to back away to fire. Vitellan staggered after her with another piece of laminate,
thrashing at her hands as she tried to fire the thumbnail, keeping them apart. She seized the end of the laminate strip
in both hands, flicked a foot up into Vitellan's jaw, then pulled the plastic laminate toward herself as his grip slackened.
She pulled too hard. The fingers of her right hand were curled around the end of the length of laminate as it thudded
into her lower chest. Her armed thumbnail was protruding slightly.

Even the terrorist's armor mesh could not withstand the explosion that resulted as the covalent lattice within the
thumbnail collapsed. Mattel was blown in two, but was held together like a burst rag doll by the mesh at her back.
Vitellan was flung back ten feet into a pile of packing and cardboard, and was unconscious when the police arrived. He
was still unconscious when the death of a notorious terrorist was credited to him on the night's newscasts. Lucel arrived
on the first available SOMS flight from Los Angeles. Vitellan did not regain consciousness until the next afternoon.

"You are recovering well, and you have a visitor."

It was a soft, firm voice in the blackness, and Vitellan suspected that it belonged to a medical software agent.

"Am I seriously hurt?" he replied in his thoughts.

"Your condition is not rated as serious, but you can only be allowed to full consciousness as a holographic projection.
Will you accept that option?"

"Who is my visitor?"

"Lucelene de Hussontal, she said to tell you." "Yes, yes, I'll be a projection."
He found himself floating out-of-body as a holographic bust above his intensive care unit. Lucel was sitting at a console
nearby, examining newscast images of the scene of Vanda Mattel's death.

"Lucel."

Her head jerked around as if she did not expect him to appear so quickly.

"Vitellan!" she exclaimed, jumping to her feet. "How the hell did you kill her—I mean, are you all right?"

"I don't know, and probably not, in that order," he replied. "Am I alive? Death seems so hard to pin down in this
century."

"You have a concussion and very minor brain damage,

but that can be fixed by some imprint therapy and neural gating. In decreasing order of importance you also have a
hairline fracture of the skull, perforated eardrums, knife wounds to the shoulder and throat, nine broken bones, and
eleven lovebites to the chest and neck."

Vitellan's holographic lips hung open, and his translucent green jaw worked without producing words. Lucel folded her
arms and smiled. She shook her head.

"No hard feelings, Vitellan. Nobody likes competition, but like I said, it was war. In war, anything goes and by the way,
we won."

"Was Jilly—I mean, was she your teacher?" he asked, tactfully fishing for another subject.

"Vanda? Yes, she was, she really was. She must have thought I was sending you two here as a scheme to check
Melbourne for some showdown. Maybe she thought the Mawson Institute was involved. We'll never know now."

"The Mawson Institute was partly destroyed last November."

"Yes, but they had a disaster contingency site set up somewhere south of the city. The switchup computers of their
network were online within fifteen minutes of the blast. The surviving staff took a bit longer to come out of hospital and
trauma counseling, but the place is open for business again."

The hologram head turned about, as Vitellan examined his surroundings.

"How long will I be like this?"

"Another four days, just to be safe. Meantime you can go anywhere by telepresence, you're wired into the network. The
Durvas Icekeeper wants to speak with you, and the Village Corporate can be trusted now. You're safe."

"Safe? What about the Luministes?"

"Have you been following the newscasts on Bonhomme?"

"Until a few minutes ago I was not in a fit condition to do the news.V

"And before that you were otherwise preoccupied— sorry, I couldn't resist that. Bonhomme still lies where he fell, and
it's five days now. The Luministes are having something of a theological crisis."