Wolf’s Empire: Gladiator (23 page)

Licinus signaled the technicians in the observation booth high above us. Holographic snow began to fall. The terraform blocks took shape, as the hologram overlaid them, transforming the deck into an approxmation of flat tundra surrounded at the edges by clustered outcroppings of layered ice and rock. Along with the freezing temperature, we had our own small-scale ice world and at its center a makeshift hippodrome—a classical oblong racing track. A razor-sharp spina—a metal spine that each chariot had to avoid and turn about—ran down the middle of the track.

“The winning team will be given additional recreation leave at the ship's baths, and the losing team will be punished,” Licinus said. “Right!” he barked. “First round of chariot fights. Nonlethal force for starters. Go!”

Licinus' team shot away, leaving us to scramble to our chariot, fumbling to fasten harnesses and straps.

Licinus' chariot braked suddenly, allowing our quadriga to draw alongside before hitting us with a sideswipe. By pure luck I managed to get a hand to a rail and prevent being thrown over the side. Grasping the pole for balance, I threw Orbis, aiming to take out Barbata at the rear of the other chariot, at the exact moment that Castor Corvinus reversed and rammed us again. Instead of making a clean cast, I had to jump back to avoid losing a leg as a curved blade protruding from their hull cut into our armored hide. Orbis' transit was way off, and Barbata unhurriedly deployed the energy net from her trident caster. It covered Orbis and sent him scuttling to the ground. Disarmed like an amateur, I lost my balance and fell, hitting the deck hard.

The Sertorians were all so fast. By comparison, I felt like I was drowning underwater, flailing my arms and legs about, instead of fighting. I scurried out of the way to avoid the enemy chariot's blades as they tried to run me down. Lurco went for our driver, but Crassus threw his javelin and caught the giant a glancing blow on his shoulder, throwing his hammer swing off target. Lurco was having the same problem as me—he was too slow and lacked chariot combat experience. The two drivers were excellent though, turning in sharp, tight arcs, working to outposition each other. Pollux managed to angle our chariot and ram his brother's into the spina, but at the last moment Castor countered and tilted his craft, coming under our chariot and using one of his spikes that was bent like a horn to displace a hover disc. I watched on as our chariot skittered across the floor, creating a trail of sparks until it crashed at high speed into a terraform block. Castor's bold move cost his own team, though, sending Lurco and Barbata flying onto the deck. Lurco landed flat on his back and took a knock to the head, but Barbata spun in midair and landed gracefully on one knee on the deck beside me.

Licinus called time. “The fact that my team won matters little because right now none of you are worth a rat's ass! I thought you were supposed to be a discus fighter?” He snarled at me. “You throw your weapon like a retarded monkey.” Before Lurco could recover his senses and rise, Licinus put his boot on his chest and pushed him back down to the ground. “It should come as no surprise to anyone here that the weak links in our chain are Accala and Lurco. I want to win that tournament decisively, and I won't have the team carry deadweight.” He tapped each of us quickly with his vintus, delivering a sharp electrical shock that took my breath away.

“Immunes, get in and get to work. You've got sixty seconds to get the chariots up and running.” Like ants on a carcass, the collegia immunes moved quickly and efficiently to tend to the team and the vehicles. Licinus explained that our crushed chariot was now classified as a naufragia—a shipwreck. To keep the pace of the games running hot, the rules stated that if the immunes couldn't get it up and running again in two minutes, then it was deemed unrecoverable and the team had to move on without it. Licinus gave them half that time.

At Licinus' order, medics tended to everyone on the team with the exception of Lurco and me, additional punishment for our poor performance. They received salves, poultice patches, and stimulant shots, and when the sixty seconds were up, both the chariots and the injured were in working order again. As I pulled Orbis free of Barbata's net, I spotted Julia finishing up work on my chariot. Was she also going to be there with the immunes on Olympus Decimus? Lending us support in the arena?

“I'll save you a poultice for the pain,” she said quickly as she passed by, lugging her heavy toolbox. “Watch out for Licinus, he's the fastest.”

“Right, mount up, you morons,” Licinus said. “You're going to keep at it until you can complete a circuit without falling off your fucking vehicles.”

We fought six more chariot rounds before Licinus called it quits for the day. At the end, he drew out his vintus once more and tapped Lurco and me on the chest. No shock this time though, he was registering his displeasure as a centurion would, signaling the team to deliver an administrative beating to the worst players of the day.

“Don't try to defend yourself,” Crassus said as they moved in. “It'll only make things worse.”

Lurco tried to stand his ground, but Barbata singled him out and dropped him at once.

“It's nothing personal,” Mania said, driving the tip of her bow staff into my solar plexus. “It's for your own good.” I doubled up and fell to the cold deck. And then there was just pain as the blows rained down upon me quick and hard.

Afterward, the team wandered off and I lay there bleeding and bruised. How was it possible for the Sertorians to be so superior in strength and speed? Not to mention resilience; the hits they took during training washed right off them. The medics had virtually nothing to do in the aftermath, but the Hawks should have sported the same cuts, bruises, and breaks that I did. It wasn't just that they were good; they were beyond good. I'd studied countless hours of footage of Crassus and Licinus and I'd been pushing myself under Marcus' direction to get to a standard where I could hold my own against them, but these were not the same fighters. The Blood Hawks didn't need me at all, or Lurco, for that matter. The six Sertorians on their own were an unbeatable combination.

*   *   *

A
LBA LED ME TO
shower and change before returning me to the cabin. Julia Silana was there, staring out the portal.

“Good timing,” she said, “we're about the leave the solar system.”

I went to look, ignoring the aching muscles and stinging cuts.

“We're going through the Janus Cardo now.”

From where our cabin was positioned, I couldn't see
Incitatus'
bow or the entrance to the shining energy gate that would transport us, but the ship lurched quickly forward and the view changed to amorphous gray clouds charged with crackling lightning that sent flashing light into the cabin as
Incitatus
was sucked into the gateway. A last bright flash, and the clouds gave way to a field of violet-streaked mercurial silver as we entered hyperspace.

“Not bad, huh?” Julia said.

She was dissatisfied with my lack of enthusiasm and nudged me with her elbow. “I don't think much about the gods, but you know what I do believe in?”

“I don't care,” I said. “Where's that pain patch you promised me?”

“I believe in celestial mechanics,” she continued, ignoring me. “That the entire universe is one great machine and we're all little parts of it. From the smallest atom to the largest nebula, all one great celestial city. Doesn't that make sense? That we've got little universes of bacteria within each one of us and maybe we're also part of a big body, something so big we can't see it, just as the bacteria aren't aware of us. Wheels within wheels. That's what I think of when I see something like this Janus Cardo. It's a beautiful thing.”

“Nothing is beautiful,” I said. Exhausted and injured, the intrusive buzzing headache returned.

“Those two quadrigas you're working out on are,” Julia said, as I climbed up into my bunk and Alba secured my lead for the night. Forearm over my eyes to block the harsh overhead light until they called curfew and turned it off. I was so tired I couldn't move a muscle.

“Look after those chariots. The immunes have decked both out for combat so you can practice against each other, but before we reach the arena world, we'll be taking one and stripping it of arms for our own use.”

“You're definitely on the auxiliary team, then?”

“You bet. Julia Silana, first-grade field engineer. When your chariot gets trashed, I'll be there to get it up and running again.”

“That's hardly reassuring,” I said. “You couldn't even fix the light in the ceiling.”

“I guess you're screwed, then, right?” She laughed. Julia tossed a pain poultice, a small adhesive patch, onto my bunk and sat down at the cabin's bench, sorting through her toolbox. I tried to summon a word of thanks as I pressed it onto the back of my right hand, but I was running on an empty tank and could offer nothing of myself, even so small a gesture.

When I was a girl I'd daydream about leaving the familiar confines of the solar system and taking my first steps out into the greater empire, but as we passed through the hyperspace tunnel, I felt deflated, desolate. The violet light outside spilled through the portal and played across my hands so that if I held them over the side of the bunk, I couldn't see the bruises. When I drew them back under the overhead light, though, all the bruises were gone. Julia's poultice must have had healing properties too. Muscular pain slowly ebbed away too, although the headache lingered on, and I found I could think enough to turn the day's events over in my mind. Did the Sertorians' newfound abilities have limits? How hard would they have to be worked before their strength and speed waned? I resolved to find out.

“Julia?” I asked. She was still tinkering away on the bench. “Back in the gym you said to watch out for Licinus. I could barely see him move. It's…” I searched for the right word.

“It's gods-be-damned creepy is what it is, hey?”

“He wasn't always that fast, was he? I've seen old footage of him fighting. How long has he been like that?”

“Can't say,” she said.

“Can't say because you don't know or because you've been told not to?”

“Pick any one, but I can't say.”

“Another secret?”

She smiled and turned back to her work.

*   *   *

E
VERY EVENING
I
WOULD
go to bed with a headache, and each morning the buzzing noise was there when I awoke, louder than ever, as if it had slowly increased in volume while I slept. The best part of the day was the morning in my cabin, sipping Alba's blue lotus tisane that stole away all pain, body and mind. I felt like a clock being reset, and by the time I reached the gym I was fresh and ready.

Prior to chariot practice, Castor Corvinus tutored us on the history of the art, the different styles of vehicle, and the traditional strategies preferred by each house. Analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of the great charioteers of history was the only time I ever saw him register something that resembled excitement. “All modern essedarii combat has its roots in the past,” he repeated again and again, extolling the virtues of the great Blood Hawk charioteer of the previous century, Porphyrius Sertorius Scorpus, victor of two thousand races. “Study the races of Gnaeus Arrius Diocles of the fourteenth republic,” he said. “A thousand years dead and still no one has been able to match him. In his twenty-seven-year career he amassed thirty-five billion sesterces in winnings, making him the highest-paid athlete in galactic history.”

Next Licinus had us run track sprints and chariot battles. I mastered using the pole and center run of the chariot, casting Orbis as we raced the track. I worked harder and learned more than I thought possible, fighting on with pain and injuries that would have laid me up for a week back home. When Licinus was satisfied with our combat skills on the chariots, he had each of us run endless drills on the desultore skirmishers, breaking away on the speeders from the main body of the vehicle to fight and then rejoining. He seemed almost as tough on the immunes, and when I sympathized with Julia about her harsh repair schedule, she commended Licinus. “In the field, with the tournament railing about you, there isn't much time to get it right,” she explained. “Anything and everything can go wrong. By making us train at double speed, he's preparing us. The quicker we can repair the chariots, the better the team's chances of survival. The longer you'll live.”

Each day I endured a beating after training, but the pain became fuel, driving me to improve, so that by the end of the week I was gaining some degree of expertise on the desultore skirmisher and even managed to score some hits, mostly against Lurco. I just couldn't match the Sertorians' strength and speed, so I focused on defense, doing my best to suppress the opposition's assaults. Concentrating less on attacking put me in a frame of mind where details I'd have otherwise missed were revealed. After heavy fighting sessions, the Sertorians who'd expended the most energy had an exhausted, hollowed out quality. Their hands trembled and their skin took on a yellowish tinge, like they were suffering jaundice. I noted that any gladiator with those symptoms was immediately excused from the gymnasium after practice. Never Licinus though. He was always the most dangerous, the fastest and strongest. Now that I knew the Sertorians did have limits, I was curious to know what Licinus' were.

Each night the same dream replayed itself, only the roles were reversed and once more I was Accala, trapped behind the ice, unable to decipher the words Mother carved upon it. I wouldn't wake up at the end. After the nuclear fire there'd be new dreams, nightmares to be accurate, that would follow on, and costarring alongside me was little white-haired Mania.

I was in a dark cave running from Mania. She was like a ghost—in the darkness all I could see was her white hair, face, and two gleaming needle knives. Terrified, heart pounding, I tried to outpace her, but she was like a cheetah running down a lame antelope. “Sister? Don't run away. I have a game we can play,” she called out as she tracked me. Then her thin blades sank into my back like two long teeth and she brought me down and flipped me over as I fell. Straddling me, she drove her knives into my eyes, stealing my sight, chattering away all the while about what good friends we were and how much she was enjoying my company, like we were two little girls playing with dolls. Then she rose and I found myself completely paralyzed, unable to move. My perspective shifted to outside my body and I continued to watch the scene unfold from above. Mania ran a line down the middle of my naked torso with her knife and then peeled the skin back to expose the ribs and organs. She kept on pulling at the skin, stretching it out further and further so it made a kind of large blanket around me. Then she cracked the ribs open and started pulling organs out, inspecting them, laying them out onto the skin like a temple priest trying to predict the future. As she did, the organs shifted and changed shape, becoming the elements of my recurring dream—I saw small scenes, my mother scratching her unintelligble message, me in the ice, Aulus being burned, all laid out before her. “Dream, dream, dream away,” she hummed as she worked, a simple, nursery song that I was unfamiliar with.