Wolf’s Empire: Gladiator (3 page)

My armilla still showed nothing out of the ordinary. I ran a quick diagnostic and discovered that some incoming frequencies were being weakened to the point that my armilla couldn't pick them up—a customized signal jam. A quick power boost to the armilla's receiver, and just like magic the screen flickered, and communicats and alerts came pouring in, accompanied by warning alarms. Seven messages from Marcus alone, and he'd never written me one before that day. They all said the same thing.

Come quickly. The committee is moving to scratch you from the tournament. I'll do what I can.

I quickly flicked to the list of confirmed Ludi Romani contestants I'd checked only moments before. With the signal block removed, it contained one vital alteration. My name, Accala Viridius Camilla, had a line running right through it. I'd been scratched. The match to find my replacement had already been held that morning, and my second cousin on my father's side, Darius Viridius Strabo, had been confirmed.

My head felt light and dizzy, like someone had taken my feet and spun me upside down inside my own body, and I leaned back against the wall to stop from falling. This was impossible news. The Golden Wolves needed me. I had three more wins than Darius and seventeen unbroken victories in the galactic league. I was a crowd favorite and the Viridian team's best shot at victory.

It was Father's doing. It had to be. As an unmarried woman, I was still subject to his will. He was trying to sabotage all my hard work, still trying to force me into a mold of his making. How would he have done it? Call in a favor or two with the senators who served on the committee and order the security staff to jam certain incoming transmissions of my armilla. I was outraged, partly at his sneak attack—I'd always considered him too noble to do anything other than confront me directly—and partly at my own ineptitude—how could I not have seen it coming? So focused on a potential attack that it never occurred to me that the fight was already over and I'd lost.

My hands tightened into fists, so tight that my flat nails bit painfully into the flesh of my palms. The pain helped focus my thoughts. There were still trials under way at the Colosseum. The committee would be there. I could plead my case, try to get the judgment against me overturned. More important, Marcus would be there. He'd know how to turn things around. With his help I could fix this.

“Is Father still in the compound?” I demanded as I rushed to my dressing room.

“He left before the sun rise up,” Bulla said, thumping along behind me. “Off to the Senate house to talk. To talk at the Senate.”

“Then quick, fetch my fighting clothes, help me dress.”

“You already dressed, domina.”

I threw off my stola. “Fighting clothes first, then robes. You know what I mean.”

“You going to fight, domina?” Bulla asked, gathering up the robes as she followed after me.

“You're damn right I am.”

“That not going to make your father happy. Not happy at all.”

“His happiness is just about the farthest thing from my mind right now.”

“Domina, do not let your father know that Bulla was the one to tell you,” she said as we entered the dressing room. “Not Bulla.”

“You have nothing to fear from him.”

“I fear he will send me to the slave markets. The slave markets or worse.”

Bulla and I had something in common. We were both subject to my father's will. He could legally kill us both if he wished, though with me he'd have to show reasonable cause, not that that would be a problem. A noble-born woman entering the arena. In the eyes of any magistrate, I'd already given him more than enough. “Nonsense. He'd have me to deal with if he did that.” I pulled back my thick black hair and wrapped it into a knot at the base of my neck while Bulla hurriedly laid out my garments.

A formfitting base layer of fine, flexible alloys over which I pulled cotton trousers and a short silk tunic. Next my armored running shoes. Last of all I rewrapped my stola. And then I was up, striding through the training area, grabbing my weapon case, slinging it over my shoulder as I headed for the balcony.

“Breakfast!” Bulla protested. “You must eat.”

“Later.”

Before I could get past her, three thick, blunt fingers closed about my arm in a stonelike grip.

“Humans tire and die easy,” Bulla said, “and you are only a calf of nineteen summers. Don't tire and die. Eat.”

Bulla was right. Food was fuel. Snatching up some honeyed figs from a bowl on the table, I stuffed them into my mouth.

“What you do when you see the enemy?” Bulla asked.

“I spear them on my horns. I pummel them with my hooves.”

She nodded, satisfied that I remembered her Taurii maxims, and released me.

“Make sure you know who friend and who enemy before you charge,” she called out after me. “Except with Sertorians. With them you kill first. Kill first, ask questions later.”

II

O
UT ONTO THE BALCONY,
past my clusters of miniature fruit trees, I stepped right up to the railing and in between two parallel bars. The bars ran back toward my apartment for a length of four feet before curving down to terminate in the balcony floor. The hot summer wind buffeted me as I gripped the bars on either side, thumbing the small built-in disc controls. At once my aer chariot broke away from the structure of the balcony and glided out over the Wolf's Den, House Viridian's family compound on the Aventine.

The Den was home. I was born and raised there, schooled in Viridian history, fed lists of Viridian virtues, surrounded by Viridian cousins so that when I reached eleven years of age and entered junior school with the children of the other noble houses, there should be no doubt in my mind that the greatest gift Fortune could bestow upon a newborn was that it should come into the world from the womb of a woman who had married into House Viridian.

We had been taught that Viridians traced their genetic origins to the sons and daughters of Remus and Numa—honest and hardworking, rising from simple stock to achieve a nobility based on honor and tradition, renowned for our skills in strategy and our logistics expertise. As such, we had always occupied the Aventine. Our allies, House Calpurnian and House Flavian, held the Esquiline and Caelian Hills. The Calpurnians were skilled agriculturists with a long history of seeding barren planets with carpets of oxygen-rich greenery, while the Flavians were experts in the design of faster-than-light engine technology and communication platforms, connecting the citizens of the empire as she continued her eternal expansion. Together, we three houses were formally known as the Caninine Alliance.

Steering the chariot away from the plaza and parade ground (no point announcing my presence to the guards and soldiers), I shot low over the roofs of the stacked, terraced buildings that housed my extended family. Great flags bearing the emblem of the golden wolf flapped in the morning breeze atop the barracks hall. The compound's armored walls, decorated in faded gold and malachite green, wore cracks like old cowhide. Its ancient structures might be worn and crumbling, but the Den, like the hill fortresses of the neighboring houses, was considered a sacred beacon—a center from which a house's power radiated outward, managing its galactic province, territories, legions, assets, and possessions. Tradition dictated that each of the eight houses should possess one of the seven sacred hills upon which Rome was founded. The obvious problem of sharing seven hills among eight houses was pragmatically and symbolically solved by the emperor and his family—encompassing the other hills by classifying their “hill” as Mother Earth herself. The emperor's house, the current being House Numerian, took on the honorific
Sons of Romulus,
the hero who founded Rome city after slaying his brother Remus in a fight over whose village had bigger walls.

Activating the homemade frequency decoder on my armilla, I dropped below the sensors of the western guard tower and slipped over the boundary wall. The decoder flashed to indicate that it had completed its job a split second before I passed right through the yellow-tinged security dome, thankfully without suffering disintegration.

I shot past the small balconies of administrators and military officers who lived in the crowded apartment blocks below the fortress, opened up the throttle, and pulled clear of the Aventine, the wind whipping my robes about as I met with the aerway and vanished into the rush of morning traffic, dodging in and out of flying chariots, palanquins, and transport convoys.

Eternal Rome spread out before me, gleaming in the light of the morning sun. Perpetually pristine—white marble temples, majestic porphyry towers, and haughty civic buildings of shining granite, architecture infused with vertical light-filled channels that lent the city a celestial glow. She was breathtaking. The noise and bustle of the traffic dropped away when you beheld her magnificence. The capital of Mother Earth, which was in turn capital of the imperial province of Terra Firma. Jewel of the provinces, the wellspring of civilization, the axial city upon which the entire galaxy turned. Honor, justice, loyalty, imperium, the Pax Romana, the Senate and the people, the Twelve Tables of Roman Law—these were the virtues and institutions that made Rome great. That was the way we were taught to think of the city, the way her solemn beauty reflected those ideals, but the last two years had taught me to look past the surface of things. I'd learned that the real Rome, devoid of honor and justice, lay behind the scenes, where old wounds festered. Three hundred families governed the empire. Forty-nine families led by consuls ruled over the three hundred. Seven families led by proconsuls ruled over the forty-nine, and one emperor and his family ruled over all. Like unruly children in the class of a strict tutor, the representatives of the great houses of the city feigned amity and cooperation as they carried out the dirty business of running the empire. Feuds between families, some millennia old, played out in assassinations, espionage, and double-dealing, but none of it was ever publicly acknowledged; it all stayed hidden beneath the façade of civilization. On the surface everything was peacefully perfect. You'd never have known that a civil war was raging, threatening to tear the empire apart.

*   *   *

T
HE CIVIL WAR STARTED
the moment House Sertorian launched their unprovoked attack on Olympus Decimus, but a potential conflict had been brewing for a long time before that. Two decades earlier the Sertorians began making a long play to take a step up in society and become one of the eight great ruling houses. They even bought up property in the Carinae, the fashionable district at the base of the Esquiline, to be near one of the sacred hills, but internal power disputes and factional fighting prevented them from rising very far; tolerance and cooperation were not natural Sertorian traits. Then the charismatic Aquilinus Sertorius Macula came to power. Aquilinus not only united his house, he gave them the essential ingredients they had lacked in their quest for upward mobility: roots and a connection to the ancient past.

He reminded his people that, as the Viridians looked to Remus and Numa, House Sertorian could trace their genetic lineage to the ancient emperor Caligula. Although it was commonly understood that Caligula was completely insane, as well as demonically creative when it came to indulging his sadism, the Sertorians weren't dissuaded in the slightest from adopting him as their ancestor and guiding influence. Aquilinus argued that what others called madness and cruel excess in ancient emperors could not be seen as sinful or blameworthy. He didn't believe in the gods but he was of the opinion that emperors were a close equivalent, the highest point of human achievement. So a superior man's passions could not be understood or contextualized by mere mortals. He argued that Caligula's excesses should be embraced as an essential component of Roman character and emulated by those of the Sertorian nobility. To concretize this, Aquilinus developed a manifesto of genetic superiority, a path that he promised would lead to a Sertorian-led empire, a shared vision all Sertorians found very appealing. His manifesto united the factions of his house like nothing before, and within a few years they were powerful, influential, and wealthy beyond belief, exploring every avenue for profit in the most ruthless and backhanded ways. They were just waiting for their chance to swoop on a weakness, and ironically it was my own house, which sought to deter them more than any other, that gave them the means to elevation.

It came about when the old emperor Julius Heliogabalus Caesar died, his mind and body crippled by millennia of inbreeding that even radical gene therapy couldn't correct. Heliogabalus' madness reached its zenith with the decision to memorialize himself and each prior Julian emperor going back to Julius Caesar by sculpting the planets of a distant solar system into a series of monumental busts—which turned out to be not so easy, as some of them were gas giants—leaving the imperial treasury's coffers nearly drained. My uncle, the Viridian proconsul Quintus Viridius Severus, led a contingent of houses seeking to reestablish a republic in which the elected representatives of the Senate ruled the empire in place of a single dictator. Unfortunately, House Numerian, famous for its powerful warriors and land barons, chose to reestablish the existing model, and our house was left in the lurch, having backed the wrong horse.

The Sertorian leader went out of his way to make a strong impression on the new emperor, promoting his house's mastery of finance and commerce, and donating vast sums of money to fill the empire's coffers. The result was their elevation to the Council of Great Houses, commonly known as the Eight, and possession of the Palatine Hill, right opposite us, on the other side of the Circus Maximus, a position of honor, traditionally owned by the wealthiest house after the emperor's. Aquilinus became a proconsul and was granted a province that they named Aeria Sertorius. He wasted no time introducing corruption into areas of commerce no one had previously thought to exploit and using the proceeds to shower the mob with festivals to increase House Sertorian's popularity.