The Twice and Future Caesar (4 page)

A
UDIBLE
ALARMS
SOUNDED
NOW
. Nox could scarcely hear Cinna's soft voice over them.

“Nemo! Paladin! Get out of there!”

Instead, Nox charged ahead to the imperially crested door. The door was locked. The lock demanded a retinal scan. Nox was not giving that thing his eyeball.

He threw himself at the door, shoulder first. “No. We're
here
. We came here to—” He stopped talking. Better not say why he was here. He hurled himself at the door again. “We came here for a reason. Get me through this door!”

Chessman: “Nemo. Fall back! We'll do it later! You need to get out of there!”

Nox threw his weight against the door. The door didn't feel stout. And with another heave, it gave way. Nox staggered into the chamber.

Came to an abrupt stop.

Pallas ploughed into his back and stopped.

“Merda,”
Nox said.

Five other voices sounded in their coms.
“What?”

Nox couldn't say it.

Pallas could. “He's
gone!
”

Nox and Pallas were in a room that was part sickbay and part royal chamber. The walls were hung with royal trappings in black and gold. An oak wreath hung over an empty pallet where a patient had recently lain.

The life-support equipment had been left behind.

A top sheet appeared half-dragged off the pallet, as it might if it clung to someone who'd got up and walked under his own power.

Nox whirled about-face to run away. Collided with Pallas.

Abruptly a heavy metal barrier slid across the doorway with deep thunks of locking mechanisms.

The voice of the Chessman sounded in their ears, “Nemo! Paladin! You got yourselves bottled. Go vertical.”

Nox and Pallas looked up. “How?”

The ceiling was high and smooth. There was a vent up there, but it was smaller than Nox's head. Nox didn't see any other egress from this room.

A gurgle sounded from the floor drain.

Pallas, blanched. “
Nego
.” No.

The gurgle from the floor sounded closer. It was coming from a drain no bigger around than Nox's fist.

And suddenly water jetted up from the opening with bone-breaking force.

“Oh no no no,” Pallas murmured, lips gone ashen. Water pounded the ceiling and rained down.

Nox had thought they were done with games. With Romulus the games never stopped.

“Is this a tactile illusion, Chessman?” Nox asked, hopeful.

“No.”

Pallas bounced off the walls, his boots splashing in the rising water.

Nox roared at the air. “Get us out of here!”

Red lights shone on both Nox's and Pallas' displacement collars. Jammers were operating. There would be no displacing out of here.

Chessman: “Get yourselves on the roof for Santa Claus.”

Santa Claus
was a physical pick up and grab.
Santa Claus
required Nox and Pallas to get to the asteroid's surface.

The Chessman calmly gave directions to each of the brothers where to go.

Nox and Pallas were locked underground and nearly under water.

A murmur sounded, right next to Nox, so soft Nox scarcely heard it. “
Frater
, I don't want to go this way.”

“We're not!” Nox said decisively, one of his better attempts at a bald lie.

Water swirled around Nox's shins. Pallas tried to take a step, splashed forward and fell, face under. He emerged sputtering.

Water shot up in a solid pillar from the floor. It hammered at the
ceiling, spraying the whole chamber with hard rain. The water level on the floor rose steadily. Pallas climbed onto the pallet.

Nox waded to him, his legs dragging heavily in the rising flood. Pallas reached down and helped Nox up onto the mattress, which was getting soggy.

“Chessman!” Nox bellowed.

Cinna's voice sounded calm. “In the ceiling there is a vertical shaft intersecting with a horizontal cross duct. The horizontal duct is far too small for human passage, but the vertical stack is wide enough for you to chimney up.”

The hard spray from the spouting water had everything wet. Nox's and Pallas' faces dripped.

Nox spat water off his lips. “Yeah? The vent to get at it is far too small too!”

“Widen it,” Chessman said.

Widen it. Right.

The ceiling was too high for either Nox or Pallas to reach the vent, even standing on the pallet.

Nox dragged gauntlets onto his wet hands. Pallas fished a hammer claw out of his pack. Pallas boosted Nox up on his shoulders. Pallas teetered on the spongy mattress.

And the lights failed.

Nox roared wordless noise. He pushed his palms against the ceiling to steady their tottering human column in the wet darkness.

A light blossomed from below. Pallas had stuck a glow dot on his own shoulder. Pallas reached up and pressed one onto Nox's back as well.

Nox pulled the cover off the vent and threw it away to the side. Too scared and angry to say anything, he reached down an open palm. The handle of the hammer claw slapped firmly into Nox's waiting glove.

Nox swung the claw at the rim of the small vent.
Widen it. Widen it
. The hammer strike clinked. Nox tried not to scream. “Chessman! It's metal!”

The Chessman, insanely calm, said, “Nemo. It's ductwork. Not armor. It's thin.”

Nox forced panic back and realized yes, the barrier did have a thin feel to it. He beat holes into it until he could pry the metal back into razor-edged rolls. He could see at last there really was a shaft up there, maybe a meter wide. Air moved against Nox's face. Water swirled at his thighs.

Under him, Pallas was blowing bubbles on the water surface. “Hurry.”

Nox slid the hammer claw into the horizontal duct. He placed gloved
hands on the cut edges, and poised to hoist himself up. Pallas got a palm under one of Nox's boots and gave him a push. Nox scrambled up through the jagged hole. He planted one boot on either side of the opening in the horizontal duct.

Down below, Pallas was up to his nose in churning water.

Nox set the small of his back against one wall of the vertical shaft and lifted one boot, sole out, to press hard against the opposite wall. When he was pressing hard enough to hold himself up between boot sole and back, he brought the other boot up. He planted his gauntleted palms on the wall behind him and started to chimney up the shaft. He moved his gloved palms up, then his back up. One foot. The other foot. Quickly. Hands. Back. Step. Step. Hands. Back. Step. Step. Hands—

—slipped. Nox's body folded up like a jackknife as he dropped into Pallas coming up beneath him. He met no resistance. He just swept Pallas along with his descent, and they both plunged into the rising water in a cloud of bubbles, down and down. Nox couldn't see. His leg brushed against the floor. The pounding inrush from the drain surrounded him with solid noise.

He dragged off his gauntlets and kicked up. He found the ceiling. The water was up to the top. There was no room to breathe.

Where was the vent? He'd lost it. He couldn't see. He had no sense of where he was. The mattress should've been under him and wasn't. Which way?

He needed to breathe
now
.

Felt a rough grip and a yank sideways. Then hands under his ass gave him a mighty shove. Pallas launched him up through the vent. Nox caught the sides of the opening and he gasped. Immediately he hauled himself up. He planted his back and feet against the walls of the shaft and chimneyed up again, fast, pressing
hard.

The water had stopped rising. It stayed flush with the level of the ceiling. There had to be a flotation cutoff switch.

He heard a gasp directly below him. Pallas had found air. Nox heard him coming up beneath him.

Nox ascended as fast as he dared, pressing hard with the small of his back and his boot soles.

The voice of the Chessman: “Nemo. Stop. Paladin stop. Nemo. Open the hatch.”

“Hatch?”

“Behind and above your head.”

Maintaining pressure between his back and boots Nox craned his neck awkwardly to find the hatch. He lifted his arms to get at it. Fumbled to open it.

And lost purchase between his back and feet. Came down on Pallas.

Hard.

A grunt underneath him.

Pallas had his head bowed, ready for it this time. Pallas was braced and holding fast.

Quickly Nox reached for the access hatchway. He grasped the frame and pulled himself up and off of Pallas. He slither-crawled head first through the opening and spilled out to a cloister-sized chamber.

It looked like the living quarters of a
medicus
, but empty. The inhabitant had packed up and gone. Not a panic flight either. The room was orderly. The
medicus
had performed his resurrection and left.

Chessman: “Nemo. Paladin. Move into the corridor and turn left. Quickly. Incoming hostiles.”

Superfluous to identify the incoming plots as hostile. Everything in the known universe was hostile to them.

Nox didn't hear his other five brothers on the com anymore. They must've got back to the ship already. Nox hoped that was why he wasn't hearing them anymore.

Nox and Pallas climbed a ladder up a fire shaft to the asteroid surface. Pallas lifted the hatch.

He howled at the cutting cold. Nox and Pallas were wet. Bitter air sliced down the shaft as fire alarms shrieked. With the opening of the fire hatch, the defenders knew exactly where Nox and Pallas were.

Nox climbed to the surface.

Overhead was perfect black. Ice crystals blew across the frozen ground with scraping sounds. Red heat lamps gave off a lurid glow and not a hell of a lot of heat. It was a jagged landscape. The air was thin, held down to the asteroid by a low, energy barrier.

High above that, a physical umbrella dome stretched horizon to flat horizon.

No spacecraft was showing. The umbrella dome was still way up there, shimmering, intact.

Nox lifted his arms, useless. He roared at the blank, artificial sky. “They beached us!”

He hurled epithets.

The calm voice of the Chessman sounded: “Run.”

Nox shut up and ran.

With a roar like a mountain crumbling, the ice pack up ahead divided before an invisible plow.

A slash of light appeared like a door into the black void. A ramp lowered from nothingness. Pallas raced up.

Buzzing flashes surrounded Nox, several paces behind. Defensive guns periscoped up from the ground. Their beams glanced off Nox's personal field.

The ramp to the ship was lifting away, the slash of light narrowing.

Nox dove into the light. The ramp rose up, just catching Nox and rolling him aboard. The hatch sealed shut.

Nox rolled to a stop.

The ship's energy gathered underneath him. He could feel it through the warm deck.

The pirate ship sprang, crashing straight up through the asteroid's dome, ripping open the sky.

Then all the stars shining in the viewports disappeared.

In an instant, the pirate ship
Bagheera
was traveling FTL.

Nox lay on his back on the deck, palms over his ears, which felt cold enough to fall off.
Made it!

Faunus' laughter boomed. “Weren't sure you were going to join us,
frateri
!”

Pallas smiled, but Nox didn't see anything funny. His frozen clothing was thawing. He rasped, “Why did we go in at all! Why didn't we just blow the whole idiot maze up!”

Nicanor spoke crisply, “Because then we wouldn't know that we
completely missed the target!
Romulus got away.”

Nox stayed on his back, catching his breath, unfreezing his lungs.

Cinna came down from the control room.

Cinna had been cultivated from the same genetic base as the rest of Nox's Roman-bred brothers, but Cinna was younger. He looked smoother. His irises were opaque black disks. The implanted cables of a patterner hung loose from the back of his neck and his forearms. He wasn't operating as a patterner at the moment. “Did anyone get hit?”

“No,” said Pallas.

“No,” Orissus growled.

“No,” said Nox.

Cinna stalked across the deck, tearing off his com set. An angry young archangel. His finger pointed down at Nox on the deck. “What do you mean
no?
Nox, what is
that?
”

Nox stared back at Cinna, puzzled. He turned his head and followed Cinna's gaze backward, over his own shoulder. There was some blood on the deck. His. Nox's brow knotted. He frowned, confused. “Unclench, Little Brother.” Nox pushed himself off the deck and stood up. “I got scratched.” Probably from the metal edges of the vent he'd enlarged. He hadn't felt it. He kind of remembered the ripping at his haz suit as he'd fallen through.

“Oh—” Cinna softly swore up blue flames.

“What?” said Nox. “Am I dead?” Thought he was kidding.