Muses of Terra (Codex Antonius Book 2) (33 page)

Find a gun, you fool
.
 

He forced himself up; his body groaned with the effort. A Praetorian lay next to him. Duran. His neck was turned in an unnatural angle, his sightless brown eyes staring to the right. Cordus took his pulse rifle and swung it around toward the palace doors. He blinked the dust and wetness from his eyes. Pulse fire still raged outside, but nobody was charging in. The right door was off its top hinge and tilted against the doorframe. Only the jagged upper half of the left door remained. Seeing no immediate danger from the entrance, he scrambled to his feet, still aiming the rifle at the doors. His eyes flicked over the bodies and debris around the hall.
 

“Aquilina!”
 

His voice still sounded muffled to his recovering ears. The Muses were hard at work repairing any damage to his body. Likely everybody else was in much worse shape than he.

“Aquilina!”
 

Her dark braid lay beneath the upper torso of one of the dictator’s assistants. Cordus rushed over and with one hand pulled the torso off Aquilina’s head. He checked her pulse, found it, and almost sobbed with relief. She coughed and gasped, her entire body curling into a fetal position.

Thank Juno, she can move.

He turned her over and she continued to cough, but her eyes were open and staring at him. He helped her sit up so she could cough easier.

“What…?” she tried to say, but another coughing fit came.

“An explosion,” Cordus rasped through his own ragged throat. “There’s fighting outside.”

She stared at him. “I can’t hear,” she shouted.

“Mine is only now coming back—”

Her eyes suddenly widened. “Mother?” she yelled, looking around.
 

She tried standing, but fell back to her knees. Cordus slung the rifle over his shoulder and helped her up.
 

“Mother!” she yelled again, searching the bodies.

Ulpius was on his feet. He looked dazed and spat gobs of debris, but he had his rifle up and aimed at the door. Everybody else still lay on the floor, either too wounded to rise or dead.
 

“Mother!” Aquilina screamed. She stumbled in the direction Gemmella had been before the blast. Cordus followed her with his rifle up, trying to avoid stepping on bodies. He tread around Piso, who lay on his back with his chest ripped open. Fortunately the Hiberian was dead.

Aquilina rushed forward and dropped to her knees next to a bloody form. Cordus stood over them both, glanced at Gemmella, and knew she was going to die. The left side of her face had been sheered off almost to the bone; her left arm was gone along with most of her torso. The whites of her ribs poked through her blackened and bloody skin.

Aquilina held her head. Amazingly, her right eye moved to Aquilina. The dictator whispered something, but blood leaked from her mouth.
 

“What?” Aquilina shouted, moving her ear next to Gemmella’s mouth. “I can’t hear you!”

It wouldn’t have mattered if she had. Cordus’s hearing was virtually healed already, but even he could not make out what the dictator was trying to say; only wet gurgles came. Then her chest stilled, and her right eye stared up at the ceiling.

More pulse fire came from outside, and this time shots tore up the remaining pieces of the jagged left door.

Ulpius, and now Gracchus, rushed over to Aquilina and Cordus, both with rifles pointed at the door. Ulpius yelled, “My lady, sire, we need to leave now!”

“Mother!” Aquilina shouted at the dead Gemmella. “What did you say? Mother, I can’t hear you—”

Cordus yelled near Aquilina’s head, “We have to go! They’re right outside the door!” He reached for her arm, but she pushed him away.

“She’s trying to tell me something! I can’t hear what she’s saying!”

Cordus slung his rifle and pulled her up by both arms. “Your mother’s dead!”

Aquilina stared at him and then looked down at her mother. “But I…I didn’t hear what she said…”

Cordus put both arms around Aquilina and gently, but firmly, pulled her along as he and the two surviving Praetorians raced back down the hall.

38

“Centuriae or pilot, ‘Ush?” Dariya said.

Daryush looked from the command couch to the pilot’s couch on the command deck of
Vacuna
. He frowned with indecision.

Dariya gave an exasperated sigh. “‘Ush, you had the pilot’s couch last time, so take the command couch.”

She knew the source of his indecision. The command couch was larger and more cushioned, which better accommodated his large frame. But the pilot’s couch had a larger screen on its tabulari for a better view of the horse races on the Roman bands. The Romans may be bastards in most things, but they bred the finest horses in the human universe.

Dariya threw up her hands and sat in the pilot’s couch. Daryush shrugged, then sat in the command couch and brought up the races on the smaller tabulari monitor. Dariya loved her brother beyond words, but his hesitant nature infuriated her at times.

She frowned as she scrolled through the local broadcast bands. She couldn’t find any horse races, but she saw lots of news criers discussing the impending announcement that an Antonius had been found and was here in Roma. Criers stood in front of the open Consular Palace doors, awaiting the Dictator and presumably the last Antonius. They all speculated that it was Marcus Antonius Cordus himself, back from the dead.
 

Cordus, you fool, you should have let them all rot. You should never have come here.

She glanced at her brother, who had settled on an old broadcast of a horse race that seemed to be running through the sands of Arabia. He watched the race with a happy grin.
 

We
should never have come here…

A rumble vibrated her couch. She knew small earthquakes were common in Italia, just as they were in Persia, but her instincts were on edge. She turned on the Praetorian bands that Aquilina had given her.

Men and women screamed over the sounds of pulse blasts. Some cried out they needed a medicus for wounded comrades, citizens, or themselves.

Dariya looked to the broadcast bands. The cameras jerked about as the holders tried to flee the scene, while at the same time record what was happening. The doors to the Consular Palace were blown apart and smoking. Black-armored guards stood near the doors, firing from behind white columns at someone in the crowd. Whoever fired back was disguised as a citizen.

Dariya sat up in the couch. “Cordus…”

Her eyes were drawn to the ship’s external cameras. Not trusting the Romans one bit, she had kept them all on and had even turned on the motion sensors. Nothing could get within a hundred paces of the ship without setting off alarms.
 

And as soon as she saw movement, the motion alarms blared. Black-armored men with pulse rifles were charging from out of the garden toward the ship.

She lunged for the shield controls on the pilot’s tabulari. A hum permeated the ship as the shield generators came on line, and then a translucent blue glow filled the external cameras. The shield encased
Vacuna
in a spherical energy, slicing through the ground on which the ship sat. The ship groaned and shifted as the landing pad beneath it became unstable from the shield scooping out a huge semi-spherical chunk of it. She engaged the anti-grav engines. The ship stopped moving as it rose a few feet above the crumbling ground and floated within the energy sphere.

Daryush grunted in alarm as he pointed at the external cameras. Through the blue glow, they saw black-armored men fire at the shield with pulse rifles. But the pellets disintegrated harmlessly upon impact.

They were protected. But with the shield in place, the public bands they’d been watching on their tabulari, along with the Praetorian bands, turned to static.

Dariya and Daryush shared a fearful look.
 

“
Caccing
Romans,” Dariya snarled.

39

Awareness came in waves.
 

First, she was warm and content. Then she realized she was alive. She soon discovered she had eyes that she could open, but they did her no good since all she could see was a dark blue haze. She did not care.

Then memories slammed into her, and Ocella woke up.

She floated in a warm gel that encased her naked body. She found she could breath the gel, but that did not ease her panic. She thrashed about, grasping for anything solid within the endless gel. She didn’t even know where to ‘swim’ to, for she had no idea which way was up or down.

A shadow moved to her right, and she swung her head toward it. More shadows moved there, and they grew close enough for her to see their human forms. She moved toward them. Once she got closer, two sets of hands reached in and grabbed her arms. She tried to slip away, but she had no leverage.
 

The hands pulled her out of the gel and into a cold, brightly lit room. Ocella shut her eyes tight against the brightness. The light filtered through her lids, causing pain. She opened her mouth to scream, but gel spewed out. She turned on her side and coughed up streams of gel.

Gentle hands rested on her back and shoulders. “Get it all out,” a male voice said. “Your new lungs will adjust. Just takes a minute or two.”

When she could breathe without gagging, she slowly opened her eyes to find that they, too, had adjusted to the room’s brightness. However, she realized the room was actually quite dim, though brighter than the cell in which they were held before—

Ocella stiffened, then looked up at the man standing beside her.
 

Gods
.
He has the face he had before Umbra. Older, perhaps, but the same.

Kaeso looked healthier and more relaxed than she could ever remember; perhaps back when they first courted twenty years ago, but certainly not after Umbra had surgically changed him.

He smiled. “Welcome back.”

“Where…?”

“Hold on,” he said, and then took a large blanket from Claudia, who stood near the head of the cot on which Ocella lay. Kaeso wrapped the blanket tightly around Ocella’s naked, gel-covered body. “Let’s get you warm first.”

Claudia went and stood next to Kaeso, regarding Ocella with a sympathetic smile. “No fun being born, is it?”

“Born?”

Ocella feigned confusion, but she already knew what had happened. Memories came back to her in a torrent. She could access them the same way she could when she stood before Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva.

She was a golem.

“Kaeso” gently wiped her face with the towel. “I resisted at first, but it’s not so bad. All the injuries I had before, the changes Umbra made to my body—all gone. This is the real me, and I’ve never felt better. You will, too, once you’re a little warmer and we get some hot
kaffa
in you. It’s actually quite good here.”

 
No. If I’m a golem, I’m already dead. I’m not alive. This isn’t me. Oh, gods, they’ve somehow trapped my soul! I’ll never see Elysium. I’ll never see Cordus again. My poor, dear boy…

Despair overwhelmed Ocella. Her body started to go numb, beginning in her fingers and toes, then spreading up her arms and legs. She couldn’t move and she didn’t care. Her breathing shallowed, and her heart skipped beats, then struggled to beat at all.

The sympathetic smiles Kaeso and Claudia wore were replaced with cold frowns, as if Ocella was a piece of machinery that didn’t work the way they hoped.

“She’s fading,” Claudia said. “The invasion approaches—”

“It’s all right,” Kaeso said. “She’ll come around.” He sighed. “Let’s get another body.”

Then warmth and darkness embraced her.

And awareness came to her in waves….

40

Cordus thanked Fortuna that the Consular Palace had not changed since he left. He led Aquilina, Ulpius, and Gracchus through the labyrinthine halls, down into the basements, and through ancient corridors. For a while, Ulpius and Gracchus stayed back several dozen paces to ensure they weren’t followed. Cordus assumed the Praetorians fighting near the palace doors had held back the attackers, for Ulpius and Gracchus reported no signs of pursuit when they later rejoined him and Aquilina.

Cordus took the survivors down a long, brick-lined tunnel with ancient wiring that lit the way with dim light fixtures. He stopped at a large metal door with rust around the edges. Cordus knew this place well. He pulled on the old latch, and the door opened with a loud scraping that echoed up and down the hall. They all held their breath and listened for footsteps. When Cordus heard none, he pulled the door wide enough to let them in. He stepped into the dark room, felt along the left side of the wall for the ancient light switch, and flipped it on. Light pads above them fluttered, then came on to illuminate the room. Cordus pulled the door close as soon as they were all in.

“
Dis Pater
,” Gracchus breathed as he looked around.

They stood in a large storage room, a hundred paces long and wide, containing items that were centuries old—from the first tabulari to bins of clothing to old hand-made toys the consular children played with before the era of mass industry. All the items were labeled and stacked neatly on rows of wide shelves that stretched into the murkiness ahead. To their right sat an old ground car that used to run on steam, most of it covered in a moldering canvas tarp. The room displayed the Roman penchant for organization, but also showed how quickly Romans forgot their past—it obviously had not been visited in years.

Cordus led them down a row toward the back of the room.

“Been working in the palace for three years,” Ulpius muttered from behind Cordus, “and I never knew this was here. More holes in this place than a senator’s honor.”

“How did you find this?” Aquilina asked.

Cordus glanced at her. It was the first thing she said since they fled the attack. Her eyes were still hollow, but her voice was calm.