The Imperium Game (19 page)

“TO ME.” The pieces came together. After Amaelia had been declared dead, Arvid had intervened with Pluto, insisting that it was all a mistake, but obviously it had been nothing of the kind. Amaelia was dead, fair and square, as the old saying went. No matter what Pluto said, she had no right whatever to be up on the playing field now.

“I’VE CHANGED MY MIND.” She turned back to Barbus. “KILL ARVID, BUT RETURN THE GIRL TO ME. WE WOULDN’T WANT TO BREAK ANY RULES.”

* * *

The sulfurous stench from the river made Kerickson’s eyes water, and the heat rivaled the interior of a rocket engine. They had to get across, and soon, but the ancient ferryman remained obstinately on the other shore.

Amaelia cupped her hands next to his ear. “We’ll never get out this way!”

He nodded back at her, then wiped the dripping sweat out of his eyes. It was pointless to waste any more time here. They were only going to get hungrier and thirstier and hotter while waiting for a new shade to show up so that Charon would have to pole
the ferry back to their side. And even if they did hold out that long, Charon’s programming forbade dead players like Amaelia to recross the Styx, and since Charon was a robot, there was no question of two humans being able to overpower it. Also, if Charon had been reprogrammed with the same upgraded version of Interact as Cerberus, then Kerickson knew he wouldn’t be able to override its programming.

“Come on!” He seized Amaelia’s hand. “We’re getting out of here.”

She stood up, gazing back at Cerberus. The three-headed dog whined, then licked all its chops. She shuddered. “How?”

“We’re going to swim.” He pulled off his sandals and threw them down on the black sand.

“Across that?”

He followed her gaze to the roiling, white-foamed water surging over the rocks. “It isn’t as bad as it looks,” he shouted over the roaring river. “Charon crosses it all the time with nothing more than a pole.” He decided not to mention that Charon’s ferry ran on an invisible track under the oily black water.

“Oh.” She wrapped her arms around her chest.

“I’ll go first, then you jump in on the upstream side of me. That way, we should stay together.”

“If—If you say so.”

He could see in her wide, staring eyes that she wasn’t crazy about this solution. He didn’t blame her. Taking several deep breaths, he jumped into the hot, smelly water and swam hard to keep from being dashed back against the rocks that lined the shore. “Come on!” he shouted over his shoulder, getting a mouthful of the nasty, brackish water.

She clambered to the top of a boulder and dove in. Then she came up sputtering on his left, arms flailing.

“Swim!” he shouted at her. She worked her arms harder, then was thrown against him by the water’s force. Before they had made more than a couple of yards’ progress, he realized that the current was too strong. They were going to be swept into the tunnel through the rock wall up ahead long before they could reach the opposite shore.

Charon waved a skeletal arm at them just as the water sucked them into the dark hole in the cavern wall.

Struggling to keep his head above water, Kerickson snagged Amaelia’s neck with one arm. “Lie—still!” he shouted to her, but he couldn’t tell if she understood or not

Where did this tunnel come out? As the rushing water threw them from side to side, he tried to remember—did this branch of the river circulate through the pumps and filters before coming out above? Amaelia floundered against him, panicking. He flipped her over so that she lay against his chest in the swirling water. “Relax, you’re all right!” he shouted in her ear, then hoped he wasn’t lying.

With an increasing roar, the river surged around them, speeding them to—where? The sweltering water closed over his head. He held his breath and wrapped both arms around the girl’s struggling body. Somewhere up ahead he heard a deep, rhythmic beat that overrode every other sound.

Evidently the pumps came first.

* * *

“WHAT DID THAT INSECT, PUBLIUS BARBUS, WANT?” Pluto’s black eyes crackled with suspicion.

With the tiniest diversion of energy, Demea erased the computer’s memory of that particular meeting. Then she twined a lock of Pluto’s curly black hair around her finger, pulling him closer and closer until she could see only the bottomless pools of his eyes. “HE WANTED ONLY TO PRAISE ME, AS IS MY DUE.”

“AND WHAT OF MY DUE?”

Heat blazed from him, hotter than the sun, which she would never see again. She pressed herself against him, drinking it in. “WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE?”

“I WILL SHARE NO PART OF YOU WITH ANYONE!” His hands gripped her shoulders, holding her hard, cruelly. “EVEN YOUR ANGER IS MINE ALONE. REMEMBER THAT!”

“OF COURSE,” she murmured, then felt herself swept away in his dark fire. “OF COURSE.”

SHRILL,
frenzied screaming penetrated the black fog
in Amaelia’s head. She turned her head, trying to get away from it, and got a faceful of wet sand.

“HAVING A BIT OF A SWIM. MY DEAR?” a reverberating male voice asked.

Screaming flashed by again, more excited than afraid. Icy water splashed the length of her body and she shivered. Her throat spasmed and she coughed up a mouthful of stale, brackish water.

“REALLY, DON’T YOU THINK IT’S TIME YOU GOT OUT OF THOSE NASTY, WET THINGS.”

Another screaming party passed close by. Pushing weakly at the sand, she managed finally to roll over on her back. Her eyes cracked open. Clouds drifted overhead, gray and brooding. Had they made it outside?

“I KNOW, LET’S GO SKINNY-DIPPING!”

She turned to see the head of a massive brown eagle cocked attentively. staring down at her. Her heart sank and a throbbing conga-drum ache settled in her temples. “Jupiter?”

“FAR-SEEING, LOUD-THUNDERING, THE ONE, THE ONLY.” It winked a gleaming yellow eye. “NOW, WHERE WERE WE BEFORE WE WERE SO RUDELY INTERRUPTED?”

“Go—away,” she said weakly.

“WELL!” The eagle fanned its wings. “SEE IF I GRANT ANY MORE OF YOUR PRAYERS, YOU LITTLE INGRATE!” It leaped skyward and disappeared.

She covered her aching eyes with a sandy arm and tried to think back; they had been in the river, alternately tossed above, then sucked under the oily, sulfurous water. She remembered being battered against the sides of the smooth conduit, and a pounding that grew louder and louder—and then she remembered nothing at all.

“Hey, you can’t swim in there!” The voice—male, but decidedly human—was somewhere above her.

“Ga—Gaius?” she called hoarsely.

“See, officer?” the voice complained. “Right in the middle of the Tiber River Adventure. I don’t care if it is Saturnalia, I could lose my license for this.”

“Don’t worry, citizen.” Footsteps crunched across the sand “We’ll have them out of there in a second.”

Amaelia tried to sit up, but the sky spun around her in crazy circles. Her stomach heaved and she pressed her hands over her eyes. The screamers sailed by again, showering her with another sheet of frigid water. Her hands and feet seemed to be made of ice.

“All right, you two,” a male voice said. “Fun is fun, and I’m sure you aren’t the only ones who had too much celebrating last night, but you can’t lie around down here on the shore.” Hands tugged at her shoulders.

“C—Cold!” she forced out through chattering teeth.

“Maybe they fell out of one of the boats,” a different voice suggested.

“No, that would have been reported right away, and the emergency drones would have taken care of it.”

Someone wrapped a warm, dry cloak around her shoulders, then rubbed her arms. “Now, then, little lady, we’ll have you all fixed up in just a minute.”

She opened her eyes and looked up into a swarthy, hook-nosed face half hidden under the crested bronze helmet of a Praetorian Guard. He reached for her wrist. “Let’s see who you are.”

Remembering her red status light, she tried to pull away, but his grip was too strong.

“Well, I’ll be—” The Praetorian’s breath puffed white in the cold air as he turned her wrist over. “Crassus, come look at this. She doesn’t have a bracelet.”

“Neither does this one.” A second guard looked up from a few feet down on the white sand beach. “And his sandals are gone, too. They must have lost them in the river.”

“Gaius?” Shivering, Amaelia wavered to her feet. “Is he alive?”

The guard took her arm, steadying her. “What possessed you to go swimming in the Tiber this time of year? You could have drowned or died of exposure.”

“It—seemed like a good idea at the time.” Gaius said weakly from the sand.

“Gaius!” Aided by the Praetorian, she stumbled barefoot to where he lay on his back. His blond hair was plastered wetly to his forehead, and his skin was so pale that it looked translucent. “Are you all right?”

A Roman galley filled with excited passengers swept by, pursued by a Carthaginian warship. Just as they hit the curve of the waterway directly opposite Amaelia, the boats kicked up a huge sheet of icy water and the passengers screamed. She watched them disappear around the corner, trying to make sense of it all. Apparently, she and Gaius had washed up next to an amusement ride along the river.

Gaius was sitting up now, shivering and blue around the lips, his forehead propped against his knees. The second soldier took off his cloak and covered him with it, then looked at Amaelia more closely. “Say, I know who she is. Quintus Gracchus has the whole city out looking for her. She’s Amaelia Metullus!”

“Are you sure?” The two men peered closely into her face.

She shuddered and did her best to look common and lowborn. “Are you kidding?” She huddled deeper inside the scratchy wool cloak. “My name is, uh, Flina. The closest I ever got to the Palace was to deliver some figs to the kitchen last quarter.”

“Well, dear . . .” Gaius tottered to his feet. “I can’t say it hasn’t been fun, but Saturnalia or not, we’d better get back to the villa or the master is going to have our hides.”

“Not so fast.” The second guard planted himself firmly between Gaius and Amaelia. “You two have no bracelets and were caught in a restricted area. You’d better come to headquarters and explain yourselves.”

* * *

He didn’t like it, no, not one bit. Publius Barbus leaned his elbows on the sticky counter and checked the current roster of workers one more time. The man Proserpina was looking for, the same man he’d found among the work crew without a properly modified bracelet just the day before, was definitely not listed.

And everyone else in the crew had already had his or her latest fix. It was well past the time for this Arvid Kerickson’s, if he needed one. Either he had gone into withdrawal somewhere out on the playing field and was now frothing at the mouth, or he had never been “processed” at all. If the first were true, the problem would, of course, take care of itself in a matter of hours—but if it were the second, big trouble was brewing. No one who knew the secrets of the Spear and Chicken could be allowed to contact the authorities.

According to Proserpina, this guy was a programmer, too. He shook his head. Bad news, no matter which way you looked at it. This was going to have to go all the way up to the big boss, and
he
was sure to be furious. Barbus rubbed a hand across his stubbly whiskers, then reached for a cup of wine. A sweet deal like the Imperium only came along once in a lifetime. Where else in New York City could a guy both lie low and operate on this sort of scale at the same time? It was worth whatever it took to protect it.

Glancing around the murky interior of the inn, he satisfied himself that no one was watching and pulled out a wristfone. He punched in a code and waited.

“What?” a voice barked after a second.

“It looks like I had an intruder in the work crew last night.”

“So deal with him.”

“He—” Barbus hesitated, knowing how
he
felt about screwups. It wouldn’t do to wind up like the late, unlamented Micio. “He seems to have escaped.”

“Who was it?”

“Some bleeder by the name of Arvid Kerickson.” He shifted his weight and the counter creaked. “Word is he’s a programmer for the Game and he’s hooked up with Amaelia Metullus.”

There was silence for a moment “Interesting pairing.”

“Well, what do you want me to do?”

“That depends. How much does he know?”

Barbus grimaced. “Beats me. I think maybe he got away before we could dose him.”

“Then you have no control over him.”

Barbus began to sweat. He took another swig of wine and let it warm him.

“But on the other hand,” the voice continued, “he may not know everything.”

“So, what do you want me to do, boss?”

“Eliminate him—immediately—with the least amount of mess possible. Do I make myself clear?”

Barbus grimaced. “Sure, boss, no problem. We’ll make it look like an accident. If you give me computer access, I can have him in an hour or two, maybe even less.”

“All right, but I expect results!” The wristfone clicked off.

Barbus slid the device off his wrist and stowed it back under the counter. His fingers touched the long, cool tube of the neuronic buzzer and he smiled. It was such a nice toy, and he had so little chance to use it. He pulled it out and thrust it under the dirty wool of his outer tunic. There was no reason why he and the boys couldn’t have a little fun while they cleaned up this particular problem. After all, it was supposed to be healthy to enjoy your work.

* * *

Tucked away in the lower level of the Palace, the Praetorian Headquarters represented everything the ancient Romans had respected: simplicity, respect for authority, and, above all, brute strength. Kerickson’s eyes lingered on the array of stout spears and glittering swords in the weapons rack as the two guards prodded him and Amaelia into a cramped office. Goose bumps still marched up and down his spine, courtesy of his dunking in the frigid Tiber River.

A middle-aged man with the jaw of a bulldog, and iron-gray hair cut in the standard, unimaginative style of a Roman soldier, looked up from a mass of scrolls and printouts. He leaned back and tapped his chin with a writing stylus. “Is this the pair reported frolicking in the water down at the amusement area?”

“Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it frolicking—” Kerickson began, then sneezed explosively.

“Shut up!” The bigger of the two Praetorians shoved him from behind. “You’ll speak to Adjunct Sixtus when you’re spoken to, and not before.”

“Do you two know the penalty for endangering yourself and others like that?” The Adjunct’s bushy eyebrows rose over his prominent nose. “You could have caused a serious accident.”

Kerickson glanced at the guard, who scowled back at him. “Answer him, dog!”

“Sorry.” Kerickson stifled a second sneeze. “I thought it was a rhetorical question.”

“Never mind!” The Adjunct shoved several sheets of parchment aside. “Give me your names so I can replace your bracelets and debit your accounts the proper number of points for this little prank.” He poised the stylus. “Well?”

Although he was tempted to try to bluff his way out, he knew the guards had limited computer access to the players’ records. If he didn’t give the name under which Wilson had enrolled him, they would know in a matter of seconds, and he could not afford to be thrown out of the Game now. He took a deep breath. “Gaius Clodius Lucinius.”

The Adjunct scribbled it down, then turned to Amaelia with the air of a man who had not slept for three days. “And you?”

She tugged the borrowed scarlet cloak more tightly around her shoulders. Her face was as white as a Forum statue.

“Look at her, Sixtus.” The taller of the two Praetorians pulled her chin to one side as though he were examining a side of beef. “I’m sure it’s
her,
Amaelia Julia Metullus.”

“Are you sure?” The Adjunct pushed back his chair and got up to peer into her face.

Pushing the Praetorian’s hand away, she turned her head to ‘ the wall. “Don’t be ridiculous. My name is Flina and I—I’m a kitchen slave in the villa of Didius Festus.”

“Isn’t this great?” The first guard grinned fiercely, baring a set of teeth that would have been more at home in the mouth of a bear. “Gracchus has been carrying on about her for days, and here she is, right under our noses! There’ll be some big points in this one for all of us, and right before the end of the quarter, too.”

“Perhaps.” The Adjunct narrowed his eyes. “See if you can find Quintus Gracchus while I have new bracelets made up.”

The guard saluted, then left. Sixtus shook his head. “You two stay put,” he said sourly to Kerickson and Amaelia, then walked through to the back room.

Kerickson edged nearer to the door; if Gracchus was in the Palace, it would take only minutes for the guard to find him. It would be smart to leave before he returned.

But then he reflected that on the other hand, if Gracchus was behind Micio’s and Wilson’s murders, confronting him here with the Praetorian Guards for witnesses might be the safest course. He turned to the remaining guard. “How about some dry clothes and something hot to drink?”

“Sure thing.” Crossing his arms, the guard looked out the window. “Just as soon as Adjunct Sixtus says so.”

A moment later Sixtus reentered the office, a Game bracelet in each hand. He handed the first to Kerickson. “Gaius Clodius Lucinius, enrolled three days ago, according to census records, and AWOL from the training school for all three of those days.” He shook his head. “Not a promising start. You’ll never advance that way.”

Kerickson accepted the bracelet. His status lights were unchanged, including green for freedman and the disappointing hit-point rating of one-half.

“As for you, young lady . . .” Sixtus scowled at Amaelia. “There is no record of any player, slave or otherwise, under the name Flina, although one of the robot slaves in the Palace is known by that designation. But you do closely resemble the file identification holo of Amaelia Julia Metullus.”