“But we make you stay here and no more sugar for Hammond, right?” Chaz smiled, showing plenty of teeth.
“You can bet on that,” Bat said, returning the feral smile with gusto.
“Guys...” Lee was not enjoying the confrontation. He felt like the table had turned against him and he was outnumbered.
“I vote for Bat.” Chaz raised his bottle. Jimbo and Boats raised theirs as well. Hammond shrugged and raised his.
“You’re going to need a membership card, girl,” Chaz said.
“To your little group?”
“To Jews for Jesus,” Chaz said and clinked a bottle with her.
They took stock of the ordnance they had on board. The last mission was a clusterfuck despite its positive outcome but had required no firepower in the end. They still had more than enough small arms and case lots of ammo for each. Jimmy Smalls had a second Winchester Model 70 to loan to Bat. She could familiarize herself with it when they put back to sea. They’d all be putting in some range time then.
The team took to the common room to do regular maintenance on their armory. Bat impressed the guys by stripping down the gifted Winchester, oiling it, and reassembling it within ten minutes. Not bad for her first time with the weapon. She stripped down a Sig P-226 she’d be using as a sidearm. She also picked a 380 Colt snubby from the collection on the long table. A stainless job with no hammer.
“This anyone’s?” She raised an eyebrow.
“Mine,” Chaz said. “My pocket rocket for party night. It’s yours if you want it.”
“A girl can’t have enough surprises,” she said.
“I have a strap holster for it somewhere,” Chaz said and sorted through a plastic tub of accessories.
They were all sharing Irish coffee and bullshitting over a table lined with a row of oil-slick rifles and shotguns when Morris Tauber walked in with an empty carafe. He went to the counter and emptied a pot of coffee into it, followed by a long stream of sugar. Morris looked like he’d combed his hair with a pitchfork and he had a week’s growth of ginger on his chin. He rarely came topside, and that was usually at night. He was the only one in the room without a deep tan.
“Our Iranian friends settled in?” Lee asked.
“They went right down to the nuke and never left it,” Morris said and poured a cup from the dregs. “They’re checking levels and running a diagnostic in sandals and shorts. Here’s to us nerds, huh?” He stopped mid-sip and blinked at Bathsheba.
“You’re a woman,” he said.
“Thanks. You’re nice,” she said.
“I mean. I don’t know you, and here I am talking about—”
“She’s hip, Mo,” Chaz said. “She’s coming with us.”
“I’m Bat Jaffe. I’m teaching the guys Hebrew.”
“Oh. Well. I suppose. Yes,” Morris said and retreated, cup and carafe in hand.
“That was the brain behind all this, right?” Bat said.
“One of them. Dr. Morris Tauber, engineer and theoretical physicist,” Jimbo said. “But not a whiz at the social niceties.”
“He’s interesting,” Bat said.
“He’s gonna get more interesting when that coffee hits him,” Boats said. “I put four fingers of Maker’s Mark in the pot.”
14
The Order of March
The runner reached the slave caravan where they camped the second night. Or rather, the third runner reached them, as the message was relayed from one station to another along the road. Every Roman citizen bragged that these roads allowed a message to travel from any point in the empire to another within two weeks.
The caravan of slaves and their minders had made slow progress, yet had passed forty mile markers since departing Nazareth the day before.
The runner used his medallion from the cursus publicus, the official messenger service authorized throughout the empire, to make his way past the sentries posted about the fortified camp. In the moonlight of the Ides of Sextilis, he trotted along the rows of tents until he found the tent where the centurion Bachus slept. An optio offered to take the packet from the messenger.
“I am under orders of the prefect of Judea to deliver this into the hands of centurion Trivian Bachus and only him,” the messenger, a slim boy of fourteen years insisted with the imperious attitude of a Claudian. The boy was a slave, and in the hierarchy of the imperium, a slave was empowered by the office of his master. Thus the legion optio was obligated to obey this lowly youth as though ordered by prefect Gratus himself.
The messenger was admitted to the tent. The optio spoke softly, and the centurion stirred naked on his cot. Bachus sat up with a mumbled curse and took the packet from the runner’s hand. It was held closed by a blob of wax embossed with the prefect’s seal, a pair of swans with necks entwined. He tore it open and read by the light of a lamp held overhead by the optio.
Ut Cen. Mettius Trivian Bachus
De Valerius Epidus Gratus, prefectus Judaica
Be warned that word has reached this office of an attack by rebels meant to halt your progress toward Philippi. You are to take refuge at the nearest fortifiable location and arrange for any reinforcements necessary to its defense. At all costs, the lives of the slaves in your charge are to be protected from harm and prevented from escape until further word from me.
The note was in the prefect’s own hand. The letters were poorly formed, and the words ran together in a way that made them almost illegible. His signature, a simple VEG, was scrawled across the bottom, accompanied by another wax seal.
Bachus allowed his optio prime to read the message aloud as he sat at his campaign desk to pen an acknowledgment. The terse words of a soldier were written and sealed with Bachus’s legion signet ring, a crude horse beneath the numeral Twenty-three. The runner was given drink and a place to sleep on the floor of a tent. Bachus dispatched one of his own men to run
