himself on a knothole.' There was general laughter.
Perennius appeared not to be listening. He walked back to the bow. The fourteen-foot long pike was still in his right hand. He carried it just ahead of the balance so that its butt brushed the deck and its point winked in the air ahead of him at the height of a man's throat. The only sign the agent made to show he was not simply bemused at making a foolish mistake was his peremptory gesture to Calvus to join him by the bowsprit. It was unnecessary. The tall man had already turned in unison with the agent. Sabellia followed also, unasked but expected as Sestius went back to his training duties.
'Now, what in blazes was that?' the agent asked. His voice held the fury of Father Sun, reswallowing the life that was his creation in tendrils of inexorable flame. 'And don't give me any crap about dolphins!' Even to himself, Perennius would not admit how fearful he was that what he had 'seen' was only a construct of his diseased mind.
'It was less like a dolphin than you are,' said the traveller calmly, always calmly. 'It appears to have been a - ' he looked at the agent, his lips pursing around the choice of a word - 'marine reptile, a tylosaurus. It eats fish, though it would probably make short enough work of a man in the water. The ship itself is far too large to be potential prey, so I was not concerned.'
The fact of identification has its own power over the thing identified. Perennius looked from Calvus to the pike in his hand. 'Oh,' he said in chagrin, conscious of the woman's eyes as well. He had made a fool of himself in his panic. 'I hadn't seen one before.'
'No, you certainly hadn't,' the traveller agreed. 'The last of them disappeared from Earth sixty-five million years ago. I don't think it will be able to stay alive very long in this age. The seas must be far too salty, so that it will dehydrate and die.'
In a society that valued rhetoric over communication, mathematics were a slave's work - or a spy's. Numbers - of men, of wealth, of distances - were a part of Perennius' job, so he had learned to use them as effectively as he did the lies and weapons which he also needed. But even in a day when inflation was rampant and the word for a small coin had originally meant 'a bag of money,' the figure Calvus had thrown out gave the agent pause. While Perennius struggled with the concept, the Gallic woman sidestepped the figures and went to the heart of the problem. 'You say they're all dead,' she said in her own smooth dialect of Latin, 'and you say we just saw one. Where did it come from?'
The traveller was looking astern, toward the empty waves past the rope-brailed canvas of the mainsail. Perhaps he was looking much farther away than that. 'Either there is something completely separate working,' he said 'or that was a side-effect of the way I came here. I can't be sure. I was raised to know and to find - certain things. And to act in certain ways. This isn't something that I would need to understand, perhaps .. . but I rather think it was not expected.'
The tall man shrugged. He looked at Sabellia, at the agent, with his stark black eyes again. 'This was not tested, you see. It was not in question that the technique
would work, but the ramifications could be as various as the universe itself. That's why they sent all six of us together . . . and I am here.'
'Calvus, I don't understand,' Perennius said. He watched his hands squeeze pointlessly against the weathered gray surface of the pike staff. 'But if you say that it's all right, I'll accept that.'
'Aulus Perennius, I don't know whether or not it is all right,' the tall man said. 'We didn't have time to test the procedure that sent us here.' The smooth-skinned, angular face formed itself - relaxed would have been the wrong word - into a smile. 'We did not have time,' Calvus repeated wonderingly. 'Yes, I've made a joke. I wonder how my siblings would react to me now?' He smiled again, but less broadly. 'Contact with you has changed me more than could have been expected before we were sent off.'
Sabellia began to laugh. Perennius looked at the woman. 'You too?' he said sourly.
Sabellia's hair was beginning to bleach to red-blond after days of sea-reflected sunlight. 'It's the idea of anyone getting a sense of humor by associating with you. Lord Perennius,' she said. Her giggle made the sarcasm of 'Lord' less cutting, though abundantly clear.
'That wasn't quite what I meant,' said Calvus. He looked from one of his companions to the other.
But as the agent strode toward the mast to rack the pike again, he too began to laugh.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The sails were to windward of them. That was bad enough. What was worse was the fact that their attitude shifted even as Perennius watched them. If he was correct, the vessels were turning toward the Eagle, not away. In this age, in these waters west of Cyprus, no honest seaman wanted to meet another ship.
'Those two ships are turning toward us,' said Calvus, as if to put paid to the hopeful doubt in the agent's mind. Perennius glanced sidelong at the tall man, wondering just how sharp his eyesight really was. 'Why are they doing that?'
'Herakles, Captain!' cried the lookout who had given the initial alarm a minute before. 'They're making for us! Pirates!'
'That seems to me to cover it, too,' said Perennius. He struggled to keep from vomiting. Disaster, disaster . . . not unexpected in the abstract, but its precise nature had been unhinted only minutes before. The voyage had been going well. The oarsmen and the Marines were both shaking down in adequate fashion -
Across the surface of the agent's mind flashed a picture of his chief, Marcus Optatius Navigatus, burying himself in trivia as the Empire went smash. It was easier to think about the way a rank of Marines dressed than it was to consider chitinous things that spat lightning - or the near certainty that he would have to battle pirates with a quarter of the troops he had thought marginally necessary to the task.
Screw'em all. Aulus Perennius had been given a job, and he was going to do it. Not 'or die trying'; that was for losers.
There were men shouting on deck and below it. The captain was giving orders to the coxswain through a wooden speaking tube. The agent turned his eyes toward the putative pirates again. They were still distant. Though interception might be inevitable, it would not be soon. With genuine calm rather than the feigned one of a moment before, Perennius said, 'It could be that these aren't simply pirates, Calvus. Like the bravos we met in Rome weren't just robbers. Can you protect us against thunderbolts here like you did then?'
'No,' Calvus said as he too continued to watch the other sails. The upper hull of the nearer of the vessels was barely visible. It was a sailing ship, and that was at least some hope. 'Their weapons - and I can only assume that what you face here is identical to what we knew - their weapons will strike at a distance of - ' a pause for conversion. The agent would have given a great deal to know the original measurement - 'two hundred double paces, a thousand feet. My capacity to affect anything physical, or even - ' a near smile - 'mental, falls off exponentially with distance. At ten feet, perhaps, I could affect their weapons. No further.'
'All right, we'll keep you out of the way,' Perennius said. His mind was ticking like the fingers of an accountant. 'Put you on an oar, you're strong, or maybe the cabin's the best idea, just in case we do get close enough you can - '
'Aulus Perennius,' the traveller said, interrupting for the first time, 'I said that if there are Guardians on those ships, they can tear this craft apart from a thousand feet.'
'And if it's just pirates, they can't!' the agent snapped back. 'Think I didn't goddam listen to you?' He pointed toward the cabin into which Gaius and Sestius had disappeared at a run. Their armor was there. 'I'll have hell's own time finishing this job if you've caught a stray arrow on the way. And if it's your lobster buddies after all, well ... I just might be able to arrange a surprise for them
even at two hundred paces. For now, get to blazes out of my way so that I can get on with what I need to do!'
Which was to kill people, the agent thought as he strode to the forward fighting tower. 'You two!' he shouted to a pair of nervous-looking seamen. 'Give me a hand with these cables!'
It was nice to have a skill that was in demand.
Perennius and his scratch team had three sides of the tower cleated together and were raising the fourth when Sestius and a pair of the Marines staggered forward. The soldiers were in armor and were carrying the ballista. With its base and a bundle of iron darts, it was a load for all of them.
'Drive home that peg!' the agent ordered. He thudded one warped timber against another with the point of his shoulder. Sestius dropped his burden obediently and rapped at the peg with his helmet, the closest equivalent to a hammer. Perennius grunted and lunged at the wall again. Sestius struck in unison, and the pieces of the tower
