John Maddox Roberts Cestus Dei

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tightened as he waited for the starting gong. No drugs were permitted prior to
the real fights, and each man had to face his enemy with whatever courage was
natural to him.
When the gong sounded, the fight was almost an anticlimax. Almost before the
brassy reverberations had died away, Parma's opponent was on the sand of the
arena, bleeding from a cut to the back of the thigh, where his armor did not
protect him. Parma hardly remembered the blow. The fight, short as it had
been, had contained at least twenty exchanges of cut, thrust, block, and
parry. The backhand cut to the rear of the unshielded thigh was one that Parma
had practiced hundreds of times in training, and he knew that he must have
made it during one of the exchanges, not even knowing that the blow had been
successful. He left the man to be attended by the medical staff, who stood by
with stretchers.
The crowd was giving Parma a good hand, which he mechanically acknowledged by
waving his bloodstained knife aloft. Luckily, he was an unknown, and the fight
was early in the day. Otherwise, the crowd might have insisted that he kill
his opponent. The crowd was distracted by some dramatic moment in another
fight, and Parma walked through the victor's gate, to be slapped on the back
and be congratulated by Vic, the trainer, and others from the School of
Marius. In the next three weeks he fought four more times, twice against
Lights, and twice against Heavies.
The result was the same: four men with bloody but nonfatal injuries.
On his return to Ludus, he was summoned to the office of Marius himself.
He hadn't seen Marius since the confusing first day in Ludus. The school was a
very large one, with thousands of men in training, so the owner was a remote
and lofty personage. Marius was sitting behind a desk as Parma entered the
office and stood attentively just inside the doorway.
While he waited for his master to look up, Parma studied his face. Parma was
now more than a year older than the bewildered boy fresh from the plains of
Thrax. and far wiser; he was able to make a much deeper reading of the man
before him than on the first occasion, when he had seen only a dangerous
fighting beast.
Now he saw the deep-etched lines of bitterness, and a deep and brutal
sensuality held rigidly in check by an iron will. This was a man who would
never let his desires and lusts get the upper hand. He could even see, here
and there, traces of ironic humor. Parma had inquired about Marius and
had found that little was known of the enigmatic games-trainer. He had been
born in the great slums of Augusta on Charun. He had risen, through force of
personality, shrewdness, physical strength, and ruthlessness to an important
position in one of the street gangs that controlled most of the city. After a
vicious all-night street battle in which his gang had been defeated, Marius
had taken refuge in the only place that provided sanctuary for his kind: a
consular recruiting office. To escape death at the hands of the rival
victorious gang, Marius had enlisted in the consul's army.
After a year in the brutal training camp of Charun, Marius had been
commissioned as an officer of constructs. These beings, fabricated from human
protoplasm to be perfect warriors, were excellent, even brilliant fighters on
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a company scale, with an intuitive grasp of infantry tactics implanted in
their genes, but they were hopeless at larger strategy and needed human
officers to direct them as well as to take care of logistics, intelligence,
supply, and all other matters not involving weapons and hand-to-hand combat.
Constructs were also subject to periodic fits of psychotic violence. Only in
combat were they stable and safe to handle.
The casualty rate was high among young officers, mainly from their failure to
take suitable precautions in defending themselves from their charges.
For three years Marius had lived among these unholy beings, wearing a uniform
of armor cloth, with holstered pistol and dagger at his belt, and always with
a heavy, spiked gauntlet on his left hand.
The campaigns in which he took part were little more than glorified plundering
expeditions. The planets of the system had been thoroughly looted and were now
mostly inhabited by slaves working the plantations, mines, mills, and
fisheries owned by the great families. The few semi-autonomous worlds, such as
Ludus and Domitian, supplied essential services to the court and the great
families, and were left alone most of the time, except for the endless feuding
among the great families themselves.
From time to time, one of the remaining scout ships would discover some
forgotten planet outside the system, and the troopship would be loaded with
constructs and return laden with wealth and slaves to keep the tottering
economy going awhile longer.
At the end of three years, Marius, not yet twenty-five, his hair already
flecked with gray, bought his discharge and signed onto a merchant vessel.
Nobody seemed to know where Marius disappeared to in the ensuing five years
though some claimed that he was seen captaining a ship that
conducted raids from Illyria, the pirate base. And it was almost certain that,
for a while, he was an officer in the hired armies of the warlord of
Cadmus, who manufactured and trained nearly all of the constructs used in the
public and private wars of the system. What was known was that, some ten years
before, Marius had shown up in Ludus with a large sum of money, bought a
long-closed school, stocked it with slaves, convicts, prisoners of war, and
free volunteers, and settled into the role of respected businessman. His drive
and intolerance of second-rate quality made his fighters the most demanded in
the system. His contacts in the military, pirate, police, and merchant slaver
fields assured that he always had first chance to buy the most desirable human
material.
This was the man who owned Parma and who addressed him with astonishing
mildness for one of such forbidding exterior and reputation.
"Well, my boy, it seems you've done well for yourself in your first fights.
I've seen the holos. Five clear wins and not a scratch on you.
Congratulations."
The man's voice and manner held a sort of sinister joviality that instantly
put Parma on his guard.
"I am honored that my poor showing has come to your notice, sir."
"So, you've learned irony along with fighting. I've heard that you spend your
spare time in the old university." The thick eyebrows went up, the tone was
oddly oblique. The trend of the burly man's speech escaped
Parma so he retained his guarded diffidence of manner.
"I seek to improve my knowledge of this confusing system, sir, and I've found
that I enjoy the acquisition of it."
"Yes, quite so. It speaks well for the optimism of youth that one in your
profession has enough confidence in the future to indulge in education.
Tell me, boy, why did you kill none of your opponents on Domitian?" The sudden
change of subject caught Parma off balance.
"Why, it was never necessary to deliver a fatal stroke. I fought until my
opponent exposed an unguarded piece of arm or leg, and I struck. There seemed
no necessity to kill."
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"Yes, but there was nothing to keep you from killing them after they [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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