Chapter 21

Southern Ériunia

It was getting dark. The rain had finally let up that afternoon, but the roads were still awful. The army had slowed to a crawl, barely covering a couple of miles every day, and Velius was starting to think they should just set up a fortified camp and wait it out until the roads dried. The only problem with that was he didn’t want to get hemmed in by the Carthaginians who could easily surround them. The greatest strength of the legions over the Carthaginian phalanxes was their mobility.

Right now, his line could outstretch at least the phalanx part of the opposing army, which would leave it exposed. The Carthaginian allies were both less of a problem, because of their lack of organization and tendency to charge straight in, and more of a problem, because of their sheer numbers. Numbers he could deal with, but again, only as long as they were mobile. Which at the moment, they weren’t.

“It’s getting late,” Gordianus, the seventh legion’s second in command, said. “If you want to fortify the camps, we’re going to have to stop soon.”

He was right, Velius thought, although it was hard to tell, since the rain had blocked out the sun for days, with the only difference in day and night being gradations of darkness. Velius had been pushing it, hoping to get just a little more distance, even though he knew better. With this kind of ground and the men’s feet sinking ankle-deep in mud, they were actually working harder than they would have had they marched miles longer on dry ground.

He needed them rested. They’d moved into the envelope the enemy scouts had created, to the point that his lead elements had even seen some of the enemy horsemen. His cavalry pursued them, but they were locals and knew the land better than his men. Velius could feel them out there, but none of his allies had been this far south before, meaning they were blundering around in the dark, blind. If they could hit the coast, at least they’d have something to key off of, but until then or until the rain let up, allowing his men to be mobile again, all he could do was crawl forward a little at a time.

Still, that didn’t mean he should be taking stupid chances.

“Alright, let’s call it a day. Send word to the fourth and ninth legions, I want more distance between each camp. At least half a mille passus between each camp.”

“Is that wise?” Gordianus asked. “With that much distance, if the enemy does find us, they can get in between our camps, and cut us off from support.”

“Yes, but if we’re all together, they can surround our entire force, which completely negates our advantages while playing into theirs. They have a large force, but not enough of one to cover that much distance.”

“They could surround each camp in turn,” Gordianus pointed out.

“They could, but they’d have to split their forces up. They couldn’t easily support each other and they’d have to fight with parts of their forces in two directions. It puts them in a weaker position than if they had us all grouped together.”

“As you say,” Gordianus said.

Velius knew this was his way of saying he’d follow orders even though he didn’t agree with them, but Velius could live with that. Gordianus was a good man, but he had trouble seeing the entire battle-scape, at times.

“Make sure they set up the towers and watchers,” Velius said.

The towers were a new touch and he’d already heard some grumbling that it was pointless. When the camps were next to each other, a messenger could travel with news faster than the shuttered lanterns could blink their coded signals, and the men up in the towers were closer to the rain and wind, making for an uncomfortable night. He’d looked over the Consul’s plan for these towers before he left, and even without the new spyglasses, at half a mille passus, they could transmit signals faster than any messenger could run and without the chance of the message being intercepted.

Of course, maybe all his precautions would be for naught. Best case scenario, nothing would happen and they’d be on the move again in the morning. If something did happen, however, Velius at least wanted to be set up so that the battle would be in his favor.

Devnum

It was after midnight when Ky rode into the city, almost knocking over the city guards as he blew past them. The men were startled but recognized the Consul enough to get out of the way, instead of intercepting him. Sophus had heard enough to know Lucilla had been taken to her rooms in the palace, since there wasn’t much for the physicians to do. With her wounds closed up, miraculously from their point of view, they couldn’t do much beyond force-feeding her honeyed water and hoping she’d recover on her own.

That, at least, wouldn’t do her any harm and the nanites could use the glucose in the honey as they fought to repair her systems. Ky had other concerns. In the two days he’d ridden, stopping only long enough to exchange horses, her condition had started to deteriorate. The few active medical nanites she still had in her body were barely able to keep the internal bleeding under control and hadn’t been able to address any of the damage beyond the bleeding. Ky’s hurry was because the stabilization they had achieved had been very temporary, and that window was quickly closing.

Her lungs were still not able to get enough oxygen into her blood, causing add-on effects that, if left unchecked, would cause damage to other organs, including her brain. Worse, her kidneys, where the most serious damage had happened, were not processing and cleaning fluids, causing a rise in her potassium levels, weakening her heart, and creating fluid retention, which had caused her arms and legs to begin swelling dangerously.

Most troubling, the over-taxed nanites were beginning to fail. There were few enough left in her body as it was, and it wouldn’t take much more before she reached the point of no return. Medical nanites were powerful tools, but they had limits and without having modern surgical techniques and organ cloning available, there would be no hope of bringing her back.

Seeing his face, her guards moved quickly to get out of Ky’s way before he trampled them in his rush to get to her. As he burst into her room, he was completely focused on her and the information that started to flood across his vision as Sophus finally got into range of the altered nanites in her system and got full readouts instead of the simplified ones it had been limited to through the comm. Ky barely noticed her guards as they followed him into the room, ignoring all of them as he knelt beside her bed.

They were curious but unalarmed. He didn’t blame them. On the outside, she looked peaceful, like she was sleeping. They had no way of knowing the battle that was raging inside her body, or how badly she was losing it.

Ky leaned forward, pressing his lips firmly to hers. Sophus had already collected as many nanites as Ky could spare without inhibiting future replication and had altered them for her system, encasing them in a molecular shell to keep his system from seeing them as invaders that had suddenly appeared. Ky’s kiss, while being full of love and worry for her, was also the delivery method for this bundle, which tumbled into her system, its shell instantly being ripped apart by several of the nanites Sophus had ordered to stand ready.

“Are we in time?” Ky said, out loud, which was unusual even for him and a sign of the stress he was under.

“Consul?” Modius asked, unsure what Ky meant, or even if he was talking to them.

“I believe so, commander. The damage is extensive and the nanites are not functioning at the same level of efficiency as they would for you. However, I believe the damage done is completely reversible. You will need to stay nearby her for some time so that I may have direct control over the repair. You will also need to reduce your physical activity so that more resources are available to produce additional medical nanites. I will have to push the ones just delivered into her system beyond their capabilities, and they will burn out, meaning you will need to donate more to her recovery. She will also need to remain comatose for the time being. It could be several days before we can wake her.”

“I’m not going anywhere. Anything you need, just tell me,” Ky said, subvocalizing this time, before turning to one of her guards. “My lictore should be a day or so behind me. Make sure they know where to find me and inform the Emperor where I am if he needs me. For now, I will be unable to leave her side, but she will not be harmed if anyone needs to come speak to me.”

Her guards looked at each other as Ky settled in the chair next to her, seemingly to do nothing, and backed out of the room. He knew his actions probably seemed strange to them, barging in, kissing her, and then proceeding to do nothing while refusing to leave her, but there wasn’t any way he could explain it that would make sense to them.

He sat in silence, watching a data feed that Sophus provided him giving updates on her condition and responses to the nanites, but this wasn’t a quick process and everything was in Sophus’s metaphorical hands, so he was mostly consoling himself rather than actually doing anything useful.

“Perhaps your time would be better spent working on updating the instructions I have compiled for the various projects.”

“Probably, but as long as she’s in this condition, I can’t concentrate on anything else.”

“Why not? You know what is being done for her and as of now, you know there is nothing else you can do for her. Losing focus because of her condition seems a poor allocation of your time and resources.”

“I know it probably seems like that to you, but people aren’t made that way. We worry over things we know we can’t affect, mostly because there isn’t anything we can do about them. If there was, we’d worry less since we’d have something to do.”

“It seems inefficient.”

“I know. Just consider it one of our many peculiarities. It comes with being human.”

“I see,” Sophus said, falling silent.

Ky sat, one hand resting on her shoulder, still as a statue, for almost an hour. It was still too early to tell if the new nanites were going to be able to reverse all the damage, and he spent most of that time referencing Sophus’s files, trying to understand everything the AI was doing. He had rudimentary training in emergency medicine given to all pilots, but that had assumed the patients would all be augmented to the same physical level Ky was., What Sophus had done so far for her protection, and what it was doing now, was well beyond what any of the nanites had been designed for. Even if Ky had more training, he wouldn’t have understood what was being done. No one but Sophus could understand what the data he was seeing actually meant.

Almost an hour later, Ky was still sitting in that same position when the door opened unceremoniously and the Emperor strode in unannounced. Ky was so focused on watching the data that at first, he didn’t register the Emperor’s presence.

“Your Majesty,” Ky said after several long heartbeats and stood. “I’m sorry, I was distracted.”

The Emperor’s eyes first went to his daughter who, from all outside appearances, seemed completely unchanged, laying in the same place she had been the last time he’d been in this room.

“Can you help her?” he asked.

His voice wasn’t that of a man of power, a leader of a new Empire with thousands of subjects at his command. It was that of a father, worried for the life of his child.

“I think so. I’m doing what I can, but it will take time. She was severely wounded and the repairs to her body’s systems are not easy.”

“I know as well as anyone the miracles you can perform. It’s just hard to see her like this. I was hoping...”

“I know,” Ky said as the Emperor’s voice trailed off. “While your poisoning was serious, it hadn’t had a lot of time to damage your body beyond the sickness it created, unlike what the blade did to her.”

“Thank you for coming. I still don’t know how you managed to get here so fast, since we only sent a messenger to you yesterday, but I’m glad you’re here. The healers told me that, although her wounds healed miraculously, most people who enter the wakeless sleep rarely come out of it, and to not get my hopes up.”

Ky didn’t have a response for that, since nothing he said would make sense. Gunpowder, telescopes, and steam engines he could explain to them. They might seem magical, but they followed the processes of the observable world. Seeing inside a working body was impossible for the people of this time, leaving them to devise all kinds of miraculous or fantastical explanations for why people sometimes got sick and died. He could tell them about viruses and bacteria all he liked, but there was no way for them to understand what that meant, since they couldn’t see them.

“Can you ... how much of your attention does her treatment take? I don’t want to distract you from your treatments of her, but if you are able...”

Ky was actually impressed. He knew the Emperor cared for his daughter and he was clearly concerned for her condition, but in spite of his personal tragedy, he still had an Empire to run and he hadn’t forgotten it.

“I am, although you probably know more about what is happening than I do,” Ky pointed out.

“I doubt that.”

As far as he knew, Lucilla had never discussed with her father their ability to speak over long distances, although considering the multiple times he or she had responded to something happening to the other before word could ever reach them, it was very possible he hadn’t needed to be told to figure it out.

“Alright, maybe not more, but as much. We’re behind on a lot of projects, although with Hortensius’s recovery, or at least being mobile again, I understand they’re all underway again. I’m most anxious to get the semaphore stations up and running, including the temporary, mobile ones I want to send over to Ériu. The king’s last message sounded like he might be considering joining the Empire, which would go a long way to improving our supply issues. With some of our advancements in farming, their yields could well exceed their needs, producing enough to help cover our shortfalls here and feed the legions when they move on to the continent, but only if we get the crops in the ground soon.”

“I don’t know if we can rely on that happening. Even when we do finish conquering the island for them, they’re joining the alliance will take time. More than it did for us to form it in the first place, since they won’t have the pressure of an invading army to defeat like we did. I’m also not convinced our victory is as assured as you are. Velius is still young for a legate and this is his first independent command. We’ve received very little word about Velius’s progress south, especially once he passed the mountains, and I hear the weather has turned against him.”