Caesar's Bicycle (The Timeline Wars, 3)

by John Barnes

  Whatever Pompey said back was lost on me, but all the men laughed, the kind of warm laugh that breaks the tension. I had a sense of just why these men would follow him everywhere.

  My problem was that at the current range, with the .45, I could probably take all the men guarding the balloon before anyone could get a shot into me; they’d have to close with cold steel, and I could turn and run if need be, since I was not weighted down by armor as they were. So purely in theory, I should have started shooting, probably Alba first, then a lot of them. The rest might turn and run, and then I could leap up the ladder into the balloon, put a pistol to Pompey’s head, and demand to know what he had done with Chrys.

  Possibly, I thought, she’s even in there—she’d be valuable enough for him to hold prisoner, surely. He had suffered a great deal because he didn’t have an ATN or Closer advisor, as Caesar and Crassus had. He might very well be willing to have even one he had to keep at knifepoint.

  So the plan was pretty simple. Four or six shots—and four or six men dead—would get me into the balloon, and I could work from there.

  The only problem was that I had been watching these guys in their very difficult circumstances for the last hour, and I just didn’t want to. Alba and his men were a bunch of fine fighters with exceptional loyalty; the centurion was a guy any fighting man would have followed to hell and back. It didn’t seem like they had to die for having picked the wrong side.

  You see how it is. I like my enemies either deeply personal, like certain Closer bastards or like the one time I fought myself from another timeline, a timeline where I had actually gone to work for them; or if not that, I like them to be completely impersonal—just figures that pop up and shoot at me, and then I shoot back at them, and that’s that.

  Either way, that’s fine. I sleep okay after that. But when you know just enough for them to be human, and all they are is in the wrong place at the wrong time—well, back before I met Chrys, back when I was still an embittered ash of a human soul with no desire other than revenge, I didn’t much care. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time was a perfectly valid reason for someone, even someone likable, to die.

  Life had changed a lot. Now it wasn’t. I kicked myself mentally for a sentimental fool, but I didn’t feel like gunning down several good, decent soldiers just doing their jobs, and I couldn’t seem to make my hand reach for the automatic. I had not turned pacifist, or anything—if a Closer had popped up, I’d have been firing before thinking—but I had started to think a little too much and feel a bit too much empathy to be the same guy I had been before.

  Why is it that changes of spirit never come when it’s convenient?

  The cannon in the distance were pounding now, and we heard bugles. Caesar’s forces were entering the city, an hour before dawn, in a surprise attack that would carry everything before it. Later I learned that they caught practically the whole patrician class at the riverboat docks and the stage stations.

  I stood there with that invading army coming in, with Pompey’s balloon ready to go at any moment, and unable to move forward because there were a couple of ordinary guys I couldn’t quite kill in cold blood. The first gray streaks of light from the false dawn were reaching across the sky, and in a moment or two I would be visible.

  The night was suddenly alive with musket fire, volley meeting volley, and light flashed through the alleys in a bewildering pattern, casting long macabre shadows across the courtyard toward the platform, like dark demons leaping toward the balloon. Alba stepped down and looked around for an instant, clearly unsure what to do; then Pompey leaned out and shouted something, and Alba picked up the ax to cut the lines.

  It tipped the balance; if Pompey took off without my getting hold of him, I would lose any chance of finding out where Chrys was. The .45 in my hand barked, and Alba fell dead; I fired double-handed, in the approved police style, and took down two other men.

  They shot back, but that ragged volley from men scattered that widely could have hit something only by chance, and they were firing into the dark.

  There was another roar of musketry. Clearly an advance guard of Caesar’s had arrived and was trying to fight its way to the balloon. Inexperienced as they all were with the effects of musketry at close range, probably what was happening was that two centuries were slaughtering each other, leaving no one able to do anything more than keep firing.

  The men who had just fired at me hesitated, moving back and forth as they reloaded. I shot another, and that decided about half of them—they ran to join the others. The rest pointed their muskets, half-blinded probably by their own muzzle flashes before, not able to see where I was.

  A voice shouted from the stagecoach, and they turned and ran to join the rest of their century. The stagecoach door popped open as I ran toward it, and a horse pistol pointed out—I fired a shot, but an upward shot at such a small target, especially while I was running, was hopeless. Still, the hand jerked in for an instant, and that gave me time enough to reach the ladder and scale it, leaping up it several rungs at a time, .45 gripped in my teeth.

  The pistol boomed above me, a great spray of red, and nothing happened—he was shooting out into space as far as I could tell, not down the ladder. Then another pistol boomed, and I heard the long hiss of the cable running through its eyebolts and grommets—Pompey had managed to sever the cable, and if you broke it in any one place, it released the balloon.

  The ladder, propped against the side of the boat, began to go over, and I flung myself forward off it. I was fifteen feet above the ground, and even as I did it I thought I might well hit the pavement or the hot side of one of the furnaces, but my hands found the knot at the top of a sandbag.

  My body swung forward and smashed into the bag, and the pistol in my teeth slammed further in, but I managed to keep my grip. We lurched up into the air, me hanging on to the sandbag by wrapping my legs all the way around it and keeping my hands locked on the knot.

  We rose rapidly, the sandbags clearing the top of the three-story-high Temple of the Great Mother by about fifteen feet. If I had let go about then, I might have had a fifty-fifty chance of survival—but that wasn’t what I was after.

  There was a roar down below; they were trying to bring us down with musket fire, but even at our altitude of less than a hundred feet, the muskets didn’t have the oomph to get anything up here at any dangerous velocity. For one instant, a lead ball hung in the air, a bit below me and ten feet out in front; then it fell back to earth.

  We drifted out over the city; the light was getting brighter by the moment, a pale pink spreading across the deep blue behind us as we drifted westward over the city. I could see the alleys of the city filling with marching troops and bicycles—Caesar had indeed arrived in force. Probably even as I floated upward then, Cicero was hiding under the docks, and Cato Uticensis was being beaten to death by Caesar’s legionaries in front of his family, but I knew none of that at the time—all that I saw were the great columns of troops pouring into the city.

  There was a little flicking of gunfire from the Servian Wall—probably some of those hastily organized volunteers hadn’t quite had the sense to desert. A field gun roared in the dark Via Nomentana ahead and to my left, sending a streak of red fire against the wall. Two more bellowed, and then there was flame and smoke from the Porta Collina; the inner city had fallen already, but Caesar’s forces were destroying resistance wherever they found it, rather than bypassing it to give a chance for surrender.

  It was thorough and brutal—he was making sure that anyone with the means and the courage to resist did so now, and was killed or captured doing it, so that there would be no nucleus around which to form an opposition. The whole thing was perfectly Caesar—it solved all his political problems efficiently, and in its willingness to slaughter a lot of untrained draftees, it was cruel enough to frighten his enemies into quiescence.

  As I had been watching the invasion roll in, we had passed on from the top of the Palatine Hill, and since it’s
steep, this meant we were now a few hundred feet in the air.

  I was still hanging on to that huge sandbag, my legs wrapped around it, my hands on the knot, the pistol in my jaws. I cautiously let loose with one hand, took the .45 in hand, and carefully tucked it into the shoulder holster, fastening it closed. At least I didn’t have to worry about breaking my teeth.

  One of the hardest things to get used to about ballooning is how silent it all is, and how still, especially in a balloon like this, with no burner going. Thus when I heard the general’s boots on the boat over my head, they boomed distinctly in the morning air, and I breathed very slowly and cautiously, hoping not to be detected.

  There was a scraping noise—it sounded like he was climbing around on the lines—and then the whump! of a fire starting. He had ignited the additional burner; we would be going up and staying up a lot longer. The balloon rocked gently at the pressure on the various lines as he clambered back down into the boat body.

  I was still working on a way to get over the gunwale and into the main body without being detected. The davit stuck out from the side of the boat about two feet over my head; the sandbag between my legs was about the size and shape of a boxer’s heavy bag, and not at all easy to climb.

  Cautiously, I humped upward once, hard, and got my hands a few inches from the davit. The clump of Pompey’s boots was over on the other end of the boat, as best I could tell, and I reached up to grip the line well above the knot.

  I tried not to look down at all, or to think about just how far down it was or how long I could fall before I hit.

  I pulled myself up on the rope, cautiously unwrapping and rewrapping my legs, getting ready for the hard push up to the davit, still six feet overhead. Another hard pull should bring me to the point where my feet rested on the bag—

  With a sickening lurch, the balloon shot upward, rocking hard. I hung on as long as I could, and despite my own advice to myself, I looked down.

  A sandbag, like the one on which my feet rested, was tumbling away in the bright morning sun, no doubt to terrify everyone wherever it might crash into the city. Pompey was dropping ballast; now that I listened, I could hear his knife sawing another line; I dared not let go of my grip, for when that line parted—

  There was a noise a bit like a pistol shot as the line went. Another sandbag plunged down through the cold morning air. Another line dangled empty from another davit. I realized, suddenly, that given the way this balloon worked, and that he was trying for the maximum possible distance, he had every good reason to get rid of most of the sandbags as soon as possible.

  I heard him sawing again, and I threw myself up the line, getting my feet on the sandbag this time and taking a hard grip. Once again the balloon lurched upward as another bag went, and my feet swung off the swinging bag below; I hung by my hands fifteen hundred feet above the ground.

  Pompey’s footsteps were now coming toward the stern of the boat, where my sandbag hung; probably he was about to balance the load. Even as I thought that, I heard the sawing, closer than ever, and saw the sandbag directly across from mine begin to vibrate. Mine would be next.

  15

  Climbing up hand over hand, not using your feet, is one of those things you do so endlessly in ATN Training School that it’s second nature, and I was climbing as hard as I could before I even had put my situation into words. Still, I had never done it when it was quite so far to the ground, nor when at any moment there might be another hard yank.

  Just as I reached for the davit, the jerk came, another sandbag plunging away. I was ready for it, but it did make me swing backward and forward alarmingly before I got a hand on the davit.

  A shadow fell across me, and before I could think—and a good thing, too, thinking is way too slow at a time like that—I had kept my grip on the davit, let go of the line, and yanked the .45 out, pointing it upward into Pompey’s surprised face as he was about to slash my hand, which would have severed the tendons and sent me plunging.

  “Don’t even think it,” I said.

  He leaped back out of sight, and I started to work on swinging up onto the davit, using just one hand. I couldn’t holster the gun without the risk that he would be back to cut my hand, and I had only one hand to hang on with, so I was trying to get my legs up and around the davit, which was taking a lot of swinging.

  It didn’t get easier when, with a bang, he used one of his horse pistols to cut another sandbag free, and yet another. The jerks made my swinging wilder and uncontrolled, and for one god-awful second all the pressure of my weight was on my wrist, torqued as far as it would go, with all the city of Rome and the land around it spread out far below me, and my body swung far out away from the hull of the boat, feet pointing into empty sky.

  But that gave me the momentum I needed, and he was reloading, so I whipped forward, kipped up, and got my legs around that davit. My thighs locked, and now at least I would be harder to get rid of.

  Two more bangs dropped two more sandbags—now only the one below me was left—but I no longer cared much, securely locked on as I was; I sat up hard, caught the gunwale with my left hand, levered myself into position, and came up pointing the Model 1911A1. Pompey crouched in the bow, his horse pistol braced and leveled, about fifteen feet from me.

  “You’ve got about a 50 percent chance of hitting me, maybe, if you’re really good with that thing,” I said, “and I suspect you know that.”

  “Granted,” Pompey said.

  “Watch this,” I said, and fired two rounds out to the side. “I’ve got three left. If we start shooting, figure the odds are overwhelming you’re dead.”

  “Very obviously true,” he said, and sat down, keeping the horse pistol level at me. “Depending on just what you intend to do to me, however, it might be better to take your chances. I assume I am in the presence of Marcus Fortius, the ATN agent?”

  “You are. And I believe you sent me a note implying that you were holding Chrysamen ja N’wook prisoner. Do you have her with you?”

  What he did next I could never have anticipated.

  He burst out laughing. There was a strange quality to it, because he seemed not quite able to stop, and he kept right on laughing till tears ran down his face, and he got quite red in the face.

  He had been a handsome man in his youth, with curly hair, a firm chin, flashing eyes, and high cheekbones—he could have been a film star in my timeline, kind of a squared-off Kirk Douglas. Now, he was close to sixty and running to flesh, a baggy second chin hanging in and his jowls a little too prominent. The laughter brought so much color to his face that I could see a few little broken veins in his nose, probably not so much from drinking as from having been out in the weather too much.

  It was the kind of laugh that makes you think of every really sick joke you know, the kind that you laugh at because they are so nakedly horrible in their implications that it’s the only way the mind can defend itself. And at the same time, there was something brave in it—a little touch of courage, like the kid who whistles when he goes by the cemetery, but goes by it anyway.

  At last he stopped, and said, “Thank you for not shooting me for a madman, sir. Well. The gods have often had their way with me. The Judeans claim that this is because I invaded their Holy of Holies and saw their Ark of the Covenant, which they say contains the tablets on which their god wrote down some wholesome advice for them. Perhaps they are right, for ever since I returned from the East, there has been one catastrophe after another, whether I tried to act nobly for the common good or merely to look after my own interests. And so often it has been just this sort of bizarre prank of the gods. It is said my genius is somehow bound up with Mercury, who is the god of transformations and changes, and moreover is reputed to have a dreadful sense of humor.”

  “Our genii probably know each other,” I said. “Suppose you tell me the joke, so we can both laugh.”

  He sighed. “It was a bluff, you see. I had almost caught her, but she turned out to have some unexpected skills, and
, well, she escaped from several of my best men, leaving a couple of them dead, if that’s of interest, even while I was drafting the message. Suddenly all I had of her was a few curls from her head. So I enclosed those in the letter, and I calculated that if she got back to you soon enough, the only harm done was that Caesar would know I was willing to lie to him—which he surely knew already. But in a war zone, many things can happen, and besides, ATN has a program of its own that might send her in another direction. If she didn’t make her way back to Caesar, I might get him and you to expend valuable effort in finding her. So now I find that all that I did was very nearly ruin my escape … or perhaps it’s already ruined. Well, you may keep me at gunpoint as much as you choose, and you can trust me or not, but I know that ATN has no preferences about who wins this struggle, so I shall put this thing away”—he tucked the horse pistol back into its scabbard—“and now, if you’re willing, we can wait out the journey. There’s more than enough food and water on board for two.”

  I thought for a long while. “You have no idea what direction she escaped in?”

  Pompey sighed. “Alas, no information I can trade with. She escaped from us near the Via Flaminia, when we stopped to eat and rest, about ten miles outside the city. That is all I can tell you. Whether she went forward toward Rome or back toward Caesar, I couldn’t say.”

  I figured Chrys must have gone forward toward the city, because if she’d headed back toward Caesar, I’d have met her on the road early that morning, or she’d have even arrived in camp. Which meant I’d probably been pretty close before, and I was getting farther away all the time.

  On the other hand, now that I knew she was alive and free, in the city, able to go to Caesar if she needed to, I was a lot less worried.