The Fourth Rome

by David Drake

Come on, Nan! Move! To his combat-heightened awareness, it was excruciatingly slow going in an exo-powered suit. And by now, everybody in Obninsk knew the closed city was under attack.

  Come on! Come on! “Come on!” he finally sidd aloud, almost prayerfully. “Team Leader, can we—”

  Then he saw the first terrified, white face appear behind her, carrying an AK and shooting.

  “Bandit! Six o’clock! Move out of the way!” He didn’t want to shoot Nan’s suit, point-blank, with his HPM gun. Fratricide was always a threat.

  He really didn’t want to shoot the unarmored local, either. But a lucky bullet could foul a servo, hit a critical part of Nan’s suit.

  “Moving right,” Roebeck’s voice told him. She stepped sideways.

  Grainger fired his HPM weapon point-blank at Kokoshin, the mayor of Obninsk. The target dropped so fast Grainger didn’t have to watch Kokoshin cook.

  He had two more backward steps to take, then he was safe. He took one. Then he stepped carefully aside. From left of the lock, he covered Roebeck’s slow, heavy approach.

  The concussive thumps of her suit’s heavy tread shook the ramp. Hrrumph! Hrrumph! Hrrumph!

  Finally she was on the ramp. In two more steps she was beside him. In three, beyond.

  “Now, Grainger! O-kay, you can stop shooting! Get in here! We’ve got to seal up and displace out!”

  Until Roebeck said that, Grainger wasn’t awate that he was shooting. He was reflexively emptying the rest of his weapon’s power pack into the doorway where Kokoshin, and now several other armed Obninskis, lay sprawled.

  He’d remember every detail, later, of the people who’d died trying to stop alien invaders in huge robotlike spacesuits.

  Now, his mind was protecting him. He took one last step to safety, and the lock started to close.

  A bullet streaked through the narrowing aperture, bounced off his helmet, and ricocheted around the lock before falling to the deck. The lock closed up tight.

  “Sealed,” came Chun’s triumphant, relieved voice. “We’re outta here … now!” The deck under him shivered as the ARC Riders’ TC displaced out of Obninsk.

  Grainger slumped in his hardsuit. It held him complacently. For a minute he didn’t have the strength to move. They’d hoped to leave no witnesses, no tale-tellers. That last shooter had gotten himself an eyeful and lived to tell about it.

  Not good.

  Nan was out of her suit before he was.

  She showed him the deformed slug from a Russian AK, holding it up, turning it in her fingers. “Not perfect,” she said. “Somebody’s going to have a story to tell their grandchildren.”

  Grainger craned his neck to look down through his visor at her and the slug she held. “Couldn’t be helped,” he said raggedly, not bothering to toggle-on his exterior speaker so that she could hear his words.

  Then he continued stripping off his armor. You had to rack the 40mm before you took off your helmet. Then you could get out of your sarcophagus one more time. For a little while, at least.

  Phase One was over, anyhow. Moscow, next stop. Grainger didn’t bother going forward. He stayed aft, checking his gear, refilling the power pack on his HPM weapon, making sure that any minor damage to his equipment didn’t slip by him.

  He was going to need all his hardware again real soon now. Chun’s displacement heads-up sounded through the TC’s intercom. When a second shiver of reality and Chun’s terse, “Displacement complete,” told him the TC was back in its hidey-hole in the catacombs, he pounded the interlock release with his fist and went forward.

  Both of his teammates looked at him soulfully.

  “How’re you doing, Grainger?” Chun asked.

  He shrugged, leaning his head against the buliiiead. “Hope you got pictures of that UTL capsule while it existed.”

  “I did,” Chun assured him. “But those people…are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Why?” he snapped in a furious rush. “Because I had to fry some indigs? Don’t I look okay to you? Anybody tell you this was going to be a nonlethal mission, Chun? You got guilt by association? Or are you just trying to ’share my pain.’ Don’t bother. It don’t mean squat. Where I come from, we would have said those Ruskies got off easy.”

  “Grainger, that’s enough. Chun, let him alone.” Roebeck returned her attention to the Phase Two strike plan for Moscow.

  Live people whining about other folks’ dead people always pissed him off. He whacked the bulkhead release and stalked aft to sulk. His equipment could use some attention. He’d cleaned everything he might be using in Moscow one more time. You couldn’t be too careful.

  The strike on FILI was going to be harder th;m the operation in Obninsk, because nukes were stored in the downtown Moscow facility. That was the real reason that Roebeck had gone back to Central. For one thing, you needed suits armored for operating in what might be a severely hot LZ. For another, you didn’t want to irradiate the main timeline, make gross changes that might impact your own future, if you could help it. If you screwed up, you were doing an unintended revision, with all the consequences. And those consequences could be as damaging to the future the ARC Riders were Tying to protect as the revision they were trying to prevent.

  So Chun had huddled with the Extrapolation analysts, and they had a plan of sorts. But what they really had—what counted—was a risk analysis of the consequences of making a radioactive mess of downtown Moscow. If they had no alternative, even radioactive consequences beat letting this revision proceed unchecked.

  No ARC Rider liked the thought of it. But downtown Moscow was no place to store nuclear weapons, either. Normally, the missiles would have been moved out to silos, submarines, various other delivery systems. But the privatization decree of July, 1991, had the weapons producers and the military providers at each other’s throats about who owned what. So warheads and the missiles they rode in were sitting around in odd places. FILI was just one unfortunate place to choose to keep your nukes.

  Since Roebeck had secured New Rules of Engagement with relaxed collateral damage parameters, they’d do what they damned well had to do. Central said maybe one more nuclear accident in Russia would be survivable so far as the timeline was concerned. As for the Muskovites, that was another matter.

  Chun had ascertained that there’d been at least thirteen nuclear “events” before ’92 that had never been publicly admitted or documented outside the USSR. Although none of those nuclear accidents had been in Moscow, Central had run the simulations and was pretty sure the local hot quotient wasn’t going to get upped all that much—if the nuclear event was an emission. If the nuclear event was an explosion, all bets were off: They were just as likely to create a revision as to forestall one.

  Still, getting Moscow hot was only a risk with Plan B. Plan A was for the ARC Riders to nab themselves some revisionists and do this mission the old-fashioned way. Do it nice and quiet and with as little fuss and muss as possible.

  Grainger didn’t mind trying Plan A. He just didn’t think it would work.

  It took long enough to stash the TC and scramble through the tunnels that he’d calmed down some by the time they’d gotten to the Métropole. After the hardsuit, the tunnels didn’t make him feel shut in this time. They were downright spacious. The team just made it to the hotel by their ETA of 0900 hours local time.

  Reobeck was emphatic about keeping her appointment with Orlov and having Chun keep hers with Etkin, planned the night before for 1000, local time. Bundling up the revisionists for their trip to 50K would be easiest that way, during scheduled meetings. If they could pull it off.

  On this horizon, you could see no sign that, nearby, a closed city had been invaded, sacked, and left to mourn its dead. Russians didn’t freak easy. Of course, Obninsk communications and transportation capabilites were pretty well nil right now. That might account for the absent signs of heightened alert status. No troop carriers were prowling. Police weren’t doubled up in their cars. Ad hoc checkpoints hadn’t blossomed
on bridges and at intersections. At least, not yet.

  It was also possible that so few knew of what happened—or would ever know—that the Obninsk strike was—and would stay—in the noise level. After all, the strike was on a secret city, accessible by invitation only.

  Or so Chun insisted.

  Here in Moscow, whatever happened was going to have visible repercussions. Grainger didn’t bother to make the point. Everybody understood what was happening here. The two women just weren’t as pumped as he was.

  Roebeck wanted to get coffee, of all things. So off they went, repacked operational gearbags in hand, into the main dining room with its gold pillars and stained-glass; ceiling. He left them to it. “I’ll wait at the front door for Etltin,” he told them.

  The sight of all that good food and greedy, privileged people alive to eat it nearly made him sick.

  “Grainger, you should eat,” Roebeck criticized.

  “Is that an order?”

  “No, it’s not. Go on then.”

  She and Chun had their heads together, whispering about him as he left.

  Grainger didn’t wait at the front door. He went outside, into the air. Polluted or not, it didn’t smell like people ;ind food. So he saw Etkin’s car pull up, with Orlov’s right behind it.

  Damn.

  Etkin had a bodyguard with him today. He recognized Grainger, waiting on the front steps. “Privyet,” he called, and spoke to the bodyguard.

  “Privyet,” Grainger called back, shifting his gearbag on his shoulder. Like “yo” or “hello,” it didn’t mean much more than a basic mammalian acknowledgment.

  Etkin came to meet him. The bodyguard went straight to Orlov’s car and held the door open for Orlov as the Foreign Ministry official got out.

  Etkin said, “Oh, I so regret arriving late. Let us hurry and find your friends.” Etkin touched Grainger’s arm to move him along. These senior Russians liked to touch you. Grainger was in no mood for physical contact. He shook off the touch. Over Etkin’s shoulder, he could see Orlov, arguing with the bodyguard. Something was going to happen back there.

  He wanted to watch it. But Etkin was insistent. As Grainger went inside with Etkin, he caught a glimpse of Orlov’s frightened face, pale beneath its scrawny beard. The bodyguard was pushing Orlov into Etkin’s car with a hand on Orlov’s head in a practiced police procedure.

  So Etkin had heard something about Obninsk. Or else he was coincidentally moving to preempt the competition.

  Grainger paced Etkin, walking rapidly through the Metro-pole while telling him about today’s schedule. When Etkin stopped for breath, Grainger said, “That was Mr. Orlov, wasn’t it? Nan was supposed to see him today. Do you know where he’s going?”

  “Oh, yes. We will produce him later. We have a meeting he must attend.” Etkin showed those perfect teeth.

  Orlov was on Nan’s list of candidates for 50K. Not having him available would be a real stumbling block in the path of Plan A: he was Nan’s key to FILL Without him, she might not be able to get back in there peacefully.

  They found Nan and Chun in the dining room. Etkin and Grainger pulled up chairs. Once pleasantries were exchanged, Etkin said, “Mr. Orlov has been detained. He will meet us at FILI at approximately eleven o’clock, if it is satisfactory. I have his apologies for you.”

  Grainger couldn’t believe his ears. Etkin knew Grainger had seen what happened. And then, slowly, it all fell into place. The perfect teeth. Even the best-looking, KGB-groomed, ready-for-export Russian didn’t have teeth like that. Gold fillings, maybe. Caps, sure. But those teeth were the result of flawless nutrition over a lifetime. It all made sense to him: the calculated Russian English, the KGB gloss. The preemptive move all of a sudden on Orlov, so soon after the Obninsk strike.

  Etkin wasn’t after Orlov. Etkin was after the ARC Riders. He was getting a valuable asset, Orlov, out of his field of fire.

  Etkin was the local agent from Up The Line. Grainger would have bet his life on that assessment. Probably was betting it right now. Etkin had stones, Grainger had to give him that.

  Grainger didn’t hear much of what Etkin was; telling the women. Instead, his attention was drawn again to the pale skin on Etkin’s ring finger. Not a circle, as a wedding ring might have left. But an oversize oval—class ring. A KGB ring, he’d thought when first he’d seen Etkin. Now he kept remembering the Citadel class ring that Dr. Bill had continually twisted back in Central. The white skin on Etkin’s finger was that very size and shape.

  Then he heard Etkin say, “Come with me to FILI, now. All of you,” and Grainger focused in on the moment at hand.

  The ARC Riders had a standing hand sign for “fall back and regroup.”

  Grainger gave that hand signal to his team. Maybe it looked to Etkin as if he was brushing away a fly. If there were flies in here, they would have to be nomenclatura flies.

  Chun saw the hand sign. Nan didn’t. Chun touched Nan under the table and shook her head. Nan’s eyes flicked across the faces of her team. “Maybe we’d better pass. Tim has another meeting scheduled. We’re all tired. We could take this time to rest up…”

  “Oh; oh, no. I must insist,” Etkin said. “We would not want to offend our hosts who are busy arranging the sadar technology meeting that Quo has so urgently requested. They must meet with all your team to set ground rules. I have gone to great trouble to arrange this.”

  “I bet you have,” Grainger said. Nan’s eyes widened. “Then let’s do this, Professor Etkin. You come with us upstairs while we rearrange our schedule. Or wait for us here. Or in the lobby. Your choice.”

  Etkin sat back in his seat. His pale shooter’s eyes appraised Grainger. Then he nodded. “All right. We will go to your rooms.”

  Okay, buddy, if that’s the way you want it.

  Chun and Roebeck were whispering together. Roebeck wanted to know what the hell was going on. Chun couldn’t tell her. But they were going to back him. It was the best he could expect.

  They paid the check, leaving a rouble tip written on the bill instead of dollars, since Etkin was watching. No use getting the wait staff in trouble. They might never get the tip, but they wouldn’t get arrested for holding dollars, either.

  Etkin moved in on Chun, deftly cutting her out of the group as the four made their way to the elevators. Nan whispered to Grainger, “What is it?”

  “UTL.” He indicated Etkin with a quick jab of his finger. “We’ve got to talk privately.”

  “Maybe he’ll go with Chun and we can join them after we talk,” Nan murmured.

  Etkin and Chun turned to wait for them to catch up. Chun said, “Viktor says we really need to meet this group he has convened for us as soon as we can.”

  “We are due at FILI right now,” Etkin said, scowling.

  “Yeah, well. I can’t offend my visitor, either. And Nan needs to get her things.” Grainger crossed his arms.

  Roebeck said, “You two go on. Go to Chun’s room. We’ll make a couple quick calls and meet you there in five minutes. I promise, it won’t take longer than that.”

  Etkin seemed immediately mollified, almost jovial. “This is very acceptable. Quo and I have much to discuss, protocols for this meeting.”

  A big Russian in a raincoat joined them as they waited for an upward-traveling car. Maybe the guy in the raincoat was an innocent stranger. Maybe he was Etkin’s boy. He acknowledged no one and pushed no floor indicator when he crowded into the small Russian elevator with them. Nobody said a word until the door opened at their floor.

  The stranger got out, and headed down one corridor. Chun and Etkin took another. Grainger and Roebeck followed Chun and Etkin, then turned a corner, going toward Nan’s room, not Chun’s.

  As soon as they heard Chun’s door opening and closing, Roebeck said, “UTL? How do you know?”

  “I was waiting outside, remember. Orlov pulled up right behind Etkin. Etkin’s bodyguard just about arresfexi Orlov in front of me, muscled him into Etkin’s car, and drove away with him. S
o Etkin’s making his move. Why? He knows about Obninsk. How? Not from local channels. Not yet.”

  “You can’t be sure, Tim. You’re overreacting. Reaching.”

  “You want to talk about this here, in this hallway? You’re the boss. Okay. It’s those teeth. Too good for this century, let alone this culture. I should have realized it before. And his ring finger’s missing a Citadel class ring like Dr. Bill’s.” If you were active-duty KGB and you had a ring saying so, you wouldn’t be wearing it routinely enough to keep the skin under it from tanning.

  “Sure, Tim. Fine. You call Matsak, cancel your appointment or postpone it. I want to see what Etkin’s got up his sleeve. You’ve got your gearbag. What are you worried about?”

  “Oh, nothing. Just ending up in a Fourth Rome, that’s all. But if you don’t mind returning to an altered future, who am I to quibble?” He stalked off to his room, keyed the lock, and slammed the door. Then he called Matsak and asked a secretary to make certain the Ministry of Science Deputy joined Grainger at the Metropole as soon as possible. He wasn’t going to Etkin’s meeting. He’d say he’d come later. They shouldn’t all walk into the same trap.

  When he was done, he half ran through the halls to join Roebeck and Etkin in Chun’s room.

  Nan was standing outside in the hall waiting for him. The door to Chun’s room was open. He knew they’d fucked up by the look on Roebeck’s face, before he saw any more than those basic situation parameters.

  “What?” he called. “What is it?” He ran those last few steps flat out.

  Roebeck, hands on hips, was standing in the doorway, shaking her head.

  “They’re not here,” she said calmly and motioned him inside. “They’re gone. Chun would never leave without us. It’s against every procedure—”

  “He’s got her.”

  Grainger let his gearbag slip to the floor. The room looked just like his. It was completely empty of personal effects. Chun and her gearbag were gone as if they’d never been. The two remaining ARC Riders searched thoroughly, not saying a word where surveillance was a certainty.

  Soon it was clear Chun had been able to leave no sign, message, or clue behind. She’d either been taken by surprise or… Grainger didn’t want to think about the alternate scenarios.