The Fourth Rome

by David Drake

  From behind Pauli heard the meat-ax whop of a full-strength microwave pulse. A pair of dogs ran back across the arena with high-pitched yelps. Fear makes a mammal’s bowels tremble. Microwaves that induced trembling tricked the dogs’ minds into believing their own fear.

  Teeth closed on Pauli’s calf. They released with a startled gasp before Pauli could stab his spear butt down. A tan dog rolled away. Its eyes were glazed. Repeated pulses hammered the short fur of its skull.

  The pack broke up in terror. The dogs still able to move slunk away, speeded by sprays of microwaves. Their tails curled under to protect their bellies from the teeth of invisible foes. Pauli felt his own guts tremble as a beam brushed him by accident. Warm blood trickled slowly down his calf.

  The official giving the games held the grill in front of him and shouted in fury. Trumpeters blew a signal even louder than the crowd. Archers entered the arena and began to shoot the dogs. They were locals using all-wood bows and their aim was poor.

  Alone in the amphitheater, Tiberius remained sjeated. He leaned forward, resting his pointed chin on one hand. His face was as unreadable as a pool of water.

  The gates of the north ramp clanged. This time the officials would send a bear. Bears were normally placid if left alone, but this one would have been starved and goaded into a rage that only leopards among the big cats could equal.

  A leopard might weigh fifty kilograms. A full-grown European brown bear would be five or six times as large. Microwave pistols wouldn’t even slow it down. Pauli might be able to kill the beast with his stabbing spear, but by the time it died the creature would have chewed the top off his skull.

  “Pauli, it’s a bear,” Beckie said in a calm voice. She didn’t panic in a crisis. You couldn’t ask for a better teammate when everything was falling apart.

  He’d been so sure that Svetlanov would attack during the games. He’d been afraid to consider the idea thai Gerd and Beckie should break him out of his cell in case that cost them the opportunity to stop the revisionist.

  Pauli Weigand was less afraid of death than he was of surviving failure and having everyone in the Anti-Rev sion Command know what he’d always known about himself: he wasn’t up to the job. Not fit to be an ARC Rider and certainly not able to lead a team.

  Pauli ran his hands along the shaft of his stabbing spear, judging the best spots to grip it for the one stroke the bear would allow him. The mission might be a failure, but at least he wouldn’t be around to answer for it.

  “Pauli, I’ve found—” Gerd said. Before the analyst could get out the next word, an explosion told Pauli that Gerd’s sensors had located the revisionist.

  The runnel acted as a wave guide, channeling the blast and feeding it on echoes. Tiberius turned. Gray smoke puffed from the archway behind his chair. An officer barked a command; the guards formed an impassable array between their general and the mouth of the tunnel.

  A second grenade burst in the midst of them with a red flash and another puff of dirty smoke. The guards went down like bowling pins.

  Spectators screamed, surging like the tide. Those nearest the blast tried to get away, some of them bleeding from shrapnel wounds. Those just beyond in the packed crowd pressed closer to see what was happening.

  “Pauli,” Beckie Carnes said in a tone of quiet desperation. “I can’t get to the tunnel. There’s too many people.”

  Pauli took off his breechclout. His mind was running as if it were on rails. He was headed directly at a result, oblivious of all else. The cloth was too heavy as is, so he ripped it in half the long way.

  The shock wave had knocked Tiberius down. He got up, stumbling when he stepped on the chair that had folded under him. His two surviving guards tried to carry him out of the way. The shouting mob blocked them. The guards turned, putting their bodies between the tunnel and their chief.

  Pauli stuck his spear point-down in the sand and knotted the cloth around the shaft a few inches from the end. He knew the bear would be coming for him, but there were more important things on his mind. He had a mission to complete.

  One of the guards above on the first tier crumpled slowly to his knees, then toppled forward. The other man bellowed. He dropped his sword, clutched at his face, and collapsed onto the body of his fellow.

  Pauli started running toward the wall. He cocked his spear over his shoulder into throwing position.

  Kyril Svetlanov stepped out of the tunnel. He was reloading his small submachine gun. Svetlanov’s face was cheerfully pink, framed by his flowing white hair and beard. He looked like a 19th-century Santa Claus as he pointed the Skorpion at the future emperor.

  Pauli threw his spear. It wobbled slightly around the point, but the drag of the cloth stabilized the weapon’s flight sufficiently.

  The spearhead was as long and almost as broad as Pauli’s big hand. It hit Svetlanov in the center of the chest so hard that none of the iron was showing when the revisionist’s body toppled backward. The shaft waggled frantically in the air as Svetlanov convulsed in death.

  “Pauli, the bear!” Beckie warned.

  Pauli turned. The beast was only a dozen meters away, coming toward its prey at a deceptively quick amble. Its legs seemed to cross at each stride.

  The bear’s brown fur was mangy. Shackles had left running sores on each leg; patches of its hide looked as though it had also been tortured with hot irons. The beast’s small eyes were pits of red fury for the first human being on which it had an opportunity to wreak the vengeance it deserved.

  Pauli braced himself. He couldn’t outrun the bear’s rush, and he preferred to face his death.

  A Roman javelin sailed over Pauli’s head and struck the bear in the neck a handsbreadth from the spine The beast staggered; the lead-weighted missile weighed several kilos.

  The bear twisted its head, trying to grasp the shaft in its jaws. A second javelin slammed the other side of its neck. The great body relaxed, free at last from captivity and pain.

  Pauli Weigand turned to scan the rows of seats above him. A Roman soldier, a member of one of the squads on duty in the amphitheater in case of a riot, had been grabbed by fellow legionaries after he threw both of his javelins. A centurion was shouting at him.

  “Flaccus?” Pauli called. “You’re an artist with those things!”

  The veteran grinned and nodded since his arms were pinioned. Flaccus had been in the army long enough to know he was safe if he stuck to any halfway believable story. He’d be all right.

  The crowd thundered in the bowl of the amphitheater. Attendants and some of the regular soldiers clustered around Tiberius. The corpses of his German bodyguards lay about him, faithful unto death.

  Thirty or more archers rushed into the arena frcm the south ramp. A few gladiators followed, some of them ruckling on their weapons and armor. It looked as though an arena official had mustered all the armed men under his control to end the embarrassing problem Pauli Weigand had become. Even if someone wanted to countermand the order, he couldn’t be heard in the echoing chaos.

  Beckie climbed over the railing and poised to jump to the sand. Gerd started to do the same from the other side of the carnage around Tiberius. A pair of microwave pistols wouldn’t make any difference against so many opponents, but Pauli didn’t waste his breath trying to order his teammates back.

  He placed his hands on his hips and stood arms akimbo, facing the oncoming archers. He and his team might be going out, but they were going out on a win.

  Moscow, Russia

  March 11, 1992

  “Boss,” Grainger complained, stomping through FILI on a room-to-room search with blue lightning crawling all over him. “You know how I hate these hardsuits.

  Ain’t there some other way? Chances are ten to one all these field effects are gonna make me sterile or somethiig.”

  Clomp, clomp, clomp came the sound of his armored boots on the tiled floors. He was taking external audio for any advance warning or situational information it might provide. Sometimes the floor
beneath the tile would give and he’d hear tiles cracking like glass breaking underfoot.

  The hallway wasn’t wide enough to proceed two abreast in the big hardsuits. He was walking point, a 200 (IB acoustic gun mated to his suit’s right arm. With it, he could crumble masonry if he had to. If he had to, he could thumb the virtual controller to lethal. As he passed each door, he tried to open it. If it didn’t give to his touch, he kicked it in or bashed it with his armored elbow. Nice to have servo-power when you need it.

  He kept trying to ignore the static crackling everywhere. Blue sparks. Flashes of forked lightning. He didn’t like this moving through a stasis field one bit. The boss was crazy. He’d always known that. She had crazy eyes, if you looked deep enough.

  Her voice came over his helmet com channel full of static he could actually see as whorls of additional blue sparks in the air. “Sterile? You? Now, come on, Grainger, no woman alive and in her right mind—in any time—would have your baby. We’ve been through all this. You worried about sterile? Worry about what’s going to happen when we release the stasis field around those leaky nuclear weapons.”

  “I’m sorry I told you about that warhead that’s gonna leak. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it’s a dummy. The Russians built lots of dummy warheads. Anyway, if you hadn’t set TC 779 down smack on top of one of those SS-N-25s, we wouldn’t have this problem. Where’d you learn to park, anyway? On a grass strip? A twelve-bin bay? A Central VIP garage? If one of those big birds blow, you think there’ll be a Central left to go home to?”

  Nan Roebeck didn’t answer. She’d stepped inside one of the rooms on the left without warning him.

  Damn her.

  “Roebeck? Boss, you copy?” He was moving in on that room as fast as this slow hulk of a suit could go without toppling over.

  He had his weapon ready.

  He nearly shot her as she stepped out from a closet.

  “Whoa! Don’t shoot, cowboy. At ease. It’s just me.”

  “Well why the hell didn’t you say? Answer me? Your com working, or what? These suits look pretty much alike. It didn’t have to be you. It could have been Etkin. We don’t know what hardware he’s got. You could have said,” he finished lamely, embarrassed because he’d nearly trashed her in her suit.

  She waved a gloved hand at him and blue trails followed her hand through the air. “Let’s go. Move on, mister. We’ve got lots of rooms to cover.”

  Grainger hated room-to-room search and destroy in urban venues. Especially hated them in the ARC, when destroy was only a last resort. There was only one thing worse than a house-to-house search, and that was a room-to-room search.

  So he was still looking for some way to short-cut this leg of the mission. Too many wrongs. Not enough rights. The hard-suits were wrong: he didn’t need one for this operation. He could handle Etkin stripped buck naked. The revisionist had just caught him by surprise. The stasis field was wrong: Nan was taking too much risk for too long with all their lives. As for her materializing the TC on top of an armed SS-N-25 in a nuclear storage facility, well, that sort of limited their options.

  “Grainger, you said yourself that if any of those big warheads go bang from unforseeable results of our stasis field effects, it won’t matter about one SS-N-25 leaking. These Russians can kiss what’s left of their downtown Evil Empire good-bye. We can kiss the future as we’ve come to know it good-bye. I don’t want it on my conscience, that’s nil. Plan B. We hold steady, keep all our instituted fields operational. No changes,” came her metallically cold voice.

  “I still say we should get back in the TC. Displace the fuck out of this venue. Then you go get Chun while I hang out of phase in my hardsuit.” If Nan agreed to his plar, Grainger couldn’t be any part of the action to rescue Chun. You couldn’t step twice on the same horizon. The only window for a preemptive strike that was available was during the time Nan had been out of phase with the TC. And only if she executed the strike solo. If so, she’d have maybe eight, nine minutes. Nan had refused the plan out of hand the first time, so ::hey hadn’t calculated the strike window yet. But he wasn’t done trying. You could make a good argument that putting the TC down amid all that fissionable material was going to solve their revisionist problem for them. Forever. But she didn’t want to hear that. She wanted to fix everything, go clean with their intended targets in hand and no collateral damage or unintended casualties left behind. Fat chance.

  They came to a corner. The hallway extended in both directions. In one direction, a man was frozen in midstep. His hand was zipping his fly, the fly half open as he exited the bathroom.

  “Signs of life,” Roebeck’s voice said. “We can get past him. Let’s go that way.”

  It was a tight squeeze, past the man in stasis. Grainger’s armor brushed the guy and a streak of blue lightning shot up from the contact.

  The concussion, even through the mediating electronics of his hardsuit’s ear-protecting audio, was impressive.

  “Come on, Nan. You hear that shock wave? This is getting dicey. Let’s phase out and let those nukes down there go critical or whatever they’ll do. What do we care, really? We tried. We can’t stop time here forever. Maybe they’ll get away with just some radioactive cleanup. Maybe Central’s right and it won’t end life as we know it Up The Line. Let’s displace out of here. I’ll hang out in my suit.” She ought to copy how serious he thought this was, if he was making an offer to hang in the netherworld in a less-than-optimum hardsuit. “You phase the TC back in for half a minute in front of the car that took Etkin and Chun to FILI So you stop traffic. So what? So some Russians see a UFO. What’s new? Zotov sees ’em all the time. Takes home movies. You want to throw a stasis field, throw one around that car then and there. Pull Chun and the others out of the car. They can’t hurt you if they’re frozen in stasis.”

  “I’m worried about leaving you in that hardsuit hanging out of phase. After what we’ve put these suits through, I’m not sure I trust it.”

  There was that. There sure as hell was that. Still, he didn’t join the ARC Riders for the retirement benefits. “I’ll meet you anywhen you say. You can pick me up at your leisure. What’s the matter, you think Etkin’s going to overpower you? That he can defeat a stasis field?”

  He really hated getting this far into an op and having to pull a new game plan out of his ass. It wasn’t the first time that Roebeck had led them into a blind canyon. If they got through this, it probably wouldn’t be the last. Frustrated, he slammed his armored chassis through the next door they came to, not bothering to try to open it.

  And there they were: Chun, Etkin, Matsak, Zotov, a couple of goons Grainger didn’t recognize. All still as death, frozen in place.

  But they were up to their eyeballs in blue field effects so thick you could hardly make out what they’d been doing when the stasis field froze them.

  “Plan B,” he said softly. “Just the way you called it, boss.”

  They took Chun and Etkin out together. Roebeck had phased out with Chun in her arms before Grainger was ready to go. He was doing a quick recon of the weird-ass equipment that Etkin obviously had been operating. Roebeck had just torn the spidery electrode-bearing headset off Chun’s head and booked with her.

  If there was damage done by disconnecting Chun from Etkin’s nasty-looking little hard case too abruptly, then they’d find out soon enough.

  Grainger had thought he was going to kill Etltin when he found him. It hadn’t really been a conscious decision as much as a natural result of what Etkin had tried to do to him.

  Now he couldn’t do that, in case Etkin had to help undo whatever he’d been doing to Chun.

  It was hard to see too much in the room, for all the blue light and static.

  Matsak and Zotov were trussed up, either in line to be Etkin’s next victims, or his last. Both men’s eyes were closed. Orlov, on Etkin’s far side, was about to make use of a handheld device.

  Just for safety’s sake, Grainger grabbed all of the hardware on the table. It
was harder to control his servos with each move he made, but he kept at it. He stuffed the strange hardware into Chun’s gearbag, slipped his arm through the straps. He was about to pick up Etkin when he noticed that there was a thin line of blood coming out of little Zotov’s left ear. Another, frozen in midstream, coming from the left corner of the Obninsk scientist’s mouth.

  Okay, he thought. So he’s dead. So were those poor folks in Obninsk under the melted filling cabinet. The blood had de-toured to avoid the growth below Zotov’s mouth. Somehow, it really bothered Grainger to see that blood there.

  He tried to wipe it away with his armored finger, but he’d forgotten about the static, and the stasis field. The blood was still there when he lifted Etkin in a fireman’s carry and phased back to the nuclear weapons storage area.

  Chun was nowhere in sight. Roebeck was by the ramp, weapon at the ready, waiting for him.

  He said, as his vision cleared, “This bastard i:ortured old Zotov to death.”

  Roebeck said, “Chun’s all right. She thinks. Watch this guy.”

  “I disarmed—”

  But then Etkin was struggling like a madman in his grip, trying to get to the gearbag hanging from Grainger’s arm.

  Crazy to fight an exo-skeletal-powered suit. Unless—

  “Watch it. He’s going for something in—”

  Roebeck shot point-blank at Grainger and the Up The Line operator struggling in his arms, who was yelling in Russian.

  At least she’d shot tranks, Grainger thought prayerfully as Etkin went limp again.

  They stripped Etkin, tearing his clothes off because they didn’t have time to waste, and isolated him in a storage casket in the transfer hold. He was coming around. They left Chun in charge. Nan didn’t think Chun was fit to suit up.

  “You sure you’re okay, Chun?” Grainger heard through his com. Roebeck had gone aft. Grainger was standing at the open lock, watching the blue lightning turn into a capture net, or a chain-link fence of energy, and worrying that he had no way to measure the danger parameters.