The Fourth Rome

by David Drake

  Usually when a warrior joined in combat with a Roman they were too close for Rebecca to trust her aim, but if the German stepped back to consider his tactics she had a shot. Repeatedly she knocked a warrior down, slammed his breath out, or spun him sideways with a broken shield.

  The captured mail many of the Germans wore was no protection against microwave pulses that hit like sandbags. Defenders finished the job with steel.

  But refugees were down also. One legionary lay on his back with a spear sticking up from the bridge of his nose. The civilian with the chest wound had fallen, and Arnobius knelt stoically while the pregnant girl bandaged his right forearm with the hem of her silk tunic.

  The attack paused. Rebecca glanced over hei shoulder to the base of the knob. There were a dozen bodies cm the trail or close off it; one of them had a Roman javelin through the chest.

  She couldn’t see Pauli or Flaccus; they stood or lay too close to the rock. At least one of them must be alive or warriors would have swarmed up the knob. She was afraid to call Pauli to be sure.

  The Germans regrouped on the surrounding slopes, visible through the undergrowth as movement though not as figures. One began to chant a guttural war song that a dozen of his fellows took up. Warriors called orders or challenges to one another. Several lancers worked their way carefully toward the edges of the defensive line.

  Arnobius stood, muttered a curse, and took his place again. He held his bloody sword in his left hand.

  A trumpet called from the near distance. Three curved horns answered raucously in succession, the notes subtly different.

  “It’s Asprenas come with his legions!” a legionary shouted. “By the mothering Venus, we’re saved!”

  “Double-time you whoresons!” Flaccus called from the base of the knob. “Double-time or we won’t have any of these fucking Fritzes for your lot to finish!”

  A second set of calls sounded, louder and nearer than the first. The refugees began to cheer, those who could speak.

  The Germans stampeded. They’d been bloodied attacking a handful of refugees; they weren’t about to face three cohorts of fresh legionaries. Warriors shouted to each other and to horses who’d caught the odor of sudden panic.

  “Eagles to me!” Flaccus said as he clambered to the top of the knob. He’d lost his helmet and the left side of his face was streaked with dried blood. “Eagles to me!”

  Pauli Weigand stepped into sight. He didn’t try to climb because he still held both the microwave pistol and his sword. Heat waves shimmered from the pistol’s receiver.

  “Beckie?” he croaked. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right,” she said. She carefully lifted her foot from the crevice where she’d wedged it, then let herself down from the tree. She hurt, particularly her foot, and her throat was dry enough to use for sandpaper.

  A rosy warmth of relief had filled her surroundings as soon as she saw Pauli.

  Gerd Barthuli rode cautiously down the trail on his mule. The sensor pack in his hand synthesized another trumpet call. Refugees stared at him in amazement.

  “I’m afraid I made the signals myself,” he said. “But there are friendly troops on top of the bluff. They’ve heard the calls and are coming toward us at their best speed.”

  “How does he know that?” the uninjured civilian said. He looked up from removing the gold armlet of a Geiman noble. “How did you know that?”

  “They said they were magicians, didn’t they?” Flaccus said. “Bugger me if I believed it, but I sure do now.”

  Rebecca tucked the pistol away in her cape. The receiver was still hot enough to startle her when it touched her bare forearm.

  “Hold still,” she ordered, stepping to Flaccus to see what had bled on his face. There was nobody to fight for the moment, so she could get back to what she was best at: patching damaged soldiers.

  Pauli joined them, but he came the long way around instead of climbing the face of the knob. He walked stiffly and there was a tear in his alloy steel mail under his left arm. No blood, though; she’d checked him after she cleaned the ragged tear over Flaccus’ left eye. A spearpoint had glanced rrom underlying bone instead of piercing it.

  The girl had cut open the tunic of the civilian who’d taken a javelin in the chest. The wound sucked when he breathed. She put her left palm over the hole to close it while she ripped more fabric from her tunic with the other hand.

  “Is she married to one of you?” Rebecca asked. “The girl, I mean.”

  “Ain’t she a nice piece?” said Flaccus. “But she’s none of ours. We found her wandering the same direction in the night…and she had a nice horse, but we guessed she needed it worse’n we did. You know, I don’t recall she ever said a word in a language I heard of. Wouldn’t it be a bitch if she turned out to be some Fritz’s doxy?”

  Rebecca tied a bandage over the wound when she’d sponged it. The flap of skin needed proper closure, but she didn’t have a needle to stitch it and she wasn’t about to use spray sealant. Central would have enough questions about the blithe way the team handled advanced weaponry in front of locals, though the refugees didn’t appear to care about anything except that they were unexpectedly alive.

  “The troops from Lucius Asprenas’ forces are about to arrive,” Gerd announced. The analyst still sat on his mule’s uncomfortable saddle. Rebecca realized that he might be unable to dismount without falling. She moved toward him. Pauli got there first and lifted Gerd down as if his own pains were nothing.

  “Rome forever!” Flaccus shouted. “This way the legions!”

  Twenty men came down the trail. To Rebecca’s surprise they were German horsemen, though they wore Roman helmets and mail shirts. Arnobius swore and gripped the pommel of the sword he’d been cleaning.

  “They’re friendly Ubians!” Gerd said. “They’re operating with Asprenas!”

  Legionary infantry followed the band of horsemen. Additional troops moved through the woods in battle order. Brass, steel, and their vermilion leather shield facings gleamed between tree trunks before the men had visible form.

  Pauli murmured something to Flaccus. The veteran nodded and elbowed his way toward the newcomers. “Marcus Patius Flaccus, senior man here and late of 1st Company, 3d Cohort, 17th Legion. And by all the gods in Rome, are we glad to see you lot!”

  A centurion, the only legionary present who’d mounted the horsehair crest on his helmet, strode over to Flaccus. More troops appeared from the woods. There was at least a full cohort and a similar number—five or six hundred—of Ubian horsemen.

  The centurion looked at the bodies and raised his eyebrow. There were more than a dozen Germans sprawled where the refugees had made their stand and an equal number in the woods or along the trail in the immediate vicinity. “Not bad,” he said to Flaccus. “We heard Varus had bit the big one. Any truth in that?”

  “I sure hope the stupid bastard bought it,” Flaccus said. More horsemen were arriving. “I told you I’m senior here. I figure I’m the senior survivor in my company and likely in the whole fucking cohort. Maybe some guys headed for Aliso instead of straight to the Rhine.”

  The centurion toed a German body. “Shit, I hopsd it was all rumor, you know? Guess it’s not.”

  Pauli moved to Rebecca’s side. “You covered for me,” he said quietly. “I got caught down below and couldn’t get up to where I was needed.”

  “You and Flaccus covered our backs,” Rebecca said. “You did more than all the rest of us together!”

  She hugged him fiercely, then stepped away embarrassed. He had cracked ribs, maybe worse; besides …

  “Well, we’ll get you back to camp,” said the centurion. “Word is we’re not going any distance into this side of the river because the CO thinks all Gaul’s going to revolt if we’re not here to keep a lid on it.”

  A group of Ubians with gilt and silvered equipment moved through the crowd on big horses.

  “That one!” said the broad, older man in the middle. He lowered his lance
to point; the tip almost touched Pauli Weigand’s chest. “He’s a traitor! He’ll come with me to meet Tiberius in Vetera!”

  “Well, I wondered how we were going to get to Xanten,” Pauli murmured calmly. “But for all the convenience, I’d as soon that King Segestes hadn’t accompanied his troops this afternoon.”

  Obninsk, Russia

  March 11, 1992

  Tim Grainger felt bad about what was about to happen to the people of Obninsk, especially Zotov and those fourteen-year-old girls. But there was no other way.

  At least Obninsk was a closed city—word might never leak of what was going to happen here. You had to think positively, this far into an operation.

  Grainger had already put on one of the exo-skeletal servo-powered hardsuits they’d loaded at Central. He hated this bigger, heavier hardsuit even more than the standard issue TCs normally carried. It was the heaviest duty armor in ARC inventory.

  Suited up, he was ready, willing, and able to stomp out the hatch when Chun displaced the TC into the Obninsk subbase-ment where the Up The Line capsule was stored. Too bad they couldn’t find a way to take the UTL capsule back with them. It would have advanced the state of the art.

  But you could only do what you could do. And, although getting into the exo-powered suit was a claustrophobic’s nightmare, you couldn’t do this mission without one. The big, bulky, self-powered exo-skeletal suit would protect Tim Grainger from the hell he was about to unleash in Obninsk. He had no way of knowing whether the Obninsk residents would be so lucky.

  Zotov’s Obninski scientists must have some kind of rudimentary shielding in the subbasement installation, to protect them from the wreckage of the nuked TC. And the scientists had the additional protection of the subbasement itself, dug into the ground. The placement of the installation below ground would protect inhabitants above from the havoc Grainger’s HPM—high-power microwave—weapon was about to unleash.

  In the lock, he ran a systems check on the big HPM gun. He couldn’t even have lifted the gun without the exo-powered suit. He had to get into the suit before he could deal with the gun. Now he had the 40mm gun securely mated to the right arm of his suit, tight in its housing along the whole length of his servo-powered, armored forearm. So it was a point and shoot situation, so far as Grainger was concerned

  Point your arm and depress your trigger finger in its armored glove. Then watch all hell break loose through a fully polarized and multisignature suppressing helmet visor.

  All Grainger had to worry about was running out of power or falling down. If he did, he couldn’t get up by himself. Roe-beck, in her hardsuit and waiting behind him, would have to come help him. Only one exo-powered suit—or the loader/charger they’d brought along—could reactivate another.

  But for any Obninskis unlucky enough to be in the bay, things weren’t going to be so easy. Orders were to slag the UTL capsule completely. Destroy all the Russian equipment around it. Trash their computer system irretrievably. Make the bay itself unusable through a methodology euphemistically called “denial of service.” In this case, that meant making the bay a smoking mass of fused matter that couldn’t be reconstituted into its constituent parts for a few thousand years.

  This culture had no defense against head-on attack by the HPM weapon that Grainger was about to deploy.

  Maybe the Russians really did have the mythical shielding paste to protect them and their equipment from ninety-nine percent of electromagnetic emissions. Maybe not. The paste, if it existed, was part of the Unobtanium category. Nobody from the West had ever gotten a sample while the inventors lived, or after. If the Obninsk scientists really had the paste sandwiched into their wallboards, they’d be partially protected from some effects of Nan Roebeck’s servo-weapon, which was going to EM-pulse the whole of Obninsk while Grainger HPM’d the main target.

  Proportional force was the name of the game today.

  As soon as she deployed out the capsule door behind him, Roebeck in her hardsuit was going to back through the doors, up two flights to the surface level where Russian girls had danced before a mural of atomic symbols two nights ago. Using her servo-slaved grenade launcher, she’d fire out the door three times. The result would be three explosively driven electromagnetic airbursts. Conventional shielding, paste, and kill switches might protect from one or two bursts, but three would take down every piece of equipment that was operating, attached to an antenna or battery, or connected to a power source.

  Lots of property and information damage, but maybe not too many casualties if people were lucky. EM airbursts packed a hell of a wallop in blast overpressure. Blast overpressure could kill you all by itself, if it was your day to die. If that overpressure was driving shrapnel, broken glass, or any object before it, you were in the lap of the gods.

  Roebeck had gone to extraordinary lengths to keep innocents in Obninsk from becoming part of the collateral damage estimate. But nothing was going to protect anybody luckless enough to be in the path of Grainger’s high-power microwave gun.

  Which was why Grainger had insisted on deploying with the microwave weapon. Nan Roebeck didn’t need any ghosts of fourteen-year-old Russian girls to carry around with her. Roebeck’s psyche, like her native culture, was nonlethal by catechism. In Grainger’s psyche, at least the ghosts he made today would have lots of company. Grainger had enough kills on his soul that a few more weren’t going to send him to any deeper hell.

  “Lock and load,” came Roebeck’s voice through his helmet’s shielded com system.

  “Roger that,” he said absently. He’d already done it. Checked his weapon and his power backpack twice. Just to be sure, he lit a red glow on the far bulkhead, a spot the size of his 40mm barrel.

  “Jesus Christ,” Roebeck exclaimed in his ear. “I didn’t say turn the bulkhead into Swiss cheese.”

  He shut the HPM gun down. HPM just made things hot. It left no environmental pollution behind. It was relatively clean. “Sorry, boss. Just making sure this equipment ain’t lying.”

  Sometimes, you got a green light that said everything was working, but the business end of the equipment didn’t tell you the same story when you asked for firepower.

  This time, his HPM gun was working fine.

  Chun’s voice said, “Thirty seconds to displacement. On my hack … Hack.”

  The world inside Grainger’s suit shivered as if reality had a sudden chill.

  Even in his hardsuit, he felt the dimensional shudder that meant they’d displaced to Obninsk before he heard Chun’s calm voice saying, “Displacement complete.”

  The lock deployed into a ramp. Grainger was already stomping downward before the ramp contacted the floor, moving as fast as the heavy suit could react.

  His helmet visor adjusted to ambient darkness, giving him multispectral scans. In multispectral, the Up The Line capsule looked like the aurora borealis.

  He hit it with everything he had, laying on the HPM gun’s trigger.

  It was a surreal experience. He heard only his own breathing and Roebeck’s occasional mutter as she passed him encased in two tons of armor and weapon. Meanwhile, everything in the broad aim-point of his HPM gun blossomed into flame. Melted. Puddled. Began to boil.

  He felt something—a distant shudder—come up through his armored boots.

  It was the first shock wave of blast overpressure from Nan’s air-bursts, upstairs.

  Only then did he realize that nobody had been in the sub-basement lab when they’d hit it. No Zotov. No Kokoshin. No fourteen-year-old girls. Yet.

  A second shudder realigned the floor. He was backing up, still firing for good measure: around the bay, at the window between the bay and the control room.

  The window shattered. His visor showed him a flashing red indicator, telling him he was half through his power pack’s available juice. Still firing, he walked with a giant’s tread toward the blown-out window.

  When he reached the window wall, he just kept going, spraying HPM fire as he advanced. What was left of
the wall crumbled before the onslaught of his exo-powered suit. He slagged the control panels, the rack of antique equipment. The table holding them buckled and collapsed with a silent crash. And then he realized he’d been wrong.

  There was somebody else down here. There’d been people in the control room. Those people were here still: hunched figures, hands over their heads, slumped in a heap in one corner of the room. A filing cabinet had melted on them. He didn’t take one step closer. He’d seen death before. He didn’t need to verify the obvious.

  He felt the third concussion from Roebeck’s weapon as he was backing up. Through the hole he’d made in the window wall, he retreated carefully. One slip, a wrong step, and he’d be helpless like a beetle on its back when Nan returned in need of covering fire.

  He relaxed his pressure on the HPM gun’s trigger. Better save whatever juice he had. You always wanted something left—in case you had to face the unexpected. He could hear Nan’s increasingly labored breathing in his helmet as she beat her retreat.

  A muttered curse, a grunt, and he could see her, striding through the far door with her grenade launcher ported.

  You couldn’t move fast in the exo-powered suits. Nan was moving toward him as quickly as her suit could safely go.

  He had to face Nan’s position to cover her as she came. Grainger took more slow, careful steps backward. His visor showed him a rearward-facing view as soon as he asked for it. He enhanced the magnification. He wanted to see the relationship of his heel to the lip of the ramp. Watching carefully, he raised his powered heel onto the ramp and begui climbing, still facing Roebeck.

  He dumped the rearward-facing view to a left quarter screen window and took real-time forward view with the rest of his visor display. He needed to watch over his team leader. They were almost home free.