The Fourth Rome

by David Drake

  Kiknadze ran into a public square, an irregular trapezoid where five streets met. He dodged around the stone coping of the wall in the center. Residents aroused by the mob’s cries peered from windows or out half-opened doors. Patches of light spilled past them, quivering on gravel and the opposite walls. Kiknadze’s head turned in all directions as he looked for a way clear.

  At the opposite side of the square was a six-hole public toilet raised several steps off the ground. A plaque on the chest-high stone screen commemorated the benefactor who’d built the convenience.

  A handcart holding a large terra-cotta jar was parked in front of the structure. As Kiknadze paused, a slave holding a smaller jar by the rim stepped out. The municipal sanitation detail was emptying the urinal—at a profit; the urine was sold to stiffen woolen garments for cleaning.

  “Get him! Get him!” the doorkeeper cried as he ran into the square. Rebecca was beside him. She was more afraid of losing the revisionist than that he might shoot her if cornered.

  Kiknadze saw the slave behind him and pointed the Skor-pion. The pot of waste shattered as the slave fell forward down the steps. Kiknadze jumped his body and entered the structure. He dropped the submachine gun and reached into the satchel hanging from his shoulder.

  “Rebecca, he’s got a grenade!” Gerd shouted.

  The revisionist’s arm drew back. He intended to shelter behind the stone screen as the blast cleared the squ;ire.

  Rebecca shot Kiknadze from twenty feet away. The jolt of focused energy knocked him backward into the structure, still holding the bomb.

  Rebecca crouched. A man ran into her from behind and tripped. A white flash and ground shock were simultaneous. Light gleamed through cracks in the screen. The echoing blast hurled chips of stone and burned flesh skyward. One of the stone panels fell over.

  The doorman picked himself up. The structure had channeled part of the shock wave out the entrance. “Lightning?” he said. “Was that lightning?”

  There was blood on his face. Grenade shrapnel had nicked him, not seriously.

  Rebecca stepped into the open structure, fumbling for her medical kit. The revisionist didn’t have to be healthy or even conscious for Gerd to comb his mind for the information they needed. There was a chance—

  There was no chance at all.

  Rebecca straightened and let her faceshield roll back into the headband. The stench of explosive and mangled bodies was so familiar to her that she didn’t even feel disgusted.

  Some locals had recovered enough to enter the structure. One of them ran his fingers over the shrapnel pocks on the inside of the screening panels.

  “Rebecca?” Gerd asked.

  Rebecca Carnes let the whore push her aside to get a better look.

  “I’d hoped maybe a tourniquet…” she said to her teammate. “But he must have had the grenade under his right ear when it went off. We’re going to have to find Svetlanov on our own.”

  Moscow, Russia

  March 11, 1992

  Roebeck didn’t pilot the TC as much as she should. A life like Roebeck’s offered one basic choice: you got to pilot, or you got to shoot. Mostly, Roebeck preferred to shoot. But to keep her competency rating, she had to requalify on the TC every six months.

  Thank God.

  She wasn’t a wand wizard like Chun. But she could slide this temporal capsule into a volume a cubic foot greater than its own and not scrape hull.

  Still, it was an eerie feeling being alone in the TC. She had her corns wide open, monitoring all the ambient message traffic. Simultaneously, she was listening to Grainger s com channel in case he had time to check in with her.

  He would if he could. She knew Grainger as well as any specialist she’d ever had. When it came to action terns, protocols, and checklists, you could set your watch by him. He’d go by the book if he could. And today’s Plan B playbook required him to attempt contact via membrane comlink before setting foot in FILI.

  So as she was taking the TC out of the catacombs, she kept one ear alert.

  Roebeck had to do this mission in stages, if her altered plan was to work. The absence of Chun felt very different than the absence of Grainger. Grainger was running around out there, loose on the local horizon, armed and dangerous. Chun was…

  … gone. Captured by the enemy. Out of play.

  She didn’t even want to sit in the seat where Chun should be sitting.

  But Roebeck had to go through Chun’s data, find the FILI coordinates, lay them into a macro on a preset. Everything must be preprogrammed, this time. All systems had to be capable of functioning remotely, automatically, perfectly calculated in time and space.

  Once an ARC ops team had worked a particular duration of elapsed time coordinates, they were barred from those coordinates forever.

  If they blew this mission totally, Central could always send another team back—if there was still a Central Up The Line that wanted to send another team back here.

  Which there might not be, if the ARC Riders failed here and now. So her two loyalties—one to team, the other to corps—were merged into a single concentrated need to act.

  To preempt, if she got lucky. Prevent, if at all possible. Interdict, if necessary. Or stop, if all else failed.

  You weren’t expected to need to pilot a temporal capsule from a hardsuit. They had, theoretically, redundant capabilities. The hardsuit could take her anywhere in time that a temporal capsule could take her. But no hardsuit or TC alone could do everything else she needed to do today.

  So at last, having exhausted every other possible option, she displaced from the local horizon in TC 779. Had to keep the elapsed time to a minimum. She hung the capsule out of phase until she finished her preparations, no longer listening for Grainger’s hail. He couldn’t reach her, not where she was now.

  Then she deserted the chair where Chun usually sat and got into her overpowered hardsuit. At Central, they’d swapped the standard suits for these, citing altered requirements and sufficient danger to their persons.

  She’d done it over Grainger’s objections. She was being overly cautious then. There were nuclear devices in FILI. There was nuclear contamination at Obninsk. Now she was doubly glad she’d insisted on the exo-skeletal servo-powered suits.

  The big suit was a pain to get ready. But in this mode she had all the prep time she needed.

  Still, when she displaced back to 1992 and phased in FTLI, she wasn’t going to have much time at all.

  The TC could be preprogrammed to perform a number of actions with a variable delay. She could control that delay from the big hardsuit. She couldn’t have done that from a standard suit.

  When she’d finished all her preparations, she ran through every check she could perform, short of a real-time systems burn-in, a live-fire field trial.

  She couldn’t afford to lock herself out of a single critical instant of the real time out there beyond the nothingness in which the TC now floated.

  On the temporal horizon in which 1992 was real time, too many lives and fates still hung in the balance.

  Fitted out in her massive armor, she trudged into the lock. Sealed it. Checked her event sequencer. Pulled down her entire set of display options and tucked them into the comers of her visor display. Double-checked once more what she’d redundantly checked before.

  On her visor display at two o’clock she had a locator that would try to zero on Grainger. She enabled it. At ten o’clock she had a locator that might be able to zero on Chun. If, that is, the ARC Riders still had their gearbags, or if their C and C membranes were in contact with their skins and therefore could respond to an inquiry. All membranes had integral inquiry-driven IFF: Identify Friend or Foe.

  Okay. If Grainger and/or Chun were operational, the system would find them eventually.

  Next Roebeck enabled a virtual remote controller under her suit’s left glove and tapped once. TC 779 displaced. Every signature reader in her helmet opened to a feed from the TC’s bow screen.

  FILI�
��s nuclear weapons storage bay came into view around her with a rush. The bay looked, and read in all signatures, empty of human life. She felt as if she’d already rephased outside the TC by suit.

  She hadn’t. She tapped a second preset. The lock opened, not laterally, but horizontally, becoming the ramp they’d retrofitted at Central to accommodate the larger hardsuits. She strolled manually down into the nuke bay, taking her leisure. She was eternally safe here and now. Around her, to the edges of the storage area and beyond, was a blue nimbus, an aura. Static from the active field producing the nimbus buzzed through her audio channel as if a thousand bees were massing.

  Once she was physically clear of the ramp, she surveyed the TC’s situation in the storage bay. Several of the nuclear weapons had been dislodged, perhaps damaged by TC 779’s materialization. A tail fin was sticking out under the TC itself, as if the capsule was sitting on a missile. A sick feeling came over her. She shook it off. Oh, well. If there were to be problems from the disturbed nukes, they wouldn’t occur until Nan allowed time in this compartment of the venue to proceed.

  Blue sparks and static bursts crackled and crawled along the walls and ceilings of FILI’s nuclear storage area, along the weapons themselves. Some of these crude rockets were big enough to take out a good chunk of city if they blew. If they blew, Nan Roebeck would have created one hell of a revision. A few of the smaller missiles had keys attached to them by crude wires, a pair of keys per missile. How did ancient nuclear weapons work, exactly? If she’d ever known, she’d forgotten. She was pretty sure that a nuclear warhead wouldn’t produce a mushroom cloud unless its triggering mechanism was keyed. It could still kill you if it dropped on your head, but most anything with mass could do that. Fissionable materials from cracked warhead casings might leak radiation at dangerous levels, but that too was less catastrophic than a thermonuclear explosion.

  Roebeck stomped among the missiles and rockets, safe and secure in her hardsuit from any possible radiation threat. She took the keys, pair by pair, from the smaller birds. Each key looked like an antique door key with a hollow metal oval at one end. Through the hollow oval were threaded red rep cloth strips, each sewn to a single point. Thin, short metal tags with serial numbers hung from each key on a small loop of flimsy wire. She crushed each pair of keys in turn.

  These nukes might still go bang by accident. She was too unfamiliar with the technology to know how to preclude unintended detonation. And there’d been nothing about preventing nuclear warhead detonation in Central’s downlead. But no one would arm them purposely. Not today, anyiiow. Three large pieces of equipment she examined were neither missiles nor booster rockets. They were space station modules, big enough to walk through even in Nan’s hardsuit.

  There was no hurry now. Everything in FILI had been temporally frozen the instant that the TC arrived. Except for Roe-beck in her hardsuit, there was no threat abroad here.

  If she’d come too late in the day and found she must leave and return at an earlier insertion point, she’d have to be out of here before the instant of her initial arrival. Or she’d cease to exist and her teammates would be stranded.

  She hoped to hell she wasn’t too late. Or too early. Damn, why hadn’t Grainger checked in with her?

  She knew the answer must be that he couldn’t check in. She tried not to dwell on it.

  Tim knew the risks. Knew the plan. They all did.

  Chun did, too. And that was one of the problems. If Grainger was right, Etkin was a UTL agent of revisionists from a future farther than her native present. If he had UTL skills, he might have been able to extract the specifics of their plan from Chun.

  In which case, the hardsuit was going to come in very handy. Roebeck intruder-locked TC 779 to recognize only her combined heartbeat and respiration. No one else could operate it now but she.

  It was either that or leave the temporal capsule vulnerable to Etkin in order to make it accessible to Chun or Grainger if they survived her.

  Having precluded both the theft of TC 779 and the chance of a nuclear event in FILI while she was hunting for her team and the revisionists, she enabled the tracker that should be able to locate Grainger.

  When her in-suit tracking system had a lock, the little display at two o’clock on her visor began to blink. Grainger! The system had located him.

  Roebeck phased out to the auto-targeted LZ containing Tim Grainger with a tap on her virtual keypad.

  The room in which she found herself was the same one where she’d sat interminably while hard-liners strutted their stuff. Only this time, it was Grainger who sat at the green-clothed table, arms behind him on a straight chair, flanked by pineapple sodas and hard-liners with bad suits. He was trussed in the chair like a Christmas turkey. His gearbag was open on the table.

  Grainger couldn’t see her. He was frozen in time, caught in a distended instant. He didn’t know she was there. Neither did any of the others in the room.

  But Grainger was the only person in the room she really cared about.

  Neat was there, leaning forward with his woodcutter’s hunch, finger pointing in midair. Lipinsky was there, with his lizard’s smirk, standing, arm raised, a truncheon in his hand poised to strike their prisoner. So she had two prime revisionist targets in her sights, plus cohorts. But Chun wasn’t there. Etkin wasn’t there. Nor was Zotov. Or Orlov. Or Matsak. They had to be here somewhere. Grainger was here. Chun had to be here. Etkin had been absolutely determined to bring them here.

  Roebeck stood very still and watched her locator display out of the corner of her eye. Chun’s position still hadn’t been identified. With the tiniest of finger taps, Roebeck banished the locator function that was still telling her Grainger was right in front of her.

  The tap, the tiniest motion she could manage, had massive repercussions.

  Blue sparks streamed from her fingertip. They rose in a cascade across the ceiling to the walls. They crawled down the walls and across the floor. The stasis field was beginning to stress. You really weren’t supposed to move around in frozen time. It was against all regulations. You normally created an active bubble in which you worked, a centsr-punch in which time proceeded normally. Her hardsuit was providing an active bubble around its occupant, but any move the suit itself made was still movement through a temporal stasis field. Even the tiniest motion of her finger was still making eddies.

  At ARC school they didn’t tell you why you shouldn’t do things, except very generally. They’d say this isn’t survivable, or you’ll get your head handed to you if you do that. Or there won’t be enough left of you to bury if you try thus-and-so. Nobody’d ever said exactly what might happen if you went roaming around in a frozen time stasis field. Th:y just said don’t try it, you won’t like it.

  Well, she wouldn’t be doing this if she didn’t need to do it.

  “Coming to get you, Grainger,” she said softly inside her suit to the Rider who couldn’t hear her.

  Determined, she clomped over to the frozen tableau at the table. Once there, she was standing in a whirlwind of blue lightning. Through it, she reached carefully for Tim Grainger. His unarmored body was frail. Suddenly she was afraid to touch him with her armored hand, crawling with blue lightning. Instead, she carefully scooped his gear into his bag with her armored forearm. The gear didn’t melt before her eyes. She smoothed the bag closed, then slid her arm through its straps. She lifted the bag. It die n’t explode or disintegrate.

  But she’d made too many motions. The stasis field where she’d been moving was all choppy waves, blue-frothed and angry. A breaker of energy crashed against her forearm. Spume flew. For an instant she couldn’t see anything but a blue wall sluicing over her like a tidal wave.

  Then through blue sparks like sleet running down her visor, she noticed that Grainger’s face was bruised, starting to swell. So there’d been a scuffle before they tied him up like that. He had a scrape running from his temple into his hair.

  She must be very careful as she snapped the bonds th
at kept him in his chair and lifted him. She had no idea what moving an unprotected human frozen in stasis was going to do to that person. The bag over her arm was filled with inanimate objects. The fact that she could fill the bag and lift it only proved that inanimates weren’t destroyed out of hand by the field disturbances she was creating. The effect of such a disturbed field on Grainger, or the others near him, was anybody’s guess.

  She was risking everything, here and now. Beyond what might happen to Grainger and the revisionists held in frozen time, she had growing concerns for her own safety. What might be happening to the active field generated by her hard-suit? Or to the bubble of frozen time in which all of FILI now existed? Was she putting the entire mission at risk because she was unwilling to lose Tim Grainger?

  Attrition of your force was a risk all ARC team leaders had to accept. It wasn’t that she didn’t accept the possibility that she might lose Grainger. He might die yet. He might die from her very effort to save him. She just wasn’t willing to lose him without a fight.

  Now or never, she told herself. Pick him up, fool. You can stand here until you die of old age, safe in your private active bubble. It won’t mean a thing to him. Or anybody else.

  If she waited much longer, she’d talk herself out of doing anything at all. Or Etkin would find her and preclude her options. She still had no idea what kind of technology her UTL enemy might be able to field.

  First she noticed, as she lifted the ARC Rider from his chair, how stiff he was. Grainger’s limbs stayed rigidly in the position they’d asumed when time froze here.

  Then she saw a nonexistent wind whirl the sparking blue sleet into the empty space he’d left. The sleet became trails. The trails became comets’ tails. The comets’ tails became a bright, human-shaped cascade. Then she had to squint to see far enough to make sure she still held Grainger’s body in her servo-powered arms. Her visor had automatically damped her incoming video to protect her eyes from a blue flash of sheet lightning that wrapped around Grainger’s form as if she’d pulled him through a blanket of wet tissue paper.