The Fourth Rome

by David Drake

  Electrically charged wet tissue paper.

  There was no turning back. If she was killing him, then it was probably already too late. She couldn’t leave him there. Not with so much at stake and other temporal actors at work.

  She stomped determinedly three steps back frcm the table, intent on returning to her entry coordinates in the conference room before she phased out with Grainger in her arms. Never mind that those coordinates were now seething with blue light.

  She wasn’t sure whether carrying Grainger in her suit’s powerful arms had been such a good idea. But the only way to transport him when she phased was to hold him in contact with her suit. She certainly couldn’t tromp throujjh the whole of FILI, carrying Grainger, plowing holes in the stasis field as she went. She had no idea what happened when you altered the volumetrics of a stasis field, except that so f;ir, it seemed survivable.

  Roebeck still thought she should try to step back into the space she’d originally occupied. She asked for a rearward-facing view. Blue sparking chaos filled every bit of space behind her, every cubic inch she’d disturbed as she’d moved away from the table. The sight convinced her not to move any more than necessary.

  Her track through frozen space-time looked as if she’d plowed blue snow angels in a drift, or fashioned cut-out figures of herself from a blue sun’s corona. She’d created a palpable daisy chain of suited Roebecks, all carrying Graingers, all limned in blue lightning. The time-prints didn’t fade. They were solid, like footprints in concrete. If Etkin was from farther Up The Line, he might be able to use those neon tracks to chart her movements through the stasis field.

  She hit the return button on her virtual remote. She heard an earsplitting snap. Either the noise came from inside her suit or else was loud enough to hear straight through all that armor. She told herself not to worry about it.

  Then for a moment she saw nothing but blackness. She was in total darkness. Maybe that snap had been the last complaint of failing visor-controlled electronics. If so, her hardsuit might now be her coffin. She had no idea whether the servo-powered system could be operated safely without visor controls. If the servos froze up, she couldn’t get out of the hardsuit. She’d die when her air was exhausted.

  The suit she was wearing gave her no sense of whether she was still carrying Grainger or not. She didn’t move a muscle. Maybe just her visor circuits had fried. Maybe she was back at the TC, inside the active bubble, and didn’t know it because she couldn’t see anything.

  But it didn’t feel as if she was standing on anything at all.

  Time to try to move.

  She hit the virtual remote’s keypad again, this time jabbing her finger downward as hard as she could.

  Blue sparks flashed around the edges of her vision. Her visor flashed white. The white light shrank to a tiny blazing dot and disappeared.

  “Shit, this is weird,” she muttered aloud.

  And then she could see. She was standing in the active bubble, a few steps from the TC, with Grainger in her arms. And he was struggling to get free.

  She held him tighter for a moment before she realized why he was writhing so desperately. He saw TC 779 and safety ahead. Then she enabled her exterior speaker. “Grainger, you okay? Don’t go near the capsule yet. It’s booby-trapped. Hold on …” To cancel the intruder lock on TC 779 using her virtual keypad she needed more than one finger. She had to shift Grainger’s legs up on her right forearm to free her hand. The servos made her motion more abrupt than she intended.

  “Put me the hell down, if you want me to take your orders!” said the startled man being jostled in her arms. “What the fuck happened? First I was about to be whacked in the head with a sock full of sand, then I was—” Grainger looked up, around, at the ceiling with its blue trails, at the walls where sparks crawled.

  Then he murmured groggily, “Roebeck, you didn’t? You wouldn’t… Yeah, you did. You could have killed me. Yourself. Chun. Blown the system. Punched a fucking, hole in the Dirac sea. Then what?”

  “I did,” she admitted through her exterior speaker. “And nothing went wrong. So it never happened, okay?” When he didn’t respond immediately, she tightened her grip on his body in her arms, oh so carefully. “Okay?”

  “Okay! Put me down before you snap my spine.”

  She carefully put him down on the floor of the nuclear storage bay. But he couldn’t stand. He collapsed and half sat, half lay, propped up on one stiff arm, his free hand to his head.

  “Take it easy,” she told him. “We have all the time we need.”

  “Figures you’d say that,” she heard him mutter, and she began to giggle. If he was trying to tear her a new asshole, then how badly could he be hurt?

  “Hot dog,” he accused.

  For the first time, she was sure that Grainger was going to be all right. She couldn’t stop giggling. He looked so helpless.

  Then he said, “Where’s Chun? Matsak? Zoi:ov? Orlov? Etkin?”

  Her throat went dry and prickly. “Don’t you know?”

  “Hell no, I don’t know. We had this little… discussion. There were too many of them. They split us up. Last I saw, Etkin, Zotov, and Matsak were together. Etkin calls the shots here, but Orlov was right with him, taking direction like a pro. Guess Orlov had a little tune-up.” Grainger wiped his mouth, spit a froth of bloody foam onto the floor. “I didn’t see Chun at all.”

  “Her gearbag? Her membrane?”

  “Etkin’s got her, so he’s got them. He knew exactly what mine were. Probably knew from the moment he saw us. Don’t assume that he’s stupid enough not to take her membrane off her. Those revisionists who had me didn’t have a clue what they were looking at when they went through my stuff. Etkin didn’t tell them, either. So he doesn’t trust them, he was using them and me for a diversion, or he’s getting sloppy. Don’t count on him making that mistake with Chun.”

  “He didn’t. I can’t get a fix on Chun. He’s isolated her from her equipment,” Roebeck told him. “All right, Grainger, you can go inside now. Suit up. We’ll launch Phase Two by the book. When I get back. That is, unless you think you’re not up to it?”

  “I’m up to whatever it takes.” Grainger pushed himself upward to demonstrate. He managed to get his knees under him. Then he shook his head, hard, as if to clear it. “But what’s this ’get back’ stuff? Where are you going? Phase Two calls for—”

  “I know what Phase Two calls for. I defined it. I’m going to go round up those hard-liners first. They’re easy pickings in that stasis field.”

  “Don’t. No. Don’t do that. You don’t know what can happen phasing—”

  “It won’t kill them. Bringing you through proved that. If I don’t take them now, we might have to kill them later. Or lose them altogether. Anyway, Neat and Lipinsky are in there. They’re two of my prime targets- for displacement.” As she spoke, she was dumping away from the TC, toward the edge of the TC’s active bubble. “You better scramble, Grainger. Get inside where you’re safe. Who knows whether there’s any back draft when somebody in a hardsuit phases out of an active bubble into frozen time? From what I saw, it’s not as simple as displacing in time. You wouldn’t want to get caught…”

  Grainger was already stumbling toward the ramp, cursing her with enough enthusiasm that she was now sure he wasn’t functionally impaired. Except, perhaps, for his pride.

  She watched her rearward-facing view to make sure the TC accepted him and locked up tight. Then she phased back into the conference room to pick up the first of her revisionist prisoners.

  Capturing people alive was always the most difficult part of these operations. She was going to make as many of those captures as easy as possible. The real threat had never been from the Russian revisionists, but from any Up The Line technology or actors involved on this time horizon.

  Mankind had always believed it had the moral right to kill to defend itself. Mankind had always believed in God, too. Belief didn’t confer anything but consensus. Belief didn’t mak
e it so. In Roebeck’s native epoch, technology had progressed to the point that it wasn’t patently necess;iry to kill to defend your own life or the lives of others.

  But killing was still an option to the unscrupulous, the stupid, the primitive, the barbaric, the desperate—in any time, at any place.

  Killing was always an option, even to the ARC Riders. The most rudimentary, unthinking forms of life killed. Single cells killed other cells. The urge and skill to kill were hard-wired into living things along with other traits necessary to survive. You didn’t have to learn to kill, any more than you had to learn to piss. Killing was a given. In the face of a Ihreat to personal survival, it was natural.

  Killing was easy. Not killing was hard.

  The enemy was always prepared to use lethal force. You learned to expect it. Counter it. Prevail over it nonlethally when possible. But prevail.

  Roebeck wasn’t religiously opposed to lethal force. Killing the enemy was always a way to defeat him—al least in the short term. She considered killing a failure of mind over instinct, a defeat of technology. A subhuman act. She wasn’t a savage. She wasn’t so afraid of her enemy’s revenge that she had to wipe him from the face of the earth.

  She was civilized. She was a result of millennia of tool making. She would use the tools her society had created to subdue her enemy and put him where he could do no more harm to her and that society.

  Displace him but good. Dump him in 50,000 BC, along with the other animals. Put him where his primitive instincts were in harmony with the time. Let him live out his life among the other fossils. Let him commune with the spirit of his closest relative, the dinosaur.

  Mankind had no tolerance for barbarians any longer. The barbarians had ruled the Earth for more than twenty millennia of recorded history. Then, like the Russian people realizing they could revolt against their totalitarian masters, humanity had finally realized it could refute a reign of terror instituted by leaders who drew their sole legitimacy from their ability to field lethal force.

  Technology had forced that realization by providing the tools that made it possible to assure personal and societal security by other means than lethal force. The barbarians had fought hard against their obsolescence. The killer instinct could not be eradicated without altering humanity forever. So no one tried to reengineer a race whose success in the future was rooted in its triumph over its past.

  Barbarians still existed. Would always exist. Killers would always long to break things and spill blood. But in Roebeck’s time, killing was not state sanctioned as standard operating procedure to enforce policy. Killing created dead heroes and generations of enemies, which served to perpetuate the power of a warlike nationalist state. Such states feared most of all the effect on the war effort of disillusioned veterans returning home.

  With the attrition of state-sponsored lethal force had come a cascade of new technologies for the military. A military must be able to enforce policy to justify the cost of its maintenance. Nonlethal technologies had provided new tools for a military tasked with projecting power in a highly constrained environment with a low tolerance for cost, destructiveness, and casualties.

  The military, like every other successful organism, changed in order to survive. When temporal travel was introduced in the 26th century by a wiser society Up The Line, the insertion point in humanity’s evolution was chosen carefully. Humanity had to be ready to police its barbarians. Its military had to be self-restraining. An agreement was reached, quid pro quo, between the technology givers and the technology receivers. Behavioral quids were established in exchange for the quos of new technologies, including temporal mobility.

  The ARC Riders operated under a strategic doctrine of containment of barbarism initially enforced by technology native to their era. Containment of barbarism was their overriding guidance, not just for policy, but for strategy and tactics as well. And those tactics of containment were considerably enhanced by integration into the force mix of temporal displacement technology from Up The Line.

  So Nan Roebeck had to be very, very careful operating against an enemy who, if Grainger was correct, had arguably better technology from farther Up The Line. What else had been devised by those who’d made temporal displacement a reality? She wanted to get as many Russian revisionists as possible out of her line of fire before she faced off with Etkin.

  What had happened Up The Line? Had there teen a palace coup in the main timeline’s future? Was there even a palace? Or was it a revolution similar to the Russian one she was witnessing here? If that was so, did a revolution Up The Line bode ill for the ARC Riders?

  The thought of being suddenly obsolete, cut adrift like the Russian scientists she’d met here, chilled her. Watching helplessly as your way of life dissolved. Losing everything you’d worked for, sacrificed to build. Scrambling for handouts. Struggling even to survive. Through no fault of your own, becoming a casualty of a societal sea change …

  Nan Roebeck felt an unaccustomed twinge of empathy, an ephemeral kinship with the Russians she was about to displace, by unilateral decision and imposition of superior technology, to 50K.

  The ARC Riders’ native horizon was as yet unchanged. The main timeline was still intact as far as Central was concerned. Her team had made certain of that by returning lo base. Central’s nontemporal locus would alter instantly if the main timeline was successfully tweaked below the 26th century. Roebeck’s ARC Riders had found that out firsthand on their last mission, when they’d faced a hostile Central created by a change downstream that affected their nontemporal headquarters.

  ARC was barred, by a temporal excluder built into the black-boxed UTL technology powering their displacement systems, from traveling farther Up The Line than the 26th century. When she’d been at Central, she’d checked to make sure. So in this instance the problem stemmed from Up The Line beyond the 26th, from wherever upstream the advanced TC had been launched.

  Roebeck tapped her virtual remote and the FILI conference room coalesced around her. The statis field was still holding. Good.

  Her second insertion riled the blue sparks into chains of connect-a-dot lightning crawling the walls. Her targets were still sitting frozen, exactly as she’d left them.

  Roebeck took Neat through first. The hunchback scientist with his woodcutter’s beard beamed jovially at nothing. Neat kept smiling until he came to his senses in the nuclear weapons storage area, held high in the arms of Roebeck’s hardsuit.

  Grainger was suited up by then. The Russian scientist who’d perfected the transition of UTL temporal implants to Russian fabricators began to scream, flailing in Roebeck’s arms.

  Roebeck dropped him and stomped two steps back. She saw Tim Grainger’s sticky capture net descend over Neat as she phased back to get the next revisionist.

  Lipinsky, the upwardly mobile lounge lizard of the Russian Foreign Ministry, was her next target. She had to be very strict with herself when she took Lipinsky’s rigid, unknowing body in her arms. He was still holding aloft the truncheon he’d used to beat Grainger. She really understood, at that moment, the urge to kill.

  But she wasn’t even going to break his arm.

  Grainger would do as he saw fit with Lipinsky. Short of leaving the revisionist alive for deposit in 50K, Roebeck would ask no more restraint than that.

  When Lipinsky came out of stasis in her arms, Grainger was waiting.

  “Thanks, boss,” said the huge armored figure with a capture gun in hand. Above his head, the blue sparks at the stressed boundary between the active and stasis fields were thickening.

  When Lipinsky saw Grainger’s suited form and opaqued helmet visor, he actually tried to grab Nan’s armored neck.

  “Nyet, nyet, nyet!” moaned Lipinsky.

  “Da, da, da,” Grainger boomed through his hardsuit’s speakers like Judgment himself.

  They had to pry Lipinsky off her manually. Quarters were too close for a capture net.

  Grainger tranquilized the struggling Russian and Lipinsky sl
umped, senseless. Next stop for Lipinsky was the casket he’d ride into 50K.

  She didn’t stay to watch the fun. All this phasing between states was taking too great a toll on the stasis field that TC 779 was maintaining in here. If the stasis field failed, for all Nan Roebeck knew, one or more of those nuclear missiles would blow despite her precautions.

  And she still had more revisionists to collect, three old men who’d never for one moment in their lives deserved better. Each time she phased into that FILI conference room, the stasis field there was getting wilder. Each time, it was harder to see. Each time, it seemed to be getting harder tc move, as if the disturbed energy was beginning to offer resistance even to her exo-skeletal servo-powered hardsuit.

  When she made her last pickup, she was sure her hardsuit couldn’t take much more. Moving at all required every bit of her skill. It was as if she were walking deep under phosphorescent blue, electric water.

  Some after-action report this was going to be. If she wrote it up straight, she’d be in debrief way too long, answering all sorts of boring questions from scientists fascinated by the effects of moving an active field through a stasis field. That is, after she got through her disciplinary hearing. If she did. When word leaked, which of course it would, the physio guys would pull every string at Central to get hold of her. They’d poke and prod her interminably to see what, if any, changes had occurred in her biosystem from doing the unthinkable. She’d be in real danger of becoming a lab specimen for weeks, months, maybe years.

  She couldn’t afford to be that popular. By the time she had the last old revisionist back in the nuclear weapons bay, she’d decided to fudge that part of her report.

  Grainger would go along. In the ARC Riders, you had to go along to get along.

  Vetera, Lower Germany