The Gordian Protocol

by David Weber

  McGuire grunted. The tracers turned the cannon’s torrent of projectiles into what looked for all the world like the “death rays” he’d seen in some ancient entertainment vids. And she was right about how spectacular that was.

  “Well, at least we’re not one of the entry teams,” he told her. “That can get a little too up close and personal for my taste.”

  “Damn betcha!” Robles agreed. “They can keep their hazardous-duty bonuses, for all I care. Give me a nice air-conditioned command couch a couple of hundred meters up any day. Last thing I want is for some hairy primitive to get lucky and stick a sword into my hide!”

  McGuire grunted again, but she had a point. The entry teams’ Esteem bonuses were all well and good, but every so often they lost someone, even with modern medicine. It didn’t happen often, but it did happen. And even if someone managed not to get killed, regenerating a new arm, or leg—or spleen—was no walk in the park. Of course, half of the entry team personnel were synthoids, with their personalities uploaded into synthetic bodies equipped with police-grade upgrades. Not as good as SysPol got, but pretty damned good. He’d considered putting in for upgrade himself, but he liked the body biology had given him just fine, so far at least.

  And so did Lydia.

  Besides, he admitted to himself, the real reason he’d never applied for entry-team duty had very little to do with synthetic bodies or potential risk factors. Entry duty was so…messy, sometimes. He vastly preferred being up here with Lydia where the carnage was nice and antiseptic and he didn’t have to worry about wiping blood and splattered viscera off his helmet cameras.

  *

  “Damn it, Johansson!” Doctor Teodorà Beckett snapped. “We want these documents intact, you idiot! That means not shredded by mag darts—and not soaked in blood, either, for that matter! Is that so hard to understand?”

  The archaeologist stood in the huge, colonnaded hall, surrounded by books and racked scrolls. Despite the lateness of the hour, oil lamps burned brightly and half a dozen scrolls had been unrolled for reading on the polished wooden tables down the hall’s center. It could have been an orderly scene of scholarship…if not for the bodies of at least a dozen of the library’s staff scattered about, leaking blood across the inlaid floors. It was hard to be certain of the exact number; hypervelocity mag darts had a tendency to shred their targets pretty badly. She didn’t mind that so much, although she’d tossed her cookies on her first ART mission, but Johansson’s people had been dismayingly careless about their lines of fire. The torrent of darts one of his teams had unleashed before Beckett could get there to stop them had turned at least forty or fifty scrolls into shredded, blood-soaked mulch which was undoubtedly seasoned with bits and pieces of human flesh.

  “Listen, Doctor Beckett”—the entry team leader made no great effort to hide his own exasperation—“if one of these yahoos gets close enough to stick a knife into you, you aren’t going to be real worried about the frigging books!”

  “The ‘frigging books’ are the reason we’re here,” she pointed out tartly.

  “So block them on the schematic.” Johansson pointed at them. “After we finish here, I’ll microjump back and collect just those racks.”

  Beckett glared at him, longing to rip his head off and stick it up his synthoid body’s anal orifice. Unfortunately for her sense of frustration, he was right. Once the retrieval team pulled out, temporal inertia would have its way and erase the fact that they’d ever been here. He could always jump back into a present in which the scrolls had never been damaged. Of course, the idiot would probably shoot up ninety percent of the rest of the collection just because he was pissed about having to come back in the first place. But that wouldn’t matter, either, because Beckett’s teams would already have loaded an earlier iteration of them.

  “Just try not to make the floor any slipperier than you can help,” she growled, waving at the still-spreading pools of blood. “And don’t forget—it’s going to take us at least two or three days to load all of this, even with the conveyors and all the mechs. We have to catalog it all, remember? And it’s summer in ancient Alexandria. You think maybe all this blood isn’t going to start stinking in the heat, not to mention drawing clouds of flies, before we get out of here?”

  At least he had the grace to grimace this time, she thought. That was something.

  She gave him one more dirty look, then picked her way between pools of blood to where her team was busily but carefully transferring the priceless books to the waiting counter-grav skids that would deliver them to the TTV conveyors. She’d never really believed the estimates that said there were a half million books in the Great Library, but there might actually be that many scrolls, she thought in awe. Of course, it could take a lot of scrolls to make a single book. As an archaeologist, Beckett was fully aware of that. But even though she’d worked with documents just like this for the better part of forty years, the sight of them always made her painfully aware of just how clumsy and mass-and volume-intensive hardcopy data storage truly was.

  Well, once we get them home and properly digitalized, that won’t be a problem, will it? she reminded herself. And we’ll get the originals into the proper climate-controlled storage, too. That’s what this is all about—the reason the Antiquities Rescue Trust was funded in the first place—really. It may be a wasteful way to record information, but the people who spent all that time laboriously writing it down deserve to have their work preserved.

  She ran her fingertips across one of the rolled scrolls reverently and glanced curiously at the body at her feet. Judging from the blood trail, the librarian had dragged himself at least ten or fifteen meters after one of Johansson’s people took him down, and he’d died with one hand reaching toward the rack before which Beckett stood. She wondered what had made this particular rack so important to him, but she put the temptation to look for the reason behind her. There’d be plenty of time for that once they got the entire collection back to the thirtieth century, where it belonged.

  “Help me remember the lot number assigned to this part of the collection, Fran,” she said.

  “Let me guess,” the voice of her abstract companion said in the back of her mind, linked from the TTV’s infosystem through her wetware. “You’re wondering if this poor fellow was trying to reach something specific when he died?”

  “You know me so well,” Beckett agreed with a crooked smile. “I like to solve puzzles. It’s the reason I became an archaeologist in the first place.”

  “Well, that and the chance to do fieldwork and actually see the past,” Fran told her in a slightly martyred tone. “Thus dragging me into it, as well.”

  “You could always stay in the TTV,” Beckett said sweetly, and Fran chuckled. Unlike quite a few ACs, Fran had been a biological human for sixty years before she transitioned to an abstract connectome, and the truth was that she was just as fascinated by the endless vista of the human race’s past as Beckett herself. That was the one of the reasons they found one another such comfortable fits.

  “But you’re right, that’s exactly what I’m thinking,” the still-physical half of their relationship admitted, “and I intend to take personal charge of cataloguing the section. There should be at least some perks for the team leader, don’t you think?”

  “I’m certainly not going to argue with you about it,” Fran told her primly.

  “Good! Now I guess we should go take a look at whatever the hell Kohlman’s found in Hall Three.”

  She headed out of the reading room, flanked by the pair of security types who accompanied every biological member of her team wherever they went on-site and headed toward the vast auditorium and lecture hall where Jebediah Kohlman seemed to think he’d just discovered the Holy Grail.

  Now don’t be that way, Teodorà, she scolded herself in a private corner of her mind. Every so often, someone does find the Grail, don’t they? Who’s to say Jeb didn’t pull it off this time?

  She chuckled at the thought and headed ba
ck out into the hot summer night.

  *

  “Are they really gone? Really gone?” Kleopha whispered, huddling against her husband’s side.

  Homeros was a baker, not a soldier, and Kleopha knew—intellectually, at least—that no mere mortal could stand against the forces of darkness. Gods knew enough of Pharaoh Cleopatra’s guard had been casually slaughtered by the demons who’d descended upon the Library almost a week ago to prove that! But what her mind knew and what her heart needed were two very different things and the feel of that beloved arm, wrapped about her while her older boys and their sister clung to her skirts, was the most welcome thing she’d ever felt in her entire life. She hugged their newest child, giving him a nipple, feeling him suckle, and that, too, told her she and her family were still alive.

  Unlike virtually all of the Library’s scholars and librarians—and several hundred of Pharaoh’s soldiers—if the rumors were true.

  “So they say, love,” Homeros said, embracing her tightly and bending to press a kiss to the top of her head. “So they say.”

  “Do…do you think they’ll come back?” she half whispered, and he laughed bitterly.

  “Who knows what demons may do?” he replied after a moment. “But so far as I can see, there’s nothing left for them to come back for! Gods only know why demons should steal books in the first place, but according to everybody I’ve talked to since they left last night, they got all of them.” He shrugged, still holding her close. “So unless there’s something else they want to steal from us, I suppose they’re done.”

  And may Jupiter Victor protect us from them if they do come back, he told himself silently, where his wife couldn’t hear. Because no one else can.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Castle Rock University

  2017 CE

  “You’re kidding me.” Benjamin Schröder sat back in his chair, shaking his head in disbelief. “You’re serious about this crap?”

  “I’m very serious, Doctor Schröder,” the thin, sharp-faced man seated behind the large, polished desk informed him severely. Patrick O’Hearn, the history department’s chairman, was a good twenty years older than Schröder, but he’d always struck the younger man as a spoiled brat who’d never quite grown up. Schröder knew he wasn’t the most tactful or “process oriented” of individuals, but O’Hearn possessed a unique ability to make him think longingly of utterly inappropriate physical responses to “microaggressions.” Of course, in O’Hearn’s universe, the clarity of his understanding—thoroughly validated by everyone else living inside his bubble—meant he was incapable of microaggressions. All he was doing was “speaking truth to power”…especially when he dragged in a junior member of his own department for “counseling.” Aside from his voice, which was actually a surprisingly pleasant baritone, the older man represented every single thing Schröder disliked about academia…except for the whiny students unalterably opposed to enduring the contamination of alternative viewpoints. The only reasons students like that bothered him less than O’Hearn—and he had to admit, they ran a very close second—was that he kept reminding himself of what his mother had taught him as a teenager: Ignorance and even narrowmindedness can be fixed; stupid is forever. And willful stupidity like O’Hearn’s was especially galling. He suspected that the two of them would have cordially disliked one another under any imaginable circumstances; under the circumstances which actually applied, “dislike” was far too pale a verb.

  “What happened to my right to file a response?” he demanded now. “I’ve got ten days to respond even to a formal grievance, let alone an administrative review!”

  “Of course you do, Doctor.” O’Hearn emphasized the academic title with a certain spiteful courtesy. “And if you choose to exercise that right, no one would even consider denying it to you. That right is absolutely guaranteed under the Student Grievance Policy and Procedures. I simply thought—purely as a courtesy to a professional colleague, you understand—that it might be expedient to…advise you in this matter.”

  Schröder clenched his teeth and cautioned himself against dwelling any further on those politically incorrect but highly satisfactory responses to O’Hearn’s bright smile. The most satisfactory item on the menu would have included a direct kinesthetic rearrangement of the smile in question, which would hardly help his case at the moment. Some of the verbal responses which sprang to mind would have been almost equally unhelpful, however well deserved and apropos they might have been.

  “Should I take it, then,” he said instead, after counting slowly to ten, “that Dean Thompson’s taken an official position on this?”

  “Oh, by no means! That would be highly inappropriate at this stage of the process.” O’Hearn shook his head, blue eyes gleaming with poorly disguised satisfaction behind the lenses of his wire-frame glasses. “She would never attempt to intervene or pressure anyone at such an early stage of the grievance process. At the same time, of course, she has to be aware of remedial options and any…potential sanctions. And, as your department chair, I thought it best to ascertain from her on your behalf exactly what those options might be after Ms. Kikuchi-Bennett raised her concerns with me.”

  “How kind of you,” Schröder said, then bit his tongue mentally as O’Hearn’s eyes flickered with mingled anger and satisfaction.

  “You are a member of my department,” the chairman pointed out. He didn’t add the words “unfortunately” or “for the moment, at least,” Schröder observed. Or not out loud, anyway. “And I’m sure you’re aware of how seriously Castle Rock University takes any potential discrimination or harassment, especially by faculty.”

  “Oh, I’m well aware of that,” Schröder replied. “I’m still a little confused about exactly how I’m supposed to have discriminated against or harassed Ms. Kikuchi-Bennett, though.”

  “The creation of a hostile classroom environment is the very definition of harassment, Doctor,” O’Hearn said rather more frostily. “And attacking an undergraduate’s gender identity and political views in front of an entire class certainly creates exactly that sort of environment.”

  “I’m not aware of having attacked Ms. Kikuchi-Bennett’s gender identity—or political views—in any way.”

  “Sarcasm, ridicule, and denigration constitute ‘attacks’ in most people’s view, Doctor.” O’Hearn’s tone was positively icy now, but the satisfaction in his eyes was brighter.

  “No doubt they would…if I’d done any of them.” Schröder felt his own temper rising and stepped on it firmly. It wasn’t easy, and he felt the ghost of his father standing at his shoulder. The old man probably would have already ripped out O’Hearn’s tonsils and wrapped them around his neck for a bowtie.

  Not the best image for him to be dwelling upon at the moment.

  “I’m afraid three independent witnesses support Ms. Kikuchi-Bennett’s interpretation of your remarks, Doctor.”

  “And am I permitted to know who these three independent witnesses might be?”

  “I’m afraid that’s privileged information under the university’s privacy procedures. At this time, of course.” O’Hearn flashed another of those thin, smug, satisfied smiles. “If the process continues to the formal grievance stage, however, I’m sure you’ll receive copies of their statements.”

  “But not their identities?”

  “It’s the content of their statements, not their identities, that would be relevant,” O’Hearn pointed out, “and the university has a legal and moral responsibility to protect their privacy, if only to avoid any appearance of retaliation against them. I’m sure you can understand the chancellor’s position on that point, Doctor. You would certainly be within your legal rights to seek that information if you should choose to appeal the Grievance Committee’s formal ruling in other venues. Of course, at that point the legal department would be legally and morally obligated to protect that information until such time as the courts directed its disclosure.”

  “Oh, of course.”

  Schröd
er wished O’Hearn’s attitude had surprised him. Given academia’s taste for witch hunts, though, the surprise would come from any other response. Besides, he had a pretty shrewd notion which of Kikuchi-Bennett’s friends had chosen to support the transgender student’s allegations. If he was right, the frightening thing was that at least two of them were undoubtedly completely sincere in their belief that he had, indeed, brutally and viciously assailed Kikuchi-Bennett in front of their entire class. Their hypersensitive, exquisitely quivering antennae would have left them with no other conclusion, especially after Kikuchi-Bennett “rebutted” his comments not by refuting—or even considering—his reasoning or his evidence, but by scorning them as “typical of the racist and homophobic patriarchy’s callous dismissal of any dissenting viewpoint.” In his experience, once those labels were deployed, any possibility of rational discourse had left the building.

  He thought—briefly, and not very seriously—about pointing out to O’Hearn that what he’d said was simply that women hadn’t acquired the franchise in the United States at the point of a gun, but by convincing the majority of men that in a just society interested in living up to the Declaration of Independence’s nobly espoused principles they should have had the franchise all along, just as African-Americans should have had their freedom all along. The suffragettes’ victory in the Nineteenth Amendment had been achieved because their stance had been correct all along and their moral pressure had convinced enough male voters of that to support the amendment’s passage. Since the discussion had been about the evolution of legal and societal viewpoints in the United States, and about the fashion in which protest movements and organized political pressure groups had achieved change, it was difficult for him to see that as even misogynistic, far less racist, homophobic, or gender phobic.

  It was Kikuchi-Bennett who’d raised a hand, rejected his argument, and asserted that only someone speaking from the “privileged platform of the white male patriarchy” could possibly have made such a ludicrous assertion. As someone who was neither female nor black, his “patronizing dismissal of their struggle” both demeaned them and revealed his own “blinkered” inability to see the truth hidden in the “so-called history written by that same white male patriarchy,” and segued from there into the necessity for “free-speech zones” where such “hate speech and shameless historical revisionism” as his—which was particularly offensive coming from someone speaking from a “privileged position of power”—would not be tolerated.