The Fourth Rome (20 page)

“I was starting to worry,” Pauli said. He sat his mount with a certain stiffness himself. Despite Rebecca’s protests, he’d
done his usual set of flexibility exercises when he got up this morning. His face had been white and clammy when he finished
them, but he
had
finished. Pauli believed against reason that pain was a challenge, not a warning, and he was afraid to back down from it.

“He’s been doing fine,” Rebecca said. She’d been worried, too, but on general principles. “Since I was able to sedate him,
Gerd wasn’t able to strain himself with manly nonsense.”

“Home sweet home,” Hordius said as the litter entered a natural clearing being expanded by the efforts of legionaries from
the front of the column. Axes rang. Gangs of soldiers shouted in cadence as they dragged fallen trees deeper into the forest
to get them out of the way.

As usual, there was no attempt to palisade the camp. Varus didn’t give the orders, and soldiers tired from a hard march and
roadcutting wouldn’t volunteer for extra labor even if they thought their lives depended on it. Rebecca’d seen the result
often, men who’d been wounded because they were too tired to dig in though they knew they’d be attacked during the night.
Soldiering was a fatalistic profession.

And these legionaries didn’t believe their enemy was any threat. They were more worried about the rain.

Rebecca leaned close to read the monitor she’d attached to the analyst’s neck. Gerd’s vital signs were all within normal range,
and brain activity was rising quickly as the sedative wore off. She’d injected a twenty-four-hour dose metered to Gerd’s body
weight and metabolism, but it was always a marvel to her that 26th-century medicine worked with the regularity of a light
switch.

The day before she’d applied first aid while the bellowing Germans checked their wounds and legionaries came up the road at
the double, summoned by the clang of weapons. Nobody paid her any attention.

She’d covered the pressure cut in Gerd’s scalp with first a topical knitting agent, then a liquid bandage that set like clear
latex and would dissolve as the flesh beneath it healed. The sedative came next, followed by a transcutaneous patch at the
back of Gerd’s neck to dissolve the blood clots that’d be forming on the brain. He’d been slugged with either a club or the
flat of a sword whose edge he’d managed to dodge. His skull wasn’t fractured, but the blow had given him both a primary and
a contra-cu concussion.

All in ninety seconds, working in near darkness. A 20th-century emergency room couldn’t have done as much.

But neither could Pauli nor Gerd have done as much if they’d been working on Rebecca Carnes. Technology was wonderful, but
it wasn’t magic and it still left room for experience.

Dealing with Pauli had been more difficult simply because he wasn’t unconscious. He kept insisting that he was fine and that
he needed to go after the surviving revisionist immediately. He maybe could have walked—he was as tough as he was stubborn—but
he couldn’t ride and he certainly couldn’t fight. Istvan still had his Skorpion. Another burst was likely to send splinters
of weakened ribs through Pauli’s lungs even if the bullets themselves didn’t penetrate, and Istvan might go for a head shot
anyway.

She’d gotten Pauli’s mail shirt off him by saying she knew it would hurt him too much to raise his arms. Raising his arms
had
hurt, but he’d done it and Rebecca pulled the fabric of fine steel links off him like a sweater.

The mail had been driven almost through the leather under-vest in three places. At those points the flesh was swollen and
hot to the touch. She’d spread anticlotting agents, topical anesthetic, and—despite Pauli’s objection—a general analgesic
that left him too wobbly to walk without help.

She helped Pauli, and a gold piece brought Gerd back to the camp seated in the arms of a pair of legionaries bemused to be
earning two weeks wages for walking a hundred yards.

They wouldn’t have long to spend the money, but it’d keep them happy for a day or two.

Rebecca had examined her teammates in better light under the tent the army provided for the emperor’s representative. She’d
found and dealt with a cut Pauli’d gotten by falling onto his head. Only then did she go back to the scene of the ambush which
the legionaries had put down to an argument between clans of Fritzes.

The German chiefs and their retainers had ridden away carrying their dead even before the legionaries left. The corpses of
the revisionists’ thugs lay where they’d fallen.

Germans had found Osric alive though unconscious. Sigimer rammed the small end of the club down the man’s throat and into
the chest cavity. Rebecca didn’t watch, but she had to pass the body when she searched for signs of Istvan.

There were none. Pauli hadn’t gotten a clean hit on the man. The revisionist had taken himself and his equipment into the
forest when he came to.

Hannes, the elderly Russian, was dead as Rebecca had expected. No one had noticed his body in the elderberry thicket. There
was a froth of blood on his lips. Both his hands were locked on the shaft of the javelin that had plunged in through the top
of his breastbone.

She’d stripped the body of its 20th-centqiry equipment. The radio might be helpful since Istvan and perhaps the unidentified
revisionists had similar units. The night-vision goggles weren’t any use to the team, but she didn’t want to leave something
anachronistic for future archaeologists to find. The belt of gold coins would be simply weight. No finder on this or a later
time horizon was going to learn anything critically important from even a detailed assay.

Rebecca Carnes belted the Skorpion and its pouch of spare magazines on under her cape. She might not be as lucky the next
time her microwave pistol failed her and a life was in the balance. Pauli knew she’d kept the weapon but he hadn’t said anything
about it.

Rebecca had never knowingly killed a human being before. She’d never even killed a warm-blooded animal. Her heart was cold
and she’d see the Russian’s face in nightmares for as long as she lived; but faced with the same choice, she’d make the same
decision. She’d rather loathe herself for what she’d become than remember that she’d let a friend die because she was too
squeamish to save him.

Gerd tried to sit up. Rebecca put a hand on his chest to keep him down. “A few minutes more, Gerd,” she said. All they needed
was for the analyst to fall off the litter now and break his neck. “You’re still groggy.”

They entered the clearing. Minutius, the centurion who commanded the 3rd Cohort, was assigning tasks. He saw the litter and
nodded. Hordius had made sure the centurion got his share of the gold. 1st Squad was effecitively excused from ordinary tasks
to serve the ARC Riders. Pauli’s supposed rank might have gotten similar results, but hard cash cut through a lot of bureaucracy.

“Rebecca?” Gerd said in a rusty, frightened whisper. “My sensor pack? Do you have it?”

“I’ve got it safe,” Rebecca said. Gerd had clamped so tight around the little device while he was unconscious that she’d injected
a muscle relaxant to pry it from his fingers. “I’ll give it back to you as soon as we’re settled.”

The team spoke Standard among themselves, completely unintelligible to everyone around them. That didn’t concern the soldiers.
A person who spoke Latin, Greek, and perhaps in the eastern provinces Aramaic could travel from one end of the empire to the
other; but hundreds of separate languages survived beneath that common umbrella. Two members of the squad spoke Oscan between
themselves, and they’d been born within sixty miles of Rome.

Hordius pushed through the mob to get direction from one of the surveyor’s assistants laying out the campsite. “Right, set
it here!” he called, gesturing the litter bearers to a location pegged in the natural clearing. The 17th led the column today;
its officers wouldn’t have to contend with tree stumps in the billeting area. “When Gaius Clovis releases you, report to Minutius
in fatigue kit.”

“Pitch the tent,” Pauli said to Flaccus, the senior legionary. “We won’t need anything more.”

“To tell the truth, Clovis,” Flaccus said, “I’d just as soon hang around guarding you lot as clear rucking forest. But at
least you’ve kept us off road-building detail, so we won’t complain.”

Rebecca helped Gerd sit up as Pauli dismounted nearby. “I’m terribly sorry for the trouble I’ve caused,” the analyst said.
Rebecca handed him a skin of water laced with dietary supplements. He sucked greedily from it. He hadn’t had anything to eat
or drink while he was under sedation.

Gerd lowered the skin and paused, breathing deeply. “One of Hannes’ guards had gone off the roadway to relieve himself.”

“A bad time for a barbarian to have a twinge of delicacy,” Pauli said, obviously relieved that Gerd was alert again. The big
man’s jaw muscles were no longer stiff.

“They were Germans, not French, Pauli,” Rebecca said; and realized that her making a joke meant that she’d relaxed also.

“I was so absorbed with my sensor display that I almost walked into him,” Gerd said. He managed a wistful smile. “Too close
to the forest to see the trees, wasn’t I?”

He looked at Carnes and said, “May I have my sensor pack now, Rebecca?”

“Of course,” she said in concern. Gerd was afraid she’d refuse, afraid that she’d cut him off from all but his immediate surroundings
to punish him for his mistake. She wondered if the analyst had been having a premonition of the dementia he knew lay in his
future.

Pauli glanced at them but said nothing. The packed confusion of the camp concealed the team’s activities almost as well as
empty forest would have done. The sensor pack looked like a plain gray tile, unremarkable to the natives of this time horizon.
Its display was by air-projected holograms, visible from only one location in respect to the device. Nobody would care even
if Gerd used the sensor in plain sight; which was unnecessary with the leather tent now raised.

The head of the column halted in early afternoon, but the tail wouldn’t straggle into the encampment until well after sunset.
Over twenty thousand people were marching into the dark interior of Germany. Little more than half were soldiers. Servants,
wives, and whores made up the reaminder, with hundreds of merchants like those the revisionists had claimed to be come to
buy loot or sell luxuries to the troops.

There were as many wagons carrying the personal effects of Varus and his retinue as there were for military baggage. With
the addition of the train of civilians, the column included over a thousand vehicles.

The roadway was narrow. Every time an axle broke or a wheel came off, the damaged wagon halted everything behind it. On a
surface of cross-logs and ax-hewn bridges, breakdowns were frequent.

“Have you been tracking the revisionists?” Gerd asked. His fingers played on an invisible control surface in front of his
sensor pack.

“Gerd,” Pauli said with the patience that Rebecca found remarkable in a man whose own actions were so crisply decisive, “neither
of us could turn your sensor
on.
The only way we could have tracked Istvan was by sniffing the air.”

“Oh, it’s not really that complex,” the analyst said, typing on nothing material. Rebecca couldn’t tell whether his tone was
one of embarrassment or pride. The air before him shimmered; to someone unfamiliar with the process, the holographic display
could have been dust motes dancing in a sunbeam. “And the unit was on at all times, of course.”

In a different, crisper voice the analyst continued, “Hannes is back at the point the attack occurred. I assume he’s dead?”
He raised an eyebrow.

“Yes,” Rebecca said. “He’s dead.”

Gerd nodded, pleased to have his analysis confirmed. “Ist-van is seventeen…” He frowned and manipulated the controls further.
“Sixteen point seven kilometers from us on a heading of twenty-eight degrees. The likelihood is that he’s on or near the military
road since our general heading has been within ten degrees of that throughout the march, but I only state that as a probability.
The course of the road isn’t in Central’s database.”

He smiled at a private joke. “Though when we return, at least part of it will be,” he added. “Istvan hasn’t moved since last
evening.”

“How do you tell distances?” Pauli asked. “Is the strength of the rubidium signature that precise?”

He’d unbuckled his sword belt; now he tensed himself to lift off the mail shirt. Rebecca rose and stepped behind him. “Permit
your faithful slave to aid you, master,” she said mildly. She removed the fabric of linked steel, shockingly heavy for all
its apparent delicacy.

“The pack recorded while we were moving,” Gerd explained. “Even though I wasn’t able to access the data.” He smiled. “With
Hannes as a control point, I can map both our track and Istvan’s precisely.”

“What’s he doing out there?” Rebecca said, more to herself than for an answer. She looked at the dark vegetation surrounding
the growing encampment. Like the jungles of Southeast Asia, this forest was neutral: hostile to men of all sorts. “Is he looking
for his friends?”

“I’d guess he was running away, Beckie,” Pauli Weigand said. He drank from the water skin, then offered it to her. “He couldn’t
get back to the camp when the attack failed, so he ran in the other direction. I don’t think he’s in any danger—he can’t locate
Arminius or have any significant effect on the massacre to come. But he’s the only path I know to finding the other two revisionists.”

Rebecca drank deeply of the fortified liquid. If you thought the container had merely water, it would taste sour but by no
means as bad as much of what others in the column were drinking. Water purification for this army was a matter of mixing wine
with the water—and the wine was acid besides.

“We’ll go after him immeditely,” Gerd said. He rose to his feet. “I’m sorry to have delayed—”

His face changed. His knees buckled; he would have fallen on his face again if Rebecca hadn’t caught him.