The Fourth Rome (36 page)

She must be very careful as she snapped the bonds that 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.

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 make 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.