The Fourth Rome (37 page)

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 slumped, 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.

R
ebecca Cames paused, leaning against a panel shielding one of the amphitheater’s midlevel entrances. A sausage seller elbowed
her to get past.

Rebecca’s misplaced frustration flared in a fashion that shocked her. She forced her hand to relax on the grip of the microwave
pistol. Hit with the full charge at this range, the vendor would’ve had blood in his urine for a week—if he’d been lucky.
All he’d done was jostle somebody standing in the way in a crowded aisle.

Vetera’s wooden amphitheater might hold as many as ten thousand spectators in a pinch, but the current six or seven thousand
were enough to fill the lower tiers fuller than comfort. She guessed as many people had come to see Tiberius as for the games
themselves. The region’s civilian population included many retired soldiers. Whatever faults Tiberius would have as emperor
in his later years, he was a popular and successful commander throughout his military career.

“I can’t be sure,” said a machine voice througi Rebecca’s headband, “but I don’t believe Svetlanov is on the other side of
the amphitheater either. Not if he has any advanced equipment with him, at least.”

Rebecca had searched for the revisionist outside the amphitheater as crowds climbed the outside steps to the upper entrances.
When Tiberius and his entourage arrived to enter through the tunnel to the first tier reserved for dignitaries, Rebecca went
in by a public entrance and worked her way down as close to Tiberius as she could.

Tiberius, a senator as well as the emperor’s stepson, sat on a folding ivory chair looking directly down through a railing
to the arena. Fifty fully armed Germans from the imperial horse guards had escorted him to Vetera. Some blocked the runnel
entrance while others separated the general from spectators behind and to either side. Only a half-dozen officials sat in
Tiberius’ immediate presence; the guards watched them as well with no great affection.

“I don’t think a submachine gun would be effective from so far away, Gerd,” Rebecca said. Spactators continued to bump her
but the fit of temper had passed.

“Istvan didn’t know Kiknadze carried a grenade,” the analyst replied. “Svetlanov may have a rifle or even a rocket launcher.
Though of course a bulkier weapon will be easier to locate.”

Gerd had gotten a space early to the left of the area reserved for dignitaries and from there scanned for Svetlanov. There’d
been a risk the revisionist would attack while Tiberius rode to the amphitheater; the general didn’t use a slave-born litter,
one of the reasons his men loved him.

Svetlanov was alone, however, and the only place he could be sure of finding Tiberius was at the entrance to the amphitheater
or seated inside. By watching those two points, she and Gerd maximized their chances. It wasn’t perfect, but it was what they
had.

Squads of regular troops were stationed at intervals on the first tier. An event like this drew spectators from local tribes.
There was a serious chance of a riot.

The crowd cheered. The pair of beast-slayers in the arena were dressed as Parthian horse archers in embroidered trousers,
terribly exotic on this opposite end of the empire. Wild bulls charged up the north ramp. The riders shot arrows over their
horses’ backs as the bulls chased them across the sand. Maybe they really were Parthians. They were certainly skillful enough.

Three bulls were down, blowing bloody froth from their nostrils. The riders played with the last animal. His flanks were a
pincushion of arrows, their feathers brightly dyed to add to the gaiety of the occasion.

More cheers as another pair of arrows slapped home. The beast stumbled but managed to pick itself up again.
My God, what a civilization!

Rebecca was ten rows above the bottom tier and about fifty feet to the right of Tiberius, a youthful-looking man of fifty-one.
From this angle she would see only sparse hair and the gleam of his high forehead. The big guardsmen glared outward, a living
iron barrier to any attack. The murder of Julius Caesar had taught his successors the basics of imperial survival.

“Pauli,” she said. “Svetlanov knows his fellows failed to prevent the massacre of Varus’ army. Now Kiknadze’s dead as well.
Mightn’t he just give up?”

“If he does,” Pauli Weigand said, “it’s going to be more difficult to find him. We’ve still got to find him, though. He could
do just as much harm even if he can’t execute his plan.”

He paused and added, “Besides, it’s our job.”

Pauli’s voice was weak and crackly despite sharpening by the AI in Rebecca’s receiver. The headbands were short-range devices
and the mass of iron and stone over Pauli attenuated the signal even more.

“I believe Svetlanov must have known from the start that he couldn’t return to his own time,” Gerd said. “A fanatic intending
to sacrifice himself is unlikely to be put oif by the loss of his fellows.”

Because he didn’t have a headband himself, Gerd keyed his words into his sensor pack and transmitted them i:i voice-synthesized
form to his teammates. The result sounded surprisingly like the analyst’s normal speech.

The bull was tiring. It stood directly below Rsbecca, legs braced and nose to the ground. The Partians capered close, trying
to entice it into another charge. Blood streaked the beast’s black hide and dripped onto the sand. The air reeked of death
and the bull’s frustrated anger.

She knew how the bull felt.

“I’m going to move closer to Tiberius,” Rebecca said. It’d be a way to release some of her tension. They
had
to find Svetlanov soon.

She began to work her way down. Spectators watched from the aisles in ever-thicker numbers nearer the arena. She squeezed
between, ignoring curses and the occasional elbow.

Pauli was right. The team couldn’t leave the revisionist loose on this horizon, but he’d be very, very hard to locate if he’d
fled Vetera when he realized he was alone. Maybe Gerd could predict Svetlanov’s movements, but she didn’t see how.

Her real concern, the fear that Rebecca Carnes kept hidden as deep in her heart as she could, was the knowledge that TC 779
couldn’t rescue the team until they’d eliminated Svetlanov. Unless the capsule arrived, she didn’t see any way that Pauli
Weigand was going to survive the next hour in the arena below.

A Parthian chose an arrow with red fletching from the quiver hanging from the left side of his belt of bronze openwork. He
laid the shaft across the ivory ring on his left thumb and aimed with particular care. The bull stared at his tormentor twenty
feet away but refused to be drawn. His tail flicked stiffly.

The Parthian loosed. The arrow hit with a
tock!
like a hammer on wood. The tuft of feather stuck out only a hands-breadth from the center of the bull’s skull. The animal
shuddered but didn’t fall over.

Rebecca’d seen the effect before. Brain damage had brought not only death but rigor mortis instantaneously. The corpse froze
in place like the statue of a bull. Blood still dripped from its wounds.

The whole crowd rose, shouting and stamping its thousands of feet. The amphitheater’s timber floor boomed and quivered under
the battering. The Parthian who’d made the final shot rode around the arena, waving his peaked cap to the adoring spectators.

God. God
damn.
And they’d do the same thing to Pauli if they could.

“Pauli,” she said. “I think we’d better get you out while there’s time and worry about Sve—”

“No,” Pauli snapped. “I’m in charge of this team. He may be planning to hit when the guards’re concentrating on the finale.
Or he hopes they are. I’m in charge!”