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  LET THE GAMES—END!

  The tunnel acted as a wave guide, channeling the blast. Tiberius turned. Gray smoke puffed from the archway behind his chair.

  A second grenade burst with a red flash. The guards went down like bowling pins.

  Spectators screamed, surging like the tide.

  “Pauli,” Beckle Carnes said in a tone of quiet desperation, “I can’t get to the tunnel. There’s too many people.”

  The shock wave had knocked Tiberius down. His two surviving guards tried to carry him out of the way. The shouting mob blocked them.

  One of the guards crumbled slowly to his knees. The other bellowed. He dropped his sword, clutched at his face, and collapsed onto the body of his fellow.

  Kyril Svetlanov stepped out of the tunnel, reloading his submachine gun. His face was cheerfully pink, framed by its flowing white hair and beard. He looked like a 19th-century Santa Claus as he aimed the Skorpion at the future Emperor…

  “FAST-MOVING AND EXCITING.”

  —Kliatt on Arc Riders

  Also by David Drake and Janet Morris

  Arc Riders

  PUBLISHED BY

  WARNER BOOKS

  Copyright

  WARNER BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 1996 by David Drake and Janet Morris

  All rights reserved.

  Aspect® is a registered trademark of Warner Books, Inc.

  Warner Books, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: September 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56692-6

  Contents

  Let the Games—End!

  Also by David Drake and Janet Morris

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  ARC Central

  ARC Central

  TC 779

  Aliso, Free Germany

  TC 779

  Civil Aliso, Free Germany

  Moscow, Russia

  Civil Aliso, Free Germany

  Moscow, Russia

  Three Kilometers East of the Ems River, Free Germany

  The Closed City of Obninsk, Kaluga Region, Russia

  Seven Kilometers East of the Hase River, Free Germany

  Between the Hase and Hunte Rivers, Free Germany

  Moscow, Russia

  Three Kilometers East of the Hase River, Free Germany

  Four Kilometers West of the Hase River, Free Germany

  Moscow, Russia

  Fourteen Kilometers West of the Rhine River, Free Germany

  Twelve Kilometers West of the Rhine River, Free Germany

  ARC Central

  Six Kilometers West of the Rhine River, Free Germany

  Four Kilometers West of the Rhine, Free Germany

  Obninsk, Russia

  Vetera, Lower Germany

  Vetera, Lower Germany

  Moscow, Russia

  Vetera, Lower Germany

  Moscow, Russia

  Vetera, Lower Germany

  Acknowledgments

  I asked Sandra Miesel for some research help on this one. She responded, as usual, with a stack of material which turned out to be crucial not only to the project’s accuracy but to the way the story developed. Many thanks—also as usual.

  —David Drake

  The Russian characters in this book are fictional. Beyond the known deeds of historical figures on the public record, any resemblance to actual serving officials of the US or Russian Federation governments is coincidental and unintentional.

  The Russian portions of this book are dedicated, on the American side, to Lt. Gen. Jerry Granrud, USA (Ret.), Gen. Dennis Reimer, USA, and John Thomas, whose vision and commitment made the real trips to Moscow during the winter of 1991-92 possible.

  And on the Russian side, to Oleg, Sasha, Egor, Boris, Viktor, and Big George: may your hopes for your country come true.

  Some of the places, events, and technology in the Russian portions are actual, some fictional. FILI did house SS-N-25s during the time period indicated. Whether they were armed is anyone’s guess. Obninsk had no known temporal displacement project. To my knowledge, its real mayor and all its people are alive and well.

  —Janet Morris

  ARC Central

  Out of the Temporal Universe

  The six ARC Riders laughed and chatted in low voices as they walked into the briefing room together. Sure, you always looked forward to leave at the end of a mission; but you wouldn’t be an ARC Rider if the missions and the people who shared them with you weren’t the most important things in your life. Team 79 was glad to be back on the job again.

  “Central’s background material covers 1992 Russia where the revisionists come from and early 1st century AD Europe where they’re operating,” Nan Roebeck told her Anti-Revision Command field team. “Just so we know, though, I asked Gerd to predict the result if the revisionists succeeded in carrying out their plan.”

  The excellent holographic projectors of the ARC Central briefing room created solid-looking images with no fuzz or fade. A huge war machine hung in the air above the projector, appearing to trundle across a rolling plain. Black smoke spewed from four stacks. The turtle-backed monster rolled on pairs of iron-shod wooden wheels ten feet in diameter.

  “For normal transit the machine is pulled by teams of oxen,” explained Gerd Barthuli, the team’s analyst. “In battle, as now, it’s operating on its own steam engines. The boilers can use any solid fuel, but on the plains they’re normally heated by a mixture of hay and horse dung.”

  He cleared his throat. “This is the most advanced military weapon of its day,” he added.

  Gerd wore a slightly quizzical expression, as though he wasn’t quite sure what he was doing here. That was how the analyst usually looked. And felt, Nan assumed, which she regretted even though it didn’t harm Gerd’s performance. Gerd was the best field analyst in the Anti-Revision Command. He had his quirks, maybe even more quirks than other ARC Riders did, but Nan wouldn’t have traded him for a pair of people who took her orders better.

  “What period?” asked Tim Grainger, leaning forward slightly as if that would give him a better view of the puffing tank. A squadron of horse cavalry cantered past the vehicle. Half the riders carried a matchlock musket and a pair of long bamboo poles tied so they hinged into a bipod shooting rest. The rest had composite bows. “First century?”

  Tim was thirty years old, little more than half Gerd’s age. He was thin, intense, and an outsider like the analyst despite Nan’s attempts to make him welcome. Grainger had been recruited from the beginning of the 21st century, a paranoid age of technologically literate “Haves” living in enclaves among a huge underclass of “Have-Nots.”

  Tim was of the former class. He was smart by any standards and comfortable with the technology of time displacement, but he was first and foremost a shooter. Tim Grainger had none of his 20th-century colleagues’ horror of killing other human beings. That was both a benefit to the team and a constant worry to Nan as team leader.

  “This is an extrapolation to 1992,” Gerd said with a smile. “The same location in western Russia as well, though the city of Moscow doesn’t exist in the timeline the revisionists’ actions would create.”

  Gerd Barthuli could have been running a bureau in ARC Central instead of being part of one of the action teams tasked to eliminate revisions of the space-time continuum. He chose to be an ARC Rider because he was under a medical death sentence. Gerd had a genetic propensity to Alzheimer’s disease and a protein allergy to the vaccine that had protected the general populace from the condition for centuries.

  Gerd knew that at some i
ndeterminate time his splendid mind was going to dissolve into static and psychotic rage. Until then he intended to experience as much of human existence as possible. There was no better way to do that than be an ARC Rider whose field was all history and prehistory.

  “Is the background briefing right about this being a deliberate revision?” Pauli Weigand asked. “Not just Russian time tourists screwing things up by accident? Because that sure doesn’t look like much of an improvement over where they came from.”

  Pauli was a big man with blond hair and Nordic features. From the outside he gave the impression of being solid to the point of stupidity. Inside he was so full of self-doubt that he was never sure what he was doing was correct. He acted anyway, with speed and resolution; the fears harmed only himself.

  Pauli was Nan’s assistant team leader. She couldn’t have asked for a better one.

  “The revisionists intend to make specific changes,” Gerd explained. “They simply don’t understand the real effect of those changes—which is scarcely surprising since the data-processing power to compute such complex models won’t be available for five centuries after their period.”

  The display continued to move while the team talked. For a moment Nan thought the tank had exploded. Dense white smoke spewed from the bow, obscuring the front half of the vehicle. The cloud spat a glowing spark that sailed downrange in a high curve: the tank had fired a bombshell from a short-barreled cannon or mortar. The vehicle wobbled forward.

  Musket barrels projected from ports around the tank’s sides. A mast rose from the dorsal spine to hold a basket of archers and musketeers sixty feet in the air. No matter which way the wind blew, one or more of the stacks bathed the basket in smoke. The tank’s interior must have been even more uncomfortable, an oven filled with smoke from the fireboxes and steam leaking through every joint and seam of the boilers.

  Gerd allowed himself a smile. “There are those of us who believe there’s an art to analysis beyond mere computation. This group fails on both counts. They’d be as horrified as anyone else to learn what their meddling with time had achieved.”

  “I’ll still bet they don’t thank us for dropping them back in 50K,” Pauli said. “Well, I suppose I can live with that.”

  “First we have to catch them,” Chun Quo said. Though her face and tone were impassive, the words made clear her mild disapproval of taking anything for granted.

  Grainger was a shooter who could do tech in a pinch. Chun—family name first in Oriental idiom—handled the controls and understood the systems of a temporal transportation capsule superbly, but she was almost useless in direct confrontation. Quo’s unwillingness to harm another human being made her hesitate to use even the nonlethal devices that were the ARC Riders’ weapons of choice.

  Nobody was perfect; a six-person field team was large enough to allow for a degree of specialization. As leader, though, Nan Roebeck made it her object to be able to do each job on the team almost as well as the expert.

  She’d never be the analyst Gerd was, but she could do his job as ably as anybody else Central might assign to the slot. She was fast and accurate with the team’s weaponry: microwave pistols, gas guns, electromagnetic pulse generators; needs must, with fléchette guns and plasma dischargers, too. Nan didn’t like to kill, but she’d killed before and would kill again if that was the only way to save the mission or her team.

  She didn’t have Quo’s intellectual understanding of TC 779 ’s systems, but her own control of the transportation capsule was instinctively light and precise. Above all she knew her people, their weaknesses and their strengths. Central had made Nan Roebeck leader of Team 79, but her teammates followed her by their own decision.

  “It’s pretty straightforward, isn’t it?” Tim Grainger said. “We eliminate the revisionists in 9 AD, then take out the laboratory in 1992.”

  He gave Quo a quirky grin. “And the population of 50,000 BC goes up by a dozen or so.”

  The Anti-Revision Command didn’t kill—except as a last resort—those who tampered with time, nor did it exactly imprison revisionists. The ARC Riders took their captives to North America in the case of males, Australia for women, and released them in 50,000 BC, 50K, before human beings had reached those continents in the course of history. Each group of revisionists was separated from others by a century.

  Though unharmed, the naked captives were of no further danger to the temporal continuum. They’d have to be both lucky and skillful to survive their first winter in their new environment. Those running the Anti-Revision Command might choose not to kill, but they were sufficiently ruthless in carrying out their mandate.

  “I’m concerned that they use a psychic technique for temporal displacement,” Quo explained. “It’s not particularly subtle or flexible, but just because it’s unique—that’s correct, isn’t it, Gerd?”

  The analyst nodded agreement.

  “Because it’s out of our—out of Central’s—previous experience,” Quo continued, “there may be something to trip us up. I can understand any of the mechanical displacement methods we’ve run into, but this notion of mentally projecting people into the past is—”

  Quo was small without being slight. She couldn’t compete in peak strength with the team’s males or even with Nan’s own rangy body, but her stamina—mental as well as physical—was remarkable. She fluttered her stubby, capable fingers. She used wands for choice to control electronics; her hands were the most expressive part of her body.

  “—magic. Fantasy. To me.”

  “‘Nevertheless it moves,’“ Gerd said, quoting Galileo. “We can expect to increase the sum of our experience on this mission, indeed. And Central’s experience as well.”

  He smiled again. There was always something sad behind Gerd’s humor. It seemed to Nan that the analyst was really laughing at himself and his own vain hopes.

  “Speaking of experience,” Nan said, “have any of us worked in this sector before? I haven’t. Early Roman Empire, I mean. Soviet breakup period we’ve done as a team.”

  “I did when I was in training,” Pauli said. “But that was 3d century BC Sicily, and this is the Rhine area three hundred years later, right?”

  Gerd nodded again. “Two hundred and sixty-four years after you were in saving Hamilcar Barca, Pauli,” he said. “Effectively a different world. And none of the rest of us have been involved with the region at all. I’m looking forward to the experience.”

  “Gerd, you looked forward to the Black Death,” Tim said. “Believe me, I didn’t trust Central’s vaccination that far.”

  “At least we don’t have to worry about our timing at the early locus,” Nan said after the general chuckle. “On the other end, we’ll be upstream of our 1991 insertion, so that’s safe enough.”

  Tim grinned at Quo. “Unless these psychic Slavs are making time run backward,” he said. “Then we’re in deep trouble.”

  Two versions of the same entity couldn’t exist in the same continuum. An ARC Rider vanished if he visited a timeline for the second time. Maybe she was ejected into another lifetime, maybe he was dead. Maybe she drifted for all eternity in a timeless gray limbo.

  In any case the duplicated Rider was no longer able to carry out the directives of the Anti-Revision Command, so the internal database prevented a transportation capsule from displacing to a timeline where any of the Riders had been before. That didn’t keep somebody from displacing to a time before his previous visit and staying too long, though Nan had never heard of that happening.

  Individual displacement suits didn’t have all the safety features of a capsule. At least two Riders had managed to eliminate themselves temporally by getting hasty in their suits.

  “Speaking of fantasy,” said Rebecca Carnes, “that’s what the revisionists’ whole plan looks like to me. Did they really think changing history is so simple?”

  She gestured toward the display. Beyond the steam-powered tank, teams of oxen hitched to poles were pushing forward a pair of wheeled bulwar
ks. Musketeers sauntered along behind the loopholed bulwarks. Tendrils of smoke drifted from their broad-brimmed hats. They carried spare matches in their hatbands in case the one burning in the gunlock went out.

  “Permit me to introduce Trainee Rebecca Carnes,” Roe-beck said dryly. “Late of the 20th century, late of Team 79. She’ll be with us while Jalouse is on leave.”

  “Hey, Beckie,” Weigand said. “Good to have you back.”

  “I put in for you guys but I wasn’t sure they’d let me,” Rebecca said. “I’m glad they did.”

  Beckie Carnes was smart though not brilliant. Technology didn’t scare her, but she wasn’t technically oriented. She was in good physical condition for a woman of forty, but that wouldn’t have earned her a slot in the ARC Riders either.

  Beckie didn’t panic, and she didn’t quit. As a combat nurse in Vietnam she’d been in the middle of situations as bad as any in Anti-Revision Command’s scope. She’d come through them—and come through still human, still able to care.

  Besides, Nan was glad to have somebody on the team who thought her primary job was to help people.

  “If we’ve got a trainee along, then Central thinks it’s a milk run,” Tim said. “Not that you’re really a trainee, Beckie.”

  “If Central were perfect,” Nan said before Quo could respond, “then you and I wouldn’t have as many scars as we do, Tim. But we are all pleased at the assignment, Beckie.”

  Team 79 had snatched Carnes from a timeline that had to be destroyed. They’d needed her local knowledge to understand a period that didn’t exist in the continuum in which their database was set.

  After that operation was completed, Beckie had the choice of a comfortable existence in the 26th century—to which she was completely alien; or joining the ARC Riders herself. She’d taken the second option, just as Tim Grainger had done on an earlier mission. She was an asset to the organization and to Team 79.