The Fourth Rome Read online

  “Take them!” Pauli shouted, drawing the pistol from beneath his cloak. Still holding the reins in his left hand, he pulled down the faceshield to improve his view of events. What Arminius and his fellows thought of ARC equipment was of secondary importance for the moment.

  Bellowing thugs with swords and clubs rushed the front of the mounted Germans. In the darkness there could have been ten times the real number.

  A figure twenty-five meters in the background braced himself against a giant pine as he sighted a weapon. It was a bad angle for Pauli but he snapped a shot anyway. Pulverized bark flew from the tree trunk. The revisionist went down.

  Horsemen and their attackers on foot mixed in shouting confusion. Several retainers jumped or fell to the ground when their mounts stumbled. Sigimer chopped at a thug’s head, then tried to ride over the wounded man. He stabbed up into the horse’s belly. The animal screamed and tried to corkscrew away stiff-legged. Sigimer came off his back, yelling even louder when a hawthorn broke his fall.

  Pauli wheeled his horse. Hannes’ gang had attacked the rear of the column when their fellows hit the front. Gold alone couldn’t make men fight at odds so long. Perhaps these clan-less folk wanted revenge on nobles of the society that had cast them out, but Pauli suspected there was more to it. The revisionists must have demonstrated a submachine gun on a dog, a sheep … or, most likely, on a man.

  Hannes and Istvan were raised as elite members of a culture that had never concerned itself overmuch with the sanctity of human life. They’d have made sure to convince their hirelings that they were magicians: powerful enough to overwhelm the troop of horsemen and far too dangerous to cross.

  “Gerd!” Pauli called. “Where’s the other man?”

  His light-enhancing faceshield made a flaring torch of what was really a foxfire quiver: powder gases burning at the submachine gun’s muzzle. Hannes was firing from an elderberry thicket.

  Three mounted retainers howled in surprise. One of them touched his chest, stared at the blood on his fingers, and slid off his horse.

  Pauli hosed his microwave pistol across the thicket, stripping patches of bark. The pulses shook individual finger-thick stems without affecting the revisionist at the heart of the clump. Hannes knelt, replacing the magazine he’d emptied without hitting his intended target.

  Arminius cut right and left over his mount’s neck. He wore his shield on his left arm and used the sword with his right, guiding the horse expertly with his heels. All of the footmen were down. The German chief shouted exultantly and brandished his sword. Blood spattered from the back edge of the blade.

  Pauli drove through the melee. His horse tripped on a squirming body but didn’t fall and didn’t, for a wonder, throw its rider. Noise and the smell of blood had maddened the beast. It was ready to bolt, but there was nowhere to run on the narrow road.

  Hannes straightened. He was only twenty feet away. Pauli pulled his reins with both hands to put himself between the revisionist and the leader of the German revolt. He tried to aim the pistol but Hannes’ muzzle flash filled the whole world with red-orange fire.

  Pauli felt the blows to his chest. His horse tossed its head, then fell as if boneless. There was froth on its jaws and a fleck of dark blood on the skull between the bulging, empty eyes.

  From his viewpoint in the air above the suddenly silent battlefield, Pauli Weigand watched his body topple backward over the haunches of his dead horse.

  The revisionists’ guards burst from ambush twenty feet from where Rebecca Carnes concealed herself. Screaming murder, they launched themselves toward the band of riders.

  “Take them!” Pauli ordered. Rebecca’s headband chirped each syllable fractionally before air transmitted the shout, syncopating the radio transmission.

  She was already aiming at the head of the blond revisionist. As she pulled the trigger, he stepped back into the shelter of a tree four feet in diameter. Her pulse snapped a branch from a sapling beyond where he’d stood a moment before.

  Rebecca stood up, so focused on dropping the revisionist that she forgot the guards she’d dismissed as a diversion for the real assassination attempt. They were a diversion, but their weapons were quite lethal nonetheless. The one named Osric saw the motion and leaped for her with a shout. He swung a club like a baseball bat with iron bands around the meaty end.

  She dodged back and shot him. Weapons training hadn’t been one of the skills at which Rebecca excelled. She could hit a target the size of Osric when he was within spitting distance, but the microwave pulse hammered the German’s shoulder rather than his forehead. The club flew from his hand.

  At point-blank range the pistol delivered a heavier shock than a projectile weapon of manageable size, but sheer inertia kept Osric coming at her. Rebecca tripped on a stone hidden in the pine straw. The German tried to pull her head off but his right arm didn’t work. His groping left hand clouted her across the temple. She managed to shoot him again, this time in the face.

  Osric’s head jerked back with a startled expression. His legs buckled and he toppled onto his face. Blood ran from his nose and ears.

  Rebecca stepped over the body. Her faceshield was skewed. Her left eye got false-color images from the infrared spectrum that her brain tried to merge with the palette of grays and blacks her right eye saw in the twilit forest. Together they created blinding dissonance and a headache. She swept the headband off instead of trying to adjust it. She had Istvan in the sights of her pistol when Pauli shot and knocked the revisionist down.

  Rebecca turned. The roadway was a blur of movement and glittering metal. Blades sparked on one another. Half the horses were riderless. She couldn’t tell one fighter from another.

  She knelt, patting the ground for the headband with her free hand. It was caught on the bark of a cedar sapling a dozen feet away, gleaming in white innocence. Rebecca didn’t know how she’d managed to throw it that far. As she scrambled to it, a horse screamed louder than all the rest of the battle.

  With her faceshield on, figures stood out in bold thermal contrast against the forest background. The bare skin of men and horses glowed yellow and yellow-green as they struggled. Pauli’s steel armor was a cool blue; the microwave pistol flared red-orange in his hand. The weapon’s mechanism heated up with use.

  Rebecca couldn’t get through the ruck; a horse would trample her and in the confusion anyone on foot was fair game for the Germans still mounted. She pushed into the lesser growth beside the roadway, ignoring the bite of thorns.

  Rebecca’s guts were tight with worry about what had happened to Gerd and what might happen to Pauli, but the first order of business was to take down the second revisionist. Nurses learn to prioritize.

  A blackberry vine caught her cape and right elbow. She pulled free, leaving the garment behind when the tie string broke.

  A German ran from the fight, looking over his shoulder and bawling with fear. He saw Rebecca in front of him and thrust up to disembowel her with the iron-pointed Roman javelin in his left hand. She shot, kicking his head sideways with an audible soap. He fell but she had to grab the javelin’s shaft to keep him from spiking her as he thrashed.

  The submachine gun fired from a clump of brush on the other side of the road. The muzzle flash was a white core in a bright orange shroud. Hannes was a green mass behind the gun, clearly visible on infrared but shielded against effective use of die microwave pistol. Rebecca fired anyway, holding the trigger down till the plastic receiver seared the inside of hergunhand.

  Pauli rode in front of Arminius, blocking the revisionist’s aim. Bullets raked bis chest, sparkling and winking. The horse leaped convulsively as Pauli slid off its back.

  Rebecca felt her heart die. She dropped the useless pistol and balanced die javelin on her right palm. Part of ARC training covered primitive weapons. She didn’t have an aptitude for fencing, but she’d played darts often enough in her former life to take naturally to the javelin.

  The revisionist sighted again from the elderbe
rry copse. Rebecca cocked her arm, took a step forward onto the roadway, and hurled the javelin.

  The instructors at ARC Central would have been pleased. The iron blade tinged as it clipped a thin stem, but momentum kept it straight till it struck Hannes’ chest with the sound of a cleaver splitting a joint. He fell backward, deeper into the clump.

  Pauli lay faceup on the road. His lips moved, but they didn’t form words for Rebecca to hear through her headband. His horse spasmed nearby. Other wounded animals pitched and screamed in the twilight.

  Rebecca ran to her teammate. A German whose cut cheek bled across half his beard tried to grab her. The pistol lay in the undergrowth but Rebecca had reflexes honed in too many bars and military camps. She kicked the man in the crotch.

  She closed the faceshield back into her headband as she bent over Pauli. His carotid pulse was strong but he breathed with difficulty and obvious pain. His mail shirt was of high-strength alloy rather than the mild steel available to the armorers of this time horizon, but a bullet’s impact was still a hammer blow even if it didn’t penetrate.

  Pauli’d been hit several times. He’d be very lucky if he didn’t have cracked ribs.

  But he was alive.

  “Did you get Hannes?” he said, more mouthing than speaking the words.

  “Oh, yes,” Rebecca said. “But he’s not in shape to be interrogated about his buddies, I’m afraid.”

  Gerd Barthuli knelt beside the two of them. He pressed his left palm to his temple. “I’m very sorry,” he said in a puzzled voice. “He was behind me and I didn’t see him until too late. Istvan has gotten away, but I can track him easily.”

  He raised the scanner in his right hand, smiled oddly, and would have fallen onto Pauli if Rebecca hadn’t caught him in time. Gerd’s hand and his thin gray hair were caked with blood.

  The Closed City of Obninsk, Kaluga Region, Russia

  March 10, 1992

  In the back of Matsak’s long black Mercedes limousine, Grainger and the Ministry Deputy were chauffeured out of Moscow on a broad divided highway rutted like a goat track. Matsak confided wryly, “Obviously, we have not yet fixed this road from the damage the tonk—tanks—did rolling into Moscow to support Yeltsin.”

  Until that moment, Grainger had assumed that the pavement humps had been either the Russian version of speed bumps, because of their regular placement, or frost heaves. Once beyond the city limits, roads became wider. Divided highways were unmarred by billboards or roadside businesses, except for occasional unadvertised petrol dispensaries comprised of little more than a couple of pumps on broadened shoulders. Tall, rectangular high-rises in Bauhaus style could be seen from the highway. Lights in balcony windows revealed glimpses of the lives being lived within. Plywood lean-tos and blankets enclosed sagging summer porches. Old mattresses were propped against exterior walls. Plastic and wood had been conjured into makeshift greenhouses. Patched curtains provided privacy or replacements for missing glass patio doors. Clustered near the road in the shadows of the unremittingly Soviet architecture, tiny huts and sheds with curved roofs remained as reminders of a pastoral past. Even these antique peasant cottages occasionally showed lights flickering between boards or through paneless windows.

  Once another Mercedes passed them. It was shiny, a recent vintage car making close to one hundred kph, if Matsak’s own speedometer was correct. As the big car passed them, Grainger noticed that it had no license plate.

  Matsak saw Grainger’s questioning look and shrugged. “Nomenclature!.”

  Literally, Grainger thought the word translated as “list of names.” In reality, he understood precisely what Matsak meant when he used it: the privileged class, the hereditary elite, those for whom rules were merely suggestions.

  A Russian police car’s blue light shattered the dark in hot pursuit of the speeding Mercedes. The Mercedes pulled over. The other traffic, Matsak’s car included, slowed nearly to a crawl to watch the show.

  The traffic cop got out and stalked over to the car with that threatening demeanor of cops everywhere, his hand hovering over his sidearm. The sight took Grainger back to Sunrise Terrace.

  As the cop reached the unlicensed Mercedes, the window of the car glided smoothly down. A well-manicured head poked out. The cop bent down to hear.

  Matsak’s driver drove slowly by. Grainger saw the policeman laugh, nod, and wave the driver of the unlicensed car on his way.

  “You see,” Matsak said in sardonic triumph, “nomenclatura.”

  “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” Grainger commiserated. The hours he’d spent with Matsak so far had been part political talk, part testing of Grainger’s technological depth, and part bonding.

  “Ah, as in Romania, you mean? Or in my Ministry. Our change in government and ideology has produced almost exclusively the same leaders. Of course, this is true only below the level where faces must look different for the international press. So you may not have noticed. I appreciate this American expression. In Russia we have a similar saying: ‘The new is the well-forgotten old.’ ” The Ministry official opened the limousine’s bar. “Vodka,” he said. “From my home region. Very pure. Made with water from spring. Like velvet.” The bottle was tall, green, and had no label. Home brew.

  The Ministry official filled two glasses and handed one to Grainger. Matsak took a deep gulp from his glass. Grainger must drink or lose all the rapport he’d been building. So he drank, losing his chance to pursue any relationship between Matsak’s well-chosen aphorism and the technology they were going to evaluate.

  The vodka took his breath away. It burned less brightly than his recent antiradiation shot, but not much. Grainger leaned his head back against the Mercedes’ padded leather and said, “I thought you’d have a Zil limousine. Or at least a Lada. I wanted to ride in a Lada.”

  “Ah, a connoisseur of Ruskie automobiles? My Ministry will put a Lada and driver at your disposal for the rest of your stay here. You will like this? Would like this,” Matsak corrected himself. “So sorry, Tim. You must excuse my English. It is worst when I am tired.”

  Or drunk. “Da, da. I’d like that a lot. Look, before I get so drunk I can’t think at all, tell me who we’re going to see and what you think I should know.”

  “Oh, okay. You are saying you wish the prebrief?”

  “Ah yeah, something like that.”

  “We each have our missions, I think. It is well that they coincide.”

  “You got that right,” Grainger muttered, wondering if the vodka had made his voice sound as scratchy to Matsak as it did to his own ears.

  “So, then, as I said you in hotel, we are going to the closed city, Obninsk. Obninsk is in the Kaluga region. The mayor and deputy mayor have extended you an official invitation. They arrange a small celebration in your honor for when we arrive.”

  “Isn’t it going to be a little late for celebrations?”

  “Please, you will be their honored guest. Many brilliant scientists will be present. I suppose you are now their excuse for big celebration—for food, for drink, for music. Dancing. You like pretty girls? The closed city girls are the prettiest. Daughters of brilliant scientists, each one.”

  “And the technology? I’d rather see hardware than mayors and girls, any day. I was hoping for a little open discussion.”

  “You say you wish it, you will have it. You will have all you need. But I must have what I need. Show my scientists there is interest in their work, possibilities for joint cooperation from Americans. The Tim Grainger visit is now an official Obninsk affair. This is well. We must work together to keep these scientists from selling their know-how to Arabs who use it against peaceful nations. To Koreans who come and take photographs and tell lies and pay nothing. To Japanese who pay small roubles for reports and begin right away the reverse engineering. Obninsk is at your disposal, as long as its scientists believe you are truly interested in their know-how. Each scientist hopes to make a contract with the Americans. Become rich in dollars.
They need money to continue their work. But do not provide dollars directly. Tell me which scientists interest you and my Ministry will make the contract.”

  “You got a deal,” Grainger agreed.

  Once the protocol was established, Matsak seemed genuinely to relax.

  “If they think you are truly interested in the joint cooperation, the city will be yours. They have all new forms of beginning businesses: joint stock companies, joint ventures, enterprises. If you can pay even small sums to anyone, even one person, they all will be encouraged. A few dollars is better than many promises.”

  “I got it,” Grainger said. “I’ll be happy to give you some dollars for whoever seems to have what I need.” And sort out the promising technologies from the hopeless ones for you. Now Grainger understood what Matsak wanted out of this. Matsak wanted an American to handicap the players for the Ministry—find out how to triage the line, which scientists to support and whom to let starve. “I’m not the greatest all-around technology evaluator,” Grainger said. Better to get this issue on the table now. “I know my area. I don’t know everything.” He didn’t want to see everything Obninsk had to offer. He wouldn’t know what to do with it. He only wanted to find the revisionists. Finding the right technology would lead him to them. “I don’t want to get your scientists’ hopes up for nothing.”

  “Hopes are not nothing to those who have so little. So sorry, but we must be gentle with these scientists. The man you want will be among them, absolutely. In my opinion, you will like Obninsk. There is hunting, if you wish it. The best hunting in the east. The big games…deers…bears…others, I don’t know the names.”

  “Wonderful. I love hunting.” Technology hunting. “How long are we staying?”

  “Is up to you. Overnight, certainly. Tomorrow, you will say me what is interesting. Then we will decide.”

  “Tonight, I want to say what is interesting. I’ll work straight through, all night long if your people are willing. Tomorrow night, I’ve got a dinner …” And then he realized he didn’t. Couldn’t. Had promised this man he wouldn’t. Goddamn, it had slipped his mind. “I’ve got to call my friends when we get to Obninsk. Can you arrange it?”