The Fourth Rome Read online

  “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.

  She looked at Pauli as she eased the mumbling analyst to the ground, pillowing his head on his rolled cape. “Tomorrow morning,” she said. “I’ll put fluids and food into him tonight. Although … we could go after Istvan ourselves?”

  “And if Istvan moves?” Pauli said. “No, tomorrow morning.”

  He too looked at the forest, seeing not the trees but the German warriors gathering in glades and hamlets throughout them. “No matter what, we have to get away from the column by tomorrow morning. If we’re caught with Varus, the best we can hope for is that Germanicus will give us proper Roman burial rites when he reaches the spot six years from now.”

  Between the Hase and Hunte Rivers, Free Germany

  August 27, 9 AD

  A cow bawled in pain nearby. Puli Weigand’s nerves felt as if they’d been stretched between pegs. He’d switched his faceshield to thermal viewing, though light amplification gave him a better view of the trail for riding. Right at the moment he was more concerned with someone waiting in ambush than he was with his horse stumbling.

  “We should dismount now,” Gerd said in a voice thinned by pain. He actually managed to chuckle. “Not only are we close to our goal, I’m afraid that my body is about to imitate the wonderful one-horse shay and fail at all points simultaneously.”

  The analyst liked to borrow metaphors from time horizons he’d visited. Pauli didn’t understand the particular reference—he didn’t even know what a “shay” was—but he took Gerd’s meaning loud and clear.

  They’d left the camp in the morning with three horses, all of them purchased within the column. Pauli led while Gerd and Beckie rode double so that she could hold the analyst in the saddle. The pair traded mounts at short intervals to prevent overstraining either beast. It wasn’t ideal, but it was the only way Gerd could cover the necessary distance.

  The analyst was adequately fit, but he was neither a young man nor one to whom physical ability had ever been a major goal. These seventeen kilometers were proof that Gerd Barthuli could cut g
lass by willpower alone.

  A good man. A good teammate. Pauli just wished the team leader were better at his job.…

  He dismounted and stepped to help Gerd down while Beckie supported him from the saddle. His horse whickered. The cow continued to bawl.

  “Her udder’s full,” Beckie said. “She wants to be milked.”

  “The revisionist is forty meters from the road,” Gerd said. He clutched his chest as Pauli lowered his feet to the ground and his legs took the strain of his weight. “He’s in a dwelling. I think I’d best kneel, Pauli. I’ll display the layout.”

  Gerd and his sensor pack had been their protection on the ride. German warbands passed near the ARC Riders a dozen times during the day. Though the tribes massing to attack Varus didn’t themselves use the old roadway, they knew that the Roman column would. Arminius and Sigimer were positioning their forces along the expected route.

  Each time Gerd had given warning while the warriors were a full kilometer away. The team either broke a fresh trail to bypass the danger or waited for the Germans to move on. Evading enemies slowed the team’s progress, but bands of hundreds of warriors together were too strong to fight.

  “Not that we wouldn’t have tried.”

  “What?” said Gerd.

  “Sorry,” Pauli said. “I didn’t mean to speak.”

  Beckie stood on the horses’ reins as she arranged feed bags to keep the animals quiet during the next minutes. The wind through the treetops was fierce. Occasionally a gust swept a billow of pine needles across the forest floor. The air was cold and the horses were restive because of the coming storm.

  “Istvan is in a hut with another person, perhaps a female,” Gerd said. He gestured to his controls. Pastel green light formed a rough oval in the air above the sensor with a blue and a pink figure within the frame. “There is a hearth in the center of the hut, though the fire is banked for now. There is a corral, a cow byre, here.”

  Pauli raised his faceshield. More green lines formed a rectangle with a half-dozen cow-shaped pink blobs beside the oval.

  “There is a dead body here,” Gerd continued with no emotional loading. Another pink figure, this time crosshatched and sprawled in front of the oval.

  The analyst looked up. “I believe the woman is tied,” he added. “She doesn’t move for long periods of time.”

  “All right,” Pauli said. He nodded twice as if he were pumping his thoughts to the surface. “Does the house have windows, Gerd?”

  Beckie knelt beside them, her face lighted by the glow diffused from the holograms. Oats crunched between the horses’ teeth.

  “No,” the analyst said. “The walls are posts set in the ground. The roof is turf over a supporting frame of branches, with a hole in the center for smoke. The door is a section of cowhide pegged to the outside wall at the top. The walls slope inward, and the doorway is only a meter high.”

  A branch tore loose in the wind and fell spinning, smashing other limbs. It hit the ground at last with a thud Pauli could feel through his boot soles. Soon it would be the weather against them along with the Germans and revisionists.

  “Gerd lifts the flap and you and I both shoot?” Beckie suggested.

  “You lift the flap, I go in and grab him,” Pauli said. “Gerd keeps watch. I don’t trust the pistols when I can’t see the target. All it takes is a bunch of onions hanging from a roof beam to stop the pulse.”

  Beckie grimaced and nodded. She didn’t refer to the submachine gun under her cape. They needed the revisionist alive for questioning.

  This was a perfect opportunity to use a gas grenade. Pauli Weigand, team leader, hadn’t brought one. If he’d tried to imagine everything he might need, he’d have wound up with more hardware than TC 779 could carry; but why hadn’t he brought one gas grenade?

  “I’m able to move, I believe,” Gerd said simply.

  Pauli forced a smile and drew his faceshield down again. “All right,” he said.

  He got up, massaged his calves to be sure that the muscles hadn’t cramped as a result of the long ride, and took off his military cape. The doorway would be narrow as well as low.

  “These’d be in the way, too,” Pauli said. He unbuckled the belt and crossed baldrics supporting his sword, dagger, and metal purse.

  Sliding the microwave pistol from the lining of his cape he stepped forward, walking lightly. His ribs no longer hurt, though they surely would when he came down off the adrenaline high in a few moments. Assuming Istvan hadn’t learned from his failed ambush to be quicker on the trigger…

  Pauli would have gone past the narrow trail connecting the isolated farmstead with the military road if Gerd hadn’t pointed it out. The briers at the junction held tufts of short, coarse hair combed from passing cattle. There was no other visible marker. The analyst must be tracking variations in the infrared ambience at a level more subtle than a standard-issue faceshield could differentiate.

  The scents might have alerted him: first wood smoke, a tingle at the back of Pauli’s nostrils. It would have made him sneeze if he hadn’t fought the urge. Then the cattle, warm bodies and warm manure with still as much the odor of vegetation as of waste.

  Pauli had almost reached the dark hovel itself before he smelled the corpse. Even that was remarkable. The weather hadn’t been exceptionally warm under the dark trees. The man lying at his own threshold must have been dead for most of a day to have ripened so far.

  Pauli paused, aiming his pistol at the door. Beckie stepped past him and knelt to raise the dead man’s torso. His upper chest was a mass of clotted blood through which insects already crawled. A dozen bullet holes pierced his cowhide jerkin.

  He’d been a young man. His beard and mustache were full but had been neatly trimmed. Pauli wondered what he’d used for a mirror. Maybe his wife had groomed him.

  Gerd raised his hand for attention and squatted, manipulating his sensor pack again. He projected a schematic of the hut’s interior based on data refined at close range. Images hung in front of the cowhide door so that the team’s attention was still directed toward the potential danger.

  The pink shape of a woman lay to the left of the doorway. The revisionist, head to the back of the hut, was on the right. He lay on his side. Both figures were on the floor; there were no beds. The image of the submachine gun near the revisionist’s hand throbbed twice, then became a white outline.

  The image of the infant in the crib beside the woman was crosshatched, like that of its dead father outside. The body was too small to have shown up before.

  Pauli pulled down his faceshield and nodded. He set the pistol on the ground beside him, then opened his mouth wide. He worked his jaws from side to side, loosening their tension. He smiled.

  Beckie gripped the door flap’s lower corner with her left hand. She bobbed the barrel of the pistol in her right hand once, twice, three times, and jerked backward. The cowhide tore away from its pegs as Pauli Weigand dived into the darkened hut.

  Istvan couldn’t have been sleeping well because he managed to lurch upright as Pauli hit him. The revisionist was ruthless but he hadn’t been a trained shooter. He didn’t reach for the Skorpion until the ARC Rider had flipped it across the hut with one hand while the other caught Istvan by the throat.

  Istvan gabbled as he choked. Pauli grabbed his flailing right hand. The Russian was trying to kick. His feet tangled in the cowhide bedding.

  The hut wasn’t big enough for a fight. Pauli slammed the ceiling’s lacework of branches with his armored shoulders. Dirt from the turf roof showered down. He backed toward the doorway, dragging his captive.

  Istvan went suddenly as limp as a puddle of water.

  “He’ll be out for ten minutes,” Beckie said, breathing heavily. “I gave him a white dose.”

  She dropped an empty injector cone back into her medical kit. The casing was a long-chain starch that would fall to dust within a month, but ARC Riders were trained to leave nothing in an operational horizon if they could possibly avoid it.<
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  “Good work,” Pauli gasped. He hadn’t noticed Beckie enter during the struggle. He backed through the doorway, pulling the revisionist behind him. “Get the gun, would you?”

  “And I’ll see to the woman,” Beckie said. In a deceptively cool tone she added, “I believe the baby choked in its own vomit. Probably while the mother was tied and gagged.”

  “He’s had a white dose, Gerd,” Pauli said. Outside the hut he realized how thick the fug within had been. “How are you feeling? Want me to handle the interrogation?”

  “Not at all,” the analyst said. He’d already taken cranial pickups and a cone of hypnotic from his kit. The drug would erase the subject’s volitional control for six hours without affecting his memory or the autonomie nervous system that kept him alive. “Have you considered what we’re going to do with him after we’ve gained the information we need?”

  “I’ve thought about it,” Pauli said curtly.

  A woman shrieked in wordless grief within the hut. Beckie came out ahead of the mother cradling the dead infant. When she saw her husband she threw herself across the body and cried even louder.

  “We’ll bury them in back,” Beckie said as her strong, capable hands lifted the woman. She sounded calm. The women walked behind the hut, the widow wailing against Beckie’s shoulder.

  “All right,” Pauli said. “I’ll bring the horses here. Better to have them close by.”

  He felt light-headed; the short walk to the horses would settle him. He looked for the stars when he reached the military road, but the sky was solidly overcast. Lightning made the gray mass glow and sometimes gave a cloud visible edges, but Pauli heard no thunder over the wind’s howl.

  He unlooped the reins from the young birch to which Beckie had tethered the horses. His own mount tried to nuzzle him through the empty feedbag. The ARC Rider pressed his forehead against the coarse, dry-smelling trunk of a huge fir tree.

  The dead baby made him sick to his stomach. He’d seen cruelty during his service with the Anti-Revision Command: cruel humans and cruel beasts; cruel fates. Most fates were cruel when viewed from a 26th-century vantage point.