The Fourth Rome Page 21

  Nan Roebeck had found Grainger’s unattended gearbag and set it ostentatiously on the tabletop. Terrific. He was really going to catch hell from Roebeck for this stunt.

  Grainger was still feeling sick enough that he didn’t argue when Etkin summoned one of the big beefy boys to escort him to Etkin’s car to wait for the others. He just grabbed his gearbag from the table without a word to Roebeck and left. Sitting there in the black Zil limousine, he watched as his team and their Russian dinner partners came out.

  Etkin and Orlov circled each other on the steps. Seeing them together that way was like watching a film of two clay-mation dinosaurs getting ready for a fight to the death. Body language never lied the way mouths did. Nan Roebeck’s body language was telling Grainger loud and clear that he was in big trouble for blowing off their evening meeting like this.

  He really had been sick. Although now, with an empty stomach, he was beginning to think he might live.

  Orlov waved good-bye and went to a government-issue Lada that had pulled up behind the Zil.

  Etkin and the women got in the limo. Etkin sat beside Grainger. The women took the rear-facing seats. The big car pulled away.

  He heard the others chatting about the schedule of events for the next day. His head still ached. The car sped through city streets without regard to traffic regulations.

  Nan asked him how he felt as the limo pulled up to the Métropole.

  “I’ll be okay.” His voice was hoarse. “Just need some sleep.”

  “For somebody with green skin and purple lips, you don’t look too bad. Maybe not trying to set the Moscow record for vodka drunk in one day by a foreign guest would be a good idea in future,” she advised icily. Etkin looked away, out the window at the brightly lit hotel entrance.

  When they got out of the limo, Etkin followed. He kissed Chun gallantly on both cheeks. “Tomorrow, then. Not so early, because of your friend. Say, ten o’clock, here. We will have preparations in order for your fruitful visit.”

  Chun promised Etkin that everybody would be shipshape. The KGB man shook hands with Roebeck and Grainger before he got back in his limo and it pulled away.

  Grainger went straight to the front desk in the hotel lobby to collect his room key. The night girl handed him the key and a small package in a glazed tan envelope. He took the package. It had only his name on it, no return address. He hadn’t been expecting anything. He’d open it in his room, where he could check to see it wasn’t a letter bomb. Something hard and flat, about the length of his index finger and twice as deep, was inside.

  Roebeck stepped in front of him as he turned and shoved him backward with a spread hand. “No. Don’t go upstairs. Not yet. Can you make it to the TC, mister shrinking violet?”

  “I guess,” he said. “It’s not like I’m gutshot or anything.” He hitched his gearbag up on his shoulder. She was the boss. He’d screwed up. It was going to be a rough haul for the next few hours.

  They couldn’t get into the TC through the Kremlin this late at night. They had to go down to the river and find the bolt-hole entrance. It took a lot out of him, but that was what Roe-beck had in mind. Once they’d scrambled down the bank and into the tunnel behind some brush, he began really feeling the strain. Climbing around through underground tunnels was a fitting climax to his day. At least he was now free to pull his field-issue membrane over his face, use his pharmakit, and generally get his blood chemistries together.

  By the time they’d reached the catacomb where they’d stashed the TC, they’d rubbed the worst of their rough edges smooth. The other ARC Riders had let him off the hook pretty easy. They were a team, after all, and no team benefits from dysfunctional members. But Roebeck ordered them to discuss no specifics en route, not about their recon, not even results of their fact-finding efforts.

  They had lots of data to exchange, lots of ground to cover, no time for regrets. The boss had something up her sleeve.

  Waiting for the TC to phase into view, Roebeck spoke through the com: “As soon as we get inside, Chun, get us out of here.”

  “Nan,” Grainger began. “I want to explain what I—”

  “No discussion of anything salient. I’m telling you, we can’t assume that there’s no technology here capable of monitoring or tracking us.” The boss was really tense. She reiterated her standing orders, despite the arguably secure environment instituted when each ARC Rider was wearing an ARC-issue multifunction command, control, and communications membrane.

  “Just come on back, TC,” he heard her mutter.

  She was counting the seconds aloud, waiting for TC 779 to reappear. It almost seemed as if she was worried it wouldn’t show up.

  But that couldn’t be.

  As the shimmer and shiver of air preceded the temporal capsule into being, Grainger could have sworn he heard Roebeck mutter, “Thank the stars.”

  Whatever she’d found, or thought she’d found, had really scared her. When she found out what Grainger had seen and learned, she was going to be even more scared.

  “In, in. Let’s go! Move,” Roebeck ordered, sprinting for the capsule as its hatch cracked open.

  Grainger was right behind her, running for the TC with Chun as if for salvation.

  As soon as they were buttoned-up in the TC, he remembered the package. Around him, the TC hummed comfortingly, all power and protection. Outside, in the immediate vicinity of TC 779’s outer hull, time was effectively stopped in its passage.

  Inside, Chun was tapping her wands furiously, mining Central’s download. The bow screen was quadranted. Three quarters of the wraparound view screen was filled with streaming data. One quarter displayed the time-locked catacombs around them.

  Roebeck was pecking out information requests as fast as she could. “Got to get some relevant data,” she said tersely. “Not this useless crap.”

  Grainger scanned the Russian envelope with his handheld. No explosives. Some composite. Some metal. Okay. He opened the package. It was from Zotov. There was no note, but a copy of Zotov’s visit card was taped to a small, flat box with wire tabs for closures.

  In the box were two chips, and a bit of metal in a clear housing too small to hold anything but nanotechnology.

  “What the hell is this?” Grainger wondered out loud.

  Roebeck said, “Let me see.”

  The team leader was silent too long after he handed her the box and she examined its contents. Roebeck turned the box cover and studied the card taped to it. “Zotov? Who’s Zotov?” she finally asked.

  “Obninsk scientist. When you’re ready, maybe I’d better give you a whole after-action report, not bits and pieces.”

  “We don’t have time for after-action reports. What we need is a hot wash.”

  You did a hot wash every time the work you’d done in the field went wrong.

  “How come?” he asked.

  “Because I know what this stuff of Zotov’s is. It’s an implant. Up The Line technology modified for Russian production,” Roebeck said tightly. “Except I saw implants like this with Orlov, through the Foreign Ministry. It’s supposed to be the work of Academican Nikolai Neat.”

  “A Russian invention? Nanotech?” Chun scoffed. “Everything Russians do is twice the size it needs to be, even for this time horizon. Etkin says—”

  Roebeck shook her head despairingly. “I know what I saw. Let’s leave the issue of how they did it, for the moment. Concentrate on what they can do. The implants are put into living tissue in order to transport mammals certainly, people by implication, through time without needing temporal capsules. But you have to do the implanting when the animal, or person, is young. Give the biological system time to accept the implant. Get it? Then all you need is a handheld, and they’ve got that, too.”

  Chun objected, “Just a handheld? That’s impossible. What’s the power source?”

  Grainger said softly, “Implants weren’t any part of what Zotov showed me in Obninsk.” Then he stopped. Maybe Zotov had shown him pieces of a puzzle. Ma
ybe these were more pieces. Puzzles were very Russian. On the tape that Grainger had seen, three young people were being abducted by the occupants of a TC from Up The Line. “On the other hand, maybe it’s all connected.”

  “What’s connected?” Chun wanted to know.

  Neither Roebeck nor Grainger answered Chun’s question.

  They were looking at each other.

  Maybe Zotov had been trying to warn him. Zotov leaving hardware at Grainger’s hotel like that was a clear signal that the Obninski academician believed he had to transmit this information through unofficial channels, or not at all.

  Roebeck said, “Chun, we’re out of here. Back to base. Forget the static download. Central obviously didn’t anticipate the kind of data we’re going to need now. I want the highest- level meeting you can get me as soon as we reach Central. Tell them we’ve run into proliferating Up The Line technology from beyond the 26th. Tell them we need better data, and we need it now. Whether or not we get any utiliz-able support from the ARC, I want to be out of Central and back in Moscow within six hours elapsed time from … now.”

  For a moment, Nan Roebeck’s team literally stopped breathing.

  What was the team leader saying?

  Then Chun said, “Yes, sir,” and her wands flew so fast they blurred.

  Grainger was stunned at first. Then he understood. Roe-beck didn’t want to spend enough real time at Central to get bogged down in red tape. Or to get pulled off the mission entirely.

  “Before the wheels start coming off Central’s cover story for this mission, I want to be back in Moscow, March 11, 1992. Nine hundred hours sharp. Same coordinates.”

  Chun said, “Nan?”

  “Do it, Chun. You’ll understand after we’ve been through the hot wash. Get off this horizon. Hold us out of phase until we’re up to speed internally. Take all the TC’s running log systems off-line while we’re talking, as well. Backtrack them ten elapsed minutes from my hack.” She paused. She hacked the time. Then she added softly, “Ain’t no telling just how nasty this mission’s going to get.”

  “God, you two. You’re scaring me,” Chun said. Her wands had fallen silent. The TC under them was responding to commands that phased it out of space-time and held it in limbo.

  Grainger’s sore stomach threatened to buck as Chun stabilized TC 779 out of phase. Here he was again, cosmic hash with delusions of personality.

  He stretched his arms above his head, cracking his intertwined fingers’joints. “Come on, Chun, don’t be scared.” His arm still hurt where serum made a lump under his skin. “Same war, different day, is all.”

  But he didn’t believe his own pep talk. Not this time. Not with Central ahead and Russia acting as a staging area for some breakaway faction Up The Line.

  If the other two ARC Riders were scared now, wait until they heard what Grainger had to tell them. When all else was said and done, you still had the nearly insolvable problem of a radioactive, wrecked TC from Up The Line, sitting big as life in a subbasement in Obninsk.

  Fourteen Kilometers West of the Rhine River, Free Germany

  September 2, 9 AD

  Gerd sat cross-legged on a ledge of shale and manipulated his sensor pack at its full sensitivity. “There’s a group of people, ten or a dozen, approximately a klick ahead of us,” he said without looking up. “I believe they’re refugees from the battle.”

  Pauli Weigand held a handful of grain to his horse in one hand while with the other he lifted one shoulder strap, then the other, of his mail coat. The weight of the steel links ground his collarbone despite the leather underlayer.

  He wasn’t about to take the armor off. His ribs ached where the revisionist’s bullets had punched him, and he remembered vividly the sight of the merchant tripping on coils of his own guts. Pauli’s teammates weren’t strong enough to wear mail during this grueling trek. He was, and he wanted to have it on when he stepped between his friends and danger.

  Beckie grinned wanly at him. Nearby her horse and the mule they’d caught for Gerd browsed young leaves from shrubs on the knoll. The beasts were drop-reined. They were too tired to bolt.

  “I shouldn’t have dismounted,” Beckie said. “My legs’re so stiff that I’m not sure I’ll be able to get back up unless you lift me.”

  Pauli shurgged. “So I lift you,” he said. “We’ll reach the river in a few hours.”

  “I rode from Memphis to Las Vegas on the back of my husband’s Harley once,” she said, bending backward as she massaged her thighs. “God, I was stupid when I was young.”

  Pauli didn’t know if she meant about the motorcycle trip or about the husband. Maybe both, given some of the other things she’d said about the marriage.

  “There’s a German warband following us,” Gerd said. “I can’t be sure of numbers because they’re six kilometers distant”—in the face of present danger he no longer played with jargon—“but there are probably more than a hundred. There are fifty or more horses with the band, though a percentage are certain to be remounts.”

  Pauli rubbed his face with his knuckles. It hadn’t rained in almost a day but the sun was staying out of sight. Astronomical sundown wasn’t for three hours, but it was already dark enough for twilight.

  “Chasing us or also going toward the Rhine?” Pauli asked. He’d made the decision to ride directly to the rivjr rather than head for Varus’ summer camp even though the road east from there would make the rest of the journey much easier. He’d crossed his fingers that Gerd’s sensors and database would prevent the team from riding into a bog or being blocked by a swollen stream.

  “I can’t tell unless we turn to the side and they follow us,” the analyst said. “I believe there are larger numbers of Germans at a greater distance, moving in this direction. The amount of refined steel is consistent with thousands of men in armor. I doubt that many legionaries escaped the ambush with their equipment.”

  “I doubt it, too,” Pauli said. His mistake in judgment was a cold mass in his stomach. He hadn’t expected the Germans to move so quickly after slaughtering the Roman field army. “Barbarian” wasn’t the equivalent of “stupid,” at least not if you were talking about Arminius.

  “All right,” he said. “We’ll ride and hope for the best.”

  He wiped his left palm on his thigh. “Gerd, Beckie,” he said. “Do you need help mounting?”

  “I’m all right,” she said, smiling faintly.

  “If we ride through the group of refugees,” Gerd said as he rose to his feet with the stiff articulations of a scarecrow, “they’ll occupy the Germans while we reach the Rhine. Getting across will still be a problem. Though we can—”

  He pursed his lips.

  “—cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  “Yes,” said Pauli Weigand. “Sacrifice the refugees to save our mission.”

  The cold weight almost choked him. He was the wrong man for the job. He couldn’t be trusted to make decisions. “All right, that’s what we’ll do.”

  He waited for Gerd to grab the mule’s saddle, then boosted him aboard.

  Though Pauli Weigand knew he was the wrong man for the job, he’d keep on going till he died in the midst of his mission’s crashing failure.

  Twelve Kilometers West of the Rhine River, Free Germany

  September 2, 9 AD

  Rebecca Carnes was in the lead because Pauli insisted on riding at the back, the direction the Germans would be coming from. She saw the refugees fifty yards ahead when she came through a patch of bracken growing tall from the well-watered soil.

  “We’ve found them,” she called over her shoulder. Her heels prodded the horse to a slight increase in speed, all she thought either of them could survive. Days of the horse’s rocking motion made the muscles at the small of her back so stiff she was afraid they’d crack.

  There were ten of them, all on foot except the pregnant girl riding a very expensive bay horse. The refugee!, were so exhausted that it was the horse who noticed the approaching riders a
nd whinnied. Gerd’s mule blatted an ill-tempered response. Only then did the humans turn.

  Three of the six legionaries had javelins. The others and two civilians drew swords, while the third male civilian lowered a twelve-foot German lance. They might have captured the horse as well from a German noble in the vicious fighting.

  The girl was dark, fifteen, and eight months pregnant if Rebecca was any judge. How she rode bareback was as much a wonder as how the refugees had come so far from the scene of the massacre.

  “Castor and Pollux!” a legionary cried hoarsely. “It’s Gaius Clovis and his household! Well, you’ve got a report for Augustus now, don’t you!”

  “Flaccus?” Rebecca said. It hadn’t occurred to her that the refugees might include somebody she knew. The sight of the legionary’s face beaming beneath a freshly dented helmet made her heart sink.

  “It’s all right, boys,” Flaccus said to his fellows. Rebecca didn’t recognize any of them. “Clovis here’s one of the emperor’s horse guards. Glad to see you, Clovis. We thought you were another batch of Fritzes wanting to nail our heads to trees!”

  Pauli rode up beside Rebecca. He looked at the refugees with hard eyes. A bandaged thigh kept one of the legionaries from walking without the help of his fellows. He stood with his legs braced, trying to fit his short sword back into the scabbard without falling over.

  Half the others had wounds; all were on the tottering edge of collapse from hunger and exhaustion. They’d thrown away their shields, though the legionaries wore full body armor and the civilians had picked up helmets. They must have been marching with only the briefest halts for sleep. They knew what to expect if the Germans caught them before they reached the Rhine.

  “There’s a German warband close behind,” Pauli said ex-pressionlessly. “They’ll be up with us in an hour.”

  He glanced back at Gerd and raised his eyebrow. The analyst nodded. “Sooner,” he said. Under his breath he added, “Although a Roman hour considered as one twelfth of daylight is a flexible concept to begin with.”