The Fourth Rome Read online

  “They didn’t run,” she said. “We pushed them away. They can’t exist where we do.”

  “Right,” said Nan Roebeck without particular emphasis. “I’m going to displace us out of phase to the revisionists’ predicted location.”

  “I’ve set those parameters,” Quo said tightly.

  “So have I,” Nan replied as her fingers moved on the controls. “So have I, Quo, but I’m going to take us in manually.”

  Rebecca felt the capsule’s floor grow vaguely unstable. The display blurred as if they were driving through the trees and occasionally the ground itself. Because the vehicle was again outside the sidereal universe, there could be no actual contact.

  “Rebecca’s suggestion would explain the anomaly,” Gerd said. “I don’t believe that Central was completely in error.”

  “Right or wrong,” Tim Grainger said, “how do we nail them if we can’t get into the same time horizon? They’re going to land somewhere. The chances are they’ll do just as much harm in the year 10 as they would 9.”

  The viewpoint feeding the display swept forward. Nan had programmed TC 779 to arrive at an uninhabited spot so that they could check calibration without risk of being seen. The capsule was supposed to be out of phase, but no machine is perfect. Now they were moving to the place where Central believed the revisionists had entered this time horizon.

  “I can take a team forward in suits,” said Pauli Weigand without turning. “We can store them out of phase and go after the revisionists with minimal equipment.”

  “First,” said Nan from the controls, “we gather information so long as we’re here. We learn where here is.”

  The terrain was wooded, rolling, and initially without any sign of human habitation. The capsule came out of the woods onto a road built up slightly from the ground and paved with split logs laid flat side up. The forest had been cleared for a hundred feet to either side of the roadway.

  Three wagons, each drawn by a pair of mules, and a dozen soldiers under an officer on horseback proceeded east on the road. The troops wore mail shirts and carried spears, but their helmets were slung from their right shoulders. Any other baggage must be in the wagons. They were headed toward the walled encampment in the near distance.

  “This is where the revisionists appeared,” Nan said softly. “Should have appeared. And there’s where they were going unless I miss my bet.”

  The capsule surged ahead under her direction. “Aliso,” Gerd said with satisfaction. “Varus’ summer camp on the Lippe River. Three days before he decided to change base to the mouth of the Weser to bring the benefits of Roman justice to the barbarians there …”

  Nan adjusted the controls, lifting the capsule’s viewpoint a hundred feet in the air. Moments later she brought them to a hovering halt above the fortress.

  “But that’s huge,” said Chun Quo. “That’s a city.”

  “It’s like going back to Fort Bragg,” Rebecca said, staring at the camp. “How many troops are here?”

  The rectangular camp stretched over a mile along the river and nearly half a mile back from the bank. A turf rampart with wooden battlements bounded the exterior. Outside the wall was a V-sided ditch set at the bottom with sharp stakes. Within were hundreds of neat timber buildings, roofed with thatch or—in the case of a few of the larger courtyard houses—baked tile.

  “Three legions plus auxiliary units from conquered peopies, armed and equipped in Roman fashion,” Gerd said. The team’s mission was with revisionists, not Romans; the Riders didn’t have to know much about the local situation. But Gerd of course did.

  “Thirty thousand men,” Pauli said, showing that he’d gone beyond the required brief, too. “If they were all present.”

  “And their servants,” Gerd agreed. “Varus has sent nearly half his force out in small units on policing duties as if Germany were already conquered, but the housing has to be available for them anyway. The buildings outside the walls are the civilian settlement.”

  “That’s as big as the camp,” Tim said; an exaggeration, but only a slight one.

  “Coke girls and hooch maids,” Rebecca said with a grim smile. “There’s never been an army base without a strip outside it. That’d be like an army without mud.”

  “Wives and taverns and laundries,” Gerd said. “Remember, this is a long-service army. It’s all the home these men have for twenty years or even longer. When they move their base, they move their whole lives with it.”

  “Merchants here to trade with the army,” said Tim Grainger. “More merchants to trade with the local population because the army’s here to protect them. Rich locals come to buy all the civilized goodies their own people can’t make. Poor locals come to work for the outsiders. Come to sell their sisters or themselves because they’re poor and they don’t have anything else to sell.”

  Tim continued to face the hatch, watching the scene on the display within the opaque helmet of his displacement suit. His voice rasped. He was seeing the enclave in which he grew up and which he almost died defending from an underclass just as dangerous as the Free Germans surrounding this bastion of armed civilization.

  Rebecca wanted to reach out and touch Tim’s arm, but it was encased in armor. He wouldn’t have noticed; and anyway, Tim’s Sunrise Towers hadn’t been the last time mankind repeated mistakes of the past.

  “That will be the governor’s palace,” Gerd said. Rebecca didn’t see his fingers move, but a red circle haloed a large courtyard building in the center of the camp. “Next to it is the army headquarters”—a similar complex of structures—“and the housing for the governor’s personal staff.”

  “What’s the high building right in the middle?” Pauli asked. “A citadel?”

  “It’s an ornamental gateway built where the camp’s two central roads cross,” Gerd said. “Brick and stucco rather than stone, I suspect, but still impressive from a distance.”

  The square tower expanded to fill half the main display. Each side had an archway twenty feet high flanked by a pair of smaller openings like the entrance to a cathedral. Two higher bands of statues and pillared windows gave the impression of upper floors, but in fact the structure was a hollow shell.

  “But what does it do?” Rebecca asked. “Is it just there to impress the locals?”

  Gerd smiled at her. “That isn’t ‘just,’ Rebecca,” he said. “It was the only thing that Varus was interested in doing—convincing the Germans that they were already conquered, rather than expending the effort to conquer them.”

  His grin grew broader. “Winning hearts and minds,” he said.

  Rebecca felt her guts tighten. The analyst loved to use idioms from ages not his own. He always used them correctly, but he couldn’t possibly understand the horror that particular phrase awoke in someone who remembered it on the lips of liars in uniform.

  “ ‘Get them by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow,’ “ she quoted. “But that didn’t work either, Gerd. Nothing worked. Nothing.”

  “We work, Beckie,” Nan Roebeck said, looking back with enough hard-edged concern to snap Rebecca out of memories of a world from which she’d escaped. “Pauli, you’re team leader for the 9 AD locus.”

  “I’ve been planning cover stories,” Gerd said, “since we’ll have to operate in the local ambience if we separate from the capsule.”

  He cleared his throat with a tiny cough. “For the same reason I’ll have to be present. This—”

  He patted his sensor pack.

  “—isn’t as broad-ranging as the capsule’s capabilities, but in my hands it should be sufficient.”

  “I’ll go,” Rebecca said. “One member of the team should be a woman.”

  “You’re in training,” said Chun. “I’ll go.”

  “Quo, you’re Oriental,” Rebecca said. “You’d stand out like a sore thumb.”

  Also you might not be able to pull a trigger fast enough when the situation demanded it. Beckie Carnes knew she wasn’t the best choice for that abi
lity either, but at least her conditioning was five centuries less intense.

  Nan looked at her with a cold glare, then a smile. “Right, you’ll do,” she said. “The rest of us will deal with Moscow and pick you up on the other side. Will a week be enough time?”

  “I would suggest a minimum of three weeks,” Gerd said. “We’ll be limited to local transport. Now, as background for the three of us…”

  Aliso, Free Germany

  August 23, 9 AD

  Pauli Weigand liked horses and his job had given him plenty of opportunity to use the riding skills that were part of ARC training. Right now, though, as he rode toward the fort he was glad that he was unlikely to need to move faster than his mount’s comfortable walk. The horse he’d bought the previous evening had a decent enough canter, but its trot was a stiff-legged wracking pace that Pauli would never be able to manage without stirrups.

  The ten men guarding the gate at ground level were relaxed without being blasé. One of them picked up the pair of lead-weighted javelins he’d leaned against the wall beside him, though there was nothing threatening in his posture. The gateway was divided into eight-foot halves by a log wall down the middle. The heavy timber panel across the left side remained closed.

  The noncom in charge was younger than most of the legionaries. He’d probably gotten his rank for being fully literate. His face showed no expression as he eyed Pauli, Gerd leading the pack mule, and Beckie walking between the two men.

  The animals’ shod hooves clopped on the wooden road. Two artillerymen watched from the platform above the rampart over the gate.

  “There are six with the catapult on the upper deck,” said Gerd in the English-based Standard language. “They’re arguing over a dice throw.”

  The analyst spoke in a muted voice, as though he were talking to himself. The teams’ headbands were communications devices set at the moment for continuous operation. When the band’s faceshield was pulled down, it also provided the user with thermal viewing, light intensification, and air filtration.

  “Guys, they don’t think the three of us are much threat to their camp,” Beckie said.

  She sounded calm, not that Pauli had really been concerned about her performance. Beckie knew her guise as a female slave in this milieu had significant risks, but she’d accepted Gerd’s plan without comment. Of course, she might correctly believe that the risks were no greater than they’d been when she served in the army of her own time horizon.

  Pauli drew up two strides short of the gate. “Courier from Rome,” he growled. His Latin, though perfectly grammatical, had a distinct North German clip to it.

  He snapped the fingers of his right hand. The horse whickered softly as Beckie ran forward with the orders. The non-com stepped forward to take the tablet from her. He undid the twine and slanted the boards so that light shadowed the writing on the waxed inner surfaces.

  “You’re a Batavian, then?” one of the older legionaries said to Pauli.

  “That’s right,” he replied, neither hostile nor friendly. “One of Augustus Caesar’s horse guard, here on Augustus Caesar’s business.”

  “These look to be in order,” the noncom said as he handed the documents back. He looked sharply at Pauli and said, “Gaius Julius Clovis, do you want to bathe and change clothes before you attend the governor?”

  “I do not,” Pauli said. “My comfort can wait until I’ve delivered my commission from the emperor.”

  The noncom grinned. “I think you’ll find Governor Varus considers it more to his comfort that he not have to deal with anybody travel-stained,” he said, “and a soldier besides. But I daresay he’ll make an exception in your case.”

  He looked at his men. “Flaccus,” he said to the man holding the javelins, “take Gaius Qovis to the forum and see that the bailiffs inform the governor of his arrival. Crispus, you take the gentleman’s servants to headquarters. When they’re assigned billets, you go to the forum and guide Gaius Clovis to them after he’s finished his business with the governor.”

  “Forum?” Pauli said.

  “The governor is a great one for the law’s civilizing effect,” the noncom said dryly. “He’s so convinced of that that he’s spent most of this campaigning season holding court and settling disputes between our benighted German subjects … at a nice profit to himself.”

  “He might think about first making sure the Fritzes were our subjects,” Flaccus said. “In the course of which there might be some profit for a poor legionary, too, you know.”

  “Put a spear up the backside of enough of them,” another soldier agreed, “the rest get subject real quick—for a while. Thing is, you got to keep applying the treatment to make sure it’s taken.”

  Pauli laughed. The legionaries knew—thought—he was a Free German himself. They clearly assumed that as a fellow soldier he would understand and sympathize with their complaints about a civilian commander who didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.

  “I don’t know anything about that,” he said. “I’m like you. I just carry out my orders.”

  Pauli dismounted, careful not to fall and make the troops wonder at his clumsiness. He was riding with just a blanket rather than a saddle. The facilities in TC 779 could have produced a four-homed military saddle along with the other articles of clothing and equipment. Bareback was the more likely riding style for a Free German even in Roman service, and Pauli had enough experience with the technique that he thought he was safer than if he used an unusual saddle for the first time.

  He handed Gerd the reins. “See that she’s properly stabled and fed on the imperial account,” he ordered. “I don’t want her being fobbed off with the baggage mules’ chaff and moldy hay.”

  “Master,” Gerd said, bowing without a trace of sarcasm. Part of the mission prep had been hypnotically implanted languages. Gerd spoke upper-class Latin and Greek—as well as several dialects of German that he didn’t expect to use. The microprocessor in each headband could translate virtually any language the team might encounter, but that wouldn’t permit the team members to reply to the speaker.

  Pauli checked the flat document safe on the left side of his belt where it counterbalanced the weight of his long cavalry sword. “All right,” he said to Flaccus. “Let’s go see the governor.”

  He strode through the long gateway with the swaggering arrogance of a man in the emperor’s personal service. Augustus used foreigners, mainly Germans, for his bodyguard. He knew they’d be loyal because if something happened to the emperor, the guards were friendless in a hostile city. Augustus’ adopted father, Julius Caesar, had dismissed his foreign guards when he returned to Rome in 44 BC since he didn’t think he needed barbarians to protect him from his fellow citizens.

  Caesar’s confidence in Roman loyalty was an error that none of his successors repeated; and it was clear to all that a man who guarded the emperor’s life was a man whom only the emperor could discipline.

  “So,” Pauli said to his guide as they walked down the log street. “How does the governor get along with Germans, then?”

  “Oh, he’s close as this with some of them,” Flaccus said sourly. He held up his middle and index fingers twined. “Sigimer and Arminius, now, I shouldn’t wonder if they were asshole buddies to our noble Varus.”

  The Roman was walking at a military pace but quick-stepping to keep abreast of the much taller man. He looked up at Pauli. “Arminius was a horse guard, too,” he said. “Guess you probably knew him. Maybe you’re even related?”

  Pauli snorted. “Hermann, that’s Arminius if you want to make a Roman of him, wasn’t a real guard,” he said. “He’s a prince, you see. Tiberius brought him back to keep around Rome for a few years. If you called him a hostage you wouldn’t be far wrong. I’m no fucking prince.”

  He spat into a rat wagon wheels had worn in the roadway. The logs would have to be replaced soon. “Besides,” he added, “I’m an Ubian and Hermann’s Cheruscan. A bunch of cowboys wandering around with the seat out
of their britches, that what the Cherusci are.”

  “Well, he’s good enough to have dinner every day with our noble governor,” Flaccus said. “Varus doesn’t know the name of a Roman citizen in this camp below the rank of tribune. It wasn’t like this under Tiberius, you can bet your life.”

  The combined headquarters of the three legions was in line with the gate on the camp’s main north-south street. Flaccus had turned left instead and was leading Pauli past officers’ housing to an open area near the west rampart. About a hundred people were present, most of them standing. A file of ten soldiers guarded a dais under a purple awning. Everyone else was either German or wore a toga, the uncomfortable formal garment whose use was limited to Roman citizens only.

  “Hell of a thing to see in the middle of Fritz country, isn’t it?” Flaccus said, voicing Pauli’s thought.

  It was one thing to know that Varus took a disastrously civilian view of administering a region that hadn’t been fully conquered, much less pacified. It was another thing to see the governor holding court just as he would have done if he’d been assigned to the administration of Athens or Marseilles.

  A thought made Pauli stumble. “We’re going to have to repave these streets pretty quick,” Flaccus said apologetically. “This time Varus is going to want stone, and tell me that’s not going to be a bitch on soil this weak.”

  You’re not going to have to repave the camp, Pauli thought. In a few days you ’re all going to be dead.

  An ARC Rider knew that everyone on the horizons he visited would die before he was born, but he didn’t often look around himself and realize that tens of thousands of people in his immediate vicinity would die almost at once. There’d been a team in Nagasaki on August 8, 1945. Pauli had heard that two members had retired shortly after they returned to ARC Central.