The Centurion's Empire (27 page)

"The Luministe guards are already watching the lines going west," Lucel said in Latin, "but we're taking a line east."

"Lines?"

" 'Lines of Magnetic Levitation to the East' is the best translation that I can manage. Magnetic means ... oh never mind,
they're sort of roads."

"Roads? What is this place?"

"Think of it as a port for now."

"Roads from a port? I don't understand. What city is this?"

"When you were born it was Lutetia, founded by the Parisii tribe and then taken over by Rome. It is now called Paris."

"Paris ... I passed within sight of Paris in the late spring. * It was nothing like this."
Lucel strode on for a moment, but a puzzled expression showed through the amazingly flexible skin of her mask.

"What was it like when you last saw it?" she asked.

"Much smaller, and there were fewer people about. The Black Death and the wars with England had killed many."

"What year was that?"

"The Christian year of 1358. Nothing is as it was then. I must have slept five or six thousand years for changes like this
to have happened."

Lucel shook her head as she produced what she called passport cards from her shoulder bag. She talked to a woman
behind a counter, then told Vitellan to look into a distorting mirror for a moment. The woman waved them on, and Lucel
led him down what seemed to be long piers.

Vitellan kept reminding himself that this was a port. He tried not to gaze at anything for too long, everything was meant
to be commonplace to him. They entered a part of a pier that was almost deserted, and hurried along to an opening in a
long, gleaming white and blue building with that same word est painted on its side. They entered a door with curved
corners, and Lucel hurried her charge along a narrow corridor with a glowing roof and square windows. She guided him
through yet another door, and it slid shut behind them with a soft hiss.

The room was small, but opulently fitted with cushioned seats of something like green kid leather, and there were
polished metal fittings that Vitellan did not recognize. A middle-aged man sat waiting inside. As Lucel flopped onto a
seat, Vitellan realized that a lamp-studded landscape of amazingly regular and uniform buildings was moving past
beyond the window. Each building blazed with light, the very sky was swamped by the light and the stars were not visible.

"Cutting it fine, Lucel."

"We're here and we're breathing. That's all that matters." "The cabin's secure."

"Well, so the fuck it ought to be. Now get a webcap onto Vitellan here. He's coped with this century pretty well so far, but
he'll need an imprint suite if he's going to get much further without drawing attention."
She turned to the Roman and spoke in Latin.

"Vitellan, this man is George Norton."

"I am grateful for your help," Vitellan said, dragging his eyes away from the lights beyond the window.

"How are you finding all this?" Norton asked in passable Latin, his face all neutral speculation. "You were last awake
during the Hundred Years War, I believe. Have you had any imprints yet?"

"Imprints?"

"Memories added to your mind to help you learn a skill or language."

"Memories of a language? I don't understand."

Lucel sighed. "It's like sex, you can't really understand it until you've experienced it." She turned back to Norton.

"He was pretty bewildered when I took him through the fighting."

She ran her finger along a strip below the window and it clouded into a bright milky white. As she drew her gloves off
Vitellan saw that the thumb and two fingers of her left hand were bloody pulp where the nails should have been.

"Just talk, I need to disarm," she said.

Norton and Vitellan remained silent as Lucel pressed her right thumb from the sides. The scarlet nail fell off onto an
open handkerchief. "That's the heavy one," she said with relief. She repeated the process with each of the nails on her
fingers.

"Those things are like little catapults, Vitellan," Norton explained.

"More like tiny bombards, or even hand-gonnes," observed Vitellan.

"Gonnes—guns! So, you know guns."

"That's right," said Lucel. "The first gunpowder weapons were being used by 1358. Vitellan, these false nails of mine
can't be detected by, ah, the guards and their machines, but it hurts to shoot them, as you can see."
Norton took something from a leather bag. "Peppare Gas Action TR," he said as he tossed the weapon onto the seat
beside Lucel. "It won't hurt so much to use it."

Lucel went on cleaning and dressing her injured fingers. Vitellan reached over to the gun.

"Leave it," snapped Norton, already pointing another snubnose gun at his head. Vitellan turned and stared at what to
him was an incongruously small weapon. Lucel stretched out her leg and flicked the tip of her toe into Norton's wrist.
The gun fell as he yelped with pain.

"It's paralysed," he gasped, convulsively rubbing his right hand.

"Pinched nerve. Give it a few minutes, you'll be fine." Norton glared at her. "He went for your gun." "His move was just
curiosity.
You
acted like the dangerous amateur that you are." "But—"

"Pick it up, Vitellan. It can't shoot unless a safety catch is released."

The Roman turned the gun over in his hands. Norton massaged his wrist. "Get the webcap ready for him," Lucel
ordered. "I can hardly use my hand."

"Well try! All this strange tech must be driving him crazy."

Norton began to unpack luridly colored cables and slick black boxes with rounded edges from his bag.

"A history lesson may help," Lucel said as she stretched a skin-simulation dressing over her thumb. "This is Anno
Domini 2028, Vitellan. It's not even seven centuries since you were last frozen."

"But the changes—"

"Yes, I know. A couple of hundred years after you were last awake the world started to change more rapidly than anyone
could have imagined. At first people concentrated on getting back to the level of your Roman Empire and the earlier
Greek states, then it went way, way further. The most incredible machines and sciences were developed."

"Like this thing we are on? It's like a wagon*the size of a ship that moves like lightning."

"That's a good description, amazing for someone straight out of the fourteenth century. You're very adaptable, you
know. I thought you might see all of this as magic and miracles."

"At first I was tempted to think that," Vitellan admitted, then he raised a hand to his temple as if he had just
remembered something important. "Has Rome—that is, does Constantinople still stand?"

"Constantinople?" echoed Norton.

"The Byzantine Empire's capital," explained Lucel. "In a way it continued Roman rule after Rome itself fell. I'm sorry,
Vitellan, it fell to the cannons of an Islamic army in 1453."

Vitellan shook his head and took fast, deep breaths to stifle the emotions welling up in him. Rome's continuity had
finally been snuffed out 95 years into his future of yesterday, and 575 years back in his past of today. For him the tragedy
was real and sharp, yet it seemed such a foolish thing to grieve about.

"Where are we going?" he asked to distract himself.

"A city called Moscow. After that, we are booked for Japan."

"Moscow. Ah yes, a long way to the northeast. Is it still threatened by the Tartars and Mongols?"

"Not for a long time. We'll be there in a few hours."

"Hours! I was told that the journey takes months. What principle moves this land-ship?"

"Ah, that's a tricky one. It's the principle that makes lode-stone align itself to the north."

"Lodestone?" wondered Vitellan wearily. "How will I ever comprehend all this? It will take as many years as I have left
to live."

"Not years, only days," Norton said, flexing his fingers. "Our people will, ah, change your brain so that you can
understand everything that's going on. We'll start as soon as you're asleep."

"I doubt that I could sleep for many hours."

"No problem," said Norton, touching a tube to his neck. There was a sjiarp hiss, then Vitellan slumped limp in his seat.
Vitellan slept as the maglev train continued its ice-smooth dash northeast. Norton spread a black webcap wide with
splayed fingers and fitted it over the Roman's head. The webcap was linked to an ALD tutor. He patched the leads from
the language module to interface a larger metal box with gray plastic casing. After taping the edges of the webcap to
Vitellan's skin he methodically pushed several dozen elec-trostaples into his scalp. He plugged the cable from the
webcap into the gray box and checked the readings that flashed up on a small inset screen. Five staples needed
reattaching, then the screen returned an array of options in green lettering. He keyed
English for Tourists, Moscow

Stopover,
and a customized option named
Modern Streetwise,
all from Microsoft.

"That's it, Lucel, by Moscow he'll have enough savvy to pass immigration," said Norton.
Lucel broke the seal on a plastic pack. "He'll need to profile as an English tourist: face, eyes, and fingerprints. He also
needs the implants scrubbed out of his body as well if we're to get to Moscow at all."

"That's a go, I'm ready."

Norton used a hypodermic syringe to inject nano-homers to search Vitellan's body for the pulse-damaged implants and
any others that had survived. It would take half an hour for the homers to report. He now held Vitellan's eyes open while
Lucel swabbed them with a preparator before bonding on holographic retinal mask overlays. His facial mask peeled off
like something out of a surrealist nightmare, and Lucel stuffed it into a jar of solvent where it slowly dissolved while she
unfolded a new mask.

Norton's nano-homers began to report on the implants to which they had bonded. Nine electronic implants had been
disabled by the EMP coil back in Paris, but another fourteen of the bio-mech type were detected by the homers while
Vitellan's new face and fingerprints were being attached. Getting them out would be slow work. Twenty-three injections
with a wide-bore needle and micro-grapple would take another two hours. Each implant extracted went into a woven
monomolecular matrix case, and they varied in size from coffee bean to pinhead.

Lucel began with the fourteen bio-mechs first, as they were still active. While dropping number eleven into the case
Lucel noted that two and five had dissolved and were now just a murky color in the solution.

"Probably just something to slow him down," Norton speculated. Lucel shrugged and began probing for number twelve,
which was deep inside the left ear.

"Tricky, tricky," she muttered as she worked.

"We should be doing scans on each of the implants," Norton said as he held up the case and examined the extracted
implants and their mock-hair antennas.

"Then you do it. Away from here."

The case jumped from his hands with a dull thud and fell to the floor of the compartment. Norton backed into a corner as
Lucel checked a display.

"Implant ten has exploded," Lucel said as she looked down at the case.

She turned back to Vitellan. Norton remained huddled in a corner.

"The chemicals from two and five would have stopped the catalytic timer on the explosive in ten," he said in a thin,
detached voice. "We'd isolated it, so pow! How did you know to take it out before these last three?"

"Sheer luck."

"Fucking hell!" he exclaimed, his face looking like wet chalk. "Uncontained it would have killed all three of us."
Barely breathing, Norton stared at the woven filament case on the floor. One internal cell was blackened from
containing the blast.

"Get it together, Norton, I need help. The other implants could activate at any time."
Number twelve came free just as the monitor reported that thirteen and fourteen were giving off a slight amount of heat.

"Beacons," said Norton. "Now that implant ten has exploded the Luministes want to track down what's left of the body."

"How long before they activate?"

"Two minutes if they're the old fullerine interlock model, fifty seconds if they're the new Hoichi line."

"Should I cut the antenna hairs?"

"That may trigger an explosion, or a toxin release."

"Then I need two minutes each," she said as she inserted the needle again. "Why do they take so long to switch on?

Anyway, why didn't the EMP fry them back in Paris?"

"When dormant they're only nonconductive organic goo and a catalytic timer. They're designed to survive an EMP, then
generate organic conductors for their electronics later."

"Damn, then they're going to go off. Fourteen will transmit for at least three minutes before I can pull it. We're in for
another fight without any backup—"

"Who's dropped the ball now, Lucel? Just stand back a moment." He held up an EMP generator and looked at .his watch.

"Forty-seven, forty-eight..."

As he fired the generator over each of two crosses on Vitellan's skin, there was a faint crackling sound. Lucel glanced at
the display readings.