The Fourth Rome (21 page)

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.”

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 glass 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.

“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.

The revisionist hadn’t been cruel. He simply hadn’t cared. A choking baby wasn’t a reason to get out of bed.

Pauli drove the horses ahead of him down the narrow track. The cow had finally stopped bawling. One of the women must have
milked some of the pressure out of the swollen udder. The corpse no longer lay beside the door.

Gerd had begun questioning their captive. In better light the pickups would have looked like brass beads; now they were vagrant
gleams on Istvan’s scalp. The drugged revisionist couldn’t speak, but the pickups transmitted his mind’s unshielded responses
to the sensor pack where an AI converted them. The analyst listened to the processed data through an earpiece.

Pauli tethered the horses again. His pistol wasn’t on the ground. Beckie must have picked up the weapon he’d forgotten. Leaving
the analyst to his business, he walked around the hut.

The German woman was digging with a pointed stick in the small clearing. The corpses lay nearby. The corral’s walls were branches
woven around vertical posts every few feet. There were six cows within.

Beckie straightened into view behind the fence, holding a bucket made of bark bound with willow splits. “Have some?” she offered.

“Thanks,” Pauli said as he took the bucket. The milk was still at body temperature. The cow’s diet gave the drink a musky
odor he didn’t recognize. If the milk had been poisonous, the German family wouldn’t have been around for Istvan to kill.

She handed him his microwave pistol. “Do you want the submachine gun?” she asked.

One of the guns. “I may as well carry it,” Pauli said. He slung the belt and holster over his shoulder, then drank more. The
milk helped settle his stomach despite its odd taste. His eyes were on the woman digging.