The Fourth Rome (6 page)

“I don’t need your money,” Rebecca said, lowering her voice. “But I don’t think your master has anything to fear from the
emperor.”

The older slave nodded. “Come along, Nestor,” he said. “We won’t forget this.”

No, you won’t,
Rebecca thought.
But at least the Germans will treat you the same as they do free men when they sweep over the army.

The slaves closed the outer door behind them. Before Rebecca could touch the latch of the suite’s entrance, Barthuli pulled
it open from inside. He held a microwave pistol.

“I thought we could give them an overdose of sedative and hide the bodies in the storage room,” he said. “No one would notice
the smell until long after we’ve left the horizon.”

Gerd had come to terms with mortality, his own and others’, when his condition was diagnosed as incurable. He was a gentle
man, as kind as he was intelligent; but he was also as ruthless as a cobra.

Rebecca entered the suite and set the ewer on the triangular table. “Close the door,” she said. She felt drained She knelt
and rested her forehead against the cool bronze container. “Gerd,” she added, “slavery is evil.”

“Umm,” the analyst said, a noncommittal syllable with a vaguely positive lilt. “The most likely place for our revisionists
is the settlement outside the camp, Rebecca. I thought I’d go check it over.”

Rebecca stood and managed a smile. “We’ll both go,” she said, “because I don’t trust you alone, Gerd. But we’ll wait till
Pauli gets back and discuss it with him before we act.”

She didn’t want to call Pauli unless there was an emergency. Interrupting a busy teammate was a good way to screw up both
him and the operation.

Gerd nodded. “All right, Rebecca,” he said. He projected a shimmering display on his multifunction sensor and seemed to be
concentrating on it. In a tone of mild interest he added, “I’ve always wished I could understand the concept of evil in a
meaningful way.”

N
an Roebeck had her issue weapons spread out before her on her command station’s console. The team in TC 779 was about to go
operational.

Everybody was rechecking their equipment one last time before insertion. Her people were nervous. She understood that. She
listened with one ear to them as she repacked her own weapons carefully in the black nylon gearbag she’d be taking into Russia
on 9 March, 1992. She checked the weaponry she had in front of her against Central’s manifest.

Then she went through the nonweapons essentials her team had been issued. If these items weren’t perfect, all weapons could
do was get you out of a disintegrating situation alive. Entry documents: invitation, visa, passport. Local currency: a roll
of Russian roubles. Venue-correct clothing: suit, shirt, underwear. She hoped she’d pass for a middle-aged American bureaucrat.
She was probably a little too tali, a little too straight in bearing to really look the part. Her brown hair was a little
too short, her skin a little too tanned, her muscle tone a little too good. Maybe she’d look like a US bureaucrat who happened
to lift weights. Oh, well. She rubbed her fingers through her brush-cut hair. This was the age of women’s liberation they
were displacing into.

Roebeck added the little extras she always took along, things that were never on any manifest: a half-dozen redundantly spare
power packs, an assortment of replacement circuits. You never knew what was going to go wrong. But something always did. You
didn’t join the operational arm of the ARC in order to spend life in an error-free environment.

Grainger was saying, “Can’t you print us some US dollars, Chun? Forget about these roubles Central gave us. They’re nearly
worthless. And these plastic credit cards won’t be good for anything but ID. Another typical ARC screw-up.”

Before Chun could answer, the temporal capsule around them hummed, shivered, and stabilized with a slight whining sound. It
didn’t sound right to Roebeck. Her hands froze on the quaint metal zipper of her gearbag.

It didn’t sound good to her ops specialists, either.

The three ARC Riders exchanged glances. Chun’s control wands knitted and purled a systems check. Chun gave the ARC Riders’
thumbs-up hand sign. “Just a little boundary turbulence. Nothing to worry about.”

Everybody relaxed. In the close confines of the TC, Nan Roebeck could smell the shock and fear leaking from her team’s bodies
as acrid perspiration. The air circulator hummed comfortingly. The waft of nervousness was quickly replaced by machine-cooled
air, tainted only by hot, thrumming components.

If your temporal capsule malfunctioned coming out of phase, nobody ever found your remains. Time travel was relatively safe.
The dicey moments were during displacement phase-in and phase-out. If you were hashed during either one, nothing rematerialized
for an investigation team to find. That was why they called it “hashed.” You were static. Forever.

Nan Roebeck had no interest in becoming a bit of cosmic background noise. None whatsoever. She dragged the gearbag across
her console and dropped it onto the deck, by her feet.

The technology that powered the TC wasn’t something any ARC Rider understood very well. It was from too far Up The line. But
after a few missions, you understood what was sur-vivable and what wasn’t. The longer they stayed out of phase, the harder
the TC had to work. The harder the TC had to work, the more chance there’d be a malfunction during displacement.

It didn’t happen often. But it did happen.

As team leader, Roebeck was responsible for everybody’s safety. She’d given the order to hang out of phase. If she wanted
to sit here for any number of elapsed-time hours, that was up to her. The maneuver should be well within TC 779’s tolerances.
The runny whine was just that: a funny whine. An artifact. That was all.

Chun’s control wands tapped again, summoning an exterior view to the bow screen of the temporal capsule. TC 779 was now hovering
placidly out of phase over the Moscow River, a little downstream from the Russian White House. The night around them was starless
and a deep, pollution-browned black. They’d phase-locked the TC at a 30-millisecond offset for safety’s sake in an urban,
post-industrial venue. The capsule was not only invisible from the river or its banks but also from above or below.

In its current state, TC 779 provided no resistance to local matter, making it sensor-proof in every domain Russians could
monitor. All sensors from this period, active or passive, utilized a surface from which to generate a return, a measurable
perturbation, or a change in state.

Grainger pursued his earlier point from where he’d broken off when the TC’s whine stopped unrelated conversation cold. “My
grandpa’s friends used to tell stories about this period—March of ’92,” he reminded the others. He was talking to hide his
jitters. Or to forget them. “Russia was the Wild West and the Klondike all rolled into one. And the dollar was king. With
dollars, you could buy anything: fissionable materials, weapons systems, scientific patents, whole government departments.
The rouble’s in a hyper-inflationary spiral. The average Russian barely had enough food to get through the winter. That food
went to people with dollars. Factions of the fledgling government here are fighting internally for control. Those factions
want dollars like everybody else. And Russians want new-looking dollars. They don’t like shabby-looking money.”

“Okay, Tim, you’ve made your point,” Roebeck decided. “If plastic is virtually useless except as ID and the local currency
isn’t worth anything, then we’ll take dollars onto the local economy—if Chun thinks making some is doable.” Roebeck looked
at Chun for a feasibility estimate.

“Counterfeit money that
looks new
in ’92? At least
old
-looking counterfeit is easy. That means fabricating high-quality currency on the fly.” Chun’s almond eyes narrowed. Heavy
black hair shimmered as she bent her head to study her desktop display. Her control wands tapped again.

The capsule’s wraparound bow screen split. One half showed a US ten-dollar bill circa 1992 as Chun analyzed its constituents.
The other half began detailing the fall of a great totalitarian empire and the stumble from its wreckage of an uncertain,
defiant democracy.

Chun’s bowed head raised. “Okay. We can do it. If dollars are what you want, Nan, dollars are what you’ll get. Plan to hover
out of phase a few hours longer while we make up reasonable facsimiles of this fancy currency.”

“Oh, great,” Grainger groaned and glowered at Chun. A 21st-century primitive, Tim Grainger was both claustrophobic and leery
of temporal travel. The weird whine that TC 779 had made coming out of displacement hadn’t helped.

“By the way, how many dollars are we talking about, exactly, Nan?” Chun wanted to know.

“So how much money
do
we take, Tim?” Right now, Roe-beck was willing to capitalize on the tension between her team members. Some of that tension
was an echo of their last mission. Last time out, the ARC Riders’ targets had been Oriental revisionists. Grainger’s own primitive
cultural prejudices had transmuted Chun’s lineage into a reason to question her allegiance to the team and the mission at
hand. But then, killers were always racists, and Grainger was a shooter, a killer from one of the most murderous times in
Earth’s history: the 21st century. One hundred sixty million souls had been killed in conflict during the 20th century. The
21st doubled that number before it was done—all in the name of freedom, democracy, humanitarian relief, and peacekeeping.

“How much money do we need?” Tim Grainger pursed thin lips and scratched his stubbled, angular jaw. “Maybe thirty thousand
dollars. We’ve got places to go and people to bribe.”

It was Chun’s turn to groan. Grainger swiveled in his seat. He looked long at her, then at Roebeck. “Just make sure the bills
are new-looking and none are higher than hundred-dollar denominations. In those days, the US dollar bought something worldwide.
In Russia then, it was the only stable currency.”

“All this money isn’t going to raise suspicions?” Chun, the senior analyst on this mission, tapped her control wands once
more. The screen displayed a photo of a stocky, florid man with a shock of white hair. He was standing on a tank, mouth open
and fist clenched. “The US didn’t recognize this man Yeltsin’s government until Christmas Day, 1991. And then only after flagrant
diplomatic maneuvers by the US meant to unseat him and reinstate Gorbachev despite Yeltsin’s popularity. Americans can’t be
too welcome, currency or not.”

“Au contraire, mon ami,“
Grainger said, “1992 Russia is full of
Americanskis.
And other foreigners. Entrepreneurs, spies, scientists, officials from the Koreas, Japan, India, the Arab world, and the
NATO countries are crawling all over Moscow buying or stealing technology.” Grainger grinned thinly.

“So you think we can just
buy
our way to the revisionists?” Chun scoffed. Her control wands were now tapping constantly. A window appeared in the datastream
and began running Russia-related 1992 US State Department message traffic.

“Maybe. Or at least to the technology,” Grainger answered.

“Okay, you two,” Roebeck said at last. “That’s enough. This team is about to be up to our hips in end-game 20th-century alligators,
whether we like it or not. Chun, get started counterfeiting the currency. I want a final logistical plan by thirteen hundred
hours—everything, including where we’re going to stash the capsule safely while we all go sightseeing. I need a safe place
to park TC 779 that’s round-the-clock accessible, if we’re
all
going anywhere. Otherwise I’ll have to leave one of you with the capsule. Right now I’m not sure who I can spare.”

Chun and Grainger just stared at her. Both specialists were in hot competition for the lead on this mission. It had never
occurred to them that all three ARC Riders might not go downrange. Each had all the equipment, all the documentation necessary
to be tasked with the field action. Each was uniquely qualified. Neither wanted to be left behind.

Chun, with her 26th-century double doctorate, was indisputably their technical expert. If the ARC Riders found some new, unknown
technology, Chun was their best-qualified evaluator. Leaving her with TC 779 was unthinkable when unknown technology was in
question and access windows might be fatally short. But Chun was their least experienced field operator.

Grainger had an inherent feel for the venue. In his native 21st century, he’d been an expert on Techno
Fin de Siècle.
His grandfather had been an old Soviet hand, a Cold Warrior. His sawy and his closeness to the period’s cultural mechanics
made him the perfect field operator in a venue where human intelligence collection and evaluation on the fly could be the
make or break.

Let them sweat it. She wasn’t going to designate a lead. Not yet. Maybe not at all.

The only problem with taking them both onto the local horizon was that there’d be nobody on board TC 779. For the duration
of their recon, the ARC Riders would have no viable link to ARC Central’s terraflops of archival data. Or to an easy emergency
extraction, if it came to cut and run. It was a calculated risk that Roebeck was willing to take, if she heard the right answers
from her ops team.

“I’m waiting,” said Nan Roebeck, “for that real good plan for stashing the TC where it’ll be safe and snug and ready whenever
we want it.” Setting the capsule to autophase in and out of the space-time continuum on a schedule was an easy matter when
the local horizon was populated by techno-primitives on earlier horizons. But here and now, among Russians, discovery of a
temporal capsule might lead to technological exposure. Even to reverse engineering. The Russian science community was arguably
the best educated and most forward-thinking group of its time. She couldn’t risk even one Russian scientist getting a good
look at TC 779. Especially since Russians were already fooling around with the space-time continuum. She wished to hell somebody
on her team had even a half-baked theory about how the Russians were doing it.