The Fourth Rome (7 page)

But nobody did. And neither of her ARC Riders seemed to have a ready answer as to how to secure TC 779 for the duration, either.

“Make it an idiot-proof scenario,” Roebeck prodded. “And make it quick. I don’t want to wait too long out of phase here in
what, despite all we think we know, might be plain sight. Especially if the revisionists we’re chasing are using different
space-time mechanics.”

Nan Roebeck drummed her nails on the padded bumper of the ship’s command console while, behind the ARC Riders’ heads, the
text window faded and the fate of the former Soviet Union unrolled in graphic detail.

T
he alloys used in twentieth-century tools differ from their first-century equivalents,” Gerd explained.

Rebecca Carnes grabbed his arm and kept him from taking the next step. The whip of the teamster standing on the seat of his
bogged cart whistled back to where it would have taken off the analyst’s nose if he’d continued.

The whip popped. The bullocks grunted against their yoke and started the cart lurching forward again. The street between the
line of civilian settlements and the river wasn’t paved, though a few shopkeepers had placed logs to corduroy the stretch
immediately in front of their establishment.

“Ah!” said Gerd. “Thank you, Rebecca. As I was saying, the alloys are different, so when they’re moved through the Earth’s
magnetic field they resonate in identifiable fashions that we can locate.”

He patted the slung pouch where he kept his sensor. He was linked to the unit by a receiver in the mastoid bone at the base
of his ear.

Three barges full of grain in huge jars proceeded up the river toward the landing on the fort’s northern side. Their masts
were stepped, but the breeze was fitful and none had set their sails. The leading barge was drawn by a team of mules plodding
in line up the outer edge of the road. Slave gangs pulled the other two.

“The objects don’t have to be, well, pulsed by an electric current for that to work?” Rebecca said. She’d heard of the technique,
but it hadn’t seemed that simple.

“Oh, no,” Gerd replied. “In your day, yes, because your equipment lacked discrimination.”

“Oh, right,” Rebecca said. She felt a wash of gloom.

People hadn’t changed in the five centuries between her time horizon and Gerd’s, not really. Language had, but she’d been
adjusted to that as easily as she now spoke dialectical Latin. The 26th century’s state-of-the-art technology was at least
as accessible as that of her own day. She could handle a transportation capsule in an adequate if not brilliant fashion; better,
at least, than she’d been at the controls of a helicopter the times a pilot had brought her onto the seat beside him when
things were slack.

The
reality
underlying that technology was still magic whenever her nose got pressed up against it. To Rebecca’s teammates, she was a
caveman who’d learned to flick a light switch.

“Have you ever considered what we mean by knowledge, Rebecca?” Gerd said. She reached for his arm again, but this time the
analyst had seen the danger himself. They paused.

A hulking German bouncer hurled a man out the door of a brothel. He splashed in the mud squarely in front of the Riders. A
red-haired woman, naked to the waist, came to the doorway and began screaming abuse.

Rebecca and Gerd stepped around the victim and walked on. “I understand the use of sensor technology,” the analyst continued,
“but I could never build a device like this myself.” He patted his pouch. “And while I could provide a detailed plan of the
body of the man lying in the street back there, I wouldn’t know what to do to help his condition.”

Rebecca smiled. “Pressure cut to the scalp from the bouncer’s club,” she said. “Not serious but it ought to be bandaged. Possible
concussion. Keep him quiet and at least get him out of the road so the next wagon doesn’t drive over him. Probable gonorrhea,
at least that was the girl’s diagnosis. Unlikely to be a resistant strain since back now there’s no antibiotics.”

She looked at the companion who’d just proved she
wasn’t
an ignorant barbarian. “Thanks, Gerd,” she added.

“I’m not a social person, Rebecca,” Gerd said. “I’m very fortunate that this team provides me with a society despite myself.”

In the same mild voice he continued, “It’s the next building, the upper floor, I believe. Ah—from the quantities and types
of alloy, particularly the tool steel and chrome in pure form, I would guess the objects I located were pistols with plated
bores.”

“Somehow I didn’t expect these revisionists were here to take pictures,” Rebecca said.

Buildings in the strip outside Aliso were of two distinct types, local and imported Mediterranean styles. The inn Gerd had
identified was a Germanic longhouse with stables at one end and living quarters including a loft beneath a high-peaked roof
at the other.

A dozen toughs squatted against the outer wall. There wasn’t a paved stoop, but the overhanging thatch kept rain from turning
the ground to mud like the street proper was.

The men were armed with swords or clubs. They held wooden drinking cups but most of them were empty. Rebecca’s hypnotically
implanted language training indicated a broad mix of dialects when they spoke German to one another and to the servant girl
entering with a wicker basket of produce.

These weren’t tribesmen. They were bits various tribes had spat out, men who’d lost their homelands. There were people like
them in every war zone. If you were lucky, you could avoid them.

Rebecca kept wide of the building front to stay clear of the loungers, but one of them squatted beside the narrow doorway.
She sent Gerd through ahead of her. As she started to follow, the German stuck his leg across the opening.

“Not so fast, honey,” he said. He wore a greasy cowhide jerkin, hair side out. His boots were hide cut and strapped over his
feet without any real attempt at shaping. “You haven’t paid the toll.”

The German reached for Rebecca’s crotch. It might have stopped there, but it might not. She wasn’t in a mood to learn, so
she kicked the knee of his outstretched leg hard enough that her hobnails bit bone.

The German bellowed and lurched upright. He grabbed the long sword leaning against the wall, then went slack as a silent pulse
from Gerd’s pistol hit the back of his skull like a battering ram.

The German pitched onto his face in the mud. The half-drawn sword fell beside him. It was rusty and of crude local workmanship.

Rebecca skipped into the inn’s dim interior.

She was afraid, for the mission and for herself. As soon as they arrived, the three of them had sent their suits three weeks
forward in time so that their displacement mechanisms wouldn’t block the revisionists’ arrival. The empty suits would appear
in a grove outside Aliso for a few seconds every three weeks. She, Gerd, and Pauli were on their own until then.

The upper sections of the longhouse walls pivoted down to provide ventilation and some light, but the openings were largely
shaded by the overhang. The straw on the floor hadn’t been changed in a week or more; the remains barely gave texture to the
mud. The odor of the animals stabled in the other half of the building was heavy but less unpleasant than the sour smell of
the humans on this end.

Gerd’s left hand held the front of his cape closed over the microwave pistol in the other. Rebecca gripped her own pistol
beneath a similar short traveling cape, but using it openly might cause the very sort of anomalies ARC Riders were tasked
to prevent.

“Landlord!” she shouted as she strode toward the counter separating private from public areas of the single room. “There’s
a man hit his head on your door beam!”

Germans crushed into the inn behind the two Riders. Their angry hurry made the doorposts creak and delayed them while Rebecca
and Gerd joined the heavyset man coming out from behind the counter.

“Hold it right there, Osric!” he shouted to the leading thug in German with a Rhenish accent. His hands were beneath his leather
apron.

“Fuck off, Lothar!” Osric replied. He raised a knobbed club, thumping one of the beams that supported the loft. Rebecca prepared
to shoot him and worry about the consequences later.

Lothar stepped forward, bringing his right hand out in a straight punch to the club-wielder’s face. His fist was wrapped in
a bronze-studded leather strap, a professional boxer’s cestus that added several pounds to a punch. He broke the thug’s nose
and cheekbone, flinging him backward.

Other members of the inn staff appeared. A woman advanced with a grinding pin and a pair of cook boys carried turnspits from
the central hearth.

“Which of you dog turds is next?” Lothar said, breathing hard. “Which fucking one?”

Rebecca guessed the innkeeper was in his late forties; obviously a gladiator who’d retired on his earnings. He might not be
the man he once was, but that punch proved he was still a man
once.

“Hey,” muttered one of the thugs. “They knifed Hilderic. You can’t let them—”

“Well it’s about time somebody knifed him!” cried the woman, waving the stone grinder under the thug’s nose. “All of you out!
Out now and stay out. We don’t need your sort in this inn!”

Two men came down the ladder from the better class of sleeping accommodations in the loft. The first was a big, graying fellow
who could possibly have been born on this time horizon. His slight blond companion was certainly a revisionist. Rebecca didn’t
need Gerd’s confirming nod as he glanced—even now!—at the sensor in his palm.

“What’s this?” the gray man demanded. He spoke German but his accent must have been almost unintelligible to the others. The
Russians had prepared themselves as carefully as possible in their time, but they wouldn’t have been able to study the actual
dialects in use on this horizon.

“They knifed Hilderic, Master Hannes,” said the same thug who’d spoken before. “We was just—”

“Wha happen?” Hilderic demanded muzzily, supporting himself on a doorpost. His head must be solid bone. A point-blank microwave
pulse could easily be fatal.

“Get your trash out of here, Hannes,” the innkeeper said in a low growl. His hairy left hand massaged the muscles of his right
shoulder. His loaded fist twitched sideways. “Get them out or you’ll go with them!”

“Tomorrow we will go, brother,” the slight Russian said. “When the army leaves.”

“You know we need bodyguards and handlers for the slaves we will buy,” the older man added. He threw back the right flap of
an embroidered cloak. “Come, Lothar, how much to settle this?”

“What the hell happened?” Hilderic repeated, still hugging the door frame. “Osric, have I been drinking?”

“I said I didn’t want you!” Lothar said. “Get your trash out or get out with them!”

“And if we don’t choose to do that?” the younger Russian asked coolly. Both his hands were under his cloak, and Rebecca didn’t
figure they were on his purse. She moved to the side so that she wouldn’t be hit by bullets aimed at the innkeeper.

Lothar looked around the big room and smiled with real humor. “So,” he said, “there’s twice as many of you as there is us,
Istvan? That’s what you’re counting on? Sure, you all can stay. Until my daughter—that’s her at the window—”

Rebecca glanced toward the street. Sure enough, a moonfaced girl whose braids were woven on top of her head watched the events
from the street.

“—tells the soldiers it’s free ale for the whole company whose men bring me all your heads. I don’t even think they’ll wait
till dark to finish the business, Istvan.”

Hannes turned to the bodyguards. “Go on, then,” he snarled. “You act like pigs, you can sleep like pigs in the street tonight.
Go on!”

“Hey, that’s not right,” said the thug who’d been sure Hilderic was stabbed. He looked in puzzlement from his employer to
Hilderic standing in the doorway. “We got a right to a roof. What if it rains?”

“Find a roof, then!” Hannes said. He shook three gold coins from his purse and tossed them at the man. “Go on, get out!”

The guards moved toward the door with a good deal of mumbling and groping for the coins—enough to pay the wages of all of
them for a week. Rebecca suspected they’d wind up sleeping in the street anyway after getting pig drunk on the unexpected
windfall.

“Master Istvan,” she said to the blond Russian in Latin. “Our master Gaius Clovis sent us to see what stock you had on hand.
He’ll be returning to Rome in a few weeks and thought he’d take some slaves back with him if the price was right.”

“What?” said Istvan. His Latin was slightly better than his German, but the revisionists’ accents probably had the locals
wondering if they came from Hyperborea. “We don’t have any slaves. We won’t have slaves till the governor puts down the barbarians
who are causing trouble.”

Hannes turned his attention to the discussion also, but he didn’t seem unduly concerned. Both Russians had taken their hands
away from the weapons that were apparently hung from their belts.

“Well, till later, then,” Rebecca said. “You’ll accompany Varus tomorrow, then?”

“Yes,” Hannes said curtly. “Come, Istvan, our goods are in the loft.”

“Have a drink with us, masters?” Rebecca offered. Gerd was manipulating the sensor concealed in his left palm. It was her
job to give the analyst time to gather as much information as possible. “Wine, perhaps?”

The Russians ignored her. Istvan preceded his companion up the ladder.

Lothar and his wife looked at Rebecca without warmth. The innkeeper didn’t know exactly what had happened, but it was clear
Rebecca was somehow involved in it. Now that the adrenaline rush had worn off, the strain Lothar had put on age-stiffened
muscles was probably making itself felt.

“Rebecca,” Gerd said in Latin, “our master won’t be back from dinner with the governor for many hours yet. I’m glad we’ll
have the opportunity to eat and drink here in this inn.”