Authors: David Drake,Janet Morris
The Fourth Rome
The tunnel acted as a wave guide, channeling the blast. Tiberius turned. Gray smoke puffed from the archway behind his chair.
A second grenade burst with a red flash. The guards went down like bowling pins.
Spectators screamed, surging like the tide.
“
Pauli
,” Beckle Carnes said in a tone of quiet desperation, “
I can’t get to the tunnel. There’s too many people.
”
The shock wave had knocked Tiberius down. His two surviving guards tried to carry him out of the way. The shouting mob blocked
them.
One of the guards crumbled slowly to his knees. The other bellowed. He dropped his sword, clutched at his face, and collapsed
onto the body of his fellow.
Kyril Svetlanov stepped out of the tunnel, reloading his submachine gun. His face was cheerfully pink, framed by its flowing
white hair and beard. He looked like a 19th-century Santa Claus as he aimed the Skorpion at the future Emperor…
“FAST-MOVING AND EXCITING.”
—
Kliatt
on
Arc Riders
Also by David Drake and Janet Morris
Arc Riders
P
UBLISHED BY
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ARNER
B
OOKS
WARNER BOOKS EDITION
Copyright © 1996 by David Drake and Janet Morris
All rights reserved.
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First eBook Edition: September 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-56692-6
Contents
Also by David Drake and Janet Morris
Three Kilometers East of the Ems River, Free Germany
The Closed City of Obninsk, Kaluga Region, Russia
Seven Kilometers East of the Hase River, Free Germany
Between the Hase and Hunte Rivers, Free Germany
Three Kilometers East of the Hase River, Free Germany
Four Kilometers West of the Hase River, Free Germany
Fourteen Kilometers West of the Rhine River, Free Germany
Twelve Kilometers West of the Rhine River, Free Germany
Six Kilometers West of the Rhine River, Free Germany
Four Kilometers West of the Rhine, Free Germany
I asked Sandra Miesel for some research help on this one. She responded, as usual, with a stack of material which turned out
to be crucial not only to the project’s accuracy but to the way the story developed. Many thanks—also as usual.
—David Drake
The Russian characters in this book are fictional. Beyond the known deeds of historical figures on the public record, any
resemblance to actual serving officials of the US or Russian Federation governments is coincidental and unintentional.
The Russian portions of this book are dedicated, on the American side, to Lt. Gen. Jerry Granrud, USA (Ret.), Gen. Dennis
Reimer, USA, and John Thomas, whose vision and commitment made the real trips to Moscow during the winter of 1991-92 possible.
And on the Russian side, to Oleg, Sasha, Egor, Boris, Viktor, and Big George: may your hopes for your country come true.
Some of the places, events, and technology in the Russian portions are actual, some fictional. FILI did house SS-N-25s during
the time period indicated. Whether they were armed is anyone’s guess. Obninsk had no known temporal displacement project.
To my knowledge, its real mayor and all its people are alive and well.
—Janet Morris
Out of the Temporal Universe
T
he six ARC Riders laughed and chatted in low voices as they walked into the briefing room together. Sure, you always looked
forward to leave at the end of a mission; but you wouldn’t be an ARC Rider if the missions and the people who shared them
with you weren’t the most important things in your life. Team 79 was glad to be back on the job again.
“Central’s background material covers 1992 Russia where the revisionists come from and early 1st century AD Europe where they’re
operating,” Nan Roebeck told her Anti-Revision Command field team. “Just so we know, though, I asked Gerd to predict the result
if the revisionists succeeded in carrying out their plan.”
The excellent holographic projectors of the ARC Central briefing room created solid-looking images with no fuzz or fade. A
huge war machine hung in the air above the projector, appearing to trundle across a rolling plain. Black smoke spewed from
four stacks. The turtle-backed monster rolled on pairs of iron-shod wooden wheels ten feet in diameter.
“For normal transit the machine is pulled by teams of oxen,” explained Gerd Barthuli, the team’s analyst. “In battle, as now,
it’s operating on its own steam engines. The boilers can use any solid fuel, but on the plains they’re normally heated by
a mixture of hay and horse dung.”
He cleared his throat. “This is the most advanced military weapon of its day,” he added.
Gerd wore a slightly quizzical expression, as though he wasn’t quite sure what he was doing here. That was how the analyst
usually looked. And felt, Nan assumed, which she regretted even though it didn’t harm Gerd’s performance. Gerd was the best
field analyst in the Anti-Revision Command. He had his quirks, maybe even more quirks than other ARC Riders did, but Nan wouldn’t
have traded him for a pair of people who took her orders better.
“What period?” asked Tim Grainger, leaning forward slightly as if that would give him a better view of the puffing tank. A
squadron of horse cavalry cantered past the vehicle. Half the riders carried a matchlock musket and a pair of long bamboo
poles tied so they hinged into a bipod shooting rest. The rest had composite bows. “First century?”
Tim was thirty years old, little more than half Gerd’s age. He was thin, intense, and an outsider like the analyst despite
Nan’s attempts to make him welcome. Grainger had been recruited from the beginning of the 21st century, a paranoid age of
technologically literate “Haves” living in enclaves among a huge underclass of “Have-Nots.”
Tim was of the former class. He was smart by any standards and comfortable with the technology of time displacement, but he
was first and foremost a shooter. Tim Grainger had none of his 20th-century colleagues’ horror of killing other human beings.
That was both a benefit to the team and a constant worry to Nan as team leader.
“This is an extrapolation to 1992,” Gerd said with a smile. “The same location in western Russia as well, though the city
of Moscow doesn’t exist in the timeline the revisionists’ actions would create.”
Gerd Barthuli could have been running a bureau in ARC Central instead of being part of one of the action teams tasked to eliminate
revisions of the space-time continuum. He chose to be an ARC Rider because he was under a medical death sentence. Gerd had
a genetic propensity to Alzheimer’s disease and a protein allergy to the vaccine that had protected the general populace from
the condition for centuries.
Gerd knew that at some indeterminate time his splendid mind was going to dissolve into static and psychotic rage. Until then
he intended to experience as much of human existence as possible. There was no better way to do that than be an ARC Rider
whose field was all history and prehistory.
“Is the background briefing right about this being a deliberate revision?” Pauli Weigand asked. “Not just Russian time tourists
screwing things up by accident? Because that sure doesn’t look like much of an improvement over where they came from.”
Pauli was a big man with blond hair and Nordic features. From the outside he gave the impression of being solid to the point
of stupidity. Inside he was so full of self-doubt that he was
never
sure what he was doing was correct. He acted anyway, with speed and resolution; the fears harmed only himself.
Pauli was Nan’s assistant team leader. She couldn’t have asked for a better one.
“The revisionists intend to make specific changes,” Gerd explained. “They simply don’t understand the real effect of those
changes—which is scarcely surprising since the data-processing power to compute such complex models won’t be available for
five centuries after their period.”
The display continued to move while the team talked. For a moment Nan thought the tank had exploded. Dense white smoke spewed
from the bow, obscuring the front half of the vehicle. The cloud spat a glowing spark that sailed downrange in a high curve:
the tank had fired a bombshell from a short-barreled cannon or mortar. The vehicle wobbled forward.
Musket barrels projected from ports around the tank’s sides. A mast rose from the dorsal spine to hold a basket of archers
and musketeers sixty feet in the air. No matter which way the wind blew, one or more of the stacks bathed the basket in smoke.
The tank’s interior must have been even more uncomfortable, an oven filled with smoke from the fireboxes and steam leaking
through every joint and seam of the boilers.
Gerd allowed himself a smile. “There are those of us who believe there’s an art to analysis beyond mere computation. This
group fails on both counts. They’d be as horrified as anyone else to learn what their meddling with time had achieved.”
“I’ll still bet they don’t thank us for dropping them back in 50K,” Pauli said. “Well, I suppose I can live with that.”
“First we have to catch them,” Chun Quo said. Though her face and tone were impassive, the words made clear her mild disapproval
of taking anything for granted.
Grainger was a shooter who could do tech in a pinch. Chun—family name first in Oriental idiom—handled the controls and understood
the systems of a temporal transportation capsule superbly, but she was almost useless in direct confrontation. Quo’s unwillingness
to harm another human being made her hesitate to use even the nonlethal devices that were the ARC Riders’ weapons of choice.
Nobody was perfect; a six-person field team was large enough to allow for a degree of specialization. As leader, though, Nan
Roebeck made it her object to be able to do each job on the team almost as well as the expert.
She’d never be the analyst Gerd was, but she could do his job as ably as anybody else Central might assign to the slot. She
was fast and accurate with the team’s weaponry: microwave pistols, gas guns, electromagnetic pulse generators; needs must,
with fléchette guns and plasma dischargers, too. Nan didn’t like to kill, but she’d killed before and would kill again if
that was the only way to save the mission or her team.