The Fourth Rome (32 page)

The lock deployed into a ramp. Grainger was already stomping downward before the ramp contacted the floor, moving as fast
as the heavy suit could react.

His helmet visor adjusted to ambient darkness, giving him multispectral scans. In multispectral, the Up The Line capsule looked
like the aurora borealis.

He hit it with everything he had, laying on the HPM gun’s trigger.

It was a surreal experience. He heard only his own breathing and Roebeck’s occasional mutter as she passed him encased in
two tons of armor and weapon. Meanwhile, everything in the broad aim-point of his HPM gun blossomed into flame. Melted. Puddled.
Began to boil.

He felt something—a distant shudder—come up through his armored boots.

It was the first shock wave of blast overpressure from Nan’s air-bursts, upstairs.

Only then did he realize that nobody had been in the sub-basement lab when they’d hit it. No Zotov. No Kokoshin. No fourteen-year-old
girls. Yet.

A second shudder realigned the floor. He was backing up, still firing for good measure: around the bay, at the window between
the bay and the control room.

The window shattered. His visor showed him a flashing red indicator, telling him he was half through his power pack’s available
juice. Still firing, he walked with a giant’s tread toward the blown-out window.

When he reached the window wall, he just kept going, spraying HPM fire as he advanced. What was left of the wall crumbled
before the onslaught of his exo-powered suit. He slagged the control panels, the rack of antique equipment. The table holding
them buckled and collapsed with a silent crash. And then he realized he’d been wrong.

There was somebody else down here. There’d been people in the control room. Those people were here still: hunched figures,
hands over their heads, slumped in a heap in one corner of the room. A filing cabinet had melted on them. He didn’t take one
step closer. He’d seen death before. He didn’t need to verify the obvious.

He felt the third concussion from Roebeck’s weapon as he was backing up. Through the hole he’d made in the window wall, he
retreated carefully. One slip, a wrong step, and he’d be helpless like a beetle on its back when Nan returned in need of covering
fire.

He relaxed his pressure on the HPM gun’s trigger. Better save whatever juice he had. You always wanted something left—in case
you had to face the unexpected. He could hear Nan’s increasingly labored breathing in his helmet as she beat her retreat.

A muttered curse, a grunt, and he could see her, striding through the far door with her grenade launcher ported.

You couldn’t move fast in the exo-powered suits. Nan was moving toward him as quickly as her suit could safely go.

He had to face Nan’s position to cover her as she came. Grainger took more slow, careful steps backward. His visor showed
him a rearward-facing view as soon as he asked for it. He enhanced the magnification. He wanted to see the relationship of
his heel to the lip of the ramp. Watching carefully, he raised his powered heel onto the ramp and begui climbing, still facing
Roebeck.

He dumped the rearward-facing view to a left quarter screen window and took real-time forward view with the rest of his visor
display. He needed to watch over his team leader. They were almost home free.

Come on, Nan! Move!
To his combat-heightened awareness, it was excruciatingly slow going in an exo-powered suit. And by now, everybody in Obninsk
knew the closed city was under attack.

Come on! Come on!
“Come
on!
” he finally sidd aloud, almost prayerfully. “Team Leader, can we—”

Then he saw the first terrified, white face appear behind her, carrying an AK and shooting.

“Bandit! Six o’clock! Move out of the way!” He didn’t want to shoot Nan’s suit, point-blank, with his HPM gun. Fratricide
was always a threat.

He really didn’t want to shoot the unarmored local, either. But a lucky bullet could foul a servo, hit a critical part of
Nan’s suit.

“Moving right,” Roebeck’s voice told him. She stepped sideways.

Grainger fired his HPM weapon point-blank at Kokoshin, the mayor of Obninsk. The target dropped so fast Grainger didn’t have
to watch Kokoshin cook.

He had two more backward steps to take, then he was safe. He took one. Then he stepped carefully aside. From left of the lock,
he covered Roebeck’s slow, heavy approach.

The concussive thumps of her suit’s heavy tread shook the ramp.
Hrrumph! Hrrumph! Hrrumph!

Finally she was on the ramp. In two more steps she was beside him. In three, beyond.

“Now,
Grainger!
O-kay,
you can
stop shooting
! Get
in
here! We’ve got to seal up and displace out!”

Until Roebeck said that, Grainger wasn’t awate that he
was
shooting. He was reflexively emptying the rest of his weapon’s power pack into the doorway where Kokoshin, and now several
other armed Obninskis, lay sprawled.

He’d remember every detail, later, of the people who’d died trying to stop alien invaders in huge robotlike spacesuits.

Now, his mind was protecting him. He took one last step to safety, and the lock started to close.

A bullet streaked through the narrowing aperture, bounced off his helmet, and ricocheted around the lock before falling to
the deck. The lock closed up tight.

“Sealed,” came Chun’s triumphant, relieved voice. “We’re outta here …
now
!” The deck under him shivered as the ARC Riders’ TC displaced out of Obninsk.

Grainger slumped in his hardsuit. It held him complacently. For a minute he didn’t have the strength to move. They’d hoped
to leave no witnesses, no tale-tellers. That last shooter had gotten himself an eyeful and lived to tell about it.

Not good.

Nan was out of her suit before he was.

She showed him the deformed slug from a Russian AK, holding it up, turning it in her fingers. “Not perfect,” she said. “Somebody’s
going to have a story to tell their grandchildren.”

Grainger craned his neck to look down through his visor at her and the slug she held. “Couldn’t be helped,” he said raggedly,
not bothering to toggle-on his exterior speaker so that she could hear his words.

Then he continued stripping off his armor. You had to rack the 40mm before you took off your helmet. Then you could get out
of your sarcophagus one more time. For a little while, at least.

Phase One was over, anyhow. Moscow, next stop. Grainger didn’t bother going forward. He stayed aft, checking his gear, refilling
the power pack on his HPM weapon, making sure that any minor damage to his equipment didn’t slip by him.

He was going to need all his hardware again real soon now. Chun’s displacement heads-up sounded through the TC’s intercom.
When a second shiver of reality and Chun’s terse, “Displacement complete,” told him the TC was back in its hidey-hole in the
catacombs, he pounded the interlock release with his fist and went forward.

Both of his teammates looked at him soulfully.

“How’re you doing, Grainger?” Chun asked.

He shrugged, leaning his head against the buliiiead. “Hope you got pictures of that UTL capsule while it existed.”

“I did,” Chun assured him. “But those people…are you sure you’re okay?”

“Why?” he snapped in a furious rush. “Because I had to fry some indigs? Don’t I look okay to you? Anybody tell you this was
going to be a nonlethal mission, Chun? You got guilt by association? Or are you just trying to ’share my pain.’ Don’t bother.
It don’t mean squat. Where I come from, we would have said those Ruskies got off easy.”

“Grainger, that’s enough. Chun, let him alone.” Roebeck returned her attention to the Phase Two strike plan for Moscow.

Live people whining about other folks’ dead people always pissed him off. He whacked the bulkhead release and stalked aft
to sulk. His equipment could use some attention. He’d cleaned everything he might be using in Moscow one more time. You couldn’t
be too careful.

The strike on FILI was going to be harder th;m the operation in Obninsk, because nukes were stored in the downtown Moscow
facility. That was the real reason that Roebeck had gone back to Central. For one thing, you needed suits armored for operating
in what might be a severely hot LZ. For another, you didn’t want to irradiate the main timeline, make gross changes that might
impact your own future, if you could help it. If you screwed up, you were doing an unintended revision, with all the consequences.
And those consequences could be as damaging to the future the ARC Riders were Tying to protect as the revision they were trying
to prevent.

So Chun had huddled with the Extrapolation analysts, and they had a plan of sorts. But what they really had—what counted—was
a risk analysis of the consequences of making a radioactive mess of downtown Moscow. If they had no alternative, even radioactive
consequences beat letting this revision proceed unchecked.

No ARC Rider liked the thought of it. But downtown Moscow was no place to store nuclear weapons, either. Normally, the missiles
would have been moved out to silos, submarines, various other delivery systems. But the privatization decree of July, 1991,
had the weapons producers and the military providers at each other’s throats about who owned what. So warheads and the missiles
they rode in were sitting around in odd places. FILI was just one unfortunate place to choose to keep your nukes.

Since Roebeck had secured New Rules of Engagement with relaxed collateral damage parameters, they’d do what they damned well
had to do. Central said maybe one more nuclear accident in Russia would be survivable so far as the timeline was concerned.
As for the Muskovites, that was another matter.

Chun had ascertained that there’d been at least thirteen nuclear “events” before ’92 that had never been publicly admitted
or documented outside the USSR. Although none of those nuclear accidents had been in Moscow, Central had run the simulations
and was pretty sure the local hot quotient wasn’t going to get upped all that much—if the nuclear event was an emission. If
the nuclear event was an explosion, all bets were off: They were just as likely to create a revision as to forestall one.

Still, getting Moscow hot was only a risk with Plan B. Plan A was for the ARC Riders to nab themselves some revisionists and
do this mission the old-fashioned way. Do it nice and quiet and with as little fuss and muss as possible.

Grainger didn’t mind trying Plan A. He just didn’t think it would work.

It took long enough to stash the TC and scramble through the tunnels that he’d calmed down some by the time they’d gotten
to the Métropole. After the hardsuit, the tunnels didn’t make him feel shut in this time. They were downright spacious. The
team just made it to the hotel by their ETA of 0900 hours local time.

Reobeck was emphatic about keeping her appointment with Orlov and having Chun keep hers with Etkin, planned the night before
for 1000, local time. Bundling up the revisionists for their trip to 50K would be easiest that way, during scheduled meetings.
If they could pull it off.

On this horizon, you could see no sign that, nearby, a closed city had been invaded, sacked, and left to mourn its dead. Russians
didn’t freak easy. Of course, Obninsk communications and transportation capabilites were pretty well nil right now. That might
account for the absent signs of heightened alert status. No troop carriers were prowling. Police weren’t doubled up in their
cars. Ad hoc checkpoints hadn’t blossomed on bridges and at intersections. At least, not yet.

It was also possible that so few knew of what happened—or would ever know—that the Obninsk strike was—and would stay—in the
noise level. After all, the strike was on a secret city, accessible by invitation only.

Or so Chun insisted.

Here in Moscow, whatever happened was going to have visible repercussions. Grainger didn’t bother to make the point. Everybody
understood what was happening here. The two women just weren’t as pumped as he was.

Roebeck wanted to get coffee, of all things. So off they went, repacked operational gearbags in hand, into the main dining
room with its gold pillars and stained-glass; ceiling. He left them to it. “I’ll wait at the front door for Etltin,” he told
them.

The sight of all that good food and greedy, privileged people alive to eat it nearly made him sick.

“Grainger, you should eat,” Roebeck criticized.

“Is that an order?”

“No, it’s not. Go on then.”

She and Chun had their heads together, whispering about him as he left.

Grainger didn’t wait at the front door. He went outside, into the air. Polluted or not, it didn’t smell like people ;ind food.
So he saw Etkin’s car pull up, with Orlov’s right behind it.

Damn.

Etkin had a bodyguard with him today. He recognized Grainger, waiting on the front steps.
“Privyet,”
he called, and spoke to the bodyguard.

“Privyet,”
Grainger called back, shifting his gearbag on his shoulder. Like “yo” or “hello,” it didn’t mean much more than a basic mammalian
acknowledgment.

Etkin came to meet him. The bodyguard went straight to Orlov’s car and held the door open for Orlov as the Foreign Ministry
official got out.

Etkin said, “Oh, I so regret arriving late. Let us hurry and find your friends.” Etkin touched Grainger’s arm to move him
along. These senior Russians liked to touch you. Grainger was in no mood for physical contact. He shook off the touch. Over
Etkin’s shoulder, he could see Orlov, arguing with the bodyguard. Something was going to happen back there.

He wanted to watch it. But Etkin was insistent. As Grainger went inside with Etkin, he caught a glimpse of Orlov’s frightened
face, pale beneath its scrawny beard. The bodyguard was pushing Orlov into Etkin’s car with a hand on Orlov’s head in a practiced
police procedure.

So Etkin had heard something about Obninsk. Or else he was coincidentally moving to preempt the competition.