The Fourth Rome (40 page)

Chun was nowhere in sight. Roebeck was by the ramp, weapon at the ready, waiting for him.

He said, as his vision cleared, “This bastard i:ortured old Zotov to death.”

Roebeck said, “Chun’s all right. She thinks. Watch this guy.”

“I disarmed—”

But then Etkin was struggling like a madman in his grip, trying to get to the gearbag hanging from Grainger’s arm.

Crazy to fight an exo-skeletal-powered suit. Unless—

“Watch it. He’s going for something in—”

Roebeck shot point-blank at Grainger and the Up The Line operator struggling in his arms, who was yelling in Russian.

At least she’d shot tranks, Grainger thought prayerfully as Etkin went limp again.

They stripped Etkin, tearing his clothes off because they didn’t have time to waste, and isolated him in a storage casket
in the transfer hold. He was coming around. They left Chun in charge. Nan didn’t think Chun was fit to suit up.

“You sure you’re okay, Chun?” Grainger heard through his com. Roebeck had gone aft. Grainger was standing at the open lock,
watching the blue lightning turn into a capture net, or a chain-link fence of energy, and worrying that he had no way to measure
the danger parameters.

He heard Chun say, “Yes. I’ll be fine, Team Leader.”

Then Roebeck’s tread shook the decking under him.

“Let’s get the rest, living and dead.”

They phased one more time. It better
be the last time.
Grainger’s hardsuit electronics were getting really balky. When he potentiated the system to return to the logged coordinates,
for a minute it seemed like his suit didn’t have a destination logged.

He was hanging in nothingness. His worst nightmare. He tried to move. Nothing worked. He was imprisoned in that huge hardsuit,
nowhere at all. It scared the shit out of him.

He actually said, “Please, God, no.” Until then, he didn’t think he believed in God. But getting hashed was no way to die.

God must have heard him. All of a sudden his balky suit popped out of phase right where it should have. Roebeck was lifting
Orlov. She hadn’t taken any chances this time. She’d bound Orlov before she tried to move him. The motions she’d made had
stayed in the air around her as if she were spinning herself and Orlov an electric blue cocoon.

“Where were you?”

“Stuck. Nearly got hashed. I ain’t doin’ but this one more trip without a complete tear-down of this system.”

“That’s all I ask—just this one more trip,” Roebeck’s voice said, coming from a blue-laced helmet that was all he could see
above her static cocoon.

Then he was alone with poor dead Zotov and Matsak, still frozen in time. He grabbed them both with as few motions as necessary,
scooping up the living man atop the dead man in one servo-mechanical embrace.

Grainger hit the virtual keypad and closed his eyes against the aurora borealis in the conference room, which seemed to be
catching on fire.

When he opened his eyes again, he was standing among nukes with blue fire crawling all over them. Static charges were shooting
around like bullets of flame. Sure as shit, if any of those birds had a live triggering mechanism, one or more of those nukes
was going to blow.

“Come on, Grainger. Board! We’ve got to displace
now
!”

Roebeck’s command was so urgent he barreled up the ramp without worrying about what would happen if he fell.

If he fell backward on his ass, or forward on the two unprotected men in his grip, the result would be the same.

In six steps, he was up the ramp. Roebeck was retracting it before he even got clear. He stumbled, all two ;ons of him. Caught
himself with one hand before he crushed Matsak, still alive, into Zotov, already dead.

He heard the lock close up. Roebeck yelled, “Power down, Grainger,
stat
! Or you’re not going where we aie. We’ll get you out of the suit later.”

Damn. He didn’t have time to get out of this suit first. If he shut it down now, he didn’t have enough power left to start
it up again on his own. She was the boss. He had to trust her. Dying of asphyxiation in that hardsuit wasn’t his first choice,
but it probably beat whatever had started to happen out there when the static charge in the stasis field caught on fire.

He crouched a long time in darkness, unable to change position, before the other ARC Riders got around to him and gave him
some auxiliary juice.

His systems came back on. He knew he was sweating and shaky. He didn’t want them to see. So when they started to help him,
he warned them off. “I got into this suit. I can get out of it. Go torture the prisoners or something.”

By the time he had his systems running, the other ARC Riders had removed Matsak and Zotov from under him. He tapped into the
main data bank and got a fix on FILI at the moment they’d displaced. There was no mushroom cloud. Dumb luck or good work on
Roebeck’s part, disarming the FILI nukes, he couldn’t say. Maybe the static fire had dudded out the triggering mechanisms
of any live warheads, fried the electronics. There’d been enough charge loose in that nuke storage bay to equal anything an
EMP gun could deliver. Who the fuck knew what happened when Roebeck released a stasis field that had been riled up that way?
Not him, that was for sure. The only unusual reading he could get from FILI was an elevated hot count from the crushed SS-N-25.
You can’t have everything.

When he’d stashed his gear and changed into standard issue, he went forward. He didn’t ask what they’d done with the live
prisoners and Zotov’s body. They were in holding caskets, waiting for drop off in 50K.

Matsak was sitting in Grainger’s accustomed seat. When the revisionist saw Grainger, he grinned through his beard. “The Tim!
Prhyet, tovarisch.
Oh, it is well to see you!”

“What the fuck? We’re letting revisionists ride forward, now?”

He had his acoustic pistol on his hip in its regular quick-draw holster. The pistol leaped into his hand. He pointed it at
Matsak without hesitation. “Up, Matsak. You ride in the back.”

Matsak’s bearded face fell.

“No he doesn’t, Tim. Sasha’s going to help us out with a couple problems.”

“Such as?” Grainger asked through gritted teeth. Sure, Matsak was a good guy. But he’d been on the wrong side. The rules were
clear enough. What was Roebeck thinking of? He didn’t take his eyes off the prisoner.

“Tim, holster your weapon. That’s an order.” Roebeck’s tone was like a backhanded slap. He put the gun away reluctantly. But
he didn’t take his eyes off Matsak.

Then Roebeck said, “Like the nuclear emissions from FILI, for one.”

“Absolutely,”
Matsak agreed, nodding his head vigorously. His burning eyes met Grainger’s. “My poor country needs no more of these … dirty
nuclear accidents. In my opinion, I can help arrange a quick and quiet cleanup. The most minimal damages. The least proliferation
of sensitive information. This has always been part of my job.”

“You’re going to let him go?” Grainger was thunderstruck. He looked away at last, to Roebeck at her team leader’s station.
The bow screen didn’t show anything. They were hanging out of phase again. Damn, didn’t Roebeck ever get enough? Chun was
ready, wands poised, to send them to their next stop.

“We
need
to minimize the damage. Control further proliferation of the temporal implant technology. Lots of the technical reports related
to this implant weren’t done on computer. They were typed by hand. Chun can’t get to them to destroy them. Every hard copy
has
got
to be tracked down and destroyed. That has to be done by someone who las plausible and continual access to sensitive scientific
research files. And we don’t have an agent in place anywhere in the Eastern European theater on this horizon. Chun’s just
confirmed that for me. So now we’ve got a volunteer.”

“Shit, I thought for a minute you’d lost it completely, Roebeck.” Grainger leaned back against the bulkhead. “Yeah, that’ll
work. If you trust him.”

“Trust me?” Matsak grinned slyly. “I am Russian. This is my country you have just been saving. So sorry, Tim, but how can
you not trust a man to do what is in his own national interest? There will be many files to destroy. It will take much effort
on my part.” Matsak sighed heavily. “I will be very busy.”

Chun said from the bow, “He’s been giving us a lot of data about Etkin and Orlov. He’ll help with the interrogation. Then
we’ll put him back in place on his horizon in time to run the damage control operation for his ministry. Best we can do for
those people. Remember, we caused this nuclear accident. It didn’t
have
to happen this way.”

It was a good thing that time wasn’t as sensitive to warping from small changes as people of Matsak’s era had thought. You
really had to bash the past over the head to get the present to take a different road to a new future. Thank … God.

“So very sorry, yes. Many will be ill, or be dead. But it is better than the alternative. You know our history, Tim. It must
be this way.”

Grainger shrugged. He still didn’t like it. Matsak had seen too much. He wasn’t even sure if they were empowered to take on
locals as agents in place.

“The Russian people,” Matsak said, sensing Tim’s hesitation, “believe that the Roman Empire gave to the Byzantines, and the
Byzantines to the Russians, the secret knowledge of power technologies. They are technologies for controlling societies. Not
hardware, but those power technologies you have seen for yourself—social technologies. This is why we are called socialists.
Our society is a result of those power technologies, applied for many years to innocent people. I cannot be a part of bringing
that weight down on Russian heads again. I will work with you because you work for freedom. Freedom is what the Russian people
want. Freedom is what they shall have. Remember, Tim, the new is just the—”

“—well forgotten old. Yeah, Sasha. I remember. Okay. If it matters, you got my vote.” He stood up straight. “Guess I’ll go
back and start interrogating our buddies Etkin and Orlov. Who knows how much I can learn before we dump them in 50K?” The
technology captured from Etkin was going to be well received by Central. Roebeck would probably get a real enthusiastic “atta-boy”
for a mission well done.

Maybe if the ARC Riders asked Command what to do with the Up The Line revisionist, they’d have been told to bring Etkin to
Central. At Central, Command would have squeezed every bit of information about UTL technologies and breakaway factions out
of Etkin’s brain. But that decision was way above all their pay grades. Grainger was pretty sure he didn’t want to know any
of the details he was about to find out. But his team was charged with taking that information back to Central. When the ARC
had that data, this mission was going to be classified out of existence.

Etkin himself was one problem that Grainger felt perfectly competent to handle. Orlov and his hard-liner friends were only
some poor fools who backed the wrong team and were just starting to pay the price. There was no reason not to leave Orlov,
Neat, Lipinsky, and the old revisionists to the mercy of 50K’s flora and fauna. However they died, it wouldn’t be worse than
being HPM’d and then trapped under a molten filing cabinet in Obninsk. But Etkin was a different animal. A potentially valuable
one. Grainger would personally inject a locator into Etkin’s scrotum. Not much chance, in 50K, that Etkin would try digging
it out of there. If Command later wanted the revisionist back, all they had to do to retrieve Etkin for further interrogation
was follow the bouncing ball.

He went back to see Etkin in his holding casket. The caskets had clear view windows so that you could check on the prisoners.
There was a slot for food and water in case you had them long enough to feed them, and a two-way intercom enabled from outside
only.

Just Etkin’s handsome blond head and neck were visible through the window. The revisionist’s eyes were closed.

Grainger tapped the intercom.
“Privyet, tovarisch.”

Etkin’s eyes snapped open. “Where’s Orlov?” Etkin demanded.

Grainger didn’t see a good reason not to tell him. The sooner Etkin understood his situation, the better. Might as well establish
what was what. “Next holding casket over. Don’t worry, as soon as we dump you and your Russian revisionist buddies in 50,000
BC
, you can all compare notes.”

“Fuck you,” Etkin snarled, and lunged against the casket window. The revisionist from Up The Line wasn’t much of a threat
stripped naked in a casket, but Etkin would figure that out soon enough.

“Easy there. I just came to see if you’re comfortable.”

“We’re going to bury you, you know, Grainger! You think you’re civilized. You’re not. You’re primitives playing with toys
you don’t understand. We will rise from the ashes of the 20th with an empire that will span the stars. Our Fourth Rome
will
live! You haven’t the technology, the might, or the brains to stop us. You’re only mongrels, our natural inferiors. We’ll
blot you out forever—”

“Seems to me I’ve heard that kind of talk before.” Grainger interrupted Etkin and toggled off the intercom with a slap at
the glass.

Tim Grainger headed forward without a backward look. Etkin wasn’t ready to be reasonable yet. How come these guys always thought
they invented the Superior Race? Among Etkin’s cohorts Up The Line, everybody was probably just as blond and beautiful as
he was. But nobody from a superior race was going to be waiting for Etkin where he was going. Grainger would give the revisionist
a chance to calm down and try again before he turned Chun and her mind probes loose on him. Chun would extract from Etkin
every name and location of Etkin’s revisionist agents, as well as the scope and design of the conspiracy Up The Line. Etkin
would name names. Grainger was going to bet Roebeck half his hazard pay that one of those names would be Dr. Bill.

The ARC Riders would make another pass to pick up the small fry, once the big fish had been delivered to 50K and Etkin had
given up whatever secrets he held most dear.