The Fourth Rome by David Drake, Janet Morris Read Free Book Online Page A

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.