Rogue Emperor

Rogue Emperor A Novel of the Chronoplane Wars Scanned by Aristotle

Crawford Kilian One:

Late in the afternoon of May 22, a.d. 100, Gerald Pierce sat four rows up from the arena in Rome's new Flavian Amphitheater, the stadium later to be known as the Colosseum. The emperor Domitian himself was pre-siding as editor over the day's show. Sixty men had been killed so far, not counting the lunchtime execution in the arena of fifteen noxii, condemned criminals unworthy of a gladiator's death. Pierce was obviously a foreigner from the awkward way he wore his toga, and as such he should have found a seat up near the top of the vast stadium. But he had trusted his height and effrontery, and had marched into the seats reserved for Romans of the senatorial order. No one had objected. While Pierce was beckoning to a vendor of honey-dipped buns, a flash of light flooded his peripheral vision. As he turned back toward the arena, the concussion crashed over him and the sixty thousand other spectators. Pierce had been Briefed and Conditioned, enhancing his sensory input synthesis and reaction time. With per-fect clarity, he saw bodies flying from the pulvinar, the broad terrace just above the arena where the emperor and his party had been watching the games. Pigeons fluttered into the spring sky. Shrapnel sliced through the enormous mustard-yellow awning that shaded the seats, and a cloud of oily black smoke rose from the pulvinar. Pierce recognized the characteristics of the ex-plosion: it had probably been caused by an antitank mis-sile. 1 2 / Crawford Kilian

The musicians stopped playing their horns and drums, and the choir fell silent. So, for a stunned moment, did the crowd. Some wounded survivor cried out, and the specta-tors answered in a great wordless shriek and began to scramble for the exits. Springing to his feet along with everyone else, Pierce shoved aside the well-dressed men who tried to trample over him. He threw off his cumbersome toga, revealing a coarse wool knee-length tunic. As the crowd began to thin in the lower seats, he shouldered his way down to the railing that fenced off the seats from the arena. Without hesitating, he vaulted over it to the sand four meters below. The moment of free fall and the sudden shock of landing were exquisite to his enhanced senses. Between the stands and the arena itself was a two-meter iron fence, intended to keep animals and gladiators out of the seats and the spectators off the sand. A couple of dozen soldiers patrolled the narrow corridor, and one was close by. "Get back up there, fool!" The soldier rushed him, sword in hand. Pierce stepped aside, pivoted, and struck a one-knuckle karate punch against the side of the soldier's exposed neck. The force of the blow threw the man against the rusty iron bars. Pierce used the soldier's body to boost himself up over the fence. He had not seen the trajectory of the missile; now, with no one blocking his line of sight, Pierce tried to find the launch point. It had probably been fairly low, perhaps from one of the gates opening directly onto the sand. The assassins must have carried the missile in a crate or a roll of fabric. Setup and launch would have taken under ten seconds, and the team was doubtless working its way an-onymously through the tunnels under the stadium. A gladiator, reaching only to Pierce's shoulder but half again as heavy, waddled menacingly toward him. He was a myrmillo, carrying a big rectangular shield and a short sword; his protective faceplate was shadowed by the broad wings of his bronze helmet. Across the arena the gladiator's opponent, a retiarius armed with net and triROGUE EMPEROR / 3

dent, stood gaping up at the turmoil in the stands. "Peace be with you, brother," Pierce called out in Latin to the myrmillo, but his voice was lost in the uproar. He jogged across the sand, away from the gladiator, with his eyes downcast. Outside the shade of the awning, the sun was surprisingly warm, and Pierce's wool tunic was damp with sweat. Thousands of flies swarmed around him, and clustered, shining, on every lump of bloodstained sand. —There was the wire: almost as fine as a human hair, visible only as a thin black line lying in gentle loops across the sand. Pierce bent, picked it up, tugged it. It was much too tough to break, of course, but he could tell from the matte-black insulation that the missile had indeed been a T-60, an old-fashioned TOW weapon based on an even older Soviet model. The Spanish had made thousands of them in the bad old days; they were the equivalent of the Saturday-night specials of Pierce's American boyhood. But none, Pierce was certain, had been exported to this chronoplane—and certainly not to anyone in Rome. The myrmillo had clumped off, ignoring both his oppo-nent and the other spectators who preferred the arena to the deadly jams in the exit tunnels. The African boys who raked the sand after each combat had come out to watch the confusion in the stands, along with the black-clad, horned Charons who finished off the dying gladiators and the Mercurys who dragged the bodies out. A couple of trainers stood amid the growing crowd in the arena, one of them still holding the red-hot poker he had used to encour-age the retiarius to fight. Pierce looked up at the emperor's terrace on the north side of the arena. The smoke had cleared somewhat. Scores of soldiers had posted themselves on the edges of the shattered pulvinar, their throwing spears gripped like lances to keep the mob at a distance. A couple of senior officers, recognizable by their plumed helmets, moved cautiously around the terrace inspecting the bodies. Fur-niture and hangings were on fire, and many spectators seemed to have become casualties of the shrapnel. Some lay writhing on the stone seats; others were being carried 4 / CrawfonhCiliafi

toward the exits by their friends. From the very top of the stands, where the women were segregated, a high keening cut through the noise. Holding the wire lightly in his left hand, Pierce walked across the sand. It led him to an abandoned launcher just inside the gate through which the dead were dragged, the Porta Libitinensis. The sand in the gate entrance was a blur of footprints and gritty clots of blood. Pierce smiled at himself: what had he expected, the prints of twenty-first-century Adidas? Or the assassins themselves? Spectators and attendants hurried past him into the dark tunnel, hoping to find a way out of the stadium that hadn't been clogged with people. Pierce followed them, ducking his head under the low arched ceiling and step-ping hesitantly. Within a few meters of the gate, the tunnel was almost black. It ran into a labyrinth of rooms and passages under the stands. A couple of small oil lamps burned smokily in sconces. Farther ahead, more lamps gleamed. Voices echoed off the stone walls, but it was quieter here than out in the arena. The air stank of urine and excrement, human «»j ™;mn\ Caaed lions coughed and roared in the dark-ness, and were answered t>y u tr&u-. j>/e*-ce-s Sc? ns e