Rogue Emperor Read online

  ROGUE EMPEROR

  CRAWFORD KILLIAN

  © Crawford Killian 1998

  Crawford Killian has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First Published in 1998 by toExcel

  This edition published in 2017 by Venture Press, an imprint of Endeavour Media Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three:

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  If a man were called upon to fix the period in the history of the world when the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.

  — Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

  “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

  — Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

  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 presiding 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 perfect 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 explosion: it had probably been caused by an antitank missile.

  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 spectators 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 anonymously 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 trident, 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 opponent 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 encourage 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. Furniture 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 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. Fierce followed them, ducking his head under the low arched ceiling and stepping 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 tha
n out in the arena. The air stank of urine and excrement, human and animal. Caged lions coughed and roared in the darkness, and were answered by a bear. Pierce’s sense of smell, almost as keen as a dog’s, caught other scents as well: pheromone signatures of men and women, fresh blood and rotting meat, and the easily identified pungency of the AB-4 solid propellant of the missile.

  People who knew how to handle that missile had also known how to make their way through this labyrinth of tunnels and cells beneath the stands, and had known that Domitian would have just returned to his seat after finishing the midday meal. The timing had been more than excellent; it had been politically brilliant. The assassination of the emperor had been witnessed by sixty thousand Romans who had never before seen an explosive weapon.

  Pierce wished he had a flashlight and a firearm. He was under heavy cover, not even staying in the Agency’s villa on the Esquiline Hill. Technically he had no connection with what the Romans called the Hesperian embassy; he was a Gaulish wine merchant on a working holiday in Rome, and wearing only what such a man would wear. His tunic was plain but of good quality, with a wide leather belt that also held a small pouch and a scabbarded dagger. Strapped inside the tunic was a money belt holding a few denarii and a medallion, stamped with Domitian’s profile, that would get him past the guards at the embassy gate.

  Pulling one of the oil lamps from its sconce, Pierce cast about, seeking some trace of the hit team. The fleeing spectators had already obscured any footprints in the fine dust of the tunnel floor. Perhaps the team had found some quiet hole rather than getting away from the Amphitheater at once. He looked into a couple of small cubicles, finding nothing but crates. But at the second cubicle he paused, catching the scent of unburned AB-4 mixed with gun oil. Looking closer, he found a crate had been recently disturbed, leaving a dustless patch exposed on the crate below it. Pierce stepped into the room, crouched under its low ceiling.

  Behind the crates was a roll of coarse material something like burlap, wrapped around a thin, hard cylinder. Pierce carefully lifted the roll and unwrapped it.

  The backup weapon, a Spanish T-60 wire-guided antitank missile as long as his arm, was painted in flat mottled gray and black. Where the serial number should have been, just behind the warhead, was a raspy patch of filed metal. A launcher, its sights and joystick folded flat, was clamped to the missile.

  Pierce wrapped the T-60, replaced it, and put the crates back to conceal it. Perhaps the embassy could send someone to retrieve it later; a careful inspection might reveal its provenance, though Pierce doubted it. The hit team had been professional enough to bring a backup. They would have been professional enough to leave no fingerprints or other clues.

  Back in the tunnel, the lamp held before him, Pierce slipped and stumbled through the darkness. Around him men and women cried out in terror, called on gods, and collided with one another. The lions roared again, very close by.

  Lights burned in another room, larger but low-ceilinged. Pierce stepped in and found himself in the spoliarium, the gladiators’ mortuary. On crude stretchers, piled three and four deep along the walls, lay the corpses of the gladiators who had fought earlier in the day. Their wide eyes caught the light of Pierce’s lamp and sent back brief gleams; their mouths gaped in silent cries.

  Beside one of them a girl stood weeping, stroking the blood-soaked hair of her dead lover. She was small, wiry, and beautiful, a gladiatrix dressed in leather armor over a coarse tunic. She was oblivious to the people a few steps away who were squeezing corpses’ wounds to fill little glass jars with gladiators’ blood — a famous remedy for impotence and infertility. Pierce reached out and touched her shoulder in sympathy; she looked up at him in surprise and then turned away.

  The spectators packed the corridor by now; Pierce used his height and weight to shove through. He smelled fresh air, followed the scent, and was out under the stands in a narrow board-walled corridor like a cattle chute. This was where the animals were dragged down into the holding pens before going into the arena to their deaths. Now it was full of men hurrying out toward the sunlight.

  Somewhere within a few hundred meters were the assassins, but he knew he had no chance of finding them. For a moment he hesitated.

  Rome was without an emperor; the next few hours would be dangerous. He could go back to his inn and wait there until it was time to enter the Hesperian embassy tonight for the I-Screen jump back to Earth. Technically the assassination was none of his business. He had been sent to get rid of a general in Transalpine Gaul who’d been interfering with the local recruiting team. The mission was finished, the general dead along with his unlucky boy lover. The embassy didn’t know Pierce, had had no contact with him apart from receiving him through the I-Screen and slipping him past Domitian’s spies into Rome.

  But Wigner would want a complete report on Domitian’s death, including the reactions of the embassy staff. Pierce would have to get into the embassy, tell them what he’d seen, and try to find out whatever the Hesperians might know.

  As he strode into the plaza around the Colosseum, Pierce smiled without humor. The shopkeepers were quickly shuttering their doors, and the thousands of spectators seemed to clog the streets as far as he could see. The plaza itself was almost deserted except for the Colossus itself — the immense bronze statue of Nero which the emperor Vespasian had transformed into one of Apollo by the simple expedient of installing a new head. The Colosseum itself must be empty by now: even the largest crowd, leaving through the building’s eighty exits, could be outside in three minutes flat.

  The Amphitheater and its surrounding plaza stood in a shallow depression between the Esquiline and Palatine hills. To avoid the worst of the crowds, Pierce ran west across the plaza, past the Temple of Venus and Rome, and up the Sacra Via, around the Arch of Titus and past the Temple of Vesta. Hundreds of others were running with him, some shouting at bystanders. Pierce squinted against the glare of sun on stucco and marble.

  The Forum was boiling with people; two or three stood on the Rostra at the west end, trying to make themselves heard over the uproar. Pierce saw four members of the urban cohorts, the city police, laying about with heavy clubs as they tried to make their way through the crowds. Aware that his height made him conspicuous, Pierce moved to his right, into the shaded colonnade, and slowed his pace to a dignified amble.

  Beyond the Forum the crowds had almost disappeared. Pierce turned north into the Via Lata; here the great official buildings and temples gave way to crowded tenements and little marketplaces. This was the Subura, a filthy and dangerous slum. It was a neighborhood of insulae, huge apartment buildings that each filled a whole block and rose five or six stories above the narrow streets. Normally each insula would be swarming with people; now they were still. One man called down to him:

  “Have the oracles been fulfilled?”

  Pierce looked up, thought of speaking, and then shrugged silently in reply. Oracles? Had Domitian’s death been predicted?

  He strode on to the Via Tiburtina, which would lead him back east to the Esquiline Hill. The streets were little more than sunless footpaths between the insulae, so narrow that he could easily touch the walls on either side with his outstretched hands. Sometimes the streets were paved, but more (Often they were plain dirt and always thick with mud and excrement. Idlers competed for space with hundreds of merchants, artisans, and whores. Wherever the plaster still clung to the brick walls of the insulae, graffiti and crude sketches had been scratched or painted.

  Glancing up, Pierce saw more people looking down from windows and balconies. Many called to one another, their voices shrill with excitement. He caught an occasional word: oracle, dead, Domitian.

  The smells of putrefaction mingled with those of frying olive oil, baking bread, and charcoal smoke; he reveled in them while still seeking some scent that didn’t belong, perhaps a whiff of AB-4 blown from someone’s clothes.

  In a marketplace, fruit and vegetable vendors squatted under their awnings or in the shade of
their carts. One grizzled old man beckoned to Pierce.

  “Big fellow! What’s this about a thunderbolt from a clear sky?” Pierce barely understood his hoarse peasant’s dialect.

  “In the Flavian Amphitheater. The emperor and many others were slain.”

  The old man nodded, scratching his beard. “We heard warnings these three days now. Omens have been seen.”

  “What omens? I’ve heard nothing.”

  “You’re a northerner, a German down from the mountains by the sound of you.”

  “A Gaul. Yes — I came to Rome just yesterday.”

  “Marketplace has been full of rumors. The mysteries have foretold great changes, a new emperor and a new order. Tell me, did you see the thunderbolt?”

  “I saw what it did.”

  “And Domitian is dead, is he?”

  “With a great many others.”

  The old peasant could not restrain a sardonic grin. “Well, well. Strange times we live in. Not like the good old days. Here, would you like to buy some dried apples, friend? Best quality, from Campania.”

  Pierce bought a double handful of dried apple slices and walked on, savoring the strange sweetness of the fruit. With tripled sensory input synthesis and enhanced reflexes, he was always hungry even though most food tasted metallic and bitter. At least Campanian dried apples were edible; he almost turned back to buy more.

  The blocks of tenements, five and six stories tall, seemed to go on forever. Some of the shops that filled the tenements’ street frontage were still open, and a few merchants were besieged with customers — slaves buying extra loaves of bread or handfuls of vegetables, amphorae of wine, jugs of olive oil. Their masters must be planning to spend a few days discreetly indoors until the imperial succession was decided. Poorer Romans, crammed into tiny apartments with no way to cook, would have to continue to come out to whatever cookshops stayed open.