Free The Fourth Rome by David Drake, Janet Morris

a few of us in this benighted bogland
     who try to keep up civilized standards.”
    Pauli eased himself onto the pillowed couch. Five of the governor’s guests were civilian friends, including the lawyers from
     the afternoon’s trial. Arminius reclined in the place of honor beside the host, next to another German. Based on the background
     briefing he must be Sigimer, another leader of the conspiracy. Sigimer was a little younger than Arminius; the Latin in which
     he demanded wine from a servant was much less fluent than his fellow’s.
    The other diners probably lived in the governor’s residence as Varus’ special friends. They had no need to twiddle their thumbs
     at the entrance, waiting for servants to pass them through.
    “Tell me, Arminius,” one of the lawyers said as he swallowed a sausage ball from the platter in the middle of the three benches,
     “do you think these Chauci rebels are going to fight? I’d like to have some stories to carry back to Rome.”
    “You’ll carry back stories anyway, Gallus,” another lawyer gibed. “The truth would just get in your way.”
    “Yes, I
am
your lesser in that fashion, Lentulus,” Gallus agreed urbanely. “You’ve never let truth delay you in the slightest.”
    “Bah, the Chauci won’t fight,” Sigimer said in his heavy accent. “Anyway, it’s just the Squirrel Clan if they did. Nothing
     to worry about.”
    He slurped down his wine and belched. He was drinking it unmixed and from the slurring of his voice this wasn’t his first
     cup. The beer Sigimer had been brought up on wouldn’t have anything like the wine’s alcohol content.
    “Some of the boys got drunk and killed a few traders, Gallus,” Arminius said. He lifted a sausage ball between thumb and middle
     finger, aping the refined technique of the Romans around him. “You know how it is. When they sobered up in the morning it
     was too late. They decided they’d rather be rebels than be crucified alone.”
    “There’s no profit in crucifixion,” Varus said through a mouthful of honeyed sparrow.
    “Oh, but you’ve got to crucify some of them, Publius,” protested the lawyer beside Sigimer. “And after all, there’s not a
     lot of profit to be made from bog-trotting Germans even when they’re alive. Scarcely what milady’s looking for in the way
     of a house slave, are they?”
    “Depends on the lady, Cisius,” the man on the far end said. “How do you suppose your wife’s keeping warm while you’re away?”
    Cisius shuddered. “The same way she keeps warm when I’m in Rome, I trust,” he said. “What a thought. But she brought three
     adjoining farms as a dowry.”
    “There’ll be plenty of wealth!” Arminius said. “Sigimer and I will bring our folk to drive all the cattle out of the woods
     where they’ll be hidden. Oh,*yes, we’ll have a fine time chasing animals in the woods!”
    “Gentlemen, cups all round!” Varus ordered. He raised his own, a fine piece of silver. “To Arminius and Sigimer, and to the
     success of their enterprise!”
    I’ll drink to that,
Pauli thought as he took a filled cup from a servant.
I came back twenty-five hundred years to make sure the Germans succeed.
    But for all that, thought of what success meant soured the Gallic wine in his mouth.

Moscow, Russia
March 9, 1992
    G rainger hated enclosed spaces. They made his skin crawl. Usually he was happy to leave the confines of the temporal capsule
     for the wide-open spaces of any temporal horizon you could name. But not this time.
    Inside the Kremlin’s high brick walls were churches as well as government offices. Under one of them, the chapel of Ivan the
     Terrible, were catacombs, all but forgotten, long unused. Deep in those catacombs, the ARC Riders left TC 779. Grainger hated
     being underground more than anything but being sheathed in his ARC Rider’s hard armor.
    The temporal capsule’s chameleon skin mimicked the rough-cut stone walls perfectly before TC 779 phased out of