The group were silent. Few of them had been briefed on the details of Project Exodus.
‘All right, listen up, everyone!’ barked Stilson. ‘Gather round closer! I’m going to bring you folks up to speed on what you need to know. What I’m about to tell you has been classified for top-level eyes only. Outside of the Exodus technical team, the only other eyes on this have been those of the President, myself and the joint Chiefs of Staff.’
Rashim noticed how easily Stilson could rally everyone round.
‘This project has been in development for over five years, funded by what remained of our defence procurement budget, for what it was. Exodus was… and still is… our plan to transplant our values, our knowledge, our wisdom on to the infrastructure of an existing, well-established and robust civilization. The Roman Empire.’
Rashim heard the vice-president’s audience stir.
‘A panel of historical experts identified a specific moment in time in which to deploy Exodus. We were meant to arrive towards the tail end of the reign of a weak emperor. A guy called Claudius. A weak emperor struggling to maintain his position in power. Now… the plan was quite simple. To offer our services, our technology, to this guy Claudius in exchange for executive power. In effect to become his governing body. And eventually, on his death, to replace Roman dictatorship with American-style Republican democracy.’
Stilson turned and looked at Rashim pointedly. ‘But it appears things have gone very wrong.’
Rashim felt all of their eyes fall on him. ‘Uh… now, yes. But you see most of you here are the wrong people. That is to say, you’re all the wrong weights and sizes; it’s thrown all my calculations completely out! Which is why we lost — ’
‘Dr Anwar,’ said Stilson, ‘what we don’t need to hear are excuses or technobabble after the fact. What we do need to do is start rethinking our plan of action. We’re here in this time now and that’s what we have to deal with. So, what we need to start finding out is exactly where we stand. What the situation is seventeen years earlier. Can you at least tell us something about that?’
Rashim looked at the man and the others gathered behind him.
You’ve lost them already. You’re not in charge any more. He realized it wasn’t knowledge or wisdom that made a leader. It wasn’t being smarter than everyone else. And, by God, he could perform intellectual somersaults round most of these morons. No, it was something as simple as the deep cadence of a voice, a certain way of addressing assembled people. A way of carrying yourself. Authority. Entitlement. Stilson had that all right. And Rashim none of it.
‘Dr Anwar?’
He sighed, slid open the panel of the h-pad on his wrist and a faint holographic display hovered in the air in front of him. ‘Yes… there we go. So.’ He swiped through a timeline with his finger. ‘Ah, here we are. We’ll be dealing with a different Roman emperor. Not Claudius, but…’ His fingers traced along a glowing chart line to a name. ‘Caligula.’
‘What data do we have on this guy, Dr Anwar?’
‘Uh… let me just look that up on my…’ He hadn’t had the time to read up on the historical briefing Dr Yatsushita had the project historians put together. Not really. If things had been a bit less of a frantic rush these last few months and weeks, he might have been able to give it a cursory read-through. His job was the metrics, punching the numbers — getting them all here in one piece.
‘Emperor Caligula? I can tell you about him.’ All heads turned towards someone in the crowd. By the fading light Rashim vaguely recognized the face: one of the candidates. One of the few people who was actually meant to be there instead of another last-minute gatecrasher.
‘I know all about Caligula… God help us.’
Stilson gestured for the crowd to allow the man through. ‘And you are?’
‘Dr Alan Dreyfuss. Roman historian. Linguist.’
‘OK, then, why don’t you go ahead and tell us what you know, Dr Dreyfuss?’
The man was in his thirties, narrow-shouldered with a pot belly, a shock of sandy hair above glasses and a salt and pepper beard grown, Rashim suspected, to hide a double chin.
‘Oh, Caligula…’ Dreyfuss began shaking his head. ‘Oh boy, this guy’s bad news.’
‘Bad news? What do you mean?’
‘He’s mad.’
‘Mad?’
‘Uh-huh. Totally. Completely insane.’
The people stirred, unhappy at the sound of that.
‘But look, I think there’s a way we can play this guy,’ said Dreyfuss, smiling.
Stilson pursed his lips and nodded appreciatively. He seemed to like this guy. ‘All right, Dr Dreyfuss, let’s hear what you’ve got.’
‘Shock and awe. We’ll make an entrance.’ Dreyfuss played the crowd almost as well as Stilson. ‘This guy made his own horse a senator, would you believe? This guy, Caligula, believed in omens, portents; he was superstitious, paranoid.’
Dr Dreyfuss grinned. ‘We’ll make him believe we’re gods.’
CHAPTER 16
AD 37, north-east of Rome
The two MCVs bounced energetically across fields of wheat, leaving broad paths of flattened stalks in their wake. Rashim held on to the handrail as both hover-vehicles slid across a rutted track into the next field.
Their approach was relatively quiet; the deep hum of electromagnetic repulsors was almost lost beneath the clatter of strapped-on equipment bouncing against the carbominium hull. He watched the heads and shoulders of slaves emerge from the tall, swaying stalks like startled meerkats. Eyes and mouths suddenly wide with horror, then gone as they scurried away in fear of their lives.
Ahead of them a wider track thick with carts on the way into Rome became a sudden carpet of chaotic panic as slaves and merchants scattered into the fields and horses reared and bucked in their harnesses. The leading MCV veered left, on to the track. This one wasn’t ruts of dried mud but a cobbled stone track. A proper road in fact.
‘ All roads lead to Rome! ’ Stilson’s voice crackled over the comms-speaker.
Rashim wrinkled his nose and sighed in silent disgust at the blowhard idiot’s appalling cliche. He looked at the back of Stilson in the MCV in front, standing on the vehicle’s front gun platform like some buccaneer admiral on the prow of his square-rigged ship. The vice-president was punching his fist in the air with childlike excitement.
You let that jerk take over. Congratulations.
He looked at the combat unit sitting beside him on the MCV’s hull, T1-38 calmly resting across muscular forearms. He covered his throat mic. ‘Looks like someone’s having fun, eh?’
The unit had the reflective sun visor of his helmet pulled down. Rashim couldn’t see his eyes, just the bottom of his nose and the mouth, chewing on protein gum with all the grace of a horse munching on hay.
‘Yes, sir.’
To be fair, Stilson and Dreyfuss’s rejigging of the plan called for a display of bravado. They’d lost way too much of their ammunition, power-packs, equipment and manpower to guarantee being successful taking control of Rome by force. Two dozen combat units and whatever number of rounds of ammo they were carrying on their equipment belts were enough to make a spectacular display of firepower, but not much more. Certainly not enough to take on several legions and a city of one million inhabitants.
‘ Hell! We’ll give ’em a display of shock and awe all right! ’
Rashim vaguely recognized the catchphrase Stilson and Dreyfuss were using, uttered by some puffed-up presidential moron long ago. Shock and awe. Make them believe the gods have come down to earth! That was basically their plan. Roll right into the middle of Rome, make a ton of noise, intimidate the lot of them and take over the whole show. Simple.
