Gunpowder Empire

She tried to sound calm, to hold the excitement out of her voice. She tried, but it didn't work. Jeremy's head came up as if he were a wolf scenting meat. “Is it-?” He stopped, as if he didn't want to go on for fear of hearing no.

But Amanda said, “Yes!”

Her brother whooped even louder than she had. He was out in the open, not in a soundproof basement. He didn't care at all, and neither did Amanda. Somebody next door exclaimed in surprise. They didn't care about that, either. Jeremy set down the water jug. It was a wonder he hadn't dropped it and smashed it. He grabbed Amanda's hands. They did sort of a two-person version of the crazy dance she'd done by herself down below.

They were both laughing and panting when they finally stopped. “What does it say?” Jeremy demanded. “Tell me what it says!”

“Come see for yourself,” Amanda told him. But then, as they both hurried to the stairs, she added, “It's just asking if we're here. I haven't even answered it yet.”

“Well, we'd better!” Jeremy said.

“You bet.” Fear filled Amanda as she set her palm on the patch of wall where it was supposed to go. The door slid aside, opening the secret part of the basement. She and Jeremy hurried in. They both ran to the PowerBook on the table. Her fear grew. Would the message still show on the screen? Had she imagined she saw it because she wanted to see it so badly?

Is anybody there?

The words were real. Seeing them there again, seeing Jeremy see them, made Amanda as happy as she had been when she saw them the first time. She would have been glad to go back to the temple to make one more thanks-offering.

Those three words made her more grateful than anything else she'd ever known.

“Wow,” Jeremy said, his eyes wide and shining. Amanda nodded. Jeremy shook his head, as if fighting to believe it. Amanda understood that, all right. Her brother started to say something, then stopped and shook his head again. He turned to her and almost bowed. “You found it. You do the talking.”

“Okay.” With that, she switched from neoLatin to English. “Answer.” That was an oral command the computer recognized. She paused to think for a moment, then just spoke simply: “This is Amanda. Jeremy and I are both here. We're all right, but the Lietuvans have Polisso under siege. What went wrong back there?”

That summed up what the home timeline needed to know, and what she and Jeremy most wanted to find out. She had another frightened moment when she sent the message. Would the laptop tell her it couldn't go through, the way the machine had so many times before?

It didn't. From everything she could tell, the message went crosstime just the way it was supposed to. Softly, she clapped her hands. Beside her, Jeremy said, “Yeah.”

Then they had to wait. That hadn't occurred to her. Back in Porolissum in the home timeline, wouldn't somebody be watching the monitor every single minute? She'd thought somebody would. Maybe she was wrong.

Five minutes went by. Ten. Fifteen. She wanted to kick something. She also wanted to scream. Had the message made it back to the home timeline?

And then the screen showed new words. Even before she read them, she and Jeremy both cheered again. Why not?

They weren't cut off any more. Only now, as the isolation ended, did Amanda realize how bad it had been.

She leaned forward to get a better look at the monitor. This is Dad, the new message began. She gri

“What happened?” Amanda asked again.

This time, the answer came back right away. Terrorists. Nationalist terrorists, Dad said. They bombed a lot of crosstime sites here in Romania, all on the same day. It was a nice piece of work, if you like that kind of thing.

“Terrific,” Jeremy said.

“Hush,” Amanda told him. “There's more.”

And there was. Their father went on, That would have been bad enough by itself, but they also planted tailored viruses at some of the blast sites. Guess what? Both of the ones that co

“Urk,” Jeremy said. This time, Amanda didn't hush him. She felt like going urk herself. Making real viruses these days was almost as easy as making computer viruses had been at the start of the twenty-first century. And real viruses could do as much damage in the real world as computer viruses had in the virtual world. They could, if you were ruthless enough to turn them loose. Nagorno-Karabakh and a big chunk of Azerbaijan next door were still uninhabitable. Armenians blamed Azerbaijanis; Azerbaijanis blamed Armenians. No one was ever likely to know who'd really used that Ebola variant. It was so hot, it had probably killed off whoever started it. That was poetic justice of a sort.

Fighting tailored viruses was dangerous enough in the home timeline. If one of them got loose in an alternate like Agrippan Rome, it might take out a third of the population or more. Natural epidemics had done that in the past. U

“How's Mom?” Jeremy asked.

She's fine. She sends her love, Dad answered. Amanda breathed a sudden sigh of relief. If Mom's appendix had waited a little longer to act up, she would have got stuck here. That could have been very bad. Amanda couldn't think of anything much worse, in fact.

She asked, “How long before you're able to come and get us?”

Crosstime Traffic and the Ministry for the Environment here both have to decide it's safe, Dad said. A week or two, probably. But you said there was a war going on there?

“That's right,” Amanda said. She and Jeremy took turns telling what had happened since they got cut off. “We've had to sell for money instead of wheat and barley,” she put in at one point. “We didn't have any place to put the produce, and then we didn't want the locals calling us hoarders.”

Don't worry about that, Dad said. No one will complain that you went against the grain.

For a second, Amanda just accepted that. She opened her mouth to start to answer it. Then she saw the revolted look on her brother's face. She read the message again. She made a horrible face, too. “Well, that's Dad for sure,” she said.

“You better believe it,” Jeremy said. “Nobody else in the world makes puns that bad.” From revolted, his expression suddenly went crafty. “Except maybe me.” He spoke to the PowerBook: “Answer. Wheat like to tell you to clean up that last message. We could barley understand it. It seemed pretty corny. Send.“

“Ow!” Amanda exclaimed. “Where's something I can hit you with?” Jeremy looked proud of himself, which wasn't what she'd had in mind.

There was a pause at the other end. Amanda hoped Dad wasn't ru

“That's rice,” Amanda said. Jeremy groaned, not quite in praise. It wasn't the best comeback, but they were ru

Dad got back to business. Just hang on till we finish decontaminating here, he said. That's all you need to do now. Like I told you, it won't be too long.

“As long as the Lietuvans don't get into Polisso again, we'll be fine,” Jeremy said. Amanda thought he'd put in one word too many, but it was too late to stop him.

Sure as houses, Dad wrote back, Again?

“They got some men in at night,” Amanda said. “Not too many, though, and Polisso is crawling with Roman soldiers. We had to pay the prefect a sort of a bribe to keep from having any quartered on us. They drove the Lietuvans out again.”