Arc Riders

by David Drake

  It was barely possible that captives might find the exiguous remains of a dump from a hundred years earlier. There was no chance at all that the groups would join forces and somehow manage to reenter the time stream. Those from up the line who ran the Anti-Revision Command may have been squeamish, but there was no question about their ultimate ruthlessness.

  Roebeck viewed their surroundings without noticing anything that shouldn’t be present. They’d settled onto a prairie, as expected. The ground looked flat as a table until you noticed the treetops in the middle distance. Ten meters or more of trunk were hidden by a combination of slope and the banks of the stream which the trees fringed.

  Roebeck had made twenty-three displacements to 50K, so she knew the terrain. Sixteen of those trips had carried captives, naked and terrified, to what would be home for the rest of their lives.

  As Barthuli had said, hostiles who were able to escape Central’s detection could also fool TC 779’s sensors. Roebeck raised her opaque faceplate with her left hand and scanned the landscape again, this time letting her Mark One Eyeball gather the information.

  There was still nothing anomalous. The grasses and associated flowering plants were waist high for the most part, though occasional sere canes of the previous season’s growth waved three or four meters in the air. A mixed herd of horses and camels cropped vegetation; some of the animals were within a hundred meters. The brown-black forms half a kilometer to the west were giant bison. Dust rose as beasts hooked dirt over themselves with their long horns.

  All as it should be, in the days before men. The hissing and actinics of the capsule arriving must have startled the animals somewhat, but they had settled back into their routine by the time the hatch opened. Suited humans didn’t disturb them.

  Spring or not, the wind on Roebeck’s bare cheeks was chill and harsh. Sometimes she wondered how many captives survived their first week in 50K, but the process wasn’t one she could’ve changed if she wanted to. Anyway, temporal intruders would end the unborn lives of billions if they weren’t stopped.

  But the wind was very cold.

  “Clear,” said Weigand from the other side of the vehicle.

  “Clear/Clear,” echoed Chun and Grainger from the positions they’d taken to bow and stern.

  “Clear,” Roebeck agreed. Whatever had happened at ARC Central, the folks responsible hadn’t managed to follow Transportation Capsule 779’s flight into the distant past.

  “Now,” she added softly, “let’s check the recordings and figure out just what was going on up there.”

  North America

  Circa 50,000 BC

  “To begin with,” Barthuli said as he reran the dump from Jalouse’s suit, “the personnel in what should have been Transfer Control Room Two were speaking Japanese. Rather, a language that differed from 19th-century Japanese in a fashion similar to the differences between Standard and 19th-century English.”

  The image on the display was enhanced to glassy cleanliness. This halfway stage between reality and iconic representation disturbed Roebeck at a gut level more than the static of the raw transmission did, though she’d never admitted that to anybody else. Anything that she told others about herself was a handle fate could use against her.

  Grainger carried a piece of the bullet that smashed his rifle—but not his face as he sighted the rifle—during some action back in his home time. Weigand wore one blue and one brown stocking at the start of every mission. Chun had an unfailing silent routine that could have been prayer, mantra, or who knew what. Jalouse didn’t touch—literally touch—a woman from the time they were warned for an operation till he’d boarded the vehicle.

  No Rider and nobody at ARC Central really knew how the capsule mechanisms worked. The technology was from up the line. A savage doesn’t have to understand electricity to flip a light switch, but the need to use forces he doesn’t understand might make the savage more, not less, superstitious.

  Even Barthuli might have a talisman. Though perhaps not.

  “The physiognomy of the office staff fits a Japanese matrix better than any available alternatives,” Barthuli continued, “though I wouldn’t put much stock in that. The interesting thing is that there’s no sign of the mid-20th century growth spurt driven by an improved diet on the home islands. Of course, these twelve individuals may not be a random sample.”

  Barthuli had slowed the movement on the display for better detail. It was like watching a ballet performed underwater. Sparks and chips of furniture pirouetted deliberately as staff members fired, their faces distorted in terrible hatred. Perhaps that, like the delicacy of the bullet damage, was merely an artifact of slow motion.

  “We’re assuming there’s been a temporal revision,” Chun Quo said crisply. Her very dispassion was a sign that she was aware of the Oriental ancestry she shared with the folk trying to kill Jalouse. “Is it possible that there’s been some kind of political change at Central? That the staff has been replaced in a… a coup?”

  “No,” said Barthuli approvingly. He cut the displayed image from the firefight in Transfer Two back to the docking bay as seen when TC 779 settled into her berth. “But that brings up a very interesting point. Notice the other vehicle?”

  A transportation capsule rested in a cradle two berths over. The vehicle was probably undergoing routine maintenance, because several of the skin panels had been removed. No personnel were in view.

  “The nose is too blunt,” Weigand said.

  Barthuli beamed. His fingers touched controls. The image became a blue schematic rotating slowly against a white background. The analyst overlaid it with a second schematic, this time yellow, as like to the first as raindrops are to one another.

  And as different. Where the exterior of the capsules was identical, the schematic was green. At least 90 percent of the outlines remained blue and yellow.

  “The second image is that of a 700-series capsule, of course,” Barthuli said. “Quite a remarkable convergence. I could have shown the same similarity in the bay itself or the geometry of the transfer control room. But it’s not the same Central we left, no.”

  “The clerks’ reaction,” Grainger said. “Do you suppose they were expecting us—somebody like us? Or is the social structure such that people are always armed and ready to go off like bombs if the unexpected occurs?”

  “No society could be that paranoid,” Weigand said. “Those people were afraid somebody’d show up to undo the revision their organization made.”

  “If you’d been raised with me on Sunrise Terrace,” Grainger said with a wan smile, “you wouldn’t be so sure of limits on xenophobia.”

  “What I found particularly striking,” Barthuli said, “is the close similarity of the physical plant, despite the obvious divergence from the social system of our timeline. I’m not sure those up the line would be concerned about the changes. They may not have been discommoded in the least.”

  “We’ve been discommoded,” Roebeck said, ending that discussion. She went on, “Our data banks have a full download for the late twentieth alone, is that correct?”

  “1971 through ‘91 in full detail,” Barthuli said. “Twenty years before that at second order. For the rest, we have only the normal baseline.”

  The team’s just-completed operation had been against a pair of 23d-century revisionists who had gone back to 1991. They weren’t dabblers who might have distorted timelines by inadvertence. Rather, they’d consciously intended to change the past by using mind-control devices on the US national security advisor. For the mission, TC 779’s data bank had been prepared with information regarding the temporal area of operations at the highest level of detail of which ARC Central was capable.

  “The first thing we need to do is to enlist someone from this timeline’s 1991, since that’s when our capsule’s database is most complete,” Roebeck said. She was stating a course of action, not asking for opinions. It struck her that she was the highest official of her Anti-Revision Command on this timeline; she smi
led inwardly.

  “We’ll compare the local’s timeline with ours,” she continued. With the keyboard she began to adjust the gross parameters of the next immersion in the timestream. TC 779’s artificial intelligence would determine the precise settings in accordance with Roebeck’s generalities. “We’ll spot the divergence, and then we’ll cure it.”

  “Cure the bastards who caused it, too,” Tim Grainger said in a voice as emotionless as a shard of broken glass. The conversation had brought Grainger’s mind back to the milieu in which he’d grown up. It always took him a while to return to an even tenor when he’d been thinking of the Sunrise Terrace enclave.

  “What if the split took place later than 1991?” Chun Quo asked. “We won’t have any kind of details then.”

  “We’ll assume that’s not the case,” Roebeck said, bending over her task. “If it is, then we’ve got a problem.”

  “If it is…” Barthuli said. He smiled as he bent his tongue around a phrase that was neither his nor that of the time horizon in which he had been born. “If it is, then we’re shit outa luck.”

  Yunnan Province

  Timeline B: June 29, 1991 AD

  The first rocket over the berm awakened Major Rebecca Carnes. Five more had landed with their terrible whoop WHAM! in the midst of Fire Support Base Schaydin before she managed to roll out of her cot.

  The ground bucked every time a warhead detonated. The gooners were launching their rockets in pairs. The six-foot rip across the top panel of the tent hadn’t been there when Carnes went to bed at midnight. Through it she saw the green tracking flare of another rocket an instant before it impacted.

  That blast toppled one side of the tent’s three-course sandbag wall and knocked all the breath from Carnes’ lungs. The canvas vanished as rags flapping on the shock wave.

  Carnes lifted her face from the dirt. She’d gone to bed fully dressed, though she’d loosened the laces of her boots to keep her feet from swelling during the night. She’d been using her flak jacket as a pillow. The protective garment was an old one with interleaved layers of ballistic nylon and aramid fiber, but it was better than nothing.

  Carnes reached up just enough to grab the jacket. The barracks belt and holstered revolver slid down also. She hooked the belt around her waist after she’d put the jacket on.

  Carnes didn’t know how to shoot. She was a nurse, for chrissake! She’d never even taken the revolver out of its holster since the supply sergeant tossed the weapon onto the pile of gear she had to carry to the helicopter waiting to fly her to her new command. The weight was a comfort of sorts, now.

  The bombardment ceased or paused. Fifty or more rockets had struck; this was no mere harassing attack. Carnes raised herself on one arm to see what was happening around her.

  By virtue of being the only officer of American citizenship present, Major Rebecca Carnes was in titular command of the battalion of Argentinian mercenaries making up the remainder of the firebase complement. A few of the Argentinians spoke English. None of them would speak to Carnes, at least not after she made clear within the hour of her arrival that she’d as soon have slept with the dogs subsisting on the battalion’s garbage as with any of the Argentinians themselves.

  The mercenaries might have been less dismissive if Carnes was male, but probably not. The assignments office in Hanoi hadn’t told her what happened to the AmCit officer she was replacing, but she’d already gotten the impression the fellow hadn’t died as a result of enemy action.

  That was how Rebecca Carnes was going to die, though. She knew enough about combat to see that. She’d arrived at her “command” less than eighteen hours before the Chinese overran it.

  The Tactical Operations Center was a trailer buried in a trench by the same team of US combat engineers who’d bulldozed up the earthen berm to create the firebase six months before. The engineers had done a good job.

  That was just as well, since FSB Schaydin had been the last mission for most of them. They’d been ambushed while withdrawing by road. Carnes, looking out the side window of the CH-47 helicopter, had seen the burned-out lowboys and construction equipment as the bird made its approach carrying her and a sling-load of supplies.

  Machine gun fire and the dull crump of grenades replaced the howling rockets. One of the warheads had plowed up a grave that must have predated the firebase. The stench of flesh dead so long it was liquescent mingled chokingly with explosive residues.

  Carnes stumbled toward the TOC. She supposed she belonged there, but she knew also she was drawn by the fancied protection of the dirt covering the trailer. That wouldn’t save her, but she didn’t suppose much of anything would.

  The attackers had chosen the night of the new moon. The only light came from explosions and the green-white tracers—Chinese tracers—snapping across the firebase. Very occasionally an Argentinian shot back, but the red sparks of the US ammunition were smothered by storms of return fire.

  A great explosion shocked the night orange. A flying object hit Carnes and flattened her against a half-collapsed sandbag wall.

  The base existed as a gun emplacement for four World War II–vintage howitzers which were supposed to support the infantry patrolling the surrounding hills. A Chinese grenade or satchel charge had detonated the ammunition bunker in a single volcanic blast.

  Carnes couldn’t breathe. She knew she’d only had the breath knocked out of her, but knowing that didn’t permit her to move.

  A white star cluster shot up from a bunker across the fire-base. The flare was meant for signaling rather than illumination. Even so, its momentary light permitted Carnes to see that the object which had hit her was a human leg, complete to the ankle.

  The sight had the unexpected effect of steadying her. Carnes had entered the US Army as a nurse in 1968. Her first tour in what was then the Vietnam War had been at the 93d Evacuation Hospital. She’d seen enough severed limbs then that she could never again feel horror at the sight of one; only sadness, and that when the living had been tended to and there was time to be sad.

  Carnes stood and resumed her course toward the TOC. She stepped carefully over the leg; not because she was queasy but rather out of respect.

  The radio tower adjacent to the buried trailer twinkled like a Christmas decoration with the reflections of tracer bullets. Argentinian officers would be begging higher command for support. US resources in southern China were stretched to—or beyond—the breaking point. Even if help was available, it couldn’t come in time to save the situation now.

  Fifty yards from Carnes, the fuel tank for the firebase generator ignited with a thump. A column of flame shot skyward from a pool that spread sluggishly across the ground. Two figures ran out of the blaze, their identities shrouded by the flames.

  A man silhouetted by the burning diesel fuel hunched, then flung a heavy parcel down the ramp to the entrance of the TOC. It was a satchel charge. Two seconds after the Chinese sapper threw it, the bundle exploded.

  Overburden covering the trailer bulged upward, then collapsed in a smoking, square-edged crater. Loose earth covered the mangled bodies of whichever Argentinians had been in the operations center when the charge went off.

  The sapper got to his feet again. Carnes was still standing, though the blast had numbed her eardrums. The gooner saw her and reached for the automatic rifle slung across his back.

  Carnes unsnapped her holster’s retaining strap. She tried to draw the revolver. It stuck to the leather. She had to tug twice, the second time with hysterical strength, to get the weapon loose.

  The gooner was only five meters from her. He jerked back the bolt handle to charge his rifle. The clang of metal tinkled like an ill-tuned bell to Carnes’ shocked hearing. She pointed the revolver at the soldier, wondering if she should instead have run.

  The trigger didn’t move, no matter how hard she pulled it. For a moment Carnes thought wildly that the safety was still on. A scrap of information from training twenty-odd years before returned to her: Revolvers don’
t have safeties.

  The weapon she’d been issued had languished, God knew how long, in some arms locker. A logistics system scraping the bottom of its resources dragged the revolver out to equip an officer who was equally useless in the combat role in which she’d been placed.

  The Chinese soldier aimed his automatic rifle. Carnes threw the revolver at him. The awkward missile didn’t come within a meter of the man.

  Blue light and a sound like bacon frying enveloped Carnes. Outside the aura, all noise and motion stopped. An oval bulk formed before her. She wondered if this was death.

  The only thing that moved in the landscape was the object solidifying from the air before her. Tracer bullets hung in midflight, sparks of light filtered blue by the surrounding haze. Fine hairs on Carnes’ arms and the back of her neck prickled as the building static charge made them rise.

  Carnes lifted her right hand to prove that the general paralysis didn’t extend to her. The object forming had lost almost all of its insubstantial shimmer. It was smoothly ovoid, some three meters by five along the primary axes. A large bubble formed on the surface facing Carnes.

  The bubble split vertically. A man stepped out. “Major Carnes?” he said. “My name’s Tim Grainger, and we have a proposition for you.”

  Carnes choked. She’d been holding her breath without realizing it. Gasping, she began to laugh. Her bruised ribs hurt her. She knelt and leaned over to relieve the pressure on them, still laughing.

  Grainger didn’t look surprised, though that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Carnes suspected he was the sort who made a point of not displaying any emotion until he’d thought it through. He was a lightly built man of medium height. His hair was brunette, and his complexion probably a deep tan. Carnes couldn’t be sure under the present light conditions.

  Grainger wore a one-piece garment which covered him from wrists and neck to a pair of seamless, lightweight boots. Its fabric was thin enough that the man’s bone structure was visible through it. The surface of the coveralls mimicked the pattern of its surroundings so perfectly that sometimes Grainger appeared to be a disembodied head and hands.