Arc Riders

by David Drake

  He barked out a laugh.

  “There’s a Taiwanese battalion taking over this AO”—area of operations—“in ten days,” the lieutenant colonel said without emphasis. “They’re supposed to be good troops.”

  “Yeah, they’re good,” the civilian said. “And the Koreans. The Pakistanis aren’t that bad. The South Americans, though, I’d as soon have Thais. Beggars can’t be choosers, I guess. It’s a seller’s market for every police state willing to export its soldiers.”

  He turned his face toward the northern horizon. “And I tell you, son, there’s a shitload of Chinese where this lot came from.”

  Superior, Minnesota

  Timeline B: May 30, 1987

  The bartender and his two male patrons were all in their sixties. There’d been a power cut earlier in the evening, but now the lights and television worked again. The bartender stood in a corner, polishing glasses in front of the BLATZ ON TAP sign. On the television above him the President was saying, “… pulling together in this final stretch, so that…”

  “They aren’t going to draft me,” one of the patrons boasted. He was a regular. He didn’t know the man three stools down the bar. “My brother-in-law, you know? He’s in the military governor’s office.”

  The other man looked at him by turning only his head. “You think they’re looking for you, huh?” he said. His tone wasn’t quite as unfriendly as the words could have been spoken.

  He slid his empty glass toward the back rim of the bar. The bartender ran another draft from the pump.

  “… veterans are therefore being directed to report…” the President said.

  “They’re getting pretty damn deep in the barrel,” the regular said with a cackle. He pointed toward the TV. “If he ain’t careful, they’ll be taking him!”

  “He’s dead, you know?” the stranger said. “That’s not really him up there.”

  He laid a $2,000 bill on the bar beside his refilled glass. The bartender made change from the cash drawer, two ragged hundreds. The stranger stuffed the violet scrip into the brandy snifter that served as a tip jar.

  “Go on,” the regular said. “Sure that’s him!”

  “Look how jerky the picture is,” the stranger said. “Words don’t quite fit together, the lips don’t move with the words—they’re cutting bits from old speeches and putting it together. He’s been dead four, maybe five years.”

  “Go on!” the regular repeated. “They can’t do that. Charlie, they can’t do that, right?”

  The bartender smiled and resumed polishing glasses.

  “It’s true,” the stranger said morosely. “Four, five years. It’s MacNamara running everything, but you never see him.”

  Four motorcycles and a limousine roared down the street at high speed. Four more bikes followed a moment later. The limousine’s windows were blacked out and there were no insignia on the vehicle. The motorcycle guards wore black Gendarmerie uniforms.

  The regular grimaced. He cupped his beer glass in both hands and stared into it to avoid looking anywhere else. “Go on,” he muttered. His hands trembled. “Go on.”

  North America

  Circa 50,000 BC

  “I feel,” Rebecca Carnes said without opening her eyes, “like I went skydiving without a parachute. And landed on my head.”

  She heard her own voice through a curtain of pain. Someone was splitting her skull with the back of an ax. She hadn’t hurt this terribly since the time she broke her knee in an auto accident.

  Cold light washed through her, dissolving the hot, sticky haze. There were a few nodes of quick agony. Carnes’ limbs thrashed. She opened her eyes and saw tour images for a moment before her optic nerves locked into synchrony.

  She was lying on the floor of the time machine. The transport capsule, she should learn to call it. A rolled-up garment cushioned her head.

  The five ARC Riders watched her with expressions of concern or pity, depending on individual temperament. Roebeck was packing away the headset. Tim Grainger held a bottle with a nipple, ready to offer Carnes when she sat up.

  “Anybody get the number of the truck that hit me?” Carnes asked, attempting a smile. Weigand, the blond man, helped her rise—all the way to her feet, when she found her body obeyed normally except for the terrible shivering that wracked it.

  She didn’t feel cold, so why…

  “It’ll pass in a few seconds more,” Grainger said, giving her the bottle. It contained water with a dash of something tangy. “There’s no permanent nerve damage.” He smiled. “Trust me.”

  Chun extended a seat from the bulkhead behind Carnes. She sank into it gratefully and sucked down more of the water. The spasms of trembling passed, as Grainger had promised.

  Carnes smiled wanly at him. “Did you get anything?” she asked the company at large.

  “We got everything we needed,” Roebeck said. She was looking at the montage of images cascading over the display.

  Barthuli fingered his control plate, manipulating the scenes as he watched them. “Or at least within one red cunt hair,” he said, smiling in satisfaction as he used jargon from a former age with the precision he demanded of himself in all things. “The rest we can get, based on what you’ve brought us.”

  Carnes shivered again, this time from a thought. Looking at the bottle she clutched with both hands, she said, “I, ah… I guess I’ve ended the world by helping you. My world, I mean?”

  “It’s not—” Weigand started to say.

  “Wait,” said Roebeck sharply. The tumbling montage vanished into a black screen as deep as starless vacuum. “Gerd, would you run us some of the data we gathered while we were sorting?”

  “We were looking for someone like you to help us,” Grainger explained. “We hung just out of phase and combed the timeline.”

  “You were born in Jacksonville, Florida, Major Carnes?” Barthuli said as his fingers moved. “But you’ve at least visited Tampa, have you not? I can provide a quicker example by using Tampa. This is from sixty-eight days after you left the timeline.”

  The display bloomed with a view of a sprawling city. The image was so clear that Carnes felt a touch of vertigo. It was as if she rode in a helicopter’s cargo bay five hundred feet in the air, looking down through the open door.

  The bay was mirror smooth. Across it, and almost as dead flat as the water, were the Gandy and twin-span Howard Frankland bridges, connecting Tampa to St. Pete.

  Carnes hadn’t been to Tampa in twenty, at least twenty-five, years, but she hadn’t forgotten—

  The white flash expanded into an opalescent dome at supersonic speed, devouring every visible structure. The bubble vanished, leaving a shock wave that spread like a fiery doughnut. The column of glowing debris in the center mounted crookedly until it belled out into a mushroom.

  “It was really quite a small device,” Barthuli said, offering without emotion a point he found of interest. “Only about fifteen times as powerful as the one dropped on Hiroshima.”

  “The Soviets…” Carnes said. Her stomach lurched. She thought for a moment she was going to lose the water that was the only thing in her digestive tract.

  “No,” Nan Roebeck said. Her voice was emotionless also, but in her case that was out of conscious kindness to Carnes. “There was a succession fight after a palace coup against the governor of the Southeast Military Region. One of the parties believed her rival was in Tampa.”

  “Atlanta went the same way within the hour,” Weigand said softly. “It didn’t end the fighting, of course.”

  Roebeck made a quick gesture. The screen returned to satiny black.

  Barthuli looked over his shoulder and said, “Within thirty days there were nuclear strikes on Soviet and European Union cities as well, though we don’t have enough information to determine why. Neither grouping had any direct involvement with what was happening to the United States, so far as I can tell.”

  “Anything that happens within the time matrix,” Roebeck said, “is eternal. I
f a timeline is revised, it doesn’t vanish. It continues, but in a part of the matrix that someone in the revised timeline can’t reach. You won’t be destroying your timeline.”

  She put her hand on Carnes shoulder. “But I want you to understand exactly what timeline we’re going to revise. Revise back.”

  “Yes,” said Rebecca Carnes. She drank the rest of the water to give her mouth something to do while her mind spun.

  She lowered the bottle and looked around at her new companions. “I’d already have been dead before”—she nodded—“that, I guess. That’s something to the good.”

  She cleared her throat. “What else do you need from me?”

  Chun and Barthuli were both busy at separate control devices. “Probably nothing,” said Roebeck, watching over the Oriental woman’s shoulder. “You’ll have to stay with us, though.” She smiled wearily. “There’ll be no place we can safely leave you until we return to Central.”

  “More water?” Grainger asked. “Or would you like something to eat?” He grinned. “The ration packs taste fine. It’s just that after a while, they all taste the same.”

  Carnes chuckled. It struck her that after watching a city die a few minutes ago, she’d have said that she’d never smile again. “Some things never change,” she said.

  She looked at the main display. The analyst was moving images so quickly that Carnes couldn’t be sure if each was a single scene or a montage of many scenes.

  “I don’t understand how what I know could be that important,” she said after a moment. “I was an army nurse for four years. I didn’t see or do anything important. When I got out, I worked in Oakland and then Memphis, until they recalled all veterans.”

  “Your knowledge, the knowledge in your mind,” Weigand said, “is a fractal of the history of your time. To build your knowledge into a totality is simply a matter of the right algorithms and sufficient computing power.”

  “More computing power than anybody in my day dreamed of,” Grainger said. “Much less dreamed of packing into a space the size of this transport capsule. The power’s necessary for temporal navigation, of course.”

  Carnes nodded understanding. Bitterly she continued, “I wasn’t that sorry to leave Memphis, to tell the truth, though running nursing at the 96th Evac in Son Tay wouldn’t have been my first choice. And then they told me I had to take over an Argentine firebase. There had to be an AmCit officer in command of each foreign battalion. It wasn’t just me—they were taking clerical supervisors, navigators, anybody with the right rank. It was crazy!”

  Grainger shrugged. “Getting involved in a land war in Asia was crazy,” he said in a quiet voice. “I can’t imagine how the people making US policy could be so stupid. And it happened on our timeline, too, it just stopped sooner.”

  Chun looked up from her keyboard. “I can’t imagine anything so stupid as war,” she said.

  On the main screen hung the image of a child wrapped in blazing napalm, running toward the viewer.

  “Oh, war,” said the man from 2025. “That I understand very well.”

  North America

  Circa 50,000 BC

  “We’ve found the nexus,” Barthuli said, “but my instinct tells me it’s a double nexus.” He smiled as he added what was for him a joke, “And the computer agrees to point nine certainty.”

  The ARC Riders shifted slightly so that no one blocked another’s view of the forward display. On it, tanks advanced across a dry, hilly landscape. Dust rose in yellow clouds. Carnes found that the image she saw wasn’t distorted, despite the angle at which she sat to the concave display area.

  “In this timeline,” Barthuli explained, “a force from the Army of the Republic of Vietnam invaded the North on March 31, 1968. That’s a revision from our database. Our background for this period isn’t of the maximum detail, but I believe it’s sufficient for the purpose.”

  “So we stop the invasion and we’re back where we want to be?” Weigand said.

  “I don’t believe so,” said Barthuli. “The incursion was trivial. In the normal course the People’s Army of Vietnam would have snuffed it out—did snuff it out, as a matter of fact. The event was only important as a spark. Political decisions being what they are, the spark could have been as easily invented from the whole cloth, the way the Gulf of Tonkin Incident was.”

  Attempts to hurry Barthuli wouldn’t make him angry, but neither would they speed his delivery. The analyst had decided in his own mind the most efficient way of imparting the information he thought necessary. The opinions of others on the question were of only casual interest to him.

  The display shifted. A balding man in a brown suit delivered an address to journalists assembled in a briefing room. Even without sound, the speaker’s passion was as obvious as the shock on the faces of his audience.

  “The response which the US President made to this incursion,” Barthuli continued, “was excessive.” He smiled dryly. “Even given the gentleman’s demonstrated tendency to see world events as a large-scale Gunfight at the O-K Corral, with himself as Wyatt Earp. It’s my belief that the same organization which effected the ARVN incursion was responsible for the President’s reaction to it.”

  “There could be separate elements, two or more,” Chun said. “Or just one. The events arc in close succession, but obviously the party responsible has very sophisticated time-displacement apparatus.”

  “I don’t see how Central could have missed them,” Weigand said. “Unless…”

  His tongue touched his lips as if in response to their sudden dryness. “Gerd said early on that this might not have affected those up the line. Do you suppose Central only responds to changes that affect them?”

  “Jap revisionists,” Grainger said, as much to himself as to the others. He cleared his throat and looked up in embarrassment. “Japanese revisionists, probably from the 23d century. When the world started to come together after the bad years, the crazies got squeezed together in the cracks. Folks who dreamed of a world on which Japan imposed peace and unity, not just a world of peace and unity for all.”

  Weigand nodded slowly. Chun’s moue was another form of agreement.

  “We don’t know who they were,” Roebeck said sharply, asserting her leadership for the first time in the discussion. “We don’t have causes, only effects. We’re not going to guess, we’re going to learn.”

  Barthuli beamed approval.

  “Sorry,” Grainger muttered. “Sure, I know that.”

  “We’re going to get that information by observing the events leading up to the incursion,” Roebeck continued. “We’ll learn who the players are, then we’ll move to Washington and stop them from affecting the President.”

  “Letting the invasion go ahead?” Weigand asked.

  “Otherwise we spook the hostiles at the main target,” Grainger said. “This isn’t the sort of operation we can execute without some risk.”

  Roebeck nodded. “Gerd says the incursion would normally have been absorbed into the detritus of time. I accept his analysis.”

  She looked from Weigand to Barthuli and smiled coldly. “I would accept Gerd’s analysis that the sun here will rise in the west tomorrow.”

  Barthuli looked down and toyed with the collar of his one-piece garment.

  Roebeck eyed the company. “Let’s go do it, shall we?”

  Quang-Tri Province,

  South Vietnam

  Timeline B: March 1968

  It was deep, velvety nighttime outside the transport capsule. Weigand swore under his breath.

  “I’m taking manual control,” Roebeck announced calmly. The keyboard split at her touch. She moved the halves left and right on the console so that her arms splayed at what was for her a more comfortable angle. “We’ll go up twelve.”

  “I’ve got the star sight,” Chun said.

  The capsule trembled as it displaced a second time; the screen blanked.

  “We were supposed to arrive by daylight,” Grainger explained to Carnes in a
low voice. “Our inertial navigation system is off—and probably drifting rather than just out a fixed amount.”

  He shrugged. “Normally it’s reset during after-mission maintenance at Central. This time… that didn’t happen.”

  “Ready,” said Roebeck from the controls.

  A daylit landscape of hills and scrub vegetation bloomed on the display. “Sun sight,” Weigand said.

  “Four hours, thirty-six minutes high,” announced Chun Quo. “Spatial displacement was accurate to the limits of testing.”

  “Right,” said Roebeck, taking a deep breath. “Now if everybody will keep quiet for a few minutes, the computer and I will get us where we want to be.”

  Her fingers moved. The display blurred, shifting both in space and—judging from the quick successions of dark sky with light—in time as well. When Carnes raised her head slightly from where she sat, she saw apparent cross-wires of golden light superimposed on the rippling images. Occasionally the gold darkened to bronze or even coppery red.

  “I could—” Barthuli said.

  Roebeck turned her head and stared at the analyst without speaking. The display continued to scroll.

  Barthuli stiffened. “Forgive me,” he said. “I was in error.”

  He turned his back to the display so that he wouldn’t be tempted to interfere again.

  “Now…” Roebeck said. The display went frosty gray. “I think we’re getting there….”

  With the brilliance of a lost-wax casting appearing from a shattered mold, a permanent regimental camp sprang in full detail from the grayness. The flag limp in still air before the headquarters building was the red-striped yellow of South Vietnam. A berm and concertina wire, both overgrown by brush and creepers, surrounded the encampment. Flatly conical metal roofs shielded sandbag bunkers from the brutal sun, like so many farmers in straw hats.

  Regimental headquarters was a rambling building with stucco walls and a red-tiled roof, a relic of the French presence in Indo-China. Four M41 tanks squatted in revetments at the building’s corners.