Arc Riders

by David Drake

  The legend - 10K shrank to a quarter of its former size and displaced to the upper left-hand corner of the field. A large zero was centered on the display.

  “Bring it up to 50.5,” Weigand ordered. “That’s noon on the last day of June.”

  “What are you going to do if there’s a thunderstorm?” Barthuli asked.

  “Get wet,” Weigand snapped.

  As a matter of pride, Carnes ran the display to 50.5 without having to backtrack. She took her right hand away from the controls so that she didn’t touch anything by accident.

  “We’re all ready,” Weigand said, a statement and a warning. “To displace, you’ll press the tit twice more. Do that now.”

  Barthuli vanished as suddenly as the lightning flashes. Weigand remained, his right thumb poised on his own controls.

  Carnes pressed the bump twice. The mask and the landscape both vanished. For a minute and a half that seemed much longer, she was alone with her thoughts in soundless blackness.

  Then there was light and life.

  North America

  Circa 50,000 BC

  Grainger entered the cabin of the transportation capsule and glanced at the display. “The major’s going to want to join the team,” he said. “I think she’d be an asset.”

  “She’s at least forty years old,” Chun said as she seated herself beside Roebeck and took off her gloves. “From her period, there’ll have been a lot of irreversible damage done.”

  Chun’s tone was cool. She was attempting to avoid the appearance of argument by putting herself on a plane of detached appraisal.

  “I think we can wait to decide whether we’ll recruit her until there’s a Central to recruit her at,” Roebeck said as she worked. Her tone was neutral rather than harsh, but she expected them to take her point.

  “I’ll get some hardware ready,” Grainger said. “Knowing they’re from the 23d gives us an idea of what to expect in the way of defenses.”

  “Quo, I’d like you to check out the spatial navigation system,” Roebeck said. “Maybe the temporal system lost its zero and spatial didn’t, but I don’t want to trust that without running it down ten places to the right of the decimal. Okay?”

  Chun lifted the pair of control wands she preferred over a keyboard and switched a holographic display to hang in the air before her. “We’ll have to recalibrate temporally before we insert in the target horizon,” she said. “I’ll have it set up for a simultaneous spatial check, too.”

  “The Defense of Freedom speech in that timeline was in the White House press briefing room,” Roebeck commented, “but we don’t know where the President was at that moment in ours. The geographical data may already have started to diverge.”

  “A pity the previous mission wasn’t into 1988 instead of 1991,” Chun said. “We’re so close to having full data.”

  “It could as easily have been 1605,” Grainger said with a laugh. “Then where would we be?”

  “The same place we are now,” Roebeck said. “Working until we fix this mess.”

  Grainger stood at the arms locker, considering options. The most effective way of eliminating sophisticated weapons and equipment—without blasting a hole in the landscape at the same time—was through electromagnetic pulses. The only defense electronics had against EMP was a Faraday cage or magnetic shielding of superior flux density.

  The problem with EMP was that while it was almost certain to destroy a time-displacement device, it wasn’t certain to prevent a hostile from killing you. If the fellow was using a gunpowder weapon with a flame or impact ignition system—let alone a knife or a bow and arrow—your pulse wasn’t going to modify his activities.

  Acoustics, gas, and tanglefoot projectiles all had their uses, though at short ranges they were apt to involve the shooter as well as the target. It wasn’t just a throwback to his upbringing on Sunrise Terrace, where ruthlessness was a reflex, that caused Grainger to favor a weapon firing hypervelocity fléchettes (though there was also a nonlethal option clipped beneath the barrel).

  “I’m going to run three test displacements,” Chun said, “spatial only. Am I clear?”

  “Go ahead,” Roebeck said, nodding. She was building alternative scenarios for the Washington operation.

  The Anti-Revision Command had an agent in place in Washington on the target horizon. The whereabouts of this agent—a local whose duties were simply to provide a safe house in a high-impact horizon—and all agents were held in every capsule at maximum detail. The team would have to intersect the agent before he or she (he, in this instance; a man named Calandine) was affected by the revision… and they couldn’t be absolutely sure that nothing had occurred before the change showed up on their relatively coarse general database for the period.

  The transportation capsule hummed as it pretended to be displacing spatially while remaining in the present temporal horizon. Outside, long, sere grass lifted as the weight of snow melted from it. Weigand and the two he was baby-sitting—Roebeck already regretted letting Barthuli go along—had displaced in their suits.

  Everything flared white. The transportation capsule rang like a cracking bell as it jounced up from the soil.

  Roebeck’s hand hit the square red button on the bulkhead before her. Reflex—displace instantly in an emergency—drove her muscles to the action intellect would have taken had it not been short-circuited.

  Nan Roebeck didn’t know who the hostiles were—not yet. But she knew somebody had just fired a plasma weapon point-blank into TC 779.

  North America

  Circa 10,000 BC

  The tech types at Central claimed everything was the same, whether someone displaced in a transportation capsule or a suit. The engine was identical; it was only the shape of the envelope that differed.

  Pauli Weigand didn’t believe that. When a TC came to rest, the horizon slid into place with a smooth, seamless feeling like that of a key turning in a well-oiled lock. A suit, though—

  A suit paused momentarily. You were nowhere for that instant, not on a horizon or crossing horizons. Weigand was sure he would never have existed if his suit failed at that point.

  Nothing went wrong this time. The horizon appeared as it always did when you displaced by suit, crashing into existence like a safe falling to the sidewalk. Oaks and hickories dotted the slope in front of him, while the rolling plains behind were different only in detail from the terrain on which TC 779 sat in the snow.

  It was early summer here. Insects buzzed among the shoulder-high grasses and the mix of flowering plants with them. The sky was saturated blue between puffs of cumulus clouds, none of them threatening rain, and the bird overhead was a hawk rather than a vulture.

  Barthuli and Major Carnes were already part of the landscape. Barthuli being Barthuli, he’d unlatched his suit without bothering to check his surroundings.

  Weigand’s display was layered: a 70-degree wedge at 1:1, normal vision, on the upper half of his display and below it a full 360-degree panorama compressed into the same 70-degree band. He turned to his right. A prairie chicken exploded from cover almost underfoot.

  Weigand let his heart settle again. He put the wide-muzzled gas/tanglefoot projector back on safe.

  There was nothing large or dangerous in the immediate vicinity. It would still have been nice if Gerd had had sense enough to look before he opened himself up.

  “The suits appear to hold their zero despite long displacement,” Barthuli said as he helped Weigand lift his legs from the armor. He smiled. “At any rate, the three of us arrived as near to simultaneously as we set out.”

  “Are the mechanisms of these suits different from the one in the ship?” Carnes asked. The front of her suit was open to the summer air. “Moving in them feels different to me.”

  Weigand beamed and went over to help Carnes from her armor. She didn’t know that when the power was off, the suit would remain as stable as if fixed to bedrock until the operator released it.

  “It’s solid,” he said as he
offered his arm as a brace. “Don’t worry about it falling over as you climb out.”

  “Central denies there’s a difference, Major,” Barthuli said, “but Pauli disagrees. I don’t see why those up the line should lie to us, but that sort of thing does happen, of course.”

  The analyst drew a headband and a palm-sized recorder/computer from his armor’s equipment pouch. “Where do you think you’re going, Gerd?” Weigand asked in sudden concern.

  Barthuli pointed up the wooded hillside. “We should be very close to the Mississippi River here,” he said. “I’d like to know how considerable its flow is on this horizon, with the ice in final retreat.”

  Weigand grimaced and shook his head—in despair, because he already knew how the argument was going to come out. “Gerd, we may be ten klicks to the west, here, and we’ve got to get back to—”

  “I’m just going to check from the hilltop,” Barthuli said. Weigand noticed that both of them talked as if the other party were a child. “If I can’t see the river from there, I’ll come back. We have an hour, you know.”

  Weigand wiped the sweat from the back of his neck. He’d wanted weather warm enough to get out of the displacement suit—needed to get out of the displacement suit—but as usual, he’d forgotten how hot it could get in an uncontrolled climate.

  “Look, these aren’t the back slopes of bluffs like you’d find along the river here,” he said. Nan should never have let the analyst come along, he thought—and smiled bitterly, knowing he was passing the buck for what was really his responsibility. “It’s just another hill. And I don’t want you to get out of my sight!”

  Barthuli shrugged. “Then come along,” he said in a reasonable tone. “A walk will do all of us good.”

  Carnes’ eyes shifted from one man to the other as if she were watching a tennis match.

  “I’m not going to leave the suits!” Weigand said. He shook his head again and added, “You’ve got your acoustic pistol, don’t you? As a matter of fact, take the gas gun.”

  He held out the fat-barreled shoulder weapon. After all, he’d known from the first syllable that you couldn’t argue with Barthuli.

  “I’ve got enough to carry,” Barthuli said. “Yes, I’ve a pistol, though I can’t imagine there’ll be much need for it. You know how rare dangerous animals are.”

  He looked at Carnes. “Would you like to come, Major?” he asked. “I’m quite confident we’ll see the river. On this horizon the continent is still rising as the weight of ice lessens, so the view won’t be as spectacular as it would be in your day or our own. But it will be there.”

  The analyst nodded to Weigand at the conclusion of what was undeniably a rebuke.

  “May I go?” Carnes asked Weigand. At least somebody seemed to think he was in charge.

  “Keep an eye on him,” Weigand said. “And don’t dawdle. And Gerd, this is really serious, so be careful. We’re going to need you, and I don’t want to explain to Nan that a pack of wolves ate you. All right?”

  Barthuli nodded. “Yes, of course. We’ll be very careful not to trip over tree roots, which I think you’ll find is the greatest danger we encounter.”

  He unlatched the pouch on the hip of Carnes’ armor and drew out the acoustic pistol there. “Come along, Major,” he said, handing the nonlethal weapon to her. “We don’t want to worry anybody.”

  Rather than a parent, Weigand thought as he watched the pair start up the hill, Barthuli sounded more like a spouse humoring his/her dithering mate.

  Eurasia

  Circa 50,000 BC

  Grainger swung for the hatch. He was holding a fléchette gun/EMP generator vertically against his upper chest. He didn’t have the stock shouldered because he didn’t know which way he’d have to aim when he jumped outside.

  “Suit up!” Roebeck ordered. “Chun, take over!”

  “Fuck my suit!” Grainger shouted. “You back me up in yours!”

  Two displacement suits remained in the capsule’s locker. Grainger and Roebeck could have traded equipment in an emergency, but Chun was too short to wear either of the available suits without great discomfort.

  Roebeck lowered herself into her armor with a care that would save time in the long run. Grainger was right, though: they wouldn’t have a long run or any run at all if the hostiles caught the team inside the vehicle a second time.

  The ninety seconds before displacement was complete wasn’t quite enough time to don and power up a cold suit. Better that Grainger be outside, if the hostiles arrived at the same time and place, than that he be suited up to go outside later by the few seconds that they may not have.

  The transportation capsule vibrated to stasis in a broad valley. The nearer wall of the valley sloped gently. The other, a kilometer distant, was for the most part a sheer escarpment.

  Grainger was through the hatch in a single sinuous motion. He sprinted away from the vehicle so that he wouldn’t be caught by whatever weapon the hostiles directed at it in the instant before Grainger nailed them.

  Roebeck locked her faceshield closed and felt the tremble of her suit’s systems coming on line. Her vision, momentarily grainy, sharpened. She hadn’t a clue about where they’d displaced to. The emergency program was intentionally random. The quirk this time was that the displacement was spatial rather than temporal because Chun Quo had shut down the latter system to run her tests.

  The hostiles had attacked TC 779 with a plasma weapon. That was Roebeck’s weapon of choice also in a hard-kill situation, which this assuredly was. She snatched the fat twenty-five kilo tube from the arms locker as she passed on the way to the hatch.

  Nan Roebeck was a civilized person from a civilized time. She had killed before, once. She still dreamed of the distorted face of the revisionist dropping three hundred meters into the Aegean as his EMPed microlight lost power. Specialists at Central said they could excise the memory from her profile, but she’d refused the offer. If she forgot what she’d done, it would be easier for her to do it again.

  She would kill now, without compunction or hesitation. It was necessary to save the mission, to save her time. The hostiles had used a plasma discharge, therefore there had to be an aperture in their protection that passed charged particles.

  If a concomitant of defeating the hostiles was that they be incinerated alive—so be it. Regrets were for the survivors.

  Roebeck ran twenty meters clear of the vehicle and stopped. With the plasma weapon resting on her right shoulder, she touched her left hand to the helmet controls and set her display to highlight movement in a 360-degree arc about her.

  She saw clouds, birds, and tree limbs waving in the slight breeze. A rhinoceros, a tonne of shaggy animal, flicked its ears in concern toward the transportation capsule. The animal was less than 200 meters away, but she hadn’t seen it until the optical software rimmed it with magenta light.

  Grainger squatted beneath a clump of alders. He was poised to EMP anything that appeared behind their vehicle and, knowing Tim Grainger, to rake it with fléchettes as well.

  But there were no intruders in the landscape with them.

  “Okay, Tim,” Roebeck said. “Suit up while I watch things here. Then we’ll trade places—but I want you in armor.”

  “Right,” said Grainger with the momentary hesitation that meant he’d considered the order rather than simply obeying it. He rose to his feet and trotted to the vehicle, smiling faintly.

  The ARC Riders were individuals, with individual virtues. If they’d been automatons stamped from sheet stock, Roebeck’s team wouldn’t have had the flexibility that made it so effective.

  Still, Nan Roebeck sometimes wished that Grainger was quicker to accept “because I said so” as sufficient justification; and that Barthuli understood that anybody else’s desires could possibly be important.

  Roebeck walked toward a gray outcrop from which a fig tree sprouted. She wouldn’t be on guard here for long, but she’d find a good location anyway. Metal ores in the granite might blur her sui
t’s outline for a few instants. That could be critical….

  It would have been easy to stumble because her viewpoint was set on panorama with movement highlighted. Roebeck had trained herself to move normally despite her distorted vision.

  Anti-Revision Command equipment was wonderfully versatile, but that didn’t matter unless the personnel were comfortable using it. Roebeck had familiarized herself with all aspects of the hardware. The lives of her team and the success of a mission might depend on her ability to use some obscure capacity of her suit.

  Grainger actively disliked wearing armor. He preferred to trust his reflexes and instincts, though intellectually he knew that a suit’s sensor suite multiplied his human senses at least a hundredfold. He wore his suit grudgingly. He knew how to use its systems, but he had to think before he engaged them.

  Confinement bothered Weigand. He couldn’t like a displacement suit any more than he could have liked a pillow smothering him. He was a top systems engineer and second only to Roebeck herself as the team’s jack of all trades, but he mentally cringed every time he had to put his suit on.

  As for Chun, she knew the equipment inside and out. She’d once entered two separate settings by disconnecting her suit’s preselector circuit, then displaced to within 31 hours of a calculated third point by riding the harmonics of the original pair. Roebeck hadn’t tried to duplicate that trick, partly because she couldn’t see any use for it—but largely because she didn’t believe her grasp of the concept was subtle enough to avoid disaster.

  But Chun Quo’s bone-deep aversion to conflict was a danger to the team in a confrontation. She refused to handle lethal weapons, which was acceptable; but she invariably hesitated before using any weapon, however harmless, and that could get your friends killed. Chun couldn’t have changed her behavior if she wanted to—and she assuredly didn’t want to.