Arc Riders

by David Drake

He bowed deeply to the leader. The gesture might have been unfamiliar, but the meaning was intuitively clear.

  Several children fed a fire in the center of the camp. Nothing was being cooked over the flames. At intervals an old woman levered out hot stones with a pair of sticks. She rolled the stones into pits in the sand, lined with hides and filled with water in which gobbets of meat floated. The stones shattered loudly and gushed steam when they hit the water.

  “Try some mammoth, Pauli,” the analyst offered, motioning with his piece of meat. “And you, Rebecca. It reminds me of horse, though it’s not so stringy.”

  Carnes shook her head curtly. Apparently Barthuli’s love of the unfamiliar extended to food products. Carnes had spent five years total in Vietnam and southern China without sampling dog meat. She had no desire to try mammoth; from an animal which, judging by the odor that permeated the camp, was riper than the Department of Agriculture would have approved.

  “Gerd,” Weigand said pleasantly. He clasped the analyst around the shoulders, giving him and the band’s leader a broad grin as he did so. “You’re coming back with us now. Either you smile and walk out of the camp with me, or I gas the whole lot of them and carry you out over my shoulder. Do you have a preference?”

  Carnes was impressed. From Weigand’s tone, he could have been commenting on how pretty the flower arrangement looked. She didn’t in the least doubt he was ready to carry out the threat, however.

  “We’ll go,” said Barthuli. He turned and also bowed to the hunting band’s leader. “I’m very sorry I put you to this trouble, Pauli. And you even more so, Major Carnes.”

  A girl wearing only a deerhide apron sidled up to Carnes. She looked twenty, but her bare breasts were too firm to have suckled children, and Carnes assumed the age of marriage in this culture was puberty. The girl rolled the rip-stopped poplin sleeve of Carnes’ shirt between thumb and forefinger, marveling at the slick feel of the cloth.

  Carnes smiled at her. The girl wore a necklace of clamshells and galena ore strung on sinew. The mother-of-pearl contrasted pleasantly with the metallic sheen of the crystals of lead and zinc sulfide.

  Carnes reached into her hip pocket, where she carried a handkerchief. The bit of cloth would be a wonder to this child—

  “Major Carnes, don’t do that, please!” Weigand said. “Come along with us now.”

  Carnes broke away from the girl and bowed.

  She was blushing with shame. Pauli was right. Carnes turned and trotted ahead of the two men. One of the dogs barked. For the most part the pack had gone back to quarreling over scraps of meat, despite the tons of it available on the carcass itself.

  “I’m sorry,” Carnes said without looking around to meet Weigand’s eyes.

  “We’ve all done worse,” Weigand said calmly. “But don’t let Gerd here convince you that there’s no rules and no need for them, all right?”

  Carnes glanced over her shoulder when she reached the willows. The band of hunters had resumed its previous occupations, sated and logy with the meat of its kill. The girl waved; then Carnes was slogging again through mud and brush, an age away from the native hunters.

  If she’d been thinking, she would have remembered to go straight up the bluffs and avoid the worst of the swamp; but whatever works….

  Eurasia

  Circa 50,000 BC

  The storm came over the western rim of the valley, blotting the sun. A gust of wind tried to lift the newly manufactured roof. Roebeck grabbed the curling edge and held it down.

  “I think we got this up just in time,” Grainger said, dropping his load next to the hopper which fed the extrusion device. He dusted his hands and stretched. The tree he’d dragged here didn’t look like much—a sapling nowhere more than ten or twelve centimeters in diameter. Multiply that by six meters, though, and you have a significant weight even in cellulose.

  “Almost up,” said Chun, raising her voice over the wind howl. “Another minute should do it.”

  She moved the nozzle in careful circles. Roebeck could see she wasn’t going to slim down the pillar she was extruding from the ground anchor to the hook in the corner of the roof which Roebeck now held.

  Chun had calculated that six 50-millimeter pillars were needed to support the roof if the construction material was coarse cellulose. Therefore the last pillar was going to be 50 millimeters in diameter all the way up, even if the delay meant the three of them would still be outside when the violent storm broke.

  “You can go in, Tim,” Roebeck said.

  He shrugged. “No problem,” he said. He looked at his hands and added, “I’ve got sap on my gloves. One of you had better cycle the hatch for me.”

  The first raindrops hit with cracking, slapping sounds so sharp that Roebeck thought for a moment the drops were hail. Roebeck’s coveralls shed the water like polished brass, but the smash of huge, cold drops on her face was thoroughly unpleasant. She turned her head away from the storm, wishing Chun would get on with it.

  The transportation capsule carried basic equipment to construct shelter and camouflage outside the vehicle. The operators loaded matter into a hundred-liter hopper. The extrusion apparatus reduced the hopper’s contents into its molecular constituents. The matter was processed in the belly of the device, then sprayed out to solidify a centimeter or two beyond the nozzle.

  The operator could program the apparatus to duplicate the appearance of any object whose parameters were known to a sufficient degree of detail; alternatively, she could use the nozzle freehand as Chun was doing now. If you wanted more than a visual match, of course—a wooden boulder or a granite tree—you had to to dump the correct contents into the feed hopper.

  The apparatus didn’t care what raw material it started with. The dissolution process was electrostatic, not mechanical: diamond would work as well as wet clay. For that matter, the device could operate on the carbon dioxide in normal air, though that material’s relatively low density meant the process took forever.

  Roebeck had given in to the weather on the previous morning and agreed the team would need shelter before they completed their task. The loss of the Maxwell Field generators irked her more than she’d been willing to admit. By sorting gases according to energy—temperature—and weight, the Maxwell Field would have kept the team warm and dry without the need for a physical barrier.

  The rain slashed down. It’d taken a day to erect the roof, and already Roebeck could see they team would need walls as well on the two windward sides. All because those bastards—

  Roebeck barked a humorless laugh.

  “Nan?” Grainger said.

  “No problem,” she replied. Roebeck knew perfectly well the depth of her anger about the field generators was emotion transferred from the loss of Pauli, Gerd, and the major… which she wasn’t willing to look at straight on.

  The real enemies were the revisionists who’d split the timeline. It would give Roebeck a great deal of pleasure, however, to put the hostile ARC Riders stark naked out the hatch of TC 779, to make lives for themselves in 50K. She suspected Grainger, at least, had similar thoughts; though Tim’s hopes more likely involved a view through the sights of his fléchette gun.

  “All right, you can let go now,” Chun said, lowering the extrusion nozzle. She stepped back to take a look at her handiwork. A roe deer—a yearling doe—blundered from the storm, caromed off the new pillar, and knocked Chun down with a cry.

  The animal was terrified and exhausted. Its tongue lolled loosely from its mouth, and the fur of its breast was black with frothy sweat. The deer managed to keep its feet after shouldering Chun aside. Staggering and splay-legged, it resumed its course out the back of the sheltered area. Roebeck first thought the beast was drawn by the floodlights, but it seemed oblivious of their presence.

  Lightning ripped the sky. A pine growing from the cliff-side a hundred meters away split in a shower of sparks; the crashing thunder reverberated down the valley.

  Grainger released his sticky palm from the grip
of his acoustic pistol. He frowned in irritation and embarrassment toward the deer, which had halted with its legs braced, twenty meters from the vehicle.

  Roebeck bent to help Chun. Chun got her feet under her unaided and warned, “I think she broke the brace. Grab—”

  Roebeck turned and saw the three giant hyenas as they sidled into the area lit by the floods reflecting off the capsule’s hull. Each beast weighed more than a man, and their long jaws were as powerful as lions’.

  Grainger screamed a curse as pine pitch on his hand slowed his draw to that of a mere expert. Roebeck drew her pistol as well. Chun screamed, “Don’t! Don’t shoot unless—”

  “It’s just acoustics!” Grainger said, but he poised with his finger on the trigger instead of shooting. The post broken by the deer’s shoulder gave way. The corner of the roof whipped up and back in another gust of wind. Rain sparkled in the light as it lashed the ten meters of soil between the team and the beasts of prey.

  The hyenas stood several meters apart. The beast in the center weighed well over a hundred kilograms. It giggled, a sound compounded of madness and malice.

  “They’re meant to catch the doe!” Chun explained. She stepped to Grainger’s side, still holding the extrusion nozzle. “If we frighten them off, then—”

  “Then nothing!” Grainger snarled, but still he didn’t shoot.

  The hyenas simultaneously broke to the left, putting the vehicle between them and the humans. The beasts’ stunted hindquarters gave them a clumsy, shambling look as they trotted, but they had run down the roe deer in the course of this night.

  The deer tried to move again. It only stumbled. The hyenas surged into view around the capsule they’d skirted. One of the hyenas grabbed the deer by its left hind leg, just above the hoof. Bones snapped beneath the crushing teeth. Another hyena clamped its long jaws onto the deer’s throat, choking the bawl of despair.

  The third hyena, the largest of the pack, began tearing at the victim’s anus and genitals, flinging bloody spray in its enthusiasm. The free hind leg continued to thrash wildly.

  Roebeck reholstered the acoustic pistol. “I’m going in,” she said deliberately. “If you want to fix the roof now, feel free, but I think it can wait till morning.”

  The front of the storm had passed. The rain fell heavily, but despite its drumbeat on the shelter roof, Roebeck thought she could hear the slurping of the predators’ feast.

  North America

  Circa 50,000 BC

  Through the fabric of his displacement suit, Pauli Weigand felt the initial shudder of phase synchronous. “A thousand one,” he counted with his eyes closed. “A thousand two.”

  Nan was going to be angry about the delay of almost four hours. She had a right to be angry. He’d been in charge and he’d let Gerd wander off when he knew what the analyst was like.

  But that was all right, as long as Weigand wasn’t stuck in a timeless nowhere.

  “A thousand—”

  Harmony between his suit, himself, and the time horizon. Weigand opened his eyes. He saw the other two suits, Gerd and Major Carnes. Good. He’d made sure they were on the way back to the capsule before he displaced himself.

  TC 779 wasn’t present. Bad. That it had been here recently was clear from the pattern burned deep in the soil by plasma which the vehicle’s magnetic shielding repelled. Real bad.

  “Gerd, record it!” Weigand ordered. He ejected the magazine of gas cartridges and replaced it with one of tanglefoot rounds. That left a gas shell in the chamber. Rather than extract it, then have a loose round to fool with, Weigand pointed the muzzle at a 45-degree angle toward the gray-white sky and fired.

  The toomp! of the gun at least let Weigand pretend he was capable of doing something useful. If the gas shell didn’t hit a really unlucky bird, it would land two klicks downrange. When it dispersed its contents over ten square meters of snow, it might possibly knock some voles or rabbits unconscious in their tunnels.

  Tanglefoot cartridges weren’t much of a choice against hostiles armed with plasma weapons, but they were the best Weigand had available. You use what you’ve got.

  “Carnes, come close to me!” Weigand shouted. She’d drawn her pistol, indicating she understood the problem, but acoustics would be as useless as gas. What the three of them needed to do was get the hell out of here. Weigand would have to carry Carnes with him when he displaced, or the best she’d do was become separated from the two ARC Riders forever.

  Weigand switched his suit to spot and vector him to anything electronic; anything alive that weighed over 50 kilograms, and anything metal over a hundred grams. Immediately his visor streaked with dozens of pale green lines as though the optics had shattered.

  He swore and clicked off the electronics parameter. He hadn’t thought about the Maxwell Field generators, abandoned around the ellipse they’d mostly cleared of snow before the heat source on TC 779 vanished.

  TC 779 had displaced, not vanished. If the revisionist attack had destroyed the vehicle, there’d have been more sign than trenches burned across the prairie. Nan, Tim, and Quo were fine, preparing even now to wax those revisionist bastards’ asses.

  Which is what Weigand and Barthuli were going to do, too. Standard operating procedure required every member of a separated team to carry on with the mission. The mission took absolute precedence.

  But first Weigand had to get his people out of here. The location had drawn the hostiles once. They could be back anytime, any time at all.

  Carnes was standing beside him, just out of contact. A really good teammate. Weigand turned up the inside of his wrist so he could get to the controls, then set his suit to revert to the previous setting.

  The wrist controls were as flexible as international Morse code, another two-element system. It took a while to get the touch, and a lot longer to execute a complex instruction set flawlessly. Weigand wasn’t about to tell a completely green hand how to set her displacement suit to revert.

  Several Maxwell Field generators had melted in the splashing ions. One seemed to have burned; it’d taken the direct charge of a badly aimed beam. The generators’ gray plastic casings were almost as inert as basalt. At the temperature of nitrogen plasma, the unit disintegrated to its constituent atoms, some of which flared as they recombined with the oxygen of the air.

  The same thing would happen to a man, even a man in armor, if the beam hit him squarely. Him or her.

  Weigand wiped the displacement readings from his display. “All right, hug me,” he said. Carnes was a solid person, too smart to act on assumptions that she’d pulled from thin air.

  With his naked eye, Weigand could tell that the attack on the vehicle had occurred some while in the past. Snow melted by plasma and TC 779’s heater, preparing the area sheltered by the Maxwell Fields, had refrozen into solid ice. The ambient temperature was in the order of −50°C, cold but not cold enough to flash-freeze boiling water at normal pressures.

  “Gerd, are you ready?” Weigand asked. Bad as he wanted them to clear the area, Weigand knew the team would need as much information as possible to plan what to do next.

  The recorders integral to the displacement suits were gathering data, but the specialized rig Barthuli panned across the site was more subtle and detailed by an order of magnitude. The analyst had unlimbered his flat gray case as quickly as Weigand reloaded with tanglefoot rounds.

  “I suppose I’ve reached the level of diminishing returns,” Barthuli said. Weigand could imagine the slight smile Gerd would wear as he spoke the words. “Human life isn’t long enough to assemble all the possible information, of course.”

  “All right, then we’ll revert to 10K,” Weigand said. As he spoke, he turned his head within the helmet, covering his surroundings with direct vision as well as the compressed panorama and the suit’s own—vastly more capable—multispectral sensors. “Major Carnes, here we go.”

  Weigand pressed the tit on his left wrist. The horizon around him vanished into limbo, while he wonder
ed what in hell he was going to do next.

  Eurasia

  Circa 50,000 BC

  Tim Grainger stood and stretched. His face bore a broad, slow grin. “You know,” he said, “I think we’ve got a working transportation capsule again.” Then he added, “I think I’ll put my armor on. Usually I’d worry about it turning to a straitjacket if they EMPed us, but that doesn’t”—his smile went as hard as the steel maw of a power shovel—“seem to be the first likelihood with this bunch. Our opposite numbers.”

  “Nan, I’d like to run one more cold check on the system,” Chun Quo said from her usual seat. “Could I—”

  “Quo,” said Grainger as he unslung the fléchette gun he’d carried even in the vehicle since the attack in North America. “There’s billions of possible circuit combinations. We can’t check a significant proportion of them, but we’ve checked a hundred and twelve without a glitch of any kind. Statistically, another hundred and twelve isn’t going to change anything except the length of time our hair grows here in 50K.”

  Roebeck eyed the display. Bright sun gleamed from snow on the bushes and grass tufts. The ground had remained warm while the snow fell during the night. The white fluff remained unmelted only where it was elevated from the soil.

  “You’ve got an hour,” Roebeck said to Chun. “I’m going for a walk.”

  Grainger grimaced.

  Roebeck raised her eyebrow toward him. “She doesn’t complain about you keeping your security blanket with you all the time we’ve been here, Tim,” she said.

  Grainger looked startled, then genuinely amused. He patted the receiver of his fléchette gun and said, “You’ve got a point there, chief.”

  Instead of donning his displacement suit, Grainger flipped out a seat beside Chun’s. “Let’s both of us run checks while the lady mistress is gone, Quo,” he said.

  Roebeck smiled as she went out the hatch, carrying another fléchette/EMP combination. Tim and Quo were a good team.

  The wind had died when the snowfall began, and the air remained as still as marble. Roebeck ducked beneath the eaves as she walked through the open end of the shelter.