Arc Riders

by David Drake

  She filled her lungs with the clean, unfiltered air. Roebeck wore gloves, but the air wasn’t uncomfortably cool on her face and she didn’t feel the need to switch on her coveralls’ supplemental heating element. The fabric formed a nearly perfect insulating layer when conditions called for it.

  She wouldn’t miss this site, though she’d found it a pleasant one for the most part. Geologic and evolutionary change was so slow that TC 779’s dump sites in 50K seemed static from one century to the next. This Eurasian valley was an interesting variation on the plains to which revisionists were consigned.

  And the valley wasn’t, of course, empty of human life.

  Roebeck knew she’d come out looking for the Neanderthal mother and daughter. Chun could probably have told her where the pair was at this moment—assuming they were still in the valley—but Roebeck had been too embarrassed to ask.

  Roebeck had been a crèche child—so was Quo, so were most of their contemporaries. She didn’t miss the lack of a mother, her mother, in her development… but there was a fascination in watching a child interact with the woman who had given birth to her.

  She walked toward the cliff, cradling her weapon in the crook of her left arm. The EMP generator made the combination muzzle-heavy and hard to sling, not that Grainger seemed to have much problem with his similar rig. At this point there was small chance of the hostile ARC Riders hitting them a second time, but Roebeck wasn’t about to take a risk with the team’s safety. She’d already lost half their personnel by being complacent.

  The cliff had weathered into meter-high steps mounting from the scree which formed the tailings of the process. Roebeck had climbed that way a score of times. The ledge midway up was deep enough to be a comfortable seat.

  She noticed a wink of red on the lowest step. She moved toward it, choosing her footing carefully on the slope of shattered rock.

  The object was a garnet the size of her thumb, chipped laboriously from the hard matrix in which it had formed. It was no more than a curiosity in Roebeck’s day; crystals of any shape and material were as cheap as any other rock. To those who placed it here for the stranger to find, however, it was an object of unique beauty.

  Roebeck raised the garnet to the sun, seeing shadows wake and ripple in the ruddy depths. She looked about her again.

  Two pairs of eyes watched from a clump of cedars only fifty meters away. The Neanderthals were lying on their bellies to peer through interwoven branches at the base of the four-meter trees. Beyond the cedars was a mixed copse of hard- and softwoods, nearly a hectare in extent. The wings of birds flashed among the trees in the morning light.

  Roebeck slipped the garnet into one of the pockets at the waist of her coveralls. She thought for a moment, then took off one glove. She reached up to the flattened starburst on the left side of her collar, the insignia of the Anti-Revision Command. Hers was silver, not gold like the others’, because she was team leader. Pressure from her bare thumb and index finger released its grip on the cloth.

  A rounded boulder, an outcrop rather than a straggler from the cliff face, domed the soil about halfway between Roebeck and the cedars, though not quite in a direct line. She sauntered toward it, turning her head slightly to continue looking at the faces beneath the cedars.

  She smiled, though she wasn’t certain the expression would have the same meaning to Neanderthals.

  Branches crackled in the copse. The gathering volume of noise ended in a damp thump and silence. Snow loosened by dawn from a treetop swept lower limbs clean as it fell, a miniature avalanche.

  The abrupt changes of temperature would make this slope of the valley dangerous. Rock split as it warmed and expanded during the daytime. Water which seeped into the cracks froze overnight and further shattered the fabric. Slabs would fall without warning, crushing anyone who happened to be in their way.

  Roebeck wouldn’t have to worry about that after today. As for the Neanderthals, well, it was their world to adapt to or die. And eventually everything died. An ARC Rider knew that well.

  She held the starburst high so that it winked brightly, then set it on the boulder. Nodding to the Neanderthals behind their screen, Roebeck walked a dozen steps away and sat down on a tussock of grass. The cap of half-congealed snow crunched beneath her, but the coveralls were waterproof.

  She waited, watching the cedars.

  Roebeck half expected to hear a complaint from Chun. The vehicle was only two hundred meters away. Chun and Grainger were certainly watching their leader on the display. Chun, at least, would be sick with fear and anger at what Roebeck was doing.

  She had a right to be. At best, Roebeck was acting unprofessionally; at worst—and Roebeck didn’t believe this, not really, but Chun did—she might be causing a revision more overwhelming than the one that had cut the team off from its own timeline.

  Roebeck grimaced and started to rise. She’d retrieve the starburst, leave the garnet in its place, and TC 779 would go on about its necessary business.

  The Neanderthal child wriggled out from her hiding place. She didn’t seem to touch the branches, though they appeared too tightly interwoven to pass a squirrel.

  For a moment the child stood, as motionless as the trees behind her. Her face broke into a toothy grin, though again Rocbeck couldn’t be sure the expression was equivalent to a modern smile.

  Roebeck smiled back anyway. The child scampered to the boulder. Roebeck had seen her wearing a cape of plaited grass in recent days, but this sunny morning the child was nude again.

  The Neanderthal stared at the insignia from a distance of two meters, shifting her position so that her shadow didn’t fall across the glitter. Her mother continued to watch from the cedars.

  The child leaped for the starburst and caught it in her hands. The movement was startlingly quick; the act of someone who had learned to snatch birds from low branches or go hungry some mornings. Poised to run, she stared at Roebeck. Her eyes were the same startling blue that Roebeck had first noticed in the mother.

  Roebeck nodded and continued to smile. The expression was becoming a strain, but she was afraid to relax it lest the Neanderthals misunderstand.

  The child put the insignia in the corner of her mouth and bit down on it with molars that could crush a walnut. Roebeck blinked in surprise. The starburst was beryllium monocrystal, proof against even Neanderthal jaws. It just hadn’t occurred to her that the child would test the object in that particular way.

  Roebeck stood up very slowly. She held the fléchette gun crossways with one hand at the butt and the other on the muzzle, letting her arms hang full length. The Neanderthals would think the weapon was a club, but they should understand that Roebeck wasn’t handling it in a threatening way.

  The child stiffened. Her mother croaked a command or warning to her. The child turned her head toward the cedars, chirped a phrase that lilted by contrast with her mother’s demand, and looked at Roebeck again. Wearing a big grin, the girl dabbed the starburst against the side of her neck—the place it had ridden on Roebeck’s collar.

  Even though Roebeck was erect and facing in the right general direction, she hadn’t seen the hyenas slinking toward her through the copse. The first warning to Roebeck and the Neanderthals came when the three powerful beasts lunged the last twenty meters toward the child.

  Two of the hyenas came from the right of the clump of cedars while the other passed to the left. They were spread on a broad front to cut the child off if she fled to either side. They didn’t notice the mother until she burst from cover with a scream of despair and a meter-long hickory club.

  The child bawled in fear and ran, back toward her mother and the jaws of the oncoming hyenas.

  Roebeck shouldered the fléchette gun. The range was a little long for acoustics and anyway the lethal weapon was already in her hands. She squeezed off a burst at the biggest of the three brutes, firing over the child’s head.

  The coils surged, at each pulse vaporizing a fléchette’s aluminum driving band into a co
nductive vapor and ejecting it from the bore by magnetic repulsion. The aluminum combined with air in a white flash at the muzzle. The needle of orthocrystaline tungsten snapped toward the target at a dozen times the speed of sound.

  The hyena spun and snapped at the air, then came on again. Tiny flecks of blood sparkled on the yellow and black of its spotted hide.

  The fléchettes were meant to pierce heavy armor. In flesh they merely punched a pinpoint hole. The wounds gaped momentarily from hydrostatic shock, but the plasticity of muscle slapped the temporary cavities shut again.

  When the fléchettes hit bone, the bone cracked. Where they hit organs of low resilience like the spleen, the tissues ruptured from the shockwave and began spilling the animal’s life out into its body cavity. But for all their lethality, the dense needles had almost no stopping power.

  Roebeck hosed the right-hand hyena, an easier shot because the Neanderthal child wasn’t at risk from the projectiles. Recoil lifted her weapon and torqued it to the right, but Roebeck managed to rip both spine and cranial vault when the beast’s spasmodic leap kept it in the path of the tungsten stream.

  The Neanderthal mother swung her club horizontally, using both arms and all the strength of her shoulders. The hickory struck the left-hand hyena’s flank. The club split like a marrow bone with a shower of splinters and a crack worthy of a lightning bolt. The hyena spun sideways, its pelvis crushed by the blow.

  The center hyena leaped like the cat it resembled as closely as it did a dog. It knocked down the child with its forepaws and had her face in its jaws before Roebeck could swing the heavy fléchette gun back on target.

  The Neanderthal mother screamed. Roebeck screamed, because she couldn’t shoot without raking the child as well.

  The hyena leaped up on its hind legs, snapping its empty jaws on the air. It turned a backflip and landed on its side several meters away. Its four limbs flailed without rhythm or direction.

  The whack of the single tungsten fléchette that had decorticated the beast echoed flatly from the valley wall. A spray of brain tissue and bone chips stained the snowy grass in a direct line from where the hyena’s skull had been—and back to Tim Grainger, standing beside the vehicle 200 meters away with his gun at his shoulder.

  The mother snatched up her offspring and mopped saliva from the child’s face with one hand. The girl blubbered, but she wasn’t seriously injured. Though the long canines had punctured her scalp, the fléchette jellied the beast’s brain an instant before the jaws crushed down with full force.

  Grainger aimed and fired again. The third hyena had been squirming forward despite its shattered hindquarters. The animal twitched and relaxed with a sigh. Its staring eyes were bulged, driven almost from their sockets by the shockwave that slammed like a maul through the brain and optic nerves.

  Roebeck knelt down. She felt so weak that she had to plant the butt of her fléchette gun on the soil like a third leg to prevent her from falling over.

  “Nan, are you all right?” Chun Quo called over the communicator. Grainger ran toward the scene with his weapon held at high port, close to his chest. “Were you hit?”

  Nan Roebeck had just revised the past. She didn’t know, she couldn’t guess, what that meant for the timeline from which she sprang.

  “Quo, I’m fine,” Roebeck said, letting the vocative autokey her headband to transmit. “I’m woozy, that’s all. I’m fine.”

  All Roebeck knew for sure about what had just happened was that she’d do it again, whatever the cost, to keep from watching hyenas devour a child in front of her.

  The Neanderthal mother trotted for the woods, carrying her daughter. Her eyes were on Grainger, and she slanted slightly away from his approach.

  The child squirmed out of her mother’s arms and ran back. Roebeck thought the child was coming to her. She stood up, swaying with the effort.

  The child dropped to her knees and scrabbled on the bloody ground where the hyena had seized her. Her mother grabbed her around the waist and snarled through bared teeth.

  The girl raised the starburst emblem and cooed in delight as her mother carried her into the forest. She waved toward Roebeck.

  Grainger halted beside Roebeck. He was breathing hard from the run and trying not to show it. He wagged his fléchette gun in ironic salute and said, “Not really the tool of choice for the job, but she’ll do in a pinch.”

  Roebeck embraced the gunman. “Thanks Tim,” she said. “Nice to know that if I screw up, I’ve still got friends.”

  Then she said, “Now let’s go see if there’s still a 1968 for us to straighten out.”

  North America

  Circa 10,000 BC

  Rebecca Carnes wished she could scratch her right side. The jacket of her fatigues was bunched up over her hip, and it itched as if a mouse were crawling over her.

  A third figure appeared on the meadow. The displacement suits didn’t move into sight, they just were. It was like a trick with mirrors, where a minute change of angle switched the visible scene entirely.

  “Don’t take your armor off!” Pauli’s voice commanded. He was holding his fat-barreled weapon ready. Carnes supposed it was a grenade launcher, but guns weren’t her line of territory.

  What Rebecca Carnes had learned in a war zone, then found to be true in civilian life as well, is that nobody really knows what’s going on while it’s happening. She’d been at Long Binh with the 93d during the 1968 Tet Offensive. The night was a zoo of orderlies running into the wards shouting the alert status, constant explosions she’d thought were outgoing artillery (some of them had been incoming mortar rounds), and attempts to get the patients onto the floor for safety—then back in bed when somebody claimed the alert level had dropped to yellow again.

  Carnes had done what was in front of her, without having the slightest notion of what the situation really was. The next morning they’d found a VC with a satchel charge, shot dead within fifty feet of the barracks Carnes normally slept in, not that anybody’d gotten much sleep that night. The whole thing was a razor’s edge from catastrophe, and she hadn’t known any more about it than she had at Firebase Schaydin during her last night in her own time.

  More to the point, the Long Binh base commander hadn’t known what was going on, either; and if the commander of US forces in Vietnam did know, he’d sure worked hard to obscure the fact. His statements were so far out of touch with reality that Carnes had suspected he’d landed on his head once too often while he was a paratrooper.

  Since she’d come to that realization, chaos didn’t frighten Carnes the way it once had. She’d do her job if she had one and try to stay out of the way if she clearly didn’t. She was willing to attempt something even if she wasn’t sure what the right thing was, but she was well aware of how easily blind motion could make a bad situation worse.

  Right now, Carnes was keeping her mouth shut and obeying orders. If somebody dropped with a bullet through the lungs or had a foot blown off by a mine, she’d be back on the job in an eyeblink.

  “I have a scenario, Pauli,” Barthuli said. “Any time you’re ready to examine it.”

  “You’ve run this through already?” Weigand demanded. He sounded as much angry as amazed.

  “A matter of giving the correct instructions to the equipment,” the analyst said in mild reproof. “Processing time is minuscule, you know.”

  Carnes heard Weigand sigh. Pauli had fallen into the common human trap of believing merely mechanically complicated things were difficult. It bothered him that Barthuli could solve what was basically a mathematical problem almost instantly. Pauli was their leader. He thought he should be able to solve his problem—how to rejoin the rest of the team, how to change time back to a pattern Carnes had never known—at least as quickly as the analyst could re-create a past reality. Instead, it/they remained an intractable mass in Weigand’s consciousness.

  Barthuli had a handheld computer as advanced from the Crays of Carnes’ day as her own brain was improved from whatever it w
as that guided bacteria. Matters that could be reduced to number crunching were easy—like landing a man on the moon as opposed to solving poverty, where the very terms slipped like water through the nets of analysis.

  It took enormous skill to repair a soldier’s bullet-ripped heart, lungs, and spleen, but it was mechanical skill: surgeon meant literally “manual laborer.” Bringing back the mind of a man found catatonic, alive and unmarked in the midst of a dozen mangled corpses—that was a job for genius or for God, and Rebecca Carnes hadn’t believed in God since her first tour in Nam.

  “Yeah, sure, run it,” Weigand said. “Sorry, Gerd. I’m jumpy.”

  Weigand shifted his weapon closer to his body. It looked to Carnes as if the big man was prepared to fight but no longer expected he’d need to. The prairie and nearby woods were much the same as when the trio left them a few minutes earlier. The only change she could see was the score of shaggy buffaloes grazing on the next rise.

  A picture formed—flashed—in the air an apparent meter from Carnes’ eyes. Her own armor must be projecting the image, since Barthuli and Weigand were facing in different directions.

  Two transportation capsules—identical as far as Carnes could tell, except that the hatch of one was open—stood in near contact. Beams of ravening light ripped from the open hatch and splashed the other capsule.

  The target disappeared. Seconds later, the hatch of the remaining capsule closed and that vehicle also vanished. Only then did Carnes recognize the background as the scarred, snowclad prairie to which the three of them had returned in 50,000 BC.

  “How did you do that?” she demanded. “We weren’t there. How did you get pictures of what happened?”

  Barthuli’s helmet didn’t move, but she suspected the analyst’s head had turned toward her as he said, “It’s one possible scenario of what happened, Rebecca. There are certain verifiable facts: the type of weapons used, the location from which they’d have had to be fired in order to give the pattern of reflection damage to the surroundings. The rest is supposition—by my computer, merely a machine, as to the most probable series of events that would give rise to those facts.”