Arc Riders

by David Drake

  “But it isn’t probable, is it?” Weigand asked, trying to come to grips with an image he hadn’t expected. “The revisionists couldn’t have a capsule like ours.”

  “The revisionists we’ve been tracking couldn’t have plasma weapons of the type involved in this attack,” Barthuli said. “These are standard—ARC standard—atmospheric nitrogen weapons, not the laser-pumped tritium guns that some vehicles mounted in the mid-23d century. Remember, the modeling program”—he lifted his tiny sensor pack/computer between his gloved thumb and forefinger to call attention to it—“has the benefit of a full spectral analysis of the vestiges of the attack.”

  Weigand’s left hand rose to his helmet, then fell away without touching the faceplate. He’d forgotten he was wearing a displacement suit; he’d been about to rub his eyes with his palm.

  “Sure, Central’s still there,” Weigand said with a pretense of calm. “It’s just not our Central.”

  He cleared his throat. The intercom system reproduced the sound perfectly. “I’m not sure what to do next,” he said simply. “Gerd—”

  “We needn’t rush into this,” the analyst said. He was temporizing. He didn’t know what the right move was, either, though he didn’t sound particularly concerned about the matter. “If the other Anti-Revision Command could determine the point to which we’d displaced, they’d have attacked us also.”

  “Maybe I’ll think better if I’m out of this armor,” Weigand muttered. His hand moved toward but not to the latch of his breastplate.

  “The other ARC Riders don’t matter to you, do they?” Carnes said. “I mean, if you correct the change Watney and his friends made, the future beyond them vanishes. Right?”

  It wasn’t so much that pieces were falling together in her mind. Rather, extraneous bits had fallen away, no longer camouflaging the real needs. Emergency medical personnel learned very quickly to focus on critical matters, ignoring things that weren’t life-threatening and could be passed until there was leisure to deal with them.

  “Yes, but we can’t go knocking around Washington in 1968,” Weigand protested. “We don’t even know who we’d be looking for.”

  “These suits can’t hover out of phase, Rebecca,” Barthuli added. His tone was too dry to be patronizing. Perhaps he didn’t remember that Weigand had explained all that to Carnes before her first displacement.

  “The other, ah, hostiles will spot us long before we’ve located our target,” Weigand said.

  “You don’t know who we’re looking for,” Carnes said with a tight rein on her temper. It had been a long, hard day for her, that was the gospel truth. “But Kyle Watney does, and I know how to find Watney in 1991. If he’s alive, at least. He’ll be coming back to the compound in Son Tay.”

  “Rebecca,” Barthuli said, “that’s very good. I didn’t—I might not ever have considered that. Of course, there’s still the matter of transportation. Our suits can’t displace geographically, and we’re in North America, not Southeast Asia.”

  Pauli Weigand slung his weapon so that he could slap his armored palms together in triumph. “Don’t worry about that, Gerd!” he said. “You just give us a setting that won’t get any of the three of us in the way of our former selves. I’ll take care of transport when you get us to the right horizon.”

  Carnes thought the big man was going to clap his hands again. Instead, he put his arm around her shoulder and patted her, hard enough to make the suit ring like a shell hitting armor.

  “Now we’re moving!” he said.

  Lincoln Memorial,

  Washington, DC

  March 15, 1967

  Grainger couldn’t get over how different from his memories of the district, circa 2025, everything seemed in this 1967 Washington as he hiked uphill toward Memorial Bridge and the Lincoln Memorial beyond.

  On the Ides of March, one year and two weeks before the President of the United States was to make the speech that plunged his country and his world into a nuclear nightmare, all looked prosperous and orderly inside the Beltway under a bright spring sun. There was no sign on this horizon of the infrastructural stresses that would make Grainger’s native Washington a cultural war zone crumbling underfoot, eroding visibly as it struggled to fund vast entitlement programs for its insatiable underclasses.

  Here and now, federal green spaces were being cut with martial precision. The air was filled with the sounds of mowers and the smell of fresh-cut grass, masking the dull roar and exhaust fumes of an endless stream of gleaming internal-combustion autos. Young red tulips planted by the thousands along Memorial Bridge and its traffic arteries bloomed in the grass like tears shed by a bloody god. Across the bridge, the columned portico of Lincoln’s resting place gleamed bone white.

  Hide in plain sight, Grainger thought. His coveralls set to mimic sixties government issue, he hiked uphill toward the bridge and his rendezvous point. Behind was Arlington National Cemetery, where the capsule waited, displaced, with Roebeck and Chun safely out of phase.

  He checked his chronograph: five minutes had elapsed since he’d left the capsule. Ten to go until pickup.

  Nan Roebeck’s initial orders had been to displace TC 779 straight to the safe house. Grainger’s skin had crawled at the thought. There were too many unanswered questions to assume that the safe house was in any way safe.

  Grainger had made his case to her while TC 779 was still out of phase: “Let me go meet this Calandine, our supposed agent in place, on neutral ground. Use our comm to ring him on his horizon’s phone, set a meet at a specific time and place. Then we risk one of us to take a baseline—not all of us if something’s changed.”

  “Everything’s changed,” Chun Quo reminded him implacably, with her control wands moving nervously as if she were knitting. Every time the wands clicked together, the sound grated on Grainger’s nerves. She was an inscrutable Oriental Fate knitting his shroud. Those wands controlled all their fates in real time—or the person controlling the wands did. One mistake now and—

  Grainger didn’t like Orientals. It was a societal prejudice, one he’d brought with him from his own time into the ARC Riders. The US Department of Energy from his native horizon had an agenda of economic espionage and industrial warfare against Asian countries inside its International Programs element, where he’d worked.

  In his day, you competed with the Asians or you were absorbed by them, turned into slave labor in a milieu where non-Asians could only rise so high. The US was just barely holding the line when he’d opted out of his horizon, in 2025, despite his enviable position among one of the most powerful and aggressive of Western elites, the Department of Energy hierarchy.

  Amid the flood tide of ravenous underclasses created by the bankrupt US educational and welfare system, the US government had been staying afloat—barely—by empowering the ivory-tower-supported best of the best, subject to no rules but one: win, at any cost. Maintain national security through innate or imported technological superiority. Buy it. Steal it. Reverse-engineer it. Protect it. Field it aggressively in service of the remaining US and friendly Occidental elites who could still read, write, think, and act globally.

  Grainger had done a lot of Asians in his time. Personally and through field assets. He’d been consciously ignoring Chun’s Oriental background since he’d joined the ARC Riders, as much for his own survival in a new milieu as for the good of the team. But this revision—this mission; the berserker Orientals at the new Central which had supplanted his own—made Orientals the enemy. He knew it. Chun knew it. And Roebeck knew it.

  And now they all had to ignore it, for the sake of the team. Or the team wouldn’t be a team much longer. Attrition rate in this unit might already be more than was survivable. Losing your home base usually was.

  In the sanctity of the out-of-phase TC 779, Roebeck had said, “Tim, I still like the first plan. Chun delivers you and me to the safe house in DC. We make a surprise entrance, giving no warning to anyone who might want to conceal a changed affiliation.” She’
d smiled mirthlessly. “We wear our suits for the insertion, take a look around. Chun waits out of phase as a safeguard against another attack. If it seems safe, we get out of the suits and stash them out of phase, too, gather some ground truth, get our legs on this horizon.”

  It made a sort of rudimentary sense, if you trusted Chun implicitly. Now that they were about to commit to a time horizon very close to the one in which Grainger had been raised, he couldn’t prevent old instincts from coming to the surface.

  “You’re the mission commander,” he’d reminded Roebeck coldly. “I’m just giving you my recommendations.”

  Chun said, “You just don’t want to wear your suit, and you know it. Any excuse…” Chun trailed off when he glared at her.

  “Fuck my suit,” he retorted. “It’s immaterial to this discussion.”

  Everybody knew what subtext was material.

  “Tim,” Roebeck said warningly.

  “Look, Nan,” Grainger pleaded, shifting in the suddenly constraining environment of TC 779. “We don’t have any way to judge whether this agent in place, Calandine, has been compromised. We can’t be sure of any mission supports that Central set up on this horizon, let alone what amounts to a sleeper agent—not his affiliation or anything else. Remember, it’s their Central that’s policing this timeline. It’s their timeline, so we’ve got to assume it’s their safe house. You can’t even be sure whose technology is superior on this revision, let alone who’s on what side.” There, it was out in the open. Sort of. “We nearly had our clocks cleaned back there in 50K, remember.”

  Nan Roebeck was the strategist, the team leader, not Grainger. Tim Grainger was—always had been—an operator, and his concerns were tactical. Had to be.

  Tactically, it didn’t make any sense to expose yourself to an arguably superior enemy force without some credible intel or at least some recon. He wanted to do that recon, and do it alone. He did not want to do it en masse, with the two women and a vehicle that was more important to the team survival than any of their individual lives.

  He especially did not want to do it with Roebeck, leaving TC 779 in Chun’s hands, trusting Chun with both their lives and with the mission’s success. Not when Chun, who was as Oriental as the revisionists who’d created this timeline, just might let her heritage cloud her judgment while she waited out of phase in a vehicle that was everybody’s last best hope.

  He stared at Roebeck, willing her to see his point of view. He couldn’t be any more blatant than he had been. He wouldn’t.

  Roebeck stared back, willing him to see her point of view. Unit cohesion was everything at a time like this. He could destroy this mission as easily as any revisionists by undermining her leadership or the shared purpose of the team.

  Finally Roebeck had nodded, her eyes too bright. “You’re not sure it’s safe to displace directly into the safe house. I can credit that. But displacing anywhere may be our most risky action, and we have to do that to function. Remember what happened—”

  “We know what happened, but not how—not what signature they’re using to find us, not for certain,” Chun Quo said. “We only think we know what not to do. If we’re wrong and we do the wrong thing, we give them a homing beacon.”

  “We can’t sit still forever,” Nan told her. “We have to act. They’ll react. We’ll be ready.” She shrugged. “That’s the job.”

  Chun wasn’t finished. “Tim, if you do this your way—without a displacement suit—that’s your style and nobody’s arguing it’s not correct for this environment—and we displace again to pick you up, then displace again into the safe house… who’s to say we’re not leaving enough signature for the Orientals”—she said it flatly—“from their Central to fix our position?”

  Grainger felt as if Chun had slapped him across the face. She’d been the first to say “Orientals,” not him. He just wanted to get out of there. “Nan, give me fifteen minutes with this guy. You monitor the realtime events from here. Chun can grab me off the pavement if it gets too dicey. I’ll agree with the agent on a time up the line to displace to the safe house. I mean, what if he’s got someone else using it today?”

  “You mean, what if the enemy—if Central’s people are using it. Yes, I see.” Nan Roebeck’s long-jawed face squared off. “But I can’t risk not being able to get to you….”

  Chun Quo was clicking her wands impatiently. “I’ll get him. Minute 16 from mission start. Or any minute you like better, Nan. Just try to make it to the designated pick-up coordinates, Grainger, so I can pick you up the easy way for the inevitable hot wash to come.” A “hot wash” was what you did after everything went wrong in an exercise that surfaced operational problems and procedural errors. Chun smiled sweetly. “Can’t lose our only remaining white male.”

  “Let’s get these time frames fixed for insertion and extraction,” Roebeck snapped. So they’d decided. Or Nan Roebeck had. She was still that good.

  Now he was roaming the 1967 afternoon, because Roebeck was that good, watching for a man who’d lean against the plinth of the statue on the left. Whatever she really thought, Nan Roebeck had let him go alone. She’d stayed with the ship.

  Grainger checked his chronograph. He had nine minutes before pickup. His facemask membrane was up on his forehead, obscured by a sweatband tied over it. The sweatband looked like indigenous nonanachronistic cloth from this time, but it was transparent in all EM wavelengths. TC 779 could record what he saw. The other ARC Riders couldn’t talk to him or hear him in real time while they were out of phase. Effectively, he was on his own.

  The walkways on the bridge were full of jogging soldiers and strolling flower children in fringe and bell-bottoms. The soldiers and the flower children were so wary of each other, he moved unremarked among them.

  Eight minutes left. The statues of gilded horses, men, and women across the bridge had been given to the US by the French, Grainger remembered. The man waiting under the scant shadow of the left-hand statue on the Lincoln Memorial side of the bridge was wearing the blue blazer and chinos of his spookish kind, and studying a pro forma map of Virginia. He was sporting the agreed-upon red socks under his penny loafers.

  Grainger walked up to the stranger slowly. Grainger wasn’t wearing any identifying insignia—best not to pick a polarizing affiliation, best not to make himself an easy target if the agent had switched sides. This close to the Lincoln Memorial, the air smelled of carbon monoxide and marijuana. Seven minutes.

  The golden horse statues, each with a naked man astride and a naked woman beside, stared down protectively on the soldiers who jogged in formation in white T-shirts and running shorts, spraying perspiration on the brightly clad civilians as they passed.

  The man who should be Calandine ignored everyone until Grainger walked up to him and said what he’d agreed to say: “Excuse me, does that map show you how to get to Pentagon Mall parking?”

  The man squinted at him, got sunglasses from his breast pocket, and put them on slowly. Then he said what he’d agreed to say: “I’m going to take a cab there now myself. I can drop you.”

  “Great. Thanks. I have to meet my cousin.” Having recited the last bit of rote formula, Grainger relaxed one notch. He took his hand out of his pocket, where it had been curled around the reassuring grip of his acoustic pistol, and scratched the band of his chronograph. Six minutes. His wrist was perspiring.

  Somewhere on the bridge, flower children and soldiers were exchanging angry words. Calandine looked over his shoulder. “Better catch that cab before they start rounding up those kids. District police and National Guard will close off the area at the first sign of trouble.”

  The dark-haired Calandine touched his sunglasses, stepped off the curb, and waved. A blue and white cab, which had been idling on the shoulder, rolled into gear and pulled up in front of them.

  Calandine opened a rear door and motioned Grainger inside, then got in the front seat. The driver didn’t wait for directions, but drove across the bridge and toward Arlington Natio
nal Cemetery.

  Five minutes. UFO mythology was alive and well in the sixties, so if worse came to worst, Project Blue Book would have another entry when Chun and Roebeck showed to pick up Grainger—even if it had to be in the middle of a highway.

  Calandine opened a briefcase that he hadn’t carried into the cab. “Here you go. Credit card. Local currency. You can use the card to get traveler’s checks if you run out of money, but we don’t think you will.” The wad of greenbacks wasn’t more than half an inch thick, but the denominations were high—and therefore traceable. “House keys. Car keys. And my card, with all my phone numbers on it.” Calandine grinned and showed front teeth trimmed with gold.

  “Who’s ‘we’?” Grainger wanted to know as he took the lot. Nobody who goes to the trouble of providing himself with a driver and cab as cover, and sits in the front when you’re in the back, is feeling real trusting, or leaving anything to chance.

  “Traveler’s Aid,” Calandine said, and looked at his watch pointedly. “You’ve got what—four and a half minutes to find that particular gravestone you like so much. You can speak freely here.” The “cabbie” was driving into Arlington National Cemetery, as if to cut across to the Pentagon. All as arranged, so far.

  “You’re the one who ought to have the questions,” Grainger said softly. “Can I go to the site now, instead?” It was so hot in the cab that perspiration was trickling down his neck.

  “Sure.” Calandine touched the driver’s shoulder. “Take us to 12th and E.” There was no hesitation in the agent’s response.

  “Never mind, I guess I better make my milestones.” Just checking.

  The field agent took off his sunglasses and peered at Grainger before peevishly redirecting the driver back onto his original course, which caused a minor traffic accident among the other autonomously piloted ground vehicles. Brakes squealed. Someone cursed in Spanish and showed a fist as Calandine’s cab veered around a dilapidated car now stalled across a lane and a half, with a smaller red car conjoining its left rear bumper.