Arc Riders

by David Drake

  Two minutes. Calandine said, “I’m a busy man. You people are putting some strain on our arrangement as it is. Don’t push it. There’s nobody near your site to bother you, if that’s what this is about. You need anything more, don’t hesitate to call.”

  You people?

  The cab stopped. Grainger said, “Walk me over to see my dead uncle, cousin.”

  Calandine got out of the front seat; Grainger got out of the rear seat. The briefcase beside the cabbie was propped open by the snout of a revolver.

  When both men had slammed the doors closed, Grainger said, “What if I call this number?” Grainger tapped the front of the other man’s government-issue calling card, which had an eagle-headed seal in the left upper corner. “What happens?”

  “Somebody answers, who’s sitting in that office at that desk, and answers to my name. That’s the way it works. I say ‘Hi, Cousin,’ and you’re connected.”

  “Thanks for reassuring me. If you see any of my people around, you be sure to let me know. Leave a message at the site. Consider it part of your job.”

  Calandine’s face, previously indeterminate, now looked closer to fifty than forty. “You expecting anybody else?”

  Grainger shrugged and looked off into the distance, over the marble teeth of death, row upon row of military gravestones stretching to the horizon. He could see the Kennedy eternal flame, still burning up on the hill. “We’re having a family reunion, with a couple of lady friends. And maybe a surprise party. So you wouldn’t want to drop in unannounced.”

  “Son, I know my job. Let’s hope you know yours. Things are getting real dangerous around here. Gonna have worse than martial law—gonna have anarchy. Gonna round up all those hippies and ship ‘em off to detention camps. President ain’t gonna serve out his term. Heard it from a friend of mine in the… FBI.” Then he brightened. “You want a gun—I mean now, before you pick up the firepower at the… site?”

  Then Grainger thought he had the man pegged. A patriot. “We’ll get these dogies settled down.” He wiped the perspiration from his eyebrows with the back of his hand. “Hot for March.”

  “Gonna get hotter,” the traitor said.

  “I’ve got one more minute,” Grainger reminded Calandine, “and depending on how much you trust your buddy, you might want to remove him and you from the scene of what’s about to happen—something you’re not going to write a contact report about.”

  Calandine grunted, and hurried to climb into his federally provided undercover car. Its door slammed. It roared away with a belch of pollutants. Grainger promised himself a better look at Calandine’s file, then realized that no data from Timeline A could be trusted.

  It didn’t matter. Somewhere in the distance, police sirens were screaming closer. The argument on the bridge must have gotten more serious.

  “Here I am, Chun,” Grainger murmured almost prayerfully as he stepped onto the grass of the cemetery, his hand thrust in his pocket and gripping his acoustic pistol. “Come and get me. Next stop, 12th and E. And ladies, for better or worse, we’ve got us a penetration agent.”

  Northeastern Iowa

  Timeline B: August 4, 1991

  The white steeple visible over the treetops to the northeast marked a church in the nearest community, seven kilometers away. Three kilometers due west, the tops of paired silos built of concrete staves indicated the closest farm. Weigand waited with his team at the T intersection of two gravel roads which, with the utility lines that paralleled them, were the other major signs of human occupation.

  The fields were fenced, but the three-strand barbed wire wobbled on posts that should have been replaced long since. The land was either meadow or fallow, more likely the latter. Grass grew rank, and the purple heads of bull thistles stood in frequent majesty two and three meters above the ground.

  Barthuli was in his element. He sat cross-legged on the shady side of a telephone pole, gorging his recorder/computer with information through a resonance tap directed at the line above him.

  Any database tied into the communications net on this horizon was open to the computing power available in the Riders’ basic kit. A rural phone line, connected to the rest of the country through an obsolescent electromechanical switch, was sufficient to give Barthuli greater access than the President or the directors of intelligence services had.

  Weigand had thought of telling Barthuli to find them a route to Son Tay, but after consideration he’d kept his mouth shut. They didn’t know yet what they’d really need, and the analyst worked best when everybody else left him alone. Weigand was lucky to have Gerd along.

  “This is as hot as Memphis,” Rebecca Carnes said; not angry, just making conversation. She mopped her brow with a sodden green handkerchief, spreading the sheen of sweat a little more evenly. “And as humid. I thought it was supposed to be cold up north here.”

  “Gerd, any news on when they’re going to pick us up?” Weigand asked. To Carnes, lying in the mottled shade beneath a clump of blackberries growing along the fenceline, he added, “You’re all right, aren’t you? Should you…”

  He didn’t know quite what he was going to offer Carnes. Her clothing didn’t mediate skin temperature the way the Riders’ coveralls did. The emergency rations, liquids included, were in the suits and locked out of phase for another nine hours. Carnes had been eating berries the red-winged blackbirds had missed, but Weigand didn’t imagine a few tart nibbles did much to cool her down.

  Carnes shook her head and gave him a tired smile. “I’m fine,” she said. “I drank as much as I could hold before I got out of my armor.”

  Barthuli had waited for Carnes to answer first. He said, “Nothing’s changed, Pauli. As soon as your request came in over the link with the regional command in Chicago, the sergeant on duty at Guard headquarters in Dubuque called the district administrator’s office. He was told that someone would be down immediately.”

  Barthuli shrugged and added, “I gather the offices are in the same building. I don’t have listening devices planted, so unless the communication is by some form of electronic media—”

  He opened his hands, palms upward.

  “They wouldn’t just ignore orders from Region without querying them,” Carnes said. Her tone didn’t sound as certain as the words themselves were. Her eyes were closed. “Of course, they could screw up.”

  Weigand had been afraid that when his team displaced to 1991, they’d find themselves in a heavily populated area. They’d avoided that, heaven knew. Weigand hadn’t seen so much as a domestic animal in the three hours he’d been on this horizon.

  After a quick survey of the immediate area, they’d walked their armor into a patch of woods 400 meters from the crossroads. Weigand set the suits to remain out of phase on a twelve-hour cycle and reappear for only ten seconds between intervals. Ten seconds was too short a time for anybody to return the equipment to normal operation by hand. A remote signal from Weigand or Barthuli could accomplish the job instantly.

  Weigand had left the gas/tanglefoot gun with his suit. His and Barthuli’s coveralls, even with the color rotated to a dirty off-white, were going to arouse comment. He didn’t want a piece of unfamiliar weaponry as well. For that matter, Carnes said her uniform wasn’t going to look like anything in normal use within the continental United States.

  Carnes sat up abruptly, catching her hair in thorny blackberry canes. “I see dust,” she said. She nodded her chin because she was using both hands to free her hair and couldn’t point. “On the horizon.”

  Weigand pulled the facemask down from his headband and stood. He was embarrassed that Carnes had seen the movement first. He’d been too busy worrying about what he’d done wrong and what he should do next.

  “Two vehicles,” he said. He increased magnification and dialed in enhancement because of the dust. “A sedan and a light truck painted green, with a machine gun. There’s something stenciled on the door.”

  The roads were graveled with soft yellow limestone, the Niobrara
chalk laid down in the Cretaceous Period a hundred million years ago. There was very little breeze today. The leading vehicle, the sedan, kicked up dust which drifted evenly to both sides of the road. Without enhancement by the mask’s processing unit, the truck following fifty meters behind the sedan was no more than a shadow in olive drab.

  Four people in chalk-yellowed uniforms bounced in the back of the truck, holding on to the side panels instead of sitting down. At high magnification, they looked grimly determined. Weigand wondered if the machine gun on a pintle in the middle of the truck’s cargo compartment was too dusty to fire.

  “They’ve seen you, Pauli,” Barthuli said. “They’re reporting in. The officer in command is a Captain Kawalec.”

  He paused. “Now they’ve seen the rest of us, too.”

  As Barthuli sat beside the utility pole, he browsed data both through a pinhead-sized link in his mastoid bone and optically via holographic projection. The sensor pack controlled the display based on prioritized key words the analyst had given it.

  Weigand had used the same phone line to tap into the Midwest Regional Headquarters of the Federal Emergency Control Authority—the military government. In the name of the regional administrator, he’d faxed an order to the National Guard HQ nearest to where Weigand’s team arrived, directing the local authorities to pick up three officials at a rural location and provide them with full facilities.

  The message itself was simply a matter of downloading a recent order of suitable format, modifying the contents, and sending it via the command link with the proper verification codes. Given the team’s equipment and training, there was nothing tricky to the job.

  The problem was determining where Weigand and his team were, in terms that the local authorities could understand. The Global Positioning Satellite system existed on this timeline, though in a truncated fashion—three units of the satellite constellation were malfunctioning and should have been replaced. Access to the system was tightly restricted, however. A district HQ wasn’t equipped to handle information in terms of precise latitude and longitude.

  There were no identification signs along either road for as far as the ARC Riders could see at top magnification. Gerd had finally solved the problem by getting the local road numbers from the computer in the county deed room.

  The oncoming vehicles slowed half a kilometer from where Weigand stood by the road. The truck pulled around the car. One of the soldiers clung to the pintle and the grip of the machine gun. There were two more soldiers in the truck’s cab, and a driver as well as a passenger in the sedan.

  “We’re playing this one by ear,” Weigand said, watching the vehicles rather than his companions. “Major, I expect you to do most of the talking, but I’ll tell you now, I’ll step in if I think I should. Ultimately, it’s my responsibility.”

  “Ultimately,” Carnes said firmly, “it’s all of our asses, Pauli. But I hear what you’re saying.”

  The worst problem the team faced for the moment was that only Carnes had hard-copy identification. The team could create any ID desired, given access to a suitable output device, but right now all they had available was a considerable acreage of meadow and woodland.

  The transportation capsule could duplicate local IDs from air or sawdust, but that equipment wasn’t part of a displacement suit’s kit. If the Dubuque authorities offered the team the “full facilities” the fax demanded, Weigand was sure he could cobble something impressive together with the local tools. For the moment, Weigand and Barthuli had to depend on the compartmentalized security of a police state to baffle the locals. They also had to hope Carnes wasn’t listed as a deserter.

  The truck pulled up. The left rear brake grabbed and made the vehicle shimmy. The soldiers in back held on to the sides in fear of being flung from the bed. The man at the machine gun swung from the grip like a pendulum, pointing the barrel skyward. The sedan halted behind and a little to the right so that the truck blocked the team’s direct line of fire toward the other vehicle.

  Major Carnes strode to the cab of the truck. The driver—both vehicles’ drivers—and one of the soldiers in the back were women.

  “Who’s in charge here?” Carnes demanded in brittle anger. Weigand could imagine her dressing down a roomful of orderlies partying on duty. “I was informed a Captain Kawalec would report to me at 1330 hours at the latest. The latest!”

  She tapped her watch—it was after 3 PM—as she stared at the sergeant in the truck’s passenger seat. “Where’s Kawalec, and where have you been?”

  An officer got out of the back of the sedan, put on his saucer hat, and straightened his tie. His shoulder patch was the red-on-white EA of the Emergency Authority. A circled numeral in the middle indicated Military Region 3.

  Kawalec was at least fifty years old, bald, and overweight. Weigand supposed if he’d been a more prepossessing specimen, he’d have been overseas—or at least somewhere other than a backwater like this. “May I see your identification, please?” he said. His voice shifted keys in the middle of the demand.

  Carnes glanced at Weigand and raised her eyebrow. Weigand looked stern and said, “All right, Major. You can show him your ID.”

  Carnes unbuttoned her left breast pocket and removed a plastic wallet with a military crest embossed on the flap. She held it open in her hand, smiling grimly at Kawalec over the hood of the truck.

  The captain swallowed. He started to step around the truck. His face suddenly contorted and he shouted at the driver, “Back this damned thing up! Are you good for nothing?”

  The driver shifted into reverse with a clang. The truck backed twenty feet, its transmission whining. More dust rose and drifted. The tires had a coarse, all-terrain tread, but they were worn to the belt in patches.

  Captain Kawalec wore a green dress uniform. The trousers were summer-weight polyester, but the coat was of wool. No wonder he was red-faced and overheated.

  Carnes continued to hold her wallet, ready to show the identification to Kawalec but not offering it to him. He came to her, wiping his face again. Despite the heat and dust, the sedan’s windows were open. Either its air conditioner didn’t work or fuel was in too short supply for the district to afford the mileage cost of air-conditioning.

  Kawalec tried to take the wallet. Carnes didn’t let go of it. She was good, really good; a first-class prospect for the Anti-Revision Command.

  Kawalec bent over to read the warrant in the card pocket, then straightened with a frown. “I don’t see what you’re doing here, Major,” he said in a peevish voice.

  “No, you don’t,” Carnes said. “What you’re doing here, Captain Kawalec, is carrying us into Dubuque, where you and your superiors will provide us with absolutely everything we request.”

  “Or else your successors will,” Weigand said. He deliberately looked up the road as he spoke to Kawalec, denying the captain the courtesy of eye contact.

  “I need to see your identification also, Mr….” Kawalec said, the last syllable rising in interrogation.

  “No,” Weigand said.

  Weigand stood at ease with his arms linked behind his back, apparently bored but not impatient. Barthuli was standing also, holding his recorder/computer at waist level, where it had an angle on the telephone repeater above. The analyst was still auditing the information his unit gathered. His expression was pleased and interested—which in his case wasn’t acting.

  Kawalec looked from Carnes to Weigand, then back to Carnes. Carnes buttoned her wallet away, pointedly closing the discussion as far as she was concerned.

  “I’ll have to get orders,” Kawalec said. He swallowed again.

  “You’ve already gotten orders,” Carnes snapped. “The length of time it’s taking you to execute them is not going unremarked.”

  The captain scuffled back into the sedan. He spoke in an undertone to his driver. Both of them rolled their side windows up before Kawalec took the handset of the dashboard-mounted radio. The flex connecting handset and transceiver was so short that
Kawalec had to lean over the front seat to use the unit.

  Barthuli and Carnes watched Kawalec, though the analyst’s smile suggested the vagueness of a person who was really paying attention to something else. Weigand surveyed the landscape, looking grim.

  The sergeant had gotten out of the cab to talk with the four soldiers in back. He continued to stand beside the vehicle. The machine gunner was wiping his weapon with a rag he’d taken from an ammo box containing cleaning supplies. There were only thirty rounds of ammunition in the belt hanging from the gun’s loading gate. Two of the soldiers had bolt-action rifles while the third, the woman, carried a civilian-pattern shotgun with a blued barrel. The troops muttered to one another and watched the team from the corners of their eyes.

  Kawalec blinked. His eyes stared and his lower jaw drooped. He gave the handset back to his driver and reached for his door handle.

  “Watch out,” said Barthuli as he did something with the instrument in his hands. The truck’s fuel tank blew up, covering the six soldiers in blazing gasoline.

  Carnes ran toward the sudden inferno. Weigand grabbed her with his left hand as he drew the acoustic pistol from his pocket with his right. He knew what had happened; why would have to wait.

  Kawalec was shouting unheard to his driver. Weigand aimed and fired. The side window in line with the driver’s head shattered into fragments the size of sand grains. It was safety glass and bulged in both directions from the plastic film separating the parallel layers.

  Barthuli had his pistol out also. He slipped his recorder/computer into the special pocket in the front of his coveralls while with his other hand he shot the machine gunner. The fellow’s legs and torso were covered with gasoline from the ruptured tank, but he still held the weapon by the grip. The twin hypersonic pulses of Barthuli’s weapon intersected on the gunner’s forehead. The 10-hertz difference tone knocked him backward unconscious, as if a mule had kicked him in the face.