Arc Riders

by David Drake

  “Your job’s to unload the Starlifter there, Specialist?” Carnes said crisply.

  “We’re watching events develop, Major,” the Spec 5 replied, his tone just short of insolence. He and his men stood with their shoulders and right boots braced against the vehicle. They didn’t straighten up because of an officer’s presence.

  One of the men eyed Carnes deliberately as he took a packet of cigarettes from the cargo pocket of his trousers. The pack was marked in flowing Cambodian script and sported a marijuana leaf in green on the front.

  Carnes nodded curtly. “What’s developing is this,” she said. “The persons who’ve forced their way aboard that aircraft will be rendered unconscious in a few minutes. I want you to move your trucks up under the aircraft’s left wing so that you’ll be out of the danger zone. You will then help the rest of us remove the bodies and the rest of the cargo, then transfer patients into the aircraft for transport to facilities in Japan.”

  Carnes knew what the risk was, but she took it anyway. She stepped forward and swung her right hand, slapping the pack of joints away from the soldier who held them. Filter cigarettes with a twist-closed end spun across the taxiway.

  “Or alternatively, soldiers…” Carnes said in a voice that cut like a circle saw; her fingers burned as if bee-stung, “You can be rendered unconscious yourselves and wake up on a flight to Yunnan in the morning. I guarantee they need warm bodies there. Which will it be?”

  The Spec 5 stared at her, then broke into a grin. “Whoo-ee, little lady!” he said. “We’re here to move shit, right? If some of that shit’s bodies, that’s cool. Not the first time we moved bodies, is it, bros?”

  All six cargo handlers were black. It hadn’t escaped Carnes’ notice—or theirs—that the vast majority of the officers and senior enlisted men who’d forced their way aboard the C-141 were whites.

  “Then get these trucks out of the way,” she ordered. “I’ll ride on your running board.”

  Weigand had found the copilot, Barthuli the loadmaster. The copilot trotted around toward the cockpit hatch, avoiding the crowd. Besides the people crammed into the cargo bay, others stood or sat on the ramp. Apparently they hoped to squeeze their way on later, or perhaps be lifted to safety when the ramp rose to close the aircraft before takeoff.

  The semis snorted as they drove forward beneath the C-141’s high wing. Pauli Weigand walked casually across the apron. He’d left the barracks bag with the medical convoy and carried only the projector he’d brought from TC 779. Some of the refugees on the ramp watched Weigand, but since his back was toward them and he was walking away, they didn’t seem particularly concerned.

  “This good enough, missie?” the Spec 5 called from the cab of the truck, speaking across the driver.

  “Yes, this is fine,” Carnes said. She had no idea, really, but she supposed Gerd or Pauli would have warned her if it wasn’t a safe location. She didn’t know exactly what was going to happen, but the implications of the word grenade were clear enough.

  Colonel Byerly was in the back of the deuce and a half, helping the sole nurse with at least thirty severely wounded patients. The fact that two MDs, a nurse, and an orderly had to deal with the transport as well as the medical needs of so many patients chilled Carnes’ soul. Bad as it had been with the 96th in Son Tay before she was transferred to a combat command, the situation in Saigon was still worse. The war was a tree, rotting away from the inside out.

  Weigand turned, raised his projector, and took momentary aim. A major on the C-141’s ramp stood up and shouted as he drew a .45 automatic.

  Choonk!

  The projectile sailed over the major’s head and into the cargo bay. Carnes could track its silvery flight with her eyes.

  For a fraction of a second after the projectile disappeared, nothing happened. The major pointed his pistol.

  The blast was as sharp as lightning. It was so loud that a cloud of dust rose from the surface of the runway behind the C-141 and curled outward, forming double horns that framed Pauli Weigand as they passed. Everyone on the ramp collapsed forward, like a stand of dominoes slammed down by a gust of wind.

  “You can start carrying out bodies now,” Rebecca Carnes called to the Spec 5 as she stepped away from his truck.

  Washington, DC

  March 18, 1967

  By the time TC 779 had been inserted directly into the safe house and was scanning for anomalies in the cellar around them, Grainger was up and running in his hard suit. He even reset his displays for standard visuals: there wasn’t room in the safe house cellar for much in the way of hidden threat, not with the capsule in there.

  Boxes and crates were scanned and pronounced harmless. The exterior temperature was 68 degrees Fahrenheit, a welcome relief. Aside from rodents, arachnids, and flying insects which could carry communicable diseases, the cellar held no threat at this moment.

  His suit took the data feed from TC 779 and pricked him with at least half a dozen inoculations in quick succession. It felt as though his right wrist cuff were nibbling him. Then that stopped and Roebeck’s voice said, “Ready?”

  “Nan, I’ll go first.”

  “Tim, age before beauty.”

  Chun said, “Nan, Tim: stable and holding,” softly in his ear. She was Chun Quo, his team mate, his backup, again; not the Oriental enemy she’d never been except in his mind.

  Grainger took a deep breath. There were times instincts could get you killed faster even than stupidity. He wasn’t going to let that happen.

  Nan Roebeck’s suited bulk shut out his centerpunched realtime view of the cellar beyond the opening hatch.

  Roebeck’s voice said, “Chun, you hold TC 779 out of phase as a safeguard against attacks. We’re going to get out of the suits once we’ve done a security check. We’ll set them for two minutes every four hours.”

  “Nan, I wish you wouldn’t—that could be just what we shouldn’t do.”

  “Chun, it’s SOP. If you see something you don’t like out there, try to pop back in long enough to signal us.”

  Chun sighed. “Nan, I don’t like this.”

  Roebeck was out of the hatchway, moving around on the floor. Grainger followed. When he was through the lock and down the ramp, he turned just in time to see TC 779 phase out.

  Then they were alone in Timeline B, committed, armed to the teeth, and ready for anything—until they got out of those suits.

  Grainger felt the phase out of the displacement craft like a physical loss.

  Roebeck was stamping around, punching holes in crates and generally trying to arouse any enemy that might be lurking.

  “Nan, there’s an upstairs to this place.”

  “Tim, if nobody comes down, we’re not taking the suits up.”

  He could only hear her breathing if she enabled the intercom by using his name. The rest of the time, if he wanted to hear more than his own breathing, he needed to be taking external audio.

  So he did that, until the moment came when she said, “Tim, let’s get out of these. Go first. I’ll cover you.”

  He hadn’t wanted to get into the damned thing. Now he didn’t want to get out of it.

  When he’d climbed out of his hard suit and finally sent it off to phase space, he felt as if he’d lost his best friend. He sat on a crate, watching Roebeck watch him, alert for revisionists. Her suit loomed larger in the dank basement the longer they sat that way. Eventually Grainger realized that the scant daylight from a high barred window was fading to night. Sirens yowled distantly, perhaps as the roundup of civilians continued, perhaps from nothing more than random city violence.

  Roebeck stayed suited, visor down, fully armored and holding a heavy plasma rifle in a robotically assisted grip, for nearly an hour before she was satisfied that it was safe to dispatch the second suit.

  Then they were adrift, for the next four hours anyway, in a 1968 as alien as Command Central had become. Grainger methodically checked all his sensory gear and his disabling weapons for the third time. They
weren’t here to hide in a basement. Every hour they spent in this time was an hour forever barred from them. If they found out later that this was the critical interval, they could do nothing, ever again, about whatever may have transpired elsewhere during the interval they spent hiding.

  Finally, wishing he could have waited her out, he nearly pleaded, “Nan, let’s go do it, can’t we?”

  “I thought you’d never ask,” said Roebeck, and let him go first up the stairs into the deepening alien night.

  Bien Hoa

  Air Force Base

  Timeline B: August 14, 1991

  The man’s jungle fatigues had been starched and pressed to hold a crease. His name tapes read REYNOLDS and us ARMY, and the black low-visibility oak leaves on his collar could have been either those of a major or a lieutenant colonel. The hair behind his high forehead was thin with a good deal of gray in it, though otherwise he didn’t appear to be older than forty. Pauli Weigand lifted him with one arm and his duffle bag with the other.

  Reynolds had been standing directly beneath the acoustic grenade when it went off. Trails of dry, black blood ran from his nose and ears, and he was just as dead as if Weigand had shot him through the head.

  Colonel Byerly had said casualties among the refugees didn’t matter to her, but Weigand didn’t believe she meant that. Certainly they mattered to Weigand.

  He tossed the duffle bag onto the concrete, then carried the corpse down the ramp and laid it gently beside the bag. He knew it didn’t matter—baggage or dead meat, neither one could feel pain—but he did it anyway.

  The acoustic grenade was simple enough that an equivalent device could have been constructed on the present horizon, though the available support technology would have resulted in something both larger and less powerful than what Weigand had used. The grenade created an omnidirectional sound wave, only microseconds in duration but of enormous intensity, by detonating a few millimeters of osmium wire with an electrical pulse. Chemical explosives could achieve similar effects, but at lower amplitude than was possible with energy density available from the 26th century’s electronic storage systems.

  Weigand couldn’t have safely used an acoustic grenade at the range he had—a hundred meters—without the protection of the cancellation wave his headband generated. The compression and rarefaction of the band’s tuned pulse were 180 degrees out of phase with those of the grenade and were of precisely the same amplitude as the detonation wave when it reached the person wearing the headband.

  The grenade delivered overpressures comparable to the muzzle blast of the largest naval guns. It was stunning at moderate distances and potentially lethal to those as close as the late Mr. Reynolds.

  Weigand wished Nan were here. He hated to make decisions like that one even more than he hated to carry them out.

  “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!” the chief of the cargo handlers boomed from the pallets at the front of the bay. “Burnett, pay out the hook and let’s get this fucker empty!”

  All the refugees had been removed from the aircraft, carried or—in the case of those the cargo handlers dealt with—dumped to the concrete as if they’d been so many sacks of mail. Weigand and the C-141’s crew had been more gentle, though none of them made much effort to amend the ground personnel’s technique. It was hard to find sympathy for cowards who feathered their nests while sending better folk to bleed and die.

  Rebecca was with the patients, able to be a nurse again. She looked more relaxed than Weigand had previously seen her, even at times when they were together in TC 779 and there was no immediate crisis.

  Barthuli had been willing to help with the physical labor, though as he’d said, he’d “probably turn out to be as useless as tits on a boar.” Weigand told him to graze the commo net and see what he could learn. There wasn’t a risk of drowning in the information flow, since Gerd’s software preselected items based on his uniquely excellent parameters.

  The cargo handlers robbed the refugees as they removed them. Weigand didn’t know how much use the money and jewelry would be when the collapse of America and the war effort became total in the next few weeks, but that wasn’t Weigand’s concern. The men were doing their job well enough. Whatever Rebecca told them had made a sufficient impression, perhaps underscored by the effect of the acoustic grenade.

  The copilot, sweaty and wan, walked over to join Weigand as the ground crewmen fitted a harness to the Conex. The fellow looked down at the refugees, piled like cordwood to either side of the ramp. “Christ,” he muttered. “Where’s this going to end?”

  “That’s out of our hands,” Weigand said with gloomy diplomacy. The airman seemed a decent man, brave or dutiful enough to make a flight whose risks he must have known. Though perhaps… you didn’t need to be able to visit the future of this horizon to be able to predict disaster for America both here and at home.

  “It’s out of everybody’s hands,” the copilot said. “It’s like stepping outside at forty thousand feet without a parachute. It may take a while to drop, but you’re going to hit the ground eventually.”

  He hawked and spit onto the ramp. “Sure wish we hadn’t taken that first step into Nam.”

  Some of the refugees were stirring now, especially those who’d been outside the aircraft when the grenade went off. Weigand was ready to use his acoustic pistol on any individual who tried to get back aboard, but he doubted that would be necessary. Those the detonation wave had stunned would be a long time regaining full intellect and motor control.

  “I’ll go forward,” the copilot said. “Help Harry check us out for takeoff. We’ll turn her around as soon as your friends get their patients aboard.”

  A cargo handler shouted. The winch whined, taking up slack for a moment before it started to move the Conex. The steel container raised low-frequency thunder in the cargo bay as it moved down the rollers in the floor.

  “Have you been fueled?” Weigand shouted.

  The copilot shrugged. “We’ve got enough in the center tanks to get us to Yokota,” he shouted back. “Air traffic control warned us before we took off there that there wouldn’t be any fuel for us at Bien Hoa.”

  He shook his head, grimacing. “They said there was a load of seriously wounded waiting. We took a vote, all of us, and decided we’d try. It’ll be all right, I figure.”

  Giving Weigand a half-mocking salute, the copilot walked toward the cockpit. The ARC Rider watched the man’s slim, stooped figure for a moment.

  The Conex trundled past. Weigand swallowed and jumped to the ground, pitching his big body far enough outward to avoid the pile of refugees.

  Everybody eventually died—brave men and cowards alike. Maybe it made a difference to them afterward as to how they’d lived their lives. Maybe it only mattered now, while they were living it. That was enough for Weigand, at least.

  He walked toward the medical convoy. The attendants were preparing to shift the vehicles closer to the ramp as soon as the last of the pallets were offloaded.

  Barthuli had been sitting cross-legged in the shade of the aircraft’s drooping wing, his computer/recorder trained on the horns of one of the nearby microwave communication towers. He stood and strode to join Weigand with a bemused expression on his face.

  “Having fun, Gerd?” Weigand asked as he adjusted the direction in which he was walking to bring him closer to the analyst.

  Barthuli quirked a wry smile. “This is a unique experience for me, Pauli,” he said.

  The two men walked parallel for a few steps, then stopped in unspoken agreement, their eyes on the distant fenced horizon.

  “It’s an information-rich environment, of course,” Barthuli continued. He nodded toward the communications towers. “Requests, orders, manifests—anything you could want, all open for you or even me to modify according to our requirements. A flight to Son Tay should be no difficulty.”

  “We’ve got a flight to Son Tay,” Weigand said. They were standing on bare concrete, fifty meters from anyone else. Colonel Byerly
got into the cab of her truck and started the engine. “We think we do, at any rate.”

  “Yes, that’s what’s interesting,” Barthuli said. His words weren’t agreement. “There’s no record of that flight that I can find. And from what I can tell—I may be wrong, of course—”

  “And pigs may fly,” Weigand muttered.

  “—but almost none of the electronic data I can access relates to anything real on the ground. Orders are ignored, or perhaps the people to whom they’re directed don’t exist, or don’t exist at that location. Matériel isn’t shipped from warehouses as directed, either because it’s not there to begin with—stolen, I suppose, or simply misplaced in the confusion—or because the people directed to move it aren’t informed, or don’t have vehicles, or were transferred a hundred kilometers away last month.”

  “Some things are getting done,” Weigand commented, looking over his shoulder at the trucks, now loaded. Carnes and the younger doctor were talking earnestly to the cargo handlers, apparently asking for help in carrying the patients aboard the C-141.

  “The chance of that cargo going where it’s supposed to is virtually nil,” Barthuli said flatly. “There’s a somewhat higher chance of it being used for a purpose more or less in line with US government objectives, such as they are. I can show you a hundred sequences of orders and messages following up orders, and none of it makes any difference. Any more than the orders to load patients on this aircraft to transport them to Japan made any difference.”

  “They’re going,” said Weigand.

  “They’re going,” Barthuli said, “because of what happened here—because Rebecca knew Lieutenant Colonel Byerly, and because we needed something Lieutenant Colonel Byerly could provide.”

  The analyst’s face froze momentarily in a smile. “Also because you cared, Pauli. And other people care. There’s still a system of sorts, that works in a fashion—because individuals know one another and care, despite all. But it isn’t anything we could tap electronically.”