Arc Riders

by David Drake

  He sat up, then stood as he spoke. Watney’s voice took on the husky power of a man channeling a force greater than himself.

  He met Weigand’s eyes. The revisionist’s face broke into the shattered smile Weigand had seen on it once before. “Oh, yes,” Watney said softly. “I believed that. I really did.”

  “You had studied the horizon in order to operate in it effectively?” Barthuli suggested. “Money, current events—that sort of thing?”

  “Oh, more than that,” Watney said. “I’d trained, Mr. Barthuli. I was a rich man, I could indulge my whims. I was trained to be a soldier fit to serve in the army that lifted America to her apotheosis.”

  He looked at Weigand, and in this at least the two of them were alike. “I’m good at it, you know.”

  His fingers traced the line of bullet scars across his bare chest. “It was more than the skills, it was instinct. And it was…[felt superior because I came from the future. You understand that, don’t you? The feeling that you’re better than everyone around you, so they can’t really touch you? You know!”

  “A lot of Riders feel that way,” Weigand said. “A lot of us.”

  Weigand had never understood that attitude, any more than he’d understood parents setting their infants to scream on Moloch’s blazing altar; but he’d seen that, too, and a score of variations on it. He looked at the revisionist and tried to feel compassion rather than loathing. Weigand’s face was as calm as a cold wax sculpture.

  “They think I can’t be killed,” Watney said. “My men do. Sometimes I do myself. Krieghoff went to pieces when he realized we couldn’t go back to 2257, that was where we came from. He’d finally decided he’d go to Washington and try to find Bates. I knew that wouldn’t have done any good. And anyway Krieghoff was killed in an accident before he got to Saigon.”

  The shooting outside had stopped. A siren called despairingly across the night.

  “Accident?” asked Carnes. She wouldn’t look directly at Watney. Even in speaking to him, her jaw muscles stiffened.

  “A cyclo hit him as he was crossing Highway 13,” Watney said. “I had to identify the body. A cyclo carrying Coke girls. They were following a battalion of the 25th Infantry to a new area of operations.”

  Watney looked at the trio he hoped would rescue him from the world he had made. “It wasn’t like training, you know,” he said in his husky voice. “And it wasn’t anything like the histories I studied said it would be. But that was all right, so long as I was fighting for a cause. It wasn’t until I saw the changes in America, and that there was still more Asia, and more Asians living in it to continue fighting…. Then I started to understand.”

  Weigand felt his own authority riding on him like a crown of thorns. He had to make decisions and he wasn’t ready to.

  He swallowed. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll sleep. In the morning, we’ll decide how we’re going to return to ConUS and then to the 1968 horizon. But for now we’ll sleep.”

  “Wait!” Barthuli snapped, his eyes on something in the air before him invisible from Weigand’s angle. More politely the analyst continued, “A moment please, Pauli. Colonel Watney, who is ‘Fern’?”

  Watney frowned. “Yeah,” he said, “General Fern. I think he gave me a first name, but I don’t remember it. He’s Air Force.”

  The face of the man whose name Barthuli plucked from the trash of the revisionist’s surface thoughts hung above the recorder/computer. The word “return” had kicked up the recollection. A man of forty; hatchet-faced, with black hair cut short enough to be a mere shadow on his scalp.

  “He tried to recruit me yester… three days ago,” Watney said. “While we were saddling up, for God’s sake. Some special operation.”

  He snorted. “As if I need the Air Force to task my boys! And stateside Air Force besides.”

  “Fifth Military District,” Weigand said, the words coming out even as the image of a head expanded to head and shoulders. The patch on General Fern’s left shoulder was that of MR 5, but with the blue star central boss of General Oakley’s personal forces.

  “Yeah,” the revisionist agreed. He looked at the holographic image with a more critical eye. “Yeah, that’s right. You knew about that?”

  Barthuli smiled tightly. “Not until now,” he said.

  “The CO of Travis is gathering a private army for a coup,” Weigand said. “He wanted real combat troops for the lead commando. People like your team. What did he offer you?”

  “He didn’t offer a damned thing,” Watney snarled, angry because he was tired and unwilling to be pushed in what he regarded as a pointless direction. “I told you, we were saddling up. I told him to get out of my way or he’d have boot tracks on his face.”

  Watney grimaced, remembering that these were the only people in the world who could end the nightmare he and his accomplices had caused. “Sorry,” he said to his hands. “Look, I mean to help, I just… I don’t know. He’s still here, though. Was this afternoon when we got back. He came in a DC-8 in Air Force markings, carrying a bunch of people he’d brought out of Yunnan. It’s still parked at the west end of the airfield.”

  Weigand nodded, forcing his mind to work. “Gerd—” he said.

  “The aircraft hasn’t been refueled,” Barthuli said before Weigand had the question out. The analyst must have been working on the answer from the instant he’d identified Fern; even so, it was fast work. “It took some fuel aboard yesterday. More, the necessary minimum to reach Kadena, is supposed to arrive by noon tomorrow.”

  Weigand looked at the revisionist. “Can you get us onto that aircraft, Colonel?” he asked. “As members of your unit?”

  “If I say you’re mine,” Watney said in a voice like a dog’s growl, “nobody in Son Tay, nobody in the war zone, will raise an eyebrow. They know me.”

  And I know you, too, Weigand thought, you murderous bastard. Aloud he said, “Okay, the plane’s going where we need to go, back to Travis.”

  He permitted himself a quiver of a grin. Watney might think that a quick trigger finger was something to be proud of. Weigand could beat the revisionist as a gunman if he had to—a fifty-fifty chance, he’d beat the revisionist. But there was a lot more to real competence than that. “Whether or not the pilot plans to,” he said, “that’s where we’ll land in ConUS.”

  Rebecca Carnes said, “Good to have a commanding officer like you, Pauli.” The words were a slap at Watney; but they were the truth as she saw it, or she wouldn’t have said them. Even though she was wrong, the statement gave Weigand a flash of hope.

  Weigand felt some of the prickly weight lift from him as he stepped to the light switch. They had a long way to go—but they were heading in the right direction for now.

  Travis Air Force Base

  Timeline B: August 22, 1991

  Mechanics were already clustered around the port outboard engine by the time Rebecca Carnes followed the rest of the team down the boarding steps. A lime-green crash truck parked facing the nacelle. Its headlights added to the illumination of a sky from which the sun had vanished while the DC-8 taxied wearily to its berth.

  Half a dozen guides in blue-on-white armbands marshaled the passengers toward the nearby hangar. Carnes couldn’t swear the structure was the one to which Weigand and the displacement suits were taken when the team touched down at Travis the first time, but that seemed the likelihood.

  Behind her, a Samoan without rank tabs said to a staff sergeant whose scalp was half shaved, half scar tissue, “No, they’ll fly on two engines. One out, that was no problem.”

  Most of the killers Fern had recruited from the war zone walked bent under the weight of duffle bags: loot, more general souvenirs, and the weapons and munitions they’d brought with them. As protective coloration, Weigand’s team members carried firearms.

  Carnes understood Weigand’s order, but her submachine gun would probably be as useless as the revolver she’d tried to use in Yunnan. The acoustic pistol was a comforting bulk in her side pocket, t
hough. Because it had no recoil or muzzle blast… and because Carnes knew the result wouldn’t be fatal, even to an enemy trying to kill her, she was a nurse… for those varied reasons, all of them psychological, she was confident of what she could do with the weapon from the future.

  Pauli openly carried his EMP generator. It was unfamiliar to the remainder of the aircraft’s 127 passengers, but they were all of them individualists armed with a wide assortment of weapons. The generator was attached to a rifle stock and looked like a weapon. The acoustic pistols looked like toys, and the sort of attention they might gather would be of an undesirable sort.

  “That crippled pig fly on two engines?” the staff sergeant sneered. “You’ve got shit for brains! Brand new, maybe, but neither of us were born back when that was brand new. It’s a fucking wonder we didn’t fall right out of the sky when we lost the one.”

  The sergeant’s tone made Carnes glance over her shoulder. The Samoan wore a bland expression. For the moment, at least, he seemed willing to ignore the insults as mere alcoholic nonsense. The shortest of the DC-8’s three refueling stops had been 12 hours. The sergeant had drunk his way through each of them, and had brought enough booze aboard besides to last him to the next layover.

  Still and all…the Samoan wore his own dried right earlobe on a neck thong. He’d explained to Carnes on the flight’s Guam-to-Hawaii leg that he’d removed it from the mouth of the Chink who bit it off while the Samoan chewed through the Chinese soldier’s throat. Being too drunk to be polite in this group meant either that you were very good or very lucky.

  “Not that it’d have made more than a couple days difference,” the sergeant added. “Whatever the fuck Fern’s got cooked up for us, it won’t be survivable. Back here in the World, for Chrissake?”

  “Could be,” the Samoan agreed in an equally careless tone.

  Weigand motioned Carnes up to his right side. Watney was on Weigand’s left, with Barthuli—who had the other communications headband—to Watney’s other side. A guide looked over his shoulder but didn’t interfere.

  “This is the same hangar,” Weigand said. “The suits will be coming into phase in ten minutes.”

  Barthuli said something Carnes couldn’t catch. “Just under ten minutes,” Weigand said, his lips pursing. “We’re going to have to lock them in phase immediately, because it’ll be a problem if we have to wait a full week.”

  “Will the people here recognize you?” Carnes asked. “General Oakley and his staff?”

  Weigand shrugged. He was very tense but trying not to show it. “We’ll deal with that if we have to,” he said. “The light wasn’t good, and they weren’t really interested in me. We can’t leave the suits. We’ll need them to displace to 1968.”

  Then he added, “I wish I knew what Nan would do.”

  “We’ll handle it,” Carnes said.

  They entered through the personnel door rather than the great plane-wide leaves closing the end of the hangar. Hundreds of three-high bunks had been set up against one of the sidewal Is since Carnes previously saw the interior. Parked along the opposite sidcwall were three APCs in addition to the wheeled armored cars, and more pallets of matériel were stacked in the rear of the hangar.

  It didn’t look like an army with which to conquer Washington. Oakley must be counting on surprise; though for that matter, Washington might not be defended by much at this point, either.

  Only about half the overhead lights worked, too few to adequately illuminate the hangar. Carnes didn’t notice Oakley. The general himself wasn’t a commanding figure, but the dozen staff officers clotted about him should be pretty obvious.

  The best hope the team had to retain control of the displacement suits was confusion and lack of a proper chain of command. If Oakley wasn’t present, there was a fair chance things would work out.

  A major with a bullhorn stood at the end of the bunks, facing the men entering the hangar. He spoke into the bullhorn. The device groaned brokenly in response. The major snarled something to a lieutenant walking by with a clipboard. The lieutenant shrugged and stepped on past.

  The major threw down the bullhorn and shouted, “Everybody from Flight 8734, come this way.”

  His unaided voice was almost extinguished by the hangar’s surf of echoes. The passengers from the DC-8 shuffled closer anyway, directed by the guides. The major might have something useful to say.

  “The people who just got off the flight from Hawaii, come this way,” the major continued. He pointedly avoided referring to where the men had been recruited; not that anybody looking at the band of grizzled killers would have been much in doubt. “These are your quarters. You’ve got half an hour to choose bunks and strike your gear. Then you’ll be taken to another building for briefing on your mission.”

  The major paused, then continued without making eye contact with the men in a semicircle about him, “And there’ll be no weapons when General Oakley briefs you.”

  There was laughter and growls. “Want to bet?” a man bigger than Pauli Weigand said. He pointed a pump shotgun at the major’s face from less than six feet away, then grinned and lowered the weapon again.

  The group moved forward. Men streamed past the major to the bunk lines like the sea about a pebble. The men regarded the hangar as civilization. For most of them, even the cramped seats of the ancient DC-8 were closer to civilization than they’d been in months or even years. They were looking forward to running water, cooked food; in many cases women, in most cases liquor. Oakley’s chances of holding a formal briefing in half an hour were even less good than the odds Carnes gave of the general becoming President of the United States.

  Weigand murmured something to Barthuli. “The displacement suits will be arriving here,” the analyst said, projecting three six-inch ovals of red light on the nearby concrete. Carnes couldn’t tell the source of the light. “In three minutes, seventeen seconds.”

  The four members of the team formed a close huddle. The major was shouting to his subordinates, the guides who’d brought the passengers from the DC-8. He hadn’t moved since the shotgun was aimed at him.

  Men from the war zone, the bulk of their gear tossed onto bunks or simply on the floor, were sauntering toward the door. They might have some distance to walk or drive commandeered vehicles, but major military bases were effectively towns. They’d find what they wanted.

  All of the returnees Carnes saw were carrying automatic weapons, as much in warning as by reflex. Air Force personnel kept out of the way.

  “Okay,” Weigand said. “When the suits appear, the three of us”—he nodded to Carnes and Barthuli—“will put them on and walk into the back corner, down one of those aisles of containers. While we’re doing that, Colonel Watney will…”

  Weigand’s eyes met Watney’s cold, empty expression. Weigand smiled with as little warmth and handed his EMP generator to Carnes.

  “No,” he said, “Colonel Watney will put on the third suit. There’s nothing to it, Watney, just walk like you would normally. Rebecca, you’ll watch the other people with the generator set to nerve stimulation.”

  Weigand turned the EMP generator on its side to check the setting. On the fore end was a sliding switch cut from a piece of aircraft spar, added at Son Tay after the dangerous minutes it had taken Weigand to reconfigure the device from EMP to nerve stimulation. The switch was in its forward position.

  “I don’t want you to call attention to yourself,” Weigand added sharply. “Don’t—”

  “I understand,” Carnes said, snappish in her present state to be told the obvious. “You intend to talk your way clear in the confusion. I’m to stay unnoticed and act only if someone starts using force.”

  The big ARC Rider bobbed his chin in agreement and apology. “Whatever happens,” he said as he glanced sideways toward Watney, “I intend this to take place without our having to kill anybody. Do you understand, Gerd?”

  “All right, Pauli,” the analyst replied. He removed his computer/recorder from a side p
ocket. “I’m ready to lock the suits in phase when they appear.”

  “I won’t tell you your job, Weigand,” Watney said. The smile that tweaked his lips was almost a sneer.

  Carnes walked toward the bunks. She wanted some distance between her and the trio of men, and her tropical battledress uniform was less obtrusive among the passengers from the DC-8 than it would be in the middle of Air Force personnel in stateside fatigues.

  Weigand and the men with him stood ready, six feet back from the ovals the analyst briefly projected on the floor again. How were Oakley’s people going to react to the appearance of the armor?

  In the hangar were still at least a hundred men—mostly men; General Oakley must have a prejudice against women. Over 60 percent of the varied US-based military forces had been women even when Carnes was shipped overseas for the second time.

  Carnes wouldn’t necessarily have been given another overseas posting. What if she’d stayed in ConUS? Would she have been stationed in Tampa? Or Atlanta? Or—how many other American locations had been targets of American H-bombs? Barthuli had said a hundred and—

  No, that was the number for the whole world on this timeline, this horizon. Still, many—

  The refractive index of the air in front of the three men changed. Carnes remembered the distorted transparency as TC 779 appeared between her and the Chinese rifleman.

  She turned her head, keeping her companions in the corner of her eye as she tried to spread her attention over everybody else in the hangar. The EMP generator was down along her right thigh, unremarkable in the lights’ sparse vertical harshness. In this vast cavern, nobody could watch all the places that might be crucial to see in the next instants.

  The three displacement suits appeared, so abruptly they seemed to have been present all along. Weigand stepped forward.

  A mechanic was leaning over an APC’s open engine compartment a hundred feet away. He blinked and called something to his assistant in front of the vehicle, handing up a wrench. An officer addressing a pair of airmen near a silent forklift stopped in midphrase and stood openmouthed.