Arc Riders

by David Drake

  The right gauntlets of two of the displacement suits held square-sectioned weapons larger than the ARC Riders’ acoustic pistols and of obviously different design. Weigand, Barthuli—and an instant later Watney as one of the suits shifted aim—dropped like rice sacks.

  No thrashing, no convulsions as shocked nerves fired when the bodies hit the concrete. It was as if all the three men’s tendons had been cut.

  Barthuli fell on his multipurpose device. The revolver Watney had managed to draw bounced beside him. Its steel barrel and alloy frame rang in separate keys.

  One of the suits stepped forward. The suit that didn’t hold a weapon remained statue still, harmless; empty. The other armed suit turned so that it was back to back with the first, covering the rear as the first suit bent down.

  Weigand’s head moved. The angular weapon twitched. Pauli flattened again like warm gelatin.

  The officer who’d seen the displacement suits appear started to walk over with a perturbed expression. The enlisted men remained beside the forklift, staring after their superior with blank incomprehension.

  Rebecca Carnes was thirty feet from the suits and her fallen companions. She reached down with her left forefinger and pulled her weapon’s switch into the rear position. She deliberately kept her face turned away from the tableau behind her.

  The officer—he was a captain—called, “Say, who—” and fell the way Carnes’ companions had. The motion was almost as smooth as that of a fluid-filled balloon. She’d never seen anything like it in her life.

  Carnes turned and squeezed the trigger as she swung the EMP generator. She didn’t have any idea what the range or dispersion of the weapon’s effect might be. There was no recoil. The stock and her flesh in contact with it quivered like a beehive.

  The suit kneeling over Weigand’s body froze in place. The suit that had just shot the Air Force officer fell frontward, though not exactly on its face. The pointing arm and gun hand, as rigid as those of a bronze statue, clanged on the concrete and held the figure like a flat tripod on gun muzzle, left toe, and the point of the left shoulder. The third displacement suit overlooked the scene with bland impassivity.

  Carnes ran to her fallen companions, ignoring the presence of the other personnel in the hangar. Barthuli moved, Watney and Pauli Weigand moved; even the Air Force captain was blinking groggily in the hands of the enlisted men who’d shouted as they came to his aid.

  It was as if the sun had risen over the soul of Rebecca Carnes.

  Watney’s right arm thrashed. Carnes thought the revisionist was in convulsions; then she realized he was groping at his empty shoulder holster. Watney was operating on reflex. Though his eyes were open, he didn’t see the revolver he’d drawn and dropped in the instant the suited figure shot him.

  Weigand’s pupils were the same size and only moderately dilated in the interior light. “Rebecca?” he said.

  “What’s going on here?” demanded an officious voice.

  “Get back, you damned fool!” Carnes snarled over her shoulder. “These men have received an electric shock. Who’s responsible for these facilities?”

  She didn’t have any idea what had happened to her companions, though it wasn’t electricity. Electroshock would have induced rigidity and convulsions. Instead, they’d relaxed. Utterly.

  Gerd turned his head and softly patted his cheek with his right fingertips. He didn’t try to move from the concrete. “I feel…” he said. “How very interesting. How interesting.”

  Watney found his revolver and gripped it in his hands. He rose to a squat, looking like nothing so much as a beast encircled by the score of Air Force personnel now clustering about the event.

  Weigand’s heart rate and breathing were normal. He didn’t appear to be harmed, just disoriented. He frowned up at Carnes and said, “Where is…” He couldn’t think of the words or—perhaps—the idea with which to complete the question.

  “Are these suits radioactive?” the officious voice demanded, rising in timbre. “Is there a radiation hazard? Answer me!”

  Rather than standing up, Gerd Barthuli crossed his legs beneath him and rose to a sitting position. He still held his computer/recorder. He began to use it as if oblivious of the noisy strangers around him.

  “My God, the suits,” Weigand murmured.

  “There’s no radiation!” Carnes said. Was there radiation? Would it help if she claimed there was?

  She turned her head. The man asking the questions was a portly, middle-aged sergeant. The short sleeves of his khaki shirt were almost covered by the number of wavy, Air Force–style rank stripes.

  “These men have nearly been electrocuted by somebody’s negligence!” Carnes shouted. The jagged nervousness of her tone—emotions she let out rather than putting on—and the implications of what she’d said moved the spectators back abruptly.

  Pauli stood, wobbled, and caught himself on the shoulder of Carnes rising beside him. “EMP?” he said into her ear.

  Watney was standing. He checked the revolver’s loads, then reholstered his weapon. He seemed to be pretending that he was alone in the great room, his face a mask of mindless tension. Watney was as dangerous at this moment as a grenade with the pin pulled; so obviously dangerous that even some of the REMFs noticed and moved out of the vicinity.

  “Yes, I…” Carnes agreed. The generator was on the floor beside her. She picked it up and tried to return it to Weigand.

  “Not now,” Weigand said. He put his hands on the hips of two Air Force officers bending over the nearer displacement suit and moved them away with as much pressure as was needed.

  “Pauli,” said Barthuli from the floor, “it’s been over four minutes of total shutdown. And it’ll cause questions if you open the equipment now.”

  “Okay, I see that,” Weigand said flatly. “The third suit, that’s okay?”

  “It was unpowered when the pulse destroyed the others,” the analyst said. “It should be fully functional.”

  Carnes was still holding the generator. She slid the switch from EMP to irritant field, then slid it back. She didn’t know what had happened, much less what she should be prepared to prevent in the next seconds or minutes.

  “We’re scheduled to leave for Washington, DC, on the same aircraft that brought us across the Pacific,” Barthuli said. Carnes couldn’t be sure whether the analyst was stating information or was pushing Pauli toward a particular decision. “Of course, schedules under the present conditions…”

  “Okay,” Weigand said. He hugged himself, then pointed to the senior sergeant who’d been questioning Carnes. “You,” Weigand said. “I want these two pieces of equipment”—he tapped the kneeling displacement suit with his boot toe, then pointed the same toe at the suit frozen into a tripod—“packed in a Conex marked 504th Provisional Company, do not open. Now. And I want that piece”—Weigand gestured toward the undamaged suit with his left hand; his right didn’t move far from the pocket in which Carnes knew Weigand kept his acoustic pistol—“boxed in wood, minimum clearances, also stenciled 504th, and delivered aboard the mission aircraft at once. The Conex remains here. Do you understand?”

  There were about thirty people in the group around the team. Some onlookers had drifted away; others came over to see what was going on, whispering to those who’d been present longer.

  One of the officers was a bird colonel. He remained in poker-faced silence, unwilling to interfere or even ask questions that would display his ignorance in the face of Weigand’s forceful certainty.

  The sergeant saluted. “Yes sir,” he said.

  The man was sweating. Carnes remembered his question about radiation. The military had forty-odd years of experience lying to its personnel about radiation dangers. Carnes’ denial would do nothing to reassure the fellow, though her presence in the possible contamination site was a positive sign.

  “You there,” the sergeant said, pointing to a junior enlisted man. “Bring over that forklift. Cole—don’t you move away, Cole, all you lot
—”

  His arm swept a group of airmen. The crowd of spectators began to break up under the sergeant’s orders and the general feeling of tension. The colonel stepped toward the team and opened his mouth to speak.

  “No, you do not have a need to know what’s going on, Colonel,” Rebecca Carnes said sharply. “This matter is in the hands of the 504th, and only our hands.”

  The colonel glared down from six inches of height and two rank steps over her. He looked at Carnes—and Weigand—and for an instant at the empty horror of Kyle Watney’s face. The colonel executed a parade-ground about-face and marched toward the parked vehicles.

  Barthuli got to his feet. The team moved a few yards away to where they could watch the sergeant’s preparations without getting in the way. Even Watney’s expression was returning to human norms.

  “I destroyed the suits when I EMPed them?” Carnes asked Weigand quietly.

  Weigand took the generator from her. “Yeah, thank goodness,” he said. He checked the switch setting. “We’re all right so long as one remains. The pulse doesn’t affect the suits when they’re shut down.”

  The forklift whined up. Besides the driver, it carried an enlisted man riding on the stack of empty pallets on the forks.

  “Could I have saved the others?” Carnes asked. “Gerd said ‘four minutes.’ Do they—”

  Weigand grinned wanly at her. “The armor was fried in the first microsecond,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. You did the right thing.”

  He cleared his throat. “What Gerd meant was the people inside the suits—our opposite numbers, this timeline’s ARC Riders. Nobody else could’ve located the suits and waited for us in them.”

  “The environmental systems stopped functioning with the rest of the suit,” Barthuli amplified. His tone was cool but for him kindly. “After four minutes, the occupants won’t be… recoverable.”

  “Oh,” said Rebecca Carnes. She swallowed.

  Airmen began knocking the pallets into boards under the senior sergeant’s direction, making an enormous clatter. The team backed a few more steps.

  “I failed in my intention not to kill anybody, Colonel Watney,” Weigand said. The words could have been apology or a challenge. The revisionist shrugged, his mind at a distance from the proceedings.

  Outside the hangar, a jet engine ran up to a scream as it was tested. The sound throbbed through the building like the call of a beast of prey.

  Baltimore, Maryland

  March 1, 1967

  This time, Grainger wasn’t taking any chances. He’d get Bates and Rhone on this attempt, even if he had to kill them—if Roebeck gave him half a chance. The woods around the ARC Riders’ second rental car were deep and somehow shielding as he drove Roebeck toward Washington on a gray day with just a hint of spring to it.

  Roebeck wouldn’t relent. No killing. Just walk up and use superior technology to preempt, interdict, and disarm any number of equally high-tech slant-eyed adversaries from Timeline B Central, or a revisionist enemy from somewhere else up the line who had no compunction about killing you—or both.

  He’d tried to reason with Roebeck when they were safely back in TC 779, out of phase, and going through an agonizing hot wash. He’d partially succeeded. “Boss, we should go back down the line a week or so, to before we met Calandine. Maybe he tipped the gooks from B Central to us. We’ve got what we need—current tracking data on the targets, correct for the March One horizon as well as for the Ides. We find a new staging area. Fuck the safe house. It’s B Central’s safe house these days. Using it means risking running into them accidentally and/or providing them with a likely locus in which to act against us.”

  “Just exactly what is it you’re suggesting, Tim? Lay it out for me. After all, you’re our expert on old America and intelligence techniques,” Roebeck said icily. All through that memorable hot wash, her discomfort at Grainger’s manipulation of the local intel community had been painfully evident. To all of them.

  “There’s no expert in our ARC on this old America. I told you, we’ve got to preempt the Orientals—and whoever tipped the CIA to the mind control device. I swear it was nothing I said to Calandine.” Roebeck clearly didn’t believe him. They couldn’t let the growing distrust and suspicion destroy their unit cohesion, especially not in a unit of two plus one Oriental. Chun increasingly gave him a bad feeling. Who had tipped the CIA, or the Orientals from B Central, to the ARC Riders’ locus behind Embassy Row was still an unanswered question.

  Grainger was willing to bet that the culprit was Calandine, under direction of the revisionists who had started this timeline rolling, but it was doubtful he’d ever be able to prove it. That was the way things went in the ARC. You fixed the problem, things straightened out. Very rarely did you get a textbook explanation to log in your after-action report, since there was no alternate history left to examine at your leisure. The only good thing about alternate histories, as far as Grainger was concerned, was that once you pulled the plug, they disappeared as if they’d never been.

  Except in your own memories. Where they’d never disappear. Grainger couldn’t get those Orientals out of his thoughts. At that moment, he was looking at one right across from him in the close confines of TC 779.

  Chun had seen him staring at her. “There’s plenty of forest out near the Baltimore flight line on this horizon. I can put you there and stay on the horizon with you if you like, Nan.”

  “No need to risk the capsule,” Grainger had said hurriedly. Out of phase, the harm that Chun could do if she were a traitor was sharply constrained. Alone in the venue, with TC 779’s capabilities at her disposal, she could be up to anything. Of course, there was no way for Grainger to tell whether she hadn’t dephased while the other ARC Riders were hunting Bates and Rhone and sicced her kinsmen on him and Roebeck….

  “I still say we preempt,” he insisted. “Go back to before we screwed up and preempt everybody’s action: the locals; the Orien—the B Central operators; everybody. We can do this—zero the targets and take them before the other side knows to look for us. Let’s try again, same drill, earlier time, insertion at the Baltimore flight line—if the boss agrees.” Grainger had looked hopefully at Roebeck.

  “All right, but no unnecessary violence, Tim. And only if you can convince me how you’re going to do without your local support base. If Calandinc can’t be trusted, then he can’t be trusted. Not now. Not then. Not ever. Nor anyone from his orbit.”

  Grainger wasn’t sure he could pull off a preemptive insertion without support from the local intel community, but he was sure as hell more ready to try a March 1, 1967, horizon than he was to battle it out on ancient streets with the guys from Timeline B’s Central sometime after March 19, 1967. When they knew he’d be coming.

  So here they were, rolling in Timeline B again. Before again. As the sun started to wane, it was getting cold as hell on March 1, 1967. The sky even looked like snow. The rented Lincoln Continental that Chun had prearranged for them to pick up at the airport didn’t include fusion heaters or a routing computer, but they were making do in the drafty automobile with their coveralls’ climate stabilizers and paper maps. He had what he really needed—fake ID, local currency, and targeting data on his quarry.

  The rest, either his way or Roebeck’s way, was soon going to be history.

  His second rented car had been no problem to acquire despite his local ID, because the accident he’d had with his first one had been in this horizon’s future—his fake driving record was as yet unmarred.

  This time, he was going to make an appointment with Bates that Bates would have to keep.

  And this time, he had an automobile with an automatic shift, so he wasn’t forced to leave his personal security in Roebeck’s slow hands. If there was reason to open fire, he wasn’t willing to depend on her to do it. Not after last time.

  The worst of the situation was that you couldn’t drive around the country in your hard suit. The bulky suits wouldn’t exactly fit in automobi
le’s trunk, so the suits were again stashed out of phase. Roebeck had wanted to leave them with TC 779 and he’d flatly refused the mission if that were to be the case.

  So there was open discord now. Chun knew he didn’t trust her and there was no way to make up for that. Machiavelli had warned that you kept your friends close and your enemies closer. Overt hostility in an ARC Riders team couldn’t be tolerated.

  Roebeck had told them both so in no uncertain terms.

  Not happy campers, this time out, not any of them.

  Roebeck turned on the RF receiver and music poured out. Some female was singing something about baby love, in an impossibly childish voice. Roebeck spun the dial. There was no newscast that she could find.

  She sighed and sat back, pulling her membrane down from her headband peevishly. The style of the day allowed for all sorts of strange headgear and clothing, which made utilizing their coveralls and basic commo gear less of a problem than it otherwise could have been.

  Three hours after insertion, Roebeck was still so angry about the tone of the hot wash that she was talking to him through her commo link, despite the fact that he was right beside her.

  “Tim, you’ve got to patch it up with Chun. That’s an order. If you don’t trust her, that’s your business. Keep it your business. We’re literally dependent on her for our lives—unless you want to spend the rest of yours here in the worst possible version of the next two weeks of 1967, or disappear with this horizon if we’re successful.”

  “Don’t think I hadn’t considered that. I’m sorry. I told her. I apologized. I’m just jumpy.” If Chun decided to leave them here—or him here—there’d be no recourse. And any ARC Rider would be in lethal trouble if one—or more—were still on this horizon when the calendar reached March 15, the day they’d first inserted. Staying here was a death sentence, whether or not the mission was successful. And Chun could decree them MIA/KIA by failing to retrieve them before that date.

  It was interesting to know one possible date of your death. It gave things a singular perspective. He’d known the risks when he’d politicked for preemption, but he hadn’t felt them until the capsule shimmered out of phase and he and Roebeck were on their own within such a severely circumscribed survivable timeframe.