Arc Riders

by David Drake

  Other men, all the other men, rose from their seats as well. This formerly commercial aircraft wasn’t configured to unload an assault company in a hurry. Those aboard were aggressive, hard-charging men. Anybody slow getting through a doorway was going to be trampled if he wasn’t shot first.

  Barthuli eyed the jostling, hair-trigger mass of killers crowding the DC-8’s aisle. “Odd, isn’t it?” he said. “As if that would help us arrive more quickly.”

  Weigand slid the switch of his EMP generator back and forth. He wondered if he should wear the displacement suit, stored now across the two seats beside Watney. The protection and sensors would be useful for the entire team; but if the hostile ARC Riders were present, Weigand would be painting a bull’s-eye on his forehead.

  “The weapon’s field causes a response in the emitter cells,” Barthuli resumed, looking at Weigand again. “The same principle as the irritant effect your device”—he nodded toward Weigand’s jury-rigged EMP generator; jury-rigged, but it worked, it had saved their lives—“causes, but more subtle if I may say so.”

  Weigand nodded, not really listening. The hostiles must track displacements, not arrivals or the course through nontime. They’d locatedTC 779 when Weigand’s group left it, and they’d found the suits themselves at Travis when the equipment repeatedly displaced out of phase at the same geographical point. But the hostiles hadn’t hunted down Weigand and his companions in 10K or the Midwest in 1991, because they hadn’t made two displacements from the same point.

  “The device acts in a manner opposite to that of contemporary nerve gas,” the analyst said. “Nerve gas inhibits cholinesterase production so that the victim’s nerves fire without remission until he dies. I wonder”—his brow narrowed in concentration—”if the same sort of projected field, beam, could inhibit cholinesterase?”

  “Okay,” Weigand said, making his mind up as he spoke. He got to his feet. “I’m going to wear the armor. Colonel Watney, please let me by.”

  Carnes was short enough that she could stand upright in front of the window seat. She rose when Weigand did and said, “What if it wasn’t the same people who attacked the… the capsule, Pauli? This pair was… They didn’t want to hurt you. The guns didn’t do any permanent damage. Not like the others.”

  The conversation was of no interest to soldiers nearby. The others’ minds were filled with immediate problems: would the airport layout be as described? When would the guards realize they were being attacked?

  Weigand wondered how much it had bothered Rebecca to have killed the hostiles. She’d brushed off the slaughter of the Guardsmen in Iowa easily enough. That had made Weigand think she was as callous as most of those the Anti-Revision Command recruited from early horizons. But Carnes hadn’t killed the victims that time, and that distinction clearly made a difference to her.

  Watney with his packful of munitions was wedged too tightly to move in the aisle or even turn his body. He craned his head over his shoulder and said to the man behind him, “Back up and let my sergeant by, buddy.”

  “They were just trying to minimize the public disruption, Rebecca,” Weigand said. “I doubt the way they deal with revisionists—that’s what we are to them—is anything as complicated as displacing them to 50K.”

  “Fuck!” said the man, a cadaverous black whose fungus condition cast pink speckles across his skin. The black braced himself and thrust backward. “Get him by, then!” he snarled at the 15-centimeter gap between his chest and Watney’s pack.

  Watney pushed forward and Weigand slid between them, feeling constricted and afraid, afraid of making the wrong decision. If the plane exploded in the air, he’d never have to explain to anybody why he’d failed….

  “I don’t think that was really their reasoning, Pauli,” Barthuli said. He was still seated, almost the only person in the passenger cabin who was. “Their transportation capsule would have caused as much comment when they summoned it as a plasma discharge or two. I think our opposite numbers wanted to pick our brains because their preemptive attack on TC 779 failed.”

  Weigand had taken the displacement suit out of its concealing crate as soon as the DC-8 lifted from its last refueling stop, a civil airport serving Nashville. It was awkward now to clamber into the armor between the close-pitched seats of the aircraft, but the task gave him something on which to concentrate apart from the events coming in the next minutes.

  “Maybe, Gerd,” Weigand said as his right leg finally found the correct angle and slid into the armor. “But remember, a couple plasma discharges might have set off the whole hangar. A lot of those pallets were ammo and explosives. The hostiles don’t dare do something that will change their past, however willing they may be to kill when they have the freedom to.”

  “This attack isn’t going to succeed, is it?” Carnes said. She’d stepped over the analyst’s legs and now stood in front of the seat Weigand had occupied. “Surely General Oakley isn’t going to become… President?”

  Barthuli chuckled. “President of what, you mean, Rebecca?” he said. “No, of course he’ll fail. Analysis would tell me that, even if we hadn’t seen the actual results when we surveyed the horizon looking for, well, for you. But to abort the attempt still in California, that sort of revision could cause any number of effects up the line. Pauli is right. An error by our opponents could divert their future, even if it doesn’t bring ours back.”

  Weigand closed the plastron over his chest, but he left the faceshield open. He could see and hear better with the armor buttoned up, but it was bad enough to have to be in this packed passenger cabin without enclosing himself still tighter.

  There wasn’t any choice about which of the team would wear the suit: Weigand was the only one it would fit. He wondered if the reason two, not three hostile ARC Riders had waited to ambush the team in its own armor was that none of the Orientals was tall enough to wear Weigand’s suit.

  He still felt like a coward, protected when his subordinates were not. What would ARC Central and those up the line think of his decision?

  The DC-8 had been repainted at Travis in the colors of Delta Airlines. It was a sloppy job, but there was a lot of bad workmanship around as America fell the last of the way into an unwinnable war. The plane would be landing some minutes ahead of the day’s regular flight from Atlanta. National’s runway wasn’t long enough for aircraft of this size and vintage, but the pilot was convinced he could get them in.

  The troops Oakley recruited from the war zone had the job of capturing National Airport. The briefings had used old airline magazine drawings of the airport layout with the recently added defenses—a missile battery and a number of blockhouses with dual-purpose automatic weapons—drawn in by hand. When that mission was accomplished, the remainder of the coup force and its vehicles could land unopposed in military transports.

  The airport’s defenses were manned by the Presidential Guard. Weigand doubted the troops’ quality was any higher than that of Oakley’s brassarded equivalent, but it takes very little effort to shoot down an aircraft on its landing run. The sight of six or seven lumbering transports—there’d have been ten if Oakley’s spares and maintenance situation had permitted them to make a 5,000-kilometer flight—would fill the air above the runways with tracer bullets.

  The PA system rattled something unintelligible. Buildings, then water, raced by beyond the scratched Plexiglas of Weigand’s window. He closed his faceshield.

  The wheels thumped. The men in the passenger compartment swayed as a single mass. The plane hit a second time. The pilot was coming down deliberately hard to shorten his run, but the tires were in no better condition than the rest of the aircraft. One of them blew like a bomb.

  The plane slewed. Somebody screamed a prayer in Spanish. Another tire blew and a roostertail of sparks shot back from where metal abraded on concrete with a shriek that silenced all voices and all hope.

  The pilot brought the nose straight, then made a deliberate turn to the right. Metal still rubbed, but the sound w
as petulant rather than triumphantly bloodthirsty.

  Wind roared through the cabin. The Air Force officers acting as cabin staff were opening the doors while the DC-8 still taxied.

  Brakes moaning like damned souls, the aircraft shuddered to a halt at the terminal. Weigand had seen only three other aircraft through his window; one of those was deadlined for repair, starboard control surfaces and engine removed.

  “Go!” an officer shouted, but his voice was a poor, weak thing compared to the bellow of over a hundred killers heading into action down the emergency slides.

  “Go, go, go,” Watney mouthed. The revisionist was taut as an E-string, but he waited under Weigand’s orders until the assault force cleared the aircraft.

  Watney understood their mission had nothing to do with capturing the airport. So far as the team was concerned, the attack was merely a ride to Washington, necessary because the suits—the suit—couldn’t displace spatially.

  General Fern had tasked “Watney’s Squad” to eliminate the blockhouse armed with 20mm cannon—aircraft guns on improvised ground mountings—on the roof of the building. Weigand had no intention of getting involved in a battle, on the roof or elsewhere, but anything that caused confusion was to the benefit of the team as it escaped from the area.

  Weigand paused on the emergency side hatch, aiming his EMPgenerator. His three companions, Watney in the lead, went out the parallel hatch two rows back instead of waiting for him. That wasn’t what he’d intended. The air glittered with muzzle flashes, tracers, and shattered glass falling in the noonday sun.

  Weigand pulsed the three microwave communication cones he could see from this angle, then aimed at the airport radar antenna and gave it a full two seconds. The radar receiver would fail—and possibly explode—when it tried to amplify the pulse. The control staff would have enough to think about already, but a healthy fear of their equipment might delay them from summoning help by the channels that hadn’t been put out of commission.

  His companions were almost to the terminal. Carnes turned to check Weigand’s progress. He jumped down an emergency slide which was already collapsing from a burst seam. The top half of the terminal exploded.

  The assault force’s gunfire had raked the upper floor where the gates had been in the days when the boarding bridges were in use. The blast blew the walls out and threw bodies, scores of bodies, as far as fifty meters from the building.

  The shock knocked Carnes down, but she’d risen to her feet before Weigand reached her. Some of the bodies had been stripped by the explosion; others were wrapped in their own burning garments.

  The disused floor had been occupied by folk who otherwise wouldn’t have had a roof over their heads. The squatters cooked their food in narrow warrens partitioned with cardboard. One family had a stove with a gas bottle big enough to blow themselves and everyone camped in that gate area to kingdom come when a bullet hit.

  All across the upper floor, smoke belched through bullet holes and the gaps where windows had been before the blast. Fuel, flesh, fabrics—sooty flames, gnawing the air with petulant orange teeth. Weigand supposed he should be glad. The smell and screams would increase the confusion still more.

  Weigand led Carnes into the building. They had to get into the city proper. Going through the terminal was shorter and a safer bet than trying to go around the U-shaped building, chancing gunfire from the dozens of doorways and windows.

  Watney and Barthuli waited inside. The analyst held his recorder/computer rather than an acoustic pistol. He hadn’t bothered to bring the Kalashnikov “assigned” to him out of the DC-8.

  The lounge was a charnel house. It had been crowded with would-be passengers—more people than aircraft the size of those serving National could have accommodated. They’d been pushing toward the doors to be sure of getting places on the outgoing flight.

  To be able to fly in these final days, you needed some connection with power; and as always in chaos, power surely did flow from the barrel of a gun. Most of those in the lounge were wearing military uniforms. That might have been the reason, or at least the excuse, the assault force had for opening fire indiscriminately.

  On the other hand, Oakley’s shock troops were men only days back from jungle and the loess hills of Yunnan. They might not have thought they needed an excuse to kill REMFs like these.

  The man lying in front of the door had silver hair and an aristocratic face. His uniform had been white and gold; now it was red as well. His hands were spread on his chest. The man’s eyes were open and he wasn’t dead yet, but it wouldn’t be long.

  One of his bodyguards was headless. A 40mm grenade had eviscerated the other, though he, too, was technically alive for the moment.

  There had been hundreds of people in the lounge. They were mostly there still, where air-bursting grenades had killed them, or sprawled in windrows of three to a dozen as automatic rifles and machine guns raked their running backs.

  A few survivors tried to hide behind the luggage carousels. Men in battledress shot them down, working in pairs like hunters driving squirrels around a tree trunk to one another.

  “Okay,” Weigand said, as a placeholder for thoughts that he couldn’t permit himself to think. He pointed out the front of the terminal building, toward the parking lot and beyond it the city in which they would go to ground while planning the next maneuver. “Straight on through, me in the lead.”

  The entryway’s marble floor was treacherous with slippery pooling blood. Weigand skidded twice, catching himself on cracks, but his balance was nearly perfect when the adrenaline was flowing as now.

  Half a dozen members of the assault force were ahead of him. Apparently because the automatic opening mechanisms no longer worked, the door slides had been wedged open. Four of the attackers ran through one open doorway; their two fellows used the next one to the right.

  A 105mm high-explosive shell from a tank in the parking lot hit one man of the pair. The shell didn’t explode then because a human chest didn’t provide enough resistance to set the fuse. Instead, the round screamed across the terminal, hit a concrete pillar in the far wall, and blew bits of its across the distant runway.

  The man whom the shell had hit was a head and shoulders poised above running legs. The center of his chest had vanished, and the air behind him was a fog of blood. The parts of his body toppled as machine gun fire riddled the four men in the next door opening.

  “Down!” Weigand screamed, throwing himself flat. A second 105 round blasted through the terminal, in and out in a shock of air. There was a huge explosion beyond and a gush of orange flame lighting the terminal through all openings on the runway side. The shell had opened up the DC-8 like a plow through fallow land.

  Bullets from two or three continuously firing automatic weapons punched in from the front of the terminal. Machine guns weren’t a danger to Weigand in the displacement suit, but 20-kilogram tank shells would kill him as dead as they had the soldier who’d taken the direct hit.

  Barthuli was saying something. Weigand tuned the analyst’s words out. He didn’t have time for answers that might not be to the precise questions that mattered now. He had to focus on his suit’s sensors and artificial intelligence.

  There were two tanks, bow on to the terminal building and about a hundred meters away. They had diesel engines and hydraulic controls. The only equipment an electromagnetic pulse could affect were their laser range finders and radios. The range finders didn’t work to begin with and were needless with the tanks firing at pistol range.

  Kyle Watney extended the tube of one of his anti-tank rockets, arming the weapon. He rolled out from behind the pillar where he’d been sheltering. Weigand grabbed the revisionist’s ankle and pulled him back down.

  Two more 105mm shells hit the terminal. One was aimed at the south end, from which somebody’d been shooting at the tanks. There was a red flash: a telephone flew from that wing of the building as a secondary projectile.

  “I’ve got to get between them!” Wa
tney screamed at the smooth surface of Weigand’s helmet. “The LAW charge won’t penetrate from the front, I have to hit them from the side! They’ll shoot us to shit if we stay here!”

  The automatic cannon on the roof opened fire. The wracking 30-round burst terminated in a whoomp! as something went wrong.

  “I’ll go,” Weigand said, taking the missile from Watney’s hands. The revisionist didn’t try to resist. “Give me the other two. You wouldn’t get through.”

  The south wing ruptured in an oily blast. God only knew what had been stored there. The explosion wasn’t caused by a tank shell, because the next pair of those streaked across the anteroom a half second later. The vehicles were firing armor-piercing arrow shot this time. One projectile drilled the pillar above Carnes and Barthuli in a blaze of green and scarlet light, sparks from the reinforcing rods and the tungsten penetrator.

  Weigand thumbed his inner left wrist. Displacement’s familiar disorientation was a relief after the carnage of the terminal building. He couldn’t have gotten through the alerted tanks, either, not with the certainty required. Pauli Weigand would have risked his life without hesitation, but he couldn’t risk the operation that would fail if his displacement suit took a main-gun round.

  The tanks weren’t alerted, weren’t even present, on August 4, 1991, when a man in bulky armor appeared in the terminal of National Airport. The figure pushed screaming travelers out of the way, lumbering through the front door and across the sun-drenched humidity of the parking lot beyond.

  Weigand had displaced back to a point one hour before he, Carnes, and Barthuli had arrived in Iowa at the start of their odyssey across this temporal horizon. If he was delayed in the past longer than an hour, he was… dead, he supposed; certainly vanished from this timeline. But only death would delay him that much anyway.