Arc Riders

by David Drake

  Washington, DC

  August 30, 1968

  The basement of the safe house smelled slightly of damp and of ozone. Normally the latter would have made Nan Roebeck worry about TC 779’s condition, but not now. A few of the capsule’s circuits were arcing beneath the temporary insulation? Big deal. They’d do their job a little longer.

  Pauli Weigand came down the stairs. He looked much harder than he had when Roebeck last saw him at 50K. “Calandine’s in the phase chamber with the revisionists Bates and Rhone, Nan,” he said. “The hostiles put them all under with a storage drug. It’s probably the same as ours, but if it’s not—I don’t know what kind of side effects our antidote might have.”

  Roebeck tossed him a medical pack. Pauli had lost his with the displacement suit at National Airport. “Try it on one of the revisionists first,” she said. “If it works, then bring Calandine around. I’d like to leave him in place if we can.”

  “Right,” said Weigand as he went back upstairs. “We’ll see if Bates goes into convulsions. Watney said the business was mostly his idea.”

  There was a tone of satisfaction in Weigand’s voice that surprised Roebeck slightly. There hadn’t been time for a proper debriefing, but she didn’t need to be told that Pauli had been through a lot on this operation.

  Chun Quo came out of TC 779. “I’ve put them under for twelve hours,” she said. She cleared her throat and added, “What are you going to do with them, Nan?”

  “Our opposite numbers, you mean?” Roebeck said. “We’re going to strip their memories with a red dose and drop them in 50K, just like we’re going to do with the revisionists who started the whole business.”

  Chun nodded, in understanding rather than agreement. “Central…” she said. “And perhaps those up the line. Might want to, ah, talk to those persons themselves.”

  “Yeah,” Roebeck said. “The only possible thing they could gain from that exercise would be a way to communicate between our timeline and the other one. That’s why you and I are going to wipe all the navigational records from the vehicle before we return from 50K to Central. So nobody can ever find these people after we’ve marooned them.”

  She turned so that she was face-to-face to Chun. “Do you have a problem with that?”

  Chun looked away. In a voice tiny with embarrassment, she said, “Nan, if you hadn’t said that, I was going to give them a triple red dose. Enough to be sure they’d never wake up.”

  Roebeck hugged the shorter woman to her. “No need for that,” she said. “Besides—I’m leading this team.”

  Barthuli was watching them from the vehicle’s open hatch. Quo broke away awkwardly and said, “I’ll go help Pauli and Tim.” She skipped up the stairs without looking back at the analyst.

  “You seem to have come through well enough, Gerd,” Roebeck said. The analyst, now that he was back in ARC coveralls, didn’t appear to have changed at all.

  Barthuli gave her a smile that was either wry or sad. “Unlike Pauli and Quo, you mean?” he said. “They’ll want some support when we return, but I don’t think there’ll be any… disabling scars. Nothing the therapists can’t put right.”

  “But not you,” Roebeck said, making the implications of her previous comment explicit.

  “I don’t think the varied experiences of the current operation have warped my psyche, team leader,” Barthuli said. He wasn’t laughing at her. There was no emotion in his voice at all. “But it would be a little hard to tell, wouldn’t it? In any case, I think you’ll continue to find me a satisfactory analyst.”

  He looked toward the ceiling. Condensate beaded the bare I-beams. “Why did you decide to carry out the revisionists’ mission in a changed format rather than aborting it?” he asked.

  Roebeck nodded. “All right,” she said. She squeezed her arms tightly around her chest, then realized what she was doing and forced herself to stand loose again.

  “Gerd,” she said, “I kept coming up with a less than 12 percent chance of the President announcing tomorrow that he wouldn’t run for reelection if we simply eliminated Bates and Rhone as I’d planned. I—”

  Barthuli was looking at her. She met his eyes. “The… our opposite numbers’ existence… it depended on a revision at this nexus. But I think our timeline, our existence… that depended on a revision, too. Tim and I went into the White House with the equipment we’d taken from Bates and Rhone, and we used it to influence the President to step down.”

  She flashed a false smile. “I really wish you’d been around to do the analysis instead of me, Gerd.”

  He shrugged. “You’d have checked my results, wouldn’t you?” he said. “You’d still have made the decision yourself?”

  “Of course,” Roebeck agreed.

  “I checked your results,” Barthuli said, “and came up with a less than 3 percent probability that the President wouldn’t run again without your intervention.”

  He grinned with more real humor than Roebeck remembered having seen on the analyst’s face before. “And the results of the President winning a second full term would be… You’ll want to go over my extrapolations, Nan. So will the people at Central who no doubt think they have the right to second-guess field agents. Quite interesting, in the sense of the Chinese curse.”

  Barthuli chuckled. “I don’t believe there’ll be any negative repercussions from the decision you made,” he said.

  “I—” Roebeck looked away and blinked. “Yeah, I was thinking about what was going to happen when Central went over my report,” she said. Holding her voice very steady, she added, “You know, Gerd, if you really didn’t care what happens, you might be happier. But you’d be no good to me. No good at all.”

  Quo came down the stairs. Behind her came Pauli, with Bates slung over one shoulder and Rhone over the other. Tim Grainger brought up the rear, his fléchette gun held with an attempt at casualness that deceived no one who knew him.

  “Bates came around fine,” Weigand said. “So I gave him another hit. It won’t kill him, but he’ll likely have a headache when a sabertooth or wolves do the job.”

  “Anchor the revisionists to the bolt next to our opposite numbers,” Roebeck said. “We’ve gotten a full load between the two groups.”

  “Despite attrition,” Grainger said mildly.

  “Oh, Pauli?” Roebeck added to the big man’s back. “I haven’t had time to thank you for warning us about the ambush.”

  “My pleasure,” Weigand said. He paused in the hatchway and turned so that he could look at Roebeck past his comatose burden. “Slim had already let us know the sort of time we were in for if we stayed in their hands.”

  “Their communicators arc earplugs, not headbands like ours,” Chun said. “They didn’t recognize what Pauli was wearing. But if Pauli hadn’t stayed so calm…”

  “Then it would still have come out the same,” Weigand said as he disappeared into the vehicle. “I’ve seen Tim draw. They hadn’t.”

  “Thanks for the compliment,” Grainger said dryly. “But you know, sometimes an extra tenth of a second comes in real handy.” He followed Weigand aboard.

  “I think we’re ready, Nan,” Chun Quo said quietly. “I’ve programmed the initial displacement to 50K.”

  Roebeck slammed upright with a sudden awareness of failed responsibility. “Major Carnes!” she said. “Did we…”

  The tip of her tongue touched her lips. “Did we lose her as well as Watney?”

  “No we did not, Nan,” Gerd Barthuli said. This time his expression would have lit a room. “I had an idea, you see. Pauli, Quo—and Rebecca—worked out the details of how it could be executed. We’ll show you.”

  He bowed and gestured Roebeck to the hatchway with full 18th-century formality.

  Epilogue: ARC Central

  Jalouse dropped his plasma weapon. He spread the fingers of his right hand before his face while he tried desperately to latch his helmet with the other. A screaming man stretched over the desk and fired with the muzzle of his ma
chine pistol touching the gauntlet.

  Three bullets struck Jalouse’s palm, flinging the arm aside, the hand numb within the armor. At least a dozen rounds ricocheted from the curved front of the helmet, howling like wasps the size of eagles. The multiple impacts did what Jalouse had failed to do: latch the faceshield despite the tag of joint sealant that had come adrift when the ARC Rider grabbed at his visor with desperate strength.

  The gas shell hit the forehead of the man leaning over Jalouse. The projectile weighed 220 grams and was moving as fast as the hoof of an angry mule.

  The shooter hurtled backward, knocked unconscious by the impact. The contents of the shell sprayed across what should have been Transfer Control Room Two, volatilizing before the droplets reached the far bulkhead.

  Civilians folded up, their muscles unable to obey the commands of fear and hatred that still glared from their eyes. A machine pistol slipped from nerveless fingers and fired a last shot into the ceiling.

  The armored figure who’d followed Jalouse through the airlock slung the gas projector and said in an unfamiliar female voice, “Hold me! We’re displacing in ten seconds!”

  Jalouse thrust his arms out. His right hand wouldn’t close properly, but his left gauntlet twined fingers with hers and they hugged, chest to chest.

  The room’s inner door opened. The hall beyond was filled with figures in displacement suits with an odd shoulder flare. The leader aimed a plasma weapon as the whole scene faded into the darkness outside of time.

  Light. Chest-high grass, clouds too scattered to dim the bright sun, and a warm breeze on Jalouse’s face as he threw his visor up again.

  “What the hell happened?” he gasped. The other figure opened her helmet also. He’d never seen her before. “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Rebecca Carnes,” the woman said. “Can you help me out of this suit? I think we got the legs two different lengths when we put it together out of the spares in the capsule.”

  “But what happened?” Jalouse repeated. He was shaking, but feeling started to return to his right hand as he reached for the latch of Carnes’ armor. “I’ve never seen you before.”

  “Your friends couldn’t go fetch you from…” she nodded, upward, a direction in time. “From there, from that Central. Because they’d been there when you were caught and couldn’t go back. But I could.”

  She stepped out of the suit with Jalouse’s support. She was wearing loose garments of a style he wasn’t familiar with. Her trousers had been shredded by whatever she’d done before suiting up. What the hell had been going on?

  “Are they…” Jalouse said. “Is… are they all right?”

  “Everybody made it,” Carnes said. “Everybody’s going to go to the real ARC Central together. Including you.”

  The air above the sun-drenched prairie trembled, then solidified into an Anti-Revision Command transportation capsule. Jalouse’s breath caught when he saw the damage to the hull, but Nan Roebeck’s smile from the opening hatch was all the proof he needed that things really were under control.

  DAVID DRAKE was born in Dubuque, Iowa, in 1945. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Iowa, majoring in history (with honors) and Latin. He was attending Duke University Law School when he was drafted. He served the next two years in the Army, spending 1970 as an enlisted interrogator with the 11th Armored Cavalry in Viet Nam and Cambodia.

  Upon return he completed his law degree at Duke and was for eight years Assistant Town Attorney for Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He then drove a city bus for a year and, since 1981, has been a full-time freelance writer.

  Drake has a wife, a son, and various pets. He lives in a new house on 22 acres in Chatham County, North Carolina, where he feeds sun-flower seeds to the birds.

  JANET MORRIS is Vice President of Morris & Morris, a private consultancy specializing in new defense technology and non-lethal warfare. She is a Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. She has participated in several unprecedented U.S./Russian technology exchanges. in collaboration with David Drake, she has written Active Measures and Kill Ratio, among other novels. With her husband, Chris Morris, she has written The American Warrior and other titles. She is also the author of the Tempus series.

  A desperate plot to destroy the United State—a desperate race to save it!

  THE 52,000 YEAR WAR

  In the twenty-third year of LBJ’s martial rule, the war for Nam has spread to Central China, and rogue generals with nuclear weapons are poised to blast America into oblivion.

  Reactionary twenty-third century conspirators have changed history…or will, unless the elite Anti-Revision Command, the ARC Riders, aided by Nam vet Major Rebecca Carnes, can find the terrorists. In a manhunt that ranges from Southeast Asia to Washington, D.C., from the twenty-sixth century to 50,000 B.C., the ARC Riders must stop the killing before they lose their one slender chance to untie the fatal knots in Time.

  Vietnam veteran DAVID DRAKE, author of. Hammer’s Slammers, and JANET MORRIS, senior fellow of the U.S. Global Strategy Council and author of The American Warrior, join their talents for the most exciting time war adventure of the year.

  PRAISE FOR DAVID DRAKE AND JANET MORRIS

  “A tense, fast-paced thriller…from a writing team that has already demonstrated their individual talents.”

  —Science Fiction Chronicle, on Kill Ratio