Arc Riders

by David Drake

  Weigand nodded. “You can make a lot of money betting on Gerd’s guesses,” he said. The only reason it’d be a tragedy if Barthuli got his head stuck on a stick, or whatever “Clovis hunters” did, was that the guy was so damned good at his job. The team could get another analyst, but there wasn’t a chance he’d be the artist Gerd Barthuli was.

  Besides, Weigand liked the guy, though he was about as spooky as anybody you were likely to meet.

  “Gerd,” he said, the name keying the commoset. “Weigand to Barthuli. Let’s talk, Gerd. Weigand to Barthuli.”

  No answer. An unusual degree of hollowness on his earphones, though, suggesting the set’s Al was blanking a great deal of static.

  Weigand checked the multisensor hanging on his belt for a spectrum analysis. The holographic readout flashed into the air before him. He swore.

  “What’s the matter?” the major said sharply. She pressed her right hand firmly against her ribs, above the flap of the pocket which her acoustic pistol bulged. Carnes’ loose cotton uniform had been in bad shape when the team picked her up. Weigand wondered if they had a set of coveralls on TC 779 that would fit her.

  Weigand waved at the hill. “All this rock is full of lead and zinc ore.” he explained. “There’s no way I can punch a signal through it. Or Gerd, either, not that I’d be real confident of him trying to call us. He didn’t ask before he went off on his little junket, after all.”

  He raised an eyebrow toward Carnes. “Might be best if you stay here in your suit,” he said. “I’ll go fetch Gerd back, and—”

  “No,” Carnes said simply. She took the acoustic pistol out of her pocket and held it like a prayer book in both hands.

  Weigand nodded. “All right with me,” he said. “You know how to use that thing?”

  “I point it and pull the trigger?” Carnes said.

  “Pretty much,” Weigand agreed. Hell, they were already near the end of their time. Nan wasn’t going to like this, but it’d turn out all right in the long run. “Don’t hold the trigger down longer than a few seconds at a time or it’ll start to get hot from harmonics. It won’t hurt the gun, but you can burn the hell out of your hand that way.”

  He adjusted two electronic controls on the inside of his armor’s backplate, then did the same with the other two suits.

  “What are you doing?” Carnes asked. She didn’t sound frightened, but there was a bright edge to her voice that hadn’t been there before she went up the hill with Barthuli.

  “I’m setting the suits to shift out of phase with sidereal time,” Weigand explained. “I doubt locals could hurt them, but you can never tell. Besides, we don’t want to find bird nests in them when we come back.”

  Or a rattlesnake, but he didn’t say that aloud.

  Carnes looked at the wooded slope. She deliberately put the pistol back in her pocket. “How do you call them back when we return?” she said, her eyes still toward the hillside.

  “They’ll return for two minutes every four hours,” Weigand explained. “You’re right, when they’re out of phase, there’s no communication with them at all.”

  Carnes grinned stiffly and started up the hill. Weigand’s longer legs brought him quickly in step with her. As he strode, he switched the magazine from tanglefoot to gas cartridges. Hard to know how many locals they’d be facing.

  And ARC coveralls were great, but they wouldn’t stop a flint spear.

  Eurasia

  Circa 50,000 BC

  Roebeck leaned against the ledge of rock and looked down at the distant capsule. Grainger was at work, tracing connections. She could see only the top of his head because he was on the hatch side of the vehicle. Chun was inside, probably asleep.

  A vulture circled above the valley’s farther rim. Roebeck had climbed to the ledge to catch the morning sun, but the thin cirrus haze combed much of the heat from the wan light. The rock was still cold from the night just past, though the hoarfrost had sublimed with the dawn.

  Roebeck sighed. This wasn’t a great place to relax, but she didn’t need sleep and she certainly wasn’t ready to resume work. Might as well view the landscape. When the weather deteriorated, as it surely would within the next weeks and months, she wouldn’t have even this.

  The Riders paced themselves individually. Chun was painstaking and slow; she worked fourteen, even sixteen hours out of twenty-four, though she knew as well as Roebeck did that she’d accomplish more in the long run if she took longer breaks.

  Grainger was very fast when he was on, but he worked the way a natural pianist plays: for the flow of music, not the individual notes. He’d have checked his own work if necessary, but his talent wasn’t in that area. Instead, Roebeck went over Grainger’s work before each spell of her own. It was a good way of bending her mind into the necessary rote pathways.

  Roebeck was the steadiest of the three. She put herself on a rigid schedule, five blocks of two hours each, with an hour off between shifts. She didn’t work during the ten hours of darkness. Miniature floodlights illuminated the entire hull, but Roebeck’s circadian rhythms were in their down-phase at night.

  She could live on her nerves when that was necessary. It wasn’t necessary now, so she paced herself for greatest efficiency.

  Roebeck pulled the facemask down from the headband and scanned the valley for large life-forms. After a moment on optical, she switched to the thermal imaging and directed the microprocessor in the band to highlight anomalies. This ledge was forty meters above the valley floor where TC 779 rested. Roebeck climbed to it up a scree of rock cracked from the cliff face by successive thaws and freezing.

  A family of giant fallow deer, six of them, moved in a straggling line toward the head of the valley where mist overhung a pond. An animal would pace ten or twenty meters forward at a time while the others waited or browsed. Occasionally one of the deer would break into a bounding run, amazingly clumsy to watch. The stag was last of all, poised like a splendid statue among a stand of cedars near the rock wall.

  The team hadn’t seen any large carnivores thus far during its stay, but common sense and the cautious behavior of prey animals indicated some were present in the valley. Even the rhinos were skittish, though the smallest of them—the offspring born the past year—weighed half a tonne by now.

  Despite the weight, Roebeck carried a fléchette gun with attached EMP generator every time she left the vehicle. The real purpose of the weapon was to deal with the hostile ARC Riders should their transportation capsule appear, but a burst of fléchettes would discourage wolves or a lion as effectively.

  For preference, Roebeck would use the acoustic pistol she carried in a shoulder holster. For absolute preference, she wouldn’t do anything at all to disturb the balance of events that would have occurred without the team’s presence.

  One school of thought held that the further back in time one went, the greater the capacity of the temporal fabric to close over rents torn in it by humans. Those on the other side of the debate pointed out that a revision occurring in the distant past acted on an enormous temporal lever. An event here could be magnified into an asymptotic rush of change, overwhelming history and perhaps the very existence of humankind.

  Grainger took the first view, though he didn’t care very much. Tim was permanently adrift from his own horizon, so the question of what happened to other times was of only academic interest to him. Chun fiercely believed that the risks of causing disruption on this horizon were logarithmically greater than they would be in a historical period.

  Roebeck didn’t have a strong opinion of her own, save that she intended to keep the debate theoretical. It frightened her to work in the presence of humans and not have proper data on what to avoid. She wasn’t sure even Central had such data. Jumps this deep into the timestream were beyond the capacity of revisionists working with experimental hardware. Those up the line might not have seen a reason to gather information on a distant preliterate period, since the investigation itself could disrupt the horizon.

/>   “Nan?” Chun said, communicating through the intercom in Roebeck’s headband. Chun’s exceptional calm bespoke tension to those who knew her well. “The humans are back. They’re moving toward us along the cliff.”

  “Quo, I see them,” Roebeck said. Though she hadn’t until Chun relayed the warning from the artificial intelligence overseeing the capsule’s sensors. Roebeck knew exactly where to look, because the mother and her young daughter made a similar trek every morning.

  The local humans—the Neanderthals—carried digging sticks. The child was naked. The mother wore a deerhide with the hair-side against her back and the forelegs tied over her shoulder. Occasionally she or her daughter dropped potential food items into a bag of similar material, though for the most part they seemed to devour their finds on the spot.

  The pair was three hundred meters from TC 779 but somewhat closer to Roebeck because they were working along the cliff-edge scree. Roebeck knew the Neanderthals were aware of the presence of intruders on their horizon; she’d caught them watching her, watching the capsule, many times in the past—

  But only from hiding, or at a distance that they probably thought shielded them from the Riders’ observance. The vehicle and its inhabitants fascinated the Neanderthals, but they refused to acknowledge its existence openly. Day after day they eased closer to TC 779, but they only viewed the capsule sidelong.

  “Nan, I think we ought to displace,” Chun said. “We don’t know what effect we could be having on these humans.”

  “They’re Neanderthalers,” commented Grainger, wholly visible now as he lifted off a section of hull plate from near the bow. “Not on the direct line, are they?”

  The curved metal caught sunlight in a brilliant shimmer. The hostiles’ plasma had damaged circuits even where particles didn’t fully penetrate the outer hull. The team couldn’t trust the computer’s own assessment by pair matching between identical circuits, because many times both pairs had been destroyed.

  “I don’t believe our information is that complete,” Chun said, calm where another person would have snapped. “I’ve set up a course to Australia, where—”

  “No,” said Roebeck. “No, I’m sorry, Quo. The risk’s just too high. By now we can be fairly certain that the hostiles haven’t tracked us. I don’t intend to risk that concealment until we’re ready to displace to the target in 1968.”

  The child scrambled up a pine tree. She began breaking cones off twigs to toss to her mother. Slender branches crackled, waggling up and down beneath her weight.

  As if by chance, the child turned so that she could look toward Roebeck through a spray of short needles. When she saw Roebeck was watching her, the tiny face ducked down again.

  Do they know we’re human? Roebeck wondered. Do they think we’re human?

  “Have either of you seen a male?” Grainger asked. “I’ve only seen those two, but that’s not a viable group.”

  “There aren’t any other humans in the valley, so far as our sensors can tell,” Chun said. “There’s no sign of fire, and an all-spectra sort during the period we’ve been here has shown only the two individuals—day or night.”

  The mother chirped to her offspring. The child chittered a response and moved back from the tip of a swaying branch. Were the sounds words or merely signals like the growl of a dog to an intruder in its territory?

  “The skins indicate hunting,” Roebeck said, thinking aloud. “This female doesn’t have either the tools or an apparent desire to bring down game so large. I’d say they were outcasts from a larger grouping. Or, more likely, survivors.”

  The child dropped to the ground in three startling leaps and retrieved her digging stick. She moved with her mother toward the loose rocks.

  “Well, don’t worry about our causing problems up the line, then,” Grainger said. “We could teach these two to smelt iron and it still wouldn’t matter. They don’t have a prayer of making it through the winter.”

  Roebeck watched the pair of Neanderthals overturning stones. They crowed in glee whenever their fingers snatched a tidbit from a crevice.

  Tim was obviously correct in his assessment, which should have made Roebeck more cheerful. She, too, worried about the unplanned effects the team might cause here.

  Instead, though, Roebeck had to stifle her desire to tell Grainger to shut up until he had something useful to say.

  North America

  Circa 10,000 BC

  Rebecca Carnes was wearing canvas-sided jungle boots, designed to drain water away from the wearer’s foot. They didn’t do a lot for mud, though. She thought she’d seen her share of mud in Southeast Asia, but this Mississippi Valley bottomland provided black muck that set new standards for clinginess. It was like walking through a basin of Super Glue.

  “We should’ve gone up as far as we needed on the high ground,” she said to Weigand ahead of her. “Then straight down. Instead of tramping along through this.”

  “The only thing that pleases me about this,” Weigand replied, “is thinking that Gerd had to walk through it, too. Hold up a moment.”

  Carnes was glad for the pause. Weigand pulled the face-mask over his eyes and scanned the overgrown terrain ahead of them. There was no visible sign of Barthuli—or anybody else—passing this way, but filters and the processing unit in the headband detected and enhanced minute changes in the infrared spectrum. “We’re on course,” Weigand said.

  “If we are,” Carnes grumbled, “we ought to be able to smell woodsmoke.”

  They slogged forward. The soil was too wet and too frequently flooded to support large trees, but the alders and willows grew in dense screens. She and Weigand didn’t have machetes. They had to squirm through, bending slender trunks and trying not to tangle their feet in the root mats.

  A sprained ankle here would be a serious problem, though Carnes supposed Weigand would be able to deal with it. The big man hadn’t struck her as solidly competent until she’d blurted the trouble with Barthuli to him.

  There was buzzing ahead, as if they were nearing a step-down transformer. Could water sound like that, bubbling through rocks?

  “Pauli?” Carnes said.

  Weigand stepped out onto a sandbar. It was a hundred yards long and twenty wide, nestled on the inner curve of a river bend. At the farther end of the sand were a score of skin-clad humans around the corpse of a mammoth.

  The beast’s stripped upper ribs arched against the background of river haze. Over them hovered in the order of a million flies. The noise Carnes heard as they approached was the wings of the insects sharing tons of mammoth flesh with the hunters who’d killed the animal.

  One of the encampment’s dogs noticed Carnes and Weigand. Probably the animal saw motion, since not even a dog’s nose could make headway against the stench of the camp; though Carnes had smelled worse. Human flesh is almost liquid in its sticky, gripping odor, when it’s had time to ripen before a bomb or a dozer blade reopens the grave.

  There were ten or a dozen dogs, nondescript animals that averaged in the 40- to 60-pound range. The beasts had varied markings, some of them gray but others brindle or spotted. They didn’t look like a pack of wolves as they leaped to their feet and charged the newcomers, yapping fiercely; but neither did they look anything like friendly.

  The humans rose to their feet. A male hefted a spear with a white quartzite blade as long as Carnes’ hand. She’d drawn her acoustic pistol. Weigand had his out as well, though he held his gas gun by the grip in his left hand.

  “Don’t shoot the dogs unless you have to,” Weigand murmured. “It won’t hurt them permanently, but I don’t know how the owners will react if we send their pets off dribbling shit and screaming.”

  Then he added, “Gerd, you’ve got a lot to answer for.”

  Barthuli, recognizable in his blue coveralls and obviously unharmed, stood up. He’d been sitting cross-legged among the local males. He waved the piece of meat he’d been eating and said over the intercom, “Pauli and Rebecca, the dogs won’t hurt
you. Don’t act as though you’re afraid!”

  “Who’s acting?” Weigand said. “Major, go on ahead and I’ll follow directly behind you. I’ll keep them from snapping at you from behind.”

  Carnes strode forward, though her first thought was, And who keeps them from hamstringing you? Weigand’s coveralls were tougher than her worn pair of jungle fatigues, and there wasn’t much use in arguing with a man determined to be gallant. Besides, somebody had to be in the rear.

  The dogs, yammering like White House reporters, parted before Carnes but darted in from the side. Pauli’s long arm swung the gas gun back and behind him. The thick barrel smacked a dog hard enough to send the beast yelping off in agony.

  After that the pack gave the two strangers more room, though the dogs accompanied them in a snarling circle all the way to the encampment. The eight adult males remained standing, but only two of them bothered to keep weapons to hand. The women and children resumed their tasks, watching Carnes and Weigand frankly.

  An older, broad-chested man wore a lynx skin around his neck by the hind legs. The rest of the hide hung down in front of him like a pectoral. The beautiful, mottled pelt was shedding, and the tied legs were black with grease. The man raised his right arm high in the air, palm outward, and spoke a short sentence.

  “The language isn’t in our translation programs, I’m afraid,” Barthuli called. His chin and tight mustache gleamed with oils from the slab of meat he’d been chewing. “With the capsule’s Al, I think we could manage something, though.”

  Weigand dropped his pistol into a side pocket and raised his arm in deliberate mimicry of the band’s leader. The gas gun was pointed down alongside his left leg.

  “We wish you good luck and good hunting,” Weigand said in a voice of solemn grandeur. He spoke as though the native hunters could understand his words. “We are leaving now, taking our companion with us. We will trouble you no more.”