Arc Riders

by David Drake

  Kawalec ducked in the backseat and squirmed to the door on the other side of the sedan. He hadn’t been carrying a weapon, even a handgun for show.

  The driver was logy but still upright. Weigand fired again. She flopped sideways unconscious, now that the window glass was out of the way.

  Weigand ran toward the car, but he had to drag Carnes with him. The nurse screamed in fury and hammered his chest to get free so that she could help the people burning alive.

  The only thing Carnes could do was get caught in the blaze herself. The team had no firefighting equipment, not even blankets with which to smother the flames on the shrieking victims.

  It was beyond that now anyway. To survive, people with third-degree burns over most of their bodies needed better medical help than this horizon, let alone this region of it, could provide. Weigand’s heart was frozen in a cold white rage at what had happened, but it had happened and you went on from there.

  Kawalec scrambled out the far side of the car. He ran, still hunched over so far that his hands dabbed the gravel as he moved. Weigand leaned onto the trunk of the sedan, took a deep breath, and threw Kawalec down on his face with a slug of focused sound.

  The air stank of gasoline and hot metal and the flesh of people whose limbs twitched but who had lost the ability even to moan. One of the soldiers had managed to crawl five meters from the vehicle before he collapsed. Grass and blue-flowering chicory burned in an expanding circle from his body.

  Carnes stopped struggling. Weigand let her go. “I’m very sorry,” he said. He couldn’t meet her eyes. “I would have stopped it if I could.”

  Gerd Barthuli had blown up the truck because it was the most efficient way to eliminate six enemies. The fact that those enemies were human beings hadn’t affected his decision in the least.

  Not for the first time, Weigand wondered if that was because Barthuli himself wasn’t human.

  Northeastern Iowa

  Timeline B: August 4, 1991

  Rebecca Carnes knelt and watched the truck. The tires burned with low orange flames, intensely saturated. The pall of black smoke mounted a thousand feet before it drifted into a smudge.

  Cartridges cooked off with vicious cracks, flinging sparks and bits of brass in all directions. For the most part the explosions were empty fury, but the round chambered in a dead soldier’s rifle could have been dangerous. The bullet blew a jagged, fist-sized hole in the side of the truck and screamed out over the empty fields. It would have killed anybody who’d been standing in the wrong place.

  At times like this, when people were dying and there was nothing she could do about it, Carnes sometimes wished she’d been standing in that wrong place herself.

  Kawalec and his driver were unconscious but not seriously injured. Weigand was stripping the captain. Carnes walked over to help him.

  “The fuel tank of the car contains seven gallons, Pauli,” Barthuli called. He squatted beside the sedan, looking at his gray box rather than the vehicle’s gauges—which wouldn’t be accurate to that degree anyway.

  “I don’t understand what happened,” Carnes said. She had Kawalec’s shoes and trousers off before Weigand had gotten the captain out of his coat. Carnes had plenty of experience in stripping unconscious men, though often enough that had been a job for blunt-ended shears ripping through the bloody, shrapnel-ripped remnants of what had been clothes.

  “Barthuli, give the driver a red dose,” Weigand ordered harshly. “One dose, for God’s sake, and don’t damage the spinal—no, I’ll do it myself.”

  Weigand got up. Carnes swung to her feet and followed in perfect harmony, as if the big man were a doctor on rounds. “What’s a red dose?” she asked, her tone sharper than she’d meant it to be.

  “It’ll put them out for an hour,” Weigand said in weary anger. “And they’ll lose all personal memory.”

  He took a thimble-shaped object from a pouch on his coveralls. It was scarlet and the surface was scored with three lines so that it could be identified in the dark.

  “They’ll retain language and it won’t affect their motor skills in the least,” Weigand continued. “But you bet, the amnesia’s irreversible on this horizon.”

  He opened the sedan’s front door. It wasn’t locked, but the hinge caught. Weigand jerked the door so hard that further bits of side window shivered onto the ground. Carnes hadn’t realized how strong Weigand really was, because he normally controlled his movements to display only minimum force.

  “Major Carnes,” Barthuli said with a formality that Carnes thought the analyst had gotten past earlier. “The captain there”—he nodded toward Kawalec—“received orders from his superiors to kill us immediately.”

  “What?” said Carnes in amazement. She stepped back, looking instinctively toward Weigand to see how he reacted.

  Weigand, grim-faced, pretended to ignore the discussion. He set the flat end of the thimble against the base of the driver’s skull, among the wispy brown hair. There was a hiss. The driver twitched, then lay flaccid with her tongue lolling from her mouth.

  “The sector commander believes we’re part of a plot by the state’s military governor to take control of the district,” Barthuli said. His face wore its usual faint smile. “The Emergency Authority and the state office are in separate chains of command.”

  “Yes, but kill us?” Carnes said, still trying to metabolize the statement. “That’s crazy. Without talking to us, anything?”

  “You haven’t been in this country for three years, Major,” the analyst said. “I’m afraid the deterioration of the polity during that period, particularly during the last twelve months, has been precipitous.”

  Weigand lifted the driver’s limp body from the sedan. Shards of glass glittered like a dusting of jewels on her sweaty fatigue uniform.

  “My God,” Carnes whispered. “In the war zone we knew things were bad, the shortages of everything.” She grinned like a skull. “Or they wouldn’t have given nurses line commands, not that I commanded much. But back here…”

  “Before Kawalec could give the order to his troops to kill us,” Barthuli continued, “I—”

  “Barthuli, shut up,” Weigand ordered. His voice trembled with a rage that Carnes had thought wholly absent from the big man’s personality. “You’re going to make it worse, and it’s plenty bad enough!”

  “I’m sorry, Pauli,” the analyst said calmly, “but she has to know. She’s one of us now, so she needs to be fully informed.”

  “Needs to know that she’s dealing with a moral imbecile?” Weigand shouted. He cradled the driver in his arms as though she were an infant he was shielding from wolves.

  “I won’t quarrel with your choice of terms,” Barthuli said. He turned to Carnes. His tone had been emotionless, but there was sadness and even pain in his eyes.

  “Major,” he said, “my equipment here”—he tapped the pouch containing his recorder/computer—“can emit tuned microwaves. They’re of relatively low power, but they were sufficient to my purpose. I treated the vehicle’s fuel tank as a cavity resonator and induced a static discharge within the tank. Since the fluid level was low, and it was gasoline rather than diesel fuel, the spark caused an explosion.”

  Weigand put the driver down in the shade of the blackberries. He squatted beside her. “We didn’t have to kill them!” he said. “We could have reacted before they did. They weren’t trained, they didn’t—I don’t know if any of their guns would have fired!”

  “Major,” said Barthuli, “I acted in the quickest, most efficient fashion that occurred to me to save our lives. You have to expect me to do that the next time, anytime a situation of the sort arises. Afterward, I may agree that there were better ways of dealing with the problem… though I don’t know that I do in this case.”

  He turned his sad gaze toward Weigand. “Skillful though I know you are, Pauli.”

  “But they were going to kill us?” Carnes said.

  “Oh, yes,” Barthuli said. “The orders were clear, an
d the captain was clearly going to carry them out. Try to carry them out. He was terrified of us from the first, you know.”

  “Terrified of the unknown,” Weigand said tiredly. “Well, that’s the usual thing. Sorry, Gerd. You’re probably right. The chance of a bullet going the wrong place was unacceptably high.”

  He stood up. “You want to get her clothes off, Rebecca?” he said. “You’re better at it than I am. I figure her uniform will fit Gerd, and you can wear the captain’s. That puts us a little better off than we were.”

  Weigand turned his head toward the truck. The rubber and paint would burn for hours. Sheets of metal pinged against one another from differential rates of expansion. “None of that lot were big enough to fit me.”

  “There’s an airport seventy miles south of here. An aircraft is scheduled to leave for Chicago tomorrow noon,” Barthuli offered. “From there, it should be practical to arrange transportation to Son Tay. To the war zone, at any rate.”

  Weigand nodded. “Yeah, we’ll do that. Let me borrow your access, Gerd. I don’t want anybody looking for this vehicle.”

  “We’ll want to take the displacement suits,” Barthuli said. “That means we won’t be able to leave before midnight.”

  He handed his recorder/computer to Weigand. Weigand squatted cross-legged with the device balanced on his ankles. He spread his hands as if over a keyboard. Light quivered above the device.

  Carnes looked at the sedan. It was a full-sized Ford, twenty years old and painted institutional gray except for the right fender—a replacement in metallic blue. They could put two suits in the backseat and one in the trunk, she supposed, though she wasn’t sure the trunk lid would close then. A pity the truck hadn’t survived.

  She turned and looked at the man who’d made it as far as the ditch. The charred exterior of the corpse had cracked in a few places to expose raw, red muscle. She’d never gotten used to that sight, neither when it was a GI dragged from a blazing helicopter nor a VC who’d been napalmed.

  She’d have saved them if she could. But they’d been about to kill her, even though they weren’t aware of that at the moment they died. Carnes didn’t know where the morality of the situation lay; but what was done, was done.

  “What’s happening now?” she asked Barthuli, her eyes on the motionless Weigand. She spoke in a low voice so as not to interfere with whatever was going on.

  “The device responds to neural commands,” the analyst said, also whispering. “That is, the intention to type a command enters that command without physical input. It’s the system I prefer.”

  He cleared his throat. “As for ‘what’ in the larger sense, I suspect Pauli is instructing the district data bank—perhaps regional as well—that when the identification of this vehicle is entered”—his toe touched the sedan’s rusted permanent license plate—“the information transmitted is something quite different, and innocuous to us.”

  Carnes watched Weigand, her eyes narrowing in surmise. “You can do that with any computer, then?”

  Barthuli nodded. “Any computer to which we have access,” he agreed. “On this horizon. Effectively anything that’s attached either to a communication line or to an outside power source.”

  “We’ll stop at a driver’s license bureau before we go to the airport,” Carnes said. The pieces became gleamingly visible in her mind, as though layers of ice were melting away from a sudden truth. “Nobody in a license bureau is going to argue with us, but their equipment is the same as we’d get in a military installation. They’ll take photographs which we can laminate in place of the originals of this pair’s IDs.”

  She waved the driver’s wallet to emphasize it, then frowned. “There’s a problem with the names, though. The driver’s Joyce Shilts. That gives us two female IDs and only one male. They may not check height, but first names…”

  Barthuli shrugged. “Joyce Kilmer, who wrote “Trees,” was male enough to be killed in combat in the trenches in World War I,” he said. “We’ll give that one to Pauli, whose masculinity is least in doubt.”

  “All right,” she said, beaming. “And you’ll fix it so that any query to these identification numbers will come back with a highest security classification hold! Mine, too.”

  Barthuli’s smile broadened. “Yes, Rebecca,” he said. “Pending Pauli’s approval, of course, that’s exactly what we’ll do.”

  Arlington National

  Cemetery

  March 15, 1967

  Calandine had been expecting someone. Grainger had showed up. Taken Calandine’s pledge of allegiance. All Grainger’s old agent-running instincts were beginning to surface. Only the “we” bothered him. When Grainger rang that number, somebody up the river would pick up an extension in the Old Headquarters Building at CIA and say hello. But what if the “we” to whom Calandine had reaffirmed allegiance by the act of handing money and keys to Grainger wasn’t the “we” that counted Tim Grainger as part of its active duty service roster?

  As TC 779 shimmered into real time, Grainger decided to suggest to Roebeck that they all get a good night’s sleep out of phase before parking themselves and the suits in some 1967 basement.

  Maybe after he’d slept he would believe that he had gotten some answers out of this exercise. Right now, all he had was more questions. Where was Barthuli when you needed him? Nowhere on this horizon, that was certain.

  Roebeck nearly pulled him inside. She was big in her suit, loaded for bear. She hugged him.

  “Piece of cake,” he admitted ruefully as the lock closed behind him and his ears popped from the pressure differential.

  Chun never once looked away from her station until the TC 779’s integrity was restored and they were safely displaced.

  By the time they were out of phase, Roebeck was levering herself free from her suit and Grainger was sitting quietly at his station, just breathing air that smelled like home.

  “Nice job,” Nan Roebeck said generally. “At your soonest convenience, Chun.”

  The safe house. He hadn’t thought to tell Nan he wanted to wait…. Now it was too late.

  Roebeck was watching him closely. “If we had Barthuli, perhaps we could analyze what happened back there more thoroughly.” She finished racking her suit and eased behind her command console.

  “I miss him, too, especially now that we’re trying to figure out Calandine,” Grainger told her.

  “The National Guard and the DC police cordoned off the bridge you were on when the fighting broke out. There was shooting. Some civilians were hurt, perhaps military as well. The protesters were gassed and beaten, taken away in vans. It’s all over the local airwaves. Some sort of crackdown on the libertines—drug arrests, incarceration.” Chun was talking as she worked the displays.

  “We were lucky you weren’t caught up in it,” Roebeck said softly.

  “I smelled the marijuana, but this…” Grainger watched the displays of violence, horses and riot shields and teenagers with blood all over them. It hadn’t seemed that bad when he was there. “What do they say started it?”

  Chun merged the video, it swirled, and an announcer was telling the audience that the incident had begun when a young girl spat on a soldier. There was, miraculously or suspiciously, footage of the event. And footage of the girl, screaming, her hands to her cheeks, when the shooting broke out. Grainger’s trained eye couldn’t detect the original source of gunfire, no matter how many times Chun ran the sequence for him.

  “So what now?”

  He knew what now.

  “The safe house,” Roebeck said implacably. “We’ll suit up and power up, but nothing more. Even leaving the suits out of phase on their own is a last resort. In a completely controlled media, you can’t believe anything but what you actually see with your eyes. What we saw was the beginning of the roundup of the dissident youth.”

  “As Calandine predicted.”

  “As Calandine informed you. He knew,” Chun said from forward.

  “And that makes him what?” G
rainger asked Chun.

  Chun didn’t answer.

  “Well informed,” Roebeck said, and motioned to the racked suits. “Too well informed not to be a player.”

  “Wired, you mean,” Grainger muttered.

  “We will reenter Timeline B in, what, Chun?”

  “Thirty-five seconds.”

  Then he had to deal with his suit. Roebeck wasn’t taking no for an answer. He didn’t like the hard suit’s weight. He had a horror of being EMPed in it, knocked flat and left helpless like a beetle or a turtle on its back. But the boss was right. There was trouble out there that only a hard suit could get him through alive. Bad trouble. Waiting for them. And it would still be waiting whenever they popped out of phase to deal with it.

  Grainger hated nothing so much as walking into an ambush, but that was what this job was about—had to be, given mission parameters and who was in control of the timeline. The only question was when that ambush was going to find them.

  And his only function was to make sure that, when the ambush did find them, they were ready, willing, and able to do whatever was necessary to survive it, even if that meant shooting up 1967 in ways that wouldn’t otherwise be thought of for a couple hundred years.

  Travis Air Force Base,

  California

  Timeline B: August 12, 1991

  Pauli Weigand rose from his fold-down canvas seat along the aircraft’s side and stretched. The jungle fatigues fit him, but the cotton felt rough to his unaccustomed skin.

  The C-141 had touched down just after midnight local time, but the big transport taxied for what seemed like forever before it reached its fueling berth. Two dozen men and women wearing a variety of uniforms walked toward the lowered rear ramp with caution born of fatigue and stiffness.

  A truck drove up to the aircraft, bathing the cargo bay with its headlights. Weigand glanced at his companions.