Arc Riders

by David Drake

  “I’m going to help move people,” Weigand said. “Then I suppose we’ll get out of here.” He cleared his throat and added, “It’s a good thing we’ve got Rebecca along.”

  “And it’s a good thing you care, Pauli,” Barthuli said. His voice sounded almost wistful.

  Son Tay, North Vietnam (Occupied)

  Timeline B: August 16, 1991

  The membrane that Carnes had pulled down from the headband to cover her face didn’t physically impede her breathing, but whenever she thought about it she felt her throat constrict. The canvas sides of the three-quarter-ton truck were half raised. When she peered through the opening out at the darkened rice paddies, she couldn’t see any difference compared to the way the landscape had looked without the facemask.

  “This is the spectrum control, Rebecca,” Weigand said, guiding her index finger to a roughened spot on the headband just above her left temple. “Infrared, light enhancement, and normal optical. You can tell which is which—”

  Carnes pressed the roughness. Water stood out from the dikes like a sheet of silver. The short rice stems were dark fur above the surface. Insects buzzed through the warm air as tiny fireballs.

  “—by the dot on the upper left corner of the display for about three seconds, red, yellow, or white.”

  She pressed. The amount of contrast shrank abruptly. The scene had color, but the hues were of low saturation. It looked like a television picture taken at noon when the sky was heavily overcast.

  “I can tell the difference,” Carnes said, returning the view to the normal optical range of a tropical night when the moon was in its first quarter.

  The road was four-lane concrete, built by US construction companies in the early days of the occupation. There had been very little maintenance in the past five years. Though the roadbed was a dozen feet deep, the alluvial soil shifted occasionally under its weight. The truck drove over a crack and dropped eight inches to the other side.

  Weigand and Barthuli bounced high in the air with the cases of medical supplies which had flown to Son Tay with the team on a high-winged U-10 utility aircraft. Carnes took the shock on her braced feet, then lowered her buttocks to the wooden side-bench again. She was used to these roads. It was a horrible thing to realize, but she was.

  The lieutenant on the passenger side in front twisted around and asked, “You guys all right? Should’ve warned you.”

  He was a medical administration officer. He had a thin, intense face and was probably strung out on something. Maybe just strung out with war and his nerves.

  “We’re fine,” Carnes said. “I hope your supplies are cushioned well, though.”

  They probably were. Not that it made much of a difference, the way things were going.

  A howitzer fired into the night from a battery position within the compound to the west. The white flash shocked the sky like heat lightning. The muzzle blast nearly ten seconds later was dull and muted.

  “You get much enemy activity here?” Carnes asked the lieutenant. She raised her voice to be heard over the rattle of the truck bed.The vehicle had only one headlight.The pylons which had once held sodium vapor lamps at every hundred meters along the roadway were dark, had been dark for years.

  The FM radio wedged between the front seats was tuned to a local armed forces station. The volume was cranked high to compete with the noise the truck made.

  The lieutenant’s head turned like that of a wasp, with quick, quasi-mechanical movements. “What?” he said. He thumped the butt of his M16 on the floor at his feet. “Don’t you worry about dinks, Major. We’re ready for them.”

  Carnes nodded, keeping her wince internal. She’d seen… hundreds? It seemed like hundreds. Hundreds of people come in wounded by accident. Because somebody did something stupid, like banging down a rifle with a bullet in the chamber.

  On the other hand, the lieutenant was out here, at night, to pick up supplies which his superiors had convinced Colonel Byerly that the 96th Evacuation Hospital needed even worse than Byerly’s clinic did. Carnes supposed you had to be crazy to function in a war zone, especially this war zone.

  “Rebecca, to use the mask as a communicator…” Pauli said. His voice echoed oddly, received both in the normal way and through the bone-conduction speaker built into the headband. He was so close to Carnes that the difference between radio and sound propagation rates was almost imperceptible. “Key the sending unit to a specific person by leading with the name, or for a general broadcast say ‘Commo.’ “

  “Pauli, I understand,” Carnes said, obeying what she took as a request. Gerd Barthuli was doing something with his little box, so Weigand had decided it would be a good time to train Carnes in the use of the headsets they’d brought from the immersion suits.

  Only two of the units were full-function now. Pauli had taken the battery out of the one Carnes normally wore to power the weapon he’d built in Chicago. The facemask had still protected her from gas, though.

  “The headband can act as a display, also,” Weigand said, speaking normally again. “Though for the—”

  The brakes squealed, but the truck didn’t slow with any enthusiasm. The driver slam-shifted to a lower gear without clutching. Carnes switched her mask to light amplification mode to see what was going on.

  “—time being, I don’t think—” Weigand said.

  The feeder road to Son Tay Base met the highway at nearly a right angle, much more sharply radiused than civilian engineers in the States would have designed its equivalent. The truck was approaching too fast for its ill-adjusted brakes alone to slow it to a safe speed. The lieutenant pounded the steel dashboard with his left hand in rhythm with the music.

  The driver grunted, leaning to the right as he dragged the nonpower-assisted steering wheel around. Son Tay Base a quarter mile away was encircled with a berm topped with barbed wire. The gate, a frame of steel X-members stretching concertina wire, glowed like a fireball. Carnes’ mask amplified the light of the single incandescent light beside the bunker.

  “—you need to worry about—”

  A burst of shots from the turn’s inside corner shattered the windshield and at least two slapped through the driver’s chest. The man shouted. The wheel spun out of his relaxed grip.

  The truck straightened and drove off the opposite side of the feeder road. It jumped high but didn’t turn over.

  Carnes bounced like a pool ball between the roof of canvas stretched on steel hoops and the sidewalls of the bed. For a moment she thought she’d be thrown out the open back. The truck’s sudden halt, mired in soft soil, saved Carnes at the cost of being slammed hard against the cab. She didn’t lose consciousness, quite.

  The driver tried to shout but gurgled instead. The lieutenant bellowed as he kicked at his wedged door with the heels of both boots.

  Pauli Weigand, holding the EMP generator, hopped out of the vehicle with the grace of a big cat. He seemed so awkward until something happened.

  “Rebecca, come with me to shoot!” Weigand demanded. “Use thermal and shoot!”

  Carnes jumped clumsily over the tailgate and plodded around the truck to the driver’s side of the cab. She’d have given the facemask to Barthuli, but she didn’t know where the analyst had gone. The ground was soft and covered with waist-high scrub, some of it thorny.

  More gunfire came from the opposite side of the road. At least two automatic weapons were firing. Their tracers were red, US issue. Bullets snapped through the air ten feet above the stalled truck.

  Carnes opened the cab door and caught the driver as he slumped out into her arms. The lieutenant stood on the other running board and ripped off the entire magazine of his rifle in a single burst. A few of his bullets ricocheted sparklingly from stones in the road embankment, but most of them sailed off into the night in high arcs to nowhere.

  “Rebecca, come support me now!”

  One of the bullets that hit the driver had keyholed, spinning most of the man’s breastbone through his chest cavity. Both lung
s were collapsed, and his heart had been chopped into hash. There was no carotid pulse. The FM radio, flung into the darkness through the disintegrating windshield, continued to make the night shimmer with a rap song.

  Carnes swallowed and slogged toward where she saw Pauli hunching on their side of the road embankment. The acoustic pistol was buttoned into the side pocket of her tunic. She took it out as she moved, bending forward to stay as low as she could without crawling.

  The lieutenant reloaded and fired again. This time he was shooting in five- or six-round bursts, but his fire was no more accurate than it had been initially. He was more danger to the team than he was to the enemy, though at least his tracers and muzzle flashes would draw the hostiles’ attention.

  Carnes reached the low embankment, then raised her head just to eye level. The night had a hazy clarity through her faceshield, as if the landscape were drawn with sticks of pale pastels. A third rifle fired from the rising slope across the road. The bullets slapped angrily against the truck’s sheet metal. The lieutenant dived for cover beneath the vehicle.

  The shooter was only a blur to Carnes, even though the muzzle flashes told her exactly where to look. She remembered Pauli had ordered her to use thermal imaging. She switched the faceshield to infrared, saw all three of the attackers clearly through the shielding vegetation, and pointed her pistol at the nearest of them some fifty feet away.

  She pulled the trigger. The pistol quivered. The ambusher, unaffected by the acoustic weapon, continued firing at the truck. So did his two companions.

  Carnes clicked her trigger twice more, then held it down for several seconds. The grip of the acoustic pistol grew alarmingly hot, but the riflemen shot without pausing.

  “Rebecca, wait!” Weigand ordered. “Wait till I tell you when!”

  Carnes crouched and looked at the big ARC Rider. He was struggling to make some adjustment on his EMP generator. She didn’t see what good a magnetic pulse would do against nonelectronic weapons.

  One of the ambushers got up and started to cross the road, firing his automatic rifle from the hip. Before Carnes could react, the fellow pitched backward unconscious from an invisible blow. Gerd Barthuli was still alive and clearly more alert than Carnes seemed to be.

  “Rebecca, get ready,” Weigand ordered. He lifted his torso over the embankment, his EMP generator shouldered. “Now!”

  One of the ambushers let out a terrible scream and leaped to his feet. Carnes swung her acoustic pistol in a desperate arc as though it were a fly swatter, mashing the trigger down. The man grunted and doubled up.

  The third rifleman shifted his stance and shot at Weigand. They were close enough together to throw rocks at one another.

  Three spurts of rock in an asphalt matrix blasted up from the road surface; one of the bullets retained enough integrity to ricochet outward with a banshee howl. Then that shooter, too, screamed, turned, and tried to run away. Carnes aimed at the man’s bent back and again held her trigger down. The ambusher flung his arms out and sprawled on his face.

  The acoustic pistol burned Carnes’ hand. She dropped it. It hissed on the damp soil.

  Pauli stood, drawing his acoustic pistol. He held the EMP generator in his left hand.

  Gerd was standing beside the truck. The lieutenant stuck his M16 over the hood of the vehicle to fire another blind burst. The analyst wrenched the weapon away from him.

  The ambusher lying on the feeder road was a Caucasian in American fatigues. He was breathing stertorously. Carnes pried the M16 from his unconscious grip. The barrel was hot from continuous firing.

  Carnes pushed through the brush to the other two ambushers, who were lying close together. Pauli followed her. “The acoustic pistols won’t work through vegetation,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “They converge at the first change in the refractive index in the line of sight, whether it’s a leaf or a man’s skull. I had to get them to jump up so that you could get a clear shot at them.”

  “EMP did that?” Carnes said. Her throat felt as though it had been sandpapered.

  The other ambushers were blacks, again carrying M 16s and wearing American uniforms. One of them was a Spec 4. He held his stomach and cursed in a desperate voice. Weigand kicked his head back with a jolt from his acoustic pistol.

  “Not EMP,” Weigand said. “I modified the generator so that it could also induce a mild current in human sensory nerves at a distance of fifty meters or so. It’s quite harmless, but it makes you feel as though your skin’s being dipped in acid.”

  Barthuli and the lieutenant joined them. “They killed Benji deader’n shit, didn’t they?” the lieutenant said. “Jesus, Jesus Christ.”

  “They were Americans,” Carnes said. “They are.”

  “Yeah,” agreed the lieutenant. “Waiting for something with a Red Cross to come by. Hoped they’d get drugs. Morphine, Demerol, Percodan… Jesus, Jesus Christ.”

  He shook his head. “I guess we better take them in, hand them over to the MPs at the gate. Notice they didn’t risk their sweet necks getting involved.”

  The lieutenant looked from Weigand to Carnes, the only one of the team wearing rank tabs, and added, “Or I suppose we could shoot them here, Major?”

  “We take them in,” said Rebecca Carnes. She wanted to cry, but her eyes were as dry as her throat was.

  Washington, DC

  March 17, 1967

  The Old Executive Office Building was perhaps the most ornately beautiful structure in the entire district. In Grainger’s time, everybody had called it OEOB, unless you worked there—then you called it the White House. That was what your business card said if you were on the National Security Council Staff, which was housed there.

  Walking with Nan Roebeck through the wrought-iron gates and down the broad stone steps into the courtyard, then up more steps and into the foyer where three guards waited, Grainger experienced a déjà vu of unsettling proportions. In the marble-floored foyer, he walked her right up to the desk and presented his 1967 driver’s license to the guard attending to visitors.

  “Mr. Calandine. He’s expecting us at 2100 hours,” Grainger said softly. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Nan Roebeck, in a period-correct skirt and blouse, fumble in her 1967-style huge handbag for her ID.

  The ID check wasn’t by computer, that was one difference from Grainger’s memories. The guard consulted a list and then punched an office phone number on an archaic base unit with square buttons that lit when depressed. He spoke into the handset and then hung up.

  By then, Nan’s ID was on the high mahogany counter. The guard took it, checked it against his clipboard, and pulled out two clip-on badges with large Vs for Visitor printed in red on them.

  “Wear these. Step this way.”

  Now came the weapons check. It too was primitive, cursory. A hand search of Nan’s purse detected nothing. They waltzed through an ancient security arch that was set for metal only and was unable to recognize any of Grainger’s acoustic weapons as dangerous.

  Once through the arch, the guard said, “Down the hall to your left. Take a right. The elevator’s halfway down on your left.”

  And they were in. The elevator doors were painstakingly chased brass. The floor buttons were round and stayed depressed when you pushed them.

  When the elevator doors opened onto the second-floor landing, the high-ceilinged corridor was empty. Doors on either side were closed, the moldings around and above them as ornate as were the stairs behind. Nan Roebeck walked over to the winding stairs and touched the wrought-iron and gold leaf and mahogany. “This is… beautiful.”

  “Best in town. The doorknobs here all have the original insignia of some service or office on them—”

  Grainger heard footsteps and shut his mouth. The man coming toward them wasn’t Calandine, but his stride was purposeful.

  “For Mr. Calandine?” said the man, putting out his hand but not giving his name. He was six-foot-six, with a bushy black mustache and a huge helmet of curly black hair. “Thi
s way.”

  Grainger was getting the feeling he was in over his depth. Roebeck cast him a furtive look. There was nothing to do but follow along, down the corridor, around a corner, and through a door into an anteroom.

  “We’re meeting in my boss’s office,” said the tall guy. Grainger nodded without listening as a secretary was introduced and held out her hand, which he shook. Behind her desk was the cagle-headed seal of the Central Intelligence Agency, on a CIA-blue wall.

  “Would you come this way?” said the woman, and: “Coffee? Tea? A cold drink?”

  Through two double doors they went, and he heard Nan ask for coffee, so he did the same. “Black, please,” to cover his consternation. They were, without doubt, in the CIA director’s office in OEOB. The paintings behind the huge desk and beyond the football-field conference table were from the national collection, the furniture was historical, and the ambience was all power.

  The tall guy said, “Take a scat,” and motioned toward the conference table. The chairs at the table were dark blue, covered with leather hides of actual animals turned into furniture. Strange to be back in that sort of milieu. Their guide smiled, and the huge mustache quivered. “We have a couple more people coming, so let’s wait.”

  The tall man didn’t want to make small talk. Okay. Where the hell was Calandine?

  The coffee came, in Lenox cups with the agency seal. Spooky wasn’t the word for this place. This was someplace Grainger had never been, in any timeline, and had no interest in being. This was an abode of elephants. Elephants can crush you underfoot without even noticing.

  Grainger kept his eyes on a painting of an ancient boat in sunset. Rocbeck, beside him, kicked him gently under the table. The tall man sat down opposite him and opened a folder containing an empty legal pad.

  You couldn’t ask what was going on. You had to wait. He hoped to hell she knew that. Under the table, there was plenty of room to slide his acoustic pistol out of his pocket and hold it one-handed between his thighs. Shoot your way out of the NSC? From the second floor? Not likely. But he had to do something….