Arc Riders

by David Drake

  “We’ve been through this, Tim. I don’t want to scare him into running. He might run anywhere, or, for all we know, anywhen. We can’t tag him well enough to follow if he can leave the temporal locus, and we don’t know he can’t. We’ve got time.”

  They were reasonably safe burning days here, so far before the critical March 1968 time frame. He hoped. Every time you lived through a temporal interval you locked yourself out of it. No revisitation was survivable. If somewhere else on this planet something critical was happening right now, Tim Grainger could never come back here again to fix it.

  He thought about the DDI whom they’d met at the NSC, who wanted the remains of the equipment for analysis. If that happened, this timeline would go even more haywire. Tim Grainger understood the time-honed rules of his former profession well enough to realize that if he and Roebeck were out here hunting Bates, purportedly seconded to CIA from DOE, then at least one other homegrown agency team was out here looking, too. Perhaps more than one. You could have CIA, DIA, FBI, and maybe a half dozen other acronymous agencies all keeping Bates under surveillance and waiting to strike. Roebeck and he were probably risking interdiction by any one or all of them. So there were multiple undefined threats in this carbon-monoxide-laced night.

  Grainger kept scanning through his membrane for any car he’d seen before, using enough light intensification to make sure he could recognize number plates if he saw them again, storing car colors and faces in his memory. Lucky it was a quiet street.

  Then it wasn’t so quiet, not for Grainger.

  “Nan,” he said, “I know it’s real close to Embassy Row, but what do you think about a car full of Orientals coming around this block twice?”

  “Interested in us?” Roebeck snapped to seated attention.

  “Us or the house. Could be either. Could be neither.”

  “Get out of here. Key this thing, or whatever you do to make it go.”

  “Okay,” he said with a grin. It was fun to drive the T-Bird, almost like visiting AmericaLand Theme Park. But the grin quickly faded as the Orientals in their black car drove slowly by, clearly looking at them with more than casual interest.

  “Damn, we’re being scanned. Move.”

  Grainger’s membrane, in passive detection mode, was already corroborating Roebeck’s words.

  He slammed the clutch in and out, ground the stick into reverse, and tried to wheel the crude auto out of its parking slot. It took both hands.

  The acoustic pistol was beside him on the seat…. Why didn’t Roebeck grab it?

  “Nan, don’t wait to be sure—”

  His eyes were aching. His stomach was cramping. He could barely feel his hands. He was filled with an overwhelming need to drop his head between his knees and puke his guts out onto his shoes. Then he needed to shit. Bad.

  He couldn’t let go of the wheel. He had to move the ancient automobile out of range of the Orientals. He slapped the clutch into a forward gear and grabbed, nearly deaf and blind, for his own acoustic pistol to counter the acoustic fire he was taking.

  But Nan Roebeck knocked it out of his hand. “Go,” she shouted in his ear. “Go!”

  He wanted to shoot back, but he couldn’t see. Anyway, both his hands were fully occupied.

  He could barely make out the road’s white dotted line through his tears. He headed for it, foot pressing the gas pedal to the floor of the car.

  The auto leaped forward with a squeal of acceleration, hit something hard with its left fender, shuddered, and careened toward the intersection ahead.

  His stomach twisted once more and he gasped for air. His body wanted to void everything he’d eaten or drunk in the last six hours from every appropriate orifice. He held on to the steering wheel to stay upright, nearly chinning himself against it, just driving forward.

  Beside him, he felt Roebeck moving around, and suddenly the assault on his senses stopped. His ears and eyes cleared. His muscles unknotted. His intense need to void his bowels diminished.

  He blinked. There was a terrible honking in his ears. Then he realized he was halfway into the intersection, blocking other vehicles, which were sounding their horns.

  He continued on through, taking a left turn across two lanes of traffic, before he looked at Roebeck. She had a piece of brown paper in her hands. She was wiping vomit off herself and her equipment. The SOUND CANCELLATION ENGAGED light was blinking happily from her pocket terminal.

  “We’re going to be apprehended now,” she said dolefully, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

  “Where?” Then he saw it.

  He’d thought she meant the Orientals, the Timeline B natives from Central. But she didn’t mean that.

  A police car with District of Columbia markings was flashing its lights at them. If the sound cancellation hadn’t been engaged, its wailing might have been deafening.

  “What now?” Roebeck said accusingly.

  “I had a traffic accident. We ate some bad food. My girlfriend has food poisoning. I’m trying to get her to the hospital.” He pulled over to the side of the road. “Maybe you and I know better, but you sure look—and stink—like a girlfriend who has food poisoning. Otherwise, I’d have dumped you out of the car by now. Wish we had ‘Smell Cancellation.’”

  “I just saved your ass, you ungrateful bastard. What more do you want?”

  “I wanted you to shoot those sons of bitches. That was the plan, remember? Since this auto requires two hands, I was going to drive and you were going to shoot. Take out any emerging threats. Incapacitate them if possible. Kill for self-preservation if necessary. But shoot! Solve at least one of our problems, since you had a target of opportunity. But no. You’ve got to be nonviolent. If I’m going to face arrest and need to use my CIA-given clout, it ought to be for something more than smashing up some diplomat’s automobile.”

  Roebeck didn’t answer. Instead, she groaned and covered her mouth. Then she retched again miserably. She’d been closer to the infrasound device than he, the way their T-Bird had been parked on the one way street.

  And then he had to roll down his window as the policeman came up with flashlight in hand. The smell of vomit billowed out the open window.

  The officer took a step backward. “What’s going on here?” he asked, wrinkling his short, broad nose.

  As Grainger talked his way through their hastily devised scenario, he hoped to hell that the Orientals hadn’t gotten more of a fix on him than the license numbers of this automobile. If they had a bioradar unit with them, he and Roebeck weren’t going to be safe anywhere on this horizon.

  Which meant to Grainger that, as soon as he got through with the local police, he was going to insist they call back TC 779 and debark for elsewhen.

  They could still do this mission from another horizon, a week or a month or six months from now.

  With those Orientals alerted, they were going to have to.

  Son Tay Base,

  North Vietnam (Occupied)

  Timeline B: August 17, 1991

  Weigand watched Kyle Watney with impassive concern. The revisionist lay on the steel springs of a bunk in a ward of the 96th Evacuation Hospital, disused for want of staff. There were no mattresses. Watney didn’t appear to care or even notice the lack.

  Weigand stood, his back to a partition wall. He didn’t worry that Watney would lie to them. Weigand trusted his instincts to notice conscious deceit, even without Gerd’s biométric analyses to support those instincts.

  Beyond the row of beds were screened windows. The night rocked with the sound of small arms and occasional explosions. Tracers rose lazily into the air, a rope of red beads so far across the base perimeter that the sound of the machine gun firing them was indistinguishable from the background noise.

  “An attack is reported,” Barthuli said. He raised an eyebrow to show that he was asking confirmation rather than merely stating a fact.

  “God knows what they’re reporting,” Watney said, his eyes on the darkness which the single hang
ing light bulb threw above the edge of its reflector shade. “There’s no attack, though. Just scared people shooting at nothing because they think what happened at the compound was an attack.”

  “Ah,” said Barthuli. “Though it was an attack of sorts. We were.”

  The problem with Watney was that he was completely insane. You couldn’t trust anything he said, because what he believed and consensus reality were so different.

  “There were six of us,” Watney said to the ceiling. “Me and Krieghoff, sent here to Vietnam. Bates and Rhone in Washington, the District of Columbia.”

  The revisionist’s tongue savored the words like a gourmet tasting a perfectly seasoned dish.

  “He was the leader, I suppose,” Watney continued in a tone of wonderment at himself and the world. “Bates was. Rhone never led anything but the way to the bar, and she led there often enough. Domini and Douglass stayed in Denver and sent the rest of us back.”

  “May we attach induction inputs to your temples to get physical descriptions of your associates?” Weigand asked politely. They didn’t need Watney’s agreement to hook him to the recorder/computer, but he had to be conscious for the system to work. Barthuli’s equipment would only fumble across a subject’s surface thoughts. Best that Watney be agreeable.

  Watney looked at Weigand. “They’ll have changed in twenty years. I didn’t see any of them but Krieghoff since we were all together in Denver. Krieghoff’s been dead almost that long.”

  “We’re more interested in what they looked like in 1968 when the operation started,” Barthuli said with a colorless smile.

  “Oh, right,” Watney said. “I forgot who you were. I—”

  His face trembled with desperate misery. “I’ve prayed somebody would come. I know there can’t be a God. But I’ve prayed every night despite that. And now you’re here.”

  “We can attach the outputs?” Weigand prodded. “There’ll be no pain.”

  Tim Grainger had been a hard man and an unhesitating killer when the team recruited him from his time. Weigand had never doubted that Tim was basically as clean and straight as an ash pole, though. Grainger’s circumstances had bent him like a bow, but there was nothing crooked about the man’s soul.

  Kyle Watney was something else again.

  The revisionist waved a dismissive hand. “Sure, do whatever you want to do.” He snorted. “Pain doesn’t matter anyway.”

  Barthuli stepped over to the bunk, holding the two tiny induction transmitters he’d taken from their storage flap in his device. As Weigand had said, the beads were painless in operation. They simply received the subject’s surface thoughts and retransmitted them as clean digital signals to the processor.

  Rebecca Carnes slept under, not on, another of the bunks. Her head was cradled on Weigand’s barracks bag, although much of what was in it was hard as stone. If Carnes was formally recruited into the ARC Riders, she’d get anti-fatigue programming. Weigand was amazed at how long she’d been functioning already.

  “Can you describe the apparatus that brought you to this time?” Weigand asked. Barthuli placed the beads, then moved them individually by slight increments. He frowned in concentration as he listened to the alignment signal from his computer/recorder.

  Watney shook his head tiredly. Barthuli lifted his fingers quickly away. “Sorry,” Watney said to the analyst. “I didn’t mean to move.”

  Barthuli resumed his task.

  “I didn’t know anything about the technical side,” Watney explained. He smiled bitterly. “Oh, I was necessary. Without my money, Professor Domini wouldn’t have been able to pay the power bill, much less build the equipment.”

  Barthuli stepped back. “That will do, I believe,” he said, taking his device from the side pocket of his fatigue jacket.

  Watney sat up smoothly. His eyes locked with those of Weigand, the only member of the team whom Watney thought of as an equal. “I wanted to be here, you know. Here in Nam. I called it Nam even when it was only history, archival recordings. I wanted to be part of the victory that cowardly politicians had robbed our great nation of.”

  Carnes was awake. “You wanted this?” she asked. The bed’s wire matting cut the view of her face into rectangles. “You wanted to make the war go on?”

  Watney hugged his arms to his trembling chest. “I’d studied it,” he whispered. “It was a failure of will, that was all. We’d been afraid to win the war, and that was the beginning of the end.”

  “We?” Weigand repeated with minuscule emphasis. The shooting on the perimeter had died down, but he could see the glow of a fire that hadn’t been a direct result of the explosion in the 504th’s compound.

  “America,” Watney said. “The real America. Not just a province of a world state dominated by Orientals and Africans and scum!”

  He glared fiercely at the men from his future and the woman from the present he’d created. He began to cry. “God help me, I thought we could win this war. God help me!”

  “You thought America could win a land war in Asia?” Barthuli said. There was no hint of incredulity in his voice. Because the analyst was so obviously seeking clarification, the question wasn’t insulting on its face as it would have been had Weigand asked it—let alone Carnes, one of the theory’s direct victims. “Against Vietnam, and then China, and I suppose the USSR as well if matters had continued long enough?”

  “I didn’t know!” Watney shouted. “I studied the histories. I thought it was… pieces on a board, Weltpolitik. One nation keeps its nerve and the other collapses. A game.”

  Rebecca Carnes slid out from under the bunk. She looked in the direction of the revisionist, but Weigand wasn’t sure what she was really seeing. Tampa devoured by a firestorm, he suspected; or perhaps the Chinese soldier preparing to shoot Carnes at the high-water point of American involvement in this war.

  “I didn’t know about the mud and the jungle and the Asians, so many Asians,” Watney said in a broken voice. “Pieces on a board. And they wouldn’t quit. No matter how many of them died, they wouldn’t quit.”

  Barthuli sat on the metal frame of a bunk, looking at his recorder/computer. “Tell us about your associate Bates, please,” he said.

  Before Watney could speak, an image appeared over the device: a man in his forties, black-haired and handsome, though a little softer than Weigand thought was ideal. The image turned and smiled toward the company; calm, powerful, its face lighted by a wicked intelligence.

  “Yes, that’s him,” Watney said. He lowered himself carefully back onto the springs. “Geoffrey Alden Bates. A man with a vision.”

  He laughed like a man choking. “Whereas I merely had a dream. I don’t know about the rest of us.”

  He rubbed his eyes. “Or I suppose I do. Krieghoff and Professor Domini were concerned with the technical problems. I don’t think they cared what the result was, so long as they achieved a result. Krieghoff cared afterwards, when he saw where the result left him. Douglass was really only a flunky. And Rhone—”

  “Rhone,” Barthuli murmured approvingly.

  The image of a woman with aristocratic features displaced that of Bates. Her hair switched through at least a dozen styles and colors, each in an eyeblink.

  “Lucille wasn’t stupid,” Watney said, still shading his eyes. “But you wouldn’t have guessed that by the way she fawned over Bates. He owned her.”

  The image’s clothing vanished. She knelt on all fours, her legs spread. She looked back over her shoulder at the viewer. Her eyes were empty of emotion and intelligence.

  “Except when she was drunk,” Watney said in a husky voice. “Then anybody owned her.”

  Weigand felt as cold as he had in the moment he saw Watney pistol the guard blocking his way. To treat enemies with ruthlessness was a human characteristic, however regrettable. To treat friends and associates in the same fashion was something altogether different.

  “I understand that you’re not a technician,” Weigand said. “But can you roughly describe the
vehicle that brought you to this horizon, this time? Was it a suit or a container of larger volume?”

  Watney frowned at him. “It wasn’t either,” he said. “Nothing left the professor’s laboratory. He mapped us, he called it mapping. And then he projected us into the past.”

  Barthuli nodded enthusiastically to Weigand. “That’s how they slipped past Central!” the analyst exclaimed. “They came back as people rather than as spaces containing people. I very much wonder how the device worked. There hasn’t been another case of that—”

  He broke off suddenly with a smile, then added, “Well, perhaps there has, of course. On this timeline, though not on our own.”

  Weigand shook his head in exasperation with the analyst’s refusal to focus on the job in hand. “That can wait for a follow-up mission,” he said harshly. “Domini probably doesn’t exist on this timeline he created. We’ve got to deal with the problem in 1968 before somebody worries about 2250 or whenever. Somebody else, I hope.”

  “Yes,” agreed Barthuli. “But it’s important to know that the device could have been detected if Central had been looking for that particular type of event. It’s quite distinct from the vestiges left when you displace a volume, you see.”

  “You don’t see the sunset when you’re looking into a microscope,” Carnes said. She sat on the floor with her legs crossed, staring at her ankles. Barthuli beamed at her.

  “I knew something must be wrong when Domini didn’t bring us back,” Watney said.

  “As soon as you succeeded in making your revision,” Weigand explained, “your horizon and your associates there with it ceased to exist on this timeline.”

  Watney nodded. “I figured it was something like that,” he said. “I didn’t mind. I was willing to die for America. I couldn’t think of a better time to live than when America asserted her dominance above all the other nations of the world.”