Arc Riders

by David Drake

A pair of guards with submachine guns patrolled the front of the terminal building. They shouted at Weigand—shouted at his back, because he ran by without pausing. The grid of lines on his helmet were centered on the spot in the pavement where he needed to be when he returned to August 24. That was all that mattered for the moment.

  A helicopter was moving slowly up the Potomac River. Sound reflecting from the water’s surface syncopated the clop of the blades.

  One of the guards threw his weapon to his shoulder, shouted another challenge, and fired. Three or four of the pistol-caliber bullets hit Weigand and bounced off with bitter whines. Protected by his armor, Weigand heard but couldn’t feel the projectiles.

  Maybe this was why the tanks were waiting in front of the terminal when the force from California assaulted it. Three weeks earlier an armored figure had burst from the terminal carrying anti-tank rockets, had run into the parking lot—and there vanished, an enigma and a threat. That could easily have spurred the authorities to shift a pair of tanks from the Pentagon garrison.

  But if the tanks hadn’t been present on August 24, Pauli Weigand wouldn’t have displaced to outflank them in time. Maybe Nan understood these things, maybe those up the line did. For now…

  Weigand checked the cocked anti-tank rocket, checked his location; both were correct. A dozen more submachine gun bullets spanged and sparked from his armor.

  Weigand returned to August 24 and the middle of a firefight.

  Fire had fully involved the terminal’s upper floor. The lower level of the building would be uninhabitable in mere minutes if it wasn’t now. Ten meters of the south wing had been blown to rubble. In the bay at the back of the terminal, hotter flames from the DC-8’s jet fuel mounted fifty meters in the air.

  The tanks were fifteen meters apart, firing into the building with both cannon and machine guns. No one aboard the vehicles noticed that Weigand had appeared between them, but an automatic rifle in the terminal raked him with its fire. The bullets didn’t have enough energy to hurt him, but they could damage the rockets he held if he didn’t use them promptly.

  Weigand aimed at the side of the turret of the tank on his left. The bow slope and the front of the turret were thicker armor than this small missile could penetrate, but the sides were less of a problem.

  Weigand pulled the long trigger. The rocket fired with an angry thow! and a gush of orange flame from the back of the tube. The missile hit the turret exactly where Weigand had intended. It ricocheted skyward from the curved armor without exploding and struck again a good five hundred meters distant. This time it went off, blasting a divot from a sparsely traveled roadway.

  Weigand swallowed. It hadn’t occurred to him that the weapon would be a dud. The mean time between failure of Anti-Revision Command equipment was comparable to that of granite.

  “Pauli,” said Gerd Barthuli in the instant that Weigand’s mind, blank with catastrophe, was capable of hearing the voice in his ears. “Colonel Watney says that the arming distance of a LAW is ten meters. You’re too close to the target.”

  Weigand strode ten meters farther from the tank as he extended the tube of the second rocket. The shooters within the terminal stopped firing at him when they saw him attempt to destroy the tank, but the clang of the missile hitting the turret had aroused interest within the vehicle. A head emerged from the open cupola hatch.

  The armor of an M60 tank was as impervious to rifle and machine gun fire as Weigand’s displacement suit. The men of the assault force were primed and ready for a target they could not only hit but hurt. At least three marksmen blew simultaneous holes through the tank commander’s head.

  Weigand aimed the notch-and-post sight of the second launcher at the same point as before. He pulled the trigger. The missile tracked straight and went off against the side of the turret with a white flash.

  The crack! of the warhead was almost lost in the clang! of beaten metal. The shaped charge’s metallic lining hit the turret armor as a gaseous spearpoint, piercing the steel and ripping on through the tank’s fighting compartment. Ammunition went off inside. A blast and fireball lifted the loader’s hatch, belching a ring of black smoke skyward.

  Weigand walked toward the tank he had just put out of action. He didn’t run, because he was extending the launcher of his last rocket. His armored grip was so strong that he might well have smashed the fiberglass tube and rocket motor if he’d been too hasty.

  The second tank’s 105 fired as Weigand turned. The muzzle blast lifted dust from the asphalt and rocked the heavy vehicle back on its suspension. The crew within were unaware that their consort was burning 15 meters away.

  Weigand aimed, squeezed, and watched the third missile strike home to detonate. The smoke from the warhead dissipated on the breeze fanning the flames of the terminal building. There was a red-rimmed smudge on the turret side. The coaxial machine gun beside the main gun fell silent, but for a few seconds there was no other sign that the missile had been effective.

  The tank blew up with a shattering roar. The turret leaped five meters skyward, spun, and crashed back down on the blazing hull, upside down and with its long cannon cocked to the side.

  Weigand got to his feet. The displacement suit had protected him from injury, but he would have needed ten times the mass not to be knocked down by the shock wave. Figures ran from the terminal—Carnes, Barthuli, and Watney, but other members of the assault force as well.

  The building was fast becoming an inferno. Most of the men in the north wing had already abandoned it for the captured gunpit on that end. Those in the south wing were surely dead.

  The air between Weigand and Barthuli shimmered and took on the appearance of translucence rather than transparency. Carnes and Watney, five meters to either side of the analyst, were still as clear as before in the spark-shot, smoky atmosphere.

  TC 779 locked into phase with the temporal horizon, hovering above asphalt that was beginning to bubble from the heat of the burning tank. The capsule’s outer hull was scarred by sealant sprayed on to replace plates melted during the attack in 50K.

  The hatch opened. Chun Quo stood in the hatchway screaming, “Quickly, they’re going to use a nuclear weapon!”

  Weigand was already running for the hatch. The unprotected members of his team ran also, in a blue ambience beyond which the world moved in slow motion.

  Quo had thrown the immediate vicinity slightly out of phase. The team would be all right if the damaged capsule’s systems could maintain phase with absolute precision despite the high-energy shock of a thermonuclear explosion.

  Weigand was two steps from the hatch, pausing to let Carnes enter ahead of him. All his electronics failed simultaneously. The displacement suit became a lump of metal as dead as an anvil, with Pauli Weigand at the center of it.

  He wasn’t in doubt as to what had delivered the electromagnetic pulse that had overwhelmed his suit. As his suit froze, he’d seen an image that he knew would remain with him for the minute or two before he died: a second transportation capsule hovered over the fire-wrapped parking lot beside TC 779.

  Washington National

  Airport

  Timeline B: August 24, 1991

  Rebecca Carnes thought she was seeing a mirage—the ARC Riders’ time vehicle mirrored by a side effect of the process which slowed down motion beyond the immediate bubble of blue haze.

  Differences struck her like a hammer of ice: the second vehicle’s hull was as smooth as a knife blade, and its hatch was closed. This wasn’t a double of TC 779 but rather the enemy that had ripped the wounds in the capsule of Carnes’ friends.

  Weigand fell forward, overbalanced by the arm he’d thrown out to gesture Carnes into the vehicle ahead of him. He hit the asphalt and rolled onto his right side with no more control than a sack of groceries has. His suit was dead. Shortly Pauli would be dead also, like the suited enemies Carnes had EMPed in California.

  She knelt beside Weigand. Her short hair lifted and began to spark purple in a building stati
c charge.

  Gerd shouted something, one hand on Watney’s shoulder and the other pointing toward the hostile vehicle. Chun Quo had vanished from the hatch of TC 779. Huge sparks popped soundlessly between the vehicles and the asphalt.

  The displacement suit’s external latch was beneath the right armpit. Carnes tried to push it open from the back and failed. To get a better angle, she jumped over Weigand’s body as though it were a vaulting horse. The surface of the armor was hot, hot enough to blister.

  The world beyond the blue ambience went white in a flash that Carnes knew now to recognize. An opalescent cloud, light tangible and more hideous than the face of a corpse lain three months in a shallow grave, swept at a snail’s pace across the airport. Everything it touched dissolved.

  The displacement suit clicked. The chest plate opened only halfway, blocked by the ground itself. Carnes grabbed the gauntlet of the outstretched arm and used it as a lever to lift the suit. She gained two inches, a third, using her thigh muscles against the stiff weight.

  “Gerd!” she shouted as she started to slip, but it wasn’t Barthuli’s hands that suddenly aided her and flung the dead mass on its back. Pauli had gotten an arm free. He pushed against the asphalt with strength doubled by desperation. With the front fully open, Weigand threw back the helmet and clambered from the suit. Carnes braced herself to anchor his brutal grip.

  Watney pulled the friction igniter of his satchel charge and flung the bomb against the side of the hostile vehicle. The charge bounced back. The vehicle drifted in the other direction as though the two were of equal mass.

  Weigand started for the satchel charge. Carnes grabbed his arm and swung the big man enough that he tripped on the legs of his rigid armor.

  “I’ve got it!” Watney cried as he scooped up the ten-pound charge again by its carrying strap. He put his free hand against the hull of the hostile capsule. It drifted like spider silk, but the revisionist walked after it in constant contact.

  The nuclear shock wave had expanded beyond the limits of the airport reservation. Objects drifted in the vacuum glowing behind the wave front. The only thing Carnes could recognize was a fragment of pierced steel girder, probably part of the terminal building.

  Barthuli clambered into TC 779. Weigand tossed Carnes aboard like a sack of rice and jumped in after her. The capsule’s insubstantial outer blister and the inner door shut more quickly than visible motion.

  Chun sat at the front of the vehicle. Bars of vertical red light danced in the air before her, obvious warning signals. The inner bulkhead was an unbroken display of the scene beyond the hull.

  Watney followed as the capsule fled, like one magnet pushing another across the surface of a fluid. A line of thin gray smoke trailed from the satchel.

  “A pyrotechnic fuse,” Weigand muttered. “If he’d used an electronic delay, it wouldn’t have worked in the stasis field.”

  Chun turned her head toward the others. Her face was still. “Is he—” she said.

  The satchel charge went off with the smoky red flash of TNT, a huge flash. Watney vanished.

  The hostile vehicle skittered from the explosion. The membrane of blue light above the hull collapsed downward, sucking with it the outward hellrush of secondary compression waves rebounding from ground zero.

  Superheated gas touched the vehicle. The solid matter of the hull sublimed with the speed of glass shattering.

  The remnants of what had been a transportation capsule spewed out into the firestorm, as dead and glowing as everything else within a mile radius.

  Rebecca Carnes hadn’t prayed since her first tour in Vietnam. She looked at the fiery expanse where Kyle Watney stood a moment before and whispered, “Christ have mercy on his soul.”

  Chun Quo’s face was a death mask. She touched a control without speaking. TC 779 displaced from the heart of hell.

  Washington, DC

  March 2, 1967

  Grainger was so frustrated he would gladly have hosed down any number of federal buildings, or, better, the business high-rises on K Street among which Bates’ office was situated.

  The team had a roomy briefcase now, the legal sort with an accordion bottom, and Grainger had bought a pilot’s case which had even more room. Enough room for a tanglefoot device.

  Armed to the teeth, they were about to make a serious try for their prey in this urban jungle with its plants in pots on concrete sidewalks.

  It felt good to be doing something real. Last night in the elegant hotel room, it had taken all of his self-restraint to avoid trying something way too real, like hitting on his boss.

  He’d taken a very long H2O shower instead, trying to estimate the number of gallons he was turning into wastewater. Even in his time, the overage charge for that water would have meant a month’s salary. In Roebeck’s milieu, such luxury was not available even to the very rich: there was no such thing as a constant stream of available water for cleaning your body. You cleaned your body with bracingly abrasive dry chemical particles sprayed from heated air jets in a dry shower stall. Water was for drinking, cooking, and the rest belonged to the environment’s flora and fauna by international agreement.

  They had appropriate day clothes, now, at Roebeck’s insistence: blue blazers, rep tie, khaki pants for him; a gray suit with flare-legged pants for her. Headgear was still a problem, so Grainger had yet another hat and so did Roebeck. She looked really grotesque with the round hat pulled down over her hair, which was brushed forward as much as possible to cover her equipment, and her pants legs flapping around her booted feet.

  He supposed he looked no better, and yet they seemed to be attracting no undue attention. It was, after all, the sixties.

  In Bates’ building, you walked up to a guard presiding over a free-standing desk. The front of the desk was a glass-topped list of who occupied what floor. You then asked for the floor and the person. The guard called ahead to confirm that you had an appointment.

  Then you were waved on, to a bank of marble-clad elevators with no attendant. You were, virtually, on your own.

  They were alone in their elevator, but there might have been surveillance cameras installed above the false ceiling. They didn’t talk. They didn’t check their gear.

  They were going to bag themselves a couple revisionists, or else.

  When the elevator opened, Roebeck checked her hair, which just covered the membrane pushed up on her forehead. “Ready?”

  She stepped out first.

  “Yes sir.” He followed.

  The suite numbers on the door didn’t immediately tell you which direction to take. They went down the hall a bit, turned, and came back the other way.

  At the very end of that hall was a pair of mahogany-colored doors with a brass plaque on one. As they neared it, one door opened, and a man with an overcoat and a briefcase came out.

  Grainger tensed. The man drew no weapon, but held the door open, smiling distractedly.

  Roebeck paused, then walked straight toward him, shoulders squared.

  Of course, Grainger realized, the gentleman was holding open the manually operated door for a lady.

  Good thing he hadn’t shot the guy down.

  Roebeck said “Thank you,” and the stranger said “My pleasure” and then headed for the elevators, leaving Grainger to fend for himself where doors were concerned.

  The carpet was a rusty orange inside the office. The chairs were upholstered in brown hides. More dead animals turned into furniture.

  A receptionist at a horseshoe made of the same mahogany received Roebeck’s announcement that they were “… here to see Mr. Bates. We have an appointment at fourteen hundred hours.”

  The receptionist looked at her curiously. “I’ll just tell Mr. Bates you’re here. Please take a seat.”

  She should have said “two o’clock,” Grainger realized. By then, so did Roebeck.

  You couldn’t anticipate every difference in custom. Maybe it would be overlooked. The receptionist had a huge curly black hairdo which m
ade her look like a mongoloid child. Her skin was the same color as the desk. The desk was made of more mahogany than Grainger had ever seen outside of 50K or in a museum.

  No wonder there had been no mahogany trees left in his own time. There were paper periodicals all over the glass table before the reception area chairs, too. Tens of them. Made of heavy, glossy stock with multicolor printing that made it nearly impossible to recycle efficiently. The prices for the periodicals were a pittance compared to the price for so much real first-use paper in Grainger’s time.

  This was Timeline B, after all, he reminded himself. Timeline A was sure to be more environmentally conscious, once they reinstated it. History made a point that environmental responsibility had started in the sixties. Still, he felt as if he were in a center of corruption par excellence. And he was probably right. His instincts were usually pretty good.

  Roebeck didn’t want to talk. Her breathing was very slow and shallow. He concentrated on syncing his respiration to hers. Always a good exercise before a team went into action. Synced breathing and body language provided a functional edge when conscious coordination was critical to mission accomplishment.

  She noticed him, and nearly smiled. She took her own pulse, and mouthed the results: “Sixty-eight.”

  He brought his own pulse into line as best he could, getting it down to sixty-nine before someone came to get them. Women always ran cooler before action.

  The greeter rubbed her hands together. She was wearing a close-fitting jacket with buttons that had little crossed Cs emblazoned on them. She teetered on impossibly spikey heels.

  “Please come this way. Mr. Bates will see you now.” She tottered away and they both followed. Over her shoulder she asked them if they’d care for some refreshment, coffee or tea, perhaps.

  They both said “No,” perfectly synchronized.

  The woman cast a glance backward and then faced front.

  Bates’ office was at the end of a long straight corridor. No problem getting out of here in a hurry. When its doors opened, Grainger was startled to see a huge corner window that showed a panorama of the buildings across the street and beyond, toward a little park and OEOB beyond it.