Arc Riders

by David Drake

  Bates wasn’t in there, yet.

  “Mr. Bates will be right with you,” she assured them as she tottered out through a side door, closing it behind her.

  “Now what?” Roebeck whispered, jostling him. He was already getting out his weapons. One way or another, this was going to end here and now. These revisionists, their flunkies, the Orientals—whatever came through that door was either going to come quietly with him or be acoustically subdued or tranked.

  Or go headfirst out that conveniently placed window to the street below.

  He just laid everything out in plain sight. He opened his case. He primed his acoustic pistol, extended its antennae to provide full directionality at close range. He set it for a ten-hertz pulse to be delivered at a point of impact two centimeters wide. He held it in one hand while he locked and loaded his tanglefoot launcher and slung it on his shoulder—in case there were more people than Bates waiting to come through that door.

  “Tim…”

  “Nan, just be ready to follow through. Call Chun now and tell her we’re go for extraction.”

  “You’re that sure?”

  He was that desperate. “You know I am.”

  She got out her fléchette gun and chambered a round. “Backup,” she said needlessly.

  Then the side door opened and Bates came through first, with Rhone close behind him, laughing as she shut the door with a wriggle of her butt.

  The laughing stopped abruptly.

  Aboard TC 779

  Displacing from August 24, 1991,

  to August 30, 1968.

  “We couldn’t afford to be surprised again,” ChunQuo said. By watching the images reeling past on the display she avoided having to look at her companions. “Not after the damage the capsule received in the first attack. Nan and Tim are operating from the safe house, while I kept the capsule out of phase.”

  She wiped her eyes by brushing against her shoulders, one and then the other. She couldn’t use her hands because she was holding the control wands. “We can join them now that the danger has been removed.”

  “I’d like to apologize to him,” Rebecca Carnes said. “Watney. I—after he shot his own man back at the compound, I…”

  Weigand was covering her scrapes and burns with gel that soaked in as soon as it was applied, leaving the surface tacky to the touch. The goo tingled mildly as it went on, as though Pauli were bathing the wounds with carbonated water. Her itching and ache vanished immediately, and Carnes found she had normal feeling again in her blistered fingertips.

  Barthuli glanced back from a display focused for his eyes only. “There’s nothing to apologize for, Rebecca,” he said. “The colonel was exactly what you thought he was. He would have been the last to deny that.”

  “We enlisted Watney because I thought we needed him,” Weigand said with a harshness Carnes didn’t expect from him. “That was true. I was just wrong about what we were going to need him for.”

  “Ruthlessness isn’t a survival characteristic for the individual,” Gerd Barthuli said. Carnes wasn’t sure who the analyst was speaking to, or even—quite—sure who he was speaking about. “But it may be for the larger body, for the race.”

  Carnes had become used to the images cascading on the main display. They formed a montage of objects juxtaposed in time rather than in space. It was only rarely that a scene meant anything to her on a conscious level, but the ripple of forms and colors soothed rather than rubbing a jagged edge against her nerves.

  Chun was conning TC 779 manually. Despite her skill at preprogramming displacements, she lacked the instincts for manual control that Nan Roebeck had. Under Chun’s direction the capsule moved in a series of unfelt jerks that even Carnes could notice on the display. She suspected that for Chun, the frustrations of manual control absorbed her cancerous anger at being involved in the death of Watney and the crew of the hostile transportation capsule.

  “I saw W-w—your suit, Pauli, displace,” Chun said. The image paused long enough for Carnes to see a lioness rubbing her shoulders against a concrete tree in some zoo or other. “Nan—and me, but it was Nan’s idea—had set our navigational probes to detect suit displacements when we realized that the other parties were able to do that. I checked what was going on, and…”

  “And saved our lives,” Carnes said loudly.

  “Let me check your buttocks,” Weigand murmured. “You tore the back off your trousers, I suppose when you came down the slide from the aircraft.”

  “I forgot the other parties might investigate also,” Chun said. “I’m not…”

  Not used to operating against opponents so sophisticated, Carnes thought. Not somebody who automatically thinks of ambushes and kill zones, the way the Kyle Watneys do.

  Carnes walked to the front of the capsule while Weigand was in mid-daub. “You saved our lives,” she said, her hands resting lightly on Chun’s shoulders. “You and Watney saved… everything you care about. He acted and you acted. Without your separate actions, we’d all be—”

  Probably as dead as the pair of hostiles in California.

  “—failed. But don’t take Watney’s actions on yourself. Don’t ever do that.”

  “I’ve been thinking about Jalouse,” Barthuli said unexpectedly. “When we correct the revision here in 1968, all chance of releasing him from this timeline’s ARC Central ends. We can’t do it because we were already there—”

  “Gerd, we know that,” Weigand said tautly. “Rebecca, let me finish covering your scrapes. God knows what germs were going around that airport.”

  “And of course another team of ARC Riders can’t be tasked to the mission,” Barthuli continued, “because it isn’t possible to displace from our timeline to the revised one.”

  “Barthuli, we know that!” Pauli Weigand shouted, his face blotched with rage and sick failure. “Look, if you want to run on about this to Nan, fine! But don’t tell me it’s a mess I can’t fix, because I know that!”

  “Yes,” Barthuli said calmly. “But there’s something you may not have considered, Pauli.”

  Washington, DC

  August 30, 1968

  “They’re at the safe house,” Chun said, looking back at Pauli Weigand with a face whose very openness implied the frown of concern she tried to hide. “I wasn’t expecting to find them here. I was just using it to make sure we hadn’t lost our temporal zero.”

  “They left their armor behind,” Weigand said as he leaned forward instinctively to bring his eyes closer to the display. “Those are just the empty—”

  The two figures in the basement of the safe house moved. They weren’t empty suits. “No, I’m wrong.”

  Why on earth were Nan and Tim wearing armor at this juncture? Had the hostiles made an attack here before—before in terms of their personal timeline as well as that of the sidereal universe—they engaged TC 779 at National Airport?

  “Bring us—”

  Did he have the authority to give orders to Chun? Was that the right order anyway?

  “Yes,” Quo said. “I thought we should… I’ll dock us now.”

  Weigand wasn’t sure he’d ever been so glad to see anyone as he was now to see Nan Roebeck. As soon as she was aboard TC 779, Pauli Weigand could return to being just the guy who obeyed orders.

  Nan carried a fléchette gun with attached EMP generator, the latter a tidy package less than a tenth the bulk of the unit Weigand had cobbled together on this horizon. Still, the makeshift had worked. Weigand was glad it was slung to Rebecca’s back when he tossed her aboard. His unit had worked, and he’d worked as team commander; though neither of them was as slick as the real article.

  “Fifteen seconds,” Chun warned as TC 779 initiated its final approach sequence. The gelid shimmer of the air in the basement center warned the suited ARC Riders. They stepped quickly to either side of the unfinished room.

  There was nothing odd about Nan with a fléchette gun, but Tim Grainger held a gas/tanglefoot projector. Tim’s displacement suit was unmistakab
le because the right knee joint had been replaced after a previous operation. It still had a distinctively new gloss.

  Weigand couldn’t think of a time Grainger had picked a projector when there were lethal weapons to be had, but the choice might have been on Nan’s orders. The team commander was ultimately responsible for every decision a member of the team made. The decisions Tim—Tim’s reflexes, really—could make before anyone stopped him weren’t always the sort Nan would be comfortable remembering in the hours before dawn.

  TC 779 shuddered. The safety mechanisms lifted the capsule a centimeter before they permitted it to lock into phase with the horizon. “Not bad,” Weigand said, though he could have done a good deal better himself.

  Quo gestured with her control wands, opening the inner and outer hatches together. Gerd frowned but didn’t speak whatever thought was on his mind.

  “Nan,” Weigand said as he stepped to the hatch to greet his fellows. “We met and destroyed—”

  The figure he thought was Tim Grainger fired at Weigand’s chest. The projectile knocked Weigand backward, slamming the air from his lungs.

  He gasped involuntarily, so the gas that filled TC 779’s cabin when the shell ruptured froze him an instant before it got the others. Chun held her breath, but it didn’t matter because the skin-absorptive formula reached her nervous system through her face before she could get her mask down.

  Weigand’s muscles went rigid, though he was still fully conscious. He bounced like a wooden dummy off a bulkhead and to the deck. To keep from rendering the transportation capsule uninhabitable, the hijackers had used a short-term paralyzing agent whose effects would wear off in a few minutes.

  As they boarded TC 779, the armored figures dropped the weapons they must have captured when they took the displacement suits. From the suits’ storage pouches they drew angular handguns like those the pair at Travis used on Weigand and the men accompanying him. Weigand knew this time to expect his mind to dissolve into white static.

  As it did.

  Washington, DC

  August 30, 1968

  He didn’t know who he was. He couldn’t move and he wasn’t sure why, maybe because he was a disembodied head floating in a prickly white mass that—

  “Oh!” shouted Pauli Weigand as a rebuilt acetylcholine supply repaved his nerve pathways. He curved up from the burning fog that wrapped him.

  The hostile ARC Riders were getting out of the displacement suits they’d appropriated to ambush TC 779. “Watch him,” one said. The words weren’t in Standard English. The capsule’s internal systems automatically translated them. “He’s big.”

  Both hostiles were male, both of Oriental ancestry. The speaker aimed the acetylcholine inhibitor that was his equivalent of Weigand’s acoustic pistol.

  “He could be a hydraulic jack and he still wouldn’t be able to stretch his restraints,” the other hostile said. “Relax. Unless you want to kill them now?”

  “No, Central will want them,” the first speaker said. “Who knows how many more there may be? And if we miss one capsule?”

  He made a cross-cutting gesture at the base of his rib cage.

  The hostiles must have been extremely uncomfortable in the hijacked displacement suits. Neither of them was as tall as Roebeck, and Grainger was a good four centimeters taller yet.

  They weren’t mirror images of one another, though, any more than Chun and Barthuli—both mumbling in their bonds beside Weigand—were. The one who’d spoken first was slim, fine-boned, and of a lighter complexion than his stocky companion.

  Stocky eyed Weigand speculatively. The Oriental was obviously strong and proud of it, but if he really thought he had a chance of taking Pauli Weigand hand-to-hand, he was a fool.

  Not so great a fool that he’d taken any chances with the bonds, though. Weigand’s hands were lashed to his ankles behind his back, and from there attached to an eyebolt mounted for the purpose at the rear of the cabin.

  Many revisionists had ridden here after the team’s previous missions. If the hostiles had used TC 779’s restraint tape, the whole capsule could have been lifted on a strand of it. If they’d used their own, Weigand didn’t imagine the material was significantly less strong.

  “You’ve lost,” Weigand lied. His voice was a croak. He hacked, clearing the phlegm that had accumulated while he was unconscious. “We blew up your capsule already.”

  The slim hostile shrugged. “Mishima and Goto were no loss,” the console said as his lips spoke syllables of a wholly different rhythm. “As for the capsule, this one will do quite well. Central will be pleased at the intelligence value.”

  He and Stocky seemed at home in TC 779. Stocky was programming a displacement, using the control wands Chun favored. Weigand wondered again at timelines that could be so close technically while utterly distinct in culture.

  Chun gagged as she regained consciousness. She twisted violently. Even if she’d been able to spin like a top, she couldn’t have affected her bonds. Barthuli was alert also, but his mind had surfaced as silently as the nostrils of a manatee coming up for air.

  “Ready,” Stocky said.

  Slim sat down where Grainger normally would. He nodded. Stocky’s wand initiated the displacement sequence.

  “Where are our friends?” Weigand asked. The form of his question avoided giving the hostiles any information they didn’t already have.

  “The man and the woman are back at the safe house,” Slim said with a smile of deliberate cruelty. “Oh, yes, we have you all, now. Fools not to realize it was our safe house also!”

  “And if you think Calandine might free them—” Stocky said. “We thought that, too, so he’s immobilized with them. They were sleeping when we arrived. Trusting a phase-locked chamber against us!”

  “Yamaguchi wanted to interrogate them immediately,” Slim said. He smiled. He had the look of a man who preferred his food to be alive when he ate it. “I told him that could wait—we needed to be in the displacement suits when their friends came back for them.”

  He smiled at his companion. “But I’m sure Central will permit him to conduct the initial stages of the process when we return.”

  Interrogation by Weigand’s Anti-Revision Command could leave the subject with a headache, but nothing worse occurred. Slim’s operation had comparable technical skills, so the methods implied in Slim’s smile must be a matter of taste.

  TC 779 trembled on the verge of meshing with the horizon. “You have the con, sir,” Stocky—Yamaguchi—said with unexpected formality.

  Slim concentrated on his individual display. Like Yamaguchi, he used control wands, but he held them between thumb and forefinger at the balance.

  The main display hovered momentarily above the east lawn of the White House, then swooped forward with a smooth grace that Nan Roebeck would have been hard put to better. Walls, furniture—a house servant in formal attire—blurred through the viewpoint. Slim was holding the capsule out of phase, viewing the temporal horizon from a point that was no more than a dust-mote shimmer in the air.

  The display steadied on a darkened room with six people present. Four of them were flaccidly unconscious. The President of the United States was upright in his armchair. An alert man had swathed him in transparent wrapping like that which had immobilized the military advisor in Quang Tri a matter of hours before.

  The woman wearing a face-covering helmet squatted before a 23d-century mind control device. Its antenna was focused on the President’s forehead.

  “Pauli?” Chun Quo said. “What—Oh.”

  Yamaguchi looked back at her, grinned, and returned his attention to the main display.

  “Don’t talk,” Weigand said. “Don’t say anything. It’ll make it worse.”

  The woman in the room of the White House took off the helmet and spoke to her companion. She folded the antenna into its carrying case. The man freed the President, then coiled the fine cord into the separate power unit while his companion finished packing the device itself.
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br />   Each carrying a case in the left hand, the pair of revisionists opened the door and strode down the hall at a deliberate pace. The pair of guards outside the door had laminated IDs clipped to the lapels of their suits; they wore the cards with the photo and data against the cloth. The guard’s eyes were unfocused, and the men made no sign as the revisionists walked past.

  23d century technology was light-years beyond the defense capabilities of this horizon. Weigand supposed the pair had drenched the hallways ahead of them with a medium-term hypnotic gas, but there were other alternatives.

  “We’ll take them when they exit the building,” Slim ordered harshly. He was keyed up though not necessarily nervous. His wands adjusted the controls.

  Yamaguchi rose and drew his acetylcholine inhibitor. “Can’t leave revisionists wandering around loose,” he said to Weigand. “Even if they did accidentally do us a favor.”

  His teeth and his smile were as perfect and false as a silicone breast. Chun looked at Yamaguchi with the perfectly blank expression of a mongoose for a cobra.

  TC 779 quivered. The display hovered three meters from an exterior doorway. Slim stood beside Yamaguchi. He aimed his pistol toward the closed hatch.

  The door of the building started to open.

  Weigand looked at his companions and said, “Nan, Tim—these two hostiles in TC 779 are going to shoot the revisionists when they walk out of the White House.”

  The door swung back. The guard there in the hallway was as glassy-eyed as his fellows at the President’s door. TC 779 locked in phase and both hatches opened. The man and woman in the White House doorway triggered their acoustic pistols.

  When Weigand warned them over the intercom, Roebeck and Grainger dropped the cases they were carrying. The sections of mind control device were still falling when the two fired.

  Nan Roebeck was faster than Weigand had imagined. She hit Yamaguchi only a heartbeat after Tim Grainger shot the stocky revisionist. Of course, Tim’s first acoustic pulse had already knocked Slim back from the hatchway unconscious.