Arc Riders (16 page)

Roebeck hosed the right-hand hyena, an easier shot because the Neanderthal child wasn’t at risk from the projectiles. Recoil
lifted her weapon and torqued it to the right, but Roebeck managed to rip both spine and cranial vault when the beast’s spasmodic
leap kept it in the path of the tungsten stream.

The Neanderthal mother swung her club horizontally, using both arms and all the strength of her shoulders. The hickory struck
the left-hand hyena’s flank. The club split like a marrow bone with a shower of splinters and a crack worthy of a lightning
bolt. The hyena spun sideways, its pelvis crushed by the blow.

The center hyena leaped like the cat it resembled as closely as it did a dog. It knocked down the child with its forepaws
and had her face in its jaws before Roebeck could swing the heavy fléchette gun back on target.

The Neanderthal mother screamed. Roebeck screamed, because she couldn’t shoot without raking the child as well.

The hyena leaped up on its hind legs, snapping its empty jaws on the air. It turned a backflip and landed on its side several
meters away. Its four limbs flailed without rhythm or direction.

The
whack
of the single tungsten fléchette that had decorticated the beast echoed flatly from the valley wall. A spray of brain tissue
and bone chips stained the snowy grass in a direct line from where the hyena’s skull had been—and back to Tim Grainger, standing
beside the vehicle 200 meters away with his gun at his shoulder.

The mother snatched up her offspring and mopped saliva from the child’s face with one hand. The girl blubbered, but she wasn’t
seriously injured. Though the long canines had punctured her scalp, the fléchette jellied the beast’s brain an instant before
the jaws crushed down with full force.

Grainger aimed and fired again. The third hyena had been squirming forward despite its shattered hindquarters. The animal
twitched and relaxed with a sigh. Its staring eyes were bulged, driven almost from their sockets by the shockwave that slammed
like a maul through the brain and optic nerves.

Roebeck knelt down. She felt so weak that she had to plant the butt of her fléchette gun on the soil like a third leg to prevent
her from falling over.

“Nan, are you all right?” Chun Quo called over the communicator. Grainger ran toward the scene with his weapon held at high
port, close to his chest. “Were you hit?”

Nan Roebeck had just revised the past. She didn’t know, she couldn’t guess, what that meant for the timeline from which she
sprang.

“Quo, I’m fine,” Roebeck said, letting the vocative autokey her headband to transmit. “I’m woozy, that’s all. I’m fine.”

All Roebeck knew for sure about what had just happened was that she’d do it again, whatever the cost, to keep from watching
hyenas devour a child in front of her.

The Neanderthal mother trotted for the woods, carrying her daughter. Her eyes were on Grainger, and she slanted slightly away
from his approach.

The child squirmed out of her mother’s arms and ran back. Roebeck thought the child was coming to her. She stood up, swaying
with the effort.

The child dropped to her knees and scrabbled on the bloody ground where the hyena had seized her. Her mother grabbed her around
the waist and snarled through bared teeth.

The girl raised the starburst emblem and cooed in delight as her mother carried her into the forest. She waved toward Roebeck.

Grainger halted beside Roebeck. He was breathing hard from the run and trying not to show it. He wagged his fléchette gun
in ironic salute and said, “Not really the tool of choice for the job, but she’ll do in a pinch.”

Roebeck embraced the gunman. “Thanks Tim,” she said. “Nice to know that if I screw up, I’ve still got friends.”

Then she said, “Now let’s go see if there’s still a 1968 for us to straighten out.”

Circa 10,000
BC

R
ebecca Carnes wished she could scratch her right side. The jacket of her fatigues was bunched up over her hip, and it itched
as if a mouse were crawling over her.

A third figure appeared on the meadow. The displacement suits didn’t move into sight, they just
were
. It was like a trick with mirrors, where a minute change of angle switched the visible scene entirely.

“Don’t take your armor off!” Pauli’s voice commanded. He was holding his fat-barreled weapon ready. Carnes supposed it was
a grenade launcher, but guns weren’t her line of territory.

What Rebecca Carnes had learned in a war zone, then found to be true in civilian life as well, is that nobody really knows
what’s going on while it’s happening. She’d been at Long Binh with the 93d during the 1968 Tet Offensive. The night was a
zoo of orderlies running into the wards shouting the alert status, constant explosions she’d thought were outgoing artillery
(some of them had been incoming mortar rounds), and attempts to get the patients onto the floor for safety—then back in bed
when somebody claimed the alert level had dropped to yellow again.

Carnes had done what was in front of her, without having the slightest notion of what the situation really was. The next morning
they’d found a VC with a satchel charge, shot dead within fifty feet of the barracks Carnes normally slept in, not that anybody’d
gotten much sleep
that
night. The whole thing was a razor’s edge from catastrophe, and she hadn’t known any more about it than she had at Firebase
Schaydin during her last night in her own time.

More to the point, the Long Binh base commander hadn’t known what was going on, either; and if the commander of US forces
in Vietnam did know, he’d sure worked hard to obscure the fact. His statements were so far out of touch with reality that
Carnes had suspected he’d landed on his head once too often while he was a paratrooper.

Since she’d come to that realization, chaos didn’t frighten Carnes the way it once had. She’d do her job if she had one and
try to stay out of the way if she clearly didn’t. She was willing to attempt something even if she wasn’t sure what the right
thing
was, but she was well aware of how easily blind motion could make a bad situation worse.

Right now, Carnes was keeping her mouth shut and obeying orders. If somebody dropped with a bullet through the lungs or had
a foot blown off by a mine, she’d be back on the job in an eyeblink.

“I have a scenario, Pauli,” Barthuli said. “Any time you’re ready to examine it.”

“You’ve run this through already?” Weigand demanded. He sounded as much angry as amazed.

“A matter of giving the correct instructions to the equipment,” the analyst said in mild reproof. “Processing time is minuscule,
you know.”

Carnes heard Weigand sigh. Pauli had fallen into the common human trap of believing merely mechanically complicated things
were difficult. It bothered him that Barthuli could solve what was basically a mathematical problem almost instantly. Pauli
was their leader. He thought he should be able to solve his problem—how to rejoin the rest of the team, how to change time
back to a pattern Carnes had never known—at least as quickly as the analyst could re-create a past reality. Instead, it/they
remained an intractable mass in Weigand’s consciousness.

Barthuli had a handheld computer as advanced from the Crays of Carnes’ day as her own brain was improved from whatever it
was that guided bacteria. Matters that could be reduced to number crunching were easy—like landing a man on the moon as opposed
to solving poverty, where the very terms slipped like water through the nets of analysis.

It took enormous skill to repair a soldier’s bullet-ripped heart, lungs, and spleen, but it was mechanical skill:
surgeon
meant literally “manual laborer.” Bringing back the mind of a man found catatonic, alive and unmarked in the midst of a dozen
mangled corpses—that was a job for genius or for God, and Rebecca Carnes hadn’t believed in God since her first tour in Nam.

“Yeah, sure, run it,” Weigand said. “Sorry, Gerd. I’m jumpy.”

Weigand shifted his weapon closer to his body. It looked to Carnes as if the big man was prepared to fight but no longer expected
he’d need to. The prairie and nearby woods were much the same as when the trio left them a few minutes earlier. The only change
she could see was the score of shaggy buffaloes grazing on the next rise.

A picture formed—flashed—in the air an apparent meter from Carnes’ eyes. Her own armor must be projecting the image, since
Barthuli and Weigand were facing in different directions.

Two transportation capsules—identical as far as Carnes could tell, except that the hatch of one was open—stood in near contact.
Beams of ravening light ripped from the open hatch and splashed the other capsule.

The target disappeared. Seconds later, the hatch of the remaining capsule closed and that vehicle also vanished. Only then
did Carnes recognize the background as the scarred, snowclad prairie to which the three of them had returned in 50,000
BC
.

“How did you do that?” she demanded. “We weren’t there. How did you get pictures of what happened?”

Barthuli’s helmet didn’t move, but she suspected the analyst’s head had turned toward her as he said, “It’s one possible scenario
of what happened, Rebecca. There are certain verifiable facts: the type of weapons used, the location from which they’d have
had to be fired in order to give the pattern of reflection damage to the surroundings. The rest is supposition—by my computer,
merely a machine, as to the most probable series of events that would give rise to those facts.”

“But it
isn’t
probable, is it?” Weigand asked, trying to come to grips with an image he hadn’t expected. “The revisionists couldn’t have
a capsule like ours.”

“The revisionists we’ve been tracking couldn’t have plasma weapons of the type involved in this attack,” Barthuli said. “These
are standard—ARC standard—atmospheric nitrogen weapons, not the laser-pumped tritium guns that some vehicles mounted in the
mid-23d century. Remember, the modeling program”—he lifted his tiny sensor pack/computer between his gloved thumb and forefinger
to call attention to it—“has the benefit of a full spectral analysis of the vestiges of the attack.”

Weigand’s left hand rose to his helmet, then fell away without touching the faceplate. He’d forgotten he was wearing a displacement
suit; he’d been about to rub his eyes with his palm.

“Sure, Central’s still there,” Weigand said with a pretense of calm. “It’s just not our Central.”

He cleared his throat. The intercom system reproduced the sound perfectly. “I’m not sure what to do next,” he said simply.
“Gerd—”

“We needn’t rush into this,” the analyst said. He was temporizing. He didn’t know what the right move was, either, though
he didn’t sound particularly concerned about the matter. “If the other Anti-Revision Command could determine the point to
which we’d displaced, they’d have attacked us also.”

“Maybe I’ll think better if I’m out of this armor,” Weigand muttered. His hand moved toward but not
to
the latch of his breastplate.

“The other ARC Riders don’t matter to you, do they?” Carnes said. “I mean, if you correct the change Watney and his friends
made, the future beyond them vanishes. Right?”

It wasn’t so much that pieces were falling together in her mind. Rather, extraneous bits had fallen away, no longer camouflaging
the real needs. Emergency medical personnel learned very quickly to focus on critical matters, ignoring things that weren’t
life-threatening and could be passed until there was leisure to deal with them.

“Yes, but we can’t go knocking around Washington in 1968,” Weigand protested. “We don’t even know who we’d be looking for.”

“These suits can’t hover out of phase, Rebecca,” Barthuli added. His tone was too dry to be patronizing. Perhaps he didn’t
remember that Weigand had explained all that to Carnes before her first displacement.

“The other, ah, hostiles will spot us long before we’ve located our target,” Weigand said.

“You don’t know who we’re looking for,” Carnes said with a tight rein on her temper. It had been a long, hard day for her,
that was the gospel truth. “But Kyle Watney does, and I know how to find Watney in 1991. If he’s alive, at least. He’ll be
coming back to the compound in Son Tay.”

“Rebecca,” Barthuli said, “that’s very good. I didn’t—I might not ever have considered that. Of course, there’s still the
matter of transportation. Our suits can’t displace geographically, and we’re in North America, not Southeast Asia.”

Pauli Weigand slung his weapon so that he could slap his armored palms together in triumph. “Don’t worry about that, Gerd!”
he said. “You just give us a setting that won’t get any of the three of us in the way of our former selves. I’ll take care
of transport when you get us to the right horizon.”

Carnes thought the big man was going to clap his hands again. Instead, he put his arm around her shoulder and patted her,
hard enough to make the suit ring like a shell hitting armor.

“Now we’re moving!” he said.

March 15, 1967

G
rainger couldn’t get over how different from his memories of the district, circa 2025, everything seemed in this 1967 Washington
as he hiked uphill toward Memorial Bridge and the Lincoln Memorial beyond.

On the Ides of March, one year and two weeks before the President of the United States was to make the speech that plunged
his country and his world into a nuclear nightmare, all looked prosperous and orderly inside the Beltway under a bright spring
sun. There was no sign on this horizon of the infrastructural stresses that would make Grainger’s native Washington a cultural
war zone crumbling underfoot, eroding visibly as it struggled to fund vast entitlement programs for its insatiable underclasses.

Here and now, federal green spaces were being cut with martial precision. The air was filled with the sounds of mowers and
the smell of fresh-cut grass, masking the dull roar and exhaust fumes of an endless stream of gleaming internal-combustion
autos. Young red tulips planted by the thousands along Memorial Bridge and its traffic arteries bloomed in the grass like
tears shed by a bloody god. Across the bridge, the columned portico of Lincoln’s resting place gleamed bone white.