Arc Riders (29 page)

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.”

He sat up, then stood as he spoke. Watney’s voice took on the husky power of a man channeling a force greater than himself.

He met Weigand’s eyes. The revisionist’s face broke into the shattered smile Weigand had seen on it once before. “Oh, yes,”
Watney said softly. “I believed that. I really did.”

“You had studied the horizon in order to operate in it effectively?” Barthuli suggested. “Money, current events—that sort
of thing?”

“Oh, more than that,” Watney said. “I’d trained, Mr. Barthuli. I was a rich man, I could indulge my whims. I was trained to
be a soldier fit to serve in the army that lifted America to her apotheosis.”

He looked at Weigand, and in this at least the two of them were alike. “I’m good at it, you know.”

His fingers traced the line of bullet scars across his bare chest. “It was more than the skills, it was instinct. And it was…[
felt
superior because I came from the future. You understand that, don’t you? The feeling that you’re better than everyone around
you, so they can’t really touch you? You know!”

“A lot of Riders feel that way,” Weigand said. “A lot of us.”

Weigand had never understood that attitude, any more than he’d understood parents setting their infants to scream on Moloch’s
blazing altar; but he’d seen that, too, and a score of variations on it. He looked at the revisionist and tried to feel compassion
rather than loathing. Weigand’s face was as calm as a cold wax sculpture.

“They think I can’t be killed,” Watney said. “My men do. Sometimes I do myself. Krieghoff went to pieces when he realized
we couldn’t go back to 2257, that was where we came from. He’d finally decided he’d go to Washington and try to find Bates.
I knew that wouldn’t have done any good. And anyway Krieghoff was killed in an accident before he got to Saigon.”

The shooting outside had stopped. A siren called despairingly across the night.

“Accident?” asked Carnes. She wouldn’t look directly at Watney. Even in speaking to him, her jaw muscles stiffened.

“A cyclo hit him as he was crossing Highway 13,” Watney said. “I had to identify the body. A cyclo carrying Coke girls. They
were following a battalion of the 25th Infantry to a new area of operations.”

Watney looked at the trio he hoped would rescue him from the world he had made. “It wasn’t like training, you know,” he said
in his husky voice. “And it wasn’t anything like the histories I studied said it would be. But that was all right, so long
as I was fighting for a cause. It wasn’t until I saw the changes in America, and that there was still more Asia, and more
Asians living in it to continue fighting…. Then I started to understand.”

Weigand felt his own authority riding on him like a crown of thorns. He had to make decisions and he wasn’t ready to.

He swallowed. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll sleep. In the morning, we’ll decide how we’re going to return to ConUS and then to the
1968 horizon. But for now we’ll sleep.”

“Wait!” Barthuli snapped, his eyes on something in the air before him invisible from Weigand’s angle. More politely the analyst
continued, “A moment please, Pauli. Colonel Watney, who is ‘Fern’?”

Watney frowned. “Yeah,” he said, “General Fern. I think he gave me a first name, but I don’t remember it. He’s Air Force.”

The face of the man whose name Barthuli plucked from the trash of the revisionist’s surface thoughts hung above the recorder/computer.
The word “return” had kicked up the recollection. A man of forty; hatchet-faced, with black hair cut short enough to be a
mere shadow on his scalp.

“He tried to recruit me yester… three days ago,” Watney said. “While we were saddling up, for God’s sake. Some special operation.”

He snorted. “As if I need the Air Force to task my boys! And stateside Air Force besides.”

“Fifth Military District,” Weigand said, the words coming out even as the image of a head expanded to head and shoulders.
The patch on General Fern’s left shoulder was that of MR 5, but with the blue star central boss of General Oakley’s personal
forces.

“Yeah,” the revisionist agreed. He looked at the holographic image with a more critical eye. “Yeah, that’s right. You knew
about that?”

Barthuli smiled tightly. “Not until now,” he said.

“The CO of Travis is gathering a private army for a coup,” Weigand said. “He wanted real combat troops for the lead commando.
People like your team. What did he offer you?”

“He didn’t offer a damned thing,” Watney snarled, angry because he was tired and unwilling to be pushed in what he regarded
as a pointless direction. “I told you, we were saddling up. I told him to get out of my way or he’d have boot tracks on his
face.”

Watney grimaced, remembering that these were the only people in the world who could end the nightmare he and his accomplices
had caused. “Sorry,” he said to his hands. “Look, I mean to help, I just… I don’t know. He’s still here, though. Was this
afternoon when we got back. He came in a DC-8 in Air Force markings, carrying a bunch of people he’d brought out of Yunnan.
It’s still parked at the west end of the airfield.”

Weigand nodded, forcing his mind to work. “Gerd—” he said.

“The aircraft hasn’t been refueled,” Barthuli said before Weigand had the question out. The analyst must have been working
on the answer from the instant he’d identified Fern; even so, it was fast work. “It took some fuel aboard yesterday. More,
the necessary minimum to reach Kadena, is supposed to arrive by noon tomorrow.”