Arc Riders (4 page)

The Chinese sapper goggled over the sights of his rifle, staring at where Carnes had been and no longer was. He began shooting.
Tracer bullets vanished when they should have struck the wall of the time machine. They reappeared on the opposite side of
the display, flickering away into the darkness.

“We’re out of phase with the horizon,” the woman said. “We can observe, but we don’t exist here in a material sense. I’m Nan
Roebeck, by the way. I’m team leader.”

The image of the firebase went white, then opalescent. Grainger’s jaw tightened, but he said nothing.

“What happened?” Carnes asked. “Why did…”

She thought she was starting to sec objects outside again, though they might have been eddies in the glowing fog.

“A tactical nuclear weapon,” the other man in the compartment said. He was much older than Grainger, sixty or more against
Grainger’s apparent thirty-five. “Northern Command couldn’t relieve your position, so they decided to use the only resources
they had available to turn it into a killing ground for the attacking forces.”

“They nuked us?” Rebecca Carnes said. She backed against the bulkhead for its support. Otherwise her knees might have buckled.
“Our own people nuked us?”

“It was the first use,” Grainger said. His face was calm, and his voice was too calm. “That’s why we chose you. If you’d refused…
well, we counted one hundred and nineteen nuclear explosions when we scanned this timeline. Someone would have accepted our
offer.”

Roebeck was keying commands into the flip-up panel before her. “I’m going to take us back to 50K,” she remarked generally.

Carnes stared at the display. The roiling hell outside the time machine had cooled enough for its emptiness to become apparent.
“Our own people,” Carnes repeated in a whisper.

When she thought about it, though, she knew that the folk who had made the decision to go nuclear weren’t “hers” in any sense.
And she wasn’t sure that they were human in her terms, either.

Circa 50,000
BC

R
oebeck’s controls gave an electronic chirrup. The queer pulsing within each of Carnes’ muscles ended. The sensation hadn’t
been unpleasant.

The forward display had been blank for the previous minute and a half. Now it showed high grasses whipping in the snow-laden
wind. The time machine had landed in something close to a blizzard.

Roebeck frowned; Grainger became very still.

One of the armored figures stepped past Carnes. The lock opened, then closed behind, him/her.

“It could be a late storm,” the other figure said in a woman’s voice. The words came from chest level, though Carnes didn’t
see any sort of speaker plate there. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ve lost our zero.”

The older man shrugged. “There may have been some drift. Operating at 50K puts us at the long arm of the lever, so to speak.
We’ll have to recalibrate each time we return to our operating levels, but we’d do that anyway. I doubt there’s a significant
problem.”

The first armored figure appeared on the display, shrouded in snow. The second figure stepped through the lock in turn.

“All clear,” a male voice reported from the display itself.

“We’ve gone to the far past, where we can prepare without interruption,” Tim Grainger said to Carnes. At some point he must
have been in much the same situation as she was now. Remembering that, he was explaining events in a fashion that the rest
of the team didn’t think to do. “Fifty thousand
BC
, 50K. We can’t be sure hostiles haven’t followed us. Pauli and Quo are making a physical check.”

Carnes nodded appreciatively. She didn’t have enough context for the words yet to claim that she understood, but the fact
of Grainger’s effort made her more comfortable. She was still trying to understand how the US government could launch a nuclear
attack
on her
.

“I’m Gerd Barthuli,” the older man said, extending his hand. “I look forward to working with you. Chun Quo and Pauli Weigand
you will meet when they take off their displacement suits.”

Grainger glanced at Roebeck. The team leader acknowledged the unspoken question with a nod but continued to work at her keyboard.
Sometimes Carnes caught a hint of color and motion in the air above the keys. There was a display there, but normally it was
visible only to the system’s user.

“We’re field operatives for the Anti-Revision Command,” Grainger said, accepting Roebeck’s nod as approval to go ahead. “ARC
Riders. Central spots indications of unapproved time travel and sends us—one of the teams, there’s more than just us—to deal
with it. Only this time something went wrong. Central was gone when we returned to it.”

“
Our
Central was gone,” Barthuli corrected with a vague smile. He was doing something also, but his fingers moved on a flat plate
with no keys or apparent markings.

Weigand and Chun returned to the hatch. On the other side of the display, an animal with snow in its shaggy fur stared at
the time machine. Its legs were braced to run. Carnes thought the creature was a horse, but the light wasn’t good enough for
certainty.

“Our Central,” Grainger agreed, smiling also, but with a touch of something else in the expression. “Someone revised the past
without being noticed by ARC Central. We were down the line from the nexus, dropping prisoners here in 50K, so we weren’t
affected. We’re going to use you—your memories—to determine the target, since Central can’t guide us in this time.”

The hatch passed a woman, Chun, with snow clinging to the raised faceplate of her armor. Chill air entered with her.

Oriental names place the family first, followed by personal identifiers. That was one of the less traumatic things Rebecca
Carnes had learned during her tours in Southeast Asia.

“We’re a little early in the year, I’m afraid,” Chun said to the company as she walked to the locker in the back of the compartment.
“The grass has started to grow, but it can’t be later than March.”

The hatch opened again. Weigand, a blond man with a long jaw and deep-set eyes, entered. He smiled at Carnes in friendly fashion.
Weigand was a very big man, even apart from the armor’s added bulk.

“You know…” Barthuli said. He looked neutrally toward a corner of the ceiling. “We might be able to hide more effectively
in a populated era than we can back here. They might expect us to run to 50K.”

Grainger said, “We’ve lost Jalouse already, Gerd. We’ve got more important things to worry about than your sightseeing.” He
spoke without heat, but equally without any flexibility in his tone.

Barthuli nodded. “Yes, I suppose that is what I was thinking about,” he admitted.

“I wish…” Chun Quo said. She opened the chest plate of her displacement suit. She was stocky, short, and—to Carnes—very young.
Certainly no more than twenty-five. “… that we knew where they came from.”

Chun gripped the horizontal bar in the locker and lifted her legs from the suit’s lower half. “Then we’d know what technology
we’re going to be up against when we meet them.”

Grainger looked at Carnes and said, “A nexus of change can occur anywhere. The people responsible, though, come from 1900
AD
to up toward the middle of the 25th century. By 2500, there’s a unitary society in which nobody would think of tampering
with time. Before 1900, there wasn’t the technology available to build displacement devices.”

“I wonder about the lower terminus sometimes,” Barthuli said.

Weigand looked surprised. “Why?” he asked. He spoke in a tenor, a lighter voice than Carnes had imagined but smooth and beautiful
to hear. “I grant that Da Vinci visualized a helicopter in the 16th century, but he didn’t
build
one. There wasn’t an engine that could power a helicopter for another four hundred years.”

“Yes, but that’s a technocentric assumption,” Barthuli argued. “If time displacement requires modulated magnetic fields, perhaps
1900 or so is the earliest possible venue. But that’s
if
, not a certainty.”

“The people we’re looking for,” Chun said as she pulled a seat—some how—from the bulk head and sat beside Carnes, “aren’t
using techniques that ARC Central recognized in time to stop. Either the revisionists’ experimental equipment was so sophisticated
that it left no more temporal wake than a 700-series capsule does, or—” she shrugged, “mental manipulation? Sacrificing a
black cock at the new moon? Barthuli’s right—they could have come from anywhen.”

Grainger reached behind Carnes and pulled out a seat for her. “Sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

Nan Roebeck stood up. “No, sit here,” she said to Carnes. “We need to hook you to these inputs.”

Carnes obeyed the team leader without comment. Like her, Roebeck was in her early forties, but the two women had few other
similarities. Roebeck was rangy and big-boned; Carnes was six inches shorter and had always had a weight problem, especially
when subsisting on the military’s high-carbohydrate meals. Of course, when Carnes was a teenager, she’d been a cheerleader
and Roebeck was probably an ugly duckling….

“I’ve programmed a four-displacement sequence,” Roebeck said. “I want to be able to get out of here instantly if we have visitors,
and I don’t want it to be any easier than it has to for them to follow.”

Did they have cheerleaders in the 26th century?

“Do you think that’ll happen?” Chun asked.

“I don’t know what will happen,” Roebeck said. She looked down at Carnes. Weigand was taking apparatus, including a skeletal
helmet, out of a cabinet in the central console. Barthuli was busy at his… control board?

“This doesn’t hurt much,” Grainger said. “A headache, maybe. But it has to be done.”

As the helmet settled coolly over her temples, Rebecca Carnes wondered if the people who’d decided to nuke her firebase had
said something similar.

Nan Roebeck and her fellows watched the display:

Timeline B: March 31, 1968

T
he eastern sky was dark, but dawn would arrive as suddenly as a knife thrust. The US advisor bent over an acetate-covered
relief map spread on the hood of a jeep. Flanking him were the commander and chief of staff of a Vietnamese armored regiment.
The regimental sergeant-major held a penlight as the American’s fingertip indicated the route of advance for the last time.

The gasoline engines of the regiment’s M41 tanks and M113 armored personnel carriers were already turning over. A tank rotated
its long, coffin-shaped turret 30 degrees to the right. The squeal cut brutally through the snarl of the unmuffled power plants.

The Vietnamese colonel shouted agreement. He shook hands with his chief of staff, then with the advisor.

The chief of staff got into the jeep and lifted the handset of the radio there. He began to speak, gesturing with his free
hand.

The colonel stepped quickly to an APC whose double whip antennas were bent forward and clinched to the front of the vehicle
where they wouldn’t be so obvious. A crewman reached down to help his commander mount from the side, using the tread itself
as a step.

The American advisor boarded the lead tank and settled himself into the turret’s right-hand hatch behind the .50-caliber machine
gun. He put on the plastic helmet waiting for him on the cupola and checked its radio and intercom switches. Then he turned
and waved back to the Vietnamese colonel.

The colonel saluted. The tank’s six-cylinder engine roared, sending the vehicle forward with clangs and screeches. Eight other
tanks fell in behind the first. The regiment’s integral artillery batteries were firing a preparation onto the hilltops flanking
the advance.

The shells were falling into North Vietnam.

Timeline B: March 31, 1968

T
he President of the United States polished his glasses against the cuff of his shirt and replaced them on his nose. He picked
up his sheaf of notes, cleared his throat, and nodded to the director.

The red light on the TV camera came on. Speaking directly into the lens in a high-pitched voice, the President said, “My fellow
Americans. I was informed this morning that troops of the Republic of Vietnam, responding to an attack on their positions
from across the so-called Demilitarized Zone, have pursued elements of the North Vietnamese Army into the bases from which
those treacherous attacks were launched.”

The President glared into the camera. The notes in his hand flapped as he pumped the heel of his right hand three times against
the lectern without striking it hard.

“The communist aggressors…” the President continued on a rising note, “have not learned the lesson that the people of America
are resolute in the defense of freedom. They will learn that lesson now. I have directed American armed forces to act in support
of our South Vietnamese allies in the exercise of their right of hot pursuit. I warn the aggressors not to interfere with
this fully justified defensive operation. If enemies challenge American resolve, they will feel our might in a direct way.”

There was a palpable intake of breath from the assembled White House press corps. A print journalist dropped his tape recorder
clattering to the floor. A young woman from one of the wire services prayed or cursed with a silent movement of her lips.
Tears ran down her cheeks.

“As a palpable warning to the enemies of freedom,” the President said, “I inform them that as of this date there are no more
sanctuaries. Even as I speak, troops of America and of our allies have crossed the boundaries that our adversaries have scoffed
at since their invasion began in 1956. We are striking at the bases of the communist aggressors in Cambodia and Laos, destroying
the matériel stockpiled to subvert the government of the Republic of Vietnam.”

The President tried to shuffle the next page of his notes to the front. He dropped the page instead. He flung down the rest
of the sheaf and said, “And I issue this warning to the leaders of China and the Soviet Union: watch where you step. If you
become directly involved in this attempt to conquer a member of the free world and an ally of America—watch out! There’s a
bear trap ready to snap, and there’s room in its jaws for you as well as for your lackeys in Hanoi!”