Arc Riders (10 page)

The ARC Riders were individuals, with individual virtues. If they’d been automatons stamped from sheet stock, Roebeck’s team
wouldn’t have had the flexibility that made it so effective.

Still, Nan Roebeck sometimes wished that Grainger was quicker to accept “because I said so” as sufficient justification; and
that Barthuli understood that anybody else’s desires could possibly be important.

Roebeck walked toward a gray outcrop from which a fig tree sprouted. She wouldn’t be on guard here for long, but she’d find
a good location anyway. Metal ores in the granite might blur her suit’s outline for a few instants. That could be critical….

It would have been easy to stumble because her viewpoint was set on panorama with movement highlighted. Roebeck had trained
herself to move normally despite her distorted vision.

Anti-Revision Command equipment was wonderfully versatile, but that didn’t matter unless the personnel were comfortable using
it. Roebeck had familiarized herself with
all
aspects of the hardware. The lives of her team and the success of a mission might depend on her ability to use some obscure
capacity of her suit.

Grainger actively disliked wearing armor. He preferred to trust his reflexes and instincts, though intellectually he knew
that a suit’s sensor suite multiplied his human senses at least a hundredfold. He wore his suit grudgingly. He knew how to
use its systems, but he had to think before he engaged them.

Confinement bothered Weigand. He couldn’t like a displacement suit any more than he could have liked a pillow smothering him.
He was a top systems engineer and second only to Roebeck herself as the team’s jack of all trades, but he mentally cringed
every time he had to put his suit on.

As for Chun, she knew the equipment inside and out. She’d once entered two separate settings by disconnecting her suit’s preselector
circuit, then displaced to within 31 hours of a calculated third point by riding the harmonics of the original pair. Roebeck
hadn’t tried to duplicate
that
trick, partly because she couldn’t see any use for it—but largely because she didn’t believe her grasp of the concept was
subtle enough to avoid disaster.

But Chun Quo’s bone-deep aversion to conflict was a danger to the team in a confrontation. She refused to handle lethal weapons,
which was acceptable; but she invariably hesitated before using any weapon, however harmless, and that could get your friends
killed. Chun couldn’t have changed her behavior if she wanted to—and she assuredly didn’t want to.

She was right, of course. Roebeck’s electromagnetic pulse hadn’t hurt the revisionist, just shut down the controls of the
engine that kept him stable in the gusty wind currents. He’d had nearly thirty seconds to scream as he tumbled down toward
water which was rock-solid at the speed he hit it.

Barthuli found displacement suits interesting, the same way he was interested in Acheulean hand-axes. The analyst’s unworldliness
was deceptive, though. In a crisis, he could react as quickly as a switch makes contact. The trouble was that with Barthuli,
you could never be sure
how
he would react.

Dor Jalouse was the team member who’d loved his suit for the power and anonymity it gave him. No ARC Rider could be lazy or
stupid, but Dor was something of an underachiever. He would use the suit’s systems to access information just to save physical
effort, and he took a childish pleasure in walking through closed doors in his armor. He always completed his tasks, though
perhaps close to the deadline, and he knew his systems almost as well as Chun knew hers.

Dor Jalouse would have been the perfect Rider to be on external guard right now. Unfortunately, he was lost, and—as Grainger
had said—lost forever. When Roebeck corrected the revision, she would saw off the branch of time to which Jalouse clung.

The grass in this valley was still green, though the beeches scattered in clumps had turned largely golden. The team had been
lucky when TC 779 displaced. Another blizzard would make work on the capsule difficult.

There would have to be work. The plasma bolts had flayed off three square meters of the outer skin forward of the hatch. Some,
perhaps all, of the electronics in that section of hull would be damaged.

The emergency displacement had seemed normal, but that didn’t prove anything. Most of the spatial circuitry lay along the
inner hull while the temporal hardware was attached to the outer skin. Until Roebeck knew where the program had intended them
to land, she couldn’t assume that even the spatial portion of the equipment was working properly.

Grainger stepped from the vehicle, graceful despite the burden of his armor. He’d used the suit’s load-carrying ability to
add a tanglefoot projector and a plasma weapon to his armaments.

“I’ve got the duty, Nan,” Grainger called cheerfully on the intercom. He hopped to the top of the outcrop beneath which she’d
sheltered.

Rather than set his suit as Roebeck did to highlight movement all around him, Grainger simply raised the magnification a moderate
degree and turned his head constantly. The sensors had an alarm function that would flash Grainger a vector to anything the
suit’s artificial intelligence believed was threatening, but the triggerman had no intention of trusting a machine to do his
job.

“You might echo the main screen,” Roebeck suggested as she headed back to the capsule. “If nobody’s appeared by now, they
probably can’t track us. Judging from the timing, I suspect they homed on the displacement suits’ wake.”

“Assuming our sensors are all working and the hostiles aren’t hovering just out of phase, waiting for an opportunity,” Grainger
said. “You check on what happened back there, chief. I’ll stay here and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Roebeck wanted Grainger’s eye—a very good eye indeed—to go over the recording of the attack on the capsule. He was right,
though. There’d be time for that later, when they were sure that TC 779 was capable of spotting hostiles lurking a few angstroms
from the present. Until then, Grainger’s whole attention should be on the safety of the capsule and the surviving team members.

Roebeck lifted her faceshield when she entered the cabin. The atmosphere had a burned tinge which she hadn’t noticed before.
She hoped that didn’t mean a bolt had penetrated both hulls.

Chun noticed the pinch of Roebeck’s nostrils. “One of the osmotic exchange panels was damaged,” Chun explained. “I didn’t
notice the telltale in time to shut it off before it had started shifting ozone. We’re over capacity, even…”

Even with one panel removed, the capsule’s air system could provide enough oxygen for a full crew of six. From the way she’d
failed to finish the thought, Chun must have wondered whether Weigand’s trio was now as completely lost as Jalouse was.

Chun looked up with concern hidden beneath a mask of calm. “I don’t think the revisionists we’re after were responsible for
the attack, Nan,” she said.

“Well, I didn’t expect that they were,” Roebeck said as she slid into the seat from which she could most comfortably watch
the display. “Granting a suit displacing makes more of a blip than a capsule does, it’s not
much
of a blip. It’d take apparatus as sensitive as Central’s to target us that way.”

“Yes,” said Chun simply as her wands dipped. “Central has sent a team of ARC Riders. To stop us.”

The display brightened into an enhanced, slowed-down image of the attack. The computer projected a three-dimensional hologram
in which TC 779 was the center of the scene. The information displayed was melded from sensor recordings, enhancement, and
backgrounds stored in the database itself.

A second transportation capsule winked into existence ten meters from TC 779, just beyond the “patio” Roebeck’s team was clearing
of snow. The intruder hovered a meter in the air. Differences in design between the attacking craft and a 700-series capsule
from the team’s timeline were too slight to note with the naked eye, even though Roebeck had seen them highlighted when she
went over the recording of their entry into the wrong Central. A hatch in the center of the vehicle blinked open.

Two figures waited with weapons shouldered in the hatchway. Their armor flared at the joints but was otherwise identical to
the team’s own displacement suits. Their weapons slashed incandescent tracks toward the hull of TC 779.

The capsule wasn’t in a posture of defense, but the standby magnetic shielding instantly shot up to maximum density. Plasma
repelled by the shielding splashed off like water being hosed against a smooth boulder. Snow flashed to steam. Grass and even
the turf itself, rich in organic compounds, erupted in smoky red flame.

The plasma, nitrogen atoms stripped of their electron shells, was of minuscule mass. Accelerated to nearly the speed of light
by positively charged coils in the fat barrel, that mass caused the weapon to recoil violently.

Instead of firing short bursts, the two figures kept their fingers on the triggers. The gun muzzles lifted; their streams
of hellfire exploded deep trenches across the snowbound prairie. Momentarily a third plasma weapon fired from knee-level behind
the two standing figures.

“Lousy technique,” Rocbcck muttered. If the gunmen had pulsed rather than streaming their plasma, and if they’d both focused
their bursts on a single aiming point—the hatch was the obvious choice—they’d have holed TC 779’s cabin and incinerated its
occupants before Roebeck could displace.

“What?” Chun asked.

“If they were my people, I’d burn them both new assholes,” Roebeck said. “Can you imagine Grainger and Jalouse letting a target
like that get away? We were fish in a barrel, and they missed us.”

“You’re offended by a murderer’s bad craftsmanship?” Chun asked coldly. She didn’t comment on the fact the error had been
committed by the team’s enemies. That didn’t affect the moral question.

“Sure I am,” Roebeck said. “We
work
for the ARC, remember.”

“Not this one!” Chun snapped.

Roebeck shrugged. “If it could happen here, it could happen to ours. But not to
my
people.”

Chun’s tight mouth suddenly broke into a broad grin. “Yes,” she said, “I’m shaky from what happened, too…. But I prefer to
cling to a myth of universal human decency rather than one of invincible skill in a crisis.”

Roebeck choked, then bent as a gust of laughter clamped her ribs. “Quo, I swear by every god I’ve come across in fifty missions,
I’ve never been closer to the hostiles handing me my head. And it’s my own fault. I should have known that we’d have Central
on the other side. What we’re going to do is a revision from where they stand, after all.”

“We were thinking of the group from the 23d,” Chun said. “Gerd probably realized that the new timeline’s ARC Riders might
take a hand, but he must not have known that Central could track suit displacements. Otherwise he’d have said something.”

Her face went still as she considered what she’d just said. She was suddenly less certain of the statement than she would
have been if some Rider other than Barthuli were the subject of it.

“Sure, he’d have said something,” Roebeck said. “We don’t know that the hostiles can really track the wake of displacement
suits, either. They spotted the point of displacement, but that doesn’t mean they followed Weigand to wherever he was going.”

The greatly slowed action on the display came to an end as TC 779, a patch of its hull glowing, vanished from the image area.
As a coda to the recorded event, the capsule’s computer postulated a doughnut of vaporized hull metal continuing to lift on
the heated air.

“Let me offer an argument for humane behavior,” Chun said, flicking the recording backward by jumps. “How would you have arranged
an attack like this, Nan?”

Roebeck pursed her lips. “Full team?”

Chun nodded. She’d stopped the display about midway in the attack.

“Jalouse and me in the port with EMP generators,” Roebeck said. “If the target isn’t shielded, it’s fried and harmless. If
it’s got magnetic shielding, and I’d assume it did, the generators are still more efficient against a given flux density than
plasma at the range in question.”

“And EMP generators have a broader field,” Chun said.

“Right,” Roebeck agreed. “Jalouse and me jump from the hatch, clearing it for Weigand with a plasma weapon. His size helps
stabilize the recoil. And Grainger with the fléchette gun he favors—I want a mix of stimuli hitting the hostiles as quickly
as we can. We don’t know what their defenses are, even if the capsule does look a lot like one of ours.”

“Tim would complain about being in the second wave,” Chun said, acting as the Devil’s advocate.

Roebeck shrugged again. “The first two use EMP generators because we can jump clear of the follow-up pair while using them.
As you said, the pulses are a broad cone. There’s no way to aim a high-recoil weapon with useful accuracy while you’re leaping
through the air.”

Roebeck grinned wryly. “Barthuli’s backup with another plasma gun,” she concluded. “I’d say an EMP generator, but Dor and
I’d be in the cone if he had to use it. And you’re at the capsule controls.”

“A good decision,” Chun said expressionlessly, “as I’d expect from you. Now, look at what the hostiles did.”

The display froze on the hatch of the attacking vehicle and changed scale downward. As the image expanded to approach 1:1,
the figures in the hatchway lost individuality. The computer was enhancing detail beyond the limits of the recorder’s resolution.

“You would be willing to kill on an operation of that sort,” Chun said. Her wands moved and outlines resolved still further.
Two more armored figures sharpened from the shadows within the cabin.

“Yes, I would,” Roebeck said. She had her morality, Quo had a different one. That was life. “I’ll kill now if I have to.”

The hostiles behind the first pair also carried plasma weapons. Roebeck remembered the brief pulse somebody had fired between
his fellows’ legs. With hardware as notoriously difficult to control as a plasma weapon, the shooter was lucky his burst hadn’t
cut down one or both of the personnel in the hatchway.