Arc Riders (2 page)

“Open the—” Grainger shouted. He had a fléchette gun/EMP combination in one hand and was pulling down the facemask from his
headband with the other. There’d be no time to suit up fully.

The expression of the woman facing Jalouse from the display went blankly farcical. One of her fellows managed accidentally
to shoot her in the nape of the neck. The high-velocity bullet flicked out one of her front teeth as it exited.

Roebeck’s hand threw the switch that did the only thing which made sense under the circumstances. Transportation Capsule 779
shunted toward its most recent previous temporal location, out of danger.

Out of an ARC Central that wasn’t the base the team had left for the just-completed mission.

Displacing from 2522
AD
to circa 50,000
BC

G
rainger turned to Roebeck. “Nan?” he said, certain of what she’d done but hoping he was wrong. He wanted the vehicle to shunt
into realtime on the dock outside the admin wing again so that the five of them could charge in to rescue Jalouse.

Charge in to get their asses blown away, was more like it. Roebeck was responsible for the whole team, not just Jalouse in
his immediate difficulties. If their ARC Central had been replaced by a hive of hostile strangers, then she and her people
were the only chance their timeline had of displacing the different present to which the transport capsule had returned.

“We didn’t really return after all, did we?” Barthuli said with a smile, as if he were reading Roebeck’s mind. Maybe he was.
The analyst was too strange for Roebeck to rule out any possibilities.

“Suit up,” Roebeck said, pushing between Grainger and the still-seated Chun. “Me and Pauli, then the other two of you. They
may be waiting there, too.”

She nodded to Barthuli. “Gerd?” she added. “Watch the controls, will you?”

The locker containing the displacement suits was at the rear of the cabin. There wasn’t enough room in the capsule for more
than two riders to don the suits at a time. Pauli Weigand was already latching his closed around him.

“We’re running back to 50K, aren’t we?” Grainger demanded at rising volume. “We’re just going to run off and leave Jalouse!”

Weigand stepped forward in his armor to face the hatch. Displacement suits were miniature temporal vehicles, though they lacked
the sophistication and spatial displacement abilities of a transport capsule. For the moment, the important things were the
protection the suit gave the person wearing it and the load of weaponry its powered muscles could handle.

“We’re not running anywhere,” Roebeck said. They were running and she knew it, but they
had
to run. “We’re backing out of an ambush. When we figure out who’s responsible for the problem, we’ll deal with them.”

She locked her suit closed. Anonymous within its scarred, rounded surfaces, she stepped to Weigand’s side.

Grainger sighed. “I’d hate to lose Jalouse,” he said. He raised himself on the crossbar and slid his feet down, into the legs
of his fitted suit.

Jalouse had survived the operation because Tim Grainger did exactly the right thing in next to no time. For Jalouse to die
in the first moments following the team’s return to the apparent safety of ARC Central would be worse for Grainger than for
the rest of them.

Worst of all for Dor Jalouse, though.

“We haven’t lost anybody yet,” Roebeck said. “We’re regrouping, then we’ll see what we can do.”

“It’s our job to fix things,” Chun said as her armored form joined Weigand and Roebeck. “This is no different.”

This was a lot different.

“It’s all clear outside,” Barthuli said from the front of the cabin. “Of course, we may not have sensors to track intruders
subtle enough to cause a change at Central.”

The analyst sounded interested, but not in the least concerned. Roebeck knew she was lucky to have somebody as skilled as
Barthuli on her team, but he still got on her nerves in a crisis.

Barthuli had become an ARC Rider because of his genetic predisposition to Alzheimer’s disease. At some point—which could be
any
point, from the present moment on—his splendid mind was going to begin unraveling into psychosis. Barthuli intended to see
as much as he could in whatever time he had, and he’d decided the field operations of the Anti-Revision Command provided the
best opportunity of doing that.

The trouble was that Barthuli’s world view was unique. Fate had condemned him to something worse than death in his own terms,
so matters that seemed of incalculable importance to the rest of the team didn’t touch him emotionally. The vanishment, the
destruction
, of the timeline in which Barthuli was born was to him only an opportunity to glimpse additional realities before his intellect
drowned in spasms of memory loss and mindless rage.

“I’m going to open up,” Roebeck said, warning the others a moment before she activated the outer hatch through the keypad
on her suit’s left thigh. With an electromagnetic pulse generator clipped beneath a fléchette gun, Roebeck followed Weigand
into a continent empty of all human life save their own.

50K was a temporal direction rather than a specific time. Anyone who carried out time displacement activities without being
a member of the ARC was a temporal violator, a revisionist. Central targeted the revisionists, and the ARC Riders solved the
problem.

Sometimes violators were killed in the process of being stopped; normally (and by choice; a truly civilized society is a squeamish
society) they were captured. Rather than imprison the captives in the 26th century, revisionists were freed, unharmed but
without tools or even clothing, at around 50,000
BC
. Males were dumped in North America, females in Australia; in either case, tens of millennia before humans populated those
continents.

The period chosen was in the middle of a major ice age, but the glaciers had been in temporary retreat for thousands of years.
The dumps were made in what was locally the late spring, giving the violators as much time as possible to adapt to their new
surroundings before winter closed in.

And the dumps were made at intervals of a century, preset into the mechanisms of the transportation vehicles themselves. This
wasn’t primarily to protect the ARC Riders involved, though some separation was necessary for that reason: the later version
of a person who revisited the person’s own timeline vanished.

It was barely possible that captives might find the exiguous remains of a dump from a hundred years earlier. There was no
chance at all that the groups would join forces and somehow manage to reenter the time stream. Those from up the line who
ran the Anti-Revision Command may have been squeamish, but there was no question about their ultimate ruthlessness.

Roebeck viewed their surroundings without noticing anything that shouldn’t be present. They’d settled onto a prairie, as expected.
The ground looked flat as a table until you noticed the treetops in the middle distance. Ten meters or more of trunk were
hidden by a combination of slope and the banks of the stream which the trees fringed.

Roebeck had made twenty-three displacements to 50K, so she knew the terrain. Sixteen of those trips had carried captives,
naked and terrified, to what would be home for the rest of their lives.

As Barthuli had said, hostiles who were able to escape Central’s detection could also fool TC 779’s sensors. Roebeck raised
her opaque faceplate with her left hand and scanned the landscape again, this time letting her Mark One Eyeball gather the
information.

There was still nothing anomalous. The grasses and associated flowering plants were waist high for the most part, though occasional
sere canes of the previous season’s growth waved three or four meters in the air. A mixed herd of horses and camels cropped
vegetation; some of the animals were within a hundred meters. The brown-black forms half a kilometer to the west were giant
bison. Dust rose as beasts hooked dirt over themselves with their long horns.

All as it should be, in the days before men. The hissing and actinics of the capsule arriving must have startled the animals
somewhat, but they had settled back into their routine by the time the hatch opened. Suited humans didn’t disturb them.

Spring or not, the wind on Roebeck’s bare cheeks was chill and harsh. Sometimes she wondered how many captives survived their
first week in 50K, but the process wasn’t one she could’ve changed if she wanted to. Anyway, temporal intruders would end
the unborn lives of billions if they weren’t stopped.

But the wind was very cold.

“Clear,” said Weigand from the other side of the vehicle.

“Clear/Clear,” echoed Chun and Grainger from the positions they’d taken to bow and stern.

“Clear,” Roebeck agreed. Whatever had happened at ARC Central, the folks responsible hadn’t managed to follow Transportation
Capsule 779’s flight into the distant past.

“Now,” she added softly, “let’s check the recordings and figure out just what was going on up there.”

Circa 50,000
BC

“T
o begin with,” Barthuli said as he reran the dump from Jalouse’s suit, “the personnel in what should have been Transfer Control
Room Two were speaking Japanese. Rather, a language that differed from 19th-century Japanese in a fashion similar to the differences
between Standard and 19th-century English.”

The image on the display was enhanced to glassy cleanliness. This halfway stage between reality and iconic representation
disturbed Roebeck at a gut level more than the static of the raw transmission did, though she’d never admitted that to anybody
else. Anything that she told others about herself was a handle fate could use against her.

Grainger carried a piece of the bullet that smashed his rifle—but not his face as he sighted the rifle—during some action
back in his home time. Weigand wore one blue and one brown stocking at the start of every mission. Chun had an unfailing silent
routine that could have been prayer, mantra, or who knew what. Jalouse didn’t touch—literally touch—a woman from the time
they were warned for an operation till he’d boarded the vehicle.

No Rider and nobody at ARC Central really knew how the capsule mechanisms worked. The technology was from up the line. A savage
doesn’t have to understand electricity to flip a light switch, but the need to use forces he doesn’t understand might make
the savage more, not less, superstitious.

Even Barthuli might have a talisman. Though perhaps not.

“The physiognomy of the office staff fits a Japanese matrix better than any available alternatives,” Barthuli continued, “though
I wouldn’t put much stock in that. The interesting thing is that there’s no sign of the mid-20th century growth spurt driven
by an improved diet on the home islands. Of course, these twelve individuals may not be a random sample.”

Barthuli had slowed the movement on the display for better detail. It was like watching a ballet performed underwater. Sparks
and chips of furniture pirouetted deliberately as staff members fired, their faces distorted in terrible hatred. Perhaps that,
like the delicacy of the bullet damage, was merely an artifact of slow motion.

“We’re assuming there’s been a temporal revision,” Chun Quo said crisply. Her very dispassion was a sign that she was aware
of the Oriental ancestry she shared with the folk trying to kill Jalouse. “Is it possible that there’s been some kind of political
change at Central? That the staff has been replaced in a… a coup?”

“No,” said Barthuli approvingly. He cut the displayed image from the firefight in Transfer Two back to the docking bay as
seen when TC 779 settled into her berth. “But that brings up a very interesting point. Notice the other vehicle?”

A transportation capsule rested in a cradle two berths over. The vehicle was probably undergoing routine maintenance, because
several of the skin panels had been removed. No personnel were in view.

“The nose is too blunt,” Weigand said.

Barthuli beamed. His fingers touched controls. The image became a blue schematic rotating slowly against a white background.
The analyst overlaid it with a second schematic, this time yellow, as like to the first as raindrops are to one another.

And as different. Where the exterior of the capsules was identical, the schematic was green. At least 90 percent of the outlines
remained blue and yellow.

“The second image is that of a 700-series capsule, of course,” Barthuli said. “Quite a remarkable convergence. I could have
shown the same similarity in the bay itself or the geometry of the transfer control room. But it’s not the same Central we
left, no.”

“The clerks’ reaction,” Grainger said. “Do you suppose they were expecting us—somebody like us? Or is the social structure
such that people are always armed and ready to go off like bombs if the unexpected occurs?”

“No society could be that paranoid,” Weigand said. “Those people were afraid somebody’d show up to undo the revision their
organization made.”

“If you’d been raised with me on Sunrise Terrace,” Grainger said with a wan smile, “you wouldn’t be so sure of limits on xenophobia.”

“What I found particularly striking,” Barthuli said, “is the close similarity of the physical plant, despite the obvious divergence
from the social system of our timeline. I’m not sure those up the line would be concerned about the changes. They may not
have been discommoded in the least.”

“We’ve
been discommoded,” Roebeck said, ending that discussion. She went on, “Our data banks have a full download for the late twentieth
alone, is that correct?”

“1971 through ‘91 in full detail,” Barthuli said. “Twenty years before that at second order. For the rest, we have only the
normal baseline.”

The team’s just-completed operation had been against a pair of 23d-century revisionists who had gone back to 1991. They weren’t
dabblers who might have distorted timelines by inadvertence. Rather, they’d consciously intended to change the past by using
mind-control devices on the US national security advisor. For the mission, TC 779’s data bank had been prepared with information
regarding the temporal area of operations at the highest level of detail of which ARC Central was capable.