Arc Riders (20 page)

“What’s happening now?” she asked Barthuli, her eyes on the motionless Weigand. She spoke in a low voice so as not to interfere
with whatever was going on.

“The device responds to neural commands,” the analyst said, also whispering. “That is, the intention to type a command enters
that command without physical input. It’s the system I prefer.”

He cleared his throat. “As for ‘what’ in the larger sense, I suspect Pauli is instructing the district data bank—perhaps regional
as well—that when the identification of this vehicle is entered”—his toe touched the sedan’s rusted permanent license plate—“the
information transmitted is something quite different, and innocuous to us.”

Carnes watched Weigand, her eyes narrowing in surmise. “You can do that with any computer, then?”

Barthuli nodded. “Any computer to which we have access,” he agreed. “On this horizon. Effectively anything that’s attached
either to a communication line or to an outside power source.”

“We’ll stop at a driver’s license bureau before we go to the airport,” Carnes said. The pieces became gleamingly visible in
her mind, as though layers of ice were melting away from a sudden truth. “Nobody in a license bureau is going to argue with
us, but their equipment is the same as we’d get in a military installation. They’ll take photographs which we can laminate
in place of the originals of this pair’s IDs.”

She waved the driver’s wallet to emphasize it, then frowned. “There’s a problem with the names, though. The driver’s Joyce
Shilts. That gives us two female IDs and only one male. They may not check height, but first names…”

Barthuli shrugged. “Joyce Kilmer, who wrote “Trees,” was male enough to be killed in combat in the trenches in World War I,”
he said. “We’ll give that one to Pauli, whose masculinity is least in doubt.”

“All right,” she said, beaming. “And you’ll fix it so that any query to these identification numbers will come back with a
highest security classification hold! Mine, too.”

Barthuli’s smile broadened. “Yes, Rebecca,” he said. “Pending Pauli’s approval, of course, that’s exactly what we’ll do.”

March 15, 1967

C
alandine had been expecting someone. Grainger had showed up. Taken Calandine’s pledge of allegiance. All Grainger’s old agent-running
instincts were beginning to surface. Only the “we” bothered him. When Grainger rang that number, somebody up the river would
pick up an extension in the Old Headquarters Building at CIA and say hello. But what if the “we” to whom Calandine had reaffirmed
allegiance by the act of handing money and keys to Grainger wasn’t the “we” that counted Tim Grainger as part of its active
duty service roster?

As TC 779 shimmered into real time, Grainger decided to suggest to Roebeck that they all get a good night’s sleep out of phase
before parking themselves and the suits in some 1967 basement.

Maybe after he’d slept he would believe that he had gotten some answers out of this exercise. Right now, all he had was more
questions. Where was Barthuli when you needed him? Nowhere on this horizon, that was certain.

Roebeck nearly pulled him inside. She was big in her suit, loaded for bear. She hugged him.

“Piece of cake,” he admitted ruefully as the lock closed behind him and his ears popped from the pressure differential.

Chun never once looked away from her station until the TC 779’s integrity was restored and they were safely displaced.

By the time they were out of phase, Roebeck was levering herself free from her suit and Grainger was sitting quietly at his
station, just breathing air that smelled like home.

“Nice job,” Nan Roebeck said generally. “At your soonest convenience, Chun.”

The safe house. He hadn’t thought to tell Nan he wanted to wait…. Now it was too late.

Roebeck was watching him closely. “If we had Barthuli, perhaps we could analyze what happened back there more thoroughly.”
She finished racking her suit and eased behind her command console.

“I miss him, too, especially now that we’re trying to figure out Calandine,” Grainger told her.

“The National Guard and the DC police cordoned off the bridge you were on when the fighting broke out. There was shooting.
Some civilians were hurt, perhaps military as well. The protesters were gassed and beaten, taken away in vans. It’s all over
the local airwaves. Some sort of crackdown on the libertines—drug arrests, incarceration.” Chun was talking as she worked
the displays.

“We were lucky you weren’t caught up in it,” Roebeck said softly.

“I smelled the marijuana, but this…” Grainger watched the displays of violence, horses and riot shields and teenagers with
blood all over them. It hadn’t seemed that bad when he was there. “What do they say started it?”

Chun merged the video, it swirled, and an announcer was telling the audience that the incident had begun when a young girl
spat on a soldier. There was, miraculously or suspiciously, footage of the event. And footage of the girl, screaming, her
hands to her cheeks, when the shooting broke out. Grainger’s trained eye couldn’t detect the original source of gunfire, no
matter how many times Chun ran the sequence for him.

“So what now?”

He knew what now.

“The safe house,” Roebeck said implacably. “We’ll suit up and power up, but nothing more. Even leaving the suits out of phase
on their own is a last resort. In a completely controlled media, you can’t believe anything but what you actually see with
your eyes. What we saw was the beginning of the roundup of the dissident youth.”

“As Calandine predicted.”

“As Calandine informed you. He knew,” Chun said from forward.

“And that makes him what?” Grainger asked Chun.

Chun didn’t answer.

“Well informed,” Roebeck said, and motioned to the racked suits. “Too well informed not to be a player.”

“Wired, you mean,” Grainger muttered.

“We will reenter Timeline B in, what, Chun?”

“Thirty-five seconds.”

Then he had to deal with his suit. Roebeck wasn’t taking no for an answer. He didn’t like the hard suit’s weight. He had a
horror of being EMPed in it, knocked flat and left helpless like a beetle or a turtle on its back. But the boss was right.
There was trouble out there that only a hard suit could get him through alive. Bad trouble. Waiting for them. And it would
still be waiting whenever they popped out of phase to deal with it.

Grainger hated nothing so much as walking into an ambush, but that was what this job was about—had to be, given mission parameters
and who was in control of the timeline. The only question was when that ambush was going to find them.

And his only function was to make sure that, when the ambush did find them, they were ready, willing, and able to do whatever
was necessary to survive it, even if that meant shooting up 1967 in ways that wouldn’t otherwise be thought of for a couple
hundred years.

Timeline B: August 12, 1991

P
auli Weigand rose from his fold-down canvas seat along the aircraft’s side and stretched. The jungle fatigues fit him, but
the cotton felt rough to his unaccustomed skin.

The C-141 had touched down just after midnight local time, but the big transport taxied for what seemed like forever before
it reached its fueling berth. Two dozen men and women wearing a variety of uniforms walked toward the lowered rear ramp with
caution born of fatigue and stiffness.

A truck drove up to the aircraft, bathing the cargo bay with its headlights. Weigand glanced at his companions.

Major Carnes looked as though she’d been awake for a week. Her skin was dull and, though she’d never be called hollow-cheeked,
her face lacked its normal roundness. Even Barthuli looked worn, to the extent you could tell with Gerd.

“It’ll take at least an hour to refuel,” Carnes said, nodding toward the ramp. “Want to get out and walk around?”

Weigand shook his head. “I’ll stick here,” he said. “When I’m operational, I don’t… well, anything else is a distraction.
Besides, there’s the suits.”

In the C-141’s bay, cardboard boxes were stacked and covered by cargo netting on seven wooden pallets. There were also two
Conex containers, eight-foot cubes of corrugated steel for secure transport. One Conex contained the team’s displacement suits.

In a barracks bag under Weigand’s seat was an EMP generator. Weigand had built it before they left Chicago, mostly out of
local materials requisitioned from Great Lakes Naval Station. The field expedient was a bulky, ten-kilogram device with its
own shoulder stock instead of being a clip-on to other weapons. To power the unit, he’d had to cannibalize the power pack
of one of the headbands. The result wasn’t perfect, but Weigand knew he needed a tool that could take out hostiles wearing
ARC armor before he got deeper in the danger zone.

“I’d like to go out also, Pauli,” Barthuli said. “I’ll be interested to see how much the base differs from its status in our
timeline. It’s the primary transshipment point feeding the war zone.”

“Do you have all that information in your little computer?” Carnes said, bobbing a finger toward the bulge in the analyst’s
pocket.

The transport’s bay echoed with the sounds of attendants and their equipment outside. Aground crewman walked past the trio,
carrying a flashlight and chattering with animation into a walkie-talkie.

Weigand wondered if Air Force maintenance standards were collapsing as suddenly as central political control was. The Pacific
was a very big ocean. If this plane came down in it, Nan’s team was going to have to seal off the revision without help from
Pauli Weigand.

“No,” Barthuli said to Carnes. “That will have to wait until we rejoin the transportation capsule—or return to ARC Central,
of course. But if I don’t gather the information now, it’ll be lost forever.”

Carnes looked at Weigand and raised her eyebrow in interrogation. Weigand shrugged and made his decision as he spoke: “Sure,
go see if you can find a canteen and bring me back something that isn’t emergency rations. And something to drink, a liter
if they’ve got it.”

He flashed Barthuli a smile as hard as that of a statue’s marble lips. “Rebecca,” he said, staring at the analyst. “I want
you to have him back here in an hour. If that means you knock him cold and drag the body back, do it. Do you have a problem
with those terms?”

“No,” Carnes said. She glanced at the analyst appraisingly. “I’d already decided I’d do that this time, if it was just Gerd
and me alone.”

“If it’s a choice between you having a physical headache, Gerd,” Weigand said, “and me having a figurative one, I’ll make
sure it’s your problem from now until you’re Nan’s responsibility again. Understood?”

“Perfectly,” Barthuli said. He didn’t appear to be either surprised or upset. He linked arms with Carnes in a mimicking of
the gallantry of a past age. Together they left the aircraft. They had to walk with care in cargo bay, because the deck plates
were roller-side up for ease in moving containerized cargo.

The ground crewman was in the front of the aircraft, talking with one of the flight engineers. Outside, a red light threw
rotating pulses across the concrete as a truck pumped kerosine into the C-141’s fuel tanks.

Pauli Weigand had done everything he could do at this moment. When they reached Bien Hoa Airbase, Gerd would locate transportation
for the next leg of the journey—either to Hanoi or to Son Tay directly, depending on what was available. Weigand would have
the job of getting the team aboard by routing the necessary orders through the communications chain.

But until then, Weigand had no immediate task. Some people, perhaps most people, would have spent their time worrying about
the unguessable future. Weigand simply turned his brain off. He didn’t chat, didn’t play solitaire, didn’t even look out the
window when windows were available—which they weren’t on this strictly military transport.

Weigand remained standing, working out kinks caused by the fold-down seats. Discomfort was a normal part of being an ARC Rider;
it didn’t bother him. The danger this time was greater than it would be on a normal operation, but that was merely a difference
of degree, not kind.

What froze Weigand whenever he let himself consider it was the fact that he was in charge of the operation. Putting Weigand
in a situation like this was comparable to ordering an arachnophobic to care for a collection of tarantulas.

But nobody’d ordered anything. Pauli Weigand was here because of fate or luck or God, take your pick. He had to make the decisions
because neither of his companions was capable of doing so. He’d sooner have stuck his hand in a fire, but that wasn’t an option.
Weigand would carry on until they’d succeeded or they’d rejoined the remainder of the team.

Or until he was killed, of course.

It was a good thing for Weigand that he
could
turn his mind off when he didn’t need to think.

Acar and a lowboy carrying a large gasoline-powered forklift pulled up at the rear of the aircraft. Five men in Air Force
dress uniforms got out of the car. They wore dark blue armbands which Weigand didn’t recognize, and the four enlisted men
carried M16 automatic rifles.

A civilian started the forklift. The uniformed men spoke for a moment to the C-141’s female loadmaster, then walked up the
ramp with her.

Weigand moved aside. The loadmaster gestured to him. The officer, a full colonel, approached Weigand as the riflemen waited
watchfully. “May I see your identification, please?” the colonel shouted over the forklift’s snarling clamor.

Weigand’s face was still, his skin cold. He handed over the leather bifold he’d gotten in Chicago.

Weigand’s present ID stated that he was operating under the authority of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and that his name and
rank were matters of the highest security classification. The ID wasn’t, in fact, of a type in use anywhere within the US
establishment, but a query to a governmental database citing the card’s identification number would elicit a supporting response.
Institutional secrecy was the imposter’s best defense.