Arc Riders (11 page)

“But that wouldn’t be your first priority?” Chun prodded. Her wands let the scene crawl forward. The hostiles began firing,
but the pair behind them were crowding the shooters for room to aim their weapons. “Killing, I mean?”

“Good God, no!” Roebeck said. “First priority is
always
the mission. Even for Tim. It’s just that, you know it yourself, Quo. Sometimes things can’t be as clean as you’d like them
to be.”

“It’s easy to be moral when you know somebody else will pull the trigger for you, you mean?” Chun said.

“I didn’t—” Roebeck said.

“Then you should have,” Chun interrupted harshly. “Because it’s true, and I know that as well as you do.”

Chun took a deep breath. “But look at the hostiles,” she went on in a settled tone again. She flicked her head sideways to
indicate the display. The control wands prevented her from making normal hand gestures.

It wasn’t just recoil that threw the plasma beams into a crazy-eight. The pair of hostiles inside the cabin was actively jostling
the shooters in front of them.

Roebeck watched, this time in full detail, as one of the backup team dropped prone to get a shot. Plasma began to scatter
as soon as it left the muzzle, so even the half-second the third weapon fired was enough to overload the environmental systems
of the pair in the hatch.

“They went berserk,” Roebeck said. “Just like the clerks or whatever in the transfer room when Jalouse walked in. They had
us cold, and they didn’t nail us because they wanted to
kill
so bad.”

“Barthuli may think the revised timeline is almost identical to ours,” Chun said. “
I
think there are points of distinction more significant than coincidental likenesses of vehicle and room design.”

That was closer to open confrontation than Roebeck had ever expected to hear from Quo. The fact Barthuli wasn’t present to
hear the statement was beside the point: Quo wouldn’t say anything behind a person’s back that she wouldn’t say to his face.

“You know…” Roebeck said aloud, “I think Gerd would probably agree with you.”

She should have said, “will agree.” She couldn’t give up hope for the trio’s safety, not yet.

“I checked the arms locker,” Chun said, answering the question just forming in Roebeck’s mind. “Pauli took a projector with
a mix of gas and tanglefoot rounds. The others have only the acoustics in their integral survival pouches. They weren’t expecting
trouble.”

Roebeck swore softly. It was all up to Weigand’s trio if they returned while the hostile vehicle was still at the North American
50K site. Acoustics and gas shells would be useless against hostiles in armor. The tanglefoot mixture could net and hold against
even a displacement suit’s powered muscles, but chances were there’d be more than one target to deal with.

Pauli
might
be fast enough…. But he might not even realize the waiting vehicle wasn’t TC 779.

“Perhaps they’ll displace again,” Chun suggested.

“Carnes won’t be able to, not fast enough,” Roebeck said. “She probably won’t know there’s a problem. Barthuli…”

She smiled grimly. “I’m not sure Gerd would even try to escape. There’s a whole new timeline for him to explore, after all.”

“They might kill him out of hand,” Chun said. “They probably would.”

“Again,” Roebeck said, “I’m not sure Gerd would care.”

She closed her eyes and forced herself to imagine the battle that might be taking place
now
, only a continent away. “Pauli could escape. If he was alone, that’s what he’d do. But I made him responsible for the other
two.”

Roebeck leaned the seat of her console back so that her eyes opened to the cabin’s familiar ceiling. “On the good side,
I
wouldn’t stick around the site of an attack where I’d let the targets get away. That’s the one place they—we—know they are
to hit back. But as you pointed out, I don’t think like their team leader.”

“Nan?” Chun Quo said quietly.

Roebeck turned her head toward her.

“We’re shorthanded now,” Chun said. “We may have to do things that usually there’d be somebody else to do.”

She placed her control wands carefully into the holder in her chair arm. “I can administer antibiotics to disease bacilli,”
she said. “And in this case, I can do whatever is necessary to save
our
timeline.”

“You think shooters as good as Tim and me’ll want you getting in the way?” Roebeck said. The only way to handle Quo’s offer
to compromise her honor was to turn it into a passing joke. “But I’ll keep your application on file.”

She coughed to clear her throat. “Now let’s see what we’ve got left in the way of a transportation capsule.”

“We don’t have temporal capacity at the moment,” Chun said, “but I think that’s repairable. If we—”

“Hold on,” Roebeck interrupted gently. She spread the intervals between keys so that she could use her board with gauntlets
on. “First things first. I want to know whether we can spot the hostiles if they wait out of phase.”

It took her a minute to bring up a three-dimensional graphic. It showed magnetic and optical anomalies in a hundred-meter
circle of the capsule during the period since they’d displaced here.

“We can’t check our sensors without another set to compare their data with, can we?” Chun said in puzzlement.

Time and space are relative approximations rather than constants. At no two points in space
or
time is the velocity of light, for example, precisely the same. By cataloging the local pattern of variation, the transportation
capsule’s computer could determine—by relatively gross changes in the flow—that another vehicle was nearly in phase with their
horizon.

But that presupposed TC 779’s sensors were still giving readings accurate at a sufficient level of subtlety.

“We can check what we’re receiving now against similar time slices from before the attack,” Roebeck explained. “The raw data
won’t be the same, but if the
pattern
is the same, then we can be reasonably sure that our robot friend here will warn us if somebody’s peeking to line up an attack.”

“If I’d thought of that,” Chun said, “I could have done it myself.” And faster by a good deal. “But I didn’t think of it.”

Roebeck grinned, aware both of the flattery and the basic truth beneath it. “Take a look and tell me what you think,” she
said.

Chun lifted out her wands. Instead of using a separate mini-screen, she echoed the data on the main display. She color-weighted
four graphs, averaged each separately, and projected the totals as individual quadrants of the display. All four were in the
yellow-green/middle-green range.

Human color vision could detect variations in shade that were a matter of a few angstroms—a few hundred millionths of a centimeter.
Only the most sensitive electronic devices were capable of finer discrimination. Chun used her eyes as a shorthand method
of measuring the sensors’ current output against electronic perceptions before the attack.

She nodded to Roebeck. “We can call Tim in,” she said. “We’ll have warning before another vehicle locks on to us.”

Roebeck stood up and bent backward to stretch. “I’m going to see what the damage looks like,” she said.

“You’ll learn more from the display,” Chun said.

“I’ll use the display,” Roebeck said. “I want to
see
what happened, too.”

Circa 10,000
BC

W
hen they entered the shade of the trees, Rebecca Carnes felt fear close in around her

There wasn’t anything wrong with the forest itself. A squirrel scolded from the opposite side of a tree bole, implying that
there was nothing more dangerous around than the two time travelers. The woods were where the enemies in Carnes’ mind lurked,
though. They were preparing to rake her with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, then melt away into the deeper
darkness….

“Mr. Barthuli?” she said.

She didn’t know what the proper form of address might be. The ARC Riders didn’t appear to be terribly rank-conscious. A good
thing, as far as Carnes was concerned. She’d met army nurses who were more concerned with being officers than in helping their
patients. Carnes’ stomach turned at people who worried about status when there was a job to be done.

The analyst turned his head. “Major?” he said. He was a slender, not unhandsome man with the features of a bird of prey. His
expression was friendly whenever Carnes looked at him, but she always had the impression that he stood behind a sheet of thick
glass.

“I don’t know how to use this gun,” Carnes said, holding up the pistol Barthuli had taken from her armor. It felt light and
flimsy, as if it were no more than a plastic shell. It seemed to have two parallel barrels, cast in one piece with the weapon’s
receiver and smooth grips.

She stopped walking. “I… had a problem with a gun just before you picked me up,” she went on. “I hadn’t checked it. I don’t
like to make the same mistake twice.”

“Pauli fusses like a mother hen,” Barthuli said. “Sometimes I think he’s worse than Nan herself.”

Though the analyst sounded dismissive, he turned the weapon slightly in Carnes’ hand so that they were both looking at the
left side. The dial there was milled on the outer edge and about an inch in diameter. Rather than increments, 90 percent of
the dial’s circuit was marked with a color band that changed clockwise in the order of the optical spectrum.

“Tim Grainger didn’t say anything, but I think he worries, too,” Carnes said reflectively.

Barthuli nodded. “Tim’s afraid that one of us will need help and he won’t be present to give it,” he said. “I believe he thinks
of us as his family, his clan. He doesn’t really have friends, though I can’t imagine a friend who’d do more for any of us
than Tim would.”

The analyst smiled at Carnes through a psychic barrier no one would ever be able to penetrate. “I don’t have friends, either,
of course, Major. But that’s a flaw in me.”

“I prefer Rebecca,” Carnes said. “Though you can call me whatever makes you comfortable.”

Barthuli chuckled. “It won’t work,” he said, “but it’s kind of you to try. Now—”

He pointed. The red end of the color band was vertical. The gray dividing segment was counterclockwise of it, with deep violet
beyond that.

“The weapon creates a difference tone of ultra-low frequency at the point of aim,” Barthuli explained. “Minimum setting is
160 dB, which is generally sufficient. Simply point the muzzle and pull the trigger.”

He indicated a standard trigger.

“To increase the output, rotate the dial.” Barthuli’s hands were unexpectedly large, though shapely. The tip of his index
finger rolled the dial upscale, then back to its original setting. “But I really don’t imagine we’ll need to be armed. Shall
we proceed?”

Birds flapped noisily in the foliage overhead. Carnes hadn’t been able to hear them when her feet and her companion’s shuffled
through the dead leaves.

“Sure, I just wanted to—” She’d almost said
be prepared
. She wasn’t prepared. “To know, that’s all.”

They resumed walking toward the top of the hill. It was farther than it had seemed from where Weigand waited with the suits,
but a slab of bare rock beneath a huge oak suddenly announced that they’d reached their goal.

Barthuli hopped onto the slab. He moved his gray box in an arm’s-length panorama.

Carnes assumed the box was some sort of camera. She kept a comfortable distance from the analyst, so as not to interfere—and
not be bumped by the gadget. She’d noticed that photographers were generally oblivious of their immediate environment.

For that matter, she’d noticed that photographers often didn’t
see
a scene until they viewed their print or videotape long afterward.

In the present case, that would have been a terrible shame. The landscape was beautiful with a touch of weirdness that Carnes
couldn’t identify for some moments.

She and Barthuli stood on a bluff a hundred feet above the river flowing swiftly in the near distance. The water winking beyond
the treetops was a cloudy blue-white from the influx of melted ice that fed it only a few hundred miles to the north.

Though the limestone bluff was steep, trees of varying size had found crevices to spout in. Their foliage, leaves and needles
both, blurred the details of the slope.

The floodplain was narrow and willow-choked, even now at low water in the summertime. Or was it low water, when meltwater
fed the stream rather than runoff from rains in the upper tributaries? The eastern margin, in the far distance, was hazy but
clearly lower than that here on the west side of the river.

“I’ve never seen so much land without anything human in it,” Carnes said. “Something felt wrong about what I was seeing. It’s
just that.”

Instead of commenting, Barthuli touched unseen controls on the edges of his gray box. The air before him shimmered, though
Carnes couldn’t see the interference patterns as images from where she stood.

“Do you know, Rebecca?” the analyst said. Carnes hadn’t heard so much animation in his voice before. “Do you know, I think
you’re wrong!”

The pine to their immediate left grew from a ledge forty feet below them. Barthuli took Carnes by the hand and pointed her
whole arm past the ragged top of the tree. A wisp of gray smoke rose fitfully, dissipating long before it reached the clouds.
The source was lost in the willows and alders close beside the river.

“I scanned for anomalies,” Barthuli explained. He gestured with the gray box as he released Carnes’ hand. “I thought the hunting
bands were too thinly scattered for us to have a real likelihood of locating one, but it seems our luck was with us.”

He placed the camera in a pocket of his coveralls and eyed the immediate slope. Gripping an inch-thick sapling crowned with
oak leaves, he slid down sideways to an outcrop four feet below the top of the bluff.

“Wait!” Carnes said. It had taken her a moment to realize what Barthuli really intended. “Barthuli, we can’t possibly get
down there and back up in an hour. For pity’s sake, we ought to be starting back right now!”