Arc Riders (15 page)

Which is what Weigand and Barthuli were going to do, too. Standard operating procedure required every member of a separated
team to carry on with the mission. The mission took absolute precedence.

But first Weigand had to get his people out of here. The location had drawn the hostiles once. They could be back anytime,
any
time
at all.

Carnes was standing beside him, just out of contact. A
really
good teammate. Weigand turned up the inside of his wrist so he could get to the controls, then set his suit to revert to
the previous setting.

The wrist controls were as flexible as international Morse code, another two-element system. It took a while to get the touch,
and a lot longer to execute a complex instruction set flawlessly. Weigand wasn’t about to tell a completely green hand how
to set her displacement suit to revert.

Several Maxwell Field generators had melted in the splashing ions. One seemed to have burned; it’d taken the direct charge
of a badly aimed beam. The generators’ gray plastic casings were almost as inert as basalt. At the temperature of nitrogen
plasma, the unit disintegrated to its constituent atoms, some of which flared as they recombined with the oxygen of the air.

The same thing would happen to a man, even a man in armor, if the beam hit him squarely. Him or her.

Weigand wiped the displacement readings from his display. “All right, hug me,” he said. Carnes was a solid person, too smart
to act on assumptions that she’d pulled from thin air.

With his naked eye, Weigand could tell that the attack on the vehicle had occurred some while in the past. Snow melted by
plasma and TC 779’s heater, preparing the area sheltered by the Maxwell Fields, had refrozen into solid ice. The ambient temperature
was in the order of −50°C, cold but not cold enough to flash-freeze boiling water at normal pressures.

“Gerd, are you ready?” Weigand asked. Bad as he wanted them to clear the area, Weigand knew the team would need as much information
as possible to plan what to do next.

The recorders integral to the displacement suits were gathering data, but the specialized rig Barthuli panned across the site
was more subtle and detailed by an order of magnitude. The analyst had unlimbered his flat gray case as quickly as Weigand
reloaded with tanglefoot rounds.

“I suppose I’ve reached the level of diminishing returns,” Barthuli said. Weigand could imagine the slight smile Gerd would
wear as he spoke the words. “Human life isn’t long enough to assemble all the possible information, of course.”

“All right, then we’ll revert to 10K,” Weigand said. As he spoke, he turned his head within the helmet, covering his surroundings
with direct vision as well as the compressed panorama and the suit’s own—vastly more capable—multispectral sensors. “Major
Carnes, here we go.”

Weigand pressed the tit on his left wrist. The horizon around him vanished into limbo, while he wondered what in hell he was
going to do next.

Circa 50,000
BC

T
im Grainger stood and stretched. His face bore a broad, slow grin. “You know,” he said, “I think we’ve got a working transportation
capsule again.” Then he added, “I think I’ll put my armor on. Usually I’d worry about it turning to a straitjacket if they
EMPed us, but that doesn’t”—his smile went as hard as the steel maw of a power shovel—“seem to be the first likelihood with
this bunch. Our opposite numbers.”

“Nan, I’d like to run one more cold check on the system,” Chun Quo said from her usual seat. “Could I—”

“Quo,” said Grainger as he unslung the fléchette gun he’d carried even in the vehicle since the attack in North America. “There’s
billions of possible circuit combinations. We can’t check a significant proportion of them, but we’ve checked a hundred and
twelve without a glitch of any kind. Statistically, another hundred and twelve isn’t going to change anything except the length
of time our hair grows here in 50K.”

Roebeck eyed the display. Bright sun gleamed from snow on the bushes and grass tufts. The ground had remained warm while the
snow fell during the night. The white fluff remained unmelted only where it was elevated from the soil.

“You’ve got an hour,” Roebeck said to Chun. “I’m going for a walk.”

Grainger grimaced.

Roebeck raised her eyebrow toward him. “She doesn’t complain about you keeping
your
security blanket with you all the time we’ve been here, Tim,” she said.

Grainger looked startled, then genuinely amused. He patted the receiver of his fléchette gun and said, “You’ve got a point
there, chief.”

Instead of donning his displacement suit, Grainger flipped out a seat beside Chun’s. “Let’s both of us run checks while the
lady mistress is gone, Quo,” he said.

Roebeck smiled as she went out the hatch, carrying another fléchette/EMP combination. Tim and Quo were a good team.

The wind had died when the snowfall began, and the air remained as still as marble. Roebeck ducked beneath the eaves as she
walked through the open end of the shelter.

She filled her lungs with the clean, unfiltered air. Roebeck wore gloves, but the air wasn’t uncomfortably cool on her face
and she didn’t feel the need to switch on her coveralls’ supplemental heating element. The fabric formed a nearly perfect
insulating layer when conditions called for it.

She wouldn’t miss this site, though she’d found it a pleasant one for the most part. Geologic and evolutionary change was
so slow that TC 779’s dump sites in 50K seemed static from one century to the next. This Eurasian valley was an interesting
variation on the plains to which revisionists were consigned.

And the valley wasn’t, of course, empty of human life.

Roebeck knew she’d come out looking for the Neanderthal mother and daughter. Chun could probably have told her where the pair
was at this moment—assuming they were still in the valley—but Roebeck had been too embarrassed to ask.

Roebeck had been a crèche child—so was Quo, so were most of their contemporaries. She didn’t miss the lack of
a
mother,
her
mother, in her development… but there was a fascination in watching a child interact with the woman who had given birth to
her.

She walked toward the cliff, cradling her weapon in the crook of her left arm. The EMP generator made the combination muzzle-heavy
and hard to sling, not that Grainger seemed to have much problem with his similar rig. At this point there was small chance
of the hostile ARC Riders hitting them a second time, but Roebeck wasn’t about to take a risk with the team’s safety. She’d
already lost half their personnel by being complacent.

The cliff had weathered into meter-high steps mounting from the scree which formed the tailings of the process. Roebeck had
climbed that way a score of times. The ledge midway up was deep enough to be a comfortable seat.

She noticed a wink of red on the lowest step. She moved toward it, choosing her footing carefully on the slope of shattered
rock.

The object was a garnet the size of her thumb, chipped laboriously from the hard matrix in which it had formed. It was no
more than a curiosity in Roebeck’s day; crystals of any shape and material were as cheap as any other rock. To those who placed
it here for the stranger to find, however, it was an object of unique beauty.

Roebeck raised the garnet to the sun, seeing shadows wake and ripple in the ruddy depths. She looked about her again.

Two pairs of eyes watched from a clump of cedars only fifty meters away. The Neanderthals were lying on their bellies to peer
through interwoven branches at the base of the four-meter trees. Beyond the cedars was a mixed copse of hard- and softwoods,
nearly a hectare in extent. The wings of birds flashed among the trees in the morning light.

Roebeck slipped the garnet into one of the pockets at the waist of her coveralls. She thought for a moment, then took off
one glove. She reached up to the flattened starburst on the left side of her collar, the insignia of the Anti-Revision Command.
Hers was silver, not gold like the others’, because she was team leader. Pressure from her bare thumb and index finger released
its grip on the cloth.

A rounded boulder, an outcrop rather than a straggler from the cliff face, domed the soil about halfway between Roebeck and
the cedars, though not quite in a direct line. She sauntered toward it, turning her head slightly to continue looking at the
faces beneath the cedars.

She smiled, though she wasn’t certain the expression would have the same meaning to Neanderthals.

Branches crackled in the copse. The gathering volume of noise ended in a damp thump and silence. Snow loosened by dawn from
a treetop swept lower limbs clean as it fell, a miniature avalanche.

The abrupt changes of temperature would make this slope of the valley dangerous. Rock split as it warmed and expanded during
the daytime. Water which seeped into the cracks froze overnight and further shattered the fabric. Slabs would fall without
warning, crushing anyone who happened to be in their way.

Roebeck wouldn’t have to worry about that after today. As for the Neanderthals, well, it was their world to adapt to or die.
And eventually everything died. An ARC Rider knew that well.

She held the starburst high so that it winked brightly, then set it on the boulder. Nodding to the Neanderthals behind their
screen, Roebeck walked a dozen steps away and sat down on a tussock of grass. The cap of half-congealed snow crunched beneath
her, but the coveralls were waterproof.

She waited, watching the cedars.

Roebeck half expected to hear a complaint from Chun. The vehicle was only two hundred meters away. Chun and Grainger were
certainly watching their leader on the display. Chun, at least, would be sick with fear and anger at what Roebeck was doing.

She had a right to be. At best, Roebeck was acting unprofessionally; at worst—and Roebeck didn’t believe this, not really,
but Chun did—she might be causing a revision more overwhelming than the one that had cut the team off from its own timeline.

Roebeck grimaced and started to rise. She’d retrieve the starburst, leave the garnet in its place, and TC 779 would go on
about its necessary business.

The Neanderthal child wriggled out from her hiding place. She didn’t seem to touch the branches, though they appeared too
tightly interwoven to pass a squirrel.

For a moment the child stood, as motionless as the trees behind her. Her face broke into a toothy grin, though again Rocbeck
couldn’t be sure the expression was equivalent to a modern smile.

Roebeck smiled back anyway. The child scampered to the boulder. Roebeck had seen her wearing a cape of plaited grass in recent
days, but this sunny morning the child was nude again.

The Neanderthal stared at the insignia from a distance of two meters, shifting her position so that her shadow didn’t fall
across the glitter. Her mother continued to watch from the cedars.

The child leaped for the starburst and caught it in her hands. The movement was startlingly quick; the act of someone who
had learned to snatch birds from low branches or go hungry some mornings. Poised to run, she stared at Roebeck. Her eyes were
the same startling blue that Roebeck had first noticed in the mother.

Roebeck nodded and continued to smile. The expression was becoming a strain, but she was afraid to relax it lest the Neanderthals
misunderstand.

The child put the insignia in the corner of her mouth and bit down on it with molars that could crush a walnut. Roebeck blinked
in surprise. The starburst was beryllium monocrystal, proof against even Neanderthal jaws. It just hadn’t occurred to her
that the child would test the object in that particular way.

Roebeck stood up very slowly. She held the fléchette gun crossways with one hand at the butt and the other on the muzzle,
letting her arms hang full length. The Neanderthals would think the weapon was a club, but they should understand that Roebeck
wasn’t handling it in a threatening way.

The child stiffened. Her mother croaked a command or warning to her. The child turned her head toward the cedars, chirped
a phrase that lilted by contrast with her mother’s demand, and looked at Roebeck again. Wearing a big grin, the girl dabbed
the starburst against the side of her neck—the place it had ridden on Roebeck’s collar.

Even though Roebeck was erect and facing in the right general direction, she hadn’t seen the hyenas slinking toward her through
the copse. The first warning to Roebeck and the Neanderthals came when the three powerful beasts lunged the last twenty meters
toward the child.

Two of the hyenas came from the right of the clump of cedars while the other passed to the left. They were spread on a broad
front to cut the child off if she fled to either side. They didn’t notice the mother until she burst from cover with a scream
of despair and a meter-long hickory club.

The child bawled in fear and ran, back toward her mother and the jaws of the oncoming hyenas.

Roebeck shouldered the fléchette gun. The range was a little long for acoustics and anyway the lethal weapon was already in
her hands. She squeezed off a burst at the biggest of the three brutes, firing over the child’s head.

The coils surged, at each pulse vaporizing a fléchette’s aluminum driving band into a conductive vapor and ejecting it from
the bore by magnetic repulsion. The aluminum combined with air in a white flash at the muzzle. The needle of orthocrystaline
tungsten snapped toward the target at a dozen times the speed of sound.

The hyena spun and snapped at the air, then came on again. Tiny flecks of blood sparkled on the yellow and black of its spotted
hide.

The fléchettes were meant to pierce heavy armor. In flesh they merely punched a pinpoint hole. The wounds gaped momentarily
from hydrostatic shock, but the plasticity of muscle slapped the temporary cavities shut again.

When the fléchettes hit bone, the bone cracked. Where they hit organs of low resilience like the spleen, the tissues ruptured
from the shockwave and began spilling the animal’s life out into its body cavity. But for all their lethality, the dense needles
had almost no stopping power.