Arc Riders (23 page)

Byerly rose to her feet. “There’s a medical supply flight to the 96th in Son Tay tomorrow,” she said. “If it leaves, at any
rate. I don’t promise that. But what can you do about…” She motioned to the aircraft.

Weigand winced and looked hesitant. “The fifth round in the magazine isn’t tanglefoot, it’s an acoustic grenade,” he said
to Barthuli, the only other person present who would understand his concern. “It’s, ah—”

He met Byerly’s eyes. “There’s a risk of permanent injury to those who are closest to the grenade when it goes off,” he said.
“Besides rendering them unconscious. Maybe death.”

Byerly snorted. “The only reason I haven’t gone looking for a CS grenade to throw aboard that plane,” she said, “is that I
couldn’t load my patients until all the gas was scrubbed out of the bay. The fact that half of those bastards would trample
the other half to death while they were puking their guts out, that wouldn’t stop me in the least. Do whatever you please.”

“Gerd,” Weigand said, shaking out of his momentary diffidence, “help me make sure that the aircraft’s crew is out of the way.
Rebecca, I want you to stand well to the side of the aircraft when I discharge the grenade. Gerd and I will be protected by
cancellation waves. You don’t have a headband so you’ll be at risk if you’re in line with the opening. The bay will act as
a resonance chamber.”

Carnes glanced at the baggage handlers. “I’ll go grab those guys,” she said, waving. “I’ll keep them out of the line of fire.”

She grinned. “I’ll also keep them from wandering off. We’ll need as much help as we can get to throw the REMFs onto the taxiway
after you knock them cold or whatever you’re going to do.”

The six cargo handlers stood together in the thin blob of shade thrown by the cab and winch mechanism of the lead truck. The
leader of the detachment was a black with a paunch, massive arms and shoulders, and a Spec 5 shield pinned to the front of
his sweatband. As he and his fellows watched Carnes approach, his primary interest was in her gender. His eyes gave only the
briefest glance toward the oak leaves on her collar before refocusing on her breasts.

“Your job’s to unload the Starlifter there, Specialist?” Carnes said crisply.

“We’re watching events develop, Major,” the Spec 5 replied, his tone just short of insolence. He and his men stood with their
shoulders and right boots braced against the vehicle. They didn’t straighten up because of an officer’s presence.

One of the men eyed Carnes deliberately as he took a packet of cigarettes from the cargo pocket of his trousers. The pack
was marked in flowing Cambodian script and sported a marijuana leaf in green on the front.

Carnes nodded curtly. “What’s developing is this,” she said. “The persons who’ve forced their way aboard that aircraft will
be rendered unconscious in a few minutes. I want you to move your trucks up under the aircraft’s left wing so that you’ll
be out of the danger zone. You will then help the rest of us remove the bodies and the rest of the cargo, then transfer patients
into the aircraft for transport to facilities in Japan.”

Carnes knew what the risk was, but she took it anyway. She stepped forward and swung her right hand, slapping the pack of
joints away from the soldier who held them. Filter cigarettes with a twist-closed end spun across the taxiway.

“Or alternatively,
soldiers
…” Carnes said in a voice that cut like a circle saw; her fingers burned as if bee-stung, “You can be rendered unconscious
yourselves and wake up on a flight to Yunnan in the morning. I guarantee they need warm bodies there. Which will it be?”

The Spec 5 stared at her, then broke into a grin. “Whoo-ee, little lady!” he said. “We’re here to move shit, right? If some
of that shit’s bodies, that’s cool. Not the first time we moved bodies, is it, bros?”

All six cargo handlers were black. It hadn’t escaped Carnes’ notice—or theirs—that the vast majority of the officers and senior
enlisted men who’d forced their way aboard the C-141 were whites.

“Then get these trucks out of the way,” she ordered. “I’ll ride on your running board.”

Weigand had found the copilot, Barthuli the loadmaster. The copilot trotted around toward the cockpit hatch, avoiding the
crowd. Besides the people crammed into the cargo bay, others stood or sat on the ramp. Apparently they hoped to squeeze their
way on later, or perhaps be lifted to safety when the ramp rose to close the aircraft before takeoff.

The semis snorted as they drove forward beneath the C-141’s high wing. Pauli Weigand walked casually across the apron. He’d
left the barracks bag with the medical convoy and carried only the projector he’d brought from TC 779. Some of the refugees
on the ramp watched Weigand, but since his back was toward them and he was walking away, they didn’t seem particularly concerned.

“This good enough, missie?” the Spec 5 called from the cab of the truck, speaking across the driver.

“Yes, this is fine,” Carnes said. She had no idea, really, but she supposed Gerd or Pauli would have warned her if it wasn’t
a safe location. She didn’t know exactly what was going to happen, but the implications of the word
grenade
were clear enough.

Colonel Byerly was in the back of the deuce and a half, helping the sole nurse with at least thirty severely wounded patients.
The fact that two MDs, a nurse, and an orderly had to deal with the transport as well as the medical needs of so many patients
chilled Carnes’ soul. Bad as it had been with the 96th in Son Tay before she was transferred to a combat command, the situation
in Saigon was still worse. The war was a tree, rotting away from the inside out.

Weigand turned, raised his projector, and took momentary aim. A major on the C-141’s ramp stood up and shouted as he drew
a .45 automatic.

Choonk!

The projectile sailed over the major’s head and into the cargo bay. Carnes could track its silvery flight with her eyes.

For a fraction of a second after the projectile disappeared, nothing happened. The major pointed his pistol.

The blast was as sharp as lightning. It was so loud that a cloud of dust rose from the surface of the runway behind the C-141
and curled outward, forming double horns that framed Pauli Weigand as they passed. Everyone on the ramp collapsed forward,
like a stand of dominoes slammed down by a gust of wind.

“You can start carrying out bodies now,” Rebecca Carnes called to the Spec 5 as she stepped away from his truck.

March 18, 1967

B
y the time TC 779 had been inserted directly into the safe house and was scanning for anomalies in the cellar around them,
Grainger was up and running in his hard suit. He even reset his displays for standard visuals: there wasn’t room in the safe
house cellar for much in the way of hidden threat, not with the capsule in there.

Boxes and crates were scanned and pronounced harmless. The exterior temperature was 68 degrees Fahrenheit, a welcome relief.
Aside from rodents, arachnids, and flying insects which could carry communicable diseases, the cellar held no threat at this
moment.

His suit took the data feed from TC 779 and pricked him with at least half a dozen inoculations in quick succession. It felt
as though his right wrist cuff were nibbling him. Then that stopped and Roebeck’s voice said, “Ready?”

“Nan, I’ll go first.”

“Tim, age before beauty.”

Chun said, “Nan, Tim: stable and holding,” softly in his ear. She was Chun Quo, his team mate, his backup, again; not the
Oriental enemy she’d never been except in his mind.

Grainger took a deep breath. There were times instincts could get you killed faster even than stupidity. He wasn’t going to
let that happen.

Nan Roebeck’s suited bulk shut out his centerpunched realtime view of the cellar beyond the opening hatch.

Roebeck’s voice said, “Chun, you hold TC 779 out of phase as a safeguard against attacks. We’re going to get out of the suits
once we’ve done a security check. We’ll set them for two minutes every four hours.”

“Nan, I wish you wouldn’t—that could be just what we shouldn’t do.”

“Chun, it’s SOP. If you see something you don’t like out there, try to pop back in long enough to signal us.”

Chun sighed. “Nan, I don’t like this.”

Roebeck was out of the hatchway, moving around on the floor. Grainger followed. When he was through the lock and down the
ramp, he turned just in time to see TC 779 phase out.

Then they were alone in Timeline B, committed, armed to the teeth, and ready for anything—until they got out of those suits.

Grainger felt the phase out of the displacement craft like a physical loss.

Roebeck was stamping around, punching holes in crates and generally trying to arouse any enemy that might be lurking.

“Nan, there’s an upstairs to this place.”

“Tim, if nobody comes down, we’re not taking the suits up.”

He could only hear her breathing if she enabled the intercom by using his name. The rest of the time, if he wanted to hear
more than his own breathing, he needed to be taking external audio.

So he did that, until the moment came when she said, “Tim, let’s get out of these. Go first. I’ll cover you.”

He hadn’t wanted to get into the damned thing. Now he didn’t want to get out of it.

When he’d climbed out of his hard suit and finally sent it off to phase space, he felt as if he’d lost his best friend. He
sat on a crate, watching Roebeck watch him, alert for revisionists. Her suit loomed larger in the dank basement the longer
they sat that way. Eventually Grainger realized that the scant daylight from a high barred window was fading to night. Sirens
yowled distantly, perhaps as the roundup of civilians continued, perhaps from nothing more than random city violence.

Roebeck stayed suited, visor down, fully armored and holding a heavy plasma rifle in a robotically assisted grip, for nearly
an hour before she was satisfied that it was safe to dispatch the second suit.

Then they were adrift, for the next four hours anyway, in a 1968 as alien as Command Central had become. Grainger methodically
checked all his sensory gear and his disabling weapons for the third time. They weren’t here to hide in a basement. Every
hour they spent in this time was an hour forever barred from them. If they found out later that this was the critical interval,
they could do nothing, ever again, about whatever may have transpired elsewhere during the interval they spent hiding.

Finally, wishing he could have waited her out, he nearly pleaded, “Nan, let’s go do it, can’t we?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” said Roebeck, and let him go first up the stairs into the deepening alien night.

Timeline B: August 14, 1991

T
he man’s jungle fatigues had been starched and pressed to hold a crease. His name tapes read
REYNOLDS
and us
ARMY
, and the black low-visibility oak leaves on his collar could have been either those of a major or a lieutenant colonel. The
hair behind his high forehead was thin with a good deal of gray in it, though otherwise he didn’t appear to be older than
forty. Pauli Weigand lifted him with one arm and his duffle bag with the other.

Reynolds had been standing directly beneath the acoustic grenade when it went off. Trails of dry, black blood ran from his
nose and ears, and he was just as dead as if Weigand had shot him through the head.

Colonel Byerly had said casualties among the refugees didn’t matter to her, but Weigand didn’t believe she meant that. Certainly
they mattered to Weigand.

He tossed the duffle bag onto the concrete, then carried the corpse down the ramp and laid it gently beside the bag. He knew
it didn’t matter—baggage or dead meat, neither one could feel pain—but he did it anyway.

The acoustic grenade was simple enough that an equivalent device could have been constructed on the present horizon, though
the available support technology would have resulted in something both larger and less powerful than what Weigand had used.
The grenade created an omnidirectional sound wave, only microseconds in duration but of enormous intensity, by detonating
a few millimeters of osmium wire with an electrical pulse. Chemical explosives could achieve similar effects, but at lower
amplitude than was possible with energy density available from the 26th century’s electronic storage systems.

Weigand couldn’t have safely used an acoustic grenade at the range he had—a hundred meters—without the protection of the cancellation
wave his headband generated. The compression and rarefaction of the band’s tuned pulse were 180 degrees out of phase with
those of the grenade and were of precisely the same amplitude as the detonation wave when it reached the person wearing the
headband.

The grenade delivered overpressures comparable to the muzzle blast of the largest naval guns. It was stunning at moderate
distances and potentially lethal to those as close as the late Mr. Reynolds.

Weigand wished Nan were here. He hated to make decisions like that one even more than he hated to carry them out.

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!” the chief of the cargo handlers boomed from the pallets at the front of the bay. “Burnett, pay out
the hook and let’s get this fucker empty!”

All the refugees had been removed from the aircraft, carried or—in the case of those the cargo handlers dealt with—dumped
to the concrete as if they’d been so many sacks of mail. Weigand and the C-141’s crew had been more gentle, though none of
them made much effort to amend the ground personnel’s technique. It was hard to find sympathy for cowards who feathered their
nests while sending better folk to bleed and die.

Rebecca was with the patients, able to be a nurse again. She looked more relaxed than Weigand had previously seen her, even
at times when they were together in TC 779 and there was no immediate crisis.

Barthuli had been willing to help with the physical labor, though as he’d said, he’d “probably turn out to be as useless as
tits on a boar.” Weigand told him to graze the commo net and see what he could learn. There wasn’t a risk of drowning in the
information flow, since Gerd’s software preselected items based on his uniquely excellent parameters.