Arc Riders (30 page)

Weigand looked at the revisionist. “Can you get us onto that aircraft, Colonel?” he asked. “As members of your unit?”

“If I say you’re mine,” Watney said in a voice like a dog’s growl, “nobody in Son Tay, nobody in the
war zone
, will raise an eyebrow. They know me.”

And I know you, too
, Weigand thought,
you murderous bastard
. Aloud he said, “Okay, the plane’s going where we need to go, back to Travis.”

He permitted himself a quiver of a grin. Watney might think that a quick trigger finger was something to be proud of. Weigand
could beat the revisionist as a gunman if he had to—a fifty-fifty chance, he’d beat the revisionist. But there was a lot more
to real competence than that. “Whether or not the pilot plans to,” he said, “that’s where we’ll land in ConUS.”

Rebecca Carnes said, “Good to have a commanding officer like you, Pauli.” The words were a slap at Watney; but they were the
truth as she saw it, or she wouldn’t have said them. Even though she was wrong, the statement gave Weigand a flash of hope.

Weigand felt some of the prickly weight lift from him as he stepped to the light switch. They had a long way to go—but they
were heading in the right direction for now.

Timeline B: August 22, 1991

M
echanics were already clustered around the port outboard engine by the time Rebecca Carnes followed the rest of the team down
the boarding steps. A lime-green crash truck parked facing the nacelle. Its headlights added to the illumination of a sky
from which the sun had vanished while the DC-8 taxied wearily to its berth.

Half a dozen guides in blue-on-white armbands marshaled the passengers toward the nearby hangar. Carnes couldn’t swear the
structure was the one to which Weigand and the displacement suits were taken when the team touched down at Travis the first
time, but that seemed the likelihood.

Behind her, a Samoan without rank tabs said to a staff sergeant whose scalp was half shaved, half scar tissue, “No, they’ll
fly on two engines. One out, that was no problem.”

Most of the killers Fern had recruited from the war zone walked bent under the weight of duffle bags: loot, more general souvenirs,
and the weapons and munitions they’d brought with them. As protective coloration, Weigand’s team members carried firearms.

Carnes understood Weigand’s order, but her submachine gun would probably be as useless as the revolver she’d tried to use
in Yunnan. The acoustic pistol was a comforting bulk in her side pocket, though. Because it had no recoil or muzzle blast…
and because Carnes knew the result wouldn’t be fatal, even to an enemy trying to kill her, she was a
nurse
… for those varied reasons, all of them psychological, she was confident of what she could do with the weapon from the future.

Pauli openly carried his EMP generator. It was unfamiliar to the remainder of the aircraft’s 127 passengers, but they were
all of them individualists armed with a wide assortment of weapons. The generator was attached to a rifle stock and
looked
like a weapon. The acoustic pistols looked like toys, and the sort of attention they might gather would be of an undesirable
sort.

“That crippled pig fly on two engines?” the staff sergeant sneered. “You’ve got shit for brains! Brand new, maybe, but neither
of us were born back when that was brand new. It’s a fucking wonder we didn’t fall right out of the sky when we lost the one.”

The sergeant’s tone made Carnes glance over her shoulder. The Samoan wore a bland expression. For the moment, at least, he
seemed willing to ignore the insults as mere alcoholic nonsense. The shortest of the DC-8’s three refueling stops had been
12 hours. The sergeant had drunk his way through each of them, and had brought enough booze aboard besides to last him to
the next layover.

Still and all…the Samoan wore his own dried right earlobe on a neck thong. He’d explained to Carnes on the flight’s Guam-to-Hawaii
leg that he’d removed it from the mouth of the Chink who bit it off while the Samoan chewed through the Chinese soldier’s
throat. Being too drunk to be polite in this group meant either that you were very good or very lucky.

“Not that it’d have made more than a couple days difference,” the sergeant added. “Whatever the fuck Fern’s got cooked up
for us, it won’t be survivable. Back here in the World, for Chrissake?”

“Could be,” the Samoan agreed in an equally careless tone.

Weigand motioned Carnes up to his right side. Watney was on Weigand’s left, with Barthuli—who had the other communications
headband—to Watney’s other side. A guide looked over his shoulder but didn’t interfere.

“This is the same hangar,” Weigand said. “The suits will be coming into phase in ten minutes.”

Barthuli said something Carnes couldn’t catch. “Just under ten minutes,” Weigand said, his lips pursing. “We’re going to have
to lock them in phase immediately, because it’ll be a problem if we have to wait a full week.”

“Will the people here recognize you?” Carnes asked. “General Oakley and his staff?”

Weigand shrugged. He was very tense but trying not to show it. “We’ll deal with that if we have to,” he said. “The light wasn’t
good, and they weren’t really interested in me. We
can’t
leave the suits. We’ll need them to displace to 1968.”

Then he added, “I wish I knew what Nan would do.”

“We’ll handle it,” Carnes said.

They entered through the personnel door rather than the great plane-wide leaves closing the end of the hangar. Hundreds of
three-high bunks had been set up against one of the sidewal Is since Carnes previously saw the interior. Parked along the
opposite sidcwall were three APCs in addition to the wheeled armored cars, and more pallets of matériel were stacked in the
rear of the hangar.

It didn’t look like an army with which to conquer Washington. Oakley must be counting on surprise; though for that matter,
Washington might not be defended by much at this point, either.

Only about half the overhead lights worked, too few to adequately illuminate the hangar. Carnes didn’t notice Oakley. The
general himself wasn’t a commanding figure, but the dozen staff officers clotted about him should be pretty obvious.

The best hope the team had to retain control of the displacement suits was confusion and lack of a proper chain of command.
If Oakley wasn’t present, there was a fair chance things would work out.

A major with a bullhorn stood at the end of the bunks, facing the men entering the hangar. He spoke into the bullhorn. The
device groaned brokenly in response. The major snarled something to a lieutenant walking by with a clipboard. The lieutenant
shrugged and stepped on past.

The major threw down the bullhorn and shouted, “Everybody from Flight 8734, come this way.”

His unaided voice was almost extinguished by the hangar’s surf of echoes. The passengers from the DC-8 shuffled closer anyway,
directed by the guides. The major might have something useful to say.

“The people who just got off the flight from Hawaii, come this way,” the major continued. He pointedly avoided referring to
where the men had been recruited; not that anybody looking at the band of grizzled killers would have been much in doubt.
“These are your quarters. You’ve got half an hour to choose bunks and strike your gear. Then you’ll be taken to another building
for briefing on your mission.”

The major paused, then continued without making eye contact with the men in a semicircle about him, “And there’ll be no weapons
when General Oakley briefs you.”

There was laughter and growls. “Want to bet?” a man bigger than Pauli Weigand said. He pointed a pump shotgun at the major’s
face from less than six feet away, then grinned and lowered the weapon again.

The group moved forward. Men streamed past the major to the bunk lines like the sea about a pebble. The men regarded the hangar
as civilization. For most of them, even the cramped seats of the ancient DC-8 were closer to civilization than they’d been
in months or even years. They were looking forward to running water, cooked food; in many cases women, in most cases liquor.
Oakley’s chances of holding a formal briefing in half an hour were even less good than the odds Carnes gave of the general
becoming President of the United States.

Weigand murmured something to Barthuli. “The displacement suits will be arriving
here
,” the analyst said, projecting three six-inch ovals of red light on the nearby concrete. Carnes couldn’t tell the source
of the light. “In three minutes,
seventeen
seconds.”

The four members of the team formed a close huddle. The major was shouting to his subordinates, the guides who’d brought the
passengers from the DC-8. He hadn’t moved since the shotgun was aimed at him.

Men from the war zone, the bulk of their gear tossed onto bunks or simply on the floor, were sauntering toward the door. They
might have some distance to walk or drive commandeered vehicles, but major military bases were effectively towns. They’d find
what they wanted.

All of the returnees Carnes saw were carrying automatic weapons, as much in warning as by reflex. Air Force personnel kept
out of the way.

“Okay,” Weigand said. “When the suits appear, the three of us”—he nodded to Carnes and Barthuli—“will put them on and walk
into the back corner, down one of those aisles of containers. While we’re doing that, Colonel Watney will…”

Weigand’s eyes met Watney’s cold, empty expression. Weigand smiled with as little warmth and handed his EMP generator to Carnes.

“No,” he said, “Colonel Watney will put on the third suit. There’s nothing to it, Watney, just walk like you would normally.
Rebecca, you’ll watch the other people with the generator set to nerve stimulation.”

Weigand turned the EMP generator on its side to check the setting. On the fore end was a sliding switch cut from a piece of
aircraft spar, added at Son Tay after the dangerous minutes it had taken Weigand to reconfigure the device from EMP to nerve
stimulation. The switch was in its forward position.

“I don’t want you to call attention to yourself,” Weigand added sharply. “Don’t—”

“I understand,” Carnes said, snappish in her present state to be told the obvious. “You intend to talk your way clear in the
confusion. I’m to stay unnoticed and act only if someone starts using force.”

The big ARC Rider bobbed his chin in agreement and apology. “Whatever happens,” he said as he glanced sideways toward Watney,
“I intend this to take place without our having to kill anybody. Do you understand, Gerd?”

“All right, Pauli,” the analyst replied. He removed his computer/recorder from a side pocket. “I’m ready to lock the suits
in phase when they appear.”

“I won’t tell you your job, Weigand,” Watney said. The smile that tweaked his lips was almost a sneer.

Carnes walked toward the bunks. She wanted some distance between her and the trio of men, and her tropical battledress uniform
was less obtrusive among the passengers from the DC-8 than it would be in the middle of Air Force personnel in stateside fatigues.

Weigand and the men with him stood ready, six feet back from the ovals the analyst briefly projected on the floor again. How
were Oakley’s people going to react to the appearance of the armor?

In the hangar were still at least a hundred men—mostly men; General Oakley must have a prejudice against women. Over 60 percent
of the varied US-based military forces had been women even when Carnes was shipped overseas for the second time.

Carnes wouldn’t necessarily have been given another overseas posting. What if she’d stayed in ConUS? Would she have been stationed
in Tampa? Or Atlanta? Or—how many other American locations had been targets of American H-bombs? Barthuli had said a hundred
and—

No, that was the number for the whole world on this timeline, this horizon. Still, many—

The refractive index of the air in front of the three men changed. Carnes remembered the distorted transparency as TC 779
appeared between her and the Chinese rifleman.

She turned her head, keeping her companions in the corner of her eye as she tried to spread her attention over everybody else
in the hangar. The EMP generator was down along her right thigh, unremarkable in the lights’ sparse vertical harshness. In
this vast cavern, nobody could watch all the places that might be crucial to see in the next instants.

The three displacement suits appeared, so abruptly they seemed to have been present all along. Weigand stepped forward.

A mechanic was leaning over an APC’s open engine compartment a hundred feet away. He blinked and called something to his assistant
in front of the vehicle, handing up a wrench. An officer addressing a pair of airmen near a silent forklift stopped in midphrase
and stood openmouthed.

The right gauntlets of two of the displacement suits held square-sectioned weapons larger than the ARC Riders’ acoustic pistols
and of obviously different design. Weigand, Barthuli—and an instant later Watney as one of the suits shifted aim—dropped like
rice sacks.

No thrashing, no convulsions as shocked nerves fired when the bodies hit the concrete. It was as if all the three men’s tendons
had been cut.

Barthuli fell on his multipurpose device. The revolver Watney had managed to draw bounced beside him. Its steel barrel and
alloy frame rang in separate keys.

One of the suits stepped forward. The suit that didn’t hold a weapon remained statue still, harmless;
empty
. The other armed suit turned so that it was back to back with the first, covering the rear as the first suit bent down.

Weigand’s head moved. The angular weapon twitched. Pauli flattened again like warm gelatin.

The officer who’d seen the displacement suits appear started to walk over with a perturbed expression. The enlisted men remained
beside the forklift, staring after their superior with blank incomprehension.

Rebecca Carnes was thirty feet from the suits and her fallen companions. She reached down with her left forefinger and pulled
her weapon’s switch into the rear position. She deliberately kept her face turned away from the tableau behind her.