Arc Riders (36 page)

This was Timeline B, after all, he reminded himself. Timeline A was sure to be more environmentally conscious, once they reinstated
it. History made a point that environmental responsibility had started in the sixties. Still, he felt as if he were in a center
of corruption par excellence. And he was probably right. His instincts were usually pretty good.

Roebeck didn’t want to talk. Her breathing was very slow and shallow. He concentrated on syncing his respiration to hers.
Always a good exercise before a team went into action. Synced breathing and body language provided a functional edge when
conscious coordination was critical to mission accomplishment.

She noticed him, and nearly smiled. She took her own pulse, and mouthed the results: “Sixty-eight.”

He brought his own pulse into line as best he could, getting it down to sixty-nine before someone came to get them. Women
always ran cooler before action.

The greeter rubbed her hands together. She was wearing a close-fitting jacket with buttons that had little crossed Cs emblazoned
on them. She teetered on impossibly spikey heels.

“Please come this way. Mr. Bates will see you now.” She tottered away and they both followed. Over her shoulder she asked
them if they’d care for some refreshment, coffee or tea, perhaps.

They both said “No,” perfectly synchronized.

The woman cast a glance backward and then faced front.

Bates’ office was at the end of a long straight corridor. No problem getting out of here in a hurry. When its doors opened,
Grainger was startled to see a huge corner window that showed a panorama of the buildings across the street and beyond, toward
a little park and OEOB beyond it.

Bates wasn’t in there, yet.

“Mr. Bates will be right with you,” she assured them as she tottered out through a side door, closing it behind her.

“Now what?” Roebeck whispered, jostling him. He was already getting out his weapons. One way or another, this was going to
end here and now. These revisionists, their flunkies, the Orientals—whatever came through that door was either going to come
quietly with him or be acoustically subdued or tranked.

Or go headfirst out that conveniently placed window to the street below.

He just laid everything out in plain sight. He opened his case. He primed his acoustic pistol, extended its antennae to provide
full directionality at close range. He set it for a ten-hertz pulse to be delivered at a point of impact two centimeters wide.
He held it in one hand while he locked and loaded his tanglefoot launcher and slung it on his shoulder—in case there were
more people than Bates waiting to come through that door.

“Tim…”

“Nan, just be ready to follow through. Call Chun now and tell her we’re go for extraction.”

“You’re that sure?”

He was that desperate. “You know I am.”

She got out her fléchette gun and chambered a round. “Backup,” she said needlessly.

Then the side door opened and Bates came through first, with Rhone close behind him, laughing as she shut the door with a
wriggle of her butt.

The laughing stopped abruptly.

Displacing from August 24, 1991,
to August 30, 1968.

“W
e couldn’t afford to be surprised again,” ChunQuo said. By watching the images reeling past on the display she avoided having
to look at her companions. “Not after the damage the capsule received in the first attack. Nan and Tim are operating from
the safe house, while I kept the capsule out of phase.”

She wiped her eyes by brushing against her shoulders, one and then the other. She couldn’t use her hands because she was holding
the control wands. “We can join them now that the danger has been removed.”

“I’d like to apologize to him,” Rebecca Carnes said. “Watney. I—after he shot his own man back at the compound, I…”

Weigand was covering her scrapes and burns with gel that soaked in as soon as it was applied, leaving the surface tacky to
the touch. The goo tingled mildly as it went on, as though Pauli were bathing the wounds with carbonated water. Her itching
and ache vanished immediately, and Carnes found she had normal feeling again in her blistered fingertips.

Barthuli glanced back from a display focused for his eyes only. “There’s nothing to apologize for, Rebecca,” he said. “The
colonel was exactly what you thought he was. He would have been the last to deny that.”

“We enlisted Watney because I thought we needed him,” Weigand said with a harshness Carnes didn’t expect from him. “That was
true. I was just wrong about what we were going to need him for.”

“Ruthlessness isn’t a survival characteristic for the individual,” Gerd Barthuli said. Carnes wasn’t sure who the analyst
was speaking to, or even—quite—sure who he was speaking about. “But it may be for the larger body, for the race.”

Carnes had become used to the images cascading on the main display. They formed a montage of objects juxtaposed in time rather
than in space. It was only rarely that a scene meant anything to her on a conscious level, but the ripple of forms and colors
soothed rather than rubbing a jagged edge against her nerves.

Chun was conning TC 779 manually. Despite her skill at preprogramming displacements, she lacked the instincts for manual control
that Nan Roebeck had. Under Chun’s direction the capsule moved in a series of unfelt jerks that even Carnes could notice on
the display. She suspected that for Chun, the frustrations of manual control absorbed her cancerous anger at being involved
in the death of Watney and the crew of the hostile transportation capsule.

“I saw W-w—your suit, Pauli, displace,” Chun said. The image paused long enough for Carnes to see a lioness rubbing her shoulders
against a concrete tree in some zoo or other. “Nan—and me, but it was Nan’s idea—had set our navigational probes to detect
suit displacements when we realized that the other parties were able to do that. I checked what was going on, and…”

“And saved our lives,” Carnes said loudly.

“Let me check your buttocks,” Weigand murmured. “You tore the back off your trousers, I suppose when you came down the slide
from the aircraft.”

“I forgot the other parties might investigate also,” Chun said. “I’m not…”

Not used to operating against opponents so sophisticated
, Carnes thought.
Not somebody who automatically thinks of ambushes and kill zones, the way the Kyle Watneys do
.

Carnes walked to the front of the capsule while Weigand was in mid-daub. “You saved our lives,” she said, her hands resting
lightly on Chun’s shoulders. “You and Watney saved… everything you care about. He acted and you acted. Without your separate
actions, we’d all be—”

Probably as dead as the pair of hostiles in California.

“—failed. But don’t take Watney’s actions on yourself. Don’t ever do that.”

“I’ve been thinking about Jalouse,” Barthuli said unexpectedly. “When we correct the revision here in 1968, all chance of
releasing him from this timeline’s ARC Central ends. We can’t do it because we were already there—”

“Gerd, we know that,” Weigand said tautly. “Rebecca, let me finish covering your scrapes. God knows what germs were going
around that airport.”

“And of course another team of ARC Riders can’t be tasked to the mission,” Barthuli continued, “because it isn’t possible
to displace from our timeline to the revised one.”

“Barthuli, we know that!” Pauli Weigand shouted, his face blotched with rage and sick failure. “Look, if you want to run on
about this to Nan, fine! But don’t tell me it’s a mess I can’t fix, because I know that!”

“Yes,” Barthuli said calmly. “But there’s something you may not have considered, Pauli.”

August 30, 1968

“T
hey’re at the safe house,” Chun said, looking back at Pauli Weigand with a face whose very openness implied the frown of concern
she tried to hide. “I wasn’t expecting to find them here. I was just using it to make sure we hadn’t lost our temporal zero.”

“They left their armor behind,” Weigand said as he leaned forward instinctively to bring his eyes closer to the display. “Those
are just the empty—”

The two figures in the basement of the safe house moved. They weren’t empty suits. “No, I’m wrong.”

Why on earth were Nan and Tim wearing armor at this juncture? Had the hostiles made an attack here before—
before
in terms of their personal timeline as well as that of the sidereal universe—they engaged TC 779 at National Airport?

“Bring us—”

Did he have the authority to give orders to Chun? Was that the right order anyway?

“Yes,” Quo said. “I thought we should… I’ll dock us now.”

Weigand wasn’t sure he’d ever been so glad to see anyone as he was now to see Nan Roebeck. As soon as she was aboard TC 779,
Pauli Weigand could return to being just the guy who obeyed orders.

Nan carried a fléchette gun with attached EMP generator, the latter a tidy package less than a tenth the bulk of the unit
Weigand had cobbled together on this horizon. Still, the makeshift had worked. Weigand was glad it was slung to Rebecca’s
back when he tossed her aboard. His unit had worked, and he’d worked as team commander; though neither of them was as slick
as the real article.

“Fifteen seconds,” Chun warned as TC 779 initiated its final approach sequence. The gelid shimmer of the air in the basement
center warned the suited ARC Riders. They stepped quickly to either side of the unfinished room.

There was nothing odd about Nan with a fléchette gun, but Tim Grainger held a gas/tanglefoot projector. Tim’s displacement
suit was unmistakable because the right knee joint had been replaced after a previous operation. It still had a distinctively
new gloss.

Weigand couldn’t think of a time Grainger had picked a projector when there were lethal weapons to be had, but the choice
might have been on Nan’s orders. The team commander was ultimately responsible for every decision a member of the team made.
The decisions Tim—Tim’s reflexes, really—could make before anyone stopped him weren’t always the sort Nan would be comfortable
remembering in the hours before dawn.

TC 779 shuddered. The safety mechanisms lifted the capsule a centimeter before they permitted it to lock into phase with the
horizon. “Not bad,” Weigand said, though he could have done a good deal better himself.

Quo gestured with her control wands, opening the inner and outer hatches together. Gerd frowned but didn’t speak whatever
thought was on his mind.

“Nan,” Weigand said as he stepped to the hatch to greet his fellows. “We met and destroyed—”

The figure he thought was Tim Grainger fired at Weigand’s chest. The projectile knocked Weigand backward, slamming the air
from his lungs.

He gasped involuntarily, so the gas that filled TC 779’s cabin when the shell ruptured froze him an instant before it got
the others. Chun held her breath, but it didn’t matter because the skin-absorptive formula reached her nervous system through
her face before she could get her mask down.

Weigand’s muscles went rigid, though he was still fully conscious. He bounced like a wooden dummy off a bulkhead and to the
deck. To keep from rendering the transportation capsule uninhabitable, the hijackers had used a short-term paralyzing agent
whose effects would wear off in a few minutes.

As they boarded TC 779, the armored figures dropped the weapons they must have captured when they took the displacement suits.
From the suits’ storage pouches they drew angular handguns like those the pair at Travis used on Weigand and the men accompanying
him. Weigand knew this time to expect his mind to dissolve into white static.

As it did.

August 30, 1968

H
e didn’t know who he was. He couldn’t move and he wasn’t sure why, maybe because he was a disembodied head floating in a prickly
white mass that—

“Oh!” shouted Pauli Weigand as a rebuilt acetylcholine supply repaved his nerve pathways. He curved up from the burning fog
that wrapped him.

The hostile ARC Riders were getting out of the displacement suits they’d appropriated to ambush TC 779. “Watch him,” one said.
The words weren’t in Standard English. The capsule’s internal systems automatically translated them. “He’s big.”

Both hostiles were male, both of Oriental ancestry. The speaker aimed the acetylcholine inhibitor that was his equivalent
of Weigand’s acoustic pistol.

“He could be a hydraulic jack and he still wouldn’t be able to stretch his restraints,” the other hostile said. “Relax. Unless
you want to kill them now?”

“No, Central will want them,” the first speaker said. “Who knows how many more there may be? And if we miss one capsule?”

He made a cross-cutting gesture at the base of his rib cage.

The hostiles must have been extremely uncomfortable in the hijacked displacement suits. Neither of them was as tall as Roebeck,
and Grainger was a good four centimeters taller yet.

They weren’t mirror images of one another, though, any more than Chun and Barthuli—both mumbling in their bonds beside Weigand—were.
The one who’d spoken first was slim, fine-boned, and of a lighter complexion than his stocky companion.

Stocky eyed Weigand speculatively. The Oriental was obviously strong and proud of it, but if he really thought he had a chance
of taking Pauli Weigand hand-to-hand, he was a fool.

Not so great a fool that he’d taken any chances with the bonds, though. Weigand’s hands were lashed to his ankles behind his
back, and from there attached to an eyebolt mounted for the purpose at the rear of the cabin.

Many revisionists had ridden here after the team’s previous missions. If the hostiles had used TC 779’s restraint tape, the
whole capsule could have been lifted on a strand of it. If they’d used their own, Weigand didn’t imagine the material was
significantly less strong.

“You’ve lost,” Weigand lied. His voice was a croak. He hacked, clearing the phlegm that had accumulated while he was unconscious.
“We blew up your capsule already.”