Arc Riders (6 page)

“So far as you’re concerned,
miss
,” the civilian said in a voice like a snake sliding on stones, “I’m the Lord God incarnate!”

DRAFT EXTENDED TO WOMEN

Measures Proposed in 1944

Now Put Into Effect

New Orleans
Times-Picayune

Timeline B: February 13, 1973

Timeline B: July 19, 1976

T
he two turbine engines of the CH-46 helicopter were mounted on the tail, just above the boarding ramp. The twin rotors were
still motionless, but even at idle the jets sounded like all the demons of hell.

Three of the Marines in the corporal’s fire team were new-bies who’d never boarded a Sea Knight before. Two of them strode
blank-eyed up the ramp, but one hesitated midway. The corporal had been expecting something like that. He put an arm around
the kid’s pack and walked him up as if they were best buddies.

The lieutenant commanding the platoon didn’t have any experience, either. Besides a rifle, the lieutenant carried a .45 in
a shoulder holster,
two
long-bladed knives, and enough ammo for a squad. The corporal didn’t know which scared him worse: the newbies he commanded
or the macho dick-head who commanded him.

The
whop
of blades faintly audible over the engine noise indicated the helicopters farther forward on the
Bonnie Dick’s
flight deck were preparing to lift. It was a fuck of a long way, over water and over land, to Canberra. The corporal hoped
to hell that if the birds got separated, his wouldn’t arrive first to land on the grounds of the Australian parliament building.

The newbie put his mouth close to the corporal’s ear and shouted, “Will they be shooting at us, Corporal?”

Who the fuck knows?
“Hell, no, kid,” the corporal shouted. “You’ll have to wait for Nam for that. And with a little luck we’ll get some time
in Sydney. Best R&R city in the world, if you like round-eyed pussy!”

LEFT-WING COUP FOILED IN AUSTRALIA

US VESSELS STEAM TO AID GOVERNMENT

Plotters Would Have Withdrawn Australia From War

New York Times

Timeline B: July 20, 1976

Timeline B: October 2, 1983

T
he seventeen bodies were laid out in a row between the firebase berm and the pad where the civilian’s black-painted helicopter
waited, its turbine at idle. The battalion commander, a twenty-eight-year old lieutenant colonel, nodded to the civilian and
said, “We killed more, but they dragged the bodies off. There’s at least a hundred blood trails.”

The civilian bent, reached into the breast pocket of one of the corpses, and pulled out a letter that the soldiers had missed.
He glanced at it and smiled wryly.

“Sir?” the colonel asked.

The civilian turned his head. He carried a well-worn M45 submachine gun, a “Swedish K,” slung from his right shoulder. The
barrel looked unusually fat because an integral silencer replaced the normal heat shield. “His mother hopes he’s keeping well,”
he said. “He’s not going to keep at all in this heat, is he?”

He crumpled the letter in his fist and threw it back down on the body. “They’re Chinese,” he said in a conversational tone.
“I suppose you knew that? First time we’ve seen them in formed units.”

“We thought they might be,” the young colonel said. “We didn’t know for sure.”

The civilian resumed his walk down the line. If you squinted, you could imagine the bodies were so many empty sacks.

“That’s why they came straight on the way they did,” the civilian said. He was a man of fifty. His clean fatigue uniform was
without any markings or identification. The round-brimmed boonie hat he wore was so old that the sun had bleached it nearly
white. “They haven’t learned what our firepower does when they try to pull that.”

The soldier nodded. The battalion’s own six artillery pieces hadn’t been able to fire because the attackers were too close,
but neighboring units had brought a barrage down to within fifty meters of the berm. The shells fell like the wrath of God
on the massed communist troops.

“They will learn, though,” the civilian continued. “The VC did, and the NVA did. I wonder if the Russians will be next?”

The soldier looked at the civilian. He assumed the man was joking, but…

“Do you think they can hold out much longer, sir?” he asked. “We’re killing, we’ve killed—” He spread his hands. “And the
air strikes.”

“I don’t know how much longer it’ll go on, Colonel,” the civilian said, answering a question different from the one the soldier
had asked. “It’s already gone on longer than I dreamed it could. Well, analysis was never my job.”

He barked out a laugh.

“There’s a Taiwanese battalion taking over this AO”—area of operations—“in ten days,” the lieutenant colonel said without
emphasis. “They’re supposed to be good troops.”

“Yeah, they’re good,” the civilian said. “And the Koreans. The Pakistanis aren’t that bad. The South Americans, though, I’d
as soon have Thais. Beggars can’t be choosers, I guess. It’s a seller’s market for every police state willing to export its
soldiers.”

He turned his face toward the northern horizon. “And I tell you, son, there’s a shitload of Chinese where this lot came from.”

Timeline B: May 30, 1987

T
he bartender and his two male patrons were all in their sixties. There’d been a power cut earlier in the evening, but now
the lights and television worked again. The bartender stood in a corner, polishing glasses in front of the
BLATZ ON TAP
sign. On the television above him the President was saying, “… pulling together in this final stretch, so that…”

“They aren’t going to draft me,” one of the patrons boasted. He was a regular. He didn’t know the man three stools down the
bar. “My brother-in-law, you know? He’s in the military governor’s office.”

The other man looked at him by turning only his head. “You think they’re looking for you, huh?” he said. His tone wasn’t quite
as unfriendly as the words could have been spoken.

He slid his empty glass toward the back rim of the bar. The bartender ran another draft from the pump.

“… veterans are therefore being directed to report…” the President said.

“They’re getting pretty damn deep in the barrel,” the regular said with a cackle. He pointed toward the TV. “If he ain’t careful,
they’ll be taking him!”

“He’s dead, you know?” the stranger said. “That’s not really him up there.”

He laid a $2,000 bill on the bar beside his refilled glass. The bartender made change from the cash drawer, two ragged hundreds.
The stranger stuffed the violet scrip into the brandy snifter that served as a tip jar.

“Go on,” the regular said. “Sure that’s him!”

“Look how jerky the picture is,” the stranger said. “Words don’t quite fit together, the lips don’t move with the words—they’re
cutting bits from old speeches and putting it together. He’s been dead four, maybe five years.”

“Go on!” the regular repeated. “They can’t do that. Charlie, they can’t do that, right?”

The bartender smiled and resumed polishing glasses.

“It’s true,” the stranger said morosely. “Four, five years. It’s MacNamara running everything, but you never see him.”

Four motorcycles and a limousine roared down the street at high speed. Four more bikes followed a moment later. The limousine’s
windows were blacked out and there were no insignia on the vehicle. The motorcycle guards wore black Gendarmerie uniforms.

The regular grimaced. He cupped his beer glass in both hands and stared into it to avoid looking anywhere else. “Go on,” he
muttered. His hands trembled. “Go on.”

Circa 50,000
BC

“I
feel,” Rebecca Carnes said without opening her eyes, “like I went skydiving without a parachute. And landed on my head.”

She heard her own voice through a curtain of pain. Someone was splitting her skull with the back of an ax. She hadn’t hurt
this terribly since the time she broke her knee in an auto accident.

Cold light washed through her, dissolving the hot, sticky haze. There were a few nodes of quick agony. Carnes’ limbs thrashed.
She opened her eyes and saw tour images for a moment before her optic nerves locked into synchrony.

She was lying on the floor of the time machine. The transport capsule, she should learn to call it. A rolled-up garment cushioned
her head.

The five ARC Riders watched her with expressions of concern or pity, depending on individual temperament. Roebeck was packing
away the headset. Tim Grainger held a bottle with a nipple, ready to offer Carnes when she sat up.

“Anybody get the number of the truck that hit me?” Carnes asked, attempting a smile. Weigand, the blond man, helped her rise—all
the way to her feet, when she found her body obeyed normally except for the terrible shivering that wracked it.

She didn’t feel cold, so why…

“It’ll pass in a few seconds more,” Grainger said, giving her the bottle. It contained water with a dash of something tangy.
“There’s no permanent nerve damage.” He smiled. “Trust me.”

Chun extended a seat from the bulkhead behind Carnes. She sank into it gratefully and sucked down more of the water. The spasms
of trembling passed, as Grainger had promised.

Carnes smiled wanly at him. “Did you get anything?” she asked the company at large.

“We got everything we needed,” Roebeck said. She was looking at the montage of images cascading over the display.

Barthuli fingered his control plate, manipulating the scenes as he watched them. “Or at least within one red cunt hair,” he
said, smiling in satisfaction as he used jargon from a former age with the precision he demanded of himself in all things.
“The rest we can get, based on what you’ve brought us.”

Carnes shivered again, this time from a thought. Looking at the bottle she clutched with both hands, she said, “I, ah… I guess
I’ve ended the world by helping you. My world, I mean?”

“It’s not—” Weigand started to say.

“Wait,” said Roebeck sharply. The tumbling montage vanished into a black screen as deep as starless vacuum. “Gerd, would you
run us some of the data we gathered while we were sorting?”

“We were looking for someone like you to help us,” Grainger explained. “We hung just out of phase and combed the timeline.”

“You were born in Jacksonville, Florida, Major Carnes?” Barthuli said as his fingers moved. “But you’ve at least visited Tampa,
have you not? I can provide a quicker example by using Tampa. This is from sixty-eight days after you left the timeline.”

The display bloomed with a view of a sprawling city. The image was so clear that Carnes felt a touch of vertigo. It was as
if she rode in a helicopter’s cargo bay five hundred feet in the air, looking down through the open door.

The bay was mirror smooth. Across it, and almost as dead flat as the water, were the Gandy and twin-span Howard Frankland
bridges, connecting Tampa to St. Pete.

Carnes hadn’t been to Tampa in twenty, at least twenty-
five
, years, but she hadn’t forgotten—

The white flash expanded into an opalescent dome at supersonic speed, devouring every visible structure. The bubble vanished,
leaving a shock wave that spread like a fiery doughnut. The column of glowing debris in the center mounted crookedly until
it belled out into a mushroom.

“It was really quite a small device,” Barthuli said, offering without emotion a point he found of interest. “Only about fifteen
times as powerful as the one dropped on Hiroshima.”

“The Soviets…” Carnes said. Her stomach lurched. She thought for a moment she was going to lose the water that was the only
thing in her digestive tract.

“No,” Nan Roebeck said. Her voice was emotionless also, but in her case that was out of conscious kindness to Carnes. “There
was a succession fight after a palace coup against the governor of the Southeast Military Region. One of the parties believed
her rival was in Tampa.”

“Atlanta went the same way within the hour,” Weigand said softly. “It didn’t end the fighting, of course.”

Roebeck made a quick gesture. The screen returned to satiny black.

Barthuli looked over his shoulder and said, “Within thirty days there were nuclear strikes on Soviet and European Union cities
as well, though we don’t have enough information to determine why. Neither grouping had any direct involvement with what was
happening to the United States, so far as I can tell.”

“Anything that happens within the time matrix,” Roebeck said, “is eternal. If a timeline is revised, it doesn’t vanish. It
continues, but in a part of the matrix that someone in the revised timeline can’t reach. You won’t be destroying your timeline.”

She put her hand on Carnes shoulder. “But I want you to understand exactly what timeline we’re going to revise. Revise back.”

“Yes,” said Rebecca Carnes. She drank the rest of the water to give her mouth something to do while her mind spun.

She lowered the bottle and looked around at her new companions. “I’d already have been dead before”—she nodded—“that, I guess.
That’s something to the good.”

She cleared her throat. “What else do you need from me?”

Chun and Barthuli were both busy at separate control devices. “Probably nothing,” said Roebeck, watching over the Oriental
woman’s shoulder. “You’ll have to stay with us, though.” She smiled wearily. “There’ll be no place we can safely leave you
until we return to Central.”

“More water?” Grainger asked. “Or would you like something to eat?” He grinned. “The ration packs taste fine. It’s just that
after a while, they all taste the same.”

Carnes chuckled. It struck her that after watching a city die a few minutes ago, she’d have said that she’d never smile again.
“Some things never change,” she said.

She looked at the main display. The analyst was moving images so quickly that Carnes couldn’t be sure if each was a single
scene or a montage of many scenes.