Arc Riders

by David Drake, Janet Morris

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alternative History sci-fi; Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi

Synopsis

The elite Anti-Revision Command, the ARC Riders, attempt to foil a desperate plot to destroy the United States. Reactionary 23rd century conspirators have changed history, and the Vietnam War has spread to central China.

Release date: September 9, 2009

Publisher: Aspect

Print pages: 320

Sample

“Come on, Roebeck, I don’t need a load of grief after an operation like this was,” Jalouse growled.

Jalouse’s displacement suit had a panoramic display, so he didn’t have to turn to see his five teammates in the capsule. Still, the sight of his armored figure swinging slowly around, displaying the battle damage, was a useful reminder of how rough a time he’d had—and how little he was asking.

“Oh, let him go,” said Tim Grainger. Chun Quo pursed her lips and stared at her personal display, pretending that she didn’t have an opinion.

“Come on,” Jalouse repeated. “I’ll be down in Debrief in ten minutes. Unloading me in the control room instead of the docking bay won’t hurt anything.”

The shimmering ambiance of plasma discharges and auroras had faded from TC 779’s screens, leaving only the bare plates and girders of the dock. The bay door was a touch-sensitive unit, accepting a high leakage rate in order to speed operations. The black-and-yellow chevrons on the leaves had been scuffed almost entirely away by equipment entering ARC Central. The personnel airlock directly into the transfer control room was almost never used.

“Transfer Control to Capsule Seven-Seven-Niner,” said a bored voice that Jalouse heard both through his helmet earphones and
over his suit’s audio pick-up from the speaker in TC 779’s cabin. “You’re cleared to Berth Seven. How do you intend to proceed?
Over.”

“Hold one, Control,” Roebeck said, grimacing as she reached for the airlock switch. “Go on, then, Jalouse. But I don’t know why she can’t meet you in Debrief like anybody else.”

The inner hatch cycled open. Jalouse entered the lock. “Thanks, Nan,” he said.

“Because he’s afraid his wife’ll be in Debrief, too.” Pauli Weigand chuckled from his seat opposite the hatch. “We’ve had enough excitement on this operation already.”

The inner lock closed. The outer membrane opened and Jalouse stepped onto the slotted emergency walkway. ARC Central was insulated from the world around it by hard vacuum.

A derrick slid into position above the capsule, in case Roebeck wanted to hand control over to the mechanical transporter.
The operator could see that somebody’d gotten out of TC 779 here, against regulations; but the ground crews didn’t make trouble for ARC Riders—and anyway, Sonia herself was the supervisor on this shift.

“Transfer Control to Seven-Seven-Niner,” said the voice, which Jalouse now heard only through his earphones. “Do you have
a problem?”

Jalouse stepped into Central’s lock. The hatch closed behind him. He felt the clang through his boot soles, and the strip-lights
on the paneling above quivered at his armored weight. Somebody else in a displacement suit was coming along the walkway from the other direction.

“Jalouse?” Weigand called over the team’s intercom. “Bet you can’t get out of your suit in ten minutes, much less into hers.”

“Wise ass!” Jalouse muttered as pressure built in the airlock. Hell, they’d never been in love. Grimacing, Jalouse poked the
switch to open the inner door and raised his faceshield as he stepped into ARC Central.

Sonia wasn’t waiting on the other side of the airlock.

Neither was anything Jalouse had ever seen in his life.

Instead of the worn paint and control panels of Transfer Control Room Two, this chamber was hung with silk brocade. From the
ceiling beamed the face of an Oriental whom Jalouse didn’t recognize in the instant he had to give to the decor.

A dozen people in one-piece taupe coveralls sat stiffly at desks. For an instant, they gaped in amazement as great as that
of Jalouse himself. Machine pistols were slung from their straight-backed chairs.

gauntleted left hand grabbed his helmet faceshield down. The plate wouldn’t seat.

“Invasion!” screamed the translation program in Jalouse’s suit as the strangers gabbled in some language that sure-hell wasn’t
Standard. “Invasion! Kill him!”

Jalouse pressed the switch of the airlock behind him. It didn’t open. One of the strangers fired point-blank into the ARC
Rider’s chest.

Bullets ricocheted in all directions. Jalouse stumbled sideways, over a desk, and fell. He pointed the weapon he carried slung,
but it was a plasma discharger. If he fired it here without his faceshield clamped, the hostiles elsewhere in ARC Central wouldn’t have to do anything but sweep up his ashes.

Short, screaming people in coveralls leaped to their feet to get a better shot at the invader. One of them spun and fell,
his face torn by a kcyholing ricochet. The slamming, sparking impacts bruised Jalouse even though they hadn’t yet penetrated
his armor.

During the operation, Jalouse had used the pair of acoustic grenades that should have hung from his equipment belt. Fifty-fifty
the detonation wave would have pulled his head off anyway when it inevitably lifted his helmet.

Timeline B: November 17, 2522 AD

Nan Roebeck tilted her scat as the transportation capsule shuddered and clucked. The electronics were aligning themselves in the limbo that was neither when nor where, preparing to displace again.

Roebeck could have saved an apparent ninety seconds by maneuvering the capsule in the sidereal universe to its berth. With
the amount of traffic around ARC Central, though, it was both simpler and safer to let the software displace the vehicle…
and anyway, Roebeck didn’t feel like doing any unnecessary work right now.

The operation had been a bitch. Central’s preinsertion intelligence had a gap in it that could have gotten somebody killed.
Would have gotten Dor Jalouse killed, except Chun Quo had noticed the anomaly in the hostiles’ wake, and Tim Grainger was
a fast triggerman even by the standards of the ARC Riders. Grainger pulsed the second hostile vehicle, frying the circuitry of the coil gun maybe a half second before penetrators would have chewed the rest of the way through Jalouse’s suit.

Roebeck turned her head slightly as she stretched. Weigand and Chun were chatting, while Barthuli was already reviewing clips
of the raw data the team’s sensors had gathered during the operation. That left Grainger to himself, as usual. Quiet, composed; not obviously uncomfortable, but still looking like a well-mannered goat that had wandered into a luxury apartment.

Tim Grainger had been born at the beginning of the 21st century. The rest of the team, Jalouse included, was from the 26th, where ARC Central was parked in a huge vacuum chamber isolated from the rest of the Earth except via temporal displacement.

In a manner of speaking, all the ARC Riders were displacees. The teams used technology from far up the line—how far, most Riders didn’t want to guess—to operate outside of their own periods. The fact remained that Grainger was an outsider even to the general outgroup.

“Got anything planned for your downtime, Tim?” Roebeck asked. She was team leader, so it was her duty to make her personnel comfortable.

At the corner of Roebeck’s mind was the awareness that, because of her position, she was as much alone as Grainger. Roebeck’s comfort was somebody else’s duty, she supposed, though they were making a piss-poor job of it.

“My orange tree ought to be ready to flower,” Grainger said. His smile suggested that he knew what Roebeck was trying to do—and
appreciated it. “If it’s going to, that—”

The capsule slid into normal spacetime. The alarms went off.

The display across the forward bulkhead was set to show the hangar in which the capsule was settling. That remained as the
background, but the color was washed out to highlight the emergency dump from Jalouse’s suit in the center of the image. A
red strobe lit the cabin, and Roebeck’s four team members muttered exclamations as they lunged for weapons and gear.

On the display, a woman screaming “Death to the intruder!” jumped onto a desk. She fired a machine pistol point-blank at the
sensors on Jalouse’s helmet. The projected image fuzzed and speckled as Jalouse toppled backward.

“Open the—” Grainger shouted. He had a fléchette gun/EMP combination in one hand and was pulling down the facemask from his headband with the other. There’d be no time to suit up fully.

The expression of the woman facing Jalouse from the display went blankly farcical. One of her fellows managed accidentally to shoot her in the nape of the neck. The high-velocity bullet flicked out one of her front teeth as it exited.

Roebeck’s hand threw the switch that did the only thing which made sense under the circumstances. Transportation Capsule 779
shunted toward its most recent previous temporal location, out of danger.

Out of an ARC Central that wasn’t the base the team had left for the just-completed mission.

Displacing from 2522 AD to circa 50,000 BC

Grainger turned to Roebeck. “Nan?” he said, certain of what she’d done but hoping he was wrong. He wanted the vehicle to shunt
into realtime on the dock outside the admin wing again so that the five of them could charge in to rescue Jalouse.

Charge in to get their asses blown away, was more like it. Roebeck was responsible for the whole team, not just Jalouse in
his immediate difficulties. If their ARC Central had been replaced by a hive of hostile strangers, then she and her people
were the only chance their timeline had of displacing the different present to which the transport capsule had returned.

“We didn’t really return after all, did we?” Barthuli said with a smile, as if he were reading Roebeck’s mind. Maybe he was.
The analyst was too strange for Roebeck to rule out any possibilities.

“Suit up,” Roebeck said, pushing between Grainger and the still-seated Chun. “Me and Pauli, then the other two of you. They
may be waiting there, too.”

She nodded to Barthuli. “Gerd?” she added. “Watch the controls, will you?”

The locker containing the displacement suits was at the rear of the cabin. There wasn’t enough room in the capsule for more
than two riders to don the suits at a time. Pauli Weigand was already latching his closed around him.

“We’re running back to 50K, aren’t we?” Grainger demanded at rising volume. “We’re just going to run off and leave Jalouse!”

Weigand stepped forward in his armor to face the hatch. Displacement suits were miniature temporal vehicles, though they lacked the sophistication and spatial displacement abilities of a transport capsule. For the moment, the important things were the protection the suit gave the person wearing it and the load of weaponry its powered muscles could handle.

“We’re not running anywhere,” Roebeck said. They were running and she knew it, but they had to run. “We’re backing out of an ambush. When we figure out who’s responsible for the problem, we’ll deal with them.”

She locked her suit closed. Anonymous within its scarred, rounded surfaces, she stepped to Weigand’s side.

Grainger sighed. “I’d hate to lose Jalouse,” he said. He raised himself on the crossbar and slid his feet down, into the legs of his fitted suit.

Jalouse had survived the operation because Tim Grainger did exactly the right thing in next to no time. For Jalouse to die in the first moments following the team’s return to the apparent safety of ARC Central would be worse for Grainger than for
the rest of them.

Worst of all for Dor Jalouse, though.

“We haven’t lost anybody yet,” Roebeck said. “We’re regrouping, then we’ll see what we can do.”

“It’s our job to fix things,” Chun said as her armored form joined Weigand and Roebeck. “This is no different.”

This was a lot different.

“It’s all clear outside,” Barthuli said from the front of the cabin. “Of course, we may not have sensors to track intruders subtle enough to cause a change at Central.”

The analyst sounded interested, but not in the least concerned. Roebeck knew she was lucky to have somebody as skilled as
Barthuli on her team, but he still got on her nerves in a crisis.

Barthuli had become an ARC Rider because of his genetic predisposition to Alzheimer’s disease. At some point—which could be
any point, from the present moment on—his splendid mind was going to begin unraveling into psychosis. Barthuli intended to see
as much as he could in whatever time he had, and he’d decided the field operations of the Anti-Revision Command provided the
best opportunity of doing that.

The trouble was that Barthuli’s world view was unique. Fate had condemned him to something worse than death in his own terms, so matters that seemed of incalculable importance to the rest of the team didn’t touch him emotionally. The vanishment, the destruction, of the timeline in which Barthuli was born was to him only an opportunity to glimpse additional realities before his intellect drowned in spasms of memory loss and mindless rage.

“I’m going to open up,” Roebeck said, warning the others a moment before she activated the outer hatch through the keypad
on her suit’s left thigh. With an electromagnetic pulse generator clipped beneath a fléchette gun, Roebeck followed Weigand into a continent empty of all human life save their own.

50K was a temporal direction rather than a specific time. Anyone who carried out time displacement activities without being
a member of the ARC was a temporal violator, a revisionist. Central targeted the revisionists, and the ARC Riders solved the
problem.

Sometimes violators were killed in the process of being stopped; normally (and by choice; a truly civilized society is a squeamish society) they were captured. Rather than imprison the captives in the 26th century, revisionists were freed, unharmed but without tools or even clothing, at around 50,000 BC. Males were dumped in North America, females in Australia; in either case, tens of millennia before humans populated those continents.

The period chosen was in the middle of a major ice age, but the glaciers had been in temporary retreat for thousands of years.
The dumps were made in what was locally the late spring, giving the violators as much time as possible to adapt to their new
surroundings before winter closed in.

And the dumps were made at intervals of a century, preset into the mechanisms of the transportation vehicles themselves. This
wasn’t primarily to protect the ARC Riders involved, though some separation was necessary for that reason: the later version
of a person who revisited the person’s own timeline vanished.

It was barely possible that captives might find the exiguous remains of a dump from a hundred years earlier. There was no
chance at all that the groups would join forces and somehow manage to reenter the time stream. Those from up the line who
ran the Anti-Revision Command may have been squeamish, but there was no question about their ultimate ruthlessness.

Roebeck viewed their surroundings without noticing anything that shouldn’t be present. They’d settled onto a prairie, as expected.
The ground looked flat as a table until you noticed the treetops in the middle distance. Ten meters or more of trunk were hidden by a combination of slope and the banks of the stream which the trees fringed.

Roebeck had made twenty-three displacements to 50K, so she knew the terrain. Sixteen of those trips had carried captives, naked and terrified, to what would be home for the rest of their lives.

As Barthuli had said, hostiles who were able to escape Central’s detection could also fool TC 779’s sensors. Roebeck raised
her opaque faceplate with her left hand and scanned the landscape again, this time letting her Mark One Eyeball gather the
information.

There was still nothing anomalous. The grasses and associated flowering plants were waist high for the most part, though occasional sere canes of the previous season’s growth waved three or four meters in the air. A mixed herd of horses and camels cropped vegetation; some of the animals were within a hundred meters. The brown-black forms half a kilometer to the west were giant
bison. Dust rose as beasts hooked dirt over themselves with their long horns.

All as it should be, in the days before men. The hissing and actinics of the capsule arriving must have startled the animals
somewhat, but they had settled back into their routine by the time the hatch opened. Suited humans didn’t disturb them.

Spring or not, the wind on Roebeck’s bare cheeks was chill and harsh. Sometimes she wondered how many captives survived their
first week in 50K, but the process wasn’t one she could’ve changed if she wanted to. Anyway, temporal intruders would end
the unborn lives of billions if they weren’t stopped.

But the wind was very cold.

“Clear,” said Weigand from the other side of the vehicle.

“Clear/Clear,” echoed Chun and Grainger from the positions they’d taken to bow and stern.

“Clear,” Roebeck agreed. Whatever had happened at ARC Central, the folks responsible hadn’t managed to follow Transportation Capsule 779’s flight into the distant past.

“Now,” she added softly, “let’s check the recordings and figure out just what was going on up there.”

Circa 50,000 BC

“To begin with,” Barthuli said as he reran the dump from Jalouse’s suit, “the personnel in what should have been Transfer Control
Room Two were speaking Japanese. Rather, a language that differed from 19th-century Japanese in a fashion similar to the differences between Standard and 19th-century English.”

The image on the display was enhanced to glassy cleanliness. This halfway stage between reality and iconic representation
disturbed Roebeck at a gut level more than the static of the raw transmission did, though she’d never admitted that to anybody else. Anything that she told others about herself was a handle fate could use against her.

Grainger carried a piece of the bullet that smashed his rifle—but not his face as he sighted the rifle—during some action
back in his home time. Weigand wore one blue and one brown stocking at the start of every mission. Chun had an unfailing silent
routine that could have been prayer, mantra, or who knew what. Jalouse didn’t touch—literally touch—a woman from the timethey were warned for an operation till he’d boarded the vehicle.

No Rider and nobody at ARC Central really knew how the capsule mechanisms worked. The technology was from up the line. A savage doesn’t have to understand electricity to flip a light switch, but the need to use forces he doesn’t understand might make
the savage more, not less, superstitious.

Even Barthuli might have a talisman. Though perhaps not.

“The physiognomy of the office staff fits a Japanese matrix better than any available alternatives,” Barthuli continued, “though
I wouldn’t put much stock in that. The interesting thing is that there’s no sign of the mid-20th century growth spurt driven by an improved diet on the home islands. Of course, these twelve individuals may not be a random sample.”

Barthuli had slowed the movement on the display for better detail. It was like watching a ballet performed underwater. Sparks and chips of furniture pirouetted deliberately as staff members fired, their faces distorted in terrible hatred. Perhaps that, like the delicacy of the bullet damage, was merely an artifact of slow motion.

“We’re assuming there’s been a temporal revision,” Chun Quo said crisply. Her very dispassion was a sign that she was aware
of the Oriental ancestry she shared with the folk trying to kill Jalouse. “Is it possible that there’s been some kind of political change at Central? That the staff has been replaced in a… a coup?”

“No,” said Barthuli approvingly. He cut the displayed image from the firefight in Transfer Two back to the docking bay as seen when TC 779 settled into her berth. “But that brings up a very interesting point. Notice the other vehicle?”

A transportation capsule rested in a cradle two berths over. The vehicle was probably undergoing routine maintenance, because
several of the skin panels had been removed. No personnel were in view.

“The nose is too blunt,” Weigand said.

Barthuli beamed. His fingers touched controls. The image became a blue schematic rotating slowly against a white background. The analyst overlaid it with a second schematic, this time yellow, as like to the first as raindrops are to one another.

And as different. Where the exterior of the capsules was identical, the schematic was green. At least 90 percent of the outlines
remained blue and yellow.

“The second image is that of a 700-series capsule, of course,” Barthuli said. “Quite a remarkable convergence. I could have
shown the same similarity in the bay itself or the geometry of the transfer control room. But it’s not the same Central we
left, no.”

“The clerks’ reaction,” Grainger said. “Do you suppose they were expecting us—somebody like us? Or is the social structure such that people are always armed and ready to go off like bombs if the unexpected occurs?”

“No society could be that paranoid,” Weigand said. “Those people were afraid somebody’d show up to undo the revision their organization made.”

“If you’d been raised with me on Sunrise Terrace,” Grainger said with a wan smile, “you wouldn’t be so sure of limits on xenophobia.”

“What I found particularly striking,” Barthuli said, “is the close similarity of the physical plant, despite the obvious divergence
from the social system of our timeline. I’m not sure those up the line would be concerned about the changes. They may not
have been discommoded in the least.”

“We’ve been discommoded,” Roebeck said, ending that discussion. She went on, “Our data banks have a full download for the late twentieth alone, is that correct?”

“1971 through ‘91 in full detail,” Barthuli said. “Twenty years before that at second order. For the rest, we have only the
normal baseline.”

The team’s just-completed operation had been against a pair of 23d-century revisionists who had gone back to 1991. They weren’t dabblers who might have distorted timelines by inadvertence. Rather, they’d consciously intended to change the past by using
mind-control devices on the US national security advisor. For the mission, TC 779’s data bank had been prepared with information regarding the temporal area of operations at the highest level of detail of which ARC Central was capable.

“The first thing we need to do is to enlist someone from this timeline’s 1991, since that’s when our capsule’s database is
most complete,” Roebeck said. She was stating a course of action, not asking for opinions. It struck her that she was the
highest official of her Anti-Revision Command on this timeline; she smiled inwardly.

“We’ll compare the local’s timeline with ours,” she continued. With the keyboard she began to adjust the gross parameters
of the next immersion in the timestream. TC 779’s artificial intelligence would determine the precise settings in accordance
with Roebeck’s generalities. “We’ll spot the divergence, and then we’ll cure it.”

“Cure the bastards who caused it, too,” Tim Grainger said in a voice as emotionless as a shard of broken glass. The conversation
had brought Grainger’s mind back to the milieu in which he’d grown up. It always took him a while to return to an even tenor
when he’d been thinking of the Sunrise Terrace enclave.

“What if the split took place later than 1991?” Chun Quo asked. “We won’t have any kind of details then.”

“We’ll assume that’s not the case,” Roebeck said, bending over her task. “If it is, then we’ve got a problem.”

“If it is…” Barthuli said. He smiled as he bent his tongue around a phrase that was neither his nor that of the time horizon
in which he had been born. “If it is, then we’re shit outa luck.”

Timeline B: June 29, 1991 AD

The first rocket over the berm awakened Major Rebecca Carnes. Five more had landed with their terrible whoop WHAM! in the midst of Fire Support Base Schaydin before she managed to roll out of her cot.

The ground bucked every time a warhead detonated. The gooners were launching their rockets in pairs. The six-foot rip across
the top panel of the tent hadn’t been there when Carnes went to bed at midnight. Through it she saw the green tracking flare
of another rocket an instant before it impacted.

That blast toppled one side of the tent’s three-course sandbag wall and knocked all the breath from Carnes’ lungs. The canvas
vanished as rags flapping on the shock wave.


Carnes lifted her face from the dirt. She’d gone to bed fully dressed, though she’d loosened the laces of her boots to keep
her feet from swelling during the night. She’d been using her flak jacket as a pillow. The protective garment was an old one
with interleaved layers of ballistic nylon and aramid fiber, but it was better than nothing.

Carnes reached up just enough to grab the jacket. The barracks belt and holstered revolver slid down also. She hooked the
belt around her waist after she’d put the jacket on.

Carnes didn’t know how to shoot. She was a nurse, for chrissake! She’d never even taken the revolver out of its holster since the supply sergeant tossed the weapon onto the
pile of gear she had to carry to the helicopter waiting to fly her to her new command. The weight was a comfort of sorts, now.

The bombardment ceased or paused. Fifty or more rockets had struck; this was no mere harassing attack. Carnes raised herself on one arm to see what was happening around her.

By virtue of being the only officer of American citizenship present, Major Rebecca Carnes was in titular command of the battalion of Argentinian mercenaries making up the remainder of the firebase complement. A few of the Argentinians spoke English. None of them would speak to Carnes, at least not after she made clear within. . .