Arc Riders (13 page)

Circa 50,000
BC

R
oebeck leaned against the ledge of rock and looked down at the distant capsule. Grainger was at work, tracing connections.
She could see only the top of his head because he was on the hatch side of the vehicle. Chun was inside, probably asleep.

A vulture circled above the valley’s farther rim. Roebeck had climbed to the ledge to catch the morning sun, but the thin
cirrus haze combed much of the heat from the wan light. The rock was still cold from the night just past, though the hoarfrost
had sublimed with the dawn.

Roebeck sighed. This wasn’t a great place to relax, but she didn’t need sleep and she certainly wasn’t ready to resume work.
Might as well view the landscape. When the weather deteriorated, as it surely would within the next weeks and months, she
wouldn’t have even this.

The Riders paced themselves individually. Chun was painstaking and slow; she worked fourteen, even sixteen hours out of twenty-four,
though she knew as well as Roebeck did that she’d accomplish more in the long run if she took longer breaks.

Grainger was very fast when he was on, but he worked the way a natural pianist plays: for the flow of music, not the individual
notes. He’d have checked his own work if necessary, but his talent wasn’t in that area. Instead, Roebeck went over Grainger’s
work before each spell of her own. It was a good way of bending her mind into the necessary rote pathways.

Roebeck was the steadiest of the three. She put herself on a rigid schedule, five blocks of two hours each, with an hour off
between shifts. She didn’t work during the ten hours of darkness. Miniature floodlights illuminated the entire hull, but Roebeck’s
circadian rhythms were in their down-phase at night.

She could live on her nerves when that was necessary. It wasn’t necessary now, so she paced herself for greatest efficiency.

Roebeck pulled the facemask down from the headband and scanned the valley for large life-forms. After a moment on optical,
she switched to the thermal imaging and directed the microprocessor in the band to highlight anomalies. This ledge was forty
meters above the valley floor where TC 779 rested. Roebeck climbed to it up a scree of rock cracked from the cliff face by
successive thaws and freezing.

A family of giant fallow deer, six of them, moved in a straggling line toward the head of the valley where mist overhung a
pond. An animal would pace ten or twenty meters forward at a time while the others waited or browsed. Occasionally one of
the deer would break into a bounding run, amazingly clumsy to watch. The stag was last of all, poised like a splendid statue
among a stand of cedars near the rock wall.

The team hadn’t seen any large carnivores thus far during its stay, but common sense and the cautious behavior of prey animals
indicated some were present in the valley. Even the rhinos were skittish, though the smallest of them—the offspring born the
past year—weighed half a tonne by now.

Despite the weight, Roebeck carried a fléchette gun with attached EMP generator every time she left the vehicle. The real
purpose of the weapon was to deal with the hostile ARC Riders should their transportation capsule appear, but a burst of fléchettes
would discourage wolves or a lion as effectively.

For preference, Roebeck would use the acoustic pistol she carried in a shoulder holster. For absolute preference, she wouldn’t
do anything at all to disturb the balance of events that would have occurred without the team’s presence.

One school of thought held that the further back in time one went, the greater the capacity of the temporal fabric to close
over rents torn in it by humans. Those on the other side of the debate pointed out that a revision occurring in the distant
past acted on an enormous temporal lever. An event here could be magnified into an asymptotic rush of change, overwhelming
history and perhaps the very existence of humankind.

Grainger took the first view, though he didn’t care very much. Tim was permanently adrift from his own horizon, so the question
of what happened to other times was of only academic interest to him. Chun fiercely believed that the risks of causing disruption
on this horizon were logarithmically greater than they would be in a historical period.

Roebeck didn’t have a strong opinion of her own, save that she intended to keep the debate theoretical. It frightened her
to work in the presence of humans and
not
have proper data on what to avoid. She wasn’t sure even Central had such data. Jumps this deep into the timestream were beyond
the capacity of revisionists working with experimental hardware. Those up the line might not have seen a reason to gather
information on a distant preliterate period, since the investigation itself could disrupt the horizon.

“Nan?” Chun said, communicating through the intercom in Roebeck’s headband. Chun’s exceptional calm bespoke tension to those
who knew her well. “The humans are back. They’re moving toward us along the cliff.”

“Quo, I see them,” Roebeck said. Though she hadn’t until Chun relayed the warning from the artificial intelligence overseeing
the capsule’s sensors. Roebeck knew exactly where to look, because the mother and her young daughter made a similar trek every
morning.

The local humans—the Neanderthals—carried digging sticks. The child was naked. The mother wore a deerhide with the hair-side
against her back and the forelegs tied over her shoulder. Occasionally she or her daughter dropped potential food items into
a bag of similar material, though for the most part they seemed to devour their finds on the spot.

The pair was three hundred meters from TC 779 but somewhat closer to Roebeck because they were working along the cliff-edge
scree. Roebeck knew the Neanderthals were aware of the presence of intruders on their horizon; she’d caught them watching
her, watching the capsule, many times in the past—

But only from hiding, or at a distance that they probably thought shielded them from the Riders’ observance. The vehicle and
its inhabitants fascinated the Neanderthals, but they refused to acknowledge its existence openly. Day after day they eased
closer to TC 779, but they only viewed the capsule sidelong.

“Nan, I think we ought to displace,” Chun said. “We don’t know what effect we could be having on these humans.”

“They’re Neanderthalers,” commented Grainger, wholly visible now as he lifted off a section of hull plate from near the bow.
“Not on the direct line, are they?”

The curved metal caught sunlight in a brilliant shimmer. The hostiles’ plasma had damaged circuits even where particles didn’t
fully penetrate the outer hull. The team couldn’t trust the computer’s own assessment by pair matching between identical circuits,
because many times both pairs had been destroyed.

“I don’t believe our information is that complete,” Chun said, calm where another person would have snapped. “I’ve set up
a course to Australia, where—”

“No,” said Roebeck. “No, I’m sorry, Quo. The risk’s just too high. By now we can be fairly certain that the hostiles haven’t
tracked us. I don’t intend to risk that concealment until we’re ready to displace to the target in 1968.”

The child scrambled up a pine tree. She began breaking cones off twigs to toss to her mother. Slender branches crackled, waggling
up and down beneath her weight.

As if by chance, the child turned so that she could look toward Roebeck through a spray of short needles. When she saw Roebeck
was watching her, the tiny face ducked down again.

Do they know we’re human? Roebeck wondered. Do they
think
we’re human?

“Have either of you seen a male?” Grainger asked. “I’ve only seen those two, but that’s not a viable group.”

“There aren’t any other humans in the valley, so far as our sensors can tell,” Chun said. “There’s no sign of fire, and an
all-spectra sort during the period we’ve been here has shown only the two individuals—day or night.”

The mother chirped to her offspring. The child chittered a response and moved back from the tip of a swaying branch. Were
the sounds words or merely signals like the growl of a dog to an intruder in its territory?

“The skins indicate hunting,” Roebeck said, thinking aloud. “This female doesn’t have either the tools or an apparent desire
to bring down game so large. I’d say they were outcasts from a larger grouping. Or, more likely, survivors.”

The child dropped to the ground in three startling leaps and retrieved her digging stick. She moved with her mother toward
the loose rocks.

“Well, don’t worry about our causing problems up the line, then,” Grainger said. “We could teach these two to smelt iron and
it still wouldn’t matter. They don’t have a prayer of making it through the winter.”

Roebeck watched the pair of Neanderthals overturning stones. They crowed in glee whenever their fingers snatched a tidbit
from a crevice.

Tim was obviously correct in his assessment, which should have made Roebeck more cheerful. She, too, worried about the unplanned
effects the team might cause here.

Instead, though, Roebeck had to stifle her desire to tell Grainger to shut up until he had something useful to say.

Circa 10,000
BC

R
ebecca Carnes was wearing canvas-sided jungle boots, designed to drain water away from the wearer’s foot. They didn’t do a
lot for mud, though. She thought she’d seen her share of mud in Southeast Asia, but this Mississippi Valley bottomland provided
black muck that set new standards for clinginess. It was like walking through a basin of Super Glue.

“We should’ve gone up as far as we needed on the high ground,” she said to Weigand ahead of her. “Then straight down. Instead
of tramping along through this.”

“The only thing that pleases me about this,” Weigand replied, “is thinking that Gerd had to walk through it, too. Hold up
a moment.”

Carnes was glad for the pause. Weigand pulled the face-mask over his eyes and scanned the overgrown terrain ahead of them.
There was no visible sign of Barthuli—or anybody else—passing this way, but filters and the processing unit in the headband
detected and enhanced minute changes in the infrared spectrum. “We’re on course,” Weigand said.

“If we are,” Carnes grumbled, “we ought to be able to smell woodsmoke.”

They slogged forward. The soil was too wet and too frequently flooded to support large trees, but the alders and willows grew
in dense screens. She and Weigand didn’t have machetes. They had to squirm through, bending slender trunks and trying not
to tangle their feet in the root mats.

A sprained ankle here would be a serious problem, though Carnes supposed Weigand would be able to deal with it. The big man
hadn’t struck her as solidly competent until she’d blurted the trouble with Barthuli to him.

There was buzzing ahead, as if they were nearing a step-down transformer. Could water sound like that, bubbling through rocks?

“Pauli?” Carnes said.

Weigand stepped out onto a sandbar. It was a hundred yards long and twenty wide, nestled on the inner curve of a river bend.
At the farther end of the sand were a score of skin-clad humans around the corpse of a mammoth.

The beast’s stripped upper ribs arched against the background of river haze. Over them hovered in the order of a million flies.
The noise Carnes heard as they approached was the wings of the insects sharing tons of mammoth flesh with the hunters who’d
killed the animal.

One of the encampment’s dogs noticed Carnes and Weigand. Probably the animal saw motion, since not even a dog’s nose could
make headway against the stench of the camp; though Carnes had smelled worse. Human flesh is almost liquid in its sticky,
gripping
odor, when it’s had time to ripen before a bomb or a dozer blade reopens the grave.

There were ten or a dozen dogs, nondescript animals that averaged in the 40- to 60-pound range. The beasts had varied markings,
some of them gray but others brindle or spotted. They didn’t look like a pack of wolves as they leaped to their feet and charged
the newcomers, yapping fiercely; but neither did they look anything like friendly.

The humans rose to their feet. A male hefted a spear with a white quartzite blade as long as Carnes’ hand. She’d drawn her
acoustic pistol. Weigand had his out as well, though he held his gas gun by the grip in his left hand.

“Don’t shoot the dogs unless you have to,” Weigand murmured. “It won’t hurt them permanently, but I don’t know how the owners
will react if we send their pets off dribbling shit and screaming.”

Then he added, “Gerd, you’ve got a lot to answer for.”

Barthuli, recognizable in his blue coveralls and obviously unharmed, stood up. He’d been sitting cross-legged among the local
males. He waved the piece of meat he’d been eating and said over the intercom, “Pauli and Rebecca, the dogs won’t hurt you.
Don’t act as though you’re afraid!”

“Who’s acting?” Weigand said. “Major, go on ahead and I’ll follow directly behind you. I’ll keep them from snapping at you
from behind.”

Carnes strode forward, though her first thought was,
And who keeps them from hamstringing
you? Weigand’s coveralls were tougher than her worn pair of jungle fatigues, and there wasn’t much use in arguing with a
man determined to be gallant. Besides, somebody had to be in the rear.

The dogs, yammering like White House reporters, parted before Carnes but darted in from the side. Pauli’s long arm swung the
gas gun back and behind him. The thick barrel smacked a dog hard enough to send the beast yelping off in agony.

After that the pack gave the two strangers more room, though the dogs accompanied them in a snarling circle all the way to
the encampment. The eight adult males remained standing, but only two of them bothered to keep weapons to hand. The women
and children resumed their tasks, watching Carnes and Weigand frankly.

An older, broad-chested man wore a lynx skin around his neck by the hind legs. The rest of the hide hung down in front of
him like a pectoral. The beautiful, mottled pelt was shedding, and the tied legs were black with grease. The man raised his
right arm high in the air, palm outward, and spoke a short sentence.