Arc Riders (3 page)

“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

T
he 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 the hour of her arrival that she’d as soon have slept
with the dogs subsisting on the battalion’s garbage as with any of the Argentinians themselves.

The mercenaries might have been less dismissive if Carnes was male, but probably not. The assignments office in Hanoi hadn’t
told her what happened to the AmCit officer she was replacing, but she’d already gotten the impression the fellow hadn’t died
as a result of enemy action.

That was how Rebecca Carnes was going to die, though. She knew enough about combat to see that. She’d arrived at her “command”
less than eighteen hours before the Chinese overran it.

The Tactical Operations Center was a trailer buried in a trench by the same team of US combat engineers who’d bulldozed up
the earthen berm to create the firebase six months before. The engineers had done a good job.

That was just as well, since FSB Schaydin had been the last mission for most of them. They’d been ambushed while withdrawing
by road. Carnes, looking out the side window of the CH-47 helicopter, had seen the burned-out lowboys and construction equipment
as the bird made its approach carrying her and a sling-load of supplies.

Machine gun fire and the dull
crump
of grenades replaced the howling rockets. One of the warheads had plowed up a grave that must have predated the firebase.
The stench of flesh dead so long it was liquescent mingled chokingly with explosive residues.

Carnes stumbled toward the TOC. She supposed she belonged there, but she knew also she was drawn by the fancied protection
of the dirt covering the trailer. That wouldn’t save her, but she didn’t suppose much of anything would.

The attackers had chosen the night of the new moon. The only light came from explosions and the green-white tracers—Chinese
tracers—snapping across the firebase. Very occasionally an Argentinian shot back, but the red sparks of the US ammunition
were smothered by storms of return fire.

A great explosion shocked the night orange. A flying object hit Carnes and flattened her against a half-collapsed sandbag
wall.

The base existed as a gun emplacement for four World War II–vintage howitzers which were supposed to support the infantry
patrolling the surrounding hills. A Chinese grenade or satchel charge had detonated the ammunition bunker in a single volcanic
blast.

Carnes couldn’t breathe. She knew she’d only had the breath knocked out of her, but knowing that didn’t permit her to move.

A white star cluster shot up from a bunker across the fire-base. The flare was meant for signaling rather than illumination.
Even so, its momentary light permitted Carnes to see that the object which had hit her was a human leg, complete to the ankle.

The sight had the unexpected effect of steadying her. Carnes had entered the US Army as a nurse in 1968. Her first tour in
what was then the Vietnam War had been at the 93d Evacuation Hospital. She’d seen enough severed limbs then that she could
never again feel horror at the sight of one; only sadness, and that when the living had been tended to and there was time
to be sad.

Carnes stood and resumed her course toward the TOC. She stepped carefully over the leg; not because she was queasy but rather
out of respect.

The radio tower adjacent to the buried trailer twinkled like a Christmas decoration with the reflections of tracer bullets.
Argentinian officers would be begging higher command for support. US resources in southern China were stretched to—or beyond—the
breaking point. Even if help was available, it couldn’t come in time to save the situation now.

Fifty yards from Carnes, the fuel tank for the firebase generator ignited with a
thump
. A column of flame shot skyward from a pool that spread sluggishly across the ground. Two figures ran out of the blaze, their
identities shrouded by the flames.

A man silhouetted by the burning diesel fuel hunched, then flung a heavy parcel down the ramp to the entrance of the TOC.
It was a satchel charge. Two seconds after the Chinese sapper threw it, the bundle exploded.

Overburden covering the trailer bulged upward, then collapsed in a smoking, square-edged crater. Loose earth covered the mangled
bodies of whichever Argentinians had been in the operations center when the charge went off.

The sapper got to his feet again. Carnes was still standing, though the blast had numbed her eardrums. The gooner saw her
and reached for the automatic rifle slung across his back.

Carnes unsnapped her holster’s retaining strap. She tried to draw the revolver. It stuck to the leather. She had to tug twice,
the second time with hysterical strength, to get the weapon loose.

The gooner was only five meters from her. He jerked back the bolt handle to charge his rifle. The clang of metal tinkled like
an ill-tuned bell to Carnes’ shocked hearing. She pointed the revolver at the soldier, wondering if she should instead have
run.

The trigger didn’t move, no matter how hard she pulled it. For a moment Carnes thought wildly that the safety was still on.
A scrap of information from training twenty-odd years before returned to her: Revolvers don’t have safeties.

The weapon she’d been issued had languished, God knew how long, in some arms locker. A logistics system scraping the bottom
of its resources dragged the revolver out to equip an officer who was equally useless in the combat role in which she’d been
placed.

The Chinese soldier aimed his automatic rifle. Carnes threw the revolver at him. The awkward missile didn’t come within a
meter of the man.

Blue light and a sound like bacon frying enveloped Carnes. Outside the aura, all noise and motion stopped. An oval bulk formed
before her. She wondered if this was death.

The only thing that moved in the landscape was the object solidifying from the air before her. Tracer bullets hung in midflight,
sparks of light filtered blue by the surrounding haze. Fine hairs on Carnes’ arms and the back of her neck prickled as the
building static charge made them rise.

Carnes lifted her right hand to prove that the general paralysis didn’t extend to her. The object forming had lost almost
all of its insubstantial shimmer. It was smoothly ovoid, some three meters by five along the primary axes. A large bubble
formed on the surface facing Carnes.

The bubble split vertically. A man stepped out. “Major Carnes?” he said. “My name’s Tim Grainger, and we have a proposition
for you.”

Carnes choked. She’d been holding her breath without realizing it. Gasping, she began to laugh. Her bruised ribs hurt her.
She knelt and leaned over to relieve the pressure on them, still laughing.

Grainger didn’t look surprised, though that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Carnes suspected he was the sort who made a
point of not displaying any emotion until he’d thought it through. He was a lightly built man of medium height. His hair was
brunette, and his complexion probably a deep tan. Carnes couldn’t be sure under the present light conditions.

Grainger wore a one-piece garment which covered him from wrists and neck to a pair of seamless, lightweight boots. Its fabric
was thin enough that the man’s bone structure was visible through it. The surface of the coveralls mimicked the pattern of
its surroundings so perfectly that sometimes Grainger appeared to be a disembodied head and hands.

Carnes got control of her laughter. She didn’t know whether it had been hysteria or relief. Maybe the gooner had shot her.
Instead of her life passing before her eyes, she’d imagined a stranger in a weird outfit and the degree of calm interest that
high-school guidance counselors show.

“I accept your proposition,” she said. “Am I dead?” She stood up. Though the spasm had passed, the whole business still struck
her as funny.

Grainger frowned for the first time. “This isn’t in your imagination,” he said. “Your agreement will commit you to certain
things. We’re… time travelers; from a timeline that should have occurred but didn’t because of something that happened within
your lifetime. We want to go through your memories and find that nexus of change so that we can reverse it.”

“I said I accept,” Carnes repeated. She was tired and she hurt and she’d been on the point of death. Anger as violent and
irrational as the laughter of a moment before made her voice shake.

“Look!” she shouted, gesturing toward the frozen chaos around her. “If I don’t volunteer, that gooner kills me, right? I volunteer!”

Grainger smiled. The expression had a murderous chill that Rebecca Carnes had seen before, when men who’d come in from the
bush talked among others of their kind. The survivors talked, the ones who returned again and again with everything but perhaps
their souls.

“Gooner,” Grainger repeated in a soft voice. He wasn’t speaking to Carnes anymore. “Welcome back to Sunrise Terrace, Tim Grainger.”

“I’m sorry,” Carnes said. The anger was gone. She didn’t know what she’d said, but she knew wounded men, and she knew the
wounds the surgeons didn’t see.

She reached out her hand.

Grainger shook his head. “Wait,” he said. “If you come with us, you’ll never be able to return to your own time. With luck,
this timeline won’t even exist for you, for us. You’ll be comfortably maintained in the 26th century, or you may—if you want
to and if you meet the requirements—be permitted to join the ARC Riders.”

He smiled again, this time wryly. “They took me. I’m from 2025. But we have to have your informed consent before we take you
aboard.”

“I’ll come with you,” Carnes said. “I’d probably come with you even if the… the soldier on the other side of your ship wasn’t
about to kill me.”

“Ah—” Grainger said. “In the interests of precision, I’m
not
telling you that Chinese soldier will kill you.” He saw her surprise and added quickly, “Major Carnes, you’ll die here if
you stay, I don’t mean that. But you may not be killed by these bullets or any particular bullet.”

“I’ll
come
with you,” Carnes said with soft emphasis.

Grainger extended his hand and took hers at last. “Watch the lintel,” he warned as they stepped together into the misty object
from which he’d appeared.

The bulge clam-shelled shut behind them. The walls around Carnes were suddenly as real as those of a submarine’s pressure
lock. An inner hatch split open before them.

A man, a woman, and two figures in suits as rigidly confining as medieval jousting armor waited within. The woman nodded welcome
or approval.

The front quadrant of the inner hull showed the firebase in three-dimensional detail, as clearly as if the wall were glass.
The flashes and chaotic movement resumed.