Arc Riders (12 page)

The analyst let himself skid to a considerable pine tree a dozen feet lower. He stopped himself by grabbing its trunk, then
sidled past a sheer drop of twenty feet to a more accessible slope. Carnes could see only the top of his head.

Barthuli paused and looked up at her. “Rebecca, I won’t have anotherchance to see this culture. They should be Clovis hunters,
you know—virtually identical to the folk who originally crossed into the continent over the Bering Land Bridge?”

“Gerd,” Carnes said, hugging her torso at diaphragm level as a protective reflex. “
Please
. We’ve got to get back, to Pauli and to the capsule.”

Barthuli shrugged. “Rebecca,” he said, “lives aren’t eternal. I’m perhaps more constantly aware of that than others of you,
but it’s true for everyone. Never give up a chance to learn, while your brain can accept the knowledge. Please, come along
with me.”

“Gerd, people depend on you!” Carnes said.

Barthuli shrugged again. “Tell Pauli that I won’t be any longer than I need be,” he said. He slid down to another pine and
vanished behind its trunk. Carnes could hear twigs crackling for a short while.

She turned and started back to where Weigand waited with the armor. After a moment, she broke into a run.

Circa 50,000
BC

“T
he hostiles weren’t very good, were they?” Grainger said as he and Roebeck viewed TC 779’s external damage with their faceshields
up. “They got buck fever and missed an easy one.”

The initial jet of plasma struck to the left of the hatch. It had dug a fist-deep gouge through the outer skin and hull core.
The cavity was of greatest diameter at its maximum depth, where it belled out like the top of a thundercloud. The inner plating
had reflected the bolt rather than absorbing the energy.

“I was thinking that,” Roebeck agreed. “We’ve got to assume they’ll still have a full complement if we run into them again,
though.”

Grainger shrugged. “Numbers within reason aren’t a problem,” he said. “So long as you’re quick and keep your muzzle down.”

He smiled. The expression made him look boyish for the moment before his face settled back into its normal grim lines.

Where the bolt first hit, damage was total. From that near-puncture, the stream of plasma trailed to the left and upward,
doing greatly diminished harm: after the first instant, TC 779’s automatic defenses had wrapped the vehicle in a dense magnetic
flux. The shielding repelled the stripped nitrogen atoms the way static-charged hairs are flung away from the scalp.

The outer skin showed the track of the plasma beam as orange-peel crinkling. Occasionally the scar deepened to a crater. These
were spots where there’d been a preexisting flaw, or a flux eddy had permitted a portion of the charged particles to strike
the metal directly.

The other shooter fired later than his partner—only by a temporal hair’s breadth, but enough that his beam struck after the
capsule’s shielding had risen to nearly full intensity. The plasma blasted a divot as broad as a soup plate from the hatch
just off-center, then slid left at a flatter angle than that of the first weapon. Where the second track crossed the first,
it blew away a chunk of the ceramic core. A penumbra of circuitry beyond the region of total destruction was crumbled.

“We’re lucky the hatch still works,” Roebeck said. “I know the theory about changing it to manual operation, but I wouldn’t
look forward to trying it.”

“For a target like this, I’d have coupled the triggers so the weapons fired together,” Grainger said. “And pulses, for Christ’s
sake, not close your eyes and mash the trigger!”

“They had three firing for a moment,” Roebeck said. She squatted to view the vehicle’s underside. “I don’t know whether the
third one simply missed, or our shielding deflected the beam completely because it came in too low.”

“Cowboys,” Grainger muttered. His gauntleted right hand caressed the grip of his fléchette gun.

“The most serious damage is…” Chun said over the helmet communicators. A beam of red light from a lens on Roebeck’s left shoulder
illuminated the point where the two plasma tracks crossed. “… here. Other places we’ve lost circuits, kilometers of them,
but it’s nothing we can’t bypass for now. Here we lost the temporal bus.”

“Is the spatial bus all right?” Roebeck asked in a thin voice. All her emotions were filtered gray by the fear Chun would
reply
no
.

“It’s on the other side of the vehicle,” Chun said. “It didn’t receive any damage at all.”

Roebeck felt her muscles relax. The world brightened around her again. She’d known they were looking at weeks of work, maybe
months, in replacing circuits and building shunts. TC 779 wouldn’t have anything like its normal delicacy of maneuver. Chances
were the apparent duration of displacements would lengthen, maybe double, because the vehicle had to generate some fields
in sequence rather than simultaneously.

But time it took to repair the capsule didn’t matter; the team would be that much older when they confronted the revisionists
and perhaps the hostile ARC Riders, that was all. The physical labor of the repairs mattered even less.

Nobody joined the Anti-Revision Command because the work was less demanding than the 26th-century norm. ARC Riders were expected
to do whatever the job required. If that meant (as it occasionally did) living for months in a community where the life expectancy—for
those who survived infancy—was less than thirty years, so be it.

Roebeck chuckled. Thirty years was probably a close approximation of the life span of the humans on this horizon—where she’d
be trapped unless they did get the vehicle temporally mobile again.

Without a bus, there would have been billions of connections to make before the computer could distribute commands. The three
of them couldn’t have done the job in ten lifetimes.

“Until…” she said aloud.

“I have a routing plan for repairs,” Chun said. “Whenever you’d care to see it…”

There was a touch of asperity in her voice. Quo simply couldn’t understand why anybody would need to look at an actual object
when the combination of computer and display would provide the information in infinite detail and clarity.

“Okay, we’re coming in,” Roebeck said. The repairs couldn’t be done by the computer, though. She wondered how many Maxwell
Field sorters remained in the locker. Probably none, and the weather here wasn’t likely to remain this comfortable throughout
their stay.

“Nan,” Grainger said quietly. “Take a look.”

She turned, expecting to see Grainger pointing. His left arm remained at his side, while the right crooked his gun/EMP generator
to his armored chest. “On the hill there,” he said.

Roebeck followed the line of Grainger’s eyes to a knoll five hundred meters down the valley. Rock grayed the mantle of long
yellow grass. A flat-topped tree twisted from a crevice. Roebeck thought it might be a fig. “What do you—” she began.

“Lower your faceplate and use some magnification,” Grainger said. “I caught the movement.”

Roebeck obeyed with a smooth, slow motion, much as she would have positioned her hand to snatch a fly from a table-top. She
locked the visor in place and boosted optical magnification by ten powers, enough that the edges of her field of view precisely
framed the knoll.

“I don’t…” she said, and then she did see the face looking at her through a screen of sere grass blades. “Yes.”

At × 100 magnification, she could see blue eyes glinting from beneath heavy brows. There was no facial hair, but the figure’s
forearms—the woman’s forearms—were covered with a russet pelt.

“ARC Central isn’t going to like this,” Grainger said with a joking lilt. “Us in a human-occupied location, and we haven’t
parked the capsule out of phase.”

A child’s face peeped over the female’s shoulder. The watchers were as still as the stone on which they crouched.

“I don’t know about you,” Roebeck said, “but I’d be more than happy if I could displace straight to Central and take my punishment.
Since we can’t…”

She raised her faceshield again. “Let’s see what Quo suggests, and then figure out how we’re going to execute the plan.”

She gestured Grainger inside the vehicle. As she followed him, she looked back toward the knoll. The faces had vanished.

Circa 10,000
BC

P
auli Weigand glanced up at the trees, pursing his lips to try again to raise Barthuli on the radio. He saw Major Carnes jogging
toward him with a set expression. She was alone.

Carnes hadn’t taken a headband with her. That was Weigand’s mistake, the way a lot of things were Weigand’s mistake, but it
didn’t bother him for the moment. Now there was trouble, so he had a job to do.

He checked his shoulder weapon. There was a tanglefoot round in the chamber. That was as good a choice as gas, because he
didn’t have a clue yet as to what the problem was. Maybe a bear? There were bears here, he knew.

Weigand pulled on his boots. He’d been digging his bare toes into the ground, and traces of rich loam still clung to them.

“Barthuli went down to the riverside,” Carnes said, breathing through her mouth between gasped phrases. “He says there’s a
camp of Indians down there and he wants to see it!”

“I swear, Gerd’s got no more sense than a, aw, I don’t know what,” Weigand said. “He’s all right, though?”

“He was fine when he went behind the trees,” Carnes said. She was getting her breathing under control. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t
make him come back without…”

Without shooting him
, probably, and Major Carnes wasn’t the first to think about shooting Barthuli. “It’s all right,” Weigand said, smiling ruefully
at Carnes. “Not a thing anybody can do when Gerd gets an idea. But he’s everything you could ask for otherwise.”

Weigand considered putting his armor on. If he wore the suit, he’d be completely safe from anything Stone Age locals could
do. It wouldn’t make the hill any easier to climb, though, and if the river had cut the other side steeper, he’d have a devil
of a time going down.

That wasn’t the real downside, though. Weigand would be safe and so would the major if she suited up, whether she came along
or stayed back here. Barthuli
wasn’t
in armor, though. If the locals decided that the stranger had brought a couple demons into their village, things might get
terminal before Weigand could cover the area with gas.

“I don’t even know there’s Indians down there,” Carnes said carefully. “Barthuli showed me smoke, but he was just guessing
that it came from a camptire. He called them Clovis hunters.”

Weigand nodded. “You can make a lot of money betting on Gerd’s guesses,” he said. The only reason it’d be a tragedy if Barthuli
got his head stuck on a stick, or whatever “Clovis hunters” did, was that the guy was so
damned
good at his job. The team could get another analyst, but there wasn’t a chance he’d be the artist Gerd Barthuli was.

Besides, Weigand liked the guy, though he was about as spooky as anybody you were likely to meet.

“Gerd,” he said, the name keying the commoset. “Weigand to Barthuli. Let’s talk, Gerd. Weigand to Barthuli.”

No answer. An unusual degree of hollowness on his earphones, though, suggesting the set’s Al was blanking a great deal of
static.

Weigand checked the multisensor hanging on his belt for a spectrum analysis. The holographic readout flashed into the air
before him. He swore.

“What’s the matter?” the major said sharply. She pressed her right hand firmly against her ribs, above the flap of the pocket
which her acoustic pistol bulged. Carnes’ loose cotton uniform had been in bad shape when the team picked her up. Weigand
wondered if they had a set of coveralls on TC 779 that would fit her.

Weigand waved at the hill. “All this rock is full of lead and zinc ore.” he explained. “There’s no way I can punch a signal
through it. Or Gerd, either, not that I’d be real confident of him trying to call us. He didn’t ask before he went off on
his little junket, after all.”

He raised an eyebrow toward Carnes. “Might be best if you stay here in your suit,” he said. “I’ll go fetch Gerd back, and—”

“No,” Carnes said simply. She took the acoustic pistol out of her pocket and held it like a prayer book in both hands.

Weigand nodded. “All right with me,” he said. “You know how to use that thing?”

“I point it and pull the trigger?” Carnes said.

“Pretty much,” Weigand agreed. Hell, they were already near the end of their time. Nan wasn’t going to like this, but it’d
turn out all right in the long run. “Don’t hold the trigger down longer than a few seconds at a time or it’ll start to get
hot from harmonics. It won’t hurt the gun, but you can burn the hell out of your hand that way.”

He adjusted two electronic controls on the inside of his armor’s backplate, then did the same with the other two suits.

“What are you doing?” Carnes asked. She didn’t sound frightened, but there was a bright edge to her voice that hadn’t been
there before she went up the hill with Barthuli.

“I’m setting the suits to shift out of phase with sidereal time,” Weigand explained. “I doubt locals could hurt them, but
you can never tell. Besides, we don’t want to find bird nests in them when we come back.”

Or a rattlesnake, but he didn’t say that aloud.

Carnes looked at the wooded slope. She deliberately put the pistol back in her pocket. “How do you call them back when we
return?” she said, her eyes still toward the hillside.

“They’ll return for two minutes every four hours,” Weigand explained. “You’re right, when they’re out of phase, there’s no
communication with them at all.”

Carnes grinned stiffly and started up the hill. Weigand’s longer legs brought him quickly in step with her. As he strode,
he switched the magazine from tanglefoot to gas cartridges. Hard to know how many locals they’d be facing.

And ARC coveralls were great, but they wouldn’t stop a flint spear.