Arc Riders (19 page)

Kawalec tried to take the wallet. Carnes didn’t let go of it. She was good, really good; a first-class prospect for the Anti-Revision
Command.

Kawalec bent over to read the warrant in the card pocket, then straightened with a frown. “I don’t see what you’re doing here,
Major,” he said in a peevish voice.

“No, you don’t,” Carnes said. “What
you’re
doing here, Captain Kawalec, is carrying us into Dubuque, where you and your superiors will provide us with absolutely everything
we request.”

“Or else your successors will,” Weigand said. He deliberately looked up the road as he spoke to Kawalec, denying the captain
the courtesy of eye contact.

“I need to see your identification also, Mr….” Kawalec said, the last syllable rising in interrogation.

“No,” Weigand said.

Weigand stood at ease with his arms linked behind his back, apparently bored but not impatient. Barthuli was standing also,
holding his recorder/computer at waist level, where it had an angle on the telephone repeater above. The analyst was still
auditing the information his unit gathered. His expression was pleased and interested—which in his case wasn’t acting.

Kawalec looked from Carnes to Weigand, then back to Carnes. Carnes buttoned her wallet away, pointedly closing the discussion
as far as she was concerned.

“I’ll have to get orders,” Kawalec said. He swallowed again.

“You’ve already gotten orders,” Carnes snapped. “The length of time it’s taking you to execute them is not going unremarked.”

The captain scuffled back into the sedan. He spoke in an undertone to his driver. Both of them rolled their side windows up
before Kawalec took the handset of the dashboard-mounted radio. The flex connecting handset and transceiver was so short that
Kawalec had to lean over the front seat to use the unit.

Barthuli and Carnes watched Kawalec, though the analyst’s smile suggested the vagueness of a person who was really paying
attention to something else. Weigand surveyed the landscape, looking grim.

The sergeant had gotten out of the cab to talk with the four soldiers in back. He continued to stand beside the vehicle. The
machine gunner was wiping his weapon with a rag he’d taken from an ammo box containing cleaning supplies. There were only
thirty rounds of ammunition in the belt hanging from the gun’s loading gate. Two of the soldiers had bolt-action rifles while
the third, the woman, carried a civilian-pattern shotgun with a blued barrel. The troops muttered to one another and watched
the team from the corners of their eyes.

Kawalec blinked. His eyes stared and his lower jaw drooped. He gave the handset back to his driver and reached for his door
handle.

“Watch out,” said Barthuli as he did something with the instrument in his hands. The truck’s fuel tank blew up, covering the
six soldiers in blazing gasoline.

Carnes ran toward the sudden inferno. Weigand grabbed her with his left hand as he drew the acoustic pistol from his pocket
with his right. He knew what had happened;
why
would have to wait.

Kawalec was shouting unheard to his driver. Weigand aimed and fired. The side window in line with the driver’s head shattered
into fragments the size of sand grains. It was safety glass and bulged in both directions from the plastic film separating
the parallel layers.

Barthuli had his pistol out also. He slipped his recorder/computer into the special pocket in the front of his coveralls while
with his other hand he shot the machine gunner. The fellow’s legs and torso were covered with gasoline from the ruptured tank,
but he still held the weapon by the grip. The twin hypersonic pulses of Barthuli’s weapon intersected on the gunner’s forehead.
The 10-hertz difference tone knocked him backward unconscious, as if a mule had kicked him in the face.

Kawalec ducked in the backseat and squirmed to the door on the other side of the sedan. He hadn’t been carrying a weapon,
even a handgun for show.

The driver was logy but still upright. Weigand fired again. She flopped sideways unconscious, now that the window glass was
out of the way.

Weigand ran toward the car, but he had to drag Carnes with him. The nurse screamed in fury and hammered his chest to get free
so that she could help the people burning alive.

The only thing Carnes could do was get caught in the blaze herself. The team had no firefighting equipment, not even blankets
with which to smother the flames on the shrieking victims.

It was beyond that now anyway. To survive, people with third-degree burns over most of their bodies needed better medical
help than this horizon, let alone this region of it, could provide. Weigand’s heart was frozen in a cold white rage at what
had happened, but it
had
happened and you went on from there.

Kawalec scrambled out the far side of the car. He ran, still hunched over so far that his hands dabbed the gravel as he moved.
Weigand leaned onto the trunk of the sedan, took a deep breath, and threw Kawalec down on his face with a slug of focused
sound.

The air stank of gasoline and hot metal and the flesh of people whose limbs twitched but who had lost the ability even to
moan. One of the soldiers had managed to crawl five meters from the vehicle before he collapsed. Grass and blue-flowering
chicory burned in an expanding circle from his body.

Carnes stopped struggling. Weigand let her go. “I’m very sorry,” he said. He couldn’t meet her eyes. “I would have stopped
it if I could.”

Gerd Barthuli had blown up the truck because it was the most efficient way to eliminate six enemies. The fact that those enemies
were human beings hadn’t affected his decision in the least.

Not for the first time, Weigand wondered if that was because Barthuli himself wasn’t human.

Timeline B: August 4, 1991

R
ebecca Carnes knelt and watched the truck. The tires burned with low orange flames, intensely saturated. The pall of black
smoke mounted a thousand feet before it drifted into a smudge.

Cartridges cooked off with vicious cracks, flinging sparks and bits of brass in all directions. For the most part the explosions
were empty fury, but the round chambered in a dead soldier’s rifle could have been dangerous. The bullet blew a jagged, fist-sized
hole in the side of the truck and screamed out over the empty fields. It would have killed anybody who’d been standing in
the wrong place.

At times like this, when people were dying and there was nothing she could do about it, Carnes sometimes wished she’d been
standing in that wrong place herself.

Kawalec and his driver were unconscious but not seriously injured. Weigand was stripping the captain. Carnes walked over to
help him.

“The fuel tank of the car contains seven gallons, Pauli,” Barthuli called. He squatted beside the sedan, looking at his gray
box rather than the vehicle’s gauges—which wouldn’t be accurate to that degree anyway.

“I don’t understand what happened,” Carnes said. She had Kawalec’s shoes and trousers off before Weigand had gotten the captain
out of his coat. Carnes had plenty of experience in stripping unconscious men, though often enough that had been a job for
blunt-ended shears ripping through the bloody, shrapnel-ripped remnants of what had been clothes.

“Barthuli, give the driver a red dose,” Weigand ordered harshly. “
One
dose, for God’s sake, and don’t damage the spinal—no, I’ll do it myself.”

Weigand got up. Carnes swung to her feet and followed in perfect harmony, as if the big man were a doctor on rounds. “What’s
a red dose?” she asked, her tone sharper than she’d meant it to be.

“It’ll put them out for an hour,” Weigand said in weary anger. “And they’ll lose all personal memory.”

He took a thimble-shaped object from a pouch on his coveralls. It was scarlet and the surface was scored with three lines
so that it could be identified in the dark.

“They’ll retain language and it won’t affect their motor skills in the least,” Weigand continued. “But you bet, the amnesia’s
irreversible on this horizon.”

He opened the sedan’s front door. It wasn’t locked, but the hinge caught. Weigand jerked the door so hard that further bits
of side window shivered onto the ground. Carnes hadn’t realized how strong Weigand really was, because he normally controlled
his movements to display only minimum force.

“Major Carnes,” Barthuli said with a formality that Carnes thought the analyst had gotten past earlier. “The captain there”—he
nodded toward Kawalec—“received orders from his superiors to kill us immediately.”

“What?” said Carnes in amazement. She stepped back, looking instinctively toward Weigand to see how he reacted.

Weigand, grim-faced, pretended to ignore the discussion. He set the flat end of the thimble against the base of the driver’s
skull, among the wispy brown hair. There was a hiss. The driver twitched, then lay flaccid with her tongue lolling from her
mouth.

“The sector commander believes we’re part of a plot by the state’s military governor to take control of the district,” Barthuli
said. His face wore its usual faint smile. “The Emergency Authority and the state office are in separate chains of command.”

“Yes, but
kill
us?” Carnes said, still trying to metabolize the statement. “That’s crazy. Without talking to us,
any
thing?”

“You haven’t been in this country for three years, Major,” the analyst said. “I’m afraid the deterioration of the polity during
that period, particularly during the last twelve months, has been precipitous.”

Weigand lifted the driver’s limp body from the sedan. Shards of glass glittered like a dusting of jewels on her sweaty fatigue
uniform.

“My God,” Carnes whispered. “In the war zone we knew things were bad, the shortages of everything.” She grinned like a skull.
“Or they wouldn’t have given nurses line commands, not that I commanded much. But back here…”

“Before Kawalec could give the order to his troops to kill us,” Barthuli continued, “I—”

“Barthuli, shut
up
,” Weigand ordered. His voice trembled with a rage that Carnes had thought wholly absent from the big man’s personality. “You’re
going to make it worse, and it’s plenty bad enough!”

“I’m sorry, Pauli,” the analyst said calmly, “but she has to know. She’s one of us now, so she needs to be fully informed.”

“Needs to know that she’s dealing with a moral imbecile?” Weigand shouted. He cradled the driver in his arms as though she
were an infant he was shielding from wolves.

“I won’t quarrel with your choice of terms,” Barthuli said. He turned to Carnes. His tone had been emotionless, but there
was sadness and even pain in his eyes.

“Major,” he said, “my equipment here”—he tapped the pouch containing his recorder/computer—“can emit tuned microwaves. They’re
of relatively low power, but they were sufficient to my purpose. I treated the vehicle’s fuel tank as a cavity resonator and
induced a static discharge within the tank. Since the fluid level was low, and it was gasoline rather than diesel fuel, the
spark caused an explosion.”

Weigand put the driver down in the shade of the blackberries. He squatted beside her. “We didn’t have to kill them!” he said.
“We could have reacted before they did. They weren’t trained, they didn’t—I don’t know if any of their guns would have fired!”

“Major,” said Barthuli, “I acted in the quickest, most efficient fashion that occurred to me to save our lives. You have to
expect me to do that the next time, anytime a situation of the sort arises. Afterward, I may agree that there were better
ways of dealing with the problem… though I don’t know that I do in this case.”

He turned his sad gaze toward Weigand. “Skillful though I know you are, Pauli.”

“But they were going to kill us?” Carnes said.

“Oh, yes,” Barthuli said. “The orders were clear, and the captain was clearly going to carry them out. Try to carry them out.
He was terrified of us from the first, you know.”

“Terrified of the unknown,” Weigand said tiredly. “Well, that’s the usual thing. Sorry, Gerd. You’re probably right. The chance
of a bullet going the wrong place was unacceptably high.”

He stood up. “You want to get her clothes off, Rebecca?” he said. “You’re better at it than I am. I figure her uniform will
fit Gerd, and you can wear the captain’s. That puts us a little better off than we were.”

Weigand turned his head toward the truck. The rubber and paint would burn for hours. Sheets of metal pinged against one another
from differential rates of expansion. “None of that lot were big enough to fit me.”

“There’s an airport seventy miles south of here. An aircraft is scheduled to leave for Chicago tomorrow noon,” Barthuli offered.
“From there, it should be practical to arrange transportation to Son Tay. To the war zone, at any rate.”

Weigand nodded. “Yeah, we’ll do that. Let me borrow your access, Gerd. I don’t want anybody looking for this vehicle.”

“We’ll want to take the displacement suits,” Barthuli said. “That means we won’t be able to leave before midnight.”

He handed his recorder/computer to Weigand. Weigand squatted cross-legged with the device balanced on his ankles. He spread
his hands as if over a keyboard. Light quivered above the device.

Carnes looked at the sedan. It was a full-sized Ford, twenty years old and painted institutional gray except for the right
fender—a replacement in metallic blue. They could put two suits in the backseat and one in the trunk, she supposed, though
she wasn’t sure the trunk lid would close then. A pity the truck hadn’t survived.

She turned and looked at the man who’d made it as far as the ditch. The charred exterior of the corpse had cracked in a few
places to expose raw, red muscle. She’d never gotten used to that sight, neither when it was a GI dragged from a blazing helicopter
nor a VC who’d been napalmed.

She’d have saved them if she could. But they’d been about to kill her, even though they weren’t aware of that at the moment
they died. Carnes didn’t know where the morality of the situation lay; but what was done, was done.