Arc Riders (33 page)

That car drove away. The next one held the National Security Advisor. After the advisor and his wife got out of the car, another
couple followed.

Bates and Rhone.

“God help us,” Roebeck groaned. “Chun didn’t say they were
that
well connected.”

“They’re that well funded. You want to give up now, or you want the expensive dinner we paid for?”

“No, we’ll go in. Maybe something will happen that will give us a shot.”

“Give a big contribution, and make an appointment,” Grainger said dourly. “That’s the only shot, unless you want to let me
take down a roomful of history-worthy locals with acoustics pushed to levels that may be indiscriminately lethal, or try breaking
into Bates’ house again.”

Bates was better looking even than his photograph, tall, black-haired with bold, intelligent eyes that swept Grainger and
Roebeck as a matter of course. The eyes didn’t pause when they encountered Grainger or Roebeck, but Grainger had the feeling
he’d been acquired and logged. Not as an enemy, only as a datum.

As planned, the ARC Riders toughed it out. They drank the cocktails, ate the shrimp canapés, and sat through the five-course
dinner with attendant speeches.

The President was saying, “My dear friends, the Founding Fathers gave us a proud legacy. That legacy demands that we act to
ensure the future of the United States for our children and grandchildren against an increasing threat to our national security.
I’m telling you here today that the buildup in Southeast Asia cannot be allowed to continue. This war cannot be lost, or with
it we’ll lose our own freedom. And to protect that freedom, we need every one of you. Your contributions will help us fight
the divisive factions in this country that want to give our future to the Communist enemy. Here at home, and abroad, a Democratic
America must prevail.” The President frowned, looked at his notes, and took a step back from the lectern as if he’d forgotten
why he was there.

At the head table, Bates leaned back in his chair and flung an arm over its back. In his hand was a napkin. Under the napkin
was… something. Something pointed at the President.

The President took a step sideways, then forward. He rubbed his nose with his thumb and forefingers, and looked down again
at his speech.

Then he continued reading from where he’d left off.

“That’s it, Tim, did you see?” Roebeck leaned close and whispered in his ear. No hats in this place.

“I saw. What do you want me to do? Start spraying the head table with acoustics?”

“No, of course not. But now we know.”

“Next move, boss?”

“Write that check you were talking about. See if we can get an appointment to see Bates in his office—he’s deputy chairman
of the Democratic Reelection Committee, isn’t he?” Nan Roebeck leaned even closer and looked at him hard. “Nothing else. Nothing
now. We can’t risk it.” There were strangers on both sides of them, listening to the President intently—or so Grainger hoped.

“So it isn’t a suicide mission, after all? Thanks, Nan. I’m glad to hear it.” He’d have done it, if she ordered. Right then
and there. He didn’t see any choice.

But she did. She kissed him softly on the cheek, for appearance’s sake, and murmured, “We’ll get a shot at them. You’ll see.”

At the head table, Rhone was sipping champagne and slipping her arm over Bates’ shoulder. She was either drunk or pretending
to be, while she tweaked whatever device Bates was holding. The President of the United States continued to read his speech.

Not until the President was done did Bates sit forward, putting both hands under the table before he raised them to clap enthusiastically.
Neither of Bates’ hands, nor either of Rhone’s, held so much as a napkin any longer.

Timeline B: August 24, 1991

“W
ell, my goodness,
that’s
how they did it,” Barthuli said. He beamed at Weigand in the aisle seat beside him. “The weapons that our counterparts used
on us!”

Weigand nodded to show he was listening. The analyst had been working all through the long flight, but the flickers Weigand
saw of the air-projected hologram display gave no hint of the subject. Weigand hadn’t wanted to disturb Barthuli with a pointless
question—Gerd would tell them if there was anything he thought they needed to know.

The other reason he hadn’t questioned Barthuli was that Weigand had disconnected himself from the world he couldn’t affect
for the time being. If he engaged Barthuli, or Carnes, or even Watney on the other side of the aisle, Weigand’s brain would
cast over the decisions he’d made and would have to make in the future; knowing that he didn’t have enough data to decide
intelligently, nor enough resources to act with any reasonable hope of success. Deciding and acting anyway.

Better not to think. Best of all, never to have been born.

Barthuli had hoped for more enthusiasm at his announcement, but the analyst wasn’t a man who depended on others for his pleasures.
“Their weapons suppress acetylcholine production!” he said proudly. “The target’s nervous system shuts down entirely because
the messenger chemical isn’t released.”

“The guns inject chemicals?” Weigand said. He’d been so sure the weapons were electronic—and thus destroyed by the electromagnetic
pulse as surely as the suits—that he hadn’t bothered to appropriate one or both. A mistake,
another
mistake?

“Oh, no,” Barthuli said. “That couldn’t be or we wouldn’t have come around so quickly when the stimulus was removed. Cholinesterase
in the bloodstream would have taken some while to decay, hours perhaps.”

Weigand couldn’t remember the event precisely. He’d noticed the forearm of the displacement suit crooked toward him when it
should have been straight, the gun that shouldn’t have been in the hand. After that—white fuzz around the edges of his vision,
heat
, his skin flushing as though he’d been seared. Those were the normal concomitants of having fainted, as was the patchy amnesia
regarding the few moments before and after.

Carnes leaned forward to catch Weigand’s eye past the analyst. “We’ve been descending,” she said. “My ears wouldn’t pop until
just now.”

“Squad leaders, prepare your men,” the PA system crackled. “Landing in ten minutes.”

The old aircraft was noisy, and its speakers were so ill-tuned and rasping that you virtually had to know what was being said
to understand it. That was all right. They did all know what was coming. Carnes’ weren’t the only ears to have felt the descent
into the target area.

Watney, the team’s nominal squad leader, stood up in the aisle and began checking his equipment. The revisionist carried a
ten-pound charge of TNT, three light anti-tank rockets, an M16 rifle with a 40mm grenade launcher beneath the barrel—much
the way Anti-Revision Command EMP generators clipped to fléchette guns, and
what
Weigand would have given for proper ARC weaponry at this moment—and bandoliers of both rifle and grenade ammunition.

Other men, all the other men, rose from their seats as well. This formerly commercial aircraft wasn’t configured to unload
an assault company in a hurry. Those aboard were aggressive, hard-charging men. Anybody slow getting through a doorway was
going to be trampled if he wasn’t shot first.

Barthuli eyed the jostling, hair-trigger mass of killers crowding the DC-8’s aisle. “Odd, isn’t it?” he said. “As if that
would help us arrive more quickly.”

Weigand slid the switch of his EMP generator back and forth. He wondered if he should wear the displacement suit, stored now
across the two seats beside Watney. The protection and sensors would be useful for the entire team; but if the hostile ARC
Riders were present, Weigand would be painting a bull’s-eye on his forehead.

“The weapon’s field causes a response in the emitter cells,” Barthuli resumed, looking at Weigand again. “The same principle
as the irritant effect your device”—he nodded toward Weigand’s jury-rigged EMP generator; jury-rigged, but it worked, it had
saved their lives—“causes, but more subtle if I may say so.”

Weigand nodded, not really listening. The hostiles must track displacements, not arrivals or the course through nontime. They’d
locatedTC 779 when Weigand’s group left it, and they’d found the suits themselves at Travis when the equipment repeatedly
displaced out of phase at the same geographical point. But the hostiles hadn’t hunted down Weigand and his companions in 10K
or the Midwest in 1991, because they hadn’t made two displacements from the same point.

“The device acts in a manner opposite to that of contemporary nerve gas,” the analyst said. “Nerve gas inhibits cholinesterase
production so that the victim’s nerves fire without remission until he dies. I wonder”—his brow narrowed in concentration—”if
the same sort of projected field, beam, could inhibit cholinesterase?”

“Okay,” Weigand said, making his mind up as he spoke. He got to his feet. “I’m going to wear the armor. Colonel Watney, please
let me by.”

Carnes was short enough that she could stand upright in front of the window seat. She rose when Weigand did and said, “What
if it wasn’t the same people who attacked the… the capsule, Pauli? This pair was… They didn’t want to hurt you. The guns didn’t
do any permanent damage. Not like the others.”

The conversation was of no interest to soldiers nearby. The others’ minds were filled with immediate problems: would the airport
layout be as described? When would the guards realize they were being attacked?

Weigand wondered how much it had bothered Rebecca to have killed the hostiles. She’d brushed off the slaughter of the Guardsmen
in Iowa easily enough. That had made Weigand think she was as callous as most of those the Anti-Revision Command recruited
from early horizons. But Carnes hadn’t killed the victims that time, and that distinction clearly made a difference to her.

Watney with his packful of munitions was wedged too tightly to move in the aisle or even turn his body. He craned his head
over his shoulder and said to the man behind him, “Back up and let my sergeant by, buddy.”

“They were just trying to minimize the public disruption, Rebecca,” Weigand said. “I doubt the way they deal with revisionists—that’s
what we are to them—is anything as complicated as displacing them to 50K.”

“Fuck!” said the man, a cadaverous black whose fungus condition cast pink speckles across his skin. The black braced himself
and thrust backward. “Get him by, then!” he snarled at the 15-centimeter gap between his chest and Watney’s pack.

Watney pushed forward and Weigand slid between them, feeling constricted and afraid, afraid of making the wrong decision.
If the plane exploded in the air, he’d never have to explain to anybody why he’d failed….

“I don’t think that was really their reasoning, Pauli,” Barthuli said. He was still seated, almost the only person in the
passenger cabin who was. “Their transportation capsule would have caused as much comment when they summoned it as a plasma
discharge or two. I think our opposite numbers wanted to pick our brains because their preemptive attack on TC 779 failed.”

Weigand had taken the displacement suit out of its concealing crate as soon as the DC-8 lifted from its last refueling stop,
a civil airport serving Nashville. It was awkward now to clamber into the armor between the close-pitched seats of the aircraft,
but the task gave him something on which to concentrate apart from the events coming in the next minutes.

“Maybe, Gerd,” Weigand said as his right leg finally found the correct angle and slid into the armor. “But remember, a couple
plasma discharges might have set off the whole hangar. A lot of those pallets were ammo and explosives. The hostiles don’t
dare do something that will change
their
past, however willing they may be to kill when they have the freedom to.”

“This attack isn’t going to succeed, is it?” Carnes said. She’d stepped over the analyst’s legs and now stood in front of
the seat Weigand had occupied. “Surely General Oakley isn’t going to become… President?”

Barthuli chuckled. “President of what, you mean, Rebecca?” he said. “No, of course he’ll fail. Analysis would tell me that,
even if we hadn’t seen the actual results when we surveyed the horizon looking for, well, for you. But to abort the attempt
still in California, that sort of revision could cause any number of effects up the line. Pauli is right. An error by our
opponents could divert their future, even if it doesn’t bring ours back.”

Weigand closed the plastron over his chest, but he left the faceshield open. He could see and hear better with the armor buttoned
up, but it was bad enough to have to be in this packed passenger cabin without enclosing himself still tighter.

There wasn’t any choice about which of the team would wear the suit: Weigand was the only one it would fit. He wondered if
the reason two, not three hostile ARC Riders had waited to ambush the team in its own armor was that none of the Orientals
was tall enough to wear Weigand’s suit.

He still felt like a coward, protected when his subordinates were not. What would ARC Central and those up the line think
of his decision?

The DC-8 had been repainted at Travis in the colors of Delta Airlines. It was a sloppy job, but there was a lot of bad workmanship
around as America fell the last of the way into an unwinnable war. The plane would be landing some minutes ahead of the day’s
regular flight from Atlanta. National’s runway wasn’t long enough for aircraft of this size and vintage, but the pilot was
convinced he could get them in.

The troops Oakley recruited from the war zone had the job of capturing National Airport. The briefings had used old airline
magazine drawings of the airport layout with the recently added defenses—a missile battery and a number of blockhouses with
dual-purpose automatic weapons—drawn in by hand. When that mission was accomplished, the remainder of the coup force and its
vehicles could land unopposed in military transports.