Arc Riders (37 page)

The slim hostile shrugged. “Mishima and Goto were no loss,” the console said as his lips spoke syllables of a wholly different
rhythm. “As for the capsule, this one will do quite well. Central will be pleased at the intelligence value.”

He and Stocky seemed at home in TC 779. Stocky was programming a displacement, using the control wands Chun favored. Weigand
wondered again at timelines that could be so close technically while utterly distinct in culture.

Chun gagged as she regained consciousness. She twisted violently. Even if she’d been able to spin like a top, she couldn’t
have affected her bonds. Barthuli was alert also, but his mind had surfaced as silently as the nostrils of a manatee coming
up for air.

“Ready,” Stocky said.

Slim sat down where Grainger normally would. He nodded. Stocky’s wand initiated the displacement sequence.

“Where are our friends?” Weigand asked. The form of his question avoided giving the hostiles any information they didn’t already
have.

“The man and the woman are back at the safe house,” Slim said with a smile of deliberate cruelty. “Oh, yes, we have you all,
now. Fools not to realize it was
our
safe house also!”

“And if you think Calandine might free them—” Stocky said. “We thought that, too, so he’s immobilized with them. They were
sleeping when we arrived. Trusting a phase-locked chamber against us!”

“Yamaguchi wanted to interrogate them immediately,” Slim said. He smiled. He had the look of a man who preferred his food
to be alive when he ate it. “I told him that could wait—we needed to be in the displacement suits when their friends came
back for them.”

He smiled at his companion. “But I’m sure Central will permit him to conduct the initial stages of the process when we return.”

Interrogation by Weigand’s Anti-Revision Command could leave the subject with a headache, but nothing worse occurred. Slim’s
operation had comparable technical skills, so the methods implied in Slim’s smile must be a matter of taste.

TC 779 trembled on the verge of meshing with the horizon. “You have the con, sir,” Stocky—Yamaguchi—said with unexpected formality.

Slim concentrated on his individual display. Like Yamaguchi, he used control wands, but he held them between thumb and forefinger
at the balance.

The main display hovered momentarily above the east lawn of the White House, then swooped forward with a smooth grace that
Nan Roebeck would have been hard put to better. Walls, furniture—a house servant in formal attire—blurred through the viewpoint.
Slim was holding the capsule out of phase, viewing the temporal horizon from a point that was no more than a dust-mote shimmer
in the air.

The display steadied on a darkened room with six people present. Four of them were flaccidly unconscious. The President of
the United States was upright in his armchair. An alert man had swathed him in transparent wrapping like that which had immobilized
the military advisor in Quang Tri a matter of hours before.

The woman wearing a face-covering helmet squatted before a 23d-century mind control device. Its antenna was focused on the
President’s forehead.

“Pauli?” Chun Quo said. “What—Oh.”

Yamaguchi looked back at her, grinned, and returned his attention to the main display.

“Don’t talk,” Weigand said. “Don’t say anything. It’ll make it worse.”

The woman in the room of the White House took off the helmet and spoke to her companion. She folded the antenna into its carrying
case. The man freed the President, then coiled the fine cord into the separate power unit while his companion finished packing
the device itself.

Each carrying a case in the left hand, the pair of revisionists opened the door and strode down the hall at a deliberate pace.
The pair of guards outside the door had laminated IDs clipped to the lapels of their suits; they wore the cards with the photo
and data against the cloth. The guard’s eyes were unfocused, and the men made no sign as the revisionists walked past.

23d century technology was light-years beyond the defense capabilities of this horizon. Weigand supposed the pair had drenched
the hallways ahead of them with a medium-term hypnotic gas, but there were other alternatives.

“We’ll take them when they exit the building,” Slim ordered harshly. He was keyed up though not necessarily nervous. His wands
adjusted the controls.

Yamaguchi rose and drew his acetylcholine inhibitor. “Can’t leave revisionists wandering around loose,” he said to Weigand.
“Even if they did accidentally do us a favor.”

His teeth and his smile were as perfect and false as a silicone breast. Chun looked at Yamaguchi with the perfectly blank
expression of a mongoose for a cobra.

TC 779 quivered. The display hovered three meters from an exterior doorway. Slim stood beside Yamaguchi. He aimed his pistol
toward the closed hatch.

The door of the building started to open.

Weigand looked at his companions and said, “Nan, Tim—these two hostiles in TC 779 are going to shoot the revisionists when
they walk out of the White House.”

The door swung back. The guard there in the hallway was as glassy-eyed as his fellows at the President’s door. TC 779 locked
in phase and both hatches opened. The man and woman in the White House doorway triggered their acoustic pistols.

When Weigand warned them over the intercom, Roebeck and Grainger dropped the cases they were carrying. The sections of mind
control device were still falling when the two fired.

Nan Roebeck was faster than Weigand had imagined. She hit Yamaguchi only a heartbeat after Tim Grainger shot the stocky revisionist.
Of course, Tim’s first acoustic pulse had already knocked Slim back from the hatchway unconscious.

August 30, 1968

T
he basement of the safe house smelled slightly of damp and of ozone. Normally the latter would have made Nan Roebeck worry
about TC 779’s condition, but not now. A few of the capsule’s circuits were arcing beneath the temporary insulation? Big deal.
They’d do their job a little longer.

Pauli Weigand came down the stairs. He looked much harder than he had when Roebeck last saw him at 50K. “Calandine’s in the
phase chamber with the revisionists Bates and Rhone, Nan,” he said. “The hostiles put them all under with a storage drug.
It’s probably the same as ours, but if it’s not—I don’t know what kind of side effects our antidote might have.”

Roebeck tossed him a medical pack. Pauli had lost his with the displacement suit at National Airport. “Try it on one of the
revisionists first,” she said. “If it works, then bring Calandine around. I’d like to leave him in place if we can.”

“Right,” said Weigand as he went back upstairs. “We’ll see if Bates goes into convulsions. Watney said the business was mostly
his idea.”

There was a tone of satisfaction in Weigand’s voice that surprised Roebeck slightly. There hadn’t been time for a proper debriefing,
but she didn’t need to be told that Pauli had been through a lot on this operation.

Chun Quo came out of TC 779. “I’ve put them under for twelve hours,” she said. She cleared her throat and added, “What are
you going to do with them, Nan?”

“Our opposite numbers, you mean?” Roebeck said. “We’re going to strip their memories with a red dose and drop them in 50K,
just like we’re going to do with the revisionists who started the whole business.”

Chun nodded, in understanding rather than agreement. “Central…” she said. “And perhaps those up the line. Might want to, ah,
talk to those persons themselves.”

“Yeah,” Roebeck said. “The only possible thing they could gain from that exercise would be a way to communicate between our
timeline and the other one. That’s why you and I are going to wipe all the navigational records from the vehicle before we
return from 50K to Central. So nobody can ever find these people after we’ve marooned them.”

She turned so that she was face-to-face to Chun. “Do you have a problem with that?”

Chun looked away. In a voice tiny with embarrassment, she said, “Nan, if you hadn’t said that, I was going to give them a
triple red dose. Enough to be sure they’d never wake up.”

Roebeck hugged the shorter woman to her. “No need for that,” she said. “Besides—I’m leading this team.”

Barthuli was watching them from the vehicle’s open hatch. Quo broke away awkwardly and said, “I’ll go help Pauli and Tim.”
She skipped up the stairs without looking back at the analyst.

“You seem to have come through well enough, Gerd,” Roebeck said. The analyst, now that he was back in ARC coveralls, didn’t
appear to have changed at all.

Barthuli gave her a smile that was either wry or sad. “Unlike Pauli and Quo, you mean?” he said. “They’ll want some support
when we return, but I don’t think there’ll be any… disabling scars. Nothing the therapists can’t put right.”

“But not you,” Roebeck said, making the implications of her previous comment explicit.

“I don’t think the varied experiences of the current operation have warped my psyche, team leader,” Barthuli said. He wasn’t
laughing at her. There was no emotion in his voice at all. “But it would be a little hard to tell, wouldn’t it? In any case,
I think you’ll continue to find me a satisfactory analyst.”

He looked toward the ceiling. Condensate beaded the bare I-beams. “Why did you decide to carry out the revisionists’ mission
in a changed format rather than aborting it?” he asked.

Roebeck nodded. “All right,” she said. She squeezed her arms tightly around her chest, then realized what she was doing and
forced herself to stand loose again.

“Gerd,” she said, “I kept coming up with a less than 12 percent chance of the President announcing tomorrow that he wouldn’t
run for reelection if we simply eliminated Bates and Rhone as I’d planned. I—”

Barthuli was looking at her. She met his eyes. “The… our opposite numbers’ existence… it depended on a revision at this nexus.
But I think our timeline, our existence… that depended on a revision, too. Tim and I went into the White House with the equipment
we’d taken from Bates and Rhone, and we used it to influence the President to step down.”

She flashed a false smile. “I really wish you’d been around to do the analysis instead of me, Gerd.”

He shrugged. “You’d have checked my results, wouldn’t you?” he said. “You’d still have made the decision yourself?”

“Of course,” Roebeck agreed.

“I checked your results,” Barthuli said, “and came up with a less than 3 percent probability that the President wouldn’t run
again without your intervention.”

He grinned with more real humor than Roebeck remembered having seen on the analyst’s face before. “And the results of the
President winning a second full term would be… You’ll want to go over my extrapolations, Nan. So will the people at Central
who no doubt think they have the right to second-guess field agents. Quite interesting, in the sense of the Chinese curse.”

Barthuli chuckled. “I don’t believe there’ll be any negative repercussions from the decision you made,” he said.

“I—” Roebeck looked away and blinked. “Yeah, I was thinking about what was going to happen when Central went over my report,”
she said. Holding her voice very steady, she added, “You know, Gerd, if you
really
didn’t care what happens, you might be happier. But you’d be no good to me. No good at all.”

Quo came down the stairs. Behind her came Pauli, with Bates slung over one shoulder and Rhone over the other. Tim Grainger
brought up the rear, his fléchette gun held with an attempt at casualness that deceived no one who knew him.

“Bates came around fine,” Weigand said. “So I gave him another hit. It won’t kill him, but he’ll likely have a headache when
a sabertooth or wolves do the job.”

“Anchor the revisionists to the bolt next to our opposite numbers,” Roebeck said. “We’ve gotten a full load between the two
groups.”

“Despite attrition,” Grainger said mildly.

“Oh, Pauli?” Roebeck added to the big man’s back. “I haven’t had time to thank you for warning us about the ambush.”

“My pleasure,” Weigand said. He paused in the hatchway and turned so that he could look at Roebeck past his comatose burden.
“Slim had already let us know the sort of time we were in for if we stayed in their hands.”

“Their communicators arc earplugs, not headbands like ours,” Chun said. “They didn’t recognize what Pauli was wearing. But
if Pauli hadn’t stayed so calm…”

“Then it would still have come out the same,” Weigand said as he disappeared into the vehicle. “I’ve seen Tim draw. They hadn’t.”

“Thanks for the compliment,” Grainger said dryly. “But you know, sometimes an extra tenth of a second comes in real handy.”
He followed Weigand aboard.

“I think we’re ready, Nan,” Chun Quo said quietly. “I’ve programmed the initial displacement to 50K.”

Roebeck slammed upright with a sudden awareness of failed responsibility. “Major Carnes!” she said. “Did we…”

The tip of her tongue touched her lips. “Did we lose her as well as Watney?”

“No we did not, Nan,” Gerd Barthuli said. This time his expression would have lit a room. “I had an idea, you see. Pauli,
Quo—and Rebecca—worked out the details of how it could be executed. We’ll show you.”

He bowed and gestured Roebeck to the hatchway with full 18th-century formality.

J
alouse dropped his plasma weapon. He spread the fingers of his right hand before his face while he tried desperately to latch
his helmet with the other. A screaming man stretched over the desk and fired with the muzzle of his machine pistol touching
the gauntlet.

Three bullets struck Jalouse’s palm, flinging the arm aside, the hand numb within the armor. At least a dozen rounds ricocheted
from the curved front of the helmet, howling like wasps the size of eagles. The multiple impacts did what Jalouse had failed
to do: latch the faceshield despite the tag of joint sealant that had come adrift when the ARC Rider grabbed at his visor
with desperate strength.