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  The War in Vietnam —1991!

  The first rocket over the berm awakened Major Rebecca Carnes. Six more landed with their terrible whoop WHAM! in the midst of the firebase before she managed to roll out of the cot.

  The smell of flesh dead so long it was liquescent mingled chokingly with explosive residues.

  A great explosion shocked the night orange. A flying object hit Carnes and flattened her against a half-collapsed sandbag wall. It was a human leg. The sight had the unexpected effect of steadying her.

  Suddenly blue light and a sound like frying bacon enveloped Carnes. Outside the aura, all noise and motion stopped. An oval bubble formed before her. Tracer bullets hung in midflight.

  The bubble split vertically. A man stepped out. “Major Carnes? We have a proposition for you.”

  Copyright

  WARNER BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 1995 by David Drake and Janet Morris

  All rights reserved.

  Aspect is a trademark of Warner Books, Inc.

  Warner Books, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: September 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56665-0

  Contents

  The War in Vietnam—1991!

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: ARC Central

  ARC Central

  Aboard TC 779

  North America

  Yunnan Province

  North America

  Quang-tri Province, South Vietnam

  Washington, DC

  Cambodia, Fishhook Region

  Durham, North Carolina

  New York City

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Tasman Sea: Aboard the USS Bonhomme Richard

  South of Ha Trung, North Vietnam

  Superior, Minnesota

  North America

  North America

  Quang-Tri Province, South Vietnam

  North America

  North America

  North America

  Eurasia

  North America

  Eurasia

  North America

  Eurasia

  North America

  Eurasia

  North America

  Eurasia

  North America

  Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC

  Northeastern Iowa

  Northeastern Iowa

  Arlington National Cemetery

  Travis Air Force Base, California

  Bien Hoa Air Force Base

  Washington, DC

  Bien Hoa Air Force Base

  Son Tay, North Vietnam (Occupied)

  Washington, DC

  Son Tay Base, North Vietnam (Occupied)

  Son Tay Base, North Vietnam (Occupied)

  Washington, DC

  Son Tay Base, North Vietnam (Occupied)

  Travis Air Force Base

  Baltimore, Maryland

  Over Northeastern Virginia

  Washington National Airport

  Washington, DC

  Aboard TC 779

  Washington, DC

  Washington, DC

  Washington, DC

  Epilogue: ARC Central

  DEDICATION

  To Doctor John Miesel.

  It’s always handy to have a biochemist around.

  —David Drake

  To Uncle Ray, who would have been amused.

  And to Bill Lewis (even-numbered pages)

  and Bob Gladstein (odd-numbered pages).

  —Janet Morris

  Prologue: ARC Central

  “Come on, Roebeck, I don’t need a load of grief after an operation like this was,” Jalouse growled.

  Jalouse’s displacement suit had a panoramic display, so he didn’t have to turn to see his five teammates in the capsule. Still, the sight of his armored figure swinging slowly around, displaying the battle damage, was a useful reminder of how rough a time he’d had—and how little he was asking.

  “Oh, let him go,” said Tim Grainger. Chun Quo pursed her lips and stared at her personal display, pretending that she didn’t have an opinion.

  “Come on,” Jalouse repeated. “I’ll be down in Debrief in ten minutes. Unloading me in the control room instead of the docking bay won’t hurt anything.”

  The shimmering ambiance of plasma discharges and auroras had faded from TC 779’s screens, leaving only the bare plates and girders of the dock. The bay door was a touch-sensitive unit, accepting a high leakage rate in order to speed operations. The black-and-yellow chevrons on the leaves had been scuffed almost entirely away by equipment entering ARC Central. The personnel airlock directly into the transfer control room was almost never used.

  “Transfer Control to Capsule Seven-Seven-Niner,” said a bored voice that Jalouse heard both through his helmet earphones and over his suit’s audio pick-up from the speaker in TC 779’s cabin. “You’re cleared to Berth Seven. How do you intend to proceed? Over.”

  “Hold one, Control,” Roebeck said, grimacing as she reached for the airlock switch. “Go on, then, Jalouse. But I don’t know why she can’t meet you in Debrief like anybody else.”

  The inner hatch cycled open. Jalouse entered the lock. “Thanks, Nan,” he said.

  “Because he’s afraid his wife’ll be in Debrief, too.” Pauli Weigand chuckled from his seat opposite the hatch. “We’ve had enough excitement on this operation already.”

  The inner lock closed. The outer membrane opened and Jalouse stepped onto the slotted emergency walkway. ARC Central was insulated from the world around it by hard vacuum.

  A derrick slid into position above the capsule, in case Roebeck wanted to hand control over to the mechanical transporter. The operator could see that somebody’d gotten out of TC 779 here, against regulations; but the ground crews didn’t make trouble for ARC Riders—and anyway, Sonia herself was the supervisor on this shift.

  “Transfer Control to Seven-Seven-Niner,” said the voice, which Jalouse now heard only through his earphones. “Do you have a problem?”

  Jalouse stepped into Central’s lock. The hatch closed behind him. He felt the clang through his boot soles, and the strip-lights on the paneling above quivered at his armored weight. Somebody else in a displacement suit was coming along the walkway from the other direction.

  “Jalouse?” Weigand called over the team’s intercom. “Bet you can’t get out of your suit in ten minutes, much less into hers.”

  “Wise ass!” Jalouse muttered as pressure built in the airlock. Hell, they’d never been in love. Grimacing, Jalouse poked the switch to open the inner door and raised his faceshield as he stepped into ARC Central.

  Sonia wasn’t waiting on the other side of the airlock.

  Neither was anything Jalouse had ever seen in his life.

  Instead of the worn paint and control panels of Transfer Control Room Two, this chamber was hung with silk brocade. From the ceiling beamed the face of an Oriental whom Jalouse didn’t recognize in the instant he had to give to the decor.

  A dozen people in one-piece taupe coveralls sat stiffly at desks. For an instant, they gaped in amazement as great as that of Jalouse himself. Machine pistols were slung from their straight-backed chairs.

  “ R o e

  b e c

  k —” Jalouse said. His

  gauntleted left hand grabbed his helmet faceshield down. The plate wouldn’t seat.

  “Invasion!” screamed the translation program in Jalouse’s suit as the strangers gabbled in some language that sure-hell wasn’t Standard. “Invasion! Kill him!”

  Jalouse pressed the switch of the airlock behi
nd him. It didn’t open. One of the strangers fired point-blank into the ARC Rider’s chest.

  Bullets ricocheted in all directions. Jalouse stumbled sideways, over a desk, and fell. He pointed the weapon he carried slung, but it was a plasma discharger. If he fired it here without his faceshield clamped, the hostiles elsewhere in ARC Central wouldn’t have to do anything but sweep up his ashes.

  Short, screaming people in coveralls leaped to their feet to get a better shot at the invader. One of them spun and fell, his face torn by a kcyholing ricochet. The slamming, sparking impacts bruised Jalouse even though they hadn’t yet penetrated his armor.

  During the operation, Jalouse had used the pair of acoustic grenades that should have hung from his equipment belt. Fifty-fifty the detonation wave would have pulled his head off anyway when it inevitably lifted his helmet.

  “ K i l

  ARC Central

  Timeline B: November 17, 2522 AD

  Nan Roebeck tilted her scat as the transportation capsule shuddered and clucked. The electronics were aligning themselves in the limbo that was neither when nor where, preparing to displace again.

  Roebeck could have saved an apparent ninety seconds by maneuvering the capsule in the sidereal universe to its berth. With the amount of traffic around ARC Central, though, it was both simpler and safer to let the software displace the vehicle… and anyway, Roebeck didn’t feel like doing any unnecessary work right now.

  The operation had been a bitch. Central’s preinsertion intelligence had a gap in it that could have gotten somebody killed. Would have gotten Dor Jalouse killed, except Chun Quo had noticed the anomaly in the hostiles’ wake, and Tim Grainger was a fast triggerman even by the standards of the ARC Riders. Grainger pulsed the second hostile vehicle, frying the circuitry of the coil gun maybe a half second before penetrators would have chewed the rest of the way through Jalouse’s suit.

  Roebeck turned her head slightly as she stretched. Weigand and Chun were chatting, while Barthuli was already reviewing clips of the raw data the team’s sensors had gathered during the operation. That left Grainger to himself, as usual. Quiet, composed; not obviously uncomfortable, but still looking like a well-mannered goat that had wandered into a luxury apartment.

  Tim Grainger had been born at the beginning of the 21st century. The rest of the team, Jalouse included, was from the 26th, where ARC Central was parked in a huge vacuum chamber isolated from the rest of the Earth except via temporal displacement.

  In a manner of speaking, all the ARC Riders were displacees. The teams used technology from far up the line—how far, most Riders didn’t want to guess—to operate outside of their own periods. The fact remained that Grainger was an outsider even to the general outgroup.

  “Got anything planned for your downtime, Tim?” Roebeck asked. She was team leader, so it was her duty to make her personnel comfortable.

  At the corner of Roebeck’s mind was the awareness that, because of her position, she was as much alone as Grainger. Roebeck’s comfort was somebody else’s duty, she supposed, though they were making a piss-poor job of it.

  “My orange tree ought to be ready to flower,” Grainger said. His smile suggested that he knew what Roebeck was trying to do—and appreciated it. “If it’s going to, that—”

  The capsule slid into normal spacetime. The alarms went off.

  The display across the forward bulkhead was set to show the hangar in which the capsule was settling. That remained as the background, but the color was washed out to highlight the emergency dump from Jalouse’s suit in the center of the image. A red strobe lit the cabin, and Roebeck’s four team members muttered exclamations as they lunged for weapons and gear.

  On the display, a woman screaming “Death to the intruder!” jumped onto a desk. She fired a machine pistol point-blank at the sensors on Jalouse’s helmet. The projected image fuzzed and speckled as Jalouse toppled backward.

  “Open the—” Grainger shouted. He had a fléchette gun/EMP combination in one hand and was pulling down the facemask from his headband with the other. There’d be no time to suit up fully.

  The expression of the woman facing Jalouse from the display went blankly farcical. One of her fellows managed accidentally to shoot her in the nape of the neck. The high-velocity bullet flicked out one of her front teeth as it exited.

  Roebeck’s hand threw the switch that did the only thing which made sense under the circumstances. Transportation Capsule 779 shunted toward its most recent previous temporal location, out of danger.

  Out of an ARC Central that wasn’t the base the team had left for the just-completed mission.

  Aboard TC 779

  Displacing from 2522 AD to circa 50,000 BC

  Grainger turned to Roebeck. “Nan?” he said, certain of what she’d done but hoping he was wrong. He wanted the vehicle to shunt into realtime on the dock outside the admin wing again so that the five of them could charge in to rescue Jalouse.

  Charge in to get their asses blown away, was more like it. Roebeck was responsible for the whole team, not just Jalouse in his immediate difficulties. If their ARC Central had been replaced by a hive of hostile strangers, then she and her people were the only chance their timeline had of displacing the different present to which the transport capsule had returned.

  “We didn’t really return after all, did we?” Barthuli said with a smile, as if he were reading Roebeck’s mind. Maybe he was. The analyst was too strange for Roebeck to rule out any possibilities.

  “Suit up,” Roebeck said, pushing between Grainger and the still-seated Chun. “Me and Pauli, then the other two of you. They may be waiting there, too.”

  She nodded to Barthuli. “Gerd?” she added. “Watch the controls, will you?”

  The locker containing the displacement suits was at the rear of the cabin. There wasn’t enough room in the capsule for more than two riders to don the suits at a time. Pauli Weigand was already latching his closed around him.

  “We’re running back to 50K, aren’t we?” Grainger demanded at rising volume. “We’re just going to run off and leave Jalouse!”

  Weigand stepped forward in his armor to face the hatch. Displacement suits were miniature temporal vehicles, though they lacked the sophistication and spatial displacement abilities of a transport capsule. For the moment, the important things were the protection the suit gave the person wearing it and the load of weaponry its powered muscles could handle.

  “We’re not running anywhere,” Roebeck said. They were running and she knew it, but they had to run. “We’re backing out of an ambush. When we figure out who’s responsible for the problem, we’ll deal with them.”

  She locked her suit closed. Anonymous within its scarred, rounded surfaces, she stepped to Weigand’s side.

  Grainger sighed. “I’d hate to lose Jalouse,” he said. He raised himself on the crossbar and slid his feet down, into the legs of his fitted suit.

  Jalouse had survived the operation because Tim Grainger did exactly the right thing in next to no time. For Jalouse to die in the first moments following the team’s return to the apparent safety of ARC Central would be worse for Grainger than for the rest of them.

  Worst of all for Dor Jalouse, though.

  “We haven’t lost anybody yet,” Roebeck said. “We’re regrouping, then we’ll see what we can do.”

  “It’s our job to fix things,” Chun said as her armored form joined Weigand and Roebeck. “This is no different.”

  This was a lot different.

  “It’s all clear outside,” Barthuli said from the front of the cabin. “Of course, we may not have sensors to track intruders subtle enough to cause a change at Central.”

  The analyst sounded interested, but not in the least concerned. Roebeck knew she was lucky to have somebody as skilled as Barthuli on her team, but he still got on her nerves in a crisis.

  Barthuli had become an ARC Rider because of his genetic predisposition to Alzheimer’s disease. At some point—which could be any point,
from the present moment on—his splendid mind was going to begin unraveling into psychosis. Barthuli intended to see as much as he could in whatever time he had, and he’d decided the field operations of the Anti-Revision Command provided the best opportunity of doing that.

  The trouble was that Barthuli’s world view was unique. Fate had condemned him to something worse than death in his own terms, so matters that seemed of incalculable importance to the rest of the team didn’t touch him emotionally. The vanishment, the destruction, of the timeline in which Barthuli was born was to him only an opportunity to glimpse additional realities before his intellect drowned in spasms of memory loss and mindless rage.

  “I’m going to open up,” Roebeck said, warning the others a moment before she activated the outer hatch through the keypad on her suit’s left thigh. With an electromagnetic pulse generator clipped beneath a fléchette gun, Roebeck followed Weigand into a continent empty of all human life save their own.

  50K was a temporal direction rather than a specific time. Anyone who carried out time displacement activities without being a member of the ARC was a temporal violator, a revisionist. Central targeted the revisionists, and the ARC Riders solved the problem.

  Sometimes violators were killed in the process of being stopped; normally (and by choice; a truly civilized society is a squeamish society) they were captured. Rather than imprison the captives in the 26th century, revisionists were freed, unharmed but without tools or even clothing, at around 50,000 BC. Males were dumped in North America, females in Australia; in either case, tens of millennia before humans populated those continents.

  The period chosen was in the middle of a major ice age, but the glaciers had been in temporary retreat for thousands of years. The dumps were made in what was locally the late spring, giving the violators as much time as possible to adapt to their new surroundings before winter closed in.

  And the dumps were made at intervals of a century, preset into the mechanisms of the transportation vehicles themselves. This wasn’t primarily to protect the ARC Riders involved, though some separation was necessary for that reason: the later version of a person who revisited the person’s own timeline vanished.