Joe Haldeman - Future Weapons of War

Her mind was still frozen, but her fingers were already busy, automatically keying in the firing sequence. “I have visual!” she shouted back. “Locking NOW!”

The eagles long range lasers discharged, and the dragon exploded. Chunks flew into the massif it had almost reached. The fog spread the orange color of destruction across the whole Martian sky, making a beacon of defeat that would shine as far away as New Beijing.

The other three eagles had blown up most of the baby spiders, and the Kennebunk garrison had sent out beetlebots to sweep up the last of them. The baby spiders clearly got off their mechviruses before they died, though, because now the beetlebots were just spinning in circles. Still, the elevator hadn’t been hit, and the Chimese had lost a costly gamble here. With a tip of their wings to the human mech crew already heading out to the stranded beetlebots, alpha team turned homeward to the Burroughs Eyrie overlooking USAM. Xandri debated how much to tell chill about what had just happened. She was already skirling a medical suspension to defrag all the biotech viruses she’d absorbed in a year-long combat rotation, and this was clearly way beyond a simple virus.

After they docked the eagles, Xandri headed quickly for the lockers where the flight suits were stored, sloughing hers off as she walked. She was very aware that Chill was right behind her—she felt him at her back but ignored him, hoping to discourage him from the conversation she knew they were about to have.

“Lieutenant Kantu!”

She made a face but stopped and turned to face him.

“What in Chimese hell happened out there?” he asked. “What were you shooting at?”

“My eagle got hit by a tech virus,” she guessed. “Took me a few seconds to purge.”

“But you lost visual twice. And no one else in the unit got hit. Maybe I should be ordering you in for a medscan.”

“It was a tech virus, not a bio,” she insisted. “Obviously the hit was a local with a repeat code.

Hey, there’s nothing wrong.” She looked around and saw they were attracting attention from two senior officers on the catwalk that ran round the hangar deck. “And I don’t need you putting ideas in anyone’s head,” she nodded her chin toward the brass. She turned and kept walking. Chill walked with her but lowered his voice.

“You’re a real magnet for locals, aren’t you? Third since the start of Gemini.”

She made no answer. The other two incidents had genuinely been the result of tech virus hits.

This one smacked of a psych problem, which was definitely a career-ender. No Kantu had ever been medically decommissioned. They died on the field or went on to glory as leaders of their people.

She reached her locker, with X J KANTU stencilled on the front, and finished stripping off her flight suit in dark silence. She secured it into its compartment. In a battle alert, she could release it and suit up in seven seconds.

“Look, I’m staying in your face here,” Chill persisted. “I care about you, dammit, Xandri. We’ll talk about this later.

“Yeah, sure,” she said tightly, reining in an angry response, and slammed the locker door shut with the heel of her hand. As she turned her back on him and headed for the shower, he was already turning his back on her.

Once he was gone, she reversed her steps and returned to her eagle. She sat in the cockpit and played back the external data recordings. Nothing out of the ordinary, except nine seconds of uncharacteristic silence on her part.

But this wasn’t just a hallucination. She knew real pain when she felt it. Besides, even if her brain was lit up like a xrismas tree from bioviruses, it could never dream up something like this. She needed to speak directly to the General, and the thought put a sour taste in her mouth. She checked the time on the wall comscreen—0800 hours. She hadn’t seen him in over a year, but she knew exactly where to find him.

Xristian Jefferson Kantu stared with disapproval at the broken, overset yolks of his micken eggs. A two-hour, early morning strategy session with President Hartwell had soured his appetite for breakfast, and given him a nasty mood to enjoy it in. The news from Earth was worse than usual, and the fears that had cramped his stomach for months now tightened their clutch on his innards.

Fears for the world of his birth, which was fast degrading past the capacity for spaceflight. Fear that the hordes of Chimese would overrun USAM once Hartwell announced the Last Flight from Earth.

He kept it all bottled inside him—no one on Mars but he and Hartwell knew just how bad the future was.

A voice cut through his dark thoughts.

“General, sir.” He felt the air move on a vigorous salute, but he didn’t look up.

“Xandri,” he said, without much warmth. The General was a man of fixed habits who compartmentalized his life, and his niece certainly didn’t fit into the 0800 breakfast compartment. Not to mention that the last time they’d met, she’d accused him of letting her parents die when she was twelve. He picked up the antique silver knife and fork he always used—the gift of Thomas Jefferson to a beautiful slave who bore him a son, Xristian’s ancestor—and attacked his mabbit bacon. He liked to eat as terran a breakfast as he could.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, sir. I have some intelligence I knew you’d want asap.”

He raised his eyes and quickly assessed her. Bulkier with muscle, but tired and a little scared around the eyes. She looked like she was just coming off patrol. Her uniform was rusty with the dust that, these days, seeped through seals and housings too worn to stop it. Her voice was husky with the powdery tones of a fighter who’d breathed too much of it in the high adrenaline situations of combat.

And tight with nervousness and residual anger.

“I believe the Chimese are field-testing a new shielding force that works on visual distortion.”

He put down his knife and fork and quickly checked to make sure no one was listening. He needn’t have worried. Around them the base dining hall buzzed with conversation, but no one ever came near the Generals booth during his breakfast unless they had to or felt driven to career suicide.

“Go on,” he ordered, gesturing her into the seat across from him. “I’m listening.”

“I witnessed it on patrol, sir. I’ve come right from the docking bay.”

“You witnessed it? And the rest of your team?”

“No one saw it but me, sir.”

“Oh? And what did you see?”

“I was out with alpha strike team, chasing a Chimese dragon back from the Kennebunk Elevator to the Coprates massif.” She told him what had happened, forcing herself to include the parts she knew were impossible.

“So a properly locked laser totally missed its target?”

“I didn’t miss, sir. The laser hit but did nothing.”

“And no one else on your strike team saw this green dragon.”

“No, sir. They reported nothing. They were engaged against ground forces at the time.”

“Does your instrumentation back you up?”

She paused. “No, sir.” At the expression on his face, she leaned toward him and burst out passionately: “I can’t explain this, but it’s not a psych problem, I promise you. It was real!”

As a general in the Corps of Engineers, he had to give her report serious thought, because there were parts that made sense to him. His micken eggs had gelled stubbornly into their irregular shape, and he scowled at them while he cut into them. He ate in silence for several minutes while Xandri sat stiffly across from him. Neither mentioned their last encounter.

“We’ve had intelligence that the Chimese are trying to develop shielding as an effect of a Rierson field,” he finally said. “Send a pulse through a nonlinear material like space. The pulse frequency stretches as it travels and creates a chirp. We’ve already tested an antichirp process where we send a time-reversed chirp, a scalar wave. The waves condense in a high-energy laser pulse that compresses into a shell membrane at a certain distance from the wave emitter. If we could build a stable scalar wavetrain emitter, we’d have an energy bubble that destroys a portion of whatever touches it and repels the rest. But we couldn’t build one, so I know the Chimese can’t do it, and in any case it wouldn’t change the position of your eagle. So there’s really no physical explanation for what happened out there.”