Joe Haldeman - Future Weapons of War

“How do you know it so certainly, that the Chimese couldn’t do it?”

“I’ve got intelligence.”

Then she did what she always did, since the day he took her in and finished raising her because there was no one else to do it. She got angry and crossed the line and disrespected him. “With respect, sir, you don’t fight them out in the field. You’re in here, where things have solutions and the universe has laws. I’ve seen the Chimese pull plenty of mabbits out of their asses.”

“That’s enough, Lieutenant,” he cut her off. He reined in his own flare of anger, trying to be fair to his brothers only child while the general in him refused to stand for the insubordination. “Leave it with me and I’ll investigate.”

At that moment, in Independent ForShing, DaQing opened the hatch of his coffin and slung himself up and onto the entrance sill. Someone had drawn obscenities on the hatch again—the war and the military were very unpopular among many of the ForShing Yan—but he had nothing left to clean it with. It hardly seemed to matter, anyway. Secretly, he too wished the military rulers of Independent ForShing would sue for peace with the Americans. He banged a cloud of dust off his boots and stored them in their cubby inside the entrance. He swung himself all the way in so he was sitting on his sleeping mat.

A dim light had flickered on when he opened the hatch, and he didn’t turn it up now. Instead, he lay back with a groan of exhaustion and pulled Jiao’s jade angel from its place at his heart. Her great-great-grandfather had been a high-ranking official at the Imperial Court, and he visited Queen Victoria during her Jubilee. He had the angel carved from a piece of ancestral jade while he was in London, and gave it on a gold chain to his beautiful young wife in Beijing. Jiao had cherished it. She loved the Western myths about these benign protective spirits who could also be mighty and terrible. But of course, the jade angel hadn’t protected her.

DaQing lay with the little piece of stone crushed against his forehead, trying as he so often did for some magic to lose himself in time.

Jiao the Golden, jade angel pressed by their lovemaking into the moist flesh of her breast where it lifts and falls with her gentle breathing, then tumbles free as she stirs and reaches for him again. He rises to her, takes her in his arms, prolonging the moment before he plunges his soul into her body….

The magic never worked; here he was still. Their life together over, destroyed in the collapse of their apartment complex while he was out on patrol. Now he lived alone, in one of the tiny cubicles known as coffins, like a million others China had gratefully offloaded onto her ForShing colony, without worrying too much about its ability to aeroform and build infrastructure, and to provide food and space for all those mouths.

DaQing tucked the jade angel back against his own breast and sat up. He ordered the light higher and pressed his thumb to his comscreen to access the specs General Han’s aide had downloaded to him.

General Han had harangued him about the honor of the ForShing Yan, the honor of the

General’s illustrious warrior family, the honor of DaQing’s own family, for he too was a Han. DaQing had been careful to stand rigid, apparently bursting with pride at being chosen to test fly the shield prototype.

But what did honor mean to him anymore? After everything China and Independent ForShing both had done to his life, to all their lives. To Jiao.

He shook his head to clear it of these thoughts. I’mthinking like an American. Everything is for me, me, me. The ForShing Yan need the resources of USAM to survive, that’s all I need to worry about now. The past has made the present, and it’s only the future I can change.

He ordered the comscreen and the light off, and lay back down, forced his eyes closed. Flying from behind the dragon shield would be a strange new environment. He didn’t know how external data might be distorted, didn’t know how his instruments would interpret the shielding itself. He had two weeks’ hard training in simulation before the test flight, on top of his missions. Best to sleep while he could.

Xandri left the dining hall, snagged a hook on the quad four elevator and rode up five levels to the Hub.

The vidscreen was running a news item on the Great Lakes War. The Canadians had sabotaged New York’s Tunnel 4 and collapsed the last ruins of the New York Public Library. At the Hub, she sat in the bar and had a few Martian beers to steady her nerves. At last, she rescued her shuttle from the extortionists at the dock office and caught the Sidestaff Airway west into USAM, to the res pod she’d shared with Chill for the last three months. The shuttle shuddered heavily all along the airway; it needed new gyros but the cost of those had skyrocketed. Americas victory over the Chinese on Earth two years ago had left her hard-pressed to resource her own needs, let alone keep up the steady stream of manufactured goods and parts her colony depended on. USAM was suffering the legacy of the European colonial structure, which kept the Martian colonies supplying raw materials while America maintained a stranglehold on the highest level manufacturing processes. If only the Chimese had acknowledged China’s right to cede its colony as spoils of war to the Americans. Instead, they’d declared independence and mired Mais in a war that neither side was well equipped to fight.

When she opened the door of the res, she saw Chill had murphied the kitchen and was chopping root vegetables on the counter. He wielded the knife heavily, and colorful chunks of carrot shot off like missiles. The two mabbits were lined up, twitching in a delirium of hope that a piece would lob through the air into their cage. Xandri picked a few up and slid them through the bars. At least someone should be happy, she thought, and turned to face Chill.

“Chill, stop chopping and listen to me.”

Instead, he said. “You’ve got a real problem with trust, don’t you? You brush your squad leader off when I question you and go directly to the general?”

She was amazed. “How did you know that? What did you do, follow me?”

“I was going in the same direction, yes,” he answered stiffly, turning to her at last. “But that’s not the point. The point is you won’t tell me what happened out there.”

It was true, she wouldn’t, and she suddenly realized why. Back at the base, he’d threatened her with medical decommission. She couldn’t trust him to be on her side if this came to a psych trial.

That’s when she knew Chill had to go. Occam’s razor. The simplest solution is the best one. The simplest life is the happiest one. “No, you’re right. I won’t. I can’t. Maybe,” she plunged on angrily, “maybe you should sign back on the residency board. This was a great arrangement when I wasn’t on alpha team, but we should have split up when I got reassigned.”

Her words hung in the air. “So this was just an arrangement to you?” he said at last, stony faced.

An hour-long argument later, she left, and spent the day doing a series of aimless things fueled by watery beer and frustration. She returned late, and the night that followed was long and exquisitely awkward. Chill murphied the second bed and they tossed in the uncomfortable silence, each listening with resentment to the small sounds made by the other. In the morning, vowing to swear off relationships for the rest of her life, Xandri fled an hour before she needed to, which put her on deck just in time to receive orders to report to General Kantu.

Her uncle got right to the point.

“I checked your black box. Nothing supports what you claim. What’s even more confusing is, our intelligence says nothing about a shield test. But all this worries me. If the Chimese ever manage to shield New Beijing, they’ll launch their assault on USAM the next day before cornflakes.” She didn’t know what cornflakes were, but got the point. “I’ve decided to move up the schedule for a prototype test of our own.”