Joe Haldeman - Future Weapons of War

“Sir?”

“A zero point energy weapon, based on quantum chromodynamics. We can easily adapt our eagles to mount it. The ZPE has twice the range of any of their missiles or l-g weapons, and it doesn’t need a straight line of sight to lock on its target. Plus, its destructive power should be on the order often times anything we’ve got now. This will be our Hiroshima—the shot across the bow that ends the war.

I’ve been very involved in the ZPE’s development, and I need you to understand how this thing works.

Because you’re the pilot who’s flying the mission.”

“Sir! Thank you, sir!” Her heart drummed fiercely against her rib cage, but she stared rigidly ahead.

“Instead of energy transmission through space in the form of electromagnetic force fields, we transmit electrogravitational potentials through spacemass/timenergy. The ZPE is based on the action of zero point energy on subatomic particles in normal vacuum. All charges in the universe are jostled through interaction with the zero point energy field, causing matter waves to propagate and giving us spacetime. In Wheeler’s spacetime foam model, the quantum mechanical state of the universe is a superposition of many different spacetime topologies. Processes that should serve to increase the Cosmological constant instead drive the production of more and more complicated spacetime foam.

What we’ve discovered is a way to explode a single unit of quantum foam—pop a single bubble.”

“Isn’t there a cause-and-effect action?” she asked. “A cascade of popping bubbles?”

“Analogies only go so far,” he answered, a little impatient. “Ultimately, quantum foam isn’t soap. The ZPE’s internal architecture is the most elegant construct I’ve ever had the honor to see. It’s the crowning achievement of quantum engineering.” His eyes bored into her. “This weapon will save America on Mars. We’ll defeat the Chimese with it, and then its practical applications will drive our society forward. And history will record that one Jefferson Kantu helped design it and another flew it.

Congratulations, Captain. Report for training to Flight Level C at 0630.”

Modifying her eagle to house the ZPE took over a week, a week of skirmishes both on and off the battlefield. Chill was living up to his name. Something had broken between them, and until he found another res she was living in a frigid zone. For a hot-tempered woman like Xandri, it was torture.

So she heaved a sigh of relief when zero hour arrived and she secured herself in her cockpit.

She flew north, following the line of the New Jersey Gardens, where Terran food plants grew in thick layers of mabbit shit and Martian soil. Beyond the controlled environment bubbles of the Gardens, the neonate Martian biosphere stretched to the horizon, a thin veneer of green fogged by red summer dust.

Her target was the Dragon Nest. In one blow, the Chimese were about to lose eighty percent of their dragons.

Six hours later she came into range, well outside the reach of any Chimese patrol, programmed the target coordinates, and fired her way into history.

The ZPE made the same jittering sound it had in simulation, but a nanosecond later, she felt the world do that shimmer-twist again, the one she had felt before she saw the green dragon. The same pain and sense of wrongness, the same spike in her meds to the top of the red zone, and the same return to normality.

Her retinal cameras were transmitting satellite images of the Dragon Nest.

No apparent signs of damage. This was impossible—had the thunderbolt of doom turned out to be a slingshot pebble?

Strangely, and in stark contrast to the satellite images she’d received just moments ago, there wasn’t much to damage beyond infrastructure anyway. Every last hangar bubble was retracted and empty.

She turned her eagle around so fast she had to fight it for control, and she sped back toward USAM over the blooming landscape. She was an hour out when the maydays started. By the time she got there the battle was almost over.

The USAM forces, ground and air, were battering at the Chimese dragon fleet. The missile impacts could be seen as a distortion of the visual field around the dragons, but none of the force was getting through. Could this have been what happened at the Dragon Nest? No, satellite imagery would have shown this effect. But certainly the Chimese had managed to shield their dragons, and USAM had abruptly lost its one decisive advantage—the superior amount of functional weapons technology it had to throw at the enemy.

Xandri rushed lo join the battle, her long range lasers already contributing to the apparently useless barrage. The New Jersey Gardens were exploded into smoking ruins, and she could see the financial district, and the USAM Trade Center itself, obscured in a puffball of flaming smoke.

Then she saw the green dragon and went after it. It didn’t seem to be engaging in the action, just hovering near the battlefield like some angel of death. Xandri fired her laser arrays, which of course did nothing but attract the green dragons attention, and it circled tightly to target her. With just seconds before it destroyed her eagle, she took the only option she had left—she fired the ZPE, hoping for a more destructive result this time.

With the discharge came the now-familiar wrench, but the result wasn’t anything she could have expected.

The green dragon, the whole battle scene, had vanished. She was buzzing around a perfectly intact USAM and Eagle Control was shouting at her to respond.

Two weeks after the inexplicable interference that blinded Dragon Nest’s instrumentation for more than six hours, DaQing was ordered to report to the office of General Han.

“It was a field of tachyon disturbances on the scalar electrostatic potential level, generated through quantum chromodynamics, and it emanated from a source flying at two thousand km.

Presumably an American eagle. What we do not understand is why the Americans did not follow through and destroy the Nest. We have decided it must be because this was an unintended effect and the pilot did not understand what happened.” General Han stopped speaking, and there was a lengthening silence broken only by the sound of the General’s terran crickets skittering across the floor of their cage. They were the only personal object in an office furnished with only the basics. In these interesting limes, even those at the top of ForShing Yan society had to make do with little. “I regret to inform you,” he went on, “our calculations show that the shielding you so successfully tested would not hold against this field.”

DaQing s mind flashed back to the test flight. He’d never reported the American eagle he had on visual for nine seconds after he turned on the shielding, the one that had seemed to fire on him. He knew it would be regarded as a psychological lapse on his part, a pilot tricked by the shields visual distortions and hallucinating. After all, they would argue, his dragon hadn’t been fooled—the external data receptors showed nothing. He’d checked the black box on his return to Dragon Nest. His career would end and, without Jiao or any future he cared about, his career was all he had left.

“We had hoped we would be able to shield all of Independent ForShing,” the General was saying. “Our engineers have the design, but we lack the materials. Still, we have plans, a small sacrifice in comfort by each of the ForShing Yan, and we will soon have enough to start construction. But now the Americans force us to move more quickly. We must attack the enemy before he realizes what he has built. Do you agree, captain?”

He was surprised to be asked his opinion. “Yes, General,” he answered.