Joe Haldeman - Future Weapons of War

“Good. Building enough systems to shield all our dragons will take less of our resources and can be accomplished much sooner, before the end of summer. And you will be the one to lead the attack on USAM. Congratulations, Colonel. We will destroy the enemy before he can destroy us.” The general saluted him, and DaQing saluted back. The flag of Independent ForShing hung on the wall behind the general, a golden dragon encircling the red sphere of Mars, and he saluted that, too. It was a fire dragon, destructive, a dragon of war, and it had claimed him. There would be no peace now.

Xristian Jefferson Kantu had never seen skin so gray in so young a person.

“I was just about to die,” Xandri said quietly. “It’s a terrible burden, knowing how and when you die.”

“We don’t know any such thing. Here’s what we think happened. Instead of propagating matter waves, we believe, but can’t observe, that the ZPE’s discharge creates minute timeshifts on a quantum level. It would be a random and diffuse phenomenon. But then Heckler’s ironically named law of chaos comes into play, which dictates that the random cause-and-effect patterns and synchronicities initiated by random source phenomena will eventually cohere into an organized, discrete phenomenon. Because time is a constant to each observer but not to all observers, the new timeshift phenomenon is localized, with a ripple effect of variable extent. Localized to you. Felt earlier in time, even before you first fired the ZPE.”

“But what is the timeshift phenomenon? Where am I going?”

“If the universe is an infinite layering of possible timecurves, with possibilities narrowing each time we make a decision, then the ZPE has breached the barrier between two of them and you are traveling through to an intersection where particular temporal realities are mutually inhabited. A future in which USAM is destroyed, but not necessarily our future. If so, the time synch could be unstable, so there would always be the risk of getting trapped. Or maybe the ZPE has created a timeloop, a closed timecurve. In order to form, a closed timecurve would need two events within a normal timecurve—an initiating event and a terminal event—of such impact on spacemass/timenergy that they create a distortion that bends the curve in on itself and ultimately breaches the timecurve barrier at the point where the two events achieve mutual temporality.”

“So the ZPE might be the initiating event.”

They were sitting in his office, in the two carved wood chairs he’d had brought from Earth in the heady days when America could afford to shower her colonists with material goods. Xristian Kantu stood and paced, deep in thought. At last, he sat down across from her again and took her hand. She was shocked. He had never done this, not even when her parents died. She was even more shocked to find comfort in his touch now.

“How long do you think it will be before the American president announces the Last Flight from Earth?” he asked.

“What do you mean? Uncle Sam on Earth will always be there for Uncle Sam on Mars. Vincente-Riaz says it in every second speech.”

“Basically, what America won in the Sino-American War was the right to preside over the end of the human era on Earth. Vincente-Riaz has already warned President Hartwell that we’d better get this war cleaned up and get ourselves self-sufficient in a hurry. Global climate change, environmental toxins, the VAIDS and brain flu pandemics—there are five billion fewer humans on Earth than there were a century ago and the birthrate is still dropping. We need a solution to the war up here fast, so Washington can concentrate on sending us the technology we’ll need to stay alive once we’re on our own. Otherwise we’ll win this war just to die a slow death.

“You’re experiencing other points on the timecurve, Xandri. Points in the future. We need to know more. We need to know the terminal event to ensure we win this war and establish a free Mars before the lifeline is cut. This isn’t an order. It can’t be. I can’t force you to fly back to the Dragon Nest and discharge the ZPE one more time. I just ask you to remember that your name is Jefferson Kantu.

Your heritage runs from great warriors, from Africa to America and now to Mars. I was modified as an adult to survive here; you carry this planet in your genes. And unfortunately, it seems the terran race dies with my generation. So one way or another, the future is yours.”

Xandri gave the order to fire and the ZPE jittered. But she never knew if there was a spatial result because the temporal reaction kicked in. When she emerged from the time twist, she was in a dogfight with the green dragon. There was a ruined city in the distance, and she seemed to know it was New Beijing. A glance at her instrumentation sent a flare of panic up her spine. The time-twist had worked differently this time—only she seemed to have come forward, not her eagle. She was in a different bird.

It too was fitted with a ZPE, but the instrumentation had been modified, and the ZPE was the only online weapons system.

She fired. The ZPE propagated matter waves that met the dragons scalar shell, and though the shield deflected much of the energy, she could see that she’d done serious damage. But before she could change course to come in for the kill, the green dragons missile took off her wing.

Eagle and dragon crash-landed a couple of kilometers from each other, but it was more of a land than a crash and both pilots walked away from the wrecks.

Only there was nowhere to walk to. She realized with horror that she remembered, without

having lived it, exactly what events brought them here. The near-destruction of USAM. The arrival of the Last Flight from Earth. The failure of peace talks. Xristian Jefferson Kantu’s team solving the ZPE problem so that the weapon propagated matter waves, not temporal ones. The final battle—eagles pitted against dragons until the eagles punched through the shield of New Beijing and destroyed it.

USAM equipped its eagles with survival gear—an individual personnel bubble, coated with a solar micropanel array that provided plenty of energy for light and heat, to process oxygen, to create and recycle water and nutrients. There were nutrient concentrates, various useful chemicals and meds, even an entertainment library she could view on the vidscreen coating on the bubble’s inner surface.

Independent ForShing had long since stripped its dragons of any such luxuries as individual survival gear. Humans were replaceable, gear was not. So it was inevitable that the pilot of the green dragon should walk her way.

It was probably also inevitable that they didn’t try to kill each other. What was the point? He wasn’t green up close, of course, just a man. Han DaQing, a flight colonel like herself.

Time passed. Xandri’s gear included a satellite communication device, and the satellites continued orbiting the planet, doing their job. But there were few survivors on the ground to communicate with. Periodically, the two established contact with small pockets of either side, but the distances were prohibitive. They’d likely die before they found each other. And here too, what was the point? Could they establish a small settlement that might survive their lifetimes, especially with the areoforming process well established and beyond human interference anyway? Probably. But there were clearly not enough of them to survive as a race.

It wasn’t long before she and DaQing became lovers, for reasons that began in desperate denial of the truth and ended in the gut-level recognition that love was all they had left. Eventually, they had said everything to each other they could think of saying. Idle conversation loses its interest when every breath drawn is an exercise in futility.