Joe Haldeman - Future Weapons of War

They know every detail of each other’s histories, values, and beliefs. They even exhausted suicide as a topic of discussion, having agreed that if she became pregnant, it would be time to crack out the poison capsules from the medkit. Certainly, they early on exhausted their understanding of the physics behind Xandri’s continuing presence here.

“Every breach has been different,” she pointed out. “The first happened before I even fired the ZPE, maybe a ripple effect backwards, Xristian thought. That one and the next sent me and my eagle forward and brought us back, although the first return wasn’t initiated by anything I did, and the second happened when I refired the ZPE. This breach defeats me completely. I’m living in a temporal paradox—my body came forward, so where is the Xandri who engaged you before I arrived? And if I do cross back, will some Xandri still be here with you? And will there be a pullback this time, so I can warn both sides and change all this? Maybe Xristian guessed right about the instability of the time synch, and I’m trapped. Was it the creation of the ZPE that created this timeloop with this terminal event? Or has it revealed our own timecurve? Or forced us into another one? I don’t know the answers to any of this, or what I could do to initiate a pullback. There’s no ZPE to fire this time, that’s the one thing I do know.”

Winter came in its time. One night, when both moons were down and the stars twinkled faintly in the thickening Martian atmosphere, they lay huddled together on the bubbles sleeping mat. They were watching old entertainment on the vidscreen. They’d long since watched anything that interested them, and they were down to ancient “science fiction movies.” This one featured a big beefy man who started up an alien terraforming array on Mars that, in the space of a few minutes of action-packed sucking and blowing, transforms the planet into a clone of Earth.

They laughed at the absurdity. But Xandri ordered the “movie” off before the names of its fictional and long-dead terrans started scrolling down the screen.

“That’ll be us someday,” she said wearily.

“Flicking a switch and saving Mars?” DaQing asked with amusement.

“No. What I meant was, whatever life-form dominates in the Mars we’ve created, we’ll be the dead alien technology they’ll have to puzzle over.”

For some reason the date/time display at the bottom of the otherwise darkened vidscreen caught her eye. They hardly ever thought about calendars and timepieces.

“Its my birthday,” she said, realizing with a shock what the date was. “I’m twenty-one. I can vote to elect the next president of USAM.”

He laughed, and sat up to unfasten the jade angel that always hung round his neck, the one that had belonged to his dead wife. He reached down and fastened the gold chain round her neck. “Isn’t democracy wonderful. Well, then, you must have a present. Besides, if you ever do get pulled back, General Han will accept it as proof of your story because it will also be hanging round my neck.”

She kissed him to thank him, and the kiss lengthened, turned passionate. She felt a protective glow from where DaQing’s body pressed the jade into her skin. It was a very hollow promise, under the circumstances, but the hope offered by angels has always been just a matter of faith.

The first wave of squidlettes hit Lobo’s hull a little less than a minute after we touched down, not bad time given that we were in a clearing a full two klicks from Osterlad’s mansion and had come in as hard and fast as we could manage. Not enough time for us to get much done, either: Lobo had fired four corner anchor bolts into the freshly scorched ground, opened his center floor hatch, and sprayed the dirt with coolant. I was out of the crash couch and had led the stealthie into position. It was just beginning to burrow down, sucking dirt through its digging tentacles and onto Lobo s floor, and then they were on us.

“Let’s see how it looks,” I said.

Lobo patched the feeds from the ring of sensors we’d planted a few seconds before impact, and a corresponding ring of video popped onto the cool gray walls opposite where I was watching the stealthie make its way into the ground.

“Audio,” I said.

“You could have asked for the whole feed in the first place,” the battlewagon grumbled on our standard frequency. A moment later, the sounds of the attack crashed from his hidden speakers.

I’ve mostly learned to tolerate the emotive programming Lobo’s customization team put in him before I acquired him. I’ve even come to think of my battlewagon as him, not it, andhe’s pretty much my best, which is to say only friend these days. He’s a fellow veteran, so I also cut him some slack for that.

Sometimes, though, I could do without the sarcasm.

On the displays, I watched as a couple dozen squidlettes crawled over Lobo’s smooth surface, each probing the reinforced metal for the hair-thin lines that even the best hatches inevitably leave. A hybrid of meat tentacles coupled to a metal exoskeleton, a variety of acid and gas nozzles, and a small cluster of comm and sensor circuits, each squidlette arrived as a round missile, opened a few seconds before impact, used the gas jets to slow enough so its tentacles could unfurl, and then stuck to whatever it hit. Normally each would carry an explosive payload in addition to the acid, detonating either when sensors, comm signals, or timers gave the command, but I knew Osterlad wouldn’t risk damaging Lobo more than he could possibly avoid; after all, the whole point was to capture the battlewagon. Some of the acid was for forcing open the hatches; the rest was for me.

Another round of squidlettes popped onto Lobo’s hull. There were so many crawling on the battlewagon now that I couldn’t get a clear count. The normally faint, slow slurping sound they made as their tentacles dragged them along made it sound through the speakers like we were being digested by some shambling creature large enough to swallow Lobo’s roughly seventy- by twenty-five-foot bulk. Even though I knew many feet of armor separated the crew area where I now stood from the squidlettes outside, I still tasted the tang of adrenaline and noticed the hairs on my arms standing up.

“Can you feel them, Lobo?” I kept our chatter to our private frequency, which Lobos armor blocked from any sensors Osterlad’s people were training on us. Thanks to the repairs my sister, Jennie, made to my brain way back when we were kids on Pinkelponker, and to the modifications the doctors on Aggro made when they laced me with nanomachines, I can communicate with most machines by focusing my thoughts in the right way. If more people realized how lonely and chatty machines generally are and how much information they’ll give to anyone who gets them talking, we might go back to living with dumb devices.

“Not the way you feel, Jon, not as best I understand humans. But I have enough hull sensors to detect the motion, and once they find the few hatch seams we had to leave open, the acid will start affecting more internal circuits.”

“Give em a jolt,” I said. “A hard one.”

“You understand that it probably won’t destroy them,” Lobo said.

“Yes, but if we don’t try to fight back, Osterlad will know somethings up, and besides, we have to use some power now so they’ll believe we’re out of it later.”

Lobo didn’t bother to answer. The displays and speakers showed his response: the air popped with electricity, streaks of blue arced all over his hull, and almost all the squidlettes slid off onto the clearing around us.

I checked the stealthie’s progress. Its top was about six inches below ground level, and it was spraying dirt around its flank. It was almost as low as it would go without me.