Joe Haldeman - Future Weapons of War

Four and five had near-direct water routes, with only the last few hundred yards exposed, but five had to cross a side road, supposedly with low traffic.

He flicked from image to image, flickering from snator to snator so fast that twice the integrator blanked. The snators’ binocular vision was clear, and there wasn’t much color. He wanted to get a better and quicker personal sense of locale matched with the plot map, but he forced himself to slow down.

He did have another thirty standard minutes, and the snators were fast.

Group five was running ahead, but deJahn didn’t see that it mattered. Better ahead and clear than on sched and facing opposition.

Group three was already on target, less than sixty yards below the nodecaster concealed in an artificial rock cliff slightly north of the center of the gardens.

One of the local patrollers was also there, and she had a stun-rifle out, leveling it at the lead snator. DeJahn dropped the third snator into limited free hunt, because its reactions and impulses were far faster than his through the links.

Her shot went wide. She did not get a second shot.

Someone else did, with a biodetonator.

Electrofire slammed back through the links, and deJahn shuddered, even as he accelerated two of the gators toward the base of the cliff, seeking whatever access points there might be. Neither of the two lagging snators could locate the attacker, even as one registered projectiles screaming past it.

Giving up on locating the attacker, deJahn pressed the laggards after the leaders, strengthening the lure of decaying meat.

A second snator went up, this time with its own bioex, leaving flame in deJahn’s eyes. He shook off the pain feedback and checked the closure. The three remaining were close enough. He triggered them, holding the link for the barest moment to make sure the command had gone true, before disengaging.

Even so, the shock rocked him, because some of the snators’ death agony washed back over him.

One down, four to go.

Automatics of some soil popped up from the sides of the cricket field right alter deJahn

detonated and disengaged from the sacrificial snator. Two of the remaining snators were shredded by the autofire, but three others sprinted through the hail of composite to the other side and the base of the nodecaster, surrounded by three yards of impermite. Impermite was weak stuff compared to NorAm bioex.

DeJahn triggered and disengaged.

Pointed iron picks began to chip away at his skull.

Three more…

Group four scuttled and splashed through the tanks of a low-tech wetworks to reach the back side of another low hill. A dozen Seasies in dull green uniforms appeared.

DeJahn sent the lead gator toward them, using it—with an early detonation—to clear the way for the others.

Another trigger and disengage.

Now… large and ancient cannon were blowing holes in his skull. How it felt, anyway.

Interrogative status?

Three objectives triggered… two in progress. His entire body was a mass of fire, pseudo biofeedback fire, but it still the frig hurt.

He struggled to focus on the link to group one. Still short of target.

Five… where was five?

Trying to cross the road, and two local patrollers were laying down a fire curtain.

That cost him two snators, but the patrollers and their vehicles went up with the bioex. He just hoped the two remaining snators had enough bioex for the nodecaster as he put them on free search-and-destroy.

Group one.

Just as he linked, he could feel the biofield constrictor sweep across the snators of group one.

He mentally lunged for disengagement… Disengage!

Fire! Like being bitten by a thousand scroaches. Light! Brighter than novafly exploding before his eyes.

DeJahn jerked. His eyes were open, saw only purple blackness, link-deep with no link. Every nerve in his body was a line of fire. Where was cool? Darkness? Easy… easy…

Whose voice? Knew the voice. Couldn’t place… couldn’t find.

“Who?” His voice rasped. Not his voice. Could tell he’d been screaming. Frig! Didn’t want to be a screamer.

A hand touched his. Warm, welcome… Yet… the warmth was fire, knifelike, daggers like the fangs of a chimbat, like the venom of a chimshrew.

“You’ll be all right, deJahn… be fine. Just disengagement link-shock…”

Just disengagement link-shock… link-shock… Sure, you’ll be fine. This time.

“Friggin… disengage…”

“You’ll be all right.” Meralez squeezed his hand once more. This time, there was no pain.

He managed to tighten his fingers around hers for a moment.

He would be fine. He was a tech.

Ygal20.43

“Come on,” the remote descendent of Homo sapiens said with something approaching exasperation. “We’ve known we’re due to get clobbered by that thing for, oh, a quarter of a galactic year at the very least. And it’s not going to happen for a very long time. What’s the big issue?”

The being, which identified herself as Selan Avris, was recognizably human in the shape and expressiveness of her head—large, hairless, and sharp-featured. Her torso was far more flexible than that of ancient gravity-bound forms, however, and long ago her species had exchanged legs for a second pair of long and delicate arms. Homo extraterrestrialis was one of some fifteen hundred extant species, all members of a swiftly diversifying genus Homo.

The term swiftly was relative, of course. For ephemeral species, the sixty million years since the original genus Homo had emerged from its gravity-bound cocoon was a very long time indeed.

“But the collision will occur,” her partner told her, “in another thirteen point seven galactic years. And what will that mean for a nascent K3 civilization?”

The partner was familiarly known as Valova, though it didn’t have a name in the traditional sense of the word. It, too, was descended from the original branch of Humanity that had reached beyond the parent world, though it was not, strictly speaking, a member of genus Homo. A fusion of the organic with the machine, it was a true cyborg. All organic components resided safely deep within its smoothly convoluted black-silver shell, a composite material neither plastic nor metal, but something of both.

“Thirteen galyears is seventy-seven percent of the age of the Earth itself,” Selan replied with a complex shrug of four shoulders. She reached out with a lower left arm to grasp a convenient handhold and turned to look out into the golden dusting of the Solar Dyson cloud. “None of us will be here to see it. Not even you”

“Feeling our mortality, are we?” Valova said, but it included a carefully crafted emotive packet—wry humor and understanding—to rob the words of any sting. “I would think that if Humankind has learned anything, it is the need to take the long view.”

“I can’t say I’m enthusiastic about this proposed step up to K3 status, is all. What have the Galactics ever done for us?”

“They left us alone,” was Valova’s reply, “to evolve in our own way.”

“Then we should return the favor.”

From this particular vantage point, a “spome”—the ancient word referred to a space home—deep within the Dyson cloud, the glow from some billions of habitats all but masked the stars.

Humanity’s descendents, in many forms, had traveled throughout the Galaxy, encountering and interacting with myriad other minds, but the vast majority remained here, safe within the home system.

After all, why venture elsewhere, when the home system of Humankind offered all in the way of comfort, diversity, and diversion any sentient being could ask?