Joe Haldeman - Future Weapons of War

Jenny usually stuck a bag in a mug and poured the milk from the carton, so this seemed to her to be uncommonly civilized. “Aren’t you having any, Sergeant?” she said.

“Sergeant Cray will pack you a bag while I explain” Gilfillan told her.

The sergeant was standing behind the doctor at that point, and Jenny met her eye. The chit favored her with what was presumably supposed to be an expression of sisterly support. It wasn’t convincing. Jenny didn’t say that she’d far rather do her own packing, because the simple fact was that it would take every last vestige of her strength just to walk up the garden path to the ambulance.

Gilfillan took a genteel sip from his unsugared cup, and pretended not to notice the second heaped teaspoon that Jenny had shovelled into hers.

“Okay,” Jenny said. “I’m gagged. Tell me exactly how I’ve been fucked over.”

“All your test results are fine, Miss Loomis. We’ll probably have to think in terms of a precautionary Caesarean section, given the size of the fetus, but we don’t expect any further problems.

If you want to bring the baby home after we’ve completed our preliminary observations, you can. We’ll stay in the background, if you wish—but if you’d like to move into army accommodation, to be with other mothers in the same situation as you, that would probably suit you as well as us. If you want to arrange mainstream schooling for him, that will be okay too—again, we’ll be discreet—but again, it might suit everyone better, especially your son, if we were able to keep him in a protected environment.”

“So he is a supersoldier with artificially boosted genes? Have you got a battalion full of pregnant squaddies, or are you mixing up the fetuses in petri dishes and outsourcing them all to civilian aides .” Is it a long-range program, or are the little Action Men programmed to continue growing twice as fast as normal once they’re out in the open?”

“It is a long-range program,” Gilfillan said, remaining perfectly calm in the face of the attempted onslaught. “It compares reasonably well with the time it takes to get a new warplane or missile from the drawing board to the battlefield, but that’s not the point. The nature of warfare is changing, though not quite in the direction your melodramatic friend imagines—and so is the range of political thinking.”

“I know,” she told him, intent on making it clear that her brain was still working even though her body had turned traitor. “The Age of Reckless Haste ended the day oil production peaked and the price of energy began its inexorable upward march. Everybody thinks in terms of generations now. I read the papers—and I fiddle company accounts for a living, or did before 1 decided that it was time to fulfil my destiny as a woman. You’d better get to the bottom line, Dr. Gilfillan, if you expect me to get into that ambulance when Sergeant Cray has packed my nightie and toothbrush.”

“Fair enough,” Gilfillan said, seemingly quite pleased by the way she was handling herself.

“Your lieutenant was right about the difficulties of biological warfare. We don’t know exactly how many biological attacks have been mounted in this country during the last twenty years, but the casualty figures have been tiny, even when the agents were supposedly deadly. Even if the flu epidemics were assisted, they’ve done far less damage than self-inflicted injuries like junk food and cigarettes. The days when biowar enthusiasts thought that it would just be a matter of opening a test tube on a plane or filling a cluster bomb’s warheads with contaminated powder are long gone.

Biological agents are delicate, and even the most contagious ones don’t spread far if the targets have the sense to move back and wash their hands. The cutting edge of research isn’t a matter of designing deadlier or cleverer diseases—it’s a matter of designing better carriers. Do you know what a perfect carrier is?”

“A Typhoid Mary, in tabloid-speak,” Jenny said. “Someone who can infect a lot of other people with a disease without suffering any ill effect himself.”

“Actually, it’s a Typhoid Mary with the ability to discriminate: to switch his infectiousness on and off, so that he—or she—can target the contagion.”

“And that’s what I’m carrying—in a slightly different sense of the word.”

“I hope so. You asked whether we have a battalion of pregnant squaddies—well, if things had gone the way we hoped, we might have. At present, we’ve hardly got a platoon. Your country needs you, Miss Loomis. And when you’ve had a chance to think it over, I’m sure you’ll understand that you might very well need us. If this were to leak out to the media—and I’m certainly not trying to threaten you, because we’ll move heaven and earth to stop that happening, whether you come aboard or not—you and your baby would be subject to weeks of intense scrutiny and a lifetime of haphazard prying.”

If she had had the strength, Jenny would have laughed—not because what he was saying was absurd, but because it was so obviously true. For her child’s sake, and her own, she ought to be begging the army to let her in, not to leave her out in the open, where the eagle eyes and sharp beaks of the media might only be one of the threats facing her. The world was, alas, full of people who might find a use for the kind of weapon she was allegedly carrying in her womb—and might not want to wait until he was in long pants before setting him loose.

“Well,” she said, softly, “it wasn’t rape, and it wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t even loneliness or desperation. All those years looking after mum while she went through the chemo three times over, and all the transfusions and transplants, took a big bite out of my life, but I was nowhere near the end of my tether. It was a choice. Go for a soldier, Jackie said. Guaranteed A-one condition, and no complications.

And I get the joke now, by the way: abstract expressionism, a load of Jackson Pollocks. Would you like another cup of tea while I make a couple of phone calls?”

Gilfillan’s hesitation was only momentary. “No thanks,” he said. “Feel free.” He didn’t utter any objection when she hauled herself to her feet and staggered to the bathroom, locking the door behind her.

Jackie’s phone was still switched off. “Now I’ve joined the bloody army, thanks to you,” she said. “I’m in the bloody secret service, and I can’t ever pour my heart out to you again, even if I want to. I hope you’re pleased with yourself. Call me when you can—it looks as if things aren’t quite as bad as I feared.”

Then she called Steve. “I won’t say its panic over,” she told his answerphone, “but it looks as if I’ll probably be able to call and let you know I’m okay. They’ll have to whip the baby out a bit prematurely, it seems, but that’ll probably make me feel a lot more comfortable. Hold tight—I’ll get back to you when I can.”

She insisted on having lunch before they left, although she had to be content with a couple of microwaved pizzas, a microwaved chocolate sponge pudding, two bananas, an apple, half a bottle of Lucozade and three cups of coffee.

She knew that the ambulance wouldn’t have gone unobserved, and that her uncomfortable journey to its interior would probably end up on a couple of DIY DVDs. The neighbours had got out of the habit of talking to one another, except in emergencies, but they filmed everything out of the ordinary just in case. Someone would be sure to show it to Jackie, in the hope of getting an explanation.

The exact nature of her relationship with Jackie had probably been a topic of speculation for some time, even though the dull reality was that they were just friends who’d found one another to lean on when Jackie’s divorce had matured in parallel with the final phase of Jenny’s mothers losing battle against the Evil Empire of Lymphoma.