SNAFU: Future Warfare

by Geoff Brown

  I growled, bringing myself back on task, just as we reached the nidus’s entry portal. A burrower whose name I didn’t know — and probably never would — slapped a shapecharge on the maglock and triggered it. The charge sizzled and burned its way through the locking mechanism, acrid smoke billowing from under its vent hood. I put my boot in the center of the door and slammed it open as soon as the lock gave way, dropping to my knees so those behind me could fire without hitting me. The narrow, thrumming chamber was empty.

  I hesitated to issue orders in the wake of no resistance, and the quiet stretched on, only the kron in my helmet clicking at me with angry insistence, driving me forward.

  “Damn it! Place wrecks,” I called out, using the slang term for the gelatinous cubes we used to take out the Worldbreakers, each a mix of white phosphorous and volatile plasma capable of searing through the hardened walls of the engine casing and razing the systems inside beyond repair, spreading through the ship much like the Saaart intended for the planet below.

  Six men charged into the room and made it halfway across before the sensors in my helmet detected an electrical surge.

  “Retreat,” I screamed, but it was too late. The trap was sprung.

  Blue-black sparks rippled across the floor, lightning across steel gray clouds, and the men were engulfed. Their screams were cut short as the current arced through their bodies, smoldering points of char where each furious tongue lapped. The burrowers stiffened and kron slowed as I spied the first of the wrecks toppling from a soldier’s rigid hand. I raced forward, careful not to touch the sparking floor, seized the big metal door, and yanked it closed just ticks before the first of the wrecks ignited.

  The explosion blew the door from the hinges and flung fire into the corridor. The steel hatch clipped me as it blew past, triggering my armor’s kinetic shields. I tumbled end over end, grav sensors shrieking, and barely felt myself strike the far bulkhead. The ground rose up to embrace me, the hatch buried halfway in the wall above, and I watched as my helmet display shrieked red warnings. Something inside me felt wrong, broken. Then the stims kicked in, flooding my veins with painkillers, and I felt nothing.

  I swept aside the display so I could see how the others had fared. It wasn’t well. Two of the remaining six had caught the full brunt of the explosion and were little more than blobs wreathed in glowing phosphorous, suits and flesh melted into one. Indistinguishable. The others had been out of direct line of the blast but they stumbled drunkenly from the concussive force, struggling to remain standing. One failed and dropped to his knees. Blood stained the inside of his visor.

  I crawled my way back to my feet and steeled my voice against the tremor that ran through me. “Status?”

  “Kin-shield 12%, otherwise okay,” the first replied, sounding almost honest. He swayed unsteadily.

  The second tapped his helmet, signaling comms down and gave a shaky thumbs up. The third, Rawlins as I remembered, barked an A-OK. The last, the trooper on his knees, said nothing, eyes wide and staring at the crimson that darkened his viewscreen.

  Grateful for the magclasps that kept my rifle firmly adhered to my forearm, I stumbled forward and put the barrel against the kneeling man’s helmet. “A warrior’s boon,” I offered, then pulled the trigger. He slumped to the floor as the bolt tore through his head. The others stared in silence, likely believing me cold, but I’d offered the man mercy. He was dead before I put the rifle to him.

  “Move,” I called out and started down the corridor. We’d scored the nidus but the Worldbreaker crept on unimpeded. “We’re not done yet.”

  The men followed after, keeping a distance between us. I didn’t bother to call them on it. Rooks on their first burrow, they’d no understanding of what they’d signed up for. The glory and honor the Khaladan brass sold them was just smoke and ash in their mouths by now, a soldier’s wet dream turned nightmare as reality sunk in. It was too late to turn back; all that was left was the mission. We had a ship to scuttle.

  I marched on, ignoring the slosh of liquid inside my chest, my suit’s enviros working overtime to filter the blood from my lungs. The scent of copper teased my nose as I led the remaining burrowers toward another target. Two nidus’s and a forward disbursement point – where the first of the Saaart would be injected into the atmosphere – pinged on my display. I chose the nearest of the former, the latter a last ditch effort, and veered down a side corridor toward the blinking red dot of the nidus.

  The Saaart found us about halfway there.

  “Contact!” Rawlins shouted over the comms, the burst of his bolt rifle nearly drowning out his voice.

  I spun to see the defenders spilling through a conduit in the ceiling, their arachnid trans-forms creating a black cloud against the manufactured sky of the corridor. Serrated legs wriggled with deadly intent as they fell. The whirl of their red-orange eyes were hypnotic, thousands of photoreceptors casting a sheen of malevolence. Rawlins fell beneath their mass as I raised my rifle and blasted away, mechagel flying.

  But there was no saving the trooper. His visor cracked against the pressure and burst, shards of glass peppering his face. He’d no time to even register it as Saaart claws hooked their way inside. Rawlins screamed, voice redlining the comms with static, then went silent as a geyser of blood erupted from the hole where his visor had been. His body still thrashed and I turned my fire on him, punching smoking black holes through his torso, dropping him amidst the shattered husks of Saaart defenders.

  The trooper whose comms were on the fritz turned his rifle full auto and sprayed the creatures as they choked the corridor, separating us. Golden surges tinted with splatters of green crackled between the swarming creatures as he unleashed volley after volley, but the Saaart defenders spilled into the gaps with relentless fury. A moment later I could see nothing but the horde.

  “No! Nooooooo—”

  With that gurgled screech ringing inside my helmet, the last of our force had fallen. I turned and fled, only to be detoured again as another sortie of creatures fell from a port in the ceiling ahead. Saaart skittered on my heels, razor-talons clicking against steel as I dashed blindly through the Worldbreaker’s labyrinthine corridors, chasing the only target available to me – the red dot of the disbursement chamber.

  I wrestled with my pack and seized a wreck, grateful for the redundancy of packing more than one, and triggered it, tossing it behind me just before skidding around the corner of a side corridor. There was a tremulous whump as the wreck ignited, chasing the shadows away with a brilliance that rivaled Sol. It followed me down the passageway. I felt the heat an instant later, enviros struggling to cope with it and my injury at the same time, but the stims overrode the sensation of charred flesh as my back seared. I ran on, silencing my damage sensor alarms so they wouldn’t distract me.

  My target grew closer and closer, but I realized I would never make it as the mechanical whir of the Saaarts echoed ahead. A wall of creatures clattered toward me, clambering across the floor, walls, and ceiling. I spun about and chose a corridor at random, nearly colliding with the bulkhead and sidestepped a protruding hatch, my visor display offering me few options for escape. The kron ticked on, relentless.

  At a T-intersection I found both directions blocked by a seething mass of Saaart defenders. I let loose with a barrage of fire, spittle against an inferno, until the bolt mag zeroed. Then I retreated only to find the way back blocked. No choice left, I pulled a shapecharge from my pack and slapped it to the lock of the hatch and activated it.

  Black smoke blurred my vision as I kicked the hatch open and leapt into the gloom beyond. I slammed it shut behind me, for all the good it would do, and leaned against the door as light globes flickered to life overhead, illuminating the room. My bio stats jumped across the visor in time with my thudding heartbeat. I’d done myself no favors coming here.

  In the center of the oval room was a creature I’d never encountered before, yet recognized instantly: a Saaart overlord. A multitude of cabling streame
d from every inch of his waxen flesh, running serpentine to the consoles encompassing the entirety of the chamber save for a blank plate at the rear. The dais rotated slowly, and the overlord faced me, bulbous eyes, like those of a fly, focusing. Little more than a skeleton of mummified gristle, the overlord stood impassive, lights dancing the lengths of the cables in random pulses.

  I raised my rifle, only then remembering I’d spent its charge, so I just stared at the creature, unable to look away as it assessed me. The slanted triangle of its mouth split wide, blackened shards of teeth glistening in a sick imitation of a smile.

  You are too late, a mellifluous voice sang inside my head, so at odds with the monstrosity looming before me. Witness what your failure has wrought.

  The panel against the wall flickered and turned transparent, showing me an exterior view beyond the Saart Worldbreaker. My heart stilled as a planet filled the viewscreen, blues and greens under a haze of alabaster clouds. I slumped against the hatch. It wasn’t Zeti 5 in the ship’s deadly path; it was Rimot Prime.

  My homeworld.

  Brass had lied.

  Impact in ten kron. Time enough to say farewell.

  I started at the voice inside my skull and straightened, tugging my pack loose. The overlord watched me without concern. I glared at the alien and pulled the last of the wrecks from my pack. The creature’s crooked grin grew wider as I advanced, holding the bomb before me so it could see what I carried.

  We admire your courage, Khaladan. It offered up a nod. You make admirable foes.

  I triggered the wreck and held it to my chest. Rimot Prime drew ever closer.

  The planet where I was born, the planet of my ancestors, was the last thing I ever saw.

  Romeo And Julie

  Mike Resnick

  Call me Ishmael.

  I won’t answer to it, of course – my name is Mortimer, though most people call me Morty – but I was told on good authority that the best way to sell this absolutely true tale of war and hardship and all that kind of stuff was to borrow the opening and closing lines of some classic novel, and Moby-Dick was the cheapest one in the second-hand store.

  Anyway, on to business.

  It was the damnedest war.

  It began when maybe a thousand of them entered the solar system and set up shop on Jupiter. Lasted about two seconds, three at the outside. I don’t know much about setting up shop, but I do know that when you put your foot down on a gas giant, you immediately sink thirty or forty miles before you’re burned to a crisp. Or crushed to a crisp. Or whatever.

  We figured that was an overt act of war, though the bleeding hearts in the press and the opposition party kept whining that we didn’t know it was an act of war, since they hadn’t communicated with us or we with them, and it may very well have been an emergency (if misguided, or perhaps misinformed) landing.

  Now in truth, Jupiter really wasn’t worth fighting over, especially when the last of them had sunk down to its core, but we decided we weren’t going to take this invasion sitting down, or lying down, or eating breakfast, or indeed doing anything but retaliating. And somehow our scientists traced some radio signals from Jupiter to the Bella Donna Cluster, except that once they pinpointed the source they changed its name to the Evil Empire.

  A navy of fifty ships took off amid a barrage of speeches, blessings, and best-selling patriotic songs, and since no one could find any fault with Einstein’s equations they just programmed a bunch of AI’s without reference to Einstein at all, and sure enough most of them found ways to far exceed the speed of light, and within a matter of two months, forty-six of our ships had reached the Evil Empire. No one ever figured out what happened to the other four, but since we were already initiating a galactic war nobody saw any need for a second one, so it was officially assumed that instead of being attacked they had stopped off for drinks on a neutral planet and gotten drunk, robbed, and incarcerated. As a result, more than two hundred private ships took off in the next month, each searching for the mysterious interstellar tavern. (They never found it. Thirty-seven of them did find a previously unknown and uncharted house of exceptionally ill repute, and the fourteen survivors eventually returned to spread a number of exotic alien diseases on five of Earth’s continents. None of them, it seems, were native to Australia or Antarctica, which are now the two population centers of the planet.)

  But I digress.

  As I was saying before my concentration was so rudely diverted, forty-six of our ships reached their destination, and immediately laid waste to half a dozen of the closest worlds. Oddly enough, not a single shot was fired in return, no threats or warnings were received, and it was only after the last inhabitant of the six worlds lay dead upon the ground that we learned the AI in charge had been programmed by a Southerner (excuse me: make that a Sutherner), and had misunderstood its order and decimated the peace-loving artistically-inclined populations of the Oval Empire. (No, I don’t know why it was the Oval Empire, since the planets were as round as worlds get to be. There is a school of thought that says ‘oval’ was simply the way their misshaped mouths pronounced ‘Ovid’ and that they worshipped the writings of the Roman poet, which had been sent by mistake during the early days of the Interstellar Postal System, and it makes as much sense as most explanations. The actual truth surfaced some time later, when it was discovered that all six worlds had been won in a poker game by the notorious gambler Herbie Oval, but I don’t suppose it makes much difference at this late date.)

  And a late date it is, since after destroying the Oval Empire we reported back to our leaders what we had done, and it was explained to us that while we had unquestionably killed more of them than they killed of us when they invaded the Solar System, they had returned in an exceptionally foul mood demanding, well, something.

  “Uh, I don’t want to confuse the issue,” replied our captain, the legendary Lance Sterling, “but exactly what are they demanding? I mean, I can’t very well demand punitive damages or take a full measure of revenge until I know the magnitude of total humiliation they plan to extract from you.”

  “Humiliation is another union! They want money, you idiot!” yelled President Campbell. Well, actually, his daughter Poopsie yelled it, but we figured she spoke for him.

  “Not to worry, guys,” said a strong, manly voice. “I’ve got the situation well in hand.”

  Since it was a voice we’d never heard before, we all looked around to see who was speaking, but there was just the usual crew of fearless heroes.

  “Poopsie, your voice is changing,” said Lance Sterling.

  Poopsie replied promptly, but I can’t print it here. [If you can’t live without knowing what she said, please remit $37.29 to the publisher by return mail, plus a copy of your driver’s license proving you are at least 21 years old.]

  “Poopsie, where did you learn words like that?” demanded Lance Sterling.

  “Don’t you remember?” she said. “It was when you got drunk and sneaked into my room and—”

  “Never mind!” yelled Lance Sterling. “It all comes back to me.” He turned to the nearest crew member. “How the hell do I hang this thing up?”

  “It’s called breaking the connection, and I just did it for you,” said the voice.

  “Thanks,” said Lance Sterling. “Now show yourself or I’ll blow your head off.”

  A few of us wanted to point out that he couldn’t blow the voice’s head off if he couldn’t figure out who it was attached to, but then we thought about it a little more and decided that he was bound and determined to blow someone’s head off, and if we annoyed him it could well be ours.

  Twenty seconds passed. Then thirty. Then a minute. (Forty and fifty seconds passed too, but I’m not being paid by the word, so you’ll have to fill in some blanks.)

  “Hah!” said Lance Sterling. “I scared the bastard off!” Then he turned to us. “Admit it. You feel safer with a commander that everyone fears.”

  Only when he’s concentrating on the enemy, I wanted to
say, but manners – and a certain degree of self-preservation – prevailed.

  “Okay,” he continued. “I probably won’t take any punitive action – at least, not any that’ll put you in the infirmary for more than a month or two – so just ’fess up. Who was doing the speaking?”

  “Even you will figure it out in another month or two, so I might as well answer you,” said the voice.

  We all looked around, but couldn’t see the voice’s owner.

  “Where the hell are you?” demanded Lance Sterling.

  “Right here,” said the voice. “Perhaps I should explain: I don’t have a body.”

  “You left it in your spare uniform?” asked Lance Sterling.

  “No, I’ve never had one,” came the answer. “Though I suppose you could say that in a way the whole ship is my body, and that you are currently standing in my small intestine.”

  “Omygod, the ship’s haunted!” cried Conan Kinnison.

  “Let me take a wild guess that you weren’t the brightest one in your class,” said the voice.

  “Okay, the ship’s infested,” said Lance Sterling with a shrug. “Big difference.”

  “I am the ship’s artificial intelligence,” said the voice. “Your fate is in my sturdy hands.”

  “You have hands?”

  “No, but I have metaphors,” said the voice.

  “So what do we call you?” asked Lance Sterling.

  “I haven’t decided yet,” said the ship. “Right at the moment I’m leaning toward Gama da Vasco.”