Standing before Captain Snipes, all medals and starch and shoe polish, Bridget had the unmistakable sense that she was about to turn the page to a new chapter in her life: leaving behind the confines of school and entering the world of applied research.
And not just applied research to any old subject, like zoology or pharma or asteroid mining, but applied to the military. The schools in her home neighborhood were crumbling, and the monorail running in Highdam was in terrible repair, but the military’s lab appeared to be receiving full funding. The test tubes gleamed, and banks of top-of-the-line computers chirped happily as they processed data. She was relieved that she’d been rescued from her mediocre school to help in the war against East Albion. But she worried, momentarily, about her classmates. Where would they end up after graduating?
“Your first project,” said Captain Snipes, indicating a pile of gleaming lab implements, “will be Lab Equipment Maintenance Detail.” Bridget bristled, despite her moment of gratitude. All the study, the passing math scores, and her talents were to be wasted on cleaning beakers?
“At eighteen-hundred hours,” he continued, “we will have a debrief session on Project Exodus. Any questions?”
It was more of a statement than a question, so Bridget shook her head and Captain Snipes turned on his heel.
Project Exodus, she thought to herself as she scrubbed a barely-used digital scale. “Exodus” meant a mass departure. Who was leaving? And where to?
❦
Hank Hazlet had not always lived in Newmarket. He had been raised in a village in the highlands of East Albion, but his family had been driven from their lands by a terrible drought. Townsfolk muttered that the catastrophe had been the work of Basland. The highlands were the only stretch of land in East Albion that bordered Basland, and shepherds had reported that a terrific blast had come from the direction of Highdam, the Baslandic capital. Why they’d targeted shepherds, no one knew.
Mere days after the blast the grasses began to wilt, the mud turned to stone, and the Hazlets were driven from their hut in the Highlands to a crowded tenement in Newmarket. Here the effects of the war with Basland were immediately apparent: cathedrals bombed, schools leveled, whole neighborhoods burned to the ground. A shopping mall in the Centennial district had been left in ruins when a Baslandic pilot had mistaken it for a military-industrial complex.
School was not an option for a poor highland refugee, so Hank found work as an errand boy at the Albionian army encampment adjoining the slum his family called home. He cleaned tents and laundered uniforms, marveling at the heavy stitching of the clothes and the waterproof fabric of the billets.
When he turned sixteen he enlisted, joining a unit made up of similarly situated refugee-slumrats called the Highland Sabers.
Two years passed.
“Hazlet,” his commanders would call. “Run.”
Hank did not ask why. He asked “where?” or, depending on the circumstances, “how fast?”
“Hazlet,” his commanders would say. “Cook.”
Hank wasn’t a cook, but he didn’t say that. He would ask “rare, medium, or well done?” or “how spicy?”
He was an eighteen-year-old lance corporal the month the Highland Sabers were to be deployed as the front force of Operation Righteous Spear, a raid on Basland’s eastern shore.
Two nights before the deployment, however, Hank’s military-issued InstaCot prematurely triggered “Pack” mode. He was still sleeping at the time, and the twisting motion of the automated packing process dislocated his knee.
He was pulled from the final assault on Basland. Instead of loading up for combat with his friends, Hank stood on crutches in the military terminal to watch the Sabers depart. They boarded their brand new invasion craft, one of East Albion’s fleet of never-before-seen tilt-rotor assault-helos. Hank watched in awe as each helo’s rotors tilted from “Hover” pitch to “Thrust” pitch, and the squadron departed for Basland.
The Albionian Top Brass confidently predicted that Baslandic resistance would melt before the new technology.
Hank was reassigned to a detachment tasked with guarding East Albion’s small military lab. In a nation of warriors and soldiers, scientists were not well regarded, but Hank vowed to carry out his duty faithfully nonetheless.
The Albionians’ raid went on without him, and word eventually filtered back that his friends in the Sabers had been annihilated. As they’d prepared to land, the rotors of their assault-helo had overtilted, driving the helos from “Thrust” back to “Hover,” as expected. But they continued to tilt, first to the previously unknown pitch “Reverse” and then, finally, to “Crash.” The few Sabers who survived the impact were mowed down by the Baslandic defenses.
Thinking of his friends killed on that beach, Hank began to understand why East Albionians hated Baslanders.
The Albionian lab’s chief scientist was Doctor Peasebottom, a professorial man who walked with a hunch and a cane. He always greeted Hank kindly, and often would tell Hank of new projects that interested him.
“We’ve begun work on a new weapon,” the old scientist said, indicating with his cane a great blueprint tacked on one wall. “Titan. A mechanized warrior suit for our strongest soldiers.”
Hank couldn’t read a simple sentence, much less make sense of the dizzying pattern of technical drawings.
“What about that one?” Hank pointed to a smaller, simpler schematic on the next panel over.
“Ah. The Lilliputianer. A partial success. It was supposed to shrink Baslandic assets. Make them inoperable.”
“That is amazing!”
“Should have been. Unfortunately, it’s only worked once so far. And only accomplished shrinking one Baslandic factory by seventeen percent. An inconvenience for them, no doubt, but hardly worth our investment.”
Hank frowned. Certainly, East Albion’s brightest minds were under great stress to keep up with their enemy.
“Titan,” said the scientist, coming back to the new project. “This will allow our brave military to do what they do best: direct force engagement. But with robotic suits!”
Direct force engagement. Frontal assault. Ninety percent attrition. The Top Brass always liked to use complex language when it talked about high casualties.
In any case, neither schematic was anything Hank could understand, but he marveled nonetheless. Surely they could prevail. Doctor Peasebottom assured him of just this fact before departing.
❦
Always Faithful
Bridget Bellweather received promotions each of the three years that followed. She rose from Lab Assistant Intern to Senior Lab Assistant Intern, then to Junior Lab Assistant and finally to Senior Junior Lab Assistant. This was due partially to her adequate mathematical talent and a knack for bureaucratic infighting; but primarily it was because her superiors were being “promoted” and moved out of the lab.
She was surprised to find that now, having been promoted out of cleaning duty, much of her working day was spent completing paperwork instead. There was a form for everything: procurement forms for data consoles that were used to track finances that were used to buy form intakes that were used to process the procurement of new data consoles.
The web of it was beyond her, so she just dutifully took notes during her meetings with Major Snipes and submitted the required forms. Paperwork made the vein in his forehead pop out even further.
On occasion, a lab project’s code name would have a connection to its objective, and she would occupy herself trying to tease out these puzzles. For example, Project Exodus had been a weapon to drive East Albionian farmers from their farms by causing a drought. Ultimately, it was supposed to have crippled their food supply and ended the war once and for all.
It had been a partial success: Exodus had definitely caused a drought.
Unfortunately, the drought had hit the already-arid East Albionian highlands instead of its fertile coastal farmlands. The result had been a migration of useless shepherds. Exodus had cripp
led the Albionian wool supply, rather than its food supply.
Despite the tedium of the work, and the setbacks of good-projects-gone-bad, the lab also opened Bridget’s eyes to the good they were doing. She watched project teams working long hours—sometimes day and night—to design systems, build prototypes, and run test scripts. She saw a pair of researchers crack the Xenon Theorem. She marveled at robots that responded to voice commands and rockets that auto-aimed to a specific target’s DNA.
Ultimately all of this was for the greater good of Basland and all civilized countries.
She opened the next file to be completed.
“Project Babel,” said Major Snipes. “The Sonic Disruption Ray is a phenomenal notion. It will eliminate the Albionian ability for verbal communication, such as it is. It could end this war, once and for all.”
Bridget shrugged. Babel was a tower-mounted weapon that would devolve East Albion’s language into an unintelligible system of grunts and gestures, reducing the speakers to primate-level communication. Though it wasn’t her decision, she still felt uncomfortable with the notion of transforming an entire nation into jabbering simians.
❦
On the other side of the western sea, Sergeant Hank Hazlet had yet to return to active combat. He completed a year on the lab security detachment and was then moved to a maintenance team supporting the next generation of assault helos. After a year working in this maintenance unit he was transferred again and became a recruiter specializing in middle schools and sports events.
He passed a year as a recruiter before he finally returned to combat duty. After three years of serving in Newmarket, Hank was transferred to a new infantry brigade. The Prairie Dogs were scheduled for deployment to the Highlands of East Albion.
Before their unit left Newmarket, Hank received a call from his old friend at the lab. Doctor Peasebottom invited him to a special event: East Albion’s Top Brass were unveiling two of the military’s newest inventions in preparation for Operation Dynamic Furor, the next offensive into Basland.
The first invention was the Neutronium Forcefield Helmet: a metal crown worn by soldiers that would cast an energy shield to protect their head and upper body from bullets and shrapnel.
The other was the Tactical Psion Antenna, a neurotransmitter that allowed soldiers to telepathically communicate with their officers. Scientists had nicknamed them Thinking Caps. Surely, the military reasoned, Albionian fighters who could read each others’ minds would act as a single organism, a unified fighting force against the tyranny of Basland.
The Top Brass presented both inventions to great fanfare. East Albionian innovation, they said, was pushing the limits of science in their nation’s righteous fight against the Baslandic lunatics. And Operation Dynamic Furor would drive the Baslanders to the edge of surrender.
The Prairie Dogs departed for the Highlands the very next day. They were a band of fearsome Albionian warriors—half of them under twenty years old, most of them from the lowest classes of society, and all of them brave in the face of nearly certain death. They were underfed, undertrained, and—thanks to the chronic wool shortage—underclothed.
But their trip ran late. The northbound train carrying the Prairie Dogs was held up by a scheduling mistake in Southport and then a personnel problem in Portsmouth. At one point, one of the men reported that they appeared to actually be heading the wrong direction down the tracks.
By the time they reached the Highlands, they were a week behind schedule, arriving the day after the start of the planned offensive.
The other brigades had been packed up with the Neutronium Forcefield Helmets and shipped to the front in Basland. The Thinking Cap neurotransmitters, which had been on the same train as the Prairie Dogs, were left behind as well.
A week after the offensive began, Top Brass reported in the newsfeeds that the units had faced heavy losses due to “Unforeseen Force Technology Reversals.” This, Hank knew, was more complex language, meaning that their own weapons had failed them.
The soldiers in the invasion force had been left defenseless when the Neutronium Force Fields had disintegrated the rifles from the soldiers’ hands instead of protecting their heads (and upper bodies) as promised. The Baslanders had mowed them down where they stood.
❦
Honor and Duty
Basland was facing an energy crisis, reported Colonel Snipes, so research resources were being reallocated. Project Babel was to be combat tested once as a boost to civic morale and then mothballed so the project team could be broken up and reassigned.
Bridget Bellweather, now Junior Lab Lead, was moved to Project Tesla: the development of Atmospheric Electricity Spools that would satiate Basland’s voracious appetite for power.
The official story from government planners was that increased energy usage was being driven primarily by libraries and bookstores in Highdam. They called for the children utilizing the libraries to begin a conservation campaign. This would save electricity until supply could be increased using military technology.
Why the military would be developing a new energy technology to power libraries was a mystery to Bridget.
But the project itself was a remarkable achievement. As Junior Lab Lead, Bridget was assigned a small team of interns and senior interns. They were given research and documentation responsibilities for the Collateral Figmentation Boosters, a critical component of the Electricity Spools’ repositioning technology.
Her team worked long hours developing the Boosters, running them through meticulous tests, and filing all of the appropriate development protocols. Each time she had Colonel Snipes sign an approval form she thought she saw one of the crevices next to his eyes deepen. Another project like this one and they’d be able to use his face to test their desert exploration drones!
One evening, as she gathered the day’s test results and filed them via the Analysis Phase Technology Development Aggregator, she thought of the quiet, dark evenings in her flat in the city center, where brownouts turned off the lights regularly. She thought of the intermittent monorail service. She thought of the bitter cold winters when heaters didn’t work, and the sweltering hot summers when the air conditioners didn’t.
The lab was always fully-powered, heated or cooled as needed—how else would they accomplish their mission?—but what if their work could restore full power to all of Basland?
That, she decided, was reason enough to finally end this war. Even if Babel did reduce East Albion to a nation of grunting primates, at least then Tesla could be used to power Basland’s trains.
❦
Sergeant Hazlet looked out from his InstaBillet onto the barren hills of the East Albionian Highlands. How strange to have returned here after so many years. He turned to his tent mate, a lance corporal from the slums of Newmarket, to ask about the blinding flash that had just woken them both.
But he found himself unable to utter a word. “Brumph, googa, blump?” was all he could manage.
The lance corporal looked at him quizzically and responded in kind: “Brumph! OOGA. Blomp?”
What had happened?
Hank grabbed his rifle, threw back the flap of the InstaBillet, and emerged into the camp. Other soldiers were milling about, too, their conversations as unproductive as Hank’s.
Some of them were pointing to the western horizon, at a place where, apparently, the light had originated. Perhaps some kind of weapon. But no one could speak cogently enough to confirm or to strategize a defense. A Baslandic assault was surely imminent.
Hank racked his brain, searching for a way to communicate with the others. They were nearly all illiterate, so writing wasn’t an option.
The Thinking Caps! The military had equipped the expeditionary force in Operation Dynamic Furor with the Neutronium Forcefield Helmets, but the neurotransmitters were yet to be generally issued.
Hank grunted and motioned for the lance corporal to follow. They ran full speed into the quartermaster’s quonset. He was still asleep, so Hank let himse
lf into the storeroom and rifled through the boxes of gear. There were tents, and a few packs of precious socks, and canteens, and the dehydrated field rations the soldiers ate.
Finally, he found the Thinking Caps. He slapped one on the top of his own head and then one on the lance corporal’s.
Can you hear me? he asked telepathically.
Brump? replied the lance corporal.
Hank sighed in disappointment. It had seemed an ingenious plan.
Just kidding, continued the lance corporal. Yes, I can hear you. Brilliant idea, Sergeant.
They laughed and together hoisted the box of Thinking Caps up and out of the quonset.
❦
The Few and the Proud
Over the next three years, Bridget Bellweather rose steadily through the dwindling ranks of the lab. General Snipes was under pressure to fill recruiting quotas, so he routinely reassigned lab staff by changing their lab titles to actual military ranks.
Bridget’s immediate superior, the lab’s Senior Division Supervisor, was made a commander and deployed to St. Rupert’s, a village on the Baslandic border with the East Albionian Highlands. So Bridget was promoted from Senior Assistant Division Supervisor. Though still only twenty-four years old, she now had her eyes on a promotion to Senior Division Lead—or even Junior Department Supervisor!
But not all was well. After the failure of their three most prominent projects, the lab’s funding had been threatened by some stuffed-shirt politician in the administration bunker on the other side of the capital.
Project Tesla had required more energy to deploy than expected, requiring the government to divert power from an elementary school, a car factory, and a shopping mall. And it had produced less energy than planned, so all three had remained closed thereafter. The good news, Bridget figured, was that the children would be conscripted into the Voluntary Civic Service Corps that much sooner now that their school was closed.
Perchance to Dream Page 6
