Future War

by Gardner Dozois

  Without warning, Marek reached out and grabbed her by the chin. He didn’t seem to be pressing hard, but I knew he must have her in a painful grip. He pulled Bex toward him. Still, she stared him in the eyes. Slowly, I rose from my chair, setting my tumbler of whiskey down on the warm seat where I had been.

  Marek glanced over at me. Our eyes met, and at that close distance, he could plainly see the enhancements under my corneas. I could see his.

  “Let go of her,” I said.

  He did not let go of Bex.

  “Who the hell are you?” he asked. ‘That you tell me what to do?”

  “I’m just a grunt, same as you,” I said. “Let go of her.”

  The halandana had risen from its chair and was soon standing behind Marek. It-she growled mean and low. A combat schematic of how to handle the situation iconed up into the corner of my vision. The halandana was a green figure, Marek was red, Bex was a faded rose. I blinked once to enlarge it. Studied it in a fractional second. Blinked again to close it down. Marek let go of Bex.

  She stumbled back, hurt and mad, rubbing her chin.

  “I don’t think we’ve got a grunt here,” Marek said, perhaps to the halandana, or to himself, but looking at me. “I think we’ve got us a genuine skyfalling space marine.”

  The halandana’s growl grew deeper and louder, filling ultra and subsonic frequencies.

  “How many systems’d you take out, skyfaller?” Marek asked. “A couple of galaxies’ worth?” The halandana made no advance on me, but Marek put out his hand to stop it. “Where do you get off? This ain’t nothing but small potatoes next to what you’ve done.”

  In that moment, I spread out, stretched a bit in ways that Bex could not see, but that Marek could—to some extent at last. I encompassed him, all of him, and did a thorough ID on both him and the halandana. I ran the data through some trans-d personnel files tucked into a swirl in n-space. I’d never expected to access again. Marek Lambrois. Corporal of a back-line military-police platoon assigned to the local cluster in a couple of possible worlds, deserters all in a couple of others. He was aggression-enhanced by trans-weblink anti-alg coding. The squad’s fighting profile was notched to the top level at all times. They were bastards who were now preprogrammed bastards. Marek was right about them being small potatoes. He and his gang were nothing but mean-ass grunts, small-time goons for some of the nonaligned contingency troops.

  “What the hell?” Marek said. He noticed my analytics, although it was too fast for him to get a good glimpse of me. But he did understand something in that moment, something it didn’t take enhancement to figure out. And in that moment, everything was changed, had I but seen. Had I but seen.

  “You’re some bigwig, ain’t you, skyfaller? Somebody that matters to the outcome,” Marek said. “This is your actual, and you don’t want to fuck yourself up-time, so you won’t fight.” He smiled crookedly. A diagonal of teeth, straight and narrow, showed whitely.

  “Don’t count on it,” I said.

  “You won’t,” he said, this time with more confidence. “I don’t know what I was worrying about! I can do anything I want here.”

  “Well,” I said. “Well.” And then I said nothing.

  “Get on over there and round up some grub,” Marek said to Bex. “I’ll be waiting for it in room fifty-five, little lady.”

  “I’d rather—”

  “Do it,” I said. The words were harsh and did not sound like my voice. But they were my words, and after a moment, I remembered the voice. It was mine. From far, far in the future. Bex gasped at their hardness, but took a step forward, moved to obey.

  “Bex,” I said, more softly. “Just get the man some food.” I turned to Marek. “If you hurt her, I don’t care about anything. Do you understand? Nothing will matter to me.”

  Marek’s smile widened into a grin. He reached over, slowly, so that I could think about it and patted my cheek. Then he deliberately slapped me, hard. Hard enough to turn my head. Hard enough to draw a trickle of blood from my lip. It didn’t hurt very much, of course. Of course it didn’t hurt.

  “Don’t you worry, skyfaller,” he said. “I know exactly where I stand now.” He turned and left, and the halandana, its drugs unfinished on the table where it had sat, trailed out after him.

  Bex looked at me. I tried to meet her gaze, but did not. I did not look down, but stared off into Thredmartin’s darkness. She reached over and wiped the blood from my chin with her little finger.

  “I guess I’d better go,” she said.

  I did not reply. She shook her head sadly, and walked in front of me. I kept my eyes fixed, far away from this place, this time, and her passing was a swirl of air, a red-brown swish of hair, and Bex was gone. Gone.

  They sucked down my heart

  to a little black hole.

  You cannot stab me.

  “Colonel Bone, we’ve done the prelims on sector eleven sixty-eight, and there are fifty-six class-one civilizations along with two-hundred seventy rationals in stage-one or -two development.”

  “Fifty-six. Two hundred seventy. Ah. Me.”

  “Colonel, sir, we can evac over half of them within thirty-six hours local.”

  “And have to defend them in the transcendent. Chaos neutral. Guaranteed forty percent casualties for us.”

  “Yes, sir. But what about the civs at least. We can save a few.”

  They wrote down my brain

  on a hard knot of space.

  You cannot turn me.

  “Unacceptable, soldier.”

  “Sir?”

  “Unacceptable.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  * * *

  All dead. All those millions of dead people. But it was the end of time, and they had to die, so that they—so that we all, all in time—could live. But they didn’t know, those civilizations. Those people. It was the end of time, but you loved life all the same, and you died the same hard way as always. For nothing. It would be for nothing. Outside, the wind had kicked up. The sky was red with Ferro’s dust, and a storm was brewing for the evening. I coated my sclera with a hard and glassy membrane, and unblinking, I stalked home with my supplies through a fierce and growing wind.

  That night, on the curtains of dust and thin rain, on the heave of the storm, Bex came to my house. Her clothes were torn and her face was bruised. She said nothing as I closed the door behind her, led her into the kitchen, and began to treat her wounds. She said nothing as her worried father sat at my kitchen table and watched, and wrung his hands, and watched because there wasn’t anything he could do.

  “Did that man . . .” her father said. The old man’s voice broke. “Did he?”

  “I tried to take the thing, the trunch, from him. He’d left it lying on the table by the door.” Bex spoke in a hollow voice. “I thought that nobody was going to do anything, not even Henry, so I had to. I had to.” Her facial bruises were superficial. But she held her legs stiffly together, and clasped her hands to her stomach. There was vomit on her dress. “The trunch had some kind of alarm set on it,” Bex said. “So he caught me.”

  “Bex, are you hurting?” I said to her. She looked down, then carefully spread her legs. “He caught me and then he used the trunch on me. Not full strength. Said he didn’t want to do permanent damage. Said he wanted to save me for later.” Her voice sounded far away. She covered her face with her hands. “He put it in me,” she said.

  Then she breathed deeply, raggedly, and made herself look at me. “Well,” she said. “So.”

  I put her into my bed, and he sat in the chair beside it, standing watch for who knew what? He could not defend his daughter, but he must try, as surely as the suns rose, now growing farther apart, over the hard pack of my homeworld desert.

  Everything was changed.

  “Bex,” I said to her, and touched her forehead. Touched her fine, brown skin. “Bex, in the future, we won, I won, my command won it. Really, really big. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we’re all here.”
r />   Bex’s eyes were closed. I could not tell if she’d already fallen asleep. I hoped she had.

  “I have to take care of some business, and then I’ll do it again,” I said in a whisper. “I’ll just have to go back up-time and do it again.”

  Between the first and second rising, I’d reached Heidel, and as Hemingway burned red through the storm’s dusty leavings, I stood in the shadows of the entrance of the Bexter Hotel. There I waited.

  The halandana was the first up—like me, they never really slept—and it came down from its room looking, no doubt, to go out and get another rubber of its drug. Instead, it found me. I didn’t waste time with the creature. With a quick twist in n-space, I pulled it down to the present, down to a local concentration of hate and lust and stupidity that I could kill with a quick thrust into its throat. But I let it live; I showed it myself, all of me spread out and huge, and I let it fear.

  “Go and get Marek Lambrois,” I told it. “Tell him Colonel Bone wants to see him. Colonel Henry Bone of the Eighth Sky and Light.”

  “Bone,” said the halandana. “I thought—”

  I reached out and grabbed the creature’s long neck. This was the halandana weak point, and this halandana had a ceramic implant as protection. I clicked up the power in my forearm a level and crushed the collar as I might a tea cup. The halandana’s neck carapace shattered to platelets and shards, outlined in fine cracks under its skin.

  “Don’t think,” I said. “Tell Marek Lambrois to come into the street and I will let him live.”

  This was untrue, of course, but hope never dies, I’d discovered, even in the hardest of soldiers. But perhaps I’d underestimated Marek. Sometimes I still wonder.

  He stumbled out, still partly asleep, onto the street. Last night had evidently been a hard and long one. His eyes were a red no detox nano could fully clean up. His skin was the color of paste.

  “You have something on me,” I said. “I cannot abide that.”

  “Colonel Bone,” he began. “If I’d knowed it was you—”

  “Too late for that.”

  “It’s never too late, that’s what you taught us all when you turned that offensive around out on the Husk and gave the Chaos the what-for. I’ll just be going. I’ll take the gang with me. It’s to no purpose, our staying now.”

  “You knew enough yesterday—enough to leave.” I felt the rage, the old rage that was to be, once again. “Why did you do that to her?” I asked. “Why did you—”

  And then I looked into his eyes and saw it there. The quiet desire—beaten down by synthesized emotions, but now triumphant, sadly triumphant. The desire to finally, finally die. Marek was not the unthinking brute I’d taken him for after all. Too bad for him.

  I took a step toward Marek. His instincts made him reach down, go for the trunch. But it was a useless weapon on me. I don’t have myelin sheaths on my nerves. I don’t have nerves anymore; I have wiring. Marek realized this was so almost instantly. He dropped the trunch, then turned and ran. I caught him. He tried to fight, but there was never any question of him beating me. That would be absurd. I’m Colonel Bone of the Skyfalling 8th. I kill so that there might be life. Nobody beats me. It is my fate, and yours too.

  I caught him by the shoulder, and I looped my other arm around his neck and reined him to me—not enough to snap anything. Just enough to calm him down. He was strong, but had no finesse.

  Like I said, glims are hard to kill. They’re the same as snails in shells in a way, and the trick is to draw them out—way out. Which is what I did with Marek. As I held him physically, I caught hold of him, all of him, over there, in the place I can’t tell you about, can’t describe. The way you do this is by holding a glim still and causing him great suffering, so that they can’t withdraw into the deep places. That’s what vampire stakes and Roman crosses are all about.

  And, like I told Bex, glims are bad ones, all right. But, but not the worst. I am the worst.

  Icicle spike

  from the eye of a star.

  I’ve come to kill you.

  I sharpened my nails. Then I plunged them into Marek’s stomach, through the skin, into the twist of his guts. I reached around there and caught hold of something, a piece of intestine. I pulled it out. This I tied to the porch of the Bexter Hotel.

  Marek tried to untie himself and pull away. He was staring at his insides, rolled out, raw and exposed, and thinking—I don’t know what. I haven’t died. I don’t know what it is like to die. He moaned sickly. His hands fumbled uselessly in the grease and phlegm that coated his very own self. There was no undoing the knots I’d tied, no pushing himself back in.

  I picked him up, and as he whimpered, I walked down the street with him. His guts trailed out behind us, like a pink ribbon. After I’d gotten about twenty feet, I figured this was all he had in him. I dropped him into the street.

  Hemingway was in the northeast and Fitzgerald directly east. They both shone at different angles on Marek’s crumple, and cast crazy, mazy shadows down the length of the street.

  “Colonel Bone,” he said. I was tired of his talking. “Colonel—”

  I reached into his mouth, past his gnashing teeth, and pulled out his tongue. He reached for it as I extracted it, so I handed it to him. Blood and drool flowed from his mouth and colored the red ground even redder about him. Then, one by one, I broke his arms and legs, then I broke each of the vertebrae in his backbone, moving up his spinal column with quick pinches. It didn’t take long.

  This is what I did in the world that people can see. In the twists of other times and spaces, I did similar things, horrible, irrevocable things, to the man. I killed him. I killed him in such a way that he would never come to life again, not in any possible place, not in any possible time. I wiped Marek Lambrois from existence. Thoroughly. And with his death the other glims died, like lights going out, lights ceasing to exist, bulb, filament and all. Or like the quick loss of all sensation after a brain is snuffed out.

  Irrevocably gone from this timeline, and that was what mattered. Keeping this possible future uncertain, balanced on the fulcrum of chaos and necessity. Keeping it free, so that I could go back and do my work.

  I left Marek lying there, in the main street of Heidel. Others could do the mopping up; that wasn’t my job. As I left town, on the way back to my house and my life there, I saw that I wasn’t alone in the dawn-lit town. Some had business out at this hour and they had watched. Others had heard the commotion and come to windows and porches to see what it was. Now they knew. They knew what I was, what I was to be. I walked alone down the road, and found Bex and her father both sound asleep in my room.

  I stroked her fine hair. She groaned, turned in her sleep. I pulled my covers up to her chin. Forty years old, and as beautiful as a child. Safe in my bed. Bex. Bex. I will miss you. Always, always, Bex.

  I went to the living room, to the shroud-covered furniture. I sat down in what had been my father’s chair. I sipped a cup of my father’s best barley-malt whiskey. I sat, and as the suns of Ferro rose in the hard-iron sky, I faded into the distant, dying future.

  RORVIK’S WAR

  by Geoffrey A. Landis

  A physicist who works for NASA, and who has recently been working on the Martian Lander program, Geoffrey A. Landis is a frequent contributor to Analog and to Asimov’s Science Fiction, and has also sold stories to markets such as Interzone, Amazing, and Pulphouse. Landis is not a prolific writer, by the high-production standards of the genre, but he is popular. His story, “A Walk in the Sun,” won him a Nebula and a Hugo Award in 1992; his story, “Ripples in the Dirac Sea,” won him a Nebula Award in 1990; and his story, “Elemental,” was on the Final Hugo Ballot a few years back. His first book was the collection, Myths, Legends, and True History. He lives in Brook Park, Ohio.

  In the vivid and fever-dream-intense story that follows, he shows us that sometimes the toughest war a soldier can fight is the battle to stay human—and in the ultra-high-tech world of future warfare, that
may turn out to be almost impossible . . .

  * * *

  1.

  A spaz launcher lies beside Private Rorvik, broken in the lee of a crushed building. The air is crisp with the tang of smokeless powder.

  He is dying. The hole in his belly leaks blood around his clenched fingers, around the spike of crimson pain that shoots through the core of his being, turning dry Boston dirt into red-brown mud. There is a lot of mud; hours’ worth. Try to ignore the pain, try to forget you’re dying.

  He is tired, so tired, but he can’t sleep. The pain won’t let him move. Each breath stabs like a bayonet into his stomach. His fear is gone, along with hope, and he is left with only pain.

  The sky is blue, impossibly blue for a day so gray, brilliant burnished blue, the blue of boredom, babbling burning broken blue, bright baking burning bleeding . . . Stop it. Stop it stop it stop it. Think of something else. There is a taste of copper in his mouth. Maybe he would be rescued. The sounds of battle as the Russians are driven back, the rumble of microtanks. The purple glint of sunlight off a video lens, peeking around the corner, the shout of discovery: “Hey! There’s somebody alive here!” Soldiers—Americans, thank God! Scurrying people all around, a ripping sound as someone pulls the tab of a smoke grenade and tosses it into the clear area behind him, boiling red smoke twisted like an insubstantial genie to guide the helicopter into the hot zone. “You all right there? Hang on, we’ve called for medics. Help is coming. You’ll be okay, just hang on.” Whop whop whop as the chopper comes in, and a stab of pain as the medevac team lifts him up, the pain is there but it’s distant because it’s going to be all right. He grins stoically and the men cheer at his bravery. The chopper takes off, Russian stingers swarming after it but the decoys and the door-gunner get them all. It’s going to be all right, it’s going to be all right, it’s going to be . . . Stop it.