Baen Books Free Stories 2017

by Baen Books

  "Keep talking to us, Yulian," Inigo says. He's sitting inside the rover while several other cosmonauts and I man the boom that will pull Yulian out feet-first.

  "I think—" Yulian says, but the radio crackles with static.

  "Yulian?" Inigo says.

  Nothing.

  "Yulian, we lost you on comms," he says.

  "Some of the dust in the cloud is iron oxide," I say. "It's going to give you interference."

  Several minutes pass in silence. The cable continues unspooling, so we know Yulian's alive.

  Then it stops.

  The cable is 1,400 meters long, and he's only 800 meters deep.

  "Yulian?"

  I try my radio too.

  Nothing.

  "—tube's cracked," he says finally. "It didn't go straight —ertical. —ull me up, and we'll —ave a look — it."

  "Reel him in," Inigo says, and I throw the lever on the boom. Slowly, to avoid ripping his arms off in the shaft, we pull Yulian back the surface.

  As the other cosmonauts help him to his feet, I see a long crack running down the side of the ceramic plating.

  There, on the regolith, Yulian pulls open the projectile that hurtled through space for a million-to-one chance at saving a life. Even through his EVA suit, I can see his hands shaking.

  A smile spreads across his face as he pulls the padding away from the CRISPR canister and holds it up in both hands.

  It made it.

  Biology proves to be the easiest hurdle of all, which I chock up to incentives. People with money have been dying from cancer for a long time, so a lot of money has been thrown at cancer. Researchers who want to feed their families have chosen to serve the public good in exchange for that money.

  Mars colonization was underfunded for decades because the coolest thing people could think of to do there was look for bacteria. When I told the Russians I had a platinum mine, they doubled Roscosmos's budget overnight.

  CIA figured out what was going on, and suddenly NASA's budget went up too. It's funny how people sit on their butts when you mention the survival of the species, but they jump up when you mention shiny rocks or hydrocarbons.

  I shouldn't cast stones, of course. Those shiny rocks are the only reason I came up with "planetary defense."

  I'm getting ahead of myself, though.

  Faith Dejah Thoris Zaytsev is born with healthy lungs and without the tumor that threatened her in the womb. After a year on Mars for early development, Faith, Li, and Yulian prepare to board a Soyuz rocket bound for Earth.

  Inigo officiates the first Martian wedding, and I'm honored to stand as Yulian's best man.

  We celebrate with Faith's cheapest vodka in the saloon.

  "Here's to a bunch of lunatics," Faith says, raising a shot glass.

  After downing his shot, Yulian speaks up.

  "It's ironic that you use this word," Yulian says, "since lunacy comes from luna. It refers to Earth's moon. It was hard when the Americans did it, of course, but now lunacy is as easy as crossing the street. We aren't lunatics, dear friend. We're far past that. We're Martians."

  Force Multipliers Being What They Are

  Travis S. Taylor

  “Thomas, pull the stack back in, you’re spreading yourselves too freakin’ thin,” Captain Markus Sanchez subvocalized as he called up the direct-to-mind heads-up display of the blue force tracker and breathed a sigh of relief.

  Had there been any red dots on the other side of the concrete wall separating Freeman’s team from the parking garage they were about to enter, the spread-out stack would have become targets in a kill box with little hope of offering each other any cover fire. To their advantage was the fact that the insurgents didn’t have the force-on-force identification system, the metamaterial powered armor, the level of nighttime imagery, or training the United States Army had. Force multipliers being what they were, overconfidence, and more importantly, stupid mistakes could still get you killed just as dead.

  “Roger that, Captain. I got ’em,” the young butterbar replied.

  Markus liked the new second team leader a lot and knew from his performance records that he was a competent soldier, but as far as officers were concerned the kid was green—very green. He hadn’t seen actual combat either. Green or not, very quickly, the second lieutenant took care of the situation. The five blue dots in the captain’s mindview heads-up display (HUD) quickly stacked up in proper formation.

  Markus made a mental note of all the blue dots overlaid on the terrain maps in his head. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was looking for, but he knew he was looking for a sore thumb—something that stuck out. That part of the city was on a slight incline and all the streets ran either north and south or east and west. The tallest building couldn’t have been more than ten or twelve stories high and most of them were old and worn-out-looking sandstone colored blocks.

  The HUD used known daytime imagery to overlay color and tactile information on the three dimensional virtual map in front of his eyes. Electrical wires of all sorts stretched across the streets to the buildings looking like someone had taken a bowl of black and gray spaghetti and spread it out randomly between poles and buildings. He hoped they wouldn’t have to hack into any of them physically, because that might take forever to find the right noodle in the pasta bowl.

  The processors in his suit quickly added the helmet-cam views of the wires onto the map and marked them for possible hazards for flight vehicles. The map was uplinked through the virtual network of unmanned aerial vehicles, high altitude balloons, and the nanosatellite constellation in low Earth orbit. The living map was continuously updated by all sensors in the field including radars, lidars, imagery, the global navigation satellite system and compass inputs from vehicles and other soldier systems, and even infantry helmet-cams. The mapping system also used purple data. If there was a commercial transmitter or internet device in the area available, data from that was input to the mapping system’s algorithm as well.

  The intel showed that there had been three truck loads full of unfriendlies that somehow had managed to get past a spec ops team farther south in what must have been a heck of a firefight. Then they took refuge somewhere in the nearest three city blocks. That was, of course, unless they had found an uncharted tunnel or magically teleported out. The ground penetrating radar, wifi multi-path analyses, laser vibrometry from drones above, and all known city maps on record showed no other tunnels underneath and Markus didn’t believe in magic. No, they were still in there somewhere and in between his team and Second Lieutenant Thomas Freeman’s stack. And worst of all, they had a quantum key distribution box that was still entangled with the uplink to the FOB and the mobile net.

  He looked up and could see the IR signature of one of the little hovering tacnet repeaters about a hundred meters over the tallest building and thought, “If they manage to get into that system . . .”

  “Specialist Passer what d’ya got?” Markus whispered as he peeked with one eye around the corner of the ten-story apartment complex and perused the mental images of Specialist Passer’s data stream graphics with the other. Sort of.

  The direct-to-mind imagery and interface had been the next big thing to hit the world. It had been as ground breaking as the introduction of the internet, smartphone, and the so-called “internet of things.” Once scientists and engineers had figured out how to control devices by thinking controls rather than touching controls it soon enabled an entirely new level of interfaces and efficiencies that mankind had never seen before. It also allowed for private communications between minds and devices. This wasn’t telepathy by any means. A radio system was still required to transmit the data, but instead of speakers and digital displays the data was directed through superconducting quantum interference devices in the soldier’s helmets directly to and from the brain. There was no longer any need for virtual reality glasses or actual HUDs.

  “Yes sir. If you’ll pull up the connectivity overlay you can see what I think are the hotspots.”
Passer replied.

  Markus noted that the twenty-something E4 didn’t seem the least bit nervous. Rightfully so, the kid had just come from the serious mess in Chad and this tactical grab and go mission shouldn’t be nearly as hot. His orders had been absolutely clear. There was no way they could hold this city in its current state and with the manpower available presently. They were to find the box, take out the unfriendlies that stole it, gather intel, and get the Hell out. This mission shouldn’t get as bad as things had gotten in Chad. At least Markus kept telling himself that.

  He looked at the map of the city and then overlaid the connectivity data on it. The large streams of data flowing in and out were clearly internet routers, hubs, and bank system connections like ATMs and credit card machines at retail stores. The smaller connections ranged from personal data implants on civilians, identification and tracking emitters for almost everything, and even old school cellular data phones, pads, and watches. There were also white lines representing power distribution systems. Markus thought that might come in handy if they needed to cut the power to the building.

  “I’m gonna highlight some of them in red, Captain. Hold one.” The specialist spoke over the squad’s tacnet channel, even though Passer was only about three meters behind him. Markus noted how the kid’s blue dot brightened each time he spoke and decided then that he liked the new upgrades to the software on the HUD.

  He checked the air quality sensor on the HUD. It was reading safe, so he popped his visor briefly and took in a whiff of the local air. It was very hot, dry, and it smelled like city. There had been no signs of chem/bio but protocol was protocol. Besides that he didn’t care to get shot in the face. He took one more whiff of the city air and then thought his visor back down while biting on his drinking tube. The cooled water shot into his mouth almost a little too forcefully, nearly causing him to choke.

  “Gonna have to get that adjusted,” he muttered to himself as he continued to study the E4’s data. “Okay, Passer, what am I looking at?”

  “Well, Cap’n, the blue streams are our secure datacoms. Purple ones are the general public which are mostly evac-ed out by now. If they’re bold they have hard encryption that we can’t undo here. The red ones, well, they are uncooperative and unaccounted for. You get the point. Look at these here.”

  “All right, all right I see them. So what?” Markus wished the specialist would cut to the chase.

  “Sir, zoom in,” Passer replied. “These red dots here about four stories up are in sets of thirty and there are many of those sets of thirty close to each other. And some of those sets of thirty are moving around.”

  “Thirty? Wait, how do you know they are moving?”

  “The algorithm that measures the data rates through all these streams watches for changes in data rate. If a router or internet device is moving about, this creates multipath echoes that cause the data rate to fluctuate. By monitoring the data rate changes the motion there can be determined by the processor here—” He tapped at the chest plate of his armored suit, then continued. “Several of them are sitting still, but two of them are pacing back and forth, sir.”

  “Thirty red dots?”

  “Yes sir. That’s important I think.”

  Markus nodded in understanding.

  “Thirty. Let me guess. You believe that if we could connect and talk to each of those thirty things they’d tell us that they were 7.62 x 39 millimeter rounds?”

  “My guess sir. Everything has an inventory data tag these days.”

  “Well, at least we know how many guns they have. And the two pacing about?”

  “They keep tracing the same paths, sir.”

  “Sentries.”

  “Yes sir. And one of them has an insulin pump. You can see it here in purple, not secured. It keeps getting updates from its manufacturer and is sending sugar levels and such to the cloud like every five seconds or so.”

  “Well, we know how many there are and how many are watching. And we know one of them has an unsecured weakness.”

  “Yes sir, and where they are. I’d bet a round of beers for the squad that this is our target. The intel from the spec op guys said one of the targets was diabetic.” Passer looked confident but Markus could see the E4 was too seasoned to see the moment as a time to smile. He respected the specialist’s poise.

  “All right, I might get in on that bet with you.” Markus thought for a second about what to do next. “Passer, do a scan about for other sets of thirty. I want to make sure there are no snipers waiting on top of a building somewhere nearby. And go ahead and get me a hack into that insulin pump. Don’t do anything yet, just get past the firewalls so we can if we want to.”

  “Already did sir. No snipers found so far. And the insulin pump is at your disposal. I’m sending you the control app now.”

  “All right then. Keep looking for snipers and booby-traps.” He looked at the data in his mindview once more and then thought to his processor to open a channel to the complete team and copy the FOB tacnet officer—as if she wasn’t listening anyway.

  “Listen up! I’m forwarding the location and overlay of what we believe to be the objective. They are two alleyways over from you Freeman and three from us. The Marines and their autotanks have them blocked off to the north and the spec ops teams will keep them from backtracking south. They are boxed in here and are on the fourth floor of the highlighted building. Let the mapping system calculate the most likely ingress and egress routes and use mark-one eyeballs yourselves to identify a backup egress plan. I’m going to pop some skyballs and stream the images to everyone. Keep your lids and visors down as we don’t know if they have anything in there that bleach won’t wash off. There might still be some unconnected civvies in the area so let’s avoid any purple casualties if we can. Top priority though is that package. We have to recover that box and neutralize the targets. Can I get a Hooah?”

  “Hooah,” in many voices echoed in his direct-to-mind audio.

  “Great. Let’s move.”

  Markus toggled the screen for the mini UAVs and the launch tube deployed from the back of his armored suit on the right side. The little tube about six centimeters in diameter thwoomped three times as the devices were launched from the air canon. The tube rescinded back into the suit and the compartment closed. The three skyballs whirred almost imperceptibly silent in front of him as he gave them flight instructions. Using a combination of GNSS, magnetic and gravitational mappings, internal compasses and inertial navigation chips, known map data, local known wifi and electromagnetic signals, and daytime commercial imagery, the guidance algorithm determined guided paths for each of the little quadcopters that would take them to the objective with different final vantage points. Their flight paths would be accurate to within centimeters barring any extreme winds, rain, or enemy fire.

  The skyball video feeds started moving rapidly as the little UAVs zipped along at over fifty kilometers per hour. Once on station, they stabilized and gave Markus a full view of the building, the floor in question, and even thermal data showing exactly how many occupants were there. He ordered one of the skyballs to make a full three hundred sixty degree pan with the thermal imager to see if there were any unusual signatures on a rooftop nearby. There were none. His guess was that these guys rushed in here with such a panic after fighting free of the spec ops team that they hadn’t had time to slow down and think about better cover. Or maybe they weren’t planning to stay long.

  “Passer, any pings from the box yet?” He asked after a couple minutes of bouncing. They finally reached the buildings adjacent to the objective.

  “Sorry sir. If they have it then they must be shielding it from us,” Passer said.

  “How are we certain it’s in there?” Staff Sergeant Jackson asked.

  “What are they protecting with all those mags of thirty if not?” Markus said with a raised eyebrow that nobody could see inside his helmet.

  “Could be random drug dealers, warlords, I dunno, sir.”

  “
Possible, but Passer hasn’t found other groups with AKs and we’ve verified one of them is diabetic.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Captain Sanchez, FOB One, copy?”

  “Sanchez here. Go Colonel.” Markus certainly wasn’t expecting the CO to be calling him at this point. He knew the QKD box was a big priority, but there were thousands of troops deployed about rural and outlier suburbs of this city in heavier fights and higher priorities. That thought alone made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end and bristle against the inner layer of the armored neck plates.

  “Captain, be advised that we have eyeball reports of three inbound choppers with two unmanned weapons platforms in formation headed your way. Do not depend on sensors as they appear to be spoofed at the moment. Use mark-one eyeballs for visual confirmation.”

  “Sir, can we expect any air support of our own?”

  “Not at this time, Captain.”

  “Crap,” Markus whispered to himself.

  “Repeat Captain. Didn’t copy last.”

  “Uh, ETA on inbound?”

  “Four minutes.”

  “Understood sir. Permission to move in on target before they get here?”

  “At your discretion, Captain.”

  “Understood sir. We’re moving in now!”

  “Good luck, Captain. FOB One out.”

  “Staff Sergeant Jackson!” Markus toggled up the weapons list of all the squad in his mind and could see that the multifunction utility/logistics and equipment bot was carrying just what they needed.

  “What can I do for you, Captain?” The NCO bounced to a stop just behind him dropping to one knee, his weapon at the ready.

  “Top, call the MULE in and bring the AUAS-DEW online. Tie in to all radars you can find, but you also have to man it and eyeball it. We’ve got inbound automated gunbirds and three choppers. They’ll be in range in three minutes. Move!”

  “Hooah,” the top sergeant replied with a nod as he turned and took a five-meter leap toward the back of the stack.