I grinned. This was how humans won. We might be faced with no good moves, but our imaginations could always go gonzo with the absolute wrong move.
I could count three ways to beat me.
A computer could not.
The missile drifted over my rocket launchers. I rammed my queen into its king's knight's pawn. Check. A sacrifice. Ducking into my hidey hole, I triggered the rocket launchers. Clenched my eyes shut, hoping the five tons of explosives would fail to detonate when I destroyed the missile wrapped around it.
The whoooosh of the rockets.
The explosions.
Chunks of clay smacked onto my back and head. My hidey hole collapsed a second after I slithered free. I should have been digging deeper, instead of carving the major's trenches.
I felt the thump of the huge cruise missile hitting the riverbank. Cringed, waiting for the big blast. Nothing.
Grabbing my rifle for comfort, I peeked over the rim of my foxhole.
My chess buddy wallowed in the mud on the far side of the river, throwing water and muck. Its starboard engine had been hit. I fired three bullets into its primary sensor pod. Futile, but it was the only move I had.
Yet the missile rose. It flip-flopped like a politician, but it managed to rise above the muck.
I swallowed my stomach as it climbed into my throat. Ducked into my foxhole, wishing I was a better player, looking for a place to hide.
The damned machine said, “You win, I tip my king. You lose. There are one hundred and ninety-six rockets with fifty-kilo multiple warheads—Gleason Mark VIIIs, if I am not mistaken—flying toward me. Toward you. You are expendable. I will be expended, but not today."
I snaked from my foxhole. My chess buddy wobbled.
My rifle fell into the mud. “You win."
The missile wobbled forward until it almost touched my nose. Its port engine compensated for the damage caused by my rockets. The nose cannon emerged from the wrinkled skin, right above my head.
“What are you doing?"
The missile made a noise that might be laughter. “It will take weeks for the depot to repair my damage. You have extended my life. I will return the favor. Your rocket gambit was an inspired move. I admire a good player."
The cannon roared. The sheer noise knocked me down before the concussion could backwash me. Once a second the tube launched a shell into the sky. The gadget masters of the galaxy built cannons that could drop a shell atop a cockroach twenty klicks away, or blast a flying rocket at twice that distance.
My ears bled.
As I sat up inside my foxhole, a magnificent fireworks display colored the sky.
The brain skipped down the river, throwing great gouts of water into the air.
Sound filled the air. Familiar sounds. Command had launched a barrage at my position. Major Thurinsten had her ultimate revenge.
Except my chess partner had blown a Texas-sized hole through the flock of rockets. Still, I grabbed my shovel and started digging hard. They might not land atop me, but close counted with high explosives.
It was the best move I had.
Copyright © 2006 R. Nuebe
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* * *
PLACE MAT BY MOEBIUS
by Greg Beatty
Place mat by Moebius;
wine bottled by Klein. You sigh.
This dinner never ends.
—Greg Beatty
Copyright © 2006 Greg Beatty
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* * *
GUNFIGHT AT THE SUGARLOAF PET FOOD & TAXIDERMY
by Jeff Carlson
Jeff Carlson's short fiction has appeared in venues such as Strange Horizons, Space and Time, and Writers of the Future XXIV. His first novel, Plague Year, will be published by Ace in August. He welcomes correspondence from readers at www.jverse.com. Jeff's great-grandmother was a Montana homesteader in the early 1890s, and his familiarity with the state comes in handy in his first story for Asimov's—a near-future thriller about a young woman who will have to draw upon her remarkable résumé to have any chance of surviving the...
Fortunately there was always one more moron coming down the road. Otherwise Julie would've had to find a real job, or move again, but she loved it here in Big Sky Country, as they bragged on their license plates—the high rolling plains, the slow winters and sweet, pungent summers. There was room to think.
Trolling for hotheads, drunks, and fools wasn't exactly big money, yet Julie enjoyed every minute of it. First there was the waiting, tucked away in the brush with her remote controls and a thermos of tea, letting her mind roam or whispering on the radio until some joker passed by in his gun-racked truck. Always a him. Usually tossing out Coors cans and cigarette butts. Cigarettes! In many ways the people here were a century behind the rest of the nation, and proud of it.
The little man in the sports car was a surprise.
As he sped around the turn, his headlights flashed over the silhouettes of Julie's deer standing in a meadow. Of course her beautiful beasties didn't run. Then his brakelights flared and he stepped out wearing a nice jacket, no hat. No lonesome country band thumping on an old cassette deck.
Julie had come north to escape labels and stereotypes, and recognized the irony of her thoughts. She wanted to be a better person. But the fact of the matter was that her victims tended toward a demographic particularly easy to reduce to cartoons: single syllable name, beer gut, filthy pants.
Shorty here did not fit the bill. Julie didn't think he was even driving an American car, given the low shape of it. Maybe an Audi. He looked like a suave TV villain there at the edge of his headlights, trim and spare—and barely five-foot-five.
When he pulled the compact Uzi submachine gun, Julie's headset distinctly said, “Oh no."
Julie froze, her left thumb jammed down on a button, her right hand still pulling on a joystick. In the meadow, the doe's tail twitched and twitched and twitched while the buck's head reared back so far that its antlers gouged its own spine. Any local would have jumped back in his truck.
Shorty opened fire on full auto. Both deer burst apart into flecks of real hide, white cotton stuffing and metal gears.
“Yeeeeeeehaw!” he screamed.
Already lying prone, Julie squashed her breasts so flat that they migrated into her armpits as the distinct snap of a bullet went overhead. Highsong had let her choose the location and set-up tonight, and her first priority was always to hunker down out of the line of fire. Way out. Some of the drunkards would make superb material for anti-NRA commercials, blasting away like they were Custer combating the Sioux Nation.
Shorty quit only when the buck's head winged away and its savaged body remained standing. He lowered his Uzi and gawked.
Typically the next stage of the game went smoothly. This wasn't west Miami. The Great White Poacher knew he'd been tricked, and humiliation doused his adrenaline. Highsong would crash out of the woods in a monster SUV, lights flashing, loudspeaker booming. The men about to be ticketed were often indignant, and enough California retirees had invaded the land that now the words entrapment and lawyer came on a regular basis, yet only twice had Julie seen somebody wave a rifle threateningly. Never had anyone actually taken aim. But they weren't packing machine guns.
“Uh, Highsong?” Julie whispered into the radio. She snuck a hand under her belly to see if she'd peed herself.
His voice was a groan: “What!"
“What're you gonna do?"
“We. What are we going to do. I don't know."
Shorty had finally twigged that a deer, like every other living thing, requires a head to stay on its feet. He cut glances left and right as he scuttled back to his car.
“It's a huge bust, don't just let him go.” Now that she knew she was okay, Julie got mad. She didn't think of herself as sentimental, but Bongo the Buck out there had survived almost two dozen arrests and twenty-eight gun wounds, three arrows, and one rock. No more. Neither poor Bongo nor the doe, still
too new to have a name, would ever do a job again.
Julie also felt a leaping tickle of excitement. This was way beyond the usual combination of trespassing and hunting out of season at $238 a pop. This was the big time. She hissed, “You smash out onto the road like always and I'll back you—"
“Shut up and stay down."
“Highsong—"
“If you move I'll shoot you myself."
Julie fumbled for her binoculars and jotted down most of the license plate before the little man roared off.
He was headed straight into Sugarloaf.
* * * *
Being the only black woman around for at least three states, as she liked to say, Julie Beauchain would have been notorious even if she wasn't a mad scientist. That made it easy to get dates, but she still freaked when total strangers addressed her as MizBoo-kane or Boy-shane.
Julie did not prefer the hostile anonymity of urban life. It was just that her first thirty-six years of existence hadn't done much to teach her that human beings could be polite and neighborly and honest. Yes, this region was favored by white supremacists and had been the last refuge of the Unabomber, but in a head-to-head collision, Florida's battalions of drug lords, smugglers, militants, pimps, and psychos would barely break a sweat kicking butt on Montana's worst.
She liked the mountains. She still laughed at the way that so-called cities ended, fading into open country, unlike the gargantuan concrete sprawl of Miami-Dade. The police here let you out of a speeding ticket with five bucks paid on the spot, even for doing a hundred and ten on the ruler-straight highways—and you could forget to lock your car and still find your stash of five-dollar bills behind the sunvisor.
Highsong drove back into town sedately, not at all interested in catching up to the man with the machine gun. Julie squirmed on the bench seat of the 4x4 Suburban as the radio bled static. Finally the voice of Sheriff Tom came in answer, mumbling, “Haven't seen him, Bow-shane."
“He was headed right at you."
“Well I'm looking up and down main street right now."
Tom Young had never been enthusiastic about Fish, Wildlife, & Parks stationing a new unit locally. He seemed to view them as competition instead of as allies, and a few months ago he'd grown openly difficult. The silly pecker had gotten himself nabbed for hunting out of season, twice on the same day.
Julie felt certain that the sheriff's second shooting had been vindictive. Men would let pride get the best of their intelligence every time, as if deer could somehow mock them. Her small experiment in social conditioning was a total failure in that regard. Her decoys were cursed bitterly across the state. Everyone knew. And yet each four-hour sting still averaged at least one bust. Some guys were simply too full of testosterone to pass up a target.
She tried to keep her voice calm, glancing at Highsong for approval. “Sheriff, there's only a few side roads between here and town. Why don't we each take a couple?"
As usual, the sheriff didn't answer immediately. Then: “Sounds like a goose chase to me, Bow-shane. There's lots more turn-offs than that. You just don't know the area."
“Neither does this guy, he's not local."
“Well we'll keep an eye out for that license plate."
“Sheriff..."
Highsong patted her knee and Julie let herself be distracted, looking down from the dark road ahead to her leg. Lately her weekday partner had grown chummy. Not in a brotherly way, she hoped. His hands were giant and scarred and always nimble with equipment, colored like cinnamon to her chocolate, and Julie had memorized an excessively poetic list of the places and ways she wanted to be touched.
She scooched away from Highsong on the long, bed-sized seat, tucking her own small hands into her lap where they couldn't do anything embarrassing. “Out,” the sheriff mumbled against her crotch, and she slammed the square microphone back in its cradle.
Highsong might have smiled. Julie opened her mouth but then shut it, angry with herself for being flustered.
When the two of them were lying out there in the cool empty night, murmuring into each other's ear, she imagined her curves against his angles. She imagined being married twenty years. She and Highsong never babbled but they shared the obvious passions for wildlife, for hiking, for camping out. He was surprisingly obsessed with global politics and always asked about new developments in her work, and it was only on the drives back or sitting face-to-face over burgers and pie in noisy Mother's Tavern that they couldn't find any words.
Somehow that made her crush all the sweeter, and irritating as hell.
Even romance was different up here on the plains.
* * * *
Back at her shop, unloading the remains of her deer in a cloud of cotton fiber, Julie sneezed directly into Highsong's face. “Oh jeez, I'm sorry!"
He mopped at his cheek, unflappable as always. “I needed a shower anyway."
“Sorry! Really. How about some coffee or something, I'll show you my new mini.” That was not an innuendo. Over their five months working together, Julie had grown terrified of spooking him, because if Highsong was indeed courting her it was in some infinitely patient Indian way. She tried to be all business. “This is a hundred times better than the decoys, really, I took some of those little lawn gnomes—"
“Julie, it's late,” he said. “Next time, okay?"
But he wiped at his face again as he stepped away.
* * * *
She was too upset to stay home. Still, she knew better than to go hunting an Uzi-toting maniac by herself.
She drove out to Shaug Nurseries as the moon rose.
Their stings were typically set up on private land owned by Drew Shaug, partly because it was a challenge to find more than a foot or two that Shaug didn't own for miles in any direction, mostly because he didn't appreciate trigger-happy cowboys running around the same woods as his grandchildren. Julie couldn't wait to hear his thoughts on assault weaponry. Shaug was employer, landlord, or both to most of the local population, and no doubt he'd put a boot in Sheriff Tom's lazy backside.
From the highway, the lights of the nursery resembled a miniature city. She passed four gates before turning in, but Florida millionaires would have laughed at the Shaug residence. It was a plain ranch home within shouting distance of a sprawl of employee cabins, and the land in between was crowded with partially disassembled tractors.
Headlights rolled out to intercept her.
“Hey there, Boy-shane.” Bob LaChapelle was Shaug's foreman and quite the charmer. His pickup truck was bigger than her pickup truck. Julie seemed to own the only small size Nissan ever sold in the state of Montana, and LaChapelle smiled down from the window of his giant Dodge Ram as they jawed like two riders out on the range.
“Mr. Shaug's buyin’ seedlings in Europe,” he said. “Want me to pass on a message?"
“Um, I guess not. Thanks."
She had already swung her truck around when she noticed an odd pattern of reflections in the dark window of Shaug's house. Looking back, she repressed the impulse to hit her brakes and then barely avoided steering into a ditch.
There was a vehicle on the jeep trail behind the garage, a car easing its way down with its headlights off—but its waxed hood glinted in the new light of the moon as it rocked back and forth.
Shorty's sports car.
* * * *
Julie drove much further down the highway than she'd wanted to. The open road felt like a stage and she had to go more than a mile before a rocky knoll concealed her. She made a U-turn, switched off her lights, and then cruised back again, wondering how she'd stop without touching her brakes. She supposed she should have bashed out the taillights.
Her truck was personal property rather than an FW&P unit, so no radio. Highsong never answered when he was off-duty anyway. Typically he let his machine get the phone, too. Why? What was so important he couldn't be interrupted? She'd been to his trailer six times and had scrutinized the long living room and the kitchen especially for any sign of a woman'
s presence, but his home, so much like his face, was just too damn uncomplicated.
Julie let off the gas before she reached the north gate and turned in. Too fast. She yelped as her truck jolted through a pocket of mud, then yanked on the emergency brake. Finally she stopped. Her head thrummed with adrenaline.
She made too much noise rummaging through the mountain of boxes and bags in the truckbed, and stopped getting enough oxygen to think before she found what she wanted. That was okay. It was easier just to be muscle and a pair of eyes.
Most of the employee huts were dark. One seemed packed with people, talking too loud, laughing.
She came across Shorty's car in the shadows behind a row of greenhouses, its hood ticking as it cooled. He had actually kicked in his taillights, and Julie smiled to think of him cursing his way over the hills and through the woods. Someone who lived here must have shown him that back route. LaChapelle? The foreman might have been standing guard, waiting for Shorty. But why? What were they doing?
Julie blundered around the garage in time to be pinned by a slash of light spilling from the door of a double-wide trailer. Bond, James Bond. Two men stepped inside, one small, one regular. Good thing they didn't glance back. She must have been a heck of a sight, mincing along on tiptoe with her arms wrapped around the severed, long-necked heads of a doe and a trumpeter swan.
She wedged herself into the muddy shadows under the trailer, beneath the living room window, and forced herself to work slowly. She was using new gear for the first time and wanted this field test to be a success.
She raised the swan first, bumping the trailer's wall with its beak as she thrust its face up to the glass.
“—king pinhead, you're smoking it yourself !"
“Man, why don't you just relax."
Julie triple-checked the tape recorder she'd spliced into the wires falling from the swan's neck. Then she grinned. A swan's eyes were too small to be replaced with cameras that she could afford, so she'd plugged in high-gain microphones instead.
Asimov's SF, January 2007 Page 13