Into the Light

by David Weber

  “Right,” the doctor agreed. “The medical robots have been adapted for human use, and they’re incredibly efficient. Still, we like to be here, just in case. There may come a time where we aren’t needed … but that time hasn’t arrived yet.” She smiled. “I’m also here because they aren’t great conversationalists yet, either, and most people like a human touch.” She winked and passed out masks. “Please put these on.

  “Okay,” the doctor said as she put her own mask on and stepped up next to the robot. “Does everyone want to watch, or would you like a privacy screen?”

  “Well—” Freymark started.

  “I want to watch,” Camila said. Her tone ended all discussion.

  “Then let’s begin,” the doctor said.

  The robot rolled up Camila’s robe, and Freymark went to stand with his wife at Camila’s head. He hadn’t seen that part of his daughter in quite some time and—despite the circumstances—was somewhat uncomfortable looking at it now, especially from that angle.

  An appendage passed over Camila’s pregnant stomach, which was larger than he remembered Janice’s ever being, and a fine mist sprayed down from it. “That’s the antibiotic nano-spray,” the doctor said. “It creates an antiseptic area to operate.” The sprayer made a second pass. “And that’s a local anesthetic that’s more efficient than anything we had in our pharmacopeia prior to the arrival of the Shongairi. It also adds a suppleness to the skin and will help preserve it for the next few minutes.”

  Freymark wanted to ask a number of questions and opened his mouth to do so, but a look from his wife caused him to shut it again. The whole process seemed—at least to this point—as if the doctor considered it a trivial procedure. But it wasn’t trivial—people died in childbirth! Didn’t they?

  An appendage with what looked like a pencil at the end hovered over Camila’s stomach, and a beam of light came from it. Freymark couldn’t help himself. “Is that … is that a laser?”

  “Yes,” the doctor said, without looking up from the procedure. “We’ve had medical lasers for a long time. We just haven’t had the precision this one has.”

  The robot cut a large patch, then folded it off to the side. That was all Freymark had to see, and he turned away for fear of losing his lunch all over the proceedings. He glanced at the others in the room. His wife and daughter appeared engrossed in the process and watched with wide-eyed looks of wonder as the robot continued with the operation. Even his son-in-law didn’t seem as disturbed as Freymark would have been if a robot had been cutting on Janice.

  “And there’s your new baby daughter,” the doctor said, as a wail broke the near silence.

  Freymark risked a glance as the robot handed the crying baby to the doctor, who stood waiting with a blanket. The doctor swaddled the baby, wiped off her face, and handed her to Camila. “Congratulations, Mom and Dad!” the doctor announced.

  The robot reached into his daughter’s stomach again, and Freymark had to look away again when his stomach spasmed. He concentrated on the wall in his effort to keep lunch down. “And here’s your son!” the doctor announced as a second wail joined the first.

  “Wait!” Freymark said. “Twins?”

  “Yes, Daddy,” Camila said. “We’ve known all along that we were going to have twins—the new medical technology is wonderful—we just wanted to keep it a surprise. We know you’re kind of old-fashioned that way. Surprise!”

  “Oh, my,” Freymark said. He joined his wife at the top of the bed where Camila held one of the babies, while Miguel held the other. He looked at the two babies in awe—it had been a while since he’d been part of a delivery—and he felt as if his heart would break from joy. He was a grandparent! Not once, but twice! Seeing those two tiny, scrunched up, beautiful faces, he swore to do everything possible to ensure they had long, healthy, and alien-free lives … no matter what anyone on the planning board wanted. They would build and prepare, then they would build and prepare some more. They would be ready.

  Movement caught his eye, and he looked down at his daughter’s stomach. The robot had closed the patch of skin—everything was remarkably bloodless—and sprayed the edges of the incision. His eyes went wide as the cut joined together and the skin reformed as if it had never been apart.

  “How is … how is this possible?” Freymark asked. Even he could hear the awe in his voice.

  “Nanobots,” the doctor replied. “Microscopic machines operating at the cellular level.”

  “I know what nanobots are,” Freymark said. “I just … I just never saw this before. It’s…” his voice trailed off, searching for a word. “It’s miraculous,” he finally said, although he found the word didn’t do his feelings justice. He looked at his watch. Only ten minutes had passed.

  “I’ll probably do twenty-five of these today,” the doctor replied. “It’s not a miracle. It’s just science.”

  . III .

  FORT SANDERS, NORTH CAROLINA,

  UNITED STATES

  “What should I be looking for out there?” Elias Favre asked as he scanned the terrain whipping past the window of the low-flying helicopter. The tall, dark-haired representative from the suburbs of what was left of Geneva had already shown himself to be inquisitive and extremely interested in the exercise going on in the fields and forests beneath the racing UH-60 helicopter. An ex-member of the Swiss militia, he also had a good grasp of military hardware and tactics.

  “Over there, you can see one of our new tank companies massing for an assault on the enemy positions by that sandy area farther to the left,” Colonel Russell Clayton replied, pointing out the left window of the Black Hawk. Although Clayton would rather have been down on the ground, commanding the troops, the President—the no-kidding President of the Planetary Union—had called him and asked him to take care of the two representatives, so here he was, giving them the dog-and-pony show.

  “You mean those tanks over there?” Luca Gerber could have been specifically designed as a contrast for Favre. While Favre looked the part of a military man—tall and aristocratic—Gerber, a professor from Universität Bern, was the direct opposite, short and extremely stocky, with hair as fair as Favre’s was dark. He represented an area that was the economic, educational, and health care hub of central Switzerland, and his support was crucial to moving the nation in the right direction.

  “Yes, Sir,” Clayton replied. “Those targets are what used to be our top-of-the-line tanks—like the ones Colonel Alastair Sanders’ battalion used to defeat the Shongairi in Afghanistan during the Puppy Invasion.”

  “That’s what I don’t understand,” Gerber said. “If we destroyed the Shongair armor with our old tanks, why do we want to use the inferior Shongair models now?”

  Clayton gave him a hunter’s grin.

  “Those tanks—we named them the Sanders, after the Colonel, as a matter of fact—may look like what he faced in Afghanistan, but they’re definitely not the same. As it turns out, the Shongairi had access to much better technology than they brought here; they just didn’t field any of it. We have!”

  Gerber’s eyebrows knitted. “But that doesn’t make any sense. If they had better technology, why didn’t they use it?”

  “It appears that, in all their previous conquests, they never needed anything more sophisticated and capable than what they brought, and they weren’t expecting us to have advanced as far as we had. The last time they were here was in 1415, and the longbow was the king of battle then. The equipment they brought would have been very effective against troops wielding longbows.…”

  “But we had advanced to tanks,” Favre finished.

  “Exactly.” Clayton nodded. “They were unprepared for how far we’d advanced. And according to the history we captured from them, they were probably no more advanced than we were by the end of World War Two, say, when they fought their last war against a true peer opponent. So even though they had lasers mounted on their counter-grav tanks, they weren’t optimized for use against enemies whose tech matched th
eir own—they were bottom-of-the-line weapons. They would have completely overwhelmed the forces being fielded during the Hundred Years’ War, or the Napoleonic Wars, or even World War One or World War Two, five hundred years later. But their vehicle-mounted energy weapons were unable to penetrate the frontal armor of an Abrams tank with a single hit.

  “What’s more interesting, though,” he added, warming to the subject, “is the fact that once they found out how far we’d advanced, they didn’t appear able to adapt to our new capabilities. The time window wasn’t wide enough for them to have made any major changes to their hardware—their industrial modules were still spinning up when the vampires took them out, so it hadn’t been physically possible to put new designs into production, even if they’d tried to—but they should have been able to figure out how to use what they had far more effectively once they found out what they were actually up against. Only they didn’t. It was as if they were so used to bullying technologically inferior races that when we stepped up and punched them in the mouth, they didn’t know what to do. Their only response was to call in strikes from orbit. We don’t expect them to be so unprepared next time; we have to be ready.”

  “Are we?” Representative Favre asked. “Are we ready for them?”

  “Let’s find out.” Clayton switched to the radio. “Control to all forces, advance and destroy the enemy armor.”

  The helicopter went into a hover, and Clayton pointed out the window as the tanks leapt forward on their counter-grav fields. The helicopter had moved a little closer to the tanks now, and Clayton could see their rectangular-shaped barrels move as they quested for targets. The hover tanks were about seven miles from the targets, with a small rise between them. As the tanks cleared the hill, they fired.

  “A dud!” Gerber said. Unlike the older 120-millimeter smoothbore guns on the M1A2 Abrams, there’d been no enormous fireball when the new tanks fired. In fact, it was singularly unimpressive for anyone accustomed to pre-invasion artillery. There was a clearly visible cloud of something directly in front of the tank, however, and then four pieces of something else arced out of the cloud to land only a fraction of the way to the target.

  “Just watch!” Clayton said, but before he could finish, two of the tanks on the range exploded.

  “What … what the hell was that?” Gerber asked. “Lasers?”

  Clayton shook his head. “We could have used lasers—they’re in the printers’ technology base—but we went with a railgun instead. It’s affected less by weather and can handle a wider variety of ammunition types. It also lets us use the tanks for a number of different missions. The cloud you saw wasn’t from propellant; it was just dust being kicked up by the atmospheric shockwave. And the black pieces you see aren’t the actual rounds—those are the shoes that go around the rounds like sabots; they’re discarded after the rounds clear the barrel.

  “In fact, the railgun on the Sanders is a scaled-up version of the personal weapons you’ll see in a bit,” Clayton explained. “It has a muzzle velocity on the order of about thirty-four hundred meters per second, which is twice the average muzzle velocity of the Abrams’ main gun. At that velocity, its ballistics closely approximate those of an energy weapon at the ranges it’s likely to be used. It might as well be a laser … except that it hits with a lot more force.”

  “But the rounds can’t be very big, if they come packed in a sabot we can see from here, can they?” Gerber asked. “How does something that small carry enough explosives to do the job?”

  “The anti-tank rounds don’t use any explosives,” Clayton replied. “They’re actually kinetic energy weapons, which, like a bullet, use only their kinetic energy to penetrate the target. Once a round forces its way through the armor, the heat and spalling it generates while it’s going through destroys the target. The idea of a penetrator isn’t new—our Abrams tanks used something similar—but now, with the railgun, we’re able to generate a whole lot more force.”

  “I don’t get it,” Gerber said. “Why doesn’t the round just bounce off? Isn’t that what tank armor is supposed to do? Make rounds bounce off it?”

  “Well, yes, that’s what a tank’s armor is for,” Clayton said, reminding himself that Gerber was an academic, not an experienced military officer. “But this type of round has so much energy it pierces the armor, rather than bouncing off.” Clayton turned to the representative to make eye contact. “Basically, energy is a function of a projectile’s mass and velocity, right?”

  Gerber nodded.

  “In order to maximize the amount of energy we apply to the target, we increase the mass as much as possible, by using materials as dense as we can find. For the Abrams, that was depleted uranium; what we can produce now is a lot denser even than that, so we can really dial the mass up. Then, we minimize the diameter of the final projectile, so all the energy is focused on as small an area as possible. In the Abrams, we encased it in a full-caliber sabot, basically a shoe to carry it down the barrel, because the sabot’s base was wide enough to get the most velocity out of the powder charge. Then the sabot was discarded as the projectile cleared the barrel, and the penetrator continued to the target, with a lot less air resistance and a lot more kinetic energy than a full-caliber round would have experienced.

  “The railgun still uses a shoe to engage with the magnetic field and stabilize the penetrator on its way down the barrel, but it doesn’t have to be anywhere near as big as the Abram’s sabot was. Basically, we make a really heavy arrow, then we shoot it at an extremely high velocity, and it hits in such a small area that it smashes straight through, rather than bouncing off. As it goes through, it pulls along pieces of the armor it touches, then it shoots all of that stuff into the tank’s interior at nearly the same speed. Between the shrapnel and the overpressure, the interior of the tank isn’t survivable.”

  “Ouch,” Favre said.

  Clayton nodded. “As a former tank guy, I agree a hundred percent. The key, however, is to do it to them before they can do it to you.”

  “And these new tanks will allow us to do that?”

  “Yes, they will.”

  “Why not just drop something on them from orbit, so they can’t hit you back?” Gerber asked.

  “Certainly, that’s an option in some cases, especially if the enemy’s out in the open, but what if you’re trying to take a city? There’s a reason the Army didn’t just ask the Air Force to demolish entire towns and cities in Iraq and Afghanistan. You can level a half dozen city blocks to destroy a tank hiding there, but it’s awfully hard on the local townspeople. You can’t win the hearts and minds of an enemy population if you kill all the civilians while you’re taking out their military—there won’t be any of them left.”

  “Makes sense, I guess,” Gerber said with a shrug.

  Clayton nodded back out the window. Even from the helicopter, it was apparent the target tanks had all been destroyed.

  “Let’s go down and take a look at how the new technology translates to the common soldier.”

  * * *

  “THIS IS A company from one of the other battalions in my brigade,” Colonel Clayton said proudly as they approached the firing range near where the helicopter had landed. The company in question was just finishing and loading up into several counter-grav trucks. “The brigade has four battalions—the armor unit you already saw, a mechanized infantry battalion, a drone battalion, and an antiaircraft battalion—and attached engineering and heavy weapons companies. Altogether, we have about forty-five hundred personnel, which includes our own supporting logistics folks, engineers, cooks, medics, and other staff.”

  “That sounds like a well-rounded package,” Favre said.

  “It is, especially when you see the capabilities of the personnel involved.”

  Clayton led them to the end of the firing line, where the brigade’s sergeant major stood at attention along with a corporal.

  “Good morning, Sergeant Major.”

  “Good morning, Sir!” The noncom turned t
o the two representatives. “Good morning, Gentlemen! I’m Sergeant Major Jenkins, and Corporal González and I will be showing you the capabilities of the new M-1 Strike Rifle. Corporal González!”

  “Good morning, Gentlemen,” González said with a smile and a touch of an Andalusian accent. Clayton nodded—the Spaniard had been chosen because he was able to be highly professional, while being simultaneously open and engaging. “As the Sergeant Major said, I’ll be showing you my new best friend, my M-1.”

  He raised his rifle to port arms and opened it for inspection so the two representatives could see it. The weapon had the high-tech, shiny look of a prop you’d see in the movies. Although Clayton hadn’t expected the rifle’s finish to hold up once it was put into his soldiers’ hands—if you want to find five new ways to break something, give it to a soldier—but the finish had defied his expectations, and his battalion’s rifles all looked the same as the day they’d arrived from the printers. Whatever alien composite they were made of was tough!

  “The M-1 is a ten-millimeter, air-cooled, capacitor-operated, magazine-fed railgun,” the corporal continued. “The M-1’s receiver is made of an aluminum alloy, its barrel, bolt, and bolt carrier of a lightweight alien alloy, and its handguards, pistol grip, and buttstock of an alien composite.

  “The M-1 is a little heavier than some of its predecessors at eleven-point-two pounds with a loaded forty-round magazine; however, the ten-millimeter round it fires is much larger than its predecessors. The earlier 5.56 round was approximately half its diameter, with a bullet that weighed less than four grams. Even the old 7.62 mm round is only three-quarters the diameter of the M-1’s, and it weighs less than ten grams. The bullet fired by the M-1 weighs almost twenty grams, yet its weight is proportionally smaller than it would have been if we’d simply scaled up an existing round to ten millimeters. In fact, the sub-caliber penetrator is only six millimeters in diameter, smaller than the old NATO 7.62; the greater weight is possible because it’s made of alien composites, like the new tank rounds. Despite its much larger size, the entire sub-caliber penetrator round—cartridge and penetrator—only weighs about forty-five grams total, and the explosive round only weighs about forty. Of note, that’s only about ninety percent and seventy percent more, respectively, than the standard NATO round, but it puts out a hell of a lot more punch.”