Future War

by Gardner Dozois

  And in the next instant the hawk flies apart, ripped to shreds by gunfire. He pushes forward, regains flying speed, and hightails downwind, at the same time keying his mike. “What the hell was that? Fletchette?”

  “Birdshot. I found a grunt dumb enough to step outside to take a shot. You owe me one, Sport. Can you make it now?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Keep your eyes peeled. Local support arty is pinned down, but we have some long-range shoot‘n’scoot that can wipe the Bear HQ if you happen to find it in your travels.”

  “Rog.” He finds some lift, gains altitude, and heads for Tiger.

  He flies over territory that is familiar to him. He had worked near here once, before he was married. For a moment he wonders why the Russians had invaded. Arming for war had shored up a failed economy, but did it make any sense for the Bears to actually hold territory? They must have had a reason, or at least a pretext for one, but for the moment Rorvik can’t remember what it was. But then, who could ever psych out the Russians? Leave that to the professionals, with their super-computers and tactical models. Not to the soldiers.

  Tiger three-niner. Circling the area, he finds a cluster of relatively undamaged buildings, apparently the remains of an old housing project. A bit exposed for a fire base, but still . . . He circles lower, looking for signs of habitation. Nothing. There! Traces of body heat lingering in the still air, a yellowish fog in the IR. He zooms out and follows the heat trace across the city as it brightens into lime green and then the pale blue of recent passage. There, under an overhang, the scarlet flash of a warm body. He checks his map. This is an evac area; a free-fire zone. A flash of movement. “Think I got something here. Hold fire.” He banks around.

  “Standing by to fire.”

  He comes in low, stalls, fights the building’s turbulence. Another flash of movement; a foot. “Got it! Bogeys, could be a Bear fire-control post.” He flashes his IR range finder. “My coords plus five at twenty-two surface, mark. I’m coming around to guide your fire.” He rides out and into some slope lift from the breeze flowing up over the facade.

  A different voice, the slight echo of multiple radio relays. “Roger. Outgoing, one, two, three.” His vision flickers static for a moment from the EM pulse used to dazzle any Bear radars from tracing back the rising shells. It takes a moment for the shells to clear far enough to aero-maneuver, a moment in which he is suddenly aware of sitting in a concrete bunker with a flickering television helmet on his head, and then his vision sharpens back to normal and he is flying again.

  The fire support base is miles away; it will be a minute before the shells come in and need his terminal guidance. Something about what he’s seen bothers him. He flicks back to his last photo. A foot shows in the shadow of an overhang. He zooms in, enhances contrast. Barefoot. The Russians are that far out of discipline? He circles back, penetrating upwind slowly, searching for a good view. There. He hovers for a moment into the wind, panning his eye around behind him. Shapes move, but the shadow is too deep to distinguish them in visual. He turns up contrast and sharpens his gain. There.

  The instant before he stalls out, he gets a good shot.

  Three children circle around a suspended object. The oldest is perhaps fourteen, the youngest perhaps nine. One, blindfolded, holds a broken mop handle like a club. In a corner a scruffy yellow dog watches him. He looks closer at the suspended object. He recognizes it as the throw-away cardboard transport tube for an 80mm Russian antiaircraft missile. It has been decorated, painted bright colors, given old buttons to serve as eyes, four painted cardboard legs and long floppy ears. A crude caricature of a donkey. A piñata.

  The voice in his earphones says, “Twenty seconds to incoming. Ready for terminal guidance.”

  “Abort your rounds! Abort!”

  “Say again, Eagle?”

  “Abort your rounds! Civilians!”

  “Roger.” Three sharp cracks in the air above him as the lifting bodies detonate. “Rounds aborted.” There is a pause, and then, “Do you have a vector on the target that can avoid the civilians?”

  He feels like ash, like he had been burned and there is nothing left. Shooting at shadows is common enough, but it won’t endear him to his superiors. “Negative. False alarm. Sorry, guys.”

  There is a long pause, and then, “Operations wants to talk to you, Rorvik.”

  Using his name instead of his code is a bad sign. “Acknowledged.”

  “That means now, Private.”

  “Roger.” He scrambles and finds some lift, prolonging the flight, knowing it might be his last. “I’ll be there as soon as I’m down.”

  Another pause. “Negative, Rorvik. Ops wants to talk to you pronto. Advise you blow the bird and get your butt down here before you get marks for insubordination.”

  “Heard and understood.” No help for it. The critical chips on his bird are set to melt when they lose the carrier wave for more than a few seconds, or if he gives the coded signal. The rest of the bird is just sticks and plastic; no more than a toy. He flicks the cover off the toggle, caresses it for a second, and then presses it with his thumb. His eye-screens flash black for an instant, and then there is nothing left of the world but the whisper and swirl of static.

  He pops his helmet, and is in a grimy concrete bunker crammed with equipment and stinking of sweat and hot electronics. Next to his contoured seat, two other fliers sit, faceless in the white plastic of surround helmets, oblivious to him and the rest of the world, except for their birds. His muscles ache from the body English he gave his bird while flying, but the bunker is too cramped for him to stretch. He unpins the throat mike, and goes to explain.

  5.

  They are kept in the dark about the overall course of the war, but from the consistent, slow retreat, and the way that replacements—men and material both—are getting scarcer and scarcer, by the end of the summer Rorvik knows that the war is not going well.

  Some of the men from Rorvik’s unit keep a Russian lieutenant tied up in a remote bunker, nominally an auxiliary command post but actually just an abandoned garage that hasn’t been shelled, with a roof thick enough to mask IR signature. They call her Olga—nobody knows her real name; it had been written on her uniform way back when she’d had one, but none of the gang could read Cyrillic, and she either can’t or won’t speak English.

  Rorvik’s unit is all male. Equality be damned, the Army is still segregated by sex. Only Headquarters units and reserves mix genders; every operational unit Rorvik has served in has been all male. There are all-female units too, the subject of a good deal of unlikely stories and rude speculation, but Rorvik’s unit rarely meets them, except on the field, where the drones are sexless and the operators invisible, hidden behind labyrinths of encrypted radio relays. The Russian lieutenant is the only female any of them has seen for weeks—some of them, months.

  And they know that there is little chance that they will survive the war anyway.

  As Rorvik passes by, one of the boys yells out an invitation for him to join them. Rorvik walks faster, and they snicker. “Ol’ Davey’s too good for us.” “No, it’s just that he’s waiting until we capture a boy.” “Maybe he’s got his own nookie stashed away somewhere, some pretty Russky major.”

  Their lieutenant pretends not to notice, but he knows. No way he could miss it. They are supposed to turn prisoners over to the authorities—they desperately need Russians for their simulations—but, for the moment, that is impossible. No doubt as soon as they rejoined their battalion the prisoner would be “found,” and rescued from the civilian “partisans” who had so cruelly mistreated her.

  Could he do anything? Informing headquarters about the prisoner would result in her disappearance, and possibly his own, long before any inspection might get to them. Still, the thought that there could be something he might do chews at Rorvik’s conscience and worries him at the odd moments when battle duty or his eight-hour watch leaves him free to think.

  As the battle eddies a
nd stalls, with movement by lightning air deployment and half the battle fought by remotes, it is almost pointless to mark battle lines. Most of the Boston area is controlled by neither the Russians nor the American forces, but watched by both. To the extent that anybody can say, though, Rorvik’s unit is temporarily behind enemy lines. Or at least, they are cut off from support.

  Their control bunker is buried under Dorchester. When the battle moved closer, his unit had to stay inside; but now, with the battle line off in Roxbury, some outside mobility is possible. At work, of course, he is right in the thick of battle, wherever it is.

  Rorvik was taken off of tac surveillance to become a drone runner. He alternates with Drejivic, six hours on, six off, controlling four robot warriors. The warriors are intelligent; if the coded remote signal is jammed, they will keep fighting until the interference clears, and their IFF (identify, friend or foe) signals—changed hourly—keep them from shooting each other. But remotes work best if an actual human watches over them to make decisions. In a hard fire-fight, it is best to let them on their own; human reaction time only slows them down. He’ll interfere only when indecision about a questionable IFF threatens a gridlock. Occasionally he’ll have to call in Rick, who runs another four, to take one of his drones; or Rick will call him in. It is a point of pride not to do this too often.

  Angie, Lissy, Gumby, and Pokey, he calls them. Drejivic has other names.

  He hooks into the computer. When he runs drones, his body stays in the bunker, but he—the important part of him—is the drone. He flits back and forth from one viewpoint to another. When he wears one body, the views from the other three cameras are always visible in the edge of his vision.

  When he concentrates on one drone, the others fight on their own initiative.

  Angie and Lissy, the fliers, he likes best. These aren’t the disposable surveillance flexies he flew when the war was young; these are armed fighting drones. The fliers are pigs for energy use, though, and have to conserve their time aloft. On the ground they are clumsy. More than once he’s had to use his rocket-assisted take-off to haul ass out of fire too hot for them to handle. The rasstos are one-shot units; use one up and you have to bring the drone home and wait for a replacement. Like everything else, they are running low. He’s been chewed out several times, the sarge drilling in that we are not to get into situations where we have to rassto out.

  Unfortunately, Angie is waiting for a replacement rassto, and Lissy is out of action. She’s taken a couple of rounds of small-caliber fire. The maintenance tech has her now, trying to scrounge parts to put her back together.

  Gumby and Pokey are his two bipedal walkers. Running them feels almost like wearing a robot suit. Gumby is the most flexible of his drones. His problem is that they also ran out of ammo for the 3mm skittergun that is Gumby’s utility weapon. He still has the 10mm armor piercers and rockets, but on his own, Gumby’s first move in a firefight is still to bring up the skittergun. The slight hesitation it takes for Gumby’s tiny processor to remember it didn’t work could be fatal. The unit is supposed to be adaptable enough to remember, but Rorvik guesses that that part of his programming has been shot out.

  Pokey is operational, but weaponless until parts become available, after the unit rejoins the main army. Mostly Rorvik stays out of Gumby’s viewpoint and lets the drone move around on auto while he scouts from Pokey.

  What the drones fight, mostly, are other drones. There are human infantry in the field, on both sides, but they tend to be dug into stealth emplacements, mobile and heavily protected, only popping out for missions too delicate to be run by drones.

  In the distance, the heavy overcast glows orange with reflected light as the ruins of Boston burn.

  The status bulletin has given them a clear for an hour. It is rare that their computers can predict a clear for that long; somewhere far away one side or the other must have ferreted a major command center, and a battle must be drawing all of the resources available. For now, Rorvik’s area is clear of Russian eyes, and they can move around outside. Drone runners have to take rest shifts of a minimum of three hours to stay at peak effectiveness; the regulations demand it, and so he knows he won’t be called back except for a serious emergency.

  A block from their bunker is a square that still has a few trees in it; the closest thing to a park within the defense perimeter. He decides to go there for as long as the clear lasts.

  Someone else has gotten there before him.

  The woman in the park has a SISI gun grafted right to her shoulder, and the eye-shaped barrel turns to aim at him at the same time she raises her head. He takes an involuntary step back; the gun unnerves him. See it, shoot it: he could be dead with a single thought. She must have volunteered to have the gun grafted into her nervous system; the regulations don’t allow them to modify you without consent. It means that she is from a live-combat unit, and that is unusual as well, especially for a woman. Women have to volunteer for front-line duty.

  He was in a live-combat unit once, during the first battle for Boston. He remembers—but that was early in the war; there is no point in dredging up those memories.

  Her insignia shows her to be a Spec-4. He has heard that a female infantry company had temporarily moved in to an area south of them, but hadn’t realized that their clear areas would overlap. The gun moves like something alive on her shoulder, pivoting minutely as she shifts her eyes, jerking from target to target with the unblinking attention of a snake.

  She watches him eyeing her gun. “It’s no safer behind the lines, soldier. I’d rather have it be up front, where I can fight back, than where you are, buried in some concrete bunker and never hear it coming, you know?”

  “Doesn’t the gun make you a target?”

  “Makes me dangerous.” She smiles. “I like to be dangerous.”

  She is too tall, too many muscles and too few curves, and wears a wrinkled jumpsuit made of fireproof fabric that masks what feminine lines she has. She is desirable as all hell. She can tell he is thinking about that, too, and she laughs.

  “Soldiers think any woman out here is sex-crazed, you know it? I’m not like that. I’ve got a husband, and two kids. They’re what I’m fighting for.”

  “I know.”

  “You married, soldier?”

  He nods.

  “Happily? Got any kids?”

  “A girl.”

  She nods. “Then you do know.” As she unzips the jumpsuit, she says, “They’re back at home, and we’re here.” She runs the tip of one finger along the gun barrel for a second, then does something to it with the other hand, and it stops tracking her gaze. “This didn’t happen, you know? It’s the war. No commitments, no promises, no looking each other up after.”

  “No.” He doesn’t believe there will be an after, not anymore. He has seen the craters where houses once were, the lines of refugees, miles long, trudging endlessly out of the cities toward areas they believed might be safe. He has seen the ruins of the area where his house had been, where his wife and girl once lived.

  But he still believes in now.

  Her name is Westermaker, she whispers. She kneels to unzip his pants. He strokes her hair—short, dark and very slightly curled—as she runs her lips along the underside of his cock.

  A confused jumble of thoughts crowds his head all at the same time. He feels himself already beginning to dribble, and wonders if he will be able to hold back, or if he will come the instant she takes him in her mouth. Wonders if he will ever be able to tell Angela about this, and whether she could possibly understand. Wonders if the Army issues female grunts birth control. Wonders if she will stay long enough for him to take her twice.

  He reaches down to slide his pants off. She cups his buttocks in a palm as she delicately touches the end of her tongue to the tip of his cock, and the burst of machine-gun fire takes her low in the chest. Her mouth opens to scream as her lungs splatter out the side of her shredded uniform and across the jagged ends of her splintered ribs. An i
nstant later, without a sound, she dies.

  He staggers back, his ears ringing with the report, tries to turn around, and trips on the pants tangled around his knees. He rolls over and looks right into the lens of a Russian walker. With the soft whirr of servos, the machine gun tracks to his face.

  He squeezes his eyes shut. The smell of blood is very strong.

  Nothing happens.

  After a long moment he opens his eyes. The machine is still there, unblinking; the gun still aimed right for him. It is heavier and clumsier than the American units Rorvik is familiar with, all angles and graceless ceramic armor-plate, and very deadly. Surreptitiously, he reaches behind him and gropes for a rock. The machine does nothing. It takes an eternity to find a rock loose enough to pull out of the ground. When he finally pries one loose he waits for an instant, gauging the distance, and then, with a quick, smooth motion, hurls it at the machine.

  It dodges easily, still watching him, still tracking him with the gun, still holding back its fire. The gun must have jammed, he thinks, and then, an instant later, God, it’s already called in artillery on me.

  But the gun killed Westermaker easily enough, and the remote is making no effort to get clear of incoming artillery.

  He should have never gone out, not even to a clear zone, without his sidearm. But he is a drone runner; he isn’t supposed to fight face to face. Holding his pants up with one hand, he scrambles to his feet, preparing to make a run for it, and hears the hydraulics start up behind him. He freezes. Suddenly he realizes what the remote is up to.

  Where can he go?

  It had shot Westermaker. Westermaker had been armed, though her SISI gun had been useless against a threat she never saw. He is no threat. The operator—somewhere miles away—can shoot him anytime he wanted. But his very presence means that there must be a command post somewhere nearby. Why not let him go, and watch where he went?