Jim Baen’s Universe
Page 67
Sarge marshaled us into the lee of big concrete shed, and laid out the general plan. He or the lieutenant couldn’t hope to conduct a thorough and systematic sweep and clear operation. There was too much chance the Rigies would decide to destroy what we were after. We had to strike hard and keep moving fast, until the objective was secured. Troops were pouring in through the breach in the wire behind us, but, as usual, it was goons to the front.
There was a momentary lull in the firing as something big blew up to the south. A tall cloud rose that way, above the Rigie city twenty kilometers away where the main assault was happening. It might have been the city’s fusion plant going up or maybe one of our ships crashed. There was no way to tell from where we were. We never did find out. We never do.
Pete, Jenny and I advanced farther into the compound, two moving while the third covered. Normally, two cover while the third cautiously advances. We called it our hurry-up offense, and it’s dangerous as hell. But, we were running short on time and playing it safe just isn’t in the job description. Our luck ran short, too, about three hundred meters in from the wire.
Jenny and Pete ran up to an ugly gray building that might have been a warehouse and dashed around the corner. I was about to jump up and follow, when they came back around the corner and threw themselves into an open doorway. Having seen this type of behavior before, I wasn’t at all surprised to see five Rigies come boiling around the corner about a femto second later.
I opened up on full auto and two of the Rigies went down. One of the injured Rigies was good and dead, but the other made it to cover with his buddies. He’d only been hit maybe a couple of times, and that’s not near enough to stop a Rigie.
I would have just loved to stick around and dealt with this group of Rigies, but we were on a tight schedule. Sarge ordered forward a light plasma gun at the double quick. The plasma gun, with help from a squad of little guys, backed the three Rigies into a corner. While they were pinned down, we goons skirted around and pressed on into the compound.
There wasn’t any real chance that those three Rigies would surrender. The very concept of surrender was new to them when the war started. Some little guy, a clerk in an intelligence unit, told me once they even borrowed our word for it.
Basically, the Rigies are big and mean and they never give up. That, in itself, wouldn’t mean that they will win the war. The trouble is that the Rigies and the human race happen to be pretty evenly matched in resources and technology. The quantity and quality of ships and weapons are about equal. So, ironically, the edge the Rigelians have in physical strength and ferocity made a real difference in our interstellar war. For a while, they were kicking our butts. The human race needed some big, tough, mean bastards of their own.
The firefight behind us tipped off the Rigies where we were, so Pete, Jenny and I worked our way wide to the right and continued the advance. The intensity of plasma bolts and rifle fire doubled and then doubled again. The Rigies were feeding troops into the firefight we’d touched off. This, we reasoned, would have the effect of pulling them away from the rest of the place. We decided to take advantage of the situation and sprinted along.
Pete and I pulled ahead of Jenny by a dozen meters or so. Any other time one of us would have picked Jenny up and carried her. But we needed both hands free, because who knew what could come boiling around the next corner.
It might seem silly to have little guys like Jenny in our unit at all. But, they’re there to make sure we goons feel a personal connection to actual factual human beings and the human race in general. It’s the same logic as having us raised by normal foster families. I think it worked. I have a soft spot in my goon heart for Jenny, or at least some impure thoughts.
Pete and I didn’t even need to talk. We each could tell what the other was thinking. That’s because we’ve been buddies so long, even before basic training. Pete grew up two blocks east of me, on Lakeshore Boulevard. I can close my eyes and imagine the way over to his house from mine, right past that big, rusty old twentieth-century tank on a concrete pad outside the library.
I think I actually smelled something different first. I stopped short of a right-hand jog in the “road” and carefully peeked around a peeling concrete wall. Ten meters away was a young Rigie standing guard in front of a door. He was alone. At that moment, I knew that we’d found what we’d come to get.
This guy was obviously a low status individual. Rigies don’t have a firm, organized system of rank. Leadership and status are based on a combination of fighting prowess, clan ties and seniority. Leadership can change day to day, even hour to hour. It sounds chaotic and inefficient as hell, but let me tell you, it can work pretty damned good for them. With humans inside the wire, every warrior would charge for the sound of the guns. The fact that they left one behind, even this sad puppy, meant that there was a high value item behind that door.
Without a moment’s hesitation, I emptied a clip into the guard’s blue midsection. Pete and I sprinted towards the door.
The brainstorm that eventually resulted in us goons sprang from the human race’s pressing need to match, or better yet exceed, the Rigelians in physical, one on one combat. From what I’ve heard, the initial attempts at genetic modification experiments ranged from disappointing to truly horrific. It turns out that it’s pretty tough to do in one generation what natural selection took maybe a million years to accomplish. They were just about ready to give up when they found the answer.
I hugged the wall on one side of the door. “Squad two to Six. Squad two to Six. Over,” I whispered into my mike.
“Squad two. Six. Go,” Sarge roared back in my ear, making himself heard over plasma fire in the background.
“Found the cheese. Repeat, found the cheese. Coordinates charlie delta four niner.” I read the glowing alphanumeric from my face shield display. “Repeat, charlie delta four niner.”
“Copy. Cheese at charlie delta four niner. Hold position. Cavalry coming.” Sarge killed the transmission.
Knowing Sarge, I took “hold position” to mean “secure the position.” So, Pete kicked the door open and I rushed in, keeping me low and my weapon ready. There was a short corridor that opened up into a large room with a high ceiling. The smell I’d whiffed outside hit me like a brick wall. It was the smell of people who hadn’t had anything close to a bath in two or three decades.
There were maybe three hundred of them sitting or lying on the bare concrete floor. This was a warehouse of some kind, not a barracks. The Rigies must have herded them in here on the spur of the moment to keep them from getting in the way, or more probably to make it easier to kill them all quickly
.
This was the first batch of humans that the Rigelians had captured, way back at the start of the war. A long time ago there had been a lot more of them. I could only imagine what kind of holy hell these people had been living for decades, and, as it turned out, my imagination came up well short of reality. Freeing them was a big part of the reason we were assaulting this particular mudball.
In fact, I guess you could say that these people were a big part of the reason that we goons exist. The initial justification for the war was to retrieve them, before we figured out that the Rigies were going to try to wipe us all out whether we fought back or not. So we needed to be better at fighting, which led humans to develop goons by genetic modification, which didn’t work. Then it dawned on some bright boy that instead of trying to rush Mother Nature through a million years of evolution overnight to make big, mean soldiers we could just use some ready made DNA that was lying around, if slightly scorched. Even at that point in time, cloning was a well-established technology.
The prisoners were staring at Pete and me. Of course they’d never seen a goon before and didn’t know what to make of us. But we were wearing a uniform that was pretty close to what they’d worn a long, terror-filled time ago.
Then Jenny shoved her way past us. The people in the room saw her and slowly realized that she was undeniably human, and armed to the teeth. You could see it in their eyes. They were telling themselves that this was some kind of cruel joke or trick. They were trying to beat down the hope that was rising up inside of them.
Jenny looked at them, grinned a wide grin and said, “Remain calm. We’re from the government, and we’re here to help you.”
There was a long pause, and then a woman in the back laughed nervously at the old, old joke. Then they were all laughing, shouting, weeping, staggering forward to touch us and make sure we were real.
Outside I could hear Sarge setting up a perimeter around the place.
I turned to see one prisoner standing next to me. Unlike the others, he was calm. His hair was white as ashes. He was missing his right eye and his left arm ended in a ragged stump just below the elbow. His remaining eye burned with an icy, green fire.
He slowly reached up and tapped my nametag: Toscanelli. “Funny.” He spoke in a hoarse whisper that may have had something to do with the scars on his throat, “You don’t look Italian.”
“Yeah, a lot of people tell me that.”
“I’ll bet they do.”
“I’m adopted.”
“Thought you might be.” He paused, weighing my human uniform against my electric blue skin. “As a matter of fact, you look more like you’re from Rigel.”
“Well, my DNA might be from Rigel.” I smiled, showing all three rows of razor-sharp, pearly white teeth. “But I’m from Cleveland.”
****
NonFiction Articles
Gods and Monsters
Gregory Benford
So there I was in fabled Hollywood, having lunch at the Fox Studios. The food was tasty and I was with a movie producer who was interested in a story idea I had pitched. While a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, I had published several novels, mostly science fiction. Hollywood, just an hour up the freeway, was a constant temptation. I succumbed to it after three decades of doing intense physics.
We had gone over the whole plot structure, the breakdown into three acts (a Hollywood commandment, Act I ending at 30 minutes and II at 90 minutes in a two hour film)-plus character, logic, setting, the works.
Everything seemed set. Everybody agreed. They thought that the female lead character seemed particularly right, a match of motivation and plot.
Then the producer, a woman in her thirties, leaned across the lunch table and said, “She’s just about right, now. Only… how about, halfway through, she turns out to be a robot?”
I looked around the dining room, at the murals depicting famous scenes from old movies, at stars in shades dining on their slimming salads in all their Armani finery, at the sweeping view of little purple dots that danced before my eyes because I had neglected breathing after she spoke. “Robot…?”
“Just to keep them guessing,” the producer added helpfully. “I want to really suck the juice out of this moment.”
“But that makes no sense in this movie.”
“It’s science fiction, though-”
“So it doesn’t have to make sense,” I finished for her.
****
The vast bulk of Hollywood science fiction films brazenly feature flat characters moving through Tinkertoy plots to the regular drumbeat of gaudy spectacles. Horn-rimmed techno-nerds get an occasional smirking nod in passing, on the way to the dazzling special effects payoffs.
This sleep of reason fruitfully births monsters on demand, though-fears of technology, of scientists, and of the future itself. Machines come alive and reflect basic human evils, from Terminators to HAL. Those who sup from the cup of knowledge turn bad-the Invisible Man, Dr. Strangelove, bladerunners galore. Hubris is the drink of choice. In Bride of Frankenstein, mad scientists drink to the toast, “To a new world of gods and monsters!” Nobody hesitates.
The few films in which science fiction sings peer beyond current received wisdom, playing music for the dance between us and our technologies. Machines both help and block our personal relationships, robots come off as terribly human rather than as Gothic horrors, and startling ideas condense into concrete drama.
The big questions before us can often be phrased as If this goes on… and What if… To get the tone of the issue right, films like Kubrick’s 2001 give us crisp, convincing space travel, not the comic book zoom and swirl of a Star Wars. Rather than play upon the easy keys of unease about change, they pull out the stops and embrace it with a realist’s love.
As a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, I felt the tug of Hollywood brimming at the horizon. I had written some fiction, so my agent began to get calls inquiring whether I could come in, pitch some ideas, schmooze. When the sirens call, who hangs up?
****
So there I was a few weeks later, talking to a story editor. His development company was interested in making a TV miniseries from my novel, The Martian Race. The whole point of the approach was to portray Mars the way it would really be, hard and gritty and unforgiving. The story editor liked this a “whole lot” and thought it was a “breakthrough concept” and all, but he had his own creative input, too.
“I want a magic moment right here, at the end of the first hour,” he said. “Really suck that ol’ juice out!”
One of the signatures of H’wood is the incessant use of clich phrases, the rule of advanced, glance-over-the-shoulder hipitude.
“Magic?” I
asked guardedly.
“Something to bring out the wonder of Mars, yeah.”
“Like…”
“See, when the astronaut is inside this cave-”
“Thermal vent. From an old volcano-”
“Okay, okay, vent it is. In this vent, he’s trapped, right?”
“Well, not actually-”
“So he’s banged up and he thinks he’s going to die and he thinks, what the hell.”
“What the hell.”
“Right, you get it. He says what the hell, he might as well take his helmet off.”
“Helmet. Off.”
“Right, you got it. Big moment. Cracks the seal. He smiles and takes a big breath, and says, ‘Oxygen! There’s oxygen here. Let’s take off these helmets!’ Whaddaya think?”
“I like the robot better.”
****
That moment expressed Hollywood’s basic rule, the Law of Thermodramatics. To get more audience, turn up the gain.
If you absolutely must use scientists as characters, make them odd, nerdy, obsessed, self-important or, even better, quite mad. The Law overwhelms the niceties that scientists would like in movie depictions of them, especially logic or truth.
Pitching a movie or TV project is humbling. Everybody in the room is passing judgment, lounging back on sofas in their H’wood casuals, wearing the baseball caps and jeans Stephen Spielberg made into a uniform. Each got his turn at bat. In my world of scientists, the rule is Everybody has a right to their own opinion, but they don’t have a right to their own facts. In Hollywood, I learned, the part after the comma does not apply.