Science and technology proceed along sharply steepening curves, and their progress is open-ended, governed only by the amount of money, time, and effort invested in them. One thing it would be wise to remember is this: we now have behind us more than thirty-five years of tight military “security,” and it would be foolish to assume that many novel weapons and devices with, say, the decisive potential that radar had have been allowed to surface.
In our ignorance, however, it is still interesting to speculate on what may have been developed or what can develop in the near future, probably in the following categories:
Unmanned flying objects that “think”
Unmanned war vessels that “think”
Space weapons and anti-weapons that “think”
I have put the think in quotes in each instance simply to indicate that the process to which it refers is different from human thinking, and means the built-in, programmed ability to react correctly in a wide variety of the situations that ordinarily confront a human pilot, the captain of a ship, a gunnery officer, or—perhaps—a general.
THE YEARS AHEAD
One of the dirty tricks the scientific method plays on us is pulling completely unexpected rabbits out of hats—scientific quantum jumps. Quite a number of years ago, before the sudden start of our “computer revolution,” one of our best science fiction writers published a story about a space war in which he prophesied a completely computerized command. However, when he wrote it, such a computer would have had to have literally thousands of vacuum tubes and God-knows-whats to perform the functions he assigned it, so in the story an entire major war vessel was required to accommodate it. The one thing he, like everyone else, had failed to foresee was solid-state electronics and the micro technology that would have reduced the whole works to the size of a small suitcase.
When we think about the special weapons, the special enabling devices, the special warriors of the future, we must always try to foresee the unexpected, and hope that our defense authorities and scientists can foresee and develop the unexpected, and try not to be caught too short if the unexpected happens.
Were-Tigers, by Rob Chilson
Editor’s Introduction
Most speculation about the future of war concentrates on the physical sciences, and probably rightly so; but the era of computer plenty will make possible developments in other sciences as well. Molecular biology seems headed for exponential growth. So does psychology.
There is more than one kind of wizard weapon, and more than one kind of specialization.
Were-Tigers
Rob Chilson
Hell with Rangers, don’t tell me Rangers. I once saw a war tiger express an opinion of a Ranger, and I agree with it. They’re crazy and no good.
Well, yeah, I could tell you about it. I never told this to no one, partly ‘cause it was the scaredest I ever got in combat, even the time I got wounded bad. Time I’m talkin’ about, the tigers saved our ass and I didn’t get more’n a scratch or two, but I really got a good fright. Near ruined me.
What? No, I’m not ashamed of it. Anybody that’s been there, they’ll understand. Anybody that ain’t, I don’t give a shit what they think. Buy me a beer, though, and I’ll tell you all about it—but it’s gonna take more’n one. You guys take turns, okay? You go first—you asked me.
It was in the jungle war, natch. If you fight with tigers, you fight in the jungles. If you like Kodiak brown bears, you fight in forest; if you like polar bears, God help you, it’s tundra for you. If you like lions, they give you prairies. Or if you like prairies, they fix you up with lions. Package deal. Hey, that’s good.
See, I liked tigers, I mean from when I was a kid. So I opted for tigers, and so they sent me to one piddly-ass jungle war after another. Three in all, but in one all I had to do was play soldier and guard things, thank God. But in the jungle war, the jungle war—
Whaddaya mean, which one? There wasn’t but one—not but one real one. Ask anybody that was there. Everybody’s forgotten us, but by God we remember. The Airborne was sent in, and that was us, with a Ranger battalion and all our tigers. We had a hundred thirty-seven—they were more expensive in those days. Some Rangers or somebody—I don’t rightly know who—was there ahead of us and marked a good drop zone, so we got down okay.
Once we was down, we fanned out into the jungle—Jungle Attack Corps don’t fuck around with base camps. They just dropped our supplies to us and we made sure the gooks didn’t get any of it. We had it all to ourselves for almost two days, then the gook scouts started comin’ in. They didn’t have our high tech, no war beasts at all, no Integrators—nothin’ but Samkillers, really, the commie version of Silent Sam rapid-firers. But they were good.
Felix, our striped topkick, notified us they was comin’ in, and he and Winona and Bellatrix laid out and ambushed half a dozen of ’em, one right after another. One made some noise, though, and they didn’t need Interpersonal radio to know they’d lost a man. The tigers scragged the last two and spread, reporting, and the rest of the gook unit walked by ‘em.
Slim, one of our comm men, came over to where the colonel was sittin’ on a log lookin’ at a map, and Slim, he says, “Sir, the gooks is gettin’ out with a report. They know we’re here.”
“Not surprising,” says the colonel. He was tall and fat but loved heat and could move like a snake through even deep growth. He was tough as hell to get along with in camp, but in the jungle he was okay. Colonel looks at his map again a couple of times and turns to Horribleness, who was Felix’s second, and says, “Go spot your men and tigers. I’m keepin’ the Rangers with me for now.”
Now, my tiger was named Hooligan, and she was a regular pet. She slept with her squad, and many a night I’ve pillowed my head on her. I’d only seen her in action once, against some street demonstrators, and she scared the shit right out of them. They flat dropped everything and ran. And she sat down in the street and laughed at them, the way a great big cat laughs, without making any noise. She weighed, oh, 160, 170 kilos, not big for a tiger. Bengals get up to 250, they say. But war tigers aren’t all that big as tigers go. They got to be big enough to be strong and hardy, but small enough to go through dense growth.
Yeah, they go on all fours, and they look like regular tigers, except their heads are bigger. You can’t see the ear antennas ‘cause they’re under the skin. And you can’t see the modified front paws with the dewclaw moved down and turned into a thumb, when they’re walkin’. The only thing you can see is the key to the teflon zipper behind the ears that opens their scalps so the techs can get at their radios and computer implants. Hooligan was wearing her war harness with her M-3 tiger pistol under her belly and the grenade launcher on the left side.
She grinned at me, Hooligan did, and I grinned back and rubbed her head, and me and John and Pete and Randy all followed her. They’re cheaper now, war beasts are, and the jungle squad is two tigers and three men, they say; soon they’ll be goin’ to three beasts and two men. But we were it in those days. We went sneakin’ out, followin’ Hooligan, who was gettin’ radio ear messages from Horribleness, who was coordinating with Felix.
It was creepy in that jungle, and if not for Hooligan I would’ve been pretty jumpy. It was all mud and rotten limbs underfoot, and heat, muggy air full of rotten leaves. It was like breathing muddy water. We picked a good spot and hid.
Pretty soon a gang of gooks came walkin’ by in front of us, movin’ real quiet. Seemed good to see their flank for a change. We could only see ‘em behind the leaves and brush with our Integrators and they couldn’t see us. But when Pete dropped the first one, they whirled and started shooting to beat hell. Samkillers whispered inaudibly and we heard the Crack!-rrrripp! of the bullets over our heads. Samkillers shoot a lot of bullets real fast, but it just means more weight to carry, and besides, the charge packs for the electroguns don’t go on forever.
Still, once every three thousand rounds, like clockwork, they were gonna hit someone, and we expected to get res
upplied, so we started chucking Smart Bullets back at ‘em fast. Every now and then you’d see a faint thin line of white smoke, or maybe a thin yellow burn from the SB rockets. I don’t say for every bullet we shot, some gook went down. But even one out of a hundred would’ve been a hell of a lot better’n they was doin’, and we actually got something like one gook for every five Smart Bullets.
They was shootin’ thousands of noisy rounds at people they couldn’t see, and we was replyin’ with dozens of quiet rounds at people we could see, and in about fifteen minutes we pretty well had ‘em sweatin’. Then a tiger came up behind them and killed one, then roared. Hooligan roared from their flank and they started to panic. Our Smart Bullets ignored tigers, of course, so we went on shootin’ till they was all dead.
It was no big deal. We had the edge in armament. Well, yeah, M-3 Muskets got disadvantages. They’re short-ranged. Big deal in the jungle. The electroarm’s solenoid throws ‘em out at low velocity, and the rocket corrects course and ups speed. Nice thing about it is, the Musket’s solenoidal barrel is openwork—air can get out from in front of the bullet, and get in behind it. They’re not even rifled—the real high-tech is in the bullets. Makin’ them in quantity is a real triumph of technology.
What if the M-3 gets full of mud? Hell, sonny, a good soldier don’t get mud in his gun. If he did, all he’d need to do is ream it with his flexible rammer—the mud drips out of the openwork. Reverse rammer and do it again and it’s clean and dry.
I remember how John brushed himself off when we stood up, like a cat, and how the tigers prowled around, purring and laughing and checking out the dead ones. I gave Hooligan a big hug, and so did the others, and we rubbed the other tiger’s ears. None of us was hurt, except the other tiger had got creased and Pete had banged up his elbow when he took dirt and it looked pretty bad. All else we got was bug bites. Not bad for my first serious combat. I’d thought I’d been in combat before, and it’s true I’d been shot at and shot back, but a riot ain’t a battle, believe me. Twenty dead gooks in the jungle look a lot different from two people dead in the street.
We went over and looked at them, and they were dressed in these thin black pants their top troops wear, and kind of small thin rubber-soled shoes. They were busted up pretty bad by the exploding Smart Bullets; each one had a big gruesome hole in him. Made me feel pretty queasy, I can tell you. Then that smart-ass Randy started laughin’ about the Gooky Monster had taken a bite out of each of ’em. Some he liked better and took two bites out of.
John and me got laughing about how it must’ve been when the first couple went down with big holes in ’em and the others didn’t even know what way the bullets was coming from. We made some pretty good jokes about how they had got the flies knocked off ’em, but they didn’t stay knocked off, and I felt a little better.
Their Samkillers were all Russian copycat designs, but their bullets looked homemade. Two or three of ‘em had binoculars, good ones, and those that got there first grabbed ’em. Not near as good as Integrators, but who’s gonna let you take a five-hundred-dollar Integrator home with you for the deer huntin’, when you get out? I didn’t get one of the binocs, though, and I figured, well, say luh gare, there’ll be more along in a minute.
Me and Pete was lookin’ at his cigarette lighter that had got busted, and laughing about the gooks runnin’ around in their pajamas—that’s what they call those black pants—when Winona come over and pushed her head against me and said, “Get ready! More coming, and the colonel is pulling back to Hill Seven! We’ll have to slow them down.”
Pete said, “That’s their high tech—making people, and they sure know how to do it.”
I said, “Yeah, what if their kill ratio’s three thousand to one, they’ll still win,” but you know, neither one of us felt all that bad. I wasn’t scared a bit. I mean, I’d just come through a session of real combat, and it had been nothing much. Besides, Hooligan was havin’ fun. So we bitched and griped about the mud and the bugs and the heat and picked out good places for another ambush, and the tigers took up station behind us.
That should’ve tipped me.
Pretty soon the jungle on a half-click-wide front began to waver and rustle and fill with little olive-skinned men in black bottoms, pushing Samkillers ahead of them. And I was Sam. Hooligan came up and whispered that we could ignore them off to the right, they was going off to miss the regiment, and would have to curl back around our flank. That’d take a third of the enemy out of action for over half an hour, maybe, ’cause they didn’t know where we was.
Then Felix came by and pulled four guys out of our line, and him and Bellatrix and a tiger I didn’t know, and the guys, all went off to the left, to make ‘em think they was findin’ a bunch of us over there, to buy more time. The guys looked pretty blue about it.
I was glad I wasn’t one of the four guys, and I felt solemn. None of us was jokin’ no more, we were grippin’ our Muskets and looking sharp through the Integrators. But they seen us first, I don’t know how, and let go with a murderous rrrrippp, _rrrrippp, rrrrippp, through the leaves. One of our guys screamed and started thrashing around, and another one coughed and jerked up, and fell back with a flop.
Three thousand to one didn’t sound so good then. I felt sick and scared and nothing had come near me yet, but I figured it’s that way in war. Wasn’t till later I realized I’d never seen one of my own side killed in war. In an accident with a chopper, sure, but not in war. It was different. “Shoot!” said Hooligan.
We could see ’em now in the Integrators. They were still searching for us. I started shooting, slow and careful, like it says in the drill, and every shot took a guy down, except where somebody else’s bullet got him first. You could see parallel lines of thin yellow light and sometimes white smoke where the Smart Bullets maneuvered in the short range, but those curving tracks weren’t much good for the gooks to aim from. Their Samkillers didn’t have smoke, flash, discharge of any kind, of course, but we could see our targets pretty well.
Hooligan and the other tigers were behind us, sitting up and shooting their M-9 bombguns, dropping fist-sized AP beehives—M-80s, we used to call ‘em, on base. It was pure hell on the gook side of the fight, but they kept on comin’. They had lost hundreds of guys, and we had lost eight or ten, and one tiger, with another tiger wounded.
But the gooks all yelled at once and ran at us, and I heard Hooligan shift to automatic fire. She laid down a cloud of flechettes in front of us, and the three guys who made it through each took half a dozen SBs, and then half a dozen more homed on them and blew the bloody rags that was left into shreds.
It was so close a flechette screamed by me, and I could smell the powder smoke, and the smell of the guys blown apart by SBs was like the jungle, hot and rank, only worse.
I was really scared then, and so was John next to me, and I could see Randy was shakin’ a little as he changed clips, but we stood it. After a bit I didn’t see no more gpoks through my Integrator and I pushed it up and wiped my face, and my hand was shakin’. Just as I dropped it down again, Hooligan said, “Attack!”
Well, they call us Jungle Attack Corps, but there was nothing I wanted less than to run into that jungle where those dead guys came from. Still, I stood up, and Randy leaped up, too, and we sort of surged forward. The tigers bolstered their guns and leaped past us. Then all hell broke loose.
Tigers roared, and we yelled, and M-80s thumped, and flechettes shrieked, and Samkiller bullets ripped, and guys screamed and yelled in pain, and bits of leaves cut by bullets drifted down. The ground got squishy and splashed underfoot, and we all got muddy when we took dirt. I never even thought about the leeches in those puddles till later. We’d see a gang of gooks in the Integrators, hidden so they thought by leaves and brush, and we’d shoot ’em up with SBs, maybe take a hit or two, then run forward and find another gang.
One guy got wise and held up me and the guys—Hooligan was off—and this gook hit Pete in the arm and again in the shoulder and he
went down, gasping not screaming. The gook was behind a thick tree we couldn’t see through. He’d pop out and let go a burst in our direction, then pop back just before our Smart Bullets got there. Finally I took a deep breath—I was really jittery about gooks comin’ up on flank or behind us, in the jungle you get all turned around—I took a deep breath and slowed everything down, and I took a chance and raised my Integrator and wiped my face. John stared at me like he’d never seen a bare face before, and I remember how strange he looked with these big camouflage leaves across his face.
I was blind without the Integrator, and I couldn’t see how the gooks got the nerve to dive into a solid mat of leaves not bein’ able to see what was on the other side. But then I dropped it again and spotted the gook gunner just as he popped out. We all ducked, but I watched close, and next time he popped out, it was on the opposite side of the tree. I had his pattern then and slung two SBs at the first side of the tree just as he popped out again. Down he went.
I couldn’t see what was goin’ on, of course, but it seemed to me we had lost a lot of guys, and besides, I was runnin’ low on ammo. Gooks was all around us, Samkillers rippin’ up the jungle till I thought the trees would fall, cut through. Then there came a really amazing uproar off to the side. Tigers’ roaring bends the trees, and there was maybe two dozen of them doing it together. The ones with us joined in, and underneath I could hear the crazy screams of the Rangers.
There Will Be War Volume VII Page 28