by Various
“That’s bad news walking, right there,” Fenn said.
Carter glanced in Ted’s direction, then stretched. His back was killing him and, as far as he knew, Ted Prinzi was never anything but bad news—sometimes walking, sometimes not. He just wanted to get up in the air and kill something.
Time passed. By afternoon, a damp fog had settled in the lowlands and rain was expected—so, obviously, the planes couldn’t fly.
• • •
The rain held off. Ugly gray-black clouds massed in wet clots on the horizon but then hung there as if dithering about approaching any closer to the pilots’ obvious magnificence. To pass the time, they played indig baseball—a game that’d been invented by one of the men (no one remembered who) and involved more than the usual number of bats and balls, more than the usual amount of punching the opposing team.
The pilots played on one side. The other was made up of a dozen or so of the camp followers—big, hairy, slumping indigs who’d been pulled off whatever odd jobs they were doing and drafted into playing whether they wanted to or not. They cringed a lot, muffed bare-handed catches of the men’s line drives, looked wide-eyed and terrified every time one of the pilots went streaking out into the bush to tackle one of them. They clapped their hands and bowed whenever the pilots laughed at them for their ineptitude at a game they didn’t understand and were being forced to play by men they understood even less.
Being neighborly, the pilots would always help the indigs back to their feet, give them a couple of hard punches in the arm or chest that appeared (maybe) brotherly because the hitting was always attended by a flinty smile. Then there would be more clapping, more bowing, some amount of the indig language that none of the men understood but imagined to mean Good play! or Wasn’t that fun? even if it was far more likely that it meant something closer to Why are you doing this? or Please don’t hit me again.
At one point, Jack Hawker, who was pitching for both sides, laid a nice, fat, slow ball across the plate for George Stork, who hit it like it had said something nasty about his mother. The ball climbed into the smothering sky, zipping along as pretty as anything, and seemed destined for home-run distance.
But then it suddenly faltered as though it’d hit thick air, seemed to hang a moment, and fell short of the distant tree line. One of the indigs went scrambling for it, put a hand on it, and loped into the base path between second and third, meaning to tag Stork out. But Stork was already running and he didn’t slow—just lowered his shoulder and plowed straight into the monkey like a truck. Both of them went down in the pounded dirt. Both of them got up again and even from the sidelines, the company men could hear the indig shouting. They could see it waving its arms around. Stork waved his arms, too. The indig hissed at him and bared sharp teeth. Stork calmly reached down, drew his sidearm, and shot the indig through the face.
“Well, shit,” said Carter, who’d gone out to join Jack on the mound. “Guess that’s game then.”
“Trouble with your indig,” said Jack Hawker, Carter’s squadron leader from number two, in his languid, roughneck accent, “is that he don’t understand basic sportsmanship.”
“Trouble with the indigs,” countered Stork as he walked back toward home plate, brushing dirt and grass from his pants and smudging a bit of blood from his knuckles, “is that they don’t understand baseball.”
• • •
They went up in the late afternoon. The fog had burned off, the rain never materialized, and the men were bored, so they rolled their planes out of the longhouse again, splashed some fuel into them, and went out hunting. Sightseeing, they called it. Reconnaissance in force. Carter took two squadron out into badland, and they managed to maintain formation until they crossed the twisting snake of the river that was just called the River because there was no need to name it anything else. After that, each plane just sort of wandered off on its own, spinning and looping and buzzing the tops of the alien trees because there was nothing else to do.
On the radio, David Rice was telling a long and convoluted story about his last deployment as a naval aviator, on garrison duty, flying off one of the big colonial carriers.
“It was orbit work,” he was saying. “BMF Ashland, over Balantyne. You ever been on one of the big boats, you know it’s dull as fuck, right?”
Carter had done some carrier duty, though not as a naval. BMF, that stood for Big Motherfucker. Capital-plus. Command element for an entire battle group. A ship that’d been assembled in orbit and would never, ever know gravity.
“Right, Davey,” he said. “Dull as fuck. Roger that.”
“So we fly ten hours, down for twenty. And down for twenty, that’s rough, right? Nothing to do. Like liberty every day, but it gets dull.”
“As fuck,” said Carter.
“Right…”
Davey had a friend who was a bad garrison soldier. Always in trouble. Threatening MPs, getting in fights, whatever. Spent more time under restraint than in his fighter.
“So his big thing was making rain, right? He’d get into the hangar bay, up in the lift gantries, and he’d bring, like, five gallons of water with him. Drink the water while he was up there. Just drink and drink. And then he’d spend hours pissing down on the MP posts from, what? Three hundred feet up or whatever. But the thing is, with the drive thrust, corriolis, the weird gravity, he’d have to know how to aim it just right—standing up there on the cats with his dick in his hand and—”
“Got one!”
The call-in from Jack Hawker on the all-hands channel interrupted Davey’s story.
“Two squadron flight, I have a target.”
“The hell you do,” said Carter. “Illuminate and hold for confirm.”
Carter strained against the belts, trying to look everywhere at once because, really, he hadn’t been keeping close track of where his planes were. He hung an arm out over the cockpit rail and banged a gloved hand on the biplane’s skin in annoyance.
After a few seconds he saw the bright point of white light from a hand-fired magnesium signal flare and knew where Jack was, so he tuned his radio to the flight address channel and called everyone in.
“Two squadron, rally on that flare.”
Come to find, Jack really had spotted something: an armed indig supply column moving in the shade, foot-slogging along the edge of a stand of fat, bushy trees way off in the middle of Indian country. Carter dutifully called it in. At altitude, it was impossible to tell whose indigs they were. Could’ve been friendly, supplies coming in for Connelly or Durba, scouts, outriders, anything. Could’ve been decidedly unfriendly, too. They all looked the same, even up close, but there were maps, supposedly. Schedules. The controllers sometimes knew right from left.
The call came in from comms: “No friendlies reported. Guns are free.”
Carter addressed the squadron: “Tallyho, motherfuckers. Get some.”
And they did, swarming around the area and then dropping like stones from the sky on short strafing runs, hitting the line from both ends with machine guns like museum-grade antiques so the monkeys wouldn’t know which way to run, making them dance.
When the indigs on the ground finally got their shit together, they abandoned their carts and their packs and whatever else they’d been hauling and hustled back into the trees, so Carter ordered those pilots so equipped to switch to cannons. They shredded the trees for a while—splitting the stumpy trunks like balsa and blowing the ever-loving shit out of the flora. And when that had less of an effect than he’d hoped, he ordered the squadron to switch to incendiary ammunition in hopes of lighting the stand of trees on fire and smoking the little fuckers out into the open.
The planes flew around for a time crazily, like gnats disturbed in the fading sun, while the pilots strained to pop the covers on their guns, unbreech their belts of standard AP, dig out the red-tip ammo from boxes secured by shock cords and stashed under or behind seats, then reload with control sticks pinned between their knees and their wings waggling like a bunch
of spastics.
Somewhere to their west, three squadron was chasing heffalumps—the native equivalent of a water buffalo, but about the size of an elephant and with glossy black skin like oil floating on water. It would sometimes take an entire belt of ammo to bring one down, screaming and kicking up the earth. And even in the cold they rotted and stank. First squadron had taken up a blocking position near the water, hoping for stragglers panicked by all the fire and flying, but they were unlucky and went home early, blue-balled and angrier and more bored than they’d been before climbing into their planes.
Down on the ground, the indigs had come to the edge of the trees again to see what was happening. They’d formed a line, and when the planes started to dive again, they loosed flights of arrows and stones.
Slings and arrows, Carter thought. Actual slings and fucking arrows… It never ceased to amaze him how persistent the dumb monkeys could be. How stupidly brave and tenacious like the clap.
In any event, firing on the planes made them bad indigs (no matter what they’d been before Carter’s squadron had opened up on them, they were bad now), so in recognition of their foolhardy monkey courage and dedication to this dumb game of war, two squadron dove and dove and killed every single one of them.
• • •
When it got too dark to play, the pilots came home and retired themselves to the field house or mess where, by lantern light, they commenced (or continued) drinking, watched movies that they’d all seen a hundred times, played cards. The camp was under radiation blackout—part of the terms of operating in this place—so there were no soft calls home to sweethearts with weeping, declarations of love, or apology for terrors committed, witnessed, or cheered; no mail, no news, no stealing of entertainment from the distant ether. Iaxo was a war without cliché, it sometimes seemed to them, and it annoyed everyone to no end.
For a time, Captain Carter chose to linger among the boys, playing a few hands of poker in the mess with cards gone soft from passing through so many fingers. At one point, he saw Vic and Willy McElroy come in, laughing over some private joke. Vic was the mission’s chief mechanic on Iaxo. Willy was one of the ground crew who did double duty on the lathe and stamping press when he wasn’t walking planes around.
They’d been in the machine shop together, were blacked to the elbows and smudged about the face with engine oil and grease. Carter looked and Vic was there, standing in her rumpled jumpsuit and tattered leathers, smiling, eyes the color of new leaves, black hair tied back and spilling over her collar. He looked again and she was gone, having ducked out a different door, her brief passage leaving a burn on Carter’s retinas like his gaze passing across the hot light of a distant sun. Willy, too, stood confused as if wondering where she’d gone. Shrugging, he went to scrub up. Carter stood and made for his tent, consciously choosing a different door than Vic.
“Fastest disengage I’ve seen in a year,” he heard someone behind him say as he stepped out, then a cloudburst of laughter.
Frances Silversmith became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of “Online War” in The Grantville Gazette, Volume 46 (Mar. 2013), edited by Paula Goodlett.
Visit her website at FrancesSilversmith.com.
* * *
Short Story: “Online War” ••••
Flash: “Finally Free” ••••
Flash: “Were” ••••
ONLINE WAR
by Frances Silversmith
First published in The Grantville Gazette, Volume 46 (Mar. 2013), edited by Paula Goodlett
• • • •
BASIL WATCHED with growing horror as tanks rolled up to the former UN buffer zone separating the two parts of Nicosia. Enemy troops approached from the Turkish north. Greek ordnance advanced through the southern part of town, which belonged to the Republic of Cyprus. Basil’s ears rang with the sound of the commands sergeants on both sides shouted to their soldiers.
Weapons were trained across the buffer zone, making it seem as if he stood directly in the line of fire. He adjusted the reality-mode setting on his Neural Interface. There was such a thing as too much realism, after all.
The newscast he was playing on his NIF turned from a real-life experience into a remote vid, but his fast-beating heart didn’t slow. Ten months ago, things had been fine. And then a single incident involving a Turkish tourist attacked by street-toughs in Greece had triggered a series of ever-increasing violence.
Until it came to this. Athens would not tolerate the Turkish attack on the Republic of Cyprus. It was all too likely that they’d answer with a nuclear strike against Ankara. In which case Iraq would retaliate, which would cause the European Union to enter the war, which would draw the African League in…
Basil cut that thought off before he could brood himself into a panic attack.
He activated his NIF’s comm app and pinged his friend Daphne. Almost immediately, her pale face appeared before his inner eye.
“Hi Basil. I take it you’ve watched the news?”
“So I have. I think I’ll go on a long vacation, say—to Antarctica, or somewhere equally far away. So should you.”
She brushed a lock out of her eyes with unsteady hands. “Hm. Actually, I’ve got a different idea. Mind if I visit you in person to discuss it?”
Basil felt his eyebrows rise. In all the years of their online friendship she had never suggested such a thing. “You want to come all the way to Cyprus just to meet me?”
She nodded. “I want to talk in private, where nobody can hack in and listen.”
Had she still not forgiven him for his little demonstration a few months back? “Hey, just because I hacked into your Neural Interface that doesn’t mean everybody can.”
“It proved to me that my NIF isn’t as secure as I thought. I’m not going to take any chances. So can I visit you, or not?”
Basil agreed, and they broke the connection.
He took a look around the room—and went into a cleaning frenzy. When the doorbell rang two hours later his apartment looked almost presentable. He picked up a sock he had overlooked and stuffed it into his pocket. Then he opened the door, and Daphne swept past him into the apartment.
She had an even more impressive presence in person than on the cloud. Her face wasn’t exactly beautiful, and her curves weren’t ample enough to suit current fashion. But she radiated an intense—and infectious—energy. Just watching her pace the length of his living room eased his exhaustion from that hurried housecleaning feat.
She turned and fixed him with a glower. “We’ve got to do something about this war.”
He stared at her. “Do something? We? What could we do? I’m a cloud security expert, not a peacemaker. And you’re an online game designer, for God’s sake. What exactly do you think the two of us could accomplish that all the powerful politicians can’t?”
Her glower grew darker, but all she said was, “Well, we won’t know until we try, will we?” She plunked herself down on his sofa. “I’ve got an idea.”
• • •
Around midnight three days later, Basil withdrew from a false persona he’d set up in the cloud environment the Neural Interfaces around the world connected to. This was the last fake user in a trail of other false identities, designed to keep people from tracing his activities back to him. If they went through with Daphne’s crazy plan, he’d need those protections.
Daphne wanted him to hack into the NIFs of every powerful politician and military leader in Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey, and install an online war game she and her co-workers at Shooting Star Games Ltd. had worked on over the last few months. The idea was to trap all the major players in the game, and have them start their war in the virtual world instead of the real one.
“Are you sure your war game will feel like the real thing to our victims?” he asked Daphne, who sat in the corner of the sofa, working on the game design.
“I’m sure,” she said. “The app was developed by Shooting Star, after al
l. We’re good at realistic games.”
“I know,” he said. He had played those games himself. A NIF game interacted directly with the user’s brain. If the game was detailed enough, the experience was indistinguishable from reality. And Shooting Star was justly famous for its realistic war games. “But that’s for settings outside the user’s real-life experience. What we’re trying to do is different. How can you convince people that they’re in the real world when you don’t know a thing about their actual surroundings?”
“But I do know everything about their current location. Every single one of our targets has retreated to their respective emergency bunkers. And I’ve got experience recordings for those bunkers.”
“Somebody actually recorded their stay in a high security bunker and made it available to you?” Basil shook his head, and she gave him a forced smile.
“There’s a lot of money in the game industry, and the people who maintain those bunkers don’t earn all that much. So yes, Shooting Star has been able to acquire top-security information on most of those bunkers world-wide.”
“You didn’t hear that from me, of course,” she added as an afterthought.
“Of course,” he echoed, still chewing on that unexpected piece of information.
The more he thought about it, the more feasible this insane plan seemed. He’d even found an outdated version of the Greek NIF security protocol, buried under terabytes of virtual trash at an obscure site that nobody claimed ownership to.