Alternate Wars

by Gregory Benford

  Other members of Team 390 passed away over the years with their lips sealed, yet almost all remained involved in the American space program. J. Jackson Jackson became the presidential science adviser during Robert Kennedy’s administration, and Hamilton Ballou was the chief administrator of NASA during the time of the first lunar landing. Ham and Jack Cube are both dead now, but each May 24, the seven remaining members of Team 390 make their way to Rindge. Sometimes they are accompanied by children or grandchildren; in the last forty-seven years, seldom have any of the former teammates missed this anniversary. The Monomonock Gun & Rod Club belongs to them now, a gift from their grateful country.

  They spend the day getting the club in shape for the summer—or, rather, telling the kids what to do, now that the youngest founding member is in his midsixties. The old men sit together in rocking chairs on the front porch, drinking beer, kidding each other that FBI agents are watching them from the woods. When the chores are done, they and their families have dinner together, sitting alongside each other on benches at the long oak table in the lodge’s dining room where they once scrawled notes and bickered. This is always a festive occasion, punctuated by laughter and dirty jokes. Another tradition is seeing who can get raunchiest, within certain unspoken limits. Their wives roll their eyes in disgust and the kids make faces, but none of the seven men give a rotten damn what they think.

  After dinner, as the wives and young people tend to the cleanup, the old men retire to the lodge’s main room; Henry and Roy and Mike, Lloyd and Harry, Gerry and Taylor settle into chairs around the fieldstone fireplace, cigars and drinks in hand, their feet warmed by the fire. After a while, they begin to talk. As the wives and children and grandchildren gradually filter into the room, while the sun sets beyond the lake and the crickets and bullfrogs strike up the nocturnal orchestra, seven friends once again tell their secret tale.

  On occasion they look at the framed photo of Robert Goddard that hangs above the mantel. At other times, though, their eyes wander to another, smaller picture that hangs beside it, a shot familiar to nearly every person in the civilized world: the space-suited figure of Neil Armstrong, the first American to set foot on Mars during the joint U.S.-Soviet expedition in 1976, opening an urn and scattering Goddard’s cremated ashes across the landing site at the Utopia Planitia.

  (The author extends his appreciation to Dorothy Mosakowski, Michael Warshaw, and Joe Thompson for their assistance.)

  MANASSAS, AGAIN

  Gregory Benford

  There were worse things than getting swept up in the first battle of the first war in over a century, but Bradley could not right away think of any.

  They had been out on a lark, really. Bradley got his buddy Paul to go along, flying low over the hills to watch the grand formations of men and machines. Bradley knew how to keep below the radar screens, sometimes skimming along so close to the treetops that branches snapped on their understruts. They had come in before dawn, using Bradley’s dad’s luxury, ultraquiet cruiser—over the broad fields, using the sunrise to blind the optical sensors below.

  It had been enormously exciting. The gleaming columns, the acrid smoke of ruin, the distant muffled coughs of combat.

  Then somebody shot them down.

  Not a full, square hit, luckily. Bradley had gotten them over two ranges of hills, lurching through shot-racked air. Then they came down heavily, air bags saving the two boys.

  They had no choice but to go along with the team that picked them out of their wreckage. Dexter, a big, swarthy man, seemed to be in charge. He said, “We got word a bunch of mechs are comin’ along this road. You stick with us, you can help out.”

  Bradley said irritably, “Why should we? I want to—”

  “Cause it’s not safe round here, kid,” Dexter said. “You joyriding rich kids, maybe you’ll learn something about that today.”

  Dexter grinned, showing two missing teeth, and waved the rest of his company to keep moving into the slanting early-morning glow.

  Nobody had any food and Bradley was pretty sure they would not have shared it out if they had. The fighting over the ridge to the west had disrupted whatever supply lines there were into this open, once agricultural land.

  They reached the crossroads by midmorning and right away knocked out a servant mech by mistake. It saw them come hiking over the hill through the thick oaks and started chuffing away, moving as fast as it could. It was an R class, shiny and chromed.

  A woman who carried one of the long rods over her shoulder whipped the rod down and sighted along it and a loud boom startled Bradley. The R mech went down. “First one of the day,” the woman named Angel said.

  “Musta been a scout,” Dexter said.

  “For what?” Bradley asked, shocked as they walked down the slope toward the mech in air still cool and moist from the dawn.

  Paul said tentatively, “The mech withdrawal?”

  Dexter nodded. “Mechs’re on their way through here. Bet they’re scared plenty.”

  They saw the R mech had a small hole punched through it right in the servo controls near the back. “Not bad shootin’,” a man said to Angel.

  “I tole you these’d work,” Angel said proudly. “I sighted mine in fresh this mornin’. It helps.”

  Bradley realized suddenly that the various machined rods these dozen people carried were all weapons, fabrications turned out of factories exclusively human-run. Killing tools, he thought in blank surprise. Like the old days. You see them in dramas and stuff, but they’ve been illegal for a century.

  “Maybe this mech was just plain scared,” Bradley said. “It’s got software for that.”

  “We sent out a beeper warning,” Dexter said, slapping the pack on his back. “Goes out of this li’l rig here. Any mech wants no trouble, all they got to do is come up on us slow and then lie down so we can have a look at their programming cubes.”

  “Disable it?”

  “Sure. How else we going to be sure?”

  “This one ran clear as anything,” Angel said, reloading her rifle.

  “Maybe it didn’t understand,” Bradley said. The R models were deft, subtle, terrific at social graces.

  “It knew, all right,” Angel said, popping the mech’s central port open and pulling out its ID cube. “Look, it’s from Sanfran.”

  “What’s it doing all the way out here, then, if it’s not a rebel?” a black man named Nelson asked.

  “Yeah,” Dexter said. “Enter it as reb.” He handed Bradley a wrist comm. “We’re keepin’ track careful now You’ll be busy just takin’ down score today, kid.”

  “Rebel, uh, I see,” Bradley said, tapping into the comm. It was reassuring to do something simple while he straightened out his feelings.

  “You bet,” Nelson said, excitement lacing his voice. “Look at it. Fancy mech, smarter than most of them, tryin’ to save itself. It’s been runnin’ away from our people. They just broke up a big mech force west of here.”

  “I never could afford one of these chrome jobs,” Angel said. “They knew that, too. I had one of these classy R numbers meanmouth me in the market, try to grab a can of soybean stew.” She laughed sarcastically. “That was when there was a few scraps left on the shelves.”

  “Elegant thing, wasn’t it?” Nelson kicked the mech, which rolled farther downhill.

  “You messed it up pretty well,” Bradley said.

  Dexter said, “Roll it down into that hollow so nobody can see it from the road.” He gestured at Paul. “You go with the other party. Hey, Mercer!”

  A tall man ambled over from where he had been carefully trying to pick the spines off a prickly pear growing in a gully. Everybody was hungry. Dexter said to him, “Go down across the road and set up shot. Take this kid—Paul’s your name, right?—he’ll help with the gruntwork. We’ll catch ’em in a crossfire here.”

  Mercer went off with Paul. Bradley helped get the dead mech going and with Angel rolled it into the gully. Its flailing arms dug fresh wet gouges in the
spring grass. The exposed mud exhaled moist scents. They threw manzanita brush over the shiny carcass to be sure, and by that time Dexter had deployed his people.

  They were setting up what looked like traps of some kind well away from the blacktop crossroads. Bradley saw that this was to keep the crossroads from looking damaged or clogged. They wanted the mechs to come in fast and keep going.

  As he worked he heard rolling bass notes, like the mumbles of a giant, come from the horizon. He could see that both the roads leading to the crossroads could carry mechs away from the distant battles. Dexter was everywhere, barking orders, Bradley noted with respect.

  The adults talked excitedly to each other about what the mechs would make of it, how easy they were to fool about real-world stuff, and even threw in some insider mech slang—codes and acronyms that meant very little to mechs, really, but had gotten into the pop culture as hip new stuff. Bradley smiled at this. It gave him a moment of feeling superior to cover his uneasiness.

  It was a crisp spring morning now that the sun had beamed up over the far hill at their backs. The perfect time for fresh growth, but the fields beyond had no plowing or signs of cultivation. Mechs should be there, laying in crops. Instead they were off over the rumpled ridgeline, clashing with the main body of humans and, Bradley hoped secretly, getting their asses kicked. Though mechs had no asses, he reminded himself.

  Dexter and Bradley laid down behind a hummock halfway up the hill. Dexter was talking into his hushmike headset, face jumping with anticipation and concern. Bradley savored the rich scents of the sweet new grass and thought idly about eating some of it.

  Dexter looked out over the setup his team was building and said, “Y’know, maybe we’re too close, but I figure you can’t be in too close as long as you have the firepower. These weapons, we need close, real close. Easier to hit them when they’re moving fast but then it’s easier for them to hit you, too.”

  Bradley saw that the man was more edgy here than he had been with his team. Nobody had done anything like this within living memory. Not in the civilized world, anyway.

  “Got to be sure we can back out of this if it gets too hot,” Dexter went on.

  Bradley liked Dexter’s no-nonsense scowl. “How did you learn how to fight?”

  Dexter looked surprised. “Hobby of mine. Studied the great Roman campaigns in Africa.”

  “They used ambushes a lot?”

  “Sometimes. Of course, after Sygnius of Albion invented the steam-driven machine gun, well sir, then the Romans could dictate terms to any tribes that gave them trouble.” Dexter squinted at him. “You study history, kid?”

  “I’m Bradley, sir. My parents don’t let me read about battles very much. They’re always saying we’ve gotten beyond that.”

  “Yeah, that Universal Peace Church, right?”

  “Yessir. They say—”

  “That stuff’s fine for people. Mechs, they’re different.”

  “Different how?”

  Dexter sucked on his teeth, peering down the road. “Not human. Fair game.”

  “Think they’ll be hard to beat?”

  Dexter grinned. “We’re programmed for this by a couple million years of evolution. They been around half a century.”

  “Since 1800? I thought we’d always had mechs.”

  “Geez, kids never know any history.”

  “Well, sir, I know all the big things, like the dates of American secession from the Empire, and the Imperial ban on weapons like the ones you’ve got here, and how—”

  “Dates aren’t history, son. They’re just numbers. What’s it matter when we finally got out from under the Romans? Bunch of lilly-livers, they were. ‘Peace Empire’—contradiction in terms, kid. Though the way the 3D pumps you kids full of crap, not even allowin’ any war shows or anything, except for prettified pussy historicals, no wonder you don’t know which end of a gun does the business.”

  This seemed unfair to Bradley but he could see Dexter wasn’t the kind of man he had known, so he shut up. Fair game? What did that mean? A fair game was where everybody enjoyed it and had a chance to win.

  Maybe the world wasn’t as simple as he had thought. There was something funny and tingly about the air here, a crackling that made his skin jump, his nerves strum.

  Angel came back and lay beside them, wheezing, lugging a heavy contraption with tripod legs they had just assembled.

  Nelson was downslope, cradling his rifle. He arranged the tripod and lifted onto it a big array of cylinders and dark, brushed-steel sliding parts unlike anything Bradley had ever seen. Sweating, Nelson stuck a long, curved clip into all this freshly made metal and worked the clacking mechanism. Nelson smiled, looking pleased at the way the parts slid easily.

  Bradley was trying to figure out what all the various weapons did when he heard something coming fast down the road. He looked back along the snaky black line that came around the far hills and saw a big shape flitting among the ash trees.

  It was an open-topped hauler filled with copper-jacketed mechs. They looked like factory hands packed like gleaming eggs in a carton.

  Dexter talked into his hushmike and pointed toward three chalk-white stones set up by the road as aiming markers. The hauler came racing through the crossroads and plunged up the straight section of the road in front of Bradley. The grade increased here so they would slow as they passed the stones.

  Bradley realized they had no way of knowing what the mechs were doing there, not for sure, and then he forgot that as a pulse-quickening sensation coursed through him. Dexter beside him looked like a cat that knows he has a canary stashed somewhere and can go sink his teeth into it any time he likes.

  When the hauler reached the marker stones Angel opened fire. The sound was louder than anything Bradley had ever heard and his first reaction was to bury his face in the grass. When he looked up the hauler was slewing across the road and then it hit the ditch and rolled.

  The coppery mechs in the back flew out in slow motion. Most just smacked into the grass and lay still. The hauler thumped solidly and stopped rolling. A few of the factory mechs got up and tried to get behind the hauler, maybe thinking that the rifle fire was only from Angel, but then the party from across the road opened up and the mechs pitched forward into the ditch and did not move. Then there was quiet in the little valley. Bradley could hear the hauler’s engine still humming with electric energy and then some internal override cut in and it whined into silence.

  “I hit that hauler square in the command dome, you see that?” Angel said loudly.

  Bradley hadn’t seen it but he said, “Yes ma’am, right.”

  Dexter said, “Try for that every time. Saves ammo if we don’t have to shoot every one of them.”

  Nelson called up the slope, “Those’re factory mechs, they look like Es and Fs, they’re pretty heavy-built.”

  Angel nodded, grinning. “Easier just to slam ’em into that ditch.”

  Dexter didn’t hear this as he spoke into his hushmike next to Bradley. “Myron, you guys get them off the road. Use those power-override keys and make them walk themselves into that place where the gully runs down into the stream. Tell ’em to jump right in the water.”

  “What about the hauler?” Bradley asked, and then was surprised at his own boldness.

  Dexter frowned a moment. “The next batch, they’ll think we hit it from the air. There was plenty of that yesterday to the west.”

  “I didn’t see any of our planes today,” Bradley said.

  “We lost some. Rest are grounded because some mechs started to catch on just about sunset. They knocked three of our guys right out of the sky. Mechs won’t know that, though. They’ll figure it’s like yesterday and that hauler was just unlucky.” Dexter smiled and checked his own rifle, which he had not fired.

  “I’ll go help them,” Bradley said, starting to get up.

  “No; we only got so many of those keys. The guys know how to use ’em. You watch the road.”

  “But I�
�d like to—”

  “Shut up,” Dexter said in a way that was casual and yet was not.

  Bradley used his pocket binoculars to study the road. The morning heat sent ripples climbing up from the valley floor and he was not sure at first that he saw true movement several kilometers away and then he was. Dexter alerted the others and there was a mad scramble to get the mechs out of sight.

  They were dead, really, but the humans could access their power reserves and make them roll down the road on their wheels and treads and then jounce down the gully and pitch into the stream. Bradley could hear laughter as the team across the road watched the mechs splash into the brown water. Some shorted out and started flailing their arms and rotors around, comic imitations of humans swimming. That lasted only a few seconds and then they sank like the rest.

  Nelson came running back up the hill, carrying on his back a long tube. “Here’s that launcher you wanted. Rensink, he didn’t look too happy to let go of it.”

  Dexter stood and looked down the road with his own binoculars. “Leave it here. We got higher elevation than Rensink.”

  Dexter took the steel tube, which looked to Bradley exactly like the telescopes he and his friends used to study the sky. Tentatively Bradley said, “If you’re not going to use that rifle, uh, sir, I’d . ”

  Dexter grinned. “You want in, right?”

  “Well, yes, I thought that since you’re—”

  “Sure. Here. Clip goes like this,” he demonstrated, “you hold it so, sight along that notch. I machined that so I know it’s good. We had to learn a whole lot of old-timey craft to make these things.”

  Bradley felt the heft and import of the piece and tentatively practiced sighting down at the road. He touched the trigger with the caution of a virgin lover. If he simply pulled on the cool bit of metal a hole would—well, might—appear in the carapace of fleeing mech. A mech they would not have to deal with again in the chaos to come. It was a simple way to think about the whole complex issue. Something in Bradley liked that simplicity.