The following is a sample of my short story, AIR INFANTRY, scheduled to appear as part of an anthology of military fiction stories, edited by Martin Geeenberg, set in the distant future and titled FUTURE WARS.
You never quite get used to the implants, no matter what the Federation Air Infantry surgeons tell you. Sure, the biochips, compined with hypnosys and injections, allow you to learn volumes in a fraction of the time, but the knowledge feels . . . foreign? Yeah, that's it. Fake. It's almost like sneaking out a cheat sheet during an exam, getting the answer you seek, and then stowing it away before anyone catches you. You get the right answer, but you didn’t really know the subject matter. The only difference here is that you get to do millions of such transactions per second as your serotonin-enhanced brain interfaces with the implants lining the bottom of your skull. That's just how the 3D terrain map floating somewhere in my altered mind feels like at the moment, as I fly in from the south, high above craggy mountain peaks that abruptly turn into a sea of green, a sea of vast forests and tundra. I gotta tell you, the stereoscopic view is incredible. Breathtaking blue-white glaciers and white-water rivers disappear into the hazy horizon as my McDonnell Douglass HX-55 dashes across a misty Alaskan sunrise at five times the speed of sound. Damn. You can easily lose yourself in the splendor and magnificence of glacier-carved cirques surrounding monumental walls that rise to snowy peaks, as seen by the dozens of microcameras around the windowless craft, all interfaced via hyperband wireless to the helmet of yours truly, where they flash in my mind to form holographic images of magnificent glaciers flowing out of high mountains, pushing aside anything standing in their way, creating a monochromatic carpet of gray and white, until slowly turning into silt-laden fingers of meltwater as I reach the coastal rain forests. Tundra and dark woods will ultimately reclaim thousands of eroded acres left behind by the passing glaciers as part of the geologic life cycle of this changing land. My jet dashes high above dozens of lakes and meandering rivers stained with vivid hues of orange and red by the looming sun's wan light. High above glaring mirrors of infinite shapes and sizes surrounded by rain forests, crystalline icing, and sleepy volcanoes. High above pure and sublime dying walls of ice approaching the harsh coast after years of scraping the ground and valley walls, before suddenly cracking and falling into the blue-green surface of the sea, marking the birth of new icebergs. I take millisecond breaks in my high-tech sightseeing to review the data streaming in from all subsystems of the forward-swept-wing fighter, verifying no alarms. The craft's skin temperature holds steady at 1085 degrees Celcius, peaking to 1700 degrees where the low Radar-Cross-Section mission-adaptive wings extend forward at a sixty-degree angle to well past the cockpit, nearly touching a set of low RCS canards, which also act as the vertical stabilizer of the fifteen-ton stealth fighter. Inward-canted vertical fins at the tip of each wing provide for the horizontal stability needed in the absence of a tail fin, and also added to the low radar signature of the HX-55. The extreme heat created by air friction rises the interior temperature to about 175 degrees Celcius, well within the operating range of the bio-molecular subsystems and the microrobotic units, but certainly high enough to roast me alive. Rather than adding lots of sophisticated cooling systems to keep a pilot comfortable, as in previous generation fighters, which not only added to the overall cost of the craft but also made it heavier, the HX-55 designers chose instead to bury the pilot in a thermagel-filled, titanium and graphite pod in the center of the jet. Resembling more a coffin than a capsule, the pod keeps me well insulated from extreme ambient conditions while also serving as an ejection module in case my HX-55 gets hit while flying Mach 5. Turn to new heading, I think. Mark one eight seven. Reading my thoughts, the on-board interface relays the command to thousands of microelectro-optical actuators buried below the Flexible-Composite-Material surface of both wings, vertical fins, and canards. The actuators slightly vary the contour of all FCM surfaces in unison to bank the craft into a shallow left turn. Leading and trailing edges move in an optically controlled harmony under the command of my enhanced mind, the central processing unit of the advanced fighter. That's right, I'm the brain of this craft. Without a pilot the HX-55 is just a sophisticated hunk of metal incabale of even taxiing out of the hangar. As the jet turns, the G-forces begin to pound the fuselage like the hammers from hell. At this speed, any maneuver, however subtle, piles up the Gs like crazy. The HX-55 is built to take 40 Gs. I breathe a sight of relief when my pod's G-sensors automatically began to adjust the pressure of the thermalgel surrounding me to keep my brain from passing out. Eleven Gs--a walk in the park while inside my pod--flash in my mind before I order the FCM surfaces return to their stable-flight configuration the instant the directional gyro feed reaches correct heading. The whole process takes 3.6 seconds. Fly-by-thought. The HX-55 is everything my superiors promised it would be--and then more. Unlike the flaps, spoilers, slats, and ailerons of previous generation fighters, all of which would rip away when attempting flight maneuvers beyond the speed of sound, the Federation's new-generation fighter sports wings, fins, and canards that simultaneously change shape to provide the optimum air surface for the desired maneuver. Add to that my enhanced brain, my training, and my implants--all safely shielded in this handy little pod--and what you''ve got is a fine war machine, far better than the best those damned hominids can produce. Hominids. I frown, not understanding what in the hell my ancestors were thinking when they launched those Voyager satellites eons ago into the far reaches of the Milky Way to advertise the wonders of our planet--and including detailed cosmological directions to get here. It was only a matter of time before another civilization, probably one that had already spent the natural resources of their own planet, came to invade our world. They reached our Solar System early in November of 2116, blasting our stations on Marte and Luna before reaching Terra orbit, disintegrating the old International Space Station, and pretty much taking over the Alaska and Yukon Territory within a week, sending Federation troops in the region running for cover. It was all actually quite humiliating. The Federation, the almighty world allegiance following the War of 2045, when our ancestors nearly erased our species off the face of this planet in a fifteen minute nuclear and biological war, had subsequently ordered the destruction of all weapons of mass destruction on Terra, making the world a safe place for humans. Of course, safe against threats from within our world. No one thought at the time of a possible threat from the outside. But it came, catching us pretty much unprepared. Our weapons, albeit advanced, were still all conventional, designed to deal with the unavoidable skirmishes that would flare up here and there around the globe each year, usually from leftover extreme groups still resisting Federation rule. So we couldn’t just nuke Hominid colonies at first. We had to go in and blast them with conventional munitions one at a time. We now have a few nukes, but are unwilling to use them because we're still recovering from the environmental chaos of the War of 2045. We do not want to repeat the mistake of our forefathers, whose actions punched a hole in the ozone layer that resulted in a few degrees' worth of global warning. By 2046 the additional melting in the polar caps rose the ocens by several feet, pretty much swallowing millions of square miles. Places like southern Louisiana, the Florida peninsula, the Netherlands, and Bangladesh no longer exist. And we're still on the exponential portion of the damage curve, meaning that the polar caps are still melting, though at a much slower rate than back in the forties, but Federation scientists are convinced that a few nukes would accelerate the process again. So this is a conventional war all the way--one that the Air Infantry is committed to accomplish before the end of the year to meet the mandate from the Federation Council. The Homis lack air power, but their land forces are formidable--though Federation regulars were able to contain them to Alaska and Yukon by the summer of 2117. Now, armed with weapons like the HX-55, we are slowly but steadily eliminating the nightmare that earlier this year threatened to spread across our world like the worst of plagues. The Homis are real bastards. Trust me on that one. During their one and only expansion, they took over entire towns and villages, ate the men and children, and did things to the women that would turn your stomach harder than pulling twenty Gs. First off, this race is composed of only males, but they carry the genes required to form other hominids. They only need an adult female host--at least according to Federation scientists, who somehow managed to capture some of the bastards alive--along with the Esquimo women they were using as hosts for their offsprings. Yeah, you heard me right. As big as they are, roughly twice the size of an average man, they manage to impregnate our women during a ritual that one survivor described as animalistic. The scientists surgically removed the growing embryos and managed to save some of the women, whom required a half dozen additional surgeries--plus plenty of hypnosys and injections--to get over the brutal experience. The only good Homi's a dead Homi. The fuckers have to be killed. Period. Information from the fighter's sensors and avionics, organized both in time and in three-dimensional virtual space, flash in my mind as I fly into a patch of fog. Forward-looking infrared sensors immediately take over, creating an holographic image of the landscape in a palette of green hues according to their heat signature as detected by the IR sensors, whose sensitivity had been adjusted for maximum resolution in such cold weather. The projected image shows the optimum path across the sky to avoid beams of radar energy from the Homis' search radars. With minimal effort I kept the fighter in between these walls of radar energy, resembling velvet curtains rising vertically from the ground, and crisscrossed by green bands of tracking radars overhead, essentially leaving a "tunnel" through which I fly to minimize detection. The system also shows me the blue inverted cones rising up from the ground that foretold the presence of unmanned Surface-to-Air missile radar tracking stations. Although I doubt that the Homis can detect my HX-55 if it came in contact with the radar walls or cones, I can't accept the gamble. Activate TATS, I think. The Target Acquisition and Tracking System begins to display an array of information on my mind. The HX-55 sensors, linked with satellites in geosynchronous orbit, begin to select ground targets on a foggy Homi stronghold seventy miles away--the target of my sortie, a sea of domes in the foggy horizon. Yeah, the Homis love those domes, and they all look alike, from their garrisons to their hospitals and living quarters. Domes, domes, and more domes, all sporting that familiar lavender color that matches the color of their skin suits--and their blood. And what's worse, the domes are electronically shielded, meaning we can't use our deep infrared or quantum optics satellite imagery to see what's inside, complicating our targeting prioritization process. There are obvious targets, of course, like the missile and laser emplacements, but as for the domes, the Air Infantry marshall had a simple answer: destroy them all. Data arrives at lightning speed as my mind acquires each target, assign it a number and priority level, stores the data in my impanted databanks, and moves on to the next. A counter somewhere in the recesses of my implants informs me that in the three seconds since activating TATS, I already have a deadlock on nearly two hundred Homi targets. I feed the range, speed, coordinates, and terrain elevation for the first target to the powerful laser gun system I carry under the fuselage. The laser system replied with a READY TO FIRE message. Go hypersonic and fire on command. In the same thought I enable the ramjet setting on the HX-55. Twenty feet behind me, the dual turbojets' turbine blades, which have been used from the beginning of my sortie to compress the air going into the combustion chamber to ignite the fuel-to-air mixture, stop rotating as engine inlet doors deflect the incoming air away from the blades and into a narrow tunnel below each turbojet. The tunnels use the ram effect of the supersonic wind to achieve combustion with injected fuel, without using any moving parts. Thermagel pressure increases to offset the powerful kick as airspeed jumps to Mach 6.7--a speed that would have melted the turbojet's turbine blades. Ramjets could carry the HX-55 from Mach three up to Mach ten, but the laser's accuracy decreased beyond Mach seven due to an instability problem that McDonnell-Douglas scientists were still trying to solve. I climb for twenty seconds before leveling off at thirty thousand feet and starting a twenty-five-mile-diameter circular pattern. Even at such a shallow turn, and while immersed in pressurized Thermagel, I still experience a mild three Gs from the centrifugal force, but it doesn't matter at this moment. TATS is a go. The laser gun is a go. As forests and glaciers blend into a carpet of green and white surrounding Dome City, I release the laser to fire according to the list of 200 targets now stored in the implanted portion of my hybrid mind. The laser starts its rhythmic discharges, each spaced by the milliseconds it takes me to select a new target and feed its coordinates to the weapon. On the third shot, the laser slices through the roof of a dome, incinerating anything inside. A moment later the dome is engulfed in a massive secondary blast of orange and yellow flames and billowing smoke. Bingo. Explosives depot. The laser shifts on to the next target, turning a missile truck into scorching and twisted metal in milliseconds. And so it goes, target after target in this virtual-reality-like game, ridding the world of Homis, eradicating their parasitic species off the face of our world. MISSILE WARNING. MISSILE WARNING. Eight Homi missiles are heading my way, their contrails, like rivers of smoke, zero in on my exhaust nozzles. Launch countermeasures. Pods beneath the plane eject a dozen high-intensity flares. As TATS reads 26 targets destroyed, I see confirmation data that the infrared brains of three missiles have fallen victim to the flares. The rest close in at mach ten. FIVE SECOND TO IMPACT. I'm holding Mach 6.7. Confirmed targets destroyes is up to 59. Clinching, I break my laser run and shove the HX-55 into a steep climb. Twenty-seven Gs blast against the Flexible-Composite-Material skin. Thermagel pressure rockets to keep me from passing out, but the pressure on my chest is enormous. The image of a huge pink elephant materializes as it presses one of its hoofs against my chest. Some joker back at Air Ops has a sick sense of humor. My mind, however, never skips a beat, keeping the nose pointed at the heavens as I rocket past sixty-thousand feet, outrunning the missiles, which sizzle off and fall to the ground. I ease off the climb and cut back throttles, shifting from ram jets to turbine blades. I level off at ninety thousand while dropping to Mach 2. Breathing a sigh of relief as the elephant vaporizes, I turn around to go for another-- FUSELAGE BREACH. FUSELAGE BREACH. Shit! Telemetry on all vital systems pours into my mind like a raging river. The HX-55 grows rapidly unstable. A Homi laser has struck a direct hit against my left wing, disabling an array of microelectro-optical actuators, forcing me to drop to subsonic speed, which over this land is as good as pointing a gun to my head. But some of the data doesn’t make sense. The damage on top of the wing has a higher temperature reading than on the bottom, suggesting the laser strike came from above, not below. That can only mean a strike from orbit, from a satellite. But that's impossible because Space Infantry took care of all space Homis three months ago, eliminating their orbital station and associated satellites. Or did they? Maybe they missed one or two satellite. Perhaps they confused them with space junk. Or maybe more of their compatriots from across the galaxy have finally arrived. In either case, it becomes evident that the missiles had been a diversion, something that forced me to climb into the stratosphere while bleeding speed, placing myself well within the range of this well-hidden orbital weapons, which would had had a much harder time hitting me when I was at twenty thousand feet flying almost Mach 7. Bastards ain't dumb. And those same bastards will vaporize me in seconds unless I . . . eject. My pod shoots off the top of the fighter like a cannon ball, sending yours truly into a long ballistic flight which apogee skims the top of the heavens at nearly one hundred thousand feet at Mach fifteen. Quantum wireless data from the fighter ceases to arrive a moment later, meaning the Homis roasted it. The beacon in my helmet starts to broadcast a signal to the unmanned rescue ship on standby several hundred miles away. Eighty thousand feet. Mach thirteen. Wow. I'm really cruising in this thing, which now has a mind of its own, following a preprogrammed ejection sequence. It's first priority is to get me the hell away from the killing zone. Outside skin temperature's a cool two thousand degrees. Good thing the pod has plenty of titanium and graphite layers. Since the pod lacks any outside cameras, I try to visualize what I look like, dropping from the sky like a flaming meteor in my first non-simulated ejection, which so far appears to follow the book. Let's hope that the rest of the experience sticks to the sim specs, otherwise there's going to be pieces of me from here to the ocean. The Thermagel is certainly doing its part, performing just as designed, not only holding my body temperature constant, but also keeping vibrations to a minimum. At fifty thousand feet I peel off the first titanium-graphite layer, jettison it off with a burst of compressed helium. Outside skin temp is just below a thousand degrees when the first parachute deploys. Its really not a chute but more of a metallic umbrella that slows me down to subsonic levels in a shove-your-guts-in-your-throat, three-second jolt that even the Thermagel has difficulty cushioning, leaving wishing I 'd never joined the damned Air Infantry. Twenty thousand feet. Off goes my next insulating layer with another helium burst. By now my speed has dropped to a mild four hundred miles per hour and outside skin temp is as frigid as the air over northern Alaska. Eight thousand feet. My last insulating layer not only peels off, but it also breaks up into dozens of fragments designed to confused ground tracking radars. All that's shielding me is the cocoon of Thermagel, wich continues to keep me nice and warm despite the ten-below-zero outside temp in this supposedly warm summer day at the Artic end of the world. What a place to get nailed. Seven thousand feet. Five thousand. Three. One. The fiber cocoon cracks like an egg, creating more radar decoys, and in a flash the Thermagel flies off in the slipstream, leaving me with just my Air Infantry all-terrain suit and my field equipment. One of the decoys burns from a laser flash. There's Homis nearby, which doesn’t make sense because this area is supposed to be deserted. My main chute blossoms at the last second, just as the snowy ground comes up to greet me, slowing my decent just enough to keep from breaking my legs, but minimizing my exposure to the ground lasers. The AI suit absorbs the brunt of the impact through the thousands of micro-electroactuators sandwiched between the two layers of Flexalloy making up the inner and outer layers of the only protection shielding my body from the harsh elements. And from the Homis. I come out of the roll and my mind switches from pilot mode to infantry mode. I need to reach high ground immediately. I do so an instant later, jumping to the top of a towering pine. The electroactuators interfaced to my implants sense my brain's command to jump and magnify the motion, allowing me to take a giant leap that defies gravity, propelling my two-hundred-pound body--plus another three hundred pounds of suit and weapons--to a height of ninety feet, where I snag one of the top branches with my free hand. The other is already clutching my laser pistol. I remain at the top for just a second or two, long enough for the telescopic lenses built into my helmet to confirm not only the reading from my implanted GPS sensor, but also the multiple inputs from the helmet's sensors, which include an electronic nose far more sensitive than those in finest creatures on the planet. It can pick up the scent of any living creature--including Homis--up to ten miles away. As I hop to an adjacent tree top, I compare the data to the 3D terrain map stored in my implants and a moment later I know exactly where I am. I convey that information to the broadcasting beacon in my helmet to transmit the coordinates to the unmanned rescue ship, which transponder lets me know that it is at least an hour away. All this fancy technology tells me what I already know: I'm in some serious shit, deep inside enemy lines with what appears to be about 200 Homis converging on my ass, along with . . . I sense Homosapiens in the vicinity as well. But that doesn’t make any sense. There shouldn't be any this deep in Homi-controlled territory. I double check the data streaming from my sensors and sure enough I sense about twenty red-blooded homosapiens. Another message flashes in my mind from my suit's motion sensor: Keep moving. In the Air Infantry motion is life. You stick around too long in one place and are bound to be fried alive by an enemy laser or even a bullet--though it would take more than a rifle shot to pierce the Flexalloy. In the AI they teach you to fight while in motion, to eat while in motion, and even to take a crap while jumping around like fucking Tarzan. I spend an extra second on a branch and as I'm about to hop on another one, it collapses under me, but not from my weight. Some Homi bastard had just sliced it off with a well-aimed laser shot. I'm falling head-first, but my gyro kicks in and straightens me up. My proximity sensor picks up two dozen Homis beneath me and no Homsapiens at least in a five-hundred-foot radius. I land while shooting the laser with one hand and my flame thrower with the other, doing some serious damage to the picturesque scenery around me. A second later I'm jumping again, but never stop blasting away. I sense laser energy a foot off to my right, a nearmiss. Many high-pitched shrieks behind me confirms that I nailed some of the purple bastards. The others are running for cover. Ping! A bullet has just bounced off my armored skin. I feel just a slight nudge as its kinetic energy has little effect on my combined five-hundred-pound mass. You have to be careful, though, because these suits can give you the false sense that you're Superman. I've seen AI troopers killed because they overexposed themselves to the enemy thinking that the suit would protect them. Back on top of the trees I fire two grenades at the Homi mob taking pot shots at me. The explosions rattle the clear morning, followed by more shrilling and grunting. Sensors confirm that there's now far fewer Homis in the vicinity than expected based on my initial count. Looks like the humans in the area are also killing their fair share of Hominids. I could keep on hopping toward the southeast and close the gap with the automatic rescue vessel, but can't stomach the thought of leaving my Homosapien brothers alone in this skirmish. I'm AI, dammit. I've beent rained to kill Homis from the air or on the ground. I've taken a vow to protect the life of Homosapiens. The time has come to put the Federation tax dollars that went into my infantry training and very expensive gear to good use. I circle around, finally locating the gun fight. The Homosapiens are bunkered inside an old-fashioned log cabin that backs into the side of a hill, hidden from by the trees and huge boulders, which explains why Satcom has not spotted it. There's a mob of Homis all around it trying to get in. I see dozens of them sprawled on the ground amidst pools of purple blood. My species is nailing them. To kill a Homi with a rifle you've got to hit him in the head, preferably the face. Otherwise the bullets will just bounce off their purple armor--unless you happen to have at your disposal the latest generation high-temp flamer or the laser, both of which are guaranteed to melt through their shield, in which case you just have to point in their general direction and blast away. I come in from behind the main group, roasting them as I do a cartwheel over them, clearing their tall bodies by almost thirty feet while sweeping the flamer in all directions, turning their attack into a soprano concerto of out-of-tune trills. I spot a couple of humans on the cabin's roof turning in my direction, probably not knowing who or what in the hell I am, but certainly realizing that I'm on their side. I land amidst tall figures running about in flames, and I cut them to half their size with the laser by doing a quick three-sixty turn, spilling their smoking purple guts across the frozen tundra. The smell would probably make me vomit, but the air conditioning system in my trusty helmet not only warms up the air for me, it also filters out smoke and other undesirable particles. And it is at this moment, as I'm feeling pretty fucking invinsible, that my sensors register at drastic increase in temperature on my back, just beneath my right shoulder blade. I try to jump but it's too late, a second laser strikes the suit's primary battery charge, just below the waist. The Homis either got lucky or the bastards have gotten ahold of the suit design to know it's weaknesses. The back-up charge strapped to my chest kicks in, giving me partial motion. I jump while turning around, though not as high as I would had just seconds ago. I lock eyes with the Homi bastard for an instant. He's an ugly mother, nearly ten feet tall and sporting orangutan arms and an ape-like head--all dressed in one of those shiny lavender suits. I barbeque him, along with six of his plum comrades who make the mistake of stepping away from the surrounding woods thinking I've been neutralized. I watch them turn into mobile pyrotechnic displays with delight. The only good Homi is a-- A bright flash of light engulfes me and I fall to the ground like a lead weight, landing on my back, light-headed, unable to move. My suit has been disabled and goes into lock-down mode. Facial shields automatically deploy to protect me from-- Intense pain shoots down from the top of my skull. Colors explode in my brain before all goes dark.
