Dean Ing - Firefight Y2K

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Firefight Y2K

Table of Contents

PREFACE

FLEAS

A REPORT ON ADVANCED SMALL ARMS CONCEPTS

MANASPILL

MALF

THE FUTURE OF FLIGHT: COMES THE REVOLUTION

LIQUID ASSETS

LOST IN

TRANSLATION

EVILEYE

VEHICLES FOR FUTURE WARS

REFERENCES

VITAL SIGNS

HIGH TECH AND SELF-RELIANCE

THE 12-VOLT SOLUTION

Firefight Y2K

by Dean Ing

This is a work of fiction. Some characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any

resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

A Baen Book

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

ISBN: 0-671-57848-0

Cover art by Larry Elmore

First printing, January 2000

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Typeset by Windhaven Press: Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This volume is updated and expanded fromFirefight 2000 , first published June 1987. The following

Syndrome and are reprinted by permission of the author.

PREFACE

When historians of the 22nd century are cudgeling their brains (and each other; God, I hope I can sit in!)

to characterize the 20th century, their problem won't be lack of data. It will be the very diversity of that

data. But what will they conclude from the structures of Gropius and Wright; the popularity of punk rock

and Stravinsky; armies supplied with bayonets and ballistic missiles; citizens enjoying Volkswagens and

Ferraris, fantasy fiction and epic nonfiction; cities drawing power from coal and nuclear plants?

I'm betting they will note the bewildering change of pace in each arena and will then ignore it, looking for

something more arcane. But it's that change of pace, that variety of choice, that separates us most

profoundly from earlier cultures! Look: people everywhere havealways sought variety—not thisor that,

but thisand that. There may be no better way to differentiate the free West from competing systems than

to note the changes of pace available to the citizens of each.

Not that everybody likes to have the pace changed: I know some folks who like only the foxtrot, white

bread, and Ford V-8s. Well, those things are all reliable, and tomorrow isn't. I understand and

sympathize, but tomorrow is where we're headed, and all indications are that it's going to be more full of

variety, changes of pace, than today.

That goes for fiction as well as fact. Even the most hardbitten of hard-science fiction scribblers can opt

for a change of pace to fantasy. It's a different set of mental gymnastics, and it keeps our sense of

wonder from getting flabby.

On the other hand, a consultant helped me flesh out the background for one of the most far-out tales in

this collection, then asked me why I considered it science fiction. "It wouldn't surprise me if it really

happened," she said; "some marine invertebrates aren't too shabby in the brains department." It was her

view that, if it's likely to happen, it ain't sci-fi. So then we got into an argument about the difference

between SF and fantasy, and I cried, and she hit me. . . . Oh all right, so I added a bit of fantasy to our

exchange. The point is, sometimes we reach into a sea of fiction and grasp a tentacle of what feels like

fact. It can be unsettling. So why does it elate me? Maybe Ilike to be unsettled a bit. I suspect my

readers like it too. God knows, anybody who likes being unsettled can have loads of whoopee in times

like these!

But some of it is very serious whoopee. Take the small arms piece, for instance, which reports on the

findings of a recent thinktank session on future weapons. I'd be disingenuous if I denied we had fun, but

the purpose of that seminar was ultimately to figure out what an infantryman will mean by "small arms" in

the next century. The diversity among members of that seminar was marvelous to behold. Well, of

course: the thinktank people wanted it that way, knowing that variety is the spice of life, the source of

strife, and a great provocation toward new ideas. Our conclusions weren't intended as fiction, but you

never know. Tune in twenty years from now.

For better or worse, the collection you're holding may be a metaphor of tomorrow: terror and hope,

right guesses and wrong ones, high tech and thatched cottages. Nothing wrong with a thatched cottage if

you want one; the nice thing about tomorrow is, we can bring the best parts of yesterday along with us.

Bearing that in mind, we can get useful tips not only from hard engineering looks at our near future, but

also from playful peeks into our distant past. Just don't start complaining when you find that each piece in

this book is a change of pace from the piece ahead of it, yet you keep finding echoes of previous

scenarios in the next ones. That's the way the book works.

That's the way theworld works. May as well enjoy it . . .

MILLENNIAL POSTSCRIPT

Anyone who risks a retrospective glance at his own science fiction has a problem. If he's serious about

guessing at our future, that look backward looks embarrassingly like a report card. I give myself only a

"B-"on these guesses, but in another twenty years they might look better. The primary reason for my

misses—a reason, not an excuse—is that I keep giving humans credit for improvements we refuse to

make until we absolutely must!

Take the "Y2K" problem, in which computers may treat January 2000 as January 1900. Why didn't I,

one of the activist cadre in survival studies a generation ago, realize the problem then? Because I wasn't a

programmer and didn't realize the deliberate oversimplification built into computers. But I worked with

aerospace programmers who did, and not one of them ever mentioned it. At the time it was a clever

touch to assume the "19" prefix. After all, the cost of data storage was on the order of a dollar per byte.

In retrospect it all seems pretty short-sighted, but no more so than, say, keeping gasoline taxes too low to

fund a national grid of fast mass transit. Thatis a logical source of its funding, as the Brits have known for

decades.

Many of the things I got right are trivial in the grand scheme but being a bit trivial myself, I'll mention a

few of them as millennial postscripts at the ends of the individual pieces that lie ahead. On the other hand,

in several novels of the early 1980s I assumed that the Soviet Union would be dissolved by 1996. Hey, I

can't be wrongall the time . . .

FLEAS

The quarry swam more for show than efficiency because he knew that Maels was quietly watching.

Down the "Y" pool, then back, seeming to ignore the bearded older man as Maels, in turn, seemed to

ignore the young swimmer.

Maels reviewed each datum: brachycephalic; under thirty years old; body mass well over the forty kilo

minimum; skin tone excellent; plenty of hair. And unless Maels was deceived—he rarely was—the quarry

offered subtle homosexual nuances which might simplify his isolation.

Maels smiled to himself and delivered an enormous body-stretching yawn that advertised his formidable

biceps, triceps, laterals. The quarry approached swimming; symbolically, thought Maels, a breast stroke.

Great.

Maels made a pedal gesture. A joke, really, since the gay world had developed the language of the foot

for venues more crowded than this. The quarry bared small even teeth in his innocent approval. Better.

"I could watch you all evening," Maels rumbled, and added the necessary lie: "You swim exquisitely."

"But I can't go on forever," the youth replied in tones that were, as Maels had expected, distinctly

unbutchy. "I feel like relaxing." Treading water, he smiled a plea for precise communication. Perfect.

"You can with me," Maels said, and swept himself up with an ageless grace. He towered, masculine and

commanding, above the suppliant swimmer. A strong grin split his beard as Maels turned toward the

dressing room. He left the building quickly, then waited.

Invisible in a shop alcove, Maels enjoyed the quarry's anxious glances from the elevated platform of the

"Y" steps. Maels strolled out then into the pale light of the streetlamp and the quarry, seeing him, danced

down the steps toward his small destiny.

Later, kneeling beneath tree shadows as his fingers probed the dying throat-pulse. Maels thought:All

according to formula, to the old books. Really no problem when you have the physical strength of a

mature anaconda. Hell, it wasn't even much fun for an adult predator. At this introspection Maels

chuckled. Adult for several normal life spans, once he had discovered he was a feeder. With such long

practice, self-assurance in the hunt took spice from the kill. Still probing the carotid artery, Maels thought:

Uncertainty is the oregano of pursuit. He might work that into a scholarly paper one day.

Then Maels fed.

It was a simple matter for Maels to feed in a context that police could classify as psychosexual.

Inaccurate, but—perhaps not wholly. Survival and sexuality: his gloved hands guiding scalpel and bone

saw almost by rote, Maels composed the sort of trivia his sophomores would love.

Research confirms the grimoires'

Ancient sanity;

Predation brings unending lust—

An old causality.

The hypothalamus, behind armoring bone, was crucial. Maels took it all. Adrenal medulla, a strip of

mucous membrane, smear of marrow. Chewing reflectively, Maels thought:Eye of newt, toe of frog. A

long way from the real guts of immortality.

He had known a feeder, an academic like himself, who read so much Huxley he tried to substitute carp

viscera for the only true prescription. Silly bastard had nearly died before Maels, soft-hearted Karl

Maels, brought him the bloody requisites in a baggie. At some personal sacrifice, too: the girl had been

Maels' best graduate student in a century.

Sacrifice, he reflected, was one criterion largely ignored by the Darwinists. They prattled so easily of a

species as though the single individual mattered little. But if you are one of a rare subspecies, feeders

whose members were few and camouflaged? A back-burner question, he decided. He could let it

simmer. With admirable economy of motion Maels further vandalized the kill to disguise his motive.

Minutes later he was in his rented sedan, en route back to his small college town. Maels felt virile,

coruscating, efficient. The seasonal special feeding, in its way, had been a thing of beauty.

Ninety-three days later, Maels drove his own coupe to another city and left it, before dusk, in a parking

lot. He was overdue to feed but thought it prudent to avoid patterns. The city, the time of day, even the

moon phase should be different. If the feeding itself no longer gave joy, at least he might savor its

planning.

He adjusted his turtleneck and inspected the result in a storefront reflection. Maybe he would shave the

beard soon. It was a damned nuisance anyhow when he fed.

Maels recalled a student's sly criticism the day before: when was a beard a symbiote, and when

parasitic? Maels had turned the question to good classroom use, sparking a lively debate on the

definitions of parasite and predator. Maels cited the German Brown trout, predator on its own kind yet

not a parasite. The flea was judged parasitic; for the hundredth time Maels was forced to smile through

his irritation at misquotation of elegant Dean Swift:

So, naturalists observe, a flea

Hath smaller fleas that on him prey.

And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em,

And so proceed,ad infinitum .

Which only prompted the class to define parasites in terms of size. Maels accepted their judgment; trout

and feeder preyed on smaller fry, predators by spurious definition.

Comfortably chewing on the trout analogy, Maels cruised the singles bars through their happy hour. He

nurtured his image carefully, a massive gentle bear of a man with graceful hands and self-deprecating wit.

At the third spa he maneuvered, on his right, a pliable file clerk with adenoids and lovely skin. She

pronounced herself simply thrilled to meet a real, self-admitted traveling salesman. Maels found her rather

too plump for ideal quarry, but no matter: she would do. He felt pale stirrings of excitement and honed

them, titillated them. Perhaps he would grant her a sexual encounter before he fed. Perhaps.

Then Karl Maels glanced into the mirror behind the bar, and the pliant clerk was instantly and brutally

forgotten. He sipped bourbon and his mouth was drier than before as he focused on the girl who had

captured the seat to his left.

It was not merely that she was lovely. By all criteria she was also flawless quarry. Maels fought down his

excitement and smiled his best smile. "I kept your place," he said with just enough pretended gruffness.

"Am I all that predictable?" Her voice seemed to vibrate in his belly. He estimated her age at twenty-two

but, sharing her frank gaze, elevated that estimate a bit.

Maels wisely denied her predictability, asked where she found earrings of beaten gold aspen leaves, and

learned that she was from Pueblo, Colorado. To obtain a small commitment he presently said, "The body

is a duty, and duty calls. Will you keep my place?"

The long natural lashes barely flickered, the chin rose and dropped a minute fraction. Maels made his

needless round-trip to the men's room, but hesitated on his return. He saw the girl speak a bit crossly to a

tall young man who would otherwise have taken Maels' seat. Maels assessed her fine strong calves, the

fashionable wedge heels cupping voluptuous high insteps. His palms were sweating.

Maels waited until the younger man had turned away, then reclaimed his seat. After two more drinks he

had her name, Barbara, and her weakness, seafood; and knew that he could claim his quarry as well.

He did not need to feign his easy laugh in saying, "Well, now you've made me ravenous. I believe there's

a legendary crab cocktail at a restaurant near the wharf. Feel like exploring?"

She did. It was only a short walk, he explained, silently adding that a taxi was risky. Barbara happily

took his arm. The subtle elbow pressures, her matching of his stride, the increasing frequency of hip

contact were clear messages of desire. When Maels drew her toward the fortuitous schoolyard, Barbara

purred in pleasure. Moments later, their coats an improvised couch, they knelt in mutual exploration, then

lay together in the silent mottled shadows.

He entered her cautiously, then profoundly, gazing down at his quarry with commingled lust and hunger.

Smiling, she undid her blouse to reveal perfect breasts. She moved against him gently and, with great

deliberation, thrust his sweater up from the broad striated ribcage. Then she pressed erect nipples against

his body. Maels cried out once.

When European gentlemen still wore rapiers, Maels had taken a blade in the shoulder. The memory

flickered past him as her nipples, hypodermic-sharp, incredibly elongated, pierced him on lances of

agony.

Skewered above her, Maels could not move. Indeed, he did not lose his functional virility, as the

creature completed her own pleasure and then, grasping his arms, rolled him over without uncoupling. He

felt tendons snap in his forearms but oddly the pain was distant. He could think clearly at first. Maels

thought:How easily she rends me. She manipulated him as one might handle a brittle doll.

Maels felt a warm softening in his guts with a growing anaesthesia. Maels thought:The creature is

consuming me as I watch.

Maels thought:A new subspecies? He wondered how often her kind must feed.A very oldsubspecies?

He saw her smile.

Maels thought:Is it possible that she feeds only on feeders? Does she read my thoughts?

"Of course," she whispered, almost lovingly.

Some yards away, a tiny animal scrabbled in the leaves.

He thought at her:" . . . and so on, ad infinitum. I wonder what feeds on you . . ."

MILLENNIAL POSTSCRIPT

Very special variants of the human species—immortals, telepaths, vampires—are familiar themes in

fiction. With the real-world mapping of the human genome, our complete genetic blueprint, it's becoming

clear that we will eventually be able to engineer humans to order. The current debate rages as to whether

we should, and to many people eugenics is a Hitlerian word. Those people may win every debate, but

labwork isn't a debated issue in every lab. Someone will try to improve our species on the DNA level.

Count on it. Of course, "improve" is a word open to interpretation; someone might decide the ideal

zookeeper should resemble his charges, only more so.

Meanwhile, one of our major tools in locating specific genes is the comparison of the human genome to

the genome of, for one real example, the cat. This is largely because we share roughly sixty inherited

diseases with cats, and engineering a diabetes-free breed of cat is a big step toward eradicating diabetes

from humans.

In the previous story, the lovely lethal Barbara may have shared some genes with a very different critter.

You're invited to guess which one I had in mind.

A REPORT ON

ADVANCED SMALL ARMS

CONCEPTS

Anyone who attends a future armament brainstorming session can expect some surprises. For me, the

conference held at Battelle's Seattle center in January 1986 was no exception. One of my major surprises

came when they said I could write about it. After all, an advanced concepts workshop is where you sow

the seeds of preliminary designs. Odd as it may seem, these concepts aren't yet classified. You can

expect that to change when some of these wild and woolly small arms systems germinate into the

development stage.

Once upon a time it would've been a bit hifalutin to talk about small arms as "systems." No more! To

begin with, we have to expand our notions of what becomes part of a small arm. Is an infantryman's

fighting suit a small arms system? If in doubt, we said "yes." We began by accepting an advanced combat

rifle with caseless cartridges as a fact, no longer of special concern. Some of tomorrow's small arms will

have innards as complicated as, say, today's cruise missile. A lot of that complication will be backup

emergency subsystems; the armed services can't afford battle gear that works only part of the time. They

also know that a man can only lug so much hardware around, and that's why the U.S. ability to

miniaturize its systems gives us a big advantage over the Eastern Bloc. Would you believe jet engines

fired as rounds from a combat rifle? I'll get to those presently.

Our goal was to thrash out advanced concepts for the Army's Joint Services Small Arms Program

(JSSAP). Battelle chose men from a variety of fields: its own labs, Army R & D centers, Texas

University's railgun program, Los Alamos, Aberdeen, several other centers, and a few science fiction

authors. Why science fiction? Because we spend lots of time peering at high-tech horizons. Some of us

began as engineers and physicists; in my case, in preliminary design of rocket systems.

The steering committee wisely avoided holding a checkrein on our thinking. Once the ground rules were

clear, they sprinkled us into three groups and hauled us back into plenary sessions for awhile every day

to compare notes. By the end of this three-day skull-bump we had zeroed in on some small arms

weapon systems that looked very likely—one in particular that embodied several subsystems proposed

by each group. Just for fun, I'll tag some of those subsystems after first mentioning them, with "TAKE

NOTE," and outline the full system last.

Each concept group focused on one of three broad fields: Target Acquisition, Energy

Transmission/Storage, and Effects. By the end of the first day, each group was pumping out concepts

that were hard to swallow on first bite. And yet, recent researches in very unlikely areas made some of

the oddest notions seem more palatable. The Target Acquisition group was typical, beginning

straightforwardly and adding some very advanced ideas.

How can targets—enemy troops and their assets—be identified quickly and differentiated from your

own so that you know what to zap? Well, we can force the enemy's characteristics to give him away. We

already use infrared (IR) and image enhancement scopes. We already have radar. How long before we

combine IR, radar, and visual light into images that are displayed on a combat infantryman's helmet visor?

The Air Force is already well on the way with its "Heads-Up Display" for fire control and navigation. We

adapted the HUD to the battlefield. If it's stifling, we can air-condition it. If our man wants a zoom

display, he can bloody well ask for it because his helmet computer will understand his spoken

commands. TAKE NOTE.

Among our biggest problems in Vietnam were the mazes of tunnels dug by the enemy. With luck, skill,

and deep-penetration bombs we cleared out some of those tunnels at great expense. Surely there must

be some way to develop a more subtle weapon that will find the tunnels and then go inside after live

targets. What, then; a robot?

Someone put previous researches together. After the work of Von Frisch with bees, scientists learned

how to "talk" to them by using a dummy bee. Evidently, a worker bee's "language" is literally built in to its

nervous system. In other labs, gene-splicing and restructured DNA show promise of modifying a bee's

nervous system. Insects already have the best chemical detectors in the world, for mating and

food-gathering. And bees have made hives in caves for a long, long time. Well?

The panel proposed an insect like a killer bee, bred for lethal sting and aggressiveness, and programmed

to seek certain chemicals common to the enemy, but not to our own troops. It might avoid the smell of

U.S. fatigues, while zeroing in on someone who smells of enemy rations. The bee would have a life span

of a couple of weeks, perhaps less (workers have short life spans as it is). Drop a few packages of those

sterile workers into a region honeycombed with enemy tunnels, and wait for your little live weapons to

acquire targets in the tunnels. If you have pheromone sensors to track the bees from a distance, you can

even locate the tunnel entrances—a great advantage in itself.

This "tailored hornet" concept seems less and less weird, the more we study it. We're not really making

the insects do anything that they don'talready do. We're just nudging them to do it exclusively against the

enemy.

A firefight can overwhelm the footsoldier with too much sound, light, odor, and touch. But if we encase

him in full body armor (TAKE NOTE), he will need some way to use information he gets through his

various sensors. For some years now, experimenters have been improving gadgetry that translates images

into patterns across an area, like finger-taps. Sightless people wearing this equipment can walk down a

street as if sighted, feeling painless taps in special patterns across their backs to warn of cars, curbs, and

other people. It should be possible to improve this equipment so that a soldier could wear it as part of his

battle dress. Will the information it adds be worth the trouble? It's still too early to tell.

Energy Transmission and Storage concepts ranged all the way from tiny rotary engines to beamed

microwave power. Early in the next century, men may have to fight on the surface of the moon. They will

need electrical power to run some of their systems. If our man is in deep shadow, he can't use solar

power. Could he actually use an oxygen-breathing Wankel rotary engine to power a tiny generator on an

airless planet? Sure he could; engine-driven torpedoes have carried their own oxygen supplies for many

years, and Lord knows there's less back-pressure in a vacuum!

Other energy storage candidates include batteries, ultracapacitors, and even very small particle-bed

nuclear power generators. The main problem is to devise a safe power of very high energy density and

reasonable cost. Whatever you use, you don't want an enemy bullet to turn it into a bomb. A particle-bed

reactor won't need refueling for a long time—but if it fails catastrophically, you won't care. A capacitor

delivers a wallop of power, but must then be recharged. Small flywheels can store tremendous amounts

of energy inside three-axis gimbaled mounts—but when that flywheel reaches the limit of its tensile

strength, it is a frag grenade on your back. Superfilament materials are under development so that we can

spin those flywheels a lot faster with safety, using them to run generators.

Smokeless powder and explosives are old-fashioned energy storage systems, though we seem to have

reached a plateau there. But we may reach higher plateaus. The wizards of propellant chemistry say there

are ways to make very dense propellant molecules. If we can cram twice as much energy into a small

bazooka round, we might penetrate thicker armor or carry more rounds. We could also power very

compact turbines capable of running small high-output generators, or of lifting heavy loads. TAKE

NOTE.

The far-out chemical storage systems include metastable helium and antimatter. Metastable helium is a

material that only exists in theory, proposed by Zmuidzinas of CalTech. If it can be processed and safely

kept, we'll have an energy source that can be squirted into a chamber in very small amounts, yielding

tremendous amounts of heat. It could power turbines, rockets, or projectile launchers, though nowhere

near as powerful as antimatter.

Antimatter is the ultimate energy source. The stuff is out of the science-fiction bag and into the lab.

Switzerland's CERN facility has kept antiprotons circulating in a huge storage ring for over three days.

That's the first step toward creating and storing antihydrogen. The energy of antimatter, when it touches

"normal" matter, is simply staggering. It doesn't just give up some tiny fraction of its mass of energy; it is

totally converted to energy. Ounce for ounce it is thousands of times more powerful than an atomic

weapon, but we should be able to control it like a tiny reactor. No, it won't be available within the next

few years. Yes, they're working on it at Fermilab near Chicago. The soldier who carried an

antimatter-powered beam weapon might have only a tenth of a gram of the stuff in its magnetic bottle, but

if struck by an enemy bullet, that bottle would blow a very large crater. Solution: keep it inside your

armor. That's the drawback of very high energy density: if your energy source fails catastrophically, you

might not survive.

Power can be transmitted by laser or microwave; in fact, a small helicopter has already flown using

electrical power beamed from a ground-based microwave source. TAKE NOTE. If we carry this

concept to the infantryman, we must design very compact receiving equipment and see that each man

gets power on demand.

We studied too many devices to detail here: the turbine-driven "compulsator" which would power

futuristic rail guns; devices that would literally burn battlefield trash (cut powder charges would make

high-energy fuel!) to generate power; and fuel cells. We even studied a cold-gas launch system, in which

compressed gas could mix with a small initial propellant charge. The result might haveno IR emission, no

flash, little dust signature and no net recoil. The projectile would contain a bazooka-like second stage,

firing after the projectile was well on its way to the target. This launch system wouldn't be as compact as

a big powder charge, but it might not give away the launcher position.

COLDGAS LAUNCHER, 40mm RECOILLESS, AUTOMATIC FIRE.

(Note ambidextrous sights set for lefthand user.)

The Effects people focused on what small weapons can do to an enemy. A rifle-fired projectile carrying

a bundle of tungsten wire can penetrate light armor to increase the lethality of a combat rifle round. The

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FirefightY2KTableofContentsPREFACEFLEASAREPORTONADVANCEDSMALLARMSCONCEPTSMANASPILLMALFTHEFUTUREOFFLIGHT:COMESTHEREVOLUTIONLIQUIDASSETSLOSTINTRANSLATIONEVILEYEVEHICLESFORFUTUREWARSREFERENCESVITALSIGNSHIGHTECHANDSELF-RELIANCETHE12-VOLTSOLUTIONFirefightY2KbyDeanIngThisisaworkoffiction.Somecharactersand...

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