Doug Dandridge's Blog, page 19

Infantry Weapons of the Future: Starship Troopers and Beyond: Part 3

In parts 1 and 2 of this entry we discussed future infantry weapons as represented by projectile weapons, explosive devices like grenades, a short sojourn into blade weapons, and then on to a staple of science fiction, the laser. In this entry I will discuss other energy weapons, such as particle beams, something already possible today in a somewhat weak form, and other, more fanciful weapons. The first thing to discuss is just what the hell is energy? In scifi movies it is colored light that flows like water. Creatures of great power are said to be made up of pure energy. In fact, except for photons, which are massless, and neutrinos, which may or my not have a tiny bit of mass, all other energy is made up of fast moving particles of matter. Remember the E=MC2 formula, which tells you how much energy you can get out of a given quantity of matter. Not colored light, and not really anything I can see a creature made out of, since fast moving particles, and we’re talking really fast, don’t really suit themselves to sitting around as a blob of color. A book I have recently read on particle physics seems to state, at least to my layman’s sensibilities, that anything that has no mass has to travel at the speed of light, and anything with mass can’t go that fast. So energy is photons or fast moving particles. Even an electromagnetic field is made up of something.

The first weapon I will talk about is the disintegration beam, a staple of science fiction. You know, you fire the beam, the person glows for a moment, and then they are gone, as in there is nothing left of them. Or, if the effects budget is low, they simply disappear. Problem is, there is a thing called the conservation of mass and energy, meaning the stuff just can’t go away, like toxic waste dumped in a river. Unless you are using negative matter, which is really just hypothetical at this point, the mass has to go somewhere. Where it is likely to go is a mass of very fast moving particles, which results in a very big boom where the target once was. The original phaser was said to turn matter into energy, not a healthy proposition in close combat. In the original movie War of the Worlds, the alien rays suppressed the atomic forces holding matter together. Again, very pretty in the movie, but very bad in reality. Now maybe a beam that converted a tiny amount of matter to energy could be used as a close in weapon, blowing apart the target. Lary Niven had a disintegration beam in his Known Space series that was kind of a gentle weapon. It turned off one of the charges and left dust in the aftermath. He had some scenes where someone being hit by the beam had time to get under cover with the loss of some skin.

There was a lightning gun in District 9 that was some kind of electron beam, taking us into the realm of particle beam weaponry. Electrons, in my opinion, are not the best particles, and I think there are too many ways to defeat that beam through insulation or channeling of energy. In the movie it caused bodies to explode, but the fluids should have been superhot, burning everyone they touched, another thing we will get into later on. I don’t think this kind of weapon can penetrate the combat armor of the future, and so is a non-starter.

Sonic weapons are the next entry. Sound can be used to stun, and to cause people to lose control of their bowels, and in some applications may actually cut through hard surfaces. Sound could be the weapon of choice for police operation in atmosphere, when stunning the target is the objective. In vacuum it does not work, and against armored suits I see little utility for this kind of weapon. So maybe as a good non lethal to handle riots and other civil disturbances, to bring down criminals, but not as a standard infantry weapon.

Which brings us to particle beams. Today we can generate beams of protons that have sufficient energy to knock down a missile. But they are big clunky things, too large to be carried. That may not always be the case, and eventually we may have heavy particle beam rifles, and even pistols, if the accelerators can be made small enough. In The Deep Dark Well and its sequel, To Well And Back, the heroes use a particle beam which does not contain the accelerator. The accelerator is at another location, and the matter is transferred to the weapon through a wormhole. Now, unless making wormholes becomes an efficient and energy cheap process, I don’t see this becoming a standard infantry weapon.

So what kind of particles can we use? Protons would seem to be the best, as they can be accelerated in a magnetic field and are heavy enough to pack a lot of energy. The problem with protons is they repel each other, causing the beam to widen over short distance (say kilometers to thousands of kilometers). This would not really be a problem in close in infantry combat. But they can also be repelled by a sufficiently strong positive magnetic field. So we strip the charge off the proton at the last second and send a beam of neutrons at the target. They are slowed a bit but still pack a punch. Or we could just send fewer neutrons into the target and short circuit their nervous system. I had read years ago that it took the same amount of energy as what propels a forty-five slug to propel sufficient neutrons to kill a person. And it’s a really messy way to go. But I feel that the armored suits of the future will be able to handle a low dose of neutrons, and anything that gets through can have their damage repaired by nanotech. So a high dose of neutrons, enough to burn through armor, seems to be the way to go. Antimatter is another possibility, antiprotons. Not a lot of them, that is a prescription for suicide. But a small amount, as long as the action is not in a realy thick or particle filled atmosphere. And there is the possibility of negative matter, if such really exists. It could burn through matter, even really tough superhard matter. I see negative matter more used for cutting through things that are in the way and need to be breached. The last problem I see with particle beams is the recoil. They are shooting a beam with mass at extreme velocity, which means there is recoil the other way. So the beam would have to be limited in how much mass it puts out or its velocity, if being used by someone without a suit, or have to depend on the armored suit to absorb the recoil, unless some other method can be developed to absorb the force. Of course use for personal combat, the lower powered weapon would be fine, while, if used for heavy combat with other suits, of course the user will have a suit as well.

What about vaporizing the target, something that the newer Trek has opted for, since even they have realized that turning a hundred kilo body into energy was a bad idea? Enough energy could vaporize a body. I’ve done the math, and reasonable sized weapon could turn a human body to vapor without shooting the user to the moon. Of course, there is all that pesky superheated steam that used to be the body to deal with. Not a good idea in a closed room and if the weapon bearer is not wearing some protective gear. Bad burns at least, and burned to death as a distinct possibility. The other question would be, why bother? A lot of energy might be needed to burn through a suit, but whatever was left when it got through would surely char broil the occupant. And an unarmored opponent with a big hole in him and the flesh around if cooked is just as dead as one converted to vapor. In Exodus I use a particle beam (in one killing) and a laser (in the other) to vaporize bodies, not even leaving the DNA, because the murderer didn’t want the police to know who the victims were, at least not for sure. Otherwise, vaporization is just a waste of energy, and does not leave a clean murder scene.

Next segment will talk about the protection the warriors of the future are sure to want. Protection that give them at least the same chance of survival against the high energy weaponry of the future as current infantrymen, with Kevlar helmets and ballistic plates in their vests, have against current weapons. Or enough to allow most of the infantry to survive long enough to fulfull the mission.

Filed under: Acceleration, Alien Invasion, Antimatter, Armor, eBooks, Far Future, Fusion, Future Prediciton, Future Warfare, Kindle, Military, Movies, Nanotechnology, Near Future, Nuclear Weapons, Plotting, Proofreading, Quantum Physics, Robots, science Fiction, self publishing, Space Industry, Space Navy, Titles, Tropes, Wormholes, Writing Tagged: Disintegration Beams, particle beams, Sonics

Infantry Weapons of the Future: Starship Troopers and Beyond: Part 2

In part one of this blog entry I discussed projectile weapons, which may still be a factor in infantry warfare for many centuries, maybe even into the next millennia. Nothing at all like our projectile weapons, they will instead use magnetic propulsion to achieve the great velocities needed to penetrate future armor. They may also be explosive, or have the capability to explode on contact. Shaped charges or superhard penetrators may aid in armor penetration. So what about other explosive shells? We use grenades today, both thrown and propelled. In World War 2 the rifle grenade was a fixture of many battles, allowing the infantry to use explosive charges against both other troops and armored vehicles at range. And today the grenade launcher is commonly used, firing a small shell with much greater range and accuracy than a thrown object. A couple of years ago I saw a grenade the size of a twelve gauge shell, fired from one of those shotguns using a drum magazine. That is the way I think I will go, with smaller grenades that can be fired from devices built into rifles, or possible rapid fire from a dedicated launcher system. The explosives we use today will not suffice, and we will either have to develop more powerful chemical explosives, or something else. One possibility is antimatter. Now before anyone freaks out about the use of antimatter, remember, in very small quantities it is not the continent destroying bomb of Star Trek. One atom of antihydogen, an antiproton, combining with one proton, would not even be noticeable. And it can be scaled up from there, until we could have any possible charge, from a firecracker up to a large conventional bomb. Of course there is the danger inherent with antimatter. It takes power to contain antiprotons in a magnetic field. Ammo sitting around might go off spontaneously if it runs out of power. Some kind of warning device would have to be incorporated.

In Exodus I use a crystal matrix battery as a power source, feeling that chemical batteries would not suffice for storing the energies needed for emergency functioning of large military vessels and vehicles. These same batteries, or whatever they come up for real to solve the problem, could probably be rigged to release all of their energy in a burst, like a grenade. One advantage to this might be the programing of the grenade to go off with a particular force. A small charge for a single target, like that needed to stun a single soft target such as a terrorist. Or maximum charge against hard targets or groups. Hand grenades might still in use, with the same programmed charge as the propellant grenades. They won’t have the range of the propelled weapons, though being thrown by a soldier in a strength enhancing armored suit might give it quite a bit of range. Will weapons like mortars be practical as organic support weapons? We can already track them on radar today, and methods are being developed to knock incoming shells down with lasers or sound, so they may become obsolete. Or, using some futuristic countermeasures, they may be able to get through to the target.

We have drones today that can loiter in the air for hours before seeking a target. In the future drones may be the answer to indirect close support weapons, though being nowhere near the size of what we use today. Drones the size of birds could be used for surveillance, and then sent in to attack when needed. Or better yet, insect sized pizzoelectric drones could saturate an area, sending back the sights and sounds of the battlefield. And when needed they could be vectored in to a target, in dozen, hundreds or thousands, they could provide a satisfactory assault on a target. Infantrymen could carry containers of insect or smaller drones to release when needed. The major problem with the smaller robots would be vulnerability to EMP, background and aimed, so the small robots would probably be carried in shielded containers until needed.

What about blade weapons? Not swords, though Larry Niven had a contraption called a variable blade that was a strand of monomolecular wire held in a stasis field, capable of being deployed a meter or a hundred meters from the handle. Other writers, like Ringo, use monomolecular blades (the boma blades of the Posleen) that can actually cut through armor. I don’t think a blade weapon would be of much use in normal combat, but might be useful in close in situations or as a last resort. Maybe mounted on the armor itself, like the blade weapons of the alien hunters in the Predator movies.

Which brings us to the topic of light amp weapons, lasers. Lasers have been used and misused in science fiction for decades. Thought by some to be the death ray of ancient scifi, they can be an effective weapon, with limitations. In some past TV shows lasers have been shown to be disintegration beams. Lasers basically put photons into an object and generate great heat. It’s a hole burner, though it can also be used to cut things up. In space, lasers suffer from a limit of range, as the beam does spread over distance, and spreads greatly over great distances. Also, at range, it takes time to get to a target, time in which the target can move. In close in combat neither is a problem. On the surface of a planet or the corridor of a spaceship it is beam of destruction that hits instantaneously. Modern lasers generate quite a bit of waste heat, and hopefully this problem will be solved in the future, with efficiencies approaching ninety-five percent or more. Lasers can be generated in many frequencies, across the spectrum, visible and invisible. Gamma ray and X-ray lasers would be very powerful, and would bypass some of the defenses that visible light lasers might face. Of course, lasers are invisible, unless there is a lot of dust or debris in the air, such as would be encountered on most battlefields.

Light amp could vaporize a target, a topic which will be discussed more in the section on energy weapons. Enough energy could turn soft tissues into superheated steam, and even burn bone, leaving little more than some seared chips behind. Of course the question would be, why bother? In most cases killing the target will be enough, and a soldier may want to conserve energy. A burst of light strong enough to burn a hole in the target would probably be enough. Why waste the power? A heavy weapon might use a continuous beam to burn through multiple targets, or sweep through a charge, sort of like the final protective line fired by modern machine guns. But cutting the enemy into two pieces should be enough, unless they have a very unusual biology.

The limitations of light amp? For one, even though the beam is invisible, in an atmosphere with a lot of particulate matter the beam is very visible. Even with a short burst there would still be a line linking target with firer, a shout of here I am. With a long burst it would be like a neon sign. And particulate matter, be it dust, fog or rain, would also absorb some of the beam. Lasers work best in clear atmosphere or no air at all. This might not always be the case, as some of the work the Navy is doing shows that some forms of laser may penetrate clouds just fine. The targets may have their own forms of defense to limit the usefulness of lasers. Reflective materials can defeat the beams, maybe only for a short time, time enough for the target to get to cover. Light bending fields could also defeat lasers, such as the fields being tested for practical invisibility today. Even if they don’t totally stop the beams, they may attenuate the effect enough to provide survivability for a target wrapped in sophisticated armor. If they’re just wearing red shirts? Well, then they probably get burned really badly.

Part 3 will discuss other energy weapons, like particle beams, and hypothetical weapons that act on matter in various ways (can you say disintegration beam?)

Filed under: Alien Invasion, Antimatter, Armor, eBooks, Far Future, Fusion, Future Prediciton, Future Warfare, Kindle, Military, Movies, Nanotechnology, Near Future, Nuclear Weapons, Plotting, Quantum Physics, Robots, science Fiction, self publishing, Space Industry, Space Navy, Space Program, Titles, Tropes, Writing Tagged: armor penetration, grenade launcher, grenade launchers, grenades, infantry, infantry weapons, lasers, magnetic propulsion, magrail weapons, projectile weapons

Infantry Weapons of the Future: Starship Troopers and Beyond: Part 1

As most people who follow this blog know, I write science fiction and fantasy. In the Science Fiction arena I tend to write Military Scifi or Space Opera. I try my hardest to get the tech right, and that includes the limitations of any such tech. Sure, I make some stuff up. I would be very surprised if the eight layers of hyperspace and one of subspace from the Exodus series ever becomes fact. But with the weapons and other tech I try to stay true to fact. When possible I stay within the realms of the possible. To those who say what I write is not possible, I say, five hundred years ago people said the only way to travel on the seas was with wind or muscle power, and they would have called nuclear powered warships pure flights of fantasy. I have several books out that explore future military action, including The Deep Dark Well series and the Exodus: Empires at War series, as well as the stand alone novels The Shadows of the Multiverse and We Are Death, Come For You. Closer to our time period are The Scorpion and Afterlife. But I really like to write the far future novels, five hundred to forty thousand years in the future.

Starship Troopers, Heinlein’s masterpiece of future warfare, was probably the first military scifi novel I ever read. With its far future look at combat, especially ground combat, using the high tech powered armor that has been copied so much since (including by this writer). Heinlein really didn’t delve too far into the field of infantry weapons, though. Some projectile weapons were mentioned, as well nuclear tipped rockets and many types grenades. Perfect weapons for use against unarmored targets or ground installations. Probably not so good for use against opponents armored as they were. I will touch upon what I think will be the weapons that these kind of soldiers will use in the future. Many of these ideas come from other books, some are my original ideas as far as I know. Since I haven’t read everything there may be instances of those ideas already out there, but if I don’t know about them I still consider them original ideas. In this series of blogs I will be discussing infantry weapons, the kind of instruments used to fight on the surface of a planet or in actions to take and defend spaceships and stations. In most cases this will involve close in fighting, no more than ten kilometers apart, and most often much closer. This is not to say that an infantry soldier in powered armor can’t take to the skies and hit something fifty kilometers away. But that will be rare, and would expose the soldier to a counterattack by powerful weaponry as well. Weapons that obliterate everything within kilometers, including people in armored suits, will not be suitable as an infantry weapon. They could be used as orbital bombardment weapons, but not in a man on man fight.

Part one of this blog will concern itself with projectile weapons, part two with light amp and explosive devices, and part three with other energy type weapons. Part four will talk about what people might wrap themselves in to ensure some survivability in the environment of these kind of weapons. So let’s start off with projectile weapons, familiar today in the form of rifles, pistols and machine guns. Now, I will be the first to admit that these weapons may survive, even in their chemically powered forms, in the arenas of hunting and personal protection, though I really think other options will become available in protection and law enforcement. When I see a movie that is not post apocalyptic and is set a century or more in the future and uses current projectile weapon technology I cringe, and wonder why the writer couldn’t come up with something better. As personal protection, in the form of powered armor, improves, then projectile weapons must improve as well. The best Barrett fifty cal sniper rifle would bounce off good armor as it is forged in the future. A machine gun would simply make noise pinging its useless rounds off the armor. To get through that kind of protection we will either need a more efficient penetrator, or a greater velocity. Putting shape charges in the projectile, especially with some kind of superhard penetrator, might do the job, but I think against really good armor this would also not be the answer. But increasing the velocity of the round would increase the power to the square of the velocity. In other words, doubling the velocity quadruples the kinetic energy, the hitting power of the bullet. Chemically powered bullets probably have a limit, unless we can come up with some really powerful propellants. The answer would seem to be in the realm of magnetic propulsion, the mag rifle or railgun. Weapons could be set to send a projectile at a desired velocity. Slower for soft targets, faster for heavy armor. I doubt a weapon sending its projectile at its maximum velocity would be fast firing. It would probably be a tradeoff between velocity and rate of fire, unless it was a crew served mounted weapon. There is also the physics problem of equal and opposite reaction. If you fire a super high velocity round, like Arnold did in Eraser, the recoil is going to fling you through the air in an equal reaction the other way. Powered armor may help, the actual propulsion units of the armor compensating for the recoil. In Exodus I use grabber units (the standard propulsion units on Imperial ships and vehicles) on some of the heavy rifles to pull the barrel in the opposite direction of the recoil.

In John Ringo’s Posleen series, the humans and Posleen invaders use hypervelocity weapons that fire small pellets at an appreciable fraction of light speed. At rapid fire these things are deadly, capable of killing thousands of soft targets in a second. The fast moving rounds transfer their kinetic energy into the target with explosive results, and are capable of going through a line of targets before losing their velocity. They are essentially mag rifles of highly advanced design. But there are also self propelled projectiles in some works, like the hyper-v rockets in Ringo’s novels, a rocket using advance tech instead of propellants to get up to ultra high velocity. These things would be suit killers, as well as tank and aircraft destroyers. In the third Exodus book I introduce a sniper rifle that flings a self powered projectile that accelerates all the way to the target. There were examples of rocket rounds in the past, and may be again in the future. Smart rounds are another possibility, projectiles with propulsion, a sensor and a brain that allows them to track a target, even going around corners to track on an enemy. I think that projectile weapons will still have a place in the future, but I think that for most uses one of the more advanced weapons will come to fore. The limitations of projectile weapons are of course the need to carry ammo and a power source, the same limitations as some of the energy weapons I will discuss in the third part, or even light amp weapons, which still need a power supply. And a weapon that has terrific penetrating power would not be the first choice for defending a spacecraft, where hull penetration might be a problem.

Explosive projectile weapons, like rifle grenades, will be discussed in the next part.

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The month of May and moving forward.

May was a very good month for this self published author, at least in sales. sold 4,539 ebooks and had 149 loans on the KOLL, giving me my sixth consecutive month above 3K sales (actually only one of those was below 4K). I wasn’t as productive as I wanted to be, probably due to falling off my motorcycle near the beginning of the month. I am diabetic, and need to exercise. But I really couldn’t find any exercise to do with my ribs hurting. Walking, pushups, leg iifts, weights, you name it, it hurt, bad. And I get lethargic when I can’t work out. The pain is almost gone, so I see better days ahead. I want to get back on the bike, and at the same time I don’t. We’ll just see.

The other day a fan commented on my facebook page, in response to my post that the success of Exodus surprised me, that it only surprised him that it wasn’t on the best seller list (it is, on Amazon’s Space Opera), and that a big publisher hadn’t picked me up. That got me to thinking. Did I really want to get a publishing contract. I mean, in one way it is the ultimate ego trip, to get books on the bookshelves at stores for people to touch. And to get membership in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, though most people I have talked to recently have agreed that things are going to change and they will eventually let self pubbed authors in. Makes sense, since some indies have more sales than many with contracts. I sent a question to a well known scifi writer I have contacted in the past about the possibility. I was told that my numbers were great, and that I probably could get an agent and a contract with a publisher. Sent an email to another writer I have corresponded with in the past who is also on best seller lists, but is relatively new to the whole thing, to get his take on it. I can already see some pros, like getting an editor as part of the package, getting cover art, etc. There is also the possibility of movie or TV deals, but that is iffy. It took over thirty-five years for Ringworld to get made into a movie, whcih is coming out soon, or so I hear. And some cons. I would probably still have to do my own promotions, unless I hit it lucky and had a bestseller out the gate. I would have little input on those covers. And I would probably not be able to put out as many novels as I want. Most publishers restrict their authors to one novel a year in any series. Some have more than one series going, so that’s a possibility. Then again, the dragon’s share of earnings from any book go to the publisher, while the booksellers of course get the book for half the cover price, and then there’s the agent’s cut. I have heard of bestselling authors who had to keep their day jobs until they got that second series out, and my day job is a bad memory that I don’t want to revisit. The good thing is I don’t have to make an instant decision. I can talk to an agent, talk to other writers, test the waters, and then make a decision. I would like to keep the books I have online going online, if the publisher isn’t interested in that particular book.

On another front, I will be talking about covers with a graphic designer next week, to see if I might be able to improve them, to make them more marketable. And I am going to contract some 3D art of the spaceships in Exodus, as well as some blueprint art. I have sketches of what the ships look like, and their general layout, but nothing I would be proud of displaying. Expect a busy summer, and hopefully a productive fall as well.

Filed under: Agents, Dragons, eBooks, Far Future, Fusion, Future Prediciton, Future Warfare, Genetic Engineering, Kindle, Magic, Military, Movies, Nanotechnology, Near Future, Plotting, Proofreading, Quantum Physics, Robots, science Fiction, self publishing, Space Industry, Space Navy, Space Program, Titles, Tropes, Typos, Websites, Writing Tagged: best seller list, best seller lists, editing, editors, ego trip, fantasy writers, science fiction and fantasy, science fiction and fantasy writers of america, SFWA, television

Exodus-The Shorts

Recently a fan commented that the Universe of Exodus could be the home to a great number of stories, which got me to thinking about how I started out, and how one of my favorite authors, Larry Niven, also started. I am really a novelist, I prefer the form that is most complicated, with numerous storylines and lots of characters. I did write quite a few short stories in my first couple of years of writing. I have them up at my website, free for the taking. I’m not sure how many people have actually looked at them. I do know that the Exodus series is doing well. Hopefully it will do even better in the future. I have a lot of ideas for the series, both for the main storyline, and for many spinoff novels that will cover some other aspect of the Galaxy and the war. It has also been suggested to me that I concentrate on Exodus to the exclusion of my other series, Refuge and The Deep Dark Well. I have enough readers in those series to keep them going. In fact, I really want to see them continue. So I have come up with a compromise that I think will at least partially satisfy everyone, as well as helping to grow the readership of this blog and visits to my website. Larry Niven also wrote a lot of novels, and a lot of short stories, some with the same characters as his novels, some with a different cast. I always loved the stories from Tales of Known Space and Neutron Star.

I have decided to write at least a short story a month set in the Exodus Universe, in one of three areas. The Dark Side, Tales of Hyperspace, and A Day In The Life. These short stories will be posted on my website, with links on the blog page to get to them. I will also give notice in my newsletter when a new one comes out. In this manner I hope to get more subscribers to the newsletter and the blog, and more visitors to the website. And I can keep putting out stories for those who are interested. Some will be short shorts, some novellas, and everything in between. They will be free for the downloading, or can be read at the site on your web browser. After enough of them have accumulated in one of the themes I will package them up and publish them as an ebook on Amazon.

I will also, over the next month, publish sketches and drawings from the Exodus Universe. Eventually I want to put some professional level art work of ships and other objects, but since people have asked me what the ships look like, or for a map of the Galaxy, I think this is a good compromise for now.

Filed under: eBooks, Far Future, Fusion, Future Prediciton, Future Warfare, Genetic Engineering, History, Kindle, Military, Nanotechnology, Nuclear Weapons, Plotting, science Fiction, self publishing, Space Industry, Space Navy, Space Program, Titles, Tropes, Websites, Wormholes, Writing Tagged: books, Hyperspace, Larry Niven, Neutron Star, Novellas, Refuge:The Arrival, short shorts, Short Stories, Tales of Known Space, The Deep Dark Well

Exodus 3 will be out tomorrow.

Just a few moments ago I uploaded Exodus: Empires at War: Book 3: The Rising Storm, the much anticipated sequel to my successful Exodus: Empires at War series. I think it will be a very entertaining addition to the series, and one that fans of the first two books will really enjoy. For those who didn’t like the first two books due to the complicated storyline and large number of characters, I am afraid you will not enjoy this one either, as it has the same problems, if problems they are. I love this kind of story, and don’t see a large cast as a problem, especially when telling a story across a huge expanse of space. Book 4 of the main storyline will wrap up the initial phase of the war, and I realize that future books will have to cover a much greater time frame in order to advance the series to the point where I can finish it before I die of extreme old age. For those who want to go right to Amazon, right now, and get the book, be patient. I uploaded it a day ahead of time to make sure that it was there by the official release date, Saturday, May 25th. It takes Amazon up to twelve hours to place a book on their digital shelves. This book was proofread, which hopefully will reduce the number of errors that were legion in the first two books. I am sure there are still some there. I have read books put out by the big publishers, supposedly professionally edited and proofread, that still have a number of typos. I have a theory that it has something to do with Quantum Mechanics. You know, the quantum tunneling of electrons at random intervals, leading to changes in the electron signatures on the media on which manuscripts are stored. Just a theory, but until proven wrong I will stick with it.

I am already working on the next chapter in the Refuge series, and expect to have the first draft finished by mid June, after which I will tackle the third volume of The Deep Dark Well series. By late Fall I hope to have the spinoff novel, Capitulum, about the political climate in the capital of the Empire, and the investigation into the murders of Members of Parliament, finished. In that book I will introduce more of the technology of everyday life, as well as the tech of crime solving, and the methods criminals use to get around discovery. I may also release an already completed, in first draft form, book tentatively titled Soulless, about the possible horrible side effects of matter transmission by nanotechnology. I say tentatively as there is already a very famous book by that name, so I will be searching for something else that fits and still is different enough. And now for the excerpt.

Colonel Samuel Baggett recalled hearing about something call The Wilderness Campaign from the time of old Earth. He didn’t remember much about it, except it was during the North American Civil War of a prespace century. He was sure that whatever it involved it would not be anything like the wilderness that he had his back to.

All night the static in the atmosphere had been clearing as the enemy systematically eliminated the human electronic warfare assets. Some of those assets were too small and dispersed to be eliminated entirely in any time frame less than weeks. Still, the enemy was getting a better look at the ground from space at any time since he had arrived. That had spelled death for more of his forces, including the young Lt. Colonel who had come to his rescue the other day.

This kind of war was totally unlike anything he had experienced on Janaikasa, fighting the Lasharan rebels. Here he was the outnumbered and outgunned force. Here he needed to use stealth and guile to bleed the enemy, while keeping his force alive.

I still have more than six hundred effectives, thought the Colonel, looking over his HUD. Not a lot of heavy weapons, but enough to hit and run for weeks if necessary. And what then? He looked up at the sky, just as he did every morning, hoping to see Imperial assault shuttles landing reinforcements. And what then, he thought in a continuing train. We can’t be the only system these bastards are hitting. We’re probably low on the list of systems to relieve, if there even is such a list.

“All the civilians are into the forest,” said the voice of Sergeant Major Terry Zacharias over the com, bringing a smile to the Colonel’s face.

Zacharias had been in the thick of the fighting the whole way, and hadn’t suffered a scratch. The irrepressible little noncom was one tough and smart SOB, and Baggett was glad to still have him.

“We’ll start falling back to the forest in five mikes,” said the Colonel over the com. And with luck we’ll be under cover before the demon fuckers even realize we’re gone. Not sure how well the civilians are going to do in this here wilderness though, the Colonel thought as he envisioned the forest filled with all those huge carnivores, and even the herbivores that could be deadly just because of gigantic size. They’ll just have to do as well as they can. At least most of them are armed, and hopefully I can use some of them as guerillas.

“We have movement to our front, Colonel,” said the voice of one of the new company commanders, just a platoon leader the day before. “Sounds like rumbling, but different than the barrage.”

“Let me listen,” said Baggett, jacking the gain from his helmet earphones up to max. It was a sound that was unmistakable to one who knew what to listen for. The creaking of metal, crumbling of building fragments underneath. And there were several of them. Baggett looked at his HUD, which was transmitting what the officer saw, and cursed under his breath as he saw what looked like a long gun.

“Those are tanks, Lieutenant,” he said, checking the rest of the front and seeing more armored vehicles just out of easy detection range. They screwed that one up. Should have waited a little longer and just come on when they were ready.

Kinetic rounds started coming down from the sky, most into the farmlands in front of the Infantry positions. Some were falling into the wilderness, knocking down multiple square kilometers of trees at every strike. The ground rumbled underneath, and some cursing came over the com.

“Quiet on the com,” came the voice of the Sergeant Major. Baggett mentally nodded his head. Any signals could be traced, though the probability was remote that any single transmission would. Multiply that probability by several hundred and the enemy would be sure to pinpoint one signal. The best protection was to only send necessary info, and to move after each transmission set.

“What’s this look like to you, Terry?” asked the Colonel over the private circuit between them as he changed positions.

“It looks like a rolling barrage, sir,” said the Top Sergeant. “I think they’re going to come in right after this and roll over our positions.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” said the Colonel. He engaged the general circuit. “All units are to leave their positions immediately. Repeat, leave your current positions immediately, unless you are already in the wilderness. All others move into the wilderness immediately.”

The acknowledgements came back immediately over the com, and Baggett’s HUD showed his men streaming into the heavy forest as fast as they could move. There were still keeping good order and separation, something needed when the enemy could always switch their targeting and hit the forest at will.

Less than a minute after they evacuated their trenches and holes the barrage came down on where they had been. Bright flashes lit the area. The rounds were not all that powerful, less than a kiloton each, but they were striking in mass, and any troops who had been underneath the strikes would have been killed, or at least seriously injured and their suits incapacitated. Rounds continued to come down in the wilderness as well, and Baggett lost about a dozen troopers to the barrage, though the unarmored civilians fared worse. But when the enemy rolled over the Imperial positions with tanks and armored infantry moments later they found nothing living. And enough booby traps that survived the barrage to make their lives miserable.

Filed under: Acceleration, Alien Invasion, Antimatter, eBooks, Far Future, Fusion, Future Prediciton, Future Warfare, Genetic Engineering, Genetics, Interdimensional Travel, Kindle, Military, Nanotechnology, Nuclear Weapons, Plotting, Proofreading, Quantum Physics, science Fiction, self publishing, Space Industry, Space Navy, Space Program, Titles, Typos, Wormholes, Writing Tagged: empires at war book, Exodus: Empires at War, quantum mechanics, quantum tunneling

But They All Look Alike

I am a psychologist by training. Due to very bizarre circumstances, partially my fault, I never received my PhD, though I received all the formal training and clinical experience to earn that degree. One thing that really interested me in graduate school was the role of stereotypes in our thinking processes. Stereotypes, assumptions, prejudices. They all had a useful role in our survival at one time, or they would not have developed. Today they are not as useful, but also not totally without utility. We are limited in the information that we can process at any one time, and by using stereotypes and making assumptions we are able to make decisions. Maybe not the best, but the best we are capable of making at the time.

Back in prehistoric times is was a useful paranoia to believe that those who were different were bad. It was hard wired into us to be for our side and against the OTHER. The OTHER might be fine people, deserving of survival, maybe even more deserving than we are. But to think this way is not to give our all to our own society. And not giving our all could mean that we fail, and the OTHER survives on the resources that we need. In much of human prehistory the word for stranger was the same as that for enemy. And very true. OTHERS were competitors, and competitors were to be destroyed so that we could prosper. Now in more civilized times things changed a bit. Not by a whole lot, but a bit. Not every stranger was an enemy. Some were allies, trade partners, or even just curiousities. But there were still dangers. If we saw a large number of furred horsemen coming our way, bows across their backs, swords in hand, it was assumed that they were a threat. It was a safe assumption. To assume they were a threat and act accordingly was to survive, or at least have a chance to. To act as if they weren’t a threat was to risk being killed, or worse, captured and tortured for the information we might have. Now this is a stereotype, that all furred barbarian horsemen were a threat. Now Bob the barbarian might be a great guy, as signified by the way he wears his enemies’ fingers around his wrist instead of his neck. But in scanning the horde, even if we possess that bit of information, we really don’t have time to catagorize each and every rider. Same as when captains were plying the South Seas in the 18th and 19th centuries. If dark skinned people with bones through their noses were said to be canibals, it was a smart decision to treat all such people one met as someone who might wish to have one for dinner, and not as a guest. It might not be fair to all people with bones in their noses, but it is definitely safer. And safer equals survival.

Now where stereotypes and assumptions, and the prejudices they lead to, break down, is when we start looking at all people of a certain racial or ethnic group (which are two different things) as all the same. All black people are faster than white people. All Jewish people are doctors and lawyers. Now place groups on a bell curve and there may even be some truth to the stereotypes. The bell curve for Jewish people is heavily weighted toward the doctor/lawyer/scientist spectrum. But some of the most brilliant mathematicians come from India, even though the bell curve for the general population of the sub continent would not be that impressive. There are more black speedsters in the NFL, but there have also been some exceptionally fast white people. There is something to say for the notion that stereotypes are bad. But there is still something to say about their usefulness. We still don’t have any more mental resources than Cro Magnon man did thousands of years ago. When I have time to judge a person individually, I will try to do it. If I’m walking down a street and see a bunch of kids coming toward me, black, white or brown, with pants almost hanging around their ankles and wearing baggy shirts, the safe bet is to go with the stereotypes and be cautious. Maybe that isn’t fair to them, but my survival is more important to me than how I am perceived to be thinking about someone. If I see the same kids in suits and ties and carrying bibles, I will probably feel relieved. I might end up getting jacked by the bible toting gang, but the odds are in my favor that I will be safe letting them walk around me.

As an addition to this post, while I was in my car just a moment ago another thought occured to me. I was reading an article by another writer, who stated that one of the problems with fantasy today was that the authors tended to think in terms of today’s values, with a politically correct slant to them. There was no political correctness in Medieval times, or even the early to mid 20th century. Strangers were still people to be suspicious of, and life was a lot cheaper than the cost of keeping prisoners. People were killed for just about anything that the people in charge didn’t like, and there was no appeal. People were seen as Barbarians if they observed different customs than the society around them, and trying to worship in a way not endorsed by the public could be a death sentence. As far as the mid 20th century Chinese were considered Wogs by the British, and there were many other unsavory names for people with darker skins around the world, and even some perjoratves for people of the same general racial group as those casting the aspersions. I remember watching the movie, The Color Purple, and cracking up when Sophie hit the white lady, while my mom and aunt’s all took in a breath of horror. They understood those times as I didn’t. I had grown with some black people, and seen many black versus white fights on TV boxing, and thought nothing of it. To women raised in the south in the 1930s and 40s, that scene was one they knew would have grave consequences for Sophie. We can think differently today, at least I hope most of us can, but just remember, people didn’t always think like this.

Filed under: Barbarians, eBooks, Fantasy, History, Military, Near Future, Past, Plotting, self publishing, Tropes, Writing Tagged: assumptions, bell curves, prejudices, stereotypes

What Comedians Don’t Know About the Real World, Part 2

This is part two of my post about how comedians and entertainers don’t seem to have a clue about how the military functions in the real world, and how they don’t understand how armed civilians can fight that military. They seem to feel that any advanced weapon that the military possesses is powerful in all situations. I discussed the use of Drones, Aircraft and Artillery, and how they are of limited use against an insurgent force, and also have their own weaknesses. And how the use of weapons of mass destruction might backfire on those who use them, not only driving more people to revolt, but also probably many regulars and guardsmen as well. Maybe even whole units of them. But let’s say that the government can keep most of the troops in line. The strength of our Army and Marine Corps is in their discipline and ability to proficiently use weapons. Now the strength of the civilian gun owners, especially the hunters, is their knowledge of the area they are operating in, and the ability to proficiently use weapons. Most hunters, and many of those who aren’t, can consistently hit a target within the effective range of their weapon, whether it is a pistol or a scope mounted deer rifle. Many civilians are also veterans, who with a minimal amount of retraining, could effectively use machine guns, mortars, rocket launchers, etc. Where would they get these weapons? From the people that are using them against the populace. Supply convoys, warehouses, trains, all kinds of places. Whenever a military unit loses a firefight there will be weapons to pick up.

The strength of the rebels is their familiarity with their area of operations. A soldier from New York State may also have been a hunter, but he is not going to be as familiar with the Ozarks as someone raised in Arkansas. The rebels will be able to choose where they fight. As a relative of mine pointed out to me, this will not be a recreation of the civil war, where regiment fought regiment in open battle. Rebels will strike at the best place and time for them to strike, bringing their forces together to hit a smaller and weaker Federal force. Sure, there will be times when the soldiers gain the advantage, moving troops into position by APC or helicopter. Even if they win a thousand of these battles they will still lose the war. In a battle of attrition the side with the most troops is almost sure to win. And the strength of the military, its discipline, will become diluted as they lose well trained men and have to replace them with new conscripts who may not be the most motivated to put their lives on the line for the government against their friends and neighbors. I figure the desertion rate would continue to grow throughout the fighting. In John Ringo’s book Live Free or Die, the US sends troops into Vermont to take away the maple syrup that aliens want because it acts as a valuable intoxicant for other aliens. The men of Vermont don’t want to give up their syrup, which can eventually be sold to the aliens that really want it for the technology to raise the Earth up to a status where they can defend themselves. The soldiers don’t fair too well in the woods of Vermont against experienced deer hunters, many of whom are good enough shots to wound instead of kill. I think Ringo was spot on in developing this scenario. Sure, hunters would die, but the soldeirs wouild also be run through a meat grinder.

The strength of the rebels will be in their anonimity. When not on operations they will be indistinguishable from the rest of the population, while a soldier will look like a soldier, whether while in battle or in garrison at a base. The rebels could not be found while they were not pursuing their non-rebel tasks. Leaving the military to either depend on catching enough of them, or on using reprisals to stop people from fighting as rebels or supporting the rebel cause. History has shown that such a tactic is unlikely to work. Rounding up and hanging innocent civilians might cause some people to give up their neighbors, but most would become really pissed, and the ranks of the rebellion would swell. History has also shown that colaborators normally don’t last very long either. And again, except in limited situations, the rebels will be dictating the time and place of battle, and many of them will be men and women with military experience, some with a great deal of experience. They will know how to cammoflauge and use terrain to their advantage. What about the militias, said to be the target of the government forces? Coming to target the militias would also mean that the militias would target them. I doubt these paranoid people would just hand over their weapons and allow themselves to be led to detainment centers, which would also become targets of the rebels.

The military has tanks and armored vehicles, you might say. Yes, they do, and such weapon systems are formidable. They are also very vulnerable in a number of ways, especiaily when deployed in urban or forested terrain. Modern tanks are very hard to kill, but fire can still do the job, and insurgents have been using fire against tanks since WW2 and the Molotov Cocktail. Most verterans know how to make jellied gasoline that sticks to tanks (and people). Many Americans have some expertise with explosives, either from military training or civilian demolitions work. A seventy ton tank dropped into the river is dead. Tanks, armored vehicles and helicopters will still inflict severe casualties in some fights, In others they will helplessly patrol the edge of a battlefield in frustration. My brother told me of a situation in Vietnam where paratroopers on a training jump were trapped in a swamp. Their armored cav company was called in to bail them out, and after the one culverted bridge into the area was taken out by a rocket, all they could do was fire their cannon on a high arc and hope they hit something. They weren’t very successful. The Afghanies learned how to shoot down heavily armored Soviet helicopters with fifty caliber machine guns fired down from the heights. There are quite a number of fifty caliber rifles out there, with more to be gathered by the rebels after a battle.

Another area in which the rebels might have some success is in the world of industry. Weapons need to be built and transported to where they are going to be used. This includes spare parts, ammunition and fuel. The rebels can interdict these in the factory through sabatoge of production lines, then stop the transport by rail or truck on the transportation arteries. The military could try to compensate for this by transporting equipment by air, an expensive propostion in fuel and time. And of course the airbases themselves could be attacked. Any way you look at it, the US Military would face a daunting task trying to supress a population in revolt. Just about anything they do would just cause the revolt to widen and the rebel forces to increase, while their own strength was whittled away. I believe that not only could the American civilian population stand up to an attempt at military control, they would eat the military alive within a very short time. A year on the outside. Even if they achieve a nine to one kill rate they lose. So all the rhetoric about how civilians don’t have a chance against the military is a bunch of crap. If their firearms are taken away their chances are really reduced. This is waht happened in the Soviet Union and NAzi Germany, where only the authorities had weapons. That is not the America I want to see.

Filed under: Armor, eBooks, Future Prediciton, Future Warfare, History, Kindle, Military, Near Future, Plotting, self publishing, Tropes, Writing Tagged: Insurrection, Internment Camps, Nukes, Revolution, Strategy, Tactics

What Comedians Don’t Know About the Real World, Part 1

I have been watching Bill Maher recently on HBO. Now I really like the guy, and find his New Rules segments really funny, though I realize many people do not like him. And like most entertainers, he has no idea of what real world military operations are like. Don’t get me wrong by reading too much into this little rant. I really do not want to see a revolution or insurrection in the United States. That would really ruin my plans for the future. However, saying that the revolution would not have a chance because it would be staged against a government that controls the most awesome military on Earth. And the words Drones and Nuclear Weapons are mentioned a lot in all of these rants about the hopelessness of any kind of insurrection. First of all, the numbers would be with the revolutionaries, as long as the reasons to revolt are clear enough. I really believe that if the government was foolish enough to try and take all firearms away from Americans there would be a fight. I don’t believe this would occur over background checks, or banning high capacity magazines. The last one is kind of stupid as well. There are a lot of high capacity magazines out there, and only a grab would get rid of most of them, precipitating the very revolt the government doesn’t want. Now, just how many gun owners are there? Another point of contention. I have heard estimates that there are over thirty million deer hunters out there, most of them possessing bolt action high velocity weapons with scopes. In other words, Sniper Rifles. I firmly believe that in any kind of long range fight these hunters hold the advantage over regular infantry. I have also seen figures that over twenty million AR-15s, the semiauto version of the M16, are in the hands of US gun owners. No, they are not full automatic assault rifles, but the advantages of the full auto have been overstated. They are great when you are spraying a bunch of grouped targets at close range (the Spray and Pray method of engagement). At medium to long ranges the AR15 is just as effective. So now we have fifty million servicable infantry weapons in the hands of the public. Probably a lot more than that, but just for argument’s sake, let’s say fifty. And if half of those weapons are used in an insurrection, that’s twenty-five million weapons. Now I know that at the peak of the cold war we had three million regulars in uniform, most of them in noncombatant support roles, and maybe two million in the reserves, with a higher percentage of trained combatants. So even at their best the military was heavily outnumbered, and that is if all of them lock step and just do what they’re told, never a sure thing with citizen soldiers. Same with the police. Maybe the FBI and Homeland Security will just do as they’re told, but I doubt the police and sheriff’s of the country will just go and take the guns away from all of their friends and neighbors. The opinions I have heard and read seem to indicate that many of them are strong Second Amendment people. So the numbers game favors the people.

But the military has drones, you say. Like drones are some magical weapon that defeats all opponents. Actually manned aircraft, in my opinion, are more effective, able to drop large weights of weapons on a target and switch targets at will. Still not a match for the enormous fleets of bombers we deployed in WW2. Drone are very effective at making surgical strikes, like taking out the so called bad guys. So let’s say you have a meeting taking place at a restaraunt that you want to take out, knowing that they will see ground forces coming. So you fly your drone over, see what looks like the targets (to the drone operator looking through the vehicle’s camera) and you hit the target. If it isn’t your target you’ve just caused a bit of colateral damage (to be talked about in a future post on how to piss the civilian population off). Even if it is your target, say Dr. Smith, the leader of the resistence in Houston, is it really to be expected that killing him will cause the movement to come unravelled? Not really. Smith’s second in command may be an idiot, and will soon be forced from command by the irregulars he leads. Or he could be a genius, in which case the drone strike has caused more problems than it has solved. But even in the best case, if Houston had twenty thousand rebels, you have at most killed off one tenth of one percent of their manpower. So if you do a drone strike a day in Houston you may kill a couple of percent of the rebels, unlikely, since they are probably going to come up with ways where you won’t find their meeting places. Aircraft could do a better job on taking out more of the rebels, even without carpet bombing the city and killing a good percentage of the population. Again, you only have so many aircraft, even if it numbers in the thousands, and there are sure to be some pilots who balk at dropping bombs in their hometown, or any American city for that matter. Or, if the objective is just to kill a lot of people, use that greatest of all historical killers, artillery, something the rebels are sure to have a dearth of. But being rebels they will never conveniently congregate for you to mow them down. And now we come to the weakness of these weapons. All weapons, no matter how strong, have a weakness. With Drones, Aircraft and Artillery the weakness is in the supply system and in deploying them where they can be taken out by ground attack. Aircraft need fuel and spare parts, which must be transported to their base, and therefor can be interdicted. Aircraft also need runways, which must be protected, unless they are VTOL (Vertical Takeoff and Landing). That brings up another problem. Troublemakers must be kept off those runways and away from the hangers. In peacetime airbases are protected by manned gates and a few roving patrols. If you think that will suffice during a rebellion you are sadly mistaken. Protecting an airbase requires fortified positions all around the perimeter of the base. And being a perimeter it is vulnerable to a concentrated attack on any one point. Not to mention the waste of manpower that could be used for infantry patrols to fight the rebels elsewhere. Drones and VTOLs, not to mention artillery, don’t need such a large area to deploy, but still require a large perimeter to protect them, otherwise the operators will come under fire from all those scoped deer rifles. So the perimeter is expanded and reinforced by the troops who can’t be used for other duties. So in a rebellion, where the enemy is dispersed and only comes together at the time and place of their choosing, these are not super weapons. Useful, yes. But not war winning in and of themselves.

So the government has nukes, chemicals, even biological weapons, and surely they could be used to crush a rebellion. Only if the government was willing to burn down the country it rules. The rebels will never gather in sufficient numbers to warrant the use of a nuke, and dropping one on a city will probably result in a revolt by the military. The weapon might not even be deployed, and entire divisions are likely to come over to the rebel side to fight against a government that they see as insane. The same with chemical and biological weapons. Too many innocents would be killed, and from my time in the Army and National Guard, that would not be tolerated. And good luck to you on getting the police to go along with the wholesale destruction of the people they are sworn to protect. The government using these weapons on its own citizenry suddenly becomes the enemy domestic that all take an oath to oppose.

I had orginally planned to do only a one post rant on this topic, but the more I think about it the more the response has expanded. The one thing most non-military people don’t seem to realize is that there is no such thing as a supreme weapon that is equally suitable for all occasions. Battleships were great, with their superior fiorepower, but also made huge targts for aircraft. The King Tiger was a match for anything in WW2, but its own size made it impossible to deploy in areas that didn’t have major highway bridges, and it suffered from many mechanical failures as well. A great book to read to learn how to think about these things is Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace by Edward Luttwak, in which he gives many examples of how weapons that seem unstoppable or wise fail in the strategic situation in which they are deployed.

In the next post on this topic I will talk about how collateral damage and strategies intended to cow populations actual backfire, as shown in many historical precidents.

Filed under: Armor, Future Warfare, Kindle, Military, Nuclear Weapons, Writing Tagged: Artillery, Biological Weapons, Chemical Weapons, Collateral Damage, Drones, Insurrection, Military Aircraft, Rebellion, Revolt, Startegy, Supreme Weapons

Exodus 3 is coming.

The light is finally apearing at the end of the tunnel for Exodus 3. Many people have asked me when the next in the series is coming out, and now I can say it will be out by either next weekend or the weekend after. A fan graciously proofread it for me, and didn’t find that much to be corrected. There was some, and it still surprises me how many things escape my eyes. I will be going over the document one more time, and will be adding quotes at the beginning of each chapter, as well as date/time stamps for each major section, at least at the chapter level. The novel is twice as long as either of the previous books, as recommended by several of my readers. The main storyline continues, with all of the characters introduced in the first two books. Not everyone makes it out alive. This is a story of a drag out no holds bared winner takes all war. Even the really cool people sometimes die. Sometimes innocent people die as well. Children, babies, people who just want to be left alone. Others find themselves in the war, discovering that they are natural born killers who just needed to opportunity to express their talents.

If you like the first two books I am sure that you will like this one. So far over eighteen thousand copies of Books 1 & 2 have been sold, over ten thousand of Book 1 alone. I have hopes that it will catch on even more. If you like books that have lots of characters and cover a great scope of territory, this is probably one you will like. If that style is confusing, then you might want to pass. It’s not for everyone, but about sixty-five percent of the reviews have been five stars, while almost ninety percent have been four or five. Some reviewers have compared the books to those written by David Weber and John Ringo. Don’t know about that, but I love the work of those authors and feel flattered by the comparison. I try to produce the kind of book that I would want to read. And for my critics who thought the battles were too detailed, that detail was expressed to set the ground rules of the combat. The need is no longer there, so some of the detail has been toned back. Not completely, but somewhat. An now for the excerpt:

The earth had stopped rumbling under foot for almost fifteen minutes. Cornelius Walborski lifted his head above the edge of the trench he was dug into and looked out over the smoke and dust filled terrain. No rumbling meant no kinetic weapons dropped for a while, no sympathetic tremors, no balls of fire reaching into the air.

“There they are,” came a voice over the com circuit.

Cornelius looked up to see a trio of assault shuttles moving across the sky. Shuttles of an alien design, still under the constraints of the laws of physics and aerodynamics. Cornelius felt the sick center of fear in his guts as he watched them heading for the main landing field in the city of Frederick, not twenty kilometers from his position. Fear for himself, having to face whatever those shuttles contained with outdated equipment. Fear for his wife and unborn child, hiding out in the shelter under his house. Shelter that seemed very inadequate while facing an invasion of who knew what.

An autocannon opened up nearby, its swift burping sound cutting through the air. A moment later a couple of missiles swooshed from the antiaircraft vehicle that was hidden from the eye. The missiles climbed toward the shuttles while the cannon continued to fire.

The shuttles juked and jinked in the sky. The missiles exploded as they ran into the defensive fire from the shuttles, the craft unloading a wave of spreading steel. Most of the cannon rounds also exploded in that field, though the explosions on the nose of the nearest aircraft showed that not all were intercepted. That shuttle nosed down, trailing smoke, to pull up at the last moment and slam in a skidding landing into the ground. The other two shuttles moved away, getting out of range of the antiaircraft vehicle.

A wooshing sound filled the air and that vehicle, well camouflaged as it was, exploded into an incandescent ball, targeted by the ships in orbit for a kinetic barrage. Cornelius ducked low, hoping that his position wouldn’t be next. They hadn’t given the enemy any reason to target them yet, but spotting them would be enough.

There was another bright flare. Walborski shielded his eyes as he stood up in the trench, looking for the source. A small hill a couple of kilometers away had shed some of its hardened foam covering, revealing the turret of a multi thousand ton mobile shore defense gun. A bright beam of light rose from the long laser barrel, highlighted through the dust and smoke. Twin barrels alongside the laser recoiled back at three second intervals, sending kinetic rounds at the target. Over the horizon another beam lanced into the sky, another unit of the mobile battery firing on the ships in orbit.

Something flashed in the sky. Cornelius looked up, his visor polarizing against the glare. Something had exploded well above the atmosphere, a bright pin point of light. Then came the dread wooshing sounds of kinetic projectiles, coming down on the now revealed battery. The private looked over at the closest gun, still blazing away with laser and rail guns. Something struck the earth nearby, sending up a cloud of dust as the earth rumbled underfoot. The four turrets of the close in defense system on the huge track opened up, each with several multiple barrel weapons putting up a cloud of metal, while metal storm barrels along the turret added their fire.

Several objects exploded above the track, maybe a kilometer high. As soon as they flashed smaller objects hit the turret and hull of the massive vehicle, pieces of the projectiles that had been shattered higher up. The turret clanged like a struck bell, but the weapons continued to track and fire into space. Hundreds of small particles raised spurts of dirt around the vehicle.

“I just wish they weren’t so close to us,” said Jacob Bennett, Walborski’s only friend in the platoon, standing next to him in the trench.

Walborski looked over and gave his friend a quick grin. “I agree. And you know another thing I wish?” His friend shook his head negative and Cornelius’ smile widened. “I wish we had a lot more of them.”

“Hell,” said Jacob. “I wish we had a battle fleet in system that could have kept these assholes away from us. That’s what I wish.”

Walborski nodded his head, then turned back to watch the slugging match between shore defenses and invading ships. A deafening blast filled the air, and a flash of fire followed by a mushroom cloud came over the horizon. They must have gotten one through, thought Walborski as he looked at where the other gun had been stationed. Beams of light came down on the nearest gun, splashing and widening as they hit the massive weapon’s electromag field. Another kinetic struck nearby, sending a mushroom into the air as the ground groaned underneath.

“Look at that,” yelled another squad member. Walborski looked up to see several distant objects smoking through the sky. They were coming down at an angle and looked to hit dozens of kilometers from where the militiamen covered, if not further.

“I guess that will teach them,” said one of the other men. A loud clanging sound brought them all back to reality, and Cornelius looked back at the nearest mobile gun. Something had struck the turret hard, and one of the kinetic cannon was out of action. The rest of the hill shook for a second, then crumbled as the huge vehicle pulled forward and started to move away. Its laser rotated down and it was obviously running for another position. Kinetic rounds continued to come down but were knocked from the sky by the vehicle’s defensive systems. The air shimmered over the mobile gun. Cornelius had talked with the crew of one of the machines, so he understood that the weapon was using most of its generated energy to produce a distortion field over it. One that the enemy would have trouble seeing through with visual, radar or any other spectrums. To them the gun would always appear to be shimmering from place to place, displacing by hundreds of meters, never giving a firm target. “What about a nuke or AM warhead,” he had asked the crew chief of that gun, while the smiling officer looked on. “I guess we’re fried then,” said the chief. “We can just hope they don’t think we’re worth the effort.” Obviously the enemy didn’t think they were worth the effort, or just weren’t thinking, because only kinetic rounds and light amp weapons continued to fall, and the vehicle lumbered away.

As soon as the mobile gun was over the horizon booming sounds started coming from the distant city. Walborski looked at his fellow troopers, then back at the city, where new clouds of smoke and dust were rising.

“It will be our turn soon,” he said to himself. “May heaven help us.”

* * *

“Crap,” yelled Captain Glen McKinnon, zooming in on the landing field with his suit systems. “As if we didn’t have enough problems.” A trio of large landing shuttles were on approach to the field, a strip near the edge of Frederick that was already swarming with Ca’cadasan troops, huge figures in battle armor that looked formidable as hell. Colonel Baggett had set him the mission of interdicting the shuttle field, but it didn’t look too promising with all those big bodies down there, some setting a perimeter to keep the field, others starting to form up and move off the tarmac and into the city. One of the shuttles slowed to a stop and lowered itself to the field. Moments later a vehicle began to disembark, something that looked much like a light tank. The other two came down on either side and started to disembark their own vehicles.

But then again that’s the enemy’s job, to make things difficult for us. I wonder why they tend to cluster so close together, thought the Captain, a plan coming to mind. He linked into the tactical net, looking at what assets were available. That looks like something I can use, he thought, sending his request up the line, then sending orders to his own company while waiting for acknowledgement. When it came the three shuttles had unloaded and were getting ready to take off, while another trio came through the clouds and started on their approach.

Approval came back from command, and McKinnon quickly set his plan in motion. Within moments the roar of incoming rounds filled the air, and the Imperial Marines moved forward.

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