What the Well-Dressed Future Warrior Will Wear
Hank Davis
I suspect that armor started out as clothing. Clothes could actually be thought of as armor against cold air and chilly, wet things falling from the sky, even against the cold, hard ground to sleep on. The sort of stuff to make an early European wonder why his ancestors ever left Africa.
Once someone decided that he needed that bearskin more than the previous occupant did, and was wrapped inside it, the next time he had a disagreement with a neighbor, leading to throwing rocks (it was the Stone Age, after all), the bearskin wearer might notice that a rock impacting on the bear skin didn’t hurt as much as one landing on bare skin, giving an extra added attraction to wearing the borrowed pelt.
(Do I deserve a point or two for not making puns about “bare skin” and “bear skin?” No? Or invoking an animal’s pelt, and being pelted with stones? No slack, eh? I see I have a tough audience.)
Of course, once that neighbor, or another more inventive one, realized that bear skins, or maybe a lot of skins taken from smaller, less contentious animals, made a defense against a hurtling rock, perhaps the result was a neolithic arms race, possibly with such stages as:
- Try throwing the rock harder.
- Add a second layer of bear skin, or even a third.
- Invent the sling.
- Try tying rocks together to go outside of the bearskin(s), or fight rocks with rocks . . .
- Invent the pointed stick . . .
- Try tying a pointed rock to the stick . . .
And I think I’ll sideline this thought experiment before we get to arrows, catapults, etc., on the offensive side, along with learning how to smelt metals (no puns on “smelt,” please note) and putting metal plates in place of those bearskins, and so on. For one thing, we’re leaping over centuries, if not millennia in a single bound and I don’t have a big red “S” on my shirt. Nor a lightning bolt.
Besides, I’m doing off-the-wall speculating here, without benefit of evidence, research, or expertise. At least it’s definite that eventually metal suits came along, getting so heavy that specially bred horses were needed to carry their wearers into battle, said battle being fought with swords and lances, which is to say, higher-tech descendants of the pointed stick.
(Of course, those knights in supposedly shining armor also used shields, but I think that shields may have originated back in Africa, invented by those with the sense not to leave the balmy climate.)
Then somebody had to go and invent gunpowder . . . Later-day warriors do have some armor, of course, such as bulletproof vests worn by police, the flak vests and steel helmets worn by twentieth-century soldiers, etc. But firearms have had the upper hand for a long time. Maybe it’s time for the pendulum to swing back. Suppose the armored warrior makes a comeback, encased in suits composed of all the latest advances in metallurgy, and maybe even plastics harder than steel. Put all sorts of electronics inside, too. Add a video screen in the helmet so the suit’s wearer can see if someone is coming up behind him. Build all the modern weapons into the suit. Make it like wearing a tank, but much smaller and more nimble.
It would still be heavy of course, probably even heavier than a medieval suit of armor. But if powerful miniaturized motors are also built into the suit, then the warrior’s own muscles are not the only things doing the lifting, walking, and even jumping. And maybe add booster rockets in case the soldier needs to jump from the top of one building to the top of another, for a better angle to launch a barrage of mini-missiles.
We’re in science fiction territory now, and it’s about time, too.
I’m not sure who first suggested such futuristic armor, either in speculative fact or fiction. Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers was a landmark, of course, but George H. Smith’s short story, “The Last Crusade,” which happens to be included in the pages which follow, was published in the magazine If in 1955, four years before the Heinlein novel was serialized in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1959 under the title “Starship Soldier”
(Heinlein’s preferred title, incidentally). Nonetheless, Heinlein’s novel, in spite of, or because of being very controversial at the time, which didn’t prevent it from winning a Hugo Award for best novel of the year, firmly established the powered armor concept in the minds of science fiction readers and writers, possibly including Stan Lee of Marvel Comics, who introduced Iron Man a few years later, but certainly in the case of Joe Haldeman, who published his novelette, “Hero” (also included in the pages which follow), in 1973 in Analog, making brilliant use of the powered armor concept. “Hero” was the first of a series of stories which eventually became the novel, The Forever War, and the book won the Hugo and Nebula Awards.
I can’t read the minds of authors (particularly authors no longer with us—where did I put that Ouija board?), but there are a number of stories which I suspect would not exist in a parallel universe lacking the examples of the Heinlein and Haldeman novels. And David Afsharirad and I have recruited a platoon of the best such future troopers in this book.
I hope I’ve made it clear how indebted this book is to the Heinlein and Haldeman novels, but there’s an intervening ancestor: Body Armor 2000, a 1986 anthology edited by Joe Haldeman (that guy does get around), Martin Harry Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh, and published by Ace Books. The connection began when intrepid science fiction reader Michael Figueroa wrote to Baen editor Tony Daniel, praising the book and suggesting that Baen reprint it. Tony passed the request on to publisher Toni Weisskopf, who liked the idea and turned it over to David Afsharirad and yr. humble but crotchety editor. The latter quality went into gear when I noted that the book had three very good stories, by David Drake, Robert Sheckley, and Gordon R. Dickson, that I nonetheless preferred not to reprint because I had already reprinted them in previous Baen anthologies (for example, the David Drake story was in Worst Contact). Another crotchet was that after reading the stories in the Ace anthology (listening to them, actually—I’m legally blind), I thought some of the stories didn’t actually fit the theme and preferred not to reprint those.
And, with great regret, C.J. Cherryh’s “The Scapegoat” was a novella, and would have made the book too long.
But we have carried over from the 1986 anthology veteran stories by Joe Haldeman (where have I heard that name before?), Harry Harrison, George H. Smith, and Larry S. Todd, and we’ve added new recruits to the powered armor platoon with Christopher Ruocchio, Allen M. Steele, Quincey J. Allen, Karin Lowachee, and more. Readers who already have the Ace anthology on their bookshelves will find much that is new here, not to mention stories well worth rereading. And readers who come to these stories for the first time will definitely get their money’s worth. We’ve tried for a wide range of viewpoints. While I (Hank) don’t subscribe to the currently fashionable notion that all war is futile, readers with that mental bent will find stories exemplifying it here. Readers looking for heroism in combat will find that here, as well. Your editors (even the crotchety one) hope you’ll enjoy the book, and also hope that these stories are as close as our readers come to actual war, futuristically attired or not. We don’t want to lose any customers.
—Hank Davis
March 2024
The mission was supposed to be a routine cleanup operation, to wipe out a nest of rogue self-replicating robots, which was why the team leader with years of combat experience was only along as a liaison with the native population. Anyway, these robot infestations always followed the same game plan, making them easy to obliterate—except that this time nobody had told the killer robots about that part.
Heuristic Algorithm and Reasoning Response Engine
Ethan Skarstedt & Brandon Sanderson
A lone dropship passed across the face of Milacria’s gibbous bulk, a pinhead orbiting a beachball. From its launch portals streamed a hundred black motes—each one a mechanized infantry unit clinging tightly to the underside of its air support craft, whose broad armored back served as a heatshield. They torched down through the hazy cloud-speckled atmosphere in precise formation, trailing thick ropes of smoke and steam, a forest of uncertain fingers pointing back up to the ship, the MarsFree.
Within his mech’s cockpit on the western edge of the formation, Karith Marvudi hunkered in a loose cocoon of straps. He caught himself watching the grip indicators. If those failed, his mech would come unhooked from the underside of Nicolette’s airship. He’d burn in from too high and Nicolette’s agile but flimsy airship—deprived of the thickly armored protection of his five-meter-tall mech—would tear apart and burn up in the atmosphere.
He stretched, spread-eagled, suspended by the feedback straps. His fingers and toes just brushed the edges of his movement space within the torso cavity. Perfect. The faint scent of his own body, mingled with that of plastic, electronics, and faux leather, swirled in the canned air.
He was surprised at the trepidation he felt. He felt a certain amount of fear every time he dropped, but this time was different. This was like . . . No, not as bad as his first drop. Maybe his fifth or sixth. He hadn’t felt this jittery in more than two hundred planetfalls.
He wondered if Nicolette felt the same way.
He pushed at the fear, shoving it down where it could be ignored. It pushed back. Maragette’s face flashed into his mind, smiling next to the squinting white bundle they’d named Karri, after her grandmother.
“You about ready to shunt some of that heat up to me, Karith?” Nicolette’s voice was as buttery as ever, not a hint of tension.
“Maybe if you ask me politely.” Karith overrode the mic on the common circuit. “Harry, we about full?”
The baritone voice of his mech’s AI filled the cabin. “Ninety-three point seven percent, sir. Shall I route fifty percent of the sink product to Captain Shepard’s power banks?”
“Make it seventy-five; Nic needs it. Show me what it looks like out there: focus on the D-Z.”
Nic’s voice came again from the cockpit speakers. “Politely? Oh, it’s manners you want now, is it? We’ll see how you like it when all my lasers can deal out is a bit of a sunburn. I—Ah, there we are.” She had seen the power surging into her ship. Her voice changed to a purr. “Karith, you shouldn’t have.”
Karith let out a loud patient sigh over the mic. She giggled.
HARRE said on the private circuit, “Is Captain Shepard displeased, sir?”
“Nope. That’s sarcasm, Harry.”
“Noted. I must point out, sir, doctrine states that the mechanized infantry unit in an entry pair has priority on power collection.”
“It does say that, doesn’t it.” Karith frowned at the 3D representation of the area around his drop zone that HARRE was feeding into his HUD.
Nicolette’s voice slipped into the cockpit again. “I can’t believe I let you and Maragette talk me into transferring out of RGK with you. I’m about ready to fall asleep up here with no anti-air fire.”
HARRE spoke, his deep voice mechanically precise. “Captain Shepard, had the Self-Replicating Machine Infestation evolved to a stage with anti-aircraft weaponry on this planet, your former comrades in the Recon Group Kinetique would have been inserted, not a line infantry unit with you for advisors.”
Silence filled the circuits for a moment, until Karith chuckled. “That’s right, HARRE, Captain Shepard has obviously forgotten . . .”
“Well, well, don’t we have a fine grasp of the obvious,” Nicolette interrupted, voice dripping honeyed acid. “I don’t remember him talking this much, Karith. You screw up his settings?”
“No. He lost a lot in the reset.”
“Hmmph. I suppose I owe him some slack since he was wounded.”
“Especially since we
were saving your ass, Nic.”
“That was a hairy mess, wasn’t it?” Somehow she managed to convey the impression that she was shivering over the audio circuit.
Karith grunted in acknowledgment, brow furrowing as he zoomed in on an area of ground to the northwest of the drop zone. “HARRE, can we get any better resolution on this area?”
“We have not yet launched sensor drones, sir.”
Karith nodded. “Right, right. Countdown?”
“We separate from Captain Shepard in fourteen minutes fifty-one point seven seconds, sir.”
“You can start inflation any time now, Nic.”
“You think?” She hmmphed at him again over the audio circuit.
Moments later he felt the first gut-churning rumble, press, and drop as Nicolette deployed her inflation scoops. They used the howling wind and heat to fill the first few hundred lift-body spheres with superheated air.
Karith ignored the creeping feeling of unease. He’d land in the mouth of an east–west running valley on the western edge of a big Panesthian city, name unpronounceable. It, in turn, sat in a bigger north–south valley.
The D-Z’s valley carved through the mountains to the west and opened out onto a plain overlaid with red haze. The main boiler infestation, a plague of self-replicating machines. A cluster of the simplest and sturdiest of them had likely arrived in a lump of meteor and been bootstrapping themselves ever since. He circled several map-areas at that end of the valley, highlighting them in pale yellow. “Harry, what’s the uncertainty over here?”
“Sir, from the limited data I can collect with the range-finding lasers, those areas differ from the historical models by just over the margin of error given the current level of interference.”
“That’s a little strange. The model’s only a month old. You suppose the Panesthians have been doing some remodeling out there, maybe defensive works? It’s right on the edge of the boiler’s zone.”
Silence.
“That last bit wasn’t me talking to myself, Harry. It was for you.”
“Noted. Unknown, sir. I have no information on any Panesthian earth-moving operations of that scale. I have very little data on their construction projects at all, sir.”
“You can call me Karith if you want, Harry.”
“Yes, sir.”
Karith chuckled. He zoomed out and slewed the view over past the yellow end of the valley and beyond, into the red zone on the plains where the boilers were building their industrial compounds. “That’s a pretty big infestation for stage seventeen.”
“Agreed, sir, but it is within parameters. I note the stage fifteen on Brindle Eight, the stage sixteen on—”
“Right.”
The boilers were mostly predictable. Stage of development followed stage of development like clockwork. Small simple foragers like four-legged
crabs running on springs. Steam-powered crawlers and cutters. Hydrocarbon-burning, motor-driven mechanicals bent on mining and refining. All the way up to nuclear spiders, tanks, and aerials. There was always some variation, of course, in response to environmental factors, but the basics stayed the same. His eyes flicked to the grip readouts. They were solid.
“Hey, Nic.”
“Wait one.”
He slammed hard against his restraints again and his stomach floated up into the back of his throat. Moments later, he settled back into the webbing. That would be the second-stage inflation scoops. Outside, hundreds more of the little spheres were lining up to get inflated with superheated air and then roll away on smart velcro into the thick braking ribbons trailing behind Nicolette. The surface of Milacria stopped sliding away to the right and resumed its steady flow beneath them.
He heard a touch of strain in his own voice when he said, “You feeling this, Nic?”
“Yeah, I felt that.”
“No, I mean, I feel like a green kid. Butterflies in the guts and everything.”
“You do?” Her tone was faintly incredulous, and he could hear laughter behind it.
“I’m going to regret telling you, aren’t I?”
“After twelve years in RGK, you’ve got drop jitters? You can’t be serious.”
“It’s no big deal.”
“Wait until I tell Jarko. You transfer to advisory to keep yourself safe for your wife and baby, and the first drop where you’re not getting shot at, you get a case of the shakes?” She laughed again. “You want a tranq?”
“Oh, shut up.”
Her giggle filled the cabin.
Karith hissed and then stabbed the button that would connect him with Major Kewlett, the commander of the mech-infantry unit dropping with them.
“Major, how goes the drop?”
The major was chewing something. “Fine, fine. Nobody’s let go of their airship yet anyway. What about you? Must be old hat, eh? You on track to meet up with the indig?”
“Yes indeed, sir.” As a member of the Advisory Corps now it was his job to be the liaison between the major and the locals.
“Good to hear. Luck. Out.” The connection clicked off.
“Sir,” HARRE said, “the Panesthians are trying to raise you on the beacon channel.”
“Put ’em through, Harry.”
The soft hiss of a long-range transmission filled the cabin, and a rectangular hole opened in Karith’s HUD. The image solidified and filled with a nightmarish mandibled visage. Karith was struck again by how much Panesthians looked like big cockroaches—big enough to eat your head. Fortunately, there had been a few Panesthians in RGK, and he’d gotten used to them.
This one hissed and clacked at him, its mouthparts writhing. It took a moment before he
was able to parse the heavily accented Spranto. “Greetings, Sir Marvudi. We await your arrival with great awaitingness.” As it talked, there was close movement in the background, other Panesthians crawling back and forth over its back.
“Thank you. You are?”
The Panesthian buzzed for a moment. “My apologies, Sir Marvudi. My name is ‘hzzzclackyow.’ The humans at the embassy speak to me as ‘Yow,’ and as a male.” He buzzed again, wingcases opening slightly, disrupting the footing of a passing Panesthian, which slid forward over Yow’s head. Yow used his forelegs, triple claws pinching, to move the other along before crawling closer to the camera lens. “I wish to confirm, Sir Marvudi, that your dropping is indeed on these coordinates?” Yow did something offscreen, and coordinates appeared in Karith’s HUD next to the visual.
HARRE spoke up, “Confirmed.”
“Wellness!” Yow replied. “I will come up to meet you in how many minutes . . . ?”
“Harry?” Karith asked.
“Approximately twelve minutes, sir.”
Yow’s antennae waved. “I hurry. Few of my nestmates speak Spranto. Your class awaits on the surface already, Captain. I will join them. Drop with great trepidating!” The image went dark and blinked away.
Nicolette’s awed voice came over the audio circuit, “Holy shit,” at the same time the alarms started.
Red warning icons began to populate Karith’s HUD.
“Incoming, sir,” HARRE said calmly. “Brace for maneuvering.”
“Damn it!” Nicolette swore. “There wasn’t supposed to be . . .” She trailed off and Karith’s restraints cinched up tight as they accelerated, swerved, and side-slipped all at once.
“Outside view, Harry!” Karith shouted. His cockpit blinked away and he was speeding through the middle reaches of Milacria’s atmosphere, high above the mottled green-and-yellow landscape. Something dark flashed past him, its red glowing backtrail leading to a computed point-of-origin deep in the red boiler haze. His computers held the view steady, but his body felt the chaotic maneuvers Nicolette was putting them through.
They were losing altitude faster than they’d planned. Below, the Panesthian city streaked by. It looked like a pile of dusty intestines. The surreal look of the place held his attention for a moment even as Nicolette tried to make him lose his lunch. The Panesthian burrow-buildings wormed over and around each other in a great heap, spreading out into the surrounding countryside like the roots of a tree, giving way to cultivated land.
“Holy Moses, Harry, is that correct?” He jabbed a finger at the icon for the MarsFree. It was black.
“Yes, sir. The MarsFree is no longer in communication. Presumed destroyed.”
He goggled. “By what?”
“The first salvo of hyperkinetic rounds was largely ineffective against the mech-infantry drop formation, sir. It was likely not intended for them or us.”
Black puffs began to blossom in the air near and far, all at about the same altitude. Anti-air, targeting the droptroops.
“Sir, I recommend a redirect to the company headquarters area—”
Karith cut him off. “Overlay unit locations and status.” HARRE went silent and complied. Karith clenched his fists. The fear had teeth now. Aborting to a nice, well-defended company headquarters appealed to the monkey part of his brain, but he was supposed to embed with that Panesthian unit. That was the whole point of his being here.
Behind him, the sky started filling with icons for the infantry unit he was inserting with, each one a mech shielding its airship from the violence of entry. He and Nic had preceded them out of the ship. Close to a hundred icons filled the sky. Additional icons over the horizon showed HARRE’s best guess at the location of enemy weapon emplacements.
He glanced back. Well over a third of the infantry icons were already flashing or black. So many casualties. A hypervelocity round could go right through a mech and its airship.
Explosion after explosion rocked them, black smoke obscuring his view time and again as Nicolette jinked them through the kind of evasive maneuverings that had made her famous in the RGK. The kind of maneuvers that had kept them both alive through a hundred hot drops.
“Karith,” she said, strained, “you need to make the call right now. I can still get you to that D-Z if you want, but I’m with Harry about redirecting to the company area. I think the embedding gig is out the window.”
“Sir,” HARRE said, “doctrine clearly indicates that when encountering a superior force, retreat and regroup is the—”
Karith gritted his teeth. “Can’t do it. Are you seeing this, Nic?”
“Yeah. Thirty percent casualties. Damn. They shouldn’t have hyperkinetic weapons yet.”
Karith growled. The boilers didn’t usually develop hyperkinetics until stage thirty, usually a good two years after stage seventeen. It was extremely dangerous to drop this close to a boiler complex at that stage of development, even for RGK troops.
These infantry were just troops of the line. Most of their missions were holding and clearing actions against early-catch boiler infestations, not assault strikes against advanced strongholds, which was what this was feeling more like every second.
HARRE’s count of casualty icons ticked up on the overlay to seventy-eight. ...
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