This novel is for two editors: John W. Campbell, who rejected a story because he thought it was absurd to write about American women who fight and die in combat, and Ben Bova, who didn’t.
“Man was born into barbarism, when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence. He became endowed with a conscience. And he has now reached the day when violence toward another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another’s flesh.”
—MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
Caveat lector: This book is not a continuation of my 1975 novel The Forever War. From the author’s point of view it is a kind of sequel, though, examining some of that novel’s problems from an angle that didn’t exist twenty years ago.
it was not quite completely dark, thin blue moonlight threading down through the canopy of leaves. And it was never completely quiet.
A thick twig popped, the noise muffled under a heavy mass. A male howler monkey came out of his drowse and looked down. Something moved down there, black on black. He filled his lungs to challenge it.
There was a sound like a piece of newspaper being torn. The monkey’s midsection disappeared in a dark spray of blood and shredded organs. The body fell heavily through the branches in two halves.
Would you lay off the goddamn monkeys? Shut up! This place is an ecological preserve. My watch, shut up. Target practice.
Black on black it paused, then slipped through the jungle like a heavy silent reptile. A man could be standing two yards away and not see it. In infrared it wasn’t there. Radar would slither off its skin.
It smelled human flesh and stopped. The prey maybe thirty meters upwind, a male, rank with old sweat, garlic on his breath. Smell of gun oil and smokeless powder residue. It tested the direction of the wind and backtracked, circled around. The man would be watching the path. So come in from the woods.
It grabbed the man’s neck from behind and pulled his head off like an old blossom. The body shuddered and gurgled and crapped. It eased the body down to the ground and set the head between its legs.
Nice touch. Thanks.
It picked up the man’s rifle and bent the barrel into a right angle. It lay the weapon down quietly and stood silent for several minutes.
Then three other shadows came from the woods, and they all converged on a small wooden hut. The walls were beaten-down aluminum cans nailed to planks; the roof was cheap glued plastic.
It pulled the door off and an irrelevant alarm sounded as it switched on a headlight brighter than the sun. Six people on cots, recoiling.
“—Do not resist,” it boomed in Spanish. “—You are prisoners of war and will be treated according to the terms of the Geneva Convention.”
“Mierda.” A man scooped up a shaped charge and threw it at the light. The tearing-paper sound was softer than the sound of the man’s body bursting. A split second later, it swatted the bomb like an insect and the explosion blew down the front wall of the building and flattened all the occupants with concussion.
The black figure considered its left hand. Only the thumb and first finger worked, and the wrist made a noise when it rotated.
Good reflexes. Oh, shut up.
The other three shapes turned on sunlights and pulled off the building’s roof and knocked down the remaining walls.
The people inside looked dead, bloody and still. The machines began to check them, though, and a young woman suddenly rolled over and raised the laser rifle she’d been concealing. She aimed it at the one with the broken hand and did manage to raise a puff of smoke from its chest before she was shredded.
The one checking the bodies hadn’t even looked up. “No good,” it said. “All dead. No tunnels. No exotic weapons I can find.”
“Well, we got some stuff for Unit Eight.” They turned off their lights and sped off simultaneously, in four different directions.
The one with the bad hand moved about a quarter-mile and stopped to inspect the damage with a dim infrared light. It beat the hand against its side a few times. Still, only the two digits worked.
Wonderful. We’ll have to bring it in.
So what would you have done?
Who’s complaining? I’ll spend part of my ten in base camp.
The four of them took four different routes to the top of a treeless hill. They stood in a row for a few seconds, arms upraised, and a cargo helicopter came in at treetop level