work and enjoy whatever time he had left?
His com buzzed.
“Yes.”
“General Hadden on one.”
Of course. “I got it.”
He reached for the receiver. This would be a fun conversation.
Retirement sounded better all the time. . . .
7
General Abe Kent had something he wanted to show to Thorn.
They met at the quartermaster’s warehouse, a nice brisk ten-minute walk from Thorn’s office. The pair of armed guards didn’t salute, but they weren’t supposed to—they needed to be able to open up with the subguns they held at a moment’s notice if somebody who didn’t belong here somehow showed up.
He saw Kent coming across the concrete, not quite a march, but more than a stroll.
“Abe,” Thorn said.
“Sir. Right this way.” General Kent nodded at the two guards.
“What am I going to look at?”
“A SWORD fighter,” Kent said.
Thorn blinked. He thought he knew about such things, but certainly there weren’t actually guys in the military these days who still used swords. . . .
“Excuse me?” he said, frowning. “Did you say ‘sword fighter’?”
“S-W-O-R-D,” Kent said. “Stands for ‘Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems.’ ”
Thorn smiled. “I see. The military sure does love those acronyms, don’t they?”
“Yes, sir, they surely do.”
“You don’t need to ‘sir’ me, Abe.”
“That’s not what I hear,
Thorn shook his head. “Hasn’t happened yet. What is it, the SWORD?”
Kent led him to a cleared-out spot in the warehouse. Except for what was parked in the middle of the space.
“What on earth—?”
Kent said, “Basically, sir, it’s a robot. About a meter high, rides on tracks, like tank treads—even looks kind of like a stripped-down tank, doesn’t it? This model weighs about fifty kilos, runs on lithium-ion batteries. It has a working range of a thousand meters, can go about thirty-five klicks on a charge, or sit parked and watching for four or five hours before the battery runs down, and you can swap that out in a couple minutes. What you have is four cameras—a wide-angle and zoom facing front, one facing to the rear, and one lined up as a gunsight. Mounts an M240 light machine gun, the ammo belt rides in a can, holds about three hundred rounds.”
Thorn stared at the device. It looked deadly just parked there.
“You need more punch, you can get one that comes with an M202-A1 6mm rocket launcher.”
Thorn glanced at Kent, then back at the SWORD device.
“SWORD is radio-controlled,” Kent continued. “Take some kid who grew up playing with a Gameboy or Xbox, put him in a VR helmet. He holds a controller, and it’s just like playing a video game. He can roll it down a street, look this way and that, and engage enemy targets from inside a protected location up to a kilometer away.”
Thorn shook his head, unsure whether he was impressed or simply depressed. “And what does this toy cost?”
“Starts out just over a quarter million, runs to three hundred fifty, four hundred thousand, depending on the bells and whistles. There’s one with an ordnance sniffer good to a few parts per million—it’ll nose out an ammo dump a walking soldier might miss. Or you can get one with a chemical/radiation detector. There’s another one with a flamethrower—you park it, a little tube comes up and spins around spewing fire in a complete circle—covers three-sixty for fifty meters. Pretty good for stopping a major shooting riot in its tracks. For less-lethal encounters, there’s a model that will spew gas the same way—tear, pepper, puke, whatever, and it comes with an extra battery that charges a capacitor which gives anybody foolish enough to lay bare hands on it about ninety thousand volts of low-amperage charge that will knock them onto their ass in a hurry.”
“Nice.”
“Yep. They started rolling them out in Second Iraq, Stryker Brigade. They were an outgrowth of the bomb- defusing Talon robots built by Foster-Miller, up in Massachusetts. Somebody said, ‘Well, if we can defuse a bomb, why can’t we put a gun on it?’ So they did.”
Thorn shook his head again. He was pretty sure he wasn’t impressed after all. “Sounds like some kind of science-fiction movie.”
“It does, doesn’t it? There were some worries about it at first. What if the bad guys got the radio codes and turned them on our people? They use coded, random-shifting opchans, so that hasn’t happened, and isn’t likely to anytime soon.”
“They durable?”
“Better than a GI in body armor. New ones use ceramic plate and cloned spider-silk weave. A lucky shot might take out a camera, but it’ll resist small-arms fire fairly well otherwise.”
“I bet the first enemy combatant to see one of these coming must have needed to change his pants.”
“I expect so. Probably didn’t get a chance to do that. Some of the kids running the gear can drive tacks with the guns. If they can see it, they can hit it. There are several hundred of the things on active duty, and another hundred on order.”
“So how did we get one?”
“Courtesy of retired Captain Julio Fernandez.”
Thorn smiled.
“Best scrounger I ever saw,” Kent said.
“He’s still working with John Howard, isn’t he?”
“Yes, sir. Man can get blood out of a stone. I don’t know how he managed it, but it wound up costing us some equipment we aren’t using and about twenty thousand dollars.”
“The question is, General, what are we going to do with it?”
Kent shrugged. “I don’t know for certain, sir, but it’s better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. Worse comes to worst, we can sell it to the Army and make a profit.”
“I suppose,” Thorn said.
“That concludes our inspection tour, sir.”
Thorn nodded. “What are you up to these day, Abe? Other than collecting props from old Schwarzenegger movies?” For a while, Kent had been showing Thorn how to use a
“Learning how to play the guitar,” Kent said.
“Really?”
“I . . . inherited one, as you probably recall.”
Thorn remembered. The Georgian hit man, what was his name? Natadze?
“How is it going?”
“Slowly. Very slowly. But I have a good teacher. She’s very patient.”
Thorn thought he caught something in Kent’s voice when he mentioned the guitar teacher, but he didn’t
