This is the twelfth installment of an exploration of some
of the possible futures discussed on this blog, using the toolkit of narrative
fiction. Our narrator attends the Lakeland Republic's annual drone shoot, and finds out that not all technological innovations start out from the current state of the art...
The Frankens had their maser broken down and loaded on the cart, and they were hauling it away, still deep in conversation with Berconi. Lopez headed back our way, while a bunch of soldiers hauled something that looked like a hand-cranked Gatling gun out onto the grass. “Come on,” Pappas said then. “Unless you want to see more here, of course. The expert competition ought to start pretty soon.”
***********
A rooster yelling at the top of its lungs woke me before
dawn the next morning. It didn’t seem likely to shut up any time soon, and I doubted the
New Shakers would be happy if I threw things at their livestock, so I got up
instead. I rang the bell as I’d been told, and a couple of minutes later, a
quiet knock on the door announced the arrival of a middle-aged woman with two
pitchers and a bowl. I took them and thanked her; she smiled and curtseyed, and
headed off to somewhere else.
I started washing up, and only then realized two things. The
first was that there weren’t any outlets for electricity in the room; the
second was that the only thing I had to shave with was an electric shaver. I
finished washing and got dressed, hoping a day’s growth of beard wouldn’t be a
faux pas by Lakeland standards. Maybe half an hour later, I was sitting behind
Colonel Pappas in the jeep as it rattled over a dirt road on its way to the
Lakeland Republic’s annual drone shoot.
“How much do you know about modern drones?” Pappas had asked
me the night before; when I admitted my ignorance, he laughed. “Fair enough.
You start talking about drones, a lot of people think of the old first and
second generation machines, the ones that used to launch rockets from a mile or
so in the air. Those haven’t been in frontline service since the ‘thirties—ever
hear of the battle of Mosul?”
I tried to remember. “That was in the second Kurdistan war,
wasn’t it?”
“Bingo. Both sides had drones, but the Kurds figured out
that you can target them with old-fashioned antiaircraft guns, got a bunch of
those in place without anybody being the wiser, and took out most of the
Turkish drone force in an afternoon. After that, you had militaries all over
the place figuring out ways to target drones, and that’s when the sort of
drones you see these days started popping up on the drawing boards—observation
drones way up where artillery can’t hit them, and attack drones flying at
treetop level where they can hide from radar. Of course then they’ve got other
vulnerabilities.”
“Can’t they simply reprogram their attack drones to fly high
if they’re going to attack you?”
“Sure.” He grinned. “We’ve got plenty of old-fashioned
antiaircraft guns, too.”
So there I was, jolting along a rough road with brown fields
of stubble to the left and a line of trees to the right, and a moving dot up
above the trees caught my eye. I turned to look; Pappas saw me move, turned in
his seat, and handed me a pair of binoculars. Despite the joggling of the jeep,
I managed to get the thing in focus: a lean angular shape with broad straight
wings, flying low and fast.
As I watched, shards suddenly flew up from the middle of one
wing. A moment later the outer half of the wing tumbled one way and the rest of
the drone tumbled the other. I managed to follow it most of the way to the
trees, then handed the binoculars back to Pappas.
“Wing hit?” he asked, pitching his voice to be heard above
the jeep’s engine. I nodded. “That’s the easy one,” he went on. “Good shots aim
for the engine or the fuel tank.”
A quarter mile or so on, as another drone came into sight,
the road veered suddenly to the right, ducked through the trees, and stopped in
an impromptu parking lot where jeeps were more or less lined up. Just past the
parking lots was a cluster of olive-drab tents, and past those a fair-sized
crowd. Off to the left, though, a bunch of horses were munching grass in a
fenced-off field, and as I watched, a dozen or so people in Lakeland Army
uniforms rode up on horses, dismounted, and led the animals into the field.
The jeep rolled to a halt. “What’s with that?” I asked
Pappas. “Cavalry in this day and age?”
“Nah, dragoons.” He figured out from my face that I didn’t
know the word, and went on: “Mounted infantry—they ride to the battlefield and
then dismount to fight. Most countries had ‘em until the end of the nineteenth
century, and we tried ‘em out in the war of ‘49 with good results. Transport’s
a lot less difficult on the logistical end of things if the only fuel you need
is hay.”
I got out of the jeep. Pappas hauled himself into his
wheelchair, then handed me a pair of earplugs. “You’ll need these,” he said.
“Drone rifles use .50 caliber ammo, and that isn’t easy on the ears.”
We wove our way through the tents, through the crowd, and
out to the places where the guns were firing. There were maybe two dozen of
them in a big arc, each with twenty or so stations for shooters, though things
were just getting under way and most of the stations didn’t have anyone at them
yet. “Those are first timers doing their qualifying rounds,” Pappas said,
pointing to one set of stations filling up quicker than the others; the
earplugs muffled his voice but I could still hear him. “Over here, the expert
marksmen—you’ll see some of the best shots in the Republic here today. Check
this one out.”
“This one” was a short middle-aged woman in jeans and a
buffalo plaid wool shirt, cradling a rifle that must have been as long as she
was tall. Past her, I could see a dot against the morning sky. She lined up the
shot with practiced ease. Even through the earplugs, the crack of the rifle was
loud enough to sting.
A moment later, off in the distance, the dot vanished in a
little red-orange flash.
“Sweet,” Pappas said. “Right in the fuel tank. That’s Maude
Duesenberg—I honestly don’t remember how many drone shoot trophies she’s got on
her mantle, but it’s got to be getting crowded.”
“Where do you get all the drones?” I asked him.
“Oh, most of ‘em we make ourselves. Expert class and proof-of-concept
shooters get real drones—we buy them through traders in Chicago. You probably
don’t want to know how many officers in how many countries sell us a drone or
two every year, list ‘em as crashed, and pocket the proceeds.”
I knew enough about the military back home to guess that the
Atlantic Republic was on that list. Still, something else had sparked my
curiosity. “What’s proof of concept shooting?”
“New or revived technologies. They’re over on this
side—let’s check ‘em out.”
Instead of the shooter’s stations elsewhere on the arc, the
place for proof-of-concept shooters was an open patch of mostly flattened grass
with a long straight view ahead of it. There wasn’t much of a crowd there, just
a couple of officers in the ubiquitous Lakeland trench coats, and several dozen
kids watching with hopeful looks on their faces. Out on the grass were maybe
twenty soldiers who looked even scruffier than I felt, manhandling what looked
like a cannon on an oddly shaped mount.
“Oh my God,” Pappas said. “I know these guys—the 34th
Infantry from Covington. I wonder what they’re up to; that can’t be an ordinary
howitzer.”
I gave him a startled look. One of the officers standing
there laughed, and said, “Good morning, sir. Yeah, Carlos and I have been
wondering about that since they started setting the thing up.”
Introductions followed; Michael Berconi and Carlos Lopez
Ruiz were captains in the Lakeland Army, down from Toledo to watch the
proof-of-concept tests. “You probably don’t know about the 34th,” Lopez said to
me. “They’re a bunch of maniacs. Every year they come up with some new stunt.”
“That’s for sure,” said Berconi. “You should have been here
last year. We were standing here, and all of a sudden a bright red triplane—you
know, like the Red Baron’s plane—comes over the trees there and starts jumping
drones from above. I heard later they spent two years building the damn thing.”
“I’m surprised the drones didn’t dodge it,” I said.
“They couldn’t see it,” Pappas told me. “Military frequency
radar won’t see wood and fabric, and military drones only have video looking
forward and down—though I understand that’s being changed. You’re not the only
visitor from outside at these events.” He grinned, though there was an edge to
it. “Though most of the others don’t announce themselves.”
The soldiers out on the open grass had finished setting up
their cannon, and one of them spread his arms in what was pretty obviously a
signal. “Here goes,” Pappas said. “You may want to put your hands over your
ears; a 75-mm howitzer makes more noise than your earplugs’ll handle.”
I covered my ears. Off in the distance, a dot rose up into
the air and came toward us in a zigzag pattern. About the time it got close
enough that I could see more of it than a dot, the cannon went off, and Pappas
wasn’t kidding; even with my hands over my ears, it packed a wallop. Something
blurred the air downrange from where we stood; an instant passed, and then the
drone shattered as though it had slammed into an unseen wall. The watching kids
whooped; so did the soldiers, and then reloaded.
“What the ringtailed rambling—” Pappas began to say, then
covered his ears; he’d spotted the next drone a moment after I had. The same
process repeated, except that the second drone only lost half of one wing; that
was enough to send it tumbling down onto the range, but the chief of the gun
crew regaled the others with a string of profanity that would have gotten a
standing ovation from Marines. Then it was hands-over-ears time; they let the
final drone get good and close before firing, and so I got a fine view as
something slammed into it and sent the fragments tumbling down to the grass below.
Before the soldiers had finished whooping Pappas wheeled out
toward them, shouting, “What the hell are you maniacs putting in that
thing?” He was apparently no stranger to the 34th Infantry; they greeted him
with sloppy salutes and big grins, and the crew chief and one of the others
stood talking with him while the others started breaking the cannon down for transport.
A woman’s voice sounded behind me: “Excuse me, is this the place for
proof-of-concept tests?”
I turned around. She was a twenty-something blonde in a big
brown barn coat. “Yes,” I said. “They’re just packing up from the last test.”
“Oh, good.” She turned and waved, and someone hauling a cart
with two bicycle wheels came out of the crowd. He turned out to be a young man
of about the same age, in a fedora and trench coat that had seen quite a bit of
hard wear; one of his shoulders was noticeably higher than the other.
“Are you with the soldiers?” she asked me.
“No, just visiting. I’m Peter Carr.”
“I’m Emily Franken, and this is my husband Jim.” Hands got
shaken all around. The cart was full of what looked like antique radio gear—a
couple of big metal boxes with dials, switches, and gauges all over the front,
and something that I swear looked like a death-ray gun from some old skiffy
vid. The kids craned their necks to look at it all, but had the common sense
not to touch anything.
“Should I ask about that?” I motioned to the contents of the
cart.
“Sure,” she replied. “It’s a maser—a microwave laser. It’s
old tech—they made them in the 1950s, but nobody could figure out how to get
real power out of them.” In response to my look of surprise: “There’s a lot of things like
that—interesting bits of technology nobody followed up on.”
“What Emily’s not saying,” Jim interjected, “is that she
spent two years studying quantum mechanics to find something that would mase
steadily at room temperature, and published a couple of papers that are going to turn three or four branches of
physics on their heads.”
“Oh, stop it,” she said, blushing.
“Not a chance. When we were in engineering school, Mr. Carr,
Emily was the only person in class who came up with anything really interesting
for me to build.”
“And Jim was the only one in the class who could build the
things I needed for my projects—so of course we got married right after
graduation.” Laughing: “When he proposed, he said I had to marry him so I’d
almost have the right last name to be a mad scientist, and a hunchbacked lab
assistant too.”
He grinned, pushed his raised shoulder up further, and gave
me a bug-eyed look. I laughed.
Out on the grass, the soldiers had the cannon and mount set
up for transport, and hauled it back toward the parking lot and the jeeps. I
wished the Frankens good luck, and they hauled the cart of electronic gear out
onto the field. They passed Pappas as he came wheeling back, shaking his head.
“Even for the 34th, that’s pretty good,” he said when he
reached me and the two captains. “You know what they were shooting? Canister shot.”
Lopez and I looked blank, but Berconi let out a startled
laugh. “Seriously?”
“God’s honest truth.” To the rest of us: “It’s something artillery used to use back in
the Civil War and before—basically, the world’s biggest shotgun shell, with
pellets half an inch across.” With a motion of his head in the direction of the
Frankens, who were busy setting up their gear: “What’s that all about?”
“Some kind of twentieth century microwave laser,” I said.
Pappas gave me a startled look, then turned to Berconi.
“What’s on their schedule?”
“Standard three trials—well, but they’ve requested one with
live ordnance.”
Pappas let out a long whistle. “This could get colorful.”
Out on the grass, the two had finished setting up their
gear: a row of batteries, the two boxes, the death-ray-thing on a tripod, and
cables connecting them. Emily Franken signaled that they were ready, and then
got behind the ray-thing and aimed it downrange while her husband hunched over
the two boxes and fiddled with the dials. The first drone appeared in the
distance. I’m not sure what I was expecting—flashes and bangs, a beam of light,
or what have you—but all that happened was that the drone suddenly dropped out
of the air as though the Frankens had flipped the off switch at a distance.
A second drone met the same fate a few minutes later. “The
third—” Pappas said.
“That’ll be the one with heat on board,” Berconi told him.
By the time the third drone went up people were beginning to
drift over to the proof-of-concept range, wondering what was going on. As it
came close enough to be more than a distant dot, I could see two missiles under
each wing. Emily Franken crouched behind the device she was aiming, Jim twisted
dials and fiddled with switches, and all of a sudden the drone vanished in a
flash and a bubble of red fire. The sharp crack of the explosion, muffled by
the earplugs I was wearing, arrived an instant later. The watching kids whooped
in delight.
Berconi and Lopez hurried across the grass to the Frankens
the moment the flaming wreckage of the drone was on the ground. “What do you
think?” Pappas asked me.
“I have no idea,” I admitted. “What did they do, microwave the inside of
the drones?”
“Good question. If I had to guess—well, you know how a radio
antenna works? Radio waves hit a piece of metal the right length and set up a
current in it? I wonder if they’ve tuned the thing so that it sets up
electrical surges in the onboard computer chips and the fuses for the
missiles.”
I gave him a horrified look. “You could fry anything
electronic with that.”
“Not our gear. All our electronics use vacuum tubes—you hit
those with a surge, they just shrug—but outside electronics? Pretty much,
yeah.”
I considered him for a long moment, and then wondered
whether this whole business had been staged for my benefit. “You get a lot of
mad scientists here in the Lakeland Republic?”
“You’d be surprised,” he said with a grin. “Lots of
technologies that got invented in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were
just plain abandoned even though they worked fine—there wasn’t a market yet, or
something else got there first, or somebody bribed the right officials so
government policy favored some other technology instead. A lot of engineers
here spend their time going through old technical journals and what have you,
looking for things that the Republic can use.”
“Like canister shot,” I said.
“Bingo. Or masers, or dragoons—or for that matter canals and
canal boats.”
