Riding the Red Horse (29 page)

“Do you know what happened with the meteorite, Alexei?”

“Some people say it was the Americans. I mean, it was too convenient. It had to be the Americans.”

“Yes. Yes, it was the Americans. But it was not just them. They are just the weapon. It's the bankers, you see?”

Alexei held his tongue, waiting.

“For longer than you have been alive, in fact, longer than I have been alive, some very rich, very powerful, very corrupt people have been keeping the rest of humanity in ignorance. I have known this since I was your age. It would take too long to tell you how I found out, but the point is, these people, they never suffer. Maybe the most powerful no longer even live on this planet.”

Alexei was not so shocked at this statement. The ideas put forth by Alternative 3 had been around a long time, but he had never really given them much thought. He couldn't see that an elite who lived on the Moon, or maybe Mars, made any sense. Even so, he kept his doubts to himself and listened to Yuri.

“They run things here, make wars and so on, just to continue their agenda of securing their power and keeping the masses safely occupied in ways that do not threaten them. We die and we suffer here because of them. No one ever gets to them. No one can touch them.”

“So you are going to blow up a plane with some of them in it? Is that why we are here today?”

Yuri smiled at him. “You are a clever young man, Alexei. Today is my birthday, you know?”

“Is it really your birthday?”

“Yes,
tovarisch
, it really is. So will you grant me a birthday wish?”

Alexei was suddenly scared. “What?”

“Will you take the food and the water, take your bag and one of the therm-tarps, and get out of here? Go back home, go back the way we came. It should be easier to get out. I am not Spetsnaz, you know? I am just a physics professor. If I could make it here, you can make it back. Go home. Go to your family or what is left of it. Go home and live. And tell people about me only after you hear what happened here. Not before. Promise that you will keep quiet about me until you are safely back in Donetsk.”

“But Yuri, we are a team–” The older man raised a hand to silence him.

Then he took out a tiny video-recorder from his pocket, switched it on, and handed it to Alexei, who understood what he wanted. He held it mutely, filming as Yuri addressed him and confessed his deception.

“I must admit I lied. I lied to the Novorossiyans. I am not here to put a transmitter in place. I am here to fire a charged power-source of steel and titanium that travels at 17 kilometres per second at a plane full of mass-murderers. I will not return.”

“That…that cannon?” Alexei looked into the tiny screen at the back of the solid-state recorder and could see that the weapon was also in the frame, slightly behind Yuri.

“Yes. It is a railgun of sorts. But the whole thing, even if it falls into their hands, will tell them nothing. The power source is the bullet. It's the size of an orange and it uses some of the same principles of antigravity technology to fuel a massive surge of electric energy. It simultaneously powers the whole system and fires itself out of the system. Because of the speed and the electric overcharge, when it hits something, it will release a pulse of energy that reduces the air next to it to a plasma state. The electric charge flows through it at near-light speed, and the explosion it will cause will leave nothing but a crater of considerable size. I will then put a grenade down the barrel of this thing and try to get away, but I will not get far.”

He paused a moment before continuing.

“But you, my friend, you can escape if you go now. You must. Show the commanders this video. Put it online. Let the people know why I did this. I did it for my little nephew Ivan. Who the murdering monsters killed with an orbital bombardment of rocks just to continue the endless wars on this planet, to keep us confused and penned in like sheep for the slaughter.

But I am no sheep. Watch this, monsters. See what happens when you anger a man who can take your technology and reach out to touch your own. And know this. Today is only the beginning. We are coming for you. Millions have died over the ages, but now it's your turn. It will be you and your children who will die, in your palaces and in your gated mansions and even in your off-planet bases. Because everywhere there is someone whose loved one is dead because of you, another seed of hate is planted. And the world will see that anyone can do as I have done, anyone will be able to reach out and touch you the same way you touched my darling Ivan. My name is Yuri Ivanovich, and I killed all of the people who died at Zhuliany in the explosion. It was not an accident. It was not a meteorite. It was me.”

He nodded once, firmly, even proudly. Then the fire seemed to go out of his eyes. He waved a hand feebly at Alexei.

Alexei switched off the recorder.

“I have made my confession. Now please, Alexei, grant me my birthday wish and go. Let the world hear my words.”

Alexei did not leave right away. He had too many questions, and besides, it would be easier after night fell. Finally, as the sun descended and painted the sky blood-red, he left. He hugged Yuri before he left the man to his last act and granted his last wish. He would avoid the curfews and patrols and he would get back to Donetsk. He didn't know how, exactly, but he would get there. He would survive. He had to survive. Because Yuri was right. The world must know.

The former Vice-President of the United States of America always rose early. As was his habit, he had already turned the television on to CNN. He wasn't really listening to it so much as having it on in the background, but then he heard the presenter, an attractive talking head, mention Zhuliany, and he began to pay attention.

His son, the senator, was travelling with the Secretary of State to Kiev today. They would have landed a short while ago, and that was probably the news item. The war in Ukraine was coming to an end, and it was time to allow the next phase, the reparations and rebuilding, to begin…but then he noticed the line scrolling at the bottom of the screen. He gasped, grabbed the remote, and turned up the volume even as the reality of what he was reading caused the screen to swim before his aghast eyes.

“…huge explosion, reportedly destroyed the flight carrying the American delegation, and there are eyewitness accounts of damage extending as far as two kilometres away from the airport. National Guardsmen of the Ukrainian People's Government have cordoned off the area and journalists are not being allowed anywhere near the airport. We go now live to Kiev, where our correspondent is reporting that he can see smoke from his hotel window…”

The former Vice-President did not hear the rest, his aged, rheumy eyes were fixed on the text scrolling across the bottom of the screen.

Secretary of State, U.S. Senator, and six U.S. Congressmen presumed dead after massive explosion near an airport in Kiev.

It was three months after the mysterious explosion near the airport. Yuri's video never made it onto YouTube. Alexei granted Yuri his birthday wish and successfully escaped, but after viewing the video, his superiors explained that if it was ever released, Novorossiya would be wiped off the face of the Earth by the vengeful Americans…if not by Yuri's hidden exoplanetary elite. Once he understood the potential ramifications, Alexei decided that he agreed and considered himself lucky that they had limited themselves to merely deleting the video and not silencing him too. Permanently.

Trevor Newman was an unusually successful bond trader. His insanely risky bets in the market had made him rich and he was only 36, yet he seemed completely uninterested in the fortune he'd amassed. He had no friends, only superficial acquaintances, and no wife or girlfriend, merely a series of casual, short-term relationships. In recent years he had spent most of his time secluded in the windowless basement of his Fairfax home. One day, for no apparent reason, his secretary booked him a top-floor suite at the Hay-Adams Hotel. No sooner had he checked in that morning than a pair of heavy metal trunks were carried to his room by his driver. He dismissed the driver with a resigned smile and an shockingly large tip, locked the door to the suite, and set to work.

An hour later his equipment was assembled. He activated the timer on the bomb that would take out the entire top floor of the hotel first. It began counting down from five minutes. Then he inserted the orange-sized power source into the main equipment he had assembled earlier, powering it up, and he went to open the window.

He could just see the White House beyond the tree tops. It lined up perfectly with the sights of the carefully constructed railgun.

Author's Note: The italicized sections in blockquotes are not fiction.

Science fiction's gain was the game industry's loss.

There are few, very few, readers of this anthology who do not know of Jerry Pournelle, the science fiction writer. Nearly everyone has heard of the author of
Jannissaries
and
The Mote in God's Eye
, the editor of many anthologies, the techno-savvy
Byte
columnist, the SFWA president, the Lord of Chaos Manor, even the aphorist who coined the Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.

But there are not very many who know of J.E. Pournelle, Ph.D., wargamer, and particular fan of the classic Avalon Hill game
Afrika Korps
. In the early 1970s, Jerry was also an occasional contributor to the Avalon Hill house magazine,
The General
, in which he introduced new rules for
Waterloo
, conceived an clever device for counter concealment that anticipated
Fifth Frontier War
's Fleet rules by a decade, and penned an astute article explaining how to draw upon the timeless Principles of War for the purposes of designing better wargames.

Alas, it is a lesson that few designers in the industry have taken to heart. These little-known facts may be reasonably cited as evidence that Dr. Pangloss was wrong, and we do not, in fact, live in the best of all possible worlds. After all, we narrowly missed living in a world where J.E. Pournelle designed
Halo: Combat Evolved
!

The title of this article is a misnomer. Although I have had some experience simulating the art of war, nothing would be duller for a
game
; so far as I can tell, the closer the simulation, the less playable the result. The best simulation of land warfare I have ever seen takes place at Research Analysis Corporation (RAC). an Army-related think tank in Virginia. At RAC, they have three enormous war-rooms, each equipped with a wargames table some twenty feet square, each table having elaborate terrain features at a scale of about one inch to the kilometer. ln the Blue room, only Blue units and the Red units located by reconaissance are shown; in the Red room, the opposite, while the only complete record of all units in the game is in the Control room.

Each team consists of an array of talent including logistics and supply officers. intelligence officers, subordinate unit commanders, etc. Orders are given to a computer, which then sends the orders to the actual units, while members of the Control team move them rather than the players Both teams send in orders simultaneously, so that the computer is needed to find which units actually get to move and which are interfered with. The last time I was involved with a RAC game, as a consultant to feed in data about how to simulate strategic and tactical air strikes, it took six months playing time to finish a forty-eight hour simulation—and that was with about ten players on each side, a staff of twenty referees, and a large computer to help. The game, incidentally was one which eventually resulted in the US Army's evolving the Air Assault Divisions, now known as Air Cav.

The point is that although an accurate simulation—it had to be. since procurement and real-world organization decisions were based in part on the results—the “war game” at RAC was
unplayable
, and, one suspects, even the most fanatical wargames buff would have found it dull after working at it full time for months.

Yet. What makes a wargame different from some other form of combat game like chess? What is there about the wargame that can generate such enthusiasm? Obviously, it is the similarity to war; the element of simulation which is lacking from other games. Consequently, the game designer must know something about simulation. and must make realism his second goal in design.

There are two ways of making a wargame realistic. The first, which by and large has been exploited well, is “face-realism”. That is, the game designer attempts to employ terrain features similar to a real world battle or war; designates units that either really were in a battle, or might have been; calls the playing pieces “armor” and “infantry”, or “CCA”, or “42nd Infantry Regiment” and the like. He tries, in other words, to give the appearance of reality. He may also, as is often done, make the rules complex, usually by adding optional rules to bring in such factors as “air power” or “supply”, or “weather”.

The second way of making a wargame realistic is much more difficult, and has seldom been tried. This method is as follows: the designer
abstracts
the principles of war as we know them, and designs a game in which only the correct application of those principles brings success. There are, as I said, few of those games. I am tempted to say none, but this would be incorrect; many Avalon Hill games partially meet this goal.

The second kind of simulation is admittedly far more difficult. To some extent it may even interfere with the “realism” of the first kind, in that some rather unusual moves may be required. In this and succeeding articles I shall attempt to analyze the principles of war which should be simulated, and the rules which may introduce “functional simulation” to the art of wargaming.