Kent had once seen a soldier on a firing line at a military range in Texas using a.308 assault rifle with a suppressor fitted to it. No way to silence that boom completely, certainly not with hypersonic rounds, but the idea was to quiet it a little, to make it harder to pinpoint the location. The machinist who had made the suppressor, or the shooter who had threaded it onto the barrel, or maybe both, had made a mistake. When the shooter fired off the first round, the bullet caught something in the silencing device, tore it off the muzzle, and hurled it thirty meters downrange.
“Whatcha got there, son?” the rangemaster had called out. “A grenade launcher?”
The.308’s muzzle was damaged enough so that firing it again without repair would have been dangerous to anybody close.
Kent smiled at the memory.
If you had to have such an experience, a safe shooting range was the place to have it — not facing a platoon of enemy soldiers with AK-47s that might be old but that worked fine. A man could kill you with a cap-and-ball carbine that had been old-tech during the Civil War…
“Clear,” came the voice over Kent’s LOSIR headset.
“You heard the mine-finder,” Kent said. “Let’s move, people.”
The team, six troopers and Kent, scrabbled up in the rain and muck and splashed their way across the field. There were AP mines buried here — electronic ones that sent an IR pulse to the receivers the men wore in their SIPEsuits. If you stepped on one, any receiver in range announced it with a loud “beep.” To make it more realistic, a small flash-bang in the ground went off, and that was enough to singe your clothes a little, reinforcing the electronic sig in a way that you didn’t forget. Scared the hell out of you and stung a little, but a real mine would have blown off an arm or leg or killed you outright, and the little popper reminded you to pay attention.
The scout had located the hidden mines in their path, and electronically tagged them, so the heads-up panes in the unit’s helmets, run off the backpack computer, showed the location of each antipersonnel device. As long as the suits worked, you could zigzag your way across the field and not worry about stepping on a mine. If the suits failed, then you had to do it the old-fashioned way, which took a lot longer. Now and then, Kent arranged for the suits to fail, but not today. Today, they would make it across the field before they were ambushed by an automatic motion sensor-operated tracking machine gun that fired either electronic bullets or paint balls, depending on the programming. Today, it would be paint balls, because those left no doubt, even in the rain, as to whether or not you had taken a hit.
Looking down and seeing that bright red splotch on your groin would make the point. Paint balls would sting a little — but then a high-powered AP round, even in good ceramic body armor, was going to seriously wound or kill you if it hit solidly.
The colonel himself didn’t know exactly where the gun would be set up. The field sergeant had chosen a spot for it. Kent did know it would be out there somewhere, and he had taught his troops that they should always expect the unexpected, so they ought to be looking for it, too.
Kent had always thought the Boy Scouts had come up with the best two-word motto that dealt with this: Be prepared.
Seurat paused to consider which suit he would pack for the trip to the United States. The Versace was a more modern cut, with a rougher tooth to the fabric, but the Gaultier was a more classical “power” suit, with a darker tone.
As he considered the merits of each, he looked, as he often did, at the painting facing his private desk. It was one of his most prized possessions, an original Georges Seurat, largely unknown to the rest of the world.
The painting wasn’t as polished as some of the artist’s earlier works — certainly not as much as La Grande Jatte, which had taken two years and countless studies, but it did bear the Neo-Impressionist pointillist dots of color that had marked his ancestor’s later works.
It was small, only three feet or so wide, and more intimate in subject matter than many of the artist’s famous pieces: A small child sat on the floor in front of a sofa; behind him was a Christmas tree, and on the right, trailing down from the top of the frame, was an adult woman’s arm, reaching down to hold the boy. The tone was dark: a mix of warm ambers and saturated magentas. The colors blended beautifully, each dot giving the painting a vibrancy no solid patch could hope to match. The composition was pure Seurat: static shapes, with little to disturb them. The diagonal of the woman’s arm broke the verticals typical of the artist’s work, but did not jar the mood.
In front of the boy were some toys: blocks, a top, a small stuffed animal. But the child wasn’t playing with them. Instead, he leaned into the arm, and looked out at the viewer, a slight smile on his face. There was a look of innocent awe, thoughtful joy, and the anticipation of something good to come.
The CyberNation leader had always thought the boy’s expression was one that embodied the joy of discovery.
He blinked, his eyes warm, as he stared at the painting. The subject was his ancestor’s son, Pierre George, and the approximate date of the painting was December 1890. Seurat the artist had died suddenly in March of 1891 of some infection — and his son had followed him the month after, apparently of the same ailment. The juxtaposition of the joy in the painting against the certain death that was coming was powerful.
The painter had not known he had but a few months left to him.
Seurat had known the painting for nearly his entire life. A great-aunt had given it to his parents when he was a young boy, and they had hung it in their sitting room. It had been purchased from Madeleine Knoblock, the artist’s wife, just before her death, and kept from the world. She had not been well liked by the rest of the family, and had disappeared for years after her husband’s and son’s death.
Many times he’d thought about the look of discovery on the boy’s face. It had encouraged him to try many new things, to seek out new experiences. He had been the boy. But tonight, he was the adult, reaching down to comfort the boy, to shepherd him from what might come. And the boy was CyberNation.
For him, the lesson was clear: You never see it coming. And it put him on his guard. Surely his ancestor hadn’t seen his end approaching — could he hope to do better than his famous forebear?
Perhaps. Then again, no matter what kind of spin he put on it, the truth was the truth:
Not everyone wins.
He exhaled a long sigh, not having realized he was holding his breath. It didn’t matter really. Win or lose, one had to do what one could, oui?
He would do everything in his power to protect his own curious and thoughtful infant from the dangers threatening it. Which was why he was packing now, to go see the Americans, whose military systems had been attacked by the same person or persons who had assaulted his child.
Considering the history CyberNation had with the Americans, particularly their Net Force, Seurat would hardly have predicted such a trip for himself. But he would climb into whatever bed was required to protect his nation.
He grinned. Perhaps he might be able to find a beautiful woman’s bed somewhere along the way, eh?
That thought in mind, he considered the suits.