The Many Deaths of Joe Buckley by Assorted Baen authors, Barflies Read Free Book Online

or targets. But there wasn’t anything. Both spans, contrary to their intelligence, were down and down hard; clearing the road was going to be a bitch.
    He moved closer, waving for the rest of his squad to spread to either side. The recon team opened out, each of them looking for Posleen and finding nothing.
    Under the shadows of the bridge they found a trench filled with dead Posleen. Most of them were too fire-blackened to determine what had killed them, but several had had their lights punched out by a large caliber gun, probably a sniper.
    The cental pylon was gone at the base. It looked like it had taken heavy fire, probably plasma or HVM, from the Posleen trench. Which didn’t make any sense unless one of them had gone completely ape-shit. There was a cooling smear at the base, but he wasn’t sure what that meant until he went to one knee, wiped at it and and sniffed his fingers. The odor of human blood, as opposed to Posleen, was distinct.
    “Sir, this is Sergeant Delf,” the team leader called, touching his communicator. “The pass is clear. Some poor bastard got all the way up here and then got waxed by an HVM. But the HVM collapsed the bridge and blew plasma back on the Posleen; they’re gone.”
    “Any other survivors?” the brigade commander asked.
    “Not so far, sir,” the sergeant replied. “It doesn’t look good. We’re not on the other side of the bridge yet, but we can see some tracks; they got wasted, sir. I see three Abrams and two Brads from here and they’re all toast. The pass is blocked by the fallen bridges, it’s down all the way across. And the tracks are in the way. But no Posleen. The survivors kicked the shit out of them.”
    “Roger,” the colonel said softly. “Is the area clear for aircraft?”
    “I can’t guarantee that, sir. I don’t know what’s down the valley.”
    “According to Eastern Command just a very pissed off SheVa. I’m sending a dustoff up for anyone you find, complete your sweep and get back to me. Be careful, though, it’s a long way to Rabun Gap.”

Cally’s War
    JOHN RINGO & JULIE COCHRANE
    A face appeared on the screen of Cally’s PDA, and a tight, somewhat morose voice issued forth, “That was a security breach. Guess we’ll have to move apartments now so the minions of the Darhel won’t find us and kill us in our sleep. Would you like me to run a search of available rental real estate? I can list the results in increasing order of risk, if you like,” it offered helpfully.
    “No thanks, buckley. I think I’ll just put up with the risk of staying here.” She never could tell if the AI emulation of the buckley was good enough to know when she was being tongue in cheek. Personality Solutions, Inc., had never been forthcoming about how it had initially developed the base personality used for AI emulation in modern PDA’s. Most people found the standard personality emulation somewhat pessimistic for their tastes, and purchased an aftermarket buckley with a personality overlay more compatible with their own preferences. Cally didn’t. She routinely used her PDA for high performance applications, and the sad truth was that buckleys overlaid with other personalities had a distressing tendency to crash catastrophically, requiring low-level system reformats. The more different the personality overlay from the original buckley, and the higher the AI emulation was set, the sooner it crashed. Of course, one of the main differences of the buckley from true AI was that even just running the base personality, if you set the emulation too high you were inviting a crash. A buckley on a high setting could just envision way too many potential catastrophes.
    After thirty years, she was pretty adept at wheedling, cajoling, and threatening the base buckley personality into acceptable performance. She tapped a few screen buttons and checked her settings. Sure enough, she’d left the AI turned up too high. She dialed it down a couple of notches and ignored the