>From: fongg@bucrsb.bu.edu (Matt Riggsby)
Subject: A word from our sponsor
Date: 17 Mar 91 06:39:41 GMT


	Yes, another one.  If you've had quite enough of these, I'm in full
agreement.  If you want to see more, send me ideas and you'll have only
yourselves to blame.

	After killing the last Thai, Hector leaned morosely on the dead gun
and watched a faraway breeze ruffle the jungle canopy.  Locked into
position, the barrel of the gun was at just the right height, if one ignored
the small knob pressing his back precisely two centimeters to the right of
his third-from-the-top thorasic vertebra.  Metal in the shade of the nets,
its cool comfort was much to be appreciated on this hot day.  Smoke
stretched quietly from the muzzle of his Krupp machine pistol.  More
smoke rose from the body of the Thai People's Army private ten yards
down the slope.  Hector managed the energy for a smile, thinking of smoke.
He lit a cigarette.
	"Roberto is dead," Julia said, Spanish flavored with Cuban accent. She
favored her right leg as she stepped up on the gun platform, stiff despite
endorphins.  In the upper right-hand corner of her vision, an implanted
clock chip flashed the time in neat red numbers.  It was set for two time
zones to the east.
	Hector nodded, saying nothing.  Yes, the trees were still. The People's
Army had sent their wave again, and it had broken against Hector's people,
hard like a wall even without the gun.  He handed her the cigarette, not
looking at her.  "Wounded?" he asked.
	She took a long drag, shook her head, handed back the cigarette
exhaling the smoke.  Her eyes tracked a red bird flying from one side of the
valley to the other.  "Little shrapnel."  The bird disappeared into the green.
"They must have got Fernandez.  Days ago."
	Hector flicked ashes towards the hillside below them, covered for
thirty meters with shattered vegetation and holes torn in the earth by
explosives.  "I'll see to Roberto."  He stubbed out his cigarette on the
treetrunk barrel of the gun and trudged along the ridge to the shack.

	Poor Argentina wanted her soldiers to come home, especially those
with costly implants.  Roberto's body went into the last of the big black
bags.  If another of the five died, they might have to double up.  If another
of the five died, there might be no one left to put him in a bag.  After
dragging the body back to the tiny rock shelter with the other six black
bags, he sat on the decaying porch and relit his cigarette.  He thought of
going in and lying down, but the one cot was in use.  He could hear Manuel
and the Chinese officer everyone called Jose going at it again, doing the
terrible thing.  Hector did not approve.  It was an evil, immoral thing, the
nuns had taught him in a cool white schoolroom.  But the world was a
larger place than they knew, and so Hector Ramon Ignacio Ramirez sat on
the porch of a one-room shack at the top of the ridge of a nameless hill in
Thailand and smoked half of a cigarette.
	The three weeks he had spent here seemed as many years or decades.
Surely he had spent as much time in such situations in his life.  Turkey,
Chad, Belize, they were much the same, like a series on his television.  The
central player in his drama was always Hector himself.  His supporting
cast consisted of the Argentine Legionnaires under his command, Julia at
the big gun, Jesus with the rockets, and Manuel inside.  His special guest
star was the young Chinese lieutenant, assigned as an observer to the
South American peacekeeping force.  Wong?  Wang?  They called him Jose.
The enemy was played by the Thai People's Army, trying to spread their
insurgency to the Khmer Republic through the pass he and his people
protected.  And Fernandez, wiry little Fernandez, was his surprise ending,
the cavalry coming over the hill with the vital coolant.  The silent gun
would speak again, and things would be as before.
	Hector finished his cigarette and wiped his brow with the forearm of
his torn fatigues.  Faint marks of sweat showed against the dirty olive
fabric.  He breathed deeply and pushed himself up with his hands.  He would
go and check on Jesus, on the rockets.

	Jesus's black hands tapped on the camouflaged casing of the Rockwell
Arms rocket launcher in an ancient, complex beat.  "Hey," his voice
cheerful, "they miss you, eh?"  Tattoo ended in flourish, and he rested on
the launcher.  He stood shirtless, a white bandage around his middle.  A
dragonfly buzzed past his ear and landed on the sharp nose of one of the
rockets.  The sleek resin warheads were painted with Julia's Aztec skulls.
She had taken art classes as a child.  The product of her education was
their totem now.  The rockets kept them alive here, the rockets and the
silent gun.
	"They missed again," Hector agreed.  "They will always miss."
	Jesus laughed and shook his head.  The camouflage netting could not
cover the rocket launcher.  They kept it open to the sky.  In return for their
care, it kept them alive, killing Thai gunships.  The wreckage of four was
scattered and hidden in the dense mass of life below.  Jesus stood on the
launcher's platform with nothing around him but the horizon of a land far
removed from his home.  "They come again," he said, his voice nearing song.
"Maybe tonight.  They kill us this time."  Three clips of ammunition lay on
the platform near his bare left foot, jungle camouflage pattern scratched
and battered.  One was half empty.  A fourth was in the Steer assault rifle
leaning against the rocket launcher.
	Hector slapped at a mosquito buzzing near his ear.  His nerves had
been replaced by metal and silicon and he moved with the speed of a
machine.  The tiny insect made a wet blur as it crushed between his thumb
and forefinger.  Hector looked up at Jesus on his platform.  "Fernandez," he
said, as though explaining it all.  "He will be back today."  He looked away
to the still jungle.  "Maybe tonight."
	"He best bring a priest," Jesus suggested through a broad white grin.
"We all be needing one here."  The launcher's target selection mask hung
from its cord around his neck, an expressionless alien face.
	Hector reached into the pouch by his side.  Metal and plastic clicked
as he drew out a rifle clip.  He flipped the curved green shape into the air.
Jesus moved in a dance, one hand sweeping out to catch it.  "Today," Hector
said firmly.  The clip had been Roberto's last.  "With the coolant.  Maybe
ammunition."
	Jesus's laugh boomed over the thick green in the valley.  "Fernandez!"
he cried.  "I name him Godot!"  Arms open to receive the sun, it was a
christening.  The sun glared on his shaved head, slick with perspiration.
	Hector walked away, and Jesus's chuckle followed him.  Afraid.  They
are afraid to die, he thought.  Jesus laughs, Julia is silent, Manuel and the
Chinese officer are filled with lust.  They seek to die in their own way.
But Hector had no fear.  Little Fernandez would come.

	Manuel absently polished the gun with a ragged scrap of oily cloth as
the sun sat on the horizon to turn the western sky red and orange.  The east
was already dark enough for his enhanced vision to see stars.  Almost a
thing of beauty it was, this Japanese hyperfire minigun.  When working, it
would spit thousands of tiny bullets through its spinning barrels and turn
Thai soldiers into so much of a red soup.  The rockets, they killed
machines.  The gun killed men.  The ammunition they had for it was
plentiful.  It lay in long brass chains in the boxes heaped behind it, next to
the generator.  With the gun working, the post would be nothing but
changing the guard and choosing targets with infrared sight, guarding the
pass between this hill and the next.
	A week ago, the fluid that had cooled the infernal inside of the
machine had run dry, and the gun silenced itself.  A great weapon, had said
the sergeant who trained him, built by clever men using science principles.
In here goes the coolant, a simple mixture of water and alcohol.  Through
the tubes it goes, washing the spinning barrels and carrying away the
blazing heat of exploding cordite like so much dirt.  Very easy, he had said.
Pour water and alcohol here, and the clever filter will drink its fill of
what it needs.  Manuel polished the patched bottom of the coolant storage
tank.  A week ago a stray Thai bullet struck the tank, and the wise gun
built by wise men had even turned itself off before it melted from its own
heat.
	Brush rubbed on brush behind him and dried leaves crunched.  It was
Hector's step, not the stealthy crawl of a Thai.  Manuel rubbed the gun with
his rag and the sun continued to go down.  Hector sat on the opposite side
of the gun platform.  He had slept three hours.  Now he lit another
cigarette.  Silently, he offered his last to Manuel.
	They sat and smoked, and Manuel watched smoke trickle up from the
glowing orange coal of the cigarette between white paper and black and
grey ash.  "System check?" Hector asked, already knowing.  Insects buzzed
far away.
	"All go," Manuel said.  "Batteries, ammunition feed, motors, timing."
He sucked in smoke and blew a cloud towards the sunset.  "No coolant."
	"That we get tonight."
	Manuel made a face.  "Fernandez."  The way Hector spoke of him,
Fernandez was Jesus Christ come again.  "No one could come through that,"
Manuel said.  Gesturing in the growing dark, the tip of his cigarette left an
orange streak on his retina for the length of a thought.  "Thailand is a
swamp," he insisted, "and the Thai are quicksand.  We sit on our hill seeing
infrared and moving as fast as computers and we shoot our fine EuroJap
guns down the hill, but it will swallow us all the same.  We should not be
here with the machines in our heads.  It is unnatural."
	Hector glared.  "You should speak of the unnatural."  He would have
said more, but Jesus fired one of the rockets at the sun.  The thick black
spear enchanted by Julia's squared-off white skulls screamed from the
hills and detonated against the canopy of a Russian-made assault
helicopter that had just risen from above the crest of the next hill to the
west.  The pilot and gunner died before they could fire a shot.  Burning,
their helicopter fell from the sky as the underbrush began to crunch yet
again under the boots of the infantry.

	Hector gasped for a breath of air black with smoke and the night.  He
held a Kaljuk assault rifle produced in Turkey five years after his birth
close to his chest as he huddled next to the thick trunk of a tree.  The rifle
he had taken from a Thai who had come too far up the hill.  His fine Krupp
machine pistol, its ammunition exhausted and a last bulled jammed in its
chamber, lay somewhere in the mass of vines near the rocket platform.
The barrel glowed gently in his infrared sight.  Fires burned along the
hillside, and the hot smoke blocked his vision.
	The first helicopter had been the last, but the men still came.  Four
times he had run from one end of the ridge to the other, shuttling from
useless rockets to silent gun.  First the Thai had rushed the gun and Hector
and Manuel had driven them away with the last of their hand grenades.
Then they had tried to storm the missile platform.  Julia and Jesus had
beaten them off, but now Julia lay gasping with two bullets through her
abdomen.  Then all semblance of order seemed to leave the People's Army
assault.  They came alone or in pairs or in small groups, and some of them
had reached their hill's summit.  Hector had killed three with a knife, two
with his hands, and many with a gun.  Jesus now held the rocket platform
and Jose the shack.  Hector made his way to Manuel and the gun.
	Bullets whistled randomly through the air.  A tracer shot through the
bushes several meters ahead of him, and Hector fired a quick burst at its
source.  He rushed away as a hail of fire tore the leaves that had only
partly masked the muzzle flash of his stolen gun.  Occasional shots broke
the darkness, sparks in the sea of night-black jungle.  Near the platform,
an unlucky Thai stepped on an antipersonnel mine, and the flash lit the
nearby jungle like lightning.
	Hector crashed through branches and vines, stumbling over roots and
slick leaves as he came to the end of the ridge.  Six small thin Thai lay cut
and broken on the ground, none closer than two meters to the gun.  Manuel
lay among them, slowly bandaging cuts on his arms and legs.  He looked up
at Hector as though not recognizing him.  "I am very tired," he said.  He
slumped to lie on the torn ground.
	Bandaging the rest of his wounds, Hector moved Manuel behind the gun
platform.  He took clips from dead Thai.  Squatting comfortably, he peered
into the hot air below.
	Voices were calling among the thick-leaved trees.  They were strange
to Hector, a language he spoke none of filtered through battery-powered
megaphones.  Megaphones in the hands of Thai officers.  Hector knew none
of the language but understood the message.  There was order in the valley
again.
	Jesus and Jose...no, call him by his name now...Jesus and Wang would
know.  They would be waiting patiently under their cover.  A wave would
come soon and, low on ammunition, the defense would crumble.  Hector
determined to take a large number of Thai with him on his journey to meet
God and his Son face to face.  As he had done twice before since becoming
a soldier, he prayed.  Perhaps he looked forward to seeing his grandparents
again.  The voices spoke once more, the foreign language in tones of
command.  Boots again pressed on ripped earth and Hector nudged the clips
in the pouches at his side.
	Figures of men, defined by halos of their own heat in Hector's
infrared-sensitive vision, stepped out of the dense, hot smoke like ghosts
out of an invisible wall.  Crouching, ducking, they stumbled up the hill.
Hector fired a single shot and moved, fired and moved, shifting his
position and picking off those in the lead.  Among the trees he kept,
slowing the advance but not stopping it.  Thirty meters and one down.
Twenty five and three.  Twenty and...the old Turkish gun and its cheap
ammunition jammed.  Hector furiously worked the unfamiliar design to
clear it.  As the nearest of the men came to within five meters, he cursed,
threw the Kaljuk aside, and slithered forward through the vegetation.
	He saw the first flash of red as he slipped his knife between the ribs
of a Thai soldier whose face he would never be able to tell from any other.
He killed another and saw it again.  Farther down the ridge, a quick red line
stood in the darkness.  Laser in the smoke, he though as a third Thai died,
unable to scream before Hector broke his neck.
	The Thai were yelling now, crying out to each other as they caught a
glimpse of Hector or saw one of their comrades suddenly fall.  A line of
bullets chased Hector behind another stump.  The line flashed again, closer
all the time.  An unlucky Thai stumbled too close to Hector's refuge.  He
reached out and struck him quickly in three vital places, catching his gun
before it struck the ground and clogged itself with dirt.  Bullets came too
close again.  Hector hurled his knife and heard a cry of pain as he moved to
another tree.  The flash of red again and more screaming in Thai.
	Hector moved closer to the red.  With the laser, perhaps he could turn
the advance.  More shouting, cries of victory?  Red again, a few feet from
his head.  A branch fell smoldering.
	He poked his head quickly around a tree and saw him, a little man with
an enormous gun.  With the machine reflexes, he swung around the stolen
gun and pulled the trigger.  The gun kicked back against him and brass
fountained until the clip was empty.  The man with the laser died
screaming.  Slowly, Hector realized that this screaming was in Spanish.

	The sun lifted itself above the east to light Hector still kneeling on
his ridge.  The Thai had fallen back to regroup for yet another assault,
their center broken by Fernandez's sudden appearance.  Today?  Tomorrow?
Soon.  Manuel was awake again, Julia dead.  Fernandez lay where he had
fallen, Hector next to him.  The laser, its optics broken by two of Hector's
bullet, rested across Fernandez's body.  Fernandez's pack carried only extra
high-performance superconductor batteries for the laser.  No other
ammunition, save for two clips for his own pistol.  No coolant.  The dead
gun would not speak again.
	Hector knelt next to the body while Jesus sang to himself at the
missile platform and Manuel and Wang huddled in the bullet-riddled shack.
As the sun rose he stood.  He began to curse Fernandez.
	"Your mother was a whore," he cried.
	"I spit on the bitch that gave you birth," he cried.
	In the perfect Spanish that the nuns had taught him in the
whitewashed classroom years ago, he said many dirty, awful things.  He
called on Manuel and Wang to do the terrible thing to the body.  His vowels
crackled and his r's thundered over the valley.
	When he had said all he could, he fell to his hands and knees.  A tear
ran down each cheek.  "Oh, Fernandez," he whispered, "I meant BUDD Light!"

	My appologies to those of you without access to American TV, since
you won't understand the ending.

Watch your ass,
	-M

	Disclaimer:  The opinions expressed herein are those of the Usenet,
IBM, DEC, Apple, General Electric, the Bureau of Standards, several major
universities, the CIA, the French Foreign Ministry, Amnesty International,
the Professional Golfer's Association, the Freemasons, SWAPO, the Bavarian
Illuminati, Britain's Labor party, the Society for Krishna Consciousness,
the mysterious universal brotherhood of aliens that keeps watch onur
planet, the Norse pantheon, and you, too.  Would I lie?

Death to .sigs!