Eiji returned to the High Command Headquarters for the promised briefing just as the sky was growing red. When he emerged at its end the darkness of late night had descended, accompanied by the neon glow of the city and its attendant din of chattering and distance-distorted music.
Together with Eiji, there were almost two dozen Meihonese officers filing into the briefing area. They had been pulled from all up and down the front lines. Some of them Eiji recognized from brief acquaintances on the Front. One or two he had actually fought alongside. To his surprise he even saw a small number of familiar faces from years before at the academy, though no one he had known exceptionally well. A few he recognized by name and face alone from stories of heroism in the war journals.
Eiji hadn’t had the chance to greet even the ones he knew before Saitou entered the briefing hall with a group of three or four other officers whom Eiji didn’t recognize. He called the group of them to attention. When they had all fallen into rows and taken the formal kneeling posture, Saitou addressed the room. The other officers were busily setting up a projector unit off to the side.
“I sincerely hope you all enjoyed your leave,” Saitou’s voice boomed. For all the exhaustion he had displayed that morning, Eiji was impressed by the confident energy he had about him now. “I hope you did everything you wanted to do, because you’re back in the world where what you want means nothing to anyone.”
There was some appreciative laughing around the room. The lights dimmed. Saitou lifted the projector’s control cable with one hand and clicked it. A blank, white rectangle appeared on the wall behind him.
“Right. We’ve got a lot to cover, so let’s cut to the chase. The new Kolsivite weapons technology revolves around two things,” he said. “Vast improvements in electronic and organic cybernetics and, more alarmingly,” he paused a short moment, looking around to watch anticipation build on the faces in the room, “the new ability and disturbing willingness to put electronic devices to use as prostheses, not only for restorative medical purposes but also for deliberate combat augmentation where the recipient is already of sound body. To say it another way,” he cleared his throat, “Kolsivite electronic and mechanical technology has advanced to a point, and their moral grounding has devolved to a point, where the human body has become to their culture simply a machine with replaceable and upgradeable parts.”
He clicked the slide-advance cable with his thumb, and the blank square of light on the wall behind him became some kind of blueprint or anatomical drawing, not immediately recognizable except vaguely, as some kind of small-arms weapon design. After a few seconds of silence, exclamations of surprise began to erupt all around the room as each man or woman recognized what they were looking at: the outline of a human arm and shoulder in detail, bones and muscles displayed in cutaway, with an intricate system of artificial cables and tubing running parallel to the natural skeleton, affixed at the bases of the elbow and shoulder. The entire hand was replaced at the wrist with an artificial one, its skeletal joints identical to those of the natural skeleton – it was only noticeably artificial in the fact that it was almost entirely detached from its forearm, folded back on a hinge installed in place of the natural wrist joint. The exposed stump of the wrist was capped with some kind of a protective guard or seal, from which protruded what was clearly, thanks to the detail of the drawing, a gun barrel, rifling etched into its interior surface. Arrows on the drawing and a spring at the base of the barrel indicated that it was retractable. It was fed by a small revolver-style cylinder of rounds encased within the flesh of the upper forearm together with a firing mechanism and small exhaust vents plumbed through to the surface of the skin and out.
“What you are looking at,” Saitou said after the pause, “is a weapon that has already seen use in the field and to which many of your comrades have already lost their lives. I understand that some of you have already encountered it.” He cleared his throat again, smoothing a growing hoarseness out of his voice, and went on. “Certain Kolsivite special operatives are implanted with this, and it acts as a concealed side-arm which can be used after surrendering, to pose as a noncombatant, or in other situations where it would be advantageous to appear unarmed. Its slug size and muzzle velocity are comparable to that of the standard-issue Kolsivite assault rifle, though with a much slower rate of fire and with only a six- or ten-round cylinder. This is a good indication of where the current trends in the enemy’s technology are heading, and I show it to you first because it is among the earliest and most primitive examples of this new weaponry.”
And he went on for some time, slide after slide showing new Kolsivite weapons systems. Full musculoskeletal reinforcements providing a single soldier enough raw strength to carry and operate squad weapons like heavy machine guns or small artillery on their own, power in hand-to-hand-combat to crush a human skull with one hand, break ribs or sternums with a fist, or steadiness of hand to make an average marksman into a sharpshooter. Similar lower-body-specific systems for increased running and climbing agility. Ocular implants by which sight range and clarity could be increased by a factor of ten, magnification performed at will. The catalog went on and on, and the initial grunts of surprise faded into a cold silent terror, the veterans able to imagine vividly what each slide would mean in the field.
“These are the changes you can expect from the enemy within the next year or two,” Saitou said after the last slide, some hours after he’d begun, “and as if they weren’t enough, the Kolsivites will also be deploying new and improved versions of most of their basic small arms, as will we. Moreover, we have recently begun to intercept intelligence about plans for larger and more advanced uses of similar technology to what you have just seen that will be ready within the decade. Provided the war isn’t over by then.”
