And He Strides Among the Treetops and is Taller than the Trees

From: john.fitzpatrick@us.army.mil
To: harold.pyle@us.army.mil
7/23/2030
Re: concerns regarding Next Generation Infantry Weapon program submissions

Captain Pyle,

While I too was deeply disappointed to learn that the railgun GE submitted had a lower effective rate of fire than both the Californian naval artillery it was allegedly modeled after and the M1903 Springfield we took into the Great War, and I am aware that the monarchist bloc has effectively succeeded where our SPIW and ACR programs failed, let me be exceedingly clear on this:

We will not be considering Steyr’s and Howa’s StG-27/Type 27 platform as a replacement to the M16/M4 family of weapons.

Some folks say the Cold War is over, that it has been over since the Soviet Union fell apart, that the Colombians are our friends because they’re selling us cheap phones and that the monarchists were part of the Free World all along, we were just too narrow-minded to see it. Those folks are wrong. We fought a revolution against a king, then toppled a Kaiser in the Great War. We would have gotten two, if the Japs hadn’t stepped in. Monarchs and aristocrats are the real threat to liberty, moreso than Communism. Kaiserin Katharina and Emperor Fumihito are not our friends, and we will not become reliant on them for small arms.

JOHN FITZPATRICK
COL
ACC

A date had long since been set for the Duel’s first round, and though Chris still had a month to run live-fire exercises in the Mojave Desert inside the completed Don Juan, he had trouble shaking the feeling that time had run out already.

General Earp had not joined him today– no one project, no matter how important, could demand all of the Director of Security’s time and attention. Between drills, Chris took lunch on the raised platform where the Duelist’s cockpit docked, with his ground crew– pit crew– whatever you called the support staff for a massive, humanoid robotic exoskeleton. Most of them had been involved in building Don Juan.

Nomura Shinzo and Otto von Reibnitz were both engineers who’d had a hand in designing it. Otto, a shaven-scalped, hawk-faced man in his middle fifties, was an Austrian mechanical engineer who had been sent over to help once Austria-Hungary’s Duelist Toldi Miklós was well into prototyping, just as the California Shogunate planned to send Shinzo to Australia, sooner or later, to help them finish their Ned Kelly. Late thirties and typically Northern Californian with his mixed Anglo-Japanese features, Shinzo, an electrical engineer from the Shogun’s capital of Shinkyo on Santa Cruz Island, was one of the handful of Califorians who actually spoke Japanese natively, rather than a dialect of English or Spanish with so many Japanese loanwords as to be near-unintelligible to anyone outside their borders. Otto seemed to have an easier time communicating with Shinzo than with the rest of them, though whether it was because his Japanese was better than his English or Spanish, or simply a matter of kinship between engineers, Chris couldn’t tell.

From the production side, there was Jennifer Higuchi, a quality engineer, and Cristina Dominguez, the lead welding technician, at the head of about a dozen other techs. The two women looked about as different as two coastal Californians could, Jennifer tall, slim, and pale with her hair in a straight-banged cut more typical of a highborn lady of Japan than a half-blooded, middle-class colonial, and Cristina twenty or thirty years her senior with a mess of graying curls over a short, stout, indigena-dark frame. All the same, Cristina called the younger woman mija, painting her cheeks red every time, and had taken to calling Chris mijo to much the same effect.

While Chris had spent the morning practicing with the enormous back-mounted magnetic artillery piece, a junior tech had been sent on a state-sponsored run to a fast food joint in the nearest town, which in California meant canned lunchmeat musubi and tamago nigiri with a side of refried beans. Over this, Otto and Jennifer were arguing about the compressive strength of the particular steel alloy used in supportive structures of the Don Juan, and how well it would hold up to the railgun’s intense recoil.

“We simulated it with a conventional cannon of similar muzzle energy,” Otto said in his thickly German-accented Japanese, “and the failure rate with routine maintenance was at a nine-sigma standard.”

“Your definition of ‘routine maintenance’ was a full rebuild after every round. What if one unit has to run multiple Duels at once, and can’t get more than a couple weeks of downtime? What if we need to deploy one to a conventional warzone?” She stopped, and looked at Chris nervously.

“You’re right, Jen,” the pilot said with a dismissive wave, “there’s no guarantee the Treaty of Budapest will stick, and even if it does, it won’t eliminate every war. Neither the Cuban Communist state nor the Bourbonist guerillas are going to be building a Duelist any time soon. Maybe I’ll eliminate mandatory service for the samurai caste, but I won’t be putting General Earp out of a job.”

“Perhaps, herr Christopher, you would like to look at the blueprints? I assure you, the frame will not buckle under the stress of an operation in Havana, should it come to that.”

Chris shook his head. “I’m not sure I could read them, anyway. I had my heart set on being a fighter jock from the second I was told all samurai boys grew up to be officers, and I didn’t want to risk getting pushed into another MOS. I avoided engineering, studied geology. Surprisingly interesting field, when you’re from the Sonoran desert. I did pick up a math minor along the way, so maybe you could explain things to me, but you have more valuable things to do with your time.”

Jennifer bit her lip, casting a pensive look over Chris. “No taste for bossing enlisted commoners around?”

Chris laughed. “There are samurai enough with talent for that, not to mention the commonborn officers who came up through the NCO route. No, I… well, I guess I have a bit of a romantic outlook on conflict. Probably a horribly outdated one, if it was relevant in any era. Two men, pitting their wits and skill at arms against each other, with life on the line… dogfights aren’t quite what they were in the first half of last century, but I didn’t make ace purely off of shooting down munitions freighters. Any second thoughts I had about blowing my Cuban counterparts out of the sky were purely on the level of high-minded moral precepts. Intellectual notions that human life was a precious thing, that even when taking it was necessary, that necessity should be regretted. Emotionally, it was… transcendent, like some mixture of winning a chess match, discovering a particularly edifying poem, and bagging a trophy pronghorn.”

Shinzo looked up and down the Don Juan. Now that it was complete and painted in the black-and-white colors of the California Air Force, it was not too far off either from the samurai of yesteryear in lacquered armor, nor from a knight of medieval France or renaissance Spain in forge-blackened plate. “It must be a rarer and rarer sensation for warriors, as war grows more and more industrialized.” the engineer posited in a thoughtful mutter. “I suppose the whole idea behind the Duelists is to bring a little bit of that back.” He laughed grimly. “I’ve been known to enjoy the odd computer game, but I have a bad habit of optimizing the fun out of them. I find the strategy that meets the game’s objective quickest and easiest, and the whole thing becomes rote button-mashing, not a fun bit of problem-solving. I guess launching a bunch of ICBMs is the least fun way to fight a war, but it might just be the most efficient. Our only way around it might be to change the rules.”

“No pressure.” Chris said. “I just have to prove the merit of this scheme to the entire Empire by pulling this off against the Colombians, and hoping they don’t renege on the treaty.”

“You’ll do fine, mijo.” Cristina said, patting Chris’s shoulder. “If anybody was born for this, is was you.”

Otto shrugged. “The Imperial states were the only ones who signed the treaty without hesitation or misgivings. If they back out because of this Duel, it will be the fault of the Colombians for not honoring it, or of the treaty drafters for some system-breaking oversight. Not yours, herr Christopher.”

Chris’s eyes lit up. “Remind me to go over that tonight.”

“Go over what?”

“The treaty. Specifically, the sections where the rules of a Duel are outlined.”

As they spoke, a semi with Security Directorate markings pulled up to their test site.

“Ah,” Cristina said, “there’s the last piece.”

Chris looked around at the engineers and technicians. “I thought you said the Duelist was complete?”

Shinzo shrugged. “There was one element we didn’t have time to implement. The in-arm coilguns were meant to be backup weapons to something the Duelist would carry, maybe a weapon that could be set down and fire autonomously while the Duelist went to its integral weapons. When we found out about the Mexico City challenge, we rushed to design something that could be made and implemented quickly, and… we drew some inspiration from the last round of the pilot selection process.”

A long pallet was forklifted out of the truck, and the package on it unwrapped. On it was a copy of the Air Force survival Bowie in an aluminum-and-fiberglass scabbard, scaled up to have a blade taller than Chris and a grip to fit the Don Juan’s enormous hands.