KarlMrax

The warship looked about its internal systems. All was ready; any further delay would constitute prevarication. It turned itself about, facing back the way it had come. It powered up its engines slowly to accelerate gradually, sleekly away into the void. As it moved, it left the skein of space behind it seeded with mines and hyperspace-capable missiles. They might only remove a ship or two even if they were lucky, but they would slow the rest down. It ramped its speed up, to significant engine degradation in 128 hours, then 64, then 32. It held there. To go any further would be to risk immediate and catastrophic disablement.

It sped on through the dark hours of distance that to mere light were decades, glorying in its triumphant, sacrificial swiftness, radiant in its martial righteousness.

	The Circuit Breaker warhead in the guided missile
	detonated at one thousand feet above the township
	of Rovesky. Designed to recreate the electromagnetic
	pulse of a thirty-kiloton thermonuclear explosion, the
	burst of radiation fused every last piece of unshielded
	electronics in a thirty-mile radius. Even shielded electronics
	such as those in the CELL APCs were overloaded
	momentarily.
	All the lights went out. The cobalt mine ceased work.
	All comms went down. That part of Siberia practically

	Short burst, correct aim, short burst, correct aim,
	repeat. Walk in on the target. The twelve-gauge solid
	shot slugs were impacting into the side of the moving
	armoured figure, knocking him over, battering him
	across the ground. She emptied the extended magazine
	of the automatic shotgun into him, ignoring the
	other armoured figure paralysed on the ground. She
	dropped the shotgun. She was appalled when he, it,
	the thing she’d seen far below St. Petersburg, stood
	up. She grabbed the weapon on her back and pulled it

	Shortly after that, I would most likely suffer a direct impact from a projectile releasing kinetic energy on the order of one megaton,
	an impact which, with my battle screens inoperative, I would not survive. Clearly, it is time to change tactics.

	- Bolo Rising

	The display focused on them for a moment, and then Nike moved slowly backward.
	The lizard cat tried to fling itself on the moving tread, only to tumble backward with a
	squall of pain as the Bolo brought up her kinetic interdiction battle screen. She must have
	it on its lowest possible power setting, since it hadn't splattered the cat all over the jungle,
	but it was sufficient to throw the scaly mother safely away from her treads.

	One of the people in the group held a little bundle of brown and yellow fur, cradled against one
	shoulder rather as one might hold a baby. “Here,” the man said, presenting the tiny furry creature to
	Sma. She took it reluctantly. It was warm, had four limbs arranged conventionally, smelled attractive
	and wasn’t any sort of animal she’d ever seen before; it had large ears on a large head, and as she
	held it, it opened its huge eyes and looked at her. “That’s the ship,” the man who’d handed her the
	animal said.
	“Hello,” the tiny being squeaked.
	Sma looked it up and down. “You’re the Xenophobe?”
	“Its representative. The bit you can talk to. You can call me Xeny.” It smiled; it had little round
	teeth. “I know most ships just use a drone, but” — it glanced at Skaffen-Amtiskaw — “they can be a

	We’ve been throwing around some pretty weighty superpowers over
	the past couple of instalments: the strength to outsprint a cheetah and
	kick a car like a soccer ball, the power to virtually disappear from the visible spectrum.

	Inside Crysis: Be the Ghoul

	By reducing the size of the cryo-H slivers I am feeding into the infinite repeater’s firing block,
	I can reduce the power output as needed, down to approximately 1 kiloton per second.

	- Bolo Strike


	The most promising of these muscle analogs are built from carbon nanotubes;
	those babies can store elastic energies ten times as great as elastomers, 250 times as great as human muscle.
	Both your biceps could be replaced by a wire of the stuff only 8mm thick.

	Think about that. An 8mm cord of artifical muscle with the lifting power of two human arms.
	Now look at all those corded bundles wrapped around the Nanosuit;
	the ability to kick a car across the boulevard doesn’t seem quite so implausible, does it?

	Inside Crysis: Be Strong, Be Fast

	He likes my stuff. He especially likes the way I ground my fiction in real-world science
	(I backload my novels with technical appendices, chock full of references from the scientific literature;
	some folks think I do it for educational purposes but I’m really just trying to cover my ass against nitpickers).
	Robert wonders if I can give him a hand on the technical specs for an advanced battlefield prosthesis called the Nanosuit 2.0.

	Sure I can. I’ve been reading up on the latest robotics news while researching my latest novel;
	there doesn’t seem to be anything about this Nanosuit that can’t be justified by pushing the
	real-world state-of-the-art ahead a few years.

	Inside Crysis: Be Strong, Be Fast

	It was a wet and chilly late October morning in A.D. 1415. Kassad had been inserted as
	an archer into the army of Henry V of England. The English force had been on French
	soil since August 14 and had been retreating from superior French forces since
	October 8. Henry had convinced his War Council that the army could beat the French in
	a forced march to the safety of Calais. They had failed. Now, as October 25
	dawned gray and drizzly, seven thousand Englishmen, mostly bowmen, faced a force of
	some twenty-eightthousand French men-at-arms across a kilometer of muddy field.

	Kassad was cold, tired, sick, and scared. He and the other archers had been surviving
	on little morethan scavenged berries for the past week of the march and almost every