I’ve sorta been my own boss since Aneerin got all of us assigned to his task force. The Peloran are more warrior than soldier in the way they fight and think. When they aren’t snuggling up to the nearest tree of course. I remember Aneerin saying something about wanting people who could decide the best course of action and take it without him having to tell them. What can I say? I took to that like a duck to water. I love being my own boss.
When the Mexican drug lords sent their people to attack Texas Tech, they may have penetrated campus security. And they may even have been able to find blind spots in the fixed defenses that made it difficult for automated systems to shoot them. But Dixie and Twilight had been working for months on robotic bodies that could move just as quick as their human friends and adversaries. The bodies were built to blend into the crowds, just two more college girls enjoying their graduation day. They were a complete surprise.
The global chaos following Peloran Contact collapsed many economies and revitalized others. The arrival of the Shang and Roderan further complicated matters as they sought to make new trade and defense treaties. France became one failed government when corrupt politicians fought each other to profit from the new arrivals. Jean-Claude Pierre Charles Napoleon (the Ninth) of the House of Bonaparte had other ideas. He suspended the elected government and declared the Fourth French Empire open for business with any and all alien governments.
I love my job. I’m my own boss. I pick whatever jobs I want to do. Or whatever Betty picks. Usually what Betty picks if I’m being honest. She has a way of finding things that need doing. As it happens I usually enjoy doing it. There’s always bad people out there that need to be taught a lesson or two. Or three. Some of them are slow learners you know. And some of them end up being object lessons for others that don’t learn quite so slow.
Texas Tech was not the first deployment of robots in combat. Many militaries had been sending them on support missions since the turn of the century, and steadily more autonomous robots swarmed over the ground and through the skies as the century went on. And then of course there was the doomed defense of the Japanese home islands from the Chinese invaders. Texas Tech was on a much smaller scale, but it had something the Japanese deployment lacked. Dixie and Twilight.
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