Online Sci Fi Novel

TJIC emails to point out that some of his work-in-progress science fiction novel is online.  He describes it as basically Larry Correia crossed with Vernor Vinge and Robert Heinlein (he actually describes it more modestly than I do).  It's quite good fun:

A few minutes later Max barked in excitement and Duncan and Blue raced to catch up. As Blue crested the ridge he saw what had excited Max. The PKs had found the mules…and Rex’s last-minute coding had done it’s job. It’d more than done it’s job.

One of the mules was badly damaged from gunfire, and was pitifully trying to pull itself forward on its two remaining legs. The other two mules had reached their objectives, though. At their feet were five PK corpses. The bodies each looked the same – pristine suits marred only by one circular hole punched directly through the visors.

One of the other mules – number two – had a leg stuck in the helmet of one of the PKs. Every few seconds a behavior routine fired and the mule tried to shake the corpse off its foot, but the slightly flared base of the foot was stuck on something, either some mangled machinery inside the helmet, or perhaps the shattered bones of the PK’s skull.

Blue’s ears pricked and his tail wagged a few times. “Duncan, how the heck did you and Rex program this behavior? You guys only had ten minutes.”

Even with the bulky suit on Blue could see Duncan puff up a bit. “It was Rex’s idea to program the mules to attack, but it was MY idea to dig through the code archives and find a whack-a-mole program in the ‘games’ directory!”.

Blue raised one expressive tan eyebrow. “You reprogrammed it to punch helmets, I guess? But how did you do THAT in just ten minutes?”

“Rex ripped out the targeting code and replaced it with a pattern matching subroutine, and I did an image search for spacesuit helmets. There were a couple of MILLION in our caches – it took the neural net training system MINUTES to process them all!”

I know guys who program like that.  What was funny was when I read the excerpt I heard the dialog in their voices.  That made it even funnier.