Peace and War - Omnibus (58 page)

We were in a large white room with ten of the mechanic shells and ten warm-up seats, like fancy barber chairs. Behind them, the wall was a huge backlit map of Costa Rica, showing with lights of various colors where soldierboy and flyboy units were working. The other walls were covered with monitors and digital readouts with jargon labels. People in white fatigues walked around checking the numbers.

Scoville stretched and yawned and walked over to me.

'Sorry you thought that last bit of violence was unnecessary. I felt the situation called for direct action.' God, Scoville and his academic airs. Doctorate in Leisure Arts.

'You usually do. If you'd warned them from outside, they would've had time to assess the situation. Surrender.'

'Yes indeed. As they did in Ascension.'

'That was one time.' We'd lost ten soldierboys and a flyboy to a nuclear booby trap.

'Well, the second time won't be on my watch. Six fewer pedros in the world.' He shrugged. 'I'll go light a candle.'

'Ten minutes to calibration,' a loudspeaker said. Hardly enough time for the shell to cool down. I followed Scoville into the locker room. He went to one end to get into his civvies; I went to the other end to join my platoon.

Sara was already mostly undressed. 'Julian, You want to do me?'

Yes, like most of our males and one female, I
did
, as she well knew, but that's not what she meant. She took off her wig and handed me the razor. She had three weeks' worth of fine blond stubble. I gently shaved off the area surrounding the input at the base of her skull.

'That last one was pretty brutal,' she said. 'Scoville needed the body count, I guess.'

'It occurred to him. He's eleven short of making E-8. Good thing they didn't come across an orphanage.'

'He'd be bucking for captain,' she said.

I finished her and she checked mine, rubbing her thumb around the jack. 'Smooth,' she said. I keep my head shaved off duty, though it's unfashionable for black men on campus. I don't mind long bushy hair, but I don't like it well enough to run around all day wearing a hot wig.

Louis came over. 'Hi, Julian. Give me a buzz, Sara.' She reached up – he was six feet four and Sara was small – and he winced when she turned on the razor.

'Let me see that,' I said. His skin was slightly inflamed on one side of the implant. 'Lou, that's going to be trouble. You should've shaved before the warm-up.'

'Maybe. You gotta choose.' Once you were in the cage you were there for nine days. Mechanics with fast-growing hair and sensitive skin, like Sara and Lou, usually shaved once, between warm-up and the shift. 'It's not the first time,' he said. 'I'll get some cream from the medics.'

Bravo platoon got along pretty well. That was partly a matter of chance, since we were selected out of the pool of appropriate draftees by body size and shape, to fit the platoon's cages and the aptitude profile for H & I. Five of us were survivors of the original draft pick: Candi and Mel as well as Lou, Sara, and me. We've been doing this for four years, working ten days on and twenty off. It seems like a lot longer.

Candi is a grief counselor in real life; the rest of us are academics of some stripe. Lou and I are science, Sara is American politics, and Mel is a cook. 'Food science,' so called, but a hell of a cook. We get together a few times a year for a banquet at his place in St Louis.

We went together back to the cage area. 'Okay, listen up,' the loudspeaker said. 'We have damage on Units One and Seven, so we won't calibrate the left hand and right leg at this time.'

'So we need the cocksuckers?' Lou asked.

'No, the drains will not be installed. If you can hold it for forty-five minutes.'

'I'll certainly try, sir.'

'We'll do the partial calibration and then you're free for ninety minutes, maybe two hours, while we set up the new hand and leg modules for Julian and Candi's machines. Then we'll finish the calibration and hook up the orthotics, and you're off to the staging area.'

'Be still my heart,' Sara murmured.

We lay down in the cages, working arms and legs into stiff sleeves, and the techs jacked us in. For the calibration we were tuned down to about ten percent of a combat jack, so I didn't hear actual words from anybody but Lou – a 'hello there' that was like a faint shout from a mile away. I focused my mind and shouted back.

The calibration was almost automatic for those of us who'd been doing it for years, but we did have to stop and back up twice for Ralph, a neo who'd joined us two cycles ago when Richard stroked out. It was just a matter of all ten of us squeezing one muscle group at a time, until the red thermometer matched the blue thermometer on the heads-up. But until you're used to it, you tend to squeeze too hard and overshoot.

After an hour they opened the cage and unjacked us. We could kill ninety minutes in the lounge. It was hardly worth wasting time getting dressed, but we did. It was a gesture. We were about to live in each other's bodies for nine days, and enough was enough.

Familiarity breeds, as they say. Some mechanics become lovers, and sometimes it works. I tried it with Carolyn, who died three years ago, but we could never bridge the gap between being combat-jacked and being civilians. We tried to work it out with a relator, but the relator had never been jacked, so we might as well have been talking Sanskrit.

I don't know that it would be 'love' with Sara, but it's academic. She's not really attracted to me, and of course can't hide her feelings, or lack of same. In a physical way we're closer than any civilian pair could be, since in full combat jack we are this one creature with twenty arms and legs, with ten brains, with five vaginas and five penises.

Some people call the feeling godlike, and I think there have been gods who were constructed along similar lines. The one I grew up with was an old white-bearded Caucasian gent without even one vagina.

We'd already studied the order of battle, of course, and our specific orders for the nine days. We were going to continue in Scoville's area, but doing H & I, making things difficult in the cloud forest of Costa Rica. It was not a particularly dangerous assignment, but it was distasteful, like bullying, since the rebels didn't have anything remotely like soldierboys.

Ralph expressed his discomfort. We had sat down at the dining table with tea and coffee.

'This overkill gets to me,' he said. 'That pair in the tree last time.'

'Ugly,' Sara said.

'Ah, the bastards killed themselves,' Mel said. He sipped the coffee and scowled at it. 'We probably wouldn't have noticed them if they hadn't opened up on us.'

'It bothers you that they were children?' I asked Ralph.

'Well, yeah. Doesn't it you?' He rubbed the stubble on his chin. 'Little girls.'

'Little girls with machine guns,' Karen said, and Claude nodded emphatically. They'd come in together about a year ago, and were lovers.

'I've been thinking about that, too,' I said. 'What if we'd known they were little girls?' They'd been about ten years old, hiding in a tree house.

'Before or after they started shooting?' Mel asked.

'Even after,' Candi said. 'How much damage can they do with a machine gun?'

'They damaged
me
pretty effectively!' Mel said. He'd lost one eye and the olfactory receptors. 'They knew exactly what to aim for.'

'It wasn't a big deal,' Candi said. 'You got field replacements.'

'Felt like a big deal to me.'

'I know. I was there.' You don't exactly feel pain when a sensor goes out. It's something as strong as pain, but there's no word for it.

'I don't think we would've had to kill them if they were out in the open,' Claude said. 'If we could see they were just kids and lightly armed. But hell, for all we knew they were FOs who could call in a tac nuke.'

'In Costa Rica?' Candi said.

'It happens,' Karen said. It had happened once in three years. Nobody knew where the rebels had gotten the nuke. It had cost them two towns, the one the soldierboys were in when they were vaporized, and the one we took apart in retaliation.

'Yeah, yeah,' Candi said, and I could hear in those two words all she wasn't saying: that a nuke on our position would just destroy ten machines. When Mel flamed the tree house he roasted two little girls, probably too young to know what they were doing.

There was always an undercurrent in Candi's mind, when we were jacked. She was a good mechanic, but you had to wonder why she hadn't been given some other assignment. She was too empathetic, sure to crack before her term was up.

But maybe she was in the platoon to act as our collective conscience. Nobody at our level knew why anybody was chosen to be a mechanic, and we only had a vague idea why we were assigned to the platoon we got. We seemed to cover a wide range of aggressiveness, from Candi to Mel. We didn't have anybody like Scoville, though. Nobody who got that dark pleasure out of killing. Scoville's platoon always saw more action than mine, too; no coincidence. Hunter/killers – they're definitely more congenial with mayhem. So when the Great Computer in the Sky decides who gets what mission, Scoville's platoon gets the kills and ours gets reconnaissance.

Mel and Claude, especially, grumbled about that. A confirmed kill was an automatic point toward promotion, in pay grade if not in rank, whereas you couldn't count on the PPR – Periodic Performance Review – for a dime. Scoville's people got the kills, so they averaged about twenty-five percent higher pay than my people. But what could you spend it on? Save it up and buy our way out of the army?

'So we're gonna do trucks,' Mel said. 'Cars and trucks.'

'That's the word,' I said. 'Maybe a tank if you hold your mouth right.' Satellites had picked up some IR traces that probably meant the rebels were being resupplied by small stealthed trucks, probably robotic or remote. One of those outbursts of technology that kept the war from being a totally one-sided massacre.

I suppose if the war went on long enough, the enemy might have soldierboys, too. Then we could have the ultimate in something: ten-million-dollar machines reducing each other to junk while their operators sat hundreds of miles away, concentrating in air-conditioned caves.

People had written about that, warfare based on attrition of wealth rather than loss of life. But it's always been easier to make new lives than new wealth. And economic battles have long-established venues, some political and some not, as often among allies as not.

Well, what does a physicist know about it? My science has rules and laws that seem to correspond to reality. Economics describes reality after the fact, but isn't too good at predicting. Nobody predicted the nanoforges.

The loudspeaker told us to saddle up. Nine days of truck-stalking.

A
ll ten people in Julian Class's platoon had the same basic weapon – the soldierboy, or Remote Infantry Combat Unit: a huge suit of armor with a ghost in it. For all the weight of its armor, more than half of the RICU's mass was ammunition. It could fire accurate sniper rounds to the horizon, two ounces of depleted uranium, or at close range it could hose a stream of supersonic flechettes. It had high explosive and incendiary rockets with eyes, a fully automatic grenade launcher, and a high-powered laser. Special units could be fitted with chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, but those were only used for reprisal in kind.

(Fewer than a dozen nuclear weapons, small ones, had been used in twelve years of war. A large one had destroyed Atlanta, and although the Ngumi denied responsibility, the Alliance responded by giving twenty-four hours' notice, and then leveling Mandelaville and Sao Paulo. Ngumi contended that the Alliance had cynically sacrificed one nonstrategic city so it could have an excuse to destroy two important ones. Julian suspected they might be right.)

There were air and naval units, too, inevitably called flyboys and sailorboys, even though most flyboys were piloted by females.

All of Julian's platoon had the same armor and weapons, but some had specialized functions. Julian, being platoon leader, communicated directly and (in theory) constantly with the company coordinator, and through her to the brigade command. In the field, he received constant input in the form of encrypted signals from flyover satellites as well as the command station in geosynchronous orbit. Every order came from two sources simultaneously, with different encryption and a different transmission lag, so it would be almost impossible for the enemy to slip in a bogus command.

Ralph had a 'horizontal' link similar to Julian's 'vertical' one. As platoon liaison, he was in touch with his opposite number in each of the other nine platoons that made up Bravo. They were 'lightly jacked' – the communication wasn't as intimate as he had with other members of the platoon, but it was more than just a radio link. He could advise Julian as to the other platoons' actions and even feelings, morale, in a quick and direct way. It was rare for all the platoons to be engaged in a single action, but when they were, the situation was chaotic and confusing. The platoon liaisons then were as important as the vertical command links.

One soldierboy platoon could do as much damage as a brigade of regular infantry. They did it quicker and more dramatically, like huge invincible robots moving in silent concert.

They didn't use actual armed robots, for several reasons. One was that they could be captured and used against you; if the enemy could capture a soldierboy they would just have an expensive piece of junk. None had ever been captured intact, though; they self-destruct impressively.

Another problem with robots was autonomy: the machine has to be able to function on its own if communications are cut off. The image, as well as the reality, of a heavily armed machine making spot combat decisions was not something any army wanted to deal with. (Soldier-boys had limited autonomy, in case their mechanics died or passed out. They stopped firing and went for shelter while a new mechanic was warmed up and jacked.)

The soldierboys were arguably more effective psychological weapons than robots would be. They were like all-powerful knights, heroes. And they represented a technology that was out of the enemy's grasp.