Forever Peace (8 page)

"Nice of you to tell us," Amelia said.

"I don't mean to embarrass you. But of course Julian would know the next time he jacks with her. I was glad to finally get you alone."

"Who was it?"

"Private Defollette."

"Candi. Well, that makes sense."

"She's the one who was so hurt about the death last month?" Amelia said.

Julian nodded. "You expect her to crack?"

"We don't expect anything. We're simply interviewing one person per platoon."

"Chosen at random," Julian said.

Marty laughed and raised an eyebrow. "We were talking about liposuction?"

I DIDN'T EXPECT A lot of action the next week, since we'd have to break in a new set of soldierboys and start with a new mechanic as well. Almost two new ones, since Rose, Arly's replacement, had no experience other than last month's disaster.

The new mechanic was not a neo. For some reason they broke up India platoon to use as replacements. So we all sort of knew the new man, Park, because of the diffuse platoon-level link through Ralph, and Richard before him.

I didn't much like Park. India had been a hunter-killer platoon. He'd killed more people than all the rest of us put together, and unabashedly enjoyed it. He collected crystals of his kills and replayed them off duty.

We trained in the new soldierboys three hours on, one off, destroying the fake town "Pedropolis," built for that purpose on the Portobello base.

When I had time, I linked up to Carolyn, the company coordinator, and asked what was going on—why did I wind up with a man like Park? He'd never really fit in.

Carolyn's reply was sour and hot with confusion and anger. The order to "decompose" India platoon had come from somewhere above the brigade level, and it was causing organizational problems everywhere. The India mechanics were a bunch of mavericks. They hadn't gotten along all that well even with each other.

She assumed it was a deliberate experiment. As far as she knew, nothing like it had been done before; the only time she'd heard of a platoon being broken up, it was because four of them had died at once, and the other six couldn't work together anymore, with the shared grief. India, on the other hand, was one of the most successful platoons they had, in terms of kills. It didn't really make sense to split them up.

I was the lucky one, to have Park, she said. He had been the horizontal liaison, and so had been directly linked to mechanics outside his platoon for the past three years. His cohorts, except for the platoon leader, had only had each other, and they were a fun bunch. They made Scoville look like a pedro lover.

Park liked to kill nonhuman things, too. During the training exercise he occasionally popped a songbird out of the air with his laser, not an easy task. Samantha and Rose both objected when he zapped a stray dog. He sardonically defended his action by pointing out that it didn't belong in the AO, and could have been rigged up as a spy or boobytrap. But we all were linked, and had felt how he felt when he targeted the enemy mutt: it was simple obscene glee. He'd cranked up to maximum magnification to watch the dog explode.

The last three days combined perimeter guard with training, and I had visions of Park using kids as target practice. Children often watch the soldierboys from a safe distance, and no doubt some of them report to Dad, who reports to Costa Rica. But most of them are just kids fascinated by machines, fascinated by war. I probably went through a stage like that. My memories before eleven or twelve are vague almost to nonexistence, a byproduct of the jack installation that affects about a third of us. Who needs a childhood when the present is so much fun?

We had more than enough excitement for anybody the last night. Three rockets came in simultaneously, two of them from the sea and one, a decoy, coming in at treetop level, launched from the balcony of a high-rise on the edge of town.

The two that came in from the sea were in our sector. There were automatic defenses against this kind of attack, but we backed them up.

As soon as we heard the explosion—Alpha knocking out the rocket on the other side of the camp—we stifled the natural impulse to look and turned to watch in the opposite direction, facing directly out from the camp. The two rockets immediately appeared, stealthed but bright in IR. A flak wall sprayed up in front of them, and we targeted them with our heavy bullets about the time they hit that. Two crimson fireballs. They were still glowing impressively in the night sky when a pair of flyboys screamed out to sea in search of the launching platform.

Our reaction time had been fast enough, but we didn't set any records. Park, of course, got in the first shot, .02 of a second ahead of Claude, which made him smug. We all had people in the warm-up seats, it being the last day of our cycle and the first of theirs; I got a confused query from Park's second, through my second: Is there something wrong with this guy?

Just a real good soldier, I said, and knew my meaning was clear. My second, Wu, didn't have any more killer instinct than I did.

I left five soldierboys on perimeter and took the other five down to the beach to police up debris from the missiles. No surprises. They were Taiwanese RPB-4s. A note of protest would be sent, and the reply would lament the obvious theft.

But the rockets were just a diversion.

The actual attack was timed pretty well. It was less than one hour before the shift ended.

As far as we could reconstruct it, the plan was a combination of patience and sudden desperate force. The two rebels who did it had been working for the food service in Portobello for years. They rolled into the lounge adjacent to the locker room to set up the buffet most of us tore into after our shift. But they had scatterguns, two streetsweepers, taped under the food carts. There was a third person, never caught, who cut the fiber line that gave Command its physical picture of the lounge and locker room.

That gave them about thirty seconds of "somebody tripped over the cable," while the two pulled out their weapons and walked through the unlocked doors that connect the lounge to the locker room and the locker room to Operations. They stepped into Ops and started shooting.

The tapes show that they lived for 2.02 seconds after the door opened, during which time they got off seventy-eight 20-gauge buckshot blasts. They didn't hurt any of us in the cages, since that would take armor-piercing shells and more, but they killed all ten of the warm-up mechanics and two of the techs, who were behind supposedly bulletproof glass. The shoe guard, who dozes over us in his armored suit, woke up at the noise and toasted them. It was actually a close thing, as it turned out, because he took four direct hits. They didn't harm him, but if they'd hit the laser, he would have had to lumber down and attack them hand to hand. That might have given them time to crack the shells. They each had five shaped charges taped under their shirts.

All the weapons were Alliance issue; the fully automatic shotguns fired depleted uranium ammunition.

The propaganda machine would play up the suicide aspect of it—lunatic pedros who place no value on human life. As if they had just run amok and wiped out twelve young men and women. The reality was frightening, not only because of their success in infiltrating and attacking, but also in the bold and desperate dedication that it bespoke.

We hadn't just hired those two people off the street. Everyone who worked on the compound had to pass an exhaustive background check, and psychological testing that proved they were safe. How many other time bombs were walking around Portobello?

Candi and I were lucky, in a grim way, because both our seconds died instantly. Wu didn't even have time to turn around. He heard the door click open and then a shotgun blast took off the top of his head. Candi's second, Maria, died the same way. Some of them were pretty bad. Rose's second had time to stand up and turn half around, and was shot in the chest and abdomen. She lived long enough to drown in blood. Claude's was shot in the crotch as a reward for facing the enemy; he lived for a long couple of seconds jackknifed in pain before a second blast tore out his lower spine and kidneys.

It was a light jack, but still profoundly disturbing, especially for those of us whose seconds died in pain. We were all tranked automatically before they popped our cages and rolled us to Trauma. I got a glimpse of the carnage all around, the big white machines that were trying to hammer life back into the ones whose brains were intact. The next day we found out that none of those had been successful. Their bodies were too completely shredded.

So there was no next shift. Our soldierboys stood in frozen postures in their guard positions while shoe infantry, suddenly pressed into guard detail, swarmed around them. The natural assumption was that the attack on our seconds would be followed immediately by a ground attack on the base itself, before another platoon of soldierboys could be brought in. Maybe it would have happened if one or two of the rockets had found their mark. But all was quiet, this time, and Fox platoon, from the Zone, was in place in less than an hour.

They let us out of Trauma after a couple of hours, and at first said we weren't to tell anyone what happened. But of course the Ngumi weren't going to keep it quiet.

AUTOMATIC CAMERAS HAD RECORDED the carnage, and a copy of the scene fell into Ngumi hands. It was powerful propaganda, in a world that couldn't be shocked by death or violence. To the camera, Julian's ten comrades were not young men and women, naked under an unrelenting spray of lead. They were symbols of weakness, triumphant evidence of the Alliance's vulnerability in the face of Ngumi dedication. The Alliance called it a freakish kamikaze attack by two murderous fanatics. It was a situation that could never be duplicated. They didn't publicize the fact that all of the native staff in Portobello were fired the next week, replaced by American draftees.

This was hard on the economy of Portobello proper, as the base was its largest single source of income. Panama was a "most favored nation," but not a full Alliance Member, which in practical terms meant it had limited use of American nanoforges, but there weren't any of the machines within its boundaries.

There were about two dozen small countries in a similar unstable situation. Two nanoforges in Houston were reserved for Panama. The Panama Import-Export Board decided what they were to be used for. Houston supplied them with a "wish book," a list of how long it took to make something, and what raw materials had to be supplied by the Canal Zone. Houston could supply air and water and dirt. If something required an ounce of platinum or a speck of dysprosium, Panama would have to dig it up somewhere or somehow.

The machine had limits. You could give it a bucket of coal and it could return a perfect copy of the Hope Diamond, which would make a dandy paperweight. Of course, if you wanted a fancy gold crown, you'd have to supply the gold. If you wanted an atomic bomb, you'd have to give it a couple of kilograms of plutonium. But fission bombs were not in the wish book; nor were soldierboys or any other products of advanced military technology. Planes and tanks were okay, and among the most popular items.

This is the way things worked: the day after the Portobello base was emptied of native workers, the Panama Import-Export Board presented the Alliance with a detailed analysis of the impact of the loss of income. (It was obvious that someone had foreseen the eventuality.) After a couple of days' haggling, the Alliance agreed to increase their nanoforge allotment from forty-eight hours per day to fifty-four, along with a onetime settlement of a half-billion dollars' credit in rare materials. So if the prime minister wanted a Rolls-Royce with a solid gold chassis, he could have it. But it wouldn't be bulletproof.

The Alliance did not officially care how client nations came up with their requests for the machines' largesse. In Panama there was at least a pretense of democracy, the Import-Export Board being advised by elected representatives, compradores, one from each province and territory. So there were occasional well-publicized imports that benefited only the poor.

Like the United States, technically, they had a semi-socialist electrocash economy. The government supposedly took care of basic needs, and citizens worked for money for luxuries, which were paid for either by electronic credit transfer or cash.

But in the United States, luxuries were just that: entertainments or refinements. In the Canal Zone they were things like medicine and meat, more often bought with cash than with plastic.

There was a lot of resentment, of their own government and Tio Rico to the north, which gave rise to an ironic pattern common to most client states: incidents like the Portobello massacre ensured that Panama would not have its own nanoforges for a long time, but the unrest that led to the massacre was directly traceable to its lack of the magic box.

WE GOT NO PEACE the first week after the massacre. The huge publicity machine that fueled the warboy mania, and was usually concerned with more interesting platoons, turned its energies on us; the general media wouldn't leave us alone, either. In a culture that lived on news, it was the story of the year: bases like Portobello were attacked all the time, but this was the first time the mechanics' inner sanctum had been violated. That the mechanics who were killed had not been in charge of the machines was a detail repeatedly stressed by the government and downplayed by the press.

They even interviewed some of my UT students to see how I was "taking it," and of course they were quick to defend me by saying it was business as usual in the classroom. Which of course demonstrated how unfeeling I was, or how strong and resilient, or how traumatized, depending on the reporter.

Actually, it may have demonstrated all of the above, or maybe just that a particle-physics practicum is not a place where you discuss personal feelings.

When they tried to bring a camera into my classroom, I called a shoe and had them evicted. It was the first time in my academic career that being a sergeant meant more than being an instructor, however junior.