Forever Peace Read online

  “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.

  * * *

  all 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 Mandellaville 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 encryptation 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. (Soldierboys 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.

  The enemy did use armed robots, like, as it turned out, the two tanks that were guarding the convoy of trucks that Julian’s platoon was sent to destroy. Neither of the tanks caused any trouble. In both cases they were destroyed as soon as they revealed their position by firing. Twenty-four robot trucks were destroyed, too, after their cargos had been examined: ammunition and medical supplies.

  After the last truck had been reduced to shiny slag, the platoon still had four days left on its shift, so they were flown back to the Portobello base camp, to do picket duty. That could be pretty dangerous, since the base camp was hit by rockets a couple of times a year, but most of the time it was no challenge. Not boring, though—the mechanics were protecting their own lives, for a change.

  * * *

  sometimes it took me a couple of days to wind down and be ready to be a civilian again. There were plenty of joints in Portobello willing to help ease the transition. I usually did my unwinding back in Houston, though. It was easy for rebels to slip across the border and pass as Panamanians, and if you got tagged as a mechanic you were a prime target. Of course there were plenty of other Americans and Europeans in Portobello, but it’s possible that mechanics stood out: pale and twitchy, collars pulled up to hide t
he skull jacks, or wigs.

  We lost one that way last month. Arly went into town for a meal and a movie. Some thugs pulled off her wig, and she was hauled into an alley and beaten to a pulp and raped. She didn’t die but she didn’t recover, either. They had pounded the back of her head against a wall until the skull fractured and the jack came out. They shoved the jack into her vagina and left her for dead.

  So the platoon was one short this month. (The neo Personnel delivered couldn’t fit Arly’s cage, which was not surprising.) We may be short two next month: Samantha, who is Arly’s best friend, and a little bit more, was hardly there this week. Brooding, distracted, slow. If we’d been in actual combat she might have snapped out of it; both of them were pretty good soldiers—better than me, in terms of actually liking the work—but picket duty gave her too much time to meditate, and the truck assignment before that was a silly exercise a flyboy could have done on her way back from something else.

  We all tried to give Samantha support while we were jacked, but it was awkward. Of course she and Arly couldn’t hide their physical attraction for one another, but they were both conventional enough to be embarrassed about it (they had boyfriends on the outside), and had encouraged kidding as a way of keeping the complex relationship manageable. There was no banter now, of course.

  Samantha had spent the past three weeks visiting Arly every day at the convalescent center, where the bones of her face were growing back, but that was a constant frustration, since the nature of her injuries meant they couldn’t be jacked, couldn’t be close. Never. And it was Samantha’s nature to want revenge, but that was impossible now. The five rebels involved had been apprehended immediately, slid through the legal system, and were hanged a week later in the public square.

  I’d seen it on the cube. They weren’t hanged so much as slowly strangled. This in a country that hadn’t used capital punishment in generations, before the war.

  Maybe after the war we’ll be civilized again. That’s the way it has always happened in the past.

  * * *

  julian usually went straight home to Houston, but not when his ten days were up on a Friday. That was the day of the week when he had to be the most social, and he needed at least a day of preparation for that. Every day you spent jacked, you felt closer to the other nine mechanics. There was a terrible sense of separation when you unjacked, and hanging around with the others didn’t help. What you needed was a day or so of isolation, in the woods or in a crowd.

  Julian was not the outdoor type, and he usually just buried himself in the university library for a day. But not if it was Friday.

  He could fly anywhere for free, so on impulse he went up to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he’d done his undergraduate work. It was a bad choice, dirty slush everywhere and thin sleet falling in a constant sting, but he grimly persisted in his quest to visit every bar he could remember. They were full of inexplicably young and callow people.

  Harvard was still Harvard; the dome still leaked. People made a point of not staring at a black man in uniform.

  He walked a mile through the sleet to his favorite pub, the ancient Plough and Stars, but it was padlocked, with a card saying BAHAMA! taped inside the window. So he squished back to the Square on frozen feet, promising simultaneously to get drunk and not lose his temper.

  There was a bar named after John Harvard, where they brewed nine kinds of beer on the premises. He had a pint of each one, methodically checking them off on the blotter, and flowed into a cab that decanted him at the airport. After six hours of off-and-on slumber, he flew his hangover back to Houston Sunday morning, following the sunrise across the country.

  Back at his apartment he made a pot of coffee and attacked the accumulated mail and memos. Most of it was throwaway junk. Interesting letter from his father, vacationing in Montana with his new wife, not Julian’s favorite person. His mother had called twice about a money problem, but then called again to say never mind. Both brothers called about the hanging; they followed Julian’s “career” closely enough to realize that the woman who’d been attacked was in his platoon.

  His actual career had generated the usual soft sifting pink snowfall of irrelevant interdepartmental memos, which he did have to at least scan. He studied the minutes of the monthly faculty meeting, just in case something real had been discussed. He always missed it, since he was on duty from the tenth to the nineteenth of every month. The only way that might have hurt his career would be jealousy from other faculty members.

  And then there was a hand-delivered envelope, a small square under the memos, addressed “J.” He saw a corner of it and pulled it out, pink slips fluttering, and ripped open the flap, over which a red flame had been rubber-stamped: it was from Blaze, who Julian was allowed to call by her real name, Amelia. She was his coworker, ex-adviser, confidante, and sexual companion. He didn’t say “lover” in his mind, yet, because that was awkward, Amelia being fifteen years older than him. Younger than his father’s new wife.

  The note had some chat about the Jupiter Project, the particle-physics experiment they were engaged in, including a bit of scandalous gossip about their boss, which did not alone explain the sealed envelope. “Whatever time you get back,” she wrote, “come straight over. Wake me up or pull me out of the lab. I need my little boy in the worst way. You want to come over and find out what the worst way is?”

  Actually, what he’d had in mind was sleeping for a few hours. But he could do that afterward. He stacked the mail into three piles and dropped one pile into the recycler. He started to call her but then put the phone down unpunched. He dressed for the morning cool and went downstairs for his bicycle.

  The campus was deserted and beautiful, redbuds and azaleas in bloom under the hard blue Texas sky. He pedaled slowly, relaxing back into real life, or comfortable illusion. The more time he spent jacked, the harder it was to accept this peaceful, monocular view of life as the real one. Rather than the beast with twenty arms; the god with ten hearts.

  At least he wasn’t menstruating anymore.

  He let himself into her place with his thumbprint. Amelia was actually up at nine this Sunday morning, in the shower. He decided against surprising her there. Showers were dangerous places—he had slipped in one once, experimenting with a fellow clumsy teenager, and had wound up with a cut chin and bruises and a decidedly unerotic attitude toward the location (and the girl, for that matter).

  So he just sat up in her bed, quietly reading the newspaper, and waited for the water to stop. She sang bits of tunes, happy, and switched the shower from fine spray to coarse pulse and back. Julian could visualize her there and almost changed his mind. But he stayed on the bed, fully clothed, pretending to read.

  She came out toweling and started slightly when she saw Julian; then recovered: “Help! There’s a strange man in my bed!”

  “I thought you liked strange men.”

  “Only one.” She laughed and eased alongside him, hot and damp.

  * * *

  all of us mechanics talk about sex. Being jacked automatically accomplishes two things that normal people pursue through sex, and sometimes love: emotional union with another and the penetration, so to speak, of the physical mysteries of the opposite sex. These things are automatic and instantaneous, jacked, as soon as they turn on the power. When you unjack, it’s a mystery you all have in common, and you talk about that as much as anything.

  Amelia’s the only civilian I’ve talked about it with at any length. She’s intensely curious about it, and would take the chance if it were possible. But she would lose her position, and maybe a lot more.

  Eight or nine percent of the people who go through the installation either die on the operating table or, worse, come out of it with their brains not working at all. Even those of us who come out successfully jacked face an increase in the frequency of cerebrovascular incidents, including fatal stroke. For mechanics in soldierboys, the increase is tenfold.

  So Amelia could get jacked—she has the mon
ey and could just slip down to Mexico City or Guadalajara and have it done at one of the clinics there—but she would automatically lose her position: tenure, retirement, everything. Most job contracts had a “jack” clause; all academic ones did. People like me were exempt because we didn’t do it voluntarily, and it was against the law to discriminate against people in National Service. Amelia’s too old to be drafted.

  When we make love I sometimes have felt her stroking the cold metal disk at the base of my skull, as if she were trying to get in. I don’t think she’s aware of doing it.

  Amelia and I had been close for many years; even when she was my Ph.D. adviser, we had a social life together. But it didn’t become physical until after Carolyn died.

  Carolyn and I were first jacked at the same time; joined the platoon on the same day. It was an instant emotional connection, even though we had almost nothing in common. We were both black Southerners (Amelia’s pale Boston Irish) and in graduate school. But she was no intellectual; her MFA was going to be in Creative Viewing. I never watched the cube and she wouldn’t know a differential equation if it had reared up and bit her on the butt. So we had no rapport at that level, but that wasn’t important.

  We’d been physically attracted to each other during training, the shoe stuff you go through before they put you in a soldierboy, and had managed to sneak a few minutes of privacy, three times, for hasty sex, desperately passionate. Even for normal people, that would have been an intense beginning. But then when we were jacked it was something way beyond anything either of us had ever experienced. It was as if life were a big simple puzzle, and we suddenly had a piece dropped in that nobody else could see.

  But we couldn’t put it together when we weren’t jacked. We had a lot of sex, a lot of talks, went to relators and counselors—but it was like we were one thing in the cage and quite another, or two others, outside.

  I talked to Amelia about it at the time, not only because we were friends, but because we were on the same project and she could see my work was starting to suffer. I couldn’t get Carolyn off my mind, in a very literal way.