She a.s.sumed 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 b.o.o.bytrap. 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 fireb.a.l.l.s. 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 sh.e.l.ls and more, but they killed all ten of the warm-up mechanics and two of the techs, who were behind supposedly bulletproof gla.s.s. 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 sh.e.l.ls. 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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.sumption 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 Ca.n.a.l 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 cha.s.sis, 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 Ca.n.a.l 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 ma.s.sacre ensured that Panama would not have its own nanoforges for a long time, but the unrest that led to the ma.s.sacre was directly traceable to its lack of the magic box.

WE GOT NO PEACE the first week after the ma.s.sacre. 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 cla.s.sroom. 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 practic.u.m is not a place where you discuss personal feelings.

When they tried to bring a camera into my cla.s.sroom, 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.

Likewise, I was able to commandeer two shoes to keep the reporters at a distance when I went out. But for almost a week they did have at least one camera watching me, which kept me away from Amelia. Of course, she could just walk into my apartment building as if she were visiting someone else, but the possibility that someone would make a connection-or happen to see her walking into my own apartment-was too great to risk. There were still some people in Texas who would be unhappy about a white woman who had a black man, fifteen years younger, for a lover. There might even be some people in the university who would be unhappy about it.

The newsies seemed to have lost interest by Friday, but Amelia and I went to the club separately, and I brought along my shoes to stand guard outside.

We overlapped trips to the bathroom, and managed a quick embrace un.o.bserved. Otherwise, most of my apparent attention went to Marty and Franklin.

Marty confirmed what I had suspected. The autopsy showed that your second's jack was disconnected by the same blast that killed him. So there's no reason for it to have felt any different to you than just being unplugged.

At first, I didn't even realize he was gone, I said, not for the first time. The input from the rest of my platoon was so strong and chaotic. The ones whose seconds were hurt but still alive.

But it wouldn't be as bad for them as being fully jacked to someone who died, Franklin said. Most of you have gone through that.

I don't know. When somebody dies in the cage, it's a heart attack or stroke. Not being ripped open by buckshot. A light jack may only feed back, say, ten percent of that sensation, but it's a lot of pain. When Carolyn died... I had to clear my throat. With Carolyn it was just a sudden headache, and she was gone. Just like coming unjacked.

I'm sorry, Franklin said, and filled both our gla.s.ses. The wine was a duped Lafite Rothschild '28, the wine of the century, so far.

Thanks. It's years now. I sipped the wine, good but presumably beyond my powers of discrimination. The bad part, a bad part, was that it didn't occur to me that she'd died. Nor to anybody else in the platoon. We were just standing on a hill, waiting for a s.n.a.t.c.h. Thought it was a comm failure.

They knew at the company level, Marty said.

Of course they did. And of course they wouldn't tell us, risk our s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up the s.n.a.t.c.h. But when we popped, her cage was empty. I found a medic and she said they'd done a brain scan and there wasn't enough to save; they'd taken her down to autopsy already. Marty, I've told you this more than once before. Sorry.

Marty shook his head in commiseration. No closure. No leave-taking.

They should've popped you all, once you were in place, Franklin said. They can s.n.a.t.c.h cold 'boys as easily as warm ones. Then you would've at least known, before they took her away.

I don't know. My memory of the whole thing is cloudy. They knew we were lovers, of course, and had me tranked before I was popped. A lot of the counseling was just drug therapy with conversation, and after a while I wasn't taking the drugs anymore and I had Amelia there in place of Carolyn. In some ways.

I felt a sudden pang of frustration and longing, partly for Amelia after this stupid week of isolation, partly for the unattainable past. There would never be another Carolyn, and not just because she was dead. That part of me was dead, too.

The talk moved on to safer areas, a movie everybody but Franklin had hated. I pretended to follow it. Meanwhile, my mind went round and round the suicide track.

It never seems to surface while I'm jacked. Maybe the army knows all about it, and has a way of suppressing it; I know I'm suppressing it myself. Even Candi only had a hint.

But I can't keep this up for five more years, all the killing and dying. And the war's not going to end.

When I feel this way I don't feel sad. It's not loss, but escape-it's not whether, but when and how.

I guess after I lose Amelia is the when. The only how that appeals to me is to do it while jacked. Maybe take a couple of generals with me. I can save the actual planning for the moment. But I do know where the generals live in Portobello, Building 31, and with all my years jacked it's nothing to slide a comm thread to the soldierboys who guard the building. There are ways I can divert them for a fraction of a second. Try not to kill any shoes on my way in.

Yoo-hoo. Julian? Anybody home? It was Reza, from the other table.

Sorry. Thinking.

"Well, come over here and think. We have a physics question that Blaze can't answer.

I picked up my drink and moved over. Not particle, then.

No, it's simpler than that. Why does water emptying out of a tub go one direction in the Northern Hemisphere and the other in the Southern?

I looked at Amelia and she nodded seriously. She knew the answer, and Reza probably did, too. They were rescuing me from the war talk.

That's easy. Water molecules are magnetized. They always point north or south.

Nonsense, Belda said. Even I would know it if water were magnetized.

The truth is that it's an old wives' tale. You'll excuse the expression.

I'm an old widow, Belda said.

Water goes one way or the other depending on the size and shape of the tub, and peculiarities of the surface near the outlet. People go through life believing the hemisphere thing without noticing that some of the basins in their own house go the wrong way.

I must go home and check, Belda said. She drained her gla.s.s and unfolded slowly out of the chair. You children be good. She went to say good-bye to the others.

Reza smiled at her back. She thought you looked lonely there.

Sad, Amelia said. I did, too. Such a horrible experience, and here we are bringing it up all over.

It's not something they covered in training. I mean, in a way they do. You get jacked to strings recorded while people died, first in a light jack and then deeper.

Some jackfreaks do it for fun, Reza said.

Yeah, well, they can have my job.

I've seen that billboard. Amelia hugged herself.

Strings of people dying in racing accidents. Executions.

The under-the-counter ones are worse. Ralph had tried a couple, so I'd felt them secondhand. Our backups who died, their strings are probably on the market by now.

The government can't- Oh, the government loves it, Reza broke in. They probably have some recruitment division that makes sure the stores are full of snuff strings.

I don't know, I said. Army's not wild about people who are already jacked.

Ralph was, Amelia said.

He had other virtues. They'd rather have you a.s.sociate the specialness of being jacked with being in the army.

Sounds really special, Reza said. Somebody dies and you feel his pain? I'd rather- You don't understand, Rez. You get larger in a way, when somebody dies. You share it and -the memory of Carolyn suddenly hit me hard- well, it makes your own death less earthshaking. Someday you'll buy it. Big deal.

You live on? I mean, they live on, in you?

Some do, some don't. You've met people you'd never want to carry around in your head. Those guys die the day they die.

But you'll have Carolyn forever, Amelia said.

I paused a little too long. Of course. And after I die, the people who've been jacked to me will remember her too, and pa.s.s her down.

I wish you wouldn't talk like that, Amelia said. Rez, who had known for years that we were together, nodded. It's like a boil you keep picking at, like you were getting ready to die all the time.

I almost lost it. I literally counted to ten. Rez opened his mouth but I interrupted. Would you rather I just watched people die, felt them die, and came home asking 'What's for dinner?' I dropped to a whisper. How would you feel about me if that didn't hurt me?

I'm sorry.

Don't. I'm sorry you lost a baby. But that's not what you are. We go through these things, and then we more or less absorb them, and we become whatever we are becoming.

Julian, Reza said in a warning tone, perhaps you ought to save this for later?

That's a good idea, Amelia said, rising. I have to go on home anyhow. She signaled the wheelie and it went for her coat and bag.

Share a cab? I asked.

It's not necessary, she said in a neutral tone. End of the month. She could use leftover entertainment points for a cab ride.

Other people didn't have points left over, so I bought a lot of wine and beer and whiskey, and drank more than my share. Reza did, too; his car wouldn't let him drive. He came along with me and my two bodyguard shoes.

I had them drop me at the campus gate, and walked the two kilometers to Amelia's through a cool mist of rain. No sign of any newsies.

All the lights were out; it was almost two. I let myself in through the back and belatedly thought I should have buzzed. What if she wasn't alone?

I turned on the kitchen light and harvested cheese and grape juice from the refrigerator. She heard me moving around and shuffled in, rubbing her eyes. No reporters? I asked.

They're all under the bed.

She stood behind me and put her hands on my shoulders. Give them something to write about? I turned around in the chair and buried my face between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Her skin had a warm, sleepy smell.

I'm sorry about earlier.

You've been through too much. Come on. I let her lead me into the bedroom and she undressed me like a child. I was still a little drunk, but she had ways of getting around that, mostly patience, but other things, too.