The black figure considered its left hand. Only the thumb and first finger worked, and the wrist made a noise when it rotated.

Good reflexes. Oh, shut up.

The other three shapes turned on sunlights and pulled off the building's roof and knocked down the remaining walls.

The people inside looked dead, bloody and still. The machines began to check them, though, and a young woman suddenly rolled over and raised the laser rifle she'd been concealing. She aimed it at the one with the broken hand and did manage to raise a puff of smoke from its chest before she was shredded.

The one checking the bodies hadn't even looked up. 'No good,' it said. 'All dead. No tunnels. No exotic weapons I can find.'

'Well, we got some stuff for Unit Eight.' They turned off their lights and sped off simultaneously, in four different directions.

The one with the bad hand moved about a quarter-mile and stopped to inspect the damage with a dim infrared light. It beat the hand against its side a few times. Still, only the two digits worked.

Wonderful. We'll have to bring it in.

So what would you have done?

Who's complaining? I'll spend part of my ten in base camp.

The four of them took four different routes to the top of a treeless hill. They stood in a row for a few seconds, arms upraised, and a cargo helicopter came in at treetop level and snatched them away.

Who got the second kill there? thought the one with the broken hand.

A voice appeared in all four heads. 'Berryman initiated the response. But Hogarth commenced firing before the victim was unambiguously dead. So by the rules, they share the kill.'

The helicopter with the four soldierboys dangling slipped down the hill and screamed through the night at treetop level, in total darkness, east toward friendly Panama.

I didn't like Scoville having the soldierboy before me. You have to monitor the previous mechanic for twenty-four hours before you take it over, to warm up and become sensitive to how the soldierboy might have changed since your last shift. Like losing the use of three fingers.

When you're in the warm-up seat you're just watching; you're not jacked into the rest of the platoon, which would be hopelessly confusing. We go in strict rotation, so the other nine soldierboys in the platoon also have replacements breathing over their mechanics' shoulders.

You hear about emergencies, where the replacement has to suddenly take over from the mechanic. It's easy to believe. The last day would be the worst even without the added stress of being watched. If you're going to crack or have a heart attack or stroke, it's usually on the tenth day.

Mechanics aren't in any physical danger, deep inside the Operations bunker in Portobello. But our death and disability rate is higher than the regular infantry. It's not bullets that get us, though; it's our own brains and veins.

It would be rough for me or any of my mechanics to replace people in Scoville's platoon, though. They're a hunter/killer group, and we're 'harassment and interdiction,' H & I; sometimes loaned to Psychops. We don't often kill. We aren't selected for that aptitude.

All ten of our soldierboys came into the garage within a couple of minutes. The mechanics jacked out and the exoskeleton shells eased open. Scoville's people climbed out like little old men and women, even though their bodies had been exercised constantly and adjusted for fatigue poisons. You still couldn't help feeling as if you'd been sitting in the same place for nine days.

I jacked out. My connection with Scoville was a light one, not at all like the near-telepathy that links the ten mechanics in the platoon. Still, it was disorienting to have my own brain to myself.

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.

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 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.

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 the 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.