When they had everything boxed, and Julian's apartment clean enough to satisfy the landlord, they called Reza for his car. He scolded Julian for not calling him earlier so he could have helped, and Julian said, honestly, that it hadn't occurred to him.
Amelia listened to the conversation with interest, and a week later would point out that there had been a good reason for them to do it alone, a kind of sacramental labor-or something even more elemental, nest-building. But what she said when Julian hung up was, "It'll take him ten minutes to get here," and hurried him to the couch, one last quick time in this place.
It only took two trips to move all the boxes. On the second trip Reza and Julian were alone, and when Reza offered to help unpack, Julian said well, you know, maybe Blaze wants to go to bed.
In fact, she did. They collapsed exhausted and slept until dawn.
ONCE OR TWICE a year, they don't bring the soldier-boys in between shifts; they just immobilize us one by one and have the mechanic's second move straight from barber chair to cage, a "hot transfer." It usually meant something interesting was going on, since we don't normally work the same AO as Scoville's hunter-killer platoon.
But Scoville had been grouchy because nothing had happened. They'd gone to three different ambush sites in nine days with nothing but bugs and birds showing up. It was obviously a make-work assignment, marking time.
He crawled out of the cage and it sealed shut for its ninety-second cleaning cycle. "Have fun," Scoville said. "Bring something to read."
"Oh, I think they'll come up with some little chore for us to do." He nodded morosely and hobbled away. They wouldn't do a hot transfer if there was a choice. So it was something important that the hunter-killers weren't supposed to know about.
The cage popped and I wiggled into it, quickly setting the muscle sensors and plugging in the orthotics and blood shunt. Then I closed the shell and jacked.
It was always disorienting for a moment, but a lot more so with a hot transfer, since being platoon leader, I went first, and was suddenly jacked with a bunch of relative strangers. I did know Scoville's platoon vaguely, since I spent one day a month lightly jacked with him. But I didn't know all the intimate details of their lives, and really didn't care to know. I was plopped in the middle of this convoluted soap opera, an interloper who suddenly knew all the family secrets.
Two by two, they were replaced by my own men and women. I tried to concentrate on the problem at hand, which was to keep guard on the pairs of soldierboys as they spent their couple of minutes of immobile vulnerability, which was easy. I also tried to open a vertical link to the company commander and find out what was really going on. What were we going to do that was so secret Scoville was kept in the dark?
There was no answer until all of my people were in place. Then it came in a gestalt trickle while I automatically scanned the morning jungle for signs of trouble: there was a spy in Scoville's platoon. Not a willing spy, but somebody whose jack was tapped, real time.
It might even have been Scoville himself, so he couldn't be told. Brigade had set up an elaborate manipulation, where each member of the platoon was misinformed as to the location of their ambush. When an enemy force showed up in the middle of nowhere, they'd know which one was the leak.
I had a lot more questions than the company commander had answers. How could they control all the feedback states? If nine of the people thought they were at point A and one thought they were at point B, wouldn't there be conspicuous confusion? How could the enemy tap a jack in the first place? What was going to happen to the mechanic who was affected?
That last one, she could answer. They would examine him and take out his jack, and he would serve out the rest of his term as a tech or a shoe, depending. Depending on whether he could count to twenty without taking off his shoes and socks, I supposed. Army neurosurgeons made a lot less than Dr. Spencer.
I cut off the thread to the commander, which didn't mean she couldn't eavesdrop on me if she wanted to. There were some large implications here, and you didn't need a degree in cybercomm to see them. All of Scoville's platoon had spent the last nine days in an elaborate and tightly maintained virtual-reality fiction. Everything each one saw and felt was monitored by Command, and fed back instantly in an altered state. That state included nine other tailor-made fictions for the rest of the platoon. A total of a hundred discrete fictions, constantly created and maintained nonstop.
The jungle around me was no more or less real than the coral reef I'd visited with Amelia. What if it bore no relation to where my soldierboy actually was?
Every mechanic has entertained the fantasy that there is no war at all; that the whole thing is a cybernetic construction that the governments maintain for reasons of their own. You can turn on the cube when you get home, and watch yourself in action, replaying the news-but that could be faked even more easily than the input-feedback state that connects soldierboy to mechanic. Had anybody actually been to Costa Rica, any mechanic? No one in the military could legally visit Ngumi territory.
Of course, that was nothing but a fantasy. The piles of shattered bodies in the control room had been real. They couldn't have faked the nuclear flattening of three cities.
It was just a place to retreat from your own responsibility for the carnage. I suddenly felt pretty good, and realized my blood chemistry was being adjusted. I tried to hold on to the thought: how could you, how could you justify ... well, they actually did ask for it. It was sad that so many Ngumi had to die for their leaders' lunacy. But that's not the thought; that's not the thought...
"Julian," the company commander thought down, "move your platoon northwest three kilometers for a pickup. As you approach the PZ, you want to home in on a twenty-four megahertz beeper."
I rogered. "Where we headed?"
"Town. We're going to join up with Fox and Charlie for a daytime thing. Details on the way."
We had ninety minutes to get to the pickup zone, and the jungle wasn't thick, so we just spread out in echelon, maintaining about twenty meters between each soldier-boy, and picked our way northwest.
My uneasiness faded in the mundane business of keeping everybody in line and moving. I realized that my train of thought had been interrupted, but wasn't sure whether it was anything important. No way to write a note to myself, I realized for about the hundredth time. And things sort of fade when you get out of the cage.
Karen saw something and I froze everybody. After a moment she said false alarm; just a howler monkey and its baby. "Out of the branches?" I asked, and got a nod back. I projected uneasiness to everybody, as if that were necessary, and had us split into two groups and move in file, two hundred meters apart. Very quietly.
"Animal behavior" is an interesting term. When an animal misbehaves, it's for a reason. Howler monkeys are more vulnerable on the ground.
Park sighted a sniper. "Got a pedro at ten o'clock, range a hundred ten meters, in a tree blind about ten meters up. Permission to fire."
"Not granted. Everyone stop and look around." Claude and Sara got the same one, but there weren't any others obvious.
I put all three images together. "She's asleep." I got the gender from Park's olfactory receptors. The IR pattern gave me almost nothing, but her breathing was regular and sonorous.
"Let's drop back about a hundred meters and circle around her." I got a confirm from the company commander and an angry "?" from Park.
I expected others-people don't just wander out into the woods and climb a tree; she was protecting something.
"Possible she knew we were coming?" Karen asked.
I paused ... Why else would she be here? "If so, she's pretty calm about it, to be able to sleep. No, it's a coincidence. She's guarding something. We don't have time to look for it, though."