“IDF’s talking about drafting sixteen-year-olds,” another soldier said, answering the first. “Don’t you read the papers?”
“I only read the funnies. And when did you become such a condescending asshole, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Will you two clowns shut up for once?”
“Why? They can’t hear us. Fucking Armageddon won’t wake the Enders up.”
Gradually, in orderly squads, the rest of the Enders shuffled in and formed up in the center of the room. Then they stopped, quite abruptly, and just stood there doing nothing.
“What are they waiting for?” Li asked impatiently.
“The SeekTo is air-gapped,” Cohen answered, still at the monitor. “Figuratively, not literally. But the patrol still can’t breach the line until a human operator checks the waypoints for blue-on-blue problems.”
“You’re fucking kidding me.”
The AI coughed delicately, then continued with the air of a man delivering slightly embarrassing news.
“There was a little incident along the India-Pakistan border a while ago. I, uh, jumped the gun. Only slightly. But humans have long memories for that sort of slip up.”
“What if there’s no human on-line to check EMET’s homework for it?”
“This is Earth,” Cohen pointed out. “There’s always a human around.”
No one spoke. The Enders waited for their clearance. Everyone else waited for the Enders.
“Jesus,” Li muttered. “Pakistan. Wherever that is. By the way, Cohen, is there anything on this planet you haven’trun?”
Cohen blinked, thought for a moment, then smiled beatifically. “Garbage collection.”
Another minute or two passed, the AI-controlled squad standing passively in the center of the room, the special forces soldiers squatting and sitting and standing along the bullet-scarred walls watching them.
“Okay,” Cohen said, “they’re cleared for insertion. Just another minute now.”
The Enders began to move again, and Arkady watched a surreal scene unfold around him: one squad of soldiers armed to the teeth and ready to go into a war zone, watching a second squad muster, check their weapons, and get ready to go into the same war zone…while the second squad walked around and stepped over their unseen shadows as if they were nothing more than dead stones.
One of the shunt-controlled soldiers was a slender blond girl who didn’t look a day above seventeen. She crouched down a mere arm’s length away from Arkady and began checking her weapon and ammunition clips with smooth precise inhuman movements. She didn’t even have to look at the gun to complete the task; her blue eyes stared blankly at the wall just over their shoulders.
“Fuckable?” asked the soldier next to Arkady in a conversational tone.
“Oh yeah,” his neighbor breathed in a tone approaching reverence.
“Has anyone ever mentioned what losers you guys are?” Osnat said.
They ignored her.
“Hey, beautiful,” the first soldier murmured to the girl. “It’s a big bad world out there. What are you doing playing the Green Line lottery? Why don’t you just stay here and let me make pretty babies with you?” And then, to Arkady’s stunned disbelief, he reached out and brushed the back of his hand down the girl’s cheek.
Arkady heard Osnat curse under her breath. He froze, waiting. The girl shook her head slightly, as if a fly had landed on her skin. Then she finished prepping her rifle and moved silently over to join the little clot of soldiers mustering by the back door.
Arkady sighed in relief. “Why are they called Enders?” he asked the soldier who had caressed the girl.
“’Cause they’re cannon fodder.” The boy’s tone suggested that he was stating the obvious. “Enders. ’Cause they’ve hit the end of the line. Get it?”
“No,” his companion argued. “It’s ’cause theyend you.You fuck with them, you’re dead, end of story.”
“You people,” Osnat announced in a tone of profound disgust, “are submoronic illiterates.”
Another few minutes and the Enders were mustered and ready to move out. The commandos slipped into their streamspace shadow, and suddenly everyone was moving out, and Arkady was being dragged along behind Osnat into the heart of a no-man’s-land that he was starting to realize was anything but empty.
Operations in the thickness of the Line turned out to mostly involve sitting around waiting.
They would move forward, agonizingly slowly, trying to stay within the Enders’ data fusion shadow. The Enders would stop—even with his experience of the AzizSyndicate tacticals, Arkady found their abrupt, silent changes of speed and direction unnerving—and everyone else would stop too. Then they would wait. For a few minutes usually. For half an hour or forty minutes. Once for a full hour and a quarter. And then some invisible nonevent would happen in streamspace, and the Enders would move off again, and off they’d all go like rats following the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
At one point they stumbled into the outer penumbra of a Palestinian artillery barrage. The Enders appeared entirely unmoved by the awesome spectacle; they simply coalesced in a nearby shell crater and took cover as if having the earth ripped apart just in front of their feet were no more alarming than spotting a rain cloud on the horizon.
The commandos huddled together in the closest available crater, unfortunately a wet one. They looked only slightly more concerned than the Enderbots, but they kept up a running commentary of flagrantly indecent summations of their current comfort level that had even Li grinning.
“Don’t worry.” Cohen leaned over to shout in Arkady’s ear between two blasts big enough to make the ground ripple under their feet. “The Palestinian Army is a highly professional organization. They have a firm grasp on how to keep the voting public scared and pliable with minimum waste of trained soldiers on both sides. As long as they’re actually trying to hit us we’re perfectly safe. Of course the fact that they don’t actually know we’re here may complicate matters somewhat.”
Arkady looked nervously toward Osnat, trying to gauge whether this was a joke. “Do the, ah…Palestinians fire into the Line often?”
“It goes up and down. At the moment we’re in a pretty hot-and-heavy phase.”
“And the only thing standing between them and the Israelis is the French Foreign Legion?” Arkady said doubtfully. “Why would anyone take that job?”
“Because they’re French,” Osnat said.
“Because they’re idiots,” Cohen said.
“Because they’re the Legion,” Li said. “Ever heard of Camerone?”
Arkady shook his head.
She leaned forward, warming to her subject, and told him the story in a series of rapid-fire, chewed-off half sentences that sounded like they’d been forged on the battlefield.
It had happened on a planet called Mexico. Or in a country called Mexico. Arkady couldn’t tell which from the way Li described it. A battalion of Legionnaires led by the already infamous Colonel Danjou was escorting a supply train when they were attacked by three Mexican battalions. The French retreated to the Hacienda Camerone (“No, Arkady, I don’t know how a hacienda is different from a house. It’s not mission-critical. Let it slide.”) and set up a perimeter around the courtyard of the hacienda under heavy sniper fire. At 9:00 A.M. on the morning of the battle, the Mexican commander offered terms of surrender, which were refused.
Several mixed cavalry and infantry charges were bloodily repelled. But the defenders took deep losses in each of the failed assaults, and Colonel Danjou, fearing for his men’s resolve, gathered them in the hacienda’s courtyard and made them swear on his wooden hand—memento of past battles—that they would fight through to death or victory.
Danjou fell to a sniper’s bullet moments later. His second-in-command died in the afternoon, and by evening the former battalion was being commanded by a second lieutenant named Maudet.