At 6:00 P.M. Maudet and the last four defenders exhausted their ammunition, fixed their bayonets, and charged the Mexican lines. Three of them survived the charge.
The Mexican commander demanded their surrender, and they sent his messenger back across the lines with the message that they would rather die than give up their arms, their flag, or the body of their slain colonel. The messenger relayed the response to the Mexican commander, who then uttered one of the most famous phrases in all of military history: “These are not men. These are devils.”
The next day the three survivors were escorted across the lines, their honor and arms intact and their slain commander’s body on their shoulders. “They took Colonel Danjou’s wooden hand with them,” Li finished, holding up her own left hand, palm forward, so that Arkady could see the bruise-blue outline of her Schengen implant and the silver tracery of ceramsteel. “It was escorted to the Legion’s mother house in Sidi el Abbès with the highest honors, and ever since then Danjou’s hand has been the symbol of the Legion’s code: Never surrender.”
“It wasn’t quite that glorious,” Cohen corrected. “But who’s quibbling? Danjou’s worm-ridden hand remains the shining symbol of the Legion’s august tradition of getting into the military equivalent of stupid barroom brawls and laying down your soldiers’ lives for no damned decent reason.”
“Scoff all you want, Cohen. You know as well as I do that Jerusalem would be in a state of outright all-out civil war if the Peacekeepers were occupying it. The only people worse at Peacekeeping than the Peacekeepers are the fucking Americans.”
“Well at least the Americans have the brains to brag about their victories instead of their suicide missions.”
“The Legion completed its mission in Camerone,” Li protested.
“Thereby allowing the French army to fight on in the name of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity in order to prop up a hereditary puppet king and save the Mexican people from the grim prospect of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Excuse me. I’m getting all choked up just thinking about it.”
“Ignore the caviar communist commentary,” Li told Arkady. “The point is that the Legion held out to the death, then went down fighting.”
“The point, Arkady, is that Catherine here has a little thing for pointless suicide missions.”
The soldiers all around them were up on their feet now, peering after the Enders in the next shell crater over, gathering their gear and stowing water bottles and nonstandard-issue candy bars.
“If you two are done sniping at each other,” Osnat interrupted, “would you mind terribly if we got our shit together and got the fuck out of here before your friends leave us behind?”
After that things got vague.
Arkady remembered passing reel after reel of the indestructible obsolete fiber optics that littered half the Judean desert. He remembered an entire field of school buses, standing snout to tail, their doors flapping open as if they were still waiting to transport a generation of children who had never shown up for school. He remembered passing through a village whose inhabitants gathered in the dark doors of their hovels to watch the Enders jangle by, and whose hostile faces could have been Jewish or Palestinian or anything in between.
They spent most of the night in another flooded-out crater.
“Know much about cannibalism?” Li asked him sometime well after darkness had fallen.
Even she was lying down by then, though she was still smoking another in her endless succession of cigarettes. How she managed to smoke lying down like that and not end up buried in a mountain of cigarette ash was a mystery to Arkady.
“Uh…no.”
“Some bright bulb did a statistical study of space wrecks. You know, the classic scenario: twenty people stranded in a life pod, food and air for thirty days, going to take ninety for the SOS to ping to the nearest BE relay and back. So who are the eaters, and who are the eatees? No pun intended. Turns out that you can predict who’s going to eat and who’s going to get eaten pretty reliably. Even when they draw straws, believe it or not. Able-bodied human males come last. They don’t generally start eating each other until they’ve run out of everyone else. Before that they go through the human women and children. And before they start on the lesser humans, they eat the posthumans. And before they eat the posthumans, they eat the constructs.”
“That’s sick.”
“Don’t be a cynic, Arkady. It used to be worse. Used to be they’d eat all the blacks and Asians before the first white woman got cooked. Now it’s ladies first regardless of incidentals like skin color. That’s what we in the UN call progress, Arkady. Anyway, here’s the real question: The guy who did the study only assumed one kind of construct. He didn’t take the Syndicates into account. So my question, Arkady, is: When the food runs out which one of us do you think these clowns’ll eat first?”
Morning found the squad on the banks of the river looking up the long slope of Mount Herzl past the IDF military cemetery.
They had penetrated into the Line’s dead heart: a no-man’s-land that no army was willing to defend, a place of ghosts where last summer’s oranges lay uneaten beneath the trees and the grass around the graves grew waist high. They might have been on Novalis, the world lay so still and quiet around them.
Li and Osnat were hunched over a map-fiche with the Israeli captain. Arkady was sitting with Cohen, who didn’t seem to have any more interest in the proceedings than he did. When the women finally came away from the map, Osnat had a sullen look on her face and was fiddling with the trigger guard of her weapon in a way that made Arkady’s stomach curl.
“You asked for help,” the AI told Osnat.
“Not from a Palestinian traitor!”
“Half-Palestinian,” Cohen corrected blandly.
Osnat fingered her weapon again. None of the Israelis seemed to register the movement; but suddenly, and without ever seeming to have moved at all, Li was standing right next to Osnat, her hand on the other woman’s trigger hand. The touch looked light, almost casual. But in fact Osnat’s fingers were turning white with the pressure of the other woman’s grip. Slowly, as if everything were happening under running water, the rifle slipped from Osnat’s grasp and slithered down her side until it hit the end of its webbed sling.
“We’re fine,” Cohen assured the Israeli captain. And, ever so gently, he lifted the rifle away from Osnat’s side, removed the ammunition clip, and pocketed it.
Osnat turned to the captain for support, but he was studiously inspecting the slime that had accumulated on his boots during the river crossing.
“You know the road home,” Li said in the take-it-or-leave-it tone Arkady was beginning to think expressed some core component of her emotional architecture. “You want to turn around, this’d be the time to do it.”
“And Arkady?”
“What do you think?”
There was a lot more walking after that. It was all uphill, and most of it was through the tall grass and tangled weeds of the vast IDF cemetery. Arkady, his mind slack with exhaustion, only noticed that the others had stopped walking when they were face-to-face with the tall iron gates of Yad Vashem.
Li reached out and gave the latch a brisk shake. It held, and when Arkady looked closer he could see why: someone had wrapped a heavy chain through the bars and closed it with a thick-hasped padlock.
Li glanced at Cohen, and again Arkady had that eerie sense that some communication the others couldn’t hear was passing between them.
“Well, have you actually talked to him yet?” Li asked aloud.
Cohen seemed to gather himself to argue, but then the shunt’s shoulders dropped slightly. “No. But he’ll be here. Where else would he be?”
Li snorted. “It’s not whether he’s here I’m worried about. It’s whether he wants to come out and talk to us.”
“There’s no wall,” Osnat pointed out. “We can just go around the gate if we want.”