Forever Peace: читать книгу онлайн полностью и бесплатно

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.