Forever Peace: читать книгу онлайн полностью и бесплатно

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 re-supplied 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.