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.
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.
