'Possible she knew we were coming?' Karen asked.
I paused … Why else would she be here? 'If so, she's pretty calm about it, to be able to sleep. No, it's a coincidence. She's guarding something. We don't have time to look for it, though.'
'We have your coordinates,' the commander said. 'Flyboy coming in, in about two minutes. You want to be elsewhere.'
I gave the platoon the order to move out fast. We didn't make too much noise, but enough: the sniper woke up and fired a burst at Lou, who was bringing up the rear on the left flank.
It was a pretty sophisticated antisoldierboy weapon, explosive rounds with depleted-uranium punchers, probably. Two or three rounds hit Lou about waist-level and blew out his leg control. As he fell over backward, another one blew off his right arm.
He hit the ground with a jarring crash, and for a moment everything was still, the high leaves over him rustling in the morning breeze. Another round exploded into the ground next to his head, showering his eyes with dirt. He shook his head to clear them.
'Lou, we can't do a pickup. Get out of there except for eyes and ears.'
'Thanks, Julian.' Lou jacked out, and the warning-signal pains from his back and arm stopped. He was just a camera pointed at the sky.
We were most of a kilometer away when the flyboy screamed overhead. I linked to her through Command and got a strange double view: from above the forest canopy, a spreading blossom of napalm shot through with glittering streaking sparkles, hundreds of thousands of flechettes. On the ground, a sudden sheet of fire overhead that dripped down through the branches, loud splintering crackle as the flechettes tore through the forest. Sonic boom and then silence.
Then a man screaming and another one talking to him in low tones, and one shot that ended the screaming. A man ran by, close but out of sight, and threw a grenade at the soldierboy. It bounced off the chest and exploded harmlessly.
The napalm dripped and flames from the underbrush licked up toward it. Monkeys screamed at the fire. Lou's eyes flickered twice and went out. As we moved away from the inferno, two more flyboys came in low and dropped fire retardant. It was an ecological preserve, after all, and the napalm had done all we wanted it to.
As we approached the PZ, Command said they'd calculated a body count of four – our sniper and both of the men plus one for whoever else might have been there – and gave three of them to the flyboy and split one among us. Park didn't like that at all, since there wouldn't have been a sortie if he hadn't spotted the sniper, and she would've been an easy kill if I hadn't ordered otherwise. I advised him to hold that in; he was on the verge of a public tantrum that would leak up to command and force an Article 15 – pro forma company-level punishment for petty insubordination.
As I shot that warning to him, I had to think how much easier it must be to be a shoe. You can hate your sergeant and smile at him at the same time.
The PZ was obvious without the radio beacon, the denuded dome of a hill that had been cleaned up recently with a controlled burn-andblast.
As we picked our way up the muddy ashes of the hillside, two flyboys came in and hovered protectively. Not a normal fast snatch.
The cargo helicopter came in and landed, or at least hovered a foot off the ground while the rear door slammed down to form an unsteady ramp. We scrambled aboard to join twenty other soldierboys.
My opposite number in Fox platoon was Barboo Seaves; we'd worked together before. I had a double-weak link to her, through Command and through Rose, who had replaced Ralph as horizontal liaison. By way of greeting, Barboo projected a multisensory image of carne asada, a meal we'd shared at the airport a few months ago.
'Anybody tell you anything?' I asked.
'I am but a mushroom.' That military joke was old when my father heard it: They keep me in the dark and feed me bullshit.
The chopper was rising and tilting as soon as the last soldierboy dove in off the ramp. We all sort of crashed around, getting acquainted.
I didn't really know Charlie platoon's leader, David Grant. Half of his platoon had been replaced, in the past year – two stroked out and the others 'Temporarily reassigned for psychological adjustment.' David had only been in command for two cycles. I hello'ed him, but at first he was busy with his platoon, trying to calm down a couple of neos who were afraid we were going into a kill situation.
With luck, we wouldn't be. When the door slammed shut I got an outline of the general order, which was basically a parade, or show of force, in an urban area that was due for a reminder that we See All, Know All. It was the el Norte section of Liberia, which, oddly enough, had both guerrilla activity and a high concentration of Anglos. They were a mixture of older Americans who had retired to Costa Rica and the children and grandchildren of earlier retirees. The pedros thought that the presence of a lot of gringos would protect them. We were supposed to demonstrate otherwise.
But if the enemy stayed out of sight, there wouldn't be any problems. Our orders were to use force 'only reactively.'
So we were to be both bait and hook. It didn't look like a good situation. The rebels in Guanacaste province had been faring badly and needed their own demonstration. I supposed Command had taken that into account.
We picked up some riot control accessories – extra gas grenades and a couple of tanglefoot projectors. They spray out a skein of sticky string that makes it impossible to walk; after ten minutes, it suddenly evaporates. We were also issued extra concussion grenades, though I'm not sure they're a good idea with civilians. Blow out somebody's eardrums and expect him to be grateful you didn't do worse? None of the riot control weapons are pleasant, but that's the only one that does permanent damage. Unless you're staggering around blinded by tear gas and get run over by a truck. Or breathe VA and choke on vomit.
We came in over the city at treetop level, lower than many of the buildings, helicopter and two flyboys in tight slow formation, loud as three banshees. I suppose that was good psychology, show we're not afraid and at the same time rattle their windows. But again I wondered whether we weren't set out as tempting bait. If somebody fired at us, I had no doubt the sky could be full of flyboys in a few seconds. The enemy must have figured that out, too.
Once on the ground and out of the chopper, the twenty-nine soldier-boys could easily destroy the city themselves, without air support. Part of our show was going to be a 'public service' demonstration: a block of tenements to be razed. We could save the city a lot of construction, or deconstruction, expense. Just walk in and pull things down.
We set down gently on the town square, flyboys hovering, and disembarked into a parade formation, ten by three, minus one. Only a scattering of people were there to watch us, which surprised no one. A few curious children and defiant teenagers and old people who live in the park. Only a few police; most of the force, it turned out, was waiting down by our demonstration area.
The buildings surrounding the square were late colonial architecture, graceful in the shadow of the glass-and-metal geometries that hovered over them. The blind reflective windows of those modern buildings could conceal a city full of watchers, maybe snipers. As we marched off in robotic lockstep I was more than ever aware of the fact that I was a safe puppeteer a couple of hundred miles away – if rifles did appear in each window and started firing, no actual people would be killed. Until we retaliated.
We broke step into a carefully random rolling gait as we crossed an old bridge, so as not to be embarrassed by shaking it apart and falling into the noisome trickle below, and then went back to the slamslam-slam that was supposed to be so intimidating. I did see a dog run away. If any humans were being terrorized along our route, they were doing it indoors.
Past the postmodern anonymity of downtown, we went through a few blocks of a residential neighborhood, presumably upper-class dwellings, all hidden behind tall whitewashed walls. Watchdogs howled at our echoing steps, and in several places we were tracked by surveillance cameras.
Then we got into the barrios. I always f
elt a kind of referred sympathy for the people who lived in these circumstances, here and in Texas, so similar to the American black ghettos that I had avoided by accident of birth. I also knew that there were sometimes compensations, family and neighborhood bonds that I never experienced. But I could never be sentimental enough to consider that a reasonable trade-off for my longer life expectancy; higher life expectations.
I turned down my olfactory receptors a notch. Smell of standing sewage and urine starting to steam in the morning sun. There was also the good smell of corn baking, and good strong peppers, and somewhere a chicken roasting slowly, maybe a celebration. A chicken was not an everyday menu item here.
You could hear the crowd several blocks before we got to the demonstration site. We were met by two dozen mounted police – mounted on horses – who formed a protective V, or U, around us.
It made you wonder who was demonstrating what. Nobody pretended that the party in power represented the actual will of the people. It was a police state, and there was no question whose side we were on. I suppose it didn't hurt to reinforce that every now and then.
There must have been two thousand people milling around the demolition site. It was obvious we were moving into a pretty complicated political situation. There were signs and banners proclaiming ACTUAL PEOPLE LIVE HERE and ROBOT PUPPETS OF RICH LANDOWNERS, and so forth – more signs in English than in Spanish, for the cameras. But there were a lot of Anglos in the crowd, too, retirees showing support for the locals. Anglos who were locals.
I asked Barboo and David to halt their platoons in place for a minute, and sent a query up to Command. 'We're being used here, and it looks like a potentially bad situation.'
'That's why you were issued all the extra riot gear,' she said. 'This crowd's been gathering since yesterday.'
'But this isn't our job,' I said. 'It's like using a sledgehammer to swat a fly.'
'There are reasons,' she said, 'and you have orders. Just be careful.'
I relayed that to the others. 'Be careful?' David said. 'Of us hurting them or of them hurting us?'
'Just try not to step on anybody,' Barboo said.
'I'd go further,' I said. 'Don't injure or kill anybody to save the machines.'
Barboo agreed. 'That's a corner the rebels may try to back us into. Stay in control of the situation.'
Command was listening. 'Don't be too conservative. This is a show of force.'
It started out well. A young Ender who'd been standing on a box, haranguing, suddenly jumped off and ran over to stand in the way of our progress. One of the mounted police touched him on the bare back with a cattle prod, which knocked him down and threw him into a trembling seizure at David's feet. David stopped dead and the soldier-boy behind him, distracted by something, ran into him with a crash. It would have been perfect if David had fallen over and crushed the helpless fanatic, but at least we were spared that. Some of the crowd laughed and jeered, not a bad response under the circumstances, and they spirited the unconscious man away.
That might protect him for a day, but I'm sure the police knew his name, address, and blood type.
'Straighten up the ranks and files,' Barboo said. 'Let's keep moving and get this over with.'
The block we were supposed to demolish was identified with a girdle of orange spray paint. Hard to miss, anyhow, since a solid square of police and sawhorses kept the crowd a neat hundred meters away on all four sides.
We didn't want to use explosives more powerful than the two-inch grenades; with the rockets, for instance, individual fragments of brick could go a lot farther than a hundred meters, with the force of a bullet. But I queried for a calculation and got permission to use the grenades to weaken the buildings' foundations.
They were six-story concrete slab constructions with crumbling brick facades. Less than fifty years old, but the work had been done with inferior concrete – too much sand in the mixture – and one building had already collapsed, killing dozens.
So it didn't sound like a big deal to bring them down. Grenades to jar things loose at the foundation, then put a soldierboy at each corner to push and pull, putting torsion on the framework structure, and jump back as it falls – or don't jump back; demonstrate our invulnerability by standing there unaffected by the rain of concrete and steel.
The first one went perfectly – a textbook demonstration, if there were a textbook on bizarre demolition techniques. The crowd was very quiet.
The second building was recalcitrant; the front facade fell away, but the steel frame wouldn't twist enough to snap. So we used lasers to cut through a few exposed I-beams, and then it came down with a satisfying crash.
The next building was a disaster. It came down as easily as the first, but it rained children.
More than two hundred children had been squeezed into one room on the sixth floor, bound and gagged and drugged. It turned out that they were from a suburban private school. A guerrilla team had come in at eight in the morning, killed all the teachers, kidnapped all the children, and moved them into the condemned building in crates covered with UN markings, just an hour before we had gotten there.
None of the children survived falling sixty feet and being buried by rubble, of course. It was not the sort of political demonstration a rational mind might have conceived, since it demonstrated their brutality rather than ours – but it did speak directly to the mob, which collectively was no more rational.
When we saw all the children, of course we stopped everything and called for a massive medevac. We started clearing away rubble, numbly looking for survivors, and a local brigada de urgencia crew came in to help us.
Barboo and I organized our platoons into search parties, covering two thirds of the building's 'footprint,' and David's platoon should have done the other third, but the shock had them badly disorganized. Most of them had never seen anyone killed. The sight of all those children mangled, pulverized – concrete dust turning blood into mud and transforming the small bodies into anonymous white lumps – it unhinged them. Two of the soldierboys stood frozen, paralyzed because their mechanics had fainted. Most of the others were wandering aimlessly, ignoring David's orders, which were barely coherent, anyhow.
I was moving slowly, myself, stunned by the enormity of it. Dead soldiers on a battlefield are bad enough – one dead soldier is bad enough – but this was almost beyond belief. And the carnage had just started.
A big helicopter sounds aggressive no matter what its actual function is. When the medevac chopper came beating in, someone in the crowd started shooting at it. Just lead bullets that bounced off, we ascertained later, but the chopper's defenses automatically acquired the target, a man shooting from behind a billboard, and fried him.
It was a little too impressive, a large spalling laser that made him explode like a dropped ripe fruit. The cry 'Murderers! Murderers!' began, and in less than a minute the crowd broke through the police lines and attacked us.
Barboo and I had our people move quickly around the perimeter, spraying tanglefoot, curling threads of neon that quickly expanded to finger thickness, then to ropes. It was effective at first, sticky as Super-glue. It immobilized the front couple of ranks of people, bringing them to their knees or flattening them. But that didn't stop the ones behind them, who eagerly crowded over their comrades' backs to get to us.
In seconds the mistake was apparent, as hundreds of them, immobilized, were crushed under the weight of the screaming mob that charged us. We popped VA and CS gas everywhere, but it barely slowed them down. More fell and were trampled.
A Molotov cocktail exploded on one of Barboo's platoon, turning him into a flaming symbol of staggering helplessness – in reality, he was just blinded for a moment and then weapons came out all over, machine guns chattering, two lasers lancing through the dust and smoke. I watched a row of men and women fall in unison, swept down by a misaimed spray of their own machine gun fire, and relayed the order from Command, 'Shoot anyone with a weapon!'
The lasers were ea
sy to spot, and went down first, but people would pick them up again and keep firing. The first man I ever killed, a boy actually, had scooped up the laser and was firing offhand, standing up. I aimed for his knees, but then somebody knocked him down from behind. The bullet struck the center of his chest and blew his heart out his back. On top of everything else, that pushed me over the edge, into paralysis.
Park went over the edge, too; the other edge, berserk. A man got to him with a knife, and tried to climb up and poke out his eyes, as if that were possible. Park grabbed an ankle and swung the man like a doll, spattering his brains on a concrete slab, and tossed his twitching body into the mob. Then he waded into the crowd like an insane mechanical monster, kicking and punching people to death. That snapped me out of my shock. When he wouldn't respond to shouted orders, I asked Command to deactivate him. He killed more than a dozen before they complied, and his suddenly inert soldierboy went down under a pile of enraged people, pounding it with rocks.
It was a truly Dantean scene, bloody crushed bodies everywhere, thousands of people staggering or crouching, blinded, gagging and spewing as the gas swirled around them. Part of me, vertiginous with horror, wanted to leave the place by fainting, let the crowd have this machine. But my crew was in bad shape, too; I couldn't desert them.
The tanglefoot suddenly dissipated in a cloud of colored smoke, but it didn't make any difference. Everyone who had been immobilized by it was lying dead or crippled.
Command told us to clear out; go back to the square as quickly as possible. We could have done an extraction right there, while the crowd was subdued, but didn't want to take the chance of more helicopters and flyboys setting them off again. So we picked up four immobilized soldierboys and rushed off in victory.
On the way, I told Command that I was going to file a recommendation that Park be given a psychological discharge, at the very least. Of course, she could read my actual feelings: 'You really want him tried for murder, for war crimes. That isn't possible.'
Well, I knew that, but said that I wouldn't have him as part of my platoon anymore, even if my refusal meant administrative punishment. The rest of the platoon had had enough of him, too. Whatever the idea had been that prompted them to insert him into our family, today's action proved it wrong.