Joe Haldeman - Forever Peace

"They sure as hell did. Brought down a whole block of slums, urban renewal. Of course they said we did it."

"How many dead?"

"Must be hundreds." Ray shook his head. "That's what got the girl, maybe. She was in the middle of it, immoblilized with both her legs off. Fought the rescue crew; wanted them to evac the civilians. They had to turn her off to get her out of there."

He asked the table for a scotch and soda and the rest of us put our orders in. No greasy waiters in this section. "Maybe she'll be okay. One of those things you have to learn to live with."

"We didn't do it," Reza said.

"Why would we? No military advantage, bad press. Shatterfield's a terror weapon, in a city."

"I'm surprised anyone survived," I said.

"Nobody on the ground; they were all instant chorizo. But those were four – and five-story buildings. People in the upper stories just had to survive the collapse.

"The Tenth set up a knockout perimeter with UN markers and called it a no-fire zone, collateral casualty, once we had all our soldierboys out. Dropped in a Red Cross med crawler and moved on.

"The shatterfield was their only real 'tech touch. The rest of it was old-fashioned, cut-off-and-concentrate tactics, which doesn't work on a group as well integrated as the Tenth. Good platoon coordination. Julian, you would have appreciated it. From the air it was like choreography."

"Maybe I'll check it out." I wouldn't; never did, unless I knew somebody in the fight.

"Any time," Ray said. "I've got two crystals of it, one jacked through Emily Vail, the company coordinator. The other's the commercial feed." They didn't show battles while they were happening, of course, since the enemy could jack in. The commercial feed was edited both for maximum drama and minimum disclosure. Normal people couldn't get individual mechanics' unedited feeds; lots of warboys would cheerfully kill for one. Ray had top-secret clearance and an unaltered jack. If a civilian or a spy got ahold of Emily Vail's crystal, they would see and feel a lot that wasn't on the commercial version, but selected perceptions and thoughts would be filtered out unless you had a jack like Ray's.

A live waiter in a clean tuxedo brought our drinks. I was splitting a jug of house red with Reza.

Ray raised a glass. "To peace," he said, actually without irony. "Welcome back, Julian." Amelia touched my knee with hers under the table.

The wine was pretty good, just astringent enough to make you consider a slightly more expensive one. "Easy week this time," I said, and Ray nodded. He always checked on me.

A couple of others showed up, and we broke down into the usual interlocking small conversational groups. Amelia moved over to sit with Belda and another man from fine arts, to talk about books. We usually did separate when it seemed natural.

I stayed with Reza and Ray; when Marty came in he gave Amelia a peck and joined the three of us. There was no love lost between him and Belda.

Marty was really soaked, his long white hair in lanky strings. "Had to park down the block," he said, dropping his sodden coat on the wheelie.

"Thought you were working late," Ray said. "This isn't late?" He ordered coffee and a sandwich. "I'm going back later, and so are you. Have a couple more scotches."

"What is it?" He pushed his scotch away a symbolic inch.

"Let's not talk shop. We have all night. But it's that girl you said you saw on the Vail crystal."

"The one who cracked?" I asked.

"Mm-hm. Why don't you crack, Julian? Get a discharge. We enjoy your company."

"Your platoon, too," Ray joked. "Nice bunch."

"How could she fit into your cross-linking studies?" I asked. "She must hardly have been linking at all."

"New deal we started while you were gone," Ray said. "We got a contract to study empathy failures. People who crack out of sympathy for the enemy."

"You may get Julian," Reza said. "He just loves them pedros."

"It doesn't correlate much with politics," Marty said. "And it's usually people in their first year or two. More often female than male. He's not a good candidate." The coffee came and he picked up the cup and blew on it. "So how about this weather? Clear and cool, they said."

"Love them Knicks," I said.

Reza nodded. "The square root of minus one." There was going to be no more talk of empathy failures that night.

JULIAN DIDN'T KNOW HOW selective the draft really was, finding people for specific mechanics' slots. There were a few hunter-killer platoons, but they tended to be hard to control, on a couple of levels. As platoons, they followed orders poorly, and they didn't integrate well "horizontally," with other platoons in the company. The individual mechanics in a hunter-killer platoon tended not to link strongly with one another.

None of this was surprising. They were made up of the same kind of people earlier armies chose for "wet work." You expected them to be independent and somewhat wild.

As Julian had observed, most platoons had at least one person who seemed like a really unlikely choice. In his outfit it was Candi, horrified by the war and unwilling to harm the enemy. They were called stabilizers.

Julian suspected she acted as a kind of conscience for the platoon, but it would be more accurate to call her a governor, like the governor on an engine. Platoons that didn't have one member like Candi had a tendency to run out of control, go "berserker." It happened sometimes with the hunter-killer ones, whose stabilizers couldn't be too pacifistic, and it was tactically a disaster. War is, according to von Clausewitz, the controlled use of force to bring about political ends. Uncontrolled force is as likely to harm as to help.

(There was a mythos, a commonsense observation, that the berserker episodes had a good effect in the long run, because they made the Ngumi more afraid of the soldierboys. Actually, the opposite was true, according to the people who studied the enemy's psychology. The soldierboys were most fearsome when they acted like actual machines, controlled from a distance. When they got angry or went crazy-acting like men in robot suits-they seemed beatable.)

More than half of the stablilizers did crack before their term was up. In most cases it was not a sudden process, but was preceded by a period of inattention and indecision. Marty and Ray would be reviewing the performance of stabilizers prior to their failure, to see whether there was some invariable indicator that would warn commanders that it was time for a replacement or modification.

The unbreakable jack fail-safe supposedly was to keep people from harming themselves or others, though everybody knew it was just to maintain the government monopoly. Like a lot of things that everybody knows, it wasn't true. It wasn't quite true that you couldn't modify a jack in place, either, but the changes were limited to memory-usually when a soldier saw something the army wanted him or her to forget. Only two of the Saturday Night Special group knew about that.

Sometimes they erased a soldier's memory of an event for security reasons; less often, for humane ones.

Almost all of Marty's work now was with the military, which made him uncomfortable. When he had started in the field, thirty years before, jacks were crude, expensive, and rare, used for medical and scientific research.

Most people still worked for a living then. A decade later, at least in the "first world," most jobs having to do with production and distribution of goods were obsolete or quaint. Nanotechnology had given us the nano-forge: ask it for a house, and then put it near a supply of sand and water. Come back tomorrow with your moving van. Ask it for a car, a book, a nail file. Before long, of course, you didn't have to ask it; it knew what people wanted, and how many people there were.

Of course, it could also make other nanoforges. But not for just anybody. Only for the government. You couldn't just roll up your sleeves and build yourself one, either, since the government also owned the secret of warm fusion, and without the abundant free power that came from that process, the nanoforge couldn't exist.

Its development had cost thousands of lives and put a huge crater in North Dakota, but by the time Julian was in school, the government was in a position where it could give everybody any material thing. Of course, it wouldn't give you everything you wanted; alcohol and other drugs were strictly controlled, as were dangerous things like guns and cars. But if you were a good citizen, you could live a life of comfort and security without lifting a finger to work, unless you wanted to. Except for the three years you were drafted.

Most people spent those three years working in uniform a few hours a day in Resource Management, which was dedicated to making sure the nanoforges had access to all the elements they needed. About five percent of the draftees put on blue uniforms and became caregivers, people whose tests said they would be good working with the sick and elderly. Another five percent put on green uniforms and became soldiers. A small fraction of those tested out fast and smart, and became mechanics.

People in National Service were allowed to reenlist, and a large number did. Some of them didn't want to face a lifetime of total freedom, perhaps uselessness. Some liked the perquisites that went along with the uniform: money for hobbies or habits, a kind of prestige, the comfort of having other people tell you what to do, the ration card that gave you unlimited alcohol, off duty.

Some people even liked being allowed to carry a gun.

The soldiers who weren't involved in soldierboys, waterboys, or flyboys-the people mechanics called "shoes" – got all of those perquisites, but always faced a certain probability of being ordered to go out and sit on a piece of disputed real estate. They usually didn't have to fight, since the soldierboys were better at it and couldn't be killed, but there was no doubt that the shoes fulfilled a valuable military function: they were hostages. Maybe even lures, staked goats for the Ngumi long-range weapons. It didn't make them love the mechanics, as often as they owed their lives to them. If a soldierboy got blown to bits, the mechanic just put on a fresh one. Or so they thought. They didn't know how it felt I LIKED SLEEPING IN the soldierboy. Some people thought it was creepy, so complete a knockout it was like death. Half the platoon stands guard while the other half is shut down for two hours. You fall asleep like a light being turned out and wake up just as suddenly, disoriented but as rested as you would have been after eight hours of normal sleep. If you get the full two hours, that is.

We had taken refuge in a burned-out schoolhouse in an abandoned village. I was on the second sleep shift, so I first spent two hours sitting at a broken window, smelling jungle and old ashes, patient in the unchanging darkness. From my point of view, of course, it was neither dark nor unchanging. Starlight flooded the scene like monochromatic daylight, and once each ten seconds I switched to infrared for a moment. The infrared helped me track a large black cat that stalked up on us, gliding through the twisted remains of the playground equipment. It was an ocelot or something, aware of motion in the schoolhouse and looking for a meal. When it got within ten meters it froze for a long period, scenting nothing, or maybe machine lubricant, and then was away in a sudden flash.

Nothing else happened. After two hours, the first shift woke up. We gave them a couple of minutes to get their bearings and then passed on the "sit-rep," situation report: negative.