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 re-enlist, 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.
I fell asleep and instantly awoke to a blaze of pain. My sensors brought in nothing but blinding light, a roar of white noise, searing heat—and complete isolation! All of my platoon was disconnected or destroyed.
I knew it wasn’t real; knew I was safe in a cage in Portobello. But it still hurt like a third-degree burn over every square centimeter of naked flesh, eyeballs fried in their sockets, one dying inhalation of molten lead, enema of same: complete feedback overload.
It seemed to last for a long time—long enough for me to think this was actually it; the enemy had cracked Portobello or nuked it, and it was actually me dying, not my machine. Actually, we were switched off after 3.03 seconds. It would have been quicker, but the mechanic in Delta platoon who was our horizontal liaison—our link to the company commander if I died—was disoriented by the sudden intensity of it, even secondhand.
Later satellite analysis showed two aircraft catapulted from five kilometers away. They were stealthed and, with no propellant, left no heat