you. But of course Julian would know the next time he jacks with her. I was glad to finally get you alone.”
“Who was it?”
“Private Defollette.”
“Candi. Well, that makes sense.”
“She’s the one who was so hurt about the death last month?” Amelia said.
Julian nodded. “You expect her to crack?”
“We don’t expect anything. We’re simply interviewing one person per platoon.”
“Chosen at random,” Julian said.
Marty laughed and raised an eyebrow. “We were talking about liposuction?”
* * *
i didn’t expect a lot of action the next week, since we’d have to break in a new set of soldierboys and start with a new mechanic as well. Almost two new ones, since Rose, Arly’s replacement, had no experience other than last month’s disaster.
The new mechanic was not a neo. For some reason they broke up India platoon to use as replacements. So we all sort of knew the new man, Park, because of the diffuse platoon-level link through Ralph, and Richard before him.
I didn’t much like Park. India had been a hunter/killer platoon. He’d killed more people than all the rest of us put together, and unabashedly enjoyed it. He collected crystals of his kills and replayed them off duty.
We trained in the new soldierboys three hours on, one off, destroying the fake town “Pedropolis,” built for that purpose on the Portobello base.
When I had time, I linked up to Carolyn, the company coordinator, and asked what was going on—why did I wind up with a man like Park? He’d never really fit in.
Carolyn’s reply was sour and hot with confusion and anger. The order to “decompose” India platoon had come from somewhere above the brigade level, and it was causing organizational problems everywhere. The India mechanics were a bunch of mavericks. They hadn’t gotten along all that well even with each other.
She assumed it was a deliberate experiment. As far as she knew, nothing like it had been done before; the only time she’d heard of a platoon being broken up, it was because four of them had died at once, and the other six couldn’t work together anymore, with the shared grief. India, on the other hand, was one of the most successful platoons they had, in terms of kills. It didn’t really make sense to split them up.
I was the lucky one, to have Park, she said. He had been the horizontal liaison, and so had been directly linked to mechanics outside his platoon for the past three years. His cohorts, except for the platoon leader, had only had each other, and they were a fun bunch. They made Scoville look like a pedro lover.
Park liked to kill nonhuman things, too. During the training exercise he occasionally popped a songbird out of the air with his laser, not an easy task. Samantha and Rose both objected when he zapped a stray dog. He sardonically defended his action by pointing out that it didn’t belong in the AO, and could have been rigged up as a spy or boobytrap. But we all were linked, and had felt how he felt when he targeted the enemy mutt: it was simple obscene glee. He’d cranked up to maximum magnification to watch the dog explode.
The last three days combined perimeter guard with training, and I had visions of Park using kids as target practice. Children often watch the soldierboys from a safe distance, and no doubt some of them report to Dad, who reports to Costa Rica. But most of them are just kids fascinated by machines, fascinated by war. I probably went through a stage like that. My memories before eleven or twelve are vague almost to nonexistence, a byproduct of the jack installation that affects about a third of us. Who needs a childhood when the present is so much fun?
We had more than enough excitement for anybody the last night. Three rockets came in simultaneously, two of them from the sea and one, a decoy, coming in at treetop level, launched from the balcony of a high-rise on the edge of town.
The two that came in from the sea were in our sector. There were automatic defenses against this kind of attack, but we backed them up.
As soon as we heard the explosion—Alpha knocking out the rocket on the other side of the camp—we stifled the natural impulse to look and turned to watch in the opposite direction, facing directly out from the camp. The two rockets immediately appeared, stealthed but bright in IR. A flak wall sprayed up in front of them,