back into the ones whose brains were intact. The next day we found out that none of those had been successful. Their bodies were too completely shredded.
So there was no next shift. Our soldierboys stood in frozen postures in their guard positions while shoe infantry, suddenly pressed into guard detail, swarmed around them. The natural assumption was that the attack on our seconds would be followed immediately by a ground attack on the base itself, before another platoon of soldierboys could be brought in. Maybe it would have happened if one or two of the rockets had found their mark. But all was quiet, this time, and Fox platoon, from the Zone, was in place in less than an hour.
They let us out of Trauma after a couple of hours, and at first said we weren’t to tell anyone what happened. But of course the Ngumi weren’t going to keep it quiet.
* * *
automatic cameras had recorded the carnage, and a copy of the scene fell into Ngumi hands. It was powerful propaganda, in a world that couldn’t be shocked by death or violence. To the camera, Julian’s ten comrades were not young men and women, naked under an unrelenting spray of lead. They were symbols of weakness, triumphant evidence of the Alliance’s vulnerability in the face of Ngumi dedication.
The Alliance called it a freakish kamikaze attack by two murderous fanatics. It was a situation that could never be duplicated. They didn’t publicize the fact that all of the native staff in Portobello were fired the next week, replaced by American draftees.
This was hard on the economy of Portobello proper, as the base was its largest single source of income. Panama was a “most favored nation,” but not a full Alliance Member, which in practical terms meant it had limited use of American nanoforges, but there weren’t any of the machines within its boundaries.
There were about two dozen small countries in a similar unstable situation. Two nanoforges in Houston were reserved for Panama. The Panama Import/Export Board decided what they were to be used for. Houston supplied them with a “wish book,” a list of how long it took to make something, and what raw materials had to be supplied by the Canal Zone. Houston could supply air and water and dirt. If something required an ounce of platinum or a speck of dysprosium, Panama would have to dig it up somewhere or somehow.
The machine had limits. You could give it a bucket of coal and it could return a perfect copy of the Hope Diamond, which would make a dandy paperweight. Of course, if you wanted a fancy gold crown, you’d have to supply the gold. If you wanted an atomic bomb, you’d have to give it a couple of kilograms of plutonium. But fission bombs were not in the wish book; nor were soldierboys or any other products of advanced military technology. Planes and tanks were okay, and among the most popular items.
This is the way things worked: the day after the Portobello base was emptied of native workers, the Panama Import/Export Board presented the Alliance with a detailed analysis of the impact of the loss of income. (It was obvious that someone had foreseen the eventuality.) After a couple of days’ haggling, the Alliance agreed to increase their nanoforge allotment from forty-eight hours per day to fifty-four, along with a onetime settlement of a half-billion dollars’ credit in rare materials. So if the prime minister wanted a Rolls-Royce with a solid gold chassis, he could have it. But it wouldn’t be bulletproof.
The Alliance did not officially care how client nations came up with their requests for the machines’ largesse. In Panama there was at least a pretense of democracy, the Import/Export Board being advised by elected representatives, compradores, one from each province and territory. So there were occasional well-publicized imports that benefited only the poor.
Like the United States, technically, they had a semisocialist electrocash economy. The government supposedly took care of basic needs, and citizens worked for money for luxuries, which were paid for either by electronic credit transfer or cash.
But in the United States, luxuries were just that: entertainments or refinements. In the Canal Zone they were things like medicine and meat, more often bought with cash than with plastic.
There was a lot of resentment, of their own government and Tio Rico to the north, which gave rise to an ironic pattern common to most client states: incidents like the Portobello massacre ensured that Panama would