not have its own nanoforges for a long time, but the unrest that led to the massacre was directly traceable to its lack of the magic box.
* * *
we got no peace the first week after the massacre. The huge publicity machine that fueled the warboy mania, and was usually concerned with more interesting platoons, turned its energies on us; the general media wouldn’t leave us alone, either. In a culture that lived on news, it was the story of the year: bases like Portobello were attacked all the time, but this was the first time the mechanics’ inner sanctum had been violated. That the mechanics who were killed had not been in charge of the machines was a detail repeatedly stressed by the government and downplayed by the press.
They even interviewed some of my UT students to see how I was “taking it,” and of course they were quick to defend me by saying it was business as usual in the classroom. Which of course demonstrated how unfeeling I was, or how strong and resilient, or how traumatized, depending on the reporter.
Actually, it may have demonstrated all of the above, or maybe just that a particle-physics practicum is not a place where you discuss personal feelings.
When they tried to bring a camera into my classroom, I called a shoe and had them evicted. It was the first time in my academic career that being a sergeant meant more than being an instructor, however junior.
Likewise, I was able to commandeer two shoes to keep the reporters at a distance when I went out. But for almost a week they did have at least one camera watching me, which kept me away from Amelia. Of course, she could just walk into my apartment building as if she were visiting someone else, but the possibility that someone would make a connection—or happen to see her walking into my own apartment—was too great to risk. There were still some people in Texas who would be unhappy about a white woman who had a black man, fifteen years younger, for a lover. There might even be some people in the university who would be unhappy about it.
The newsies seemed to have lost interest by Friday, but Amelia and I went to the club separately, and I brought along my shoes to stand guard outside.
We overlapped trips to the bathroom, and managed a quick embrace unobserved. Otherwise, most of my apparent attention went to Marty and Franklin.
Marty confirmed what I had suspected. “The autopsy showed that your second’s jack was disconnected by the same blast that killed him. So there’s no reason for it to have felt any different to you than just being unplugged.”
“At first, I didn’t even realize he was gone,” I said, not for the first time. “The input from the rest of my platoon was so strong and chaotic. The ones whose seconds were hurt but still alive.”
“But it wouldn’t be as bad for them as being fully jacked to someone who died,” Franklin said. “Most of you have gone through that.”
“I don’t know. When somebody dies in the cage, it’s a heart attack or stroke. Not being ripped open by buckshot. A light jack may only feed back, say, ten percent of that sensation, but it’s a lot of pain. When Carolyn died . . .” I had to clear my throat. “With Carolyn it was just a sudden headache, and she was gone. Just like coming unjacked.”
“I’m sorry,” Franklin said, and filled both our glasses. The wine was a duped Lafite Rothschild ’28, the wine of the century, so far.
“Thanks. It’s years now.” I sipped the wine, good but presumably beyond my powers of discrimination. “The bad part, a bad part, was that it didn’t occur to me that she’d died. Nor to anybody else in the platoon. We were just standing on a hill, waiting for a snatch. Thought it was a comm failure.”
“They knew at the company level,” Marty said.
“Of course they did. And of course they wouldn’t tell us, risk our screwing up the snatch. But when we popped, her cage was empty. I found a medic and she said they’d done a brain scan and there wasn’t enough to save; they’d taken her down to autopsy already. Marty, I’ve told you this more than once before. Sorry.”
Marty shook his head in commiseration. “No closure. No leave-taking.”
“They should’ve popped you all, once you were in place,” Franklin said. “They can snatch cold ’boys as easily as