to retreat from your own responsibility for the carnage. I suddenly felt pretty good, and realized my blood chemistry was being adjusted. I tried to hold on to the thought: how could you, how could you justify . . . well, they actually did ask for it. It was sad that so many Ngumi had to die for their leaders’ lunacy. But that’s not the thought; that’s not the thought . . .
“Julian,” the company commander thought down, “move your platoon northwest three kilometers for a pickup. As you approach the PZ, you want to home in on a twenty-four megahertz beeper.”
I rogered. “Where we headed?”
“Town. We’re going to join up with Fox and Charlie for a daytime thing. Details on the way.”
We had ninety minutes to get to the pickup zone, and the jungle wasn’t thick, so we just spread out in echelon, maintaining about twenty meters between each soldierboy, and picked our way northwest.
My uneasiness faded in the mundane business of keeping everybody in line and moving. I realized that my train of thought had been interrupted, but wasn’t sure whether it was anything important. No way to write a note to myself, I realized for about the hundredth time. And things sort of fade when you get out of the cage.
Karen saw something and I froze everybody. After a moment she said false alarm; just a howler monkey and its baby. “Out of the branches?” I asked, and got a nod back. I projected uneasiness to everybody, as if that were necessary, and had us split into two groups and move in file, two hundred meters apart. Very quietly.
“Animal behavior” is an interesting term. When an animal misbehaves, it’s for a reason. Howler monkeys are more vulnerable on the ground.
Park sighted a sniper. “Got a pedro at ten o’clock, range a hundred ten meters, in a tree blind about ten meters up. Permission to fire.”
“Not granted. Everyone stop and look around.” Claude and Sara got the same one, but there weren’t any others obvious.
I put all three images together. “She’s asleep.” I got the gender from Park’s olfactory receptors. The IR pattern gave me almost nothing, but her breathing was regular and sonorous.
“Let’s drop back about a hundred meters and circle around her.” I got a confirm from the company commander and an angry “?” from Park.
I expected others—people don’t just wander out into the woods and climb a tree; she was protecting something.
“Possible she knew we were coming?” Karen asked.
I paused . . . Why else would she be here? “If so, she’s pretty calm about it, to be able to sleep. No, it’s a coincidence. She’s guarding something. We don’t have time to look for it, though.”
“We have your coordinates,” the commander said. “Flyboy coming in, in about two minutes. You want to be elsewhere.”
I gave the platoon the order to move out fast. We didn’t make too much noise, but enough: the sniper woke up and fired a burst at Lou, who was bringing up the rear on the left flank.
It was a pretty sophisticated antisoldierboy weapon, explosive rounds with depleted-uranium punchers, probably. Two or three rounds hit Lou about waist-level and blew out his leg control. As he fell over backward, another one blew off his right arm.
He hit the ground with a jarring crash, and for a moment everything was still, the high leaves over him rustling in the morning breeze. Another round exploded into the ground next to his head, showering his eyes with dirt. He shook his head to clear them.
“Lou, we can’t do a pickup. Get out of there except for eyes and ears.”
“Thanks, Julian.” Lou jacked out, and the warning-signal pains from his back and arm stopped. He was just a camera pointed at the sky.
We were most of a kilometer away when the flyboy screamed overhead. I linked to her through Command and got a strange double view: from above the forest canopy, a spreading blossom of napalm shot through with glittering streaking sparkles, hundreds of thousands of flechettes. On the ground, a sudden sheet of fire overhead that dripped down through the branches, loud splintering crackle as the flechettes tore through the forest. Sonic boom and then silence.
Then a man screaming and another one talking to him in low tones, and one shot that ended the screaming. A man ran by, close but out of sight, and threw a grenade at the soldierboy. It bounced off the chest and exploded harmlessly.