“But couldn’t someone just copy the tape? Or steal it?”
“Not that easy. It’s interactive, talks back and forth with the AIs’ sensors, and they change the colors every few patrols, mix them up between zones and so forth to try to stay ahead of infiltrators. Anyway, it’s not an absolute interdiction. It just kicks the AI into a different decision tree or something. It can still waste you if it wants to. And don’t forget that.” She gave him her fiercest look. “’Cause if you get yourself shot out there, I’m going to personally kick your ass!”
“Okay, I’m in,” Cohen said, emerging out of the hallucinatory visions of streamspace like a messenger from the afterlife.
“What does he mean?” Arkady whispered, leaning into Osnat to speak in her ear.
They were still in the abandoned house. Through the ragged window frames Arkady could see the house’s sagging back porch, the rich green slopes of Mount Herzl, the precise geometric lines of the tombs in the military cemetery, the tall trees of Yad Vashem’s Avenue of the Righteous Gentile. Mount Herzl was the heart of the Line, the thickest part of the thickness.
Arkady looked out over the dusty scrubland that separated them from the mountain and thought of the deadly tide of AI-controlled weaponry and human muscle patrolling its paths and riverbeds and crumbling roadways. He remembered the figures of tonnage of land mines buried on the Line per year and shuddered. It was hell. Hell masquerading as an earthly paradise. What sort of beings could evade the patrols and the trip wires long enough to live out there?
Down in the valley bottom a patrol—Israeli? Palestinian?—threaded its way along the riverbed, olive drab ghosts in an olive drab landscape. The wind shifted, and the thick cold smell of gun oil drifted up from the valley bottom.
The soldiers fell silent, watching. The patrol snaked down the valley bottom and vanished. A few minutes passed. Someone heaved a sigh. People around Arkady began to talk again, then to get up and move around and go back to the tasks they’d been engaged in before the patrol appeared.
Cohen stood up, stretching stiff muscles, and walked over to look down at Arkady, who was still crouched on the floor where Osnat had left him.
“How can they not see us?” Arkady asked.
“Because they’re not really here,” the machine explained. “They’re under full-immersion shunts, just like my bodies are. Each one is under the control of an Emergent AI operating in a three-dimensional game space that exactly mirrors the real Green Line.”
“Why?”
“Suicide.” The machine smiled. “And not the romantic kind that Syndicate novelists write about. An Emergent AI’s personality architecture is a lot brittler than the human variety. And Emergents don’t have the benefit of the human hypothalamic-limbic system to help them rationalize killing in wartime. They have to live with it in cold blood, so to speak. And a lot of them turned out not to want to do that. So now we tell them they’re just playing a game in streamspace.”
“And the AIs think the Palestinians are doing the same? I mean, they don’t know there are actual people on the other side of the gun?”
“Right.”
“And what happens if one of the AIs figures it out?”
“Bye-bye, little AI.”
“Oh.”
“Cheer up. That’s what’s going to get us through the Line safe and more or less sound. Because the game can’t look too realistic, of course. The gamespace in which the Emergents think they’re operating is only a simplified model of the real Green Line. And you know the old saying about how there’s many a slip ’twixt cup and lip? Well, we’re going to engineer a few slips between gamespace and realspace.”
The captain eyed Cohen from across the room. “You know what time it is, right?”
“If that’s a polite way of telling me to hurry up, then allow me to point out, equally politely, that your equipment stinks.”
“Tell it to the Knesset.”
“Nothing’s stopping you from buying it below the line.”
“Are you kidding me? What kind of putz buys legal equipment with below-the-line money? What the hell’s the point of having a covert ops budget if you waste it on stuff you’re allowed to have?”
Cohen snorted and went back to pecking at the keyboard and peering into the blue depths of the monitor.
Meanwhile the captain straightened up from the monitor and turned to face the room at large. “Listen up, everyone. From here on in we’re in the thickness of the Line and we’re flying below radar as far as IDF’s concerned. You know what that means. We do not want to be sending any nice young reservists home to their mothers in body bags today, so be bloody damn careful. But if it comes down to choosing who’s going to fill up a body bag, the State of Israel has a hell of a lot more invested in each of you than it does in any eighteen-year-old AI puppet. So act accordingly…and you can cry on my shoulder when we’re all safe at home again. That’s a promise.”
The tenor of activity in the abandoned house changed. One by one the soldiers around Arkady fell silent. The frenetic camaraderie gave way to a tense waiting alertness that reeked of approaching danger. “What’s happening?” he asked Osnat.
“Shh! They’re coming.”
It took Arkady another minute to hear what Li’s enhanced senses and the IDF monitors had told the others: the muffled clank and rustle of a fully equipped infantry squad on the move.
The soldiers on either side of Arkady were shrinking back against the wall, clutching their weapons to their chests. Osnat pulled him back toward the wall by one sleeve. “Get back, Arkady. Give them room.”
They waited. Fabric moved softly against fabric. Someone coughed. Cohen tapped sporadically at the old-fashioned keyboard in front of him, making frustrated faces. The sound of the approaching squad swelled and echoed down the empty street until Arkady began to feel that they must already have passed the open doorway before him—or that time had become stuck in an endlessly repeating loop in which the unseen force was arriving and arriving and never actually here.
“Safeties off,” the captain murmured. He looked sick to his stomach.
“NavMesh is initializing,” Cohen reported finally. “They’re checking the patrol waypoints against the terrain database and updating the blind data. Okay. Now they’re getting a modification to their SeekToViaNavMesh.”
The machine paused, watching some process unfurl in the virtual, and to Arkady unimaginable, world of streamspace. Then it shook its head in apparent exasperation.
“These people have an idea of surface and barrier architecture that the word baroque doesn’t even begin to cover! No wonder they patrol the Line on foot. If they sped up to a jog, they’d have to stop every other tick to wait for the next state-of-the-world update!”
The machine fell silent.
“You done yet, Cohen?” That was Li, somewhere across the room and out of sight.
“Yes. No. I think so.”
A bootheel scraped in the dust outside. A shadow flitted past the door, too fast for Arkady to have more than a vague sense of color and movement.
“They’re here,” someone whispered.
And they were.
The Enderbots took the house with a seamless and silent deliberation that was at least as terrifying as the cold competence of Syndicate-bred tacticals. One minute the center of the room was empty. The next an impassively staring trio of infantrymen was flowing smoothly into tactically optimal positions from which they were able to cover the entire room and its approaches. Their weapons were equipped with spintronic range finders: a pale beam that quivered through the dusty air and picked out precise blue circles that wandered over the faces and uniforms of the special forces soldiers. Several of the men around Arkady flinched when the beams touched them, but no one broke ranks.
“God,” someone said, “how the hell can they be so young?”
Arkady felt an almost instinctive urge to reach over and shut him up, but it was clear that the voice made no impression on the shunt-driven
infantrymen. It was also clear that Cohen had succeeded in hacking NavMesh; the Enderbots, or Enders, as the Israelis called them, disregarded Arkady and the others as if they really had faded into the peeling woodwork of the old building.
“IDF’s talking about drafting sixteen-year-olds,” another soldier said, answering the first. “Don’t you read the papers?”
“I only read the funnies. And when did you become such a condescending asshole, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Will you two clowns shut up for once?”
“Why? They can’t hear us. Fucking Armageddon won’t wake the Enders up.”
Gradually, in orderly squads, the rest of the Enders shuffled in and formed up in the center of the room. Then they stopped, quite abruptly, and just stood there doing nothing.
“What are they waiting for?” Li asked impatiently.
“The SeekTo is air-gapped,” Cohen answered, still at the monitor. “Figuratively, not literally. But the patrol still can’t breach the line until a human operator checks the waypoints for blue-on-blue problems.”
“You’re fucking kidding me.”
The AI coughed delicately, then continued with the air of a man delivering slightly embarrassing news.
“There was a little incident along the India-Pakistan border a while ago. I, uh, jumped the gun. Only slightly. But humans have long memories for that sort of slip up.”
“What if there’s no human on-line to check EMET’s homework for it?”
“This is Earth,” Cohen pointed out. “There’s always a human around.”
No one spoke. The Enders waited for their clearance. Everyone else waited for the Enders.
“Jesus,” Li muttered. “Pakistan. Wherever that is. By the way, Cohen, is there anything on this planet you haven’t run?”
Cohen blinked, thought for a moment, then smiled beatifically. “Garbage collection.”
Another minute or two passed, the AI-controlled squad standing passively in the center of the room, the special forces soldiers squatting and sitting and standing along the bullet-scarred walls watching them.
“Okay,” Cohen said, “they’re cleared for insertion. Just another minute now.”
The Enders began to move again, and Arkady watched a surreal scene unfold around him: one squad of soldiers armed to the teeth and ready to go into a war zone, watching a second squad muster, check their weapons, and get ready to go into the same war zone…while the second squad walked around and stepped over their unseen shadows as if they were nothing more than dead stones.
One of the shunt-controlled soldiers was a slender blond girl who didn’t look a day above seventeen. She crouched down a mere arm’s length away from Arkady and began checking her weapon and ammunition clips with smooth precise inhuman movements. She didn’t even have to look at the gun to complete the task; her blue eyes stared blankly at the wall just over their shoulders.
“Fuckable?” asked the soldier next to Arkady in a conversational tone.
“Oh yeah,” his neighbor breathed in a tone approaching reverence.
“Has anyone ever mentioned what losers you guys are?” Osnat said.
They ignored her.
“Hey, beautiful,” the first soldier murmured to the girl. “It’s a big bad world out there. What are you doing playing the Green Line lottery? Why don’t you just stay here and let me make pretty babies with you?” And then, to Arkady’s stunned disbelief, he reached out and brushed the back of his hand down the girl’s cheek.
Arkady heard Osnat curse under her breath. He froze, waiting. The girl shook her head slightly, as if a fly had landed on her skin. Then she finished prepping her rifle and moved silently over to join the little clot of soldiers mustering by the back door.
Arkady sighed in relief. “Why are they called Enders?” he asked the soldier who had caressed the girl.
“’Cause they’re cannon fodder.” The boy’s tone suggested that he was stating the obvious. “Enders. ’Cause they’ve hit the end of the line. Get it?”
“No,” his companion argued. “It’s ’cause they end you. You fuck with them, you’re dead, end of story.”
“You people,” Osnat announced in a tone of profound disgust, “are submoronic illiterates.”
Another few minutes and the Enders were mustered and ready to move out. The commandos slipped into their streamspace shadow, and suddenly everyone was moving out, and Arkady was being dragged along behind Osnat into the heart of a no-man’s-land that he was starting to realize was anything but empty.
Operations in the thickness of the Line turned out to mostly involve sitting around waiting.
They would move forward, agonizingly slowly, trying to stay within the Enders’ data fusion shadow. The Enders would stop—even with his experience of the AzizSyndicate tacticals, Arkady found their abrupt, silent changes of speed and direction unnerving—and everyone else would stop too. Then they would wait. For a few minutes usually. For half an hour or forty minutes. Once for a full hour and a quarter. And then some invisible nonevent would happen in streamspace, and the Enders would move off again, and off they’d all go like rats following the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
At one point they stumbled into the outer penumbra of a Palestinian artillery barrage. The Enders appeared entirely unmoved by the awesome spectacle; they simply coalesced in a nearby shell crater and took cover as if having the earth ripped apart just in front of their feet were no more alarming than spotting a rain cloud on the horizon.
The commandos huddled together in the closest available crater, unfortunately a wet one. They looked only slightly more concerned than the Enderbots, but they kept up a running commentary of flagrantly indecent summations of their current comfort level that had even Li grinning.
“Don’t worry.” Cohen leaned over to shout in Arkady’s ear between two blasts big enough to make the ground ripple under their feet. “The Palestinian Army is a highly professional organization. They have a firm grasp on how to keep the voting public scared and pliable with minimum waste of trained soldiers on both sides. As long as they’re actually trying to hit us we’re perfectly safe. Of course the fact that they don’t actually know we’re here may complicate matters somewhat.”
Arkady looked nervously toward Osnat, trying to gauge whether this was a joke. “Do the, ah…Palestinians fire into the Line often?”
“It goes up and down. At the moment we’re in a pretty hot-and-heavy phase.”
“And the only thing standing between them and the Israelis is the French Foreign Legion?” Arkady said doubtfully. “Why would anyone take that job?”
“Because they’re French,” Osnat said.
“Because they’re idiots,” Cohen said.
“Because they’re the Legion,” Li said. “Ever heard of Camerone?”
Arkady shook his head.
She leaned forward, warming to her subject, and told him the story in a series of rapid-fire, chewed-off half sentences that sounded like they’d been forged on the battlefield.
It had happened on a planet called Mexico. Or in a country called Mexico. Arkady couldn’t tell which from the way Li described it. A battalion of Legionnaires led by the already infamous Colonel Danjou was escorting a supply train when they were attacked by three Mexican battalions. The French retreated to the Hacienda Camerone (“No, Arkady, I don’t know how a hacienda is different from a house. It’s not mission-critical. Let it slide.”) and set up a perimeter around the courtyard of the hacienda under heavy sniper fire. At 9:00 A.M. on the morning of the battle, the Mexican commander offered terms of surrender, which were refused.
Several mixed cavalry and infantry charges were bloodily repelled. But the defenders took deep losses in each of the failed assaults, and Colonel Danjou, fearing for his men’s resolve, gathered them in the hacienda’s courtyard and made them swear on his wooden hand—memento of past battles—that they would fight through to death or victory.
Danjou fell to a sniper’s bullet moments later. His second-in
-command died in the afternoon, and by evening the former battalion was being commanded by a second lieutenant named Maudet.
At 6:00 P.M. Maudet and the last four defenders exhausted their ammunition, fixed their bayonets, and charged the Mexican lines. Three of them survived the charge.
The Mexican commander demanded their surrender, and they sent his messenger back across the lines with the message that they would rather die than give up their arms, their flag, or the body of their slain colonel. The messenger relayed the response to the Mexican commander, who then uttered one of the most famous phrases in all of military history: “These are not men. These are devils.”
The next day the three survivors were escorted across the lines, their honor and arms intact and their slain commander’s body on their shoulders. “They took Colonel Danjou’s wooden hand with them,” Li finished, holding up her own left hand, palm forward, so that Arkady could see the bruise-blue outline of her Schengen implant and the silver tracery of ceramsteel. “It was escorted to the Legion’s mother house in Sidi el Abbès with the highest honors, and ever since then Danjou’s hand has been the symbol of the Legion’s code: Never surrender.”
“It wasn’t quite that glorious,” Cohen corrected. “But who’s quibbling? Danjou’s worm-ridden hand remains the shining symbol of the Legion’s august tradition of getting into the military equivalent of stupid barroom brawls and laying down your soldiers’ lives for no damned decent reason.”
“Scoff all you want, Cohen. You know as well as I do that Jerusalem would be in a state of outright all-out civil war if the Peacekeepers were occupying it. The only people worse at Peacekeeping than the Peacekeepers are the fucking Americans.”
“Well at least the Americans have the brains to brag about their victories instead of their suicide missions.”
“The Legion completed its mission in Camerone,” Li protested.
“Thereby allowing the French army to fight on in the name of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity in order to prop up a hereditary puppet king and save the Mexican people from the grim prospect of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Excuse me. I’m getting all choked up just thinking about it.”
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