Joe Haldeman - Forever Peace

But if the enemy stayed out of sight, there wouldn't be any problems. Our orders were to use force "only reactively."

So we were to be both bait and hook. It didn't look like a good situation. The rebels in Guanacaste province had been faring badly and needed their own demonstration. I supposed Command had taken that into account.

We picked up some riot control accessories-extra gas grenades and a couple of tanglefoot projectors. They spray out a skein of sticky string that makes it impossible to walk; after ten minutes, it suddenly evaporates. We were also issued extra concussion grenades, though I'm not sure they're a good idea with civilians. Blow out somebody's eardrums and expect him to be grateful you didn't do worse? None of the riot control weapons are pleasant, but that's the only one that does permanent damage. Unless you're staggering around blinded by tear gas and get run over by a truck. Or breathe VA and choke on vomit.

We came in over the city at treetop level, lower than many of the buildings, helicopter and two flyboys in tight slow formation, loud as three banshees. I suppose that was good psychology, show we're not afraid and at the same time rattle their windows. But again I wondered whether we weren't set out as tempting bait. If somebody fired at us, I had no doubt the sky could be full of flyboys in a few seconds. The enemy must have figured that out, too.

Once on the ground and out of the chopper, the twenty-nine soldierboys could easily destroy the city themselves, without air support. Part of our show was going to be a "public service" demonstration: a block of tenements to be razed. We could save the city a lot of construction, or deconstruction, expense. Just walk in and pull things down.

We set down gently on the town square, flyboys hovering, and disembarked into a parade formation, ten by three, minus one. Only a scattering of people were there to watch us, which surprised no one. A few curious children and defiant teenagers and old people who live in the park. Only a few police; most of the force, it turned out, was waiting down by our demonstration area.

The buildings surrounding the square were late colonial architecture, graceful in the shadow of the glass-and-metal geometries that hovered over them. The blind reflective windows of those modern buildings could conceal a city full of watchers, maybe snipers. As we marched off in robotic lockstep I was more than ever aware of the fact that I was a safe puppeteer a couple of hundred miles away-if rifles did appear in each window and started firing, no actual people would be killed. Until we retaliated.

We broke step into a carefully random rolling gait as we crossed an old bridge, so as not to be embarrassed by shaking it apart and falling into the noisome trickle below, and then went back to the slam-slam-slam that was supposed to be so intimidating. I did see a dog run away. If any humans were being terrorized along our route, they were doing it indoors.

Past the postmodern anonymity of downtown, we went through a few blocks of a residential neighborhood, presumably upper-class dwellings, all hidden behind tall whitewashed walls. Watchdogs howled at our echoing steps, and in several places we were tracked by surveillance cameras.

Then we got into the barrios. I always felt a kind of referred sympathy for the people who lived in these circumstances, here and in Texas, so similar to the American black ghettos that I had avoided by accident of birth. I also knew that there were sometimes compensations, family and neighborhood bonds that I never experienced. But I could never be sentimental enough to consider that a reasonable trade-off for my longer life expectancy; higher life expectations.

I turned down my olfactory receptors a notch. Smell of standing sewage and urine starting to steam in the morning sun. There was also the good smell of corn baking, and good strong peppers, and somewhere a chicken roasting slowly, maybe a celebration. A chicken was not an everyday menu item here.

You could hear the crowd several blocks before we got to the demonstration site. We were met by two dozen mounted police-mounted on horses-who formed a protective V, or U, around us.

It made you wonder who was demonstrating what. Nobody pretended that the party in power represented the actual will of the people. It was a police state, and there was no question whose side we were on. I suppose it didn't hurt to reinforce that every now and then.

There must have been two thousand people milling around the demolition site. It was obvious we were moving into a pretty complicated political situation. There were signs and banners proclaiming actual people LIVE HERE and ROBOT PUPPETS OF RICH LANDOWNERS, and so forth-more signs in English than in Spanish, for the cameras. But there were a lot of Anglos in the crowd, too, retirees showing support for the locals. Anglos who were locals.

I asked Barboo and David to halt their platoons in place for a minute, and sent a query up to Command. "We're being used here, and it looks like a potentially bad situation."

"That's why you were issued all the extra riot gear," she said. "This crowd's been gathering since yesterday."

"But this isn't our job," I said. "It's like using a sledgehammer to swat a fly."

"There are reasons," she said, "and you have orders. Just be careful."

I relayed that to the others. "Be careful?" David said. "Of us hurting them or of them hurting us?"

"Just try not to step on anybody," Barboo said.

"I'd go further," I said. "Don't injure or kill anybody to save the machines."

Barboo agreed. "That's a corner the rebels may try to back us into. Stay in control of the situation."

Command was listening. "Don't be too conservative. This is a show of force."

It started out well. A young Ender who'd been standing on a box, haranguing, suddenly jumped off and ran over to stand in the way of our progress. One of the mounted police touched him on the bare back with a cattle prod, which knocked him down and threw him into a trembling seizure at David's feet. David stopped dead and the soldierboy behind him, distracted by something, ran into him with a crash. It would have been perfect if David had fallen over and crushed the helpless fanatic, but at least we were spared that. Some of the crowd laughed and jeered, not a bad response under the circumstances, and they spirited the unconscious man away.

That might protect him for a day, but I'm sure the police knew his name, address, and blood type.

"Straighten up the ranks and files," Barboo said. "Let's keep moving and get this over with."

The block we were supposed to demolish was identified with a girdle of orange spray paint. Hard to miss, anyhow, since a solid square of police and sawhorses kept the crowd a neat hundred meters away on all four sides.

We didn't want to use explosives more powerful than the two-inch grenades; with the rockets, for instance, individual fragments of brick could go a lot farther than a hundred meters, with the force of a bullet. But I queried for a calculation and got permission to use the grenades to weaken the buildings' foundations.

They were six-story concrete slab constructions with crumbling brick facades. Less than fifty years old, but the work had been done with inferior concrete-too much sand in the mixture-and one building had already collapsed, killing dozens.

So it didn't sound like a big deal to bring them down. Grenades to jar things loose at the foundation, then put a soldierboy at each corner to push and pull, putting torsion on the framework structure, and jump back as it falls-or don't jump back; demonstrate our invulnerability by standing there unaffected by the rain of concrete and steel.

The first one went perfectly-a textbook demonstration, if there were a textbook on bizarre demolition techniques. The crowd was very quiet.