“Sound off!”

“One, two!”

Two squads, about twenty men, were jammed into the Ural. Its wood floor and metal sides rubbed Mark raw at the tailbone and lower back. Gilbert – in command of the platoon with the apparent rank of first lieutenant – bragged on it as the most powerful and capable utility truck in the world. That might be true, but it didn’t seem to be designed for hauling humans. Maybe the Network had secretly sold the Sovs a design meant for rhomboidal life-forms.

“Sound off!”

“Three, four!”

“Sound off!”

“One, two three, four, one, two – three, four!”

“Y’know,” said Croyd, stirring beside Mark, where he had been slumped the past half hour seemingly asleep or dead, “that’s kind of catchy”

Mark grimaced. The marching song had a nasty edge to it, in the tone in which it was sung and in lyrics that smacked to him of rape. It made him uncomfortable.

Seated across the truck-bed, Dillman gave Mark his death’s-head grin. “You’re not singing, Meadows. What’s the matter? Don’t like our little song?”

“Hey,” another kid said, “you know how clannish nats are. They always stick together in the face of nasty, dirty jokers.” He and Dillman made a big show of working the bolts of their M-16s. It didn’t really matter – they didn’t have any ammunition – but to Mark it was the thought that counted. He spent the rest of the ride with one hand in his pants pocket, wrapped around a vial of powder. It was orange, and he just hoped the rain held off until the trip was over.

Their new forward base camp was at a gutted church, on a hill surrounded by mountains and overlooking a vast expanse of tea bushes. Croyd paused a moment to light a stogie and gaze out at the vista. Like the rest of rural Vietnam that Mark had seen, the mountains and the plantation were green, more shades of green than he had ever known existed, and all so lush they hurt the eye.

Dirt roads crossed the green tea fields, red and raw as the marks of a whip. The straw hats of black-clad workers bobbed among the waist-high plants.

“Lordy, look at all them slaves just a-workin’ away on de old plantation,” Croyd intoned in a terrible Amos ’n’ Andy accent.

“It’s not a plantation,” Mark said. “It’s a collective farm.”

Up until that moment Mark hadn’t known Croyd could move his rather forbidding-looking eyebrow ridges. He raised one now. The effect was as if the pon farr had hit Mr. Spock while he was visiting the Gorn homeworld, and the resultant offspring was trying to mimic Daddy’s trademark “highly illogical, you dumb Earthling fucks” look.

A rain squall swept the plantation – no, commune – workers from view as though washing them away. Luce Gilbert emerged from the lead Ural of their two-truck platoon convoy. He wore a cammie baseball cap and a camouflaged uniform whose creases you could shave with. It was obviously tailored; it had sleeves for his upper two sets of arms, the functional ones, and little tuck-and-roll pouches for the lower, semi-vestigial sets. He began to yell orders for his troops to unass the Urals from Hell and get his H.Q. tent set up among the bullet-pocked stone walls and fallen blackened timbers of the church.

Mark turned around to help unload the gear. A touch on his biceps stopped him. He whirled to find Osprey standing beside him. His talons were lustrous black, with white feathers between. They gripped Mark lightly by the ann.

Mark’s eyes rolled. His hand hunted wildly through his pants pocket. Those claws could take a man’s throat out like that. A spatter of rain hit his cheek. No, orange won’t do, the rain’d be like an acid bath to J. J. Flash. And the sun’s still shining, so Moonchild’s out… Jesus, does this mean my only chance is to turn into Aquarius?

“Don’t be afraid,” Osprey said. His huge, hooked beak was anything but reassuring. “I won’t hurt you.”

He steered a still-quivering Mark to one side. “Look, what happened back at Rick’s… we didn’t know you, man. Didn’t know who you were. We know now. We remember what Cap’n Trips did for Doughboy when the nats were ready to toast him, man. We don’t forget our friends.”

“Uh – thanks, man.”

“Now, the way some of these young bloods talk” He shook his magnificent eagle head – “Be aware you don’t have to worry about us, man. But keep an eye on your back, just the same. Some of these kids look at you, they see nothing but nat meat. Know what I mean?”

Mark nodded nervously, glanced around through the downpour. Nobody was paying any overt attention to him. “Yeah. Thanks, man.”

“The Rox lives, man.” Osprey gave him a feathered thumb up and drifted away. Mark stood watching him, with his boonie hat collapsing around his ears from the weight of the water falling from the sky, fingering the vials in his pocket.

Okay. If somebody tries anything, I turn into Aquarius and hope for the best.

Why did trying to do good have to be so complicated?

Chapter Twenty-nine

They were crashing and tripping their way down through the dense underbrush of a jungle slope, alternately cursing the hill, the jungle, each other, and the clouds of tiny stinging bugs that swarmed around them. Even Croyd, humping along on all-fours behind Mark in the middle of the line, bitched about them. They were too small to catch with his tongue, and they got in his eyes and up his nose like everybody else’s.

Eye Ball, Second Squad’s point man, loomed up on the deer trail they were following. Walking first after him, bulky Haskell left off griping about being compelled to tote the squad’s big black M60 machine gun to point the weapon at him.

As soon as the column stopped, Mark collapsed by the side of the trail. His lungs pumped air that cut like glass. The muscles of his thighs felt like lye Jell-O. His pack straps were like a cheese slicer cutting him in thirds.

“Easy. Easy, dammit.” Sarge pushed forward from the third-spot to shore the M-60’s barrel skyward. His M-16 had a thick M-203 grenade launcher slung under its barrel; along with Haskell he was the squad’s heavy-weapons support. He alone carried ammo, for both components of the compound weapon. “Mario, what does he say?”

The point man had no mouth; his head was a mass of eyeballs, of various sizes and colors, with a boonie hat perched uncomfortably on top to keep the sun off. Mark had the impression the eyes tended to flow together and redivide over time, but he wasn’t sure. Eye Ball was one of the few jokers he had met whom he honestly could not stand to look at for any length of time.

Eye Ball was agitated, waving his hands frantically, and not just at the insects that must have been torturing him to the point of madness. He communicated solely by signing. Mario was his official interpreter. A significant percentage of jokers lacked the capacity for speech, so sign was the unofficial second language of jokers everywhere. Mario was the squad’s most fluent signer.

“He says he’s found something,” the slender young joker reported. “He can’t say exactly what it is.”

“Is it dangerous?” Sarge asked.

Eye Ball held up his right hand and made a motion like a chicken closing its beak with his thumb and index and middle finger. “No,” Mark panted under his breath as Mario translated aloud.

“What? You understand signing?” Croyd had sat up when the column stopped, and was craning around Mark to see what was going on. He wore a boonie hat, too, and because his skull wasn’t real ideal for holding hats, it was taped under his chin. The effect was of some sort of wharf dowager got up for hard weather. “I never knew that.”

“I have a cousin who’s hearing-impaired. I picked up some signs growing up. Stuff like ’I love you’ and, uh, ’bullshit.”

Commotion erupted behind, up the hill. Mark heard the voice of Spoiler, currently in the tail position, raised in an unusually shrill squeal of anger.