Jared glanced over to Sarah Pauling, who gave him a shrug. In the week they had been attached to the 2nd Platoon, the best adjective to describe relations was frosty. Other members of the platoon were diffidently polite when forced to be but otherwise ignored the two of them whenever possible. Jane Sagan, the platoon’s superior officer, let them know briefly that this was par for the course for new recruits until their first combat mission. ::Just deal with it,:: she said, and returned to work of her own.
It made both Jared and Pauling uneasy. Being casually ignored was one thing, but the two of them were also denied full integration with the platoon. They were lightly connected and shared a common band for discussion and sharing information concerning the upcoming mission, but the intimate sharing offered by their training squad was not in evidence here. Jared looked back at Harvey and not for the first time wondered if integration was simply a training tool. If it was, it seemed cruel to offer it to people only to take it away later. But he’d seen evidence of integration among his platoon mates: the subtle movements and actions that suggested an unspoken common dialogue and a sensory awareness beyond one’s own senses. Jared and Pauling yearned for it but also knew the lack of it was a test to see how they would respond.
To combat the lack of integration with their platoon, Jared and Pauling’s integration was defensively intimate; they spent so much time in each other’s heads that by the end of the week, despite their affection together, they were very nearly sick of each other. There was, they discovered, such a thing as too much integration. The two of them diluted their sharing slightly by inviting Steven Seaborg to integrate with them informally. Seaborg, who had been receiving the same cold shoulder from the 1st Platoon but who had no training mates in the platoon to keep him company, was almost pathetically grateful for the offer.
Jared glanced down at Jane Sagan and wondered if the platoon leader would tolerate having him and Sarah unintegrated during the mission; it seemed dangerous. For him and Pauling, at the very least.
As if responding to his thoughts, Sagan glanced up at him and then spoke. ::Assignments,:: she said, and sent a map of the tiny Gettysburg colony to the platoon with their assignments overlaid. ::Remember this is a sweep and clean. There’s been no Skip drone activity, so either they’re all dead or they’re all herded somewhere where they can’t get a message out. The idea is to clean out the Rraey with a minimum of structural damage to the colony. That’s minimal, Harvey,:: staring pointedly at the soldier, who squirmed uncomfortably. ::I don’t mind blowing things up when necessary but anything we destroy is something these settlers have less of.::
::What?:: Roentgen said. ::Are you seriously suggesting we’re going to let these people stay? If they’re still alive?::
::They’re wildcatters,:: Sagan said. ::We can’t force them to act intelligently.::
::Well, we could force them,:: Harvey said.
::We won’t force them,:: Sagan said. ::We have new people to take under our wings. Roentgen, you’re responsible for Pauling. I’ll take Dirac. The rest of you, two by two to your assignments. We land here::—a small landing zone illuminated—::and I’ll let you use your own creativity to get to where you need to be. Remember to note your surroundings and the enemy; you’re looking for all of us.::
::Or at least some of us,:: Pauling said privately to Jared. Then the both of them felt the sensuous rush of integration, the hyper-awareness of having so many points of view overlaid on one’s own. Jared struggled to control a gasp.
::Don’t cream yourself,:: Harvey said, and there were a few pings of amusement in the platoon. Jared ignored this and drank in the emotional and informational gestalt offered by his platoon mates: the confidence in their abilities to confront the Rraey; a substrata of early planning for their paths to their mission destinations; a tense and subtle anticipatory excitement that seemed to have little to do with the combat to come; and shared communal feeling that taking care to keep structures intact was pointless, since the colonists were almost certainly dead already.
::Behind you,:: Jared heard Sarah Pauling say, and he and Jane Sagan turned and fired even as they received the image and data, from Pauling’s distant point of view, of three Rraey soldiers moving silently but not invisibly around a small general-purpose building to ambush the pair. The trio stepped out into a hail of bullets from Jared and Sagan; one dropped dead while the other two broke and ran in separate directions.
Jared and Sagan quickly polled the viewpoints of the other members of the platoon to see who might pick up one or both of the fleeing soldiers. Everyone else was engaged, including Pauling, who had returned to her primary task of flushing out a Rraey sniper on the edge of the Gettysburg settlement. Sagan audibly sighed.