TITLE: BOOK 12: FORCE MULTIPLICATION
Hand-delivery of a wedding invitation drops Schlock, Bunni, Para, Legs, and Tailor into the middle of a drug war. They didn't start it, but they just might end it.
NARRATOR: He sees scattered leaves behind him, each leaf a memory, a loose page in the book of his life.
NARRATOR: Captain Kaff Tagon, career mercenary, hasn't the poetry in him to describe memory as blown leaves, though he has shredded a book or two in his day.
The haphazard fluttering mimics what passes for an index in his mind. Memory is ordered not by chronology, but by relationships.
The drawing of a weapon is related to every other unholstering.
NARRATOR: The loss of one friend contains the essence of the loss of every friend.
NARRATOR: Military life is long stretches of boredom punctuated by brief bursts of panic. Mercenaries adjust the panic-to-boredom ratio in favor of more panic.
Naturally, the panic is remembered more vividly.
NARRATOR: He may be no poet, but Tagon does see the patterns in his memories.
TAGON: Does my memory have a budget problem? Some of those panels were in black-and-white.
PETEY: Good. You were paying attention.