Forever Peace

"I'm jacked. I've done that-lightning chess and three-dimensional go. Even you must know it's not the same."

"No, it's not the same. You've been jacked, but not long enough to even understand the rules we play by."

"I'm talking about stakes, not rules! War is terrible and cruel, but so is life. Other games are just games. War is for real."

"You're a throwback, Ingram," I said. "You want to smear yourself with woad and go bash people's brains out."

"What I am is a man. I don't know what the hell you are, other than a coward and a traitor."

I can't pretend he didn't get to me. One part of me sincerely wanted to get him alone and beat him to a pulp. Which is exactly what he wanted; I'm sure he could have stuffed my foot up my ass and pulled it out through my throat.

"Excuse me," Marty said, and tapped his right earring to pick up a message. After a few moments, he shook his head. "His orders come from too high. I can't find out when they expect him back."

"If I'm not back in two – "

"Oh, shut up." He gestured to Megan. "Knock him out. The sooner we get him jacked, the better."

"You don't have to knock me out."

"We have to go to the other side of the building. I'd rather carry you than trust you."

Megan clicked the gun to another setting and popped him. He stared defiantly for a few seconds and then slumped. Marty reached to untie him. "Wait a half minute," Megan said. "He might be bluffing."

"That's not the same stuff as this?" I said, holding up the pistol.

"No, he's had plenty of that in one day. This doesn't work as fast, but it doesn't take as much out of you." She reached over and pinched his earlobe, hard. He didn't react. "Okay."

Marty untied the left arm and it jerked halfway to his throat and fell back limp. The lips twitched, eyes still shut. "Tough guy." He hesitated, then untied the other bonds.

I got up to help him carry, but winced with the pain in my chest. "You sit down," Megan said. "Don't lift a pencil until I get a look at you."

Everybody else hustled out with Ingram, leaving Amelia and me alone.

"Let me look at that," she said, and unbuttoned my shirt. There was a red area at the bottom of my rib cage that was already starting to turn bruise-tan, on its way to purple. She didn't touch it. "He could have killed you."

"Both of us. How does it feel to be wanted, dead or alive?"

"Sickening. He can't be the only one."

"I should have foreseen it," I said. "I should know how the military mind works-being part of one, after all."

She stroked my arm gently. "We were just worried about the other scientists' reactions. Funny, in a way. If I thought about outside reaction at all, I assumed people would just accept our authority and be glad we had caught the problem in time."

"I think most people would, even military. But the wrong department heard about it first."

"Spooks." She grimaced. "Domestic spies reading journals?"

"Now that we know they exist, their existence seems almost inevitable. All they have to do is have a machine routinely search for key words in the synopses of papers submitted for peer review in the physical sciences and some engineering. If something looks like it has a military application, they investigate and pull strings."

"And have the authors killed?'

"Drafted, probably. Let them do their work with a uniform on. In our case, your case, it called for drastic measures, since the weapon was so powerful it couldn't be used."

"So they just picked up a phone and had orders cut for someone to come kill me, and another one to kill Peter?" She whistled at the autobar and asked it for wine.

"Well, Marty got from him that his primary order was to bring you back. Peter's probably in a room like this somewhere in Washington, shot full of Tazlet F-3, verifying what they already know."

"If that's the case, though, they'll know about you. Make it sort of hard for you to sneak into Portobello as a mole."

The wine came and we tasted it and looked at each other, thinking the same thing: I was only going to be safe if Peter had died before he could tell them about me.

Marty and Mendez came in and sat down next to us, Marty kneading his forehead. "We're going to have to move fast now; move everything up. What part of the cycle is your platoon in?"

"They've been jacked for two days. In the soldier-boys for one." I thought. "They're probably still in Portobello, training. Breaking in the new platoon leader with exercises in Pedroville."

"Okay. The first thing I have to do is see whether my pet general can have their training period extended-five or six days ought to be plenty. You're sure that phone line's secure?"

"Absolutely." Mendez said. "Otherwise we'd all be in uniform or in institutions, including you."

"That gives us about two weeks. Plenty of time. I can do the memory modification on Julian in two or three days. Have orders cut for him to be waiting for the platoon in Building 31."

"But we're not sure whether he should go there," Amelia said. "If the people who sent Ingram after me got ahold of Peter and made him talk, then they know Julian collaborated on the math. The next time he reports for duty they'll grab him."

I squeezed her hand. "I suppose it's a risk I'll have to take. You can fix it so that they won't be able to learn about this place from me."

Marty nodded, thoughtful. "That part's pretty routine, tailoring your memory. But it does put us in a bind ... we have to erase the memory of your having worked on the Problem, in order for you to get back into Portobello. But if they grab you because of Peter and find a hole there, instead of a memory, they'll know you've been tampered with."

"Could you link it with the suicide attempt?" I asked. "Jefferson was proposing to erase those memories anyhow. Couldn't you make it look like that's what had been done?"

"Maybe. Just maybe ... may I?" Marty poured some wine into a plastic cup. He offered it to Mendez, and he shook his head. "It's not an additive process, unfortunately-I can take away memories, but I can't substitute false ones." He sipped. "It's a possibility, though. With Jefferson on our side. It wouldn't be hard to have him supposedly erase too much, so that it covered the week you were working up in Washington."

"This is looking more and more fragile," Amelia said. "I mean, I know almost nothing about being jacked-but if these powers that be tapped into you or Mendez or Jefferson, wouldn't the whole thing come tumbling down?"

"What we need is a suicide pill," I said. "Speaking of suicide."

"I couldn't ask people to do that. I'm not sure that I would do it."

"Not even to save the universe?" I meant that to be sarcastic, but it came out a simple statement.

Marty turned a little pale. "You're right, of course. I have to at least provide it as an option. For all of us."

Mendez spoke up. "This is not so dramatic. But we're overlooking an obvious way of buying time: we could move. Two hundred miles north and we're in a neutral country. They'd think twice before sending an assassin into Canada."

We all considered that. "I don't know," Marty said. "The Canadian government wouldn't have any reason to protect us. Some agency would come up with an extradition request and we'd be in Washington the next day, in chains."

"Mexico," I said. "The problem with Canada is it's not corrupt enough. Take the nanoforge down to Mexico and you can buy absolute secrecy."

"That's right!" Marty said. "And in Mexico there are plenty of clinics where we can set up jacks and do memory modification."

"But how do you propose getting the nanoforge there?" Mendez said. "It weighs more than a tonne, not even counting all those vats and buckets and jars of raw materials it feeds on."

"Use the machine to make a truck?" I said.

"I don't think so. It can't make anything bigger than seventy-nine centimeters across. In theory, we could make a truck, but it would be in hundreds of pieces, sections. You'd need a couple of master mechanics and a big metal working shop, to put it together."

"Why couldn't we steal one?" Amelia said in a small voice. "The army has lots of trucks. Your pet general can change official records and have people promoted and transferred. Surely he can have a truck sent around."

"I suspect it's harder to move physical objects than information," Marty said. "Worth a try, though. Anybody know how to drive?"

We all looked at each other. "Four of the Twenty do," Mendez said. "I've never driven a truck, but it can't be that much different."

"Maggie Cameron used to be a chauffeur," I recalled from jacking with them. "She's driven in Mexico. Ricci learned to drive in the army; drove army trucks."

Marty stood up, moving a little slowly. "Take me to that secure line, Emilio. We'll see what the general can do."

There was a quick light rap on the door and Unity Han opened it, breathless. "You should know. As soon as we jacked with him two-way, we found out... the man Peter, he's dead. Killed out of hand, for what he knew."

Amelia bit a knuckle and looked at me. One tear.

"Dr. Harding..." She hesitated. "You were going to die, too. As soon as Ingram was sure your records had been destroyed."

Marty shook his head. "This isn't the Office of Technology Assessment."

"It's not Army Intelligence, either," Unity said. "Ingram is one of a cell of Enders. There are thousands of them, scattered all through the government."

"Jesus," I said. "And now they know that we can make their prophecy come true."

WHAT INGRAM REVEALED WAS that he personally knew only three other members of the Hammer of God. Two of them were fellow employees of the Office of Technology Assessment-a civilian secretary who worked in Ingram's office in Chicago, and his fellow officer, who had gone to St. Thomas to kill Peter Blankenship. The third was a man he knew only as Ezekiel, who showed up once or twice a year with orders. Ezekiel claimed that the Hammer of God had thousands of people scattered throughout government and commerce, mostly in the military and police forces.

Ingram had assassinated four men and two women, all but one of them military people (one had been the husband of the scientist he was sent to kill). They were always far from Chicago, and most of the crimes had passed muster as death from natural causes. In one, he raped the victim and mutilated her body in a specific way, following orders, so the death would appear to have been one of a chain of serial killings.

He felt good about all of them. Dangerous sinners he had sent to Hell. But he had especially liked the mutilation, the intensity of it, and he kept hoping Ezekiel would bring him another order for one.

He'd had the jack installed three years before. His fellow Enders wouldn't have approved of it, and neither did he approve of the hedonistic ways they were normally used. He only used his at the jack chapels and sometimes the snuff shows, which also qualified as a kind of religious experience for him.

One of the people he'd killed was an off-duty mechanic, a stabilizer like Candi. It made Julian wonder about the men, maybe Enders, who had raped Arly and left her for dead. And the Ender with the knife, outside the convenience store. Were they just crazy, or part of an organized effort? Or were they both?

THE NEXT MORNING I jacked with the bastard for an hour, which was more than fifty-nine minutes too long. He made Scoville look like a choirboy.

I had to get away. Amelia and I found bathing suits and pedaled to the beach. In the men's changing room two men watched me in a strangely hostile way. I supposed black people are rare up here. Or maybe bicyclists.

We didn't do much swimming; the water was too salty, with a greasy metallic taste, and surprisingly cold. For some reason, it smelled like cured ham. We waded out and dried off, shivering, and walked for a while on the odd beach.

The white sand wasn't native, obviously. We'd come in pedaling over the actual crater surface, which was a kind of dark umber glass. The sand felt too powdery underfoot, and made a squeaking sound.

It seemed really strange compared to the Texas beaches where we'd vacationed, Padre Island and Matagorda. No seabirds, shells, crabs. Just a big round artifact full of alkaline water. A lake created by a simpleminded god, Amelia said.

"I know where he could find a couple of thousand followers," I said.

"I dreamed about him," she said. "I dreamed he had gotten me, like the one you talked about."

I hesitated. "Do you want to talk about it?" He had opened the victim from navel to womb, and then made a cross-slash through the middle of the abdomen, as a kind of decoration after cutting her throat.

She made a brushing-away gesture. "The reality's more frightening than the dream. If it's at all like his picture of it."

"Yeah." We'd discussed the possibility that there were only a few of them; maybe only four deluded conspirators. But he seemed to be able to draw on an awful lot of resources-information, money, and ration credits, as well as gadgets like the AK 101. Marty was going to talk to his general this morning.

"It's scary that their situation is the opposite of ours. We could locate and interrogate a thousand of them and never find anyone involved in the actual planning. But if they jack with any one of you, they know everything."

I nodded. "So we have to move fast."

"Move, period. Once they track him or Jefferson up here, we're dead." She stopped walking. "Let's sit here. Just sit quietly for a few minutes. It might be our last chance."

She crossed ankles and drifted into a kind of lotus position. I sat down less gracefully. We held hands and watched morning mist burn off the dead gray water.

MARTY PASSED ON WHAT Ingram had revealed about the Hammer of God to the general. He said it sounded fantastic, but he would make cautious inquiries.

He also found for them two decommissioned vehicles, delivered that afternoon: a heavy-duty panel truck and a school bus. They turned the conspicuous army green into a churchly powder blue, and lettered "St. Bartholomew's Home" on both vehicles.

Moving the nanoforge was no picnic. The crew that had delivered it long ago had used two heavy dollies, a ramp, and a winch to get it into the basement. They used the machine to improvise duplicates, jacked it up onto the dollies and, after widening three doors, managed to get it into the garage in one backbreaking day. Then at night they snuck it out and winched it into the panel truck.

Meanwhile, they were modifying the school bus so that Ingram and Jefferson could stay jacked continuously, which meant taking out seats and putting in beds, along with equipment to keep them fed and watered and emptied. They would stay continually jacked to two of the Twenty, or Julian, working in staggered four-hour shifts.

Julian and Amelia were working as unskilled labor, tearing out the last four rows of seats in the bus and improvising a solid frame for the beds, sweating and swatting mosquitoes under the harsh light, when Mendez clomped into the bus, rolling up his sleeves: "Julian, I'll take over here. The Twenty need you to jack with them."

"Gladly." Julian got up and stretched, both shoulders crackling. "What's up? Ingram have a heart attack, I hope?"

"No, they need some practical input about Portobello. One-way jack, for safety's sake."

Amelia watched Julian go. "I'm afraid for him."

"I'm afraid for us all." He took a small bottle from his pants pocket, opened it, and shook out a capsule. He handed it to her, his hand quivering a little.

She looked at the silver oval. "The poison."

"Marty says it's almost instantaneous, and irreversible. An enzyme that goes straight to the brain."

"It feels like glass."

"Some kind of plastic. We're supposed to bite down on it."

"What if you swallow it?"

"It takes longer. The idea is – "

"I know what the idea is." She put it in her blouse pocket and buttoned it. "So what did the Twenty want to know about Portobello?"

"Panama City, actually. The POW camp and the Portobello connection to it, if any."

"What are they going to do with thousands of hostile prisoners?"

"Turn them into allies. Jack them all together for two weeks and humanize them."

"And let them go?"

"Oh, no." Mendez smiled and looked back toward the house. "Even behind bars, they won't be prisoners anymore."

I UNJACKED AND STARED down into the wildflowers for a minute, sort of wishing it had been two-way; sort of not. Then I stood up, stumbled, and went back to where Marty was sitting at one of the picnic tables. Incongruously, he was slicing lemons. He had a large plastic bag of them and three pitchers, and a manual juicer.

"So what do you think?"

"You're making lemonade."

"My specialty." Each of the pitchers had a measured amount of sugar in the bottom. When he sliced a lemon, he would take a thin slice out of the middle and throw it on the sugar. Then squeeze the juice out of both halves. It looked like six lemons per pitcher.

"I don't know," I said. "It's an audacious plan. I have a couple of misgivings."

"Okay."

"You want to jack?" I nodded toward the table with the one-way box.

"No. Give me the surface first. In your own words, so to speak."

I sat down across from him and rolled a lemon between my palms. "Thousands of people. All from a foreign culture. The process works, but you've only tried it on twenty Americans-twenty white Americans."

"There's no reason to think it might be culture-bound."

"That's what they say themselves. But there's no evidence to the contrary, either. Suppose you wind up with three thousand raving lunatics?"

"Not likely. That's good conservative science-we ought to do a small-scale test first-but we can't afford to. We're not doing science now-we're doing politics."

"Beyond politics," I said. "There's no word for what we're doing."

"Social engineering?"

I had to laugh. "I wouldn't say that around an engineer. It's like mechanical engineering with a crowbar and sledgehammer."

He concentrated on a lemon. "You do still agree that it has to be done."

"Something has to be done. A couple of days ago, we were still considering options. Now we're on some kind of slippery ramp; can't slow down, can't go back."

"True, but we didn't do it voluntarily, remember. Jefferson put us on the edge of the ramp, and Ingram pushed us over."

"Yeah. My mother likes to say, 'Do something, even if it's wrong.' I guess we're in that mode."

He set down the knife and looked at me. "Actually not. Not quite. We do have the option of just plain going public."

"About the Jupiter Project?"

"About the whole thing. In all likelihood, the government's going to discover what we're doing and squash us. We could take that opportunity away from them by going public."

Odd that I hadn't even considered that. "But we wouldn't get anything close to a hundred percent compliance. Less than half, you figured. And then we're in Ingram's nightmare, a minority of lambs surrounded by wolves."

"Worse than that," he said cheerfully. "Who controls the media? Before the first volunteer could sign up, the government would have us painted as ogres bent on world domination. Mind controllers. We'd be hunted down and lynched."

He finished with the lemons and poured equal amounts of juice into each pitcher. "Understand that I've been thinking about this for twenty years. There's no way around the central conundrum: to humanize someone, we have to install a jack; but once you're jacked two-way, you can't keep a secret.

"If we had all the time in the world, we could do it like the Enders' cell system. Elaborate memory modification for everybody who's not at the very top, so that nobody could reveal my identity or yours. But memory modification takes training, equipment, time.

"This idea of humanizing the POWs is partly a way of undermining the government's case against us, ahead of time. It's presented initially as a way of keeping the prisoners in line-but then we let the news media 'discover' that something more profound has happened to them. Heartless killers transformed into saints."

"Meanwhile, we're doing the same thing to all the mechanics. One cycle at a time."

"That's right," he said. "Forty-five days. If it works."

The arithmetic was clear enough. There were six thousand soldierboys, each serviced by three cycles. Fifteen days each, and after forty-five days you had eighteen thousand people on our side, plus the thousand or two who run the flyboys and Waterboys, who would be going through the process.

What Marty's pet general was going to do, or try, was to declare a worldwide Psychops effort that required certain platoons to stay on duty for a week or a few weeks extra.

It only took five extra days to "turn" a mechanic, but then you couldn't just send him home. The change in behavior would be obvious, and the first time one was jacked, the secret would be out. Fortunately, once the mechanics were jacked, they'd understand the necessity for isolation, so keeping them on base wouldn't be a problem. (Except for feeding and housing all those extra people, which Marty's general would incorporate into the exercise. Never hurt a soldier to bivouac for a week or two.)

Meanwhile, the publicity over the miraculous "conversion" of the POWs would be priming the public to accept the next step.

The ultimate bloodless coup: pacifists taking over the army, and the army taking over the government. And then the people-radical idea! – taking over the government themselves.

"But the whole thing hinges on this mystery man, or woman," I said. "Someone who can shuffle medical records around, have a few people reassigned, okay. Appropriate a truck and a bus. That's nothing like setting up a global Psychops exercise. One that's actually a takeover of the military."

He nodded quietly.

"Aren't you going to put water in the lemonade?"

"Not until morning. That's the secret." He folded his arms. "As to the big secret, his identity, you're perilously close to solving it."

"The president?" He laughed. "Secretary of defense? Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff?"

"You could figure it out with what you know, given a table of organization. Which is a problem. We're extremely vulnerable between now and the time your memory has been tailored."

I shrugged. "The Twenty told me about the suicide pills."

He carefully uncapped a brown vial and shook three hard pills into my hand. "Bite down on one and you'll be brain-dead in a few seconds. For you and me it ought to be in a glass tooth."

"In a tooth?"

"Old spy myth. But if they take you or me alive, and get a jack into us, the general's dead meat, and the whole thing is over."

"But you're one-way."

He nodded. "With me, it would take a little torture. With you... well, you might as well just know his name."

"Senator Dietz? The pope?"

He took my arm and started to lead me back to the bus. "It's Major General Stanton Roser, the Assistant Secretary for Force Management and Personnel. He was one of the Twenty who supposedly died, but with a different name and face. Now he has a disconnected jack, but otherwise he's well-connected indeed."

"None of the Twenty knows?"

He shook his head. "And they won't find out from me. Nor from you, now. You don't jack with anybody until we get to Mexico and tailor your memory."

THEIR DRIVE DOWN TO Mexico was too interesting. The fuel cells in the truck lost power so fast they had to be recharged every two hours. Before they got out of South Dakota they decided to pull over for half a day and rewire the vehicle so it was powered directly by the nanoforge's warm fusion generator.

Then the bus broke down, the transmission turning to mush. It was essentially an airtight cylinder of powdered iron stiffened by a magnetic field. Two of the Twenty, Hanover and Lamb, had worked on cars, and together they figured out that the problem was in the shifting program-when the torque demand reached a certain threshold, the field switched off for a moment to shift to a lower gear; when it went below another threshold, it would shift up. But the program had gone haywire, and was trying to shift a hundred times a second, so the iron powder cylinder wasn't rigid long enough to transmit much power. After they figured out the nature of the problem, it was easy to fix, since the shifting parameters could be set manually. They had to reset them every ten or fifteen minutes, because the bus wasn't really designed for so heavy a load, and kept overcompensating. But they did lurch south a thousand miles a day, making plans.

Before they got into Texas, Marty had made arrangements of a shady nature with Dr. Spencer, who owned the Guadalajara clinic where Amelia had been operated on. He didn't reveal that he had a nanoforge, but he did say he had limited, but unsupervised, access to one, and he could make the doctor anything, within reason, that the thing could make in six hours. As proof, 2200 carats' worth, he sent along a one-pound diamond paperweight with Spencer's name lasered into the top facet.

In exchange for the six machine hours, Dr. Spencer shuffled his appointments and personnel so that Marty's people could have a wing to themselves, and the use of several technicians, for a week. Extensions to be discussed.

A week was all that Marty would need, to tailor Julian's memories and complete the humanization of his two captives.

Getting through the border into Mexico was easy, a simple financial transaction. Getting back the same way would be almost impossible; the guards on the American side were slow and efficient and difficult to bribe, being robots. But they wouldn't be driving back, unless things absolutely fell apart. They planned to be flying to Washington aboard a military aircraft-preferably not as prisoners.

It took another day to drive to Guadalajara; two hours crawling through the sprawl of Guadalajara itself. All the streets that were not under repair seemed not to have been repaired since the twentieth century. They finally found the clinic, though, and left the bus and truck in its underground lot, guarded by an old man with a submachine gun. Mendez stayed with the truck and kept an eye on the guard.

Spencer had everything prepared, including the rental of a nearby guest house, la Florida, for the busload. No questions, except to verify their needs. Marty had Jefferson and Ingram installed in the clinic, along with a couple of the Twenty.

They began setting up the Portobello phase from la Florida. Assuming the local phones weren't secure, they had a scrambled military line bounced off a satellite and routed through General Roser.

It was easy enough to get Julian assigned to Building 31 as a kind of middle-management trainee, since he was no longer a factor in the company's strategic plans. But the other part of it-a request to extend his platoon's time in the soldierboys an additional week-was turned down at the battalion level, with the terse explanation that the "boys" had already gone through too much stress the past couple of cycles.

That was true enough. They had had three weeks, un-jacked, to dwell on the Liberia disaster, and some had not been in good soldierly shape when they came back. Then there was the new stress of retraining with Eileen Zakim, Julian's replacement. For nine days they would be confined to Portobello – "Pedroville" – doing the same maneuvers over and over, until their performance with Eileen was close enough to what it had been with Julian.

(It would turn out that Eileen did have one pleasant surprise. She had expected resentment, that the new platoon leader had come from outside, rather than being promoted from the ranks. It was quite the opposite: they all had known Julian's job intimately, and none of them wanted it.)

It was fortunate, but not exactly unusual, that the colonel who brusquely turned down the extension request had himself a request for change of assignment in the works. Many of the officers in Building 31 would rather be assigned someplace with more action, or with less; this colonel suddenly had orders delivered that sent him to a relief compound in Botswana, a totally pacified place where the Alliance presence was considered a godsend.

The colonel who replaced him came from Washington, from General Stanton Roser's Office of Force Management and Personnel. After he'd settled in for a few days, reviewing his predecessor's policies and actions, he quietly reversed the one affecting Julian's old platoon. They would stay jacked until 25 July, as part of a long-standing OFMP study. On the 25th, they'd be brought in for testing and evaluation.

Brought in to Building 31.

Roser's OFMP couldn't directly affect what went on in the huge Canal Zone POW camp; that was managed by a short company from Army Intelligence, which had a platoon of soldierboys attached to it.

The challenge was somehow to have all the POWs jacked together for two weeks without any of the soldierboys or Intelligence officers, one of whom was also jacked, eavesdropping.

To this end they conjured up a colonelcy for Harold McLaughlin, the only one of the Twenty who had both army experience and fluency in Spanish. He had orders cut to go to the Zone to monitor an experiment in extended "pacification" of the POWs. His uniforms and papers were waiting for him in Guadalajara.

One night in Texas, Marty had called all the Saturday Night Special people and asked, in an enigmatic and guarded way, whether they would like to come down to Guadalajara, to share some vacation time with him and Julian and Blaze: "Everyone has been under so much stress." It was partly to benefit from their varied and objective viewpoints, but also to get them across the border before the wrong people showed up asking questions. All of them but Belda said they were able to come; even Ray, who had just spent a couple of weeks in Guadalajara, having a few decades' worth of fat vacuumed out of his body.

So who should be first to show up at la Florida but Belda, after all, hobbling in with a cane and an overloaded human porter. Marty was in the entrance hall, and for a moment just stared.

"I thought it over and decided to take the train down. Convince me it wasn't a big mistake." She nodded at the porter. "Tell this nice boy where to put my things."

"Uh... habitacion dieciocho. Room 18. Up the stairs. You speak English?"

"Enough," he said, and staggered up the stairs with the four bags.

"I know Asher's coming in this afternoon," she said. It was not quite twelve. "What about the others? I thought I might rest until the festivities begin."

"Good. Good idea. Everyone should be in by six or seven. We have a buffet set up for eight."

"I'll be there. Get some sleep yourself. You look terrible." She pulled herself up the stairs with cane and banister.

Marty looked as bad as she said, having just spent hours jacked with McLaughlin going over all the ins and outs, every possible thing that could go wrong with the POW aspect of "the caper," as McLaughlin called it. He'd be on his own most of the time.

There would be no problem as long as orders were followed, since the orders called for all of the POWs to be isolated for two weeks. Most of the Americans didn't like jacking with them anyhow.

After two weeks, starting right after Julian's platoon moved in on Building 31, McLaughlin would take a walk and disappear, leaving the POWs' humanization an irreversible fact of life. Then they would be connected with Portobello and prepare for the next stage.

Marty flopped down on the unmade bed in his small room and stared at the ceiling. It was stucco, and the crusted swirls of it made fantastic patterns in the shifting light that threaded across the room from the top of the shutters that cut off the view of the street; light reflected from the windshields and glittering canopies of the cars that crawled by in the street below, noisily unaware that their old world was about to die. If everything went right. Marty stared at the shifting shadows and catalogued all the things that could go wrong. And then their old world would die, literally.

How could they keep the plan secret, against all odds? If only the humanization didn't take so long. But there was no way around it.

Or so he thought.

I'D BEEN LOOKING FORWARD to seeing the Saturday Night Special crowd again, and there couldn't have been a more welcome setting for the reunion, as tired as we were of road food. The dining table at la Florida was a crowded landscape of delights: a platter of jumbled sausages and another of roasted chickens, split and steaming; a huge salmon lying open on a plank; three colors of rice and bright bowls of potatoes and corn and beans; stacks of bread and tortillas. Bowls of salsa, chopped peppers, and guacamole. Reza was loading a plate when I came in; we exchanged greetings in silly gringo Spanish and I followed his example.

We'd just collapsed in overstuffed chairs, plates balanced on laps, when the others came downstairs in a group, led by Marty. It was a mob, a dozen of the Twenty as well as five from our crowd. I gave up my chair to Belda and filled a small plate to her specifications, saying hello to everyone, and eventually found a piece of floor in a corner with Amelia and Reza, who had also given up his early advantage to a white-haired woman, Ellie.

Reza poured us each a cup of red wine from an un-labeled jug. "Let me see your ID, soldier." He shook his head, drank half the cup and refilled it. "I'm emigrating," he said.

"Better bring lots of money," Amelia said. There were no jobs for Nortes in Mexico. .

"You guys really have your own personal nano-forge?"

"Boy, security is tight around here," I said.

He shrugged. "I sort of heard Marty tell Ray about it. Stolen?"

"No, an antique." I told him as much of the story as I could. It was frustrating; everything I knew about its history came from being jacked with the Twenty, and there was no way to communicate all the nuance and complexity of its shadowy story. Like reading just the face level of a hypertext.

"So technically, it's not stolen. It does belong to you."

"Well, it's not legal for private citizens to own warm fusion plants, let alone the nanogenesis modules-but St. Bartholomew's was chartered by the army in a grant that hid all kinds of spooky classified things. I guess the records got scrambled, and we're sort of caretaking the old machine until someone like the Smithsonian shows up for it."

"Good of you." He attacked a quarter-chicken. "Would I be wrong in assuming that Marty didn't summon us down here for our sage advice?"

"He'll ask your advice," Amelia said. "He asks for mine all the time." She rolled her eyes.

Reza dipped a chicken leg in jalapenos. "But basically, he's covering his rear. His rear flank."

"And protecting you," I said. "As far as we know, nobody's after Marty yet. But they're certainly after Blaze, for this ultimate weapon she knows all about."

"They killed Peter," she murmured.

Reza looked blank and then shook his head sharply. "Your coworker. Who did?"

"The one who came after me said he was from the army's 'Office of Technology Assessment.' " She shook her head. "He was and he wasn't."

"Spooks?"

"Worse than that," I said. I explained about the Hammer of God.

"So why not just go public?" he said. "You didn't plan for it to stay secret."

"We will," I said, "but the later, the better. Ideally, not until we have all the mechanics converted. Not just Portobello, but everywhere."

"Which will take a month and a half," Amelia said, "if everything goes according to plan. I can imagine how likely that is going to be."

"You won't even get to that stage," Reza said. "All those people able to read minds? I'd bet you a month's alcohol ration it'll blow up in your face before you get the first platoon converted."

"No bet," I said. "As little as I need your ration. The only chance we have is to stay a little ahead of the game. Try to be ready for disaster when it strikes."

A stranger sat down with us and I realized it was Ray, the three quarters of him that was left after cosmetic surgery. "I jacked with Marty." He laughed. "God, what a screwball plan. Go away for a couple of weeks and everybody goes crazy."

"Some are born crazy," Amelia said. "Some achieve craziness. We had craziness thrust upon us."

"Bet that's a quote," Ray said, and crunched down on a carrot. He had a plate full of raw vegetables. "True enough, though. One person dead and how many of us to follow? To take on the unlikely task of improving human nature."

"If you want out," I said, "it better be now."

Ray set his plate down and helped himself to some wine. "No way. I've worked with jacks as long as Marty. We've been playing with this idea longer than you've been playing with girls." He glanced at Amelia and smiled and looked down at his plate.

Marty rescued him by dinging a spoon on a water glass. "We have a vast range of experience and expertise here, and won't often all be together in one room. I think it would be smart this first time, though, to limit ourselves to getting our timetable and other information straight-things the jacked people all know in detail, but the rest of us only in bits and pieces."

"Let's take it backward," Ray said. "We conquer the world. What's the step just before that?"

Marty stoked his chin. "September first."

"Labor Day?"

"It's also Armed Forces Day. The one day in the year when we can have a thousand soldierboys marching down the streets of Washington. Peacefully."

"One of the few days," I added, "when most of the politicians are also in Washington. And more or less in one place, at the parade."

"A lot of what happens before, just before that, is control of the news. 'Spin,' they used to call it.

"Two weeks before, we will have finished humanizing the entire POW compound down in Panama City. It's going to be a miracle-all those unruly, hostile captives transformed into a forgiving, cooperative nation, eager to use their newfound harmony to end the war."

"I see where this is going," Reza said. "We'll never get away with it."

"Okay," Marty said. "Where are we going?"

"You get everybody excited about turning these nasty goomie soldiers into angels, and then you whip aside the magic curtain and say, 'Ta-da! We've done the same thing to all our soldiers. By the way, we're taking over Washington.'"

"Not quite that subtle." Marty rolled up a tortilla with a strange mixture of beans, shredded cheese, and olives. "By the time the public learns about it, it will be 'Oh, by the way, we've taken over Congress and the Pentagon. Stay out of our way while we work this out.'" He bit into the tortilla and shrugged at Reza.

"Six weeks from now," Reza said.

"Six eventful weeks," Amelia said. "Just before I left Texas, I sent the rationale for the doomsday scenario to about fifty scientists-everyone in my address book tagged as a physicist or astronomer."

"That's funny," Asher said. "I wouldn't have gotten it, since I'd be in your book as 'math' or 'old fart.' But you'd think some colleague would have mentioned it by now. How long's it been?"

"Monday," Amelia said.

"Four days." Asher filled a mug with coffee and steaming milk. "Have you contacted any of them?"

"Of course not. I haven't dared to pick up a phone or log on."

"Nothing in the news," Reza said. "Aren't any of your fifty publicity-hungry?"

"Maybe it was intercepted," I said.

Amelia shook her head. "It was from a public phone, a data jack in the Dallas train station; maybe a microsecond download."

"So why hasn't anybody reacted?" Reza said.

She kept shaking her head. "We've been so... so busy. I should have..." She set down her plate and fished through her purse for a phone.

"You're not – " Marty said.

"I'm not calling anybody." She punched a sequence of numbers from memory. "But I never checked the echo of that call! I just assumed everybody got... oh, shit." She turned the handset around. It showed a random jumble of numbers and letters. "The bastard got to my database and scrambled it. In the forty-five minutes it took for me to get to Dallas and make the call."

"It's worse than that, I'm afraid," Mendez said. "I've jacked with him for hour after hour. He didn't do it; didn't think of it."

"Jesus," I said into the silence. "Could it have been someone in our department? Someone who could decrypt your files and cream them?" She'd been keying through the text. "Look at this." There was nothing but gibberish until the last word:

"G|O|D|S|W|I|L|L."

IT TAKES TIME FOR information to percolate up through a cell system. By the time Amelia found evidence that the Hammer of God had scrambled her files, there was still one day left before the very highest echelon knew that God had given them a way to bring on the Last Day: all they had to do was keep anybody from interfering with the Jupiter Project.

They were not dumb, and they knew a thing or two about spin themselves. They leaked the "news" that there were lunatic-fringe conservatives who wanted to convince you that the Jupiter Project was a tool of Satan; that continuing it could precipitate the end of the world. The End of the Universe! Could anything be more ridiculous? A harmless project that, now that it was set in motion, cost nobody anything, and might give us real information as to how the universe began. No wonder those religious kooks wanted it suppressed! It might prove that God didn't exist!

What it proved, of course, was that God did exist, and was calling us home.

The Ender who had decrypted and destroyed Amelia's files was none other than Macro, her titular boss, and he was glad beyond words to see that his part in the plan was crystallizing.

Macro's involvement did help the other Plan – Marty's rather than God's-in that he deflected attention from the disappearance of Amelia and Julian. He had set up Ingram to get rid of Amelia, and assumed he had taken care of the black boyfriend at the same time, good riddance to both of them. He had forged letters of resignation from both, in case anyone came looking. He'd assigned their teaching duties to people who were too grateful to be curious, and there was already so much rumor brewing about them that he didn't bother to manufacture a cover story. Young black man and older white woman. They probably pulled up stakes and went to Mexico.

FORTUNATELY I STILL HAD the rough draft of the paper on my own notebook. Amelia and I could clean it up and send a delayed broadcast after we left Guadalajara. Ellie Morgan, who had been a journalist before committing murder, volunteered to write a simplified version for general release, and one with everything but equations for a popular science magazine. That would be a pretty short article.

The staff removed all the plates, empty or piled with bones, and brought back plates of cookies and fruit. I couldn't look at another calorie, but Reza attacked both.

"Since Reza has his mouth full," Asher said, "let me be devil's advocate for a change.

"Suppose all it took to become humanized was a simple pill. The government demonstrates how it's going to make life better for everyone-or even that life will end if everyone doesn't take it-and they supply the pills to everybody. Pass a law saying it's life imprisonment if you don't take the pill. How many would manage not to take it anyhow?"

"Millions," Marty said. "Nobody trusts the government."

"And instead of a pill, you're talking about a complex surgical procedure that only works ninety-some percent of the time and when it doesn't work, it usually kills or stupefies the victim. You'll have people running for the hills."

"We've been through this," Marty said.

"I know. I got the argument when we were jacked. You don't provide it for free-you charge for it and make it a symbol of status and individual empowerment. How many Enders do you think you're going to get that way? And what about the people who already have status and power? They're going to say, 'Oh, good, now everybody else can be like me'?"

"The fact is," Mendez said, "it does give you power. When I'm linked with the Twenty, I understand five languages; I have twelve degrees; I've lived over a thousand years."

"The status part will be propaganda at first," Marty said. "But when people look around and see that virtually everything of interest is being done by the humanized, we won't have to sell the idea."

"I'm worried about the Hammer of God," Amelia said. "We're not likely to convert many of them, and some of them like to serve God by murdering the godless."

I agreed. "Even if we convert a few like Ingram, the nature of the cell system would keep it from spreading."

"They're notoriously antijack anyhow," Asher said. "Enders in general, I mean. And arguments about status and power aren't going to move them."

"Spiritual arguments might," Ellie Morgan said. She looked kind of saintly herself, all in white with long flowing white hair. "Those of us who are believers find our belief strengthened, and broadened."

I wondered about that. I'd felt her belief, jacked, and was attracted by the comfort and peace she derived from it. But she'd instantly accepted my atheism as "another path," which didn't sound much like any Ender I'd met. The hour I'd spent linked with Ingram and two others, Ingram had used the power of the jack to visualize imaginative hells for me three of us, all involving anal rape and slow mutilation.

It would be interesting to jack with him after he'd been humanized, and play those hells back for his entertainment. I suppose he'd forgive himself.

"That's an angle we ought to map out," Marty said. "Using religion-not your kind, Ellie, but organized religion. We'll automatically have people like the Cyber-Baptists and Omnia on our side. But if we could be endorsed by some mainstream religion, we could have a big bloc that not only preached our gospel, but demonstrated its effectiveness." He picked up a cookie and inspected it. "I've been concentrating so much on the military aspects that I've neglected other concentrations of power. Religion, education."

Belda tapped her cane on the floor. "I don't think deans and professors are going to see the appeal of gaining knowledge without working through their institutions. Mr. Mendez, you plug into your friends and speak five languages. I only speak four, none of them that well, and it took a large piece of my youth, sitting and memorizing, to learn three of those four. Pedagogues are jealous of the time and energy they invest in gaining knowledge. You offer it to people like a sugar pill."

"But no, it's not like that at all," Mendez said earnestly. "I only understand things in Japanese or Catalan when one of the others is thinking with that language. I don't keep it."

"It's like when Julian joined us," Ellie said. "The Twenty never had a physical scientist before. When he was linked with us, we understood his love for physics, and any of us could use his knowledge directly-but only if we knew enough, anyhow, to ask the right questions. We couldn't suddenly do calculus. No more than we understand Japanese grammar when we're linked with Wu."

Megan nodded. "It's sharing information, not transferring it. I'm a doctor, which may not be a huge intellectual accomplishment, but it does take years of study and practice. When we're all jacked together and someone complains of a physical problem, all the others can follow my logic in diagnosis and prescribing, while it's happening, but they couldn't have come up with it on their own, even though we've been jacked together off and on for twenty years."

"The experience might even motivate someone to study medicine, or physics," Marty said, "and it certainly would help a student, to have instant intimate contact with a doctor or a physicist. But you still have to unplug and hit the books, if you want to actually have the knowledge."

"Or never unplug at all," Belda said. "Just unplug to eat or sleep or go to the toilet. That's really attractive. Billions of zombies who are temporarily expert in medicine and physics and Japanese. For all of their so-called waking hours."

"It'll have to be regulated," I said, "the way it is now. People will spend a couple of weeks jacked, to humanize them. But after that..."

The front door opened so hard it banged against the wall, and three large policemen strode in with submachine guns. An unarmed policeman, smaller, followed them.

" – I have a warrant for Dr. Marty Larrin," he said in Spanish.

" – What is the warrant for?" I asked. " – What is the charge?"

" – I am not paid to answer to negros. Which of you is Dr. Larrin?"

"I am," I said in English. "You can answer to me."

He gave me a look I hadn't seen in years, not even in Texas. " – Be silent, negro. One of you white men is Dr. Larrin."

"What is the warrant about?" Marty asked, in English.

"Are you Professor Larrin?"

"I am and I have certain rights. Of which you are aware."

"You do not have the right to kidnap people."

"Is this person I supposedly kidnapped a Mexican citizen?"

"You know he is not. He's a representative of the government of the United States."

Marty laughed. "Then I suggest you send around some other representative of the government of the United States." He turned his back on the guns. "Where were we?"

"To kidnap is against Mexican law." He was turning red in the face, like a cartoon cop. "No matter who kidnaps who."

Marty picked up a phone handset and turned around. "This is an internal matter between two branches of the United States government." He walked up to the man, holding the phone like a weapon, and switched to Spanish. " – You are a bug between two heavy rocks. Do you want me to make the phone call that crushes you?"

The cop rocked back but then held his ground. "I don't know anything about that," he said in English. "A warrant is a simple matter. You must come with me."

"Bullshit." Marty touched one number and unreeled a jack connector from the side of the handset. He clicked it onto the back of his head.

"I demand to know who you are contacting!" Marty just stared at him, slightly wall-eyed. "Cabo!" He gestured, and one of the men put the muzzle of his submachine gun under Marty's chin.

Marty reached back slowly and unjacked. He ignored the gun and looked down into the little man's face. His voice was shaky but firm. "In two minutes you may call your commander, Julio Castenada. He will explain in detail the terrible mistake you almost made, in all innocence. Or you might decide to just go back to the barracks. And not further disturb Comandante Castenada."

They locked eyes for a long second. The cop jerked his chin sideways and the private withdrew his gun. Without another word, the four of them filed out.

Marty eased the door shut behind them. "That was expensive," he said. "I jacked with Dr. Spencer and he jacked with someone in the police. We paid this Castenada three thousand dollars to lose the warrant.

"In the long run, money isn't important, because we can make anything and sell it. But here and now, we don't have a 'long run.' Just one emergency after another."

"Unless somebody finds out you have a nanoforge," Reza said. "Then it won't be a few cops with guns."

"These people didn't look us up in the phone book," Asher said. "It had to be someone in your Dr. Spencer's office."

"You're right, of course," Marty said. "So at the very least, they do know we have access to a nanoforge. But Spencer thinks it's a government connection I'm not able to talk about. That's what these police will be told."

"It stinks, Marty," I said. "It stinks on ice. Sooner or later, they'll have a tank at the door, making demands. How long are we here?"

He flipped open his notebook and pushed a button. "Depends on Ingram, actually. He should be humanized in six to eight days. You and I are going to be in Portobello on the twenty-second, regardless."

Seven days. "But we don't have a contingency plan. If the government or the Mafia puts two and two together."

"Our 'contingency plan' is to think on our feet. So far, so good."

"At the very least, we ought to split up," Asher said. "Our being in one place makes it too easy for them."

Amelia put a hand on my arm. "Pair up and scatter. Each pair with one person who knows Spanish."

"And do it now," Belda said. "Whoever sent those boys with guns has his own contingency plan."

Marty nodded slowly. "I'll stay here. Everybody else call as soon as you find a place. Who speaks enough Spanish to take care of rooms and meals?" More than half of us; it took less than a minute to sort up into pairs. Marty opened a thick wallet and put a stack of currency on the table. "Make sure each of you has at least five hundred pesos."

"Those of us who are up to it ought to take the subway," I said. "An army of cabs would be pretty conspicuous, and traceable."

Amelia and I got our bags, not yet unpacked, and were the first ones out the door. The subway was a kilometer away. I offered to take her suitcase, but she said that would be too conspicuously un-Mexican. She should take mine, and walk two paces behind me.

"At least we'll get a little breathing space to work on the paper. None of this will mean anything if the Jupiter Project is still going September fourteenth."

"I spent a little time on it this morning." She sighed. "Wish we had Peter."

"Never thought I'd say it... but me, too."

THE WOULD SOON FIND out, along with the rest of the world, that Peter was still alive. But he was in no shape to help with the paper.

Police in St. Thomas arrested a middle-aged man wandering through the market at dawn. Dirty and unshaven, dressed only in underwear, at first they thought he was drunk. When the desk sergeant questioned him, though, she found that he was sober but confused. Monumentally confused: he thought the year was 2004 and he was twenty years old.

On the back of his skull, a jack connection so fresh it was crusted with blood. Someone had invaded his mind and stolen the last forty years.

What was taken from his mind corroborated the text of the article, of course. Within a few days, the glorious truth had spread to all of the upper echelons of the Hammer of God: God's plan was going to be fulfilled, appropriately enough, by the godless actions of scientists.

Only a few people knew about the glorious End and Beginning that God would give them on September 14.

One of the paper's authors was safe, most of his brain in a black box somewhere. The academics who had juried the paper had all been taken care of, by accident or "disease." One author was still missing, along with the agent who had been sent to kill her.

The assumption was that they were both dead, since she hadn't surfaced to warn the world. Evidently the authors had been uncertain how much time they had before the process became irreversible.

The most powerful member of the Hammer of God was General Mark Blaisdell, the undersecretary of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Not too surprisingly, he knew his arch-rival, Marty's General Roser, in a casual social way; they took meals at the same Pentagon dining room – "officers' mess," technically, if you can apply the term to a place with mahogany paneling and a white-clad server for each two "messers."

Blaisdell and Roser did not like each other, though both hid it well enough to occasionally play tennis or billiards together. When Roser once invited him to a poker game, Blaisdell coldly said, "I have never once played cards."

What he did like to play was God.

Through a series of three or four intermediaries, he supervised most of the murder and torture that was regrettably necessary to hasten God's plans. He used an illegal jack facility in Cuba, where Peter had been taken to have his memory stripped. It was Blaisdell who reluctantly decided to let the scientist live, while the five jurors were succumbing to their accidents and diseases. Those five scientists lived all over the world, and there wasn't much to immediately link their deaths and disabilities-two of them were in comas, and would sleep through the end of the world-but if Peter showed up dead as well, it could make trouble. He was moderately famous, and there were probably dozens of people who knew the identities of the five jurors and the fact that they had turned down his paper. An investigation might lead to a re-evaluation of the paper, and the fact that Blaisdell's agency had mandated its refusal might attract unwanted scrutiny to other activities.

He tried to keep his religious beliefs to himself, but he knew there were people-like Roser-who knew he was very conservative, and might suspect, given a whisper of fact or rumor, that he was an Ender. The army wouldn't demote him for that, but they could make him the highest-ranking supply clerk in the world.

And if they found out about the Hammer of God, he'd be executed for treason. He would personally prefer that, of course, to demotion. But the secret had been sealed for years, and he would be the last one to give it away. Marty's group was not the only one with pills.

Blaisdell came home from the Pentagon and put on sport coveralls and went to an evening soccer game in Alexandria. At the hot dog stand he talked to the next woman in line, and as they walked back toward the bleachers, he said their agent Ingram had gone to the Omaha train station the evening of July 11th, to pick up and eliminate a scientist, Blaze Harding. Agent and scientist left the station together-security cameras confirmed that-but then both had disappeared. Find them and kill Harding. Kill Ingram if he does anything that makes you think he's on the wrong side.

Blaisdell returned to his seat. The woman went to the ladies' room and disposed of her hot dog, and then went home to her weapons.

Her first weapon was an illegal FBI infoworm, threading undetected through municipal transportation records. She found out that a third party shared the cab with the agent and his supposed victim; they had stopped the cab on Grand Street, no particular address. The original order had been for 1236 Grand, but they'd stopped early, a verbal cancel.

She went back to the security tapes and saw that the two had been followed by a large black man in uniform. She didn't yet know that there was a connection between the scientist and the black mechanic. She assumed he was a backup for Ingram; Blaisdell hadn't mentioned it, but maybe it was an arrangement Ingram had made on his own.

So Ingram probably had a car waiting, to drive his victim out into the country to dispose of her.

The next stage depended on luck. The Iridium system that provided global communication by way of a fleet of low-flying satellites had been quietly co-opted by the government after the start of the Ngumi War; all of the satellites had been replaced by dual-function ones: they still took care of phone service, but each one also spied continuously on the strip of land it passed over. Had one of them passed over Omaha, over Grand Street, just before midnight on the 11th?

She wasn't military, but she had access to Iridium pictures through Blaisdell's office. After a few minutes of sorting, she had an image of the cab leaving and the black mechanic getting into the back seat of a long black limousine. The next shot was a low angle that showed the limousine's license plate: "North Dakota 101 Clergy." In less than a minute, she had it traced to St. Bartholomew's.

That was strange enough, but her course was clear. She already had a bag packed with a business suit and a frilly dress, two changes of underwear, and a knife and a gun made completely of plastic. There was also a jar of vitamins with enough poison to murder a small town. In less than an hour she was in the air, headed for the crater city Seaside and its mysterious monastery. St. Bartholomew's had some military connection, but General Blaisdell didn't have high enough clearance to find out what it was. It occurred to her that she might be getting in over her head. She prayed for guidance, and God told her in his stern fatherly voice that she was doing the right thing. Stay your course and don't fear dying. Dying is just coming home.

She knew Ingram; he was a third of her cell-and she knew how much better he was at mayhem. She had killed more than twenty sinners in service to the Lord, but always at a distance or protected by extremely close contact. God had gifted her with great sexual attractiveness, and she used it as a weapon, allowing sinners in between her legs while she reached under the pillow for the crystal knife. Men who don't close their eyes when they ejaculate will close their eyes a moment later. If she was on her back with the man above her, she would embrace him with her left arm and men drive the dagger into his kidney. He would straighten up in tetanic shock, his penis trying to ejaculate again, and she could sweep the razor-keen blade across his throat. When he sagged, she would make sure both carotid arteries were severed.

Sitting in the plane, she put her knees together and squeezed, remembering how the last dying thrust felt. It probably didn't hurt the man too much, it was over so fast, and he faced an eternity of torment anyhow. She had never done it to anyone who had taken Jesus as his Savior. Instead of being washed in the Blood of the Lamb, they drowned in their own. Atheists and adulterers, they deserved even worse.

Once a man had almost escaped, a pervert she had allowed to engage her from behind. She'd had to half-turn and stab him in the heart, but she didn't have full force or good aim, and the point of the knife broke off in his breastbone. She dropped the knife and he ran for the door, and might have run naked and bleeding into me hotel corridor, but she had double-locked it, and while he was struggling with the combination of latches, she retrieved the knife and reached around him and slashed open his abdomen. He was a gross fat man, and an incredible mess spilled out. He made a lot of noise dying, while she knelt helplessly sick in the bathroom, but the hotel was evidently well soundproofed. She left by way of window and fire escape, and the morning news said that the man, a well-connected city commissioner, had died at home, peacefully, in his sleep. His wife and children had been full of praise for him. A godless swine too fat to engage a woman normally. He had even pretended to pray before they had sex, currying favor because of her crucifix, and then expected her to use her mouth to make him ready. It was while she was doing that, that she had savored the image of splitting him open. But her hate hadn't prepared her for the multicolored jumble of gore.

Well, this one would be clean. She had killed women twice before, each one a merciful pistol shot to the head. She would do that and then escape or not. She hoped she wouldn't have to kill Ingram, a stern but nice man who had never looked at her with lust. He was still a man, though, and it was possible that this redheaded professor had led him astray.

It was after midnight by the time she got to Seaside. She got a room at the hotel closest to St. Bartholomew's, slightly more than a kilometer away, and walked over to take a look.

The place was completely dark and silent. Not surprising for a monastery, she supposed, so she went back to the hotel and slept for a few hours.

One minute after 8:00, she phoned the place, and got an answering machine. The same at 8:30.

She put on her weapons and walked over and rang the doorbell at 9:00. No response. She walked completely around the building and saw no sign of life. The lawn needed mowing.

She noted several places she could break in, come nightfall, and went back to the hotel to do some electronic snooping.

She found no reference to St. Bartholomew's in any database of religious activity, other than acknowledgment of its existence and location. It was founded the year after the nanoforge cataclysm that formed the Inland Sea.

It was doubtless a cover organization for something, and that something was somehow connected with the military-in Washington, when she'd typed in the name, working under Blaisdell's aegis, she'd gotten a message that "need-to-know" documents would have to be processed through Force Management and Personnel. That was pretty spooky, since Blaisdell had unquestioned access to top-secret material in any part of the military establishment.

So the people in that monastery were either very powerful or very subtle. Maybe both. And Ingram was evidently part of them.

The obvious conclusion would be that they were part of the Hammer of God. But then Blaisdell would know about their activities.

Or would he? It was a large organization, with linkages so complex and well-protected that it was possible even the man in charge could have lost track of an important part. So she should be ready to go in shooting, but also ready to tiptoe away quietly. God would guide her.

She spent a couple of hours assembling an Iridium mosaic of snapshots of the place since the 11th. There were no pictures of the black limousine, which was not too surprising, since the monastery had a large garage and there were never any vehicles parked outside.

Then she saw the army truck and bus appear, and watched them reappear as blue church vehicles, and leave.

It would take a long time, and a lot of luck, to trace them through the Interstate system. Fortunately, the powder blue was an unusual color. But before she settled into that mind-numbing chore, she decided to go check the monastery for clues.

She put on her business suit over the weapons and assembled the ID package and pocket litter that identified her as an FBI agent from Washington. She wouldn't get past a retinal scan at a police station, but she didn't foresee going into any police station alive.

Again, no response from the doorbell. It took her only a couple of seconds to pick the lock, but it was dead-bolted. She took out the pistol and blew the deadbolt off, and the door swung open.

She hurried in with the gun drawn and shouted "F.B.I.!" at the dusty waiting room. She went into the main corridor and started a hasty search, hoping to get through and out before the police arrived. She figured, accurately, that it was possible the folks at St. Bart's didn't have a burglar alarm because they didn't want any police showing up suddenly, but she didn't want to count on that.

The rooms off the corridor were disappointing-two meeting rooms and individual dormitory rooms or cells.

The atrium stopped her, though, with the towering trees and active brook. A trash container had six empty Dom Perignon bottles. Off the atrium, a large circular conference room built around a huge hologram plate. She found the controls and turned it on to the peaceful woodland scene.

At first she didn't recognize the electronic modules at each seat-and then it dawned on her that this was a place where two dozen sinners could jack together!

She'd never heard of anything like that outside of the military. Maybe that was the military connection, though: a top-secret soldierboy experiment. The office of Force Management and Personnel might indeed be behind it.

That made her hesitant about proceeding. Blaisdell was her spiritual superior as well as her cell leader, and she would normally follow his orders without question. But it seemed increasingly obvious that there could be aspects to this he was unaware of. She would go back to the hotel and try to set up a secure line to him.

She turned off the hologram and tried to return to the atrium. The door was locked.

The room spoke up: "Your presence here is illegal. Is there any way you would care to explain it?" The voice was Mendez's; he was viewing her from Guadalajara.

"I'm Agent Audrey Simone from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We have reason to believe – "

"Do you have a warrant to search this establishment?"

"It's on file with the local authorities."

"You forgot to bring a copy when you broke in, though."

"I don't have to explain myself to you. Show yourself. Open this door."

"No, I think you'd better tell me the name of your supervisor and the location of your branch. Once I verify that you are who you say you are, we can discuss your lack of a warrant."

With her left hand she pulled out her wallet and turned in a circle, displaying the badge. "Things will go a lot easier for you if – " She was interrupted by the invisible man's laugh.

"Put the fake badge away and shoot your way out. The police should have arrived by now; you can explain about your warrant to them."

She had to shoot off both hinges as well as the three bolts on this door. She ran across the brook and found that the door out of the atrium was now similarly secured. She reloaded, automatically counting the number of remaining air cartridges, and tried to open this one with three shots. It took her four more.

I WAS WATCHING HER on the screen from behind Mendez. She was finally able to push the door down with her shoulder. He pushed two buttons and switched to the corridor camera. She went pounding down the corridor in a dead run, the pistol held out in front of her with both hands.

"Does that look like an FBI agent going out to reason with the local cops?"

"Maybe you should have actually called them."

He shook his head. "Unnecessary bloodshed. You didn't recognize her?"

"Afraid not." Mendez had called me when she shot down the front door, on the off chance that I might recognize her from Portobello.

Before she went out the front door, she slipped the pistol into a belly holster, and buttoned just the top button of her suit, so it was like a cape, concealing without restraining. Then she walked casually out the door.

"Pretty smooth," I said. "She might not be official. She could have been hired by anyone."

"Or she could be a Hammer of God nutcase. They had Blaze tracked as far as the train station in Omaha." He switched to an outside camera.

"Ingram had a lot of government authority, as well as being a nut. I guess she might, too."

"I was sure the government lost her in Omaha. If anyone had followed the limo, St. Bart's would have had company long before now."

She stepped out and looked around, her face revealing nothing, and started up the sidewalk toward town like a tourist on a morning constitutional, neither slow nor hurried. The camera had a wide-angle lens; she dwindled away pretty fast.

"So should we check the hotels and try to find out who she is?" I asked.

"Maybe not. Even if we got a name, it might not do us any good. And we don't want anyone to make a connection between St. Bart's and Guadalajara."

I gestured at the screen. "No one can track that signal to here?"

"Not the pictures. It's an Iridium service. I decrypt them passively from anywhere in the world." He turned off the screen. "You going to the unveiling?" Today was the day Jefferson and Ingram were to have finished the humanization process.

"Blaze wondered whether I ought to. My feelings about Ingram are still pretty Neanderthal."

"I can't imagine. He only tried to murder your woman and then you as well."

"Not to mention insulting my manhood and attempting to destroy the universe. But I'm due in the Clinic this afternoon anyhow, to get my memory fucked with. Might as well see Wonder Boy in action."

"Give me a report. I'm going to stay by the screen for the next day or two, in case 'Agent Simone' tries another visit."

Of course I wouldn't be able to give him a report, because the encounter with Ingram was related to all the stuff I was having erased, or at least so I assumed-I wouldn't be able to remember his assault on Amelia without recalling what she had done to attract his attention. "Good luck. You might check with Marty-his general might have some way to access FBI personnel records."

"Good idea." He stood up. "Cup of coffee?" "No, thanks. Spend the rest of the morning with Blaze. We don't know who I'm going to be tomorrow."

"Frightening prospect. But Marty swears it's totally reversible."

"That's true." But Marty was going ahead with the plan even though it meant the risk of a billion or more dying or losing their sanity. Maybe my losing or keeping my memories didn't rank too high on his list of priorities.

THE WOMAN WHO CALLED herself Audrey Simone, whose cell name was Gavrila, would never go back to the monastery. She had learned enough there.

It took her more than a day to put together a mosaic of Iridium pictures of the two blue vehicles making their way from North Dakota to Guadalajara. By God's grace the last picture was perfect timing: the truck had disappeared and the bus was signaling for a left turn into an underground parking garage. She used a grid to find the address and was not surprised when it turned out to be a clinic for installing jacks. That Godless practice was at the heart of everything, obviously.

General Blaisdell arranged transportation to Guadalajara for her, but she had to wait six hours for an express package to arrive. There was no sporting goods store in North Dakota where she could replace the ammunition she'd used up opening doors-Magnum-load dum-dum bullets that wouldn't set off airport detectors. She didn't want to run out of them, if she had to fight her way to the redheaded scientist. And perhaps Ingram.

INGRAM AND JEFFERSON SAT together in hospital blues. They were in straight-backed chairs of expensive teak or mahogany. I didn't notice the unusual wood first, though. I noticed that Jefferson sat with a serene, relaxed expression that reminded me of the Twenty, Ingram's expression was literally unreadable, and both of his wrists were handcuffed to the chair arms.

There was a semicircle of twenty chairs facing them in the featureless white round room. It was an operating theater, with glowing walls for the display of X-ray or positron transparencies.

Amelia and I took the last empty chairs. "What's with Ingram?" I said. "It didn't take?"

"He just shut down," Jefferson said. "When he realized he couldn't resist the process, he went into a kind of catatonia. He didn't come out of it when we unjacked him."

"Maybe he's bluffing," Amelia said, probably remembering the conference room at St. Bart's. "Waiting for an opportunity to strike."

"That's why he's handcuffed," Marty said. "He's a wild card now."

"He's just not there," Jefferson said. "I've jacked with more people than everybody in this room put together, and nothing like this has ever happened. You can't unjack yourself mentally, but that's what it felt like. Like he decided to pull the plug."

"Not exactly a selling point for humanization," I said to Marty. "It works on everyone but psychopaths?"

"That's the word they used to describe me," Ellie said, saintly and serene. "And it was accurate." She had murdered her husband and children, with gasoline. "But the process worked with me, and still works after all these years. Without it, I know I would have gone crazy; stayed crazy."

"The term 'psychopath' covers a lot of territory." Jefferson said. "Ingram is intensely moral, even though he's repeatedly done things that all of us would call immoral; outrageously so."

"When I was jacked with him," I said, "he reacted to my outrage with a kind of imperturbable condescension. I was a hopeless case who couldn't understand the rightness of the things he had done. That was the first day."

"We wore him down a little over the next couple of days," Jefferson said. "By not disapproving; by trying to understand."

"How can you 'understand' someone who can follow an order to rape a woman and then mutilate her in a specific way? He left her tied up and gagged, to bleed to death. He's not even human."

"But he is human," Jefferson said, "and however bizarre his behavior is, it's still human behavior. I think that's what shut him down-we refused to see him as some sort of avenging angel. Just a profoundly sick man we were trying to help. He could take your condemnation and laugh at it. He couldn't take Elbe's Christian charity and loving kindness. Or, for that matter, my own professional detachment."

"He should be dead by now," Dr. Orr said. "He hasn't taken any food or water since the third day. We've kept him on IVs."

"A waste of glucose," I said.

"You know better." Marty waved fingers in front of Ingram's face and he didn't blink. "We have to find out why this happened, and how common it's going to be."

"Not common," Mendez said. "I was with him before, during, and after his retreat into wherever he is now. From the first, it was like jacking with some kind of alien, or animal."

"I'll go along with that," I said.

"But nevertheless very analytical," Jefferson said. "Studying us intently from the very first."

"Studying what we knew about jacking," Ellie said. "He wasn't that interested in anybody as a person. But he had only jacked before in a limited, commercial way, and he was hungry to absorb our experience."

Jefferson nodded. "He had this vivid fantasy that he extrapolated from the jack joints. He wanted to be jacked with someone and kill him."

"Or her," Amelia said, "like me, or that poor woman he raped and cut up."

"The fantasy was always a male," Ellie said. "He doesn't see women as worthy opponents. And he doesn't have much of a sex drive-when he raped that woman, his penis was just another weapon."

"An extension of his self, like all of his weapons," Jefferson said. "He's more obsessive about weapons than any soldier I ever jacked with."

"He missed his calling. I know some guys he'd get along with fine."

"I don't doubt it," Marty said. "Which makes him that much more important to study. Some people in hunter-killer platoons have similar personality traits. We have to find a way to keep this from happening."

Good riddance, I didn't say. "So you won't be coming with me tomorrow? Stay here?"

"No, I'm still going to Portobello. Dr. Jefferson's going to work on Ingram. See whether he can walk him back with a combination of drugs and therapy."

"I don't know whether to wish you luck. I really prefer him this way." Maybe it was just my imagination, but I thought the bastard showed a glimmer of expression at that. Maybe we should send Marty down to Portobello alone, and leave me up here to taunt him out of catatonia.

JULIAN AND MARTY MISSED by only a few minutes sharing the Guadalajara airport with the woman who had come down to kill Amelia. They got on a military flight to Portobello while she took a taxi from the airport to the hotel across the street from the Clinic. Jefferson was staying there, no coincidence, and so were two of the Twenty-Ellie and the old soldier Cameron.

Jefferson and Cameron were dawdling over breakfast in the hotel cantina when she walked in to get a cup of coffee to take back to her room.

They both looked at her automatically, as men will when a beautiful woman makes an entrance, but Cameron kept staring.

Jefferson laughed and put on the accent of a popular comedian. "Jim ... you don't stop puttin' eye tracks on her, she's gonna come over and smack you one." The two men had become friends, having worked their way up from the same beginning, the lower-class black suburbs of Los Angeles.

He turned around with a careful expression and said quietly, "Zam, she might more'n smack me. Kill me just for practice."

"What?"

"Bet she's killed more people than I have. She has that sniper look: everyone's a potential target."

"She does hold herself like a soldier." He slid a glance over to her and back. "Or a certain kind of patient. Obsessive-compulsive."

"How 'bout let's not ask her over to join us?"

"Good idea."

But when they left the cantina a few minutes later, they ran into her again. She was trying to deal with the night clerk, a frightened teenaged girl whose English was not good. Gavrila's Spanish was worse.

Jefferson walked over to the rescue. " – Can I be of some assistance?" he asked in Spanish.

"You're American," Gavrila said. "Will you ask her if she's seen this woman?" It was a picture of Blaze Harding.

" – You know what she's asking," he said to the clerk.

"Si, claro." The woman opened both her hands. " – I have seen the woman; she has been in here for meals a few times. But she doesn't stay here."

"She says she's not sure," Jefferson translated. "Most Americans look pretty much the same to her."

"Have you seen her?" Gavrila asked.

Jefferson studied the photograph. "Can't say as I have. Jim?" Cameron stepped over. "You seen this woman?"

"I don't think so. A lot of Americans coming and going."

"You're here at the Clinic?"

"Consulting." Jefferson realized he'd hesitated a moment too long. "Is she a patient?"

"I don't know. I just know she's here."

"What do you want her for?" Cameron asked.

"Just a few questions. Government business."

"Well, we'll keep an eye out. You're ...?"

"Francine Gaines. Room 126. I'd surely appreciate any help you could give me."

"Sure." They watched her walk away. "Is this deep shit," Cameron whispered, "or just meters of excrement?"

"We have to get a picture of her," Jefferson said, "and send it on to Marty's general. If the army's after Blaze, he can probably get rid of her."

"But you don't think she's army."

"Do you?"

He hesitated. "I don't know. When she looked at you, and when she looked at me, she looked first at the middle of the chest and then between the eyes. Targeting. I wouldn't make any sudden movements around her."

"If she's army, she's a hunter-killer."

"We didn't have that term when I was in the service. But it takes one to know one, and I know she's killed a lot of people."

"A female Ingram."

"She might be even more dangerous than Ingram. Ingram rather looks like what he is. She looks like ..."

"Yeah." Jefferson looked at the elevator door that had just been graced by her presence. "She sure does." He shook his head. "Let's get a picture and get it over to the Clinic for when Mendez checks in." He was down in Mexico City, scrounging raw materials for the nano-forge. "He had some crazy woman break into St. Bart's."

"No resemblance," Cameron said. "She was ugly and had frizzy red hair." Actually, she'd had a wig and a pressure mask.

WE WALKED RIGHT INTO Building 31, no trouble. To their computer, Marty was a brigadier general who had spent most of his career in academic posts. I was sort of my old self.

Or not. The memory modification was seamless, but I think if I had jacked with anyone in my old platoon (which should have been done as a security measure; we were just lucky) they would have known immediately that there was something wrong. I was too healthy. They had all sensed my problem and, in a way you can't put into words, had always "been there"; had always helped me get from one day to the next. It would be as obvious as an old friend showing up without the limp he'd had all his life.

Lieutenant Newton Thurman, who was given the task of finding me a place to be useful, was an oddity: he had started out as a mechanic but developed a kind of allergy to being jacked-it gave him intense headaches that were no fun for him or for anybody jacked with him. I wondered at the time why they would put him in Building 31 rather than just retiring him, and it was clear that he wondered the same thing. He'd only been there a couple of weeks. In retrospect, it's obvious that he was planted as part of the overall plan. And what a mistake!

The staff in Building 31 was top-heavy in terms of rank: eight generals and twelve colonels, twenty majors and captains, and twenty-four lieutenants. That's sixty-four officers, giving orders to fifty NCOs and privates. Ten of those were just guards, too, and not really in the chain of command, unless something happened.

My memory of those four days, before I had my actual personality restored, is vague and confused. I was slotted into a time-consuming but unchallenging make-work position, essentially verifying the computer's decisions about resource allocation-how many eggs or bullets to go where. Surprise, I never found a mistake.

Among my other unchallenging duties was the one, as it turned out, that everything else was a smoke screen for: the "guard sitrep-log," or situation report log. Every hour I jacked in with the guard mechanics and asked for a "sitrep." I had a form with boxes to check, according to what they reported each hour. All I had ever done was check the box that said "sitrep negative": nothing's happening.

It was typical bureaucratic make-work. If anything of interest did happen, a red light would go on on my console, telling me to jack in with the guards. I could fill out a form then.

But I hadn't given any thought to the obvious: they needed someone inside the building who could check on the actual identities of the mechanics running the guard soldierboys.

I was sitting there on the fourth day, about one minute before sitrep time, and the red light suddenly started blinking. My heart gave a little stutter and I jacked in.

It wasn't the usual Sergeant Sykes. It was Karen, and four other people from my old platoon.

What the hell? She gave me a quick gestalt: Trust us; you had to undergo memory modification so we could Trojan-horse our way in here and then a broad outline of the plan and the incredible Jupiter Project development.

I acknowledged a numb kind of affirmative, unjacked, and checked the "sitrep negative" box.

No wonder I had been so damned confused. The phone buzzed and I thumbed it.

It was Marty, in hospital greens with a neutral expression. "I have you down for a little brain surgery at 1400. You want to come down and prep when your shift's over?"

"Best offer I've had all day."

IT WAS MORE THAN just a bloodless coup-it was a silent, invisible coup. The connection between a mechanic and his or her soldierboy is only an electronic signal, and there are emergency mechanisms in place to switch connections. It would only take a few minutes after something like the Portobello massacre, where every mechanic was disabled, to patch in a new platoon from a few hundred or a thousand miles away. (The actual limit was about thirty-five hundred miles, far enough for the speed of light to be a slight delaying factor.)

What Marty had done was set things up so that at the push of a button all five guard mechanics in the basement of Building 31 would be switched off from their soldierboys, and simultaneously, control of the machines would be switched over to five members of Julian's platoon, with Julian being the only person in Building 31 in a position to notice.

The most aggressive thing they did, immediately after taking over, was to pass on an "order" from Captain Perry, the guard commander, to the five shoe guards, that they had to report immediately to room 2H for an emergency inoculation. They went in and sat down and a pretty nurse gave them each a shot. Then she stood quietly behind them and they all fell asleep.

The rooms 1H through 6H were the hospital wing, and it was going to be busy.

At first, Marty and Megan Orr could be doing all the jack installations. The only bedridden patient in H wing, a lieutenant with bronchitis, was transferred to the base hospital when the order came down from the Pentagon to isolate Building 31. The doctor who normally came around every morning couldn't have access.

Two new doctors came in, though, the afternoon after the morning coup. They were Tanya Sidgwick and Charles Dyer, the jack team from Panama who had a ninety-eight percent success rate. They were mystified over their orders to come to Portobello, but sort of looked forward to the vacation-they'd been installing jacks in POWs at the rate of ten or twelve a day, too fast for comfort or safety.

The first thing they did after settling into their quarters was to go down to the H wing and see what was happening. Marty got them comfortable on a pair of beds and said they had to jack with a patient. Then he plugged them into the Twenty, and they instantly realized just what kind of a vacation they were in for.

But after a few minutes of deep communication with the Twenty, they were converts-in fact, they were a lot more sanguine about the plan than most of the original planners were. That simplified the timing, because it wasn't necessary to humanize Sidgwick and Dyer before putting them on the team.

They had sixty-four officers to deal with, and only twenty-eight of them were already jacked; only two of the eight generals. Twenty of the fifty NCOs and privates were jacked.

The first order of business was to get the ones who were already jacked into bed and plugged in with the Twenty. They lugged fifteen beds into the H wing from the Bachelor Officer Quarters. That gave forty spaces in H; for the other nine, they could install jack interfaces in their rooms.

But the first order of business for Marty and Megan Orr was to restore Julian's lost memories. Or try.

There was nothing complicated about it. Once Julian was under, the procedure was totally automated and only took forty-five minutes. It was also totally safe, in terms of the patient's physical and mental health. Julian knew that.

What he didn't know was that it only worked about three quarters of the time. About one in four patients lost something.

Julian lost a world.

I FELT REFRESHED AND elated when I woke up. I could remember the mind-numbed state I'd been in for the past four days, and could also remember all the detail that had been taken away from me-odd to feel happiness at being able to remember a suicide attempt and the imminent danger of the world coming to an end-but in my case it was a matter of providing actual reasons for the sense of unease that had pervaded my world.

I was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at a silly Norman Rockwell print of soldiers reporting for duty, remembering furiously, when Marty walked in looking grim.

"Something's wrong," I said.

He nodded. From a black box on the bed table he unreeled two jack cables and handed one to me, wordlessly.

We plugged in and I opened up, and there was nothing. I checked the jack connection and it was secure. "Are you getting anything?"

"No. I didn't in post-op either." He fed his cable back in, and then mine.

"What is it?"

"Sometimes people permanently lose the memories we removed – "

"But I've got it all back! I'm certain!"

" – and sometimes they lose the ability to jack."

I felt cold sweat prickling on my palms and forehead and under my arms. "It's temporary?"

"No. No more than it is with Blaze. It's what happened to General Roser."

"You knew." The sick feeling of loss was turning into rage. I stood up and towered over him.

"I told you you might lose ... something."

"But you meant memory. I was willing to give up memory!"

"That's an advantage to jacking one-way, Julian. Two-way, you can't lie by omission. If you had asked me, 'Could I lose the power to jack?' I would have told you. Fortunately, you didn't ask."

"You're an MD, Marty. How does the first part of that oath go?"

" 'Do no harm.' But I was a lot of things before I got that piece of paper. A lot of things afterward."

"Maybe you better get out of here before you start explaining."

He stood his ground. "You're a soldier in a war. Now you're a casualty. But the part of you that died-only a part-died to shield your unit, to get it safely into position."

Rather than hit him, I sat back down on the bed, out of range. "You sound like a goddamned warboy. A war-boy for peace."

"Maybe so. You must know how badly I feel about this. I knew I was betraying your trust."

"Yeah, well, I feel pretty bad about it, too. Why don't you just leave?"

"I'd rather stay and talk to you."

"I think I have it figured out Go on. You have dozens of people to operate on. Before the world has the slightest chance of being saved."

"You do still believe that."

"I haven't had time to think about it, but yes, if the stuff you put back in my mind about the Jupiter Project is true, and if the Hammer of God is real, then something has to be done. You're doing something."

"You're all right about it?"

"That's like being 'all right' about losing an arm. I'm fine. I'll learn to shave with the other hand."

"I don't want to leave you like this."

"Like what? Just get out of my sight. I can think about it without your help."

He looked at his watch. "They are waiting for me. I have Colonel Owens on the table."

I waved him away. "So go do it. I'll be all right."

He looked at me for a moment and then got up and left without a word.

I fished around in my breast pocket. The pill was still there.

BACK IN GUADALAJARA THAT morning, Jefferson had warned Blaze to stay out of sight. That was no problem; she was holed up with Ellie Morgan several blocks away, working on the various versions of the paper that would warn the world about the Jupiter Project.

Then Jefferson and Cameron sat for a few hours in the cantina, a small camera on the table between them, watching the elevator doors.

They almost missed her. When she came back down, her silky blond hair was tucked under a wig of black ringlets. She was dressed conservatively and had toned her visible skin to a typical Mexican olive hue. But she hadn't disguised her perfect figure or the way she walked.

Jefferson froze in mid-conversation and surreptitiously slid the camera around with his forefinger.

They had both idly watched her exit the elevator. "What?" Cameron whispered.

"That's her. Made up like a Mexican."

Cameron craned around in time to see her glide through the revolving door. "Good God, you're right."

Jefferson took the camera upstairs and called Ray, who, along with Mendez, was coordinating things in Marty's absence.

Ray was at the Clinic. He downloaded the pictures of her and studied them. "No problem. We'll keep an eye out for her."

Less than a minute later, she walked into the Clinic. The metal detectors didn't catch either of her weapons.

But she didn't pull out a picture of Amelia and ask whether anyone had seen her; Gavrila knew that Amelia had been in this building, and assumed it was enemy territory.

She told the receptionist she wanted to talk about a jack installation, but she refused to talk to anyone but the top man.

"Dr. Spencer's in surgery," she said. "It will be at least two hours, maybe three. There are plenty of other people – "

"I'll wait." Gavrila sat down on a couch with a clear view of the entrance.

In another room, Dr. Spencer joined Ray looking at a monitor watching the woman watching the entrance.

"They say she's dangerous," Ray said; "some sort of spy or assassin. She's looking for Blaze."

"I don't want any trouble with your government." "Did I say she was government? If she was official, wouldn't she produce credentials?" "Not if she was an assassin."

"The government doesn't have assassins!"

"Oh, really. Do you also believe in your Santa Claus?"

"I mean, no, not for us. There's a crackpot religious group that's after Marty and his people. She's either one of them or she was hired by them." He explained about her suspicious activity at the hotel.

Spencer stared at her image. "I believe you are correct. I have studied thousands of faces. Hers is Scandinavian, not Mexican. She probably has dyed her blond hair-or no, she's wearing a wig. But what do you expect me to do about her?"

"I don't suppose you could just lock her up and throw away the key."

"Please. This is not the United States."

"Well... I want to talk to her. But she may be really dangerous."

"She has no knife or gun. That would have registered as she walked through the door."

"Hm. Don't suppose I could borrow a guy with a gun to watch over her while we talked?"

"As I said – "

"'This is not the United States.' What about that old hombre downstairs with the machine gun?"

"He does not work for me. He works for the garage. How dangerous could this woman be, if she has no weapon?"

"More dangerous than me. My education was sadly neglected in the mayhem category. Do you at least have a room where I could talk to her and have somebody watching, in case she decides to tear off my head and beat me to death with it?"

"That's not difficult. Take her to room 1." He aimed a remote and clicked. The screen showed an interview room. "It's a special room for seguridad. Take her in there and I will watch. For ten or fifteen minutes; then I will ask someone else to watch.

"These ultimodiadores – you call them Enders – is that what this is all about?"

"There's a relation."

"But they are harmless. Silly people, and what, blaspheming? But harmless, except to their own souls."

"Not these, Dr. Spencer. If we could jack, you'd understand how scared I am of her." For Spencer's protection, no one who knew the whole plan could jack with him two-way. He accepted the condition as typical American paranoia.

"I have a male nurse who is very fat... no, very large-and who knows, who grasps, a black belt in karate. He will be watching along with me."

"No. By the time he got down the stairs, she could kill me."

Spencer nodded and thought. "I'll put him in the room next door, with a beeper." He held up the remote and pushed a button. "Like now. This will call him."

Ray excused himself and went to the bathroom, where he was unable to do anything but catalogue his weapons: a key ring and a Swiss Army knife. Back in the observation room he met Lalo, who had arms the size of Ray's thighs. He spoke no English and moved with the nervous delicacy of a man who knows how easily things break. They walked downstairs together. Lalo slipped into room 2, and Ray went into the lobby.

"Madame?" She looked up at him, targeting. "I'm Dr. Spencer. And you?"

"Jane Smith. Can we go someplace and talk?"

He led her to room 1, which was larger than it had seemed in the camera. He motioned her to the couch and pulled over a chair. He straddled it, the chair back a protective shield between them.

"How may I help you?"

"You have a patient named Blaze Harding. Professor Blaze Harding. It is absolutely imperative that I speak to her."

"In the first place, we don't give out the names of our clients. In the second place, our clients don't always give us their real names. Ms. Smith."

"Who are you, really?"

"What?"

"My sources said Dr. Spencer was Mexican. I never met a Mexican with a Boston accent."

"I assure you that I am – "

"No." She reached into her waistband and pulled out a pistol apparently made of glass. "I don't have time for this." Her face became grim, set; totally mad. "You are going to quietly take me from room to room until we find Professor Harding."

Ray paused. "And if she's not here?"

"Then we'll go to a quiet place where I will cut your fingers off, one by one, until you tell me where she is."

Lalo eased the door open and swung in with a large black pistol coming up to aim. She gave him an annoyed look and shot him once in the eye. The glass pistol was almost completely silent.

He dropped the gun and fell to one knee, both hands over his face. He began a girlish keening but her second shot sheared off the top of his head. He toppled forward silently in a flood of blood and brain and cerebrospinal fluid.

Her tone of voice was unchanged: earnest and flat. "You see, the only way you're going to live to see the night is to cooperate with me."

Ray was struck dumb, staring at the corpse.

"Get up. Let's go."

"I... I don't think she's here."

"Then where – " She was interrupted by the rattling sound of metal shutters rolling down over the door and window.

Ray heard a faint hissing sound, and remembered Marty's story about the interrogation room at St. Bart's. Maybe they had the same architect.

She evidently didn't hear it-too many hours on the firing range-but she looked around and did see the television camera, like a stub of pencil pointed at them from an upper corner of the room. She jerked him around to face the camera and put the pistol to his head. "You have three seconds to open that door, or I kill him. Two."

"Senora Smith!" A voice came from everywhere. "To open that door, it requires a, el gato ... a jack. It will take two minutes, or three."

"You have two minutes." She looked at her watch. "Starting now."

Ray slumped and suddenly collapsed, rolling out on his back. His head hit the floor with a solid whack.

She made a disgusted noise. "Coward." Then a few seconds later, she herself staggered, and then sat down hard on the floor. Wavering, she held the pistol with both hands and shot Ray in the chest four times.

MY PLACE IN THE BOQ had two rooms-a bedroom and an "office," a gray cubicle with just enough room for a cooler, two hard chairs, and a small table in front of a simple comm console.

On the table, a glass of wine and my last meal: a gray pill. I had a yellow legal tablet and a pen, but couldn't think of anything to say that wasn't obvious.

The phone rang. I let it go three times, and said hello.

It was Jefferson-my psychiatric nemesis, come to save me in the eleventh hour. The instant he hangs up, I resolved, I'm taking the pill.

But like the room and the pill, Jefferson was gray, more gray than black. I hadn't seen anybody that color since my mother had called to tell me Aunt Franci had died. "What's wrong?" I said.

"Ray's dead. He was killed by an assassin they sent after Blaze."

"'They'? The Hammer of God?" The wavering silver bar at the top of the screen meant the encryptation was working; we could say anything.

"We assume she's one of them. Spencer's drilling her out now for a jack."

"How do you know she was after Amelia?"

"She had her picture; was nosing around the hotel here-Julian, she killed Ray just for the hell of it, after she'd killed another man. She walked right through the security screen at the clinic, with a gun and a knife of some plastic. We're scared shitless that she's not here alone."

"God. They tracked us to Mexico?"

"Can you get up here? Blaze needs your protection – we all need you!"

I actually felt my jaw drop. "You need me to come up and be a soldier?" All those professional snipers and convicted murderers.

SPENCER UNPLUGGED HIS JACK and walked to the window. He raised the blinds and squinted at the rising sun, yawning. He turned to the woman who was bound to a wheelchair with locked restraints.

"Senora," he said, "you are crazy nuts."

Jefferson had unjacked a minute before. "That would be my professional opinion, too."

"What you've done is completely illegal and immoral," she said. "Violating a person's soul."

"Gavrila," Jefferson said, "if you have a soul, I couldn't find it in there."

She jerked at her bonds and the wheelchair rocked toward him.

"She does have a point, though," he said to Spencer.

"We can't very well turn her over to the police."

"I will, as you Americans say, keep her under observation indefinitely. Once she's well, she's free to go." He scratched the stubble on his chin. "At least until the middle of September. You believe that, too?"

"I can't do the math. But Julian and Blaze can, and they don't have any doubts."

"It's the Hammer of God coming down," Gavrila said. "Nothing you can do will stop it."

"Oh, shut up. Can we put her someplace?"

"I have what you would call a 'rubber room.' No lunatic has ever escaped from it." He went to the intercom and arranged for a man named Luis to take her there.

He sat down and looked at her. "Poor Lalo; poor Ray. They didn't suspect what a monster you were."

"Of course not. Men just see me as a receptacle for their lust. Why should they fear a cunt?"

"You're going to find out a lot about that," Jefferson said.

"Go ahead and threaten me. I'm not afraid of rape."

"This is more intimate than rape. We're going to introduce you to some friends. If you do have a soul, they'll find it."

She didn't say anything. She knew what he meant; she knew about the Twenty from being jacked with him. For the first time, she looked a little frightened.

There was a knock on the door, but it wasn't Luis. "Julian," Jefferson said, and gestured. "Here she is."

Julian studied her. "She's the same woman we saw in the monitor at St. Bart's? Hard to believe." She was staring at him with an odd expression. "What?"

"She recognizes you," Jefferson said. "When Ingram tried to kidnap Blaze off the train, you followed them. She thought you were with Ingram."

Julian walked over to her. "Take a good look. I want you to dream about me."

"I'm so frightened," she said.

"You came here to kill my lover, and instead killed an old friend. And another man. They say you didn't blink." He reached slowly toward her. She tried to dodge, but he grabbed her throat.

"Julian..."

"Oh, don't worry." The wheels on the chair were locked. He pushed slowly on her throat and she tipped back. He held her at the balance point. "You're going to find everyone here so nice. They just want to help you." He let go, and the wheelchair fell over with a jarring crash. She grunted.

"I'm not one of them, though." He got down on his hands and knees, his face directly over hers. "I'm not nice, and I don't want to help you."

"That's not going to work with her, Julian."

"It's not for her. It's for me." She tried to spit at him, but missed. He stood up and casually flipped the wheelchair into an upright position.

"This isn't like you."

"I'm not like me. Marty didn't say anything about my losing the ability to jack!"

"You didn't know that could happen with the memory manipulation?"

"No. Because I didn't ask."

Jefferson nodded. "That's why you and I haven't been scheduled together lately. You might have asked me about it."

Luis came into the room and they didn't say anything while Spencer instructed him and he rolled Gavrila out.

"I think it's more sinister than that, more manipulative," Julian said. "I think Marty needed somebody who'd been a mechanic, knows soldiering, but is immune to being humanized." He gestured with a thumb at Spencer. "He knows everything now?"

"The essentials."

"I think Marty wants me this way in case there's a need for violence. Just like you-when you called me to come protect Blaze, you implied the same."

"Well, it's just that – "

"And you're right, too! I'm so fucking mad that I could kill someone. Isn't that crazy?"

"Julian..."

"Oh, you don't use the word 'crazy.'" He lowered his voice. "But it's odd, isn't it? I've sort of come full circle."

"That could be temporary, too. You have every right to be angry."

Julian sat down and clasped his hands together, as if to restrain them. "What did you learn from her? Are there other assassins in town, headed here?"

"The only other one she actually knew was Ingram. We do know the name of the man above her, though, and he must be close to the top. It's a General Blaisdell. He's also the one who ordered the suppression of your paper and had Blaze's partner killed."

"He's in Washington?"

"The Pentagon. He's the undersecretary of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency-DARPA."

Julian almost laughed. "DARPA kills research all the time. I've never heard of them killing a researcher before."

"He knows she came to Guadalajara, and that she was coming to a jack clinic, but that's all."

"How many clinics are there?"

"One hundred thirty-eight," Spencer said. "And when Professor Harding had her work done here, the only connections to her real name are my own office records and the... what did you call the thing you signed?"

"Power of attorney."

"Yes, that's buried in a law office's files, and even so, there shouldn't be anything connecting it with this clinic."

"I wouldn't get too complacent," Julian said. "If Blaisdell wants to, he can find us the same way she did. We left some kind of a trail. The Mexican police could probably place us in Guadalajara-maybe even right here-and they could be bribed pretty easily. Begging your pardon, Dr. Spencer."

He shrugged. "Es verdad."

"So we suspect anyone who comes through that door. But what about Amelia, Blaze-is she nearby?"

"Maybe a quarter of a mile," Jefferson said. "I'll take you there."

"No. They might be following either of us. Let's not double their odds. Just write down the name of the place. I'll take two cabs."

"Do you want to surprise her?"

"What does that mean? She's staying with someone?"

"No, no. Yeah, but it's Ellie Morgan. Nothing to get all bothered about."

"Who's bothered? It was just a question."

"All I meant was, should I call and say you're coming?"

"Sorry. I'm in a state. Go ahead and give her a... wait, no. The phone might be tapped."

"Not possible," Spencer said.

"Humor me?" He looked at the address Jefferson had written down. "Good. I'll take a cab to the mercado. Lose myself in the crowd and then dive into the subway."

"Your caution verges on paranoia," Spencer said.

"Verges? I'm well over the edge, actually. Wouldn't you be paranoid if one of your best friends just ripped out half your life-and some Pentagon general is sending assassins down after your lover?"

"It's like they say," Jefferson said. "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't someone after you."

HAVING SAID I WAS going to the market, instead I took a cab out to T-town and then the subway back into the city. No such thing as being too careful.

I slipped from a side street into the courtyard of Amelia's motel. Ellie Morgan answered the door.

"She's asleep," she said in a half-whisper, "but I know she'd want to be woken up." They had adjoining rooms. I went through and she eased the door closed behind me.

Amelia was warm and soft from sleep and smelled of lavender from the bath salts she liked.

"Marty told me what happened," she said. "It must be horrible, like losing one of your senses."

I couldn't answer that. I just held her close for a moment longer.

"You know about the woman and ... and Ray," she stammered.

"I've been there. I spoke to her."

"The doctor was going to jack her."

"They did that, a high-risk speed installation. She's Hammer of God, same cell as Ingram." I told her about the general in the Pentagon. "I don't think you're safe here. Nowhere in Guadalajara. She traced us from St. Bart's right to the clinic door, through low-orbit spy satellites."

"Our country uses satellites to spy on its own people?"

"Well, the satellites go all around the world. They just don't bother to turn them off over the U.S." There was a coffee machine set into the wall. I kept talking while I set it up. "I don't think this Blaisdell knows exactly where we are. Otherwise we probably would have had a SWAT team instead of a lone assassin, or at least a team backing her up."

"Did the satellites actually see us as individuals, or just the bus?"

"The bus and the truck."

"So I could walk out of here and go to the train station, and just slip away to some random part of Mexico."

"I don't know. She had a picture of you, so we have to assume that Blaisdell can give a copy to the next hit man. They might be able to bribe someone, and you'd have every policeman in Mexico looking for you."

"Nice to feel wanted."

"Maybe you should come back to Portobello with me. Hole up in Building 31 until it's safe. Marty can have orders cut for you, probably with a couple of hours' notice."

"That's good." She stretched and yawned. "I just have a few hours to go on this proof. I'd like to have you go over it; then we can send it out through an airport phone just before we leave."

"Good. It'll be a relief to do some physics for a change."

Amelia had written a good concise argument. I added a long footnote about the appropriateness of pseudo-operator theory in this regime.

I also read Elbe's version for the popular press. To me it seemed unconvincing-no math-but I supposed it would be best to bow to her expertise and keep my mouth shut. Ellie had intuited my unease, though, and had remarked that not using mathematics was like writing about religion without mentioning God, but editors believed that ninety percent of their readers would quit at the first equation.

I had called Marty. He was in surgery, but an assistant called back and said that orders would be waiting for Amelia at the gate. He also passed along the unsurprising news that Lieutenant Thurman was not going to be among the humanized. We'd hoped that the peaceful mental environment, being jacked with people from my converted platoon, would eliminate the stress that was causing his migraines. But no, they just came on later and stronger. So like me, he'd have to sit this one out. Unlike me, he was virtually under house arrest, since the few minutes he did spend jacked were enough for him to learn far too much.

I looked forward to talking to him, since we were no longer bureaucrat-and-flunky. We suddenly had a lot in common, involuntary ex-mechanics.

I also suddenly had a lot more in common with Amelia. If there was any advantage in my losing the ability to be jacked, that was it: it erased the main barrier between us. Cripples together, from my point of view, but together nonetheless.

It felt so good working with her, just being in the same room with her, it was hard for me to believe that the day before, I'd been ready to take the pill.

Well, I wasn't "me" anymore. I supposed I could put off finding out who I was until after September 14. By then, it might be immaterial-I might be immaterial! A plasma, anyhow.

While Amelia was packing her small bag, I called the airport for the flight number, and verified that they had pay phones with long-distance data links. But then I realized that if Amelia had orders waiting down in Portobello, we could probably deadhead down in a military flight. I called D'Orso Field and, sure enough, Amelia was "Captain Blaze Harding." There was a flight leaving in ninety minutes, a cargo flyboy with plenty of room if we didn't mind sitting on benches.

"I don't know," Amelia said. "Since I outrank you, I should get to sit on your lap."

The cab made good time. Amelia uploaded twelve copies of the proof, along with personal messages, to trusted friends, and then posted copies on the public domain physics and math nets. She put Ellie's version on both popular science and general news, and then we ran for the flyboy.

RUSHING OFF TO THE air base, rather than waiting in the motel for the next commercial flight, probably saved their lives.

A half hour after they left, Ellie answered a knock on the door to Amelia's adjoining room. Through the peephole, she saw a Mexican maid, apron and broom, pretty with long black hair in ringlets.

She opened the door. "I don't speak Spanish – " The end of the broom handle plunged into her solar plexus and she staggered backwards, crashing to the floor in a ball.

"Neither do I, Satan." The woman lifted her easily and threw her into a chair. "Don't make a sound or I'll kill you." She pulled a roll of duct tape out of the apron pocket and wound it around the woman's wrists, and then wound a tight loop twice around her chest and the chair back. She tore off a small piece and smoothed it over Ellie's mouth.

She shrugged off the apron. Ellie gasped through her nose when she saw the hospital blues underneath, streaked with blood.

"Clothes." She ripped off the blood-stained pyjamas. She pivoted, tense muscular voluptuousness, and saw El-lie's suitcase through the open double door. "Ah."

She walked through the door and came back with jeans and a cotton shirt. "They're a little baggy, but they'll do." She folded them neatly on the end of the bed and peeled away enough of the tape so that Ellie could speak.

"You're not getting dressed," Ellie said, "because you don't want to get blood on your clothes. My blood on my clothes."

"Maybe I want to excite you. I think you're a lesbian, living here alone with Blaze Harding."

"Sure."

"Where is she?"

"I don't know."

"Of course you do. Do I have to hurt you?"

"I'm not telling you anything." Her voice shook and she swallowed. "You're going to kill me no matter what."

"Why do you think that?"

"Because I can identify you."

She smiled indulgently. "I just killed two guards and escaped from the high-security area of your clinic. A thousand police know what I look like. I can let you live." She bent to the floor in a gymnast's sweep and took a glittering scalpel from the apron pocket.

"You know what this is?"

Ellie nodded and swallowed.

"Now, I solemnly swear that I will not kill you if you answer my questions truthfully."

"Do you swear to God?"

"No, that's blasphemy." She hefted the scalpel and stared at it. "In fact, though, I won't even kill you if you tell me lies. I'll just hurt you so badly that you'll beg for death. But, instead, just before I leave, I'll cut out your tongue so you can't tell them anything about me. And then cut off your hands so you can't write. I'll tourniquet them with this tape, of course. I want you to have a long life of regret."

Urine dripped on the floor and Ellie started sobbing. Gavrila smoothed the tape back over her mouth.

"Did your mother ever say 'I'll give you something to cry about'?" She stabbed down hard and pinned El-lie's left hand to the chair.

Ellie stopped sobbing and stared dully at the handle of the scalpel and the rivulet of blood.

Gavrila rocked the blade slightly and eased it out. The flow of blood increased, but she gently folded a Kleenex over it and taped it in place. "Now if I let you talk, will you just answer questions? Not cry out?" She nodded her head listlessly and Gavrila peeled back half the tape.

"They went to the airport."

"They? Her and her black friend?"

"Yes. They're going back to Texas. To Houston."

"Oh. That's a lie." She positioned the scalpel over the back of Ellie's other hand, and raised her fist like a hammer.

"Panama!" she said in a hoarse shout. "Portobello. Don't... please don't – "

"Flight number?"

"I don't know. I heard him writing it down" – she pointed with her head – "over by the phone there."

She walked over and picked up a piece of paper. " 'Aeromexico 249.' I guess they were in such a hurry they left it."

"They were in a hurry."

Gavrila nodded. "I suppose I should be, too." She came back and looked at her victim thoughtfully. "I won't do all those terrible things to you, even though you lied." She smoothed the tape over Ellie's mouth and took another small piece and pinched her nose shut with it. Ellie began kicking wildly and jerking her head back and forth, but Gavrila managed to make a couple of tight turns of tape around her head, fixing the two small pieces in place and cutting off any possibility of air. In her struggles, Ellie tipped the chair over. Gavrila bought her back upright with an effortless lift, as Julian had done with her a couple of hours earlier. Then she dressed slowly, watching the pagan's eyes as she died.

THERE WAS A MESSAGE waiting for us in my BOQ office, flashing on the console screen, that Gavrila had overcome her guard and escaped.

Well, there was no way she could get to us inside the base, locked inside a building isolated by Pentagon decree. Amelia was worried that the woman might find out where she had been living, so she called Ellie. There was no answer. She left a message, warning about Gavrila and advising her to move to some random place across town.

Marty's schedule said he was in surgery and wouldn't be free until 1900-five hours. There was some cheese and beer in the cooler. We had a slow snack and then collapsed into bed. It was narrow for two people, but we were so exhausted that anything horizontal would do. She fell asleep with her head on my shoulder, for the first time in a long time.

I woke up groggily to the console pinging. It didn't wake Amelia, but I did, in my clumsy efforts to extricate myself. My left arm was asleep, a cold tingling log, and I had romantically left a spot of drool on her cheek.

She rubbed at that and opened her eyes to slits. "Phone?"

"Go back to sleep. I'll tell you if it's anything." I walked into the office, beating my left arm against my side. I snagged a ginger ale from the cooler – the favorite drink of whoever had lived there previously, and sat down to the console:

Marty will meet you and Blaze at 1915 in the mess hall. Bring this.

The size of the roster was familiar, a listing of the entire complement of Building 31, minus me. I'd probably seen it a hundred times a day in my old job.

The order of the listing was odd, since it had nothing to do with people's functions (I'd normally seen it as a duty roster), but it only took a minute to figure it out. The first five names were the mechanic guards whose soldierboys my platoon had taken over. Then a list of all the jacked officers, who had been jacked together since 26 July, presumably not all in one big group.

Likewise, the end of the roster was all of the jacked noncoms and privates, besides the guards. They also had been jacked together since day before yesterday. They would all theoretically come out of it on the 9th of August, cured of war.

In between those two groups, a list of the sixty-some who had spent all their lives up to now under the handicap of normality. The four doctors had been drilling since yesterday. It looked like team 1 was doing about five a day, and team 2-presumably the hotshots from the Canal Zone-were doing eight.

I heard Amelia moving in the bedroom, changing out of the clothes she'd slept in. She came out combing her hair and wearing a dress, a red-and-black Mexican thing I'd never seen.

"I didn't know you brought a dress."

"Dr. Spencer gave it to me; said he bought it for his wife, but it didn't fit her."

"Likely story."

She looked over my shoulder. "Lot of people."

"They're doing about a dozen a day, with two teams. I wonder whether they're sleeping at all."

"Well, they're eating." She checked her watch. "How far away is that mess hall?"

"Couple minutes."

"Why don't you change your shirt and shave?"

"For Marty?"

"For me." She plucked at my shoulder. "Shoo. I want to call Ellie again."

I scraped a quick shave and found a shirt that had one day's wear.

"Still no answer," Amelia said from the other room. "There's no one at the motel desk, either."

"You want to check with the Clinic? Or Jefferson's motel room?"

She shook her head and pushed the PR button. "After dinner. She's probably out." A copy of the roster drifted out of the slot; Amelia caught it, folded it, and put it in her purse. "Let's go find Marty."

THE MESS HALL WAS small but, to Amelia's surprise, not totally automated. There were machines for some standard simple food, but also an actual food station with an actual cook, who Julian recognized.

"Lieutenant Thurman?"

"Julian. Still can't tolerate jacking, so I volunteered to step in for Sergeant Duffy. Don't get your hopes up, though; I can only cook four or five things." He looked at Amelia. "You would be ... Amelia?"

"Blaze," Julian said, and introduced them. "Were you jacked with them for any length of time?"

"If you mean 'Are you in on it,' yes, I got the general idea. You did the math?" he asked Amelia.

"No, I did the particles; just tagged along behind Julian and Peter on the math."

He started tossing two salads.

"Peter, the cosmology guy," he said. "I saw about him on the news yesterday."

"Yesterday?" Julian said.

"You didn't hear? They found him wandering around dazed on some island." Thurman told them all he remembered about the news item.

"But he doesn't recall anything about the paper?" Amelia said.

"I guess not. Not if he thinks it's the year 2000. You think he can get it back?"

"Only if the people who took out the memory saved it," Julian said, "and that doesn't sound likely. Sounds like a pretty crude job."

"At least he's still alive," Amelia said.

"Not much good to us," Julian said, and caught a look from Amelia. "Sorry. True, though."

Thurman gave them their salads and started a couple of hamburgers. Marty came in and asked for the same.

They went to the end of a long empty table. Marty slumped into the chair and unpeeled a speedie from behind his ear. "Better sleep a few hours."

"How long you been on your feet?"

He looked at his watch without focusing on it. "I don't want to know. We're just about through with the colonels. Two Team's just up from a nap; they'll do Tomy and the topkick, what's his name?"

"Gilpatrick," Julian said. "He could use a little humanizing."

Thurman brought over Marty's salad. "That was a mess up in Guadalajara," he said. "The news came in from Jefferson just before I left the Twenty." Most of the communication between Guadalajara and Portobello was via jack circuit rather than conventional phone – you got through more information in less time, and everyone who was jacked would know sooner or later, anyhow.

"It was sloppy," Julian said. "They should have been more careful with that woman."

"That's for sure." Thurman went back to his hamburgers. Neither of them knew they were talking about two different incidents; they'd tried Thurman on the jack twice; he'd been in contact when the news came in about the killing rampage that ended in Elbe's murder.

"What woman?" Marty said between bites.

Julian and Amelia looked at each other. "You don't know about Gavrila. About Ray."

"Nothing. Is Ray in trouble?"

Julian took a breath and let it out. "He's dead, Marty."

Marty dropped his fork. "Ray?"

"Gavrila's a Hammer of God assassin who was sent down to kill Blaze. She smuggled a gun into an interrogation room and shot him."

"Ray?" he repeated. They'd been friends since graduate school. He was still and pale. "What will I tell his wife?" He shook his head. "I was best man."

"I don't know," Julian said. "You can't just say 'He gave his life for peace,' though it's true, in a way."

"It's also true that I dragged him away from his safe, comfortable office and put him in the way of a lunatic murderer."

Amelia took his hand in both of hers. "Don't worry about it now. Nothing you can do will change anything."

He stared at her blankly. "She's not expecting him back until the fourteenth. So maybe the universe will make it all irrelevant by exploding."

"More likely," Julian said, "he'll wind up just one in a long list of casualties. You might as well wait and announce them all after the shitstorm. After the bloodless revolution."

Thurman came over quietly and served them their hamburgers. He'd overheard enough to realize that they didn't yet know about Elbe's murder, and perhaps the fact that Gavrila was loose.

He decided not to tell them. They would know soon enough. There might be something in the delay that he could turn to his advantage.

Because he wasn't going to just stand around and let these lunatics wreck the military. He had to stop them, and he knew exactly where to go.

Through the migraine haze that kept him from communing with these misdirected idealists, some real information did bleed through. Like the identity of General Blaisdell, and his powerful position.

Blaisdell had the power to neutralize Building 31 with a phone call. Thurman had to get to him, and soon. "Gavrila" might do as a code word.

WHEN WE GOT BACK to our billet, there was a message on the console for Amelia, not me, to call Jefferson immediately on the secure line. He was in his own motel room in Guadalajara, eating dinner. He was wearing a handgun in a shoulder holster, a dart-thrower.

He stared out of the screen. "Sit down, Blaze." She eased herself slowly into the chair in front of the console. "I don't know how secure Building 31 is supposed to be. I don't think it's secure enough.

"Gavrila escaped. She's left a trail of bodies leading to you. She killed two people at the Clinic, and one of them she apparently had tortured into giving up your address."

"No ... oh, no!"

Jefferson nodded. "She got there right after you left. We don't know what Ellie might have told her before she died."

That may have hit me harder than it did her. Amelia had lived with Ellie, but I had lived inside her.

She turned pale and spoke almost without moving her lips. "Tortured her."

"Yes. And went straight to the airport and took the next flight to Portobello. She's somewhere in the city now. You have to assume she knows exactly where you are."

"She couldn't get in here," I said.

"Tell me about it, Julian. She couldn't get out of here, either."

"Yeah, all right. Are you set up to jack?"

He gave me a cautious doctor look. "With you?"

"Of course not. With my platoon. They're standing guard here, and could use a description of the bitch."

"Of course. Sorry."

"You tell them everything you know, and then we'll go to Candi for a debriefing."

"All right.. just remember Gavrila's been jacked with me two-way – "

"What? That was smart."

"We thought she'd be in a straitjacket for the duration. It was the only way to get anything from her, and we got a lot. But you have to assume she'll retain a lot of what she got from Spencer and me."

"She didn't retain my address," Amelia said.

Jefferson shook his head. "I didn't know it, and neither did Spencer, in case. But she knows the broad outline of the Plan."

"Damn. She'll have passed it on."

"Not yet. She has a superior in Washington, but she won't have talked to him yet. She idolizes him, and combining that with her rigid fanaticism... I don't think she'll call until she can say 'Mission accomplished.' "

"So we don't just stay away from her. We catch her and make sure she doesn't talk."

"Nail her into a room."

"Or a box," I said.

He nodded and broke the circuit.

"Kill her?" Amelia said.

"Won't be necessary. Just turn her over to the medicos and she'll sleep past D day." Probably true, I thought, but pretty soon Amelia and I were going to be the only people in this building physically able to kill.

WHAT CANDI TOLD THEM told them was frightening. Not only was Gavrila vicious and well trained and motivated by love and fear of God and His avatar, General Blaisdell – but it would be easier for her to get into Building 31 than Julian would have supposed. Its main defenses were against military attack and mob assault. It didn't even have a burglar alarm.

Of course she first would have to get onto the base. They sent descriptions of her in the two modes they knew of, and copies of her fingerprints and retina scans, to the gate, with strict detention orders – "armed and dangerous."

There were no security cameras in the Guadalajara airport, but there were plenty at Portobello. No one who looked like her had gotten off any of the six flights arriving from Mexico that afternoon and evening, but that could just mean a third disguise. There were a few women her size and shape. Their descriptions also went to the gate.

In fact, as Jefferson might have predicted, in her paranoia Gavrila bought a ticket to Portobello, but didn't use it. Instead, she flew to the Canal Zone disguised as a man. She went down to the waterfront and found a drunken soldier who resembled her, and killed him for his papers and uniform. She left most of the body in a hotel room, first cutting off the hands and head, wrapping them well, and mailing them at the cheapest rate to a fictitious address in Bolivia. She took the monorail to Portobello and was inside the base an hour before they started looking for her.

She didn't have her plastic gun and knife, of course; she'd even left behind the scalpel she'd used on Ellie. There were thousands of weapons inside the base, but all were locked up and accounted for, except for a few guards and MPs with pistols. Killing an MP sounded like a bad way to get a weapon. She went down to the armory and loitered for a while, inspecting it while appearing to read the notices on the bulletin board, then waiting in line for a few minutes and rushing off as if she'd forgotten something.

She went outside the building and then re-entered through a back door. From the floor plan she'd memorized, she went straight to routine maintenance. There was a duty roster posted; she went to an adjacent room and called the specialist on maintenance duty, and told him a Major Feldman wanted to see him at the desk. He left the room unlocked, and Gavrila slipped in.

She had perhaps ninety seconds. Find something lethal that looked like it worked and wouldn't be missed immediately.

There was a jumbled pile of M-31s, mud-spattered but otherwise in good shape. Probably used in an exercise – by officers, who wouldn't be expected to clean them afterward. She picked one and wrapped it in a green towel, along with a cassette of exploding darts and a bayonet. Poison darts would have been better, quieter, but there weren't any in the open stock.

She slipped outside undetected. This didn't appear to be the kind of base where a soldier could casually carry a light assault weapon around, so she kept the M-31 wrapped up. She put the sheathed bayonet inside her belt, under her shirt.

The binding that compressed her breasts was uncomfortable, but she left it on in case it would buy her an extra second or two of surprise. The uniform was loose, and she looked like a slightly chubby man, short with a barrel chest. She walked carefully.

Building 31 looked no different from the ones that surrounded it, except for a low electrified fence and a sentry box. She walked by the box in the dusk, fighting the temptation to rush the shoe guard and shoot her way in. She could do some real damage with the forty rounds in the cassette, but she knew from Jefferson that there would be soldierboy guards on duty. The black man Julian's platoon. Julian Class.

Dr. Jefferson hadn't known anything about the building's floor plan, though, which was what she needed now. If she knew where Harding was, she could create a diversion for the soldierboys as far as possible from her quarry, and then go after her. But the building was too large to just go in cold and hope to find her while the soldierboys were occupied for a few minutes.

They would be expecting her, too, of course. She didn't look at Building 31 as she walked by. They certainly knew about the torture-murders. Was there any way she could use that knowledge against them? Make them careless through fear?

Whatever action she took, it would have to be within the building. Otherwise, outside forces would deal with it, while Harding was protected by the soldierboys.

She stopped dead and then forced herself to move on. That was it! Create a diversion outside, but be inside when they find out about it. Follow the soldierboys to her prey.

Then she would need God's help. The soldierboys would be swift, though probably pacified, if the humanizing scheme had worked. She had to kill Harding before they restrained her.

But she was all confidence. The Lord had gotten her this far; He would not fail her now. Even the woman's name, Blaze, was demonic, as well as her mission. Everything was right.

She turned the corner and said a quiet prayer. A child was playing alone on the sidewalk. A gift from the Lord.

WE WERE LYING IN bed talking when the console chimed its phone signal. It was Marty.

He was weary but smiling. "They called me out of surgery," he said. "Good news, for a change, from Washington. They did a segment on your theory on the Harold Burley Hour tonight."

"Supporting it?" Amelia said.

"Evidently. I just saw a minute of it; back to work. It should be linked to your data queue by now. Take a look." He punched off and we found the program immediately.

It started out with an optical of a galaxy exploding dramatically, sound effects and all. Then the profile of Burley, serious as usual, faded in, looking down on the cataclysm.

"Could this be us, only a month from now? Controversy rages in the highest scientific circles. And not only scientists have questions. The police do, too."

A still picture of Peter, bedraggled and forlorn, naked from the waist up, holding up a number for the police camera. "This is Peter Blankenship, who for two decades has been one of the most highly regarded cosmologists in the world.

"Today he doesn't even know the right number of planets in the Solar System. He thinks he's living in the year 2004-and is confused to be a twenty-year-old man in a sixty-four-year-old body.

"Someone jacked him and extracted all his past, back to that year. Why? What did he know? Here is Simone Mallot, head of the FBI's Forensic Neuropathology Unit." A woman in a white coat, with a jumble of gleaming equipment behind her. "Dr. Mallot, what can you tell us about the level of surgical technique used on this man?"

"The person who did this belongs in jail," she said. "Subtle equipment was used, or misused; microscopic AI-directed investigation shows that they initially tried to erase specific, fairly recent, memories. But they failed repeatedly, and finally erased one huge block with a surge of power. It was the murder of a personality and, we know now, the destruction of a great mind."

Beside me, Amelia sighed, almost a sob, but leaned forward, studying the console intently.

Burley peered directly out of the screen. "Peter Blankenship did know something-or at least believed something, that profoundly affects you and me. He believed that unless we take action to stop it, the world will come to an end on September fourteenth."

There was a picture of the Multiple Mirror Array on the far side of the Moon, irrelevant to anything, tracking ponderously. Then a time-lapse shot of Jupiter rotating. "The Jupiter Project, the largest, most complex scientific experiment ever conducted. Peter Blankenship had calculations that showed it had to be stopped. But then he disappeared, and came back in no shape to testify about anything scientific.

"But his assistant, Professor Blaze Harding" – an inset of Amelia lecturing – "suspected foul play and herself disappeared. From a hiding place in Mexico she sent dozens of copies of Blankenship's theory, and the high hard mathematics behind it, to scientists all over the world. Opinions are divided."

Back in his studio, Burley faced two men, one of them familiar.

"God, not Macro!" Amelia said.

"I have with me tonight Professors Lloyd Doherty and Mac Roman. Dr. Doherty's a longtime associate of Peter Blankenship. Dr. Roman is the dean of sciences at the University of Texas, where Professor Harding works and teaches."

"Teaching isn't work?" I said, and she shushed me.

Macro settled back with a familiar self-satisfied expression. "Professor Harding has been under a great deal of strain recently, including a love affair with one of her students as well as one with Peter Blankenship."

"Stick to the science, Macro," Doherty said. "You've read the paper. What do you think of it?"

"Why, it's ... it's utterly fantastic. Ridiculous."

"Tell me why."

"Lloyd, the audience could never understand the mathematics involved. But the idea is absurd on the face of it. That the physical conditions that obtain inside something smaller than a BB could bring about the end of the universe."

"People once said it was absurd to think that a tiny germ could bring about the death of a human being."

"That's a false analogy." His ruddy face got darker.

"No, it's precise. But I agree with you about it not destroying the universe."

Macro gestured at Burley and the camera. "Well, then."

Doherty continued. "It would only destroy the Solar System, perhaps the Galaxy. A relatively small corner of the universe."

"But it would destroy the Earth," Burley said.

"In less than an hour, yes." The camera came in close on him. "There's no doubt about that."

"But there is!" Macro said, off camera.

Doherty gave him a weary look. "Even if the doubt were reasonable, and it is not, what sort of odds would be acceptable? A fifty-fifty chance? Ten percent? One chance in a hundred that everyone would die?"

"Science doesn't work like that. Things aren't ten percent true."

"And people aren't ten percent dead, either." Doherty turned to Burley. "The problem I found isn't with the first few minutes or even millenniums of the prediction. I just think they've made an error extrapolating into intergalactic space."

"Do tell," Burley said.

"Ultimately, the result would just be twice as much matter; twice as many galaxies. There's room for them."

"If one part of the theory is wrong – " Macro began.

"Furthermore," Doherty confined, "it looks as if this has happened before, in other galaxies. It actually clears up some anomalies here and there."

"Getting back to Earth," Burley said, "or at least to this solar system. How big a job would it be to stop the Jupiter Project? The largest experiment ever set up?"

"Nothing to it, in terms of science. Just one radio signal from JPL. Getting people to send a signal that will end their careers in science, that would normally be hard. But everybody's career ends September fourteenth, if they don't."

"It's still irresponsible nonsense," Macro said. "Bad science, sensationalism."

"You have about ten days to prove that, Mac. A long line is forming behind that button."

Close-up on Burley, shaking his head. "They can't turn it off too soon for me." The console went dead.

We laughed and hugged and split a ginger ale in celebration. But then the screen chimed and turned itself on without my hitting the answer button.

It was the face of Eileen Zakim, my new platoon leader. "Julian, we have a real situation. Are you armed?"

"No-well, yes. There's a pistol here." But it had been left behind, like the ginger ale; I hadn't checked to see if it was loaded. "What's up?"

"That crazy bitch Gavrila is here. Maybe inside. She killed a little girl out front in order to distract the shoe guard at the gate."

"Good grief! We don't have a soldierboy out front?"

"We do, but she patrols. Gavrila waited until the soldierboy was on the opposite side of the compound. The way we've reconstructed it, she slashed up the child and threw her, dying, up against the sentry box door. When the shoe opened the door, she cut his throat and then dragged him across the box and used his handprint to open the inner door."

I had the pistol out and threw the dead bolt on the door. "Reconstructed? You don't know for sure?"

"No way to tell; the inner door isn't monitored. But she did drag him back into the box, and if she's military, she knows how the handprint locks work."

I checked the pistol's magazine. Eight packs of tumblers. Each pack held 144 razor-sharp tumblers-each actually a folded, scored piece of metal that shatters into 144 pieces when you pull the trigger. They come out in a hail of fury that can chew off an arm or a leg.

"Now that she's in the compound – "

"We don't know that for sure."

"If she is, though, are there any more handprint locks? Any monitored entrances?"

"The main entrance is monitored. No handprints; just mechanical locks. My people are checking every door."

I winced a little at "my" people. "Okay. We're secure here. Keep us posted."

"Will do." The console went dark.

We both looked at the door. "Maybe she doesn't have anything that can get through that," Amelia said. "She used a knife on the child and guard."

I shook my head. "I think she did that for her own amusement."

GAVRILA HUDDLED IN A cabinet under a laundry sink, waiting, the M-31 cradled, ready to fire, and the guard's assault rifle digging into her ribs. She had come in through a service door that was open to the night air, and locked it behind her.

While she watched through a crack, her patience and foresight were rewarded. A soldierboy slipped silently up to the door, checked the lock, and moved on.

After one minute, she got out and stretched. She had to either find out where the woman was staying or find some way to destroy the whole building. But fast. She was ridiculously outnumbered, and in gaining the advantage of terror she had sacrificed the possibility of surprise.

There was a beat-up keyboard and console, gray plastic turning white with some kind of soap film, built into the wall. She went over to it and pushed a random letter, and it turned itself on. She typed in "directory" and was rewarded with a list of personnel. Blaze Harding wasn't there, but Julian Class was, at 8-1841. That looked like a phone number, rather than a room number.

Guessing, she rolled a pointer over to his name and clicked on it. That gave her 241, more useful. It was a two-story building.

A sudden loud rattling startled her. She spun around, pointing both weapons, but it was just an unattended washing machine that had been dormant while she was hidden.

She ignored the freight elevator and shouldered though a heavy FIRE EXIT door that opened on a dusty staircase. There didn't seem to be any security cameras. She climbed quickly and quietly up to the second floor.

She thought for a moment and left one of the weapons by the door on the landing. She only needed one for the kill. Besides, she'd be retreating fast, and might want an element of surprise. They would know she had the guard's assault rifle, but probably didn't know about the M-31 yet.

Opening the door a crack, she could see that the odd-numbered rooms were across from her, numbers increasing to the right. She closed her eyes for a deep breath and a silent prayer, and then burst through the door in a dead run, assuming there were cameras and soldier-boys in her near future.

There were neither. She stopped at 241, took a fraction of a second to note the class nameplate, leveled the assault rifle, and fired a silenced burst at the lock.

The door didn't open. She aimed six inches higher and this time blew out the dead bolt. The door opened a couple of inches and she kicked it the rest of the way.

Julian was standing there, in the shadow, holding the pistol straight out with both hands. She spun away instinctively as he fired, and the burst of razors that would have beheaded her instead just tore out a piece of her left shoulder. She fired two random blasts into the darkness-trusting God to guide them not to him, but to the white scientist she was there to punish-and leaped back out of the way of his second shot. Then she sprinted back to the stairwell and just got through the door as his third shot redecorated the hall.

There was a soldierboy waiting there, hulking huge at the top of the stairs. She knew from picking Jefferson's mind that the mechanic controlling it probably had been brainwashed so it couldn't kill her. She emptied the rest of the magazine into the thing's eyes.

The black man was shouting for her to throw out her weapon and come out with her hands up. All right. He was probably the only thing between her and the scientist.

She toed the door open, ignoring the soldierboy groping blindly behind her, and threw out the useless assault rifle. "Now come out slowly," the man said.

She took one moment to visualize her move while she eased back the arming lever of the M-31. Shoulder-roll across the corridor and then a continuous sweeping burst in his direction. She leaped.

It was all wrong. He got her before she hit the ground,. an ungodly pain in her belly. She saw her own death happening, a thick spray of blood and entrails as her shoulder hit the floor and she tried to complete the roll but just slid. She managed to get up on her knees and elbows, and something slimy fell out of her body. She fell over facing him, and through a darkening haze raised the weapon toward him. He said something and the world ended.

I SHOUTED "DROP IT" but she ignored me, and the second shot disintegrated her head and shoulders. I fired again, reflexively, blowing apart the M-31 and the hand that was aiming it, and turning her chest into a bright red cavity. Behind me, Amelia made a choking sound and ran to the bathroom to vomit.

I had to stare. She didn't even look human, from the waist up; just a messy montage of butchered meat and rags. The rest of her was unaffected. For some reason I held up my hand to block out the gore and was a little horrified to see that her lower body was in a relaxed, casually seductive pose.

A soldierboy slowly pushed the door open. The sensory apparatuses were a chewed-up mess. "Julian?" it said in Candi's voice. "I can't see. Are you all right?"

"I'm okay, Candi. I think it's over. Backup coming?"

"Claude. He's downstairs."

"I'll be in the room." I walked back through the door on automatic pilot. I'd almost meant it when I said I was okay. I just turned a human being into a pile of steaming meat, hey, all in a day's work.

Amelia had left the water running after washing her face. She hadn't quite made it to the toilet, and was trying to clean up the mess with a towel. I set down the pistol and helped her to her feet. "You lie down, honey. I'll take care of this."

She was weeping. She nodded into my shoulder and let me guide her to the bed.

After I cleaned it up and threw the towels into the recycler, I sat on the end of the bed and tried to think. But I couldn't get past the horrible sight of the woman bursting open three times, each time I pulled the trigger.

When she silently threw the rifle out, for some reason I knew she would come through the door shooting. I had a sight picture and the trigger halfway pulled when she leaped out into the corridor.

I'd heard a pattering sound, which must have been her silenced weapon blinding Candi. And then when she threw it out without hesitation, I guess I assumed it was empty and she had another weapon.

But the way I felt as I eased down on the trigger and waited for her to show herself... I had never felt that way in the soldierboy. Ready.

I really wanted her to come out and die. I really wanted to kill her.

Had I changed that much in a few weeks? Or was it actually change? The boy was a different case, an "industrial accident" that I didn't completely cause, and if I could bring him back, I would.

I wouldn't bring Gavrila back except to kill her again.

For some reason I remembered my mother, and her rage when President Brenner was assassinated. I was four. She hadn't liked Brenner at all, I learned later, and that made it worse, as if she had some complicity in the crime. As if the murder were some kind of wish fulfillment.

But that wasn't close to the personal hate I felt for Gavrila-besides, she was almost not human. It was like disposing of a vampire. A vampire who was single-mindedly stalking the woman you loved.

Amelia was quiet now. "I'm sorry you saw that. It was pretty awful."

She nodded, face still buried in the pillow. "At least it's over. That part's over."

I rubbed her back and murmured agreement. We didn't know how Gavrila-like the vampire-was going to return from her grave to kill again.

IN THE GUADALAJARA AIRPORT, Gavrila had written a short note to General Blaisdell and put it in an envelope with his home address. She put that in another envelope, addressed to her brother, with instructions to send it on unread if Gavrila didn't call by tomorrow morning.

This is what it said: If you haven't heard from me by now, I'm dead. The man in charge of the group that killed me is MG Stanton Roser, the most dangerous man in America. An eye for an eye?

Gavrila.

After she had sent that one, she realized it wasn't enough, and on the plane she scribbled another two pages, trying to set down everything she could remember from the minutes when she'd been able to see into Jefferson's mind. Luck was on the other side for that one, though. She dropped it in a mailbox in the Canal Zone and it was automatically routed through Army Intelligence, where a bored tech sergeant read part of it and recycled it as crank mail.

But she hadn't been the only one on the wrong side who had been exposed to the Plan. Lieutenant Thurman heard of Gavrila's death a few minutes after it happened, and put two and two together, and changed into his dress uniform and slipped out into the night. He got by the sentry box with no problem. The shoe who had been pressed into service to replace the one Gavrila had murdered was just this side of catatonic. He passed Thurman through with a rigid salute.

He didn't have any money for a commercial flight, so he had to gamble on using the military. If the wrong person asked for his travel orders, or if he had to go through a retinal scan for security, that would be it – not just AWOL, but fleeing from administrative detention.

A combination of luck and bluff and planning worked, though. He got off the base just by getting aboard a supply chopper that was returning to the Canal Zone. He knew that the CZ had been in bureaucratic chaos for months, ever since it had seceded from Panama and become a U.S. Territory. The Air Force base there was not exactly overseas and not exactly stateside, either. He wait-listed himself on a flight to Washington, misspelling his name, and a half hour later flashed his picture ID and rushed aboard.

He arrived at Andrews Air Force Base at dawn, had a big free breakfast at the Transient Officers' Mess, and then loitered around until nine-thirty. Then he called General Blaisdell.

Lieutenant's bars don't move you through the Pentagon's switchboards very fast. He told two civilians, two sergeants, and a fellow lieutenant that he had a personal message for General Blaisdell. Finally, he wound up with a bird colonel who was his administrative assistant.

She was an attractive woman a few years older than Thurman. She eyed him suspiciously. "You're calling from Andrews," she said, "but my board says you're stationed in Portobello."

"That's right. I'm on compassionate leave."

"Hold your orders up to the lens."

"They aren't here." He shrugged. "My luggage went missing."

"You packed your orders?"

"By mistake."

"That could be an expensive mistake, lieutenant. What is this message for the general?"

"With all due respect, colonel, it's very personal."

"If it's that personal, you'd better put it in a letter and mail it to his home. I pass on everything that goes through this office."

"Please. Just tell him it's from his sister – "

"The general doesn't have a sister."

"His sister Gavrila," he pressed on. "She's in trouble."

Her head jerked up suddenly and she spoke beyond the screen. "Yes, sir. Immediately." She pushed a button and her face was replaced by the green DARPA sigil. A shimmering encryptation bar appeared over it, and then it dissolved to the general's face. He looked kind, grandfatherly.

"Do you have security on your end?"

"No, sir. It's a public phone. But there's no one around."

He nodded. "You spoke with Gavrila?"

"Indirectly, sir." He looked around. "She was captured and had a jack installed. I jacked briefly with her captors. She's dead, sir."

He didn't change expression. "Did she complete her assignment?"

"If that was to get rid of the scientist, no, sir. She was killed in the attempt."

While they were talking, the general made two unobtrusive hand gestures, recognition signals for Enders and for Hammer of God. Of course Thurman didn't respond to either one. "Sir, there's a huge conspiracy – "

"I know, son. Let's continue this conversation face-to-face. I'll send my car down for you. You'll be paged when it arrives."

"Yes, sir," he said to a blank screen.

Thurman drank coffee for most of an hour, looking at the paper without actually reading it. Then he was paged and told that the general's limousine was waiting for him in the arrivals area.

He went there and was surprised to see that the limo had a human driver, a small young female tech sergeant in dress greens. She opened the back door for him. The windows were opaque mirrors.

The seats were deep and soft but covered with uncomfortable plastic. The driver didn't say a word to him, but did turn on some music, soft-drift jazz. She didn't drive, either, other than pushing a button. She read from an old-fashioned paper Bible and ignored the numbing monotony of the huge gray Grossman modules that housed a tenth of a million people each. Thurman was kind of fascinated by them. Who would live that way voluntarily? Of course most of them were probably government draftees, just marking time until their term of service was up.

They traveled alongside a river, in a greenbelt, for several miles, and then went spiraling up an entrance ramp to a broad highway that led to the Pentagon, which was actually two pentagons-the smaller historical building nested inside the one where most of the work was actually done. He could only see the whole structure for a few seconds, and then the car banked down a long arc of concrete toward its home.

The limousine came to a stop outside a loading bay, identified only by the flaking yellow letters blkrde21. The driver put her Bible down and got out and opened Thurman's door. "Please follow me, sir."

They went through an automatic door straight into an elevator, whose walls were an infinite regression of mirrors. The driver put her hand on a touchplate and said, "General Blaisdell."

The elevator crawled for about a minute, while Thurman studied a million Thurmans going off in four directions, and tried not to stare at the various attractive angles of his escort. A Bible-thumper, not his type. Nice butt, though.

The doors opened to a silent and spare reception room. The sergeant went behind the desk and turned on a console. "Tell the general that Lieutenant Thurman is here." There was a whisper and she nodded. "Come with me, sir."

The next room was more like a major general's office. Wood paneling, actual paintings on the walls, a pic window that displayed Mount Kilimanjaro. One wall of awards and citations and holos of the general with four presidents.

The old gentleman rose gracefully from behind his acre of uncluttered desk. He was obviously athletic and had a twinkle in his eye.

"Lieutenant, please sit over here." He indicated one of a pair of leather-upholstered easy chairs. He looked at the sergeant. "And bring in Mr. Carew."

Thurman sat uneasily, "Sir, I'm not sure how many people ought to – "

"Oh, Mr. Carew's a civilian, but we can trust him. He's an information specialist. He'll jack with you and save us all kinds of time."

Thurman had a premonitory migraine glow. "Sir, is that absolutely necessary? Jacking – "

"Oh yes, yes. The man's a jack witness in the federal court system. He's a marvel, a real marvel."

The marvel came in without speaking. He looked like a wax replica of himself. Formal tunic and string tie.

"Him," he said, and the general nodded. He sat down in the other chair and pulled two jack cables from a box on the table between him and Thurman.

Thurman opened his mouth to explain, but then just plugged in. Carew followed suit.

Thurman stiffened and his eyes rolled back. Carew stared at him with interest and started breathing hard, sweat dotting his forehead.

After a few minutes he unplugged, and Thurman sagged into relieved unconsciousness. "That was hard on him," Carew said, "but I have a great deal of interesting information."

"Have it all?" the general said.

"All we need and more."

Thurman started to cough and slowly levered himself into a normal sitting position. He clamped his forehead with one hand and massaged a temple with the other. "Sir... could I ask for a Pain-go?"

"Certainly ... sergeant?" She went out and returned with a glass of water and a pill.

He gulped it down gratefully. "Now ... sir. What do we do next?"

"The next thing you do, son, is get some rest. The sergeant will take you to a hotel."

"Sir, I don't have a ration book, or any money. It's all back in Portobello; I was under detention."

"Don't worry. We'll take care of everything."

"Thank you, sir." The headache was retreating, but he had to close his eyes at the mirrored elevator car, or face the prospect of watching himself puke a thousand times at once.

The limousine hadn't moved. He slid gratefully onto the soft slick plastic.

The driver closed his door and got in the front. "This hotel," he asked her, "are we going all the way downtown?"

"No," she said, and started the engine. "Arlington." She turned and raised a silenced .22 automatic and shot him once in the left eye. He clawed for the door handle and she leaned over and shot him again, point-blank in the temple. She made a face at the mess and pushed the button that directed the car to the cemetery.

MARTY DROPPED HIS BOMBSHELL by bringing a friend to breakfast. We were eating out of the machines, as usual for the morning meal, when Marty walked in with someone whom I didn't at first recognize. He smiled, though, and I remembered the diamond set into his front tooth.

"Private Benyo?" He was one of the mechanic guards replaced by my old platoon.

"In the flesh, sarge." He shook hands with Amelia and introduced himself, then sat down and poured a cup of coffee.

"So what's the story?" I asked. "It didn't take?"

"Nope." He grinned again. "What it didn't take was two weeks.'"

"What?"

"It doesn't "take two weeks," Marty said. "Benyo is humanized, and so are all the others."

"I don't get it."

"Your stabilizer, Candi, was in the loop. That's what did it! It only takes about two days, if you're jacked with somebody who's already humanized."

"But... then why did it take the whole two weeks with Jefferson?"

Marty laughed. "It didn't! He was one of them after a couple of days, but people didn't recognize it, since he was the first-and he was ninety percent there from the beginning. Everybody, Jefferson included, was concentrating on Ingram, not him."

"But then you take a guy like me," Benyo said, "who hates the idea from the very start-and wasn't exactly a sweetheart to begin with-hell, everybody could tell when I converted."

"And you are converted?" Amelia said. He got a serious look and nodded in jerks. "You don't feel resentful about... losing the man you used to be?"

"It's hard to explain. What I am now is the man I used to be. But more me than I used to be, get it?" He made a helpless gesture with both hands. "What I mean is I never in a million years could've found out who I really was, even though it was there all the time. I needed the others to show me."

She smiled and shook her head. "It sounds like a religious conversion."

"It is, sort of," I said. "It literally was, with Ellie." I shouldn't have said that; she started to cloud up. I put my hand on hers.

For a moment everyone was silent. "So," Amelia said. "What does this do to the timetable?"

"If we'd known before the thing started, it would've sped it up considerably-and of course it will do that in the long run, when we're out to change the world.

"Right now the limiting factor is the surgery schedule. We plan to finish the last set of implants on the thirty-first. So by the third of August, we should have a building-full of converts, general to private."

"What about the POWs?" I asked. "McLaughlin didn't convert them in two days, did he?"

"Again, if we'd only known. He was never jacked with them for more than a few hours at a time. It would be good to know whether it does work with thousands of people at once."

"How do you know it's one or the other?" Amelia said. "Two weeks if they're all just 'normal' people; two days if one of the elect is with them all the time. You don't know anything about intermediate states."

"That's right." He rubbed his eyes and grimaced. "And no time to experiment. There's some fascinating science to be done, but as we said up at St. Bart's, we're not doing science quite yet." His phone pinged. "Just a second."

He touched his earring and listened, staring. "Okay ... I'll get back to you. Yes." He shook his head.

"Trouble?" I asked.

"Could be nothing; could be disaster. We've lost our cook."

That took me a moment. "Thurman's gone AWOL?"

"Yep. He cruised right past the guard last night, right after you ... after Gavrila died."

"No idea where he went?"

"He could be anywhere in the world. Could be downtown living it up. You jacked with him, Benyo?"

"Huh-uh. But Monez did, and I'm with Monez all the time. So I got a little. Not much, you know, his headaches."

"Do you have any secondhand impression of him?"

"Just a guy." He rubbed his chin. "I guess he was a little more army than most. I mean he kind of liked the idea.".

"He didn't much like our idea, then."

"I don't know. I'd guess not."

Marty looked at his watch. "I'm due in surgery in twenty minutes. Be doing jacks until one. Julian, you want to track him down?"

"Do what I can."

"Benyo, you jack with Monez and whoever else was with Thurman. We have to know how much he knows."

"Sure." He stood up. "I think he's down by the game room."

We watched him go. "At least he couldn't have known who the general was."

"Not Roser," Marty said. "But he might have gotten the name of Gavrila's boss, Blaisdell, through one of the people in Guadalajara. That's what I want to find out." He checked his watch again. "Call Benyo about it in an hour or so. And check all the flights to Washington."

"Do what I can, Marty. Once he's out of Porto, hell, there must be ten thousand ways to get to Washington."

"Yeah, right. Maybe we should just wait and see whether we hear from Blaisdell."

We were about to.

BLAISDELL SPENT A FEW minutes talking to Carew – the actual "download" of information from the jack session would take several hours' patient interrogation under hypnosis, by machine, but he did learn that there were a couple of days unaccounted for, between the time Gavrila was jacked in Guadalajara and her death more than a thousand miles away. What did she learn that sent her to Portobello?

He stayed in the office until he got the coded message from his driver that matters had been disposed of, and then he drove himself home-an eccentricity that sometimes was useful.

He lived alone, with robot servants and soldierboy guards, in a mansion on the Potomac less than a half hour's drive from the Pentagon. An eighteenth-century home with original exposed timbers and a wooden floor buckled with age, it was consistent with his image of himself-a man destined from birth, privileged birth, to change the history of the world.

And now his destiny was to end it.

He poured his daily ounce of whiskey into a crystal snifter and sat down to the mail. When he turned on the console, before the index came up, a blinker told him he had paper mail waiting.

Odd. He asked the wheelie to fetch it, and it brought back a single letter, no return address, postmarked from Kansas City that morning. It was interesting, considering the intimacy of some aspects of their relationship, that he didn't recognize Gavrila's handwriting on the envelope.

He read the short message twice and then burned it. Stanton Roser the most dangerous man in America? How unlikely, and how convenient: they had a golf date Saturday morning at the Bethesda Country Club. Golf could be a dangerous game.

He bypassed his mail and opened up the line to his computer at work. "Good evening, general," it said in a carefully modulated sexless voice.

"List for me every project rated 'secret' or above that has been initiated in the past month-no, eight weeks-by the Office of Force Management and Personnel. Delete any that have no connection to General Stanton Roser."

There were only three projects on the list; he was surprised at how little of Roser's work was classified. But one of those "projects" was essentially a file of miscellaneous classified actions, with 248 entries. He tabled that one and looked at the other two, separated because they were Top Top Secret.

They were apparently unrelated, except that both projects had been initiated the same day, and-aha! – both were in Panama. One was a pacification experiment on the detainees in a POW camp; the other, a management evaluation scheme at Fort Howell in Portobello.

Why hadn't Gavrila given more details? Damn the woman's flair for the dramatic.

When had she gone to Panama? That was easy enough to check. "Show me all the DARPA travel voucher requests for the past two days."

Interesting. She had bought a ticket to Portobello under a female code name and one to the Canal Zone under a male code name. Which flight did she actually take? The note had been on Aeromexico stationery, but that was no help; both flights used that carrier.

Well, which identity had she used in Guadalajara? The computer said that neither code name had flown into the city in the past two weeks, but it was a good assumption that she wouldn't have gone through the inconvenience of masquerading as a male while she was tracking down that woman. Therefore it was likely that she did cross-dress to elude detection on the flight down.

Why Panama, why the Canal Zone, why the connection with mousy old Stanton? Why didn't she just come back to the States, after the damned woman's theory about the Jupiter Project was splashed all over the news?

Well, he knew the answer to the last one. Gavrila watched the news so seldom she probably didn't even know who was president. As if the country had an actual president nowadays.

Of course, the Canal Zone could have been a feint. She could get to Portobello from there in minutes. But why would she want to go to either place?

Roser was the key. Roser was protecting the scientist by hiding her in one of those two bases. "Give me a list of noncombat deaths of Americans in Panama over the past twenty-four hours."

All right: there were two at Fort Howell, a male private who was "KILODNC" – killed in the line of duty, noncombat-and an unidentified female, homicide. Details available, no surprise, on a need-to-know basis from the Office of Force Management and Personnel.

He touched the KILODNC, which was not restricted, and found that the man had been murdered while standing guard at the central administration building. That must have been Gavrila's work.

A soft chime and a picture of the interrogator, Carew, appeared in the corner of the screen. He touched it and a hundred-thousand-word hypertext report appeared. He sighed and decided to have a second ounce of whiskey, in coffee.

WE WERE GOING TO be a little crowded in Building 31. The people in Guadalajara were too vulnerable; there was no telling how many nutcases like Gavrila might be available to Blaisdell. So our administrative experiment suddenly needed a couple of dozen civilian consultants, the Saturday Night Special crowd and the Twenty. Alvarez stayed behind with the nanoforge, but everybody else got away within twenty-four hours.

I wasn't sure it was a good idea-after all, Gavrila had killed almost as many people here as she had in Guadalajara. But the guards were really on guard now; three soldierboys patrolling instead of one.

It did simplify the humanization schedule. We had been set up to use the Twenty one at a time, by way of the secure phone line at the Guadalajara clinic. Once they were physically inside Building 31, we could use them four at a time, in rotation.

I wasn't looking forward to the Twenty arriving so much as I was the others-my old friends who now shared with me an inability to read minds. Everybody who was jacked was completely caught up in this huge project, in which Amelia and I were reduced to the status of retarded helpers. It was good to be around people with a few ordinary, noncosmic problems. People who had time for my own ordinary problems. Like becoming a murderer for a second time. No matter how much she deserved it, and had brought it on herself, it was still my finger on the trigger, my head full of the indelible image of her last horrifying moments.

I didn't want to bring it up with Amelia, not now, maybe not for a long time.

Reza and I were sitting out on the lawn at night, trying to pick out a few stars hidden in the glare and haze from the city.

"It couldn't possibly have bothered you as much as the boy," he said. "If anybody ever had it coming to them, she did."

"Oh, hell," I said, and opened a second beer. "At a visceral level, it doesn't make any difference who they were or what they did. The kid just got a red spot on his chest and fell over dead. Gavrila, I sprayed her guts and brains and fucking arms all over the corridor."

"And you keep thinking about it."

"Can't help it." The beer was still cool. "Every time my stomach growls or I get a little pain down there, I can see her bursting open. Knowing I have the same stuff inside."

"But it's not as if you've never seen it before."

"Never caused seeing it before. Big difference."

There was an awkward silence. Reza ran a fingertip around the rim of his wineglass, but it just hissed. "So are you going to try it again?"

I almost said Try what again? but Reza knew me better than that. "I don't think so. Who ever knows? Until you die of something else, you can always kill yourself."

"Hey, I never thought of it quite that way. Thanks."

"Thought you needed cheering up."

"Yeah, right." He licked his finger and tried the glass again, with no result. "Hey, is this an army-issue wineglass? How you guys expect to win a war without decent glassware?"

"We learn to rough it."

"So are you taking medicine?"

"Antidepressants, yeah. I don't think I'm going to do it."

I was startled to realize I hadn't thought about suicide all day, until Reza brought it up. "Things have to get better."

I spilled my beer hitting the dirt. Then the sound registered with Reza-machine-gun fire-and he joined me on the ground.

THE DEFENSE ADVANCED RESEARCH Projects Agency does not have any combat troops. But Blaisdell was a major general, and among his secret coreligionists was Philip Cramer, the vice president of the United States.

Cramer's primacy on the National Security Council, especially in light of the absence of oversight from the most feckless president since Andrew Johnson, allowed him to grant Blaisdell authority for two outrageous actions. One was the temporary military occupation of the Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, essentially preventing anybody from pushing the button that would end the Jupiter Project. The other was an "expeditionary force" under his control in Panama, a country with which the United States was not at war. While the senators and justices blustered and postured over these two blatantly illegal actions, the soldiers involved locked and loaded and went forth to follow orders.

The JPL action was trivially easy. A convoy pulled up at three a.m. and chased out all the night workers, and then locked the place up tight. Lawyers rejoiced, as did America's persistent antimilitary minority. Some scientists felt the celebration was premature. If the soldiers stayed in place for a couple of weeks, constitutional issues would become irrelevant.

Attacking an actual army base was not so simple. A brigadier general filed a battle order and died seconds later, personally disposed of by General Blaisdell. It sent a hunter-killer platoon, along with a support company, on a short hop from Col6n to Portobello, supposedly to put down an insurrection by traitorous American troops. For security reasons, they of course were forbidden to contact the Portobello base, and they knew very little other than the fact that the insurrection was limited to the central command building. They were to take control of it and await orders.

The major in charge sent back a query as to why, if the insurrection was so limited, they hadn't given the assignment to a company that was already on the base. There was no answer, the general being dead, so the major had to assume that all of the base was potentially hostile. The map showed that Building 31 was conveniently close to the water, so he improvised an amphibious attack: the soldierboys waded into the water at a deserted beach north of the base, and walked underwater for a few miles.

Moving through water so close to the shore, they eluded submarine defenses, a deficiency the major recorded for his eventual report.

I COULD HARDLY BELIEVE what I was seeing: soldier-boy versus soldierboy. Two of the machines had come up out of the water and were crouching on the beach, blasting away at two of the guard soldierboys. The other guard machine was hanging back around the corner of the building, ready to join in but keeping an eye on the front.

Nobody had noticed us, evidently. I shook Reza's shoulder to get his attention-he was transfixed by the pyrotechnics of the duel-and whispered, "Stay down! Follow me!"

We low-crawled to a line of shrubs and then ran crouched over to the building's front door. The shoe guard down by the gate saw us and fired a warning shot-or a badly aimed one-over our heads. I yelled "Arrowhead!" at him, the day's password, and it evidently worked. He shouldn't have been looking in our direction anyway, but I could lecture him on that some other time.

We piled through the narrow door together like a pair of slapstick comics and confronted a blind soldierboy, the one Gavrila had damaged. We hadn't sent it out for repair because we didn't want to answer questions, and four soldierboys seemed like plenty. Before we found ourselves in the middle of a war.

"Password," somebody yelled. I said "Arrowhead" and Reza, helpfully, said "Arrowsmith," a movie I missed. Close enough, though. The woman who was kneeling behind the reception desk, acting as eyes for the soldierboy, waved us on.

We crouched down next to her. I was out of uniform. "I'm Sergeant Class. Who's in charge?"

"God, I don't know. Sutton, maybe. She's the one who told me to come down here and spot for the thing." There were two loud explosions out back. "Do you know what the hell's going on?"

"We're being attacked by friendlies, is all I know. That, or the enemy has finally gotten soldierboys."

Whatever was happening, I realized that the attackers had to move fast. Even if there weren't any other soldierboys in the base, we should have flyboys any minute.

She was thinking along the same lines. "Where are the flyboys? They should be scrambled by now."

That's right; they were always on duty, always plugged in. Was it possible they had been taken over? Or had orders not to interfere?

There wasn't anything like an "operations room" in Building 31, since they never actually directed battles from there. The sergeant said that Lieutenant Sutton was in the mess hall, so we headed there. A windowless basement room, it was probably as safe as anywhere, if the soldierboys started to take the building apart.

Sutton was sitting at a table with Colonel Lyman and Lieutenant Phan, who were both jacked. Marty and General Pagel, both jacked, were at another table, with Top, Chief Master Sergeant Gilpatrick, anxiously fidgeting. There were a couple of dozen shoes and unjacked mechanics crouched around with weapons, waiting. I spotted Amelia with a crowd of civilians underneath a heavy metal serving table and waved.

Pagel unjacked and handed the cable to Top, who plugged in. "What's going on, sir?" I asked.

Surprisingly, he recognized me. "I can't tell much, Sergeant Class. They're Alliance troops, but we can't make contact. It's like they came from Mars. And we can't raise Battalion or Brigade.

"Mr. Larrin-Marty-is trying to subvert their command structure, the way he did here, through Washington. We have ten mechanics waiting on-line, though not in cages."

"So they could take control, but not do anything fancy."

"Walk around, use simple weapons. Maybe all they have to do is make the soldierboys just stand there, or lie down. Anything but attack."

"Our flyboy and waterboy communications have been cut off, apparently right at this building." He pointed at the other table. "Lieutenant Phan's trying to patch through."

There was another explosion, powerful enough to rattle dishes. "You'd think someone would notice."

"Well, everybody knows the compound's isolated for a top-secret simulation exercise. All this commotion could be special training effects."

"Until they actually vaporize us," I said.

"If they'd intended to destroy the building, they could have done that in the first second of the engagement."

Top unplugged. "Shit. Pardon me, sir." There was a huge crash upstairs. "We're dead meat. Four soldierboys against ten, we never had a chance."

"Had?" I said.

Marty unjacked. "They got all four. They're inside."

A glossy black soldierboy clomped up to the mess hall door, bristling with weapons. It could kill us all in an instant. I didn't move a muscle, except for an eyelid twitching uncontrollably.

Its contralto voice was loud enough to hurt the ears. "If you follow orders there is no reason for anyone to be hurt. Everyone with weapons, place them on the floor. Everyone move to the wall opposite me, leaving your hands visible." I backed up with my hands in the air.

The general stood up a little too fast, and both laser and machine-gun barrels swiveled to target him. "I'm Brigadier General Pagel, the ranking officer here – "

"Yes. Your identity is verified."

"You know you are going to be court-martialed for this? That you'll spend the rest of your life – "

"Sir, begging your pardon, but I am under orders to disregard the rank of anyone in this building. My orders come from a major general, who I understand will be here eventually. I respectfully suggest you wait to discuss it with him."

"So are you going to shoot me if I don't go to that wall with my hands up?"

"No, sir. I'll fill the room with vomiting agent and not kill anyone unless they touch a weapon."

Top turned pale. "Sir..."

"All right, Top. I've had a sniff of it myself." The general sulked back to the wall with his hands in his pockets.

Two more soldierboys rolled up behind her, along with a couple of dozen people from other floors, and I heard the faint sound of a cargo helicopter approaching; then a small flyboy. They both landed on the roof and went silent.

"Is that your general?" Pagel said.

"I wouldn't know, sir." After a minute a bunch of shoes came in, ten and then another dozen. They were wearing camouflage coveralls with head nets, no insignia or unit markings. That could make you nervous. They stacked their own weapons in the hall outside, and gathered armloads from the floor.

One of them stepped out of his coveralls and tossed away the head covering. He was bald except for a few strands of white hair. He looked kindly in spite of his major general's uniform.

He stepped up to General Pagel and they exchanged salutes. "I want to speak to Dr. Marty Larrin."

"General Blaisdell, I presume," Marty said.

He walked over to him and smiled. "We have to speak, of course."

"Of course. Maybe we can convert one another."

He looked around and stared at me. "You're the black physicist. The murderer." I nodded. Then he pointed at Amelia. "And Dr. Harding. I want all of you to come with me."

On his way out, he tapped the first soldierboy. "Come along for my protection," he said, smiling. "Let's go talk in Dr. Harding's office."

"I don't really have an office," she said, "just a room." She seemed to be straining not to look at me. "Room 241."

We did have a weapon there. Did she think I could outdraw a soldierboy? Excuse me, general; let me open this drawer and see what I find. Oops, fried Julian.

But it might be the only chance we'd have at him.

The soldierboy was too big for all of us to fit in the freight elevator, so we walked up the stairs. Blaisdell led at a quick pace. Marty got a little winded.

The general was obviously disappointed that room 241 wasn't full of test tubes and blackboards. He consoled himself with a ginger ale from the cooler.

"I suppose you're curious about my plan," he said.

"Not really," Marty said. "It's a fantasy. No way you can prevent the inevitable."

He laughed, quiet amusement rather than a madman's cackle. "I have JPL."

"Oh, come on."

"It's true. Presidential order. There are no scientists there tonight. Just my loyal troops."

"All of them Hammer of God?" I asked.

"All the leaders," he said. "The others are just a cordon, to keep the world of unbelievers away."

"You seem like a normal person," Amelia said, lying through her teeth. "Why would you want all this beautiful world to end?"

"You don't really think I'm normal, Dr. Harding, but you're wrong. You atheists in your ivory towers, you don't have any idea how real people feel. How perfect this is."

"Killing everything," I said.

"You're worse than she is. This is not death; it's rebirth. God has used you scientists as tools, so He can cleanse everything and start over."

It did make a crazy kind of sense. "You're nuts," I said.

The soldierboy swiveled to face me. "Julian," it said in a deep voice, "I'm Claude." There was an uncertain tremor to his movements that said he wasn't in a cage, warmed up, but was operating the soldierboy from a remote jack.

"What's going on here?" Blaisdell said.

"The transfer algorithm worked," Marty said. "Your people aren't in control of the soldierboys. Ours are."

"I know that's not possible," he said. "The safeguards – "

Marty laughed. "That's right. The safeguards against transfer of control are profoundly complex and powerful. I should know. I put them there."

Blaisdell looked at the soldierboy. "Soldier. Leave this room."

"Don't, Claude," Marty said. "We may need you."

It stayed put, rocking slightly. "That was a direct order from a major general," Blaisdell said.

"I know who you are, sir."

Blaisdell made a leap for the door, surprisingly fast. The soldierboy reached to grab his arm but punched him down instead. He shoved him back into the room.

He stood up slowly and brushed himself off. "So you're one of these humanized ones."

"That's right, sir."

"You think that gives you the right to disregard orders from your superiors?"

"No, sir. But my orders include assessing your actions, and orders, as those of a man who is mentally ill, and not responsible."

"I can still have you shot!"

"I suppose you could, sir, if you could find me."

"Oh, I know where you people are. The mechanics' cages for this building's guards are in the basement, in the northeast corner." He pinched his earring. "Major Lejeune. Come in." He pinched it again. "Come in."

"Nothing gets out of this room but static, sir, except on my frequency."

"Claude," I said, "why don't you just go ahead and kill him?"

"You know I can't do that, Julian."

"You could kill him to save your own life."

"Yes, but his threat to find my cage is not realistic. In fact, my body is not there."

"But look. He's proposing to kill not only you, but everybody else in the world. In the universe."

"Shut up, sergeant," Blaisdell snarled.

"You couldn't have a more clear-cut case of self-defense if he was standing with a gun at your head."

The soldierboy was silent for a long moment, weapons at its side. The laser came up partway and fell back. "I can't, Julian. Even though I don't disagree with you. I can't kill him in cold blood."

"Suppose I ask you to leave the room," I said. "Go stand in the corridor. Could you do that?"

"Of course." It staggered outside, taking off a piece of the doorjamb with its shoulder.

"Amelia ... Marty ... please go out there, too." I pulled open the top drawer of the bureau. The tumbler pistol had two rounds left. I took it out.

Amelia saw the gun and started to stammer something.

"Just go outside for minute." Marty put his arm around her and they stepped awkwardly, crabwise, through the door.

Blaisdell stood up straight. "So. I take it you're not one of them. The humanized."

"Actually, I'm partway there. At least I understand them."

"Yet you'd kill a man for his religious beliefs."

"I'd kill my own dog if it had rabies." I clicked the safety off.

"What kind of devil are you?"

The aiming laser spot danced on the center of his chest. "I'm finding out." I squeezed the trigger.

THE SOLDIERBOY DIDN'T INTERFERE when Julian fired and almost literally blew Blaisdell into two pieces. Part of the body knocked over a lamp and the room was in darkness except for the light from the corridor. Julian stood rigid, listening to the wet sounds of the corpse settling.

The soldierboy glided in behind him. "Let me have the gun, Julian."

"No. It's of no use to you."

"I'm afraid for you, old friend. Give me the weapon."

Julian turned in the half-light. "Oh. I see." He stuck the pistol in his belt. "Don't worry, Claude. I'm okay with that."

"Sure?"

"Sure enough. Pills, maybe. Guns, no." He walked around the soldierboy and into the hall. "Marty. How many people do we have who aren't humanized?"

It took Marty a minute to find the composure to answer. "Well, a lot of them are partway. Everyone who's recovered from surgery is either humanized or hooked up.

"So how many haven't been operated on? How many people in this building can fight?"

"Maybe twenty-five, thirty. Most over in E Wing. The ones who aren't under guard downstairs."

"Let's go there. Find as many weapons as we can."

Claude came up behind him. "We had lots of NLIs in the old soldierboys" – the somewhat pacifistic weapons of nonlethal intent – "and some of them must still be intact."

"Get them, then. Meet us over at E Wing."

"Let's take the fire escape," Amelia said. "We can sneak around to E without going through the lobby."

"Good. Do we have all the soldierboys?" They started toward the fire escape.

"Four," Claude said. "But the other six are harmless, immobilized."

"Do the enemy shoes know yet?"

"Not yet."

"Well, we can capitalize on that. Where's Eileen?"

"Down in the mess hall. She's trying to figure out a way to disarm the shoes without anybody getting hurt."

"Yeah, good luck." Julian opened the window and looked out cautiously. Nobody in sight. But then, down the hall, the elevator pinged.

"Everybody look away and cover your ears," Claude said. When the elevator door opened, he launched a concussion grenade down the hall.

The flash and bang blinded and deafened the shoes who had been sent to check on Blaisdell. They started shooting at random. Claude stepped between the firing and the window. "Better move," he said unnecessarily. Julian was pushing Amelia through the window in an ungentlemanly way, and Marty was about to crawl over both of them.

They pounded down the metal steps and sprinted toward the ell of E Wing. Claude fired scary bursts that just missed them, alternating machine gun and laser, that chewed up and scorched the ground to their left and right in the darkness.

The people in E Wing had already armed themselves as much as possible-there was a storage room with a rack of six M-31s and a box of grenades-and had improvised a defensive position by piling up mattresses in a shoulder-high semicircle at the end of the main corridor. Their lookout, fortunately, recognized Julian, so when they burst through the front door they weren't mowed down by the distinctly unhumanized, and completely terrified, group behind the mattresses.

Julian outlined the situation for them. Claude said that two of the soldierboys had gone outside to check on the remains of our original soldierboys, the ones with weapons of nonlethal intent. The current crop of soldierboys were peaceful types, but it's hard to express your pacifism with grenades and lasers. Tear gas and vomiting agent didn't kill, but it was less dangerous just to put people to sleep and collect their weapons.

As long as the enemy shoes stayed inside, that was a possibility. Unfortunately, Building 31 wasn't set up the way the Guadalajara clinic and St. Bart's were, where you could maneuver people into the right room and push a button and knock them out. But two of the original soldierboys had been carrying crowd-control canisters of Sweet Dreams, which was a combination knockout gas and euphoriant – you put them to sleep and they wake up laughing.

Both of those machines, though, were wreckage strewn along about a hundred meters of beach. The two searchers sorted through the scattered junk pile and did come up with three intact gas canisters. But they were all identical modules; there was no way to tell whether they would make you sleep or cry or puke. With a normal cage hookup, the mechanics could have let out a little gas and smelled it, but they couldn't smell anything with the remote.

They didn't have a lot of time to work on the problem, either. Blaisdell had covered his tracks well, so they weren't getting any long-distance calls from the Pentagon, but there was plenty of curiosity in Portobello itself. For a training exercise, aspects of it were profoundly real; two civilians had been injured by stray rounds. Most of the city was huddled in cellars. Four squad cars of police ringed the entrance to the base, with eight nervous officers hiding behind their cars shouting, in English and Spanish, at a soldierboy guard that didn't respond. They couldn't know it was empty.