Forever Peace (36 page)

"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."