Forever Peace (40 page)

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.