Forever Peace Part 27

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 a.s.sistance? 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 s.h.i.+t, 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 ident.i.ties 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 h.e.l.l? 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 d.a.m.ned 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 s.h.i.+ft'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 ma.s.sacre, 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 b.u.t.ton all five guard mechanics in the bas.e.m.e.nt 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 pa.s.s 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 s.p.a.ces 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 p.r.i.c.kling 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 s.h.i.+eld 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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned 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 G.o.d 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 surrept.i.tiously 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.