Joe Haldeman - Forever Peace

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.