Joe Haldeman - Forever Peace

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."