'Then the more fools you both are. Get rid of competition and you're just not human anymore.'
'There's competition here,' Mendez said. 'Even physical. Ellie and Megan play vicious handball. Most of us are slowed down by age, but we compete mentally in ways you couldn't even comprehend.'
'I'm jacked. I've done that-lightning chess and three-dimensional go. Even you must know it's not the same.'
'No, it's not the same. You've been jacked, but not long enough to even understand the rules we play by.'
'I'm talking about stakes, not rules! War is terrible and cruel, but so is life. Other games are just games. War is for real.'
'You're a throwback, Ingram,' I said. 'You want to smear yourself with woad and go bash people's brains out.'
'What I am is a man. I don't know what the hell you are, other than a coward and a traitor.'
I can't pretend he didn't get to me. One part of me sincerely wanted to get him alone and beat him to a pulp. Which is exactly what he wanted; I'm sure he could have stuffed my foot up my ass and pulled it out through my throat.
'Excuse me,' Marty said, and tapped his right earring to pick up a message. After a few moments, he shook his head. 'His orders come from too high. I can't find out when they expect him back.'
'If I'm not back in two – '
'Oh, shut up.' He gestured to Megan. 'Knock him out. The sooner we get him jacked, the better.'
'You don't have to knock me out.'
'We have to go to the other side of the building. I'd rather carry you than trust you.'
Megan clicked the gun to another setting and popped him. He stared defiantly for a few seconds and then slumped. Marty reached to untie him. 'Wait a half minute,' Megan said. 'He might be bluffing.'
'That's not the same stuff as this?' I said, holding up the pistol.
'No, he's had plenty of that in one day. This doesn't work as fast, but it doesn't take as much out of you.' She reached over and pinched his earlobe, hard. He didn't react. 'Okay.'
Marty untied the left arm and it jerked halfway to his throat and fell back limp. The lips twitched, eyes still shut. 'Tough guy.' He hesitated, then untied the other bonds.
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.
