"That's if you succeed, which I don't think is likely. You'll convert a large fraction of us, from the top down, and then the Ngumi, or whoever, will step in and take over. End of experiment."
"We'll be converting the Ngumi, too."
"Not many and not fast enough. Their leadership is too fragmented. If you converted all the South American goomies, the African ones would step in and eat them up."
Kind of a racist image, I thought, but kept it to my cannibal self.
"But if we do succeed," Mendez said, "you think that would be even worse?"
"Of course! Lose a war, you can rise up and fight again. Lose the ability to fight..."
"But there would be no one to fight," Megan said.
"Nonsense. This thing can't work on everybody. You have one tenth of one percent unaffected, they'll arm themselves and take over. And you'll just give them the key to the city and do whatever they say."
"It's not that simplistic," Mendez said. "We can defend ourselves without killing."
"What, the way you've defended yourself against me? Gas everybody and tie them up?"
"I'm sure we'll work out strategies well ahead of time. After all, we'll have plenty of minds like yours at our disposal."
"You're actually a soldier," he said to me, "and you go along with this foolishness?"
"I didn't ask to be a soldier. And I can't imagine a peace as foolish as this war we're in."
He shook his head. "Well, they've gotten to you. Your opinion doesn't count."
"In fact," Marty said, "he's on our side naturally. He hasn't gone through the process. Neither have I."
"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?"