"Oh, I know where you people are. The mechanics' cages for this building's guards are in the basement, in the northeast corner." He pinched his earring. "Major Lejeune. Come in." He pinched it again. "Come in."
"Nothing gets out of this room but static, sir, except on my frequency."
"Claude," I said, "why don't you just go ahead and kill him?"
"You know I can't do that, Julian."
"You could kill him to save your own life."
"Yes, but his threat to find my cage is not realistic. In fact, my body is not there."
"But look. He's proposing to kill not only you, but everybody else in the world. In the universe."
"Shut up, sergeant," Blaisdell snarled.
"You couldn't have a more clear-cut case of self-defense if he was standing with a gun at your head."
The soldierboy was silent for a long moment, weapons at its side. The laser came up partway and fell back. "I can't, Julian. Even though I don't disagree with you. I can't kill him in cold blood."
"Suppose I ask you to leave the room," I said. "Go stand in the corridor. Could you do that?"
"Of course." It staggered outside, taking off a piece of the doorjamb with its shoulder.
"Amelia ... Marty ... please go out there, too." I pulled open the top drawer of the bureau. The tumbler pistol had two rounds left. I took it out.
Amelia saw the gun and started to stammer something.
"Just go outside for minute." Marty put his arm around her and they stepped awkwardly, crabwise, through the door.
Blaisdell stood up straight. "So. I take it you're not one of them. The humanized."
"Actually, I'm partway there. At least I understand them."
"Yet you'd kill a man for his religious beliefs."
"I'd kill my own dog if it had rabies." I clicked the safety off.
"What kind of devil are you?"
The aiming laser spot danced on the center of his chest. "I'm finding out." I squeezed the trigger.
THE SOLDIERBOY DIDN'T INTERFERE when Julian fired and almost literally blew Blaisdell into two pieces. Part of the body knocked over a lamp and the room was in darkness except for the light from the corridor. Julian stood rigid, listening to the wet sounds of the corpse settling.
The soldierboy glided in behind him. "Let me have the gun, Julian."
"No. It's of no use to you."
"I'm afraid for you, old friend. Give me the weapon."
Julian turned in the half-light. "Oh. I see." He stuck the pistol in his belt. "Don't worry, Claude. I'm okay with that."
"Sure?"
"Sure enough. Pills, maybe. Guns, no." He walked around the soldierboy and into the hall. "Marty. How many people do we have who aren't humanized?"
It took Marty a minute to find the composure to answer. "Well, a lot of them are partway. Everyone who's recovered from surgery is either humanized or hooked up.
"So how many haven't been operated on? How many people in this building can fight?"
"Maybe twenty-five, thirty. Most over in E Wing. The ones who aren't under guard downstairs."
"Let's go there. Find as many weapons as we can."
Claude came up behind him. "We had lots of NLIs in the old soldierboys" – the somewhat pacifistic weapons of nonlethal intent – "and some of them must still be intact."
"Get them, then. Meet us over at E Wing."
"Let's take the fire escape," Amelia said. "We can sneak around to E without going through the lobby."
"Good. Do we have all the soldierboys?" They started toward the fire escape.
"Four," Claude said. "But the other six are harmless, immobilized."
"Do the enemy shoes know yet?"
"Not yet."
"Well, we can capitalize on that. Where's Eileen?"
"Down in the mess hall. She's trying to figure out a way to disarm the shoes without anybody getting hurt."
"Yeah, good luck." Julian opened the window and looked out cautiously. Nobody in sight. But then, down the hall, the elevator pinged.
"Everybody look away and cover your ears," Claude said. When the elevator door opened, he launched a concussion grenade down the hall.
The flash and bang blinded and deafened the shoes who had been sent to check on Blaisdell. They started shooting at random. Claude stepped between the firing and the window. "Better move," he said unnecessarily. Julian was pushing Amelia through the window in an ungentlemanly way, and Marty was about to crawl over both of them.
They pounded down the metal steps and sprinted toward the ell of E Wing. Claude fired scary bursts that just missed them, alternating machine gun and laser, that chewed up and scorched the ground to their left and right in the darkness.
The people in E Wing had already armed themselves as much as possible-there was a storage room with a rack of six M-31s and a box of grenades-and had improvised a defensive position by piling up mattresses in a shoulder-high semicircle at the end of the main corridor. Their lookout, fortunately, recognized Julian, so when they burst through the front door they weren't mowed down by the distinctly unhumanized, and completely terrified, group behind the mattresses.
Julian outlined the situation for them. Claude said that two of the soldierboys had gone outside to check on the remains of our original soldierboys, the ones with weapons of nonlethal intent. The current crop of soldierboys were peaceful types, but it's hard to express your pacifism with grenades and lasers. Tear gas and vomiting agent didn't kill, but it was less dangerous just to put people to sleep and collect their weapons.
As long as the enemy shoes stayed inside, that was a possibility. Unfortunately, Building 31 wasn't set up the way the Guadalajara clinic and St. Bart's were, where you could maneuver people into the right room and push a button and knock them out. But two of the original soldierboys had been carrying crowd-control canisters of Sweet Dreams, which was a combination knockout gas and euphoriant – you put them to sleep and they wake up laughing.
Both of those machines, though, were wreckage strewn along about a hundred meters of beach. The two searchers sorted through the scattered junk pile and did come up with three intact gas canisters. But they were all identical modules; there was no way to tell whether they would make you sleep or cry or puke. With a normal cage hookup, the mechanics could have let out a little gas and smelled it, but they couldn't smell anything with the remote.