Joe Haldeman - Forever Peace

I woke up groggily to the console pinging. It didn't wake Amelia, but I did, in my clumsy efforts to extricate myself. My left arm was asleep, a cold tingling log, and I had romantically left a spot of drool on her cheek.

She rubbed at that and opened her eyes to slits. "Phone?"

"Go back to sleep. I'll tell you if it's anything." I walked into the office, beating my left arm against my side. I snagged a ginger ale from the cooler – the favorite drink of whoever had lived there previously, and sat down to the console:

Marty will meet you and Blaze at 1915 in the mess hall. Bring this.

The size of the roster was familiar, a listing of the entire complement of Building 31, minus me. I'd probably seen it a hundred times a day in my old job.

The order of the listing was odd, since it had nothing to do with people's functions (I'd normally seen it as a duty roster), but it only took a minute to figure it out. The first five names were the mechanic guards whose soldierboys my platoon had taken over. Then a list of all the jacked officers, who had been jacked together since 26 July, presumably not all in one big group.

Likewise, the end of the roster was all of the jacked noncoms and privates, besides the guards. They also had been jacked together since day before yesterday. They would all theoretically come out of it on the 9th of August, cured of war.

In between those two groups, a list of the sixty-some who had spent all their lives up to now under the handicap of normality. The four doctors had been drilling since yesterday. It looked like team 1 was doing about five a day, and team 2-presumably the hotshots from the Canal Zone-were doing eight.

I heard Amelia moving in the bedroom, changing out of the clothes she'd slept in. She came out combing her hair and wearing a dress, a red-and-black Mexican thing I'd never seen.

"I didn't know you brought a dress."

"Dr. Spencer gave it to me; said he bought it for his wife, but it didn't fit her."

"Likely story."

She looked over my shoulder. "Lot of people."

"They're doing about a dozen a day, with two teams. I wonder whether they're sleeping at all."

"Well, they're eating." She checked her watch. "How far away is that mess hall?"

"Couple minutes."

"Why don't you change your shirt and shave?"

"For Marty?"

"For me." She plucked at my shoulder. "Shoo. I want to call Ellie again."

I scraped a quick shave and found a shirt that had one day's wear.

"Still no answer," Amelia said from the other room. "There's no one at the motel desk, either."

"You want to check with the Clinic? Or Jefferson's motel room?"

She shook her head and pushed the PR button. "After dinner. She's probably out." A copy of the roster drifted out of the slot; Amelia caught it, folded it, and put it in her purse. "Let's go find Marty."

THE MESS HALL WAS small but, to Amelia's surprise, not totally automated. There were machines for some standard simple food, but also an actual food station with an actual cook, who Julian recognized.

"Lieutenant Thurman?"

"Julian. Still can't tolerate jacking, so I volunteered to step in for Sergeant Duffy. Don't get your hopes up, though; I can only cook four or five things." He looked at Amelia. "You would be ... Amelia?"

"Blaze," Julian said, and introduced them. "Were you jacked with them for any length of time?"

"If you mean 'Are you in on it,' yes, I got the general idea. You did the math?" he asked Amelia.

"No, I did the particles; just tagged along behind Julian and Peter on the math."

He started tossing two salads.

"Peter, the cosmology guy," he said. "I saw about him on the news yesterday."

"Yesterday?" Julian said.

"You didn't hear? They found him wandering around dazed on some island." Thurman told them all he remembered about the news item.

"But he doesn't recall anything about the paper?" Amelia said.

"I guess not. Not if he thinks it's the year 2000. You think he can get it back?"

"Only if the people who took out the memory saved it," Julian said, "and that doesn't sound likely. Sounds like a pretty crude job."

"At least he's still alive," Amelia said.

"Not much good to us," Julian said, and caught a look from Amelia. "Sorry. True, though."

Thurman gave them their salads and started a couple of hamburgers. Marty came in and asked for the same.

They went to the end of a long empty table. Marty slumped into the chair and unpeeled a speedie from behind his ear. "Better sleep a few hours."

"How long you been on your feet?"

He looked at his watch without focusing on it. "I don't want to know. We're just about through with the colonels. Two Team's just up from a nap; they'll do Tomy and the topkick, what's his name?"

"Gilpatrick," Julian said. "He could use a little humanizing."

Thurman brought over Marty's salad. "That was a mess up in Guadalajara," he said. "The news came in from Jefferson just before I left the Twenty." Most of the communication between Guadalajara and Portobello was via jack circuit rather than conventional phone – you got through more information in less time, and everyone who was jacked would know sooner or later, anyhow.

"It was sloppy," Julian said. "They should have been more careful with that woman."

"That's for sure." Thurman went back to his hamburgers. Neither of them knew they were talking about two different incidents; they'd tried Thurman on the jack twice; he'd been in contact when the news came in about the killing rampage that ended in Elbe's murder.

"What woman?" Marty said between bites.

Julian and Amelia looked at each other. "You don't know about Gavrila. About Ray."

"Nothing. Is Ray in trouble?"

Julian took a breath and let it out. "He's dead, Marty."

Marty dropped his fork. "Ray?"

"Gavrila's a Hammer of God assassin who was sent down to kill Blaze. She smuggled a gun into an interrogation room and shot him."

"Ray?" he repeated. They'd been friends since graduate school. He was still and pale. "What will I tell his wife?" He shook his head. "I was best man."

"I don't know," Julian said. "You can't just say 'He gave his life for peace,' though it's true, in a way."

"It's also true that I dragged him away from his safe, comfortable office and put him in the way of a lunatic murderer."

Amelia took his hand in both of hers. "Don't worry about it now. Nothing you can do will change anything."

He stared at her blankly. "She's not expecting him back until the fourteenth. So maybe the universe will make it all irrelevant by exploding."

"More likely," Julian said, "he'll wind up just one in a long list of casualties. You might as well wait and announce them all after the shitstorm. After the bloodless revolution."

Thurman came over quietly and served them their hamburgers. He'd overheard enough to realize that they didn't yet know about Elbe's murder, and perhaps the fact that Gavrila was loose.

He decided not to tell them. They would know soon enough. There might be something in the delay that he could turn to his advantage.

Because he wasn't going to just stand around and let these lunatics wreck the military. He had to stop them, and he knew exactly where to go.

Through the migraine haze that kept him from communing with these misdirected idealists, some real information did bleed through. Like the identity of General Blaisdell, and his powerful position.

Blaisdell had the power to neutralize Building 31 with a phone call. Thurman had to get to him, and soon. "Gavrila" might do as a code word.

WHEN WE GOT BACK to our billet, there was a message on the console for Amelia, not me, to call Jefferson immediately on the secure line. He was in his own motel room in Guadalajara, eating dinner. He was wearing a handgun in a shoulder holster, a dart-thrower.

He stared out of the screen. "Sit down, Blaze." She eased herself slowly into the chair in front of the console. "I don't know how secure Building 31 is supposed to be. I don't think it's secure enough.

"Gavrila escaped. She's left a trail of bodies leading to you. She killed two people at the Clinic, and one of them she apparently had tortured into giving up your address."

"No ... oh, no!"

Jefferson nodded. "She got there right after you left. We don't know what Ellie might have told her before she died."

That may have hit me harder than it did her. Amelia had lived with Ellie, but I had lived inside her.

She turned pale and spoke almost without moving her lips. "Tortured her."

"Yes. And went straight to the airport and took the next flight to Portobello. She's somewhere in the city now. You have to assume she knows exactly where you are."

"She couldn't get in here," I said.

"Tell me about it, Julian. She couldn't get out of here, either."

"Yeah, all right. Are you set up to jack?"

He gave me a cautious doctor look. "With you?"

"Of course not. With my platoon. They're standing guard here, and could use a description of the bitch."

"Of course. Sorry."

"You tell them everything you know, and then we'll go to Candi for a debriefing."

"All right.. just remember Gavrila's been jacked with me two-way – "

"What? That was smart."

"We thought she'd be in a straitjacket for the duration. It was the only way to get anything from her, and we got a lot. But you have to assume she'll retain a lot of what she got from Spencer and me."

"She didn't retain my address," Amelia said.

Jefferson shook his head. "I didn't know it, and neither did Spencer, in case. But she knows the broad outline of the Plan."

"Damn. She'll have passed it on."

"Not yet. She has a superior in Washington, but she won't have talked to him yet. She idolizes him, and combining that with her rigid fanaticism... I don't think she'll call until she can say 'Mission accomplished.' "

"So we don't just stay away from her. We catch her and make sure she doesn't talk."

"Nail her into a room."

"Or a box," I said.

He nodded and broke the circuit.

"Kill her?" Amelia said.

"Won't be necessary. Just turn her over to the medicos and she'll sleep past D day." Probably true, I thought, but pretty soon Amelia and I were going to be the only people in this building physically able to kill.

WHAT CANDI TOLD THEM told them was frightening. Not only was Gavrila vicious and well trained and motivated by love and fear of God and His avatar, General Blaisdell – but it would be easier for her to get into Building 31 than Julian would have supposed. Its main defenses were against military attack and mob assault. It didn't even have a burglar alarm.

Of course she first would have to get onto the base. They sent descriptions of her in the two modes they knew of, and copies of her fingerprints and retina scans, to the gate, with strict detention orders – "armed and dangerous."

There were no security cameras in the Guadalajara airport, but there were plenty at Portobello. No one who looked like her had gotten off any of the six flights arriving from Mexico that afternoon and evening, but that could just mean a third disguise. There were a few women her size and shape. Their descriptions also went to the gate.

In fact, as Jefferson might have predicted, in her paranoia Gavrila bought a ticket to Portobello, but didn't use it. Instead, she flew to the Canal Zone disguised as a man. She went down to the waterfront and found a drunken soldier who resembled her, and killed him for his papers and uniform. She left most of the body in a hotel room, first cutting off the hands and head, wrapping them well, and mailing them at the cheapest rate to a fictitious address in Bolivia. She took the monorail to Portobello and was inside the base an hour before they started looking for her.