We'd just collapsed in overstuffed chairs, plates balanced on laps, when the others came downstairs in a group, led by Marty. It was a mob, a dozen of the Twenty as well as five from our crowd. I gave up my chair to Belda and filled a small plate to her specifications, saying hello to everyone, and eventually found a piece of floor in a corner with Amelia and Reza, who had also given up his early advantage to a white-haired woman, Ellie.
Reza poured us each a cup of red wine from an un-labeled jug. "Let me see your ID, soldier." He shook his head, drank half the cup and refilled it. "I'm emigrating," he said.
"Better bring lots of money," Amelia said. There were no jobs for Nortes in Mexico. .
"You guys really have your own personal nano-forge?"
"Boy, security is tight around here," I said.
He shrugged. "I sort of heard Marty tell Ray about it. Stolen?"
"No, an antique." I told him as much of the story as I could. It was frustrating; everything I knew about its history came from being jacked with the Twenty, and there was no way to communicate all the nuance and complexity of its shadowy story. Like reading just the face level of a hypertext.
"So technically, it's not stolen. It does belong to you."
"Well, it's not legal for private citizens to own warm fusion plants, let alone the nanogenesis modules-but St. Bartholomew's was chartered by the army in a grant that hid all kinds of spooky classified things. I guess the records got scrambled, and we're sort of caretaking the old machine until someone like the Smithsonian shows up for it."
"Good of you." He attacked a quarter-chicken. "Would I be wrong in assuming that Marty didn't summon us down here for our sage advice?"
"He'll ask your advice," Amelia said. "He asks for mine all the time." She rolled her eyes.
Reza dipped a chicken leg in jalapenos. "But basically, he's covering his rear. His rear flank."
"And protecting you," I said. "As far as we know, nobody's after Marty yet. But they're certainly after Blaze, for this ultimate weapon she knows all about."
"They killed Peter," she murmured.
Reza looked blank and then shook his head sharply. "Your coworker. Who did?"
"The one who came after me said he was from the army's 'Office of Technology Assessment.' " She shook her head. "He was and he wasn't."
"Spooks?"
"Worse than that," I said. I explained about the Hammer of God.
"So why not just go public?" he said. "You didn't plan for it to stay secret."
"We will," I said, "but the later, the better. Ideally, not until we have all the mechanics converted. Not just Portobello, but everywhere."
"Which will take a month and a half," Amelia said, "if everything goes according to plan. I can imagine how likely that is going to be."
"You won't even get to that stage," Reza said. "All those people able to read minds? I'd bet you a month's alcohol ration it'll blow up in your face before you get the first platoon converted."
"No bet," I said. "As little as I need your ration. The only chance we have is to stay a little ahead of the game. Try to be ready for disaster when it strikes."
A stranger sat down with us and I realized it was Ray, the three quarters of him that was left after cosmetic surgery. "I jacked with Marty." He laughed. "God, what a screwball plan. Go away for a couple of weeks and everybody goes crazy."
"Some are born crazy," Amelia said. "Some achieve craziness. We had craziness thrust upon us."
"Bet that's a quote," Ray said, and crunched down on a carrot. He had a plate full of raw vegetables. "True enough, though. One person dead and how many of us to follow? To take on the unlikely task of improving human nature."
"If you want out," I said, "it better be now."
Ray set his plate down and helped himself to some wine. "No way. I've worked with jacks as long as Marty. We've been playing with this idea longer than you've been playing with girls." He glanced at Amelia and smiled and looked down at his plate.
Marty rescued him by dinging a spoon on a water glass. "We have a vast range of experience and expertise here, and won't often all be together in one room. I think it would be smart this first time, though, to limit ourselves to getting our timetable and other information straight-things the jacked people all know in detail, but the rest of us only in bits and pieces."
"Let's take it backward," Ray said. "We conquer the world. What's the step just before that?"
Marty stoked his chin. "September first."
"Labor Day?"
"It's also Armed Forces Day. The one day in the year when we can have a thousand soldierboys marching down the streets of Washington. Peacefully."
"One of the few days," I added, "when most of the politicians are also in Washington. And more or less in one place, at the parade."
"A lot of what happens before, just before that, is control of the news. 'Spin,' they used to call it.
"Two weeks before, we will have finished humanizing the entire POW compound down in Panama City. It's going to be a miracle-all those unruly, hostile captives transformed into a forgiving, cooperative nation, eager to use their newfound harmony to end the war."
"I see where this is going," Reza said. "We'll never get away with it."
"Okay," Marty said. "Where are we going?"
"You get everybody excited about turning these nasty goomie soldiers into angels, and then you whip aside the magic curtain and say, 'Ta-da! We've done the same thing to all our soldiers. By the way, we're taking over Washington.'"
"Not quite that subtle." Marty rolled up a tortilla with a strange mixture of beans, shredded cheese, and olives. "By the time the public learns about it, it will be 'Oh, by the way, we've taken over Congress and the Pentagon. Stay out of our way while we work this out.'" He bit into the tortilla and shrugged at Reza.
"Six weeks from now," Reza said.
"Six eventful weeks," Amelia said. "Just before I left Texas, I sent the rationale for the doomsday scenario to about fifty scientists-everyone in my address book tagged as a physicist or astronomer."
"That's funny," Asher said. "I wouldn't have gotten it, since I'd be in your book as 'math' or 'old fart.' But you'd think some colleague would have mentioned it by now. How long's it been?"
"Monday," Amelia said.
"Four days." Asher filled a mug with coffee and steaming milk. "Have you contacted any of them?"
"Of course not. I haven't dared to pick up a phone or log on."
"Nothing in the news," Reza said. "Aren't any of your fifty publicity-hungry?"
"Maybe it was intercepted," I said.
Amelia shook her head. "It was from a public phone, a data jack in the Dallas train station; maybe a microsecond download."
"So why hasn't anybody reacted?" Reza said.
She kept shaking her head. "We've been so... so busy. I should have..." She set down her plate and fished through her purse for a phone.
"You're not – " Marty said.
"I'm not calling anybody." She punched a sequence of numbers from memory. "But I never checked the echo of that call! I just assumed everybody got... oh, shit." She turned the handset around. It showed a random jumble of numbers and letters. "The bastard got to my database and scrambled it. In the forty-five minutes it took for me to get to Dallas and make the call."
"It's worse than that, I'm afraid," Mendez said. "I've jacked with him for hour after hour. He didn't do it; didn't think of it."
"Jesus," I said into the silence. "Could it have been someone in our department? Someone who could decrypt your files and cream them?" She'd been keying through the text. "Look at this." There was nothing but gibberish until the last word: