look terrible.” She pulled herself up the stairs with cane and banister.
Marty looked as bad as she said, having just spent hours jacked with McLaughlin going over all the ins and outs, every possible thing that could go wrong with the POW aspect of “the caper,” as McLaughlin called it. He’d be on his own most of the time.
There would be no problem as long as orders were followed, since the orders called for all of the POWs to be isolated for two weeks. Most of the Americans didn’t like jacking with them anyhow.
After two weeks, starting right after Julian’s platoon moved in on Building 31, McLaughlin would take a walk and disappear, leaving the POWs’ humanization an irreversible fact of life. Then they would be connected with Portobello and prepare for the next stage.
Marty flopped down on the unmade bed in his small room and stared at the ceiling. It was stucco, and the crusted swirls of it made fantastic patterns in the shifting light that threaded across the room from the top of the shutters that cut off the view of the street; light reflected from the windshields and glittering canopies of the cars that crawled by in the street below, noisily unaware that their old world was about to die. If everything went right. Marty stared at the shifting shadows and catalogued all the things that could go wrong. And then their old world would die, literally.
How could they keep the plan secret, against all odds? If only the humanization didn’t take so long. But there was no way around it.
Or so he thought.
* * *
i’d been looking forward to seeing the Saturday Night Special crowd again, and there couldn’t have been a more welcome setting for the reunion, as tired as we were of road food. The dining table at la Florida was a crowded landscape of delights: a platter of jumbled sausages and another of roasted chickens, split and steaming; a huge salmon lying open on a plank; three colors of rice and bright bowls of potatoes and corn and beans; stacks of bread and tortillas. Bowls of salsa, chopped peppers, and guacamole. Reza was loading a plate when I came in; we exchanged greetings in silly gringo Spanish and I followed his example.
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 unlabeled 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 nanoforge?”
“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 classifed 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 jalapeños. “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