Glasshouse

Fiore, to give him his due, has a cool enough head to do exactly as I tell him with no hesitation and no hysterics. Or maybe he just knows exactly what he can expect if he doesn't obey. He can't be under any illusions about how hated he is, can he?

"Forward one pace, then hands behind back," I say. He steps forward. I have to stretch to keep the knife around his neck, but I reach down with my free hand and follow his right arm round. Now is the moment of danger—if he were to kick straight back while blocking with his left shoulder he could hurt me badly and probably get away. But I'm betting Fiore knows very little indeed about serious one-on-one physical mayhem, and the bag over his head should keep him disoriented long enough for me to do this. I step to one side, reach into my pocket with my right hand until I find what I'm after, then squeeze the contents of the tube over his hands and fingers. Cyanoacrylate glue—the librarian's field-expedient handcuffs. "Don't move your hands," I tell him.

"What is it—" He stops. Of course he can't help moving his hands and the stuff flows into small cracks. It's less viscous than water but it polymerizes in seconds. I move the knife round to the side of his neck and examine my handiwork. He might be able to get his hands apart if he's willing to leave skin behind, but he won't be able to take me by surprise while he's doing it.

"Okay, we're now going to take three slow steps forward. Yes, you can shuffle. I'll tell you when to stop—easy, easy, stop!"

I stop him in the middle of an open patch of floor. I need to think. He's breathing hoarsely inside the improvised hood, and he stinks of fear-sweat. Any moment now, he'll realize that I can't let him live, then he'll be uncontrollable. I've got maybe twenty seconds—

"When my husband says * * * I can't hear him," I say conversationally. "What does that mean?"

"It means you're infected with Curious Yellow." He sounds oddly placid.

"You ran off a duplicate of yourself as a guard to see who was coming in here," I tell him. "That was smart. Were you afraid I was using the A-gate?"

"Yes," he says tersely.

"It's immune to the strain I'm infected with, isn't it?" I ask.

I can feel his muscles tensing. "Yes," he says reluctantly.

"And Yourdon didn't insist it was locked to your netlinks?" I ask, tensing as I gamble everything on the right answer.

He doesn't give it to me verbally, but he grunts and begins to pull his hands apart and I know I'm right, but I also know I've got about three seconds left. So I step in close behind him and run my right hand down his chest, caressing, and he freezes when I get to his crotch. A moment of relief—he's anatomically orthohuman, and male. I grab his balls and squeeze viciously. He jackknifes forward, speechless and gasping, almost knocking me over with the violence of it, and the bag goes flying. But that's okay, because a moment later I grab his hair and while he's preoccupied with the terrible breath-sucking pain, I pull his head up and run the knife blade smoothly through his carotid artery and thyroid cartilage, just below the hyoid bone.

See, the difference between me and Fiore is that I don't enjoy killing, but I know how to do it. Whereas Fiore gets off on control fantasies and watching his score whores lynch lovers, but it didn't occur to him to tell the assembler to restore him holding a weapon, and it took him almost twenty seconds to realize that I was going to have to kill him regardless of anything he did or said. Basically, Fiore is your bureaucrat-type killer who runs push-button experiments by remote control, while I'm—

I blank again.

THE civil war lasts two gigasecs, nearly sixty-four years by the reckoning of long-lost Urth. It's probably still raging in some far-flung corners of human space. When the longjump network was shattered in an attempt to firewall the damage, it split the interstellar net into disjoint domains separated by lightspeed communications lag. Isolated pockets of Curious Yellow are probably still ru

I spend my first gigasec among the Cats being a tank. There's very little that is human left in me once I get a clear picture of what's going on. It's not hard to generalize from the tales of random atrocities committed against people who specialize in the past; besides, the gigasecond of nonexistence I spent aboard Grateful for Duration is a small death in its own right—time enough for children to mature as adults, for spouses to despair, mourn, and move on. Even if by some miracle my family hasn't been targeted for liquidation because of my career, they're still lost to me. That sort of experience tends to make one bitter. Bitter enough to give up on humanity as a bad job, bitter enough to experiment with other, more sinister, identities.

About my body: I mass approximately two tons and stand three meters high at the shoulder. My nervous system is nonbiological—I'm ru

As a callout sign I adopt the name liddellhart. The other Cats don't know what this signifies. Maybe that explains why over the bloody course of four hundred megs and sixteen engagements I end up being promoted to template-senior sergeant and replicated a hundredfold. Unlike Loral and some of the others, I don't freeze up when there's a problem. I don't experience shock and dissociation when I realize we've just decapitated twelve thousand civilians and shoved their heads into a tactical assembler that is silently failing to back them up. I do what's necessary. I don't hesitate when it's necessary to sacrifice six of me in a suicide attack to buy time for the rest of the intrusion team to withdraw. I don't feel anything much except for icy hatred, and while I appreciate in the abstract that I'm sick, I'm not willing to ask for medical attention that might impair my ability to fight. Nor do our shadowy directors, who are watching over us all, see fit to override me.

For the first gigasec, we pursue the war by traditional methods. We find half-forgotten T-gates leading into polities under the control of Curious Yellow. We go through, shoot up the assemblers they're using as immigration firewalls, establish a toehold, fight our way in, install sanitized A-gates of our own, and forcibly run the civilian population through them to remove the Curious Yellow taint from their heads. The ones who survive usually thank us afterward.