She grunted, "Thanks. You okay now?"

"I'm fine. Considering."

"Then don't consider. If that's what keeps you from being fine, don't do it."

"I'm fine," I said.

"Good. 'Cause I'll need your assistance on weapons when we get there."

"Get where?"

"Where we're going." She pointed to the map, to the largest, darkest red spot. "I want to show you what an infestation looks like today."

I watched the ground slide past beneath us. The countryside grew ever more rugged. The rolling hills turned into rocky crests and Lizard kept pulling the chopper higher and higher above each advancing ridge. Soon, we were swooping and swerving through steep canyons of brush and pine. The slopes were dry and brown, and close enough to touch.

"Why are you staying so low?" I asked.

"I don't like being tracked."

"Tracked? Worms don't have the technology-"

"Hmph." She just grunted.

I didn't pursue the subject. After a moment, I said, "I suppose you want me to thank you."

"You suppose wrong. I don't care what you do."

"Well, you came after me."

"No, I didn't. You were just a stopover." We lifted up to the crest of a ridge, then dropped down the opposite side. It was like riding a roller coaster. My stomach was about two loops behind. "This is what I came to do. I do this as many times a week as I can get fuel and armament."

She said, "You still have an inflated idea of your own importance, Jim. You think we care about you. Truth is, you're not worth the fuel to make a special trip." She looked at me. "Really."

"Then why did you bother?"

"You had one of our vans. I was curious. Who were you? How did you get it? Where were you going with it? According to our satellite tracking, you were headed straight into the thickest worm infestation on the North American continent. We had you figured for a renegade. We almost pushed the button on you a week ago."

"Huh? How?"

"You have to ask?" she said. "Those vans have satellite phone links, right? Your computer was always in constant communication with the network. The network always knew where you were."

"I thought I disconnected the links."

"You did. But that's a military van. It just switched over to one of its backups."

"That's not possible! I disconnected every link on the schematics."

"That's right, you did. You got every transceiver that shows on the schematics. That's one of the reasons we thought you were a renegade, delivering arms to worms."

I didn't notice the second part of that statement, I was still realizing the implications of the first. "Those vans have secret channels?"

Lizard grinned at me. "Do you like secrets?"

I shrugged. "Not particularly. All my experience with secrets is that they're a damn nuisance."

She said, "You're right. They are." Then she asked, "Do you want to know the greatest American military secret of the past twenty years?"

My impulse was to answer yes, then I thought about it. That took about ten seconds. I said, "I don't think so."

"Actually, it doesn't matter," Lizard said. "Because it's not a secret any more."

"All right, I'll bite. What isn't?"

"This: every piece of military equipment manufactured in this country in the past twenty years has been a Trojan horse."

"Huh?"

"It's in the microchips. There are certain extra circuits-a piece in this chip, a piece in that chip-they look like they're supposed to do something else. Most of the time they do. Except every so often, they emit a random piece of low-level electronic noise. It's a spurious thing, nearly impossible to trace."

"I remember reading about that. The Israelis noticed it. They said the electronics were flawed. And we acknowledged that there was a problem with spurious signals."

"Right-except the problem wasn't the signals. It was the fact that they weren't supposed to be detectable. Those signals were coded responses to high-level electronic queries from stationary satellites. For twenty years, we've had the ability to scan the entire planet, querying the weapons we've built to let us know where they are. Not only weapons we've built, but weapons other people have built that we've supplied parts for. We've been doing it almost since the very first serial number was coded into a chip. The day that it became possible for chips to identify themselves, the technology became practical. The weapon listens for its own serial number or its category code. When it hears it, it responds within twenty-four minutes. It gives a distinct electronic beep or buzz, on one of several hundred randomly chosen microwave channels. Most receivers tune out those signals automatically. Most technicians have never even heard our noises except as static. "

"But-why? I mean, I can see that there is some value in tracking our own equipment, but it seems such a cumbersome way."

"Actually, it's all automatic. And you're looking at it from the wrong angle. It wasn't to track our own weaponry as much as it was to track weaponry we'd manufactured or supplied parts for. Do you know that the United States was the number one supplier of military hardware for over sixty years? It's an incredible intelligence advantage to know where all your weapons are."

"That's unbelievable!"

She grinned. She looked absolutely delighted. "That's its virtue. The whole idea is too outrageous to believe. The one time we had a security leak, the other side's intelligence refused to accept the validity of the information. They thought it was some kind of ploy, because there was no confirming evidence at all."

I was a little confused. "But if we had that kind of power, that kind of advantage, why did we still lose the war in Pakistan? The other side was using captured weapons, as well as equipment they'd purchased third- and fourth-party. Didn't the system work?"

"The system worked perfectly," Lizard said. "We were able to track whole divisions of the enemy by nothing more than routine queries of the field weapons in the hands of the infantry. It was a flawless demonstration." She looked positively cheerful as she recounted. "The problem was, we couldn't use the intelligence without the risk of exposing the whole game. So we never released any of that intelligence except when we had confirmation from an additional source, say a satellite photo. And most of our spy satellites were being knocked down as fast as we were putting them up. So we couldn't use that intelligence. It was too big a secret," Lizard said. "We had to save it for a war that directly endangered the existence of the United States. It was that powerful a strategic advantage."

"Um," I said. Then, "You said it isn't a secret any more. What happened?"

"Oh, about three months ago, some of our Fourth World allies tried to land some divisions in the Gulf of Mexico. Near Houston. They called it an army of Economic Liberation."

"Huh? I never heard about it."

"Not too many people did. A very funny thing happened. Their rifles blew up. Their boats sank. Their planes came apart in the air. Their missiles exploded. Their tanks melted. Their communications failed. There weren't too many survivors."

"Huh?"

"That was the rest of the secret. If you can program a chip to identify itself when it receives a specific signal, you can also program it to destroy itself when it receives another specific signal. We've had the ability for twenty years to disarm or disable at least a third of-the world's military equipment-any individual weapon or any category of weapon, worldwide or limited to a specific area.