“Thanks. These bastards would dick over their own mothers for a buck,” Wheeler was less circumspect in front of the AID than his partner, but his voice held no particular rancor, just acceptance. And the observation, although the biology was necessarily metaphorical, was simple truth.

“So, you got any advice on the best way to do this?” Karnstadt asked the AID.

“I am not programmed to plan killing,” it said distastefully.

“Wait a minute. You can tell if these guys are on their phones or head-thingamajigs or whatever. How many of them are down in there with their whatzis on?” Wheeler pointed downward into the building.

“Four hundred thirty-seven,” the machine answered.

“Any of those the same as the ones that showed up to that meeting?”

“No.”

“How many are in the meeting, and where’s that?”

A ghost-transparent hologram of the building came into being in front of the two men. Built with antigravity technology, it was the typical Indowy squared-off soda straw. Troops from early in the Posleen war had compared some Indowy cities to an order of french fries, only organized. Notably, the comparison had come from troops who had spent the prior three months on a near-exclusive diet of MREs.

This particular french fry had a red dot in one corner, almost a third of the way down. The dot blinked wickedly as the AID spoke, “Two hundred nineteen targets are in room fifty-seven point twenty-five point twenty-five.”

“Uh, yeah. So can you show dots for the rest of them?”

Flares of red coalesced into fine mists of dots grouped together in various locations throughout the building.

“Which one has the most lumped together?” Karnstadt asked.

“Waitaminute,” Wheeler broke in while the AID obediently started one group blinking. “If we whack the guys in the meeting room, by the time we get to another group, all the guys in the building will have scattered. You can’t keep this shit quiet — no, I mean the screaming you can, but these little fuckers will be able to communicate. If we go to that lump first, then the guys in the meeting will have scattered, along with everybody else. This ain’t gonna work.”