Rogue Clone

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

A fighter carrier and two destroyers floated just a few miles away, guarding the broadcast discs that orbited New Columbia. The carrier brought a compliment of Tomcats, Hornets, and Harriers. The fighters flew in groups of three as they buzzed back and forth, “inspecting and protecting” the solid lane of traffic that stretched from the edge of the atmosphere to the discs. The authorities stepped up security in some areas of New Columbia and evacuated others. After considering the attack on New Gibraltar, the Pentagon decided to evacuate Safe Harbor.

“You’re flying into Safe Harbor?” Colonel McAvoy had asked when I told him my plans. “They’re evacuating the planet. The only people there are going to be Marines and looters. Come to think of it”—he brightened as he thought about this—“you’ll fit right in.”

As I glided out of the reception disc, I saw the line of ships leaving New Columbia. This was a mishmash that included military transports.

From what I had read, New Columbia had a population of over fifty million civilians. Looking down this seemingly endless line of evacuation ships, I would have believed that an entire population was on its way out. Big ships, small ships, just floating there waiting for a turn to enter the Network. As I flew toward the atmosphere, I took one final look at the line of ships. It looked like a kite string holding the discs in place. At the top of the line, the electrical field created by the broadcast discs flashed bright white against the eternal blackness. That distant flash burned ghosts into my eyes, but the ghosts faded quickly.

I traveled toward the planet at the intolerably slow pace of three thousand miles per hour, aware that below me were Marine, Army, and Air Force cannons that tracked my every move. Any suspicious deviation from my specified flight course would be fatal.

By the time I reached New Columbian space, my ship had been scanned so many times that the security computers even knew which of my bones had pins in them. The only worry the military types had about me was that I might be an enemy scout.

“Starliner A-ten-twenty-thirty-four, this is Safe Harbor spaceport. Come in.”

“This is Starliner A-ten-twenty-thirty-four,” I said.

“Starliner A-ten-twenty-thirty-four, we are evacuating this planet.”

“So I’ve been told,” I said.

“I show that you are a Marine,” the controller said. “Please confirm.”

“Colonel Wayson Harris, Unified Authority Marines Corps,” I said.

“You have chosen to use a civilian landing facility, Colonel. Are you aware that there is a Marine base with a landing field just outside of town?”

“I am aware of that,” I said. I was also aware that that base would be a prime target once the Confederates arrived. I wanted my ship in one piece.

“We can offer you landing assistance. Please be advised that this spaceport will close within the next three hours. All traffic control will close at that time. Should you choose to leave your ship here, this facility cannot be held responsible for your ship.”

“Got it.”

“Can’t talk you out of this, can I, Colonel?” the man asked.

“You got a problem down there?” I asked.

“Yeah. I can’t spare the men to check in your ship. Everyone I have is busy sending up transports. I don’t know if you noticed that little line of ships leaving home.”

“Of course I noticed it,” I said. I also noticed how absolutely vulnerable these transports would be if a couple of GCF dreadnoughts happened to appear, but I did not mention it. Shoot a few cannons straight down this line of traffic, and you would likely kill half the population of New Columbia. But judging by the pinpoint tactics the invaders used in their siege of Gateway Outpost, I did not think they were after civilian casualties.

On the other hand, a billion casualties would interest Bill “the Butcher” Patel. Patel was a radical separatist from the Cygnus Arm who was not constrained by morals or religious beliefs.

The line of transports did not extend from the edge of the atmosphere down to the spaceport. In the full gravitational pull of the atmosphere, transports would not be able to support themselves in a slow-moving line without burning tons of fuel.

I flew down through an evening sky, penetrating a thick layer of clouds as my approach slowed to a few hundred miles per hour. The weather had turned bad over Safe Harbor. Mercury-colored clouds formed a washboard ceiling over the city. Lightning illuminated pockets in the clouds with dazzling flashes. Rain fell in heavy drops that burst across my windows. Below me the city was dark. Not a light shown in the forest of skyscrapers that covered Safe Harbor. No street lights shined. The giant billboards on the sides of the buildings were invisible in the blackness.

The city may have looked lifeless, but the air above it fairly bristled with movement. I looked up through the top corner of my rain-spattered windshield and saw the darting profiles of three F-19s passing above me like shadows against the steel wool clouds. Beneath me, three more crossed my path.

The Marines, the Army, and the Air Force all maintained bases around the city of Safe Harbor. Unlike Gateway, New Columbia was a well-protected planet. The Marines of New Gibraltar Outpost had only cannons to defend themselves from attack. Here, on New Columbia, there were squadrons of F-19 Falcons, and the Navy had capital ships guarding the planet from above. The invasion of Gibraltar had been a massacre. An invasion of Safe Harbor would be a battle.

Against the jungle of shadows that was the city of Safe Harbor, the spaceport looked like an eruption of light. Two lines of strobe lanterns clicked on and off along the runway, creating dashes of midnight-blue. In the distance, white glare poured out of a row of hangars at the edge of the runway. Lights shone around the outside of the air terminal and more light spilled from the windows.

I landed the Starliner on the edge of the runway and coasted toward the hangars. Two runway workers placed it in a security hangar. I asked if it would be safe, and they said it would. “As safe as anything else on the planet,” one of them amended. The hangar had been filled with private craft just one day earlier. Now my ship was the only one. The hangar crew drove me to the main terminal of the spaceport in silence.

A few weeks earlier and in another life, I had sat in this very building trying to distract myself as I waited for a flight. Back then I sensed ambition in the air. Safe Harbor attracted businessmen and tourists, people who were glad to travel or glad to clinch the next big deal. This time I sensed something very different—depression and panic.

In the terminal, long lines of people sat silently clutching their belongings. The richest people, able to buy their way to the front of the line, had left first. The last of the New Columbian elite were probably in the queue of transports I passed on my way down from the discs. The people I saw in the spaceport now were the poor and the middle class—people with families and suitcases; little girls with dolls and boys with video games. They formed lines that snaked back and forth the entire length of the lobby—rows of people in perfectly straight lines standing so crowded together that the lines disappeared altogether. I heard sneezing and sobbing and a few whispers, but this population was mostly in shock.

Many people wore damp clothing. Had the spaceport been its normal chilly temperature, these people would have caught colds, but the sheer numbers overloaded the air-conditioning, and the atmosphere was hot inside the terminal and the air smelled of sweat.

“Where do you think you’re going?” a Marine in combat armor asked as I reached the main entrance. I flashed him the newly-minted identification card that Colonel McAvoy gave me. It identified me as “Colonel Wayson Harris.”

The man looked at it and snapped to attention. “My apologies, sir! The private was not aware that he was speaking with an officer.”

He saluted.

I saluted back.

“Carry on, Marine,” I said as I stepped around the boy and left, glad that I was no longer a mere grunt. Stepping out of the terminal, I entered a cold, wet night. The rain fell continuously. Puddles covered the sidewalk leading away from the terminal building. A line of streetlights stretched as far as the parking garage. Beyond that, a shroud of inky darkness hid everything from view. Before stepping out from under the awning, I looked into the sky and sighed. I did not know who I might meet in that darkness, but it did not matter much—this time I was armed.

I stole a car. I didn’t have any other options. Supposing that a city-wide evacuation and naval attack might hurt their business, the car rental agencies had closed for the night …and the next night, and the night after that. In honor of Billy the Butcher, I found a sporty little Paragon in the parking lot and wired it. Patel’s Paragon was orange and this one was red, but they both had the same shoehorn-shaped chassis.

I did not bother myself with fables about returning the car or justifications about the owner of the car having cast it away. I needed wheels, this car looked nice. Once I had the engine going, I threaded my way though the spaceport parking lot and drove into town.

There was something eerie about traveling through an abandoned city that reminded me of swimming underwater. It might have been the emptiness or the silence or the lack of movement. The electricity was out almost everywhere. Without their red, yellow, and green glow, the traffic lights looked like misshapen trees. I did not care for crowds, but I found this emptiness unsettling.

Driving down dark streets lined by lifeless buildings, my isolation seemed to amplify itself. I looked into storefronts that were as dark as caves. It wasn’t just that the lights were off—life itself was gone. It was like climbing up an escalator that has been turned off. For psychological reasons, climbing dead escalators seems harder than walking up stairs. It feels like civilization has failed.

I drove past the movie house where I had met Jimmy Callahan and watched The Battle for Little Man . The entrance was a black hole. The holotoriums would be empty and the projection rooms dark. It seemed unnatural.

Jimmy Callahan, I mused, with his bulging muscles and his big, big talk, would be one of the last men on New Columbia. The Mogats and the Secessionists may have chased everybody else away, but Callahan was still on the planet, right where I left him, locked up in a Marine base brig. The irony was that the very spot where I placed him for safekeeping would soon be the most dangerous location on the planet.

I was driving through uptown Safe Harbor and turned a corner. The block in front of me was completely demolished. For a moment I thought the attack must have begun, and then I recognized where I was. This was the neighborhood that Patel bombed. Only three weeks had passed since that bombing …two weeks and an era.

Something far more dangerous than Billy the Butcher Patel was coming to New Columbia. Who would have believed it? Jimmy Callahan who had talked so big and gotten himself into so much trouble might just be the key to winning the war.

I expected to see looters hiding in shadows, moving through alleys, and breaking into buildings. Instead, I ran into roadblocks. The Army was out in force. I turned a corner and saw a chrome and titanium barrier stretched across the road. A string of bright blue lights winked on and off sequentially across the top of their barricade. Five soaked and miserable-looking soldiers in camouflaged ponchos flagged me down. They had M27s strapped over their shoulders, and there were machine-gun nests on either side of their barricade.

I stopped and lowered my window.

“Nice car,” a soldier said as he approached. He was a corporal. He was a clone. He had brown hair, broad shoulders and a round chest. He was short and squat, and powerful. He and I might have been raised in the same orphanage for all I knew. Rain poured down on him. Drops hit his poncho and burst.

“You mind if I don’t get out?” I asked. “I don’t want to get the upholstery wet.”

He smiled and nodded. “I don’t suppose you have papers for that car?” he asked.

“How about these?” I handed him my military ID.

He took the card and read it over several times. “Colonel,” he said, acknowledging my identity, but the barrier did not open. “Our scanner says this car belongs to James Walker. I don’t suppose you can prove that he loaned you this vehicle?”

“No, Corporal, I can’t,” I said.

“Then we have a bit of a problem, Colonel. We’ve been sent out to prevent looting. That includes the borrowing of cars.”

Colonel McAvoy had issued me a pistol. I had it under my car seat. I could have shot the corporal. “How far is Fort Washington from here?”

The corporal’s expression tightened. Fort Washington was the local Marine base. If I was indeed a colonel in the Marines, I should have known how to get there.

“I just flew in, Corporal,” I said. “Fleet Headquarters dispatched me to see what I can do to prepare this planet for an attack.”

“I heard air traffic was stacked up for hours,” the corporal said, a dubious note in his tone.

“Getting out is a problem,” I said. “There’s a line all the way up to the disc and more people waiting in the spaceport. Coming in is a breeze. Who wants to go to a planet that’s about to get smashed?”

That seemed to satisfy him. The corporal smiled and nodded. “Sir, I can’t let you pass in that car.”

“I understand,” I said.

“Tell you what, sir. You park the car over there,” he said, pointing to a nearby alley, “and I’ll give you a ride to Washington in our jeep.”

“You don’t mind?” I asked.

“Base Command, Base Command, this is post fifteen in Sector A, come in,” he said into an interLink microphone that was attached to his poncho. He must have received the response through an unseen earpiece.

“I have an incoming Marine colonel looking for Fort Washington. Requesting permission to drive him.”

He put a hand over his ear to block outside sounds. “That is correct. I said a Marine colonel …yes, that would be the equivalent of colonel in the Marine Corps.”

The corporal bent down again and said, “Okay, I’m cleared to drive you to the base.”

“I appreciate it,” I said.

Then, lowering his voice just shy of a whisper, he added, “Leave the keys in the Paragon …just in case.”

I couldn’t really leave the keys in the ignition since I had hot-wired the car. “You know anything about hot-wiring cars?”

“No sir,” the corporal said.

“I’ll leave the ignition running,” I said. I turned the car around, backed into the nearest alley, and stepped out into the rain. The downpour was hard and steady, but the air was warm. Sitting in an open-air bungalow on an evening like this could have been very pleasant, I thought, assuming you had the right company.

The corporal led me to his jeep, a sturdy little five-seat auto with a hard top. It did not have mounted machine guns or a missile carriage—clearly the Army did not expect to face ground forces.

I was not so confident. Once out of the rain, I put my pistol in my ruck and pulled out my M27. I grabbed two extra clips and hid them in my jacket.

“You expecting a war?” the corporal asked as he climbed in.

“Better safe than specked,” I said.

“Colonel, we have road blocks set up every eight blocks across Safe Harbor. Intel ran a scan. There may be a couple thousand looters out there, but the last thing they want is to mess with us.”

“You’re probably right,” I said. “This just makes me feel a little more relaxed.” I patted the M27.

“Sort of a security blanket, sir?”

“Ever been in combat, Corporal?”

“Mostly police actions.”

“That’s good,” I said. “You’ll know what I am talking about soon enough.” Dead is dead. It doesn’t matter if you’re shot by a scared looter or a separatist sniper.

The strange sensation of driving through empty streets never went away. We drove through the financial district with its tall skyscrapers, the light of our headlights reflecting on marble and glass façades the way it might reflect on the surface of a still lake. I kept looking for men in suits. We drove past a row of apartment complexes and grocery stores, and I automatically checked the buildings for lights. The only time we saw people was when we passed roadblocks.

The soldiers would see us, slow us for visual inspection, and salute us on our way.

“Spotted any looters, sir?” the corporal asked. I didn’t answer.

The most haunting thing we passed was a LAWSONS convenience store. These were stores that never closed. Lights were always supposed to be on in these stores and the doors were never supposed to be locked. Yet here was a LAWSONS that was as dark and deserted as any dance club on Sunday. Even the LAWSONS sign over the door was dark.

The corporal drove like a maniac. He streaked down the wet streets so quickly that he could not possibly have swerved in time to avoid hitting another car had one appeared. When he came around corners, he did not slow down, causing the jeep to drift more than it turned.

“You know, I’ve been stationed in Safe Harbor for two years now and I’ve seen more of the town over the last five hours than the last twenty-four months. It’s not a bad place, really …a little dark, maybe.”

“Did you see the feed from New Gibraltar?” I asked.

“I’d like to see them try something like that around here. McCord would send one thousand fighters and shoot their asses down,” the corporal said.

“From what I hear, the Separatists only had four ships at Gateway,” I said.

“Yeah?” the corporal said.

“And from what I understand, they have over five hundred ships in their fleet.”

The corporal frowned. The dim green glow of the dashboard lights lit up the lower half of his face. It lit his bottom lip, the bottom of his nose, and the folds of skin under his eye sockets. The strange lighting made his expression grim. “Five hundred ships? I didn’t know that.”

The entrance to Fort Washington Marine base was up ahead. You did not need to know military tactics to see that it was also on high alert. Bright lights lit the main gate to the base. Red strobes flashed on and off on the half dozen radar dishes that spun around the wall of the fort. Unlike New Gibraltar, which looked like a modernized version of an old medieval castle, Fort Washington was a sprawling campus that took up several square miles.

Looking beyond the gate, I saw the taillights of jeeps rushing between buildings. They drove by headlight only. The streetlights were out. There were no lights on the outsides of the buildings. Throughout the grounds, the only bubbles of light were emplacements for long-range cannons capable of hitting ships outside the atmosphere.

Crazy driver that he was, I expected the corporal to race up to the front gate and screech to a stop. He showed more common sense than that. With the base on alert and armed guards all around the entrance, the corporal slowed to a crawl and coasted to the gate.

The guard who approached the jeep did not draw his M27, but I could sense a dozen other weapons pointed in our direction.

“Corporal,” the guard said.

“Just bringing you one of your own,” the corporal said, nodding toward me.

I handed the guard my ID. “I brought in a local thug named Jimmy Callahan about a week ago. Your MPs have been keeping him and a couple of buddies in the brig for safekeeping,” I said.

The guard walked around the jeep for a better look at me. He read my ID, considered it, and reread. “Wait here, sir,” he said and went into his booth to phone command. When he hung up the phone, he handed me my card and saluted. A moment later the gate went up, and the other guards saluted as we drove by.

The corporal may have been Army, but he knew his way around this Marine base. He skirted the motor pool and the barracks and brought me right to the administration building. I thanked the man and he saluted me, then he drove off.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Jimmy Callahan and his two bodyguards sat in an interrogation room. Both of Callahan’s stooges smoked, he didn’t. The three of them sat without speaking to each other. Callahan did not even look in the other boys’ direction. He occasionally reached up to smooth his hair as he considered his various options.

I watched this scene on a security screen in the chief ’s office hoping for a clue about Callahan’s general mood. The man was a sphinx for nearly five minutes, then he gave me a clear insight by staring into a supposedly hidden camera and sticking his middle finger out at it.

Two MPs escorted me to the interrogation room and locked the door behind me.

“You’re a colonel now?” Callahan asked as he turned to look at me. “You must have run away from something really big this time. Know what I mean?” He bobbed his head in that arrogant way as he spoke. Behind him, Silent Tommy and Limping Eddie, the two bodyguards I maimed right before the explosions, stubbed out their cigarettes and sat like statues. They did not seem as happy to see me as their boss was.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

“Allow me to explain. You run away from the battle at Little Man and they make you lieutenant. Now, in two short weeks, you’re a specking colonel. What did you do, run away from New Gibraltar?”

It became very apparent that there were two Jimmy Callahans. The first, the one speaking to me at this moment, was a petulant prick who thought he had the world by the balls. The other was a scared little kid.

“That’s clever,” I said. “Don’t you think that’s clever?” I asked Silent Tommy. He did not answer. “How about you, Eddie? Don’t you think Jimmy’s joke is clever?”

“See, now, Harris, they don’t want to answer because they’re scared of you. They don’t have anything you want. Me …I have information you want, so I’m not scared. In fact, I think it’s about time you did me some favors.”

“Really?” I asked, sitting on the edge of the table in the center of the room. “You don’t think saving your ass from Patel was enough?”

Callahan’s mouth bent in a comical frown that took the corners of his lips halfway down his chin. “I’ve been thinking about that, and I don’t think Patel was after me. I think he was after you. Know what I mean? I never did anything to Billy. What would he have against me?”

“Well, there is this little issue about you fingering him to the Marines.” I said.

“You cannot possibly be talking about yourself, Harris? You’re not the Marines. Hell, you’re a specking deserter.” Callahan smiled at his own joke and flexed his biceps. “And as for saving my ass, who says that you saved it? Tommy and Eddie were there. They came out just fine ’cept what you did to them.”

Tommy’s jaw was wired shut and mending. Eddie was on crutches. Both my doing.

“And where did I end up?” Callahan continued. “I ended up in Fort frigging Washington, the biggest shithole on New Columbia. I figure you did nothing for me. The way I figure it, you owe me.”

“Sounds like you have it all figured out,” I said. I hopped off of the table and started for the door.

“Where are you going?” Callahan asked.

“Didn’t you hear?” I asked. “Your buddies from the Confederate Arms are getting ready to bag this planet. Should be quite a reunion. Their fleet will bombard this base until it’s defenseless, then they’ll probably send down commandoes to nuke it. That’s what they did on Gateway. Of course, Billy the Butcher probably didn’t have an old pal like you that he wanted to bust out of Gateway Outpost.

“You did know that they evacuated New Columbia?” I asked.

“So I hear,” Callahan said.

“If I were you, Jimmy, I’d be thinking about how I might get off this planet. They planted hot bombs around the base on Gateway,” I said. “You know what that means? It means that most of the jarheads who were in that building are alive and melting at this very moment. Mop them with a sponge and you’ll pull off their skin. And those boys were wearing radiation-proof armor.

“The lucky ones got cooked on the spot. They weren’t wearing armor, just like you’re not wearing armor. Lucky you. You will probably die just like that.” I snapped my fingers. “One moment you’re praying, ‘God, please don’t let them nuke me.’ The next minute, you’re face to face with God and he says, ‘About that prayer …’”

“What do you want?” Callahan asked, all humor drained from his voice.

“Where is the GC Fleet?”

“How the speck should I know?” Callahan said.

“You said you knew.”

“I asked what I would get if I led you to that fleet,” Callahan said. “I didn’t say I knew where it was. I just wanted to know what it would be worth to me.”

“You wanted to show off.”

“What?” Callahan thought about this. “Yeah …maybe.”

“What is the Hinode Fleet?” I asked.

“Never heard of it,” Callahan said.

“Right before the attack on New Gibraltar, the Intelligence Network intercepted signals referring to the Hinode Fleet. Is that what your Mogat buddies call the Galactic Central Fleet?”

“I don’t know,” Callahan said.

“How do the Japanese figure into this?” I asked, feeling more than a little frustrated. “Are they in with the Mogats?”

“Who the speck are the Japanese?” Callahan asked.

“Refugees from Ezer Kri,” I said. “Are they part of the Confederate Arms?”

“How should I know?” Callahan asked. He sounded frustrated and his face turned red.

“How about your pal Billy the Butcher?” I asked. By this time I was yelling. The mood in the room was thick with anger, and I wanted to hit Callahan. “Where is Patel?”

“I don’t know,” Callahan shouted. Then, lowering his voice, he said, “Someone else always arranged our meetings.”

Finally I was getting somewhere. “Who was that?”

Callahan sat slumped in his chair when Limping Eddie mumbled, “Tell him how to find the supply guy.”

Callahan looked at him and a smile stretched across his face. “I like that.” Then he turned back to me. “You could visit Batt, he’s your best bet. If anyone can answer your questions, it’s Batt.”

“Who is Batt?” I asked, the calm returning to my voice.

“Batt is Bartholomew Wingate,” Callahan said. “He introduced me to Patel.”

“Mogat or Confederate?” I asked.

“Neither,” Callahan said, the swagger back in his smile. “He’s one of yours. I guess patriotism isn’t his bag. Know what I mean?”

“He’s a punk like you?” I asked.

Callahan’s smile brightened. “Oh, he’s much bigger than me. You might say he has his own army.”

“I thought you had one, too?” I said.

“I do,” Callahan said, “but it’s not as good as Batt’s. He’s got a lot more clout around here than me. He knows everything and everybody.”

“Great,” I said throwing my hands up in frustration. “Only we can’t find Batt. We just evacuated the planet.” Players like that vanish into the woodwork the moment you look the other way.

“Oh, you don’t have to worry about that.” Now Callahan sounded almost gleeful. “He’s still in Safe Harbor. He’s just up the road. He’s the commander at the Army base.”

“Let me get this straight,” Lieutenant Colonel Bernie Phillips said. “Your prisoner claims that Colonel Wingate is selling supplies to the Confederates?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Bullshit.”

We sat in an observation room in the brig. Behind Phillips, the video screens showed the room in which Callahan and his bodyguards sat idly waiting for me. I could only hope that the colonel did not glance at the screen. At the moment, Callahan was flexing his biceps and kissing them. Silent Tommy responded with a hand-gesture that meant “go speck yourself.” This only encouraged Callahan. He responded by flexing both arms at once.

“How well do you know Wingate?” I asked.

“I’ve known Batt three years now,” Phillips said. “Ever since I transferred in.”

“So you’re friends?” I asked, knowing that I could always play the Che Huang trump card if the need arose.

“I can’t stand the son of a bitch,” Phillips said, his expression dower. “He thinks he’s king of the goddamned planet just because he has a bigger base. Command airlifts our supplies in through his base. The prick makes me fill out so many forms to get my stuff you’d think he owned it. He’s always showing off. He must come from a rich family. He lives like a friggin’ king.”

“Let’s see here. Your supplies come through his base and he acts like he owns them. Is that right?” I asked. Phillips nodded. “And he lives like a king, but you don’t think he’s selling?”

Phillips’s expression brightened. “Bust Batt Wingate? Think we could shoot him for this?”

“Once this is over, I’ll hand you the gun,” I said. “For now I need him alive. If my hunch is right, Wingate might be able to lead me to the Confederate Fleet.”

“Just remember, I get to shoot him when you’re done with him,” Colonel Phillips said.

“Deal,” I said.

“What’s our first step?”

It was late at night and the sky over the city was still black. I crept through the alley behind a row of restaurants until I could see the roadblock. Arc lights filled the street around the barricade with senseless glare. The light shined on the soldiers, blinding them to any enemies lurking nearby while making them well-lit targets for any snipers who happened to pass.

These boys did not have anything to worry about from me. I didn’t want the pack. I wanted the stray. I hid in the alley, using garbage pails and food crates as cover. I hoped my fall guy would come soon. There was so much rot in the cans around me that the air smelled like vomit.

My target came in the form of a sergeant who was touring roadblocks to keep the men alert. He drove a jeep. He drove alone. Approaching the roadblock, he stormed out of his vehicle and started screaming and cussing the moment his feet hit the ground. He was kind enough to line the men up at attention in just the right angle so that neither he nor they were facing in my direction. Then he paced back and forth in front of the line like a caged animal, screaming something about always being alert. I did not listen to what he said or how they responded.

“Phillips, I found our guy,” I called over a comLink stem in my glove.

The colonel had volunteered to direct this operation himself. He and five of his men hid a few blocks away, waiting for me to locate and mark a target. They had two special jeeps that had been decked out for night operations. Unlike other jeeps, these units had absolutely silent engines that could only be detected with sound equipment. These stealth jeeps were black with special nonreflective glass. Their chassis were not painted. They were covered with a nonreflecting flat coat of black porcelain that resisted radar detections. Sophisticated radar equipment would spot them in a heartbeat, but the cheap radar used in ground vehicles such as tanks and all-terrain vehicles would turn a blind eye. Even trackers, those sniper robots so loved by the enemy, had trouble spotting these vehicles.

Since these jeeps were also made for night operations, they had night-for-day scanning built into their windshields. They had discreet lights and searchlights, but with that night-for-day scanning, you could drive stealth jeeps black.

“What you got?” Phillips voice came over the discreet ear piece.

“A single passenger in a stealth bug.”

“Officer or enlisted man?” Phillips asked.

“Does it matter? You’re in either way, right?” I asked. We were going to kidnap the man and use his ID and vehicle to break into Fort Clinton. If Callahan gave us good information, a medal of valor awaited Phillips for his part in this. If Callahan had lied …even a Secessionist attack would not save him from a court martial, assuming he survived.

“If we have to knock somebody up, I’d rather hit a synthetic,” Phillips said.

“He’s a sergeant.”

“Perfect. Can you mark him?”

Hiding in the darkness of the alley behind some trash cans and a stack of crates, I shined a laser pointer on one of the rear tires of the jeep. It had stopped raining in Safe Harbor, but the air was humid and heavy. Puddles dotted the ground and the alley was grimy with dirt and slop.

My laser pointer cast a red beam that was as thin as a sewing needle. It illuminated a tiny red spot no bigger than a mouse’s eye on the side of the tire. I kept the light steady for twenty seconds as the sergeant berated his men.

“How the speck do you plan on catching criminals? Are you on guard duty or vacation?” Then, without a pause, “I asked you a question!”

“Guard duty!” the men yelled.

“Guard duty. That must be why you ladies are not wearing bathing suits,” the sergeant continued yelling. He made me nostalgic for my old drill sergeants back in basic, though those sergeants used far more creative profanity than this fellow. They also cuffed us alongside the head at every opportunity.

“You got him?” I asked.

“Yeah, he’s marked,” Phillips said.

“Now if he would just shut up and drive,” I said.

But the sergeant continued to pace back and forth and berate his men. “So you ladies think you can keep this block safe? I’m not sure who I would bet on if it comes down to you five speck-suckers against a gang of kindergarteners.

“You need to be alert. Do you hear me soldiers? Alert! A! L! E! R! T!”

I could not help myself. I painted the laser across the sergeant’s A-L-E-R-T ass. His soldiers were too busy looking him in the eye to see a filament-wide laser beam shining on his butt.

“You marking another jeep?” Phillips radioed me. “I’m getting another signal.”

“Sorry,” I said as I slipped the pointer back into my clothes.

The sergeant inspected each man’s weapon, wasting another five minutes, leaving me in that fetid alley smelling of rotten food. I saw a rat scurry among some distant crates. I would even the score with that sergeant for making me wait, I told myself, and I felt better.

A few minutes later, the sergeant climbed into his jeep. He slammed the door behind himself and sped away.

“I wish somebody would stomp that specker,” one of the soldiers said.

Somebody was about to.

Moving in absolute silence, not kicking a can or brushing a box, I walked through the alley. I did not think those soldiers would notice a marching band parading by with that arc light shining in their eyes, but I did not take any chances. A stealth jeep filled with Marines met me at the end of the alleyway. I climbed in.

“I don’t know where you marked the target that second time, but it’s a good thing you did,” Phillips said. “This guy drives like a frigging maniac. That second mark is a lot clearer.”

Our driver watched the road through a night-for-day lens in the windshield. I did not envy him that task. I had used similar technology in my old combat armor. Night-for-day lenses, with their monochrome displays, just about annihilated your depth perception.

A radar panel on the dashboard showed our position, the sergeant’s position, and the position of our second stealth jeep, along with any nearby Army vehicles. Sergeant Target was on his way to the next barricade, three miles away. His car swerved severely as he drove. Our jeeps, driving on parallel roads, flanked him on either side.

“What’s the matter with him?” Phillips asked.

“Probably drinking and driving,” I said.

“Was he drunk?” Phillips asked.

“He’s a sergeant,” I said. “You can’t tell without a blood test.”

This was a lucky break. A shitfaced sergeant might crash his car. He might stop for a drink, be found by looters, and be stripped from his car. It fit perfectly into our plans. He had given us an alibi, assuming we needed one.

Looking at the map, I saw that our sergeant was still one mile from the next barricade. “Last chance to back out,” I said to Colonel Phillips.

Phillips picked up the microphone and said, “Take him.”

Our driver accelerated. Looking at the map, I saw that the driver in the other jeep had also picked up some speed. We streaked ahead for two blocks and gained a good lead, then swerved around the next corner and planted ourselves in the middle of the road. Using a computer to aim our searchlights on the sergeant, we leapt from the car and drew our weapons.

Our second jeep pulled in behind the sergeant. Once our lights went on, the other driver flashed his, too. And now the brain-dead sergeant, Mr. A.L.E.R.T, did exactly what we hoped he would do. Instead of hunkering in his jeep and calling in his situation, he grabbed his weapon and stepped on to the street. The searchlights blinded him, and he stood with his arms over his eyes too dumb to move.

I approached from the front. The searchlight shone over my shoulder.

“Who are you?” the sergeant muttered.

“Are you drunk, sergeant?” I asked as my right fist slammed into his jaw, dropping him to the street. He fell and did not stir. The drivers in the stealth jeeps cut their searchlights as I knelt beside the fallen Army man and stripped him down to his underwear. I took his uniform, wallet, ID and dog tags. These articles I placed on the hood of his car. Then I stripped my clothes off and handed them to Phillips.

“Damn, Harris. You didn’t need to do that,” Phillips said.

“The last thing he heard was drunk ,” I said.

“So?” Phillips asked.

“The word will stay fresh in his subconscious. It’ll be the first thing he thinks of when he wakes up,” I said.

“Does it work that way?” Phillips asked.

“It does with me,” I said as I buttoned his shirt over my chest. That was a lie. I had never gotten so drunk that I passed out.

“Good thinking,” Phillips said.

The sergeant was a clone, of course …brown hair, brown eyes. He was shorter than me, and broader around the neck and the chest. He also had a gut. The sleeves of his fatigues ended well shy of my wrists, but I didn’t worry about it. I was not headed to Fort Clinton for a fashion show. The soldiers manning that base would be too busy to notice my sleeves.

As for the good sergeant, he was on his way to the brig at Fort Washington. There he would remain in a cell until he woke up. He would tell them that he was a soldier in the Unified Authority Army. They would tell him that they found him passed out and naked on the street. Thanks to the bottle he carried in his jeep, the story would be an easy sell. His blood alcohol would be legitimately high. If everything went as expected, Phillips would be in the clear. Had he known what we were doing, Colonel Batt Wingate would have been worried.

I nodded to Phillips and climbed into the Army jeep. The air inside the car smelled of beer and flatulence. Using the dome light in the roof, I examined my dog tags for a name—First Sergeant Mark Hopkins. Then I rolled down the window and started up the engine. I was about to pull forward when one of Phillips’s men waved for me to stop.

“You might want this,” he said, handing me the sergeant’s M27. I thanked the man and left. Rather than follow Sergeant Hopkins’s designated course, which would have taken me through three more checkpoints, I found a circuitous route that took me through alleys until I passed all but one final guard station. There I would need to make an appearance.

The jeep barely fit through a few of the tighter alleys. Dumpsters, trash cans, and abandoned cars choked some of the back ways. I saw looters, too—mostly harmless men, scurrying like rats through the shadows, trying to hide by diving into buildings when my headlights turned in their direction. These men traveled alone or in teams of two, mostly. Had I run into a mob, I suspect they would have come after me.

I left the cover of the alleys before entering the final checkpoint. The soldiers guarding that checkpoint would expect an Army sergeant to come up the street. So I pulled onto good old Main Street, Safe Harbor, a six-lane thoroughfare leading to an endless suspension bridge that spanned a great river.

The checkpoint looked like a wall of light spanning the front entrance to the bridge. Soldiers milled around the titanium barricade which stretched the width of the road. There must have been an officer in charge at this post. The soldiers were far more alert than the ones at the other barricades I had seen. They held their guns at the ready. Men sat in the machine-gun nests on either side of the bridge. Soldiers sat behind the wheels of the jeeps and all-terrain vehicles on the edges of the post.

None of this would matter as long as I did not do anything stupid. I slowed my jeep and coasted up to the barricade before coming to a stop. Somebody flashed a spotlight on me; the glare through the windshield was blinding. I lifted a hand to block the glare as I opened my door.

“May I see your identification?” a soldier asked from somewhere within the light.

I felt through my pockets and produced Sergeant Hopkins’s ID.

Hopkins and I were different models of clones, but we were both clones. We both had brown hair, brown eyes, and similar facial features. I was an elongated version of Hopkins, a more than reasonable facsimile with this blinding spotlight bleaching my skin and features.

“Could you cut the light?” I asked. It seemed like something a dumb-ass sergeant might ask.

The soldier handed back my ID. I heard the grating yawn of metal scraping across a concrete surface as the barricade slid open.

“You’re clear,” the soldier said.

So I drove across the bridge, watching the island of light diminish in my rearview mirror. The bridge stretched for more than one mile, the yard-wide cables that supported it forming an arc that reminded me of the spokes of a bicycle tire. A blanket of thick clouds stretched across the sky. Rain so fine that it felt like mist filled the air. An enormous mile-wide river rushed beneath the bridge, but it was so far below me that I could barely hear the hiss of its currents. And covering everything was the inky blackness of night.

I took confidence from the ease with which I had passed through that last checkpoint. Had I stopped to think about it, I might have hesitated before entering the base. Mark Hopkins was supposed to be out reviewing guard stations, a fact that should have told me that he had something to do with security. My luck had held so far, and I did not stop to think that it might end soon.

Ahead of me, Fort Clinton looked more like a constellation of stars than an Army base. Most of the complex was blacked out. Shutters had been closed across windows of buildings so that the only light they emitted came out in thin stripes that dissolved into the night air. The buildings themselves looked darker than a shadow.

Helicopter gunboats ran slow patrols above the fort while jets circled the area high in the atmosphere. I could not see the gunboats or the jets, but the loud chop, chop, chop of helicopter rotors echoed up from the ground and the searing roar of jet engines thundered and faded in the darkness.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The guard at the gate barely checked my identification. I drove a Fort Clinton Army jeep. After a glance at my papers and a sweep of my face, he signaled his pals to let me through.

Following base signs, I found my way to the administration building. The lobby of the building was brightly lit. Officers in fatigues hustled up and down the halls. Men hunkered by communications consoles, relaying orders and checking the overall readiness of the soldiers. No one so much as looked in my direction.

This administration building was no different than thousands of other similar buildings across the galaxy. Colonel Bartholomew Wingate’s office was right where I expected it to be. And, as I suspected, the colonel was nowhere to be found. I went out to my jeep and drove until I found officer housing. I only hoped that I had enough time to find Wingate before he bolted.

Base commander housing tended to be big and conspicuous, and I had little trouble locating Wingate’s estate. There was a stealth jeep in the driveway that looked black and sinister, a phantom car meant to blend in with the night.

I parked my jeep along the street and climbed out into the misty night hiding behind a stand of trees as I waited to see what would happen next. If Callahan was right about Colonel Bartholomew Wingate, I would not have to wait very long.

Wingate’s front door was about ten yards ahead of me. His house was easy to spot. His porch lights blazed while every other house on the block was dark. I sat in the silence, my mind wandering.

There was so much that the U.A. intelligence community did not know about the enemy. We knew that the four rebelling arms—Cygnus, Scutum-Crux, Perseus, and Norma—all had their own governments. But we also knew that Gordon Hughes, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, was the acting president of the Confederate Arms. Was there one government or four?

From everything I had heard, the arms had formed a shaky alliance. The only thing they had in common was that they wanted the Unified Authority out of their space. The Morgan Atkins Separatists, on the other hand, wanted to topple the Unified Authority. They wanted to conquer and destroy, but unlike the renegade arms, the Mogats did not have the kind of infrastructure that would allow for an army. They had controlled the Galactic Central Fleet for more than forty years and did nothing with it.

Then there were the Japanese. Approximately 12.5 million people of Japanese descent fled Ezer Kri because of the Unified Authority occupation of their planet. No one had ever satisfactorily explained how 12.5 million people could have fled a planet in a system patrolled by the Scutum-Crux Fleet, but I had my ideas. They could have been evacuated by a large fleet of self-broadcasting ships such as the dreadnaughts, battleships, and destroyers in the Galactic Central Fleet.

The last estimate I read placed the Mogat population at approximately two hundred million. The combined arms had approximately thirty billion citizens. So how did the Japanese fit in? They numbered less than thirteen million; how important could they be? And yet, for some reason, people were calling the GC Fleet by a Japanese name.

An hour passed. I remained crouched, hidden from Wingate’s house by trees and a shrub. An observant driver might have spotted me among the trees, but no one came down this road. The base was at high-alert and the officers were at their stations.

When the enemy finally appeared, they were dressed in Army fatigues and spoke common English. They drove a jeep, leaving the windows open to enjoy the breeze. After the trip down in a Galactic Fleet transport, they must have been glad for the cold fresh air.

The jeep rolled up the street right past me. It parked in front of Colonel Wingate’s yard and two men climbed out.

“I told you this was the right street,” one man said. He had a single bar on his fatigues. Had he not been an enemy commando, that bar would have made him a lieutenant in the Army.

“I spotted the house,” the other man said. He wore the same clever disguise. They were wolves in wolves’ clothing.

“How hard was that?” the first man said. “It’s the only house with its lights on.” They spoke loud enough for me to hear them from thirty yards away. Stealth work was clearly not their strength. An angry-looking Wingate came to the door before they reached it. He might have been watching from the window, but he might also have heard their pointless babble.

“Ready, Colonel?” one of the commandos asked.

Wingate turned off the lights outside his house and locked the door behind him. He did not speak as he walked over to the stealth jeep in his driveway, a rucksack dangling over his shoulder. He climbed into the back seat. I could see his head through the rear window. The commandos climbed into the front seats, and the jeep rolled out of the driveway.

I wished I had marked that jeep with the laser pointer that Bernie Phillips loaned me. Then I could have asked his trusty Marines to do the tracking. I did not have the option this time. The Marines had returned to their base.

Colonel Wingate and his commando escort drove with their headlights off. Since their stealth vehicle had night-for-day vision built into its windshield, that was no problem for them. To avoid being spotted, I also drove with my headlights off. I did not want the base police or the traitor I was tailing to notice me. The only thing in my favor was that instead of following Wingate, I sped ahead to the place I hoped would be his rendezvous spot.

Before taking me into town to kidnap the Army soldier, Colonel Phillips had shown me several maps of Fort Clinton and the surrounding area. There was no way a sellout like Wingate was going to ride out the attack. His soldiers were going to die. The Pentagon would send men to survey the base and there would be huge inventory discrepancies. Even if Wingate survived the attack, he would be arrested and killed in the aftermath. His Confederate Arms pals might not care if he got himself executed, but he might spill some important information in the process. To keep him quiet, they either needed to kill him or get him off the planet. Either way, they would need to send down a transport with a team of commandos. When that transport returned to the fleet, I aimed to hitch a ride.

By studying the maps, Phillips and I located the most likely spot for an enemy transport to land. It was only an educated guess, but it proved right.

Driving almost blind, I headed up a slow grade toward the raised parade grounds along the eastern gate of the base. This area was dark and mostly empty. Sure enough, every few seconds I spotted just a glimpse of the phantom black car in the darkness.

This part of the base was dark and lifeless. We passed no other cars. The landscape was studded with old-fashioned drill towers, standing high over the ground on stilts made of logs. A half-mile ahead of me, Wingate’s jeep slowed as it passed through a poorly-lit guard station. The gate at the guard station raised as Wingate approached. A commando left the station and climbed into Wingate’s stealth jeep.

As if this were a cue, the attack commenced the moment Wingate’s car left the base. It came in the form of a silvery red beam that poured out of the night sky like a translucent pillar. The scene remained absolutely silent for a moment, then fire, smoke, and sirens erupted as a building exploded. I watched this scene unfold as I drove, and I looked at my wristwatch to mark the time. Once eight minutes had passed, I knew the whole thing would be over.

Fire trucks flashing red and white warning lights streaked across the base. From where I sat at the edge of the parade grounds, I could see fire blazing below, and I could see the immaculate red and white light twinkling from the tops of the fire trucks.

When I reached the gate, I noticed the shattered glass of the security booth and knew that the commandos had slaughtered the men left to guard this gate. There was no blood, no major destruction. The commandos had probably sneaked up to the gate on their way into the base. A couple of quick shots from a high-powered pistol, and the gate was theirs. Did Wingate care that men under his command had been ambushed?

Behind me, lasers rained down from above. Beams as big around as water towers struck buildings. Smaller beams no more than one foot in diameter flashed quickly, striking jets and gunboats right out of the sky.

I drove through the gate at eighty miles per hour—not a safe speed for driving wet roads on a dark night without lights. It might have taken the transport one minute to drop to the planet. It could have taken another minute or two for the commandos to drive to Wingate’s house. In another four minutes the shooting match would end whether I was on hand to catch Wingate or not.

The sky outside of the fence was velvet and peaceful, a typically calm evening on a nonindustrial planet. When I saw a break in the clouds, I thought the sky looked like a lake of oil and stars. In the distance, another silver-red barrage cascaded down on Fort Washington.

There would be similar fireworks over the Air Force base. There the attack would be more intense, if anything. The base would send up its squadrons of F-19s to attack the invaders. If the enemy ships could destroy the runways in time, a few of those fighters might be stranded on the ground. The majority would streak through the sky faster than bullets. They would leave the atmosphere, find the invading ships and the real battle would begin.

The Air Force’s F-19 Falcons would attack from the ground. The U.A. fighter carrier and destroyers guarding the discs would close in from above. How many GCF ships had the enemy sent? How would they perform in battle? Were their weapons updated?

How long had the attack lasted so far? I looked at my watch. Only twenty seconds had passed since the first beam rolled down from the sky.

I saw no trace of Wingate’s jeep in front of me and had no time left for discretion. Turning my headlights on, I raced down tree-lined lanes and into the forested countryside. The sounds of sirens and explosions carried in the air, but they were distant and I ignored them. The attack was far away now and seemed no more significant than a day-old dream as I concentrated on finding the transport.

I looked at my wristwatch and saw the timer hand sweep past the twelve. One full minute had passed since that first laser attack. Why had I not started timing when I spotted the commandos? Why had I gone to the base instead of simply hiding out here?

I doused my headlights. Up ahead, the white light of arc lamps shined through a grove. The trees blocking the glare created a strobe effect, as if I were watching an ancient silent movie. I pulled off the road and skidded to a halt in the mud.

There would be no time to call for help or pack my weapons, not even my M27. I jumped out of my jeep. A good hundred feet into the woods, men in green uniforms loaded small stacks of crates into an antique-looking military transport.

Other men with guns circled the area looking for folks like me. Here I had a stroke of luck. These men were dressed in Army fatigues that looked precisely like mine. They were camouflaged to look like the soldiers at Fort Clinton. Had one of Wingate’s soldiers unknowingly stumbled into their operation, these spies might have pointed to their own transport and claimed that they had located an enemy ship.

“We’re out of time,” somebody said in a soft voice that carried through the silence. “Anything and anyone who does not get on now gets left behind.” Somewhere back near town, still as distant as a dream, sirens and explosions continued to break the silence. I had to make my move. Fortunately for me, one guard had strayed far enough into the trees for me to take him.

“Last call. Return to the transport.” The voice was soft but it echoed over a hundred comLinks and carried through the woods.

I drew closer to my target, a lone man with an M27. He had blond hair. We looked nothing alike, but I did not think it would matter. Looking around these woods, between the men loading the ship and the guards, there were too many faces for anyone to keep them all straight.

I doubt my victim heard me. He took one last sweep of the area before turning to go back to the transport. I hid behind a tree, no more than fifteen feet from where he stood. He had his back to me. I could see the barrel of his M27 pointing straight up above the top of his shoulder. Nice of him to bring me a replacement for the one I left in my jeep.

I took a deep breath and held it in my lungs. Barely lifting my feet, I rushed forward, staying in a slight crouch, my arms out and my fingers stretched as if preparing to strangle the boy. Had the floor of the forest been dry, I could have taken him easily, but the ground was muddy from the rain. I moved more quickly than he did, but I had to shuffle my feet to squelch the sound of my boots tromping through the mud. He hiked, I glided.

Ahead of him, I could see the landing area. Guards, cargo handlers, and commandos hustled into the transport. They did not look back as I leaped forward, fastening my right hand around the boy’s chin and anchoring my grip by placing my left hand just on the back of his neck. I pulled with my right hand and pushed with my left. The sound of his neck snapping was no louder than the tick of a clock as we both toppled forward. He was dead before our momentum sent us to the ground.

Straightening my fatigues, I climbed to my feet. There was a smear of mud on my knee. I brushed off the dirt and leaves as best I could as I approached the transport.

“Hurry up, asshole,” someone yelled as I started up the ramp. I nodded and ran forward as the doors closed behind me. My boots clanked against the metal floor. I heard excited chatter all around me. The cabin was mostly dark except for soft red emergency lights. The engines rumbled and the transport lifted straight up in the air.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Every ship in the Galactic Central Fleet was more than forty years old. That did not mean that they were in bad condition or that they had seen a lot of action. In fact, few of the ships had traveled over the last few decades. New and clean as this transport was, it had antiquated technology. To prevent glare in the cockpit, the only light in the kettle—that was what we called the cattle car in which the soldiers traveled—came from red emergency lights. That was to my liking. I was, after all, a stowaway. I sat in the back of the kettle not far from the cargo area where nobody noticed me.

The men around me did not like the dark atmosphere. “Like traveling in an armpit,” one man complained. “Sending us back and forth in a damned drain pipe,” another man said in a different conversation. The best line came from the man sitting beside me: “Not even fit for clones.”

The inside of the kettle was anything but luxurious. The walls, ceiling, and floor were bare, unadorned metal. A line of benches ran along the wall of the cabin offering enough seating for maybe one-quarter of the men on this flight. Safety harnesses hung from the ceiling. In the case of an emergency, men would strap themselves in with these harnesses and hang from the ceiling like butchered cattle in a slaughterhouse freezer. The harnesses became rigid when in use, preventing the men from swinging into each other.

In a transport like this, passengers were nothing more than cargo. There were no windows and no way of knowing what was happening outside of the ship. The launch from New Columbia was smooth enough, but moments after we took off, the pilot signaled us to harness ourselves in.

Batt Wingate and his commando-escort sat somewhere in the front of the kettle. I could not see them. It did not matter. I knew they were inside and besides, there was only one way off this bird. Once we landed, I would slink toward the door so that Wingate would pass me before he left. The mood in the kettle changed as the men fastened themselves in. Now, nobody spoke. Most of the men hung absolutely silent. A few smoked cigarettes and spat their smoldering butts to the floor.

Outside the ship, the gears of war were turning. Swarms of fighters might spot us and attack as we left the atmosphere and entered the blanket of space. A lone fighter could destroy a transport, but it would take multiple missiles. These ships looked and flew like pregnant seagulls, but they had powerful shields and thick armor. This ship could survive a direct hit from a particle beam cannon. If one or two fighters homed in on us, we would likely survive the attack long enough for the Confederates to send help.

I looked at my watch. Just under four minutes had passed since the bombardment began. By my best guess, the GCF ships had been in the area for six minutes and would broadcast out in another two.

A missile slammed into our shields and the transport shuddered. The red lights blinked out for several seconds. In the darkness, men gasped but no one screamed. The atmosphere was tense but not panicked.

Another missile slammed into the shields sending the transport skidding sideways. It was a blow, a force that struck quickly and vanished. A few moments passed and we were struck by a particle beam. The walls of the kettle began vibrating. At first they shook, and then they convulsed in short fast shakes that seemed to tear the metal plates around us.

The lights went out again. This time they stayed out. I heard heavy breathing. The shuddering continued for no more than three seconds, but it seemed like minutes. I heard an occasional whimper, then somebody yelled, “Shake ’em and bake ’em!” It was a dumb joke but it broke the tension. Relieved laughter filled the cabin. A moment later the red lights came back on.

In times of danger, I had the Liberator combat reflex that flooded my blood with a hormone made of adrenaline and endorphins. Everyone else on this ship turned to desperate humor to distract themselves. I did not need it. A warm, comfortable feeling spread through my body, a sense of power and mental clarity. I was not in control of the situation, yet the hormone made me feel as if I were.

Another missile struck the ship and the kettle rattled.

“Knock, knock,” some man yelled. I could not see who.

“Who’s there?” responded nearly every man in the cabin, and the men burst out in hysterics.

Inside joke, I guessed, and not a very good one.

And then the ride was over. There was the loud clank of metal dropping on metal as we lowered into a landing pad inside some GCF ship. The whining growl of straining motors echoed through the kettle as the heavy iron doors slid open and the hangar bay came in view.

I, of course, was still hanging from my harness. When my harness released me, I pushed through the crowd and hid near the door.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Granted, I did not see the space battle as it took place, but I had time to study it at length over the next few days. What I saw was the work of genius.

The first GCF ship to arrive in New Columbian space broadcasted in alone. It was a cruiser, the smallest class of ship in the GCF Fleet. It carried a crew of 130 men and, among other things, a fleet of three transports.

The captain of this ship played an interesting gambit. Instead of broadcasting his ship a few million miles out and risking remote radar detection, he used the Broadcast Network as camouflage. His ship materialized so close to the reception disc that the U.A. radar system recorded the anomaly caused by his ship’s appearance as a hiccup in Broadcast Network radiation. His ship was as black as space, making visual detection unlikely. To use an antiquated phrase, the cruiser flew in under the radar.

If the ship’s arrival near the Broadcast Network had disrupted the Network, the cruiser would have been quickly detected. Some kind of modification in the cruiser’s engine prevented the disruption, and the ship was never spotted.

This cruiser parked itself five hundred miles above Safe Harbor. It launched a single transport and waited.

So, was this lone cruiser picked up by radar? Nobody knows and the equipment that would have recorded the readings was destroyed during the ensuing battle. Somebody knew the space around New Columbia very well. The cruiser stopped in a blind spot—a seam between two different radar systems. There it stayed until the battle was over.

About the time that Colonel Wingate left Fort Clinton, the cruiser radioed the rest of the fleet, and that initiated the attack. Fifteen GCF ships broadcasted into New Columbian space—a slightly larger attack force than the one that sacked Gateway. There would be no missing the anomalies caused by fifteen GCF ships broadcasting in at the same time.

The Air Force responded by sending up all of its F-19 Falcons. The fighter carrier and destroyers guarding the discs also moved into position. Had the GCF ships been of recent design, this might have been an even fight—a fifteen-ship armada comprised of destroyers, cruisers, and battleships against nearly 400 fighters, two destroyers, one fighter carrier, and ground cannon. But the Joint Chiefs were not looking for a fair fight.

Hoping to rout the enemy, the Navy had an additional fleet of ships waiting near a set of broadcast discs. The moment the battle began, the plan was to feed these ships into the Network, and in less than sixty seconds, the U.A. Navy would have twenty more ships in New Columbian space.

But the Navy had to deal with the bottleneck of using a single reception disc. The GCF Fleet had no such restrictions. As the first of the Tomcats bore down from space and the Falcons flared up from the atmosphere, fifty additional GCF ships broadcasted into the battlefield.

The video feed from the battle looked like a misprint. So many anomalies tore into the open blackness that it looked like the fabric of space had begun to boil. Feathery white lines flashed and crisscrossed. Circles of light appeared from which shadowy black forms seemed to glide.

A dozen GCF battleships coasted into place in front of the broadcast disc and formed a line. Other ships parked behind the first waiting for a turn. When the first U.A. carrier emerged from the disc, the GCF ships opened fire as it materialized into space.

The hull of the carrier flashed and ignited. The tip of its wing sheered off and webs of flame danced along its shell. That was the worst of the spectacle, I think. Flames cannot exist in the vacuum of space. Those flames were feeding on oxygen pouring out of the ship.

Only two or maybe three fighters made it out of the launch tube as the carrier staggered forward. An enormous fireball burst out of the tube and dissipated. Two battleships left their place in the firing squad and followed the dying fighter carrier, bombarding her with bright red laser fire. In another minute, the hull cracked and spokes of flames shot through. It looked, for a brief moment, as if the ship had a yellow and orange aura that vanished as quickly as it appeared. Then streams of debris gushed out of those ruptures in place of the flames, and the lifeless ship floated sideways and drifted into space.

By this time, the next U.A. fighter carrier emerged from the Network and the massacre repeated itself. The firing squad bombarded the ships until they could not defend themselves. Then two ships finished the execution, and two more GCF battleships took their place in the firing line.

Once the U.A. ships entered the Broadcast Network, it was too late to stop them or save them. A few ships were rerouted, but more than twenty Unified Authority ships were destroyed.

Closer to the atmosphere, GCF ships prowled above Safe Harbor like sharks in a feeding frenzy. They traveled in groups of three and four, circling small territories and firing powerful lasers at planetary targets. A satellite captured video of this directly from above, and you could see the ships clearly against the blue and white glow of the New Columbian atmosphere.

New Columbia’s planetary defenses crumbled quickly. In the beginning, plenty of green and red beams fired up from the planet, but they seldom hit targets. The gunnery men on the ships homed in on those rays and returned fire. It took them less than two minutes to silence the cannons below.

The fighters fared no better. Rows of battleships bore down on the Falcons as they tore out of the atmosphere. Several more GCF battleships swarmed the fighter carrier and the destroyers that had been guarding the broadcast discs.

The battle took ten minutes, not eight. During that entire time, the line of civilian ships fleeing New Columbia continued to stream into the Broadcast Network. The GCF ships never attacked them. When the last of the U.A. ships exploded, the GCF ships broadcasted away.

You may or may not win an even fight, but you will certainly take casualties. By stacking the deck with sixty-five ships, the commander of the Galactic Central Fleet guaranteed more than victory, he guaranteed himself a rout. The Unified Authority lost three forts, twenty-three capital ships, and hundreds of fighters on March 24, 2512. The GCF lost one soldier, the guy I killed to get aboard their transport. I was about to even the score.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The landing bay was disorganized. Of course, the battle was still going on when the transport landed on a Confederate ship, but that did not explain all of the chaos. This was supposed to be a military operation. During my time as a Marine, the ships I served on either ran like clockwork or key officers lost their jobs. That did not seem to be the case in the Confederate Navy.

As the rear door of the kettle split open revealing the deck, I saw cargo movers driving large crates through a confused crowd. Men sprinted to get to their stations. The movers, rudimentary robots that looked like a cross between a forklift and a battle tank, used radar to keep from colliding with people and objects. The mob of crewmen running back and forth around the movers must have overloaded the radar.

On the Kamehameha , every wall was polished and every light fixture dusted. On this ship, bunches of black and red cables hung from the walls like bunting. Branches from these cables snaked along the ceiling.

“Okay, let’s get this ship unloaded,” somebody yelled. There was a distinctly informal sound to the way the man gave orders, and I realized just how devoid of military leadership the Confederates must be. With very few notable exceptions, every officer that graduated from the military academies was Earth-born and Earth-loyal. It had always been so.

The only officers the Confederate Arms and Mogats would have were likely book-trained with no battle experience. They had a few notable defectors like Crowley and Halverson, but those officers would be too busy running the battles to work with the rank and file. The men I saw giving orders had not gone to basic training. They had not experienced the way seasoned drill sergeants stalk among enlisted men like a Tyrannosaurus rex in a herd of grass-eaters. The only experience these poseurs might have came from watching movies. Small wonder the Unified Authority won every land battle.

The men on the transport unloaded the crates. They mobbed boxes that were light enough to be lifted and trotted down to the deck, stacking them in marked areas. They were a willing throng, not a workforce.

What I needed above all else was to blend in. By the time I got involved in unloading the transport, the small stuff was off. That left crates filled with heavy equipment, munitions, and the like. A crew of men riding lifters, two-wheeled vehicles with mechanical dollies capable of lifting a five thousand-pound pallet, weaved their way aboard.

I joined the hubbub at the base of the ramp and watched for Colonel Wingate. Now that we were on a GCF ship, Wingate was just a small fish, but he was connected. He would lead me to the men in charge. The pack of men around me thinned and disappeared, and still Wingate did not leave the transport. The men in lifters skittered back and forth up the ramp until their work was done, and still Wingate remained on the ship.

Soon I was alone in the landing bay, hiding near the open transport. I could not remain on the deck much longer without someone spotting me.

Yellow and red lights began flashing around the deck. “Prepare for broadcast,” a mechanical voice intoned. “Prepare for broadcast in ten, nine, eight …”

I looked at the transport. Wingate had to have boarded this ship. He would not have remained on the planet. It was entirely possible that the commandos killed him and left his body in the woods to cover their tracks, but why go to such lengths? Why send men to Fort Clinton? Why smuggle him off the base? Why not just target his house from space?

“Seven, six, five, four, three …”

No need for stealth with that mechanical voice blaring so loudly. The flashing red and yellow lights created visual noise on the deck. The ship would self-broadcast any moment and, of course, images of Admiral Klyber’s pale corpse ran through my mind. I had a brief moment of uncertainty, then I sprinted up the ramp and into the dark belly of the transport. The kettle was completely empty. Harnesses hung from the ceiling. In the red light, they looked blacker than darkness. With its ring of hard benches and metal walls dully reflecting the non-glare amber light, the kettle looked like the inside of a kiln.

“Two, one. Broadcast initiated.” The voice sounded nearly as loud aboard the transport as it did in the landing bay.

Wingate had to be on this transport. He was not in the kettle. So he had to be up near the cockpit. The mechanical door began to close. Behind me, I heard voices.

“…complete shutout,” somebody said. “They’re guessing twenty, maybe twenty-five U.A. ships and as many as five hundred fighters.”

“Five hundred?” another voice asked.

“They had four hundred and twenty at Bolivar Air Base,” a voice said. I did not see the man speaking, though it was probably Wingate. So the traitor now was standing just outside the cockpit chatting with the pilots, getting a blow-by-blow account of the battle. They headed toward me. By the time Wingate and his friends reached the kettle, I had hid myself in the shadows near the ramp, wrapping myself up in cargo netting along the side of the wall.

“They had a carrier guarding the discs. That was another seventy fighters, so that makes four hundred ninety fighters.”

“How many of their ships were carriers?”

“I’d say all of ’em if I had to guess.” I could not see him, but I would have waged good money that was Wingate again.

“Broadcast complete,” the mechanical voice said over a speaker above the door of the kettle. The rear doors had sealed.

“All fighter carriers carry seventy fighters?”

“They’re supposed to. There’s a ship in the Scutum-Crux Fleet that has nothing but SEALS and transports.” All I could see was the netting around me and the metal walls, but I now thought I knew the sound of Wingate’s voice.

Now that the broadcast was complete, the transport could shuttle between ships. I heard the hiss of thruster engines and the whine of the landing gear as tons of weight were lifted from it. I felt the tremble of the ship as the hull lifted off the deck.

“I heard about that one,” somebody said. “I heard all of those SEALS are clones. Special clones. Real dangerous.” This was a low voice. A hard voice. This was undoubtedly the voice of a commando, probably one of the men that pulled Wingate out of Fort Clinton. I would have happily wagered my life savings that this fellow was some sort of street thug before starting a new career in the military.

“I wouldn’t know. That was a Navy project. All of the Rangers and Special Forces men I commanded were natural-born.” Wingate sounded irritated and tired. Turning traitor must have taken a toll on him.

The grinding sound of retracting landing equipment echoed through the empty kettle. We were cutting through space. I did not know if we would fly to another ship or land on a planet. Wherever we were, it was deep in Confederate territory.

“So if there were seventy fighters on each of the ships we caught coming out of the Network, and we caught twenty-five of them …” He paused to do a little math. “That would mean we got one thousand seven hundred and fifty fighters.” There was excitement and pride and intelligence in this voice. It belonged to neither the thug nor Wingate. “Man, I’d hate to be the guy who has to report those losses to the Joint Chiefs.”

“And we didn’t lose a single ship?” the thug asked.

“Not a one,” the intelligent-sounding commando replied.

“How about the planet?” Wingate asked. Apparently the bright commando had access to some kind of report that neither Wingate nor the thug had received.

“I haven’t heard anything. You get the best info on stuff like that from the mediaLink anyway. They’ll have reporters down on the planet …assuming there’s any planet left.” The bright commando said this, then he and the thug laughed.

A moment passed and the sound of the thrusters started again. We were coming in for our landing.

Hiding there in the netting, I realized that I was still dressed in camouflage gear and needed a change of clothing. No use taking the bright commando or the thug, they were probably dressed like me, in U.A. Army fatigues. I needed to dress like a crewman, not a soldier. I hung in the netting, silent and still listening to the muffled roar of the thruster engines as the transport prepared to land in some new hangar. Were we touching down on land or a battleship?

The thick metal doors of the kettle split open. I could see a quiet landing pad outside. The area was brightly lit. The ground was paved with black asphalt. There were no boxes or people, and no clues about where we might have landed.

“Well, come on. Atkins and Crowley both asked to see you,” the bright commando said. In saying this, he revealed a lot of information. Amos Crowley was the Army general who had defected to the Mogats. Atkins would likely be Warren Atkins, the son of the founder of the Morgan Atkins movement. That would make this a Mogat base or a command ship, I thought.

The doors ground open and white light poured into the red-lit world of our transport. Ducking my head behind a hanging fold of cargo netting, I listened as Wingate, the commando, and the thug tromped down the metal ramp, their shoes clanging against the steel. I caught a brief glimpse of their backs as they reached the end of the ramp. Wingate was short and normal in every regard compared to the tall, athletic-looking men on either side of him.

As soon as they were out of sight and out of hearing range, I wrestled my way out from behind the cargo nets. The netting itself was made of nylon. It hung like a spider’s web, suspended from the roof by dozens of little metallic cables. The cables rattled as I worked my way free, causing a soft clatter that would have attracted attention if anyone else was in the kettle. One of the pilots, however, was still in the cockpit. I could see white light spilling out of the open door at the front of the kettle.

Moving slowly, stepping lightly so that my boots made barely any noise as they touched down on the metal flooring, I stalked across the cabin hiding behind the ribbings in the wall. I got to the door of the cockpit, took a deep breath, and peered in. A lone man sat at the controls speaking into a radio. He had a data pad on his lap. If he was filling out reports, he might be in that seat for hours. He might even finish his report, fire up the engines, and fly off to some new destination.

Life would have been easier had the man sat with his back to me. Instead, he had turned his seat ass backward. Miraculously, he did not spot me.

I had a gun, the M27 that I took from the guy I killed on New Columbia, but that would be loud. I had my knife, but I needed the man’s uniform. I also needed him off the damned radio, and quickly, before a maintenance crew happened by.

It didn’t happen that way.

The sound of heavy shoes echoed through the kettle. A lone worker in white overalls, the uniform of a civilian mechanic, came walking across the deck. He walked right past me, no more than three feet from my face, as I lay on my side under a disturbingly narrow bench.

“I hear it was some battle,” the mechanic said at the cockpit door.

“I only saw it for a second,” the pilot answered. “What I saw was wild.”

“Did you fly into it?”

I squirmed back as far as I could. My feet connected with the girders that wrapped up and around the kettle—-the ribs. Rolling on my stomach for a quick glance, I saw the mechanic standing in the door of the cockpit. A new target, I thought. I could kill him as he left the ship and hide his body in the cargo nets.

Rising silently to my feet, never taking my eyes off the mechanic, I breezed toward the back of the kettle, the cargo nets, and the open doorway. There, I stopped.

Standing at the top of the ramp was a boy who could not yet have been in his twenties. He wore white overalls and a white hard hat. The boy looked strong. The zipper of his jumper was down to his chest. He had a stunned, slightly stupid look on his face as he stared at me. “Do you know where Fred …Hey? Who are you?” Never realizing the gravity of his situation, the boy spoke in a soft voice that did not carry.

I slammed the edge of my hand hard across his throat—a slow method of murder but effective in keeping a victim silent: if you crush your victim’s windpipes, you render him voiceless. He will then spend a full minute thrashing about as he suffocates, but he cannot call for help.

This boy brought his hands along the bottom of his throat as he struggled for breath. His lips formed a wide, gasping O. I slung him sideways into the heavy cargo netting. The cables rattled as they brushed against the side of the kettle, but the noise was soft. Then, as he tried to wrestle free of the netting, I finished the boy by slamming the heel of my hand into the side of his neck. The whole thing was quick and silent. The sounds of the murder did not disturb the mechanic and pilot as they chatted up at the cockpit.

A moment later, a nearly naked boy lay tucked under a mess of cargo netting. No one would find him for a while, at least not until the next time somebody loaded cargo onto this transport.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

I had no plan. Here I was, on an enemy ship, probably in the center of the enemy fleet, and I was not sure what to do next. I did not make it off the transport in time to tail Wingate. I did not have a prayer of sabotaging the fleet, or even this ship. Escape seemed out of the question. My best bet would be to find a way onto the bridge of the ship and learn the fleet’s galactic coordinates. If I could locate that information and broadcast it to Huang, the U.A. Navy could come after the bastards. After what I saw on New Columbia, I liked the idea of U.A. ships having a fair fight.

Looking around the landing area, I stared into the ivory horizon where the runway met the walls. Cavernous and square, this hangar was designed for transports and cargo ships, not fighters. With the exception of Harriers, which had a vertical take off, fighters took off in runway tubes, allowing them to build up speed before entering battles.

The overalls were a bad fit. Either the kid I took them from had been less than six feet tall or he liked wearing pants that showed his ankles and sleeves that did not cover his wrists. And his clothes were baggy. I did not expect a tailored fit, still they had looked snug on the boy’s muscled body. With my tall and lanky frame, I vanished under the wide swath of cloth.

The worst thing was the boots. A swampy, phosphorous stench rose out of them, and they were hot and moist around my feet. Given the choice, I would have preferred to go barefoot.

I found a pair of mediaLink shades inside one of the waist-line pockets. The lenses were greasy and dusted with dandruff. I checked the three small pores at the base of each of the eyepieces to make sure that the microphones were clear. The pores were mostly clean and I blew off the hairs and dandruff.

When I reached the door of the hangar I stopped to look back. There sat the transport, alone in the center of the brightly lit landing pad. The world around the transport was ivory white. In that bright lighting, the transport was the color of eggshells. It almost blended with its surroundings; but because it did not quite blend in, it stood out even more.

What about Fred the chatty mechanic and his friend the pilot? Would they discover the little surprise I had wrapped up in the cargo bay? They might, but that could not be helped. Sooner or later, somebody would spot the body no matter where I hid it.

The hall outside the hangar seemed to stretch the entire length of the ship. The polished gray floor went on as far as the eye could see. This was a major corridor, a squared tube with twenty-foot walls. Clumps of people moved through it, but it was far from crowded. Compared to the bustling walkways of most U.A. ships, this corridor was deserted.

Enough time had passed since Wingate left the transport that I had not a prayer of catching up to him. In my mind, Wingate had become a low priority at this point. He had led me to the enemy fleet. But even capturing Crowley and Atkins seemed unimportant at the moment. What would I do with them this deep in enemy territory?

All I could do was go along for the ride. My first priorities now were to blend in and to find my way around this ship.

Navy crews had a practice called “hot bunking.” It meant that three men slept in the same rack—obviously not at the same time. They had eight-hour shifts—work eight hours, recreate eight hours, sleep eight hours. That meant that at any time, one-third of the crew would work while one-third slept and another third ate and played. The thirds were not always equal. The day crew, meaning the crew on duty when the captain was on duty, was generally larger than the others.

Hot bunking caused problems for saboteurs like myself because it meant that the ship never slept. There would always be men at the helm and in the engine rooms. So what could I accomplish? I toyed with the idea of slipping a cable into the broadcast engines, but I did not feel like committing suicide.

Feeling like I needed a better disguise than these coveralls, I followed the hall toward the center of the ship. Old as this ship was, it was still of a Unified Authority design. The basics were the basics. I knew that the landing bay would be on the bottom deck and that I would have to go to another deck to find what I wanted—a gym. Fifteen minutes and two decks later, I found one.

I began unzipping my jumper even before I entered the locker room, and had it off my shoulders by the time the door closed behind me. Training did not appeal to these sailors by the look of things. The locker room was nearly empty. I heard someone in the shower and a couple of men with towels around their waists discussed the battle at New Columbia in front of the mirrors.

Both men were Japanese. I noticed that quickly. They had black hair, narrow eyes, and bronzed skin. One man stole a casual glance in my direction while his friend spoke. Had this gym been for Japanese only, I might have been caught. But a moment later, a blubbery man with white skin turned the color of rare roast beef stepped out of a steam room. The man did not have a towel. Drops of water splashed from his flabby legs as he walked.

I grabbed shorts and a shirt from a shelf and tossed my coveralls into a locker. A moment later, I walked out to exercise, the mediaLink shades hidden in my pocket. And things continued to go my way. There was only one other person working out. He did not look at me as I climbed on a stationary bike, dropped the shades over my eyes, and began pedaling.

Now that I had changed to exercise clothes, I blended in. What I needed to do next was contact Huang or Freeman; but with another person in the room, I did not want to hold a conversation.

In this case, I went the old-fashioned route and composed letters, customizing a form letter by choosing words and phrases from a menu and optically typing words when needed.

On my own shades, I had a menu of people I contacted on a regular basis. It was a short list that included only the late Bryce Klyber and Ray Freeman. The boy’s shades had a different list. Using optical commands, I typed Freeman’s address on a virtual keyboard that was always present at the edge of your vision when you composed letters.

Freeman and I swapped emergency codes so that we would always be able to locate each other in situations like this. There may have been multiple Ray Freemans in the galaxy, but he was the only one who received messages sent with this code.

Optical typing was a slow process. When I switched from the keyboard to the context-sensitive letter, it was a relief. I selected an urgent document. The default letter that appeared was a request for financial assistance; but every word was interactive and as I changed words at the front of the letter, the rest of the document composed itself.

Ray,

I have stowed away on a GCF ship. I believe Warren Atkins and Amos Crowley are on this ship. Contact Huang and let him know that I will transmit the location of this ship as soon as I have it. I will call when it is safe.

Harris

I mailed the letter. When I removed the shades, I discovered that a new crop of people had entered the gym. Four men stood in the weight lifting area, joshing with each other as they pushed levers and pulled handles. Their weights clanked loudly as they lowered them. I climbed off of the bicycle.

“Buddy, you mind tossing me a towel?” one of the men called.

“Sure,” I said. I picked up a gym towel and tossed it to him. He snatched it out of the air and turned back to his weights without thanking me.

I went back to the locker room and stripped for a shower. The goal now was to remain inconspicuous as I killed time and waited for the right change of clothing. I needed something I could wear on the upper decks without attracting attention. So I went in the shower room and soaped and showered, peering out whenever I heard people entering or leaving the locker room. More than an hour passed before the man I was waiting for arrived, and I counted myself lucky that he had come so soon.

I heard the door close and rinsed myself off. When I looked out of the shower, I saw a crewman walking around the floor picking up a few sopping towels that had been discarded and tossing them into the laundry cart.

Drying myself off as quickly as possible, I listened as he emptied bins filled with dirty gym clothes into his cart. As he left, I pulled on a fresh pair of gym shorts and a T-shirt.

Stepping out into the corridor, I saw the crewman moving away slowly. He stood hunched over the laundry cart, his head turning to follow everyone he passed. He turned down one hall and then another before reaching his final destination.

Capital ships had more than one laundry facility. Chances were, there was a special facility on the upper decks just for cleaning officers’ uniforms; but this laundry would do.

I approached and the door slid open.

“What do you want?” the crewman asked as I stepped into the room.

“My clothes,” I said, doing an impersonation of a peeved officer. “You hauled off my uniform in one of your laundry carts.”

“Sorry,” the man said in a flat voice. He went back to sorting dirty clothes and did not look back in my direction. Such insubordination. I was an officer. He was an enlisted man. Okay, I was a spy pretending to be an officer, but he didn’t know that.

I had at least thirty carts to choose from. In the third cart, I found an officer’s work uniform.

CHAPTER THIRTY

I went to the emptiest room on any battleship—the chapel. There I could speak freely.

“Who is Derrick Hines?” Freeman’s face appeared on my MediaLink shades.

“Never heard of him,” I said.

“You’re using his Link address,” Freeman said.

“Oh, him,” I said. “He was a crewman on a GCF ship.”

“Confederate or Mogat—?” Freeman asked. He had no interest in Hines’s fate.

Freeman was on a communications console. I could see his face. It was as impassive as ever. Judging by his nonplussed expression, you might have thought that I had called from a bar in Mars Spaceport.

“No idea,” I said. “I think it’s their flagship.”

“How did you get on?” Freeman asked.

“I followed Colonel Wingate, the commander of Fort Clinton.”

“That was the Army base that got destroyed on New Columbia,” Freeman said. “What’s he doing on a GCF ship?”

“He swapped sides,” I said. “Turns out he was using Fort Clinton as a surplus outlet and the Mogats were his favorite customers. Think he’s worth much?”

As I thought about it, I had plenty of reasons to hate Batt Wingate. He would have sold me out without a second thought when I was regular military. He’d certainly sold out enough other clones. He must have helped William Patel smuggle bombs into Safe Harbor. Did he know that I would be there or was he just after Jimmy Callahan? I would gladly kill the man myself if I got a chance.

“He’s worth something,” Freeman said. “The Mogats routed the Navy at New Columbia. They shot down twenty-three U.A. ships and destroyed all three military bases. The pundits are saying that Washington is desperate.

“Have you got a location on the Fleet?”

“No,” I said.

Freeman waited for me to say more.

“Ray, this is too big for us. We’re going to need to bring Huang in on it. Keep this channel open. I don’t know how I’m going to do it yet, but I will get you a location. Once I have something, you’re going to have to turn it over to Huang.”

He agreed.

“Where are you now?” I asked.

“I was on my way to Little Man.”

“Your family okay?” I asked.

“A carrier buzzed them last night. I think it scared them. They’re colonists. Having the Navy around makes them nervous.”

“Did anything happen?” I asked.

“The captain gave them one month to evacuate the planet. They’ll still be there when this is over with.” For some reason, I got the feeling that he was not anxious to visit Little Man. Until recently, he never even mentioned his family. Now, when he talked about them, he did not seem to exude warm feelings.

We agreed to meet in Safe Harbor once I got off this ship. Freeman would go and see what happened to Callahan and the commandant at Fort Washington. One way or another, I thought I could bring in Batt Wingate, and we would need witnesses to prove he was our Benedict Arnold.

My new uniform made me a lieutenant in the Confederate Navy. Now that I was an officer, I moved around the ship more freely. I walked the halls and looked for clues.

The first thing that struck me was the sheer emptiness of the ship. U.A. ships were crowded with personnel. Engineers, weapons officers, cooks, communications officers …wherever you looked, you saw sailors. Command ships seemed doubly crowded because, along with the crew, they had fleet officers and administrative flunkies.

This ship had a skeleton crew, maybe a half-crew. I walked down major arteries between engineering and weapons systems passing only an occasional sailor.

The ship itself was clean, brightly lit, and remarkably unorganized. The cables that I saw lining the walls down in the landing bay also snaked along the halls on the upper decks. They were about three inches in diameter and highly insulated, which led me to believe that they might carry a high-voltage electrical charge. The ceilings in this part of the ship were only eight feet tall, and the cables hung one foot lower than that. At one point, thinking I was alone in a long hall, I stopped to examine them. The outside covering of these cables was black with maroon strips.

“Is there a problem with the cables, Sir?” somebody asked behind my back.

I whirled around expecting to see an MP. It was a petty officer—a maintenance technician. I recognized the crossed hammers insignia on his blouse. It was the same insignia that the U.A. Navy used. This man did not suspect me of being a spy. He was worried about my spotting a flaw in the way that the cables were hung.

“Looks sound,” I said.

He saluted, but he had a curious, maybe even slightly nervous look on his face. “Sir,” he said, looking as if he was not sure he should continue. I thought I knew what he would say and I was ready.

“Yes?”

Now lowering his voice to a whisper, he leaned forward and said, “You forgot your bars.” As he said this, he pinched the right side of his collar between his thumb and forefinger and shook it.

That was not what I expected. I pretended to be confused. Seeing that there were no bars on my collar, I acted surprised and embarrassed. “Thank you. I can’t believe I missed that,” I said with an expression that I hoped looked like a nervous grin. The petty officer saluted and left.

Of course there were no bars pinned to my collar, I had liberated this blouse from laundry. No officer worth his spit would leave his bars or clusters on the collar of a blouse that was headed for a cleaning.

My first discovery was that this ship was a battleship. I found that out when I passed a directory on the top deck. The directory showed the ship’s seven decks plus a picture of the ship from the outside. A ship of this size should have had a 2,500-man crew. Now, having walked its length on every deck, I guessed the crew at no more than 800. Maybe one-tenth of the crew was Japanese. The engineering area was almost all Japanese.

The Japanese officers made no attempt to fit in with the other sailors that I saw. Most of the men on this battleship wore tan-colored uniforms. The Japanese uniforms were dark blue. Still, Japanese officers spoke English whether talking to other officers or just among themselves.

The closer I came to the command deck, the more this ship looked Japanese. Not far from the directory, on the command deck, stood an archway made of two posts topped by two beams. Under the arch was a shrine or display with three long swords stretched across a three-tiered pedestal. Since the officers I saw walk past this shrine did not stop to bow or pray to it, I decided the display had more to do with heritage than religion.

I continued toward the bridge, passing through officer country and the maze of cubicles and offices that occupies the top deck of almost any naval ship. Here I walked with a businesslike stride, acting as if I had an important meeting to attend. On a U.A. Navy ship, someone would have noticed the missing bars. I would have been stopped and questioned. On this ship, few people noticed how I dressed.

I turned a corner and saw the entry to the bridge. Taking a deep breath to steel myself, I walked to the door. The bridge was spacious and dark. Teams of sailors gathered around various consoles and workstations.

Everyone in the room was Japanese. In the dimmed light, their royal blue uniforms were black as shadows, even in the low glow from the workstations. Looking around the floor, I estimated that there were at least fifty officers sitting at the various stations.

In the center of the bridge sat a large square table which the captain and his senior officers used to chart courses and consider battle strategies.

There was nothing else to do. I stepped onto the bridge and walked its breadth. The workstations were arranged in concentric circles. Walking quickly without a pause, I recognized each station. The computers in the weapons area, which were unmanned at that moment, had large displays showing the diagram of the battleship with its gun and cannon arrays highlighted. The engineering station had computers showing detailed maps of each deck. I would have loved to have parked myself beside one of those computers to discover its many secrets, but three men sat at that station. The white glow of the readout display flickered on their faces.

Three men sat in front of one elongated screen in the navigation section. Their screen had a map of the galaxy along the top but most of the screen was filled with the local star system. I did not recognize the system. The last area I passed as I lapped the outer circle of the bridge was communications. Voices came from a station for monitoring fleet communications. During battle, this station would be the nerve center for the fleet. Now, after the battle, transmissions between ships went unobserved.

BATTLE GROUP SIX ABLE, THIS IS BATTLESHIP SEVEN ABLE, OVER.

COME IN BATTLESHIP SEVEN ABLE. THIS IS BATTLE SIX ABLE COMMAND.

WE ARE BREAKING FORMATION. DO YOU COPY?

WHAT SEEMS TO BE THE PROBLEM SEVEN ABLE?

This particular station was more cluttered than the worst workstation in the Golan traffic tower. A stack of data pads had toppled, spreading across the desk. Pencils, pens, papers, coffee cups, and other bric-a-brac lay all around those pads. There were four cups of coffee along the edge of that particular desk along with a brick-sized box of audio chips. In the center of this mess was a large ashtray filled to capacity with cigarette ash and butts. The line of drawers along the left side of the station hung partially open. The drawers, like everything else at this station, overflowed with junk.

I passed by the station without slowing, completed my lap of the bridge and left. Not far from the bridge, I found a bathroom. A couple of men stood by the urinals; so I entered a stall and waited until they left, then I contacted Freeman.

“Okay,” I spoke quickly, but in a whisper, “this is a battleship. I have no idea where we are. I am going to leave this line open. Tell Huang to have his Intel section listen in.”

Freeman nodded. He did not bother telling me to “be careful” or to “watch my back.” That was not his way. He stared into the console intense and humorless as ever. His eyes reminded me of a double-barreled shotgun as they stared out from that mahogany skull. He was the most dangerous man in the galaxy, and I had absolutely no doubt that I could rely on him. His very being communicated undeniable competence.

Removing the shades, I stepped out of the bathroom stall and returned to the bridge. I took another stroll on the bridge, slowing to glance at the various workstations as I passed them. I wished I could examine the strategic charts. Huang would have paid one billion dollars for the secrets that they held. But I had something even more valuable …the fleet itself.

As before, nobody paid any attention to me. I approached the communications area and looked over my shoulder to be sure that no was watching. I never stopped, but I slowed down as I left a little extra mess on the already cluttered workstation. A moment later, I left the command deck and never returned.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

I was alone on the command ship of the enemy fleet. I had no idea about the fleet’s position. Escape was out of the question. We must have been light years from the nearest broadcast station. At this point, I had no means of communicating with Freeman or Huang or anyone else who could help me. I could, of course, steal another set of shades; but I did not know how long I would be on this scow, and I could not afford to take any more chances.

My best bet, I decided, was to return to the landing bay, a relatively empty part of the ship. There I would stow away on the next transport that came through. Sooner or later this fleet would attack another target. If I managed to dig in with the right group of commandos, I might have a way out.

I returned to the gym. The place was as dead as before. A couple of enlisted men stood in the locker room chatting as they put on their uniforms. Neither man paid much attention as I grabbed shorts and a T-shirt and started undressing. A moment later they left and I went to the lockers.

The coveralls were still in the locker where I placed them. Weeks might have passed before somebody discovered them in a forsaken gym like this one. I pulled them from the locker, stepped into the pants legs, and zipped them up. I did not bother with socks before stepping into my foul-smelling boots. If the worst I got out of this brush with the GC Fleet was foot fungus, I would consider myself lucky.

Still noticing just how bad the clothes smelled, I started down to the landing bay. The smell was strong and the clothes felt damp against my skin. I did not know how long I would be stuck in these clothes. How had I missed this smell before?

And something else …I realized that I was hungry. The last time I had eaten was when I grabbed a sandwich on the Marine base on New Columbia. That seemed like a long time ago until I did the math. It had only been a few hours ago.

I took a lift down one deck. As I made my way down the corridor, I passed an electrician working on a wall panel. He had removed the faceplate from the panel and now probed the circuits with a pen-shaped tool. As I walked by, he stopped to look over at me. Our eyes met for a moment, and I nodded and moved on. The man did not return my greeting, but he continued to watch me. Perhaps I was paranoid. I looked back as I meandered down the hall. The electrician remained where he was, standing on a foot-tall step ladder, probing around that open panel.

Traveling down the next two decks, I passed almost no one. Perhaps a shift had ended and a smaller crew had replaced it. Maybe it was lunchtime and most of the sailors were eating.

That last corridor that led to the launch bay was entirely empty. The thud of my boots created an indistinct echo as I walked through that brightly-lit stretch. Everything was going so smoothly, I had no doubt that I would slip off the ship soon.

The next time I saw people was as I drew near the landing bay. Two men walked silently down an intersecting corridor. They wore the khaki uniforms of regular officers rather than the blue uniforms of the Japanese, and they fell in quietly behind me as I continued toward the bay. I expected them to turn into some door or another, but they did not. They continued straight ahead, walking at the same pace as me.

I thought about turning into the next door or hall that I passed, but there were no more doors until the ones leading into the bay. I pretended to be unaware of the men. I did not look back and I did not slow down. Neither did the men behind me.

With no other choice, I entered the landing area. A lone transport sat in the middle of the hangar, its hatch hung open. A small crowd stood on the ramp leading into the kettle. I counted three medics and six MPs, and in the center of them, placed on the bare metal ramp like a cadaver on a mortuary slab, lay Derrick Hines, stripped down to his briefs.

The muzzle of a gun jabbed into my back and a voice said, “How do you like that, boys, we have our first prisoner.”

If there was one kind of naval design that did not change with the times, it was brig. I once ran security for the Doctrinaire , the most advanced ship ever made. I knew every cell in its brig thoroughly, and they were exactly like the cells in this ancient ship …the one in which I was now a prisoner. Both brigs had the same kinds of bars on their walls and the same limp mats on their cots. I did not have the means to measure my floor, but if I did, it would have measured precisely eight feet by twelve feet. I knew that because that was the size of the cells on the Doctrinaire .

I lay on my cot staring up at the charcoal-gray ceiling. For a change of scenery, I sometimes turned to look at the charcoal-gray walls. These cells were the ultimate in ease when it came to housekeeping. You simply pulled the mattress out and sprayed everything down with a steam hose. The floor was a grating that led to a drain.

Mercifully, they had stripped me down to my briefs before throwing me in the cell. Those coveralls reeked. From what I could tell, the late Derrick Hines hadn’t washed them for weeks. I might have been a bit cold in this cell, but at least I could breathe.

Had the brig been darker, I might have slept. The lights in the hall were too bright.

I think I knew why Liberators got addicted to violence, we became morose when we just laid around. I thought about the diary from Saint Germaine in which that priest and Tabor Shannon argued about whether or not Liberators had souls. I bought into both arguments and decided that perhaps we had worthless souls. I thought about Freeman. Had he arrived in Safe Harbor yet? I wondered about his family on Little Man. What would the Navy do?

Forced to guess how long I had been in this cell, I might have said three hours. It could have been longer. It could have been shorter. With no sun coming up and no events by which to gauge time, my internal clock was all but useless.

Footsteps echoed down the hall as the men came to look in my cell. My jailors looked in on me through the bars. Both men wore khaki uniforms. One was a tall man with blond hair, the other had dark brown locks.

“Hello, Harris,” the blond man said.

I glanced in their direction. I remained flat on my back on the cot. I wanted to test them. I was their first prisoner. Would they know how to treat me and how to control me, or would they make mistakes? If they were naïve enough, I could end up in charge even though I was the one behind the bars.

“Comfortable, Harris?” the blond man asked.

“Hope you didn’t go to too much trouble getting my name,” I said.“ I would have told you if you had asked.”

“Really? I always heard that Liberator clones were tougher than that,” the blond man said. “You knew you were a clone, right? I mean, I would hate for you to have one of those death reflex things and keel over right here.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

“So you’re a Liberator. I always thought your kind would be bigger. I mean, aren’t you guys the planet exterminators?”

I looked toward the man. “You must be a Mogat,” I said in as dismissive a voice as I could muster.

“The term is Morgan Atkins Believer. I suggest you remember that, Harris, or your stay here could become real unpleasant.” The humor never left his face, but his voice turned serious.

Now that I stopped to look, I saw that this was not a man to take lightly. He had a broad and powerful build. His bull neck was almost as wide as his jaw, making it look like he had a pointed head. The muscles in his shoulders bulged, but this was not the beautiful physique of a bodybuilder. This man had padding around his gut.

“Learn anything else?” I asked.

The second man outside my cell, a short chubby man with the brown hair, stepped forward with a data pad and answered. “Harris, Wayson, Colonel, Unified Authority Marines. Raised: U.A. Orphanage # five hundred fifty-three. Year of Manufacture: 2490. Clone Class: Liberator.

“How does a clone, especially a Liberator Clone, achieve the rank of colonel?” the dark-haired man asked.

“You want to know how I became a colonel?” I asked.

“I want to know why you exist at all,” the man said. “How did you find your way on this ship?”

“Do you want the full story or the abbreviated version?” With this I sat up.

“Let’s stick with the short one for now,” the man with the data pad said.

“I caught a ride on your transport when it left New Columbia.”

The blond-haired man, clearly my jailor, smiled and gave me a vigorous nod. “Know what Harris, I believe you. An honest clone, no less.”

“May I ask a question?”

“Go ahead,” the man with the data pad said. The jailor scowled at him.

“Is this ship part of the Hinode Fleet, or part of the Confederate Navy, or part of the Galactic Central Fleet?”

“None of your business,” the man with the blond hair said.

“Confederate Navy,” the man with the dark hair said. The bigger man, the jailor, scowled at him.

“It depends who you ask, I suppose,” the blond man continued to glare down at him.

“So what is the Hinode Fleet?”

“Another name for the same bunch of ships,” the smaller man said.

“Do you have more than one fleet?” I asked.

“No,” the man admitted.

“Shut up,” the jailor snapped.

“He’s in jail, Sam, and he’s down to his skivvies. How is he going to tell anyone?” Then the man seemed to think twice about this before adding, “We will ask the questions from here on out, Harris. We have not decided what to do with you yet. I suggest you conduct yourself properly. Execution is not out of the question.”

They left me in my cell with nothing to do and no way of knowing how much time passed. I laid on the cot in my underwear staring at the ceiling and tried to piece together all of the little fragments of information I had collected. It seemed like the separatists had a genuine Power Struggle on their hands. They had an alliance, but all three sides were claiming the Navy for themselves.

Why did the Japanese officers wear different uniforms than the other men? Did the Mogats consider themselves part of the Confederate Arms? Did the Japanese? My thoughts drifted and I fell asleep.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

“I knew it was you the moment I heard they had a prisoner.” “Smiling” Tom Halverson, my nickname for him, stood outside my cell looking dapper in his dress whites, with the three gold stripes of a full admiral on his shoulder boards. He’d cut his graying hair into a flattop, but otherwise he looked no different than the first time I saw him, on the bridge of the Doctrinaire . “Hello, Harris.”

“Get specked,” I said.

“Watch yourself, clone.” Sam, my blond-haired jailor, warned me. Whenever people visited me, Sam accompanied them.

“That’s all right, Sergeant. Colonel Harris and I are old acquaintances,” Halverson said. “Is that why you’re here, Harris? Did you come for me?”

I did not respond.

“No comment, Harris? That doesn’t sound good.”

“The admiral asked you a question,” Sam said in his most menacing voice.

“That’s all right, Sergeant,” Halverson said.

“You know, Harris, you really are amazing. The rest of them can’t even locate our ships and you turn up on one of them. It’s a good thing the Unified Authority doesn’t have one hundred more of you. Of course if they want to win the war they can make more of you. But then, I get the feeling that all you want is a little revenge.”

“Why did you kill him?” I asked, propping myself up to look at Halverson. “You and Klyber were friends.”

“I should have thought that was obvious, Harris. He’s with the Unified Authority. I defected to the Confederate Arms. We were on different sides.”

“Get specked,” I said, slumping over on my back.

“I brought you a present, Harris.”

I did not respond.

“You can break these if you want, but I went to a lot of trouble to get them for you, so don’t expect me to replace them if you do.” He tossed a pair of mediaLink shades in through the bars.

“Bryce said you liked to keep up with current events. There should be some dandy news for you to follow over the next few weeks.

“And don’t bother trying to send messages out on those. I had the sending gear disabled.” With this, Halverson turned and left.

“You were stupid,” I yelled as he reached the door to the brig. “Killing Admiral Klyber was a stupid mistake.”

Halverson paused. “Why is that, Colonel?” he asked.

“Huang already planned to replace him with …”

“With Robert Thurston, no doubt,” Halverson said. He watched me for a moment with that implacable smile, and then he left.

Sam, who remained just outside the bars of my cell, continued to stare at me with those narrow green eyes that looked both alert and angry. Sometimes he looked like he could barely control himself. “If you break the lenses, they’d make real sharp blades. You might be able to save us some trouble and slit your own throat with ’em,” he said. “I’d like that.” Then he favored me with his backside, leaving me to pick up the shades.

I picked them up and turned them over in my hands to examine them from every angle. This was an expensive pair, far more stylish than the plastic shades I took from the late Derrick Hines. These shades had gold wire frames and honest-to-goodness glass lenses that automatically adjusted to ambient light levels.

The strip along the bottom of the lenses with the microphones had been removed. When I slipped the shades over my eyes and jacked in, I saw they had been hobbled so that the sending functions no longer worked. The browsing functions worked well however.

We were somewhere in the Norma Arm. Not only could I browse the Unified Authority-approved channels, I also found local broadcasts that were banned and filtered out of the U.A. media. Calendars were everywhere on the Link, and I knew that it was now March 26. Eleven days had passed since Bryce Klyber’s death. Thirty-six hours had passed since the attack on New Columbia. It was here that I watched the video feeds of the attack on New Columbia. I got to see how both sides reported the battle.

The big story on the U.A. feeds was the unveiling of the Doctrinaire . Admiral Huang, now officially the highest-ranking man in the Navy after Klyber’s death, could not have been any better suited for the role of tour guide. He began his tours by telling the press how the late Fleet Admiral Klyber conceived the project and spearheaded the construction of the ship.

Huang escorted a large group of reporters on a tour of the Doctrinaire . He charmed them with his enthusiasm as he led them into battle turret after battle turret, then showed them the observation deck from which they could view the rest of the ship.

Huang did not reveal classified secrets like the dual broadcast generators, but he highlighted many of the obvious innovations. No reporter could possibly have missed the four launch tubes that ran the length of the hull of the Doctrinaire , so Huang talked about the fighter squadrons at length. He pointed out that most fighter carriers had a single tube and a compliment of seventy Tomcat fighters. The Doctrinaire , with its four tubes, had 280 fighters. With their rounded antennas’ the new shield technology was impossible to miss; so Huang told the reporters about the rounded shields and gave a cursory explanation about the technology that made them possible.

As Huang finished speaking, he was joined by the other Joint Chiefs and several senators. Hundreds of reporters sat in folding chairs, the way they might have attended the unveiling of the old Earth-bound battleships five hundred years earlier. They would have fit more comfortably in one of the ship’s briefing auditoriums than on the observation deck, but Huang saw a great photo opportunity and had the media sense to take advantage of it.

This was a side of Huang that I had never known about. He stood behind a small podium looking absolutely resplendent in his white uniform with its many medals. He and Halverson had the same number of gold stripes across their shoulder boards—three, but Huang cut a more commanding figure with the gray in his hair and his athletic build. Huang and Halverson were about the same age, but Huang wore it better. Huang looked like a middle-aged man. Halverson looked like a man closing in on his sixties.

Smiling pleasantly, Huang opened the floor for questions, and every hand shot up. Reporters clambered for his attention until he finally selected a man near the front of the audience.

“This is unquestionably an amazing ship. But it is still just one ship. How can it possibly fare against an attack force like the sixty-five ships that sacked New Columbia?”

“Excellent question,” Huang said. “We have arranged a demonstration to address that very point. If you are not satisfied after our demonstration, we can discuss it further.”

Every reporter’s hand went up again. Huang selected a woman from the front row. “Can a ship this size self-broadcast reliably?”

“I think Admiral Klyber struggled a long time with that question,” Huang said. “The engines on this ship are perfectly reliable. We have tested them thoroughly …”

“Didn’t Admiral Klyber die in a broadcast malfunction?” the reporter followed up her own question.

“An unfortunate irony, if you like,” said Huang. “The broadcast equipment in this ship is completely stable.”

The reporters raised their hands. Huang selected his next inquisitor.

“Admiral Klyber was going to command this ship, was he not? Who will command it in his place?”

“Admiral Klyber never intended to command this ship. He was a fleet admiral, you know. You don’t assign a fleet admiral to a single ship. Rear Admiral Robert Thurston was selected to command the Doctrinaire while Klyber commanded the entire fleet.”

“Rear Admiral Thurston?” the reporter asked quickly, before Huang could open the floor for the next question. “The commander of the Scutum-Crux Fleet?”

“Yes,” said Huang. “As you may recall, he commanded our forces to victory at Hubble and Little Man.”

Thurston stepped onto the dais in his whites. A few of the less experienced reporters, the ones who had never seen Thurston, laughed or gasped at his youthful appearance. Short and skinny, with spiky red hair and an adolescent’s face, Robert Thurston always looked out of place in his uniform, especially standing next to a seasoned officer like Huang. The senators at the back of the dais looked like they could have been Thurston’s grandparents.

The questions continued for ten more minutes. The session would have gone on for hours had Huang allowed it, but he had promised a final demonstration.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I suggest you prepare yourselves. We are about to enter a war zone,” said Huang.

Smoky-colored tinting appeared in the glass ceiling and walls of the observation deck turning them opaque. The reporters spoke nervously among themselves as they saw the muted flashes of lightning all around them. It was one thing to sit in some comfortable commuter craft and pass through the Broadcast Network. This was raw. Here they sat on folding chairs on the glass-encased deck of a monolithic battleship while millions of volts of electricity danced on the glass just above their heads.

When the lightning stopped and the tinting cleared, the Doctrinaire was in a battle zone. Looking around the crown of the observation deck, you could see dozens of ships buzzing around it.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Cygnus Arm. In case it has slipped your attention, this is one of the Confederate Arms. We are forty thousand light years deep in enemy territory.

“What you see flying outside our shields are twenty-five ships from what we in the Navy call the ‘mothball fleet.’ These are vintage ships. These are battleships from 2488 and newer. They are fully functional, space-worthy ships. They were perfectly preserved for just such an occasion as this.

“Who is flying them?” a reporter called out.

“Not to worry,” Huang said, “they are not being manned by live crews.”

Knowing Huang and his disdain for synthetic life, it would not have surprised me to learn that those ships had all-clone crews. But even the cost of raising clones comes out of the budget, so Huang most likely controlled these ships using remotely controlled computers.

Zipping around, weaving in and out and around each other, the old battleships circled around the Doctrinaire from two miles off.

“Before we begin our actual battle,” Huang said, “you should know that the ships around us are using live ammunition. Rear Admiral Thurston, would you direct one of those battleships to attack?”

One of the battleships charged straight at the Doctrinaire and fired. It shot a brilliant burst of bright red laser fire followed by three torpedoes. I could not believe what I saw. This was a full-on assault. A lethal attack. The translucent shields turned milky white where the beam hit. The laser beam was round and red and as thick around as a tree stump, but it stopped dead at the shields. Moments later, the three torpedoes slammed into the shields and burst into puddles of light that dissolved quickly in the vacuum of space.

Most of the reporters gasped and a few screamed.

“As I stated before, the attacking ships are decommissioned U.A. Navy ships. We stopped using these fifteen years ago because their technology was obsolete, surpassed by technologies which are now also considered obsolete. These ships were made twenty years after the ships currently used by the Confederate Arms,” said Huang.

Huang now pulled an old-fashioned analog pocket watch from the podium. He held it up for the reporters to see. “Let the battle begin,” he said.

“Admiral Klyber spared nothing when he designed this ship,” Huang said. “He wanted to make the ship that would end the war …a ship that would terrify enemies into abandoning their Revolution.”

Above Huang’s head, the vacuum of space looked like a thunderstorm. Hundreds of torpedoes pecked at the shields from every angle. They burst and vanished leaving no trace. Laser beams slammed into the canopy creating a crimson light show.

“I think it’s time we teach these marauders a lesson,” Huang said, tensing his thumb over the timer button on the pocket watch. “Admiral Thurston, return fire.” The watch bobbed up and down as he clicked the timer.

Laser bursts fired from the side of the Doctrinaire . I had never seen these cannons tested, so I did not know what to expect. The battleships continued to fire lasers and torpedoes at the Doctrinaire , but nothing penetrated the shields. Seeing these fireworks reminded me of watching a light rain fall through a see-though umbrella.

The cannons on the Doctrinaire fired measured bursts. The cannon fire made a sizzling sound that lasted one-half of a second at most. Dzzzz. Dzzzz . You could see it launch if you happened to look at the right cannon just as it fired. The laser looked like a solid red rod that issued from the cannon and vanished.

The bursts traveled at the speed of light. The time that it took for the laser bursts to pass through the shields was so short that they could not be measured by any instrument. Out in the blackness that engulfed the observation deck, “enemy” ships exploded.

Lasers from the Doctrinaire penetrated the hulls of the attacking ships as if they had no shields. There would be a flash. A ball of fire and smoke would flush out of the injured ship precisely where the laser hit. Everything burst from the laser wound, then the injured ships went dark. They were not crushed. They simply coughed out everything inside them as if all of their innards had been sucked out by space itself.

The computer-controlled targeting system on the Doctrinaire wasted few shots. Lasers burst in all directions. Many of the ships in the attacking fleet were hit two and three times. Dzzzzz , and they burst and died. Dzzzz . Dzzzz , and the crumbled carcasses turned red and somersaulted in space. The lasers might melt the surface of the ships, but the absolute cold of space quenched the damage.

Soon there was so much debris floating around the Doctrinaire that it looked like the ship had entered an asteroid belt.

The last of the attacking ships nearly disintegrated in the laser fire from multiple cannons. The ship continued to glide toward the shields. Huang stopped the time with a flourish, making sure that the reporters knew that the battle had ended. He looked at his watch and smiled. “Two minutes and twenty-three seconds. Not quite the time I hoped for, but not far off pace.”

Putting the watch back on the podium, Huang looked up at the derelict battleship that now hurtled toward the Doctrinaire . “This is a lucky break. Robert, let that ship fly into our shields,” he said.

The battleship tumbled into the shields and stopped instantly. The collision reminded me of a small bird slamming into a windowpane. The shields held that battered hull in place, infusing it with an electrical charge. After a few moments, the charge repulsed the dead ship and it floated away from the Doctrinaire .

“The enemy is using the Galactic Central Fleet, a fleet of U.A. Navy ships that vanished more than forty years ago. It is an incomplete fleet. It has no fighter craft. A fleet without fighters, gentlemen, is like a boxer without a jab. In order to strike, the enemy will be forced to use battleships, and battleships, ladies and gentlemen, big and slow ships that are hard to maneuver, make great targets …great targets.

“The Confederate Navy is perfect for bushwhacking helpless carriers as they emerge from the Broadcast Network. It will be useless against a giant ship that hits the deck running.”

As I watched this first active demonstration of the Doctrinaire , I began to wonder why no one had bothered questioning me about the ship. Perhaps with traitors like Crowley and Halverson, they knew more than I did. Admiral Halverson, until recently the second-in-command on the Doctrinaire , probably knew all about the dual broadcast generators and the rounded shields. He knew everything I knew, plus he knew about the powerful new cannons that could destroy GCF ships with a single shot—something I had not been briefed about.

Halverson assumed I had come to avenge Bryce Klyber. Since I had no means of transmitting information when I was captured, nobody worried about what I might have learned. In their minds, I was an assassin, not a spy.

I lay on my cot thinking about the demonstration I had just seen. What would Warren Atkins make of it? What would Amos Crowley, the general-turned-traitor, think?

Would Colonel Wingate regret switching sides? Wingate could not possibly have known about the Doctrinaire . Would he try to weasel his way back into the U.A. Army?

What could Admiral Halverson possibly say to the men around him to give them hope? I imagined him at a table surrounded by stunned officers. “Sure it looks impressive,” he would say, “but we can take it. I know we can.”

No one bothered to interrogate me. In fact, after the visit from Halverson, I was pretty much left alone. My jailors suddenly remembered me the following day, March 27, 2512. That was the day that the tides of war turned.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

I started the day with a quick search of the mediaLink and found nothing exciting. I pinged a few channels to watch news analysts digest yesterday’s demonstration. One U.A. analyst called the Doctrinaire the “most dominating advance in military strategy since the fighter carrier.” On the Confederate Arms stations, I saw the same interview again and again—some wizened admiral I had never heard of dismissing the Doctrinaire as “The Unified Authority’s new Bismarck .”

“ Bismarck ,” I mused. Huang had used the same historic reference during the summit.

Having grown up in U.A. Orphanage #553, a clone farm in which the term social studies translated to the study of great land battles and oceanography meant naval science, I knew all about the Bismarck . That was the unstoppable battleship of its day, a juggernaut with one Achilles heel—its rudder. A torpedo jammed the rudder of the unsinkable Bismarck and it sailed in circles as enemy warships pounded it into the sea.

“We have more than five hundred ships in our fleet, not twenty-five,” said the old admiral, a man with mutton chop sideburns and a bushy white mustache. “Our ships have been reengineered. The U.A.’s new Bismarck is big and slow and will make an easy target for a modernized fleet. No serious military strategist believes you can win wars by making a really big boat. They gave that up centuries ago.”

Irritated by that silly old man, I took one last look around the U.A. networks for news and gave up.

I laughed at that relic of an officer for pulling out an old chestnut like comparing the Doctrinaire to the Bismarck . Granted, the Bismarck had been sunk, but there was no overlooked rudder on the Doctrinaire . Apollo could not have guided an arrow into Achilles’s heel had he been dipped in wraparound shields.

It did not look like much had happened during my resting period, so I took off my shades and began my morning exercises. I stretched my legs, arms, back, and neck. Placing my toes on the edge of my cot, I balled up my fists and did four sets of fifty push-ups on my knuckles. I then did sit-ups and leg lifts and jumped in place.

Just as I began to work up a decent lather, Sam the jailor came in. “You might want to put on the shades Admiral Halverson gave you,” he said. “We’re about to attack another planet. It’s time to show those U.A. speckers what we think of their big scary boat.”

My chest, shoulders, and arms had a pleasant dull ache. I felt muscle spasms as I sat on the edge of my cot and slipped on my shades. Regular programming had been preempted. In a moment, the station would show a live news flash.

“How long has the attack been going?” I called.

“Just began,” Sam said.

At first I thought the Confederate Arms reporters and their Navy had become so cocky that they were talking about attacks before they happened. Then I remembered that I had been watching a Unified Authority station when I removed my shades. Somehow the U.A. knew about this attack before it commenced.

The heading at the bottom of the screen read: TUSCANY—SAGITTARIUS ARM. The scene above was a battle in progress.

The live feed was shot from the planet’s surface and told me nothing. There was none of the destruction I had seen on New Columbia. People gathered along the streets and stared into the sky to watch tiny flashes of light—a distant naval battle that blended in all too well with the stars around it. Whenever there was a big flash, a momentary explosion that looked no bigger than a dime in the night sky, the crowd would “oooooo” and “ahhhh” like an audience watching a pretty fireworks display.

Just moments ago, a fleet of fifteen Confederate Navy ships broadcasted into Tuscany space and were intercepted by a fleet of nearly fifty U.A. ships. It is not known if the Doctrinaire, the Unified Authority’s super ship, joined this battle.

The reporter, a young woman with long brown hair wearing a pretty light blue suit, looked more like she was on her way to the bank than covering a war. Her hair was perfect. She stood calmly in front of the camera, speaking casually. Above and behind her, little lights twinkled and extinguished. They might have been fireflies, or stars on a very clear night.

In recent days, the Confederate Navy has attacked Gateway and New Columbia, destroying military bases on both planets. This attack marks the first time that Confederate ships have been seen in the Sagittarius Arm.

The woman paused and touched her finger to her ear. Then the screen split into two side-by-side windows.

Paula, we are receiving the first still images of the battle as it appears from space. These are early images released by the Department of the Navy.

Behind the anchor woman’s desk, a large screen showed pictures of a space battle. The first picture on the screen showed ships broadcasting in. The ships were black and would have been almost invisible if not for the bright lightning halos that formed around them.

As you can see, at 2215 standardized time, fifteen Confederate ships appeared in New Tuscan space.

The next picture showed swarms of fighters gathering around shadowy shapes that looked something like black holes. The attack had already begun by the time this image was taken. The only evidence that those black shapes were indeed enemy ships was the little pricks of light where missiles and lasers struck their shields.

According to Naval sources, 350 U.A. fighters engaged the enemy ships, destroying two battleships. U.A. battleships, cruisers, and missile carriers also joined the battle.

The next picture showed four ships taking heavy damage. In the background, I saw the flare of rocket engines. While their comrades burned, several Confederate ships tried to cut and run. They had no choice.

There are unconfirmed reports that Naval Intelligence knew about this attack in advance and that Navy spies have infiltrated enemy command. The Department of the Navy denies those reports. We do know that the Navy was ready for this attack.

There was a pause.

I have just received a report that a total of six enemy ships have been destroyed and that nine others managed to broadcast out safely. While Pentagon sources confirm that several single-man fighter craft were destroyed in the battle, the U.A Navy lost no capital ships.

I heard the clang, but my attention was fixed on the news and it never occurred to me that somebody had stepped into my cell. “Company, Harris.” It was Sam’s voice and Sam’s fist, which slammed into my stomach. I was stretched out on the cot, completely unaware. The pain telegraphed itself from my gut to my brain in an instant. I curled up, my arms folded over my diaphragm as I struggled for air.

My Liberator programming kicked in the moment Sam’s fist struck. The problem was not that I panicked. My mind was clear and I felt that warmth as the endorphins and adrenaline spread through my veins, but I had no air in my lungs. Given a moment to breathe and climb to my feet, I might have fought back, but Sam did not give me that moment. He grabbed my hair, gave my head a hard shake, and then dragged me off the cot. I toppled onto the cold steel floor, the edges of the grating cutting into my palms and knees, and my right cheek, which landed hard. Sam’s boot slammed into my jaw with enough force to partially lift me off of the ground, and the back of my head struck the metal frame of my cot. After that, everything went blank.

When I woke, I lay dressed in my briefs in what appeared to be an operating room. My neck, shoulders, wrists, waist, and ankles were all strapped to the hard, cold surface of a table. There was a strap across my forehead, but this one was loose enough for me to lift my head an inch. I could turn my head enough to see the straps around my wrists. A bright light shined on my face from above. Its glare gave the skin on my arms a bleached look. Beyond the veil of the light, I could not see much of anything.

“I am sorry I could not visit you sooner,” a voice said from beyond my sight. It was a low voice, a voice filled with commiseration. A squat silhouette appeared at the edge of the light. The man stepped closer. Yoshi Yamashiro, the former governor of Ezer Kri, stood beside the table. He wore a dark gray suit and red tie, the uniform of a civilian politician.

“I guess Tuscany didn’t go the way you expected,” I said.

Yamashiro laughed. “I guess not.”

“And you think I had something to do with it?” I asked.

“You make an excellent suspect. Obviously you could not have done it alone.” Yamashiro was a short man, no taller than five-feet-six-inches. He was powerfully built with broad shoulders and a wide chest. He did not look like a man who worked out, but rather like a man who was naturally strong. He was in his fifties or sixties with gray streaks woven into his black hair. The walnut-colored skin of his face was dry but not wrinkled. His eyes were as black as olives. I saw sympathy in his expression.

“Your being a Liberator has caused quite a stir between three uneasy partners,” Yamashiro said. He spoke in a hushed voice. I was pretty sure that we were alone in the room, but that did not mean there were no mikes or cameras.

“The Morgan Atkins Believers consider you a devil. They claim to respect all life forms, but when it comes to Liberator clones, they make an exception. They want you exterminated immediately.

“Sam, your jailor, is a Morgan Atkins Believer. He has offered to kill you himself.”

“He damned near did,” I said, feeling deep aches in my jaw and ribs.

“The Believers are not military minded. They are politically savvy. The military minds come from the Confederate Arms. They say we should torture you, find out how you learned of our plans and what else you might know. After they get what they want, they plan to execute you.”

“How about you?” I asked.

“After we win this war, I think you should go free …provided you explain a few things” said Yamashiro.

“How I boarded this ship?” I asked.

“We know all about that,” Yamashiro said, placing a chair beside the table and sitting down. He pulled a small gold lighter and pack of cigarettes from inside his jacket. “Mind if I smoke?” Before I could answer, he lit a cigarette and replaced everything in his jacket.

I lay on my back, cold in the chilled air of this operating room, watching tendrils of cigarette smoke rise in the light.

“You killed Corporal Jamie Rogers outside of Safe Harbor while he was patrolling the woods. You were alone, and you took his place on the lift that brought his platoon back to the fleet. We know you killed Rogers because he did not report after the mission. We know you were alone because we took a head count on the ship.”

I listened to this and nodded. “I did not know his name.”

“We’ve been able to trace your movements on this ship. You killed Private Derrick Hines for his clothing. Once you had it, you went to a gymnasium on the second deck. Then you went to a laundry facility and stole a uniform belonging to Lieutenant Marcus Cox. You were seen inspecting the wiring in a service hall. When asked about it, you commented that it looked secure.

“We even have a security feed of you on the command deck. You strolled around the bridge twice. A few minutes later, you were captured back in the landing bay. Presumably you were looking for a way off the ship. Does that sound correct?”

“More or less,” I said. I came off sounding much more confident than I felt.

“How did you know we would attack Tuscany?”

“I didn’t,” I said.

“Did you hear people discussing it?”

“Maybe the Unified Authority has a spy on the ship. I came here for revenge, not information.”

“There is no one else on this ship,” a voice said from behind me. I could not see the man, though I thought I recognized the voice. “There are no spies on this ship …well, other than you.”

“General Crowley,” Yamashiro said. He must have meant for this to sound like a greeting, but it sounded more like an announcement.

“Governor Yamashiro,” Crowley said, stepping into view. “I was not aware that you knew Colonel Harris.”

“We met on Ezer Kri,” Yamashiro said.

We had not actually met. I was on Bryce Klyber’s guard detail and escorted the fleet admiral into the capitol building. Yamashiro and I did not speak on that occasion. It seemed unlikely that Yamashiro would remember me from that incident.

“And you took a personal interest in the colonel?” Crowley asked. A tall and lanky man with a snowy-white beard, Crowley looked down at me with an expression that was not entirely unfriendly.

“He was not a colonel at the time, only a corporal,” Yamashiro said.

“Then I have known Colonel Harris even longer than you have,” said Amos Crowley. “He was a mere private when we met. He was fresh out of basic and assigned to an awful planet called Gobi. Harris was promoted from private to corporal a few days after I left. Isn’t that right, Harris?”

I did not say anything. If I could have broken free of the table, I would have happily murdered General Crowley on the spot.

“You must feel very special, Colonel Harris. Here you are, a prisoner of war, and an important man like Governor Yamashiro has chosen to come visit you. I would never have guessed you to have such powerful friends.”

“Governor Yamashiro asked you how you knew about our plan to attack Tuscany.” Crowley said. “I would be interested in hearing your answer as well.”

“I did not know about it,” I repeated. “How could I possibly have known about it? I was in a cell.”

“But somehow, you did,” Crowley said. His voice lost its native jocularity. Now it had an antagonistic edge. “And somehow you managed to communicate that information to the Navy, Colonel. I want to know how. If you do not tell me willingly, I am prepared to force it out of you.”

The truth about torture was that it never failed—the victim will always give in. It was only a matter of time. I could have told Yamashiro or Crowley my secret. I believed Yamashiro when he hinted his intention to protect me and set me free once the war was won. The problem was that his position did not seem so much better than my own.

If I read this situation correctly, the Confederate Navy was suffering from an identity crisis. The boats captured by the Morgan Atkins Believers were taken so long ago that the antiquated ships would have proven worthless in battle.

The Japanese came from Ezer Kri, a planet with several prestigious schools of engineering. The Japanese must have provided the engineering talent needed to update the GC Fleet. To Yamashiro and the refugees of Ezer Kri, this was Hinode Fleet.

The Confederate Arms, with their billions of citizens, and the Mogats, with their millions of members, were willing to tolerate Yamashiro for now. I could hear it in Amos Crowley’s voice. He did not like seeing Yamashiro in this room, did not trust Yamashiro to be alone with me.

Crowley’s loyalties were obvious enough. He joined the Mogats movement and deserted the U.A. Army in 2507, three years before the Confederate Arms declared independence and formed their own government. Clearly he had no connection with the Japanese. As a Mogat, Crowley would want me dead.

Fortunately for me, Amos Crowley was also a military man, the kind of man who understands the importance of good intelligence. He knew everything he needed to know about the Unified Authority military complex. Hell, he helped build it. What he did not know was how much I knew about his plans and how much of that knowledge I might have communicated to my superiors.

Staring down at me, his urbane smile as bright as ever, Crowley said, “Governor, Colonel Harris and I have some matters to discuss.”

“There are the articles …” Yamashiro began.

“Articles of agreement stipulating the humane treatment of prisoners,” Crowley said, sounding bored. “Yoshi, I assure you that Colonel Harris will receive humane treatment. Now, if you would excuse us, my interrogation team should be arriving.”

Yamashiro listened to this and appeared to consider his options. Lying down on the table, I felt like I was watching two dinosaurs battle above me. Yoshi Yamashiro, the short, solid man with the powerful build, was the herbivore—the Stegosaurus fighting for its life. Crowley, ever the carnivore, was the Tyrannosaurus rex.

“I will speak with you again,” Yamashiro said to me. He nodded to Crowley and left.

Crowley looked away from me to watch Yamashiro leave. When he looked down again, he had an expression that reminded me of a wolf staring at a wounded lamb. “I’ll give you one chance. How did you know about the attack on Tuscany?”

“I didn’t,” I said. There was no reason to tell Crowley the truth at this point. He would not have believed me. He would have tortured me to confirm what I said and to make certain I told him everything. I did not want to be tortured. More than anything I had ever wanted in my life, I did not want to be tortured.

“How did you warn the Navy about the attack?”

“I did not know about the attack,” I repeated. I was sticking to the truth in case they were monitoring me for physical responses. I knew how I warned the Navy, but I had not known about the attack.

Crowley pursed his lips. “I see,” he said. He reached a hand along the side of the table and I heard a snap as he flipped a switch. There were several video monitors around the table, just at the edge of the light. One down toward my feet showed body readings. Multi-colored lines ran across the screen displaying my pulse, my heartbeat, my stress level, and my brain activity. A score in the top right corner of the screen showed a computer-calculated projection of the veracity of everything I said based on those body readings.

“It would be pointless to lie, Harris. You know that.” He paused, waited a moment for me to study my readings on the video screen, then repeated his questions. “How did you know about the attack? How did you send your message?”

“I did not know about the attack,” I said.

“I suppose it is possible that some U.A. admiral got lucky and happened to station fifty ships around Tuscany,” Crowley said in a confiding voice, “but the monitor reading your vital signs does not seem to believe you.”

My pulse and heartbeat remained steady, but the lines showing my stress level and brain activity had turned into saw blades.

“I think there are things that you are not telling me, Harris. I’m not good at interrogation. We have other people who specialize in it. I’m betting that you will be a lot more helpful once they have a word with you.”

He stepped out of the room leaving me alone to think about what might happen to me. They would torture me. They would use every old and new technology at their disposal to make me suffer. The old forms of torture had not been forgotten. They were brutal and barbaric. The new forms were surgically precise, left little damage, and were incredibly effective. And I was going to go through this for what? To protect the nation I hated? To get paid by Huang? To get revenge on the men who killed Klyber? More likely, I would allow myself to be tortured because of neural programming. I was designed not to back down …and because, despite it all, I wanted to protect the Republic, earn my bounty from Huang, and kill the men who killed Klyber. But above all, I was going to be tortured because my programming would not let me help the enemy.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

The chemical compound in the syringe was not lethal, but the medical technician let me know that having electricity-conducting toxins flowing through my veins was not good for my health. “Taken in large quantities,” he said, “it might cause cancer.” He did not smile as he said this, though he must have known that a long bout with cancer was the least of my worries. He also told me that the toxins would dissolve in my blood. Two or three injections, he said, should not cause permanent damage; and in his experience, no one had required more than two sessions with this particular compound.

After giving me the injection, the technician left the room and I was alone. My fingers tingled and my palms were covered with sweat. Lying alone in the darkness wearing nothing but my briefs, I noticed the air getting colder and wondered if that chill was in the room or in me. I had time to think about how I could twist information. I practiced lies and half-truths in my head and watched the way the monitor reacted as I convoluted facts.

I did not know if anyone had ever tortured or even interrogated a Liberator clone. I did not know what kind of strength the hormone—the adrenaline and endorphins— would offer. It would certainly keep my thoughts clear, but that might make the pain more acute.

At the moment, I saw no reason to suffer for the Unified Authority, the pan-galactic republic that created me. Yes, I had been made and raised by that government, but I had also been banned by it. The Senate passed laws to outlaw my existence. Che Huang sent me out to do his bidding, but he was no friend. The patriotic stirrings that I once felt for the Republic had been nothing but a misconception.

I looked around as best I could. Everything within that cone of blinding light shining over my table was bleached white by its brightness. Everything beyond the edge of the light was nearly invisible to me, shadows at most. Time moved slowly. I thought about the orphanage in which I grew up. I had a mentor at the orphanage—Aleg Oberland. He was the man who convinced me to follow current events. He kept in touch with me after I left the orphanage. He sent me two or three letters per year over the mediaLink.

I thought about Vince Lee, my old friend from my days in the Marines. Vince and I went on leave together. We were in the same platoon and we survived the slaughter on Little Man together. He was still an officer in the Scutum-Crux Fleet.

How long would they leave me alone to think? Was this part of the process—letting the fear of torture weaken my resolve? Maybe they just wanted to wait until their chemicals spread through every cell of my body, running through my veins like a mouse in a maze. I made the mistake of staring straight up, and the light above my head shined into my eyes. When I looked away, orange and black dots filled my vision. And the room around me was filled with absolute silence.

Time continued to pass. I watched the heart, stress, and pulse lines on the monitor. Minutes done were minutes gone. I thought about the people I knew, the clones and officers in my past platoons. I did not care for the Unified Authority, nor did I feel that I owed it anything, but there were individuals who had mattered at one time or another. There was Sergeant Tabor Shannon, a Liberator. He and I got drunk together the night I learned that I was a clone. During the battle at Hubble, he and I went into a cave filled with Mogats. He never came out.

There was Captain Gaylan McKay, a natural-born who showed no prejudice against clones, not even Liberators. He died on Little Man. McKay’s last act was ordering me to leave him behind. How could I ever look these men in the eye …even in my dreams? These men died defending the Republic. They believed in it to the last.

What about Klyber? I imagined him standing over the table and regarding me coldly with his stern face and pale gray eyes.

“How are we doing?” The man who came in was tall, thin, bald, and wore glasses. He looked absolutely ordinary. If I passed him in a crowd, I would not notice him.

My heart, stress, and pulse lines jumped. My stress reading, which had nearly flat-lined, now looked like a mountain range. I tried to roll from side to side and break free from the restraints.

Something had to happen. Someone would save me. Perhaps Yamashiro would come back. Maybe Navy intelligence had discovered the Hinode Fleet’s location. Maybe …Maybe Ray Freeman would come. Any moment, he could pound through that door carrying his massive particle beam gun.

The man stood over me. His skin looked paper white in the bright overhead light. The thick lenses of his glasses magnified the size of his eyes. He reached into the breast pocket of his white lab coat and produced a long glass tube. This he opened, showing me its contents. The tube was a quiver for three-inch needles. The man selected one. “This will not hurt,” he said.

Yamashiro or Freeman , I thought. They were my best bets. Surely Yamashiro knew that the Morgan Atkins Separatists would betray him. He would have to know that the Confederate Arms would not look upon the Japanese as equals.

Smiling kindly, as if to reassure me, the man stabbed the first needle deep into my right bicep. I flinched, but the restraints prevented me from moving my arm.

“Don’t move,” the man said, pressing the needle deeper into the muscle. “You would not want to break the needle. Then we might have to dig it out.” His head ticked up and down as he counted to twenty. When he finished counting, he pulled the needle from my arm, wiped the blood off with a cloth, and examined it under the light. “Good. Good.”

“The needle turns green if the compound has dispersed properly,” the man said. He held the needle over my face so I could see it; but of course, the light engulfed it and I could not see anything.

“You’re in excellent shape, Colonel Harris. Sometimes the compound bunches up, especially when a patient has bad circulation. With you, it’s spread through your upper extremities perfectly.”

He placed the needle on the table beside me. I twisted my neck and managed to get a look at it. The shaft of that needle had turned jade green. I imagined myself sticking that needle into the man’s eye, stabbing it into the eye and pushing it all the way through until it jabbed into his brain.

The man held the tube so that I could see it. He wanted me to know what he was doing. I could tell this by the slow way he selected the next needle and held it up for me. “Now let’s be sure that the compound is spreading through your lower extremities,” he said cheerfully.

“Get specked,” I sneered.

“Don’t take this personally, Colonel Harris. I’m just doing my job. Besides, this is nothing. This is just a small pin-prick. Don’t get worked up. In a minute it will all be over; and I assure you, you will forget all about the pin test.” With that, he stabbed the needle deep into the calf of my right leg. This was not like an injection where the medic presses the point against your skin, then neatly slides the needle into place. This man jabbed his needle in as if it were an ice pick. I winced, but the straps held my leg still. The man repeated everything, counting to twenty, pulling and cleaning the needle, and then showing me the results.

“Excellent. Now, let’s just be sure the compound has dispersed properly throughout.” He selected another needle, then paused. “This one may hurt. I assure you, you will forget about it soon enough.” And he plunged that third needle into my stomach.

The pain was brilliant and clear, a flash of silver lightning that shot from my stomach to my brain. I grimaced as he counted to twenty. I took short, panting breaths, feeling the stitch that the needle created between my stomach muscles.

“Get specked,” I hissed between gritted teeth. “Get specked you goddamned son of …”

He clicked his tongue at me. “There is nothing personal about this,” he said.

“Oh, yes, there is,” I sighed as he pulled the bloody needle out of my gut. The muscles in my neck relaxed and my head clunked back against the metal surface of the table.

“You won’t believe this, but we created this compound for humane purposes. It lets us communicate pain to your brain without inflicting physical damage,” the man said. “What you will feel is a very amplified version of the damage your body is taking.”

“Get specked,” I repeated. The hormone had not yet kicked in. I was weak and tired and scared. Would it be Freeman who came for me, or would it be Yamashiro? I would not be tortured.

“I will give you a brief demonstration of pain. Then, perhaps, we can discuss the information I am looking for before we proceed much further.”

It would be Freeman. If I could smuggle myself aboard a transport, so could he. He was seven feet tall and black-skinned, which might make him easy to spot, but he would find a way in and kill this bastard.

The man held up a harness that reminded me of a bit for a horse. He showed it to me. “Colonel, I suggest that you take this voluntarily. If you don’t wear this, you may bite your tongue, and that would not be good for either of us.”

“Get specked,” I said again. I could not think of anything else to say.

“Suit yourself,” he said. Then he held up a five-inch chrome-plated wand. It looked like a fancy pen. There were no wires hanging out of it and no lights built into it. It was just a plain, silvery shaft. He held it a few inches away from my face, giving me an opportunity to take a good look at it.

“Generally we like to start out light, maybe a couple of hundred volts, but since you’re a Liberator, I think that would be a waste of time.” With this he ran the wand over the left side of my chest, along my ribs, and down to my naval. For an instant I felt nothing but the smooth warm surface of the wand on my skin. That pleasant sensation might have lasted one tenth of a second. Then the pain shot through me.

The pain was like a blaring noise that engulfs everything else around it. My thoughts turned into a silver-white flash, possibly a visualization of the electrical jolt splashing out of my blood and into my nervous system. Every muscle in my body contracted. I would have arched my back, but the straps across my pelvis and shoulders held me in place. Somehow I managed to arch the area of my spine that was between the restraints.

My hands balled into fists and my shoulders tensed and bunched. My jaw clenched so tightly that my teeth should have shattered. Had my tongue slipped between my teeth, I would have sheered it off.

Then, as suddenly as it started, the pain disappeared and my body dropped to the table. I lay there on that cold metal, my back no more rigid than a wet rag. And, for the first time since I had been brought into this room, I felt the hormone flowing through my body. It had probably been released during that jolt as the shock of the electricity overwhelmed my brain.

“My, you Liberators are tough,” the man said. “Normally my patients start to sob about now.” The man looked down at me. “Still, you did mess yourself. That’s something.”

It was true. During the jolt, my body had let go of all the waste it was holding. Far from sobbing, however, I would have broken this man’s neck if not for the restraints. My thoughts and head were clear. My desires were violent, and this time I knew my bloodlust was not just a response to the endorphins flowing through my veins.

I chanced a glance at the biofeedback monitor and saw something interesting. My readings had flat-lined again. Calmed by the hormone, my brain activity and stress level were normal. My heart was beating a bit fast and I found that I could speed up my pulse by fighting against the restraints—isometric exercise.

“In the old days, they used to kill people with the voltage you just experienced,” the man said. “Did you know that? You just experienced twenty seconds of two thousand volts. Well, actually, it was ten volts …the wand only has a ten-volt charge, but your neural receptors believed they were taking a two thousand-volt shock. That was the voltage they used to use in electric chairs. They would electrocute the condemned for thirty seconds at two thousand volts to make them pass out, then they would drop the voltage and finish the job.

“Now you know how those old outlaws felt just before they died. The only difference is that this won’t kill you. This won’t fry your brain or damage your vital organs, so we can keep you riding the lightning for a much longer time. The only thing we have to worry about is having a fear-induced heart attack. Judging by your readings, Colonel Harris, I don’t think that will be a problem.

“So, think you could hang on to your sanity through a ten-minute jolt?”

I wanted to tell this asshole to go speck himself, but I did not want to show that I was in control of myself. More than that, I did not want to make him angry.

“You know, the first time I tried this procedure I killed the man. The guy died …my fault entirely. I had him on a table just like this one, only it had electric restraints.

“It was just a little shock, just a disabling shock. It shouldn’t have hurt the guy at all, but, you know, with the compound increasing the voltage …Anyway, the restraints had a two hundred-volt charge, so he got the equivalent of forty thousand volts nonstop. His heart burst.

“I don’t know if that would happen to you. This is such an excellent opportunity. I never imagined I could ever work with a clone of your make. You have no idea what an amazing specimen you are, and to think, they can mass-produce you.”

I was not sure how to act, so I lay in place shaking my head and moaning softly. I acted as if all of the strength had left my body. In truth, a lot of it had. I did not have enough strength to make a fist or fight against the restraints.

“So let’s talk about the information I need, Colonel Harris.” The man sat down on a rolling chair and glided up to the side of the table so that our heads almost met. “Should I call you Wayson? Can I call you Wayson?” He laughed. “I suppose at this point I can call you anything I want. Just don’t pull out my magic wand—is that what you are thinking, Wayson?”

Thanks to the hormone in my blood, I began to forget just how painful that jolt had been. I had to work to stop myself from telling the man to “get specked.”

“So, Wayson, I’m going to ask you some questions. Whether you answer or not, I’m going to give you another jolt. One of the things they teach us in intelligence training is, ‘Never accept the first offer.’

“So you tell me as much or as little as you want, and I’ll still fry you after that. Then I will ask you the same questions again. And we’ll keep that up until I think you’ve told me the truth. All of the truth.”

He leaned still farther in so that our faces were almost touching. “Tell me, Wayson, how did you know that we were going to attack Tuscany?”

I continued rolling my head back and forth and groaning softly. My acting must have been decent enough. “Didn’t know about Tuscany,” I said, clenching my fists lightly to raise my bio-readings.

Out came the wand. He pulled it from his lab coat with a snap of his wrist. He did not look at me. He watched the monitor as he brought the wand toward me, and I suppose he liked what he saw. My heart rate must have been skyrocketing and now I was not acting. He placed the wand on the table beside my arm.

“Wayson, you cannot possibly expect anyone to believe that,” the man said, though something in the tone of his voice made me think that he might.

“I suppose if you didn’t know about the attack, the next question makes no sense. Still, you must be in contact with someone, Wayson. A bright man like you would not come out to the enemy fleet without telling somebody.”

Sighing slightly, the man climbed to his feet and I saw that he had the harness in his hands. There was a plastic bar in the middle of the harness. This he slipped into my mouth, pinning my tongue in place behind my teeth. I put up some resistance; but I was weak and he won easily enough. He laced the harness around my face then synched it to the strap across my forehead.

“Is there another spy on this ship?”

I could not speak, of course; and now that my face was bound and my breathing obstructed, my pulse, heartbeat, and stress readings were no doubt off the charts.

“Nothing to say for yourself?” the man said as he picked up the wand. This time he touched the wand to my throat, just below the corner of my jaw. The pain was all encompassing. My muscles clamped and my thoughts turned into a silver explosion.

The wand traveled slowly down my neck, over my collar-bone, and then paused just above my heart. The agony was exquisite. My hands clenched into fists, and my fists pounded involuntarily up and down between the table and the restraints. My jaw clamped down on that plastic bit. My eyes screwed into tiny slits, which was good because I lay staring up into that blinding light.

During the moment itself, as the stream of electricity seemed to stab into my body like an endless blade, I lost all thought and control. If the man had asked me a question and I had somehow been able to hear him and I was intelligent enough to understand and answer, I would have told him anything he wanted. I do not know if he asked questions during the torture itself. He must have known that I could not hear, could not think, could not speak. I lay on that table a straining, suffering, quivering mass, no more intelligent than the electricity that so overwhelmed my brain.

From my heart, the wand moved down across the flat of my stomach. Had I been cognizant, I would have worried about the man dragging that wand across my genitals, but he paused over my lower abdominal muscles, and then he placed the wand back on the table.

“Wayson, you just survived three minutes and twenty-two seconds of two thousand volts. If you were truly riding the lightning in an old-fashioned electric chair, your eyes would have melted and your hair would have caught on fire. Do you still say that you’ve never heard of Tuscany?” the man asked.

Thanks to the hormone, which likely flooded my veins in excessive quantities, my thoughts came back the moment the wand went away. I was in pain, no doubt about that. I felt worn out and weak, but I was back in control the moment the electricity stopped.

A whimper left my lips. I was not sure if it was real or I pretended it. I did not cry. I did not even whimper again. When the man removed the harness from my mouth, I whispered, “I did not know about Tuscany.”

“Is there another spy on this ship?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.” All the strength left my body this time. I lay flat on the table without enough strength to so much as turn my head. A layer of sweat covered my body. The cold air in the office bit into my damp skin, but I was calm. The hormones left me calm and resigned.

“You know what, Harris,” the man said in a voice so informal that I might not have recognized it, “I think I believe you.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Between the initial beating I received from Sam the jailor and the time that I woke up again inside my cell, nearly twenty-four hours had passed. The ringing in my head was the worst I had ever felt, but my body did not hurt too badly. Sam had left some nasty bruises on my ribs. That was the worst of it. My left bicep and right calf had deep charley horses where the interrogator stabbed me with his needles. As for the electrocution, some of my muscles were strained from fighting against the restraining straps. For the most part, I felt no worse than I would have felt after a really tough day at the gym.

During the time I was being interrogated, I caught a lucky break. The Confederate Arms sent ten ships to Odessa, a wealthy planet in the Sagittarius Arm that supported the Revolution. They did not intend to attack the planet, this was a blockade-running mission.

A flotilla of U.A. Navy destroyers and fighter carriers met them as they emerged. The Confederate ships tried to escape without engaging the Sagittarius Fleet. The U.A. ships followed. Two Hinode battleships were destroyed. The others fled until they could broadcast to safety.

Since I was deep in the bowels of the ship, stripped to my briefs and strapped to an interrogation table when the battle occurred, Crowley must have decided that I had nothing to do with it. The Confederate Arms said there was a leak in the chain of command and blamed the Mogats. The Mogats said that the Japanese should have been better prepared for the battle. I personally wanted all sides to blame Tom Halverson. With any luck, they might even shoot the bastard and me with the same firing squad.

The door down the hall opened. Someone walked toward my cell, his hard-soled shoes clanked against the metal grid floor. I did not bother climbing from my cot. At any moment, I thought, Sam would step into view. If he came close enough, I would kill him. I would snap his neck. I was marked to die anyway, and dying sooner might mean avoiding another torture session. So I lay on my cot facing the far wall of my cell, curled into a ball and acting defeated.

The steps stopped at the edge of my cell. “I have a gift for you, Colonel Harris,” Yamashiro said. “This is a gentleman’s gift. No one else needs to know that I gave it to you.”

For one wild moment I thought he had smuggled a gun into the brig. I spun over on my cot so that I faced him. Yamashiro stood right in front of my cell leaning forward into the bars. He held on to the bars with his right hand, and reached toward me with his left. That hand was cupped around something, my “gentleman’s gift.”

I sat up and stared through the bars at the man. Our eyes met for a moment, then he nodded down toward the gift he had offered me. I stood and approached.

“You’re not supposed to stand so close to the bars,” I said. “It’s dangerous. A prisoner could grab your arm and pin you against the bars.”

“I’m not worried about it,” Yamashiro said. As I drew closer and looked at his offered hand, I noticed the calloused skin along the edge of it. A short and powerful build, sandpaper hands—these were the signs of training in judo or jujitsu.

Yamashiro turned his hand so that the palm faced up. His fingers still curled over the gift hiding it. As I approached, the fingers spread revealing their secret. I saw nuggets of glass and wadded up wires that looked like they were made of gold. Yamashiro smiled. “It was a fine magic trick.”

Seconds passed as I stared at that hand filled with sparkling gems of broken glass, my heart sinking in my chest. Then I realized that the pulverized mediaLink shades he held had gold frames. The ones I left on the bridge had cheap black plastic frames. “A young ensign found them in a communications station on the bridge.”

“Then you have more than one spy on your hands,” I said. “I’ve never seen those before.”

Yamashiro’s smile spread. “No? The shades you left had black frames. These were the best I could do on short notice.” He closed his fist again and pulled his hand back through the bars.

“Where are the real ones?” I asked.

“Right where you left them,” Yamashiro said. “I thought they might be more valuable just as you left them. Having unseen ears can be a powerful tool.”

I worried about Halverson setting a trap by giving faux orders in range of those shades. I imagined intelligence relaying those orders to Huang and Huang sending the Doctrinaire into an ambush. What kind of trap could stop a ship like that? Then I remembered that Yamashiro had called this a “gentleman’s gift.” Why had he come and why had he not told Crowley about my little trick?

“Who did your ensign tell about the shades?” I asked.

“He told his commanding officer, who told his commanding officer,” Yamashiro said, an infectious, mischievous grin spreading across his face.

“And it went all the way to the top?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Yamashiro.

“But Admiral Halverson did not hear about it?” I asked.

“He is with the Confederate Arms Fleet,” Yamashiro said, as if those few words explained everything. “The ensign was an officer in the Hinode Fleet. The information came to me.”

“And you don’t share intelligence between fleets?” I asked.

“Sadly, no. Like you, we also suspect that our allies in the Confederate Arms may not be reliable.”

“I see,” I said. “In my opinion, the Mogats aren’t much better. You know how they got these ships in the first place?”

Without waiting for a response, I answered my own question. “They gassed the original crew.”

“So you would not trust them?” Yamashiro asked.

“If I were you, you mean? I would trust the Arms before I would trust the Mogats,” I said. “You know who you should have trusted? You should have trusted Klyber. Klyber did not want to invade your planet. He tried to keep the Senate off your back as much as possible.”

Yamashiro’s smile did not fade, but his eyes seemed to harden and his expression became more serious. “I admired Admiral Klyber but I did not trust the Senate.”

I stared straight into Yamashiro’s eyes. “The Mogats would not have known how to rig Klyber’s ship like that.”

For a long moment, Yamashiro returned my glare, looking me in the eyes. Then he looked down at the floor and shook his head. “Klyber was an honorable man. I did not want him killed.”

“But you showed them how to do it,” I said.

“Yes,” said Yamashiro, still looking down. He produced a package of cigarettes and lit one. “A Hinode engineer figured out how to sabotage the generators and taught some of their engineers.”

“Did you know what they would do with it?”

“Yes.”

I laughed. It was an angry laugh. “Is it irony or karma? Now that they know how to sabotage broadcast engines, what makes you think that they won’t do it to you?”

“The Believers could barely fly these ships when they helped us escape Ezer Kri,” Yamashiro said. “They had no idea how to maintain or repair them. We renovated the fleet. Our engineers did all of it.”

“The Mogats learn quickly,” I said, “so watch your back. Once they know enough, they won’t need you or your fleet officers. As I recall, you’re a student of history. Right now, your officers are playing the role of Poland to the Confederate Arms’s Soviet Union and the Mogats’ Nazi Germany.”

Yamashiro took a drag on his cigarette, stared at me for a moment, then shook his head. Clearly his history was civil, not military.

“The Nazis and the Soviets had a shaky alliance. It ended the moment they both invaded Poland to try and get a better shot at each other. Once your war with the Unified Authority is done, you’d better have an exit plan.”

Yamashiro thought to himself as he listened. He took one last long drag from his cigarette and exhaled the smoke through his nostrils in dual streams. His smile had vanished and he wore a serious and thoughtful expression. “One way or another, the war ends tomorrow. We’re attacking Earth,” he said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Time never moved so slowly for me as it did after Yoshi Yamashiro’s visit. I was locked in the brig of a ship that was about to go to battle against the most powerful navy in history. This was the command ship. If the Doctrinaire located this ship, it would undoubtedly destroy it. With those big cannons, one shot could finish the job.

If the Secessionists won, the Confederate Arms and Mogats would agree that it was time for me to die. If the Unified Authority carried the day, Huang might execute me. For somebody who had supposedly given up on life and survived purely by instinct, I cared more than I should have.

I tried to sleep but found that I could not lie still on my cot. Sam came in to check on me every hour. He stood outside my cell and stared in at me.

“You want something?” I asked once.

He gave me a cocky smile. “Comfortable?” he asked.

“You want to come in and fluff my pillow?” I asked.

“You know, Harris, I used to want to shoot you. After seeing what they did to you in the interrogation room, I’d rather keep you alive. I might enjoy giving you the wand a time or two myself.”

“Why don’t you come in here and we can discuss it,” I said.

“You might show me some respect after what happened last time. Maybe I went too easy on you.” Sam actually seemed to believe what he was saying.

“I’d love to go another round. Maybe this time you can hit me when I’m looking.” I knew I was baiting him, and I knew it would have the desired effect. Sam considered himself a pretty tough guy.

He turned red then fought back his rage. “Watch yourself,” he said. “Things could go worse for you next time. I wonder how that wand would feel if you went in with a broken jaw.”

“Lets find out. Why don’t you come in here and break it?” I asked. Sam heard this and stormed down the hall.

The next person to call on me was Admiral Halverson. As he had before, Halverson came bearing gifts. This time, he carried a small red visor on a two-legged stand. The unit was no more than eighteen inches tall, wobbly support frame and all. Sam accompanied him. In the admiral’s wake, the jailor acted more civil. “You’ve got a visitor, Harris,” he said.

The last time he said that, of course, he caught me unaware and pummeled me. This time he stayed outside my cell, as did Halverson.

“Hello, Colonel,” Halverson said.

“What is that?” I asked.

“This?” Halverson held the visor up so that I could get a better look at it. “This is how sailors used to view their battles forty years ago, back when this ship was made. This is a remote strategic display.” Halverson walked to the door of my cell and placed the display on the floor.

“Be careful with it, Harris. It’s an antique.”

I sat on the edge of my cot, my legs dangling over the side. “So you really plan to attack Earth today?” I asked. “Doesn’t that seem a bit …suicidal? The Doctrinaire will be waiting.”

“I’m counting on it,” Halverson said with a bright air. “I should hope that the Unified Authority’s most powerful ship will come to protect its capital world. Believe it or not, Harris, we sped up our plans because of you.

“Ever since you arrived, we seem to have lost the element of surprise. So now, thanks to you, we have very little choice but to finish the war.”

“May I?” I asked, looking first at the remote display, then at Sam.

Halverson nodded. I stepped off the cot and walked over to the door of the cell. Kneeling rather than bending over, so that I could keep an eye on Sam, I reached through the bars and picked up the display.

The thing weighed no more than a pound. The visor itself was made of cheap, hollow plastic. The outside of the display was convex. The inside had two eyepieces surrounded by spongy padding. A black cable hung between the back of the visor and a U-shaped control pad.

“The display is monochrome, I’m afraid. It’s red against black. Old technology, but it’s the best I could find.”

“I can’t watch from the bridge?” I asked.

“Harris, I don’t know how you tipped Huang off, but resourceful as you’ve proven yourself to be, I wouldn’t trust you anywhere near the bridge.”

“So you think you can win?” I asked. “You have what …roughly six hundred ships? Didn’t the Galactic Central Fleet have about six hundred ships? That was before Thurston blasted four of them at Little Man.”

“Some of the fleet is too old or too badly maintained to fight.” Halverson continued to smile. “And they’ve shot down seventeen more of our ships since you came aboard, Harris. We’re down to five hundred and forty. Well, five hundred and thirty-nine.”

“Did you hear what Huang said about a fleet with no fighters?” I asked.

“That it’s like a boxer without a jab? He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The man is a politician, not a sailor. He puts on a good show.”

“Not as good a show as Thurston, though,” I said. “You were crazy to kill Klyber. Did you really think you could stop the Doctrinaire by killing Klyber? Didn’t it ever occur to you that Huang would replace him with Robert Thurston?”

“Harris, Bryce Klyber was a personal friend, but this is war. I hated killing Bryce, but I need Thurston in his place.”

“Thurston is a better strategist than Klyber ever was,” I said. “You were there when Klyber tried to match him in a simulation.” Days after Thurston replaced Admiral Absalom Barry as the commander of the Inner Scutum-Crux Fleet, Admiral Klyber challenged him to a simulated battle. Thurston read Klyber’s opening move and predicted his every step, forcing him into submission.

“Klyber was more dangerous for our purposes,” Halverson said. “I’ve served under both officers. Thurston’s style is tailor-made for us.”

“You’re crazy,” I said. “Robert Thurston is the best commander in the U.A. Navy.”

“Under most circumstances,” Halverson said, his smile as unfailing as ever.

“But you didn’t need to kill Klyber,” I said. “Huang took the ship away from him at the summit. He gave Thurston the Doctrinaire and moved Klyber to the support fleet.”

Halverson’s smile faltered. “They moved Klyber to the support fleet,” Halverson echoed, and the pride and bravado vanished from his voice. “I learned about the transfer after the cable was set, but by the time I heard about it, it was already too late …too late.” He stood silently staring at me, then turned to leave. “Enjoy the show, Harris,” he called over his shoulder.

He and Sam left the brig; and once again, I was alone.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

I had heard about strategic displays like the one Tom Halverson gave me. Sailors used to call them “red worlds.” This was not the obsolete strategic views replaced by the 3-D holographic displays used in modern ships. This was a portable display that officers could take into engineering or battle stations.

The visor was about three inches thick. Inside its housing was a laser that could draw objects in brilliant detail. The only problem was that it could only draw them in one color—red. My eyes never did adjust to that red-and-black display.

I switched on the power and pressed my face into a soft foam ring that ran along the inside of the visor. A little sign appeared instructing me to adjust the eyepieces to the shape of my face. Using two knobs built into the top of the visor, I adjusted the display until the words in that sign seemed to float out in space.

The display showed a satellite view of Earth. I could see the side of the planet facing the sun. In the display, the lasers drew clouds and land in red. The ocean was black and hollow. The edge of the moon was barely visible in the right corner of the display. In the lower corner, a digital clock counted backward. The clock read 00:05:37.

When the clock reached 00:01:00, I heard a muffled commotion outside my cell as the ship was called to general quarters. The call to battle stations lasted the full minute. The sound must have been thunderous throughout the ship. In the brig, where thick iron walls muted most of the sound, I soon forgot about the call to general quarters and did not notice when it ended.

The visor blanked out. It went dead for just a moment then winked back to life, and I knew that we had just broadcasted into Earth space. In the red-and-black panorama, the fabric of space around the moon seemed to shatter as 540 self-broadcasting ships appeared just behind the moon. Seen in red and black, the charcoal gray Hinode ships were not visible on this display but a label along the bottom of the screen said 540 ships.

A more modern display would have offered me optical menus. I might have found a way to view the Hinode ships using heat or motion-tracking sensors. On this old relic, the most I could do was zoom in and zoom out.

Turning my attention to Earth, I saw hundreds of ships rising from all points on the globe and forming a blockade. The Doctrinaire was nowhere among them. There were Perseus-class fighter carriers, battleships, and destroyers. Not all of the Unified Authority ships were made for combat. The fleet included medical barges and emergency evacuation ships designed to save crews from dying vessels.

I zoomed out to see a wider perspective. From this angle, the U.A. ships looked no more significant than specks of dust in a sandstorm. As I closed my perspective, the U.A. ships took on shape and detail. My camera was still far enough out to see from Canada to the Brazilian coast. From here, the Earth ships looked like a swatch of broken glass. Panning in so close that I could make out the Rocky Mountains, I studied the Earth Fleet’s formation.

I watched as an endless stream of fighter jets sprayed out of carrier flight tubes. Even this close in, the fighters were nothing more than motes as they flew into formation and moved to the front of the fleet.

Fumbling blindly with the little control pad as I watched the Earth fleet fly into formation, I accidentally pressed a button that altered my view. Earth was still formed of solid land and hollow oceans, and the open space around the moon was still black, but now objects appeared in that space.

The Hinode ships were now more marked than displayed. They were still grouped around the moon, some 240,000 miles away. The two fleets would only need a minute to cross the 200,000 miles between the Earth and moon.

Pressing another button changed my battle perspective so that I could now get a closer look at the Hinode ships. Fine vector lines traced the edges of the ships. There were only three kinds of ships in the Hinode Fleet—cruisers, destroyers, and battleships. These ships were big. They would make easy targets.

When I switched back to the Earth Fleet, I did not like what I saw. The fleet could have used Klyber at the helm. It looked untried and unready for battle …or, perhaps, simply unready for this battle. Whoever was in command of the Fleet had placed the frigates near the front of the formation, just behind the fighters—a textbook formation for a different battle. The U.A. did not need frigates, a class of ship designed specifically to combat fighters for this battle. The Hinode Fleet had capital ships and no fighters. I saw this and realized Che Huang had undoubtedly installed himself as Fleet Commander.

“Good going, Huang,” I laughed.

Looking at how the Earth Fleet had arrayed itself, I saw that the cruisers were stationed so far out that they would be easy targets for any ships that flanked the formation.

In the bottom corner of the display, the clock now counted forward. Six minutes had passed since the enemy ships broadcasted into Earth space. The Hinode ships spread their ranks and started forward.

One of the old cruisers, however, seemed to have stalled. It inched forward, limping behind the other Hinode ships in stuttering short bursts. This had to have been the 540th ship, the one that Halverson doubted would be in on the battle. I might have thought that it was the command ship, but I was on the command ship. I would have felt that kind of engine problem.

The Earth Fleet had twenty carriers with 1,400 fighters. Those fighters dashed forward and splashed across the front of the advancing Hinode formation, parting in every direction and breaking into its ranks. The visor lit up as thousands of short-range lasers and cannons opened fire, and still the Hinode ships advanced, closing in on Earth.

I zoomed in for a more detailed view. Now I could see both the cannon fire and the toll it took on the fighters. Laser fire appeared on my visor as hair-width lines that flared out of nowhere then disappeared without a trace. Looking into the battle was like staring into a dandelion, there were so many filaments. The U.A. fighter squadrons evaporated before my eyes. The bigger Hinode ships simply picked them off as they continued their advance.

But where was the Doctrinaire ? The battle had begun.

The front ranks of the Hinode and Earth Fleets were almost within range, and the barrage began. Missiles and long-range beams filled the air. I could not tell the difference between particle beams and lasers on this display. I knew that the U.A. ships had both particle beams and lasers, and that the particle beams were far more destructive.

Hinode ships had only lasers.

Perhaps the frigates were a sacrifice. The first Hinode ships blew them up quickly and brushed past their mangled hulls without incident. Next came the front ranks of destroyers and battleships. Running into this bedrock layer, the Hinode ships spread wide.

And then it happened. First the jagged shards of lightning appeared. I had never seen anything like the anomaly caused by the Doctrinaire . It was a huge shimmering bubble, as big as any two ships on the field. On my visor, it showed in translucent red.

This antique could not possibly show the bright intensity of the anomaly. On the battlefield, it would have looked silver and white. It would be the same color and intensity of the electricity that filled my head when I was being tortured, and I imagined it against the pure black background of space. Any pilot looking in that direction would have been blinded.

From that silver white bubble, the bow of the Doctinaire emerged. It was huge and fierce, like a fire demon emerging from a cocoon of flames. It was the embodiment of the entire galactic military—a beast that had won every war and nearly every battle for the last five hundred years.

Huang was a better tactician than I gave him credit for. The cruisers were off on the edges to make space. As the anomaly began, the U.A. battleships cleared out of the way and the Doctrinaire drifted into the void that they created.

Even before it had fully emerged from its anomaly, the Doctrinaire began to fire. Its massive cannons lashed out quickly, appearing to pluck Hinode ships out of space. I imagined the dzzzz sound as the new, special cannons fired their half-second bursts. In the vacuum of space, a Hinode battleship trying to fly over the front line of the U.A. formation exploded, jettisoning anything that was not fastened down. Then the fires within the ship consumed all of the oxygen around it and the ship imploded. The crumpled ship floated sideways as it drifted away from the battle.

More cannon fire followed. Another Hinode ship exploded and imploded, then drifted away. Then two cannons fired in different directions, and two more derelicts appeared. Every time the cannons from the Doctrinaire hit an enemy ship, the ship exploded, taking thousands of men with it.

Across the battlefield, the reaction was immediate. Hinode ships scattered. They broke out of their offensive position and shot off in weaving evasive threads. Several ships broadcasted away. Zoomed out far enough to see the entire battle, I could not make out details. I did not know how many ships fled from the scene. I just saw the anomalies. It looked like twenty or maybe thirty ships had fled.

From the corner of my eye, I noted the time. The battle had gone on for nine minutes and twelve seconds. The entire Hinode Fleet could broadcast to safety if it wanted. Because I took my eye off the battle for just a second to look at the clock, I almost missed the decisive blow.

I saw the flash and zoomed in immediately. I was just in time to see the last of the lightning as it danced like Saint Elmo’s Fire along the edges of the Doctrinaire . The great ship seemed to list, its bow dipping down and moving counter-clockwise as if preparing for some spiraling maneuver. Then the ship seemed to flinch. It grew brighter as light shined through its portals. Panels along its roof burst, unleashing folds of flame and vapor. Finally the Doctrinaire , the great ship, the leviathan, vanished in a glowing ball that hurled debris in every direction before collapsing on itself.

I pulled my face out of the visor. I needed a moment to understand what I had seen. When I looked back, I saw the wreckage of the Doctrinaire hanging silently in space. It looked like a giant bird lying with its wings spread. The ship was utterly dark now, with not so much as a spark flashing.

Only a handful of U.A. ships remained around the Doctrinaire . The destruction of the Doctrinaire brought even more ruin: every ship around it was smashed.

Now the Hinode Fleet regrouped. It had lost a few ships at the onset of the battle. After the Apocalypse of the Doctrinaire , the Hinode Fleet suddenly had a huge numerical advantage. Most of the Earth Fleet had been destroyed. Many of those U.A. ships that survived the destruction were so badly damaged that they could hardly defend themselves as the Hinode ships renewed their attack.