The Clone Betrayal

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Usually I rode in the cockpit, but on the ride back from Terraneau, I chose to ride in the kettle with what was left of my men. We had two transports and eighty-three men—counting pilots. The whole lot of us would have fit comfortably on one transport; divided between two birds, the gaps were conspicuous.

I sat near the rear in an especially dark corner of the cabin, sneaking glances around the kettle and browbeating myself for our losses.

“Captain Harris, do think you can find your way to the enlisted man’s bar?” Private Roark asked me. I’d noticed Roark on the way down to Terraneau, he was one of those life-of-the-party types.

I heard what he said, but it sounded like he had spoken in a foreign language. Go have a drink with the men, always a good move for morale …assuming they want to have a drink with you. Why would they want to drink with me? I was the man who sent them out to die.

Just a day earlier, I’d told Hollingsworth I would smuggle these men into the officers’ club. Now I wondered if he took that as a reward or a punishment.

I looked up at the kid but did not speak. This shook his confidence. He waited several seconds, then added, “We’re going to celebrate, sir.”

The Kamehameha’s two thousand enlisted Marines shared a single bar, a drinking hole I knew well. These men had fought hard, now it was my turn to make a show of strength. “Are we talking a one-shot deal, or are you boys planning to pull an all-nighter?”

“I can’t speak for anybody else, but I’m staying till I’m too drunk to find my rack,” Roark said.

“I may be late,” I said. Now that I thought about it, I liked the idea of downing a few beers with the boys, but the drinks would have to wait. My priorities might have been all wrong, but they were all mine.

Roark nodded and went back to join his friends.

I heard the sigh of the boosters and knew that we had entered the docking bay. My heart thumped in my chest. Adrenaline coursed through my veins. So did testosterone, I suppose; but the reflex I was experiencing had nothing to do with combat. The landing gear clanked and groaned as we landed, and I sprang to my feet.

“Thomer, see that the gear is unloaded,” I said, as we taxied through the locks.

“Yes, sir.”

“If anybody asks for me, tell them I will handle debriefings tomorrow.”

“Aye, aye.”

The miserable doors of the kettle ground open so slowly. I did not wait until they slid all the way apart. As soon as I could squeeze through the gap, I trotted down the ramp and out the docking bay. My men probably thought I needed to get to a bathroom.

And, in a way, I did.

Men saluted me as I rushed down the hall. I returned their salutes and hurried on. I was a Marine on a mission. I reached my quarters and opened the door to find an empty room with a neatly made bed. The door closed behind me.

“Ava,” I called in a soft voice.

Nothing.

For a moment, and just a moment, I worried that something had gone wrong. That thought passed quickly. I opened the bathroom door and switched on the light. Hearing a faint gasp, a sound so soft I could easily have missed it, I turned toward the shower.

The bedroom appeared clean and completely untouched, but the bathroom looked lived in. A bouquet of empty MRE pouches filled the wastebasket, a set of utensils lay in the sink, and a shadow moved behind the glass of my shower stall door.

“If you don’t come out of there, I’m going to have to come in,” I said.

I heard a soft giggle, and the water in the shower began to run.

“So that’s how it’s going to be,” I said. I pulled the shower door open, and there she was, dressed in a tank top and panties, allowing the warm water to splash her hair and back. She looked at my combat armor, and said, “Honey, I was hoping you would be hard, but this is ridiculous.”

We showered together, and we made love. Afterward, we lay in bed. I stroked her wet hair and kissed her. Dreading her reaction, I told her I needed to go to the bar for drinks with my men, but she just cocked an eyebrow and smiled.

“You’re not upset?” I asked.

“I will be if you come back empty-handed.”

I drank with my boys and grabbed a few beers before leaving the bar. On my way back, I stopped by the mess hall and picked up food for two. By the time I made it back to my quarters, I had a small salad, sandwiches, fruit cocktails, cheese-cake, and four beers.

Always cautious, Ava remained hidden in the bathroom when I entered. Instead of calling out to her, I spread our meal across my desk.

I called out, “I hope you’re hungry,” and out she came.

She looked at the food, then looked at me with her “this is better than sex” smile, and I knew that I had graduated from benefactor/lover to friend.

Ava and I ate together and talked. She wanted to know everything that happened on Terraneau. I told her about Herrington first, then about the rest of my men. She squeezed my hand and stopped eating, but said nothing.

I thought that was the perfect response. If she had tried to empathize with me, she would have driven me away. I had been through something she could not possibly comprehend.

When I asked what it was like hiding out in my quarters, she said, “I talked to myself. I hid in the bathroom talking to myself, and I never ran out of things to say. It beat living with Teddy. At least I had somebody to talk to.”

“What did you talk about?”

“With Teddy?”

“When I was gone,” I said.

“I talked about you,” she said. “I talked to myself about every man I have ever been with, and I compared them to you.”

By this time we were in bed, both of us naked. I had my arms around her. She felt warm. “How did I do?”

“Uhm?” she purred.

“How did I do?” I asked.

“Now, what kind of question is that?” she asked.

“An honest one,” I said.

“Harris, I never thought of you as the insecure type.”

“I have my moments,” I said. I pulled her in even tighter than before, so that everything from our shoulders to our thighs pressed together.

“Ouch,” she cooed.

“Are you going to answer me?” I asked.

“I don’t know why I would,” she said. “If I say you are better than any of them, you won’t believe me. If I say some of them were better than you, you’ll get jealous. I think I’ll just plead the First.”

“The right to free speech?” I asked.

“The right to tell you to shut the speck up, Harris.”

“Oh,” I said. We lay there in each other’s arms. I wondered how I matched up with Ted Mooreland. When I began to feel insecure, I thought about how I compared to General Smith. As my thoughts drifted, I started to fall asleep.

“I wasn’t telling you to let me go,” Ava complained. I had not actually let her go, but I had loosened my grip around her. “What is it like down there?”

I told Ava about the building with the orphan girls. I told her how my men found it and how Doctorow had tried to protect it. When I finished, she laughed, and said, “It sounds terrible, like a monastery.”

When I did not respond, she said, “Oh God, you’re not thinking about …”

“You’ll be safe there,” I said.

“With the latter-day vestal virgins?” she asked. “That’s not safekeeping, Honey, that’s solitary confinement.”

“You wouldn’t need to stay there long, just until we get the planet sorted out. It can’t be any worse than hiding in the shower and talking to yourself.”

She started to say something and stopped. She shifted on the pillow until our faces were only three inches apart, then she reached up and stroked my eyebrow with a finger. “How did you get this scar over your eye?”

“Are you trying to change the subject?” I asked.

“No,” she said in a childlike, flirtatious way. “How did you get that scar?”

“I got it in a fight,” I said.

“But Marines wear helmets. Wouldn’t your helmet protect you?”

“It was a fight, not a battle.”

“Like in a bar?”

“Not in a bar, in a ring,”

“Oh?” She reached around my back, where four parallel scars ran across my ribs. “How about these scars.”

“Same fight,” I said.

“These must have hurt,” she said.

“They did,” I said.

“How many men were you fighting?”

“Just one,” I said.

“I hope you hurt him, back.”

“I did.”

“As bad as he hurt you?”

“He died.”

Silence. I made a mental note not to tell Ava about killing people right after making love.

“You’ve killed a lot of people, haven’t you, Harris?” she asked.

I did not want to talk about it. Stealing a page from her playbook, I tried to change the subject. “When you make movies, what’s it like doing a love scene?”

“It depends on the actor,” Ava said, the flirtatious tones drained from her voice. I had hit a nerve; but, on the bright side, I had successfully changed the subject.

I named a few actors and Ava told me she despised all of them. According to the gossip, she’d had off-screen romances with every last one of them.

I thought about her undressing in love scenes with actors she didn’t like. Maybe it was like killing, maybe you just got used to it. Maybe she’d just gotten used to me, too. I did not want to think about that.

As I finally started to fall asleep, a parade of ghosts invaded my thoughts. I saw Herrington, white-haired and good-humored Herrington. I thought about transports falling through the atmosphere. And I thought about ghosts from other wars, too.

I brought in a large breakfast of eggs, toast, and bacon the next morning and told Ava my plans while we ate. I would meet with Admiral Thorne in a few hours, and I hoped to tour the ship with Master Chief Warshaw; but first, I had a staff meeting.

After breakfast, I went to the conference room, where I met Thomer and Hollingsworth. We all arrived on time, then we sat and we waited, and waited. The sailors arrived at the meeting thirty minutes late.

“Where is Warshaw?” I asked, as I surveyed the table.

“He couldn’t get away,” said Senior Chief Petty Officer Lilburn Franks.

“Couldn’t get away?” I asked. “This is a staff meeting.” Under normal circumstances, I would have sent an aide to collect Warshaw. Attendance at staff meetings was never optional. “Do you know what he is doing?” I asked Franks.

He shrugged in a casual, offhand way.

I could already feel my blood pressure rising. Part of me wanted to go Machiavellian—to crush the insubordination at the start and make an example of Warshaw. I decided to take the “making friends and influencing people” route instead, against my better judgment.

“I hear you and your boys saw action. What did you come back with, about one-third of your men?” That quip came from Senior Chief Petty Officer Perry Fahey. He stared in my direction, his heavily made-up eyes locked on mine, daring me to react.

Sitting beside me, Thomer took this in but said nothing. I had the feeling he had recently dropped a load of Fallzoud. When the drug wore off, though, I thought Thomer might have a thing or two to say.

“Perhaps you see some humor in battlefield losses, Senior Chief,” I said.

“Humor?” he asked.

“Is there something funny about the deaths of 170 Marines?”

“Um, well, no.” Fahey looked up and down the table, hoping for support from the other sailors. They all looked away. Senior Chief Franks looked at his computer. The guy next to him straightened his cuffs. Another stared down into his lap.

“I lost a close friend in that action, Senior Chief, Sergeant Lewis Herrington. Do you remember Herrington? He attended our last staff meeting.”

“I remember the sergeant.”

“He died liberating Terraneau.” When I used the term “liberate,” it sent a shock through the room. Coming from someone with my background, the word carried an implicit threat. “Is there a joke I am missing here, Senior Chief? If there is, I would sure as speck love to be in on it.”

“No, sir,” Fahey said.

“Herrington died scouting for the enemy. Is that funny, asshole?”

This was Hollingsworth’s first staff meeting. He had come to fill Herrington’s seat. Hearing this verbal mugging, Hollingsworth looked nervous.

“No, sir. I am sure Sergeant Herrington was a good man,” Fahey said, but he still had a slight smile at the corners of his mouth. He should have been smiling; he had just accomplished his private mission without my suspecting a thing. He had distracted me. Gary Warshaw was now the furthest thing from my mind.

Officers in the Marines do not think like their counterparts in the Navy. The intrigues of Fleet Command were entirely new to me.

Still trying to calm myself down, I introduced the new addition to our council. “This is Master Sergeant Philo Hollingsworth. Sergeant Hollingsworth will take over Herrington’s responsibilities.”

I got the feeling that a few of the officers knew Hollingsworth. Nobody congratulated him, however. We all sat mute.

“Let’s get started,” I said. “With Warshaw gone, that puts you on the hot seat, Senior Chief Fahey. What’s your schedule for Terraneau?”

“My staff is overseeing that project,” Senior Chief Petty Officer Jim Milton offered. “I landed a team of engineers in Norristown at 0600.

“Their preliminary reports are optimistic. After surveying the damage around Norristown, they say they can restore the power grid by the end of the week.”

“For all of Norristown?” I asked, remembering that most of the city was little more than rubble.

“The north, east, and central sectors, where most of the people live.”

“How soon can they get the juice going citywide?”

“The prospects look good, sir. The power plants were outside the city, in an area that the aliens never attacked. From what we’ve seen so far, the underground power lines are still in place, except in one area just west of town. Apparently an underground train system collapsed in that part of town.”

Hollingsworth and I exchanged glances. We knew all about that particular disaster.

“What about Fort Sebastian?” I asked.

“Same thing, sir. We’ll have it ready for your Marines in the next week.”

“Captain Harris, I heard you were going to restrict the use of that base,” said Franks, the ranking NCO on the battleship Washington.

“That is correct,” I said.

Even before I finished speaking, Franks said, “You can’t be serious about that. These men have not had shore leave for four years.”

“The locals are nervous about having us around. I don’t want to do anything to upset them.”

“It sounds to me like somebody else is calling the shots around here,” sneered Fahey.

“Colonel Doctorow said …” I started.

“He’s got you licking his boots does he?” With this statement, Fahey graduated from contempt to outright insubordination. Once again believing he had the other NCOs watching his back, he became downright fearless.

“We need Doctorow’s cooperation,” I said, hating myself for trying to justify my decision.

Fahey looked up one side of the table, then the other, and said, “Doctorow is no big deal. Show him who’s in charge. Haul his ass up to the Washington, and we’ll straighten him out. We’re calling the shots in this corner of the galaxy.

“I mean, speck, according to his records, the bastard is absent without leave. If he’s a specking criminal, throw him in the brig.”

In the moment of silence that followed, Fahey made a show of rolling his eyes. Franks, sitting beside him, chuckled. The two of them exchanged some private joke, speaking so quietly that no one else could hear them.

All of this positioning ran counter to my Liberator genetics and my Marine training. I wanted to kick the chair out from under Fahey’s ass. If Franks joined in to help him, so much the better. I even felt the beginnings of the combat reflex, testosterone and adrenaline entering my bloodstream at a very unwelcome time.

Fahey went on. “I’ll let you in on a secret, Harris. If you plan on running this Arm, you need my crew a hell of a lot more than you need Doctorow.” He was baiting me. He was trying to get me to threaten him. He leaned back in his chair, batted his heavily made-up eyes at me, and drummed his fingers on the table.

I knew that I could gain nothing by playing his game. So there we sat, nobody speaking, a verbal standoff in an undeclared mutiny. The standoff lasted for nearly a minute, no one wanting to be the first one to speak. The first officer to do so would lose face.

I was the one who ended it. “Where do we stand on the blockade?”

“What blockade?” asked Franks.

“I issued orders for a blockade around Terraneau,” I said. “I sent those orders to Master Chief Warshaw. Do you know if he received them?”

“He did,” Fahey interrupted, offering no more information.

“And do you know if he has drawn up plans for the blockade?”

“Yes.”

“Yes? Yes, he drew up plans?”

“Yes, I know if he drew up the plans,” answered Fahey, a smug grin forming on his lips.

Taking a deep breath, fighting the urge to rip the man’s throat out, I asked, “Okay, so has he drawn up plans, Senior Chief?”

“Nope.”

“Do you know why he has not carried out my orders?”

“He was busy, so he passed the orders to me.” Fahey raised a hand to stop me, the way a senior officer might raise a hand to quiet a subordinate. But I was not a subordinate. I was the senior officer in the meeting. “I have not drawn up the plans. There’s no point to establishing a blockade around a planet in an arm that we have all to ourselves.

“We’re the only ones here, sir. Haven’t you figured that out?”

If Herrington had been here, he might well have pulled his gun and shot Fahey on the spot. Old-school Marines like Herrington had no time for this kind of shit. God I missed Herrington.

This time, however, Fahey had given me all the ammunition I would need. “Okay, Senior Chief, so you have taken it upon yourself to countermand Master Chief Warshaw’s orders. Is that correct? Before I have you arrested, would you like to explain why you have ignored a direct order from Master Chief Warshaw?”

It had not occurred to Fahey that he had unintentionally attached Warshaw to the orders. The self-satisfied grin suddenly melted. “Captain, I guess I do not see why Terraneau would need a protective blockade.”

“You don’t?” I asked.

Now he was in full retreat. “No, sir. We have no enemies in this Arm, the Broadcast Network is down, and the aliens do not use ships. Having a blockade won’t make a bit of difference if they return.”

“And you only comply with orders you agree with? Is that correct, Senior Chief?” I asked.

“No, sir,” he said.

“Fahey, are you unable to obey orders or simply selective about which orders you follow?” I snapped out each syllable of each word, speaking slowly. “Should I charge you with dereliction of duty or mutiny?”

“Mutiny?”

“Okay, mutiny it is,” I said.

“No, no, I was asking you, are you charging me with mutiny?”

“Master Chief Warshaw gave you an order, and you chose to ignore it. He did give you the order to draw up a blockade? Is that correct?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you decided against it?”

“I can draw up the plans and have them to you within the hour,” Fahey said.

“That would be acceptable, Senior Chief,” I said.

I turned to the other men in the room, and asked, “Do any of the rest of you have concerns that I need to know about?” When none of them said anything, I ended the meeting.

Watching the various NCOs file out of the room, I took stock of my situation. My fleet was stranded in space, my first lieutenant was openly mutinous, and the captain of my Marines had a Fallzoud habit. The only planet my fleet could reach wanted nothing to do with us, and I wanted to start a war with the nation that had created me. I wondered if things could get any worse.

I soon discovered that they could.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

“You need to bust that prick down,” Thomer said, once the sailors left the room. “Slam his gay ass in the brig.”

“He isn’t gay,” said Hollingsworth.

“What do you mean he isn’t gay?” Thomer asked. “The son of a bitch comes to staff meetings wearing makeup.”

“Why do you think he wants to get to Norristown so bad?” Hollingsworth shouted the question. “Thomer, you don’t know how good you had it.”

As always, Thomer received that last comment with a certain lethargy. In an unnaturally subdued voice, he said, “We were massacred by aliens and locked in relocation camps.”

“That’s not what I meant. I know they ran you through the wringer.” Thomer’s slow demeanor had a calming effect on Hollingsworth. He lowered his voice.

“The enlisted men on this ship have not seen a woman for four years. Until you guys came with plans to retake Terraneau, we had no reason to think any of us would ever see one again. Do you know what that does to a man?

“They’re clones, Thomer, not eunuchs. If anything, their gonads are too active.

“Given a choice between a few months in a prison camp and a life sentence on a ship with nothing but men, which way would you go?”

“What about the makeup?” I asked.

Hollingsworth shrugged his shoulders and said, “Most clones would much rather give than receive. Men who are a little more, er, uh, flexible wear makeup to identify themselves.”

“You thought you would never see a woman again?” Thomer asked. Sympathy showed in his eyes, but the downturn at the corners of his mouth made it clear he found the whole thing revolting.

“Wait, now …You and Fahey didn’t …you know?” I asked.

“No,” Hollingsworth said. “We weren’t even on the same ship.”

“Did you …you know?”

“Thomer, I didn’t think I’d ever see any scrub again.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Thomer said, sounding unconvinced.

It was time to put my cards on the table.

I looked over at Thomer and said, “Sergeant, I need to have a private chat with Sergeant Hollingsworth.” He left without saying a word.

I could not trust Fahey and probably not Warshaw. Lilburn Franks seemed more interested in running the fleet than politics, but he was the only one. Because of the normally adversarial relationship between swabbies and sea soldiers, I thought I could count on Hollingsworth and the other Marines who came with the fleet. I hoped I could.

Now that it was just me and Hollingsworth in the room, I turned to him, and said, “Do you know what happens if you kill all the rattlesnakes? You get silent snakes instead.

“The only reason I didn’t bust Fahey on the spot was because I always know where he stands. He’s an asshole, but he telegraphs his punches, and that makes him useful. Warshaw’s a different story.”

“Warshaw’s all right,” Hollingsworth said. Nervous that I had asked Thomer to leave, Hollingsworth went into full-fledged fight-or-flight mode. He paced the floor, rapped his knuckles on the table, and spoke in an unnecessarily loud voice. “I know Warshaw much better than I know Fahey, we’ve been on the same ship for six years. He’s all right.”

“You thought Fahey was cool, too,” I pointed out.

“I still do,” Hollingsworth said. “He’s a good sailor. He just …”

“He practically declared a mutiny,” I yelled. “He’s trying to pick a fight with me. Do you know what would happen if I let him goad me into a specking war? Which way do you think his sailors will go?”

Hollingsworth sat down. He leaned back in his chair and considered the question but did not answer.

“Right or wrong, every sailor in Scrotum-Crotch is going to side with Fahey if I bust him,” I said. “Think about that …and while you mull it over, I have another question for you. Where are your loyalties?” I fixed Hollingsworth with an angry glare.

He met my eyes and did not look away. “You know where I stand. I’m a Marine.”

“Good,” I said.

“So if it comes down to a fight between me and Warshaw, I have you at my back?”

“Yes, sir,” Hollingsworth said.

“What if they accuse me of going against regulations?”

“Then I guess we both go to the brig.”

“How about Unified Authority law?” I asked.

This time Hollingsworth took longer to answer. “What are you talking about?”

Now I spoke slowly and very clearly, making sure he caught the significance of every word. “Hollingsworth, if you have any questions about where your loyalties lie, you need to speak up. You are either all in or you’re out.”

“I’m in,” he said. “I’m all in.”

I took a deep breath, then I said what I had been hiding. “I want to declare war on the Unified Authority.”

A heavy silence hung over the room like a storm cloud waiting to burst. I was not joking, and he knew it. “Does Thomer know what you have in mind?”

“He does,” I said. On the flight back from Terraneau, I’d told Thomer exactly what I wanted to do.

“What kind of war? They’re a trillion miles away,” Hollingsworth said. “Don’t waste your breath if you’re planning to declare independence; they won’t care. You’ll just give Warshaw more ammunition to shoot you down.”

“What if we can take the fight to Earth?” I asked.

“Attack Earth?” Hollingsworth mostly mouthed the words.

“Attack Earth,” I said.

“Take my word on this one, Captain Harris, you can’t hit them without a self-broadcasting fleet. Every man on this ship has spent the last four years of his life trying to figure out a way to get out of here. There is no way out.”

“Would you come along for the ride if there was a way out?”

“You’re serious about this?” Hollingsworth asked. “You’re really serious about this?”

“Sergeant, you know why we are out here. How do you feel about being abandoned on the outer edge of known space?”

“Have you discussed any of this with Warshaw? Sooner or later he’s going to need to hear about this,” Hollingsworth pointed out.

“Yeah, I know.”

“So how do we get back to Earth?” Hollingsworth asked.

I told Hollingsworth something that I had told to only one other person—Thomer. I told him about a self-broadcasting fleet that was even larger than the Earth Fleet. The only problem was that all of its ships had been destroyed.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Three days after we returned from Terraneau, I called Hollingsworth over the ship intercommunications system. “Sergeant, I hear you know how to fly a transport.”

“I haven’t logged many hours, but I had the training,” he said. “There’s not much to it.”

“I have an errand I need to run on Terraneau,” I said. “Think you can take me?”

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“It’s a private matter, Sergeant. Do you think you can keep a lid on it?”

“Yes, sir, I won’t discuss it with anyone, sir,” he said.

“Meet me in the docking bay, in thirty minutes. I already have a transport signed out.”

Ava seemed excited to leave. I took this personally, of course. In my mind, she wasn’t leaving the ship behind, she was leaving me. When I asked her why she was so excited to go, she talked about “solitary confinement” in my quarters and days spent hiding in the shower.

I watched her dress in her combat armor. She stepped into boots that made her three inches taller. Then she strapped on the various plates, rigid scales that camouflaged her sensuous curves and contours.

“Are you going to miss me?” I asked.

“Of course I will miss you,” she said, examining herself in the mirror. I sounded needy and hated myself for it. She sounded unaware of me, and I hated her even more.

“Are you nervous?” I asked.

“Not at all.” She combed her hair with her fingers, spreading the silky strands out, then twisted it into a knot so that it did not fall below the base of her helmet.

“I’ll talk to Doctorow. I’ll explain everything.”

“Of course you will,” she said.

“He’ll take care of you.”

“I’m sure he will, darling.” She fitted the helmet down over her head. I had hoped she would kiss me before she sealed herself in her helmet, but I suppose it did not occur to her. She turned to me, and asked, “How do I look?”

“Like a Marine,” I said.

“We should get going,” she said, as she started for the door. Then she stopped. I hoped she would take the helmet off and kiss me. Who knew what might have happened if she did, we could afford to be a few minutes late. But she looked back, and said, “Maybe you should go first, Harris. You know, just in case someone’s in the hall.”

I stepped out the hatch, looked up and down the corridor, then brought her out.

The docking bays were on the same deck as the Marine compound. It only took a few short minutes to walk to the bay. Hollingsworth had the transport open, and we walked in.

He met us in the kettle. Hollingsworth and I wore our Charlie service uniforms. Ava, of course, had needed to keep her armor on. She looked out of place, like a man in a suit and tie on a beach.

“Sergeant Hollingsworth, this is Corporal Rooney,” I said.

Ava knew enough about Marines etiquette to pass. Trained actress that she was, she used body language to convey a lack of interest in Hollingsworth. She walked up the ramp, leaving Hollingsworth and me in the bay.

As Ava moved away, Hollingsworth asked me. “Why is he dressed in armor? Is he on some kind of field mission?”

“Don’t ask,” I said. “Everything dealing with Corporal Rooney is on a need-to-know basis.”

A grim expression crossed Hollingsworth’s face, and he acknowledged this with a nod. “Yes, sir,” he said. “I’ll take us out.”

It only took fifteen minutes to fly the three thousand miles from the Kamehameha to the airfield. Ava and I spent the time in the dark and silence of the kettle, sitting side by side on the wooden bench that ran along the walls. She kept her helmet on in case Hollingsworth came down. We did not hold hands, and we spoke very little. I did not want to risk Hollingsworth’s overhearing us. How could I explain hiding a woman aboard the ship to a man who had not seen a woman in years?

Moments after the transport touched down, and the kettle doors opened, Hollingsworth slid down the ladder and asked me if he should “keep the meter running?” I told him that I needed to drive Corporal Rooney into town and asked him to inspect the engineers’ progress around the airfield while I was gone.

“Is Rooney coming back to the Kamehameha with us?” he asked.

“I don’t see how that is any of your specking business, Sergeant,” I said. He saluted and left to inspect the airfield.

Ava and I drove a jeep into town. When we’d planned this errand, I had told her that she should keep her helmet on for the short ride. I now regretted the decision. It’s hard to speak to people in combat armor. They can hear you, and you can hear them, but the conversation passes through electronic filters.

Driving through the eastern outskirts of Norristown, I asked Ava, “Are you excited?”

“Honey, are you joking? I haven’t changed my clothes for three months now.”

“You had the tank tops,” I pointed out.

“Marine tank tops and boxers don’t count. They’re not clothes, they’re gear.”

“Are you looking forward to anything besides a new dress?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I want to go for long walks in new clothes. And I want to talk with people.”

“We talked,” I said. In truth, I had spoken more with her than with just about anyone ever.

“No offense, dear, but I mean other girls. Talking to Marines is nice, but it’s not girl talk. You’re sweet, but you’re all guy. Take my word on this one, there are a lot of things that guys do not understand.” These words and the feminine voice coming from the combat helmet played nasty tricks with my mind.

After that, I felt tongue-tied.

“Are you going to be okay, Harris?” she asked.

“Yeah, of course,” I said.

“You know, you’re pretty silly,” she said. “You’re never going to be very far away. I mean, how far can you get? You’re stuck here just like the rest of us.” She laughed.

We entered the city center, or what was left of it, and Ava became silent. She looked around, taking in the devastation. The way she gripped the side of the jeep, her armor-gloved hands curled like claws, she reminded me of a nervous new Marine riding a truck into a battle.

I could not hear what was happening inside Ava’s helmet, but I imagined her terror at seeing the broken world. She might be fighting to breathe.

“It’s okay, Ava,” I said, stroking her back and realizing she would not feel my hand. “They’re gone. The aliens are gone. They’re gone for good. You’ll be safe here.”

“Wayson, maybe I should go back to the ship,” she said.

I pulled the jeep over and cut off the engine. Placing my hands on her shoulders, I turned Ava so that she faced me. I wanted to remove the helmet so I could be sure her eyes stayed on mine. “They are gone. You will be safe on this planet.”

“But what if they come back?” she asked.

“They won’t,” I said, though I had no way of knowing whether that was true. I would protect her if they did, though. I knew that much.

“I didn’t know it would look like this,” she said. “I don’t know if I can ever feel safe here.”

“You’ll be safe enough. Besides, you know what they have here that we don’t have on the ship?”

She shook her head. The movement was barely perceptible with the helmet over her head.

“They have dress shops.”

“But what if …”

“And shoe stores.”

“Can you protect …”

“And jewelry stores.”

“Damn it, Harris, you are such a specking guy.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“It’s not a compliment.” She laughed. Her laugh sounded like a metallic shutter coming through the audio equipment in her helmet. She took off her helmet, shook out her hair, and said, “If the women on this planet are anything like they were back in Hollywood, all the good stores will have been looted.”

I was sorry to see her go. When Ava turned brassy and sarcastic, that was when I liked her best. I wondered how quickly she would forget me.

As we approached the three buildings the locals used for dorms, Ava’s confidence dried up. She looked around at all the flat land and the rubble dunes. “This was a city?” she asked. She had to know what it had been.

“The aliens that hit this place four years ago, they’re all gone now. We chased them away,” I said.

“But how can you be sure?” she asked.

“They haven’t returned to New Copenhagen,” I said. “It’s been two and a half years now.”

I could hear her breathing. Her nervousness seemed to carry on the wind. “Maybe this isn’t a good idea.”

“You’ll be safe,” I said. I repeated myself, then I told her to put on her helmet. I did not want anyone to spot her until she was safely with Doctorow. I gave her a moment to adjust to her new surroundings and drove the rest of the way to the dorms.

Per my request, Doctorow met us at the dorms. Also per my request, he came alone. He had plenty of opportunity to hide observers or even snipers around the area, but I did not think that was his style.

He came wearing Army fatigues with the blouse unbuttoned and a T-shirt beneath.

“I did not expect you back so soon, Captain,” Doctorow said, as I climbed out of my jeep.

“I have something to discuss in private,” I said.

Looking past me and toward my jeep, Doctorow said, “We’re still not alone.”

“Actually, that’s the reason I came.”

He leaned into me and spoke in an angry tone. “Captain Harris, I hope you don’t expect me to let this man anywhere near my dorm building. That is simply out of the question. Only a fool permits a weasel to enter his chicken coop.”

As Doctorow spoke, I nodded to Ava, and she removed her helmet.

“How about an additional hen?” I asked.

Her hair now hung in a disheveled knot and her “queer gear” makeup was not the right shade for her eyes, but her skin was pale as a cloud and just as luminous.

“Good God,” Doctorow said.

Ava smiled, and said in her softest, most flirtatious voice, “There’s no need for profanity.” Hoping she would make an optimal first impression, I had prepped Ava to say this the first time anybody made an off-color comment. I had planned on slipping the word “speck” into something I said. This was better.

“Ava, this is Colonel Ellery Doctorow,” I said.

“Hello, Colonel Doctorow, I’m Ava Gardner,” she said in a low husky voice that left men helpless.

“I see that,” Doctorow said mechanically, his eyes transfixed.

She climbed out of the jeep, shook out her hair, and let it fall around her shoulders. She looked like a child wearing an adult’s armor.

“I heard rumors that she was, I mean that you were, there are all kinds of stories about you being …”

“…a clone?” she asked, finishing the sentence.

I felt a momentary jolt of pity for Doctorow. The gaze Ava gave him had always stripped away my confidence. When she turned on the charm, she left me feeling like an inferior species, like a caveman watching a ballerina.

Pity gave way to envy when Ava’s gaze did not shift back toward me. I wondered if perhaps Ava had gotten what she needed out of me, and envy turned into embarrassment. I remembered the things Ava had told me about Ted Mooreland and General Smith and wondered what she might say about me.

“What brings you to Norristown?” Doctorow asked.

“She needs a place to stay,” I said, pointing to the building for girls.

“Would that be okay with you, Colonel?” Ava asked, her eyes still holding him captive.

“No offense, ma’am, but you’re a bit old to room with these girls,” he said.

“Who takes care of them? They must need tutors and nannies. I can cook or clean.” She sounded downright domesticated, the perfect little housewife/sex goddess.

“I think she will be a lot safer here than on a ship,” I said.

“I see what you mean,” Doctorow conceded, though he seemed to have his doubts. He thought for a moment. “Of course she can stay. Of course.”

“Well, I guess my business is done here,” I said as I turned to leave, knowing that the empty pain I felt at the moment would turn into bitterness soon enough.

Both Ava and Doctorow stood rooted in place. I wondered if they even noticed, then she yelled, “Harris!”

I turned, and saw her running toward me. She crashed into me, which might have been a pleasant experience if she hadn’t been wearing hardened combat armor. When she threw her armor-plated arms around me, her custom-made exoskeleton dug into my shoulders. She pressed her mouth against mine.

“What kind of a good-bye was that?” she asked.

“I thought you were done with me,” I said.

“I swear, Harris, you are such a guy.” She smiled as she said this, her face just a few inches from mine. “I’ll be waiting for you.” She rubbed her armored shell against me, and added, “Come back soon.”

“As soon as I can,” I said.

“Sooner,” she said.

“Sooner,” I said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Feeling like my life had headed in a good direction, I rode with Hollingsworth in the cockpit on the way back to the Kamehameha. He reported on the progress our engineers had made erecting hangars along the airfield. I didn’t really care what the engineers had or had not accomplished. I had Ava on my mind.

Maybe I was in love, maybe I was just more deeply in lust than I had ever been. I liked her strength. Sure, she’d panicked while we drove through Norristown, but so had some of my Marines.

As we took off, I searched the skies for traces of the ion curtain and came up dry. We cut across a clear blue sky, which faded white, then darkened into blackness as we climbed. Hollingsworth suggested ways to build rapport between the Marines and sailors under my command, and I pretended to listen. Off in the distance, I saw a giant disc floating in the darkness and realized that it was a broadcast station. The network was made up of mile-wide satellites.

I still had Ava on my mind, but I did what I could to hide my excitement from Hollingsworth and from myself. As we approached the fleet, I stared at the various ships, their triangular outlines reminding me of moths and wedges. Hollingsworth located the Kamehameha in the logjam and got us clearance to land.

He was a good pilot. He brought us in smooth and fast, and touched us down gently. I still missed Herrington, the old veteran with whom I had fought some major battles, but Philo Hollingsworth was a good Marine.

The sled brought us through the locks and into the docking bay. With the docking bay in control of his transport, Hollingsworth powered down the engines and switched off the cockpit controls. Once he finished, we headed down into the kettle.

“You know, Captain Harris, I was thinking about Fahey. He’s okay. I mean he popped off pretty bad in that meeting, but do you blame him? I mean, he’s got to be desperate to find some scrub.” Hollingsworth dispensed this advice as the kettle doors opened.

“I hope you’re right, Sergeant, because I’m going to flatten the specker next time he crosses me,” I said. I wished Hollingsworth had not brought up Fahey. The mere thought of him made my stomach tense.

“Okay, well, what I really want to say, sir, is give Warshaw a fair break. He’s not like Fahey. He’s a stand-up officer. We’ve been on the same boat for four years now, and I can tell you, he’s not the kind of guy that shoots you in the back.”

“Speak of the devil,” I muttered.

Across the deck, Master Chief Petty Officer Gary Warshaw stood shouting orders to a pack of sailors. When he saw us, he worked up a smile and came bounding in our direction. I noted the spring in his step and decided it did not bode well. No matter what Hollingsworth said, this man was no friend.

In his right hand, Warshaw carried a folder with the seal of the Office of the Navy. Parking himself at the base of the ramp, the master chief looked up at me and saluted. “Captain Harris, may I have a private word with you, sir?”

Hollingsworth excused himself, shooting me an I-told-you-so self-satisfied smirk. He must have thought Warshaw had come to shake hands and ask to be my buddy. I made a mental note: reliable or not, Hollingsworth was a piss-poor judge of character.

“What can I do for you, Master Chief?” I asked, trying to smother the voice in my head. I got the same feeling in my gut dealing with sailors that I got pulling the pins from live grenades.

“I hope you don’t mind, sir, but I asked Admiral Thorne if he would join us,” Warshaw said, looking slightly apologetic.

“Not a problem,” I said, ignoring the tightening knot in my stomach. I really wanted to kill this man. I could feel the beginnings of a combat reflex. My nervous system did not differentiate between war and infighting.

Warshaw led me out of the landing area without any further explanation, and I followed without asking.

“I’m sorry I missed your staff meeting the other day. I hear you and Fahey had some friction.”

“You might say that,” I agreed. “Fahey seems to think he can ignore my orders.”

“I’ll have a word with him about that,” Warshaw said, sounding a little embarrassed. I took that as a good sign.

After that, the conversation trailed off. Trying to restart the collegial patter, Warshaw said, “Congratulations on liberating Terraneau. That’s quite an accomplishment.”

“I lost most of my men,” I said. “I’m not entirely sure that congratulations are in order.”

“You rescued a planet with a handful of Marines; congratulations are in order,” Warshaw said. He was all muscles and smiles, a man trying too hard to be my friend. “I haven’t seen the official report, but I understand the fighting was fierce.”

There was no official report; I had not written it yet. I did not point this out, though. If Warshaw wanted to be my buddy, I would go along for the ride. Maybe he would reveal a few of his cards.

He didn’t. He chatted me up as we walked most of the length of the ship, finally ending up in a conference room near the bridge. Thorne had already arrived. The normally passive admiral sat at the table looking irritable, his thin lips pursed and his eyes not quite meeting ours as we entered the room.

As a man holding the rank of master chief petty officer, Warshaw did not have the authority to call commissioned officers to meetings. He did not seem to care. Paying no attention to the look on Admiral Thorne’s face, he slid into the conference room and took a seat.

“What is this about?” Thorne asked as I sat down. Apparently he thought this meeting was my idea.

I shrugged.

“Actually, Admiral, I called this meeting, sir,” Warshaw said. “Well, maybe not me. I suppose you would say that Admiral Brocius is calling the shots.”

“Admiral Brocius?” Thorne repeated. “He’s back in Washington.”

“Yes, sir,” Warshaw said.

An embarrassed smile wormed its way across Warshaw’s mouth, and he said, “I took the liberty of traveling to Earth.”

“You what?” asked Admiral Thorne, his voice hard but low.

“I caught a ride back to Earth on the last transfer ship,” Warshaw said.

“Unless one of my senior officers approved that trip, you were absent without leave, Master Chief,” Thorne said.

“You’ll need to take that up with Admiral Brocius, Admiral. He approved my leave …retroactively.” Warshaw placed the folder with the Office of the Navy seal on the table and pulled two envelopes from it.

He slid Admiral Thorne an envelope with his name on it, then he handed me one with my name as well. A small triangle of foil sealed the back of the envelope—an automated security seal. When I pressed my thumb against the foil, it read my thumbprint and curled open.

As I removed the sheet of paper inside, Warshaw said, “Sorry, Harris, it’s nothing personal.”

I pretended not to hear him. My combat reflex was full-bore at that moment. In another minute, I might not be able to stop myself.

Beside me, Admiral Thorne silently read the contents of Admiral Brocius’s memo, his face an impassive mask. I did the same. I read and realized that Warshaw had not the slightest clue of what was written in these orders, the poor bastard.

When I looked up, I met Warshaw’s gaze. He had the petulant expression of a little boy caught breaking rules he does not like.

Thorne reread his letter, then folded it and slipped it back into its envelope. I placed mine face down on the table.

“So it’s official, Harris, once Admiral Thorne is gone, I will assume command of the fleet.”

“I see,” I said. The orders I had just read mentioned more than a change in command.

“You will retain the rank of general and assume command of the Marines,” Warshaw said.

Thorne started to say something, but Warshaw interrupted him. “I’m sorry to have gone around you, Admiral, but it had to be done. I could not allow them to leave the Scutum-Crux Fleet in the hands of a Marine.”

“I understand,” said Thorne.

“Do you have any questions, Captain Harris?” Warshaw asked. He sounded as if he were already a commanding officer, not a noncom speaking to an officer.

I shook my head.

“Admiral Thorne?”

“You took this directly to Admiral Brocius?”

“I served under him for twelve years in the Sagittarius Central Fleet,” Warshaw said. “Any other questions?” He paused, then said, “If neither of you have anything else to discuss, I think I’ll get back to work.” With that, he left the room.

“I never did care for that son of a bitch,” Thorne said, as soon as the door closed behind Warshaw.

“Which son of a bitch?” I asked. “Brocius or Warshaw?”

“Either of them. Both of them,” Thorne said.

I passed Thorne my orders.

Wayson Harris, Captain, UAMC, Scutum-Crux Fleet

Captain Harris, it has been brought to my attention that there are questions about the transfer of power in the Scutum-Crux Fleet. Master Chief Petty Officer Gary Warshaw has lodged a formal complaint about a Marine taking control of the fleet.

As the ranking Naval NCO, the master chief believes he should assume command of the fleet. I have considered his petition and agree.

You shall remain Commandant of the Marines.

Further, per Master Chief Warshaw’s suggestion, we shall rely upon the survivors of Terraneau to elect their own planet administrator.

Harris, it is vital that this transfer of command be carried out without incident. Once Admiral Thorne and his officers have transferred out, you are authorized to deal with Warshaw as you see fit.

Admiral Alden Brocius, Office of the Navy

“ ‘Deal with Warshaw as you see fit’?” Thorne said as he finished reading. “Am I misreading this, or did Admiral Brocius just authorize you to kill that poor bastard?”

“Let’s just say he is not going to limit my options,” I said.

“Can you make heads or tails of this?” Thorne asked as he slid the envelope to me. I pulled out the orders. The page was blank except for three names: Grayson, Moffat, Ravenwood.

“Does that mean anything to you?” Thorne asked. “I assume this message was meant for you as well.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s Grayson?”

“Not ‘what.’ ‘Who.’ Colonel Aldus Grayson. He was my commanding officer for a short while.”

“What happened to him?” Thorne asked.

“Somebody shot him.”

“People get shot all the time during war,” Thorne pointed out.

“There were no enemies in the vicinity,” I said. “A lot of people think I shot him.”

“Did you?”

“That’s the rumor,” I said.

“And Moffat?”

“Another CO.”

“Did you kill him, too?”

“Yeah. There were witnesses that time.”

“Was he the guy on New Copenhagen? I heard about him.”

“There were two inquests, I was cleared of all charges both times,” I said.

“What about Ravenwood? Another dead officer?”

“It’s a planet.”

“You killed a planet?” Thorne asked.

“The Marines had an outpost on Ravenwood.”

“Ravenwood Outpost …shit, I know about that,” Thorne said, recognizing the name. Ravenwood was the Scutum-Crux Arm’s answer to Roanoke. Every platoon the Marines sent to Ravenwood Outpost vanished. According to the official report, no one ever made it off the planet alive. That was a whitewash. In truth, no one ever lasted his first night on that planet.

“Do you know what happened on Ravenwood?” Thorne asked.

“I know exactly what happened,” I said. “Admiral Huang used it as a training ground for a new breed of SEAL clones. He used the Marines as live bait. They came, they tried to defend themselves, and they died. Huang’s killer SEALs polished them off quick.”

“But what does that have to do with you and Warshaw?” Thorne was no fool. Watching his face, I could tell that he had the riddle partially solved.

“If I had to guess, I’d say he brought up Grayson and Moffat to let me know that a little friendly fire might be in order.”

“Yeah, I figured that out. What about Ravenwood?”

“War games,” I said.

“They’re not just sending you away; they’re going to use you for target practice,” Thorne said in astonishment.

“That’s my guess,” I said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

The military philosopher Michael Khumalo said, “Your most dangerous enemy is the one you mistake for a friend.” Advice to live by.

Besides Thomer and Hollingsworth, I shared my plans with no one. Admiral Thorne had his suspicions; but he was a bright guy and knew better than to ask.

My plans fell into place in the weeks after we liberated Terraneau. Convinced that everyone was playing according to Hoyle, the brass began using battleships to ferry clones to our fleet. They started with one; but after another week, they upped the ante by sending three. With three big ships, they could ship six thousand clones at a time. Given another week, they might well have completed the transfers.

I played possum as the first big shipment arrived. When I heard that the battleships were coming again, I opened the books to an ally I was not sure I could trust. I found Warshaw’s billet and tapped the CALL button on the intercom.

“Yeah?” the voice barked.

“It’s Harris,” I said.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I’m about to declare a war. Since you command the fleet, I thought I’d let you in on my plans,” I said.

“I don’t have time for jokes, Captain,” Warshaw said.

“I’m not joking.”

The master chief’s door slid open.

Warshaw had just come back from the gym. He wore baggy sweatpants and a loose Navy tank top. His clothes bulged over his chest, shoulders, arms, and legs and hung loose over his gut and hips. Quarter-inch veins formed patterns on his shoulders and biceps. Veins showed along his bald head as well.

“You better not be specking with me,” he said. He stood in the doorway, blocking me from entering his quarters.

“Did Admiral Brocius show you the orders he sent me?” I asked, as I held up the envelope.

“He told me what was in them,” Warshaw said.

“I don’t think so.” I handed him the envelope.

Warshaw pulled the letter out, his eyes focused on mine. He made no effort to hide his mistrust. Leaning against the doorjamb, he unfolded the paper and read. When he got to the end, he froze. “ ‘Deal with …as you see fit’? What the speck is that supposed to mean?”

“Here’s what he told Thorne,” I said as I handed him the second envelope.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “ ‘Grayson, Moffat, Ravenwood.’ What is that supposed to mean?”

“Grayson and Moffat were officers I killed,” I said. “Ravenwood was a frontier outpost where they used Marines as live targets for training Navy SEALs. It doesn’t sound like your buddy Brocius has your best interests in mind.”

Warshaw shook his head, and hissed, “That son of a bitch.” Then he rethought it, and said, “No way. No way, Harris, I don’t specking buy it.” Then he carefully refolded the letters and placed them back in the envelopes.

“Yes you do,” I said. He had to know that I hadn’t forged the letters, they were printed on Office of the Navy letterhead.

He sighed. “Brocius gave me everything I wanted. He told me I was right about everything and thanked me for helping him avoid a ‘colossal mistake.’ That was what he called it, a ‘colossal mistake.’ ”

Watching reality hit Warshaw, I almost felt sorry for the boot-licking son of a bitch. Almost.

“So this letter gives you permission to what …shoot me? Throw me in the brig?”

“Or both,” I said, hoping to drive home the differences between Marines and sailors.

“But what does Ravenwood have to do with this?” Warshaw asked.

“That’s Brocius tipping his hand. It’s his way of telling me why he handed over the fleet in the first place.”

“And you think he gave us the fleet to use us for training exercises? Is that right?”

“That is exactly what I think.”

“Even if it is true, I don’t see how this changes anything. We’re stuck here, Harris. They can’t hit us, and we can’t hit them.”

“They can hit us.”

“How are they going to hit us? With the specking Earth Fleet? They have thirty self-broadcasting ships. We’d rip them a new asshole if they came out here.”

“We’d rip them a new asshole if they came out here in the fleet we know about,” I said.

“You think they have a new fleet?”

“They have something we don’t know about,” I said. “You served with Brocius.”

“Damn right I did, twelve years’ worth,” Warshaw said.

“Did you ever hear about his casino?” I asked.

“I heard about it,” Warshaw said.

“The man does not gamble, but he has an entire casino in his house,” I said.

“He gambles,” Warshaw said. “He puts his money up.”

“He plays as the house, which buys him slightly better odds. That’s how Brocius likes to play, with the odds stacked in his direction.”

“Yeah …yeah, that’s his MO. He stacks the deck.”

“Before he sends a fleet into harm’s way …”

Warshaw nodded, and said, “You think it’s new ships.”

“That’s my guess,” I said. “And you can bet they’re bigger, faster, and more powerful than what we have out here.”

“So what do you have in mind, Harris?”

“We don’t want to play his game if he’s giving himself house odds,” I said.

Warshaw laughed. “Good luck attacking Earth without a self-broadcasting fleet.”

“Three self-broadcasting battleships are about to arrive on our doorstep,” I pointed out.

“Touching those ships would be an act of war,” Warshaw said.

I tapped the envelopes. “They’ve already declared the war, I’m angling to get off the first shot.”

Warshaw walked over to his desk and sat down to think things over. He pumped his left fist so he could watch the muscles in his forearm bulge and relax, bulge and relax. “Three battleships aren’t going to do us much good. The first time we tried to take them into Earth space, Brocius would nail us.”

“So we don’t enter Earth space. We take them someplace else, someplace they’re not expecting us to appear. We start up a salvage operation in the Galactic Eye.”

Warshaw stared at me, a quizzical look in his eyes. “The Mogat world? I thought it was destroyed.”

“Not the planet, the space around it. The Mogats had four hundred self-broadcasting ships in their fleet,” I said.

“The way I heard it, there’s not much left of those ships,” Warshaw said.

I did not need a history lesson on the destruction of the Mogat Fleet, I was there. I took a step toward Warshaw, and said, “That doesn’t mean we destroyed the equipment inside those ships. There are four hundred ships with broadcast engines and broadcast generators circling that planet. What do you want to bet that some of those generators and engines are still in working condition?”

Warshaw smiled. “You know, General Harris, I always wanted to command my own self-broadcasting fleet.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The next week passed slowly as I orchestrated one set of missions and submitted fabricated reports for another. Officially, my Marines had begun the reclamation of Norristown. The Corps of Engineers sent thousand-man teams to clear debris, fix roads, restore power, build farms, and bury the dead. They also refurbished Fort Sebastian. The project went quickly.

Behind the scenes, my Marines scouted Terraneau for a new base, food stores, and a place to build a prison. We found most of the cities in the same condition as Norristown—destroyed and populated by scared civilians. The Avatari had laid most cities bare and left others entirely untouched.

We found no rhyme or reason to the destruction. The aliens never even entered Carlton, the tenth largest city on Terraneau. The people had power, sewage, even running water. The only part of the city hurt during the invasion was the spaceport, and the residents destroyed it themselves, thinking that having a working spaceport might attract the Avatari.

We found several small towns untouched but empty. The aliens might or might not have killed all of the people, but we found no corpses. The houses and stores simply sat empty, as if the people had just packed up and left. One of those abandoned burgs was Zebulon, a town with a population of five thousand that had mysteriously whittled down to zero without leaving a suicide note.

Not an organization to let things go to waste, the Corps of Engineers converted Zebulon into a relocation camp and renamed the place, “Outer Bliss,” in honor of the Texas relocation camp outside Fort Bliss. The Corps surrounded the town with electrified razor-wire fences and guard towers, then invited me to inspect its work. Thomer and I flew down for a look.

The landing field and barracks were on the outside of the fence—a sturdy flattop with a Quonset-hut hangar. Outer Bliss sat on a plateau in the high desert. My men would be hot during the day and cold at night until the Corps could add heating and ventilation.

The prison area was a lot nicer than the Texas facility from which it took its name. Instead of living in sheds, the inmates would occupy houses and a small hotel. They would have pools, two movie theaters, school facilities for meetings, and a gymnasium for sports. Thomer and I walked the empty streets, the dry desert wind whistling as it whipped around houses and lampposts.

“This beats the hell out of Clonetown,” I said. “Maybe they made it too nice.” Yes, I was bitter. The inmates in this camp would spend their incarceration in relative comfort. In all fairness, we were moving fifteen thousand men into a town with living facilities for five thousand people, but they would not be forced to take communal showers or sleep in sheds made out of corrugated metal.

We had reached a somewhat shady lane lined with dead trees and brick homes. Sitting on a small rise a few blocks ahead of us, an empty elementary school presided over a neighborhood that had not seen children in several years.

Thomer looked around, and said, “I used to dream about growing up in a town like this. I bet kids used to ride bicycles down this street.”

Suburban as a shopping mall, Outer Bliss did not compare to the horror of Clonetown. Then I reminded myself that the men who would soon populate this prison were, themselves, innocent victims. Natural-born or not, they were not politicians. But they would all be natural-borns …

“It’s too specking nice,” I said. “It’s like we’re sending the bastards on a specking vacation.”

Thomer continued walking. He did not even look over at me. He simply said, “It’s a prison, Harris. They aren’t going to like it.”

The grass in the yards had died and withered. There were no dogs or cats in the town. The Corps had hunted down anything larger than a squirrel, then fumigated the houses to kill the rats and mice. It also hauled out the cars, the trucks, the tractors, anything that could be used to crash the gates.

We entered a grocery store and discovered that the people had left food behind. We explored a bank and found the safe-deposit boxes intact. We toured a two-story motel. The beds were made but the blankets were dusty. I wondered if the Corps had dressed the beds or if this was the last job of maids who had vanished four years ago. We saw no signs of death or violence, nothing to suggest that the inhabitants had been forced to move.

Back on the Kamehameha, I tapped the intercom button outside Admiral Thorne’s quarters and asked him if he had a moment.

“What is it, Harris?” He did not sound unfriendly, just a busy man with a lot on his mind.

“It’s about transfers,” I said.

“Very well,” he said, and the door opened. Thorne was no fool. When he saw the two MPs I brought with me, he knew the score. He stood and stared past me, into the hall, watching the MPs.

“You’re making your move,” he said. The old man stood motionless beside his desk, a pen in his hands. His wispy, white hair a mess, his blue eyes slightly red from days with very little sleep, his skin pale from years spent away from the sun, he did not put up a fight. “Am I under arrest?” he asked as the door closed behind me.

His words felt like a splash of cold water. “We’re not arresting anybody.”

He braced and asked, “You’re not going to kill …”

“I had the Corps of Engineers convert a small town into a relocation camp. It’s a damn sight better than what they put us in back on Earth,” I said.

“Is that what this is about? Is this revenge or revolution?” Thorne asked, the calm never leaving his voice.

I thought about the question for a moment. We were not sticking Thorne and his crew in our camp for revenge. We were doing it because we had no other choice. If we didn’t relocate them, they would try to stop us, and lives would be lost. We were putting them in our prison to protect them, I was sure of that much.

“Both,” I said.

“I see,” Thorne said. He stood still, staring into my eyes, clearly trying to decide whether he should say what he wanted to say next. He might have a pistol someplace in his room. He certainly had a panic button that would sound Klaxons on every ship in the fleet. I hoped he would not do anything foolish.

When he spoke, the words gushed like water breaking through a dam. “I can help you, you know. There’s nothing for me back on Earth. I have more ties here than I do on Earth.”

“Help me what?” I asked.

“I can help you run the fleet. I can help you fight your war. You found some way to get back to Earth, didn’t you? You wouldn’t do this if you didn’t know what you were doing. I can help.”

“Why would you do that?” I asked. Thorne struck me as an honest man, a fair man, the least aristocratic officer I had ever known; not the type of man who trades sides to stay in power.

He placed the papers on the desk. “Harris, they transferred me to the Scutum-Crux Fleet thirty-seven years ago. I’ve spent more of my life on these ships than on Earth. The fleet is my home.

“My parents died while I was still at the Naval Academy. I can’t think of anyone I care about on Earth.”

If the rumors were true, Thorne had more ties to this corner of space than he wanted to admit. Scuttlebutt had it that he had a common-law wife on Terraneau. I had never asked him about it, but the rumor went a long way toward explaining why he had never put in for a transfer.

“You are an officer of the Unified Authority Navy,” I pointed out. “I’d be crazy to trust you.” But I did trust him.

“I can help you. I have command experience.” He tapped his knuckle on the top of his desk, and asked, “Can we speak, man-to-man? Can we at least discuss my offer before you arrest me, General?”

Suddenly he was calling me “General.” He was right. Once we made our move, our field ranks would come into play.

I nodded. As I sat, I said, “I’m not arresting you.”

“But you are placing twenty thousand men in a prison camp.”

“I prefer the term, ‘relocation camp.’ And as of the last transfer, you’re down to about fifteen thousand natural-borns.”

“Let’s be honest with each other, General,” Thorne said. “Who is going to run your fleet? Gary Warshaw, the man Brocius appointed? He’s a good sailor, but he’s an engineer. There’s a reason why the Navy never promotes engineers to the rank of Admiral. They don’t have the background to command a ship. They fix things, they don’t run them. How do you think Warshaw is going to do in battle?”

“There’s always Franks,” I said.

“Lilburn Franks,” Thorne said. He leaned back in his chair and smiled. “He’d be better than Warshaw; at least he’s spent time on a bridge. He’s smart, too; but he’s loyal to Warshaw through and through. He’ll never be loyal to you. Give him a chance, and Franks will stick a knife in your back.”

I was pretty sure I believed the other things Thorne had said, but that last bit about Franks stabbing me in the back I accepted without question.

“Admiral, you have a transport waiting on you, sir,” I said, as I rose to my feet. I hated sticking Thorne in the relocation camp. The truth was, I hated the idea of placing anyone in that town-turned-prison-camp. By the end of the day, every natural-born sailor with the bad luck to have remained in the Scutum-Crux Fleet would find himself a guest of Outer Bliss.

“At least think about what I said?” Thorne asked, both looking and sounding a bit desperate.

“I’ll take it under advisement,” I said. I wanted to take him up on his offer, but I had other concerns at the moment. My next act would be a declaration of war on the Unified Authority. With Warshaw fighting me for control of the fleet, Admiral Thorne’s offer did not figure very prominently on my list of priorities.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Other than Warshaw, only Thomer and Hollingsworth knew my agenda. My lieutenants deserved to know who they were fighting and why. I decided to keep my plans hidden from everyone else. I was, after all, plotting a revolution.

Six transports sat in the starboard docking bay of U.A.N. Washington, a big Perseus-class fighter carrier. Six more sat in the port-side docking bay. In all, the transports had enough space to ferry twelve hundred men to the self-broadcasting battleships moored just outside our fleet. The plan was to load the transports with twelve hundred natural-born officers, but we were about to stray from the script. We would load the birds with Marines in combat armor.

The U.A.N. Washington had been one of the first ships in my fleet to go all-clone. The ship had also become a de facto transfer terminal. The self-broadcasting battleships sent transports filled with clones transferring to the Scutum-Crux Fleet to the Washington and received transports filled with natural-borns returning to Earth from that ship.

The ritual was about to end.

First, we needed to remove the Earth Fleet pilots from their transports before they could set off any alarms. We sent two-man teams to seize the transports—men with commando training who knew how to work quietly and would not hesitate to commit murder. If a pilot managed to do so much as tap his microphone, we would find ourselves stuck in the Scutum-Crux Arm forever.

The sergeant on my team would receive a field promotion to major once we became the Enlisted Man’s Marine Corps. He had been in the Corps for twenty years.

I stole up to the rear of the transport, held my gun ready, and peered inside. For this op, I used an S9 stealth pistol, a sidearm developed specifically for covert operations. The S9 used magnetic actuation to fire fléchettes with iron shafts and depleted-uranium tips. The guns were light, lethal, and silent.

Had I spotted anyone in the cabin or cargo hold, I would have shot him; but the kettle was empty. “Clear,” I whispered into my mike, and the sergeant slipped ahead of me and up the ramp. He crouched beside the cargo netting, his gun trained ahead. “Clear,” he said.

I shuffled up the ramp, barely lifting my feet so my boots would not make noise against the steel deck. I kept my pistol raised and ready, aimed on the door of the cockpit, my finger tight across the trigger. S9s were rated accurate to twenty-five yards—not exactly the sniper’s weapon of choice.

Hiding behind one of the girder ribs of the ship, I signaled the sergeant to catch up and checked in with my other teams. All twelve teams had managed to board the transports without incident.

Even with the ambient sound sensitivity in my helmet switched to maximum, the sergeant’s soft footsteps sounded no louder than somebody sweeping the floor with a wire brush. The man clearly had stealth-op experience.

“I’m going up,” I said.

The sergeant glided into a shadowy niche from which he had a clear line of sight to the cockpit, and said, “I’ve got your back.” He knelt and aimed his pistol, his armor blending into the darkness.

I crept up to the ladder, my pistol now stowed in its holster. My armored gloves made a soft clicking noise as I wrapped my fingers around the posts. At this point, the pilot would not be able to see me without leaving the cockpit, but he might hear something.

Transport 3 is secured, Thomer said over the interLink. He had captured his bird.

There was an eight-foot climb from the floor of the kettle to the narrow catwalk that led to the cockpit door.

“Captain, I can see him in there,” the sergeant said.

“Is he coming out?” I froze.

“Standing in the doorway.”

“Think he heard me?”

“I can’t tell.” The sergeant paused, then said, “Okay, he’s moving back in.”

Transport 5 is secure.

I’ve got 6.

Seven is secure.

I climbed to the top of the ladder, walked to the door of the cockpit, and swung in, lowering my pistol into place. The pilot started to reach for his communications set, then stopped.

“Don’t be stupid,” I said.

He looked at me, nervousness and indecision showing in his expression. Despite my warning, he reached for the microphone, and I fired three shots. The first dart pierced the top of his skull, just above the temple. The second hit him in the ear. The third hit him in the base of the neck. Had they been bullets, any one of the shots would have blown his head apart.

S9s had a nice soft touch. Instead of passing through the pilot and destroying equipment, the fléchettes lodged deep in the pilot’s brain and throat. He died instantly, thin streams of blood pouring out of his wounds.

Transport 2 is secure.

I waited until I had heard from all eleven of my teams, then I added that we had captured the lead transport. I also sent the message to Warshaw. That was his signal to radio the battleships that their transports were en route.

I dragged the dead pilot out of the cockpit and tossed him into the kettle. The steady stream of blood leaking from the holes in his head reminded me of motor oil oozing from an engine.

The sergeant knelt beside the body and examined the wounds. He looked up, and said, “Nice work.”

Once we captured the transports, it only took fifteen minutes to load our Marines. We would not use stealth pistols for the next part of the mission, we would use M27s loaded with standard rounds. Each of the battleships carried a five-thousand-man crew. We’d be outnumbered ten-to-one. Long odds.

With the natural-born pilots dead or captured, we used our newly trained Marine pilots to fly the transports. Our pilots sealed the kettle doors and started toward the atmospheric locks. Once again, I found myself standing in the crush of a hundred Marines crammed into a kettle, willing myself calm as I stared into the future.

The floor shook as the sleds pulled us through the locks.

“Listen up, Marines,” I said. “This little chat is the only briefing you will get on this op. The objective of this exercise is to commandeer ourselves a trio of battleships. I don’t know what kind of resistance we will run into, but we are dealing with sailors here; I don’t expect them to put up too big a fight.

“Are you with me so far?”

Every man answered. In the Marines, officers do not ask rhetorical questions.

“Any questions?”

“Sir, who is the enemy?” asked one of my sergeants.

“The new Navy,” I said, opting for total honesty.

“New Navy, sir?” several men asked.

“The brass at Navy Headquarters wants to train their new all-natural-born navy by testing it against us.” This was true, though I had made the unauthorized decision to accelerate the process.

“Are we packing blank rounds and dummy grenades?” another man asked.

“Good guess, but dead wrong. We’re using live rounds, boys,” I said. “Tag ’em and bag ’em.”

“We can’t use live ammo on U.A. sailors.” Dozens of men said that or something like it all at once.

“This is a full-contact exercise. We use live rounds on maneuvers. Today it is man against man. In another month, they will bring their new ships out here, and we’ll get to see how nicely they play the game.

“Now listen up, drill or no drill, we are going to lose men. This is military Darwinism, boys—one side lives, and one side dies. Let’s show them what a clone force can do, hoorah.”

“I don’t belong here! I’m natural-born!” The clone who said this sounded absolutely terrified. More than a thousand other clones responded by laughing, each of them believing that he was the only natural-born enlisted man in the fleet.

We only had a minute before we would reach the battleship, and I had one more order to give. “I’m looking for the smallest body count that gets the job done,” I said. “If they surrender, take ’em alive. Otherwise, just remember, we’re doing this for the good of the Unified Authority.”

I heard a twelve-thousand-man Aye aye, sir!

We were sending four companies to board each of the three battleships. All of my company commanders and platoon leaders had their assignments. Maps of the ships and virtual beacons had been programmed into every man’s visor. If we struck quickly, we would have the element of surprise on our side. With every passing moment, the sailors on those ships would have more time to arm and defend.

Normally, as I headed into battle, I would listen in on the conversations around the kettle. This time, however, I spent the remainder of our short trip lost in thought. I wondered what the security structure would be like on the battleships. Sailors did not carry sidearms. The armory might issue pistols or M27s to sailors pulling MP duty; but for the most part, the only weapons they packed were their wits. Needless to say, that left most sailors empty-handed.

The capital ships in the U.A. Navy carried a detachment of Marines who handled ship security. As far as I knew, the Unified Authority no longer trained new Marines. That meant these ships would either have sailors carrying guns or soldiers doing the work of Marines. Neither option impressed me. As long as they let us dock …

“Captain Harris, we’re cleared to land.” My pilot had just given me the thirty-second warning.

“Okay, we’re coming in for a landing,” I said, using an open interLink frequency that all my men would hear. “The watchword on this op is speed. Hit hard, hit fast.”

We landed. Boosters hissed. Runners clanked and groaned. I moved to the rear of the ship. My Marines lined up behind me, pressing against my back. I did not need to look back to know they had their guns out and ready. I would lead the way into this battle. As the first man off the first transport, I would set the pace.

We stood in the dim light of the kettle, waiting for the heavy doors to open. Scanning the interLink, I did not find a single conversation. The motors in the kettle walls whined, and the heavy iron doors began to slide apart. Staring down the ramp, I saw technicians servicing the engines and deck-hands running errands, all unarmed and unsuspecting. They paid no attention to me as I clambered down the ramp. The men working on the engine were natural-borns. One had blond hair, two had brown. My instincts told me to shoot them, but I did not listen. I stormed down the ramp and ran past them. They did not look up at me.

“Asshole!” “Coward!” “Failure!” I muttered curses at myself as I ran across the docking bay, hating myself for not having pulled the trigger.

A couple of techs stood near the door. I wondered if I had what it took to kill anyone anymore. When had I become so timid? Why had I let those men live? If one of them so much as touched an intercom, we would all be stuck in Scrotum-Crotch forever. I hated myself.

The spatter of automatic gunfire echoed across the deck. Someone had cleaned up after my mess. I did not need to look back to know that the mechanics working on the engine were dead. My self-loathing turned to shame.

Hearing the commotion, the techs near the door finally looked up, only curiosity showing on their faces. Then they saw the parade of armor-clad Marines and reacted. One ran for the communications panel on a nearby wall, the other ran for the door. I shot them both—the man reaching for the panel first, then the sprinter. The guy heading for the door threw his arms wide when my bullets drilled into his back and neck, his head lolling back while his chest and shoulders thrust forward. He looked like a runner making a final burst to cross the finish line.

When I reached the door, I pressed my boot against the dead man’s shoulder and slid his bloody body out of the way. I felt no remorse; I would not have shot him had he not turned to run. “Soldiers have an army, sailors have a navy, the Marines have a corpse,” my old drill instructor used to say.

The corridor outside the docking bay was nearly empty, empty enough that I did not worry that anyone heard the shots. Even if someone had been nearby, the doors were thick, and we had suppressors on our M27s. The gunfire sounded no louder than the sound of a racquet striking a tennis ball. Any sailors happening to pass by the door would not even stop to think about what they had heard.

With a hundred men following behind me, I headed toward the bridge. Another hundred headed aft, toward the engine room. That left two hundred men to locate the armory and neutralize whatever resistance the sailors offered. In the past, battleships carried a complement of a thousand Marines. It occurred to me that even if this ship carried a regiment of “new” Marines, my four hundred could still win the day. My men were veterans of a more-established service. If the Unified Authority had an all-natural-born-Marines corps, the men in that corps would be untried men in an untried service.

The hall from the docking bay to the center of the ship was long and straight, wide enough for ten men to walk abreast. The way was bright and surprisingly empty.

We slipped through the halls quickly, making only a half-hearted effort to keep ourselves concealed. We stopped at junctions, peered around corners for targets, then moved on. A door opened and a sailor started to step out, saw us, and ran back inside. Two of my men followed him. I heard the soft chatter of suppressed gunfire and knew our secret was safe.

“Check every door,” I told my men.

“It’s like a ghost town,” one of my sergeants radioed in.

“Beta Team report?” I snapped.

Upon leaving the docking bay, we had split into four squads. Beta was the team I sent to capture Engineering. Alpha, my squad, would take the bridge. Gamma would look for the armory, assuming the ship had one. Delta would watch the halls and squish anything that looked dangerous.

“We’re approaching the engine room.” A moment later, he radioed in again. “It’s like they’re taking a lunch break or something, there’s only a couple of techs here.”

“Secure the area and report,” I said. “Gamma?”

“We have the armory.” Gamma had the shortest route to cover. The armory was on the same deck as the docking bay.

“Any problems?”

“Just a dumb-ass janitor who tried to run. I had to cap him.”

“Anyone else there?”

“The place is empty, Captain.”

“Delta?” I asked.

“Still deploying.”

“Okay, Delta leader. Fast and quiet. If they don’t stop and drop, waste ’em.”

It occurred to me that I had not heard the screech of the Klaxons. Apparently no one had spotted us yet.

Swinging around a doorway, I saw five sailors lazing around a coffee dispenser. I signaled caution to the Marines behind me. When we went in to take them, one of the sailors threw his hands in the air to show he wasn’t armed. My Marines shot the other four. Blood, meat, and coffee splattered the wall. Bodies fell.

“What do I do with him?” a private asked. He pointed to the scared shell of a man kneeling on the floor with his hands laced behind his head. The man hung his head till his chin pressed against his neck. He just knelt there, whimpering.

“Guard him,” I said.

“What about …”

I looked at the quailing sailor, and said, “We either guard him or kill him. Your choice.” Then I went to an open frequency, and said, “Listen up, Alpha, this break room is now our official holding pen. If you take a prisoner, you bring him here. You got that?”

They said they did.

The private cracked his M27 against the back of the sailor’s head, and said, “Stay down there, asshole.” He forgot to broadcast externally. Alpha Team heard him, the captured sailor did not.

The corridor funneled into a wide berth near the center of the ship. As we reached this area, we finally ran into resistance. Somebody fired a shot. The bullet struck the wall about five feet ahead of me, leaving a scrape. Two more shots followed.

I ducked against a wall, peered around the corner. The shooter hid behind a bulkhead.

“You three, flank him, take him,” I ordered the men standing behind me. As I fired a few shots, they scampered back down the hall and took an alternate route.

Moments later, the alarms finally sounded. The Klaxons were so loud that they made my helmet vibrate. The audio filters in my helmet dampened the noise, but it must have been excruciating for the sailors.

Somebody fired three hopeless shots in my direction even though I was completely hidden behind the corner. The shots came spaced a few seconds apart. I returned fire in three-shot bursts. My job was not to kill the enemy, just to keep them pinned. A moment later, automatic fire rang out, and my Marines let me know that the coast was clear.

Before leaving, I went to have a look at the fallen resistance. There were two of them, sailors on MP duty with sidearms and armbands. They lay facedown, their blood spreading into puddles.

I noticed my heartbeat as I ran up the stairs leading to the next deck. It was normal. Running down the corridors of this battleship, facing only token resistance, I had not built up enough of a sweat to start a combat reflex. I might just as well have been playing Ping-Pong or herding a flock of sheep.

“Beta, report?”

“We have control of Engineering, sir.”

“That’s it?” I asked.

“We killed a guy.”

“Any prisoners?” I asked.

“Yeah, sixty-three of ’em. There was a guy who took a swing at me with a wrench, but everyone else gave up without a fight.”

Sixty-three men in Engineering? I didn’t know you could operate a battleship with so small a crew.

“Captain, we have secured the lower decks.” It was the Delta Team leader.

“Any problems at the Marine compound?” I asked. The Marines would be stowed on the bottom deck.

“The deck was empty, sir.”

“There are no Marines in the compound?” I asked.

“It’s an empty space, sir. The whole compound is empty. There aren’t even any racks in the barracks.”

I considered this as we reached the bridge. The captain of the ship could have sealed off the bridge, but he didn’t. The hatch stood wide open, revealing a huge floor that looked like an office complex. There were desks and dividers and computers. You did not fly a ship like this with a flight stick or yoke; even the combat maneuvers were programmed into a computer.

We had not seen any real resistance. On the bridge, the captain of the ship made his stand as best he could. He met us at the entrance, flanked by six men carrying M27s. He and the two armed men beside him wore the khaki uniforms of officers—a one-star admiral with a captain and a commander by his side. The four men behind them were simple seamen.

“What is the meaning of this, clone?” The old man spat out the words as he approached us. Annoyance showed in his eyes. Fear showed in the eyes of the men around him.

Seeing this angry old man’s composure, I felt my nerve slip just a bit. “I am commandeering your ship.”

“Clone, this is treason.” He used the word “clone” twice, and I suspected he would use it again. He wanted to trigger a death reflex, the bastard.

“I’m not going to have a death reflex,” I said, “but if I hear you say that word one more time, I will shoot you on the spot.”

“You son of a bitch,” the old man said. “You’re behind this, aren’t you? You’re that Liberator clone.” I got the feeling that last use of “clone” had just slipped out and did not shoot.

Trying to sound more confident than I felt, I said, “Tell your men to lay down their arms.”

“And then what? You’ve already committed treason, how about murder? How many of my men have you already killed?”

“Admiral, I am running out of patience.”

The admiral told his men to drop their weapons with no more than a nod. Then he said, “You do know they will come for you? You can’t possibly get away with this.”

“They were always going to come for us,” I said. “We were sent here for combat exercises.”

When the admiral heard this, his raised his eyes to my face and took a half step backward. That was the only sign of fear I ever saw from the man. “You’re damn right you were, and you will get everything you have coming to you.”

The admiral surrendered the bridge, and we captured three battleships without taking a single casualty. In the back of my mind, though, I asked myself, What have I done?

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Senior Chief Petty Officer Perry Fahey, now wearing full face makeup that included lipstick, rouge, and false eyelashes along with mascara, opened the next staff meeting with, “Captain Harris, I hear congratulations are in order. You managed to hijack three ships filled with unarmed sailors on a peaceful mission without losing a single man. That’s quite an accomplishment. What’s next on your agenda, blowing up a school for girls?”

I wanted to kick the bastard’s chair out from under him, but that was what he wanted as well. He wanted to provoke me into a fight, then claim I was not ready to command. Instead, I smiled, and said, “You said that entire line without stuttering or wetting your pants, Senior Chief. Well done.”

“I, I don’t stutter,” Fahey said.

“Really? You stuttered up a storm at our last meeting,” I said.

It was a childish display on both our parts, but I got what I wanted. I stopped myself from lashing out with my fists.

Warshaw and Franks sat impassive, watching to see what Fahey would do next. I remained silent, waiting for the same.

What Fahey said next let me know that I was not the only person worrying about whether it had been a mistake to start this war. “You got us in a specking war.” He looked at Warshaw and Franks for support, then added, “What are you going to do next, bomb Terraneau?”

Franks laughed.

Maybe they had rehearsed the whole thing. Fahey’s outburst gave Warshaw the opportunity to position himself as an officer-statesmen. Neither laughing nor smiling, he said, “You did assure me that those ships had come to fight.”

“No, Master Chief, I never said any such thing. I said that the Unified Authority plans to use our fleet to practice maneuvers.”

“There weren’t even any Marines on board those ships. It seems clear to me that they did not come to fight,” Warshaw said. He spoke slowly, showing restraint.

Fahey didn’t bother with things like restraint. “They won’t make that mistake again, now, will they?”

I turned to Fahey, and said, “The Earth Fleet has thirty-two battle …excuse me, as of two days ago the fleet has twenty-nine self-broadcasting battleships. It has twenty-five self-broadcasting destroyers, and a few self-broadcasting cruisers. How many battleships do we have?”

Warshaw and his crew sat mute.

Hollingsworth leaned forward, and said, “I believe we have ninety battleships, sir.”

“Ninety, you say?” I asked. “Ninety?” I pretended to fumble with a complex mathematical equation. “Why, ninety, that’s more than thirty!”

Thomer chipped in. “I believe it is three times more, sir.”

“Three times, you say?” Then, dropping my momentary befuddlement, I turned to Warshaw, and said, “I don’t expect they’ll make too much of a fuss over those ships.”

“So which is it, Harris? You don’t get it both ways. Are we so much stronger than them that they’re afraid to come after us, or are they planning to use us for target practice?” Franks asked that question. If the son of a bitch analyzed and responded this effectively in battle, he’d make a hell of a captain.

“They’re not ready to attack us just yet,” I said.

“This is why the Navy always commands.” Warshaw pronounced his edict with a regal attitude. He leaned back in his seat and rubbed a hand across his chin. “I suppose we’re both guilty on this one. I should have known better than to listen to you.”

With the Broadcast Network down, the Navy would not be able to verify the fate of those battleships without sending ships out to investigate. In a few hours, the brass would realize that their three battleships were not coming back. They would suspend any flights pending an investigation. Once Intelligence determined that we had commandeered their ships, they would abort the transfer entirely.

For all intents and purposes, I had received my field promotion to general. Warshaw was now an acting admiral, and though our ranks were similar, our authority was not. He commanded the ships. I commanded the Marines, a body of fighting men that he and his sailors considered just another form of cargo.

Warshaw would do whatever he thought he needed to preserve his command. The next time I left the ship, for instance, I might not be allowed back.

I left the conference room and headed for the Marine compound, Thomer and Hollingsworth in tow.

“Okay, Sergeant Hollingsworth, why in hell was Fahey in full drag? The bitch was wearing everything but a dress and wig,” I said.

“Why are you asking me?” Hollingsworth protested.

“You said you knew him. You said he’s a good man.”

“That doesn’t specking make me his fashion consultant.”

“Okay, fine. Why do you think he came to the meeting like that?” I asked.

“It seems pretty obvious.”

“It does?” I asked.

“You confiscated makeup from the bitches on this ship. He came in kabuki face to show that he isn’t scared of you. It seems pretty obvious.”

“Yeah, I should have known it was something like that,” I admitted. Now that he pointed it out, it did seem obvious.

“Do you want to go get drunk?” Thomer asked.

“Not today,” I said. I needed to stay sober and think about my next move.

“How about you?” Thomer asked Hollingsworth.

“Sounds good,” Hollingsworth said.

“You don’t mind if we get drunk?” Hollingsworth asked me.

I laughed and told them to enjoy their last minutes as enlisted men. By the time they returned from the bar, they would be a brigadier general and a full-bird colonel.

So I returned to my billet to relax. I took off my shoes and stripped out of my uniform. An hour-long nap sounded good, then maybe a meal. First things first, though; I needed rest. After turning off the lights, I climbed into my rack, then groped along the table beside my bed until I found the pair of mediaLink shades that I had checked out from the commis sary. The shades let me tap into the ship’s media center. Since returning from Terraneau, I had been reading the collected works of Friedrich Nietzsche.

I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not.

Poison-mixers? “That shows what you know,” I muttered to the Nietzsche in my head.

The soft ring of my communications console broke into my thoughts. When I answered, Warshaw asked me to come to the bridge.

“What is it?” I asked.

“You’re either a prophet, Harris, or you’ve gotten us all killed,” he said.

“More U.A. ships?” I asked as I climbed out of bed.

“A lot of them.”

“How many is a lot?” I asked.

“Twenty battleships.”

I had my blouse buttoned and my pants up. Stepping into my shoes, I said, “That’s half their fleet.”

“There’s no backing out now, Harris,” Warshaw said. “I hope you were right about everything.”

It took me five minutes to get from my billet to the bridge. Warshaw and one of his top NCOs, Senior Chief Hank Bishop, met me at the lift when I arrived. Well, he had been a senior chief. Now that we had broken relations with Washington, Bishop was the captain of the Kamehameha.

Warshaw had not yet ordered the call to quarters, but the bridge was on full alert. Technicians ran system checks and radar sweeps. Amber lights flashed on several computer consoles.

Warshaw led me to a large table in the center of the bridge. On the table, a holographic display showed our fleet and the intruders as quarter-inch three-dimensional models on a green-and-black grid. Our ships filled the center of the grid. The U.A. ships moved along the edge of the display.

“Why haven’t you sounded the alarms?” I asked.

“If we sound general quarters, they’ll hear it,” Bishop said. “The fleetCom system notifies all U.A. ships in the area when one ship sounds general quarters.”

“What’s so bad about that?” I asked.

“That’s not how we do things in the Navy,” Warshaw said. “We don’t go off half-cocked.”

I wanted to tell Warshaw to get specked, but I controlled myself. “I don’t see what’s wrong with telling them we’re ready for a fight. They came here looking for a fight; we should let them know that we’re willing to give it to them.”

“They will take it as a sign of guilt …like we have something to hide,” Warshaw said. He turned and faced me, fury flashing in his eyes. “Why the hell do I bother even trying to explain these things to a Marine?”

“Because you need me as much as I need you.”

“For now,” Warshaw said, calming slightly. “Here is the situation, Harris. They sent two unarmed research vessels to look for their ships. The only contact we have had was with those first ships. They asked us if we knew what happened to their battleships. We told them that we haven’t seen them.

“Apparently they don’t believe us,” Warshaw said pointing to the display.

I shook my head. “Twenty self-broadcasting ships. If we could take them …”

“We can’t,” Warshaw said. “If we make a move, they’ll broadcast out.”

I expected a show of force. As the staff meeting ended, I had said as much, but I had not expected twenty ships. That was half their fleet. Even with twenty ships, they would not have any leverage. Not on our turf. They might make some hollow demands, but we would say, “No,” and their self-broadcasting fleet would return to Earth with its tail between its legs …figuratively speaking. Sending so many ships had been a mistake, it made them look weak.

On the holographic display, the ships meandered around empty space. They could have been looking for debris or maybe the radioactive signature of a broadcast engine.

“What would you do if you were in their shoes?” Bishop asked me. “What if an enemy stole three of your tanks?”

“They don’t have a hound’s breath of a chance against us, not with only twenty battleships,” I pointed out.

“Obviously. That is why they haven’t engaged us,” Warshaw said. He pointed to the display. “They’re staying well out of firing range.”

“But they are in an offensive formation,” Bishop added.

Warshaw shook his head. “It’s aggressive, but not offensive,” he said. “They’re still far enough apart to break and run if we attack.”

Bishop looked more closely, thought it over, and agreed.

“Where are the ships we commandeered?” I asked.

“Over here.” Warshaw sounded distracted as he pointed to the center of the display. He’d parked the commandeered ships in the center of the fleet. As he showed me the location, something struck me. Normally testy, the master chief was now showing a surprising amount of patience.

“There’s something else, isn’t there?” I asked.

Warshaw and Bishop traded a silent glance, then Warshaw gave me an embarrassed grin. “You were right about the Navy building a new class of ships. Our engineers found these.” He pressed a button, and the holographic image of a ship replaced the tactical map on the table.

“Is this a battleship?” I asked quietly as I inspected the design. The three-dimensional image showed a long and slender hull. For the last hundred years, U.A. capital ships had been moth-shaped wedges. This boat was shaped like a knife.

“We found plans for an entire fleet,” Warshaw said.

As Warshaw said this, a sailor came and saluted.

“What is it, Brown?” Bishop asked.

“Sir, the battleships have changed course. They’re coming toward us, sir.”

“Sound general quarters,” Warshaw shouted.

Bishop struck a button on the table and Klaxons began. Warning lights were already flashing when I came onto the bridge; now the ambient lighting faded, and the glow of blinking amber flashed across the bridge.

Bishop fiddled with a dial on the table, and the tactical view of the ships reappeared, only more magnified.

“Scramble the fighters,” Warshaw ordered.

Bishop repeated the order.

“Scrambling fighters, aye,” an officer yelled.

“Send out all three carrier groups,” Warshaw yelled.

I might have only been a lowly Marine, but I recognized overkill when I heard it. Warshaw was sending thirty-five fighter carriers to intercept twenty battleships.

“How many ships are incoming?” the fleetCom asked.

Across the bridge, communications officers relayed orders as loudly as they could against the distant blare of the Klaxons.

“Keep your fighters in close,” Warshaw told Bishop.

Watching Warshaw, I thought he looked like a schoolboy spouting information he had memorized but did not understand. He’d spent his career as a deckhand, never expecting that he might one day become an officer. There was no strategy in his attack; he was simply throwing every ship in his fleet at the enemy.

But strategy would not make a difference in this near battle. Bright flashes appeared on the 3-D display. The enemy battleships broadcast to safety before coming close enough for us to shoot at them.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

We needed the three U.A. battleships for several reasons. We needed ships with broadcast engines if we ever wanted to travel beyond Terraneau. Commandeering Pershing’s self-broadcasting cruiser would have given us broadcast-travel capabilities, but it was a runt of a ship, and we needed cargo space for what I had in mind.

We also needed ships with the location of the Mogat home world stored on their broadcast computers because none of us had the slightest specking idea how to find the place. The Unified Authority Navy sent all of its self-broadcasting battleships to fight in the final battle against the Morgan Atkins Believers. Before a ship can self-broadcast to any location, coordinates must be programmed into its broadcast computer.

The computers on the battleships we captured yielded unexpected treasures. Along with the location of the Mogat home world, we found external diagrams of the new ships and a tentative launch schedule. Over the next three years, the Unified Authority planned to swap out its old fleet for an all-new one. From what we could tell, the new ships would be slightly smaller than earlier models. Our engineers were unable to decipher the weapons.

Hoping to glean a little more information about the new fleet, we decided to take a detour as we flew out to the Mogat home world.

Lilburn Franks—formerly a senior chief petty officer in the U.A. Navy but now an upper-half rear admiral in the Enlisted Man’s Fleet—suggested we swing by the Golan Dry Docks on our way to the Mogat Fleet.

The dry docks sat in an otherwise-unpopulated corner of Norma, the smallest and innermost of the galactic arms. Long noted as the Unified Authority’s most advanced shipyard, the Golan facility measured eight miles from top to bottom and included hundreds of cubic miles of construction space. If the Navy had new ships under construction, the Golan Dry Docks was where it would build them.

We broadcasted our newly confiscated three-ship fleet out to that remote corner of Norma. There were no planets within a light-year of the dry docks, just acres of star-riddled darkness.

I sat in an observatory just off the bridge with Warshaw and Franks—a high-powered conclave. With our field ranks in effect, I now had the rank of lieutenant general. Thanks to his visit with Brocius, Warshaw was an admiral. Franks was a rear admiral. We wore uniforms befitting our new status. Franks and I fit our uniforms perfectly. Warshaw’s blouse strained around the bulging contours of his chest, shoulders, neck, and arms.

Warshaw sat ramrod straight in his chair, looking massive and muscular. When he was sure Warshaw was not around, the late Sergeant Herrington sometimes referred to him as the “Careless Hairless” because he shaved his head, eyebrows and all.

Beside him sat Franks, a man with an aggressive streak. Franks leaned forward in his chair, excitedly scanning the scene through the panoramic viewport. We had broadcasted in thirty-five million miles from the dry docks, far enough away that their sensors would not spot the anomaly of our entrance—far enough away to give our broadcast generator time to recharge in case the U.A. had ships patrolling the area. The enormous generator that built up the energy for us to broadcast required eight minutes to recharge.

Warshaw and I chatted about the overall mission. Franks listened in while keeping one eye on the viewport and the other on a telemetry readout. If another ship approached, Franks would notice it before anyone else.

“Doesn’t matter where you go, it always looks the same out here,” I said.

Franks disagreed. “Spoken like a Marine,” he said.

This took Warshaw and me by surprise. “Not all the same?” he asked.

“Of course not,” said Franks. “We’re in the Norma Arm, the stars are more closely clustered here.”

Warshaw laughed, and said, “It doesn’t look any different.”

“No, it wouldn’t to you,” said Franks.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Warshaw asked.

“You’re an engineer. You spend your time in the belly of the ship taking equipment apart and making sure it works right. What do stars matter to an engineer. You’re too busy with your seals and readouts to care about space.”

“Get specked.”

I turned to the viewport and looked over at the other battleships flying beside us. Their bulbous forms showed in full silhouette against the bright backdrop of stars. In most situations, ships of this make vanished into the darkness of space, their charcoal-colored hulls offering nearly perfect camouflage. Against the Norma stars, however, the ships stood out like crows flying across a morning sky.

“What makes you think the dry docks are still in use?” Warshaw asked.

“Where would you go if you were going to build a fleet?” Franks answered the question with a question.

“It’s a long way from Earth …hard to protect,” Warshaw said.

“Who are they protecting it from, the aliens? The aliens go after planets, not satellites,” Franks said. Then he looked down at his holographic display, and added, “Gentlemen, and in your case, Harris, I use the term loosely, we have arrived.”

I looked out through the viewport and saw nothing other than open space.

“Have you ever been to the dry docks?” I asked Warshaw.

“No, have you?” He sounded confident that I had not.

“I’ve been there,” I said. I would have said more, but something about the way Franks knelt over his display distracted me. He brought up a floating holographic display of the dry docks.

“I’m getting a reading from the dry docks facility,” Franks said. “There’s some kind of activity going on around it.” He flipped a switch that brought up a shoebox-sized virtual representation of the bridge.

“Sound general quarters,” Franks told his virtual bridge, sounding calm, like a clone who was bred for command.

“Have they spotted us?” asked Warshaw. He walked over to get a closer look.

“Look at this. Look, here, and here,” he said, pointing at the display. “See these three ships here, they’re moored outside the dry docks,” Franks said. “That means they are operational. At the very least, they have been out for a test flight.”

He turned back to his virtual bridge, and said, “Bring all weapons systems online. Relay all orders to B2 and B3.” For lack of better names, we currently referred to the captured battleships as B1, B2, and B3.

“Do we even know if they are capital ships?” Warshaw leaned over the monitor. “Maybe they’re just cargo.”

I once thought all sailors were alike, the same way Warshaw or Franks probably believed all Marines were alike. Watching these two clones operate, I now saw vast differences.

Franks, who had spent his career in navigation and weapons, had an intuitive understanding of tactics and situations. Warshaw, the more decorated and experienced of the two, had worked his way up in Engineering. He could keep a ship running; but when it came to commanding a ship, he was out of his depth.

I half expected Warshaw to argue or try to take control of the situation, but he didn’t. “Do you think they pose a threat?” he asked.

“Better safe than sorry,” Franks answered, without looking up from the display. “If they are building the new fleet out here, then those are going to be ships from that fleet.”

“They could have come from the Norma Central Fleet,” Warshaw suggested.

Franks shook his head. “The Norma Central Fleet is a thousand light-years away.”

I started to say something but stopped myself as I realized that I no longer had a part in the conversation.

“How far to the dry docks?” Warshaw asked.

“We’re still about 1.5 million miles out.”

“Think they know we sounded general quarters?”

I wanted to ask if they even knew we were here.

“They know. They went on high alert, too,” Franks said. “This is our chance to get a closer look at those ships. Who knows when we will get another shot like this.”

I didn’t like the odds. We had three ships, and so did they, but our ships were sixty years old. They had brand-new equipment. I pointed this out.

Warshaw took up the cause. “We can’t risk a fight. Until we pick up more equipment, these ships are all we have.”

“Now they’re sounding general quarters,” Franks added. He seemed more fascinated by this turn of events than bothered by it.

“That’s enough, Franks. Get us out of here,” Warshaw repeated.

“We’re safe. Hell, for all we know, they might not have crews on those ships,” Franks said. Then, to the helm, he added, “Set speed to fifty thousand.” At fifty-thousand miles per hour, it would take us thirty hours to reach the dry docks.

This seemed to calm Warshaw slightly. He asked, “What if they do have men aboard?”

“Doesn’t seem likely,” Franks argued.

“Who would have sounded general quarters?” Warshaw asked.

“Dry-docks security could have triggered the alarms.”

“Why sound general quarters on empty ships?” Warshaw asked.

“It could be a bluff,” Franks said. “They might be bluffing to make us think their ships have gone online. We don’t even know if their specking weapons systems are operational. For all we know, those ships are empty shells.”

He looked down at his display and muttered something I could not make out. At that moment, the bridge let us know that two of the three moored ships had launched in our direction.

“What’s their speed?” Franks asked the bridge.

The answer, “Five hundred, sir,” came from the virtual bridge.

“Franks, get us out of here,” Warshaw commanded.

“We might not get another opportunity like this. They’re only sending two ships out, that’s three of us against two of them.”

“They’ll be in firing range in two minutes,” Warshaw said. “Looks to me like they are spoiling for a fight.”

“Here is a chance to see the new class in action. Do you really want to run?” Franks argued. He was right. It was our one chance to gather intelligence by watching those ships in action, but I thought it might be fatal intelligence.

“Take us out of here,” Warshaw growled.

Franks sighed as he gave the order to his virtual bridge. “Contact the other ships. Tell them to broadcast to Mogat space.”

The viewport darkened, the lightning danced, and we traded one space panorama for another.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

We broadcasted in a hundred thousand miles above the Mogat home world, roughly half the distance between the Earth and its moon. Before hearing Franks’s little lecture about differences in space, I never paid attention to the textures of the stars. Out there in the Galactic Eye, space looked like black velvet walls studded with millions of Christmas lights. The only direction in which I saw undisturbed darkness was toward the planet below us.

What the Avatari had hoped to do to New Copenhagen and Terraneau, they had already accomplished on this planet. They had captured the planet, saturated it with toxic gas, then baked it by expanding the nearby sun. The extinct sun loomed like a shadow orbited by a cinder of a planet.

…And when he invented hell for himself, behold, that was his very heaven, I thought, another little gem from Nietzsche.

“Scan the area,” Franks ordered his virtual bridge.

My eyes adjusted before my mind could accept what they saw. We drifted slowly toward the graveyard, a floating reef of dead ships and debris left in the wake of the U.A. Navy attack on the Mogat Fleet. As my eyes took in the starry surroundings, I began seeing shadows of inert shapes. I saw hulls and wings, whole ships and partial ships outlined in light, floating in place, as sharp and as dead as fish in a jar of formaldehyde.

A voice came from Franks’s console. “The area is clear, sir. It doesn’t look like anyone has been out here in years, sir.”

“Well, General Harris, we have twelve crews and four hundred ships to explore,” Warshaw said as he rose to his feet. “Did you plan to join us?”

“I do,” I said, more aware than ever that I had come on this operation as an observer. This was a job for engineers and technicians. Having a leatherneck along would add nothing to the equation.

“Have you ever been on a wreck before?” I asked Warshaw as we left the observation deck and cut our way across the bridge.

“No. I hear it can get ugly,” he answered.

“It’s pretty grim,” I said, remembering a mission in which I had explored a wreck. There were bodies floating weightless, frozen in the null heat. Once the hull of a ship gets pierced, the air, heat, and pressure flush out of the hole, and the inside of the ship becomes as sterile as the space around it.

“Maybe you know the answer to this. I always wondered, what happens first when your ship gets smashed? Do you freeze, suffocate, or explode?”

“It’s that bad?” Warshaw asked.

He must have thought I was joking or trying to make a point. I wasn’t. That question had remained on my mind since the first time I boarded a Mogat wreck.

“Admiral,” I said, “this tour will haunt you for the rest of your life.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

In my experience, sailors and officers waged wars like gods. They sat on high, out of the line of fire, sending more expendable souls to bleed and die on the battlefields.

But both the officers and the sailors came along for the ride this time. I wondered if Warshaw or Franks had ever seen the aftermath of a space battle. The flash-frozen bodies on these ships would look exactly as they had the moment after the battle. Without oxygen or heat, they did not decay.

We piled into transports, cramming the kettles beyond capacity with 120 men each, plus equipment. Unlike Marines, human crustaceans in their hardened combat armor, engineers wore soft-shells—rubberized suits that were flame-, chemical-, and radiation-retardant, but little else. Far from bulletproof, engineering armor wouldn’t even protect them from an assailant with a mechanical pencil. As little more than an observer on this mission, I was issued soft-shell armor. By the time the transport doors closed, I already knew I hated engineering armor.

Crushed against the back wall of the kettle, I felt a bolt digging into my side. When another man stepped on my foot, I felt it. It didn’t hurt, but I didn’t expect to feel anything.

The visors on the soft-shelled armor showed the names and ranks of the men around me. Instead of night-for-day lenses, these suits had cheery little torches along their visors. They had a good reason for this backward step in technology. Night-for-day vision wreaked havoc with depth perception and showed the world in monochrome. Working with color-coded wires, circuits, and diodes, these engineers needed to know red from green. Hell, even their armor was color-coded. Weapons techs wore red armor, electronic and computer systems specialists wore yellow, and engineers wore blue.

I’d brought contraband on this mission. As the only Marine in a flock of sailors, I felt duty-bound to bring a weapon—a particle-beam pistol. If Warshaw ever came on a mission with me, I’d allow him to bring a wrench …in the spirit of fairness.

The sailors around me had to have been chatting on the interLink, but I was deaf to them. Reminding me that this was a naval mission, Warshaw refused to give me a commandLink, the bastard. He alone could listen in on every conversation and speak on private frequencies with whomever he liked.

That left me in isolation. I stood in the tightly packed kettle alone with my thoughts.

The audio equipment in my armor was not as sensitive to ambient sound as the equipment in combat armor. I knew when we lifted off because I felt it, but I could not hear the boosters. Instead of telescopic lenses, my engineering visor had a magnification lens. Engineers don’t snipe, they inspect circuits.

“They’re away,” Warshaw said. On the off chance that the U.A. sent a patrol through Mogat space, we sent our ships back to Terraneau.

“The battleships?” I asked. I knew the answer before I asked, but I wanted to talk. I was lonely. Goddamn.

“Yes, the battleships. Harris, you said you entered one of these ships once. Is that really true or were you just slinging shit?”

“The Mogats scuttled a ship in the Perseus Arm, I went out to explore it.”

“How did you get in?” Warshaw asked.

We sure as hell didn’t ride in on a gigantic specking transport, I thought. “There was a gash on bottom of the ship. We flew a ten-man sled in through one of the holes.”

“Did you try opening the docking-bay doors?”

“Nope.”

“Did you have engineers with you?”

“Nope, SEALs.”

Warshaw sort of snorted, and said, “SEALs.”

“They knew their stuff,” I said.

“Yeah, I’m sure they did,” Warshaw said. “Look, Harris, you mind going out with A Team? It sounds like you have more experience finding your way around a wreck.”

“No problem,” I said.

A moment later, Warshaw’s voice came over an open channel as he addressed every man on the transport. “We’re opening the rear hatch. A Team prepare to launch.”

The pilot maintained the gravity field within the kettle, keeping us rooted to the ground, even as he purged the air from the kettle so that we would not be flushed out when he opened the doors. Once the atmosphere turned into a vacuum, the doors slid apart, revealing an open field of space and stars.

One of the men at the top of the ramp panicked. He screamed for help over an open frequency and tried to fight his way to the back of the kettle. Warshaw addressed the kid over an open frequency. “Westerfield, get out there.”

“I, I can’t. I can’t.”

“That is an order,” Warshaw said, but the softness in his voice made it more of a request than an order.

“I can’t do it.”

Warshaw ordered the other sailors to let the kid through, and then asked, “Is anyone else too specking scared?”

I reminded myself that these were sailors, not Marines. They had grown accustomed to having an atmosphere and walls around them.

“No other takers?” Warshaw asked. “Okay, A Team, move out.”

That was my call. There were about twenty of us on the team. We walked down the ramp, the gravity becoming weaker the farther we got. Halfway down, I could have kicked off hard and flown into space. When the first man reached the bottom of the ramp, he held his motivator over his head and lifted off.

Engineers used handheld motivators instead of attaching jetpacks to their armor. The device looked like a pair of bin-oculars with handlebars instead of a strap. Their thrust technology used noncombustible gas emissions instead of flames. When I switched on its power, my motivator lifted me from the ramp and into open space.

Following the sailor before me, I banked around the stern of the transport. As we flew along the transport, the pilot switched on the runner lights along the hull, lighting the rust-colored skids and smooth steel underbelly of the sturdy bird. Each motivator had a row of knuckle-sized safety lights blinking a ruby red signal along their top.

Our team leader hit some button, and a headlight appeared at the front of his motivator. He only flew about fifty feet ahead of me; but I could not see him, just the cone of his headlight. The men ahead of me lit lights on their motivators as well.

We circled the wreck of a massive battleship like a swarm of flies approaching a beached whale. The holes along the belly of the ship were large enough for us to fly through, but the bottom deck of the ship had imploded.

“General Harris, sir?” My visor identified the man on the line as our team leader contacting me on an open line.

“What is it, Ensign?”

“Sir, do you know what kinds of weapons they used on this ship? I’ve never seen such extensive damage.”

Having spent the last six years of their lives trapped in the Scutum-Crux Arm, none of these boys had ever seen combat up close. “This is what happens when you get hit with your shields down,” I said. What I did not add was that this ship had gotten off lightly.

“Their shields were down?” the team leader asked. “Why would they lower their shields in battle?”

“We lowered the shields for them,” I said. “The Mogats used a centralized shielding technology that they broadcast to their fleet. Once our SEALs shut down the central shield generator, the ships were unprotected.”

“You were in on the Mogat invasion, sir?” The team leader did not ask that question; it came from another member of our little team. I heard a tone of awe in the boy’s voice.

“Yeah, I was there,” I said, trying to keep the darkness of my thoughts out of my voice. “A lot of good men died. We lost a lot more men than we should have.”

We flew across the battered underbelly of the battleship and up the port side. My interLink connection remained fairly quiet as men fanned out and inspected holes and burns along the face of the ship. Three decks up, one of the men found our doorway.

“The outer lock of the docking bay is open,” the man reported.

Knowing that the end had come, some Mogats had piled into a transport to abandon ship. They almost made it to safety. The broken nose of the transport poked out of the docking-bay hatch like a missile launching from a silo. The outer hatch of the docking bay had come down on the transport like a giant cleaver, slicing halfway through the kettle and crushing the rest into a bow-shaped heap.

The transport had made it through all three atmospheric locks when the first torpedo or laser pierced the hull of the battleship. Once the hull integrity failed, all of the outer hatches would have automatically sealed to protect the ship against the vacuum of space. In theory, sealing hatches creates pockets of oxygen in which sailors can survive for days. I’d been on enough wrecks to know that air pockets preserve fires, not lives. Rescuers never arrive in time. Scavengers may come looking for treasure, but the hope of rescue is the last resort of fools.

We flew in around the crushed transport. The eight-inch-thick hatch had slid down like a blade on a guillotine with enough force to flatten the nearly impregnable walls of a kettle.

Small diodes embedded in my visor sent out a fifteen-foot shaft of light. Beyond that beam of light, blackness shrouded everything not illuminated by the beams from another man’s helmet.

As I worked my way in along the side of the transport, three men floated in place, staring into a spot where the hatch had sliced through the kettle wall. Seeing the wreckage of the transport gave these boys a good introduction to what they would find inside the ship.

“Move along,” the team leader said. “We have a job to do. Perryman, Miller, Ferris, see if you can open the locks. Gold-berg, Lewis, figure out a way to sweep this place out. I need the runway clear.” By “sweep” he meant for them to purge the transport.

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Until we found a way to open the inner doors of the atmospheric locks, we would not be able to enter the ship. A trio of beams played along the wall until they all centered on the same panel. Using small torches, three engineers cut away the panel and discarded it. Behind the panel, they found a small lever, which one of them pumped up and down as if using a socket wrench. After four or five twists, the door pinning down the transport lifted toward the ceiling, rocking the injured transport as the hatch rose from the kettle.

“How can it still have power?” I asked the team leader.

“Emergency hydraulics.”

Three engineers placed charges along the rear of the transport. There was a flash, a small explosion, and the wreck rolled into space.

“That was easy,” the team leader said over an open channel.

Getting rid of that transport was the only thing that came easily. The other emergency controls were all on the inner sides of each hatch, meaning our engineers needed to cut through each of the locks, then open the way for the rest of us.

It took Warshaw’s engineers most of an hour to untangle the first lock, but they learned as they went. The next lock only took ten minutes. After they opened it, we entered the enormous, blackened cavern of the landing bay. Up to that point, the sailors only knew there would be bodies aboard the ship. Now they saw some.

Men in overalls hung suspended just off the ground, their limbs so stiff and brittle they might have been made of glass. I spotted a man whose face hung from his head like a flap of skin on a badly stubbed toe. The exposed parts of his skin had the blue-white color of an evening cloud. The skinned remains of his head sparkled like coal. His blood hung above him in a tangle of beaded icicles.

The team leader started to say something and vomited. I felt bad for the man, I did. Once the transport came, he could clean his equipment; but without steam cleaning, the air in that armor would never be sweet again.

“Good God,” the team leader bawled.

“Get used to it, Ensign. Everybody on this ship is going to look like that,” I said.

Nobody said anything after that, at least they did not say anything to me. For all I knew, the rest of the team was playing twenty questions. I doubted it, though. Most of the men stood in a huddle staring at the body, the lights from their visors shining on a loose flap of skin that had once been a face.

Trying to get the mission back on track, I asked the team leader, “Ensign, are you planning on bringing our transport inside to dock?”

“Yes, sir,” he said, his voice so mechanical that I could not tell if he understood what I’d said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

In the blackness of the runway, the transport’s runner lights showed crystal white, bleaching everything they shone on. With the ship destroyed and no power for the runway sleds, our pilot had to fly the transport all the way in, a slow and testing process.

Negotiating past one of the locks, the transport shined its lights directly over me, and I learned the hard way that engineering armor did not have automatic tint shields. Unaware that my visor would not protect my eyes from the glare, I watched the transport’s lights as it taxied up the runway. Then the lights hit me. Even after I looked away, orange and yellow ghosts blurred my vision.

The transport touched down and Admiral Gary Warshaw congratulated A Team for opening the docking bay. He followed up with, “Okay, men, you have your assignments. Let’s get this ship finished quickly, we have three hundred more to go.”

The rear of the kettle opened, and a swarm of technicians slid out, carrying toolboxes and meters and equipment I could not have identified.

As Alpha Team made its way into the ship, four of its members had to return to the transport. Poor bastards—they were the ones who threw up inside their armor. Their teammates would give them grief once the mission ended.

“Harris, you still dry inside your armor or do you need to visit the head?” Warshaw asked.

“Marines don’t lose their lunch when they see breakage,” I said, hoping to hell that he had not somehow heard about my little vomiting fit on Terraneau. He hadn’t.

“Get specked, Harris,” he said.

I spotted Warshaw gliding down the ramp. He moved with the ease of a man who has logged time in zero-gravity situations.

Looking around the bay, I decided that we had come to the right place if we wanted outdated transports or other obsolete equipment. A row of salvageable transports lined the far wall of the landing area. Tools, bodies, and furniture lay in an avalanche blocking our way to the ship. A couple of engineers pushed their way through the debris and jimmied the door open.

This battleship was a long-dead twin of the one we flew in on. They had the exact same floor plan. The halls of this ship were dark and silent, but they had the same turns and passages.

I did not use my motivator to fly through the halls. I kicked off surfaces and redirected my momentum by pushing off the walls. I passed through a mess hall so large it could have substituted for an aircraft hangar. The tables, which were bolted to the floor, had not moved, but a pile of bodies lay stacked against one wall. Strands of blood formed a web over the jumble of corpses. I had to break that web to reach the hatch on the far side of the mess.

Warshaw and his men had tasks to accomplish on this ship. For now, I was little more than a tourist come to see the grisly sights. I traveled through officer country across a rec room and finally down toward the lower decks. When I reached the Engineering sections, I spotted Warshaw and his men gathering around the broadcast generator—a group of eighteen bullet-shaped cylinders that stood thirty feet tall.

“Looks like it’s in solid condition,” I said, noting that none of the brass cylinders had so much as a dent.

“Nah, this one’s a complete bust,” said Warshaw.

“The cylinders look fine,” I said.

“Yeah, well, they would look perfectly sound to a Marine, they’re big, unbreakable, and made of metal. It’s the rigging on top that takes all the damage.” He sounded confident, but I wondered just how much time and training Warshaw had when it came to broadcast technology.

“How about the broadcast computer?” I asked.

Warshaw did not answer for several seconds, but I knew better than to repeat the question. I waited. He put a finger over the part of his helmet that covered his ears, and I realized he wasn’t ignoring me, he was receiving a message. Finally, he said, “Harris, the team on the bridge has spotted incoming battleships.”

“Franks must be in a hurry, he’s not due back for …”

“U.A. battleships, the ones we spotted by the dry docks,” Warshaw said.

“Shit,” I said.

There was no way those could have tracked us here. There was no way to track where ships broadcasted themselves. “Maybe it’s some kind of routine patrol,” I said.

Warshaw ignored that idea, and said, “Who knows what they have on those ships. They probably read the data off our computers before we broadcasted out.” He was guessing, but it sounded like a reasonable guess.

Warshaw and I headed to the bridge together, flying through the dark corridors as quickly as we could. By sticking to inner corridors, we managed to skirt around most of the damage, but we passed a lot of bodies. The sailors in the outer halls would have been sucked out into space. In the heart of the ship, though, the dead remained, floating forever in their cryogenic sepulcher.

Flying up an elevator shaft, we made our way to the bridge. In a working ship, it would have taken ten minutes to sprint from Engineering to the bridge. Floating weightless in this ghost ship, we made the trip in less than five.

“Have all of the transports docked?” I asked.

“You shitting me?” Warshaw asked. “Three of ’em are socked away. The other nine are playing possum.”

In a graveyard like this, with four hundred capital ships, turning off your engines and letting your transport float would leave you all but invisible.

Two men dressed in the red armor of weapons techs met us at the command area. They spoke on a direct frequency. I could not hear anyone with my Link unless I called them or they called me. Warshaw was well within his rights when he labeled this a “naval operation,” but he’d stuck it to me when he assigned me standard communications equipment instead of a commandLink. Bastard.

Without a word of explanation, Warshaw headed toward one of the off-bridge conference rooms. I had no idea whether I should follow him or not. I trailed after him, feeling more isolated by the minute.

The oblong room had a table and a viewport with a panoramic view of utter blackness. I went to the viewport and stared into the void outside, the light from my visor forming bright spots on the glass.

“Harris, kill the light on your visor,” Warshaw said. He sounded angry.

Now I was embarrassed and angry at myself. He was right. It was less significant than a needle, but a passing ship might spot the light from my helmet.

Though I could not see it through the viewport, a vast outer-space battlefield lay on display outside this ship. Without outside illumination, I could not see the broken ships or the desolate planet beyond them. And then, off in the distance, I saw the first trace of light.

“I see one,” I said to Warshaw.

I could not see the ship itself, just a gold-tinted luminescence that slowly hovered in our direction. As it glided toward us, I recognized the knife-blade shape of the hull. A general glow poured out of it, shining on the derelicts and debris as the battleship pushed past them.

Warshaw and two of his men came for a look. I wondered what they said to each other, and was reminded how much I hated Warshaw for sticking me with a standard Link.

The ship ambled closer, the glow from its hull lighting up everything it passed. The battleship floated by a defunct Mogat ship. In the gold glow, I saw scars along the dead ship’s sides. The hole in the bridge was so large, a skilled pilot could have steered a transport through it.

I noticed something about the glow around that battleship as it approached. It was like a skin.

“Admiral,” I said. By this time, he had left the viewport and stood talking with his techs. “Warshaw,” I repeated.

“Not now, Harris,” he said.

This was a new technology. The ships I had served on had projected shields that formed an invisible box around the ship. I chanced a quick glance back at Warshaw and saw that he had spread some kind of chart across the conference table. He and four of his men stood huddled together over the table, Warshaw pointing to a spot above the chart. As a ranking officer, I belonged in their conference. I looked back at the oncoming battleship, then went over to the table.

At first, I thought it must be a joke. The map or chart Warshaw had spread was blank, just a square of plasticized cloth with no marks at all. It took me a moment to understand. The cloth projected a virtual display that Warshaw and his techs saw through their visors. That function had not been activated on my visor. Paraphrasing Warshaw’s mantra in my head, I mumbled, “specking naval operations.” I returned to the viewport and saw a second battleship cruising toward us.

“Warshaw, there is a second battleship out there,” I said.

“I’m aware of that,” Warshaw said, his voice sounding testy. “I’m also tracking a third ship coming in at about five o’clock. Now, if you don’t mind, Harris, I’m busy at the moment.”

I did mind.

The first battleship came closer, cutting through the empty space with the confidence of a shark gliding through open waters. I studied the way its shields adhered around it like a second skin, as if the ship had been dipped and coated in glowing plastic. Sparks flashed in the shield when anything struck the ship—tiny explosions that flared and faded in the silent darkness.

I looked back toward Warshaw and saw him pointing at invisible details above that mat. Was it a map? A schematic? I should have been in on the planning. Yes, I was a lowly Marine, but I was also the highest-ranking officer in the fleet, damn it. Except, of course, Brocius had given Warshaw a third star. We had the same specking rank, even if this was a naval operation.

“General, would you like to join us?” Warshaw asked. It was not a friendly invitation. He was not asking me to help with the planning. He wanted to give me an obligatory briefing, the same kind of briefing company commanders give their platoon sergeants before throwing them into a battle.

Outside the viewport, the first battleship pulled even with us, then flashed past. I stared out into the darkness for another second, unable to tell whether the light to my left was the second battleship or a visual echo burned into my irises from the first ship.

“Harris, care to join us?” Warshaw repeated, a note of annoyance in his voice.

“They have new technology in their shields,” I said, as I turned to join the planning.

“Yes, I suspect they do,” Warshaw agreed.

“It looks like it’s based on Avatari technology,” I said.

“What kind of technology?” A perfunctory question.

“The technology the aliens used,” I said.

“I wasn’t aware that the aliens used ships,” Warshaw said. I could hear other people on the Link as well. I had been invited into a conference.

“They didn’t, but they lent the technology to the Mogats,” I said.

“The Mogats used alien technology in their shields? That explains a lot,” Warshaw said. I heard notes of agreement in the background. “We found disabled shield generators on almost every ship we’ve boarded. A few of the ships didn’t have any shield systems at all.”

“That’s because they used a central generator that the aliens gave them,” I said.

“Do you think the aliens might have given a similar generator to the Unified Authority?”

Of course not, you pompous, preening son of a bitch, I thought. “I think the Navy may have deciphered their technology. Lord knows, they’ve had enough scientists trying to work it out.

“If they do have it worked out, we’re screwed,” I added.

“We’re going to find out,” Warshaw said. “In fifteen minutes, we’re going to open fire on those ships.”

CHAPTER FORTY

A three-dimensional map of the area appeared in the air above the table. The hulls of twelve ships appeared in red, surrounded by the hulls of another three hundred ships in green.

“The red ships are the ones we’ve boarded,” Warshaw said.

I wanted to congratulate him for his ability to state the obvious, but I knew better. If he reverted into “naval operation” mode, he would leave me in the dark until we either died or returned to the fleet. “I thought we had more teams out,” I said.

“Some of the teams have not been able to break into their ships,” Warshaw said. Poor them. That meant those teams would spend the battle playing possum in their transports.

“Judging by the way they are patrolling, the U.A. ships know we are here, but they have no idea where we are hiding. One of them bumped into a transport without scanning it.”

“How is the transport?” I asked.

“The pilot is shook-up, but …”

“No, how is the transport itself?”

One of the techs said, “The pilot did not report any problems.”

“What are you getting at, Harris?” Warshaw asked.

“Just curious,” I said.

The shields the Mogats used absorbed energy. If a Mogat ship bumped a transport, its shields would have drained the transport’s batteries. I decided to file the information away rather than share it.

“My teams have found functional weapons systems on seven of the ships,” Warshaw said. As he said this, the display darkened as five of the red ships turned a swampy blue. The seven remaining red ships formed a misshapen ring.

I pictured the landscape in my head. If I had it right, the ships the U.A. sent to chase us down had passed right through that ring. Assuming Warshaw’s men could get those weapons systems up and running, they could incinerate those ships the next time they passed through. It sounded too good to be true. In fact, it sounded downright impossible.

“How can these wrecks have working weapons systems?” I asked. These derelicts had been floating in space for years. I did not understand how they could have working systems.

“Functional, not working,” Warshaw said. “We’ve isolated the weapons systems from the rest of the ship and supplied our own power.”

“What about shields?” I asked. “Can you get them working?”

Warshaw laughed. “It sounds like those U.A. battleships make you nervous.”

That summed up my feelings accurately. On the battlefield, I had some control over the environment. Out here, all I could do was sit back and watch. If the ship went down, I would go down with it.

“What do you have, lasers and torpedoes?” I asked. Having seen all of the damage along the hull of this ship, I wondered how reliable the torpedo tubes might be.

“Just lasers,” Warshaw said. He sounded distracted, as if he was holding a conversation with someone else at the same time that he answered my questions. He had the commandLink, he could do that …the bastard.

“No torpedoes. What if you can’t get through their shields?” I asked.

In the sixty years since the construction of the ships in this derelict fleet, the Unified Authority had stopped building lasers into battleships and switched to a more effective particle-beam technology; but even particle beams did not cause the trauma of a torpedo.

“Then we’re dead,” Warshaw answered in a voice that sounded like a verbal shrug of the shoulders. “We’re as good as dead if we don’t find a way to get rid of those ships before Franks comes back.”

He had a point.

I never claimed to understand the naval approach to combat. For some reason that defied all logic, Warshaw insisted on pulling the trigger from the bridge. On a working ship with operational systems, that would have made sense. On this derelict, he sat in a pitch-black chamber filled with lifeless computers, broken systems, and an audience of stiffs.

I remained on the off-bridge observation deck, watching the battlefield through the viewport. In the distance, I caught brief glimpses of light, nothing more than a streak here and there. Perhaps we had hidden too well the first time the battleships patrolled our little corner at the edge of the graveyard.

Fighting this battle no more aggressively than a spider tending a web, we could not hit those U.A. battleships until they entered our trap. Franks would return in another thirty-two minutes. We either had to clear the enemy ships out of the area or they would catch our self-broadcasting fleet off guard. Time was running out.

Staring out the viewport and seeing nothing but darkness, I gave up on the Warshaw Plan. We were in a life-and-death battle, and he wanted to fight it like a specking engineer—relying on antiquated weapons and enemies blundering into his trap. Granted, booting up the weapons systems on a bunch of derelict ships was a brilliant piece of speckery; he had ginned up a fighting chance in a lost situation. But we would not win unless we took the reins.

Five minutes ticked by before any of the battleships appeared again. I waited alone in that blasted conference room, in the stark gloom. The light of one battleship appeared in the extreme corner of the viewport. The big ship was so far away that its light might have been the signature of a firefly.

What were they doing out there? If they had the ability to track us this far, they should have known that Franks had taken our self-broadcasters back to Terraneau. They had to know.

The spark of light that looked no bigger than a firefly cut a twisted path in the distance. No longer swimming in straight strokes, the battleship conducted a more methodical search, dodging this way and that as it came closer. It circled completely around one wreck.

A second battleship appeared, loosely shadowing the first. The third one would have to be nearby, guarding their flank. Another eight minutes passed as the battleships slowly meandered into range.

“What if only two of them come in range, are you going to take the shot?” I asked Warshaw.

“Take the shot? Is that Marine lingo?” he asked.

Engage, shoot the specker, give them a laser enema, a dozen responses ran through my mind, some positive, some not. I said nothing.

“There are three U.A. ships out there. We won’t accomplish our objective by only sinking two of them,” Warshaw said.

“Franks is going to broadcast into the area in less than thirty minutes. This may be the last time any of those ships stumbles into your shooting gallery,” I said.

“Stay out of this, Harris,” Warshaw repeated. “This is not a friendly game of bullets and grenades. Battlefield tactics don’t work here.”

“Taking out one of those birds may just even the odds for Franks,” I said.

“Bullshit, Harris. If Franks comes in unprepared, they’ll use him for target practice.” Warshaw signed off as one of the U.A. ships swished past my viewport. I checked the time—21:49, just eleven minutes and Franks would fly in to rendezvous.

Warshaw had driven one point home above all else, that we were as good as dead unless we destroyed all three enemy ships. Without announcing my intentions, I slipped out of the observation area and headed back to the docking bay.

I dropped down two decks, skirted a badly damaged corridor along the outer edge of the ship, and found an inner corridor leading toward the rear of the ship. Lights flickered inside one of the hatches as I passed. I peered in and saw some of Warshaw’s men removing a panel from a wall. They ran cables from a jeep-sized crate into the circuits they had uncovered.

I did not have time to worry about weapons systems, though I would die in the next few minutes if Warshaw’s men could not get the weapons systems working.

My plan hinged on my finding a pilot for the transport. I entered the docking bay, not sure whether the man piloting our transport had remained in his bird. Someone had pivoted the transport around so that its nose pointed out toward space. The rear doors sat wide open, revealing an empty kettle, the gravity off. I launched myself up the ramp, paused just long enough to seal the rear hatch, then kicked off the floor to the cockpit, not bothering with the ladder.

For one cold moment, I thought that the cockpit was empty, but then a man in pilot gear hovered over to meet me.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

Staring into the pilot’s face, I switched on the edge lighting around my visor, hoping to blind him. Then, bracing my knee under a bolted-down chair so that I had some purchase, I grabbed the man and slung him across the cockpit. He landed in his pilot’s chair and said, “Hey!”

“Hey”? I thought. What an asshole.

I whipped out my particle-beam pistol, a tiny, unimpressive-looking weapon with a great capacity for doing damage, and I tapped it against the pilot’s visor. “I want to go for a ride,” I said. When he did not respond right away, I added, “Call for help, and I’ll fry you on the spot.”

I was already too late.

“Harris, what are you doing?” It was Warshaw.

The asshole must have started calling for help while I was slinging him into his chair. “You miserable little prick,” I said to the pilot, tapping my pistol against his visor as I spoke each word.

“Please, just …”

“Harris, get your ass up here.” Warshaw barked the command at me as if he were speaking to a buck private.

“Do you want to die now, or take your chances?” I asked the pilot.

“Harris, I said get up here. Now!”

The pilot must have thought my question was rhetorical. He did not answer.

I needed to keep the guy scared. No matter what else happened, I needed him so scared of me that he did not consider consequences. Still leveraging myself with my legs, I leaned forward and slammed my fist into his gut.

If he’d been dressed in stiff combat armor, I would have broken my fingers and wrist long before he felt a thing, but he felt this blow. The poor son of a bitch doubled over right there in his seat, burying his visor in his knees. His soft-shelled armor might not have offered him much protection, but it let him double over better than combat armor would have.

Judging by the way Warshaw shouted, “Harris, what the speck do you think you are doing?” I decided the pilot must have been pleading for help when I hit him.

“This is a Marine operation, Admiral,” I said. Then I turned my attention to the pilot. “Next time I use this, asshole,” I said, pressing my pistol to his visor once more. “Now, get us out of here.”

“We’ll settle up, Harris. When this is over, you and I are going to settle up,” Warshaw yelled. He might have said more, but he had more important things on his mind than my mutiny.

Warshaw’s hands were tied. His engineers had opened the locks but never brought them online. He could not shut the doors on me, and I was the only man on the ship with a gun. He had no way to stop the transport from leaving, and the terrified pilot was not going to put up a fight.

“Where are we going?” the pilot asked. He sounded as if he was still fighting for breath.

I cuffed the man across the side of his head with my pistol. I did not enjoy terrorizing the boy, but I needed him scared and obedient. “Just take us out, fast.”

“There are battleships out there!”

“I know, I saw them,” I said.

“They’re going to see us,” the pilot said. “They’ll shoot us down.”

“If they want us, they’re going to have to come and get us,” I said, trying to remember the layout of Warshaw’s map. I tapped my pistol on the pilot’s visor, and he lifted us off the deck and started down the runway. Our transport lumbered through the tunnel at such a slow rate that I might have been able to outrun it on foot.

21:53:36

At 2200, Franks would arrive. That gave us six minutes until he broadcast with his shields down and his guns asleep. I pistol-whipped the pilot, and growled, “Faster, asshole.”

The pilot did not say anything, but the transport picked up speed.

21:54:00

We slipped through the locks, one after another. As we broke into open space, the pilot flipped a switch to shut off the runner lights.

“Leave ’em on,” I said.

“Are you out of your …”

I swatted his soft-shell helmet with my pistol again. I did not hit him hard, nothing that would give him a concussion; but I certainly hit him with enough force to make a lasting impression.

Looking out into space, I tried to figure out our position in relationship to Warshaw’s map. “Does this bird have any more lights?”

“No, sir,” the pilot said. He sounded suitably scared.

I could see the shapes of the wrecks against the stars, but they meant nothing to me. With no other choice, I called Warshaw over the interLink, not entirely sure he would read me now that I had left the ship.

After seconds of silence, he answered. “Harris. What the hell are you doing?” he asked, his voice filled with curiosity and disdain. He did not like me, but he did not think I was running away. “If you give away our position, I will …”

“I’m not giving away your position, dipshit, I am giving away my position,” I said.

“You won’t be able to outrun those ships if they spot you,” Warshaw said.

“I don’t want to outrun them.

“Harris, you don’t have any guns.”

“But you do,” I said.

“I did not authorize …”

“Yeah, can we discuss that later?” I asked.

21:54:51

“Where do you want the damn ships?” Franks was going to return in another five minutes and nine seconds, and Warshaw wanted to talk about who did or did not authorize my flight. What an ass.

“You’re thirty-five miles out of position,” Warshaw said. Things went quiet. At first I thought he had abandoned me, then I realized he was explaining the lay of the land to my pilot.

As I waited for him to come back, the glowing figure of a battleship came around a hull and filled our windshield. Suddenly, I felt like a very small fish in a very large pond.

“Shit,” my pilot said.

I started to tell him to get us out of there, but he figured it out on his own. He swung the transport into a forty-five-degree rotation that pointed us toward a narrow passage between two wrecks and hit the boosters. Had I been floating beside the copilot’s seat, I would have been thrown back against the rear of the cockpit. I grabbed the seat in time to save myself.

“You probably should strap in, sir,” the pilot said. I heard something unexpected in his voice: concern. As I struggled to pull myself into the chair, the pilot did me another kindness—he switched on the gravity generator. That shifted the center of gravity from the rear of the ship to the bottom. Gs still pulled at my back, but I was able to sit down and buckle myself in.

For a moment, the only thing I could see through the windshield was the hulls of destroyed ships, but then a trace of golden glow appeared along the top edge of the windshield.

“Watch out,” I said, pointing toward the ship.

“There’s another one behind us,” the pilot said.

The beam of a searchlight rolled along the alley ahead of us, questing to touch us, lighting the dark hulls of the ships wrecked long ago. Fortunately for us, radar would do no good in this floating junkyard. They would need to spot us to shoot us.

“Hold on, sir.”

The nose of the transport dropped, and the entire ship seemed to somersault over itself. Suddenly, we were rocketing in a completely new direction. Had I been standing, I would have been slammed into the windshield, then rolled around the cabin.

For a moment I saw nothing but stars, but then a glowing hull slid into view. The pilot cut a sharp right and took us behind another wreck.

Not realizing anyone was listening in, I said, “What I’d give for a torpedo.”

“You wouldn’t want to do that, sir. Some of these wrecks are unstable,” the pilot answered.

“How unstable?”

“That’s why they haven’t fired at us yet, they don’t want to trigger a chain reaction.”

Fuel, uranium reactors, oxygen, unexploded torpedoes …all of a sudden, I realized my own naïveté. I had boarded these death traps with the nonchalance of a Marine in a china shop.

“Warshaw?” I called, and got no answer. Specking great. I was out here in an unarmed transport with three uber-ships hunting me down, and I lost contact with Warshaw.

“Warshaw, goddamnit, where are you?”

There was no answer.

“Where do we go, sir?” the pilot asked.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Warshaw set up a trap, but I have no idea where it is.”

The pilot did not answer me. Maybe he had given up, too. Seconds ticked by. Then, with an abrupt change of direction, we headed into a narrow gap between two ships. The pilot must have reached somebody.

“Are we headed toward the trap?” I asked.

“It’s the other way, but we don’t have any choice. They cut us off.”

21:55:28

If Franks came back in on time, he would arrive in less than five minutes. He might be late, that would be a reprieve. He could also arrive early, while we were still playing cat and mouse with the battleships. Maybe he would save us, or maybe he would die trying, and I would spend the rest of my life trapped in a floating graveyard orbiting the planet on which so many Marines had died.

“You better get us there quick,” I said.

“They’ve got us hemmed in on every side, sir,” the pilot said. Then, with desperation in his voice, he added, “Don’t hit me with that gun. For God’s sake, please don’t hit me again!”

“Just get us there,” I yelled.

“As long as we stay close to the big wrecks, they aren’t going to shoot,” the pilot chanted. “They aren’t going to shoot.” He made a sharp turn, then darted under the bulbous bow of a derelict battleship. I caught a glimpse of the jagged edges of a torn hull.

“They won’t shoot,” the pilot repeated. He had to make the transport twist and drop to avoid an outcropping where two of the wrecks had drifted into each other. Transports were not designed for maneuverability. Behind us, the walls of the kettle groaned with every turn.

As we snaked our way between the demolished wreckage of the Mogat Fleet, a U.A. battleship closed in beside us. For a brief moment it was no more than a thousand yards away, and it kept its distance, like a cat waiting for a mouse to leave its hole.

“We have to get across there.” The pilot pointed in the direction of the ship.

I looked at the empty stretch ahead, knowing that we would be an easy target the moment we entered it. We could not continue straight ahead, a ship blocked our way. “Cut your engines,” I said.

“What?” asked the pilot.

“Cut your engines and put up your shields.”

The wing of a dead capital ship stretched out, just at the edge of my vision.

“We’ll hit that ship,” the pilot said.

“Yeah, it’s called the element of surprise,” I said.

“Plowing into that wreck shield first could set off an explosion,” he reminded me.

“You see any other options?” I asked.

“Hold on tight.”

The transport did not slow when the pilot cut its thrusters, it slid forward at that same speed. I braced myself in my seat, helpless, as we drifted toward the wreck. We came in at an angle, skimming off the giant wing like a stone skipping water, the blue-white pane of our front shields shimmering like lightning in the darkness and once again becoming invisible.

The momentum would have bucked me out of my chair if not for the straps holding me in my seat. There were no fires or explosions inside our ship, transports were made to take worse beatings than this.

The collision did not rebound us in the direction we wanted to go, but at least the ricochet sent us in a different direction than the big battleship. Leaning into the windshield, I watched the glowing, shielded hull of the battleship as it drifted away.

Fast and large and flying in a frictionless field, the U.A. ship was unable to turn sharply and follow us. Instead, it fired its particle-beam cannons at us. One of the green beams missed us entirely. The other glanced off the shields around the cockpit.

“Do you know where we need to go?” I asked the pilot.

“Yes, sir,” the pilot said, as he started to double back into a shoal of ruined ships.

“So get us there!” I yelled.

“There’s no cover in that direction!”

Something solid, probably a torpedo, struck us hard along our back. The shot sent us skittering into a spin. Had our engines been damaged, we might have gone cartwheeling into space, but our tough little transport adapted. The pilot hit the engines, using one set of boosters to stop our spin and another to launch us in what I hoped was the right direction. The yaw from his sudden turn wrenched me to one side.

“Is that where we want to go?” I asked.

“Not quite there,” the pilot admitted. As he saw me reach for my pistol, he added, “I know what I’m doing. Don’t hit me!”

21:56:42

I needed to forget about the specking clock.

The debris around us was just as large as our transport. We battered our way through chunks of ship, unrecognizable trash, furniture, and an occasional corpse. We flew past a familiar shape: another transport, one of ours, playing possum. A second or two later, we slid into a tight alley between the busted hull of a destroyer and the ruins of an even bigger ship.

Two glowing U.A. battleships circled us at a leisurely pace, like vultures waiting for their meal. They had all the time in world. We were small, slow, and unarmed.

21:57:10

“Please tell me we are headed in the right direction?” I asked the pilot.

Warshaw answered the question. The first laser flared out like a spear, striking the battleship head-on. The steady stream of silvery red laser fire lashed at the U.A. ship’s bow, striking just below the top deck.

The second of the Unified Authority battleships charged in, heading toward the source of the attack. As it did, another ship fired its lasers. The shields around both U.A. ships flashed brighter and brighter as the second battleship tried to return fire. When the third battleship entered the shooting gallery, Warshaw ordered all of his ships to let loose.

The light from the shields grew brighter and brighter. From where I sat, it looked as if the scene were happening in daylight instead of deep space. Listless derelicts floating like clouds, their laser beams straight as the spokes of a wheel, fired lasers into the glowing shields of the U.A. ships.

The shields around one of the U.A. ships began to fail, allowing our lasers to strike the unprotected hull. The ship took damage. Bubbles appeared along its bow. The bubbles punctured the outer walls of the ship, and flames appeared. Where there are flames, there must be oxygen—air was leaking from the outer wall of the ship. Death.

We must have drifted within interLink range. Warshaw had created an open channel so that his men could hear what was happening. I heard men cheering and shouting. Warshaw shouted, “One down!”

The guns on the second ship fell silent as its shield failed. The side of the ship bubbled, then burst, spewing flames, men, and debris into space. Fires danced and died inside the hull, and the ship went dark. The space around it went dark as well, except for the silver-red threads of laser drilling into the third ship.

My pilot went wild. He cheered with the sailors manning the lasers. He pumped his fists in the air. Listening in to the chatter on the open channel, I heard one man crying and another saying a prayer.

The shield around the third ship changed color from honey gold to a sickly green, and suddenly the ship seemed impervious to our lasers. Pinpricks of light appeared around the hull, tiny little flashes as if someone had lit up little electrodes in sequence.

“What is …” I started to ask the question out loud without meaning to.

Someone said, “They’re firing torpedoes,” over the interLink. It might have been Warshaw.

The crew of that final Unified Authority battleship did not need to aim, they just trained their torpedoes along the laser beams. The derelicts were massive, but brittle and unprotected. One moment, we had seven ships spinning a laser web around the last U.A. battleship, then there were only three. Two of the old derelicts simply went dark when the torpedoes hit them. The other two lit up like skyrockets.

The U.A. battleship fired off a second fusillade of torpedoes, then it exploded. Particle beams and torpedoes slammed into it from three different directions, nearly shearing the ship in half. The green shield evaporated as the hull cracked open and twisted. An enormous fireball flashed and vanished, leaving behind a pitch-black carcass.

Franks had arrived. His three battleships flew in tight formation, cutting across the graveyard like eagles coming in for the kill, but there was nothing left to kill.

“I thought you came here to collect equipment, not fight a war,” Franks said over an open frequency.

The clock in my visor said the time was 21:59:57.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Brigadier General Kelly Thomer sat slumped in his chair, his arms dangling over the sides, his breakfast barely touched. He had potatoes, eggs, toast, bacon, and orange juice—a meal for a man with an appetite. As I looked at his hollowed cheeks and sunken eyes, I did not think that the man matched the meal. The fluffy yellow kernels of scrambled eggs sat in an untouched pile on his plate. All of the Marines I knew painted their eggs with ketchup.

“Are you planning on eating those eggs or hatching them?” I asked.

He woke from his trance, and said, “Oh yeah,” then splashed ketchup on everything but his toast.

More than anything else, Thomer looked bored. When I asked him about his last dose of Fallzoud, he said he had not taken it for days. Fallzoud was a serotonin inhibitor. I got the feeling that Thomer’s serotonin had been inhibited past the point of no return.

“How’d it go with the Mogat Fleet?” He asked the question, but he did not strike me as interested in hearing the answer.

“We ran into U.A. battleships,” I said.

“That’s good,” he said.

“No, that’s bad,” I said. “Live ships. They chased us into the Mogat graveyard.”

“Oh,” Thomer said. “You know when you found out you were a clone, did it bother you that you never had a family? I mean, I’m kind of grieving my parents, like they died or something.” He stared at me and through me, his brown eyes unblinking. He looked halfway down the road to catatonic.

“Why in God’s name are you grieving for people who never existed?” I asked.

“Yeah, but I didn’t know that they didn’t exist, and now I do. It’s kind of like they died a second time. See what I mean?”

There was a certain logic to what he said, twisted as it was.

The conversation left me incredulous. I told Thomer, “Well, I’m sure they would have been really excellent parents, had they ever existed and had they not died,” and went to work on my eggs.

Thomer just sat there, staring over his ketchup-covered tray, his body gaunt, his arms nearly limp, his fork hanging off his plate. He had the kind of slack expression I would expect to find on a person who had died in his sleep.

Deciding to change my tactics, I asked, “Did I ever tell you about my friend, Vince Lee?”

Thomer shook his head but said nothing.

“I served with him on this very ship. He was one of the Little Man Seven, one of the seven Marines who survived the battle on Little Man.” I normally did not need to explain who the Little Man Seven were, but Thomer looked like he might have moss growing under his brain.

When Thomer said nothing, I went on. “Yeah, well, Vince came back from Little Man a hero. They promoted him from corporal to lieutenant and transferred him to the Grant.

“I lost touch with him for a couple of years after that. The next time I saw him, I was back on Little Man with Ray Freeman.” Ray Freeman had been my partner when I was technically absent for the Corps without leave. He was a mercenary, a mountain of a man who could kill enemies with a knife, a bomb, or his bare hands, but he preferred using a sniper rifle. Thomer knew Freeman, he’d contracted out to fight in both the Mogat and New Copenhagen campaigns.

“So Vince turned up on Little Man, only he wasn’t himself anymore. He’d gotten himself hooked on Fallzoud and figured out he was a clone, kind of like you.

“Things went from bad to worse after that. He started calling himself the ‘King of Clones,’ and the next thing you know, he got all of the other clones on his ship hooked. Once he got everyone all good and luded, he told the whole crew they were clones, and nobody died from it.

“And that’s where things hit rock bottom. Vince and his buddies killed all of the natural-borns on the Grant and declared independence.”

“What became of him?” Thomer asked.

“I killed him,” I said, offering no explanation.

Thomer reacted no more strongly to this bit of information than he might have reacted to my telling him that temperatures were cold in space. He sat slumped in his seat, eyes vacant, muscles relaxed. I wondered if he even noticed the implicit threat in my story.

“Thomer, you need to get off Fallzoud,” I said.

“Why?”

“You’re turning into a specking zombie. You say that you haven’t shot up for a while, but you’re acting like you just dosed.”

“Maybe I did take it this morning,” he said.

What could I do? When his head was clear, Thomer was the most dependable man I had, a battle-tested Marine with an analytical mind and a reliable temperament. I did not want to write him off as a burnout, but I could not afford to keep this husk of a man as my first in command.

“We have a staff meeting,” I said.

Thomer tried a bite of toast, then drank his juice. We tossed our trays down the cleaning line and left the mess. Walking in silence, we headed up to the fleet deck.

Only six officers attended the meeting: Gary Warshaw, Lilburn Franks, Perry Fahey, Kelly Thomer, Philo Hollingsworth, and me. We had ten stars among us, even if they were only “field” stars.

Warshaw had already let me know that he planned to conduct the briefing. As he pointed out, until I got around to killing him, he was in command.

The six of us sat in a room with enough space for thirty officers, huddled tight around a table and speaking so loudly our voices echoed.

“So, Harris, I hear you got to command your own ship.” Fahey sounded almost gleeful. He batted his shadow-dusted eyes at me. Fortunately, the lipstick and rouge had gone away. “Commanding a specking transport with a one-man crew, was that a lifelong ambition?”

Sitting beside Fahey, Warshaw looked at the ground and fidgeted. The battle between Fahey and me had taken on a life of its own, independent of Warshaw. He no longer had any control over it.

Franks stared at Fahey, true annoyance showing on his face.

But Fahey went on. “What did you call your cruise? ‘A Marine operation’? Slick, Harris.”

“You got a point you’re trying to make?” I asked, hoping to get the meeting back on track. We did not have time to waste with all of this infighting. Now that the Golan engineers had branched out into broadcast engines, they could have established some kind of permanent broadcast Link with Earth. The entire Unified Authority might know about our trip to Mogat home world.

“You killed off the Marines you took to Terraneau. You killed off half the sailors you took to the Mogat Fleet. What’s next, Harris?” Fahey screamed this last jab, spit flying from his lips. I wondered if maybe he had lost a lover on the Mogat mission. He half stood in his chair, looking ready to leap across the table.

I killed half the sailors I took to the Mogat Fleet? I did not know what he meant at first, but I figured it out quickly. There had to have been men manning the lasers on those derelict ships. Of course there had been men, engineers and technicians, and they died when the Unified Authority battleships fired back at them. But their deaths were not my fault …they couldn’t be.

“I told you, it wasn’t like that,” Warshaw said in a subdued voice.

“The speck it wasn’t!” Fahey yelled. “I can’t believe you’re defending this asshole. Who’s next, Harris? Are you going to keep killing us off till you have the fleet to yourself?”

“I was in charge, Fahey,” Warshaw said.

“You weren’t in charge of that specking transport. That was General Harris’s show, his ‘Marine Operation.’ We lost five hundred qualified techs because of this bastard. That’s what happens when you treat a Marine clone …”

“One more word, Fahey, and I will slam your ass in the brig so hard you’ll be shitting cots and bars,” I said.

Warshaw put up a hand to stop me. He spoke the words quietly and forcefully as he said, “Stow it, Fahey. One more word out of you, and I’ll throw you in the brig myself.”

Fahey turned to look at him. The two clones looked like distortions of each other. They were cut from the same helix, but little about them matched. Fahey was young and thin, his makeup making his brown eyes look large and doelike. Warshaw was in his forties, a mighty man with huge muscles and a shaved head.

Their faces were identical, but their expressions could not have been more different. Warshaw looked calm, maybe a little sad. Fahey looked out of control, as wild as a dog pulled from a fight. Whites showed all the way around his eyes, and beads of sweat formed on his forehead.

“What are you going to do, Gary, take away my command? Is that what you want? Are you out of your specking mind?” Fahey’s mouth worked into a sneer that showed most of his teeth.

Warshaw did not look crazy. He looked tired and focused, like a man finishing a twelve-hour work shift, as he said, “Senior Chief, you are relieved of command.”

Fahey fell back into his seat. “Gary,” he said. “What are you doing? You’re taking his side?” At that moment it struck me that there was nothing feminine about Perry Fahey other than his makeup. He did not speak in a falsetto or behave like a woman.

“I am relieving you of command and stripping you of your field rank,” Warshaw said. He turned to me, and said, “General Harris, would you have one of your Marines escort this man to the brig?”

“Aye,” I said. I turned to Hollingsworth and issued the order.

Hollingsworth rose from his seat and walked over to Fahey. “Senior Chief, I have orders to deliver you to the brig. Please come with me,” he said, in a flat voice.

The two men had once been friends, it showed in both their expressions. Fahey stared at Hollingsworth, anger and amazement showing in his eyes. Hollingsworth looked stiff, like a man gearing up for an unpleasant task.

“Idiots. You’re all idiots,” Fahey muttered, as he rose to his feet. He allowed Hollingsworth to lead him out of the room without speaking another word. Watching them leave, I wondered if I should have had Thomer escort Fahey instead. Hollingsworth and Fahey had served together, and I still had questions about his loyalties.

“It’s about time somebody put him away,” Thomer said, shattering the tense silence in the room.

“I apologize, General Harris. I do not know how Fahey came up with that shit. When I told him about what had happened, it never occurred to me that he would twist it like that,” Warshaw said.

“I never liked that asshole,” said Franks.

Listening to them, I knew we needed to change our chain of command. Warshaw was right, I could not run this fleet. Ships and the strategies of open-space combat were not my forte. Unfortunately, Warshaw, the veteran engineer, was not much more qualified than I was. He knew how to fix ships, not how to run them.

I took a deep breath, flashed a weary smile, and said, “Let’s move on.”

The other officers nodded. Thomer, who seemed to have woken from his funk, shuffled in his chair and sat upright.

“I’ll start,” Warshaw said. He stood and stretched, his massive shoulders and neck bulging. “We have several teams working round the clock on the G.C. Fleet. We have identified 328 ships that look like they might have salvageable broadcast equipment. The other ships are so banged up, we’ve written them off.”

“Is that wise? I mean, we’re going to need all the gear we can get,” Franks interrupted.

“First, we go for the low-hanging fruit,” Warshaw said. “We don’t know how much time we have before the U.A. sends more ships to guard the area.”

“How is the work going?” I asked.

“We’ve landed teams on 125 ships.”

Finding himself in his natural element, reporting on an engineering operation, Warshaw cut an impressive figure. I wondered how he would react when I suggested placing someone else in charge. The hit to his ego might blind him to the realities.

“We tested the shield systems on one of the ships, but it was a complete wash,” Warshaw said. “Harris, you said the signal for the shields came from the planet. Is there any chance we could reestablish it?”

“The planet is filled with shit gas,” Thomer said.

“Excuse me, did you say ‘shit gas’?” Franks asked, sounding more than amused.

“Bad stuff,” I said. “Take my word for it, there’s no point sending anyone down there. Even if the shield equipment didn’t break, we’d never be able to get to it.”

“Okay, but what is shit gas?” Warshaw asked.

“Is that a scientific term or something you Marines came up with?” Franks asked.

“I didn’t name the stuff,” Thomer said. He had become defensive.

Of the two field admirals, Warshaw conducted himself more like an officer. He moved to regain control of the meeting. “Okay, it was just a thought. Without those shields, everyone we send out to the G.C. Fleet will be vulnerable if the Unifieds return.” Now the U.A. were the “Unifieds.” In the military, enemies must have a derogatory nickname to be taken seriously.

“Can you retrofit the G.C. Fleet broadcast equipment onto our ships?” Franks asked.

“That’s the big question, isn’t it?” Warshaw sighed. “I don’t see why not.”

“Have you landed crews on the U.A. battleships we shot down?” Franks asked. “We need to have a look at their technology.”

“That’s probably a Marine operation,” Warshaw said.

“A Marine operation?” I asked.

“We’ve surveyed those ships from the outside,” Warshaw said. “The systems are out, but that doesn’t mean everyone aboard them is dead.”

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Once our official business ended, Thomer returned to his quarters to rest, and our conclave dwindled to three: Warshaw, Franks, and me. As soon as the door closed behind Thomer, the dynamics of the meeting changed. Instead of two admirals and a general, our psychology seemed to revert to enlisted-man status. Differences in branch and pay grade no longer mattered, we were Gary, Lil, and Wayson—three guys serving on the Scrotum-Crotch Fleet.

Warshaw had an aide bring in some bottles, and the booze poured freely.

“What is going on with Thomer?” Franks asked. “I can’t figure the guy out. One moment he’s spaced out, the next moment he’s the only guy in the room with a clue what to do.” He poured himself a tall glass of vodka.

We each had our personal poison of choice. Franks, who apparently preferred flame to flavor, had his bottle of vodka. Warshaw drank whiskey in small shots. I drank beer. They might get drunk, but I wouldn’t. I could have set up a drip line and taken an entire keg intravenously without getting inebriated.

I did not want Warshaw or Franks to get smashed, but a little lubrication would take the edge off our conversation. Removing the sharp edges would be good.

“He’s on Fallzoud,” I said.

Warshaw made a low, whistling noise that sounded like a bomb falling out of the sky. “Fallzoud? That’s some serious shit. Why do you keep him around?”

“After New Copenhagen, he needed it,” I said, as if it answered the question.

“I heard New Copenhagen was brutal,” Franks said.

“You have about thirty thousand New Copenhagen survivors in your fleet,” I said. “Almost all of the clones who transferred in with me fought there.”

“Are they all on Fallzoud?” Warshaw asked. It was a fair question—a lot of them were.

“Not all of them, but a bunch. They handed it out like candy in Clonetown. It made us easier to control,” I said.

“Clonetown? What the hell is Clonetown?” asked Franks.

Warshaw knew. He said, “That’s what they called the relocation camp.”

“You had thousands of clones living in a relocation camp called ‘Clonetown’? Why didn’t they all have a death reflex and die? I mean, shit, what does it take to make those speckers realize they’re clones?” Franks, of course, was one of “those speckers”; but he seemed not even to suspect it. Now on his third glass of vodka, he was in no shape to suspect much of anything.

Warshaw had not touched his drink yet. I needed him to drink before Franks became too drunk to think. Hoping to encourage Warshaw to drink, I uncapped two beers and downed them in quick order.

Warshaw answered, “It’s just like the orphanages, Franks. Think about it. All those clones packed together, each of them believing they are the only natural-born. It’s the same goddamn thing.”

I finished another beer. “Thomer knows,” I said.

Warshaw flicked his thumb across the top of the bottle with so much force that the seal broke, and the cap spun off. I would have brought Warshaw a stein for his whiskey if I thought he’d use it, but he used a specking shot glass, not even a tumbler. He filled the glass and tossed it down, refilled, but waited to drink. The veins and muscles in his neck flexed when he downed his drink.

“Thomer knows what?” Franks asked. If he lost any more of his edge, we’d have to tuck him in for the night.

“He knows he’s a clone, asshole,” Warshaw said. He downed another shot.

I downed another beer.

“He can’t know that, or he’d be dead,” Franks said.

“I heard that could happen,” Warshaw said. “I heard there were drugs that would block the reflex. Fallzoud must be one of ’em.”

“He had a pretty good idea where he came from before he got hooked,” I said. “I’ve known Thomer a long time. He always had his suspicions.”

“Speck! That’s hard shit. I mean, God, who’d want to be a clone?” Franks said.

Warshaw stared at him. Even if he’d wanted to inform Franks that he, too, was a clone, Warshaw’s neural programming would not permit him to do it.

“I’m trying to get him off the Fallzoud,” I said.

“What happens to him if he quits?” Warshaw asked. “Can he still have the reflex?”

“Probably not,” I said. “If he were going to have a reflex, he’d probably have had it when he dried out between ludings.”

“Poor bastard,” Franks said. He drained his glass but made no move to pour a refill.

“Harris, are you nervous about sweeping those battleships tomorrow?” Warshaw asked. He drained another shot, reloaded, and drained it again.

“Not really. There aren’t going to be any survivors. You guys blew the hell out of those ships, no one could have survived that.” I thought about the frozen dead I’d seen on other wrecks and tipped my beer in salute.

Seeing me drink seemed to relax Warshaw. He tossed another shot.

“If they sealed off some parts of the ship, those areas might have air and pressure,” Warshaw pointed out.

“What are they going to do about the specking cold?” I asked.

“What about reinforcements?” Warshaw asked. “What if they sent for help?”

“How would they call for reinforcements, they’d need a broadcast network.”

“The Mogats sent messages,” Franks said. “I heard they set up spy stations in every arm.”

“They did, but they had to build them around their own private broadcast network. They had mini broadcast engines that sent and received messages.”

“Maybe these ships have mini broadcast engines, too,” Franks said. He slurred his words as he spoke. “You don’t specking know if they have mini broadcast engines on their ships.”

“Maybe,” I admitted. “But why would they have come in alone if they could have called for help?” I asked. “They would have called for backup.”

Franks started to reach for his bottle, and paused. “They had newer, better ships,” he said. “Those cocky pricks probably thought they could take us easy.”

“They probably did,” I agreed.

Franks nodded. Warshaw tossed back yet another shot of whiskey. If he wasn’t properly lubricated by now, he never would be.

Deciding to make my move, I said, “You know, you and I are both in the shits,” to Warshaw. “My second-in-command is a Fallzoud sinker, and yours is in the brig.”

“Fahey? Don’t you worry about his ass. I’ll take care of him,” Warshaw said.

I heard sharpness in his voice. My bringing up Fahey burned through the whiskey haze. “You told me that no Marine was fit to command a fleet,” I said. “Do you remember that?”

“Something like that, yeah,” Warshaw agreed.

“Engineering officers don’t cut it either,” I said. “When was the last time you heard about an engineer making admiral?”

“You son of a …” He jumped to his feet, his fists tight and his arms flexed.

I put up a hand. “I’m not trying to take over. I don’t believe either one of us is fit for command.”

Warshaw calmed slightly. His fists opened, and his shoulders relaxed, but he did not sit down. “What are you saying, Harris?”

“I’m saying we both need to step down,” I said.

“And get passed over for command?”

“You think Marines aren’t fit for command because they don’t understand naval operations.”

“Damn specking right they don’t,” Warshaw said. He dropped back into his seat.

“You’re right. We don’t. The problem is, engineers don’t know shit about operations, either. What this fleet needs is a bridge officer, not a wrench jockey.”

“You mean him?” Warshaw asked, his mouth working into a sardonic smile. He nodded toward Franks, who sat passed out in his chair, his back slumped, his face flush against the conference table, saliva forming a pool in front of his opened mouth. He snored softly.

“You’re joking, right?” Warshaw asked.

Feeling embarrassed, I said, “He’s next in line.”

Warshaw laughed.

“Bullshit. I’m next in line, Harris. Admiral Brocius gave me this command.”

That was how we left it. Warshaw running the fleet, me commanding the Marines, and Franks passed out in his seat.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Technically, I should have brought Hollingsworth on this mission, but I’d already sent him to run Fort Sebastian instead. I should have left Thomer as a liaison with fleet operations, but I thought some action would do him good. I needed to know if I could count on him in battle, and this seemed like a safe testing ground. All we had to do was explore a derelict ship, locate and capture any survivors who wanted rescue, and offer a fatal helping hand to any survivors who wanted to go down with their ship.

I sat in the cockpit with the pilot as he flew my team out. It was the same clone pilot I had hijacked the last time I came out to the Mogat home world. Back then he was a sailor. Now he’d put in a transfer to become a Marine—as my staff pilot no less. Apparently we’d bonded while dodging U.A. battleships in our unarmed transport.

The newly destroyed U.A. battleships did not resemble the wrecks around them. It wasn’t just the difference in their shape and color. The Mogat ships were not just sunk, they were annihilated. Some had imploded hulls. Several decks had been entirely sheared away from one Mogat destroyer. The U.A. ships had gone dark, but they looked like they could be repaired.

“I like the look of this ship a lot better now that it’s dead,” the pilot said as we approached one of the wrecks. He and I had played a serious game of tag with this ship not all that long ago.

“Let’s just hope it stays dead,” I said.

Light still shone through cracks in the battleship’s hull. The batteries backing their emergency lighting might hold out for months. Flames, fed by oxygen leaking out of improperly sealed cabins, flickered deep in the recesses of the ships. Their unsteady glow reminded me of candles.

“I feel like I’m sneaking up on a sleeping bear,” the pilot joked.

“A dead bear,” I said. I hoped it was dead.

“You better hope it’s dead, sir,” the pilot said. He acted like we were old friends. I didn’t mind. More than anything else, I felt embarrassed for what I had done to the guy. I had done what I felt I had to do, but I still felt bad about pistol-whipping him.

Without its shields, the battleship had the same beige and gray colors as the ships in the Scutum-Crux Fleet. Its skin had laser burns and trenches along its outer hull, the scars of war. The white glare of sparks flashed in some of the crevices. Most of the ship was dark. The sparks and flames added up to little more than a scattering of bright scales.

We moved in slowly, our runner lights blazing on the hull. Toward the bow of the ship, about a hundred yards back, we found the hatch to the docking bay and sent a team of technicians armed with laser torches.

The process went slowly. The pilot opened the kettle doors. A couple of minutes later five techs drifted into view. They spent fifteen minutes evaluating the situation, then finally got to work. The laser-resistant outer wall of the ship cut slowly, but it did cut.

“Do we have our shields up?” I asked the pilot.

“Do we need them up?”

“Luck specks the unprepared,” I said.

Outside, our techs stripped away the outer skin of the hatch, revealing a panel filled with rods and hydraulics. Once the shield covering was gone, the work went quickly. A few more cuts, and the outer hatch fell away from the ship.

“Looks like we’re in, sir.”

The techs went ahead of us to clear the atmospheric locks. A few minutes later, we entered the runway at a crawl. Our runner lights revealed the signs of battle. The deck was cracked. Sixty feet ahead of us, the doors of the next lock hung askew. Beyond the broken hatch, a lightning-colored bouquet flashed over the top of a shorted-out electrical panel.

“Looks like you’re on your own from here, sir,” the pilot said.

“Looks that way,” I agreed.

“Okay, Thomer, lead them out,” I said over the interLink.

“Everybody out. Hit the deck and fall in!” Thomer yelled. The men obeyed. As I left the cockpit, I saw the last of the men floating down the ramp. Off-loading and forming ranks took longer in zero gravity.

Not showing any traces of Fallzoud confusion, Thomer took charge. He sounded more like a sergeant than a general. That was good. In my experience, generals did not bring much to the battlefield.

I looked over the ranks. The hundred armor-wearing Marines were a sight for sore eyes. They did not wear jetpacks. Unlike the motivators used by Navy techs, our jetpacks gave off flames. In the wrong environment, those flames could trigger an explosion.

“Listen up,” I said. “The fleet sent us here to look for survivors. It’s probably a waste of time, but that is why we are here. Search each deck for heat signatures. If you find something, report back before going in to investigate. I repeat, if you find somebody with a pulse and a face, call for backup.”

I should have given them a more detailed briefing, but I did not think it would be necessary. Instead, I said my short piece and let Thomer divide up the company. He sent them out in fire teams, four-man units that made a lot more sense in other situations. Fire teams were supposed to include a rifleman, an automatic rifleman, a grenadier, and a team leader. In this situation, everyone carried a particle-beam pistol.

This particular ship was the second of the U.A. battleships to stumble into Warshaw’s shooting gallery. It had taken the least damage. With the third battleship fighting its way out of our trap, Warshaw’s techs had shifted their fire over to that ship the moment this one went dark. What had looked like a quiet death from the outside, however, didn’t seem so gentle now that I had entered the ship.

We threaded through the broken, second lock and found the third lock fully open. By the time we reached that final lock, we were walking along the deck. I had already noticed this when Thomer hailed me to say, “General, the gravity generator is still online.”

Wondering what other equipment might still be up and running, I answered, “Tell your men to stay alert.” If the gravity generator had survived the fight, the environmental systems might have also survived; and if there was heat and air, there might well be survivors.

Listening in on the commandLink, I heard one Marine say, “We had a battle simulation just like this back at the orphanage.”

“Damn, I remember that sim,” a second man said. “That’s the one where you have to defend the ship or blow the sucker up.”

“Keep it quiet,” Thomer ordered.

I knew that simulation as well. The holographic simulation took place on a disabled freighter. One team played as sailors and the other as pirates. The pirates were the aggressors, sent to capture the ship; and they had every possible advantage. They had better guns. They did not have to worry about laws or regulations. They even had more men on their team. The simulation was set up so that they outnumbered the sailors three to one.

But the sailors always won.

Since blowing up the freighter kept it out of enemy hands, all the sailors had to do was set the reactor to overload. It wasn’t fair, but it was realistic. I thought this and realized that from the U.A. point of view, this operation had the same zero-sum solution. If the U.A. Navy found itself unable to salvage this ship, they would demolish it before allowing us to capture it.

“Thomer, tell the men to look for anything that looks like it could explode.”

“Like on the Corvair?” Thomer asked.

Corvair? I thought. The name sounded so damn familiar. It only took a moment for me to place it. Corvair was the name of the ship in the simulation. “That is precisely what I am talking about.”

Thomer issued the order, then spoke to me again. “I hated that simulation. I always ended up a pirate. We never won.”

Because of the darkness, our combat visors defaulted to night-for-day lenses, but we would also need to use heat vision in order to search for survivors. It would not be hard to locate heat on this busted scow, the ambient temperature had dropped to absolute zero.

I switched to heat vision and saw that the men in front of me radiated red with an orange halo against the cobalt world around them. Normally men in combat armor did not give off a heat signature. They did in space.

The fire teams spread out quickly. Eight teams headed toward the lower decks, where we would have found Engineering and the Marines on other ships. Who knew what they would find with this new design.

I commandeered a team, telling them to follow me as I headed toward the bow of the ship. I entered a hall and quickly located a stairwell that would take us to any deck. The stairs were wide enough for five men to climb abreast.

Two flights up, I paused to check the lay of the land, switching to heat vision as I looked down a hallway lined with sealed hatches. Four of the hatches showed dark orange. There was heat behind those doors. A fifth hatch had not been sealed. Blades of yellow and red danced outside that doorway. I switched to my tactical lens and watched the flames. Whether it was oxygen or some other gas, something leaking from that room was fueling the fire.

I marked the rooms with a virtual beacon, which I sent to Thomer. “I have some interesting prospects up here,” I said.

“I’ll send a team by,” Thomer said.

The correct response would have been, “I’ll send a team by, sir,” but I overlooked it. Worrying about being addressed as “sir” may sound petty, but it isn’t. The Marine Corps was built on discipline. Without that discipline, we were just another gang of soldiers.

I wished there was some surefire way to dry Thomer out without killing him.

I led my fire team up two more flights and surveyed the next deck. It looked exactly like the same scene one deck down, sans the flames. Almost all of the doors radiated heat, but the hall itself was as cold as space.

A man had died in this hall. He lay on the floor. Seen through night-for-day lenses, the dead sailor’s hands were the color of snow. Coin-sized speckles of blood had formed on the ground around his head. Frozen blood showed in the gash along the back of his head. If I’d stomped a boot down hard enough on the man, he would have shattered like a porcelain figurine. His bones were the least rigid part of his body, now that the veins and capillaries had frozen solid.

None of the hatches on the sixth deck radiated heat, and we found no bodies. What we did locate was the wound that had killed the ship—where the first lasers hit once the shields had given way. I remembered seeing a narrow beam hit the ship on the bow, just below the bridge. Once the lasers pierced the hull, the cabin pressure must have flushed all of the bodies into space.

The seventh deck looked like a battlefield. We passed the frozen bodies of dozens of dead sailors right off the stairwell. I had to kick one out of the way just to enter the hall. The man must have fallen to his knees as he died—at least his body had frozen in that position. The palm of his hand had frozen to the floor. It snapped off just above the wrist when I kicked his body out of the way.

I listened in on my fire team.

Man, this place is a specking morgue.

I hate specking space battles.

At least these guys died fast. I saw a guy take five days to die after he got hit in the gut.

I knew a guy that got burned. The poor bastard hung on for six months.

The way to the bridge was an obstacle course, and we found at least a hundred frozen dead in the various stations around the bridge. Fifteen crewmen lay in a huddle around the weapons section. I found the captain of the ship sprawled out on the floor near the front of the bridge. His skin was a glacier blue, and his eyes were open and frozen.

“Did you see that, sir?” my fire team leader asked me.

I had. It was just a fleeting glimpse, but I had seen a man in soft-shell armor slip through a doorway.

“Thomer, I’ve got a contact. Seventh deck, just off the bridge, I repeat, we have a live one!” I switched to an open frequency. “There’s been a change of plans, boys. There is life aboard this ship, and that means there may be traps. I want everyone to stay where you are until you receive further instructions. Do not engage. I will personally snap every finger off the first sorry speck who fires his gun on this ship.”

I had not gotten a good look at the man. He had flittered across the hall outside the bridge. With my peripheral vision hampered by my helmet, I might not have seen him at all, had he not stumbled over a frozen body and flailed before ducking out of sight.

“What did you see?” Thomer asked on a direct frequency.

“One contact,” I said. “He’s dressed in soft-shell.” All of my men were dressed in combat armor.

In the simulation, the defending team only needed one member to prevent the pirates from capturing the Corvair. If the ship was rigged, it would not matter if the Unified Authority had one man on this ship or a million, we would not be able to take it.

“I hope this isn’t like the specking Corvair,” I told Thomer.

“It isn’t,” he said. “You don’t really die when you pull the pin in a simulation. If they pull the pin on us, they die, too.”

I thought about that. Thomer had a point. Any survivors on this ship were as likely to be engineers from the dry docks as sailors. They might not be willing to go down with their ship.

Looking around the deck, I noted that the bridge looked like something from a nightmare. The computers, the chairs, the stations, all remained in perfect order except for the dead men surrounding them. Death had come in a frozen flash to this part of the ship.

“Have your men reached the Marine compound?” I asked Thomer.

“It’s empty.”

“How empty?” I asked, wanting to make sure we were dealing with a sailor or an engineer, and not a Marine.

“No beds, no racks, no equipment.”

“No Marines,” I said in a hollow voice, a reaction meant more for my ears than Thomer’s. “Got anybody down in Engineering?”

“A couple of teams,” Thomer said.

“Good. Tell them to shut down anything that looks like it still works. Don’t smash things, just break them a little.”

“The gravity generator?” Thomer asked.

“Gravity generators, life-support systems …I don’t want power going to any systems.”

“You said he was wearing armor,” Thomer said.

“I think so.”

“So he’s got heat, light, and air,” Thomer pointed out.

“That’s not going to save him next time he needs to take a dump,” I said. “He’ll freeze his ass off.” I thought of a disturbing image—the remains of an engineer who froze to death during the act of defecating.

There might only have been one survivor left on this ship, or there might have been hundreds. It didn’t matter. Confronted with a shoot-out, they would be more likely to pull the proverbial pin than they would be if left alone and facing a slow death in space. People do heroic things in the face of fire; but when the end comes gradually and their bodies betray them and their only enemy is their own natural needs, heroism gives way to the instinct for survival.

When we returned twenty-four hours later, boarding the derelict battleships was no longer a Marine operation. All we needed were some engineers and a chaplain.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

“Harris, you son of a bitch, I demand you return my ships,” the captain said. Natural-borns had become as interchangeable in my mind as clones. It didn’t matter whether it was Admiral Brocius or General Smith or Captain Pershing, or this guy, Rear Admiral Lower-Half Hugo George, the man from whom I had commandeered our self-broadcasting fleet, they all sang the same angry song.

“Sure, Admiral, I’ll just give you back your three battleships, and we’ll call it even,” I said.

That set him off. “You specking pissant clone!” George, a young admiral at forty-five, rose to his feet. Fire showed in his eyes, which were the exact same mud brown as mine. A vein ran down the center of his forehead. As he shouted, the muscles along the sides of his neck flexed.

Just the two of us sat in the little interrogation room. I did not need guards though I had a couple waiting outside. On his feet and snarling, George stood an inch taller than me, but years in a command chair had left him softened. He had a gut, not a big one, but a gut, nonetheless.

Before coming to the Outer Bliss penal colony, I’d looked up George’s record. He’d distinguished himself as a ship’s captain fighting Mogats. His battleship destroyed more de fenseless Mogat battleships than any other ship in the fleet, once we disabled their shields. Apparently, he knew when to attack and when to wait.

“Sit down, Admiral, you’re embarrassing yourself,” I said. I leaned my chair against the wall behind me, bracing my knees against the table, which was bolted to the floor. To get to me, the admiral would either need to jump over the table or run around it. Considering his size and conditioning, I ruled the element of surprise out of the equation.

He stood there fuming, leaning over the table, his hands in fists. Seconds passed, and he said nothing. Finally, he sat down.

What I knew, what he did not know, was that over the last three weeks, Warshaw’s engineers had attempted to install salvaged broadcast engines on several of our battleships. We flat-out lost one ship when we tested it. God knows where it went. Two ships exploded. One ship survived the broadcast, but the electricity from the anomaly fried every wire, switch, and computer on the vessel. The electricity hadn’t done the crew any favors, either.

We also had one mostly successful test. It did not go off without some flaws. The ship’s shields and weapons systems shorted out. One of the engineers monitoring the broadcast engine died when an arc formed between the wrench in his right hand and one of the cylinders.

Minor hiccups on the road to success.

“Release me and my men,” George demanded, in a quiet voice that betrayed the ragged edges of his self-control.

“You mean you haven’t enjoyed your vacation in Outer Bliss?” I asked.

He did not answer.

“I have no interest in holding you here any longer than I need to.”

“Then return my ships,” he demanded.

“Nope.”

“Stealing my ships was an act of war, Harris.”

“Yeah, well, what are you going to do about it?” I asked, still reclining in my chair. “The Navy sent half its self-broadcasting fleet to threaten us. We have three times as many battleships as they do, and our ships are Perseus-class design. The only boats they have that can reach us are G.C. Fleet vintage, sixty-year-old ships. You don’t really think they are going to attack us, do you?”

George took a moment to compose himself, then said, “The pendulum swings both ways. You’ve got the advantage now …”

“I’m glad you brought that up,” I said. “When we do finally let you out of here, I was hoping you could deliver a message for me.”

“A message?”

“You know those next-generation battleships they’re building at the Golan Dry Docks? We destroyed three of them.”

“You what?” George asked.

“Read ’em and weep,” I said. “Three of those new battleships against three G.C. Fleet antiques manned by all-clone crews, and we made a clean sweep of it. What do they call those new ships anyway? Around here we call them Asshole-class ships, but I figure you probably have a better name for them.”

“You’re lying. You’re specking lying to me,” George said.

“You know that I am not lying,” I said, though, of course, I was certainly withholding information. I was not about to mention Warshaw’s hot-wiring derelicts. I wanted to see if I could shake old Hugo’s confidence.

Admiral George greeted my comment with silence. Finally, I stood up, and said, “Well, it looks like there’s nothing more to say.” This was my third debriefing of the day, and I wanted it to end as quickly as possible. I had more interesting business to conduct back in Norristown.

I knocked on the door, and the guards opened it.

“Take him away,” I said.

Admiral George left without a word. I think he was as glad to get away from me as I was to see him leave.

Once I shut the door, Warshaw said, “Wayson Harris, you evil sack of pus! You lied to that pathetic asshole. You let him think we took those ships head-on. Now, why would you do that?”

Warshaw’s disembodied voice came from the Kamehameha . He was monitoring my interrogations using the two-way communications gear that the Corps of Engineers had built into the ceiling.

“We’re going to send him home sooner or later. If we convince him the ships are no good, he might scare Brocius and Smith into giving us more time. You know Brocius and his fetish for house odds. If he thinks we beat his ships in a fair fight, he’s going to scrap his plans until he’s sure he’s got the upper hand.”

“I don’t imagine we’ll be sending Admiral George home anytime soon,” Warshaw said.

“Maybe not,” I agreed.

“Think he bit?”

“Maybe. It shut him up,” I said.

“He’s a prick. I’m glad he’s in the brig,” Warshaw said. “Who do you have next?”

“Fahey,” I said, trying to hide my distaste.

“You and Perry face-to-face? I’d pay big money to see that one,” Warshaw said. He could not be here. Every bit as much the engineer as I was the Marine, Warshaw “needed” to oversee every facet of the work with the broadcast equipment. He had not spent much time on the Kamehameha once the broadcast equipment started rolling in.

“I have a case of Earth-brewed that says that one of you will not leave the room alive.” How the hell Warshaw had found a case of Earth-brewed beer was beyond me.

“You’re not sure which one of us?” I asked.

“I can hope, can’t I?” He could also watch. Along with the audio equipment, there was a tiny camera in the ceiling. If Fahey and I got physical, the bastard would show the feed to every officer in the fleet …especially in the unlikely event that I lost.

“Save your beer, there isn’t going to be a fight,” I said.

“No, Harris, I want the bet. Tell you what, I’ll give you odds. You put up a twenty against the whole case. What’s that, five-to-one? Ten-to-one? What do you say?”

“Just don’t try to back out,” I warned him.

There was a knock on the door. I barked out an order, “Enter.”

The door opened and in came Perry Fahey, recently demoted back to senior chief petty officer; only now he was more of a “pretty” officer than a petty officer. He had on the customary eye shadow, mascara, lipstick, rouge, and false eyelashes. He had let his hair grow beyond regulation. It was only touching his ears, but that was long by Navy standards.

Watching the polite way the guards led Fahey into the room, I knew I had to arrange for my men to R & R someplace with women and soon. The MP who led Fahey into the room held the door and smiled at him. The MP bringing up the rear patted Fahey on the back. He did not shove him through the door, he did not give him a warning blow to the kidneys to show him what would happen if he misbehaved, he reached out and gave him a supportive pat on the shoulder. I watched this and knew whose side they would be on if Fahey and I came to blows.

I pointed to the chair on the other side of the table, and they led him to it.

“Why don’t you guys stay here for this one?” I said.

Maybe it was just my imagination, but I could have sworn I heard the word “speck” hiss out of the ceiling.

I had a good reason for having them stay. With them standing over Fahey, I could see if they reached for their pistols. If I sent them outside, they might well come into the room with their pistols drawn.

“Hello, Senior Chief. It looks like you are making the most of your stay here,” I began.

“Get specked, Harris,” Fahey said.

“Well, it certainly looks as if you have done just that,” I said, looking from Fahey to the two sailors/MPs guarding him. They both looked away from me.

“I’m trying to decide what to do with you,” I said. “I suppose I could leave you here till you rot, but I’m leaning toward other options—send your ass back to Earth or have you shot.”

“Put me back on active duty,” Fahey said. He could not possibly have expected me to put him back on active duty. He had to be pumping me for information. I decided to play along and see where he took me. “Do you expect to come back as a senior chief petty officer?” I asked.

“As an admiral,” he said. He sat there motionless, his eyes fixed on mine. He did not blink, did not look from side to side. His eyes were narrow and angry, and the smile on his face was angry and derisive.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Think about it, Harris. Who do you have that can run a fighter carrier. Who do you have commanding the Washington ?”

“Tom Hampton comes to mind. He’s a good man.”

Hampton was Fahey’s second-in-command. In truth, I did not trust him any more than I trusted Fahey.

“Hampton? You have got to be kidding me! Hampton can’t fly a ship. The guy doesn’t know his ass end from his hockey stick.”

“I don’t suppose you have personal experience on that matter?” I asked.

“Get specked, asshole,” Fahey growled.

“I thought you and Hampton were buddies.”

“Oh, I have a lot of friends, Harris. Believe me, I have friends.”

“I believe you. In fact, that is precisely why I came today. I’ve been looking over your record, Senior Chief. It says that you’re only twenty-six years old. Is that right?”

“What about it?”

“That’s awfully young to have made senior chief. You’re five years younger than any other senior chief in the fleet. Did you know that?”

Fahey smiled and shook his head.

“Impressive,” I said.

“Like I said, I have friends,” Fahey said.

“Whom do you mean? Who are your friends? What about Warshaw? Are you and Warshaw friends?” I asked.

“Sure we are,” he said.

“You were only promoted to senior chief just three weeks before I arrived. That makes you the least senior man of your pay grade in the fleet.”

“So?” Fahey sneered. “I’m good at what I do.”

I shot a glance at a guard, and said, “I bet you are.”

The guard flushed, but he did not reach for his pistol.

“Once you were promoted to senior chief, who placed you on my command staff? Who placed you so high in the chain of command? Was it Warshaw?” I asked.

“Forget it, Harris. You don’t know what you are talking about,” Fahey said.

“Maybe not,” I said. “So I suppose we’re done here.” We weren’t done, but I wanted to see how Fahey would react.

“I can help you,” Fahey said, showing me a downright friendly smile.

“How can you help me?” I asked.

He leaned across the table and spoke quietly, as if confiding a secret to me in a crowded room. “Warshaw promoted me.”

“Were you lovers?” I asked.

“Lovers?” Fahey asked. “What we did had nothing to do with love. I touched my toes for him, if that’s what you mean.”

“You piece of shit!” The nearly animal scream echoed from the ceiling, changing the mood in the room from tense to explosive.

“Warshaw?” Fahey sat up, searching around the room for the big man.

“You lying piece of shit! Harris, shoot that specking liar. No, don’t shoot him! I want to come down there and kill him myself!”

A mischievous grin spread across Fahey’s lips. “Sorry, Gary, I kept it quiet as long as I could.”

Until that moment, I had planned on executing Fahey; but now I felt sympathy for the bastard. I said, “That’s a very serious accusation, Senior Chief.”

“Harris, you can’t possibly believe that bullshit,” Warshaw said.

If the guards had ever planned on making a move, they no longer would, not now that they knew the room was under observation. I looked at them, and said, “Take Senior Chief Fahey back to his cell.”

They hesitated for a moment, and I rose from my chair. If they made a move, I wanted to be ready. But one of them helped Fahey to his feet, and the other walked around the table and opened the door. As he left the room, Fahey turned to me and spat out the words, “Specking son of a bitch Liberator clone.”

I met Fahey’s eyes and grinned. And then he was gone, and I was alone in the room with the disinterred voice of Warshaw.

“You let that backstabbing, son of a bitch walk out alive!” Warshaw said.

“I wanted my beer,” I said. “We had a bet.”

The room went silent. After a moment, Warshaw told me, “Don’t believe a word he said, Harris.”

“The stuff about Hampton?” I asked.

“About me,” Warshaw roared. “It’s all bullshit.”

“I’m not an expert in these areas; but as I understand it, there’s generally a big, strong protector for every lipstick-wearing queen; and you do take your weightlifting—”

“Harris, I never—” he interrupted.

And I interrupted him back. “Warshaw, you were still a master chief petty officer when he was promoted. You might have recommended him for the promotion, but you couldn’t have approved it.”

“Yeah …yeah, you’re right.” Warshaw sounded relieved. He could see me, but I could not see him. There was a camera in the ceiling, but no monitor for showing images. Being in this room was like being on the reflective side of a one-way mirror. And that was too bad. I would have liked to have seen the sweat rolling down Warshaw’s bald pate.

“There’s only one man who could have approved Fahey’s promotion,” I said.

“It wasn’t Thorne,” Warshaw said. “He had a woman on Terraneau.”

“And when was the last time he got to see her?” I asked.

“That horny old bastard.” Now there was admiration in Warshaw’s voice.

There were still pieces missing from the puzzle. Fahey knew more than he was letting on. I did not mention this to Warshaw, however. Instead, I looked into the camera, and said, “Just remember, you owe me a case of Earth-brewed.”

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

I had one more debriefing to conduct; but it could wait, so I called it a day.

The two-hour plane ride from Outer Bliss to Norristown would give me time to think about the future. I piloted my own Johnston R-27, a little twelve-seater commuter capable of both space travel and atmospheric travel. I did not know how to fly anything as big as a transport, but I had no trouble with this little bird. I’d once owned a little Johnston Starliner myself.

Before taking off, I scanned the Zebulon plateau. The runway stretched along the outside of the relocation camp. Three rows of electrified razor-wire fence separated the right side of the runway from the prison. A line of portable barracks sat off to the left of the runway.

Outer Bliss was a naval facility with MPs for guards. I would have preferred to post Marines, but Warshaw said his men needed the shore leave.

I took off into an early sunset with clouds the size of mountain ranges, painted orange and peach by the last dregs of sunlight. As I took off, I searched the sky for hints of silver—not the literary device used to denote a brighter future but the first traces of the Avatari ion curtain. Nothing. Below me, Terraneau looked like an artist’s rendition of the ideal planet. In the ebbing light, the cobalt sea had turned to steel. A few, small islands shone against the horizon. Beyond that, the clouds parted, revealing black-satin skies filled with twinkling stars. Somewhere up there, a broadcast station orbited the planet. It orbited so low that on clear nights, people could spot it without a telescope when it passed before the moon.

By the time I reached Norristown, the sun had set and lights sparkled all across the landscape. With the Corps of Engineers’ help, Doctorow and his people had repaired the power lines. Most of the city still lay in ruins, but streetlights now shone along the avenues. Lights blazed in the three skyscrapers/dormitories.

Before I could call it a night, I would have dinner with Ellery Doctorow, a formality I could not afford to ignore. The peace between Doctorow and the fleet remained tenuous. After seeing Fahey and the guards, I was more convinced than ever that my men needed a place where they could go for entirely immoral rest and recreation. We had found other cities, but only Norristown had the facilities and the population to accommodate us.

But Doctorow did not trust the military, and maybe he had it right. We did hide things from him. We didn’t tell him we had built a relocation camp, and we did not tell him we had filled it up with prisoners. He found out about it on his own. Until he did, we had him convinced that the reconstruction of Norristown was the only thing we had going on Terraneau.

The real reason I had come was to see Ava, of course. We had not spoken for weeks. I worried that she might have moved on. Hearing that she had taken up with some local would not kill me, but I would feel it. Sometimes my jealousy got the better of me, and I fantasized about hiding her in my quarters again. My insecurities got the better of me, and I thought it would be a relief when she finally moved on.

As I came into the airstrip for a landing, I saw a car waiting just outside the gate—a white sedan, a civilian vehicle, Doctorow’s car. He left his headlights on, shining twin shafts of light through the fence.

I touched down, rolled the R-27 in toward the tower, and parked it. I climbed out and pulled my rucksack from the back.

As I walked toward the gate, I heard a voice I recognized. “Harris, over here.” Ellery Doctorow stepped into the beams, his silhouette nearly swallowed in the glare. He waved a hand to catch my attention. “Harris!”

I slung my rucksack to my left hand and waved with my right just as the loud crack rang through the air.

At first, I had no idea what happened. I was waving, walking toward the gate, then I was on the ground. The force of whatever hit me had picked me up and thrown me on my ass. I felt the bruising on my back first, and then my chest began to burn, and I realized the front of my blouse was wet.

Doctorow came running through the gate. In the glare of the headlights, I saw Ava’s outline, too. She came running after him. I recognized her hair …her beautiful hair. I touched my chest and saw that my hand was covered with blood. I felt dizzy and winded, but not weak.

It didn’t make sense. I could not have been shot.