The Clone Betrayal

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Doctorow yelled, “Harris, don’t move!” as he ran over and knelt by my side.

“Wayson!” Ava screamed. She was already crying.

“I’m not hurt,” I said, propping myself up on my elbows. In an act of bald stupidity, I had not brought a gun, not even a pistol to defend myself. I had not a prayer of defending myself if the sniper decided to finish the job.

“You have to stay down, Harris,” Doctorow said as he pushed on my shoulders.

“I’m not hurt,” I complained.

“Captain, you are covered with blood,” Doctorow said, now forcing me back down.

Ava fell on her knees and reached for me, but I pushed her hand away. I did not want to get the blood on her.

“Wayson …Oh damn! Oh damn! Wayson,” Ava said. She looked at me and cried.

“I’m not hurt,” I repeated. I tried to sit up again, but Doctorow pushed me back down. I had an urge to slug him.

Then my former partner, Ray Freeman, strode in through the gate, as silent and as mysterious as a shadow. He carried a sniper rifle with a smart scope in his left hand.

Ava turned and saw Freeman’s gigantic outline against the headlights. She screamed even louder than she had when she saw me get shot.

“Admiral Brocius says you broke the rules. He wanted me to give you his regards,” Freeman said in a low, slow voice that reminded me of cannon fire echoing in a valley.

Seeing Freeman, Doctorow forgot all about me. He turned and stared, finally allowing me to sit up. I made it to a sitting position, and said, “You shot me, you specking son of a bitch.”

“I assassinated you,” said Freeman, his voice little more than a whisper. He turned and started to walk away.

I sprang to my feet and followed.

“Wayson, what …are you …what?” Ava did not know what to say.

“What in God’s name is going on?” Doctorow asked.

I ignored them and chased after Freeman. “You’re delivering messages for Brocius now?”

Just as I caught up to him, Freeman turned to look at me. The light from the headlights caught half his face, and I saw nothing but ice in his expression. “They’re coming for you.” He said this so quietly that neither Doctorow nor Ava could hear him.

“How much time do I have?” I asked.

Freeman did not answer. He might or might not have known, but he would not say which. The man stood seven feet tall and weighed in at over three hundred pounds. He had no fear.

“So that’s it?” I called after him. “Brocius sent you all the way to Terraneau just to hit me with a specking simmy?”

Freeman stopped again. He looked back at me, and said, “Next time, it will be a bullet.” And then he walked around a hangar. I heard a car start and saw taillights pull away.

“Friendly fellow. Who exactly was he?” Doctorow asked, as I climbed into the backseat of the car with Ava. As the acting administrator of Norristown, he had a nice car, with lots of leather and chrome, but he did not merit a chauffeur. He did have a radio, however, which he used to report my “assassination.”

Freeman had hit me with “simunition,” a kind of round specifically designed for faking assassinations. Instead of a slug, his cartridge housed a capsule designed to burst on contact and shower me with blood.

Unfortunately, Freeman always used a high-velocity rifle. Simunition or live round, any projectile coming at that speed would knock a strong man flat on his back. The round hit me hard enough to rip my blouse, and I was not anxious to see what else it had done.

I unbuttoned the remains of my shirt and found that the fake blood had soaked through my undershirt. I pulled that off as well and used it to wipe the blood off my chest. Not all of the blood was fake. A welt the size of an egg had formed just above my left nipple. The skin at the top of that welt had broken open, forming a crater on my chest

Freeman’s aim was as good as ever. If he had used a real bullet, it would have passed right through my heart.

Ava gasped and reached slowly to touch my chest. She cared. I felt encouraged.

She looked like an angel as she watched me, even more beautiful than the first time I had seen her. She wore a yellow dress with a low-cut neck and stringy, little straps that hung over her shoulders. Her dress was bright and happy and clean. It reminded me of daisies. I wanted to grab her, hold her, and press her body against mine, but I had to keep my mind on business.

“His name is Ray Freeman,” I said.

“You know him?”

“We used to be partners,” I said.

Peering through the rearview mirror, Doctorow saw me bunch the remains of my blouse into a ball, and said, “Partners eh? I’m betting you did not run a dry-cleaning service.”

“You’re hurt,” Ava whispered. She touched her fingertips to the wound as gently as a butterfly lands on a leaf. Tears ran down her cheeks.

“No, not a dry-cleaning service,” I agreed. “We did pretty much the same thing he’s doing now.”

“Shooting people with blood bullets?” Doctorow asked. “Sounds like a fairly specialized niche. Did you get much business?” Clearly, he did not think highly of mercenaries.

Realizing that I was sitting on a powder keg, I did not answer.

By that time, we had driven across the long stretch of destruction that separated the airstrip from the suburbs. The glow of streetlights replaced the starry sky. We drove past a school and a fire station. Light shone from the windows of both buildings. The familiar low glow from the streetlights helped me relax. It represented electricity, civilization, humanity.

We drove into a neighborhood with stores and schools and trees.

“That friend of yours …was he a black man, or was I just seeing things?” Doctorow asked.

Race had been abolished by fiat when the Unified Authority moved into space. As they spread humanity across their 180-planet republic, the founding fathers mixed people from every race on every planet. Heritage was discouraged and ethnicity all but banned as Earth’s continents and countries became a distant memory. Freeman, a living anomaly who grew up in a religious colony founded by African-American Baptists, had to live with a new kind of prejudice from people who thought he should be extinct.

Ava ran her fingers along my chest so softly that she did not disturb the deep purple welt that had formed around the wound. She caressed my chest. She stared into my eyes. My body responded to her touch, and we kissed. For a moment, I thought we might make love right there in the backseat of Doctorow’s car.

“There are three of us in this car, you know,” Doctorow said.

Ava blushed.

I laughed, and said, “Feel free to pull over and go for a walk.”

Ava hit me in the arm. Her punch did not hurt, but I turned to protect myself. The movement stung, but not much.

“Were you and Freeman friends?” Ava asked.

“Friends?” I asked. “I’m not sure Ray Freeman has ever considered anybody a friend. He doesn’t have friends, only people he trusts and people he does not trust.”

“Which are you?” Doctorow asked.

I unzipped my ruck and pulled out a clean blouse. I’d only brought one change of uniform for the trip. Assuming nobody else shot me, and that Ava and I did not wrinkle the fabric later, I would be fine.

“He trusts me.”

“That’s how he treats the people he trusts?” Doctorow asked.

“I’m still breathing,” I said.

A fine sheen of blood continued to ooze out of the wound on my chest. I wiped it away. I knew that I needed to call this in. Franks needed to know that an enemy ship had run the blockade, and Warshaw needed to know that we’d been served fair warning. Freeman had said they were coming, but he did not say when. Maybe Brocius was bluffing, trying to get me to play by his rules. He would not come until he had a big enough force to settle the odds in his favor, I was almost sure of that.

“Maybe we should go to the hospital,” Doctorow suggested.

“Why? Are you hurt?” I asked. I was a Marine, so I had to be stoic.

Doctorow laughed. Ava did not.

“Your friend scares me,” she said.

“Me, too,” I said, tearing a long strip from my undershirt to tie around my chest. “Can you tie this off for me?” I said, giving Ava one end, then pressing her hand against my chest. I leaned forward, looped the cloth around my back. Ava took both ends of the bandage and fixed them into a bow.

“What I don’t get is why he’s here in the first place. The government paid Freeman a lot of money to help liberate New Copenhagen. He doesn’t need the money.” I was also curious about how he got to the Scutum-Crux Arm and landed on Terraneau without being seen.

Now that I had finished with the wound, I looked out the window. I did not recognize the area. “Where are we?” I asked.

“We’re almost there,” Doctorow said. “My wife made dinner for us.”

“Your wife? How did your wife end up on Terraneau?” I asked. He had transferred here just before the invasion, meaning he had either brought his wife to a war zone or married a local.

Doctorow laughed. “Not exactly. I have a widow on Earth. Sarah is my wife on Terraneau. We met after the alien attack.”

“You mean you have two wives?” Ava asked.

“Well, it’s always possible that Tina has died or remarried,” Doctorow said. “It’s been several years since I’ve seen her, but she was alive and married to me last time I checked.

“Technically, I suppose that makes me a polygamist,” Doctorow said.

“Isn’t polygamy a sin?” I asked.

“Only if God is watching and cares,” Doctorow said.

I slipped on my spare blouse and fastened the buttons. Turning to Ava, I smiled and said, “See, good as new.”

Ava brought up a finger, pointed at me, then poked it hard into my chest. When I winced, she asked, “How can you stand living like this?”

“He wasn’t trying to kill me,” I said. “If Freeman wanted to kill me …”

Doctorow finished the thought, “You’d already be dead. I had that feeling, as well. How do you know he won’t come back to finish the job next time?” He thought for a moment, then added, “What did he mean when he said ‘you broke the rules’?”

Doctorow did not know about my plans. Ava had some idea, but she did not know about our stealing three self-broadcasting battleships. This was not the time to tell them.

“It’s a long story,” I said. It was the best I could come up with. I was never any good at politics, words did not come naturally.

As he turned his car into the driveway of a two-story home, Doctorow said, “Ava, I’m afraid your boyfriend is keeping secrets from us.”

Her boyfriend? I thought to myself. The evening was looking up.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Opening his front door, Doctorow said, “Whatever you do, Harris, don’t tell Sarah about what happened at the airstrip. She’s a bit on the delicate side, you wouldn’t want to worry her.” He winked as he said this, and Ava giggled, then Doctorow swung the door open, and bellowed, “We’re home, dear.”

A voice called out from deep in the house, “No need to shout, El. I heard you coming up the driveway.” “El” must have been short for Ellery.

“Sorry we’re late, dear. Somebody assassinated Captain Harris as he came off his plane,” Doctorow called.

“Should I remove his place from the table?” the woman called back. She came out of the kitchen, smiled at me, and said, “General Harris, you’re looking well for a man who was just assassinated.”

Sarah Doctorow was considerably wider along the bottom than she was across the top, giving her body a pyramid shape. Her bottom was so wide it looked like she’d stuffed bed pillows inside her pants. She was less heavy around the stomach, and her girth continued to taper as it reached her notably flat chest and sunken shoulders. She had a lovely round face with laugh lines around the eyes and a little girl’s smile. Her face was a patchwork of colors, with spruce-colored eyes, ruby red lips that looked freshly painted, and cerulean makeup above her eyes. She wore her long, red hair in a simple ponytail.

I liked Sarah Doctorow the moment I saw her, but the romance did not last. She moved around the room like a human whirlwind, kissing her husband on the cheek, shaking my hand, then pecking Ava on the cheek and giving her a hug.

She turned to me, and said, “General Harris, you must be famished. I understand being shot takes a lot out of you.” And then, without pausing to breathe, she turned to Ava, and said, “Ava darling, why don’t you come help me in the kitchen? You can tell me all about that awful assassination.” And just like that, Ava and Mrs. Doctorow vanished around the corner.

“Watch this,” Doctorow whispered, then he cupped his hands like an actor pretending to yell, and called, “Can I help in the kitchen?”

The offer earned him a giggle from Ava and a belly laugh from Sarah. Ava said something about Doctorow being a good husband, to which Sarah replied, “Don’t you believe it for a moment, sweetie.”

“I had a word with Lieutenant Mars. He says a planetwide mediaLink will be up in the next week or two. We should be able to contact every city on Terraneau.”

Mars was the top dog in the Corps of Engineers. He commanded the crews that built Outer Bliss and refurbished Fort Sebastian. I was not aware of how far he had gotten with the mediaLink. I was not keen on the idea of Doctorow sending flights around the planet.

“Do you have working media stations?” I asked, making a mental note to contact Mars as soon as I got back to the fleet. I would tell him to slow it down on the media equipment.

“No, but we should be able to throw something together. Perhaps you have some broadcast equipment you could loan us,” Doctorow said.

“I’m sure we can find something,” I told Doctorow, knowing full well that we did have equipment we could give him and that I would not give it to him. Maybe I was cut out for politics after all.

“Would you like a drink?” Doctorow had a large wet bar stocked with enough bottles to run an officers’ club for a night. He might have been a big drinker, but I had the feeling the booze was here for his political friends and rivals.

“Got any juice?” I asked.

“Powdered milk and powdered juice,” Doctorow said. “Fresh food is still in short supply.”

“I’ll make it simple,” I said. “Give me whatever you’re drinking.”

He poured me a tumbler, and I took it without looking to see what it was.

We went out to the patio and sat in the languid night air. Doctorow’s house sat on a ridge overlooking Norristown. From the back porch, I could look out into the heart of the city, with its newly lit populated areas and its unlit badlands. In the center of everything, the three skyscrapers stood like sparkling columns.

“They have the elevators working in the dorms,” Doctorow said, tracing the line of my sight.

“Does that mean people are living on the upper floors now?” I asked.

“Are you kidding? It’s hotter than blazes up there. We haven’t got the air-conditioning running yet.”

I tried my drink. It was a liqueur, something that tasted a lot like coffee. I did not like it.

We sat on some metal furniture and stared out across town for several seconds. Finally, Doctorow broke the silence. “There’s a nasty rumor going around these days that you are planning to start a war with the Unified Authority, General,” he said. “Is that what Freeman meant by ‘breaking the rules’?”

I thought about playing innocent or just plain denying everything, but there was too much to hide. “Something like that,” I said, feeling uncomfortable. “Care to share how you heard about it?”

“It doesn’t matter how I heard it.”

“It may not matter to you,” I said. “To me, it’s a breach of security …a bad one.”

“Do you plan on involving my planet in your war?”

“The war has already begun, but I didn’t start it,” I said. “The Unified Authority is phasing clones and obsolete fleets out of its military. They didn’t send us here to free Terraneau, they sent us here for target practice.”

Doctorow whistled. “Wow. I don’t know what to say.” He thought about what I had said, and finally asked, “What happened? I mean, clones …they were the heart of the military.”

“A couple of generals blamed clones for all of the losses against the aliens.”

“There was always deep-seated prejudice among the officers I knew. I won’t say it made sense, but it was always there …always there,” Doctorow said.

“Yeah, I know,” I said.

“What did your friend mean when he said you broke the rules?”

“We captured three of their self-broadcasting ships.”

“Were those ships attacking you?”

“The Navy was using them to bring clones in and ship natural-borns back to Earth.”

“So, they came on a peaceful mission,” Doctorow said.

“Yeah, I suppose so.”

“You fired on those ships?” Doctorow asked.

“Hell, we had to do something, or we would all be trapped right now. We hijacked …commandeered three self-broadcasting battleships. Now, maybe we will be able to defend ourselves.”

“Have they asked for their ships back?”

I nodded.

“Are you going to return them?”

“I can’t imagine why I would,” I said.

“It sounds to me like you’ve started yourself a war.”

“To us, it’s a war. We’re fighting for our survival. To them, it’s a military exercise,” I said.

“Just make sure you keep your war off my planet,” Doctorow said, all of his former good humor missing from his voice.

“That’s why we wanted the self-broadcasting ships. We want to take the fight to them.”

“What do you think they’ll call your war back on Earth? The Clone Rebellion? The Clone Uprising?” Doctorow finished his drink and placed the glass on the little table by his seat.

“I prefer the Enlisted Man’s War,” I said. “My men tend to keel over when they hear they’re clones.”

“I don’t want you pulling my planet into your war,” Doctorow said.

“We have a five-hundred-ship fleet orbiting this planet. The Earth Fleet is down to somewhere in the neighborhood of forty self-broadcasting ships.”

“Forty ships that you know about,” Doctorow corrected.

I went on as if I had not heard him. “We have a blockade around your planet. You and your people are safe.”

Doctorow heard this and laughed. “Safe? Your friend with the rifle not only managed to run your blockade, he knew how to find you and put a bullet in your chest.”

“Simunition,” I said.

“What?”

“He used simunition, not a live round.”

“You’re missing my point, Harris. You weren’t even able to protect yourself. You’re in over your head. That’s my point.” Doctorow had raised his voice so that he nearly shouted the words.

Sarah came out to the patio. “How are you boys getting on?” she asked, pretending she had not heard us.

“It appears General Harris here has plunged us into another war,” Doctorow snapped.

“Well, that’s fine then,” Sarah said, the smile never faltering from her face. I wondered if she even heard him. “Now, you boys come in before our dinner gets cold.”

The Doctorows’ dining room was a long and narrow rectangle with a small table surrounded by large empty spaces on either end. When I mentioned this to Ava, she laughed and said that the table could be extended to fill the room.

“The first time I came here, Sarah hosted a dinner party for twenty guests,” Ava said. “We all sat at the same table.” Ava sat to my right. Ellery sat across the table, glaring at me.

The Doctorows ate like people living in a war zone. Sarah had worked wonders with rice and beans and canned meats, but I got better food on the Kamehameha.

Ava and Sarah talked about movies. They chatted like sisters, Sarah asking questions about stars and Ava dishing up insider gossip that might well have been old news three years ago. Not that it mattered to Sarah—her planet had been cut off from movies and movie stars since the day the Mogats destroyed the Broadcast Network.

Doctorow and I traded a few questions, but we mostly listened in on the women. When we spoke, we talked about galactic wars; Ava and Sarah chatted about movie stars and gossip. Their conversation was more interesting than ours.

When Ava and Sarah finally hit a lull in their conversation, I commented that watching them converse, I would have guessed that they had known each other their entire lives, they might even have been sisters.

“We’re new-old friends,” Sarah explained. “We have Ava up to the house every weekend.”

“Really?”

“Well, sure. You asked El to look after her,” Sarah said.

“I appreciate it,” I said, not sure what else to say.

“We’ve loved having her. I did not know what to expect when El first told me about Ava, her being a movie star and all,” Sarah said. “A war hero and a movie star—my goodness, you two are going to be the life of the party wherever you go.”

Ava smiled and gave my hand a squeeze.

We ate and chatted amiably, then Sarah changed the tenor of the evening. “You know, Wayson …Is it all right if I call you Wayson? General Harris just sounds so full of starch.”

Ava chipped in, “I call him Harris.”

“Wayson is fine,” I said.

“You really are a hero. You saved the planet. I mean, I heard all about you chasing away the aliens with so very few men—absolutely amazing, like a miracle or something.”

“Thank you,” I said, feeling a little embarrassed.

She gushed on about my heroism, but then she said, “Who are you going to war with now?”

“He declared war on the Unified Authority,” Doctorow said.

“But we are part of the Unified Authority,” Sarah said, clearly confused.

“On Earth,” Doctorow said.

“Oh, on Earth,” Sarah said. She sounded impressed. “You better keep the fighting away from Terraneau.”

“We’ll keep you safe,” I said, thinking that Doctorow must have rehearsed the entire night with his wife.

“See, now, Wayson, you’re not listening to me. I have no doubt you will keep us safe, but that is not what I am telling you. What I am trying to say is that given a choice, the people on this planet are surely going to support Earth over a bunch of clones.”

Sarah smiled and passed me the beans, apparently unaware that I might object to her antisynthetic comments.

“But Earth abandoned Terraneau,” Ava said. “They had a fleet of ships circling your planet for four years without ever sending anyone to rescue you.”

“We told them not to. El, didn’t you tell them to leave us alone.” She said this as a statement, not a question. “You told them not to come, isn’t that right?”

“Yes, dear,” Doctorow said. “I think we are all glad that General Harris decided not to listen.”

“Well, of course we are,” Sarah admitted, “but that does not mean we would pick clones over humans if it comes to a war. You understand that, don’t you, Wayson?”

“Yes,” I said. I understood her perfectly.

“God, I hate that woman,” Ava said, as we walked through her front door. I had expected Doctorow to move her in with the girls in the dormitory, but that never happened. She never spent so much as a night in that building.

“I thought you two were old friends,” I said.

“Honey, where I come from, she would not be allowed on the sidewalk without a leash and a muzzle!” Ava said. “I could never be friends with that two-faced, antisynthetic bitch. Do you know what she said behind my back? When she found out her husband wanted to put me in the girls’ dorm, she told her friends they should set me up in a convenience store and call it a ‘home for wayward clones.’ ”

“How about Doctorow?” I asked. “Is he any better?”

“I don’t know how he puts up with her. They’re completely different. He’s a nice man, and he’s honest, and …”

“She’s honest, too,” I said.

“Honestly antisynthetic. Was it always like this for you, Harris? Did people always treat you like that? I don’t think anyone knew I was a clone when I first got here. They knew who I was, you know, they’d seen my movies, but then Sarah started telling everyone I was a clone. She’s like a one-woman mediaLink. God, I hate her.”

“Do you think she speaks for the rest of the planet?” I asked, knowing that in Ava’s experience, Norristown was the rest of the planet. “Who’s got more clout, Ellery or Sarah?”

“If it comes down to a fight between Sarah and Ellery, my money is on Ellery,” Ava said. But I got the feeling she had told me whom she wanted to win, not who she thought would take the title.

I looked around the house. The living room was all done up in bright colors and glass tile. The home probably came furnished, just move in and put your name on the shingle, with a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy when it came to the previous owners. There was a bright square above the fireplace where someone might once have hung a family portrait.

“Did Doctorow give you this house?” I asked.

“I pay the rent by teaching drama classes up at the dorms,” Ava said, brightening up.

“Should I be worried about the other teachers?”

“Other guys? Wayson Harris is worried about other guys?” Ava laughed. She led me into the kitchen, where she picked out two mugs and made us coffee. “Ellery warned everyone about you. Between Sarah advertising that I am a clone and Ellery scaring the guys off, it gets pretty lonely around here.

“How about you?” she asked. “Any other women I need to know about?” She spoke more softly and came close. I put my hands on her waist and brought her toward me. We hugged, and I swung her gently back and forth. A few moments passed before we kissed. Somewhere in her breath, I tasted a trace of the imitation bacon Sarah Doctorow used to flavor her beans, but mostly Ava’s breath just smelled like Ava. She kissed me, rubbed her body against mine, and giggled. “Wayson Harris worried about other guys.” She laughed and pressed her face against my chest.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I thought about Freeman and his warning, and I knew that I should call the incident in to Warshaw, but Ava wrapped her right leg around my left thigh, and she reached up and kissed my neck. She kissed me on the lips, and her taste lingered. I did not forget about Freeman, but the run-in just did not seem all that important at the moment. I would be back on the Kamehameha by lunch.

“You know what you said about my never forcing you?” I asked.

“You’re not going to need to now,” she said.

Sometimes things just work that way.

We went to bed and made love. When we were done, we held each other in the darkness. I felt cool fingers with skin as soft as flower petals probing the wound on my chest. Once she had finished examining my chest, Ava moved her hands to my face, where she ran her fingers along my eyebrow. This touched off a strange kind of search. She felt my thighs, my arms, and my neck. She finished by going over my back, stopping on a spot below the shoulder blade on my left side.

“Find anything interesting?” I asked.

“Yes,” she whispered, in a voice as soft and sensuous as the feel of her skin against mine. “This is the worst one.” She meant my worst scar. I had three inch-wide stripes across that part of my back.

“How did you get these?” she asked.

“Somebody scratched me,” I said.

“Scratched you?” she asked, unable to hide her giggle. “Somebody scratched you? Poor baby.”

I did not tell her he was a Navy SEAL clone genetically developed to have daggerlike fingers. Instead, I just said, “Yeah, poor me.”

“Ted told me you were the toughest man in the Marines,” Ava said.

“Nice of him,” I said.

“Have you ever been shot?” she asked.

“Besides today?” I asked.

“Today doesn’t count. You said he used blanks.”

“He used simmies. They’re not blanks. Blanks just make noise.”

“I mean shot with bullets?”

“No, I have never been shot,” I admitted.

“Really?” She seemed surprised. I wanted to tell her that being shot in real life was nothing like being shot in the movies. On the battlefield, you got it in the gut or the head and you died. Maybe you got shot in the arm or the leg, and the limb never worked right again. In the movies, heroes get shot and still manage to save the day. In real war, Marines get shot and never fully recover.

“Have you ever been stabbed?” she asked.

“I got scratched real bad,” I said. The SEAL who put those scars on my back had dug so deep that he cut through muscle and damaged organs, but I felt no desire to tell her that. This conversation irritated me.

“You were in all of those big battles, and you never got shot? You know what, Harris? I think Ted was wrong about you,” she said. She probably wanted to sound playful, this being an after-sex conversation. To me, though, she sounded childish. “I don’t think you’re the toughest man in the Marines. I think you’re the luckiest.”

There was just enough light in the room for me to see her hair, her face, her breasts. There was not a man in the Corps who would have disagreed with her about my luck at that moment, not even Ted Mooreland.

I fell asleep after that. I did not remember my dream when I woke up; but whatever I dreamed, it left me feeling small, worried …unlucky.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

Knowing that I needed to report my run-in with Freeman as soon as possible, I woke up early the next morning and flew back to Outer Bliss. I had one final interrogation to conduct.

I went to the guardhouse and told the officer in charge whom I wanted to see. He had two of his men take me to the interrogation room, where I waited for fifteen minutes before there was a knock on the door.

“Enter,” I said.

The guards led Admiral Thorne into the room, and I dismissed them. Thorne and I would be alone for this private conversation; not even Warshaw would listen in on this one.

Thorne came in, looking solemn and dignified. His time in the relocation camp had not treated him kindly. He had lost weight. His posture seemed stiff, which actually added to his air of dignity. I expected him to call me Captain Harris, but he surprised me.

“Good morning, General,” he said as he entered, and he gave me a smart salute.

I returned the salute.

“So, what brings the commandant of the Scutum-Crux Marines to Bliss on the Plateau?” he asked.

“Bliss on the Plateau? Is that what they’re calling it?”

“That’s what the inmates are calling it.”

“I have a few questions,” I said. I motioned to the table, and we took our seats.

“Questions for me? I’m not sure what I can tell you, General. I am well aware of the war. Admiral George and Senior Chief Fahey aren’t keeping confidences. I suppose you know that.”

I nodded. “I’m beginning to figure that out.” I could feel the tension building already. “How about you, Admiral? Do you keep confidences?”

“I am at this moment,” Thorne said. “I have not told anyone but you about the harnesses I found on the carriers.”

The harnesses—I had almost forgotten about them. Someone had booby-trapped the fighter carriers in the fleet to prevent them from leaving the space around Terraneau. Even if broadcast engines were installed on the carriers, we could not use them. The harnesses were designed to detect the electrical buildup needed to power a broadcast. They would make the engines explode. Admiral Thorne had showed me the harness on the Kamehameha the day I arrived.

I still had not told Warshaw about the harnesses. There was no need to mention them until we figured out how to install the broadcast engines on smaller ships.

“We need to talk about those,” I said.

Showing me those harnesses had been an act of sedition on Thorne’s part. As I considered it, he had indeed shown that his loyalty was to the fleet and not the Unified Authority. Someone was feeding information back to Earth, but I did not think it was Thorne.

“I was assassinated last night,” I said. “Admiral Brocius sent me a message by way of a sniper and a round of simunition.”

Thorne laughed. “Let you know that you were not untouchable, did he?”

“How did he do that?” I asked.

“Are you asking how he landed a sniper on Terraneau?” Thorne asked, leaning back in his chair, his fingers forming a church and steeple. “It sounds as if someone ran your blockade.”

“He shouldn’t have been able to get through,” I said. “We have a fleet surrounding this planet.”

“Blockades are for stopping fleets and convoys, General. Your ships weren’t looking for a five- or ten-man spacecraft. If he came in a Johnston or Cessna, he might even slip past your ships.”

“Without us spotting him on radar?”

“He would need to find a significant hole in your coverage,” Thorne said. “Blocking off an entire planet isn’t as easy as guarding a prison camp, not even with a fleet as big as yours.”

“I figured that much out,” I said. In truth, I had flown small craft through a few nets during the Mogat War. Using a small self-broadcasting ship, I had broadcasted in millions of miles away from well-guarded destinations so that no one would detect the anomaly from my ship, then flown in under the radar. I was not running active blockades, though, just entering guarded areas.

“How did the assassin know where to find me?” I asked. “The guy knew when and where I was.”

Ray Freeman was a dangerous and resourceful man, more resourceful than any man I had ever known, but even he had his limits. He could not read minds or predict the future.

“Good question,” Thorne agreed. He continued leaning back in his chair, flexing his fingers, the stiff expression on his face a mask hiding his emotion. I could not tell if he hated me or liked me, not that it mattered.

“You know you have a significant breach in your command structure. You do know that, don’t you?” Thorne asked. “I knew you were coming to Bliss on the Plateau five days ago, Senior Chief Fahey told me.”

“Fahey?” I asked. “How the speck does he know so much?” I could feel my frustration mounting.

“Sometimes you surprise me, Harris. He knows because he has friends on the Washington who keep him briefed.”

I hit my boiling point. “Briefed? What do you mean ‘briefed’? Are you telling me I have officers in my fleet who just ring him up and tell him our plans?” I knew the answer even as I asked. I let Hollingsworth take Fahey to the brig instead of Thomer. Hollingsworth was loyal to me, but he’d had sex with Fahey. He might well do small favors for Fahey if he thought they were harmless. He might, for instance, have let Fahey’s friends know he’d been sent to Outer Bliss.

“Everything points back to Fahey,” I said. He was the one who had set up the blockade around Terraneau. He might have built blind spots into it. He could even have sent that information back to Admiral Brocius. When natural-borns transferred back to Earth, they transferred out through the Washington—Fahey’s ship. He could have sent messages with them or anyone else on the transports. Hell, he had plenty of opportunity to ride out to the U.A. ships himself.

“So was Fahey working for you?” I asked. “Was he your spy?”

“My spy? General, why would I spy on the fleet? I wanted to stay out here,” Thorne said.

“But you promoted him to senior chief right before the transfers started. If he’s been playing Mata Hari with my officers, you were the one who placed him where he could catch the right information.”

“It wasn’t me. That promotion came straight from Navy Headquarters …in the Pentagon. General Harris, I think you have your leak.”

“Obviously,” I said.

“No, hear me out. The guards practically let Fahey run this place. Half the men guarding this camp are sailors from the Washington, and they let him call his friends all the time. What if he used a predetermined frequency? What if he wanted you to put him here so he could get information out?”

I rolled that question around in my mind. If half the guards in the camp were from the Washington, Fahey might have picked them himself. The two guards who came in with Fahey were probably from the Washington. I got the feeling that Fahey and those men may have been joined at the hip a time or two.

I pounded my fist into the table. “Damn it!” I yelled. Fahey had outmaneuvered me again and again. He’d floated enough information for Ray Freeman, possibly the most dangerous man in the galaxy, to take a shot at me. “Damn it,” I repeated more quietly.

“The Navy doesn’t operate like the Marines. You’re dealing with sailors now, and you can’t make them act like Marines. Their world is a lot more sophisticated, and the parts don’t fit together as neatly,” Thorne said.

“Yeah, well, Gary Warshaw sure as hell agrees with you. He says I’m not fit to command a fleet.”

“He’s one to talk,” Thorne said. “He’s the other half of your problems.”

“What do you think of Lilburn Franks?” I asked.

“He’d be a good choice for a second-in-command. At least he knows his way around a bridge, but he’s a bit too aggressive. He understands naval strategy, but he hasn’t seen what happens when things go wrong.”

“Any other recommendations?” I asked. Thorne knew the SC Fleet better than any man alive.

Thorne sat up and went through the litany of NCOs I had available to me. I watched him closely as he spoke. The man looked old, but life still coursed through his veins. He didn’t know it, but he was auditioning. Watching him speak, I decided that he still had a few good years in him. I could see it in his face.

“How about you? You still want to stay with the fleet?” I asked.

He looked me right in the eye and, giving me his best poker face, he slowly said, “Yes, you know I do.”

“Why?” I asked.

I . . “I .” told you, I’ve spent more than half my life out here. I.. “

“Do you have a wife on Terraneau?” I asked.

“Not a wife, I never married her. Earth-born officers are supposed to wait for Earth-born wives. If it got back to Washington, it would have hurt my career.”

“Children?” I asked.

“Three of them.” He spoke evenly, slowly, a man trying to hide his excitement. He might have been in bed with the Unified Authority, or he might have been telling me the truth.

“And nobody ever knew about them?” I asked.

“Having illegitimate children is considered conduct unbecoming in certain circles. If word got back to Washington about the children, it would have ended my career.”

“And that is why you want to stay in Scutum-Crux?” I asked. It explained a lot more than that. It explained why he’d continued flying around Terraneau, trying to break through the ion curtain for the last four years. It also explained his mystery visit to the planet the day the curtain went down.

“Why do you want to fight against the Unified Authority?” I asked.

Thorne leaned across the table, and said, “Why would I pick you over Earth? Why would I pick a bunch of clones over the Unified Authority?

“General Harris, I have been out here for more than half of my life. Those ships in your fleet, they are my home. Those men in your fleet, I’ve been flying with some of those men for thirty years now.

“I don’t know what Alden Brocius has up his sleeve, but it’s going to be powerful. Those ships I lived on and those men I served with, they’re all going to die if I can’t help them.”

I took Thorne with me when I returned to the fleet.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Thorne and I spent the short flight back to the Kamehameha in the kettle of the transport, discussing command structures and politics. We talked about possible scenarios and whom we could count on if Warshaw fought us for control of the fleet. As a Marine dealing with sailors, I would have few allies. As a natural-born and a relic of the old U.A. power structure, Thorne would have even fewer.

Leaving the atmosphere, the transport struggled for just a moment. Thorne looked around the dark cabin nervously. “I hate these things.”

“It’s nothing. You get a rattle whenever you leave the atmosphere,” I said.

“Doesn’t the shaking bother you?”

“You get used to it,” I said. “I spent six weeks in a bird like this once.”

“This is a short-range transport,” Thorne said. He did not say anything more, but he did not need to. The lull in the conversation signaled his skepticism.

“They’re supposed to have a range of two hundred thousand miles. I know all about it,” I said. “We took ours closer to four billion miles.”

“That would be suicidal,” Thorne said.

“That’s one way to look at it,” I admitted.

There were two of us on that flight, Ray Freeman and I. We were escaping a Baptist farming colony, and the transport was the only way off the planet. We did what we had to do.

“General Harris, we’re approaching the Kamehameha,” the pilot called over the intercom. Three minutes later, we had touched down, and the doors at the rear of the kettle slid open.

Thorne and I exited the transport and headed up to Fleet Command without saying a word to anyone we passed.

Somebody must have alerted Warshaw as soon as we stepped off our transport. He and three of his lieutenants met us as we came off the lift.

“General Harris,” he said, putting on a reasonable pretense of surprise.

“Admiral,” I said.

He looked over at Admiral Thorne, and said, “Admiral Thorne, up for a visit?” Suspicion jingled in his voice.

This was not a discussion I planned to hold in a busy corridor, so I said, “Perhaps you and Admiral Franks could join us for a meeting in the conference room; we have a lot to discuss.”

Maybe Warshaw had already put two and two together, or maybe he read my intentions by the stiff tone of my voice. Sounding more businesslike than usual, he told one of his lieutenants to send for Franks, then he turned and led the way to a conference room. We barely had time to find our seats before Franks joined us.

The cease-fire between me and Warshaw ended as soon as the meeting began. “What is it now, Harris?” he asked.

“I was shot last night,” I said, opening my rucksack and pulling out the blouse. The blood was still tacky. The other men in the room all stared at it. They were mesmerized.

“Sweet shit,” Warshaw said. He reached out and touched the stain, then looked at his fingers. The fake blood stained his fingertips.

I told them about Freeman and what he said.

“What does it mean?” asked Warshaw, temporarily forgetting about Admiral Thorne.

“It means a lot of things,” I said. “It means at least one ship was able to run our blockade. It means we have a leak. Perry Fahey has been spying for the U.A. all along.”

“You’re sure it was Fahey?” Franks asked.

“Of course it was Fahey. That son of a bitch,” Warshaw said.

After I rehearsed the evidence—Fahey setting up the blockade, the officers transferring back to Earth through the Washington, the way Fahey kept up with our movements from Outer Bliss—Franks seemed convinced as well.

“The assassin said they’re coming for us? Did he say when?” asked Franks.

“Tomorrow, next week, your guess is as good as mine,” I said. I did not regret waiting until I got back to the fleet to report the whole thing. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that Admiral Brocius would not move until he had an overwhelming force. We might still have a year to prepare.

No one asked for my interpretation of the comment about us breaking the rules. We all knew what it meant. I looked back at Thorne one last time to renew my confidence, then I said, “We’re going to need an experienced officer at the helm.”

“Good God, not that again,” Warshaw moaned, rolling his eyes, his face so red he looked like he’d been boiled. As he often did when angered, he flexed his muscles and stared at me. His eyes bored into mine. The muscles in his neck, shoulders, and arms bulged. He squeezed his fists and relaxed his hands, squeezed and relaxed, pumping blood into his spade-shaped forearms.

How many officers had he silently intimidated with that little trick? How many rivals had he scared off? The big muscles might intimidate other sailors, but to me he looked like a mouse roughing its fur so it can look as big as a rat.

“What are you saying? I have been in the Navy for twenty-five years, you don’t call that experience?” Warshaw practically whispered the question, the calm in his voice as precarious as a dagger wrapped in a silk scarf.

“You have no experience commanding a ship,” I said.

“The hell with that,” Warshaw said. “If you want to step down, Harris, go ahead. That’s your choice. I earned my commission.”

“I’m not asking you to resign your commission,” I said, trying to sound reasonable.

Warshaw shook his head. He looked angry enough to launch himself at me. He looked crazed. “I run the ships! I run the specking fleet! You hear me, Harris? I am the goddamned commander of the Scutum-specking-Crux Fleet!”

“Harris, we’ve already been through this. Admiral Brocius put Warshaw in charge,” Franks said. He might not have sounded so reasonable had he not gotten falling-down-drunk the night I recommended that he take over the fleet.

“I don’t want to run the specking fleet, Franks. I want Admiral Thorne to run it,” I said.

“Admiral Thorne?” Franks asked. “Why in God’s name do you want a natural-born to run the Enlisted Man’s Fleet? Why would you even trust him?”

I never got to state my case, however. That was when the Klaxons sounded.

CHAPTER FIFTY

“We’ve detected two anomalies.” The voice on the intercom belonged to Hank Bishop, captain of the Kamehameha. He was a good officer, a veteran sailor, but he sounded nervous.

“Have you identified the ships?” asked Admiral Thorne. We could not identify specific ships by their anomalies, but we could identify the class of the ships.

Bishop did not answer.

Warshaw glared at Thorne.

Franks jumped to his feet and bolted out the door. Having spent his career on the bridge of a capital ship, he had no trouble putting politics and power struggles out of his mind in an emergency. There was a call to quarters, and he needed to be at the helm.

I got on the intercom and raised Thomer. “This is not a drill,” I said. “Contact every ship; I want every last Marine suited up and ready to fight.”

“Aye, aye,” he said, then he followed up with an unexpected question, “Did you know this was coming?”

I did not have time to think about it at that moment. “Good question,” I said. He and I could debate what I should have expected and what I could not have known over drinks once the alert was over. “Get a move on it, Sergeant,” I said, temporarily forgetting Thomer’s rank.

He responded, “Yes, sir,” and signed off.

By the time Thorne and I left for the bridge, Warshaw and Franks were already there. The wail of the Klaxons thundered through the ship with its earsplitting decibels.

“When was the last time this fleet was in a battle?” I asked Thorne, as we boarded the lift from Fleet Command down to the bridge.

“We took on a couple of ships orbiting Little Man,” Thorne said.

“Little Man,” I repeated. I had been there for that fight. Was that six years ago? Seven? I could not remember.

It had not occurred to me before, but having spent his career in the outermost arm of the galaxy, Thorne did not exactly fit the bill of a battle-tested veteran. He was a graduate of the Naval Academy, but that graduation had happened nearly forty uneventful years ago.

We entered the bridge.

Fleet Command had been loud and relatively empty, the bridge was very different. The siren hummed low and steady in the background. Officers rushed from one station to the next. In the scramble, most of them ran around me, but a few pushed off me and continued without looking back.

Franks, Warshaw, and Bishop stood around the chart table in the center of the bridge, huddling together like chefs around a stove. As Thorne and I approached, Warshaw looked up, and asked, “What the speck is a U.A. officer doing on my bridge? Someone remove this man.” He was not calling for bridge security to remove Thorne, he said it quietly, for my benefit.

“He’s with me,” I said.

Even before I finished saying this, Warshaw drowned me out, yelling, “Great, I have a Marine and a spy on my bridge.”

Franks pointed to something on the strategy table, and Warshaw seemed to forget about us.

The three-dimensional map on the chart table showed Terraneau, our fleet, and the area in which our telemetry detected the anomaly. It depicted open spaces as blue-black cubes. There were no stars in the three million miles between us and the anomaly, just open space.

Without looking up, Franks said, “They’re headed toward us at one-fifth full.” One-fifth full meant six million miles per hour, a cautious speed for closing long distances.

“Do we have a read on the anomaly?” Warshaw repeated Thorne’s question as if he had come up with it himself.

“No information yet,” Captain Bishop answered, as he edged around the table.

“Have we made contact?” Franks asked.

“No, sir. They’re ignoring us,” a communications officer called.

“Where are our self-broadcasting ships?” Warshaw asked. “They’ve got to be here for the ships.”

Franks pointed them out. They were halfway between our fleet and the intruders, rocketing toward us as fast as they could.

I did not think Warshaw was correct in his assessment. We had captured three U.A. ships and destroyed three more. Until that moment, it had not occurred to me that we had captured or destroyed six of their ships. We didn’t just beat them to the punch; we had declared an all-out war.

Seeing that our self-broadcasting fleet was safe for the time being, Warshaw seemed to relax. He leaned against a desk and took a deep breath. He started to say something, then stopped. On the table, seven new anomalies appeared almost on top of our fleeing ships.

Franks barked out orders like an experienced commander, or, I realized, a man who has spent his career watching experienced commanders. He sent orders across the fleet telling his captains to power up their shields, charge weapons systems, and put all fighter pilots on red alert.

Around the bridge, the various stations hummed with activity. Displays lit up, showing shield readiness and weapons status.

Looking at the chart table, I reckoned the second wave of U.A. ships were still a million miles away. They did not chase our ships. Apparently, they were satisfied with herding them into our fold. The more distant, first wave of ships continued toward us, but they were still two million miles away. It would take them at least twenty more minutes to reach our lines.

An ensign brought a coded message over to Warshaw, whose expression went from desperation to defeat. He read the message again and handed it to Franks.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s from one of the engineers overseeing the work in the Galactic Eye. He says the Unifieds sent battleships to destroy the Mogat Fleet,” Warshaw said.

“So much for harvesting broadcast engines,” he said, planting his arms along the edges of the table to prop himself up.

Franks’s face turned pale as he looked from Warshaw to me. “Maybe we should send our ships back …”

“Three ships,” Warshaw said. “We have three self-broadcasting ships.”

“Did we get all of our men out?” Thorne asked.

“No,” answered Warshaw. He turned to me, and said, “We had eight thousand men out there.”

On the chart table, another wave of anomalies appeared. Five ships broadcasted in this time, giving the U.A. a total of twelve ships in the area. They had twelve ships, we had five hundred. They would not attack.

“Just a few more days …all we needed was a few more days.” Warshaw groaned in a soft voice, still leaning on the table for support. With his huge muscles and tired posture, he looked like a Hollywood hero resting after a long battle. “Not even another week. How the hell did they know?”

“The same way Freeman knew how to find me,” I said.

“Fahey?” Warshaw asked. “I told you you should have shot that traitor bastard. He told them everything from the prison camp, didn’t he?”

“Anything and everything he knew,” I said. “He probably wanted us to arrest him.”

“Wanted us to arrest him?” Franks asked.

“He’s a lot safer down there than he would be up here with us,” I said.

“Speck!” Warshaw slammed his fist on the chart table. Then we all went quiet as five more anomalies appeared. Now the U.A. Navy was up to seventeen ships. It didn’t really matter if they sent their whole specking fleet, we had ten times as many ships as they did. They might have taken the Galactic Central Fleet from us, but they could not touch us here.

A small herd of officers had gathered around the chart table. Not only did Warshaw and Franks have aides, but it appeared that their aides had aides as well. It takes a lot of officers to control a fleet, and the Scutum-Crux Fleet was the largest fleet in the galaxy.

Six more anomalies appeared on the table, and suddenly it looked like the U.A. Navy might really attack. With twenty-three battleships gathered along one of our flanks, it no longer looked as if they had simply come to send a message. Most of those ships were still three million miles away, too great a distance for us to exchange shots; but it suddenly looked like they’d come for a fight.

We all shared the same thought—the Unified Authority could not possibly win a fight out here. They had fewer than forty self-broadcasting ships, and there were no fighter carriers in their self-broadcasting fleet. If it came to a fight, we could win just using our carriers. They had to know that. Brocius had to know that, and that was what scared me. If he had come to fight, he knew something we didn’t know.

Ten more anomalies appeared. They had thirty-three ships in a single sector, the vast majority of their self-broadcasting fleet.

“What are they doing?” Warshaw asked. “That’s almost everything they have.”

Franks looked over at an aide, and snapped, “Get me analysis on those anomalies, now!”

Warshaw said what we all were hoping, “They’re bluffing.”

“No, they aren’t,” said Thorne.

Forgetting that he had threatened to have Thorne thrown off the bridge a few minutes earlier, Warshaw now tried to argue with him. “They’re not going to send their fleet against us; we outnumber them ten-to-one. They’d be crazy.”

But they were not trying to scare us, and they were not crazy. Fifteen more anomalies appeared on the chart table, giving them forty-eight ships, more self-broadcasting capital ships than they were supposed to have in their entire fleet.

An officer approached Franks with the first analysis of anomalies. He looked like he was choking on words, as he said, “We were not able to identify several of the anomalies, sir.”

Twelve more anomalies bloomed on the chart table.

“Sixty ships,” Franks whispered.

“They’re sending in the new fleet,” Warshaw said.

Ice-cold fingers seemed to have wrapped themselves around my vitals. Somewhere out there, in the dark clarity of space, some of those ships would have shining shields wrapped tightly around their hulls like a luminous skin. We had bested three of those ships in an ambush, but this time it would be a head-on collision.

On the chart table, the U.A. ships did not move. They seemed to have come all the way across the galaxy just to park.

“Those crazy speckers really came to fight,” Franks announced. “They’re massing a specking attack.” Far from panicking, he sounded excited. This was an empirical experience for him; he was about to put his education to the test. Using signal officers to relay his orders around the fleet, Franks began reeling off a series of commands. I did not recognize much of what he said, but I watched the results on the chart table.

Our outlying ships slid into place. The loose configuration of the fleet tightened into a fist.

“He’s circling the wagons,” Thorne whispered to me.

“Sounds like a good call,” I said.

“Not against a foe with superior firepower,” Thorne said. “You want to spread out. We have more ships than they do. We should take a more aggressive stance and hit them from every angle.”

“The way we fight this battle is not your concern, Admiral Thorne,” Warshaw warned. “As far as I am concerned, you are still an officer of the Unified Authority.”

Franks gave the order to scramble the fighters and sent them to the front of the fleet. On the table, the simulation showed our self-broadcasting battleships approaching the fleet. The curtain of fighters split, allowing the battleships in, then closed in behind them.

“We better keep those babies tucked away,” Warshaw said.

Franks looked up at Warshaw and nodded.

Fifteen more anomalies appeared. Three million miles away, the Unified Authority was preparing to attack.

“Seventy-five ships?” Franks sounded amazed. “How many ships do you have, Admiral Brocius?” he hummed. “How many are you willing to risk?”

Thorne stared down at the table, taking in every nuance and movement. He was like a blind man reading Braille. To me, the various blips and dots meant nothing. To him, they were ships with specific speeds and weapons capabilities.

Warshaw stepped between me and the chart table. I moved out from behind him; but as I stepped toward the table, he said, “Excuse me, General, this is a naval operation.”

I shuffled back, aware that Warshaw really could have me removed from the bridge. Thorne wisely followed my lead. I floated over to him, and asked, “Where are our self-broadcasting ships?”

Thorne leaned forward slightly and pointed.

I would not have recognized them without his help. To me, they looked like little dashes in a field of dots and dashes.

As I looked at the symbols representing our self-broadcasting ships, I noticed they had stopped beside a small, red triangle. “Is that us?” I whispered to Thorne.

He nodded.

Looking at the tight formation on the chart table, I had a premonition and started edging my way off the bridge.

Ten more anomalies appeared. So the Unified Authority had eight-five ships. One of Franks’s aides had a new round of analysis. “Sir, we can’t be sure, but those ships appear to be fighter carriers.”

“Fighter carriers? How the hell can they possibly have fighter carriers? It’s not possible; there are no self-broadcasting fighter carriers.” Franks coughed out the words as if they had barbs attached to them. He did not sound scared, but his confidence had dwindled.

Three more anomalies appeared about a hundred thousand miles away.

“What do they have now, a damn floating planet?” Warshaw asked.

“Explorers,” the aide answered.

“Explorers? Why send explorers out here? What the hell do they want with explorers?” Franks asked.

We have three self-broadcasting ships, and they have three explorers, I thought to myself, and an evil memory came to mind. I remembered the sinking of the Doctrinaire, the most indestructible juggernaut of our time, and I ran from the bridge.

“Where the speck do you think you are going?” Warshaw yelled behind me.

I ignored him and ran to the observation deck.

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

I looked out of the viewport and saw miles of space and ships. With so many ships hovering in such close proximity, the Scutum-Crux Fleet would appear as a single block on most navigation screens. The captains had lit the navigation lights along the hulls of their ships as visual beacons for fighter pilots to see.

From the observation deck, I could see hundreds of ships forming what looked like a mosaic of sparkling, monochrome tiles against the velvet backdrop of space. The glow of sunlight radiating from Terraneau shone up on the gray underbellies of our ships. With their wedge-shaped hulls, the ships of the SC Fleet lined up like the teeth on a saw.

Slowly pushing through the flotilla, our self-broadcasting battleships had diamond-shaped hulls and bloated bows. Their shape and charcoal gray hues bore no resemblance to the ships around them. They looked obsolete—military icons rescued from a different era as they hid themselves in a pod of naval ships. I did not see the self-broadcasters themselves, just the runner lights blinking along the lengths of their hulls.

From where I stood, I could see the massive bow of a nearby fighter carrier. The space ahead of us was filled with battleships. Beyond that, I caught a glimpse of several fighters, Phantoms, weaving in and out among the larger ships. The fighters looked like motes swirling in a dark wind.

“No! No! No!” I muttered, as I looked at the rows of ships standing as stationary as toys in a chest. It was just like Thorne said, only worse. Even Thorne could not possibly have realized what those self-broadcasting explorers would do in another moment.

I hit the intercom on the table and called down to the Marine compound. “Thomer, are your men loaded up?” I yelled.

“We’re ready. How many do you want?” he asked.

“Every available man. Every available transport.”

“Just the Kamehameha?”

“Fleet-wide,” I said.

Knowing that Warshaw would never listen to me, I reluctantly went back to the bridge. As I entered, he glared up at me for a moment, and muttered, “What are you doing here?”

“You need to scramble your ships,” I said.

Thinking I meant his fighters, Franks said, “We already launched.” He did not understand, and I could not explain myself quickly enough. Time was slipping away. The Unified Authority did not need to cross the three-million-mile no-man’s-zone to attack our self-broadcasting ships.

I fumbled for words, then blurted out, “Break formation. You can’t give them a stationary target.” Realizing too late that he would not understand, I added, “If the self-broadcasting ships stay in one place, Brocius will broadcast his ships into them.”

“What are you talking about?” Warshaw sounded impatient. Standing off in a corner, even Admiral Thorne looked irritated by my babbling.

I took a deep breath to calm myself. “That was what happened to the Doctrinaire,” I said. The Mogats had destroyed the Doctrinaire with a single shot by broadcasting a ship right into the center of it.

“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Warshaw said. “Get him off my bridge now.”

I lost control and yelled, “Listen, asshole!”

“Warshaw.” Admiral Thorne barely had to raise his voice to take control of the conversation; his voice was as cold and as bracing as a slap across the face. Franks, Warshaw, and I all turned to look at him, all of us giving in to native feelings of inferiority.

But Thorne was too late. The chart table displayed the event in miniature—tiny silver blooms appeared as one of the Unified Authority explorer ships broadcasted out. At that same moment, a bloom appeared in our ranks.

Explosions make no sound in space. We did not see or hear anything on the bridge of the Kamehameha as three battleships and thousands of lives died in a cataclysm as deadly as an atomic explosion.

A new set of alarms sounded throughout the ship, reporting the attack.

“What the speck?” Franks asked.

Warshaw, the consummate officer-engineer, turned to an aide, and yelled, “Damage report! I need a damage report!”

“They destroyed our self-broadcasting ships,” I said, not even bothering to look at the chart table to be sure.

“But that’s not …” Franks began.

“Admiral, thirty of their ships have broadcasted to the other side of Terraneau,” one of the aides said.

“We lost three ships,” another officer reported. He had not yet identified which ships were gone. Franks did not need the aide to tell him which ships—he already knew.

I could see it in Franks’s face. He was beaten. He no longer wanted to fight now that his strategy had fallen apart. He looked at me, then he turned to Admiral Thorne. He needed someone to tell him what he should do next.

“Harris, you better get your Marines down to that planet,” Admiral Thorne said. He had new color in his face. He had the energetic, excited eyes of a young officer preparing for a fight.

Warshaw watched the conversation, but remained silent. Maybe he finally realized he was not made to command a fleet. As damage reports filtered in, Warshaw left the bridge. I did not need to ask to know he was headed to Engineering.

Apparently seeing the same thing that Thorne saw, Franks turned to me, and asked, “Harris, how fast can you load up your Marines?”

“They’re already on the transports,” I said, speaking more to Thorne than Franks, but facing them both. We were ready, but we might already have been too late. By the time we launched, the U.A. ships would be on us.

“They’re launching transports,” an aide said.

“You better get going, Harris,” Thorne said. He hunched over the chart table, reading details out of tiny points of light. “We’ll give you whatever cover we can …” He did not finish the sentence, but I knew what he was trying to say. With all of those battleships out there, we were in for a bumpy ride.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

Amber-colored lights flashed along the walls, casting their orange glare along the ceilings. Klaxons clanged and bellowed. The hall outside the bridge was a quagmire, with sailors darting in different directions. I watched the crazed scene as I waited for a lift down to the docking bay, where Thomer and my men waited for me in their transports.

When the lift doors opened several decks down, I found the corridors leading to the docking bay all but deserted. The docking bay itself, however, was another matter.

We had two thousand Marines on the Kamehameha, including support troops who would remain on the ship until we had secured the planet. All two thousand men had crammed into the docking bays. Eight hundred of those men waited in the transports. The others waited on deck for the next flight.

As I made my way to the lead transport, I calculated how many Marines we could land on our first wave. With the exception of the Expansion-class Kamehameha, there would be twenty transports ferrying two thousand Marines from each of our thirty-five fighter carriers—seventy thousand troops. We had ninety battleships with sixteen transports each. That gave us another 144,000 Marines. And we had the men already stationed at Fort Sebastian. That would give us a massive first wave—more than 200,000 men. With a force like that, we could win the battle quickly.

“You do realize that generals don’t lead the troops from the front line?” Thomer asked me, as I jogged up the ramp and into the kettle.

“It’s a field rank,” I said. “Field generals fight along with their troops.”

Unfortunately, I was still wearing my Charlie service uniform and not dressed to lead troops into battle. Without the commandLink equipment in my helmet, I would be all but cut off from my men. I wanted to send someone to grab my armor, but we needed to launch immediately.

Remembering the isolation I felt when I went with Warshaw to the explore the Galactic Fleet, I watched the rear doors of the transport clap shut. The kettle was dark. Had I been wearing my armor, I would have had night-for-day vision available to me.

One hundred Marines had crammed into the kettle. They wore armor—one hundred identical men in one hundred identical suits. Without my armor, I could not tell them apart, which added to my frustration.

I pushed through the men and rushed up the ladder and into the cockpit. Thomer followed.

The pilot met me at the door of the cockpit. We traded salutes. He noted my Charlie service uniform, and said, “I guess I better keep the cabin pressurized.”

“I’d appreciate that,” I said. “Get us down there fast.”

Sitting in the copilot’s chair, counting every second, I looked out through the windshield as the sled dragged us through the atmospheric locks. The last door closed, and we went wheels up.

As we left the cover of the tube, the pilot asked, “What happened?” He sounded nervous.

Ahead of us, the remains of our self-broadcasting fleet looked like the burned-out remnants of an extinguished fire—three jagged, twisted hulls with sections that still glowed orange from fires within.

Standing beside me, Thomer looked hypnotized by the sight. His jaw hung slightly open, and his eyes remained fixed on the destruction. I took this as a good sign. Thomer was clean. With fresh Fallzoud running through his veins, he might not have noticed the destruction.

“What the speck hit them?” Thomer asked. He did not mean for me to answer the question, but I did.

“That, General Thomer, is what happens in a broadcast collision.”

“A collision, sir?” the pilot asked.

“Those ships stayed in one place too long,” I said. “The Mogats came up with the idea. You program an enemy ship’s location into a broadcast computer, then broadcast a ship into it. The U.A. used unmanned explorers. The Mogats used manned ships. That was how they destroyed the Doctrinaire.

“You broadcast in past shields and defenses, and the electricity from the anomaly destroys the target.”

“They broadcasted into the Doctrinaire?” asked the pilot.

“Shit,” said Thomer, “that’s brilliant.” Looking at the wreckage of the three big ships, you could not help but be in awe, they were so thoroughly destroyed.

The attack began moments after we left the Kamehameha. A laser cannon hit us as we veered toward open space. The beam was a yard-wide stream of lustrous, silvery red fire that splashed across our shields but did not break through.

The pilot steered away from the beam. Moments later, a squadron of five Tomcats streaked past us. I did not see them until they shot over the windshield. The fighters turned in a tight formation and disappeared.

“Ours or theirs?” I asked, wondering if we would reach the planet.

“Those are ours,” the pilot said.

“Those aren’t,” Thomer said, pointing to the line of battleships forming between us and the planet.

“How the speck do you like that? We’re right back where we started, eh General?” the pilot asked. Only when he said this did I realize that he was the pilot I’d kidnapped for my joyride around the G.C. Fleet.

“What are those?” Thomer asked, pointing at three of the new U.A. battleships as they approached. The ships looked huge compared to the fighters around them.

“Battle group at three o’clock,” I shouted.

“Hold on!” the pilot answered, moments before three torpedoes struck our transport. They hit in quick succession, one right after another. The transport never faltered, but I smelled the acrid tang of ozone coming from our engines.

“Kamehameha, we’re hit. We’re hit. We need protection,” the pilot yelled into his microphone.

“How bad?” I asked.

“One more like that, and we’re dead,” he said.

A torpedo whizzed past us. I caught a glimpse of the flame from its tail, then it was gone.

A swarm of fighters flashed past us, closing the lane between us and the ships that had fired at us. They darted by us and closed in around one of the new battleships. In the brief moment that I watched the attack, several fighters burst into flames.

Then we broke through the atmosphere and the black of space gave way to light and color. Entering the atmosphere so hard and fast, the transport’s walls rattled as if they would come apart. The sturdy bird did not come apart, however, and we found that we had entered the atmosphere only a few thousand miles from the Outer Bliss relocation camp.

“Signal all transports to head to Norristown,” I told the pilot. I thought for a moment, and added, “And tell them to lay off the radio as much as possible, in case the Unifieds are listening in.” They’d have no trouble eavesdropping on our transmission; the equipment in our transports was of U.A. design.

“Should we leave some men to help guard Outer Bliss?” Thomer asked.

“Tell the guards at Outer Bliss to surrender at the first sign of trouble,” I said.

“Surrender?” Thomer asked.

“We may be guests there ourselves by this time tomorrow,” I said.

“Do you think they know about Outer Bliss?” asked Thomer.

“Know about it? They’ve been in contact with Fahey all along. He’s a U.A. spy,” I said.

“That son of a bitch,” Thomer muttered as he raised the guards at Outer Bliss and gave them my orders. They accepted the order without argument.

When he got off the radio, Thomer asked, “What about the people in Norristown? Will they help us?”

“I wouldn’t count on them,” I said, thinking about Sarah Doctorow and her warning that she and her friends would choose the Unified Authority if it came down to a fight. I did not doubt the bitch. “The best we can hope for is that they will stay out of it.”

“Should I land at the airfield?” the pilot asked.

“No, head for the center of town.” We had launched with nothing but our rifles, but I knew where we could upgrade our equipment.

“Contact Fort Sebastian,” I told Thomer. “Tell Hollingsworth to mobilize his men and meet us at the armory.”

Had I suited up, I could have made the calls and monitored the progress myself. Now, I had to depend on Thomer and hope he did not have some sort of Fallzoud-flashback.

The flight seemed interminable. I looked out the windshield and saw an endless sea that stretched to the horizon in every direction. The sun set behind us. I did not see other transports, but we’d had to scatter to make it through the U.A. blockade. We would regroup once we reached town.

“How do you know Fahey is a spy?” Thomer asked.

I told him everything. I told him about Fahey’s affairs. I told him about Brocius appointing him to my chain of command and about Freeman. Thomer listened carefully. When I finished, he did not say a word; but I saw a new intensity in his eyes. The story had gotten through. For the first time since he began his Fallzoud addiction, I saw hate in Kelly Thomer’s eyes.

“How long before we reach Norristown?” I asked the pilot.

“Two hours, maybe ninety minutes if we’re lucky,” said the pilot.

Forty-five minutes passed, and Thomer reported that the Unifieds had landed outside Outer Bliss.

“Remind them to surrender,” I said.

“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” Thomer said. “They’ve already handed over their weapons to their prisoners. The Unifieds are airlifting the natural-borns back to their fleet.”

I checked the time. If we got lucky, we might reach Norristown in an hour, I told myself as I counted off the seconds in my head.

“General, I’m receiving a message for you from Fleet Command,” the pilot said. He switched on the cockpit speaker.

“Harris?” Warshaw was on the other end of the line.

I leaned in toward the radio, and asked, “What’s the situation up there?”

“I’ll tell you what the specking situation is. We’re getting our asses stomped, that’s the situation. Harris, they’re grinding us up. We’ve lost two carriers.”

“We’re on our way to Norristown,” I said. “I’m not sure how many transports got through, but …”

“Seventeen transports broke through,” Warshaw said.

“Seventeen?” I asked. I heard the number seventeen, but my mind didn’t accept it. He must have meant the number of transports we had lost. “How many transports did they hit?”

Warshaw’s long pause before answering me gave me a chill. “They shot down fifty-six transports before we were able to recall them. Their fighters got in the lane.”

“Fifty-six transports?” I asked, not believing what I’d heard.

“They destroyed fifty-six transports.”

The news splashed through me like a shot to the gut. I braced my arm on the panel above the radio and rested my forehead against the back of my forearm.

One moment everything seemed hopeless, then I remembered that our fleet still outnumbered theirs ten-to-one. Even with two fighter carriers down, we still had over thirty carriers. It was just a matter of time until our fleet overwhelmed theirs; the numbers were too far in our favor. “How long do we need to hold out until you can send more transports?”

“You’re not listening, Harris. There aren’t going to be any more transports. We’re fighting for our specking lives up here, and we are losing.”

Outside the cockpit, the sky had turned dark. Stars sparkled in the darkness, but there was no moon to break up the blackness around us. The ocean below us seemed to drop out and fade into a shadow.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

“No sign of them yet,” Hollingsworth told Thomer for the fourth time. We would meet up with Hollingsworth at the garage under the government buildings—the one the local militia had converted into an armory. Hollingsworth and his men were already there. I had Thomer check in with him every fifteen minutes in case the Unifieds got there before we did.

Hollingsworth gave Thomer the same response every time: “No sign of them yet.”

We also received constant reports from the fleet. They weren’t pretty. The U.A. had a new class of fighters that outmaneuvered our Tomcats and Phantoms. We’d lost badly when our fighters engaged one of their squadrons; then Thorne wedged several frigates into the lanes and turned the fight around.

“We can’t get past their specking shields,” Warshaw said, when I called in.

I would have told Thorne to cut us loose and run, but he had nowhere to go. The new ships were quicker and self-broadcasting. They were killing us in a fair fight, and we had no chance of outrunning them.

It occurred to me that we were flying unprotected, too. The U.A. Fleet didn’t need to send fighters into the atmosphere to destroy us. Their battleships could target us from space, but that did not seem to fit in with their plans.

Then the other shoe dropped. “Harris …? Harris, do you read me?” It was Warshaw. He sounded frantic as he said five words I did not want to hear. “You are on your own.”

Seconds later, we all saw the first flash. It was only a pinprick of light, brighter but no larger than the stars in the night sky. It winked enough to catch my attention and vanished.

“Oh, shit,” I whispered after the first flash. “Did you see that?”

Thomer had caught it. The pilot had missed it.

More flashes followed—a rapid series of second-long flashes all in the same spot. It looked like someone was flashing Morse code with a tiny light.

“What was that?” the pilot asked. I think he knew.

“Death,” I said.

Unable to believe that a force as powerful as the Scutum-Crux Fleet could be defeated, the pilot tried to raise the Kamehameha. There was no response.

“Should we tell them?” Thomer asked, looking back toward the kettle.

“No,” I said. Why discourage the men? They had a fight ahead of them either way. Better to send them in believing they have a chance.

The explosions continued for another thirty minutes. Watching the quick bursts of light and knowing each meant the deaths of hundreds of clones tortured me, then something worse happened. The explosions stopped, and I knew that the battle had ended. The peaceful sky meant that hundreds of thousands of clones were gone.

We did not speak to each other for the rest of the flight to Norristown. When he was not calling Hollingsworth, Thomer sat silently, staring out into the moonless night. We sat tensely—three men way out on a limb and waiting for the branch to break.

We would make our last stand in the ruins of Norristown, the city so many men had died to protect. As we flew over the southern edge of the city, we passed two- and three-story buildings that stuck out of the ground like giant grave markers in a cemetery gone to seed. Ground swellings below us marked the spots where buildings had collapsed. In my mind, each hill became a mass grave.

In the middle of this, the government building complex was a steel-and-glass anomaly. Its walls and walkways still intact, the government complex was a modern Camelot overlooking a decimated fiefdom. Hollingsworth had already mapped the grounds for tactical use. Following his instructions, we arranged our seventeen transports in strategic spots as we landed.

The transports weren’t much to look at, but then the military had its own school of landscaping—FOCPIG. Military men love their acronyms. In this case, FOCPIG stood for Fire, Observed, Concealed, Protected, Integrated, non-Geometric; in short, it is the process of preparing a field for battle. In the FOCPIG school of landscaping, aesthetics mattered less than utility. Placed strategically, those transports would create nearly impenetrable obstacles that the Unifieds would need to run around.

Judging by the first wave of transports the Unifieds had sent, they’d come light. Until they sent a second wave, they would not have tanks or gunships, just men, guns, and a handful of light-armor vehicles. That would play into our preparations. According to the feng shui of FOCPIG, our job was to route them so that we could have every advantage. Using transports as barriers, we would steer the enemy between the outstretched arms of the government center—a natural gauntlet. Once they entered, we would have the high-ground advantage.

Thomer and Hollingsworth remained with me as I surveyed the grounds. Their underlings swapped in and out as they gave orders. After a few minutes, Hollingsworth went down to the garage for an inspection.

By now, I had armor of my own, brand-new equipment that Hollingsworth’s men snagged out of the armory. The armor was stiff, and none of my preferences had been programmed into it, but it was better than isolation. When I got the chance, assuming I lived to get the chance, I would calibrate the ocular controls in the visor to read my particular eye movements. I could live with the glitches, the armor came with a commandLink, and that meant I could communicate with the men unassisted.

We walked along the roof of one of the wings of the building—“snipers’ row.” Hollingsworth and Thomer knew the drill. You placed snipers where they would have a good view of anyone passing by, then you waited. Often, you had to sit patiently letting viable targets march past in exchange for a clean shot at the men at the top of the food chain. Shoot the peons in the front, and you warn the bastards in the back that they’re walking into a trap. Sniping is a game of patience.

Not that we were going to take anybody by surprise. There was only one way into the armory, and we marked that path by placing our transports along it. If they wanted us, the U.A. invaders would need to walk our gauntlet. I wondered what they would do once they entered it.

In the predawn hours of an otherwise calm summer night, we moved along the top of the building. Locked up in my combat armor, I did not worry about the breeze or rain. My bodysuit kept me cool and dry.

The grounds around the government center must have been beautiful at one time. I saw shattered concrete beds that must once have been a network of ponds. A border of waist-high grass grew around the complex. A soft breeze combed through the grass.

“They’re coming, General,” Hollingsworth called up from the garage. He must have had some kind of mobile radar set up.

“Do you have a count?” I looked out toward the horizon and saw only the wide, open expanse over the broken city. Off in the distance, the three remaining skyscrapers that Doctorow used for dormitories, glittered.

“Thirty ships coming in from the south,” Hollingsworth said.

I had been looking east, but I now turned south, the direction from which we had just come. There were hills to the south. Even as I watched, dots appeared in the horizon. They looked no more significant than the sparks in the darkness.

“We’ve got company, boys. Get to your stations. Dig in. Get comfortable,” I called over the interLink.

“Think they’ll attack soon?” Hollingsworth asked.

“Not a chance. Not with only thirty transports in place. They’ll want more than three thousand troops before they attack,” I said. I assumed that, like our transports, their transports carried one hundred men.

I told Hollingsworth about the fleet, but we were not about to educate the rank and file until this conflict was over. He knew the Earth Fleet now controlled the skies, and he knew about the last message we’d heard from Warshaw. I did not tell him about the size of the enemy fleet. He did not need to know that the Unified Authority had defeated our 450-ship armada with a mere eighty ships.

“They’ll probably land on the other side of town and build up their forces,” I said. I knew how these operations worked. They would set up a camp and make us wait while their transports ferried in soldiers and equipment.

But I was wrong.

The transports did not stop at the southern edge of town. They flew over the suburbs. By the time they reached the ruins of downtown, the glow from their shields filled the sky. They were not the same antiquated design as the birds we flew in on, they had graceful wings and tapered shields. At about a half mile from our lines, the transports slowed and landed, lighting down like flies.

“Looks like they know we’re here,” Thomer said. He’d been so silent, I’d forgotten he was there.

Of course they know we’re here, they use the same specking interLink frequencies we do. They’re listening in on us, I thought to myself.

And they might not have even needed their damn technological advantage to find us because Sarah Doctorow and her pals would not think twice about ratting us out. And then there were the leaks—Perry Fahey and his friends in Outer Bliss would happily tell them everything they knew.

“Switch off your safeties, boys, we’re going live,” I said over an open frequency. The invaders probably heard me, as well. From here on out, I would keep my conversations short and switch frequencies between calls. I could not stop them from listening, but I didn’t want to make things too easy for them.

I remained on the roof with the snipers, Hollingsworth joined the grenadiers in the wings, and Thomer went down to the underground garage. Between the troops we had manning the buildings and the Marines we positioned in the garage, we had nearly five thousand men. Based on the number of their transports, I estimated their strength at three thousand.

Time ticked away slowly, seconds seemed to stretch themselves into minutes. I wondered what they were doing. Were they off-loading equipment? Were they playing with us, making us wait, to consider our situation? I kept expecting more transports to arrive, but the skies remained clear.

“How’s it hanging, Harris?” The message came over the commandLink, on a frequency reserved for officers. The equipment in my visor identified the caller: General Theodore Mooreland.

“You’re in charge of this one, Ted? They must think I’m real dangerous to send in a veteran like you.” I called him Ted. Why not? We were both generals.

“Nice of you to drill my men,” he said.

“War games are one of my specialties,” I said.

“So, is she here?” Mooreland asked. That meant he was keeping the locals out of the fight. He would not have needed to ask me about Ava if he had talked to Doctorow.

“Please, tell me you did not come all this way just to impress Ava.”

Mooreland laughed. “No, Harris, I came for you.”

“I’m flattered, Ted, really I am. But, um, I’m spoken for.”

“Speck you, clone.”

“Ted, I just told you, I’m not interested.”

“We were going to give you twelve months to prepare, did you know that? We were going to give you a year to get your men ready, but you blew it. You shouldn’t have attacked our battleships. Did you really think we’d look the other way?”

I did not say anything.

The sun started to rise in the east. Pockets of yellow, gold, and white appeared over a horizon of rolling desolation. The ruins of the city looked like a desert in the first light of the morning. If Mooreland was in command, the intruders had to be Marines. They would be wearing combat armor. They would use tactics like ours.

“You’re an interesting man, Harris. I’d love to continue this chat, but my men came to fight,” Mooreland said. “Are you ready?”

“Sporting of you to ask,” I said. “We’re as ready as we’re going to get.” I tried to sound confident, but I knew Mooreland meant business. He was showing me the cat-bird courtesy of a commander who knows he owns the field. But how could he be so confident with only three thousand men? I wondered what I did not know.

“Well, good luck, Harris,” Mooreland said. He signed off.

I stood there on the roof of that enormous government complex, as insecure as an ancient ruler waiting for the Huns to pillage his city.

“Why haven’t they attacked yet?” Thomer’s question brought me out of my thoughts.

“Courtesy,” I said. “They were giving us a moment to say our prayers.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

Somebody else noticed the lights before me. Watching the world through my night-for-day lenses, I stared right at and through the scene without noticing the subtle change in luminescence. One of Thomer’s snipers noticed, however.

The sniper alerted Thomer, and Thomer told me.

“There’s light coming from the enemy camp, sir.”

“Light?” I asked.

I switched to tactical view. At first, I thought they had fired up the shields on their transports. Patches of golden glow lit up the air. “What is that?” I asked, in a whisper directed at myself, but Thomer picked it up over the interLink and answered.

“It looks like they have the shields up on their transports,” he said.

“The light isn’t coming from the transports.” I could see that much. Using my telescopic lenses, I zoomed in on the glow. I could not see what the light was coming from, but it wasn’t the transports. I had a clear view of the tops of several U.A. transports, and their shields were down.

“Oh, shit,” I said.

“Sir?” Thomer asked.

Thank God for the commandLink, it enabled me to bring Hollingsworth in on the conversation. He was in the garage, blind to the world above him. Using my Link, I showed Hollingsworth and Thomer what I saw.

“What is that?” Hollingsworth asked.

“Shields,” I said.

Thomer started to say something, but I interrupted him.

“The shields aren’t on the transports,” I said. I shifted my focus to show the sleeping birds.

“Then what are they shielding?” Hollingsworth asked.

“Shielded armor,” I said.

The patch of glowing light moved as the first of Mooreland’s Marines began their march into battle.

“Hang on,” I said. I ripped off my helmet and picked up a sniper rifle. The other snipers had had enough time to program their scopes to their armor so that they could look through their visors and aim their rifles. Since the visor in this suit was not yet calibrated, I had to aim the old-fashioned way. I pressed the scope against my eye and homed in on the front echelon.

We had built our strategy around waiting for Mooreland to meander into our trap, but tactics be damned. If we were about to fight men in shielded armor, the rules had just changed.

Looking through the scope, I picked out a man and studied him. His armor looked a lot like mine—the same helmet, the same chest plates and shoulder pads. It appeared to be a rich, dark brown in color, but that might have been an optical effect. Viewed through the golden glow of the shields that shone from the plating, the dark green of my armor would probably appear brown.

I steadied my rifle against my shoulder, aimed at the Marine’s head, and pulled the trigger. The crack of my rifle was no louder than the sound of a man giving a single, hard clap of his hands, but it echoed. My armor absorbed the recoil of the rifle so that I felt only the slightest nudge against my shoulder. Eight hundred yards away, my bullet had about as much impact on the new Marine as a sparrow might have flying into a skyscraper.

The Marine saw or felt the bullet, or perhaps his equipment reported the shot. The man pointed to the spot where the bullet hit. I imagined him laughing as he reported the wasted attack to his platoon sergeant.

I put down my rifle and slung my helmet over my head. “Rifles are no good,” I told Thomer and Hollingsworth.

Hollingsworth answered first. “Speck!” Thomer gave a similar response.

“Let me try one more shot,” I said.

Aiming with the telescopic lenses in my visor, I chose another target, aimed at his helmet, and fired. My first shot went wide. The next three shots hit. The bullets showed only as momentary white flashes against the golden glow of the man’s shields. I fired four more shots, hitting the son of a bitch in the chest, the stomach, the crotch, and the knee.

I had a sinking feeling of defeat as I replaced my helmet. We had signed up for a fight we would not win. Even as I thought this, my combat reflex started, filling me with confidence, clearing self-doubt from my thoughts, and turning fear into comfort. I smiled a ghoulish smile as I realized just how little the terms “impregnable” and “invincible” had in common.

“Hard on the outside, soft on the inside,” I said to myself. Then, I opened a channel to Thomer, and said, “General, withdraw your snipers and reposition them in the top two floors of the garage.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Thomer said.

“And Thomer, tell them to leave their sniper rifles here. We’re sticking with particle beams and rocket launchers from here on out.”

“But …Sir, the garage could cave in on us,” Thomer said.

“I certainly hope so,” I said, knowing that what I had in mind was the military equivalent of threading a needle.

Thomer figured out what I had in mind immediately. He said, “You evil son of a bitch,” sounding more like the old Thomer than he had since New Copenhagen.

“But we’ll be buried,” Hollingsworth said.

“Not if we slip out the back door,” I said.

“The train station,” Hollingsworth said. He should have remembered it; he was the one who helped Doctorow’s men drag explosives through the tunnel. “If you can’t beat them, bury them. I specking love it.”

“You just make sure your men do a good job rigging the garage,” I said. “I don’t want Mooreland digging himself out.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Hollingsworth said. “It’s going to take a few minutes.”

“We’ll buy you whatever time we can,” I said. “You got that, Thomer?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thomer, have your men rig the buildings to blow on their way down. That goes double for any stairs and elevators that lead into the garage.”

“Yes, sir,” said Thomer.

“And remember, keep your Link chatter short. You never know who might be listening,” I said.

I doubted there were any demolitions experts stationed at Fort Sebastian. Trained demolitions men could make buildings blow so precisely that they imploded in on themselves, folding in on themselves like origami figures. Our guys did not have that kind of skill, but that would not stop us from achieving our objectives. We were Marines—when we lacked the skill, we compensated for with sheer will and a large supply of explosives. The garage wouldn’t exactly implode, but it would sure as hell come down. We just needed to make sure that it caved in from the top down and that we made it to the train tunnels before the world came down around us. This was war—nobody would give us extra points for neatness.

Thomer ordered his snipers to abandon their rifles and report to the first floor of the garage. By the time Mooreland’s men entered sniper range, Thomer no longer had anyone on the roof to shoot them. I remained on the roof a moment longer to observe the enemy.

The shine of their shields gave Mooreland’s men a god-like appearance in the frail dawn light. Had their aura shone brighter, the light from the various suits would have meshed; instead, each man had his own, personal, tea-colored glow.

As they approached, they broke into smaller formations. A couple of companies tried to fan out and flank the brigade, but that failed. Hollingsworth’s FOCPIG preparations funneled them back. If they meant to chase us down into the armory, they would need to pass through two bottlenecks—the first created by our transports and the second by the entrance to the underground garage.

The last man on the roof, I took a final look at the high-velocity sniper rifles we’d abandoned in our wake. They lay spread across the concrete like sticks dropped from a bundle. In a fair fight, we might have been able to eliminate Mooreland’s entire regiment with those rifles. Letting the door close behind me as I started down the stairs, I tried to remember the last time I saw a fair fight and came up dry.

“Thomer, make sure your men know this is the foreplay, not the sex,” I said over a new frequency, as I left the stairwell and joined my grenadiers.

The third floor of the building looked like a breezeway. In preparation for the fight, we had knocked out the windows. The wind howled as it blew through broken casings. Hundreds of men in combat armor knelt along the wall, rocket tubes in hand. We had the high-ground advantage, nearly bulletproof cover, numerical superiority, and possibly even the element of surprise; and still, we could not afford to wage the war from this spot, not against an enemy dressed in shielded armor. Unless we found a way through their shields, Mooreland’s men would make our cover cave in around us.

For this mission, my grenadiers had orders to fire a few shots and retreat to the garage. If everything went according to plan, these men would lead the way into the train station. That was, if everything went according to plan. In the heat of battle, entropy dissolves plans into chaos, and Marines sometimes forget their orders. Some become heroes, lingering to fire one final round, when they have been told to pull back. Others lose their nerve and abandon their posts.

Looking over my troops, it occurred to me that I might be going to the well one time too many. By the time we finished this battle, I would have pushed the same damn tactic three times: fighting the Avatari; destroying the battleships that followed us into the Mogat Fleet; and now, I was using it against the Unified Authority Marines. Coaxing a dangerous enemy into an ambush is a fine tactic, and there was no way these guys could know that we had used it on the Avatari and the battleships, but overused tactics have a way of coming apart on their own.

If I made it out of this, I told myself, I would ditch Nietzsche and start brushing up on military strategy. If I made it out of this alive, I would be smarter in the future.

“That which did not destroy me would make me stronger,” I said to myself, citing the battlefield wisdom of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Mooreland’s scouts stepped into the kill zone between the wings of the government buildings. The first of the four men entered the zone slowly, showing no more confidence than a mouse leaving its hole. The rest of his fire team followed.

These were the men on point, the sacrifices. They stepped onto a walkway, stopped, and examined the buildings. One of them pointed to the broken window casings. They knew what we had planned.

“Hold your fire,” I said over the interLink.

“Hold your fire. Hold your fire,” Thomer told his men. He crouched below a broken window, his first grenade launcher out and ready to fire. “Those are just the scouts. Save it for the ranks.”

Waiting for Mooreland, peering over a casing, I got a close look at the new armor. The shielding glowed no brighter than a candle, but it covered the entire suit in a single continuous sheen.

“Once the shooting starts, fire one shot, and leave,” I whispered over an open frequency. “One shot, no heroics.” Mooreland might well have been listening. I didn’t care. The information would do him no good.

Down in the kill zone, Mooreland’s scouts timidly made their way toward the two outstretched wings of the building. They came within a hundred feet of the entrance and stopped to wait for the rest of the brigade to catch up.

The point men moved forward until they were right below me. I peered over the windowsill and watched them. To me, they looked like a team of confused spirits haunting the bat tleground before the war even began.

Something caught my eye—their weapons were inside their shields, built into their armor. Inch-wide barrels ran along the outsides of their arms, ending just shy of the fingers on their gloves. The barrels did not look wide enough for bullets. The bastards were probably packing fléchettes, the same deadly needles we used in our S9 stealth weapons.

Dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of men appeared at the head of the buildings. They did not walk right into our gauntlet. They waited, surveying the area, filling our view with glow and bodies. One minute passed, then another. They had to know where we were hiding, but they did not fire blindly to flush us out. Watching them mass, I considered beginning our evacuation. Just as I started to issue the command, Mooreland ordered his men in.

The space between the buildings was twice the length of a football field and just as wide. Mooreland could have fit three thousand men in that space, but it might have been tight. His first wave broke into a wedge formation, facing out, arms up so they could return fire when we emerged from our painfully obvious hiding place.

“Fire!” Thomer yelled. “Shoot and run. Shoot and run. Shoot and run!”

Along the long hall, men jumped to their feet, fired a single rocket into the courtyard, tossed their empty launcher tubes aside, and ran for the stairs. The rockets hissed and flashed out of their tubes, leaving a thin smoke trail behind them.

On the ground below, the glow of the shields faded in a storm of smoke and explosions. The blasts created a strobe-light effect. In the start-and-stop motion of an ancient movie, Marines fired weapons, ran along the hall, and vanished down stairwells. Flash, five men ran crouched along the inner wall of the corridor. Flash, the first reached the door to a stairwell and wrenched it open. Flash, the third man in the line threw his hands over his head as the first two disappeared through the door. Flash, tiny holes and fine drops of blood appeared on the wall as the man crumpled to the floor. Flash, the fourth and fifth men in the line jumped over the body and disappeared down the stairs.

Sharp as needles and harder than steel, the fléchettes pierced combat armor, leaving a pinprick entrance hole on one side and a pinprick exit hole on the other. The lethal darts bored into the concrete walls as if they were made of cloth. They burrowed into the ceiling above us, vanishing into soft tiles and shattering light fixtures.

In the courtyard, our rockets were about as effective as a strong wind. The blasts threw Mooreland’s Marines off their feet and cast them aside like toys, but their shielded armor protected them from shrapnel.

“We can’t hurt the speckers!” somebody called on an open line.

“Shoot and run! Shoot and run! Shoot and run!” Thomer shouted, as he moved up and down the hall, his voice as dry as desert sand.

Men were dying. I watched one of my men stand, aim, and fall before he could fire; fléchette holes dotted in his helmet, his chest plates, and his shoulder plates. He fell on his back, and thin streams of blood leaked out of the holes. The man next to him sprang for the window, tripped over the body, and was shot in the head at least five times before he could steady himself.

I prepared to fire my first rocket. Taking a deep breath, I slid up to the edge of the casing, aimed the launcher into the crowd, and pulled the trigger. I did not wait to see what I hit. The moment I fired, I dropped down to safety. Dozens of fléchettes struck the spot from which I had fired. By the time they hit, I had already pulled my second rocket launcher and moved to a new spot.

As I lay on the floor, I looked across the darkened hall. Dead men in armor lay in odd poses along the floor. The waist-high window casing protected us as long as we stayed down waiting to shoot, but they left our heads and chests unprotected when we stood to fire. I saw men with shattered visors and men with holes in their helmets, men with blood leaking from so many holes in their armor that they looked like they were covered in sweat.

I climbed to my knees, peered out from behind the casing, and fired my second rocket.

“Harris, where are you?” It was Hollingsworth.

“I’m still in the building,” I said.

“You need to get out of there, sir. If we don’t blow those charges now, the Unifieds are going to enter the building,” Hollingsworth said. He was polite, respectful, a nice guy. In a deferential way, he had just told me to get my ass out of the building.

Looking around the hall, I realized I was the last man there. In the time it took me to fire my second shot, everyone else had left or died. As I crawled toward the stairs, I saw a man rolling on the floor. He held an armored hand against his left shoulder as he rolled from side to side. My visor identified him as Corporal James Mattock.

“Mattock,” I said on an open frequency, “we need to get out of here.” I saw three separate streams of blood running down his arm. “Mattock,” I repeated.

He did not answer. He just lay there, writhing like a dying snake. I reached a hand under his arm and pulled him with me. When we reached the stairs, I heaved him over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry. The Unified Authority did not necessarily make the fléchettes the new Marines used out of the same depleted uranium we used in our stealth weapons. It occurred to me that the uranium they used could even be enriched.

If Mooreland’s men were using hot uranium, the damage to his shoulder would be the least of Mattock’s problems. Shooting heavily radioactive materials through your enemies was a good way to make sure they died no matter where you hit them.

Mattock did not sag like a dying man; he rolled and twisted and tried to put a hand over his wound. Holding him tight so that he would not roll out of my grip, I started down the stairs. Along the walls, I saw the charges Thomer’s men left behind. Wires wound around the corners, leading from one bundle of explosives to the next.

“Are you clear, General?” Hollingsworth asked.

“Still on the stairs.”

“You better hurry, sir. They’re already entering the garage.”

I clattered down the stairs as quickly as I could with Mattock over my shoulder. Jumping a couple of stairs, I overshot a landing and slammed into the wall. Somewhere along the line, Mattock’s hand dropped from his wound and he hung limp and lifeless along my back. Hating the situation and loathing myself for doing what I had to do, I dropped the inert body and ran.

Skipping the top floor of the garage, where the fighting had already begun, I sprinted down to the second floor. “Clear!” I yelled, as I crashed out of the stairwell, slamming the door behind me.

The explosion was a classic example of Marine Corps overkill. The blast caved in the stairwell and the surrounding walls. The door I had just slammed closed came flying out of its jamb like a cork from a champagne bottle.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

Doctorow and his men had enough weapons on the second level of the garage to launch a minor world war. Racks of M27s and particle beam cannons lined two of the walls. Crates of grenades stood in stacks that reached the ceiling. Preparing to fight the Avatari, the Unified Authority had sent three million men with enough munitions to wage a prolonged war. Now, only their surplus gear survived.

Hollingsworth’s men rigged charges around the tops of the pillars. Using my night-for-day lenses to look into the shadows, I spotted the wires, but the emergency lights were bright enough to keep my visor switched to tactical lenses. Without night-for-day vision illuminating the shadows, the charges were invisible.

The garage rang with the echoes of gunfire and explosions. One floor above me, war had gone full scale. Glare and shadows flashed on the wall along the ramp out. I picked up battle chatter on every frequency as I scanned the interLink.

I contacted Hollingsworth and told him to begin evacuating the garage. I contacted Thomer and told him to retreat.

Marines started backing down the ramp in a trickle. These were the men at the back of the battle, men who might not have fired a single shot. They ran down quickly, hid as best they could, and turned to cover the ramp. They hid behind pillars and corners. A few fools hid behind crates of grenades; the wooden sides of the crates would offer little protection against fléchettes.

I ran to the side of the ramp and pulled out my particle beam pistol. The little gun would probably have no more effect against shielded armor than an M27, but I had to try.

More of my men retreated down the ramp, now in a steady stream. Some men backpedaled, firing up at the enemy as they came. Some ran and dived for cover. From my hiding place, I watched as swarms of fléchettes turned men into mist. Men hit while running for cover fell and slid along the floor. Men hit while returning fire collapsed where they stood. A few toppled over the side of the ramp.

One man fell in front of me. He was gut-shot, but not dead. He landed on his back on the concrete, his hand over the lower part of his stomach. He squirmed, his movements getting slower and weaker. I wanted to save him, but I couldn’t. I wanted to kill him and put him out of his misery, but I could not bring myself to do that, either. A few moments passed and his squirming stopped. Blood trickled from holes in his armor.

My men continued their retreat. The ramp was wide and open, offering no chance of cover or concealment. When I peered over the edge, I saw more of my men falling than reaching the bottom. The screams and sounds of panic I heard over the interLink left me numb.

I opened up a channel to Thomer and yelled, “Get them moving, Thomer. Get them down to the third floor! Get them into the tunnels. They’re dying up here!”

The combat reflex was in such full flow in my veins, it was almost joyous. I watched men retreating past me. They no longer stopped to fight. Sprinting across the concrete, they hit the bottom of the ramp, rounded the corner, and continued deeper into the garage.

One man came limping past me. He had streams of blood pouring out of three holes in his leg, but he kept going. In another minute, poisons from the fléchettes would kill him, but the man kept going.

Time had become as transparent as glass to me now. Seconds had no meaning as I prepared to fight and kill.

More of my men backed down the ramp, firing particle beams up as they went. As they walked past me, three men hiding along the base of ramp opened launched grenades.

“Get them out of here!” I called to Thomer.

“Fall back,” Thomer gave the order even before I finished. The glow of shielded armor spilled over the ramp as Mooreland’s men started down. I waited, holding my particle beam pistol ready.

Fléchettes flitted through the air, scratching chips from the concrete walls and pillars, drilling through crates and racks of weapons, forcing men from positions they had already been ordered to abandon. The tiny metal darts drilled into walls. Some banked off the concrete, making the tinkling noise of breaking glass as they dropped on to the ground. Over my head, an exposed pipe burst and light bulbs shattered. More of my men fell as they retreated.

Wanting to see what a particle beam would do at close range, I shot out of my hiding place, stood along the side of the ramp, pressed my pistol right up against the knee of an advancing U.A. Marine, and fired. The sparkling green beam struck his shielded armor and disappeared. The man did not even flinch.

And then I felt pain, a sharp and brilliant jolt. My fingers flew open. My hand went numb and I dropped my pistol. There was a moment of dead silence in my head. Then, I felt the fire in my skin. When I drew back my hand, I saw holes in my armor. Blood trickled out over my forearm and palm. I had been shot twice.

First, I felt dizzy and then confused. The warmth of my combat reflex comforted me for a moment and then it faded.

The shielded Marines reached the bottom of the ramp. Having seen the rest of my Marines in retreat, they must have expected to find the level empty. In the moment it took them to spot me, I dived behind a stack of crates and tried to roll to safety. Fléchettes ripped through the air around me. Crates shattered in a storm of dust, darts, and splinters.

“Harris, where are you?” Thomer asked.

“I’m coming,” I said, the words slow as they rolled from my lips. “I’m on the second …”

The blood from my hand and arm did not stain my armor; it beaded and rolled across the slick, dark plating the way raindrops roll down a well-waxed car. My forearm burned, my hand was numb. My injured arm dragged as if it had fallen asleep. I tried to make a fist with my right hand as I used my left to crawl toward the next ramp down. I could not even make a fist, my fingers would not cooperate.

So many fléchettes hit the box beside me that the wood disintegrated and grenades rolled to the floor. I tried to pick one up with my right hand and could not close my fingers around it. I picked it up with my left and realized I would need my injured right hand to pull the pin.

“Are you hit?” Thomer asked.

“My arm,” I said. The slurred voice in my helmet did not sound familiar to me. It sounded as if it came from a drunk man.

Bringing myself up in a sitting position, I slumped across the ledge overlooking the ramp to the next floor down. There was a ten-foot drop. I managed to thread my right pointer finger through the loop of the grenade pin, and held my right arm steady as I pulled the grenade away with my left hand. As the pin broke free, I saw men in glowing, shielded armor coming around the corner. The bastards looked like angels in the darkness. My head filled with mist and cobwebs, I bowled the grenade in their direction.

The bastards fired back at me. Fléchettes hit the rail around me, glancing off the metal in a dance of sparks and chips. One dart struck me in the leg as I swung it under the rail and rolled over the ledge. The grenade exploded. I did not see what it did to the bastards. I dropped ten feet to the concrete below, landing on my back.

I felt pain. My thoughts were disjointed. The fall must have knocked the air out of my lungs. I had to fight to breathe. My chest felt crushed.

“You’re not the toughest man in the Marines, just the luckiest,” Ava had told me the last time that I saw her. I did not feel so lucky now. When I tried to get up, my body ignored me.

I kept expecting the combat reflex to revive me, but it didn’t. I felt cold and powerless, the weight of my body holding me down. Wondering if it was shock or radiation, I managed to roll onto my left side. I tried to push myself up with no success.

The world seemed to have left me behind. I thought I heard men fighting all around me, but the gunfire and explosions seemed far away. I reminded myself that I was in a garage, but my thoughts had become a slippery stream of images that never quite came into focus.

“I’ve got you, Harris,” somebody said. Whoever had grabbed me did not give me a chance to stand up on my own. He pulled me along the ground first, and then threw me in the air.

I could feel knots twisting in my stomach. I was upside down, the blood rushing to my head.

“Harris, I’m getting you out,” the voice said. A virtual dog tag showed in my visor, but I could not focus my eyes sufficiently to read it.

Slung over the man’s shoulder, I could barely breathe. My head cleared for a moment, then I vomited. You can drown in your own vomit, I thought. Warm liquid ran into my nostrils and into my eyes.

I tried to remove my helmet, but my arms would not cooperate. They hung like ropes as I wrestled with the acrid-sawdust taste of bile in my throat.

The man carrying me came to a stop. Moving slowly, he lowered me onto my back. A moment later, my helmet came off. I tried to stand up, but my body ignored me. The world was dark and cold around me. Nobody spoke.

The last thing I remembered was an explosion, a thunderous, pulverizing sound followed by a rush of smoke and grit that choked out the last of my breath.

“Did we get them?” I asked.

Nobody answered, as the remaining shreds of my consciousness spun into nothing.