The Clone Empire

CHAPTER ONE

Once Lieutenant Mars’s engineers broke through to the third level of the underground garage, the work went quickly. They found hundreds of bodies, many of which were as neatly preserved as eggs in a carton. The engineers filled their body quota and radioed Mars to say they had found guns, jeeps, and ammunition.

“They’ve found a mother lode of munitions,” Mars told me.

“Leave it,” I said.

“Are you sure you want to do that, sir?” Mars asked.

I looked back at Ellery Doctorow and his militia lined up along the fence. The bastards didn’t trust us, and I didn’t blame them. “Leave it,” I repeated. “I gave them my word.”

Cheerful as ever, Mars said, “Yes, sir,” and told his men to exit the underground garage and seal it behind them. “We don’t want to tempt the locals,” he said. The engineers said something, I could not hear what, and he said, “It’s the golden rule. Yeah …You know, ‘Arm thy neighbor as thyself.’ We don’t get the weapons, and neither do they.”

Mars must have felt my eyes upon him. He looked at me and flashed an innocent smile.

It took the engineers about an hour to carry the last of the bodies out, set the charges, and clear the pit. They made sure no one lingered too close to the hole, then they sealed the tunnels they had dug, sending a thirty-foot plume of dust into the air.

Seeing that our work was done and that we had not exhumed any weapons, Doctorow and his militia returned to their homes.

Hollingsworth joined Mars and me as we watched Doctorow and company load into their trucks and cars. “Specking antisynthetic pricks,” Hollingsworth muttered. Colonel Philo Hollingsworth was a clone. Scott Mars was a clone. Every man under my command was cloned, and none of them knew it. They were programmed to think they were natural-born.

“He’s not so bad,” I told Hollingsworth. “Now his wife …”

Sarah Doctorow was an antisynthetic bitch; but Doctorow didn’t share her prejudice. She saw no difference between clones and robots. He, on the other hand, did not care whether people came from a fallopian tube or a test tube.

Mars excused himself and went to help his engineers load the stiffs onto their truck. A few minutes later, Hollingsworth and I climbed into our jeep and headed back to Fort Sebastian, locking the security fence behind us. We did not electrify the fence, but we placed sensors around it to make sure no one climbed it or cut their way through.

“So what do you think they will call the war?” I asked Hollingsworth, as we pulled onto the street leading through the ruins of Norristown.

“Who are you talking about?” Hollingsworth asked.

“You know, a hundred years from now. What do you think people will call the war?”

“I don’t think anyone will remember it ever happened,” he said.

“Sure they will. Maybe they’ll call it a revolutionary war,” I said. “Isn’t it a revolutionary war when you fight for independence?”

That was an exaggeration. In truth, we were already quasi-independent. Having decided to eliminate its clone military program, the Pentagon marooned us on its fifteen abandoned fleets. The goal was to use us for military exercises as they developed newer and more powerful ships.

“It wasn’t a revolution,” Hollingsworth said. “It’s not a revolution unless you win.”

“Well, okay, maybe we didn’t win, but neither did they. I don’t see any Unified Authority guard towers. Do you?” I asked, ignoring the obvious.

“We got crushed. We didn’t win shit. They crushed us,” Hollingsworth said, stating the obvious, which I had tried to ignore.

“Okay, so we didn’t exactly win, but we didn’t totally lose. Maybe that makes it a civil war,” I said. “Like the American Civil War.”

Hollingsworth shook his head. “It wasn’t a civil war, either, sir. It wasn’t important enough to be a civil war. I bet the local media on Earth didn’t even report the battle.”

“They reported it. They lost a decorated war hero, they didn’t have any choice,” I said. “People notice when someone like Ted Mooreland goes missing.” Mooreland was a general in the Unified Authority Marines. He had led the ground assault that ended in the underground garage.

“They’ll just announce that he died in a training exercise,” Hollingsworth said.

“You’re probably right,” I agreed.

“Damn right they’ll say that,” Hollingsworth went on. “That’s all this was to them, just a training exercise. It wasn’t a civil war, and it sure as hell wasn’t a revolutionary war.”

“Maybe it was a coup,” I said, feeling a little brighter now that I had found a word to describe our insignificant revolt.

Hollingsworth shook his head, and said, “Don’t flatter yourself. A year from now, no one remembers it.”

“Oh, they’ll remember it,” I said. “The Unified Authority lost twenty-three ships. They lost three fighter carriers, five battleships, and three thousand Marines. Damn straight they’ll remember it. Anytime the Navy loses three fighter carriers, it’s a big deal.”

Hollingsworth thought about this and gave ground. “A big battle, but a minor war.”

“But it was a war,” I said.

“Okay, so it was a war, and the war is over, sir. Unless they come back to finish us, your war is dead.”

We drove across the newly restored viaduct that led along the southern outskirts of Norristown. Like seedlings springing up in the wake of a volcanic eruption, new buildings had begun to appear around the city.

“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “Only time will tell.”

“Maybe I’m right about what?” Hollingsworth asked, sounding surprised.

“About the war being on hold,” I said.

“I didn’t say it was on hold; I said it was dead.”

I could not fault Hollingsworth for his pessimistic attitude. Based on the information he had at hand, our chances of winning a war with the Unified Authority seemed bleak. I had more information than he did, but now was not the time to discuss it. I needed to get back to Fort Sebastian to clean up. I had dinner plans that night, and I wanted to look my best.

CHAPTER TWO

Ava, my significant other/girlfriend, and I ate dinner with Ellery Doctorow and his wife every month. It was never a friendly occasion. Doctorow considered me and my Marines a relic of Unified Authority intervention and wanted us to leave. As far as he and everyone else knew, we were landlocked on his planet. We couldn’t very well fly off into space in a fleet of short-range transports, so he tolerated our settling into the Army base on the east side of town.

“Ellery tells me you want to attack Earth,” said Sarah Doctorow, the Right Reverend’s clone-hating wife.

“Wayson, are you planning attacks without telling me?” Ava pretended her feelings were hurt.

Sarah was Ellery Doctorow’s common-law wife. Ava was more like my fiancée than my wife. I got the better deal.

Wearing an ivy-colored dress, Sarah Doctorow looked like a turtle—tiny flesh-colored limbs and head, massive green shell in the middle. Her breasts hung like watermelons, and her third chin sagged so far down her neck, it could have hidden an Adam’s apple.

She looked over at Ava, gave her a warm smile, and said, “You need to keep a close eye on that man of yours. He’s planning a war behind your back.”

Ava answered Sarah in kind, smiling graciously, and saying, “That’s my Wayson.”

Ava had once been the hottest actress in Hollywood. She was a dark-haired, green-eyed goddess who might have been remembered among Hollywood’s greatest legends had word not gotten out that she had inherited her name and her DNA from an ancient actress.

U.A. society turned its back on Ava along with the rest of its synthetic progeny. About the same time that the gossip columnists began flogging Ava, the Joint Chiefs of Staff decided to jettison their clones. They sent us to the farthest reaches of the galaxy; and Ava Gardner, the fallen star, hitched a ride with us.

Sarah loathed Ava because she was a clone. Ava detested Sarah because Doctorow’s wife was a bigot and a bitch. Both women put on a great show. The first time I saw them chatting, I thought they liked each other.

“What happened to your cane?” Doctorow asked, as our better halves conversed.

“I think I’ve outgrown it,” I said.

“Congratulations on your remarkable recovery,” Doctorow said. “Your doctor gave you even chances of survival two months ago, now you’re walking around without a cane.” He lifted his wineglass for a toast. “To what should we attribute your amazing recovery? Good genes, I suppose?”

Doctorow had a talent for delivering insults as backhanded compliments. I was a Liberator, a class of clone that had been discontinued because of a tendency toward uncontrollable violence. The reason I survived was because my Liberator physiology included a special gland that pumped testosterone and adrenaline into my system to help Liberators adjust to battle. They called that feat of anatomical engineering a “combat reflex.”

The new Unified Authority Marines used fléchettes instead of bullets. The fléchettes were no larger than a sewing needle, but they were coated with a neurotoxin that would have killed me had my combat reflex not gone into overdrive. Strained but not destroyed, the gland went dormant during my recovery period. I was still weak but getting stronger.

Pretending not to notice the insult, I smiled and drank my wine.

Ellery Doctorow did not like me or my Marines, but that did not stop him from making a toast with wine we had provided him. The peas and the canned chicken his wife served for dinner all came compliments of the military he so despised.

The Avatari left Terraneau so battered that the people did not have enough food to feed themselves. Fortunately, the Unifieds lost a lot of ships when they attacked us; we might have starved if they hadn’t come to kill us. Rummaging on the derelict warships floating above the atmosphere, my men found enough food to feed the planet while my Corps of Engineers built farms.

“I even went jogging this morning,” I said. “Nothing too ambitious, just a couple of miles.” Actually, I’d jogged a full ten miles, but Doctorow did not need to know that.

“Jogging? I’m glad to hear it,” he said through a stiff grin that made him look anything but happy. “Now that you are up and around, have you put any thought into finding a new location for your base? I think it’s high time you moved.”

“A new location,” I said. “Washington, D.C., comes to mind.”

He laughed.

I leaned over the table, my eyes locked on Doctorow’s, and said in a hushed voice as if confiding my deepest personal secrets, “I know what happened to my fleet.”

Thinking that I meant I had found the wreckage of the missing ships, he asked, “How far did they get?”

“They made it,” I said. “They survived.”

The room had gone quiet. Ava and Sarah stared at me. I had not thought they would hear me, but I didn’t mind.

“What do you mean they made it?” asked Doctorow.

“They escaped. They’re fine,” I said, both bluffing and telling the truth. I did not know whether or not they were “fine,” but I did know how they had escaped.

CHAPTER THREE

Ava saw through me. She always saw through me. Fortunately for me, she was an actress by trade. She knew when to hide her emotions, and how.

The tone of the evening changed after I made my announcement. Thrilled with the idea that my Marines might actually leave his planet, Ellery Doctorow wanted details. “Where did they go?”

“That’s classified,” I said.

“How soon will they return?”

“Classified.”

“But you’re in contact with them? You’re making plans to leave?”

“Not in the foreseeable future,” I said.

His silence was smothering. He shook his head to show disappointment.

Taking advantage of the silence, Sarah Doctorow butted into the conversation. “Oh, but, General, you can’t possibly attack Earth from Terraneau, it’s too far away. Wouldn’t that weaken your attack?” She didn’t care about my welfare, of course. That was just camouflage.

“Where do you suggest I launch from?” I asked her.

Her husband answered, “Anywhere but here.”

“We don’t have anyplace else,” I said, though I did not know if that was accurate.

“Attack from wherever your fleet disappeared to. Where did you say they went?” he asked.

“I didn’t,” I said.

“You brought the Earth Fleet down on us once already. I won’t allow you to do that again.”

I wondered how he planned to stop me but did not ask. I also wondered why I tolerated the pontificating old windbag. Hell, I didn’t just put up with him, I kowtowed to him. I let him push me around. Somewhere in my mind, I accepted the notion that I was just a guest on Terraneau. This was not my home. Me and my Marines, we were here for a visit, and we could not wait to get away. Doctorow, he was here forever, and for that reason I gave him a little more authority than I normally would have.

Sarah took a different tack. “That is so brave,” she raved. “They nearly annihilated you just two months ago, and you’re already preparing to fight them again.” She touched a hand to her voluminous bosoms as if genuinely moved.

Ava did not join in the discussion. She listened to Ellery and Sarah but kept her eyes on me. No emotion showed on her face.

And that was how the night ended—Doctorow angling to get my Marines off his planet, his wife praising me for my self-destructive spirit, and Ava watching in silence.

Seeing that I would not give out any more specifics, Doctorow finished his glass of wine, and announced, “It’s getting late, perhaps we should call an end to the evening.”

Sarah yawned, placing a hand as thick as a catcher’s mitt before her mouth but making no effort to stifle the sound. Then she stood, started gathering dirty plates, paused to look at Ava, and said, “It’s so nice to see you again.”

“At least let me help clear the table,” Ava offered.

As they went through the monthly ritual of Ava’s offering to help with the dishes and Sarah’s declining, Ellery Doctorow led me toward the door. “How much do you really know?” he asked in a whisper.

“I know they got away, and I know how,” I said.

“Do you have any way of reaching them?”

“Maybe,” was all I told him, then Ava came to join us, and it was time to leave. She kissed Doctorow on the cheek and thanked him for dinner. She and Sarah hugged as if they were sisters, then we said our final good-byes.

Had Ava and I held hands, hypothermia might have set in, her vibe was so cold. She did not speak. When I opened the door for her, she slid into her seat without a word.

“You’re awfully quiet,” I said as I slipped behind the wheel.

She did not respond.

I started the engine and pulled away. Both Ava and the Doctorows lived in a northern suburb of Norristown, a wealthy community that had somehow gone unscathed during the Avatari invasion. All of the houses still stood. Once my engineers had restored the power and water, the residents began taking care of their yards, and the streets returned to their prewar elegance.

We drove the short distance to Ava’s house in silence. Then, as I parked, she finally asked, “When were you going to tell me?”

She climbed out of the car before I could answer.

Ava’s house was not as big or nice as the Doctorows’, but it wasn’t bad—a single-story flat with a rock garden in the front and a backyard the size of a postage stamp. She also had two bedrooms, both of which would end up occupied for the rest of the night if I did not find a way to make amends.

“I was going to tell you,” I said, as she unlocked the front door.

“Are they back?” she asked.

“Is who back?” I asked.

Ava was not the kind of gal who holds still for a fight. She removed her shoes and tucked them into the closet as she entered the house. Pulling off her right earring, she turned to me, and asked, “The ships. Your missing ships. Are they back?”

I stood motionless, watching her as she headed toward her master bedroom. “No,” I said.

“But they’re coming back?” she called from the bedroom.

Her clothes were coming off. Ava had no compunction about undressing in front of me, no matter what her mood. I, on the other hand, preferred not to watch her undress during fights. If I couldn’t have it, I didn’t want to see what I was missing. That way, I avoided nights spent in frustration.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You don’t know?”

“I haven’t made contact,” I confessed.

Her blouse unbuttoned, her bra exposed, she stepped into the doorway to take another shot at me. “Honey, from the way you were talking tonight, I would have thought you’d moved in with them.”

Oh shit, I thought, she’s using the “H-word.” When Ava felt brassy, she began her sentences by calling me “Honey.” Sometimes sentences that began with “Honey” were funny, sometimes they were brutal, but they were never nice.

“Yeah, well, Doctorow wants me out of here, and he’ll be a lot easier to work with when he thinks that I’m planning to leave,” I said.

She pulled off her blouse and disappeared into the bedroom. When she spoke again, her voice was softer. We had come to the heart of the argument. “Are you leaving?”

“Not without you,” I said.

She came back into the doorway, this time dressed only in her bra and her panties. Giving me a snide smile, she said, “Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Harris, you rang the right bell; now come and claim your reward.”

CHAPTER FOUR

The time had come to lay my cards out on the table.

Hollingsworth and I dressed in combat armor for this excursion. Lieutenant Mars came in a soft shell—that was Marine talk for the kind of armor worn by technicians and engineers. Unlike our hardened armor, Mars’s shell was made of flexible rubber latex.

Mars, Hollingsworth, and I sat inside the kettle—the cargo and passenger section of a military transport ship—as our pilot prepped for takeoff. We talked, trying to make ourselves comfortable, but you were never really comfortable riding in the kettle. Everything was made of metal—metal floor, metal walls, metal ceiling, even the horseshoe seat in the head was made of metal. Everything was metal except for the wooden bench running the length of the walls and the restraining harnesses.

And the kettle was dark, too. It had a twenty-foot ceiling and a couple of red emergency lights, but most of the lighting came from the cockpit.

“You know, General, I could have had my men string lights in here,” Mars said.

“Good thought,” I said. “We’ll take you up on that next time.” I held up my helmet, which offered night-for-day vision that would allow me to see perfectly well. But although our helmets included interLink connectivity that let us hear each other, conversation flows more easily when you’re not wearing an airtight helmet.

“General Harris, what exactly are we here for?” Hollingsworth asked. In the light that spilled out from the open cockpit door, I could see Hollingsworth’s face. He was a young Marine. Like every other military clone, he had brown hair and brown eyes though like the others, what he saw when he looked in the mirror was a young man with blue eyes and blond hair.

“I’m going to show you how the fleet escaped,” I said.

“No shit?” Hollingsworth asked. “How did they do it?”

“I’ll demonstrate when we get there,” I said. We sat in silence for a moment, then I asked Mars, “Were you able to get the shields running on that armor?”

Of the three of us, Mars was the one sitting in the most light; it illuminated a wedge of his face that started just above his chin and ended on his nose. He smiled, and said, “Yes, sir. All we had to do was recharge the batteries.”

“And?” I asked.

“The shielding is worthless,” Mars said.

“What do you mean by ‘worthless’? Are you saying it’s weak?” Hollingsworth asked. “It wasn’t weak when we fought them; we hit those sons of bitches with rockets and grenades.” Like me, Hollingsworth had seen that armor in battle.

“My particle-beam pistol didn’t get through,” I added. “I shot a man at point-blank range.”

“You should have kept shooting,” Mars said.

I might have kept shooting if the bastard hadn’t drilled through my forearm with two fléchettes. After that, I was busy trying to breathe as the neurotoxins turned my body numb.

“Those shields are just for show,” Mars continued. “Do you want to know what they used as a power source? A battery pack about the size of my finger.” He held up his little finger.

“Well, I suppose it’s the age-old trade-off, power versus mobility,” Mars began. Like every other engineer I knew, he got excited and started spouting jargon. He went on for a couple of minutes like that, babbling as if he had actually gone to engineering school. Clones did not go to officer training because they weren’t supposed to rise beyond enlisted ranks. I was a general, Hollingsworth a colonel, and Mars a lieutenant, but those were temporary field ranks given to us by the Unified Authority. They made us officers so we could run our fleet, then they attacked. Bastards.

“In a perfect setting, they might have gotten forty-five minutes out of their shields,” Mars went on. “Every time you hit them, it causes the power to spike. It doesn’t matter if you hit them with a missile or a spit wad, the power in their shields spikes.

“Do you know how long those shields would hold up in a rainstorm? We tried it. We powered up a suit and splashed it with a hose. The battery died in eight minutes.” He sounded disappointed by the armor’s poor showing.

He dropped his voice and became a bit more reverent as he added, “Most of their shields failed three minutes after you brought that garage down on their heads.”

“Wait,” Hollingsworth said, sounding more than a little skeptical. “Some of those guys were alive for weeks. If their shields gave out, why weren’t they crushed?”

“You only crushed the laggards, the ones who were still on the first and second levels of the garage,” Mars explained. “The lower levels did not cave in, especially on the fourth and fifth. The men on those levels weren’t buried, they were trapped. If they’d had food and oxygen, they’d still be alive today.”

“Interesting,” I said, interrupting Hollingsworth’s next question in the hope of getting the conversation back on point. “So we can drain the battery by hitting them with a barrage.”

“More or less,” Mars agreed.

“Do you have any idea how long the armor would stand up to a particle beam?” I asked.

“Eight minutes,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what you hit it with, there’s a power surge, and the battery goes dry after eight minutes.”

“Good to know,” I said.

“That’s eight minutes of prolonged exposure,” Mars said. “You would need to hit your target with a continuous wave.”

“Does that include sound waves?” I asked.

Mars considered the idea. “That might do it. We didn’t try that, but it probably would work.”

“What might work?” Hollingsworth asked.

“Using sonic waves to deplete the batteries,” Mars said.

“You sneaky bastard,” Hollingsworth said, quickly adding “sir” to avoid the appearance of insubordination.

My pilot spoke to us over the intercom. “General, we’re in position.”

“How close?” I asked.

“Fifteen hundred miles, sir,” he said.

“Give us a moment to suit up,” I told the pilot. I turned to Hollingsworth and Mars, and said, “Helmets on, gentlemen. For today’s demonstration, we will be opening the rear hatch.”

After we pulled on our helmets, I contacted my pilot via the interLink. “Ready,” I told him, giving him the signal to vent the air from the kettle. Once the oxygen had been evacuated, he opened the massive iron doors at the rear of the ship, revealing a wide field of stars and empty space.

“You brought us out here to see this?” Hollingsworth asked. “There’s nothing here.”

“It’s what you don’t see that counts,” I told Hollingsworth as I picked up a handheld rocket launcher.

Speaking over the interLink on a direct frequency that only my pilot would hear, I said, “Lower the rear shields in ten, nine, eight …” I continued the count in my head.

“There’s more going on out here than meets the eye,” I told Hollingsworth. “Watch.”

“What does this have to do with the fleet?” he asked.

Five, four … I continued counting silently to myself. Without answering, I aimed the rocket out the rear of the ship.

Three, two, one …

There was a barely visible blue-white flash as the rear shield of the transport came off-line. I fired the RPG.

Rifles, pistols, and rockets shoot perfectly well in space. If anything, projectiles fly faster and travel along a much more rigid trajectory without the distractions of friction and gravity. In a breathable atmosphere, the little rocket might never have broken the sound barrier. Here in space, it lit off at Mach 2 and would have kept at that rate forever, or at least until it bumped into a meteor or a ship or a planet. On this day, it found something else.

“Shield up,” I told the pilot over a direct link.

“What is this about?” asked Mars, who clearly wanted more than a demonstration of physics in space.

The explosion took place about five hundred miles away, straight ahead of us, in the vast emptiness. Some of the shrapnel came back and struck our shields, creating sparks against the invisible pane of electrical energy.

“What was that?” asked Mars. “What just happened?”

“Gentlemen, we are at the edge of a battlefield. The area around us is crowded with broken ships and debris, and yet the space we are facing is almost entirely empty. Do either of you have any idea why no ships entered this zone?” I asked.

“You said ‘almost empty,’ ” Hollingsworth observed. “What do you mean by ‘almost’?”

“There’s a broadcast station in the center of it,” I said.

“A broadcast station?” asked Mars. “Are you saying Warshaw broadcasted the fleet?” Gary Warshaw was the clone sailor the Unifieds had promoted to command the Scutum-Crux Fleet.

“That can’t be,” said Hollingsworth. “The Broadcast Network was shut down during the Mogat Wars, that was years ago.”

Hollingsworth missed the big picture, but Mars pieced it together. “The broadcast engines weren’t broken, they just needed power. Warshaw must have installed generators on the station.”

“That’s my guess,” I said.

“If he got the station running, he could have made it out with hundreds of ships,” Hollingsworth said.

“Twenty-one carriers, seventy-two battleships, and who knows how many frigates and cruisers,” I said.

The visor in my combat armor had equipment for surveillance, reconnaissance, and battle, such as lenses that could illuminate the darkness, see over long distances, and detect heat. Lieutenant Mars’s soft-shelled armor had an entirely different set of lenses designed for engineers. When he whistled, and said, “The current out there is off the charts,” I knew he had run some kind of test. “How far are we from the broadcast station?”

“Fifteen hundred miles,” I said.

“And no ships got any closer than this?” Mars asked.

“Not much,” I said.

There was a pause, then Mars asked, “Does the field go all the way around the station?”

“As far as I can tell, it forms a perfect sphere,” I said.

“Warshaw must have supercharged the broadcast engines to create a hot zone,” Mars said.

“If you say so,” I said. I was a combat Marine. What did I know about supercharging broadcast engines?

“No. No, it doesn’t make sense. Why didn’t the Unifieds blast the station?” Hollingsworth asked. “They would have destroyed this station the same way the Mogats destroyed the Mars broadcast station.”

“No, they couldn’t,” I said. “They couldn’t hit it with a torpedo. You saw what just happened to that rocket.”

“So they would have used a particle beam or a laser,” Hollingsworth said.

I handed Hollingsworth a shoulder-held laser cannon, and said, “Be my guest.”

“What about our shields?” Hollingsworth asked.

I had already asked the pilot to lower them. I told him, “They’re already down.”

Hollingsworth aimed the cannon out the back of the transport and fired. The silver-red beam disappeared only a few hundred feet from the ship.

“How did you do that?” Hollingsworth asked.

“The current from the broadcast station disassembled it,” Mars said.

“It what?” asked Hollingsworth.

“Disassembled it. Pulled it apart,” said Mars. “We used to communicate across the galaxy sending laser signals over the Broadcast Network. The current from the broadcast station must translate light waves.”

“So what? We fire a laser at the station, and it comes out in another galactic arm?” Hollingsworth asked.

I shrugged my shoulders, an action made almost invisible by my combat armor.

“Not without an encoded address built into the signal to specify where it is supposed to go,” Mars said. “Without an address, the waves stay broken apart.”

“Have you tried contacting the people on the other side?” Hollingsworth asked.

“What do you suggest, shouting into it? Maybe we could float a tin cup on a really long string into the zone and see if someone picks up on the other side,” I said.

CHAPTER FIVE

“Why didn’t the Unifieds send ships in after them?” Hollingsworth asked, as the transport doors closed.

The mood in the kettle had changed. Hollingsworth, who began the flight hostile, had suddenly become my pal. Lieutenant Mars, who’d boarded the transport confused about the fate of the Scutum-Crux Fleet, began dispensing answers about broadcast physics as if he had invented the technology.

“You wouldn’t want to enter a hot zone unless you had a ship designed for network travel. The current from a zone like this would overload the engines in a self-broadcasting ship.”

The Unified Authority Navy’s new fleet was entirely composed of self-broadcasting warships.

“What would happen if one of their ships did go in?” Hollingsworth asked.

“It would cause a massive explosion,” Mars explained.

“How massive?” asked Hollingsworth.

“Massive,” Mars said, giving off the air of one who knows.

“You mean like a nuclear explosion?” asked Hollingsworth. Like any good Marine, he wanted things spelled out in combat terms.

Sounding more like a college professor than a boot-strapped engineer, Mars said, “Nuclear bombs come in all sizes, don’t they? I suspect it would be the equivalent of a very small nuclear device.”

That was bullshit, of course. Mars had no idea what he was talking about.

The pilot addressed me on an open interLink channel that Mars and Hollingsworth would hear as well. “General, the air and heat are online,” he said. “You can remove your helmet.”

I thanked him and removed my lid. Mars and Hollingsworth followed.

A dark emotion seemed to come over Hollingsworth. The excitement left his face. He sat in the shadows, quiet and sullen. Finally, he said, “I don’t see how this changes anything. We know how they got away, but we can’t go after them. I mean, what are we going to do, put a message in a bottle and toss it through the zone?”

“Not a message in a bottle,” I said. “I’m going to fly a ship into the hot zone.”

They greeted this statement with the kind of silence generally reserved for people discussing suicide. Hollingsworth broke the silence. “You’re joking, right?” he asked, though he must have known I meant what I had said. “Unless you have a ship we don’t know about, the only thing you have that flies is a transport.”

“He’s right,” Mars said. “Only an idiot would enter a broadcast zone in a transport.”

I wished he hadn’t added that last line. Ray Freeman, my old business partner, and I once tried to modify a transport to self-broadcast. Freeman got electrocuted, and we ended up stranded in space.

I held up my hands, palms out, and said, “No working ships up my sleeves, but there’s a whole fleet out there.”

Hollingsworth shot me an incredulous look, and asked, “You mean the wrecks?”

“One man’s wreckage may well be another man’s pangalactic barge,” I said.

Hollingsworth laughed, and said, “You’re going to ride a wreck into a broadcast zone? That’s suicide.”

“Do you have any better ideas?” I asked.

He thought it over and shook his head, then admitted, “No, sir, I don’t.”

Still sounding enthusiastic, Mars offered, “I’ll work out the details.”

CHAPTER SIX

It took Mars and his engineers more than a month to work out the kinks. That meant that a month had passed since the night I promised Ava I would take her with me when I left Terraneau. I meant what I said when I made the promise; but now that I knew the gory details, I needed to renege.

In truth, I was not sure she cared either way. An indefinable coldness had entered our relationship. We did not argue, but the passion was gone. We ate meals together and we had sex, but we didn’t talk much. In her past life, she’d lived with generals and movie stars and billionaires. Was this how she ended relationships, by allowing them to dry up and blow away?

I did not want that to happen with us. Maybe the passion was gone, but she had become an important part of my world. I did not feel passionately about my right hand, but I could not imagine living without it.

I arrived at Ava’s house just after sunset; the last fibers of sunlight streaked across the sky, making the clouds look like the embers of a dying fire. Above the clouds, the sky dithered from paper white to a blue so dark it qualified as black. Her house was in the Norristown foothills, overlooking the city in all of its stages of repair. In the dark world below, streetlights shimmered like tracer fire. Cars crowded onto newly opened streets. From her backyard, it looked like Norristown had more cars than people.

On this evening, I came bearing an offering for my Hollywood goddess—beer rescued from a derelict ship. She would have preferred wine, but the only way to get wine would have been through Ellery Doctorow, and sacrifice has its limits.

I didn’t believe in fortune-telling, but I sensed negative energy in the air. I had the same feeling I got playing blackjack when I had twelve on the table and knew the next card off the deck would be worth ten.

I went to the front door and knocked. Ava opened the door. She looked beautiful. Her hair, which she frequently wore in an organized tangle of locks and tresses, hung down over her back. She wore a red dress that left her shoulders bare and showed just the right preview of cleavage.

“Hi, there,” she said as she let me in. Her gaze met mine for half a second, but I thought I saw sadness in her eyes.

“I come bearing gifts,” I said, brandishing the beers. “They’re even cold.”

She smiled, and said, “You know how to make a girl feel special,” but her voice sounded distracted, and her eyes did not quite hold with mine.

“Is everything okay?” I asked, feeling nervous.

Ava sighed. She thought for a moment, then finally said, “We’d better eat while the food is hot and your beers are cold.”

Her home was small but stylish. The dining table was about the right size for an end table. She had spread a white linen cloth across the top and wedged a candle between our plates. Her china was bone white, her utensils were silver and gleamed in the candlelight.

As we reached the table, she excused herself to get glasses for the beers. I waited for her to return before sitting down. I pulled her chair out for her, though I was not sure she wanted me to. There was something in the air, something cold and distancing.

Ava handed me a glass, and said, “There’s a rumor going around about you leaving Terraneau.”

“Really? Who’s spreading it?” I asked, trying to outmaneuver the truth. “I hope you’re not listening to Sarah.”

“I didn’t hear it from Sarah. I heard about it from Julie Neberker.”

“Who is that?” I asked. I had never heard the name.

“She lives a few doors down,” Ava said.

“Is she dating one of my Marines?” I asked, trying to figure out if she might have access to anything more than gossip.

“No.”

“You can’t take anything she says very seriously, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

“She heard about it from Rachel Johnson. Rachel heard Sarah and Ellery joking about you leaving at a bridge party,” Ava said.

I always knew Sarah Doctorow had a big mouth. By that time, I had confided the information about the broadcast zone to Doctorow.

“I see,” I said. “Did they happen to give any specifics?”

“No. All she knew was that you found a working broadcast station.”

“I see.”

“Are you going after the missing ships?” Ava asked.

“I think so,” I said.

I expected her to ask if I planned to take her with me, but she surprised me. Instead of asking about going with me, she said, “Julie says they’re not going to let you back on Terraneau once you leave.”

“Who’s not going to let me back on?”

She thought about that, and said, “Ellery, I guess.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “He’d need an air force to stop me. All he has is a civilian militia armed with popguns.”

She studied my face, her olivine green eyes boring into me and seeing through my bluster. Did I see hurt in her eyes or anger? Maybe I was fooling myself, and all that was there was indifference. “I don’t think it’s just Ellery. I think Hollingsworth is with him. “

“Hollingsworth?” I asked. I did not know what to say. I knew he didn’t like me, but he was a Marine. Marines did not turn on each other. I sat motionless, my head reeling. Our meal sat before us ignored—her food and my beers.

“Wayson, if you come back, they might shoot you down,” she said.

“Not likely.” I shook my head. Hollingsworth was a good Marine. He wouldn’t do that, it was not in his programming. “Not Hollingsworth. He might ignore me, but he wouldn’t shoot at me.”

“What if he and Doctorow want to take over the planet?” she asked.

“Now there’s an unholy alliance.” I said it as a joke. “Ellery Doctorow doesn’t want to conquer Terraneau, he wants to be elected king. He’s an idealist, not a dictator, and he’s not going to tag team with Philo Hollingsworth. It’s not just me. Doctorow thinks every Marine is a serpent in his garden of Eden.”

“That doesn’t scare you?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Wayson, tell me the truth. Are you leaving soon?” Ava asked.

That seemed pretty obvious at this point. I nodded.

“How are you going to do it?”

“It’s just like Doctorow said, there’s a working broadcast station. I’m going to ride a busted ship through it.”

“What do you mean by ‘busted’?” Ava asked.

“That’s classified,” I said, hoping to avoid telling her the details.

“How busted is it, Wayson?” Ava repeated.

“It was destroyed during the battle with the Earth Fleet,” I said. I still had no idea which ship I would ride, but whichever one it was, it would be a victim of that battle.

“But you have it running now?” Ava asked.

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Not exactly?” she asked.

I didn’t say anything. I was divulging classified information. That made me worse than Doctorow. At least he was a civilian.

“If you haven’t repaired the ship, how are you going to fly it?”

“Ava, that’s classified information.” I hoped the term would put her off.

“Classified? We’re not at war, who are you trying to hide it from?” She pursed her lips and stared at me angrily, and I felt my resolve turn to mush.

“Scott Mars is going to seal me in a derelict ship and launch it toward the station,” I said.

“Have you even tested to see if it’s safe?” she asked.

“Why don’t we have this out after dinner?” I suggested. I pulled the bowl of MRE beef stew she had heated and ladled some on my plate. As the highest-ranking officer on Terraneau, I made sure Ava’s pantry was stocked with Meals Ready to Eat.

Her voice more stern, Ava repeated herself. “Have you flown anything else into the station?”

“A couple of grenades,” I said as I took a bite of cold stew.

“How about something with people in it?” she asked, her voice as cold as ice and as hard as steel. “You have to send another ship through before you go yourself,” she said.

“How will we know if it made it through?” I asked. I took another bite of stew; it needed reheating.

“Maybe you should send a guinea pig first to see if it’s safe,” she said.

“I suppose that’s me,” I said. Commanding officer and head guinea pig Wayson Harris. Give me enough rope, and I’ll hang myself.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Launching a derelict ship into the broadcast zone required more planning than I had anticipated.

The first problem was finding a ship that was solid enough to stand the stresses of the electrical current. It had to be one of ours. The Unified Authority’s ships were closer to the zone; but they were all self-broadcasting, which meant they lacked the kind of insulation needed to keep me safe.

As we mapped the battlefield, a pattern quickly emerged. While we had lost almost three times as many ships as the Unified Authority in the battle, all of the wrecks around the broadcast zone were from the Earth Fleet. They had all been destroyed from the inside out. Apparently they had entered the outer reaches of the broadcast zone and exploded when exposed to the current flowing from the broadcast station.

Mars held a briefing to explain the situation. Using a three-dimensional holographic map to show the area, he said, “These ships marked in blue are U.A. ships. Our job would be a whole lot easier if we could send you in one of these ships, but it wouldn’t be safe.”

“What if you sealed me in?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“What if you took tiles off the hull of an SC Fleet ship and sealed them around one of these ships?” I asked. “Would that be enough to protect me?”

“If it were that easy, we could just weld some armor to a working transport, and you’d have flight controls,” Mars said. “The inadequacy goes deeper. It’s structural.”

Listening to him speak, I realized that Mars genuinely wanted me to survive the mission. Hollingsworth and Doctorow might have seen me as an obstacle, but maybe Mars did not.

“Since we can’t launch you in a U.A. ship, we need to clear them out from between your ship and the zone.”

Inspecting the display, I saw what he meant. The battle had apparently taken place on an almost two-dimensional plane, with the Unified Authority ships forming a solid wall between the battlefield and the hot zone. “Can you drag my ship around them?” I asked.

“And Jesus wept.” Mars sighed. “No offense, General, but your grasp of physics never ceases to amaze me. We’ll be lucky if we can get you moving at all; turns and course corrections are out of the question.

“You are going to be in a great big ship being propelled by tiny ships. Just building inertia will be a feat. Newton’s Second Law …mass, force, acceleration?

“You are familiar with Sir Isaac Newton, right, sir? ‘An object in motion’? ‘Equal and opposite reaction’? Once we build up enough velocity to drive your wreck toward the zone, you will be traveling in a straight line. If something is in your way, we need to move it out of the way or break it. Those are the only options—clear a path or scrap this mission.”

Having grown up in Unified Authority Orphanage # 553, I took a “Survey of Science” class that introduced chemistry, physics, astronomy, biology, and anatomy all in a ten-week term. I had never studied any of the sciences since.

“Why can’t you just haul the flotsam and jetsam out of the way?” I asked.

“It’s a matter of size,” Mars said. He fingered his remote device, and the holographic display zoomed in on the wrecks blocking the route to the broadcast zone. Originally shown as squiggles and dots, the images now resolved themselves into discrete shapes.

“These five ships here”—he pointed with his device, which made the hulls glow—“are U.A. fighter carriers. They are thirty-three hundred feet long and eight hundred feet wide. We can’t exactly tie a rope to their gunnels and tow them into port.”

He played with his remote again, and this time an orange light appeared around three ships. “These are U.A. battleships, the new ones,” he said. “They’re twenty-six hundred feet long and five hundred feet wide. Three of these ships rammed into each other and got tangled. We think we can clear a path for you by breaking these ships apart. If it doesn’t work …”

“We’ll need to scrub the mission,” I guessed.

“Probably so, sir.”

I’d made a tactical error when I told Ellery Doctorow about the broadcast zone so early in the game. With each passing week, Doctorow became more insistent that I leave and take my military with me. After six weeks, he acted up.

The buzz from my communications console woke me from a near sleep. Turning on my side, I saw it was 02:30, sat up, and said, “This better be good.”

“General, someone is breaking into the armory,” Hollingsworth said. That got my attention. The armory was the underground garage, the place with all of the buried weapons.

“Do we know who?” I asked.

“I sent a squad to investigate.”

“What did they find?”

“I’ve lost contact with them, sir.”

I turned on the light and slid off my rack. The only people who would go after those weapons were Doctorow and his militia. He had never struck me as a man who turned to violence; but he if he wanted us off Terraneau badly enough, who knew what he would do.

I told Hollingsworth to muster a single company. “I want them dressed in combat armor and loaded on trucks in five minutes.”

“Won’t we need more men?” Hollingsworth asked. “What if—”

“Put the rest of the base on alert,” I said.

“But what if—”

“You have your orders,” I said.

“Yes, sir,” Hollingsworth said, and signed off. The call to arms sounded a few seconds later. By the time it did, I had my bodysuit on and was fastening my armor.

I thought about the armory. As a show of respect for Doctorow and his government, I had decided against posting guards around the site. Perhaps I had made a mistake. My show of respect, however, only went so far. I might not have posted guards around the caved-in armory, but I’d had my engineers install a discreet security system around the grounds.

I grabbed my M27, left my particle-beam pistol in my locker, and headed out the door.

Sirens wailed. Across the grounds, men in fatigues rushed out of lit barracks, but most of the barracks were dark. Originally built to house twenty-five thousand soldiers, Fort Sebastian was now home to a mere thirty-two hundred men: one thousand naval engineers and twenty-two hundred combat Marines.

Four troop carriers lined up near the gate, their engines purring. Hollingsworth waited beside the first truck, already in his armor. Moments after I arrived, two lines of men in dark green combat armor formed, and a pair of sergeants shepherded the men onto the trucks. Hollingsworth and I rode with the men in the back of the first carrier.

“Has your patrol reported in?” I asked Hollingsworth, as we settled onto the bench at the back of the truck. With twenty-five Marines in camouflaged armor around us, the back of the transport looked like a forest.

“No response, sir,” Hollingsworth said. “The bastards must have hit them.”

“Must have,” I said, though I had my doubts. Doctorow’s militia could not afford to go balls out with us, and they knew it. They outnumbered us, but they did not have the stomach for collateral damage.

I put on my helmet and tried to listen in on my men’s conversations over the interLink, but heard nothing. For a moment I thought something might be wrong with my equipment. I removed my helmet and stared into it. I tapped on the visor, knowing that tapping on the glass would be no more effective at repairing microcircuitry than patting a man on the back would be at removing a brain tumor.

“I’m not Linking,” Hollingsworth said. “It’s like my helmet went deaf.”

As I stared into my helmet, the truck slowed to a stop. A moment later, the sea of men in front of me parted as our driver called out to me from the back of the truck. As I pushed through the crowd, I noticed that all of the men had removed their helmets.

“What is it?” I asked.

“General, I tried to contact you over the interLink, sir, but I could not get a signal.”

“Somebody is jamming the signal,” I said, trying to sound as if I had known that all along.

“Yes, sir,” said the driver. “There’s an overturned jeep about a quarter mile up the road from here.”

“One of ours?” I asked.

“Maybe we should send some men to have a look at it,” Hollingsworth suggested.

“See to it,” I said, deciding to play things safe even as my instincts told me not to worry.

Hollingsworth sent a fire team in to investigate. The team included a rifleman, an automatic rifleman, a grenadier, and a team leader. I watched them as they went up the road, knowing that the time had come to make a tactical decision. I needed to choose between communication and equipment. If we wore our helmets, we would not be able to communicate; but we would have radar, sonar, and optical lenses to provide us a tactical edge. With our helmets off, we would be able to speak; but we would be blind to snipers and traps.

Communications or security? I asked myself. I opted for security.

Using the heat-vision lenses in my visor, I scanned the road ahead and saw no signs of people other than the men I had just sent out. I pulled off my helmet and barked out orders.

“We’re hiking in from here,” I told Hollingsworth and the noncoms who had gathered around me. “Tell your men to stay in a tight formation and keep their helmets on until we give the signal to remove them.

“There may be snipers out there,” I said. “If there are, I want to see them before they hit us.”

As we fanned out, the men we sent to investigate the jeep were already on their way back. We sent four men, but eight men returned.

“What happened?” I asked the patrol leader.

“They hit the jeep,” the man said.

“Was anybody hurt?”

“The jeep’s in bad shape,” one of them said. With their jeep destroyed and the interLink down, the men in Hollingsworth’s original patrol could neither proceed nor call for help. Their only option had been to dig in and wait for backup.

The terrain was mostly flat, though much of it was buried under mounds of debris. We secured the area quickly, then moved forward.

We reached the jeep. It lay on its side, all of its wheels shredded. Somebody had gouged a two-inch-deep trench across the road, then filled it with spikes.

I knelt beside the spikes and tried to pull one out. They were wedged in tightly. It took a little work, but I managed to pry one out of the ground.

“Bastards,” Hollingsworth muttered.

Whoever set this trap wanted to get his point across without starting a war, I thought. Placing a mine would have been easier. It would also have been lethal.

“Do you think the militia did this?” asked Hollingsworth.

“Why don’t you ask your pal Doctorow,” I said. “I hear you two are tight.”

Hollingsworth heard me, but he did not respond. He stood still and silent for a few seconds, then excused himself to go check on his men. The stupid son of a bitch should have known it would get back to me.

I stood and looked off across the landscape. If the militia had time to set these spikes, they’d had time to set up more surprises. None of the traps would be lethal, just something to get our attention.

The street leading to the government compound was clear, but the ground on either side of the road was knee-deep in the debris of buildings destroyed long ago. Two-thirds of a mile ahead of us, the abandoned government complex rose out of the ground like small buttes in a desert. In the middle of the buildings, a wide gap marked the target—the building we had knocked down during our battle with the Unified Authority.

There might be bombs ahead. There might be snipers.

“See if you can contact Fort Sebastian,” I told Hollingsworth though I knew it was useless. “I want to know if they’ve seen anything.”

A moment later, he said, “Nothing, sir.”

“Maybe we should send a man back to tell them what’s going on,” Hollingsworth suggested.

It was a good idea but not necessary. “Not yet,” I said. “Not until I know what’s out here.”

“Yes, sir.”

It was just after 03:00. The sky was dark except for the stars and a crescent of moon so thin it looked like it had been made with a single stroke of a pen. I put on my helmet and searched the area using night-for-day lenses, then I switched to heat vision. On the off chance that the locals had snipers hiding along the side of the road, I hoped to spot their heat signatures. The lenses showed me nothing but a barren landscape giving off very little heat.

As I thought about it, I became more convinced that Doctorow would not sanction a firefight. He would not send snipers, but he might have had his demolitions experts set some traps. Doctorow had a couple of retired Navy SEALs among his troops. They had top-notch demolitions training and field experience.

While the rest of us waited by the overturned jeep, a team went out to look for IEDs. None of my men had extensive demolitions training, and it showed. One of my dupes accidentally set off a trap. He might have stepped on a cap, or broken a laser stream, or possibly kicked a trip wire. Whatever he did, he triggered fireworks, sending a fifty-foot phosphorous geyser of red-and-white sparks into the air. The man closest to the fireworks fell on his ass as if he’d been shot, but he’d only been startled. They hadn’t set off a specking mine, after all, just a flare display.

Once we knew the only traps were for show, we pushed ahead. We moved slowly, spreading out over a rolling field of rubble and debris. Bits of glass reflected the dark sky along the ground. I stepped on small shards, grinding them into the dust under my armored boots. Larger blades only shattered. We did not worry about making noise as we covered the silent landscape. After the fireworks, we were pretty sure that any hostiles in the area would know we arrived.

Using the telescopic lenses in my visor, I located the remains of the fence we’d erected around the armory as a perimeter. They might have used trucks or tractors; someone had torn the chain link aside, leaving only the skeleton of a badly twisted frame standing.

I allowed my men to approach the edge of the grounds, then had them stop. I searched for heat, then holes, then radiation. The area came up clean.

“Have your men secure the area,” I ordered the platoon leaders. “No one gets in or out.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” he said.

“The rest of you, spread out and look for holes, traps, bombs, tunnels, cameras, anything. I want to know if anyone has been digging or if this is a wild-goose chase.”

“What about snipers?” Hollingsworth asked.

“If you find one, shoot him.”

“Yes, sir,” said Hollingsworth.

I looked across the area. Somebody had planted a row of six flagpoles along the far end of the field, just beyond the wreckage of the underground garage. Oddly shaped black flags hung from each of the poles.

I went for a closer look, putting on my helmet as I walked, skirting around the wreckage. As I stepped closer, I saw that it was not flags that hung from the poles but antique gas masks. The masks were not so much a warning as a message.

At the base of the poles sat a small silver box, no larger than a beer bottle. I approached the box for a closer look, already afraid that I would not like whatever I found. It might have been a small canister filled with any one of a million deadly gases or germs. It could also have been a bomb. It wasn’t. It was a device for jamming communications, and my interLink gear came back to life the moment I fired my M27 into it.

I contacted Hollingsworth using the interLink. “Contact the fort, tell them to call off the alert,” I said.

“You got the Link working,” Hollingsworth said, sounding surprised.

I suspected we would find a bomb or some other weapon back at the base, but it would be disarmed or maybe just an empty shell. The locals were letting me know that it was high time for the Marines to leave their town. I only hoped Hollingsworth realized that the message was meant for him as much as me.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Ellery Doctorow dropped by Fort Sebastian at my request later that morning.

I had the guards hold him at the front gate as I drove out to meet him. Doctorow left his car in an outside parking lot, and we rode together in my jeep.

“Someone left us a special delivery last night,” I said, as we passed through the gate.

“Anything in particular?” asked Doctorow, not even pretending to sound surprised.

He was better dressed than usual. Instead of his customary combination of fatigues and civilian clothes, he wore slacks, a light button-up blue shirt, and a necktie. His long hair was pulled back into a ponytail. On this visit, Doctorow behaved more like a politician than a soldier or a chaplain.

I slowed as we approached a large truck bearing a fifteen-foot-long aluminum canister. NOXIUM was stenciled across the side of the canister in turkey red paint. Six antique gas masks hung from a rack at the back of the truck.

I stopped beside the truck and pulled one of the gas masks from the rack. Draping it over my left hand, I held it out so that Doctorow could get a better look at it. “Know what this is?” I asked.

“It looks like an old-fashioned breathing apparatus.” He barely gave the mask a glance before answering.

“Yes it is. I’d never seen one of these before, so I looked it up on the mediaLink,” I said as I spun it and studied it from different angles. “This one isn’t for soldiers. It was made for firefighters. Marines don’t use them at all, of course. We have airtight armor with a built-in rebreather.”

The longer we hovered around the gas canister, the more uncomfortable Doctorow seemed to become. He did not look at me directly; nor did he seem to want to look at the mask or the canister. Instead, he stared at the road ahead.

“Firefighters don’t use these masks anymore, either. Did you know that?”

“I wasn’t aware of that,” he said, still not meeting my gaze.

“Nope. They use combat armor …Marine combat armor. At least they used to. See, most Marines come in one size, being clones, so the armor comes in one size as well. They custom-make armor for officers, but that’s expensive …really expensive; so firefighters had to use standard-issue enlisted gear. You know how they got around the single-size issue? They hired retired servicemen, you know, clones. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

“They can’t do that now, though, because they’re out of clones. Now they probably use natural-borns. I suppose they could make robots, but that’s even more expensive than custom-fitted gear. It’s so specking—”

“All very fascinating, General, but there’s no call for profanity,” Doctorow said, interrupting me just as I was closing in on the punch line.

“Oh, sorry about that,” I said. “I got carried away.” I laughed. “Do you know what this is?” I pointed to the canister as I slung the gas mask back on the rack.

Doctorow barely glanced at the back of the truck before saying, “I’d say somebody was trying to send you a message.”

“Yes indeed, it would appear so,” I agreed. “Some of the boys and I went out on the town last night. We found this waiting for us when we returned home. Fortunately, the canister was empty.”

“That is fortunate. As I understand it, Noxium gas makes quite a mess,” Doctorow said.

“Quite a mess. Quite a mess, indeed. In fact, it’s so messy that these gas masks would have done nothing to protect us. Even combat armor is useless against this kind of gas. Did you know that?”

“I think I have heard something along that line,” Doctorow admitted.

I thought of an old memory and laughed. “One of my old platoon sergeants had some men who were killed by Noxium. Do you know how he got their bodies out of the armor? He washed them out with a fire hose. No joke. He said the Noxium ate their bodies until all that was left was this flesh-colored jelly, sort of a coagulated goo that washed out in clumps.”

“This is all very fascinating, but—” Doctorow began.

I cut him off. “Now a canister this size, if it had been full, it would have held enough gas to wipe out half of Norristown. You’d have been cleaning out Fort Sebastian with a fire hose, but you’d also have needed to hose out every apartment, house, and car from Ford Street to West Angle, almost half of town.”

“Is that so?” asked Doctorow. “I heard Noxium gas evaporates so quickly that it doesn’t spread.”

“Oh, you see now, that’s just a myth. The truth is, Noxium doesn’t evaporate at all. It dies,” I said, stating information that any schoolkid would know. I was patronizing the bastard, and he knew it. “It’s not really a gas, it’s a cloud of microscopic organisms, voracious little bastards that will bore through anything they can sink their teeth into.”

“There’s no cause to use—”

I ignored him and went on. “The little bastards die quickly when you release them in small concentrations. Unleash a pint or two, and they die in a matter of seconds. That’s why Noxium is such an effective tool for capturing enemy strongholds. You just shoot a few Noxium shells over the wall, and the gas turns the occupants into goo, then you capture their base and wash the enemy out with a hose.

“But that’s with a small amount …maybe the amount of gas you’d get from a half-gallon shell. With a big batch like this, the microbes insulate each other from the atmosphere, and the cloud doesn’t go away. If this much had spilled, the cloud would have spread all the way over to your part of town. My Marines wouldn’t have been the only ones receiving the message; Sarah and Ava would have gotten it as well.”

“How very fortunate for all of us that the canister was empty,” Doctorow said.

“You wouldn’t happen to have any idea who left us this message?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t know anything about it,” Doctorow protested, feigning alarm. “General, I am a peaceable man.”

“Ellery, I’m not accusing anyone.”

Doctorow seemed to regain his nerve. He said, “I don’t think it was meant as a threat. Whoever left it, they probably meant it as a reminder.”

“Probably so,” I agreed.

“I happen to agree with whoever did this. It’s high time you left,” Doctorow said. “You and your men have outstayed your welcome.”

“Does that go for all of us?” I asked. “Colonel Hollingsworth is under the impression that you only object to me.”

“A simple misunderstanding,” said Doctorow. “Don’t take this personally, General Harris, but I don’t really like having a military presence in my city. Armies are a tool of intimidation, and I don’t believe governments should be in the business of intimidation.”

“But you don’t mind my Corps of Engineers,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“If you are evicting me and my men, I will need to take my engineers with me,” I said. “How are you going to rebuild Norristown without them?”

“I would prefer for you to leave them, they make a valuable contribution,” Doctorow said.

“They’re military clones, just like the rest of us,” I pointed out. “They came off the same assembly line and grew up in the same orphanages. The only difference between Scott Mars and Philo Hollingsworth is their training. When I give the order to leave, Mars and his men go with the rest of us.”

“Are you threatening me, General?”

I answered with a wry smile, gestured with my head toward the empty gas canister, and said, “Not me, I’m just answering your message.”

“I have every intention of leaving Terraneau as quickly as possible,” I told Doctorow as I started the jeep. “I want to get off this specking rock, the sooner the better.”

“Yes, you said that two months ago, General, but you’re still here,” Doctorow said. The farther we drove from the empty canister, the more he seemed to relax.

“Then you will be glad to know why I called for this little meeting,” I said, and I told him that we were just about ready to send a ship through the broadcast zone. He listened carefully and said nothing. He probably did not care whether the plan worked or failed so long as it got me away from his precious society.

We stopped at the McGraw building, the building that served as a headquarters for the Corps of Engineers. Hollingsworth and several of his lieutenants attended the briefing as well.

Looking around the room, I saw that none of us had gotten much sleep. Thanks to the early-morning call to the armory, Hollingsworth and I had not returned to base until nearly 05:00. Mars had been on alert guarding the base. Doctorow looked tired as well. His eyes were badly bloodshot.

When Doctorow saw that he was surrounded by military men, he found a quiet corner where he could lean against the wall and watch the presentation unnoticed. I ditched him and drifted over to Hollingsworth. When I was close enough to whisper without being overheard, I said, “I brought your pal.”

“We’re not pals,” he said.

I only grunted.

Lieutenant Mars booted up his holographic display, and we gathered around him for a closer look. Mars was a smart officer; he waited for me to get things started. When I asked him how things were progressing, he sighed and explained why everything was going wrong.

“Do you have any concept about the sheer mass of a battleship?” he began.

“I know they’re big,” said Hollingsworth. The other Marines laughed.

“We’re talking about one hundred and thirty thousand tons of metal spread across three hundred thousand cubic feet.”

“Why are you giving us a lesson on mass, Lieutenant?” asked Hollingsworth, who was clearly tired and edgy from the last night’s activities.

Mars pointed to the display, and said, “Because the only way we are going to launch General Harris into that broadcast zone is by sealing him inside a battleship.”

“Why are you choosing a big ship?” asked Hollingsworth. “Wouldn’t it be easier to send him off in a frigate?”

“He’d never break through the ships blocking the zone; the smaller ships don’t have enough mass,” said Mars.

He pointed to the wall of derelict ships. Since our last meeting, the problem had gone from difficult to intractable. Hoping to blow the ships into tiny fragments, we’d talked about sending engineers to rig wrecks with charges. As far as I knew, he hadn’t actually sent anyone.

“Break through?” I asked. “I thought we were going to clear a path.”

“It doesn’t look like that’s going to work, sir,” Mars answered, all of his former enthusiasm now absent from his voice. “We’ve tried conventional charges. We experimented with a small tactical weapon as well.”

I should have seen this coming. The Morgan Atkins Believers had detonated an atomic bomb inside a Unified Authority fighter carrier. Parts of the ship fell away, but the frame of the ship survived.

“You nuked ’em?” Hollingsworth asked.

“Yes, sir, we nuked one. The device blew the outer hull off the ship, but the decks and the structure remained in place,” Mars said.

“But a battleship could ram through?” I asked. I knew the answer. He would not have said he needed to seal me in a battleship if he did not believe it could break through. Still, I wanted reassurance.

Mars did not get a chance to answer. Hearing the ease with which the discussion had switched to tactical weapons, Doctorow spoke up. “Where, precisely, did you get a nuclear weapon?”

“Maybe we dug it up while we were out collecting gas masks,” I said.

Doctorow glared at me, his fury coloring his face as red as rare roast beef, and sputtered for words. Finally, he said, “You son of a bitch. You raided the armory when you were pulling out those bodies.”

I smiled, and said, “There’s no call for profanity, Reverend.”

“You lied. ‘Bodies,’ you said. ‘I’m just collecting bodies so I can examine the armor.’” Doctorow threw his hands in the air.

“I wasn’t lying,” I said. “We only took bodies.”

“Then you went back afterward. You still went back on your word.”

“Last night was the first time I set foot past the fence since the day we dug up the armor. It was the first time any of us have been back, and we weren’t the ones who tore down the fence,” I said.

Doctorow did not take the bait. He ignored my jab about the fence, and asked, “Then where did you get a nuclear bomb?”

“Oh, that,” I said, grinning as brightly as I could. “I didn’t need to raid the armory to get that; we have plenty of nukes right here in Fort Sebastian.”

Hollingsworth and Mars, both of whom knew I had been restocking the base with weapons, laughed softly as I spoke. “Remember when I offered to salvage food and rations from those derelict ships? I figured since we were up there, we might as well restock our armory while we were at it. You wanted rations, I wanted rockets. We both made out.”

“You son of a—”

“You already said that,” I reminded Doctorow.

“What do you plan to do with those weapons, General?” Doctorow asked. “Are you planning on recapturing Terraneau?”

I laughed. “We both want the same thing. You want me off your planet, and I can’t wait to leave.”

“But that didn’t stop you from building your arsenal. Why stockpile weapons if you aren’t planning a war?”

I shrugged my shoulders, and said, “I’m a Marine. Marines like things that are loud. It’s all part of speaking softly and carrying a big stick.”

Doctorow took a step forward and drove his right fist into his open left palm. “This is unacceptable. This is an act of—”

“We didn’t leave an empty gas canister outside your door last night,” I said. “If we ever do leave you a message, you can bet that the canister won’t be empty.”

Doctorow glared at me, but I didn’t care. He had delivered his message last night, and I brought him to this meeting so that I could deliver mine. He now knew that I was leaving, and that if it came to a fight, I held all of the aces in my hand.

Now that everything was in the open, it was time to turn our attention back to the mission. “So you’re suggesting that we light up the wrecks and bash through in a battleship?”

“Considering the situation, sir, that’s the best we’ve come up with.”

“What are the odds of success?” I asked.

Lieutenant Mars let a second pass before he answered. He was a young clone, maybe not even in his thirties. Fatigue and frustration showed on his face. “General, there are so many variables; I can’t even begin to guess. It’s a matter of velocity. With the right speed and God’s good grace, this should work.”

“It sounds like you’ve got everything you need,” said Doctorow, suddenly sounding cheerful again. Perhaps hearing the suicidal nature of my mission had cheered him up. He bent over the display, looking the scene over closely. “Which ship is going to carry Harris?”

The display showed the entire battlefield, which was spread out over thousands of cubic miles of open space. With the camera panned so far out, the fighter carriers were indistinguishable from the fighters they carried. Everything was represented by tiny motes of light.

Mars said, “You won’t really be able to see the ship from this angle.” He adjusted the display so that it zoomed in on the wreckage of a Scutum-Crux Fleet battleship. “I had originally thought we would use a smaller ship, maybe even a minesweeper. A minesweeper would only have about one-tenth the overall mass of this battleship.

“Setting a battleship in motion is going to be challenge.” He laughed nervously.

“What do you have in mind?” I asked. I was the one putting his ass on the line, not Mars, not Hollingsworth, not Doctorow; and I did not like the plan so far. The ideas sounded too damn theoretical, and the wall of dead ships blocking my way sounded too concrete.

“General, sir, we’re going to attach a fleet of transports to the hull of the ship and use them like booster rockets,” Mars said.

“What about the men in the transports?” asked Hollingsworth. “What about the pilots?”

“No live pilots; everything will be remote control,” said Mars. “This mission involves guiding a battleship into a nuclear explosion. No one in his right mind would fly into a nuclear blast.”

“But that’s what I’m doing?” I asked.

Nobody answered.

CHAPTER NINE

The plan was to attach thirty remotely controlled transports to the hull of a derelict battleship to use as external rockets. No one had ever used transports to move a derelict battleship or anything of like size. Everything was theoretical, but Mars assured me that it would work.

When you place your life in other men’s hands, you want to know that they take their work seriously. The Corps of Engineers called their plan “Operation Chastity Belt” and referred to the battleship as “Harris’s Tool.” They probably took the mission seriously, but they were also enlisted men; juvenile humor was part of their makeup.

They had clever names for every element of the operation. “Harris’s Tool,” the battleship, would travel nearly three hundred miles gathering speed in a linear acceleration before poking “Chastity Belt,” the wall of destroyed Unified Authority ships that blocked the way to “Virginity,” the hot zone. When the Tool was precisely forty-seven miles from Chastity Belt, the engineers would fire a series of nuclear devices that would both damage and superheat the U.A. ships, but the blast would not destroy them. They labeled this part of the operation “Foreplay.” Just as the negative 450-degree temperature of space would set in, turning the metal brittle, the Tool would ram into the ships. If everything went right, the Tool would hit with sufficient velocity to break through the barrier.

Lieutenant Mars might have been counting on “God’s good grace,” but he carefully calculated acceleration and timing as well. Without the proper velocity, I would not have the power to smash through the ships.

My battleship/barge/battering ram would be wedge-shaped and wider from wing to wing than from bow to stern. This meant that I would have a better chance of survival traveling sideways, leading with the starboard wing while I hid in the landing bay on the port side of the ship.

I explained all of this to Sergeant Nobles, and he said, “It sounds like you’re trying to kill yourself, sir.” Nobles was a trained transport pilot. Officially, I did not have a personal pilot; but when I took rides in transports, he generally flew the bird.

We sat in the empty mess area of a vacant wing of Fort Sebastian. I wanted privacy as I explained the mission.

It was raining outside; gusts of wind blew a steady stream of water against the windows. The mess had a wall of windows overlooking Sebastian Commons—a park in the center of the base. The lawns outside those windows were as flat and even as a gymnasium floor. Even though we did not have enough men to fill the base, I had my men mow the grass. When forts become run-down, the men surely follow.

“Then it may be a double suicide,” I said.

“Oh shit,” he said. “You’re asking me to come with you.”

“I’ll need a pilot,” I said.

He’d been my pilot for nearly a year, making him one of my oldest friends on Terraneau; but until this conversation, I’d only known him as “my pilot.” We’d flown missions in which we both nearly died, and I didn’t even know his name. Was it because he was a clone? Had I become antisynthetic?

“Please say this is a joke, General,” Nobles said.

“Once I get through to the other side, I’m going to need someone to fly the transport off the battleship.”

“You mean the Tool?” Nobles asked.

“Yeah, okay, the Tool,” I conceded.

“General, do you know where we’ll be when we get to the other side?”

“I have no idea,” I admitted.

“And you want me to come along for the ride?” he asked. “Are you ordering me to come?”

“I was hoping you would volunteer.”

“Have you asked for other volunteers?”

I shook my head and told the truth, “There’s no point placing additional lives in harm’s way.”

“No, sir. Why would you want to put anyone else in danger?”

I would not order Nobles to go. I could. He was a clone. In theory, his programming would make him comply. In theory, our battleship would break through the barrier, and we would sail into the broadcast zone safe and sound. In theory, military clones were incapable of fighting against the Unified Authority. I’d never placed much faith in theoretical solutions, but that wasn’t stopping me from placing my life on the line.

“You’ve been my pilot since they transferred me to the Scutum-Crux Fleet. I’d hate to go without you,” I said. It sounded weak, but Nobles liked the distinction of being my pilot. From what I could tell, he did not mind high-risk missions, either.

He gave me a sly, one-sided smile, and asked, “Since you put it that way, when do we leave?”

“Oh, our schedule,” I said, feeling a bit ashamed. I had not told him about the mission until the last minute because, assuming he agreed to fly me, I did not want to give him enough time to change his mind. “We leave within the hour.”

“Aye, sir, an hour,” he said. “I’ll go pack my things.” He’s a good man, I thought. I’d seen so many good men die during the ten years I’d spent as a Marine.

I didn’t give my pilot time to have second thoughts, but I also secretly hoped for a delay. One man’s delay is another man’s reprieve. I had not yet told Ava that I was ready to leave. She knew about the mission, but she had no idea about my schedule.

I went to visit her at work. She worked in one of the three skyscrapers left standing in a cluster in the Norristown financial district. One of the buildings served as a dormitory for orphaned boys, another for girls. Now that Mars and the Corps of Engineers had restored the power, the locals used the third building as a hospital, among other things. Ava taught literature and drama classes in the girls’ dormitory.

I drove up to the building in my jeep, rain thrumming on the removable roof, making a noise like a thousand fingers tapping on a desk. The triangle of streets between the three buildings stood empty. One of the streets had been dug up and railed off from traffic. The Corps of Engineers had been laying cable there; but with my mission about to begin, the project had stalled as they were needed elsewhere.

I parked my jeep along the curb right beside the girls’ dormitory. When I opened my door, a cold wind blew rain onto the dashboard. I jumped out, and the wind slammed the door shut behind me. My shoulders hunched against the cold and my right hand holding down my lid, I ran to the entrance. As I approached the covered walkway that led to the door of the building, an armed guard stepped out of nowhere and planted himself in my path.

He was a civilian, a kid in his twenties with a little beef on him.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked.

A year ago, I would have planted the kid on his ass, but that was before the shoot-out with the U.A. Marines. I had not had a combat reflex since the Marines shot me with five neurotoxin-coated fléchettes. Instead of feeling the warmth of testosterone and adrenaline in my blood, I felt a slight tinge of nerves. That tiny glimpse of fear bothered me far more than the kid himself. I could not afford to hesitate when challenged, not even for a millisecond, so I responded with more prejudice than needed. Instead of explaining why I had come, I said, “Out of my way.”

The boy started to raise his rifle; but my reflexes, quick as ever, were faster. I grabbed the gun, directing the muzzle away from me, and pulling as if trying to wrench it out of the kid’s hands. When he yanked back, I gave the rifle a shove in his direction, driving the butt into his chest. The boy dropped to the ground, fighting for breath, while I held on to the rifle.

“Now if you will excuse me,” I said. I dropped the gun a few feet from where the boy lay gasping and continued toward the door. Two more armed guards stood just inside the glass door, their rifles drawn.

Those two needed a lesson in depth perception that I would happily give them. They had miscalculated the distance between themselves and the door. I threw the door open, hitting the guard to the right on the nose. Some stupid instinct caused him to fire his weapon as he spun to the ground, and the bullets shattered the glass in the door, sending shards and blades across the lobby. The noise and destruction startled the second guard for a split second—long enough for me to grab his rifle and sweep his legs out from under him. The sound of the gunfire still ringing in my ear, I pulled the clip from the rifle, emptied the chamber, and dropped the gun to the floor. Then I turned to the first guard, and asked, “Excuse me, I’m here to see Ava Gardner. Could you tell her that I’m here?”

The kid scampered backward a couple of paces on his hands and ass, then climbed to his feet and disappeared into the building. I would not set foot beyond the lobby of the girls’ dormitory; some taboos cannot be ignored. Doctorow might overlook my assaulting his three armed guards, but he would not look kindly upon my entering his home for orphaned girls.

As it turned out, my decision to semibehave proved wise. The next person to enter the lobby was not Ava, as I had hoped, but the Right Reverend Colonel Ellery Doctorow. He stormed out of the elevator, came halfway across the lobby, saw the shattered door, and froze where he stood.

“What happened here?” he barked in a voice that was nearly as loud as gunfire.

Only then did I notice the blood on the ground. There was a small puddle to my left, where the second guard sat wiping his face. Blood ran down from his cheeks and squeezed between his fingers. The flying glass must have slashed him.

“Your men pointed their weapons at me, I felt I had to take them away,” I said. “The blood and the door, they did that on their own.”

Outside the door, that first guard managed to sit up but remained on the concrete rubbing his chest, his rifle still resting on the ground beside him.

A dozen people crowded behind Doctorow gaping at the destruction that had been the door of the lobby. They chattered in tiny, half-whispering voices. No one came any closer than Doctorow, who remained thirty feet from me.

I had come unarmed, and I remained unarmed, having given the rifles back to the guards. Standing there in my Charlie service uniform, I tried to look as harmless as possible. If the locals ignored the bits of glass and blood on the ground, the injured men, and the rifles, they might have found me charming.

Attempting to compose himself, Doctorow asked, “What are you doing here?”

The words had barely left his mouth when an elevator opened, and Ava stepped into view. She saw the destruction around me and gave me a somewhat motherly smile—the smile mothers must sometimes give their children as they prepare to scold them. She worked her way through the crowd and stood beside me.

“What are you doing here, General? You know this building is off-limits to you and your men,” Doctorow repeated. He was right, of course; I did know. Until this moment, I had always honored that rule. Even now, I stood just outside the building. I had barely entered its threshold. Once the guards were down, I could have waltzed in at leisure; instead, I remained at the door.

“I came to tell Ava good-bye,” I told Doctorow.

“So you attacked my men and shot up my building?” Doctorow asked.

I did not know how to respond. The way he spun the story, I was the aggressor.

“Honey, next time, why don’t you paint your message on a tank of poison gas and leave it outside the building?” Ava said in her tart voice. Her sarcasm was biting, but it was not aimed at me.

Ava saw things that completely skirted my range of vision. In the bigger scheme of things, Doctorow had fired the first shots.

He lifted a hand to his face and ran his fingers along his beard. “You’re leaving?” he asked, sounding more in control.

“I came to say good-bye,” I repeated.

“You stepped way out of line, Harris; but under the circumstances, I suppose we’ll overlook it,” Doctorow said. What else was he going to do? If he threw me in jail, I couldn’t leave his planet.

Doctorow turned and went back to the elevators, his entourage following after him like a pack of well-trained dogs.

The three guards remained, though they now kept well away from me. Congregating in a distant corner of the lobby, they looked in my direction and whispered among themselves.

“Thank you so much for not making a scene,” Ava said. Now the scorn focused on me, and I wished I hadn’t come.

“Sorry,” I said. It might not have made any difference to Ava, but I felt embarrassed. As we walked through the shattered doorway, glass crunching under our shoes, I wondered if Doctorow might have been right about me. Maybe I couldn’t be trusted.

The rain continued to fall in windblown streaks. My Army green jeep blended in with the darkened streets and gray sky.

“When are you leaving?” Ava asked, as we reached the edge of the awning.

“Now,” I said. “I’m driving to the airfield from here.”

“That seems rather sudden. How long have you known you were leaving?”

“A week.”

“You don’t give a girl much notice.”

“I thought maybe we could have lunch before I left.” I used lunch as bait, but I had something else in mind.

“Harris, it’s three in the afternoon.”

“I haven’t eaten,” I said.

“I have,” she said. I looked in her eyes and knew that she understood what I wanted. Having run out of things to say, I fumbled for a moment, then decided to go for broke. “I could drive you home.”

“What about my car?” she asked.

“We could drive in separate cars,” I said.

“I have classes.”

I could not tell if the wall between us was because she had already moved on from me or if she wanted to protect herself. The last two men in her life had cast her aside; maybe she built mental walls to insulate herself from pain. They were natural-borns, and they had dropped her because she was a clone. She was a clone, and I was a clone; we were together because society had very little use for us. Then again, she was beautiful, and beautiful women seldom hurt for company.

Hoping she had not simply moved on from me, I said, “I will come back.”

I expected to hear more brass from her. I expected Ava to say some line that started with, “Honey.” Instead, she drew close to me. I felt her warm breath as she pressed her lips to my mouth, then I tasted her. She held the kiss for most of a minute, then said, “Harris, you better come back.”

With that, she spun on her heels and walked back into the dormitory, where she knew I could not follow.

CHAPTER TEN

I pulled over in an empty area and changed into my combat armor, then drove to the airfield. The wind and rain picked up as I drove. A constant stream of droplets cascaded down my windshield.

I noticed the weather, but my mind was on Ava. If I came back, would we pick up where we left off? How long would she wait? Why hadn’t she agreed to let me take her home? I knew the answer to that last question: She didn’t want to have sex at that moment. But did that mean we were done? I had to clear my mind for the mission, but I didn’t want to.

As I pulled along the edge of the airfield, I saw Sergeant Nobles waiting in his jeep. Like me, he’d come wearing combat armor. He stepped out of his ride as I approached. Nobles stood at attention and saluted, drops the size of toenails splattering against his armor. “Sir, we’ve fallen a little behind schedule, but we shouldn’t be very late,” he said.

“They won’t start the mission without us,” I said.

He laughed.

If things had gone the way I planned, we would have taken off an hour later, but I would have faced the unknown feeling a bit more satisfied. In the end, though, sex with Ava would have changed nothing.

As we walked around the transport, I watched to see if Nobles would comment on the boot-sized tube attached under the nose of the bird—a tube with a nuclear-tipped torpedo I’d had specially fitted. If he saw it, he didn’t mention it. He might not have noticed the tube hidden the way it was. Me, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Amazing that such a tiny package could do so much damage.

We entered the transport, walking up the rear ramp into the darkness of the kettle, and my heart dropped. I had learned to live with saluting superiors and taking orders from banal-brained officers whose only qualification was that they were natural-born; but the gloomy feeling of entering a transport always gave me a chill. On this day, though, the chill turned icy.

Without saying a word, I crossed the kettle and climbed the ladder to the cockpit. Storm-filtered sunlight shone through the windshield.

A thick wall of mercury-colored storm clouds hid the sun but not its light. Driven by blustering winds, the rain fell at sharp angles and splash-landed in puddles along the side of the landing strip.

The airfield was little more than a landing strip with a couple of newly built hangars surrounded by a wall of chain link and razor wire. We had built guard towers in the corners of the fence to keep the locals out, but that was for show. No one manned the towers.

The landing strip was too short for anything but transports, a species of air-/spacecraft that took off vertically. You couldn’t land so much as a fighter on this strip, but it had enough room for dozens of transports.

“What’s that?” Nobles asked, pointing to the bright red switch one of Mars’s engineers had installed over his throttle.

“Oh, that,” I said, feeling a little bit guilty. “That fires the torpedo.”

“We need a torpedo?” he asked, sounding nervous and more than a little skeptical. He probably wondered if there was more danger to this mission than I had let on about. There wasn’t.

“It never hurts to be prepared,” I said.

Nobles sat in the pilot seat but made no move toward the instrumentation around him. He folded his arms across his chest, and asked, “Prepared for what exactly?”

“Well, you know, there’s no way of knowing where the broadcast will send us.”

Nobles started to say something, but I put up my hand and stopped him.

“Hear me out,” I said. “Admiral Warshaw flew his ships through this broadcast zone; it’s going to be safe,” I said. Having spent six years assigned to the Scutum-Crux Fleet, Nobles knew Warshaw. He might or might not have known Warshaw personally, but they’d both served on the Kamehameha, the flagship of the fleet.

“Did Warshaw strike you as having a death wish?” I asked. “If he used this zone to broadcast himself out, I’m betting it will send us someplace safe.”

Nobles thought about this for a moment, then asked, “So where do you think we’ll come out?”

“Where will we come out?” I repeated. “I have no specking idea, but I can make an educated guess. When the top brass decided to eliminate the cloning program, they shipped off whatever clones were left to twelve of the outer fleets. I don’t know about you; but if I were Warshaw, and I had the Earth Fleet chasing after me, I’d send myself someplace where I could find reinforcements.”

“And the torpedo?” Nobles asked.

“It’s nuclear-tipped,” I said. He knew what that meant.

When I arrived in the Scutum-Crux Arm, the Avatari had Terraneau sealed off from rescue by a layer of tachyons. By firing a nuke above the spot where the layer originated, we were able to poke a small hole through the layer. That was how we landed men on the planet.

Of course, with Terraneau, we knew the exact spot to hit with our torpedo. On this run, we might not even know what planet we were circling, let alone the right spot to hit.

“But it’s just a precaution, right? We’re not bringing it because we’re going to fight aliens.”

“Just a precaution,” I agreed.

“And we won’t need it?” he asked.

“No. Probably not.”

He thought about this, nodded, and pivoted his seat so that he faced the flight controls. “You’re a brave man, sir,” he said as he fired up the engines. “It takes a lot of nerve to decide to fly a nuke through a broadcast zone.”

“They used to do that all the time,” I said, feeling relieved that we were finally going wheels up.

“Those ships were sealed. You’ve got us riding in a specking wreck,” Nobles said. He looked back to see if I was suitably panicked, then fired the thrusters and lifted off the ground. “Good thing you’re comfortable around nuclear weapons.”

He knew I wasn’t.

When I thought the situation through, I realized that anything that set off the nuke would probably toast us as well. Logic only went so far, however, when it came to my phobia of things I could not control. Trying to ignore my nerves, I sat in the copilot’s seat and strapped myself in.

We crossed back over Norristown, passing over barren streets and thriving neighborhoods. Going up to gather food and weapons, I had flown over this territory dozens of times, but this time was different. This time I did not know when I would return. It was not just a question of survival. Even if everything worked out just right, I might never return.

Off in the distance, I saw the three towers of the financial district—the boys’ dorm, the girls’ dorm, and the hospital. Only a few minutes had passed since Ava sent me away. She’d still be in that building. Was she thinking of me?

“So if Warshaw broadcasted into wherever we’re going, what’s to say he stayed there?” Nobles asked. “I mean, maybe he wasn’t any safer there than he was over here. Maybe he got there, patched up another broadcast station, and took his fleet to the next stop.” As he asked this, Nobles took us out of the atmosphere. The sky turned dark and was no longer a sky but field of stars.

And maybe the Earth Fleet caught up to him on the other side, I thought. It was entirely possible that we were broadcasting from one graveyard to another.

“If it isn’t the prodigal son come for a visit,” Lieutenant Mars radioed in to us as we slowed to a drift and floated toward the wreckage. “I was beginning to think you changed your mind.”

Nobles, who had become very serious, ignored Mars’s greeting, and said, “This is Marine 1, do you have a target for us?”

“You mean Harris’s Tool?” asked one of the engineers.

“Roger that,” said Nobles.

“Harris’s Tool,” the engineer persisted. “Harris’s Tool. That is the code name for the battleship. The only way Operation Chastity Belt can succeed is for us all to be on the same page. You need to call it ‘Harris’s Tool,’ or we won’t know what you are talking about.”

“Come again?” asked Nobles.

“The names were Spuler’s idea, not mine,” Mars said, sounding somewhat apologetic. Seaman First Class Aaron Spuler was the resident joker of the Corps of Engineers.

“Fine, where is Harris’s Tool?” Nobles asked.

“Where do you think?” asked Spuler.

Several people laughed. I did not, neither did Nobles.

“COE 1, where precisely is the battleship?” Nobles asked, his voice flat. “COE” was short for Corps of Engineers.

“Honestly, Spuler, you’re acting like a ten-year-old,” said Mars. Then he said, “Marine 1, I’ll send over the coordinates.”

The laughter stopped.

We picked our way through the graveyard. Terraneau, a giant blue, green, and tawny globe, spun in one corner of our vision. Far in a distance, a roiling orange-and-yellow sun glowed. Seen from inside our transport, the dead ships floating around us looked as large as continents, their portholes dark, the exposed areas of their decks even darker. Humanity never conquered space, it just learned to travel in bubbles. All around us, the dead ships hung as reminders of what happens when that bubble breaks.

It took us twenty minutes to fly through the graveyard, dodging around the ruins of capital ships, sometimes breaking through a fog of litter. We saw no bodies, though tens of thousands of them floated around us. We pushed through bits of armor plating, folds of molten glass, wings from fighters, and more than one curtain of frozen water, all suspended in space. My pilot might have been used to these sights; he always flew in the cockpit where he could see his surroundings. I generally traveled in the kettle, blissfully ignorant of everything around the ship.

Off in the distance, a derelict battleship sat in a clearing like an island in the night. Three rows of flashing lights ran along the underside of the ship, winking on and off in a sequence of red and yellow squares. At the far end of the ship, four flashing blue lights marked the entrance to the landing bay.

The hull of the battleship was somewhere between beige and gray in color, an enormous moth-shaped wedge with tears in its skin where torpedoes had struck it.

“I don’t like the looks of this scow,” Nobles said.

I did not say anything. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I wanted to treat this whole adventure as if it were a bad dream. I would do what had to be done, but fear lurked in my mind. I tried to ignore it, but I knew it was there.

All along the side of the ship, tiny dark spots stood out against the gray of the hull. They looked no more significant than slugs crawling on a garden wall. These were transports, clamped to the hull on the ship in regular intervals, thirty of them in all. We flew below one, and I stared up at it. No light shone from within the cockpit. The transport looked every bit as dead as the host to which it was now attached.

“They look like ants compared to the battleship,” Nobles said. I expected him to question whether they would be able to move the big ship, but he didn’t. A trained pilot, he understood the physics of space travel better than I did.

We approached the landing bay, a straight-edged passageway shrouded in darkness. In the dead of space, with the landing-pad lights extinguished, the inside of the bay was absolute black. The silhouette of a raven flying across a moonless sky would not have been as dark as the world inside that ship.

“COE1, this is Marine 1,” Nobles began, and hesitated before completing his thought. “We have entered the battleship.”

Spuler started to make another stupid joke, but Mars cut him off. “Understood,” he said. I could hear Spuler grumbling in the background.

“Are the locks open?” Nobles asked. Landing bays incorporated enormous doors for atmospheric control.

“Everything is a go,” Mars said. “We will seal the locks behind you.”

“Yeah, we wouldn’t want anything to shoot out prematurely,” Spuler added.

“Stow it, Seaman,” Mars snapped.

More laughter. Even Mars laughed this time. Then he said, “One more word out of you, Spuler, and you’ll be cleaning the Norristown sewage system for the rest of your career.”

Silence.

I knew Spuler. He had a mouth on him, but he was worth the trouble. Mars had one thousand men in his Corps of Engineers; Spuler might well have been the best of them. He’d probably done more to get this show rolling than all of the other engineers combined.

Moving no faster than ten miles per hour, we drifted into that dark hatchway, our runner lights illuminating small swatches along the runway and walls. This part of the ship was in immaculate condition—the walls, pipes, panels, doors, ceiling fixtures, and other furnishings all in perfect trim.

The runway was designed to accommodate transports, but it was wide enough for larger ships. Part of the design included an artificial-gravity field in which ships entering this passage were supposed to land. The field had not been restored. Instead of riding the sled system through the locks, Nobles had to fly the transport through that needle’s eye.

“Marine 1, the outer hatch is sealed,” Mars informed us.

Spuler said nothing. He probably had some smart remark about restoring a foreskin or something along that line, but Mars had warned him off.

We slowly drifted past the first of the atmospheric shields, a massive iron door that weighed multiple tons. Behind it, in a discrete recess, a tiny red light winked on and off. I was glad to see it. It meant that while the rest of the ship was dormant, the engineers had restored power to the atmospheric locks.

Nobles pointed to a glowing lever on his flight stick. “Looks like we’ll be able to open the doors from in here,” he said, sounding relieved. I knew how he felt. Everything had gone according to plan so far.

We floated in past all three of the locks and settled onto the landing-bay deck. In the glare of our runner lights, I saw that Mars and his engineers had cleared as much debris as they could from the area.

I looked around the empty landing bay outside the window, a world so dark and silent it might have been at the bottom of a sea. Abandoned. Lifeless. How many people had died in this chamber? A crew of three thousand men had died defending this ship. That much I knew. Some had been flushed out to space. Undoubtedly, others were still aboard, floating statues that had once been sailors and Marines.

The Corps of Engineers had equipped the skids of our transport with special magnetic clamps to hold us in place during our upcoming collision. The magnets came on and locked us into place once we landed.

“COE 1, we are in place, repeat, we are in place,” Nobles radioed, as our bird touched the deck.

I hated the sound of those words. They meant we were sealed into this orbiting tomb. They meant I could not turn back. Anxiety built in my gut. I wanted to tell Nobles that this was all a mistake. We needed to go back. Without my combat reflex to calm me, I had to deal with unadulterated fear.

“Copy that, Marine 1,” Mars said.

And then, on a direct line that Nobles would not hear, Lieutenant Mars said, “General Harris, a lot of your men will be glad to see you go.”

“So I hear,” I said. Now it was Mars’s turn to tell me what he thought of me. Why not give me an earful? He wasn’t likely to see me again. I always thought the “born-again clone” liked me, but maybe he simply had a better poker face than Hollingsworth or Doctorow.

“Serving with you has been an honor, sir. I hope your mission goes as planned, and you return soon,” he said, leaving me stunned. He signed off before I could respond.

Once again I found myself alone with my thoughts, trying to adjust to the alien feeling of unbridled fear. Flying always bothered me, even when I had a reliable combat reflex. It made me feel helpless. In the fight-or-flight of the battlefield, I had a measure of control. On a ship, I had no control of my fate. Whatever became of the ship would also become of me.

“Nobles, what’s your first name?” I asked, mostly to clear the suffocating silence from my helmet.

“Chris, sir,” he said.

“Short for Christopher?”

“Short for Christian. My parents must have been religious types.” Like every other clone, he was raised to believe he was a natural-born. In fact, he was programmed to die if he discovered his synthetic heritage. As a Liberator, I was spared that last bit of programming.

“Must have been,” I agreed. “Too bad you never knew them. Do you know how they died?”

“They died in a house fire,” Nobles said.

Funny, I thought, mine, too. Lieutenant Mars broke up our conversation. “Prepare for launch initiation. Repeat, prepare for launch initiation.”

“Shit, here we go,” I whispered, not even thinking who would hear me.

“General Harris, we set up a video array if you want to follow the operation’s progress.”

I thought that he meant some kind of an interLink display. The last thing I wanted at that moment was images of transports dragging the carcass of a battleship showing inside my helmet.

Willing myself to sound calm, I said, “I’d rather keep the interLink open.”

“They’re not on the interLink, sir, they’re on the screens behind your seat.”

“What?” When I looked at the back wall of the cockpit, I saw five rows of four-inch video screens inlaid in the wall. Most of the screens showed a small section of the battleship’s hull and a bird’s-eye view of cluttered space. The engineers must have placed cameras in the transports along the hull.

“That’s was kind of you,” I said.

“It was Spuler’s idea,” Mars said.

“Think of it as an in-flight porno,” said Spuler. “You get to watch the Tool’s penetration.”

“Spuler,” Mars said.

I tried to ignore them. Looking at the little displays, I realized just how much I wanted to scrub the mission. I felt the jittering in my hands and the throbbing in my temples. Now that the transport had landed, and the runner lights were out, I sat in darkness, seeing only by the light of the night-for-day lenses in my visor. I was scared already, and soon I would be terrified.

Trying to sound confident, I told Mars, “Pull the trigger.” Then I did something I knew I would regret; I told Nobles, “I’m shutting down our Link until we get through,” without giving him a reason why. I wasn’t shutting down the entire interLink, we might need to contact Mars; I was just shutting down the Link between me and Nobles because I could feel the panic spreading through my thoughts like a cancer, and I did not want him to hear me.

“Yes, sir,” said Nobles. He seemed preoccupied as he toyed with the switches and gear around his seat.

I removed the harness and climbed out of the chair. The artificial gravity drawing my boots to the deck, I walked to the panel of screens. When I took a closer look at some of the monitors, I saw the rear sides of transports in the corners of the screens. The engines were already running. We had started the flight without my noticing. Sometimes, that happens in space.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I couldn’t stop myself from looking at the monitors. It didn’t matter that I wanted to stick my head in the proverbial sand; the screens bore down on me like five rows of unblinking eyes. Even when I looked away, I felt their weight upon me.

Across the cockpit, Nobles busied himself checking systems and flight controls. He flipped switches, read gauges, then turned his attention to the video array I wanted so much to ignore. He settled comfortably, and there he sat, his gaze transfixed, the reflections of the little screens showing in rows of bright squares in his visor.

In the isolation of my helmet, I began to panic. “I’m not ready for this,” I said to myself. I said it out loud. There was something comforting in hearing my own voice rolling around in my helmet; and what did it matter, I had shut off the interLink. No one would hear me.

“Did you say something, General?” For a moment I thought I might be hearing voices, then I remembered that I had not severed my Link with Lieutenant Mars.

“No,” I said. “I’m just mumbling to myself.” I thought for a moment, then I said, “I can’t do this. This is crazy, we need to call this off.”

The top screens of the array showed the view from the lead transport drones. The cameras looked out into space, but not open space. A tangle of wrecked warships filled the view, looking as impregnable as a castle wall.

I became aware of the way I was breathing, panting like a winded dog.

Light flared across thirty of the thirty-five screens, turning them white as an afternoon sun. The nuclear explosion. We’d just shot off enough bombs to destroy a small planet. The heat generated by the cataclysm would only last a moment. During that moment, metal would melt—and bodies—then the chill of space would return. What was the power of a few nuclear bombs against the immenseness of space?

The flash of the bombs vanished as quickly as it appeared, but it left ghosts on the video screens. Thirty of the thirty-five screens were outside the ship, placed in transports; the other five showed scenes inside the hull of the battleship …the Tool. These screens showed dark corridors and braced walls. Mars and his men had done a lot of work preparing the ship.

“I’m not ready for this,” I told Mars. On the other side of the cockpit, Nobles sat comfortably, unbothered by what we were about to do. Apparently, flying through nuclear explosions left him unfazed.

“It’s too late to call off the mission, General,” Mars said in a voice meant to soothe me.

“Shut down the transports,” I said. “You have control of the transports, shut them down.”

“We can’t do that, sir. There’s already too much forward momentum.”

“Shut them off,” I said, feeling frantic. I had no control over the situation, and that terrified me.

“The Tool will still hit Chastity Belt whether we cut the engines or not,” Mars said.

Now he was using the names Spuler had used, and that aggravated me. My anger cut through my panicked thoughts, and I said, “Lieutenant, shut off the specking engines.”

Mars laughed. “Does Ava Gardner know that you’re a coward?”

I heard the words, but it took a moment for them to sink in. I sat in the copilot’s chair in stunned silence, as he added, “Harris, you’re the best kept secret in the whole Marine Corps. Everyone thinks you’re such a badass, and it turns out you’re just another bed wetter.”

“You son of a bitch,” I said, looking away from the monitors. “You specking son of a bitch. If I get out of here …”

“Now I’m scared,” Mars said. “General Bed Wetter is threatening me.”

I could not think of anything else but how much I wanted to kill that son of a bitch. “Born-again clone” my ass. I would have hopped out of the battleship and dog-paddled to Terraneau if I thought I could do it. It was as I sat there fuming, trying to invent some form of revenge, that we struck the barrier. We did not slice through the broken ships, we smashed through like a hammer hitting glass, and the force nearly threw me from my chair.

I turned toward the monitors in time to see three of them go dead. The working screens showed a fractal kaleidoscope of shapes—shards of ships tumbling as they floated out of view. The five cameras located inside the battleship showed crumbled walls that looked like they might have been made out of paper.

Two of the screens in the first row showed the bow of one of the U.A. ships floating into open space. Strands of blue electricity formed around it, flexing and dancing; and then, in a flash, the section of ship was gone.

“You’re through the barrier, sir,” Mars said, suddenly sounding respectful once more. “For what it’s worth, I would have resigned my commission before I would have done what you are doing.”

“What?” I asked, my thoughts still entropic.

“You are traveling at a sustained speed of 273 miles per hour,” Mars said. “I hoped you would come through at 290, but 270 is within the margin of error.”

I still did not understand. I looked over at Nobles, who still sat staring into the monitors, looking so damned relaxed. He had his seat swiveled around, his right hand stretched across the arm of his chair and his left hand curled on his lap.

It took me another moment to realize that Mars had said those things to distract me. I took a deep breath, and said, “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

“No problem, sir,” said Mars. I could hear the smile in his voice. “Go with God.”

My blood pressure returning to normal, I turned to look at screens and saw the beginning of the anomaly forming. The electricity of the anomaly was not as bright as the nuclear flare, but it was sustained. It looked like a bubble of light in the darkness of space. Jagged tentacles of electricity reached out from it.

“Here comes the dangerous part of the ride,” I said.

“You’ll be fine, sir,” Mars said.

In less than a second, the lightning from the anomaly stretched and overtook the battleship. The screens on the first row of the array showed a brief flash of white and went dead. The screens on the second row showed lightning dancing on the hull of the battleship. They showed transports peeling away from the hull like dried leaves falling from a tree.

Electricity continued dancing along the hull. More screens went bright, then dark. Somehow, the electricity worked its way inside the battleship; I could see it on three of the internal screens. Unstable light danced inside the hallways, an obscene wattage, multiple millions of joules, more than enough power to stop my heart and sear my skin and melt my eyes.

The electricity ran through the ship like a flood, splashing glare everywhere. It happened so quickly, literally in a flash. One moment I saw monitors winking out of existence, the next moment all was silent. I sat in the cockpit aware that if a catastrophe were going to happen, it would already have occurred.

“Mars, can you hear me?” I asked.

No one responded.

We’ve either made it through, or Mars has died, I thought. Then I came up with another possibility—my communications gear might have fried.

I tried to raise Mars on several frequencies and had no luck. Then I tried Nobles. When he did not respond, it occurred to me that he might have had a heart attack. The poor son of a bitch might have died right there, sitting in his pilot’s seat just a few feet away from me.

If he was having heart problems, there was nothing I could do. I could not open his armor; we had purged the oxygen from the cabin. Not knowing what else to do, I tapped my fingers on the glass visor of his helmet.

“What are you doing?” Nobles asked, his voice groggy.

“You fell asleep?” I asked, feeling both relieved and embarrassed.

“Sorry, sir,” Nobles said. “When are we going to make the broadcast?”

“You slept through the entire thing?” I asked, now realizing why he looked so relaxed. Wondering if the sleep had helped him avoid a panic attack or if the sleep had been the attack, I patted Nobles on his armored shoulder, and said, “Let’s take our bird out of here and find out where we are.”

“Yes, sir,” Nobles said, sounding as if I had woken him from a trance. He flipped a switch, and the lights came back online in the cockpit. The gauges in the instrument panel shone their low green-and-white glow. The runner lights along the base of the transport started, shining bright light all around the landing bay. Hitting our thrusters ever so slightly, he lifted us off the ground to rotate the transport so that our nose faced the runway.

He tapped a button and looked out the windshield. When he did not get the response he wanted, he tapped the button several more times. “COE 1, this is Marine 1. The atmospheric gates are not responding. Repeat, COE 1, I am unable to open the gates.” He sounded so damn official when he hit the mike.

“Lieutenant Mars warned me that this might happen while we were prepping for launch,” Nobles said.

“Come again,” I said.

“The atmospheric locks are not responding, sir. Mars said that could happen. He said something about taking our fate in our own hands by flying a wreck,” Nobles said. “I didn’t think we’d survive the broadcast, that’s why I took that sleeping pill.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

The doors of the atmospheric locks might have been knocked out of alignment when we crashed through the other ships, or the controls for opening the door may have been fried when we passed through the broadcast zone. We were trapped either way.

Nobles parked the transport and opened the rear hatch for me. The artificial gravity that rooted me to the deck of the transport did not extend beyond its ramp. I leaped into the void and floated across the open landing-bay floor as smoothly as a cloud rolls across the sky. Below me, I saw the rubberized insulation that the Corps of Engineers used to coat the floor, walls, and ceiling. The stuff had probably saved our lives; a lot of electricity had pulsed through this ship.

“Speck,” I said.

“What is it?” asked Nobles.

I drifted right up to the wall and pounded a fist into the insulation. It was rigid. Hoping to peel the rubber away, I tried stabbing my fingers into the rubber. It did not give way.

“They sealed the doors to the ship,” I said. I had hoped to search the ship for explosives or maybe a laser welder, something I could use to cut through the atmospheric locks.

“It’s insulation,” Nobles informed me. “That’s what kept the electricity out of the landing bay.”

“It’s also sealing us in,” I pointed out, my temper starting to get the better of me. I silently toyed with the idea of pulling my combat knife from my rucksack, but I knew I couldn’t even nick industrial-grade insulation using a simple knife. “You wouldn’t happen to have anything we can use to cut our way out?”

“You mean like a laser welder?” asked Nobles.

“Yeah,” I said.

“No, sir. Did you bring any weapons we can use?”

“I have an M27 and a torpedo.”

“Didn’t you say the torpedo was a nuke?” asked Nobles.

“Affirmative.”

“Maybe we should save that for a last resort, sir.”

“There has got to be some way out of here,” I said. Pushing off the rubberized wall, I launched myself past the transport and glided to the far end of the bay. With its electronics off-line, the massive atmospheric lock was just another wall. It was designed to be bulletproof, fireproof, and radiation resistant. I might have been tempted to fire my M27 at it, but firing a gun in a vacuum with neither gravity nor air friction to slow the bullets down was never a good idea.

“Speck,” I muttered as I kicked off the lock, sending myself past the transport. Gliding in the null gravity, I had no more capacity to steer myself than a bullet or a billiard ball. I sailed past the nose of the transport, then along the side and pushed a different wall, reangling myself so that I entered the transport through its ass, where the artificial gravity brought me to my feet.

Dragging my feet along the ramp to stop myself, I turned to take one last look across the landing bay. Surely there had to be a welding torch or a drill. Hell, even a particle beam might do the trick. A particle beam …A tiny pistol—its disruptive beam might tear through the insulation.

The standard-issue particle-beam pistol was small …so small you could throw one in your rucksack and forget it was there. I hit the button, closing the rear doors, then grabbed my rucksack and headed up to the cockpit.

“What are you doing?” Nobles asked, as I burst into the cabin.

“I have an idea,” I said as I pulled out my clothes. I pulled out my Charlie service pants and blouse, not really flinging them away, but not watching where they landed. I had underwear, shoes, socks, toiletries, my M27, and three clips of ammunition.

And then, at the bottom of my rucksack where I hoped I might find a particle-beam pistol, I found nothing.

“What are you looking for?” Nobles asked.

“A particle-beam weapon,” I said.

“Did you bring one?”

“Apparently not,” I said. “I don’t suppose you did?” I already knew the answer, but he confirmed it. Nobles was a pilot, not a fighter.

“So what do we do now?” Nobles asked.

I dropped into the copilot’s seat, and said, “Isn’t it obvious?”

“We die?” he asked.

“We wait,” I said. “We’re in a battleship that just sailed into occupied space. If the Scutum-Crux Fleet is anywhere near here, Warshaw will send ships out to investigate.”

“Oh, hey, maybe I should send out a distress signal,” Nobles suggested.

“Good idea,” I said, no longer certain either of us imbeciles deserved to live much longer.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The fighters came first. Unseen by us, they circled the battleship, listening to our distress signal for several minutes before asking us to identify ourselves. Trapped within the landing bay, unable to scan the area outside the battleship, we had no idea whether we were dealing with a couple of fighters or an entire fleet.

I identified myself as General Wayson Harris of the Enlisted Man’s Marines.

“It doesn’t look like you have much of a ship there, General,” said one of the fighter pilots.

It occurred to me that the Unified Authority might well have tracked the SC Fleet to this stretch of the galaxy and defeated it. I might have been speaking to a Unified Authority fighter pilot, in which case my name, rank, and serial number would be more than enough information for a court-martial and firing squad.

The pilot had a clonelike voice, however. He sounded pretty much like any man under my command. They were all built with the exact same vocal cords, after all.

“This battleship is deader than dinosaur shit,” I said. “My pilot and I are sitting in a transport inside the battleship. The transport works. The battleship was just an empty husk we used to surf through the broadcast zone.”

The fighter pilot repeated my story back to me to make sure he had heard correctly. “You say you rode a dead battleship through the broadcast zone?”

“That just about sums it up,” I said.

He didn’t believe me. I didn’t blame him. “Tell you what, General, you just fly out, and we will escort you down to the planet.”

“Um, I can’t,” I said. “The landing-bay hatch is broken.”

“This just keeps getting more interesting,” the pilot said. He thought for a moment, then asked in a suspicious voice, “Is this a readiness drill?”

“Pilot, what is your name?” I asked.

“Stanford, sir. Petty Officer First Class Jefferson Stanford.”

“I assure you, Petty Officer First Class Stanford, this is not a drill. This is not a specking joke,” I said, and I ordered him to call his commander and report his findings.

Another hour of silence followed. Nobles suggested we pipe air and heat into the cockpit so we could remove our helmets. Taking off the old lid felt good after what we had been through. A few minutes later, he suggested we air out the main kettle. Once that was done, he went to the head and relieved himself.

“Did I miss anything?” he asked when he returned.

I shook my head.

“What if they don’t come back?”

“They will,” I said.

Another hour passed, and they came back en masse.

“Harris, is that really you in there?”

“Who am I speaking with?” I asked.

“Are you a message in a bottle or a guinea pig?” The voice could have belonged to just about any clone, but the attitude sounded familiar.

“Who is this?” I repeated.

“This is Hank Bishop, Captain of the E.M.F. Kamehameha ,” he said, “E.M.F.” being short for “Enlisted Man’s Fleet.” Just a few months ago, it was still the Scutum-Crux Fleet; but now that the break with the Unified Authority was formal, it was the Enlisted Man’s Fleet, and the Kamehameha was its flagship.

“No shit,” I said.

Bishop laughed. It was a friendly laugh. “Stay put, Harris, I have some engineers on the way. We’ll get you out of there.”

Another hour passed, and the atmospheric gates slid open. A squadron of fighters met our transport as we emerged from the battleship and escorted us to the Kamehameha.