The Clone Empire

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

“It’s over.”

Freeman woke me from a light sleep. I opened my eyes, got my bearings, and slid off my spot in the back of the truck.

The air down at the bottom of the station was cool. An odd pattern of emergency lights showed from the ceilings. I looked around the shadowy chamber and thought to myself, It couldn’t have been much of an explosion if I slept through it.

I was still reviewing that thought when an explosion occurred. As cataclysms go, it was not much. The ground did not shake, and the walls did not crumble. An audible thud rang through the underground power station, and that was that. Shit. If that little thud is all that we get, Warshaw’s going to ride my ass forever, I thought to myself. The underground station seemed to have survived the event without so much as a crack.

Putting on his helmet to seal his armor, Freeman started walking up the ramp. I donned my helmet and followed, scanning for radiation as I went. I used the night-for-day lens in my visor so I could see clearly in the dark.

The top level of the station seemed unaffected by whatever had happened. The structure looked sound, no breaks in the walls, no toppled equipment. As we rounded a turn and started toward the exit, I noticed something on the ground. In the blue-gray graphics of my night-for-day lens, the stuff looked like ice. It had an organic look, like a thick liquid that had spilled on the ground and frozen in place.

I switched the lens in my visor to heat vision. Through this lens, frozen objects appeared blue and humans gave off an orange signature. The stuff on the concrete near my feet was white. Had I stepped on it, my armored boot would have melted.

I started to ask Freeman what it was, but when I looked up the ramp, I had my answer. I saw the night sky. The heavy metal shutter Freeman had lowered to block the entrance had melted soft, then imploded. Its soggy cardboardlike remains still blocked the bottom third of the doorway, but some of the metal had melted to liquid and run down the ramp.

“We might as well blow the rest of it right off its tracks,” I said.

“Once it cools down,” Freeman said.

I examined the magmalike liquid using heat vision. It no longer gave off a glowing white signature; in just those few seconds, it had cooled to the color of butter. The concrete around the entrance glowed a dark yellow. Freeman stood fifty feet back from the entrance; the walls around him barely registered on my visor.

“What the speck happened here?” I asked.

Freeman did not answer.

I asked, “Have you checked with Sweetwater and Breeze?” “Communications are out.”

If a nuke went off outside this station, the shock wave would have sent the door flying, but it wouldn’t have specking melted it. Not a thick metal door like this one. I looked back at the remains, noting the way the top curled in like a badly hung curtain. Above the wilting metal, the night sky looked almost ablaze, the lower clouds glowing an eerie orange.

A moment passed before I realized that I wasn’t looking at clouds; I was looking at a sky filled with steam. The rebreather in my armor would protect me if I stepped out; but without it, that air would have poached my lungs.

Whatever had struck Olympus Kri, it wasn’t just powerful, it was cataclysmic. Did it land on the planet or simply strike from space? The Avatari’s new weapon of destruction had an almost velvet touch. The ground had not shook. Hell, I slept through the entire event.

For now, Freeman and I were trapped in the underground station, not buried alive, but trapped. We could not leave the ramp, there was too much molten metal on the ground, and the concrete around the entrance was burning hot, heated to crystal.

Not daring to step any closer, I stared out through the ruined entrance and into the sky. I saw clouds of steam that smoldered against a dirty black sky. With its roiling orange clouds and its layers of steam and smoke, the horizon looked like it was made of embers.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“We wait,” Freeman answered.

“How long?” I asked.

“Till the planet cools off.”

Had one of my Marines said that, I would have busted the sarcastic prick in the nose. From Freeman, I smiled and ignored it. He wasn’t capable of sarcasm …and I wasn’t capable of busting him in the nose.

So we walked back down the ramp and I found my place on the truck and tried to sleep. I closed my eyes and pretended to drift off, but it was all pretend. The image of a planet burning like a lump of coal in a furnace filled my mind. I thought about Terraneau reduced to a cinder and Ava caught in the blaze.

If I made it off this planet, I would go to Terraneau. I would beg Doctorow to evacuate the planet. I would beg Ava to leave with me. At some point, I slipped into that frenetic state between sleep and consciousness in which I could never tell the difference between dreams and reality. I imagined myself walking through the ashes of Norristown, looking for Ava.

In my dream, the streets had vanished, and all of the buildings had vanished, all but the three towers that Doctorow used as dormitories. The three skyscrapers in the center of town still stood, but they had melted. Their straight edges had melted and they now had curves and convolutions and I realized that they looked like skeletal fingers sticking out of the ground. They were black, like the color of charred bone, and they reached up to the ashen sky, and I recognized them. The finger on the left belonged to Ellery Doctorow and the finger on the right belonged to Scott Mars; and though I desperately tried to deny it, I knew that the finger in the center was Ava.

“Ava!” I shouted. In my sleep, the name came out so slowly that it sounded like a wind that could blow apart rocks.

Freeman woke me from the dream. He tapped on my helmet until I sat up, then he said, “We can get out.” As I stood and stretched my arms, he climbed into the truck and started the engine.

Sweetwater greeted me on both the interLink and the little two-way as I slipped into the passenger’s seat. “Glad to see you made it,” he said, sounding unnaturally cheerful.

“What happened out there?” I asked.

“We were just telling Raymond,” Sweetwater said.

Breeze came on as well. He must have been sitting and Sweetwater standing, or maybe Sweetwater was on a ladder. They looked to be about the same size on the little screen of the two-way.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Breeze said. “We had satellites all around the planet looking for an explosion. From all we observed, it was a spontaneous event.”

Excited by a discovery that seemed to ignore the laws of physics, Breeze no longer stuttered. “The temperature over Odessa rose from seventy-two degrees to nine thousand degrees so quickly that our instruments recorded it as instantaneous. The same thing happened all around the planet—a spontaneous and uniform change in temperature to nine thousand degrees.”

“Which also explains why the Tachyon D levels dropped,” Sweetwater said. “The little devils consumed themselves. They burned themselves up like gas in a fire. Do you have any idea how much energy it would take to generate that much heat?”

The dwarf scientist squared his shoulders, and said, “Here. Here are some of the satellite images. You can see for yourself.”

Sweetwater and Breeze disappeared from the screen, replaced by the image of a city at night. Streetlights shone, but no cars roved the streets. Without lights shining in their windows, the buildings of Odessa hid in the darkness.

Then it happened. The event did not start on one side of the screen and move to the other like an explosion; it happened everywhere all at once. The very air seemed to catch on fire.

“Nine thousand degrees,” Sweetwater said. “It’s nearly as hot as the surface of the sun.” Sweetwater, the communicator, used analogies. Breeze, the scientist, spouted data.

The satellite footage showed a car parked along the side of the street. The paint dulled, metal sagged, and the car exploded. It flipped through the air, landing on its roof. It looked like a turtle turned on its shell. Moments later, its tires burst into flames.

Grass, trees, cloth awnings, and signs burst into flames. Steam rose up around an iron lid covering a manhole, then the cover launched and spun through the air like a tossed coin. By the time it hit the ground, the street had melted, and it sank into the tar.

Thick fog rose from the flaming wreckage of a grassy park. The steel cables along a suspension bridge stretched and drooped like melting plastic, finally giving way and dropping the bridge into the river below. The cloud of steam coming off the river was thick as linen.

You can’t fight this, I thought, as I watched the scene with grim fascination.

I saw cars and trucks sinking into the street below them and thin coils of steam rising from cement sidewalks. I saw concrete shelters collapse in on themselves. Explosions occurred everywhere. A fire hydrant burst, sending a column of steam into the air. The camera focused on a skyscraper, the windows along the bottom of the building melting in their casings.

A counter appeared in the top right corner of the screen. It ticked off seconds and hundredths of seconds.

“Now this is curious,” Sweetwater said, the excitement obvious in his gravelly voice.

The camera panned back, showing more of the street. The windows of several buildings along an avenue exploded, spitting out shotgun bursts of glittering glass shrapnel that turned a fiery orange and melted in the air.

Sweetwater continued to narrate. “You see how the windows are bursting outward? We think it is because the atmosphere is rising. That means the pressure from the air trapped inside the buildings is not being matched by air pressure on the outside of the building. It’s all guesswork, of course, no one has ever seen anything like this before; but we think heat is causing the atmosphere to rise like a hot-air balloon, so the pressure on the outside of the buildings is dropping. Here, look at this!”

The camera moved in on a skyscraper. The building coughed glass out of its windows floor by floor, the damage rising quickly. Not all of the windows shattered. Some had already melted.

The image changed to show a forest, and the timer in the corner returned to zero. At five seconds, the trees in the forest lit up like match heads in a book that had been set ablaze. The trees did not ignite one here and one there, they all lit up at once, flaring into a brilliant orange.

The image changed again, this time showing a vast body of water, maybe an ocean or maybe a great lake. Then the heat started. Twenty seconds in, steam began to rise off the water.

“We estimate the heat penetrated no more than five feet deep,” Sweetwater said. “Any fish swimming close to shore would have been poached.”

To this point, the video feed did not show anything that might have caused the explosion I had heard when I awoke. Nor had it shown anything that would have caused the shutter at the top of the power station to burst inward.

On the screen, the timer showed eighty-three seconds and froze.

“It lasted precisely eighty-three seconds,” Sweetwater said, the former excitement missing from his voice. “At eighty-three seconds, the heat stopped, and the air temperature dropped sharply.”

The timer started counting. It reached ninety-six seconds, and there was the explosion. Nothing big or fiery, but something powerful enough to make weakened buildings collapse as it flushed enormous clouds of ash and soot into the air.

“What was that?” asked Freeman.

“The heat from the event lifted the atmosphere. We estimate that the atmosphere rose approximately 550 feet from ground level because of the heat. After the event ended, the atmosphere dropped back into place,” said Sweetwater.

Freeman said nothing. He sat silent and unmoving, his helmet hiding his expression. I whispered a constant stream of expletives to myself as I watched the destruction.

The video feed stopped, and the scientists again appeared on the screen. Breeze stared into a monitor on his desk instead of the camera. Sweetwater stared into the camera as if watching us.

Breeze looked up from his monitor and turned to face us. “I’ve reviewed the data again, and I still cannot find evidence of an initial explosion, not even a transfer of energy that might have set this off.”

“The only anomaly is the tachyons,” Sweetwater agreed.

“Does the atmosphere look stable?” Freeman asked.

“Completely stable,” said Breeze.

“Raymond, you want to be careful out there,” Sweetwater said. “We’re tracking movement on the planet.”

“You mean survivors?” I asked, thinking of the Double Y clones and wondering how any of those bastards could have survived.

“Whatever it is, it’s so fast it barely registers on our instruments,” Sweetwater said.

“It’s behaving like an electrical current in circuit,” Breeze said, trying to be helpful but unable to divest himself of scientific jargon that meant nothing to us military types.

“We think it’s traveling a set path, but we only pick it up in certain locations,” Sweetwater said by way of explanation. “We can’t tell if there is a single current streaming around the planet or several separate currents traveling in vectors, but our instruments keep registering it in the same key locations.”

Until that moment, I had taken it as a given that the event had ended—the Avatari had come, they’d toasted the planet, and now they were gone. But maybe my assumptions were wrong. Maybe after toasting the planet, they left something behind to finish off survivors.

“What about the tachyon levels?” Freeman asked, sounding more like a scientist than a mercenary.

“Oh, now that is interesting,” Sweetwater said. “Ninety-nine percent of the Tachyon D concentration was spent during the conflagration. The rest is diminishing quickly.”

“Will the current disappear when the tachyons run out?” Freeman asked.

“Excellent question, Raymond. That is our guess,” said Sweetwater. “Only time will tell if our hypothesis is correct. Of course, we still found a residue of Tachyon D on New Copenhagen, so the assumptions may not be valid.”

“How long before it’s safe out there?” I asked. By this time, I had fished five grenade launchers out of my go-pack.

“At this rate, fifteen minutes,” Sweetwater said. “Perhaps you should stay where you are and wait until the currents runs down.”

The truck was already moving before he finished the suggestion. Freeman asked, “Do you have a fix on our location.” When Sweetwater nodded, he said, “It’s time to run the tests.”

Freeman stepped on the gas, and the truck lurched ahead, growling like a mongrel dog, tearing around corners and speeding up the ramp. As we approached the entrance, I expected him to fire a rocket at the remnant of that steel door, but he didn’t. He pulled to a stop about twenty feet from the top.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m going to set a charge,” he said.

I laughed and handed him a grenade launcher. He didn’t need my weapons, the truck had rockets and a chain gun mounted on its front fender.

Freeman ignored me. He placed charges beside both ends of the door, then came back to the truck. His charges produced tiny explosions, and the door tipped over and fell out of its track.

Using charges instead of rockets struck me as prissy, but it probably saved our lives.

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

Freeman’s charges exploded, and the remains of the metal shutter toppled backward in a drunken twist, revealing an altered world. The parking lot had not changed much, but the fleet of heavy equipment was no longer parked in neat rows. A steamroller had simply sunk into the street. Cranes lay on their sides, and a few of the trucks now lay upside down.

“What the hell?” I hissed as I surveyed the wreckage. Having seen the video feed, I should have known what to expect; but I still was not prepared for it. The feed showed me places I had never seen, but I had just driven through this parking lot a few hours earlier.

Stolid as ever, Freeman said nothing.

“Gentlemen, you will want to keep your helmets on,” Sweetwater said.

“If you mean it’s hot out there, I can see that,” I said. Sitting in the truck, eyeing the devastation, I felt overwhelmed.

I looked to my right and saw the remains of a Dumpster. The thin sheet metal of its walls had simply wilted in the heat.

“The temperature outside the tunnel is 126 degrees,” Sweetwater said. “That qualifies as toasty. But the reason you’ll want your helmets is to breathe. You’re in the middle of a fire zone, the oxygen is thin.”

“How thin?” I asked. I thought about lessons I had learned in science growing up in the orphanage. “Does oxygen burn at nine thousand degrees?”

“Oxygen doesn’t burn,” Sweetwater said.

As Sweetwater spoke, Freeman returned to the top of the ramp, where he attached some kind of panel to the wall. A large white light at the top of the panel winked sporadically, and smaller diodes flashed red, blue, yellow, green in no discernible order along the bottom.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Raymond, it is essential we get the meter up right away,” Sweetwater said.

“It’s up,” Freeman said.

“What is that?” I repeated.

“Harris, this little invention just may save your life. It detects tachyon activity. If the tachyons flood into your hidey-hole, we should be able to detect them.”

“I thought tachyons were too small and too fast to track,” I said.

“The meter tracks energy fluctuations along a defined plain,” Breeze explained.

“Does that answer your question?” Sweetwater asked, mostly because he knew that it had not. I decided to move on rather than risk more scientific gibberish.

As I watched the lights on the panel, Freeman walked around the truck and pulled out a black case that looked about the right size to carry a spare set of armor. It did not carry armor, however. When he opened it, I recognized the contents. I had seen him use one of these before.

The head of the robot was a radio-controlled drone with a propeller and wings. The body was a twelve-foot-long train made of a heat-resistant silver material. It reflected the ember-and-smoke sky like a mirror. He removed the “flying snake” from its case, stretched it out, then used his remote to launch it in the air behind the truck.

The snake took off from the ground and swirled through the air like a Chinese dragon. The last time I saw Freeman use one of these remote-controlled robots, he had deployed it like a lightning rod, sending it out to distract motion-tracking robots called “trackers.”

The drone’s terephthalate ruffles fluttered as it sped off, making a noise like a flag in a strong wind. The robot flew out of the underground power station and into the parking lot. It managed an aerobatic loop, then burst into flames. The spontaneous combustion lasted only a second and left nothing in its wake, not even smoke.

“Did you get that?” asked Freeman.

Damn straight I saw it, and I started to say so, then I realized he wasn’t speaking to me.

“Localized ignition,” Breeze said. “Of course, it happened so quickly I can only speculate.”

“Raymond, can you launch the second drone?” Sweetwater asked.

Freeman set off to prepare a second drone without responding.

I eavesdropped as Sweetwater and Breeze spoke privately between themselves, their voices carrying over an open mike as if they were real. They traded scientific jargon, but they could have been speaking some long-extinct language for all I understood of it.

Meanwhile, Freeman returned with another black case. A few moments later, a second silver dragon soared up the ramp, its reflective train wagging behind it. It flew over the top of the truck and into the parking lot, where it burst into flames.

“It appears the tachyons are drawn to movement,” Breeze said.

“Should I run the shield test? Freeman asked.

“Yes, we better move along. The tachyon level is dropping faster than we expected,” said Sweetwater.

Freeman’s next toy was a little robot car, which he placed on the ground beside the truck. He fiddled with a remote, and a bright yellow glow formed around the car. I knew that glow. I’d seen it around Unified Authority ships. It hung like an aura over the new U.A. combat armor. It stopped bullets and particle beams.

Using a remote to guide the car up the ramp, Freeman asked, “Are you ready?”

“Go ahead, Raymond,” said Sweetwater.

Those shields might have been able to stop bullets or absorb lasers, but they didn’t do shit against tachyons. As the car wound its way into the yard, it burst into flames.

Seeing this, I felt hollow inside. “Could they do the same thing to our ships?” I asked anyone who might answer.

Sweetwater fielded the question like a politician. “We don’t see any reason why they would bother attacking a ship.”

Breeze took a more honest approach. He simply said, “Yes.”

We were running out of time. When Freeman asked, “Should I try the weapons?” Sweetwater said, “By all means.”

Freeman pulled a sniper rifle from the back of the truck. He was the finest marksman I had ever known, but in this case it wouldn’t matter. All he had to do was fire a bullet through a thirty-foot-wide doorway at the top of the ramp. He pointed the gun in the right direction and pulled the trigger. A split second later, with the sound of the shot still echoing off the walls, a tiny flicker of flame ignited just outside the entrance to the tunnel. The bullet had combusted, just like the toy car, just like the drone dragon. It disappeared so quickly, I barely saw it.

“Six feet,” said Breeze.

“Six feet?” I asked.

“The bullet traveled six feet out of the station before it caught fire,” Sweetwater said.

Breezed corrected him. “It might have caught fire the moment it entered open air, but it traveled six feet before it disintegrated.”

Freeman removed a particle-beam cannon and started toward the top of the ramp.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” I asked, knowing that if its ray superheated, the gun would explode.

He did not answer. As he moved up the ramp, I watched the light on the sensor. It stayed mostly white, with an occasional flick of yellow. As Freeman got closer, the light turned yellow. The tachyon activity had shot up; they might even have homed in on him.

“Ray, stop!” I yelled.

He saw it, too, and froze, but the light remained yellow.

“What do I do?” I asked Sweetwater and Breeze.

“Raymond, stay perfectly still,” Sweetwater ordered.

Sounding calm as ever, Freeman asked, “Should I run the test?”

Sweetwater did not even consider the question. “Stay still. According to our latest readings, the tachyon concentration will drop to a safe level in two minutes.”

Freeman chose that moment to do something that was absolutely insane. Instead of concentrating on standing as still as possible, he fired the cannon. The glittering green beam of the particle beam traveled in a perfectly straight line the rest of the way out of the power station and out, into the yard.

My eyes switched from the particle beam to the meter warning panel and back. I had already slipped into the driver’s seat of the truck and started the engine. If the meter turned orange or green or black or any color other than white, I would launch the truck up the ramp to try to distract the tachyons.

Unlike the bullet, the shielded robotic car, and the drones, the beam seemed not to interest the tachyons. The meter flashed orange for a millisecond, and I stomped down on the gas, stayed behind the wheel just long enough to guide the truck around Freeman, then jumped from the cab. Trying to run straight up a spiral path, the truck bumped one wall and skidded across the ramp, a shower of sparks trailing behind it. Armored or not, the truck burst into flames the moment it entered into the yard. The explosion that followed launched the truck fifteen feet in the air. It spun like a corkscrew as it flew ass first, then landed nose down, three-foot flames dancing on its engine and all four wheels.

Freeman said nothing. His silence was icy.

“Sweetwater,” I said. “How much longer?”

Nothing.

“Breeze?”

Nothing.

“They’re gone,” Freeman said. “We were linked to them through the two-way communicator.”

“The one in the truck?” I asked.

Freeman did not answer.

“Does that mean they’re dead?” I asked, wondering if I had somehow destroyed the computer world in which they existed.

Freeman responded with a rare show of humor. He said, “Not any deader than they were before.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

Without Sweetwater and Breeze guiding our next steps, Freeman and I ended up sitting on the ramp for twenty minutes before deciding to take our chances on the street. I still had a go-pack filled with weapons, so I piped a grenade into the parking lot. When it lasted long enough to explode, I hurled the empty launcher after it. The six-inch chrome cylinder clanked when it hit the cement, rolled in a circle, and came to a stop.

“Looks safe,” I said. Freeman climbed to his feet and started hiking toward the entrance without responding.

As we stepped out, I took a temperature reading using the atmospheric thermometer built into my visor. The air temperature had dropped to a mere ninety-three degrees—about one percent of what it had been earlier that evening. I took a Geiger reading and found that the radiation levels were normal, possibly even low.

I looked at what had once been a brick-lined planting bed with large bushes. There was no sign of the bushes or the soil below them. Instead of dirt, the ground was covered with a combination of soot and coal-like crystals that sparkled like fool’s gold.

Wispy spirals of steam rose from the ground below our feet, but our boots did not sink into the ash-covered concrete. Ripples of heat rose from a crane lying on its side a few feet ahead of us.

My brain numbed by the devastation on every side of me, I followed Freeman around the administration building and out to the street. Newly formed air pockets in the sidewalk caved in under my feet as I walked along the road; crystalline glass and ash crunched under my boots when we walked on the soil.

Using my commandLink, I signaled for Nobles to come and get us. When he asked if he should come in a transport or the shuttle, I told him to bring the shuttle. Soft seats and a carpeted cabin sounded good at the moment.

A few minutes later, the sleek bird appeared in the sky, winding its way down to us so quickly it looked like it might crash. Nobles touched down on an empty stretch of highway, his wheels sinking two inches into the crumbling ground.

We flew to the ad-Din through almost vacant space. The barges had long since left. So had most of our ships. With Olympus Kri evacuated and burned, there was no reason to maintain a fleet in the area. What remained was a small coven of six E.M.N. cruisers, which included the Kamehameha. That meant that Warshaw had called yet another summit, which I hoped to avoid. Now that Warshaw was grooming Hollingsworth to replace me, I thought he would go as the token Marine.

My ship, the Salah ad-Din, hovered by itself several miles from the others. So did a Unified Authority cruiser. It looked so small beside our fighter carriers. Seeing the U.A. ship, I realized this might be more than an Enlisted Man’s summit. That cruiser had probably ferried some high-level U.A. negotiator.

As we approached the ad-Din, I received a message from Captain Villanueva directing me to the Kamehameha. I acknowledged the transmission and cursed under my breath.

“Do you have any interest in attending an Enlisted Man’s summit?” I asked Freeman.

He shook his head. He looked down on politicians and general officers every bit as much as they looked down on him. “I have a plane waiting on that cruiser,” he said.

“What are you going to do next?” I asked.

“Same as you, I’m getting ready for Terraneau,” he said.

I laughed, and said, “It sounds like you’re out to save humanity.”

He did not answer.

I went to the little stateroom at the back of the shuttle and changed out of my armor before meeting with Warshaw. I showered, shaved, and put on a fresh uniform. By the time I came out, Freeman was long gone.

No one came to greet me as I came off the shuttle. I left the landing bay and found my way to the fleet deck; only with Warshaw in charge, it was more than a fleet deck—it was the seat of an empire.

One of Warshaw’s lieutenants interrupted the summit to let him know that I had arrived. About thirty minutes later, having called a brief recess, Warshaw and his entourage came out to greet me.

“General Harris, the man of the hour,” Warshaw said, giving me a rare salute. “A lot of people are still alive because of you.”

He looked tired. His eyes were red, and dark blotches showed on his cheeks. His broad shoulders were tight and as straight across as a board.

I tried to despise Warshaw for the genocide of the Double Y clones, but in my heart I doubted myself. I had mixed feelings. He had disposed of them in a way that was heartless, logical, and efficient. I would not have disposed of them that way; and the Enlisted Man’s Empire would have paid the price for my inability to act. In this instance, Warshaw was not my moral inferior; he was simply more courageous than me.

He guided me into the meeting room. Admirals came and shook my hand. The greetings were cordial, but the smiles did not last long.

“We need to get back to the negotiations,” Warshaw said.

“What negotiations?” I asked.

“I would have thought that was obvious,” he said, a frigid edge in his voice. “You saw what happened down there.”

The tiny drops of sweat on his shaved head reflected light like a coat of wax. He tried to wipe them away, but the perspiration was too fine. He wore his dress whites, with all of its stars and medals and epaulets. Even tired and frustrated, he cut an impressive figure, his bodybuilder’s physique stressing every inch of his stiff white uniform.

“Life as we know it just ended,” he said. “The Unifieds are talking about resurrecting the old Cousteau undersea cities programs. They think we might be able to survive this storm if we go underwater.”

I vaguely remembered learning about the Cousteau program. When the United States and its allies began colonizing space, the old French government turned its eyes toward deep-sea exploration. The program lasted a couple of years before the French gave up and signed on with the Americans.

“Rebuilding those cities could take years, maybe decades,” I said.

“You got any better ideas?” Warshaw asked.

I wasn’t challenging him, but he crushed me just the same. I felt rage spreading through me, then I realized it was embarrassment. I did not have any better ideas. I stood there wishing I could fade away.

“Looks like we’re rejoining the Unified Authority. Earth is the only planet that never got invaded. The aliens will go there last; hopefully, we can get everyone underwater by then.

“Welcome to the future, Harris; it’s just like the goddamned past.”

I stood there, silent and frustrated.

Warshaw studied my expression, and finally said, “This is a negotiation, not a war council. I can’t bring you in, I just wanted to thank you for what you did on Olympus Kri. You gave us a fighting chance, but it’s over now.”

The words stung because I knew he was right.

“I need to get to Terraneau,” I said.

“You’re going to warn them?” Warshaw asked.

“They’re next,” I said.

“I hear you had a girl on that rock,” Warshaw said. “Hollingsworth says you hooked up with Ava Gardner.”

“Yeah, something like that,” I said, already anxious to leave.

“How are you going to get there?” he asked. “I can’t give you the ad-Din if you’re traveling into neutral space. The Unifieds might see that as an act of bad faith.”

He was right, of course. None of the reactivated broadcast stations were programmed to send me out to Terraneau. I would need a self-broadcasting ship. “I’ll find a way,” I said.

Warshaw smiled and shook his head. “You’re on your own with Terraneau. It’s not part of our empire.” Then he signaled for an aide to join our conversation. “McGraw, the general needs a broadcast key.”

The aide was an old man. He gave me a surprised glance, then said, “Aye, aye, sir.”

“A broadcast key?” I asked.

“You’re going to need a key if you’re going to get that shuttle you’re flying to Terraneau,” Warshaw said. He started to leave, then turned back, and added, “You be careful with that key, Harris. I only issue them to fleet commanders …and now to you. God knows you’ve earned it.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said. The man was a prick. The man was a bastard. The man was a savior.

Warshaw gave me a weak salute, and said, “Good luck.” With that, I seemed to dematerialize before him. He turned away as if I weren’t there and began speaking with the officers in his entourage.

“General, perhaps we should get going, sir,” the petty officer said. He was an older man, a veteran sailor with white hair to show for decades of service.

I nodded.

We took a lift down into Engineering. From there, we wound our way into the arcane maze of high-tech specialists, where sailors who worked on weapons systems, communications, and life-support systems maintained their offices. The door to Broadcast Engineering stood out; that was the door with armed guards on either side of it. Warshaw’s aide showed the guards his badge, and they let us through.

We entered, and the petty officer went to a computer and filled out the requisition protocol. It took twenty minutes.

Broadcast Engineering looked like a mediaLink repair shop. A workbench littered with parts and tools ran along one of the walls. The lights were so bright they dried my eyes. A half dozen men worked here, all of them sitting on tall stools and gazing through magnifying lenses as they tinkered with circuit boards. Everyone in the room, of course, was a clone.

When McGraw finished typing out the request, he hit the SEND button, then called across the room, “Baxter, I just sent you a high-priority requisition.”

“Got it,” Baxter yelled back.

They were joking around. They were sitting less than thirty feet apart and could have whispered to each other. Once Baxter saw the requisition, however, he became serious. He climbed from his stool and walked over to McGraw. “Why in the world would Warshaw issue a broadcast key to a Marine? Does this guy even have clearance to be up here?”

“All I can say is that Magilla gave me the order,” the petty officer said.

“Shit. You’re kidding.”

The old petty officer shook his head.

I don’t know what I expected a broadcast key to look like, maybe a torpedo or some other projectile that I would fire into the broadcast zone. When the sailor returned, he handed me a palm-sized box no bigger than a candy bar.

“And a book,” McGraw told Baxter.

The sailor sighed and went to fetch the book.

The key was a tiny touch screen, an unimpressive trinket that would fit in your pocket without making a bulge. The book was three inches thick and lined in black leather. The petty officer took the book, handed it to me, and said, “General, sir, you now hold the key to the empire.”

McGraw traded salutes with Baxter, and we left Broadcast Engineering.

As we waited for the lift, I examined the key, and said, “It’s a lot less impressive than I expected.”

McGraw laughed. “It’s a transmitter. Transmits old-fashioned frequency-modulated radio waves. Warshaw set up the hot zones to disassemble anything that enters them, but the zones don’t disassemble signals from the key.”

“And the Unifieds haven’t figured that out?”

“No, sir. I mean, these are FM signals, it’s old, old technology. The Unifieds aren’t watching for ancient technology, it’s like we’re controlling the stations with smoke signals, it’s that old.”

“And the book?” I asked

“It’s an index of established broadcast coordinates. It’s the same book the Mogats used on their self-broadcasting fleet …same codes and everything. We stole the books along with the broadcast equipment off their wrecks.”

Back in the days when the Unified Authority counted the entire galaxy as its territory, the Republic established 180 colonies. The coordinates for the colonized worlds all fit on the inside flap, the rest of the volume held coordinates for scientific research sites, satellites, and rendezvous spots.

Seeing McGraw tap the lift button several times, I asked, “Are you in a hurry?”

He apologized, and said, “I’m nervous about the negotiations, sir. I don’t trust the Unifieds.”

The elevator arrived, and we rode it to the fleet deck. Still carrying the key and book, I followed McGraw into a small side room in which most of Warshaw’s remoras sat watching the negotiations on a large monitor.

I’m not entirely sure such a partnership would be in our best interest. I did not recognize the man who said that, but he spoke in the same imperious tone as Tobias Andropov. The screen showed a nearly empty conference room in which Warshaw sat flanked by three admirals on one side of the table, the man representing the Unified Authority sat with two male secretaries on the other.

“Who is that?” I whispered to McGraw.

“His name’s Martin Traynor. He’s the U.A. minister of expansion; but I get the feeling he thinks he’s God.”

We have more people than you. We have more planets than you do. We have more ships than you do. What do you mean the partnership isn’t in your interest? We control the broadcast network, Warshaw said. I expected to see him flexing the various muscles in his arms as he spoke, but he did not do that in this negotiation. He sat hunched in his chair, looking like a man kept alive by coffee and prayers.

Unless you do something quick, you will be out of planets and civilians in three more months, Traynor said. He looked like the quintessential bureaucrat, perfectly coiffed, manicured, dressed in wool and silk. Satisfied that he had just laid down an unbeatable hand, he leaned back in his chair and smirked.

Warshaw responded by drawing a line in the sand and daring the U.A. minister to cross it. So you’re going to wait for those people to die?

His bluff was called, and the smirk vanished. Traynor said, Obviously, we want to save as many lives as possible. The only reason we’re holding these negotiations is to save lives.

There was a moment of silence, then Warshaw said, I must have misheard you. A moment ago I thought you said you didn’t mind if they all died.

The players might have kept their cool in the conference room, but the men watching the negotiation wore their emotions on their sleeves. The man next to me said, “Specking Traynor. Specking Unified Authority. Specking …” His rant lasted more than a minute, and he said “specking” every other word.

Seeing Warshaw put Traynor in his place, McGraw slammed his palm on the table, and yelled, “Right! Damn right!”

Watching the negotiation, it was clear that neither side trusted the other. I thought that was a good sign. Having found himself abandoned in the Scutum-Crux Arm, then used for a target in a military game, Warshaw had little reason to trust the Unifieds.

Maybe the smartest course of action would be to evacuate the people from your planets and leave you and your superior military to handle the aliens, Traynor suggested.

Excellent idea, Warshaw said. Do you think you can fit that many people in your hypothetical underwater cities?

McGraw and several other viewers shouted their approval. On the screen, one of the admirals sitting beside Warshaw gave him an approving nod.

Traynor coughed. He poured himself a glass of water, but still seemed to be choking. His right hand in front of his mouth, he excused himself and asked for a five-minute break.

The tension in the viewing room relaxed as soon as Traynor stepped out of the picture. We watched Warshaw conferring with his admirals. Across the table, Traynor’s secretaries silently reviewed their notes.

While I enjoyed watching the fireworks, I needed to get to Terraneau. I thanked McGraw for the broadcast key and signaled Nobles to get the shuttle ready.

As I stepped out of the viewing room, I saw something that struck me as odd. Walking like a man who is late for a meeting, Martin Traynor stomped past me and continued down the hall. Our shoulders brushed, but he did not look back as he hurried away.

“Where do you think you are going?” I asked in a whisper as I watched him rush past the head. He didn’t even give the door a second glance.

Temporarily shelving my concern for Terraneau, I followed the son of a bitch.

Maybe he heard my steps, maybe he only sensed me behind him, but Traynor picked up speed. His legs pumping quickly, he rounded a corner and headed for the elevators. I jogged to gain ground on him.

By the time I reached the corner, I could see him running to the lifts. He stabbed a button with his forefinger, then held the button down in an impatient bid to speed things up. As I came toward him, one of the elevators opened, and he leaped in. I ran to catch up, but the doors shut before I arrived.

I hit the button, calling for another elevator, trying to sort out the scene as I waited. Traynor fleeing the negotiations made no sense to me. Even if the negotiations fell through, Warshaw would not arrest him, he was an ambassador. Had he forgotten something on his shuttle? A bomb, maybe? I thought; but he wasn’t a saboteur. If anything, he struck me as a stiff.

My lift opened. I pressed the button for the bottom deck, the deck with the landing bays. If I ran into Traynor, I would follow him. If I did not see him, I would board my shuttle and ride to Terraneau. I doubted I would see Traynor, though, and I tried to put him out of my mind.

The doors of the elevator slid open, and there he was, walking down the hall. Hearing my lift open, he turned to look back and saw me. Our eyes met for just a moment and I did not like what I saw. In his eyes I saw abject terror, then he looked down and started speed-walking away.

He scampered down the hall, and I followed. I wanted to yell after him, but I had no idea what I should or should not say …what I could or could not say. I could not arrest him. If I made the wrong move, the negotiations might collapse.

Traynor looked back, saw me following him, and ran. The rule book went out the window the moment he picked up his pace. If I’d had a gun on me, I might have shot him in the leg just to stop him; but he was short and domesticated, and if it came to a chase, I would overtake him in a couple of seconds. I was gaining on him, then I passed an observation window, stopped, and forgot all about the minister of expansion. In that moment, he became the furthest thing from my mind.

Staring out that observation wall, I saw white holes in the blackness of space. The anomalies appeared so far away that their brightness only created spots before my eyes. At first, only five or six appeared, then a dozen followed, then still more. As I watched the scene, Klaxons began to sound.

Hatches opened along the hall, and sailors flooded out, rushing this way and that, headed for their battle stations. I forced my way against the current, fighting to get to the landing bay.

Even as I cut through, something struck the Kamehameha, rocking the ship. When a big ship shakes, the people inside it become as insubstantial as snowflakes in a blizzard. The force struck the Kamehameha, throwing all of us against the walls and the deck. Barely noticing that I had fallen to my knees, I gathered my balance and tried to press forward to the landing bay.

I was almost there when we took the first real hit. Something had penetrated our defenses and struck the ship. At the far end of the hall, the outer shell of the ship gave way. Lights flashed off and on, men screamed, the force of the suction nearly lifted me off my feet in the split second that our atmosphere bled through the breach, then emergency bulkheads slammed into place, dividing the corridor into airtight sections.

The lights came back online, revealing men strewn on the floor, some bleeding, and some writhing in pain. We would remain trapped between the massive bulkheads until the atmospheric pressure stabilized. This was the naval equivalent of an amputation. Parts of the ship that were too badly damaged were sealed off in order to save the whole.

Bulkheads blocked the hall on either side of me. I could not run to the landing bay or return to the elevators. All I could do was wait and wonder if the hull would crack, and I’d be flushed into space.

The bastards hit us again, and I was helpless. How many men had we lost? What part of the ship would the next laser or torpedo hit? How much damage had we taken? How much more could we sustain? If the ship broke into pieces, would my little section of hull float into space with me sealed inside like a bird in a cage? Like a body in a coffin. How many ships had the Unified Authority sent through the broadcast zone?

What if the attack on Olympus Kri had all been a hoax? I knew it wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t, but Andropov had used it as an opportunity to get the upper hand. All that bullshit about the Liberators never losing a battle …With the unintended help of the Avatari, Andropov would succeed where his Double Y clones had failed, the bastard.

The lights went off-line again. In the darkness, men screamed and pounded the atmospheric bulkheads with their fists.

Two birds with one stone, I thought. With our cooperation, Andropov had built a temporary broadcast station by Mars, and now he was using that broadcast station to send battleships and destroyers.

Our broadcast station was programmed to send ships to Mars; they’d just sent their specking barges through it. They could hit us and return home, and there wasn’t a specking thing we could do to stop them. Now that they had their own sending station and a way to broadcast their ships home, we were at their mercy …as if the Unified Authority had ever had mercy.

They hit us again. There, in the darkness, I fell as the ship shuddered around me. I listened to the screams, the calls for help, the prayers. I made my way to my feet, and felt my way ahead until I reached the cold smooth surface of the emergency bulkhead. I wondered what I would find on the other side if it ever opened.

Moments passed, then the bulkhead slid open. The lights remained out; so, groping the wall for balance, I pushed forward, tripping over men I could not see in the darkness. The only light shone from panels and signs along the walls.

More shots hit the ship, but these felt like glancing blows. Perhaps the shields were up, perhaps they came from weaker weapons. I knew so little about naval combat. The floor shook. People toppled. Whatever damage was going to be done to the Kamehameha might already be done.

Moving ahead slowly, taking faltering steps and reaching out with my to feel my way ahead, I reached the landing bay. The hatch slid open, revealing emergency lights and the glow of fire. Crews hosed down a blaze under the control booth. Across the deck, fountains of sparks shot out of a row of panels.

Lieutenant Nobles waited for me just inside the door. He pulled at my arm, and yelled, “They’re going to let us through, but they can’t protect us once we’re out!”

We ran into the shuttle and started rolling toward the launch tube. The nose of the shuttle veered right and left, as if Nobles were steering like a drunk, he, all the while, shouting into the microphone, “Open the first lock. Open the first lock!”

I could hear commotion over the radio. Several seconds passed before we got an answer. “You’re cleared. God help you.”

The first of the atmospheric locks slowly ground open just far enough for us to fit through and began closing even before we cleared it. The men controlling the flight deck were not taking any chances. They handled the second and third atmospheric gates the same way, just giving us enough room to pass and closing it quickly behind us.

A wave of relief washed over me as we launched. I had not really believed we would make it off the ship; but there we were, trading the tight confines of the launch tube for the endless expanse of space.

Huge fighter carriers loomed before us. Fighters sped around us, ignoring us, approaching us and ducking away. Tiny fireballs erupted from the side of the Kamehameha. They flared out of the ship and evaporated into nothing. The ship’s shields were down and the antennae that projected those shields were destroyed. It was only a matter of time until the ship went dark; large portions already had.

Beside the Kamehameha hung the ad-Din, looking stronger, but still wounded. Villanueva had sent all of her fighters to circle the ship. They formed a protective screen around the big carrier, but what did it matter?

Using the radio, I hailed the Salah ad-Din. I identified myself and asked for Captain Villanueva, but I only got as far as one of his lieutenants.

“General, where are you?” he asked. “We can try to—”

“I’m on a shuttle. If you scan, you’ll find us. We’re headed to the broadcast zone,” I said.

“Now listen, I have a broadcast key aboard the shuttle. I am about to broadcast to Terraneau. Tell Villanueva to try and enter the zone. The Unifieds won’t follow you; they’ll think it’s a trap.”

“Aye, aye.”

“Pass the message. Tell any ship that can to follow us.”

“Aye, sir.”

I signed off, knowing that if any ship’s captain could possibly break free, it was probably Villanueva. Maybe we would salvage a few ships.

Glancing back at the damaged fighter carriers, six of them—one representing each of the six galactic arms—I saw immediately that the outlook was bleak. Layers of U.A. ships had clustered around the E.M.N. fighter carriers. The Unifieds had sent old ships and new ones as well. It looked like the entire Earth Fleet had joined in on the attack. Seeing four battleships advance on the Kamehameha, I realized that this was not so much a battle as it was a lynching.

I took one last glance at that proud old ship, then I opened the front cover of the book and found the forty-two-digit code for Terraneau. The new generation ships that the Unifieds had sent had broadcast engines, they would be able to return to Earth. Most of the ships involved in this ambush were older ships, however. They were not self-broadcasting. The plan was to send them back to the Sol System using our broadcast station, which was currently set for Mars. By programming a new code into the key, I would strand some of those Earth ships in Olympus Kri space. Their only escape would be to follow me to Terraneau; but, fearing a trap, they would be slow to come after me.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

“They’re not going to make it out of there, are they?” Nobles asked, as we emerged from the anomaly.

“Some of them might,” I said. “If Villanueva reaches the broadcast zone, he’s home free. The Unifieds won’t follow him.”

Nobles changed the subject. “Why did they attack us?” The words came out in a groan. He looked miserable, somewhere between tears and insanity. A wild look of fear and anger showed in his brown eyes, and his lips quivered as he spoke. “Why the hell did they attack us?”

I looked out into the calm corner of space we had just entered. Stars shone around us. Terraneau, a planet with lakes and rivers and oceans, sparkled like a rare gem.

“They attacked because they can’t afford an open war,” I said in a quiet, subdued voice, the voice of defeat.

Nobles turned to me. His eyes tightened, and he asked, “What?” in a hardened angry voice.

“We showed them how to rebuild their empire. The planets, the broadcast network, the Navy …they want to take it all back in one piece,” I said.

The clone assassins failed, so they lured Gary Warshaw and his top admirals into a negotiation, then they massacred the whole lot of them. Now they want to round the rest of the clones up like sheep, I thought. They will round us up like sheep, and send us out like slaves …like eunuchs, the guardians of the republic that massacred their empire.

The Romans manned their legions by filling them with conquered soldiers; why shouldn’t the Unifieds do the same? And then they would …What would they do? Would they hide under the sea in watertight cities while aliens charbroiled the galaxy? They would not need clones for that. Now that they had a broadcast network, if they managed to capture the network, they could send us out to find the Avatari. We’d be the second wave. They would send us out the same way they sent out the Boyd Clones and the Japanese Fleet; only the Japanese Fleet had self-broadcasting ships. They could return from the mission; we would be stuck wherever they sent us.

“The aliens were real, right?” Nobles asked. “The attack on Olympus Kri was real.” He needed assurance. He knew the attack was real; but at times like this, are you ever sure about anything?

“It was real,” I said.

“Then why?”

I thought I finally understood. Andropov wanted to send out a second wave. After winning the battle for New Copenhagen, the Unified Authority sent out the Japanese Fleet, but that was only four ships, four lowly self-broadcasting battleships. The brass hedged their bets by manning them with a special line of SEAL clones instead of Marines, but still only had four ships tracking an alien signal across an entire galaxy.

If they managed to ingest the Enlisted Man’s Navy, the Unifieds would gain thirteen fleets, over one hundred fighter carriers, hundreds of battleships, millions of clones. And they could broadcast their disposable new fleet into space to search for the alien world, never to return. Kill the chain of command, orphan the ships and the crews …it finally made sense. Maybe Andropov even wanted to send a token Liberator out on the mission to bring it luck; after all, the Clone Empire had gone undefeated in open war. Bastard.

I left the cockpit and went to my little stateroom, where I spent the rest of the flight in silence, brooding over how much I hated my creators.

Nobles alerted me when we neared the planet. We entered an atmosphere with clouds instead of smoke. We crossed over snowcapped mountains and frost-dusted forests that would soon be burned to ash. I took in the beauty, knowing that nothing could be done to protect it. No weapon existed that could defend this planet, and humanity had no bargaining chip that could turn the attackers away. The most I could hope for was to save a few people. Ava.

Far ahead of us, Norristown shimmered in the afternoon sun, a city healed from most of its wounds. The wreckage had been cleared, and an extensive patchwork of parks and open markets now filled the void.

We received a message from the spaceport asking us to identify ourselves. When Nobles answered that we were an unarmed envoy from the Enlisted Man’s Fleet, the control tower cleared us to land.

Judging by the lines of military trucks and police cars waiting along the runway as we began our approach, I got the feeling that the locals did not want guests.

“I don’t think they’re happy to see us,” Nobles said.

If understatement were a form of humor, Christian Nobles would have been the funniest man alive.

Police cars closed in behind us as we rolled forward down the runway, moving toward the line of armored trucks and the militiamen with guns. Doctorow did not want Marines on his planet, but that did not stop him from using his militia. Judging by the tanks and transports, he’d helped himself to the weapons we left behind.

We rolled to within twenty feet of the trucks and stopped. The shuttle’s struts compressed, and the fuselage dropped. Men with anxious, angry faces and government-issue M27s stared in at us.

With Nobles following behind me, I opened the shuttle door. Guns pointed directly at us. I could see that much through the glare, but I stopped and had to place a hand over my eyes to block the sun. Somebody yelled for us to step out, so I held my hands above my head and stepped out into the sunlight. Men with guns intercepted me as I stepped to the ground. Dozens of militiamen formed a circle around me. One of them shoved me from behind to get me clear of the shuttle, but most of the militiamen looked scared. They had the numbers and the guns; but I got the feeling that they were more scared of me than I was of them.

For a split second, we all stood there in silence in the cool evening breeze, then a militiaman asked, “Are you carrying weapons?”

I said, “Not on me.”

Nobles shook his head.

A captain in the militia stepped up to me, gave me an embarrassed grin, and asked, “Do you mind if we search your ship?”

Nice of him to ask, I thought. I told him, “We came empty-handed, but feel free.”

The standoff continued as three men in soft-shelled engineering armor carrying an array of detection equipment entered the shuttle. A couple of minutes ticked away as we waited for them to conclude the obvious, that two men traveling in an unarmed shuttle did not pose much of a threat.

There was no point in trying to explain why we had come, not to these men. They were just the foot soldiers. I needed to take my story to the top. I needed to explain everything to the president himself. No one under Doctorow would have the authority to react even if they believed me. In the meantime, every second wasted here on the runway felt like a crime. Had the planet already seen temperature fluctuations? Maybe we would be cooked as we stood on the airfield waiting for locals to search our unarmed ship.

“Any weapons?” the militia leader asked.

I turned and saw one of the men waving the go-pack I had taken to Olympus Kri. He held up the pack, and said, “He’s got combat armor, a couple of grenade launchers, a particle-beam pistol, and a cannon.”

“Was that a particle-beam cannon?” asked the captain. He turned back to me, and said, “I thought you said you came unarmed?”

“I forgot they were there,” I said.

“Anything else you forgot, Harris?” the captain asked. I did not recognize him, but apparently he recognized me. I had spent a lot of time on this planet and made a lot of enemies.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

They did not place us in handcuffs. They led me and Nobles into the back of an armored truck along with a dozen guards, and they drove to town. Jeeps and trucks followed behind us.

Our escort delivered us to a police station, where a platoon of militiamen led us down two flights of stairs and into a basement. The militiamen hauled Nobles away. I watched them lead him down a hall with a sinking feeling.

I ended up locked in an interrogation room, and there I sat and waited. A team of armed guards stood outside the door. I would not have known they were there except that they looked in on me every few minutes. For all I knew, an entire firing squad waited for me just outside that door.

I sat alone in that little room with its soundproofed walls and wondered what happened to all of the big talk about utopian ideals. In Ellery Doctorow’s new order, the terms “police,” “military,” and “militia” seemed nearly interchangeable. From my perspective, liberated Norristown operated like any other police state.

Precious time slipped irretrievably away as I sat alone in that room.

I tried to piece together how much time passed between the attacks on New Copenhagen and Olympus Kri. Had it been a week? Five days? It was possible that nobody knew. The only video Sweetwater had of the attack on New Copenhagen was of the aftermath. The planet might have been a scorched wreck for a week before anyone noticed.

Only a day had passed since I left Olympus Kri. Time might have been running out, but I did not think we had reached the midnight hour just yet.

The door opened. “Okay, Harris, so why did you come back?” the man asked as he stepped into the interrogation room. He was a natural-born, of course, a tall man with a slender build, his black hair combed back and oiled.

He could have been a hard-living twenty-year-old or a well-preserved quadragenarian. He had a trace of stubble across his cheeks, chin, and throat, and he projected confidence with his cold gaze. I looked at him, sized him up as someone of minimal importance, and dismissed him all in an instant.

How long would it take the Avatari to reach Terraneau? I wondered. A week? I had time, but I wanted to be out of this jail and off the planet I when they came. I was in a basement, but it wasn’t very deep. If the attack occurred while I was down here, my cell would turn into a crematorium.

“I asked you a question,” he said, demanding my attention. He had the demeanor of a gangster; but, of course, now he was an idealist working for Ellery Doctorow. Gangster, militant, pacifist; chameleons like this guy presented themselves as true believers in any cause that kept them in power.

I glared back at him and said nothing.

“I asked you why you came back to Terraneau,” he said.

“A mission of mercy,” I said. “I came to save you.”

“To save us from what?”

“From an invasion,” I said. “Look, I’m sure you’re a very big man around here; but I need to see Doctorow.” That was my best attempt at being polite. I had no idea how I might act on my next approach.

“Maybe he’s already listening,” the man said. He pointed to a little glass window built into the wall. The window was a square inch of bulletproof glass with a tiny surveillance camera peering out behind it. “Tell me what you got, and maybe we’ll both hear it at the same time.”

“He’s not watching,” I said. I knew assholes like this guy. They’d do anything to increase their sphere of influence, the unscrupulous specks. The problem is, by the time this fool figured out that he was in over his head, it might be too late. “He’s not watching, and this situation is out of your pay grade.”

“What makes you so sure?” the man asked.

I ignored the question and delivered the punch line. “The aliens have attacked Olympus Kri and New Copenhagen. They’ll come here next.”

“Aliens?” He looked back over his shoulder, giving the camera a nervous glance.

“Are you lying to me, Harris?” the man asked.

I did not answer.

“Are they the same aliens as before?” He did not sound like he believed me. He sounded like he was humoring me, allowing me a chance to pitch my shit, so to speak.

“Yes,” I said, though, come to think of it, that was only an assumption. We didn’t really know if the Avatari were behind the last attacks.

“Think you can beat them?” he asked.

“Beat them?” I repeated, stunned that I had not anticipated such an obvious question. “I just want to outrun them.”

Silence. I was not sure if my message was getting through. I watched him cycle through several emotions—suspicion, doubt, fear, then more suspicion. When he finally spoke, he asked, “Why would they come here?”

“Look, we really don’t have a lot of time,” I said.

“Then start answering my questions,” the man demanded.

“They’re taking back planets,” I said, stating the obvious.

Apparently, that was enough for him. He moved to the next question. “Got any proof?”

I knew that question was coming; and the answer was no. Without virtual Sweetwater and his video feed of the destruction, I had nothing to show. Because I had not prepared for one obvious question, every last person on Terraneau might die, and that included me.

“Maybe I should leave,” I said.

“What?” he asked.

“I don’t have any proof,” I said. “The mission’s a bust, and I might as well head home.”

The man laughed. “An act like this doesn’t get you in with Doctorow.”

“You’re right,” I said, throwing up my hands. “You are exactly right. The problem is, I don’t have anything more to give you. I shouldn’t have bothered you, I’ll just leave.”

“You’re not going anywhere.”

“So I’m a prisoner,” I said.

Looking exasperated, the interrogator sat and stared at me, slowly shaking his head. After a few seconds, he said, “We’re all friends here. I’m trying to help you.”

“So why do you need the guards?”

“What?”

“Why do you need armed guards if you are trying to help me?”

“You’re a dangerous man, Harris. We all know that.”

“Look, you’re out of your depth,” I said.

I did not mean to offend the bastard, but obviously I had. He yelled at me, but I didn’t listen. He ranted, and spit flew from his lips. If I had been an average prisoner, he might have turned off the camera and had his guards beat me; but I was a prisoner who came with an implicit threat. For all he knew, I had an armada circling the planet.

Not knowing what else to do, the man simply stormed out, and my interrogation room once again became a prison cell. Time passed slowly. I sat in my metal chair and glared up at the camera in the ceiling, occasionally giving it a one-finger salute.

At some point I climbed out of the chair and stretched out on the table. Since there was nothing else to do, I caught up on my sleep.

The sound of the door woke me from my nap, but I remained on my back on the table, my fingers laced together over my chest. My shoulders and neck felt stiff.

“You’re awfully calm for a harbinger bringing tidings to a doomed planet,” Doctorow said.

Like the revitalized city in which he lived, Ellery Doctorow had a new face. Gone were the long hair and beard, replaced by a square-cut coif in which the white hairs had been dyed coal black. He wore a navy blue suit, tailored to make his shoulders look wide and his waist look small. He’d been dressed in a suit the last time I saw him as well. Gone were the days of fatigues and ponytails.

Doctorow entered the interrogation room alone. He might have had a dozen bodyguards outside the door, but he entered the interrogation room alone.

“Have a seat, and I will tell you about the end of the world,” I said.

The comment earned me an enigmatic smirk.

As I climbed off the table and returned to my seat, Doctorow pulled a chair close. He sat there, stroking his chin while staring at me, apparently deep in thought. Finally, he said, “You say you’re here because the aliens attacked two other planets.”

“New Copenhagen and Olympus Kri,” I said.

“Both planets in the Orion Arm,” Doctorow noted.

“Liberated planets,” I said.

“Yes, yes, you defeated the aliens on New Copenhagen. I’m guessing that you rescued Olympus Kri the same way you rescued Terraneau. That much of your story makes sense to me.”

“They’re coming here next,” I said.

“So you say,” Doctorow said. “Why would they come here? Olympus Kri and New Copenhagen are in the Orion Arm. Why jump from the Orion Arm all the way to a planet in the Scutum-Crux Arm? Wouldn’t Earth be the logical next stop?”

“Olympus Kri was the first planet we liberated after the war,” I said.

“I thought you came here first,” Doctorow said.

“I wasn’t involved. Olympus Kri was already in the works before they transferred me here.”

Doctorow nodded to show that he accepted the explanation. “So we’re the third planet in line …if their advance is chronological.” He spoke in a flat tone that would veil both belief and skepticism equally. He sat very still, his hands on his lap, his eyes meeting mine.

“Did you come here to organize an army?” he asked.

I shook my head. “An evacuation.”

“An evacuation?”

“There’s no point even trying to fight,” I said, and I told him what had happened on Olympus Kri. I explained about the destruction and how Freeman and I had hidden in an underground power station during the attack.

Doctorow listened to my story, his face a mask hiding whatever emotion he felt. When I finished, he summed it up by stating, “So you propose we evacuate the planet.”

“We’d need to contact Andropov and—”

“Andropov? Are you here in concert with the Unified Authority?” he asked, sounding suspicious. “I thought you were at war with them.”

“They declared war on us,” I said.

“You stole their ships,” Doctorow said.

“They sent us out here for target practice. This is ancient history; we don’t have time …”

“Absurd. Everything you have said is preposterous,” Doctorow said.

“I see, then your only other choice is to take your people underground.”

“I will need some time to think it over,” Doctorow said. Though he tried to hide it, I could tell that he had already made up his mind. “Do you have any evidence to prove what you are saying?”

“No,” I said.

“So I have to trust you. I have to take your word on blind faith?”

“That just about sums it up.” I had never lied to him, at least no times that I could think of on the spot.

He responded with an elegant laugh. “Walk by faith,” he said, a vestige from the religious life he had abandoned. “Here’s my theory. I think New Copenhagen and Olympus Kri are just fine. The Unified Authority may have taken those planets away from you, but I suspect the people are safe.

“What happened, Harris? Did the Earth Fleet crush you again?”

I had told him the truth, and he called me a liar. Maybe the truth was on both his side and mine. The Earth Fleet had indeed just served us a bloody defeat. Had any of our ships survived the attack at Olympus Kri?

“You’ve got it wrong,” I said, though perhaps he didn’t.

“You want us to evacuate our cities and send everyone underground,” Doctorow continued. “Wasn’t that how you won the last one; you invited the U.A. Marines into an underground garage, then you buried them?”

“Bullshit,” I said.

I expected Doctorow to tell me to watch my language; but now that the Right Reverend was president, bad language no longer seemed to concern him. “Interesting strategy you have there, Harris, persuade your enemies to go underground and bury them—”

“You’re not listening,” I said.

“Then you start the invasion while we’re digging ourselves out.”

“Invasion? What kind of invasion? I came in an unarmed shuttle.”

“We know about the other ship,” Doctorow said. “We picked up the anomaly when your fighter carrier broadcasted in. We’ve been tracking it for the last hour.”

So the ad-Din made it out, I thought. That ship might have been the only reason I was still breathing. Doctorow was scared of her, and that made him scared of me.

“I’m trying to save lives,” I said.

“By flying a warship into neutral territory?” Doctorow glared at me, and added, “I’m not afraid of you, Harris. I’m not afraid of you or your clones or your ships.”

He delivered the lines well, but I could tell that I frightened him. I could see it in his forced expression. I could hear it in his voice.

“I’m not the one you should be scared of,” I said.

That ended the meeting. He stood up and left the room without saying another word.

I did not want to die in this police station. I did not want to die saving this worthless planet. I imagined what would happen to this room when the heat hit nine grand, how the glass would melt, and the walls would turn a glowing orange.

Looking at the camera, I let my thoughts drift, rewinding my interview with Doctorow. I replayed my story and his response. What I hated most about his explanation was that it sounded more plausible than mine. How ironic, his fabrication sounded more reasonable than the truth.

On this planet, I was the boogeyman, and I would die because no one trusted me, even when I told the truth. Doctorow had his ideal society, all right. He’d created a fleeting utopia; and now that he’d built it, his citizens would burn.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

Nobles and I spent the night in an underground cell, a small cage about ten feet long and ten feet wide with bunk beds, a sink, and a little chrome toilet that rose out of the floor like a tree stump. I’d stayed as a guest in worse accommodations. I’d stayed as a prisoner in better.

An ever-present camera, sitting like a bird on a perch, watched over us from outside our cell. I had no idea who was on the other side of the camera, but the winking red diode on its base told me it was live.

I lay on the top bunk, and Nobles took the bottom. We seldom spoke if ever. He never told me his thoughts. I had Ava on my mind. I needed to find her. I needed to get out of this prison. Thinking of that, I asked myself, How many prisoners fried in their cages on New Copenhagen? And that reminded me of the Double Y clones we left on Olympus Kri.

Time continued to pass slowly by.

The hall was empty but brightly lit. Lying on my bunk, I covered my eyes with my right forearm and tried to sleep. The light did not keep me awake, but my thoughts did. For that reason, I was awake when the visitor arrived.

He appeared in the corridor that ran along the outside of the cells. As he reached our cage, the door slid open.

The visitor was a clone with no unique scars to distinguish him, but I recognized him just the same. It was the way he carried himself, I think. Maybe it was his cheerful expression. “Mars, what are you doing here?” I asked, remembering that he had chosen to stay on Terraneau.

“I came to help,” he said. He stopped just outside the door and watched me, possibly made nervous by my hostile tone.

“I thought you were a loyal citizen of Terraneau,” I said. Not sure if I should trust a man who had chosen Doctorow and his utopia over the Enlisted Man’s Empire, I decided to rake Mars over the coals. If he took it too easily, I’d know he was a spy.

Still standing outside my cell, Mars said, “Half the planet would come if you asked them now. Anyone who’s got any sense is more scared of Doctorow than they ever were of you.”

I heard him, but thought I must have misunderstood. Something was wrong with a world in which a retired priest scared people more than a Liberator clone.

“Don’t you like living in a utopian society?” I asked.

“Don’t know; I haven’t seen any utopias lately,” Mars said. “Once you left, Doctorow decided that his society could only work if everybody participated, so he armed his militia and moved them into Fort Sebastian. That’s when things got bad.

“When people disagree with his government, Doctorow sees it as a threat to his perfect world. The man keeps lists of agitators. Many of them have disappeared.”

Muttering some sort of “Hail Mary,” Mars stepped into our cage, and said, “I’m just glad we got to you before he stashed you away in Outer Bliss.” Outer Bliss was a relocation camp on the other side of the planet. It was an entire town surrounded by razor wire and guard towers.

“That would have been bad,” I said, thinking that an apartment or maybe a house in Outer Bliss would have come with windows and a private toilet.

As Mars passed under a lamp, I noticed the flat sheen of his hair. I started to ask him about it, then I noticed that his irises were no longer brown, they were black. “What’s with your eyes?” I asked.

He looked up and down the hall as if making sure that no one could see him, then he held up a bunched-up wash-cloth covered with oily brown stains. He tried to give this to Nobles, but Nobles only stared at it.

“What’s that?” Nobles asked, not reaching for it.

“It’s a disguise to make you look like a clone,” Mars said.

“If someone comes into the building, we’ll pass you off as one of my men.”

Hesitating before accepting the grimy bundle, Nobles opened the cloth. Inside, he found a small tube, and looked at Mars questioningly.

“Hair dye to make your hair brown like a clone’s.”

“This?” Nobles asked, holding up a tiny bottle.

“Colored eye-drops that turn your irises brown.”

“Oh, to make me look like a clone,” Nobles said. “Brilliant.” He squeezed the tube onto his left palm, rubbed the brown spew between his hands, then ran it through his hair. The dye gave Noble’s hair the same muted shine as Mars’s.

Once he worked the dye into his hair, Nobles wiped his hands on the cloth. Next, he squeezed a couple of drops of iris dye into his eyes, changing their color from dirt brown to very nearly black.

“Perfect,” Mars said, feigning surprise. “You could walk into any base in the galaxy, and they wouldn’t spot you.”

And he did look like one clone, at least. He looked exactly like Lieutenant Mars.

“What about the guards?” I asked, pointing toward the camera. “Aren’t they watching us?”

“Sure they are, but they work for me,” said Mars. He walked right up to Nobles and checked the coloring in his eyes like a doctor examining a patient, then said, “Head out that door and up the stairs. My boys will take care of you.”

“Thank you,” said Nobles. He left in a hurry, jogging up the corridor and out the door.

As soon as Nobles was out of earshot, Mars said, “Sort of a waste of time putting brown hair dye and colored eyedrops on a clone; but with that whole death-reflex thing …you just can’t take any chances.” He sounded apologetic.

So that was what had happened. Thinking he had blond hair and blue eyes, Mars had used the same disguise.

“The regulars won’t roll in until 06:00,” Mars said. “That gives us three hours.”

“We have bigger things to worry about than guards,” I said, and I gave him a brief description of the Avatari attacks on New Copenhagen and Olympus Kri. I also told him how the Unified Authority ambushed Warshaw. I thought it would take a long time, but the whole sorry tale took less than ten minutes.

“Why would they do that?” he asked. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“It makes sense from their point of view,” I said. “They want a disposable Navy to send out after the Avatari. By assassinating our command structure, they stand to inherit disposable ships, disposable crews, even a broadcast network for sending them into space.”

“But they’d be marooned. They’d be stranded …” He did not bother finishing the thought.

I finished for him. “Just like we were left stranded out here.”

“What do we do?” Mars said.

I told him about Tachyon D concentrations and temperature fluctuations, and said, “I think we probably have a few more days, but we want to be long gone before the temperatures start changing.”

“How can we check for tachyons?” he asked.

“I don’t know. The U.A. had a couple of dead scientists figure it out.”

He didn’t know who or what I meant, not that it mattered.

“I can have my men check the weather reports,” he said. “Tracking temperature changes shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Good place to start,” I said.

“What do we do about Doctorow?” Mars asked. “Do you think you can get him to see the light?” He must have already known the answer even as he asked the question. Doctorow would not listen to us, never in a million years.

I shook my head. “How do you make an enlightened man see the light?” I asked, amazed by my own pessimism. “He doesn’t trust me, and there is nothing I can do about it. Maybe it’s for the best. I’m going to have enough trouble getting you and your thousand engineers off the planet.”

As I said this, I remembered what Doctorow said about tracking a fighter carrier. “Do you know anything about a carrier circling the planet?” I asked.

Mars nodded. “It’s the Churchill. She’s hiding up in the graveyard.”

“What about the Salah ad-Din?”

He shook his head. “The only ship we’ve seen is the Churchill.”

“Good thing she’s there; we can use her to get off the planet,” I said. “Now for the next problem, I need to get a message to Ava.”

“Your girlfriend?” Mars asked.

“Ex-girlfriend. Do you think she knows I’m here?” Though the question was more for me than for Mars, I asked it out loud.

“She probably doesn’t. Doctorow is trying to keep the whole thing quiet.”

By this time, a couple of hours had passed, and Nobles appeared at the door of the cell. His hair still had that matted sheen and his irises were black as wet rock. The door slid open, and he stepped in. He and Mars traded places. Nobles went to the sink and began rinsing the gunk out of his hair and eyes.

“Are you sure you can trust her?” Mars asked as he left the cell. “If she’s not with you anymore, I mean—”

I put up a hand to stop him. “We could always kidnap her,” I said. I was joking.

Mars smiled, and said, “Now there’s an interesting option,” and he left our jail cell a free man. Nobles and I spent the rest of the night locked behind bars.

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

The inquisition began again at 07:00.

Armed guards ushered Nobles and me out of our cell. I wasn’t asleep when they came, but I was awfully tired from the long night.

As they had the day before, the guards placed Nobles in one room and me in the next. The waiting game began again. I sat in the soundproofed room, staring into the coin-sized camera lens that watched me from behind a bulletproof window, wondering when and how I would make my next move.

I was still slumped in that chair, fighting exhaustion but fully awake, when my new interrogator entered the room. He did not arrive alone. He came with a matched set of three guards in Marine combat armor. The man was tall and thin, with a gray handlebar mustache that extended well past the corners of his mouth. He had a familiar face. I could not dredge up the memory of where I had seen him before, so I dismissed him as just another militiaman.

“Well, well, Wayson Harris, I always expected you to end up in here,” the man said. Clearly he knew me, and I got the feeling he bore a grudge.

His guards planted themselves on either side of the door, where they stood as still as statues. The armed guards weren’t necessary. I would not try to escape, not yet. I would wait for Mars.

“Tell me about your plans to recapture Terraneau,” the interrogator asked as he sat down in the chair on the side of the table. He spoke in an easy, informal way.

“I have no interest in retaking this planet,” I said.

“Oh, right. I heard about that. You came here to warn us. Wayson Harris the Liberator messiah.

“We spotted two more fighter carriers this morning.”

“Now there are three of them,” I muttered to myself. Things were looking up.

“What’s with all that firepower if you are here to rescue us?” I locked eyes with him. He was one of those guys who meets your stare and doesn’t blink and doesn’t look away because he thinks it’s some sort of macho challenge. I played along for a second, winked and smiled and had a look around the room. Metal chairs, wall-mounted camera, armed guards, locked door …yup, I was in prison.

I wondered which carriers had made it out. The ad-Din had almost certainly survived. Could the Kamehameha have made it to the zone? The thought left me elated.

“I didn’t actually bring them with me,” I said. “It’s more of a rendezvous.” For some reason, I felt fidgety. I caught myself tapping my fingers on the table and dropped my hands to my thighs. Alarms sounded in my head, and it wasn’t fear. Something was about to happen, I could feel it.

Like animals sometimes do, I sensed a coming storm, but I did not know the nature of that storm.

“Are there more ships on the way?” the interrogator asked.

“I sure hope so,” I said, thinking of the U.A. barges.

“Where is the rest of your fleet?” he asked.

I sighed. “That depends what you mean by my ‘fleet.’ If you mean the Scutum-Crux Fleet, most of it is in the Cygnus Arm. If you mean the Enlisted Man’s Fleet, that’s all over the galaxy.”

Doctorow, his high-minded ideals now mingled with paranoia, would probably object to my being tortured; but that did not mean he wouldn’t have me executed. He’d happily leave me locked up until he was sure I posed no threat.

I could wait this out. Mars needed time to make the arrangements. I knew he needed time, but I couldn’t get past the feeling that something was about to happen. A bomb was about to explode, or a gun was about to go off, or a planet was about to go up in flames. Or was it just a case of nerves?

“I’m going to ask you again. How many ships do you have in your fleet?” The man sounded like he had run out of patience.

“I really don’t know,” I said, not thinking about what I was saying. “It depends how many ships survived the ambush.”

“What ambush?” he asked.

I saw no reason to hide the whole truth, not anymore. “I told Doctorow that we helped evacuate Olympus Kri. What I did not tell him was that the Unified Authority attacked us after the evacuation. They caught us napping, and we lost some of our ships.”

“So you came here looking for asylum?”

“I came here hoping to pull your worthless asses out of a fire,” I said. Not the most politic response, but at least it was honest.

“That’s what you told President Doctorow. He didn’t believe you either,” he said, picking up a clipboard, presumably looking over notes from the previous interrogations. “You told him that aliens have attacked two other planets, and they are coming here to kill us.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said.

“You wouldn’t?”

“You’ve got your head so far up your ass, the aliens might not notice you,” I said.

He looked up from his clipboard and gave me a plastic smile. He wanted to hit me, I could see it in his eyes. He stood, squared his shoulders, placed the clipboard on the table. “So you came here to warn us? To be honest with you, Harris, I always thought you were a coward. I still do.

“We lost every man and vehicle we sent out with you when you took on the aliens …every last man. Everybody died but you. You came waltzing out of it without a scratch.”

Behind the interrogator, one of the guards moved his right hand along the grip of his gun. You need to be a very good shot to cover a target in a fistfight; otherwise, you’re just as likely to shoot the man you are trying to protect.

“Are you saying I hid during the fight?” I asked, on the verge of laughing in the man’s face.

“A lot of good men died trying to help you,” the interrogator said. “One of them was my brother.”

“O’Doul,” I said, finally putting a name with the guy’s face. “Your brother died saving me.”

“What a mistake that was,” he said.

I started to respond, then stopped. “If you don’t want me on your planet, just say the word. I’ll take my pilot and my shuttle and head home.”

“It’s too late for that, Harris. You should not have returned in the first place.”

“Doctorow wants me off the planet, but he’s not going to let me leave. Is that how things work on Terraneau now? Is he planning to kill me or just bury me in a jail cell?” I wondered how far Doctorow and his friends would go to protect their utopian society.

“Kill you?” the interrogator asked, sounding both shocked and amused. “Why would we kill you? You came to save us.”

Another moment passed, then the battle began.

It started with an explosion that shook the building. The soundproof walls of the interrogation room muffled the blast, but the walls vibrated just the same. Alarms went off, but they sounded like they were a million miles away.

“What the speck?” the interrogator said. Now his guards drew their M27s. One of them aimed his gun at me while the other watched the door.

The electricity went out. I remembered the police station that the Double Y clone attacked on St. Augustine. This attack seemed to go by the same numbers. The lights went out, then emergency lights kicked in, casting their pale white glow. Through all of this, I remained in my chair. I did not know if this was the work of the Corps of Engineers or the last surviving Double Ys, but I did not want to give the guards a reason to shoot me.

The clock on the wall had frozen at 07:45.

I sat on the far side of the table, facing the door and the two armed guards. Had the table been loose, I might have kicked it toward them, but the table was bolted to the floor. I thought about leaping over it and trying to grab O’Doul, but what would it get me? In the end, I had no choice but to trust Mars and his engineers.

Thirty seconds after that initial explosion, the door of the interrogation room burst open, and in walked a giant of a man wearing custom-fitted combat armor, its green camouflage coloring looking taupe in the emergency lighting.

The screaming alarms tore into my thoughts. With the guards occupied, I shot over the table, knocking O’Doul out of his seat, and tackled the guard hiding behind the door. His armor protected him from punches, not grappling. I slammed into his chest, and we both hit the floor, me on the top and him on the bottom. I pinned his right hand down as he tried to raise his gun.

The giant in the specially fitted combat armor, he could only have been Ray Freeman, lifted the other guard in the air, slammed him against the wall so hard it must have knocked the fellow senseless, and slung him at O’Doul as if he were a sack of laundry. The guard and the interrogator lay there on the floor as Freeman drew his M27 and shot them both. Their blood looked black as oil in the dim light.

“You didn’t need to kill them,” I said, ignoring the fact that I had already snapped the second guard’s neck. So there we were, Ray Freeman, the homicidal humanitarian, and me, killing the very people I had come to save. Was it murder? With the Avatari on the way, everyone on the planet was as good as dead.

“You’re early,” I said.

“The temperatures started jumping yesterday afternoon,” Freeman answered.

“That’s not supposed to happen yet,” I said, taking the dead guard’s M27 and following Freeman out of the room.

Water rained from burst mains along the ceiling. Inch-deep puddles had formed on the corridor floor. Light fixtures dangled from wires, and in the middle of the entropy, three guards lay dead where Freeman had shot them. Smoke or maybe steam or possibly exhaust wafted out of the vents along the wall. The air had a burned and dusty smell to it.

Someone peered from around a corner down the hall. In the brief glimpse I had, I saw that he was natural-born; so when he peered around the corner for a second glance, I shot him in the face. He fell to the ground, and his M27 clattered across the floor.

“What about Nobles?” I asked, as Freeman led the way.

“Who’s that?”

Freeman was ruthless that way. The Marines lived by the code that no man gets left behind, but Ray Freeman was no Marine. He was a mercenary, his loyalty was selective.

“My pilot,” I said as I turned and headed down the hall. A guard stepped out through an open door. I would have shot him, but Freeman got him first—three shots in the chest, and the man flew against the wall, then slumped to the floor; the water sprinkling from the ceiling washed some of his blood from the wall.

The locals must have dismissed Nobles as unimportant. I found him alone in his interrogation room, the door locked from the outside. I opened the door, and Nobles followed me out. Freeman led us out a back door and into an alley, where two Jackals waited. Freeman and I climbed in the first vehicle, and Nobles rode in the second. No one fired at us as we pulled away from the station. No one followed us.

The man driving the Jackal removed his helmet and turned to look at me. “How in God’s good name can you stand this armor?” asked Mars. I recognized him by his badly dyed hair. “If these thigh plates dug any deeper in my crotch, I might end up a eunuch.”

Freeman, sitting in the backseat with his feet behind my seat and his body behind Mars, removed his helmet as well.

The streets around us were still semisilent. I expected police cars and sirens, but the streets were almost empty of cars, and I saw very few pedestrians.

“Where is everybody?” I asked.

“The militia is busy stopping the invasion,” Mars said.

“What invasion?” I asked, wondering if perhaps Doctorow had taken me seriously after all.

“The Enlisted Man’s Navy just landed fifty transports outside Scott Card Park on the east side of town. Doctorow is evacuating Norristown.”

“Why the hell would fifty transports land outside Scott Card Park?” I asked. The park was nothing but an open field.

Mars gave me a patient smile, and said, “They’re ghosts, General. It’s a fake. I hacked into the Terraneau tracking system last night. The transports are fakes, just like the additional fighter carriers.”

“There’s only one fighter carrier?” I asked, my spirits suddenly dropping.

Mars didn’t notice. “Just the Churchill.” He sounded cheerful as he pounded another coffin nail into my soul.

We sped over a viaduct, toward the southern edge of town; and again, I was struck by the emptiness of the road around us. Doctorow had risen to power during the Avatari occupation. If there was one skill the people had learned under his leadership, it was how to evacuate town efficiently. My real warning of an alien threat did not impress Doctorow enough to call for an evacuation, but Mars’s phantom clones did the trick.

“What happens when they get to the park and find out it’s empty?” I asked.

“That could take a while,” he said.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“I left trackers,” he said. “That park has never been so heavily guarded.”

I had to laugh. He’d left the park in the hands of robots that consisted of nothing more than a motion-tracking sensor and an automated trigger finger.

But Mars was more of an engineer than he was a military strategist. Scott Card Park was a flat grassy field with a stream and a few shade trees. We would not have much time before the militia figured out that the invasion was a hoax.

We were halfway across town, and the second Jackal lagged a few hundred yards behind us. As it drove down the ramp at the end of the viaduct, I glanced back and wondered how long it would take Doctorow to figure out that Mars had outsmarted him.

As the second Jackal reached the bottom of the ramp, Mars said something softly into the radio. I did not catch what he said.

The voice on the other end gave a one-word response, “Clear.”

Mars gave me a wicked smile, and asked, “Do you believe in burning bridges behind you?”

I turned in time to see the horizon go up in flames. At first I thought the crazy bastard had detonated the entire city, then I saw that he’d just blown up the bridge. He’d destroyed the viaduct that ran from the north end of town to the south. An enormous, twisting curtain of smoke, dust, and debris rose from the spot where the ten-mile-long bridge once stood.

“You just cut Norristown in half,” I said.

“No one’s hurt, no one’s killed, and no one’s going to follow us,” Mars said. “Praise Jesus, God is good.”

And so are well-placed explosives, I thought.

The cloud of smoke and dust settled, revealing sections of bridge that hung like severed limbs over battered city blocks.

“Mars, you missed your calling,” I said. “You should have been in demolitions.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said, sounding extraordinarily cheery about his act of benevolent terrorism. “It’s much more fun to bust them than to build them, but the Corps of Engineers giveth, and the Corps of Engineers taketh away.” He laughed, and I could not help but smile. Freeman, on the other hand, kept his rifle out and his finger on the trigger.

I turned to him, and said, “Why the speck did you come here, Freeman?”

He didn’t answer, but Mars did. “He was the one that got you out of jail.”

“Stay out of this,” I told Mars. “Freeman and I have a few issues we need straightened out.”

I asked Freeman, “Whose specking side are you on? Are you working for the Unified Authority this time, or are you just out for yourself?”

Had my mind sped up or had time just slowed down? We were in the Jackal driving through Norristown, but everything seemed silent and slow. The world around me seemed to disappear so that there was nothing left except for me and Ray Freeman. Even Mars had vanished.

“Somebody has to survive,” Freeman said.

I saw agony in his generally emotionless face and understood. “Marianne?” I asked.

Ray shook his head.

“Caleb?”

Freeman did not answer, and by not doing so, he made the answer even more clear. Marianne was Ray’s sister. Caleb was her son. They had lived in a Baptist colony on the edge of the Milky Way. As the Avatari began their invasion, the Navy moved the colony to New Copenhagen. They were still on New Copenhagen when the Avatari returned.

“Hill didn’t tell me he was going to attack your ships,” Freeman said. He did not say this by way of apology, just explanation. Millions of people were about to die; he did not have time to grieve over a few dead clones.

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

“The temperature’s been playing roulette for the last fourteen hours,” Mars said, as we drove the slalom course leading to the Norris Lake tunnels.

Mars and his engineers had placed cars, trucks, Dumpsters, and heavy equipment along the road. Our sporty little Jackals had no problem threading the gaps between the barriers, but larger vehicles like tanks and troop carriers would need to go slow to get through. Once we made it through the obstacle course, Mars set off a pyrotechnical display that left the trucks, cars, and Dumpsters in flames. His engineers had rigged a masterful barrier.

Ahead of us, the twin tunnels rose from the waters of Lake Norris like a double-barreled shotgun. Mars drove the Jackal right up to the tunnel for northbound traffic, then came to a stop.

I climbed out. To my left was Lake Norris, an endless stretch of sparkling water. A bright sun hung high into the sky. Like Olympus Kri, Terraneau would have a radiant final day. Perhaps the tachyons caused clear weather; perhaps they needed clear weather to perform their work of death. All I knew was that the sky was clear, and a chilled, crisp breeze blew off Lake Norris. The wind cooled one side of my face, and the heat from the fires warmed the other. The breeze put a crease in the column of greasy black smoke that rose from the flames. Heat ripples hovered over the wreckage, and the flames looked especially orange.

I climbed back into the Jackal and powered up the radar-scope. Mars, a sailor and engineer who had never seen ground fighting, asked, “What’s that?”

“It’s radar,” I said.

On the scope, swarms of dots appeared. Some represented the burning barriers, some were in the air.

I looked back at Freeman, and said, “The home team’s coming in at six o’clock.” The militia would not need to drive across town to get to us; as long as they had pilots, they could fly here in transports. I’d left a small fleet of transports behind when I evacuated Fort Sebastian.

Transports were big and bulky, but unarmed. Had we left fighters behind, Tomcats or Harriers, they could have fired rockets at us from the air. They could, of course, ferry tanks and troops in those transports, but they would not be able to attack from the air.

Freeman pushed his way out of the Jackal, bringing with him his rifle and gear. He surveyed the three-lane entrance of the tunnel. The way his mind worked, he instantly spotted tactical advantages that most men would miss. He was clever and cunning; and though he had come to save lives, he would kill without mercy. With Doctorow in charge, the only lives that could be saved on Terraneau belonged to me and Mars and the Corps of Engineers.

The first transports appeared above the barriers. They flew so slowly they looked like they would fall, hovering like bees as they passed over the fiery obstacle course. Mars watched them and chuckled, then asked, “Where do they think they’re going to land?”

The only road leading to the front of the tunnels was blocked; and the tunnels rose out of the lake. There was no place to land behind them.

A transport passed over our heads, circled us in the air, then returned the way that it had come. Several more transports followed. I counted eight, but there might have been more. Each of those transports could carry one hundred troops, but they could also carry a tank or a combination of men and machinery.

I walked up beside Freeman as he geared up, attaching grenades to his armor and checking the clip in his rifle. “How long do you think we have?” I asked. “How long before the planet burns?”

Freeman shrugged his shoulders and continued loading bullets and grenades.

“Care to guess?” I asked.

“Maybe ten minutes, maybe ten hours,” he said. Freeman was an agent of action who left prophecies and predictions to the likes of Arthur Breeze and William Sweetwater.

“I don’t suppose you brought Sweetwater with you,” I said.

“They’re in a U.A. computer. The only way to talk to them is to have a capital ship nearby.”

“But you had them with you when I met you on Olympus Kri …” I stopped myself in midsentence. Another piece suddenly fitted into the puzzle. “Their self-broadcasting spy ships …they had a cloaked ship orbiting Olympus Kri.”

Freeman, of course, did not comment. Instead, he said, “We need to get into the tunnel. We can’t get pinned down out here.” As I left him, he was carrying equipment into the tunnel and preparing for a fight.

The differences between men. Freeman stood silent and subdued, all of his attention focused on the road as he waited for the militia to attack. I found Mars gabbing with a knot of about thirty engineers. They were in the tunnel, but no more than fifty feet from the entrance.

“Where are the rest of your men?” I asked. When I left Terraneau, Mars had one thousand engineers in his corps.

“In there, waiting for us.” Mars pointed down the tunnel as he spoke.

“Do you have men guarding both tunnels?” I asked.

Mars shook his head. “We flooded the southbound tube.”

I nodded, and said, “You better tuck your men in; the fighting is about to begin.”

“What about the aliens?” he asked.

“One battle at a time,” I said. “Freeman and I will slow the militia while you and your men dig in. After that, we’ll work on the blast doors.”

“Hear that, guys. It’s time,” Mars said. He sounded so damn cheerful that I thought he must have misunderstood me. His engineers scattered. Two of them climbed into a freight truck that was parked along one wall of the tunnel. As they started up the engine, Mars and a few of his engineers hopped into a Jackal.

The big truck headed out the tunnel, then cut a wide U-turn and squealed to a stop. It was so large it blocked out most of the sunlight. It also completely clogged two of the three lanes leading in from the city.

The engineers hopped out of the truck unscathed.

Moments later, huge metal doors pivoted out from the shadows along the walls and shut out the rest of the sunlight. The doors were perfectly fitted for the entrance. They were tall and thick, and they slid along rails, making no more noise than a bicycle riding on a flat paved road until they connected together with an earsplitting clang.

With the doors shut, the tunnel went as dark a closet. Just a narrow seam of daylight shone in around the edges of the doors. I turned and looked into the darkness. Far away, a Jackal moved slowly through the darkness, its racks of lights casting a blinding glare. And then the tunnel lights came on, shining down on the spider’s web of scaffolding that ran along the walls.

When I did not see him immediately, I worried that we might have sealed Freeman outside the tunnel, but my worries proved unfounded. I spotted him working under the scaffolding, probably setting charges or some other defense.

One of the Jackals rolled up beside me, and Nobles hopped out. I said to him, “That flimsy door isn’t going to keep anyone out,” though I thought it might protect us from the pressure shift of a falling atmosphere.

“It’s just supposed to slow them down,” Mars said.

I kept my eyes on Freeman, watching him walk around the piping. He moved slowly, deliberately. I could not tell what he was doing.

How ironic, I thought. Ray Freeman, out to save the universe.

The first grenade exploded. The force of the explosion did not destroy the iron door, but the sound of the blast echoed inside the tunnel.

One of the engineers came to me, and shouted, “Your armor is in the back of the Jackal.”

“No shit,” I said. They’d brought me armor, I was touched.

A rocket struck the door, nearly blasting it off its rails. The deafening sound was followed by the sharp tak tak of bullets striking unyielding metal.

“It’s in the turret,” the man said.

I nodded and jogged to the back of the Jackal. The militia would break through in another moment. I needed armor and firepower. When I opened the door of the turret, I saw that Mars had used the space to stow a lot more than a set of armor and a handful of weapons. Two figures lay huddled on the floor, tied up and gagged.

I stared in at Ava, and she stared back at me. Her hands were bound behind her back, and someone had taped her mouth. Seeing me, she struggled and shifted her weight, mumbling incoherently all the while.

“Ava,” I said. “I’m glad you’re safe.”

She mumbled something, twisting and turning and struggling to get free. I might have untied her, but I did not have time. The next rocket knocked one of the huge metal doors out of its tracks. With a deafening yawn, it fell, kicking up a blast of air that smelled of dust, oil, sulfur, and iron.

The man lying beside Ava screamed and struggled. There was no mistaking the look of terror in his eyes. In Ava’s green eyes, I saw nothing but fury. As I grabbed my rucksack, Ava began babbling all the louder. She thrashed to get my attention as I removed the various sections of my armor from the bag. After laying out the armor, I gazed at the assortment of weapons Mars had brought me.

I leaned in, and said, “Well, Ava, nice seeing you again.”

She brought up a foot and tried to stomp it on my face; but she was slow, and she telegraphed the kick. I dodged her foot, and said, “That wasn’t very polite.” As I closed the door to the turret, I could hear her kicking and shouting.

Freeman must have captured them, Ava and her new lover. Maybe it was Mars. I did not have time to think about it; but if I survived Terraneau, I would have a debt to repay.

It took me under a minute to strip out of my service uniform and step into my bodysuit. In another thirty seconds, my armor was in place.

“Mars, are you on?” I asked over the interLink.

“Sounds like it’s getting hot out there,” he said. That was an understatement. By that time, the other half of the door had caved in. A fusillade of militia bullets struck the jackknifed truck and dug into the walls and ceiling. Sunlight and bullets and the sound of explosions poured in through the tunnel entrance.

Retreating deep into the tunnel and hiding behind whatever protection the engineers had installed would be easy, the trick would be stalling the militia so that they did not have time to kick in the doors. We would not fight them, per se, so much as slow them down; but even that had to be timed just right. If we stalled too long, we might get ourselves cooked in the bargain.

“Get your men in deep,” I told Mars. “Get settled in and get the doors ready.”

Someone fired a grenade into the scaffolding where I had last seen Freeman. The grenade burst, sending smoke and flames and twisted pipes in every direction. My helmet deadened the sound, and my armor absorbed the percussion, giving the explosion a dreamlike feeling, and I felt no fear and realized that my combat reflex had already begun.

The militia fired automatic weapons along the walls, their bullets kicking up sparks as they struck steel pipes. “Freeman, where are you?” I asked over the interLink. As I checked for Freeman, I saw Lieutenant Nobles climb behind the wheel of the Jackal that carried Ava and her lover. He drove away.

Freeman answered my query with action instead of words. Three men tried to sprint from the entrance of the tunnel. Using his sniper rifle, Freeman picked them off.

I spotted him by following the angle of his rifle fire. He had taken cover behind a crane. “The engineers built a steel barrier a quarter mile in,” he said in his low, ineffable voice. “We need to get back there.”

A few of Mars’s men tried to come back and help us; but they were engineers, not combat Marines. They crawled along the walls and froze when the gunfire erupted, and I told them to get back into the tunnel and guard the door. “Fall back,” I shouted over the interLink on a frequency that every man could hear. They did not need to be told a second time.

Several guns opened fire. Shooting blindly into the tunnel, the militia leaders hoped to keep us pinned while some of their men tried to flank us. They made a mistake. They overestimated our numbers. They must have thought there were dozens of us instead of two men hiding in the shadows along the wall. They fired toward the center of the tunnel, then they sent out six men who ducked low and sprinted for cover. Freeman picked them off, starting with the man in the rear and working his way forward. He hit them so quickly that the first four went down before last ones noticed.

A grenadier spotted Freeman. As he stepped out to fire an RPG, I picked him off with my M27.

“Where are you?” I asked Mars over a frequency that only he and Freeman would hear.

“We’re dug in behind the next blast wall, about a quarter mile in,” he said.

“Okay, we’re going to try and work our way back to you.”

“Your girlfriend escaped,” Mars said.

“Shoot her if she gives you any trouble,” I said. I wasn’t joking.

The sound of a large engine caught my attention. The growl of the engine seemed to fill the tunnel, drowning out the gunfire. It became louder, then vanished under the thunder of a shell striking the jackknifed truck. The blast sent the truck skidding along the street, kicking up a trail of sparks as large as dandelions. A Targ Tank had entered the tunnel. Low to the ground and very fast-moving, Targ Tanks were the Jackal killers and troop displacers of the battlefield.

The tank fired a second shell into the truck, sending it into a slow roll. It crashed into a concrete barrier and smashed it to rubble. Still rolling, the truck rammed into a scaffolding platform and crushed it like a house of twigs. The tank headed toward a dark corner in which Freeman knelt behind a bulldozer.

I pulled my first grenade launcher, flipped the safety, and fired. Before the pill even hit, I’d chucked the first tube and pulled out a second. The first grenade hit home, striking the turret just behind its guns. The second shot caused the tank to skid sideways, crumpling the turret and bending the cannon so that it hung askew.

By that time, I had found a new hiding place. Rocket-propelled grenades were great for killing tanks, but they left a trail of fine smoke that stretched from your target to your front door. I had barely dug into my new spot, semisafe behind a concrete barrier, when Freeman said, “Harris, we’re out of time. We have to get behind the wall.”

Knowing that the militia would spot me the moment I left my new hiding place, I sprang from behind my barricade. I caught a quick glimpse of men pouring into the tunnel, then I began my sprint, thinking I might just survive this action. The militia would shoot at me, but they would not fire missiles. If they fired missiles, they might rupture the walls of the tunnel, and lake water would flood in.

“Mars, close the gates,” I shouted over an open frequency. I knew Freeman would be listening.

“Where are you?”

“We’re on our way,” I said. By the time I said that, it was already a lie. We were both pinned down. The militia had spotted me. Bullets rang out and chipped at the ceiling and the walls of the tunnel.

Freeman fired off the charges I had seen him placing by the front of the tunnel and something amazing happened. Instead of triggering a massive explosion, the charges burst into a wall of flames that filled the tunnel from roof to floor in a solid sheet of fire. He triggered a second of those explosions, then a third.

The militia fired bullets through those flames, shooting blindly, not compensating for the downhill grade. Running just ahead of me, Freeman spun and set off one last explosion. I did not stop to watch the fireworks. I dashed ahead, making my way through the tunnel until I reached the front metal doors, where I did not so much stop as fall. Panting for air, I skidded behind a crane, then slid for cover. Freeman ran in beside me.

Mars and another engineer watched us from behind the door. I could see them; but I could not see if there was concern on their faces.

Bullets struck the heavy metal door; but this was shielded metal, and they might as well have been shooting spit wads for all the damage their bullets would do. The sound of the bullets was faint, a dull thud, then that stopped.

And then the event began.

A quarter of a mile deep in the tunnel, I did not hear or feel a thing; but when I looked back up the tunnel, I caught a brief glimpse of the glowing red sky, the color of lava or maybe molten metal. Anyone near the front of the tunnel was already ash; but this far in, with the lake distributing the heat, we were safe. There was plenty of cool air in the tunnel; and as long as we stayed behind the metal door, we’d be safe from the backlash when the superheated atmosphere came down. Freeman and I dashed the last few yards and ducked behind the door. By that time, though, the shooting had stopped.

The last thing I saw as the engineers rammed the doors in place was a passel of militiamen lined up like stones in a cemetery. They stood facing toward the mouth of the tunnel, their backs bathed in shadow. Beyond them, I could see just a sliver of open sky in which the colors were all wrong, and the air itself seemed to have caught on fire.

They must have all seen what I saw before they sealed the doors. Ava, her courage spent and her strength gone, sat on the ground crying like a child. When her boyfriend tried to comfort her, she pushed him away. Mars’s army of engineers stood silent. I lost track of Freeman.

It was crowded in the tunnel, Mars had a thousand men in his Corps of Engineers; but I think every soul in that tunnel went through the next dark hours feeling alone. Mars came to me and said something about Noah closing the doors of his ark. I heard the words, but I wasn’t listening. I did not respond.

It would be like this all across the galaxy—running, warning, hiding, waiting. The Enlisted Man’s Empire still had twenty-two planets. The thought of trying to rescue so many planets left me exhausted. The thought of failing left me hollow.

I needed to sleep.

I had come to rescue people, and now I wanted to escape from the few people I had actually managed to save. No one paid attention to me as I pushed through the ranks of engineers, slowly walking deeper into the tunnel. I removed my helmet. The air was still and cool. It was musty and smelled of iron. I tasted ash in the air, but that might have been my imagination. I could not tell.

Deep in the tunnel I spotted the shuttle, parked under a flickering light that only illuminated its nose. Nobles sat inside the cockpit doing what he always did when he was nervous, checking instruments, running tests, distracting himself. I watched him, not really paying attention as I stared in his direction.

I had no idea how much time passed.

Ava found me. She planted herself in front of me and stared into my eyes until I looked back at her, then she pressed herself against me. I think she wanted me to hold her, but I felt nothing for her at that moment. I had come all this way because I loved her. There was a time when every man, woman, and child on the planet could have died, and I would have considered my mission a success because I had rescued Ava. Now she stood before me, wanting me to make her feel safe, and I would not even wrap my armor-plated arms around her.

“They’re all dead?” she asked.

I said nothing.

“Could you have stopped this?”

“No,” I said.

“Hold me,” she said, and she pressed the side of her face against the cold and hardened plate that covered my heart. She locked her arms around me the way a frightened little girl might lock her arms around her father. I let her hold me, but I did not put my arms around her. After a moment, I stepped away.

“Don’t leave me, Wayson,” she said; but she was too late, I already had.

Later, I had no idea how much later, we heard the thud of the atmosphere crashing back into place. Some men moaned, and other men shouted, but the impact was not especially loud.

Freeman found me, and said in a soft voice, “We’re going to open the shield.” He stood behind me. I could not see him, but I could feel his presence.

As I followed him toward the shield, I saw Ava begin to sob. I watched her fall to her knees, and I felt no desire to comfort her.

I placed my helmet over my head as I followed Freeman toward the front of the tunnel. Holding our guns ready, we waited as the engineers pulled back the doors, revealing a scene I’d seen too many times before—the aftermath.

The tunnel was intact, but its contents were in tatters. Men lay like puzzle pieces across the concrete. The heat had not penetrated that far into the tunnel, but the pressure from the atmosphere had. There was blood on the ground and on the walls. Two overturned jeeps sat in a pile. I took my first tentative steps from behind the steel doors and stopped.

Not all of the men were dead. A half dozen militiamen sat huddled along one wall of the tunnel. They had blood on their faces and bloodstained clothes and blood in their hair, and they looked stunned as they sat and moaned. I stepped over a body and saw blood running out the man’s ear.

“Maybe the medics on the Churchill can save them,” Freeman said.

The Churchill was a fighter carrier, it would certainly have beds and medicine. “Do you mean save them or fix them?” I asked.

Freeman said nothing.

Walking just outside the door, I found two more pockets of survivors. Three men sat beside each other, they were silent and still. As I approached them, one looked up into my visor, and asked, “Is it over?” He yelled the words. The heat hadn’t reached these men; when the atmosphere dropped back in place, the pressure it created obliterated their eardrums.

But it wasn’t physical pain that left them numb. They had lost everything and everyone that meant anything to them.

“Harris, come here,” Mars called over the interLink.

He stood in a little clearing. I went to join him.

Not far from Mars, a single body rested against a wall. The Right Reverend Colonel Ellery Doctorow, president of Terraneau, sat with his finger still around the trigger of the gun he had used to kill himself. His head had shattered like a melon tossed from a tall building, but I recognized his tailored suit just the same. The jolt of recognition did not include sympathy; I felt nothing but disgust for this man whose high ideals and sense of self-importance had cremated an entire population. How many millions had he killed with his visions of moral superiority simply because he did not trust any authority other than his own?

I came up beside Mars, who was dressed in his engineering armor. He stared down at Doctorow. I had no idea what he felt; but I thought his feelings toward Doctorow might not be any kinder than my own.

“General, should we take your shuttle out?” he asked after several seconds passed. They really were magicians, Lieutenant Mars and his engineers. They saved ships, built bridges, dug tunnels, and resurrected the left-for-dead.

“Give it a few more minutes,” I said, remembering the tests Freeman had run on Olympus Kri. “Let’s let the dust settle.”

Outside the tunnel, the sky would be filled with soot and steam and smoke. The final dregs of Tachyon D would still be dangerous as they traveled their circuits like angels of death.

Mars did not leave. He stood there, beside me, staring down at Doctorow’s lifeless remains. He did not speak for several seconds. I could not see his face through his helmet, but I could imagine his expression. He was new to this kind of war. The first time you see the bodies and the blood and the waste, the muscles in your face go numb and your mind goes numb and you feel as if you are no more alive than the men lying on the ground.

“What about the other planets?” Mars asked. “Is it going to be like this? Can we save them?”

I took a deep breath, held it in my lungs until I felt them searing; and even then, I still did not exhale. I thought about the Unified Authority, its leaders waiting for another chance to betray us, and the Avatari traveling from planet to planet, burning entire worlds.

“We can’t save them all,” I said, but I would try just the same. Staring down at Doctorow, I realized that the only time I appreciated the value of life was when I saw it spent and wasted.