The colonel laughed. “You think Huang killed Admiral Klyber?”
“I can prove it,” I said. “Do you have a video feed from the summit?”
“No,” the colonel said.
“Good,” I said, not believing him. High-level meetings like the summit were always recorded, and McAvoy was the man with the recording equipment at the Dry Docks. “Klyber and Huang will have gotten into a hot debate. Check out their brawl, then watch the feed of the maintenance team . . . and check out the short, bald guy.”
“I should have shot you while I had the chance,” the colonel said. “Suppose I just say you planted the cable . . .”
“Your own video record proves that I never went near Klyber’s ship,” I said. “Are you planning to doctor your records?”
“Get specked,” the colonel said.
“Look, Colonel, if you have access to the summit records, and we both know that you do, I suggest you view them. Once you’ve done that, send it to me, and I will try to help . . .”
“And you think I trust you?” the colonel asked.
“If you don’t want my help, that’s fine. The best of luck to you. You’re going to need it.”
“If you’re right and there’s something there, I’ll get you that feed. If you’re lying to me, Harris, I’ll have you hauled back to my station for an immediate court-martial,” the colonel said. “How do you like that deal, Liberator?” With this, he ended the transmission.
I did not like that deal. I sat in the cockpit of the Starliner, stared out into space, and stewed. As the fleet admiral’s security officer, I felt duty-bound to find Klyber’s killer. As a Liberator, I felt an almost pathological need for revenge. Beyond that, the evidence suggested that Admiral Huang murdered Klyber and just thinking about putting a bullet between his eyes made me feel happy.
Killing Huang . . . killing Huang. A simple bullet in the head would be too easy. A gun, a bomb, or maybe a knife so that he would know it was personal. Our eyes would meet in the last moment, and he would know who killed him and why.
McAvoy contacted me within an hour. He did not call or write a message. Instead, he sent a virtual delivery. A massive, encrypted file and the key with which to open it.
“Klyber’s death is all over the Link,” Freeman said on my mediaLink shades. Judging by the ugly furniture and plain room behind him, he was staying in a cheap hotel. “The Navy says it was a tragic accident.”
“If you call sabotage an accident,” I said. “Otherwise it was a tragic murder.” I was still out in space, still a few million miles from the Golan Dry Docks. I had spent the last four hours viewing the summit and had more to go.
“You think it was murder?” Freeman asked.
“Yes, and Huang was behind it,” I said.
“Can you prove it?”
“No.”
Freeman was sitting on a bed. The shape of the mattress turned from a square to a funnel under his weight. “What do you have?” he asked.
“I have a security tape showing the maintenance team that cleaned Klyber’s transport. There was an Adam Boyd with them.” I paused to see how Freeman would react.
He raised an eyebrow, and said, “That’s it?”
“Huang created those little speckers.”
“Was Thurston at the summit?” Freeman asked.
I remembered seeing him on the video feed and nodded.
“The only Boyd clones I’ve ever seen were assigned to one of Thurston’s ships. Maybe he did it.”
It was true. To the best of my knowledge, every last Adam Boyd clone had been transferred to the Kamehameha, the command ship of the Scutum-Crux Fleet—Robert Thurston’s purview. That tidbit did not fit in with my theory. I wanted Huang to be the killer. “Thurston is Huang’s man. He doesn’t have anything against Admiral Klyber.”
“You can’t prove Huang has anything against Klyber.” Freeman replied.
“Get specked,” I said, knowing that Freeman was right.
“The only thing you have is a picture of an Adam Boyd clone boarding Klyber’s ship. Is that right? You can’t even prove he did anything to sabotage it.”
I nodded. “He was carrying a toolbox,” I said. “And he was on the ship for eighteen minutes and thirty-two seconds.”
“Was he alone?”
“Some of the time. He got on first.”
“So you are saying he had the opportunity to open the broadcast engine and place the cable even though the rest of the maintenance crew was coming?”
“Must have,” I said. “How did you know about the cable?”
“That’s how you sabotage self-broadcasting ships.” Freeman said. “Do you have anything else?”
“I’ve got a security feed from the summit. You should have seen the sparks. Klyber and Huang really hated each other.”
“The way I see it, we can either drop this or go after the Boyd,” Freeman said. “That’s the best we can do until we can tie Huang to the clone.”
I knew the Adam Boyd clones were trained on Earth, on an island called Oahu. I stumbled into one of them while on R and R on that island. I knew that their base of operations was now the U.A. Kamehameha, a fighter carrier in the Scutum-Crux Arm. Of the two places, Hawaii sounded more hospitable.
“Guess I’m headed to Earth to have a look at their farm,” I said. “You coming?”
Freeman nodded. “The only time I’ve ever seen Boyd clones was after you got through with them. It’d be interesting to see one that is still breathing.”
Part II
THE INVESTIGATION
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
General Alexander Smith, secretary of the Air Force and ranking member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stands in front of an electronic display board holding a laser pointer. Like most of the members of the Joint Chiefs, Smith is in his sixties, a short man with a medium build and graying hair. His mustache covers the entire length of his upper lip.
The display board is an old-fashioned two-dimensional model, strictly low-tech. How he smuggled such an antique into the Dry Docks is beyond me, but there is no way this is Golan equipment. All of the big corporations gave up on 2-D displays long before this facility was built.
The summit takes place around a U-shaped table that is fifty feet long. Only generals and admirals sit at this table. Staffs members sit behind them in chairs set against the wall.
At the moment, General Smith’s 2-D display shows a diagram of the galaxy. Large red circles appear in several areas of the diagram. The general turns and points at them.
“As you know, we have engaged enemy troops in the following locations.” He points to the circles. “The Mogats seem to have set up power bases here . . .” He points at the lower flank of the outer Cygnus Arm. “Here . . .” He circles a parallel segment on the Perseus Arm. “And throughout these portions of Scutum-Crux.”
Smaller red splotches appear throughout the map. “The Mogats have free access throughout the galaxy. These are hotspots for spying and illegal activity. The only red zones in the Orion Arm are the planets New Columbia and Olympus Kri.”
Three of the galactic arms turn bright green. “The Cygnus, Perseus, and Scutum-Crux Arms have declared independence and formed the Organization of Confederate Arms. The Norma Arm has also declared independence. From what we can tell, this arm has ejected all Mogat colonists and is not a member of the OCS.
“Only the Orion and Sagittarius Arms have remained loyal; and in all candor, the U.A. government is funding an all-out covert war in Sagittarius that is costing us trillions of dollars. That’s the bad news.”
The colored areas vanish from the display, leaving a white and blue-black map of the stars. “The pink areas represent the territories in which our enemies currently enjoy military superiority.”
All of the men in the room laugh. There are no pink areas.
With the introductions and joking out of the way, General Smith suddenly turns serious. “About three weeks ago, Air Force intelligence intercepted the message,
‘Alterations complete. Will test in NGC three thousand six hundred and twelve.’
“Obviously, we had no way of knowing what the message meant then.”
“NGC,” Klyber calls out, “Norma Galactic Center?”
“Correct,” Smith says with a slight bow. “NGC did indeed refer to the inner curve of the Norma Arm, an unpopulated sector of the galaxy.” He walks to the edge of the dais, his eyes still focused on Admiral Klyber. “Care to venture a guess as to their usage of alterations or three thousand six hundred and twelve?’” There is nothing confrontational in the way he does this. This is a friendly challenge between two fellow officers.
“It sounds like a date,” Klyber says, shaking his head and sitting back in his seat.
“You missed your calling, Bryce,” says Smith. “You should have been in intelligence. You would have really risen up the ranks.”
This comment gets scattered laughs as Klyber is the highest ranking officer in any branch.
“We do not have any outposts in the central part of the Norma Arm, it’s just too remote. We do, however, have an experimental radar station. This is what that radar readout looked like nine days ago—March 6, 2512.”
The screen turns flat black with concentric rings marking distances from the radar station. Except for the wand effect of the screen refreshing itself, the screen remains still and black for several seconds. When the radar wand finishes its third sweep, a litter of dots appear in one small section of the screen.
The wand sweeps by refreshing the radar reading every thirty seconds and the dots do not move. They stay in place for sixteen complete sweeps of the wand, a total of eight minutes. Eight minutes pass and the next pass of the wand reveals that the dots are gone. They vanished without a trace. The wand sweeps on, but the radar reading remains clear.
“Do we have a more detailed reading, sir?” asks Admiral Brocius. “I’d like to see an analysis of that.”
“This radar reading was taken over a four-million-mile distance. I’m afraid the ship designs and serial numbers were out of focus,” General Smith quips. “The best we could do was dots.”
The patch with the dots reappears, then grows until it fills the entire screen. The dots look like a clutch of glowing eggs laid across a black surface in no particular order.
“There are precisely five hundred and seventy-six dots in this picture,” Smith says. “There were five hundred eighty ships in the Galactic Central Fleet—”
“Admiral Thurston shot down four of the Galactic Central destroyers during the battle at Little Man,” Huang interrupts, standing up as he speaks. Sitting behind Huang, Leonid Johansson nods complacently, as if he has some ownership in that victory.
Once I notice Johansson, I turn my attention to the wall behind Klyber. Halverson is sitting behind Klyber taking careful notes. Beside him sits an officer I do not know . . . could be the ill-fated Major Burns for all I know. Each officer attending the summit has three aides. The last seat behind Klyber must have been Captain Johansson’s. It now sits empty.
“That would mean that every last ship was up and running,” an Air Force general I do not recognize calls out.
“Why not?” Huang shoots back, still standing, “they’ve had more than forty years to tune them up.”
“Admiral Huang makes a good point,” says Admiral Brocius.
As the inertia of this discussion builds up among the other officers, Admiral Klyber leans back in his chair and mumbles something to Halverson. The way Klyber leans back and the sly smile on his face suggest that he is telling the rear admiral a joke, but the startled look on Halverson’s face is anything but amused.
“Those ships are antiques. They belong in a museum,” the unidentified Air Force general responds.
“I wish I shared your confidence,” General Smith says in a raised voice, trying to arrest control of the floor.
“Come on, Alex . . . one sighting in two years . . . Before that it was forty years,” the unidentified Air Force general replies.
The board behind General Smith clears itself and turns into a map of the Scutum-Crux Arm. “There have been eighteen sightings of those ships in the last three days. They appeared here, here, and here . . .”
“That’s only a few million miles from the Scutum-Crux Fleet,” Huang says in astonishment. “Perhaps they plan to engage Admiral Thurston.”
“Yeah, too bad your boy missed them,” The unidentified Air Force general taunts Huang.
Rear Admiral Robert Thurston, sitting quietly in a corner in the back of the room, says nothing. He is a quiet, deliberate man. He has red spiky hair and the face of a high school student. His short waif ’s physique adds to the illusion that he is a boy just out of secondary school.
“Don,” General Smith says, turning toward his fellow Air Force man, “we have a radar record of three hundred ships appearing within six hundred thousand miles of your base. They come in, reprogram their broadcasting computers, and flash out. One theory is that they are testing our level of preparedness.”
“It looks like those old ships are flying circles around you boys,” says an Army officer. It is easy for him to talk. His forces aren’t expected to guard open space.
“You cannot possibly expect us to patrol every inch of space,” Don says, now sounding defensive.
“We’ve got a bigger problem than that,” says Smith. “Whatever fleet this is, it has an uncanny awareness of our movements.”
Earthdate: March 16, 2512 A.D.
City: Honolulu; Planet: Earth; Galactic Position:
Orion Arm
The last time I flew into Hawaii, I was a young sergeant in the Marines on leave. I played like a kid, swam in the ocean like a kid, and had a meaningless romance with a girl whom I could only describe as ornamental. Within a month of returning to duty, I landed on Little Man. After seeing the massacre on Little Man, I would never be a boy again. Looking back, I see my stay in Hawaii as the last chapter in my youth.
I did not fly directly from the Dry Docks to Earth. As a Liberator, I was not allowed to enter the Orion Arm and I did not want to take the chance of attracting attention.
Having a self-broadcasting ship allowed me to bypass the broadcast network and Mars security. I broadcasted myself to the “dark side” of the solar system, the spot exactly opposite Mars in its orbit. That left me with nearly one hundred million miles to fly to reach Earth—twenty hours of travel at the Starliner’s top non-atmospheric speed was five million miles per hour.
Even more hours of flying awaited me once I entered Earth’s atmosphere. The Starliner had a top speed of three thousand miles per hour in atmospheric conditions. The Mach 3 speed limit was a convention imposed throughout the Unified Authority.
“Harris, you there?” Ray Freeman’s voice sounded on my mediaLink.
“Yeah. I’m here,” I said. I had been watching the summit and was lost in the politics of it. Hearing Freeman’s voice brought me back to the real world. “Are you in Hawaii yet?”
“Not yet.”
“When you went to Little Man, were you hunting Mogats?” Freeman asked.
“That’s what they told us,” I said. “This about your family?”
“What do you think the Navy will do if they find neo-Baptists there?”
“It’s a valuable planet,” I said. “There aren’t many planets capable of sustaining life without engineering. At the very least they will consider them squatters. How many people are there?”
“About one hundred,” Freeman said.
“That’s tiny. The Navy may not even notice them,” I said.
“They noticed them,” Freeman said. “My father contacted me. He said that they’re sending a carrier to review the situation.”
“Know which one?” I asked.
“The Grant, I think. Does it matter?”
“It might if it’s the Grant. Remember Vince Lee?” Vince was my best friend when I was a Marine. I had not talked with him since going AWOL. “He’s an officer on the Grant.”<
br />
“Lee?” Freeman said, not making a connection.
“You tried to kill him once,” I said. “You paid him a few bucks to wear my helmet without telling him there was an assassin looking for me.”
“Yeah,” Freeman said.
“He’s a fair man,” I said. “I’ve met the captain of that ship, too . . . Pollard. Both good men. They’ll give your father a fair shake. They might tell them to leave, but they won’t be harsh about it. Hell, once they know the colony doesn’t pose a threat, they may choose to ignore it. How long ago did they make contact?”
“A day or two.”
“Well, they won’t get there anytime soon. It takes a long time to travel to Little Man. The nearest broadcast disc is several days away.”
Freeman and I spoke for a few more minutes, then he signed off. I leaned back in my chair to watch more of the summit. I had ninety-five million miles to go, time was on my side.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“The GC Fleet’s movements show an increasing amount of sophistication,” General Smith says as a new set of circles appear on the screen behind him. “In the radar reading from Central Norma, they appear to have been testing their ability to broadcast. That was the first reading that we took. The ships broadcasted in, they remained perfectly still for eight minutes, and they left. From what we can tell, they remained just long enough to generate the power they needed to broadcast out.”
“Eight minutes between broadcasts?” Klyber asks, unconsciously using a voice that is just loud enough to catch everyone’s attention. “That hardly seems possible.”
“Bryce?” Smith asks. “Did you say something?”
“The broadcast generators on those ships should take fifteen minutes to build up enough energy for a broadcast,” Klyber says. He looks and sounds deeply concerned. Seeing this, I wonder how long it takes the Doctrinaire to charge up and broadcast.
“You will recall the intercepted message—‘alterations complete,’” says General Smith. “We believe they have updated their equipment.”
“What’s the problem, Admiral Klyber?” Huang calls. He is sitting directly across from Klyber; now the two officers face each other. “How long does it take the generators on the
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