“Buddy, you mind tossing me a towel?” one of the men called.
“Sure,” I said. I picked up a gym towel and tossed it to him. He snatched it out of the air and turned back to his weights without thanking me.
I went back to the locker room and stripped for a shower. The goal now was to remain inconspicuous as I killed time and waited for the right change of clothing. I needed something I could wear on the upper decks without attracting attention. So I went in the shower room and soaped and showered, peering out whenever I heard people entering or leaving the locker room. More than an hour passed before the man I was waiting for arrived, and I counted myself lucky that he had come so soon.
I heard the door close and rinsed myself off. When I looked out of the shower, I saw a crewman walking around the floor picking up a few sopping towels that had been discarded and tossing them into the laundry cart.
Drying myself off as quickly as possible, I listened as he emptied bins filled with dirty gym clothes into his cart. As he left, I pulled on a fresh pair of gym shorts and a T-shirt.
Stepping out into the corridor, I saw the crewman moving away slowly. He stood hunched over the laundry cart, his head turning to follow everyone he passed. He turned down one hall and then another before reaching his final destination.
Capital ships had more than one laundry facility. Chances were, there was a special facility on the upper decks just for cleaning officers’ uniforms; but this laundry would do.
I approached and the door slid open.
“What do you want?” the crewman asked as I stepped into the room.
“My clothes,” I said, doing an impersonation of a peeved officer. “You hauled off my uniform in one of your laundry carts.”
“Sorry,” the man said in a flat voice. He went back to sorting dirty clothes and did not look back in my direction. Such insubordination. I was an officer. He was an enlisted man. Okay, I was a spy pretending to be an officer, but he didn’t know that.
I had at least thirty carts to choose from. In the third cart, I found an officer’s work uniform.
CHAPTER THIRTY
I went to the emptiest room on any battleship—the chapel. There I could speak freely.
“Who is Derrick Hines?” Freeman’s face appeared on my MediaLink shades.
“Never heard of him,” I said.
“You’re using his Link address,” Freeman said.
“Oh, him,” I said. “He was a crewman on a GCF ship.”
“Confederate or Mogat—?” Freeman asked. He had no interest in Hines’s fate.
Freeman was on a communications console. I could see his face. It was as impassive as ever. Judging by his nonplussed expression, you might have thought that I had called from a bar in Mars Spaceport.
“No idea,” I said. “I think it’s their flagship.”
“How did you get on?” Freeman asked.
“I followed Colonel Wingate, the commander of Fort Clinton.”
“That was the Army base that got destroyed on New Columbia,” Freeman said. “What’s he doing on a GCF ship?”
“He swapped sides,” I said. “Turns out he was using Fort Clinton as a surplus outlet and the Mogats were his favorite customers. Think he’s worth much?”
As I thought about it, I had plenty of reasons to hate Batt Wingate. He would have sold me out without a second thought when I was regular military. He’d certainly sold out enough other clones. He must have helped William Patel smuggle bombs into Safe Harbor. Did he know that I would be there or was he just after Jimmy Callahan? I would gladly kill the man myself if I got a chance.
“He’s worth something,” Freeman said. “The Mogats routed the Navy at New Columbia. They shot down twenty-three U.A. ships and destroyed all three military bases. The pundits are saying that Washington is desperate.
“Have you got a location on the Fleet?”
“No,” I said.
Freeman waited for me to say more.
“Ray, this is too big for us. We’re going to need to bring Huang in on it. Keep this channel open. I don’t know how I’m going to do it yet, but I will get you a location. Once I have something, you’re going to have to turn it over to Huang.”
He agreed.
“Where are you now?” I asked.
“I was on my way to Little Man.”
“Your family okay?” I asked.
“A carrier buzzed them last night. I think it scared them. They’re colonists. Having the Navy around makes them nervous.”
“Did anything happen?” I asked.
“The captain gave them one month to evacuate the planet. They’ll still be there when this is over with.” For some reason, I got the feeling that he was not anxious to visit Little Man. Until recently, he never even mentioned his family. Now, when he talked about them, he did not seem to exude warm feelings.
We agreed to meet in Safe Harbor once I got off this ship. Freeman would go and see what happened to Callahan and the commandant at Fort Washington. One way or another, I thought I could bring in Batt Wingate, and we would need witnesses to prove he was our Benedict Arnold.
My new uniform made me a lieutenant in the Confederate Navy. Now that I was an officer, I moved around the ship more freely. I walked the halls and looked for clues.
The first thing that struck me was the sheer emptiness of the ship. U.A. ships were crowded with personnel. Engineers, weapons officers, cooks, communications officers . . . wherever you looked, you saw sailors. Command ships seemed doubly crowded because, along with the crew, they had fleet officers and administrative flunkies.
This ship had a skeleton crew, maybe a half-crew. I walked down major arteries between engineering and weapons systems passing only an occasional sailor.
The ship itself was clean, brightly lit, and remarkably unorganized. The cables that I saw lining the walls down in the landing bay also snaked along the halls on the upper decks. They were about three inches in diameter and highly insulated, which led me to believe that they might carry a high-voltage electrical charge. The ceilings in this part of the ship were only eight feet tall, and the cables hung one foot lower than that. At one point, thinking I was alone in a long hall, I stopped to examine them. The outside covering of these cables was black with maroon strips.
“Is there a problem with the cables, Sir?” somebody asked behind my back.
I whirled around expecting to see an MP. It was a petty officer—a maintenance technician. I recognized the crossed hammers insignia on his blouse. It was the same insignia that the U.A. Navy used. This man did not suspect me of being a spy. He was worried about my spotting a flaw in the way that the cables were hung.
“Looks sound,” I said.
He saluted, but he had a curious, maybe even slightly nervous look on his face. “Sir,” he said, looking as if he was not sure he should continue. I thought I knew what he would say and I was ready.
“Yes?”
Now lowering his voice to a whisper, he leaned forward and said, “You forgot your bars.” As he said this, he pinched the right side of his collar between his thumb and forefinger and shook it.
That was not what I expected. I pretended to be confused. Seeing that there were no bars on my collar, I acted surprised and embarrassed. “Thank you. I can’t believe I missed that,” I said with an expression that I hoped looked like a nervous grin. The petty officer saluted and left.
Of course there were no bars pinned to my collar, I had liberated this blouse from laundry. No officer worth his spit would leave his bars or clusters on the collar of a blouse that was headed for a cleaning.
My first discovery was that this ship was a battleship. I found that out when I passed a directory on the top deck. The directory showed the ship’s seven decks plus a picture of the ship from the outside. A ship of this size should have had a 2,500-man crew. Now, having walked its length on every deck, I guessed the crew at no more than 800. Maybe one-tenth of the crew was Japanese. The engineering area was almost all Japanese.
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br /> The Japanese officers made no attempt to fit in with the other sailors that I saw. Most of the men on this battleship wore tan-colored uniforms. The Japanese uniforms were dark blue. Still, Japanese officers spoke English whether talking to other officers or just among themselves.
The closer I came to the command deck, the more this ship looked Japanese. Not far from the directory, on the command deck, stood an archway made of two posts topped by two beams. Under the arch was a shrine or display with three long swords stretched across a three-tiered pedestal. Since the officers I saw walk past this shrine did not stop to bow or pray to it, I decided the display had more to do with heritage than religion.
I continued toward the bridge, passing through officer country and the maze of cubicles and offices that occupies the top deck of almost any naval ship. Here I walked with a businesslike stride, acting as if I had an important meeting to attend. On a U.A. Navy ship, someone would have noticed the missing bars. I would have been stopped and questioned. On this ship, few people noticed how I dressed.
I turned a corner and saw the entry to the bridge. Taking a deep breath to steel myself, I walked to the door. The bridge was spacious and dark. Teams of sailors gathered around various consoles and workstations.
Everyone in the room was Japanese. In the dimmed light, their royal blue uniforms were black as shadows, even in the low glow from the workstations. Looking around the floor, I estimated that there were at least fifty officers sitting at the various stations.
In the center of the bridge sat a large square table which the captain and his senior officers used to chart courses and consider battle strategies.
There was nothing else to do. I stepped onto the bridge and walked its breadth. The workstations were arranged in concentric circles. Walking quickly without a pause, I recognized each station. The computers in the weapons area, which were unmanned at that moment, had large displays showing the diagram of the battleship with its gun and cannon arrays highlighted. The engineering station had computers showing detailed maps of each deck. I would have loved to have parked myself beside one of those computers to discover its many secrets, but three men sat at that station. The white glow of the readout display flickered on their faces.
Three men sat in front of one elongated screen in the navigation section. Their screen had a map of the galaxy along the top but most of the screen was filled with the local star system. I did not recognize the system. The last area I passed as I lapped the outer circle of the bridge was communications. Voices came from a station for monitoring fleet communications. During battle, this station would be the nerve center for the fleet. Now, after the battle, transmissions between ships went unobserved.
BATTLE GROUP SIX ABLE, THIS IS BATTLESHIP SEVEN ABLE, OVER.
COME IN BATTLESHIP SEVEN ABLE. THIS IS BATTLE SIX ABLE COMMAND.
WE ARE BREAKING FORMATION. DO YOU COPY?
WHAT SEEMS TO BE THE PROBLEM SEVEN ABLE?
This particular station was more cluttered than the worst workstation in the Golan traffic tower. A stack of data pads had toppled, spreading across the desk. Pencils, pens, papers, coffee cups, and other bric-a-brac lay all around those pads. There were four cups of coffee along the edge of that particular desk along with a brick-sized box of audio chips. In the center of this mess was a large ashtray filled to capacity with cigarette ash and butts. The line of drawers along the left side of the station hung partially open. The drawers, like everything else at this station, overflowed with junk.
I passed by the station without slowing, completed my lap of the bridge and left. Not far from the bridge, I found a bathroom. A couple of men stood by the urinals; so I entered a stall and waited until they left, then I contacted Freeman.
“Okay,” I spoke quickly, but in a whisper, “this is a battleship. I have no idea where we are. I am going to leave this line open. Tell Huang to have his Intel section listen in.”
Freeman nodded. He did not bother telling me to “be careful” or to “watch my back.” That was not his way. He stared into the console intense and humorless as ever. His eyes reminded me of a double-barreled shotgun as they stared out from that mahogany skull. He was the most dangerous man in the galaxy, and I had absolutely no doubt that I could rely on him. His very being communicated undeniable competence.
Removing the shades, I stepped out of the bathroom stall and returned to the bridge. I took another stroll on the bridge, slowing to glance at the various workstations as I passed them. I wished I could examine the strategic charts. Huang would have paid one billion dollars for the secrets that they held. But I had something even more valuable . . . the fleet itself.
As before, nobody paid any attention to me. I approached the communications area and looked over my shoulder to be sure that no was watching. I never stopped, but I slowed down as I left a little extra mess on the already cluttered workstation. A moment later, I left the command deck and never returned.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
I was alone on the command ship of the enemy fleet. I had no idea about the fleet’s position. Escape was out of the question. We must have been light years from the nearest broadcast station. At this point, I had no means of communicating with Freeman or Huang or anyone else who could help me. I could, of course, steal another set of shades; but I did not know how long I would be on this scow, and I could not afford to take any more chances.
My best bet, I decided, was to return to the landing bay, a relatively empty part of the ship. There I would stow away on the next transport that came through. Sooner or later this fleet would attack another target. If I managed to dig in with the right group of commandos, I might have a way out.
I returned to the gym. The place was as dead as before. A couple of enlisted men stood in the locker room chatting as they put on their uniforms. Neither man paid much attention as I grabbed shorts and a T-shirt and started undressing. A moment later they left and I went to the lockers.
The coveralls were still in the locker where I placed them. Weeks might have passed before somebody discovered them in a forsaken gym like this one. I pulled them from the locker, stepped into the pants legs, and zipped them up. I did not bother with socks before stepping into my foul-smelling boots. If the worst I got out of this brush with the GC Fleet was foot fungus, I would consider myself lucky.
Still noticing just how bad the clothes smelled, I started down to the landing bay. The smell was strong and the clothes felt damp against my skin. I did not know how long I would be stuck in these clothes. How had I missed this smell before?
And something else . . . I realized that I was hungry. The last time I had eaten was when I grabbed a sandwich on the Marine base on New Columbia. That seemed like a long time ago until I did the math. It had only been a few hours ago.
I took a lift down one deck. As I made my way down the corridor, I passed an electrician working on a wall panel. He had removed the faceplate from the panel and now probed the circuits with a pen-shaped tool. As I walked by, he stopped to look over at me. Our eyes met for a moment, and I nodded and moved on. The man did not return my greeting, but he continued to watch me. Perhaps I was paranoid. I looked back as I meandered down the hall. The electrician remained where he was, standing on a foot-tall step ladder, probing around that open panel.
Traveling down the next two decks, I passed almost no one. Perhaps a shift had ended and a smaller crew had replaced it. Maybe it was lunchtime and most of the sailors were eating.
That last corridor that led to the launch bay was entirely empty. The thud of my boots created an indistinct echo as I walked through that brightly-lit stretch. Everything was going so smoothly, I had no doubt that I would slip off the ship soon.
The next time I saw people was as I drew near the landing bay. Two men walked silently down an intersecting corridor. They wore the khaki uniforms of regular officers rather than the blue uniforms of the Japanese, and they fell in quietly behind me as I continued toward the bay. I expected them to turn into some door or
another, but they did not. They continued straight ahead, walking at the same pace as me.
I thought about turning into the next door or hall that I passed, but there were no more doors until the ones leading into the bay. I pretended to be unaware of the men. I did not look back and I did not slow down. Neither did the men behind me.
With no other choice, I entered the landing area. A lone transport sat in the middle of the hangar, its hatch hung open. A small crowd stood on the ramp leading into the kettle. I counted three medics and six MPs, and in the center of them, placed on the bare metal ramp like a cadaver on a mortuary slab, lay Derrick Hines, stripped down to his briefs.
The muzzle of a gun jabbed into my back and a voice said, “How do you like that, boys, we have our first prisoner.”
If there was one kind of naval design that did not change with the times, it was brig. I once ran security for the Doctrinaire , the most advanced ship ever made. I knew every cell in its brig thoroughly, and they were exactly like the cells in this ancient ship . . . the one in which I was now a prisoner. Both brigs had the same kinds of bars on their walls and the same limp mats on their cots. I did not have the means to measure my floor, but if I did, it would have measured precisely eight feet by twelve feet. I knew that because that was the size of the cells on the Doctrinaire.
I lay on my cot staring up at the charcoal-gray ceiling. For a change of scenery, I sometimes turned to look at the charcoal-gray walls. These cells were the ultimate in ease when it came to housekeeping. You simply pulled the mattress out and sprayed everything down with a steam hose. The floor was a grating that led to a drain.
Mercifully, they had stripped me down to my briefs before throwing me in the cell. Those coveralls reeked. From what I could tell, the late Derrick Hines hadn’t washed them for weeks. I might have been a bit cold in this cell, but at least I could breathe.
Had the brig been darker, I might have slept. The lights in the hall were too bright.
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