I knew better than to argue the point.
Yamashiro and his senior officers walked me to the landing bay and escorted me on to the transport. Yamashiro bowed and his officers saluted as I walked up the ramp. I turned and returned the salute.
The kettle was large and gloomy, big enough to hold one hundred men and entirely empty except for me. I looked around the poorly-lit cabin, taking in the metal walls and shadowy compartments.
There was a box on one of the benches. The card on the box had my name on it. As the thruster rockets lifted the ship off the deck, I sat down and opened that box. Inside it, I found an M27 complete with a detachable rifle stock. I found a particle beam pistol. I also found a combat knife with an eighteen-inch serrated blade and a blood gutter that looked remarkably similar to the knife that the Hollywood version of me carried in the movie, The Battle for Little Man. The knife that I had once thought no self-respecting Marine would carry, I now connected to my belt. In the quagmire of Safe Harbor, that knife might indeed come in handy. The box also held an ammo belt. Under the belt I found five spare clips for my M27 and a half-dozen golf ball-sized grenades.
The ride down to Safe Harbor spaceport only took a couple of minutes. During that time I stripped and reassembled my M27. I loved the way the snaps and clicks echoed against the walls of the empty cabin. I stuck a clip into the slot and set the safety.
“We’re coming in for a landing,” the pilot called from the cockpit. That was all the warning I got. I heard the thrusters, felt the padded bounce as the landing gear struck the pavement, and headed down the ramp as the heavy metal doors opened ahead of me.
The transport, with its landing light and area lanterns, created a small island of light. As soon as I stepped off the ramp, the doors closed behind me and jets of blue flame formed in the thruster rockets. Crouching out of instinct, I jogged a safe distance and watched as the bulky drop ship lifted itself off the tarmac, rotated in the air, then roared out of sight. For a few seconds, I tracked the light of the transport’s engines as they shrank from view.
The air was still and humid on the tarmac. It was a warm night lacking so much as a simple breeze. Crickets or some similar insect made an electronic sounding buzz off in the distance. Other than the buzz of the insects, there were no other sounds in that liquid night.
The vast dark plateau of the spaceport runway looked as dark as coal in the moonless night. Maybe it was the torture, or maybe it was the fall of the seemingly invincible Unified Authority, but something left me feeling small and alone. Not long ago, I had avoided people. Now I felt keenly aware of some new emotion, some barren emptiness, that rose in my stomach whenever people left me alone. I considered this new emotion and decided that it had nothing to do with fear. It came from a new understanding that life was fragile.
I thought about the way I felt after I killed Sam in my cell. Regret for the murder of a man who planned to murder me was not logical. Was it loneliness? Had I somehow become untethered?
Judging by what I saw around me, there was not so much as a stray volt of electricity anywhere in the spaceport. The buildings stood mute and dark like mountains with unnaturally straight cliffs. Runway lights sprouted mute from the pavement. From what I could see through this shroud of darkness, the spaceport had not been touched during the attack. I saw the profile of the terminal building off in the distance. It appeared as a silhouette with straight lines.
The runway stretched out before me vast and smooth. I ran its length with little fear of tripping. The stark white walls of the hangars looked dark gray as I passed them. The large entry doors of the first few hangars hung open. When I peered inside, I found them emptied of everything except tools and equipment.
I had a moment of panic when I found the hangar in which I left the Starliner wide open and empty. I felt that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as I looked around the cavernous blackness. Just as I began to lose hope, I saw a similar hangar not too far away and realized that I might have gone to the wrong building.
Feeling my pulse quicken, I rushed to the next hangar. The door was locked on this one. I thought about pulling out my particle beam pistol and shooting the door off its tracks, but decided against it. If my Starliner was in there, I should be grateful for a door that hid it from prying eyes.
Along the side of the hangar, I found an office door and smashed the glass in with my pistol. Reaching in, I turned the lock and let myself in. The power was out. The only light in the office came from an EXIT sign that faded as it fed on the last fumes of its emergency batteries. The sign’s green light formed a luminous puddle over the door. That the emergency batteries could have lasted so long amazed me until I realized that the attack on New Columbia had happened less than one week ago.
I opened the door beneath the EXIT sign. The hangar was small by spaceport standards. Despite its thirty-foot ceiling, the building was far too narrow to hold a military transport such as the one I had just come in on. It had just enough real estate to house three commuter-class ships side by side.
Wan light shown in through a window in the back wall and dissolved into the eerie blackness. My eyes could not adjust to such total darkness. The hangar was not only dark but silent. It was an auditory vacuum, devoid of so much as a cricket chirping, or a dripping faucet, or a breeze, or even a ticking clock.
Reaching a hand in front of my face to keep from smashing into something, I stumbled forward. I worried about tripping on a power cord or a toolbox, but the floor was clear. I imagined reaching out and finding something cold and dead, a victim of the invasion, but that did not happen. The only people in the spaceport during the attack were allowed to leave the planet unmolested.
I found the smooth, rounded, metal of a spaceship. It was almost too large a ship to be in this hangar. My Starliner was big by private ship standards, but it wasn’t as big as this ship. This ship was tall and bulky. Brushing my hand along its nearly vertical hull, I felt my way around the floor. I could not be sure in the dark, but I felt confident that I recognized this ship.
Once again I felt my way through the darkness, walking slowly and blindly, afraid that at any moment I might bump my head on a wing or shelf. Not far from the first ship, I found the edge of a diagonal wing belonging to a second ship. I followed that wing toward the front of the Starliner. Punching my security code into the pad, I unlocked the hatch.
Now I found myself on familiar ground. I flipped a switch and lights turned on around the cabin. The cabin was long and narrow, with white leather seats and surrounded by wood-paneled walls. From this angle, the cabin looked like a miniature movie theater fitted into a tube. Instead of a screen it had a cockpit.
I switched on the landing lights and had a look at the other ship. As I suspected, it was Freeman’s ship. He had come this far. I had not known whether or not he made it to Safe Harbor before the Confederate Navy destroyed the Broadcast Network. Freeman must not have realized that my Starliner was self-broadcasting or he would have taken it.
I slept in the Starliner that night. The chairs only reclined so far, but they were soft and comfortable.
Safe Harbor Spaceport was thirty miles out of town. At the first light of day, I stole a car from a parking lot outside the passenger terminal and began the trip into town. The highway was empty and still with forests lining one side of the road and open fields on the other. There were no cars along the road and no signs of people. Except for the occasional billboard or road sign, this might have been a natural path on an uninhabited planet.
Five miles down the road, however, I ran into the ruins of an armored column. Tanks, missile carriers, personnel carriers, jeeps . . . military vehicles of all makes lay burned and broken. Some were upside down, their wheels in the air.
When the enemy demolished this column, they destroyed the road as well. Ten- and twenty-foot trenches scarred the road. Rough craters pocked much of the landscape. One particularly large trough cut across a bend in the road and may well have extended beyond it.
It looked like an enormous knife wound in the earth, and the exposed soil within that gouge was charred black.
Seeing no point in trying to drive any farther, I climbed out of my car and shouldered my gear. I was not the first person to park here. A civilian van was parked near the front of the convoy. Like me, somebody had stolen a vehicle and driven in as far as he could from the spaceport. I stole a luxury car. The other person had stolen a family van—a utilitarian vehicle with cargo space and headroom. It had to have been Freeman.
I went to have a closer look at a broken tank before starting the hiking portion of my trip to town. It was an Alsance-Blake, a make of tank generally used by the Army. The same powerful laser that gashed the ground hit the tank’s turret and melted it. Molten metal had poured down the side of the tank like wax flowing down the side of a candle. The soldiers inside this tank would have drowned in a bath of melted steel if they were not incinerated first.
A few days earlier, I would not have equated human lives with this destruction. Now I felt something akin to pity for the men who died here. They would have been clones, like me, but not like me as well. They would have been standard GI clones. They were not my kind, but not far from it.
I hopped a small gully the lasers had cut into the road and continued to the next vehicle, a truck that had been sheered in two. This was the work of a battleship. That was the strength of attacking with battleships. You could scour the planet from above the atmosphere, using laser cannons to destroy enemy emplacements that were so far away they could not return fire. At least thirty men had died on this truck. Corpses in battle gear, their skin charred and their lips and eyelids burned away, grinned down at me.
I heard the caw of birds in the distance. Whether or not the birds had already picked over this particular carrion, they were coming now. If any of these dead had moist flesh, the birds would peck at it and strip it away. That might be good. The air around these vehicles reeked of burned meat. I doubted anyone would come out to bury these poor bastards.
A few vehicles later, I came to a spot where an explosion had blown a twenty-foot hole in the road. The blast radius was thirty or forty feet long. Judging by the debris I saw around the hole, the laser had likely struck a missile truck, detonating its deadly munitions. Had that truck carried a nuclear payload, I would have been irradiated long before reaching the convoy. I might not have made it out of the spaceport alive.
A wonderful cooling breeze blew across this scene. The tops of the trees swayed in that breeze. The wind brushed across the velvety carpet of tall grass that stretched across the fields. Beyond the fields a blue lake twinkled in the bright morning sun. And ahead of me, the scorched supply line stretched on and on and vanished behind a hill. To the best of my reckoning, the column stretched on for another seven miles.
I did not make it all the way to Safe Harbor before nightfall. Crossing the gullies and blown out sections of road slowed me down. By late afternoon, I was only two or three miles from the outskirts of the city. I was close enough to see it clearly, but I did not want to travel into that urban tangle in the darkness. As the sun set and the sky took on streaks of amber, orange, and gold, I set up camp just inside the forest and ate an MRE that I had scrounged from the Starliner.
Once night fell, I hiked out of the woods to have a look at the distant city. No lights shined in the tall buildings. Some glow rose from the street. There might have been fires in dumpsters and trashcans. Maybe a few small stores had gone up in flames. The glow suggested controlled fires, but you never knew.
When morning came, I would make my way into the city. I would travel to Fort Washington, the stricken Marine base. I wanted combat armor. The sensors and lenses in a combat visor would help as I searched for Freeman and Callahan.
Resting in the woods, sleeping in the dark because I did not want to give away my position by building a fire, I thought about Safe Harbor, and Honolulu, and the Mars Spaceport, and the city they called Hinode on Ezer Kri. These had all been busy, thriving cities. I tried to imagine what it would be like to walk through these cities today, but the only image I could conjure was a spaceport terminal packed with millions of people fleeing their homes. I remembered frightened children and crying women and general silence.
In the morning, I ate another MRE and finished the hike into town.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The last time I came into Safe Harbor, the city was empty but perfectly preserved, like a museum exhibit. Now it more truly fit the profile of a ghost town. Looters had gutted the small stores on the outskirts of town. Some buildings were burned down.
There had been few cars along the street on the night of the attack. Now I found cars parked in the middle of the streets. These cars must have been found, driven dry, and abandoned. Not that I was in any position to condemn car thievery.
Safe Harbor had become a patchwork of prime city and war zones. A few blocks into town, I walked into a neighborhood that had probably survived the Hinode attack only to be sacked and destroyed by gangs. This had been an up-scale residential area with two- and three-story apartment buildings, parks with playgrounds, and hedges along the sidewalks.
Hinode lasers had not done this damage. The streets were intact but there were bullet holes everywhere.
The windows and doors of the apartment buildings were broken in. Some buildings had been gutted by fire. The windows of these buildings were blackened from smoke. Beds, toys, and clothing littered the streets. The people who sacked this neighborhood had taken everything they wanted, then, in an anarchic feeding frenzy, destroyed everything they did not want. I looked at the stuffed animals, the toy cars, the books, and the furniture and thought about the families I passed in Safe Harbor spaceport.
The thieves were like wild dogs, like a goddamned pack of dogs. Soon I would run into them, and my newfound respect for human life would not help me. I began to wonder if I would have the ability to pull the trigger when the moment came.
Without people, cities become uncomfortably quiet. Walking through Safe Harbor, I heard my own breathing and the soft clap of my footsteps. I turned one corner and heard the pop of automatic fire. This happened on the outskirts of the financial district, an area filled with monolithic skyscrapers that seemed to slide out of the sky.
One of the buildings across the street from where I stood had a circular drive lined by four flagpoles. From those poles hung flags representing the Unified Authority, the Orion Arm, New Columbia, and Safe Harbor. A strong wind pushed those flags. They snapped and waved. Holding my M27 before me, my right forefinger over the trigger and my left hand supporting the stock, I paused to look at the flags.
The financial district stretched on for blocks, three square miles of city real estate covered by fifty- and sixty-floor buildings with marble façades and glistening windows. The looters would certainly have come into the financial district; but they could not break these inch-thick windows with simple bricks and they would not waste bullets trying to decorate this part of town. Some of the buildings had protective louvers across their entries. The looters would need to find better tools before they could enter these buildings. They would need lasers or explosives. I wondered just how well armed the looters might be.
I saw snatches of sky between the buildings. It was blue and cloudless, and it glowed. The day would turn hot and humid by midafternoon; but for now, the temperature remained in the high sixties and a cooling breeze rolled through the city.
A few blocks into the financial district, I located the remains of an Army checkpoint. I smelled the destruction long before I saw it. The scents of decay, dust, and fire became stronger. Then I turned a corner and confronted it. The men who erected the barricade had prepared to face looters, not battleships. A few laser blasts had reduced their tanks and armored transports to slag. There was one spot in which a laser had dug a six-foot pit in the middle of the street.
The laser carved a perfectly round pit. The laser melted the road around the pit, heating the tar until it bo
iled. The tar had cooled days ago, but the acrid smell of melted tar lingered in the air.
The men guarding this checkpoint would have died at their post before deserting. They were government-issue clones, heavily programmed and damned near incapable of abandoning an assignment. A direct hit from those laser cannons could turn an entire platoon to ash, and the heat from a near hit would kill a man, but they would have stayed. If there had been bodies left after the attack, the looters carted them away.
Taking one last look around the destruction, I sighed and continued on. From here on out, I would travel through smaller streets and alleyways. As long as I continued heading north and east, I would end up somewhere near Fort Washington. When Ray Freeman arrived in Safe Harbor, the Marine base was the first place he would have visited.
After another hour, I found my way into a retail district. Going from the deserted financial district into a retail section was like stepping out of a forest and finding yourself in a pasture. As I moved through alleys, working my way around pallets and the layer of trash that carpeted this portion of town, I heard an engine growl.
Moving through the empty streets of Safe Harbor, the hum of an engine sounded as foreign to me as the roar of a dinosaur. This was not a car, I could tell that easily enough. If it was a truck, it was a large truck. If I had to guess, I would have said it was an armored transport from the Marine or Army base. No self-respecting corporation would own such a noisy truck.
I switched from my M27 to my particle beam pistol as I peeked around a corner. Ahead of me I saw a four-way intersection over which hung a blacked-out stoplight. From here on out, I would need to move more cautiously. I was entering enemy territory. This was gangland. Anybody and everybody was the enemy.
Traveling from lot to lot, hiding behind walls and fences whenever I could, I worked my way forward. I tracked down the sound of that truck engine. Soon I heard voices.
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