“Hello?” the voice asked cautiously. It was the voice of a little girl.
“How is life on the lam?” I asked.
“Who is this?” the girl asked.
The voice was young and innocent, but the inflections were incongruent. They made her sound indifferent.
“Cut the shit,” I said. Then I added, “All of the Intelligence agencies have computerized receivers that see right through voice masking.”
“Did they recall you yet?” Freeman asked. He continued to use the voice mask, making him sound like an eight-year-old girl. Try as I might, I could not envision the seven-foot hulking giant on the other end of that voice.
“Yeah. I’m a sergeant. How’s that for a demotion? They haven’t told me where I’m going to be stationed.”
Freeman did not respond. A moment later, he asked, “Has Yamashiro shown up yet?”
“Yeah, he arrived a couple of days ago. I only heard about it this afternoon. I don’t know how the negotiations are going. I wasn’t invited.”
“You expected an invitation?” the little girl’s voice asked.
“Did you hear about the Outer Perseus Fleet?” I asked. Freeman said no, so I told him what Brocius had told me, then followed by telling him about my visit to the Mogat ship. I told him every last high-security detail, including the part about the working broadcast engine.
Freeman listened carefully, then changed the subject. “The Mogats have a base near Washington. It’s an old brownstone mansion in Chevy Chase.”
“What kind of a base?” I asked.
“I can’t tell,” Freeman said, as the technology in his microphone turned his low, rumbling voice into a high burbly voice. “I haven’t figured out how to get inside it.”
“Do you think the good guys know about it?” I asked.
“No. I set up a surveillance site in the woods across the street. The Feds never go by.”
“They could be watching by satellite,” I said.
“Yeah,” Freeman said, which meant he did not take the idea seriously.
I almost called Freeman by name but stopped myself for the sake of those listening. That would have come across as too cavalier. Whether or not the Intelligence boys had already tapped into this mediaLink account, they had almost certainly bugged my room. This call was as much about feeding information to Navy Intelligence as it was about trading information with Freeman. The difference was, Freeman knew what we were up to.
“Remember the limo driver who brought us to the base?” I asked.
“The Navy spook in the civilian suit?” Freeman asked.
“That’s the one. He’s looking for you, and he’s pressuring me. Now that I’m back on active duty…”
“Don’t sweat it,” Freeman said. “I’ll handle the situation.” That comment would have sounded a lot more menacing had it not been for Freeman’s little-girl voice.
The next morning, a new operative came dressed as a chauffeur to drive me into town. My old driver, he said, was taking personal leave.
Message delivered.
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
“Harris, you have a most unstable career. When you came to Ezer Kri, you were a corporal. In the movie they portrayed you as a lieutenant. When we found you in space, you were a colonel. Now you are a sergeant,” Yoshi Yamashiro said, with an uncharacteristic smile. He had yet to light up a cigarette, so he had already bucked tradition, but he wore his usual dark suit and red necktie. He shook his head sadly as he repeated, “A most unstable career.”
I smiled, and said, “When I first met you, you were the governor of Ezer Kri, a loyal colony of the Unified Authority. The next time I saw you, you had allied with the Atkins Believers. Now you are the governor of an independent planet hoping to sign a treaty with the Unified Authority.” I shook my head. “You have a very checkered career.”
Yamashiro smiled and laughed softly. His teeth looked very white against the teak color of his skin.
We met in a conference room with a large screen. Admiral Brocius and I sat on one side of the table. Yoshi Yamashiro sat with an officer and two civilians on the other. The civilians belonged to the Shin Nippon Corps of Engineers. The officer was Captain Hideo Takahashi, Yamashiro’s son-in-law, aide, and full-time shadow.
From what I could tell, the Shin Nippon military only had one branch, a Navy. It could have a second, possibly larger, branch if it militarized its corps of engineers.
The current meeting did not go off without the usual Shin Nippon touches. Yamashiro sat directly at the table with his entourage spread in a protective fan behind him. Yamashiro was still the shogun. Engineers or officers, the men behind him were still his samurai.
“Did you find anything of value in the computer parts Harris brought back from that ship?” Brocius asked. I could tell that he already knew the answer.
“Sadly, the data storage unit was empty,” Yamashiro said.
“Too bad,” Brocius said.
“I find it strange that the storage was empty and not destroyed,” Yamashiro said.
“What do you mean?” Brocius asked.
“How did a ship with an unused navigation computer find its way out of their docks?” Yamashiro asked.
“Who says it was unused?” Brocius asked.
“Then perhaps they erased the data from the unit during battle,” Yamashiro said. “Maybe that is why the ship was destroyed, the crew was so busy erasing information from the computer that they forgot to defend the ship.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Brocius said.
“Ah, so I see. Maybe the crew had time to purge their navigation computer while a massive laser cut through their bow,” Yamashiro suggested.
“No one worries about computer maintenance during battle,” Brocius said.
“I agree,” Yamashiro said.
Brocius thought about this but said nothing. He was a career officer; politicians and diplomats infuriated him. He wanted to finish the meeting and leave as soon as he could. “As I understand it, you wanted to question Sergeant Harris about the video record?”
“My engineers have some questions,” Yamashiro said with a gesture somewhere between a nod of the head and a bow. He looked over and spoke quietly to one of the engineers in Japanese. The man took a remote from the table. He sat down, pressed a few buttons, and the lights went out.
On a wall screen, our approach to the derelict battleship played out in slow motion. Judging by the angle, this segment had to have come from my helmet. I was in the front of the sled and was ten inches taller than everyone else. The record had been edited so that it never showed the Boyd clones.
“Sergeant, were you able to see this damage up close?” the engineer asked. “You flew your vehicle through this breach in the hull?”
“Sure,” I said. “That should be in the record. We entered the ship through that breach.”
“Ah.” He grunted the word, affecting great surprise. “That was not in the record we received.”
Brocius fidgeted. “We edited the record slightly for security purposes.”
“We flew our craft through that breach. It was a ten-man sled…a very small craft.”
“But the hole was big enough for you to fly through?” the engineer asked.
Yamashiro’s engineers traded a few excited words. “I know you are not an engineer,” Yamashiro’s second engineer prefaced, “but could you tell if this damage was made by a single shot?”
“One swipe,” I said with absolute surety.
The feed on the screen froze displaying a straight-in view of the gash. I could see up three decks. I stood up and walked to the screen. The scene it displayed was dark except for the spotlights that the Special Operations clones used. “Can you make the picture brighter?” I asked.
Using gamma controls, the engineer bleached the picture on the screen. I studied the screen and realized that the unnatural lighting made details even harder to find. “Oh yes, this was a single shot,” I said.
“D
o you want to know what I really think?” I asked. “I think that someone on the bridge lowered the shields.”
Admiral Brocius laughed. “Someone lowered the shields in a battle situation? That’s absurd.”
“Permission to speak freely, sir?” I asked.
“Go ahead, Sergeant,” Brocius said. His reference to my rank was meant to remind me of the limitations to my latitude.
“I think they meant to leave that battleship behind,” I said.
“You think they purposely sacrificed a battleship? Why would they do something like that?” Brocius asked.
“I must agree with Harris’s appraisal,” Yamashiro said. “When lasers hit ships with shields, they create small areas of damage as the shields fail. This ship should have several scorched areas along its hull from attacks penetrating its shields. Instead, there is this one large hole.”
“The Doctrinaire had lasers that would hit one side of a ship and shoot right out the other, shields or no shields,” Brocius argued.
“Maybe that was a particle-beam weapon prepared especially for the Doctrinaire,” Yamashiro said. When you made a mistake, Yamashiro never came right out and told you you were wrong. Instead, he would say, “Maybe this…” then give the correct information without challenging the speaker.
In this case, he could well have told Brocius that he was making an ass of himself. The Doctrinaire was an ubership that the Navy had hoped would win the war. It had one-of-a-kind shields and weapons designed to sink entire fleets.
“Is your navy testing ships with the same experimental particle-beam weapons as the Doctrinaire in the Perseus Arm?” Yamashiro asked.
The room went silent. “Not likely,” Brocius admitted, clearly glad to back away from the discussion.
“This damage was done by a laser,” one of the engineers said. “As you can see along the edges of the gash, the armored plating has melted from heat.”
Brocius focused on the screen and did not speak. I could tell that he was a man who hated to be proven wrong; it must have felt too much like losing.
One of the engineers asked Yamashiro a question in Japanese. Once Yamashiro nodded approval, the man walked over to the screen. He turned to Admiral Brocius. “Admiral, the nature of the particle beam is that it strikes a fixed target and disrupts it. Maybe it is more like a shotgun than a knife.
“This breach is long and relatively straight. The laser that did this cut through the hull like a knife.”
“I am quite aware of the differences between a laser beam and a particle beam,” Brocius said. “You still haven’t answered the bigger question. Why would the Mogats scuttle a perfectly good battleship?”
Brocius paused for a moment to think. Revelation showed in his expression when he spoke again. “Better than good. You’re telling me that the only reason we managed to sink it was that they dropped their shields, right? That would mean that we don’t have any weapons that can get through their shields.”
“I saw the topside of that ship,” I said. “It was unmarked. Either that ship spent the entire battle floating over Porter’s head, or its shields blocked everything Porter fired.”
After this, the room went silent again. Finally, Brocius broke the silence with an officious question. “Is there anything else?”
“Yes,” said one of the engineers. “From what we can tell of the record, there were two broadcast engines on that battleship. There was a small engine still working. Is that correct?”
“That is what I saw,” I said.
“Ah, very curious,” the engineer said.
“Maybe the large one broke down a long time ago,” Brocius said. “Maybe that ship had always operated with a spare.”
“Maybe so,” Yamashiro agreed. He sat nodding, a solemn expression on his face. “We need more information. My engineers have told me that judging by its size, this smaller engine would not be able to generate enough of a field to broadcast a full-sized battleship.”
“Interesting theory. Is there anything else?” Brocius asked. When no one said anything, he left the room.
Several questions hung in the air.
“If we can’t wear down their shields, our ships won’t stand a chance,” I said quietly. “Did they have anything like this when you were on their side?”
Now that Brocius had left the room, Yamashiro finally produced a pack of cigarettes. He lit one. I could tell he had wanted that smoke all meeting long. “Harris, we never saw the Mogats produce any sort of military technology. They are a population of converts.
“From what we saw, they lacked the resources to manufacture this smaller broadcast engine. In my experience, there are few engineers or soldiers among them.”
“They do have Amos Crowley,” I said. Crowley was a highly decorated general who had defected to the Atkins Believers.
“Yes, but maybe General Crowley is involved in land strategies more than naval.” In non-Yamashiro terms, this translated to, He’s with the Army, asshole. Yamashiro took a deep drag and held it in his lungs. A fine curl of smoke escaped his lips.
“So where did the Mogats get the shields?” I asked. “Why couldn’t we hurt their ships?”
“In my opinion, they must have a new ally,” Yamashiro said.
“A renegade from the Confederate Arms?” I asked. “Maybe they have an ally in the Perseus Arm.”
“Maybe not a Confederate planet,” Yamashiro said. “If any of the Confederate planets had such technology, we would have used it when we attacked Earth.”
“Whoever it is, they have to be in the Perseus Arm. The Mogats had to have had their fleet somewhere nearby to know we had boarded their ship,” I said.
“Maybe not,” Yamashiro said.
“Maybe not?” I asked.
“My engineers and I have spent a great deal of time discussing possible uses for this second broadcast engine. We all agree that the Mogats protected that engine even as they sacrificed their ship.”
“What did you come up with?” I asked.
“This is just a theory,” Yamashiro said. “Some of my men believe that they are using that ship as a broadcast station. If they place enough stations around the galaxy, they can create a network,” Yamashiro said.
I thought about that. “But they don’t need a broadcast network. They have a self-broadcasting fleet.” After a moment’s more consideration, I said, “You said that engine was too small to send a big ship.”
“Perhaps they do not want the network for transportation. Maybe they will use their network for communications. The engine you saw was running continuously, just like the engines in a network. It could send and receive signals anywhere in the galaxy.”
“The Mogats,” I said, shaking my head. “Who can understand those lousy speckers?”
CHAPTER
TWENTY
Earthdate: November 9, A.D. 2512
Location: Open space
Galactic Position: Central Cygnus Arm
“Is that a Bible?” Colonel Grayson’s face was full of mirth as he asked this. He looked about ready to burst into uncontrollable laughter.
“Yes, sir, it is,” I said. I had just stowed my two rucksacks in the locker and started back to my seat.
“You afraid of broadcasting, son?” the colonel asked.
I knew a bit about Grayson. He was a recent promotion. Until this year, he’d commanded a boot camp. When the Mogats destroyed the orphanages, the Unified Authority Marine Corps ran out of recruits, and the boot camps closed. Men like Grayson, who’d spent their careers bullying clones, had to move to the field.
Grayson was an older man, probably in his late forties. Some of the stubble along the freshly shaved sides of his head had turned white.
“Do you always travel with a Bible?” he asked.
“No, sir,” I said. “I just brought…”
“The way I always heard it, you clones don’t believe in God. That right, son? You’re that Liberator clone. You’re the clone that knows he’s a clone.”
I knew what was happening. This was my comeuppance. Grayson probably knew my background better than I knew his. Grayson knew that I had once held the rank of colonel, and he wanted to make sure I knew my place. I was no longer an officer, and I had never been a natural-born. Boot-camp officers. You can take them out of the camps but you can’t take the camps out of them. So what if you were once a colonel, Grayson was telling me. I still have clusters on my shoulder boards.
“I can’t speak for all Liberators…”
“Sure you can, boy. You’re all that’s left of them.” There was a gleam in the colonel’s brown eyes. He enjoyed this shit, but he would not take it much further. On some level he had to know that I had Admiral Brocius watching my back. Unless he wanted to spend the rest of his career commanding an abandoned boot camp, Grayson would know when to quit.
“You planning on reading that Bible or just holding on to it?” Grayson asked.
“Reading it, sir.”
“You must be a fast reader, son. We’ll be parked on the Obama in another five minutes.” He gave up on bullying and asked an interested question. “When was the last time you took a transfer?”
“It’s been a few years,” I said.
“Yeah? I’ll bet it took a few hours for you to reach your post last time you had a transfer. Am I right, Sergeant?”
“Days, sir. My last transfer was to a ship patrolling the outer edge of the Scutum-Crux Arm.” That was not exactly my last transfer, but I did not think Grayson was looking for specifics.
“That was the old Marine Corps, son. This here is the new Marines. We don’t have a Broadcast Network anymore, so we deliver you right to your new assignment.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said. I didn’t mind the “sirs” and salutes. I could put up with officers and egos.
Colonel Grayson started to leave, then turned back to look at me. “Do you really read the Bible, son?” he asked. “I don’t suppose you could tell me the name of King David’s son?”
“Who do you mean, Solomon or Absalom?” I asked. There were more, but those were the only two I could name offhand.
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