Before I could do anything for Philips, there was the little matter of surviving the trip. I thought, just for a moment, of Samson captured and put on display in a Philistine temple. Samson asked God to give him the strength to destroy that temple, committing suicide in the act. Me, I had no desire to go down with these particular Philistines. I would pull a fast exit before I sent in the coordinates. The Unified Authority made a vengeful god indeed.
“You. What are you doing there?” An engineer walking by the base of the transport saw me standing in the darkened kettle.
“Tertiary system back up,” I said, trying to come up with a lie no one would investigate. “The pilot asked me to have a look at it.”
“No, shit,” the man said. I pretended to laugh because the man looked so specking pleased with his pun.
“I wish,” I said. “There’s a mountain of it. Where are the septic removal kits?”
The man grimaced and pointed to a row of doors.
“I know it’s in the supplies, but which door?” I asked. “I mostly just mop and polish.”
“Third door. Have fun,” he said.
“You ever clean up a crapper that overflowed in zero gravity?” I asked. “That’s not my idea of fun.”
The guy grunted a laugh and walked away. If he asked any of the commandos about the toilet, my goose was fried; but I doubted he would.
The storage room turned out to be a gold mine. The septic removal kit came in a twenty-four-inch tin cylinder that could easily hold my helmet. I also found a laundry cart filled with grimy janitorial crew smocks. A guy in a dirty smock carrying a “septic cylinder”—there is no better camouflage.
So I stepped into janitorial rags. The cloth smelled bad and felt wet against my skin. The pile I stole it from was headed for a washing. So much the better. I took a septic kit and headed back to the transport. Locked in the booth-sized latrine, I emptied out the kit—a large cylinder for waste and chemicals for cleaning. I flushed the chemicals down the crapper. Then I loaded my helmet into the cylinder and sealed it. In a real tertiary situation, I would compress the refuse and discharge it into the cylinder. For good measure, I fished some slime from the septic system and smeared it around the top of the cylinder. Both my hand and that cylinder reeked fiercely. When I left the transport, I felt confident that no one would bother me. I looked bad, smelled worse, and had a big slimy septic cylinder in my hands. No one would approach me unless he had a good reason.
By the time I came down the ramp, the last of the Mogat commandos had already left the launch bay. They would go back to their barracks. They would shower and change. Their commanders would give them the remainder of the day to rest as a reward for winning the skirmish. They deserved it. They’d taught Philips’s stiffies a thing or two. They would go off to whatever served as a bar on the ship, get drunk, and tell evermore-exaggerated stories about the deadly firefight they had won.
As for me, I needed information. I needed to know where I was and if I was near the Mogat home base. Knowing how to find the Mogats would be valuable enough. That information alone could turn the tide of the war, if we could reach them. The galaxy was one hundred thousand light-years across. The Unified Authority had eighteen fleets; but without the Broadcast Network, they could only patrol one-one-thousandth of 1 percent of galaxy.
The Mogats, with their self-broadcasting fleet, could go anywhere. Their base could be a single light-year from Earth in any direction, and without some facility to broadcast its ships, the U.A. Navy would never reach it.
On the plus side, I thought that I might have an ally nearby. True, nearly a month had passed since the SEALs and I distracted the Mogats while Illych boarded their transport, but I thought I might find him somewhere lurking around their base. The problem was that I had no idea how to contact him.
Leaving the launch bay I entered a main corridor of the ship. A group of sailors loitered near the door doing, as far as I could tell, absolutely nothing. They might have been off duty, but they were still in uniform and standing in one of the most highly trafficked areas of any ship. It did not surprise me to see that the Mogats ran a relaxed ship. They were, after all, civilians in sailor uniforms. In a real navy, men go to rec rooms and canteens during their off-duty hours. If they are tired they remain in their barracks.
The dawdling oafs paid little attention to me as I walked by. They showed no signs of suspicion. One man sneered at me. He probably resented my dragging a septic cylinder down his clean corridor. On the most part, the only interest I elicited in the men I passed was interest in seeing me leave.
After two excursions on a derelict battleship, I had no trouble finding my way around. I went up three levels and headed toward the bow of the ship. This would take me into an observation deck below the bridge. Once there, I would scout the space around us for stations, ships, and planets. If I did not find anything, I would need to go to the bridge. That might be a problem; I’d stand out like a leper carrying a septic cylinder onto the bridge.
I made my way down the main corridor. People steered clear of me and generally ignored me until I stepped onto an elevator. The door opened and there stood a lieutenant. “Where do you think you are going?”
“Fifth deck, sir,” I said.
“Not with that shit can,” he said. “Take the cargo lift.”
I saluted with my refuse-stained hand. He did not return the salute.
When I found the cargo lift, I decided I liked it better than the elevator. I had the car to myself, for openers; no stuffy lieutenants. The car was an open platform. The only light in the shaft came from floodlights in the ceiling, but I did not need creature comforts.
The lift let me off in a dark service corridor. I did not know how Mogat sailors spent their time, but ship maintenance could not have ranked high on their priority list. A row of work carts lined the wall, ending by a pile of empty pallets.
I thought that I might have a use for this empty corridor. I needed a place to hide my helmet. The area was not secure enough to test the old interLink, but I did take the opportunity to stash the cylinder with my helmet, cylinder can and all, on the floor between the carts and the pallets. Then I went to explore.
I found my way out of that service corridor and meandered in the general direction of the observation deck. It was essentially a rec room. Off-duty sailors came here to drink and talk. I worried that a man in janitor clothes would stand out; but now that I had ditched the smelly cylinder, no one paid attention to me.
The Mogats ran the rec room like a nightclub. It had chrome-and-glass furniture, dim lighting, a bar made of some kind of obsidian glass. Men lounged about, some drinking, some smoking, some doing both. I could not tell if the mix included officers and enlisted men. In a navy as informal as this one, officers and enlisted men might share the same bar.
“Hey, Mr. Clean, you here to work or to gawk?” a sailor shouted in my direction. “Move it, fellah. You’re stinking up the air.”
I nodded and moved out of his way. Under other circumstances, I might have broken his neck.
The observation wall was twenty feet tall and forty feet wide, like a giant movie screen that showed nothing but outer space. Today’s panorama displayed at least fifty other ships, three out-of-use dry-dock facilities, and a distant planet that I did not recognize. The planet had a uniform gray-brown surface. Whatever sun had once shone on this planet had long since expired. I had gone to war on a planet like it before. The gas on that planet would strip you to the bone if it got through your space gear.
I needed more information, and I knew I could not get it as a janitor. I wanted to explore the bridge and I especially wanted to get down to that planet. In the meantime, I would not complain about a sandwich. Between the puppet show and the ride to this ship, a lot of time had passed since my last meal.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
“Evans, where are you now?” I asked.
“I’m on a Perseus Fleet frigate,” Evans said. “We’re abo
ut six million miles from the wreck.”
“And the signal is coming through?” I asked.
“We’re talking,” Evans pointed out.
“Did everyone make it back?” I asked.
“The entire platoon is present and accounted for, except you.”
“I need you to get a message to the Kamehameha. Ask them if they have any suggestions about how I might be able to locate a SEAL.”
“You mean the Special Ops guys?” Evans asked.
“One of their men is behind enemy lines,” I said.
“I thought the whole thing about the SEALs was that they never left anyone behind,” Evans said.
“It wasn’t like that,” I said. “It was more like they sent him ahead.”
Though I had the boiler room to myself, I saw no reason to push my luck. I told Evans that I would call back as soon as I could.
If the Mogats had their entire fleet around here, Illych could have been on any of those ships. If the Mogats had a base on that dead planet, I suspected I would find him in their base. He would go wherever he could do the most damage.
A month had passed since he landed on Mogat territory. Alone and cut off from his platoon, Illych might think he had no real hope of ever getting home. A guy like him would want to go out making the biggest bang he could. He might already have made his mark.
Still dressed in my janitor’s smock, I entered the officers’ laundry and stole a lieutenant’s uniform that fit reasonably well. I found a gym and showered, then visited the mess hall. The place was nearly empty, but the Mogats had a twenty-four-hour self-service counter. I slid my tray along a stainless steel counter and scooped up a helping of some sort of casserole, three slices of bread, a cube of Jell-O, and a salad.
The chow the Mogats fed their men tasted bad, really bad. They ate hard bread that crumbled to dust in my fingers. The chicken-and-cheese dish looked nice until I dug into it with my fork. Under its yellow and white surface, the entire dish was gray. The stuff that passed as meat was more likely chicken-flavored gluten. The salad might have been made out of the same stuff as the chicken. It did not contain genuine vegetables. Looking around the mess hall, I noted that the other men in the facility ate with no enthusiasm.
If I hoped to learn anything of value, I would not hear it in the mess hall. The men gossiped about various officers and little else. One sailor spoke endlessly about going down to the planet to visit his family. The more I listened to him, the more I believed that the Mogats had settled the rancid planet near which we had moored.
The bad food told me something, too. When news analysts spoke about the Morgan Atkins Believers on the mediaLink, they described them as the human equivalent of a swarm of locusts. Before the war, Mogat colonies did not mix with society at large. They sent missionaries into communities, but they generally remained in their own private districts. Whatever food and goods they produced, they sold among themselves. Now I thought I knew why. Who would buy shit like this? And where did they get it? Not from that planet.
If the Mogats really lived on the cinder ash of a planet below us, eking out enough food to feed an army would take a miracle. I ate what I could of my meal and threw the rest away, knowing its substances would be recycled and served at that same counter in some other form within the week.
Now that I was unofficially a Mogat lieutenant, I could move around the ship more easily. I entered an equipment depot and told the man at the desk to find me an empty box. He disappeared through the door and returned a few minutes later with a two-foot cube that looked just a shade too big for transporting my helmet.
“It’s bigger than I wanted,” I growled, though I was actually quite pleased. Officers never accept the first offer no matter how good.
“Better big than small,” the man said.
“Do you have any padding for this box?”
He took the box and disappeared through the door again. No more than a minute later, he handed the box back to me. Along the bottom he had spread a few inches of packing gel.
“Good enough,” I said and left.
The variety of faces on the ship left me feeling off-balance. On a Unified Authority ship, the man at the supply desk would have been a clone. Clones performed all of the menial work. They worked in crews, each clone’s neural programming struggling to convince him that he was the only natural-born sailor in the entire Navy who mopped decks or lugged cargo.
I took my box back to the service hall. After making sure no one was around, I removed my helmet from the septic cylinder and placed it in the box, pushing it deep into the packing gel. Then I sealed the box and labeled it, “HQ Urgent.”
I returned to the launch bay and found the officer directing traffic. “When is the next ride down?” I asked.
“I’ve got one leaving within the hour,” the man said.
“Do you have space for one more?” I asked.
“No problem,” he said. “Two if you want to bring a friend along.”
“Just this,” I said, holding up my box.
“Want me to pack that for you?” he asked.
“I think I’d better keep this one with me,” I said. “Thanks, though.”
The man cast a wary glance at the word “Urgent,” but knew better than to ask about it.
I expected to travel down in the absolute discomfort of a military transport. With their bare benches and steel walls, kettles had a torture-chamber charm about them.
As it turned out, the next ride was a Johnston R-56 Starliner, a commuter plane. I found a seat and watched the other passengers to see if they would have space gear.
The planet below would have a toxic atmosphere. If it was anything like Hubble, the burned-out planet on which I fought my first real battle as a Marine, the planet would have toxic oily gas instead of air. That oil dissolved flesh and soft plastics. Seven other passengers showed up for the flight down to the planet. None of them had space gear.
When the deck officer called us to board, I followed the other passengers onto the Starliner. All of them wore regular uniforms with not so much as an oxygen tube.
My box did not fit in the compartment above my seat. Fortunately, the flight was almost empty. No one complained when I placed my box on the empty seat beside my own.
I was glad to relax and ride a comfortable commuter down to the planet instead of a transport. In a windowless kettle, I could only sit and count the minutes until the heavy metal doors at the rear slid open. From my seat on the Starliner, I could start scouting the moment we left the battleship.
The launch-bay officer walked through the ship. He went to the cockpit and spoke to the pilot. Then he came back down the aisle and counted passengers. Then he left.
“Prepare for takeoff,” the pilot radioed back to us. A moment later we taxied to the front of the launch bay. The atmospheric locks closed behind us. I heard the thrusters flare and we lifted off the deck.
As we left the ship, I began counting ships. Once more showing their military incompetence, they had allowed their navy to park in disarray. One battleship was so hemmed in by the smaller ships around it that I doubted its crew could fire its engines without blasting two destroyers behind it. I saw clusters of ships in every direction, all with bulbous bows and charcoal-colored hulls. The stars were thick in this part of the galaxy, and the silhouettes of the ships stood out like crows flying through a clear noon sky. I did not have time to make a full count; but from what I saw, it seemed entirely possible that the Mogats had their entire four-hundred-ship armada circling the planet.
I spotted dozens of ships by checking for shadow shapes against the stars. There were ships floating beneath us. I saw them very clearly against the murky atmosphere of the planet.
I thought about that battle on Hubble. The Mogats had dug in long before the Unified Authority arrived with its overwhelming force. We sent a hundred thousand Marines down for that invasion. We had tanks and Harriers and gunships, and they had snake shafts—hidden trenches that were twenty feet dee
p and even farther across. No one knew what snake shafts were used for, but we found out on Hubble. The shafts gathered corrosive gas. Once our forces were in the middle of their trap, the Mogats blew the tops off their snake shafts. Marines and equipment fell in alike. Those shafts became shallow graves.
It took only three minutes to reach the atmosphere of the planet. We entered into the atmosphere at a sharp angle, then leveled out a few miles up. Beneath us, stretched out like an ancient leather scroll, the Mogat planet looked devoid of life. The surface was dark. I saw no sign of water, just a black-and-brown landscape with ash for dirt and obsidian mountains. The rockets on the Starliner ignited small explosions in the oily air outside. I saw no clouds or light in the sky, just a smoggy haze as thick as smoke and even less breathable.
So this is their “promised land,” I thought. By serving their false god they had condemned themselves to this.
We flew across that dead planet for three hours. According to the 2508 census, over 200 million people identified themselves as members of the Morgan Atkins Movement—a sizable population. You might be able to hide 200 million people on a settled planet like Earth, but not a planet like this. They would have needed an enormous environmental dome of some sort.
The Starliner had a top atmospheric speed of Mach 3, which meant we had probably covered nine thousand miles when the plane slowed and began its descent. Searching the horizon ahead, I saw more plains and yet another obsidian mountain range. There was nothing else to see. I expected a giant dome or the glow of lights against the horizon. Nothing.
We were no more than a few hundred yards above the mountain peaks when I finally spotted our target. Instead of a dome, we flew to an isolated mountain. We dropped lower and lower as we crossed the plains that separated the peak from the others. Craning my neck so that I could see ahead, I spotted a row of blinking lights marking some sort of tunnel. A moment later we entered.
Someone had cut a doorway into the face of the mountain. The opening was so large you could fit a navy cruiser through it. I saw the rows of synchronized lights that winked on and off along each of the walls. Looking out one side of the Starliner, then the other, I estimated that this entrance was half a mile wide and at least a quarter mile in height.
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