I felt a slight tremor as the pilot killed the Starliner’s engines. We had not yet landed. In fact, staring down as far as I could, I saw no sign of a landing area. I did see an occasional flash of light, and I saw other ships rising straight out of the darkness. They just seemed to levitate straight into the air.
Having extensive experience flying a Starliner, I had a working knowledge about the thruster rockets Starliners used for vertical lifts. They were made for use in zero-and low-gravity situations. They were far too weak to hold the ship in place for an extended period. Starting to panic, I listened for the thrusters and did not hear them. I would have noticed if the pilot had landed the ship. Looking out the window, I saw that something was conveying us downward slowly, but I did not know what.
“Still not used to the gravity chute, Lieutenant?”
When I turned around, I saw the pilot staring down at me. I shook my head.
“I don’t think I will ever get used to it,” the pilot confessed. “It still scares me.” He patted me on the shoulder and walked away.
A “gravity chute”? I had never heard the term before and had no idea how such a thing could work. All I knew was that we were dropping miles below the surface of the planet, and here the pilot stood gabbing with me instead of sitting by the controls. Something else occurred to me, too. Had I been in a better temper, I might have joked that my chance of survival had just gone down the chute.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT
When Morgan Atkins, the majority leader of the Senate, hijacked the self-broadcasting fleet and vanished, he must have already had thousands of followers. He had hundreds of millions of followers when the war broke out. But nothing explained what I saw when we reached the bottom of the gravity chute.
The man-made subterranean plateau on which his people lived stretched farther than I could see. To have said it was sparsely populated would have been an act of criminal understatement. The ground below us was an endless plain with an occasional building. But the main feature here was not the occasional building, it was the endless plain. Had I viewed the cavern from space, I might have been able to see all the way across it; then again, it might have stretched beyond the curvature of the planet. Below us, streets as straight as rulers formed a perfect grid. The only buildings I saw were stubby cubes spaced two or three miles apart.
The Starliner’s engines kicked on as we dropped out of the gravity chute. I looked out the top of the window for a last glance at the chute and saw something unexpected. Instead of the rock roof of a subterranean cavern, I saw an expansive night sky. It was as if I could see straight through miles of rock and right into that polluted sky above the surface of the planet.
I wanted to stare, I wanted to gape, I wanted to ask a million questions; but I had already drawn too much attention to myself. I forced myself to look away from the window and act casual about the impossibilities outside.
Just before we landed, I saw a military transport rising straight up from the spaceport below us. That ship easily had one hundred times the mass of the streamlined Starliner, which was dagger-shaped and aerodynamic. That transport, with its bloated kettle, was anything but aerodynamic. It looked like something made to fall, not fly. It relied on powerful rockets to maneuver in gravity. It rose from the ground through the hard effort of a dozen booster rockets, then it reached the bottom of the gravity chute. The rockets switched off, and the transport rose as smoothly and effortlessly as an air bubble in water—thousands of tons of steel, rising straight up through the chute.
Unlike the transport, which had skids instead of wheels, our Starliner came to a rolling stop along the runway. The engines slowed, and we taxied forward toward a terminal. As we rolled ahead, I studied the cube-shaped buildings in the distance. If I had the distances and proportions correct in my head, those buildings stood approximately four stories tall. I saw no windows on their rose gray façades.
The Starliner pulled up to a terminal, if you could call it that. It was a ten-foot arch with people waiting under it. A moment after we came to a stop, the pilot walked into the cabin and opened the hatch. My seat was one row back from the hatch. A cool breeze blew in around me.
“Welcome home, boys,” the pilot said to the cabin in general. There were nine passengers on the flight including me. We all wore Navy uniforms.
I pretended to fidget with my box while the first passengers stepped out of the Starliner. I did not want to lead the way off the plane. Not knowing the lay of the land or the protocol, it would be too easy for me to expose myself by making some obvious mistake.
As I stepped into the fresh air of the deep underground cavern, I saw three children running to meet one of the other passengers. A woman in a blue dress followed, coming up to the man and kissing him on the mouth. I tried to tell myself that women and children were not a problem. The Mogats had started the war. They attacked civilian sites. In order to win, we would need to do the same. My arguments fell on deaf ears.
I thought of the times in the Bible when God directed His generals to annihilate entire populations of enemies. In His new guise as the Unified Authority, He had not become any more forgiving. The Mogats won that first round on Hubble with their snake shafts, but we settled the score in that battle. Lord did we ever settle that score.
I followed the other passengers across the empty landing field and out to the street. The guy with the family headed in one direction, his children buzzing around him and his wife like bees in a flower bed. The man had his arm around her waist.
“How long are you down for, Lieutenant?” the pilot asked me.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“R and R?” he asked.
He was trying to be friendly. Even if I had been a real Mogat lieutenant, I would not have wanted to chat. I could have pretended, but I preferred to play things as close to real as possible. I did what I would have done on Earth if I didn’t feel like talking. “Yeah,” I grunted. “R and R.” I hoped I sounded like somebody who wanted to be left alone making a halfhearted attempt to sound friendly.
“Well, have a nice stay,” the pilot said. Message received.
I looked up one side of the street, then down the other. The nearest buildings were at least a mile away in every direction. From here, they looked exactly alike. They were made of the same dull plastic material, and they all appeared to be approximately fifty feet tall and shaped like cubes. Resolutely uniform.
During the battle on Hubble, the Mogats lived in a large underground cavern; but it was nothing like this. The cavern on Hubble was rough-hewn. When we sent probes down, we saw no cube-shaped buildings and no gridwork of streets. They had oxygen and strings of lightbulbs powered by portable generators. I wondered if they could ever have made something like this on Hubble, had they been given enough time. On that occasion, we gave them no time.
As I thought about Hubble, a small shudder ran the length of my spine. I lost friends on Hubble. I witnessed a massacre. The planet made me feel desolate when we landed. By the time we left, I had no feeling at all.
The ground around me on this planet was flat, with no notable features. The sheer uniformity of this city left me disoriented. The computers in my helmet could have created a virtual map to mark my path as I explored, but I could not go walking around a Mogat city wearing the combat helmet of a Unified Authority Marine.
In fact, I could not afford to do anything suspicious. If this was the Mogat promised land, there would be a sizable population. As I looked around, I saw only a scattering of people walking the streets; but I might have arrived during their night or perhaps a time of prayer. I knew so little about Mogat beliefs. Maybe they had prayer hours like Moslems, a time when every man spread his mat and prayed. The Starliner might have let us off in an unpopulated district. Perhaps we would take a train into a larger city.
I needed someplace to hide and access the interLink, but I saw no alleys, just scattered buildings with endless open space between them. I saw no signs to in
dicate one street from the next. No vehicles moved along the streets. They were broad and clean and entirely unused. I had the feeling I could sleep in the middle of any road without worrying about ever being hit by a car.
All of the other passengers had left, and I did not want to call attention to myself by loitering. Since the pilot went right, I headed left. I simply grabbed my box by its handle and started walking toward the closest building in that direction.
Cubes play optical illusions on your eyes. From the air, all of the buildings looked four stories tall. From the street, the nearest building looked smaller and closer, maybe a mile away. It was a cube in an open space. It could have been ten miles away and forty stories tall. If I had my helmet on, I could have measured the distance to the building and the height of the walls. I ached for my armor.
It took me about twenty minutes to reach that building. As I got closer, I realized that its blank façade gave no clues about what the Mogats used it for. It could have been a movie holotorium or a penitentiary or a home for wayward violinists. It might have been abandoned. From what I could see, it had no windows. The only feature I saw was an open doorway in the front. It reached almost all the way to the roof.
This cannot possibly be the Mogat home world, I thought. I had traveled a mile or two and seen no homes, no vehicles, and barely any people. If there were really 200 million Mogats, and this was their planet, I should have seen crowds.
When I reached the first building, I put down my box, peered in through the doorway, and found myself alone. I strolled in through the tall doorway and paused. The building was hollow, a four-story empty cube. Its gray façade had a strange rose-colored tint. It was made out of some smooth, cool material that looked like a merging of plastic and marble.
Thinking that I might have come to an abandoned structure, I turned and stared back down the street. Something else caught my eye. This planet did not have a sun, but there was enough ambient light to create the illusion of daylight. Looking back into the sky, I recognized the layer of phosphorous gas that must have provided the light for the internal world. I assumed it was phosphorous gas, and I assumed they could charge the ions in that gas to simulate an entire day-night cycle.
I wondered about the Mogats. They had no concept of how to run a military or maintain battleships, but I had never seen such technological miracles as I found here.
Back in the direction I came from, the Starliner took off from the spaceport with the customary rolling start of an atmospheric craft. It zipped over the ground at a shallow angle, hung a wide, looping curve, then decelerated as it spiraled back toward the opening of the gravity chute. Just as it reached the chute, the Starliner came to a dead stop. It did not drop. Caught in the mysterious updraft, it hovered higher until it disappeared from sight. At that same moment, a military transport dropped out of the chute. Its thruster rockets ignited, and it hovered toward the ground.
I did not understand what technology governed this planet. I did not believe that the Unified Authority Corps of Engineers could hollow a planet, and I knew they had nothing resembling a gravity chute. Maybe Atkins and his followers had more luck converting scientists than they did converting soldiers. On the other hand, I had heard that Atkins’s Space Bible told wild stories about an underground city and aliens with light emanating from their being. Well, they certainly had an underground city. I would need to keep my eyes peeled for radiant beings.
I turned and entered that hollow building. As I entered, I realized that I could see through the inside of its walls. They’d built the structure using some kind of translucent material. From the outside it looked like a mixture of marble and plastic. From the inside it seemed more like tinted glass.
Inside the building I found nothing but a gigantic foyer. There was no furniture, no signs, nothing but a waist-high wall with a rail around it in the center of the floor. Feeling discouraged, I examined that wall and realized that I was peering over the edge of a terrace. Below me, I saw a crowded city block. The drop from this rail was a good hundred feet, but it was not the drop that interested me.
Below the building, a thriving sea of humanity bustled along, completely unaware of me. It was like staring into a paved and urbanized ant colony. I saw businessmen and women and soldiers in uniforms. I saw a street and cars.
Up here I was alone and ignored; but one hundred feet below me, an entire society existed. Though I barely believed what I saw, I needed to report it. Looking out at the street through the walls around me, I saw no one nearby. I crouched down behind the waist-high wall, opened the box, and took out my helmet. After one last unnecessary look around to make sure no one would see me, I lowered the helmet over my head and tried the interLink.
“Evans, are you there?”
“Sergeant, are you on?” Sutherland asked.
“Yeah,” I said, still feeling a dreamy kind of unreality. “I’m on.”
“Where are you?” Sutherland asked.
“I think I’m on the Mogat home world. I’m going to send you some visuals.” I stood up, checked again to make sure the coast was clear, then headed out the door.
“What the hell?” Sutherland asked.
“This is what their buildings look like,” I said.
“They’re made of glass?”
“Not from the outside,” I said. The street was still empty. I stepped out and turned toward the building so that Sutherland could see. From the outside, the building was opaque.
“That’s some magic trick,” Sutherland said.
“I’ll show you a better one,” I said. I went back in the building and looked over the rail. All of Mogat humanity walked below me.
I was transmitting all of this to Sutherland so that he could see exactly what I saw. More importantly, his helmet recorded the transmission. He could send the images up the chain until they landed on Admiral Brocius’s desk.
“Are you getting this?” I asked.
“Are you shitting me?” Sutherland asked. “Have you been down there?”
“No,” I said. “I just got here. Look, I need to get going before someone comes by. Do you know if Evans contacted the Kamehameha?”
“The question about how to find a SEAL? Yeah, he got through. They told him to do a little sabotage. You’re supposed to blow up a couple of buildings, then travel six hundred yards at a 110-degree angle from front and center. Do that enough times, and they claim their boy will find you.
“And by the way, they say they want their SEAL brought back to them in one piece and unharmed.”
“Do they?” I asked.
“Yeah. They also say that if you don’t bring him back in the same condition you got him in…”
“That I might as well stay here?” I interrupted.
“No, that you will wish you never made it off Ravenwood alive.”
Ravenwood Outpost was a testing ground for SEALs. The Outer Scutum-Crux Fleet Command sent Marines to defend a small outpost on that planet. Then they sent SEALs to infiltrate the outpost and kill the men guarding it. I was the only Marine who’d ever made it out alive.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
The first time I entered the building, I did not notice that the rear wall was opaque. As I removed my helmet, I saw it. After stowing my helmet back in the box, I went for a closer look and quickly realized that this great hollow shell of a building was little more than an elevator station. The entire back wall of the building was taken up by a bank of thirty-six lifts.
I did not like stepping into an enemy elevator. As the door shut behind me, I remembered the days I spent locked in the brig of a Mogat battleship. I knew nothing would happen here. The Mogats could not know that I had landed on their planet and, as far as I could tell, nobody saw me enter the elevator; but I felt a claustrophobic shiver when the doors shut behind me.
The lift had no controls. The doors opened and closed automatically when the car dropped to the next floor. A lighted display beside the door showed that there were six more s
ubterranean levels. Thinking about the sheer size of the place as I stepped off the elevator, I felt like I was lost at sea.
Every step I took seemed to take me farther from ever returning home, assuming I had a home. I had broadcasted into an unknown quadrant of space on a Mogat battleship, dropped miles beneath the surface of a seemingly uninhabitable planet, and descended one level deeper into that planet on an elevator.
Each new step was another move deeper into a heart of darkness. That may sound overly dramatic, but when I looked up to see the terrace from which I had viewed the city block, I saw nothing but sky. Once again I could see through everything above me as if it had not been there. All I saw was that dark and hazy sky with its phosphorous-induced simulated sunlight.
The floor to which I had just descended sprawled in every direction. The terrain was as uniform as the landscape on the floor above. Like the floor above, it had its own horizon.
This layer of the Mogat planet qualified as a city. While the sky appeared to be several miles up, I knew it was an illusion. I had just seen that stretch of street from an elevator no more than a hundred feet up from the spot where I stood. Like me, the architects who designed the buildings around this amazing place knew the limitations. Four-story and five-story buildings, grouped like trees in a forest, dominated the landscape. The only buildings that actually reached the sky were these tall narrow pillars spaced several miles apart. When I looked back at the elevator from which I had come, I realized the pillars were elevator shafts.
Now that I had stepped out in the lower level, I found it far from crowded, but busy nonetheless. A steady flow of people walked past me as I looked across the skyline and tried to find my bearings. Men, the majority of whom wore military uniforms, walked into buildings so nondescript that they would have fit in on any Marine base in the galaxy. Scanning the crowd, I saw people of every description—tall men, short men, fat men, men with blond hair and others with red hair. What I did not see was clones.
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