Changing the subject, I said, “You know, you nearly got me arrested. They’re going crazy looking for terrorists around here. Some old man spotted me for a Liberator and sent an MP after me.”
“You lost him?” Illych asked.
“Killed him,” I said. “I left him on the train tracks. He’s probably been atomized by now.”
“These people are obsessed with Liberators,” Illych said with a wry smile. “They think there’s a Liberator terrorist running wild on the planet. Whenever anything bad happens, they always think there’s a Liberator behind it.”
I wonder what they would think if they knew about Adam Boyd clones, I thought to myself. I did not share that thought. Instead, I asked, “You got any chow?” I asked.
“Yeah, but it’s all Mogat chow,” Illych said. Anyone else would have called it “shit,” but Illych talked like a Boy Scout, a homicidal Boy Scout. “Do you want carbonized soup, carbonized casserole, or carbonized stew?”
“Does one taste better than the others?” I asked, remembering the meal I had on their battleship.
“Not really. They all taste the same.”
“I’ll take whatever you’ve got,” I said.
Illych handed me an MRE and a knife. The label said “BEEF CASSEROLE.” I peeled back the tin with the knife and tried a bite. It tasted disgusting.
Illych drank a tin labeled “CHICKEN SOUP.” It looked more like split pea soup.
“So how are we going to get out of here?” Illych asked.
“Funny you should ask,” I said as I opened my box and pulled out the helmet. “I think our best bet is to arrange for a ride home.”
I never understood the finer mechanics of broadcast technology. Something about broadcast engines allowed them to generate a superaccelerated electrical field. They could not only translate and send matter, they could also translate certain wavelengths. Sending engines attracted frequencies from millions of miles away. Receiving engines broadcast those frequencies over millions of miles with next to no latency.
Radio and even laser communications would have had clunky delays just communicating from the earth to the moon. Without broadcast accelerations, conversations between Earth and Mars moved at the pace of a world championship chess game. One person said something or asked a question, then waited. The other person finally heard the statement or question, answered, then waited. Through the miracle of broadcast engines, I could speak with Marines on the other side of the galaxy as if we were standing side by side.
I put on my helmet, knowing I would reach Marines from my platoon using the interLink connection. “Evans, you there?”
“Hey, Master Sarge.” It was Private Philips. I recognized his slow, languid tones even before I saw the identification.
“Evans left you to monitor the Link?” I asked.
“Nah. Thomer was supposed to be watching for you, but he had to run to the shitter. I volunteered to watch for him.”
I liked Philips. Strangely enough, I respected him, but I could not send him on the errand I had in mind. Philips rubbed authority the wrong way, and the errand I wanted would involve a lot of authority.
“Can you get Evans for me?” I asked.
“Not a problem,” Philips said. “Master Sarge, are you really in the Mogat Motherland?”
“I’m on a Mogat-held planet,” I said.
Philips laughed but said nothing. A moment later, I heard him say, “Hey, Evans, Harris wants to talk to you.”
“You better not be playing with me, Philips, or you’ll be cleaning latrines for the rest of your…”
“I’m not playing with you.”
“Better not be,” Evans muttered.
I heard a noise that sounded like Philips taking off his helmet.
“What are you doing?”
“Harris wants to talk to you, Evans,” Philips repeated.
“I’ll use my own helmet.”
Smart, I thought. Knowing Philips’s disregard for authority, he might spit in the helmet before handing it over.
“Master Sergeant?”
“Evans,” I said.
“Did you find the SEAL?”
“Standing right next to me. Thank you for putting in the call to the Kamehameha.”
“I can’t believe you found the bastard,” Evans said. “I mean, I can’t believe it worked.”
“Evans, I need to make some arrangements before we can get back to the Obama.”
“How can I help?” Evans asked.
“Glad you asked,” I said. “I’m going to need to talk to somebody a bit higher in the chain of command.”
“You want me to contact Faggert?” He meant Captain James Taggert. I had a cold moment in which I wondered what Evans called me behind my back.
“This might be a bit big for him,” I said.
“Colonel Grayson?” Evans asked.
“Over his head, too,” I said.
“Who did you have in mind?” Evans asked.
“We can start with Admiral Brocius, but we’re going to need to talk to Admiral Brallier and Admiral Porter by the time we’re done.”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO
Admiral Samuel S. Brallier, commander of the Outer Scutum-Crux Fleet, insisted that his SEALs take charge of the operation once I explained what I had in mind. I had no problem with that. Surprisingly enough, neither did Admiral Brocius. Brallier had more experience with this type of mission than we did.
It would take time to plan out all of the logistics for the operation, so I got to spend the next several days hidden away in the back of Illych’s private armory with the corpses of the people who used to run the joint. Illych played the front man, receiving shipments, signing out equipment, and keeping the books. I had the feeling he enjoyed himself.
When no one was around, I went “shopping.” That meant that I walked around the warehouse opening crates and looking for useful information. I quickly learned that the Mogats had not developed any new weapons. The only gear I found was fifty-year-old U.A. equipment and inventory that the Confederate Arms provided during their brief alliance with the Mogats.
In the back of the warehouse I found crates of bric-a-brac that the Mogats had all but discarded. On one shelf I found a crate of old military Bibles. This surprised me. The Mogats must not have known what the crate contained. Their culture had no room for Earth religions. They believed in self-determination and independence from Earth. They also had their own holy writ—Man’s True Place in the Universe: The Doctrines of Morgan Atkins. As we called it back home, the “Space Bible.”
The Bibles I found were small enough to fit in your pocket, with green leather covers and tissue-paper pages. This particular Bible included the entire New Testament and selected readings from the Old Testament.
I did not like the New Testament; it confused me. My theory that God was a metaphor for government worked well with the Old Testament. When God directed the Israelites to massacre enemies, pay taxes, and build temples, their civilization worked. No matter how hard I tried to wrestle with the god of the New Testament, I could never understand him. In my experience, no self-respecting government would forgive those who trespassed against it.
When Illych saw me reading a Bible, he asked about it. “What book is that?” he asked. He might have thought I was reading a Space Bible. We were enlisted men, and only officers were allowed to read that book.
“The Bible,” I said.
“You’re not supposed to read the Space Bible,” Illych said.
“Not the Space Bible, the Christian Bible,” I said.
“You read the Bible? You can’t possibly believe that stuff.”
“Sure I do,” I said, and I told him my theory about how God was really just the government. He listened quietly then said, “If God is the government, would that make clones his chosen people?”
“That is precisely how I see it,” I said.
“I like that,” Illych said. He was my first convert. I felt like quite the evangelist.
Admiral Brocius checked in every few days to update me on different events. Yamashiro signed an alliance with the Unified Authority and the Confederate Arms. He sent engineers to the remote Golan Dry Docks facility, the most advanced aerotechnology program in Unified Authority space. I had always imagined that the people in the dry docks were marooned after Mogats-Confederate Arm forces destroyed the Broadcast Network; but, in fact, maintaining the dry docks had been a top priority. Explorer ships bearing food and medical supplies had visited the dry docks within twenty-four hours of the battle.
Brocius updated me on the Naval Intelligence hunt for Ray Freeman. “It’s like the man is a damned ghost,” Brocius said once.
“He’ll turn himself in when he’s ready, sir,” I said.
“Do you know where he is?”
I did not answer. We had been through this before.
“He assaulted an Intelligence officer,” Brocius said. “I could have you arrested for aiding and abetting.”
“Why don’t you send some men out to arrest me?” I asked.
“You’re on your way home,” Brocius said. I could hear mirth in his voice. “We can arrest you once you’re back.”
Changing the subject, I asked, “What about the House of Representatives?”
“What about it?” Brocius asked.
“With the alliance…”
He interrupted me. “The Confederate Arms is an ally, not a member. Hughes says his planets have no interest in rejoining the union. We have a military alliance, and not a very strong one at that.”
As the chairman of the Confederate Arms Treaty Organization, Hughes would know, I thought to myself. “What about Yamashiro?” I asked.
“What about him?” Brocius asked.
“Is he just an ally?” I asked.
“We’ve offered to take him back. So has Hughes. Nobody knows where his base planet is located. If he’s based in Orion or Sagittarius, I suppose he’ll sign with us.
“Something you should know. We had another scrape with the Mogat Navy this week. This time it was in the Orion Arm.”
“Mogats in the Orion Arm?” I asked.
“The inner curve of the Orion Arm, yes. You want to guess how it went?”
“There were three or four of them,” I guessed.
“Six, this time,” Brocius corrected me.
“And we destroyed one of their ships?”
“Right you are. Five of their ships went completely undamaged. The one that we managed to hit, we damn near sliced in half.
“The other Mogats ran away,” Brocius said.
“Is the wreck near any place of value?”
“Olympus Kri,” Brocius said.
“That’s Gordon Hughes’s home planet,” I said.
“Yes, that occurred to us, as well.”
With just a few minutes to go before we left the armory, I could not find Illych anywhere. I checked the different supply rooms. I checked our on-site living quarters. Finally, I found him out by the Jeeps. I arrived in time to see him placing bombs inside the various cars. He used card-deck-sized bombs, which he placed under the chassis of trucks and Jeeps. One bomb should have been enough to demolish the entire depot. Illych said he had already placed fifty, and he must have had another thirty ready to go in a box.
“That’s a lot of bombs,” I said.
“It should get the job done.” He was on his back lying under a Jeep. He placed a bomb near a fuel tank.
“What if something goes wrong?” I asked.
“Goes wrong?” Illych parroted.
“Oh, I don’t know. There are all kinds of things that could go wrong. What if the Mogats don’t send our battleship out to the Perseus Arm?”
“What about it?” Illych said. He stopped working and looked up at me from beneath the chassis.
“We’ll end up right back here,” I said.
“We’ll come back somewhere,” Illych said. “We won’t come back here. I’m blowing up the place.”
“But if you don’t blow the place up, we could come back,” I said.
“That wouldn’t be a good idea,” Illych said. “They already suspect us.”
“Who suspects us?” I asked.
“Army Intelligence. They sent a couple of guys to investigate this morning.”
“I didn’t know about that,” I said.
“I didn’t want to worry you,” Illych said. He finished placing the bomb and crawled out from under the Jeep. “I took care of it.”
“So we’re okay?”
“For now,” Illych said.
He wasn’t telling me something. “You killed them?” Considering Illych’s homicidal leanings, it seemed like a safe bet.
“They’re in that Jeep. With any luck, whoever investigates the explosion will mistake them for us and say that we accidentally blew ourselves up.”
“You don’t honestly believe that will happen.”
“No,” Illych agreed, “but we should be safe on a Mogat battleship. It won’t matter.” He carried a stack of three bombs and wired them to the electric eye that guarded the front door.
“You ready to leave, sir?” he asked.
“I’m a master sergeant,” I said. “We’re the same rank.”
By this time Illych had done just about everything he could to disguise me. He requisitioned green dye for my eyes. He shaved my head and bleached my eyebrows. He tried to stain my skin; but my cheeks and forehead burned instead of tanning. I thought I looked like a bald Liberator clone with olivine eye stain, bleached eyebrows, and bad skin.
“They’ve probably got the building under surveillance,” Illych said, as we climbed into our truck.
“Is that a problem?” I asked.
“Yes and no,” Illych said. “They’ll outnumber us; that’s a problem. If they get a good look at us, they might radio a warning. That might make it hard for us to make our flight.
“On the other hand, I’m guessing that we’re better armed than they are.” As I opened my door, I saw the stash of weapons Illych had placed behind the seat. We had rocket launchers, laser pistols, automatic rifles, and grenades. He’d also thrown a copy of the Bible back there. I made a trade, stowing the box with my helmet behind my seat and taking a grenade and a laser pistol for the ride.
I ducked low in the cab as we rolled out. Illych, still wearing his sergeant’s uniform, hit a button closing the gate behind us and, incidentally, arming all of the bombs he had placed in the motor pool.
The Mogats placed their training grounds and armories on the second level of the military district. Who knew what they had on the third, fourth, and fifth. The sixth level was an enormous freeway that not only laced together the entire military sector, it reached under the other sectors as well.
Illych knew the way to the ramp that led down to the sixth level. He had never driven there before, but he had memorized the route. It took us past a couple of buildings he had tried to blow up. He pointed them out as we went by.
“There must be a broadcast engine working somewhere on this planet,” I said.
“You think they’re planning on broadcasting the planet?” Illych asked. He could not stop himself from laughing at his own droll joke.
“I think they have some kind of newfangled shield on this planet that they broadcast out to their ships,” I said.
Illych’s grin disappeared. “So the same shield that protected those ships is protecting the buildings? How do people get in and out? Wouldn’t a shield stop them?”
“You’re thinking about technologies we understand,” I said. “When we use shields, they’re like walls in front of our ships, right? Their shield technology could be totally different. It’s only a guess, but it’s my best guess.”
I saw the ramp up ahead. It was a half mile wide, big enough to accommodate a formation of tanks. We bounced as we went over the incline and started our way down. The ramp headed down at a shallow angle. We drove for more than a mile before reaching the bottom deck.
A black cavern with pocke
ts of orange-pink lights spread out in every direction. It was a dark world in which tan, green, and blue cars—the colors of the military branches—scurried like rodents. In the bad light, the green and blue cars looked black.
Other vehicles passed us at incredible speeds. We traveled at 150 miles per hour, and I had the feeling that some vehicles more than doubled us. “These guys drive like maniacs,” I said to Illych.
“We don’t have to go very far,” he said
Illych had done a good job memorizing his route. He found the next ramp and drove up to the top level, taking us right to the spaceport. We parked along an empty street. I waited outside the Jeep while Illych changed out of his Marine sergeant’s uniform and into his Navy pilot’s duds. Since I still had the uniform I stole on my way down, I was already a lieutenant.
We drove to the port and presented orders Illych had drawn up back at the supply depot. We had no trouble getting in. Hacking into the Mogats’ computer system, Illych had already booked us on a military transport. The transport would drop us off on the battleship Illych had flown in from the Perseus Arm—very likely the battleship I’d flown in on as well. We built our escape around the idea that this particular ship received the alarm signal from the derelict in the Perseus Arm. If we were right, the ship would take us back into Unified Authority territory very shortly.
If everything went according to plan, I hoped to see this planet again very soon.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-THREE
Even with my bald head, bleached eyebrows, and temporarily green eyes, I did not want to socialize. We traveled in the kettle of a transport, a lucky break. In a Starliner, people would have been able to get a better look at me.
Illych and I sat apart so that if the Mogats caught one of us, the other might still escape. He sat toward the front of the kettle, not far from the stairs that led to the cockpit. I sat in the shadows toward the back.
A Mogat officer came and sat beside me.
“Good Lord, Lieutenant, what happened to your face?” he asked.
“I got burned, sir,” I said. He was a lieutenant commander.
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