“I always hate it when natural-borns die in battle,” Brocius said. “Reports, letters to relatives, all that hero bullshit. Any idea who shot him?”
“No, sir,” I said.
“Did you shoot him?” Brocius asked.
“Certainly not, sir,” I said.
“Harris, you came back with a specking Mogat battleship. You come back with another prize like that, and you can shoot ‘Wild Bill’ for all I care.” “Wild Bill” Grace was the most powerful man in Unified Authority government.
“I do not want to shoot anyone but the enemy, sir,” I said.
“Whoever that enemy might be,” Illych muttered under his breath. He knew me too well.
This was a private briefing. Illych and I stood at attention. Admiral Brocius and Admiral Brallier sat behind a table reviewing us. Brocius would give me a one-on-one briefing when he got the chance. I would learn a lot more without a competing admiral in the room. Brallier would do the same with Illych.
“Harris, I’ve reviewed the records from the battle,” Brallier said. “I must say, I’m impressed.”
I stood at attention, staring straight ahead, but I could see the satisfaction on Brocius’s face. His man had stolen the show. Illych might have been the first man on the Mogat planet and one of the last men holding the engine room, but nothing upstaged my launch-bay pyrotechnics.
“You bucking to become an officer again?” Brocius asked.
“No, sir. The sergeant is not looking for a promotion, sir,” I said. Later I would ask him about promoting Philips, but this was neither the time nor the place.
“How about you, Illych?” Admiral Brallier asked. “Do you think you deserve some bars for this?”
“No, sir,” Illych answered.
We both knew the same thing—becoming an officer meant living with natural-borns and dabbling in their petty politics. We preferred field work to command.
“I see,” said Brallier, sounding a little like the late Colonel Grayson.
The interview went on for an entire hour. Both admirals wasted time beating us down to make sure we did not put in for promotions. As we left the office, our caps tucked under our left arms and our minds swollen with frustration, Illych said, “Colonel, can I buy you a drink?”
“I’m a sergeant,” I said.
“A master gunnery sergeant…yes, I know,” Illych said. “You were a colonel when I met you, you did nothing to get demoted, and thinking of you as a colonel makes me feel better about the boys with bars and clusters.
“So, can I buy you a drink, Colonel?”
“How do you feel about doubling up?” I asked.
“Doubling up?”
We were in the administrative offices of the Golan Dry Docks. The polished plastic floor showed our reflection as cleanly as any mirror. The white walls gleamed under the bright fluorescent lights. The halls ran as far as the eye could see. Men in pressed uniforms and men in business suits, natural-borns all, walked the floor.
At the end of the hall was a sight that seemed incongruous in these polished premises. Thirty-six men in Marine tans stood loitering near an elevator. Everyone around them moved silently and efficiently. The boys joked in loud voices and laughed like drunks.
“I promised to take my boys out. You mind drinking with a bunch of Leatherneck clones?”
“Can I bring my SEALs?”
“We’ll drink with them if they’ll drink with us,” I said.
Illych gave me a rare smile. “I’ll get them.”
“Did you have to invite them SEALs?” Philips asked as he watched Illych and his SEALs enter the bar. “Those boys give me the willies.” Philips sat on a stool with his back to the bar. He held his beer in his right hand and leaned back on his left elbow.
“They should scare you,” I said. “Those ‘boys’ are death dressed in a Navy uniform.”
The bar was big and dim with brass lamps and lots of mirrors. Along the walls were models of the many different spacecrafts designed in this facility. Behind the bar, three bartenders in white shirts and red vests sorted through shelves of odd-shaped bottles.
This was a businessman’s bar. People came here to talk, not to drink. Soft music rolled from the speakers.
“Do they make you nervous?” Philips asked.
“Not especially. Not as much as you do,” I lied.
In truth, Philips would be more dangerous than the SEALs in most battlefield situations. He had absolutely no fear of dying. He could shoot as well as any man I knew, and he did not hesitate when it came to pulling the trigger. With his temperament, Philips would have washed out of recon training, but he knew how to carry himself on the battlefield.
“Shit, Master Sarge, you’re embarrassing me,” Philips said as he downed the rest of his beer. He immediately turned around and asked the bartender for another one.
I’d known men who preferred hard drinks or insisted on Earth-brewed beers. Not Philips. The man held no pretensions. He wanted his drinks cheap and fast and plentiful.
Thomer came to join us just as Illych and his company arrived.
“Are we still invited?” Illych asked as he strolled up.
There was something I noticed about Illych and his strain of clone—they all had an inferiority complex. They seemed to think that no one could like them.
When I first met them, the SEALs’ quiet mannerisms impressed me as independence. Later I amended that and thought they were introverts. Now I realized that they considered themselves somehow beneath the rest of society, even other clones.
“It’s an open bar,” Philips said, waving his beer to show the mostly empty tavern. “Pull up a seat.”
“I’m Kelly Thomer. Most folks just call me Thomer,” Thomer said, reaching out to shake Illych’s hand.
“Emerson Illych,” Illych said.
Thomer broke the ice with his easy style. The SEALs fell in around us, trying to start up conversations, then letting the Marines do most of the talking. Just watching them I knew these boys had demons that vexed them. When they stood on friendly soil, the Boyd clones reminded me of lonely children. If any of my Marines paid for another drink that night, I would have been surprised. The SEALs gladly caught the tabs and offered to buy more.
“You the one that went off to that Mogat planet?” Philips asked Illych.
“Illych, this is Philips,” I said.
Illych listened to me and nodded, then turned to Philips. “Mogatopolis.”
“Mogatopolis?” I asked. “Official name?”
“That’s what we’re calling it,” Illych said.
“You couldn’t come up with anything better than Mogatopolis?” Philips asked
“Can you come up with something better?” Illych asked.
Philips thought for a moment. “You could call it Planetary Home of Morgan.”
“That’s better?” Illych asked.
“Planet HomeMo for short,” Philips said.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Illych said. There it was again, the revulsion to vulgarity. The revulsion had to have been programmed into his brain, just like vulgarity was tattooed onto Philips’s supposedly nonexistent soul.
“It beats the hell out of Mogatopolis,” Philips said. He knocked down another beer and excused himself to go “siphon the pond.”
I laughed when Philips said that, but Illych did not even smile. He stood in silence as Philips walked to the bathroom.
“Don’t be so hard on him,” I said.
“He’s a clown,” Illych said. He changed the subject. “Did you look around that battleship?”
“Which one, the wreck or the one we flew back?” I asked.
“Both?”
“Sure. Are we talking about anything in particular?” I asked.
“The engine rooms are completely different,” Illych said. “The one we brought home only has one broadcast engine. Did you notice that?”
“I didn’t look,” I admitted.
“Did you know that we’ve had run-ins with the
Mogats in all six arms now?” Illych asked. “They’ve lost a ship in every fight. They’ve lost four in the Orion Arm.”
“They lost a lot more than that around Earth,” I said.
“No,” Illych said, “I mean over the last three weeks.” Illych drank gin, not beer. He took long, slow sips that lasted for seconds. Watching him closely, I had the feeling he was not very interested in his drink.
“Do you know who Yoshi Yamashiro is?” I asked.
“The governor of Shin Nippon,” Illych said.
I had not expected him to know Yamashiro. “He thinks they are purposely scuttling those ships to set up a communications network.”
“Did I miss anything?” Philips asked as he rejoined us.
“We were just talking about Mogat battleships,” I said. I could tell by the way Illych tightened up that he did not want to continue the conversation in front of Philips. They were polar opposites, those two. Illych was quiet, thoughtful, and very calculated. Philips let his whims make his decisions. Illych spoke in a hushed voice and never swore. Philips swore and could not manage a whisper. That they should not trust each other seemed inevitable.
I decided to show Illych what he would never have guessed about Private Mark Philips. “Philips, you were on both Mogat ships.”
“Both ships? You mean the sucker we sank and the one we stole?”
I nodded. “Did you see any differences between them?”
“You mean besides the forty-foot laser gash on the bottom of the dead one?”
“Yeah, besides that,” I said.
“Not outside of the engine room,” Philips said. “But the engine rooms were completely different.” He went on to describe the two broadcast engines and the special shielding around the working engine on the derelict ship.
Illych listened to this and nodded, looking impressed. “I noticed the same things. Do you have any theories about the differences?”
“Any theories? I’m just a specking grunt. Us specking grunts don’t come up with theories, we just pull the damned triggers and shoot our damned guns.”
All admiration evaporated from Illych’s expression.
CHAPTER
FORTY
I was not drunk or hungover after seven glasses of beer, but I needed some sleep. Less than thirty hours ago, I had woken up on a rack in a Mogatopolis armory.
We stayed in a dry-docks dormitory. Most of the Marines had to share their apartments, but I had one to myself. The last time I had stayed here, I’d had a much larger apartment. Of course, the last time I stayed at the Golan Dry Docks, three men tried to beat me to death. When that failed, they tossed a grenade in my room.
My apartment was ten feet wide and ten feet deep with a ten-foot ceiling. It was a perfect cube. My bed was six and a half feet long and three feet wide. There was a closet on one side of the bed and a closet-sized bathroom on the other. I liked the room. It had absolutely no luxuries, but it made me feel secure.
As I settled onto my bed, I saw the flashing light on the wall console warning me that I had a message waiting. I went to the console and punched in my code. The message was from Brocius asking me to call him. I punched in the return code.
“There you are,” Brocius said, as his face appeared on the screen.
“I went out for a drink with my platoon,” I said.
“And you’re still sober?”
“More or less,” I said.
“Glad to hear it, we have things to discuss,” he said. “Come to my quarters.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“And don’t worry about the uniform, Harris, this meeting is off the record.”
When you spend time with high-ranking officers, you quickly learn that there is a difference between being “at ease” and relaxed. When an officer gives the order, “At ease,” you spread your legs and relax your shoulders, but remain alert and erect. You remain that way until the officer says, “Dismissed,” at which time you walk away alert and erect until you are out of sight.
Brocius told me not to worry about my uniform, but that did not mean he wouldn’t notice if I came dressed like a civilian. Above all else, officers want you to show them respect, even when they try to act like your friend. I changed back into my Charlie Service uniform and reported to the admiral’s suite.
Brocius, still wearing the same uniform he had worn to my debriefing five hours earlier, came to the door. “Good of you to come, Sergeant,” he said. He stepped away to allow me in.
The couch in Brocius’s suite would not have fit in my quarters. He had a full-sized bar, a living room, and a pool table. The suite probably came with a bartender, too, but Brocius would have excused the man before discussing sensitive matters. As he led me into the area, I spotted Yoshi Yamashiro sitting on the sofa.
“Hello, Harris,” Yamashiro said as he stood. He wore his traditional dark blue blazer and red necktie. Between the middle finger and forefinger of his left hand, Yamashiro held his traditional half-smoked cigarette.
We shook hands.
“Admiral Brocius has told me about your latest adventures. Perhaps we might have saved you some trouble had we allowed you to commit suicide on your transport ship.” On his ship, Yamashiro showed a strong preference for hot Sake, but he seemed comfortable with the whiskey he now held.
“Suicide?” Brocius asked. “I don’t believe I heard about that.”
“Harris and his friend tried to adapt the broadcast engine from a broadcast station for use on a transport,” Yamashiro said.
“On a transport? That would never work. You would not have had enough power,” Brocius said.
“Ah.” Yamashiro nodded. “Maybe even if you generated enough power, the metal hull of a transport would not be well suited for the electrical discharge.” It was a cultural thing. What he meant was, There’s more than enough power, asshole, but you would blow up your ship.
“Really?” Brocius asked. “I have long wondered why our engineers have never retrofitted transports for broadcast. Now I guess I know.” He pointed to the furniture. “Have a seat. Harris, I know you’re probably well lubed after a night with the boys, but can I fix you a drink?”
Yamashiro’s whiskey on the rocks looked good, but I decided to play it politic. “No thank you, sir,” I said. Had it just been Yamashiro and I, I would have been on my third drink by this time.
We took our seats.
“I’m betting that Admiral Brallier is giving his boys a briefing as we speak. I apologize for not getting to you sooner, Harris. You deserve to be in the loop.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
“We’ve compared the video record you took on the derelict to what we’ve found on the captured ship. Any guesses on the differences between the two ships?”
“The second broadcast engine,” I said.
“You’re halfway there, Harris,” Brocius said. “They changed the entire engine room. They also changed the shields.”
“The ship you brought back has changed very little since my engineers renovated it two years ago,” Yamashiro said. “The broadcast engine is untouched.”
“From what we can tell, the Mogats placed components for two additional shield systems on the battleship Porter sank. One of the shields came with its own generator. It was designed to protect the secondary broadcast engine. As you probably noticed, both the shield and the broadcast engine are still running.
“The Mogats stripped out the ship’s original shield system and replaced it with something new.
“Whatever they have, it’s powerful. Porter hit that battleship with lasers, particle beams, and torpedoes before it went down. We’ve gone over that battle from every angle. Until the fatal shot, nothing came close to penetrating its shields.”
Brocius sat silently for a moment. He sipped his Scotch and considered what to say next. Finally, he placed his drink on an end table, and said, “You know what our engineers are saying? They think the damn shields eat energy. No kidding. They absorb energy out of lasers and
particle beams and use it to recharge their batteries. Hell, they think that shield can even strip the kinetic energy out of explosions.
“Of course, that’s all conjecture. We won’t know anything until we see one of the shields on this ship up and running.”
“What about the shields on the battleship—”
“The one you captured?” Brocius interrupted. “We found the shield system but not the shield generator.”
“Maybe they used the generator from the original shield system,” I suggested.
“We do not think that is the case,” Yamashiro said. He finished his whiskey and went to the bar to fix another.
“While we were dissecting their ship, we found a signal receiver hooked into the weapons systems. This is all theory, of course, but it looks like the Mogats are broadcasting the shields as some kind of signal to their ships. The problem is, the only way to test that theory is to fly the ship into Mogat territory,” Brocius said. “I suppose we could take the ship back to where we found it.”
“Maybe not just there,” Yamashiro called from behind the bar. “My engineers estimate that there will be a hundred-million-mile radius in which you can receive that signal.
“You remember when I told you that I thought the Mogats wanted to create a broadcast network? I thought they would use it for communications. After seeing this shield system, I have changed my mind. Now I believe they are using their network to broadcast their shield signal.” He filled his tumbler four fingers full and rejoined us.
“What happens if we shut the signal down?” I asked.
“The Mogats have disabled the original shields on their ships,” Yamashiro said, a wicked smile on his lips. He took a deep drag from his cigarette, then blew the smoke out through his nostrils. “If they lose their shield signal, they will be completely unprotected. I would enjoy seeing that battle.”
“I heard the Mogats lost four ships in the Orion Arm,” I said. “What if they are using those ships as broadcast stations for their shield signal?”
“They probably are. Fortunately, they don’t seem interested in placing a station near Earth.”
I thought about my last conversation with Freeman and realized that they already had a broadcast station in place.
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