“We are at war, you know,” Bishop said, a nonanswer designed to brush off the question.
“This isn’t wartime security,” I said. “Wartime security is a fighter escort and armed guards at the door.”
He took a deep breath, held it for just a moment, then exhaled. “It’s not the war that’s got us worried. The war is going well, everything else is falling apart.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Four Marines followed from a few feet back as Bishop led me out of the landing bay. The rest of the platoon hung back with Nobles as he secured the transport.
The Kamehameha was a warship with a complement of fighters and Marines, but it was also the mobile administrative headquarters of the Enlisted Man’s Fleet. Fleet headquarters was spread across an upper deck of the ship. At least, it used to be there. We did not take the lift to the fleet deck. Instead, Bishop led me to the bridge.
“We’re not going to Fleet Command?” I asked.
“Not now, no,” Bishop said.
“Is Warshaw up there?” I asked.
Bishop stopped walking and turned to face me. I saw deep-seated suspicion in the way he examined my face. “Why are you in such a rush to see Warshaw?” he asked.
Oh, there were so many good responses, both politic answers and flaming. Warshaw was the only officer in my pay grade in the fleet; I wanted to congratulate him for saving the fleet, but I also wanted to poke him in the nose for leaving me stranded on Terraneau. Instead, I said, “I get the feeling I’m still being screened.”
“Something like that,” Bishop admitted.
I didn’t know him all that well; we’d only been on the same ship for a few months before the Earth Fleet attacked. We occupied different worlds—he was Navy, I was a Marine. We’d gotten along, but the standard prejudices applied. Sailors thought of Marines as cargo.
“I’m not a spy,” I said. “You don’t really think the Unified Authority captured me, trapped me in a battleship, and sent me through that broadcast zone.”
“General, I don’t know what to think. You’re not even supposed to be alive.”
“I walked through the posts. What did your computers tell you?”
“You’ve got the DNA of a Liberator Clone. We’ve verified that.”
That was my genetic fingerprint. That was as specific as the computers could get with clones. They could tell one natural-born from the next by their DNA; but since clones were cut from the same helix, genetic fingerprinting only went so far. The security station could identify our make and our age and catalog any major or recent illnesses.
“That should narrow the field,” I said. “How many Liberators do you know?”
Bishop did not answer my question.
We went up to the bridge deck, but we did not enter the bridge. With his MPs still tailing us, Bishop led me into an off-bridge conference room. Wanting to believe Warshaw would join us, I took a seat at the table. The room was empty, except for a table, chairs, and a media/communications display.
We sat in silence for a moment, then I asked, “What am I missing here?”
“What do you mean?” Bishop asked, playing the role of the obtuse ship’s captain.
“You say the war is going well,” I said.
“I believe I said it was going better than we could have hoped for.”
“Okay, but you’re hiding like a mouse in a hole. What’s with the siege mentality?” I asked.
I waited several seconds for him to answer. To this point, I had not yet become angry, but my tension level was rising.
“What happened on Terraneau?” he asked.
“Is that an official question?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
“Who else is listening in on our conversation?”
“No one,” he said, shaking his head.
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
Before the big attack, the Corps of Engineers set up a prison called Outer Bliss on Terraneau. They rigged a mike and a camera in the prison’s interrogation room that were so small, trained experts would need equipment to locate them. When I interrogated prisoners in Outer Bliss, Warshaw listened in on the conversations from the Kamehameha. I suspected he would listen in on this conversation as well.
“What happened on Terraneau?” Bishop repeated.
“Do you mean before or after you guys ditched the party?” I asked.
“What happened on the planet?” he asked. “How did you get out alive?”
“The Unified Authority landed three thousand Marines; I had five thousand men. The cocky bastards didn’t even bother landing more men after you left. That’s how sure they were that they would win.”
“You faced their Marines, and you survived?” Bishop asked, ignoring the obvious evidence that we were having a conversation, not a séance.
“Something like that,” I said.
“Was there anything unusual about their troops?” Bishop asked. Now he was probing.
“Do you mean the shielded armor?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Tell me about it.” The son of a bitch was testing me.
“They had shielded armor,” I said. “What do you want to know? Their armor was just like ours except that it projected a shield. Even the palms of their hands were shielded; they couldn’t carry guns. They fired fléchettes from tubes that ran along their arms inside their armor. Sound familiar?” I placed my right hand on the table, palm up, and showed him pea-sized scars in my wrist and forearm. The fléchettes had passed through my arm and armor with the ease of a sewing needle poking through a cotton sheet.
“You were shot?” he asked.
“Five times,” I said.
“You’re lucky to be alive.”
“I wouldn’t have the pleasure of sitting through this interrogation if I had died,” I said. “And Warshaw wouldn’t be listening in on us,” I added, hoping to get Warshaw’s goat and flush him out of hiding.
“Just answer the specking questions, okay, hotshot?” said the voice that came out of the ceiling. Admiral Gary Warshaw had the same voice box as every other clone, but he had his own way of talking.
Bishop winced. I smiled.
“They’re using poison on their fléchettes now,” Warshaw said. “They hit you, you die.”
“That’s how it went on Terraneau, too. They killed everyone they hit,” I said.
“Everyone but you,” Bishop pointed out.
“Genetics. I’m a Liberator. I had the mother of all combat reflexes. The doctor said there was so much adrenaline and testosterone in my blood that I should have died of a heart attack.”
“But you survived.”
“More or less. That may be my last combat reflex. The poison injured the gland.” In truth, the gland had mostly healed, but I decided to keep that to myself. With Bishop holding his cards close to the vest and Warshaw playing hide-and-seek behind a camera, I would hold on to my secrets as well.
“That’s how you survived the fight, but how did you win it?” Warshaw asked.
I explained how we lured General Mooreland and the U.A. Marines into the underground garage, then demolished the structure while we escaped through the subterranean train station in the back.
“And you just left them there?” Warshaw asked. “You just left them there to starve?”
“Yes.”
“You specking bastard.” Warshaw meant this as a compliment. “Bastard” is one of those all-purpose words in the military. “Your doctor was wrong about you, Harris; you don’t have adrenaline running through your veins, you’ve got ice.”
“Brilliant move,” Bishop said in a voice just slightly above a whisper.
“Damn specking right it’s brilliant,” Warshaw said. “And I bet our boy Harris came up with the idea all on his own. Am I right, Harris?”
It was my idea, but I did not say so. I did not respond. I felt like Warshaw and Bishop were herding me somewhere I did not want to go.
Bishop asked, “What happened after you buried the Marines
?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Why didn’t the fleet send more Marines?” Bishop asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“So they just left?” Bishop asked.
“Some of them left, some of them stayed,” I said. “You sank twenty-three of their ships.”
“Twenty-three,” Warshaw said. He sounded pleased. “I wondered what kind of damage we left behind.”
“They lost twelve ships trying to chase you into your broadcast zone,” I said.
“They didn’t even need to send more men down to the planet,” Bishop said. “Why didn’t they just bombard you from space?”
He still did not trust me.
“Maybe they didn’t think we were worth the trouble,” I said. “We were landlocked; they probably didn’t consider us a threat.”
“Then they didn’t know you as well as I do,” Warshaw said. “Anyone who knew you would be scared. He’s clean. You can bring him down.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Bishop told me the fleet decks were empty, then offered to let me inspect them for myself if I did not believe him. I believed him.
He remained, however, unwilling to explain the situation. When I asked what happened to Fleet Command, he put up a hand, and said, “Take it up with Warshaw.”
“You can’t tell me anything?” I asked.
“Not my pay grade, sir. I just steer the ship.”
We had that discussion over an early dinner in the last vestige of Fleet Command, a mess reserved for captains and up. Bishop ate chicken, I ate beef, and we both had potatoes and salad. There was a linen sheet across the table, and the utensils appeared to be made out of silver instead of some chrome-coated alloy.
“Can you tell me where we are?” I asked.
Bishop laughed, and asked, “You don’t know your galactic position?”
“How the speck would I know that?”
He thought about that, and said, “It takes real balls to fly into a broadcast zone without knowing where you’ll come out.” He shook his head, and added, “I’ve got to hand it to you.
“You’re in the Cygnus Arm, Enlisted Man’s territory.” He pointed to the viewport, and added, “The planet down there is Providence Kri.”
“Is that where Warshaw is hiding?” I asked.
Bishop shook his head. “Nope; he’s not even in this arm.”
“Are you going to tell me where he is?”
“He’s in the Tube.”
“What is the Tube?” I asked.
“It’s our high command. The Unifieds have their Pentagon, and we have our Tube,” Bishop said, clearly enjoying my frustration. “Times have changed, General. Admiral Warshaw has thirteen fleets under him. We don’t just have an Enlisted Man’s Fleet anymore, we have an Enlisted Man’s Navy.”
“You’re shitting me,” I said.
“I told you, the war is going well.”
“So where is the Tube?” I asked.
Bishop’s smile spread so wide, it looked painful as he said, “That’s on a need-to-know basis. You’re not navigating, so you don’t need to know.”
You could broadcast from one end of the galaxy to the other and never know it inside a big bird like a fighter carrier. At some point, the Kamehameha entered a broadcast zone. We might have entered several for all I knew. I went to my temporary billet to wash up and rest. A few minutes later, I got a message informing me that we had reached Naval Command and directing me to report to the landing bay.
Bishop met me at the bay and escorted me into my transport. We traded salutes.
“Well, General, you’re Warshaw’s problem now,” he said.
“Anything I should watch out for?” I asked.
“You’ll be fine, sir. He’s happy to see you,” Bishop said.
I looked around the transport, and asked, “Am I flying with the same pilot I came in with?”
“You have a personal pilot?” Bishop asked, sounding surprised.
“More or less,” I said.
“You’re stuck with a loaner pilot for this trip. Your identity checked out, but we haven’t started on the guy you flew in with.”
I nodded and crossed the kettle on my way to the cockpit. The door of the transport slowly closed behind me, clapping shut as I reached the top of the ladder and stepped onto the narrow catwalk.
We launched into space, and I immediately saw that we were not headed for Providence Kri. The term “Kri” was given to planets with “engineered” atmospheres. Back in the days of the great expansion, the Senate selected planets based on several factors, location being the most important. If a planet with a breathable atmosphere was roughly the same distance from its nearest star as Earth was from the sun, it became a candidate for colonization.
Some planets were “retreads,” meaning they had all the ingredients to support life but needed the right infusions of hydrogen and oxygen along with some plant life to sustain the mixture. Seen from space, Providence Kri was a green-and-blue marble with layers of clouds and ice caps. It looked a lot like Earth. “God makes ’em good, and terraforming makes ’em better” was the old motto of the now-defunct Unified Authority Planetary Engineering Corps.
The planet we were heading for was arid, the color of sand, with few clouds and bone-dry poles. In the distance, a hot sun blazed. I could see its flare peeking out beyond the equatorial horizon.
“What a shit hole,” I said.
My pilot smiled but did not respond.
“What planet is that?” I asked, thinking perhaps he had been told to ignore my questions.
“Gobi, sir.”
“Gobi?” I asked, then I laughed so hard he must have thought I’d lost my mind. I began my career on Gobi. Wanting to make sure this was the same planet, I asked, “If that’s Gobi, then we must be in the Perseus Arm, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
Nearly ten years ago, in 2508, I had meandered into Gobi Station as a new Marine fresh out of boot camp. Now, almost a decade and three wars later, to Gobi I returned, a general.
Hundreds of ships crowded the space around the planet. A trio of fighter carriers floated in the distance. Beyond them, a broadcast station blended into the darkness around it. Had it not been for the ring of lights along its mile-wide discs, I would never have spotted the station.
Closer to the planet, Navy ships hovered in silhouette against the atmosphere. Squadrons of fighters flew in and out of view. A school of battleships passed around the wide equatorial curve of the planet at a lazy pace. The first time I had landed on Gobi, it struck me as a backwater planet and a dead end for my fledgling military career. It had the galaxy’s smallest Marine installation and the Navy, Army, and Air Force were nowhere to be seen.
We dropped into the atmosphere.
“Last time I came here, the fort looked like a house of cards after an earthquake,” I said. The old base was a sandstone fortress made more for show than warfare. When the Mogats attacked, the bulky walls caved in around us.
“You’ve been here before, sir?” the pilot asked.
“Yeah, but it’s been a while. I was stationed here.”
“No offense, sir, but you must have really pissed someone off. I wouldn’t station a dog on this planet.”
I felt the same way.
The new Gobi Station rose out of the desert like a modern-day minaret, a single, nearly indefensible column as sleek and straight as an old-world rocket preparing to launch into space.
The original station, the fort I’d once called home, was built along the side of a cliff. Not this building. The desert spread out in every direction around it.
The structure stood thirty stories tall. As we approached, I spotted a ring of bunkers around the base of the structure. Tawny and mostly submerged in the sand, those bunkers could have housed five thousand men. Particle-beam-cannon and missile arrays ran along the sides of the cylindrical fort like rows of spines. “How long has this building been around?” I asked. It sure as hel
l had not existed ten years ago, or we wouldn’t have been living in a prehistoric rat hole.
The pilot shrugged, and said, “It was here when we got here.”
I always hated the way transports handled in atmospheric conditions. They were built for space, relying on boosters and skids instead of wings and wheels. They had wings, but they were small and useless for gliding. Cut the power in a bird like that, and it would fall like a rock. My pilot knew his trade, but he wasn’t good at it. As we approached the landing pad, he missed a mark, and we dropped sixty feet below the platform; then he righted the bird, and we had to fly around the building and come in again.
“Sorry about that, sir,” he said as he fumbled with the controls.
We touched down on the second pass, and the ground crew converged on our transport. The landing pad was open-air. Why not? Rain was never a problem on this planet.
A security station with armed guards hiding behind a wall of bulletproof glass waited just inside the doorway. The glass formed a funnel that led to a set of security posts. As I walked through the posts, a team of security techs confirmed my identity while men with M27s kept close watch on me.
The techs only needed a moment to clear me, and the guards waved me on.
Even after all of the other precautions, two of the guards paired off with me. They herded me into a lift, and down we went. Judging by the lights, the numbers, and the length of the drop, it seemed clear we had gone deep underground. When the elevator doors opened, we had arrived at another security station with another set of posts.
There was no way to enter this building without passing through posts that scanned your DNA, and yet they scanned me again when I left the elevator. These people weren’t just digging in for a war; they were terrified.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
If you did not know that Gary Warshaw was a clone, you might have mistaken him for a natural-born. He didn’t have general-issue standard brown hair. In fact, he didn’t have any hair at all. The man shaved his entire head from his crown to his chin, including the eyebrows. He shaved in the morning. By the end of the day, dark grainlike stubble covered his chin, neck, and head. The eyebrows, though, he might have removed with lasers. They never grew back.
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