“Have you had a look at yourself in the mirror this morning? Your face is covered with bruises,” he said. “I’m sure it wasn’t your fault. You were attacked. I understand that, but what happened to the men who attacked you?”
“One man,” I said.
“Where is he now?” Doctorow asked. “Is he dead? Did you kill him?”
“Dead, but I didn’t kill him,” I said. I hated this. The bastard had put me on the defensive.
“You didn’t kill him, but he’s still dead,” Doctorow said. “That is why we don’t want you or your kind on our planet.”
“How will you protect yourselves?” I asked.
“Protect ourselves from what? With you and your Marines off the planet, we won’t need to defend ourselves. Without you, we’ll be safe.”
“What happens when the Unified Authority arrives?” I asked.
“With you gone, they won’t have any reason to come here. We’re not at war with them.”
“Do you think they will respect your sovereignty?” Actually, I was pretty sure they would. They’d given up colonizing years ago.
“Yes, I believe they will. Look, we don’t want you here. I really don’t see that there is anything else for us to discuss.”
“What happens if the aliens come back?” I asked.
It was my ace in the hole, but I had played it too often, and I knew it. This time Doctorow was ready for it. “That’s a possibility, I suppose,” he said. “Personally, I am less concerned about that possibility than I am about getting you and your men off my planet.”
“You didn’t feel that way when we chased them away,” I said.
“If you recall, we did feel that way. We asked you to go away. I’m glad you ignored our request, but we didn’t want you here in the first place. And now, General Harris, it is time for you to leave.”
I stared at him angrily, he returned my gaze, looking calm and smug, neither of us willing to look away.
“We’ll leave,” I said, “but we are taking our engineers with us.”
“Have you asked them what they want?” Doctorow asked. “I have. I took the liberty of speaking with Lieutenant Mars last night.”
“You ran an end run to my engineers?” I asked, barely able to contain my anger. Why the speck had I come back to Terraneau? My girlfriend left me, an assassin nearly beat me to death, now this bastard was kicking me off the planet. “Have you spoken with anyone else? Perhaps you want my pilot.”
“I spoke with Ava this morning,” Doctorow volunteered.
“You spoke with Ava.” I muttered.
“She wants to stay,” he said.
“I saw her last night,” I said. “I got the same feeling.”
Doctorow’s composure never wavered throughout the interview. My temper flared. I became sullen. I wanted to kill the bastard. My emotions betrayed me and made Doctorow look all the more prescient.
“Hollingsworth would probably stay if you asked him,” I said.
“I don’t plan on extending that invitation,” Doctorow said.
“So I guess we are done,” I said as I started to stand.
“Not yet,” Doctorow said. “What are your plans, General? The Council would prefer for you to leave within the week.”
My thoughts had become a double helix. One strand contained logic and the other emotion. I never wanted Terraneau to sign a treaty with the Enlisted Man’s Empire; but now that they had rejected me, damn it, I felt judged and devalued by the people whose worthless lives I had saved.
“It won’t take long for us to pack,” I said, admitting my defeat.
“And your engineers?” he asked.
“I’ll speak to Mars. They can decide for themselves.” The Enlisted Man’s Empire would have plenty of engineers. If Mars wanted to stay, we’d get by without him. He’d earned that.
“Good man,” Doctorow said.
Had he just called me a “good man”? Had this specking antiestablishment son of a bitch just called me a “good man”? I quietly contemplated ripping his throat out of his neck.
He stood up to signal that the interview had ended, then he did something that almost set me off. As we walked to his door, he patted me on the shoulder and repeated his comment that I was “a good man.” Shoot me, stab me, kick me off your specking planet, but for God’s sake don’t make a show of being magnanimous in victory.
“So, I suppose that concludes our business together, General,” he said as he led me toward the door.
I turned to say something to Doctorow and found that I could not look the bastard in the eye. I wasn’t ashamed, just angry beyond reason.
And so I left. I walked out of that marble-lined office and found my own way out of the building. I stormed out to my car and told my driver to take me downtown.
He wanted us off his planet by the end of the week. I wanted us off by the end of the day.
Ava looked so pretty in her cream-colored blouse and sky blue skirt. The blouse was loose, but it showed off her figure. She wore her hair down, and her makeup was perfect. She applied her makeup discreetly so that it blended with her face. I wouldn’t have known she was wearing makeup had I not seen her without it. She looked at me and smiled.
“I’m leaving,” I said.
“L told me,” she said. “L” was the name Doctorow’s closest associates used to address him. Apparently Ava had joined that elite circle of friends. Maybe she had joined it long ago, and I had never noticed.
“So I guess that’s it. I’m done here,” I said, feeling rather foolish for having come to see her again.
Tears formed in the corners of her eyes. Were they real? I reminded myself that she was an actress.
“You can come with me?” I said.
“And live on a battleship?” she asked. “Honey, I’ve done that before. I think I’m done with big guns and seamen.”
She’d slipped into her brassy persona. For a moment I felt hope. Then she dashed it. She looked at me with deep-seated sympathy and touched me on the cheek. “I can’t come with you, Wayson,” she said. “There’s nothing for me out there.”
“I’d be there,” I said, sounding so specking pathetic I thought I might never forgive myself.
One of the tears broke free from its nest and slid down her cheek. “You? You were never there for me. After the Unified Authority attacked, when you were in the hospital, and you were so weak, I thought you needed me. I thought maybe we had a chance.
“But once you got better, you started looking for a way off the planet.”
“I told you, I wouldn’t leave you here.”
“You never needed me. You had your big plans and your Marines, and that was everything you needed.” She smiled for a moment, brushed a tear from the corner of her eye, and said, “You never even pretended to need me.”
“So when did he happen?” I asked, not bothering to explain that I meant the other man.
“I fell in love with him while you were planning how to escape Terraneau,” she confessed.
“In love?” I whispered.
“I’m sorry.”
I swallowed and asked the question I had to ask. “Did you ever love me?”
“Back in the beginning, you asked me how you compared to other guys. Do you remember that?” She took my hand in hers, and said, “You are the only one who ever broke my heart.”
I smiled when I heard this though it meant nothing to me.
PART III
DEALING WITH CANCERS
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
This was my day for good-byes. Within the last two hours I’d already said good-bye to Ava and Ellery Doctorow. In a few more hours, I’d bid a happy farewell to Terraneau, which had lately replaced Gobi as my least favorite planet in the galaxy. Now Freeman was leaving.
I looked at Freeman’s Piper Bandit, a private commuter craft that the Unified Authority had outfitted with a tiny broadcast engine, and remembered the days when I had a Johnston R-56 Starliner of my own. The Johnston was a nicer ride�
�a twenty-seat luxury corporate number flown by rich executives with private pilots.
Civilians were not allowed to own self-broadcasting planes; hence, broadcast engines were never offered as standard equipment. The Unified Authority Navy had placed the broadcast rig under the hood of my Starliner. The jet had been built for a four-star admiral, and I sort of inherited it when he died.
My Starliner was considered a luxury ride. Freeman’s plane was known in some quarters as an “interplanetary mosquito.”
It was supposed to be a two-seater, apparently designed to fit two anorexic midgets. Ray Freeman was not fat, but his seven-foot frame was thick and filled with muscle. To wedge himself into that tiny cockpit, he would need to curl his legs in odd angles under the instrumentation. The seats were narrow, and his massive shoulders would probably rub against both walls of the cockpit. Worst of all, he’d have to fly with his head bowed to fit it under the low ceiling. As we stood beside the Bandit, I gave it a dubious glance. That cockpit would be a tight fit for me, and Freeman had nine inches and a hundred pounds on me.
Not only was the Bandit too small for Freeman; it was also too small to house a broadcast generator. Someone had outfitted the plane with a tiny broadcast engine that had a single destination setting—Earth—instead of a broadcast computer. In lieu of a broadcast generator, it had a one-use battery. You got one broadcast out of this bird, and the preprogrammed computer made sure it ended up near Earth.
“Where’d you get this?” I asked.
“I took it from a clone,” he said.
“This is what infiltrator clones fly?” I asked. “No shit? Did this one belong to the guy who tried to kill me?”
Freeman shook his head.
“You mean there’s another one in Norristown?”
Freeman did not answer. If Freeman had the plane, the guy who was supposed to fly it was dead.
There had to be at least one more of these planes hidden somewhere around Norristown. I wondered how many I would find when I searched St. Augustine. Now we had something to look for—clones traveling in Piper Bandits.
“How does it fly?” I asked.
“Slow,” Freeman said. “A half million miles per hour.”
That was slow. Most naval ships had a top speed of thirty million miles per hour. You needed that kind of speed when you traveled billions of miles.
I changed the subject and asked Freeman the question that had been bothering me since he’d first shown up. “What are you doing here?”
“Besides saving your ass?”
“Are you here for money or revenge?” I asked. He was a mercenary first and foremost. Those were the only reasons he did anything besides eat, shit, and sleep. “You didn’t come all this way just to save me.”
“We were partners,” he said.
“You didn’t come here for old time’s sake,” I said. “How did you know about the clone in the first place?”
Then, recognizing the flaw in the story, I said, “You wouldn’t have known about him unless you were already in the war. What’s your stake?”
Freeman said nothing, and I would not push it. When the time came, he would tell me his reasons. He was ruthless and violent, but he also lived by a personal code of conduct. I trusted him.
“You can’t fly that into the broadcast zone,” I said. “You know that, right?”
Again, he did not answer. It was a stupid question.
“It’s a one-way zone,” I said, another inane comment. “It goes straight to Providence Kri.”
I wanted to make sure he knew how to find me. “Any chance that I will see you there?” I asked.
Freeman opened the door of his plane and folded himself into the cockpit. He slid his right leg all the way across the cabin and into the well for the passenger’s feet, then exhaled all the air from his lungs before wedging his chest behind the yoke. He pressed his chin to his collarbone as he crammed his shoulders and head into the tiny space under the ceiling.
Once he was in, he snaked a hand out to close the door, then paused. “How do I find you?” he asked.
I told him about Scrubb’s, the restaurant on St. Augustine, and promised to check the restaurant the following Thursday night.
“Doesn’t sound very private,” Freeman said.
“So we meet and go for a walk,” I said.
He nodded and closed the door of his plane. The Bandit was small and he was a giant. He filled the cockpit as snug as a bullet in the chamber of a gun.
There were many lessons they never taught us in the Marine Corps, foremost among them was instruction on how to be magnanimous in defeat. Trash a Marine, and you have an enemy for life.
At the moment, I did not feel especially charitable toward Ellery Doctorow; but what I had in mind for this visit might just save lives, Ava’s life in particular. He’d kicked me off his rock and made an end run on my engineers; his last-minute concern about my well-being struck me as gloating. I considered him a pompous, arrogant, self-important windbag, and that was why I hated what I had to do next.
Before returning to Fort Sebastian, I would visit Doctorow one last time. If he was no longer in his office, I would go to his home. I would find him, and, despite my desire to break his neck, I would do him a favor.
I told my driver to take me to the new capitol building.
Freeman had found his Bandit on a civilian airfield on the south side of town. The south and west sides of Norristown had taken the brunt of the war against the aliens. The Corps of Engineers, formerly my Corps of Engineers, began restoring the west side as soon as we liberated the planet. The south side, however, remained in tatters. If I were trying to hide a plane near Norristown, I would hide it in the wreckage of a southern suburb.
I stared out at broken buildings and empty space as we headed north, then I saw a massive work project—the Norris Lake Tunnels. The southern edge of Norristown fronted on a large lake that sparkled like a giant mirror across the landscape. The sun shone across its endless blue surface and shimmered. At one corner of the lake, a pair of tunnels grew out of the water like a set of sleeping leviathans, their four-lane mouths stitched shut by a latticeworks of scaffolding and heavy equipment.
So they’re working on the tunnels, I thought to myself. That was why Doctorow wanted my Corps of Engineers. It would have taken the locals a decade to finish the project; Mars and his engineers would polish it off in a few weeks. The tunnels ran three miles along the bottom of the lake. Once they finished, Norristown would be reconnected to Ephraim, its long-abandoned sister city.
Driving from the south side of town to the governmental seat took fifteen minutes. We started in a place of ruins and ended in a canyon of marble and glass. I had my driver wait in the car while I went to speak with Doctorow. As I reached the door of the capitol, two guards blocked my way.
I told them whom I had come to see, and one of them escorted me to the receptionist. The receptionist, in turn, contacted Doctorow’s office and told me that an aide would come out and speak with me.
I was not impressed, but at least the charades were over. Doctorow had my assurance I was leaving. He had everything he wanted from me, the bastard, so I was no longer worth his time.
A few moments later, out came this snooty kid in a nice suit and silk tie. His wrist went limp as he shook my hand, then he suggested that we sit and talk in the lobby. As far as he was concerned, he was as close to Doctorow as I was going to get.
When the kid asked, “What can I do for you?” I wanted to tell him to douse his hair with gasoline and light up a cigar; but I behaved. I looked him in the eye, and said, “You can tell Colonel Doctorow—”
“President Doctorow.”
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“His title is president.”
“Oh, I see. Well, that’s different. I had no idea,” I said, trying to sound contrite. “You can tell Colonel Doctorow that I am here and wish to see him.”
“The president is a busy man,” the kid said.
&nbs
p; “Yes, so am I,” I said.
“Perhaps if you have a message—”
“I just told you my message. I am here, and I wish to see him.”
“Perhaps you would like to tell me what this is about,” the kid said, his patience wearing thin.
“If I wanted to tell you why I was here, I would have already done so,” I said.
The kid controlled his temper better than I would have. He sat unmoved by my sarcasm. “If you would prefer to write—”
“If I wanted to send the president a letter, I would have written one.”
The kid just sat there. He started to say something, but only said, “Hmmmm.”
I stood up.
The kid thought I was leaving, and said, “What should I tell President Doctorow?” He started to get up and reached out to shake hands.
“I’ll tell him myself,” I said, and started for the door to the offices.
The kid threw himself in front of me as the guards from the entrance came trotting across the lobby. The receptionist started speaking frantically into a panel on his desk. I had not come to make a scene, but I was about to make one just the same; then the door to Doctorow’s office flew open, and out came “the president.”
“Are you quite finished, General Harris?” Doctorow asked in a loud but calm voice.
“Do you see anybody bleeding?” I asked.
“That is precisely why we want you off our planet.” Doctorow pronounced this judgment with finality.
“You know what, I can’t wait to leave,” I said.
Doctorow took a deep breath, and asked, “What do you need, Harris?”
“I came here to do you a favor, but you probably don’t want anything from someone like me.”
“No, I probably do not,” he agreed.
I took a deep breath, and said, “I came to give you an escape hatch . . . in case the aliens ever return.”
Now I had Doctorow’s attention. He surveyed the scene one last time, then said, “Perhaps we should speak in my office.” He turned to leave without speaking, and I followed, like an obedient dog.
Doctorow returned to his seat behind his desk. “How are your preparations going?”
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