“The Double Ys,” I said, hoping the name would irritate Freeman. He had no patience for clever nicknames.
“Is that what you call them?” he asked, obviously unperturbed.
“I don’t know if you heard about their chromosomes, they have an X and two Ys. Apparently that makes them more dangerous. Sending out saboteurs isn’t going to sink our fleet.”
Freeman sat still and placid, but his eyes burned holes in my head as he said, “You still don’t get it. Hill doesn’t want to sink your fleet; he wants to take it back whole.
“You’re looking for war while he’s slipping you rat poison. He figures if he kills off enough of your officers, your enlisted clones will just hand the ships over. He doesn’t care about clones. It’s the ships he’s after.”
“Then he’s out of luck,” I said. “We’ve pretty much cracked our infestation problems.”
“They’re tracking your movements, too,” Freeman said.
“Right, the satellites. You were the one who clued us in about them, remember?” I felt frustrated. This was Ray Freeman, nothing ever slipped his mind, yet here he was, telling me things he had already told me. The pieces did not fit.
“So if it comes to a fight, are you taking sides?” I asked.
“We’re talking,” Freeman said.
“Are you looking for work?” I asked. “If you have an angle on Olympus Kri, name your price.”
Freeman did not answer right away.
I downed my beer and signaled to the waitress for another one. She brought it over.
I watched him closely. Freeman wasn’t in this for the money; he’d made over a billion dollars on New Copenhagen. “What are you looking for?”
“We’re all after the same thing.”
“Yeah, and what’s that?” I asked, not even bothering to hide my irritation. He wasn’t being straight with me, and I was tired of it.
“Survival,” he said. As he said the word, his fingers tightened around his unfinished beer.
CHAPTER FORTY
I called Warshaw to give him the news.
“The Unified Authority is planning to attack Olympus Kri,” I said. A simple announcement that I hoped would start the gears of war turning.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Warshaw said. “If they ever get around to picking a fight, that’s where they’re going to start it. Everyone knows that.”
“In five days,” I said.
“Five days?”
“The attack is coming in five days?”
“No shit? Who’s your source?” He wasn’t taking me seriously, but I had his attention.
“Ray Freeman, the same guy who warned us about the satellites,” I said. Warshaw had never met Freeman, but he’d certainly heard tales about the man.
“Wasn’t he the bastard who shot you on Terraneau?”
“And told us the U.A. was about to attack,” I pointed out.
“But he was working for them,” Warshaw countered. “He was delivering a message for Admiral Brocius. What if he’s still working for them?”
“He says he isn’t.”
“You believe him?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“He sounds like a real saint, Harris.”
“He was right about the satellites,” I said.
“Maybe he was right. We still haven’t found one. It makes sense that they’re spying on us, but that doesn’t make it true.
“U.A. spy satellites and God . . . you can’t prove either exists, but your questions are answered the moment you accept they’re out there.”
Warshaw had no interest in taking a leap of faith based on Freeman’s word, and I didn’t blame him. The Unified Authority had apparently stopped sending cruisers into our territory, and there was no way we would find those satellites without U.A. cruisers leading us to them.
“I’ve never met this friend of yours. Do you think he knows what he’s talking about?”
“He always knows what he’s talking about. That’s not the problem. It’s not a question of confidence, it’s a question of trust. Freeman’s out for himself. Even when he picks a side, he’s still out for himself. He keeps his cards hidden and plays his angles tight. So far, he hasn’t even told me why he’s helping us.”
“So why trust him?”
“History,” I said. “Until now, he and I always ended up on the same side. He makes a damn good ally.”
“Harris, that doesn’t even sound like you. You’re a brute. You’re a specking Liberator clone. If he’s not telling you what you want, catch the bastard and beat it out of him?”
I laughed. I could not stop myself. “Beat information out of Ray Freeman?” Killing him might not be too much of a problem, not with satellite surveillance and high-altitude air strikes; but trying to interrogate the son of a bitch would be like trying to tackle a bull elephant.
“If you think he’s a spy . . .”
“Not a spy,” I said. The man stood seven feet tall. He was an “African-American,” living in a time when races had been abolished. He was a purebred living among synthetics and mutts. Stealth was not among his long suits. Brutal strength, patience, and cunning intelligence were. He was a mercenary and an assassin, not a spy.
I felt tired. It had been a long day. I wished I could do something about the buzzing in my head, and sleep seemed like the best solution.
Planets had time zones, but outer space did not. The Space Travel Clock (officially Coordinated Universal Time) coincided with a zone that used to be known as Greenwich Mean Time on Earth. To avoid confusion, the Unified Authority had set up an arbitrarily selected twenty-four-hour clock for an endless void with an infinite number of suns but neither sundown nor sunup. St. Augustine, which had a faster rotation than Earth, had twenty-two-hour days. Warshaw and I spoke at the same time every night by his clock, but each of our meetings kept getting later and later by mine.
“It sounds like a trap,” Warshaw said.
“Maybe, but we’d still better get more ships out there,” I said. “I don’t see that we have any other choice.”
“What about the Double Ys?” he asked.
“We take care of them first. We can close that chapter today if we need to. All the pieces are in place.” Before leaving for St. Augustine, I had put Hollingsworth in charge of the project. Reconfigured posts were set up on every ship and in every fort. We could recall the armor in the morning and spring our trap in the afternoon.
“Hollingsworth says everything is ready. All he has to do is pull the trigger.” Warshaw knew Hollingsworth, they’d served on the same ship.
“Then pull the trigger,” he said. “The sooner we close that door, the better.”
“That still leaves Olympus Kri,” I said. This conversation was not going as I had hoped.
“I’m not sending more ships,” Warshaw said.
“What if the Unifieds have figured out a way to knock out our broadcast stations?” I asked.
“Not very likely,” Warshaw said, but he didn’t sound confident. Without a broadcast network lacing it together, the Enlisted Man’s Empire would come apart.
“Probably not,” I agreed. “I’m just thinking out loud.”
But my comment had the desired effect. Still nervous, Warshaw said, “I could send a few more ships . . . just in case.”
“I’m going to take the ad-Din out there,” I said. “I want to get as many Marines on the ground there as possible.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
We were coming down to zero hour for the infiltrators. Hollingsworth began the day by sending out a fleetwide order recalling all combat armor. Until we sent out new orders, any man caught in armor would be detained, questioned, and ultimately have his chromosomes scanned.
With the cogs quickly falling in place, Freeman and I met at Fort Greeley, the local Marine base, for breakfast. Wanting to stay alert, I ate light that morning, a boiled egg, a cup of coffee, and toast. Freeman ate relatively light as well, four eggs, a whole damn p
ig’s worth of bacon, two cups of juice, no coffee, no toast.
“How did you get to St. Augustine?” I asked.
“I flew here,” he said.
“Another one-way ticket?” He could not have flown in on a stolen Bandit; the broadcast computers on those ships were set for Earth.
He shook his head. “I caught a ride in your broadcast network.”
Ships with onboard broadcast equipment blew up when they entered our network. If Freeman was telling the truth, he would have had to have come from one of our planets. I had a good idea which one it was.
“How is the weather in Odessa?” I asked. Odessa was the capital city of Olympus Kri.
Freeman favored me with a half smile, and said, “It depends how you feel about rain.”
“It beats the hell out of living in a desert,” I countered. I thought about the summer I’d spent in that concentration camp in the Texas badlands.
“I thought you liked the sun,” Freeman said.
I liked St. Augustine, with its coastal cities and languid days. I liked waking up to tropical mornings and going to sleep on balmy nights. I had no trouble forgetting time and seasons in places like this. Before the Avatari invasion, I’d spent a year living like a civilian in the Hawaiian Islands on Earth.
“Does Olympus Kri have the same seasons as Earth?” I asked.
“More or less,” Freeman said. “It rains hard in Odessa during the winter.”
I looked at the calendar on the wall and saw that the Earthdate was November 12.
In the time we were talking, Freeman methodically cleared his tray, occasionally gulping down an egg in a single bite.
“I’m not sure I can get any more ships to Olympus Kri,” I said. “Warshaw wants proof.”
Freeman nodded, and said, “Tell him to get used to having twenty-two planets in his empire.”
“We have a fleet circling the planet. We’ll outnumber them. Even if they send everything they have, we’ll still outnumber them.”
“You have sixty-eight ships in the area,” Freeman said.
“You know the size of our fleet?”
Freeman said nothing.
Sixty-eight ships, that was just a small fraction of what we’d had at Terraneau when the Unifieds came knocking. The Unified Authority attacked Terraneau with eighty-five ships and sent the four-hundred-ship Scutum-Crux Fleet running for cover.
“And you do not think that’s enough to protect the planet?” I asked.
Freeman did not speculate. When he knew the answers, he gave them; but he was not one for guessing.
“Have they figured out a way to attack our broadcast stations?” I asked.
Freeman downed a large glass of juice. “I haven’t heard anything either way,” he said. His low voice gave the words a rumbling timbre. His father had been a minister. Had he followed in his father’s shoes, Ray Freeman would have been one of those preachers who seemed to call down the heavens when they speak.
“Once the attack begins, we can call in a thousand ships if we need them,” I said.
Freeman said nothing.
I wondered what card he was hiding.
“I’m taking the ad-Din to Olympus Kri. If you want a ride back, I can take you,” I offered.
“I have a ship,” he said.
“What are you hiding, Ray?” I asked.
He did not answer.
At 11:00 STC (Space Travel Clock), Captain Villanueva held a shipwide briefing; attendance was mandatory. I personally prescreened two hundred Marines to run the security posts and patrol the corridors during the briefing. Villanueva screened a team of officers to man the bridge and Engineering.
On the Salah ad-Din, Marines and sailors did not commingle, not even for an all-hands briefing. The leathernecks attended a broadcast on the bottom deck, in the Marine complex. Sailors attended their briefing in a huge auditorium on the third deck.
I watched the scene outside the third-deck auditorium from an overlook as men lined up in crooked queues and waited to file through the doors. The talk was loud and came in indecipherable waves. I could not focus on a single conversation, there were too many going on at once, and I could not untangle the chatter of four thousand simultaneous discussions.
The MPs stood out with their helmets, armbands, and batons. At this stage, they would make no arrests. They had one standing order: “Everyone has to enter the auditorium through the security posts, no exceptions. Anyone discovered to have the Double Y chromosome will be quietly pulled aside.”
We had recalibrated posts on the inside of the auditorium doors. Prescreened MPs manned the computers. An army of MPs monitored the lines. If anyone tried to slip away, he was escorted back to his place.
Immediately below me, a sailor broke ranks, and four MPs descended upon him. They formed a circle, blocking his way. I tried to listen to what was said but could not hear a word of it.
Looking almost straight down on the scene, I could not see faces or expressions. Two of the MPs brandished their sticks, one of them slapping the end of it into his palm in a way that suggested he would gladly hit the sailor. The conversation went on for several seconds. When the sailor did not turn back, one of the MPs reached out and grabbed his shoulder. The man jerked free, then turned and returned to his place in line, unescorted.
Maybe he had argued that he needed to go to the head. Maybe the MPs had convinced him that he would not find his equipment in working order if he did.
As the sailor approached the door to the auditorium, he made a few furtive glances over his shoulder; but the MPs were right behind him. They remained in place, watching him as he stepped through the door.
A fight broke out in another line. A man grabbed the sailor in front of him and threw him to the floor. Three MPs ran to break up the fight, pushing gawking sailors out of their way and stepping between the downed man and his assailant.
They moved like cattle, these sailors did. They took slogging steps. They formed fuzzy lines that snaked down the hall. They moved slowly, more interested in talking and searching the crowd for friends than getting where they were going.
The sailor who had started the fight took a menacing step toward one of my MPs as he arrived on the scene. The MP drew his baton, but that seemed to mean nothing. The sailor took another step. When one MP tried to club him, the man caught his wrist and stopped the blow.
The other two MPs stepped in to help. One of them hit the man in the ribs, causing him to wince and cover the wound. Pressing his elbow over his battered ribs, the errant sailor returned to his spot in line. He might have been tough, but I did not think he was a Double Y.
Watching the drama closely, I almost missed the man at the end of the hall as he stole into the shadows with the grace of a phantom.
I shouted for help, but no one could hear me over all of the noise. Using the security Link built into my collar, I called for backup, then I charged after our rabbit. I dashed along the corridor, running in the same direction as the phantom, but one floor up. I could not see him; if he turned right or left, I would not know, and I would lose him.
Sprinting, swinging wide around a corner, I dashed down a set of stairs. I leaped the first flight, my arms pinwheeling as I flew through the air, and I crashed on the deck and into the wall, turned, and leaped the second flight.
“Where are you?” I yelled over the Link when I did not see MPs coming my way.
“They’re on their way. These halls are packed.”
“Get them here quickly,” I shouted.
The short sprint did not wind me, but my legs took a jolt as I came down the stairs. Behind me, I heard the cloud of conversations coming from outside the auditorium. I was at a T-junction. The corridors were empty to the right and to the left. I turned right, then changed my mind, and sprinted left.
The halls of the ad-Din were a labyrinth, with offshoots and avenues and hatches. Without seeing which way my rabbit had run, I had no prayer of finding him. And then I heard three shots. I ran back in the di
rection from which I had just come and spotted the blood on the wall and the two dead Marines. One sat with his back against the wall like a man taking a rest; the hole in his chest was large enough for me to fit my fist into it. The other man lay on the floor with his arms stretched before him.
So much for my backup. I radioed in for more reinforcements.
I was only a few seconds behind the clone. Now I could hear him running. It was the only sound in the hall.
If I could hear him, then he could hear me. He must have known I called in for help. Now in full pursuit, I ran around a corner, spotted the gun, and stepped back behind the wall in time to make him miss. He fired one shot, then silence. Hoping he was not waiting to ambush me, I jumped forward, dropped to my knees, and returned fire.
He was already gone.
My combat reflex began. I ran faster now, and the world seemed to slow down around me. I could hear the clone running and knew I would catch him. I sprinted down one hall, took a right turn, and spotted him. He spun, fired, missed by more than a yard, and took off running. I did not return fire.
He’d fired at least five shots. I suspected he took the gun from one of the dead MPs, meaning he had a clip that carried thirty rounds, with at least five spent.
He took a right turn into a long, narrow passage where he didn’t dare turn to shoot because there was nowhere to duck for cover. I was right behind him, my gun out. In the time it would take him to stop, spin, and aim, he knew I could cap him.
He was forty feet ahead of me, and I was gaining on him. My legs were longer. Another moment, and he was thirty-five feet ahead of me, then thirty, then twenty-five, my footsteps drowning out the sound of his. He was one of those full-body runners, every inch of him swinging with every step. His elbows cut through the air like pistons.
His steps slowed, his stride shortened, and he glided, then coasted, then stopped. He held his hands in the air, the muzzle of his pistol pointing to the ceiling, and he slowly turned to face me.
“Drop it,” I said.
He hesitated for just a moment, undoubtedly calculating the odds in his head, and the pistol fell from his hand. Without my giving the order, he stepped on the gun and slid it toward me.
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