“What happened, Harris? Did the Earth Fleet crush you again?”
I had told him the truth, and he called me a liar. Maybe the truth was on both his side and mine. The Earth Fleet had indeed just served us a bloody defeat. Had any of our ships survived the attack at Olympus Kri?
“You’ve got it wrong,” I said, though perhaps he didn’t.
“You want us to evacuate our cities and send everyone underground,” Doctorow continued. “Wasn’t that how you won the last one; you invited the U.A. Marines into an underground garage, then you buried them?”
“Bullshit,” I said.
I expected Doctorow to tell me to watch my language; but now that the Right Reverend was president, bad language no longer seemed to concern him. “Interesting strategy you have there, Harris, persuade your enemies to go underground and bury them—”
“You’re not listening,” I said.
“Then you start the invasion while we’re digging ourselves out.”
“Invasion? What kind of invasion? I came in an unarmed shuttle.”
“We know about the other ship,” Doctorow said. “We picked up the anomaly when your fighter carrier broadcasted in. We’ve been tracking it for the last hour.”
So the ad-Din made it out, I thought. That ship might have been the only reason I was still breathing. Doctorow was scared of her, and that made him scared of me.
“I’m trying to save lives,” I said.
“By flying a warship into neutral territory?” Doctorow glared at me, and added, “I’m not afraid of you, Harris. I’m not afraid of you or your clones or your ships.”
He delivered the lines well, but I could tell that I frightened him. I could see it in his forced expression. I could hear it in his voice.
“I’m not the one you should be scared of,” I said.
That ended the meeting. He stood up and left the room without saying another word.
I did not want to die in this police station. I did not want to die saving this worthless planet. I imagined what would happen to this room when the heat hit nine grand, how the glass would melt, and the walls would turn a glowing orange.
Looking at the camera, I let my thoughts drift, rewinding my interview with Doctorow. I replayed my story and his response. What I hated most about his explanation was that it sounded more plausible than mine. How ironic, his fabrication sounded more reasonable than the truth.
On this planet, I was the boogeyman, and I would die because no one trusted me, even when I told the truth. Doctorow had his ideal society, all right. He’d created a fleeting utopia; and now that he’d built it, his citizens would burn.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Nobles and I spent the night in an underground cell, a small cage about ten feet long and ten feet wide with bunk beds, a sink, and a little chrome toilet that rose out of the floor like a tree stump. I’d stayed as a guest in worse accommodations. I’d stayed as a prisoner in better.
An ever-present camera, sitting like a bird on a perch, watched over us from outside our cell. I had no idea who was on the other side of the camera, but the winking red diode on its base told me it was live.
I lay on the top bunk, and Nobles took the bottom. We seldom spoke if ever. He never told me his thoughts. I had Ava on my mind. I needed to find her. I needed to get out of this prison. Thinking of that, I asked myself, How many prisoners fried in their cages on New Copenhagen? And that reminded me of the Double Y clones we left on Olympus Kri.
Time continued to pass slowly by.
The hall was empty but brightly lit. Lying on my bunk, I covered my eyes with my right forearm and tried to sleep. The light did not keep me awake, but my thoughts did. For that reason, I was awake when the visitor arrived.
He appeared in the corridor that ran along the outside of the cells. As he reached our cage, the door slid open.
The visitor was a clone with no unique scars to distinguish him, but I recognized him just the same. It was the way he carried himself, I think. Maybe it was his cheerful expression. “Mars, what are you doing here?” I asked, remembering that he had chosen to stay on Terraneau.
“I came to help,” he said. He stopped just outside the door and watched me, possibly made nervous by my hostile tone.
“I thought you were a loyal citizen of Terraneau,” I said. Not sure if I should trust a man who had chosen Doctorow and his utopia over the Enlisted Man’s Empire, I decided to rake Mars over the coals. If he took it too easily, I’d know he was a spy.
Still standing outside my cell, Mars said, “Half the planet would come if you asked them now. Anyone who’s got any sense is more scared of Doctorow than they ever were of you.”
I heard him, but thought I must have misunderstood. Something was wrong with a world in which a retired priest scared people more than a Liberator clone.
“Don’t you like living in a utopian society?” I asked.
“Don’t know; I haven’t seen any utopias lately,” Mars said. “Once you left, Doctorow decided that his society could only work if everybody participated, so he armed his militia and moved them into Fort Sebastian. That’s when things got bad.
“When people disagree with his government, Doctorow sees it as a threat to his perfect world. The man keeps lists of agitators. Many of them have disappeared.”
Muttering some sort of “Hail Mary,” Mars stepped into our cage, and said, “I’m just glad we got to you before he stashed you away in Outer Bliss.” Outer Bliss was a relocation camp on the other side of the planet. It was an entire town surrounded by razor wire and guard towers.
“That would have been bad,” I said, thinking that an apartment or maybe a house in Outer Bliss would have come with windows and a private toilet.
As Mars passed under a lamp, I noticed the flat sheen of his hair. I started to ask him about it, then I noticed that his irises were no longer brown, they were black. “What’s with your eyes?” I asked.
He looked up and down the hall as if making sure that no one could see him, then he held up a bunched-up wash-cloth covered with oily brown stains. He tried to give this to Nobles, but Nobles only stared at it.
“What’s that?” Nobles asked, not reaching for it.
“It’s a disguise to make you look like a clone,” Mars said.
“If someone comes into the building, we’ll pass you off as one of my men.”
Hesitating before accepting the grimy bundle, Nobles opened the cloth. Inside, he found a small tube, and looked at Mars questioningly.
“Hair dye to make your hair brown like a clone’s.”
“This?” Nobles asked, holding up a tiny bottle.
“Colored eye-drops that turn your irises brown.”
“Oh, to make me look like a clone,” Nobles said. “Brilliant.” He squeezed the tube onto his left palm, rubbed the brown spew between his hands, then ran it through his hair. The dye gave Noble’s hair the same muted shine as Mars’s.
Once he worked the dye into his hair, Nobles wiped his hands on the cloth. Next, he squeezed a couple of drops of iris dye into his eyes, changing their color from dirt brown to very nearly black.
“Perfect,” Mars said, feigning surprise. “You could walk into any base in the galaxy, and they wouldn’t spot you.”
And he did look like one clone, at least. He looked exactly like Lieutenant Mars.
“What about the guards?” I asked, pointing toward the camera. “Aren’t they watching us?”
“Sure they are, but they work for me,” said Mars. He walked right up to Nobles and checked the coloring in his eyes like a doctor examining a patient, then said, “Head out that door and up the stairs. My boys will take care of you.”
“Thank you,” said Nobles. He left in a hurry, jogging up the corridor and out the door.
As soon as Nobles was out of earshot, Mars said, “Sort of a waste of time putting brown hair dye and colored eyedrops on a clone; but with that whole death-reflex thing . . . you just can’t take any chances.” He sounded apologetic
.
So that was what had happened. Thinking he had blond hair and blue eyes, Mars had used the same disguise.
“The regulars won’t roll in until 06:00,” Mars said. “That gives us three hours.”
“We have bigger things to worry about than guards,” I said, and I gave him a brief description of the Avatari attacks on New Copenhagen and Olympus Kri. I also told him how the Unified Authority ambushed Warshaw. I thought it would take a long time, but the whole sorry tale took less than ten minutes.
“Why would they do that?” he asked. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“It makes sense from their point of view,” I said. “They want a disposable Navy to send out after the Avatari. By assassinating our command structure, they stand to inherit disposable ships, disposable crews, even a broadcast network for sending them into space.”
“But they’d be marooned. They’d be stranded . . .” He did not bother finishing the thought.
I finished for him. “Just like we were left stranded out here.”
“What do we do?” Mars said.
I told him about Tachyon D concentrations and temperature fluctuations, and said, “I think we probably have a few more days, but we want to be long gone before the temperatures start changing.”
“How can we check for tachyons?” he asked.
“I don’t know. The U.A. had a couple of dead scientists figure it out.”
He didn’t know who or what I meant, not that it mattered.
“I can have my men check the weather reports,” he said. “Tracking temperature changes shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Good place to start,” I said.
“What do we do about Doctorow?” Mars asked. “Do you think you can get him to see the light?” He must have already known the answer even as he asked the question. Doctorow would not listen to us, never in a million years.
I shook my head. “How do you make an enlightened man see the light?” I asked, amazed by my own pessimism. “He doesn’t trust me, and there is nothing I can do about it. Maybe it’s for the best. I’m going to have enough trouble getting you and your thousand engineers off the planet.”
As I said this, I remembered what Doctorow said about tracking a fighter carrier. “Do you know anything about a carrier circling the planet?” I asked.
Mars nodded. “It’s the Churchill. She’s hiding up in the graveyard.”
“What about the Salah ad-Din?”
He shook his head. “The only ship we’ve seen is the Churchill.”
“Good thing she’s there; we can use her to get off the planet,” I said. “Now for the next problem, I need to get a message to Ava.”
“Your girlfriend?” Mars asked.
“Ex-girlfriend. Do you think she knows I’m here?” Though the question was more for me than for Mars, I asked it out loud.
“She probably doesn’t. Doctorow is trying to keep the whole thing quiet.”
By this time, a couple of hours had passed, and Nobles appeared at the door of the cell. His hair still had that matted sheen and his irises were black as wet rock. The door slid open, and he stepped in. He and Mars traded places. Nobles went to the sink and began rinsing the gunk out of his hair and eyes.
“Are you sure you can trust her?” Mars asked as he left the cell. “If she’s not with you anymore, I mean—”
I put up a hand to stop him. “We could always kidnap her,” I said. I was joking.
Mars smiled, and said, “Now there’s an interesting option,” and he left our jail cell a free man. Nobles and I spent the rest of the night locked behind bars.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
The inquisition began again at 07:00.
Armed guards ushered Nobles and me out of our cell. I wasn’t asleep when they came, but I was awfully tired from the long night.
As they had the day before, the guards placed Nobles in one room and me in the next. The waiting game began again. I sat in the soundproofed room, staring into the coin-sized camera lens that watched me from behind a bulletproof window, wondering when and how I would make my next move.
I was still slumped in that chair, fighting exhaustion but fully awake, when my new interrogator entered the room. He did not arrive alone. He came with a matched set of three guards in Marine combat armor. The man was tall and thin, with a gray handlebar mustache that extended well past the corners of his mouth. He had a familiar face. I could not dredge up the memory of where I had seen him before, so I dismissed him as just another militiaman.
“Well, well, Wayson Harris, I always expected you to end up in here,” the man said. Clearly he knew me, and I got the feeling he bore a grudge.
His guards planted themselves on either side of the door, where they stood as still as statues. The armed guards weren’t necessary. I would not try to escape, not yet. I would wait for Mars.
“Tell me about your plans to recapture Terraneau,” the interrogator asked as he sat down in the chair on the side of the table. He spoke in an easy, informal way.
“I have no interest in retaking this planet,” I said.
“Oh, right. I heard about that. You came here to warn us. Wayson Harris the Liberator messiah.
“We spotted two more fighter carriers this morning.”
“Now there are three of them,” I muttered to myself. Things were looking up.
“What’s with all that firepower if you are here to rescue us?” I locked eyes with him. He was one of those guys who meets your stare and doesn’t blink and doesn’t look away because he thinks it’s some sort of macho challenge. I played along for a second, winked and smiled and had a look around the room. Metal chairs, wall-mounted camera, armed guards, locked door . . . yup, I was in prison.
I wondered which carriers had made it out. The ad-Din had almost certainly survived. Could the Kamehameha have made it to the zone? The thought left me elated.
“I didn’t actually bring them with me,” I said. “It’s more of a rendezvous.” For some reason, I felt fidgety. I caught myself tapping my fingers on the table and dropped my hands to my thighs. Alarms sounded in my head, and it wasn’t fear. Something was about to happen, I could feel it.
Like animals sometimes do, I sensed a coming storm, but I did not know the nature of that storm.
“Are there more ships on the way?” the interrogator asked.
“I sure hope so,” I said, thinking of the U.A. barges.
“Where is the rest of your fleet?” he asked.
I sighed. “That depends what you mean by my ‘fleet.’ If you mean the Scutum-Crux Fleet, most of it is in the Cygnus Arm. If you mean the Enlisted Man’s Fleet, that’s all over the galaxy.”
Doctorow, his high-minded ideals now mingled with paranoia, would probably object to my being tortured; but that did not mean he wouldn’t have me executed. He’d happily leave me locked up until he was sure I posed no threat.
I could wait this out. Mars needed time to make the arrangements. I knew he needed time, but I couldn’t get past the feeling that something was about to happen. A bomb was about to explode, or a gun was about to go off, or a planet was about to go up in flames. Or was it just a case of nerves?
“I’m going to ask you again. How many ships do you have in your fleet?” The man sounded like he had run out of patience.
“I really don’t know,” I said, not thinking about what I was saying. “It depends how many ships survived the ambush.”
“What ambush?” he asked.
I saw no reason to hide the whole truth, not anymore. “I told Doctorow that we helped evacuate Olympus Kri. What I did not tell him was that the Unified Authority attacked us after the evacuation. They caught us napping, and we lost some of our ships.”
“So you came here looking for asylum?”
“I came here hoping to pull your worthless asses out of a fire,” I said. Not the most politic response, but at least it was honest.
“That’s what you told President Doctorow. He didn’t believe you either,” he said, pic
king up a clipboard, presumably looking over notes from the previous interrogations. “You told him that aliens have attacked two other planets, and they are coming here to kill us.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said.
“You wouldn’t?”
“You’ve got your head so far up your ass, the aliens might not notice you,” I said.
He looked up from his clipboard and gave me a plastic smile. He wanted to hit me, I could see it in his eyes. He stood, squared his shoulders, placed the clipboard on the table. “So you came here to warn us? To be honest with you, Harris, I always thought you were a coward. I still do.
“We lost every man and vehicle we sent out with you when you took on the aliens . . . every last man. Everybody died but you. You came waltzing out of it without a scratch.”
Behind the interrogator, one of the guards moved his right hand along the grip of his gun. You need to be a very good shot to cover a target in a fistfight; otherwise, you’re just as likely to shoot the man you are trying to protect.
“Are you saying I hid during the fight?” I asked, on the verge of laughing in the man’s face.
“A lot of good men died trying to help you,” the interrogator said. “One of them was my brother.”
“O’Doul,” I said, finally putting a name with the guy’s face. “Your brother died saving me.”
“What a mistake that was,” he said.
I started to respond, then stopped. “If you don’t want me on your planet, just say the word. I’ll take my pilot and my shuttle and head home.”
“It’s too late for that, Harris. You should not have returned in the first place.”
“Doctorow wants me off the planet, but he’s not going to let me leave. Is that how things work on Terraneau now? Is he planning to kill me or just bury me in a jail cell?” I wondered how far Doctorow and his friends would go to protect their utopian society.
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