Sitting at his desk in the security office, Cardston looked unchanged. He acted as he normally would, stiff and bureaucratic. “We’re still on alert, Admiral.”
General MacAvoy wanted to join the conversation. He cleared his throat and shifted in his seat. This was liar’s poker, though. He wasn’t fit to play. His “ram it up their ass” style made him a lousy liar.
Hauser kept the ball. He said, “I can’t make the summit tomorrow, that’s why I called this confab.”
Cardston asked, “You’re too busy to meet with the president?”
“You mean the acting president,” said Hauser, not missing a beat. “You will recall that Perry was next in line, and I’m in line after him, then Colonel Ritz . . .” He paused, turned to Ritz and asked, “Are you really just a colonel? How the hell did a colonel make third in line?”
Ritz said, “Yeah, Harris should have made me a two-star.”
“A colonel in charge. What a clusterspeck! I’ll have to fix that,” said Hauser.
“You gonna bust him down?” asked MacAvoy. “Maybe you should make him a private, that’s about as far as he would get in this man’s Army.”
“Get specked,” said Ritz.
“Watch it, Ritz; you’re speaking to a superior officer,” warned MacAvoy. Both of them were playing. Neither one of them had much in the way of respect for the other, but they knew how to work together.
Listening to Hauser throw his weight around, I had to stop myself from laughing. He played his role so brilliantly that Cardston only offered token resistance. He asked, “How can you be too busy to come to the summit? What’s more important than the future of the empire?”
Hauser asked, “Major, are you having problems with your equipment? How about you, MacAvoy? Do you read me?”
“Loud and clear, Admiral.”
“So the summit is off?” asked Ritz.
“There’s no need to cancel it, let’s just relocate that damn thing,” said Hauser, who seldom swore. He was trying to talk like the old natural-born admirals who ran the Navy in the days before the Enlisted Men declared independence, and was doing a pretty good job. “We can still hold a summit; we’ll just hold it on the Churchill instead.”
“Sounds good to me,” said Ritz.
“I’m in,” said MacAvoy.
“Wait,” said Cardston. “You just said you don’t have time for a summit, now you’re saying you do have time?”
“I have time for a meeting; I don’t have time to fly to Earth,” said Hauser. “I just checked the orbital charts; I’d be flying five hours each way. I’d spend more time en route than attending the meeting. Tell you what. I’ll send my personal shuttle to collect you three . . . by three, I mean Watson, MacAvoy, and Ritz. No offense, Major, but you’re in way over your pay grade.”
“I doubt President Watson has ten hours to spare,” said Cardston.
“You may be right,” said Hauser. “Why don’t you patch me through, and I’ll ask him.”
“He’s not available at the moment,” said Cardston.
“Is he using the head or something?” asked Ritz. Someone had to ask that question. It did not surprise me that Ritz asked first.
“He’s in meetings,” said Cardston.
“Major, I am the highest-ranking officer in the Enlisted Man’s Navy. You see these other men on the screen, the one in olive drab with the crew cut is the highest-ranking officer in the Enlisted Man’s Army. Now, you see that young guy with the nonregulation haircut, the one in the tan-colored shirt; he is the highest-ranking officer in the Enlisted Man’s Marines. Who in the hell could that civilian appointee be speaking with that is more important than the three of us?”
Cardston looked troubled. His eyes leaped to each of the men on the screen as he said, “I am sorry, sir. President Watson is not available.”
“I see,” said Hauser. “If he is too busy to get on the horn with us today, is there any reason we should not expect him to make an appearance at the summit?”
Remaining entirely calm, Cardston attempted to change the subject. He asked, “Will Harris be at the summit?”
Ritz’s smile faded ever so slightly. For a moment, I was afraid he would play it dumb and try to slip the momentary lapse past Cardston, the Enlisted Man’s Empire’s most effective interrogator. I could see the hawk in the major’s glare, as his eyes narrowed while the rest of his face remained impassive. He didn’t stare at any one officer; he watched all three of them.
Ritz, sticking as close to the truth as possible, said, “Freeman said something about locating Harris. That’s why I came down here. Now I can’t find Freeman.”
Hauser played the peacemaker. He said, “Major, all three of us have tried to reach Watson. We’re becoming concerned.”
“Well, I have spoken to him, and he wants to know if you’ve found Harris,” Cardston said, making no effort to hide the suspicion in his voice.
“No such luck,” Ritz repeated.
“What about Freeman. How do I reach him?” asked Cardston.
“Freeman? He’s that mercenary, right?” asked MacAvoy. “Why are we talking about a mercenary?”
“Because he is in the New Olympian Territories, and he might have found General Harris,” said Cardston.
“Let me get this straight. Harris is missing in the Territories, and Freeman is missing in the Territories. It’s starting to sound like the New Olympian Territories are dangerous. Maybe we should invade them,” said MacAvoy.
“An invasion seems so extreme,” said Hauser.
“How about a benevolent occupation?” asked MacAvoy.
“What would that accomplish?” asked Cardston, responding precisely as Hauser had predicted he would.
Flinging his words as precisely a knife thrower tosses daggers, Hauser said, “Major, that is a topic for the president and his senior-most officers to discuss. I see no point explaining myself to a junior officer.”
For the first time, the anger showed in Cardston’s eyes. He winced. He glared. He somehow managed to hold his tongue, but hate seethed in his expression.
Pretending not to notice, Hauser said, “Well, unless any of the rest of you object, perhaps we should take up this discussion again tomorrow . . . at the summit on my ship.”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-THREE
“You don’t really think Watson is coming to your summit tomorrow?” asked MacAvoy.
“Sure he will,” said Ritz. “I bet he rides out to Mars on Genghis Khan’s horse with good old ‘Honest Abe’ Lincoln holding the reins.”
MacAvoy, Ritz, and I now sat in the same office, facing a screen on which Thomas Hauser appeared. He was the officer in charge. He had control. Technically, MacAvoy and I outranked him, but I had long since learned my place as a Marine, and MacAvoy was a simple soldier. We had an unspoken agreement among us that the Navy would run the show.
Hauser was a good man for the job, smart and crafty, and he listened to what the rest of us had to say. He said, “I’ll send a shuttle to Bolling tonight . . . just in case; but I’m sending Marines in combat armor to guard it.”
“Good idea,” said Ritz. “I’ll have a full company guarding the spaceport.”
“Do you think they got to him?” asked MacAvoy. “Do you think they got to Cardston?”
“Obviously,” said Hauser.
They all turned to me for some reason, so I nodded and said, “Looks like it. The question is, did they get to all of them?”
“All of who?” asked MacAvoy.
“Everyone in the Pentagon,” said Hauser.
“How could they have gotten everyone in the Pentagon? It’s not like they gassed the building,” said MacAvoy. Seeing Hauser’s expression on the screen, he turned to me, and asked, “How the speck could they do that?”
Hauser said, “I don’t know, but that seems to be exactly what they did.”
I said, “It all fits together pretty neatly, doesn’t it. The only two natural-borns I knew in that building were Watson and
Tasman. Now I can’t reach either of them.
“Travis Watson, the acting president of the Empire, is missing, and no one in the Pentagon seems to have raised an eyebrow.”
“We’ll need to circumvent standard channels for the time being,” said Hauser. “We can keep Cardston pretty much out of the loop if we run all intelligence operations from my ships. Do any of you have a problem with that?”
“Good with me,” I said.
“Intelligence doesn’t matter to me,” said MacAvoy. I took this comment in stride, but Ritz and Hauser couldn’t keep from laughing.
“What if he produces Watson?” I asked.
“Can they reprogram Watson?” asked MacAvoy.
“He’s a natural-born,” said Hauser. “Natural-born brains don’t have programming.”
“That doesn’t mean shit, and you know it,” said MacAvoy. “They could still control him. He’s got a fiancée, right? I heard he was engaged. They could catch her and blackmail him. I like Watson, but he doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who puts up a fight.”
“And what about Tasman?” asked Hauser.
“He’s a scrappy old geezer,” I said. “He’ll break before he bends.”
“Who the hell is Tasman?” asked MacAvoy.
MacAvoy hadn’t been on Mars during the fighting, and, as he said, “intelligence didn’t matter to him.” The dumb speck had probably skipped out or slept through every briefing he’d ever attended.
“He’s a scientist,” said Hauser. “He was the U.A. genius who invented clone programming. He’s working for us now.”
“If he’s still alive,” I said.
Now that he was no longer the commandant of the Marines, Ritz remained silent as a church mouse through most of our meeting, but hearing the name Tasman, he flew into a rage. He said, “There is no way in speck that that old specker is still alive. That old boy is so dry, I bet he shits dust!”
Ignoring Ritz, Hauser asked, “So what do you suggest?” The question was directed at me. He didn’t care what Ritz or MacAvoy had in mind.
I said, “First things first—we need to contain the Pentagon. We need to know if anyone in the building is still on our side. We need to know who’s friends with Cardston and who’s still with us.”
“I can do that,” said MacAvoy. “Shut down the Pentagon, hooah! Just thinking about is giving me a woody.”
“Don’t get too erect, General,” I warned. “However they gassed Cardston, you know they’re going to try to get you the same way.”
“I hope they do,” he said. “I like it when my targets come to me.”
“We need somebody to find Watson,” I said.
“Since I’ll be in the neighborhood, I got that, too,” said MacAvoy. He added, “Harris, I’ve been looking for an excuse to run some combat scenarios around Capitol Hill.”
“What about me?” asked Ritz.
“You and I have a friend to find in the New Olympian Territories.”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FOUR
Location: Guanajuato, New Olympian Territories
Date: July 29, 2519
The boot kept Freeman’s ankle from swelling out of control, but it didn’t fix the sprain. Placing weight on the foot sent a shock up his leg. Freeman ignored the throbbing altogether, but the stab that ran through him when he placed weight on the foot was another story.
He anchored his mind on the present, not allowing himself to analyze the past or worry about the future. He listened to the rhythm of his breathing, slowed it, and let it carry him as he huddled in a blind, surrounded by rocks, high up on a cliff. He breathed slowly, rhythmically, taking the thin air deep into his gut. His stomach rose and collapsed with each breath. He breathed in through his nostrils, held the air for five seconds, and exhaled through his mouth. He drew in a breath and spooled it in his lungs as he selected his first target, aimed his rifle, and tightened his finger across the trigger.
Twelve men and five dogs, slightly more than a mile away. He had planned to shoot the dogs first. Now, as he examined the posse, he changed his priorities. Two of the men wore combat armor. If they were reprogrammed clones, the armor wouldn’t matter, but if they were natural-borns, their armor would be shielded. Once the shields went up, Freeman’s bullets wouldn’t hurt them.
He had to shoot the Marines first, hit them fast before they got their armor up, then shoot the dogs and the others.
Breathe in . . . feel the oxygen spreading through your body, the air brings strength, serenity, peace, he told himself. In Freeman’s twisted Zen, murder and meditation were sometimes one.
Freeman pointed his rifle first without using the scope, then fine-tuned his aim with the scope. The men in the armor stayed toward the back of the pack, away from the dogs. He targeted one, the reticle of his scope resting in the middle of the man’s head.
He inhaled, felt the air cooling his insides, held the breath for five seconds, and exhaled. His breathing was even and regular and calm as waves rolling in to shore.
At 09:00, the day was already bright and warm.
Freeman’s foot and ankle throbbed, but pain became a distant sensation . . . a fire on a faraway island. He could see the smoke. He knew it was there, but it was far away and he was at peace and the air washed in and out of his lungs like waves on a gentle sea.
Freeman didn’t care if the man he was targeting was kind or evil. Freeman didn’t wonder if the man had children or if his parents were yet alive. He didn’t let sympathy about wives or pets or burial arrangements enter his mind as he first centered the reticle on the man’s combat helmet, then slightly forward and high to compensate for distance and wind. The scope had circuits designed specifically to calculate wind, temperature, and distance, but Freeman trusted his instincts more than the circuits.
Working almost of its own volition, his finger pulled back on the trigger.
He fired the first shot, switched to the next target, then fired again. He was a mile away; his bullets would strike a moment before the sound of the gunfire caught up to them.
The men in the armor had no idea that death had come for them. They stood at the back of the pack chatting happily, letting the dogs and the men around them worry about Freeman.
The first bullet struck, hitting the man in the face, shattering his visor, the flattened slug dragging splinters of glass and filament behind it as it smashed into the front of his skull, passed through his brain, and exploded through the back of his head. The second Marine didn’t realize what had happened for an instant. Had he listened carefully during that instant, he would have heard the rumble of the report from Freeman’s rifle, but he wouldn’t have had time to digest what he’d heard before Freeman’s second bullet struck the side of his head.
The pack reacted, scattering like billiard balls after a break.
Still breathing slowly, his mind calmly in the present, his brain still in a Zen-like meditative state, Freeman went after the dogs. The hunters had kept them on electronic leashes, magnetic connections that allowed the animals to run freely around trees and rocks so long as they stayed within range.
With the electronic leashes restricting them, the dogs could not stray more than one hundred feet from their handlers. They darted quickly, springing unpredictably in every direction, but their leashes limited and confused them.
Freeman “dispatched them with extreme prejudice.” In his mind, the dogs were threats, not living creatures.
Once he was sure that the dogs were neutralized, he went after their handlers. A man threw the controls for an electronic leash aside and tried to dash down the path. Freeman fired, hitting him in the back, his bullet shoving the corpse like a wave washing a wreck in to shore.
Freeman didn’t waste time watching to see if his targets stayed dead. He didn’t care. They were no different than the dogs; wounded or dead, they no longer posed a threat.
One of the men crouched behind a rock holding a pistol in one hand and touching the pointer finger of the other against
the communications device clipped to his ear. Freeman shot him. The bullet cut a crease across the top of the man’s shaved head, leaving a gouge and burned skin. He dived into a shallow dent in the ground. Thinking no more clearly than a scared rabbit with nowhere to run, he’d left a good hiding place for a bad one. Freeman killed him with his second shot.
Two men tried to run to safety. Freeman hit both, then paused to reload. He dropped the clip from his rifle and replaced it with a preloaded spare. He hadn’t reloaded to continue the ambush, however. He could have hit some. Instead, he watched as posse survivors ran down the ridge. Now, having dissolved the hunting party, he slung the rifle over his shoulder and limped toward his sanctuary, his cave.
Far away, at the foot of the mountain, a U.A. gunship slid through the air.
The gunship no longer worried Freeman. He’d found the opening to a large mineshaft that would take him deep into the mountain. Once he entered the shaft, the gunship would no longer matter.
Freeman had surveyed the mineshaft during the night. The path he chose would take him through unstable caverns laced by timbers so old and dry they crumbled at his touch. If the Unifieds sealed the entrance behind him, he would find alternate tunnels, air vents, and caved-in areas through which he could escape. They could send an entire battalion to hunt him if they liked. One man or a thousand, it wouldn’t matter, not in that old mineshaft. In there, a grenade or bomb would kill a thousand men as likely as one.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FIVE
Location: Washington, D.C.
Date: July 30, 2519
The transports flew in before dawn.
Having been left to his own devices, General Pernell “Perry” MacAvoy decided to deal with the search and the Pentagon “the Army way.” He flew in the 3rd Corps, complete with its armor, cavalry, and two infantry divisions.
At 05:00, one thousand transports and dozens of larger, cargo-hauling aircraft appeared in the skies over Washington, D.C. The transports landed in metro-area spaceports, parking lots, military installations, civilian shopping malls, with a few stragglers touching down in public parks.
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