A voice shouted through my inner chaos, begging me to say that nothing had changed. I had tender feelings for Kasara, but I didn’t love her, so I ignored that voice.
She had once been beautiful, but what she’d suffered on Mars had taken that away. The glow of the fire accentuated the sunken hollows of her cheeks, and I couldn’t see the color of her eyes.
A few seconds passed as we regarded each other in a standoff. I don’t know if Kasara was afraid of me or afraid of rejection, but she kept her distance. Pugh was afraid. All the kingpin’s horses and all the kingpin’s men couldn’t protect him from the Marines with the guns.
Pugh and his men had brought their families to the park for a party of some sort. The women sat around a table covered with food served on paper plates. I saw the trappings of games—a finish line for races, plastic swords, and long straps of cloth that might have been used as blindfolds in a game of Blind Man’s Battle.
Neither ignoring Kasara nor specifically paying attention to her, I said, “We found Ray Freeman. The doctors aren’t sure if he’ll last the night.”
“Freeman, I didn’t know that man could be hurt,” said Pugh.
“Apparently, he can,” I said.
Most of the people remained silent and sober. A few feet behind Pugh, a man sat alone at a table. He had a cast on his arm. Hearing about Freeman, he smiled. By the fading bruises on his face and the way he clenched his teeth, I knew that his jaw had been broken, and I had a good idea about who had broken it. He was a big man. Until he’d run into Freeman, he’d probably been Pugh’s fiercest enforcer.
Standing in front of his family and his employees, Pugh didn’t allow himself to show fear. He sat silent, trying to form questions that would not make him sound overly concerned.
I asked, “Want to take a drive with us?”
Pugh looked at his minions, then back at me. Perhaps he hoped that his friends would forbid us from taking him. Nobody moved. He said, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“Sure it is,” I said. “We can have the conversation right here if you want. I don’t mind, but you seem like a man who values his privacy.”
Pugh nodded. Two of his men started to object, but he told them he would be back shortly. I’d read the Bible a time or two. I wondered if Christ told his apostles the same thing before walking off with the Romans.
Kasara darted between us. She said, “I’m coming along.”
Pugh put up a hand, and said, “Kassie . . .”
I interrupted, and said, “We have room for a fourth.”
So there it stood. Kasara and her uncle climbed into the jeep. She sat behind me on the passenger side of the jeep. Pugh sat behind Ritz.
“Where are we going, sir?” asked Ritz.
“East,” I said.
“East,” he repeated. “East to anyplace in particular?”
“East to where the town is dark, and we have the street to ourselves.”
We were on the west side of town, not far from shore, in an area with families and streetlights. The engineers had not yet reclaimed the east side of town.
After a few miles, we left the lights and sounds of Mazatlán behind us as we entered an ancient neighborhood with unlit streets and run-down hundred-year-old homes. Most of the buildings had faded away, many had collapsed. The chain-link fences that surrounded each property seemed good as new.
No one spoke until I said, “Pull over here.”
Ritz drifted over to the side of the road and stopped. There we sat, everybody watching me, waiting for me to set the tone. I said, “Help me make sense of all of this.”
A strong wind blew through the neighborhood, rattling fences, whistling through broken windows and fallen doors. The partial moon did little to brighten the sky. Stars winked between patches of cloud.
Pugh said, “I told you, Freeman went to kill Petrie as favor to me.”
“Yeah, I got that,” I said. “The Unifieds sent a lot of firepower out to stop that from happening. I went through that village; they had tanks and guns. The Unifieds sent four gunships and a lot of men. Why did they care so much about Petrie?”
Silence. I saw Kasara’s face in the filtered moonlight and the glow from the dashboard. She looked worried. She looked from me to her uncle and back again.
Pugh said, “Maybe they weren’t protecting Petrie. Maybe they were after Freeman.”
“No doubt,” I said. “How did they know Freeman was on his way?”
He shrugged his shoulders, and said, “I have no idea.”
I said, “Well, Petrie is dead, and so are a lot of his men. Can you tell me why the Unified Authority would have loaned Petrie tanks and jeeps?”
Kasara said, “Wayson, you’re not being fair. How would he know that?” I heard scolding in her voice.
Pugh, though, he understood. He said, “Are you sure they were his? Why would a gangster living in a camp in the mountains want tanks? People in my line of business don’t overdo their firepower, it scares away our customers.”
Fair point, I thought. “Then why were they there?”
“If I had to guess,” said Pugh, “I’d say they didn’t belong to him. I’d say they still belonged to the Unies. I’d say the real owners of those tanks might have placed them in Petrie’s camp for safekeeping.”
“But if Petrie is a play . . . was a minor player, why would the Unifieds trust him to guard their equipment?” I was guessing, trying to make sense out of a puzzle with missing pieces.
“He was a big deal on Olympus Kri. He was the only one who kept his organization running on Mars.”
I thought about that. Could Petrie have been some kind of U.A. strongman before the alien invasions? Not likely. If he’d had friends on the Linear Committee, they would have slipped him off Mars.
“So you told Freeman about Petrie and asked him to make a hit. Is that right?”
“You sent a man to kill Ryan Petrie?” asked Kasara.
“Kassie, we’re fighting for our lives here. You don’t see it, but there’s a war going on, and the first ones to go will be the ones who play nice,” said Pugh.
“Oh, in that case you should be real safe,” Kasara said, sounding sarcastic and angry.
“Kassie . . .”
I cut him off. I asked, “What else did you tell Freeman?”
Pugh started to say something, then stopped and rethought the comment. He seemed to riffle through a list in his head, sometimes even nodding to himself as he did. After some inner dialogue, he said, “I’ve told you everything . . .”
He was a bright man, not especially honest, and always looking for an angle, but bright. Watching him now, I got the feeling he would rather die than give me whatever information he was hiding. Men like him always wanted some form of hidden insurance. Shoot them during a card game, and you would inevitably find aces up their sleeves.
Pugh was hiding something. It might not have been particularly incriminating; it didn’t need to be incriminating for him to hold it close to his vest. Hell, he had already confessed to selling me out. What could be more incriminating than that?
I toyed with the idea of drawing my gun and threatening him. It wouldn’t have worked. I could have threatened Kasara instead. No. No, I really couldn’t have done that. Even now, I felt tenderness toward her.
She sat silently, watching me and her uncle. If she’d known anything, she would have told me.
Do you love her? I asked myself. Maybe I would come back to find out after I finished with Nailor.
“I showed him where the Unifieds landed . . . the ones who tried to kill you. I showed him their diving equipment. That was when he agreed to take care of Petrie; before that, he didn’t seem very interested.”
I said, “Brandon, you’ve been holding out on me. Diving equipment?”
• • •
The party had ended by the time we returned to the settled side of the city. The park sat dark and mostly empty. I noticed two men sitting in a clearing, concealed by trees and bus
hes. Sentries, Pugh’s men, sent to watch for his return and probably unarmed.
Pugh made no effort to signal them as we went by. I suppose he didn’t need to. They knew he was in our jeep. How many EME jeeps would be on the streets of Mazatlán at that time of night?
We passed the park and entered a wealthy neighborhood, driving past large homes that did not quite qualify as mansions along a street that snaked its way down the face of a hill that overlooked the ocean. Pugh had moved into a large home with a million-dollar view that might well have needed a million dollars’ worth of repairs.
The house wasn’t empty. People had gathered just inside the house, dozens of them. As we pulled to the front, the door swung open, and Pugh’s henchmen filed out.
They saw him and us and made no move. We had guns and he wasn’t bleeding; they had no reason to attack and plenty of reason not to. I’ve seen men who can beat a gunman with a knife. Maybe some of Pugh’s boys could, but that always depended on the gunman’s readiness and the guy with the knife’s proximity.
Pugh wanted us happy. He wanted allies. In a loud voice that all his men could hear, he announced, “Harris, I’m taking you out back.” He’d said that to us, but he’d meant it for his men. He was telling them that everything was fine and copacetic and that they should back off.
So Pugh and I and Ritz headed down the steep slope toward the back of the house. The only person who followed us was Kasara. She clearly knew her way around the place. I wondered if she lived here as well.
The porch at the back of the house was as old as mankind and so rickety I thought I could topple it with a sneeze. Because the house was built on the side of a steep hill, the stilts supporting that porch were twenty feet tall.
Ritz stared up into the wobbly matrix of planks and beams and whistled. He asked, “Is the whole house built on toothpicks?”
It wasn’t the porch that Pugh wanted to show us. He answered Ritz by saying, “The foundation is cement.”
Ritz said, “So what, the porch is like a burglar alarm? If any bad people try to break into your house, the porch falls down on top of them?”
Pugh looked at me, and asked, “Is he always this funny?”
“Not when he gets angry,” I said.
The old thug didn’t have an answer for that. Apparently tongue-tied, he opened the door and led us into the space under the house.
There, sitting on the crumbling concrete slab, were three sets of SCUBA gear. I took one look at them and saw exactly what Freeman must have seen, and a cold chill ran down my spine. Standard Marine combat armor is watertight and good to go for a swim of twenty or thirty feet. Of course, the engineers who designed our gear meant for us to use it in outer space, where bodies burst open because of the lack of atmospheric pressure. The SCUBA gear Pugh had hidden under his house was designed to protect clones against external pressure, to keep a man’s guts and lungs from collapsing under the considerable weight of deep, deep water.
The clones who had tried to kill me hadn’t just come from the ocean, they’d come from deep beneath the sea.
CHAPTER
FIFTY-THREE
Location: Flying from Mazatlán to Washington, D.C.
Date: August 5, 2519
Hauser and I sat across the table from each other on his shuttle. Perry MacAvoy joined us via a confabulator. Looking at him through the window, it looked like he was actually in the cabin.
“They’ve gotten smarter,” said MacAvoy. “They used to start wasting their batteries the moment the shooting started. Now they’re carrying spare batteries, and they don’t switch their shields on without encouragement.”
“What kind of encouragement?” asked Hauser.
“Snipers and mortars, mostly,” said MacAvoy. “When we pick off a couple of guys in a platoon, the rest of them turn on the juice.”
I asked, “How is your situation?”
MacAvoy and I were members of an exclusive club to which Hauser would never be admitted. We were ground pounders, foot soldiers, men who took their chances on the battlefield. Hauser fought his battles from the comfort of his bridge, drinking coffee, dressed in his service uniform, making his ship perform the same sorts of maneuvers we performed on our feet.
“They took back some of the city, but they aren’t getting any more,” said MacAvoy. “We can keep them bottled up as long as they don’t get reinforcements. They’re down to thirty or forty thousand men; sooner or later, they are going to run out of stiffs.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “They may have just as many men as we do.”
“Bullshit,” said MacAvoy.
“It doesn’t matter if they do,” said Hauser, sounding formal and more than a little prissy. “We’ve got our entire fleet blockading the planet. They might have been able to slip a spy ship or two past us . . .”
“And a destroyer,” said MacAvoy. “They slipped that bitch right under your nose.”
“Yes, thank you for reminding me,” said Hauser. “I had almost forgotten about that.
“We have our ships parked tight around the planet right now.”
“That would hold them if they didn’t already have their boots on the ground,” I said. Then I dropped the punch line; I said, “They’re hiding in Cousteau underwater cities. Admiral, the reason you didn’t spot them flying into the city is because they came in underwater from the Chesapeake Bay.”
When I explained about the SCUBA gear that Pugh had shown me, Hauser said, “That doesn’t prove anything . . . nothing at all.” Then I brought up something Hauser should have noticed on his own. I said, “Gunships and transports keep materializing above the ocean, either you’re running a shitty blockade, or those birds are already down here, down deep, someplace where our satellites don’t see them.”
MacAvoy said, “Speck. How the hell are we gonna hit ’em down there?”
That was going to be a problem. Four hundred years had passed since the nations of the world merged under the watchful umbrella of the Unified Authority. There’d been no reason to maintain a Wet Navy for over four hundred years. All of our boats now floated in space. Submarines ceased to exist. Once mankind turned its attention to colonizing space, guarding oceans no longer mattered.
• • •
Back in 2110, as more and more nations signed pacts with the Unified Authority, the French government created the Cousteau Oceanic Exploration Program, an initiative that involved the creation of several underwater cities. The initiative died after a few short years, and no one knew what became of the underwater cities.
Somebody once told me that one of the cities, which the French had named Mariana, was built in a deep trench somewhere in the Pacific. From what I had heard, Mariana could only hold a few thousand people, but it might have been one of the smaller sites.
This was all theoretical. The French had supposedly shut the Cousteau program down in 2115. The cities they built must have survived, though. All of the attacks—the Pentagon, Sheridan Penitentiary, and Washington, D.C., had taken place near coastlines. We always spotted their gunships and troop carriers coming in over the ocean and assumed that meant they had been dropped there from outer space. Bad assumption.
• • •
Hauser and I spent the rest of the flight discussing undersea cities and how to destroy them. We hadn’t come up with any workable solutions by the time we reached Washington, D.C.
As the shuttle touched down, Hauser asked me a question that I didn’t want to answer. He asked, “How much of this is personal, Harris? How much of this is you and your need for revenge?”
Amazingly, I hadn’t even mentioned Franklin Nailor at this point.
• • •
We had gunships and fighters flying over Washington, D.C. We had troops and convoys evacuating the city. Not all of the civilians we evacuated came willingly, but most did. We sent troops to patrol neighborhoods and armed those who stayed behind with orders to shoot looters on sight.
MacAvoy’s soldiers enjoyed shooting looters. The
y considered looter shooting a cross between MP duty and target practice.
We touched down in a secure area on the northeastern corner of the city, and I immediately recognized the trappings of a war zone. Soldiers patrolled the perimeter of the landing field. Looking around the field, I saw tanks and sentry drones and guard towers.
Standing beside me as we prepared to step off the shuttle, Hauser whispered, “This all seems a little draconian, don’t you think?”
I said, “This is how you fight battles when you’re not floating in space.”
He caught my drift, and said, “Oh.”
Hauser seemed nervous. He was a talker under normal circumstances. On this day, he couldn’t stop talking. He made stupid little puns and hemmed and hawed.
We had come to take a tour of the battlefield. A fighter escort circled overhead. MacAvoy had a gunship prepped and waiting just a few dozen yards away. He met us as we stepped off the shuttle and saluted. He asked, “Are you sure you don’t want some time to rest before we head out?”
Hauser said, “Now is as good a time as any.”
I said, “I don’t know about you soldiers, but we Marines don’t rest until the battle’s over, General.”
He said, “I always heard it the other way around. I always heard that you Marines didn’t battle until your rest is over.”
I called him “Cannon fodder.” He called me “Leatherneck.”
Thomas Hauser rolled his eyes and boarded the gunship ahead of us. We followed like dogs on a leash.
Never let it be said that armored gunships are fast, aerodynamic, or shielded. They are slow, ponderous, bloated birds covered with weapons and heavy armor. They don’t have shields because you can’t fire rockets and bullets from within a shield, and the whole point of gunships is to deliver missiles and rockets and chain-gun fire. Gunships aren’t really helicopters; they’re more like flying tanks.
The overhead rotors ran merry-go-round laps around the gunship as we strapped ourselves into our seats. The whirl of the rotors rocked the bird and everyone inside her. The churn was loud, too. Every turn of the blades echoed in my ears.
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