CHAPTER TWENTY

The carrot that Bryce Klyber dangled in front of me, Che Huang delivered: an honorable discharge. With just a word from Huang, I was Lieutenant Wayson Harris, Unified Authority Marines retired. My permanent record did not even contain the word, “Liberator,” not that I doubted Huang’s intention to add it back the moment I caught up to Halverson.

“What are you going to do next?” Freeman asked me as we left Schofield Barracks.

“I need to pick up Halverson’s trail,” I said. “Whoever put the cables on Bryce Klyber’s ship was working with Halverson. That means Halverson was spying for the Separatists or the Confederate Arms.”

“It looks that way,” Freeman agreed.

“Last place I saw him was in the Golan Dry Docks. I figure that’s the place to start.”

Freeman dropped me off at Honolulu Airport, then went to return his rental car. I did not trust Huang. I would never trust him, but I thought this might be a good time to see if he had kept his word. Instead of going out to the field with the private planes, I passed through the tighter security at the commercial terminal where they had DNA-scanning posts for outgoing passengers.

The last time I had passed through one of these stations was just two days earlier, and I had been spotted as Wayson Harris the Liberator. This time I had no idea how the computer would label me. I might be an AWOL Marine or a Liberator or a dead Marine. As I approached the posts, I heard the quick blast of air as it wafted across the man ahead of me. I looked at the armed guards inside the station and wondered if testing my identity so soon was a mistake.

The guard on the other side of the posts, a civilian in an outfit designed to look like an old fashion police uniform, motioned me forward. As I stepped forward, I considered everything that would happen in the next three seconds. One of the jams would hit me with a burst of air. The other jam would inhale the air and any debris it shook loose. A bank of computers would scan my DNA. If the computer warned the guards that I was a Liberator in the Orion Arm . . . as I thought about it, being recognized here would be more dangerous than being recognized in the Golan Dry Docks. Here, in the Orion Arm, where Liberators were illegal, being spotted might be fatal. I was betting my life that Admiral Che Huang was a man of his word. What was wrong with me?

The guard, a grubby man whose shirt barely fit over his jostling beer belly, hardly noticed me as I stepped between the posts. He had a pistol. There was no bulletproof glass around this security station, but I noticed a dozen armed guards around the area.

A warm and humid breeze blew through the open-air lobby of the terminal. Most people stepped right through the posts, but I stood my ground waiting to see what would happen. The security guard looked at me curiously. “You okay?” he asked.

I looked around the station, other people were watching me curiously as well. No one reached for their guns. “Yes,” I said. “I’m more than okay. I’m street-legal.”

The man gave me a suspicious look, but what could he do? His high-tech security equipment had searched both me and my identity.

I walked across the terminal and followed signs to the private pilots/corporate jets terminal. Nobody stopped me when I asked for my plane, and I left Hawaii without incident. I was for all intents and purposes, a free man.

This time I would use the Broadcast Network. I saw no point in advertising that I still had my hands on a self-broadcasting transport. If Huang knew I had a self-broadcasting ship from the Doctrinaire , he would demand its return and possibly keep the ship for himself. After all, the good will that now existed between us only went so far.

I put in a call to Colonel McAvoy, the head of security at the Golan Dry Docks as I started the long trip to Mars. I asked him if he had searched Klyber’s C-64 for listening devices. He said, “No,” but said that he would and that he would get back to me shortly. The Unified Authority’s only fleet admiral had died on his watch. McAvoy’s career would be as good as over unless he caught the murderer. Ten minutes after we hung up, Colonel McAvoy called back to say that he had located a wide array of spying devices.

“That clears Adam Boyd,” I said.

“Spying devices clear the guy?” McAvoy asked.

“I talked with Huang,” I said. “Boyd was Huang’s man, and Huang admits having Boyd plant the devices. Why bother planting mikes and cameras on the ship if you plan to kill the passengers?”

“Spying as an alibi for murder,” the colonel observed. “That’s a new one.”

“I need whatever information you can get me on the rest of the maintenance team,” I said. “And get me anything you can on Admiral Halverson. I need to know where he went when he left the Dry Docks, and I need to know if he went alone.”

One of the niceties of crossing such highly trafficked airspace as the lanes between Earth and Mars was that you did not need to pilot your own ship. With thousands of ships traveling at millions of miles per hour in a relatively small pocket, collisions would be inevitable without computers seizing control of every spacecraft. Pilots who refused to relinquish control were given mere moments to turn around before squadrons were scrambled from Mars Station to shoot them down.

Now that I was a legitimate citizen, I chose the conservative route. I logged my travel plans into the Mars traffic control computer and allowed it to schedule my route through the Broadcast Network. From here on out, I would not need to touch a flight stick or turn a knob until the Network spilled me out a few minutes from the Dry Docks.

I leaned back in my chair and stared out the window at the endless blackness of outer space. Stars winked in the distance. Out here I could see the colors of the planets. Jupiter, a dust-colored marble with horizontal stripes, loomed off to the right. Mars, not really red but tan with a rust-colored patina, floated in the darkness dead ahead.

I looked back at the dimly lit cabin behind me. The passenger seating was no more comfortable than my pilot’s chair, but I liked the idea of leaving the cockpit. Taking my mediaLink shades, I slipped into the first chair behind the cockpit and reclined it as far back as it would go. The top story of the day was Bryce Klyber’s funeral. Several sites, both civilian and military, showed the service in its entirety. The faces of the guests taking up the front two rows of Arlington Chapel were remarkably similar to to those sitting around the table at the summit. Smith and the other Joint Chiefs were there along with their aides. In enlisted man lingo, “There were so many stars and bars in that funeral you would have sworn you were touring a flag factory.”

Huang was there. I expected him to have a secret grin or at least the smug sneer with which he customarily greeted the world, but he did not. Huang stared straight ahead at the glossy black casket that lay on the stand. He did not look arrogant or satisfied. If anything, he looked worried.

“Hello, Judas,” I said when I saw Captain Leonid Johansson was there as well. Captain was a much higher rank in the Navy than it was in the Marines. But even as a Navy captain, Johansson looked like a piker in this setting. The chapel was filled with admirals, generals, and famous politicians. The Joint Chiefs and members of the Linear Committee sat on the front pew. I looked for people who might be Klyber’s family and saw no one. After the service, as I filtered through ancillary stories, I learned that Klyber had never married. He’d outlived his siblings. Except for the Navy, he was alone. In the grand tradition of Washington D.C. funerals, this service droned on and on. I wondered if I would reach Mars before it ended. First there was some dreary organ music. Then a Protestant minister stood up to speak. The man gave a thirty-minute sermon over the dead body of a devout atheist. I imagined Klyber’s ghost rising from the coffin to say, “Listen to this rubbish, not over my dead body.”

After the sermon came the eulogies. I thought military men kept their speeches short, but General Alexander Smith of the U.A.A.F. went on for forty-five frigging minutes. Next came two of Klyber’s pals in politics. I expected them to drone on and they did not disappoint. A small red emergency beacon flickered on and off at the bottom of my vision. By flicking my eyes at the flashing symbol, I brought up the call.

“Harris, are you seeing this?” Freeman asked.

“Seeing what?” I asked, though I really wanted to say, “Ray, nice to hear from you. Yes, the flight has been good so far. And how are you?”

“Gateway Outpost is under attack,” said Freeman.

I knew Gateway. It was a habitable planet in the area where the Orion and Sagittarius arms met. The space around Gateway was a high-security zone even though Sagittarius and Orion were the only arms that remained fully loyal to Earth.

Both the Central Sagittarius Fleet and the Inner Orion Fleet patrolled that area. As I considered this, I realized it could take days or weeks before ships would arrive to help Gateway. The Inner Orion Fleet patrolled a channel that was 10,000 light years deep. The Central Sagittarius Fleet covered an area that was more than 30,000 light years. Getting to a planet like Gateway would only take a couple of minutes if either fleet happened to be near the Broadcast Network. It could take weeks if they were in deep space.

Without saying a word, I switched to the Galactic News Service. The GNS was an organ of the Unified Authority internal structure and a propaganda machine, but it offered the most up-to-the-moment information. GNS reporters traveled everywhere, including planets that had declared independence from the Republic.

The picture before my eyes was one of grand destruction. The legend on the screen said, “New Gibraltar” in light blue letters that seemed to glow over the pitch-black sky. New Gibraltar was the capital city of Gateway. Gateway Outpost, the local Marine base, was on the outskirts of the city. In the center of the picture, a dying Marine base crumbled before my eyes. Its three green particle beam cannons fired into the air lighting up the midnight sky. On a major base like this Gateway Outpost, there should have been a hundred cannons. No buildings remained on the streets around the fort. Flames danced on the shattered remains of what might have been hotels and business centers. The fort itself, a five-or six-story affair, was shrouded in darkness. Sections of the outer wall had fallen. A red beam, as wide around as a highway tunnel, flashed down from the sky. It seared one corner of the fort. Cement exploded into smoke and flames and another cannon went dead as more of the wall tumbled to the ground.

“When did this happen?” I asked.

As if hearing my question, a tickertape image along the bottom of the screen appeared. “Live Feed.”

“The attack started a couple minutes ago,” said Freeman.

There was movement on the street near the base of the fort. Twenty men, maybe as many as thirty, skirted around the remains of blasted buildings and wrecked vehicles. They were on foot, running quickly, and hiding behind cover. “The scouts have arrived,” I said.

“It has to be a demolition team,” Freeman said. “There aren’t enough of them for anything else.”

“Who are they?” I asked.

“The Pentagon won’t speculate until after the battle,” Freeman said. “I’m guessing they’re Mogats. Amos Crowley is probably someplace nearby coordinating the attack.”

Freeman and Crowley had history, and Freeman wanted to settle that score. He wished he was in New Gibraltar, I could hear it in his voice. Freeman may have considered himself a mercenary, but he mostly collected bounties. Crowley was the prize he wanted most.

The majority of the Marines in the base must have been dead or wounded. However many were left, they did not put up much of a fight as the commandos closed in. Somebody managed to mount a machine-gun nest on the wall and a perforated line of tracer fire rained down into the street. A commando fired a shoulder-mounted rocket at the nest. The rocket streaked through the air leaving a trail of glare and smoke. Dust clouds exploded out of the wall where the machine gun had been. The tracer fire stopped.

The commandoes divided into teams that now stormed ruins of the fort. They sprinted the last yards to the base, dodging around holes and debris and overturned cars in the near darkness of the night. I viewed all of this knowing that I was connected to these events and yet somehow I felt detached. What did I care if the Republic fell? The only people I ever considered friends were in the Unified Authority military—Bryce Klyber and Vince Lee, my old buddy from the Marines. Klyber was dead, of course, and I had not heard from Vince in years. Last I heard, he was an officer in the Scutum-Crux Fleet. Using an optical command, I brought up an “On the Spot” audio analysis.

“Enemy ships continue to batter the city of New Gibraltar from outside Gateway’s atmosphere while enemy troops now storm the Marine facility. Reports suggest that there may be as many as ten battleships attacking the city.

“In recent months, Gateway has functioned as the central base of operations for several raids into the Perseus Arm. This attack may be retaliation for . . .

“We have a report that several ships from the Sagittarius Fleet have broadcasted into the Gateway System and should arrive shortly.”

On the screen, the commandoes turned to retreat. They backed away from the fort and headed toward a single transport under the cover of a bullet and rockets barrage. The last of the commandos boarded and the shooting stopped. In the distance, the firefly glow of armored transport rockets vanished into space.

“The Moga . . .

“Watch the fort,” Freeman interrupted me.

The Mogats had placed High Yield radiation bombs around the walls of fort. These bombs burst, flooding the streets with a dazzling blue-white display that seemed to burn into my eyes. The effect of having my shades go stark white then black was like being blinded. For a moment I sat in that plush cabin thinking my shades had died, then I realized that the site I had been watching was no longer in operation.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Normally a wing of three Air Force F-19 Falcons guarded the Mars broadcast discs. As my Starliner approached on this visit, however, I saw two squads of five fighters circling the area.

“Starliner A-ten-twenty-thirty-four, be advised that Mars Station is on high alert. Do you copy?”

“Aye,” I said. “I copy.”

“Due to heightened security, disc traffic is slow. We are requesting that pilots return home unless they have urgent business. Please await instructions while I access your travel file.”

Considering the attack on Gateway and the importance of the Mars broadcast discs, I thought that ten F-19s was pretty skimpy protection. The Army base on Mars had some pretty hefty cannons, but after seeing the destruction of Gateway Outpost, ground cannons no longer seemed like an effective deterrent. I joined the queue of ships waiting to approach the broadcast discs. The line was at least twenty miles long. Hovering above the line, like a trio of vultures, were three fighter carriers. Mars did not have a fleet of its own. These ships had to be on loan from the Earth fleet. Since capital ships travel a maximum speed of thirty million miles per hour, the trip from Earth to Mars would be anywhere from three to five hours depending on where each planet was in its orbit. Even a five-hour trip seemed short compared to the twenty hours it had just taken me in my Starliner.

“My records show that you are traveling to the Golan Dry Docks. Is this correct, Starliner A-ten-twenty-thirty-four?” the traffic controller asked. “The Golan facility is a maximum security facility. What is the purpose of your travel?”

“I am working for the Joint Chiefs,” I said.

There was a short pause. “Starliner A-ten-twenty-thirty-four, you have been cleared for immediate broadcast. We have dispatched an escort to take you to the front of the line, sir. Please follow your escort.”

In times of emergency, the military ran the Broadcast Network. The man on the other end must have been Air Force.

As I approached the broadcast discs, the tint shields came on and I could no longer see out the windows of my ship. The tint shields had to be thick to protect my eyes from the blinding glare that poured out of the discs when they discharged their electrical currents. Sitting in my pilot’s chair, I watched the slow approach of the two Falcons on my radar. In another moment, the radar would go blind and I would see the glare of lightning so bright that it penetrated the tinting across the Starliner. In the last moments before my radar went out, three fighters glided alongside my ship. My Starliner must have looked like such a relic compared to those ships. The F-19, designed for space and atmospheric combat, was probably the sleekest fighter in the U.A. arsenal. It had an elongated fuselage that looked like a cross between a stiletto and a dart. Its wings were razor thin but strong enough to handle atmospheric maneuvers. These jets would outpace any fighter in space and fly circles around any attacker that tried to touch down in an atmosphere like Earth’s. The F-19 was the pride of the Air Force.

“Hello, Starliner A-ten-twenty-thirty-four,” one of the fighter pilots said. “Why don’t you follow us, sir?”

This, of course, was fighter pilot humor. The Mars flight computers had complete control over my cockpit. I could not even shut down the power to my engines without asking permission.

A squadron of Tomcats circled the Golan Dry Docks and the nearby disc station. Two battleships were moored nearby. Golan was indeed on high alert. After identifying me and scanning my plane, traffic control brought me in through a partially sealed aperture and armed guards walked me to the security station.

The last time I passed through the posts at this security station, I was identified as Lieutenant Wayson Harris, “Marine on the lam.” This time I was a retired Marine and I was coming to visit the head of Golan security, Colonel Clarence McAvoy.

I handed my papers to the guard and walked toward the post. The Dry Docks’ high alert had brought out the brass. An Army major sat with civilians and enlisted men on the other side of the bulletproof glass. The light on the inside of the booth was bright. After the gloom of the hangar, it made me squint. This, I suspect, was intentional: it’s hard to shoot accurately when your eyes have not adjusted.

“Step forward,” said the guard on the other side of the posts. For all I knew, this was the guy who pulled the gun on me the last time I passed through. He was Army. He wore combat greens, and his M27 was strapped to his belt like a side arm.

I stepped forward.

The corporal snapped to attention. “Welcome to the Dry Docks, Colonel,” he said in a loud enough voice for the people behind the glass to hear. I looked over and saw that even the major now saluted me. I returned the salute and moved on.

“Colonel McAvoy is expecting you, sir. He left word that he wanted to drive you to your meeting personally.”

“Very well,” I said, still trying to figure out how I could have suddenly become a colonel. McAvoy pulled up in his little base cart—an electrical scooter with a top speed of fifteen miles per hour.

“Colonel Harris?” he asked in a voice drenched with mirth. “You’ve gone through the ranks more quickly than any soldier I have known. Weren’t you a Lieutenant last time I saw you?”

“I retired after that,” I said.

We shook hands. “Well, come on Colonel,” McAvoy said. “I thought I should roll out the red carpet for you, just in case.”

“In case of what?” I asked as I climbed into the cart.

“In case you’re on the Joint Chiefs next time I see you.” He started the cart and rolled into the service hall. “Your pal, Huang, called for you. He told me to have you call him the moment you landed.

“You heard about Gateway, right?”

I nodded.

“Bastards,” McAvoy said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“Colonel?” I asked.

“Welcome back, Harris. You’ve been recalled to active service, and as a colonel. I never thought I would see a clone make colonel, but desperate times call for desperate measures.” Huang looked more tired than he had at the funeral. Dark bags had formed under his dark brown eyes. No trace of that cocky smile showed on his face.

“And the reason for this?”

“Clearance, Harris. Only officers with the rank of colonel or higher are cleared to view the information I’m going to show you. Don’t worry about the commission, I don’t want to leave you in the Corps any longer than I need to.”

Still an anti-synthetic prick, I thought to myself, but I was glad the change was not permanent.

“I don’t suppose you can guess how long the siege on Gateway Outpost lasted?” Huang asked. I took a moment to think about this. “I watched the feed,” I said. “It was fast.”

“Real fast,” Huang agreed. “No guesses?”

“No,” I said.

“Eight minutes,” he said, a disapproving expression on his face. “Almost to the second.”

“I must be missing something,” I said as I tried to figure out why he mentioned this.

“Shit, Harris! You’re supposed to be bright.” Huang no longer looked tired or disappointed. Now he looked disgusted. His eyes closed to slits. He put a hand to his temple, brushing aside the short brown hair.

I thought quickly. What was so important about eight minutes? It showed a certain level of efficiency. Whoever planned the attack had done a superb job combing out the logistics.

“Eight minutes, Harris. Eight, specking minutes. Eight minutes, the amount of time it takes GCF ships to power-up and self-broadcast. You couldn’t figure that out on your own? Judas in heaven, what did Klyber see in you?”

I wanted to tell Huang to speck himself, but I agreed with him. I should have seen it. I said nothing.

“I’m sure you’ve seen the video feed of the ground attack,” Huang said. “You haven’t seen this.”

Satellite video showing the surface of Gateway appeared in my mediaLink shades. The full name of the planet was Gateway Kri—the term kri designating that the planet had a terraformed atmosphere. In truth, the planet looked a lot like Earth with icy poles, large oceans, and green continents. The screen flashed as lightning danced across the scene. I saw the four battleships from the Galactic Central Fleet only as silhouettes against the glowing surface of the planet. Their hulls looked black as coal. They were shadows. Had the satellite not been orbiting above them, they would have been invisible against the backdrop of space. From this perspective, the ships looked like giant sharks circling their territory.

The ships had a deformed diamond shape. They were long, not wide, with blunted corners at their bow and stern. They dove down to the edge of the atmosphere and green dots flashed on the surface as the Marines down below fired cannons at them.

“Concentrated firepower, the mark of a well-trained commander,” Huang said. “All of their laser fire hit within a five-block radius. Whoever led this assault knew his tactics.”

In the bottom corner of the screen, a small window showed the Gateway outpost. Laser blasts rained down on the fort and the streets surrounding it. As the attack began, the cannons along the walls of the fort flashed like strobe lights. That cannon fire slowed as hit after hit tore into the walls of the fort.

“Now this is interesting,” Huang said. “The GCF ships appeared one minute ago to the second. In that minute, the Marine base has focused all of its weapons on the capital ships . . . standard procedure.”

The screen froze. What I saw was one flame. It looked no more significant than a firefly as it penetrated the atmosphere.

“That is the transport. It will take that transport precisely one minute to land.”

The little flame seemed to shrink to nothing as the transport raced down to the planet. In the small window on my screen, New Gibraltar wilted quickly. The invading ground force stormed the fort, then ran off. At six minutes, to the second, the bombs went off creating a bubble of white light that seemed to grow like a blister out of the side of the planet. The flash was clearly visible from space. At seven minutes the transport rejoined the battleships. One minute later, the entire invasion force was gone.

“They call themselves the Hinode Fleet,” Huang said.

“Hinode?” I asked. I had heard the name Hinode before, on Ezer Kri, the planet with the large population of Japanese descent. That was what the locals called their capital city. The real name of the city was Rising Sun, or Hinode in Japanese.

“The Japanese population on Ezer Kri called their capital city Hinode. Do you think there is a connection?” I asked.

“I don’t want to guess,” Huang said. “That’s your job.”

“My job?” I asked.

“Yes, Colonel, your job. It came with the commission.”

“What about finding the guy . . . ?”

“The Republic is under attack. We knew about the Mogat instigators and the Confederate Arms. We knew about the GC Fleet. You get to figure out why GCF ships are using a Japanese name.”

“Doing a little scouting before you take them on in the Doctrinaire ?” I asked.

“Yes,” Huang said as if answering a challenge. He took a moment to gather his thoughts before speaking in a calmer voice. “You get me movements and capabilities on that fleet. You get me a profile on the officers commanding those ships. You help me win this war.”

“And the guy who killed Klyber?”

“Harris, once that fleet is destroyed, you can do whatever you want to Halverson. Get me what I want, and I will make you a very rich, very retired Liberator clone.”

“I’ll need help.”

“You want men?”

“One,” I said. “I have a partner.”

“Freeman,” Huang said. “I’ve heard about him.”

“He’s going to need access to whatever information you give me. And he won’t help me if it means he has to enlist.”

“Do what you need to do. Tell who you need to tell. Spend whatever money you need. I’m giving you a blank check.”

“Okay,” I said. I did not like the idea of working for Huang, but we both wanted the same thing at this moment. He wanted a clean shot at the Hinode Fleet. I wanted the men who killed Klyber. Both of us wanted Halverson.

“Do you know where to start?” Huang asked. I could see him beginning to relax. The plane of his shoulders softened. “Where will you start?”

“New Columbia.”

“Why New Columbia?” Huang asked.

“Because Jimmy Callahan is a two-bit know-nothing, and Billy the Butcher Patel tried to kill him,” I said, only just beginning to put the pieces together.

“What are you talking about?” Huang asked.

“There’s a two-bit thug on New Columbia who thought he was a big fish,” I said. “He sold supplies to the Mogats or the Confederates and thought he was a player. He tried to sell out Patel and nearly got himself killed. Remember the Safe Harbor bombing? Callahan was the one they were going after.

“I figured they wanted to make an example out of Callahan, but now I have another idea.”

“What does this have to do with Klyber?” Huang asked impatiently.

“I never stopped to figure out how they knew about Callahan. . . . Klyber was the one who sent me to meet with him. If Klyber knew about it, Halverson must have known as well. Halverson must have known something else, too, like where Callahan was getting his supplies.”

“Did Patel get him?” Huang asked.

“I locked him up in the local Marine base brig for safekeeping,” I said.

“You think he knows something?” Huang asked.

“He’s too small-time and too stupid to have set up a deal with the Confederates himself. Somebody with bigger ambitions must have used him as a middleman. I need to sweat the name out of him.”

“You’d better get there quickly,” Huang said. “Intelligence says the Confederates are going after New Columbia next. We’re already evacuating the planet.”

Huang thought for a moment. “I told you you’ve got a blank check on this. You can spend whatever you need. I’ll send you whatever equipment you need. And one more thing. I don’t think I need to tell you this, Harris—but just in case . . . feel free to kill anyone that gets in your way.”

And they say that clones have no souls, I thought to myself. I wondered if they would have allowed Huang on a Catholic colony like Saint Germaine.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Earthdate: March 23, 2512 A.D.

City: Safe Harbor; Planet: New Columbia; Galactic

Position: Orion Arm

A fighter carrier and two destroyers floated just a few miles away, guarding the broadcast discs that orbited New Columbia. The carrier brought a compliment of Tomcats, Hornets, and Harriers. The fighters flew in groups of three as they buzzed back and forth, “inspecting and protecting” the solid lane of traffic that stretched from the edge of the atmosphere to the discs. The authorities stepped up security in some areas of New Columbia and evacuated others. After considering the attack on New Gibraltar, the Pentagon decided to evacuate Safe Harbor.

“You’re flying into Safe Harbor?” Colonel McAvoy had asked when I told him my plans. “They’re evacuating the planet. The only people there are going to be Marines and looters. Come to think of it”—he brightened as he thought about this—“you’ll fit right in.”

As I glided out of the reception disc, I saw the line of ships leaving New Columbia. This was a mishmash that included military transports.

From what I had read, New Columbia had a population of over fifty million civilians. Looking down this seemingly endless line of evacuation ships, I would have believed that an entire population was on its way out. Big ships, small ships, just floating there waiting for a turn to enter the Network. As I flew toward the atmosphere, I took one final look at the line of ships. It looked like a kite string holding the discs in place. At the top of the line, the electrical field created by the broadcast discs flashed bright white against the eternal blackness. That distant flash burned ghosts into my eyes, but the ghosts faded quickly. I traveled toward the planet at the intolerably slow pace of three thousand miles per hour, aware that below me were Marine, Army, and Air Force cannons that tracked my every move. Any suspicious deviation from my specified flight course would be fatal.

By the time I reached New Columbian space, my ship had been scanned so many times that the security computers even knew which of my bones had pins in them. The only worry the military types had about me was that I might be an enemy scout.

“Starliner A-ten-twenty-thirty-four, this is Safe Harbor spaceport. Come in.”

“This is Starliner A-ten-twenty-thirty-four,” I said.

“Starliner A-ten-twenty-thirty-four, we are evacuating this planet.”

“So I’ve been told,” I said.

“I show that you are a Marine,” the controller said. “Please confirm.”

“Colonel Wayson Harris, Unified Authority Marines Corps,” I said.

“You have chosen to use a civilian landing facility, Colonel. Are you aware that there is a Marine base with a landing field just outside of town?”

“I am aware of that,” I said. I was also aware that that base would be a prime target once the Confederates arrived. I wanted my ship in one piece.

“We can offer you landing assistance. Please be advised that this spaceport will close within the next three hours. All traffic control will close at that time. Should you choose to leave your ship here, this facility cannot be held responsible for your ship.”

“Got it.”

“Can’t talk you out of this, can I, Colonel?” the man asked.

“You got a problem down there?” I asked.

“Yeah. I can’t spare the men to check in your ship. Everyone I have is busy sending up transports. I don’t know if you noticed that little line of ships leaving home.”

“Of course I noticed it,” I said. I also noticed how absolutely vulnerable these transports would be if a couple of GCF dreadnoughts happened to appear, but I did not mention it. Shoot a few cannons straight down this line of traffic, and you would likely kill half the population of New Columbia. But judging by the pinpoint tactics the invaders used in their siege of Gateway Outpost, I did not think they were after civilian casualties.

On the other hand, a billion casualties would interest Bill “the Butcher” Patel. Patel was a radical separatist from the Cygnus Arm who was not constrained by morals or religious beliefs. The line of transports did not extend from the edge of the atmosphere down to the spaceport. In the full gravitational pull of the atmosphere, transports would not be able to support themselves in a slow-moving line without burning tons of fuel.

I flew down through an evening sky, penetrating a thick layer of clouds as my approach slowed to a few hundred miles per hour. The weather had turned bad over Safe Harbor. Mercury-colored clouds formed a washboard ceiling over the city. Lightning illuminated pockets in the clouds with dazzling flashes. Rain fell in heavy drops that burst across my windows. Below me the city was dark. Not a light shown in the forest of skyscrapers that covered Safe Harbor. No street lights shined. The giant billboards on the sides of the buildings were invisible in the blackness.

The city may have looked lifeless, but the air above it fairly bristled with movement. I looked up through the top corner of my rain-spattered windshield and saw the darting profiles of three F-19s passing above me like shadows against the steel wool clouds. Beneath me, three more crossed my path. The Marines, the Army, and the Air Force all maintained bases around the city of Safe Harbor. Unlike Gateway, New Columbia was a well-protected planet. The Marines of New Gibraltar Outpost had only cannons to defend themselves from attack. Here, on New Columbia, there were squadrons of F-19

Falcons, and the Navy had capital ships guarding the planet from above. The invasion of Gibraltar had been a massacre. An invasion of Safe Harbor would be a battle.

Against the jungle of shadows that was the city of Safe Harbor, the spaceport looked like an eruption of light. Two lines of strobe lanterns clicked on and off along the runway, creating dashes of midnight-blue. In the distance, white glare poured out of a row of hangars at the edge of the runway. Lights shone around the outside of the air terminal and more light spilled from the windows. I landed the Starliner on the edge of the runway and coasted toward the hangars. Two runway workers placed it in a security hangar. I asked if it would be safe, and they said it would. “As safe as anything else on the planet,” one of them amended. The hangar had been filled with private craft just one day earlier. Now my ship was the only one. The hangar crew drove me to the main terminal of the spaceport in silence.

A few weeks earlier and in another life, I had sat in this very building trying to distract myself as I waited for a flight. Back then I sensed ambition in the air. Safe Harbor attracted businessmen and tourists, people who were glad to travel or glad to clinch the next big deal. This time I sensed something very different—depression and panic.

In the terminal, long lines of people sat silently clutching their belongings. The richest people, able to buy their way to the front of the line, had left first. The last of the New Columbian elite were probably in the queue of transports I passed on my way down from the discs. The people I saw in the spaceport now were the poor and the middle class—people with families and suitcases; little girls with dolls and boys with video games. They formed lines that snaked back and forth the entire length of the lobby—rows of people in perfectly straight lines standing so crowded together that the lines disappeared altogether. I heard sneezing and sobbing and a few whispers, but this population was mostly in shock. Many people wore damp clothing. Had the spaceport been its normal chilly temperature, these people would have caught colds, but the sheer numbers overloaded the air-conditioning, and the atmosphere was hot inside the terminal and the air smelled of sweat.

“Where do you think you’re going?” a Marine in combat armor asked as I reached the main entrance. I flashed him the newly-minted identification card that Colonel McAvoy gave me. It identified me as

“Colonel Wayson Harris.”

The man looked at it and snapped to attention. “My apologies, sir! The private was not aware that he was speaking with an officer.”

He saluted.

I saluted back.

“Carry on, Marine,” I said as I stepped around the boy and left, glad that I was no longer a mere grunt. Stepping out of the terminal, I entered a cold, wet night. The rain fell continuously. Puddles covered the sidewalk leading away from the terminal building. A line of streetlights stretched as far as the parking garage. Beyond that, a shroud of inky darkness hid everything from view. Before stepping out from under the awning, I looked into the sky and sighed. I did not know who I might meet in that darkness, but it did not matter much—this time I was armed.

I stole a car. I didn’t have any other options. Supposing that a city-wide evacuation and naval attack might hurt their business, the car rental agencies had closed for the night . . . and the next night, and the night after that. In honor of Billy the Butcher, I found a sporty little Paragon in the parking lot and wired it. Patel’s Paragon was orange and this one was red, but they both had the same shoehorn-shaped chassis.

I did not bother myself with fables about returning the car or justifications about the owner of the car having cast it away. I needed wheels, this car looked nice. Once I had the engine going, I threaded my way though the spaceport parking lot and drove into town.

There was something eerie about traveling through an abandoned city that reminded me of swimming underwater. It might have been the emptiness or the silence or the lack of movement. The electricity was out almost everywhere. Without their red, yellow, and green glow, the traffic lights looked like misshapen trees. I did not care for crowds, but I found this emptiness unsettling. Driving down dark streets lined by lifeless buildings, my isolation seemed to amplify itself. I looked into storefronts that were as dark as caves. It wasn’t just that the lights were off—life itself was gone. It was like climbing up an escalator that has been turned off. For psychological reasons, climbing dead escalators seems harder than walking up stairs. It feels like civilization has failed. I drove past the movie house where I had met Jimmy Callahan and watched The Battle for Little Man . The entrance was a black hole. The holotoriums would be empty and the projection rooms dark. It seemed unnatural.

Jimmy Callahan, I mused, with his bulging muscles and his big, big talk, would be one of the last men on New Columbia. The Mogats and the Secessionists may have chased everybody else away, but Callahan was still on the planet, right where I left him, locked up in a Marine base brig. The irony was that the very spot where I placed him for safekeeping would soon be the most dangerous location on the planet. I was driving through uptown Safe Harbor and turned a corner. The block in front of me was completely demolished. For a moment I thought the attack must have begun, and then I recognized where I was. This was the neighborhood that Patel bombed. Only three weeks had passed since that bombing . . . two weeks and an era.

Something far more dangerous than Billy the Butcher Patel was coming to New Columbia. Who would have believed it? Jimmy Callahan who had talked so big and gotten himself into so much trouble might just be the key to winning the war.

I expected to see looters hiding in shadows, moving through alleys, and breaking into buildings. Instead, I ran into roadblocks. The Army was out in force. I turned a corner and saw a chrome and titanium barrier stretched across the road. A string of bright blue lights winked on and off sequentially across the top of their barricade. Five soaked and miserable-looking soldiers in camouflaged ponchos flagged me down. They had M27s strapped over their shoulders, and there were machine-gun nests on either side of their barricade.

I stopped and lowered my window.

“Nice car,” a soldier said as he approached. He was a corporal. He was a clone. He had brown hair, broad shoulders and a round chest. He was short and squat, and powerful. He and I might have been raised in the same orphanage for all I knew. Rain poured down on him. Drops hit his poncho and burst.

“You mind if I don’t get out?” I asked. “I don’t want to get the upholstery wet.”

He smiled and nodded. “I don’t suppose you have papers for that car?” he asked.

“How about these?” I handed him my military ID.

He took the card and read it over several times. “Colonel,” he said, acknowledging my identity, but the barrier did not open. “Our scanner says this car belongs to James Walker. I don’t suppose you can prove that he loaned you this vehicle?”

“No, Corporal, I can’t,” I said.

“Then we have a bit of a problem, Colonel. We’ve been sent out to prevent looting. That includes the borrowing of cars.”

Colonel McAvoy had issued me a pistol. I had it under my car seat. I could have shot the corporal.

“How far is Fort Washington from here?”

The corporal’s expression tightened. Fort Washington was the local Marine base. If I was indeed a colonel in the Marines, I should have known how to get there.

“I just flew in, Corporal,” I said. “Fleet Headquarters dispatched me to see what I can do to prepare this planet for an attack.”

“I heard air traffic was stacked up for hours,” the corporal said, a dubious note in his tone.

“Getting out is a problem,” I said. “There’s a line all the way up to the disc and more people waiting in the spaceport. Coming in is a breeze. Who wants to go to a planet that’s about to get smashed?”

That seemed to satisfy him. The corporal smiled and nodded. “Sir, I can’t let you pass in that car.”

“I understand,” I said.

“Tell you what, sir. You park the car over there,” he said, pointing to a nearby alley, “and I’ll give you a ride to Washington in our jeep.”

“You don’t mind?” I asked.

“Base Command, Base Command, this is post fifteen in Sector A, come in,” he said into an interLink microphone that was attached to his poncho. He must have received the response through an unseen earpiece.

“I have an incoming Marine colonel looking for Fort Washington. Requesting permission to drive him.”

He put a hand over his ear to block outside sounds. “That is correct. I said a Marine colonel . . . yes, that would be the equivalent of colonel in the Marine Corps.”

The corporal bent down again and said, “Okay, I’m cleared to drive you to the base.”

“I appreciate it,” I said.

Then, lowering his voice just shy of a whisper, he added, “Leave the keys in the Paragon . . . just in case.”

I couldn’t really leave the keys in the ignition since I had hot-wired the car. “You know anything about hot-wiring cars?”

“No sir,” the corporal said.

“I’ll leave the ignition running,” I said. I turned the car around, backed into the nearest alley, and stepped out into the rain. The downpour was hard and steady, but the air was warm. Sitting in an open-air bungalow on an evening like this could have been very pleasant, I thought, assuming you had the right company.

The corporal led me to his jeep, a sturdy little five-seat auto with a hard top. It did not have mounted machine guns or a missile carriage—clearly the Army did not expect to face ground forces. I was not so confident. Once out of the rain, I put my pistol in my ruck and pulled out my M27. I grabbed two extra clips and hid them in my jacket.

“You expecting a war?” the corporal asked as he climbed in.

“Better safe than specked,” I said.

“Colonel, we have road blocks set up every eight blocks across Safe Harbor. Intel ran a scan. There may be a couple thousand looters out there, but the last thing they want is to mess with us.”

“You’re probably right,” I said. “This just makes me feel a little more relaxed.” I patted the M27.

“Sort of a security blanket, sir?”

“Ever been in combat, Corporal?”

“Mostly police actions.”

“That’s good,” I said. “You’ll know what I am talking about soon enough.” Dead is dead. It doesn’t matter if you’re shot by a scared looter or a separatist sniper.

The strange sensation of driving through empty streets never went away. We drove through the financial district with its tall skyscrapers, the light of our headlights reflecting on marble and glass façades the way it might reflect on the surface of a still lake. I kept looking for men in suits. We drove past a row of apartment complexes and grocery stores, and I automatically checked the buildings for lights. The only time we saw people was when we passed roadblocks.

The soldiers would see us, slow us for visual inspection, and salute us on our way.

“Spotted any looters, sir?” the corporal asked. I didn’t answer.

The most haunting thing we passed was a LAWSONS convenience store. These were stores that never closed. Lights were always supposed to be on in these stores and the doors were never supposed to be locked. Yet here was a LAWSONS that was as dark and deserted as any dance club on Sunday. Even the LAWSONS sign over the door was dark.

The corporal drove like a maniac. He streaked down the wet streets so quickly that he could not possibly have swerved in time to avoid hitting another car had one appeared. When he came around corners, he did not slow down, causing the jeep to drift more than it turned.

“You know, I’ve been stationed in Safe Harbor for two years now and I’ve seen more of the town over the last five hours than the last twenty-four months. It’s not a bad place, really . . . a little dark, maybe.”

“Did you see the feed from New Gibraltar?” I asked.

“I’d like to see them try something like that around here. McCord would send one thousand fighters and shoot their asses down,” the corporal said.

“From what I hear, the Separatists only had four ships at Gateway,” I said.

“Yeah?” the corporal said.

“And from what I understand, they have over five hundred ships in their fleet.”

The corporal frowned. The dim green glow of the dashboard lights lit up the lower half of his face. It lit his bottom lip, the bottom of his nose, and the folds of skin under his eye sockets. The strange lighting made his expression grim. “Five hundred ships? I didn’t know that.”

The entrance to Fort Washington Marine base was up ahead. You did not need to know military tactics to see that it was also on high alert. Bright lights lit the main gate to the base. Red strobes flashed on and off on the half dozen radar dishes that spun around the wall of the fort. Unlike New Gibraltar, which looked like a modernized version of an old medieval castle, Fort Washington was a sprawling campus that took up several square miles.

Looking beyond the gate, I saw the taillights of jeeps rushing between buildings. They drove by headlight only. The streetlights were out. There were no lights on the outsides of the buildings. Throughout the grounds, the only bubbles of light were emplacements for long-range cannons capable of hitting ships outside the atmosphere.

Crazy driver that he was, I expected the corporal to race up to the front gate and screech to a stop. He showed more common sense than that. With the base on alert and armed guards all around the entrance, the corporal slowed to a crawl and coasted to the gate.

The guard who approached the jeep did not draw his M27, but I could sense a dozen other weapons pointed in our direction.

“Corporal,” the guard said.

“Just bringing you one of your own,” the corporal said, nodding toward me. I handed the guard my ID. “I brought in a local thug named Jimmy Callahan about a week ago. Your MPs have been keeping him and a couple of buddies in the brig for safekeeping,” I said. The guard walked around the jeep for a better look at me. He read my ID, considered it, and reread.

“Wait here, sir,” he said and went into his booth to phone command. When he hung up the phone, he handed me my card and saluted. A moment later the gate went up, and the other guards saluted as we drove by.

The corporal may have been Army, but he knew his way around this Marine base. He skirted the motor pool and the barracks and brought me right to the administration building. I thanked the man and he saluted me, then he drove off.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Jimmy Callahan and his two bodyguards sat in an interrogation room. Both of Callahan’s stooges smoked, he didn’t. The three of them sat without speaking to each other. Callahan did not even look in the other boys’ direction. He occasionally reached up to smooth his hair as he considered his various options.

I watched this scene on a security screen in the chief ’s office hoping for a clue about Callahan’s general mood. The man was a sphinx for nearly five minutes, then he gave me a clear insight by staring into a supposedly hidden camera and sticking his middle finger out at it.

Two MPs escorted me to the interrogation room and locked the door behind me.

“You’re a colonel now?” Callahan asked as he turned to look at me. “You must have run away from something really big this time. Know what I mean?” He bobbed his head in that arrogant way as he spoke. Behind him, Silent Tommy and Limping Eddie, the two bodyguards I maimed right before the explosions, stubbed out their cigarettes and sat like statues. They did not seem as happy to see me as their boss was.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

“Allow me to explain. You run away from the battle at Little Man and they make you lieutenant. Now, in two short weeks, you’re a specking colonel. What did you do, run away from New Gibraltar?”

It became very apparent that there were two Jimmy Callahans. The first, the one speaking to me at this moment, was a petulant prick who thought he had the world by the balls. The other was a scared little kid.

“That’s clever,” I said. “Don’t you think that’s clever?” I asked Silent Tommy. He did not answer. “How about you, Eddie? Don’t you think Jimmy’s joke is clever?”

“See, now, Harris, they don’t want to answer because they’re scared of you. They don’t have anything you want. Me . . . I have information you want, so I’m not scared. In fact, I think it’s about time you did me some favors.”

“Really?” I asked, sitting on the edge of the table in the center of the room. “You don’t think saving your ass from Patel was enough?”

Callahan’s mouth bent in a comical frown that took the corners of his lips halfway down his chin. “I’ve been thinking about that, and I don’t think Patel was after me. I think he was after you. Know what I mean? I never did anything to Billy. What would he have against me?”

“Well, there is this little issue about you fingering him to the Marines.” I said.

“You cannot possibly be talking about yourself, Harris? You’re not the Marines. Hell, you’re a specking deserter.” Callahan smiled at his own joke and flexed his biceps. “And as for saving my ass, who says that you saved it? Tommy and Eddie were there. They came out just fine ’cept what you did to them.”

Tommy’s jaw was wired shut and mending. Eddie was on crutches. Both my doing.

“And where did I end up?” Callahan continued. “I ended up in Fort frigging Washington, the biggest shithole on New Columbia. I figure you did nothing for me. The way I figure it, you owe me.”

“Sounds like you have it all figured out,” I said. I hopped off of the table and started for the door.

“Where are you going?” Callahan asked.

“Didn’t you hear?” I asked. “Your buddies from the Confederate Arms are getting ready to bag this planet. Should be quite a reunion. Their fleet will bombard this base until it’s defenseless, then they’ll probably send down commandoes to nuke it. That’s what they did on Gateway. Of course, Billy the Butcher probably didn’t have an old pal like you that he wanted to bust out of Gateway Outpost.

“You did know that they evacuated New Columbia?” I asked.

“So I hear,” Callahan said.

“If I were you, Jimmy, I’d be thinking about how I might get off this planet. They planted hot bombs around the base on Gateway,” I said. “You know what that means? It means that most of the jarheads who were in that building are alive and melting at this very moment. Mop them with a sponge and you’ll pull off their skin. And those boys were wearing radiation-proof armor.

“The lucky ones got cooked on the spot. They weren’t wearing armor, just like you’re not wearing armor. Lucky you. You will probably die just like that.” I snapped my fingers. “One moment you’re praying, ‘God, please don’t let them nuke me.’ The next minute, you’re face to face with God and he says, ‘About that prayer . . . ’”

“What do you want?” Callahan asked, all humor drained from his voice.

“Where is the GC Fleet?”

“How the speck should I know?” Callahan said.

“You said you knew.”

“I asked what I would get if I led you to that fleet,” Callahan said. “I didn’t say I knew where it was. I just wanted to know what it would be worth to me.”

“You wanted to show off.”

“What?” Callahan thought about this. “Yeah . . . maybe.”

“What is the Hinode Fleet?” I asked.

“Never heard of it,” Callahan said.

“Right before the attack on New Gibraltar, the Intelligence Network intercepted signals referring to the Hinode Fleet. Is that what your Mogat buddies call the Galactic Central Fleet?”

“I don’t know,” Callahan said.

“How do the Japanese figure into this?” I asked, feeling more than a little frustrated. “Are they in with the Mogats?”

“Who the speck are the Japanese?” Callahan asked.

“Refugees from Ezer Kri,” I said. “Are they part of the Confederate Arms?”

“How should I know?” Callahan asked. He sounded frustrated and his face turned red.

“How about your pal Billy the Butcher?” I asked. By this time I was yelling. The mood in the room was thick with anger, and I wanted to hit Callahan. “Where is Patel?”

“I don’t know,” Callahan shouted. Then, lowering his voice, he said, “Someone else always arranged our meetings.”

Finally I was getting somewhere. “Who was that?”

Callahan sat slumped in his chair when Limping Eddie mumbled, “Tell him how to find the supply guy.”

Callahan looked at him and a smile stretched across his face. “I like that.” Then he turned back to me.

“You could visit Batt, he’s your best bet. If anyone can answer your questions, it’s Batt.”

“Who is Batt?” I asked, the calm returning to my voice.

“Batt is Bartholomew Wingate,” Callahan said. “He introduced me to Patel.”

“Mogat or Confederate?” I asked.

“Neither,” Callahan said, the swagger back in his smile. “He’s one of yours. I guess patriotism isn’t his bag. Know what I mean?”

“He’s a punk like you?” I asked.

Callahan’s smile brightened. “Oh, he’s much bigger than me. You might say he has his own army.”

“I thought you had one, too?” I said.

“I do,” Callahan said, “but it’s not as good as Batt’s. He’s got a lot more clout around here than me. He knows everything and everybody.”

“Great,” I said throwing my hands up in frustration. “Only we can’t find Batt. We just evacuated the planet.” Players like that vanish into the woodwork the moment you look the other way.

“Oh, you don’t have to worry about that.” Now Callahan sounded almost gleeful. “He’s still in Safe Harbor. He’s just up the road. He’s the commander at the Army base.”

“Let me get this straight,” Lieutenant Colonel Bernie Phillips said. “Your prisoner claims that Colonel Wingate is selling supplies to the Confederates?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Bullshit.”

We sat in an observation room in the brig. Behind Phillips, the video screens showed the room in which Callahan and his bodyguards sat idly waiting for me. I could only hope that the colonel did not glance at the screen. At the moment, Callahan was flexing his biceps and kissing them. Silent Tommy responded with a hand-gesture that meant “go speck yourself.” This only encouraged Callahan. He responded by flexing both arms at once.

“How well do you know Wingate?” I asked.

“I’ve known Batt three years now,” Phillips said. “Ever since I transferred in.”

“So you’re friends?” I asked, knowing that I could always play the Che Huang trump card if the need arose.

“I can’t stand the son of a bitch,” Phillips said, his expression dower. “He thinks he’s king of the goddamned planet just because he has a bigger base. Command airlifts our supplies in through his base. The prick makes me fill out so many forms to get my stuff you’d think he owned it. He’s always showing off. He must come from a rich family. He lives like a friggin’ king.”

“Let’s see here. Your supplies come through his base and he acts like he owns them. Is that right?” I asked. Phillips nodded. “And he lives like a king, but you don’t think he’s selling?”

Phillips’s expression brightened. “Bust Batt Wingate? Think we could shoot him for this?”

“Once this is over, I’ll hand you the gun,” I said. “For now I need him alive. If my hunch is right, Wingate might be able to lead me to the Confederate Fleet.”

“Just remember, I get to shoot him when you’re done with him,” Colonel Phillips said.

“Deal,” I said.

“What’s our first step?”

It was late at night and the sky over the city was still black. I crept through the alley behind a row of restaurants until I could see the roadblock. Arc lights filled the street around the barricade with senseless glare. The light shined on the soldiers, blinding them to any enemies lurking nearby while making them well-lit targets for any snipers who happened to pass.

These boys did not have anything to worry about from me. I didn’t want the pack. I wanted the stray. I hid in the alley, using garbage pails and food crates as cover. I hoped my fall guy would come soon. There was so much rot in the cans around me that the air smelled like vomit. My target came in the form of a sergeant who was touring roadblocks to keep the men alert. He drove a jeep. He drove alone. Approaching the roadblock, he stormed out of his vehicle and started screaming and cussing the moment his feet hit the ground. He was kind enough to line the men up at attention in just the right angle so that neither he nor they were facing in my direction. Then he paced back and forth in front of the line like a caged animal, screaming something about always being alert. I did not listen to what he said or how they responded.

“Phillips, I found our guy,” I called over a comLink stem in my glove. The colonel had volunteered to direct this operation himself. He and five of his men hid a few blocks away, waiting for me to locate and mark a target. They had two special jeeps that had been decked out for night operations. Unlike other jeeps, these units had absolutely silent engines that could only be detected with sound equipment. These stealth jeeps were black with special nonreflective glass. Their chassis were not painted. They were covered with a nonreflecting flat coat of black porcelain that resisted radar detections. Sophisticated radar equipment would spot them in a heartbeat, but the cheap radar used in ground vehicles such as tanks and all-terrain vehicles would turn a blind eye. Even trackers, those sniper robots so loved by the enemy, had trouble spotting these vehicles. Since these jeeps were also made for night operations, they had night-for-day scanning built into their windshields. They had discreet lights and searchlights, but with that night-for-day scanning, you could drive stealth jeeps black.

“What you got?” Phillips voice came over the discreet ear piece.

“A single passenger in a stealth bug.”

“Officer or enlisted man?” Phillips asked.

“Does it matter? You’re in either way, right?” I asked. We were going to kidnap the man and use his ID

and vehicle to break into Fort Clinton. If Callahan gave us good information, a medal of valor awaited Phillips for his part in this. If Callahan had lied . . . even a Secessionist attack would not save him from a court martial, assuming he survived.

“If we have to knock somebody up, I’d rather hit a synthetic,” Phillips said.

“He’s a sergeant.”

“Perfect. Can you mark him?”

Hiding in the darkness of the alley behind some trash cans and a stack of crates, I shined a laser pointer on one of the rear tires of the jeep. It had stopped raining in Safe Harbor, but the air was humid and heavy. Puddles dotted the ground and the alley was grimy with dirt and slop. My laser pointer cast a red beam that was as thin as a sewing needle. It illuminated a tiny red spot no bigger than a mouse’s eye on the side of the tire. I kept the light steady for twenty seconds as the sergeant berated his men.

“How the speck do you plan on catching criminals? Are you on guard duty or vacation?” Then, without a pause, “I asked you a question!”

“Guard duty!” the men yelled.

“Guard duty. That must be why you ladies are not wearing bathing suits,” the sergeant continued yelling. He made me nostalgic for my old drill sergeants back in basic, though those sergeants used far more creative profanity than this fellow. They also cuffed us alongside the head at every opportunity.

“You got him?” I asked.

“Yeah, he’s marked,” Phillips said.

“Now if he would just shut up and drive,” I said.

But the sergeant continued to pace back and forth and berate his men. “So you ladies think you can keep this block safe? I’m not sure who I would bet on if it comes down to you five speck-suckers against a gang of kindergarteners.

“You need to be alert. Do you hear me soldiers? Alert! A! L! E! R! T!”

I could not help myself. I painted the laser across the sergeant’s A-L-E-R-T ass. His soldiers were too busy looking him in the eye to see a filament-wide laser beam shining on his butt.

“You marking another jeep?” Phillips radioed me. “I’m getting another signal.”

“Sorry,” I said as I slipped the pointer back into my clothes.

The sergeant inspected each man’s weapon, wasting another five minutes, leaving me in that fetid alley smelling of rotten food. I saw a rat scurry among some distant crates. I would even the score with that sergeant for making me wait, I told myself, and I felt better.

A few minutes later, the sergeant climbed into his jeep. He slammed the door behind himself and sped away.

“I wish somebody would stomp that specker,” one of the soldiers said. Somebody was about to.

Moving in absolute silence, not kicking a can or brushing a box, I walked through the alley. I did not think those soldiers would notice a marching band parading by with that arc light shining in their eyes, but I did not take any chances. A stealth jeep filled with Marines met me at the end of the alleyway. I climbed in.

“I don’t know where you marked the target that second time, but it’s a good thing you did,” Phillips said.

“This guy drives like a frigging maniac. That second mark is a lot clearer.”

Our driver watched the road through a night-for-day lens in the windshield. I did not envy him that task. I had used similar technology in my old combat armor. Night-for-day lenses, with their monochrome displays, just about annihilated your depth perception.

A radar panel on the dashboard showed our position, the sergeant’s position, and the position of our second stealth jeep, along with any nearby Army vehicles. Sergeant Target was on his way to the next barricade, three miles away. His car swerved severely as he drove. Our jeeps, driving on parallel roads, flanked him on either side.

“What’s the matter with him?” Phillips asked.

“Probably drinking and driving,” I said.

“Was he drunk?” Phillips asked.

“He’s a sergeant,” I said. “You can’t tell without a blood test.”

This was a lucky break. A shitfaced sergeant might crash his car. He might stop for a drink, be found by looters, and be stripped from his car. It fit perfectly into our plans. He had given us an alibi, assuming we needed one.

Looking at the map, I saw that our sergeant was still one mile from the next barricade. “Last chance to back out,” I said to Colonel Phillips.

Phillips picked up the microphone and said, “Take him.”

Our driver accelerated. Looking at the map, I saw that the driver in the other jeep had also picked up some speed. We streaked ahead for two blocks and gained a good lead, then swerved around the next corner and planted ourselves in the middle of the road. Using a computer to aim our searchlights on the sergeant, we leapt from the car and drew our weapons.

Our second jeep pulled in behind the sergeant. Once our lights went on, the other driver flashed his, too. And now the brain-dead sergeant, Mr. A.L.E.R.T, did exactly what we hoped he would do. Instead of hunkering in his jeep and calling in his situation, he grabbed his weapon and stepped on to the street. The searchlights blinded him, and he stood with his arms over his eyes too dumb to move. I approached from the front. The searchlight shone over my shoulder.

“Who are you?” the sergeant muttered.

“Are you drunk, sergeant?” I asked as my right fist slammed into his jaw, dropping him to the street. He fell and did not stir. The drivers in the stealth jeeps cut their searchlights as I knelt beside the fallen Army man and stripped him down to his underwear. I took his uniform, wallet, ID and dog tags. These articles I placed on the hood of his car. Then I stripped my clothes off and handed them to Phillips.

“Damn, Harris. You didn’t need to do that,” Phillips said.

“The last thing he heard was drunk ,” I said.

“So?” Phillips asked.

“The word will stay fresh in his subconscious. It’ll be the first thing he thinks of when he wakes up,” I said.

“Does it work that way?” Phillips asked.

“It does with me,” I said as I buttoned his shirt over my chest. That was a lie. I had never gotten so drunk that I passed out.

“Good thinking,” Phillips said.

The sergeant was a clone, of course . . . brown hair, brown eyes. He was shorter than me, and broader around the neck and the chest. He also had a gut. The sleeves of his fatigues ended well shy of my wrists, but I didn’t worry about it. I was not headed to Fort Clinton for a fashion show. The soldiers manning that base would be too busy to notice my sleeves.

As for the good sergeant, he was on his way to the brig at Fort Washington. There he would remain in a cell until he woke up. He would tell them that he was a soldier in the Unified Authority Army. They would tell him that they found him passed out and naked on the street. Thanks to the bottle he carried in his jeep, the story would be an easy sell. His blood alcohol would be legitimately high. If everything went as expected, Phillips would be in the clear. Had he known what we were doing, Colonel Batt Wingate would have been worried.

I nodded to Phillips and climbed into the Army jeep. The air inside the car smelled of beer and flatulence. Using the dome light in the roof, I examined my dog tags for a name—First Sergeant Mark Hopkins. Then I rolled down the window and started up the engine. I was about to pull forward when one of Phillips’s men waved for me to stop.

“You might want this,” he said, handing me the sergeant’s M27. I thanked the man and left. Rather than follow Sergeant Hopkins’s designated course, which would have taken me through three more checkpoints, I found a circuitous route that took me through alleys until I passed all but one final guard station. There I would need to make an appearance.

The jeep barely fit through a few of the tighter alleys. Dumpsters, trash cans, and abandoned cars choked some of the back ways. I saw looters, too—mostly harmless men, scurrying like rats through the shadows, trying to hide by diving into buildings when my headlights turned in their direction. These men traveled alone or in teams of two, mostly. Had I run into a mob, I suspect they would have come after me.

I left the cover of the alleys before entering the final checkpoint. The soldiers guarding that checkpoint would expect an Army sergeant to come up the street. So I pulled onto good old Main Street, Safe Harbor, a six-lane thoroughfare leading to an endless suspension bridge that spanned a great river. The checkpoint looked like a wall of light spanning the front entrance to the bridge. Soldiers milled around the titanium barricade which stretched the width of the road. There must have been an officer in charge at this post. The soldiers were far more alert than the ones at the other barricades I had seen. They held their guns at the ready. Men sat in the machine-gun nests on either side of the bridge. Soldiers sat behind the wheels of the jeeps and all-terrain vehicles on the edges of the post. None of this would matter as long as I did not do anything stupid. I slowed my jeep and coasted up to the barricade before coming to a stop. Somebody flashed a spotlight on me; the glare through the windshield was blinding. I lifted a hand to block the glare as I opened my door.

“May I see your identification?” a soldier asked from somewhere within the light. I felt through my pockets and produced Sergeant Hopkins’s ID.

Hopkins and I were different models of clones, but we were both clones. We both had brown hair, brown eyes, and similar facial features. I was an elongated version of Hopkins, a more than reasonable facsimile with this blinding spotlight bleaching my skin and features.

“Could you cut the light?” I asked. It seemed like something a dumb-ass sergeant might ask. The soldier handed back my ID. I heard the grating yawn of metal scraping across a concrete surface as the barricade slid open.

“You’re clear,” the soldier said.

So I drove across the bridge, watching the island of light diminish in my rearview mirror. The bridge stretched for more than one mile, the yard-wide cables that supported it forming an arc that reminded me of the spokes of a bicycle tire. A blanket of thick clouds stretched across the sky. Rain so fine that it felt like mist filled the air. An enormous mile-wide river rushed beneath the bridge, but it was so far below me that I could barely hear the hiss of its currents. And covering everything was the inky blackness of night. I took confidence from the ease with which I had passed through that last checkpoint. Had I stopped to think about it, I might have hesitated before entering the base. Mark Hopkins was supposed to be out reviewing guard stations, a fact that should have told me that he had something to do with security. My luck had held so far, and I did not stop to think that it might end soon. Ahead of me, Fort Clinton looked more like a constellation of stars than an Army base. Most of the complex was blacked out. Shutters had been closed across windows of buildings so that the only light they emitted came out in thin stripes that dissolved into the night air. The buildings themselves looked darker than a shadow.

Helicopter gunboats ran slow patrols above the fort while jets circled the area high in the atmosphere. I could not see the gunboats or the jets, but the loud chop, chop, chop of helicopter rotors echoed up from the ground and the searing roar of jet engines thundered and faded in the darkness.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The guard at the gate barely checked my identification. I drove a Fort Clinton Army jeep. After a glance at my papers and a sweep of my face, he signaled his pals to let me through. Following base signs, I found my way to the administration building. The lobby of the building was brightly lit. Officers in fatigues hustled up and down the halls. Men hunkered by communications consoles, relaying orders and checking the overall readiness of the soldiers. No one so much as looked in my direction.

This administration building was no different than thousands of other similar buildings across the galaxy. Colonel Bartholomew Wingate’s office was right where I expected it to be. And, as I suspected, the colonel was nowhere to be found. I went out to my jeep and drove until I found officer housing. I only hoped that I had enough time to find Wingate before he bolted.

Base commander housing tended to be big and conspicuous, and I had little trouble locating Wingate’s estate. There was a stealth jeep in the driveway that looked black and sinister, a phantom car meant to blend in with the night.

I parked my jeep along the street and climbed out into the misty night hiding behind a stand of trees as I waited to see what would happen next. If Callahan was right about Colonel Bartholomew Wingate, I would not have to wait very long.

Wingate’s front door was about ten yards ahead of me. His house was easy to spot. His porch lights blazed while every other house on the block was dark. I sat in the silence, my mind wandering. There was so much that the U.A. intelligence community did not know about the enemy. We knew that the four rebelling arms—Cygnus, Scutum-Crux, Perseus, and Norma—all had their own governments. But we also knew that Gordon Hughes, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, was the acting president of the Confederate Arms. Was there one government or four?

From everything I had heard, the arms had formed a shaky alliance. The only thing they had in common was that they wanted the Unified Authority out of their space. The Morgan Atkins Separatists, on the other hand, wanted to topple the Unified Authority. They wanted to conquer and destroy, but unlike the renegade arms, the Mogats did not have the kind of infrastructure that would allow for an army. They had controlled the Galactic Central Fleet for more than forty years and did nothing with it. Then there were the Japanese. Approximately 12.5 million people of Japanese descent fled Ezer Kri because of the Unified Authority occupation of their planet. No one had ever satisfactorily explained how 12.5 million people could have fled a planet in a system patrolled by the Scutum-Crux Fleet, but I had my ideas. They could have been evacuated by a large fleet of self-broadcasting ships such as the dreadnaughts, battleships, and destroyers in the Galactic Central Fleet. The last estimate I read placed the Mogat population at approximately two hundred million. The combined arms had approximately thirty billion citizens. So how did the Japanese fit in? They numbered less than thirteen million; how important could they be? And yet, for some reason, people were calling the GC Fleet by a Japanese name.

An hour passed. I remained crouched, hidden from Wingate’s house by trees and a shrub. An observant driver might have spotted me among the trees, but no one came down this road. The base was at high-alert and the officers were at their stations.

When the enemy finally appeared, they were dressed in Army fatigues and spoke common English. They drove a jeep, leaving the windows open to enjoy the breeze. After the trip down in a Galactic Fleet transport, they must have been glad for the cold fresh air.

The jeep rolled up the street right past me. It parked in front of Colonel Wingate’s yard and two men climbed out.

“I told you this was the right street,” one man said. He had a single bar on his fatigues. Had he not been an enemy commando, that bar would have made him a lieutenant in the Army.

“I spotted the house,” the other man said. He wore the same clever disguise. They were wolves in wolves’ clothing.

“How hard was that?” the first man said. “It’s the only house with its lights on.” They spoke loud enough for me to hear them from thirty yards away. Stealth work was clearly not their strength. An angry-looking Wingate came to the door before they reached it. He might have been watching from the window, but he might also have heard their pointless babble.

“Ready, Colonel?” one of the commandos asked.

Wingate turned off the lights outside his house and locked the door behind him. He did not speak as he walked over to the stealth jeep in his driveway, a rucksack dangling over his shoulder. He climbed into the back seat. I could see his head through the rear window. The commandos climbed into the front seats, and the jeep rolled out of the driveway.

I wished I had marked that jeep with the laser pointer that Bernie Phillips loaned me. Then I could have asked his trusty Marines to do the tracking. I did not have the option this time. The Marines had returned to their base.

Colonel Wingate and his commando escort drove with their headlights off. Since their stealth vehicle had night-for-day vision built into its windshield, that was no problem for them. To avoid being spotted, I also drove with my headlights off. I did not want the base police or the traitor I was tailing to notice me. The only thing in my favor was that instead of following Wingate, I sped ahead to the place I hoped would be his rendezvous spot.

Before taking me into town to kidnap the Army soldier, Colonel Phillips had shown me several maps of Fort Clinton and the surrounding area. There was no way a sellout like Wingate was going to ride out the attack. His soldiers were going to die. The Pentagon would send men to survey the base and there would be huge inventory discrepancies. Even if Wingate survived the attack, he would be arrested and killed in the aftermath. His Confederate Arms pals might not care if he got himself executed, but he might spill some important information in the process. To keep him quiet, they either needed to kill him or get him off the planet. Either way, they would need to send down a transport with a team of commandos. When that transport returned to the fleet, I aimed to hitch a ride.

By studying the maps, Phillips and I located the most likely spot for an enemy transport to land. It was only an educated guess, but it proved right.

Driving almost blind, I headed up a slow grade toward the raised parade grounds along the eastern gate of the base. This area was dark and mostly empty. Sure enough, every few seconds I spotted just a glimpse of the phantom black car in the darkness.

This part of the base was dark and lifeless. We passed no other cars. The landscape was studded with old-fashioned drill towers, standing high over the ground on stilts made of logs. A half-mile ahead of me, Wingate’s jeep slowed as it passed through a poorly-lit guard station. The gate at the guard station raised as Wingate approached. A commando left the station and climbed into Wingate’s stealth jeep. As if this were a cue, the attack commenced the moment Wingate’s car left the base. It came in the form of a silvery red beam that poured out of the night sky like a translucent pillar. The scene remained absolutely silent for a moment, then fire, smoke, and sirens erupted as a building exploded. I watched this scene unfold as I drove, and I looked at my wristwatch to mark the time. Once eight minutes had passed, I knew the whole thing would be over.

Fire trucks flashing red and white warning lights streaked across the base. From where I sat at the edge of the parade grounds, I could see fire blazing below, and I could see the immaculate red and white light twinkling from the tops of the fire trucks.

When I reached the gate, I noticed the shattered glass of the security booth and knew that the commandos had slaughtered the men left to guard this gate. There was no blood, no major destruction. The commandos had probably sneaked up to the gate on their way into the base. A couple of quick shots from a high-powered pistol, and the gate was theirs. Did Wingate care that men under his command had been ambushed?

Behind me, lasers rained down from above. Beams as big around as water towers struck buildings. Smaller beams no more than one foot in diameter flashed quickly, striking jets and gunboats right out of the sky.

I drove through the gate at eighty miles per hour—not a safe speed for driving wet roads on a dark night without lights. It might have taken the transport one minute to drop to the planet. It could have taken another minute or two for the commandos to drive to Wingate’s house. In another four minutes the shooting match would end whether I was on hand to catch Wingate or not. The sky outside of the fence was velvet and peaceful, a typically calm evening on a nonindustrial planet. When I saw a break in the clouds, I thought the sky looked like a lake of oil and stars. In the distance, another silver-red barrage cascaded down on Fort Washington.

There would be similar fireworks over the Air Force base. There the attack would be more intense, if anything. The base would send up its squadrons of F-19s to attack the invaders. If the enemy ships could destroy the runways in time, a few of those fighters might be stranded on the ground. The majority would streak through the sky faster than bullets. They would leave the atmosphere, find the invading ships and the real battle would begin.

The Air Force’s F-19 Falcons would attack from the ground. The U.A. fighter carrier and destroyers guarding the discs would close in from above. How many GCF ships had the enemy sent? How would they perform in battle? Were their weapons updated?

How long had the attack lasted so far? I looked at my watch. Only twenty seconds had passed since the first beam rolled down from the sky.

I saw no trace of Wingate’s jeep in front of me and had no time left for discretion. Turning my headlights on, I raced down tree-lined lanes and into the forested countryside. The sounds of sirens and explosions carried in the air, but they were distant and I ignored them. The attack was far away now and seemed no more significant than a day-old dream as I concentrated on finding the transport. I looked at my wristwatch and saw the timer hand sweep past the twelve. One full minute had passed since that first laser attack. Why had I not started timing when I spotted the commandos? Why had I gone to the base instead of simply hiding out here?

I doused my headlights. Up ahead, the white light of arc lamps shined through a grove. The trees blocking the glare created a strobe effect, as if I were watching an ancient silent movie. I pulled off the road and skidded to a halt in the mud.

There would be no time to call for help or pack my weapons, not even my M27. I jumped out of my jeep. A good hundred feet into the woods, men in green uniforms loaded small stacks of crates into an antique-looking military transport.

Other men with guns circled the area looking for folks like me. Here I had a stroke of luck. These men were dressed in Army fatigues that looked precisely like mine. They were camouflaged to look like the soldiers at Fort Clinton. Had one of Wingate’s soldiers unknowingly stumbled into their operation, these spies might have pointed to their own transport and claimed that they had located an enemy ship.

“We’re out of time,” somebody said in a soft voice that carried through the silence. “Anything and anyone who does not get on now gets left behind.” Somewhere back near town, still as distant as a dream, sirens and explosions continued to break the silence. I had to make my move. Fortunately for me, one guard had strayed far enough into the trees for me to take him.

“Last call. Return to the transport.” The voice was soft but it echoed over a hundred comLinks and carried through the woods.

I drew closer to my target, a lone man with an M27. He had blond hair. We looked nothing alike, but I did not think it would matter. Looking around these woods, between the men loading the ship and the guards, there were too many faces for anyone to keep them all straight. I doubt my victim heard me. He took one last sweep of the area before turning to go back to the transport. I hid behind a tree, no more than fifteen feet from where he stood. He had his back to me. I could see the barrel of his M27 pointing straight up above the top of his shoulder. Nice of him to bring me a replacement for the one I left in my jeep.

I took a deep breath and held it in my lungs. Barely lifting my feet, I rushed forward, staying in a slight crouch, my arms out and my fingers stretched as if preparing to strangle the boy. Had the floor of the forest been dry, I could have taken him easily, but the ground was muddy from the rain. I moved more quickly than he did, but I had to shuffle my feet to squelch the sound of my boots tromping through the mud. He hiked, I glided.

Ahead of him, I could see the landing area. Guards, cargo handlers, and commandos hustled into the transport. They did not look back as I leaped forward, fastening my right hand around the boy’s chin and anchoring my grip by placing my left hand just on the back of his neck. I pulled with my right hand and pushed with my left. The sound of his neck snapping was no louder than the tick of a clock as we both toppled forward. He was dead before our momentum sent us to the ground. Straightening my fatigues, I climbed to my feet. There was a smear of mud on my knee. I brushed off the dirt and leaves as best I could as I approached the transport.

“Hurry up, asshole,” someone yelled as I started up the ramp. I nodded and ran forward as the doors closed behind me. My boots clanked against the metal floor. I heard excited chatter all around me. The cabin was mostly dark except for soft red emergency lights. The engines rumbled and the transport lifted straight up in the air.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Every ship in the Galactic Central Fleet was more than forty years old. That did not mean that they were in bad condition or that they had seen a lot of action. In fact, few of the ships had traveled over the last few decades. New and clean as this transport was, it had antiquated technology. To prevent glare in the cockpit, the only light in the kettle—that was what we called the cattle car in which the soldiers traveled—came from red emergency lights. That was to my liking. I was, after all, a stowaway. I sat in the back of the kettle not far from the cargo area where nobody noticed me. The men around me did not like the dark atmosphere. “Like traveling in an armpit,” one man complained.

“Sending us back and forth in a damned drain pipe,” another man said in a different conversation. The best line came from the man sitting beside me: “Not even fit for clones.”

The inside of the kettle was anything but luxurious. The walls, ceiling, and floor were bare, unadorned metal. A line of benches ran along the wall of the cabin offering enough seating for maybe one-quarter of the men on this flight. Safety harnesses hung from the ceiling. In the case of an emergency, men would strap themselves in with these harnesses and hang from the ceiling like butchered cattle in a slaughterhouse freezer. The harnesses became rigid when in use, preventing the men from swinging into each other.

In a transport like this, passengers were nothing more than cargo. There were no windows and no way of knowing what was happening outside of the ship. The launch from New Columbia was smooth enough, but moments after we took off, the pilot signaled us to harness ourselves in. Batt Wingate and his commando-escort sat somewhere in the front of the kettle. I could not see them. It did not matter. I knew they were inside and besides, there was only one way off this bird. Once we landed, I would slink toward the door so that Wingate would pass me before he left. The mood in the kettle changed as the men fastened themselves in. Now, nobody spoke. Most of the men hung absolutely silent. A few smoked cigarettes and spat their smoldering butts to the floor. Outside the ship, the gears of war were turning. Swarms of fighters might spot us and attack as we left the atmosphere and entered the blanket of space. A lone fighter could destroy a transport, but it would take multiple missiles. These ships looked and flew like pregnant seagulls, but they had powerful shields and thick armor. This ship could survive a direct hit from a particle beam cannon. If one or two fighters homed in on us, we would likely survive the attack long enough for the Confederates to send help. I looked at my watch. Just under four minutes had passed since the bombardment began. By my best guess, the GCF ships had been in the area for six minutes and would broadcast out in another two. A missile slammed into our shields and the transport shuddered. The red lights blinked out for several seconds. In the darkness, men gasped but no one screamed. The atmosphere was tense but not panicked.

Another missile slammed into the shields sending the transport skidding sideways. It was a blow, a force that struck quickly and vanished. A few moments passed and we were struck by a particle beam. The walls of the kettle began vibrating. At first they shook, and then they convulsed in short fast shakes that seemed to tear the metal plates around us.

The lights went out again. This time they stayed out. I heard heavy breathing. The shuddering continued for no more than three seconds, but it seemed like minutes. I heard an occasional whimper, then somebody yelled, “Shake ’em and bake ’em!” It was a dumb joke but it broke the tension. Relieved laughter filled the cabin. A moment later the red lights came back on. In times of danger, I had the Liberator combat reflex that flooded my blood with a hormone made of adrenaline and endorphins. Everyone else on this ship turned to desperate humor to distract themselves. I did not need it. A warm, comfortable feeling spread through my body, a sense of power and mental clarity. I was not in control of the situation, yet the hormone made me feel as if I were. Another missile struck the ship and the kettle rattled.

“Knock, knock,” some man yelled. I could not see who.

“Who’s there?” responded nearly every man in the cabin, and the men burst out in hysterics. Inside joke, I guessed, and not a very good one.

And then the ride was over. There was the loud clank of metal dropping on metal as we lowered into a landing pad inside some GCF ship. The whining growl of straining motors echoed through the kettle as the heavy iron doors slid open and the hangar bay came in view.

I, of course, was still hanging from my harness. When my harness released me, I pushed through the crowd and hid near the door.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Granted, I did not see the space battle as it took place, but I had time to study it at length over the next few days. What I saw was the work of genius.

The first GCF ship to arrive in New Columbian space broadcasted in alone. It was a cruiser, the smallest class of ship in the GCF Fleet. It carried a crew of 130 men and, among other things, a fleet of three transports.

The captain of this ship played an interesting gambit. Instead of broadcasting his ship a few million miles out and risking remote radar detection, he used the Broadcast Network as camouflage. His ship materialized so close to the reception disc that the U.A. radar system recorded the anomaly caused by his ship’s appearance as a hiccup in Broadcast Network radiation. His ship was as black as space, making visual detection unlikely. To use an antiquated phrase, the cruiser flew in under the radar. If the ship’s arrival near the Broadcast Network had disrupted the Network, the cruiser would have been quickly detected. Some kind of modification in the cruiser’s engine prevented the disruption, and the ship was never spotted.

This cruiser parked itself five hundred miles above Safe Harbor. It launched a single transport and waited.

So, was this lone cruiser picked up by radar? Nobody knows and the equipment that would have recorded the readings was destroyed during the ensuing battle. Somebody knew the space around New Columbia very well. The cruiser stopped in a blind spot—a seam between two different radar systems. There it stayed until the battle was over.

About the time that Colonel Wingate left Fort Clinton, the cruiser radioed the rest of the fleet, and that initiated the attack. Fifteen GCF ships broadcasted into New Columbian space—a slightly larger attack force than the one that sacked Gateway. There would be no missing the anomalies caused by fifteen GCF ships broadcasting in at the same time.

The Air Force responded by sending up all of its F-19 Falcons. The fighter carrier and destroyers guarding the discs also moved into position. Had the GCF ships been of recent design, this might have been an even fight—a fifteen-ship armada comprised of destroyers, cruisers, and battleships against nearly 400 fighters, two destroyers, one fighter carrier, and ground cannon. But the Joint Chiefs were not looking for a fair fight.

Hoping to rout the enemy, the Navy had an additional fleet of ships waiting near a set of broadcast discs. The moment the battle began, the plan was to feed these ships into the Network, and in less than sixty seconds, the U.A. Navy would have twenty more ships in New Columbian space. But the Navy had to deal with the bottleneck of using a single reception disc. The GCF Fleet had no such restrictions. As the first of the Tomcats bore down from space and the Falcons flared up from the atmosphere, fifty additional GCF ships broadcasted into the battlefield. The video feed from the battle looked like a misprint. So many anomalies tore into the open blackness that it looked like the fabric of space had begun to boil. Feathery white lines flashed and crisscrossed. Circles of light appeared from which shadowy black forms seemed to glide. A dozen GCF battleships coasted into place in front of the broadcast disc and formed a line. Other ships parked behind the first waiting for a turn. When the first U.A. carrier emerged from the disc, the GCF

ships opened fire as it materialized into space.

The hull of the carrier flashed and ignited. The tip of its wing sheered off and webs of flame danced along its shell. That was the worst of the spectacle, I think. Flames cannot exist in the vacuum of space. Those flames were feeding on oxygen pouring out of the ship.

Only two or maybe three fighters made it out of the launch tube as the carrier staggered forward. An enormous fireball burst out of the tube and dissipated. Two battleships left their place in the firing squad and followed the dying fighter carrier, bombarding her with bright red laser fire. In another minute, the hull cracked and spokes of flames shot through. It looked, for a brief moment, as if the ship had a yellow and orange aura that vanished as quickly as it appeared. Then streams of debris gushed out of those ruptures in place of the flames, and the lifeless ship floated sideways and drifted into space. By this time, the next U.A. fighter carrier emerged from the Network and the massacre repeated itself. The firing squad bombarded the ships until they could not defend themselves. Then two ships finished the execution, and two more GCF battleships took their place in the firing line. Once the U.A. ships entered the Broadcast Network, it was too late to stop them or save them. A few ships were rerouted, but more than twenty Unified Authority ships were destroyed. Closer to the atmosphere, GCF ships prowled above Safe Harbor like sharks in a feeding frenzy. They traveled in groups of three and four, circling small territories and firing powerful lasers at planetary targets. A satellite captured video of this directly from above, and you could see the ships clearly against the blue and white glow of the New Columbian atmosphere.

New Columbia’s planetary defenses crumbled quickly. In the beginning, plenty of green and red beams fired up from the planet, but they seldom hit targets. The gunnery men on the ships homed in on those rays and returned fire. It took them less than two minutes to silence the cannons below. The fighters fared no better. Rows of battleships bore down on the Falcons as they tore out of the atmosphere. Several more GCF battleships swarmed the fighter carrier and the destroyers that had been guarding the broadcast discs.

The battle took ten minutes, not eight. During that entire time, the line of civilian ships fleeing New Columbia continued to stream into the Broadcast Network. The GCF ships never attacked them. When the last of the U.A. ships exploded, the GCF ships broadcasted away.

You may or may not win an even fight, but you will certainly take casualties. By stacking the deck with sixty-five ships, the commander of the Galactic Central Fleet guaranteed more than victory, he guaranteed himself a rout. The Unified Authority lost three forts, twenty-three capital ships, and hundreds of fighters on March 24, 2512. The GCF lost one soldier, the guy I killed to get aboard their transport. I was about to even the score.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The landing bay was disorganized. Of course, the battle was still going on when the transport landed on a Confederate ship, but that did not explain all of the chaos. This was supposed to be a military operation. During my time as a Marine, the ships I served on either ran like clockwork or key officers lost their jobs. That did not seem to be the case in the Confederate Navy.

As the rear door of the kettle split open revealing the deck, I saw cargo movers driving large crates through a confused crowd. Men sprinted to get to their stations. The movers, rudimentary robots that looked like a cross between a forklift and a battle tank, used radar to keep from colliding with people and objects. The mob of crewmen running back and forth around the movers must have overloaded the radar.

On the Kamehameha , every wall was polished and every light fixture dusted. On this ship, bunches of black and red cables hung from the walls like bunting. Branches from these cables snaked along the ceiling.

“Okay, let’s get this ship unloaded,” somebody yelled. There was a distinctly informal sound to the way the man gave orders, and I realized just how devoid of military leadership the Confederates must be. With very few notable exceptions, every officer that graduated from the military academies was Earth-born and Earth-loyal. It had always been so.

The only officers the Confederate Arms and Mogats would have were likely book-trained with no battle experience. They had a few notable defectors like Crowley and Halverson, but those officers would be too busy running the battles to work with the rank and file. The men I saw giving orders had not gone to basic training. They had not experienced the way seasoned drill sergeants stalk among enlisted men like a Tyrannosaurus rex in a herd of grass-eaters. The only experience these poseurs might have came from watching movies. Small wonder the Unified Authority won every land battle. The men on the transport unloaded the crates. They mobbed boxes that were light enough to be lifted and trotted down to the deck, stacking them in marked areas. They were a willing throng, not a workforce.

What I needed above all else was to blend in. By the time I got involved in unloading the transport, the small stuff was off. That left crates filled with heavy equipment, munitions, and the like. A crew of men riding lifters, two-wheeled vehicles with mechanical dollies capable of lifting a five thousand-pound pallet, weaved their way aboard.

I joined the hubbub at the base of the ramp and watched for Colonel Wingate. Now that we were on a GCF ship, Wingate was just a small fish, but he was connected. He would lead me to the men in charge. The pack of men around me thinned and disappeared, and still Wingate did not leave the transport. The men in lifters skittered back and forth up the ramp until their work was done, and still Wingate remained on the ship.

Soon I was alone in the landing bay, hiding near the open transport. I could not remain on the deck much longer without someone spotting me.

Yellow and red lights began flashing around the deck. “Prepare for broadcast,” a mechanical voice intoned. “Prepare for broadcast in ten, nine, eight . . .”

I looked at the transport. Wingate had to have boarded this ship. He would not have remained on the planet. It was entirely possible that the commandos killed him and left his body in the woods to cover their tracks, but why go to such lengths? Why send men to Fort Clinton? Why smuggle him off the base?

Why not just target his house from space?

“Seven, six, five, four, three . . .”

No need for stealth with that mechanical voice blaring so loudly. The flashing red and yellow lights created visual noise on the deck. The ship would self-broadcast any moment and, of course, images of Admiral Klyber’s pale corpse ran through my mind. I had a brief moment of uncertainty, then I sprinted up the ramp and into the dark belly of the transport. The kettle was completely empty. Harnesses hung from the ceiling. In the red light, they looked blacker than darkness. With its ring of hard benches and metal walls dully reflecting the non-glare amber light, the kettle looked like the inside of a kiln.

“Two, one. Broadcast initiated.” The voice sounded nearly as loud aboard the transport as it did in the landing bay.

Wingate had to be on this transport. He was not in the kettle. So he had to be up near the cockpit. The mechanical door began to close. Behind me, I heard voices.

“. . . complete shutout,” somebody said. “They’re guessing twenty, maybe twenty-five U.A. ships and as many as five hundred fighters.”

“Five hundred?” another voice asked.

“They had four hundred and twenty at Bolivar Air Base,” a voice said. I did not see the man speaking, though it was probably Wingate. So the traitor now was standing just outside the cockpit chatting with the pilots, getting a blow-by-blow account of the battle. They headed toward me. By the time Wingate and his friends reached the kettle, I had hid myself in the shadows near the ramp, wrapping myself up in cargo netting along the side of the wall.

“They had a carrier guarding the discs. That was another seventy fighters, so that makes four hundred ninety fighters.”

“How many of their ships were carriers?”

“I’d say all of ’em if I had to guess.” I could not see him, but I would have waged good money that was Wingate again.

“Broadcast complete,” the mechanical voice said over a speaker above the door of the kettle. The rear doors had sealed.

“All fighter carriers carry seventy fighters?”

“They’re supposed to. There’s a ship in the Scutum-Crux Fleet that has nothing but SEALS and transports.” All I could see was the netting around me and the metal walls, but I now thought I knew the sound of Wingate’s voice.

Now that the broadcast was complete, the transport could shuttle between ships. I heard the hiss of thruster engines and the whine of the landing gear as tons of weight were lifted from it. I felt the tremble of the ship as the hull lifted off the deck.

“I heard about that one,” somebody said. “I heard all of those SEALS are clones. Special clones. Real dangerous.” This was a low voice. A hard voice. This was undoubtedly the voice of a commando, probably one of the men that pulled Wingate out of Fort Clinton. I would have happily wagered my life savings that this fellow was some sort of street thug before starting a new career in the military.

“I wouldn’t know. That was a Navy project. All of the Rangers and Special Forces men I commanded were natural-born.” Wingate sounded irritated and tired. Turning traitor must have taken a toll on him. The grinding sound of retracting landing equipment echoed through the empty kettle. We were cutting through space. I did not know if we would fly to another ship or land on a planet. Wherever we were, it was deep in Confederate territory.

“So if there were seventy fighters on each of the ships we caught coming out of the Network, and we caught twenty-five of them . . .” He paused to do a little math. “That would mean we got one thousand seven hundred and fifty fighters.” There was excitement and pride and intelligence in this voice. It belonged to neither the thug nor Wingate. “Man, I’d hate to be the guy who has to report those losses to the Joint Chiefs.”

“And we didn’t lose a single ship?” the thug asked.

“Not a one,” the intelligent-sounding commando replied.

“How about the planet?” Wingate asked. Apparently the bright commando had access to some kind of report that neither Wingate nor the thug had received.

“I haven’t heard anything. You get the best info on stuff like that from the mediaLink anyway. They’ll have reporters down on the planet . . . assuming there’s any planet left.” The bright commando said this, then he and the thug laughed.

A moment passed and the sound of the thrusters started again. We were coming in for our landing. Hiding there in the netting, I realized that I was still dressed in camouflage gear and needed a change of clothing. No use taking the bright commando or the thug, they were probably dressed like me, in U.A. Army fatigues. I needed to dress like a crewman, not a soldier. I hung in the netting, silent and still listening to the muffled roar of the thruster engines as the transport prepared to land in some new hangar. Were we touching down on land or a battleship?

The thick metal doors of the kettle split open. I could see a quiet landing pad outside. The area was brightly lit. The ground was paved with black asphalt. There were no boxes or people, and no clues about where we might have landed.

“Well, come on. Atkins and Crowley both asked to see you,” the bright commando said. In saying this, he revealed a lot of information. Amos Crowley was the Army general who had defected to the Mogats. Atkins would likely be Warren Atkins, the son of the founder of the Morgan Atkins movement. That would make this a Mogat base or a command ship, I thought.

The doors ground open and white light poured into the red-lit world of our transport. Ducking my head behind a hanging fold of cargo netting, I listened as Wingate, the commando, and the thug tromped down the metal ramp, their shoes clanging against the steel. I caught a brief glimpse of their backs as they reached the end of the ramp. Wingate was short and normal in every regard compared to the tall, athletic-looking men on either side of him.

As soon as they were out of sight and out of hearing range, I wrestled my way out from behind the cargo nets. The netting itself was made of nylon. It hung like a spider’s web, suspended from the roof by dozens of little metallic cables. The cables rattled as I worked my way free, causing a soft clatter that would have attracted attention if anyone else was in the kettle. One of the pilots, however, was still in the cockpit. I could see white light spilling out of the open door at the front of the kettle. Moving slowly, stepping lightly so that my boots made barely any noise as they touched down on the metal flooring, I stalked across the cabin hiding behind the ribbings in the wall. I got to the door of the cockpit, took a deep breath, and peered in. A lone man sat at the controls speaking into a radio. He had a data pad on his lap. If he was filling out reports, he might be in that seat for hours. He might even finish his report, fire up the engines, and fly off to some new destination. Life would have been easier had the man sat with his back to me. Instead, he had turned his seat ass backward. Miraculously, he did not spot me.

I had a gun, the M27 that I took from the guy I killed on New Columbia, but that would be loud. I had my knife, but I needed the man’s uniform. I also needed him off the damned radio, and quickly, before a maintenance crew happened by.

It didn’t happen that way.

The sound of heavy shoes echoed through the kettle. A lone worker in white overalls, the uniform of a civilian mechanic, came walking across the deck. He walked right past me, no more than three feet from my face, as I lay on my side under a disturbingly narrow bench.

“I hear it was some battle,” the mechanic said at the cockpit door.

“I only saw it for a second,” the pilot answered. “What I saw was wild.”

“Did you fly into it?”

I squirmed back as far as I could. My feet connected with the girders that wrapped up and around the kettle—-the ribs. Rolling on my stomach for a quick glance, I saw the mechanic standing in the door of the cockpit. A new target, I thought. I could kill him as he left the ship and hide his body in the cargo nets.

Rising silently to my feet, never taking my eyes off the mechanic, I breezed toward the back of the kettle, the cargo nets, and the open doorway. There, I stopped.

Standing at the top of the ramp was a boy who could not yet have been in his twenties. He wore white overalls and a white hard hat. The boy looked strong. The zipper of his jumper was down to his chest. He had a stunned, slightly stupid look on his face as he stared at me. “Do you know where Fred . . . Hey? Who are you?” Never realizing the gravity of his situation, the boy spoke in a soft voice that did not carry.

I slammed the edge of my hand hard across his throat—a slow method of murder but effective in keeping a victim silent: if you crush your victim’s windpipes, you render him voiceless. He will then spend a full minute thrashing about as he suffocates, but he cannot call for help. This boy brought his hands along the bottom of his throat as he struggled for breath. His lips formed a wide, gasping O. I slung him sideways into the heavy cargo netting. The cables rattled as they brushed against the side of the kettle, but the noise was soft. Then, as he tried to wrestle free of the netting, I finished the boy by slamming the heel of my hand into the side of his neck. The whole thing was quick and silent. The sounds of the murder did not disturb the mechanic and pilot as they chatted up at the cockpit.

A moment later, a nearly naked boy lay tucked under a mess of cargo netting. No one would find him for a while, at least not until the next time somebody loaded cargo onto this transport.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

I had no plan. Here I was, on an enemy ship, probably in the center of the enemy fleet, and I was not sure what to do next. I did not make it off the transport in time to tail Wingate. I did not have a prayer of sabotaging the fleet, or even this ship. Escape seemed out of the question. My best bet would be to find a way onto the bridge of the ship and learn the fleet’s galactic coordinates. If I could locate that information and broadcast it to Huang, the U.A. Navy could come after the bastards. After what I saw on New Columbia, I liked the idea of U.A. ships having a fair fight.

Looking around the landing area, I stared into the ivory horizon where the runway met the walls. Cavernous and square, this hangar was designed for transports and cargo ships, not fighters. With the exception of Harriers, which had a vertical take off, fighters took off in runway tubes, allowing them to build up speed before entering battles.

The overalls were a bad fit. Either the kid I took them from had been less than six feet tall or he liked wearing pants that showed his ankles and sleeves that did not cover his wrists. And his clothes were baggy. I did not expect a tailored fit, still they had looked snug on the boy’s muscled body. With my tall and lanky frame, I vanished under the wide swath of cloth.

The worst thing was the boots. A swampy, phosphorous stench rose out of them, and they were hot and moist around my feet. Given the choice, I would have preferred to go barefoot. I found a pair of mediaLink shades inside one of the waist-line pockets. The lenses were greasy and dusted with dandruff. I checked the three small pores at the base of each of the eyepieces to make sure that the microphones were clear. The pores were mostly clean and I blew off the hairs and dandruff. When I reached the door of the hangar I stopped to look back. There sat the transport, alone in the center of the brightly lit landing pad. The world around the transport was ivory white. In that bright lighting, the transport was the color of eggshells. It almost blended with its surroundings; but because it did not quite blend in, it stood out even more.

What about Fred the chatty mechanic and his friend the pilot? Would they discover the little surprise I had wrapped up in the cargo bay? They might, but that could not be helped. Sooner or later, somebody would spot the body no matter where I hid it.

The hall outside the hangar seemed to stretch the entire length of the ship. The polished gray floor went on as far as the eye could see. This was a major corridor, a squared tube with twenty-foot walls. Clumps of people moved through it, but it was far from crowded. Compared to the bustling walkways of most U.A. ships, this corridor was deserted.

Enough time had passed since Wingate left the transport that I had not a prayer of catching up to him. In my mind, Wingate had become a low priority at this point. He had led me to the enemy fleet. But even capturing Crowley and Atkins seemed unimportant at the moment. What would I do with them this deep in enemy territory?

All I could do was go along for the ride. My first priorities now were to blend in and to find my way around this ship.

Navy crews had a practice called “hot bunking.” It meant that three men slept in the same rack—obviously not at the same time. They had eight-hour shifts—work eight hours, recreate eight hours, sleep eight hours. That meant that at any time, one-third of the crew would work while one-third slept and another third ate and played. The thirds were not always equal. The day crew, meaning the crew on duty when the captain was on duty, was generally larger than the others. Hot bunking caused problems for saboteurs like myself because it meant that the ship never slept. There would always be men at the helm and in the engine rooms. So what could I accomplish? I toyed with the idea of slipping a cable into the broadcast engines, but I did not feel like committing suicide. Feeling like I needed a better disguise than these coveralls, I followed the hall toward the center of the ship. Old as this ship was, it was still of a Unified Authority design. The basics were the basics. I knew that the landing bay would be on the bottom deck and that I would have to go to another deck to find what I wanted—a gym. Fifteen minutes and two decks later, I found one. I began unzipping my jumper even before I entered the locker room, and had it off my shoulders by the time the door closed behind me. Training did not appeal to these sailors by the look of things. The locker room was nearly empty. I heard someone in the shower and a couple of men with towels around their waists discussed the battle at New Columbia in front of the mirrors. Both men were Japanese. I noticed that quickly. They had black hair, narrow eyes, and bronzed skin. One man stole a casual glance in my direction while his friend spoke. Had this gym been for Japanese only, I might have been caught. But a moment later, a blubbery man with white skin turned the color of rare roast beef stepped out of a steam room. The man did not have a towel. Drops of water splashed from his flabby legs as he walked.

I grabbed shorts and a shirt from a shelf and tossed my coveralls into a locker. A moment later, I walked out to exercise, the mediaLink shades hidden in my pocket. And things continued to go my way. There was only one other person working out. He did not look at me as I climbed on a stationary bike, dropped the shades over my eyes, and began pedaling.

Now that I had changed to exercise clothes, I blended in. What I needed to do next was contact Huang or Freeman; but with another person in the room, I did not want to hold a conversation. In this case, I went the old-fashioned route and composed letters, customizing a form letter by choosing words and phrases from a menu and optically typing words when needed. On my own shades, I had a menu of people I contacted on a regular basis. It was a short list that included only the late Bryce Klyber and Ray Freeman. The boy’s shades had a different list. Using optical commands, I typed Freeman’s address on a virtual keyboard that was always present at the edge of your vision when you composed letters.

Freeman and I swapped emergency codes so that we would always be able to locate each other in situations like this. There may have been multiple Ray Freemans in the galaxy, but he was the only one who received messages sent with this code.

Optical typing was a slow process. When I switched from the keyboard to the context-sensitive letter, it was a relief. I selected an urgent document. The default letter that appeared was a request for financial assistance; but every word was interactive and as I changed words at the front of the letter, the rest of the document composed itself.

Ray,

I have stowed away on a GCF ship. I believe Warren Atkins and Amos Crowley are on this ship. Contact Huang and let him know that I will transmit the location of this ship as soon as I have it. I will call when it is safe.

Harris

I mailed the letter. When I removed the shades, I discovered that a new crop of people had entered the gym. Four men stood in the weight lifting area, joshing with each other as they pushed levers and pulled handles. Their weights clanked loudly as they lowered them. I climbed off of the bicycle.

“Buddy, you mind tossing me a towel?” one of the men called.

“Sure,” I said. I picked up a gym towel and tossed it to him. He snatched it out of the air and turned back to his weights without thanking me.

I went back to the locker room and stripped for a shower. The goal now was to remain inconspicuous as I killed time and waited for the right change of clothing. I needed something I could wear on the upper decks without attracting attention. So I went in the shower room and soaped and showered, peering out whenever I heard people entering or leaving the locker room. More than an hour passed before the man I was waiting for arrived, and I counted myself lucky that he had come so soon. I heard the door close and rinsed myself off. When I looked out of the shower, I saw a crewman walking around the floor picking up a few sopping towels that had been discarded and tossing them into the laundry cart.

Drying myself off as quickly as possible, I listened as he emptied bins filled with dirty gym clothes into his cart. As he left, I pulled on a fresh pair of gym shorts and a T-shirt. Stepping out into the corridor, I saw the crewman moving away slowly. He stood hunched over the laundry cart, his head turning to follow everyone he passed. He turned down one hall and then another before reaching his final destination.

Capital ships had more than one laundry facility. Chances were, there was a special facility on the upper decks just for cleaning officers’ uniforms; but this laundry would do. I approached and the door slid open.

“What do you want?” the crewman asked as I stepped into the room.

“My clothes,” I said, doing an impersonation of a peeved officer. “You hauled off my uniform in one of your laundry carts.”

“Sorry,” the man said in a flat voice. He went back to sorting dirty clothes and did not look back in my direction. Such insubordination. I was an officer. He was an enlisted man. Okay, I was a spy pretending to be an officer, but he didn’t know that.

I had at least thirty carts to choose from. In the third cart, I found an officer’s work uniform.

CHAPTER THIRTY

I went to the emptiest room on any battleship—the chapel. There I could speak freely.

“Who is Derrick Hines?” Freeman’s face appeared on my MediaLink shades.

“Never heard of him,” I said.

“You’re using his Link address,” Freeman said.

“Oh, him,” I said. “He was a crewman on a GCF ship.”

“Confederate or Mogat—?” Freeman asked. He had no interest in Hines’s fate. Freeman was on a communications console. I could see his face. It was as impassive as ever. Judging by his nonplussed expression, you might have thought that I had called from a bar in Mars Spaceport.

“No idea,” I said. “I think it’s their flagship.”

“How did you get on?” Freeman asked.

“I followed Colonel Wingate, the commander of Fort Clinton.”

“That was the Army base that got destroyed on New Columbia,” Freeman said. “What’s he doing on a GCF ship?”

“He swapped sides,” I said. “Turns out he was using Fort Clinton as a surplus outlet and the Mogats were his favorite customers. Think he’s worth much?”

As I thought about it, I had plenty of reasons to hate Batt Wingate. He would have sold me out without a second thought when I was regular military. He’d certainly sold out enough other clones. He must have helped William Patel smuggle bombs into Safe Harbor. Did he know that I would be there or was he just after Jimmy Callahan? I would gladly kill the man myself if I got a chance.

“He’s worth something,” Freeman said. “The Mogats routed the Navy at New Columbia. They shot down twenty-three U.A. ships and destroyed all three military bases. The pundits are saying that Washington is desperate.

“Have you got a location on the Fleet?”

“No,” I said.

Freeman waited for me to say more.

“Ray, this is too big for us. We’re going to need to bring Huang in on it. Keep this channel open. I don’t know how I’m going to do it yet, but I will get you a location. Once I have something, you’re going to have to turn it over to Huang.”

He agreed.

“Where are you now?” I asked.

“I was on my way to Little Man.”

“Your family okay?” I asked.

“A carrier buzzed them last night. I think it scared them. They’re colonists. Having the Navy around makes them nervous.”

“Did anything happen?” I asked.

“The captain gave them one month to evacuate the planet. They’ll still be there when this is over with.”

For some reason, I got the feeling that he was not anxious to visit Little Man. Until recently, he never even mentioned his family. Now, when he talked about them, he did not seem to exude warm feelings. We agreed to meet in Safe Harbor once I got off this ship. Freeman would go and see what happened to Callahan and the commandant at Fort Washington. One way or another, I thought I could bring in Batt Wingate, and we would need witnesses to prove he was our Benedict Arnold.

My new uniform made me a lieutenant in the Confederate Navy. Now that I was an officer, I moved around the ship more freely. I walked the halls and looked for clues. The first thing that struck me was the sheer emptiness of the ship. U.A. ships were crowded with personnel. Engineers, weapons officers, cooks, communications officers . . . wherever you looked, you saw sailors. Command ships seemed doubly crowded because, along with the crew, they had fleet officers and administrative flunkies.

This ship had a skeleton crew, maybe a half-crew. I walked down major arteries between engineering and weapons systems passing only an occasional sailor.

The ship itself was clean, brightly lit, and remarkably unorganized. The cables that I saw lining the walls down in the landing bay also snaked along the halls on the upper decks. They were about three inches in diameter and highly insulated, which led me to believe that they might carry a high-voltage electrical charge. The ceilings in this part of the ship were only eight feet tall, and the cables hung one foot lower than that. At one point, thinking I was alone in a long hall, I stopped to examine them. The outside covering of these cables was black with maroon strips.

“Is there a problem with the cables, Sir?” somebody asked behind my back. I whirled around expecting to see an MP. It was a petty officer—a maintenance technician. I recognized the crossed hammers insignia on his blouse. It was the same insignia that the U.A. Navy used. This man did not suspect me of being a spy. He was worried about my spotting a flaw in the way that the cables were hung.

“Looks sound,” I said.

He saluted, but he had a curious, maybe even slightly nervous look on his face. “Sir,” he said, looking as if he was not sure he should continue. I thought I knew what he would say and I was ready.

“Yes?”

Now lowering his voice to a whisper, he leaned forward and said, “You forgot your bars.” As he said this, he pinched the right side of his collar between his thumb and forefinger and shook it. That was not what I expected. I pretended to be confused. Seeing that there were no bars on my collar, I acted surprised and embarrassed. “Thank you. I can’t believe I missed that,” I said with an expression that I hoped looked like a nervous grin. The petty officer saluted and left. Of course there were no bars pinned to my collar, I had liberated this blouse from laundry. No officer worth his spit would leave his bars or clusters on the collar of a blouse that was headed for a cleaning. My first discovery was that this ship was a battleship. I found that out when I passed a directory on the top deck. The directory showed the ship’s seven decks plus a picture of the ship from the outside. A ship of this size should have had a 2,500-man crew. Now, having walked its length on every deck, I guessed the crew at no more than 800. Maybe one-tenth of the crew was Japanese. The engineering area was almost all Japanese.

The Japanese officers made no attempt to fit in with the other sailors that I saw. Most of the men on this battleship wore tan-colored uniforms. The Japanese uniforms were dark blue. Still, Japanese officers spoke English whether talking to other officers or just among themselves. The closer I came to the command deck, the more this ship looked Japanese. Not far from the directory, on the command deck, stood an archway made of two posts topped by two beams. Under the arch was a shrine or display with three long swords stretched across a three-tiered pedestal. Since the officers I saw walk past this shrine did not stop to bow or pray to it, I decided the display had more to do with heritage than religion.

I continued toward the bridge, passing through officer country and the maze of cubicles and offices that occupies the top deck of almost any naval ship. Here I walked with a businesslike stride, acting as if I had an important meeting to attend. On a U.A. Navy ship, someone would have noticed the missing bars. I would have been stopped and questioned. On this ship, few people noticed how I dressed. I turned a corner and saw the entry to the bridge. Taking a deep breath to steel myself, I walked to the door. The bridge was spacious and dark. Teams of sailors gathered around various consoles and workstations.

Everyone in the room was Japanese. In the dimmed light, their royal blue uniforms were black as shadows, even in the low glow from the workstations. Looking around the floor, I estimated that there were at least fifty officers sitting at the various stations.

In the center of the bridge sat a large square table which the captain and his senior officers used to chart courses and consider battle strategies.

There was nothing else to do. I stepped onto the bridge and walked its breadth. The workstations were arranged in concentric circles. Walking quickly without a pause, I recognized each station. The computers in the weapons area, which were unmanned at that moment, had large displays showing the diagram of the battleship with its gun and cannon arrays highlighted. The engineering station had computers showing detailed maps of each deck. I would have loved to have parked myself beside one of those computers to discover its many secrets, but three men sat at that station. The white glow of the readout display flickered on their faces.

Three men sat in front of one elongated screen in the navigation section. Their screen had a map of the galaxy along the top but most of the screen was filled with the local star system. I did not recognize the system. The last area I passed as I lapped the outer circle of the bridge was communications. Voices came from a station for monitoring fleet communications. During battle, this station would be the nerve center for the fleet. Now, after the battle, transmissions between ships went unobserved.

BATTLE GROUP SIX ABLE, THIS IS BATTLESHIP SEVEN ABLE, OVER.

COME IN BATTLESHIP SEVEN ABLE. THIS IS BATTLE SIX ABLE COMMAND.

WE ARE BREAKING FORMATION. DO YOU COPY?

WHAT SEEMS TO BE THE PROBLEM SEVEN ABLE?

This particular station was more cluttered than the worst workstation in the Golan traffic tower. A stack of data pads had toppled, spreading across the desk. Pencils, pens, papers, coffee cups, and other bric-a-brac lay all around those pads. There were four cups of coffee along the edge of that particular desk along with a brick-sized box of audio chips. In the center of this mess was a large ashtray filled to capacity with cigarette ash and butts. The line of drawers along the left side of the station hung partially open. The drawers, like everything else at this station, overflowed with junk. I passed by the station without slowing, completed my lap of the bridge and left. Not far from the bridge, I found a bathroom. A couple of men stood by the urinals; so I entered a stall and waited until they left, then I contacted Freeman.

“Okay,” I spoke quickly, but in a whisper, “this is a battleship. I have no idea where we are. I am going to leave this line open. Tell Huang to have his Intel section listen in.”

Freeman nodded. He did not bother telling me to “be careful” or to “watch my back.” That was not his way. He stared into the console intense and humorless as ever. His eyes reminded me of a double-barreled shotgun as they stared out from that mahogany skull. He was the most dangerous man in the galaxy, and I had absolutely no doubt that I could rely on him. His very being communicated undeniable competence.

Removing the shades, I stepped out of the bathroom stall and returned to the bridge. I took another stroll on the bridge, slowing to glance at the various workstations as I passed them. I wished I could examine the strategic charts. Huang would have paid one billion dollars for the secrets that they held. But I had something even more valuable . . . the fleet itself.

As before, nobody paid any attention to me. I approached the communications area and looked over my shoulder to be sure that no was watching. I never stopped, but I slowed down as I left a little extra mess on the already cluttered workstation. A moment later, I left the command deck and never returned.