CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

I was alone on the command ship of the enemy fleet. I had no idea about the fleet’s position. Escape was out of the question. We must have been light years from the nearest broadcast station. At this point, I had no means of communicating with Freeman or Huang or anyone else who could help me. I could, of course, steal another set of shades; but I did not know how long I would be on this scow, and I could not afford to take any more chances.

My best bet, I decided, was to return to the landing bay, a relatively empty part of the ship. There I would stow away on the next transport that came through. Sooner or later this fleet would attack another target. If I managed to dig in with the right group of commandos, I might have a way out. I returned to the gym. The place was as dead as before. A couple of enlisted men stood in the locker room chatting as they put on their uniforms. Neither man paid much attention as I grabbed shorts and a T-shirt and started undressing. A moment later they left and I went to the lockers. The coveralls were still in the locker where I placed them. Weeks might have passed before somebody discovered them in a forsaken gym like this one. I pulled them from the locker, stepped into the pants legs, and zipped them up. I did not bother with socks before stepping into my foul-smelling boots. If the worst I got out of this brush with the GC Fleet was foot fungus, I would consider myself lucky. Still noticing just how bad the clothes smelled, I started down to the landing bay. The smell was strong and the clothes felt damp against my skin. I did not know how long I would be stuck in these clothes. How had I missed this smell before?

And something else . . . I realized that I was hungry. The last time I had eaten was when I grabbed a sandwich on the Marine base on New Columbia. That seemed like a long time ago until I did the math. It had only been a few hours ago.

I took a lift down one deck. As I made my way down the corridor, I passed an electrician working on a wall panel. He had removed the faceplate from the panel and now probed the circuits with a pen-shaped tool. As I walked by, he stopped to look over at me. Our eyes met for a moment, and I nodded and moved on. The man did not return my greeting, but he continued to watch me. Perhaps I was paranoid. I looked back as I meandered down the hall. The electrician remained where he was, standing on a foot-tall step ladder, probing around that open panel.

Traveling down the next two decks, I passed almost no one. Perhaps a shift had ended and a smaller crew had replaced it. Maybe it was lunchtime and most of the sailors were eating. That last corridor that led to the launch bay was entirely empty. The thud of my boots created an indistinct echo as I walked through that brightly-lit stretch. Everything was going so smoothly, I had no doubt that I would slip off the ship soon.

The next time I saw people was as I drew near the landing bay. Two men walked silently down an intersecting corridor. They wore the khaki uniforms of regular officers rather than the blue uniforms of the Japanese, and they fell in quietly behind me as I continued toward the bay. I expected them to turn into some door or another, but they did not. They continued straight ahead, walking at the same pace as me. I thought about turning into the next door or hall that I passed, but there were no more doors until the ones leading into the bay. I pretended to be unaware of the men. I did not look back and I did not slow down. Neither did the men behind me.

With no other choice, I entered the landing area. A lone transport sat in the middle of the hangar, its hatch hung open. A small crowd stood on the ramp leading into the kettle. I counted three medics and six MPs, and in the center of them, placed on the bare metal ramp like a cadaver on a mortuary slab, lay Derrick Hines, stripped down to his briefs.

The muzzle of a gun jabbed into my back and a voice said, “How do you like that, boys, we have our first prisoner.”

If there was one kind of naval design that did not change with the times, it was brig. I once ran security for the Doctrinaire , the most advanced ship ever made. I knew every cell in its brig thoroughly, and they were exactly like the cells in this ancient ship . . . the one in which I was now a prisoner. Both brigs had the same kinds of bars on their walls and the same limp mats on their cots. I did not have the means to measure my floor, but if I did, it would have measured precisely eight feet by twelve feet. I knew that because that was the size of the cells on the Doctrinaire .

I lay on my cot staring up at the charcoal-gray ceiling. For a change of scenery, I sometimes turned to look at the charcoal-gray walls. These cells were the ultimate in ease when it came to housekeeping. You simply pulled the mattress out and sprayed everything down with a steam hose. The floor was a grating that led to a drain.

Mercifully, they had stripped me down to my briefs before throwing me in the cell. Those coveralls reeked. From what I could tell, the late Derrick Hines hadn’t washed them for weeks. I might have been a bit cold in this cell, but at least I could breathe.

Had the brig been darker, I might have slept. The lights in the hall were too bright. I think I knew why Liberators got addicted to violence, we became morose when we just laid around. I thought about the diary from Saint Germaine in which that priest and Tabor Shannon argued about whether or not Liberators had souls. I bought into both arguments and decided that perhaps we had worthless souls. I thought about Freeman. Had he arrived in Safe Harbor yet? I wondered about his family on Little Man. What would the Navy do?

Forced to guess how long I had been in this cell, I might have said three hours. It could have been longer. It could have been shorter. With no sun coming up and no events by which to gauge time, my internal clock was all but useless.

Footsteps echoed down the hall as the men came to look in my cell. My jailors looked in on me through the bars. Both men wore khaki uniforms. One was a tall man with blond hair, the other had dark brown locks.

“Hello, Harris,” the blond man said.

I glanced in their direction. I remained flat on my back on the cot. I wanted to test them. I was their first prisoner. Would they know how to treat me and how to control me, or would they make mistakes? If they were naïve enough, I could end up in charge even though I was the one behind the bars.

“Comfortable, Harris?” the blond man asked.

“Hope you didn’t go to too much trouble getting my name,” I said.“ I would have told you if you had asked.”

“Really? I always heard that Liberator clones were tougher than that,” the blond man said. “You knew you were a clone, right? I mean, I would hate for you to have one of those death reflex things and keel over right here.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

“So you’re a Liberator. I always thought your kind would be bigger. I mean, aren’t you guys the planet exterminators?”

I looked toward the man. “You must be a Mogat,” I said in as dismissive a voice as I could muster.

“The term is Morgan Atkins Believer. I suggest you remember that, Harris, or your stay here could become real unpleasant.” The humor never left his face, but his voice turned serious. Now that I stopped to look, I saw that this was not a man to take lightly. He had a broad and powerful build. His bull neck was almost as wide as his jaw, making it look like he had a pointed head. The muscles in his shoulders bulged, but this was not the beautiful physique of a bodybuilder. This man had padding around his gut.

“Learn anything else?” I asked.

The second man outside my cell, a short chubby man with the brown hair, stepped forward with a data pad and answered. “Harris, Wayson, Colonel, Unified Authority Marines. Raised: U.A. Orphanage #

five hundred fifty-three. Year of Manufacture: 2490. Clone Class: Liberator.

“How does a clone, especially a Liberator Clone, achieve the rank of colonel?” the dark-haired man asked.

“You want to know how I became a colonel?” I asked.

“I want to know why you exist at all,” the man said. “How did you find your way on this ship?”

“Do you want the full story or the abbreviated version?” With this I sat up.

“Let’s stick with the short one for now,” the man with the data pad said.

“I caught a ride on your transport when it left New Columbia.”

The blond-haired man, clearly my jailor, smiled and gave me a vigorous nod. “Know what Harris, I believe you. An honest clone, no less.”

“May I ask a question?”

“Go ahead,” the man with the data pad said. The jailor scowled at him.

“Is this ship part of the Hinode Fleet, or part of the Confederate Navy, or part of the Galactic Central Fleet?”

“None of your business,” the man with the blond hair said.

“Confederate Navy,” the man with the dark hair said. The bigger man, the jailor, scowled at him.

“It depends who you ask, I suppose,” the blond man continued to glare down at him.

“So what is the Hinode Fleet?”

“Another name for the same bunch of ships,” the smaller man said.

“Do you have more than one fleet?” I asked.

“No,” the man admitted.

“Shut up,” the jailor snapped.

“He’s in jail, Sam, and he’s down to his skivvies. How is he going to tell anyone?” Then the man seemed to think twice about this before adding, “We will ask the questions from here on out, Harris. We have not decided what to do with you yet. I suggest you conduct yourself properly. Execution is not out of the question.”

They left me in my cell with nothing to do and no way of knowing how much time passed. I laid on the cot in my underwear staring at the ceiling and tried to piece together all of the little fragments of information I had collected. It seemed like the separatists had a genuine Power Struggle on their hands. They had an alliance, but all three sides were claiming the Navy for themselves. Why did the Japanese officers wear different uniforms than the other men? Did the Mogats consider themselves part of the Confederate Arms? Did the Japanese? My thoughts drifted and I fell asleep.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

“I knew it was you the moment I heard they had a prisoner.” “Smiling” Tom Halverson, my nickname for him, stood outside my cell looking dapper in his dress whites, with the three gold stripes of a full admiral on his shoulder boards. He’d cut his graying hair into a flattop, but otherwise he looked no different than the first time I saw him, on the bridge of the Doctrinaire . “Hello, Harris.”

“Get specked,” I said.

“Watch yourself, clone.” Sam, my blond-haired jailor, warned me. Whenever people visited me, Sam accompanied them.

“That’s all right, Sergeant. Colonel Harris and I are old acquaintances,” Halverson said. “Is that why you’re here, Harris? Did you come for me?”

I did not respond.

“No comment, Harris? That doesn’t sound good.”

“The admiral asked you a question,” Sam said in his most menacing voice.

“That’s all right, Sergeant,” Halverson said.

“You know, Harris, you really are amazing. The rest of them can’t even locate our ships and you turn up on one of them. It’s a good thing the Unified Authority doesn’t have one hundred more of you. Of course if they want to win the war they can make more of you. But then, I get the feeling that all you want is a little revenge.”

“Why did you kill him?” I asked, propping myself up to look at Halverson. “You and Klyber were friends.”

“I should have thought that was obvious, Harris. He’s with the Unified Authority. I defected to the Confederate Arms. We were on different sides.”

“Get specked,” I said, slumping over on my back.

“I brought you a present, Harris.”

I did not respond.

“You can break these if you want, but I went to a lot of trouble to get them for you, so don’t expect me to replace them if you do.” He tossed a pair of mediaLink shades in through the bars.

“Bryce said you liked to keep up with current events. There should be some dandy news for you to follow over the next few weeks.

“And don’t bother trying to send messages out on those. I had the sending gear disabled.” With this, Halverson turned and left.

“You were stupid,” I yelled as he reached the door to the brig. “Killing Admiral Klyber was a stupid mistake.”

Halverson paused. “Why is that, Colonel?” he asked.

“Huang already planned to replace him with . . .”

“With Robert Thurston, no doubt,” Halverson said. He watched me for a moment with that implacable smile, and then he left.

Sam, who remained just outside the bars of my cell, continued to stare at me with those narrow green eyes that looked both alert and angry. Sometimes he looked like he could barely control himself. “If you break the lenses, they’d make real sharp blades. You might be able to save us some trouble and slit your own throat with ’em,” he said. “I’d like that.” Then he favored me with his backside, leaving me to pick up the shades.

I picked them up and turned them over in my hands to examine them from every angle. This was an expensive pair, far more stylish than the plastic shades I took from the late Derrick Hines. These shades had gold wire frames and honest-to-goodness glass lenses that automatically adjusted to ambient light levels.

The strip along the bottom of the lenses with the microphones had been removed. When I slipped the shades over my eyes and jacked in, I saw they had been hobbled so that the sending functions no longer worked. The browsing functions worked well however.

We were somewhere in the Norma Arm. Not only could I browse the Unified Authority-approved channels, I also found local broadcasts that were banned and filtered out of the U.A. media. Calendars were everywhere on the Link, and I knew that it was now March 26. Eleven days had passed since Bryce Klyber’s death. Thirty-six hours had passed since the attack on New Columbia. It was here that I watched the video feeds of the attack on New Columbia. I got to see how both sides reported the battle. The big story on the U.A. feeds was the unveiling of the Doctrinaire . Admiral Huang, now officially the highest-ranking man in the Navy after Klyber’s death, could not have been any better suited for the role of tour guide. He began his tours by telling the press how the late Fleet Admiral Klyber conceived the project and spearheaded the construction of the ship.

Huang escorted a large group of reporters on a tour of the Doctrinaire . He charmed them with his enthusiasm as he led them into battle turret after battle turret, then showed them the observation deck from which they could view the rest of the ship.

Huang did not reveal classified secrets like the dual broadcast generators, but he highlighted many of the obvious innovations. No reporter could possibly have missed the four launch tubes that ran the length of the hull of the Doctrinaire , so Huang talked about the fighter squadrons at length. He pointed out that most fighter carriers had a single tube and a compliment of seventy Tomcat fighters. The Doctrinaire , with its four tubes, had 280 fighters. With their rounded antennas’ the new shield technology was impossible to miss; so Huang told the reporters about the rounded shields and gave a cursory explanation about the technology that made them possible.

As Huang finished speaking, he was joined by the other Joint Chiefs and several senators. Hundreds of reporters sat in folding chairs, the way they might have attended the unveiling of the old Earth-bound battleships five hundred years earlier. They would have fit more comfortably in one of the ship’s briefing auditoriums than on the observation deck, but Huang saw a great photo opportunity and had the media sense to take advantage of it.

This was a side of Huang that I had never known about. He stood behind a small podium looking absolutely resplendent in his white uniform with its many medals. He and Halverson had the same number of gold stripes across their shoulder boards—three, but Huang cut a more commanding figure with the gray in his hair and his athletic build. Huang and Halverson were about the same age, but Huang wore it better. Huang looked like a middle-aged man. Halverson looked like a man closing in on his sixties. Smiling pleasantly, Huang opened the floor for questions, and every hand shot up. Reporters clambered for his attention until he finally selected a man near the front of the audience.

“This is unquestionably an amazing ship. But it is still just one ship. How can it possibly fare against an attack force like the sixty-five ships that sacked New Columbia?”

“Excellent question,” Huang said. “We have arranged a demonstration to address that very point. If you are not satisfied after our demonstration, we can discuss it further.”

Every reporter’s hand went up again. Huang selected a woman from the front row. “Can a ship this size self-broadcast reliably?”

“I think Admiral Klyber struggled a long time with that question,” Huang said. “The engines on this ship are perfectly reliable. We have tested them thoroughly . . .”

“Didn’t Admiral Klyber die in a broadcast malfunction?” the reporter followed up her own question.

“An unfortunate irony, if you like,” said Huang. “The broadcast equipment in this ship is completely stable.”

The reporters raised their hands. Huang selected his next inquisitor.

“Admiral Klyber was going to command this ship, was he not? Who will command it in his place?”

“Admiral Klyber never intended to command this ship. He was a fleet admiral, you know. You don’t assign a fleet admiral to a single ship. Rear Admiral Robert Thurston was selected to command the Doctrinaire while Klyber commanded the entire fleet.”

“Rear Admiral Thurston?” the reporter asked quickly, before Huang could open the floor for the next question. “The commander of the Scutum-Crux Fleet?”

“Yes,” said Huang. “As you may recall, he commanded our forces to victory at Hubble and Little Man.”

Thurston stepped onto the dais in his whites. A few of the less experienced reporters, the ones who had never seen Thurston, laughed or gasped at his youthful appearance. Short and skinny, with spiky red hair and an adolescent’s face, Robert Thurston always looked out of place in his uniform, especially standing next to a seasoned officer like Huang. The senators at the back of the dais looked like they could have been Thurston’s grandparents.

The questions continued for ten more minutes. The session would have gone on for hours had Huang allowed it, but he had promised a final demonstration.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I suggest you prepare yourselves. We are about to enter a war zone,” said Huang.

Smoky-colored tinting appeared in the glass ceiling and walls of the observation deck turning them opaque. The reporters spoke nervously among themselves as they saw the muted flashes of lightning all around them. It was one thing to sit in some comfortable commuter craft and pass through the Broadcast Network. This was raw. Here they sat on folding chairs on the glass-encased deck of a monolithic battleship while millions of volts of electricity danced on the glass just above their heads. When the lightning stopped and the tinting cleared, the Doctrinaire was in a battle zone. Looking around the crown of the observation deck, you could see dozens of ships buzzing around it.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Cygnus Arm. In case it has slipped your attention, this is one of the Confederate Arms. We are forty thousand light years deep in enemy territory.

“What you see flying outside our shields are twenty-five ships from what we in the Navy call the

‘mothball fleet.’ These are vintage ships. These are battleships from 2488 and newer. They are fully functional, space-worthy ships. They were perfectly preserved for just such an occasion as this.

“Who is flying them?” a reporter called out.

“Not to worry,” Huang said, “they are not being manned by live crews.”

Knowing Huang and his disdain for synthetic life, it would not have surprised me to learn that those ships had all-clone crews. But even the cost of raising clones comes out of the budget, so Huang most likely controlled these ships using remotely controlled computers.

Zipping around, weaving in and out and around each other, the old battleships circled around the Doctrinaire from two miles off.

“Before we begin our actual battle,” Huang said, “you should know that the ships around us are using live ammunition. Rear Admiral Thurston, would you direct one of those battleships to attack?”

One of the battleships charged straight at the Doctrinaire and fired. It shot a brilliant burst of bright red laser fire followed by three torpedoes. I could not believe what I saw. This was a full-on assault. A lethal attack. The translucent shields turned milky white where the beam hit. The laser beam was round and red and as thick around as a tree stump, but it stopped dead at the shields. Moments later, the three torpedoes slammed into the shields and burst into puddles of light that dissolved quickly in the vacuum of space.

Most of the reporters gasped and a few screamed.

“As I stated before, the attacking ships are decommissioned U.A. Navy ships. We stopped using these fifteen years ago because their technology was obsolete, surpassed by technologies which are now also considered obsolete. These ships were made twenty years after the ships currently used by the Confederate Arms,” said Huang.

Huang now pulled an old-fashioned analog pocket watch from the podium. He held it up for the reporters to see. “Let the battle begin,” he said.

“Admiral Klyber spared nothing when he designed this ship,” Huang said. “He wanted to make the ship that would end the war . . . a ship that would terrify enemies into abandoning their Revolution.”

Above Huang’s head, the vacuum of space looked like a thunderstorm. Hundreds of torpedoes pecked at the shields from every angle. They burst and vanished leaving no trace. Laser beams slammed into the canopy creating a crimson light show.

“I think it’s time we teach these marauders a lesson,” Huang said, tensing his thumb over the timer button on the pocket watch. “Admiral Thurston, return fire.” The watch bobbed up and down as he clicked the timer.

Laser bursts fired from the side of the Doctrinaire . I had never seen these cannons tested, so I did not know what to expect. The battleships continued to fire lasers and torpedoes at the Doctrinaire , but nothing penetrated the shields. Seeing these fireworks reminded me of watching a light rain fall through a see-though umbrella.

The cannons on the Doctrinaire fired measured bursts. The cannon fire made a sizzling sound that lasted one-half of a second at most. Dzzzz. Dzzzz . You could see it launch if you happened to look at the right cannon just as it fired. The laser looked like a solid red rod that issued from the cannon and vanished. The bursts traveled at the speed of light. The time that it took for the laser bursts to pass through the shields was so short that they could not be measured by any instrument. Out in the blackness that engulfed the observation deck, “enemy” ships exploded.

Lasers from the Doctrinaire penetrated the hulls of the attacking ships as if they had no shields. There would be a flash. A ball of fire and smoke would flush out of the injured ship precisely where the laser hit. Everything burst from the laser wound, then the injured ships went dark. They were not crushed. They simply coughed out everything inside them as if all of their innards had been sucked out by space itself. The computer-controlled targeting system on the Doctrinaire wasted few shots. Lasers burst in all directions. Many of the ships in the attacking fleet were hit two and three times. Dzzzzz , and they burst and died. Dzzzz . Dzzzz , and the crumbled carcasses turned red and somersaulted in space. The lasers might melt the surface of the ships, but the absolute cold of space quenched the damage. Soon there was so much debris floating around the Doctrinaire that it looked like the ship had entered an asteroid belt.

The last of the attacking ships nearly disintegrated in the laser fire from multiple cannons. The ship continued to glide toward the shields. Huang stopped the time with a flourish, making sure that the reporters knew that the battle had ended. He looked at his watch and smiled. “Two minutes and twenty-three seconds. Not quite the time I hoped for, but not far off pace.”

Putting the watch back on the podium, Huang looked up at the derelict battleship that now hurtled toward the Doctrinaire . “This is a lucky break. Robert, let that ship fly into our shields,” he said. The battleship tumbled into the shields and stopped instantly. The collision reminded me of a small bird slamming into a windowpane. The shields held that battered hull in place, infusing it with an electrical charge. After a few moments, the charge repulsed the dead ship and it floated away from the Doctrinaire .

“The enemy is using the Galactic Central Fleet, a fleet of U.A. Navy ships that vanished more than forty years ago. It is an incomplete fleet. It has no fighter craft. A fleet without fighters, gentlemen, is like a boxer without a jab. In order to strike, the enemy will be forced to use battleships, and battleships, ladies and gentlemen, big and slow ships that are hard to maneuver, make great targets . . . great targets.

“The Confederate Navy is perfect for bushwhacking helpless carriers as they emerge from the Broadcast Network. It will be useless against a giant ship that hits the deck running.”

As I watched this first active demonstration of the Doctrinaire , I began to wonder why no one had bothered questioning me about the ship. Perhaps with traitors like Crowley and Halverson, they knew more than I did. Admiral Halverson, until recently the second-in-command on the Doctrinaire , probably knew all about the dual broadcast generators and the rounded shields. He knew everything I knew, plus he knew about the powerful new cannons that could destroy GCF ships with a single shot—something I had not been briefed about.

Halverson assumed I had come to avenge Bryce Klyber. Since I had no means of transmitting information when I was captured, nobody worried about what I might have learned. In their minds, I was an assassin, not a spy.

I lay on my cot thinking about the demonstration I had just seen. What would Warren Atkins make of it?

What would Amos Crowley, the general-turned-traitor, think?

Would Colonel Wingate regret switching sides? Wingate could not possibly have known about the Doctrinaire . Would he try to weasel his way back into the U.A. Army?

What could Admiral Halverson possibly say to the men around him to give them hope? I imagined him at a table surrounded by stunned officers. “Sure it looks impressive,” he would say, “but we can take it. I know we can.”

No one bothered to interrogate me. In fact, after the visit from Halverson, I was pretty much left alone. My jailors suddenly remembered me the following day, March 27, 2512. That was the day that the tides of war turned.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

I started the day with a quick search of the mediaLink and found nothing exciting. I pinged a few channels to watch news analysts digest yesterday’s demonstration. One U.A. analyst called the Doctrinaire the “most dominating advance in military strategy since the fighter carrier.” On the Confederate Arms stations, I saw the same interview again and again—some wizened admiral I had never heard of dismissing the Doctrinaire as “The Unified Authority’s new Bismarck .”

“ Bismarck,” I mused. Huang had used the same historic reference during the summit. Having grown up in U.A. Orphanage #553, a clone farm in which the term social studies translated to the study of great land battles and oceanography meant naval science, I knew all about the Bismarck . That was the unstoppable battleship of its day, a juggernaut with one Achilles heel—its rudder. A torpedo jammed the rudder of the unsinkable Bismarck and it sailed in circles as enemy warships pounded it into the sea.

“We have more than five hundred ships in our fleet, not twenty-five,” said the old admiral, a man with mutton chop sideburns and a bushy white mustache. “Our ships have been reengineered. The U.A.’s new Bismarck is big and slow and will make an easy target for a modernized fleet. No serious military strategist believes you can win wars by making a really big boat. They gave that up centuries ago.”

Irritated by that silly old man, I took one last look around the U.A. networks for news and gave up. I laughed at that relic of an officer for pulling out an old chestnut like comparing the Doctrinaire to the Bismarck . Granted, the Bismarck had been sunk, but there was no overlooked rudder on the Doctrinaire . Apollo could not have guided an arrow into Achilles’s heel had he been dipped in wraparound shields.

It did not look like much had happened during my resting period, so I took off my shades and began my morning exercises. I stretched my legs, arms, back, and neck. Placing my toes on the edge of my cot, I balled up my fists and did four sets of fifty push-ups on my knuckles. I then did sit-ups and leg lifts and jumped in place.

Just as I began to work up a decent lather, Sam the jailor came in. “You might want to put on the shades Admiral Halverson gave you,” he said. “We’re about to attack another planet. It’s time to show those U.A. speckers what we think of their big scary boat.”

My chest, shoulders, and arms had a pleasant dull ache. I felt muscle spasms as I sat on the edge of my cot and slipped on my shades. Regular programming had been preempted. In a moment, the station would show a live news flash.

“How long has the attack been going?” I called.

“Just began,” Sam said.

At first I thought the Confederate Arms reporters and their Navy had become so cocky that they were talking about attacks before they happened. Then I remembered that I had been watching a Unified Authority station when I removed my shades. Somehow the U.A. knew about this attack before it commenced.

The heading at the bottom of the screen read: TUSCANY—SAGITTARIUS ARM. The scene above was a battle in progress.

The live feed was shot from the planet’s surface and told me nothing. There was none of the destruction I had seen on New Columbia. People gathered along the streets and stared into the sky to watch tiny flashes of light—a distant naval battle that blended in all too well with the stars around it. Whenever there was a big flash, a momentary explosion that looked no bigger than a dime in the night sky, the crowd would “oooooo” and “ahhhh” like an audience watching a pretty fireworks display.

Just moments ago, a fleet of fifteen Confederate Navy ships broadcasted into Tuscany space and were intercepted by a fleet of nearly fifty U.A. ships. It is not known if the Doctrinaire, the Unified Authority’s super ship, joined this battle.

The reporter, a young woman with long brown hair wearing a pretty light blue suit, looked more like she was on her way to the bank than covering a war. Her hair was perfect. She stood calmly in front of the camera, speaking casually. Above and behind her, little lights twinkled and extinguished. They might have been fireflies, or stars on a very clear night.

In recent days, the Confederate Navy has attacked Gateway and New Columbia, destroying military bases on both planets. This attack marks the first time that Confederate ships have been seen in the Sagittarius Arm.

The woman paused and touched her finger to her ear. Then the screen split into two side-by-side windows.

Paula, we are receiving the first still images of the battle as it appears from space. These are early images released by the Department of the Navy.

Behind the anchor woman’s desk, a large screen showed pictures of a space battle. The first picture on the screen showed ships broadcasting in. The ships were black and would have been almost invisible if not for the bright lightning halos that formed around them.

As you can see, at 2215 standardized time, fifteen Confederate ships appeared in New Tuscan space.

The next picture showed swarms of fighters gathering around shadowy shapes that looked something like black holes. The attack had already begun by the time this image was taken. The only evidence that those black shapes were indeed enemy ships was the little pricks of light where missiles and lasers struck their shields.

According to Naval sources, 350 U.A. fighters engaged the enemy ships, destroying two battleships. U.A. battleships, cruisers, and missile carriers also joined the battle.

The next picture showed four ships taking heavy damage. In the background, I saw the flare of rocket engines. While their comrades burned, several Confederate ships tried to cut and run. They had no choice.

There are unconfirmed reports that Naval Intelligence knew about this attack in advance and that Navy spies have infiltrated enemy command. The Department of the Navy denies those reports. We do know that the Navy was ready for this attack.

There was a pause.

I have just received a report that a total of six enemy ships have been destroyed and that nine others managed to broadcast out safely. While Pentagon sources confirm that several single-man fighter craft were destroyed in the battle, the U.A Navy lost no capital ships.

I heard the clang, but my attention was fixed on the news and it never occurred to me that somebody had stepped into my cell. “Company, Harris.” It was Sam’s voice and Sam’s fist, which slammed into my stomach. I was stretched out on the cot, completely unaware. The pain telegraphed itself from my gut to my brain in an instant. I curled up, my arms folded over my diaphragm as I struggled for air. My Liberator programming kicked in the moment Sam’s fist struck. The problem was not that I panicked. My mind was clear and I felt that warmth as the endorphins and adrenaline spread through my veins, but I had no air in my lungs. Given a moment to breathe and climb to my feet, I might have fought back, but Sam did not give me that moment. He grabbed my hair, gave my head a hard shake, and then dragged me off the cot. I toppled onto the cold steel floor, the edges of the grating cutting into my palms and knees, and my right cheek, which landed hard. Sam’s boot slammed into my jaw with enough force to partially lift me off of the ground, and the back of my head struck the metal frame of my cot. After that, everything went blank.

When I woke, I lay dressed in my briefs in what appeared to be an operating room. My neck, shoulders, wrists, waist, and ankles were all strapped to the hard, cold surface of a table. There was a strap across my forehead, but this one was loose enough for me to lift my head an inch. I could turn my head enough to see the straps around my wrists. A bright light shined on my face from above. Its glare gave the skin on my arms a bleached look. Beyond the veil of the light, I could not see much of anything.

“I am sorry I could not visit you sooner,” a voice said from beyond my sight. It was a low voice, a voice filled with commiseration. A squat silhouette appeared at the edge of the light. The man stepped closer. Yoshi Yamashiro, the former governor of Ezer Kri, stood beside the table. He wore a dark gray suit and red tie, the uniform of a civilian politician.

“I guess Tuscany didn’t go the way you expected,” I said.

Yamashiro laughed. “I guess not.”

“And you think I had something to do with it?” I asked.

“You make an excellent suspect. Obviously you could not have done it alone.” Yamashiro was a short man, no taller than five-feet-six-inches. He was powerfully built with broad shoulders and a wide chest. He did not look like a man who worked out, but rather like a man who was naturally strong. He was in his fifties or sixties with gray streaks woven into his black hair. The walnut-colored skin of his face was dry but not wrinkled. His eyes were as black as olives. I saw sympathy in his expression.

“Your being a Liberator has caused quite a stir between three uneasy partners,” Yamashiro said. He spoke in a hushed voice. I was pretty sure that we were alone in the room, but that did not mean there were no mikes or cameras.

“The Morgan Atkins Believers consider you a devil. They claim to respect all life forms, but when it comes to Liberator clones, they make an exception. They want you exterminated immediately.

“Sam, your jailor, is a Morgan Atkins Believer. He has offered to kill you himself.”

“He damned near did,” I said, feeling deep aches in my jaw and ribs.

“The Believers are not military minded. They are politically savvy. The military minds come from the Confederate Arms. They say we should torture you, find out how you learned of our plans and what else you might know. After they get what they want, they plan to execute you.”

“How about you?” I asked.

“After we win this war, I think you should go free . . . provided you explain a few things” said Yamashiro.

“How I boarded this ship?” I asked.

“We know all about that,” Yamashiro said, placing a chair beside the table and sitting down. He pulled a small gold lighter and pack of cigarettes from inside his jacket. “Mind if I smoke?” Before I could answer, he lit a cigarette and replaced everything in his jacket.

I lay on my back, cold in the chilled air of this operating room, watching tendrils of cigarette smoke rise in the light.

“You killed Corporal Jamie Rogers outside of Safe Harbor while he was patrolling the woods. You were alone, and you took his place on the lift that brought his platoon back to the fleet. We know you killed Rogers because he did not report after the mission. We know you were alone because we took a head count on the ship.”

I listened to this and nodded. “I did not know his name.”

“We’ve been able to trace your movements on this ship. You killed Private Derrick Hines for his clothing. Once you had it, you went to a gymnasium on the second deck. Then you went to a laundry facility and stole a uniform belonging to Lieutenant Marcus Cox. You were seen inspecting the wiring in a service hall. When asked about it, you commented that it looked secure.

“We even have a security feed of you on the command deck. You strolled around the bridge twice. A few minutes later, you were captured back in the landing bay. Presumably you were looking for a way off the ship. Does that sound correct?”

“More or less,” I said. I came off sounding much more confident than I felt.

“How did you know we would attack Tuscany?”

“I didn’t,” I said.

“Did you hear people discussing it?”

“Maybe the Unified Authority has a spy on the ship. I came here for revenge, not information.”

“There is no one else on this ship,” a voice said from behind me. I could not see the man, though I thought I recognized the voice. “There are no spies on this ship . . . well, other than you.”

“General Crowley,” Yamashiro said. He must have meant for this to sound like a greeting, but it sounded more like an announcement.

“Governor Yamashiro,” Crowley said, stepping into view. “I was not aware that you knew Colonel Harris.”

“We met on Ezer Kri,” Yamashiro said.

We had not actually met. I was on Bryce Klyber’s guard detail and escorted the fleet admiral into the capitol building. Yamashiro and I did not speak on that occasion. It seemed unlikely that Yamashiro would remember me from that incident.

“And you took a personal interest in the colonel?” Crowley asked. A tall and lanky man with a snowy-white beard, Crowley looked down at me with an expression that was not entirely unfriendly.

“He was not a colonel at the time, only a corporal,” Yamashiro said.

“Then I have known Colonel Harris even longer than you have,” said Amos Crowley. “He was a mere private when we met. He was fresh out of basic and assigned to an awful planet called Gobi. Harris was promoted from private to corporal a few days after I left. Isn’t that right, Harris?”

I did not say anything. If I could have broken free of the table, I would have happily murdered General Crowley on the spot.

“You must feel very special, Colonel Harris. Here you are, a prisoner of war, and an important man like Governor Yamashiro has chosen to come visit you. I would never have guessed you to have such powerful friends.”

“Governor Yamashiro asked you how you knew about our plan to attack Tuscany.” Crowley said. “I would be interested in hearing your answer as well.”

“I did not know about it,” I repeated. “How could I possibly have known about it? I was in a cell.”

“But somehow, you did,” Crowley said. His voice lost its native jocularity. Now it had an antagonistic edge. “And somehow you managed to communicate that information to the Navy, Colonel. I want to know how. If you do not tell me willingly, I am prepared to force it out of you.”

The truth about torture was that it never failed—the victim will always give in. It was only a matter of time. I could have told Yamashiro or Crowley my secret. I believed Yamashiro when he hinted his intention to protect me and set me free once the war was won. The problem was that his position did not seem so much better than my own.

If I read this situation correctly, the Confederate Navy was suffering from an identity crisis. The boats captured by the Morgan Atkins Believers were taken so long ago that the antiquated ships would have proven worthless in battle.

The Japanese came from Ezer Kri, a planet with several prestigious schools of engineering. The Japanese must have provided the engineering talent needed to update the GC Fleet. To Yamashiro and the refugees of Ezer Kri, this was Hinode Fleet.

The Confederate Arms, with their billions of citizens, and the Mogats, with their millions of members, were willing to tolerate Yamashiro for now. I could hear it in Amos Crowley’s voice. He did not like seeing Yamashiro in this room, did not trust Yamashiro to be alone with me. Crowley’s loyalties were obvious enough. He joined the Mogats movement and deserted the U.A. Army in 2507, three years before the Confederate Arms declared independence and formed their own government. Clearly he had no connection with the Japanese. As a Mogat, Crowley would want me dead.

Fortunately for me, Amos Crowley was also a military man, the kind of man who understands the importance of good intelligence. He knew everything he needed to know about the Unified Authority military complex. Hell, he helped build it. What he did not know was how much I knew about his plans and how much of that knowledge I might have communicated to my superiors. Staring down at me, his urbane smile as bright as ever, Crowley said, “Governor, Colonel Harris and I have some matters to discuss.”

“There are the articles . . .” Yamashiro began.

“Articles of agreement stipulating the humane treatment of prisoners,” Crowley said, sounding bored.

“Yoshi, I assure you that Colonel Harris will receive humane treatment. Now, if you would excuse us, my interrogation team should be arriving.”

Yamashiro listened to this and appeared to consider his options. Lying down on the table, I felt like I was watching two dinosaurs battle above me. Yoshi Yamashiro, the short, solid man with the powerful build, was the herbivore—the Stegosaurus fighting for its life. Crowley, ever the carnivore, was the Tyrannosaurus rex.

“I will speak with you again,” Yamashiro said to me. He nodded to Crowley and left. Crowley looked away from me to watch Yamashiro leave. When he looked down again, he had an expression that reminded me of a wolf staring at a wounded lamb. “I’ll give you one chance. How did you know about the attack on Tuscany?”

“I didn’t,” I said. There was no reason to tell Crowley the truth at this point. He would not have believed me. He would have tortured me to confirm what I said and to make certain I told him everything. I did not want to be tortured. More than anything I had ever wanted in my life, I did not want to be tortured.

“How did you warn the Navy about the attack?”

“I did not know about the attack,” I repeated. I was sticking to the truth in case they were monitoring me for physical responses. I knew how I warned the Navy, but I had not known about the attack. Crowley pursed his lips. “I see,” he said. He reached a hand along the side of the table and I heard a snap as he flipped a switch. There were several video monitors around the table, just at the edge of the light. One down toward my feet showed body readings. Multi-colored lines ran across the screen displaying my pulse, my heartbeat, my stress level, and my brain activity. A score in the top right corner of the screen showed a computer-calculated projection of the veracity of everything I said based on those body readings.

“It would be pointless to lie, Harris. You know that.” He paused, waited a moment for me to study my readings on the video screen, then repeated his questions. “How did you know about the attack? How did you send your message?”

“I did not know about the attack,” I said.

“I suppose it is possible that some U.A. admiral got lucky and happened to station fifty ships around Tuscany,” Crowley said in a confiding voice, “but the monitor reading your vital signs does not seem to believe you.”

My pulse and heartbeat remained steady, but the lines showing my stress level and brain activity had turned into saw blades.

“I think there are things that you are not telling me, Harris. I’m not good at interrogation. We have other people who specialize in it. I’m betting that you will be a lot more helpful once they have a word with you.”

He stepped out of the room leaving me alone to think about what might happen to me. They would torture me. They would use every old and new technology at their disposal to make me suffer. The old forms of torture had not been forgotten. They were brutal and barbaric. The new forms were surgically precise, left little damage, and were incredibly effective. And I was going to go through this for what? To protect the nation I hated? To get paid by Huang? To get revenge on the men who killed Klyber? More likely, I would allow myself to be tortured because of neural programming. I was designed not to back down . . . and because, despite it all, I wanted to protect the Republic, earn my bounty from Huang, and kill the men who killed Klyber. But above all, I was going to be tortured because my programming would not let me help the enemy.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

The chemical compound in the syringe was not lethal, but the medical technician let me know that having electricity-conducting toxins flowing through my veins was not good for my health. “Taken in large quantities,” he said, “it might cause cancer.” He did not smile as he said this, though he must have known that a long bout with cancer was the least of my worries. He also told me that the toxins would dissolve in my blood. Two or three injections, he said, should not cause permanent damage; and in his experience, no one had required more than two sessions with this particular compound. After giving me the injection, the technician left the room and I was alone. My fingers tingled and my palms were covered with sweat. Lying alone in the darkness wearing nothing but my briefs, I noticed the air getting colder and wondered if that chill was in the room or in me. I had time to think about how I could twist information. I practiced lies and half-truths in my head and watched the way the monitor reacted as I convoluted facts.

I did not know if anyone had ever tortured or even interrogated a Liberator clone. I did not know what kind of strength the hormone—the adrenaline and endorphins— would offer. It would certainly keep my thoughts clear, but that might make the pain more acute.

At the moment, I saw no reason to suffer for the Unified Authority, the pan-galactic republic that created me. Yes, I had been made and raised by that government, but I had also been banned by it. The Senate passed laws to outlaw my existence. Che Huang sent me out to do his bidding, but he was no friend. The patriotic stirrings that I once felt for the Republic had been nothing but a misconception. I looked around as best I could. Everything within that cone of blinding light shining over my table was bleached white by its brightness. Everything beyond the edge of the light was nearly invisible to me, shadows at most. Time moved slowly. I thought about the orphanage in which I grew up. I had a mentor at the orphanage—Aleg Oberland. He was the man who convinced me to follow current events. He kept in touch with me after I left the orphanage. He sent me two or three letters per year over the mediaLink. I thought about Vince Lee, my old friend from my days in the Marines. Vince and I went on leave together. We were in the same platoon and we survived the slaughter on Little Man together. He was still an officer in the Scutum-Crux Fleet.

How long would they leave me alone to think? Was this part of the process—letting the fear of torture weaken my resolve? Maybe they just wanted to wait until their chemicals spread through every cell of my body, running through my veins like a mouse in a maze. I made the mistake of staring straight up, and the light above my head shined into my eyes. When I looked away, orange and black dots filled my vision. And the room around me was filled with absolute silence.

Time continued to pass. I watched the heart, stress, and pulse lines on the monitor. Minutes done were minutes gone. I thought about the people I knew, the clones and officers in my past platoons. I did not care for the Unified Authority, nor did I feel that I owed it anything, but there were individuals who had mattered at one time or another. There was Sergeant Tabor Shannon, a Liberator. He and I got drunk together the night I learned that I was a clone. During the battle at Hubble, he and I went into a cave filled with Mogats. He never came out.

There was Captain Gaylan McKay, a natural-born who showed no prejudice against clones, not even Liberators. He died on Little Man. McKay’s last act was ordering me to leave him behind. How could I ever look these men in the eye . . . even in my dreams? These men died defending the Republic. They believed in it to the last.

What about Klyber? I imagined him standing over the table and regarding me coldly with his stern face and pale gray eyes.

“How are we doing?” The man who came in was tall, thin, bald, and wore glasses. He looked absolutely ordinary. If I passed him in a crowd, I would not notice him.

My heart, stress, and pulse lines jumped. My stress reading, which had nearly flat-lined, now looked like a mountain range. I tried to roll from side to side and break free from the restraints. Something had to happen. Someone would save me. Perhaps Yamashiro would come back. Maybe Navy intelligence had discovered the Hinode Fleet’s location. Maybe . . . Maybe Ray Freeman would come. Any moment, he could pound through that door carrying his massive particle beam gun. The man stood over me. His skin looked paper white in the bright overhead light. The thick lenses of his glasses magnified the size of his eyes. He reached into the breast pocket of his white lab coat and produced a long glass tube. This he opened, showing me its contents. The tube was a quiver for three-inch needles. The man selected one. “This will not hurt,” he said. Yamashiro or Freeman, I thought. They were my best bets. Surely Yamashiro knew that the Morgan Atkins Separatists would betray him. He would have to know that the Confederate Arms would not look upon the Japanese as equals.

Smiling kindly, as if to reassure me, the man stabbed the first needle deep into my right bicep. I flinched, but the restraints prevented me from moving my arm.

“Don’t move,” the man said, pressing the needle deeper into the muscle. “You would not want to break the needle. Then we might have to dig it out.” His head ticked up and down as he counted to twenty. When he finished counting, he pulled the needle from my arm, wiped the blood off with a cloth, and examined it under the light. “Good. Good.”

“The needle turns green if the compound has dispersed properly,” the man said. He held the needle over my face so I could see it; but of course, the light engulfed it and I could not see anything.

“You’re in excellent shape, Colonel Harris. Sometimes the compound bunches up, especially when a patient has bad circulation. With you, it’s spread through your upper extremities perfectly.”

He placed the needle on the table beside me. I twisted my neck and managed to get a look at it. The shaft of that needle had turned jade green. I imagined myself sticking that needle into the man’s eye, stabbing it into the eye and pushing it all the way through until it jabbed into his brain. The man held the tube so that I could see it. He wanted me to know what he was doing. I could tell this by the slow way he selected the next needle and held it up for me. “Now let’s be sure that the compound is spreading through your lower extremities,” he said cheerfully.

“Get specked,” I sneered.

“Don’t take this personally, Colonel Harris. I’m just doing my job. Besides, this is nothing. This is just a small pin-prick. Don’t get worked up. In a minute it will all be over; and I assure you, you will forget all about the pin test.” With that, he stabbed the needle deep into the calf of my right leg. This was not like an injection where the medic presses the point against your skin, then neatly slides the needle into place. This man jabbed his needle in as if it were an ice pick. I winced, but the straps held my leg still. The man repeated everything, counting to twenty, pulling and cleaning the needle, and then showing me the results.

“Excellent. Now, let’s just be sure the compound has dispersed properly throughout.” He selected another needle, then paused. “This one may hurt. I assure you, you will forget about it soon enough.”

And he plunged that third needle into my stomach.

The pain was brilliant and clear, a flash of silver lightning that shot from my stomach to my brain. I grimaced as he counted to twenty. I took short, panting breaths, feeling the stitch that the needle created between my stomach muscles.

“Get specked,” I hissed between gritted teeth. “Get specked you goddamned son of . . .”

He clicked his tongue at me. “There is nothing personal about this,” he said.

“Oh, yes, there is,” I sighed as he pulled the bloody needle out of my gut. The muscles in my neck relaxed and my head clunked back against the metal surface of the table.

“You won’t believe this, but we created this compound for humane purposes. It lets us communicate pain to your brain without inflicting physical damage,” the man said. “What you will feel is a very amplified version of the damage your body is taking.”

“Get specked,” I repeated. The hormone had not yet kicked in. I was weak and tired and scared. Would it be Freeman who came for me, or would it be Yamashiro? I would not be tortured.

“I will give you a brief demonstration of pain. Then, perhaps, we can discuss the information I am looking for before we proceed much further.”

It would be Freeman. If I could smuggle myself aboard a transport, so could he. He was seven feet tall and black-skinned, which might make him easy to spot, but he would find a way in and kill this bastard. The man held up a harness that reminded me of a bit for a horse. He showed it to me. “Colonel, I suggest that you take this voluntarily. If you don’t wear this, you may bite your tongue, and that would not be good for either of us.”

“Get specked,” I said again. I could not think of anything else to say.

“Suit yourself,” he said. Then he held up a five-inch chrome-plated wand. It looked like a fancy pen. There were no wires hanging out of it and no lights built into it. It was just a plain, silvery shaft. He held it a few inches away from my face, giving me an opportunity to take a good look at it.

“Generally we like to start out light, maybe a couple of hundred volts, but since you’re a Liberator, I think that would be a waste of time.” With this he ran the wand over the left side of my chest, along my ribs, and down to my naval. For an instant I felt nothing but the smooth warm surface of the wand on my skin. That pleasant sensation might have lasted one tenth of a second. Then the pain shot through me. The pain was like a blaring noise that engulfs everything else around it. My thoughts turned into a silver-white flash, possibly a visualization of the electrical jolt splashing out of my blood and into my nervous system. Every muscle in my body contracted. I would have arched my back, but the straps across my pelvis and shoulders held me in place. Somehow I managed to arch the area of my spine that was between the restraints.

My hands balled into fists and my shoulders tensed and bunched. My jaw clenched so tightly that my teeth should have shattered. Had my tongue slipped between my teeth, I would have sheered it off. Then, as suddenly as it started, the pain disappeared and my body dropped to the table. I lay there on that cold metal, my back no more rigid than a wet rag. And, for the first time since I had been brought into this room, I felt the hormone flowing through my body. It had probably been released during that jolt as the shock of the electricity overwhelmed my brain.

“My, you Liberators are tough,” the man said. “Normally my patients start to sob about now.” The man looked down at me. “Still, you did mess yourself. That’s something.”

It was true. During the jolt, my body had let go of all the waste it was holding. Far from sobbing, however, I would have broken this man’s neck if not for the restraints. My thoughts and head were clear. My desires were violent, and this time I knew my bloodlust was not just a response to the endorphins flowing through my veins.

I chanced a glance at the biofeedback monitor and saw something interesting. My readings had flat-lined again. Calmed by the hormone, my brain activity and stress level were normal. My heart was beating a bit fast and I found that I could speed up my pulse by fighting against the restraints—isometric exercise.

“In the old days, they used to kill people with the voltage you just experienced,” the man said. “Did you know that? You just experienced twenty seconds of two thousand volts. Well, actually, it was ten volts . .

. the wand only has a ten-volt charge, but your neural receptors believed they were taking a two thousand-volt shock. That was the voltage they used to use in electric chairs. They would electrocute the condemned for thirty seconds at two thousand volts to make them pass out, then they would drop the voltage and finish the job.

“Now you know how those old outlaws felt just before they died. The only difference is that this won’t kill you. This won’t fry your brain or damage your vital organs, so we can keep you riding the lightning for a much longer time. The only thing we have to worry about is having a fear-induced heart attack. Judging by your readings, Colonel Harris, I don’t think that will be a problem.

“So, think you could hang on to your sanity through a ten-minute jolt?”

I wanted to tell this asshole to go speck himself, but I did not want to show that I was in control of myself. More than that, I did not want to make him angry.

“You know, the first time I tried this procedure I killed the man. The guy died . . . my fault entirely. I had him on a table just like this one, only it had electric restraints.

“It was just a little shock, just a disabling shock. It shouldn’t have hurt the guy at all, but, you know, with the compound increasing the voltage . . . Anyway, the restraints had a two hundred-volt charge, so he got the equivalent of forty thousand volts nonstop. His heart burst.

“I don’t know if that would happen to you. This is such an excellent opportunity. I never imagined I could ever work with a clone of your make. You have no idea what an amazing specimen you are, and to think, they can mass-produce you.”

I was not sure how to act, so I lay in place shaking my head and moaning softly. I acted as if all of the strength had left my body. In truth, a lot of it had. I did not have enough strength to make a fist or fight against the restraints.

“So let’s talk about the information I need, Colonel Harris.” The man sat down on a rolling chair and glided up to the side of the table so that our heads almost met. “Should I call you Wayson? Can I call you Wayson?” He laughed. “I suppose at this point I can call you anything I want. Just don’t pull out my magic wand—is that what you are thinking, Wayson?”

Thanks to the hormone in my blood, I began to forget just how painful that jolt had been. I had to work to stop myself from telling the man to “get specked.”

“So, Wayson, I’m going to ask you some questions. Whether you answer or not, I’m going to give you another jolt. One of the things they teach us in intelligence training is, ‘Never accept the first offer.’

“So you tell me as much or as little as you want, and I’ll still fry you after that. Then I will ask you the same questions again. And we’ll keep that up until I think you’ve told me the truth. All of the truth.”

He leaned still farther in so that our faces were almost touching. “Tell me, Wayson, how did you know that we were going to attack Tuscany?”

I continued rolling my head back and forth and groaning softly. My acting must have been decent enough.

“Didn’t know about Tuscany,” I said, clenching my fists lightly to raise my bio-readings. Out came the wand. He pulled it from his lab coat with a snap of his wrist. He did not look at me. He watched the monitor as he brought the wand toward me, and I suppose he liked what he saw. My heart rate must have been skyrocketing and now I was not acting. He placed the wand on the table beside my arm.

“Wayson, you cannot possibly expect anyone to believe that,” the man said, though something in the tone of his voice made me think that he might.

“I suppose if you didn’t know about the attack, the next question makes no sense. Still, you must be in contact with someone, Wayson. A bright man like you would not come out to the enemy fleet without telling somebody.”

Sighing slightly, the man climbed to his feet and I saw that he had the harness in his hands. There was a plastic bar in the middle of the harness. This he slipped into my mouth, pinning my tongue in place behind my teeth. I put up some resistance; but I was weak and he won easily enough. He laced the harness around my face then synched it to the strap across my forehead.

“Is there another spy on this ship?”

I could not speak, of course; and now that my face was bound and my breathing obstructed, my pulse, heartbeat, and stress readings were no doubt off the charts.

“Nothing to say for yourself?” the man said as he picked up the wand. This time he touched the wand to my throat, just below the corner of my jaw. The pain was all encompassing. My muscles clamped and my thoughts turned into a silver explosion.

The wand traveled slowly down my neck, over my collar-bone, and then paused just above my heart. The agony was exquisite. My hands clenched into fists, and my fists pounded involuntarily up and down between the table and the restraints. My jaw clamped down on that plastic bit. My eyes screwed into tiny slits, which was good because I lay staring up into that blinding light. During the moment itself, as the stream of electricity seemed to stab into my body like an endless blade, I lost all thought and control. If the man had asked me a question and I had somehow been able to hear him and I was intelligent enough to understand and answer, I would have told him anything he wanted. I do not know if he asked questions during the torture itself. He must have known that I could not hear, could not think, could not speak. I lay on that table a straining, suffering, quivering mass, no more intelligent than the electricity that so overwhelmed my brain.

From my heart, the wand moved down across the flat of my stomach. Had I been cognizant, I would have worried about the man dragging that wand across my genitals, but he paused over my lower abdominal muscles, and then he placed the wand back on the table.

“Wayson, you just survived three minutes and twenty-two seconds of two thousand volts. If you were truly riding the lightning in an old-fashioned electric chair, your eyes would have melted and your hair would have caught on fire. Do you still say that you’ve never heard of Tuscany?” the man asked. Thanks to the hormone, which likely flooded my veins in excessive quantities, my thoughts came back the moment the wand went away. I was in pain, no doubt about that. I felt worn out and weak, but I was back in control the moment the electricity stopped.

A whimper left my lips. I was not sure if it was real or I pretended it. I did not cry. I did not even whimper again. When the man removed the harness from my mouth, I whispered, “I did not know about Tuscany.”

“Is there another spy on this ship?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.” All the strength left my body this time. I lay flat on the table without enough strength to so much as turn my head. A layer of sweat covered my body. The cold air in the office bit into my damp skin, but I was calm. The hormones left me calm and resigned.

“You know what, Harris,” the man said in a voice so informal that I might not have recognized it, “I think I believe you.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Between the initial beating I received from Sam the jailor and the time that I woke up again inside my cell, nearly twenty-four hours had passed. The ringing in my head was the worst I had ever felt, but my body did not hurt too badly. Sam had left some nasty bruises on my ribs. That was the worst of it. My left bicep and right calf had deep charley horses where the interrogator stabbed me with his needles. As for the electrocution, some of my muscles were strained from fighting against the restraining straps. For the most part, I felt no worse than I would have felt after a really tough day at the gym. During the time I was being interrogated, I caught a lucky break. The Confederate Arms sent ten ships to Odessa, a wealthy planet in the Sagittarius Arm that supported the Revolution. They did not intend to attack the planet, this was a blockade-running mission.

A flotilla of U.A. Navy destroyers and fighter carriers met them as they emerged. The Confederate ships tried to escape without engaging the Sagittarius Fleet. The U.A. ships followed. Two Hinode battleships were destroyed. The others fled until they could broadcast to safety. Since I was deep in the bowels of the ship, stripped to my briefs and strapped to an interrogation table when the battle occurred, Crowley must have decided that I had nothing to do with it. The Confederate Arms said there was a leak in the chain of command and blamed the Mogats. The Mogats said that the Japanese should have been better prepared for the battle. I personally wanted all sides to blame Tom Halverson. With any luck, they might even shoot the bastard and me with the same firing squad. The door down the hall opened. Someone walked toward my cell, his hard-soled shoes clanked against the metal grid floor. I did not bother climbing from my cot. At any moment, I thought, Sam would step into view. If he came close enough, I would kill him. I would snap his neck. I was marked to die anyway, and dying sooner might mean avoiding another torture session. So I lay on my cot facing the far wall of my cell, curled into a ball and acting defeated.

The steps stopped at the edge of my cell. “I have a gift for you, Colonel Harris,” Yamashiro said. “This is a gentleman’s gift. No one else needs to know that I gave it to you.”

For one wild moment I thought he had smuggled a gun into the brig. I spun over on my cot so that I faced him. Yamashiro stood right in front of my cell leaning forward into the bars. He held on to the bars with his right hand, and reached toward me with his left. That hand was cupped around something, my

“gentleman’s gift.”

I sat up and stared through the bars at the man. Our eyes met for a moment, then he nodded down toward the gift he had offered me. I stood and approached.

“You’re not supposed to stand so close to the bars,” I said. “It’s dangerous. A prisoner could grab your arm and pin you against the bars.”

“I’m not worried about it,” Yamashiro said. As I drew closer and looked at his offered hand, I noticed the calloused skin along the edge of it. A short and powerful build, sandpaper hands—these were the signs of training in judo or jujitsu.

Yamashiro turned his hand so that the palm faced up. His fingers still curled over the gift hiding it. As I approached, the fingers spread revealing their secret. I saw nuggets of glass and wadded up wires that looked like they were made of gold. Yamashiro smiled. “It was a fine magic trick.”

Seconds passed as I stared at that hand filled with sparkling gems of broken glass, my heart sinking in my chest. Then I realized that the pulverized mediaLink shades he held had gold frames. The ones I left on the bridge had cheap black plastic frames. “A young ensign found them in a communications station on the bridge.”

“Then you have more than one spy on your hands,” I said. “I’ve never seen those before.”

Yamashiro’s smile spread. “No? The shades you left had black frames. These were the best I could do on short notice.” He closed his fist again and pulled his hand back through the bars.

“Where are the real ones?” I asked.

“Right where you left them,” Yamashiro said. “I thought they might be more valuable just as you left them. Having unseen ears can be a powerful tool.”

I worried about Halverson setting a trap by giving faux orders in range of those shades. I imagined intelligence relaying those orders to Huang and Huang sending the Doctrinaire into an ambush. What kind of trap could stop a ship like that? Then I remembered that Yamashiro had called this a

“gentleman’s gift.” Why had he come and why had he not told Crowley about my little trick?

“Who did your ensign tell about the shades?” I asked.

“He told his commanding officer, who told his commanding officer,” Yamashiro said, an infectious, mischievous grin spreading across his face.

“And it went all the way to the top?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Yamashiro.

“But Admiral Halverson did not hear about it?” I asked.

“He is with the Confederate Arms Fleet,” Yamashiro said, as if those few words explained everything.

“The ensign was an officer in the Hinode Fleet. The information came to me.”

“And you don’t share intelligence between fleets?” I asked.

“Sadly, no. Like you, we also suspect that our allies in the Confederate Arms may not be reliable.”

“I see,” I said. “In my opinion, the Mogats aren’t much better. You know how they got these ships in the first place?”

Without waiting for a response, I answered my own question. “They gassed the original crew.”

“So you would not trust them?” Yamashiro asked.

“If I were you, you mean? I would trust the Arms before I would trust the Mogats,” I said. “You know who you should have trusted? You should have trusted Klyber. Klyber did not want to invade your planet. He tried to keep the Senate off your back as much as possible.”

Yamashiro’s smile did not fade, but his eyes seemed to harden and his expression became more serious.

“I admired Admiral Klyber but I did not trust the Senate.”

I stared straight into Yamashiro’s eyes. “The Mogats would not have known how to rig Klyber’s ship like that.”

For a long moment, Yamashiro returned my glare, looking me in the eyes. Then he looked down at the floor and shook his head. “Klyber was an honorable man. I did not want him killed.”

“But you showed them how to do it,” I said.

“Yes,” said Yamashiro, still looking down. He produced a package of cigarettes and lit one. “A Hinode engineer figured out how to sabotage the generators and taught some of their engineers.”

“Did you know what they would do with it?”

“Yes.”

I laughed. It was an angry laugh. “Is it irony or karma? Now that they know how to sabotage broadcast engines, what makes you think that they won’t do it to you?”

“The Believers could barely fly these ships when they helped us escape Ezer Kri,” Yamashiro said. “They had no idea how to maintain or repair them. We renovated the fleet. Our engineers did all of it.”

“The Mogats learn quickly,” I said, “so watch your back. Once they know enough, they won’t need you or your fleet officers. As I recall, you’re a student of history. Right now, your officers are playing the role of Poland to the Confederate Arms’s Soviet Union and the Mogats’ Nazi Germany.”

Yamashiro took a drag on his cigarette, stared at me for a moment, then shook his head. Clearly his history was civil, not military.

“The Nazis and the Soviets had a shaky alliance. It ended the moment they both invaded Poland to try and get a better shot at each other. Once your war with the Unified Authority is done, you’d better have an exit plan.”

Yamashiro thought to himself as he listened. He took one last long drag from his cigarette and exhaled the smoke through his nostrils in dual streams. His smile had vanished and he wore a serious and thoughtful expression. “One way or another, the war ends tomorrow. We’re attacking Earth,” he said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Time never moved so slowly for me as it did after Yoshi Yamashiro’s visit. I was locked in the brig of a ship that was about to go to battle against the most powerful navy in history. This was the command ship. If the Doctrinaire located this ship, it would undoubtedly destroy it. With those big cannons, one shot could finish the job.

If the Secessionists won, the Confederate Arms and Mogats would agree that it was time for me to die. If the Unified Authority carried the day, Huang might execute me. For somebody who had supposedly given up on life and survived purely by instinct, I cared more than I should have. I tried to sleep but found that I could not lie still on my cot. Sam came in to check on me every hour. He stood outside my cell and stared in at me.

“You want something?” I asked once.

He gave me a cocky smile. “Comfortable?” he asked.

“You want to come in and fluff my pillow?” I asked.

“You know, Harris, I used to want to shoot you. After seeing what they did to you in the interrogation room, I’d rather keep you alive. I might enjoy giving you the wand a time or two myself.”

“Why don’t you come in here and we can discuss it,” I said.

“You might show me some respect after what happened last time. Maybe I went too easy on you.” Sam actually seemed to believe what he was saying.

“I’d love to go another round. Maybe this time you can hit me when I’m looking.” I knew I was baiting him, and I knew it would have the desired effect. Sam considered himself a pretty tough guy. He turned red then fought back his rage. “Watch yourself,” he said. “Things could go worse for you next time. I wonder how that wand would feel if you went in with a broken jaw.”

“Lets find out. Why don’t you come in here and break it?” I asked. Sam heard this and stormed down the hall.

The next person to call on me was Admiral Halverson. As he had before, Halverson came bearing gifts. This time, he carried a small red visor on a two-legged stand. The unit was no more than eighteen inches tall, wobbly support frame and all. Sam accompanied him. In the admiral’s wake, the jailor acted more civil. “You’ve got a visitor, Harris,” he said.

The last time he said that, of course, he caught me unaware and pummeled me. This time he stayed outside my cell, as did Halverson.

“Hello, Colonel,” Halverson said.

“What is that?” I asked.

“This?” Halverson held the visor up so that I could get a better look at it. “This is how sailors used to view their battles forty years ago, back when this ship was made. This is a remote strategic display.”

Halverson walked to the door of my cell and placed the display on the floor.

“Be careful with it, Harris. It’s an antique.”

I sat on the edge of my cot, my legs dangling over the side. “So you really plan to attack Earth today?” I asked. “Doesn’t that seem a bit . . . suicidal? The Doctrinaire will be waiting.”

“I’m counting on it,” Halverson said with a bright air. “I should hope that the Unified Authority’s most powerful ship will come to protect its capital world. Believe it or not, Harris, we sped up our plans because of you.

“Ever since you arrived, we seem to have lost the element of surprise. So now, thanks to you, we have very little choice but to finish the war.”

“May I?” I asked, looking first at the remote display, then at Sam.

Halverson nodded. I stepped off the cot and walked over to the door of the cell. Kneeling rather than bending over, so that I could keep an eye on Sam, I reached through the bars and picked up the display. The thing weighed no more than a pound. The visor itself was made of cheap, hollow plastic. The outside of the display was convex. The inside had two eyepieces surrounded by spongy padding. A black cable hung between the back of the visor and a U-shaped control pad.

“The display is monochrome, I’m afraid. It’s red against black. Old technology, but it’s the best I could find.”

“I can’t watch from the bridge?” I asked.

“Harris, I don’t know how you tipped Huang off, but resourceful as you’ve proven yourself to be, I wouldn’t trust you anywhere near the bridge.”

“So you think you can win?” I asked. “You have what . . . roughly six hundred ships? Didn’t the Galactic Central Fleet have about six hundred ships? That was before Thurston blasted four of them at Little Man.”

“Some of the fleet is too old or too badly maintained to fight.” Halverson continued to smile. “And they’ve shot down seventeen more of our ships since you came aboard, Harris. We’re down to five hundred and forty. Well, five hundred and thirty-nine.”

“Did you hear what Huang said about a fleet with no fighters?” I asked.

“That it’s like a boxer without a jab? He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The man is a politician, not a sailor. He puts on a good show.”

“Not as good a show as Thurston, though,” I said. “You were crazy to kill Klyber. Did you really think you could stop the Doctrinaire by killing Klyber? Didn’t it ever occur to you that Huang would replace him with Robert Thurston?”

“Harris, Bryce Klyber was a personal friend, but this is war. I hated killing Bryce, but I need Thurston in his place.”

“Thurston is a better strategist than Klyber ever was,” I said. “You were there when Klyber tried to match him in a simulation.” Days after Thurston replaced Admiral Absalom Barry as the commander of the Inner Scutum-Crux Fleet, Admiral Klyber challenged him to a simulated battle. Thurston read Klyber’s opening move and predicted his every step, forcing him into submission.

“Klyber was more dangerous for our purposes,” Halverson said. “I’ve served under both officers. Thurston’s style is tailor-made for us.”

“You’re crazy,” I said. “Robert Thurston is the best commander in the U.A. Navy.”

“Under most circumstances,” Halverson said, his smile as unfailing as ever.

“But you didn’t need to kill Klyber,” I said. “Huang took the ship away from him at the summit. He gave Thurston the Doctrinaire and moved Klyber to the support fleet.”

Halverson’s smile faltered. “They moved Klyber to the support fleet,” Halverson echoed, and the pride and bravado vanished from his voice. “I learned about the transfer after the cable was set, but by the time I heard about it, it was already too late . . . too late.” He stood silently staring at me, then turned to leave.

“Enjoy the show, Harris,” he called over his shoulder.

He and Sam left the brig; and once again, I was alone.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

I had heard about strategic displays like the one Tom Halverson gave me. Sailors used to call them “red worlds.” This was not the obsolete strategic views replaced by the 3-D holographic displays used in modern ships. This was a portable display that officers could take into engineering or battle stations. The visor was about three inches thick. Inside its housing was a laser that could draw objects in brilliant detail. The only problem was that it could only draw them in one color—red. My eyes never did adjust to that red-and-black display.

I switched on the power and pressed my face into a soft foam ring that ran along the inside of the visor. A little sign appeared instructing me to adjust the eyepieces to the shape of my face. Using two knobs built into the top of the visor, I adjusted the display until the words in that sign seemed to float out in space.

The display showed a satellite view of Earth. I could see the side of the planet facing the sun. In the display, the lasers drew clouds and land in red. The ocean was black and hollow. The edge of the moon was barely visible in the right corner of the display. In the lower corner, a digital clock counted backward. The clock read 00:05:37.

When the clock reached 00:01:00, I heard a muffled commotion outside my cell as the ship was called to general quarters. The call to battle stations lasted the full minute. The sound must have been thunderous throughout the ship. In the brig, where thick iron walls muted most of the sound, I soon forgot about the call to general quarters and did not notice when it ended.

The visor blanked out. It went dead for just a moment then winked back to life, and I knew that we had just broadcasted into Earth space. In the red-and-black panorama, the fabric of space around the moon seemed to shatter as 540 self-broadcasting ships appeared just behind the moon. Seen in red and black, the charcoal gray Hinode ships were not visible on this display but a label along the bottom of the screen said 540 ships.

A more modern display would have offered me optical menus. I might have found a way to view the Hinode ships using heat or motion-tracking sensors. On this old relic, the most I could do was zoom in and zoom out.

Turning my attention to Earth, I saw hundreds of ships rising from all points on the globe and forming a blockade. The Doctrinaire was nowhere among them. There were Perseus-class fighter carriers, battleships, and destroyers. Not all of the Unified Authority ships were made for combat. The fleet included medical barges and emergency evacuation ships designed to save crews from dying vessels. I zoomed out to see a wider perspective. From this angle, the U.A. ships looked no more significant than specks of dust in a sandstorm. As I closed my perspective, the U.A. ships took on shape and detail. My camera was still far enough out to see from Canada to the Brazilian coast. From here, the Earth ships looked like a swatch of broken glass. Panning in so close that I could make out the Rocky Mountains, I studied the Earth Fleet’s formation.

I watched as an endless stream of fighter jets sprayed out of carrier flight tubes. Even this close in, the fighters were nothing more than motes as they flew into formation and moved to the front of the fleet. Fumbling blindly with the little control pad as I watched the Earth fleet fly into formation, I accidentally pressed a button that altered my view. Earth was still formed of solid land and hollow oceans, and the open space around the moon was still black, but now objects appeared in that space. The Hinode ships were now more marked than displayed. They were still grouped around the moon, some 240,000 miles away. The two fleets would only need a minute to cross the 200,000 miles between the Earth and moon.

Pressing another button changed my battle perspective so that I could now get a closer look at the Hinode ships. Fine vector lines traced the edges of the ships. There were only three kinds of ships in the Hinode Fleet—cruisers, destroyers, and battleships. These ships were big. They would make easy targets.

When I switched back to the Earth Fleet, I did not like what I saw. The fleet could have used Klyber at the helm. It looked untried and unready for battle . . . or, perhaps, simply unready for this battle. Whoever was in command of the Fleet had placed the frigates near the front of the formation, just behind the fighters—a textbook formation for a different battle. The U.A. did not need frigates, a class of ship designed specifically to combat fighters for this battle. The Hinode Fleet had capital ships and no fighters. I saw this and realized Che Huang had undoubtedly installed himself as Fleet Commander.

“Good going, Huang,” I laughed.

Looking at how the Earth Fleet had arrayed itself, I saw that the cruisers were stationed so far out that they would be easy targets for any ships that flanked the formation. In the bottom corner of the display, the clock now counted forward. Six minutes had passed since the enemy ships broadcasted into Earth space. The Hinode ships spread their ranks and started forward. One of the old cruisers, however, seemed to have stalled. It inched forward, limping behind the other Hinode ships in stuttering short bursts. This had to have been the 540th ship, the one that Halverson doubted would be in on the battle. I might have thought that it was the command ship, but I was on the command ship. I would have felt that kind of engine problem.

The Earth Fleet had twenty carriers with 1,400 fighters. Those fighters dashed forward and splashed across the front of the advancing Hinode formation, parting in every direction and breaking into its ranks. The visor lit up as thousands of short-range lasers and cannons opened fire, and still the Hinode ships advanced, closing in on Earth.

I zoomed in for a more detailed view. Now I could see both the cannon fire and the toll it took on the fighters. Laser fire appeared on my visor as hair-width lines that flared out of nowhere then disappeared without a trace. Looking into the battle was like staring into a dandelion, there were so many filaments. The U.A. fighter squadrons evaporated before my eyes. The bigger Hinode ships simply picked them off as they continued their advance.

But where was the Doctrinaire ? The battle had begun.

The front ranks of the Hinode and Earth Fleets were almost within range, and the barrage began. Missiles and long-range beams filled the air. I could not tell the difference between particle beams and lasers on this display. I knew that the U.A. ships had both particle beams and lasers, and that the particle beams were far more destructive.

Hinode ships had only lasers.

Perhaps the frigates were a sacrifice. The first Hinode ships blew them up quickly and brushed past their mangled hulls without incident. Next came the front ranks of destroyers and battleships. Running into this bedrock layer, the Hinode ships spread wide.

And then it happened. First the jagged shards of lightning appeared. I had never seen anything like the anomaly caused by the Doctrinaire . It was a huge shimmering bubble, as big as any two ships on the field. On my visor, it showed in translucent red.

This antique could not possibly show the bright intensity of the anomaly. On the battlefield, it would have looked silver and white. It would be the same color and intensity of the electricity that filled my head when I was being tortured, and I imagined it against the pure black background of space. Any pilot looking in that direction would have been blinded.

From that silver white bubble, the bow of the Doctinaire emerged. It was huge and fierce, like a fire demon emerging from a cocoon of flames. It was the embodiment of the entire galactic military—a beast that had won every war and nearly every battle for the last five hundred years. Huang was a better tactician than I gave him credit for. The cruisers were off on the edges to make space. As the anomaly began, the U.A. battleships cleared out of the way and the Doctrinaire drifted into the void that they created.

Even before it had fully emerged from its anomaly, the Doctrinaire began to fire. Its massive cannons lashed out quickly, appearing to pluck Hinode ships out of space. I imagined the dzzzz sound as the new, special cannons fired their half-second bursts. In the vacuum of space, a Hinode battleship trying to fly over the front line of the U.A. formation exploded, jettisoning anything that was not fastened down. Then the fires within the ship consumed all of the oxygen around it and the ship imploded. The crumpled ship floated sideways as it drifted away from the battle.

More cannon fire followed. Another Hinode ship exploded and imploded, then drifted away. Then two cannons fired in different directions, and two more derelicts appeared. Every time the cannons from the Doctrinaire hit an enemy ship, the ship exploded, taking thousands of men with it. Across the battlefield, the reaction was immediate. Hinode ships scattered. They broke out of their offensive position and shot off in weaving evasive threads. Several ships broadcasted away. Zoomed out far enough to see the entire battle, I could not make out details. I did not know how many ships fled from the scene. I just saw the anomalies. It looked like twenty or maybe thirty ships had fled. From the corner of my eye, I noted the time. The battle had gone on for nine minutes and twelve seconds. The entire Hinode Fleet could broadcast to safety if it wanted. Because I took my eye off the battle for just a second to look at the clock, I almost missed the decisive blow. I saw the flash and zoomed in immediately. I was just in time to see the last of the lightning as it danced like Saint Elmo’s Fire along the edges of the Doctrinaire . The great ship seemed to list, its bow dipping down and moving counter-clockwise as if preparing for some spiraling maneuver. Then the ship seemed to flinch. It grew brighter as light shined through its portals. Panels along its roof burst, unleashing folds of flame and vapor. Finally the Doctrinaire , the great ship, the leviathan, vanished in a glowing ball that hurled debris in every direction before collapsing on itself.

I pulled my face out of the visor. I needed a moment to understand what I had seen. When I looked back, I saw the wreckage of the Doctrinaire hanging silently in space. It looked like a giant bird lying with its wings spread. The ship was utterly dark now, with not so much as a spark flashing. Only a handful of U.A. ships remained around the Doctrinaire . The destruction of the Doctrinaire brought even more ruin: every ship around it was smashed.

Now the Hinode Fleet regrouped. It had lost a few ships at the onset of the battle. After the Apocalypse of the Doctrinaire , the Hinode Fleet suddenly had a huge numerical advantage. Most of the Earth Fleet had been destroyed. Many of those U.A. ships that survived the destruction were so badly damaged that they could hardly defend themselves as the Hinode ships renewed their attack.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

On board the Hinode flagship, sirens blared and people shouted. I heard the muffled sounds of celebration through the walls of the brig. They had destroyed the Unified Authority’s goliath ship, but they had not made the galaxy safe for themselves. U.A. ships still patrolled Perseus, Norma, Cygnus, and Scutum-Crux. They would certainly retaliate.

The door of the brig opened and in entered Yoshi Yamashiro. He looked dour as he approached. He came right to the door of my cell and spoke quietly. “The war is over, Harris.” He saw the antique “red world” sitting on my cot and asked, “Where did you get that display?”

“Halverson gave it to me,” I said. “How did they do it? How did they destroy the Doctrinaire ?”

Yamashiro smiled, but I saw no joy in that smile. It was the tired smile, the man who has heard a funny joke but lacks the strength to appreciate it. “We should discuss that later.”

“I’m not sure how much later I have,” I said.

Yamashiro passed a package wrapped in brown paper through the bars. The package was approximately the same size as a folded flag. It was not soft, but it was bendable.

“You will need to take care of the jailor yourself,” Yamashiro said. “We will be back in an hour.”

“Take care of Sam?” I asked. “How do you expect me to do that?”

“Let yourself out,” Yamashiro told me.

As he left the brig, I gave the door a tug. It slid open easily on its rollers. I caught it after less than an inch. There were security cameras all along the brig, three of which had views into my cell. Smiling to myself and trying to look away from the cameras, I returned to my cot.

I could have slipped out of my cell and killed Sam in his office. I knew where it was. I visited it on my way to my cell the day I was captured. The problem was that in all likelihood, he would spot me. The security cameras had motion-tracking.

“You and I have a score to settle,” Sam called from the door of my cell. Instead of making me come to him, the Mogat jailor had come to me. Unfortunately, he also had a pistol in his right hand. That presented a problem.

“You going to shoot me?” I asked.

Sam pretended to give this question serious consideration, then beamed. “Yeah. I suppose I am.”

“No trial?” I asked.

Sam stuck his right hand, pistol and all, in through the bars. He aimed the pistol at me. “We have a problem. See, the Japanese think they won the war. They reconfigured the boats, you know. So they think they’re in charge. And the Confederate Arms, they think they won the war because Admiral Halverson came up with the idea of attacking Mars. They think they’re in charge, too.”

At that moment, I still did not know about the Broadcast Network. All I knew was that the Doctrinaire had been destroyed. I did not even stop to question why other fleets had not sent ships into the battle.

“What about Mars?” I asked.

“You didn’t hear? We destroyed the Mars broadcast station,” Sam said. He saw the stunned look on my face. “Didn’t know about that, huh? We turned out the lights on the rest of the galaxy. Now the whole U.A. military is dark and stuck in place.“

It took me a moment to understand what Sam meant. At first I thought he meant that the Network provided power to the rest of the Republic. Then I realized that he meant that there would be no communications. Without the Broadcast Network, the outer fleets would not only be stranded, they would have no idea about what had happened.

“Which brings me back to you. Halverson and the Japanese want to let you go free. Now General Crowley, he knows what’s what. He figures it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission, if you know what I mean. He figures, we shoot you now. Then, if Halverson and the Japanese complain, we say something along the lines of, ‘Oops. We didn’t know you’d care.’”

Sam stood just outside the bars at the far end of my cell, lazily pointing the gun in my general direction. His arm and hand were relaxed. I was a fish in a barrel. He probably wanted me to plead or to lunge for his pistol. What he did not expect . . .

I sprang from the cot; but instead of lunging toward Sam as he must have expected, I vaulted along the floor in the other direction. Probably thinking that I had lost my nerve and was running for cover, he did not bother firing at me.

As I reached the end of the cell, I kicked. The heavy door slid along its track and crushed Sam’s arm which was resting in the bars. He did not realize what had happened until the gun fell from his hand, which remained pinned in place by the bars. He screamed in surprise or pain, or rage, or possibly fear and fell to one knee.

I did not know if anyone was watching on the security monitors, so I moved quickly.

“You son of a . . .”

“. . . test tube,” I finished the sentence for him.

Sam pulled his arm from the bars and charged forward. He had to know that he did not stand a chance in this fight. He could not beat me whole. With his wrist broken, he would be an easy mark, and he had to know that I meant to kill him.

As he came toward me, he rose to his feet. I chopped into the side of his neck with the heel of my right hand. Keeping my hand on his shoulder, I guided him face-first into the wall. He stumbled back, yelling as he toppled to the floor. I stomped on his neck and snapped it. Sam lay on the metal grating floor, silent and bloody, with a gash across his forehead and his neck creased at a sixty-degree angle. His left ear rested against his shoulder. His mouth had a frozen sneer that showed most of his teeth. Alien thoughts ran through my head as I looked at Sam lying on the ground. I felt regret, though not for Sam, per se. I hated the bastard. Had the war gone the other way, I had planned to kill Sam anyway. No, I did not feel bad about killing Sam. For some reason I just felt bad about killing. It was as if life had suddenly become more important to me because I had seen so much of it wasted. I tried to ignore those alien thoughts. I had work to do.

I dragged Sam into the cell and hoisted him on to the cot facedown, then spread my blanket over him. Yamashiro’s gift was a Japanese naval uniform. I slipped it on quickly. My hour was almost over. He would return for me.

The uniform fit nearly perfectly, though it was a bit wide in the shoulders and gut. Anybody looking closely would see that I was not Japanese long before they would notice the baggy blouse. I did not know whether I should wait in my cell or hide in the jailor’s office. Yamashiro answered that question for me when he and seven officers strolled into the corridor. Yamashiro wore his customary dark wool suit and tie. He looked at Sam’s lumpy body on my cot, then down at the pistol on the floor.

“It appears as if we have interrupted an execution.”

“That was the general plan,” I said.

“Stay close to us,” Yamashiro said.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Another ship.”

All of the officers in Yamashiro’s cadre were tall; three stood an inch or two taller than me. Yamashiro arranged these men in a loose formation around me, then led us out of the brig. We moved at a brisk, businesslike pace, walking like men who had someplace important to go. Confederate sailors in tan uniforms stopped to watch as we passed.

As we got farther from the brig, more Japanese officers turned out to join us. We formed a solemn parade. While the rest of the ship celebrated, the Japanese marched quietly, gaining in number. By the time we reached the landing bay, where three transports awaited, there were easily two hundred officers in our ranks.

While we officers boarded the transports, Yamashiro went to have a word with the Confederate officer running the landing bay. After a brief chat, Yamashiro returned and the transport took off. The mood on the transport remained solemn. The men did not speak or joke. Most of the men stared at the ground as if ashamed. There was a distinct air of defeat.

“What is going on?” I asked Yamashiro, who sat beside me on the bench lining the outer wall. He stared at me for a moment then spoke. “The officers of the Hinode Fleet are meeting for a victory celebration,”

he said. “We will have four battleships to ourselves.”

“Celebration?” I asked. “This looks more like a wake.”

“After a fashion. Like you, we are making our escape. The enemy will have several hundred ships. We will have four. We view this battle as a defeat.”

“You could not have planned all of this since last night,” I said.

Yamashiro shook his head. “We knew where we stood long ago . . . long before you and I spoke. We have been planning our escape for months.

“One thing did come out of our conversation. I have long felt a debt to Admiral Klyber. Had it not been for him, the Navy would have attacked Ezer Kri. He persuaded the Senate to settle with an occupation. When you tried to warn me, I decided to repay my debt by bringing you along.”

The entire Broadcast Network would have shut down the moment a Hinode battleship fired its lasers into the Mars broadcast station. The discs, mile-wide mirrors with little more than electrical wiring and razor-fine welds to hold them together, shattered instantly. Think of it—the Unified Authority, the largest and most powerful empire in the history of humanity, was held together by electrical wiring and a bit of welding.

Now that the Network was down, all fleets were stuck in the areas they were patrolling. When the Mars discs broke, the entire Broadcast Network shut down. The U.A. Navy ships could fly thirty million miles per hour, but that was still one-sixth the speed of light, and most inhabited planets were located thousands of light years apart from each other. The U.A. Navy had a fleet in the Scutum-Crux Arm that could have defeated the Hinode Fleet, but those ships were 10,000 light years away. Without the Broadcast Network it would take those ships 60,000 years to reach Earth. Without the Broadcast Network, the galaxy was no longer a Republic, it was a loose collection of inhabited planets. Throughout the six arms, there were only a very few instances in which any two inhabited planets were within traveling distance of each other.

And then there was the question of communications. The discs worked as a transom, broadcasting and directing radio waves so that Earth could communicate across its empire. Now, even using laser messaging, it would take messages minutes just to reach Mars. As Tom Halverson later described it, human communications had been knocked back to the days of the Pony Express. In Scutum-Crux, Sagittarius, and all the outer arms, Earth had suddenly gone silent. Most people would know that Hinode ships had attacked Earth. That was all they would know. Suddenly every planet was alone in the universe. No fleet could hope to go beyond the territory it was currently patrolling. Struggling planets could never hope to receive support or supplies.

Only the allies—the Confederate Arms, the Mogats, and the Japanese—could traverse the galaxy now that the Broadcast Network was destroyed. With the exception of small scientific craft designed for exploration, the U.A.’s entire self-broadcast fleet was aboard the Doctrinaire . Now, the alliance between the Japanese, the Mogats, and the Confederate arms was splitting. I had not lied when I told Yamashiro my dire predictions.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

If the Confederate Arms or the Morgan Atkins Believers suspected that the Japanese planned to flee, they did not care. The Japanese said they required four battleships for their victory celebration, and the Mogats and Confederates agreed. Why not? After their losses against the Doctrinaire , that left them with 486 ships in their fleet.

Yamashiro’s men searched their four-ship squadron for bombs and traps and found them clean. Their broadcast generators already powering up, the new four-ship Hinode Fleet flew away from the Confederate/Mogat ships. Officers on the other ships should have figured out that the Japanese planned to leave. Had they been paying attention, they would have seen that the broadcast generators were powered up.

Once we broadcasted away from the other ships, we were safe. The Milky Way was so spread out that no one would ever find us without knowing where to look. Forget the analogy about looking for a needle in a haystack. The odds of accidentally running into an enemy fleet in the Milky Way were more along the lines of accidentally finding a particular grain of sand in the Sahara desert. The mood throughout the ship became more relaxed once all four ships materialized. Most of the crew attended a mass briefing to which I was not invited. I stayed in a ready room not far from the bridge realizing that for all intents and purposes, I was still a prisoner. I sat at one end of a large conference table, my eyes fastened at an indistinct spot on the wall. For the last few years of my life, I had suffered from disconnect. I felt alienated. I was not a normal clone, nor was I a natural-born, and I felt I owed no allegiance to anyone synthetic or natural. Now, knowing that the Republic I had been created to defend was gone, I felt sick and hollow. The Unified Authority had been so vast and so undeniable that it never occurred to me that it could actually end. What happens when the universe comes to an end? Who knows? Who cares? We’d all be dead.

But the universe of my creation had come to an end, and I survived. I sat alone in the conference room contemplating the end of Earth-brewed beer and orphanages filled with military clones. Would the Navy’s various outer fleets find food, or would they starve? The tens of thousands of men on the Golan Dry Docks would surely die unless somebody saved them, but the only ships that could reach them were Confederate State ships.

The briefing took hours, but I did not notice. I wondered what strange debt Yoshi Yamashiro thought he owed Bryce Klyber, and why he thought he could pay it off by saving me. I wondered how deep that debt extended. Was it paid off by sparing my life? Would payment include integrating me into the Hinode Navy?

The door to the conference room opened, but I did not look up. I might as well have been back on my cot in the brig. In came Yamashiro and four officers. Yamashiro sat across the table from me. His four officers positioned themselves, two on either side of him. They did not sit at the table but formed a V

around him, like samurai guarding their shogun. For the next few minutes, I sat in silence.

“The second war has already begun,” Yamashiro said in a whisper that nonetheless shattered the silence.

“A battle has broken out between the Mogats and the Confederate Arms. The Mogats have seized control of most of the fleet.”

“How can you know that?” I asked.

“We took a lesson from you and placed transmitters on every ship,” Yamashiro said.

“You bugged your own ships? But that would mean we were still nearby?”

“We are five million miles from the fleet. You might say we traveled a safe distance to listen.”

“Can’t they detect you?” I asked.

“How would they do that?”

“Radar,” I said. “Radar stations pick up the anomaly when you broadcast in.”

“And transmit the information over the Broadcast Network,” Yamashiro said. “Only the Broadcast Network is no more.”

“And your transmitters have a direct link,” I said.

“Even if the Morgan Atkins Believers detected us, we would be able to broadcast away before they could reach us. But, as you might guess . . .”

“The Mogats and Confederates have bigger fish to fry.”

“I would say they are distracted at the moment,” Yamashiro said.

“So where does that leave me?” I asked. “Am I now a citizen of Shin Nippon?”

“I am sorry to inform you, Colonel Harris, that my officers and I have discussed this and we do not feel it would be advisable to bring a man of your destructive capacity to our planet.”

“You mean a Liberator?” I asked.

“I mean a killer,” Yamashiro said. “Some of my men watched you kill your jailor. Liberator or natural-born, you are a dangerous man.”

“I’m not the only killer. You and your men are wearing uniforms,” I pointed out.

“We are engineers. We modernized the ships and helped fly them,” Yamashiro said. “The Mogats and the Confederates did all of the fighting. We never wanted to enter a war.”

“So this was just a reprieve,” I said, thinking Yamashiro meant to execute me.

“I do not understand,” Yamashiro said. “We will take you wherever you wish to go as long as it does not endanger our ship.”

“You’re joking,” I said.

Yamashiro looked confused.

“Why are you helping me?” I asked.

“We owe a debt to . . .”

“Bryce Klyber. Yes, you mentioned that before. But you also showed a Mogat assassin how to kill Klyber by rigging his transport.”

“We had no choice,” Yoshi Yamashiro said. “Admiral Halverson said that we could not have won the war if Klyber commanded the Doctrinaire .”

“I don’t understand how that can be. I served under both Klyber and Admiral Thurston. I saw them square off in a battle simulation. Thurston ran circles around Klyber.

“Why was it so important that Thurston take command? From what I saw, you had something more powerful than the Doctrinaire all along.”

Yamashiro looked back at the officers sitting on either side of him as if looking for permission or perhaps support. Some of them seemed not to be paying attention. The ones who acknowledged his glance nodded.

“Now that the battle has ended, I suppose there is no reason for this to remain a secret. I understand Admiral Halverson loaned you a portable display unit. Is that correct?”

I nodded.

“When the battle started, one of our cruisers remained behind.”

I thought about this and remembered a ship sputtering forward and falling behind the rest. I assumed it had mechanical problems. Then, as the battle progressed, I forgot all about it.

“That was the weapon,” Yamashiro said this with the self-satisfied air of a man who believes that he has satisfactorily explained a great mystery.

“That cruiser destroyed the Doctrinaire? ” I asked, doubting. Yamashiro looked back at his officers, then decided to give up the goods. “Admiral Klyber was a very aggressive commander. He would send his command ship into battle along side his other ships. Robert Thurston was more of an organizer. With a super-ship like the Doctrinaire , he preferred to shoot enemy ships as his support fleet herded them in his direction.

“Klyber would have flown the Doctrinaire as it was meant to be flown, like a gigantic battleship. Thurston used it like a floating fortress. Do you see now?”

I shook my head, though the pieces were starting to come together.

“Klyber would have flown his ship up and down the battlefield. Thurston remained in one place, destroying every ship that came within range. He remained in one place long enough for us to chart his position and . . .”

“You broadcasted that cruiser into the center of the Doctrinaire ,” I said. My admiration was immense.

“Absolutely brilliant.”

“We placed a nuclear bomb on the bridge of the cruiser.”

“So the cruiser was a drone?” I asked.

“You can’t self-broadcast a drone ship. You might lose control during the broadcast. We could not trust a drone ship, not with so much depending on it. We trained a crew of Morgan Atkins Believers to fly a suicide mission.”

“A kamikaze mission? You trained kamikaze pilots?” The irony was remarkable, but Yamashiro seemed unimpressed. He gazed at me with a stony expression. “You taught a bunch of Mogats how to run their own broadcast computer?” I asked. “Did you give them some engineering tips?”

Yamashiro nodded.

“And they would have passed that information on to their friends,” I said. “You won the war and made yourselves expendable. From here on out, the Mogats will be able to pilot their own ships.”

Yamashiro pulled out his cigarettes and lit one. He drew the smoke in very deeply and held it for several seconds in his lungs. His eyes never flickered. He never blinked. He stared off into the distance as he performed the calculations that now ran through his head. He was stocky and strong, but still an old man. His allies had outmaneuvered him, and he knew it.

Dressed in his suit and red necktie, his black hair brushed back and oiled, Governor Yoshi Yamashiro considered the alliances to which he had sold his soul. Whom did he hate more, the Confederate Arms, the Morgan Atkins Believers, the Unified Authority, or himself?

“We cannot fly you back to Earth,” Yamashiro finally said, after blowing a stream of cigarette smoke.

“That entire system is a battle zone. Is there anyplace else you would like to go?”

“Anyplace?” I asked. “Take me to New Columbia.”

CHAPTER FORTY

I had a lot of reasons why I wanted to return to New Columbia. If I had to be stranded on a planet, being stranded on a planet with a large agricultural base and a small population was attractive. Thanks to the evacuation, New Columbia had far more food than people.

Even before the evacuation, New Columbia had the kind of economy that could survive on its own. In Safe Harbor and other cities, it had both industrial and financial infrastructures. Outside of those cities, it had large farms. The planet had started out as a farming colony. Granted, I had enemies in Safe Harbor. If Jimmy Callahan survived the attack on the Marine base, he would have a score to settle with me. There might be Marines who would consider me a deserter for not staying on base during the attack. But I also had my reasons for wanting to go to New Columbia. The first was Ray Freeman. The last time I spoke with Freeman, he was headed to that very planet to meet with me. While he and I were not exactly friends, we were partners. I felt as connected to him as I did to any man in the galaxy. Since the Mogats destroyed the Doctrinaire , I had begun to place more importance on people. My other reason for wanting to go to New Columbia was my plane, the self-broadcasting Starliner I had borrowed from the Doctrinaire . The ship was mine now, free and clear. With the destruction of that great ship, no one even knew that Johnston Aerodynamics had ever built a self-broadcasting Starliner. Once I had the Starliner, I would no longer be stranded on New Columbia . . . assuming it survived the attack.

From the bridge of the Hinode battleship, a deck officer took a satellite scan of Safe Harbor and reported to Governor Yamashiro. “The city was evacuated before the attack,” he said. “It still appears mostly empty. The primary targets were all destroyed. I did locate a tank and some armored personnel carriers moving in the city limits. I also recorded a firefight.”

“Artillary?” Yamashiro asked.

“Small weapons,” the officer reported.

“Are you certain this is where you want to go?” Yamashiro asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

He turned to his deck officer. “Can we send a transport safely?”

“From what I can tell, there are no people around Safe Harbor spaceport.”

“You think it’s safe to land there?” Yamashiro asked.

“I doubt anyone would even see us flying in. The spaceport is several miles out of town. Even if they pick up the transport on the way down, we should be able to lift off again well before anyone comes within twenty miles of us.”

“How does the airport look?” I asked.

“Undamaged,” said the officer. “I don’t think any looters have made it out there yet. It’s pretty far from town and the roads were destroyed.”

“What about the Marine base?” I asked.

“Destroyed.”

“The Army base?” I asked.

The officer shook his head. “All primary targets were destroyed.”

Maybe Callahan was dead, I thought. Even as I thought this, a voice deep in my head scoffed at the idea.

Yoshi Yamashiro suggested that I wear old Galactic Central Fleet work fatigues rather than the uniform of a Hinode officer. Actually, he told me to change into the fatigues, but he made it sound like a suggestion by saying, “Maybe you would present less of a target by wearing fatigues.”

I knew better than to argue the point.

Yamashiro and his senior officers walked me to the landing bay and escorted me on to the transport. Yamashiro bowed and his officers saluted as I walked up the ramp. I turned and returned the salute. The kettle was large and gloomy, big enough to hold one hundred men and entirely empty except for me. I looked around the poorly-lit cabin, taking in the metal walls and shadowy compartments. There was a box on one of the benches. The card on the box had my name on it. As the thruster rockets lifted the ship off the deck, I sat down and opened that box. Inside it, I found an M27 complete with a detachable rifle stock. I found a particle beam pistol. I also found a combat knife with an eighteen-inch serrated blade and a blood gutter that looked remarkably similar to the knife that the Hollywood version of me carried in the movie, The Battle for Little Man . The knife that I had once thought no self-respecting Marine would carry, I now connected to my belt. In the quagmire of Safe Harbor, that knife might indeed come in handy. The box also held an ammo belt. Under the belt I found five spare clips for my M27 and a half-dozen golf ball-sized grenades.

The ride down to Safe Harbor spaceport only took a couple of minutes. During that time I stripped and reassembled my M27. I loved the way the snaps and clicks echoed against the walls of the empty cabin. I stuck a clip into the slot and set the safety.

“We’re coming in for a landing,” the pilot called from the cockpit. That was all the warning I got. I heard the thrusters, felt the padded bounce as the landing gear struck the pavement, and headed down the ramp as the heavy metal doors opened ahead of me.

The transport, with its landing light and area lanterns, created a small island of light. As soon as I stepped off the ramp, the doors closed behind me and jets of blue flame formed in the thruster rockets. Crouching out of instinct, I jogged a safe distance and watched as the bulky drop ship lifted itself off the tarmac, rotated in the air, then roared out of sight. For a few seconds, I tracked the light of the transport’s engines as they shrank from view.

The air was still and humid on the tarmac. It was a warm night lacking so much as a simple breeze. Crickets or some similar insect made an electronic sounding buzz off in the distance. Other than the buzz of the insects, there were no other sounds in that liquid night.

The vast dark plateau of the spaceport runway looked as dark as coal in the moonless night. Maybe it was the torture, or maybe it was the fall of the seemingly invincible Unified Authority, but something left me feeling small and alone. Not long ago, I had avoided people. Now I felt keenly aware of some new emotion, some barren emptiness, that rose in my stomach whenever people left me alone. I considered this new emotion and decided that it had nothing to do with fear. It came from a new understanding that life was fragile.

I thought about the way I felt after I killed Sam in my cell. Regret for the murder of a man who planned to murder me was not logical. Was it loneliness? Had I somehow become untethered?

Judging by what I saw around me, there was not so much as a stray volt of electricity anywhere in the spaceport. The buildings stood mute and dark like mountains with unnaturally straight cliffs. Runway lights sprouted mute from the pavement. From what I could see through this shroud of darkness, the spaceport had not been touched during the attack. I saw the profile of the terminal building off in the distance. It appeared as a silhouette with straight lines.

The runway stretched out before me vast and smooth. I ran its length with little fear of tripping. The stark white walls of the hangars looked dark gray as I passed them. The large entry doors of the first few hangars hung open. When I peered inside, I found them emptied of everything except tools and equipment.

I had a moment of panic when I found the hangar in which I left the Starliner wide open and empty. I felt that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as I looked around the cavernous blackness. Just as I began to lose hope, I saw a similar hangar not too far away and realized that I might have gone to the wrong building.

Feeling my pulse quicken, I rushed to the next hangar. The door was locked on this one. I thought about pulling out my particle beam pistol and shooting the door off its tracks, but decided against it. If my Starliner was in there, I should be grateful for a door that hid it from prying eyes. Along the side of the hangar, I found an office door and smashed the glass in with my pistol. Reaching in, I turned the lock and let myself in. The power was out. The only light in the office came from an EXIT

sign that faded as it fed on the last fumes of its emergency batteries. The sign’s green light formed a luminous puddle over the door. That the emergency batteries could have lasted so long amazed me until I realized that the attack on New Columbia had happened less than one week ago. I opened the door beneath the EXIT sign. The hangar was small by spaceport standards. Despite its thirty-foot ceiling, the building was far too narrow to hold a military transport such as the one I had just come in on. It had just enough real estate to house three commuter-class ships side by side. Wan light shown in through a window in the back wall and dissolved into the eerie blackness. My eyes could not adjust to such total darkness. The hangar was not only dark but silent. It was an auditory vacuum, devoid of so much as a cricket chirping, or a dripping faucet, or a breeze, or even a ticking clock.

Reaching a hand in front of my face to keep from smashing into something, I stumbled forward. I worried about tripping on a power cord or a toolbox, but the floor was clear. I imagined reaching out and finding something cold and dead, a victim of the invasion, but that did not happen. The only people in the spaceport during the attack were allowed to leave the planet unmolested. I found the smooth, rounded, metal of a spaceship. It was almost too large a ship to be in this hangar. My Starliner was big by private ship standards, but it wasn’t as big as this ship. This ship was tall and bulky. Brushing my hand along its nearly vertical hull, I felt my way around the floor. I could not be sure in the dark, but I felt confident that I recognized this ship.

Once again I felt my way through the darkness, walking slowly and blindly, afraid that at any moment I might bump my head on a wing or shelf. Not far from the first ship, I found the edge of a diagonal wing belonging to a second ship. I followed that wing toward the front of the Starliner. Punching my security code into the pad, I unlocked the hatch.

Now I found myself on familiar ground. I flipped a switch and lights turned on around the cabin. The cabin was long and narrow, with white leather seats and surrounded by wood-paneled walls. From this angle, the cabin looked like a miniature movie theater fitted into a tube. Instead of a screen it had a cockpit.

I switched on the landing lights and had a look at the other ship. As I suspected, it was Freeman’s ship. He had come this far. I had not known whether or not he made it to Safe Harbor before the Confederate Navy destroyed the Broadcast Network. Freeman must not have realized that my Starliner was self-broadcasting or he would have taken it.

I slept in the Starliner that night. The chairs only reclined so far, but they were soft and comfortable. Safe Harbor Spaceport was thirty miles out of town. At the first light of day, I stole a car from a parking lot outside the passenger terminal and began the trip into town. The highway was empty and still with forests lining one side of the road and open fields on the other. There were no cars along the road and no signs of people. Except for the occasional billboard or road sign, this might have been a natural path on an uninhabited planet.

Five miles down the road, however, I ran into the ruins of an armored column. Tanks, missile carriers, personnel carriers, jeeps . . . military vehicles of all makes lay burned and broken. Some were upside down, their wheels in the air.

When the enemy demolished this column, they destroyed the road as well. Ten-and twenty-foot trenches scarred the road. Rough craters pocked much of the landscape. One particularly large trough cut across a bend in the road and may well have extended beyond it. It looked like an enormous knife wound in the earth, and the exposed soil within that gouge was charred black.

Seeing no point in trying to drive any farther, I climbed out of my car and shouldered my gear. I was not the first person to park here. A civilian van was parked near the front of the convoy. Like me, somebody had stolen a vehicle and driven in as far as he could from the spaceport. I stole a luxury car. The other person had stolen a family van—a utilitarian vehicle with cargo space and headroom. It had to have been Freeman.

I went to have a closer look at a broken tank before starting the hiking portion of my trip to town. It was an Alsance-Blake, a make of tank generally used by the Army. The same powerful laser that gashed the ground hit the tank’s turret and melted it. Molten metal had poured down the side of the tank like wax flowing down the side of a candle. The soldiers inside this tank would have drowned in a bath of melted steel if they were not incinerated first.

A few days earlier, I would not have equated human lives with this destruction. Now I felt something akin to pity for the men who died here. They would have been clones, like me, but not like me as well. They would have been standard GI clones. They were not my kind, but not far from it. I hopped a small gully the lasers had cut into the road and continued to the next vehicle, a truck that had been sheered in two. This was the work of a battleship. That was the strength of attacking with battleships. You could scour the planet from above the atmosphere, using laser cannons to destroy enemy emplacements that were so far away they could not return fire. At least thirty men had died on this truck. Corpses in battle gear, their skin charred and their lips and eyelids burned away, grinned down at me.

I heard the caw of birds in the distance. Whether or not the birds had already picked over this particular carrion, they were coming now. If any of these dead had moist flesh, the birds would peck at it and strip it away. That might be good. The air around these vehicles reeked of burned meat. I doubted anyone would come out to bury these poor bastards.

A few vehicles later, I came to a spot where an explosion had blown a twenty-foot hole in the road. The blast radius was thirty or forty feet long. Judging by the debris I saw around the hole, the laser had likely struck a missile truck, detonating its deadly munitions. Had that truck carried a nuclear payload, I would have been irradiated long before reaching the convoy. I might not have made it out of the spaceport alive. A wonderful cooling breeze blew across this scene. The tops of the trees swayed in that breeze. The wind brushed across the velvety carpet of tall grass that stretched across the fields. Beyond the fields a blue lake twinkled in the bright morning sun. And ahead of me, the scorched supply line stretched on and on and vanished behind a hill. To the best of my reckoning, the column stretched on for another seven miles.

I did not make it all the way to Safe Harbor before nightfall. Crossing the gullies and blown out sections of road slowed me down. By late afternoon, I was only two or three miles from the outskirts of the city. I was close enough to see it clearly, but I did not want to travel into that urban tangle in the darkness. As the sun set and the sky took on streaks of amber, orange, and gold, I set up camp just inside the forest and ate an MRE that I had scrounged from the Starliner.

Once night fell, I hiked out of the woods to have a look at the distant city. No lights shined in the tall buildings. Some glow rose from the street. There might have been fires in dumpsters and trashcans. Maybe a few small stores had gone up in flames. The glow suggested controlled fires, but you never knew.

When morning came, I would make my way into the city. I would travel to Fort Washington, the stricken Marine base. I wanted combat armor. The sensors and lenses in a combat visor would help as I searched for Freeman and Callahan.

Resting in the woods, sleeping in the dark because I did not want to give away my position by building a fire, I thought about Safe Harbor, and Honolulu, and the Mars Spaceport, and the city they called Hinode on Ezer Kri. These had all been busy, thriving cities. I tried to imagine what it would be like to walk through these cities today, but the only image I could conjure was a spaceport terminal packed with millions of people fleeing their homes. I remembered frightened children and crying women and general silence.

In the morning, I ate another MRE and finished the hike into town.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

The last time I came into Safe Harbor, the city was empty but perfectly preserved, like a museum exhibit. Now it more truly fit the profile of a ghost town. Looters had gutted the small stores on the outskirts of town. Some buildings were burned down.

There had been few cars along the street on the night of the attack. Now I found cars parked in the middle of the streets. These cars must have been found, driven dry, and abandoned. Not that I was in any position to condemn car thievery.

Safe Harbor had become a patchwork of prime city and war zones. A few blocks into town, I walked into a neighborhood that had probably survived the Hinode attack only to be sacked and destroyed by gangs. This had been an up-scale residential area with two-and three-story apartment buildings, parks with playgrounds, and hedges along the sidewalks.

Hinode lasers had not done this damage. The streets were intact but there were bullet holes everywhere. The windows and doors of the apartment buildings were broken in. Some buildings had been gutted by fire. The windows of these buildings were blackened from smoke. Beds, toys, and clothing littered the streets. The people who sacked this neighborhood had taken everything they wanted, then, in an anarchic feeding frenzy, destroyed everything they did not want. I looked at the stuffed animals, the toy cars, the books, and the furniture and thought about the families I passed in Safe Harbor spaceport. The thieves were like wild dogs, like a goddamned pack of dogs. Soon I would run into them, and my newfound respect for human life would not help me. I began to wonder if I would have the ability to pull the trigger when the moment came.

Without people, cities become uncomfortably quiet. Walking through Safe Harbor, I heard my own breathing and the soft clap of my footsteps. I turned one corner and heard the pop of automatic fire. This happened on the outskirts of the financial district, an area filled with monolithic skyscrapers that seemed to slide out of the sky.

One of the buildings across the street from where I stood had a circular drive lined by four flagpoles. From those poles hung flags representing the Unified Authority, the Orion Arm, New Columbia, and Safe Harbor. A strong wind pushed those flags. They snapped and waved. Holding my M27 before me, my right forefinger over the trigger and my left hand supporting the stock, I paused to look at the flags. The financial district stretched on for blocks, three square miles of city real estate covered by fifty-and sixty-floor buildings with marble façades and glistening windows. The looters would certainly have come into the financial district; but they could not break these inch-thick windows with simple bricks and they would not waste bullets trying to decorate this part of town. Some of the buildings had protective louvers across their entries. The looters would need to find better tools before they could enter these buildings. They would need lasers or explosives. I wondered just how well armed the looters might be. I saw snatches of sky between the buildings. It was blue and cloudless, and it glowed. The day would turn hot and humid by midafternoon; but for now, the temperature remained in the high sixties and a cooling breeze rolled through the city.

A few blocks into the financial district, I located the remains of an Army checkpoint. I smelled the destruction long before I saw it. The scents of decay, dust, and fire became stronger. Then I turned a corner and confronted it. The men who erected the barricade had prepared to face looters, not battleships. A few laser blasts had reduced their tanks and armored transports to slag. There was one spot in which a laser had dug a six-foot pit in the middle of the street. The laser carved a perfectly round pit. The laser melted the road around the pit, heating the tar until it boiled. The tar had cooled days ago, but the acrid smell of melted tar lingered in the air. The men guarding this checkpoint would have died at their post before deserting. They were government-issue clones, heavily programmed and damned near incapable of abandoning an assignment. A direct hit from those laser cannons could turn an entire platoon to ash, and the heat from a near hit would kill a man, but they would have stayed. If there had been bodies left after the attack, the looters carted them away.

Taking one last look around the destruction, I sighed and continued on. From here on out, I would travel through smaller streets and alleyways. As long as I continued heading north and east, I would end up somewhere near Fort Washington. When Ray Freeman arrived in Safe Harbor, the Marine base was the first place he would have visited.

After another hour, I found my way into a retail district. Going from the deserted financial district into a retail section was like stepping out of a forest and finding yourself in a pasture. As I moved through alleys, working my way around pallets and the layer of trash that carpeted this portion of town, I heard an engine growl.

Moving through the empty streets of Safe Harbor, the hum of an engine sounded as foreign to me as the roar of a dinosaur. This was not a car, I could tell that easily enough. If it was a truck, it was a large truck. If I had to guess, I would have said it was an armored transport from the Marine or Army base. No self-respecting corporation would own such a noisy truck.

I switched from my M27 to my particle beam pistol as I peeked around a corner. Ahead of me I saw a four-way intersection over which hung a blacked-out stoplight. From here on out, I would need to move more cautiously. I was entering enemy territory. This was gangland. Anybody and everybody was the enemy.

Traveling from lot to lot, hiding behind walls and fences whenever I could, I worked my way forward. I tracked down the sound of that truck engine. Soon I heard voices.

“Hey, guys, look at me! I’m a specking Marine.” The man who said this had a low voice that sounded utterly without intelligence.

The buildings in this area, mostly two-and three-story commercial structures with block-length display windows and awning-covered entrances, had been looted and gutted. The glass in the display windows was shattered. In one window, dozens of naked mannequins lay piled on top of each other like logs in a fireplace.

The building directly behind me was a looted diner. The people who broke into the restaurant seemed to have had a certain reverence for it. They did not break the windows or steal the tables and chairs. Except for a missing door, the restaurant looked clean enough to open for business. Whoever was talking was right around the corner from me when he said, “Careful with that, it’s worth something.”

“This thing? I wouldn’t want to wear it. It’s got clone meat inside it. Clone probably rotted all over it.”

“I’m telling you, that helmet is worth something. That Marine combat armor, that’s good shit.”

“If you don’t want it, I’ll take it,” a third voice said. “I’ll give you five hundred bucks for it.”

I did not recognize the voices. I knelt in a shadow to listen for clues about who these men were.

“Money doesn’t buy jack,” the first man complained.

“Might sometime.”

“Only if the government comes back. If that happens, we’re all screwed.” That was the second speaker, the only one who sounded like he could read.

“I’ll trade you a canned ham for it,” the third man offered.

“A canned ham? No shit?” the man sounded impressed.

Staying low to the ground, I slipped over towards a broken display window. The floor inside the display was covered with sparkling shards of glass. Whatever had been on display inside this window must have been valuable since the looters had picked it clean.

I climbed into the window and found an open door that led into the store itself. This particular shop had sold gourmet foods, not that there was anything left on the shelves. Posters showing kosher this and imported that covered the walls. Banners for cheeses and special brands of coffee hung from the ceiling. Toppled refrigerator display cases, demolished shelves, and cast-away shopping carts littered the floor. The store was huge and dark except for the bright sunlight that shined in through small windows in distinct rays.

I sorted my way through the wreckage. Checkout stands were pushed over and computerized registers lay on the floor, their drawers hanging open and empty. Stepping over a register, I approached the front door of the store and peered around the edge.

The plaza did not look busy by any stretch of the imagination, but it was well-trafficked. It looked like a downtown shopping district might look on a Saturday afternoon, in a city that closed on weekends. Groups of men and women sat on walls or around a fountain. The fountain was full of sloshing blue water, but its jets were turned off.

I recognized the canned ham boys instantly. They were the ones standing around the corpse of a Marine. The biggest of the men had stripped the helmet off of the dead clone and held it in his hands. As I watched, he placed one boot on the dead man’s back. I decided the man was an idiot as I watched him hold the helmet to his face and stare into the visor. “What’s so good about this thing?”

I could have used that visor. In my personal opinion, Marine combat armor, with its audio sensors and lenses, was the most important innovation in soldiering since the invention of gunpowder. Also, I did not like seeing these grave robbers abusing the body of a fallen Marine. Looking around the plaza, I noted that all of the men were armed. Most had government-issue M27s. They must have taken these from dead soldiers and Marines. I wondered if looters had found their way to Fort Washington and how thoroughly they had picked over the base.

“Why do you want this so badly?” the goliath with the helmet asked the runt sitting beside him.

“No reason, I just like the look of it.”

“You wouldn’t have offered a ham for it for no reason.”

At the edge of the plaza, three men looked under the hood of an Army supply truck. The truck’s dark green paint stood out against the cement courtyard and slate fountain. Any number of warlords had probably carved up the city and claimed sections for themselves. I had located some warlord’s stronghold. There were a couple of heavy-caliber machine guns mounted on the front and back of the truck, but if that was the best this dime store daimyo could do, he and his tribe would not last long.

“Throw in some chocolate bars and you can have it,” the big man said.

“I ate all my chocolate bars,” the runt sounded embarrassed. “How about a half-box of Twinkies?”

I went back into the store and let myself out through a window on the other side.

The warlords with downtown territories mostly concerned themselves with survival. They held small areas, kept their gangs grouped in tight clusters, and gathered whatever small arms they could find. I passed more than one dozen similarly doomed fiefdoms on my way through Safe Harbor. What if every city in the galaxy had degenerated this way? Had Washington, D.C. been carved up by a handful of self-appointed warlords? Maybe not. Maybe cities like Safe Harbor, cities that had been evacuated, collapsed more readily into anarchy. Cities that still had soldiers and police to keep the peace might be okay. It occurred to me that this anarchy was probably not restricted to U.A. territory, either. The Confederate Arms probably had the same problem.

As I reached the outer suburbs around Fort Washington, however, I discovered signs of a different disorder. Someone had claimed these streets, and I had a pretty good idea of who had done it. Someone painted the letters JC on signs and walls. Like a dog urinating to mark its territory, JC, possibly Jimmy Callahan, had painted graffiti around this part of town. On one larger building I saw, “JC ‘Resurrection’.”

“Resurrected,” I thought, it had to be Callahan.

I thought about Silent Tommy and Limping Eddie, the two men who had been his bodyguards. Were they his seconds-in-command? The notion of Jimmy Callahan running this section of town should have made me laugh. Instead, it sent a chill through me.