“Shin Nippon is prepared to form an alliance with the Unified Authority and the Confederate Arms,” Yamashiro said. “None of our armies can defeat the Mogats alone. When the Mogats discover Shin Nippon, their fleets will defeat us. They will roll over us like a wave crushing a sand castle on a beach.”
From his delivery, I had the feeling that the analogy of the wave and the sand castle was neither spontaneous nor original to Yamashiro. He was rehearsing the pitch he would use to sell his idea on Earth.
“The Confederate Navy is also too small to oppose the Mogats, and their land forces are useless against an orbital attack. Only the Unified Authority has enough ships to fight the Mogats, but their ships do not have self-broadcasting capability.”
“The U.A. Navy is useless,” I agreed. “They’re beached without the Broadcast Network.”
“Exactly,” Yamashiro agreed. “It is exactly so.”
“If you’re talking about restoring the Broadcast Network, it can’t work,” I said, putting down my juice and finally noticing the charts on the back wall. “We’d never be able to defend it. The Mogats would be able to shoot it down anytime they wanted.”
There were several charts along the wall. One of them showed a schematic diagram of a broadcast station.
“I agree with you, Harris, we would not be able to defend the Broadcast Network even if we could repair it,” Yamashiro said. “For now, I simply propose an alliance, nothing more.”
“How do we play into this?” Freeman asked.
Yamashiro’s expression turned to surprise. “I should have thought that was obvious. We need to send somebody to Earth to propose our alliance.”
“You want us as ambassadors?” I asked, trying to suppress my sardonic smile.
“You mean you’re using us as guinea pigs,” Freeman said. “You want to see if we can land on Earth without getting shot.”
“Yes,” agreed Yamashiro. “You are perfect for the job.”
CHAPTER
SIX
“Kampai. It means, ‘dry glass.’”
“Dry glass?” I asked.
“Yes, ‘dry glass,’” Yamashiro said. As he generally did, Yamashiro conducted himself in a subdued fashion as we entered the officers’ club. He spoke softly, wore a veiled expression, and did not look me in the eye.
We had come to celebrate the sale. Yamashiro had sold Freeman and me the concept of going to Earth. Now it was time to mark the occasion with booze.
Enlisted men are the same in every army. They like to get drunk. They drink to steel themselves before heading into combat. They drink to celebrate when they return home. On long stretches between combat missions, they drink to ward off boredom. In the unpredictable days before a campaign, they drink to calm their nerves. Had he been a Marine instead of a philosopher, René Descartes might have said, “I drink, therefore I am.” That is the empiricism of the enlisted man.
In the Unified Authority Marines, officers held to a different standard. They drank, though not as publicly as their enlisted underlings. The officers I knew might enjoy a strong libation before or after combat; but, unlike the privates and sergeants below them, they did not necessarily drink until they became drunk. Such was the culture of the Unified Authority Marines.
The officers in the Shin Nippon Navy, on the other hand, started their off-duty hours with the stated goal of getting drunk. Yamashiro, Takahashi, and six other officers led Freeman and me into the officers’ club telling us that they would not take us to dinner until we were too drunk to know what we were eating.
We sat on mats beside a table that only came up to our knees. I had seen bars like this on Ezer Kri, the planet these men had once called home. This was their idea of a traditional pub. The time I entered a bar like this on Ezer Kri, the matron pretended she could not understand me unless I spoke Japanese. On that occasion, I ended up in a bar with normal waist-high tables and chairs.
Sitting around the table, all of Yamashiro’s officers became equals. Hideo Takahashi sat shoulder to shoulder with Yamashiro himself, and the two men spoke freely. It no longer mattered that Yamashiro was the chief administrator of Shin Nippon or that he was Takahashi’s father-in-law. Takahashi no longer played the samurai, and Yamashiro no longer played the shogun.
A pretty waitress in a silk kimono came in and placed four ceramic bottles on our table, then she handed out lacquered cups. She had long black hair combed back into an elaborate bun.
“You have women on your battleship,” I said, remembering my surprise at seeing the secretary earlier that morning.
“How very observant you are,” Takahashi said. “I am glad you are so alert.”
“Women on a battleship, that’s unusual,” I said. “Don’t you worry about…”
One of the officers poured cups of Sake and passed them along the table. We all took one.
“Do you know Sake?” Yamashiro asked me.
“I’ve heard of it,” I said. “Some of the guys in my platoon tried it when we were on Ezer Kri.”
“But you did not try it?” Yamashiro asked.
I shook my head.
“Kampai!” yelled one of the officers. Everyone tossed the Sake into their mouths and, as far as I could tell, swallowed without tasting. They threw it so fast that it practically sailed over their tongues and down their throats.
I drank the contents from my cup. It was warm.
Freeman held his cup but never drank.
The officers refilled their cups quickly and drained them with another shout of “Kampai.” I followed suit. Ray did not.
“I don’t worry about the women on my ship, especially this one,” Yamashiro said as he watched the waitress enter the room. She brought four more bottles of Sake.
Yamashiro was already on his third or fourth cup. His posture had relaxed, and he spoke less guardedly. Beaming with pride, he added, “I have had her a few times myself.”
“Why isn’t your friend drinking?” Takahashi asked me. English was the first language on Ezer Kri, but these officers conversed just as comfortably in Japanese. They pronounced English properly, but sometimes they strung their words together in ways that might have been influenced by speaking Japanese.
Takahashi turned to Freeman. “Don’t you like Sake?”
“I don’t drink,” Freeman said.
Takahashi looked at me, confusion showing on his face. “How can that be?”
“I’ve had most of the girls in the administrative area,” Yamashiro boasted. He was now on his fifth or six cup. I was still on my third, not that it would have mattered. Whether by accident or by design, Liberator clones had a nearly superhuman tolerance for alcohol. “God made us that way,” I mumbled to myself. God, of course, was the government.
“Kampai!” Another round of Sake disappeared from the table. That pretty waitress returned every five or six minutes with more bottles. Judging by Yamashiro’s responses to her, each time she returned, she became more beautiful.
“How can you not drink?” Takahashi demanded of Freeman. “Everybody must drink. You cannot live if you do not drink.”
When we first entered the club, some of the officers around the table spoke in Japanese. Now they all spoke in English, and they did not seem to care if I overheard their conversations.
“If the Mogat fleet is anywhere near Earth, the clone and the black man are as good as dead.”
“If the Mogats have their fleet somewhere near Earth, we’re all as good as dead.”
“Yeah, but they will be more dead. They’re traveling in a transport.”
“Dead is dead.”
So we were flying into trouble. I tried to turn toward them to listen in, but…
“You know the secretary that brought the coffee to our meeting this morning? I had her, too…in that very room,” Yamashiro confided in a voice both loud and proud. By this time he had downed so much Sake that his eyes seemed to roll in his head. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it. He had so much alcohol in his blood that I expected the
cigarette to explode when he plugged it into his mouth.
“She was very loud,” Yamashiro boasted.
“Oh,” I said, trying to tune back in on the other officers.
“We won’t need to get too close. The clone and the black man have already traveled four billion miles in a transport…four billion miles! Can you believe that?”
“Captain Takahashi told me they were trying to commit suicide.”
“Really? I heard they were trying to restart the Broadcast Network.”
“No. They were trying to commit suicide.”
“Why didn’t they just kill themselves on Little Man?”
Across the table, Takahashi continued to interrogate Freeman. “Do you drink whiskey?” he asked.
Freeman shook his head.
“Just beer?” Takahashi asked.
“I don’t drink beer.”
“There is a beautiful girl in the officer’s mess who will let you eat sushi off her naked body. When you finish your meal, you can have her,” Yamashiro said. He closed his eyes and giggled. “She is very pretty. I have never eaten sushi so quickly in my life.”
“Kampai!” This time Yamashiro led the charge. He opened his mouth and downed another cup of Sake. All of his officers followed.
The officers became louder and more demonstrative as they drank. By the end of the night, Yamashiro was lighting his cigarettes with the butts of the cigarettes he had just finished.
Many of the other officers smoked, too. A cloud of silver-blue smoke hung just under the ceiling. I stared into that cloud and wondered about the Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of these officers. On duty, these men were quiet, precise, in control. After hours, they drank harder than any other men I knew.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
The last time I visited Earth, the Earth Fleet ruled the skies and the Unified Authority ran the galaxy. Since that time, the Mogats and their allies shut down the Broadcast Network. I had no idea what to expect when Freeman and I landed in Washington, DC.
During the war, I visited a planet named New Columbia a few days after a Mogat attack. When I entered Safe Harbor, the capital city of New Columbia, I found many of the buildings intact, but the society was demolished.
In the days leading up to the attack, the government had evacuated the law-abiding citizens of Safe Harbor. That left the looters, the criminals, and the military in the city when the Mogats began their attack. They orbited the planet destroying military bases, gun emplacements, and convoys.
By the time I arrived, anarchy had taken over in Safe Harbor. Rival gangs had already carved the city into territories. The only way to reintroduce civilization back into Safe Harbor would have been to fumigate the place and start from scratch.
“Think it will be like Safe Harbor?” I asked Freeman, as we carried our equipment into the transport. Freeman had been there. He’d changed the political landscape by shooting the guy whose gang controlled the Marine base. With his size and strength, Ray Freeman could tear most men limb from limb, but he was even more dangerous with a sniper rifle.
“If it is,” Freeman said as he checked out the sight on his rifle, “this will be a short trip.”
In his rucksack, Freeman carried a sniper rifle, two M27s with one rifle stock, a particle-beam pistol, one dozen grenades, and extra ammunition. The bag weighed forty or fifty pounds and he carried it as easily as a sack lunch. He had already strapped a combat knife to his leg. The knife had a ten-inch blade. He was a human fortress.
I’d brought an M27 and three extra clips. Ray thought like a mercenary, a lone gunman who sometimes found himself waging war against an entire army. I thought like a Marine. I preferred to travel light.
Because we had no idea what we would find on Earth or in the space that surrounded it, Yamashiro and his officers took special precautions. The broadcast generator on the S.N.N. Sakura needed eight minutes to generate enough electricity to power up its broadcast engine. That meant that from the time the Sakura arrived in Earth space to the time it could broadcast out, there would be eight minutes in which enemy ships could attack. If we accidentally broadcasted into the middle of the Mogat fleet, or if the Unified Authority somehow resurrected its Earth Fleet, the Sakura would need to scramble for safety. Unaccompanied battleships made easy targets when things went wrong.
The door to the launch bay opened and in walked Takahashi, Yoshi Yamashiro’s son-in-law, along with a junior officer. He came to salute us and see us off the ship.
Takahashi was a captain in the Shin Nippon Navy, but he did not command the Sakura. According to Yamashiro, he made a better administrator than commander. Yamashiro did not come to see us off. I wondered if he was embarrassed about the night before.
“We will broadcast in on the dark side of Earth,” Takahashi said. The “dark side” was a navigational term referring to the side of Earth facing away from Mars. Historically, almost every ship heading into Earth had to come through the Broadcast Network, which orbited Mars. Now that the Mars discs were down, all of Earth was technically “dark.”
“How far out are we broadcasting?” Freeman asked.
“Thirty million miles,” Takahashi said. “We’ll fly you within three million miles. You’ll have an hour before you have to launch.”
Not even the most sophisticated tracking equipment could pick up a ship from beyond thirty million miles. Tracking “anomalies” was a different story. An anomaly was the electrical field that ships generated when they broadcasted into space. Even the most basic equipment could detect an electronic disturbance such as an anomaly from a few million miles away.
On the off chance that the Mogats did have a fleet somewhere in the vicinity, the Sakura would broadcast well out of range. Traveling at a top speed of just under thirty million miles per hour, it would take us an hour to reach Earth, but that also meant that the broadcast engine could recharge. The Sakura would be able to broadcast to safety the moment our transport left the ship.
“Prepare for broadcast. Prepare for broadcast,” a voice warned over loudspeakers. The message echoed across the launch bay.
Tint shields formed over portholes and windows. All of the atmospheric locks in the launch bay sealed. If you happened to glance at the “lightning” that coated ships during a broadcast, you would be blinded for life. With the tint shields up and the landing doors closed, you could not see the electricity. The broadcast itself happened in a split instant. We disappeared from the outer region of the Scutum-Crux Arm in a flash of lightning and appeared thirty million miles from Earth in that same instant.
A moment later the broadcast warning ended and the atmospheric locks opened. I knew we were back in the Sol System of the Orion Arm.
“Earth won’t be like New Columbia,” Freeman said as he headed up the ladder toward the cockpit. “They evacuated Safe Harbor before the Mogats attacked. The only people left on the planet were the criminals.”
“They left the Army and Marines,” I said, following him up the ladder.
“Yeah,” Freeman grunted. This was not the transport in which Yamashiro had found us. The crew of the Sakura jettisoned that ill-fated ship. Yamashiro’s engineers said that our broadcast engine experiment had damaged it beyond repair.
The transports on the Sakura were fifty years older and even less sleek than our old one. This transport had the same basic floor plan and controls. Not much had changed over the last fifty years. Military transports were still shitty little tin cans designed to take maximum abuse on short trips at slow speeds.
“Earth is different,” Freeman said. “The government is still down there, not just a bunch of shell-shocked Marines.” He sat in the pilot’s chair and went over the controls.
We still had an hour to kill before we launched. I sat in the copilot’s seat and fastened the safety harness across my chest. My thoughts wandered back to New Columbia and the gang-riddled city of Safe Harbor.
Technicians walked around the launch bay. One came and inspected the outside of our trans
port.
On our way out of Little Man, I’d read a Bible story in which Syria laid siege to the capital city of Israel. As the siege continued, the people starved.
One day a woman approached the king of Israel to ask for help. When the king asked what she wanted, the woman told him about an agreement she had made with another woman. They would “sodden” her son one night and then the next night they would “sodden” the other woman’s boy. They did indeed sodden the first woman’s son; but the next night, the other woman reneged on the deal.
When I asked Ray what “sodden” meant, he said, “stewed.”
“You mean like boiled?” I asked.
He did not bother to answer.
In my mind, I imagined Washington, DC, under Syrian siege. I envisioned ruined buildings, herds of homeless people, and a city carved up by gangs.
In that Bible story, the king blamed the destruction of his city on God. “Why should I wait for God to save us?” he asked Elisha, who happened to be God’s press secretary at the time. I agreed. I saw God as a metaphor for government. In my mind, the king was not really a king but just a middleman placed between God and the people. In this case, God got scared and ran away long before the Syrians arrived.
Would we find the same thing on Earth? Had the government that created me run scared when the Mogats overpowered its fleet?
“Prepare to launch.” Takahashi’s voice came over the radio. Yamashiro had not bothered to see us off himself. Did his absence betray a certain lack of confidence? Realistically, our chances of landing near Washington, DC, and slipping into the city undetected seemed slim.
“Ready,” Freeman answered.
Red lights flashed around the launch bay. The heavy doors of the atmospheric locks slid open, revealing the curtain of space. The deck officer cut the gravity in the launch bay so that we lifted off the deck the moment Freeman touched the boosters. Freeman took us five feet up, then floated us through the doors and into space.
Had the Sakura maintained full speed, it would have disappeared into space before we could have seen it. Instead, it had dropped to a mere five thousand miles per hour for our launch—virtually a dead stop by space-travel standards.
The Clone Alliance Page 5
