“We built the Galactic Central Fleet in three years,” I said.
“Ah, yes we did. But we had the Network up and running back then. Without the Network, we can’t send unfinished ships between dry docks. We’ll have to start and complete each ship in the same facility.
“We’re not looking at three years this time, we’re looking at ten if we get lucky. Maybe twelve if things don’t fall into place.”
We drove out of town and through a wooded countryside. Finally, we ended up in a residential area. To me, the mansions along the street looked as big as hotels. They had manicured lawns and acre-long driveways. We pulled up to a three-story home with a redbrick façade and brown tile roof.
“Nice place,” I said. “Your home?”
“Not very often,” Brocius said. “My home is the fleet. I guess that makes this more my vacation house. When I’m in town on business, I generally stay in the barracks. It’s much more convenient.”
The car stopped in front of a redbrick walkway that led to the door. Our chauffeur came around and opened the admiral’s door. Not sure if I should wait for the man to open mine as well, I let myself out.
“The place has been in the family for generations. I make it out here two, maybe three times a year,” Brocius said, still continuing the same conversation.
We went inside. Whoever had decorated Admiral Brocius’s home could not decide whether to go modern or antique. The entry had bright lights and shiny smooth walls made out of a modern stone-and-glass hybrid. The builders had made curved corners and pleated the walls. The look was chic, I suppose. Beyond the entryway, the glass/stone material gave way to cherrywood walls, leather furniture, and lots of bookcases. The house had a musty feeling.
We entered a parlor decorated with antique brass instruments. The room had a telescope on a large hutch and a compass the size of a coffee table in the center of the floor. Brocius had an ancient map of some Earth ocean framed on the wall.
We moved on to Brocius’s private study. In this room he had an antique rolltop desk. A painting of an old-time sailing ship cutting through a stormy sea hung on the wall. In one corner of the room stood a cutaway model of an early orbital space station. Like the rooms we entered before it, the office had carpets in the center of the floor with a wide hardwood border.
“What do you think?” Brocius asked.
“It’s comfortable,” I said. In truth, I found the furnishings so dull and dark that they made me sleepy.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” Brocius said. “I hate this room. As an admiral, I’m obligated to have at least one room like that in my house. We’re all supposed to love the sea. We’re supposed to be fascinated by the history of navigation. That’s our public image. We have to decorate our houses to look like monuments to naval history.”
“Bryce Klyber had a room like this in his house, too. I think he actually liked his.” Bryce Klyber, my mentor, had been the highest-ranking officer in the U.A. Navy until his untimely death. I was sure that he did have a room like this one in his house, and I was just as sure that he often retired there to meditate.
Brocius led me upstairs. The staircase ended in an enormous parlor. When he turned on the lights, I saw mirrored walls, old-fashioned neon signs, and bulbs that blinked on and off. He had two rows of antique slot machines, the oldest of which took coins instead of credits. Some even had mechanical wheels with symbols instead of computer screens.
In one corner of the room was a twenty-foot display that looked like a track for horse racing. It had six tin horses on a mural that depicted a straightaway. There was a betting counter beside the game with six stools. It was impressive.
“What do you think?” Brocius asked.
“I like it,” I said. It beat the hell out of the naval museum downstairs.
“It all works. Even the horse-racing game,” Brocius said.
That was not an invitation to come back and play. He probably held enormous parties for his fellow alumni from Annapolis—officers, natural-borns. Clones and enlisted men need not apply.
“Some of these machines are over five hundred years old,” Brocius said. He pointed to three pinball machines against a far wall. “Those machines are American twentieth century.”
They looked shiny and new, with flashing lights hidden behind gaudy glass marquees. There was a kind of practical whimsy about these old toys. Many of them captured the way their ancient owners envisioned the future—all chrome and flashing lights. The people who designed them had it all wrong, of course, but I liked the look of the future as they saw it.
We had “Budge” pinball machines in the game room at our orphanage, holographic machines that let you use a pre-designed course or create your own table. Everything from the ball to the bumpers looked solid and real, but it was all laser projection. One of Brocius’s pinball tables had a volcano made of plastic and winking lights to simulate lava. With Budge machines, you could have an erupting volcano that spit molten lava, or, if you wanted to play like the ancients, a holographic version of a toy volcano made of plastic and lights.
Growing up, I never saw anyone select antique-looking elements. We all wanted volcanoes and roller coasters that looked real, and monsters that breathed air and spit fire. If ever I got my hands on one of those machines again, I decided I would go with all antique elements.
“This room is a gambling man’s dream,” I said. “You must be quite a player.”
“You’ve got me all wrong, Harris. I don’t gamble, I win,” Brocius said.
“The gamblers are the people who put money in my machines. Once in a while they walk off with more than they brought, usually they leave empty-handed. Me, I always walk away with more than I started with. I’m the house.” He leaned toward me as if to confide a secret. “I get better odds.”
He shut off the lights and led me back down the stairs, back to his stodgy museum of maritime history.
We ate in a large dining room on a hardwood table that could have served twenty people. A petty officer in a dress uniform served us our meal. The man looked so serious as he handed us our plates, you would have thought Brocius had threatened him with a court-martial.
“Did you know that the Mogats routed one of the fleets in the Perseus Arm?” Brocius asked. This was the first time he’d spoken since we sat at the table. It was one hell of a conversation starter, especially as I had been laboring under the impression that the Mogat ships could not stand up to the modern U.A. Navy.
“One of our fleets?” I echoed, lamely.
“Fortunately for us, they only sent a few ships. Our ships didn’t put up much of a fight.
“Some Outer Perseus ships overtook five Mogat ships as they broadcasted in an area they were patrolling. That’s it, just five ships. Good thing. If there had been more of them, we might have lost the whole damned fleet.
“The Outer Perseus Fleet is Adam Porter’s outfit, mind you. Porter served on one of my ships a couple of years before he got his star. He’s no atom-splitter, that one. He never had much of a mind for strategy.”
“You called it a rout. How bad was it?” I asked.
Our waiter returned with eggs Benedict, hash browns, toast, and wedges of cantaloupe. He placed the plates with the eggs Benedict in front of us, then placed the rest of the food in the center. He poured us coffee and orange juice. I half expected him to put down his tray and start reciting poetry, he was taking so long. I wanted to know what happened, and Brocius did not seem willing to speak with anyone else in the room.
Finally, the petty officer left the room.
“Porter went after them with a fighter carrier, five battleships, ten frigates…”
“Beat by five Mogat ships?” I asked. That sounded bad.
“Porter’s fleet has the oldest ships in the galaxy,” Brocius said. I briefly considered reminding Brocius that the ships in the Mogat fleet were older than our oldest active ships but decided against it.
“We’re talking about the Perseus Arm, Harris. Nothing
much happens out there. Before the war broke out, Congress wanted to shut the Outer Perseus Fleet down.”
“What kind of ships did the Mogats bring to the fight?” I asked.
“Five battleships,” Brocius said. “We’ve built our strategy around the idea that ship-per-ship we can beat the Mogats any time. Now we have to rethink that. By the time they were done, Porter lost a fighter carrier and three battleships. The Mogats didn’t even bother with his frigates.”
“What did they lose?” I asked.
“We don’t know how much damage Porter did to the ships that got away, but he only sank one of their battleships.” Brocius took a long drink of coffee, but his eyes remained fixed on me.
I cut a triangle from my eggs Benedict. This was not the kind of breakfast I normally ate. I preferred my eggs scrambled and my bacon straight instead of with hollandaise sauce. The muffin on the bottom of this stack was still crunchy. This was too rich a breakfast for my taste, but I did not say so. I cut more, watched the yolk spill out across my plate, then took another bite of the slimy thing.
“Like it?” Brocius asked.
“It’s good,” I chose to be politic. “Earth-grown?”
“That’s all you can get with the Broadcast Network down,” he said. “Do you have any idea how much it would cost to ship in eggs and bread from the territories?”
I should have figured that.
“Porter is still in command of the fleet for now, but his career is specked. There’s no room in the U.A. Navy for officers who let their fleet get chased by five ships,” Brocius said.
“So the Mogats sank a few of his ships…then what? They wouldn’t just let him leave,” I said.
“That is precisely what they did,” Brocius said. More than anything else, he sounded disgusted.
“Why the speck would they do that?” I asked. It didn’t make sense. Having defeated an enemy with superior numbers, why let him flee and regroup? I thought about this for a few seconds. “Have there been any other engagements?”
“No,” Brocius said.
“Before they merged with the Confederate Arms and Halverson took over, the Mogats never seemed very bright,” I said.
“Did you know Halverson’s been promoted to fleet admiral? Our fleet admiral?” Brocius asked, obvious distaste dripping from his voice.
Admiral Tom Halverson, who led the attack on the Earth Fleet, joined the Confederate Arms while they were allied with the Atkins Believers. He left the Unified Authority as a rear admiral, received a few additional stars, and emerged as the head of the combined Mogat-Confederate Arms Navy. The notion that Halverson could return and take command of our fleet clawed at my stomach.
Brocius went after his eggs Benedict in a methodical fashion, cutting the open-faced sandwich into six bites, then downing three of those bites in a minute-long feast. He chewed each piece mechanically, washed it down with a sip of orange juice, and then speared the next bite with his fork.
“I’ll ask it again, Harris, what do we need? How do we stack the deck? What do we need to do to give ourselves house odds?”
“They’re hard to read,” I said. “I always knew that the Mogats were not military-minded, but allowing a fleet to escape is strange, even by their standards.”
I thought about what I’d said and changed my mind. “They almost act surprised when they win. I mean, when they beat the Earth Fleet and shut down the Network, the planet was theirs. They should have landed troops and taken DC.
“Now you tell me that they had a fleet at their mercy and let it escape. It’s almost like they want to convert us, not beat us.”
“Did you hear that they tried to land a messiah in Israel?” Brocius asked.
“Yes, I heard about the Space Bibles, too.”
“I agree with you, it does sound like they’re out to convert us,” Brocius said.
“We need one of their ships with its navigational computer in one piece. That is how we can find them,” I said.
“We can send a salvage team to the battleship Porter sank,” Brocius suggested.
“No, we need a boat in working condition.”
Brocius began his eggs Benedict–eating ritual again. He cut a sandwich into six pieces and speared the first piece. “Capture a battleship? That would be a trick.”
“We have people who could do it,” I said. “Can you get me to the outer Scutum-Crux Fleet?” I asked.
“Why Scuttum-Crux?” Brocius asked.
“Because the Kamehameha is in that fleet,” I answered.
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
In the entire Unified Authority Navy, there was only one Expansion-class fighter carrier active in any of its fleets—the Kamehameha. All of the other carriers were of the more modern Perseus-class variety. They were five thousand one hundred feet wide and carried eleven thousand troops—fourteen battalions of Marines just spoiling for a fight. The Kamehameha measured half that size and carried a mere one thousand combat men, but they were special. They were Navy SEALs; and more than that, they were Adam Boyd clones. The Kamehameha might have been undersized and obsolete, but with that complement of Boyd clones, it could win a war.
Larger than any battleship and smaller than other fighter carriers, the Kamehameha traveled with the rest of the Scutum-Crux Fleet as well hidden as a shark among dolphins. From the cabin of the self-broadcasting explorer ship, I watched the whole fleet and remembered my days as a Marine. I spent almost two years on the Kamehameha, back when it carried Marines. I reported in as a corporal and transferred out as a lieutenant.
On the charts and simulations, you always see ships laid out in a flat formation—even when the charts are three-dimensional. Coming in this time, I was struck by the way the fleet had grouped. The fighter carriers were in the center of a three-dimensional diamond with layers of destroyers and battleships surrounding them from above, from below, and from every side. A trio of battleships led the formation.
All of the ships had the same beige hull and light gray underbelly. Lights on the outsides of these ships illuminated their numbers and bows. The Unified Authority Navy placed little stock on stealth when it came to its fleets. The Scutum-Crux Fleet thundered across its corner of the galaxy with all the subtlety of a herd of elephants crossing the plains.
As we circled around the back of the fleet, I watched the blue-white flames that flared from the ships’ engines. “We’ve been cleared for approach, Colonel,” my pilot told me. My pilot was a natural-born lieutenant who seemed to resent playing chauffeur for a clone.
Brocius cut me orders, too, but they were purposely vague. They identified me as being on Central Cygnus Fleet business and told people to cooperate with me and nothing more. Brocius’s orders gave me enough leeway to land myself in the brig for life. They gave Brocius enough wiggle room to say I had acted on my own.
Rereading these orders I realized how easily I allowed myself to be swept by the tides. I did not need to carry Yamashiro’s olive branch to Earth just because he found me in space. I did not need to partner up with Brocius or rejoin the Marines just because I returned to Earth. I just seemed to let the tide of events sweep me along. I had not officially rejoined the Marines, but here I was, with the Scutum-Crux Fleet, preparing to leave on an unofficial mission. I was wearing a Marine’s uniform, talking like a Marine, and acting like a Marine. Even worse, much as I tried to fool myself otherwise, I knew I was exactly where I wanted to be.
I was built for war, and was pretty sure that I was programmed to be incapable of fighting for anyone other than the Unified Authority. When I really tried, I was capable of passive resistance—living with farmers instead of fighting with the Marines, trying to adapt a transport for broadcast instead of putting a pistol to my head, but in the end, I was in the warrior class, and this was my republic.
My mind wandered as I sat alone. I was the only passenger in a cabin designed to hold two hundred scientists. The explorer was the size of an atmosphere-bound commercial jetliner—too big to fit i
n the Kamehameha’s launch bay. We had to fly within a mile of the fighter carrier and match her speed. From where I sat, it looked like both ships had come to a stop.
The Kamehameha sent out a ten-man skiff to meet us. The skiff “mated” with the explorer, sealing its temporary air lock over our hatch like a tick attaching itself to a dog. The intricate process took several minutes. Once the air lock was ready, and the gangway was set, I crossed over and rode the skiff to the Kamehameha.
The welcoming crew that met me in the launch bay included the ship’s captain and several high-ranking officers. They did not know why I had come. They only knew that I had orders from Earth.
As the hatch opened, and I stepped out to the deck, I saw recognition on a few of their faces. Some of these men had served on this ship four years ago when I returned with six other survivors from the battle on Little Man.
I saluted the captain, and he returned my salute. I was still dressed in the colonel’s uniform I had worn to breakfast at Brocius’s house. Technically I was impersonating an officer, but the uniform was the only clothing I had at the moment.
“Requesting permission to come aboard,” I said as I stood at attention.
“Welcome aboard,” the captain said.
“Thank you, sir,” I said. “May I present my orders to the captain?” I remained at attention, chest out, shoulders back. High-ranking officers noticed when you did or did not show them the proper respect.
“At ease, Colonel,” the captain said.
I spread my feet fifteen inches apart. I clasped my hands behind my back. I released the air in my chest.
“Let’s see your orders, Colonel,” the captain said.
I handed him the sheet. He read it. “You wish to meet with my SEALs…” he said. “I don’t suppose you are able to tell me what you might discuss with them?”
I said nothing and looked straight ahead.
“I didn’t think so,” the captain said.
“Ensign, conduct Colonel Harris down to the barracks. See that he meets Illych.”
I saluted. The captain saluted. His salute seemed more formal than it had a few moments earlier.
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