Brocius had a tall Scotch which he would likely nurse all night. He seldom touched it. When he did pick it up, he swirled the ice around the glass and took short sips.
“You remember Ray Freeman?” I asked.
“Of course,” Brocius said. I did not even bother looking for a nod from Yamashiro. He would remember Freeman vividly.
“He found a Mogat base,” I said.
“On Earth? Impossible,” Brocius said. “We would have known about it. Where did he say it was located, somewhere near Antarctica?”
“Washington, DC, sir,” I said.
“And you believe him?” Brocius asked.
“Freeman? If he says it is there, it’s there.”
Yamashiro listened without offering any information. He lit a new cigarette and enjoyed the smoke. I got the feeling that he agreed with me about trusting Freeman.
“So you think the Mogats have a secret base on Earth, somewhere near Washington, DC?” Brocius said. “Rubbish. That’s just pure…fantasy.”
“After the Galactic Central War, we went forty years without seeing a single Mogat ship,” I said. “The battle in Outer Perseus was our first sighting in months. Now, over the last two weeks, they’re all over the place. Each engagement ends the same way—they lose one ship and run away.”
“It does seem like they are ramping up.” Brocius forgot himself and took a long pull of his Scotch.
“If they have a working base on Earth, they may be ready to attack,” Yamashiro said.
“Admiral Brallier wants to send his SEALs out to disband their network. He wants to send them out in demolition teams to blow up the Mogat wrecks,” Brocius said.
“I’m not sure that would work, sir,” I said.
“I know,” Brocius agreed. “Waste of time. We might be able to blow up the ships, but with those shields, we can’t touch the broadcast gear. It’s a specking nightmare. It’s like having a damned tumor and not being able to cut it out.”
“Our only choice is to strike first,” I said.
“Take out their shields at the source?” Brocius asked. “It does seem like the only alternative, assuming we are not too late.” He thought for a moment, “Assuming Freeman is right about that base, and we’re not too late.”
Clearly shaken by the news that the Mogats had landed on Earth, Brocius drained the Scotch I had expected him to hold all night. “I’m glad we talked,” he said, and he stood, signaling both Yamashiro and me that our meeting had ended. As we rose to our feet, Brocius added, “You know what frustrates the hell out of me? It’s the feeling like we’ve won every damned battle, but we’re still losing the war.”
Admiral Brocius paused to think about what he had just said. “Listen to me. I’m swearing like a specking Marine.”
PART II
EXTREMISM…NO VICE
CHAPTER
FORTY-ONE
We had breakfast in a cafeteria meant for dry-dock employees. They fed us whatever we wanted. I grabbed a tray and ordered a four-egg scramble, five strips of bacon, a double order of potatoes, two slices of toast, and two cups of orange juice. The food felt heavy on my tray.
That chow tasted good. A Marine could get spoiled. A few of my men even ate their eggs without smothering them in ketchup.
We ate breakfast early, at 0600, and had the place to ourselves. Rows of tables stood empty on either side of us. I had hoped to see the SEALs this morning, but they might have already left.
“Hey, Master Sarge, when are we going back to the ship?” Philips asked.
Only Philips called me “Master Sarge.” Soldiers may call their sergeants “Sarge,” but in the Marine Corps, the term “Sarge” is demeaning, not that it bothered me…much. I had not yet accustomed myself to the name, “Master Sergeant,” because I did not think of myself as a master gunnery sergeant. Back when I had the rank of colonel, I never thought of myself as an officer. The only rank I ever felt entirely confident about was private first class, and I got promoted out of that after three months.
“We’re not going back to the Obama,” I said. “We’re headed Earth-side, boys.”
They greeted my announcement with a moment of hushed awe. The thirty-six remaining men in my platoon all knew what that meant. It meant war.
“We’re not going back for our gear?” one of the men asked.
“It’s already been crated and shipped to Fort Houston.” I sat down, and they moved in around me.
“You wouldn’t happen to know the next stop after Fort Houston?” Evans called from across the table.
“I could make an educated guess,” I said.
“Strap on your bayonets, we’re headed to Mogatopolis,” Philips said to the Marine sitting beside him. He surprised me by not referring to it as “Planet HomeMo.”
“We’re still a few men shy of a platoon,” Thomer pointed out. He was a cautious one.
“I’m not sure what they’re going to do about that,” I said. “Now that the orphanages are gone, reinforcements are harder to come by. Maybe someone will shift some companies around.”
“Think they’ll break us up?” Thomer asked.
“No. They don’t break up teams that produce. Not if they can help it.”
Thomer nodded. He was skinnier than the other clones. He ate light and preferred jogging to lifting weights. He left the tough talking to the other Marines, but he held his own in combat.
I picked up a strip of bacon and ate it followed by two fork-loads of eggs. “The brass has a bigger problem than a few empty slots,” I said. “They have to figure out some way to land enough men to make a stand. And they have to do it without the Broadcast Network.”
“How many men will they need?” Evans asked.
“This is off the top of my head, but I’m guessing we’ll need one hundred thousand or maybe two hundred thousand fully equipped troops just to get our boot in the door.
“The 2510 census said there were 200 million Mogats. If they have 200 million people on that planet, we’re going to need a couple million men along with tanks and gunships to support them.”
Evans whistled. “Two million men?” he asked. “That’s going to be some airlift.”
“Especially if we have to ship them there in explorers,” I said. “If Washington is serious about invading that planet, they’re going to need to come up with something.”
“When do we leave for Fort Houston?” Thomer asked me.
“Pretty soon—1100.”
“When do we deploy?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I think they plan to send us out as quickly as possible,” I said around a wad of bacon. I finished my first cup of orange juice in one long drink. “It just depends on how quickly they can figure out the logistics.”
“But they know how to find the Mogat planet?” Thomer asked.
“They seem to. I’m guessing they lifted the information off the broadcast computer on that ship we took.”
Thomer nodded again.
I had withheld a lot of information. My boys did not know that the Unified Authority and the Confederate Arms had signed a treaty and that we would likely ship out in battleships like the one we had captured. I neglected to mention that the entire Mogat fleet, which was still nearly four hundred ships strong, was moored around the target planet. I said nothing about our unarmed ships needing to slip in, drop us on the hostile planet, and get out before the Mogats shot them down. I also neglected to mention that the Mogats’ ships had some new shield technology that rendered our weaponry useless.
Three hours after breakfast, we all boarded an explorer and flew to Earth.
It took less than an hour for us to arrive at Fort Houston, a small training base in the southwestern portion of the old United States. Fort Houston had once been attached to an orphanage. Young clones ages twelve and up once had run its obstacle course and bivouacked in its fields. The Mogats destroyed the orphanage after defeating the Earth Fleet. Thirty-six thousand clone children fried in their beds as a Mogat battleship hit th
e orphanage with a laser from above the atmosphere.
Bastards.
Over the next two days, a hundred platoons moved into portable barracks buildings set up around the Fort Houston parade grounds. That gave us four thousand five hundred Marines. If they’d had a hundred more forts with a hundred platoons, we might have had enough Marines to hold a beachhead while we waited for reinforcements to arrive.
Within an hour of landing in Fort Houston, we began training. I found comfort in this. There was something nostalgic about doing calisthenics in the blazing-hot noonday sun, sweat rolling down my face and back, while another platoon ran laps around the field. We finished our calisthenics and headed for the firing range, passing men on the obstacle course crawling across a field while their sergeants fired live rounds over their shoulders.
Hearing the swearing of sergeants and the explosions of grenades, I realized that I had returned home. Semper fi, Marine.
One of the great benefits of being stationed back on Earth was the mediaLink. On the Obama, the only news we received was prerecorded information released by the Department of the Navy. It wasn’t much. Before I logged on to the mediaLink, however, I had important business to take care of. I had a call to place.
At 1600 hours, the base commander announced that we had the rest of the night to ourselves. My men went into a nearby town called Austin. I stayed back.
We had our own barracks building. With the platoon gone, I dug through my gear and found the pair of disposable shades I’d bought in DC. After one last glance to make sure that no one would see me, I logged on to the mediaLink and placed the call.
The picture that appeared on the screen was a pretty little girl with long blond hair and startling blue eyes. She sat on a blanket in a field of daisies holding a dandelion in her hands. Looking at me through the screen, she smiled and in the sweetest of voices said, “We can’t beat the Mogats.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I tried to break into their compound,” Freeman said through his little girl avatar.
“Let me guess, the building has impenetrable shields,” I said. My trip to Mogatopolis was highly classified. I could barely wait to share the details.
“Have a look,” said the little girl.
The picture of the little girl disappeared from the screen. Video of a large building that took up an entire city block replaced it. There was an explosion. I saw a flash of fire followed by a cloud of smoke. Cars parked near the building flipped in the air and tumbled away. There was no sound.
When the smoke cleared, the building looked exactly as it had before the explosion. Then the image on the screen returned to the little girl as she blew on her dandelion, and the air carried its fluff toward the camera.
“Something big is going on in there. I took energy readings from my station. They’re off the scales,” Freeman said. On the screen, the little girl, who could not have been older than five and probably weighed all of fifty pounds, picked a daisy and started playing He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not.
“It’s almost like they have a broadcast engine running in there.”
“They do have a broadcast engine,” I said. “That is exactly what they have.”
“Sounds like you’ve been busy,” Freeman said. He was using a short video loop. The dandelion magically reappeared in the little girl’s hand.
“I went down to Mogatopolis,” I said.
“Mogatopolis?”
“That’s the name they’re using for the Mogat home world,” I said. “The Mogats have some new kind of shield generator on their planet. They’re broadcasting the shield. If you give me a location on that building, Brocius can send out the hounds of war.”
“They still have to deal with those shields.”
“We’re shutting the shields down at the source,” I said. “Now that we have the Mogats’ address, we’re going to pay them a visit. I think you should come with us as a civilian advisor.” I knew that Freeman would never accompany us any other way.
“Why would I do that?” Freeman asked.
“Crowley should be there.” The first time I met Freeman, I was stationed in an armory on a backwater planet called Gobi. Freeman, who made his living as a mercenary, had come to investigate a report that Amos Crowley, a former U.A. Army general who had converted to Mogatism and defected, was on that planet. Crowley attacked the armory and almost took us with it.
“What’s Crowley worth these days?” Freeman asked.
“I’m guessing two or three million.”
On the screen, the little girl blew her dandelion fluff.
CHAPTER
FORTY-TWO
Word came around the camp to look smart; Admiral Brocius had come to Fort Houston to review the troops.
It was our second week on the base. A captain and three lieutenants woke my platoon and three others at 0500. We dressed and fell in for an early-morning hike that would last sixteen hours and end with a bivouac. We ate MREs in the field and drank only the water we brought with us as we hiked in the 110-degree weather.
None of this would have mattered had we worn our climate-controlled armor, but we hiked in fatigues. My men were more acclimatized to the chilled air on the U.A.N. Obama than the heat in Texas. They suffered the entire way.
Philips, who had no trouble staying ahead of the rest of the platoon, bellyached more than the rest of my men combined. He must have asked “Where the hell are we going?” five times an hour as we tromped through plains and over foothills. In the midafternoon we entered a marsh. Philips grimaced as his feet sank in the mud, and he asked, “What is the point of running through this shit?”
In the marshland we ran through ankle-deep mud, crushing reeds and scaring ducks as we went. That lasted for three hours. At 1500, the officers steered us to a makeshift firing range they had constructed in the middle of the swamp. They sat in the backs of their Jeeps and ate MREs as we fired M27s and other small weapons.
Of the 168 Marines on the hike, I scored highest on the range with a perfect score—three hundred shots fired, three hundred hits scored on targets three hundred yards away. In Marine jargon, I had just pulled off a “three-by-three.”
I took more than a little pleasure when I noted that Private Philips came in second with a score of 283. No one else scored over 250.
We spent two hours on the firing range, then continued our hike. Mud sucked at our boots. The air smelled of sulfur and decay. Clouds of mosquitoes formed around us. The hot sun glistened on the water and shone in our eyes. The air was hot and wet and thick as perspiration. The crickets and cicadas buzzed so loud it nearly drove some men insane.
When we finally reached the far side of the swamp, we were met by two trucks. The captain over the exercise climbed into the back of a truck and dumped out our gear. “We’re here for the night,” he said. “You might as well set up your bivouac.” As he grabbed a pack, Philips mentioned something about using their Jeep as a latrine once the officers settled down for the evening. I seriously toyed with the idea of joining him.
We had tents, but whoever’d planned the hike wanted us to rough it. Instead of a plasticized tent with an elevated floor and inflatable cots, we slept in an old-fashioned canvas tent. Groundwater soaked through the floor of our tent and our blankets.
Had we been planning to invade a swamp, I would have called this bivouac an ideal proving ground; but I had never seen so much as a drop of groundwater on the Mogat home world. Unless the brass wanted to invade their planet through its plumbing, the hike made no sense.
That night, as we doused our lanterns and went to sleep, one of the lieutenants called in through the tent door. “Harris, Captain Moultry wants to see you in his tent.”
A bright full moon hung over the campgrounds. We had set up our bivouac on the edge of the swamp lands. As likely to inhale mosquitoes as oxygen with every breath, I trudged to the captain’s tent.
I knocked on the door.
“Enter,” the voice growled back.
&nb
sp; There sat Admiral Alden Brocius, looking tired and grim in the bleaching white light of a lantern. “This hike was not my idea,” he said as I stepped in.
“It certainly wasn’t my idea,” I said.
“Your base commander didn’t want me fraternizing with enlisted men,” Brocius said. “His replacement is arriving tomorrow.
“You’re welcome to come back with me and spend the night in the commandant’s quarters. They’re vacant and a lot more comfortable.”
Compared to my canvas tent in the swamp, this plasticized tent with its dry interior and hardened floor was a five-star hotel. It had climate control and folding chairs.
“Sounds nice, sir, but I would prefer to stay with my platoon,” I said.
“I had a feeling you would say that,” Brocius said. “This hike was a very bad idea. We need you rested.”
“Big plans for us?” I asked. I already knew the answer. If we didn’t launch an invasion soon, we’d be defending, not attacking.
“Briefing the day after tomorrow.” Brocius pulled a book with a black leather cover from a table by his seat. He tossed it to me. The book was unread and its cover stiff. Its pages did not flutter as it flew through the air. I caught it and looked at the cover. The title was printed in gold leaf: Man’s True Place in the Universe: The Doctrines of Morgan Atkins.
“Have you read this book?” Brocius asked.
I shook my head. “No, sir.”
“Have you ever wondered why you haven’t read this particular book?”
“It’s against regulations,” I said.
“Yeah, they don’t want to take a chance on any of you enlisted men becoming converted. I always wondered who came up with that rule,” Brocius said. He took a bottle of Scotch from the table and poured himself a glass. Then he tossed me the bottle. “You can share it with your platoon. Tell them it came compliments of Fleet Command.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said, turning the bottle in my hand so I could read the label. I did not recognize the name.
The Clone Alliance Page 27
