by Kent, Steven
“There’s no need for vulgarity, Colonel,” I said, purposely trying to make my voice like Doctorow’s when he had corrected me. We all laughed.
“ ‘Gods laughed themselves to death . . .’ You have to admit, it does sound pretty stupid,” Thomer said.
I did not say anything. Until that moment, I had always thought it sounded mystical and wise.
Doctorow changed the subject. “Thomer says you’re a Liberator clone. Is that right? He says you know you’re a clone.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“He says he knows he’s a clone, too,” Doctorow added.
“We do live in an age of miracles,” I said. “So, you were explaining to us how you became the poet of Norristown?”
“Not so much a poet, maybe a historian,” Doctorow said. “I recorded the defense of Norristown, one funeral at a time. I was like a New-Age version of Homer recalling the siege of Troy. Now you’ve come along and changed the ending of the story.” He paused, pulled out his fourth beer, and chugged it.
“How did you end up in charge?” Thomer asked.
“Most of the line officers died. Some took their own lives. That left me the highest-ranking man on base.
“When the fighting died down, the people came to Fort Sebastian looking for protection; and I . . . I gave them the best advice of all. I told them not to fight. At the time, I told them to trust in God because God would protect them.
“As it turned out, we didn’t need God to protect us. Once we stopped taking up arms, the aliens went away.”
“Maybe that was how God protected them,” Thomer said. We both stared at him. This was his night for deep thoughts.
“You’re defending God?” I asked.
“It just seems like that’s how God works,” Thomer said, sounding defensive.
“That was how I rose from a chaplain to leader. Funny, it happened so gradually that I never stopped to think about it.”
“So are you governor of Norristown or the whole planet?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Doctorow said, thinking the question over. “I’ve never been outside of Norristown. We lost contact with the rest of the planet.”
“Why did you put all those girls in that building?” Thomer asked.
“They’re orphans,” Doctorow said. “We put them there so we could keep them safe.”
“Safe from whom?” I asked.
“Just safe,” Doctorow said.
“The building I was in, was that a dorm for orphan boys? Were they just trying to keep themselves safe when they rigged the walls with explosives?” I asked. “They almost killed me.”
“They weren’t trying to hurt you, Captain Harris. They barricaded the door with a propane canister from their kitchen. It was the heaviest thing they could find. Fortunately for all of us, they were already running for the fire escape when you tossed your grenade at the door.” He chuckled. “That kind of behavior is another reason why we would prefer for you to build your base away from Norristown.”
PART III
THE RISE OF THE SCUTUM-CRUX FLEET
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Usually I rode in the cockpit, but on the ride back from Terraneau, I chose to ride in the kettle with what was left of my men. We had two transports and eighty-three men—counting pilots. The whole lot of us would have fit comfortably on one transport; divided between two birds, the gaps were conspicuous.
I sat near the rear in an especially dark corner of the cabin, sneaking glances around the kettle and browbeating myself for our losses.
“Captain Harris, do think you can find your way to the enlisted man’s bar?” Private Roark asked me. I’d noticed Roark on the way down to Terraneau, he was one of those life-of-the-party types.
I heard what he said, but it sounded like he had spoken in a foreign language. Go have a drink with the men, always a good move for morale . . . assuming they want to have a drink with you. Why would they want to drink with me? I was the man who sent them out to die.
Just a day earlier, I’d told Hollingsworth I would smuggle these men into the officers’ club. Now I wondered if he took that as a reward or a punishment.
I looked up at the kid but did not speak. This shook his confidence. He waited several seconds, then added, “We’re going to celebrate, sir.”
The Kamehameha’s two thousand enlisted Marines shared a single bar, a drinking hole I knew well. These men had fought hard, now it was my turn to make a show of strength. “Are we talking a one-shot deal, or are you boys planning to pull an all-nighter?”
“I can’t speak for anybody else, but I’m staying till I’m too drunk to find my rack,” Roark said.
“I may be late,” I said. Now that I thought about it, I liked the idea of downing a few beers with the boys, but the drinks would have to wait. My priorities might have been all wrong, but they were all mine.
Roark nodded and went back to join his friends.
I heard the sigh of the boosters and knew that we had entered the docking bay. My heart thumped in my chest. Adrenaline coursed through my veins. So did testosterone, I suppose; but the reflex I was experiencing had nothing to do with combat. The landing gear clanked and groaned as we landed, and I sprang to my feet.
“Thomer, see that the gear is unloaded,” I said, as we taxied through the locks.
“Yes, sir.”
“If anybody asks for me, tell them I will handle debriefings tomorrow.”
“Aye, aye.”
The miserable doors of the kettle ground open so slowly. I did not wait until they slid all the way apart. As soon as I could squeeze through the gap, I trotted down the ramp and out the docking bay. My men probably thought I needed to get to a bathroom.
And, in a way, I did.
Men saluted me as I rushed down the hall. I returned their salutes and hurried on. I was a Marine on a mission. I reached my quarters and opened the door to find an empty room with a neatly made bed. The door closed behind me.
“Ava,” I called in a soft voice.
Nothing.
For a moment, and just a moment, I worried that something had gone wrong. That thought passed quickly. I opened the bathroom door and switched on the light. Hearing a faint gasp, a sound so soft I could easily have missed it, I turned toward the shower.
The bedroom appeared clean and completely untouched, but the bathroom looked lived in. A bouquet of empty MRE pouches filled the wastebasket, a set of utensils lay in the sink, and a shadow moved behind the glass of my shower stall door.
“If you don’t come out of there, I’m going to have to come in,” I said.
I heard a soft giggle, and the water in the shower began to run.
“So that’s how it’s going to be,” I said. I pulled the shower door open, and there she was, dressed in a tank top and panties, allowing the warm water to splash her hair and back. She looked at my combat armor, and said, “Honey, I was hoping you would be hard, but this is ridiculous.”
We showered together, and we made love. Afterward, we lay in bed. I stroked her wet hair and kissed her. Dreading her reaction, I told her I needed to go to the bar for drinks with my men, but she just cocked an eyebrow and smiled.
“You’re not upset?” I asked.
“I will be if you come back empty-handed.”
I drank with my boys and grabbed a few beers before leaving the bar. On my way back, I stopped by the mess hall and picked up food for two. By the time I made it back to my quarters, I had a small salad, sandwiches, fruit cocktails, cheese-cake, and four beers.
Always cautious, Ava remained hidden in the bathroom when I entered. Instead of calling out to her, I spread our meal across my desk.
I called out, “I hope you’re hungry,” and out she came.
She looked at the food, then looked at me with her “this is better than sex” smile, and I knew that I had graduated from benefactor/lover to friend.
Ava and I ate together and talked. She wanted to know everything that happened on Terraneau. I told her about
Herrington first, then about the rest of my men. She squeezed my hand and stopped eating, but said nothing.
I thought that was the perfect response. If she had tried to empathize with me, she would have driven me away. I had been through something she could not possibly comprehend.
When I asked what it was like hiding out in my quarters, she said, “I talked to myself. I hid in the bathroom talking to myself, and I never ran out of things to say. It beat living with Teddy. At least I had somebody to talk to.”
“What did you talk about?”
“With Teddy?”
“When I was gone,” I said.
“I talked about you,” she said. “I talked to myself about every man I have ever been with, and I compared them to you.”
By this time we were in bed, both of us naked. I had my arms around her. She felt warm. “How did I do?”
“Uhm?” she purred.
“How did I do?” I asked.
“Now, what kind of question is that?” she asked.
“An honest one,” I said.
“Harris, I never thought of you as the insecure type.”
“I have my moments,” I said. I pulled her in even tighter than before, so that everything from our shoulders to our thighs pressed together.
“Ouch,” she cooed.
“Are you going to answer me?” I asked.
“I don’t know why I would,” she said. “If I say you are better than any of them, you won’t believe me. If I say some of them were better than you, you’ll get jealous. I think I’ll just plead the First.”
“The right to free speech?” I asked.
“The right to tell you to shut the speck up, Harris.”
“Oh,” I said. We lay there in each other’s arms. I wondered how I matched up with Ted Mooreland. When I began to feel insecure, I thought about how I compared to General Smith. As my thoughts drifted, I started to fall asleep.
“I wasn’t telling you to let me go,” Ava complained. I had not actually let her go, but I had loosened my grip around her. “What is it like down there?”
I told Ava about the building with the orphan girls. I told her how my men found it and how Doctorow had tried to protect it. When I finished, she laughed, and said, “It sounds terrible, like a monastery.”
When I did not respond, she said, “Oh God, you’re not thinking about . . .”
“You’ll be safe there,” I said.
“With the latter-day vestal virgins?” she asked. “That’s not safekeeping, Honey, that’s solitary confinement.”
“You wouldn’t need to stay there long, just until we get the planet sorted out. It can’t be any worse than hiding in the shower and talking to yourself.”
She started to say something and stopped. She shifted on the pillow until our faces were only three inches apart, then she reached up and stroked my eyebrow with a finger. “How did you get this scar over your eye?”
“Are you trying to change the subject?” I asked.
“No,” she said in a childlike, flirtatious way. “How did you get that scar?”
“I got it in a fight,” I said.
“But Marines wear helmets. Wouldn’t your helmet protect you?”
“It was a fight, not a battle.”
“Like in a bar?”
“Not in a bar, in a ring,”
“Oh?” She reached around my back, where four parallel scars ran across my ribs. “How about these scars.”
“Same fight,” I said.
“These must have hurt,” she said.
“They did,” I said.
“How many men were you fighting?”
“Just one,” I said.
“I hope you hurt him, back.”
“I did.”
“As bad as he hurt you?”
“He died.”
Silence. I made a mental note not to tell Ava about killing people right after making love.
“You’ve killed a lot of people, haven’t you, Harris?” she asked.
I did not want to talk about it. Stealing a page from her playbook, I tried to change the subject. “When you make movies, what’s it like doing a love scene?”
“It depends on the actor,” Ava said, the flirtatious tones drained from her voice. I had hit a nerve; but, on the bright side, I had successfully changed the subject.
I named a few actors and Ava told me she despised all of them. According to the gossip, she’d had off-screen romances with every last one of them.
I thought about her undressing in love scenes with actors she didn’t like. Maybe it was like killing, maybe you just got used to it. Maybe she’d just gotten used to me, too. I did not want to think about that.
As I finally started to fall asleep, a parade of ghosts invaded my thoughts. I saw Herrington, white-haired and good-humored Herrington. I thought about transports falling through the atmosphere. And I thought about ghosts from other wars, too.
I brought in a large breakfast of eggs, toast, and bacon the next morning and told Ava my plans while we ate. I would meet with Admiral Thorne in a few hours, and I hoped to tour the ship with Master Chief Warshaw; but first, I had a staff meeting.
After breakfast, I went to the conference room, where I met Thomer and Hollingsworth. We all arrived on time, then we sat and we waited, and waited. The sailors arrived at the meeting thirty minutes late.
“Where is Warshaw?” I asked, as I surveyed the table.
“He couldn’t get away,” said Senior Chief Petty Officer Lilburn Franks.
“Couldn’t get away?” I asked. “This is a staff meeting.” Under normal circumstances, I would have sent an aide to collect Warshaw. Attendance at staff meetings was never optional. “Do you know what he is doing?” I asked Franks.
He shrugged in a casual, offhand way.
I could already feel my blood pressure rising. Part of me wanted to go Machiavellian—to crush the insubordination at the start and make an example of Warshaw. I decided to take the “making friends and influencing people” route instead, against my better judgment.
“I hear you and your boys saw action. What did you come back with, about one-third of your men?” That quip came from Senior Chief Petty Officer Perry Fahey. He stared in my direction, his heavily made-up eyes locked on mine, daring me to react.
Sitting beside me, Thomer took this in but said nothing. I had the feeling he had recently dropped a load of Fallzoud. When the drug wore off, though, I thought Thomer might have a thing or two to say.
“Perhaps you see some humor in battlefield losses, Senior Chief,” I said.
“Humor?” he asked.
“Is there something funny about the deaths of 170 Marines?”
“Um, well, no.” Fahey looked up and down the table, hoping for support from the other sailors. They all looked away. Senior Chief Franks looked at his computer. The guy next to him straightened his cuffs. Another stared down into his lap.
“I lost a close friend in that action, Senior Chief, Sergeant Lewis Herrington. Do you remember Herrington? He attended our last staff meeting.”
“I remember the sergeant.”
“He died liberating Terraneau.” When I used the term “liberate,” it sent a shock through the room. Coming from someone with my background, the word carried an implicit threat. “Is there a joke I am missing here, Senior Chief? If there is, I would sure as speck love to be in on it.”
“No, sir,” Fahey said.
“Herrington died scouting for the enemy. Is that funny, asshole?”
This was Hollingsworth’s first staff meeting. He had come to fill Herrington’s seat. Hearing this verbal mugging, Hollingsworth looked nervous.
“No, sir. I am sure Sergeant Herrington was a good man,” Fahey said, but he still had a slight smile at the corners of his mouth. He should have been smiling; he had just accomplished his private mission without my suspecting a thing. He had distracted me. Gary Warshaw was now the furthest thing from my mind.
Officers in the Marines do not think like
their counterparts in the Navy. The intrigues of Fleet Command were entirely new to me.
Still trying to calm myself down, I introduced the new addition to our council. “This is Master Sergeant Philo Hollingsworth. Sergeant Hollingsworth will take over Herrington’s responsibilities.”
I got the feeling that a few of the officers knew Hollingsworth. Nobody congratulated him, however. We all sat mute.
“Let’s get started,” I said. “With Warshaw gone, that puts you on the hot seat, Senior Chief Fahey. What’s your schedule for Terraneau?”
“My staff is overseeing that project,” Senior Chief Petty Officer Jim Milton offered. “I landed a team of engineers in Norristown at 0600.
“Their preliminary reports are optimistic. After surveying the damage around Norristown, they say they can restore the power grid by the end of the week.”
“For all of Norristown?” I asked, remembering that most of the city was little more than rubble.
“The north, east, and central sectors, where most of the people live.”
“How soon can they get the juice going citywide?”
“The prospects look good, sir. The power plants were outside the city, in an area that the aliens never attacked. From what we’ve seen so far, the underground power lines are still in place, except in one area just west of town. Apparently an underground train system collapsed in that part of town.”
Hollingsworth and I exchanged glances. We knew all about that particular disaster.
“What about Fort Sebastian?” I asked.
“Same thing, sir. We’ll have it ready for your Marines in the next week.”
“Captain Harris, I heard you were going to restrict the use of that base,” said Franks, the ranking NCO on the battleship Washington.
“That is correct,” I said.
Even before I finished speaking, Franks said, “You can’t be serious about that. These men have not had shore leave for four years.”
“The locals are nervous about having us around. I don’t want to do anything to upset them.”
“It sounds to me like somebody else is calling the shots around here,” sneered Fahey.
“Colonel Doctorow said . . .” I started.
“He’s got you licking his boots does he?” With this statement, Fahey graduated from contempt to outright insubordination. Once again believing he had the other NCOs watching his back, he became downright fearless.
