by Kent, Steven
I went to the guardhouse and told the officer in charge whom I wanted to see. He had two of his men take me to the interrogation room, where I waited for fifteen minutes before there was a knock on the door.
“Enter,” I said.
The guards led Admiral Thorne into the room, and I dismissed them. Thorne and I would be alone for this private conversation; not even Warshaw would listen in on this one.
Thorne came in, looking solemn and dignified. His time in the relocation camp had not treated him kindly. He had lost weight. His posture seemed stiff, which actually added to his air of dignity. I expected him to call me Captain Harris, but he surprised me.
“Good morning, General,” he said as he entered, and he gave me a smart salute.
I returned the salute.
“So, what brings the commandant of the Scutum-Crux Marines to Bliss on the Plateau?” he asked.
“Bliss on the Plateau? Is that what they’re calling it?”
“That’s what the inmates are calling it.”
“I have a few questions,” I said. I motioned to the table, and we took our seats.
“Questions for me? I’m not sure what I can tell you, General. I am well aware of the war. Admiral George and Senior Chief Fahey aren’t keeping confidences. I suppose you know that.”
I nodded. “I’m beginning to figure that out.” I could feel the tension building already. “How about you, Admiral? Do you keep confidences?”
“I am at this moment,” Thorne said. “I have not told anyone but you about the harnesses I found on the carriers.”
The harnesses—I had almost forgotten about them. Someone had booby-trapped the fighter carriers in the fleet to prevent them from leaving the space around Terraneau. Even if broadcast engines were installed on the carriers, we could not use them. The harnesses were designed to detect the electrical buildup needed to power a broadcast. They would make the engines explode. Admiral Thorne had showed me the harness on the Kamehameha the day I arrived.
I still had not told Warshaw about the harnesses. There was no need to mention them until we figured out how to install the broadcast engines on smaller ships.
“We need to talk about those,” I said.
Showing me those harnesses had been an act of sedition on Thorne’s part. As I considered it, he had indeed shown that his loyalty was to the fleet and not the Unified Authority. Someone was feeding information back to Earth, but I did not think it was Thorne.
“I was assassinated last night,” I said. “Admiral Brocius sent me a message by way of a sniper and a round of simunition.”
Thorne laughed. “Let you know that you were not untouchable, did he?”
“How did he do that?” I asked.
“Are you asking how he landed a sniper on Terraneau?” Thorne asked, leaning back in his chair, his fingers forming a church and steeple. “It sounds as if someone ran your blockade.”
“He shouldn’t have been able to get through,” I said. “We have a fleet surrounding this planet.”
“Blockades are for stopping fleets and convoys, General. Your ships weren’t looking for a five- or ten-man spacecraft. If he came in a Johnston or Cessna, he might even slip past your ships.”
“Without us spotting him on radar?”
“He would need to find a significant hole in your coverage,” Thorne said. “Blocking off an entire planet isn’t as easy as guarding a prison camp, not even with a fleet as big as yours.”
“I figured that much out,” I said. In truth, I had flown small craft through a few nets during the Mogat War. Using a small self-broadcasting ship, I had broadcasted in millions of miles away from well-guarded destinations so that no one would detect the anomaly from my ship, then flown in under the radar. I was not running active blockades, though, just entering guarded areas.
“How did the assassin know where to find me?” I asked. “The guy knew when and where I was.”
Ray Freeman was a dangerous and resourceful man, more resourceful than any man I had ever known, but even he had his limits. He could not read minds or predict the future.
“Good question,” Thorne agreed. He continued leaning back in his chair, flexing his fingers, the stiff expression on his face a mask hiding his emotion. I could not tell if he hated me or liked me, not that it mattered.
“You know you have a significant breach in your command structure. You do know that, don’t you?” Thorne asked. “I knew you were coming to Bliss on the Plateau five days ago, Senior Chief Fahey told me.”
“Fahey?” I asked. “How the speck does he know so much?” I could feel my frustration mounting.
“Sometimes you surprise me, Harris. He knows because he has friends on the Washington who keep him briefed.”
I hit my boiling point. “Briefed? What do you mean ‘briefed’? Are you telling me I have officers in my fleet who just ring him up and tell him our plans?” I knew the answer even as I asked. I let Hollingsworth take Fahey to the brig instead of Thomer. Hollingsworth was loyal to me, but he’d had sex with Fahey. He might well do small favors for Fahey if he thought they were harmless. He might, for instance, have let Fahey’s friends know he’d been sent to Outer Bliss.
“Everything points back to Fahey,” I said. He was the one who had set up the blockade around Terraneau. He might have built blind spots into it. He could even have sent that information back to Admiral Brocius. When natural-borns transferred back to Earth, they transferred out through the Washington—Fahey’s ship. He could have sent messages with them or anyone else on the transports. Hell, he had plenty of opportunity to ride out to the U.A. ships himself.
“So was Fahey working for you?” I asked. “Was he your spy?”
“My spy? General, why would I spy on the fleet? I wanted to stay out here,” Thorne said.
“But you promoted him to senior chief right before the transfers started. If he’s been playing Mata Hari with my officers, you were the one who placed him where he could catch the right information.”
“It wasn’t me. That promotion came straight from Navy Headquarters . . . in the Pentagon. General Harris, I think you have your leak.”
“Obviously,” I said.
“No, hear me out. The guards practically let Fahey run this place. Half the men guarding this camp are sailors from the Washington, and they let him call his friends all the time. What if he used a predetermined frequency? What if he wanted you to put him here so he could get information out?”
I rolled that question around in my mind. If half the guards in the camp were from the Washington, Fahey might have picked them himself. The two guards who came in with Fahey were probably from the Washington. I got the feeling that Fahey and those men may have been joined at the hip a time or two.
I pounded my fist into the table. “Damn it!” I yelled. Fahey had outmaneuvered me again and again. He’d floated enough information for Ray Freeman, possibly the most dangerous man in the galaxy, to take a shot at me. “Damn it,” I repeated more quietly.
“The Navy doesn’t operate like the Marines. You’re dealing with sailors now, and you can’t make them act like Marines. Their world is a lot more sophisticated, and the parts don’t fit together as neatly,” Thorne said.
“Yeah, well, Gary Warshaw sure as hell agrees with you. He says I’m not fit to command a fleet.”
“He’s one to talk,” Thorne said. “He’s the other half of your problems.”
“What do you think of Lilburn Franks?” I asked.
“He’d be a good choice for a second-in-command. At least he knows his way around a bridge, but he’s a bit too aggressive. He understands naval strategy, but he hasn’t seen what happens when things go wrong.”
“Any other recommendations?” I asked. Thorne knew the SC Fleet better than any man alive.
Thorne sat up and went through the litany of NCOs I had available to me. I watched him closely as he spoke. The man looked old, but life still coursed through his veins. He didn’t know it, but he was auditioning.
Watching him speak, I decided that he still had a few good years in him. I could see it in his face.
“How about you? You still want to stay with the fleet?” I asked.
He looked me right in the eye and, giving me his best poker face, he slowly said, “Yes, you know I do.”
“Why?” I asked.
I . . “I .” told you, I’ve spent more than half my life out here. I.. “
“Do you have a wife on Terraneau?” I asked.
“Not a wife, I never married her. Earth-born officers are supposed to wait for Earth-born wives. If it got back to Washington, it would have hurt my career.”
“Children?” I asked.
“Three of them.” He spoke evenly, slowly, a man trying to hide his excitement. He might have been in bed with the Unified Authority, or he might have been telling me the truth.
“And nobody ever knew about them?” I asked.
“Having illegitimate children is considered conduct unbecoming in certain circles. If word got back to Washington about the children, it would have ended my career.”
“And that is why you want to stay in Scutum-Crux?” I asked. It explained a lot more than that. It explained why he’d continued flying around Terraneau, trying to break through the ion curtain for the last four years. It also explained his mystery visit to the planet the day the curtain went down.
“Why do you want to fight against the Unified Authority?” I asked.
Thorne leaned across the table, and said, “Why would I pick you over Earth? Why would I pick a bunch of clones over the Unified Authority?
“General Harris, I have been out here for more than half of my life. Those ships in your fleet, they are my home. Those men in your fleet, I’ve been flying with some of those men for thirty years now.
“I don’t know what Alden Brocius has up his sleeve, but it’s going to be powerful. Those ships I lived on and those men I served with, they’re all going to die if I can’t help them.”
I took Thorne with me when I returned to the fleet.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Thorne and I spent the short flight back to the Kamehameha in the kettle of the transport, discussing command structures and politics. We talked about possible scenarios and whom we could count on if Warshaw fought us for control of the fleet. As a Marine dealing with sailors, I would have few allies. As a natural-born and a relic of the old U.A. power structure, Thorne would have even fewer.
Leaving the atmosphere, the transport struggled for just a moment. Thorne looked around the dark cabin nervously. “I hate these things.”
“It’s nothing. You get a rattle whenever you leave the atmosphere,” I said.
“Doesn’t the shaking bother you?”
“You get used to it,” I said. “I spent six weeks in a bird like this once.”
“This is a short-range transport,” Thorne said. He did not say anything more, but he did not need to. The lull in the conversation signaled his skepticism.
“They’re supposed to have a range of two hundred thousand miles. I know all about it,” I said. “We took ours closer to four billion miles.”
“That would be suicidal,” Thorne said.
“That’s one way to look at it,” I admitted.
There were two of us on that flight, Ray Freeman and I. We were escaping a Baptist farming colony, and the transport was the only way off the planet. We did what we had to do.
“General Harris, we’re approaching the Kamehameha,” the pilot called over the intercom. Three minutes later, we had touched down, and the doors at the rear of the kettle slid open.
Thorne and I exited the transport and headed up to Fleet Command without saying a word to anyone we passed.
Somebody must have alerted Warshaw as soon as we stepped off our transport. He and three of his lieutenants met us as we came off the lift.
“General Harris,” he said, putting on a reasonable pretense of surprise.
“Admiral,” I said.
He looked over at Admiral Thorne, and said, “Admiral Thorne, up for a visit?” Suspicion jingled in his voice.
This was not a discussion I planned to hold in a busy corridor, so I said, “Perhaps you and Admiral Franks could join us for a meeting in the conference room; we have a lot to discuss.”
Maybe Warshaw had already put two and two together, or maybe he read my intentions by the stiff tone of my voice. Sounding more businesslike than usual, he told one of his lieutenants to send for Franks, then he turned and led the way to a conference room. We barely had time to find our seats before Franks joined us.
The cease-fire between me and Warshaw ended as soon as the meeting began. “What is it now, Harris?” he asked.
“I was shot last night,” I said, opening my rucksack and pulling out the blouse. The blood was still tacky. The other men in the room all stared at it. They were mesmerized.
“Sweet shit,” Warshaw said. He reached out and touched the stain, then looked at his fingers. The fake blood stained his fingertips.
I told them about Freeman and what he said.
“What does it mean?” asked Warshaw, temporarily forgetting about Admiral Thorne.
“It means a lot of things,” I said. “It means at least one ship was able to run our blockade. It means we have a leak. Perry Fahey has been spying for the U.A. all along.”
“You’re sure it was Fahey?” Franks asked.
“Of course it was Fahey. That son of a bitch,” Warshaw said.
After I rehearsed the evidence—Fahey setting up the blockade, the officers transferring back to Earth through the Washington, the way Fahey kept up with our movements from Outer Bliss—Franks seemed convinced as well.
“The assassin said they’re coming for us? Did he say when?” asked Franks.
“Tomorrow, next week, your guess is as good as mine,” I said. I did not regret waiting until I got back to the fleet to report the whole thing. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that Admiral Brocius would not move until he had an overwhelming force. We might still have a year to prepare.
No one asked for my interpretation of the comment about us breaking the rules. We all knew what it meant. I looked back at Thorne one last time to renew my confidence, then I said, “We’re going to need an experienced officer at the helm.”
“Good God, not that again,” Warshaw moaned, rolling his eyes, his face so red he looked like he’d been boiled. As he often did when angered, he flexed his muscles and stared at me. His eyes bored into mine. The muscles in his neck, shoulders, and arms bulged. He squeezed his fists and relaxed his hands, squeezed and relaxed, pumping blood into his spade-shaped forearms.
How many officers had he silently intimidated with that little trick? How many rivals had he scared off? The big muscles might intimidate other sailors, but to me he looked like a mouse roughing its fur so it can look as big as a rat.
“What are you saying? I have been in the Navy for twenty-five years, you don’t call that experience?” Warshaw practically whispered the question, the calm in his voice as precarious as a dagger wrapped in a silk scarf.
“You have no experience commanding a ship,” I said.
“The hell with that,” Warshaw said. “If you want to step down, Harris, go ahead. That’s your choice. I earned my commission.”
“I’m not asking you to resign your commission,” I said, trying to sound reasonable.
Warshaw shook his head. He looked angry enough to launch himself at me. He looked crazed. “I run the ships! I run the specking fleet! You hear me, Harris? I am the goddamned commander of the Scutum-specking-Crux Fleet!”
“Harris, we’ve already been through this. Admiral Brocius put Warshaw in charge,” Franks said. He might not have sounded so reasonable had he not gotten falling-down-drunk the night I recommended that he take over the fleet.
“I don’t want to run the specking fleet, Franks. I want Admiral Thorne to run it,” I said.
“Admiral Thorne?” Franks asked. “Why in God�
�s name do you want a natural-born to run the Enlisted Man’s Fleet? Why would you even trust him?”
I never got to state my case, however. That was when the Klaxons sounded.
CHAPTER FIFTY
“We’ve detected two anomalies.” The voice on the intercom belonged to Hank Bishop, captain of the Kamehameha. He was a good officer, a veteran sailor, but he sounded nervous.
“Have you identified the ships?” asked Admiral Thorne. We could not identify specific ships by their anomalies, but we could identify the class of the ships.
Bishop did not answer.
Warshaw glared at Thorne.
Franks jumped to his feet and bolted out the door. Having spent his career on the bridge of a capital ship, he had no trouble putting politics and power struggles out of his mind in an emergency. There was a call to quarters, and he needed to be at the helm.
I got on the intercom and raised Thomer. “This is not a drill,” I said. “Contact every ship; I want every last Marine suited up and ready to fight.”
“Aye, aye,” he said, then he followed up with an unexpected question, “Did you know this was coming?”
I did not have time to think about it at that moment. “Good question,” I said. He and I could debate what I should have expected and what I could not have known over drinks once the alert was over. “Get a move on it, Sergeant,” I said, temporarily forgetting Thomer’s rank.
He responded, “Yes, sir,” and signed off.
By the time Thorne and I left for the bridge, Warshaw and Franks were already there. The wail of the Klaxons thundered through the ship with its earsplitting decibels.
“When was the last time this fleet was in a battle?” I asked Thorne, as we boarded the lift from Fleet Command down to the bridge.
“We took on a couple of ships orbiting Little Man,” Thorne said.
“Little Man,” I repeated. I had been there for that fight. Was that six years ago? Seven? I could not remember.
It had not occurred to me before, but having spent his career in the outermost arm of the galaxy, Thorne did not exactly fit the bill of a battle-tested veteran. He was a graduate of the Naval Academy, but that graduation had happened nearly forty uneventful years ago.
