"It took us four days to get here, during which time you were in stasis—did you know about that?" Harry asked. I nodded. "And it was a couple of days before they found you on Coral. So you've been out of it more or less for two weeks."
I looked at both of them. "I'm glad to see both of you," I said. "Don't get me wrong. But why are you here? Why aren't you on the Hampton Roads?"
"The Hampton Roads was destroyed, John," Jesse said. "They hit us right as we were coming in from our skip. Our shuttle barely got out of the bay and damaged its engines on the way out. We were the only ones. We drifted for almost a day and a half before the Sparrowhawk found us. Came real close to asphyxiation."
I recalled watching as a Rraey ship slugged a cruiser on its way in; I wondered if it had been the Hampton Roads. "What happened to the Modesto?" I asked. "Do you know?"
Jesse and Harry looked at each other. "The Modesto went down, too," Harry said, finally. "John, they all went down. It was a massacre."
"They can't all have gone down," I said. "You said you were picked up by the Sparrowhawk. And they came to get me, too."
"The Sparrowhawk came later, after the first wave," Harry said. "It skipped in far away from the planet. Whatever the Rraey used to detect our ships missed it, although they caught on after the Sparrowhawk parked itself above where you went down. That was a close thing."
"How many survivors?" I asked.
"You were the only one off the Modesto," Jesse said.
"Other shuttles got away," I said.
"They were shot down," Jesse said. "The Rraey shot down everything bigger than a bread box. The only reason our shuttle survived was that our engines were already dead. They probably didn't want to waste the missile."
"How many survivors, total?" I said. "It can't just be me and your shuttle."
Jesse and Harry stood mute.
"No fucking way," I said.
"It was an ambush, John," Harry said. "Every ship that skipped in was hit almost as soon as it arrived in Coral space. We don't know how they did it, but they did it, and they followed through by mopping up every shuttle they could find. That's why the Sparrowhawk risked us all to find you—because besides us, you're the only survivor. Your shuttle is the only one that made it to the planet. They found you by following the shuttle beacon. Your pilot flipped it on before you crashed."
I remembered Fiona. And Alan. "How many were lost?" I asked.
"Sixty-two battalion-strength cruisers with full crews," Jesse said. "Ninety-five thousand people. More or less."
"I feel sick," I said.
"This was what you'd call a good, old-fashioned clusterfuck," Harry said. "There's no doubt about that at all. So that's why we're still here. There's nowhere else for us to go."
"Well, that and they keep interrogating us," Jesse said. "As if we knew anything. We were already in our shuttle when we were hit."
"They've been dying for you to recover enough to talk to," Harry said to me. "You'll be getting a visit from the CDF investigators very soon, I suspect."
"What are they like?" I asked.
"Humorless," Harry said.
"You'll forgive us if we're not in the mood for jokes, Corporal Perry," Lieutenant Colonel Newman said. "When you lose sixty ships and one hundred thousand men, it pretty much leaves you in a serious state of mind."
All I had said was "broken up," when Newman asked how I was doing. I thought a slightly wry recognition of my physical condition was not entirely out of place. I guess I was wrong.
"I'm sorry," I said. "Although I wasn't really joking. As you may know, I left a rather significant portion of my body on Coral."
"How did you get to be on Coral, anyway?" asked Major Javna, who was my other interviewer.
"I seem to remember taking the shuttle," I said, "although the last part I did on my own."
Javna glanced over to Newman, as if to say, Again with the jokes. "Corporal, in your report on the incident, you mention you gave your shuttle pilot permission to blow the Modesto shuttle bay doors."
"That's right," I said. I had filed the report the night before, shortly after my visit from Harry and Jesse.
"On whose authority did you give that command?"
"On my own," I said. "The Modesto was getting hammered with missiles. I figured that a little individual initiative at that point in time would not be such a bad thing."
"Are you aware how many shuttles were launched across the entire fleet at Coral?"
"No," I said. "Although it seems to have been very few."
"Less than a hundred, including the seven from the Modesto," Newman said.
"And do you know how many made it to the Coral surface?" Javna said.
"My understanding is that only mine made it that far," I said.
"That's right," Javna said.
"So?" I said.
"So," Newman said, "that seems to have been pretty lucky for you that you ordered the doors blown just in time to get your shuttle out just in time to make it to the surface alive."
I stared blankly at Newman. "Do you suspect me of something, sir?" I said.
"You have to admit it's an interesting string of coincidences," Javna said.
"The hell I do," I said. "I gave the order after the Modesto was hit. My pilot had the training and the presence of mind to get us to Coral and close enough to the ground that I was able to survive. And if you recall, I only barely did so—most of my body was scraped over an area the size of Rhode Island. The only lucky thing was that I was found before I died. Everything else was skill or intelligence, either mine or my pilot's. Excuse me if we were trained well, sir."
Javna and Newman glanced at each other. "We're only following every line of inquiry," Newman said mildly.
"Christ," I said. "Think about it. If I really planned to betray the CDF and survive it, chances are I'd try to do it in a manner that didn't involve removing my own fucking jaw." I figured that in my condition, I just might be able to snarl at a superior officer and get away with it.
I was right. "Let's move on," Newman said.
"By all means, let's," I said.
"You mentioned you saw a Rraey battle cruiser firing on a CDF cruiser as it skipped into Coral space."
"That's correct," I said.
"Interesting you managed to see that," Javna said.
I sighed. "Are you going to do this all through the interview?" I said. "Things will move along a lot quicker if you're not always trying to get me to admit I'm a spy."
"Corporal, the missile attack," Newman said. "Do you remember whether the missiles were launched before or after the CDF ship skipped into Coral space?"
"My guess is that they were launched just before," I said. "At least it seemed that way to me. They knew when and where that ship was going to pop out."
"How do you think that's possible?" Javna asked.
"I don't know," I said. "I didn't even know how skip drives worked until a day before the attack. Knowing what I know, it doesn't seem like there should be any way to know a ship is coming."
"What do you mean, 'knowing what you know'?" Newman said.
"Alan, another squad leader"—I didn't want to say he was a friend, because I suspected they'd think that was suspicious—"said that skip drives work by transferring a ship into another universe just like the one it left, and that both its appearance and disappearance are phenomenally unlikely. If that's the case, it doesn't seem like you should be able to know when and where a ship will appear. It just does."