Golan did not orbit a planet. It was a free-floating space station.
“Starliner pilot, please identify yourself and prepare for security scan.”
This request did not worry me. The Golan Dry Docks were one of the most security-intensive facilities in the galaxy. Knowing that Admiral Klyber had picked me for this assignment, the head of Doctrinaire security crafted my new identity and logged my clearance and flight plans while I was still on New Columbia. He knew where I was headed before I knew, it seemed. Rather than enter the Dry Docks as Corporal Arlind Marsten or Lieutenant Wayson Harris, both of whom had damning skeletons in their closets, I now traveled as Lieutenant Commander Jeff Brocius of the U.A. Navy assigned to the Central Cygnus Fleet.
I flew a Johnston R-56 Starliner, a 20-seat luxury craft on loan to me from the Doctrinaire fleet. The R-56 was generally flown by corporate pilots. Like every other pair of wings on the Doctrinaire , this R-56 had been outfitted with its own broadcast engine.
“Please state your identity.”
“Lieutenant Commander Jeff Brocius, U.A. Navy.”
“Lieutenant Commander Brocius, copy. Are there passengers aboard your flight?”
“No, sir.”
“Thank you, Starliner.”
Traffic Control was acting unusually polite and I had a pretty good idea why. Security gave me the name Brocius because Admiral Alden Brocius, the officer-in-command of the Central Cygnus Fleet, was headed to the Golan Dry Docks for the summit. For all the men in the traffic tower knew, I was the admiral’s son or nephew.
“Starliner R-fifty-six, we are under heightened security at this time. Please switch off all onboard controls. Our traffic computers will guide your ship into port.”
“Aye,” I said.
The traffic tower took control of my ship the moment my hands left the panel. Lights turned on and off as traffic control accessed all of my instrumentation. They might discover that I had unusual equipment on board, but they would not know it was a broadcast engine unless they tracked me from millions of miles away. I had disconnected the power after broadcasting in. Without a generator pouring tera-volts into it, the broadcast engine would look like nothing more than spare parts to their security computers.
My ship slowed to a near standstill as it joined the queue waiting to enter the Phase 2 landing bays. Unlike the rest of the platform, Phase 2 of the Golan platform was totally enclosed.
Seen from this side, the Dry Docks had a sleek teardrop shape. The outer skin of the station had a pattern of shining black squares against a flat white base. As I flew closer, I realized that those black squares were enormous solar energy cells.
This side of the Dry Docks facility had three landing bays, each marked by two half-mile wide circular entrances called “apertures.” All ships entering or exiting the docks would have to pass through those doors. As traffic control led me toward one of those openings, I saw the distinctive silver-red of a security laser and knew someone in the dry docks had X-rayed my ship.
Leaning back in my seat, I took in the sights as my ship dropped into place before one of the apertures. Inside, I could see the brightly-lit landing area and the staging area that planes entered just before takeoff. Ships and transports of all shapes and sizes sat quietly at the back of the runway. Beyond that, so far away that it looked no bigger than my fist, was the half-mile-wide aperture for departing flights.
Whether by computer or human talent, traffic control brought me in for a perfect landing. Thruster rockets in the wings of my Starliner fired as I entered the quarter-gravitational field of the tarmac. My ship landed with no perceptible bounce. A runway technician towed me through the atmosphere locks and into the staging area. There would be no old-fashioned blast door on the ultra-modern Golan Dry Docks. No, sir. On Golan, the locks were completely transparent electroshields.
I grabbed my bags and climbed out of the Johnston. Two guards armed with M27s approached and saluted as I stepped on to the deck. These were Army MPs. Golan had thousands of them.
I, wearing my Charlie service uniform and looking like the quintessential officer, saluted back.
“Commander Brocius?” one of the guards asked. “May I take your bag?” It was not an offer or a courtesy. He spoke in that robotic tone that grunt soldiers use when speaking to an officer. They would search my bag and find that I had a government-issue M27 of my own. They would also see that I had combat armor, something that was not general-issue among naval officers.
“Aye,” I said, handing him my rucksack.
The guards did not scare me.
“Please follow us, sir,” said the officer with my bag. The please was as perfunctory as the request to take may bag. With this, the two guards turned on their heels so smartly that they looked like they were on spindles.
Now came the only part of this duty that did make me nervous. The soldiers led me to the security station, a well-lighted island in the otherwise dim light of this enormous spacecraft hangar. Ahead of me, several dozen soldiers milled around a booth enclosed by bulletproof glass. Some smoked. Some talked. Some manned personal computers and monitored everyone and every thing that passed.
All I had to do was walk between “the posts”—an innocuous ten-foot archway made of beige-colored plastic. Terrorists and criminals feared the posts. They made supposedly extinct clones edgy as well. The post on the left side of the archway housed a device called “the sprayer” which emitted a fine mist of oil and water and a sudden blast of air. The jam on the right was “the receiver,” a micron-filtered vacuum that drew in the air, the mist, and anything that the sprayer dislodged.
There was no disguising your identity from the posts. You could wash, shower, and shave your entire body with a micron-bladed scalpel, and the gust from the left post would still find dandruff, flecks of skin, loose hairs, lint, or sweat. A bank of computers analyzed every substance the right post drew in.
“Commander Brocius,” one of the MPs said. He motioned toward the posts. I hesitated for a moment. I looked around. A security camera watched me from overhead. All of the soldiers behind the bulletproof glass wore firearms. None of them looked old enough to know what Liberators looked like, and they paid little attention to me. As far as they could see, this was another routine entry.
I had to pass through security funnels like this one on every planet. The difference was that this was the Golan Dry Docks, a high-security facility. The computers would recognize that I was a Liberator. But the men manning the computers were no more screening for Liberators than they were screening for dinosaurs or dragons. As long as my identity cleared, my Liberator DNA would not trigger an alarm.
I stepped into the arch, my mind already focusing on what I would do once I left the security station. The Joint Chiefs had already arrived. Admiral Klyber and the other field officers would arrive in another two hours. As soon as I left this station, I would make a preliminary sweep of the corridors just beyond this security station. Then I would move to Klyber’s quarters. If I worked quickly, I would finish an hour before he arrived.
The post on my left blew out a milli-second-long burst of air. It did not last long enough to mess my hair. In its wake I felt slightly moist, as if I had jumped in and out of a steam room.