The errand was not dangerous. All I was doing was broadcasting out to the middle of nowhere to take some radar readings and locate the Grant. I would not broadcast anywhere near its course, and unless they were looking for a broadcast signature, they would not detect me. If they did detect me, I would broadcast out before they reached me. If they reached me, they still wanted my ship intact. They could not risk shooting at me.
Ray came into the cockpit. Marianne loaded some food in the Starliner’s galley as I prepared to take off. The last people on the Starliner were Archie and Caleb, Marianne’s son. Over the last few days, Caleb had become my shadow, my helper, and my unofficial second-in-command. The boy was twelve years old, far too tall for his age, and headed toward another growth spurt. He liked to ask questions and watch his surroundings with great curiosity.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Marianne asked.
“I’m going along for the ride,” he said.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Marianne said.
“That’s what I told him,” Archie said.
“He’s with me,” I said.
She stared at me as if making sure I was serious. Caleb grinned like a child and squeezed around her as he made his way toward the cockpit. Marianne gave me a nasty look and climbed out of the Starliner.
“Go sit back there,” Ray said, pointing back to the cabin. Caleb and Archie sat on the same row. Caleb sat by the wall and stared out the window. Archie sat by the aisle and watched Ray and me.
“He’s adopting you,” Ray said. “You know that, don’t you?”
Taking a break from my instruments, I looked back at Caleb. I could only see the back of his head. I imagined that he was smiling, excited to fly into space.
“I don’t know much about families,” I said. “Is that what they call it?” I flipped a switch and brought the controls on line. I would take off in another minute.
“When a fatherless boy starts following you around, he’s looking for more than a friend,” Ray said. He glanced at Marianne, who was standing in the door of the meetinghouse. “She and Caleb are alone. Unless you want to live here on Little Man, you’d better let Marianne know you’re not here to stay.”
“You lost me,” I said. “Let’s square things with the Grant, then we can talk family.”
So Ray sat cramped in his seat and watched me. I stole a peek at Caleb. Had he pressed his face into the window any harder, he might have broken the glass. Seeing the boy made me laugh.
“Harris,” Freeman said, “this colony is a different world from your old clone farm. Nothing goes to waste here.”
“Meaning?” I asked.
“Marianne is looking for a husband,” Freeman said. “Her boy needs a father and you’re available.”
“I’m a clone,” I said.
“You see any other options?” Ray asked.
Stewing over Freeman’s warning, I looked back at Caleb. Archie was glaring at him, but he looked out the window and pretended not to notice. So now Ray wanted to play the role of the protective brother.
I did not want to settle down on a cozy little planet with a family. It might have been my military upbringing or the neural program that made Liberators what they were, but I could not imagine life on a farm.
“She could come with us,” I said, thinking I had found a workable alternative. “We could take them to Earth or to …some other planet.”
Freeman shook his head. “She doesn’t want to get out. She wants to bring you in.”
“Ray, the boy is just coming along for the ride,” I said.
“Just know what you’re getting into,” Freeman said. “Marianne isn’t just scrub you met on the beach.” Having delivered his warning, he left the cockpit and climbed out of the ship. His job was to scout the area around the farm. We needed to know where the Grant would send its landing party and how we could defend ourselves.
“You want to sit up here?” I asked Caleb.
His smile brightened and he trotted into the cockpit. He sat in the copilot’s seat.
Archie stood hunched in the door of the cockpit. Caleb and he watched every move I made as I pressed buttons and flipped switches. “What is that for?” “How about that one?” Caleb asked questions like a six-year-old, but he stored up the details like an adult. Archie watched in silence.
When I powered up the broadcast computer, Caleb’s face lit up. “What is that?” he asked.
“This,” I said, “is the reason we can still travel when the rest of the galaxy is stuck in one place. This is a broadcast computer. It lets us go places without having to fly there.”
“Without having to fly?” he asked.
“I tell this computer where I want to go and it puts us right there.”
“That’s the part that scares me,” Archie said.
I was afraid Caleb would ask for details, but he didn’t. Instead, he hovered over the computer and pieced together how it worked. “How do you tell it where to go?”
I showed him how to translate interactive maps into coordinates. “Going to a planet is easy. The computer has coordinates for every star and planet in the galaxy.” I thought I would impress the boy. I mostly ignored Archie. “The hard part is if you want to fly to a pinpoint location, like a certain spot right above a planet. You don’t always aim at something big like a planet. Sometimes you have to fine tune it.”
“Like into deep space?” Caleb asked. “Like where we are now?”
“There used to be a space station called the Golan Dry Docks,” I said. “It was top secret. If you wanted to broadcast yourself there, you needed to put in the coordinates yourself.”
And then I remembered a story that I thought he would find interesting. “You heard there was a war, right? That was the reason your uncle and I came to Delphi.”
“A war against Earth?” Caleb asked.
“Yes, and Earth had this giant ship called the Doctrinaire . It was bigger and stronger than any other ship in the galaxy,” I said. “It was so strong that it could destroy whole fleets of enemy ships. And it had special shields so no other ship could hurt it.”
“So Earth used it to win the war,” Caleb said, his eyes wide with excitement.
“No, Earth lost. The people attacking Earth destroyed that ship with a single shot,” I said. “And they did it with a computer like this.”
We spent two hours on this trip. Caleb and I spent the entire time talking. We could have returned the moment we finished taking the radar readings. Instead, I showed Caleb how the Starliner worked. This fine young man, this kid whose company I so enjoyed, I told him stories from the war. Freeman might have said that I adopted the boy back.
“How can you destroy a ship with a computer?” Archie asked.
“The shields of the Doctrinaire were so strong that nothing could get through them, right? And its cannons were so powerful that it could pick off any ship that came within range. But the captain of the Doctrinaire kept the ship in one place while the smaller ships in his fleet chased the enemy.”
“Why did he do that?” Caleb asked.
“He was smart. Big ships are not maneuverable. They get into trouble when they move out of position. So Thurston, he used the Doctrinaire like a floating fortress. He wanted to trap the enemy with the Doctrinaire on one side and his cruisers and battleships on the other.
“You never saw anything like it. It looked like the Doctrinaire was falling …falling asleep. The ship slid out of formation.” I held my right hand flat to imitate the ship, then let it list the way that the Doctrinaire had done.
“And all of a sudden it just blows up. See, the Mogats, they knew Thurston liked to leave his ship in one place.”
“You’re not saying that they broadcasted another ship into it?” Archie asked. “They killed themselves?”