“You think you’re in control, don’t you, asswipe?” the Marine asked. He acted as if the entire situation struck him funny.
“That depends how badly you want my ship,” I said.
“Who says I want your ship?” He made a strange, high-pitched whinnie. “Maybe I just want to poke a few women and go home.”
This, of course, was not the way Marines talked to outsiders. Had the man not been a clone, I would have thought he was a pirate or a guerilla wearing stolen combat armor.
Marianne stood outside her tent, watching all of this anxiously. She took little stuttering steps as if she wanted to start running to Caleb then she pulled herself back. She looked at me with a pleading expression.
“This your boy?” the Marine asked, pointing his rifle at Caleb. I loved that boy, and I had no idea what this crazed Marine might do. Bringing my right hand up, I batted the rifle away from Caleb, then grasped the muzzle and thrust it backward as hard as I could. The rifle butt struck the Marine in the shoulder.
“Watch yourself,” he snarled at me.
“Yeah, you’re here for the ship,” I said with a sneer as I let go of the rifle.
Tension showed in his face. He wanted to shoot me, but he couldn’t. If he shot me, he would lose the Starliner. Thanks to Ray Freeman’s opening gambit—shooting three Marines then tossing out the pin of a grenade, no one dared accuse us of bluffing. “I could kill you,” the man’s gaunt face with its hollow cheeks and bulging eyes contorted into a snarl.
“Mad Dog,” I said, “you wouldn’t even be a warm-up.”
He raised his M27. The other Marines all raised their M27s. For a moment I had no idea what would happen. Then I heard clink, clink, clink, and a second pin dropped out of the Starliner.
“Why don’t you put me in touch with the officer in command?” I asked.
The guns did not go down. The Marine continued to stare into my face. “I’m going to pull your brains out through your ass,” he said.
“You know, you do a lot more talking than thinking,” I said. “There is at least one man on that ship holding live grenades. Unless you want to set up permanent residence on Delphi …Little Man, I suggest you lower that specking M27 and get me your commanding officer.”
Eyes still fixed on mine, the Marine lowered his rifle again. “You want to speak to the man in command? I’ll get him for you. But you won’t like him. You won’t like the general, but he might have some fun with you.”
The Marine replaced his helmet so he could use the comLink. I was glad not to see his face, it took the edge off the situation. I looked over at Caleb and told him to go to Marianne. Without saying a word, the boy ran over to his mother and they hugged. She kissed him several times on the head and looked at me.
Combat helmets drowned out sounds. They had an external speaker that let you communicate with people around you. “You want to come up to the ship?” the Marine asked using the speaker.
“Sure. I’ll just hop in the kettle of that transport you have hidden somewhere in the woods, and we’ll all fly off to the mothership like we’re best friends. Get real, Marine.”
There was a pause while the Marine relayed my message. “Okay, General Lee says that he will come down.”
I did not know the name of every general in the Marine Corps and I did not know every officer in the Scutum-Crux Fleet, but I took a gamble on this one. “General Lee?” I asked. “Would that be General Vince Lee?”
There was a pause, and then the Marine said, “The general thought you might recognize the name, Harris. He also says you’d better have a damned good reason for being here.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
The three of us, Ray, Archie, and I, met alone in the Starliner. Either Ray or I had to remain in the ship at all times. With their satellites and observation equipment, the crew of that battleship could watch us closely, and they might yet have commandoes or snipers around our camp. As long as one of us remained on the ship, grenade in hand, they could not gas, rush, or shoot us.
“We were better off before you came,” Archie yelled in his booming baritone. He stood a couple of inches taller than me, and despite his age, there was a menacing quality to his angry stare. His eyes were as dark as shotgun barrels, and when he frowned, the wrinkles formed concentric Vs on his forehead.
It was still night outside, but now no one slept. The congregation sat around a bonfire. I could see them through the window. The fire glowed bright and warm. Its sparks rose into the sky.
Archie paced back and forth in the aisle as he thought and spoke. “I should have known better than to trust professional killers. I should have known you would start a war.”
Maybe he was right. With the exceptions of Ray and myself, no one had fired a shot, but that would undoubtedly change.
“All they want is your ship,” Archie said. “I say you give it to them.”
I wanted to remind Archie that I was not a member of his congregation, but I fought back the urge. I also wanted to tell him that this wasn’t just a question of me giving up my ride to help build his clone-hating kingdom of Christ. Before I could do that, Ray told him what I should have been thinking.
“You think they’ll take the ship and leave?” Ray asked.
Archie did not answer for a moment. “There’s no reason for them to stay,” he said, watching the members of his congregation through one of the windows. “There’s no reason for them not to leave once we give them what they want.”
“How many people do you think they have up there on their carrier?” Ray asked.
Archie shook his head. “Couple hundred?”
“Have you ever seen a carrier?” Ray snorted. He turned to me. “Harris, how big is the crew on a U.A. carrier?”
“Full crew? Twenty-five hundred,” I said.
“A couple thousand,” Ray repeated. “And how many people do you think could fit on this little ship?”
“A dozen, maybe two,” Archie said.
“How long do you think it would take those Marines to fly a couple thousand men to whereever they want to go? Five months? Six months? That’s assuming the broadcast engine holds up under the strain of extended use. What if it breaks? You saw that Marine. Do you think he would be able to repair it?” Ray spoke in actual paragraphs. I was used to him speaking in single syllables and an occasional sentence.
“Some of those Marines are going to have to stay here for a long time. When half of them are gone, they won’t even have enough of a crew to man their ship. Sooner or later they are going to need to leave it. Do you think they’re going to make good neighbors? Do you think they’re planning on sharing this planet or taking it?”
“I bet they are planning to share,” I said. “Who’s going to plant the crops and grow the food? Those clones are programmed for combat, not farming.” I remembered that clone quipping, “Maybe he wanted to poke a few women,” and hoped Archie remembered it, too.
“So after six months of servitude, we would be free. Our lives for six months as slaves; that sounds like a fair trade,” Archie kept on arguing, but he sounded desperate.
“You think they’ll behave themselves for the six months?” I asked. “They’re clones. They’re the ones with the guns. You can bet that the commanding officers will be the first to go, so the enlisted men will be in control. They’re sterile, not impotent.”
“Harris means that there are going to be rapes,” Freeman said.
“Copulate, not populate,” I said in a glib tone. “It’s a Marine Corps motto.”
That got through to Archie. He heard this and froze, wringing his hands as he thought. “And you think you can get them to leave without giving up your ship?” Archie asked. “They may just decide that if they can’t have your ship, neither should anybody else. They may decide to simply kill us all.”
“They won’t,” Ray said. “They need the ship whole or they would have mowed us down last night.”