“If the Mogat fleet is anywhere near Earth, the clone and the black man are as good as dead.”
“If the Mogats have their fleet somewhere near Earth, we’re all as good as dead.”
“Yeah, but they will be more dead. They’re traveling in a transport.”
“Dead is dead.”
So we were flying into trouble. I tried to turn toward them to listen in, but…
“You know the secretary that brought the coffee to our meeting this morning? I had her, too…in that very room,” Yamashiro confided in a voice both loud and proud. By this time he had downed so much Sake that his eyes seemed to roll in his head. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it. He had so much alcohol in his blood that I expected the cigarette to explode when he plugged it into his mouth.
“She was very loud,” Yamashiro boasted.
“Oh,” I said, trying to tune back in on the other officers.
“We won’t need to get too close. The clone and the black man have already traveled four billion miles in a transport…four billion miles! Can you believe that?”
“Captain Takahashi told me they were trying to commit suicide.”
“Really? I heard they were trying to restart the Broadcast Network.”
“No. They were trying to commit suicide.”
“Why didn’t they just kill themselves on Little Man?”
Across the table, Takahashi continued to interrogate Freeman. “Do you drink whiskey?” he asked.
Freeman shook his head.
“Just beer?” Takahashi asked.
“I don’t drink beer.”
“There is a beautiful girl in the officer’s mess who will let you eat sushi off her naked body. When you finish your meal, you can have her,” Yamashiro said. He closed his eyes and giggled. “She is very pretty. I have never eaten sushi so quickly in my life.”
“Kampai!” This time Yamashiro led the charge. He opened his mouth and downed another cup of Sake. All of his officers followed.
The officers became louder and more demonstrative as they drank. By the end of the night, Yamashiro was lighting his cigarettes with the butts of the cigarettes he had just finished.
Many of the other officers smoked, too. A cloud of silver-blue smoke hung just under the ceiling. I stared into that cloud and wondered about the Jekyll-and-Hyde nature of these officers. On duty, these men were quiet, precise, in control. After hours, they drank harder than any other men I knew.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The last time I visited Earth, the Earth Fleet ruled the skies and the Unified Authority ran the galaxy. Since that time, the Mogats and their allies shut down the Broadcast Network. I had no idea what to expect when Freeman and I landed in Washington, DC.
During the war, I visited a planet named New Columbia a few days after a Mogat attack. When I entered Safe Harbor, the capital city of New Columbia, I found many of the buildings intact, but the society was demolished.
In the days leading up to the attack, the government had evacuated the law-abiding citizens of Safe Harbor. That left the looters, the criminals, and the military in the city when the Mogats began their attack. They orbited the planet destroying military bases, gun emplacements, and convoys.
By the time I arrived, anarchy had taken over in Safe Harbor. Rival gangs had already carved the city into territories. The only way to reintroduce civilization back into Safe Harbor would have been to fumigate the place and start from scratch.
“Think it will be like Safe Harbor?” I asked Freeman, as we carried our equipment into the transport. Freeman had been there. He’d changed the political landscape by shooting the guy whose gang controlled the Marine base. With his size and strength, Ray Freeman could tear most men limb from limb, but he was even more dangerous with a sniper rifle.
“If it is,” Freeman said as he checked out the sight on his rifle, “this will be a short trip.”
In his rucksack, Freeman carried a sniper rifle, two M27s with one rifle stock, a particle-beam pistol, one dozen grenades, and extra ammunition. The bag weighed forty or fifty pounds and he carried it as easily as a sack lunch. He had already strapped a combat knife to his leg. The knife had a ten-inch blade. He was a human fortress.
I’d brought an M27 and three extra clips. Ray thought like a mercenary, a lone gunman who sometimes found himself waging war against an entire army. I thought like a Marine. I preferred to travel light.
Because we had no idea what we would find on Earth or in the space that surrounded it, Yamashiro and his officers took special precautions. The broadcast generator on the S.N.N. Sakura needed eight minutes to generate enough electricity to power up its broadcast engine. That meant that from the time the Sakura arrived in Earth space to the time it could broadcast out, there would be eight minutes in which enemy ships could attack. If we accidentally broadcasted into the middle of the Mogat fleet, or if the Unified Authority somehow resurrected its Earth Fleet, the Sakura would need to scramble for safety. Unaccompanied battleships made easy targets when things went wrong.
The door to the launch bay opened and in walked Takahashi, Yoshi Yamashiro’s son-in-law, along with a junior officer. He came to salute us and see us off the ship.
Takahashi was a captain in the Shin Nippon Navy, but he did not command the Sakura. According to Yamashiro, he made a better administrator than commander. Yamashiro did not come to see us off. I wondered if he was embarrassed about the night before.
“We will broadcast in on the dark side of Earth,” Takahashi said. The “dark side” was a navigational term referring to the side of Earth facing away from Mars. Historically, almost every ship heading into Earth had to come through the Broadcast Network, which orbited Mars. Now that the Mars discs were down, all of Earth was technically “dark.”
“How far out are we broadcasting?” Freeman asked.
“Thirty million miles,” Takahashi said. “We’ll fly you within three million miles. You’ll have an hour before you have to launch.”
Not even the most sophisticated tracking equipment could pick up a ship from beyond thirty million miles. Tracking “anomalies” was a different story. An anomaly was the electrical field that ships generated when they broadcasted into space. Even the most basic equipment could detect an electronic disturbance such as an anomaly from a few million miles away.
On the off chance that the Mogats did have a fleet somewhere in the vicinity, the Sakura would broadcast well out of range. Traveling at a top speed of just under thirty million miles per hour, it would take us an hour to reach Earth, but that also meant that the broadcast engine could recharge. The Sakura would be able to broadcast to safety the moment our transport left the ship.
“Prepare for broadcast. Prepare for broadcast,” a voice warned over loudspeakers. The message echoed across the launch bay.
Tint shields formed over portholes and windows. All of the atmospheric locks in the launch bay sealed. If you happened to glance at the “lightning” that coated ships during a broadcast, you would be blinded for life. With the tint shields up and the landing doors closed, you could not see the electricity. The broadcast itself happened in a split instant. We disappeared from the outer region of the Scutum-Crux Arm in a flash of lightning and appeared thirty million miles from Earth in that same instant.
A moment later the broadcast warning ended and the atmospheric locks opened. I knew we were back in the Sol System of the Orion Arm.
“Earth won’t be like New Columbia,” Freeman said as he headed up the ladder toward the cockpit. “They evacuated Safe Harbor before the Mogats attacked. The only people left on the planet were the criminals.”
“They left the Army and Marines,” I said, following him up the ladder.