“Hey, Mr. Clean, you here to work or to gawk?” a sailor shouted in my direction. “Move it, fellah. You’re stinking up the air.”
I nodded and moved out of his way. Under other circumstances, I might have broken his neck.
The observation wall was twenty feet tall and forty feet wide, like a giant movie screen that showed nothing but outer space. Today’s panorama displayed at least fifty other ships, three out-of-use dry-dock facilities, and a distant planet that I did not recognize. The planet had a uniform gray-brown surface. Whatever sun had once shone on this planet had long since expired. I had gone to war on a planet like it before. The gas on that planet would strip you to the bone if it got through your space gear.
I needed more information, and I knew I could not get it as a janitor. I wanted to explore the bridge and I especially wanted to get down to that planet. In the meantime, I would not complain about a sandwich. Between the puppet show and the ride to this ship, a lot of time had passed since my last meal.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“Evans, where are you now?” I asked.
“I’m on a Perseus Fleet frigate,” Evans said. “We’re about six million miles from the wreck.”
“And the signal is coming through?” I asked.
“We’re talking,” Evans pointed out.
“Did everyone make it back?” I asked.
“The entire platoon is present and accounted for, except you.”
“I need you to get a message to the Kamehameha. Ask them if they have any suggestions about how I might be able to locate a SEAL.”
“You mean the Special Ops guys?” Evans asked.
“One of their men is behind enemy lines,” I said.
“I thought the whole thing about the SEALs was that they never left anyone behind,” Evans said.
“It wasn’t like that,” I said. “It was more like they sent him ahead.”
Though I had the boiler room to myself, I saw no reason to push my luck. I told Evans that I would call back as soon as I could.
If the Mogats had their entire fleet around here, Illych could have been on any of those ships. If the Mogats had a base on that dead planet, I suspected I would find him in their base. He would go wherever he could do the most damage.
A month had passed since he landed on Mogat territory. Alone and cut off from his platoon, Illych might think he had no real hope of ever getting home. A guy like him would want to go out making the biggest bang he could. He might already have made his mark.
Still dressed in my janitor’s smock, I entered the officers’ laundry and stole a lieutenant’s uniform that fit reasonably well. I found a gym and showered, then visited the mess hall. The place was nearly empty, but the Mogats had a twenty-four-hour self-service counter. I slid my tray along a stainless steel counter and scooped up a helping of some sort of casserole, three slices of bread, a cube of Jell-O, and a salad.
The chow the Mogats fed their men tasted bad, really bad. They ate hard bread that crumbled to dust in my fingers. The chicken-and-cheese dish looked nice until I dug into it with my fork. Under its yellow and white surface, the entire dish was gray. The stuff that passed as meat was more likely chicken-flavored gluten. The salad might have been made out of the same stuff as the chicken. It did not contain genuine vegetables. Looking around the mess hall, I noted that the other men in the facility ate with no enthusiasm.
If I hoped to learn anything of value, I would not hear it in the mess hall. The men gossiped about various officers and little else. One sailor spoke endlessly about going down to the planet to visit his family. The more I listened to him, the more I believed that the Mogats had settled the rancid planet near which we had moored.
The bad food told me something, too. When news analysts spoke about the Morgan Atkins Believers on the mediaLink, they described them as the human equivalent of a swarm of locusts. Before the war, Mogat colonies did not mix with society at large. They sent missionaries into communities, but they generally remained in their own private districts. Whatever food and goods they produced, they sold among themselves. Now I thought I knew why. Who would buy shit like this? And where did they get it? Not from that planet.
If the Mogats really lived on the cinder ash of a planet below us, eking out enough food to feed an army would take a miracle. I ate what I could of my meal and threw the rest away, knowing its substances would be recycled and served at that same counter in some other form within the week.
Now that I was unofficially a Mogat lieutenant, I could move around the ship more easily. I entered an equipment depot and told the man at the desk to find me an empty box. He disappeared through the door and returned a few minutes later with a two-foot cube that looked just a shade too big for transporting my helmet.
“It’s bigger than I wanted,” I growled, though I was actually quite pleased. Officers never accept the first offer no matter how good.
“Better big than small,” the man said.
“Do you have any padding for this box?”
He took the box and disappeared through the door again. No more than a minute later, he handed the box back to me. Along the bottom he had spread a few inches of packing gel.
“Good enough,” I said and left.
The variety of faces on the ship left me feeling off-balance. On a Unified Authority ship, the man at the supply desk would have been a clone. Clones performed all of the menial work. They worked in crews, each clone’s neural programming struggling to convince him that he was the only natural-born sailor in the entire Navy who mopped decks or lugged cargo.
I took my box back to the service hall. After making sure no one was around, I removed my helmet from the septic cylinder and placed it in the box, pushing it deep into the packing gel. Then I sealed the box and labeled it, “HQ Urgent.”
I returned to the launch bay and found the officer directing traffic. “When is the next ride down?” I asked.
“I’ve got one leaving within the hour,” the man said.
“Do you have space for one more?” I asked.
“No problem,” he said. “Two if you want to bring a friend along.”
“Just this,” I said, holding up my box.
“Want me to pack that for you?” he asked.
“I think I’d better keep this one with me,” I said. “Thanks, though.”
The man cast a wary glance at the word “Urgent,” but knew better than to ask about it.
I expected to travel down in the absolute discomfort of a military transport. With their bare benches and steel walls, kettles had a torture-chamber charm about them.
As it turned out, the next ride was a Johnston R-56 Starliner, a commuter plane. I found a seat and watched the other passengers to see if they would have space gear.
The planet below would have a toxic atmosphere. If it was anything like Hubble, the burned-out planet on which I fought my first real battle as a Marine, the planet would have toxic oily gas instead of air. That oil dissolved flesh and soft plastics. Seven other passengers showed up for the flight down to the planet. None of them had space gear.
When the deck officer called us to board, I followed the other passengers onto the Starliner. All of them wore regular uniforms with not so much as an oxygen tube.
My box did not fit in the compartment above my seat. Fortunately, the flight was almost empty. No one complained when I placed my box on the empty seat beside my own.
I was glad to relax and ride a comfortable commuter down to the planet instead of a transport. In a windowless kettle, I could only sit and count the minutes until the heavy metal doors at the rear slid open. From my seat on the Starliner, I could start scouting the moment we left the battleship.
The launch-bay officer walked through the ship. He went to the cockpit and spoke to the pilot. Then he came back down the aisle and counted passengers. Then he left.
“Prepare for takeoff,” the pilot radioed back to us. A moment later we taxied to the front of the launch bay. The atmospheric locks closed behind us. I heard the thrusters flare and we lifted off the deck.