As we left the ship, I began counting ships. Once more showing their military incompetence, they had allowed their navy to park in disarray. One battleship was so hemmed in by the smaller ships around it that I doubted its crew could fire its engines without blasting two destroyers behind it. I saw clusters of ships in every direction, all with bulbous bows and charcoal-colored hulls. The stars were thick in this part of the galaxy, and the silhouettes of the ships stood out like crows flying through a clear noon sky. I did not have time to make a full count; but from what I saw, it seemed entirely possible that the Mogats had their entire four-hundred-ship armada circling the planet.
I spotted dozens of ships by checking for shadow shapes against the stars. There were ships floating beneath us. I saw them very clearly against the murky atmosphere of the planet.
I thought about that battle on Hubble. The Mogats had dug in long before the Unified Authority arrived with its overwhelming force. We sent a hundred thousand Marines down for that invasion. We had tanks and Harriers and gunships, and they had snake shafts—hidden trenches that were twenty feet deep and even farther across. No one knew what snake shafts were used for, but we found out on Hubble. The shafts gathered corrosive gas. Once our forces were in the middle of their trap, the Mogats blew the tops off their snake shafts. Marines and equipment fell in alike. Those shafts became shallow graves.
It took only three minutes to reach the atmosphere of the planet. We entered into the atmosphere at a sharp angle, then leveled out a few miles up. Beneath us, stretched out like an ancient leather scroll, the Mogat planet looked devoid of life. The surface was dark. I saw no sign of water, just a black-and-brown landscape with ash for dirt and obsidian mountains. The rockets on the Starliner ignited small explosions in the oily air outside. I saw no clouds or light in the sky, just a smoggy haze as thick as smoke and even less breathable.
So this is their “promised land,” I thought. By serving their false god they had condemned themselves to this.
We flew across that dead planet for three hours. According to the 2508 census, over 200 million people identified themselves as members of the Morgan Atkins Movement—a sizable population. You might be able to hide 200 million people on a settled planet like Earth, but not a planet like this. They would have needed an enormous environmental dome of some sort.
The Starliner had a top atmospheric speed of Mach 3, which meant we had probably covered nine thousand miles when the plane slowed and began its descent. Searching the horizon ahead, I saw more plains and yet another obsidian mountain range. There was nothing else to see. I expected a giant dome or the glow of lights against the horizon. Nothing.
We were no more than a few hundred yards above the mountain peaks when I finally spotted our target. Instead of a dome, we flew to an isolated mountain. We dropped lower and lower as we crossed the plains that separated the peak from the others. Craning my neck so that I could see ahead, I spotted a row of blinking lights marking some sort of tunnel. A moment later we entered.
Someone had cut a doorway into the face of the mountain. The opening was so large you could fit a navy cruiser through it. I saw the rows of synchronized lights that winked on and off along each of the walls. Looking out one side of the Starliner, then the other, I estimated that this entrance was half a mile wide and at least a quarter mile in height.
I felt a slight tremor as the pilot killed the Starliner’s engines. We had not yet landed. In fact, staring down as far as I could, I saw no sign of a landing area. I did see an occasional flash of light, and I saw other ships rising straight out of the darkness. They just seemed to levitate straight into the air.
Having extensive experience flying a Starliner, I had a working knowledge about the thruster rockets Starliners used for vertical lifts. They were made for use in zero-and low-gravity situations. They were far too weak to hold the ship in place for an extended period. Starting to panic, I listened for the thrusters and did not hear them. I would have noticed if the pilot had landed the ship. Looking out the window, I saw that something was conveying us downward slowly, but I did not know what.
“Still not used to the gravity chute, Lieutenant?”
When I turned around, I saw the pilot staring down at me. I shook my head.
“I don’t think I will ever get used to it,” the pilot confessed. “It still scares me.” He patted me on the shoulder and walked away.
A “gravity chute”? I had never heard the term before and had no idea how such a thing could work. All I knew was that we were dropping miles below the surface of the planet, and here the pilot stood gabbing with me instead of sitting by the controls. Something else occurred to me, too. Had I been in a better temper, I might have joked that my chance of survival had just gone down the chute.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
When Morgan Atkins, the majority leader of the Senate, hijacked the self-broadcasting fleet and vanished, he must have already had thousands of followers. He had hundreds of millions of followers when the war broke out. But nothing explained what I saw when we reached the bottom of the gravity chute.
The man-made subterranean plateau on which his people lived stretched farther than I could see. To have said it was sparsely populated would have been an act of criminal understatement. The ground below us was an endless plain with an occasional building. But the main feature here was not the occasional building, it was the endless plain. Had I viewed the cavern from space, I might have been able to see all the way across it; then again, it might have stretched beyond the curvature of the planet. Below us, streets as straight as rulers formed a perfect grid. The only buildings I saw were stubby cubes spaced two or three miles apart.
The Starliner’s engines kicked on as we dropped out of the gravity chute. I looked out the top of the window for a last glance at the chute and saw something unexpected. Instead of the rock roof of a subterranean cavern, I saw an expansive night sky. It was as if I could see straight through miles of rock and right into that polluted sky above the surface of the planet.
I wanted to stare, I wanted to gape, I wanted to ask a million questions; but I had already drawn too much attention to myself. I forced myself to look away from the window and act casual about the impossibilities outside.
Just before we landed, I saw a military transport rising straight up from the spaceport below us. That ship easily had one hundred times the mass of the streamlined Starliner, which was dagger-shaped and aerodynamic. That transport, with its bloated kettle, was anything but aerodynamic. It looked like something made to fall, not fly. It relied on powerful rockets to maneuver in gravity. It rose from the ground through the hard effort of a dozen booster rockets, then it reached the bottom of the gravity chute. The rockets switched off, and the transport rose as smoothly and effortlessly as an air bubble in water—thousands of tons of steel, rising straight up through the chute.
Unlike the transport, which had skids instead of wheels, our Starliner came to a rolling stop along the runway. The engines slowed, and we taxied forward toward a terminal. As we rolled ahead, I studied the cube-shaped buildings in the distance. If I had the distances and proportions correct in my head, those buildings stood approximately four stories tall. I saw no windows on their rose gray façades.
The Starliner pulled up to a terminal, if you could call it that. It was a ten-foot arch with people waiting under it. A moment after we came to a stop, the pilot walked into the cabin and opened the hatch. My seat was one row back from the hatch. A cool breeze blew in around me.