Below the building, a thriving sea of humanity bustled along, completely unaware of me. It was like staring into a paved and urbanized ant colony. I saw businessmen and women and soldiers in uniforms. I saw a street and cars.
Up here I was alone and ignored; but one hundred feet below me, an entire society existed. Though I barely believed what I saw, I needed to report it. Looking out at the street through the walls around me, I saw no one nearby. I crouched down behind the waist-high wall, opened the box, and took out my helmet. After one last unnecessary look around to make sure no one would see me, I lowered the helmet over my head and tried the interLink.
“Evans, are you there?”
“Sergeant, are you on?” Sutherland asked.
“Yeah,” I said, still feeling a dreamy kind of unreality. “I’m on.”
“Where are you?” Sutherland asked.
“I think I’m on the Mogat home world. I’m going to send you some visuals.” I stood up, checked again to make sure the coast was clear, then headed out the door.
“What the hell?” Sutherland asked.
“This is what their buildings look like,” I said.
“They’re made of glass?”
“Not from the outside,” I said. The street was still empty. I stepped out and turned toward the building so that Sutherland could see. From the outside, the building was opaque.
“That’s some magic trick,” Sutherland said.
“I’ll show you a better one,” I said. I went back in the building and looked over the rail. All of Mogat humanity walked below me.
I was transmitting all of this to Sutherland so that he could see exactly what I saw. More importantly, his helmet recorded the transmission. He could send the images up the chain until they landed on Admiral Brocius’s desk.
“Are you getting this?” I asked.
“Are you shitting me?” Sutherland asked. “Have you been down there?”
“No,” I said. “I just got here. Look, I need to get going before someone comes by. Do you know if Evans contacted the Kamehameha?”
“The question about how to find a SEAL? Yeah, he got through. They told him to do a little sabotage. You’re supposed to blow up a couple of buildings, then travel six hundred yards at a 110-degree angle from front and center. Do that enough times, and they claim their boy will find you.
“And by the way, they say they want their SEAL brought back to them in one piece and unharmed.”
“Do they?” I asked.
“Yeah. They also say that if you don’t bring him back in the same condition you got him in…”
“That I might as well stay here?” I interrupted.
“No, that you will wish you never made it off Ravenwood alive.”
Ravenwood Outpost was a testing ground for SEALs. The Outer Scutum-Crux Fleet Command sent Marines to defend a small outpost on that planet. Then they sent SEALs to infiltrate the outpost and kill the men guarding it. I was the only Marine who’d ever made it out alive.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The first time I entered the building, I did not notice that the rear wall was opaque. As I removed my helmet, I saw it. After stowing my helmet back in the box, I went for a closer look and quickly realized that this great hollow shell of a building was little more than an elevator station. The entire back wall of the building was taken up by a bank of thirty-six lifts.
I did not like stepping into an enemy elevator. As the door shut behind me, I remembered the days I spent locked in the brig of a Mogat battleship. I knew nothing would happen here. The Mogats could not know that I had landed on their planet and, as far as I could tell, nobody saw me enter the elevator; but I felt a claustrophobic shiver when the doors shut behind me.
The lift had no controls. The doors opened and closed automatically when the car dropped to the next floor. A lighted display beside the door showed that there were six more subterranean levels. Thinking about the sheer size of the place as I stepped off the elevator, I felt like I was lost at sea.
Every step I took seemed to take me farther from ever returning home, assuming I had a home. I had broadcasted into an unknown quadrant of space on a Mogat battleship, dropped miles beneath the surface of a seemingly uninhabitable planet, and descended one level deeper into that planet on an elevator.
Each new step was another move deeper into a heart of darkness. That may sound overly dramatic, but when I looked up to see the terrace from which I had viewed the city block, I saw nothing but sky. Once again I could see through everything above me as if it had not been there. All I saw was that dark and hazy sky with its phosphorous-induced simulated sunlight.
The floor to which I had just descended sprawled in every direction. The terrain was as uniform as the landscape on the floor above. Like the floor above, it had its own horizon.
This layer of the Mogat planet qualified as a city. While the sky appeared to be several miles up, I knew it was an illusion. I had just seen that stretch of street from an elevator no more than a hundred feet up from the spot where I stood. Like me, the architects who designed the buildings around this amazing place knew the limitations. Four-story and five-story buildings, grouped like trees in a forest, dominated the landscape. The only buildings that actually reached the sky were these tall narrow pillars spaced several miles apart. When I looked back at the elevator from which I had come, I realized the pillars were elevator shafts.
Now that I had stepped out in the lower level, I found it far from crowded, but busy nonetheless. A steady flow of people walked past me as I looked across the skyline and tried to find my bearings. Men, the majority of whom wore military uniforms, walked into buildings so nondescript that they would have fit in on any Marine base in the galaxy. Scanning the crowd, I saw people of every description—tall men, short men, fat men, men with blond hair and others with red hair. What I did not see was clones.
As a group of men walked past me, one stopped to give me a second glance and said something to his friends as they walked away. His pals did not give me a second glance as they continued down the street, but the first guy turned back for one more look. I decided to head in the opposite direction, turning at the next corner to disappear from view. As I passed the façade of a long, two-story building, a man in a Mogat Navy uniform stepped out. He seemed to watch me for a moment, then smiled to himself and shook his head. Perhaps he had mistaken me for a friend. Maybe I had made some mistake with my officer’s uniform. In the moment that the man seemed to think he recognized me, I thought I saw fear in his expression.
Walking alone in enemy territory made me paranoid. Atkins Believers considered clones evil. In their pantheon of wrong and right, Liberator clones were the kith and kin of Satan himself. Fortunately, after those first few encounters, no one else seemed to take notice of me.
I found a train station and entered. Apparently it did not cost money to ride the trains. I saw no booths or machines for taking money. Just inside the station, I found a large map, which I stopped to study.
The Mogats had laid their world out in sectors. In one corner of that map, I saw a diagram showing all of the sectors on the planet. It included industrial, residential, and government districts. I saw no financial sector. I was in their military sector, one of the smaller portions of the metropolis.
In the center of everything was a compound marked only as the “Morgan Atkins Society.” I had no idea what that might be, but I suspected it was religious.
So the Mogats had grouped their entire military complex into one concentrated area. From a tactical standpoint, that was idiotic. By grouping their military, they had presented the Unified Authority a perfect target. If we could reach this planet, we could neutralize their entire military complex with one shot. Maybe they knew that. Their subterranean location would protect them from an orbital attack.