“What happened to the rain?” Smith asked as he stepped out of the car.
I ignored him.
The storm might have vanished, but the air felt as humid as a wet towel. Doldrums. At least the temperature had dropped a few degrees.
Four guards held the doors open for General Smith and me to enter. They led us into a small conference room with an eight-man table, audiovisual equipment, and a screen. Smith asked me if I planned to behave myself. When I assured him I did, he told the guards to wait outside.
Now that we were in an air-conditioned office, I missed the heat. My clothes were damp from sweat and rain, and the overchilled air gave me a shiver.
I had long ago dismissed any illusions that General Smith cared for my welfare. Whatever he had up his sleeve, it would only get me far enough out of the frying pan to assure that I landed in the fire. “You served under Admiral Klyber, didn’t you?” he asked. That was all I needed to hear to know that I was headed to the Scutum-Crux Fleet. The late Admiral Bryce Klyber had spent more than a quarter of a century commanding that fleet.
I said that I had.
“Did you ever visit Terraneau?” Terraneau was the capital of the Scutum-Crux Arm.
“No, sir,” I said.
“I see. It’s a beautiful planet. Lakes, oceans; it’s a lot like Earth.” He slid a folder across the table.
“It’s been four years since the Avatari captured Terraneau, Harris. The first two years, we had no idea how to get through the ion layer in which the Avatari sealed the planet. After the experiments you ran on New Copenhagen, of course, we picked up a few new tricks.”
The fat old man with the graying hair and the piglike eyes, watched me closely as he spoke. He was cordial, but I sensed a sharp blade inside his voice. He did not care what happened to me or the clones who had once served under his command.
“We haven’t tried to reclaim any of the planets we lost during the war. As things now stand, the U.A. doesn’t have enough population to restart lost colonies; and quite frankly, I doubt Congress has the stomach for it.” General Smith slid into briefing mode that quickly. The conversation portion of our interview had ended, and he was giving me my next assignment.
“We have fleets orbiting fifteen of our lost colonies.”
The man had a knack for putting a positive spin on a dismal situation. Our fleets were orbiting those planets because they were trapped. Without the Broadcast Network transmitting our ships across space, our fleets could not travel between solar systems.
“We have attempted to make contact with those planets,” Smith continued. “Nothing big, mind you. Following your lead, we fired nuclear-tipped torpedoes into the ion curtains surrounding those planets and tried radioing in, but until last week, we’ve never made contact.
“Last week the Scutum-Crux Fleet picked up a signal from Terraneau. We’re sending you to look for survivors and retake the planet.”
“Am I going in alone?” I was being sarcastic. We’d stationed over a million men on New Copenhagen, and the Avatari damn near annihilated us.
General Smith ignored my comment. “We don’t know how many survivors are on the planet. We won’t know anything until you report back, but we’re guessing that the Avatari have done whatever damage they were planning to do and have gone home.”
The damage the Avatari planned on doing to New Copenhagen included doping the planet with poisonous chemicals, then charbroiling the place. They had bored a mine deep into the planet and saturated it with a toxic gas. I saw a man blister and die from breathing the fumes.
“What happens if I find the place crawling with Avatari?” I asked.
“Liberate it,” Smith said in a matter-of-fact tone. “That’s your specialty, right? If anyone can retake Terraneau, it’s you.”
Early in my career with the Marines, I developed a taste for philosophy. Now, listening to General Smith, I remembered a line from Nietzsche: A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
“Just like that?” I asked. “Here’s a planet, go capture it?”
Smith laughed. “You’ll have the entire SC Fleet for support. Take whatever you need to get the job done.”
“And once I retake the planet, then what? You said you didn’t have enough people to reestablish lost colonies.”
“If I were you, I’d start by establishing a base. That’s your call, Harris. We’re transferring our officers out of the Scutum-Crux Arm. Once they are gone, you will assume command of the fleet.” He made it sound so specking magnanimous.
“You’re sending me to the farthest corner of the galaxy to assume command of an abandoned fleet which you want me to use to retake an alien-held planet. Is that right? What if I say no?”
“I’ll hang your ass from the nearest guard tower,” Smith said without a moment’s hesitation.
Another quote from Friedrich Nietzsche occurred to me: Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
CHAPTER NINE
The Unified Authority was handing over more than the Scutum-Crux Fleet. Over the next six months, the Pentagon planned to deploy all-clone crews in twelve of its fifteen stranded fleets. This wasn’t the rumored genocide my men talked about, but it would effectively turn Earth into a clone-free zone. You had to hand it to them, the Joint Chiefs had come up with a hell of a solution for their embarrassing clone situation.
General Smith claimed they were assigning us to the outer fleets so that we could “maintain security on the frontier,” but it seemed more like the Joint Chiefs were doing the military equivalent of ditching an unwanted dog. Without the Broadcast Network or ships with broadcast engines, we would never be able to return home. Some frontier security we would offer, we would not even be able to send warnings to Earth. Pangalactic communications were just as dependent on the Broadcast Network as pangalactic travel.
When I returned to my quarters, I found Ava Gardner passed out on my rack. She looked peaceful for someone who had recently cried herself to sleep. I looked at her and thought about the irony of Ted Mooreland sweeping his own dirty secret under the rug as part of the larger Pentagon action. He would fit in well with those other generals.
There was only one rack in my quarters, and I did not feel especially chivalrous; but fortunately for Ava, sleep was the last thing on my mind. I reread General Smith’s orders. That was when the first germ of my plan occurred to me. I thought it was time somebody taught the bastards a lesson. Not just generals like Smith and Newcastle, but Congress and the society that had turned its back on the men who defended it. The Scutum-Crux Fleet did not have self-broadcasting ships, but it had firepower. It was the strongest fleet in the galaxy, bar none. If I could find a way to sail that fleet back into Earth space, I could bring the Unified Authority to its knees.
Two hundred years ago, the Unified Authority began its cloning program as part of a master plan to colonize the galaxy. For two centuries, natural-born politicians feared us and natural-born generals abused us. They sent us to fight their battles and left us to die in space. And now this.
I reread the orders for the fourth time, then checked my watch. It was 0300. I didn’t feel like sleeping on the floor, nor did I feel like turning the movie starlet out of my bed; so I climbed on the rack beside her. The pretty little kitten turned and snuggled against me without ever opening her eyes.
Ava was a practical woman, I could tell from the start. She was still on the rack when I woke up, though she had managed to put some real estate between us. She looked angry that I moved in on her, but she also knew I had not taken advantage of her during the night. I woke up to find her watching me, the stern set in those green eyes warning me not to cross her.