I nodded.
“I bet you think it’s an antisynthetic conspiracy. Do you think they sent you out here because you’re a clone?” Thorne asked. “Somebody told me that you knew you were a Liberator clone and not to worry about the death reflex.” He looked at me, concern showing in his sky-blue eyes.
“I know that I am a clone, sir.”
“You’re a Liberator, right?” He said the term “Liberator” with little emotion. “I’ve gone over your record. Not a bad record. It might even be a great record if they hadn’t flagged you for killing superior officers.
“You’re a Liberator; they should have expected a little fratricide from you. That’s why they discontinued your kind.”
Thorne walked as he spoke, leading me through the halls at a pace so fast that no one could follow us without looking suspicious. “We’re outdated, Captain Harris. I’m old and you’re obsolete. Didn’t they stop making your kind fifty years ago? We’re both marked for extinction.”
The old man chattered nervously. He might have been scared of Liberators, but he might have just been giddy knowing that my arrival meant he could soon go home.
He paused to take a breath or possibly to let me respond. I had nothing to say. When I first saw him, I thought Admiral Thorne was a dried-up relic, a paper-pusher who had been pressed into commanding an inconsequential fleet. I might have been partly right, but there was something more to this man.
“They sold me the same line when I took command of the fleet three years ago. That was right after the aliens sleeved Terraneau. I was fifth in the command chain at the time. Admiral Chen should have taken command, but he had a brother in the Senate. Admiral Long was under him. He had an uncle on the Linear Committee. They both went home. I didn’t have any high-ranking relatives, so they promoted me to admiral and congratulated me for becoming ‘the most powerful man in the galaxy.’
“They had to reach a long way down the chain to find someone they could leave behind,” Thorne said. “That was three years ago.”
I heard what he said, but my attention strayed. Three sailors walked past us down the hall, and I could have sworn that two of them had blue eyelids. It wasn’t a dark pronounced blue, just a light, faint shade that could easily be overlooked.
I watched them walk past, my eyes following them even as they turned a corner and headed away from us.
“Is something the matter?” Thorne asked.
“No, just …I saw something I didn’t …I’m fine,” I said, feeling confused.
I knew the layout of the Kamehameha well, so I was surprised when Admiral Thorne walked past the bank of elevators that led to the fleet decks. He caught me looking back at the elevator, and asked, “What’s the matter?”
“Aren’t those the elevators to Fleet Command?”
“We’re not going to Fleet Command, Captain.”
“Where are we going?”
“Those men you saw following me when you arrived, they are all fleet officers. They’re waiting for us on the fleet deck so they can give you a proper briefing. I want to take a few minutes to brief you improperly.”
“That’s very kind of you,” I said, feeling a little suspicious.
By this time Thorne had led me across the ship to the second docking bay. Here he stopped, and said, “I want to start by showing you the things I am supposed to show you, then I thought I might show you what that prick Stone did to this ship behind my back. I’ve got something to show you that neither of us is supposed to know about.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A fleet of five transports sat in the darkened hangar. These were obese, ugly ships with immoderately small wings sticking out of the distended bellies of their cabin. The spine that stretched from the cockpit to the tail along the top of the transports looked like it had been thrown on as an afterthought. The transports stood on struts instead of wheels, though they struggled with vertical takeoffs in atmospheric conditions. Lacking even the semblance of aerodynamics and entirely unable to glide, they dropped like bricks when their thrusters cut out; but they were the workhorses of the Unified Authority’s invasion force. Without them, the Army and Marines would have been grounded.
Admiral Thorne led me to the first bird in the line and pointed between the struts. “This is the one with the torpedo tube,” he said.
I bent down but still could not see the modification, so I dropped to my knees. A cylinder the size and shape of an Army boot hung from the bottom of the ship. It looked almost as if someone had welded a boot to the chassis.
“That’s it?” I asked, amazed that such a small barrel could house a nuclear-tipped torpedo. I remained on my knees, staring into that tube. Deep inside it, I could see the rounded point of a red-tipped cone.
“Armed and ready,” Thorne said. He coughed a dry, wheezing sort of cough. It was an old man’s cough, not one caused by congested lungs or something in his throat.
I fired off a nuclear device once. The sight was dazzling and mesmerizing and horrible. Heat, or radiation, or maybe it was just force, rose from the center of the explosion like an electric sheet. I remember thinking that with some skill, you could protect yourself from a bullet or a knife; but with a nuke, there was nothing you could do. It would kill you, then incinerate your body no matter how you tried to protect yourself. The realization that I would once again be dealing with a weapon designed to destroy areas instead of people left me nervous.
“Per your request, the other transports are not armed. You have one armed transport, and that transport is armed with one torpedo. If the shot fails, you’re going to need to return to the ship for another torpedo, Captain. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want us to place tubes on the other transports.”
“If we need another one, we can come back easily enough,” I said. “It’s not like we have to work around a window of time.”
I was making up excuses. The truth was that nuclear weapons scared me. We would need one nuclear-tipped torpedo to get through the ion curtain; and once we made it through the curtain, I did not want any superfluous warheads distracting me.
“No, there isn’t. Not for you,” Thorne said. “How long do you think you will need to capture the planet?”
What would happen once we landed on Terraneau was anybody’s guess. A few weeks had passed since Admiral Thorne received the message from the survivors. Apparently he had not heard anything since. He told me this along with his belief—that we would find ourselves on a ghost planet once we landed. I did not like that prospect, but I could think of a worse scenario—finding the atmosphere saturated with the gas the aliens used in their mining. The gas was so corrosive that it would dissolve our transports around us as soon as we punched our way through the curtain.
“Is the big package ready as well?” I asked.
“It’s on board, Captain. So is the other equipment you requested,” Thorne said. “Did you want to inspect it?”
“No,” I said. The big package was a fifty-megaton bomb. If Thorne said it was ready and aboard the ship, that was good enough for me.
“Excellent. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s move on to the Engine Room,” Thorne said.
I asked, “What’s in the Engine Room?” giving Thorne an opening he could not resist. “The ship’s engine,” he said. Then he added, “Admiral Brocius authorized Captain Stone to make a modification without telling me, Captain. I became aware of it quite by accident last week, and I thought you might find it interesting.”
What Thorne showed me next opened my eyes. I had not told anyone my plans, not even Thomer or Ava, but the brass suspected me just the same. Somebody had hobbled this ship.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I spent hours touring the ship and discussing the fleet with Admiral Thorne. After that, I went to my billet to rest. A pile of combat armor belonging to Corporal Mike Rooney sat in the corner of the room. Rooney herself, now in Ava attire, sat cleaned and dressed in the booth-sized head across the room.