“Are you threatening me, General?”
I answered with a wry smile, gestured with my head toward the empty gas canister, and said, “Not me, I’m just answering your message.”
“I have every intention of leaving Terraneau as quickly as possible,” I told Doctorow as I started the jeep. “I want to get off this specking rock, the sooner the better.”
“Yes, you said that two months ago, General, but you’re still here,” Doctorow said. The farther we drove from the empty canister, the more he seemed to relax.
“Then you will be glad to know why I called for this little meeting,” I said, and I told him that we were just about ready to send a ship through the broadcast zone. He listened carefully and said nothing. He probably did not care whether the plan worked or failed so long as it got me away from his precious society.
We stopped at the McGraw building, the building that served as a headquarters for the Corps of Engineers. Hollingsworth and several of his lieutenants attended the briefing as well.
Looking around the room, I saw that none of us had gotten much sleep. Thanks to the early-morning call to the armory, Hollingsworth and I had not returned to base until nearly 05:00. Mars had been on alert guarding the base. Doctorow looked tired as well. His eyes were badly bloodshot.
When Doctorow saw that he was surrounded by military men, he found a quiet corner where he could lean against the wall and watch the presentation unnoticed. I ditched him and drifted over to Hollingsworth. When I was close enough to whisper without being overheard, I said, “I brought your pal.”
“We’re not pals,” he said.
I only grunted.
Lieutenant Mars booted up his holographic display, and we gathered around him for a closer look. Mars was a smart officer; he waited for me to get things started. When I asked him how things were progressing, he sighed and explained why everything was going wrong.
“Do you have any concept about the sheer mass of a battleship?” he began.
“I know they’re big,” said Hollingsworth. The other Marines laughed.
“We’re talking about one hundred and thirty thousand tons of metal spread across three hundred thousand cubic feet.”
“Why are you giving us a lesson on mass, Lieutenant?” asked Hollingsworth, who was clearly tired and edgy from the last night’s activities.
Mars pointed to the display, and said, “Because the only way we are going to launch General Harris into that broadcast zone is by sealing him inside a battleship.”
“Why are you choosing a big ship?” asked Hollingsworth. “Wouldn’t it be easier to send him off in a frigate?”
“He’d never break through the ships blocking the zone; the smaller ships don’t have enough mass,” said Mars.
He pointed to the wall of derelict ships. Since our last meeting, the problem had gone from difficult to intractable. Hoping to blow the ships into tiny fragments, we’d talked about sending engineers to rig wrecks with charges. As far as I knew, he hadn’t actually sent anyone.
“Break through?” I asked. “I thought we were going to clear a path.”
“It doesn’t look like that’s going to work, sir,” Mars answered, all of his former enthusiasm now absent from his voice. “We’ve tried conventional charges. We experimented with a small tactical weapon as well.”
I should have seen this coming. The Morgan Atkins Believers had detonated an atomic bomb inside a Unified Authority fighter carrier. Parts of the ship fell away, but the frame of the ship survived.
“You nuked ’em?” Hollingsworth asked.
“Yes, sir, we nuked one. The device blew the outer hull off the ship, but the decks and the structure remained in place,” Mars said.
“But a battleship could ram through?” I asked. I knew the answer. He would not have said he needed to seal me in a battleship if he did not believe it could break through. Still, I wanted reassurance.
Mars did not get a chance to answer. Hearing the ease with which the discussion had switched to tactical weapons, Doctorow spoke up. “Where, precisely, did you get a nuclear weapon?”
“Maybe we dug it up while we were out collecting gas masks,” I said.
Doctorow glared at me, his fury coloring his face as red as rare roast beef, and sputtered for words. Finally, he said, “You son of a bitch. You raided the armory when you were pulling out those bodies.”
I smiled, and said, “There’s no call for profanity, Reverend.”
“You lied. ‘Bodies,’ you said. ‘I’m just collecting bodies so I can examine the armor.’” Doctorow threw his hands in the air.
“I wasn’t lying,” I said. “We only took bodies.”
“Then you went back afterward. You still went back on your word.”
“Last night was the first time I set foot past the fence since the day we dug up the armor. It was the first time any of us have been back, and we weren’t the ones who tore down the fence,” I said.
Doctorow did not take the bait. He ignored my jab about the fence, and asked, “Then where did you get a nuclear bomb?”
“Oh, that,” I said, grinning as brightly as I could. “I didn’t need to raid the armory to get that; we have plenty of nukes right here in Fort Sebastian.”
Hollingsworth and Mars, both of whom knew I had been restocking the base with weapons, laughed softly as I spoke. “Remember when I offered to salvage food and rations from those derelict ships? I figured since we were up there, we might as well restock our armory while we were at it. You wanted rations, I wanted rockets. We both made out.”
“You son of a—”
“You already said that,” I reminded Doctorow.
“What do you plan to do with those weapons, General?” Doctorow asked. “Are you planning on recapturing Terraneau?”
I laughed. “We both want the same thing. You want me off your planet, and I can’t wait to leave.”
“But that didn’t stop you from building your arsenal. Why stockpile weapons if you aren’t planning a war?”
I shrugged my shoulders, and said, “I’m a Marine. Marines like things that are loud. It’s all part of speaking softly and carrying a big stick.”
Doctorow took a step forward and drove his right fist into his open left palm. “This is unacceptable. This is an act of—”
“We didn’t leave an empty gas canister outside your door last night,” I said. “If we ever do leave you a message, you can bet that the canister won’t be empty.”
Doctorow glared at me, but I didn’t care. He had delivered his message last night, and I brought him to this meeting so that I could deliver mine. He now knew that I was leaving, and that if it came to a fight, I held all of the aces in my hand.
Now that everything was in the open, it was time to turn our attention back to the mission. “So you’re suggesting that we light up the wrecks and bash through in a battleship?”
“Considering the situation, sir, that’s the best we’ve come up with.”
“What are the odds of success?” I asked.
Lieutenant Mars let a second pass before he answered. He was a young clone, maybe not even in his thirties. Fatigue and frustration showed on his face. “General, there are so many variables; I can’t even begin to guess. It’s a matter of velocity. With the right speed and God’s good grace, this should work.”
“It sounds like you’ve got everything you need,” said Doctorow, suddenly sounding cheerful again. Perhaps hearing the suicidal nature of my mission had cheered him up. He bent over the display, looking the scene over closely. “Which ship is going to carry Harris?”
The display showed the entire battlefield, which was spread out over thousands of cubic miles of open space. With the camera panned so far out, the fighter carriers were indistinguishable from the fighters they carried. Everything was represented by tiny motes of light.
Mars said, “You won’t really be able to see the ship from this angle.” He adjusted the display so that it zoomed in on the wreckage of a Scutum-Crux Fleet battleship. “I had originally thought we would use a smaller ship, maybe even a minesweeper. A minesweeper would only have about one-tenth the overall mass of this battleship.