As I pulled along the edge of the airfield, I saw Sergeant Nobles waiting in his jeep. Like me, he’d come wearing combat armor. He stepped out of his ride as I approached. Nobles stood at attention and saluted, drops the size of toenails splattering against his armor. “Sir, we’ve fallen a little behind schedule, but we shouldn’t be very late,” he said.
“They won’t start the mission without us,” I said.
He laughed.
If things had gone the way I planned, we would have taken off an hour later, but I would have faced the unknown feeling a bit more satisfied. In the end, though, sex with Ava would have changed nothing.
As we walked around the transport, I watched to see if Nobles would comment on the boot-sized tube attached under the nose of the bird—a tube with a nuclear-tipped torpedo I’d had specially fitted. If he saw it, he didn’t mention it. He might not have noticed the tube hidden the way it was. Me, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Amazing that such a tiny package could do so much damage.
We entered the transport, walking up the rear ramp into the darkness of the kettle, and my heart dropped. I had learned to live with saluting superiors and taking orders from banal-brained officers whose only qualification was that they were natural-born; but the gloomy feeling of entering a transport always gave me a chill. On this day, though, the chill turned icy.
Without saying a word, I crossed the kettle and climbed the ladder to the cockpit. Storm-filtered sunlight shone through the windshield.
A thick wall of mercury-colored storm clouds hid the sun but not its light. Driven by blustering winds, the rain fell at sharp angles and splash-landed in puddles along the side of the landing strip.
The airfield was little more than a landing strip with a couple of newly built hangars surrounded by a wall of chain link and razor wire. We had built guard towers in the corners of the fence to keep the locals out, but that was for show. No one manned the towers.
The landing strip was too short for anything but transports, a species of air-/spacecraft that took off vertically. You couldn’t land so much as a fighter on this strip, but it had enough room for dozens of transports.
“What’s that?” Nobles asked, pointing to the bright red switch one of Mars’s engineers had installed over his throttle.
“Oh, that,” I said, feeling a little bit guilty. “That fires the torpedo.”
“We need a torpedo?” he asked, sounding nervous and more than a little skeptical. He probably wondered if there was more danger to this mission than I had let on about. There wasn’t.
“It never hurts to be prepared,” I said.
Nobles sat in the pilot seat but made no move toward the instrumentation around him. He folded his arms across his chest, and asked, “Prepared for what exactly?”
“Well, you know, there’s no way of knowing where the broadcast will send us.”
Nobles started to say something, but I put up my hand and stopped him.
“Hear me out,” I said. “Admiral Warshaw flew his ships through this broadcast zone; it’s going to be safe,” I said. Having spent six years assigned to the Scutum-Crux Fleet, Nobles knew Warshaw. He might or might not have known Warshaw personally, but they’d both served on the Kamehameha, the flagship of the fleet.
“Did Warshaw strike you as having a death wish?” I asked. “If he used this zone to broadcast himself out, I’m betting it will send us someplace safe.”
Nobles thought about this for a moment, then asked, “So where do you think we’ll come out?”
“Where will we come out?” I repeated. “I have no specking idea, but I can make an educated guess. When the top brass decided to eliminate the cloning program, they shipped off whatever clones were left to twelve of the outer fleets. I don’t know about you; but if I were Warshaw, and I had the Earth Fleet chasing after me, I’d send myself someplace where I could find reinforcements.”
“And the torpedo?” Nobles asked.
“It’s nuclear-tipped,” I said. He knew what that meant.
When I arrived in the Scutum-Crux Arm, the Avatari had Terraneau sealed off from rescue by a layer of tachyons. By firing a nuke above the spot where the layer originated, we were able to poke a small hole through the layer. That was how we landed men on the planet.
Of course, with Terraneau, we knew the exact spot to hit with our torpedo. On this run, we might not even know what planet we were circling, let alone the right spot to hit.
“But it’s just a precaution, right? We’re not bringing it because we’re going to fight aliens.”
“Just a precaution,” I agreed.
“And we won’t need it?” he asked.
“No. Probably not.”
He thought about this, nodded, and pivoted his seat so that he faced the flight controls. “You’re a brave man, sir,” he said as he fired up the engines. “It takes a lot of nerve to decide to fly a nuke through a broadcast zone.”
“They used to do that all the time,” I said, feeling relieved that we were finally going wheels up.
“Those ships were sealed. You’ve got us riding in a specking wreck,” Nobles said. He looked back to see if I was suitably panicked, then fired the thrusters and lifted off the ground. “Good thing you’re comfortable around nuclear weapons.”
He knew I wasn’t.
When I thought the situation through, I realized that anything that set off the nuke would probably toast us as well. Logic only went so far, however, when it came to my phobia of things I could not control. Trying to ignore my nerves, I sat in the copilot’s seat and strapped myself in.
We crossed back over Norristown, passing over barren streets and thriving neighborhoods. Going up to gather food and weapons, I had flown over this territory dozens of times, but this time was different. This time I did not know when I would return. It was not just a question of survival. Even if everything worked out just right, I might never return.
Off in the distance, I saw the three towers of the financial district—the boys’ dorm, the girls’ dorm, and the hospital. Only a few minutes had passed since Ava sent me away. She’d still be in that building. Was she thinking of me?
“So if Warshaw broadcasted into wherever we’re going, what’s to say he stayed there?” Nobles asked. “I mean, maybe he wasn’t any safer there than he was over here. Maybe he got there, patched up another broadcast station, and took his fleet to the next stop.” As he asked this, Nobles took us out of the atmosphere. The sky turned dark and was no longer a sky but field of stars.
And maybe the Earth Fleet caught up to him on the other side, I thought. It was entirely possible that we were broadcasting from one graveyard to another.
“If it isn’t the prodigal son come for a visit,” Lieutenant Mars radioed in to us as we slowed to a drift and floated toward the wreckage. “I was beginning to think you changed your mind.”
Nobles, who had become very serious, ignored Mars’s greeting, and said, “This is Marine 1, do you have a target for us?”
“You mean Harris’s Tool?” asked one of the engineers.
“Roger that,” said Nobles.
“Harris’s Tool,” the engineer persisted. “Harris’s Tool. That is the code name for the battleship. The only way Operation Chastity Belt can succeed is for us all to be on the same page. You need to call it ‘Harris’s Tool,’ or we won’t know what you are talking about.”
“Come again?” asked Nobles.
“The names were Spuler’s idea, not mine,” Mars said, sounding somewhat apologetic. Seaman First Class Aaron Spuler was the resident joker of the Corps of Engineers.
“Fine, where is Harris’s Tool?” Nobles asked.