“That should narrow the field,” I said. “How many Liberators do you know?”
Bishop did not answer my question.
We went up to the bridge deck, but we did not enter the bridge. With his MPs still tailing us, Bishop led me into an off-bridge conference room. Wanting to believe Warshaw would join us, I took a seat at the table. The room was empty, except for a table, chairs, and a media/communications display.
We sat in silence for a moment, then I asked, “What am I missing here?”
“What do you mean?” Bishop asked, playing the role of the obtuse ship’s captain.
“You say the war is going well,” I said.
“I believe I said it was going better than we could have hoped for.”
“Okay, but you’re hiding like a mouse in a hole. What’s with the siege mentality?” I asked.
I waited several seconds for him to answer. To this point, I had not yet become angry, but my tension level was rising.
“What happened on Terraneau?” he asked.
“Is that an official question?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
“Who else is listening in on our conversation?”
“No one,” he said, shaking his head.
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
Before the big attack, the Corps of Engineers set up a prison called Outer Bliss on Terraneau. They rigged a mike and a camera in the prison’s interrogation room that were so small, trained experts would need equipment to locate them. When I interrogated prisoners in Outer Bliss, Warshaw listened in on the conversations from the Kamehameha. I suspected he would listen in on this conversation as well.
“What happened on Terraneau?” Bishop repeated.
“Do you mean before or after you guys ditched the party?” I asked.
“What happened on the planet?” he asked. “How did you get out alive?”
“The Unified Authority landed three thousand Marines; I had five thousand men. The cocky bastards didn’t even bother landing more men after you left. That’s how sure they were that they would win.”
“You faced their Marines, and you survived?” Bishop asked, ignoring the obvious evidence that we were having a conversation, not a séance.
“Something like that,” I said.
“Was there anything unusual about their troops?” Bishop asked. Now he was probing.
“Do you mean the shielded armor?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Tell me about it.” The son of a bitch was testing me.
“They had shielded armor,” I said. “What do you want to know? Their armor was just like ours except that it projected a shield. Even the palms of their hands were shielded; they couldn’t carry guns. They fired fléchettes from tubes that ran along their arms inside their armor. Sound familiar?” I placed my right hand on the table, palm up, and showed him pea-sized scars in my wrist and forearm. The fléchettes had passed through my arm and armor with the ease of a sewing needle poking through a cotton sheet.
“You were shot?” he asked.
“Five times,” I said.
“You’re lucky to be alive.”
“I wouldn’t have the pleasure of sitting through this interrogation if I had died,” I said. “And Warshaw wouldn’t be listening in on us,” I added, hoping to get Warshaw’s goat and flush him out of hiding.
“Just answer the specking questions, okay, hotshot?” said the voice that came out of the ceiling. Admiral Gary Warshaw had the same voice box as every other clone, but he had his own way of talking.
Bishop winced. I smiled.
“They’re using poison on their fléchettes now,” Warshaw said. “They hit you, you die.”
“That’s how it went on Terraneau, too. They killed everyone they hit,” I said.
“Everyone but you,” Bishop pointed out.
“Genetics. I’m a Liberator. I had the mother of all combat reflexes. The doctor said there was so much adrenaline and testosterone in my blood that I should have died of a heart attack.”
“But you survived.”
“More or less. That may be my last combat reflex. The poison injured the gland.” In truth, the gland had mostly healed, but I decided to keep that to myself. With Bishop holding his cards close to the vest and Warshaw playing hide-and-seek behind a camera, I would hold on to my secrets as well.
“That’s how you survived the fight, but how did you win it?” Warshaw asked.
I explained how we lured General Mooreland and the U.A. Marines into the underground garage, then demolished the structure while we escaped through the subterranean train station in the back.
“And you just left them there?” Warshaw asked. “You just left them there to starve?”
“Yes.”
“You specking bastard.” Warshaw meant this as a compliment. “Bastard” is one of those all-purpose words in the military. “Your doctor was wrong about you, Harris; you don’t have adrenaline running through your veins, you’ve got ice.”
“Brilliant move,” Bishop said in a voice just slightly above a whisper.
“Damn specking right it’s brilliant,” Warshaw said. “And I bet our boy Harris came up with the idea all on his own. Am I right, Harris?”
It was my idea, but I did not say so. I did not respond. I felt like Warshaw and Bishop were herding me somewhere I did not want to go.
Bishop asked, “What happened after you buried the Marines?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Why didn’t the fleet send more Marines?” Bishop asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“So they just left?” Bishop asked.
“Some of them left, some of them stayed,” I said. “You sank twenty-three of their ships.”
“Twenty-three,” Warshaw said. He sounded pleased. “I wondered what kind of damage we left behind.”
“They lost twelve ships trying to chase you into your broadcast zone,” I said.
“They didn’t even need to send more men down to the planet,” Bishop said. “Why didn’t they just bombard you from space?”
He still did not trust me.
“Maybe they didn’t think we were worth the trouble,” I said. “We were landlocked; they probably didn’t consider us a threat.”
“Then they didn’t know you as well as I do,” Warshaw said. “Anyone who knew you would be scared. He’s clean. You can bring him down.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Bishop told me the fleet decks were empty, then offered to let me inspect them for myself if I did not believe him. I believed him.
He remained, however, unwilling to explain the situation. When I asked what happened to Fleet Command, he put up a hand, and said, “Take it up with Warshaw.”
“You can’t tell me anything?” I asked.
“Not my pay grade, sir. I just steer the ship.”
We had that discussion over an early dinner in the last vestige of Fleet Command, a mess reserved for captains and up. Bishop ate chicken, I ate beef, and we both had potatoes and salad. There was a linen sheet across the table, and the utensils appeared to be made out of silver instead of some chrome-coated alloy.
“Can you tell me where we are?” I asked.
Bishop laughed, and asked, “You don’t know your galactic position?”
“How the speck would I know that?”
He thought about that, and said, “It takes real balls to fly into a broadcast zone without knowing where you’ll come out.” He shook his head, and added, “I’ve got to hand it to you.
“You’re in the Cygnus Arm, Enlisted Man’s territory.” He pointed to the viewport, and added, “The planet down there is Providence Kri.”
“Is that where Warshaw is hiding?” I asked.
Bishop shook his head. “Nope; he’s not even in this arm.”
“Are you going to tell me where he is?”
“He’s in the Tube.”
“What is the Tube?” I asked.
“It’s our high command. The Unifieds have their Pentagon, and we have our Tube,” Bishop said, clearly enjoying my frustration. “Times have changed, General. Admiral Warshaw has thirteen fleets under him. We don’t just have an Enlisted Man’s Fleet anymore, we have an Enlisted Man’s Navy.”