In the short term, I was placing my investigation on hold. I knew someplace where I could assemble an elite brigade of Marines that I knew had not been infiltrated. The only question in my mind was, “Would they follow me?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I sailed out of the Scutum-Crux Arm on a wrecked battleship and returned on a yacht …more or less. I rode a frigate to Gobi, then requisitioned the Salah ad-Din, a Perseus-class fighter carrier.
In demographic terms, the ad-Din had the oldest crew of any carrier in the Enlisted Man’s Navy, its youngest sailor being thirty-two years old. Beyond that, having not yet been granted leave, the crew of the Salah ad-Din could not have picked up pests from St. Augustine. If any ship was secure, it was the Salah ad-Din, and she had plenty of space for transporting Marines since the eleven-thousand-man Marine compound on her bottom deck now sat vacant.
There were twenty-two hundred Marines stationed on Terraneau. The ad-Din had room to spare.
I toured the Marine complex as the ad-Din broadcasted out through a station that was specially programmed for a single broadcast to Terraneau. Walking through the barracks, I imagined them filled with men. I went to the firing range, the ghosts of ancient gunfire echoing in my head.
“General Harris?” The voice of Captain Pete Villanueva spoke to me from a squawk box on the wall. I wondered if his voice had sounded from every speaker in the Marine complex or if some onboard system had tracked my movements.
I went to the box. “Harris here.”
“We are in Scutum-Crux space, sir.”
“What is the situation?”
“All clear, sir.”
Several months had passed since the U.A. Navy attacked Terraneau. If the Unifieds were coming back, I figured they would have done it months ago.
“Have you made contact?” I asked.
“We reached Fort Sebastian, the Marines are expecting you, sir.”
“Very well. All I need now is a transport and a pilot,” I said.
“Your staff pilot is ready and waiting for you, sir.”
“My staff pilot?” I asked. He might have meant Nobles, but to the best of my knowledge, Nobles was still on the Kamehameha . Maybe I picked up a tick on St. Augustine, I thought, and the thought made me smile.
“Captain, please send a security detail to the landing bay,” I said. “Have them seal off the bay and wait for me in the hall.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Under no circumstances are they to enter the bay before I arrive,” I said.
“Aye, aye, sir.”
I didn’t need to worry about them arriving before me as the Marine complex was on the same deck as the landing bay. Running through the hall, I arrived in about three minutes. My security detail—six men armed with M27s—arrived a few seconds later. Villanueva ran a tight ship; I was impressed.
“There’s a transport waiting for takeoff,” I told the men. “The man piloting that transport may be a Unified Authority assassin.”
If these men had been SEALs instead of MPs, I would have sent them in first. I’d seen SEALs at work; they could slip into a hangar, sneak onto a transport, and knock out the pilot more smoothly than most men could zip their pants.
MPs had a different calling. They arrested drunken sailors and escorted troublemakers to the brig. “I’m going in first. I want you to come in fifteen seconds after me. If there’s an enemy in there, I want to take him alive,” I said.
They answered with nods and sirs.
“Fifteen seconds, then you come in with your fingers off your triggers. I don’t want you shooting me in the back,” I said.
Months had passed since the last time I’d seen combat. During that time, I had not so much as fired a gun at a range; so as I entered the landing bay, it came as no surprise that I felt a nervous rush of adrenaline. I had not slipped into a combat reflex, but it wasn’t far off.
I stepped through the hatch, took three steps forward, and heard the familiar greeting.
“General Harris.” Sergeant Nobles waved and greeted me like an old friend. Then he remembered himself, stiffened, and gave me a proper salute.
“Nobles?” He fit the profile of the U.A. assassins—a clone in his twenties. He was neither heavy nor thin, neither muscular nor frail. Put him in any platoon, and he would blend in.
I had burst through the hatch and run toward the transport, then I slowed to the speed of a drill sergeant inspecting his platoon. A few seconds passed and the hatch opened again and six M27-carrying MPs charged in behind me and ground to a stop. I did not even need to look back to know they had confused expressions on their faces.
They had come in locked and loaded, expecting a fight. Instead, they got a dawdling general and an unarmed man standing at attention.
I ignored them and returned Nobles’s salute.
“Are we bringing an escort, sir?” he asked. The guy was so positive, so innocent. Six armed MPs had just stormed the transport, and it never occurred to him that he was under suspicion.
I said no and dismissed the MPs.
Thus began one of the more dismal missions of my career.
* * *
I did not expect Philo Hollingsworth to greet me with open arms, but I thought he would be interested in what I had to say. As things currently stood, he commanded a tiny base on a backwater world that was cut off from the rest of the universe.
No cars waited as we touched down on the airfield outside of Norristown. I wasn’t hoping for a ticker-tape parade, but I expected something. Nobles secured the transport, and we stood there wondering if perhaps we’d landed in the wrong place.
Two jeeps arrived fifteen minutes later. Colonel Hollingsworth did not come himself. Instead, he sent a couple of enlisted men to drive me. Glad for the chance to gather his gear, Nobles rode back to base in one of the jeeps. The driver of the second jeep took me to Norristown.
“Where exactly are we going?” I asked, as we drove past the road to Fort Sebastian.
“To the capitol building, sir,” the man said.
I did not know that Terraneau had a capitol building.
We drove almost all the way across Norristown. I had seen the city in ruins, now I saw it in reclamation, like a forest three years after a major fire. Collapsing structures had been torn down. Lots had been cleared. The locals had begun work on a scattering of small buildings, nothing too aggressive, just two- and three-story affairs. In another year, they might begin work on new skyscrapers.
Hollingsworth must have ignored my orders and alerted Doctorow that I was coming if we were headed to the capitol. I didn’t like it, but it could have been worse. Hollingsworth could have sent a firing squad out to shoot me when I stepped off the transport.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
We drove into the prewar government sector.
For a moment, I thought we might end up outside the collapsed garage, with Doctorow telling me he had excavated the weapons; but the new fence we had built around the lot remained closed, and the ground looked undisturbed.
We stopped in front of a building with a polished onyx façade and working fountains. Its windows, once crusted with dust, now sparkled in the sun. A stream burbled down the tiered waterway that ran along the front of the building. The buildings in this part of town had not been destroyed, but they hadn’t been in use when I’d left. Someone had done a lot of work in a very little time on this structure. Taking in the amazing restoration around me, I hopped out of the jeep and entered Terraneau’s new “government center.”