Oh shit, I thought, she’s using the “H-word.” When Ava felt brassy, she began her sentences by calling me “Honey.” Sometimes sentences that began with “Honey” were funny, sometimes they were brutal, but they were never nice.
“Yeah, well, Doctorow wants me out of here, and he’ll be a lot easier to work with when he thinks that I’m planning to leave,” I said.
She pulled off her blouse and disappeared into the bedroom. When she spoke again, her voice was softer. We had come to the heart of the argument. “Are you leaving?”
“Not without you,” I said.
She came back into the doorway, this time dressed only in her bra and her panties. Giving me a snide smile, she said, “Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Harris, you rang the right bell; now come and claim your reward.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The time had come to lay my cards out on the table.
Hollingsworth and I dressed in combat armor for this excursion. Lieutenant Mars came in a soft shell—that was Marine talk for the kind of armor worn by technicians and engineers. Unlike our hardened armor, Mars’s shell was made of flexible rubber latex.
Mars, Hollingsworth, and I sat inside the kettle—the cargo and passenger section of a military transport ship—as our pilot prepped for takeoff. We talked, trying to make ourselves comfortable, but you were never really comfortable riding in the kettle. Everything was made of metal—metal floor, metal walls, metal ceiling, even the horseshoe seat in the head was made of metal. Everything was metal except for the wooden bench running the length of the walls and the restraining harnesses.
And the kettle was dark, too. It had a twenty-foot ceiling and a couple of red emergency lights, but most of the lighting came from the cockpit.
“You know, General, I could have had my men string lights in here,” Mars said.
“Good thought,” I said. “We’ll take you up on that next time.” I held up my helmet, which offered night-for-day vision that would allow me to see perfectly well. But although our helmets included interLink connectivity that let us hear each other, conversation flows more easily when you’re not wearing an airtight helmet.
“General Harris, what exactly are we here for?” Hollingsworth asked. In the light that spilled out from the open cockpit door, I could see Hollingsworth’s face. He was a young Marine. Like every other military clone, he had brown hair and brown eyes though like the others, what he saw when he looked in the mirror was a young man with blue eyes and blond hair.
“I’m going to show you how the fleet escaped,” I said.
“No shit?” Hollingsworth asked. “How did they do it?”
“I’ll demonstrate when we get there,” I said. We sat in silence for a moment, then I asked Mars, “Were you able to get the shields running on that armor?”
Of the three of us, Mars was the one sitting in the most light; it illuminated a wedge of his face that started just above his chin and ended on his nose. He smiled, and said, “Yes, sir. All we had to do was recharge the batteries.”
“And?” I asked.
“The shielding is worthless,” Mars said.
“What do you mean by ‘worthless’? Are you saying it’s weak?” Hollingsworth asked. “It wasn’t weak when we fought them; we hit those sons of bitches with rockets and grenades.” Like me, Hollingsworth had seen that armor in battle.
“My particle-beam pistol didn’t get through,” I added. “I shot a man at point-blank range.”
“You should have kept shooting,” Mars said.
I might have kept shooting if the bastard hadn’t drilled through my forearm with two fléchettes. After that, I was busy trying to breathe as the neurotoxins turned my body numb.
“Those shields are just for show,” Mars continued. “Do you want to know what they used as a power source? A battery pack about the size of my finger.” He held up his little finger.
“Well, I suppose it’s the age-old trade-off, power versus mobility,” Mars began. Like every other engineer I knew, he got excited and started spouting jargon. He went on for a couple of minutes like that, babbling as if he had actually gone to engineering school. Clones did not go to officer training because they weren’t supposed to rise beyond enlisted ranks. I was a general, Hollingsworth a colonel, and Mars a lieutenant, but those were temporary field ranks given to us by the Unified Authority. They made us officers so we could run our fleet, then they attacked. Bastards.
“In a perfect setting, they might have gotten forty-five minutes out of their shields,” Mars went on. “Every time you hit them, it causes the power to spike. It doesn’t matter if you hit them with a missile or a spit wad, the power in their shields spikes.
“Do you know how long those shields would hold up in a rainstorm? We tried it. We powered up a suit and splashed it with a hose. The battery died in eight minutes.” He sounded disappointed by the armor’s poor showing.
He dropped his voice and became a bit more reverent as he added, “Most of their shields failed three minutes after you brought that garage down on their heads.”
“Wait,” Hollingsworth said, sounding more than a little skeptical. “Some of those guys were alive for weeks. If their shields gave out, why weren’t they crushed?”
“You only crushed the laggards, the ones who were still on the first and second levels of the garage,” Mars explained. “The lower levels did not cave in, especially on the fourth and fifth. The men on those levels weren’t buried, they were trapped. If they’d had food and oxygen, they’d still be alive today.”
“Interesting,” I said, interrupting Hollingsworth’s next question in the hope of getting the conversation back on point. “So we can drain the battery by hitting them with a barrage.”
“More or less,” Mars agreed.
“Do you have any idea how long the armor would stand up to a particle beam?” I asked.
“Eight minutes,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what you hit it with, there’s a power surge, and the battery goes dry after eight minutes.”
“Good to know,” I said.
“That’s eight minutes of prolonged exposure,” Mars said. “You would need to hit your target with a continuous wave.”
“Does that include sound waves?” I asked.
Mars considered the idea. “That might do it. We didn’t try that, but it probably would work.”
“What might work?” Hollingsworth asked.
“Using sonic waves to deplete the batteries,” Mars said.
“You sneaky bastard,” Hollingsworth said, quickly adding “sir” to avoid the appearance of insubordination.
My pilot spoke to us over the intercom. “General, we’re in position.”
“How close?” I asked.
“Fifteen hundred miles, sir,” he said.
“Give us a moment to suit up,” I told the pilot. I turned to Hollingsworth and Mars, and said, “Helmets on, gentlemen. For today’s demonstration, we will be opening the rear hatch.”
After we pulled on our helmets, I contacted my pilot via the interLink. “Ready,” I told him, giving him the signal to vent the air from the kettle. Once the oxygen had been evacuated, he opened the massive iron doors at the rear of the ship, revealing a wide field of stars and empty space.
“You brought us out here to see this?” Hollingsworth asked. “There’s nothing here.”
“It’s what you don’t see that counts,” I told Hollingsworth as I picked up a handheld rocket launcher.
Speaking over the interLink on a direct frequency that only my pilot would hear, I said, “Lower the rear shields in ten, nine, eight …” I continued the count in my head.
“There’s more going on out here than meets the eye,” I told Hollingsworth. “Watch.”
“What does this have to do with the fleet?” he asked.
Five, four … I continued counting silently to myself. Without answering, I aimed the rocket out the rear of the ship.