“But they’d be marooned. They’d be stranded …” He did not bother finishing the thought.
I finished for him. “Just like we were left stranded out here.”
“What do we do?” Mars said.
I told him about Tachyon D concentrations and temperature fluctuations, and said, “I think we probably have a few more days, but we want to be long gone before the temperatures start changing.”
“How can we check for tachyons?” he asked.
“I don’t know. The U.A. had a couple of dead scientists figure it out.”
He didn’t know who or what I meant, not that it mattered.
“I can have my men check the weather reports,” he said. “Tracking temperature changes shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Good place to start,” I said.
“What do we do about Doctorow?” Mars asked. “Do you think you can get him to see the light?” He must have already known the answer even as he asked the question. Doctorow would not listen to us, never in a million years.
I shook my head. “How do you make an enlightened man see the light?” I asked, amazed by my own pessimism. “He doesn’t trust me, and there is nothing I can do about it. Maybe it’s for the best. I’m going to have enough trouble getting you and your thousand engineers off the planet.”
As I said this, I remembered what Doctorow said about tracking a fighter carrier. “Do you know anything about a carrier circling the planet?” I asked.
Mars nodded. “It’s the Churchill. She’s hiding up in the graveyard.”
“What about the Salah ad-Din?”
He shook his head. “The only ship we’ve seen is the Churchill.”
“Good thing she’s there; we can use her to get off the planet,” I said. “Now for the next problem, I need to get a message to Ava.”
“Your girlfriend?” Mars asked.
“Ex-girlfriend. Do you think she knows I’m here?” Though the question was more for me than for Mars, I asked it out loud.
“She probably doesn’t. Doctorow is trying to keep the whole thing quiet.”
By this time, a couple of hours had passed, and Nobles appeared at the door of the cell. His hair still had that matted sheen and his irises were black as wet rock. The door slid open, and he stepped in. He and Mars traded places. Nobles went to the sink and began rinsing the gunk out of his hair and eyes.
“Are you sure you can trust her?” Mars asked as he left the cell. “If she’s not with you anymore, I mean—”
I put up a hand to stop him. “We could always kidnap her,” I said. I was joking.
Mars smiled, and said, “Now there’s an interesting option,” and he left our jail cell a free man. Nobles and I spent the rest of the night locked behind bars.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
The inquisition began again at 07:00.
Armed guards ushered Nobles and me out of our cell. I wasn’t asleep when they came, but I was awfully tired from the long night.
As they had the day before, the guards placed Nobles in one room and me in the next. The waiting game began again. I sat in the soundproofed room, staring into the coin-sized camera lens that watched me from behind a bulletproof window, wondering when and how I would make my next move.
I was still slumped in that chair, fighting exhaustion but fully awake, when my new interrogator entered the room. He did not arrive alone. He came with a matched set of three guards in Marine combat armor. The man was tall and thin, with a gray handlebar mustache that extended well past the corners of his mouth. He had a familiar face. I could not dredge up the memory of where I had seen him before, so I dismissed him as just another militiaman.
“Well, well, Wayson Harris, I always expected you to end up in here,” the man said. Clearly he knew me, and I got the feeling he bore a grudge.
His guards planted themselves on either side of the door, where they stood as still as statues. The armed guards weren’t necessary. I would not try to escape, not yet. I would wait for Mars.
“Tell me about your plans to recapture Terraneau,” the interrogator asked as he sat down in the chair on the side of the table. He spoke in an easy, informal way.
“I have no interest in retaking this planet,” I said.
“Oh, right. I heard about that. You came here to warn us. Wayson Harris the Liberator messiah.
“We spotted two more fighter carriers this morning.”
“Now there are three of them,” I muttered to myself. Things were looking up.
“What’s with all that firepower if you are here to rescue us?” I locked eyes with him. He was one of those guys who meets your stare and doesn’t blink and doesn’t look away because he thinks it’s some sort of macho challenge. I played along for a second, winked and smiled and had a look around the room. Metal chairs, wall-mounted camera, armed guards, locked door …yup, I was in prison.
I wondered which carriers had made it out. The ad-Din had almost certainly survived. Could the Kamehameha have made it to the zone? The thought left me elated.
“I didn’t actually bring them with me,” I said. “It’s more of a rendezvous.” For some reason, I felt fidgety. I caught myself tapping my fingers on the table and dropped my hands to my thighs. Alarms sounded in my head, and it wasn’t fear. Something was about to happen, I could feel it.
Like animals sometimes do, I sensed a coming storm, but I did not know the nature of that storm.
“Are there more ships on the way?” the interrogator asked.
“I sure hope so,” I said, thinking of the U.A. barges.
“Where is the rest of your fleet?” he asked.
I sighed. “That depends what you mean by my ‘fleet.’ If you mean the Scutum-Crux Fleet, most of it is in the Cygnus Arm. If you mean the Enlisted Man’s Fleet, that’s all over the galaxy.”
Doctorow, his high-minded ideals now mingled with paranoia, would probably object to my being tortured; but that did not mean he wouldn’t have me executed. He’d happily leave me locked up until he was sure I posed no threat.
I could wait this out. Mars needed time to make the arrangements. I knew he needed time, but I couldn’t get past the feeling that something was about to happen. A bomb was about to explode, or a gun was about to go off, or a planet was about to go up in flames. Or was it just a case of nerves?
“I’m going to ask you again. How many ships do you have in your fleet?” The man sounded like he had run out of patience.
“I really don’t know,” I said, not thinking about what I was saying. “It depends how many ships survived the ambush.”
“What ambush?” he asked.
I saw no reason to hide the whole truth, not anymore. “I told Doctorow that we helped evacuate Olympus Kri. What I did not tell him was that the Unified Authority attacked us after the evacuation. They caught us napping, and we lost some of our ships.”
“So you came here looking for asylum?”
“I came here hoping to pull your worthless asses out of a fire,” I said. Not the most politic response, but at least it was honest.
“That’s what you told President Doctorow. He didn’t believe you either,” he said, picking up a clipboard, presumably looking over notes from the previous interrogations. “You told him that aliens have attacked two other planets, and they are coming here to kill us.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said.
“You wouldn’t?”
“You’ve got your head so far up your ass, the aliens might not notice you,” I said.
He looked up from his clipboard and gave me a plastic smile. He wanted to hit me, I could see it in his eyes. He stood, squared his shoulders, placed the clipboard on the table. “So you came here to warn us? To be honest with you, Harris, I always thought you were a coward. I still do.