“Shut up and listen,” Godfrey said in an uncharacteristically severe voice. “The entire Central Cygnus Fleet is on alert. Command is looking for this man. His name is…”
Godfrey paused to check the bulletin. “Amos Crowley. Have any of you grunts seen him?”
“Doesn’t he live in Morrowtown?” Lars Rickman joked with the man sitting next to him.
I was laughing with everybody else when Dalmer passed the picture my way. Crowley had intense dark eyes, white hair, and a thick white beard. I looked over at Taj Guttman squirming in his seat. We both recognized him, though Guttman clearly did not want to say anything. It was the man from the card game.
“What is he wanted for?” I asked.
“The bulletin doesn’t say much about what he’s done,” Godfrey said. He held his notes up and read in a soft voice that almost seemed meant for a private conversation. “ ‘Crowley is sought for involvement in several seditious activities.’ The brass in Washington labeled him an enemy of the Republic.”
“He’ll fit right in on Gobi; nobody likes the U.A. over here,” someone bawled from the back of the room.
“Crowley was a general in the Army,” Godfrey said. The laughing stopped, but I could hear men whispering to each other. “That makes him special. He was the highest-ranking general in the Perseus Arm before he disappeared. Now Washington wants a word with him in the worst way.”
“He might be here,” I said, and the hall went silent. “I saw him two weeks ago. One of Guttman’s card games.”
Glan Godfrey turned toward me. “Are you certain about this, Harris?”
“Yes,” I said, suddenly feeling like a Marine again.
“What about you, Guttman?”
“It was a while ago…” he said. “I mean, I guess that looks like him, but I was…”
“You festering sack of eye pus,” Godfrey said in a voice that echoed a dawning realization. “Did you bet your sidearm?” When Guttman did not answer, Godfrey’s glare hardened. “Shit, Guttman, you lost your sidearm, didn’t you?”
“I won it back with the next hand.” Guttman sounded scared.
“Shut your speck-receptacle!” Godfrey snapped. “Fleet Command is going to want a full report. I’ll be surprised if we don’t all end up in front of a firing squad for this, Four-Cheeks.” He glared at Guttman for another moment, then turned toward me, and said, “Harris, come with me.”
Taking short, brisk strides, and not saying a word, Godfrey ushered me to his office. He worked in a cavernous chamber that had probably once served as an entire office complex. The platoon could have bunked in the space. Real estate was never a problem on Gobi.
Godfrey’s desk sat in a far corner. Light poured in through arc-shaped windows along the domed ceiling. “I need you to report what you saw to Fleet Command,” Godfrey said, as we walked toward his desk.
“You want me to do it?”
“I’m not letting Guttman anywhere near Command. Harris, we’re in trouble here. Admiral Brocius has taken a personal interest in this hunt. You think I’m going to show him that moron?”
“Brocius?” I asked, feeling numb in the knees. Vice Admiral Alden Brocius, the highest-ranking officer in the Central Cygnus Fleet, had a reputation for being hard-nosed.
Godfrey chuckled bitterly. “Brocius is personally directing the manhunt.” He looked at me and smiled. “Don’t worry about your career, Harris. You’re on Gobi, you’re already in the shits.”
Godfrey crouched in front of his communications console and typed in a code. A young ensign appeared on the screen. He studied Godfrey for a moment, then asked the nature of the call. Godfrey said he had a positive sighting of Amos Crowley, and the ensign put the call on hold. When the screen flashed on again, Brocius, a tall and slender man with jet-black hair and brown eyes, stared back at us.
“What is it, Sergeant?” the admiral asked in a brusque voice.
“Two of my men spotted General Crowley.”
“I see,” Brocius said, sounding more interested. “You have a positive identification?”
“Yes, sir. One of the men who identified him is with me now.”
“Let’s have a word with him,” Brocius said.
Godfrey saluted and moved back. I stepped forward and saluted.
“What is your name, son?”
“PFC Wayson Harris, sir.”
“You saw Amos Crowley?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you believe he is still on Gobi?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Do you have any reason to believe he has left the planet?”
“No, sir.”
“Then you believe he is still on Gobi?”
“He did not tell the private his plans, sir.”
“I realize that,” Brocius said, starting to sound irritated. “Do you think he is still on Gobi?”
I did not know how to answer. I had no idea if Crowley was still on Gobi, and Brocius did not seem to care. It seemed like the admiral wanted me to say that Crowley was still here. I stole a glance at Godfrey and saw him nodding.
“Well, which is it?”
“He may be here, sir.”
“I see. Very well then, put the sergeant back on.”
Godfrey stepped up to the receiver. “Your man does not seem confident,” Brocius said. “Still, if there is anything to it…I’ll send someone to investigate.”
Perhaps I overestimated Crowley’s importance. I don’t think that I expected the Central Cygnus Fleet to converge on Gobi, but I did expect a significant force. I expected marshals guarding the spaceport and a surveillance fleet blockading the planet…a full-blown manhunt. Admiral Brocius did not send any of those things. He sent one man—Ray Freeman.
Three days after my interview with Admiral Brocius, a beat-up barge appeared in the sky above our base. It was early in the morning, and the barge left a contrail of oily smoke in the otherwise immaculate sky. Lars Rickman and I happened to be standing in a breezeway enjoying the 90-degree morning chill when the ship first appeared. We watched as it touched down on the loading area beside our outer wall, its gear making a shrill grinding noise as it settled on the tarmac.
“What a wreck,” Rickman said, as we trotted down for a closer look.
The barge had battered armor. Some of the plates around its cockpit had curled along the edges. There were rows of inset doors along its forty-foot hull that looked as if they might have housed an impressive array of weapons.
“This bitch has been through a war,” Rickman said. He had a bemused smile as he looked back and forth along the spaceship’s dilapidated hull. As we walked around the rear of the ship, the hatch opened, and Ray Freeman emerged— the biggest man I have ever met, standing at least seven feet tall with arms and legs as thick as most men’s chests.
Freeman was a “black man.” Understand that since the United States brought the world together in a single “unified authority,” racial terms like “African,” “Oriental,” and “Caucasian” had become meaningless. Under the Unified Authority, the Earth became the political center of the galaxy. Most commerce, manufacturing, and farming were done in the territories, and the territories were fully integrated. I heard rumors about certain races refusing to marry outside of their own; but for the most part, we had become a one-race nation. So when Ray Freeman, whose skin was the color of coffee without a trace of cream, stepped out of his ship, it was like the return of an extinct species.
It wasn’t just that Freeman was taller and several shades darker than any man I had ever seen. It was that his biceps were the size of a grown man’s skull when he bent his arms, and his triceps looked like slabs of rock when his arms hung straight. And it was that you could see the outlines of those muscles through the stiff, bulletproof canvas of his sleeves.
Freeman’s shaved head was so massive that it looked like he was wearing a helmet. A small knot of scars formed a paisley pattern on the back of his skull. He had a wide nose, which looked as if it had been broken several times, and thick lips. His neck was as wide around as either of my thighs. It completely filled the collar of his jumper, a garment that looked lost between Army fatigues and a pilot’s uniform. Dents and scratches dotted every inch of the massive armored plate that covered his chest and shoulders. Judging by the scars and battered armor, I knew this man had enemies.