“I was on my way to Little Man.”
“Your family okay?” I asked.
“A carrier buzzed them last night. I think it scared them. They’re colonists. Having the Navy around makes them nervous.”
“Did anything happen?” I asked.
“The captain gave them one month to evacuate the planet. They’ll still be there when this is over with.” For some reason, I got the feeling that he was not anxious to visit Little Man. Until recently, he never even mentioned his family. Now, when he talked about them, he did not seem to exude warm feelings.
We agreed to meet in Safe Harbor once I got off this ship. Freeman would go and see what happened to Callahan and the commandant at Fort Washington. One way or another, I thought I could bring in Batt Wingate, and we would need witnesses to prove he was our Benedict Arnold.
My new uniform made me a lieutenant in the Confederate Navy. Now that I was an officer, I moved around the ship more freely. I walked the halls and looked for clues.
The first thing that struck me was the sheer emptiness of the ship. U.A. ships were crowded with personnel. Engineers, weapons officers, cooks, communications officers …wherever you looked, you saw sailors. Command ships seemed doubly crowded because, along with the crew, they had fleet officers and administrative flunkies.
This ship had a skeleton crew, maybe a half-crew. I walked down major arteries between engineering and weapons systems passing only an occasional sailor.
The ship itself was clean, brightly lit, and remarkably unorganized. The cables that I saw lining the walls down in the landing bay also snaked along the halls on the upper decks. They were about three inches in diameter and highly insulated, which led me to believe that they might carry a high-voltage electrical charge. The ceilings in this part of the ship were only eight feet tall, and the cables hung one foot lower than that. At one point, thinking I was alone in a long hall, I stopped to examine them. The outside covering of these cables was black with maroon strips.
“Is there a problem with the cables, Sir?” somebody asked behind my back.
I whirled around expecting to see an MP. It was a petty officer—a maintenance technician. I recognized the crossed hammers insignia on his blouse. It was the same insignia that the U.A. Navy used. This man did not suspect me of being a spy. He was worried about my spotting a flaw in the way that the cables were hung.
“Looks sound,” I said.
He saluted, but he had a curious, maybe even slightly nervous look on his face. “Sir,” he said, looking as if he was not sure he should continue. I thought I knew what he would say and I was ready.
“Yes?”
Now lowering his voice to a whisper, he leaned forward and said, “You forgot your bars.” As he said this, he pinched the right side of his collar between his thumb and forefinger and shook it.
That was not what I expected. I pretended to be confused. Seeing that there were no bars on my collar, I acted surprised and embarrassed. “Thank you. I can’t believe I missed that,” I said with an expression that I hoped looked like a nervous grin. The petty officer saluted and left.
Of course there were no bars pinned to my collar, I had liberated this blouse from laundry. No officer worth his spit would leave his bars or clusters on the collar of a blouse that was headed for a cleaning.
My first discovery was that this ship was a battleship. I found that out when I passed a directory on the top deck. The directory showed the ship’s seven decks plus a picture of the ship from the outside. A ship of this size should have had a 2,500-man crew. Now, having walked its length on every deck, I guessed the crew at no more than 800. Maybe one-tenth of the crew was Japanese. The engineering area was almost all Japanese.
The Japanese officers made no attempt to fit in with the other sailors that I saw. Most of the men on this battleship wore tan-colored uniforms. The Japanese uniforms were dark blue. Still, Japanese officers spoke English whether talking to other officers or just among themselves.
The closer I came to the command deck, the more this ship looked Japanese. Not far from the directory, on the command deck, stood an archway made of two posts topped by two beams. Under the arch was a shrine or display with three long swords stretched across a three-tiered pedestal. Since the officers I saw walk past this shrine did not stop to bow or pray to it, I decided the display had more to do with heritage than religion.
I continued toward the bridge, passing through officer country and the maze of cubicles and offices that occupies the top deck of almost any naval ship. Here I walked with a businesslike stride, acting as if I had an important meeting to attend. On a U.A. Navy ship, someone would have noticed the missing bars. I would have been stopped and questioned. On this ship, few people noticed how I dressed.
I turned a corner and saw the entry to the bridge. Taking a deep breath to steel myself, I walked to the door. The bridge was spacious and dark. Teams of sailors gathered around various consoles and workstations.
Everyone in the room was Japanese. In the dimmed light, their royal blue uniforms were black as shadows, even in the low glow from the workstations. Looking around the floor, I estimated that there were at least fifty officers sitting at the various stations.
In the center of the bridge sat a large square table which the captain and his senior officers used to chart courses and consider battle strategies.
There was nothing else to do. I stepped onto the bridge and walked its breadth. The workstations were arranged in concentric circles. Walking quickly without a pause, I recognized each station. The computers in the weapons area, which were unmanned at that moment, had large displays showing the diagram of the battleship with its gun and cannon arrays highlighted. The engineering station had computers showing detailed maps of each deck. I would have loved to have parked myself beside one of those computers to discover its many secrets, but three men sat at that station. The white glow of the readout display flickered on their faces.
Three men sat in front of one elongated screen in the navigation section. Their screen had a map of the galaxy along the top but most of the screen was filled with the local star system. I did not recognize the system. The last area I passed as I lapped the outer circle of the bridge was communications. Voices came from a station for monitoring fleet communications. During battle, this station would be the nerve center for the fleet. Now, after the battle, transmissions between ships went unobserved.
BATTLE GROUP SIX ABLE, THIS IS BATTLESHIP SEVEN ABLE, OVER.
COME IN BATTLESHIP SEVEN ABLE. THIS IS BATTLE SIX ABLE COMMAND.
WE ARE BREAKING FORMATION. DO YOU COPY?
WHAT SEEMS TO BE THE PROBLEM SEVEN ABLE?
This particular station was more cluttered than the worst workstation in the Golan traffic tower. A stack of data pads had toppled, spreading across the desk. Pencils, pens, papers, coffee cups, and other bric-a-brac lay all around those pads. There were four cups of coffee along the edge of that particular desk along with a brick-sized box of audio chips. In the center of this mess was a large ashtray filled to capacity with cigarette ash and butts. The line of drawers along the left side of the station hung partially open. The drawers, like everything else at this station, overflowed with junk.
I passed by the station without slowing, completed my lap of the bridge and left. Not far from the bridge, I found a bathroom. A couple of men stood by the urinals; so I entered a stall and waited until they left, then I contacted Freeman.
“Okay,” I spoke quickly, but in a whisper, “this is a battleship. I have no idea where we are. I am going to leave this line open. Tell Huang to have his Intel section listen in.”
Freeman nodded. He did not bother telling me to “be careful” or to “watch my back.” That was not his way. He stared into the console intense and humorless as ever. His eyes reminded me of a double-barreled shotgun as they stared out from that mahogany skull. He was the most dangerous man in the galaxy, and I had absolutely no doubt that I could rely on him. His very being communicated undeniable competence.