I looked toward the man. “You must be a Mogat,” I said in as dismissive a voice as I could muster.
“The term is Morgan Atkins Believer. I suggest you remember that, Harris, or your stay here could become real unpleasant.” The humor never left his face, but his voice turned serious.
Now that I stopped to look, I saw that this was not a man to take lightly. He had a broad and powerful build. His bull neck was almost as wide as his jaw, making it look like he had a pointed head. The muscles in his shoulders bulged, but this was not the beautiful physique of a bodybuilder. This man had padding around his gut.
“Learn anything else?” I asked.
The second man outside my cell, a short chubby man with the brown hair, stepped forward with a data pad and answered. “Harris, Wayson, Colonel, Unified Authority Marines. Raised: U.A. Orphanage # five hundred fifty-three. Year of Manufacture: 2490. Clone Class: Liberator.
“How does a clone, especially a Liberator Clone, achieve the rank of colonel?” the dark-haired man asked.
“You want to know how I became a colonel?” I asked.
“I want to know why you exist at all,” the man said. “How did you find your way on this ship?”
“Do you want the full story or the abbreviated version?” With this I sat up.
“Let’s stick with the short one for now,” the man with the data pad said.
“I caught a ride on your transport when it left New Columbia.”
The blond-haired man, clearly my jailor, smiled and gave me a vigorous nod. “Know what Harris, I believe you. An honest clone, no less.”
“May I ask a question?”
“Go ahead,” the man with the data pad said. The jailor scowled at him.
“Is this ship part of the Hinode Fleet, or part of the Confederate Navy, or part of the Galactic Central Fleet?”
“None of your business,” the man with the blond hair said.
“Confederate Navy,” the man with the dark hair said. The bigger man, the jailor, scowled at him.
“It depends who you ask, I suppose,” the blond man continued to glare down at him.
“So what is the Hinode Fleet?”
“Another name for the same bunch of ships,” the smaller man said.
“Do you have more than one fleet?” I asked.
“No,” the man admitted.
“Shut up,” the jailor snapped.
“He’s in jail, Sam, and he’s down to his skivvies. How is he going to tell anyone?” Then the man seemed to think twice about this before adding, “We will ask the questions from here on out, Harris. We have not decided what to do with you yet. I suggest you conduct yourself properly. Execution is not out of the question.”
They left me in my cell with nothing to do and no way of knowing how much time passed. I laid on the cot in my underwear staring at the ceiling and tried to piece together all of the little fragments of information I had collected. It seemed like the separatists had a genuine Power Struggle on their hands. They had an alliance, but all three sides were claiming the Navy for themselves.
Why did the Japanese officers wear different uniforms than the other men? Did the Mogats consider themselves part of the Confederate Arms? Did the Japanese? My thoughts drifted and I fell asleep.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
“I knew it was you the moment I heard they had a prisoner.” “Smiling” Tom Halverson, my nickname for him, stood outside my cell looking dapper in his dress whites, with the three gold stripes of a full admiral on his shoulder boards. He’d cut his graying hair into a flattop, but otherwise he looked no different than the first time I saw him, on the bridge of the Doctrinaire . “Hello, Harris.”
“Get specked,” I said.
“Watch yourself, clone.” Sam, my blond-haired jailor, warned me. Whenever people visited me, Sam accompanied them.
“That’s all right, Sergeant. Colonel Harris and I are old acquaintances,” Halverson said. “Is that why you’re here, Harris? Did you come for me?”
I did not respond.
“No comment, Harris? That doesn’t sound good.”
“The admiral asked you a question,” Sam said in his most menacing voice.
“That’s all right, Sergeant,” Halverson said.
“You know, Harris, you really are amazing. The rest of them can’t even locate our ships and you turn up on one of them. It’s a good thing the Unified Authority doesn’t have one hundred more of you. Of course if they want to win the war they can make more of you. But then, I get the feeling that all you want is a little revenge.”
“Why did you kill him?” I asked, propping myself up to look at Halverson. “You and Klyber were friends.”
“I should have thought that was obvious, Harris. He’s with the Unified Authority. I defected to the Confederate Arms. We were on different sides.”
“Get specked,” I said, slumping over on my back.
“I brought you a present, Harris.”
I did not respond.
“You can break these if you want, but I went to a lot of trouble to get them for you, so don’t expect me to replace them if you do.” He tossed a pair of mediaLink shades in through the bars.
“Bryce said you liked to keep up with current events. There should be some dandy news for you to follow over the next few weeks.
“And don’t bother trying to send messages out on those. I had the sending gear disabled.” With this, Halverson turned and left.
“You were stupid,” I yelled as he reached the door to the brig. “Killing Admiral Klyber was a stupid mistake.”
Halverson paused. “Why is that, Colonel?” he asked.
“Huang already planned to replace him with …”
“With Robert Thurston, no doubt,” Halverson said. He watched me for a moment with that implacable smile, and then he left.
Sam, who remained just outside the bars of my cell, continued to stare at me with those narrow green eyes that looked both alert and angry. Sometimes he looked like he could barely control himself. “If you break the lenses, they’d make real sharp blades. You might be able to save us some trouble and slit your own throat with ’em,” he said. “I’d like that.” Then he favored me with his backside, leaving me to pick up the shades.
I picked them up and turned them over in my hands to examine them from every angle. This was an expensive pair, far more stylish than the plastic shades I took from the late Derrick Hines. These shades had gold wire frames and honest-to-goodness glass lenses that automatically adjusted to ambient light levels.
The strip along the bottom of the lenses with the microphones had been removed. When I slipped the shades over my eyes and jacked in, I saw they had been hobbled so that the sending functions no longer worked. The browsing functions worked well however.
We were somewhere in the Norma Arm. Not only could I browse the Unified Authority-approved channels, I also found local broadcasts that were banned and filtered out of the U.A. media. Calendars were everywhere on the Link, and I knew that it was now March 26. Eleven days had passed since Bryce Klyber’s death. Thirty-six hours had passed since the attack on New Columbia. It was here that I watched the video feeds of the attack on New Columbia. I got to see how both sides reported the battle.
The big story on the U.A. feeds was the unveiling of the Doctrinaire . Admiral Huang, now officially the highest-ranking man in the Navy after Klyber’s death, could not have been any better suited for the role of tour guide. He began his tours by telling the press how the late Fleet Admiral Klyber conceived the project and spearheaded the construction of the ship.
Huang escorted a large group of reporters on a tour of the Doctrinaire . He charmed them with his enthusiasm as he led them into battle turret after battle turret, then showed them the observation deck from which they could view the rest of the ship.
Huang did not reveal classified secrets like the dual broadcast generators, but he highlighted many of the obvious innovations. No reporter could possibly have missed the four launch tubes that ran the length of the hull of the Doctrinaire , so Huang talked about the fighter squadrons at length. He pointed out that most fighter carriers had a single tube and a compliment of seventy Tomcat fighters. The Doctrinaire , with its four tubes, had 280 fighters. With their rounded antennas’ the new shield technology was impossible to miss; so Huang told the reporters about the rounded shields and gave a cursory explanation about the technology that made them possible.