The anomaly around the cruiser began at the bow of the ship and wound around the hull like an electric skein. With my goggles on, I saw only lightning, creating the illusion that it might be inside the ship. I felt a stab of fear, then the broadcast ended, and everything went dark.
“You can remove your goggles now, Captain,” Captain Pershing said.
Feeling unsteady, I clamped my trembling fingers on the goggles and pulled them from my eyes.
“Isn’t that something?” Pershing asked. “You never get used to it.” He sounded so damned excited.
“Specking hell,” I whispered, still feeling jitters in my muscles.
I had not meant for anyone to hear this, but Pershing did and laughed. “Harris, perhaps you would join me in my stateroom. It’s going to be a while before the Kamehameha arrives. We might as well get to know each other.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Pipes and cables ran along the ceiling of Captain Pershing’s stateroom. He had a dented metal relic for a desk wedged into a space so small that books falling from his shelves would almost certainly hit him. At least the room was bright. Two high-lumens light fixtures dangled from the ceiling, projecting glare so bright that it made me squint.
Apparently, Pershing believed we would chat like old friends. He pulled a chair up beside his desk for me, then threaded his way through the narrow alley between his deck and the wall. He slid his chair out as far as he could, then ducked beneath a bookshelf and squeezed his legs into the tight gap under his desk. Once safely seated, he said, “I’ll tell you up front, Harris, Fleet Command showed me your orders. Some duty you got there. Play your cards right, and you could end up the most powerful man in the galaxy.”
Having known Pershing for about five minutes, I gave him the politic response to any statement by a superior officer. “Yes, sir.”
“You don’t seem excited about it,” Pershing noted.
“Are we speaking man-to-man, or am I a clone Marine speaking to his superior?”
“The gloves are off,” Pershing said.
“I’ve never traveled on a self-broadcasting cruiser before, but every other self-broadcaster I’ve ridden could go wherever it wanted,” I said. “Is there a problem with your broadcast computer?”
“What’s your point?” Pershing asked.
“We could have broadcast in right beside the Kamehameha ,” I said.
Pershing’s expression hardened into something a little less friendly. “True enough.”
“So Fleet Command asked you to stage this little soiree,” I guessed.
Pershing leaned back in his chair and laughed. “Captain Harris, you’re a bright man. Admiral Brocius warned me you were smart.”
I did not respond. I had to play this interview just right, passing myself off as cautious instead hostile. If I came across as spoiling for a fight, Pershing might report back to Brocius that I was too big a risk. If I played it too polite, he might suspect a hidden agenda.
Pershing waited several seconds for me to speak, then added, “Okay, yes, this conversation may have been authorized on some level. Admiral Brocius is keeping an eye on you. Do you blame him?”
I still said nothing.
“You do realize that they’re giving you command of the largest fleet in the galaxy?”
“The largest fleet in the galaxy,” I repeated. “That’s one way of putting it. Here’s another, they’re sending me to the far end of the galaxy with no way to return.”
“Is that really how you see it, Harris?” Pershing asked. “You’ll have three times as many battleships as the Earth Fleet.”
True enough. All of the six galactic arms had three fleets; but in the Scutum-Crux Arm, the Unified Authority combined those fleets into one.
“Are they giving me any self-broadcasting ships …you know, for shuttling in supplies?”
Pershing shook his head. “It’s not in the cards.”
“Are they planning on reestablishing a broadcast connection between Terraneau and Earth?”
“No,” Pershing said in a quiet voice, making no attempt to mask his irritation.
“So I’ll have big ships, plenty of guns, and a lot of empty space.”
“There’s always Terraneau,” Pershing pointed out.
“If we can’t break Terraneau away from the aliens, we’re screwed,” I said.
Pershing sat silent for a moment. In former times, before the civil war and the Avatari invasion, the commanding officer of a scow like this cruiser would barely have been considered an officer at all. Some commanders didn’t even think cruisers qualified as capital ships. Pershing had a shabby little office with pipes running along the ceiling and battered furniture, a stateroom fit for an officer with a dead-end career.
But times had changed. He was the commander of a self-broadcasting naval ship, a scarce commodity indeed. Officer country on this scow may have been dingy, but the men who inhabited it had friends in high places.
“You’ve got yourself a fleet, and I have no doubt you’ll recapture Terraneau, Captain.” Pershing said this with the voice that officers use when they want to signal the end of an interview.
I thought about offering to swap places with Pershing—he could have the gigantic fleet and the strategic planet, and I would take the dilapidated cruiser; but I knew better. I had already pushed him too far and, despite his chatty demeanor, his interest in me was anything but friendly.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Some Pentagon genius must have choked when he saw the logistics. The Navy originally intended to ship the entire population of Clonetown to Scutum-Crux in one mass transfer. Who came up with the idea of trusting thirty thousand trained killing machines to behave themselves as you shipped them out to nowhere?
The plans changed. Instead of shipping us off like Marines, the Pentagon transferred the inmates of Clonetown the way prison guards transfer inmates—with limited contact and in small groups. Granted, they did not place us in shackles, but we were confined to our transports. Pershing’s cruiser served as the prison bus, hauling us in increments of four hundred men at a time.
Captain Pershing’s shuttle service ran in both directions. After dropping us off with the fleet, his orders had him loading up natural-borns and returning them to Earth. The Navy intended to complete the entire transfer four hundred men at a time, but I did not think the sailors out in Scutum-Crux would be happy with this slow-trickle approach. The natural-born officers coming back to Earth had just spent the last four years of their lives running laps around a tiny planet in a nondescript corner of space, they’d be in a rush to head home. The problem was, there were so many of them.
The Kamehameha was an old Expansion-class fighter carrier, making it the smallest of the thirty-six fighter carriers in the SC Fleet. She carried an eight-thousand-man crew, nearly a thousand of whom were natural-borns. She also carried a complement of two thousand Marines, almost two hundred of whom were natural-born officers. It would take Pershing’s cruiser three trips just to bring home the natural-borns on the Kamehameha.
The other carriers would take longer as they were Perseus-class, vessels twice as big as the Kamehameha. While the basic crew of a Perseus-class fighter carrier was only slightly larger than the crew of an Expansion-class ship, Perseus carriers stowed five times as many Marines and twice as many fighters. All fighter pilots were natural-born.
And the carriers only formed the backbone of the Scutum-Crux Fleet. There were 90 battleships, 150 frigates, 120 cruisers, and sundry communications ships, minelayers and minesweepers, and scouts, and more. At four hundred men per trip, it would take Pershing months to ferry all natural-born officers back to Earth. Maybe years.
Sitting in the windowless kettle of the transport, I did not get a view of the cruiser as we left, nor did I catch a glimpse of the Kamehameha as we approached her. I sat in the darkness of the cabin with my men listening to the noise of the landing gear. The rear doors ground open, and the officer on duty came up the ramp.