He said, “I understand your need to intrude upon our privacy, Captain, but why in God’s name are you shooting at us?”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Hoping that the mob would overestimate our numbers, I had my Marines trail me as I left the building.
The locals made way for me as I entered the street, allowing me and my Marines to pass through unchallenged. I worked my way toward the flaming wreckage of the jeep and the man in the combat helmet who stood beside it. As I came closer, he removed his helmet, revealing shoulder-length hair and a flowing beard. I hardly recognized him.
I came within a few feet of the man and removed my helmet as well.
“What are you doing here, Captain Harris?” asked the Right Reverend Colonel Ellery Doctorow in a voice that held both hostility and restraint. This was the man who had told the fleet to go away. He sounded like he was about to do it again. Gone was the slightest trace that this man had ever been an Army chaplain.
“We came to liberate Terraneau,” I said.
Doctorow laughed. “You hear that? He came to rescue us,” he called out to his men. Those close enough to hear him laughed. Then turning to me, he said, “The aliens left here long ago, Captain.”
Somehow, Doctorow seemed to have gone from highest-ranking shaman in the U.A. Army to some sort of acting governor of Norristown. Hell, for all I knew, he might have set himself up as the lord high emperor of all Terraneau. Whatever his domain, these men clearly followed him.
Doctorow was not as tall as he looked in his picture. He stood over six feet tall, but I still had an inch or two on him. He had aged over the last four years and had become less military in his bearing. The photo that came with my orders showed Doctorow still in his fifties; now he looked more like a well-preserved sixty-five-year-old. He stood erect, but he was too thin. He had let his coal-colored flattop grow into a shaggy mane that reached down to his shoulders, and his thick salt-and-pepper beard had strayed over to the salt side of the equation.
I did not know whether to call the man by his military rank or religious title. Since he was out of uniform, I decided to go the religious route. “Reverend Doctorow,” I began.
“I prefer ‘Colonel,’ ” he corrected.
“Colonel, you see that bright stuff up there in the sky?” I asked.
“Hard to miss,” Doctorow said.
“They call that the ‘ion curtain,’ ” I said.
“I’m familiar with the term. The scientist who coined it was stationed at Fort Sebastian.”
“Was he a dwarf?” I asked.
Doctorow smiled. “It sounds as if we have a common acquaintance.”
“Dr. William Sweetwater,” I said.
Undoubtedly remembering dark days past, Doctorow said, “They tried to lift him off the planet as the invasion began. Sounds like he made it.”
“I met him on New Copenhagen,” I said.
“New Copenhagen? The aliens made it all the way to New Copenhagen?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. There was nothing more to say.
We stood in the road, in the junction between the three skyscrapers. Doctorow’s horde surrounded us, but they also gave us a lot of space. The seven men who had come down with me had worked their way to one of the jeeps. The tone of our meeting was neither friendly nor hostile. “They would have finished us off on New Copenhagen if it were not for Sweetwater,” I said. “The little bastard saved us.”
“Saved you from what?” Doctorow asked. “The aliens don’t do much once they capture your planet. They leave their ion curtain in the sky; they knock down buildings. But they’re not all that bad.
“They killed off our army, but they left us alone once we stopped trying to fight them.” He wore a reassuring expression, the smile of a parent explaining the difference between right and wrong to an ignorant kid.
“They haven’t left,” I said.
“We haven’t seen them for years.”
“You do know that there’s a line of glowing spheres no more than twenty miles from here?” I asked. “The aliens use those to spawn. You know that, right?”
Doctorow placed a hand on my shoulder. It was a condescending gesture, and it made me angry. He leaned toward me and spoke in a whisper so that no one would hear what he said. “That, Captain Harris, is why we asked your fleet to go away.”
I did not go into detail, but I told Doctorow about New Copenhagen. I described how the Avatari had hollowed mountains and filled them with gas so toxic the fumes slowly melted your skin. I told him how the aliens would expand the nearest sun and use it to bake Terraneau until it was cinder and gas.
“Is that a fact?” Doctorow asked, already acting a lot less sure of himself. “That changes things. How long do we have?”
“It will be a few thousand years before the sun goes on broil, but we’ve already located the gas,” I said. “It’s nasty shit.”
“There’s no need for vulgarity,” Doctorow said; but I had the feeling that he said it out of reflex instead of conviction, the same way he might say “God bless you” to a man who sneezed. As a former Army man, he knew the score. Among military men, swearing isn’t a vice, it’s a specking art form. Once he finished considering what I said, he added, “I don’t suppose you have any proof?”
“Excuse me,” I told Doctorow. I replaced my helmet and tried to reach Herrington. He did not answer, so I called Thomer instead.
I wanted to send Doctorow to the mines with Herrington, but I could not raise his transport. Somehow, he had flown out of range.
I contacted Hollingsworth and told him to get a transport ready, then I told Thomer to return to the airfield. With Herrington gone, Thomer would need to take his place. He would take Doctorow to see the Avatari mines, and he would lead a team into the mines to detonate the bomb.
As one of the only three men in the Unified Authority to enter an alien dig site and survive, Thomer had the right ré sumé for offering guided tours around Avatari mines; but I still worried. The Right Reverend would undoubtedly notice Thomer’s Fallzoud-induced lethargy. Thomer was more alert than he had been back on the ship, but he still reacted to questions a fraction of a second too slow.
Thomer arrived at the airfield first. He loaded seventy-five Marines onto the transport, then waited for Doctorow to show. Once the Right Reverend rolled onto the field, Thomer led him onto the transport, and they took off for the mines. They did not leave empty-handed. I hoped Doctorow would not notice the large crate in the cargo hold or ask why seventy-five Marines had come along for the ride.
So far, nothing on this mission had gone according to plan.
“Captain Harris, sir?” Hollingsworth called from the airfield just moments after Thomer and Doctorow took to the air.
“What do you have?”
“I’m still not getting through to Sergeant Herrington.”
“Maybe something is wrong with his equipment,” I said.
“I understand, sir, but I haven’t had any luck locating his transport with our radar.” Hollingsworth was using the equipment on our third transport. Powerful equipment.
I wondered how long it had been since I spoke with Herrington. A couple of hours had passed. He said he had located the mines. He had said something else, but I was distracted. I’d missed what he said.
Then I remembered what he had said. “Oh shit,” I groaned. “Speck.”
“What is it, sir?” Hollingsworth asked.
“Herrington said he was going to fly by the Avatari spheres,” I said. “He said he was going to swing by the spheres on the way back to the airfield.”
“I don’t understand.” Hollingsworth sounded confused. Not having served on New Copenhagen, he could not fit the pieces together.
“Sergeant, you’d better have your pilot patch me through to Thomer’s transport,” I said. “We have a hell of a problem.”