“We’d rip them a new asshole if they came out here in the fleet we know about,” I said.
“You think they have a new fleet?”
“They have something we don’t know about,” I said. “You served with Brocius.”
“Damn right I did, twelve years’ worth,” Warshaw said.
“Did you ever hear about his casino?” I asked.
“I heard about it,” Warshaw said.
“The man does not gamble, but he has an entire casino in his house,” I said.
“He gambles,” Warshaw said. “He puts his money up.”
“He plays as the house, which buys him slightly better odds. That’s how Brocius likes to play, with the odds stacked in his direction.”
“Yeah …yeah, that’s his MO. He stacks the deck.”
“Before he sends a fleet into harm’s way …”
Warshaw nodded, and said, “You think it’s new ships.”
“That’s my guess,” I said. “And you can bet they’re bigger, faster, and more powerful than what we have out here.”
“So what do you have in mind, Harris?”
“We don’t want to play his game if he’s giving himself house odds,” I said.
Warshaw laughed. “Good luck attacking Earth without a self-broadcasting fleet.”
“Three self-broadcasting battleships are about to arrive on our doorstep,” I pointed out.
“Touching those ships would be an act of war,” Warshaw said.
I tapped the envelopes. “They’ve already declared the war, I’m angling to get off the first shot.”
Warshaw walked over to his desk and sat down to think things over. He pumped his left fist so he could watch the muscles in his forearm bulge and relax, bulge and relax. “Three battleships aren’t going to do us much good. The first time we tried to take them into Earth space, Brocius would nail us.”
“So we don’t enter Earth space. We take them someplace else, someplace they’re not expecting us to appear. We start up a salvage operation in the Galactic Eye.”
Warshaw stared at me, a quizzical look in his eyes. “The Mogat world? I thought it was destroyed.”
“Not the planet, the space around it. The Mogats had four hundred self-broadcasting ships in their fleet,” I said.
“The way I heard it, there’s not much left of those ships,” Warshaw said.
I did not need a history lesson on the destruction of the Mogat Fleet, I was there. I took a step toward Warshaw, and said, “That doesn’t mean we destroyed the equipment inside those ships. There are four hundred ships with broadcast engines and broadcast generators circling that planet. What do you want to bet that some of those generators and engines are still in working condition?”
Warshaw smiled. “You know, General Harris, I always wanted to command my own self-broadcasting fleet.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The next week passed slowly as I orchestrated one set of missions and submitted fabricated reports for another. Officially, my Marines had begun the reclamation of Norristown. The Corps of Engineers sent thousand-man teams to clear debris, fix roads, restore power, build farms, and bury the dead. They also refurbished Fort Sebastian. The project went quickly.
Behind the scenes, my Marines scouted Terraneau for a new base, food stores, and a place to build a prison. We found most of the cities in the same condition as Norristown—destroyed and populated by scared civilians. The Avatari had laid most cities bare and left others entirely untouched.
We found no rhyme or reason to the destruction. The aliens never even entered Carlton, the tenth largest city on Terraneau. The people had power, sewage, even running water. The only part of the city hurt during the invasion was the spaceport, and the residents destroyed it themselves, thinking that having a working spaceport might attract the Avatari.
We found several small towns untouched but empty. The aliens might or might not have killed all of the people, but we found no corpses. The houses and stores simply sat empty, as if the people had just packed up and left. One of those abandoned burgs was Zebulon, a town with a population of five thousand that had mysteriously whittled down to zero without leaving a suicide note.
Not an organization to let things go to waste, the Corps of Engineers converted Zebulon into a relocation camp and renamed the place, “Outer Bliss,” in honor of the Texas relocation camp outside Fort Bliss. The Corps surrounded the town with electrified razor-wire fences and guard towers, then invited me to inspect its work. Thomer and I flew down for a look.
The landing field and barracks were on the outside of the fence—a sturdy flattop with a Quonset-hut hangar. Outer Bliss sat on a plateau in the high desert. My men would be hot during the day and cold at night until the Corps could add heating and ventilation.
The prison area was a lot nicer than the Texas facility from which it took its name. Instead of living in sheds, the inmates would occupy houses and a small hotel. They would have pools, two movie theaters, school facilities for meetings, and a gymnasium for sports. Thomer and I walked the empty streets, the dry desert wind whistling as it whipped around houses and lampposts.
“This beats the hell out of Clonetown,” I said. “Maybe they made it too nice.” Yes, I was bitter. The inmates in this camp would spend their incarceration in relative comfort. In all fairness, we were moving fifteen thousand men into a town with living facilities for five thousand people, but they would not be forced to take communal showers or sleep in sheds made out of corrugated metal.
We had reached a somewhat shady lane lined with dead trees and brick homes. Sitting on a small rise a few blocks ahead of us, an empty elementary school presided over a neighborhood that had not seen children in several years.
Thomer looked around, and said, “I used to dream about growing up in a town like this. I bet kids used to ride bicycles down this street.”
Suburban as a shopping mall, Outer Bliss did not compare to the horror of Clonetown. Then I reminded myself that the men who would soon populate this prison were, themselves, innocent victims. Natural-born or not, they were not politicians. But they would all be natural-borns …
“It’s too specking nice,” I said. “It’s like we’re sending the bastards on a specking vacation.”
Thomer continued walking. He did not even look over at me. He simply said, “It’s a prison, Harris. They aren’t going to like it.”
The grass in the yards had died and withered. There were no dogs or cats in the town. The Corps had hunted down anything larger than a squirrel, then fumigated the houses to kill the rats and mice. It also hauled out the cars, the trucks, the tractors, anything that could be used to crash the gates.
We entered a grocery store and discovered that the people had left food behind. We explored a bank and found the safe-deposit boxes intact. We toured a two-story motel. The beds were made but the blankets were dusty. I wondered if the Corps had dressed the beds or if this was the last job of maids who had vanished four years ago. We saw no signs of death or violence, nothing to suggest that the inhabitants had been forced to move.
Back on the Kamehameha, I tapped the intercom button outside Admiral Thorne’s quarters and asked him if he had a moment.
“What is it, Harris?” He did not sound unfriendly, just a busy man with a lot on his mind.
“It’s about transfers,” I said.
“Very well,” he said, and the door opened. Thorne was no fool. When he saw the two MPs I brought with me, he knew the score. He stood and stared past me, into the hall, watching the MPs.
“You’re making your move,” he said. The old man stood motionless beside his desk, a pen in his hands. His wispy, white hair a mess, his blue eyes slightly red from days with very little sleep, his skin pale from years spent away from the sun, he did not put up a fight. “Am I under arrest?” he asked as the door closed behind me.
His words felt like a splash of cold water. “We’re not arresting anybody.”