He braced and asked, “You’re not going to kill …”
“I had the Corps of Engineers convert a small town into a relocation camp. It’s a damn sight better than what they put us in back on Earth,” I said.
“Is that what this is about? Is this revenge or revolution?” Thorne asked, the calm never leaving his voice.
I thought about the question for a moment. We were not sticking Thorne and his crew in our camp for revenge. We were doing it because we had no other choice. If we didn’t relocate them, they would try to stop us, and lives would be lost. We were putting them in our prison to protect them, I was sure of that much.
“Both,” I said.
“I see,” Thorne said. He stood still, staring into my eyes, clearly trying to decide whether he should say what he wanted to say next. He might have a pistol someplace in his room. He certainly had a panic button that would sound Klaxons on every ship in the fleet. I hoped he would not do anything foolish.
When he spoke, the words gushed like water breaking through a dam. “I can help you, you know. There’s nothing for me back on Earth. I have more ties here than I do on Earth.”
“Help me what?” I asked.
“I can help you run the fleet. I can help you fight your war. You found some way to get back to Earth, didn’t you? You wouldn’t do this if you didn’t know what you were doing. I can help.”
“Why would you do that?” I asked. Thorne struck me as an honest man, a fair man, the least aristocratic officer I had ever known; not the type of man who trades sides to stay in power.
He placed the papers on the desk. “Harris, they transferred me to the Scutum-Crux Fleet thirty-seven years ago. I’ve spent more of my life on these ships than on Earth. The fleet is my home.
“My parents died while I was still at the Naval Academy. I can’t think of anyone I care about on Earth.”
If the rumors were true, Thorne had more ties to this corner of space than he wanted to admit. Scuttlebutt had it that he had a common-law wife on Terraneau. I had never asked him about it, but the rumor went a long way toward explaining why he had never put in for a transfer.
“You are an officer of the Unified Authority Navy,” I pointed out. “I’d be crazy to trust you.” But I did trust him.
“I can help you. I have command experience.” He tapped his knuckle on the top of his desk, and asked, “Can we speak, man-to-man? Can we at least discuss my offer before you arrest me, General?”
Suddenly he was calling me “General.” He was right. Once we made our move, our field ranks would come into play.
I nodded. As I sat, I said, “I’m not arresting you.”
“But you are placing twenty thousand men in a prison camp.”
“I prefer the term, ‘relocation camp.’ And as of the last transfer, you’re down to about fifteen thousand natural-borns.”
“Let’s be honest with each other, General,” Thorne said. “Who is going to run your fleet? Gary Warshaw, the man Brocius appointed? He’s a good sailor, but he’s an engineer. There’s a reason why the Navy never promotes engineers to the rank of Admiral. They don’t have the background to command a ship. They fix things, they don’t run them. How do you think Warshaw is going to do in battle?”
“There’s always Franks,” I said.
“Lilburn Franks,” Thorne said. He leaned back in his chair and smiled. “He’d be better than Warshaw; at least he’s spent time on a bridge. He’s smart, too; but he’s loyal to Warshaw through and through. He’ll never be loyal to you. Give him a chance, and Franks will stick a knife in your back.”
I was pretty sure I believed the other things Thorne had said, but that last bit about Franks stabbing me in the back I accepted without question.
“Admiral, you have a transport waiting on you, sir,” I said, as I rose to my feet. I hated sticking Thorne in the relocation camp. The truth was, I hated the idea of placing anyone in that town-turned-prison-camp. By the end of the day, every natural-born sailor with the bad luck to have remained in the Scutum-Crux Fleet would find himself a guest of Outer Bliss.
“At least think about what I said?” Thorne asked, both looking and sounding a bit desperate.
“I’ll take it under advisement,” I said. I wanted to take him up on his offer, but I had other concerns at the moment. My next act would be a declaration of war on the Unified Authority. With Warshaw fighting me for control of the fleet, Admiral Thorne’s offer did not figure very prominently on my list of priorities.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Other than Warshaw, only Thomer and Hollingsworth knew my agenda. My lieutenants deserved to know who they were fighting and why. I decided to keep my plans hidden from everyone else. I was, after all, plotting a revolution.
Six transports sat in the starboard docking bay of U.A.N. Washington, a big Perseus-class fighter carrier. Six more sat in the port-side docking bay. In all, the transports had enough space to ferry twelve hundred men to the self-broadcasting battleships moored just outside our fleet. The plan was to load the transports with twelve hundred natural-born officers, but we were about to stray from the script. We would load the birds with Marines in combat armor.
The U.A.N. Washington had been one of the first ships in my fleet to go all-clone. The ship had also become a de facto transfer terminal. The self-broadcasting battleships sent transports filled with clones transferring to the Scutum-Crux Fleet to the Washington and received transports filled with natural-borns returning to Earth from that ship.
The ritual was about to end.
First, we needed to remove the Earth Fleet pilots from their transports before they could set off any alarms. We sent two-man teams to seize the transports—men with commando training who knew how to work quietly and would not hesitate to commit murder. If a pilot managed to do so much as tap his microphone, we would find ourselves stuck in the Scutum-Crux Arm forever.
The sergeant on my team would receive a field promotion to major once we became the Enlisted Man’s Marine Corps. He had been in the Corps for twenty years.
I stole up to the rear of the transport, held my gun ready, and peered inside. For this op, I used an S9 stealth pistol, a sidearm developed specifically for covert operations. The S9 used magnetic actuation to fire fléchettes with iron shafts and depleted-uranium tips. The guns were light, lethal, and silent.
Had I spotted anyone in the cabin or cargo hold, I would have shot him; but the kettle was empty. “Clear,” I whispered into my mike, and the sergeant slipped ahead of me and up the ramp. He crouched beside the cargo netting, his gun trained ahead. “Clear,” he said.
I shuffled up the ramp, barely lifting my feet so my boots would not make noise against the steel deck. I kept my pistol raised and ready, aimed on the door of the cockpit, my finger tight across the trigger. S9s were rated accurate to twenty-five yards—not exactly the sniper’s weapon of choice.
Hiding behind one of the girder ribs of the ship, I signaled the sergeant to catch up and checked in with my other teams. All twelve teams had managed to board the transports without incident.
Even with the ambient sound sensitivity in my helmet switched to maximum, the sergeant’s soft footsteps sounded no louder than somebody sweeping the floor with a wire brush. The man clearly had stealth-op experience.
“I’m going up,” I said.
The sergeant glided into a shadowy niche from which he had a clear line of sight to the cockpit, and said, “I’ve got your back.” He knelt and aimed his pistol, his armor blending into the darkness.
I crept up to the ladder, my pistol now stowed in its holster. My armored gloves made a soft clicking noise as I wrapped my fingers around the posts. At this point, the pilot would not be able to see me without leaving the cockpit, but he might hear something.