“Do you know where we need to go?” I asked the pilot.
“Yes, sir,” the pilot said, as he started to double back into a shoal of ruined ships.
“So get us there!” I yelled.
“There’s no cover in that direction!”
Something solid, probably a torpedo, struck us hard along our back. The shot sent us skittering into a spin. Had our engines been damaged, we might have gone cartwheeling into space, but our tough little transport adapted. The pilot hit the engines, using one set of boosters to stop our spin and another to launch us in what I hoped was the right direction. The yaw from his sudden turn wrenched me to one side.
“Is that where we want to go?” I asked.
“Not quite there,” the pilot admitted. As he saw me reach for my pistol, he added, “I know what I’m doing. Don’t hit me!”
21:56:42
I needed to forget about the specking clock.
The debris around us was just as large as our transport. We battered our way through chunks of ship, unrecognizable trash, furniture, and an occasional corpse. We flew past a familiar shape: another transport, one of ours, playing possum. A second or two later, we slid into a tight alley between the busted hull of a destroyer and the ruins of an even bigger ship.
Two glowing U.A. battleships circled us at a leisurely pace, like vultures waiting for their meal. They had all the time in world. We were small, slow, and unarmed.
21:57:10
“Please tell me we are headed in the right direction?” I asked the pilot.
Warshaw answered the question. The first laser flared out like a spear, striking the battleship head-on. The steady stream of silvery red laser fire lashed at the U.A. ship’s bow, striking just below the top deck.
The second of the Unified Authority battleships charged in, heading toward the source of the attack. As it did, another ship fired its lasers. The shields around both U.A. ships flashed brighter and brighter as the second battleship tried to return fire. When the third battleship entered the shooting gallery, Warshaw ordered all of his ships to let loose.
The light from the shields grew brighter and brighter. From where I sat, it looked as if the scene were happening in daylight instead of deep space. Listless derelicts floating like clouds, their laser beams straight as the spokes of a wheel, fired lasers into the glowing shields of the U.A. ships.
The shields around one of the U.A. ships began to fail, allowing our lasers to strike the unprotected hull. The ship took damage. Bubbles appeared along its bow. The bubbles punctured the outer walls of the ship, and flames appeared. Where there are flames, there must be oxygen—air was leaking from the outer wall of the ship. Death.
We must have drifted within interLink range. Warshaw had created an open channel so that his men could hear what was happening. I heard men cheering and shouting. Warshaw shouted, “One down!”
The guns on the second ship fell silent as its shield failed. The side of the ship bubbled, then burst, spewing flames, men, and debris into space. Fires danced and died inside the hull, and the ship went dark. The space around it went dark as well, except for the silver-red threads of laser drilling into the third ship.
My pilot went wild. He cheered with the sailors manning the lasers. He pumped his fists in the air. Listening in to the chatter on the open channel, I heard one man crying and another saying a prayer.
The shield around the third ship changed color from honey gold to a sickly green, and suddenly the ship seemed impervious to our lasers. Pinpricks of light appeared around the hull, tiny little flashes as if someone had lit up little electrodes in sequence.
“What is …” I started to ask the question out loud without meaning to.
Someone said, “They’re firing torpedoes,” over the interLink. It might have been Warshaw.
The crew of that final Unified Authority battleship did not need to aim, they just trained their torpedoes along the laser beams. The derelicts were massive, but brittle and unprotected. One moment, we had seven ships spinning a laser web around the last U.A. battleship, then there were only three. Two of the old derelicts simply went dark when the torpedoes hit them. The other two lit up like skyrockets.
The U.A. battleship fired off a second fusillade of torpedoes, then it exploded. Particle beams and torpedoes slammed into it from three different directions, nearly shearing the ship in half. The green shield evaporated as the hull cracked open and twisted. An enormous fireball flashed and vanished, leaving behind a pitch-black carcass.
Franks had arrived. His three battleships flew in tight formation, cutting across the graveyard like eagles coming in for the kill, but there was nothing left to kill.
“I thought you came here to collect equipment, not fight a war,” Franks said over an open frequency.
The clock in my visor said the time was 21:59:57.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Brigadier General Kelly Thomer sat slumped in his chair, his arms dangling over the sides, his breakfast barely touched. He had potatoes, eggs, toast, bacon, and orange juice—a meal for a man with an appetite. As I looked at his hollowed cheeks and sunken eyes, I did not think that the man matched the meal. The fluffy yellow kernels of scrambled eggs sat in an untouched pile on his plate. All of the Marines I knew painted their eggs with ketchup.
“Are you planning on eating those eggs or hatching them?” I asked.
He woke from his trance, and said, “Oh yeah,” then splashed ketchup on everything but his toast.
More than anything else, Thomer looked bored. When I asked him about his last dose of Fallzoud, he said he had not taken it for days. Fallzoud was a serotonin inhibitor. I got the feeling that Thomer’s serotonin had been inhibited past the point of no return.
“How’d it go with the Mogat Fleet?” He asked the question, but he did not strike me as interested in hearing the answer.
“We ran into U.A. battleships,” I said.
“That’s good,” he said.
“No, that’s bad,” I said. “Live ships. They chased us into the Mogat graveyard.”
“Oh,” Thomer said. “You know when you found out you were a clone, did it bother you that you never had a family? I mean, I’m kind of grieving my parents, like they died or something.” He stared at me and through me, his brown eyes unblinking. He looked halfway down the road to catatonic.
“Why in God’s name are you grieving for people who never existed?” I asked.
“Yeah, but I didn’t know that they didn’t exist, and now I do. It’s kind of like they died a second time. See what I mean?”
There was a certain logic to what he said, twisted as it was.
The conversation left me incredulous. I told Thomer, “Well, I’m sure they would have been really excellent parents, had they ever existed and had they not died,” and went to work on my eggs.
Thomer just sat there, staring over his ketchup-covered tray, his body gaunt, his arms nearly limp, his fork hanging off his plate. He had the kind of slack expression I would expect to find on a person who had died in his sleep.
Deciding to change my tactics, I asked, “Did I ever tell you about my friend, Vince Lee?”
Thomer shook his head but said nothing.
“I served with him on this very ship. He was one of the Little Man Seven, one of the seven Marines who survived the battle on Little Man.” I normally did not need to explain who the Little Man Seven were, but Thomer looked like he might have moss growing under his brain.
When Thomer said nothing, I went on. “Yeah, well, Vince came back from Little Man a hero. They promoted him from corporal to lieutenant and transferred him to the Grant.
“I lost touch with him for a couple of years after that. The next time I saw him, I was back on Little Man with Ray Freeman.” Ray Freeman had been my partner when I was technically absent for the Corps without leave. He was a mercenary, a mountain of a man who could kill enemies with a knife, a bomb, or his bare hands, but he preferred using a sniper rifle. Thomer knew Freeman, he’d contracted out to fight in both the Mogat and New Copenhagen campaigns.