“I hope this isn’t like the specking Corvair,” I told Thomer.
“It isn’t,” he said. “You don’t really die when you pull the pin in a simulation. If they pull the pin on us, they die, too.”
I thought about that. Thomer had a point. Any survivors on this ship were as likely to be engineers from the dry docks as sailors. They might not be willing to go down with their ship.
Looking around the deck, I noted that the bridge looked like something from a nightmare. The computers, the chairs, the stations, all remained in perfect order except for the dead men surrounding them. Death had come in a frozen flash to this part of the ship.
“Have your men reached the Marine compound?” I asked Thomer.
“It’s empty.”
“How empty?” I asked, wanting to make sure we were dealing with a sailor or an engineer, and not a Marine.
“No beds, no racks, no equipment.”
“No Marines,” I said in a hollow voice, a reaction meant more for my ears than Thomer’s. “Got anybody down in Engineering?”
“A couple of teams,” Thomer said.
“Good. Tell them to shut down anything that looks like it still works. Don’t smash things, just break them a little.”
“The gravity generator?” Thomer asked.
“Gravity generators, life-support systems …I don’t want power going to any systems.”
“You said he was wearing armor,” Thomer said.
“I think so.”
“So he’s got heat, light, and air,” Thomer pointed out.
“That’s not going to save him next time he needs to take a dump,” I said. “He’ll freeze his ass off.” I thought of a disturbing image—the remains of an engineer who froze to death during the act of defecating.
There might only have been one survivor left on this ship, or there might have been hundreds. It didn’t matter. Confronted with a shoot-out, they would be more likely to pull the proverbial pin than they would be if left alone and facing a slow death in space. People do heroic things in the face of fire; but when the end comes gradually and their bodies betray them and their only enemy is their own natural needs, heroism gives way to the instinct for survival.
When we returned twenty-four hours later, boarding the derelict battleships was no longer a Marine operation. All we needed were some engineers and a chaplain.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
“Harris, you son of a bitch, I demand you return my ships,” the captain said. Natural-borns had become as interchangeable in my mind as clones. It didn’t matter whether it was Admiral Brocius or General Smith or Captain Pershing, or this guy, Rear Admiral Lower-Half Hugo George, the man from whom I had commandeered our self-broadcasting fleet, they all sang the same angry song.
“Sure, Admiral, I’ll just give you back your three battleships, and we’ll call it even,” I said.
That set him off. “You specking pissant clone!” George, a young admiral at forty-five, rose to his feet. Fire showed in his eyes, which were the exact same mud brown as mine. A vein ran down the center of his forehead. As he shouted, the muscles along the sides of his neck flexed.
Just the two of us sat in the little interrogation room. I did not need guards though I had a couple waiting outside. On his feet and snarling, George stood an inch taller than me, but years in a command chair had left him softened. He had a gut, not a big one, but a gut, nonetheless.
Before coming to the Outer Bliss penal colony, I’d looked up George’s record. He’d distinguished himself as a ship’s captain fighting Mogats. His battleship destroyed more de fenseless Mogat battleships than any other ship in the fleet, once we disabled their shields. Apparently, he knew when to attack and when to wait.
“Sit down, Admiral, you’re embarrassing yourself,” I said. I leaned my chair against the wall behind me, bracing my knees against the table, which was bolted to the floor. To get to me, the admiral would either need to jump over the table or run around it. Considering his size and conditioning, I ruled the element of surprise out of the equation.
He stood there fuming, leaning over the table, his hands in fists. Seconds passed, and he said nothing. Finally, he sat down.
What I knew, what he did not know, was that over the last three weeks, Warshaw’s engineers had attempted to install salvaged broadcast engines on several of our battleships. We flat-out lost one ship when we tested it. God knows where it went. Two ships exploded. One ship survived the broadcast, but the electricity from the anomaly fried every wire, switch, and computer on the vessel. The electricity hadn’t done the crew any favors, either.
We also had one mostly successful test. It did not go off without some flaws. The ship’s shields and weapons systems shorted out. One of the engineers monitoring the broadcast engine died when an arc formed between the wrench in his right hand and one of the cylinders.
Minor hiccups on the road to success.
“Release me and my men,” George demanded, in a quiet voice that betrayed the ragged edges of his self-control.
“You mean you haven’t enjoyed your vacation in Outer Bliss?” I asked.
He did not answer.
“I have no interest in holding you here any longer than I need to.”
“Then return my ships,” he demanded.
“Nope.”
“Stealing my ships was an act of war, Harris.”
“Yeah, well, what are you going to do about it?” I asked, still reclining in my chair. “The Navy sent half its self-broadcasting fleet to threaten us. We have three times as many battleships as they do, and our ships are Perseus-class design. The only boats they have that can reach us are G.C. Fleet vintage, sixty-year-old ships. You don’t really think they are going to attack us, do you?”
George took a moment to compose himself, then said, “The pendulum swings both ways. You’ve got the advantage now …”
“I’m glad you brought that up,” I said. “When we do finally let you out of here, I was hoping you could deliver a message for me.”
“A message?”
“You know those next-generation battleships they’re building at the Golan Dry Docks? We destroyed three of them.”
“You what?” George asked.
“Read ’em and weep,” I said. “Three of those new battleships against three G.C. Fleet antiques manned by all-clone crews, and we made a clean sweep of it. What do they call those new ships anyway? Around here we call them Asshole-class ships, but I figure you probably have a better name for them.”
“You’re lying. You’re specking lying to me,” George said.
“You know that I am not lying,” I said, though, of course, I was certainly withholding information. I was not about to mention Warshaw’s hot-wiring derelicts. I wanted to see if I could shake old Hugo’s confidence.
Admiral George greeted my comment with silence. Finally, I stood up, and said, “Well, it looks like there’s nothing more to say.” This was my third debriefing of the day, and I wanted it to end as quickly as possible. I had more interesting business to conduct back in Norristown.
I knocked on the door, and the guards opened it.
“Take him away,” I said.
Admiral George left without a word. I think he was as glad to get away from me as I was to see him leave.
Once I shut the door, Warshaw said, “Wayson Harris, you evil sack of pus! You lied to that pathetic asshole. You let him think we took those ships head-on. Now, why would you do that?”
Warshaw’s disembodied voice came from the Kamehameha . He was monitoring my interrogations using the two-way communications gear that the Corps of Engineers had built into the ceiling.
“We’re going to send him home sooner or later. If we convince him the ships are no good, he might scare Brocius and Smith into giving us more time. You know Brocius and his fetish for house odds. If he thinks we beat his ships in a fair fight, he’s going to scrap his plans until he’s sure he’s got the upper hand.”