Doctorow did not know about my plans. Ava had some idea, but she did not know about our stealing three self-broadcasting battleships. This was not the time to tell them.
“It’s a long story,” I said. It was the best I could come up with. I was never any good at politics, words did not come naturally.
As he turned his car into the driveway of a two-story home, Doctorow said, “Ava, I’m afraid your boyfriend is keeping secrets from us.”
Her boyfriend? I thought to myself. The evening was looking up.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Opening his front door, Doctorow said, “Whatever you do, Harris, don’t tell Sarah about what happened at the airstrip. She’s a bit on the delicate side, you wouldn’t want to worry her.” He winked as he said this, and Ava giggled, then Doctorow swung the door open, and bellowed, “We’re home, dear.”
A voice called out from deep in the house, “No need to shout, El. I heard you coming up the driveway.” “El” must have been short for Ellery.
“Sorry we’re late, dear. Somebody assassinated Captain Harris as he came off his plane,” Doctorow called.
“Should I remove his place from the table?” the woman called back. She came out of the kitchen, smiled at me, and said, “General Harris, you’re looking well for a man who was just assassinated.”
Sarah Doctorow was considerably wider along the bottom than she was across the top, giving her body a pyramid shape. Her bottom was so wide it looked like she’d stuffed bed pillows inside her pants. She was less heavy around the stomach, and her girth continued to taper as it reached her notably flat chest and sunken shoulders. She had a lovely round face with laugh lines around the eyes and a little girl’s smile. Her face was a patchwork of colors, with spruce-colored eyes, ruby red lips that looked freshly painted, and cerulean makeup above her eyes. She wore her long, red hair in a simple ponytail.
I liked Sarah Doctorow the moment I saw her, but the romance did not last. She moved around the room like a human whirlwind, kissing her husband on the cheek, shaking my hand, then pecking Ava on the cheek and giving her a hug.
She turned to me, and said, “General Harris, you must be famished. I understand being shot takes a lot out of you.” And then, without pausing to breathe, she turned to Ava, and said, “Ava darling, why don’t you come help me in the kitchen? You can tell me all about that awful assassination.” And just like that, Ava and Mrs. Doctorow vanished around the corner.
“Watch this,” Doctorow whispered, then he cupped his hands like an actor pretending to yell, and called, “Can I help in the kitchen?”
The offer earned him a giggle from Ava and a belly laugh from Sarah. Ava said something about Doctorow being a good husband, to which Sarah replied, “Don’t you believe it for a moment, sweetie.”
“I had a word with Lieutenant Mars. He says a planetwide mediaLink will be up in the next week or two. We should be able to contact every city on Terraneau.”
Mars was the top dog in the Corps of Engineers. He commanded the crews that built Outer Bliss and refurbished Fort Sebastian. I was not aware of how far he had gotten with the mediaLink. I was not keen on the idea of Doctorow sending flights around the planet.
“Do you have working media stations?” I asked, making a mental note to contact Mars as soon as I got back to the fleet. I would tell him to slow it down on the media equipment.
“No, but we should be able to throw something together. Perhaps you have some broadcast equipment you could loan us,” Doctorow said.
“I’m sure we can find something,” I told Doctorow, knowing full well that we did have equipment we could give him and that I would not give it to him. Maybe I was cut out for politics after all.
“Would you like a drink?” Doctorow had a large wet bar stocked with enough bottles to run an officers’ club for a night. He might have been a big drinker, but I had the feeling the booze was here for his political friends and rivals.
“Got any juice?” I asked.
“Powdered milk and powdered juice,” Doctorow said. “Fresh food is still in short supply.”
“I’ll make it simple,” I said. “Give me whatever you’re drinking.”
He poured me a tumbler, and I took it without looking to see what it was.
We went out to the patio and sat in the languid night air. Doctorow’s house sat on a ridge overlooking Norristown. From the back porch, I could look out into the heart of the city, with its newly lit populated areas and its unlit badlands. In the center of everything, the three skyscrapers stood like sparkling columns.
“They have the elevators working in the dorms,” Doctorow said, tracing the line of my sight.
“Does that mean people are living on the upper floors now?” I asked.
“Are you kidding? It’s hotter than blazes up there. We haven’t got the air-conditioning running yet.”
I tried my drink. It was a liqueur, something that tasted a lot like coffee. I did not like it.
We sat on some metal furniture and stared out across town for several seconds. Finally, Doctorow broke the silence. “There’s a nasty rumor going around these days that you are planning to start a war with the Unified Authority, General,” he said. “Is that what Freeman meant by ‘breaking the rules’?”
I thought about playing innocent or just plain denying everything, but there was too much to hide. “Something like that,” I said, feeling uncomfortable. “Care to share how you heard about it?”
“It doesn’t matter how I heard it.”
“It may not matter to you,” I said. “To me, it’s a breach of security …a bad one.”
“Do you plan on involving my planet in your war?”
“The war has already begun, but I didn’t start it,” I said. “The Unified Authority is phasing clones and obsolete fleets out of its military. They didn’t send us here to free Terraneau, they sent us here for target practice.”
Doctorow whistled. “Wow. I don’t know what to say.” He thought about what I had said, and finally asked, “What happened? I mean, clones …they were the heart of the military.”
“A couple of generals blamed clones for all of the losses against the aliens.”
“There was always deep-seated prejudice among the officers I knew. I won’t say it made sense, but it was always there …always there,” Doctorow said.
“Yeah, I know,” I said.
“What did your friend mean when he said you broke the rules?”
“We captured three of their self-broadcasting ships.”
“Were those ships attacking you?”
“The Navy was using them to bring clones in and ship natural-borns back to Earth.”
“So, they came on a peaceful mission,” Doctorow said.
“Yeah, I suppose so.”
“You fired on those ships?” Doctorow asked.
“Hell, we had to do something, or we would all be trapped right now. We hijacked …commandeered three self-broadcasting battleships. Now, maybe we will be able to defend ourselves.”
“Have they asked for their ships back?”
I nodded.
“Are you going to return them?”
“I can’t imagine why I would,” I said.
“It sounds to me like you’ve started yourself a war.”
“To us, it’s a war. We’re fighting for our survival. To them, it’s a military exercise,” I said.
“Just make sure you keep your war off my planet,” Doctorow said, all of his former good humor missing from his voice.
“That’s why we wanted the self-broadcasting ships. We want to take the fight to them.”
“What do you think they’ll call your war back on Earth? The Clone Rebellion? The Clone Uprising?” Doctorow finished his drink and placed the glass on the little table by his seat.
“I prefer the Enlisted Man’s War,” I said. “My men tend to keel over when they hear they’re clones.”
“I don’t want you pulling my planet into your war,” Doctorow said.
“We have a five-hundred-ship fleet orbiting this planet. The Earth Fleet is down to somewhere in the neighborhood of forty self-broadcasting ships.”