“Fahey?” I asked. “How the speck does he know so much?” I could feel my frustration mounting.
“Sometimes you surprise me, Harris. He knows because he has friends on the Washington who keep him briefed.”
I hit my boiling point. “Briefed? What do you mean ‘briefed’? Are you telling me I have officers in my fleet who just ring him up and tell him our plans?” I knew the answer even as I asked. I let Hollingsworth take Fahey to the brig instead of Thomer. Hollingsworth was loyal to me, but he’d had sex with Fahey. He might well do small favors for Fahey if he thought they were harmless. He might, for instance, have let Fahey’s friends know he’d been sent to Outer Bliss.
“Everything points back to Fahey,” I said. He was the one who had set up the blockade around Terraneau. He might have built blind spots into it. He could even have sent that information back to Admiral Brocius. When natural-borns transferred back to Earth, they transferred out through the Washington—Fahey’s ship. He could have sent messages with them or anyone else on the transports. Hell, he had plenty of opportunity to ride out to the U.A. ships himself.
“So was Fahey working for you?” I asked. “Was he your spy?”
“My spy? General, why would I spy on the fleet? I wanted to stay out here,” Thorne said.
“But you promoted him to senior chief right before the transfers started. If he’s been playing Mata Hari with my officers, you were the one who placed him where he could catch the right information.”
“It wasn’t me. That promotion came straight from Navy Headquarters …in the Pentagon. General Harris, I think you have your leak.”
“Obviously,” I said.
“No, hear me out. The guards practically let Fahey run this place. Half the men guarding this camp are sailors from the Washington, and they let him call his friends all the time. What if he used a predetermined frequency? What if he wanted you to put him here so he could get information out?”
I rolled that question around in my mind. If half the guards in the camp were from the Washington, Fahey might have picked them himself. The two guards who came in with Fahey were probably from the Washington. I got the feeling that Fahey and those men may have been joined at the hip a time or two.
I pounded my fist into the table. “Damn it!” I yelled. Fahey had outmaneuvered me again and again. He’d floated enough information for Ray Freeman, possibly the most dangerous man in the galaxy, to take a shot at me. “Damn it,” I repeated more quietly.
“The Navy doesn’t operate like the Marines. You’re dealing with sailors now, and you can’t make them act like Marines. Their world is a lot more sophisticated, and the parts don’t fit together as neatly,” Thorne said.
“Yeah, well, Gary Warshaw sure as hell agrees with you. He says I’m not fit to command a fleet.”
“He’s one to talk,” Thorne said. “He’s the other half of your problems.”
“What do you think of Lilburn Franks?” I asked.
“He’d be a good choice for a second-in-command. At least he knows his way around a bridge, but he’s a bit too aggressive. He understands naval strategy, but he hasn’t seen what happens when things go wrong.”
“Any other recommendations?” I asked. Thorne knew the SC Fleet better than any man alive.
Thorne sat up and went through the litany of NCOs I had available to me. I watched him closely as he spoke. The man looked old, but life still coursed through his veins. He didn’t know it, but he was auditioning. Watching him speak, I decided that he still had a few good years in him. I could see it in his face.
“How about you? You still want to stay with the fleet?” I asked.
He looked me right in the eye and, giving me his best poker face, he slowly said, “Yes, you know I do.”
“Why?” I asked.
I . . “I .” told you, I’ve spent more than half my life out here. I.. “
“Do you have a wife on Terraneau?” I asked.
“Not a wife, I never married her. Earth-born officers are supposed to wait for Earth-born wives. If it got back to Washington, it would have hurt my career.”
“Children?” I asked.
“Three of them.” He spoke evenly, slowly, a man trying to hide his excitement. He might have been in bed with the Unified Authority, or he might have been telling me the truth.
“And nobody ever knew about them?” I asked.
“Having illegitimate children is considered conduct unbecoming in certain circles. If word got back to Washington about the children, it would have ended my career.”
“And that is why you want to stay in Scutum-Crux?” I asked. It explained a lot more than that. It explained why he’d continued flying around Terraneau, trying to break through the ion curtain for the last four years. It also explained his mystery visit to the planet the day the curtain went down.
“Why do you want to fight against the Unified Authority?” I asked.
Thorne leaned across the table, and said, “Why would I pick you over Earth? Why would I pick a bunch of clones over the Unified Authority?
“General Harris, I have been out here for more than half of my life. Those ships in your fleet, they are my home. Those men in your fleet, I’ve been flying with some of those men for thirty years now.
“I don’t know what Alden Brocius has up his sleeve, but it’s going to be powerful. Those ships I lived on and those men I served with, they’re all going to die if I can’t help them.”
I took Thorne with me when I returned to the fleet.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
Thorne and I spent the short flight back to the Kamehameha in the kettle of the transport, discussing command structures and politics. We talked about possible scenarios and whom we could count on if Warshaw fought us for control of the fleet. As a Marine dealing with sailors, I would have few allies. As a natural-born and a relic of the old U.A. power structure, Thorne would have even fewer.
Leaving the atmosphere, the transport struggled for just a moment. Thorne looked around the dark cabin nervously. “I hate these things.”
“It’s nothing. You get a rattle whenever you leave the atmosphere,” I said.
“Doesn’t the shaking bother you?”
“You get used to it,” I said. “I spent six weeks in a bird like this once.”
“This is a short-range transport,” Thorne said. He did not say anything more, but he did not need to. The lull in the conversation signaled his skepticism.
“They’re supposed to have a range of two hundred thousand miles. I know all about it,” I said. “We took ours closer to four billion miles.”
“That would be suicidal,” Thorne said.
“That’s one way to look at it,” I admitted.
There were two of us on that flight, Ray Freeman and I. We were escaping a Baptist farming colony, and the transport was the only way off the planet. We did what we had to do.
“General Harris, we’re approaching the Kamehameha,” the pilot called over the intercom. Three minutes later, we had touched down, and the doors at the rear of the kettle slid open.
Thorne and I exited the transport and headed up to Fleet Command without saying a word to anyone we passed.
Somebody must have alerted Warshaw as soon as we stepped off our transport. He and three of his lieutenants met us as we came off the lift.
“General Harris,” he said, putting on a reasonable pretense of surprise.
“Admiral,” I said.
He looked over at Admiral Thorne, and said, “Admiral Thorne, up for a visit?” Suspicion jingled in his voice.
This was not a discussion I planned to hold in a busy corridor, so I said, “Perhaps you and Admiral Franks could join us for a meeting in the conference room; we have a lot to discuss.”