Maybe Warshaw had already put two and two together, or maybe he read my intentions by the stiff tone of my voice. Sounding more businesslike than usual, he told one of his lieutenants to send for Franks, then he turned and led the way to a conference room. We barely had time to find our seats before Franks joined us.
The cease-fire between me and Warshaw ended as soon as the meeting began. “What is it now, Harris?” he asked.
“I was shot last night,” I said, opening my rucksack and pulling out the blouse. The blood was still tacky. The other men in the room all stared at it. They were mesmerized.
“Sweet shit,” Warshaw said. He reached out and touched the stain, then looked at his fingers. The fake blood stained his fingertips.
I told them about Freeman and what he said.
“What does it mean?” asked Warshaw, temporarily forgetting about Admiral Thorne.
“It means a lot of things,” I said. “It means at least one ship was able to run our blockade. It means we have a leak. Perry Fahey has been spying for the U.A. all along.”
“You’re sure it was Fahey?” Franks asked.
“Of course it was Fahey. That son of a bitch,” Warshaw said.
After I rehearsed the evidence—Fahey setting up the blockade, the officers transferring back to Earth through the Washington, the way Fahey kept up with our movements from Outer Bliss—Franks seemed convinced as well.
“The assassin said they’re coming for us? Did he say when?” asked Franks.
“Tomorrow, next week, your guess is as good as mine,” I said. I did not regret waiting until I got back to the fleet to report the whole thing. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that Admiral Brocius would not move until he had an overwhelming force. We might still have a year to prepare.
No one asked for my interpretation of the comment about us breaking the rules. We all knew what it meant. I looked back at Thorne one last time to renew my confidence, then I said, “We’re going to need an experienced officer at the helm.”
“Good God, not that again,” Warshaw moaned, rolling his eyes, his face so red he looked like he’d been boiled. As he often did when angered, he flexed his muscles and stared at me. His eyes bored into mine. The muscles in his neck, shoulders, and arms bulged. He squeezed his fists and relaxed his hands, squeezed and relaxed, pumping blood into his spade-shaped forearms.
How many officers had he silently intimidated with that little trick? How many rivals had he scared off? The big muscles might intimidate other sailors, but to me he looked like a mouse roughing its fur so it can look as big as a rat.
“What are you saying? I have been in the Navy for twenty-five years, you don’t call that experience?” Warshaw practically whispered the question, the calm in his voice as precarious as a dagger wrapped in a silk scarf.
“You have no experience commanding a ship,” I said.
“The hell with that,” Warshaw said. “If you want to step down, Harris, go ahead. That’s your choice. I earned my commission.”
“I’m not asking you to resign your commission,” I said, trying to sound reasonable.
Warshaw shook his head. He looked angry enough to launch himself at me. He looked crazed. “I run the ships! I run the specking fleet! You hear me, Harris? I am the goddamned commander of the Scutum-specking-Crux Fleet!”
“Harris, we’ve already been through this. Admiral Brocius put Warshaw in charge,” Franks said. He might not have sounded so reasonable had he not gotten falling-down-drunk the night I recommended that he take over the fleet.
“I don’t want to run the specking fleet, Franks. I want Admiral Thorne to run it,” I said.
“Admiral Thorne?” Franks asked. “Why in God’s name do you want a natural-born to run the Enlisted Man’s Fleet? Why would you even trust him?”
I never got to state my case, however. That was when the Klaxons sounded.
CHAPTER FIFTY
“We’ve detected two anomalies.” The voice on the intercom belonged to Hank Bishop, captain of the Kamehameha. He was a good officer, a veteran sailor, but he sounded nervous.
“Have you identified the ships?” asked Admiral Thorne. We could not identify specific ships by their anomalies, but we could identify the class of the ships.
Bishop did not answer.
Warshaw glared at Thorne.
Franks jumped to his feet and bolted out the door. Having spent his career on the bridge of a capital ship, he had no trouble putting politics and power struggles out of his mind in an emergency. There was a call to quarters, and he needed to be at the helm.
I got on the intercom and raised Thomer. “This is not a drill,” I said. “Contact every ship; I want every last Marine suited up and ready to fight.”
“Aye, aye,” he said, then he followed up with an unexpected question, “Did you know this was coming?”
I did not have time to think about it at that moment. “Good question,” I said. He and I could debate what I should have expected and what I could not have known over drinks once the alert was over. “Get a move on it, Sergeant,” I said, temporarily forgetting Thomer’s rank.
He responded, “Yes, sir,” and signed off.
By the time Thorne and I left for the bridge, Warshaw and Franks were already there. The wail of the Klaxons thundered through the ship with its earsplitting decibels.
“When was the last time this fleet was in a battle?” I asked Thorne, as we boarded the lift from Fleet Command down to the bridge.
“We took on a couple of ships orbiting Little Man,” Thorne said.
“Little Man,” I repeated. I had been there for that fight. Was that six years ago? Seven? I could not remember.
It had not occurred to me before, but having spent his career in the outermost arm of the galaxy, Thorne did not exactly fit the bill of a battle-tested veteran. He was a graduate of the Naval Academy, but that graduation had happened nearly forty uneventful years ago.
We entered the bridge.
Fleet Command had been loud and relatively empty, the bridge was very different. The siren hummed low and steady in the background. Officers rushed from one station to the next. In the scramble, most of them ran around me, but a few pushed off me and continued without looking back.
Franks, Warshaw, and Bishop stood around the chart table in the center of the bridge, huddling together like chefs around a stove. As Thorne and I approached, Warshaw looked up, and asked, “What the speck is a U.A. officer doing on my bridge? Someone remove this man.” He was not calling for bridge security to remove Thorne, he said it quietly, for my benefit.
“He’s with me,” I said.
Even before I finished saying this, Warshaw drowned me out, yelling, “Great, I have a Marine and a spy on my bridge.”
Franks pointed to something on the strategy table, and Warshaw seemed to forget about us.
The three-dimensional map on the chart table showed Terraneau, our fleet, and the area in which our telemetry detected the anomaly. It depicted open spaces as blue-black cubes. There were no stars in the three million miles between us and the anomaly, just open space.
Without looking up, Franks said, “They’re headed toward us at one-fifth full.” One-fifth full meant six million miles per hour, a cautious speed for closing long distances.
“Do we have a read on the anomaly?” Warshaw repeated Thorne’s question as if he had come up with it himself.
“No information yet,” Captain Bishop answered, as he edged around the table.
“Have we made contact?” Franks asked.
“No, sir. They’re ignoring us,” a communications officer called.
“Where are our self-broadcasting ships?” Warshaw asked. “They’ve got to be here for the ships.”
Franks pointed them out. They were halfway between our fleet and the intruders, rocketing toward us as fast as they could.