I shuffled back, aware that Warshaw really could have me removed from the bridge. Thorne wisely followed my lead. I floated over to him, and asked, “Where are our self-broadcasting ships?”
Thorne leaned forward slightly and pointed.
I would not have recognized them without his help. To me, they looked like little dashes in a field of dots and dashes.
As I looked at the symbols representing our self-broadcasting ships, I noticed they had stopped beside a small, red triangle. “Is that us?” I whispered to Thorne.
He nodded.
Looking at the tight formation on the chart table, I had a premonition and started edging my way off the bridge.
Ten more anomalies appeared. So the Unified Authority had eight-five ships. One of Franks’s aides had a new round of analysis. “Sir, we can’t be sure, but those ships appear to be fighter carriers.”
“Fighter carriers? How the hell can they possibly have fighter carriers? It’s not possible; there are no self-broadcasting fighter carriers.” Franks coughed out the words as if they had barbs attached to them. He did not sound scared, but his confidence had dwindled.
Three more anomalies appeared about a hundred thousand miles away.
“What do they have now, a damn floating planet?” Warshaw asked.
“Explorers,” the aide answered.
“Explorers? Why send explorers out here? What the hell do they want with explorers?” Franks asked.
We have three self-broadcasting ships, and they have three explorers, I thought to myself, and an evil memory came to mind. I remembered the sinking of the Doctrinaire, the most indestructible juggernaut of our time, and I ran from the bridge.
“Where the speck do you think you are going?” Warshaw yelled behind me.
I ignored him and ran to the observation deck.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
I looked out of the viewport and saw miles of space and ships. With so many ships hovering in such close proximity, the Scutum-Crux Fleet would appear as a single block on most navigation screens. The captains had lit the navigation lights along the hulls of their ships as visual beacons for fighter pilots to see.
From the observation deck, I could see hundreds of ships forming what looked like a mosaic of sparkling, monochrome tiles against the velvet backdrop of space. The glow of sunlight radiating from Terraneau shone up on the gray underbellies of our ships. With their wedge-shaped hulls, the ships of the SC Fleet lined up like the teeth on a saw.
Slowly pushing through the flotilla, our self-broadcasting battleships had diamond-shaped hulls and bloated bows. Their shape and charcoal gray hues bore no resemblance to the ships around them. They looked obsolete—military icons rescued from a different era as they hid themselves in a pod of naval ships. I did not see the self-broadcasters themselves, just the runner lights blinking along the lengths of their hulls.
From where I stood, I could see the massive bow of a nearby fighter carrier. The space ahead of us was filled with battleships. Beyond that, I caught a glimpse of several fighters, Phantoms, weaving in and out among the larger ships. The fighters looked like motes swirling in a dark wind.
“No! No! No!” I muttered, as I looked at the rows of ships standing as stationary as toys in a chest. It was just like Thorne said, only worse. Even Thorne could not possibly have realized what those self-broadcasting explorers would do in another moment.
I hit the intercom on the table and called down to the Marine compound. “Thomer, are your men loaded up?” I yelled.
“We’re ready. How many do you want?” he asked.
“Every available man. Every available transport.”
“Just the Kamehameha?”
“Fleet-wide,” I said.
Knowing that Warshaw would never listen to me, I reluctantly went back to the bridge. As I entered, he glared up at me for a moment, and muttered, “What are you doing here?”
“You need to scramble your ships,” I said.
Thinking I meant his fighters, Franks said, “We already launched.” He did not understand, and I could not explain myself quickly enough. Time was slipping away. The Unified Authority did not need to cross the three-million-mile no-man’s-zone to attack our self-broadcasting ships.
I fumbled for words, then blurted out, “Break formation. You can’t give them a stationary target.” Realizing too late that he would not understand, I added, “If the self-broadcasting ships stay in one place, Brocius will broadcast his ships into them.”
“What are you talking about?” Warshaw sounded impatient. Standing off in a corner, even Admiral Thorne looked irritated by my babbling.
I took a deep breath to calm myself. “That was what happened to the Doctrinaire,” I said. The Mogats had destroyed the Doctrinaire with a single shot by broadcasting a ship right into the center of it.
“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Warshaw said. “Get him off my bridge now.”
I lost control and yelled, “Listen, asshole!”
“Warshaw.” Admiral Thorne barely had to raise his voice to take control of the conversation; his voice was as cold and as bracing as a slap across the face. Franks, Warshaw, and I all turned to look at him, all of us giving in to native feelings of inferiority.
But Thorne was too late. The chart table displayed the event in miniature—tiny silver blooms appeared as one of the Unified Authority explorer ships broadcasted out. At that same moment, a bloom appeared in our ranks.
Explosions make no sound in space. We did not see or hear anything on the bridge of the Kamehameha as three battleships and thousands of lives died in a cataclysm as deadly as an atomic explosion.
A new set of alarms sounded throughout the ship, reporting the attack.
“What the speck?” Franks asked.
Warshaw, the consummate officer-engineer, turned to an aide, and yelled, “Damage report! I need a damage report!”
“They destroyed our self-broadcasting ships,” I said, not even bothering to look at the chart table to be sure.
“But that’s not …” Franks began.
“Admiral, thirty of their ships have broadcasted to the other side of Terraneau,” one of the aides said.
“We lost three ships,” another officer reported. He had not yet identified which ships were gone. Franks did not need the aide to tell him which ships—he already knew.
I could see it in Franks’s face. He was beaten. He no longer wanted to fight now that his strategy had fallen apart. He looked at me, then he turned to Admiral Thorne. He needed someone to tell him what he should do next.
“Harris, you better get your Marines down to that planet,” Admiral Thorne said. He had new color in his face. He had the energetic, excited eyes of a young officer preparing for a fight.
Warshaw watched the conversation, but remained silent. Maybe he finally realized he was not made to command a fleet. As damage reports filtered in, Warshaw left the bridge. I did not need to ask to know he was headed to Engineering.
Apparently seeing the same thing that Thorne saw, Franks turned to me, and asked, “Harris, how fast can you load up your Marines?”
“They’re already on the transports,” I said, speaking more to Thorne than Franks, but facing them both. We were ready, but we might already have been too late. By the time we launched, the U.A. ships would be on us.
“They’re launching transports,” an aide said.
“You better get going, Harris,” Thorne said. He hunched over the chart table, reading details out of tiny points of light. “We’ll give you whatever cover we can …” He did not finish the sentence, but I knew what he was trying to say. With all of those battleships out there, we were in for a bumpy ride.