“Contact Fort Sebastian,” I told Thomer. “Tell Hollingsworth to mobilize his men and meet us at the armory.”
Had I suited up, I could have made the calls and monitored the progress myself. Now, I had to depend on Thomer and hope he did not have some sort of Fallzoud-flashback.
The flight seemed interminable. I looked out the windshield and saw an endless sea that stretched to the horizon in every direction. The sun set behind us. I did not see other transports, but we’d had to scatter to make it through the U.A. blockade. We would regroup once we reached town.
“How do you know Fahey is a spy?” Thomer asked.
I told him everything. I told him about Fahey’s affairs. I told him about Brocius appointing him to my chain of command and about Freeman. Thomer listened carefully. When I finished, he did not say a word; but I saw a new intensity in his eyes. The story had gotten through. For the first time since he began his Fallzoud addiction, I saw hate in Kelly Thomer’s eyes.
“How long before we reach Norristown?” I asked the pilot.
“Two hours, maybe ninety minutes if we’re lucky,” said the pilot.
Forty-five minutes passed, and Thomer reported that the Unifieds had landed outside Outer Bliss.
“Remind them to surrender,” I said.
“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” Thomer said. “They’ve already handed over their weapons to their prisoners. The Unifieds are airlifting the natural-borns back to their fleet.”
I checked the time. If we got lucky, we might reach Norristown in an hour, I told myself as I counted off the seconds in my head.
“General, I’m receiving a message for you from Fleet Command,” the pilot said. He switched on the cockpit speaker.
“Harris?” Warshaw was on the other end of the line.
I leaned in toward the radio, and asked, “What’s the situation up there?”
“I’ll tell you what the specking situation is. We’re getting our asses stomped, that’s the situation. Harris, they’re grinding us up. We’ve lost two carriers.”
“We’re on our way to Norristown,” I said. “I’m not sure how many transports got through, but …”
“Seventeen transports broke through,” Warshaw said.
“Seventeen?” I asked. I heard the number seventeen, but my mind didn’t accept it. He must have meant the number of transports we had lost. “How many transports did they hit?”
Warshaw’s long pause before answering me gave me a chill. “They shot down fifty-six transports before we were able to recall them. Their fighters got in the lane.”
“Fifty-six transports?” I asked, not believing what I’d heard.
“They destroyed fifty-six transports.”
The news splashed through me like a shot to the gut. I braced my arm on the panel above the radio and rested my forehead against the back of my forearm.
One moment everything seemed hopeless, then I remembered that our fleet still outnumbered theirs ten-to-one. Even with two fighter carriers down, we still had over thirty carriers. It was just a matter of time until our fleet overwhelmed theirs; the numbers were too far in our favor. “How long do we need to hold out until you can send more transports?”
“You’re not listening, Harris. There aren’t going to be any more transports. We’re fighting for our specking lives up here, and we are losing.”
Outside the cockpit, the sky had turned dark. Stars sparkled in the darkness, but there was no moon to break up the blackness around us. The ocean below us seemed to drop out and fade into a shadow.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
“No sign of them yet,” Hollingsworth told Thomer for the fourth time. We would meet up with Hollingsworth at the garage under the government buildings—the one the local militia had converted into an armory. Hollingsworth and his men were already there. I had Thomer check in with him every fifteen minutes in case the Unifieds got there before we did.
Hollingsworth gave Thomer the same response every time: “No sign of them yet.”
We also received constant reports from the fleet. They weren’t pretty. The U.A. had a new class of fighters that outmaneuvered our Tomcats and Phantoms. We’d lost badly when our fighters engaged one of their squadrons; then Thorne wedged several frigates into the lanes and turned the fight around.
“We can’t get past their specking shields,” Warshaw said, when I called in.
I would have told Thorne to cut us loose and run, but he had nowhere to go. The new ships were quicker and self-broadcasting. They were killing us in a fair fight, and we had no chance of outrunning them.
It occurred to me that we were flying unprotected, too. The U.A. Fleet didn’t need to send fighters into the atmosphere to destroy us. Their battleships could target us from space, but that did not seem to fit in with their plans.
Then the other shoe dropped. “Harris …? Harris, do you read me?” It was Warshaw. He sounded frantic as he said five words I did not want to hear. “You are on your own.”
Seconds later, we all saw the first flash. It was only a pinprick of light, brighter but no larger than the stars in the night sky. It winked enough to catch my attention and vanished.
“Oh, shit,” I whispered after the first flash. “Did you see that?”
Thomer had caught it. The pilot had missed it.
More flashes followed—a rapid series of second-long flashes all in the same spot. It looked like someone was flashing Morse code with a tiny light.
“What was that?” the pilot asked. I think he knew.
“Death,” I said.
Unable to believe that a force as powerful as the Scutum-Crux Fleet could be defeated, the pilot tried to raise the Kamehameha. There was no response.
“Should we tell them?” Thomer asked, looking back toward the kettle.
“No,” I said. Why discourage the men? They had a fight ahead of them either way. Better to send them in believing they have a chance.
The explosions continued for another thirty minutes. Watching the quick bursts of light and knowing each meant the deaths of hundreds of clones tortured me, then something worse happened. The explosions stopped, and I knew that the battle had ended. The peaceful sky meant that hundreds of thousands of clones were gone.
We did not speak to each other for the rest of the flight to Norristown. When he was not calling Hollingsworth, Thomer sat silently, staring out into the moonless night. We sat tensely—three men way out on a limb and waiting for the branch to break.
We would make our last stand in the ruins of Norristown, the city so many men had died to protect. As we flew over the southern edge of the city, we passed two- and three-story buildings that stuck out of the ground like giant grave markers in a cemetery gone to seed. Ground swellings below us marked the spots where buildings had collapsed. In my mind, each hill became a mass grave.
In the middle of this, the government building complex was a steel-and-glass anomaly. Its walls and walkways still intact, the government complex was a modern Camelot overlooking a decimated fiefdom. Hollingsworth had already mapped the grounds for tactical use. Following his instructions, we arranged our seventeen transports in strategic spots as we landed.
The transports weren’t much to look at, but then the military had its own school of landscaping—FOCPIG. Military men love their acronyms. In this case, FOCPIG stood for Fire, Observed, Concealed, Protected, Integrated, non-Geometric; in short, it is the process of preparing a field for battle. In the FOCPIG school of landscaping, aesthetics mattered less than utility. Placed strategically, those transports would create nearly impenetrable obstacles that the Unifieds would need to run around.
Judging by the first wave of transports the Unifieds had sent, they’d come light. Until they sent a second wave, they would not have tanks or gunships, just men, guns, and a handful of light-armor vehicles. That would play into our preparations. According to the feng shui of FOCPIG, our job was to route them so that we could have every advantage. Using transports as barriers, we would steer the enemy between the outstretched arms of the government center—a natural gauntlet. Once they entered, we would have the high-ground advantage.