“You’re shitting me,” I said.
“I told you, the war is going well.”
“So where is the Tube?” I asked.
Bishop’s smile spread so wide, it looked painful as he said, “That’s on a need-to-know basis. You’re not navigating, so you don’t need to know.”
You could broadcast from one end of the galaxy to the other and never know it inside a big bird like a fighter carrier. At some point, the Kamehameha entered a broadcast zone. We might have entered several for all I knew. I went to my temporary billet to wash up and rest. A few minutes later, I got a message informing me that we had reached Naval Command and directing me to report to the landing bay.
Bishop met me at the bay and escorted me into my transport. We traded salutes.
“Well, General, you’re Warshaw’s problem now,” he said.
“Anything I should watch out for?” I asked.
“You’ll be fine, sir. He’s happy to see you,” Bishop said.
I looked around the transport, and asked, “Am I flying with the same pilot I came in with?”
“You have a personal pilot?” Bishop asked, sounding surprised.
“More or less,” I said.
“You’re stuck with a loaner pilot for this trip. Your identity checked out, but we haven’t started on the guy you flew in with.”
I nodded and crossed the kettle on my way to the cockpit. The door of the transport slowly closed behind me, clapping shut as I reached the top of the ladder and stepped onto the narrow catwalk.
We launched into space, and I immediately saw that we were not headed for Providence Kri. The term “Kri” was given to planets with “engineered” atmospheres. Back in the days of the great expansion, the Senate selected planets based on several factors, location being the most important. If a planet with a breathable atmosphere was roughly the same distance from its nearest star as Earth was from the sun, it became a candidate for colonization.
Some planets were “retreads,” meaning they had all the ingredients to support life but needed the right infusions of hydrogen and oxygen along with some plant life to sustain the mixture. Seen from space, Providence Kri was a green-and-blue marble with layers of clouds and ice caps. It looked a lot like Earth. “God makes ’em good, and terraforming makes ’em better” was the old motto of the now-defunct Unified Authority Planetary Engineering Corps.
The planet we were heading for was arid, the color of sand, with few clouds and bone-dry poles. In the distance, a hot sun blazed. I could see its flare peeking out beyond the equatorial horizon.
“What a shit hole,” I said.
My pilot smiled but did not respond.
“What planet is that?” I asked, thinking perhaps he had been told to ignore my questions.
“Gobi, sir.”
“Gobi?” I asked, then I laughed so hard he must have thought I’d lost my mind. I began my career on Gobi. Wanting to make sure this was the same planet, I asked, “If that’s Gobi, then we must be in the Perseus Arm, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
Nearly ten years ago, in 2508, I had meandered into Gobi Station as a new Marine fresh out of boot camp. Now, almost a decade and three wars later, to Gobi I returned, a general.
Hundreds of ships crowded the space around the planet. A trio of fighter carriers floated in the distance. Beyond them, a broadcast station blended into the darkness around it. Had it not been for the ring of lights along its mile-wide discs, I would never have spotted the station.
Closer to the planet, Navy ships hovered in silhouette against the atmosphere. Squadrons of fighters flew in and out of view. A school of battleships passed around the wide equatorial curve of the planet at a lazy pace. The first time I had landed on Gobi, it struck me as a backwater planet and a dead end for my fledgling military career. It had the galaxy’s smallest Marine installation and the Navy, Army, and Air Force were nowhere to be seen.
We dropped into the atmosphere.
“Last time I came here, the fort looked like a house of cards after an earthquake,” I said. The old base was a sandstone fortress made more for show than warfare. When the Mogats attacked, the bulky walls caved in around us.
“You’ve been here before, sir?” the pilot asked.
“Yeah, but it’s been a while. I was stationed here.”
“No offense, sir, but you must have really pissed someone off. I wouldn’t station a dog on this planet.”
I felt the same way.
The new Gobi Station rose out of the desert like a modern-day minaret, a single, nearly indefensible column as sleek and straight as an old-world rocket preparing to launch into space.
The original station, the fort I’d once called home, was built along the side of a cliff. Not this building. The desert spread out in every direction around it.
The structure stood thirty stories tall. As we approached, I spotted a ring of bunkers around the base of the structure. Tawny and mostly submerged in the sand, those bunkers could have housed five thousand men. Particle-beam-cannon and missile arrays ran along the sides of the cylindrical fort like rows of spines. “How long has this building been around?” I asked. It sure as hell had not existed ten years ago, or we wouldn’t have been living in a prehistoric rat hole.
The pilot shrugged, and said, “It was here when we got here.”
I always hated the way transports handled in atmospheric conditions. They were built for space, relying on boosters and skids instead of wings and wheels. They had wings, but they were small and useless for gliding. Cut the power in a bird like that, and it would fall like a rock. My pilot knew his trade, but he wasn’t good at it. As we approached the landing pad, he missed a mark, and we dropped sixty feet below the platform; then he righted the bird, and we had to fly around the building and come in again.
“Sorry about that, sir,” he said as he fumbled with the controls.
We touched down on the second pass, and the ground crew converged on our transport. The landing pad was open-air. Why not? Rain was never a problem on this planet.
A security station with armed guards hiding behind a wall of bulletproof glass waited just inside the doorway. The glass formed a funnel that led to a set of security posts. As I walked through the posts, a team of security techs confirmed my identity while men with M27s kept close watch on me.
The techs only needed a moment to clear me, and the guards waved me on.
Even after all of the other precautions, two of the guards paired off with me. They herded me into a lift, and down we went. Judging by the lights, the numbers, and the length of the drop, it seemed clear we had gone deep underground. When the elevator doors opened, we had arrived at another security station with another set of posts.
There was no way to enter this building without passing through posts that scanned your DNA, and yet they scanned me again when I left the elevator. These people weren’t just digging in for a war; they were terrified.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
If you did not know that Gary Warshaw was a clone, you might have mistaken him for a natural-born. He didn’t have general-issue standard brown hair. In fact, he didn’t have any hair at all. The man shaved his entire head from his crown to his chin, including the eyebrows. He shaved in the morning. By the end of the day, dark grainlike stubble covered his chin, neck, and head. The eyebrows, though, he might have removed with lasers. They never grew back.
From a distance, Warshaw looked shorter than other clones. He wasn’t, of course. He stood the standard five-foot-ten just like every other government-issue clone; but he looked smaller because he was wide. A fanatical bodybuilder, Warshaw began and ended every day in the gym, then supplemented his achievements with ample doses of chemistry.