“Looks like a good fit,” Niles said.
Kline slumped forward in his chair, hyperventilating. Only the restraints around his arms kept him from falling to the floor. “What are you doing?” he moaned.
“My experiment,” the Intelligence officer said, sounding slightly offended. “You remember, we’re conducting an experiment?
“On the arrest report, it says that the scope on your rifle reads a frequency reserved for military use. That makes this scope contraband, and smuggling contraband between planets is a federal offense. And it gets worse. The report says that the auto-switch on this scope was set to go off when it located a specific signal. Now, why would the scope on a hunting rifle be set to read identifier signals in the first place? I’m sure this is all a colossal mistake.”
Kline said nothing.
“According to the police, that specific signal would be the identifying code broadcast by Corporal Harris’s helmet…the helmet you are wearing at this very moment. That would mean you came to Lake Pride hunting Corporal Harris.
“Me, I don’t believe that a law-abiding fellow like you came to Rising Sun hunting another human being. So here is my experiment.”
Niles picked up the rifle and walked behind Kline’s chair. “First, I will load this rifle.” He drew back the bolt. Deliberately fumbling the bullet so that it clanged against the barrel of the rifle several times, he slid it into the chamber and locked the bolt back in place.
“Now let’s see what happens when I hit to auto-switch and point the gun at that helmet you are wearing.”
“Don’t!” Kline shouted.
“A problem with my theory?”
“You’re going to kill me!” Kline’s voice bounced and fluttered. He was crying inside the helmet.
Without a word, the Intelligence officer removed the bullet from the rifle and pocketed it. He placed the rifle back on the table, then wrenched the helmet off Kline’s head. The prisoner whimpered and sat with his chin tucked into his flabby neck.
“You know, Mogat, I think you have some interesting tales to tell. And the best part is, chubby little speckers like you always talk. Always.”
Niles headed for the door of the interrogation room, then turned back. “I’ll have the police return you to your cell.”
“He will cooperate,” Admiral Klyber said quietly. “I doubt, however, that he will have any valuable information. Crowley would never trust anything important with such a weakling.”
I felt as if I had just watched an execution. Klyber showed absolutely no empathy for their prisoner. The physiology monitors lining the walls of the observation room showed that Kline’s heart pace had nearly doubled. His blood pressure rose so high when Niles placed my helmet over his head that a heart attack seemed imminent; yet I, too, felt strangely unsympathetic.
“I don’t believe there was any particular bounty on Kline,” said Klyber. “Does a reward of three thousand dollars seem adequate?”
Freeman nodded.
“Very good. I will see that you are paid by the end of the day, Mr. Freeman. I’m curious, though, why come as far as the Scutum-Crux Arm chasing a small-time criminal with such low prospects?”
“Little fish sometimes lead you to bigger ones,” Freeman said as he stood to leave.
“I see,” Klyber said, without standing up. “Well, fine work, Freeman. I hope you find the bigger fish you are looking for.”
Freeman nodded again and left.
Admiral Klyber leaned forward and flipped a switch, turning off the sound in the next room. “Your name keeps popping up, Corporal Harris. Why should that be?”
I knew precisely why my name sounded familiar to Admiral Klyber, but I had no intention of dredging up my record on Gobi. I had other things on my mind, so as soon as Klyber and the Intelligence officer left the police station, I asked one of the guards to take me to Kline’s cell. I found him lying on his cot and staring up at the ceiling, his swollen eye still oozing yellow pas.
“You should have a doctor look at that,” I said as I entered the cell.
Kline said nothing. He continued to stare up at the ceiling.
“I can see you’re busy, and I don’t want to take up too much of your time, but I was curious how you survived Freeman’s grenade,” I said.
“Is that you, Harris?” Kline asked.
“It’s me,” I said.
“Did you watch the interrogation?”
“You didn’t say anything about how you made it out of the desert with a grenade glued to your hand,” I said.
Kline snickered and sat up on his cot. While returning the little mutant to his cell, the guards had finally washed the blood from his head, but the entire side of his face was swollen and bruised. He held up his left arm and let the baggy sleeve of his robe fall to reveal the stub. “How do you think I survived?”
“I’m guessing that the grenade was a dud,” I said.
“I cut my hand off and left it in the desert, asshole. Well, one of Crowley’s lieutenants cut it off for me,” Kline said. “He found me wandering in the desert. Do you have any idea how much that hurt?” With that, he lay back down on his cot.
“So you decided to fly to Ezer Kri to shoot me,” I said. “Why me? Why not Freeman? He was the one who glued the grenade to your hand.”
“I wanted to go after Freeman, but Crowley said to go after you instead,” Kline said without looking in my direction. “He said I’d never get a shot off if I went after Freeman. Freeman is a dog. You are just as bad as he is. You let him do this to me. You’re just another rabid dog.”
“And you are a terrorist,” I said. “You are an enemy of the Republic.”
“Everybody is an enemy of the Republic. I don’t know anybody who likes the Republic,” Kline said. “At least nobody who isn’t a clone.”
From what I could see, Governor Yamashiro sincerely wanted to cooperate. The mediaLink ran local news stories about the Ezer Kri police cracking down on all known Morgan Atkins sympathizers. Work crews began converting the ruins of the Mogat district into a park two days after the Kamehameha bombarded it. With local forces closing in on the ground and Klyber’s ships blockading the planet, no one could leave Ezer Kri. Yamashiro only had twenty-four hours left to turn over the criminals. At that point, I thought he might make it.
The Chayio was one of fifteen frigates that accompanied the Kamehameha on the mission to Ezer Kri. Small by capital ship standards and designed for battling fighters and smugglers, frigates were approximately six hundred feet long and outfitted with twenty particle-beam cannons. The guns on frigates were perfect for downing the small, fast-moving ships used by pirates and smugglers, but they would not dent the armor on a capital ship.
They fit well with Admiral Klyber’s philosophy. Since the Unified Authority was the only entity with a navy in the entire galaxy, he wanted the Scutum-Crux Fleets outfitted for conflicts with smugglers and terrorists. After all, nobody but the U.A. Navy had the capacity to build anything even near the size of a battleship.
By spreading his frigates over the most populated areas on Ezer Kri, Klyber formed a blockade that could stop ships from leaving the planet. It was a good strategy. A single frigate would have enough guns to shoot down any ship parked in this solar system. On the off chance that a frigate did run into that unforeseen enemy, the three nearest frigates could converge on the scene in less than one minute. In theory, our net was impregnable and our ships unstoppable. But in practice, our net had frayed along the edges.