“Those ships were sealed. You’ve got us riding in a specking wreck,” Nobles said. He looked back to see if I was suitably panicked, then fired the thrusters and lifted off the ground. “Good thing you’re comfortable around nuclear weapons.”
He knew I wasn’t.
When I thought the situation through, I realized that anything that set off the nuke would probably toast us as well. Logic only went so far, however, when it came to my phobia of things I could not control. Trying to ignore my nerves, I sat in the copilot’s seat and strapped myself in.
We crossed back over Norristown, passing over barren streets and thriving neighborhoods. Going up to gather food and weapons, I had flown over this territory dozens of times, but this time was different. This time I did not know when I would return. It was not just a question of survival. Even if everything worked out just right, I might never return.
Off in the distance, I saw the three towers of the financial district—the boys’ dorm, the girls’ dorm, and the hospital. Only a few minutes had passed since Ava sent me away. She’d still be in that building. Was she thinking of me?
“So if Warshaw broadcasted into wherever we’re going, what’s to say he stayed there?” Nobles asked. “I mean, maybe he wasn’t any safer there than he was over here. Maybe he got there, patched up another broadcast station, and took his fleet to the next stop.” As he asked this, Nobles took us out of the atmosphere. The sky turned dark and was no longer a sky but field of stars.
And maybe the Earth Fleet caught up to him on the other side,
I thought. It was entirely possible that we were broadcasting from one graveyard to another.
“If it isn’t the prodigal son come for a visit,” Lieutenant Mars radioed in to us as we slowed to a drift and floated toward the wreckage. “I was beginning to think you changed your mind.”
Nobles, who had become very serious, ignored Mars’s greeting, and said, “This is Marine 1, do you have a target for us?”
“You mean Harris’s Tool?” asked one of the engineers.
“Roger that,” said Nobles.
“Harris’s Tool,” the engineer persisted. “Harris’s Tool. That is the code name for the battleship. The only way Operation Chastity Belt can succeed is for us all to be on the same page. You need to call it ‘Harris’s Tool,’ or we won’t know what you are talking about.”
“Come again?” asked Nobles.
“The names were Spuler’s idea, not mine,” Mars said, sounding somewhat apologetic. Seaman First Class Aaron Spuler was the resident joker of the Corps of Engineers.
“Fine, where is Harris’s Tool?” Nobles asked.
“Where do you think?” asked Spuler.
Several people laughed. I did not, neither did Nobles.
“COE 1, where precisely is the battleship?” Nobles asked, his voice flat. “COE” was short for Corps of Engineers.
“Honestly, Spuler, you’re acting like a ten-year-old,” said Mars. Then he said, “Marine 1, I’ll send over the coordinates.”
The laughter stopped.
We picked our way through the graveyard. Terraneau, a giant blue, green, and tawny globe, spun in one corner of our vision. Far in a distance, a roiling orange-and-yellow sun glowed. Seen from inside our transport, the dead ships floating around us looked as large as continents, their portholes dark, the exposed areas of their decks even darker. Humanity never conquered space, it just learned to travel in bubbles. All around us, the dead ships hung as reminders of what happens when that bubble breaks.
It took us twenty minutes to fly through the graveyard, dodging around the ruins of capital ships, sometimes breaking through a fog of litter. We saw no bodies, though tens of thousands of them floated around us. We pushed through bits of armor plating, folds of molten glass, wings from fighters, and more than one curtain of frozen water, all suspended in space. My pilot might have been used to these sights; he always flew in the cockpit where he could see his surroundings. I generally traveled in the kettle, blissfully ignorant of everything around the ship.
Off in the distance, a derelict battleship sat in a clearing like an island in the night. Three rows of flashing lights ran along the underside of the ship, winking on and off in a sequence of red and yellow squares. At the far end of the ship, four flashing blue lights marked the entrance to the landing bay.
The hull of the battleship was somewhere between beige and gray in color, an enormous moth-shaped wedge with tears in its skin where torpedoes had struck it.
“I don’t like the looks of this scow,” Nobles said.
I did not say anything. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I wanted to treat this whole adventure as if it were a bad dream. I would do what had to be done, but fear lurked in my mind. I tried to ignore it, but I knew it was there.
All along the side of the ship, tiny dark spots stood out against the gray of the hull. They looked no more significant than slugs crawling on a garden wall. These were transports, clamped to the hull on the ship in regular intervals, thirty of them in all. We flew below one, and I stared up at it. No light shone from within the cockpit. The transport looked every bit as dead as the host to which it was now attached.
“They look like ants compared to the battleship,” Nobles said. I expected him to question whether they would be able to move the big ship, but he didn’t. A trained pilot, he understood the physics of space travel better than I did.
We approached the landing bay, a straight-edged passageway shrouded in darkness. In the dead of space, with the landing-pad lights extinguished, the inside of the bay was absolute black. The silhouette of a raven flying across a moonless sky would not have been as dark as the world inside that ship.
“COE1, this is Marine 1,” Nobles began, and hesitated before completing his thought. “We have entered the battleship.”
Spuler started to make another stupid joke, but Mars cut him off. “Understood,” he said. I could hear Spuler grumbling in the background.
“Are the locks open?” Nobles asked. Landing bays incorporated enormous doors for atmospheric control.
“Everything is a go,” Mars said. “We will seal the locks behind you.”
“Yeah, we wouldn’t want anything to shoot out prematurely,” Spuler added.
“Stow it, Seaman,” Mars snapped.
More laughter. Even Mars laughed this time. Then he said, “One more word out of you, Spuler, and you’ll be cleaning the Norristown sewage system for the rest of your career.”
Silence.
I knew Spuler. He had a mouth on him, but he was worth the trouble. Mars had one thousand men in his Corps of Engineers; Spuler might well have been the best of them. He’d probably done more to get this show rolling than all of the other engineers combined.
Moving no faster than ten miles per hour, we drifted into that dark hatchway, our runner lights illuminating small swatches along the runway and walls. This part of the ship was in immaculate condition—the walls, pipes, panels, doors, ceiling fixtures, and other furnishings all in perfect trim.
The runway was designed to accommodate transports, but it was wide enough for larger ships. Part of the design included an artificial-gravity field in which ships entering this passage were supposed to land. The field had not been restored. Instead of riding the sled system through the locks, Nobles had to fly the transport through that needle’s eye.
“Marine 1, the outer hatch is sealed,” Mars informed us.
Spuler said nothing. He probably had some smart remark about restoring a foreskin or something along that line, but Mars had warned him off.
We slowly drifted past the first of the atmospheric shields, a massive iron door that weighed multiple tons. Behind it, in a discrete recess, a tiny red light winked on and off. I was glad to see it. It meant that while the rest of the ship was dormant, the engineers had restored power to the atmospheric locks.
Nobles pointed to a glowing lever on his flight stick. “Looks like we’ll be able to open the doors from in here,” he said, sounding relieved. I knew how he felt. Everything had gone according to plan so far.
We floated in past all three of the locks and settled onto the landing-bay deck. In the glare of our runner lights, I saw that Mars and his engineers had cleared as much debris as they could from the area.
I looked around the empty landing bay outside the window, a world so dark and silent it might have been at the bottom of a sea. Abandoned. Lifeless. How many people had died in this chamber? A crew of three thousand men had died defending this ship. That much I knew. Some had been flushed out to space. Undoubtedly, others were still aboard, floating statues that had once been sailors and Marines.
The Corps of Engineers had equipped the skids of our transport with special magnetic clamps to hold us in place during our upcoming collision. The magnets came on and locked us into place once we landed.
“COE 1, we are in place, repeat, we are in place,” Nobles radioed, as our bird touched the deck.
I hated the sound of those words. They meant we were sealed into this orbiting tomb. They meant I could not turn back. Anxiety built in my gut. I wanted to tell Nobles that this was all a mistake. We needed to go back. Without my combat reflex to calm me, I had to deal with unadulterated fear.
“Copy that, Marine 1,” Mars said.
And then, on a direct line that Nobles would not hear, Lieutenant Mars said, “General Harris, a lot of your men will be glad to see you go.”
“So I hear,” I said. Now it was Mars’s turn to tell me what he thought of me. Why not give me an earful? He wasn’t likely to see me again. I always thought the “born-again clone” liked me, but maybe he simply had a better poker face than Hollingsworth or Doctorow.
“Serving with you has been an honor, sir. I hope your mission goes as planned, and you return soon,” he said, leaving me stunned. He signed off before I could respond.
Once again I found myself alone with my thoughts, trying to adjust to the alien feeling of unbridled fear. Flying always bothered me, even when I had a reliable combat reflex. It made me feel helpless. In the fight-or-flight of the battlefield, I had a measure of control. On a ship, I had no control of my fate. Whatever became of the ship would also become of me.
“Nobles, what’s your first name?” I asked, mostly to clear the suffocating silence from my helmet.
“Chris, sir,” he said.
“Short for Christopher?”
“Short for Christian. My parents must have been religious types.” Like every other clone, he was raised to believe he was a natural-born. In fact, he was programmed to die if he discovered his synthetic heritage. As a Liberator, I was spared that last bit of programming.
“Must have been,” I agreed. “Too bad you never knew them. Do you know how they died?”
“They died in a house fire,” Nobles said.
Funny,
I thought,
mine, too.
Lieutenant Mars broke up our conversation. “Prepare for launch initiation. Repeat, prepare for launch initiation.”
“Shit, here we go,” I whispered, not even thinking who would hear me.
“General Harris, we set up a video array if you want to follow the operation’s progress.”
I thought that he meant some kind of an interLink display. The last thing I wanted at that moment was images of transports dragging the carcass of a battleship showing inside my helmet.
Willing myself to sound calm, I said, “I’d rather keep the interLink open.”
“They’re not on the interLink, sir, they’re on the screens behind your seat.”
“What?” When I looked at the back wall of the cockpit, I saw five rows of four-inch video screens inlaid in the wall. Most of the screens showed a small section of the battleship’s hull and a bird’s-eye view of cluttered space. The engineers must have placed cameras in the transports along the hull.
“That’s was kind of you,” I said.
“It was Spuler’s idea,” Mars said.
“Think of it as an in-flight porno,” said Spuler. “You get to watch the Tool’s penetration.”
“Spuler,” Mars said.
I tried to ignore them. Looking at the little displays, I realized just how much I wanted to scrub the mission. I felt the jittering in my hands and the throbbing in my temples. Now that the transport had landed, and the runner lights were out, I sat in darkness, seeing only by the light of the night-for-day lenses in my visor. I was scared already, and soon I would be terrified.
Trying to sound confident, I told Mars, “Pull the trigger.” Then I did something I knew I would regret; I told Nobles, “I’m shutting down our Link until we get through,” without giving him a reason why. I wasn’t shutting down the entire interLink, we might need to contact Mars; I was just shutting down the Link between me and Nobles because I could feel the panic spreading through my thoughts like a cancer, and I did not want him to hear me.
“Yes, sir,” said Nobles. He seemed preoccupied as he toyed with the switches and gear around his seat.
I removed the harness and climbed out of the chair. The artificial gravity drawing my boots to the deck, I walked to the panel of screens. When I took a closer look at some of the monitors, I saw the rear sides of transports in the corners of the screens. The engines were already running. We had started the flight without my noticing. Sometimes, that happens in space.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I couldn’t stop myself from looking at the monitors. It didn’t matter that I wanted to stick my head in the proverbial sand; the screens bore down on me like five rows of unblinking eyes. Even when I looked away, I felt their weight upon me.
Across the cockpit, Nobles busied himself checking systems and flight controls. He flipped switches, read gauges, then turned his attention to the video array I wanted so much to ignore. He settled comfortably, and there he sat, his gaze transfixed, the reflections of the little screens showing in rows of bright squares in his visor.