A car waited for me on the runway. I trotted the few feet to the car and was surprised to see who waited inside.
“Admiral Cabot,” I said. “Aren’t you supposed to be on St. Augustine?”
“Not much left for me to do over there,” he said.
The clouds were so thick that I could not see stars in the sky. The rain fluctuated somewhere between drizzle and mist, forming a film on my skin and uniform.
I patted beads of water off my shoulders and stepped into the car.
“How did you know where to find me?” I asked.
“Colonel Hollingsworth sent me your itinerary, sir,” Cabot said.
“General Hollingsworth,” I said.
“Warshaw made him a general?” Cabot said.
I nodded, not sure if I should tell him how many stars came with the promotion. I changed the subject. “I’m here looking for a civilian named Ray Freeman. Heard of him?”
“He’s waiting for you at Camp Marshall.” Camp Marshall was the largest military base in Odessa. It had been an Army base; but, the Enlisted Man’s Empire did not have an Army, so it now housed Marines.
“Are you sure he’s there?” I asked.
“He’s a hard man to miss,” Cabot said.
I watched the surroundings out the window as we drove through the city. We crossed a suspension bridge, and I saw a shoreline bustling with life. Rows of skyscrapers lined the freeway like the cliffs along a river canyon. “I have not seen a city like this for a while,” I said.
“Yes, sir. It’s like the war never came here,” Cabot agreed.
You can only dodge bullets for so long,
I thought. These people might have ducked the Avatari; but the Unifieds would make up for it. The next war would begin in a day and a half.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
“Evacuate the planet?” I asked. The suggestion was ridiculous. It didn’t matter what the Unified Authority had up its sleeve, evacuation was out of the question. “I have five hundred thousand men here.”
“I’m not just talking about your men, I mean the civilian population,” Freeman said. He sat unflinching, his eyes narrowed in on mine.
“That isn’t going to happen,” I said. Then I thought about what he had just said. “The Unifieds aren’t going after civilians.”
We sat alone in the camp commander’s office. The pictures on the walls were placed there for soldiers, not Marines. They showed scenes with tanks and gunships and fighting men wearing fatigues. The clock showed 22:13.
“You are talking about millions of people. I couldn’t evacuate them if I wanted to. I don’t have enough ships.”
“You’re going to need more,” Freeman agreed.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a few lying around that you could loan me?” I asked with so much sarcasm that even Freeman could not ignore it.
“I have twenty-five of them,” he said. “They carry a quarter of a million passengers apiece.”
That gave me pause. I would have accused him of joking, but Freeman never joked. He was more likely to build twenty-five gargantuan ships than tell a joke.
“Bullshit! Nothing but a planet can carry a quarter of a million people,” I muttered, though I already knew that the ships must exist.
“They’re barges,” Freeman said.
“Where the speck did you find something like that?” I asked; but as soon as I asked, I realized the only possible answer. I shelved that information away, Freeman was on the verge of showing me his hidden cards. Taking a deep breath, I asked, “Ray, why do we need to evacuate?”
Always enigmatic, Freeman did not answer. He studied me for a moment, his expression impassive, then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small device that looked like a notepad with a screen. Whatever it was, it looked tiny in Freeman’s gigantic right hand.
He placed it flat on the table.
The two-way communicator was six inches long, less than three inches wide, and flat as a shingle. The edges of the communicator were shiny black plastic. The screen that filled the frame was already lit. A face I recognized stared up from it.
“Good morning, Harris,” said the familiar gravelly voice.
“Good morning,” I said, wondering if somewhere along the line, I had lost my mind.
“We hear you’ve been promoted to general. Congratulations.”
“Thank you,” I said, staring at the screen and trying to figure out its magic. Few people had earned my respect as thoroughly as Dr. William Sweetwater. He died more bravely than any man I knew.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
William Sweetwater died on New Copenhagen. He led the team of scientists that unraveled the aliens’ technology. He was a brilliant, fearless dwarf who always referred to himself in the royal plural.
I started to ask Freeman if this was some sort of a prank, but he put up a hand to stop me. He had pointed the communicator toward me, so that the pin-sized camera mounted under the screen would not catch his movements, then he put up a finger across his lips.
On the screen, Sweetwater continued chatting amiably. He watched me with eyes that I had seen burned by toxic air. He spoke with lips I had seen blister so badly they burst. In this new incarnation, the little man was once again whole.
The diminutive scientist chattered on. “We hear you’ve been busy resurrecting planets, Harris.”
I almost spoke up when I heard his use of the word “resurrected.” He looked real enough, but any schoolkid could scan a photograph into a computer and convert it into a three-dimensional animation. Making the animation interactive, though, giving it the exact right voice and mannerisms, that would require familiarity with Sweetwater and extensive audio files. The character on the screen not only looked and sounded like Sweetwater, it acted like him.
“You mean the revolution?” I asked. Now Freeman waved his hand to stop me, then picked up the communicator and turned it toward himself.
“Doctor, give me a moment to speak with General Harris?” Freeman asked.
The avatar on the screen smiled, and said, “Certainly, Raymond.”
Freeman switched the two-way off, then told me, “He doesn’t know you are at war with the Unified Authority.”
“Of course he doesn’t, he’s been dead for three years,” I said. “The only thing going through his mind is worms.”
“He thinks he’s alive and that he has been assigned to the Clarke space station.” The Arthur C. Clarke Space Station, or the “Wheel,” as most people called it, was a scientific observation post on the extreme outer edge of the Orion Arm. The Wheel was huge, three miles in diameter. It took its name from a prehistoric science-fiction writer who had popularized ideas like spinning space stations and spaceflights to nearby planets.
“He doesn’t think anything,” I pointed out. “He’s dead. He’s more than dead, he’s incinerated. We left him lying next to a fifty-megaton bomb.”
“He may only be a V-job of Sweetwater, but he thinks he’s real, and we need to keep it that way,” Freeman said. “They replicated Sweetwater’s brain.”
“What about Breeze?” I asked. Arthur Breeze had been Sweetwater’s partner in science and his polar opposite. Sweetwater was barely four feet tall, plump, with a scraggly beard and long reddish brown hair. He was mildly cocky, acted hip, walked with a swagger.
Breeze, on the other hand, stood six-foot-four and weighed a bony buck fifty at best. He was forehead-bald past the crown of his head with a garland of cotton-fluff hair that ran between his ears but no lower. He wore thick glasses that were always smudged with fingerprints and dusted with dandruff. He had teeth the size of gravestones that would have looked just about right in the mouth of a horse.
“Breeze is in there, too,” Freeman said. “No point having one without the other.”
“In there? On the Wheel?”
“They believe they are alive and that they are on the Wheel for their own protection,” Freeman said.
“For their own protection,” I repeated. “Protection from what? They’re dead?”
“From the Avatari,” Freeman said.
Hearing Freeman mention the Avatari, I felt a moment of elation. I’d been expecting Freeman to play whatever ace card he’d been hiding, but he didn’t have a card at all. Instead, he had the missing piece of a very frightening puzzle.
The Double Y clones, the rush to get as many ships to Olympus Kri as possible, the way the Unified Authority never pressed the attack . . . they all fit together in a flash of clarity. The Double Y clones were never meant to destroy our Navy, they were meant to behead its leadership, to kill the officers and leave the ships and crews operational. Once our Navy fell apart, the Unifieds hoped to assimilate the ships and the crews. Clones were designed to follow orders, not to give them. Kill all the leaders, and the followers might well give up without a fight when ordered to surrender. Then what? Then send the ships here? Send the entire Navy to Olympus Kri to . . .
If the Unifieds weren’t planning to attack, why did Freeman want me here?
I asked myself, and I knew the answer.
The Unified Authority wasn’t going to invade Olympus Kri, but somebody else might, somebody the Unifieds feared . . . the Avatari.
“The barges you were talking about, they’re U.A. ships, right?” I asked.
Freeman nodded.
“It’s New Copenhagen all over again,” I said, now starting to feel a chill as the reality of what this meant set in.
Freeman shook his head, fixed his eyes on mine, then said in rumbling whisper, “This isn’t New Copenhagen. This is Armageddon.”
Before resurrecting Sweetwater on the two-way, Freeman gave me one last warning. He said, “Sweetwater doesn’t know that he’s dead. Neither does Breeze. It’s got to stay that way. There is no way of knowing how they will react if they find out they are dead.”
The psychology of the virtual soul,
I thought. Clones die when they learn they are synthetic. Do virtual people shut down when they find out they exist only on a computer?
“What about the mine on New Copenhagen?” I asked.
Sweetwater came with my platoon as we entered the underground cavern that the Avatari had created. The bottom of that mine was filled with corrosive gas, the fumes of which slowly dissolved the little man’s skin and lungs. He insisted on accompanying us as we delivered the bomb, even though we did not have armor that would fit him. His heroism cost him his life in one long, slow, painful, installment.
“He doesn’t know about it.”
“And Breeze doesn’t know he was torn apart by a giant spider?”
Freeman shook his head. “They think we evacuated them from New Copenhagen. They know you liberated some planets, but they think you did it for the Unified Authority.”
“And I’m supposed to lie to them?” I asked.
“Lives are depending on it,” Freeman said.
“Lives are depending on my lying to a computer?” I asked. If it had really been Sweetwater, instead of a computer program, I wouldn’t have agreed to lie to him. Sweetwater deserved better.
“If you can’t be trusted—” Freeman began.
“What do you care about saving lives? You’ve never cared about anybody.”
He did not answer.
I might have walked away from this meeting; but Olympus Kri belonged to the Enlisted Man’s Empire. If the Avatari annihilated this planet, they would be killing citizens of the Enlisted Man’s Empire, not the Unified Authority.
“You haven’t become some kind of homicidal humanitarian, have you?” I asked.
“Are you ready to talk to Sweetwater?” Freeman asked, ignoring my question.
“Not even remotely,” I said. The cogs were clicking together in my head. I nodded toward the two-way communicator, and asked, “When did they boot up the ghost?”
“When we lost New Copenhagen.”
“Lost New Copenhagen?” I asked. The pieces finally fell into place. “I bet that was right about the same time you showed up on Terraneau.”
Freeman said nothing.
“They sent two clones to kill me . . .”
“Five clones,” Freeman said. “I hit three of them before you came back from St. Augustine.”
“They sent the clones, then they lost New Copenhagen, so they sent you to keep me alive.”
Freeman sat silent and impassive. He was big and dark and powerful and oddly serene. Here was a man who avoided friendships, who might never have loved anyone, even as a child; but now he exuded a sense of ominous serenity.
“Why attack Olympus Kri?” I asked. It didn’t make sense. Granted, Olympus Kri was the closest colony to New Copenhagen, but astrogeography did not matter to the Avatari. They had the technology to leapfrog entire galaxies when they chose to.
“New Copenhagen was the first planet we liberated from the aliens,” Freeman said. “We liberated Olympus Kri next.”
“No we didn’t. The first planet we liberated was Terraneau,” I said.
Freeman shook his head, and said, “The Inner Orion Fleet landed here while you were still in Bliss.” He meant Fort Bliss, the concentration camp the Unified Authority built as a home away from home for the clones who fought in the battle of New Copenhagen.
“Oh,” I said. Then I mumbled, “That’s not good . . . not good at all.” If the Avatari were taking planets by the order of their liberation, Terraneau was next in line. And here I learned something about myself. I thought I had washed my hands of Ava Gardner and Ellery Doctorow and the stupid, stupid people who lived on Terraneau; but now, knowing that they might all be killed, I had a change of heart. Fantasizing about them getting what I felt they deserved was one thing; knowing that they all might die was entirely different.
I thought about Ava and wondered if we could possibly evacuate Terraneau before the zero hour.
“You ready to talk to Sweetwater?” Freeman asked.
I nodded. He was a ghost, just one more ghost with which I would have to reckon, one more occupant in a life already overpopulated by the dead.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Peace does not always come with a signed treaty. Sometimes it is foisted upon sworn enemies when they realize they must either work together or perish.