The new Unified Authority Marines used fléchettes instead of bullets. The fléchettes were no larger than a sewing needle, but they were coated with a neurotoxin that would have killed me had my combat reflex not gone into overdrive. Strained but not destroyed, the gland went dormant during my recovery period. I was still weak but getting stronger.
Pretending not to notice the insult, I smiled and drank my wine.
Ellery Doctorow did not like me or my Marines, but that did not stop him from making a toast with wine we had provided him. The peas and the canned chicken his wife served for dinner all came compliments of the military he so despised.
The Avatari left Terraneau so battered that the people did not have enough food to feed themselves. Fortunately, the Unifieds lost a lot of ships when they attacked us; we might have starved if they hadn’t come to kill us. Rummaging on the derelict warships floating above the atmosphere, my men found enough food to feed the planet while my Corps of Engineers built farms.
“I even went jogging this morning,” I said. “Nothing too ambitious, just a couple of miles.” Actually, I’d jogged a full ten miles, but Doctorow did not need to know that.
“Jogging? I’m glad to hear it,” he said through a stiff grin that made him look anything but happy. “Now that you are up and around, have you put any thought into finding a new location for your base? I think it’s high time you moved.”
“A new location,” I said. “Washington, D.C., comes to mind.”
He laughed.
I leaned over the table, my eyes locked on Doctorow’s, and said in a hushed voice as if confiding my deepest personal secrets, “I know what happened to my fleet.”
Thinking that I meant I had found the wreckage of the missing ships, he asked, “How far did they get?”
“They made it,” I said. “They survived.”
The room had gone quiet. Ava and Sarah stared at me. I had not thought they would hear me, but I didn’t mind.
“What do you mean they made it?” asked Doctorow.
“They escaped. They’re fine,” I said, both bluffing and telling the truth. I did not know whether or not they were “fine,” but I did know how they had escaped.
CHAPTER THREE
Ava saw through me. She always saw through me. Fortunately for me, she was an actress by trade. She knew when to hide her emotions, and how.
The tone of the evening changed after I made my announcement. Thrilled with the idea that my Marines might actually leave his planet, Ellery Doctorow wanted details. “Where did they go?”
“That’s classified,” I said.
“How soon will they return?”
“Classified.”
“But you’re in contact with them? You’re making plans to leave?”
“Not in the foreseeable future,” I said.
His silence was smothering. He shook his head to show disappointment.
Taking advantage of the silence, Sarah Doctorow butted into the conversation. “Oh, but, General, you can’t possibly attack Earth from Terraneau, it’s too far away. Wouldn’t that weaken your attack?” She didn’t care about my welfare, of course. That was just camouflage.
“Where do you suggest I launch from?” I asked her.
Her husband answered, “Anywhere but here.”
“We don’t have anyplace else,” I said, though I did not know if that was accurate.
“Attack from wherever your fleet disappeared to. Where did you say they went?” he asked.
“I didn’t,” I said.
“You brought the Earth Fleet down on us once already. I won’t allow you to do that again.”
I wondered how he planned to stop me but did not ask. I also wondered why I tolerated the pontificating old windbag. Hell, I didn’t just put up with him, I kowtowed to him. I let him push me around. Somewhere in my mind, I accepted the notion that I was just a guest on Terraneau. This was not my home. Me and my Marines, we were here for a visit, and we could not wait to get away. Doctorow, he was here forever, and for that reason I gave him a little more authority than I normally would have.
Sarah took a different tack. “That is so brave,” she raved. “They nearly annihilated you just two months ago, and you’re already preparing to fight them again.” She touched a hand to her voluminous bosoms as if genuinely moved.
Ava did not join in the discussion. She listened to Ellery and Sarah but kept her eyes on me. No emotion showed on her face.
And that was how the night ended—Doctorow angling to get my Marines off his planet, his wife praising me for my self-destructive spirit, and Ava watching in silence.
Seeing that I would not give out any more specifics, Doctorow finished his glass of wine, and announced, “It’s getting late, perhaps we should call an end to the evening.”
Sarah yawned, placing a hand as thick as a catcher’s mitt before her mouth but making no effort to stifle the sound. Then she stood, started gathering dirty plates, paused to look at Ava, and said, “It’s so nice to see you again.”
“At least let me help clear the table,” Ava offered.
As they went through the monthly ritual of Ava’s offering to help with the dishes and Sarah’s declining, Ellery Doctorow led me toward the door. “How much do you really know?” he asked in a whisper.
“I know they got away, and I know how,” I said.
“Do you have any way of reaching them?”
“Maybe,” was all I told him, then Ava came to join us, and it was time to leave. She kissed Doctorow on the cheek and thanked him for dinner. She and Sarah hugged as if they were sisters, then we said our final good-byes.
Had Ava and I held hands, hypothermia might have set in, her vibe was so cold. She did not speak. When I opened the door for her, she slid into her seat without a word.
“You’re awfully quiet,” I said as I slipped behind the wheel.
She did not respond.
I started the engine and pulled away. Both Ava and the Doctorows lived in a northern suburb of Norristown, a wealthy community that had somehow gone unscathed during the Avatari invasion. All of the houses still stood. Once my engineers had restored the power and water, the residents began taking care of their yards, and the streets returned to their prewar elegance.
We drove the short distance to Ava’s house in silence. Then, as I parked, she finally asked, “When were you going to tell me?”
She climbed out of the car before I could answer.
Ava’s house was not as big or nice as the Doctorows’, but it wasn’t bad—a single-story flat with a rock garden in the front and a backyard the size of a postage stamp. She also had two bedrooms, both of which would end up occupied for the rest of the night if I did not find a way to make amends.
“I was going to tell you,” I said, as she unlocked the front door.
“Are they back?” she asked.
“Is who back?” I asked.
Ava was not the kind of gal who holds still for a fight. She removed her shoes and tucked them into the closet as she entered the house. Pulling off her right earring, she turned to me, and asked, “The ships. Your missing ships. Are they back?”
I stood motionless, watching her as she headed toward her master bedroom. “No,” I said.
“But they’re coming back?” she called from the bedroom.
Her clothes were coming off. Ava had no compunction about undressing in front of me, no matter what her mood. I, on the other hand, preferred not to watch her undress during fights. If I couldn’t have it, I didn’t want to see what I was missing. That way, I avoided nights spent in frustration.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You don’t know?”
“I haven’t made contact,” I confessed.
Her blouse unbuttoned, her bra exposed, she stepped into the doorway to take another shot at me. “Honey, from the way you were talking tonight, I would have thought you’d moved in with them.”
Oh shit,
I thought,
she’s using the “H-word.”
When Ava felt brassy, she began her sentences by calling me “Honey.” Sometimes sentences that began with “Honey” were funny, sometimes they were brutal, but they were never nice.
“Yeah, well, Doctorow wants me out of here, and he’ll be a lot easier to work with when he thinks that I’m planning to leave,” I said.
She pulled off her blouse and disappeared into the bedroom. When she spoke again, her voice was softer. We had come to the heart of the argument. “Are you leaving?”
“Not without you,” I said.
She came back into the doorway, this time dressed only in her bra and her panties. Giving me a snide smile, she said, “Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Harris, you rang the right bell; now come and claim your reward.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The time had come to lay my cards out on the table.
Hollingsworth and I dressed in combat armor for this excursion. Lieutenant Mars came in a soft shell—that was Marine talk for the kind of armor worn by technicians and engineers. Unlike our hardened armor, Mars’s shell was made of flexible rubber latex.
Mars, Hollingsworth, and I sat inside the kettle—the cargo and passenger section of a military transport ship—as our pilot prepped for takeoff. We talked, trying to make ourselves comfortable, but you were never really comfortable riding in the kettle. Everything was made of metal—metal floor, metal walls, metal ceiling, even the horseshoe seat in the head was made of metal. Everything was metal except for the wooden bench running the length of the walls and the restraining harnesses.
And the kettle was dark, too. It had a twenty-foot ceiling and a couple of red emergency lights, but most of the lighting came from the cockpit.
“You know, General, I could have had my men string lights in here,” Mars said.
“Good thought,” I said. “We’ll take you up on that next time.” I held up my helmet, which offered night-for-day vision that would allow me to see perfectly well. But although our helmets included interLink connectivity that let us hear each other, conversation flows more easily when you’re not wearing an airtight helmet.
“General Harris, what exactly are we here for?” Hollingsworth asked. In the light that spilled out from the open cockpit door, I could see Hollingsworth’s face. He was a young Marine. Like every other military clone, he had brown hair and brown eyes though like the others, what he saw when he looked in the mirror was a young man with blue eyes and blond hair.
“I’m going to show you how the fleet escaped,” I said.
“No shit?” Hollingsworth asked. “How did they do it?”
“I’ll demonstrate when we get there,” I said. We sat in silence for a moment, then I asked Mars, “Were you able to get the shields running on that armor?”
Of the three of us, Mars was the one sitting in the most light; it illuminated a wedge of his face that started just above his chin and ended on his nose. He smiled, and said, “Yes, sir. All we had to do was recharge the batteries.”
“And?” I asked.
“The shielding is worthless,” Mars said.
“What do you mean by ‘worthless’? Are you saying it’s weak?” Hollingsworth asked. “It wasn’t weak when we fought them; we hit those sons of bitches with rockets and grenades.” Like me, Hollingsworth had seen that armor in battle.
“My particle-beam pistol didn’t get through,” I added. “I shot a man at point-blank range.”
“You should have kept shooting,” Mars said.
I might have kept shooting if the bastard hadn’t drilled through my forearm with two fléchettes. After that, I was busy trying to breathe as the neurotoxins turned my body numb.
“Those shields are just for show,” Mars continued. “Do you want to know what they used as a power source? A battery pack about the size of my finger.” He held up his little finger.
“Well, I suppose it’s the age-old trade-off, power versus mobility,” Mars began. Like every other engineer I knew, he got excited and started spouting jargon. He went on for a couple of minutes like that, babbling as if he had actually gone to engineering school. Clones did not go to officer training because they weren’t supposed to rise beyond enlisted ranks. I was a general, Hollingsworth a colonel, and Mars a lieutenant, but those were temporary field ranks given to us by the Unified Authority. They made us officers so we could run our fleet, then they attacked. Bastards.
“In a perfect setting, they might have gotten forty-five minutes out of their shields,” Mars went on. “Every time you hit them, it causes the power to spike. It doesn’t matter if you hit them with a missile or a spit wad, the power in their shields spikes.
“Do you know how long those shields would hold up in a rainstorm? We tried it. We powered up a suit and splashed it with a hose. The battery died in eight minutes.” He sounded disappointed by the armor’s poor showing.
He dropped his voice and became a bit more reverent as he added, “Most of their shields failed three minutes after you brought that garage down on their heads.”
“Wait,” Hollingsworth said, sounding more than a little skeptical. “Some of those guys were alive for weeks. If their shields gave out, why weren’t they crushed?”
“You only crushed the laggards, the ones who were still on the first and second levels of the garage,” Mars explained. “The lower levels did not cave in, especially on the fourth and fifth. The men on those levels weren’t buried, they were trapped. If they’d had food and oxygen, they’d still be alive today.”
“Interesting,” I said, interrupting Hollingsworth’s next question in the hope of getting the conversation back on point. “So we can drain the battery by hitting them with a barrage.”
“More or less,” Mars agreed.
“Do you have any idea how long the armor would stand up to a particle beam?” I asked.
“Eight minutes,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what you hit it with, there’s a power surge, and the battery goes dry after eight minutes.”
“Good to know,” I said.
“That’s eight minutes of prolonged exposure,” Mars said. “You would need to hit your target with a continuous wave.”