“New Copenhagen and Olympus Kri,” I said.
“Both planets in the Orion Arm,” Doctorow noted.
“Liberated planets,” I said.
“Yes, yes, you defeated the aliens on New Copenhagen. I’m guessing that you rescued Olympus Kri the same way you rescued Terraneau. That much of your story makes sense to me.”
“They’re coming here next,” I said.
“So you say,” Doctorow said. “Why would they come here? Olympus Kri and New Copenhagen are in the Orion Arm. Why jump from the Orion Arm all the way to a planet in the Scutum-Crux Arm? Wouldn’t Earth be the logical next stop?”
“Olympus Kri was the first planet we liberated after the war,” I said.
“I thought you came here first,” Doctorow said.
“I wasn’t involved. Olympus Kri was already in the works before they transferred me here.”
Doctorow nodded to show that he accepted the explanation. “So we’re the third planet in line . . . if their advance is chronological.” He spoke in a flat tone that would veil both belief and skepticism equally. He sat very still, his hands on his lap, his eyes meeting mine.
“Did you come here to organize an army?” he asked.
I shook my head. “An evacuation.”
“An evacuation?”
“There’s no point even trying to fight,” I said, and I told him what had happened on Olympus Kri. I explained about the destruction and how Freeman and I had hidden in an underground power station during the attack.
Doctorow listened to my story, his face a mask hiding whatever emotion he felt. When I finished, he summed it up by stating, “So you propose we evacuate the planet.”
“We’d need to contact Andropov and—”
“Andropov? Are you here in concert with the Unified Authority?” he asked, sounding suspicious. “I thought you were at war with them.”
“They declared war on us,” I said.
“You stole their ships,” Doctorow said.
“They sent us out here for target practice. This is ancient history; we don’t have time . . .”
“Absurd. Everything you have said is preposterous,” Doctorow said.
“I see, then your only other choice is to take your people underground.”
“I will need some time to think it over,” Doctorow said. Though he tried to hide it, I could tell that he had already made up his mind. “Do you have any evidence to prove what you are saying?”
“No,” I said.
“So I have to trust you. I have to take your word on blind faith?”
“That just about sums it up.” I had never lied to him, at least no times that I could think of on the spot.
He responded with an elegant laugh. “Walk by faith,” he said, a vestige from the religious life he had abandoned. “Here’s my theory. I think New Copenhagen and Olympus Kri are just fine. The Unified Authority may have taken those planets away from you, but I suspect the people are safe.
“What happened, Harris? Did the Earth Fleet crush you again?”
I had told him the truth, and he called me a liar. Maybe the truth was on both his side and mine. The Earth Fleet had indeed just served us a bloody defeat. Had any of our ships survived the attack at Olympus Kri?
“You’ve got it wrong,” I said, though perhaps he didn’t.
“You want us to evacuate our cities and send everyone underground,” Doctorow continued. “Wasn’t that how you won the last one; you invited the U.A. Marines into an underground garage, then you buried them?”
“Bullshit,” I said.
I expected Doctorow to tell me to watch my language; but now that the Right Reverend was president, bad language no longer seemed to concern him. “Interesting strategy you have there, Harris, persuade your enemies to go underground and bury them—”
“You’re not listening,” I said.
“Then you start the invasion while we’re digging ourselves out.”
“Invasion? What kind of invasion? I came in an unarmed shuttle.”
“We know about the other ship,” Doctorow said. “We picked up the anomaly when your fighter carrier broadcasted in. We’ve been tracking it for the last hour.”
So the
ad-Din
made it out,
I thought. That ship might have been the only reason I was still breathing. Doctorow was scared of her, and that made him scared of me.
“I’m trying to save lives,” I said.
“By flying a warship into neutral territory?” Doctorow glared at me, and added, “I’m not afraid of you, Harris. I’m not afraid of you or your clones or your ships.”
He delivered the lines well, but I could tell that I frightened him. I could see it in his forced expression. I could hear it in his voice.
“I’m not the one you should be scared of,” I said.
That ended the meeting. He stood up and left the room without saying another word.
I did not want to die in this police station. I did not want to die saving this worthless planet. I imagined what would happen to this room when the heat hit nine grand, how the glass would melt, and the walls would turn a glowing orange.
Looking at the camera, I let my thoughts drift, rewinding my interview with Doctorow. I replayed my story and his response. What I hated most about his explanation was that it sounded more plausible than mine. How ironic, his fabrication sounded more reasonable than the truth.
On this planet, I was the boogeyman, and I would die because no one trusted me, even when I told the truth. Doctorow had his ideal society, all right. He’d created a fleeting utopia; and now that he’d built it, his citizens would burn.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Nobles and I spent the night in an underground cell, a small cage about ten feet long and ten feet wide with bunk beds, a sink, and a little chrome toilet that rose out of the floor like a tree stump. I’d stayed as a guest in worse accommodations. I’d stayed as a prisoner in better.
An ever-present camera, sitting like a bird on a perch, watched over us from outside our cell. I had no idea who was on the other side of the camera, but the winking red diode on its base told me it was live.
I lay on the top bunk, and Nobles took the bottom. We seldom spoke if ever. He never told me his thoughts. I had Ava on my mind. I needed to find her. I needed to get out of this prison. Thinking of that, I asked myself,
How many prisoners fried in their cages on New Copenhagen?
And that reminded me of the Double Y clones we left on Olympus Kri.
Time continued to pass slowly by.
The hall was empty but brightly lit. Lying on my bunk, I covered my eyes with my right forearm and tried to sleep. The light did not keep me awake, but my thoughts did. For that reason, I was awake when the visitor arrived.
He appeared in the corridor that ran along the outside of the cells. As he reached our cage, the door slid open.
The visitor was a clone with no unique scars to distinguish him, but I recognized him just the same. It was the way he carried himself, I think. Maybe it was his cheerful expression. “Mars, what are you doing here?” I asked, remembering that he had chosen to stay on Terraneau.
“I came to help,” he said. He stopped just outside the door and watched me, possibly made nervous by my hostile tone.
“I thought you were a loyal citizen of Terraneau,” I said. Not sure if I should trust a man who had chosen Doctorow and his utopia over the Enlisted Man’s Empire, I decided to rake Mars over the coals. If he took it too easily, I’d know he was a spy.
Still standing outside my cell, Mars said, “Half the planet would come if you asked them now. Anyone who’s got any sense is more scared of Doctorow than they ever were of you.”
I heard him, but thought I must have misunderstood. Something was wrong with a world in which a retired priest scared people more than a Liberator clone.
“Don’t you like living in a utopian society?” I asked.
“Don’t know; I haven’t seen any utopias lately,” Mars said. “Once you left, Doctorow decided that his society could only work if everybody participated, so he armed his militia and moved them into Fort Sebastian. That’s when things got bad.
“When people disagree with his government, Doctorow sees it as a threat to his perfect world. The man keeps lists of agitators. Many of them have disappeared.”
Muttering some sort of “Hail Mary,” Mars stepped into our cage, and said, “I’m just glad we got to you before he stashed you away in Outer Bliss.” Outer Bliss was a relocation camp on the other side of the planet. It was an entire town surrounded by razor wire and guard towers.
“That would have been bad,” I said, thinking that an apartment or maybe a house in Outer Bliss would have come with windows and a private toilet.
As Mars passed under a lamp, I noticed the flat sheen of his hair. I started to ask him about it, then I noticed that his irises were no longer brown, they were black. “What’s with your eyes?” I asked.
He looked up and down the hall as if making sure that no one could see him, then he held up a bunched-up wash-cloth covered with oily brown stains. He tried to give this to Nobles, but Nobles only stared at it.
“What’s that?” Nobles asked, not reaching for it.
“It’s a disguise to make you look like a clone,” Mars said.
“If someone comes into the building, we’ll pass you off as one of my men.”
Hesitating before accepting the grimy bundle, Nobles opened the cloth. Inside, he found a small tube, and looked at Mars questioningly.
“Hair dye to make your hair brown like a clone’s.”
“This?” Nobles asked, holding up a tiny bottle.
“Colored eye-drops that turn your irises brown.”
“Oh, to make me look like a clone,” Nobles said. “Brilliant.” He squeezed the tube onto his left palm, rubbed the brown spew between his hands, then ran it through his hair. The dye gave Noble’s hair the same muted shine as Mars’s.
Once he worked the dye into his hair, Nobles wiped his hands on the cloth. Next, he squeezed a couple of drops of iris dye into his eyes, changing their color from dirt brown to very nearly black.
“Perfect,” Mars said, feigning surprise. “You could walk into any base in the galaxy, and they wouldn’t spot you.”
And he did look like one clone, at least. He looked exactly like Lieutenant Mars.
“What about the guards?” I asked, pointing toward the camera. “Aren’t they watching us?”
“Sure they are, but they work for me,” said Mars. He walked right up to Nobles and checked the coloring in his eyes like a doctor examining a patient, then said, “Head out that door and up the stairs. My boys will take care of you.”
“Thank you,” said Nobles. He left in a hurry, jogging up the corridor and out the door.
As soon as Nobles was out of earshot, Mars said, “Sort of a waste of time putting brown hair dye and colored eyedrops on a clone; but with that whole death-reflex thing . . . you just can’t take any chances.” He sounded apologetic.
So that was what had happened. Thinking he had blond hair and blue eyes, Mars had used the same disguise.
“The regulars won’t roll in until 06:00,” Mars said. “That gives us three hours.”
“We have bigger things to worry about than guards,” I said, and I gave him a brief description of the Avatari attacks on New Copenhagen and Olympus Kri. I also told him how the Unified Authority ambushed Warshaw. I thought it would take a long time, but the whole sorry tale took less than ten minutes.
“Why would they do that?” he asked. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“It makes sense from their point of view,” I said. “They want a disposable Navy to send out after the Avatari. By assassinating our command structure, they stand to inherit disposable ships, disposable crews, even a broadcast network for sending them into space.”
“But they’d be marooned. They’d be stranded . . .” He did not bother finishing the thought.
I finished for him. “Just like we were left stranded out here.”
“What do we do?” Mars said.
I told him about Tachyon D concentrations and temperature fluctuations, and said, “I think we probably have a few more days, but we want to be long gone before the temperatures start changing.”
“How can we check for tachyons?” he asked.
“I don’t know. The U.A. had a couple of dead scientists figure it out.”
He didn’t know who or what I meant, not that it mattered.
“I can have my men check the weather reports,” he said. “Tracking temperature changes shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Good place to start,” I said.
“What do we do about Doctorow?” Mars asked. “Do you think you can get him to see the light?” He must have already known the answer even as he asked the question. Doctorow would not listen to us, never in a million years.
I shook my head. “How do you make an
enlightened
man see the light?” I asked, amazed by my own pessimism. “He doesn’t trust me, and there is nothing I can do about it. Maybe it’s for the best. I’m going to have enough trouble getting you and your thousand engineers off the planet.”
As I said this, I remembered what Doctorow said about tracking a fighter carrier. “Do you know anything about a carrier circling the planet?” I asked.
Mars nodded. “It’s the
Churchill
. She’s hiding up in the graveyard.”
“What about the
Salah ad-Din
?”
He shook his head. “The only ship we’ve seen is the
Churchill
.”
“Good thing she’s there; we can use her to get off the planet,” I said. “Now for the next problem, I need to get a message to Ava.”
“Your girlfriend?” Mars asked.
“Ex-girlfriend. Do you think she knows I’m here?” Though the question was more for me than for Mars, I asked it out loud.
“She probably doesn’t. Doctorow is trying to keep the whole thing quiet.”
By this time, a couple of hours had passed, and Nobles appeared at the door of the cell. His hair still had that matted sheen and his irises were black as wet rock. The door slid open, and he stepped in. He and Mars traded places. Nobles went to the sink and began rinsing the gunk out of his hair and eyes.