“Are you sure you can trust her?” Mars asked as he left the cell. “If she’s not with you anymore, I mean—”
I put up a hand to stop him. “We could always kidnap her,” I said. I was joking.
Mars smiled, and said, “Now there’s an interesting option,” and he left our jail cell a free man. Nobles and I spent the rest of the night locked behind bars.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
The inquisition began again at 07:00.
Armed guards ushered Nobles and me out of our cell. I wasn’t asleep when they came, but I was awfully tired from the long night.
As they had the day before, the guards placed Nobles in one room and me in the next. The waiting game began again. I sat in the soundproofed room, staring into the coin-sized camera lens that watched me from behind a bulletproof window, wondering when and how I would make my next move.
I was still slumped in that chair, fighting exhaustion but fully awake, when my new interrogator entered the room. He did not arrive alone. He came with a matched set of three guards in Marine combat armor. The man was tall and thin, with a gray handlebar mustache that extended well past the corners of his mouth. He had a familiar face. I could not dredge up the memory of where I had seen him before, so I dismissed him as just another militiaman.
“Well, well, Wayson Harris, I always expected you to end up in here,” the man said. Clearly he knew me, and I got the feeling he bore a grudge.
His guards planted themselves on either side of the door, where they stood as still as statues. The armed guards weren’t necessary. I would not try to escape, not yet. I would wait for Mars.
“Tell me about your plans to recapture Terraneau,” the interrogator asked as he sat down in the chair on the side of the table. He spoke in an easy, informal way.
“I have no interest in retaking this planet,” I said.
“Oh, right. I heard about that. You came here to warn us. Wayson Harris the Liberator messiah.
“We spotted two more fighter carriers this morning.”
“Now there are three of them,” I muttered to myself. Things were looking up.
“What’s with all that firepower if you are here to rescue us?” I locked eyes with him. He was one of those guys who meets your stare and doesn’t blink and doesn’t look away because he thinks it’s some sort of macho challenge. I played along for a second, winked and smiled and had a look around the room. Metal chairs, wall-mounted camera, armed guards, locked door . . . yup, I was in prison.
I wondered which carriers had made it out. The
ad-Din
had almost certainly survived.
Could the
Kamehameha
have made it to the zone?
The thought left me elated.
“I didn’t actually bring them with me,” I said. “It’s more of a rendezvous.” For some reason, I felt fidgety. I caught myself tapping my fingers on the table and dropped my hands to my thighs. Alarms sounded in my head, and it wasn’t fear. Something was about to happen, I could feel it.
Like animals sometimes do, I sensed a coming storm, but I did not know the nature of that storm.
“Are there more ships on the way?” the interrogator asked.
“I sure hope so,” I said, thinking of the U.A. barges.
“Where is the rest of your fleet?” he asked.
I sighed. “That depends what you mean by my ‘fleet.’ If you mean the Scutum-Crux Fleet, most of it is in the Cygnus Arm. If you mean the Enlisted Man’s Fleet, that’s all over the galaxy.”
Doctorow, his high-minded ideals now mingled with paranoia, would probably object to my being tortured; but that did not mean he wouldn’t have me executed. He’d happily leave me locked up until he was sure I posed no threat.
I could wait this out. Mars needed time to make the arrangements. I knew he needed time, but I couldn’t get past the feeling that something was about to happen. A bomb was about to explode, or a gun was about to go off, or a planet was about to go up in flames. Or was it just a case of nerves?
“I’m going to ask you again. How many ships do you have in your fleet?” The man sounded like he had run out of patience.
“I really don’t know,” I said, not thinking about what I was saying. “It depends how many ships survived the ambush.”
“What ambush?” he asked.
I saw no reason to hide the whole truth, not anymore. “I told Doctorow that we helped evacuate Olympus Kri. What I did not tell him was that the Unified Authority attacked us after the evacuation. They caught us napping, and we lost some of our ships.”
“So you came here looking for asylum?”
“I came here hoping to pull your worthless asses out of a fire,” I said. Not the most politic response, but at least it was honest.
“That’s what you told President Doctorow. He didn’t believe you either,” he said, picking up a clipboard, presumably looking over notes from the previous interrogations. “You told him that aliens have attacked two other planets, and they are coming here to kill us.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said.
“You wouldn’t?”
“You’ve got your head so far up your ass, the aliens might not notice you,” I said.
He looked up from his clipboard and gave me a plastic smile. He wanted to hit me, I could see it in his eyes. He stood, squared his shoulders, placed the clipboard on the table. “So you came here to warn us? To be honest with you, Harris, I always thought you were a coward. I still do.
“We lost every man and vehicle we sent out with you when you took on the aliens . . . every last man. Everybody died but you. You came waltzing out of it without a scratch.”
Behind the interrogator, one of the guards moved his right hand along the grip of his gun. You need to be a very good shot to cover a target in a fistfight; otherwise, you’re just as likely to shoot the man you are trying to protect.
“Are you saying I hid during the fight?” I asked, on the verge of laughing in the man’s face.
“A lot of good men died trying to help you,” the interrogator said. “One of them was my brother.”
“O’Doul,” I said, finally putting a name with the guy’s face. “Your brother died saving me.”
“What a mistake that was,” he said.
I started to respond, then stopped. “If you don’t want me on your planet, just say the word. I’ll take my pilot and my shuttle and head home.”
“It’s too late for that, Harris. You should not have returned in the first place.”
“Doctorow wants me off the planet, but he’s not going to let me leave. Is that how things work on Terraneau now? Is he planning to kill me or just bury me in a jail cell?” I wondered how far Doctorow and his friends would go to protect their utopian society.
“Kill you?” the interrogator asked, sounding both shocked and amused. “Why would we kill you? You came to save us.”
Another moment passed, then the battle began.
It started with an explosion that shook the building. The soundproof walls of the interrogation room muffled the blast, but the walls vibrated just the same. Alarms went off, but they sounded like they were a million miles away.
“What the speck?” the interrogator said. Now his guards drew their M27s. One of them aimed his gun at me while the other watched the door.
The electricity went out. I remembered the police station that the Double Y clone attacked on St. Augustine. This attack seemed to go by the same numbers. The lights went out, then emergency lights kicked in, casting their pale white glow. Through all of this, I remained in my chair. I did not know if this was the work of the Corps of Engineers or the last surviving Double Ys, but I did not want to give the guards a reason to shoot me.
The clock on the wall had frozen at 07:45.
I sat on the far side of the table, facing the door and the two armed guards. Had the table been loose, I might have kicked it toward them, but the table was bolted to the floor. I thought about leaping over it and trying to grab O’Doul, but what would it get me? In the end, I had no choice but to trust Mars and his engineers.
Thirty seconds after that initial explosion, the door of the interrogation room burst open, and in walked a giant of a man wearing custom-fitted combat armor, its green camouflage coloring looking taupe in the emergency lighting.
The screaming alarms tore into my thoughts. With the guards occupied, I shot over the table, knocking O’Doul out of his seat, and tackled the guard hiding behind the door. His armor protected him from punches, not grappling. I slammed into his chest, and we both hit the floor, me on the top and him on the bottom. I pinned his right hand down as he tried to raise his gun.
The giant in the specially fitted combat armor, he could only have been Ray Freeman, lifted the other guard in the air, slammed him against the wall so hard it must have knocked the fellow senseless, and slung him at O’Doul as if he were a sack of laundry. The guard and the interrogator lay there on the floor as Freeman drew his M27 and shot them both. Their blood looked black as oil in the dim light.
“You didn’t need to kill them,” I said, ignoring the fact that I had already snapped the second guard’s neck. So there we were, Ray Freeman, the homicidal humanitarian, and me, killing the very people I had come to save. Was it murder? With the Avatari on the way, everyone on the planet was as good as dead.
“You’re early,” I said.
“The temperatures started jumping yesterday afternoon,” Freeman answered.
“That’s not supposed to happen yet,” I said, taking the dead guard’s M27 and following Freeman out of the room.
Water rained from burst mains along the ceiling. Inch-deep puddles had formed on the corridor floor. Light fixtures dangled from wires, and in the middle of the entropy, three guards lay dead where Freeman had shot them. Smoke or maybe steam or possibly exhaust wafted out of the vents along the wall. The air had a burned and dusty smell to it.
Someone peered from around a corner down the hall. In the brief glimpse I had, I saw that he was natural-born; so when he peered around the corner for a second glance, I shot him in the face. He fell to the ground, and his M27 clattered across the floor.
“What about Nobles?” I asked, as Freeman led the way.
“Who’s that?”
Freeman was ruthless that way. The Marines lived by the code that no man gets left behind, but Ray Freeman was no Marine. He was a mercenary, his loyalty was selective.
“My pilot,” I said as I turned and headed down the hall. A guard stepped out through an open door. I would have shot him, but Freeman got him first—three shots in the chest, and the man flew against the wall, then slumped to the floor; the water sprinkling from the ceiling washed some of his blood from the wall.
The locals must have dismissed Nobles as unimportant. I found him alone in his interrogation room, the door locked from the outside. I opened the door, and Nobles followed me out. Freeman led us out a back door and into an alley, where two Jackals waited. Freeman and I climbed in the first vehicle, and Nobles rode in the second. No one fired at us as we pulled away from the station. No one followed us.
The man driving the Jackal removed his helmet and turned to look at me. “How in God’s good name can you stand this armor?” asked Mars. I recognized him by his badly dyed hair. “If these thigh plates dug any deeper in my crotch, I might end up a eunuch.”
Freeman, sitting in the backseat with his feet behind my seat and his body behind Mars, removed his helmet as well.
The streets around us were still semisilent. I expected police cars and sirens, but the streets were almost empty of cars, and I saw very few pedestrians.
“Where is everybody?” I asked.
“The militia is busy stopping the invasion,” Mars said.
“What invasion?” I asked, wondering if perhaps Doctorow had taken me seriously after all.
“The Enlisted Man’s Navy just landed fifty transports outside Scott Card Park on the east side of town. Doctorow is evacuating Norristown.”
“Why the hell would fifty transports land outside Scott Card Park?” I asked. The park was nothing but an open field.
Mars gave me a patient smile, and said, “They’re ghosts, General. It’s a fake. I hacked into the Terraneau tracking system last night. The transports are fakes, just like the additional fighter carriers.”
“There’s only one fighter carrier?” I asked, my spirits suddenly dropping.
Mars didn’t notice. “Just the
Churchill
.” He sounded cheerful as he pounded another coffin nail into my soul.
We sped over a viaduct, toward the southern edge of town; and again, I was struck by the emptiness of the road around us. Doctorow had risen to power during the Avatari occupation. If there was one skill the people had learned under his leadership, it was how to evacuate town efficiently. My real warning of an alien threat did not impress Doctorow enough to call for an evacuation, but Mars’s phantom clones did the trick.
“What happens when they get to the park and find out it’s empty?” I asked.
“That could take a while,” he said.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“I left trackers,” he said. “That park has never been so heavily guarded.”
I had to laugh. He’d left the park in the hands of robots that consisted of nothing more than a motion-tracking sensor and an automated trigger finger.
But Mars was more of an engineer than he was a military strategist. Scott Card Park was a flat grassy field with a stream and a few shade trees. We would not have much time before the militia figured out that the invasion was a hoax.
We were halfway across town, and the second Jackal lagged a few hundred yards behind us. As it drove down the ramp at the end of the viaduct, I glanced back and wondered how long it would take Doctorow to figure out that Mars had outsmarted him.
As the second Jackal reached the bottom of the ramp, Mars said something softly into the radio. I did not catch what he said.
The voice on the other end gave a one-word response, “Clear.”