We stopped at the McGraw building, the building that served as a headquarters for the Corps of Engineers. Hollingsworth and several of his lieutenants attended the briefing as well.
Looking around the room, I saw that none of us had gotten much sleep. Thanks to the early-morning call to the armory, Hollingsworth and I had not returned to base until nearly 05:00. Mars had been on alert guarding the base. Doctorow looked tired as well. His eyes were badly bloodshot.
When Doctorow saw that he was surrounded by military men, he found a quiet corner where he could lean against the wall and watch the presentation unnoticed. I ditched him and drifted over to Hollingsworth. When I was close enough to whisper without being overheard, I said, “I brought your pal.”
“We’re not pals,” he said.
I only grunted.
Lieutenant Mars booted up his holographic display, and we gathered around him for a closer look. Mars was a smart officer; he waited for me to get things started. When I asked him how things were progressing, he sighed and explained why everything was going wrong.
“Do you have any concept about the sheer mass of a battleship?” he began.
“I know they’re big,” said Hollingsworth. The other Marines laughed.
“We’re talking about one hundred and thirty thousand tons of metal spread across three hundred thousand cubic feet.”
“Why are you giving us a lesson on mass, Lieutenant?” asked Hollingsworth, who was clearly tired and edgy from the last night’s activities.
Mars pointed to the display, and said, “Because the only way we are going to launch General Harris into that broadcast zone is by sealing him inside a battleship.”
“Why are you choosing a big ship?” asked Hollingsworth. “Wouldn’t it be easier to send him off in a frigate?”
“He’d never break through the ships blocking the zone; the smaller ships don’t have enough mass,” said Mars.
He pointed to the wall of derelict ships. Since our last meeting, the problem had gone from difficult to intractable. Hoping to blow the ships into tiny fragments, we’d talked about sending engineers to rig wrecks with charges. As far as I knew, he hadn’t actually sent anyone.
“Break through?” I asked. “I thought we were going to clear a path.”
“It doesn’t look like that’s going to work, sir,” Mars answered, all of his former enthusiasm now absent from his voice. “We’ve tried conventional charges. We experimented with a small tactical weapon as well.”
I should have seen this coming. The Morgan Atkins Believers had detonated an atomic bomb inside a Unified Authority fighter carrier. Parts of the ship fell away, but the frame of the ship survived.
“You nuked ’em?” Hollingsworth asked.
“Yes, sir, we nuked one. The device blew the outer hull off the ship, but the decks and the structure remained in place,” Mars said.
“But a battleship could ram through?” I asked. I knew the answer. He would not have said he needed to seal me in a battleship if he did not believe it could break through. Still, I wanted reassurance.
Mars did not get a chance to answer. Hearing the ease with which the discussion had switched to tactical weapons, Doctorow spoke up. “Where, precisely, did you get a nuclear weapon?”
“Maybe we dug it up while we were out collecting gas masks,” I said.
Doctorow glared at me, his fury coloring his face as red as rare roast beef, and sputtered for words. Finally, he said, “You son of a bitch. You raided the armory when you were pulling out those bodies.”
I smiled, and said, “There’s no call for profanity, Reverend.”
“You lied. ‘Bodies,’ you said. ‘I’m just collecting bodies so I can examine the armor.’” Doctorow threw his hands in the air.
“I wasn’t lying,” I said. “We only took bodies.”
“Then you went back afterward. You still went back on your word.”
“Last night was the first time I set foot past the fence since the day we dug up the armor. It was the first time any of us have been back, and we weren’t the ones who tore down the fence,” I said.
Doctorow did not take the bait. He ignored my jab about the fence, and asked, “Then where did you get a nuclear bomb?”
“Oh, that,” I said, grinning as brightly as I could. “I didn’t need to raid the armory to get that; we have plenty of nukes right here in Fort Sebastian.”
Hollingsworth and Mars, both of whom knew I had been restocking the base with weapons, laughed softly as I spoke. “Remember when I offered to salvage food and rations from those derelict ships? I figured since we were up there, we might as well restock our armory while we were at it. You wanted rations, I wanted rockets. We both made out.”
“You son of a—”
“You already said that,” I reminded Doctorow.
“What do you plan to do with those weapons, General?” Doctorow asked. “Are you planning on recapturing Terraneau?”
I laughed. “We both want the same thing. You want me off your planet, and I can’t wait to leave.”
“But that didn’t stop you from building your arsenal. Why stockpile weapons if you aren’t planning a war?”
I shrugged my shoulders, and said, “I’m a Marine. Marines like things that are loud. It’s all part of speaking softly and carrying a big stick.”
Doctorow took a step forward and drove his right fist into his open left palm. “This is unacceptable. This is an act of—”
“We didn’t leave an empty gas canister outside your door last night,” I said. “If we ever do leave you a message, you can bet that the canister won’t be empty.”
Doctorow glared at me, but I didn’t care. He had delivered his message last night, and I brought him to this meeting so that I could deliver mine. He now knew that I was leaving, and that if it came to a fight, I held all of the aces in my hand.
Now that everything was in the open, it was time to turn our attention back to the mission. “So you’re suggesting that we light up the wrecks and bash through in a battleship?”
“Considering the situation, sir, that’s the best we’ve come up with.”
“What are the odds of success?” I asked.
Lieutenant Mars let a second pass before he answered. He was a young clone, maybe not even in his thirties. Fatigue and frustration showed on his face. “General, there are so many variables; I can’t even begin to guess. It’s a matter of velocity. With the right speed and God’s good grace, this should work.”
“It sounds like you’ve got everything you need,” said Doctorow, suddenly sounding cheerful again. Perhaps hearing the suicidal nature of my mission had cheered him up. He bent over the display, looking the scene over closely. “Which ship is going to carry Harris?”
The display showed the entire battlefield, which was spread out over thousands of cubic miles of open space. With the camera panned so far out, the fighter carriers were indistinguishable from the fighters they carried. Everything was represented by tiny motes of light.
Mars said, “You won’t really be able to see the ship from this angle.” He adjusted the display so that it zoomed in on the wreckage of a Scutum-Crux Fleet battleship. “I had originally thought we would use a smaller ship, maybe even a minesweeper. A minesweeper would only have about one-tenth the overall mass of this battleship.
“Setting a battleship in motion is going to be challenge.” He laughed nervously.
“What do you have in mind?” I asked. I was the one putting his ass on the line, not Mars, not Hollingsworth, not Doctorow; and I did not like the plan so far. The ideas sounded too damn theoretical, and the wall of dead ships blocking my way sounded too concrete.
“General, sir, we’re going to attach a fleet of transports to the hull of the ship and use them like booster rockets,” Mars said.
“What about the men in the transports?” asked Hollingsworth. “What about the pilots?”
“No live pilots; everything will be remote control,” said Mars. “This mission involves guiding a battleship into a nuclear explosion. No one in his right mind would fly into a nuclear blast.”
“But that’s what I’m doing?” I asked.
Nobody answered.
CHAPTER NINE
The plan was to attach thirty remotely controlled transports to the hull of a derelict battleship to use as external rockets. No one had ever used transports to move a derelict battleship or anything of like size. Everything was theoretical, but Mars assured me that it would work.
When you place your life in other men’s hands, you want to know that they take their work seriously. The Corps of Engineers called their plan “Operation Chastity Belt” and referred to the battleship as “Harris’s Tool.” They probably took the mission seriously, but they were also enlisted men; juvenile humor was part of their makeup.
They had
clever
names for every element of the operation. “Harris’s Tool,” the battleship, would travel nearly three hundred miles gathering speed in a linear acceleration before
poking
“Chastity Belt,” the wall of destroyed Unified Authority ships that blocked the way to “Virginity,” the hot zone. When the Tool was precisely forty-seven miles from Chastity Belt, the engineers would fire a series of nuclear devices that would both damage and superheat the U.A. ships, but the blast would not destroy them. They labeled this part of the operation “Foreplay.” Just as the negative 450-degree temperature of space would set in, turning the metal brittle, the Tool would ram into the ships. If everything went right, the Tool would hit with sufficient velocity to break through the barrier.
Lieutenant Mars might have been counting on “God’s good grace,” but he carefully calculated acceleration and timing as well. Without the proper velocity, I would not have the power to smash through the ships.
My battleship/barge/battering ram would be wedge-shaped and wider from wing to wing than from bow to stern. This meant that I would have a better chance of survival traveling sideways, leading with the starboard wing while I hid in the landing bay on the port side of the ship.
I explained all of this to Sergeant Nobles, and he said, “It sounds like you’re trying to kill yourself, sir.” Nobles was a trained transport pilot. Officially, I did not have a personal pilot; but when I took rides in transports, he generally flew the bird.
We sat in the empty mess area of a vacant wing of Fort Sebastian. I wanted privacy as I explained the mission.
It was raining outside; gusts of wind blew a steady stream of water against the windows. The mess had a wall of windows overlooking Sebastian Commons—a park in the center of the base. The lawns outside those windows were as flat and even as a gymnasium floor. Even though we did not have enough men to fill the base, I had my men mow the grass. When forts become run-down, the men surely follow.
“Then it may be a double suicide,” I said.
“Oh shit,” he said. “You’re asking me to come with you.”
“I’ll need a pilot,” I said.
He’d been my pilot for nearly a year, making him one of my oldest friends on Terraneau; but until this conversation, I’d only known him as “my pilot.” We’d flown missions in which we both nearly died, and I didn’t even know his name. Was it because he was a clone? Had I become antisynthetic?
“Please say this is a joke, General,” Nobles said.
“Once I get through to the other side, I’m going to need someone to fly the transport off the battleship.”
“You mean the
Tool
?” Nobles asked.
“Yeah, okay, the
Tool
,” I conceded.
“General, do you know where we’ll be when we get to the other side?”
“I have no idea,” I admitted.
“And you want me to come along for the ride?” he asked. “Are you ordering me to come?”
“I was hoping you would volunteer.”
“Have you asked for other volunteers?”
I shook my head and told the truth, “There’s no point placing additional lives in harm’s way.”
“No, sir. Why would you want to put anyone else in danger?”
I would not order Nobles to go. I could. He was a clone. In theory, his programming would make him comply. In theory, our battleship would break through the barrier, and we would sail into the broadcast zone safe and sound. In theory, military clones were incapable of fighting against the Unified Authority. I’d never placed much faith in theoretical solutions, but that wasn’t stopping me from placing my life on the line.
“You’ve been my pilot since they transferred me to the Scutum-Crux Fleet. I’d hate to go without you,” I said. It sounded weak, but Nobles liked the distinction of being my pilot. From what I could tell, he did not mind high-risk missions, either.
He gave me a sly, one-sided smile, and asked, “Since you put it that way, when do we leave?”
“Oh, our schedule,” I said, feeling a bit ashamed. I had not told him about the mission until the last minute because, assuming he agreed to fly me, I did not want to give him enough time to change his mind. “We leave within the hour.”
“Aye, sir, an hour,” he said. “I’ll go pack my things.”
He’s a good man,
I thought. I’d seen so many good men die during the ten years I’d spent as a Marine.
I didn’t give my pilot time to have second thoughts, but I also secretly hoped for a delay. One man’s delay is another man’s reprieve. I had not yet told Ava that I was ready to leave. She knew about the mission, but she had no idea about my schedule.
I went to visit her at work. She worked in one of the three skyscrapers left standing in a cluster in the Norristown financial district. One of the buildings served as a dormitory for orphaned boys, another for girls. Now that Mars and the Corps of Engineers had restored the power, the locals used the third building as a hospital, among other things. Ava taught literature and drama classes in the girls’ dormitory.
I drove up to the building in my jeep, rain thrumming on the removable roof, making a noise like a thousand fingers tapping on a desk. The triangle of streets between the three buildings stood empty. One of the streets had been dug up and railed off from traffic. The Corps of Engineers had been laying cable there; but with my mission about to begin, the project had stalled as they were needed elsewhere.