Rogue Clone: The Clone Betrayal Part 39

"How about you? You still want to stay with the fleet?" I asked.

He looked me right in the eye and, giving me his best poker face, he slowly said, "Yes, you know I do."

"Why?" I asked.

I . . "I ." told you, I've spent more than half my life out here. I.. "

"Do you have a wife on Terraneau?" I asked.

"Not a wife, I never married her. Earth-born officers are supposed to wait for Earth-born wives. If it got back to Was.h.i.+ngton, it would have hurt my career."

"Children?" I asked.

"Three of them." He spoke evenly, slowly, a man trying to hide his excitement. He might have been in bed with the Unified Authority, or he might have been telling me the truth.

"And n.o.body ever knew about them?" I asked.

"Having illegitimate children is considered conduct unbecoming in certain circles. If word got back to Was.h.i.+ngton about the children, it would have ended my career."

"And that is why you want to stay in Scutum-Crux?" I asked. It explained a lot more than that. It explained why he'd continued flying around Terraneau, trying to break through the ion curtain for the last four years. It also explained his mystery visit to the planet the day the curtain went down.

"Why do you want to fight against the Unified Authority?" I asked.

Thorne leaned across the table, and said, "Why would I pick you over Earth? Why would I pick a bunch of clones over the Unified Authority?

"General Harris, I have been out here for more than half of my life. Those s.h.i.+ps in your fleet, they are my home. Those men in your fleet, I've been flying with some of those men for thirty years now.

"I don't know what Alden Brocius has up his sleeve, but it's going to be powerful. Those s.h.i.+ps I lived on and those men I served with, they're all going to die if I can't help them."

I took Thorne with me when I returned to the fleet.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE.

Thorne and I spent the short flight back to the Kamehameha in the kettle of the transport, discussing command structures and politics. We talked about possible scenarios and whom we could count on if Warshaw fought us for control of the fleet. As a Marine dealing with sailors, I would have few allies. As a natural-born and a relic of the old U.A. power structure, Thorne would have even fewer.

Leaving the atmosphere, the transport struggled for just a moment. Thorne looked around the dark cabin nervously. "I hate these things."

"It's nothing. You get a rattle whenever you leave the atmosphere," I said.

"Doesn't the shaking bother you?"

"You get used to it," I said. "I spent six weeks in a bird like this once."

"This is a short-range transport," Thorne said. He did not say anything more, but he did not need to. The lull in the conversation signaled his skepticism.

"They're supposed to have a range of two hundred thousand miles. I know all about it," I said. "We took ours closer to four billion miles."

"That would be suicidal," Thorne said.

"That's one way to look at it," I admitted.

There were two of us on that flight, Ray Freeman and I. We were escaping a Baptist farming colony, and the transport was the only way off the planet. We did what we had to do.

"General Harris, we're approaching the Kamehameha," the pilot called over the intercom. Three minutes later, we had touched down, and the doors at the rear of the kettle slid open.

Thorne and I exited the transport and headed up to Fleet Command without saying a word to anyone we pa.s.sed.

Somebody must have alerted Warshaw as soon as we stepped off our transport. He and three of his lieutenants met us as we came off the lift.

"General Harris," he said, putting on a reasonable pretense of surprise.

"Admiral," I said.

He looked over at Admiral Thorne, and said, "Admiral Thorne, up for a visit?" Suspicion jingled in his voice.

This was not a discussion I planned to hold in a busy corridor, so I said, "Perhaps you and Admiral Franks could join us for a meeting in the conference room; we have a lot to discuss."

Maybe Warshaw had already put two and two together, or maybe he read my intentions by the stiff tone of my voice. Sounding more businesslike than usual, he told one of his lieutenants to send for Franks, then he turned and led the way to a conference room. We barely had time to find our seats before Franks joined us.

The cease-fire between me and Warshaw ended as soon as the meeting began. "What is it now, Harris?" he asked.

"I was shot last night," I said, opening my rucksack and pulling out the blouse. The blood was still tacky. The other men in the room all stared at it. They were mesmerized.

"Sweet s.h.i.+t," Warshaw said. He reached out and touched the stain, then looked at his fingers. The fake blood stained his fingertips.

I told them about Freeman and what he said.

"What does it mean?" asked Warshaw, temporarily forgetting about Admiral Thorne.

"It means a lot of things," I said. "It means at least one s.h.i.+p was able to run our blockade. It means we have a leak. Perry Fahey has been spying for the U.A. all along."

"You're sure it was Fahey?" Franks asked.

"Of course it was Fahey. That son of a b.i.t.c.h," Warshaw said.

After I rehea.r.s.ed the evidence-Fahey setting up the blockade, the officers transferring back to Earth through the Was.h.i.+ngton, the way Fahey kept up with our movements from Outer Bliss-Franks seemed convinced as well.

"The a.s.sa.s.sin said they're coming for us? Did he say when?" asked Franks.

"Tomorrow, next week, your guess is as good as mine," I said. I did not regret waiting until I got back to the fleet to report the whole thing. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that Admiral Brocius would not move until he had an overwhelming force. We might still have a year to prepare.

No one asked for my interpretation of the comment about us breaking the rules. We all knew what it meant. I looked back at Thorne one last time to renew my confidence, then I said, "We're going to need an experienced officer at the helm."

"Good G.o.d, not that again," Warshaw moaned, rolling his eyes, his face so red he looked like he'd been boiled. As he often did when angered, he flexed his muscles and stared at me. His eyes bored into mine. The muscles in his neck, shoulders, and arms bulged. He squeezed his fists and relaxed his hands, squeezed and relaxed, pumping blood into his spade-shaped forearms.

How many officers had he silently intimidated with that little trick? How many rivals had he scared off? The big muscles might intimidate other sailors, but to me he looked like a mouse roughing its fur so it can look as big as a rat.

"What are you saying? I have been in the Navy for twenty-five years, you don't call that experience?" Warshaw practically whispered the question, the calm in his voice as precarious as a dagger wrapped in a silk scarf.

"You have no experience commanding a s.h.i.+p," I said.

"The h.e.l.l with that," Warshaw said. "If you want to step down, Harris, go ahead. That's your choice. I earned my commission."

"I'm not asking you to resign your commission," I said, trying to sound reasonable.

Warshaw shook his head. He looked angry enough to launch himself at me. He looked crazed. "I run the s.h.i.+ps! I run the specking fleet! You hear me, Harris? I am the G.o.dd.a.m.ned commander of the Scutum-specking-Crux Fleet!"

"Harris, we've already been through this. Admiral Brocius put Warshaw in charge," Franks said. He might not have sounded so reasonable had he not gotten falling-down-drunk the night I recommended that he take over the fleet.

"I don't want to run the specking fleet, Franks. I want Admiral Thorne to run it," I said.

"Admiral Thorne?" Franks asked. "Why in G.o.d's name do you want a natural-born to run the Enlisted Man's Fleet? Why would you even trust him?"

I never got to state my case, however. That was when the Klaxons sounded.

CHAPTER FIFTY.

"We've detected two anomalies." The voice on the intercom belonged to Hank Bishop, captain of the Kamehameha. He was a good officer, a veteran sailor, but he sounded nervous.

"Have you identified the s.h.i.+ps?" asked Admiral Thorne. We could not identify specific s.h.i.+ps by their anomalies, but we could identify the cla.s.s of the s.h.i.+ps.

Bishop did not answer.

Warshaw glared at Thorne.

Franks jumped to his feet and bolted out the door. Having spent his career on the bridge of a capital s.h.i.+p, he had no trouble putting politics and power struggles out of his mind in an emergency. There was a call to quarters, and he needed to be at the helm.

I got on the intercom and raised Thomer. "This is not a drill," I said. "Contact every s.h.i.+p; I want every last Marine suited up and ready to fight."

"Aye, aye," he said, then he followed up with an unexpected question, "Did you know this was coming?"

I did not have time to think about it at that moment. "Good question," I said. He and I could debate what I should have expected and what I could not have known over drinks once the alert was over. "Get a move on it, Sergeant," I said, temporarily forgetting Thomer's rank.

He responded, "Yes, sir," and signed off.

By the time Thorne and I left for the bridge, Warshaw and Franks were already there. The wail of the Klaxons thundered through the s.h.i.+p with its earsplitting decibels.

"When was the last time this fleet was in a battle?" I asked Thorne, as we boarded the lift from Fleet Command down to the bridge.

"We took on a couple of s.h.i.+ps...o...b..ting Little Man," Thorne said.

"Little Man," I repeated. I had been there for that fight. Was that six years ago? Seven? I could not remember.

It had not occurred to me before, but having spent his career in the outermost arm of the galaxy, Thorne did not exactly fit the bill of a battle-tested veteran. He was a graduate of the Naval Academy, but that graduation had happened nearly forty uneventful years ago.

We entered the bridge.

Fleet Command had been loud and relatively empty, the bridge was very different. The siren hummed low and steady in the background. Officers rushed from one station to the next. In the scramble, most of them ran around me, but a few pushed off me and continued without looking back.

Franks, Warshaw, and Bishop stood around the chart table in the center of the bridge, huddling together like chefs around a stove. As Thorne and I approached, Warshaw looked up, and asked, "What the speck is a U.A. officer doing on my bridge? Someone remove this man." He was not calling for bridge security to remove Thorne, he said it quietly, for my benefit.

"He's with me," I said.

Even before I finished saying this, Warshaw drowned me out, yelling, "Great, I have a Marine and a spy on my bridge."

Franks pointed to something on the strategy table, and Warshaw seemed to forget about us.

The three-dimensional map on the chart table showed Terraneau, our fleet, and the area in which our telemetry detected the anomaly. It depicted open s.p.a.ces as blue-black cubes. There were no stars in the three million miles between us and the anomaly, just open s.p.a.ce.

Without looking up, Franks said, "They're headed toward us at one-fifth full." One-fifth full meant six million miles per hour, a cautious speed for closing long distances.

"Do we have a read on the anomaly?" Warshaw repeated Thorne's question as if he had come up with it himself.

"No information yet," Captain Bishop answered, as he edged around the table.

"Have we made contact?" Franks asked.

"No, sir. They're ignoring us," a communications officer called.

"Where are our self-broadcasting s.h.i.+ps?" Warshaw asked. "They've got to be here for the s.h.i.+ps."

Franks pointed them out. They were halfway between our fleet and the intruders, rocketing toward us as fast as they could.

I did not think Warshaw was correct in his a.s.sessment. We had captured three U.A. s.h.i.+ps and destroyed three more. Until that moment, it had not occurred to me that we had captured or destroyed six of their s.h.i.+ps. We didn't just beat them to the punch; we had declared an all-out war.

Seeing that our self-broadcasting fleet was safe for the time being, Warshaw seemed to relax. He leaned against a desk and took a deep breath. He started to say something, then stopped. On the table, seven new anomalies appeared almost on top of our fleeing s.h.i.+ps.

Franks barked out orders like an experienced commander, or, I realized, a man who has spent his career watching experienced commanders. He sent orders across the fleet telling his captains to power up their s.h.i.+elds, charge weapons systems, and put all fighter pilots on red alert.

Around the bridge, the various stations hummed with activity. Displays lit up, showing s.h.i.+eld readiness and weapons status.

Looking at the chart table, I reckoned the second wave of U.A. s.h.i.+ps were still a million miles away. They did not chase our s.h.i.+ps. Apparently, they were satisfied with herding them into our fold. The more distant, first wave of s.h.i.+ps continued toward us, but they were still two million miles away. It would take them at least twenty more minutes to reach our lines.

An ensign brought a coded message over to Warshaw, whose expression went from desperation to defeat. He read the message again and handed it to Franks.

"What is it?" I asked.