“No sir. I was a prisoner. The only reason I got out of my cell was because Dominus was sighted. Abigail wanted to talk to me about the incoming attack. It came in so fast, however, there wasn’t much time to do more than die.”
A few of the crewmen applauded at that. I nodded to them, giving them their due. The navy boys were sissies, but they had a few good pilots among them.
Graves still seemed unhappy. There was just no pleasing some people. “So… are you spying for them, or for us?”
“I’m purely in the employ of Earth, sir. Don’t forget I found this rat’s nest. I brought Legion Varus right to it.”
“All right, all right. Any idea of who else is involved, and what their aims might be?”
I squinted in thought. “Abigail did say something about hitting Earth directly. This is all connected to the docks at Central City. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those gateways led there.”
“Every super-cargo ship back home has been impounded, searched, and turned away from the port since we left. It has to be something other than that.”
“Well, they could already have delivered the posts and setup the gateway. But I’m not sure what we’re worried about. These monkey-dogs aren’t that bad, or that bright.”
“No, they’re not. But that’s not who we’re going up against. Those are only some minor players, slaves to the Claver Clan. Don’t you remember these warehouses? In your previous visit, they were full of weapons and gear.”
“They surely were.”
Graves waved impatiently to the undertaker guy, Primus Gilbert. He stepped up and plucked the briefing controller out of my fingers. I let him do it without a fuss.
He sped through the files, clicking backward in some app. At last, he brought up an image from my last visit. The warehouses were chock-full of gear of all kinds.
“That was the original intel,” Gilbert said. “But that’s old news. Here’s the state of the storage units now.”
He flicked to the end of the files and played a vid showing the interior of the same warehouses. This time, they were mostly empty.
Many sets of eyes moved to me. I could feel them.
“Uh… looks like they moved the stuff. I never was allowed in there—I was in this cell in the ground, see—”
“Yes, yes. The dogs pissed in your face. I got all that, McGill. Thanks for the useless report.”
He waved for me to return to my seat, and I did so with troubled thoughts.
Where had all that gear gone? They could have outfitted a small army with all that stuff. It occurred to me that maybe, by going out there and visiting Abigail twice, I’d managed to spook the Clavers. Just maybe, they’d taken all their stuff and stashed it someplace else.
“Damn…” I said out loud. “That girl is six kinds of tricky, just like all her brothers.”
-39-
The general consensus among the brass was that somehow, some-way, this was all my fault.
“McGill,” Tribune Turov told me sternly during the after-meeting. “This sort of thing simply has to stop.”
She was in fine fettle. After not attending the open briefing, she showed up to the second one, all full of piss-and-vinegar. To me, the situation seemed plain unfair. Not only was I being blamed for the fact Legion Varus had done a bang-up attack on a pretty much empty base, but then there was the fact that we were in Skay territory with our dicks out—for no apparent reason.
“Are you entirely sure that vast stash of gear was here, in these very warehouses?” Graves asked me.
I made an exasperated sound. “Sirs, just look at the video I brought back from the first trip. I’m sorry if that didn’t convince you—it certainly did convince me.”
Just for laughs, Graves replayed my initial visit’s recordings. He even ran it up to where I got shot in the face by Abigail.
“We should have left you permed,” Galina said angrily.
I threw up my hands, and everyone at the table flinched, except for Graves. “All right, I’m out then. If you don’t want me to breathe, you don’t need me at some all-day long meeting, do you?”
Managing to stand up and stage an angry walk-out, I got as far as touching the door before Galina growled at me. “Get back here and sit down, James. We’re not finished yet.”
With slumping shoulders, I flopped into my chair again.
“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” she said. “Drusus is due in an hour, and we’ve got nothing to show him but an empty island full of craters.”
That’s what this was really all about. Winslade, Graves, Turov—they didn’t care about me at all. They just wanted to come up with some pretty bullshit to tell Drusus. Unfortunately, he was a very hard man to fool, and we all knew it.
For my own part, I wasn’t overly interested in the gloomy mood of the upper officers. I wasn’t going to be chewed out or demoted—at least, no more than normal.
“Look—how about this,” I said, slamming a big hand on the conference table to stop the videos, which had looped around to the beginning to start playing again. “How about we just all agree to get publicly flogged? The brass will usually go for that. It’s an easy way out.”
“Publicly flogged?” Winslade asked incredulously. “That’s for recruits, McGill.”
“Nonsense, I get flogged regularly.”
Winslade rolled his eyes at me and crossed his arms. “It unbecoming for an officer. Even you should know that.”
“You’re chicken.”
“Stop it, you two,” Galina said. “This isn’t funny, McGill. We’ve gone out on a limb way out here in Province 926, and we’d better find those damned weapons.”
I shook my head. “That’s not what we’re looking for.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look, the way I see it, the gear was stashed here
