“Obviously, McGill,” Winslade said in his usual, snooty tone. “All you’re saying is the gear has been deployed somewhere. Fine. What difference does that make?”
Graves looked thoughtful. “McGill has a point. We’ve been scanning this planet for a hidden cache of weapons and gear. Instead, maybe we should be looking for a large enemy encampment.”
“How is this vague nuance useful in any possible way?” Winslade demanded. “We haven’t seen any gear, or any troops—nothing. We’ve been scanning the islands, the ocean and even a few undersea caves. We haven’t found anything.”
“Right,” Graves agreed. “The conclusion is therefore inescapable.”
“What conclusion?”
“The enemy is no longer here. We’re wasting our time, and we need to pull up stakes and retreat to Earth before the Skay figure out we spoofed their security.”
That sentence perked me up. I realized, all of a sudden, that I’d forgotten to tell the assembled officers something very, very important.
“Uh… sirs?”
Galina looked at me tiredly. “What is it now, McGill? Don’t tell me that you’re hungry again. We just had lunch brought in.”
I opened my big mouth, sucked in a deep breath, then let it out slowly. I wasn’t good at delivering bad news. It was a weakness of mine. My mind was racing, therefore, to find a way to do it without taking the blame—or possibly to lie about it entirely.
Sure, they had to find out the truth. But maybe they could do it in a way that didn’t involve my being castrated, or permed, or something heinous like that.
Before I could come up with anything, the door opened. Galina turned toward it, raising her upper lip into a snarl. I pitied whatever lost cabin-boy had dared to enter.
“I left strict orders to—oh! Praetor Drusus?”
She scrambled to her feet, and the rest of us did the same. We stood at attention until he stepped inside, closed the door, and told us to sit down at ease.
Drusus himself didn’t sit down. Instead, his eyes swept the group. He didn’t look very happy. Maybe he already knew some of the details of our latest fiasco.
“Turov, make your report,” he ordered.
“Of course. You’re early, sir, and we were just discussing how we were going to brief you on our highly successful raid of Green World.”
He put his hands on his hips and gave us all the evil eye. “How about you just tell me the plain truth? You brought a trillion credits worth of shipping and manpower out here to Green World, and you found nothing.”
“That’s not exactly true, Praetor. We found the base we were looking for. We destroyed it, but not without taking some unique prisoners first.”
“Unique, eh? Yes, I saw your kennel full of dog-men. They don’t even speak—nothing that we can interpret, anyway. All the Clavers and other aliens were dead or absent by the time our troops landed and took the island.”
His baleful eyes slid to me again. Unlike the others, I wasn’t hunkered down and wincing. I was sprawled out in my chair. I felt an urge to yawn, but I suppressed it with difficulty.
“McGill? What were you about to tell the group before I arrived?”
I blinked a few times, but then I realized that Drusus must have been listening in on us somehow. The others looked stunned, too.
My lips smiled of their own accord. Of course Drusus could listen in. these other pukes could do it to low-ranked people. They did it all the time—especially Galina. She was the worst offender.
But now, the shoe was on the other foot. There were no secrets to be kept from a man with Drusus’ high rank.
“Well sir, that’s not a happy tale.”
“Out with it, McGill.”
“Well, maybe—and I do mean maybe, sir. That’s what I want to point out. Everything swirling in my head is pure conjecture, see. I just thought it might be worth mentioning to an appropriately affected group like this one.”
Drusus crossed his arms and so did Graves. They both knew that when I put a ton of qualifiers on something, it meant there was a horrible chunk of news coming their way. It was like when you get a bad piece of steak at a restaurant, and they slather on the sauce like there’s no tomorrow.
“Out with it, McGill. What could be worse than having to retreat from this campaign with nothing to show for it?”
“Uh… maybe… well, what if we didn’t have a way to retreat? Like… at all.”
They all stared at me for about a second and a half.
“What did you do?” Galina demanded loudly.
Drusus waved her back into her chair. He approached me, stalking me like a lion sneaking up on a gazelle.
“McGill… what are you trying to say?”
“Well sir, there’s a problem. See, the Clavers… they know that Dominus snuck through the border. They know we spoofed the security.”
“How in the hell did they find out about that?” Drusus demanded. His voice was rising, and that wasn’t a good sound for him. He rarely shouted, and by the sound of it, I thought maybe I knew why now. He tended to get kind of high-pitched.
“I don’t rightly know,” I lied. “They might have figured it out themselves. I mean, maybe the approach of such a large ship could have been reported to them from the border. They knew what stars we would pass by while coming here from Earth—it’s not rocket science.”
“No…” Drusus said, pacing his way around the table. “It’s not rocket science, it’s basic astronavigation…”
He stopped pacing, and turned on me. “What other theories do you have?”
“About how they found out? Oh… well, maybe someone told them.”
“Like who?”
I
