Yellow and red lights began flashing around the deck. “Prepare for broadcast,” a mechanical voice intoned. “Prepare for broadcast in ten, nine, eight …”
I looked at the transport. Wingate had to have boarded this ship. He would not have remained on the planet. It was entirely possible that the commandos killed him and left his body in the woods to cover their tracks, but why go to such lengths? Why send men to Fort Clinton? Why smuggle him off the base? Why not just target his house from space?
“Seven, six, five, four, three …”
No need for stealth with that mechanical voice blaring so loudly. The flashing red and yellow lights created visual noise on the deck. The ship would self-broadcast any moment and, of course, images of Admiral Klyber’s pale corpse ran through my mind. I had a brief moment of uncertainty, then I sprinted up the ramp and into the dark belly of the transport. The kettle was completely empty. Harnesses hung from the ceiling. In the red light, they looked blacker than darkness. With its ring of hard benches and metal walls dully reflecting the non-glare amber light, the kettle looked like the inside of a kiln.
“Two, one. Broadcast initiated.” The voice sounded nearly as loud aboard the transport as it did in the landing bay.
Wingate had to be on this transport. He was not in the kettle. So he had to be up near the cockpit. The mechanical door began to close. Behind me, I heard voices.
“…complete shutout,” somebody said. “They’re guessing twenty, maybe twenty-five U.A. ships and as many as five hundred fighters.”
“Five hundred?” another voice asked.
“They had four hundred and twenty at Bolivar Air Base,” a voice said. I did not see the man speaking, though it was probably Wingate. So the traitor now was standing just outside the cockpit chatting with the pilots, getting a blow-by-blow account of the battle. They headed toward me. By the time Wingate and his friends reached the kettle, I had hid myself in the shadows near the ramp, wrapping myself up in cargo netting along the side of the wall.
“They had a carrier guarding the discs. That was another seventy fighters, so that makes four hundred ninety fighters.”
“How many of their ships were carriers?”
“I’d say all of ’em if I had to guess.” I could not see him, but I would have waged good money that was Wingate again.
“Broadcast complete,” the mechanical voice said over a speaker above the door of the kettle. The rear doors had sealed.
“All fighter carriers carry seventy fighters?”
“They’re supposed to. There’s a ship in the Scutum-Crux Fleet that has nothing but SEALS and transports.” All I could see was the netting around me and the metal walls, but I now thought I knew the sound of Wingate’s voice.
Now that the broadcast was complete, the transport could shuttle between ships. I heard the hiss of thruster engines and the whine of the landing gear as tons of weight were lifted from it. I felt the tremble of the ship as the hull lifted off the deck.
“I heard about that one,” somebody said. “I heard all of those SEALS are clones. Special clones. Real dangerous.” This was a low voice. A hard voice. This was undoubtedly the voice of a commando, probably one of the men that pulled Wingate out of Fort Clinton. I would have happily wagered my life savings that this fellow was some sort of street thug before starting a new career in the military.
“I wouldn’t know. That was a Navy project. All of the Rangers and Special Forces men I commanded were natural-born.” Wingate sounded irritated and tired. Turning traitor must have taken a toll on him.
The grinding sound of retracting landing equipment echoed through the empty kettle. We were cutting through space. I did not know if we would fly to another ship or land on a planet. Wherever we were, it was deep in Confederate territory.
“So if there were seventy fighters on each of the ships we caught coming out of the Network, and we caught twenty-five of them …” He paused to do a little math. “That would mean we got one thousand seven hundred and fifty fighters.” There was excitement and pride and intelligence in this voice. It belonged to neither the thug nor Wingate. “Man, I’d hate to be the guy who has to report those losses to the Joint Chiefs.”
“And we didn’t lose a single ship?” the thug asked.
“Not a one,” the intelligent-sounding commando replied.
“How about the planet?” Wingate asked. Apparently the bright commando had access to some kind of report that neither Wingate nor the thug had received.
“I haven’t heard anything. You get the best info on stuff like that from the mediaLink anyway. They’ll have reporters down on the planet …assuming there’s any planet left.” The bright commando said this, then he and the thug laughed.
A moment passed and the sound of the thrusters started again. We were coming in for our landing.
Hiding there in the netting, I realized that I was still dressed in camouflage gear and needed a change of clothing. No use taking the bright commando or the thug, they were probably dressed like me, in U.A. Army fatigues. I needed to dress like a crewman, not a soldier. I hung in the netting, silent and still listening to the muffled roar of the thruster engines as the transport prepared to land in some new hangar. Were we touching down on land or a battleship?
The thick metal doors of the kettle split open. I could see a quiet landing pad outside. The area was brightly lit. The ground was paved with black asphalt. There were no boxes or people, and no clues about where we might have landed.
“Well, come on. Atkins and Crowley both asked to see you,” the bright commando said. In saying this, he revealed a lot of information. Amos Crowley was the Army general who had defected to the Mogats. Atkins would likely be Warren Atkins, the son of the founder of the Morgan Atkins movement. That would make this a Mogat base or a command ship, I thought.
The doors ground open and white light poured into the red-lit world of our transport. Ducking my head behind a hanging fold of cargo netting, I listened as Wingate, the commando, and the thug tromped down the metal ramp, their shoes clanging against the steel. I caught a brief glimpse of their backs as they reached the end of the ramp. Wingate was short and normal in every regard compared to the tall, athletic-looking men on either side of him.
As soon as they were out of sight and out of hearing range, I wrestled my way out from behind the cargo nets. The netting itself was made of nylon. It hung like a spider’s web, suspended from the roof by dozens of little metallic cables. The cables rattled as I worked my way free, causing a soft clatter that would have attracted attention if anyone else was in the kettle. One of the pilots, however, was still in the cockpit. I could see white light spilling out of the open door at the front of the kettle.
Moving slowly, stepping lightly so that my boots made barely any noise as they touched down on the metal flooring, I stalked across the cabin hiding behind the ribbings in the wall. I got to the door of the cockpit, took a deep breath, and peered in. A lone man sat at the controls speaking into a radio. He had a data pad on his lap. If he was filling out reports, he might be in that seat for hours. He might even finish his report, fire up the engines, and fly off to some new destination.
Life would have been easier had the man sat with his back to me. Instead, he had turned his seat ass backward. Miraculously, he did not spot me.
I had a gun, the M27 that I took from the guy I killed on New Columbia, but that would be loud. I had my knife, but I needed the man’s uniform. I also needed him off the damned radio, and quickly, before a maintenance crew happened by.
It didn’t happen that way.
The sound of heavy shoes echoed through the kettle. A lone worker in white overalls, the uniform of a civilian mechanic, came walking across the deck. He walked right past me, no more than three feet from my face, as I lay on my side under a disturbingly narrow bench.
“I hear it was some battle,” the mechanic said at the cockpit door.
“I only saw it for a second,” the pilot answered. “What I saw was wild.”
“Did you fly into it?”
