I mailed the letter. When I removed the shades, I discovered that a new crop of people had entered the gym. Four men stood in the weight lifting area, joshing with each other as they pushed levers and pulled handles. Their weights clanked loudly as they lowered them. I climbed off of the bicycle.
“Buddy, you mind tossing me a towel?” one of the men called.
“Sure,” I said. I picked up a gym towel and tossed it to him. He snatched it out of the air and turned back to his weights without thanking me.
I went back to the locker room and stripped for a shower. The goal now was to remain inconspicuous as I killed time and waited for the right change of clothing. I needed something I could wear on the upper decks without attracting attention. So I went in the shower room and soaped and showered, peering out whenever I heard people entering or leaving the locker room. More than an hour passed before the man I was waiting for arrived, and I counted myself lucky that he had come so soon.
I heard the door close and rinsed myself off. When I looked out of the shower, I saw a crewman walking around the floor picking up a few sopping towels that had been discarded and tossing them into the laundry cart.
Drying myself off as quickly as possible, I listened as he emptied bins filled with dirty gym clothes into his cart. As he left, I pulled on a fresh pair of gym shorts and a T-shirt.
Stepping out into the corridor, I saw the crewman moving away slowly. He stood hunched over the laundry cart, his head turning to follow everyone he passed. He turned down one hall and then another before reaching his final destination.
Capital ships had more than one laundry facility. Chances were, there was a special facility on the upper decks just for cleaning officers’ uniforms; but this laundry would do.
I approached and the door slid open.
“What do you want?” the crewman asked as I stepped into the room.
“My clothes,” I said, doing an impersonation of a peeved officer. “You hauled off my uniform in one of your laundry carts.”
“Sorry,” the man said in a flat voice. He went back to sorting dirty clothes and did not look back in my direction. Such insubordination. I was an officer. He was an enlisted man. Okay, I was a spy pretending to be an officer, but he didn’t know that.
I had at least thirty carts to choose from. In the third cart, I found an officer’s work uniform.
CHAPTER THIRTY
I went to the emptiest room on any battleship—the chapel. There I could speak freely.
“Who is Derrick Hines?” Freeman’s face appeared on my MediaLink shades.
“Never heard of him,” I said.
“You’re using his Link address,” Freeman said.
“Oh, him,” I said. “He was a crewman on a GCF ship.”
“Confederate or Mogat—?” Freeman asked. He had no interest in Hines’s fate.
Freeman was on a communications console. I could see his face. It was as impassive as ever. Judging by his nonplussed expression, you might have thought that I had called from a bar in Mars Spaceport.
“No idea,” I said. “I think it’s their flagship.”
“How did you get on?” Freeman asked.
“I followed Colonel Wingate, the commander of Fort Clinton.”
“That was the Army base that got destroyed on New Columbia,” Freeman said. “What’s he doing on a GCF ship?”
“He swapped sides,” I said. “Turns out he was using Fort Clinton as a surplus outlet and the Mogats were his favorite customers. Think he’s worth much?”
As I thought about it, I had plenty of reasons to hate Batt Wingate. He would have sold me out without a second thought when I was regular military. He’d certainly sold out enough other clones. He must have helped William Patel smuggle bombs into Safe Harbor. Did he know that I would be there or was he just after Jimmy Callahan? I would gladly kill the man myself if I got a chance.
“He’s worth something,” Freeman said. “The Mogats routed the Navy at New Columbia. They shot down twenty-three U.A. ships and destroyed all three military bases. The pundits are saying that Washington is desperate.
“Have you got a location on the Fleet?”
“No,” I said.
Freeman waited for me to say more.
“Ray, this is too big for us. We’re going to need to bring Huang in on it. Keep this channel open. I don’t know how I’m going to do it yet, but I will get you a location. Once I have something, you’re going to have to turn it over to Huang.”
He agreed.
“Where are you now?” I asked.
“I was on my way to Little Man.”
“Your family okay?” I asked.
“A carrier buzzed them last night. I think it scared them. They’re colonists. Having the Navy around makes them nervous.”
“Did anything happen?” I asked.
“The captain gave them one month to evacuate the planet. They’ll still be there when this is over with.” For some reason, I got the feeling that he was not anxious to visit Little Man. Until recently, he never even mentioned his family. Now, when he talked about them, he did not seem to exude warm feelings.
We agreed to meet in Safe Harbor once I got off this ship. Freeman would go and see what happened to Callahan and the commandant at Fort Washington. One way or another, I thought I could bring in Batt Wingate, and we would need witnesses to prove he was our Benedict Arnold.
My new uniform made me a lieutenant in the Confederate Navy. Now that I was an officer, I moved around the ship more freely. I walked the halls and looked for clues.
The first thing that struck me was the sheer emptiness of the ship. U.A. ships were crowded with personnel. Engineers, weapons officers, cooks, communications officers …wherever you looked, you saw sailors. Command ships seemed doubly crowded because, along with the crew, they had fleet officers and administrative flunkies.
This ship had a skeleton crew, maybe a half-crew. I walked down major arteries between engineering and weapons systems passing only an occasional sailor.
The ship itself was clean, brightly lit, and remarkably unorganized. The cables that I saw lining the walls down in the landing bay also snaked along the halls on the upper decks. They were about three inches in diameter and highly insulated, which led me to believe that they might carry a high-voltage electrical charge. The ceilings in this part of the ship were only eight feet tall, and the cables hung one foot lower than that. At one point, thinking I was alone in a long hall, I stopped to examine them. The outside covering of these cables was black with maroon strips.
“Is there a problem with the cables, Sir?” somebody asked behind my back.
I whirled around expecting to see an MP. It was a petty officer—a maintenance technician. I recognized the crossed hammers insignia on his blouse. It was the same insignia that the U.A. Navy used. This man did not suspect me of being a spy. He was worried about my spotting a flaw in the way that the cables were hung.
“Looks sound,” I said.
