“What kind of a base?” I asked.
“I can’t tell,” Freeman said, as the technology in his microphone turned his low, rumbling voice into a high burbly voice. “I haven’t figured out how to get inside it.”
“Do you think the good guys know about it?” I asked.
“No. I set up a surveillance site in the woods across the street. The Feds never go by.”
“They could be watching by satellite,” I said.
“Yeah,” Freeman said, which meant he did not take the idea seriously.
I almost called Freeman by name but stopped myself for the sake of those listening. That would have come across as too cavalier. Whether or not the Intelligence boys had already tapped into this mediaLink account, they had almost certainly bugged my room. This call was as much about feeding information to Navy Intelligence as it was about trading information with Freeman. The difference was, Freeman knew what we were up to.
“Remember the limo driver who brought us to the base?” I asked.
“The Navy spook in the civilian suit?” Freeman asked.
“That’s the one. He’s looking for you, and he’s pressuring me. Now that I’m back on active duty…”
“Don’t sweat it,” Freeman said. “I’ll handle the situation.” That comment would have sounded a lot more menacing had it not been for Freeman’s little-girl voice.
The next morning, a new operative came dressed as a chauffeur to drive me into town. My old driver, he said, was taking personal leave.
Message delivered.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Harris, you have a most unstable career. When you came to Ezer Kri, you were a corporal. In the movie they portrayed you as a lieutenant. When we found you in space, you were a colonel. Now you are a sergeant,” Yoshi Yamashiro said, with an uncharacteristic smile. He had yet to light up a cigarette, so he had already bucked tradition, but he wore his usual dark suit and red necktie. He shook his head sadly as he repeated, “A most unstable career.”
I smiled, and said, “When I first met you, you were the governor of Ezer Kri, a loyal colony of the Unified Authority. The next time I saw you, you had allied with the Atkins Believers. Now you are the governor of an independent planet hoping to sign a treaty with the Unified Authority.” I shook my head. “You have a very checkered career.”
Yamashiro smiled and laughed softly. His teeth looked very white against the teak color of his skin.
We met in a conference room with a large screen. Admiral Brocius and I sat on one side of the table. Yoshi Yamashiro sat with an officer and two civilians on the other. The civilians belonged to the Shin Nippon Corps of Engineers. The officer was Captain Hideo Takahashi, Yamashiro’s son-in-law, aide, and full-time shadow.
From what I could tell, the Shin Nippon military only had one branch, a Navy. It could have a second, possibly larger, branch if it militarized its corps of engineers.
The current meeting did not go off without the usual Shin Nippon touches. Yamashiro sat directly at the table with his entourage spread in a protective fan behind him. Yamashiro was still the shogun. Engineers or officers, the men behind him were still his samurai.
“Did you find anything of value in the computer parts Harris brought back from that ship?” Brocius asked. I could tell that he already knew the answer.
“Sadly, the data storage unit was empty,” Yamashiro said.
“Too bad,” Brocius said.
“I find it strange that the storage was empty and not destroyed,” Yamashiro said.
“What do you mean?” Brocius asked.
“How did a ship with an unused navigation computer find its way out of their docks?” Yamashiro asked.
“Who says it was unused?” Brocius asked.
“Then perhaps they erased the data from the unit during battle,” Yamashiro said. “Maybe that is why the ship was destroyed, the crew was so busy erasing information from the computer that they forgot to defend the ship.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Brocius said.
“Ah, so I see. Maybe the crew had time to purge their navigation computer while a massive laser cut through their bow,” Yamashiro suggested.
“No one worries about computer maintenance during battle,” Brocius said.
“I agree,” Yamashiro said.
Brocius thought about this but said nothing. He was a career officer; politicians and diplomats infuriated him. He wanted to finish the meeting and leave as soon as he could. “As I understand it, you wanted to question Sergeant Harris about the video record?”
“My engineers have some questions,” Yamashiro said with a gesture somewhere between a nod of the head and a bow. He looked over and spoke quietly to one of the engineers in Japanese. The man took a remote from the table. He sat down, pressed a few buttons, and the lights went out.
On a wall screen, our approach to the derelict battleship played out in slow motion. Judging by the angle, this segment had to have come from my helmet. I was in the front of the sled and was ten inches taller than everyone else. The record had been edited so that it never showed the Boyd clones.
“Sergeant, were you able to see this damage up close?” the engineer asked. “You flew your vehicle through this breach in the hull?”
“Sure,” I said. “That should be in the record. We entered the ship through that breach.”
“Ah.” He grunted the word, affecting great surprise. “That was not in the record we received.”
Brocius fidgeted. “We edited the record slightly for security purposes.”
“We flew our craft through that breach. It was a ten-man sled…a very small craft.”
“But the hole was big enough for you to fly through?” the engineer asked.
Yamashiro’s engineers traded a few excited words. “I know you are not an engineer,” Yamashiro’s second engineer prefaced, “but could you tell if this damage was made by a single shot?”
“One swipe,” I said with absolute surety.
The feed on the screen froze displaying a straight-in view of the gash. I could see up three decks. I stood up and walked to the screen. The scene it displayed was dark except for the spotlights that the Special Operations clones used. “Can you make the picture brighter?” I asked.
Using gamma controls, the engineer bleached the picture on the screen. I studied the screen and realized that the unnatural lighting made details even harder to find. “Oh yes, this was a single shot,” I said.
“Do you want to know what I really think?” I asked. “I think that someone on the bridge lowered the shields.”
Admiral Brocius laughed. “Someone lowered the shields in a battle situation? That’s absurd.”
“Permission to speak freely, sir?” I asked.
“Go ahead, Sergeant,” Brocius said. His reference to my rank was meant to remind me of the limitations to my latitude.
“I think they meant to leave that battleship behind,” I said.
“You think they purposely sacrificed a battleship? Why would they do something like that?” Brocius asked.
“I must agree with Harris’s appraisal,” Yamashiro said. “When lasers hit ships with shields, they create small areas of damage as the shields fail. This ship should have several scorched areas along its hull from attacks penetrating its shields. Instead, there is this one large hole.”
“The
“Maybe that was a particle-beam weapon prepared especially for the
