“Evans, get out of there,” I barked over the interLink.
“I saw them coming up the well,” Evans said.
“Are you clear of them?” I asked.
“All clear,” Evans answered.
I had just started to tell everyone that Evans was safe and the first act of the show was over when the anomalies started flashing. Ships began broadcasting in by the dozen. Just looking away from the glare was not enough. I had to bury my visor in the crook of my arm. The walls around the storage hold flashed so brightly I would have sworn someone was flash-welding steel an inch away from my face.
“Oh, shit,” I whispered to myself, knowing full well that every last man on my team would hear me. The problem was, I could not change the frequency with my eyes closed; and with all of that lightning going out there, I turned away, covered my face, closed my eyes, and still saw bleaching.
“What’s going on?” nine of my men asked me at the same time. Philips, the tenth, said, “That doesn’t sound so good.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Even looking away and covering my eyes, I could feel the intensity of the anomalies outside. They came at a rapid staccato, like thousands of blinding-white arc bulbs popping on and off at an impossibly fast speed.
“I think the whole specking Mogat Navy is out there,” I said over the open frequency.
“How many ships?” one man asked.
“I can’t look out to count, they just keep coming.”
I knew it would not be the entire Mogat Fleet. Broadcasting four hundred ships into a tight lane of space is a complicated matter. You would need to stage the broadcasts so that the ships came in far enough apart. Broadcasting ships do not need to bump each other to cause damage; the electricity from their anomalies is enough to cause havoc. Besides, it would have taken hours for the Mogats to broadcast their entire four-hundred- ship navy into our space. The lightning storm ended a mere five minutes after it began.
When the flashes stopped, I turned back toward the break in the deck for a look. From this narrow window, I counted thirteen ships milling about. Had I had a more panoramic view, I suspected I might have spotted fifty. The Mogats probably had another hundred on reserve in case the battle turned nasty. Despite their recently nonaggressive stance, the Morgan Atkins Believers were spoiling for a fight over this little acre.
The Mogats could field as many battleships as they wanted; it wouldn’t affect us in here so long as their ships cleared out before our ride returned. Our pilot had struck me as a guy with a strong sense of self-preservation. He would broadcast in far away and find a safe zone from which to scan the area before flying into a potentially hazardous situation. The mission still seemed on track, but then things took an unexpected turn.
A formation of transports drifted into view.
“Bad news, puppeteers, your audience just got larger,” I said.
“How bad?” someone asked.
“Three more transports,” I said. If each transport carried a full load, we would have a grand total of nearly four hundred Mogats trolling the halls. This old battleship was starting to feel crowded.
“Speck me with a three-legged dog,” Private Philips grumbled. “This show of yours was already standing room only.” As always, he called on a platoon-wide band. Philips enjoyed an audience.
I heard a few Marines laughing. I wanted the platoon to be serious, but I needed them calm. Philips was a joker, but he was also the old man of the platoon. Even if he was a private, some of my men looked to him for leadership.
“Listen up, Leathernecks,” I said. That was us. We were “grunts.” We were “jarheads.” We were “Leathernecks.” Marines get shitty-sounding names and shitty-sounding jobs and take pride in them. “Things are getting tight in here, but the show goes on exactly as planned.”
“How the speck are you going to sneak on their specking transport with three hundred specking Mogats milling around the specking launch bay? Not meaning any disrespect, Master Sarge, but you’re specked,” Philips said.
“Can it, Philips,” I said.
I agreed with Philips. After taking another look at my stealth kit to make absolutely sure it was engaged, I leaped to the top of the elevator shaft for another look. As I flew higher, light from the Mogat transports illuminated the walls around me. Had one of the Mogats glanced into the elevator shaft at that moment, he would have seen me. I would have made a dandy target, alone in an empty shaft with only a pistol.
I found a handhold and stopped myself just below the light. Inching slowly along the wall, I got to the door and peered out.
Somehow, the Mogats had wedged four transports side by side onto the deck. The ships’ landing lights shone down, illuminating the entire bay. I turned off my night-for-day lens and viewed the scene through the tactical lens in my visor. Even with the lights, there was a distinct lack of color—dozens of men in dark armor climbing out of bare metal kettles and lining up in front of the white walls of the launch bay.
Using optical controls for the interLink, I started scanning frequencies to find the band the Mogats used, but the signal got buried under the chatter from my men. “Keep it down,” I said. “From here on, I do the talking and you listen unless there is an emergency. Do you read me?”
We would have a hard time outmaneuvering these boys unless we could eavesdrop on their conversations.
Mogat interLink technology included a narrow and obsolete band of frequencies. The Unified Authority armed forces had abandoned those bands years ago.
I found their chatter, but their signals overlapped each other. When I was here with the SEALs, the Mogats sent two transports, and we had no problem listening in on them. This time, with four transports and four hundred men, the messages seemed to scramble themselves. It would have taken a cryptography computer to untangle who said what and which statement responded to which question. From what I could tell, however, they were confusing themselves as well with this chatter.
Apparently no more impressed with the chaos than I was, a group of Mogat platoon leaders weighed into their mob. The platoon leaders wore magnetic-gravitation boots that anchored their feet to the ground. Thanks to their gravity boots, they could stand firm as they sorted through the cluster and found the men from their various platoons. Every so often they would spot a man out of place and grab him by the arm or the neck. The sergeants would yank these unfortunate conscripts and sling them. In a weightless situation, a man with gravity in his shoes can throw other men as if they had no more substance than a wet towel.
I switched to a frequency my platoon would hear. “Get ready, they’re sending teams out.”
“How do they look?” asked Evans, probably the most serious man under my command.
“You’ve never seen anything like this. They’re about as organized as a pond full of ducks,” I said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that these boys can’t tell their boots from their helmets,” I said.
The Mogats from the first transport had long since filed out into the ship. Two of my men, Evans and Kasdan, tracked their movements, while other members of my team led them on a wild-goose chase that would end somewhere near midship.
The teams from the secondary transports started filing out. Listening to my men, I heard them abandoning routes and altering plans as additional Mogats poured out. Maneuvering like ghosts around a ship with four hundred Mogats crowding the corridors would present a challenge.
I took reports every two minutes.
“This would be a whole lot easier if you could get them to stay in one place,” Private Adams signaled me after nearly two hundred Mogats converged by sick bay, a single hatch away from where he and PFC Nielsen lay hidden. They had planned to enter the vent system; but when the dozens of Mogats flooded the area, they hid in a room without any vents.
“They’re closing in on us,” Nielsen called. Military clones seldom panicked, but they were prone to confusion when they did not receive close supervision while under fire.
