After two excursions on a derelict battleship, I had no trouble finding my way around. I went up three levels and headed toward the bow of the ship. This would take me into an observation deck below the bridge. Once there, I would scout the space around us for stations, ships, and planets. If I did not find anything, I would need to go to the bridge. That might be a problem; I’d stand out like a leper carrying a septic cylinder onto the bridge.
I made my way down the main corridor. People steered clear of me and generally ignored me until I stepped onto an elevator. The door opened and there stood a lieutenant. “Where do you think you are going?”
“Fifth deck, sir,” I said.
“Not with that shit can,” he said. “Take the cargo lift.”
I saluted with my refuse-stained hand. He did not return the salute.
When I found the cargo lift, I decided I liked it better than the elevator. I had the car to myself, for openers; no stuffy lieutenants. The car was an open platform. The only light in the shaft came from floodlights in the ceiling, but I did not need creature comforts.
The lift let me off in a dark service corridor. I did not know how Mogat sailors spent their time, but ship maintenance could not have ranked high on their priority list. A row of work carts lined the wall, ending by a pile of empty pallets.
I thought that I might have a use for this empty corridor. I needed a place to hide my helmet. The area was not secure enough to test the old interLink, but I did take the opportunity to stash the cylinder with my helmet, cylinder can and all, on the floor between the carts and the pallets. Then I went to explore.
I found my way out of that service corridor and meandered in the general direction of the observation deck. It was essentially a rec room. Off-duty sailors came here to drink and talk. I worried that a man in janitor clothes would stand out; but now that I had ditched the smelly cylinder, no one paid attention to me.
The Mogats ran the rec room like a nightclub. It had chrome-and-glass furniture, dim lighting, a bar made of some kind of obsidian glass. Men lounged about, some drinking, some smoking, some doing both. I could not tell if the mix included officers and enlisted men. In a navy as informal as this one, officers and enlisted men might share the same bar.
“Hey, Mr. Clean, you here to work or to gawk?” a sailor shouted in my direction. “Move it, fellah. You’re stinking up the air.”
I nodded and moved out of his way. Under other circumstances, I might have broken his neck.
The observation wall was twenty feet tall and forty feet wide, like a giant movie screen that showed nothing but outer space. Today’s panorama displayed at least fifty other ships, three out-of-use dry-dock facilities, and a distant planet that I did not recognize. The planet had a uniform gray-brown surface. Whatever sun had once shone on this planet had long since expired. I had gone to war on a planet like it before. The gas on that planet would strip you to the bone if it got through your space gear.
I needed more information, and I knew I could not get it as a janitor. I wanted to explore the bridge and I especially wanted to get down to that planet. In the meantime, I would not complain about a sandwich. Between the puppet show and the ride to this ship, a lot of time had passed since my last meal.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“Evans, where are you now?” I asked.
“I’m on a Perseus Fleet frigate,” Evans said. “We’re about six million miles from the wreck.”
“And the signal is coming through?” I asked.
“We’re talking,” Evans pointed out.
“Did everyone make it back?” I asked.
“The entire platoon is present and accounted for, except you.”
“I need you to get a message to the
“You mean the Special Ops guys?” Evans asked.
“One of their men is behind enemy lines,” I said.
“I thought the whole thing about the SEALs was that they never left anyone behind,” Evans said.
“It wasn’t like that,” I said. “It was more like they sent him ahead.”
Though I had the boiler room to myself, I saw no reason to push my luck. I told Evans that I would call back as soon as I could.
If the Mogats had their entire fleet around here, Illych could have been on any of those ships. If the Mogats had a base on that dead planet, I suspected I would find him in their base. He would go wherever he could do the most damage.
A month had passed since he landed on Mogat territory. Alone and cut off from his platoon, Illych might think he had no real hope of ever getting home. A guy like him would want to go out making the biggest bang he could. He might already have made his mark.
Still dressed in my janitor’s smock, I entered the officers’ laundry and stole a lieutenant’s uniform that fit reasonably well. I found a gym and showered, then visited the mess hall. The place was nearly empty, but the Mogats had a twenty-four-hour self-service counter. I slid my tray along a stainless steel counter and scooped up a helping of some sort of casserole, three slices of bread, a cube of Jell-O, and a salad.
The chow the Mogats fed their men tasted bad, really bad. They ate hard bread that crumbled to dust in my fingers. The chicken-and-cheese dish looked nice until I dug into it with my fork. Under its yellow and white surface, the entire dish was gray. The stuff that passed as meat was more likely chicken-flavored gluten. The salad might have been made out of the same stuff as the chicken. It did not contain genuine vegetables. Looking around the mess hall, I noted that the other men in the facility ate with no enthusiasm.
If I hoped to learn anything of value, I would not hear it in the mess hall. The men gossiped about various officers and little else. One sailor spoke endlessly about going down to the planet to visit his family. The more I listened to him, the more I believed that the Mogats had settled the rancid planet near which we had moored.
The bad food told me something, too. When news analysts spoke about the Morgan Atkins Believers on the mediaLink, they described them as the human equivalent of a swarm of locusts. Before the war, Mogat colonies did not mix with society at large. They sent missionaries into communities, but they generally remained in their own private districts. Whatever food and goods they produced, they sold among themselves. Now I thought I knew why. Who would buy shit like this? And where did they get it? Not from that planet.
If the Mogats really lived on the cinder ash of a planet below us, eking out enough food to feed an army would take a miracle. I ate what I could of my meal and threw the rest away, knowing its substances would be recycled and served at that same counter in some other form within the week.
Now that I was unofficially a Mogat lieutenant, I could move around the ship more easily. I entered an equipment depot and told the man at the desk to find me an empty box. He disappeared through the door and returned a few minutes later with a two-foot cube that looked just a shade too big for transporting my helmet.
“It’s bigger than I wanted,” I growled, though I was actually quite pleased. Officers never accept the first offer no matter how good.
“Better big than small,” the man said.
“Do you have any padding for this box?”
He took the box and disappeared through the door again. No more than a minute later, he handed the box back to me. Along the bottom he had spread a few inches of packing gel.
“Good enough,” I said and left.
The variety of faces on the ship left me feeling off-balance. On a Unified Authority ship, the man at the supply desk would have been a clone. Clones performed all of the menial work. They worked in crews, each clone’s neural programming struggling to convince him that he was the only natural-born sailor in the entire Navy who mopped decks or lugged cargo.
I took my box back to the service hall. After making sure no one was around, I removed my helmet from the
