septic cylinder and placed it in the box, pushing it deep into the packing gel. Then I sealed the box and labeled it, “HQ Urgent.”
I returned to the launch bay and found the officer directing traffic. “When is the next ride down?” I asked.
“I’ve got one leaving within the hour,” the man said.
“Do you have space for one more?” I asked.
“No problem,” he said. “Two if you want to bring a friend along.”
“Just this,” I said, holding up my box.
“Want me to pack that for you?” he asked.
“I think I’d better keep this one with me,” I said. “Thanks, though.”
The man cast a wary glance at the word “Urgent,” but knew better than to ask about it.
I expected to travel down in the absolute discomfort of a military transport. With their bare benches and steel walls, kettles had a torture-chamber charm about them.
As it turned out, the next ride was a Johnston R-56 Starliner, a commuter plane. I found a seat and watched the other passengers to see if they would have space gear.
The planet below would have a toxic atmosphere. If it was anything like Hubble, the burned-out planet on which I fought my first real battle as a Marine, the planet would have toxic oily gas instead of air. That oil dissolved flesh and soft plastics. Seven other passengers showed up for the flight down to the planet. None of them had space gear.
When the deck officer called us to board, I followed the other passengers onto the Starliner. All of them wore regular uniforms with not so much as an oxygen tube.
My box did not fit in the compartment above my seat. Fortunately, the flight was almost empty. No one complained when I placed my box on the empty seat beside my own.
I was glad to relax and ride a comfortable commuter down to the planet instead of a transport. In a windowless kettle, I could only sit and count the minutes until the heavy metal doors at the rear slid open. From my seat on the Starliner, I could start scouting the moment we left the battleship.
The launch-bay officer walked through the ship. He went to the cockpit and spoke to the pilot. Then he came back down the aisle and counted passengers. Then he left.
“Prepare for takeoff,” the pilot radioed back to us. A moment later we taxied to the front of the launch bay. The atmospheric locks closed behind us. I heard the thrusters flare and we lifted off the deck.
As we left the ship, I began counting ships. Once more showing their military incompetence, they had allowed their navy to park in disarray. One battleship was so hemmed in by the smaller ships around it that I doubted its crew could fire its engines without blasting two destroyers behind it. I saw clusters of ships in every direction, all with bulbous bows and charcoal-colored hulls. The stars were thick in this part of the galaxy, and the silhouettes of the ships stood out like crows flying through a clear noon sky. I did not have time to make a full count; but from what I saw, it seemed entirely possible that the Mogats had their entire four-hundred-ship armada circling the planet.
I spotted dozens of ships by checking for shadow shapes against the stars. There were ships floating beneath us. I saw them very clearly against the murky atmosphere of the planet.
I thought about that battle on Hubble. The Mogats had dug in long before the Unified Authority arrived with its overwhelming force. We sent a hundred thousand Marines down for that invasion. We had tanks and Harriers and gunships, and they had snake shafts—hidden trenches that were twenty feet deep and even farther across. No one knew what snake shafts were used for, but we found out on Hubble. The shafts gathered corrosive gas. Once our forces were in the middle of their trap, the Mogats blew the tops off their snake shafts. Marines and equipment fell in alike. Those shafts became shallow graves.
It took only three minutes to reach the atmosphere of the planet. We entered into the atmosphere at a sharp angle, then leveled out a few miles up. Beneath us, stretched out like an ancient leather scroll, the Mogat planet looked devoid of life. The surface was dark. I saw no sign of water, just a black-and-brown landscape with ash for dirt and obsidian mountains. The rockets on the Starliner ignited small explosions in the oily air outside. I saw no clouds or light in the sky, just a smoggy haze as thick as smoke and even less breathable.
We flew across that dead planet for three hours. According to the 2508 census, over 200 million people identified themselves as members of the Morgan Atkins Movement—a sizable population. You might be able to hide 200 million people on a settled planet like Earth, but not a planet like this. They would have needed an enormous environmental dome of some sort.
The Starliner had a top atmospheric speed of Mach 3, which meant we had probably covered nine thousand miles when the plane slowed and began its descent. Searching the horizon ahead, I saw more plains and yet another obsidian mountain range. There was nothing else to see. I expected a giant dome or the glow of lights against the horizon. Nothing.
We were no more than a few hundred yards above the mountain peaks when I finally spotted our target. Instead of a dome, we flew to an isolated mountain. We dropped lower and lower as we crossed the plains that separated the peak from the others. Craning my neck so that I could see ahead, I spotted a row of blinking lights marking some sort of tunnel. A moment later we entered.
Someone had cut a doorway into the face of the mountain. The opening was so large you could fit a navy cruiser through it. I saw the rows of synchronized lights that winked on and off along each of the walls. Looking out one side of the Starliner, then the other, I estimated that this entrance was half a mile wide and at least a quarter mile in height.
I felt a slight tremor as the pilot killed the Starliner’s engines. We had not yet landed. In fact, staring down as far as I could, I saw no sign of a landing area. I did see an occasional flash of light, and I saw other ships rising straight out of the darkness. They just seemed to levitate straight into the air.
Having extensive experience flying a Starliner, I had a working knowledge about the thruster rockets Starliners used for vertical lifts. They were made for use in zero-and low-gravity situations. They were far too weak to hold the ship in place for an extended period. Starting to panic, I listened for the thrusters and did not hear them. I would have noticed if the pilot had landed the ship. Looking out the window, I saw that something was conveying us downward slowly, but I did not know what.
“Still not used to the gravity chute, Lieutenant?”
When I turned around, I saw the pilot staring down at me. I shook my head.
“I don’t think I will ever get used to it,” the pilot confessed. “It still scares me.” He patted me on the shoulder and walked away.
A “gravity chute”? I had never heard the term before and had no idea how such a thing could work. All I knew was that we were dropping miles below the surface of the planet, and here the pilot stood gabbing with me instead of sitting by the controls. Something else occurred to me, too. Had I been in a better temper, I might have joked that my chance of survival had just gone down the chute.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
When Morgan Atkins, the majority leader of the Senate, hijacked the self-broadcasting fleet and vanished, he must have already had thousands of followers. He had hundreds of millions of followers when the war broke out. But nothing explained what I saw when we reached the bottom of the gravity chute.
The man-made subterranean plateau on which his people lived stretched farther than I could see. To have said it was sparsely populated would have been an act of criminal understatement. The ground below us was an endless plain with an occasional building. But the main feature here was not the occasional building, it was the endless plain. Had I viewed the cavern from space, I might have been able to see all the way across it; then again, it might have stretched beyond the curvature of the planet. Below us, streets as straight as rulers formed a perfect grid. The only buildings I saw were stubby cubes spaced two or three miles apart.
The Starliner’s engines kicked on as we dropped out of the gravity chute. I looked out the top of the window
