for a last glance at the chute and saw something unexpected. Instead of the rock roof of a subterranean cavern, I saw an expansive night sky. It was as if I could see straight through miles of rock and right into that polluted sky above the surface of the planet.
I wanted to stare, I wanted to gape, I wanted to ask a million questions; but I had already drawn too much attention to myself. I forced myself to look away from the window and act casual about the impossibilities outside.
Just before we landed, I saw a military transport rising straight up from the spaceport below us. That ship easily had one hundred times the mass of the streamlined Starliner, which was dagger-shaped and aerodynamic. That transport, with its bloated kettle, was anything but aerodynamic. It looked like something made to fall, not fly. It relied on powerful rockets to maneuver in gravity. It rose from the ground through the hard effort of a dozen booster rockets, then it reached the bottom of the gravity chute. The rockets switched off, and the transport rose as smoothly and effortlessly as an air bubble in water—thousands of tons of steel, rising straight up through the chute.
Unlike the transport, which had skids instead of wheels, our Starliner came to a rolling stop along the runway. The engines slowed, and we taxied forward toward a terminal. As we rolled ahead, I studied the cube-shaped buildings in the distance. If I had the distances and proportions correct in my head, those buildings stood approximately four stories tall. I saw no windows on their rose gray facades.
The Starliner pulled up to a terminal, if you could call it that. It was a ten-foot arch with people waiting under it. A moment after we came to a stop, the pilot walked into the cabin and opened the hatch. My seat was one row back from the hatch. A cool breeze blew in around me.
“Welcome home, boys,” the pilot said to the cabin in general. There were nine passengers on the flight including me. We all wore Navy uniforms.
I pretended to fidget with my box while the first passengers stepped out of the Starliner. I did not want to lead the way off the plane. Not knowing the lay of the land or the protocol, it would be too easy for me to expose myself by making some obvious mistake.
As I stepped into the fresh air of the deep underground cavern, I saw three children running to meet one of the other passengers. A woman in a blue dress followed, coming up to the man and kissing him on the mouth. I tried to tell myself that women and children were not a problem. The Mogats had started the war. They attacked civilian sites. In order to win, we would need to do the same. My arguments fell on deaf ears.
I thought of the times in the Bible when God directed His generals to annihilate entire populations of enemies. In His new guise as the Unified Authority, He had not become any more forgiving. The Mogats won that first round on Hubble with their snake shafts, but we settled the score in that battle. Lord did we ever settle that score.
I followed the other passengers across the empty landing field and out to the street. The guy with the family headed in one direction, his children buzzing around him and his wife like bees in a flower bed. The man had his arm around her waist.
“How long are you down for, Lieutenant?” the pilot asked me.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“R and R?” he asked.
He was trying to be friendly. Even if I had been a real Mogat lieutenant, I would not have wanted to chat. I could have pretended, but I preferred to play things as close to real as possible. I did what I would have done on Earth if I didn’t feel like talking. “Yeah,” I grunted. “R and R.” I hoped I sounded like somebody who wanted to be left alone making a halfhearted attempt to sound friendly.
“Well, have a nice stay,” the pilot said. Message received.
I looked up one side of the street, then down the other. The nearest buildings were at least a mile away in every direction. From here, they looked exactly alike. They were made of the same dull plastic material, and they all appeared to be approximately fifty feet tall and shaped like cubes. Resolutely uniform.
During the battle on Hubble, the Mogats lived in a large underground cavern; but it was nothing like this. The cavern on Hubble was rough-hewn. When we sent probes down, we saw no cube-shaped buildings and no gridwork of streets. They had oxygen and strings of lightbulbs powered by portable generators. I wondered if they could ever have made something like this on Hubble, had they been given enough time. On that occasion, we gave them no time.
As I thought about Hubble, a small shudder ran the length of my spine. I lost friends on Hubble. I witnessed a massacre. The planet made me feel desolate when we landed. By the time we left, I had no feeling at all.
The ground around me on this planet was flat, with no notable features. The sheer uniformity of this city left me disoriented. The computers in my helmet could have created a virtual map to mark my path as I explored, but I could not go walking around a Mogat city wearing the combat helmet of a Unified Authority Marine.
In fact, I could not afford to do anything suspicious. If this was the Mogat promised land, there would be a sizable population. As I looked around, I saw only a scattering of people walking the streets; but I might have arrived during their night or perhaps a time of prayer. I knew so little about Mogat beliefs. Maybe they had prayer hours like Moslems, a time when every man spread his mat and prayed. The Starliner might have let us off in an unpopulated district. Perhaps we would take a train into a larger city.
I needed someplace to hide and access the interLink, but I saw no alleys, just scattered buildings with endless open space between them. I saw no signs to indicate one street from the next. No vehicles moved along the streets. They were broad and clean and entirely unused. I had the feeling I could sleep in the middle of any road without worrying about ever being hit by a car.
All of the other passengers had left, and I did not want to call attention to myself by loitering. Since the pilot went right, I headed left. I simply grabbed my box by its handle and started walking toward the closest building in that direction.
Cubes play optical illusions on your eyes. From the air, all of the buildings looked four stories tall. From the street, the nearest building looked smaller and closer, maybe a mile away. It was a cube in an open space. It could have been ten miles away and forty stories tall. If I had my helmet on, I could have measured the distance to the building and the height of the walls. I ached for my armor.
It took me about twenty minutes to reach that building. As I got closer, I realized that its blank facade gave no clues about what the Mogats used it for. It could have been a movie holotorium or a penitentiary or a home for wayward violinists. It might have been abandoned. From what I could see, it had no windows. The only feature I saw was an open doorway in the front. It reached almost all the way to the roof.
When I reached the first building, I put down my box, peered in through the doorway, and found myself alone. I strolled in through the tall doorway and paused. The building was hollow, a four-story empty cube. Its gray facade had a strange rose-colored tint. It was made out of some smooth, cool material that looked like a merging of plastic and marble.
Thinking that I might have come to an abandoned structure, I turned and stared back down the street. Something else caught my eye. This planet did not have a sun, but there was enough ambient light to create the illusion of daylight. Looking back into the sky, I recognized the layer of phosphorous gas that must have provided the light for the internal world. I assumed it was phosphorous gas, and I assumed they could charge the ions in that gas to simulate an entire day-night cycle.
I wondered about the Mogats. They had no concept of how to run a military or maintain battleships, but I had never seen such technological miracles as I found here.
Back in the direction I came from, the Starliner took off from the spaceport with the customary rolling start of an atmospheric craft. It zipped over the ground at a shallow angle, hung a wide, looping curve, then decelerated as it spiraled back toward the opening of the gravity chute. Just as it reached the chute, the Starliner came to a dead stop. It did not drop. Caught in the mysterious updraft, it hovered higher until it disappeared from sight. At that same moment, a military transport dropped out of the chute. Its thruster rockets ignited, and it hovered toward the ground.
I did not understand what technology governed this planet. I did not believe that the Unified Authority Corps of Engineers could hollow a planet, and I knew they had nothing resembling a gravity chute. Maybe Atkins and his followers had more luck converting scientists than they did converting soldiers. On the other hand, I had heard that
