and everyone in the chamber knew it. “Do you think I made it up?” I asked.
Brallier kept blathering on about how there were thousands of Marines on the planet and how unlikely it was that I had spotted the only “bug-eyed monster” to invade the planet. “How is it, Master Gunnery Sergeant, that you were the only man who spotted the invading aliens?” The question must have been rhetorical, because instead of giving me a chance to respond, the admiral kept going.
I could not figure out why Admiral Brallier was doing so much of the talking. Yes, he was one of the highest- ranking officers in the Unified Authority Navy, but General Thomas “Tommy” Mooreland sat right beside him, a man with enough brass and braids to decorate a division. As the commandant of the Marines, General Mooreland should have had more say in my interrogation than the admiral. I was, after all, a Marine. Instead, Mooreland sat there looking stolid and angry, never uttering a single syllable.
It wasn’t just the military that had turned out to watch this inquisition. “Wild Bill” Grace, the senior member of the Linear Committee, had come. He was the closest thing the Unified Authority had to a president. The other members of the Committee came as well. So had half the Senate.
Our allies, the Confederate Arms, sent representatives as well. Gordon Hughes, the chairman of the Confederate Arms Treaty Organization, sat in the gallery. Earlier this year, the Unified Authority and the Confederate Arms were at war with each other. Now they were allies. Go figure.
“Are you saying that I lied? What would I get out of lying?” I asked.
Admiral Brallier did not respond. He stood his ground, glaring at me, sucking in his lips.
“I have no idea what to make of this,” Al Smith said, putting in his two cents. Well, he was “Al Smith” to his friends. To the likes of me, he was General Alexander Smith of the U.A. Air Force, the ranking member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He threw up his hands. “Except for the fact that you spent two years absent without leave, you have a stellar record as a Marine, but this …”
Five more high-ranking officers sat behind the rail along with Smith, Brallier, and Mooreland, and among them was Admiral Thomas Halverson, the highest-ranking officer in the Confederate Arms Navy. There was so much brass and epaulets in the room that I half expected a marching band.
“Can you please explain to my satisfaction why you are the only Marine who reported seeing this creature? We sent sixty thousand men on that operation,” Admiral Brallier said. He managed to keep his voice low, but did not bother trying to disguise the hostility toward me
“They might have reported it,” I said, “but the Navy left 59,980 of those Marines stranded on the planet, sir.” I looked directly at Mooreland. As the commandant of the Marines, he might have flinched at the mention of the sixty thousand Marines betrayed and sacrificed. He did not stir.
“Watch yourself, Master Sergeant,” General Smith warned me. “You are speaking to a senior officer.”
As far as I was concerned, he was not my senior officer. I had resigned from the Marines fair and square.
“Okay, Master Gunnery Sergeant,” Brallier said, clearly making a show of keeping his calm. “Can you think of any reason why none of the other men in your platoon saw this creature?”
I was also having trouble keeping my temper in check, but I had to hide it. He was an admiral, and I was apparently going to be a master gunnery sergeant, retired or not.
After thinking for a moment, I added, “I was the last one out. Just like it shows in the video feed, I was bringing up the rear.”
“I have been in the Navy for thirty years, Master Sergeant. I am quite familiar with the layout of troop transport units,” Brallier sneered, his eyes boring into mine, his face unflinching.
“Have you actually ridden in a transport?” I asked. I was being grossly insubordinate, but I really did want to know.
“I can see that I have been far too tolerant with you, Master Gunnery Sergeant,” Brallier said. Sitting beside him, Smith nodded in agreement.
I wanted to tell them all to go speck themselves, but I kept quiet. I had already pushed my luck too far, and discretion is the better part of valor.
I retired from the Marines because I could no longer fight under corrupt bastards like Brallier. My platoon, what was left of my platoon, was the only platoon to make it off that planet, and only half of my men made it. Nearly sixty thousand clone Marines had been on the planet.
It wasn’t the number of men who died that disturbed me; it was the way the higher-ups betrayed them. Those clones were built for war and trained to fight and die on the battlefield. On this mission, we were sent in as an advance guard and told to keep the enemy pinned down until the bulk of the invasion force arrived. The problem was, we were the bulk of the invasion. We were sent to keep the Mogats from escaping while their entire planet dissolved around them …around us.
It seemed like we had reached an impasse. Brallier thought I was lying. I did not care what Admiral Brallier thought anymore. He’d planned the invasion. Leaving those Marines to die was his idea.
“It is obvious to me that Sergeant Harris must have seen something,” said Admiral Halverson, a man with no allegiance. Halverson had served with distinction in the U.A. Navy before defecting to the Confederate Arms. Under his leadership, the combined navies of the Confederates and Mogats whipped the U.A. Fleet. Now that the Confederates Arms had allied itself with the Unified Authority, Halverson was back among the officers he had defeated. Judging by the way General Smith and Admiral Brallier winced at the sound of Halverson’s voice, the old wounds had not yet healed.
“It seems obvious that Harris would be the only one who saw the alien,” Halverson said. “The record makes it perfectly clear that Sergeant Harris was the last man off the field. We have no way of knowing what the Marines who fell behind might have seen.”
“Nothing about this seems obvious to me, Admiral,” Admiral Brallier hissed. He did not look in Halverson’s direction as he said this.
“Let me see if I understand this. Are you accusing the master sergeant of engineering this video feed?” Admiral Halverson asked.
I hated having Halverson on my side. I agreed with the U.A. officers—Halverson was a worm. In fact, I pretty much hated everybody in the room, except maybe General Mooreland. I did not know enough about Mooreland to hate him, at least not yet.
Everyone turned to see how Admiral Brallier would respond to Halverson’s challenge. Tangible silence filled the auditorium in the moments he took to consider this question. Seconds passed, but Brallier said nothing.
“When do you think he might have engineered this feed?” Halverson asked.
“And here’s another question for you: Why would he make something like this up? Why would he do it? Why go to all that trouble?
“He didn’t do it for a promotion. Hell, as I understand it, he had barely landed on the
“That gives the sergeant and me something in common.” General Mooreland, the commandant of the Marine Corps, finally spoke up. “I don’t want him in the Corps. He isn’t fit to be a Marine.”
PART I
THE SECRET WAR
CHAPTER ONE
