“That is fortunate. As I understand it, Noxium gas makes quite a mess,” Doctorow said.
“Quite a mess. Quite a mess, indeed. In fact, it’s so messy that these gas masks would have done nothing to protect us. Even combat armor is useless against this kind of gas. Did you know that?”
“I think I have heard something along that line,” Doctorow admitted.
I thought of an old memory and laughed. “One of my old platoon sergeants had some men who were killed by Noxium. Do you know how he got their bodies out of the armor? He washed them out with a fire hose. No joke. He said the Noxium ate their bodies until all that was left was this flesh-colored jelly, sort of a coagulated goo that washed out in clumps.”
“This is all very fascinating, but—” Doctorow began.
I cut him off. “Now a canister this size, if it had been full, it would have held enough gas to wipe out half of Norristown. You’d have been cleaning out Fort Sebastian with a fire hose, but you’d also have needed to hose out every apartment, house, and car from Ford Street to West Angle, almost half of town.”
“Is that so?” asked Doctorow. “I heard Noxium gas evaporates so quickly that it doesn’t spread.”
“Oh, you see now, that’s just a myth. The truth is, Noxium doesn’t evaporate at all. It dies,” I said, stating information that any schoolkid would know. I was patronizing the bastard, and he knew it. “It’s not really a gas, it’s a cloud of microscopic organisms, voracious little bastards that will bore through anything they can sink their teeth into.”
“There’s no cause to use—”
I ignored him and went on. “The little bastards die quickly when you release them in small concentrations. Unleash a pint or two, and they die in a matter of seconds. That’s why Noxium is such an effective tool for capturing enemy strongholds. You just shoot a few Noxium shells over the wall, and the gas turns the occupants into goo, then you capture their base and wash the enemy out with a hose.
“But that’s with a small amount …maybe the amount of gas you’d get from a half-gallon shell. With a big batch like this, the microbes insulate each other from the atmosphere, and the cloud doesn’t go away. If this much had spilled, the cloud would have spread all the way over to your part of town. My Marines wouldn’t have been the only ones receiving the message; Sarah and Ava would have gotten it as well.”
“How very fortunate for all of us that the canister was empty,” Doctorow said.
“You wouldn’t happen to have any idea who left us this message?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t know anything about it,” Doctorow protested, feigning alarm. “General, I am a peaceable man.”
“Ellery, I’m not accusing anyone.”
Doctorow seemed to regain his nerve. He said, “I don’t think it was meant as a threat. Whoever left it, they probably meant it as a reminder.”
“Probably so,” I agreed.
“I happen to agree with whoever did this. It’s high time you left,” Doctorow said. “You and your men have outstayed your welcome.”
“Does that go for all of us?” I asked. “Colonel Hollingsworth is under the impression that you only object to me.”
“A simple misunderstanding,” said Doctorow. “Don’t take this personally, General Harris, but I don’t really like having a military presence in my city. Armies are a tool of intimidation, and I don’t believe governments should be in the business of intimidation.”
“But you don’t mind my Corps of Engineers,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“If you are evicting me and my men, I will need to take my engineers with me,” I said. “How are you going to rebuild Norristown without them?”
“I would prefer for you to leave them, they make a valuable contribution,” Doctorow said.
“They’re military clones, just like the rest of us,” I pointed out. “They came off the same assembly line and grew up in the same orphanages. The only difference between Scott Mars and Philo Hollingsworth is their training. When I give the order to leave, Mars and his men go with the rest of us.”
“Are you threatening me, General?”
I answered with a wry smile, gestured with my head toward the empty gas canister, and said, “Not me, I’m just answering your message.”
“I have every intention of leaving Terraneau as quickly as possible,” I told Doctorow as I started the jeep. “I want to get off this specking rock, the sooner the better.”
“Yes, you said that two months ago, General, but you’re still here,” Doctorow said. The farther we drove from the empty canister, the more he seemed to relax.
“Then you will be glad to know why I called for this little meeting,” I said, and I told him that we were just about ready to send a ship through the broadcast zone. He listened carefully and said nothing. He probably did not care whether the plan worked or failed so long as it got me away from his precious society.
We stopped at the McGraw building, the building that served as a headquarters for the Corps of Engineers. Hollingsworth and several of his lieutenants attended the briefing as well.
Looking around the room, I saw that none of us had gotten much sleep. Thanks to the early-morning call to the armory, Hollingsworth and I had not returned to base until nearly 05:00. Mars had been on alert guarding the base. Doctorow looked tired as well. His eyes were badly bloodshot.
When Doctorow saw that he was surrounded by military men, he found a quiet corner where he could lean against the wall and watch the presentation unnoticed. I ditched him and drifted over to Hollingsworth. When I was close enough to whisper without being overheard, I said, “I brought your pal.”
“We’re not pals,” he said.
I only grunted.
Lieutenant Mars booted up his holographic display, and we gathered around him for a closer look. Mars was a smart officer; he waited for me to get things started. When I asked him how things were progressing, he sighed and explained why everything was going wrong.
“Do you have any concept about the sheer mass of a battleship?” he began.
“I know they’re big,” said Hollingsworth. The other Marines laughed.
“We’re talking about one hundred and thirty thousand tons of metal spread across three hundred thousand cubic feet.”
“Why are you giving us a lesson on mass, Lieutenant?” asked Hollingsworth, who was clearly tired and edgy from the last night’s activities.
Mars pointed to the display, and said, “Because the only way we are going to launch General Harris into that broadcast zone is by sealing him inside a battleship.”
“Why are you choosing a big ship?” asked Hollingsworth. “Wouldn’t it be easier to send him off in a frigate?”
“He’d never break through the ships blocking the zone; the smaller ships don’t have enough mass,” said Mars.
He pointed to the wall of derelict ships. Since our last meeting, the problem had gone from difficult to intractable. Hoping to blow the ships into tiny fragments, we’d talked about sending engineers to rig wrecks with charges. As far as I knew, he hadn’t actually sent anyone.
“Break through?” I asked. “I thought we were going to clear a path.”
“It doesn’t look like that’s going to work, sir,” Mars answered, all of his former enthusiasm now absent from his voice. “We’ve tried conventional charges. We experimented with a small tactical weapon as well.”
I should have seen this coming. The Morgan Atkins Believers had detonated an atomic bomb inside a Unified Authority fighter carrier. Parts of the ship fell away, but the frame of the ship survived.
“You nuked ’em?” Hollingsworth asked.
“Yes, sir, we nuked one. The device blew the outer hull off the ship, but the decks and the structure remained in place,” Mars said.
“But a battleship could ram through?” I asked. I knew the answer. He would not have said he needed to seal me in a battleship if he did not believe it could break through. Still, I wanted reassurance.
Mars did not get a chance to answer. Hearing the ease with which the discussion had switched to tactical
