Warshaw had the same voice box as every other clone, but he had his own way of talking.
Bishop winced. I smiled.
“They’re using poison on their flechettes now,” Warshaw said. “They hit you, you die.”
“That’s how it went on Terraneau, too. They killed everyone they hit,” I said.
“Everyone but you,” Bishop pointed out.
“Genetics. I’m a Liberator. I had the mother of all combat reflexes. The doctor said there was so much adrenaline and testosterone in my blood that I should have died of a heart attack.”
“But you survived.”
“More or less. That may be my last combat reflex. The poison injured the gland.” In truth, the gland had mostly healed, but I decided to keep that to myself. With Bishop holding his cards close to the vest and Warshaw playing hide-and-seek behind a camera, I would hold on to my secrets as well.
“That’s how you survived the fight, but how did you win it?” Warshaw asked.
I explained how we lured General Mooreland and the U.A. Marines into the underground garage, then demolished the structure while we escaped through the subterranean train station in the back.
“And you just left them there?” Warshaw asked. “You just left them there to starve?”
“Yes.”
“You specking bastard.” Warshaw meant this as a compliment. “Bastard” is one of those all-purpose words in the military. “Your doctor was wrong about you, Harris; you don’t have adrenaline running through your veins, you’ve got ice.”
“Brilliant move,” Bishop said in a voice just slightly above a whisper.
“Damn specking right it’s brilliant,” Warshaw said. “And I bet our boy Harris came up with the idea all on his own. Am I right, Harris?”
It was my idea, but I did not say so. I did not respond. I felt like Warshaw and Bishop were herding me somewhere I did not want to go.
Bishop asked, “What happened after you buried the Marines?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Why didn’t the fleet send more Marines?” Bishop asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“So they just left?” Bishop asked.
“Some of them left, some of them stayed,” I said. “You sank twenty-three of their ships.”
“Twenty-three,” Warshaw said. He sounded pleased. “I wondered what kind of damage we left behind.”
“They lost twelve ships trying to chase you into your broadcast zone,” I said.
“They didn’t even need to send more men down to the planet,” Bishop said. “Why didn’t they just bombard you from space?”
He still did not trust me.
“Maybe they didn’t think we were worth the trouble,” I said. “We were landlocked; they probably didn’t consider us a threat.”
“Then they didn’t know you as well as I do,” Warshaw said. “Anyone who knew you would be scared. He’s clean. You can bring him down.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Bishop told me the fleet decks were empty, then offered to let me inspect them for myself if I did not believe him. I believed him.
He remained, however, unwilling to explain the situation. When I asked what happened to Fleet Command, he put up a hand, and said, “Take it up with Warshaw.”
“You can’t tell me anything?” I asked.
“Not my pay grade, sir. I just steer the ship.”
We had that discussion over an early dinner in the last vestige of Fleet Command, a mess reserved for captains and up. Bishop ate chicken, I ate beef, and we both had potatoes and salad. There was a linen sheet across the table, and the utensils appeared to be made out of silver instead of some chrome-coated alloy.
“Can you tell me where we are?” I asked.
Bishop laughed, and asked, “You don’t know your galactic position?”
“How the speck would I know that?”
He thought about that, and said, “It takes real balls to fly into a broadcast zone without knowing where you’ll come out.” He shook his head, and added, “I’ve got to hand it to you.
“You’re in the Cygnus Arm, Enlisted Man’s territory.” He pointed to the viewport, and added, “The planet down there is Providence Kri.”
“Is that where Warshaw is hiding?” I asked.
Bishop shook his head. “Nope; he’s not even in this arm.”
“Are you going to tell me where he is?”
“He’s in the Tube.”
“What is the Tube?” I asked.
“It’s our high command. The Unifieds have their Pentagon, and we have our Tube,” Bishop said, clearly enjoying my frustration. “Times have changed, General. Admiral Warshaw has thirteen fleets under him. We don’t just have an Enlisted Man’s Fleet anymore, we have an Enlisted Man’s Navy.”
“You’re shitting me,” I said.
“I told you, the war is going well.”
“So where is the Tube?” I asked.
Bishop’s smile spread so wide, it looked painful as he said, “That’s on a need-to-know basis. You’re not navigating, so you don’t need to know.”
You could broadcast from one end of the galaxy to the other and never know it inside a big bird like a fighter carrier. At some point, the
Bishop met me at the bay and escorted me into my transport. We traded salutes.
“Well, General, you’re Warshaw’s problem now,” he said.
“Anything I should watch out for?” I asked.
“You’ll be fine, sir. He’s happy to see you,” Bishop said.
I looked around the transport, and asked, “Am I flying with the same pilot I came in with?”
“You have a personal pilot?” Bishop asked, sounding surprised.
“More or less,” I said.
“You’re stuck with a loaner pilot for this trip. Your identity checked out, but we haven’t started on the guy you flew in with.”
I nodded and crossed the kettle on my way to the cockpit. The door of the transport slowly closed behind me, clapping shut as I reached the top of the ladder and stepped onto the narrow catwalk.
We launched into space, and I immediately saw that we were not headed for Providence Kri. The term “Kri” was given to planets with “engineered” atmospheres. Back in the days of the great expansion, the Senate selected planets based on several factors, location being the most important. If a planet with a breathable atmosphere was roughly the same distance from its nearest star as Earth was from the sun, it became a candidate for colonization.
Some planets were “retreads,” meaning they had all the ingredients to support life but needed the right infusions of hydrogen and oxygen along with some plant life to sustain the mixture. Seen from space, Providence Kri was a green-and-blue marble with layers of clouds and ice caps. It looked a lot like Earth. “God makes ’em good, and terraforming makes ’em better” was the old motto of the now-defunct Unified Authority Planetary Engineering Corps.
