The planet we were heading for was arid, the color of sand, with few clouds and bone-dry poles. In the distance, a hot sun blazed. I could see its flare peeking out beyond the equatorial horizon.
“What a shit hole,” I said.
My pilot smiled but did not respond.
“What planet is that?” I asked, thinking perhaps he had been told to ignore my questions.
“Gobi, sir.”
“Gobi?” I asked, then I laughed so hard he must have thought I’d lost my mind. I began my career on Gobi. Wanting to make sure this was the same planet, I asked, “If that’s Gobi, then we must be in the Perseus Arm, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
Nearly ten years ago, in 2508, I had meandered into Gobi Station as a new Marine fresh out of boot camp. Now, almost a decade and three wars later, to Gobi I returned, a general.
Hundreds of ships crowded the space around the planet. A trio of fighter carriers floated in the distance. Beyond them, a broadcast station blended into the darkness around it. Had it not been for the ring of lights along its mile-wide discs, I would never have spotted the station.
Closer to the planet, Navy ships hovered in silhouette against the atmosphere. Squadrons of fighters flew in and out of view. A school of battleships passed around the wide equatorial curve of the planet at a lazy pace. The first time I had landed on Gobi, it struck me as a backwater planet and a dead end for my fledgling military career. It had the galaxy’s smallest Marine installation and the Navy, Army, and Air Force were nowhere to be seen.
We dropped into the atmosphere.
“Last time I came here, the fort looked like a house of cards after an earthquake,” I said. The old base was a sandstone fortress made more for show than warfare. When the Mogats attacked, the bulky walls caved in around us.
“You’ve been here before, sir?” the pilot asked.
“Yeah, but it’s been a while. I was stationed here.”
“No offense, sir, but you must have really pissed someone off. I wouldn’t station a dog on this planet.”
I felt the same way.
The new Gobi Station rose out of the desert like a modern-day minaret, a single, nearly indefensible column as sleek and straight as an old-world rocket preparing to launch into space.
The original station, the fort I’d once called home, was built along the side of a cliff. Not this building. The desert spread out in every direction around it.
The structure stood thirty stories tall. As we approached, I spotted a ring of bunkers around the base of the structure. Tawny and mostly submerged in the sand, those bunkers could have housed five thousand men. Particle-beam-cannon and missile arrays ran along the sides of the cylindrical fort like rows of spines. “How long has this building been around?” I asked. It sure as hell had not existed ten years ago, or we wouldn’t have been living in a prehistoric rat hole.
The pilot shrugged, and said, “It was here when we got here.”
I always hated the way transports handled in atmospheric conditions. They were built for space, relying on boosters and skids instead of wings and wheels. They had wings, but they were small and useless for gliding. Cut the power in a bird like that, and it would fall like a rock. My pilot knew his trade, but he wasn’t good at it. As we approached the landing pad, he missed a mark, and we dropped sixty feet below the platform; then he righted the bird, and we had to fly around the building and come in again.
“Sorry about that, sir,” he said as he fumbled with the controls.
We touched down on the second pass, and the ground crew converged on our transport. The landing pad was open-air. Why not? Rain was never a problem on this planet.
A security station with armed guards hiding behind a wall of bulletproof glass waited just inside the doorway. The glass formed a funnel that led to a set of security posts. As I walked through the posts, a team of security techs confirmed my identity while men with M27s kept close watch on me.
The techs only needed a moment to clear me, and the guards waved me on.
Even after all of the other precautions, two of the guards paired off with me. They herded me into a lift, and down we went. Judging by the lights, the numbers, and the length of the drop, it seemed clear we had gone deep underground. When the elevator doors opened, we had arrived at another security station with another set of posts.
There was no way to enter this building without passing through posts that scanned your DNA, and yet they scanned me again when I left the elevator. These people weren’t just digging in for a war; they were terrified.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
If you did not know that Gary Warshaw was a clone, you might have mistaken him for a natural-born. He didn’t have general-issue standard brown hair. In fact, he didn’t have any hair at all. The man shaved his entire head from his crown to his chin, including the eyebrows. He shaved in the morning. By the end of the day, dark grainlike stubble covered his chin, neck, and head. The eyebrows, though, he might have removed with lasers. They never grew back.
From a distance, Warshaw looked shorter than other clones. He wasn’t, of course. He stood the standard five-foot-ten just like every other government-issue clone; but he looked smaller because he was wide. A fanatical bodybuilder, Warshaw began and ended every day in the gym, then supplemented his achievements with ample doses of chemistry.
He had the basic facial features of a clone—the correct shade of brown in his eyes, the right shape of nose and mouth; but his skull seemed to have stretched to keep up with the tree-trunk diameter of his neck. His face had taken on a flattened appearance. A skein of veins bobbed in and out of view along the sides of his neck.
Warshaw had an office the size of a basketball court, which he divided into distinct areas that did not blend into one another. We met in the conference area, which included a desk and a ring of chairs. No more than forty feet from us, and not partitioned off by walls or screens, was a gym with weights, exercise equipment, and a personal sauna. Scanning the space, I saw a drafting room, a chartroom, and a lounge.
Warshaw looked at me, his eyes sparkling, and he said, “I doubt you’ll believe me, but I’ll say it anyway. If I thought there had been the slightest chance that you survived the attack, I would have gone looking for you.”
He sat behind his desk, looking both lost and out of place. He had a weight room, and food, and men to command; but he was an engineer, and one thing he did not have in his fortress was an engine room. He belonged on a ship.
“It wouldn’t have been worth the trouble,” I said. “No point sending your fleet clear across the galaxy to pick up a few thousand Marines.” As a commander, Warshaw tended to err on the side of caution. He wouldn’t have risked a trip to Terraneau.
“It depends on the Marines. For guys like you and Thomer—”
“Thomer is dead,” I said.
“The Unifieds got him?”
“He survived the attack and died a few days later,” I said. Kelly Thomer had been my second-in- command.
“Sorry to hear that,” Warshaw said. He sounded gloomy. “He was a good man, Thomer.”
We both gave Thomer a spontaneous and perfunctory moment of silence; and after that, neither of us seemed to have anything to say. For my part, I had so many questions that I did not know where to begin. I wanted to ask about the war with Earth and about the size of our fleet. Just as I was about to ask my first question, Warshaw spoke up.
“Look, Harris, I don’t feel like playing ‘twenty questions’ with you, so I’ll lay it all out. The Unifieds are running scared. We hooked up with twelve of the abandoned fleets. That gives us thirteen fleets and twenty-three planets. Throw in Terraneau, and I guess I have twenty-four planets. You think that speck Doctorow wants to play ball with
