No cars waited as we touched down on the airfield outside of Norristown. I wasn’t hoping for a ticker-tape parade, but I expected something. Nobles secured the transport, and we stood there wondering if perhaps we’d landed in the wrong place.
Two jeeps arrived fifteen minutes later. Colonel Hollingsworth did not come himself. Instead, he sent a couple of enlisted men to drive me. Glad for the chance to gather his gear, Nobles rode back to base in one of the jeeps. The driver of the second jeep took me to Norristown.
“Where exactly are we going?” I asked, as we drove past the road to Fort Sebastian.
“To the capitol building, sir,” the man said.
I did not know that Terraneau had a capitol building.
We drove almost all the way across Norristown. I had seen the city in ruins, now I saw it in reclamation, like a forest three years after a major fire. Collapsing structures had been torn down. Lots had been cleared. The locals had begun work on a scattering of small buildings, nothing too aggressive, just two- and three-story affairs. In another year, they might begin work on new skyscrapers.
Hollingsworth must have ignored my orders and alerted Doctorow that I was coming if we were headed to the capitol. I didn’t like it, but it could have been worse. Hollingsworth could have sent a firing squad out to shoot me when I stepped off the transport.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
We drove into the prewar government sector.
For a moment, I thought we might end up outside the collapsed garage, with Doctorow telling me he had excavated the weapons; but the new fence we had built around the lot remained closed, and the ground looked undisturbed.
We stopped in front of a building with a polished onyx facade and working fountains. Its windows, once crusted with dust, now sparkled in the sun. A stream burbled down the tiered waterway that ran along the front of the building. The buildings in this part of town had not been destroyed, but they hadn’t been in use when I’d left. Someone had done a lot of work in a very little time on this structure. Taking in the amazing restoration around me, I hopped out of the jeep and entered Terraneau’s new “government center.”
The lobby of the building was a giant cavern paved in black marble and sparsely populated by men in expensive suits. The room could have held five hundred people. I saw no more than two hundred.
Hollingsworth met me at the door, his expression belying something deeper than anger. He saluted. I saluted.
“Did you really go through that broadcast zone?” he asked in a whisper, his eyes switching between me and the lobby. “It wasn’t just a trick?”
“What do you think?” I asked.
“Did you find anyone on the other side?”
We were just inside the door. Across the floor, maybe one hundred feet away, Doctorow spotted us and started in our direction. Others noticed us as well, and the din dropped noticeably.
“I found Warshaw,” I said.
“He made it?”
“He’s got a growing empire with twenty-three planets,” I said in a soft voice. “Looks like the Unifieds want their planets back.”
Sarah Doctorow floated in her husband’s wake. She smiled in my direction, her lipstick the bright red color of oxygenated blood. Her face was as round as a full moon, and her body was tapered up like a pyramid. She moved through the gathering with the grace of a queen.
“I don’t believe it. You were right about everything,” he said in a voice that betrayed aggravation instead of admiration.
And then Doctorow was upon us. I had never seen him dressed like this before. He wore a freshly pressed dark suit. He’d trimmed his beard so that it no longer covered his neck. He had also cut his hair. It still hung past his ears, but gone were the dried-out tresses that had once brushed his shoulders.
“Welcome back,” Doctorow said as he approached us.
“General Harris, thank God you’re safe. It’s just a miracle,” Sarah said, sounding too enthusiastic to be sincere.
“It’s good to see you,” I told Sarah, my pleasure in seeing her every bit as genuine as her gratitude for my safe return.
Doctorow came up beside me. We traded handshakes and glances with about as much affection as boxers touching gloves before a fight.
The last time I had checked, Doctorow had been running Norristown out of his house, with his wife snooping over his shoulder. As for this building, I did not notice any cleaning crews in the government complex the last time I came by. Now it had a gleaming chandelier cascading from its ceiling, water fixtures decorating its lobby, acres of shining black marble, and air-conditioning.
“When did you move here?” I asked.
“This is our new capitol building,” Doctorow said, the friendly smile never leaving his face.
“For Norristown?” I asked.
“For all of Terraneau,” Hollingsworth said.
“Now you’re the governor of the planet,” I said. “Congratulations on your promotion.”
“We all have our ambitions, General,” Doctorow said in a booming voice. “You want to conquer Earth. My plans are not nearly so grand. I’ll settle for rebuilding Terraneau.”
The small crowd that had gathered around us chuckled …everybody but me.
We adjourned to the assembly room. It reminded me of the capitol building on Earth, only in miniature. The men Doctorow had assembled to help him run his utopian planet were the inquisitors; I was the criminal.
We entered a three-story auditorium in which a lectern and a couple of seats waited on a stage at the bottom of the well. Doctorow led the way down the stairs, bounding each step with energy I would not have expected from a man in his sixties, his excitement unmistakable.
He led me to the stage and asked me to take a seat. Behind us, extending out like a small wall, stood the type of raised bench that judges use in courtrooms. The stand rose a full eight feet above the stage, and Doctorow sat behind it, leaving me alone on display.
The audience quietly assembled along the tiers of the auditorium. Were they Doctorow’s appointees or elected officials? How had so many changes happened so quickly? I’d only been gone a week. Doctorow must have started the ball rolling before I left. Maybe that was why he’d wanted me off his planet so badly.
Hollingsworth sat the meeting out, leaving me to the lions …the bastard.
Once everyone was seated, Doctorow started the meeting by congratulating me on my safe return. He assured me that the “assembled body” had been briefed about the circumstances of my departure and that the meeting was nothing more than a briefing. “We’re simply curious about what you found,” he said, sounding so specking diplomatic. He must have seen himself as cordial, but his demeanor made me think of a rancher giving a steer a friendly pat before leading it to the slaughterhouse.
Instead of letting me speak, Doctorow invited the gallery to ask questions. Not a moment passed before five or six people stood in place, signaling that they wanted the floor. Doctorow called each of them by name.
“General, you left to find your fleet. Did you find it?” asked the first man.
“Yes,” I said.
“Was it destroyed?” the man continued.
“No. I returned on the
Back when the Unified Authority ran the galaxy, every planet had security stations monitoring nearby space. If a ship broadcasted in within a couple of million miles of that planet, the equipment detected the anomaly and tracked the ship. Judging by the nervous twitters filling the room, I got the feeling that the
