Only one admiral, one I did not recognize, raised his hand, and asked, “How can you have the same DNA but different chromosomes?” It took guts to ask the question that everyone else was afraid to ask.
I pretended to mull over my answer, then I stole the bit about glass and sand and bowls and syringes. Trying to come across like a man-in-the-know, I damn near quoted Sam the coroner verbatim.
“I’m impressed,” said Warshaw. “I never realized you knew so much about science.”
Feeling more confident now that I had spoken with Cabot, I continued on to the topic I had meant to discuss before the break. “Those cruisers you’ve been spotting, they’ve been carrying more than satellites. They have been ferrying infiltrator clones into our space. The infiltrators are flying into our territory on cruisers, then penetrating our blockades in planes with stealth shields.
“While we’ve been looking for battleships or cargo carriers, they’ve been using private planes. They’re flying Piper Bandits.”
Warshaw put up his hand. “Bandits? You mean the little two-man jobs? That thing’s got a range of what, one or two hundred thousand miles.”
“Not if they are outfitted with broadcast engines,” I said.
“Out of the question,” one of the admirals said. “There is no way anyone is going to wedge a broadcast engine into a little two-seater.”
The natives were getting restless. A dozen private conversations ignited across the room.
“I’ve seen a modified Bandit,” I said. “The broadcast engine is not much bigger than a shoebox. Instead of a broadcast generator, it has a single-use battery. You use it once, then you have to recharge it.”
“That’s it? That’s your big theory of how they are getting here?” Warshaw asked. “You think they are flying them in on cruisers? How many Bandits do you think they can fit on a cruiser, Harris? I started out on a cruiser. You’d be lucky to fit five planes on one.”
Entourage officers, men like J. Winston Cabot, live in a black-and-white world in which they judge everything by the way it impacts their careers. They view anyone or anything that slows their career as the enemy, and they remember every indiscretion.
By sending Cabot to measure a cruiser, I had made myself his enemy. I could probably have repaired the damage by citing him as the source of some of my information. Instead, I called him up to the dais.
He came up slowly. I had caught him off guard, and that made him nervous.
“Admiral, tell us what you were doing this morning and what you found.”
He looked across the gallery and focused on Warshaw as he said, “I took the
“Did you have any luck?” I asked Cabot, trying to prompt him. God he was stiff.
“We found several in the wreckage around Terraneau. Per your orders, sir, I boarded one and measured her landing bays.”
“What did you find?” I asked.
“The new Unified Authority cruisers have three landing bays. Each landing bay has ten thousand square feet of floor space, sir. If you packed them carefully, you could fit eighteen Piper Bandits in each bay. That means they can transport and launch fifty-four Bandits per ship per mission.”
Stunned silence.
Cabot seemed to inflate before my eyes.
I turned toward Warshaw, and said, “Your fleets have spotted cruisers near every planet in the empire. Is that correct?” Not waiting for an answer I already knew, I added, “The cruisers have been particularly active around St. Augustine. Is that correct?” And then I told them about the massacre on St. Augustine.
I had hoped to finish my presentation by having Jen Morman report her findings, but she never appeared.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
I rounded up a squad of MPs and rode the elevator down to the basement. As the elevator descended, I warned them that we would find armed killers, and that was all the briefing I gave.
We reached the bottom floor of the station.
The doors slid apart, and the light from the elevator formed a stripe across the leg of the dead guard lying on the hallway floor. I saw the body and hit the emergency button, setting off an alarm and causing the elevator doors to close. So much for the element of surprise.
The two men beside me had seen the body as well.
“Why did he close the door?” asked an MP in the back of the lift.
“We’re sitting ducks,” I said. “It’s dark out there and bright in here.”
“I thought I saw a dead man,” one of MPs said.
Another one whispered, “I wonder if there is any connection between this and that plane we saw in the desert?”
“What plane?” I asked.
“We found a plane in the desert, sir,” the MP said. “We found it while we were patrolling for bandits.”
Which explained why they had not notified me, the silly pricks saw the word “bandit” in their orders and thought I meant robbers.
“When was that?” I asked in as measured a voice as I could muster.
“Last night, sir.” He sounded nervous.
“You,” I said, singling out an MP with an earpiece in his ear. “You just became my radioman. Contact Station Security. Tell them to place the entire station on emergency lockdown. I want the exits sealed, the elevators stopped, and the emergency stairwells closed off while they run a floor-by-floor search of the entire facility.”
“What about the landing bays?” the MP asked.
“That goes double for the landing bays.”
“Yes, sir.” He turned and faced the wall, his shoulders hunched, and whispered in emphatic tones.
The panel beside the emergency cutoff held a flashlight, an oxygen mask, and a fire extinguisher. I took the flashlight.
“Who wants to hold this?” I asked.
Two men volunteered.
“You’ll be a target,” I warned them. “Those bastards out there are going to aim at the light.”
One of the men lowered his hand. I handed the flashlight to the other.
We were trapped in a cramped elevator. Seven men pressed together like fish in a barrel.
“There are enemy assassins out there,” I said. “I’m guessing that there are two of them. They’ll look like general-issue clones. At least one of them might be dressed like an MP.
“One of them will have just come off a cage, and the sides of his head will be shaved. If you see him, shoot him and keep shooting him until you are sure he is dead. If he’s got a friend with him, shoot them both.”
That was all the advice I had to give them. It wasn’t much.
We pulled our guns—the thirty-shot pistols preferred by military police, with limited muzzle velocity that made them safer for indoor use. Fire a powerful weapon like an M27 in a building, and the bullets could bore through two or three walls.
I used my first bullet shooting out the light in the elevator. The lift went dark, and the elevator buttons lit up. I found the button that opened the door and pressed it.
The infiltrators had shut off the lights, but they had not been able to shut off the emergency power. Rows of tiny colored lights winked on and off on a far wall.
The first shot hit the man with the flashlight. A single shot, the muzzle flash appeared and disappeared like a drop of lightning, the sound from the suppressed weapon no louder than a muffled cough.
I leaped from the elevator like a swimmer diving from a starting block. I landed on the dead MP with the flashlight and rolled across the floor, ending up in a crouching position, my gun out. The other MPs clambered off the elevator, at least one of them stumbling over the guards. An infiltrator fired two more shots, and two more of my men died. I heard them groan as they fell, then I heard silence instead of labored breathing, and I knew that they were dead.
