“Seventeen million,” said Hughes, answering quickly, sounding desperate. “We have twenty-five barges capable of transporting 250,000 people at a time.”
“Big boats,” Warshaw said, sounding impressed. “Are they self-broadcasting?”
Hill answered, “No, sir, they are not.”
“So how are you going to get them here?” Warshaw asked. Hill answered again. “We need you to link the Mars broadcast station into your network.”
“Mars station? I thought the Mogats busted it,” Warshaw said, finally sitting up straight and taking the meeting seriously. Now it wasn’t just a question of saving lives; our military security was at stake. Warshaw might not have cared about lives and evacuations, but he took security seriously.
“We’ve constructed a temporary station,” Hill said. “It’s primitive, but it will do the job for now.”
Warshaw’s eyes narrowed and hardened. His mouth worked itself into a sneer. “So we open the gates and let you roll your horse in. I’m not biting,” he said. He turned to me, and added, “And you, Harris, I never figured you for a collaborator.”
“Admiral …” Andropov began, at the same time as Hughes, Hill, and the scientist from the academy.
But I was the one who had been challenged. I spoke over them. “Get this through your head, you overinflated son of a bitch. We have a new enemy, someone too big and mean to beat. There’s no question who is going to win this one. The only question is how many people we are going to lose.”
“If they’re telling the truth,” Warshaw muttered.
“Oh, right, we can’t trust the Unifieds. Tell you what. Let’s run a test on Olympus Kri,” I said. “We’ll just wait and watch, and after seventeen million people burn, then we’ll know it’s time to evacuate Terraneau. Is that what you want?”
An angry silence filled the room. We all sat staring into the table.
“Okay, so let’s say you’re right. Even if we get everybody off Olympus Kri, where do you plan on putting them?” Warshaw asked. It was the closest thing to an olive branch that he was willing to offer. He sat rigid in his chair, no longer flexing his muscles.
“We have to save them,” Hughes said, sounding tired and discouraged.
“If you’re routing them through Mars and taking them to Earth, your barges better have broadcast engines,” Warshaw said.
“I told you, we’ve got a temporary station by Mars,” Andropov said.
“Check the orbits. The jump from Earth to Mars is over one hundred million miles at the moment. That’s a three-hour trip, even for your ships.” Warshaw held up a little handheld computer he must have been hiding under the table.
I did not know the positions of Earth and Mars in their orbits, but I had considered the problem. “There’s a way around that,” I said.
The solution should have been obvious. “We can store the evacuees in the Mars Spaceport,” I said.
“The spaceport is closed. We haven’t used it since the Mogat War,” Andropov said. The stupid bastard still wanted to fight the Avatari. He wanted to send out the clones like his father did in the good old days. Of course, he would not lead the fight himself. His bravery extended only as far as declaring wars, not fighting them.
“The military used it as a processing station before the battle on New Copenhagen,” I said.
“All of the equipment was operational when we shut it down,” Hill said. He sounded enthusiastic. The Mars Spaceport had dormitory rooms for hundreds of thousands of workers and enough floor space to accommodate millions of visitors. “We should be able to get the power and oxygen running.”
“But that still leaves us with your Trojan horse,” Warshaw said. “I don’t trust you.” He looked directly at Andropov as he said this. “And I don’t want your specking ships in my broadcast network.”
“Admiral, what if you took Olympus Kri off your broadcast grid?” Hughes’s voice was low and nervous and hollow.
“Are you saying I should give the planet away?” Warshaw asked.
“He’s saying we should amputate it,” I said. “The planet is as good as gone. Once we remove it from our network—”
“I won’t know if the aliens came or the whole thing was a fraud,” Warshaw said.
I looked across the table at Gordon Hughes. When we went to New Copenhagen, he saw one planet and thought of another. Now I was doing the same thing. “I’ll stay and oversee the evacuation,” I said, speaking of Olympus Kri and thinking of Terraneau …not even Terraneau, really, just one of its residents.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
The rescue had been going on for three days now, and I still had not gotten used to the look of the Unified Authority’s new barges. They were little more than biospheres. They looked like floating warehouses as they grew out of their anomalies. They had a nub in the front for a cockpit and enormous rocket engines in the back, but they lacked even the semblance of wings or aerodynamics. They did not have landing bays or atmospheric locks. Transports would land along the hulls of the barges, on special pads with automatic clamps that would fasten onto the transports’ skids. Passengers would enter the barges through umbilical walkways.
“Those barges have got to be the ugliest ships I have seen in my entire life,” Hollingsworth said, as one of the barges floated toward the
The barge passed beside a U.A. battleship, positively dwarfing it. “It looks like a packing crate for mailing battleships,” Hollingsworth added. “You’d have more control steering a piece of shit down a toilet.”
“Yeah,” I grunted, still astonished by the size of the barges.
The U.A. battleship was long and narrow like a flying dagger. The barge could have held four of those ships easily and possibly even a fifth. It was that big.
More barges followed in a series of flashes. They floated out of the broadcast zone like boxes on an assembly line.
“It’s getting pretty close to zero hour. Why are you going down to the planet now?” Hollingsworth asked.
I gave him a one-word answer, hoping to brush off the question. “Reconnaissance.”
“Are you coming back to the
“I’m staying on the planet,” I said.
He paused, grinned at me, and finally said, “I’m just curious. Does your martyr complex ever get in your way?”
“What did you say?” I asked, though I’d heard him perfectly well. If he’d yelled or raised his voice, I would have been certain he was trying insult me, but he sounded calm and sincere.
Alone on the observation deck, we stood side by side, staring out the viewport.
“You assigned yourself to point position when we fought the aliens on Terraneau.”
“I led a team—”
“You were the commanding officer, not some specking platoon leader. You were supposed to observe and direct.”
“I thought I could do a better job if I was on the field with my men,” I said.
“You got stuck in a basement. You got trapped in a specking basement with half the specking Avatari Army swarming around you.”
“You don’t think I did that on purpose?”
“No, but it shouldn’t have happened.”
