Muttering some sort of “Hail Mary,” Mars stepped into our cage, and said, “I’m just glad we got to you before he stashed you away in Outer Bliss.” Outer Bliss was a relocation camp on the other side of the planet. It was an entire town surrounded by razor wire and guard towers.
“That would have been bad,” I said, thinking that an apartment or maybe a house in Outer Bliss would have come with windows and a private toilet.
As Mars passed under a lamp, I noticed the flat sheen of his hair. I started to ask him about it, then I noticed that his irises were no longer brown, they were black. “What’s with your eyes?” I asked.
He looked up and down the hall as if making sure that no one could see him, then he held up a bunched-up wash-cloth covered with oily brown stains. He tried to give this to Nobles, but Nobles only stared at it.
“What’s that?” Nobles asked, not reaching for it.
“It’s a disguise to make you look like a clone,” Mars said.
“If someone comes into the building, we’ll pass you off as one of my men.”
Hesitating before accepting the grimy bundle, Nobles opened the cloth. Inside, he found a small tube, and looked at Mars questioningly.
“Hair dye to make your hair brown like a clone’s.”
“This?” Nobles asked, holding up a tiny bottle.
“Colored eye-drops that turn your irises brown.”
“Oh, to make me look like a clone,” Nobles said. “Brilliant.” He squeezed the tube onto his left palm, rubbed the brown spew between his hands, then ran it through his hair. The dye gave Noble’s hair the same muted shine as Mars’s.
Once he worked the dye into his hair, Nobles wiped his hands on the cloth. Next, he squeezed a couple of drops of iris dye into his eyes, changing their color from dirt brown to very nearly black.
“Perfect,” Mars said, feigning surprise. “You could walk into any base in the galaxy, and they wouldn’t spot you.”
And he did look like one clone, at least. He looked exactly like Lieutenant Mars.
“What about the guards?” I asked, pointing toward the camera. “Aren’t they watching us?”
“Sure they are, but they work for me,” said Mars. He walked right up to Nobles and checked the coloring in his eyes like a doctor examining a patient, then said, “Head out that door and up the stairs. My boys will take care of you.”
“Thank you,” said Nobles. He left in a hurry, jogging up the corridor and out the door.
As soon as Nobles was out of earshot, Mars said, “Sort of a waste of time putting brown hair dye and colored eyedrops on a clone; but with that whole death-reflex thing …you just can’t take any chances.” He sounded apologetic.
So that was what had happened. Thinking he had blond hair and blue eyes, Mars had used the same disguise.
“The regulars won’t roll in until 06:00,” Mars said. “That gives us three hours.”
“We have bigger things to worry about than guards,” I said, and I gave him a brief description of the Avatari attacks on New Copenhagen and Olympus Kri. I also told him how the Unified Authority ambushed Warshaw. I thought it would take a long time, but the whole sorry tale took less than ten minutes.
“Why would they do that?” he asked. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“It makes sense from their point of view,” I said. “They want a disposable Navy to send out after the Avatari. By assassinating our command structure, they stand to inherit disposable ships, disposable crews, even a broadcast network for sending them into space.”
“But they’d be marooned. They’d be stranded …” He did not bother finishing the thought.
I finished for him. “Just like we were left stranded out here.”
“What do we do?” Mars said.
I told him about Tachyon D concentrations and temperature fluctuations, and said, “I think we probably have a few more days, but we want to be long gone before the temperatures start changing.”
“How can we check for tachyons?” he asked.
“I don’t know. The U.A. had a couple of dead scientists figure it out.”
He didn’t know who or what I meant, not that it mattered.
“I can have my men check the weather reports,” he said. “Tracking temperature changes shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Good place to start,” I said.
“What do we do about Doctorow?” Mars asked. “Do you think you can get him to see the light?” He must have already known the answer even as he asked the question. Doctorow would not listen to us, never in a million years.
I shook my head. “How do you make an
As I said this, I remembered what Doctorow said about tracking a fighter carrier. “Do you know anything about a carrier circling the planet?” I asked.
Mars nodded. “It’s the
“What about the
He shook his head. “The only ship we’ve seen is the
“Good thing she’s there; we can use her to get off the planet,” I said. “Now for the next problem, I need to get a message to Ava.”
“Your girlfriend?” Mars asked.
“Ex-girlfriend. Do you think she knows I’m here?” Though the question was more for me than for Mars, I asked it out loud.
“She probably doesn’t. Doctorow is trying to keep the whole thing quiet.”
By this time, a couple of hours had passed, and Nobles appeared at the door of the cell. His hair still had that matted sheen and his irises were black as wet rock. The door slid open, and he stepped in. He and Mars traded places. Nobles went to the sink and began rinsing the gunk out of his hair and eyes.
“Are you sure you can trust her?” Mars asked as he left the cell. “If she’s not with you anymore, I mean —”
I put up a hand to stop him. “We could always kidnap her,” I said. I was joking.
Mars smiled, and said, “Now there’s an interesting option,” and he left our jail cell a free man. Nobles and I spent the rest of the night locked behind bars.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
The inquisition began again at 07:00.
Armed guards ushered Nobles and me out of our cell. I wasn’t asleep when they came, but I was awfully tired from the long night.
As they had the day before, the guards placed Nobles in one room and me in the next. The waiting game began again. I sat in the soundproofed room, staring into the coin-sized camera lens that watched me from behind a bulletproof window, wondering when and how I would make my next move.
I was still slumped in that chair, fighting exhaustion but fully awake, when my new interrogator entered the room. He did not arrive alone. He came with a matched set of three guards in Marine combat armor. The man was tall and thin, with a gray handlebar mustache that extended well past the corners of his mouth. He had a familiar face. I could not dredge up the memory of where I had seen him before, so I dismissed him as just another militiaman.
“Well, well, Wayson Harris, I always expected you to end up in here,” the man said. Clearly he knew me, and I got the feeling he bore a grudge.
His guards planted themselves on either side of the door, where they stood as still as statues. The armed guards weren’t necessary. I would not try to escape, not yet. I would wait for Mars.
