“Tell me about your plans to recapture Terraneau,” the interrogator asked as he sat down in the chair on the side of the table. He spoke in an easy, informal way.
“I have no interest in retaking this planet,” I said.
“Oh, right. I heard about that. You came here to warn us. Wayson Harris the Liberator messiah.
“We spotted two more fighter carriers this morning.”
“Now there are three of them,” I muttered to myself. Things were looking up.
“What’s with all that firepower if you are here to rescue us?” I locked eyes with him. He was one of those guys who meets your stare and doesn’t blink and doesn’t look away because he thinks it’s some sort of macho challenge. I played along for a second, winked and smiled and had a look around the room. Metal chairs, wall- mounted camera, armed guards, locked door …yup, I was in prison.
I wondered which carriers had made it out. The
“I didn’t actually bring them with me,” I said. “It’s more of a rendezvous.” For some reason, I felt fidgety. I caught myself tapping my fingers on the table and dropped my hands to my thighs. Alarms sounded in my head, and it wasn’t fear. Something was about to happen, I could feel it.
Like animals sometimes do, I sensed a coming storm, but I did not know the nature of that storm.
“Are there more ships on the way?” the interrogator asked.
“I sure hope so,” I said, thinking of the U.A. barges.
“Where is the rest of your fleet?” he asked.
I sighed. “That depends what you mean by my ‘fleet.’ If you mean the Scutum-Crux Fleet, most of it is in the Cygnus Arm. If you mean the Enlisted Man’s Fleet, that’s all over the galaxy.”
Doctorow, his high-minded ideals now mingled with paranoia, would probably object to my being tortured; but that did not mean he wouldn’t have me executed. He’d happily leave me locked up until he was sure I posed no threat.
I could wait this out. Mars needed time to make the arrangements. I knew he needed time, but I couldn’t get past the feeling that something was about to happen. A bomb was about to explode, or a gun was about to go off, or a planet was about to go up in flames. Or was it just a case of nerves?
“I’m going to ask you again. How many ships do you have in your fleet?” The man sounded like he had run out of patience.
“I really don’t know,” I said, not thinking about what I was saying. “It depends how many ships survived the ambush.”
“What ambush?” he asked.
I saw no reason to hide the whole truth, not anymore. “I told Doctorow that we helped evacuate Olympus Kri. What I did not tell him was that the Unified Authority attacked us after the evacuation. They caught us napping, and we lost some of our ships.”
“So you came here looking for asylum?”
“I came here hoping to pull your worthless asses out of a fire,” I said. Not the most politic response, but at least it was honest.
“That’s what you told President Doctorow. He didn’t believe you either,” he said, picking up a clipboard, presumably looking over notes from the previous interrogations. “You told him that aliens have attacked two other planets, and they are coming here to kill us.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said.
“You wouldn’t?”
“You’ve got your head so far up your ass, the aliens might not notice you,” I said.
He looked up from his clipboard and gave me a plastic smile. He wanted to hit me, I could see it in his eyes. He stood, squared his shoulders, placed the clipboard on the table. “So you came here to warn us? To be honest with you, Harris, I always thought you were a coward. I still do.
“We lost every man and vehicle we sent out with you when you took on the aliens …every last man. Everybody died but you. You came waltzing out of it without a scratch.”
Behind the interrogator, one of the guards moved his right hand along the grip of his gun. You need to be a very good shot to cover a target in a fistfight; otherwise, you’re just as likely to shoot the man you are trying to protect.
“Are you saying I hid during the fight?” I asked, on the verge of laughing in the man’s face.
“A lot of good men died trying to help you,” the interrogator said. “One of them was my brother.”
“O’Doul,” I said, finally putting a name with the guy’s face. “Your brother died saving me.”
“What a mistake that was,” he said.
I started to respond, then stopped. “If you don’t want me on your planet, just say the word. I’ll take my pilot and my shuttle and head home.”
“It’s too late for that, Harris. You should not have returned in the first place.”
“Doctorow wants me off the planet, but he’s not going to let me leave. Is that how things work on Terraneau now? Is he planning to kill me or just bury me in a jail cell?” I wondered how far Doctorow and his friends would go to protect their utopian society.
“Kill you?” the interrogator asked, sounding both shocked and amused. “Why would we kill you? You came to save us.”
Another moment passed, then the battle began.
It started with an explosion that shook the building. The soundproof walls of the interrogation room muffled the blast, but the walls vibrated just the same. Alarms went off, but they sounded like they were a million miles away.
“What the speck?” the interrogator said. Now his guards drew their M27s. One of them aimed his gun at me while the other watched the door.
The electricity went out. I remembered the police station that the Double Y clone attacked on St. Augustine. This attack seemed to go by the same numbers. The lights went out, then emergency lights kicked in, casting their pale white glow. Through all of this, I remained in my chair. I did not know if this was the work of the Corps of Engineers or the last surviving Double Ys, but I did not want to give the guards a reason to shoot me.
The clock on the wall had frozen at 07:45.
I sat on the far side of the table, facing the door and the two armed guards. Had the table been loose, I might have kicked it toward them, but the table was bolted to the floor. I thought about leaping over it and trying to grab O’Doul, but what would it get me? In the end, I had no choice but to trust Mars and his engineers.
Thirty seconds after that initial explosion, the door of the interrogation room burst open, and in walked a giant of a man wearing custom-fitted combat armor, its green camouflage coloring looking taupe in the emergency lighting.
The screaming alarms tore into my thoughts. With the guards occupied, I shot over the table, knocking O’Doul out of his seat, and tackled the guard hiding behind the door. His armor protected him from punches, not grappling. I slammed into his chest, and we both hit the floor, me on the top and him on the bottom. I pinned his right hand down as he tried to raise his gun.
The giant in the specially fitted combat armor, he could only have been Ray Freeman, lifted the other guard in the air, slammed him against the wall so hard it must have knocked the fellow senseless, and slung him at O’Doul as if he were a sack of laundry. The guard and the interrogator lay there on the floor as Freeman drew his M27 and shot them both. Their blood looked black as oil in the dim light.
“You didn’t need to kill them,” I said, ignoring the fact that I had already snapped the second guard’s neck. So there we were, Ray Freeman, the homicidal humanitarian, and me, killing the very people I had come to save. Was it murder? With the Avatari on the way, everyone on the planet was as good as dead.
“You’re early,” I said.
“The temperatures started jumping yesterday afternoon,” Freeman answered.
“That’s not supposed to happen yet,” I said, taking the dead guard’s M27 and following Freeman out of the room.
Water rained from burst mains along the ceiling. Inch-deep puddles had formed on the corridor floor. Light fixtures dangled from wires, and in the middle of the entropy, three guards lay dead where Freeman had shot
