known that his shields would repulse anything he touched, but he had to make sure.
I moved toward the edge of the catwalk on the off chance he was stupid enough to lower the shields and start climbing. He stood at the base of the ladder and weighed his options, growling like a caged animal and firing flechettes into the impenetrable steel of the kettle walls.
Apparently rejecting the ladder as an option, he paced back and forth across the floor of the cargo hold. I could not see him, per se, just the red-orange oval of his heat signature. He walked toward one corner of the cabin, maybe looking for a better shot at me, then he stormed off in the other direction.
By this time, he had figured out an indisputable truth—he could not exit the transport without opening the rear hatch. There were only two mechanisms for opening that hatch. One was up in the cockpit, one was in the kettle. He walked to the panel at the far end of the kettle.
At that point, I needed to do more than track heat signatures—I needed to watch the bastard. Needing to catch him the moment he lowered his shields, I crawled to the edge of the catwalk and stared down at him.
He stood a foot from the panel with his back to me, staring at the button. He stayed that way for several seconds, then spun and fired six shots my way. His shots were wild. Most of them struck the wall somewhere below me and ricocheted around the kettle.
Now we were both in trouble. He could not hit that button without lowering his shields; but I could not watch him without placing myself in his line of fire. Realizing my trap was not as bulletproof as I had surmised, I ducked back behind the ledge and used my heat-vision lenses to watch as his hand edged toward the button. He fired a couple of shots at me, reached for the button, and stopped. I could not tell if he was waiting to shoot me or looking at the button. When I rose to my knees, he fired. Suddenly, the bastard knew how to aim; his first shot missed me by an inch.
I dropped to my stomach. When I raised myself with my elbows, he fired again. In the brief glimpse I got, I saw him there, standing two feet from the button, his right arm pointing up toward me and his left probing toward the button. Like him, I was using heat-vision tracking. I switched to tactical view, the unenhanced view we used on the battlefield.
I rose to a crouch and dropped, not hoping to shoot so much as to keep the bastard honest. I wanted to keep him on his toes. I wanted him to know I was watching, waiting, biding my time until he dropped his shields; and then I would have my shot.
I wanted him to think that I was blind, but I was not blind, not anymore. He was using heat vision to track me. Using the tactical view, I could see the glow his shields projected on the wall.
Another moment passed, and he began shooting faster, maybe five shots per second. The shots cut a line above me, some pinged off the side of the catwalk.
And then he made his move. He lowered his shields, and the cabin went dark. The moment the cabin went dark, I rolled to my side and fired three shots blindly as I engaged my night-for-day lenses. Even before the lenses showed me the cabin floor, I instinctively knew I had hit the target.
The bastard lay on the cold steel deck, rolling and writhing like a fish on a line. Blood leaked out of his armor at the shoulder and gut. The two shots that hit him in the shoulder probably hurt more than the one in the gut, but it was the latter that would kill him.
I’d seen too many men kill the enemy who had dealt them the fatal blow, so I waited on the catwalk and watched as the poor bastard bled to death. I watched as his convulsions slowed into tremors, and his tremors slowly went still.
“Does the computer work?” I asked.
“I haven’t tested it yet,” he said.
That made sense. You’d want to make sure you had everything ready before you booted a computer that conjured up ghosts.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Enlisted Man’s Empire had men and ships and a recently rebuilt broadcast network. What we did not have were the “ghosts.” We needed the computer from the spy ship to reach the Unified Authority’s top secret ghosts.
Okay, well, I called them ghosts. In truth, they were virtual reproductions of William Sweetwater and Arthur Breeze, the two dead scientists who had helped thwart the Avatari’s first invasion.
Shortly before they died, the real Sweetwater and Breeze allowed a team of medical technicians to scan their brains and take samples of their DNA. Somewhere along the line, the Unifieds used the scans and samples to re- create the scientists inside a computer. They used the DNA to construct virtual models of their bodies that were realistic enough to make their scanned brain waves feel right at home.
In order to keep the virtual versions of Sweetwater and Breeze from figuring out that they weren’t real, the models had all of the original scientists’ mental and physical flaws. In life, William Sweetwater had been an overweight, middleaged dwarf who got winded climbing a single set of stairs. When virtual Sweetwater climbed a flight of stairs, his pulse rose dangerously high, and sweat stains formed under his arms. I’d placed a few calls to virtual Sweetwater. When he had to run to the monitor to catch the call, he came panting.
In his computer universe, virtual Arthur Breeze was a six-foot-six balding beanpole with dandruff and oily skin who needed to clean the grease from his glasses every couple of minutes. He stuttered when he became nervous, which was most of the time since he suffered from an intense inferiority complex.
The flaws were almost as entertaining as the men themselves.
But the tiny computer Freeman showed me had neither a broadcast engine for pangalactic communications nor the power to host the complex models of Sweetwater and Breeze.
“That’s it?” I asked. “I played hide-and-seek with a guy in shielded armor for that?”
The computer was the size of a man’s wallet, and most of it was screen. “Where’s the broadcast engine?”
“Broken,” said Freeman.
“Broken? So we’re out of business,” I said.
“The computer works, I just need to connect it to a broadcast engine before we can reach Sweetwater and Breeze,” Freeman said.
“Did you have one in mind?” I asked. Broadcast engines were complex and dangerous machinery. You didn’t find them lying around.
“The E.M.E. broadcast network,” said Freeman. He was so big and so menacing, I sometimes wondered if he realized just how frightening he could be.
The Enlisted Man’s Empire had a broadcast network. It was the backbone of the empire. Friend or foe, it didn’t matter, I was not about to give a mercenary access to the network.
“You’re out of luck, Ray,” I said. “I won’t give you that access.”
He sat on the edge of my desk, staring down at me. His wide-set eyes reminded me of the barrels of a shotgun. Even though he spoke softly, his voice had a thunderlike rumble. The voice and the eyes were intimidating, but not as intimidating as the implicit threat of his enormous arms and chest.
Freeman sat silent for a moment, then he said, “You’re going to need Sweetwater and Breeze if you’re planning to evacuate planets.”
“I’m not giving you our broadcast codes,” I said.
Freeman’s expression did not change. He did not smile or snarl or do anything threatening. He simply spoke in a quiet voice as he asked, “Are you saying that the Enlisted Man’s Empire is going to abandon its planets and citizens?”
I could have shot him, of course. We were on the
