was Sweetwater and Breeze. Freeman was right, we needed them. Finding that communications computer was worth the risk …assuming they would be willing to help us. The last time I had spoken with them, they had not known that the Unified Authority and the Enlisted Man’s Empire had gone to war. Hell, they didn’t even know that the enlisted men had an empire; they thought we were loyal to the Unified Authority.
I sat lost in my thoughts, for maybe fifteen minutes.
The Avatari did not attack arbitrary targets. They went after the planets we had reclaimed after their first sweep through the galaxy. Once they finished attacking our planets, they would turn their sights on Earth. Sooner or later, we might need to evacuate the Unifieds from Earth along with the people living on our planets.
Thinking about the situation made my head hurt, the kind of low, thudding ache you get with a hangover. I sat and I stared and I rubbed my temples, and finally I got up, still staring blankly ahead, and left the conference room. I went to the temporary quarters that Cutter had assigned me in officer country—a comfortable suite generally reserved for visiting politicians, with its own office and a spacious shower in the head.
When I opened the door to my billet, I found Ava waiting for me. Ava Gardner, the cloned incarnation of a twentiethcentury movie star, was my ex. When the Unifieds decided to jettison all clones from their republic, they didn’t just aim that animosity at military clones; they extended it to the only known cloned goddess in the galaxy.
First, she was under my protection, and the next thing I knew, we were in love. Well, maybe I was in love. She moved on before I did. Thinking they were doing me a favor, my engineers rescued Ava and her natural-born lover when the Avatari incinerated Terraneau.
I’m not being fair. Ava left me because I talked nonstop about conquering Earth when I should have been saying sweet nothings in her ear. She thought I was married to the Corps. She was right.
“How did you get in here?” I asked as I entered the room. Officers’ quarters were supposedly as secure as prison cells.
She stood about ten feet away from me, swaying slightly and looking nervous. She wore a wrinkled yellow dress, and her hair and makeup needed tidying, but that couldn’t be helped; her clothes, makeup, and brushes would have gone up in smoke when the Avatari fried Terraneau.
“A sailor let me in,” Ava said.
“They’re not supposed to let passengers into officers’ quarters,” I said.
“He thought you’d be glad to see me,” she said.
I wouldn’t have described Ava as top-heavy, but she had a notable figure. Fire smoldered in her wide-set olivine-colored eyes. She knew how to smile at a man and dismiss him at the very same moment. I did not know if she could read every man, but she always seemed to know what I was thinking.
“Wayson, I need to be with you,” she said, sounding so damned sincere. She pressed herself against me, trusting that I would wrap my arms around her. When I did not respond, she took a step away from me.
She usually referred to me as “Harris,” but she did it in a way that was informal and endearing. When she became brassy, I was “Honey” and when she was angry, I was “Dear.” And now, having seen the destruction of Terraneau, she added “Wayson” to her vocabulary.
“You need to be with me?” I asked. “You moved on, remember?”
“Everything changed yesterday. I don’t think I ever understood your world,” she said. “Yesterday it became real.” Here came the tears. Right on time. God, I hated dealing with women.
It wasn’t the crying that bothered me. I’d seen grown men cry. Hell, I’d seen Marines get weepy. Who would not cry after seeing an entire population cremated. What bothered me was the way women cried, like they weren’t embarrassed about it …like they expected you to do something about it.
“I don’t see how that changes anything,” I said.
“Wayson, they killed my girls.”
“Go tell it to …”
“I don’t love Kyle. I never did,” Ava said as she stepped back in my orbit. She reached out and placed her hand against my chest.
She might have been acting or sincere or possibly she was acting but thought she was sincere. I believed her.
I did not know if she was my roommate or my girlfriend, but we spent the next few hours together.
CHAPTER FIVE
Only the captains of the four ships saw the video feed; Admiral Yamashiro would not risk showing it to anyone else.
They met in a conference room on the command deck of the
The captains saw the bleak landscape and the giant silos. They watched in silence as Illych scraped ice and analyzed it. A timer in the corner of the screen showed that the SEALs had been on the planet for ten minutes and seventeen seconds when the light appeared in the sky.
Yamashiro stood at the front of the room. He said, “Matsuda thinks the aliens detected the infiltration pods the moment they entered the atmosphere.” Matsuda Takashi ran Fleet Intelligence.
“How could they have done that?” asked Captain Yokoi Shigeru. “We cannot track those pods. How would the aliens track them?”
Yamashiro ignored the question, and the video feed resumed with Illych telling his men to take positions. When Humble spun around to fire rounds at the silo, a small window appeared in a corner of the screen. The window showed the scene through the late Chief Petty Officer Humble’s eyes as his bullets exploded against the silo’s icy surface.
“I wish he had tried a laser and a particle beam as well,” said Takeda Gunpei, the only captain with an engineering background.
Captain Miyamoto said, “Good point. You should tell him if you see him.” They all knew that the SEALs did not return; but Miyamoto Genyo was a hard-ass, an old-style Japanese military man who never smiled and had no sympathy for weakness. “You may soon get your chance.”
The feed showed the globe of light with creatures forming inside it and the ion curtain forming across the sky. The transmission ended, but the video feed continued. The screen showed the planet as seen from the stealth transport that launched the pods.
The image on the screen looked like a barren planet partially dipped in white gold.
“The ‘sleeving’ process went quickly,” said Takeda as he watched the shiny skin move across the atmosphere.
A jolt ran across the planet, and the ion curtain dissolved, revealing a partially imploded planet. A flat and fiery dent showed on the otherwise-iron-colored globe. With the planet’s symmetry broken, it looked as though the stress of its own rotation might cause it to come apart. “The
Miyamoto was the captain of the
