smile, and said, “I’m the kind of guy who guards the throne, not the kind who sits in it.”
They liked that. Admiral Jolly bobbed his head up and down, his real chin vanishing behind the folds of his jowls. He said, “Well done, General. That makes perfect sense.”
Liotta gave me a casual salute.
“But the bastard still has more stars than us?” said Wallace.
“You can have ’em if you want,” I offered. “As of this moment, Admiral Jolly, you are in charge.”
“You’ve just relinquished your command, General. You no longer have the authority to make that kind of decision,” said Admiral Liotta, waking from his revelry. He must have thought I would put him in charge.
“I still have three stars,” I said. I turned to Jolly, and added, “Unless you plan to strip me of command.” I knew he wouldn’t. If Liotta and Wallace conspired against him, he’d need a strong ally.
Jolly shook his head. “No, General, I think you should hold on to those stars.” He was weak, and no one values alliances more than the weak.
Before calling the summit, I had visited Engineering and shown the broadcast key to Lieutenant Mars. When he saw it, he laughed, and said, “Mary Mother of God, you have got to be kidding. A frequency-modulation transmitter?” He looked at me and saw that I had no idea what he was talking about, so he said, “It transmits FM radio waves. This is very old technology …ancient even. Kids build these things as history projects in grade school. These things came out between the Internet and smoke signals.”
“What is the Internet?” I asked.
He laughed, and said, “No wonder the Unifieds never cracked it; only a fool would use such a primitive technology to control a broadcast network. It’s inspired.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Ava waited for me in my billet. What else could she do? As the only woman aboard the
In better times, those shades could have provided news and editorial; now they only accessed preprogrammed materials—books, movies, and educational curricula that had been created a decade earlier.
“I was watching your movie,” she said.
“My movie?” I asked.
“
The name did not register for a few seconds. Then it hit me.
The movie was made at a time when I was listed as MISSING IN ACTION AND PRESUMED DEAD, opening the door for the filmmakers to portray me as a natural-born.
“You don’t look a thing like Sean Gregory,” Ava said. Gregory was the square-jawed male model who played natural-born me.
“Really? I thought that was the most accurate part of the movie.”
“You’re much better-looking than Sean,” Ava said. She acted like she was in a playful mood, but I could see through the cracks. She didn’t call me “Honey.” That was a sure tipoff. She also sounded more sincere than brassy. When Ava was playful, she liked to sound tough.
“I knew that,” I said, trying to play along.
“I’m not kidding. You should see Sean in person.”
“He isn’t six feet tall and covered with muscles?” I asked.
Ava pretended to have to think that over, pausing, mulling over the words, scratching her chin, and finally saying, “Well, he is pretty tall.”
“And muscular?” I asked.
“He does have big arms …and that chest …” Her olivine-colored eyes became dreamy. Had I dredged up old memories or fantasies?
It felt nice to flirt with Ava even though I could tell she was putting on an act. I wished things had worked out differently. I wished I could have given her what she wanted and that she had not left me for some other man. I wished the people in charge on Terraneau had listened to me, and the girls in Ava’s orphanage had not been incinerated.
Wishes were like intentions; they counted for shit.
“We’re meeting the Cygnus Central Fleet at Providence Kri,” I said. “I’m going to leave you there for a little while.”
“How long of a little while?” Ava asked, no longer pretending to smile.
“I don’t know. You’ll be a lot safer there than you would be on a ship. The Unifieds aren’t attacking planets.”
She looked at me, studying me closely, her arms folded across her chest. She said, “The aliens are.” Her eyes marched back and forth across my face, seeming to take in every detail. God, she was beautiful.
“You’ll be safer on a planet than you would be on a ship,” I said. “At least you will be for a little while.”
“You live for this. You live to fight, don’t you?” she asked.
“The Unifieds haven’t asked for a truce,” I said. “The aliens are still scorching planets.”
“I hoped maybe Terraneau was the end of it,” she said.
Ava put up a hand to stop me. She did not want to talk about aliens or reality.
Hearing me mention the Avatari ended the charade. She stood there, her eyes twitching back and forth as if she were having some sort of seizure. Her arms dropped to her sides, and her hands formed fists. “They kill everyone,” she said. “They killed my girls.”
She thought about what she had just said. “My girls …my girls, they had their whole lives ahead of them.”
When I did not answer, she stared up at me. A few seconds passed, before she asked, “How long do we have before the Avatari reach Providence Kri?”
“I don’t know. I think it will be one of the last planets they hit before they attack Earth.”
“Earth?”
I needed to sleep, not talk. I had an hour or two to rest while Mars built FM transmitters to use as broadcast keys.
Freeman was in his quarters trying to reach Sweetwater and Breeze. We had not heard back from them yet, and I began to wonder if perhaps they now considered us the enemy.
While Ava and I discussed life, the galaxy, and the Avatari, Captain Cutter sailed the
The
