“What about the other ships?” asked Suzuki.
His face turning red, Yamashiro hissed the word, “Now!”
Tint shields formed on the viewport, blocking any hint of the one remaining moon. A moment later, the
Slowly turning in his chair so that he faced his son-in-law, his dark eyes burning with more intensity than Takahashi had ever seen in them, Yamashiro said, “They have been destroyed.”
The video feeds were clear and mysterious.
The feed of A-361-D/Satellite 1 showed a bird’s-eye view of the deck and the surface of the moon. For a tenth of a second, maybe only a hundredth of a second, light flared across the screen. A small wisp of steam formed and dissipated. Steam and smoke vanish quickly in the absolute zero temperature and vacuum conditions of space.
Slowing the feed to five seconds per frame did not make a difference. Whatever happened, it happened so quickly that the camera on the satellite could not record it. One moment there was open space, then light appeared and vanished, then the steam appeared and dissolved.
Yamashiro played that portion of the video feed three times without saying a word.
“What was that?” asked Takahashi.
“That was the destruction of an infiltration pod,” said Yamashiro. Now that they were out of danger, he seemed drained of energy. He sat slumped in his chair, answering his son-in-law’s questions in a soft tone that could most accurately be described as defeated.
Yamashiro ran the loop again, this time even more slowly. The one-second feed lasted nearly ten minutes.
“That can’t be a pod,” Takahashi said.
Yamashiro switched to a screen that showed a battleship. One moment she lingered peaceably in space. Something happened. Like the S.I.P., the big ship did not explode. She left no debris. It was like a magician’s illusion. For just a moment, the battleship seemed to inflate, then she crumpled, folding in on herself, compressing until nothing remained except a formless wad of space-colored junk leaking tendrils of steam or smoke.
Yamashiro stared at the screen, and, in a soft, broken voice, he said, “The
“That cannot be,” said Takahashi. The words were a reflex. He believed his eyes. He did not place as much trust in the absolute laws of physics as he did in his father-in-law’s word.
“I can show you what happened to the
Takahashi heard himself hyperventilating, but he could not stop. “We need to go back. We need to help them. We need to look for survivors.”
“We need to accomplish our mission,” Yamashiro replied in a hushed voice. “They sent us because we are expendable. We are not part of the Unified Authority, we are the Japanese. Our fleet and our men were the price we paid to return to Earth.”
Takahashi looked at the screen again and rewitnessed the destruction of the
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
More often than not, the Unified Authority colonized planets that came complete with continents and an oxygenated atmosphere. The Galactic Expansion Committee’s top criteria for selecting suitable locales included distance from a suitable and stable star, Earth-like size and gravity, and good galactic position.
Since the prime criteria could not be altered, they were nonnegotiable. Other preferences, such as oxygen and water were open to interpretation. Providence Kri, for instance, was something of a fixer-upper when the Unified Authority decided to colonize it. The term “Kri” was attached to planets that required terraforming—a miracle process that could convert rocks and deserts into gardens of Eden.
As I entered the bridge, I saw Providence Kri in its rotation through the view screen. Whatever the planet had looked like before the Unified Authority gave it a makeover, it certainly looked like a hospitable blue-and-green marble afterward.
Having been rescued from the Avatari by clones, the populace of Providence Kri was unfailingly loyal to the Enlisted Man’s Empire. That was good. We were too busy fighting natural-borns and aliens to lay down laws, so we trusted the residents of the various planets to govern themselves. We were military clones; our dabbling in politics never worked out the way we hoped.
Looking out of a viewport, I wondered how long we had until the Avatari turned this planet into a dust bowl as well.
In better times, Providence Kri had served as a galactic hub for the Unified Authority. In these times, it served as a galactic hub for the Enlisted Man’s Empire. The Cygnus Central Fleet, Admiral Liotta’s fleet, a fleet that included seven fighter carriers and thirty battleships, orbited the planet.
The Cygnus Central Fleet was big, but it lacked the firepower needed to defeat the Earth Fleet. The U.A.’s new generation fighter carriers and battleships were smaller, faster, and better shielded than our ships.
Liotta and an entourage of fleet officers flew out to the
Liotta took me and my team to Engineering, where Lieutenant Mars presented the crew with a new broadcast key. I allowed Admiral Liotta to have a key, but I did not give him a copy of the book that contained the complete set of codes and broadcast locations. The book contained hundreds of thousands of codes, pinpoint coordinates for safe broadcast areas all across the galaxy. Instead, I handed him a highly abbreviated list that included coordinates for the twenty-two remaining planets in the Enlisted Man’s Empire along with a few strategic destinations such as New Copenhagen.
“I have a pilot delivering keys and coordinate cards to every fleet,” I said. “He’ll have a key to Jolly within the hour.”
Liotta smiled, and said, “So we’re back in business,” as he glanced at the list of broadcast coordinates. Then he paused, and asked, “New Copenhagen? I thought they destroyed that planet.”
“They did.”
“Why would we want to go there?”
“That’s the point,” I said. “There’s absolutely no reason to go there. If there’s no good reason to go there, the Unifieds probably aren’t patrolling the area.”
Liotta nodded, and said, “So it’s a safe place to regroup.”
“Something like that,” I said.
I did not say good-bye to Ava. As I said before, time was scarce.
She would be safe on Providence Kri until we evacuated the planet. Once the evacuation was done, and the danger had passed, we would sit down and sort things out …assuming she had any interest in sorting things out with me.
I had not come to Providence Kri to drop off refugees or meet with officers though I did a little of both. I came to commandeer a new ship. With her shields broken, the