“Sounds like you’ve got the golden goose,” I said.
I took some of my weight off the guy’s back; and, still whimpering, he placed his hands over his head to protect himself.
“Maybe I should let you go,” I said.
“We can be partners. Don’t shoot me.” His whining gave me a headache.
“How do I know you aren’t going to keep it all?” I asked.
“I’ll bring it. I promise. We can split it fifty-fifty!”
“I swear! I swear!”
Jolly shouted, “Kill him, Harris. That’s an order.” He hadn’t figured me out yet. He would in a moment.
“Don’t kill me. Please don’t kill me.”
“How do I know I can trust you?” I repeated.
“Ask anyone. I’m honest. I’m good for it.”
“I’d ask your friends, but they’re all dead. Everyone else is gone,” I growled. Good thing the looter could not see the smile on my face. I was playing with him and having fun.
I gave his face one last shove into the street, then I stood and let him up. I said, “We meet right here day after tomorrow. If you’re not here with enough swag to fill a transport, you’re a dead man. You hear me?”
“Yeah, yeah! You’re going to be a rich man!” he said.
“I can still shoot you. Tomorrow, next week …You got that?”
“You won’t be sorry. You won’t. You’re going to be rich.”
“Get out of here,” I said.
The bastard tried to shake my hand. If he’d been the one with the gun, he would have shot me in the back and not thought twice about it. But I had the gun, so he assured me that I was going to be a wealthy man, then he walked five paces away and sprinted around a corner.
“Why did you let him go?” asked Admiral Jolly.
“Didn’t you hear? He’s going to make me rich,” I said.
“You’re never going to see him again,” said Jolly.
“Damn straight I’m not going to see him again. Why the speck do you think we evacuated this planet? In three hours, this city is going to be dust, and that bastard is going to be dust along with it,” I said. I caught a brief glimpse of the looter scurrying away like a rodent. That summed him up, just another rodent.
Jolly was indignant. He screamed, “I told you to kill him. I ordered you to kill him! You disobeyed a direct order.” His face flushed with anger, he waved his hands like he wanted to fly. He became even more flustered when I ignored his rant and walked past him.
“Yeah,” I said as I knelt and picked up the M27 to examine it. “We need to talk about that. Admiral, I am relieving you of command.”
“You’re what?” asked Jolly.
“I’m relieving you of command. These are dire times, Admiral, and you’re not fit for command.”
“I’m what?” asked Jolly.
“Not fit for command,” I repeated. “I am telling you to step down.”
“To what?”
“To retire,” I said. “Go set up a villa by the beach. Go spend time with your grandkids.” He didn’t have any grandchildren, of course. He was a clone, and we clones were as sterile as boiling alcohol. You could probably kill germs with the “sperm” we produced.
“Who the hell do you think you are speaking to?” he screamed.
“Admiral Steven R. Jolly, Enlisted Man’s Navy, retired,” I said.
“And who do you think will take my place?”
“Probably Admiral Liotta …maybe Wallace. I haven’t decided.”
“Do you honestly believe Warhawk Wallace is fit for command?”
“Nope,” I admitted. “It really doesn’t matter. If Wallace isn’t any better than you, I’ll retire him.”
Jolly shook his head, laughed, and said, “You can’t do this,” so I shot him with the M27. When I reported his death, I’d say that the looter had done it. This wasn’t the first time I had killed a superior officer; and, judging by the men lined up to replace Steven Jolly, it wouldn’t be the last time, either.
As the last of our transports left the planet, I received a message from Captain James Holman inviting me to the
I had never met Holman in person, but I liked the way he evacuated Gobi. As I had already rifled through one- third of my top leadership prospects, I made a mental note to watch Holman as a possible alternative once I ran out of one-stars.
I went to the observation deck, and there was Holman, who might have been the oddest-looking clone in history. When I first saw him, I even mistook him for a natural-born.
Holman dyed his hair. Older clones were known to dye their hair blond; but Holman, a man in his early thirties, had dyed his hair a coppery version of fire-engine red. He also had a beard. I had seen clones with whiskers, but a beard …Like his hair, the beard was that same unnatural color of red.
It was a short beard, trimmed to follow the curve of his jaw. He shaved the beard so that it fell short of his lower lip. The top of his beard followed the curve of his lips to create a well-trimmed look.
“Hello,” said Holman in a deep, throaty voice that did not sound clonelike. He had been sitting, watching the planet through a viewport, but he stood and saluted as I entered the deck.
I returned the salute, and said, “You put together a good operation.”
“Not good enough,” he said. “I understand there were looters.”
“You can bring a horse to water,” I said.
“But they shot Admiral Jolly. This is a blow to the Enlisted Man’s Empire.”
I gave him a sly smile, and said, “Not as much a blow as you might think. I understand he planned to retire right after the evacuation.”
“He never told me,” said Holman. He sounded suspicious.
“Yes, well, Admiral Jolly kept his plans pretty quiet.”
With that, we sat and we waited. Death arrived on Gobi six hours late. This had happened before. The virtual ghost of Arthur Breeze tended to err on the safe side with his predictions.
At 03:17 S.T.C. time, the Avatari ignited the Tachyon D particles they had pumped into the atmosphere, and the temperature instantaneously spiked to nine thousand degrees.
Unable to see the destruction through the viewport, Holman and I switched to a computer display. The first thing we saw was the destruction of Gobi Station. Several of the smaller structures around the base exploded. The base itself, a tall spindlelike building armed with cannons and radars and landing pads, seemed untouched by the heat for twenty seconds. Laser cannons exploded, launchpads melted, but the base remained erect.
The heat continued for precisely eighty-three seconds. During that time, the sand around Gobi Station turned orange and melted into a shallow ocean of glass. Outcroppings of rock exploded.
The superheating of the planet caused the atmosphere to rise in its own convection. As it rose, the atmospheric pressure lifted with it, and Gobi Station burst like a balloon. The inner framework remained, but the outer walls blew off the building, leaving the inner structure to wilt in the extreme heat.
When the eighty-three-second attack ended, the atmosphere cooled and fell back into place, crushing the remains of Gobi Station into a twisted pile of girders.
I thought about the looter I had allowed to escape. He’d probably died in the first second of the attack. One moment he’d have been looking at whatever swag he’d accumulated, and the next moment, he was dust.
At least he’d died happy, after all; he’d outwitted a dumb Marine.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
