He was exactly right. The Unifieds wouldn’t waste time trying to conquer colonies they knew were going to be burned. All they wanted was the barges, and they could not take the barges by force.
Holman was a straight shooter. The admirals might not have appreciated his candor, but I did.
“So they want their barges back, so what?” asked Wallace.
“Don’t you get it, sir? They can’t just take the barges,” said Holman.
“What do you mean they can’t take the barges? We can’t defend our ships against those torpedoes,” said Liotta.
Holman said, “Admiral, they can’t use those torpedoes on the barges. They need the barges as much as we do. If they break the barges, everybody dies.
“Even if they board the barges, where are they going to take them?”
“They’ll specking take them back to Earth,” said Wallace.
“How?” asked Holman. “Those barges don’t have broadcast engines. They would need our broadcast stations to take the barges back to Earth.”
“Shit,” said Wallace.
“You’re right,” said Liotta. “They can’t take the barges without our help. They’d need us to surrender so they can use the broadcast network.”
“That’s why they’re trying to scare us,” Holman said, starting to sound more confident. “That’s why they’re using the killer torpedoes. They’re trying to scare us into submission. They want us to surrender the barges and the broadcast network without a fight.”
“Assuming you’re right,” said Liotta, “what does that get us?”
Holman did not take the bait. He leaned forward in his chair, stared at Admiral Liotta’s holographic image through the window, and said, “We don’t need to fight. They won’t attack our ships if they don’t get anything for their trouble. They want us to stand and fight because they know they won’t lose. If we run and take the barges with us, they can’t come after us if we enter a broadcast zone.”
“That’s your strategy?” asked Liotta. He laughed. “That’s your observation? You think we should just run away.” He turned to Admiral Wallace, and said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let a …”
Holman interrupted Liotta. He asked, “Do you have a better idea?”
“Captain, I think you’d better …”
Holman interrupted Liotta a second time. He said, “Admiral, if we keep our ships close enough to our broadcast zones, the Unifieds won’t be able to attack them.”
No longer willing to tolerate Holman’s insubordination, Liotta slammed a fist on the table. Watching him, I realized that he was no more real to me than Sweetwater or Breeze. Sure, he was actually alive, but what I saw was a holographic hand striking a holographic table. I watched the scene in silence, wondering how long I should wait before relieving Admiral Curtis Liotta of his useless command.
Admiral Wallace cleared his throat, and said, “I’m not sure that a goddamned specking mass retreat counts as a strategy, Admiral; but the kid’s got a point.”
“What point?” shouted Liotta. “What is his point?” He sounded frustrated. His holographic image stood, paced along its side of the table.
“If we keep our ships just outside the broadcast zones and run when the Unifieds arrive, they won’t be able to hit us.”
“That’s a coward’s way of running a navy,” sneered Liotta.
“But it will work,” said Wallace.
“How about you, Harris? You’re the big, hairy-chested fighting machine. How do you feel about ducking for cover every time we see the Unifieds?”
“Works for me,” I said. “I think it’s an ingenious strategy.”
“An ingenious strategy,” repeated Liotta. “Well, if we’re going to employ the captain’s
Bangalore was the next planet slated by the Avatari for execution. We had already begun evacuating it.
“I’ll tell you what,” Liotta continued. “We’ll leave a hell of a lot of people to fry if we run away at Bangalore.” He sat back down and rubbed his eyes, then pressed his hands together as if saying a prayer. “God, I hope they do not attack us at Bangalore.”
I wondered if his rantings were the result of theatrics or fatigue? He seemed sincere.
Holman said, “If it comes to a choice between evacuating Bangalore or evacuating all of our other planets, we’ll need to abandon Bangalore, Admiral.”
Liotta turned to look at me. His eyes were bloodshot, and dark bags circled their bottoms. He asked, “Do you think the Unifieds know that Bangalore is next?”
“They know,” I said. They got their information from the same source we got ours—from the virtual ghosts of the late, great scientists William Sweetwater and Arthur Breeze.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
What took a couple of hours on Gobi had already taken an entire day on Bangalore, and the end was not in sight.
Admiral Liotta tried to write off the clusterspeck as a question of population. Gobi had a population of under five hundred thousand. Bangalore had eight million residents. It took two barges to evacuate Gobi. If we filled all twenty-five barges to capacity on the first round, we’d still need to send some of them for a second pass.
And it wasn’t just a question of loading the people onto the barges. Once we loaded them on, we carted them to Providence Kri, where we had to transport them down to the planet. Offloading passengers went more quickly than loading them, but not quickly enough.
Once we airlifted the people off the planet, assuming we were able to airlift all of them, we’d still need time to search for food and supplies. We might have been able to evacuate the people and the supplies had Liotta’s team not cataclysmically botched the opening hours of the operation.
Liotta’s officers were afraid to go down to the planet. They had heard that Bangalore was going to go up in smoke, so they sent seaman and petty officers to run the show in case the Avatari attacked before they were supposed to attack. So battalions of seaman and petty officers went down to the planet and did the heavy lifting, while Liotta’s chickenhearted senior officers tried to run the show from orbiting battleships. The arrangement did not work well.
The junior officers running the evacuation were used to taking orders, not giving them. Trying to run things from their Mount Olympus above the clouds, the officers in charge were too removed from the operation to adjust the logistics. Five hours into the operation, the wheels were so badly specked that only one million people had been lifted off the planet, and the officers in charge admitted they would not be able to airlift all of the remaining seven million. By the time I reached Bangalore, searching for food and medicine had become a pipe dream.
Despite all of his bluster at the summit, Admiral Liotta was an idiot who surrounded himself with idiots. It’s a popular form of camouflage that many officers use. Hoping to hide their ineptitude behind the greater stupidity of others, morons surround themselves with other morons. There’s an old saying that, “In the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man shall be king.” In officer country, men with two eyes and two testicles are hard to come by.
