“Aye, aye.”
“Helm, down and away.”
The tactical showed the U.A. battleships as shapes, not ships. The circles representing the live ships had been moving like the hands of a clock, circumscribing a circular pattern, firing lasers while sniffing for targets. Once we launched the torpedoes, both ships streaked in our direction.
The dot representing our ship scurried to safety as the first of our red torpedoes struck the target ship, then the second.
Moments passed, and the tint shields evaporated from the viewport. At first, I could not tell what I was looking at. The helmsman clapped his hands, and said, “Hell yeah!” Then everyone on the bridge cheered. The final torpedoes had penetrated the crippled ship’s shields.
The Unified Authority battleship sat battered and lifeless but not destroyed. She would not fly anytime soon. We would need to fire another torpedo to deal the fatal blow, but her shields were down. She had twists and cracks along her dagger-shaped hull. Lights still blazed throughout the ship, but the new torpedoes had ruptured the hull, not broken it.
Holman looked at me, and said, “We could finish her.”
“She looks done,” I said, not sure if the instinct that led me to say this had more to do with mercy or self- preservation. “After this point, it’s not combat, it’s murder.”
“That’s what they did to our ships,” Holman said.
“Yeah. They’re murderers.”
He turned to his helmsman, and said, “Power up the broadcast engine. We’re going home.”
“What about Solomon?” I asked.
“General, there are still two more battleships out there. They’re on high alert. They will destroy us and the transport if we try to launch.”
He was right. So were Liotta and Wallace. They’d been right all along. Seven million people would die on Solomon. We could not evacuate the planet. If we tried to warn the people, there’d be riots and chaos. Warning the people to go underground might save lives but not many. Most of the lucky few who found shelter underground would be sealed in once the heat melted the ground above them.
“We need to send a warning,” I said, though in my heart I had already abandoned the mission.
“Those U.A. ships can trace our signals,” said Holman.
I tried to convince myself that it was for the best. We could never have saved more than a small fraction of the population. By leaving them in ignorance, we would allow the people of Solomon to live their last few hours in peace.
They would not know they’d been incinerated until God told them what had happened. It wasn’t a bad way to go, I suppose; but I didn’t feel good about letting it happen.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
On the surface, Freeman appeared to take the news about leaving Solomon with cold indifference. I told him about the Unified Authority ships and the battle, and he listened in silence. His expression remained impassive, as slack as a death mask. His eyes, though. His eyes bored through me.
If you could see into a man’s soul through his eyes, I thought I glimpsed the fires of Hell deep within Freeman. His skin was dark as wet stone. His head was bald and scarred. He’d abandoned a religious home for a life of battlefields and gunfights; now death followed him like a shadow as he returned to his roots.
“I asked Holman about warning them,” I said.
“The Unifieds would track the signal,” Freeman answered, speaking mechanically. “Even if they got the message, we wouldn’t save many people,” he said, parroting Curtis Liotta’s words. He paused, stared straight ahead the way blind men stare straight ahead, then he said, “Dust to dust.”
We stood together in the kettle of the transport, a large metal cavern with steel-girder ribs along its iron walls. Freeman wore his custom-made battle armor with his helmet off. I had come in my Charlie service uniform.
At six-foot-three, I was the tallest clone in the Enlisted Man’s Empire. Freeman stood nine inches taller than I and might well have packed twice my weight. He was big and strong and deadly, a fierce man who’d spent most of his life caring about no one but himself. He’d become a murderous messiah, a man on a quest.
I did not know the Bible from front to back, but I remembered a few words here and there. Six of those words came back to me. I said, “Let the dead bury the dead.”
The words woke Freeman from his stupor. He glared at me, and growled, “What is that supposed to mean?” That was the first time I’d ever heard rage in his voice.
“It means that we can kill ourselves trying to warn people who cannot be saved, but we cannot save them. It means that I would rather get caught by a sniper’s bullet than be stood in front of a firing squad. They will spend their last hours humping girlfriends, fishing, reading, going to the specking ballet …doing whatever it is they like to do. I’d rather go that way than spend my last hours panicking about death.”
As I said this, I thought about mothers holding their children. What does a mother do when she learns that all of her children will die at the end of the day? Does she tuck them into bed and tell them a story? Does she give them candy for their final meal? Does she think about her own death? Having never had a mother, I imagined each of them as superhuman, a cross between a saint, a martyr, and a drill sergeant.
I had no concept of what it meant to lose family. Freeman did. His father, a Neo-Baptist minister, died defending his colony. The Avatari had burned Freeman’s last relations when they attacked New Copenhagen. I was haunted by my imagination. He was haunted by his memories.
Sounding like Admiral Liotta and hating myself for it, I said, “Solomon was a lost cause.”
Freeman, big as he was, standing there so still and silent, reminded me of a spider on a web in some abandoned archway. I was a weakling, and he was a spider, and we lived in a universe that was crumbling around us. He spun webs, and I made plans, but we were feeble. Neither his webs nor my plans mattered in the end.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Under normal circumstances, the pilot of the first transport was a talkative man. So were the two technicians. But flying a mission they all expected to result in their deaths, they had lost interest in chatting.
From one million miles out, planet A-361-B looked like a very small moon. Each hour brought them two hundred thousand miles closer to their destination, and from their current position, the pilot could see that the planet was the color of platinum rather than the dull white of a moon.
He sat alone in the cockpit. They did not need to spend these hours flying to A-361-B; the S.I.P.s could have traveled to the planet in one-one-hundredth the time. The pilot thought about mentioning that fact to his crew, then decided against it. What if the aliens tracked the S.I.P.s to their transport? This way, maybe they could buy
