“I need a commander. Are you in or out?”
“I’m in,” he said.
“Glad to hear it. You couldn’t have taken this post at a better time. We’re about to launch a sensitive operation.”
I really was glad he’d accepted. The three previous candidates were little more than stuffed suits with unearned stars. Holman was different. He’d shown judgment, talent, and initiative.
“I hate to start off on the wrong foot, General, but moving refugees to Terraneau is a bad idea. General Hill will see it coming,” he said. General George “Nickel” Hill was the head of the Joint Chiefs. “He knows our situation.
“He’ll expect us to move refugees someplace with large bodies of water, that means Terraneau or Olympus Kri.”
“Those are the planets with the best chance of sustaining life,” I said.
“What about New Copenhagen? It has oceans?” asked Holman.
I remembered something the late Curtis Liotta had mentioned, something about an attack on three Unified Authority ships. If they were patrolling the area, entering it would be a bad idea. It sounded like something happened there, someone had rolled through with enough firepower to sink three U.A. ships. It must have been the Avatari using some new weapon. No one else had that kind of firepower.
“I’ve put some thought into this,” I told Holman. “I think we can draw their navy away.”
“How do you suggest we draw them away?”
“By invading Earth,” I said. “It’s time we went on the attack.”
Both Sweetwater and Breeze took the call. They had the lab to themselves.
“You want us to send a team to Terraneau to survey the planet? That could present a problem,” said Sweetwater. He looked tired. His face, which generally had a ruddy complexion, now had a grayish pallor. The bags under his eyes had darkened so that they looked like bruises. “We could probably get away with running remote tests from a satellite, but a certain Mr. Andropov is going to ask questions if we send an explorer.”
The dwarf was right, but I did not see any other options. “What can you get from your satellites?”
“We won’t be able to determine sustainability,” Sweetwater admitted. “We’d need soil samples for that. We can certainly determine oxygen and radiation levels. You probably already have those.”
“We need to know about drinking water and farms,” I said.
“You will need filtration equipment for potable water,” said Sweetwater. “The ash in the atmosphere is a pollutant. The lakes are contaminated, but they’re not especially toxic.”
“We have enough food to last six months. After that, the colonists will starve if they can’t raise their own food,” I said.
Sweetwater shook his head. “We’d suggest taking them to Earth, but we’ll need to evacuate Earth soon.”
“You can worry about that next month; right now, let’s talk about Terraneau,” I said.
“There is no way to test the water without landing a team,” said Breeze.
“Even if we authorized the work, we’d never persuade the U.A. Academy to land a team out there,” Sweetwater said, still referring to himself as “we.” “Andropov doesn’t trust us. The Linear Committee just sent a team of auditors to check our work.”
“That’s a problem,” I said.
“You have a spy ship, maybe you could gather samples,” Breeze suggested.
I shook my head. “The Unifieds would spot our transports.”
Breeze, tall and skinny and alien in appearance with bugeyed glasses, stared into the camera as I spoke, desperation showing in his magnified eyes.
“If they don’t trust you, they may be listening in on us now,” said Freeman.
“Not on our side, they aren’t,” Sweetwater said. “We devised a secure communications console.”
“We could send explorers to all of the planets,” said Breeze.
“What?” asked Sweetwater.
“They might suspect something if we tested sustainability on Terraneau, but what if we sent teams to New Copenhagen, Olympus Kri, Gobi, Solomon, Nebraska Kri, and Bangalore.”
Funny thing. When Breeze mentioned Solomon, a shock ran through me. I became dizzy and fell back in my chair.
“Solomon is a confirmed kill?” I asked, though I should have known.
Sweetwater stared into the camera, no emotion on his face, and said, “That is affirmative.”
I did not ask about survivors, I knew the answer.
“We can say we are running tests on all seven planets,” said Breeze. “We can tell them we need to start searching for a suitable place.” He meant a suitable place for the population of Earth.
I played with the idea in my head, looking at it from every direction to see if I could poke holes in it. The idea held water. “They haven’t started searching?” I asked.
“We think they have,” said Sweetwater, “but they haven’t informed us about their progress.”
“How will they react if you suggest a survey?” I asked.
Sweetwater considered the idea for several seconds. The plan was not without its risks. If Tobias Andropov already suspected Sweetwater and Breeze of collusion, he might see the tests as absolute proof.
Sweetwater sat on his tall stool, staring into the camera. One moment his face flushed with anger. He might have been more worried about his own arguable existence than the millions of lives spread out across our last remaining worlds. Then he smiled, and said, “Brilliant. Even an idiot like Andropov will recognize the importance of creating an evacuation plan.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
We were running reconnaissance. For the mission, we took the spy ship.
I asked Don Cutter to captain the ship. He had time on his hands. Mars and his Corps of Engineers had not even begun working on the
If we’d broadcasted in behind Jupiter or Saturn, we might have come in undetected; but Jupiter was four hundred million miles from Earth and Saturn was eight hundred million miles away. Even flying balls-out, at thirty-nine million miles per hour, it would have taken twenty hours to cover that distance, and we did not have a day to spare.
We broadcasted in behind Mars, knowing that the Unifieds had figured out that trick. They might detect our entrance, but that did not necessarily translate into their tracking our route. The moment we entered the Sol System, Cutter engaged the stealth generator, and our spy ship became invisible …we hoped.
In the old moon-shot and satellite days, navigators planned trajectories that curved around the sun as they plotted routes from Earth to Mars. Back in that day, spaceships traveled only twenty-four thousand miles in an hour. At fifteen hundred times that speed, we took a more direct approach, pausing to add the occasional curve to make our route less predictable.
I stood on the bridge beside Captain Cutter, staring out the viewport. I’d known this man for only a month, but we had the familiarity of the battlefield. We’d faced death together. In military circles, that made us family.
“Do you think they’ve figured out a way of peeking through our cloak?” I asked.
