“They probably don’t even know we have a stealth cruiser,” said Cutter.
I thought about the day Holman and I had attacked their Solomon patrol, and said, “I think they’ve figured that out.”
Cutter looked at me, and said, “General, has anybody ever mentioned that you’re a pessimistic man? You go through life a lot happier if you’re an optimist.”
“I’m not pessimistic,” I said, though I knew he was right. I hadn’t always been a pessimist. How had I changed? Was it fatigue? Was I worn-out from fighting wars on two fronts? Maybe it was the drugs? For the last few weeks, I’d been taking stimulants so I could work around the clock. The medics warned me that the drugs could have side effects—rollercoaster emotions, the sensation of feeling hyperalert, paranoia. Light hurt my eyes. Sounds made me jumpy. Looking around the little bridge of the spy ship, I felt closed in.
“Do they have ships out there?” I asked.
Sounding more calm than he reasonably should have, Cutter said, “Dozens of them. They’re searching everywhere, but they can’t see us. We came to look at their fleet, right? You wanted a peek at their forces; here they are.”
I nodded.
“So let’s look,” he said as he led me to his tactical display. The holographic display showed a chunk of space that included Earth and its moon. A rainbow of different-colored threads, each as thin as a strand of a spider’s web, traced the paths of ships as they circled the planet in search of the intruder. The scene fit Cutter’s description precisely. The Unifieds were everywhere. We had kicked the hornets’ nest.
Cutter pointed to the legend at the bottom. Red lines marked courses traveled by the new generation fighter carriers. There were only two of them. Gold threads marked the paths of three new generation battleships. The computer tracked five Perseus-class battleships and three Perseus-class carriers. Even throwing in cruisers, dreadnaughts, destroyers, and frigates, the Unifieds only had fifty-eight capital ships.
“Ah, look, here comes the cavalry,” Cutter said. He did not sound worried.
The tactical display marked broadcast anomalies with Xs. Seven of them appeared. Three of them dissolved into the red lines that marked new generation fighter carriers. The other four resolved into the gold of new generation battleships.
The U.A. ships concentrated their search on an area close to Earth. Hidden by a stealth shield, we watched the U.A. ships from a half million miles away. They never came near us.
Clearly, Cutter enjoyed spying on the enemy with impunity. He laughed when ships searched in the wrong direction, tracing their flight paths with his finger and making lame jokes.
“Sixty-five ships? Do you think that’s all they have?” I asked.
“They’d have a lot more if you hadn’t stranded them at Olympus Kri,” said Cutter.
We spent another half hour watching their movements. No new ships appeared on the scene though a few ships broadcasted out. “Do you have what you need?” Cutter asked. He almost never addressed me as “sir.” From anyone else I might have taken that as a sign of disrespect but not from him.
“How close can we get to Earth without their spotting us?” I asked.
“They’re already on alert,” Cutter said, a crooked smile forming across his lips. In the time that we had been standing by the tactical display, the multicolored threads representing the various ships had knitted themselves into a fabric. “We’d be taking a risk.”
“How big a risk?” I asked.
“Those ships are traveling at thousands of miles per hour,” he said, pressing a button to expand the ledger. Now it showed single-line readouts on every ship. The battleships and destroyers traveled at a uniform fifty thousand miles per hour.
“The fighter carriers aren’t moving,” I said.
“They’re preparing to launch attack wings,” Cutter said.
“But they don’t know where we are.”
“That’s the standard procedure when you’re dealing with an invisible threat. In another minute, they will start firing particle charges.”
I stared down at the display. With their fighters launched, the Unifieds expanded their net. They had started out between the Earth and its moon; now they had spread their search beyond it.
“Particle charges?” I repeated. I thought about the rickety hull of the ship, with its many patches. “Could we withstand a direct hit?”
“Easily. They don’t use particle charges to destroy enemies; they use the charges to locate them.”
Though I did not keep current with Navy weaponry, I knew what he meant. The charges exploded in bursts of energy-seeking ionized particles that attached themselves to energy fields like the electricity in our shields. In the vacuum of space, those particles would travel thousands of miles, while techs aboard the U.A. ships traced their movements.
“What if we lowered our shields?” I asked.
“How do you feel about radiation poisoning?”
I smiled, and said, “I’m not committing suicide until I can take the Unified Authority down with me.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Who do you trust in a time of war?
I once had a lieutenant named Thomer with a debilitating drug addiction. He used to sit through staff meetings in a near-catatonic state staring at walls, never speaking unless he was spoken to. Against my better judgment, I kept him in place during a big showdown with the Unified Authority Marines. He fought brilliantly and saved lives.
The first time I had met Ray Freeman, I wrote him off as a thug. Now I considered him my closest friend. I needed more friends.
Freeman and I sat in an empty transport. On a ship as small as the cruiser, the transports were the only place you could go to be alone. Freeman sat in the pilot’s chair. “Have you reached Sweetwater and Breeze?” I asked as I sat down in the copilot’s chair.
“I’m here,” said Breeze. Freeman must have routed the signal to the transport’s communications system. We had an audio signal, but the video was off.
“Is Dr. Sweetwater there as well?” I asked, as we only had an audio connection. I heard him through the communications console.
“It’s just me this time. William is checking the results from the survivability survey,” he said.
Freeman sat silent, staring straight ahead through the windshield. He looked big and strong and vanquished, like an evil giant in a fairy tale who has been tricked but not yet killed.
“General, do you remember William’s mentioning the auditors that the Linear Committee has sent to oversee our work? He is leading them on quite a wild-goose chase. I think he has them counting the number of stars in the Galactic Eye.”
I thought he was joking; there were billions of stars in the Eye. When I laughed, he asked, “Why are you laughing?”
“He’s really making them count stars?” I asked. “Aren’t there billions of stars in the Galactic Eye?”
“Seventy-eight billion in the section he has given them,” Breeze said.
“They can’t count seventy-eight billion stars. It would take a lifetime.”
Freeman sat beside me, either not listening to us or not caring what we said. He stared out the window, his face impassive.
“No one is going to count that many stars,” I said.
“He told them it was an accounting irregularity,” Breeze said.
“An accounting error in the stars?” It didn’t make sense.
“He found a glitch in their programming,” Breeze said.
That caught Freeman’s attention. He stared at the communications console, and I saw the old intensity in his