their spy ship back to retrieve it.
When their spy ship returned, we would give her a proper reception.
CHAPTER TWO
The spy ship sneaked out of the anomaly the way mice sneak out of their holes—quickly, carefully, silently. Anomalies are like electrical tears in the fabric of space. They occur when ships travel using broadcast technology. In this case, the Unified Authority spy ship had a built-in broadcast engine that enabled her to make the hundred- thousand-light-year jump from Earth to Terraneau instantaneously. She arrived in Scutum-Crux space approximately fourteen million miles from Terraneau, far enough out of casual surveillance range that we would not have noticed the disturbance had we not been looking for it. With her stealth generator, the spy ship was invisible to our equipment. Only the anomaly showed on the readouts.
The spy ship was small and unarmed, the naval equivalent of a hummingbird. She had the ability to slip in behind enemy lines and listen to our communications, track our movements, and watch our production without threat of detection.
But this ship had been detected. We saw where she broadcasted into our space, and we knew her final destination. It didn’t matter that we lost track of the ship as she traveled the fourteen million miles from the anomaly to the satellite because we knew precisely where she would end her journey.
She was the mouse in the night, we were the cat. When she materialized beside the satellite, we would pounce. Even if we never saw the ship, our equipment would detect a momentary energy fluctuation when she lowered her shields to retrieve the satellite. She would be vulnerable when she lowered her shields.
I had no sympathy for the crew of the spy ship; they had come to the Scutum-Crux Arm to watch people die. Instead of offering assistance, the bastards placed a satellite so that scientists could study the death of an entire planet.
The satellite was smaller than a golf ball and armed with a camera so powerful that it could pick out a single grain of sand in an open desert. The satellite’s unblinking eye undoubtedly recorded us as we pulled our shuttle out of the tunnel and launched into space. It must have spotted us setting our trap as well; but the crew of the spy ship would have no access to those data until they retrieved the satellite.
“Anything?” I asked Cutter. Under normal circumstances, I would have used ship-to-ship communications; but the spy ship might have overheard us. Instead, we used the short-range interLink, a network designed for battlefield communications.
Cutter spoke to a tech officer, then said, “Nothing yet, sir.”
We kept our communications short in case the Unifieds tried to listen in.
Freeman and I watched the scene on a small video screen as we waited inside the kettle of a transport. The screen showed a panoramic view of open space. Terraneau spun in a corner of the screen, its oceans still blue but hidden behind a global cloud of smoke and ash. The alien attack had erased the green from the continents. Gone, too, were the ice caps that had once marked the poles at the top and bottom of the planet. Soot from the attack had turned the atmosphere a rusty gray.
“You’re still on our side, right?” I asked Freeman.
Ray Freeman, one of the deadliest men who ever lived, said nothing as he watched the screen. The man was huge, seven feet tall. He was wide and thick and covered with muscle. He was also the last of his kind. In a galaxy that had outlawed ethnicities a century ago, Ray Freeman was proudly African-American. A lot of men saw him as someone to fear. I admired him.
Freeman was a human sphinx. He answered questions only when he felt like answering. Generally, he ignored them. He was a mercenary, but money did not determine his loyalty.
“Why help us?” I asked. “Why not the Unifieds?”
“I’m not taking sides,” said Freeman.
“The hell you’re not,” I said. “We’re about to attack a Unified Authority boat. If you don’t care who wins, you don’t belong on this ride.”
I trusted Freeman though he had been vague about his loyalties. Freeman was not the type who started the mission as your friend, then shot you in the back. He made his alliances public and sniped his targets from a mile away. In my experience, Freeman’s loyalty was never in question.
“I don’t care about sides, just saving lives,” Freeman said. “That’s it. It’s not about loyalty. The only planet the Unifieds care about is Earth; you’re out to save what’s left of the galaxy.”
“What’s left of the galaxy …” Before the first alien invasion, the Unified Authority had 180 colonized planets scattered around the Milky Way. The aliens “sleeved” 178 of them. The Enlisted Man’s Empire, a nation composed of the cloned military that the Unified Authority had ejected, reestablished contact with 23 of those planets before the aliens began incinerating rescued planets.
Freeman’s entire family had been on the first planet the Avatari, the aliens, incinerated. Having lost everyone he might have ever loved, the galaxy’s best professional killer became a self-appointed savior.
When dealing with people like Ray Freeman, as if there were anyone else like Freeman, there is no room for ambiguity. I decided to reconfirm his motivation. “As long as we’re saving more lives than the Unifieds, you’re on our side?”
He nodded.
“Good enough for me,” I said, though inwardly I still had doubts. The clones of the Enlisted Man’s Empire had been bred to save the lives of natural-borns, and the Unified Authority had thanked us for it with one betrayal after another. I felt a need to save the natural-born residents of our planets, but I could not come up with any logical reason to do it.
Satisfied that I could trust Freeman for now, I turned my attention to the mission at hand. “Cutter, are the traps in position?” I asked over the commandLink.
Asking that question was my form of fidgeting. Captain Don Cutter was a good officer, not the kind of man who left things undone. Still, we were dealing with an invisible foe, and we would only get one shot at the bastards. It was one of those pivotal moments on which the future hung. If we failed to bag that spy ship, the war would end before it began.
“Yes, sir,” said Cutter. He spoke in a whisper.
Five transports floated within a few hundred yards of the satellite. They were not debris from the graveyard of ships but fully functional birds Cutter had placed himself. One of the transports carried a team of engineers. Freeman and I sat in the kettle of the second. The others sat facing away from the satellite, their rear hatches open, their kettles carefully packed with explosives. When the spy ship lowered her shields, we would use these transports like old-fashioned cannons.
The bombs were not especially powerful. We needed to cripple the spy ship, not decapitate her. I didn’t care if the crew lived or died; I didn’t owe the bastards. The ship’s computers, on the other hand, they mattered.
Five million people had just died on Terraneau, and millions more had their necks on the chopping block on other planets. The key to saving them was on those computers. We could not win the war with the aliens; but armed with the right information, we might survive it.
“How long has it been since you detected the anomaly?” I asked Cutter.
“Fifty-two minutes, sir,” he said.
“Maybe they know we’re here.” I said the words out loud but meant them for myself.
“Not likely,” said Cutter.
