top to inspect the joint. He reached for the lid to the electrical panel, paused, then opened it.
“Not sure it will work?” I asked.
“It’s going to work perfectly.”
“Then why are you opening it?”
He said, “Because I am here and it’s there and that’s what engineers do,” a hint of self-mockery in his voice.
I patted the fuselage of the fighter the way a man might pat his horse, and asked, “How many of these are we taking?”
An engineer lit a laser torch under the wing of a nearby Tomcat. Mars shaded his eyes from the glare. He squinted toward me, and said, “None.”
“What?”
“They’re all going to Terraneau.”
“What the hell are you going to use them for on Terraneau?” I asked. “You’re setting up a colony. We’re the ones going into battle.”
“It wasn’t my idea—Holman’s orders.”
“Holman?” Hearing who gave the orders, I felt like I’d been kicked in the gut.
The blue-white light of the laser welder flashed and flickered along the hull of the fighter. It lit one side of Mars’s face. The acrid tang of melting metal filled the air.
“He says we need them for insurance in case the Unifieds get around you,” said Mars. “Harris, don’t worry. You’re going to outnumber the Earth Fleet a hundred to one.”
I once saw a man pour a bag with fifty goldfish into a tank with five piranhas. There were ten goldfish for each of the predators, but they lasted less than a minute. Each time a piranha snapped at a goldfish, it left behind nothing more than orange-gold scales and the tips of the fins.
Was the empty knot in my chest formed by frustration or disappointment? “Those fighters could save a lot of lives during an invasion,” I said. I was also thinking,
When Navy ships go to battle, the Marines inside of them sit helplessly as they wait for their turn to fight.
“General, what you really need to do is appeal to a higher power,” Mars said.
“I know, Holman’s orders.”
“No, there’s a higher authority than Jim Holman …God helps those who ask for help. You need to pray.”
A rush of anger ran through my brain.
“I’ve never had much luck with prayer,” I said. I didn’t mind Freeman’s sermons because he had more questions than doctrine. For Freeman, God was a concept that had recently started to make sense. Scott Mars, on the other hand, bought into Christianity with all of its hooks, lines, and sinkers.
He accepted all its voodoo. He believed that a virgin gave birth to a man who walked on water when he wasn’t changing it into wine. Mars believed in blind men seeing and burning bushes. Make up a story about a dead man rising from his grave, and Lieutenant Mars would praise God and declare it a miracle.
Freeman tried to extract the truth from the mythology. Mars swallowed it all in one great gulp of faith.
He followed me out from under the wing of the Tomcat, and asked, “Have you ever actually prayed?”
Not sure how I would react if he offered to pray with me, I admitted that I had never actually dropped to my knees.
He smiled, and said, “Whoever came up with that thing about there not being any atheists in the trenches never met you, Harris. I’ll pray for you.”
“While you’re asking God to spare my synthetic soul, would you mind asking Him to do something about U.A.’s specking shielded armor? That’s the miracle I’d pray for …if I ever prayed.”
Mars smiled, and said, “God works in ineffable ways.”
I said, “So do broadcast stations. If, by some miracle, we find a working broadcast station when we get to Earth, maybe I’ll see you again.”
Lieutenant Mars saluted, and said, “Wouldn’t that be a miracle.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
We loaded men and guns onto the transports as pilots boarded their fighters. In another minute, our ships would enter the broadcast system, and the invasion would begin. We’d emptied every corner of the Enlisted Man’s Empire. Every working ship would either escort barges or join the invasion.
One thousand two hundred thirty-six ships now prepared to enter Earth space. We had sixty-eight fighter carriers and two hundred battleships. We had Tomcats, Phantoms, and Harriers by the hundreds. Our landing force included one thousand helicopter gunships and nearly ten thousand transports, which we would use to deploy our three million Marines.
We had an overwhelming force. Why did I not feel confident?
When Freeman came to see me, he wore his armor and carried his go-pack. He had a sniper rifle, an M27, laser and particle-beam weapons, and grenades. Strong, smart, and a masterful assassin, he could pulverize men with his fists or snipe at them from two miles away. He knew how to set charges and hack into computer systems. Having Freeman on our side was reason enough to feel positive. Ray Freeman could tip battles and win wars.
“I ran into Scott Mars. He says he’s going to pray for us,” I said.
Freeman certainly heard me, but he did not respond. He stepped into my billet, a seven-foot giant as wide around the chest as a wheelbarrow, with ebony skin and scars on his scalp. The improbably wide sleeves of his armor hid the muscles in his arms.
“I told him to keep his prayers and give us fighters with U.A. torpedoes.”
Freeman asked, “You go to tell him good-bye?”
“Something like that,” I said.
Freeman placed his little two-way communicator on my desk. “We need to warn Sweetwater and Breeze about the invasion.”
“Warn them? Ray, they aren’t people. They’re software. It’s like kissing your bunk good-bye. You might have had some good times together, but that doesn’t make it human.”
Freeman placed the communicator on the desk for me to handle the security codes. I felt the weight of his eyes on my neck and the weight of my words on my conscience.
Living, breathing men would die today. I might die. I had somehow convinced myself that I did not have time to worry about virtual people. I was an asshole. William Sweetwater and Arthur Breeze deserved better. If the Unifieds suspected that the scientists had helped us, they would pull the plug on them. Alive or not, they would cease to exist for having helped us …having helped me.
I muttered, “Next you’re going to want me to tuck them in bed,” but it was just for show. Like Freeman, I’d come to think of the scientists as human.
“Hello, Harris. Has your invasion begun?”
The screen did not show an odd pairing of scientists in a lab, it showed a man sitting at an oak desk in a richly furnished office. Instead of Sweetwater’s gravelly voice or Breeze’s low whisper, this man had deep resonance and polish. He had the voice of a politician.
Tobias Andropov, the youngest member of the Linear Committee, sat alone at his desk. He looked into the
