"Just get us there," I yelled.

"As long as we stay close to the big wrecks, they aren't going to shoot," the pilot chanted. "They aren't going to shoot." He made a sharp turn, then darted under the bulbous bow of a derelict battleship. I caught a glimpse of the jagged edges of a torn hull.

"They won't shoot," the pilot repeated. He had to make the transport twist and drop to avoid an outcropping where two of the wrecks had drifted into each other. Transports were not designed for maneuverability. Behind us, the walls of the kettle groaned with every turn.

As we snaked our way between the demolished wreckage of the Mogat Fleet, a U.A. battleship closed in beside us. For a brief moment it was no more than a thousand yards away, and it kept its distance, like a cat waiting for a mouse to leave its hole.

"We have to get across there." The pilot pointed in the direction of the ship.

I looked at the empty stretch ahead, knowing that we would be an easy target the moment we entered it. We could not continue straight ahead, a ship blocked our way. "Cut your engines," I said.

"What?" asked the pilot.

"Cut your engines and put up your shields."

The wing of a dead capital ship stretched out, just at the edge of my vision.

"We'll hit that ship," the pilot said.

"Yeah, it's called the element of surprise," I said.

"Plowing into that wreck shield first could set off an explosion," he reminded me.

"You see any other options?" I asked.

"Hold on tight."

The transport did not slow when the pilot cut its thrusters, it slid forward at that same speed. I braced myself in my seat, helpless, as we drifted toward the wreck. We came in at an angle, skimming off the giant wing like a stone skipping water, the blue-white pane of our front shields shimmering like lightning in the darkness and once again becoming invisible.

The momentum would have bucked me out of my chair if not for the straps holding me in my seat. There were no fires or explosions inside our ship, transports were made to take worse beatings than this.

The collision did not rebound us in the direction we wanted to go, but at least the ricochet sent us in a different direction than the big battleship. Leaning into the windshield, I watched the glowing, shielded hull of the battleship as it drifted away.

Fast and large and flying in a frictionless field, the U.A. ship was unable to turn sharply and follow us. Instead, it fired its particle-beam cannons at us. One of the green beams missed us entirely. The other glanced off the shields around the c.o.c.kpit.

"Do you know where we need to go?" I asked the pilot.

"Yes, sir," the pilot said, as he started to double back into a shoal of ruined ships.

"So get us there!" I yelled.

"There's no cover in that direction!"

Something solid, probably a torpedo, struck us hard along our back. The shot sent us skittering into a spin. Had our engines been damaged, we might have gone cartwheeling into s.p.a.ce, but our tough little transport adapted. The pilot hit the engines, using one set of boosters to stop our spin and another to launch us in what I hoped was the right direction. The yaw from his sudden turn wrenched me to one side.

"Is that where we want to go?" I asked.

"Not quite there," the pilot admitted. As he saw me reach for my pistol, he added, "I know what I'm doing. Don't hit me!"

21:56:42.

I needed to forget about the specking clock.

The debris around us was just as large as our transport. We battered our way through chunks of ship, unrecognizable trash, furniture, and an occasional corpse. We flew past a familiar shape: another transport, one of ours, playing possum. A second or two later, we slid into a tight alley between the busted hull of a destroyer and the ruins of an even bigger ship.

Two glowing U.A. battleships circled us at a leisurely pace, like vultures waiting for their meal. They had all the time in world. We were small, slow, and unarmed.

21:57:10.

"Please tell me we are headed in the right direction?" I asked the pilot.

Warshaw answered the question. The first laser flared out like a spear, striking the battleship head-on. The steady stream of silvery red laser fire lashed at the U.A. ship's bow, striking just below the top deck.

The second of the Unified Authority battleships charged in, heading toward the source of the attack. As it did, another ship fired its lasers. The shields around both U.A. ships flashed brighter and brighter as the second battleship tried to return fire. When the third battleship entered the shooting gallery, Warshaw ordered all of his ships to let loose.

The light from the shields grew brighter and brighter. From where I sat, it looked as if the scene were happening in daylight instead of deep s.p.a.ce. Listless derelicts floating like clouds, their laser beams straight as the spokes of a wheel, fired lasers into the glowing shields of the U.A. ships.

The shields around one of the U.A. ships began to fail, allowing our lasers to strike the unprotected hull. The ship took damage. Bubbles appeared along its bow. The bubbles punctured the outer walls of the ship, and flames appeared. Where there are flames, there must be oxygen-air was leaking from the outer wall of the ship. Death.

We must have drifted within interLink range. Warshaw had created an open channel so that his men could hear what was happening. I heard men cheering and shouting. Warshaw shouted, "One down!"

The guns on the second ship fell silent as its shield failed. The side of the ship bubbled, then burst, spewing flames, men, and debris into s.p.a.ce. Fires danced and died inside the hull, and the ship went dark. The s.p.a.ce around it went dark as well, except for the silver-red threads of laser drilling into the third ship.

My pilot went wild. He cheered with the sailors manning the lasers. He pumped his fists in the air. Listening in to the chatter on the open channel, I heard one man crying and another saying a prayer.

The shield around the third ship changed color from honey gold to a sickly green, and suddenly the ship seemed impervious to our lasers. Pinp.r.i.c.ks of light appeared around the hull, tiny little flashes as if someone had lit up little electrodes in sequence.

"What is . . ." I started to ask the question out loud without meaning to.

Someone said, "They're firing torpedoes," over the interLink. It might have been Warshaw.

The crew of that final Unified Authority battleship did not need to aim, they just trained their torpedoes along the laser beams. The derelicts were ma.s.sive, but brittle and unprotected. One moment, we had seven ships spinning a laser web around the last U.A. battleship, then there were only three. Two of the old derelicts simply went dark when the torpedoes. .h.i.t them. The other two lit up like skyrockets.

The U.A. battleship fired off a second fusillade of torpedoes, then it exploded. Particle beams and torpedoes slammed into it from three different directions, nearly shearing the ship in half. The green shield evaporated as the hull cracked open and twisted. An enormous fireball flashed and vanished, leaving behind a pitch-black carca.s.s.

Franks had arrived. His three battleships flew in tight formation, cutting across the graveyard like eagles coming in for the kill, but there was nothing left to kill.

"I thought you came here to collect equipment, not fight a war," Franks said over an open frequency.

The clock in my visor said the time was 21:59:57.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE.

Brigadier General Kelly Thomer sat slumped in his chair, his arms dangling over the sides, his breakfast barely touched. He had potatoes, eggs, toast, bacon, and orange juice-a meal for a man with an appet.i.te. As I looked at his hollowed cheeks and sunken eyes, I did not think that the man matched the meal. The fluffy yellow kernels of scrambled eggs sat in an untouched pile on his plate. All of the Marines I knew painted their eggs with ketchup.

"Are you planning on eating those eggs or hatching them?" I asked.

He woke from his trance, and said, "Oh yeah," then splashed ketchup on everything but his toast.

More than anything else, Thomer looked bored. When I asked him about his last dose of Fallzoud, he said he had not taken it for days. Fallzoud was a serotonin inhibitor. I got the feeling that Thomer's serotonin had been inhibited past the point of no return.

"How'd it go with the Mogat Fleet?" He asked the question, but he did not strike me as interested in hearing the answer.

"We ran into U.A. battleships," I said.

"That's good," he said.

"No, that's bad," I said. "Live ships. They chased us into the Mogat graveyard."

"Oh," Thomer said. "You know when you found out you were a clone, did it bother you that you never had a family? I mean, I'm kind of grieving my parents, like they died or something." He stared at me and through me, his brown eyes unblinking. He looked halfway down the road to catatonic.

"Why in G.o.d's name are you grieving for people who never existed?" I asked.

"Yeah, but I didn't know that they didn't exist, and now I do. It's kind of like they died a second time. See what I mean?"

There was a certain logic to what he said, twisted as it was.

The conversation left me incredulous. I told Thomer, "Well, I'm sure they would have been really excellent parents, had they ever existed and had they not died," and went to work on my eggs.

Thomer just sat there, staring over his ketchup-covered tray, his body gaunt, his arms nearly limp, his fork hanging off his plate. He had the kind of slack expression I would expect to find on a person who had died in his sleep.

Deciding to change my tactics, I asked, "Did I ever tell you about my friend, Vince Lee?"

Thomer shook his head but said nothing.

"I served with him on this very ship. He was one of the Little Man Seven, one of the seven Marines who survived the battle on Little Man." I normally did not need to explain who the Little Man Seven were, but Thomer looked like he might have moss growing under his brain.

When Thomer said nothing, I went on. "Yeah, well, Vince came back from Little Man a hero. They promoted him from corporal to lieutenant and transferred him to the Grant.

"I lost touch with him for a couple of years after that. The next time I saw him, I was back on Little Man with Ray Freeman." Ray Freeman had been my partner when I was technically absent for the Corps without leave. He was a mercenary, a mountain of a man who could kill enemies with a knife, a bomb, or his bare hands, but he preferred using a sniper rifle. Thomer knew Freeman, he'd contracted out to fight in both the Mogat and New Copenhagen campaigns.

"So Vince turned up on Little Man, only he wasn't himself anymore. He'd gotten himself hooked on Fallzoud and figured out he was a clone, kind of like you.

"Things went from bad to worse after that. He started calling himself the 'King of Clones,' and the next thing you know, he got all of the other clones on his ship hooked. Once he got everyone all good and luded, he told the whole crew they were clones, and n.o.body died from it.

"And that's where things. .h.i.t rock bottom. Vince and his buddies killed all of the natural-borns on the Grant and declared independence."

"What became of him?" Thomer asked.

"I killed him," I said, offering no explanation.

Thomer reacted no more strongly to this bit of information than he might have reacted to my telling him that temperatures were cold in s.p.a.ce. He sat slumped in his seat, eyes vacant, muscles relaxed. I wondered if he even noticed the implicit threat in my story.

"Thomer, you need to get off Fallzoud," I said.

"Why?"

"You're turning into a specking zombie. You say that you haven't shot up for a while, but you're acting like you just dosed."

"Maybe I did take it this morning," he said.

What could I do? When his head was clear, Thomer was the most dependable man I had, a battle-tested Marine with an a.n.a.lytical mind and a reliable temperament. I did not want to write him off as a burnout, but I could not afford to keep this husk of a man as my first in command.

"We have a staff meeting," I said.

Thomer tried a bite of toast, then drank his juice. We tossed our trays down the cleaning line and left the mess. Walking in silence, we headed up to the fleet deck.

Only six officers attended the meeting: Gary Warshaw, Lilburn Franks, Perry Fahey, Kelly Thomer, Philo Hollingsworth, and me. We had ten stars among us, even if they were only "field" stars.

Warshaw had already let me know that he planned to conduct the briefing. As he pointed out, until I got around to killing him, he was in command.

The six of us sat in a room with enough s.p.a.ce for thirty officers, huddled tight around a table and speaking so loudly our voices echoed.

"So, Harris, I hear you got to command your own ship." Fahey sounded almost gleeful. He batted his shadow-dusted eyes at me. Fortunately, the lipstick and rouge had gone away. "Commanding a specking transport with a one-man crew, was that a lifelong ambition?"

Sitting beside Fahey, Warshaw looked at the ground and fidgeted. The battle between Fahey and me had taken on a life of its own, independent of Warshaw. He no longer had any control over it.

Franks stared at Fahey, true annoyance showing on his face.

But Fahey went on. "What did you call your cruise? 'A Marine operation'? Slick, Harris."

"You got a point you're trying to make?" I asked, hoping to get the meeting back on track. We did not have time to waste with all of this infighting. Now that the Golan engineers had branched out into broadcast engines, they could have established some kind of permanent broadcast Link with Earth. The entire Unified Authority might know about our trip to Mogat home world.

"You killed off the Marines you took to Terraneau. You killed off half the sailors you took to the Mogat Fleet. What's next, Harris?" Fahey screamed this last jab, spit flying from his lips. I wondered if maybe he had lost a lover on the Mogat mission. He half stood in his chair, looking ready to leap across the table.

I killed half the sailors I took to the Mogat Fleet? I did not know what he meant at first, but I figured it out quickly. There had to have been men manning the lasers on those derelict ships. Of course there had been men, engineers and technicians, and they died when the Unified Authority battleships fired back at them. But their deaths were not my fault . . . they couldn't be.

"I told you, it wasn't like that," Warshaw said in a subdued voice.

"The speck it wasn't!" Fahey yelled. "I can't believe you're defending this a.s.shole. Who's next, Harris? Are you going to keep killing us off till you have the fleet to yourself?"

"I was in charge, Fahey," Warshaw said.

"You weren't in charge of that specking transport. That was General Harris's show, his 'Marine Operation.' We lost five hundred qualified techs because of this b.a.s.t.a.r.d. That's what happens when you treat a Marine clone . . ."

"One more word, Fahey, and I will slam your a.s.s in the brig so hard you'll be s.h.i.tting cots and bars," I said.

Warshaw put up a hand to stop me. He spoke the words quietly and forcefully as he said, "Stow it, Fahey. One more word out of you, and I'll throw you in the brig myself."

Fahey turned to look at him. The two clones looked like distortions of each other. They were cut from the same helix, but little about them matched. Fahey was young and thin, his makeup making his brown eyes look large and doelike. Warshaw was in his forties, a mighty man with huge muscles and a shaved head.

Their faces were identical, but their expressions could not have been more different. Warshaw looked calm, maybe a little sad. Fahey looked out of control, as wild as a dog pulled from a fight. Whites showed all the way around his eyes, and beads of sweat formed on his forehead.