“Wild Bill” Grace, the senior member of the Linear Committee, stood at the podium smiling at his audience. Gordon Hughes, the chairman of the Confederate Arms, stood behind him. Both men smiled so freely you would never guess that they had recently sent navies to annihilate each other. Behind them, two flags hung from crossed staffs—the Unified Authority stars and bars and the Confederate Arms map of the galaxy.
Seated at the back of the podium were Admiral Brallier, General Smith, and several other officers I recognized. An empty seat marked Admiral Brocius’s place. He was in exile back on the Central Cygnus Fleet. He had sent Freeman to die along with me and my platoon. He had deceived Ray Freeman just as he had the rest of us; but there was no programming in Freeman’s natural-born brain to cause him to overlook the indiscretion. Freeman would take his revenge. Once he learned that we had survived, Brocius fled to the safety of his ships.
Admiral Brallier looked particularly pleased with himself, sitting beside Brocius’s empty seat.
Brocius’s obsession with house odds had done him in. He tried to hedge his bets against the Mogats by sacrificing the Marines. Afraid that Freeman might try to avenge me, he improved the odds against Freeman by sending him to die on a wild-goose chase. Crowley was never on the Mogat planet; he died fighting his former allies when the Mogats attacked the Confederate Arms as they battled for control of the fleet. Yoshi Yamashiro gave us that scrap of information on our way back to Earth.
“Wild Bill” held a single sheet of paper. “Perhaps we can get started,” he said. “I’d like to start by introducing my colleague for this occasion, Mr. Gordon Hughes, chairman of the Confederate Arms.”
The reporters in the gallery obviously recognized the former Speaker of the House and chairman of the Confederate Arms Treaty Organization, but the introduction drew anxious whispers from the crowd.
“This afternoon at 2:30 Washington, DC, time, the Unified Authority and Confederate Arms launched an invasion into Mogat space,” Grace continued.
Judging by the gasps of the reporters in the audience, you might have thought that Grace had tossed a live grenade into the gallery. Some people merely raised their hands to signal questions. Others tried to push right up to the dais.
Grace ignored the pandemonium and continued.
“We sent an invasion force of sixty thousand Unified Authority Marines and two hundred Navy SEALs to the home world of the Morgan Atkins Movement. At the same time, the Confederate Arms sent its forty-ship self-broadcasting fleet to support the invasion.
“I am pleased to announce that the invasion was an unqualified success. The Mogat threat has been eliminated. We have destroyed their base of operations, and we have destroyed their self-broadcasting fleet.
“I think it is safe to say that we have closed the door once and for all on the Morgan Atkins uprising.
“Are there any questions?”
Reporters pushed and shoved to climb in front of each other. One man actually grabbed another by the back of his collar and yanked him out of the way.
Grace selected a pretty female reporter and pointed to her.
“When did you create an alliance with the Confederate Arms, and does this mean the Confederate Arms will be rejoining the Republic?”
“Perhaps I could answer that,” Gordon Hughes said, stepping up to join “Wild Bill.”
“Ambassadors from the Unified Authority approached us several months ago. As you may know, our alliance with the Mogats ended quickly…”
This might have been the hundredth time I replayed the briefing. It was a work of art that mystified me. Grace and Hughes put on a splendid show. They never hinted that the invasion had ended in the total annihilation of an entire planet. They never mentioned the Japanese Fleet. They sure as hell never mentioned that they’d left tens of thousands of Marines stranded or that they annihilated 200 million civilians. To listen to those two prophets, you would have thought that we won a conventional battle on Mogatopolis and that the long-dead Morgan Atkins handed over his sword from his grave.
“You’re not watching that briefing again?” Freeman asked as he stepped into the courtyard.
Including the question-and-answer period, the briefing lasted two full hours, and no one ever bothered to ask the most important question: “Who was helping the Mogats?”
If their performance was any indication, Grace and Hughes did not believe the Mogats had any help. The Confederate Arms ships circling the planet did not see any bright lights or alien ships.
I removed my shades. I was sitting on a deck chair, in an open-air courtyard, in a villa on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. I’d stayed here four years earlier, shortly after I was promoted to sergeant. When I received my honorable discharge three months ago, I marched off the base and boarded a plane to Hawaii. I rented the villa and had been staying here ever since.
I liked the sun and the warm air in Hawaii. I liked it when it rained, and I liked the sweet smell in the air following the rain. I liked going to the beach. Most of all, I liked the feeling that I was out of the picture.
“You think I spend too much time watching the briefing?” I asked as I picked up the Space Bible I’d placed beside my chair. The book was six hundred pages long. I’d read it five times now.
“You spend too much time with the book, too,” Freeman said. “If you wanted to become a Mogat, you should have done it before you helped kill everyone on that planet.”
Freeman telling jokes…what a world.
His joke struck a nerve. I had helped kill 200 million people. Two hundred million. I didn’t feel bad about the soldiers, but the faces of the civilians still haunted me day and night. I was obsessed. I was obsessed with that briefing and everything Grace and Hughes did not divulge. I was obsessed with the Space Bible and everything Morgan Atkins had told the world.
When the book first appeared, people dismissed it as a hoax. As far as the public knew back then, Atkins had died during the Liberaton invasion, and that was all they knew. When evidence emerged that Atkins had not died and that the book was authentic, everyone dismissed his book as the work of a crackpot.
Now that I had read the book, I did not blame them. In it, Atkins talked about uncovering an alien city buried in the core of a planet in the center of the galaxy. He referred to the “radiant being” who guarded the city as a “Space Angel.” The angel, he said, warned him that his race would soon invade our galaxy. Atkins said he created an alliance with the creature. He would unite the galaxy under his control, and the radiant aliens would leave mankind alone. That was why he needed to subvert the government, so he could set up a government of his own. He wanted to save us. Morgan Atkins was actually the good guy—no wonder no one believed it.
It sounded ridiculous. From what I had seen, Atkins told the truth about some things, but I had trouble envisioning that “Space Angel” as a benevolent partner. I did not think the Unified Authority would be able to stand up to those aliens. I abandoned the Christian Bible and began studying the Space Bible because Morgan Atkins had a more powerful God.
“You think I should stop reading, I’ll stop reading,” I said. I tossed the Space Bible back on the table.
“You can’t stay here forever,” Freeman said. “You’re not going to be able to sit this one out.”
Now Freeman, a man who never swore allegiance to anything or anyone, was lecturing me about patriotism and civic duty.
“If we cannot stop them, they’re going to kill everybody,” Freeman said. “You might as well commit suicide as sit this one out.”
“Stop them? Are you joking? We barely beat the specking Mogats. These guys will eat us alive.”
Off in the distance, waves rolled in and out of the bay below the villa. I heard the sound of the waves. A breeze blew off the ocean and rustled the leaves around the garden. The sun burned hot and bright overhead.
Part of me actually believed that Freeman was talking to me. Sometimes it was Freeman who came to talk me into rejoining the war, sometimes it was Philips, and sometimes it was Thomer; but it was all in my imagination.
Philips and Thomer and the rest of my platoon remained in Washington, DC. Given the option to retire, they’d all reen-listed. Some young lieutenant now commanded my platoon. Yoshi Yamashiro and the Japanese returned to Earth. The Unified Authority allowed them to settle on the original islands of Japan. His four battleships now orbited the Earth.
I did not know where Ray Freeman was. He simply vanished while we orbited Earth. He said he would join this fight, but he had no intention of fighting it as a Marine or a soldier. Not Freeman. He was a mercenary.
But I had no intention of fighting or of rejoining the Marines. The U.A. had betrayed me too many times. Yes, I would die, too; but at least I would not die protecting a government that had tricked me and left me to die. One thing seemed certain, we were all going to die.
Yet deep inside I knew I was just fooling myself. Sooner or later, I would get sucked in again. After all, I was a military clone. Like it or not, I was government property, and the final battle was coming.