activate and man the systems, they had to keep them a closely guarded secret.
Manpower turned out to be less and less of a problem. Each platform required a crew of about twenty, since much of it operated under computer control. And every tenday there were more defections from House de Maris and others. There had been something like ten thousand men in various Syndonese POW camps. And while most had not been part of the Two Thousand, they all had suffered similar depravations. Charlie’s name had become a symbol for opposition to useless, pointless wars, and the result was a steady stream of highly trained and experienced spacers and their families. And many of the women wanted to serve in the same capacity as their husbands. Charlie’s consent to train the women as combatants occasionally raised a few eyebrows, but more often than not was accepted with little more than a shrug.
Cesare had stocked the barracks on the platforms with nonperishable foodstuffs, so that was one issue they didn’t have to worry about. But Charlie didn’t have enough crewmen to fully operate the platforms’ weapons, so he decided to staff them with couples, married or otherwise.
Now that they knew the layout and status of the platforms, each verification team carried a full stock of supplies for the barracks, just in case some of the nonperishables had perished. And Charlie had purchased a number of in-system shuttles to ferry crews back and forth, driving him even further into debt. Winston had warned him that his credit would soon run out.
But what else could he do?
It was Roger who discovered the facilities on Luna in the Overlord schematics. Charlie hadn’t noticed them because he’d asked for a schematic of the entire Overlord system, which meant the scale on his screen had been adjusted to view the entire Sol system, and Luna was too small a detail to show up on such a scale except as a single red dot. Roger had been reviewing the locations of Overlord’s spare parts inventory with an eye toward repairs on the platforms, and he’d noticed that much of it was located on Luna. So when he’d zoomed in on the Starfall schematics, with the Overlord schematics active, it showed that large defensive batteries pocked the surface of the moon itself, with a number of power plants buried far beneath old, radioactive hot spots, a nice way of keeping them hidden from anything but a detailed examination. But what intrigued them most was a large facility beneath Starfall. To reach it, the schematics directed them to a special lift.
“How deep does this fucking thing go?” Roacka demanded.
Roger answered, “From the schematic, I’d guess about three hundred meters.”
They waited several more seconds before the doors of the lift opened with a whoosh. The lights in the room beyond turned on automatically, revealing what appeared to be a small reception area, with a counter behind which a guard or receptionist might sit. They stood immersed in an eerie silence for several moments, but when the lift doors began to close, Roacka said, “Fuck this,” forced the doors to reopen, and marched into the reception area. The only exit visible, other than the lift, was a door to one side and behind the receptionist’s desk. Roacka marched up to the door, opened it, and held it for Charlie. “You want to do the honors, lad?”
As Charlie stepped through the door the lights in the room beyond came on, and he found a bullpen of desks, though no indication as to their purpose. There were a number of doors on the periphery of the bullpen, and a quick glance through a few of them merely revealed simple offices. It reminded Charlie of a large operations center of some sort. The far wall appeared to be transparent plast, and as Charlie approached it he called over his shoulder, “Roger, see if you can bring up some of these systems—especially the lights—and find out what we’re dealing with here.”
Pitch darkness beyond the transparent plast windows hid whatever lay there. Charlie stood there staring into nothing for several moments until Roger called, “Got it.” A moment later the room beyond the windows lit up and he tried to make sense of what he saw. The room in which he stood appeared to be a few meters above a warehouse floor, with rows of shelves two or three meters high stretching into the distance. Seth stopped beside him, stood there for a moment with his