“What if you sealed me in?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“What if you took tiles off the hull of an SC Fleet ship and sealed them around one of these ships?” I asked. “Would that be enough to protect me?”
“If it were that easy, we could just weld some armor to a working transport, and you’d have flight controls,” Mars said. “The inadequacy goes deeper. It’s structural.”
Listening to him speak, I realized that Mars genuinely wanted me to survive the mission. Hollingsworth and Doctorow might have seen me as an obstacle, but maybe Mars did not.
“Since we can’t launch you in a U.A. ship, we need to clear them out from between your ship and the zone.”
Inspecting the display, I saw what he meant. The battle had apparently taken place on an almost two-dimensional plane, with the Unified Authority ships forming a solid wall between the battlefield and the hot zone. “Can you drag my ship around them?” I asked.
“And Jesus wept.” Mars sighed. “No offense, General, but your grasp of physics never ceases to amaze me. We’ll be lucky if we can get you moving at all; turns and course corrections are out of the question.
“You are going to be in a great big ship being propelled by tiny ships. Just building inertia will be a feat. Newton’s Second Law . . . mass, force, acceleration?
“You are familiar with Sir Isaac Newton, right, sir? ‘An object in motion’? ‘Equal and opposite reaction’? Once we build up enough velocity to drive your wreck toward the zone, you will be traveling in a straight line. If something is in your way, we need to move it out of the way or break it. Those are the only options—clear a path or scrap this mission.”
Having grown up in Unified Authority Orphanage # 553, I took a “Survey of Science” class that introduced chemistry, physics, astronomy, biology, and anatomy all in a ten-week term. I had never studied any of the sciences since.
“Why can’t you just haul the flotsam and jetsam out of the way?” I asked.
“It’s a matter of size,” Mars said. He fingered his remote device, and the holographic display zoomed in on the wrecks blocking the route to the broadcast zone. Originally shown as squiggles and dots, the images now resolved themselves into discrete shapes.
“These five ships here”—he pointed with his device, which made the hulls glow—“are U.A. fighter carriers. They are thirty-three hundred feet long and eight hundred feet wide. We can’t exactly tie a rope to their gunnels and tow them into port.”
He played with his remote again, and this time an orange light appeared around three ships. “These are U.A. battleships, the new ones,” he said. “They’re twenty-six hundred feet long and five hundred feet wide. Three of these ships rammed into each other and got tangled. We think we can clear a path for you by breaking these ships apart. If it doesn’t work . . .”
“We’ll need to scrub the mission,” I guessed.
“Probably so, sir.”
I’d made a tactical error when I told Ellery Doctorow about the broadcast zone so early in the game. With each passing week, Doctorow became more insistent that I leave and take my military with me. After six weeks, he acted up.
The buzz from my communications console woke me from a near sleep. Turning on my side, I saw it was 02:30, sat up, and said, “This better be good.”
“General, someone is breaking into the armory,” Hollingsworth said. That got my attention. The armory was the underground garage, the place with all of the buried weapons.
“Do we know who?” I asked.
“I sent a squad to investigate.”
“What did they find?”
“I’ve lost contact with them, sir.”
I turned on the light and slid off my rack. The only people who would go after those weapons were Doctorow and his militia. He had never struck me as a man who turned to violence; but he if he wanted us off Terraneau badly enough, who knew what he would do.
I told Hollingsworth to muster a single company. “I want them dressed in combat armor and loaded on trucks in five minutes.”
“Won’t we need more men?” Hollingsworth asked. “What if—”
“Put the rest of the base on alert,” I said.
“But what if—”
“You have your orders,” I said.
“Yes, sir,” Hollingsworth said, and signed off. The call to arms sounded a few seconds later. By the time it did, I had my bodysuit on and was fastening my armor.
I thought about the armory. As a show of respect for Doctorow and his government, I had decided against posting guards around the site. Perhaps I had made a mistake. My show of respect, however, only went so far. I might not have posted guards around the caved-in armory, but I’d had my engineers install a discreet security system around the grounds.
I grabbed my M27, left my particle-beam pistol in my locker, and headed out the door.
Sirens wailed. Across the grounds, men in fatigues rushed out of lit barracks, but most of the barracks were dark. Originally built to house twenty-five thousand soldiers, Fort Sebastian was now home to a mere thirty-two hundred men: one thousand naval engineers and twenty-two hundred combat Marines.
Four troop carriers lined up near the gate, their engines purring. Hollingsworth waited beside the first truck, already in his armor. Moments after I arrived, two lines of men in dark green combat armor formed, and a pair of sergeants shepherded the men onto the trucks. Hollingsworth and I rode with the men in the back of the first carrier.
“Has your patrol reported in?” I asked Hollingsworth, as we settled onto the bench at the back of the truck. With twenty-five Marines in camouflaged armor around us, the back of the transport looked like a forest.
“No response, sir,” Hollingsworth said. “The bastards must have hit them.”
“Must have,” I said, though I had my doubts. Doctorow’s militia could not afford to go balls out with us, and they knew it. They outnumbered us, but they did not have the stomach for collateral damage.
I put on my helmet and tried to listen in on my men’s conversations over the interLink, but heard nothing. For a moment I thought something might be wrong with my equipment. I removed my helmet and stared into it. I tapped on the visor, knowing that tapping on the glass would be no more effective at repairing microcircuitry than patting a man on the back would be at removing a brain tumor.
“I’m not Linking,” Hollingsworth said. “It’s like my helmet went deaf.”
As I stared into my helmet, the truck slowed to a stop. A moment later, the sea of men in front of me parted as our driver called out to me from the back of the truck. As I pushed through the crowd, I noticed that all of the men had removed their helmets.
“What is it?” I asked.
“General, I tried to contact you over the interLink, sir, but I could not get a signal.”
“Somebody is jamming the signal,” I said, trying to sound as if I had known that all along.
“Yes, sir,” said the driver. “There’s an overturned jeep about a quarter mile up the road from here.”
“One of ours?” I asked.
“Maybe we should send some men to have a look at it,” Hollingsworth suggested.
“See to it,” I said, deciding to play things safe even as my instincts told me not to worry.
Hollingsworth sent a fire team in to investigate. The team included a rifleman, an automatic rifleman, a grenadier, and a team leader. I watched them as they went up the road, knowing that the time had come to make a tactical decision. I needed to choose between communication and equipment. If we wore our helmets, we would not be able to communicate; but we would have radar, sonar, and optical lenses to provide us a tactical edge. With our helmets off, we would be able to speak; but we would be blind to snipers and traps.
Communications or security? I asked myself. I opted for security.
Using the heat-vision lenses in my visor, I scanned the road ahead and saw no signs of people other than the men I had just sent out. I pulled off my
helmet and barked out orders.
“We’re hiking in from here,” I told Hollingsworth and the noncoms who had gathered around me. “Tell your men to stay in a tight formation and keep their helmets on until we give the signal to remove them.
“There may be snipers out there,” I said. “If there are, I want to see them before they hit us.”
As we fanned out, the men we sent to investigate the jeep were already on their way back. We sent four men, but eight men returned.
“What happened?” I asked the patrol leader.
“They hit the jeep,” the man said.
“Was anybody hurt?”
“The jeep’s in bad shape,” one of them said. With their jeep destroyed and the interLink down, the men in Hollingsworth’s original patrol could neither proceed nor call for help. Their only option had been to dig in and wait for backup.
The terrain was mostly flat, though much of it was buried under mounds of debris. We secured the area quickly, then moved forward.
We reached the jeep. It lay on its side, all of its wheels shredded. Somebody had gouged a two-inch-deep trench across the road, then filled it with spikes.
I knelt beside the spikes and tried to pull one out. They were wedged in tightly. It took a little work, but I managed to pry one out of the ground.
“Bastards,” Hollingsworth muttered.
Whoever set this trap wanted to get his point across without starting a war, I thought. Placing a mine would have been easier. It would also have been lethal.
“Do you think the militia did this?” asked Hollingsworth.
“Why don’t you ask your pal Doctorow,” I said. “I hear you two are tight.”
Hollingsworth heard me, but he did not respond. He stood still and silent for a few seconds, then excused himself to go check on his men. The stupid son of a bitch should have known it would get back to me.
I stood and looked off across the landscape. If the militia had time to set these spikes, they’d had time to set up more surprises. None of the traps would be lethal, just something to get our attention.
The street leading to the government compound was clear, but the ground on either side of the road was knee-deep in the debris of buildings destroyed long ago. Two-thirds of a mile ahead of us, the abandoned government complex rose out of the ground like small buttes in a desert. In the middle of the buildings, a wide gap marked the target—the building we had knocked down during our battle with the Unified Authority.
There might be bombs ahead. There might be snipers.
“See if you can contact Fort Sebastian,” I told Hollingsworth though I knew it was useless. “I want to know if they’ve seen anything.”
A moment later, he said, “Nothing, sir.”
“Maybe we should send a man back to tell them what’s going on,” Hollingsworth suggested.
It was a good idea but not necessary. “Not yet,” I said. “Not until I know what’s out here.”
“Yes, sir.”
It was just after 03:00. The sky was dark except for the stars and a crescent of moon so thin it looked like it had been made with a single stroke of a pen. I put on my helmet and searched the area using night-for-day lenses, then I switched to heat vision. On the off chance that the locals had snipers hiding along the side of the road, I hoped to spot their heat signatures. The lenses showed me nothing but a barren landscape giving off very little heat.
As I thought about it, I became more convinced that Doctorow would not sanction a firefight. He would not send snipers, but he might have had his demolitions experts set some traps. Doctorow had a couple of retired Navy SEALs among his troops. They had top-notch demolitions training and field experience.
While the rest of us waited by the overturned jeep, a team went out to look for IEDs. None of my men had extensive demolitions training, and it showed. One of my dupes accidentally set off a trap. He might have stepped on a cap, or broken a laser stream, or possibly kicked a trip wire. Whatever he did, he triggered fireworks, sending a fifty-foot phosphorous geyser of red-and-white sparks into the air. The man closest to the fireworks fell on his ass as if he’d been shot, but he’d only been startled. They hadn’t set off a specking mine, after all, just a flare display.
Once we knew the only traps were for show, we pushed ahead. We moved slowly, spreading out over a rolling field of rubble and debris. Bits of glass reflected the dark sky along the ground. I stepped on small shards, grinding them into the dust under my armored boots. Larger blades only shattered. We did not worry about making noise as we covered the silent landscape. After the fireworks, we were pretty sure that any hostiles in the area would know we arrived.
Using the telescopic lenses in my visor, I located the remains of the fence we’d erected around the armory as a perimeter. They might have used trucks or tractors; someone had torn the chain link aside, leaving only the skeleton of a badly twisted frame standing.
I allowed my men to approach the edge of the grounds, then had them stop. I searched for heat, then holes, then radiation. The area came up clean.
“Have your men secure the area,” I ordered the platoon leaders. “No one gets in or out.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” he said.
“The rest of you, spread out and look for holes, traps, bombs, tunnels, cameras, anything. I want to know if anyone has been digging or if this is a wild-goose chase.”
“What about snipers?” Hollingsworth asked.
“If you find one, shoot him.”
“Yes, sir,” said Hollingsworth.
I looked across the area. Somebody had planted a row of six flagpoles along the far end of the field, just beyond the wreckage of the underground garage. Oddly shaped black flags hung from each of the poles.
I went for a closer look, putting on my helmet as I walked, skirting around the wreckage. As I stepped closer, I saw that it was not flags that hung from the poles but antique gas masks. The masks were not so much a warning as a message.
At the base of the poles sat a small silver box, no larger than a beer bottle. I approached the box for a closer look, already afraid that I would not like whatever I found. It might have been a small canister filled with any one of a million deadly gases or germs. It could also have been a bomb. It wasn’t. It was a device for jamming communications, and my interLink gear came back to life the moment I fired my M27 into it.
I contacted Hollingsworth using the interLink. “Contact the fort, tell them to call off the alert,” I said.
“You got the Link working,” Hollingsworth said, sounding surprised.
I suspected we would find a bomb or some other weapon back at the base, but it would be disarmed or maybe just an empty shell. The locals were letting me know that it was high time for the Marines to leave their town. I only hoped Hollingsworth realized that the message was meant for him as much as me.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ellery Doctorow dropped by Fort Sebastian at my request later that morning.
I had the guards hold him at the front gate as I drove out to meet him. Doctorow left his car in an outside parking lot, and we rode together in my jeep.
“Someone left us a special delivery last night,” I said, as we passed through the gate.
“Anything in particular?” asked Doctorow, not even pretending to sound surprised.
He was better dressed than usual. Instead of his customary combination of fatigues and civilian clothes, he wore slacks, a light button-up blue shirt, and a necktie. His long hair was pulled back into a ponytail. On this visit, Doctorow behaved more like a politician than a soldier or a chaplain.
I slowed as we approached a large truck bearing a fifteen-foot-long aluminum canister. NOXIUM was stenciled across the side of the canister in turkey red paint. Six antique gas masks hung from a rack at the back of the truck.
I stopped beside the truck and pulled one of the gas masks from the rack. Draping it over my left hand, I held it out so that Doctorow could get a better look at it. “Know what this is?” I asked.
“Yes it is. I’d never seen one of these before, so I looked it up on the mediaLink,” I said as I spun it and studied it from different angles. “This one isn’t for soldiers. It was made for firefighters. Marines don’t use them at all, of course. We have airtight armor with a built-in rebreather.”
The longer we hovered around the gas canister, the more uncomfortable Doctorow seemed to become. He did not look at me directly; nor did he seem to want to look at the mask or the canister. Instead, he stared at the road ahead.
“Firefighters don’t use these masks anymore, either. Did you know that?”
“I wasn’t aware of that,” he said, still not meeting my gaze.
“Nope. They use combat armor . . . Marine combat armor. At least they used to. See, most Marines come in one size, being clones, so the armor comes in one size as well. They custom-make armor for officers, but that’s expensive . . . really expensive; so firefighters had to use standard-issue enlisted gear. You know how they got around the single-size issue? They hired retired servicemen, you know, clones. Makes sense, doesn’t it?
“They can’t do that now, though, because they’re out of clones. Now they probably use natural-borns. I suppose they could make robots, but that’s even more expensive than custom-fitted gear. It’s so specking—”
“All very fascinating, General, but there’s no call for profanity,” Doctorow said, interrupting me just as I was closing in on the punch line.
“Oh, sorry about that,” I said. “I got carried away.” I laughed. “Do you know what this is?” I pointed to the canister as I slung the gas mask back on the rack.
Doctorow barely glanced at the back of the truck before saying, “I’d say somebody was trying to send you a message.”
“Yes indeed, it would appear so,” I agreed. “Some of the boys and I went out on the town last night. We found this waiting for us when we returned home. Fortunately, the canister was empty.”
“That is fortunate. As I understand it, Noxium gas makes quite a mess,” Doctorow said.
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