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.
“It looks like an old-fashioned breathing apparatus.” He barely gave the mask a glance before answering.
“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.
“Quite a mess. Quite a mess, indeed. In fact, it’s so messy that these gas masks would have done nothing to protect us. Even combat armor is useless against this kind of gas. Did you know that?”
“I think I have heard something along that line,” Doctorow admitted.
I thought of an old memory and laughed. “One of my old platoon sergeants had some men who were killed by Noxium. Do you know how he got their bodies out of the armor? He washed them out with a fire hose. No joke. He said the Noxium ate their bodies until all that was left was this flesh-colored jelly, sort of a coagulated goo that washed out in clumps.”
“This is all very fascinating, but—” Doctorow began.
I cut him off. “Now a canister this size, if it had been full, it would have held enough gas to wipe out half of Norristown. You’d have been cleaning out Fort Sebastian with a fire hose, but you’d also have needed to hose out every apartment, house, and car from Ford Street to West Angle, almost half of town.”
“Is that so?” asked Doctorow. “I heard Noxium gas evaporates so quickly that it doesn’t spread.”
“Oh, you see now, that’s just a myth. The truth is, Noxium doesn’t evaporate at all. It dies,” I said, stating information that any schoolkid would know. I was patronizing the bastard, and he knew it. “It’s not really a gas, it’s a cloud of microscopic organisms, voracious little bastards that will bore through anything they can sink their teeth into.”
“There’s no cause to use—”
I ignored him and went on. “The little bastards die quickly when you release them in small concentrations. Unleash a pint or two, and they die in a matter of seconds. That’s why Noxium is such an effective tool for capturing enemy strongholds. You just shoot a few Noxium shells over the wall, and the gas turns the occupants into goo, then you capture their base and wash the enemy out with a hose.
“But that’s with a small amount . . . maybe the amount of gas you’d get from a half-gallon shell. With a big batch like this, the microbes insulate each other from the atmosphere, and the cloud doesn’t go away. If this much had spilled, the cloud would have spread all the way over to your part of town. My Marines wouldn’t have been the only ones receiving the message; Sarah and Ava would have gotten it as well.”
“How very fortunate for all of us that the canister was empty,” Doctorow said.
“You wouldn’t happen to have any idea who left us this message?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t know anything about it,” Doctorow protested, feigning alarm. “General, I am a peaceable man.”
“Ellery, I’m not accusing anyone.”
Doctorow seemed to regain his nerve. He said, “I don’t think it was meant as a threat. Whoever left it, they probably meant it as a reminder.”
“Probably so,” I agreed.
“I happen to agree with whoever did this. It’s high time you left,” Doctorow said. “You and your men have outstayed your welcome.”
“Does that go for all of us?” I asked. “Colonel Hollingsworth is under the impression that you only object to me.”
“A simple misunderstanding,” said Doctorow. “Don’t take this personally, General Harris, but I don’t really like having a military presence in my city. Armies are a tool of intimidation, and I don’t believe governments should be in the business of intimidation.”
“But you don’t mind my Corps of Engineers,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“If you are evicting me and my men, I will need to take my engineers with me,” I said. “How are you going to rebuild Norristown without them?”
“I would prefer for you to leave them, they make a valuable contribution,” Doctorow said.
“They’re military clones, just like the rest of us,” I pointed out. “They came off the same assembly line and grew up in the same orphanages. The only difference between Scott Mars and Philo Hollingsworth is their training. When I give the order to leave, Mars and his men go with the rest of us.”
“Are you threatening me, General?”
I answered with a wry smile, gestured with my head toward the empty gas canister, and said, “Not me, I’m just answering your message.”
“I have every intention of leaving Terraneau as quickly as possible,” I told Doctorow as I started the jeep. “I want to get off this specking rock, the sooner the better.”
“Yes, you said that two months ago, General, but you’re still here,” Doctorow said. The farther we drove from the empty canister, the more he seemed to relax.
“Then you will be glad to know why I called for this little meeting,” I said, and I told him that we were just about ready to send a ship through the broadcast zone. He listened carefully and said nothing. He probably did not care whether the plan worked or failed so long as it got me away from his precious society.