CHAPTER


TWENTY-FOUR

En Route to Gilbert’s Corners

No matter what their commanders thought, the soldiers on security duty northeast of Gilbert’s Corners obviously didn’t think there was a threat of Confederation ground action in the area—their light discipline was miserable. The task light that was on at the communications desk shone clearly through windows left half-shuttered to allow fresh air to circulate through the low building.

Not only that, but the commander of the guard station didn’t bother to place sentries or listening posts outside the building. When Sergeant Williams looked through one of the windows, he saw that nobody was monitoring the sensor array, either.

The guard shack had five rooms—a command center with the comm equipment, the sensor monitors, and the guard commander’s desk; a mess room with a kitchen on one side; a barracks room for two squads of soldiers, who just then were sleeping, playing cards, reading, or talking; a head/ shower room, which was unoccupied; and the guard commander’s quarters, where the commander was sleeping.

Only one soldier was in the command center, sitting at the comm console, watching something on what looked like a personal trid unit. Williams wondered where the soldier who was supposed to be monitoring the sensor suite was—or whether the guard commander allowed it to go unwatched at night. Williams was surprised that no one was watching for the approach of somebody from Gilbert’s Corners. A visitor of the right rank could cause disciplinary action to be brought against just about everybody at the guard station.

Considering how lax the security was, Williams decided to enter the command center to get a look at the sensor monitors. Fourth squad hadn’t seen any remote sensors during their approach to the fields or to the guard station. He thought it wise to know what kind of sensors were in place, and, if possible, where they were.

Unlike the soldiers, the Marines had security out. Lance Corporal Rudd was stationed at the front corner of the building, watching over the fields for anyone approaching from that direction. Corporal Belinski and Lance Corporal Skripska watched the forest.

Williams found Belinski and touched helmets. “I’m going inside,” he told him.

“Be careful, boss,” Belinski said.

“I always am.”

“Not in this business you aren’t.”

Williams chuckled softly and squeezed Belinski’s shoulder. They were both right; Force Recon Marines took risks nobody else did—but they took them carefully.

The blackout curtain that was supposed to cover the window of the command center was pulled to the side, and one of the shutters stood all the way open. The window was open to allow air to flow through, but the screen was closed. Williams decided to check the doors before trying to enter through a window. There were three doors: one into the far side of the building into the barracks room, the others to the command center, one on the forest side and the other on the field side. The door facing the forest was closed.

After he looked at the other two doors, Williams decided to check the forest side. He didn’t want to enter through the barracks. Even though he was effectively invisible, there was too great a danger that one of the soldiers would make accidental contact with him or that something else would happen to alert them to his presence. Nonetheless, the barracks door was inviting, as it stood half-open to aid ventilation. On the field side, the door to the command center was ajar, which Williams hadn’t been able to see from the window.

Just a few meters away, Williams found Rudd and told him what he was doing.

The door was ajar, not open enough for him to simply slip through. Cautiously, he eased his hand into the opening and pushed the door a few centimeters wider. The soldier at the comm desk was far too engrossed in his trid to notice. Williams opened the door a little farther. Still, the duty soldier didn’t notice. Another push and the door was open far enough for Williams to slip through.

A gust of wind caught the door and swung it fully open, banging it against the outer wall. The duty soldier started at the sound and twisted around.

“Who’s there?” he said to the door.

Williams stood still in the shadows a meter from the door. Where he was, someone in the chameleons worn by infantry Marines would be totally invisible to anyone who didn’t know he was there. The chameleons worn by Force Recon Marines were even more effective at conferring invisibility, so Williams had no worry that the soldier would see him, even now that he was alert. There was still the possibility of accidental discovery, though.

The soldier got to his feet and took a step toward the door. Belatedly, he remembered his weapon, a sidearm in a holster on a belt hanging on the wall next to the comm console. He reached for the weapon and took it in his hand, then went to the door.

“Who’s there?” he asked again. He reached the door and placed the hand with the sidearm on the doorjamb to lean out. “Is anybody there?” he softly called out. When nobody answered, he shook his head and muttered something about the wind. He closed the door and made sure it was latched before he returned to his station. He replaced the weapon in its holster before he picked up the viewer and returned to his trid.

The now latched door didn’t bother Williams. If that was all the concern the duty soldier showed, Williams was confident that he could exit even through a locked door without raising an alarm.

He gave the soldier a couple of minutes to reimmerse himself in his trid, then eased his way to the sensor monitor station. What he saw there made him smile.

A bank of vid monitors showed views of patches of forest; a few showed the fields. Another bank displayed the results of infrared scans. Being effectively invisible, the Marines had little concern for vid monitoring, and their chameleons effectively damped their infrared signatures—they’d show up as faint traces only. There were no motion detectors. Where vids and infra detectors would miss the Marines, motion detectors could well pick them up. Schematics showing the layout of the vidcams and infra scanners lay on the desk.

Williams had the information he’d come for, it was time to leave. He had watched the comm man close and latch the door to the fields, so he checked the door to the forest, which he knew only was closed. The building used old, simple technology: a simple knob was set into the door next to the frame. He put his hand on it and twisted. The knob turned easily. Williams gently pulled the door in, slipped through, and drew it to behind him. The door made a slight click when it caught. The comm man looked up at the noise.

“What’s going on here?” he asked the empty room. He jumped to his feet, reached the door in a couple of rapid steps, and flung it open. He stuck his head outside and looked all around. “All right, who’s out there?” he demanded. “You’re not being funny! I’m going to get the sergeant of the guard if you don’t identify yourself. Now who’s there?”

As Williams began to move to silence the comm man, the radio he was watching squawked.

“Now what?” the soldier muttered, turning to answer the call. He slammed the door behind him.

The radio call was a comm check. Williams stood at the open window and listened as the patrols reported in from the forest.

Muttering to himself and casting glares at the doors to the outside, the comm man picked up the trid viewer and returned to the evening’s entertainment.

Williams shook his head at the sloppy discipline and lack of concern for security. He got Belinski from the front corner of the guard station; the two of them joined Rudd and Skripska and the four continued along the forest’s edge to a point directly opposite Gilbert’s Corners, where corn grew higher than a man, and started across. They reached the village without incident.

Outside Gilbert’s Corners

The cornfields gave way to a half-kilometer-wide band of soya beans before they reached Gilbert’s Corners. Sergeant Williams stopped the squad at the end of the towering cornstalks and took a hard look at the village. He quickly decided the three best words to describe the place were extended construction site. It was clear that Gilbert’s Corners had recently far overrun its previous boundaries—on this side alone, new construction had eaten hundreds of meters into the fields. He briefly wondered how the loss of croplands was going to affect the local economy, but shrugged off the thought. The more important question was the why of the new construction. And why were all those soldiers someplace they obviously thought totally unimportant to the war effort?

It was about midnight local time, so it wasn’t surprising that there was no construction activity, but people were out and about, and some lights were visible in the old village, which was unusual for a farming community. Williams drew his squad close and touched helmets.

“Rudd, come with me. I want to take a closer look at what’s going on. Belinski, you and Skripska stay here. If you hear we’re in trouble, get out of here and report to the Skipper.” He touched Rudd’s arm and the two of them slipped into the village.

Inside Gilbert’s Corners

The ground in the newly built-up area closest to the northeast fields was gouged and scarred by construction vehicles. Buildings, low-roofed, blocky, and with no distinguishing characteristics, other than number signs next to their doors, had been put up in regimented rows along roads lit dimly by widely spaced lights. There was no evidence, at least in that area, that any landscaping was planned for the near future. Most of the buildings were about the right size to house an infantry platoon—provided they weren’t encumbered with too many creature comforts. The lights were off in the buildings, but light-gatherer screens allowed Sergeant Williams and Lance Corporal Rudd to look in enough windows to confirm that the buildings actually were barracks. Williams made a quick count and estimated billeting for a reinforced battalion—fifteen or twenty barracks. Two other buildings, larger than the barracks, were a battalion headquarters and a mess hall. A couple of other buildings were smaller but windowless and more solidly built. Williams suspected they were armories or ammunition depots. A small motor pool was off to one side of the barracks area. During the time it took them to go through the barracks area, the two Marines spotted only one, two-man patrol.

Inward of the troop area was a modest parade ground, and beyond it a hundred-meter-wide stretch of forest undisturbed except for where several roads cut through it. Then came a stretch of better-constructed housing before the original village. There the ground had been sodded rather than left bare, with rows of young trees paralleling the roadsides; the streets were far better lit than in the troop area. Some of the houses still had internal lights burning. Families rather than soldiers were visible in them. Not many of the families in the lit houses seemed to have men present. Aside from the two-man patrol they’d seen in the barracks area, Williams and Rudd noticed that nobody was out and about on foot before they reached the original village, and few were in vehicles.

Three streets ran the length of the village; eight shorter streets crossed them. The only streetlamps were at intersections. The houses were mostly on the small side, all on lots much bigger, with wide side yards between the houses. Nearly all of them sat dark, as one would expect after midnight in a farming village. But two or three establishments on the central street were well lit. Williams and Rudd investigated; whoever was in those places must have something to do with the soldiers and all the recent construction.

The first lit place they came to was on the small side. The front half of the first floor was a bar with a few tables off to the side, and a door to another room in the back wall. About half of the places at the bar were occupied; a few people sat in twos and threes at some of the tables. Most of the patrons were men; the few women looked as rough and hard-used as the men. What little conversation went on was quiet, in tired voices. The people looked like construction workers. The bartender listlessly rubbed a rag along the bar top. Williams and Rudd slipped along the side of the building to look into the back room. Five men, who also looked like construction workers, sat around a table playing cards. They seemed as tired as the people in the front. Williams turned up his ears and listened, as he had outside the bar. In neither place did he hear anyone say anything of interest. Going all around the building, Williams couldn’t see a way to reach the windows of the second floor that wouldn’t make noise. It probably wasn’t worth looking into anyway, the second-story windows were all dark. The two Marines returned to the street in front of the building. The next lights were three buildings farther along the way, on the opposite side of the street. They headed for the lights.

What had looked at a distance like two establishments side by side turned out to be one bar-restaurant, unexpectedly large for a village the size of Gilbert’s Corners. It had been made by knocking archways through the common wall of two adjoining buildings. One half had a long bar running along the side, and a row of intimate tables along the other. The other half was a large dining room. The dining room was more than half-filled, and few spaces were open in the bar section. The crowd was more like what might be found in a good-size city following a theater performance—or in a village such as Gilbert’s Corners on a Sixth Day night following harvest.

The people, again more men than women, looked as rough as the construction workers, though not hard-used. They were all dressed casually, but their clothes were of far better cut and quality. None of them looked any more tired than the hour would suggest. Two bartenders and three waitstaff bustled about, serving drinks and food, or clearing dishes from tables.

These were the people who had everything to do with the presence of the soldiers and the recent construction. Williams turned his ears up, but couldn’t hear anything clearly from inside, merely the murmur of indistinct voices echoing at a distance. He couldn’t make out anything even when he touched the window glass with his helmet—the place had some serious sound baffling. He used his optics to record as many of the faces as he could.

That done, Williams and Rudd headed out of Gilbert’s Corners; the sergeant wanted his squad to be well back in the forest by daybreak. They were. Sergeant Williams prepared a report—including the scan of the faces in the large bar-restaurant—and tight-beamed it up to the Kiowa the next time she rose above the horizon.

It had been a long day and a longer night. Fourth squad hunkered down to rest while waiting for further orders—the discovery that something significant was going on in Gilbert’s Corners was probably going to change their mission.