CHAPTER


TWENTY-THREE

One Hundred and Fifty Kilometers South-Southwest of the Bataan Peninsula

In the navy’s most recent attempt to lay a string-of-pearls, three of the satellites had been knocked out when they passed over an area south-southwest of the besieged Confederation forces on Bataan. The navy believed more laser guns were in the area, and likely one or more of the emplacement vehicles. Taking them out was a top priority for the navy. So, following its initial success, second platoon’s fourth squad was one of four squads sent there to find and kill them.

Fourth squad’s assigned area of operations was to the northeast of a village that served a large agricultural area. It didn’t really matter to the success of their mission for the Marines to know the name of the village, but learning it was part of the Force Recon Marine’s normal pre-mission: learning everything they could about the objective. The name of the village was Gilbert’s Corners.

There were a couple of important things about Gilbert’s Corners the Marines hadn’t learned before being inserted to its northeast. One of them they found out almost as soon as they began patrolling.

Fourth squad was inserted near a road that led northeast of the village. They didn’t follow the Gilbert’s Corners road to its nether end to see just what, if anything, was there to justify its existence. But the Marines were surprised at the amount of traffic the road’s well-worn surface indicated it had.

As they had on all of their previous hunts, the squad began by examining the main road nearest the location from which a laser gun had killed a satellite. Main road was a grand term for the narrow, packed-dirt road that ran through a thin forest from the fields surrounding Gilbert’s Corners to, well, nowhere in particular. The road was narrow enough that if two vehicles approached from opposite directions, one of them might have to back up to find a wide enough space between the bordering trees before the vehicles could pass each other.

As before, the Marines traveled via puddle jumper—the area they had to search was far too large to cover on foot. Sergeant Williams and Lance Corporal Skripska flew just above the road surface, looking for signs of a vehicle turning off the road, while Corporal Belinski flew a hundred meters ahead and a few meters above the trees, watching for traffic. Lance Corporal Rudd likewise flew above the trees a hundred meters behind Williams and Skripska, watching the rear for traffic from that direction.

Belinski was the first to see something. He dropped below treetop level and turned around, hovering. “Company coming,” he said over the squad circuit. His transmission was narrow-beamed; the radio waves were directional in a narrow enough cone no one to his rear or sides could pick them up, unlike a tight-beam, which went to a point target.

Williams popped up and saw dust rising less than a kilometer to his front. He replied with a burst transmission to the squad: “In twenty meters, my right.” He put action to words and weaved his way twenty meters into the trees on his right. Skripska came close behind, following the ultraviolet dot on Williams’s back. A moment later, Belinski and Rudd reached them. Williams and Skripska already had their puddle jumpers off and hidden behind tree trunks to mask their infra signatures in case the approaching vehicles were using IR detectors. The infrared-damping chameleon sheets the Marines tucked around the puddle jumpers did more than the tree trunks to hide their signatures.

Seconds after arriving, Belinski and Rudd also had their puddle jumpers off and covered behind tree trunks.

The four Marines set into an ambush position, ready to fight if they had to.

Williams tight-beamed to Belinski, “What is it?”—hoping for one of the emplacement vehicles.

“Two landcars,” Belinski tight-beamed back. “Personnel. No lasers I could see.”

A small, open landcar zipped past at what Williams thought was a faster than safe speed for the road. In addition to the driver, there were four seated passengers—all of them armed soldiers. A sixth soldier stood in the back, clinging for balance to the mount of an assault gun. A second landcar, manned the same as the first, followed fifty meters behind.

Twelve armed soldiers in two landcars, going fast along a road to nowhere. Williams wondered whether he should have checked out the nether end of the road. He wondered if the rushing soldiers had anything to do with the insertion of his squad, if the AstroGhost had been spotted and the soldiers were going to search for them. Or were they somehow connected with the laser guns that were fourth squad’s objective?

The soldiers on the two landcars raised too many questions to ignore. Williams decided to follow them and find out where they were in such a hurry to get to. He told his men; they quickly retrieved their puddle jumpers and took off, paralleling the road fifty meters from it. The dust cloud they could see from the landcars was heading away faster than they were following, but Williams didn’t want to risk the soldiers spotting their exhausts, so he didn’t try to catch up. So long as they could keep the dust cloud in sight, they were all right. If they lost it, then they could speed up.

They lost the cloud, but because it stopped and settled, not because it got out of sight. Williams maintained speed until the squad was three-quarters of a kilometer from where the landcars had stopped. There he signaled the squad to land; they’d go the rest of the way on foot.

Suddenly, they heard the vehicles accelerating back the way they’d come. The Marines raced to get the road in view and were in time to see the two landcars speed by with only their drivers and gunners—the passenger soldiers were gone.

“Let’s find them,” Williams ordered on the squad circuit. The Marines ran as fast as they could and still maintain silence to where the dust cloud had stopped.

The ground there clearly showed where the landcars had stopped and turned about. It also showed many footprints left by the dismounted soldiers as they stretched their legs, then organized themselves into patrol formation and moved off on foot.

Williams needed to know what those soldiers were doing. He considered caching the squad’s puddle jumpers as they’d have to follow on foot to avoid detection, but decided against that; the Marines might not be able to come back that way. Besides, they might need to make a quick exit later on.

After checking all around to make sure no enemy soldiers were nearby, Williams raised his shields long enough to say, “Let’s find out where they’re going.”

The squad moved out, following in the footsteps of the Coalition troops.

The Coalition squad didn’t practice good noise discipline, and the Marines heard them well before they could see them. Williams, in second place in the squad’s column, speeded up to catch Skripska on the point and told him to move to the flank, to close on the patrol from the side—he was beginning to think the soldiers were a security patrol, but security for what?

The sounds of the patrol grew louder and more distinct as the Marines gained on it: heavy footsteps, jangling gear, an occasional word.

Skripska was twenty meters to the left rear of the last man in the column when the leader sharply ordered, “Let’s have some quiet here, men. If anybody’s out here, they’ll hear us coming.”

That was met by some grumbling, but the occasional voices ceased, and the soldiers trod a bit more lightly and their gear jangled less.

They still make more noise than an entire Marine company, Williams thought.

Stepping lightly, the Marines paced the patrol for more than half an hour before Williams decided the patrol wasn’t going anywhere, that it was just patrolling an area. He stepped forward and touched helmets with Skripska.

“Break contact, left,” he told him.

Skripska turned sharply left, away from the patrol. Belinski and Rudd followed the UV marker on Williams’s back.

Ten minutes later, Williams decided they were far enough away to use their puddle jumpers and they lifted to treetop level.

Fourth squad could easily have wiped out the eight-man patrol, probably before the Coalition soldiers even had a chance to return a shot, but the squad was looking for satellite killers and their support structure. If the soldiers in that patrol were protecting a distribution center, which seemed possible, the enemy would be alerted when they didn’t return when expected, and that could cause the Marines’ mission to fail.

Of course, it was possible that the patrol was there for another reason. If it was, the Marines needed to find out what that reason was. A premature attack on Coalition forces could do more than jeopardize the squad’s mission—it would alert the enemy to their presence and could get them killed.

Whatever the reason for the patrol, Sergeant Williams intended to find out before engaging any other foot patrols his squad encountered.

Fourth squad returned to the road they’d been following and resumed their investigation of it, looking for places where a vehicle might have turned off into the forest.

They found one a kilometer beyond the place where Belinski earlier saw the approaching vehicles.

Williams examined the tracks left by the wheeled vehicle that had turned into the trees at what looked like a game trail. The tread was familiar, and so was the tire spacing—exactly like those of the emplacement vehicles they’d previously found and destroyed. He signaled the squad; they would follow the trail on foot.

Twenty minutes into the forest they found a laser gun at the edge of a gap in the trees too small to call a clearing.

The Force Recon Marines tasked with destroying the laser guns and their vehicles had learned a great deal since they’d first found and killed one. Some of that was thanks to the engineers on the Kiowa, who were thrilled when one of the squads, instead of destroying a gun, had taken it to a pickup spot and loaded it aboard the AstroGhost to take to the starship.

One thing the engineers had figured out was how to rig a laser gun so that when it fired, it fed back on itself and committed suicide rather than killing its intended target. The engineers had gladly passed that information on to the Marines.

And Sergeant Williams applied that knowledge to this laser gun. The sabatoge could only be discovered by a detailed inspection of the gun, something the Marines didn’t think was done, or at least not done very often.

Once the rigging was done, Williams directed the squad to continue following the emplacement vehicle’s tracks. They found another gun a half hour later.

But before they could do anything to the laser, they had to go to cover because of the approach of a patrol.

The first patrol, the one they’d followed, had come from the northwest, then continued to the northeast when it was dropped off. This one came from the west.

The patrol’s point man picked up his pace as he neared, then plopped down to sit against the laser gun’s pedestal mount.

“Get away from that thing, dammit,” a commanding voice ordered. “You don’ wanna be sittin’ there thet gun goes off. It’ll flash-fry yer ass.”

“Ah, gimme a break, Sarge,” the soldier shot back. “Ain’t no satellites come in two, three days now. This here gun ain’t gonna fire while we takes us a break.”

“Two, three days,” the sergeant said, “tha’s alla more reason thet gun’s gonna go off anytime now. Move!

“Ah, Sarge! Ah—” The soldier grumbled, but shoved himself to his feet and moved to a shady tree to sit under

“Take ten,” the sergeant said, looking around at his men. It was a pointless order; he was the only man in the patrol who wasn’t sitting down taking a break. He shook his head, muttering, and found a place for himself.

Unseen, thirty meters away from the sergeant, Williams slowly shook his head. He couldn’t imagine leading a patrol and not establishing security when he called a rest break. But this sergeant hadn’t. If nothing else, that told him the Coalition forces had no idea Marines were in the area. It also told him their discipline wasn’t very good.

The soldiers looked hot, tired, and bored. At first they just sat listlessly, some drinking from canteens—at least one had already drunk all of his water and tried unsuccessfully to beg a drink from other soldiers.

Close to the end of the “ten” the patrol leader had called for, one of the soldiers called out, “Hey, Sarge, how come we gotta keep runnin’ these here patrols. Ain’t no Confedshon sojers here. They’s all stuck inside that Bataan place.”

The sergeant, looking as hot, tired, and bored as his men, slowly raised his head and looked at the questioner. “We keep runnin’ these here patrols jist in case the Confedshon figgers out who’s here an’ decides ta do sumpin’ about it. Tha’s why. Now shut yer yap an’ get on yer feet, we moving out agin.”

The soldiers groaned, but got to their feet and shuffled off in a rough semblance of patrol order.

Williams’s eyes widened. In case the Coalition figures out who’s here and decides to do something about it, the sergeant had said. So who was here? And exactly where was here?

Williams thought about it while he rigged the laser gun to kill itself. Something big was in or somewhere near Gilbert’s Corners, something bigger than laser satellite killers, something Commander Obannion needed to know about.

Williams had planned to continue following the tracks of the emplacement vehicle, hoping to eventually find it or its supply depot. But no longer. He checked his map. The squad was only a few kilometers from the edge of the cultivated area. He thought they’d learn something more important there than the location of another laser gun. He gathered the squad close and touched helmets to tell them what he was thinking.

When he finished, Skripska led off, and they reached the fields without seeing another patrol. Williams immediately sent his men up trees; they’d be able to see farther, perhaps even into the woods they’d been in; the canopy wasn’t very dense.

Several Kilometers Northeast of Gilbert’s Corners

Directly in front of the Marines lay a vast expanse of farmland. Sergeant Williams didn’t recognize most of the crops he saw growing, since he had been raised in a city and his knowledge of the appearance of foodstuffs was primarily what they looked like when they were cooked and served. He did know what cornstalks looked like, though, so he knew what was growing in what he identified as cornfields. Here and there in the fields were small clusters of buildings. Examination with his ocular resolved them to farmhouses, barns, and other farm buildings. Farm machinery, some automated, some of which he could see humans directing, moved about the fields doing things incomprehensible to a city boy. Several kilometers away, across the fields, was the village of Gilbert’s Corners.

Williams looked to his right. A few hundred meters away a low building that resembled an oversize shack lay where the road to nowhere emptied into the fields. A directional antenna on top of the building pointed at Gilbert’s Corners; another antenna waved back and forth in a ninety-degree arc into the forest. Williams could just make out the nose of a vehicle on the building’s far side; he suspected it was one of the landcars that had delivered the deep patrol fourth squad had followed earlier. He thought the building was likely a guard station, a barracks for the soldiers patrolling in the forest.

Williams looked to the west, but couldn’t see much in that direction because the setting sun cast long, deep shadows on the fields.

Williams had his survey interrupted by a burst message from Lance Corporal Rudd: “Lorry, two-zero-zero, klick and a half.” Southwest, a kilometer and a half distant.

Williams looked and saw a military lorry filled with soldiers heading along a road through the fields. He watched as it turned left onto the crossroad that led to the low building at the edge of the trees. Using his ocular, Williams watched as about twenty soldiers jumped off the lorry and marched into the building; then an equal number came out and boarded the lorry. The second group of soldiers looked as tired as the first group looked fresh.

As soon as its new passengers were boarded, the lorry headed back the way it had come. Williams had to switch from his magnifier screen to his ocular to watch where it went.

Williams wished one of his men had a census module for his comp, but nobody had thought a squad hunting the satellite killers would have occasion to count troops, so no one had taken one. He would have liked to know whether the soldiers who just left were from one of the patrols his squad had seen or were a totally different group.

A few minutes later, he heard engines. Two landcars had started up on the far side of the building. He watched through the trees as they took off down the road, heading into the forest. Each landcar had several passengers in addition to the driver and gunner—another patrol going out. Moments later, he saw another patrol headed into the forest on foot.

Williams looked back at the lorry in time to see it turn to head into Gilbert’s Corners. He took another look at the village through his ocular. There was a lot of new construction, and more was going up. His briefing materials had said Gilbert’s Corners was a village with a population of not much more than a thousand people. The new construction could house and serve many times that population. And a good deal more than a thousand people were moving about in the village, and many of them were soldiers.

All thought of finding the satellite killers was pushed aside. Sergeant Williams and his Marines were going to find out who all those people in Gilbert’s Corners were. But first they were going to take a closer look at the guard station. He waited until the swiveling antenna was pointed away, then sent his men a burst transmission, telling them to eat something and catch an hour’s nap; they’d move out two hours after sundown.