CHAPTER


EIGHTEEN

Approaching Cranston from the West

Sergeant Wil Bingh popped up to see above the trees to beyond the next bend in the road, as he had regularly for forty kilometers. He hadn’t seen any movement since the convoy with the odd weapons system had passed them an hour earlier. For the first time since then, he now saw something other than continuous forest. The treetops in the distance thinned, and the peaks of high roofs were visible through them; either the land hadn’t been completely cleared when Cranston was established, or the citizens had gone on a tree-planting frenzy soon after moving in.

Bingh dropped back down and sent a burst transmission to first squad to halt and gather on him. He raised the screens on his helmet so they could see where he was.

“The town’s up ahead,” he told his men when they joined him. “It’s got a lot of tree cover, so I couldn’t see that convoy that passed us—or where the bivouac of the Twenty-third Ruspina Rangers is, either. We’ll go deeper into the trees for the next five klicks, then drop our puddle jumpers and continue on foot. And from here on, we have to be particularly alert for enemy patrols.

“Any questions?”

They were all professionals, each of them with several successful missions to his credit, and they’d worked together for long enough to know what each of them would do. None of them had any questions about what they were going to do or how it would be accomplished.

“Let’s do it.” Bingh lowered his chameleon screen and vanished from view.

The four Marines headed away from the road, keeping track of each other by keeping the exhausts of the puddle jumpers, and the UV markers on their backs, in view. Their movement was slower than it had been when they were following the road; they had to weave among the tree trunks and stay under the spreading branches.

Nearly an hour later, Bingh stopped the squad while he popped up to take a look around. The ground gently rolled under the trees, but seen from above, the undulations of the treetops had no particular relation to the irregularities of the land below. Several kilometers to the east, Bingh could see the tops of some buildings poking through the tree cover, but he didn’t dare go high enough to see down through the tree cover—while he was effectively invisible, someone sharp-eyed in the town might be able to spot the exhaust from the puddle jumper. He took a line-of-sight azimuth, fed it into his UPUD, then dropped back down and raised his helmet screens. The other Marines also exposed their faces.

“We’re on foot from here,” he told his men. “Unass your puddle jumpers. We’ll secure them here.”

In a couple of minutes they had the puddle jumpers bundled in a chameleon tarp with a line attached to it. Lance Corporal Wehrli took the end of the line and shimmied up a tree to a fork about six meters above the ground. He pulled the bundle up and used the line to tie it into the fork. While Wehrli was securing the puddle jumpers, Bingh marked the location of the tree on his UPUD.

“Wehrli, take point,” Bingh ordered when the four of them were ready. “Then me and Musica. Pricer, rear point. That way.” He removed a glove and pointed. “Move out.” He closed his screens; so did the other three. Wehrli stepped out in the direction Bingh had pointed. They started off at a brisk walk and gradually slowed as they got closer to Cranston.

Just inside the Trees on the Outskirts of Cranston

Cranston was a town of some thirty thousand people, constructed entirely from local materials, mostly using hand tools and small power tools—it almost looked as though some massive time machine had lifted it whole from a mid-industrial-period culture and put it down there. The four Marines settled just inside the forest fringe at the edge of the town and observed.

After a time, Sergeant Bingh began wondering why the town was there. From his vantage he saw mostly close-packed housing, with a shopping district and some light industry. No heavy industry was visible from his position. Nor did there seem to be any major roads coming through. They hadn’t passed through farmland on the way in, nor had he seen any clearings large enough for significant food growing. The nearest navigable river was more than twenty-five kilometers to the north. None of the materials he’d studied aboard the Admiral Stoloff had said there was anything worth mining near Cranston. None of the sensors the squad deployed picked up any of the chemical traces that would indicate the presence of industry—or several thousand soldiers with weapons and equipment.

So why was the town there?

And where was the Twenty-third Ruspina Rangers regiment? Or, for that matter, where was the convoy that had passed the squad on the road?

People walked about, or rode here and there on adult-size, muscle-powered versions of children’s three-wheel toy vehicles. The only people who seemed to be in a hurry were children running from one playground to another.

After watching for a while longer, Bingh began to think Cranston might be a Potemkin village. He needed to get a closer look. He formulated a plan and passed it to his men.

Near dusk, people began ambling toward the houses and went inside—nearly all of the people were men. That might be reasonable if Cranston were an old-fashioned society where the men worked outside the home while women worked at home. But, Bingh reflected, with that many men outside, if most of them had a wife who worked at home, there should have been more children in evidence than he had seen. Lights began twinkling on in the houses, and lamps came to life one street at a time. The sensors that had failed to produce evidence of industry or a concentration of soldiers had also failed to pick up any indication of enemy sensors that might be capable of detecting the heavily chameleoned Force Recon Marines. Of course, the Marines’ sensors couldn’t detect passive sensors the Coalition forces might have watching.

Bingh stood; they had to take the risk. “We’re going in now,” he said.

Three Blocks inside the Cranston Town Limits

Sergeant Bingh wanted to go through backyards. The light-gathering screens in the Force Recon Marine helmets were better than those in the regular infantry helmets; they showed limited color instead of the infantry helmets’ stark gray tones and allowed better depth perception. But there were too many white picket fences and hedges for him to be certain they could be as silent as he wanted. So he and Lance Corporal Wehrli walked as close to the fronts of houses on one side of the street as the fences and hedges allowed, while Corporals Musica and Pricer did the same on the opposite side of the street. They looked in windows as they went. What Bingh saw disturbed him; the furnishings and the way the people took their ease in living rooms, or sat around dining tables, looked to him like nothing so much as dioramas he’d seen in a cultural history museum—dioramas of middle-class American life in the middle of the twentieth century.

They had just crossed the inconspicuously labeled Fifteenth Street when Bingh received a burst transmission from Musica.

“I’ve got something you should take a look at, boss.”

Bingh stopped and put a hand out to contact Wehrli and guide him. Across the street, he saw a UV marker showing where one of the other two Marines stood next to the white picket fence in front of the house opposite; this house was smaller than most and was tucked tightly in between two others. He touched helmets with Wehrli to tell him they were joining the others, then crossed the street. When he reached the Marine whose marker he saw, he touched helmets and asked, “What do you have?”

It was Pricer. “Take a look where the side of the house meets the ground,” he said.

Bingh looked and could hardly credit his eyes. “Where’s Musica?” he asked.

“Taking a closer look.”

Bingh kept looking. The masonry foundation of the house didn’t look as if it went all the way down, but stopped two or three centimeters above the ground. The shadows under the edge of the foundation were deep, but he thought he could make out the regularities of the treads of a tracked vehicle. He looked into the window directly above. There wasn’t enough space from the bottom of the foundation to the bottom of the window to fit a tracked vehicle. But—

He walked ten paces to one side, looking into the window all the way, then back ten paces in the opposite direction. The interior of the room beyond the window shifted, but not quite as smoothly as he expected it to. Could he be looking at a hologram image of a room?

A hand gripped Bingh’s shoulder. It was Musica.

“That’s the most fantastic bit of camouflage I’ve ever seen,” Musica said when they touched helmets. “I got close and looked inside the window. It’s only about thirty centimeters deep. Everything’s foreshortened so when you walk past on the street and look in, it looks real no matter if you see straight in or at an angle. The whole thing is hiding a tracked vehicle of some sort.”

“Then let’s take a better look,” Bingh said. He withdrew a minnie disguised as a local rodent and sent it scurrying under the house, then led the squad around the side of the house, where they hunkered down between it and the dense hedge that separated it from the house behind. Only then did he turn on the control box to direct the minnie in its search. He plugged the minnie’s control box into his helmet so he could watch its movements on the heads-up display, eliminating the possibility of anyone’s spotting the slight glow from the box’s display.

He sent the minnie a climb-and-prowl order, and the small robot scampered about until it found a place where it could climb up a tread. The sides of the tracked vehicle sloped sharply, which left plenty of room for the false room inside the window next to it. On its top was a low-lying turret with a brace of barrels for some kind of energy gun, possibly lasers. It wasn’t a tall vehicle; after allowing for the high ground clearance Bingh had seen when the minnie had searched for a way up, he thought the vehicle’s crew must be recumbent when it was buttoned up. He suspected the crew could only be two men; three would probably be too crowded to be able to function well. Skittering all over the vehicle, the minnie found several shielded openings—one in the back, two in the front, and two in each side—that looked like view-ports rather than gunports, and what looked like extensible arms on the front—arms with cutters on their ends. On impulse, he sent the minnie back to the ground and had it examine the vehicle’s undercarriage. It looked to be solidly waterproof. He sent the minnie scampering back to the top to take another look at something he hadn’t identified earlier. Seen in light of the vehicle’s watertight bottom, he realized it had to be an extendable snorkle—this was an amphibious vehicle, probably submersible.

Satisfied that the minnie had completely inspected the vehicle, Bingh double-checked that he’d stored the data and sent the minnie looking elsewhere. It found two more of the slope-sided vehicles inside the house. Then he had it look for an opening to the house above. It found a ventilation tube with a joint that was loose enough for it to wiggle its way in. The robot’s olfactory sensors picked up human scent from its left; Bingh sent it in that direction.

A grill opened into a low-ceilinged, windowless room a few meters along the tube. Six men were in the room, sitting around a table, playing cards. The remnants of a meal were piled on a side table. Holstered sidearms hung on their belts from a rack near a door on the far side of the room. A military comm unit sat on the tabletop next to the elbow of the oldest man. Despite the military accoutrements, none of the men were in uniform. Still, they had to be the crews of the three amphibs under the house.

Bingh watched and listened for a few minutes, but the soldiers were talking in a dialect he could barely understand. He didn’t think they were discussing anything about their unit or mission, and his squad needed to continue to recon the town. He set the minnie to continue observing and recording for two hours, then return on its own to a location on the outskirts of Cranston. That done, he touched helmets with his men.

“We need to take a closer look at these houses,” he told them. “If this one’s a blind, probably more of them are as well. Get your minnies ready.” He gave them the rendezvous coordinates to feed into their spybots.

While his men prepared their minnies to go out on their own, Bingh readied his second minnie. He sent Musica and Pricer two blocks to the south and gave them instructions to have their minnies search the bases of houses in a two-block stretch east and west from there. As soon as they left, he led Wehrli two blocks north.

“Get the yellow one,” Bingh ordered Wehrli when they’d gone two blocks. He sent his own minnie to scuttle around the foundation of a pastel blue house.

In less than two minutes, Wehrli touched helmets with Bingh. “Got a gap,” he said.

“Show me,” Bingh replied needlessly; from his command box he could tie into the transmissions from any of the squad’s minnies without the Marine controlling it doing anything to assist him. He could even override the Marine and take direct control of the minnie if he wanted. But he didn’t want to control Wehrli’s minnie, he just wanted to see what it had found. He reduced the display from his own minnie to a corner of his HUD and locked onto Wehrli’s minnie’s transmission.

Bingh and Wehrli watched as the minnie squeezed through a slender gap between the base of the house and the ground. Inside, seeking in visual, infrared, and ultraviolet, the minnie found an excavated area, a sort of shallow cellar. Sitting in the cellar were two amphibious vehicles. These were much larger than the two-man amphibs they’d found in the first house they’d examined.

Bingh watched as Wehrli sent his minnie around a ledge that circled the outside edge of the cellar. The view would have caused vertigo in anyone not used to following the transmission from a minnie’s searching in the dark—the robot’s head moved constantly, looking up and to the sides, only occasionally looking where it was going.

The minnie’s sideways glances as it skittered along the ledge quickly gave Bingh views of two of the sides of the nearer amphibious vehicle. Bingh recognized it; it was a modified Mark VII amphibious tractor, the kind called a Mudpuppy, manufactured on Carhart’s World for that planet’s own military. He’d heard a rumor that the Mudpuppy was available on the black market, but hadn’t heard any confirmation of it. The Heptagon would be very interested in this piece of intelligence.

While Bingh was identifying the Mudpuppy, the minnie found a ramp at one end of the cellar; the ramp was wide enough to allow the amphibious vehicles to climb out.

Wehrli saw the significance of the ramp and immediately set the minnie to examining the wall next to it. The wall was false; it was a disguised door with tracks that allowed it to slide up and out of the way so the Mudpuppies could go in or out. He touched helmets with Bingh, and the squad leader agreed to let the minnie search for an entrance to the house above.

In the meanwhile, Bingh’s minnie completed its search of the base of the pastel blue house without finding anything out of the ordinary. Bingh sent it on to check out the neighboring house.

It took Wehrli’s minnie five minutes to find a way up into the interior of the house. It was a shell, except for shallow boxes in front of the windows, just like the boxes the Marines had found in the first house they’d examined. Bingh looked at the yellow house and saw a dimly lit room through its curtains, right where one of the boxes the minnie had found was.

In two out of two houses they’d entered, they’d found amphibious vehicles, and both had the eye-fooling setups. It looked as if the Twenty-third Ruspina Rangers were expecting a visit from Force Recon. Bingh wondered what they had in place to catch unwelcome visitors—he thought it was unlikely they would only have false fronts to fool the Marines.

Bingh hit the panic button on his control box to make the minnie stop transmitting and return to him now, then told Wehrli to do the same with his minnie. He switched the view on his HUD to pick up the transmissions from Musica’s and Pricer’s minnies and overrode their instructions, had them cease transmission, and return to their Marines.

“Let’s go,” he ordered Wehrli as soon as their minnies rejoined them. He turned on his scent sensor and turned his ears all the way up as he led the way south. He sent the two corporals a burst transmission: “Hold position, I’m on my way.”

Bingh’s skin was crawling by the time he and Wehrli reached the area where he’d dispatched Musica and Pricer, even though he hadn’t detected any sign of pursuit. Or any other activity on the streets or in the yards. It took a few minutes for him to locate the UV marker on one of the Marines. He got everyone together and touched helmets.

“We found another false house,” he said, “one of the first two we checked.”

“Then we’re four for six between us,” Pricer said. “We found Mudpuppies in two houses.”

Half of the houses the Marines had had their minnies examine were little more than false fronts, hiding amphibious vehicles. Bingh wasn’t particularly surprised at finding amphibious vehicles; since the Coalition army hadn’t been able to break through Bataan’s main line of defense, it made sense for them to try a waterborne assault on the peninsula’s flank. But why give the invasion craft such thorough camouflage? Sure, if the navy had been able to lay its string-of-pearls, intense camouflage would be necessary to hide the amphibs from orbital discovery and retain the element of surprise. But the navy hadn’t been able to lay the string-of-pearls, thanks to the satellite killers. So the only reason Bingh could think of was the Twenty-third Ruspina Rangers were expecting someone to come on the ground. The Coalition commanders had to know the Confederation forces were completely boxed in, totally unable to get anybody out to recon, had to know that the only reconnaissance units capable of discovering them had to come from off-world. Surely with camouflage this intense, the Twenty-third Ruspina Rangers had some means of detecting the presence of snoops, even those as well chameleoned and infrared-cool as Force Recon.

“I think we’re in a trap,” Bingh told his men. “Time to leave. Everybody remember where the rally point is?”

They all did; where they’d left their puddle jumpers.

“Pricer, point. Me, Wehrli, Musica. Go.”

Corporal Pricer led off at a faster speed than Force Recon normally moved this deep in enemy territory, not following the route the four Marines had taken to enter Cranston, but roughly paralleling it.

All four Marines listened and watched carefully, but neither saw nor heard any sign of a search or pursuit. Now that Bingh knew what to look for, he saw several more houses that appeared to have slight gaps between their foundations and the ground.

Almost half of this town must be false, Bingh thought.

They were soon out of Cranston and back into the forest. Bingh sent his men up trees to watch for pursuit, but none came during the hour they watched and waited. At last he had the squad return to the puddle jumpers, where he prepared a report and tight-beamed it up to the orbiting Kiowa.

The squad moved a klick to the south to await instructions.