Issue In Doubt (4 page)

Back at the open entrance, Kinser said, “Inside.” The two Marines held their weapons the way a police officer would; finger outside the trigger guard, muzzle pointed up. An infantryman entering a building like this would have his finger on the trigger and the muzzle pointed where his eyes were looking.

The interior of the admin room was a shambles. Everything—desks, chairs, cabinets, office machines—was overturned and broken. Files, hardcopy and crystal both, littered the floor. Using infrared, Kinser and Stein saw stains on the floor, walls, and furniture that experience told them was most likely blood. They saw no bodies or body parts. Looking through the broken door and shattered window to the control room, they could see that the computers and other equipment in it had been smashed.

Kinser and Stein had just turned to enter the control room when they heard the first shot.

Downtown Millerton, Fifteen Kilometers From the McKinzie Elevator Base

Fourth squad’s pod touched down on what looked like a junkyard, but had actually been a parking lot. Corporal James L. Day began recording the instant the Squad Pod dropped its ramp to let the Marines out. PFC Joseph W. Ozbourn began recording as soon as his feet hit the pavement. Land vehicles of all manner were in the lot, every one of them smashed, tumbled, leaning on or piled on others. The Marines headed rapidly for the nearest unblocked exit from the lot to take positions. Day and PFC James D. La Belle went fifty meters left, to the far edge of the parking lot. Lance Corporal William R. Caddy and PFC James D. La Belle headed the other way. They didn’t have to go quite as far to reach that end of the lot. Sergeant Grant F. Timmerman remained where they’d exited and watched into the lot.

Fourth squad was on a narrow street, with the lot on one side and the backs of buildings, mostly one story, none more than three, on the other. Doors and windows all along the block had their doors and windows knocked out from the inside. Timmerman was nervous about being so close to so many buildings he and his Marines hadn’t cleared, so he only kept his squad in place for ten minutes before calling his men in and leading them into the middle-most building.

The interior was a cavernous space, with only three doorways to smaller rooms; the wall next to two of the rooms was marked with the universal symbols for male and female restrooms, the third with the word “office” next to it. The doors were all broken in. Stains on the floor showed that water had flowed out of the restrooms, though it no longer was. Day and Ozbourn checked inside the rooms while the others covered them. All the fixtures were broken, which explained the water stains on the floor outside them.

A more-than-waist-high counter separated a kitchen area from the larger area; the space had obviously been a restaurant. That was confirmed when the Marines examined the broken chairs and tables—and broken crockery—that littered the floor. The front door and windows had been blown in.

The Marines didn’t linger in the restaurant, but began methodically searching the buildings to the right of it. Timmerman always had someone watching the buildings on the other side of the street. Everywhere they went they found destruction; nothing inside the buildings had been left unshattered. There were no bodies or body parts.

They had almost completed a circuit back to their starting point when there was a burst of fire, and La Belle, who was watching the street, pitched to the ground, bleeding profusely.

Jordan, East Shapland

Fifth squad landed a klick away from Jordan, a farming town a thousand kilometers from Millerton and the McKinzie Elevator Base, located on a river of the same name. Like first squad at Millerton, the five Marines dashed away from their pod toward the points of an imaginary star and settled in place to watch and wait. But they didn’t spend as much time in observation before moving.

“Up, move out,” Staff Sergeant William G. Harrell ordered after twenty minutes in place. He didn’t have to tell his Marines what direction they to head in, or in what order to go. Corporal Hershel W. Williams led off, followed by Harrell, Lance Corporal Douglas T. Jacobson, and Sergeant Ross F. Gray. Corporal Anthony Casamento had rear point. Williams and Jacobson recorded. Their first objective was a small cluster of farm buildings about three hundred meters off, on the way to Jordan. They went through a field of chest-high corn. The Marines went at a normal walking pace. They weren’t concerned about being seen; they knew how effectively the camouflage pattern on their uniforms tricked the eye, and the rows of corn were far enough apart that they didn’t give away their movement by pushing through them.

The first thing the Marines encountered was some kind of native avians that rose complaining to fly away from dead animals they’d been feeding on. The Marines guessed the corpses were dogs, but it was hard to tell; the carcasses had been thoroughly scavenged and the bones scattered.

“Be sharp,” Harrell said. He wondered how the crow-like avians had detected him and his men, and knew that their noisy flight would alert anybody in the area to the Marines’ presence.

The first of the farm buildings they examined was the barn. It had large double doors. One side of the door was down, the other was hanging on one hinge. Inside, whatever stalls the barn may have held were buried under the debris of what had been the floor of the barn’s hay loft. The Marines carefully made their way through the debris, but didn’t see anything that looked like human remains, though there were obvious cattle skulls. Elsewhere, a grain silo had been torn open to spill its contents. A shed was broken apart, as were the vehicles it had sheltered before the farm was attacked. The remains of a smaller building and its contents appeared to have been a small smithy.

Harrell saved the farmhouse for last. The porch roof sagged—two of the pillars that held it up had been broken away. The door was blown in, as were the windows on the front of the house. The squad headed for the porch.

The
Monticello
had withdrawn after launching the Spirits, and was more than one and a half light minutes from Troy by this time, resulting in a five minute time lag between when Staff Sergeant Lummus at the foot of the McKinzie elevator sent the message that the squads in Millerton were under attack and the message was received by fifth squad.

“Hold,” Harrell ordered when he received the message. The Marines lowered themselves to the ground in a five pointed star, facing outward. “Someone’s hitting first squad,” Harrell told his men. After a couple of minutes with no further message, and no sign of unwelcome company, he ordered, “Inside, on the double.”

The Marines jumped up and dashed into the farmhouse. The interior of the house was as thoroughly trashed as the barn and other out buildings had been. The only differences were that the farmhouse’s second floor hadn’t been collapsed into the first, and there were no bones. The windows on the side and rear walls were all blown outward, as was the back door.

After a few minutes search, with no additional reports on what was happening elsewhere, Harrell gave the order to resume the movement to Jordan. The Marines kept to the field, walking between the rows of corn, bent low enough that only their heads were above the corn stalks.

Edge of Alberville, Thirty-Five Kilometers West of Millerton

With plenty of space for its relatively small population, the people of Troy revived a lifestyle that began in the middle of the twentieth century, but died out in the first half of the twenty-first: the bedroom community. Alberville had a large enough shopping district to tend to the basic needs of its population of 18,000, and schools from pre-elementary to pre-college for its children. But other than shopkeepers and teachers, people went to Millerton or other locations for work. Commuting was via a network of high speed maglev trains, which people also used to go elsewhere for entertainment, dining, and recreation.

Sixth squad found that the alien invaders had demolished the train system as thoroughly as they had everything else. The guideways were broken and collapsed. The train cars were broken and their parts scattered about. The train station was gutted, and its roof was sagging.

Half an hour after landing, having ascertained that there was nobody nearby, Staff Sergeant William J. Bordelon ordered his squad into Alberville proper. The five Marines spot-checked houses on their way to the shopping district. Everywhere it was the same: front doors and windows had been broken in, those on the sides and rear blown out, the entire contents of the houses reduced to scrap. No sign of a body or body part.

The Marines were confident in the ability of their camouflage to keep them unseen to any observers. Still, they spread out and moved stealthily, flitting from shadow to shadow.

Bordelon called a halt when the squad reached a park that marked the transition from housing to shopping. Again, the Marines examined their surroundings and checked their sensors. Again, they saw and detected nothing.

Until Bordelon gave the order to move out.

“I have movement,” Corporal Louis J. Hauge, Jr. suddenly said from the squad’s rear point. “Seventy-five, five o’clock.”

Bordelon slowly swiveled to his right rear. Seventy-five meters away was a house he recognized as one he’d checked himself.

“They’re following us,” Bordelon said out loud, while silently cursing himself—how could anybody be coming up from behind? Where did they come from? His motion detector was set to check three-sixty, but it hadn’t shown any movement. “Down.” He set action to words by lowering himself to the ground. “Show me.”

Hauge aimed a pulse of ultraviolet light at the empty window frame where he’d detected movement.

Bordelon looked where Hauge indicated, but the only thing he saw inside the window was the strobing flash of an automatic rifle firing at him. In an instant, he had his handgun drawn and fired at a point behind the muzzle flash. He never knew if he’d hit anything—just as he fired, a burst of automatic fire tore into his right sideshattering his ribs and shredding internal organs.

Less than a minute after Hauge reported motion, all five Marines of sixth squad were dead.

McKinzie Elevator Base, Millerton

By chance, Staff Sergeant Lummus had been looking in the right direction to see the flash of the weapon that fired at Corporal Damato.

“Sixty-five degrees!” he shouted into his helmet comm.
That shot just missed Damato. How the hell did anybody see him?
he wondered.
I know where he is, and
I
can hardly see him!

Damato and Lance Corporal Witek took cover behind the elevator pylon. Sergeant Kinser and Corporal Stein took vantage points inside the control building, Kinser facing the direction the shot had come from, and Stein watching the rear. No more shots came for almost a minute.

Abruptly, shrill shouts rang out from all directions around the elevator. Most of them sounded like they were more than two hundred meters distant.

Well within range of our detectors
, Lummus thought.
Why didn’t we pick up anything?

No point in worrying about it, it was time for the squad to get out. Lummus looked to his rear. He was fifty meters from the Squad Pod, but his men were three times as far. If he could make it to the pod, he could pilot it in two short hops to pick them up. If the aliens didn’t have something to knock it out before he could get to them. In a few words, he told his Marines what he was going to do. They all said they’d be ready to pile in as soon as he reached them.

“I’ll cover you,” Kinser said—he had the only rifle in the squad.

Lummus braced himself, then lunged out of his crater like a sprinter leaving the blocks. He heard the loud cracks of Kinser’s rifle firing, and the less-loud cracks of the other Marines’ handguns. Lummus zigged and zagged to spoil the aim of anyone shooting at him. He was more than halfway to the Squad Pod when he looked beyond it and saw a mass of aliens racing toward him. The speed with which they jinked side to side startled him so badly he stutter-stepped. That was just enough to allow bullets from two directions to hit him. He crashed to the tarmac, dying.

At the rear of the control building, Stein shouted, “I hope he gets here in a hurry!” as he fired his handgun at rushing aliens. “There must be a hundred of them coming at us.”

Kinser swore. “He’s not coming, they got him.” He turned and ran to the back of the building to help Stein try to fight off the aliens. The two fired as fast as they could, but most of their shots missed. The attackers reached the building and dove through the door and windows, dropping their weapons in favor of using their long, vicious claws to rend the Marines.

Damato and Witek fired into the mass of charging aliens from opposite sides of the pylon, but to little effect.

“He better get here soon, or we’re screwed,” Witek shouted.

“We’re screwed.” Damato swore softly. He hadn’t looked in the direction of the Squad Pod, but he knew that Lummus should have reached it and been on the way by then. But he didn’t hear the pod’s engine—he knew it wasn’t coming.

Downtown Millerton

Corporal Day was the closest to PFC La Belle. He pulled the wounded Marine away from the door where he’d been shot and grimaced at the blood coming from several holes in his shirt. He glanced at La Belle’s face; it was pale, and his eyes were rolled up—shock was setting in.

“Stay with me, Jim.” Day wrenched La Belle’s first aid kit from his belt and reached into it for the self-sealing bandages. He tore La Belle’s shirt open and grimaced again when he saw the wounds. Working feverishly, he did his best to cover all of the punctures. Blood welled up around the edges of the bandages. Day guessed at exactly where the holes were, and poked a finger into the bandages in those spots. He got three out of five on the first attempt; the synthetic material of the bandages sank into the wounds and began to do their job, speeding a coagulation agent. By the time Day found the other two holes, blood had stopped welling out and La Belle wasn’t breathing.