Pointblank, p.17
Pointblank, page 17
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.
CHAPTER
* * *
NINETEEN
Candidates’ Quarters, Marine OTC, Arsenault
By the time they were into their fourth month at Camp Upshur, the remaining officer candidates had begun to adjust to their daily routine quite well. That was when Jak Daly began to have a serious problem. He decided that he wanted to go back to the fleet, back to Force Reconnaissance.
Lieutenant Stiltskein’s casual remark that there was a war going on while they were “stuck” back in OTC had got Daly thinking. He knew without anyone telling him that Fourth Force Recon Company would be involved in the war, and he began to feel his proper place was with them, not on Arsenault, studying battalion maneuvers in brigade operations and other esoteric matters far removed from the life-and-death struggle his buddies were engaged in. So each night Daly found a seat in the company dayroom to watch the worldwide news broadcast on the Military News Network, which kept the far-flung installations on Arsenault connected to the rest of Human Space. It made no difference that the news about the war was more than a week behind real-time events; for Jak Daly, the war on Ravenette was happening right now.
One night MNN showed recent footage of Marines in combat at Fort Seymour, successfully repulsing a massive attack by the Coalition forces. In passing, the commentator noted that Marine Force Reconnaissance units were operating behind enemy lines to develop intelligence and upset the enemy’s logistical posture. That was all it took.
“Manny,” Daly told Ubrik when he got back to their room, “tomorrow I’m going down to see the company commander and ask to be dismissed from OTC.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
Ubrik sat up in bed. He’d been rereading Caesar’s de Bello Gallico in preparation for a discussion on “great commanders” in their military history class the next day. “Family problems?”
“No.”
Ubrik turned off his reader and swung his legs to the floor. “I could tell something was eating at you these last weeks, Jak. Why do you want to quit now? Muhammad’s cavities, buddy, you’re a cinch to graduate in the top ten percent of this class!”
Daly did not answer at once. “Manny, I want to go back to the fleet. I want in on this war on Ravenette.” He shrugged. “I’m a Marine and I’m not going to sit here while my buddies are risking their lives on this goddamned Fort Seymour place, wherever in the hell that is.”
“Jak, they’ll never let you go, you know that.”
“Well, I’m going to give it a try, old buddy.”
“You’re going to leave here before you even get into Felicia’s drawers?” Manny grinned, trying to lighten the atmosphere. “That’s not like you, Jak, to leave important business unfinished.”
Daly perked up a bit. “How do you know I haven’t? Mission accomplished, time to return to home station?”
“You bastard!” Ubrik laughed. They were both silent for a moment. “Well, Jak, I know you well enough now to know I can’t talk you out of this foolishness. But, man, I’m going to miss you! I’ve never in my life felt as close to anyone as I do to you, Jak.”
“Hey, I feel the same way about you, Manny. We’ve been through some shit together, haven’t we?”
“You bet.”
Neither man got much sleep that night.
Company Office, Marine OTC
“Get your ass the hell outta here, Candidate Daly, and don’t bring this subject up again in my orderly room!” First Sergeant Beedle roared. His eyes flashed and his shaven head gleamed and the veins in his neck stood out, but Daly did not move.
“I request permission to see the company commander, Top,” Daly repeated, staring at a space on the wall just above the top sergeant’s head. In his hand Daly carried his formal letter of resignation from OTC. He leaned forward and placed it on Beedle’s desk. “It is my right to see the company commander and request he forward this letter through channels, First Sergeant.”
“Don’t tell me what your ‘rights’ are, pissant!” Beedle roared as the hairs in his nostrils flared menacingly, but he took the letter. “Sit your ass down over there while I take this—this letter in to the CO’s office. You can damn well wait there all day, for all I care.” He snorted again, stood up, knocked once on the CO’s door, and entered, closing the door behind him. Daly took a seat and grinned at the company clerk, a lance corporal who pretended to busy himself with office work.
From inside the CO’s office that worthy roared, “Send that pissant little sonofabitch in here!”
That morning was the first time Daly could remember hearing anyone use the word pissant. He filed it away for future reference as a useful adjective and marched smartly into the CO’s sanctum.
Office of the Commandant, Marine OTC
It took several days for Daly’s letter of resignation to reach Brigadier Beemer’s office. At each stage along the chain of command—battalion, brigade, Training Directorate—it was endorsed with a hearty “RECOMMEND DISAPPROVAL.”
