Issue In Doubt

by David Sherman

  “Aye aye,” Adriance answered.

  “Orndoff, Zion, look in the windows. Mackie, go around and get ready to go through the front door when I tell you to.”

  There were two windows on the first floor of the side facing them. They climbed over the porch railing, and the two junior men headed to the windows to cautiously look into them. Mackie went around the corner to the front door, and Adriance took position at the corner where he could cover all three of his men.

  “All I see is an empty room,” Orndoff said.

  “What about furniture?” Martin asked.

  “Yeah, it’s got furniture. And what looks like an entertainment center. But no people, no animals, no aliens.”

  “Same thing here,” Zion reported. “It’s a bedroom. At least, it’s got a bed.”

  “Can either of you see through a door into the rest of the house?”

  “The bedroom door’s ajar, but I can’t really see anything beyond it,” Zion said.

  “I see a door. It’s wide open,” Orndoff reported. “Beyond it there’s just another room with furniture, and a window on its far side. No curtains or drapes on the window. Not closed curtains, anyway.”

  “All right, hold your positions, and let me know if anything changes. And keep watch behind yourselves.”

  “Aye aye,” they said.

  “Mackie, wait for me, then we go in.”

  A large hole had been broken out in the lower part of the front door, but the hole’s top was too low for a human to duck through without doubling over. The door’s bottom scraped along the floor when Mackie, standing to its side, shoved it open. Adriance stood on the doorway’s other side. Both Marines had their rifles ready and their helmets’ ears turned up. There was no sound from inside the house.

  “Go!” Adriance said.

  In well practiced movements, Mackie darted through the doorway and to his right, looking everywhere, with his rifle muzzle pointing where he looked. Adriance followed on Mackie’s heels and to the left, likewise looking everywhere, muzzle sweeping along with his eyes.

  Dust motes dancing in the sunlight streaming through the window on the room’s left provided the only movement. There was no sound except for the blood pounding in their ears, and the breath in their helmets.

  On the right wall was the open door to the room Orndoff was looking into. Another open door on the left of the back wall led into another room. A stairwell leading up was on the rear wall’s right. Another door, ajar, was on the side wall near the stairs.

  “Cover me,” Adriance said. “I’m going to check that back room.”

  “Right.” Mackie moved to his left front, to where he could see into the back room. It was a large kitchen.

  Adriance went behind Mackie to reach the kitchen, staying out of his line of fire, then ducked low to enter the room.

  After a moment, he called, “Mackie, get in here.”

  Mackie didn’t run getting into the kitchen—there hadn’t been any urgency in Adriance’s voice—but still went in quickly. It only took him a second to locate his fire team leader; the camouflage pattern wasn’t as effective indoors as out.

  “Check it out,” Adriance said, pointing at the stove and a table set for six. A pot of something long gone to rot and mold was on the stove. The same was true of three of the six bowls on the table. It was as though the residents had been interrupted halfway through serving dinner, but not so suddenly that whoever was serving didn’t have time to put the pot back on the stove.

  “Damn,” Mackie murmured.

  “Cover me,” Adriance said, and headed for two doors on the far side of the kitchen. One door was open; it was a slope-ceilinged pantry with a cold-storage unit. Adriance opened the storage unit, flinched away, and slammed it shut again. “It’s loaded with organics that’ve gone bad,” he said, and shuddered. There was nothing else in the pantry that could conceal a body, living or dead. He went to the closed door. It opened to a small water closet. Again, no one was in it.

  “You know what’s weird?” Mackie asked.

  “Tell me,” Adriance said absently as he headed out of the kitchen and to the stairs leading up.

  “There’s no blood, no sign of a fight except for the broken front door, and nothing seems out of place.”

  “You noticed,” Adriance said dryly. Let’s check out the second deck, and then get out of here.” Second deck, not second floor. The Marine Corps was born in Navy ports and on Navy ships, so Marines use many Navy terms.

  “Aye aye.” Mackie took the lead going to the second floor. Again, he didn’t race but still went rapidly, stepping along the side of the stairs so they wouldn’t creak. Halfway up the stairs took a turn to the left, over the pantry. At the top, he looked left before turning to the right and stepping out of Adriance’s way.

  The second floor was smaller than the first, and had three bedrooms. One, larger than the others, had its own bathroom. A second bathroom was between the other two bedrooms, and was obviously shared by their occupants. One bedroom had bunk beds.

  “Parents’ room, kids’ rooms,” Adriance said.

  “Three kids had to share one bathroom,” Mackie said with a shake of his head, relegating the former occupants of the house to the past tense. “I hope they weren’t all girls.”

  Adriance grunted.

  They were checking inside the last of the closets when Sergeant Martin’s voice came over the comm. “First fire team, get a move on in there, we need to move.”

  “Just finishing up,” Adriance reported back. “We’ll be out in a couple of minutes.”

  That first two story, white-painted clapboard house was typical of what India Company found on the south side of Millerton. No bodies, no sign of struggle, very little out of place, hardly any blood. The southern fringe was like the Mary Celeste, a nineteenth century ship found abandoned off Portugal, seaworthy and fully provisioned, with no sign of foul play to explain the disappearance of her crew and passengers.

  The heart of the city was very different. It was obvious that a fierce battle had been fought there. Structures were severely damaged, some burned to their foundations. Broken vehicles littered the streets. Unpaved ground was gouged. Blood stains were everywhere.

  But there wasn’t a single person, human or alien, to be found. Not even a body part. Not even a dog or a cat turned feral.

  That feral dog Force Recon saw must have died, Mackie thought.

  As ordered, India Company sent out three platoon-size patrols ten klicks east of Millerton. None of them found any sign of human or alien life, or domestic animals gone feral.

  A battalion from the Fifth Marines landed in the second wave, escorting Marine Tactical Air Command Squadron 28, and Marine Attack Squadron 214 from Marine Air Group 14; the squadrons took off for the McKenzie Elevator Base as soon as they were off-loaded from the shuttles. The battalion relieved First Battalion, 1st Marines and secured the landing zone while the rest of the First Marine Combat Force made planetfall.

  Chapter Nine

  Near the McKinzie Elevator Base, Marine Headquarters

  Lieutenant General Harold W. Bauer, commander of the 1st Marine Combat Force, studied his situation board. The First Marine Division was all present. Sixteen battalions—infantry, light armor, armor—all ranging out far from Millerton on search-and-destroy missions, seeking the aliens who had invaded the world, and hoping to find survivors. The division’s reconnaissance battalion roamed in platoons and squads farther out. The rest of the division was in defensive positions surrounding Millerton and the planethead, formerly called the landing zone, five klicks to the west of Millerton. The Second Marine Air Wing was all planetside. Sixteen of the fighter and ground attack squadrons flew cover for the battalions; the other three flew search patterns where the ground forces didn’t go. Two of the atmospheric squadrons off the carrier Rear Admiral Norman Scott had been deployed planetside and joined the Marine air in searching for humans and aliens in areas not being patrolled by the ground forces. The res
t of the MAW’s units were assigned to building, securing, and maintaining its base, and maintaining, refueling, and rearming the squadrons’ aircraft when they returned from their patrols. The First Marine Logistics Group was busy building Camp Puller, which would be the division’s home base on Troy, and in preparing ground for the VII Corps to establish its base when it made planetfall.

  The level of the force’s activities satisfied Bauer—except for one detail. They had yet to find one bit of activity that they wouldn’t find on any habitable world that didn’t have human or other sentient occupants. For all he, or anybody else, could tell, Troy was an uninhabited world of ruins, or human structures that would someday decay into ruins.

  The report from the Navy in orbit seconded what the Marines on the ground and in the air found: No vessels other than Task Force 8’s warships were anywhere in or near Troy’s system; Amphibious Ready Group 17 had already returned to Earth to pick up VII Corps. The satellites ringing the planet found nothing but a few gravitational anomalies on the world, not all that unusual for extraterrestrial planets—gravitational anomalies had long been known on Earth and its moon. Troy’s two moons had similar gravity irregularities.

  The situation was such that Bauer and Rear Admiral James Avery considered sending a message to Earth calling off the deployment of VII Corps. In the end they decided that, in the interest of training for the Army and the ARG, not to send the message.

  Wormhole, Troy Space

  TF8’s two cruisers, the Coral Sea and Ramsey Strait, two of its destroyers, the Lance Corporal Keith Lopez and Chief Gunners Mate Oscar Schmit, Jr., and the fast attack carrier Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd took up station where the wormhole was about to open. Avery thought, there being no threat in Troy’s system, that this was simply a training opportunity for his warships.

  An area of empty space, some 400,000 kilometers north of the ecliptic, seemed to somehow shimmer and waver in a manner difficult to see and focus on. Indeed, anyone who stared at it for more than a few seconds was in danger of developing a severe headache. Then, with a pop that was somehow felt but not heard, a vacancy that could be called neither black nor a hole in space, abruptly took the place of the shimmering waver and a wormhole opened. A convoy of Navy transports exited single file from the rent in the fabric of space-time; Amphibious Ready Group 17 was returning to Troy space. As the ships exited, they maneuvered into an open formation. The waiting warships took station around the ARG as it formed up. ARG17 now had a quarter more ships than it had before. While there were more than twice as many soldiers in VII Corps as there had been Marines in the initial landing, the Marine aircraft had taken considerable space. That worked out to, man per man, a one-division-one-wing MCF needed nearly as much shipping as a four division Army Corps.

  Once the ARG was fully exited and deployed into its new formation, with its five warship escort in place, it began its five-day-long cruise to orbit around Troy where it would land its landing force. When it was three quarters of the way there, a gravitational anomaly on Troy’s lesser moon, called “Mini Mouse,” which at the time was on the far side of the planet from the warships orbiting in geosync, and out of sight of any Navy assets in the Troy system, gave up its secret.

  Sections of the moon’s surface rolled aside and missiles shot out. Less than a kilometer above the moon’s surface they turned onto a parabolic path on course to intercept the oncoming ARG and its escort.

  Combat Action Center, NAUS Durango, Task Force 8’s Flagship, in geosync orbit around Troy

  The CAC was quiet and dimly lit, the only light was from the screens of the displays at the various stations in the room, and the dim lights that showed where the hatches were. The compartment felt cavernous, but that was only because the stations were spaced sufficiently far apart that the glow from one screen wouldn’t distract the techs at the next. The soft voices of the sailors watching the displays as they occasionally made reports were the only sounds. There weren’t even the pings that normally would have been heard to indicate radar signals; the Durango’s radarwasn’t on.

  “Chief, do we have an exercise going?” Radarman 3 John F. Bickford asked, staring at his display, speaking more loudly than he had when making routine reports.

  “Not that anybody told me,” Chief Petty Officer James W. Verney answered. He took the two steps from his station to Bickford’s and stood over him to look at the display.

  After a brief moment Verney called to Lieutenant Thomas J. Hudner, the radar division head, “Mr. Hudner, it looks like we’ve got possible hostiles heading our way!” His voice cracked. The soft murmurs silenced, and everyone turned to look at Verney.

  “Say what?” Hudner asked, startled from his reverie; he’d been thinking of the homecoming he was going to get from his fiancée when this cruise was over. He glanced at the chief to see which display he was looking at, then dialed his screen to show that view seen at his station. It was a second or two before he fully absorbed the sight that met his eyes. Then he got on the comm to the bridge.

  “Bridge, CAC.”

  “CAC, Bridge. What do you have?” came back the bored voice of the watch officer, Lieutenant Commander Allen Buchanan.

  “We’ve got a lot of bogeys approaching from Mini Mouse. They look on course to intercept the ARG.”

  “What?” Buchanan squawked, his boredom abruptly vanished. He leaned forward and ordered, “Show me.” He quickly examined the display from the CAC that popped up on the bridge’s main board. “God,” he murmured as he slapped the comm button to the captain’s quarters.

  Captain Harry M. P. Huse awoke instantly and sat up on his bed before hitting the comm button. “Speak,” he rumbled.

  “Sir, we have bogeys moving at speed from Mini Mouse toward the ARG.”

  “Sound general quarters and notify Admiral Avery. I’ll be with you momentarily.” Huse took two minutes to slap water on his face to dredge the sleep from his eyes, and to get dressed.

  Bridge, NAUS Durango

  “Captain on deck!” Petty Officer 2 Henry Nickerson shouted as the Durango’s commanding officer stepped into the bridge.

  The bridge wasn’t kept dark like the CAC, and routine voices spoke in normal volume. But all went silent when Lieutenant Commander Buchanan reported to Captain Huse, and everybody appeared to be very intent on their duties.

  “Carry on,” Huse ordered, ignoring the fact that none of the officers or sailors on the bridge had stopped what they were doing following Nickerson’s announcement. He strapped himself into his chair, which had just been vacated by Buchanan. As soon as he saw the display showing the bogeys headed toward the ARG, he called to the fast attack carrier Kidd and told them, “Bogeys are en route from Mini Mouse to the ARG. Suggest you ready fighters to intercept.” He simultaneously transmitted location data on the bogeys and buzzed Admiral Avery.

  “Talk to me,” the admiral said on his command link with Huse.

  “Sir, several dozen, perhaps sixty, bogeys are headed toward the ARG. I have alerted the ARG and the Kidd.”

  There was a pause before Avery said, “I’ve ordered the Kidd toplot intercepts and launch their squadrons. Stand by to protect the Marines on the ground if the enemy launches anything at them. For your information, I have deployed the three remaining destroyers to intercept and destroy the bogeys. That leaves you, Scott, and the three frigates to guard the planet. Avery out.”

  Now all that Huse or anybody else in the Durango’s crew could do was wait and watch, ready to move into action the instant they saw any sign of threat to themselves or the Marines planetside.

  Fleet CAC, NAUS Durango

  “I want to know where they came from,” Rear Admiral James Avery snapped, glaring at the display showing the bogeys that were headed for ARG 17 as though his very look could turn them aside, if not actually destroy them.

  “Aye aye, sir,” Lieutenant Commander R. Z. Johnston replied. “On it.”

  “Comm,” Avery said.

  “Sir!” Lieutenant Command
er George Davis responded.

  “Earth needs to know about this, ASAP. Prepare drones. Launch when ready. Use the wormhole ARG 17 just exited from”

  “Prepare drones, aye.” Davis began murmuring orders to his section.

  Moments later, a barely felt thump signaled the launch of the first drone to Earth. For as long as the wormhole stayed open, more drones followed the first one as the action developed, so that Earth would have the most complete picture of what was happening in Troy space. But Avery knew the picture wouldn’t be complete enough, that the wormhole would close long before the action was resolved.

  Ready Room, Fast Attack Carrier NAUS Rear Admiral Isaac C. Kidd

  The pilots of VSF 114 “Catfish” squadron were startled by the klaxon that suddenly blared, followed by a voice that commanded, “Ready squadron, stand by for orders!” The pilots glanced at each other; they all caught that the command was to “stand by for orders,” not “stand by for briefing.”

  Captain John P. Cromwell, the Kidd’s Commander Air Group, strode into the ready room and stepped onto the small stage at its front. All eyes fixed on him. He looked like he’d just been awoken and couldn’t quite believe what he was about to say.

  “We don’t have time for a proper briefing,” Cromwell said as soon as he faced the pilots. “At least sixty bogeys have been detected on an intercept vector from Mini Mouse to the ARG. You are to go out there and keep them from reaching their targets. All available data on the bogeys will be fed into your Meteors’ comps by the time you reach them. Lionfish squadron will follow you as soon as they can scramble. This is not a drill. Now get out there and seriously kick some ass!”

  “Catfish, let’s go!” Lieutenant Adolphus Staton, VSF 114’s commander, shouted as he jumped to his feet and raced out of the ready room.

  The ready room was adjacent to the launch deck, where thirty-two SF6 Meteor interceptors waited. Sixteen of the Meteors stood with their crew hatches open.