My fire team joined me. “Where are the survivors, sir?” the automatic rifleman asked.
“Hiding behind the door,” I said. As I pulled out a grenade and set it for the lowest yield possible, my backup instinctively backed off. I called to the people hidden on the other side of the walclass="underline" “Stand away from the wall.”
“Sir, I found the mines.” It was Herrington.
I wanted to hear his report, but I had other priorities at the moment. “Not now, Herrington,” I said as I tossed my grenade toward the wall and took cover.
“Aye, aye, sir, but do you want me to reconnoiter the spheres on my way back?”
“Herrington, I’m a bit busy at the moment,” I snapped.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
The first explosion, the one from my grenade, had enough force to blow a ten-foot section out of the wall. The second explosion, the one caused by whatever explosives the friendly natives had rigged, sent a rush of flames across the hall.
“What the hell was that?” my rifleman asked.
“That, Corporal, is why you stay under cover when there is fire in the hole.”
“I don’t think they were happy to see you, sir,” the grenadier said.
“That’s just ’cause they don’t know him,” said the rifleman.
We searched the first five floors of the building. The place had been occupied recently, but now stood abandoned. Reviewing the confrontation, I decided that throwing a grenade might not have made a good first impression, and time was running out.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Captain Harris, we’ve located survivors. Do you want us to make contact?” The call came from the fire team I had sent into the metal-skinned skyscraper. The Marine on the line, Corporal Hunter Ritz, sounded too helpful.
“Negative, Corporal. The natives are not friendly,” I said.
“The natives in this building may be hostile, but they don’t look dangerous, sir,” Ritz said. “It’s like a cathouse in here.”
“A cathouse?” I repeated.
“Yes, sir. A brothel, sir.”
“As in hookers and whores?” I asked, suddenly understanding his motivation to volunteer.
“Maybe not hookers and whores, but they are all of the female variety, sir,” Ritz said. “It’s pretty much paradise as far as I can tell. We’ve checked several floors; there are no men.”
“Keep your armor on,” I said.
“We’re going to need to make contact sooner or later, sir, and they don’t appear to be hostile. Maybe we could just ask them for directions.”
“Keep away from them, Ritz. That is an order. Do not start up a conversation. Do not deliver your best pickup line. You and your men will observe the targets, but do not engage.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And try to stay alert, asshole. There’s no point keeping the hens in a henhouse unless you have a watchdog to guard it.”
“Yes, sir.”
I had left the Kamehameha with 250 men, 100 of whom I lost entering the atmosphere. We did not have enough men to take this city by force, not from the survivors and certainly not from the aliens. If I lost anyone else, I would not even have enough bodies to deliver the big bomb to the mines, and I did not want to be stuck on this planet for the rest of my life.
Unfortunately, Ritz had contacted me on an open frequency to report his discovery.
As I scanned through other frequencies, I heard Marines offering to help guard the place they had already dubbed “the Norristown brothel and home for wayward girls.” I had to admit, I was just as curious as everyone else. Was the building a harem? A brothel? Maybe a boot camp for Amazons? In a broken society, there was no telling what a building filled with women could mean.
“Sir, we have a problem?” one of my men reported. “The locals have arrived.”
Using the commandLink, I looked at the situation through the other man’s visor. He must have been standing at a window staring down at the street. Below him, the residents of Norristown had arrived en masse.
There were hundreds of men in the street, standing silently, prepared to fight but not yet rioting. In the center of this mob, my three jeeps looked like tiny islands. No one had overturned our vehicles, but the tide closed around them.
I sent my next message out on a company-wide frequency that even Hollingsworth and Herrington would hear. “Boys, we have a street full of survivors.”
“How did you find them?” Thomer asked.
“They found us,” I said.
“Do you want me to bring my men?” Thomer asked.
“Stay put, they’re behaving themselves so far,” I said as I headed down the stairs toward the lobby. As I stepped on to the floor, I could see men just outside the lobby staring in. Without taking my eyes off the street, I backed into the stairwell and trotted back up the stairs to the mezzanine, where I could have a closer look at the street below.
I loped over the debris left behind by looters and stole up to the window, my nerves tense. A large mob of men had formed on the street, but they showed no interest in entering the building. They milled around like an army of vagrants. Many carried M27s or handguns. A few of them had rocket launchers. Every weapon I saw was standard military issue, probably gleaned from the streets.
As I surveyed the scene, I noticed Corporal Ritz peering around the shattered glass of a fifth-floor window. My visor read his virtual tags. He looked in my direction, probably spotting me through the window with his telescopic lens.
“Do you think they know we’re up here?” Ritz asked.
“Can you think of any other reason for them to be here?” I asked.
“Look at those bastards. There must be a thousand of them.”
I estimated them at five hundred or six hundred, but kept it to myself.
“Are they armed?” Thomer asked.
“Every last mother-specking one of them,” I said. “I think we know where all the guns disappeared to.”
The mob filled the streets and sidewalks in a single, unorganized mass. At any moment, I expected some leader to climb onto one of our jeeps and rally his troops with a speech, but it did not happen.
“Ritz, what’s happening in the brothel?”
“Not much, sir,” Ritz said. “I don’t think the ladies know we’re in here.”
“So we have a standoff,” I said. “They don’t want to come in, and we don’t want to step out.”
“Maybe they don’t know who we are, sir,” Ritz said. “Maybe they don’t know we’re Marines.”
“Maybe they don’t care,” I said. Who knew what kind of anarchy had taken hold in Norristown. These people probably knew no authority higher than a gun.
I decided it was time to introduce myself. Pulling both a grenade and a rocket launcher from my belt, I took twelve paces back from the window. I set the grenade for a relatively low-yield explosion, and tossed it toward the window, then hid in a doorway. The explosion sprayed shattered glass onto the street. Bright light poured in through the shattered glass wall.
“What are you doing?” Ritz asked.
“I’m introducing myself,” I said.
The men in the street scattered as glass showered down on them. Not giving them a moment to regroup, I bolted for the window and fired my rocket at one of the jeeps. I hated sacrificing a perfectly good ride, but explosions and burning metal made a strong impression.
The rocket hit the rear of the jeep just above the fuel tank, touching off a second explosion. The jeep did an anemic flip through the air, crashing onto its front bumper, then landing upside down. Greasy black smoke rose from the chassis along with a bloom of orange-and-red flames.
Down below, all of the men on the street turned their guns in my direction, but nobody fired. Finally, a man stepped out of the crowd and climbed onto the nearest jeep. He wore Army fatigues and a Marine Corps combat helmet. He spoke to me over an open channel on the interLink, his voice sounding so damn familiar we might have been old friends.