I contacted Hollingsworth using the interLink. “Contact the fort, tell them to call off the alert,” I said.
“You got the Link working,” Hollingsworth said, sounding surprised.
I suspected we would find a bomb or some other weapon back at the base, but it would be disarmed or maybe just an empty shell. The locals were letting me know that it was high time for the Marines to leave their town. I only hoped Hollingsworth realized that the message was meant for him as much as me.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ellery Doctorow dropped by Fort Sebastian at my request later that morning.
I had the guards hold him at the front gate as I drove out to meet him. Doctorow left his car in an outside parking lot, and we rode together in my jeep.
“Someone left us a special delivery last night,” I said, as we passed through the gate.
“Anything in particular?” asked Doctorow, not even pretending to sound surprised.
He was better dressed than usual. Instead of his customary combination of fatigues and civilian clothes, he wore slacks, a light button-up blue shirt, and a necktie. His long hair was pulled back into a ponytail. On this visit, Doctorow behaved more like a politician than a soldier or a chaplain.
I slowed as we approached a large truck bearing a fifteen-foot-long aluminum canister. NOXIUM was stenciled across the side of the canister in turkey red paint. Six antique gas masks hung from a rack at the back of the truck.
I stopped beside the truck and pulled one of the gas masks from the rack. Draping it over my left hand, I held it out so that Doctorow could get a better look at it. “Know what this is?” I asked.
“It looks like an old-fashioned breathing apparatus.” He barely gave the mask a glance before answering.
“Yes it is. I’d never seen one of these before, so I looked it up on the mediaLink,” I said as I spun it and studied it from different angles. “This one isn’t for soldiers. It was made for firefighters. Marines don’t use them at all, of course. We have airtight armor with a built-in rebreather.”
The longer we hovered around the gas canister, the more uncomfortable Doctorow seemed to become. He did not look at me directly; nor did he seem to want to look at the mask or the canister. Instead, he stared at the road ahead.
“Firefighters don’t use these masks anymore, either. Did you know that?”
“I wasn’t aware of that,” he said, still not meeting my gaze.
“Nope. They use combat armor …Marine combat armor. At least they used to. See, most Marines come in one size, being clones, so the armor comes in one size as well. They custom-make armor for officers, but that’s expensive …really expensive; so firefighters had to use standard-issue enlisted gear. You know how they got around the single-size issue? They hired retired servicemen, you know, clones. Makes sense, doesn’t it?
“They can’t do that now, though, because they’re out of clones. Now they probably use natural-borns. I suppose they could make robots, but that’s even more expensive than custom-fitted gear. It’s so specking—”
“All very fascinating, General, but there’s no call for profanity,” Doctorow said, interrupting me just as I was closing in on the punch line.
“Oh, sorry about that,” I said. “I got carried away.” I laughed. “Do you know what this is?” I pointed to the canister as I slung the gas mask back on the rack.
Doctorow barely glanced at the back of the truck before saying, “I’d say somebody was trying to send you a message.”
“Yes indeed, it would appear so,” I agreed. “Some of the boys and I went out on the town last night. We found this waiting for us when we returned home. Fortunately, the canister was empty.”
“That is fortunate. As I understand it, Noxium gas makes quite a mess,” Doctorow said.
“Quite a mess. Quite a mess, indeed. In fact, it’s so messy that these gas masks would have done nothing to protect us. Even combat armor is useless against this kind of gas. Did you know that?”
“I think I have heard something along that line,” Doctorow admitted.
I thought of an old memory and laughed. “One of my old platoon sergeants had some men who were killed by Noxium. Do you know how he got their bodies out of the armor? He washed them out with a fire hose. No joke. He said the Noxium ate their bodies until all that was left was this flesh-colored jelly, sort of a coagulated goo that washed out in clumps.”
“This is all very fascinating, but—” Doctorow began.
I cut him off. “Now a canister this size, if it had been full, it would have held enough gas to wipe out half of Norristown. You’d have been cleaning out Fort Sebastian with a fire hose, but you’d also have needed to hose out every apartment, house, and car from Ford Street to West Angle, almost half of town.”
“Is that so?” asked Doctorow. “I heard Noxium gas evaporates so quickly that it doesn’t spread.”
“Oh, you see now, that’s just a myth. The truth is, Noxium doesn’t evaporate at all. It dies,” I said, stating information that any schoolkid would know. I was patronizing the bastard, and he knew it. “It’s not really a gas, it’s a cloud of microscopic organisms, voracious little bastards that will bore through anything they can sink their teeth into.”
“There’s no cause to use—”
I ignored him and went on. “The little bastards die quickly when you release them in small concentrations. Unleash a pint or two, and they die in a matter of seconds. That’s why Noxium is such an effective tool for capturing enemy strongholds. You just shoot a few Noxium shells over the wall, and the gas turns the occupants into goo, then you capture their base and wash the enemy out with a hose.
“But that’s with a small amount …maybe the amount of gas you’d get from a half-gallon shell. With a big batch like this, the microbes insulate each other from the atmosphere, and the cloud doesn’t go away. If this much had spilled, the cloud would have spread all the way over to your part of town. My Marines wouldn’t have been the only ones receiving the message; Sarah and Ava would have gotten it as well.”
“How very fortunate for all of us that the canister was empty,” Doctorow said.
“You wouldn’t happen to have any idea who left us this message?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t know anything about it,” Doctorow protested, feigning alarm. “General, I am a peaceable man.”
“Ellery, I’m not accusing anyone.”
Doctorow seemed to regain his nerve. He said, “I don’t think it was meant as a threat. Whoever left it, they probably meant it as a reminder.”
“Probably so,” I agreed.
“I happen to agree with whoever did this. It’s high time you left,” Doctorow said. “You and your men have outstayed your welcome.”
“Does that go for all of us?” I asked. “Colonel Hollingsworth is under the impression that you only object to me.”
“A simple misunderstanding,” said Doctorow. “Don’t take this personally, General Harris, but I don’t really like having a military presence in my city. Armies are a tool of intimidation, and I don’t believe governments should be in the business of intimidation.”
“But you don’t mind my Corps of Engineers,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“If you are evicting me and my men, I will need to take my engineers with me,” I said. “How are you going to rebuild Norristown without them?”
“I would prefer for you to leave them, they make a valuable contribution,” Doctorow said.
“They’re military clones, just like the rest of us,” I pointed out. “They came off the same assembly line and grew up in the same orphanages. The only difference between Scott Mars and Philo Hollingsworth is their training. When I give the order to leave, Mars and his men go with the rest of us.”