The officer who had lived in this home was a family man with a pretty platinum-blond wife and two little boys. I saw pictures of the family on the walls. The boys shared a single room sleeping on bunk beds with steel tube frames. Searching the house, I found a flashlight and a cheap pair of binoculars, both of which I took. I also found a book of fairy tales and a Bible, both of which I left behind. The wife had jars of fruit preserves in the garage. She and the boys had undoubtedly left the planet during the mass evacuation. Even if he was alive, her husband would never find them again. Not without the Broadcast Network.
Before leaving the house, I stowed my M27 and four grenades in the family linen closet under a stack of children’s blankets. I would need to travel light and kill quietly. I kept my particle beam pistol and the ridiculously large combat knife.
As the sun dropped on the horizon and the sky turned dark blue, I slipped back on to the street and traveled the last mile to Fort Washington. A tabby cat followed me from a distance as I walked down the street. The people had left their pets behind. The cats would roam free. Dogs left in houses would likely starve to death.
Fort Washington was a large compound encompassed by a chain link fence and razor wire. No lights burned anywhere that I could see, but I saw the glow of fires around the grounds. Lasers or looters had destroyed much of the fence. Making one last inventory check, I knelt beside the chassis of an overturned bus, examined my pistol to be sure it was charged, and stole on to the base.
Since the attack on Earth, I had developed an inconvenient appreciation for human life. It was as if my neural programming had gone haywire. I had the same instincts as ever, but after seeing the Galactic Republic go up in flame, I now placed a value on humanity. I even had an idea about what was going wrong inside me. I was designed and programmed to protect the Unified Authority. My programming must have been specifically set up to do whatever was necessary for the protection of the Republic. Only now, there was no Republic. I had no trouble identifying the enemy, but the mental loop that let me justify any action had been closed.
The attack had left the base in ruins. Every building I passed was destroyed. The first building I saw was a barracks, an elongated brick dormitory for enlisted Marines. The building had caved in.
More than anything else, Fort Washington reminded me of a college campus. It had old buildings and new ones, modern structures made out of the same red brick that the minutemen would have used had they built barracks during the Revolutionary War. Tradition. A network of tree-lined lanes laced the base together. Between the buildings were long, well-mowed stretches of grass that looked like city parks in miniature.
The base landscaping also included trees. There were thirty-foot firs and groups of leafed trees. As I walked around the base, I noticed large bundles hanging from the lower boughs of almost every tree. The bundles looked like rucksacks. They hung at the end of long leads of rope, dangling perfectly still, apparently so heavy that the low summer breeze did not move them.
Strange how the mind works. Coming into the base I did not notice these cocoons. Now that I saw a few, the mental veil dissolved from my eyes and I saw that they were everywhere, hanging from the trees, from the rafters of the buildings, and two or three bundles hung from each streetlamp.
They were not rucksacks, of course. These were the Marines of Fort Washington. Pulling my flashlight from my pocket, I stole up to one of the streetlights. Three men dangled above me, two clones and an officer. The clones were clearly killed in combat. They had been stripped of their armor, but I could tell by the blistered skin of their faces and their charred bodysuits that they were killed by laser fire. Some grave robber must have found them while scavenging through the base.
The officer, however, had not died during the raid. Someone had executed him, firing a single bullet into the side of his head from close range. I could see his tied hands through the bag. Shining my light on him, I saw that the top right corner of his head was a bloody, hollow mess.
These were Callahan’s scarecrows. Killed in action or put to death after the battle, it didn’t matter. Jimmy Callahan strung up the bodies as a warning to other warlords that Fort Washington was his territory. If I looked around long enough, I might find Colonel Bernie Phillips hanging from a tree. As the base commander, Phillips had helped me stash Callahan. He was the one who helped me steal an Army jeep so that I could sneak into Fort Clinton. I was disgusted with myself for letting this desecration bother me.
There might have been 20,000 or even 30,000 men assigned to Fort Washington. Could Callahan and his men have strung up all of the bodies? Some of the Marines would have gone into town to fight. Seeing the hopelessness of the situation, some of the officers would have gone AWOL. The enlisted clones would have fought to the end.
I thought that many of the men killed during the attack would have been too torn up to hang, but that turned out to be wrong. Under a nearby tree, I saw a body without arms or legs or any of the familiar curves you associate with the human form. On closer inspection I discovered that it was nothing but a bunch of body parts. Somebody had stuffed this fellow into nylon netting used for laundry.
Like I said before, most of the base lay in darkness. Crossing a hill, however, I heard the mechanical drone of a power generator. I had no trouble locating where the noise came from. Off in the distance, a two-story building shown in a bath of incandescent light. Glare from that building illuminated the broken buildings around it.
You could only describe Jimmy Callahan as a complete moron. Lying on the ground at the crest of a grassy hill, partially hidden by the six Corps corpses hanging above me, I could have picked off half of Callahan’s army with a single shot had I brought a rocket launcher. They had lined up in a tight group for some kind of parade.
The terrain he selected showed his lack of tactical training. He set up his headquarters in a building surrounded by hills. The hills formed a ring around him, giving me or any invading gang the high-ground advantage.
And then there was the light. Callahan felt compelled to show off to the world that he had a working power generator. The light from his headquarters illuminated his troops. I could see the men in the machine-gun nests set up on the veranda. I had a much better view of the sharpshooters on the roof than they had of me. Although they had night-for-day scopes, they would need to locate me before they could aim and shoot. I could see them clear as day.
A particle beam pistol, however, was not the right equipment for a sniper attack. It was a short-range weapon for killing people and blowing up targets within a thirty-feet radius.
So I lay silently at the base of a tree, hidden from view by dangling corpses, and I watched. Most of Callahan’s men wore fatigues. Some carried M27s. Some carried pistols.
I estimated Callahan’s troops at somewhere between 150 and 200 men. He had jeeps and all-terrain vehicles, and a few armored personnel carriers. How he had taken control of this territory with so few men I could not understand. Then I heard the rumble. An LG tank rumbled up the street toward the lighted building. The letters, LG , stood for low gravity . These units were made for use on planets with low gravity, obviously. Tell a Marine engineer to make a tank heavier and you can guess exactly what he’ll do. He adds thicker armor, heavier guns, more durable treads, and more powerful motors. Most tanks weighed about sixty-five tons or 130,000 pounds. The extra 70,000 pounds on an LG tank was dedicated to killing.