"Tell me how you plan to do this, Lieutenant," the major said after a moment.
"They're not capable enough for me to take a chance simply loading everyone aboard to ride back," Kuramochi said. "Defensively, they're actually not all that bad against militia-grade weapons, but 'all that bad' isn't good enough if they've got the planetary government on board. So I'm thinking that my platoon comes out on foot, the same way we came in. I'll use one squad to break trail and sweep for threats. I'll use another squad for close cover, protecting the APCs from anything the sweep squad misses. And I'll use my third squad to cover the rear and provide at least a small tactical reserve. It'll still be slow, but we'll be faster than we would with the older Delegates hobbling along on foot, and we should be able to cover the APCs against significant threats on the way home."
"I see." Palacios considered for several more seconds, then made her decision.
"All right, Chiyeko. Do it your way. And, for what it matters, you have my official endorsement, not just my permission."
"Thank you, Ma'am. I appreciate that. We'll see you in a couple of hours or so. Kuramochi, clear."
"Well, DeVries-Alley," Kuramochi said, and Alicia twitched internally in surprise. She hadn't realized that the lieutenant even knew what her first name was.
"Yes, Ma'am?"
She and Kuramochi stood on the Presidential Mansion's chipped and battered steps with Cusherwa, watching the snorting APCs move into position. Alicia had continued trailing the lieutenant around after her encounter with Jongdomba, obedient to Sergeant Metternich's unspoken order. She'd rather hoped her CO hadn't noticed, since Metternich still hadn't bothered to ask Lieutenant Kuramochi's approval for the arrangement.
Not that there'd ever been much chance that she wouldn't notice, of course.
"You'd better get back to your squad, now." Kuramochi smiled crookedly. "Sergeant Metternich's going to need you. And you can tell Abe for me that while I appreciate his solicitude, I don't think I'll really need a bodyguard once we get started."
"Uh, yes, Ma'am!"
"Oh, don't look so startled, Alley." Kuramochi actually chuckled. "I'll admit I was a bit surprised when he and Gunny Wheaton picked you for the role, but they're mother hens, the pair of them. Maybe they thought I wouldn't notice a mere 'larva' hovering in the background and raise a stink. And as a matter of fact, I suppose I should admit you've actually been quite a comfort-especially in that little unpleasantness with Jongdomba. But now," she made a shooing motion with one hand, "go find Abe. It's about time we got back across the Major here's perimeter and headed back to the barn."
Getting back out of the Mall perimeter wouldn't be quite as simple as getting in had been, Alicia decided fifteen minutes later. She rather doubted that it would be quite as difficult as the people on the other side thought it would, but that didn't mean it was going to be simple, either.
The civilian evacuees, although manifestly willing, were hardly going to be an asset for this particular mission. If any of them had ever had any military training, it had been decades ago. They were basically cargo, loaded aboard the APC's for safekeeping, but they were also cargo which would be capable of making mistakes if it fell into the crapper, and Alicia was more than happy that Sergeant Jackson had been assigned the dubious pleasure of providing them with close cover.
Of course, the fact that First Squad was busy doing that meant it was up to Second and Third Squads to lead the way back out again.
The carnage Lieutenant Ryan's mortars had wreaked on the platoon's way in had clearly shocked the rioters and would-be guerrillas around the Mall. Second Platoon had left effectively no survivors in its wake when it broke the line around Jongdomba's positions, and for almost half an hour, there'd been scarcely a shot from the "enemy's" other dug-in firing positions. No doubt they'd been afraid of drawing the same sort of firestorm down on themselves. By the time Lieutenant Kuramochi was ready to begin her pullout, though, that had changed.
At least some of the attackers had apparently begun getting their nerve back, or perhaps they'd simply suffered a catastrophic loss of common sense. Not only had some of them begun harassing Cusherwa's militiamen with small arms fire once more, but others had moved to block the gap Lieutenant Ryan had blasted in their lines. They hadn't been stupid enough to try to regain their original positions-or not, at least, after they ran into the murderously effective opposition of the single fire team from Sergeant Bruckner's Second Squad which Lieutenant Kuramochi had left behind to support the militiamen who'd occupied those positions. But the capital city's heavily built-up terrain had allowed them to swing around behind the area the mortar fire had plowed up, and they'd found new perches in several of the high-rise buildings from which they could bring the streets and avenues below them under fire.
Their new positions were harder to spot, even with the remotes. Worse, they had overhead cover-several stories worth of it, in most cases-which enormously decreased the effectiveness of Lieutenant Ryan's mortars. Unfortunately for them, "harder to spot" wasn't the same thing as "impossible to spot." Also, and even more unfortunately for them, their lack of experience against Imperial Marines with first-line equipment had kept them from fully realizing just how … unwise their decision to cross swords with Second Platoon truly was.
The Marines' chameleon systems made them extraordinarily difficult for the unaided eye, or even the considerably more capable optical sighting systems the planetary militia's combat rifles boasted, to spot. The people in the buildings had probably figured that the concealment of their own positions would level that particular part of the playing field, and to some extent, they'd been right. But the Marines' helmet sensor systems, especially with their direct links to their hovering remotes, promptly unleveled it once again.
While First Squad was getting the civilians organized, Sergeant Metternich, who'd become acting platoon sergeant when Gunny Wheaton went down, had moved Second and Third Squads into position to open the door for the column behind them. Sergeant Bruckner had been monitoring the take from the platoon's remotes, and now Metternich conferred briefly with her while they studied the remotes' data over their synth-links.
On their way into the Mall, Lieutenant Kuramochi had positioned her available remotes-she hadn't exactly had an unlimited supply of them-to watch her preselected exit point. Those remotes had hovered there, patiently (and invisibly) watching even while the lieutenant and her people dealt with Brigadier Jongdomba and his supporters. Which meant that they'd actually watched the people filtering cautiously out of the alleys and side streets to take up their new positions.
The remotes had lost lock on the exact locations of several of those people once they'd entered the buildings of their choice, but Bruckner had managed to keep track of the majority of them. Even some of those her remotes had lost track of had been relocated when they injudiciously exposed themselves on balconies or at windows as they found themselves firing positions. Every single potential hostile whose location had been determined had been meticulously noted on the continuously updated tactical plot she'd taken over from the incapacitated Wheaton, and now Metternich took ruthless advantage of that information.
"All right, people. Listen up," Metternich came up on the communications subnet which had been dedicated to Second and Third Squads. "Here's how we're going to do this. Chris?"
"Yo," Corporal Sandusky acknowledged tersely.
"Alpha Team takes the right side of the street. Leo, Bravo Team takes the left side. Second Squad's Alpha holds its position to watch our rear, and Second's Bravo is our tactical backup. We've got to clear these three blocks -" a red arrow appeared on the map graphic in Alicia's mental HUD "-before the rest of the outfit can haul the civilians out of here. Once we're through the immediate crust, Clarissa will hold the door open while Julio's First Squad takes the civilians through it. After that, she'll have the column's back door and bring up the rear. Anybody got any questions, so far?"
Alicia studied the HUD, noting the clusters of solid red icons representing positively identified hostiles and the somewhat less numerous blinking icons of possible enemies' locations. There seemed to be quite a lot of them, she noticed, yet to her own surprise, she no longer felt nervous. Instead, she felt a strangely focused, almost singing sense of calm, unlike anything she'd quite experienced before.
"All right," Metternich said again, when no one voiced any questions. "Alley."
"Yes, Abe?" Her voice sounded just a bit odd, almost serene, to her own ears.
"As it happens," Metternich said, "and without wanting to give you a swelled head or anything, you've got the highest marksmanship scores of the entire Platoon."
Alicia blinked. She'd been impressed-almost awed-by the casual expertise of her more experienced fellows' marksmanship. She'd certainly never thought that hers was better than theirs!
"In addition," Metternich continued, "you and Cйsar are the only fully synth-link-capable rifles we've got in Bravo. That's why I'm designating you and him as Bravo's long guns," Metternich continued. "Gregory, you're covering them. Leo, you and Frinkelo are responsible for -"
Alicia listened to the sergeant as he continued laying out the plan, but deep inside, her mind was grappling with her own assigned part of it. She'd been more than a little surprised, despite any relative marksmanship scores involved, when Metternich selected her as one of Bravo Team's counter-snipers. And while he was right about her synth-link capability, and even though it was exactly the sort of thing she'd trained to do, she still felt more than a few qualms. What she was about to do amounted to visiting specifically targeted death upon other human beings not just once, but again and again, and whatever her ability as a marksman, she was also the newest, least experienced member of the entire Platoon. This wasn't the sort of job that normally got handed to the newest kid on the block.
"- and after that," Metternich concluded finally, "we pass the word to the Lieutenant that the door's open, and we all haul ass back to the spaceport. Any questions? If you've got 'em, ask now, people."
No one did.
"In that case, let's saddle up," he said.
Chapter Twelve
Alicia DeVries eased cautiously forward.
Late afternoon was finally beginning to give way to early evening, and the smoke and shadows made her chameleon camouflage even more effective. Nonetheless, she moved slowly, carefully, like a woman wading through waist-deep water. The slower she moved, the less likely anyone on the other side was to see some small, betraying flicker of movement. The odds of their seeing her, even if she'd run full tilt down the middle of the street, were slim, to say the least. But they had time to do this the right way. Indeed, the darker it got, the worse the visibility, the better from their perspective, and Sergeant Metternich had been very firm on the matter of not running any unnecessary risks.
She reached her assigned position uneventfully and settled into place. Her particular perch was a traffic island, in the center of a four-way intersection. There were drawbacks to it, especially the fact that virtually every building in a half-block radius had a direct line of sight to it. On the other hand, that meant that she had an unobstructed LOS to all of them, as well.
The other major advantage of the island was that it was home to half a dozen native shade trees. The smallest of them was at least twenty-five or thirty centimeters thick, and their branches and foliage were dense enough to hide even someone who'd never heard of chameleon camouflage. In addition, there were roughly built, solid stone benches on all four sides of the island, which meant that it provided military cover, as well as mere concealment.
She watched her HUD icons as the rest of Able and Bravo Teams reached their own positions. For their present purposes, hers was the best-sited of the lot, and she tried not to think too hard about exactly why that was.
She shifted around to the south side of her island and arranged herself behind the solid stone bench on that side. It was just short enough that she could take up a seated firing position behind it and use the top of its back as a rest for her weapon.
"Three-Alpha, Bravo-Five," she said quietly over the com. "Position."
"Three-Alpha, Bravo-Four," she heard from Cйsar Bergerat. "Position."
"Three-Alpha, Bravo-Three," Gregory Hilton reported. "Position."
One by one, all of the members of the three fire teams assigned to the mission reported in, confirming what the icons on Abe Metternich's HUD had already told him.
"All Wasps this net," Metternich said when they had finished, "Three-Alpha. We are go. Bravo-Five, open the ball."
"Five copies," Alicia said simply, and closed her eyes.
Her normal vision disappeared, and she concentrated her full attention on her synth-link. Each of the Marines in Third Squad had been assigned his or her own dedicated sensor remote. That remote's exquisitely sensitive optical, thermal, and electronic passive sensors were patched directly into the helmet computers of the Marines to whom they had been assigned. Those computers translated the data into detailed displays which were presented to each Marine in the format he or she found easiest to process. Some Marines, Alicia knew, preferred wire-diagram representations and tactical icons. She herself found a direct visual presentation easiest to absorb, without icons, and so she found herself apparently hovering motionless in mid-air fifty meters south and forty meters above her actual physical position, gazing at a crystal clear image of the first building in her assigned sector.
A mental command reoriented the sensor remote very slightly, zooming in on the panoramic windows of a specific office on the sixth floor of the commercial building. There were four people in the room on the other side of those windows, and the remote's sensors clearly identified the weapons in their hands as they knelt or crouched in firing positions of their own, peering alertly down into the street below. Unlike Alicia, they saw nothing, and she dropped another command into her computer.
A crosshair appeared in her mental vision. It was at the very bottom of her field of view, and far to the right, but it moved as she shifted her M-97's point of aim without ever opening her eyes. One of the hardest things in the Camp Mackenzie marksmanship curriculum-for most people, at least-was learning how to direct small arms fire accurately based on the feed from a remote sensor just like the one assigned to Alicia. It had been considerably easier for synth-link-capable people like Alicia than for most, since the input from the remote feed dropped directly into their brains without the need for distracting sensory interfaces. Which wasn't exactly the same thing as saying that it hadn't been difficult, even for her. But the Corps' tradition was that every Marine was a rifleman first, and so, hard or easy, it was a lesson she'd learned. Learned so thoroughly, so completely, that she didn't even think about it as the crosshair tracked smoothly across her mental view until it settled on the righthand person in the room she had selected.
She'd considered the possibility of using the grenade launcher, but rejected it. The M-97 used a low-visibility propellant, which, coupled with the flash suppressor, made its muzzle flash extremely difficult to see, even in a low-light conditions, from any point outside a relatively narrow cone directly in front of it. The rifle grenade's rocket engine, on the other hand, would have drawn a bright, arrow-straight line directly back to her firing position for anyone in any of the buildings around it. Which meant she was going to have to do this the hard way.
The crosshair positioned itself at the base of her target's throat. She drew a deep breath, let most of it out, and squeezed slowly, steadily.
The slam of recoil came as a surprise, exactly as it was supposed to do, and the target-the human being-at whom she had fired went down instantly, bonelessly, without a sound except for the sodden impact of the high-velocity round.
Alicia was aware of the other people in the room. She was aware of everything, with a godlike crystalline clarity, and she noted all of it. But she was focused on the task in hand, and the crosshair tracked just over one meter farther to the left. It settled on the rifleman who was just turning towards the spot at which his companion had died, alerted by the impact sound, and she squeezed again.
Two, an icy, dispassionate corner of her mind recorded as she rode the recoil, and the crosshair tracked left again. Settled. Squeeze.
Three.
The fourth and final person in the office had time to realize what was happening. Had time to come to her feet, to begin to back away from the window at which she had waited. But she didn't have enough time, and Alicia squeezed the trigger again.
"Three-Alpha, Bravo-Five. First target neutralized. Four down," someone said in Alicia's voice, her tone calm, almost serene. "Five engaging second target."
The hovering sensor remote shifted very slightly, zooming in on another window. There were only two people behind this one, and as yet, they had no clue of what had happened in the office three doors down the hall from their own position.
Nor would they ever find out, that still, cold corner of Alicia's brain thought as the crosshair settled on the first of them and her hand began to squeeze.
The people who had positioned themselves to reseal the gap Second Platoon had blasted in the siege lines around the Mall had no idea, no concept, of just what they had "trapped."
The "Empire's Wasps" had a towering reputation as dispensers of devastation in the Empire's name, yet some people persisted in thinking that the very fearsomeness of their reputation must indicate exaggeration. And most even of those who weren't convinced that at least half the Corps' supposed invincibility had to be pure propaganda had no direct, personal experience with the Marines' combat capabilities. Perhaps they might have reflected upon the fact that very few people who had had direct, personal experience with Marine capabilities were still around to pass the lessons of that experience on.
Be that as it may, the people waiting in those buildings to pour rifle fire, grenade fire, and rockets down on any attempt to break back out of the Mall had never allowed for the Marines' ability to literally see around corners. To accurately target individual opponents under such adverse conditions of visibility.
To kill them with single, aimed shots.
Alicia was only one of four riflemen. Although she had no spare time or attention to waste realizing it, she was the quickest and most effective of them all, but still only one of four, and all of them were killing targets with metronome-steady precision. She'd just taken down her seventeenth when the first belated return fire began to crack out from the other side.
Most of it was unaimed, panic fire. An instinctive reaction as someone lasted long enough to squeeze a trigger as the other people in his ambush position were picked off. The first long, suddenly interrupted burst of fire from one of the buildings set off others, and within seconds the gathering twilight glared and flickered and danced with the muzzle flashes of scores of weapons.
Very little of it was actually aimed at anything, and Alicia was only vaguely aware of the supersonic whipcracks of the scattered handful of shots coming anywhere near her own position. Had her eyes been open, no doubt the blinding effect of all of those muzzle flashes would have disoriented her, but they weren't. The sensor remote and her helmet computer showed her each flash, but unlike her physical retina, her mental vision wasn't subject to the blinding effect of those brilliant flares of light.
Something whipped through the branches above her. A spattering of twigs and leaves showered down over her, and her crosshair moved steadily to her next target. A digital readout in the corner of her HUD reminded her that she was down to twenty-three rounds in the current magazine, and she dropped the crosshair onto the chest of a man firing long, sweeping, obviously unaimed bursts in the general direction of Cйsar Bergerat's position.
Squeeze.
She was no longer counting the people she'd killed. She simply noted that the target was down, and moved to the next in her queue.
Squeeze.
The Marines' very efficiency kept their victims from immediately realizing just how dreadfully outclassed they were. There simply wasn't time for the awareness of Death's steady march through their ranks to spread. Not at first. But eventually, here and there, some of the targets waiting to become statistics had enough time to realize what was happening to the other people in the room, or on the balcony, or on the roof with them, and run before it was their turn. And as a few people began to survive the Marines' attention, they began trying to contact others, who had been less fortunate.
Alicia was ten rounds into her second magazine when she realized the targets in her assigned sector were beginning to vanish before she got around to them.
"All Wasps this net, Three-Alpha," Metternich's voice sounded in her mastoid implant. "Check fire. Repeat, check fire. Hostiles are breaking and running. Let them go."
"Three-Alpha, Bravo-Five," Alicia said, still in that stranger's voice which sounded so much like her own. "Confirm check fire."
The other confirmations came in, and Alicia ejected her partially used magazine. She replaced it with a full one, then began snapping individual loose rounds into the one she'd replaced. Her fingers, she noticed, were rock steady.
Fifty rounds, she thought. That was how many she'd fired, and she remembered missing her target exactly once.
"All Wasps this net," Metternich said again after a moment. "Well done, people. Now sit tight where you are for another few minutes. The APCs are moving into position. When everyone else is ready, Third Squad will lead off. Three-Alpha, clear."
Alicia DeVries sat tight, finishing reloading both of her magazines, while the twilight settled fully about her and her own awareness of just how deadly a killer she was settled within her.
Kuramochi Chiyeko watched the lead APC shudder like an irritated boar. She'd been astonished when she discovered that their engines actually ran on petroleum distillates, not hydrogen, and the gout of stinking black smoke as its driver fired up sent a grimace of distaste across her face. Not that it actually made the smoke, dust, and varied palette of stenches hanging over the Mall any worse. It just offended her sensibilities to be using such ancient and grotesque so-called technology.
The other APCs in her column shuddered and shook as their engines turned over in turn, and the militia lieutenant in charge of them listened to his own com for a moment, then turned to her.
"Ready to proceed, Lieutenant Kuramochi," he said.
"Thank you. In that case, let's roll them out."
"Yes, Ma'am!"
The militiaman actually saluted, then gave an order over the com. The first squat vehicle lurched into motion, and the militia lieutenant went scampering across to the third APC. He climbed up and ducked through the command vehicle's hatch, and Kuramochi walked forward to join Sergeant Jackson.
"Well, Julio?" she said.
"Begging your pardon, Skipper, but there's nothing particularly 'well' about it."
"Now, now," she chided as the second and third APCs began moving at a slow walking pace. The two Marines started forward behind the militia lieutenant's command vehicle, which put them at the center of the column. Kuramochi watched her own HUD critically, but all of her Marines were exactly where they were supposed to be, and the three blocks Second and Third Squads had been tasked to clear were completely free of red, hostile icons.
"How can you say that, Sergeant Jackson?" she continued. "We've got the open road before us, our knapsacks on our backs, a song on our lips, and only a brisk sixteen-kilometer walk between us and home. And if that's not enough to warm the cockles of your heart," she said with a grin, "I might add that Brigadier Jongdomba and his staff officers are in the lead APC, and the remainder of his so-called 'Headquarters Guard' is spread between there and the second APC. So if it should happen that we did miss somebody with one of the militia's antitank weapons, well … ."
She shrugged, and Jackson shook his head at her.
"Skipper," he said firmly, "an officer and a lady isn't supposed to indulge herself in that sort of nasty attitude. However much the bastards in question might deserve it."
"I'll try to bear that in mind," she promised dutifully as the rest of the armored vehicles began to grunt, shiver, and clank their way forward.
Alicia drifted onward through the night.
The sky to the southeast of her present position was a lurid sea of billowing, flame-shot smoke as Zhikotse's business district burned. Over half of the city's power grid appeared to be down, despite the fact that the Marines controlled the primary generating station and switching facility. In those areas where the power had been cut, the streets were dark, bottomless canyons of blackness-like the one through which she moved now-while in others, streetlights, traffic control devices, and shop windows burned brightly and steadily in bizarre contrast.
This was not the sort of combat environment she'd envisioned when she enlisted, despite all of her discussions with her grandfather. She'd thought in terms of open-field battle, not of this enclosed, complicated urban setting. And even though she'd known that at least three-quarters of the Marines' duties were those of peacekeepers, especially out here among the Crown Systems of the frontier, she hadn't really pictured herself sniping rioters and would-be insurrectionists out of office windows when they didn't even know she was killing them.
Those reflections drifted through the back of her mind, like koi floating weightlessly just above the bottom of their pond. The front of her brain was busy with other things, monitoring her surroundings as she advanced steadily into the blackness her helmet systems and enhanced vision turned into daylight.
She moved onward for another dozen meters, then paused once again, waiting for Bergerat to leapfrog up the other side of the street and for Gregory Hilton to close up on both of them from behind. She could hear the distant clank and snort of the militia's obsolescent APCs grinding up Capital Boulevard well behind her, and she checked her map coordinates.
They were making pretty good time, she decided. They'd covered almost a third of the total distance back to the spaceport, and while they weren't moving as quickly as they had on the way to the Mall, they were moving a lot faster than they would have managed with the President and the Delegates walking it. Now, if only -
Her reflections halted abruptly as she detected movement in front of her.
"Three-Alpha, Bravo-Five," she said quietly. "I've got movement."
"Five, Three-Alpha," Metternich's voice came back instantly. "I don't have it on any of my remotes. What does it look like?"
"Three-Alpha, I can't say for certain yet. At the moment, it looks like one person. He just stepped out of an apartment building and sat down on the front steps. Right about here."
She dropped a blinking amber icon onto Metternich's HUD through her synth-link. She wasn't too surprised that neither Metternich nor Bruckner had spotted the unknown. The platoon's supply of remotes was stretched knife-thin covering the flanks of the extended column. They hadn't had an unlimited number of them to begin with, and they'd lost quite a few of them-mostly to the sorts of accidents that happened in combat zones, rather than to anyone's deliberate effort to destroy them. A thin shell was still sweeping ahead of them, but without the sort of multiply redundant overlapping coverage The Book called for, and the fellow she'd spotted had stepped out of cover only after the shell had passed.
But that was why each of the riflemen probing ahead of the column still had his or her personal remote assigned.
"Five, Three-Alpha," Metternich said, "proceed at your discretion."
"Three-Alpha, Bravo-Five copies."
Alicia stood for a moment, her mind ticking coolly. As far as her remotes and her helmet's sensors could determine, the individual she was observing was unarmed. He might have a sidearm, but there was no sign of any shoulder weapon. He did have several power sources scattered about his person, more than most civilians would normally carry, which was certainly suspicious. On the other hand, simply shooting someone out of hand on the possibility that he might be a Bad Person was something command authority frowned upon.