"Uncle Arthur," Alicia said with a tight grin, "if they've got that much manpower, we're screwed, whatever we try to do. I say we roll the dice."
A warning blinked in the back of her brain as the tactical remote picked up active targeting systems from the aircraft. From their emissions signatures, they were lighter craft than the sting ships Doorn and Osayaba had downed-probably only two- or three-man air cavalry mounts. But she had five of them on her HUD already, and she was bleakly certain she hadn't seen all of them yet.
"And the hostages?" Keita asked in a painfully toneless voice.
"If they really intended to kill them all if a rescue was even attempted," Alicia replied unflinchingly, "then they're all already dead. I don't think they did, though. I don't know what the hell is really going on down here, but whatever it is, it's a damned sight more than a simple hostagetaking. They've already hammered us. Our loss rate's been over two-to-one so far, and given the numbers we've already detected, they have to be pretty confident they can do that to us again. At the same time, they aren't going to be in a hurry to kill their bargaining chips-especially not after something like this. They're going to need something awfully significant if they're going to have a prayer of talking their way off Fuller now."
"You're figuring that if you get there fast enough, you may be able to break in to the hostages before they kill them."
"Something like that, Uncle Arthur. I'm not saying it's a good option. But I don't think we have any good options left, and whatever we do, we're going to have to do it quick. I've got three more aircraft inbound from the east. If I hold here much longer, they're going to try swarming us."
"Understood." Alicia thought she might have heard the sound of an indrawn breath, but she might not have, too. Then, "All right, Alley. I said it was your call. It is. Good hunting."
"Thank you, Skycap," Alicia said formally. "Winchester-One, clear."
She changed circuits, dropping into the company-wide com net.
"All units," she said, her voice flat and hard with purpose, "Winchester-One. We're going to Green Haven, people, and these bastards aren't going to stop us."
There was no response from the other troopers-not in words, anyway, but any wolf would have envied their snarl-and she continued.
"Mauser-One."
"Winchester-One, Mauser-One," Hillman acknowledged.
"You've got our six," Alicia told her. "I'm designating units now." As she spoke, icons on the HUD started changing color as she selected the wings she was assigning to Hillman. "I figure they're going to press us hardest from behind," she continued, "and I'm especially worried about their aircraft. That's why I'm giving you three of the plasma guns."
"Understood," Hillman replied tautly.
"Lion-Alpha-Three," Alicia went on.
"Winchester-One, Lion-Alpha-Three," Sergeant Jake Hennessy, the senior surviving member of Francesca Masolle's platoon, responded.
"You're in charge of our reserve, such as it is and what there is of it," Alicia told him with a gallows grin. "I'm designating units now." Another dozen pairs of wings changed color, and her armor computer simultaneously set up new dedicated communications nets for Hillman and Hennessy's scratch units. "I want you in the middle, Jake, where you can support Celestine or me. And I'll expect you to use your own judgment if it hits the fan again."
"Understood, Winchester-One."
"The rest of you are with me," Alicia continued, as the final fourteen icons shifted color. "We're point. And this is where we're all going."
She dropped yet another mental command into the HUD, and and a new line drew itself across the mountainous terrain.
"It's going to be tough, it's going to be ugly, and we're going to get hurt, people," she told Charlie Company's survivors harshly. "But the only way out is through, and we owe these bastards. Any questions?"
There were none, and she nodded sharply inside her armored helmet.
"In that case, let's go kick some ass."
Sir Arthur Keita opened his eyes and made himself sit back down across the tactical table from Captain Wadislaw Watts. The Marine intelligence specialist looked back at him, his expression shocked, and Keita shook his head.
"What the hell happened?" he grated, his expression hewn from solid granite.
"Sir Arthur, I can't -" Watts broke off and shook his own head slowly. "Nobody at Battalion saw this coming, Sir," he said, his voice flat. "You heard the same briefings I did. I don't know-That is, I know there are intelligence failures, but I've never seen one this bad. Never."
Keita grunted. An ignoble part of him wanted to blame the Marine, make this all somehow his fault. But Keita had seen exactly the same intelligence materials Watts had, and he'd shared the captain's conclusions. For that matter, so had Madison Alwyn and every single one of Charlie Company's officers.
"The one thing it damned well wasn't," the Cadre brigadier said after a moment of sulfurous silence, "was an accident. DeVries is right-those bastards down there were waiting for them, camouflaged so well we never got even a sniff of them. Somebody planned this entire thing, maneuvered us into feeding an entire Cadre company straight into a meat grinder."
"You think Duke Geoffrey was in on it, Sir?" Watts asked in the tone of a man whose brain was beginning to work once again.
"Somebody down there in Shallingsport goddamned well was!" Keita said grimly. "They've got frigging sting ships, for God's sake! Those didn't just spring out of the ground like toadstools. They were brought in from off-world, and not by the people on Star Roamer. So if Geoffrey wasn't in on it, who was?"
"I don't know," Watts admitted. "We just don't have enough information at this point to tell. On the one hand, it almost had to be Geoffrey. He's the Duke of Shallingsport, he's the one who agreed to give the terrorists sanctuary, and he's the one who handed them Green Haven. But that's insane, Sir Arthur! He'd have to know the galaxy isn't big enough for someone who helped set up something like this to hide from the Empire."
"I know," Keita growled. "But maybe he is crazy enough to think he could get away with it. Or maybe it was what's-his-name-Jokuri, his industrial development guy."
"That could be," Watts said slowly, his expression intent. "For them to get this stuff down there, it must have come in through the Green Haven spaceport, and Green Haven is one of Jokuri's pet projects. And Jokuri's been in charge of whatever customs inspections there may have been. But even if it was Jokuri, why did he do it? Why did the Freedom Alliance do it? I think you're right, Sir Arthur-this entire operation was set up specifically to mousetrap the response force we sent in. And given the nature of the provocation-the hijacking and the identity of the hostages-they almost certainly meant to suck in the Cadre, specifically, because that's who they must have known what catch the assignment." He shook his head again. "For all intents and purposes, this is a declaration of war against the Cadre."
"I think that's exactly what it is." Keita stood and began pacing angrily around Marguerite Johnsen's intelligence center. "You said it yourself-this is a psychological warfare operation from their perspective. They've just demonstrated that they can ambush a Cadre company and inflict massive casualties. I don't think any Cadre unit has ever taken losses like this, certainly not in a 'routine' operation against a batch of hostagetaking terrorists!"
"But it's a suicide operation for everyone involved," Watts said. "It has to be. There's no way we're ever going to let them off this planet. We'll call in the Fleet to blockade the entire star system, if that's what it takes to keep them pinned down. And eventually, we'll go down there in assault shuttles, or in a heavy-configuration drop, and kill or capture every single one of them. His Majesty will send in an entire Marine brigade, if that's what it takes, Sir Arthur. You know that, I know that-anyone capable of setting this up must know it!"
"Maybe," Keita said almost absently, pacing faster. "Maybe."
"What about Ctesiphon?" Watts said after a moment. "She's got the equivalent of an entire Marine battalion on board."
"But she still four hours out, minimum," Keita replied. He shook his head like an irritated horse plagued by flies. "I've already had the com center alert her and instruct her to expedite her arrival." He tapped his headset to indicate how he'd passed the orders. "Major Bennett already has his people working on alternate plans to send an assault dirt-side when she gets here, assuming the opportunity presents. I'm sure Ctesiphon and Bennett's people will do anything humanly possible, but whatever's going to happen down there are on Fuller, it's almost certainly going to be long over by the time they can get here."
For the first fifteen or twenty minutes, Alicia's decision to strike out directly towards Green Haven seemed to have taken the other side by surprise. She'd been right-all of the heavily dug-in infantry positions the surviving cadremen's sensor remotes could find were in the river valley or along its rim. That didn't mean there weren't more of them somewhere else, of course, and she had half a dozen of their twenty-three surviving sensor remotes sweeping the mountain forests ahead of them.
So far, those remotes had found nothing but trees, rocks, and mountain streams, but she didn't expect that to last. They had forty air-kilometers to go; in this terrain, that would be more like fifty or even sixty of actual ground travel. Even with Cadre battle armor, the best speed they were going to make through the heavy tree cover would be no more than forty kilometers per hour in an all-out sprint-half that, if they moved with a modicum of tactical caution-but the enemy undoubtedly had transportation available. Since they'd taken over an industrial park, they had to at least have gotten their hands on substantial numbers of air lorries.
Alicia would have liked to believe they could be stupid enough to bring those lorries where she could get a shot at them, but while whoever had set this up might be crazy, she didn't appear to be stupid. No. They were going to use those lorries to pull troops from other positions and drop them somewhere in front of her. Somewhere safely out of the reach of her line-of-sight heavy weapons at the moment they set down. And if the enemy CO was as smart as Alicia suspected she was, she wouldn't panic. She'd take the time to collect as many as possible of the armored infantry she'd initially stationed along the river valley and combine them before she went up against the company again.
And in the meantime, Alicia thought, continuing to crash ahead through dense, low-hanging tree branches, she'll do everything she can to slow us up and give herself time to make her own preparations.
"Mauser-One, Winchester-One," she said over her new private com link to Hillman.
"Go, Alley," Hillman replied rather more informally, and Alicia smiled tightly.
"I've just been thinking about what I'd to if I were in charge on the other side," she said. "They're going to try to slow us up-they have to. And they're going to do it with those air-cav mounts."
There were nine of the aircraft icons swarming around now, just beyond plasma gun range of the moving cadremen. Their active sensor systems lashed at the Cadre troopers, obviously tracking them and reporting back to their own HQ.
"Roger that," Hillman said flatly. "I've been thinking the same thing and wondering why they haven't already done it."
"Because they're afraid of what it's going to cost them." There was a certain grim satisfaction in Alicia's reply as she remembered what Michael Doorn and Obaseki Osayaba had done to four larger and much more capable sting ships. "But that isn't going to hold them off much longer. So, here's what I'm thinking -"
Another five minutes passed-five minutes in which Charlie Company's survivors made good another three kilometers towards their objective. The sensor emissions from the air cavalry mounts intensified as they entered a rocky, more sparsely-forested ravine, and Alicia's lips skinned back from her teeth. She'd picked this particular bit of ground from her storage terrain maps as the most likely spot, and the stronger sensor emissions suggested she'd been right.
Cadre battle armor was a hellishly hard target for sensors to lock up at extended ranges, even in open country. The people in those air-cav mounts were undoubtedly getting enough back to know where the company was, but there was no way they could be keeping track of individual targets with any degree of confidence. The fact that they were driving their sensor systems harder now that her people were in less concealing terrain told her they were trying to rectify that, and that suggested that they were just about to -
"Incoming!" she snapped over the all-units net, and her people responded instantly.
The brutally truncated company column exploded, unraveling into two-man knots as its individual wings scattered. They bounded off into the trees and boulders, splitting up to deny the air-cav a concentrated target, and Alicia and Tannis did the same.
"Here!" Tannis barked over their private link, and Alicia automatically slammed to halt. Tannis had been concentrating on their individual tactical situation while Alicia rode herd on everyone else, and Alicia had total faith in her wing's judgment. Now, as she focused her own attention on the spot Tannis had selected, she nodded in sharp approval. They had a hillside covering one flank and a couple of huge boulders covering another, and the overhead tree cover was sparse enough to give their battle rifles decent coverage.
Alicia didn't waste time approving Tannis' selection; she simply dropped into her normal position, covering their right flank while Tannis covered the left. She reached out through her armor sensors, sweeping her area of responsibility, but even as she did that, another part of her attention watched the icons of her other troopers, and yet another part was focused on the take from the tactical remotes hovering above the company.
The remotes watching half a dozen air-cav mounts bank sharply, drop their noses, and come streaking in at just under mach one.
The good news, a corner of her brain reflected with the detached precision of the tick, was that the enemy didn't appear to have any indirect fire weapons. There'd been no mortar or artillery rounds dropping on their heads, and the air-cav hadn't been dropping any precision-guided weapons on them. Nor had they been using hyper-velocity weapons, which was even better.
The bad news was that there were at least two types of air-cav mounts above them. One, she didn't recognize, but it appeared to be a relatively light craft, with a maximum crew of two, and without the size and power plant emissions to support plasma cannon. But the other, the larger one, she did recognize. Like the battle armor and the Groundhog-Three surveillance array they'd already destroyed, it was an Imperial Marine design-one of the old Sabre Bats. The Sabre Bats hadn't been first-line Marine equipment in at least thirty years, but they were still capable platforms. And unlike the lighter mounts she couldn't identify, the Sabre Bat did carry a pair of plasma cannon.
The six attackers howled in on the scattering cadremen in a column of twos. Both of the leaders were Sabre Bats, coming right down the middle, followed by four of the lighter types, and fresh, even heavier gouts of plasma flashed across the night. Trees vaporized, boulders shattered, and yet more forest fires roared to life at the kiss of the plasma's thermal bloom.
Another green icon turned crimson as Corporal William Tchaikovsky took a direct hit. His wing, Corporal Helena Chu went down, as well, her icon circled by the strobing red band which indicated major damage to her armor. The two lighter mounts directly behind the Sabre Bats opened fire, spraying heavy-caliber penetrators from their nose-mounted calliopes, and three more of Alicia's troopers' icons switched from green to lurid crimson.
But then more plasma bolts screeched through the night, not raining down from the heavens, but streaking up from below. Celestine Hillman and the three plasma gunners Alicia had detached from the main body opened fire from well behind the rest of the company, still hidden from the aircraft's sensors by the heavy trees and their own armor's stealth systems. The strafers' attention had been on their targets; they hadn't realized someone else was targeting them, as well.
Hillman's people had zero-deflection shots from directly astern at targets headed directly away from them, and both Sabre Bats disintegrated in the same instant. One of the lighter types exploded even more spectacularly, and then the three survivors were jinking and weaving wildly in a frantic effort to evade the same fate.
One of them managed to dodge two plasma bolts, but a third bolt impacted on its turbine. It was only a glancing hit, almost a clear miss, but the turbine's housing shattered, and the mount's hydrogen reservoir exploded in a brilliant blue flash.
The other two aircraft evaded the plasma fire, but while they were doing that, they swept through the air space directly above their intended victims, and Alicia's rifle snapped into firing position. She ripped off an extended twelve-round burst, and fifty other rifles, and a pair of calliopes, were doing the same thing. The distracted air-cav pilots were too busy worrying about the plasma gunners who'd suddenly appeared behind them like evil genies to think about ground fire from the rest of the cadremen, and neither of them had the chance to realize that they should have been looking in both directions. Their aircraft carried light armor, but not enough in the face of that hurricane of penetrators, and both of them plummeted out of the heavens, trailing comet tails of flame that smashed, crackling, into the resinous trees.
"All units, Winchester-One," Alicia said. "Reform on me."
She and Tannis made their way out of their positions, heading for Corporal Chu, while the other troopers filtered back out of the flaming forest and Hillman and her people came up from behind. The three remaining air-cav mounts stayed where they were, hovering with what Alicia devoutly hoped was shocked caution, outside effective plasma range.
She looked around at the raging fires, grimly satisfied with the destruction of two-thirds of the enemy's remaining air power. Well, she corrected herself, two-thirds of the air power we know about, anyway. But her satisfaction was bitter on the tongue as she counted the cost. It could have been far, far worse; she knew that. But that didn't make the loss of four more of her people-her family-any less agonizing.
A distant corner of her mind knew what was waiting for her when she finally had time to stop concentrating on the business of survival, on the unremitting drive to accomplish what had become an impossible mission. For the moment, the need to focus everything on getting her surviving people out shoved all other thoughts, all other concerns, into the background. But when that was no longer true, when she could finally allow herself to face the wrenching brutality of Charlie Company's destruction … .
She closed the door on that corner of her mind once again as she went to one armored knee beside Helena Chu, and her green eyes were bleak.
"How you doing, Helena?" she asked quietly.
"Not so good, Alley." The wounded trooper's voice was harsh, strained, despite all the painkillers in her pharmacope could do. The plasma bolt which had knocked out her armor hadn't killed her outright, but she'd lost her left leg just below the hip, and the entire left side of her armor was a smoking ruin. Her battle rifle had been destroyed, and her vital signs flickered unsteadily on Alicia's monitors. Alicia looked up at Tanis' face through the visor of her armor, and her wing shook her head silently.
"We -" Alicia began, but Chu cut her off.
"I already figured it out, Alley," she said.
"I figured you had," Alicia said softly, and laid her armored hand on Chu's right shoulder. She knelt there for a few silent heartbeats, then straightened her spine.
"You guys need to get moving," Chu said. She reached down and drew her sidearm-a CHK three-millimeter, identical to the one Alicia normally carried. "I'll just wait here with Bill," the crippled corporal said, nodding to where her wingman had already died.
Alicia gazed down at her, longing for something-anything-to say. Some comforting lie, like "I'm sure the bad guys will be too busy concentrating on us to send in a follow-up sweep," or "Hang on, and we'll get a med team out here as soon as we've polished off Green Haven." But Chu knew the odds as well as Alicia did, and she could read her own life sign monitors. She knew how little time she had left unless the med team arrived almost instantly, that only her pharmacope and augmentation were keeping her alive even now, and Alicia owed her people something better than a lie.
"God bless, Helena," she said, very quietly, instead, then turned to lead the fifty-eight surviving effectives of Charlie Company, Third Battalion, Second Regiment, Fifth Brigade, Imperial Cadre back into motion.
Chapter Twenty-Four
"Winchester-One, Winchester-Alpha-Three. We've got a problem."
"All units, Winchester-One," Alicia said instantly. "Hold position."
The other surviving forty-six members of Charlie Company stopped instantly, freezing in place, while she and Tannis continued moving forwards.
"What have we got, Erik?" she asked as she caught up with her point man, and Corporal Erik Andersson, call sign Winchester-Alpha-Three grunted over the com.
"Let me show you," he replied, and switched the feed from his own tactical remote to Alicia.
They didn't have many remotes left. Wherever the "terrorists" equipment had come from, they'd obviously gotten their money's worth. Their refurbished Marine battle armor's sensors were able to detect the presence of even a Cadre sensor remote. They couldn't localize it as well as a cadreman might have, but they could pin down a general volume, and they obviously realized that without their airborne spies, Charlie Company's survivors would be floundering around blind. So every time they did detect the emissions signature of a remote's heavily stealthed counter-grav, they saturated its general area with heavy fire, and remotes were "soft" targets, subject to mission kills, even if they weren't destroyed outright. A near miss with a plasma bolt was usually sufficient to do major damage to a remote's sensors, rendering it effectively useless. Charlie Company should have had sixty remotes left; Alicia actually had seventeen, and against first-line equipment-even old first-line equipment, like the terrorists had-she had to keep sending them in close if she wanted reliable data. Which meant she kept losing them in a steady trickle.
One of the seventeen survivors was assigned to Andersson, and Alicia clenched her teeth as she saw what Winchester-Alpha-Three had already seen.
Where are they getting all these people? she asked herself bitterly. Andersson's remote was picking up at least two hundred more battle-armored infantry, dug in in three separate positions directly across the saddle between two mountains through which Alicia had intended to pass her column.
Well, at least that settles the question of whether or not they still know where we are, she thought.
She'd hoped that they'd dropped completely off the enemy's sensors, but the FALA's commanders wouldn't have been able to airlift those people around in front of her if they hadn't had a pretty shrewd notion of where she was and where she was headed. On the other hand, one of the positions she could see was much too far to the west to support the others. Its location had clearly been chosen to block a side valley several kilometers to one side, and that suggested they were at least uncertain about her exact position. If they hadn't been, they would have known she'd actually been edging away from that side valley for the last twenty minutes.
None of which made her present situation any less unpalatable.
She studied the take from Andersson's remote intently, chewing the inside of her lip while she contemplated it. Fatigue was becoming yet another enemy, and she knew it. Thanks to the tick, the last couple of hours seemed to have taken weeks to drag past. She knew better, but there was a direct link between the mind's perception of time's passage and the body's physical responses, and the stress of such bitter combat-and casualties-burned up energy like another forest fire. It was a fatigue cadremen were trained to cope with, and Alicia's pharmacope was trickling carefully metered doses of offsetting drugs into her system, but the drain of such constant tension made all of them less effective than they ought to have been.
She pushed that thought aside again, as she also pushed aside the thought of the ten more people she'd lost since they'd been forced to leave Helena Chu behind. Chu was dead now, too; Alicia had still been in range for the corporal's armor icon to show on her HUD when the air-cav mount swept over Chu and killed her. All of Charlie Company's survivors had known when it happened, and Alicia had felt their hatred melding with her own.
But at least the people who'd killed Chu were almost certainly dead themselves. The company's plasma gunners had picked off six more aircraft when they'd closed in-much more cautiously than before-to strafe. Alicia might have lost ten more troopers in exchange, but the enemy was obviously beginning to run out of air-cav mounts at last. More had turned up since their first disastrous strafing attack, but after the additional losses they'd also taken, there were only four left within the reach of Alicia's sensors. Three of those had arrived after Chu was killed, and Alicia took a hard, grim pleasure from the thought that the people who'd murdered her corporal had almost certainly been among those who'd been shot down.
The four survivors were orbiting at extreme range now, obviously keeping their distance and closing in only for occasional overflights. Given how hard it was to track Cadre battle armor even under the best of circumstances, it was no wonder their feel for exactly where Alicia's people were had become fuzzy.
"We can't go around them," she said quietly to Tannis over their private com link.
"Sarge, I don't know as we've got a lot of choice," Tannis replied, equally quietly, studying the same tactical data. She was accustomed to serving as Alicia's sounding board, as a wing was supposed to do. "We're awfully beat up," she continued, "and we're running low on ammo. We could probably work around them, to the east."
She dropped the dotted line of a possible altnerative route onto Alicia's HUD, and Alicia nodded. Tannis's projection swept well to the east, around the end of the line the blocking positions had drawn across the mountain saddle. Unfortunately … .
"There's no time," she said. "They must've used air lorries, or something like that, to lift these people in-probably from the positions back by the LZ-to wait here for us, and if we try to work our way around them, we end up with even worse terrain between us and Green Haven. It'd take us even longer to get there, even if nothing else went wrong. And it would go wrong, Tannis. That damned air-cav may be keeping its distance, but it sure as hell knows roughly where we are, or these people wouldn't be here. So if we try to work around them, they'll probably spot us. And if they do, the extra time we'll spend trying to get through the terrain to the east will give them plenty of time to lift these people out of here again and drop them somewhere else in front of us."
"But if we punch into them head-on, we solve their problem for them," Tannis countered. "They want us to engage them, Sarge. That's why they're here."
"Granted." Alicia studied the tactical data in silence for a few more seconds, but she knew Tannis had a point.
The enemy's commander obviously knew that taking the Cadre on, even when they had heavy weapons and the Cadre didn't, was a good way to get hurt. But it was equally obvious that the enemy had an enormous numerical advantage, although Alicia still couldn't imagine how they'd managed to get all of these people down here. And their commander equally clearly wanted nothing more than to force Alicia's people to engage them on the FALA's terms. The terrorists weren't interested in fighting on Alicia's terms; they wanted to force her to come to them when they had both the numerical advantage and the advantage of prepared positions.
"You know," she continued to Tannis after a moment, "looking at their positions here, it strikes me that they've obviously got a better feel for strategy than for tactics."
"I know that tone, Sarge," Tannis said. She was standing with her back to Alicia, keeping wary watch around their position, but Alicia could see the single raised eyebrow as clearly as if they'd been standing face-to-face. She'd seen it literally scores of time over the past eighteen months, and her mouth quirked as she smiled fondly at her friend's back.