Her mouth tightened as she took in the weaponry so clearly on display. The terrorists had had the better part of three standard weeks since arriving here to prepare their defenses, but everything she'd seen so far shouted that the FALA had actually started the process long before that. They'd had to get the weapons and the personnel to man them on to the planet well in advance of Star Roamer's arrival, and it looked to her as if the air-defense cannon's positions had actually been ceramacreted at the same time as the parking apron around the Jason buildings. They'd certainly been graded out of the slopes of the hill under the building, almost like terraces set a little below the level of the rest of the parking apron. No doubt the architect's plans had shown some perfectly reasonable justification for them, but Alicia was grimly certain that their real reason for being was the purpose they were serving now.
Which means the "Jason Corporation" is going to get a very close examination from imperial Intelligence in the very near future, she told herself coldly. Not that that helps us a great deal right this moment.
"So what do we do now?" Tannis asked quietly.
"First, I send in my remote," Alicia replied, and sent the mental command to the small robotic scout riding her equipment harness. They'd lost two more of them since her last report to Sir Arthur, and a tiny part of her wanted to stroke the remote, as if it were some faithful, treasured hunting hawk, before she launched it on its way.
But she didn't. Instead, she closed her eyes and concentrated on steering her flying viewpoint as stealthily as she could.
There were active sensors covering the terrorists' central position. She tasted them through the remote's senses, and she felt her way cautiously towards them. They rose in an almost unbroken barrier in front of her, but it was only almost unbroken, and their primary concern was with a direct assault landing. She hovered with her remote, a disembodied presence just outside the electronic fence, cautiously tasting its emissions for what the tick made seem a very long time, and then she nodded very slightly.
There was a gap. It wasn't much of one-certainly much too small for anything the size of an assault shuttle or a recovery boat to get through-but it was there, and she edged carefully, carefully into it. The remote carried a single detachable relay transceiver, and she guided the probe to the roof of the building and instructed it to detach the relay link. She positioned it very carefully, with the whisker laser directed back through the keyhole the remote had crept through. There was no guarantee that something or someone wouldn't stray into the transmission path and detect it anyway, but she could at least avoid the known detection threats.
Once the relay was in place, she lifted the remote higher, hovering directly above the central building. Its active sensors, like those of her armor, were locked down, but its passive sensors had a much closer look at the antiair defenses, and she grimaced. Her original impression had been correct, except that there were three multi-rail HVW launchers, one paired with each of the plasma cannon emplacements.
She studied them for several seconds even as she recorded every detail of the take from the remote, then sent her small henchman drifting silently along the building's eaves, looking for a way in. After a couple of minutes, she found one. The remote hovered under the roof's overhang, tiny cutting laser slicing quietly through the mesh-like grill covering the opening, and then floated very slowly through the ventilation intake.
The interior of the building looked much as Alicia had expected. A portion of it was cut up into office space and what looked like a cafeteria, but at least eighty percent of the vast structure was a single, open cavern dotted with maintenance workstations for the heavy construction equipment which should have filled it. There was a second-floor catwalk around the large, central area, and additional office space on that level, but her remote's passives were more than adequate at such close range to confirm that only two or three of those offices had anyone in them.
Not that there weren't plenty of other people in the building.
The hostages huddled in the middle of the open space, most of them sitting on what appeared to be foam sleeping mats. There were portable toilets parked along the holding area's walls, and the remote's visual sensors showed her canisters of drinking water and what looked like standard Marine field ration packs. All of the captives were dirty and unwashed looking, and most of them sat folded in on themselves, with the body language of people who wanted to withdraw to some inner place, safely away from the terror which had enveloped them for two standard months.
On the other hand, there were actually fewer terrorists inside the building than she'd expected, and she smiled humorlessly at the realization.
We've seen so many of them out here that I've gotten into the habit of thinking they must have an inexhaustible supply of manpower, she thought. Well, obviously they don't.
Under the circumstances, though, they might be excused for believing they had enough inside guards, she reflected. There were four heavy calliopes mounted on the catwalk, positioned to cover every square centimeter of floorspace. Any one of them could spit out over five thousand rounds per minute; the four of them together could turn the maintenance area into an abattoir in moments. Nor where they the only security measure the terrorists had taken. An infantry plasma cannon-lighter than the ones in the air-defense positions but considerably heavier than anything Alicia still had-was positioned far enough inside the building to cover all three of the vehicle entrances in its western wall.
Only the crew of the plasma cannon were in battle armor. The remainder of the eighteen armed personnel backing up the calliope crews and the cannoneers were either completely unarmored or wore only unpowered body armor. All of them, however, she noticed, wore combat helmets. She couldn't make out enough details to be certain, but they looked like more Marine surplus equipment, in which case they would provide their wearers with at least semi-decent sensors and a free-flow tactical link.
She rotated the remote, giving herself one last good look, then lifted it up and landed it quietly on an exposed support beam just under the building's roof. She positioned it to give herself the best field of view she could, then switched it to standby and sat up.
"I take it you followed all of that?" she said to Tannis.
"Yep." Tannis climbed to her own feet, and the two of them moved down the back side of their ridge to join the other Charlie Company survivors.
There aren't very many of them, Alicia thought as she their icons gathered around hers.
Thirty-one other men and women stood around her, eleven percent of the company which had made the drop. Only seven of the original eighteen troopers of her own squad were still on their feet … which still made First Squad her strongest surviving unit.
Every suit of armor bore its own proof of what its wearer had been through to get this far. The reactive chameleon features built into Cadre armor wasn't doing much good at the moment-not for armor whose smart surfaces had been liberally smeared with resinous sap as it crashed through the dense branches of the native conifers. The forest fires which so much plasma fire left in their wake-the fires whose lurid light still painted the skies above the tangled mountains behind them-had added their own share to the surviving cadremen's battered and bedamned appearance. Cinders, ash, and unburned twigs and needle-like leaves were glued to the sap-coated armor, and most of the armored figures she could see showed the same sort of dents and gouges her own armor did.
She looked around at them, and her heart twisted within her as she thought about what she was about to ask of them.
"You've all seen what we're up against out there," she said finally. "I don't see any way to get recovery boats-or assault shuttles, for that matter-down against those sorts of defenses. Not without using suppressive fire that would kill all the hostages, anyway. So the way I see it, that only leaves one option."
She paused, then opened her mouth again, but before she could speak, Astrid Nordbш spoke for her. The dark-haired, blue-eyed corporal had run out of ammunition for her battle rifle and replaced it with Shai Hau-zhi's calliope when Obaseki Osayaba's wing stopped a heavy-caliber calliope round from one of the air-cav mounts. Now she chuckled mirthlessly over the com.
"What the hell, Sarge," she said. "We've come this far, and it's been so much fun. We might as well stay to the end of the ride."
Chapter Twenty-Six
"Skycap, Winchester-One."
Sir Arthur Keita twitched upright in his comfortable chair as the tick-clipped, husky contralto spoke.
"Winchester-One, Skycap," he said quickly. "Go."
"We've got that eyeball of the objective for you, Uncle Arthur," the voice said. "It doesn't look especially good. They've got air-defense plasma cannon-they look like Marine Mark Eighteens-positioned around the central facility, with HVW launchers to back them up. They've also got a hundred and eighty-I say again, one-eight-zero-more infantry dug in around the base of the hill. We've gotten a remote inside the objective, and they've got all of the hostages in a single location covered by calliopes and infantry support cannon. We have a hard count of thirty-three hostiles inside the building, including weapons crews, but only three in battle armor. I've confirmed active air-defense radar and lidar, and they have a radar fence around the building itself at ground level. They do not-I repeat, do not-have a fence around the base of the hill. Some of their infantry seems to be moving around a good bit, and I'd guess they figured their own people would keep triggering alarms if they covered the hill itself."
Keita's expression had tightened further with every word, and he rubbed his face wearily at the end of Alicia's summary.
"Winchester-One," he said when she paused. "Alley. The FALA's been in contact with us. They say they'll kill half the hostages if we try to land Marines from Ctesiphon-and all of them if it looks like we might manage to actually get the Wasps down through their defenses. And," his jaw tightened, but he made himself continue levelly, "they say they won't let us withdraw you. They want to finish you off, make a clean sweep. Although," he admitted bleakly, "I think they might actually be happier in some ways if we tried to extract you anyway and all the hostages were killed."
"That's about how I'd already read the situation, Uncle Arthur," Alicia said calmly. "But none of us down here are inclined to let these people get away with it."
Keita's eyebrows rose, but she continued steadily before he could speak.
"I think we can get into the objective," she told him. "I believe we can take out the air defense positions and hold the main facility until you get the Wasps down to relieve us."
Keita turned to stare at Wadislaw Watts. The Marine intelligence specialist stared back at him in obvious disbelief, and Keita shook his head sharply.
"Alley," he said, "I'm sorry, but I don't think you can do it."
"Then you're wrong, Uncle Arthur," she replied flatly. "My people can do it. We will do it."
"But -"
"They don't know we're here," she continued, overriding his protest. "If they did, they'd sure as hell be doing something about it. We've got good cover and concealment up to within less than three hundred meters of their outer infantry positions on the north side of the hill. I've got three plasma guns left, and there are three anti-air sites. We move most of our people in as close as we can get on the north side. Then the plasma gunners take out the air defenses to clear the way for the Wasps. While they do that, the rest of us break through their outer ring position, charge the building, cut our way through the outer wall-it's only prefab plastic-with our vibro blades, and take out the interior terrorists before they know we're coming. Then all we have to do is hold the central building until the Wasps get there."
Keita closed his eyes and clenched his fists so tightly that they hurt, then shook his head again, hard.
"Alley, that's a suicide mission," he said, and his powerful voice was frayed ever so slightly about the edge. "You're low on ammo, you'd have to cover-what? five hundred meters? six?-to reach the building. And even assuming you managed that, and managed to take out the inside guards, there'd still be almost two hundred people in battle armor coming in behind you. People who wouldn't give a good goddamn how many of the hostages they kill."
"Uncle Arthur, they're going to kill all of them-or most of them-anyway," Alicia said even more flatly. "That may not be their game plan, but it's what's going to happen, and you know it as well as I do. They can't talk their way out of this one whatever they do, and when they start to figure that out, they're going to get desperate and begin killing people to try to force concessions you xan't give them. And when they do that, you're going to have to come in anyway. And when that happens, everyone dies. This way we can get at least some of them-most of them, I believe-out alive."
"But we don't have to do it right now," Keita said almost desperately. "If they don't know where you are, you can break off, evade. Maybe we can get a resupply drop to you without them realizing it. For God's sake, Alley, at least let us get more ammunition to you first!"
"We do have to do it now," she replied. "Right now. They don't know we're here at the moment, but they're still looking for us. Eventually, they'll find us. And even if that weren't true, even if we could withdraw, resupply, we'd never get this close again without being spotted on the way in. It's now or never, Uncle Arthur, and we've lost too many of our people to settle for never. Charlie Company is going in. Now, are you going to support us with a Marine drop, or not?"
"I can't believe we're doing this," Captain Wadislaw Watts said quietly. Keita gave him a sharp look, and the Marine shook his head quickly. "That wasn't a criticism, Sir Arthur. It was … amazement. I'm just trying to understand how even the Cadre can insist on going in after what's already happened to Charlie Company."
"Put that way, I have to agree with you," Keita said after a moment. "And a part of me wishes to hell they weren't. But DeVries is the one on the ground down there. She's the one who's gotten them this far despite everything those bastards could do to stop them, she's the one who's actually seen the site, and she's the commander on the spot. That makes it her call, and, God help me, I think it's the right call, too."
"You really believe they can pull it off, Sir?" Watts asked. Keita gazed at him for several seconds, then sighed.
"No, Captain," he said softly. "I don't, not deep down inside. But I wouldn't have believed they could get as far as they have, either. If they can do that, maybe they've got one more miracle left in them. And even if they don't, DeVries is right about what's going to happen eventually. We'll try like hell to get the hostages out alive, but we won't. Not in the end. So she's right about its being time to roll the dice, too."
He turned away from the Marine, gazing into the depths of a visual display, unfocused eyes resting upon the pinprick stars gleaming in the endless, velvet blackness. Then he drew a deep breath and looked at Lieutenant Smithson.
"Get me a link to Ctesiphon, please, Lieutenant. I need to speak to Major Bennett."
"Are you serious, Sir?" Captain Broderick Lewinsky said, staring at Major Alexander Bennett, the commanding officer of Ctesiphon's reinforced Marine detachment. The briefing compartment would have been relatively spacious for the officers of the battlecruiser's normal detachment, but it was badly crowded by the number of people crammed into it at the moment. The fact that all of them were already in battle armor only put an even greater squeeze on the available space. But none of them had helmeted up yet, and Lewinsky wasn't the only officer in the compartment who looked as if he was having trouble believing what the major had just told them.
"Yes, I am serious," Bennett said flatly. "We're going in."
"But, Sir," Lieutenant Jurgensen said, "I thought Brigadier Keita told us the LZ was covered by antiair weapons."
"It is." If Bennett's voice had been flat before, it was grim now, and he looked the youthful lieutenant in the eye. "As a matter of fact, they say they've got Mark Eighteens dug in around the facility, with HVW launchers backing them up. And using Ctesiphon to provide suppressive fire has already been ruled out."
The officers in the compartment stared at him in horror, and he smiled thinly.
"According to Sir Arthur Keita, the survivors of the Cadre company are going to take out the emplacements for us before we enter atmosphere. Then they're going to seize the facility from the terrorists, and hold it against counterattack until we can get down to relieve them."
The compartment was completely silent for several seconds, then Lewinsky cleared his throat.
"Major, I know the Cadre's good. And God knows, just from the bits and pieces we've already heard, these people have kicked ass and taken names, especially after hitting a hot LZ. But how many of them can be left?"
"According to Sir Arthur, thirty-two effectives," Bennett said quietly.
"Thirty-two?" someone blurted. "My God, Sir-they went in with a company!"
"Which doesn't have a single officer left," Bennett said with a nod.
"And they're going to take out dug-in plasma cannon and HVW launchers, then seize and hold the facility until we hit dirt?" Captain Sigmund Boniface, Bravo Company's CO, said carefully.
"That's what they say, Siggy," the major told him. "I don't know if they honestly believe they can do it, but they're sure as hell going to try. And if they've got the guts to put it all on the line this way after what they've already been through, people, then we are going to support them. Is that perfectly clear?"
His expression was half a glare as he looked around the compartment, and the men and women gathered in it with him looked back steadily. The traditional rivalry between the Marines and the Cadre-the Wasps' resentment of all the publicity and media hype the Cadre routinely received, the Cadre's higher budget priorities, their frustration with the Cadre's habit of raiding the Corps' best personnel for its own recruits-none of that mattered. Not now, not in this compartment. These people understood what Charlie Company had already done … and what its battered and broken remnants were offering to do now.
"Of course it is, Sir," Boniface, as the senior company commander present replied. "I just don't believe even the Cadre can do it."
"According to Sir Arthur, this Sergeant DeVries does believe it," Bennett said. "And she's the one down there, not us."
"Excuse me, Sir," Delta Company's commander said, "but did you say DeVries? Alicia DeVries?"
"Sir Arthur didn't mention her first name," Bennett replied, looking sharply at the youthful captain with the Recon patch on the shoulder of her armor. "But the last name was certainly DeVries. Sergeant First Class DeVries. Why, Captain?"
"Because it sounds like you're talking about Alicia DeVries," the captain replied. "And if you are, she's Sebastian O'Shaughnessy's granddaughter."
"Sergeant Major O'Shaughnessy?" Bennett said sharply, and the captain nodded.
"Yes, Sir. And in her case, blood is definitely thicker than water."
"You know this sergeant? Know her personally, I mean?"
"Oh, yes, Sir," Captain Kuramochi Chiyeko said softly. "I believe you could say that. And if Alley DeVries says her people can do this, then I'm damned well not going to bet against it."
"I see." Bennett looked around the compartment one last time, and his lips quirked in a quick, brief smile. "Well, there you have it, people. We'll go with the original Green Haven assault landing plan. So get your people loaded up. I want the shuttles ready to separate from the racks fifteen minutes from now.
"Winchester-One, Skycap."
"Skycap, Winchester-One. Go, Uncle Arthur."
"Ctesiphon's launched her shuttles," Keita said. "At the moment, they're sticking close to the ship, so hopefully the bastards in Star Roamer won't realize they've separated. From the moment you give the insertion signal, they'll need twenty-five-I say again, two-five-minutes to hit the LZ. That's how long you'll have to hold."
"Understood, Skycap," Alicia said steadily.
Far, far above her, in Marguerite Johnsen's intelligence center, Sir Arthur Keita fought down the temptation to ask her one more time if she was certain about this.
"In that case, Winchester-One," he said instead, "the ball is in your hands."
"Understood," Alicia said again. "We will commence our attack in five minutes from … now."
A digital time display began ticking down in the corner of the mental HUD Keita's synth-link displayed for him, and his jaw set hard.
"Good hunting," he managed to say almost normally. "Skycap, clear."
Alicia studied her own HUD one final time.
Obaseki Osayaba, Alec Howard, and Serena DuPuy had the company's surviving plasma guns. Every one of them had lost his or her original wing on the nightmare journey to this point, and she'd paired them with Astrid Nordbш, Jackson Keller, and Ingrid Chernienko. Astrid, Jackson, and Ingrid had three of the four remaining calliopes, and she'd handed all of the remaining calliope ammunition to them and ditched the fourth calliope completely. The heavy-caliber, rapidfire weapons would have been of limited utility breaking into a facility crowded with civilian noncombatants.
"All units, Winchester-One," she said. "Plasma teams, remember-hit the air-defense positions and your assigned secondary targets, then get the hell out of it. The rest of us go the instant Obaseki and Serena take out the center positions on our slope."
There was no real need for her to tell them that yet again, but that was all right with her. She wasn't worried that they were going to think she didn't trust them to get it right, but she couldn't tell them what she really wanted to. Couldn't tell them how much each and every one of them meant to her, especially now, when they were the only Cadre family she had left. When she was the one who had decided for them that they were going to throw themselves into the furnace.
When so many of them were about to die.
No, she couldn't tell them that … but they heard it anyway. She knew they did, and that was enough.
"We go in three minutes," she said quietly. "God bless."
Section Leader Shwang Shau-pang of the Freedom Alliance Liberation Army hated battle armor. He'd never liked it, despite all the things it could do for him, because he'd never been able to completely overcome the claustrophobia which had plagued him since childhood. That was the main reason he preferred to leave his helmet visor open whenever he could, and he inhaled a deep breath of Green Haven's cool, late-night air.
Like most of the FALA "regulars" assigned to the operation, Shwang was himself ex-military. Unlike most of the others, however, he'd actually put in his time in the Imperial Marines. The long and tangled chain of events which had led him to where he was today would never have occurred to the long ago, long distant self who'd volunteered to be a Wasp, but the training remained. That was why he'd been tapped for this operation-the FALA didn't have all that many personnel who'd spent almost five standard years manning and maintaining Mark 18 plasma cannon.
And just between himself and the cool, breezy night, Shwang Shau-pang was grateful his experience had landed him here and not out with the screening infantry. He hated the Cadre as much as any other member of the Freedom Alliance, and he was coldly, viciously pleased by the losses the Emperor's personal storm troopers had taken this night. But he was a practical man, was Shwang Shau-pang, and he was perfectly content to let someone else do the killing.
Especially when the bastards have been so good at killing us right back, he thought with a twisted grin.
On the other hand, Comrade Omicron-even among their most trusted subordinates, the members of the Command Council went only by their code names-had finally begun letting the Empies know what the Alliance really had in mind. Shwang rather doubted that even Omicron was quite as confident they'd be able to walk away from this one as he was careful to project. Personally, Shwang figured there was no more than a forty percent chance the Empire would back off, hostages or no hostages. But every man and woman assigned to this operation had understood from the moment they took up arms against the might of the Terran Empire that the odds against their ultimate survival were steep. And if they succeeded in their actual objectives even half as well as it looked like they were going to, it would all be worth it in the end.
Not that I wouldn't like to walk away alive, he admitted to himself. It's always nicer to live to enjoy your successes, after all.
He smiled again and turned to look back towards the central building where the hostages were being held.
Which was why he was looking in exactly the opposite direction when the first plasma bolt exploded directly on top of his number three cannon and vaporized it, its crew, the central data processing unit for the battery, and one Shwang Shau-pang, who died without even knowing that he had.
Alicia watched Obaseki Osayaba's plasma bolt take out the central cannon of the northernmost emplacement. Secondary explosions and blast had probably done for the others, as well, but Osayaba was taking no chances. He fired again, and again, as rapidly as his plasma rifle's firing chamber lasers could induce fusion in the hydrogen pellets. The plasma bolts screamed out of the night, obliterating the Mark 18 cannon and the missile launcher paired with them.
Surprise was total. As she had told Keita, if the FALA infantry had suspected even for a moment that Charlie Company's survivors were anywhere near Green Haven, they would have been trying to do something about it. And, as she had also hoped, the sheer shock of the sudden, totally unexpected attack, induced a momentary paralysis.
Osayaba finished eliminating his assigned antiair weapons and retargeted. His plasma bolts shrieked over Alicia's head, shredding the night, impacting on the defensive FALA perimeter around the northern side of the hill. He continued to fire as rapidly as he could … and just as accurately. Individual armored infantrymen took direct hits, torsos vaporizing, heads simply disappearing, and a hole opened in the center of their line.
"Go!" she barked, and twenty-six cadremen and women came out of the night-wrapped woods in the prodigious bounds of battle armor being pushed to its maximum capability.
Nobody even noticed them for a heartbeat or two. Then the first plasma bolts and calliope rounds began sizzling in their direction, but there weren't very many of them, and Alicia's heart twisted within her as she realized why.
"Two o'clock!" Astrid Nordbш said sharply.
"I see it," Obaseki Osayaba replied, and he did. Not that there was very much he could do about it at the moment.
He tracked steadily to his left, working his way along the line of dug-in terrorist infantry in front of Alicia and her charging troopers. He really ought to be withdrawing into the woods by now, according to Alicia's instructions, but he and Astrid had known they wouldn't be. They were the only fire team in position to cover Alicia's mad charge, and that meant that, orders or no, that was what they were going to do.
Return fire shrieked, sizzled, and howled around Osayaba's position. He and Astrid were bellied down behind the shallow earth berms they'd thrown up for cover, and a superheated fog of vaporized soil hung in the air around them. Someone down there was using his armor sensors to back-plot Osayaba's fire, but he wasn't as good at it as the bastards who'd set up the ambush at the LZ.
Even without his armor, it would have been impossible for Osayaba to sort any individual sound out of the insane bedlam screaming about him, but he knew Astrid was firing back with her calliope. She had less than five hundred rounds, and she was expending them in short, tight bursts as FALA infantry, unable to get clear shots at them, came charging in from either flank.
Osayaba saw them coming, knew they were hurtling through the night almost as rapidly as Alicia and her troopers on the hillside, even if the tick did make them seem to float slowly towards him. And he knew Astrid wasn't going to be able to stop them all. She simply didn't have enough ammunition, and neither did he. And since he couldn't stop them, he ignored them, continuing to pick off individual targets as battle armored terrorists around the base of the hill tried to bring their weapons to bear on Alicia's attack.