"I do," Keita didn't wince, though his voice gave the impression he had, "but I have no choice. I know what happened at Shallingsport, and I was at Louvain. I understand your attitude. But I have no choice."
"Understand?" Alicia's voice cracked. She swallowed, but she couldn't stop. Despite all Tisiphone could do, an old, old agony drove her. "I'm not sure you do, sir. I don't think anyone could-except Tannis, perhaps. We went in with a company, sir-a company!-and came out with less than a squad!"
"I know."
"Yes, and you know why, too, sir! You know why that son-of-a-bitch screwed our mission brief to hell! You know he sent us in against a 'soft target,' a bunch of crackpot League separatists with 'improvised weaponry' and no tactical training. Well, I've got news for you, sir- there were two fucking thousand of the bastards, with the best weapons money could buy! But Captain Alwyn took us in, and we did our job. Oh, yes, we did our goddamned job, and seven of us came out alive!"
"Alley. Alley!" Alicia's augmentation crackled with prep signals as emotion jangled through her, and Gateau's hands massaged her shoulders, trying to relax her tension. "They did their best, Sarge." Tannis's voice was soft. "Intelligence screws up sometimes. It happens, Alley."
"Not like this," Alicia grated. "Not like this time, does it, Uncle Arthur?" Her eyes were green flint, challenging his, and he inhaled deeply.
"No, Captain. Not like this," he said at last, quietly, and looked over her head at Major Gateau. "Did Alley ever discuss this with you, Major?"
"No, sir." Tannis sounded confused, Alicia thought, and no wonder.
"No," he sighed, and turned his eyes back to Alicia. "Forgive me. You promised me you wouldn't, didn't you?
She stared back, face like marble, and he pursed his lips in thought, then nodded slowly.
"Perhaps it's time someone did, Major." He gestured at the chair beside Alicia and waited until Gateau sat. "All right. You know about the, um, flap when Alicia resigned?" Tannis nodded. "Then you know it was part of a bargain-a cover-up, if you will. In return for her resignation, the Cadre agreed not to press charges for striking a superior officer. Correct?" She nodded again. "Do you happen to know the identity of the officer she struck?"
"No, sir."
"I'll be damned. I never thought the cover-up would hold." Keita pinched the bridge of his nose again. "That officer, Major Gateau, was Colonel Wadislaw Watts, Imperial Cadre, the man-" he met her eyes, not Alicia's "-responsible for the Shallingsport intelligence assessment. And she didn't just 'strike' him; she hospitalized him in critical condition. In fact, it was, by her own subsequent admission, her intent to kill him.
Tannis gasped and turned to stare at her friend, but Alicia looked straight ahead, eyes stony, showing her only her profile, while Keita continued in that same flat, steady voice.
"Precisely. You and I know, Major, that the Cadre isn't perfect, whatever the Empire as a whole may believe. We make mistakes. Not often, perhaps, but we make them, and when we do, they can have … major consequences. Shallingsport was one such mistake."
"Mistake!" Alicia hissed like a curse, then caught herself and pressed her lips together. Keita frowned, but he didn't reprimand her. He simply went on speaking to Tannis as if they were the only people in the room.
"Alley's right," he told her. "It wasn't a mistake that killed ninety-three percent of your company. It was a crime, because those casualties-" he laid his palms on the tabletop, as if for balance "-were completely avoidable. Colonel Watts had in his possession data which gave an accurate picture of the opposition you faced. Data which he suppressed."
Gateau's race was white, twisted with disbelief and anguish, and Keita folded his hands together and frowned down at them.
"He thought he could get away with it, hide it," he said softly, "and he very nearly did."
"But … but why, sir?"
"Blackmail. The … foreign power actually behind the Shallingsport terrorists had suborned him. He'd been feeding them information-minor data, but valuable- for seven years before the raid, and he'd been very, very clever. He went through several routine security checks and one regular five-year close scrutiny, and we never realized. But when Shallingsport came up, his employers informed him that he could either cook his intelligence analysis to guarantee a blood bath that ended in failure, or be exposed by them."
"You're saying we were set up," Gateau whispered.
"Exactly. You were supposed to be wiped out and 'push' the terrorists into massacring their hostages, thus blackening the Cadre's reputation and branding the Emperor with the blame for a catastrophic military adventure. That plan failed for only two reasons: the courage and determination of your company and, in particular, of Master Sergeant Alicia DeVries."
Alicia glared at him, hands taloned in her lap under the table edge, and horror boiled behind her eyes. Captain Alwyn and Lieutenant Strassman dead in the drop. Lieutenant Masolle dead two minutes after grounding. First Sergeant Yussuf and her people buying the breakout from the LZ with their lives. And then the nightmare cross-country journey in their powered armor, while people-friends-were picked off, blown apart, incinerated in gouts of plasma or shattered by tungsten penetrators from auto cannon and heavy machine-guns. Two-man atmospheric stingers screaming down to strafe and rocket their weeding ranks, and the wounded they had no choice but to abandon. And then the break-in to the hostages. Private Oselli throwing himself in front of a plasma cannon to shield the captives. Tannis screaming a warning over the com and shooting three terrorists off her back while point-blank small arms battered her own armor and she took two white-hot tungsten penetrators meant for Alicia. The terror and blood and smoke and stink as somehow they held they held they held until the recovery shuttles came down like the hands of God to pluck them out of Hell while she and the medic ripped at Tannis's armor and restarted her heart twice… .
It was impossible. They couldn't have done it-no one could have done it-but they had. They'd done it because they were the best. Because they were the Cadre, the chosen samurai of the Empire. Because it was their duty. Because they were, by God, too stupid to know they couldn't … and because they were all that stood between two hundred civilians and death.
"The plan failed," Keita's quiet voice cut through the surreal flashes of hideous memory, "because of you people, but we didn't know how the intelligence had gone so horribly wrong. We looked-I assure you we looked- but we never found the answers. And then, two years later, on Louvain, Captain DeVries captured a dying Rishathan War Mother. Her medics did their best for the Rish, but she was too far gone. And because she was dying and Alley had spared her war daughters' lives, she repaid her honor debt."
More memories wracked Alicia, and Tisiphone rushed to harvest their rage, gathering it up and storing its fiery strength. Alicia remembered the dying Rish. She remembered the beautiful golden eyes blazing in that hideous face as the matriarch discovered she was that DeVries and bestowed the priceless, poisonous gift in the name of honor.
"There was no proof, no record, only the word of a dying Rish, but Alley knew it was true. And because she had no proof, she returned to the command ship, found Colonel Wadislaw Watts, the mission's assistant intelligence chief, and challenged him with what she'd learned. He panicked and tried to run, confirming his guilt, and she shattered his skull, his ribs, and both legs with her bare hands before they could pull her off him."
The room was very quiet, and Alicia heard her own harsh breathing while echoes of savagery burned in her nerves. Only her hate had spared Watts's life. Only her need to make him feel it, to return just a taste of what her people had suffered. If only she'd kept control of herself! One clean blow-just one!-would have left the medics nothing to save.