David Weber - In Fury Born (ARC)

by In Fury Born (ARC)(lit)

  Besides, up-checking your own armor before a drop was a company tradition, especially in First Platoon. Even if you knew your armor was in perfect condition, you dropped by to "make certain"... which just happened to give you an opportunity for an informal little get-together with men and women who were important to you. Men and women, some of whom might not be alive a day or two later. It let you have that moment with them when you "coincidentally bumped into them" without anyone ever admitting that that was what any of you were doing.

  And under the unwritten rules, it was unforgivable to say anything maudlin or-God forbid!-serious.

  "I'll have you know, Sergeant McGwire," she said severely, "that the rumor that Rish matriarchs eat their mates raw is totally unfounded, a legacy of humanocentric prejudice and rank xenophobia. The Rish haven't eaten anyone raw at least since they discovered fire, and the Rishathan Sphere represents a mature and highly developed society, however it may look to uneducated barbarians like yourself."

  "Sure, sure!" McGwire rolled his eyes.

  The Alpha Team leader had been twitting Alicia ever since she signed up for the xenopsychology course. Cadre troopers were strongly encouraged to pursue additional education and training. Obviously, anything which contributed directly to their ability to perform their missions was a good thing, but the Cadre also believed that keeping its people mentally supple was as important as keeping them that way physically. Equally obviously, anything which would help a cadrewoman better understand the Rish who were humanity's primary nonhuman competitors came under the heading of enhancing mission capability, but Alicia had found the course fascinating on its own merits, as well. She wondered sometimes if that was her father's genetic heritage coming out in her.

  "Your hostile attitude towards another sentient species is scarcely becoming in someone whose actions and attitudes represent the Emperor personally," Alicia told McGwire now, waving an old-fashioned screwdriver and frowning darkly upon him. "If you keep this up, I'm going to have to report you to CHIRP. They'll know what to do with you!"

  McGwire stifled a crack of laughter. CHIRP-the Center for Human Interspecies Relations Policy-was the brainchild of Senator Edward Gennady one of the Senate's more senior members. Gennady was from Old Earth herself, which gave him a powerful political base, and he was also, in the considered opinion of virtually every member of the imperial military, a raving lunatic. His CHIRP was a think tank whose members had all acquired impressive academic credentials, and many of whom were undeniably brilliant in terms of their own isolated intellectual community. Unfortunately, they also represented a strata of Core World intellectuals for whom the ability of any thinking species to peacefully coexist with any other "if it only tried" was an uncontestable article of faith. From which it followed that the Empire's inability to peacefully coeexist with someone like the Rish automatically demonstrated that humanity wasn't trying and must therefore adopt a more "conciliating" policy and stop trying to "enforce parochial, humanocentric prejudices" on other, equally valid alien cultures. Indeed, they clung to that belief, even-or perhaps especially-in the face of all empirical evidence to the contrary, with a dogmatic determination worthy of a medieval peasant.

  In Alicia's view, the only people more dangerous than CHIRP were the idiots like Senator Breckman and his Mankind Triumphant Alliance, who argued that humanity could learn nothing from alien cultures. The MTA was just as blind and just as dogmatic, and even more closed-minded, than CHIRP at its worst. Even the Rish, who could have been poster children for the MTA's evil alien caricatures, had developed concepts and ideas humanity might do well to study, if only in order to better understand their opposition. And, what was worse, some of Breckman's followers actually thought war was a good idea and that it was "time to seek a final solution to the Rish problem." The only good thing about the MTA was that it could at least be counted upon to support military appropriations bills, but Alicia doubted their support on that single issue was worth their idiocy on every other. Both packs of imbeciles, in her opinion, spent their time living in their own little worlds only peripherally-and sporadically-attached to the universe at large.

  "I'd be astonished if Gennady knew what to do with anything he couldn't drink, smoke, snort or screw," Corporal Imogene Hartwell said. It was meant to sound humorous, but it didn't, and Alicia hid a mental frown.

  Gennady's reputation for youthful promiscuity and the pursuit of mind-altering substances was well known. It didn't hurt him very much with his constituency, which some-and she knew Hartwell (who'd been born and raised on a Crown World and had the 'frontier' mentality to go with it) was one of them-would argue was because the people who kept voting for him were just as "decadent" as he was. Over the last couple of decades, though, Gennady had cleaned up his act, publicly at least, where his sex life was concerned. And although Alicia never doubted he'd had a genuine problem with old-fashioned alcohol and more esoteric drugs, at least when he was younger, she also suspected that it had been exaggerated by his political enemies-of whom he had more than she could count.

  "Well, he can't do any of those with me," McGwire declared, provoking another general chuckle. "But," he continued, looking severely at Alicia, "don't think you can divert me that easily, Alley!" The look he gave Alicia made her suspect he was deliberately sidestepping Hartwell's scorching disgust and genuine anger. "I've heard all the stories about other people who took those 'Understand the Lizards' courses. Scrambled their brains, every one of them!"

  "Thanks for the warning," Alicia retorted. Then she frowned and cocked her head.

  "Actually," she said a bit more seriously, "it's really pretty fascinating in a lot of ways. Some of the things the Rish have done seem... odd, at best, by human standards. For that matter, a lot of them seem downright crazy! But once you start wrapping your mind around the way they think, the way their society is structured, it all starts making sense."

  "Please don't tell me you're signing up with Gennady and his warm-and-fuzzy-feelings crowd!" McGwire protested.

  "Of course not." Alicia shook her head with a snort. "The fact that it makes sense doesn't mean I think they're all sweetness and light, Alan! If you go back and look at any lunatic in human history, his actions probably 'made sense' in terms of his own basic assumptions and beliefs. That didn't make someone like Adolph Hitler or Hwang Chyang-tsai or Idrisi al-Fahd or Naomi Johansson any less of a crazed sociopath, and 'understanding' the Rish isn't going to magically make them start behaving themselves, whatever people like the CHIRP may think. It is interesting, though."

  "If you say so," McGwire said dubiously. "Personally, though, I like my view of human-Rish relations nice and simple. They poke their noses into imperial space, and we kick their ass clear back to Rishatha Prime."

  "Works for me," Vartkes Kalachian agreed. "But if you're really that interested in how Rish think, Sarge," he continued, looking at Alicia, "you might want to try picking Watts' brain."

  "Captain Watts?" Alicia asked in a tone of mild surprise.

  "Sure." Kalachian grimaced. "I knew Watts years ago, before I ever got tapped for the Cadre. I was a Wasp, too, you know, and I caught guard duty for our embassy on Rishatha Prime back about, oh, five, six years ago. He was there, too, as a brand new butter-bar, back before they turned him into an Intelligence puke-or, hell, maybe he was already in training for intel, now that I think about it. Anyway, he pulled a hitch with the Foreign Minstry as a gopher for the military attach‚. He was there over a year, I think-until after I got selected for the Cadre, at any rate. And maybe he really was already working on the whole spy thing, at that, because I heard later that they'd PNGed him."

  Alicia blinked. The Rishathan Sphere had officially declared Watts persona non grata? That was a cachet which didn't find its way into very many serving Marines' resumes!

  "Maybe I will have talk with him," she said after a moment. "Might be interesting to get his perspective on them. Thanks, Vartkes."

  "De nada." Kalachian shrugged and returned his
attention to his battle armor.

  Alicia did the same. Lieutenant Strassmann and Lieutenant Pa l had completed the planning Captain Alwyn had requested, and unless something had changed radically between their last intelligence briefing and their arrival in the Fuller System in about seventeen standard hours, they were indeed going to drop in light configuration on Watts' suggested LZ. Alicia preferred going in light herself, rather than lugging around the plasma gun-more like a plasma cannon, for anyone not in battle armor-which was her normally assigned weapon when the company went in heavy. A plasma gun wasn't really a precision weapon, especially not the Cadre version, which could have doubled as main armament on an assault shuttle. It was a pretty much all or nothing proposition which left very little in the way of potential prisoners, and she preferred something a little more flexible than that, especially when she might be shooting at terrorists in close proximity to hostages she was trying to keep alive. And Pa l had been right about the kind of terrain they had to get through. The lighter they were, the quicker they could reach their objective.

  At the same time, she had to admit that a part of her would have preferred having a little more heavy firepower along. Michael Doorn and Obaseki Osayaba would have the plasma guns she didn't, and their wings, douard Bonrepaux and Shai Hau-zhi, would have calliopes this time, instead of the grenade launchers they usually drew. But that was going to be all of the really heavy weapons her squad would have along, and she hoped it would be enough.

  She completed her suit diagnostics and shut down her synth-link. All systems were green, and she frowned to herself as she reconsidered her backup weapon and equipment harness.

  The Book required all cadremen to carry sidearms for backup, although Alicia couldn't remember the last time she'd heard about any Cadre trooper actually using one. Normally, she carried a Colt-Heckler & Koch three-millimeter, a selective-fire machine pistol capable of taking out just about anything short of battle armor with its two-millimeter subcaliber penetrators. This time, she'd opted for a neural disrupter, instead, and she wasn't sure she was comfortable with the selection. There was always a potential over-penetration problem with the CHK, whereas a disrupter on tight focus stopped dead when it hit its target. But she'd always hated disrupters, which struck her as a particularly nasty way for someone to die. Of course, she had to admit if pressed that she'd yet to find a good way, and she knew that what bothered her more were the people who weren't quite killed by a disrupter hit. Even with modern medicine, the consequences were pretty gruesome.

  Then again, she thought grimly, the people we're going after are terrorists who've already murdered helpless prisoners just to make a "negotiating" point. I can probably live with a little gruesome where they're concerned.

  She snorted at her own thoughts, and ran quickly through the rest of the equipment list. The force blade might be more useful than usual this time, she reflected, given the heavily forested terrain through which they would be moving. The thirty-five-centimeter battle steel blade that went into its scabbard had an edge little more than a couple of molecules across. That made it a formidable slicer and dicer in its own right, yet its real function was mainly to form the basic matrix for the tool's force field and give the force blade balance and some heft. When it was activated, the length of the "blade" suddenly expanded to almost seventy centimeters, and the cutting surface of the force field it projected was much, much sharper than the alloy blade. She'd yet to encounter any sort of vegetation (or, for that matter, anything else) which could stand up to that, especially when the arm swinging it had the advantage of battle armor "muscles."

  She considered switching back to the CHK one more time, then gave herself a mental shake.

  Why do you do this every time? she asked herself. This is your form of dithering, isn't it? Well, stop it. You've checked everything at least twice now, and it's time you went and got yourself some extra shuteye before the drop.

  "Well, that's that," she said, suiting action to the thought and stripping off her headset. "I'm going to grab myself some rack time while the grabbing is good. The rest of you should consider doing the same thing."

  Most of the others nodded, waved, or grunted in basic agreement, but she knew some of them had no intention of taking her advice. Benjamin Dubois, Astrid Nordbo, and Thomas Kiely would undoubtedly drag in a fourth-probably Malachai Perlman-and wile away the time playing cutthroat spades. And Brian Oselli and Erik Andersson would almost certainly haul out their chessboard, while Chul Byung Cha would most probably wander down to Marguerite Johnsen's range and shoot her way through a couple of hundred rounds of pistol ammunition.

  They all had their own ways of dealing with pre-drop tension, and by now, Alicia knew all of them. Just as she knew there was absolutely no point in trying to change any of them. So she only smiled, shook her head fondly at them, and headed for her waiting bunk.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  "Saddle up, people," First Sergeant Yussuf said over the platoon net. The first sergeant's voice was calm, almost conversational, but Alicia was confident that Yussuf had her own share of abdominal butterflies.

  "All right, you heard the lady," Alicia said in turn, and the men and women of First Squad headed for the drop tubes.

  Alicia and her two team leaders checked each trooper's readouts carefully before they followed them through the hatches and settled into their own drop harnesses.

  This drop wasn't going to be like the Chengchou drop in a lot of ways, Alicia reflected as the drop harness enveloped her torso and the umbilicals and tractor locks mated with her armor. For one thing, Chengchou had been a cakewalk compared to this operation. She might have gone into her first drop with Charlie Company without the opportunity to share in the pre-drop rehearsals, and she might not have known her people yet, and there might have been noncombatants mixed in among the targets. But the opposition on Chengchou hadn't had any reason to expect that they were coming. And there'd been no hostages involved.

  This time there were six hundred imperial citizens' lives riding on how well they did their jobs, and that made a difference. A huge difference. But at least this time she was no longer the new kid, the unknown quantity, either. She and her squad had made a half-dozen combat drops, two or three times that many live training drops, and more simulated drops than she could count, over the last year and a half. They'd been over the river and through the woods together, and they were a close-knit, intimately fused unit.

  More even than any of the Marines with whom she had served, the men and women of Charlie Company-and of First Squad in particular-had become her family. Like any family, they didn't live in perfect harmony. Everyone knew about Lieutenant Masolle's hot temper, and that Lieutenant Pa l was the company pessimist. First Sergeant Yussuf wasn't particularly fond of Denise Cronkite, Second Platoon's platoon sergeant. Within First Squad, Chul Byung Cha and Astrid Nordbo had a long-standing feud (which, as near as Alicia could figure out, went back to a confrontation over some jerk who'd turned out to be married to someone else at the time, anyway). And douard Bonrepaux and Flannan O'Clery were constantly sniping at one another over one imagined fault or another.

  But none of that mattered. They were family, and they knew and trusted one another with absolute certainty. However much grief they might give one another between drops, whatever practical jokes they might pull, whatever quarrels might arise, none of it mattered once the drop tube hatch closed behind them.

  They were the Cadre, the Empire's chosen samurai, the Emperor's sword, and one way or another, they would get the job done.

  "Drop in five minutes," Marguerite Johnsen's AI announced in her mastoid, and she lay back, waiting.

  ***

  Marguerite Johnsen, masquerading as the Rogue World-registry freighter Anzhelika Nikolaevna Dubrovskiy, swept around toward the dark side of the planet Fuller in her parking orbit.

  The Shallingsport Peninsula was well up into Fuller's northern hemisphere, much too far above the equator for Star Roamer to maintain
a geostationary orbit over it, and the transport had never been designed to handle remote sensor arrays. The terrorists still aboard her had clearly attempted to place their stolen starship to give themselves the best coverage of near-planet traffic they could, bearing in mind the limitations of their civilian-grade communications links to their deployed sensor arrays. Despite that, their major concern was clearly to watch for the arrival of Fleet units, not to monitor the movements of ships which they "knew" were civilian freighters. And the fact that they couldn't maintain a fixed position over Shallingsport provided windows in each orbit during which it was impossible for them to directly observe what was going on there.