by David Weber
"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 attaché. 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 Paál 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 Paál 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, Édouard 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 Nordbø, 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 Paál 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 Nordbø had a long-standing feud (which, as near as A
licia 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 Édouard 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.
Lieutenant Strassmann and Marguerite Johnsen's astrogator had very carefully worked out an approach to the planet which "just happened" to lead the ship into a "routine" parking orbit which would carry her across Shallingsport during one of those windows which also happened to fall just after local midnight in the Green Haven Industrial Park.
Strassmann had also planned the drop not for the first night-hour window, or even the second. He'd given the terrorists still aboard Star Roamer no less than three unobserved nighttime overflights on "Anzhelika Nikolaevna Dubrovskiy's" part to get accustomed to the "freighter's" harmlessness.
Meanwhile, the battlecruiser HMS Ctesiphon, which had rendezvoused with Marguerite Johnsen and two Fleet heavy cruisers well short of Fuller, had followed the Cadre transport the rest of the way to Fuller, timing her arrival to coincide with Charlie Company's drop. At the moment, the battlecruiser was headed in-system, squawking the transponder of yet another merchant ship and using her electronic warfare systems to disguise her emission signature. She couldn't fool a competent sensor array if she got too close to it, but as long as she kept her distance, she'd look harmless enough, and she had no intention of approaching the planet until after the Cadremen had reached their objective. Ctesiphon had the equivalent of a short battalion of Marines, made up from her own detachment and transfers from the cruisers, in the assault shuttles riding her exterior racks, but even at their maximum acceleration, it would take those shuttles at least another four hours to reach Fuller orbit. On the other hand, her business wasn't with Shallingsport; it was with Star Roamer. One way or another, the passenger liner would not be leaving the Fuller System under its current management.
Now Marguerite Johnsen's drop tubes began deploying Charlie Company's drop commandos very, very stealthily.
Alicia had always enjoyed covert drops in training. Unlike the Chengchou drop, which had been intended to put Charlie Company on the ground as quickly as possible, a covert drop was intended to put drop commandos on the ground as unobtrusively as possible. They launched without the massive acceleration—and painfully evident electromagnetic signature from the tube catapults—of a standard drop profile, and they entered atmosphere on a much shallower profile at far lower velocity. They also dispensed with the protective force field bubble a drop harness provided for a higher-velocity, steeper reentry profile. It wasn't needed for what one of Alicia's instructors had called "planet-diving"—basically an exercise in old-fashioned skydiving or hang-gliding which simply started outside the planet's atmosphere. And without the electronic emissions of the force field bubble and the thermal signature of a high-velocity reentry, a drop commando fluttering down from a night sky with her powered armor's stealth systems on-line was the next best thing to completely invisible. Which meant Charlie Company ought to reach its LZ unobserved, undetected, and—most importantly of all—unexpected.
A covert drop took a lot longer than a standard, high-speed insertion. That was one reason covert profiles were nonstandard. If, by some misfortune, an opponent guessed a covert insertion was coming and his sensors managed to detect it at all, he'd have far longer to track the incoming drop commandos. Against Cadre armor's stealth capabilities, his chance of detecting and tracking the attackers would be considerably little better than even, even if he'd been able to predict the landing zone's exact position. But the possibility always existed, which was one of the reasons The Book specified high-speed drops for hot LZs.
Spotting Cadre armor would be a nontrivial challenge, even under ideal circumstances, for first-line tactical sensor arrays, however. In this case, with the terrorists restricted to what they could have landed in personnel shuttles and Charlie Company coming in with all of its own active emitters locked down tight, they couldn't possibly have the sort of sensors needed to do the job.
That, at least, was the theory.
For the moment, though, Alicia actually managed to put that thought aside and surrender to the sheer delight of inserting herself into an endless ocean of air like a thought of God. She slanted down into that airy envelope, and her drop harness' airfoil wings configured outward. She controlled them directly through her synth-link—they were her wings, not the harness'—and she felt them stretch even as the tick began to slow the universe about her.
No wonder the medical types worried about tick dependency, she thought as the time-slowing drug stretched out the sensual delight of her flight. She was a huge night bird, slashing across the Tannenbaum Sea towards Shallingsport, yet despite her speed, the flight seemed slow, dreamy as she watched her mental HUD and her descent vector projected itself towards the mountain valley LZ.
That same HUD showed the icons of the rest of Charlie Company's men and women as they arrowed downward with her. There were two hundred and seventy-four other green dots, riding two hundred and seventy-four other descent vector projections, all about her, and she smiled wolfishly as they fell towards their prey.
The digital time readout in the corner of Alicia's mental HUD spun downward. They were less than two minutes from the ground now, and she felt herself tightening internally, reaching out mentally to the next phase of the operation. It was only —
She stiffened as her armor's passive sensors picked up the impossible. She could "taste" the sudden lash of radar from directly ahead—from directly on top of the landing zone!
"Zulu! Zulu!" Captain Alwyn said suddenly, sharply, over the all-hands net. "Active sensors on the LZ! Hot LZ! Hot LZ! Go to Zu—"
His voice cut off with instant, ax-blow brutality as heavy weapons fire stabbed upward out of the blackness below. Plasma bolts streaked up from the valley rim in lightning strobes of fury, ripping through the moonless night like brimstone darts, and green icons began vanishing with hideous speed from Alicia's HUD.
Sir Arthur Keita jerked up out of his comfortable chair in Marguerite Johnsen's intelligence center as the first incredible tactical data came streaming in from Charlie Company.
"Jesus Christ!" someone blurted. "What the f—?"
The speaker chopped himself off, but Keita never even noticed. His eyes were tightly closed as he concentrated on his own neural link to Marguerite Johnsen's computers and watched what was supposed to have been a smooth, undetected insertion transform itself into bloody chaos.
This was no exercise, and horror hovered in the back of her mind as Captain Alwyn's green icon turned scarlet and he went off the air. Lieutenant Strassmann's followed in almost the same instant, and so did Lieutenant Paál's, and still those eye-tearing plasma blasts sleeted upward.
Not even the Cadre could take that kind of damage to its command structure so quickly without losing cohesion. Alicia's armor's AI tried to keep track of who had command, but the hurricane of fire pouring up from their intended landing zone was killing people too quickly. A corner of Alicia's attention watched the golden command designation ring flashing madly about her HUD, trying to settle around a single icon. But those icons kept turning red before it could settle, and this time the time-stretching effect of the tick only made the shock worse.
But if there was chaos, there was very little panic. The Cadre's ruthless testing and merciless training saw to that. The people who qualified for the Cadre weren't the sort who panicked, and the endless hours of training asserted themselves as responses trained into Charlie Company's personnel at the level of instinct took over.
Alicia hit the release on her drop harness while she was still sixty meters from the ground. She dropped instantly, vertically, while the harness continued forward and, obedient to her final command, brought its built-in drive systems online in a frantic evasion pattern. The sensors which might have detected Alicia locked onto the harness' larger, far stronger emissions signature, instead, and a ball-lightning burst of plasma fire blew it out of Fuller's night sky.
Alicia plummeted into the treetops, her armored body automatically orienting itself so that she hit the branches feetfirst. She felt the shock of impact, despite the armor's built-in inertia damping, and then she was crashing through the limbs like a battering ram in a canonnade of splintering wood.
