In Fury Born

by David Weber

  But she couldn't say it, of course. Not any more than he could admit his own fear that it would be another Shallingsport.

  "In that case," she said instead, "let's get my people in here and let them start explaining the ops plan we've already put together."

  ***

  "Ready to go, Skipper?" First Sergeant James Kr¢l asked over her armor's dedicated command circuit.

  Alicia looked up to see Charlie Company's senior noncom standing beside Sergeant Ludovic Th”nes. Kr¢l, one of the other three Shallingsport survivors still with the company, had inherited Pamela Yussuf's old job eleven months ago, while Th”nes doubled as the senior company clerk and Alicia's wing. He'd been with her for a bit over three standard years-ever since Alicia had been promoted to company commander. Tannis had been promoted to lieutenant at the same time, and offered Second Platoon, but she'd opted to head back to Old Earth to complete her medical training as a full-fledged doctor, and she was currently assigned to Johns Hopkins/Bethesda of Charlotte, the same hospital where Fiona DeVries was currently Chief of Surgery.

  Alicia missed Tannis badly, but they'd stayed in close touch, and Tannis had become a close friend of her mother's. In fact, she'd gotten to know all of Alicia's family well and become almost a third daughter. It also hadn't hurt Tannis' career prospects one bit, either. The Cadre was always chronically short of its own medical staff, and Tannis had been assigned to JHB as part of a concious plan to groom her for bigger and better things.

  But Tannis' decision to pursue her medical career was how Lieutenant Angelique Jefferson had gotten the platoon, instead. Alicia regretted the loss of Tannis' coolheaded tactical insight almost as much as she missed having her watching her back. But Jefferson had done the platoon proud, and Alicia and Th”nes had become a smoothly integrated team.

  "And what might make you question my preparedness, First Sergeant?" she asked severely now.

  "Well, far be it from me to suggest that you can sometimes be just a little bit slow, Skipper," Kr¢l replied with a grin. "Something about 'late to your own funeral' I believe Tannis said, wasn't it?"

  "That was one time," Alicia said with dignity, "and it was only a training mission, and that glitch in my battle armor wasn't my fault to begin with."

  "Whatever you say, Skipper," Kr¢l said soothingly, and all three of them chuckled.

  "Seriously, Skipper," the first sergeant continued after a moment, "we're ready to enter tubes."

  "Then I suppose we'd better saddle up and get to it," Alicia said, and switched to the all-units circuit.

  "All units, Ramrod," she said. "Let's go, people-it's time to dance."

  ***

  Marguerite Johnsen swept steadily around the planet of Louvain in her parking orbit. The Rish on the planetary surface were amply supplied with antiair weapons which could reach up to and just beyond the edge of atmosphere, but the Cadre transport was well outside their range. That was about to change for the individual cadremen in her tubes, however, and Alicia felt her own stomach muscles tightening as she lay in the number one launch position.

  Don't be such a nervous bitch, she scolded herself. You're the one who came up with this brilliant plan in the first place, aren't you?

  She chuckled, if a bit tensely, and decided that it was just as well no one else could read her medical telltales at this particular moment.

  "All units, stand by for launch in five minutes," Marguerite Johnsen's cyber synth said, and Alicia drew a deep breath.

  The five minutes in question seemed to take forever to ooze past, and then the audio tone of the thirty-second warning sounded. As always, she considered some final word of encouragement. And, also as always, she decided against it. Her people didn't need to listen to her voicing her confidence in them as a way to relieve her own nervousness.

  And then the catapult grabbed her harness and hurled her out of the tube.

  She watched her mental display as the rest of the company spat from the transport's tubes with the rapidity of an old-fashioned machine gun. The pattern was perfect, as she'd known it would be, and she watched the planet hurtling towards her.

  Louvain's atmosphere began to blossom with tears of flame, streaking down towards the planetary surface. There were dozens-hundreds-of them, and Alicia smiled nastily. Brigadier Sampson's reaction to her "request" for a diversionary drop had been... testy. He hadn't really been able to say no, not when the person who'd authorized Alicia's request was none other than Brigadier Sir Arthur Keita. That hadn't made him particularly happy to expend forty-two percent of his total drop harnesses on dummy insertions, however. In fact, he'd rather pointedly suggested that since this was a Cadre operation, perhaps Marguerite Johnsen should supply the diversionary drops. But Keita had pointed out in return that a Cadre drop harness cost about three times what a Marine harness cost, at which point Sampson had submitted (as graciously as he could bring himself to) to the inevitable.

  Now the Rishathan defenders found their sensors saturated with scores of absolutely genuine drop signatures. Unfortunately for them, there was no way for them to discriminate between the drop harnesses which contained live human enemies and those which didn't. And just to make their problems complete, all of the drop patterns, not just Charlie Company's, were liberally seeded with EW platforms and penetration aids.

  From the Rishathan perspective, it had to look like a full brigade drop, an all-out effort by the Marines to put a decisive amount of human firepower inside their outer perimeter. Alicia and her platoon commanders had deliberately targeted the diversionary drops on exactly the sorts of positions the Wasps would have gone after if that was what it had actually been. They'd also set up a handful of drops for targets which clearly made no military sense at all to encourage the Rish to regard them as feints. Which-they all hoped-would also encourage them to assume that the company's actual drop was only another diversion from the"real" targets. After all, the planetary invasion force's command post was the most heavily dug-in piece of real estate on the entire planet. It was also in the center of their spacehead, which meant any force trying to break in and link up with drop commandos landing on top of it would have to fight its way through over two hundred kilometers of fortified positions.

  All in all, it was hardly the sort of target a Marine brigadier would commit his troops to, and Alicia devoutly hoped that the Theryian command staff would draw the appropriate conclusions.

  Unfortunately, there was only one way to find out, and she bared her teeth as she entered Louvain's atmosphere and became another of those plunging tears of flame.

  ***

  "Striker, Ramrod. Talk to me, James!"

  "Ramrod, Striker," First Sergeant Kr¢l acknowledged calmly. "We had a little scatter, Skipper. No sweat. I'm rounding up the strays now."

  Alicia snorted. "A little scatter" wasn't exactly the way she would have phrased it... although, she acknowledged, she might have put it that way back when she'd been a sergeant, now that she thought about it. After all, one of a sergeant's jobs was to keep the officers from fretting over the little stuff.

  "All right, Striker," she said, still loping along in the ground-covering bounds of battle armor. "Round them up and bring them along. I'm heading for the Tiger RP."

  "Copy that, Boss. See you in a few."

  "See that you do," Alicia said, and turned her attention back to her HUD.

  Actually, Kr¢l's description was right about on the money, she told herself. The company had made it down without losing a single trooper, which had to mean the Lizards had bought the diversionary plan. They'd written the actual drop off as an obvious feint and declined to waste any of their defensive firepower on it.

  Now that Charlie Company was on the ground, however, the Rish were doing their best to rectify their initial oversight. Heavy fire came at the cadremen from every direction, but the pre-drop recon had been spot-on. Unlike the Shallingsport debacle, the company knew exactly where their enemies' prepared positions were, and each strong point which could
bear upon the LZ had been assigned to a specific wing.

  One or two of those wings had landed too far from their intended positions to immediately engage them, but that was why Alicia and her platoon commanders had arranged backup assignments. Now Charlie Company's men and women moved purposefully through the flying dirt and smoke of incoming mortar rounds and the scream of heavy-caliber penetrators. They closed in on their primary or backup assignments, and Alicia had dropped in heavy configuration. Six of each squad's nine wings were armed with plasma rifles and HVW launchers, and as the green icons on Alicia's HUD swarmed towards the glaring orange icons of dug-in Rishathan heavy weapons and infantry, those orange icons began to disappear.

  The Rish were past masters-or mistresses-at field fortification. They dug their weapons in deep, with excellent fields of fire, but Charlie Company had brought along the firepower equivalent of an old pre-space division-at least. Each of the HVW launchers had only three rounds, but each of those rounds produced a kiloton-range fireball when it impacted. Even the best-bunkered weapons couldn't survive that kind of treatment. Not, at least, if they were exposed enough to have a field of fire of their own.

  The plasma gunners left the most heavily dug-in positions up to their HVW-armed wings. They were busy taking out the surface positions, the infantry pickets covering the flanks of the heavy weapons. And here and there, a Cadre plasma gunner sent a bolt screaming straight in through a firing slit to turn the bunker on the other side into a fusion-fired crematorium.

  "Medic! Medic!" she heard, and muttered a curse as Corporal Sosa, one of Lieutenant Akama Alves' Third Platoon troopers, went down. His icon strobed rapidly, indicating heavy damage to his armor, and his life signs monitor blipped the emergency transponder code of a life-threatening injury.

  Sosa's wing, Corporal Frederica Stone, was already there, dragging him into the lee of a furiously burning Rishathan bunker, and Alicia noted the caduceus icon of the Third Platoon medic bounding towards them.

  Another green icon went down, and she swore again, more viciously. This time, the icon didn't strobe; it turned the bloody red of death instantly as Corporal Harold Madsen took a Rishathan plasma bolt center of mass.

  That shouldn't have happened, a corner of Alicia's brain told her. That strong point was supposed to've already been taken out by-oh.

  The strong point had been taken out, and, so-almost before Madsen's shattered armor hit the ground-had the single Rish trooper who'd popped up out of nowhere to take the shot. It was just one of those things. Just Murphy's way of reminding people that no matter how carefully they planned, he always had the final word.

  "Tiger-One, Ramrod," she said, shaking that thought aside. "I'm approaching your rally point from eight o'clock."

  "Ramrod, Tiger-One," Lieutenant Jefferson's soprano replied. "I've got you and Ludovic on the HUD, Skipper."

  "Glad to hear it," Alicia said dryly as she and Th”nes loped along the trail of wrecked, shattered, burning Rishathan strong points Jefferson's people had left in their wake. It would have been embarrassing, to say the least, to be picked off by one of her own people over a case of mistaken identity.

  She and Th”nes covered the last dozen meters in a single bound, and Lieutenant Jefferson waved one armored arm at her company commander.

  "Over here, Skipper!"

  Alicia strode over and slapped the lieutenant's shoulder.

  "Mind if Ludovic and I come along for the ride, Angelique?" she asked.

  "Course not, Boss," Jefferson assured her. Not, Alicia reflected, that she'd ever been likely to say no, but there were formalities to observe, even in the middle of a battlefield like this one.

  "Erik has your left flank," she said now, leaning close enough to Jefferson that they could see one another's features through their armored visors as she highlighted First Platoon's icons on the lieutenant's HUD.

  "He'll have that last calliope position knocked out in another ninety seconds, max," Alicia continued, "and Akama and his people have already secured this entire arc on your right."

  "Good enough," Jefferson said, nodding in satisfaction, then looked up at Alicia with a wolfish smile. "We kind of cleared everything that might have come at us from behind on the way in, Skipper."

  "So I noticed," Alicia replied.

  "Well, as soon as Erik takes out that calliope, we'll go," Jefferson said, looking back up to where the calliope in question was flaying the approaches to a particularly substantial-looking bunker with penetrators that could have knocked out an assault APC, not just battle armor. "I don't want to -"

  Alicia's visor polarized as a searing explosion obliterated the calliope's position. The thermal pulse and blast front from the HVW strike rolled over her and Jefferson like a fiery fist, and her armor's automatic stabilizing systems whined in protest as they kept her on her feet.

  "So much for that," Jefferson observed, and punched into her platoon's all-hands circuit.

  "All Tigers," she said. "That was First Platoon taking out some rather unpleasant Lizards who might have objected to our presence. Now that Lieutenant Andersson and his people have attended to that minor detail for us," she smiled at Alicia, "let's dance, people."

  ***

  As a company commander, Alicia no longer had any business in the forefront of a firefight like this one. She knew that, and under most circumstances, she would have stayed out of it, whether she liked it or not. But this time, she couldn't. Not only were she and Ludovic Th”nes one of the minority of rifle-armed wings, but she was the company's Rish expert.

  She did let Jefferson and her people effect the initial break-in into the Rishathan command bunker. They executed the breaching operation flawlessly, and at such close quarters the heavier weapons Rish infantry normally carried lost a lot of their advantage. Rish battle armor was more ponderous than human armor, which also meant it was considerably tougher than standard Marine equipment. In fact, it was tougher than the Cadre's armor, but at close enough range, the Cadre battle rifle was quite capable of punching its penetrators even through Rish armor. And the fact that the attacking humans were fused directly into their sensor systems and required no physical input interface for their armor's and weapons' onboard computers gave them a deadly advantage in a dogfight like this one. Coupled with the tick, the cadremen's enormously greater "situational awareness" simply meant they reacted faster, and far more accurately, than the Rish possibly could.

  Second Platoon didn't have it all its own way, of course. Jefferson's squads took seven more casualties on the way in-none of them, thankfully, immediately fatal, although Alicia didn't much care for the look of Corporal Inglewood's vitals on her medical monitor. But once the platoon had broken into the command bunker, it actually outnumbered the Rishathan defenders by almost two-to-one. The fight was short, vicious, and ugly... as fights tended to be when the combatants engaged one another with plasma rifles at ranges as low as three meters.

  "Pandora!" one of Jefferson's troopers announced. "I have Pandora!"

  "All Tigers," Jefferson said instantly. "Pandora. I say again, Pandora! Let's watch those plasma bolts, people!"

  Acknowledgment came back, and the tempo of the combat shifted abruptly. Jefferson's Third Squad, tasked to cover the other two squads' backs as they fought their way into the bunker, was still furiously engaged with Rish infantry trying to fight their way in behind the attacking humans. Between them and the platoon's point, the flaming, shattered passages through which the fighting inside the bunker had already passed were relatively quiet. Now the furious tempo at the head of the column suddenly seemed to hesitate as the plasma gunners who had been leading the assault slowed abruptly to let their rifle-armed colleagues past them.

  Alicia and Th”nes squirmed through the halted ranks of the heavy weapon-armed troopers and joined the platoon's six wings of riflemen.

  "Skipper," Jefferson began over the dedicated command circuit in a last-ditch, spinal-reflex argument, "you really don't -"

  "Just stick to the o
ps plan, Angelique," Alicia scolded with a tight smile. "You know why."

  "Yes, Ma'am," Jefferson sighed in the tone of a gradeschool student promising to do her homework this time. "In that case, when you're ready, Skipper," she added over the general circuit, and Alicia chuckled.

  "All right, people. It's dance time," she said.

  ***

  The final break-in was actually almost something of an anticlimax. Alicia had more than half anticipated a fanatical, backs-to-the-wall stand by mysorthayak-charged matriarchs. She'd been prepared to shoot her way through them, but she'd expected to take casualties of her own in the process of stacking the defenders like cordwood. Only it didn't work out that way.

  A single pair of armored Rish infantry loomed up out of the big, dimly lit chamber at the very heart of the command bunker. They opened fire the instant the cadremen came around the defensive dogleg in the final approach corridor. But they were armed with calliopes, not plasma guns, because they couldn't afford to let the backblast from their own weapons turn this room into the sort of flaming shambles Second Platoon had left behind it on the way in.