"I'd welcome you to Louvain, Captain," he heard himself saying, "except that it's not exactly the sort of vacation spot I'd wish on a friend."
"Oh, I don't know, Major." There was something suspiciously like a chuckle in the captain's voice. "Until the present visitors arrived, it was a nice enough planet. Or so I understand."
"I've been told it was," Truman acknowledged. "Unfortunately, I've been a bit too busy being shot at to play tourist."
"Actually, that's why I'm here," DeVries told him, and smiled at him through her armor's visor. She was a remarkably attractive-and young-woman, Truman realized. Which was almost a surprise, given her... formidable reputation.
"I understand you Wasps have the Lizards pretty well contained," she continued, "but now that you've got them pushed back into their final perimeter, it's going to get nothing but uglier."
"Maybe," Truman said a bit more stiffly. "I think, though, Captain, that Second Battalion's found a weak spot. Assuming, of course, that we're ever allowed to exploit it," he added pointedly.
"My, my, you are pissed off." There was no doubt about the chuckle this time, and Truman felt his temper stir once again. DeVries obviously realized it, and she smiled again, quickly.
"I don't blame you if you are pissed," she told him. "Obviously, if you've found a weakness, you want to punch in hard and fast. Unfortunately, Major, you haven't found one yet."
"I beg your pardon?" Truman didn't care who she was, or what medals she'd won. Not when she came waltzing in and told him he didn't know how to read a tactical situation.
"Sorry," she said calmly. "I don't want to rain on your parade, Major Truman, but I've got access to some background intelligence that wasn't available to your own intel people. We developed it after you'd already deployed for the operation, which is why my company was sent along behind you."
"What kind of 'background intelligence?' " Truman asked suspiciously.
"According to a source which Cadre Intelligence considers reliable," she told him, "when Clan Theryian headed out for Louvain, it came prepared for a full-court mysorthayak."
Truman blinked. He was scarcely what he'd consider an expert on Rishathan psychology, but he'd heard the term mysorthayak before. Every Marine had.
"Jesus Christ," he said. "What the hell makes Louvain important enough for something like that?"
"We're not really positive," DeVries admitted. "There are conflicting views on that particular question. There always are, aren't there?" She gave him a crooked grin-the sort the shooters at the sharp end always gave one another. "All we can say for sure is that our source is pretty insistent. Personally, I don't think their real objective is the conquest of Louvain, at all. I think the Sphere's simply decided it's time for another test of our resolve and picked Clan Theryian to carry it out. But I think you'll agree that if they are thinking in terms of a mysorthayak, you might want to be just a bit cautious about exploiting any 'weaknesses' you find."
"You can say that again, Captain," Truman said fervently.
The Rishatha had found the technological gap between their military capabilities and those of their human-specifically, of their imperial human-opponents growing steadily wider ever since the old League Wars. In particular, the fact that no Rish could use neural receptors placed them at a huge disadvantage, especially when it came to naval warfare. Their basic weapons were as good as humanity's, as was their equivalent of the Fasset Drive, but humans' ability to link directly with their military hardware gave them an enormous advantage.
That advantage was most pronounced where the Fleet was concerned. A Rish admiral really required at least a three-to-one advantage in weight of metal if she wanted just to hold her own against a Fleet task force, which was one reason the Rishathan ships supporting this invasion had scuttled out of the system as soon as the Fleet turned up. But when it came to ground combat, the traditional human advantages got a bit thinner.
For one thing, Rish were big. At a height of almost three meters-and squat for their height, compared to homo sapiens-a fully mature Rishathan matriarch massed up to about four hundred kilos, all of it muscle and solid bone. No human could hope to match a Rish in hand-to-hand combat without battle armor, and the Rish built their own battle armor on the same scale nature had used when she built them. Their unarmored infantry routinely carried weapons which not even human battle armor could support, and a fully armored Rish infantryman (although any self-respecting Rishathan matriarch would have ripped out the lungs of anyone who applied a masculine gendered pronoun to her), was tougher than most human light battle tanks.
They still couldn't match the flexibility and "situational awareness" of human troops equipped with neural receptors, but they'd worked hard to develop ways to compensate for that. In the assault, they eschewed anything like finesse, relying on sheer mass and weight of fire to bull their way through any opposition. On the defensive, they deployed tactical remotes profusely, dug their troops in deeply with overlapping fields of fire, backed them with as large and powerful a mobile reserve as they could, and tied in multiply redundant layers of air defense and fire support from heavy weapons. Blasting a way through a prepared Rishathan infantry position was always a costly affair.
Which only got worse when they were thinking in terms of mysorthayak. Truman wasn't sure exactly how to translate the term, but he supposed the closest human concept would have been jihad, although that had overtones he knew weren't really applicable. Jihad hadn't been a very popular term for humanity for the past several centuries, and it had resonances which didn't fit very well in this case. Mysothayak was all about clan honor, honor debts, and Rish bloody-mindedness, with only a small religious component, but the Rishathan honor code was twisty enough and hard-edged enough to make "jihad" the closest convenient human analogue. Once they committed to mysorthayak, Rishathan matriarchs didn't give ground. They fought and died where they stood, and if they had the resources available, they seeded their positions with nuclear demolition charges in order to take as many of their enemies with them as possible.
"So what you're saying," Truman said after a moment, "is that if I'd bulled on ahead, they'd have waited until my people and I were well stuck into their position, then blown us all to hell along with themselves?"
"I'm saying that's a strong possibility," DeVries corrected meticulously. "I can't say it's any more than that without better tactical info. But whether that's what they've got in mind right here in front of you or not, it's something we're going to run into somewhere before this op is over. Unless, of course, we do something about it."
"Meaning what?" Truman asked, regarding her through narrowed eyes.
"Meaning that the one way to avoid the sort of casualties mysorthayak usually inflicts is to decapitate the Lizard command structure."
"Decapitate it?" Truman frowned. "What do you mean?"
"It just happens, Major Truman," DeVries told him with a tart smile, "that I hold a doctoral degree equivalent in xenopsych, with a specialty in Rishathan psychology. Which is undoubtedly the reason Brigadier Keita picked my company for this little adventure. Think of it as a reward for my diligent efforts to understand the enemy."
Despite himself, Truman snorted in amusement at her dust-dry tone.
"At any rate," she continued more seriously, "the best way to beat a mysorthayak defense is to 'turn it off' at the source. There's no real human equivalent for some of the Rishathan honor code concepts, but the matriarchs understand the ideas of individual combat and of honorable surrender to a worthy adversary. And if the war mother in command of this little incursion of theirs orders her troops to surrender, they will, mysorthayak or not. So, the way to avoid having to kill every single Rish on the planet-and losing a lot of our own people along the way-is to...."
She let her voice trail off, and Truman's eyes widened.
"You're going to hit their planetary HQ?" He shook his head. "Are you out up your mind?!"
"I wasn't the last time I looked," she told him. "Of cour
se, I suppose that's subject to change. In the meantime, however, that's exactly what we've got in mind. So I'd appreciate the opportunity to go over your own reports and recorded tac data. I want to develop a better feel for their actual weapons mix and tactics while our own Intelligence people are figuring out exactly where their HQ is."
Chapter Thirty
"So that's about the size of it, Uncle Arthur." Alicia leaned back in her chair across the tactical table in Marguerite Johnsen's intelligence center from Sir Arthur Keita. "I think Truman was right-the Lizards are just about ready to crack in his area-but if they really are in mysorthayak mode, letting him push would be the worst thing we could possibly do."
"Maybe it would be," Keita said. "In fact, you're almost certainly right. But I'm not too sure that what you're proposing isn't the next to worst thing we could possibly do."
Alicia gazed at Keita with a sort of fond exasperation. In the five and a half standard years since Keita had sent her off to OCS, she'd come to know "the Emperor's Bulldog" far better than even most cadremen ever did. He spent a lot of time-as much of it as he could-in the field, moving about from one hot spot to another, and Charlie Company had mounted three more operations under his personal direction since Shallingsport. None of them, thankfully, remotely like that nightmare experience.
But she'd seen more of him than just that. Every member of the cadre was important to Sir Arthur Keita, but Alicia DeVries had become one of his personal prot‚g‚s. She knew that, and, despite her powerful distaste for anything which smacked of favoritism, it didn't bother her very much. Uncle Arthur might take particular pains to nourish the careers of cadremen who'd demonstrated special promise in his eyes, but no one in the Cadre could believe for a moment that he'd allow favoritism to substitute for demonstrated ability... or to excuse its absence.
But one of the things she'd learned about him, something he went to great lengths to disguise, was that for all his decades of military service, all of his hard-won experience, Sir Arthur Keita was a worrier. Not about his own duty or responsibilities, but where the men and women under his command were concerned. He had to send them out again and again, sometimes into situations almost as bad as Shallingsport, and he did, unflinchingly. But he hated it, and the avoidance of any unnecessary casualties was an obsession with him.
Especially where his "prot‚g‚s" are concerned, she reminded herself.
"Uncle Arthur," she said, with the assurance of her own experience, "we can do this. It may be a little tricky to set up, but the Company can do it. And if we pull it off, we save a lot of lives-not all of them human."
"Alley, I appreciate what you're saying, but I think Sir Arthur may have a point," another voice said.
Alicia turned her head and gazed thoughtfully at Colonel Wadislaw Watts. The Marine intelligence specialist's career-like Alicia's own, she supposed-had survived Shallingsport. She suspected that it might have cost him earlier promotion to his present rank, but his superiors had generally recognized that the major intelligence failures of that operation had occurred at a level considerably higher than Watts'.
She'd worked with him a couple of times since Shallingsport, as well, although he'd recently been returned to regular service with the Marines, instead of continuing to support the Cadre, and she couldn't complain about his performance either time. But she still didn't like him very much, although she sometimes thought that was probably because deep down inside somewhere, on some subconscious level, she blamed him for Shallingsport. The illogic of that attitude left her feeling angry with herself, which was why she made a deliberate effort to be pleasant and courteous to him.
Even if it does irritate the hell out of me when he insists on calling me by my first name, she thought wryly. Of course, he is a colonel, and I'm only a captain, even if I am Cadre and he's "only" a Wasp.
Now she simply raised one eyebrow, inviting him to continue, and he shrugged.
"I realize I'm here as Brigadier Sampson's representative," he said, "but I've worked with the Cadre enough to feel confident you could get in and almost certainly take all of your objectives. Personally, I think you're underestimating your probable casualties, but you and Sir Arthur have a lot more actual combat experience than I do, so I'm more than willing to defer to your judgment in that respect. The problem I have with what you're proposing is that for it to work, you've got to take the Rish's senior war mother alive, and then you've got to convince her to do what you want."
He paused and shook his head, then continued.
"First of all, given the probable response of any Rishathan war mother to the sudden arrival of armed enemies in her headquarters, I think your odds of taking her alive are less than even. Second, even if you manage to pull that off, a Rish of her probable seniority, especially one who's in a mysorthayak mindset already, is more likely to tell you to go to hell then to order her troops to stand down."
"That's exactly what I'm worried about, Alley," Sir Arthur said, nodding sharply. "And if she does tell you to go to hell, there you'll be, with an entire company trapped in the middle of their fortified zone. If they do have the area mined, they'll probably set the charges off, which would kill all of you. But even if they don't do that, they'll certainly have enough firepower available in the immediate vicinity to eventually overwhelm you."
"And," Watts pointed out, "if the operation fails, Brigadier Sampson has already instructed his staff and his Fleet support elements to begin planning for HVW strikes to take out the Lizards' positions. He's lost over a hundred and thirty dead since his brigade went in, and he's got a lot of nonfatal casualties; he's not prepared to lose any more people fighting his way centimeter-by-centimeter through fortified mysorthayak positions. I don't like to think about Charlie Company sitting right on top of one of his bull's-eyes in a worst-case scenario."
"Uncle Arthur-Colonel," Alicia said after a moment, "I appreciate what you're saying. But we have to look at the consequences if the Company doesn't go in. And, with all due respect, Colonel, whatever Brigadier Sampson may want to do, I strongly doubt that the use of HVW is going to be a politically acceptable option."
Watts bristled slightly, but Alicia looked him straight in the eye.
"Undersecretary Abrams has the ultimate responsibility, Colonel," she reminded him.
The Honorable Jesse Abrams was the permanent assistant undersecretary the Foreign Ministry had assigned to coordinate with the Louvain planetary government. So far, he'd been willing to allow the military more or less free rein, which spoke well for his basic intelligence. But the ultimate responsibility-and authority-were his.
"The Brigadier would have to clear any strikes at that level with him," Alicia continued, "and the fact that Louvain is a Rogue World squarely in the middle of the frontier zone between the Empire and the Sphere has to be a major factor in his thinking." She moved her gaze to Keita. "Uncle Arthur, do you really think Abrams is going to authorize kinetic strikes on Louvain, given the present situation down there?"
Keita gazed back at her for a moment, then sighed.
"No," he admitted. "No, I doubt very much that he will." The brigadier smiled tartly. "That's your father's viewpoint speaking, isn't it, Alley?"
"No, Sir." She smiled back. "It's only common sense when the Lizards have two small cities and half a dozen towns inside their perimeter."
"Our targeting is good enough to miss them," Watts protested.
"And HVW are 'clean' weapons," Alicia acknowledged. "But what Abrams is going to be worrying about is that if there's major civilian loss of life-even if the casualties are inflicted by the Rish, not us-and we've used orbital HVW strikes in a populated region of the planet, the Empire's enemies are all going to spin the story their way. Which means there'll be scads of stories all over the 'faxes recounting, in loving detail, how we inflicted all those losses. The fact that there won't be a scrap of truth in any of those stories won't slow the propaganda mills down a bit, will it?"
Watts looked rebellious, but he clamped
his jaw tight and, manifestly against his will, shook his head.
"So, if we don't go in, Brigadier Sampson's people are going to have to fight their way in on the ground, after all. In which case, their casualties are going to be much worse than those they've already suffered. Not to mention the fact," she moved her eyes back to Keita again, "that the longer the fighting drags out, especially if they do have charges in place and begin detonating them, the more likely we are to get heavy civilian casualties. We can't let that happen if there's any way we can avoid it. First, because it would be morally wrong, and, second, because it could be politically disastrous when the propagandists go to work."
"But -" Keita began, then stopped. He glared at her for a moment, and then shrugged unhappily.
"You win, Alley," he said. "I don't like it, but I'm afraid you're right, at least about the consequences of trying to do it any other way. I just -"
He broke off again and shook his head angrily, and Alicia's smile went crooked.
David Weber - In Fury Born (ARC) Page 45