by David Weber
"Captain Alwyn seems to think we will," Alicia pointed out.
"And the Skipper's usually got a pretty good nose for this kind of thing," Onassis agreed. "On the other hand, we've been stood-to for it twice already. The first time, we picked up on them too far into their training cycle. They were going to be shut down and gone again by the time we could get there. I'm not sure what happened the second time. If I had to guess, I'd lay money on one of the Foreign Ministry pukes deciding we had to show 'restraint' because the talks were 'at a delicate point.' "
He rolled his eyes in eloquent disgust, and Alicia grimaced. She probably had rather more tolerance for what was still sometimes referred to as the "pinstripe crowd" than most members of the imperial military did. But she was one of the shooters herself, now. She'd seen firsthand what sorts of situations the political and policy types all too often wound up dropping in the military's lap. She knew it was dangerous to get too addicted to the direct, sledgehammer approach to interstellar relations, but it looked to her like this was one instance in which the answer really might be to go and get a bigger hammer.
And the Cadre, she thought, looking at the display table once again, is a pretty damned big hammer, when you come right down to it.
She nodded again, to herself this time, and realized she actually felt a little sorry for the nails.
Chapter Eighteen
From the outside, HMS Marguerite Johnsen was a thoroughly unprepossessing spectacle.
The tramp freighter—listed on her splendidly official looking papers as IMS, or "Imperial Merchant Ship," rather than HMS, for "His Majesty's Starship"—was on the smallish size for a Fasset Drive cargo hauler. Barely a thousand meters long, she had that battered, down-at-the-heels look that went with owners who couldn't—or wouldn't—spend the money to provide her with proper upkeep and maintenance. If anyone had bothered to give her a good sensor examination, they would have discovered that she had what was obviously a Fleet surplus Fasset Drive. They might have noticed that it seemed unusually powerful for a bulk carrier of her dimensions, but they would also have discovered that at least twenty percent of its nodes were currently off-line—another indication, no doubt, of lack of maintenance.
From the inside, it was quite a different matter.
Alicia DeVries sat with the other armored members of "her" squad in the ready room in what was supposed to be Marguerite Johnsen's number one cargo hold and tried to project the proper air of confidence as they awaited final confirmation that the operation was truly a "go" this time. Back aft, on the "freighter's" gleaming, efficient command deck, her officers—linked with Captain Alwyn through his synth-link—were considering the take from the Marguerite Johnsen's extremely capable passive sensors and the heavily stealthed reconnaissance drones the ship had deployed shortly after dropping back sublight. She was decelerating steadily towards her final insertion into Chengchou orbit at fifteen gravities, and at that rate they had about another eighteen minutes to go before they hit their programmed drop point.
"All right, people," Alwyn's deep voice sounded suddenly in her mastoid implant as he came up on the all-hands net, "we've got confirmation. The target is hot. We don't see any significant changes from our last sitrep, although Beech Tree Two seems to've added another fifteen or twenty trainees to its current roster. Saddle up. Ramrod, clear."
"You heard the man, Adolfo," Lieutenant Strassmann said over the dedicated First Platoon net a moment later.
"Yes, Sir," Master Sergeant Onassis acknowledged. "Okay, people. Into the tubes and harness up."
As the platoon's lead squad, the eighteen men and women of what was eventually going to be Alicia's squad, stood and filed into the carefully concealed drop tubes which were Marguerite Johnsen's true reason for being. Alicia's external audio pickups were on-line, and she had the gain cranked up high enough to hear the soft, purring whine of exoskeletal "muscles" from the others' powered armor. Unaugmented human hearing wouldn't have been able to hear it, even standing right next to the armor in question, which was just one of the many ways in which the Cadre's equipment differed from that of the Corps.
She and Tannis Cateau, as her wing, stopped to stand between the two tube access hatches while Alicia used her command armor's monitors to personally double check the readiness readouts on each set of armor as the others climbed past them through the hatches.
Sergeant Alan McGwire, Alpha Team's leader, stood to Alicia's right, in front of the starboard hatch, doing the same thing for his team. Sergeant Lawrence Abernathy, who had Bravo Team, stood on her other side, beside the port hatch. They knew the members of their teams far better than Alicia had yet had time to come to know them, and she felt almost excluded as people exchanged those last minute, pre-drop looks. No one was doing that to her deliberately, but she was acutely aware that she was most definitely the newest kid on the block once again. Titular squad leader or not, she was even more of an unknown quantity to them than they were to her.
The last pair of troopers climbed into place, followed by the two team leaders and Cateau, and then it was Alicia's turn.
She swung herself through the hatch, moving as easily and naturally in her powered armor as she would have in her regular fatigues, and settled herself into drop configuration. The drop harnes slid out to envelop her armored torso, and she felt the slight, distinct click of impact as its tractor collars mated. Its umbilicals connected themselves to her armor, and her synth-link expanded to interface with the harness' onboard computers. The last to enter the starboard tube, and thus last in the loading queue, she would be the first out of it, and if anything went wrong with her harness, she and the person immediately behind her would become a very messy showstopper for the rest of First Squad.
But nothing was going to go wrong, she reminded herself firmly, as a quick glance at her HUD confirmed that all drop systems were green, not just for her but for every member of First Squad.
"Rifle-Two," she said over the platoon net, "Winchester-One. First Squad, ready for drop."
"Winchester-One, Rifle-Two copies ready for drop," Onassis acknowledged.
"Rifle-Two, Weatherby-One," she heard Staff Sergeant Henry Gilroy announce. "Second Squad, ready for drop."
"Weatherby-One, Rifle-Two copies ready for drop," Onassis replied.
"Rifle-Two, Mauser-One," Sergeant First Class Celestine Hillman came up on the net in in turn. "Third Squad, ready for drop."
"Mauser-One, Rifle-Two copies ready for drop," Onassis confirmed. He paused a moment, obviously checking his own tell-tales, as well. Then: "Rifle-One," she heard him continue a moment later to Lieutenant Strassmann, "Rifle-Two. First Platoon, ready for drop."
"Copy ready for drop," Strassmann's tenor confirmed. "All Rifles, stand by. The clock is running—drop in thirteen minutes from . . . now."
Alicia lay back in her armor, eyes closed, breathing slowly and deeply in the drop tube's confines. Many people, even some who'd made dozens of drops, suffered from pre-drop tension, she knew. Frequently, it was aggravated by a bit of claustrophobia, although anyone who'd suffered from acute claustrophobia would never have been considered for drop commando training in the first place. At the moment, she felt more than a little tension herself, but it had nothing to do with the simple mechanics of the drop itself.
Well, not much, anyway.
She opened her eyes once more, looking up through her visor at the roof of the drop tube, sixteen centimeters from the tip of her nose. There wasn't much to see, so she closed them again and spent her time running through one last systems check.
Her Cadre armor was still a bit of a marvelous new toy, in a lot of ways. The basic powered armor issued to Marine line infantry was at least as good as the combat equipment issued to any other first-line military organization in the explored galaxy. The more specialized armor issued to the elite Raiders was considerably better than that, in large part because Raiders—like Recon—had to come from the sixty-odd percent of the human race who were neural receptor-capable. Th
at meant Raiders could take the direct feed from their armor's sensors, diagnostic systems, and tactical computers and send orders back the same way, which enormously enhanced that armor's responsiveness. A Raider was probably about the least stealthy infantryman in the known universe, but he was also extraordinarily dangerous, with the same sort of situational awareness a Recon Marine had, coupled with the toughness of a late pre-space main battle tank and the firepower to single-handedly annihilate an entire company of planetary militia. A standard suit of Marine powered armor had roughly the same firepower, but couldn't match the flexibility and versatility of the Raider variant.
Recon was a different story, of course. Recon did rely on stealthiness, rather more than firepower, to accomplish its significantly different mission. Raiders were specialists in scientifically organized mayhem and destruction and about as subtle as a chainsaw; Recon specialized in getting the information the Raiders needed to plan their operations, hopefully so quietly the Bad Guys never realized they'd been spotted.
But Cadre battle armor out-classed Raider battle armor by at least as big a margin as Raider battle armor out-classed basic Marine armor. Indeed, the margin of superiority was almost certainly greater than that.
Cadre armor was manufactured using advanced composites which were painfully expensive but allowed it to be lighter, faster, and tougher than Raider armor. It had far more endurance, thanks to the incorporation of a small, fantastically expensive cold-fusion powerplant, which freed it from reliance on the Raider armor's bulky superconductor capacitors. Its reactive chameleon capability was at least twice that of Recon's unpowered body armor, and it incorporated stealth features which would have at least doubled the price tag of Raider armor all by themselves. It had better sensors, and much better computer support. Nor did it stop there. Although the standard Cadre "rifle" fired a considerably smaller-caliber projectile than the standard Marine battle armor "rifle," it fired it at an even higher velocity, and each cadreman carried a lot more ammunition.
And, of course, the fact that every cadreman had to be synth-link-capable, not simply able to tolerate neural receptors, allowed a degree of human-technology fusion even the Raiders simply couldn't count on. With her synth-link up, Alicia literally "saw" electromagnetic radiation and "tasted" thermal signatures. She could see in total darkness, actually watch the radar-mapped trajectory of incoming fire, and simultaneously integrate the take from remotely deployed sensors into the same instant gestalt of her combat environment. A cadreman didn't wear his combat armor; he made that armor's systems a literal extension of his own muscles and senses, so that hardware and human melded into a single, highly capable, incredibly lethal entity.
It was a pointed lesson in cost-versus-quantity. There were a maximum of only forty thousand cadremen, as opposed to quite literally millions of Imperial Marines. Which was probably a very good thing for the Treasury, since each suit of Cadre battle armor cost rather more than a Leopard-class assault shuttle capable of landing thirty-one fully armored Marines plus the cost of all of the external ordinance and fuel that same shuttle would require to provide fire support for its Marines once they were on the ground.
Not even the Terran Empire could conceivably have afforded to spend that much equipping every one of its Marines, even assuming all of those Marines had been synth-link-capable in the first place. But it could afford to equip the Cadre on that scale, which helped to explain just what it was which placed the combat power of the Imperial Cadre of Seamus II on a completely different plane from any other military unit.
"Prepare for drop," the voice of Marguerite Johnsen's cyber-synth AI said emotionlessly in Alicia's mastoid, breaking into her reverie. "Drop in sixty seconds." She felt herself tightening internally in anticipation of the coming shock. "Fifty. Forty. Thirty. Twenty. Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . . five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . drop."
A particularly foul-tempered mule kicked her squarely between the shoulders.
That was what it felt like, anyway. She'd made her eight required qualification drops, and another twenty live training drops (and over thirty simulated drops) during ACTS. In a lot of ways, this was just one more—an explosive grunt as the tube catapult suddenly drove the drop harness tractor-locked to her armor down the exact center of the tube's gleaming bore under one hundred and sixty gravities of acceleration. The harness took her with it, and its counter-gravity and inertial sump reduced the apparent acceleration to "only" about fifteen gravities. Which, in Alicia's considered opinion, was more than enough to be getting on with. She never blacked out—her "feet-first" launch posture and the pressure suit lining built into her armor's anti-kinetic systems helped stave off blood drain away from the brain—but she'd decided on her very first drop that the experience gave her a cannonball's-eye view of the universe.
By the time she cleared the two-kilometer electromagnetic extension of the tube catapult, two endless seconds later, she was traveling at over seven hundred kilometers per hour and headed straight into Chengchou's atmosphere.
Not even her armor would have been enough to protect her through such a steep reentry (although, technically, since she'd never left Chengchou she could hardly be said to be reentering its atmosphere, she supposed), but that was where the drop harness came in. Not even it could make a drop pleasant, but it could make it survivable. The harness's tractor/presser field reached out, forming an immaterial and yet immensely strong aerodynamically-shaped bubble around her. Heat, light, and turbulence bellowed and howled on the bubble's surface as she bulleted down into the heart of Chengchou's deep envelope of air, and if it wasn't pleasant, it was immensely exciting, like riding inside the heart of a star. The sort of experience no civilian would ever know.
She watched her blazing corona, protected by her bubble and the armor within it, and felt the universe begin to slow as the first trickle of tick slid into her bloodstream.
Charlie Company screamed down towards Chengchou's Muztagh Ata Mountains like a flight of homesick meteors, and the finest stealth systems in the galaxy could not have concealed the visual and thermal signatures of its coming.
But, of course, by the time anyone looked up into the night sky to see them coming, it was far too late to do anything about it.
Alicia didn't even turn her head as Tannis Cateau fell into position on her left flank. If Cateau had any misgivings about going into combat with a wing with whom she'd never even been through a simulated exercise, she'd concealed them well. Alicia appreciated that, the more so because she'd found time to study Cateau's file. Whatever else the medic corporal might be, she was also a highly experienced close-combat warrior. Every drop commando fought—even the chaplains—and Cateau had done more than her fair share of that. Which meant she knew exactly what she was getting into with a newbie wing and that her silence on the subject didn't spring from the overconfidence of inexperienced ignorance.
Alicia's attention was on her HUD. Lieutenant Francesca Masolle's Second Platoon had been assigned responsibility for the northernmost, and smaller, of the two training camps, the one code-named Beech Tree One. Lieutenant Strassmann's First Platoon had primary responsibility for Beech Tree Two, the larger of the camps. Lieutenant Paál Ágoston's Third Platoon was supposed to drop between the two camps. Two of his three squads would serve as the company reserve, while the third would assist First Platoon in taking out Beech Tree Two.
Alicia's own squad had been tasked as an immediate tactical reserve, assigned to cover Gilroy's Second Squad as it advanced and to join hands with Third Platoon's reserve once Paál's people linked up with First Platoon. Originally, First and Second Squads' roles had been reversed, but the sudden arrival of a brand new squad leader had convinced Strassmann to flip their assignments. No doubt so that Master Sergeant Onassis could keep a closer eye on the fledgling, Alicia thought.
That was the plan, anyway, but it looked t as if there were about to be a few glitches.
First Platoon had experienced
a little scatter—even the best trained, most experienced people were almost certain to do that on a full-bore atmospheric-insertion drop—but each squad's pairs of wings had already found one another. Now, as she watched, her own squad's people were moving into their assigned positions in the ground-devouring, low-trajectory jumps their battle armor made possible. A part of Alicia was tempted to say something, if only to let them know the new kid was staying on top of things, but she knew better than that. And so, she kept her mouth shut, watching patiently while people who obviously knew what they were supposed to be doing did it. They were moving quickly and smoothly, even if the time-slowing effect of the tick stretched out the duration of each individual jump improbably.
But if First Platoon's people were getting themselves sorted out, Third Platoon wasn't. Its icons were about as scattered as First Platoon had been, but they were moving towards a semblance of order much more slowly. Some of them, in fact, weren't moving at all, she noticed.
"Winchester-One, Rifle-Two," Onassis' voice sounded in her mastoid as she and Cateau moved forward behind the advancing skirmish line of her Alpha Team, and a green data code in her HUD indicated that he was speaking to her on a dedicated circuit.
"Rifle-Two, Winchester-One," she acknowledged.
"Lieutenant Masolle's people have made contact with Beech Tree One," Onassis told her. "Looks like she caught them with their pants down. Her point is already inside their outer perimeter. That's the good news. The bad news is that Lieutenant Paál's people came down in the middle of a frigging swamp."