by David Weber
She swept into arm's reach of him, moving with a dancer's grace, despite her armor, as she rode the tick, and her left hand reached out. She caught him by one arm, carefully moderating the strength of her powered gauntlet so that she didn't break anything, and heard his brief, beginning cry of shock and pain as she snatched him towards her. But he hadn't completed that cry when her right hand floated slowly forward, moving with all of the flashing, meticulously metered precision of the tick, and struck the side of his skull.
He went down, instantly unconscious, and she stopped, her rifle darting back down into firing position to cover the windows on either side of the doorway from which he'd emerged as Cateau swept past her.
The corporal didn't even slow down. The door had swung shut behind the man Alicia had neutralized, and Cateau simply dropped her left shoulder slightly and bulldozed straight into it. It was a relatively sturdy, well constructed door, but it had never been intended to stand up to someone in battle armor. She went through it in a shower of splinters, and Alicia's HUD was abruptly speckled with the icons of three more human beings as Cateau's armor's sensors relayed to her. Nor was there any question about whether or not these human beings were armed. All three of them carried rifles, hastily snatched from a weapons rack on the wall opposite the door, and that was fatally unfortunate for them.
Cateau killed all three of them, probably before any of them even realized she was there.
The corporal kept moving, deep into the structure's interior. The building was constructed around one very large ground-floor room which clearly functioned as a combination commons room and mess hall. It was two stories tall, however, and Cateau's sensors probed at the ceiling above her.
"Clear," she announced a moment later.
"Copy clear," Alicia confirmed, and the two of them moved on, leaving three more corpses and one unreasonably lucky, still- breathing body behind them.
Alicia's mental command flared her icon on Cateau's HUD, warning her wing that she was stopping. The corporal reacted instantly, dropping into a guard position, as Alicia paused to assess the situation.
Her entire Alpha Team was deep into the camp now, and a couple of Beech Tree Two's buildings were in flames. The fires were just beginning to take hold, and she wondered whether the camp's inhabitants had torched them, or if the Cadre's fire had found something flammable inside them. Not that it mattered much, either way. The attack was barely four minutes old, and its inevitable outcome was already apparent to her.
Sergeant Abernathy's Bravo Team was closing in on Rathole One from the east, but by this time, the barracks block's tenants had at least figured out that they were under attack. It was also obvious that they had quite a fair amount of heavy-caliber firepower at their disposal. Combat rifles were crackling, firing at half-imagined targets, and her sensors picked up the snarling thunder of multi-barreled calliopes, spitting high-velocity darts in bursts of blind, suppressive fire.
Those calliopes worried her. The weapons were the latest evolution of the ancient Gatling gun principle, although they were considerably more lethal than any of their direct ancestors. They burned through ammunition voraciously, but they also produced an unbroken stream of lethal penetrators that didn't have to be aimed at someone to kill her instantly if they hit her anyway. And while Rathole One's defenders were obviously firing blind, they were pouring a lot of rounds in Abernathy's direction as he and his squad approached the ravine she'd indicated to him earlier.
"Winchester-Bravo-One, Winchester-One," she said. "Find yourselves some cover and hold position. There's too much fire coming your way."
"Winchester-One, Bravo-One, that sounds like a winner to me, Sarge!" Abernathy replied with feeling, and Alicia chuckled harshly.
"Alpha-Seven, Winchester-One. I need you over here."
"Alpha-Seven is on the way, Winchester-One," Corporal Doorn replied, and moments later, he and Édouard Bonrepaux appeared at Alicia's shoulder.
The two of them were the single "heavy" wing assigned to Alpha Team with Charlie Company in "light" configuration. Doorn carried a plasma rifle; Bonrepaux carried a fifty-millimeter grenade launcher with a five-round magazine. Both weapons were much heavier than anything which could have been carried without the artificial muscle power of battle armor, and Alicia smiled grimly as she saw them.
"Bravo-One, Winchester-One," she said over the squad net, "I've got some people with some serious firepower over here. I think it's time that we discouraged the rats in the woodwork, don't you?"
"I never much cared for rodents, Winchester-One," Abernathy replied.
"All right, then. I want Bravo-Seven and Bravo-Eight —" that was Corporal Obaseki Osayaba and Corporal Shai Hau-zhi, Bravo Team's equivalent of Doorn and Bonrepaux "—to take out this building here."
She dropped a mental command into Abernathy's HUD, highlighting one of the barracks buildings. A calliope was firing long, sweeping bursts from a second-floor window on its eastern side.
"When they do that, Alpha's heavies will take out these two buildings," she continued, highlighting two more structures. Another calliope was firing from one of them; the other was clearly the administrative center of Rathole One, and there were a lot of armed individuals in and around it.
"All Winchesters," she went on, bringing the rest of her squad in on the conversation, "we're going to take down these three buildings with plasguns and grenades. It's going to be messy. As soon as they're down, we close in and clear the remaining buildings. These people are going to duck and cover when the shit hits the fan, and I want us right behind the explosions. I want us in among them before they have time to recover."
She paused to let them digest that much, then began assigning specific objectives to each of her wings. She marked each wing's target meticulously on their HUDs, making certain there was no confusion. The Bad Guys hadn't managed to kill any of her people get, and she was determined not to produce any avoidable friendly-fire casualties.
Despite the care she took, it required only a very few seconds for people riding the tick to complete their preparations. She took one last look at her own HUD, then glanced at Cateau, who had closed up at her shoulder once more.
"Ready?" she asked over their dedicated circuit.
"Sure, why not?" Cateau replied in an almost drawling voice. "I mean, it's been such a fun party this far, hasn't it?"
"You're a strange person," Alicia observed with a grim chuckle. "However —"
She shrugged, then switched back to the squad master com net.
"All Winchesters," she said, her voice calm, "Winchester-One. All right, people. Let's dance. Go."
Chapter Nineteen
"Excuse me, Sergeant DeVries," the AI's voice said politely in Alicia's mastoid.
"Yes, Central?" she replied. The base's master AI rejoiced in the nickname of "Gertrude," according to its cyber-synth partner. Alicia, however, had never felt comfortable enough with it to indulge in informality.
"You're wanted at Base Ops. Captain Alwyn has scheduled an emergency briefing in Sit One in fifteen minutes."
Both of Alicia's eyebrows rose in surprise. An emergency briefing?
She looked across the holographic tactical display hovering between her and Alan McGwire, Lawrence Abernathy, and Tannis Cateau.
"It seems our little planning session has just been derailed, people," she observed.
"That's not exactly going to break the troops' hearts, Sarge," Cateau observed with a smile. It was a genuine smile, but after eighteen standard months, Alicia had come to know her wing about as well as she'd ever known another human being. She saw the questions, echoes of her own, behind Tannis' brown eyes.
"I don't know about that," McGwire said. "My people were looking forward to getting a little of their own back from Larry's."
"In your dreams," Abernathy said complacently.
"Pride goeth," Alicia observed dryly. Although, she admitted, Abernathy did have at least a little bit of a point. Bravo Team had bested Alpha Team in th
e last three exercises in a row. Not by very much, in two of them, but still . . . .
"Alan, I want you and Larry to go on working up the basic parameters of the exercise," she said after a moment. "I'm going to operate on the assumption that we may get a chance to go ahead and mount it. In the meantime, I need to get over for that briefing. Tannis, why don't you come along?"
"I wasn't invited, Sarge," Tannis pointed out mildly.
"Maybe not." Alicia cleared her throat. "Central."
"Yes, Sergeant DeVries?"
"Please ask First Sergeant Yussuf if it would be acceptable for Corporal Cateau to attend the briefing."
"Of course, Sergeant DeVries," the AI replied. A handful of seconds passed, then it spoke again. "First Sergeant Yussuf says that Corporal Cateau may accompany you."
"Thank you, Central." Alicia looked at her subordinates again, then twitched her head at the door.
"I think we'd best be going," she said mildly.
Alicia found her mind sliding back over the last year and a half as she and Tannis walked briskly across to the main admin building. Those eighteen months had been both similar to her experience in the Marines and totally different from it. For one thing, the training tempo had been much higher, although when she'd been a Wasp herself, she wouldn't have believed that was possible. But the Cadre trained constantly. If they weren't out on active operations, then they were training. Or actively planning the next training exercise. Or evaluating the training exercise they'd just completed.
And the Cadre subscribed to the theory that the best preparation for combat was to train harder than actual combat would require. The Cadre training regimen routinely pushed the Cadre's men and women to the point of collapse, and those men and women didn't collapse all that easily.
That was one difference. Another was that the Cadre actively promoted long-term, stable relationships. Alicia had been promoted to sergeant first class three standard months ago, but she still had First Squad, and she still had Tannis. Nor was that unusual for the Cadre. It wasn't unheard of for a cadrewoman to spend her entire Cadre career serving in the same regiment of the same brigade, and the Cadre made a concerted effort to keep wings which had proven themselves compatible together on a permanent basis.
Alicia wasn't about to complain about that. The cadre's tactical and operational doctrines were even more different from the Marines' than she'd originally realized. Cadremen were specialists in every sense of the word, and one of the things which made them so effective in the field was the absolute familiarity which existed between each pair of wingmen. They trained together, they fought together, they usually partied together, and it wasn't uncommon for them to go on leave together.
And sometimes, of course, they died together.
In the last year and a half, she and Tannis had become exactly the sort of team the Cadre sought to build. They operated on the same mental wavelength, almost as if they were telepathic. Each of them knew exactly what the other would do in a given situation, and each of them understood exactly what her function was in any given tactical confrontation.
And, Alicia thought, smiling slightly as she glanced across at Tannis' profile, neither one of them had ever had a closer friend—or sibling—in her entire life.
But it was the nature of the wing relationship which the Cadre took such pains to nourish which had inspired her to bring Tannis along. The wing assigned to any squad leader, platoon sergeant, or company first sergeant was in a special position. She wasn't assigned to a regular slot in a squad's fire teams. Instead, she went wherever her wing partner went, and the fact that her wing was likely to be distracted by the need to concentrate on managing a tactical situation meant she had to be even better than the Cadre's norm. There were times—too many of them, Alicia thought—when Tannis had to carry far more than her fair share of the load because Alicia simply had to be doing other things, and that wasn't helped by the fact that Tannis was also First Platoon's senior medic. If Tannis felt overworked, she'd never indicated it, but she wouldn't have.
In effect, though, Tannis sometimes found herself operating almost in the role of assistant squad leader, and it made a lot of sense for her to be fully briefed in for any op. That was the way Alicia felt about it, at any rate, and from First Sergeant Yusuf's response, it sounded as if she felt that way, too.
They reached the main admin building, crossed the small lobby area, followed a short corridor past a half-dozen office doors, then turned right into Situation Room One.
The big room—the second largest on the entire base—was subdivided by head-high internal partitions, dimly lit, and kept just a bit cooler than was actually comfortable. The subdued lighting made the various displays sharper and easier to follow, and the cooler temperature helped keep people alert.
Situation Room One—Sit One, for short—was in many ways the nerve center of Base Operations. It was one door down the hall from Ops One, from which Captain Alwyn ran the company on a day-to-day basis, and it was responsible for collating incoming information, processing it and translating it into operational intelligence. Sit One maintained the threat maps for the company's area of responsibility, and Sit One was where most of the company's initial operational briefings took place.
"Come in, Alley, Tannis. Find seats," Lieutenant Paál said. Alicia wasn't surprised to see the lieutenant as she and Tannis stepped into the largest of Sit One's office cubicles. In addition to his role as commanding officer of Third Platoon, Paál , as the senior of Charlie Company's lieutenants, was also Captain Alwyn's executive officer. He got to wear the S-1 "hat" as the company's adjutant, in charge of personnel and administration, as well. What she was surprised by was the fact that Captain Alwyn himself wasn't present yet.
She settled into her usual seat with Gilroy, Hillman, and Onassis. Gilroy and Hillman had both brought along their wings, as well, and Tannis smiled and nodded to them as she joined them.
"Any idea what this is all about, Adolfo?" Alicia whispered, leaning towards the platoon sergeant.
"Not a clue," he murmured back. "But I did hear —"
He broke off as the door opened again, this time to admit Captain Alwyn and two other officers.
Alicia recognized both of them immediately, and astonishment stabbed through her as one of those faces registered.
The presence of Captain Wadislaw Watts, Imperial Marine Intelligence, was no particular surprise. He was on semipermanent assignment to the Cadre, attached to Fifth Brigade as a "loaner" to fill one of the chronically shorthanded Cadre's necessary staff billets. The Cadre had its own Intelligence specialists, but it didn't have enough of them—just as it didn't have enough of most of the staff specialists it really needed. So, it made do by borrowing the necessary staff expertise from the Marines or Fleet. Brigade had passed Watts on to Second Regiment, which in turn had assigned him to Third Battalion, Charlie Company's parent battalion. And Third Battalion used him as its roving Intelligence guru on an operation-by-operations basis.
Personally, Alicia didn't much care for him. She couldn't really have said why. Certainly it wasn't because she regarded the Marines as interlopers, since she—like virtually all of the Cadre's personnel—had once been a Marine herself, after all. Perhaps it was because she sometimes suspected that somewhere deep down inside, the dark-haired, dark-eyed, always impeccably groomed Marine resented the fact that he was not and never would be acceptable as a cadreman himself, if only because he wasn't synth-link-capable. Maybe it was just bad chemistry.
But whether she liked Watts or not, he'd always seemed more than competent where his duties were concerned. He'd handled the battalion intelligence brief on all but one of the five operations, including the highly successful Chengchou raid, the company had carried out since Alicia joined it. If there was something in the air, he was a logical choice to brief them in on it.
But it was the presence of the other officer who accompanied Captain Alwyn which took her completely by surprise her. Nor was she the only person in Sit One
who felt that way.
"Attention!" Lieutenant Paál barked after an instant of astonishment, and Alicia felt herself snapping to her feet and to attention even before she heard the order.
Sir Arthur Keita Keita, Knight Grand Commander of the Order of Terra, Solarian Grand Cross, Senate Medal of Valor with diamonds and clasp, and second in command of the Personal Cadre of His Imperial Majesty Seamus II, had that effect on people.
"As you were," the man known as "the Emperor's Bulldog," growled in a gravelly bass. He was silver-haired, built something along the lines of a brick wall, and somewhere close to a hundred standard years old. Not that age had withered his physique or dimmed the quick alertness of the dark eyes under his craggy brows. Like Alicia, he wore the Cadre's green-on-green and harp and starships; unlike her, he also wore the single starburst of a brigadier.
She settled back into her seat gingerly, her mind racing, as Keita stalked to the chair at the head of the conference table below the main holo display unit. Captain Alwyn waited until the brigadier had been seated, then sat in his own chair, to Keita's right, while Watts continued to the briefing officer's station. The Marine laid what looked like a sheaf of old-fashioned, handwritten notes on the lectern, then picked up the neural headset and slipped it on.
"All right, people," Alwyn said, while Watts was making his preparations. "I'm sure all of you are as surprised to see Uncle Arthur—excuse me, Brigadier Keita —" he corrected himself, winning a slight chuckle from his audience in response "—as I was when he and Captain Watts arrived from Battalion."
He paused, and any levity which might have touched his expression, had vanished.
"Sir Arthur is about to explain why he's here," the company commander continued in a much more serious tone. "Then he and Captain Watts are going to explain what we're going to do about it." He swept his subordinates' with his eyes, then turned courteously to Keita.