In Fury Born (ARC)

by David Weber

  He looked very steadily at Charlie Company's commanding officer, and Captain Madison Alwyn looked back, equally steadily.

  "Yes, Uncle Arthur," he said, after a moment. "It is."

  Chapter Twenty-One

  "I'm sorry, Skipper," Lieutenant Paál said, "but I just don't like it."

  "I'm not too crazy about it, either, Ágoston," Madison Alwyn replied, "but I don't think we've got a lot of choice. Captain Watts —" he nodded his head courteously at the Marine officer sitting in on the planning session in Marguerite Johnsen's comfortably appointed intelligence center as the disguised transport hurtled through wormhole space "—has already confirmed that the terrorists have orbital arrays deployed from Star Roamer. We can probably use the planet for cover for the insertion, especially if we drop covert. But if they've got orbital arrays, we have to assume they have ground-based tactical arrays deployed to cover the area immediately around the objective, too. That means they're going to see us coming, if we drop inside the radius they've got covered. At which point —"

  "At which point, they start killing hostages," Paál finished for him unhappily. "I know that, Skip. I'm just afraid that wherever we drop, they're still going to pick us up coming in across country, if they've got decent tactical arrays already set up. If they don't—have arrays already in place, I mean—then we might as well drop closer to the objective and minimize the time they have to see us coming."

  "If I may, Captain Alwyn?" Watts said diffidently. Charlie Company's CO sat back, waving one hand to invite the Marine to continue, and Watts turned his attention to Paál.

  "On balance, Lieutenant," he said, "I'd be inclined to agree that a drop closer to the Jason Corporation facility would minimize exposure and give you the best chance of getting into the terrorists' positions before they realized you were coming. But I think Captain Alwyn and Lieutenant Masolle have a valid point. If they do have tactical remotes deployed on counter-grav, or even a ground-based sensor net deployed around Green Haven, they'd be bound to pick up your drop. And they've got six hundred hostages."

  "We're well aware of that," Tobias Strassmann said, and Alicia, sitting in along with the rest of the platoon's squad leaders, pricked mental ears at his tone. It wasn't an obvious thing. In fact, she suspected that someone who didn't know the lieutenant as well as she'd come to know him wouldn't have noticed it in the first place. But she had come to know him, and she suddenly realized that he didn't particularly care for Watts, either.

  "I realize that, Lieutenant Strassmann," the Marine said, and his tone was interesting, too. He sounded like a man who realized Strassmann disliked him for some reason, and who was trying extra hard to be nonconfrontational. "My comments were simply a preface for what I really wanted to say. Which is that —" he used his neural headset to activate the tactical table as he spoke, and zoomed in on an area about forty kilometers from their objective "—even if they have arrays out, this valley here should be outside any radius at which they could pick up a covert drop. And if you'll notice, the valley itself extends along this river . . . ."

  He let his voice trail off, and a flashing green cursor trailed a bright dotted line behind it as it traveled the length of the indicated valley. Which, Alicia realized, traced its steep, rugged, rather winding way along a river that flowed right past the terrorists' position. The contour lines were steep along its entire length, but it became almost a gorge, with near vertical sides, at a distance of barely one kilometer from their objective. Its length added a lot of extra distance to the trip, and the relatively narrow valley wasn't at all apparent at first glance—it disappeared into the peninsula's convoluted, tree-covered terrain—but once it was pointed out, the possibilities were obvious.

  "I hadn't noticed that," Strassmann said after a moment, his voice rather warmer and more approving than it had been. He gazed at the glowing line and nodded. "You've got a pretty good eye for terrain," he added.

  "I've had longer to think about it than your people have," Watts pointed out. "Believe me, I started poring over the maps of Shallingsport as soon as Battalion was alerted to what was going on."

  "It's better than I thought we could do," Paál Augustin admitted after a moment. "A lot better. But we're still looking at an approach march of almost seventy klicks if we stick to the river, and we'll be lucky to make fifty kilometers an hour through this kind of terrain."

  "Agreed." Alwyn nodded. "On the other hand, when was the last time we got to dictate the terrain when it came to mission planning?"

  "I'll have to get back to you on that one, Skipper," Paál said with a tight grin. "Right off the top of my head, though, I can't think of one."

  That evoked a brief chuckle, and Alwyn leaned forward, studying the tactical table's imagery.

  "Did you run an analysis of other possible approach routes, Wadislaw?" he asked.

  "As a matter of fact, I did. There are a couple of others which would give you cover that's almost as good, but they all start from even further out than this one does. Your approach march would be longer for any of them, and, frankly, I think they'd have a better chance of spotting you on most of them. Do you want to look at all of them?"

  "Yes. Although, if this really is the shortest, fastest way in from a point where they won't be able to see our arrival, it's probably the way to go," Alwyn said.

  "Unless they expect us because it is the shortest, fastest way in from someplace where they wouldn't be able to see us drop, Sir," First Sergeant Yussuf pointed out. "And if I were a terrorist worried about a visit from someone like us, Skip, I'd be keeping a real close eye on this gorge here." She flipped her own cursor into the display and indicated the river line's closest approach to their target.

  "Maybe," Alwyn conceded. "But I'm a great believer in KISS. We'll scout ahead with our remotes, just in case, and we'll plan alternates, but this really does look like the best approach. Besides, if we let ourselves get too involved in double-think and second guessing, I'm sure we'll be able to find a reasonable objection to any approach route."

  "There's also the fact that they just plain can't have the manpower to scatter people all over the countryside watching for us," Strassmann observed. "Even taking Battalion's most pessimistic numbers, they can't have more than a couple of hundred people actually on-planet. And they've got three times that many hostages to ride herd on. They've got to be thinking in terms of economizing their manpower."

  "Lieutenant Strassmann has a point," Watts said. "Obviously, as I've already pointed out, our numbers on how many people the FALA actually has down there are all inferential. We could be off by a fairly substantial margin, but that's why Battalion's been working from a worst-case set of assumptions. And there's another point to consider. I pulled detailed terrain maps on Shallingsport before Battalion sent me to Guadalupe to brief you. But when these people arrived in the Fuller System, they demanded sanctuary from King Hayden, not Duke Geoffrey. On that basis, it seems unlikely they ever actually planned on ending up in Shallingsport. So even if they'd been inclined to do a detailed study of the terrain around their eventual 'sanctuary,' could they have known which maps to pull? It's possible they did a radar map on their way down from Star Roamer, but by that point they were into improvisation mode after King Hayden turned them down and Duke Geoffrey accepted. Besides, the shuttles they used to get dirt-side were standard civilian models—Jason Corporation cargo birds provided by Director Jokuri and Duke Geoffrey. There's no way they had the sensor suites to do a detailed mapping job."

  "I was thinking along those lines myself," Alwyn agreed. "They may be already in place on the ground, but that isn't the same thing as being intimately familiar with the terrain. And as Tobias says, they can't have manpower to spare. So, if I were them, and if I only had a couple of hundred people, and if I had access to decent tactical arrays, I'd be inclined to fort up at the center of the area I could cover. And this valley of yours gives us our best chance to get inside their perimeter, or at least right up to it, without being spotted o
n the way in."

  He sat for a moment longer, gazing down at the dotted line Watts had drawn. Then he nodded and looked back up again.

  "Francesca," he said to Masolle. "I want you to sit down with Wadislaw and look at the other possible LZs and approach routes. Give me your best analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of each of them."

  Masolle nodded, and he turned to Strassmann.

  "Unless Francesca comes up with some fairly compelling reason for us to go another way, I'm thinking we'll probably follow Wadislaw's recommendation," he said. "On that basis, I want you to rough out a covert drop plan. Go ahead and set up for a 'light' drop. Given how far we've got to go, the fact that the bad guys can't have very many heavy weapons of their own, and that we're going to have to execute a break-in to the hostages, we're going to need speed, precision, and flexibility more than brute firepower."

  "On it, Skipper," Strassmann agreed, and the Cadre captain turned his attention to Paál.

  "Ágoston, while they do that, I want you and Pam," he nodded to First Sergeant Yussuf, "to work up a plan for the approach from Tobias' LZ to the objective. I think Pam may have a point about their picketing the gorge, so plan us a couple of alternatives that avoid that particular stretch, as well. Let's look at all the possibilities and run them through the sims before we decide."

  "Yes, Sir."

  "Okay, people." Alwyn pushed himself back from the tactical table and stood. "Sic 'em. We'll meet back here in four hours."

  "Hey, Alley! I've been meaning to ask you how the Lizard Mind-Reading 101 is going. Are you starting to feel like going out and eating your mate yet?" Alan McGwire asked with a grin.

  Alicia opened her eyes and looked up from the careful check of her powered armor she'd been carrying out through her synth-link. She and a dozen other troopers were in Marguerite Johnsen's "Morgue"—the storage and service area for Charlie Company's battle armor. Although the company was supported by a team of armor specialists assigned by the Marines to the Cadre on a semi-permanent basis, much as Captain Watts was assigned to provide intelligence support, most cadremen preferred to handle the regular maintenance and combat prep on their armor themselves. Those highly trained armor specialists were responsible for major repairs, upgrades, and modifications, but in Alicia's opinion, anyone who didn't want to stay hands-on with the standard maintenance and, especially, troubleshooting of her own armor just before a drop ought to be confined somewhere in a nice, soft-sided room where she couldn't hurt herself or anyone else.

  Besides, up-checking your own armor before a drop was a company tradition, especially in First Platoon. Even if you knew your armor was in perfect condition, you dropped by to "make certain" . . . which just happened to give you an opportunity for an informal little get-together with men and women who were important to you. Men and women, some of whom might not be alive a day or two later. It let you have that moment with them when you "coincidentally bumped into them" without anyone ever admitting that that was what any of you were doing.

  And under the unwritten rules, it was unforgivable to say anything maudlin or—God forbid!—serious.

  "I'll have you know, Sergeant McGwire," she said severely, "that the rumor that Rish matriarchs eat their mates raw is totally unfounded, a legacy of humanocentric prejudice and rank xenophobia. The Rish haven't eaten anyone raw at least since they discovered fire, and the Rishathan Sphere represents a mature and highly developed society, however it may look to uneducated barbarians like yourself."

  "Sure, sure!" McGwire rolled his eyes.

  The Alpha Team leader had been twitting Alicia ever since she signed up for the xenopsychology course. Cadre troopers were strongly encouraged to pursue additional education and training. Obviously, anything which contributed directly to their ability to perform their missions was a good thing, but the Cadre also believed that keeping its people mentally supple was as important as keeping them that way physically. Equally obviously, anything which would help a cadrewoman better understand the Rish who were humanity's primary nonhuman competitors came under the heading of enhancing mission capability, but Alicia had found the course fascinating on its own merits, as well. She wondered sometimes if that was her father's genetic heritage coming out in her.

  "Your hostile attitude towards another sentient species is scarcely becoming in someone whose actions and attitudes represent the Emperor personally," Alicia told McGwire now, waving an old-fashioned screwdriver and frowning darkly upon him. "If you keep this up, I'm going to have to report you to CHIRP. They'll know what to do with you!"

  McGwire stifled a crack of laughter. CHIRP—the Center for Human Interspecies Relations Policy—was the brainchild of Senator Edward Gennady one of the Senate's more senior members. Gennady was from Old Earth herself, which gave him a powerful political base, and he was also, in the considered opinion of virtually every member of the imperial military, a raving lunatic. His CHIRP was a think tank whose members had all acquired impressive academic credentials, and many of whom were undeniably brilliant in terms of their own isolated intellectual community. Unfortunately, they also represented a strata of Core World intellectuals for whom the ability of any thinking species to peacefully coexist with any other "if it only tried" was an uncontestable article of faith. From which it followed that the Empire's inability to peacefully coeexist with someone like the Rish automatically demonstrated that humanity wasn't trying and must therefore adopt a more "conciliating" policy and stop trying to "enforce parochial, humanocentric prejudices" on other, equally valid alien cultures. Indeed, they clung to that belief, even—or perhaps especially—in the face of all empirical evidence to the contrary, with a dogmatic determination worthy of a medieval peasant.

  In Alicia's view, the only people more dangerous than CHIRP were the idiots like Senator Breckman and his Mankind Triumphant Alliance, who argued that humanity could learn nothing from alien cultures. The MTA was just as blind and just as dogmatic, and even more closed-minded, than CHIRP at its worst. Even the Rish, who could have been poster children for the MTA's evil alien caricatures, had developed concepts and ideas humanity might do well to study, if only in order to better understand their opposition. And, what was worse, some of Breckman's followers actually thought war was a good idea and that it was "time to seek a final solution to the Rish problem." The only good thing about the MTA was that it could at least be counted upon to support military appropriations bills, but Alicia doubted their support on that single issue was worth their idiocy on every other. Both packs of imbeciles, in her opinion, spent their time living in their own little worlds only peripherally—and sporadically—attached to the universe at large.

  "I'd be astonished if Gennady knew what to do with anything he couldn't drink, smoke, snort or screw," Corporal Imogene Hartwell said. It was meant to sound humorous, but it didn't, and Alicia hid a mental frown.

  Gennady's reputation for youthful promiscuity and the pursuit of mind-altering substances was well known. It didn't hurt him very much with his constituency, which some—and she knew Hartwell (who'd been born and raised on a Crown World and had the 'frontier' mentality to go with it) was one of them—would argue was because the people who kept voting for him were just as "decadent" as he was. Over the last couple of decades, though, Gennady had cleaned up his act, publicly at least, where his sex life was concerned. And although Alicia never doubted he'd had a genuine problem with old-fashioned alcohol and more esoteric drugs, at least when he was younger, she also suspected that it had been exaggerated by his political enemies—of whom he had more than she could count.

  "Well, he can't do any of those with me," McGwire declared, provoking another general chuckle. "But," he continued, looking severely at Alicia, "don't think you can divert me that easily, Alley!" The look he gave Alicia made her suspect he was deliberately sidestepping Hartwell's scorching disgust and genuine anger. "I've heard all the stories about other people who took those 'Understand the Lizards' courses. Scrambled their brains, every one of t
hem!"

  "Thanks for the warning," Alicia retorted. Then she frowned and cocked her head.

  "Actually," she said a bit more seriously, "it's really pretty fascinating in a lot of ways. Some of the things the Rish have done seem . . . odd, at best, by human standards. For that matter, a lot of them seem downright crazy! But once you start wrapping your mind around the way they think, the way their society is structured, it all starts making sense."

  "Please don't tell me you're signing up with Gennady and his warm-and-fuzzy-feelings crowd!" McGwire protested.

  "Of course not." Alicia shook her head with a snort. "The fact that it makes sense doesn't mean I think they're all sweetness and light, Alan! If you go back and look at any lunatic in human history, his actions probably 'made sense' in terms of his own basic assumptions and beliefs. That didn't make someone like Adolph Hitler or Hwang Chyang-tsai or Idrisi al-Fahd or Naomi Johansson any less of a crazed sociopath, and 'understanding' the Rish isn't going to magically make them start behaving themselves, whatever people like the CHIRP may think. It is interesting, though."

  "If you say so," McGwire said dubiously. "Personally, though, I like my view of human-Rish relations nice and simple. They poke their noses into imperial space, and we kick their ass clear back to Rishatha Prime."

  "Works for me," Vartkes Kalachian agreed. "But if you're really that interested in how Rish think, Sarge," he continued, looking at Alicia, "you might want to try picking Watts' brain."