by David Weber
"We —" Alicia began, but Chu cut her off.
"I already figured it out, Alley," she said.
"I figured you had," Alicia said softly, and laid her armored hand on Chu's right shoulder. She knelt there for a few silent heartbeats, then straightened her spine.
"You guys need to get moving," Chu said. She reached down and drew her sidearm—a CHK three-millimeter, identical to the one Alicia normally carried. "I'll just wait here with Bill," the crippled corporal said, nodding to where her wingman had already died.
Alicia gazed down at her, longing for something—anything—to say. Some comforting lie, like "I'm sure the bad guys will be too busy concentrating on us to send in a follow-up sweep," or "Hang on, and we'll get a med team out here as soon as we've polished off Green Haven." But Chu knew the odds as well as Alicia did, and she could read her own life sign monitors. She knew how little time she had left unless the med team arrived almost instantly, that only her pharmacope and augmentation were keeping her alive even now, and Alicia owed her people something better than a lie.
"God bless, Helena," she said, very quietly, instead, then turned to lead the fifty-eight surviving effectives of Charlie Company, Third Battalion, Second Regiment, Fifth Brigade, Imperial Cadre back into motion.
Chapter Twenty-Four
"Winchester-One, Winchester-Alpha-Three. We've got a problem."
"All units, Winchester-One," Alicia said instantly. "Hold position."
The other surviving forty-six members of Charlie Company stopped instantly, freezing in place, while she and Tannis continued moving forwards.
"What have we got, Erik?" she asked as she caught up with her point man, and Corporal Erik Andersson, call sign Winchester-Alpha-Three grunted over the com.
"Let me show you," he replied, and switched the feed from his own tactical remote to Alicia.
They didn't have many remotes left. Wherever the "terrorists" equipment had come from, they'd obviously gotten their money's worth. Their refurbished Marine battle armor's sensors were able to detect the presence of even a Cadre sensor remote. They couldn't localize it as well as a cadreman might have, but they could pin down a general volume, and they obviously realized that without their airborne spies, Charlie Company's survivors would be floundering around blind. So every time they did detect the emissions signature of a remote's heavily stealthed counter-grav, they saturated its general area with heavy fire, and remotes were "soft" targets, subject to mission kills, even if they weren't destroyed outright. A near miss with a plasma bolt was usually sufficient to do major damage to a remote's sensors, rendering it effectively useless. Charlie Company should have had sixty remotes left; Alicia actually had seventeen, and against first-line equipment—even old first-line equipment, like the terrorists had—she had to keep sending them in close if she wanted reliable data. Which meant she kept losing them in a steady trickle.
One of the seventeen survivors was assigned to Andersson, and Alicia clenched her teeth as she saw what Winchester-Alpha-Three had already seen.
Where are they getting all these people? she asked herself bitterly. Andersson's remote was picking up at least two hundred more battle-armored infantry, dug in in three separate positions directly across the saddle between two mountains through which Alicia had intended to pass her column.
Well, at least that settles the question of whether or not they still know where we are, she thought.
She'd hoped that they'd dropped completely off the enemy's sensors, but the FALA's commanders wouldn't have been able to airlift those people around in front of her if they hadn't had a pretty shrewd notion of where she was and where she was headed. On the other hand, one of the positions she could see was much too far to the west to support the others. Its location had clearly been chosen to block a side valley several kilometers to one side, and that suggested they were at least uncertain about her exact position. If they hadn't been, they would have known she'd actually been edging away from that side valley for the last twenty minutes.
None of which made her present situation any less unpalatable.
She studied the take from Andersson's remote intently, chewing the inside of her lip while she contemplated it. Fatigue was becoming yet another enemy, and she knew it. Thanks to the tick, the last couple of hours seemed to have taken weeks to drag past. She knew better, but there was a direct link between the mind's perception of time's passage and the body's physical responses, and the stress of such bitter combat—and casualties—burned up energy like another forest fire. It was a fatigue cadremen were trained to cope with, and Alicia's pharmacope was trickling carefully metered doses of offsetting drugs into her system, but the drain of such constant tension made all of them less effective than they ought to have been.
She pushed that thought aside again, as she also pushed aside the thought of the ten more people she'd lost since they'd been forced to leave Helena Chu behind. Chu was dead now, too; Alicia had still been in range for the corporal's armor icon to show on her HUD when the air-cav mount swept over Chu and killed her. All of Charlie Company's survivors had known when it happened, and Alicia had felt their hatred melding with her own.
But at least the people who'd killed Chu were almost certainly dead themselves. The company's plasma gunners had picked off six more aircraft when they'd closed in—much more cautiously than before—to strafe. Alicia might have lost ten more troopers in exchange, but the enemy was obviously beginning to run out of air-cav mounts at last. More had turned up since their first disastrous strafing attack, but after the additional losses they'd also taken, there were only four left within the reach of Alicia's sensors. Three of those had arrived after Chu was killed, and Alicia took a hard, grim pleasure from the thought that the people who'd murdered her corporal had almost certainly been among those who'd been shot down.
The four survivors were orbiting at extreme range now, obviously keeping their distance and closing in only for occasional overflights. Given how hard it was to track Cadre battle armor even under the best of circumstances, it was no wonder their feel for exactly where Alicia's people were had become fuzzy.
"We can't go around them," she said quietly to Tannis over their private com link.
"Sarge, I don't know as we've got a lot of choice," Tannis replied, equally quietly, studying the same tactical data. She was accustomed to serving as Alicia's sounding board, as a wing was supposed to do. "We're awfully beat up," she continued, "and we're running low on ammo. We could probably work around them, to the east."
She dropped the dotted line of a possible altnerative route onto Alicia's HUD, and Alicia nodded. Tannis's projection swept well to the east, around the end of the line the blocking positions had drawn across the mountain saddle. Unfortunately . . . .
"There's no time," she said. "They must've used air lorries, or something like that, to lift these people in—probably from the positions back by the LZ—to wait here for us, and if we try to work our way around them, we end up with even worse terrain between us and Green Haven. It'd take us even longer to get there, even if nothing else went wrong. And it would go wrong, Tannis. That damned air-cav may be keeping its distance, but it sure as hell knows roughly where we are, or these people wouldn't be here. So if we try to work around them, they'll probably spot us. And if they do, the extra time we'll spend trying to get through the terrain to the east will give them plenty of time to lift these people out of here again and drop them somewhere else in front of us."
"But if we punch into them head-on, we solve their problem for them," Tannis countered. "They want us to engage them, Sarge. That's why they're here."
"Granted." Alicia studied the tactical data in silence for a few more seconds, but she knew Tannis had a point.
The enemy's commander obviously knew that taking the Cadre on, even when they had heavy weapons and the Cadre didn't, was a good way to get hurt. But it was equally obvious that the enemy had an enormous numerical advantage, although Alicia still couldn't imagine how they'd mana
ged to get all of these people down here. And their commander equally clearly wanted nothing more than to force Alicia's people to engage them on the FALA's terms. The terrorists weren't interested in fighting on Alicia's terms; they wanted to force her to come to them when they had both the numerical advantage and the advantage of prepared positions.
"You know," she continued to Tannis after a moment, "looking at their positions here, it strikes me that they've obviously got a better feel for strategy than for tactics."
"I know that tone, Sarge," Tannis said. She was standing with her back to Alicia, keeping wary watch around their position, but Alicia could see the single raised eyebrow as clearly as if they'd been standing face-to-face. She'd seen it literally scores of time over the past eighteen months, and her mouth quirked as she smiled fondly at her friend's back.
"Their problem," she explained, "is that whoever picked out their positions had the strategic sense to find a choke point from her maps and send somebody out to block it. But the way they went about blocking it after they got here has a few tiny drawbacks. Look here."
She manipulated the terrain overlay on Tannis' HUD, and Tannis gave a sudden, tuneless whistle.
"My, that was careless of them, wasn't it?" she said.
"That's one way to put it," Alicia agreed, gazing at the HUD's contour lines herself. Then she switched channels.
"Mauser-One, Winchester-One. Move your people to this point —" she dropped a location icon into Celestine Hillman's HUD "—and meet me there. Lion-Alpha-Three," she continued, "move your people up to this point."
She dropped yet another icon into the HUD, and waited until acknowledgments came back from Hillman and Hennessey. Then she slapped Andersson on his armored shoulder.
"Good work, Erik," she told him. "Now stay here and keep an eye on them until we're ready."
"You got it, Sarge," he replied, and she went bounding back along the column towards Hillman.
"Winchester-One, Mauser-One," the voice in Alicia's mastoid said ten minutes later. "We're in position, Alley."
"Mauser-One, Winchester-One copies," Alicia replied. Celestine sounded confident, she thought—or, at least, like someone trying to project confidence. She smiled humorlessly at the thought, and drew a deep breath.
"All right, people," she said over the all-units net. "It's time to dance."
Group Leader Burkhart, the man in command of the action group holding the center of the three Freedom Alliance Liberation Army blocking positions, stood gazing out into the darkness. His command post was exactly where The Book said it should be, on the reverse slope of the shallow ridge line running across the mountain saddle at an angle. But Cornelius Burkhart felt cramped, confined, sitting in its protection. So he'd left his second-in-command there and come here, where he could stand in one of his forward plasma cannon positions and glare out across the moonless night.
Burkhart did a lot of glaring, because he was an angry man, one who used his anger to fuel his purpose and fire his passion. He'd been that way for a long time, and if he'd never been completely satisfied with the plan for this operation, that was all right. He understood the plan's objectives and approved them fiercely, and so far, at least, it seemed to be working. His faith in its ultimate success—and his own survival—might be qualified, but that didn't mean he wasn't determined to drive it through to success if it could be driven, because he hated the Terran Empire with a pure and burning passion.
His family had been prominent in its opposition to the Incorporation of his homeworld, and they'd paid the price. Perhaps the Empire hadn't been directly implicated in the attack which had killed his father, mother, and older brother, but someone had tossed the homemade bomb during the anti-Incorporation rally.
The planetary government had insisted it had come from among the protesters, thrown—or possibly dropped—by one of the violent fringe elements in the protest movement. The rally's organizers had blamed government provocateurs and fiercely rejected the so-called "investigation" the government had conducted. Even the "investigation" hadn't been able to (or had been ordered not to) identify the hand which actually threw the bomb, of course. And in the absence of any other clearly identifiable guilty party, Burkhart and his two surviving brothers had assigned the blood guilt where it ultimately belonged, the hands of Empress Maire, Seamus II's mother, and set out to do something about it.
They'd taken their vengeance where they could find it, and Cornelius Burkhart had lost track long ago of how many Empies and Empie collaborators they'd killed over the past twenty-three standard years. All three of them had joined the Freedom Alliance's Liberation Army six years ago, and they'd been able to kill even more of their enemies with the FALA's support structure behind them. But however many they'd killed, it hadn't been enough. It would never be enough, and it had come with its own price tag. He was the only surviving member of his family, now, thanks to the Cadre raid on Chengchou, and the knowledge that the company which had killed his brothers would almost inevitably be assigned to this operation explained why he'd volunteered so promptly for it.
He smiled thinly, staring out into the night, wondering where the Cadre survivors were. There couldn't be more than fifty of them left—less than twenty percent—and that was sweet, sweet on his tongue. He'd made a study of the Cadre and its operations over the past quarter-decade, and because of that, he knew just how great the Alliance's accomplishment here on Fuller was.
The Cadre was more than simply another branch of the imperial military. It was the Empire, the personification of the House of Murphy. For the subjects of Seamus II, its members were the standardbearers, the guardians—the Emperor's paladins and the shining heroes who stood against the enemies of all they held dear. But Cornelius Burkhart was one of those enemies. For him, too, the Cadre was the personification of the House of Murphy . . . and he hated the Cadre even more than he hated the Emperor. But it wasn't a blind hate, and that was why he'd lavished such attention upon his enemies, studying their strengths as well as their weaknesses. And it was also why he knew that in its entire history, the Cadre had never suffered losses like the ones it had already suffered here. An eighty-plus percent casualty rate was horrendous for any unit, under any circumstances, but it would be far worse for the Cadre, those arrogant pricks with their aura of invincibility, their pride in their reputation and their unbroken record of successes.
Well, their record's broken now, he thought viciously. And if he continued to cherish doubts about the extraction plan, that was all right, too. There was no one waiting for him, no one worrying about him. Not anymore. The Empire and the Cadre had seen to that. His enemies themselves had freed him, and in the final analysis, whether or not this operation ultimately led where the Freedom Alliance command council imagined that it would was unimportant. It was only a matter of time until —
Cornelius Burkhart's thought were interrupted with sudden finality as the sub-caliber penetrator from Corporal Thomas Kiely's battle rifle struck a quarter centimeter below the exact center of his battle armor's visor. It punched through the incredibly tough, transparent composite on an upward trajectory, like an incandescent spike. It made only a tiny hole as it drilled through, but when it struck Burkhart, just under the arch of his left eye socket, the top of the group leader's skull exploded into his helmet liner.
"Go!" Alicia snapped, and her people moved forward.
It was obvious that the first volley had taken the enemy completely by surprise. Battle armor had defeated at least a few of the Cadre penetrators, but her HUD showed eleven hard kills and three probables.
They should've stayed further down in those nice deep holes, after they went to all the trouble of digging them, she thought grimly as twenty-six of Charlie Company's surviving forty-six troopers moved forward with her and Tannis.
Plasma roared over their heads as Doorn and Osayaba laced the infantry support cannon opposite them with fire. The terrible blinding flashes walked along the crest of the enemy's position, ripping and tearing.
But those positions really were well dug in, and answering fire began hammering back at the cadremen as their own fire proclaimed their locations to their enemies.
Another Cadre icon turned crimson, and deep at the core of her, Alicia felt a fresh stab of pain as Corporal Allen Shidahari died. An instant later, Corporal Manfred Branigan, the Third Platoon trooper she'd paired with Erik Andersson after Vartkes Kalachian was killed, went down, as well. Benjamin Dubois, Lawrence Abernathy's wing, who'd been paired with Michael Doorn after they both lost their own wingmen, killed three more of the defenders. He fired steadily, carefully, as if he were on a target range somewhere, and scored three helmet hits in a row—then went flying backwards, his breastplate and torso vaporized by the plasma bolt which took him almost exactly center of mass.
Alicia was firing herself, picking her targets, and still more of the defenders went down. But not enough. The ones they'd killed in the initial volley had been the careless ones, the ones taken unawares. The ones who were still left were the cautious ones, the careful ones who returned fire without exposing themselves any more than they had to, and their weapons were heavier than the Cadre troopers'.
"Hold what you've got!" she said over the tactical net as the advancing green icons on her HUD reached the points she'd selected ahead of time. Not all the positions she'd chosen were as good as she'd hoped they would be, but all of them offered at least some cover, and her people went to ground, continuing to fire but obviously pinned down by the fire coming back at them.
Alicia bared her teeth in a fierce grimace as the enemy's fire redoubled.
That's right, she thought viciously at them. You go right ahead and pin us down. You've got us, don't you?
"We've got them—we've got them!" Cornelius Burkhart's executive officer screamed into his com.