Men cursed and screamed as penetrators hammered through their armor at point-blank range. Grenades added their fury to the violence-sick night, and plasma bolts shrieked back in answer.
Seventeen men and women of the Imperial Cadre went up that slope at Yussuf's heels. Nine of them lived to break through the line and continue their charge straight into the support cannon dug in behind the infantry. They exploded into the heavy artillery's position, rifles thundering on full automatic, only to be met by the fire of the cannon themselves and the multibarrel calliopes dug in to cover them.
They rampaged through the position, killing cannoneers, taking out calliopes, raging through the darkness and the flame and the confusion. Sixty-seven armored plasma gunners lay dead on the slope behind them, and another thirty-eight died as Second Platoon's surviving troopers came out of the night. Yussuf's attack knocked out eight of the cannon and half a dozen of their supporting calliopes, and panic swept the ambushers.
The surviving cannoneers abandoned their weapons, running towards the beckoning concealment of the night-struck forest with the fury as of Hell on their heels. Three calliope gunners stood their ground, sending thousands of rounds shrieking into the cadremen's faces. Then there were only two calliopes in action. Then only one.
Then none.
Alicia watched the icons of thirty-plus surviving hostiles fleeing into the night as she and her people came bounding up through the roaring, wedge-shaped forest fire which marked the line of Yussuf's attack. There was no more shooting, because there was no one left to shoot... yet. Her hovering remote was already detecting a fresh wave of inbound aircraft, as well as the traces of additional ground units threaded along the line of the river valley like beads on a string.
But no one was shooting at them now, and she cleared the edge of the valley shelf where the cannon had been emplaced and braked to a halt.
There were only three Cadre icons waiting there to greet her. First Sergeant Pamela Yussuf's was not among them, and Alicia's mouth tightened as the gold ring designating the company's commanding officer settled at last.
It gleamed around the icon representing Sergeant First Class Alicia DeVries.
"All units," she heard someone else say with her voice, "Winchester-One. Form on me at Alpha-One-Bravo."
Chapter Twenty-Three
"Winchester-One, Skycap," a voice said in Alicia's mastoid.
"Skycap, Winchester-One," she replied, speaking with one corner of her mind while the rest watched the last tattered icons of Charlie Company bounding up the cliff-like slope Pamela Yussuf's people had cleared at such terrible cost. "Go."
"Winchester-One," Sir Arthur Keita's voice sounded as strong and powerful as ever, but Alicia sensed his own shock echoing in its depths, "we've lost our direct LOS to your position. I've got a feed off a civilian comsat, but it doesn't have enough bandwidth for your telemetry channels. Are you in a position to give me a sitrep?"
"Skycap, our situation is... serious," Alicia replied, her voice more flattened than the tick alone could account for. She watched Celestine Hillman, the only other surviving squad leader, sorting out their survivors and directing them into a hasty defensive perimeter. "I count sixty-three effectives," she continued, not adding that there were no wounded. The sorts of weapons the company had encountered seldom left anything behind but the dead. "My heavy weapons are reduced to five plasma guns and three calliopes. We've confirmed about a hundred enemy dead, but our planned approach route is covered by additional dug-in forces."
"Can you reach the backup recovery site?" Keita asked. His voice still sounded calm, but even nowAlicia felt shocked by the implications of his question. The Cadre never abandoned a mission when civilian lives were on the line.
But then she looked at her HUD. Charlie Company had gone in with two hundred and seventy-five men and women; she had less than seventy left, and she was forty-plus kilometers from her objective in a straight line. The mission was a bust, whatever else happened, and she knew it. But even so....
"Skycap, Winchester-One," she said, after moment. "Negative. I say again, negative. My tac remote shows two fortified positions with heavy weapons support between us and the backup recovery site."
There was silence for a second or two before Keita spoke again.
"Winchester-One, do you have an enemy strength estimate?" he asked at last, and Alicia smiled without any humor at all.
"Skycap, I'd say our enemy capabilities estimate was just a bit off. Remote reconnaissance confirms a current hard count of eight hundred and eleven-I say again, eight-one-one-hostiles within six kilometers of the LZ. They're dug in deep and camouflaged and stealthed well enough we never spotted them from orbit on passives. They have plasma cannon, heavy calliopes, and battle armor, and we found an old Groundhog-Three ground-based surveillance array when we overran their heavy weapons position. All of their other hardware looks like Marine-issue equipment that's been surplussed, too; it's not new, but on the basis of its performance, it's in good shape. We've also downed four mil-spec sting ships... and I have additional aircraft circling ten klicks out."
The fresh moment of silence wasn't actually all that long; it was Alicia's tick-stretched time sense which made it seem that way.
"Winchester-One," Keita said finally, "can you evade?"
"Skycap, there's no point," she said quietly. "You can't land recovery boats in this sort of terrain. In fact, the backup recovery site and the objective itself are the only spots you can get them in, and we can't stay away from them forever when they've got air support and we don't. Besides, wherever they got them, these people have enough heavy weapons down here to take out even an assault shuttle. Even if we could manage to find some place else recovery boats could set down, they'd probably nail them on the way in."
"Winchester-One... Alley," Keita's voice was equally quiet, "you're the woman on the spot. Call it, and I'll back your decision, whatever it is."
"Thank you, Skycap," she said, and meant it. "But I only see one option. I'm going for the objective."
"Are you sure about that?" Keita asked. "If the enemy's present in such numbers...."
"Skycap, they were waiting for us," Alicia's voice was harsher, and her attention strayed back to the icons of the orbiting aircraft. They were starting to edge in a little closer, and she used her synth-link to nudge her hovering remote towards them.
"I don't know where they came from, or how they got this many people and this many heavy weapons into place without anyone spotting it," she continued, "but they figured out exactly where we were coming in, and the Groundhog gave them the tracking ability to zero us from the get-go. They were shooting fish in a barrel, Uncle Arthur. And it's obvious from the positions our remote recon's already picked up that they've got the rest of this valley covered just as thoroughly as they did the LZ.
"But if they've got that many people out here in the boonies, they can't have the direct line between here and Green Haven covered this heavily. Unless you directly forbid it, I'm heading for the objective on the theory that it's the last-place they'll expect us to go after a reaming like this one."
"The terrain between you and Green Haven is awfully rough," Keita replied. "And if our original estimates were so far off, you can't count on their having insufficient manpower to cover the direct approach in overwhelming strength, as well."
"Uncle Arthur," Alicia said with a tight grin, "if they've got that much manpower, we're screwed, whatever we try to do. I say we roll the dice."
A warning blinked in the back of her brain as the tactical remote picked up active targeting systems from the aircraft. From their emissions signatures, they were lighter craft than the sting ships Doorn and Osayaba had downed-probably only two- or three-man air cavalry mounts. But she had five of them on her HUD already, and she was bleakly certain she hadn't seen all of them yet.
"And the hostages?" Keita asked in a painfully toneless voice.
"If they really intended to kill them all if a rescue was even att
empted," Alicia replied unflinchingly, "then they're all already dead. I don't think they did, though. I don't know what the hell is really going on down here, but whatever it is, it's a damned sight more than a simple hostagetaking. They've already hammered us. Our loss rate's been over two-to-one so far, and given the numbers we've already detected, they have to be pretty confident they can do that to us again. At the same time, they aren't going to be in a hurry to kill their bargaining chips-especially not after something like this. They're going to need something awfully significant if they're going to have a prayer of talking their way off Fuller now."
"You're figuring that if you get there fast enough, you may be able to break in to the hostages before they kill them."
"Something like that, Uncle Arthur. I'm not saying it's a good option. But I don't think we have any good options left, and whatever we do, we're going to have to do it quick. I've got three more aircraft inbound from the east. If I hold here much longer, they're going to try swarming us."
"Understood." Alicia thought she might have heard the sound of an indrawn breath, but she might not have, too. Then, "All right, Alley. I said it was your call. It is. Good hunting."
"Thank you, Skycap," Alicia said formally. "Winchester-One, clear."
She changed circuits, dropping into the company-wide com net.
"All units," she said, her voice flat and hard with purpose, "Winchester-One. We're going to Green Haven, people, and these bastards aren't going to stop us."
There was no response from the other troopers-not in words, anyway, but any wolf would have envied their snarl-and she continued.
"Mauser-One."
"Winchester-One, Mauser-One," Hillman acknowledged.
"You've got our six," Alicia told her. "I'm designating units now." As she spoke, icons on the HUD started changing color as she selected the wings she was assigning to Hillman. "I figure they're going to press us hardest from behind," she continued, "and I'm especially worried about their aircraft. That's why I'm giving you three of the plasma guns."
"Understood," Hillman replied tautly.
"Lion-Alpha-Three," Alicia went on.
"Winchester-One, Lion-Alpha-Three," Sergeant Jake Hennessy, the senior surviving member of Francesca Masolle's platoon, responded.
"You're in charge of our reserve, such as it is and what there is of it," Alicia told him with a gallows grin. "I'm designating units now." Another dozen pairs of wings changed color, and her armor computer simultaneously set up new dedicated communications nets for Hillman and Hennessy's scratch units. "I want you in the middle, Jake, where you can support Celestine or me. And I'll expect you to use your own judgment if it hits the fan again."
"Understood, Winchester-One."
"The rest of you are with me," Alicia continued, as the final fourteen icons shifted color. "We're point. And this is where we're all going."
She dropped yet another mental command into the HUD, and and a new line drew itself across the mountainous terrain.
"It's going to be tough, it's going to be ugly, and we're going to get hurt, people," she told Charlie Company's survivors harshly. "But the only way out is through, and we owe these bastards. Any questions?"
There were none, and she nodded sharply inside her armored helmet.
"In that case, let's go kick some ass."
***
Sir Arthur Keita opened his eyes and made himself sit back down across the tactical table from Captain Wadislaw Watts. The Marine intelligence specialist looked back at him, his expression shocked, and Keita shook his head.
"What the hell happened?" he grated, his expression hewn from solid granite.
"Sir Arthur, I can't -" Watts broke off and shook his own head slowly. "Nobody at Battalion saw this coming, Sir," he said, his voice flat. "You heard the same briefings I did. I don't know-That is, I know there are intelligence failures, but I've never seen one this bad. Never."
Keita grunted. An ignoble part of him wanted to blame the Marine, make this all somehow his fault. But Keita had seen exactly the same intelligence materials Watts had, and he'd shared the captain's conclusions. For that matter, so had Madison Alwyn and every single one of Charlie Company's officers.
"The one thing it damned well wasn't," the Cadre brigadier said after a moment of sulfurous silence, "was an accident. DeVries is right-those bastards down there were waiting for them, camouflaged so well we never got even a sniff of them. Somebody planned this entire thing, maneuvered us into feeding an entire Cadre company straight into a meat grinder."
"You think Duke Geoffrey was in on it, Sir?" Watts asked in the tone of a man whose brain was beginning to work once again.
"Somebody down there in Shallingsport goddamned well was!" Keita said grimly. "They've got frigging sting ships, for God's sake! Those didn't just spring out of the ground like toadstools. They were brought in from off-world, and not by the people on Star Roamer. So if Geoffrey wasn't in on it, who was?"
"I don't know," Watts admitted. "We just don't have enough information at this point to tell. On the one hand, it almost had to be Geoffrey. He's the Duke of Shallingsport, he's the one who agreed to give the terrorists sanctuary, and he's the one who handed them Green Haven. But that's insane, Sir Arthur! He'd have to know the galaxy isn't big enough for someone who helped set up something like this to hide from the Empire."
"I know," Keita growled. "But maybe he is crazy enough to think he could get away with it. Or maybe it was what's-his-name-Jokuri, his industrial development guy."
"That could be," Watts said slowly, his expression intent. "For them to get this stuff down there, it must have come in through the Green Haven spaceport, and Green Haven is one of Jokuri's pet projects. And Jokuri's been in charge of whatever customs inspections there may have been. But even if it was Jokuri, why did he do it? Why did the Freedom Alliance do it? I think you're right, Sir Arthur-this entire operation was set up specifically to mousetrap the response force we sent in. And given the nature of the provocation-the hijacking and the identity of the hostages-they almost certainly meant to suck in the Cadre, specifically, because that's who they must have known what catch the assignment." He shook his head again. "For all intents and purposes, this is a declaration of war against the Cadre."
"I think that's exactly what it is." Keita stood and began pacing angrily around Marguerite Johnsen's intelligence center. "You said it yourself-this is a psychological warfare operation from their perspective. They've just demonstrated that they can ambush a Cadre company and inflict massive casualties. I don't think any Cadre unit has ever taken losses like this, certainly not in a 'routine' operation against a batch of hostagetaking terrorists!"
"But it's a suicide operation for everyone involved," Watts said. "It has to be. There's no way we're ever going to let them off this planet. We'll call in the Fleet to blockade the entire star system, if that's what it takes to keep them pinned down. And eventually, we'll go down there in assault shuttles, or in a heavy-configuration drop, and kill or capture every single one of them. His Majesty will send in an entire Marine brigade, if that's what it takes, Sir Arthur. You know that, I know that-anyone capable of setting this up must know it!"
"Maybe," Keita said almost absently, pacing faster. "Maybe."
"What about Ctesiphon?" Watts said after a moment. "She's got the equivalent of an entire Marine battalion on board."
"But she still four hours out, minimum," Keita replied. He shook his head like an irritated horse plagued by flies. "I've already had the com center alert her and instruct her to expedite her arrival." He tapped his headset to indicate how he'd passed the orders. "Major Bennett already has his people working on alternate plans to send an assault dirt-side when she gets here, assuming the opportunity presents. I'm sure Ctesiphon and Bennett's people will do anything humanly possible, but whatever's going to happen down there are on Fuller, it's almost certainly going to be long over by the time they can get here."
***
For the first fifteen or tw
enty minutes, Alicia's decision to strike out directly towards Green Haven seemed to have taken the other side by surprise. She'd been right-all of the heavily dug-in infantry positions the surviving cadremen's sensor remotes could find were in the river valley or along its rim. That didn't mean there weren't more of them somewhere else, of course, and she had half a dozen of their twenty-three surviving sensor remotes sweeping the mountain forests ahead of them.
So far, those remotes had found nothing but trees, rocks, and mountain streams, but she didn't expect that to last. They had forty air-kilometers to go; in this terrain, that would be more like fifty or even sixty of actual ground travel. Even with Cadre battle armor, the best speed they were going to make through the heavy tree cover would be no more than forty kilometers per hour in an all-out sprint-half that, if they moved with a modicum of tactical caution-but the enemy undoubtedly had transportation available. Since they'd taken over an industrial park, they had to at least have gotten their hands on substantial numbers of air lorries.