In Fury Born

Chapter Thirteen

"Yo, Alley!"

Staff Sergeant Alicia DeVries opened her eyes and "looked up" from the field manual she'd been reading through her synth-link as Sergeant Haroldson came noisily into their quarters' shared sitting room/office.

"I know you're not from Old Earth, Greta," Alicia said mildly, "but are you familiar with the Old Earth critter called an elephant?"

"Vaguely, yeah. Why?" Haroldson said suspiciously.

"Because your idea of how to walk into a room reminds me of an entire herd of them."

"Very funny. Ha-ha." Haroldson made a face, andAlicia grinned and stripped off her synth-link headset, then leaned back in her desk chair and stretched luxuriously.

"And what brings you back to our humble domicile so far ahead of schedule, O thundering herd?" she asked.

"As a matter of fact, the Captain sent me to get you. He wants you in his office soonest."

"Me?" Alicia's eyebrows rose, and Haroldson shrugged.

"He didn't say why, but I think some HQ weanie type wants to see you. That's what the guy smelled like to me, anyway, even if he wasn't in uniform. I think he's from Old Earth, too. He's got an accent sort of like yours."

"Curiouser and curiouser," Alicia murmured. She pushed up out of her chair and turned to the sitting room's view screen. She punched the button which configured it for mirror mode, then examined her image thoughtfully.

Haroldson watched with a hidden smile as her roommate inspected her own appearance even more critically than she would have inspected a member of her squad. Haroldson had known the younger sergeant for a little under four months, and she'd been impressed-almost against her will, initially at least. DeVries was not quite nineteen standard years old, which made her four years younger than Haroldson, and there weren't very many eighteen-year-old staff sergeants in the Imperial Marines. In fact, she was the only one Haroldson had ever met.

Of course, there weren't very many eighteen-year-olds with the Recon patch, the Master Sniper qualification badge, the Grav-Drop qualification badge, and the Silver Star, either. Not only that, Haroldson happened to know that DeVries was Raider-qualified, although she hadn't yet tested to collect the official badge for that one. And she also knew that DeVries had been getting none-too-subtle "suggestions" for the last couple of months that she should be considering officer candidate school.

She looked older than her years, too, Haroldson reflected, more like a twenty-something then someone who was still officially a teenager. It wasn't so much a physical thing, either, although she was tall and broad-shouldered (for a woman). And if she carried an extra gram of body fat anywhere, Haroldson hadn't seen it. She had a hard-trained, sinewy muscularity which was rare even among Marines, although she didn't seem to be a fanatic about maintaining it. Then again, she didn't seem to be fanatical about anything … yet she routinely demonstrated that she could do anything she asked a member of her squad to do, only better. It was that unspoken, total confidence in her own competence which made her so much older than her years. Especially since it was obvious to those about her that her confidence was completely justified.

Haroldson had concluded after the first month that DeVries was simply one of those people who made mere mortals aware of their mortality. It would be interesting to see just what final rank she obtained, and Haroldson was already looking forward to "Why, I knew General DeVries back when she was just a staff sergeant! And let me tell you … "

"You are planning on dropping by the Old Man's office sometime this afternoon, aren't you, Alley?" she said after moment, and the younger woman chuckled.

"Now, now. You're just upset with me over that elephant remark."

Alicia gave her appearance one last glance, switched off the view screen, and headed towards the door.

"Assuming they aren't sending me off someplace horrible, like shipping me all the way back to Sol just so they can assign me to Titan Base, I'll be back shortly," she said.

"Hey! If they do send you to Titan, can I have that box of chocolates in your locker?" Haroldson called after her.

"Enter!" a voice called, in response to Alicia's quick double-knock on the office door. She opened it, stepped through, and braced to attention rather more sharply than usual as she spotted the man in civilian dress Haroldson had warned her about. He did have that certain indefinable aura of a senior staff officer as he sat there, but there was something else about him, too. Something … different.

"Sir!" she said to Captain Ahearn.

"Stand easy, Sergeant," Ahearn replied, and Alicia's internal antennae twitched. The "let's-humor-the-staff-puke" gleam her parade ground manner should have put into the captain's eye was singularly missing.

She obeyed the command, dropping into a stand-easy position which could have served as a training manual illustration, and Ahearn indicated the stranger in his office with a wave of his right hand.

"Staff Sergeant DeVries," he said, "this is Colonel Gresham."

"Colonel," Alicia acknowledged when the captain paused.

"Sergeant." Gresham nodded to her, and her curiosity sharpened still further as she noticed his eyes. They were a curious silvery color, one she'd never seen before, and there was something else just a bit peculiar about them. She couldn't put a finger on exactly what that something else was, though. It was almost as if they were focusing on something behind her-or perhaps on something through her.

"The Colonel's come a long way, Sergeant. He's got something he wants to discuss with you," Ahearn said. He hesitated for just a moment, as if he were about to say something more, then shrugged, gave his head a little shake, and stood.

"Good day, Colonel," he said, with an almost curt nod. He looked at Alicia for a second, then gave her a nod (this one much less curt), as well. And then, to her astonishment, he walked out of his own office and closed the door quietly but firmly behind himself.

She watched him leave, then turned back to face Gresham, and her mind raced while she tried to think of any explanation for Ahearn's bizarre behavior. None came to mind, and so she simply stood there, hands clasped behind her, expression politely attentive, and waited.

Gresham studied her with those odd eyes of his for what seemed like a very long time, although she knew it wasn't. She had the distinct impression that he was waiting for her to show some indication of curiosity or uncertainty. Which, of course, she wasn't about to do.

Finally, the civilian-garbed colonel smiled, like a man conceding some contest, and climbed out of the chair in which he'd been sitting. He crossed to stand behind Ahearn's desk, but he didn't seat himself in the captain's chair. Instead, he simply stood there, half-turned away from Alicia to gaze out the window at the parade ground baking under the afternoon heat of the Jepperson System's G-0 primary.

"Tell me, Staff Sergeant," he said after a moment, "how do you like being a Marine?"

"Excuse me, Sir?"

Gresham smiled again at Alicia's courteously blank tone.

"Actually, that wasn't a trick question," he told her. "I'm serious. How do you like being a Marine, now that you've had a couple of years experience?"

"I like it," she said after moment. "I like it a lot."

"Why?"

"Sir, that's a pretty sweeping question," she said slowly.

"I know." He turned back from the window to face her fully and folded his arms across his chest as he leaned back against the office wall. "It's meant to be a tough one, too," he added.

Well, it's certainly succeeded, then, she thought tartly. Just who is this yahoo, and why is he trying to screw with my head?

"Sir," she said finally, "a Marine is what I've always wanted to be. Partly, I suppose, because of my grandfather's example. Partly because of the challenge. But mostly? Mostly because standing up to defend the things you believe in is what adults do."

" 'The things you believe in,' " Gresham repeated softly. In the wrong tone of voice, he might have sounded as if he were mocking her, but instead, it came out musingly. Then he cocked his head.

"And just what do you believe in?" he asked.

Another of those deliberately "tough" questions of his, I suppose, she snorted mentally.

"If you want the simple form," she told him, allowing just a hint of testiness into her own voice, "I believe in what the Empire stands for. I believe in the individual rights imperial citizens are guaranteed, in the prosperity and standard of living the Empire offers its citizens-the educational opportunities, the medical support, all of it. And I believe in my responsibility to defend the society that gives me and all of my fellow citizens those things." She shrugged. "I guess that sounds pretty simplistic, but that's the bottom line for me."

"And killing other people to do that doesn't bother you?" Gresham's voice was completely neutral, as was his expression, but Alicia bridled inside anyway.

"I don't love combat for the adrenaline rush of blowing somebody else away, if that's what you mean, Sir," she said just a bit more coldly than she'd actually intend to.

"That wasn't what I asked," he replied. "I asked if killing other people to do your duty bothered you." He waved his right hand gently in the air in front of him. "I think it's a fair question, given the number of confirmed kills you racked up on Gyangtse alone."

Alicia's curiosity sharpened at the evidence of just how much this Gresham knew about her. She supposed it shouldn't really have been a surprise. The numbers were part of her official record, and it was only logical for him to have done his homework before he descended from Mount Olympus to interrogate her. Whyever he was doing that.

"All right, Sir," she said, deciding to answer his "fair question" as honestly as possible, "yes. It bothers me. I don't like it very much, in fact. But it comes with doing the job I chose, doesn't it? And I knew going in that it would. I guess I'm enough my father's daughter -" she allowed a hint of challenge into her green eyes, pushing to see just how much of her family background he'd studied up on as well "-to wish that no one ever had to do that. But I'm enough my grandfather's granddaughter to recognize that since it does have to be done, it's better for the doers to be people who volunteer for it. Who are … good at it, I suppose."

"But who don't enjoy doing it?"

"Sir, with all due respect, I've never much cared to trust the judgment of someone who likes to kill other people." She shook her head. "I know they exist. I've even met some, here in the Corps. But there's a difference between recognizing that you're good at something and deciding that doing it when you don't have to is a good idea. It isn't. I saw both sides of that on Gyangtse, in my first tour. So, yes, I know there are people who subscribe to the 'kill them all; let God sort them out' philosophy. But I'm not one of them, and they aren't the ones I want making the decisions, or acting in the Empire's name."

"I can't argue with that." The colonel's brief smile showed what looked like a flash of amusement mixed with what sounded like genuine agreement. Then he looked back out the window again, facing away from her.

"So killing people does bother you, but you're still willing to do the job. I believe you said that part of it was the challenge. From your record, you look like someone who enjoys doing hard things simply because they're hard." He swung back around towards her, silvery eyes narrowed. "Would you agree with that assessment?"

"Simply because they're hard?" Alicia shook her head. "Colonel, I'm not a masochist. I enjoy challenges, enjoy … stretching myself, I suppose. In fact," she looked him in the eye, "I guess if I'm going to be completely honest, the reason I put in for Recon straight out of McKenzie was because I wanted to prove I could tackle the hardest job out there. And, no, it wasn't to impress anyone else. It was because I wanted to prove it to me."

"I see."

Gresham pursed his lips, studying her thoughtfully for several seconds. She felt uncomfortable under those odd, featureless silver eyes. Eyes, she abruptly realized, which were cybernetic replacements for his original organic eyes. But she returned his regard levelly, respectfully but with more than a slight edge of challenge.

"There's a reason for my questions, Staff Sergeant DeVries," he said finally. "I'm sure you're aware that your performance as a Wasp has been well above the norm. You may not be aware of just how far above the norm it's been, but your current rank at your age is pretty clear evidence of how the Corps sees you. And, while I'm aware that you don't know this yet, the Corps has already designated you for a Raider tour, to be followed by OCS."

Alicia's eyes widened slightly. She'd picked up the Raider qualification on her own time, although she hadn't yet officially tested for it, and she'd hoped for a Raider tour sometime soon. There weren't that many Marines-and practically none of them were as young as she was-who had both Recon and Raider in their rйsumйs. But despite that, and despite the increasingly unsubtle hints from her superiors that she ought to be considering officer's rank, she hadn't considered the possibility that the Corps was keeping as close an eye on her professional development as Gresham seemed to be suggesting.

"The reason I'm telling you this," the colonel continued, "is that I don't want you to take it."

"Sir?" This time she failed to keep the surprise out of her voice, and he smiled.

"I have a somewhat different offer for you to consider, Staff Sergeant DeVries," he said calmly. "One that doesn't come the way of very many people."

Alicia eyed him warily, and he chuckled softly.

"No, it's not quite that bad," he told her. "You see, I came directly out here from Old Earth specifically to see you, and I'm here on behalf of my own immediate superior, Brigadier Sir Arthur Keita."

He watched her closely, and she frowned. The name rang a distant sort of bell, but she couldn't quite remember exactly why. Gresham waited a moment, then snorted softly.

"Sir Arthur," he said, "is the second in command of the Imperial Cadre, Staff Sergeant." Alicia's eyes popped wide, and he nodded. "That's right," he said. "Sir Arthur believes you're Cadre material, Staff Sergeant DeVries. So if you can stand to tear yourself away from the Marines, the Emperor needs your services."

Alicia DeVries sat in the NCO club, nursing a stein of beer, and stared blankly at the HD above the bar. A bunch of burly men in brightly colored jerseys were doing something complicated with a ball in a spherical micro-gravity court. She wasn't certain exactly what they were doing, or even what the game was called-it was a purely local variant practiced here in Jepperson-but that was fine. She wasn't paying any attention, anyway.

Colonel Gresham had finally managed to get her attention, she thought wryly.

The offer he'd extended ran through her brain again and again. As he'd said, it wasn't one that came the way of many people. She knew about the Cadre, of course. Everyone did, especially in the military, because the Cadre was, quite simply, the best. They were the standard to which every special forces unit in the imperial armed forces aspired … and which none of the others ever attained.

The few, the proud, the Cadre, she thought, and somehow the well-worn phrase didn't seem quite as clichйd now.

The Cadre wasn't part of the regular armed forces, at all. All though they still came under the overall control of the Ministry of War, the Cadre answered directly to the Emperor, in his own person. They were sometimes called "the Emperor's Own," because they served the Emperor as their own direct liege lord, but they were closely regulated and watchdogged, under the Constitution, by a special Senate oversight committee. And they were hedged about with other restrictions, as well, including the biggest one of all-numbers. The Cadre was the only imperial military organization whose total roster strength was forever restricted by constitutional amendment to a maximum of forty thousand. That was it. The total legally permissible active-duty strength of the Cadre … for an empire with almost two thousand inhabited worlds.

She'd told Gresham that she enjoyed "stretching herself." Well, here was the ultimate opportunity for that! Of course, there were a few little points about joining the Cadre which bore thinking on. For one thing, the least outre rumors she'd heard about the sort of augmentation cadremen underwent were bizarre, to say the least. Then there was the fact that membership in the Cadre was for life. You didn't retire from the Cadre; you simply went onto inactive reserve status, and the Cadre could call you back anytime it chose. And the Cadre's casualty rate, despite its superlative training and matchless equipment, was substantially higher than that of any other branch of service. Not surprisingly, since the Cadre got only the hardest jobs.

But if you were up for the challenge, it offered you the chance to prove that you were the best. And what she'd said to Gresham about an adult's responsibility to defend a society in which she believed came back to her now, because that was what the Cadre was. The Emperor's sword, wielded in the pure service of the Empire he ruled.

Gresham had insisted that she go away and think about it before she gave him her answer, and she was glad he had. This wasn't a decision to rush into, and the colonel's awareness of that-his refusal to pressure her, or rush her-only emphasized its importance. But as she sat there, with her chilled beer gradually warming to something Greta Haroldson would have preferred, she knew it didn't really matter how much time he wanted her to take.

"Gresham," the voice on the other end of the com said.

"Colonel, it's Staff Sergeant DeVries. I've thought about it."

"And?" Gresham said after a few seconds of silence.

"Show me where to sign," she said simply.

"Meet me in Admin Three, Room 1017, tomorrow morning. Zero-nine-hundred hours."

"Yes, Sir."

"Good. Oh, and DeVries?"

"Yes, Sir?"

"Welcome aboard."

Chapter Fourteen

The wind howl was barely audible as Alicia stepped out of the elevator. It was still there, though. Not so much heard, as sensed. And although the air inside Camp Cochrane's main administration building was kept at a toasty 23°, and despite the fact that her uniform's smart fabric would have maintained a comfortable body temperature even if it hadn't been, she shivered. She'd grown too accustomed to the bone-deep warmth of Jepperson's summer for the abrupt transition to the middle of winter in Old Earth's Argentina Province's high Andes Mountains.

She walked briskly down the well lit hallway, following the map of the building which Admin had uploaded to her through her neural receptor. The map showed only a very limited portion of the administration building, of course. She didn't need all of it, and she wasn't a bit surprised by the fact that the Cadre insisted on a strict interpretation of the need-to-know rule, especially here. Camp Cochrane was to the Imperial Cadre what Camp Mackenzie was to the Imperial Marines.

It was also very large.

Alicia had arrived in the middle of the night, and also in the middle of a snowstorm. Or, at least, she'd thought it was a storm until a real storm blew in the following morning. The darkness and flying snow had kept her from forming more than a very vague impression of Cochrane on her arrival, but she'd seen enough to be a bit disappointed. Somehow, she'd assumed that the central headquarters facility of the famed Cadre would consist of more than a handful of nondescript weather domes, none of them more than three or four stories tall.

Her initial disappointment had become something quite different when the air car transporting her from Valparaiso Spaceport to her new temporary home had passed through a portal in one of those "nondescript weather domes" and she'd discovered just how large they actually were. They might not go up very far, but they went down a long way, indeed. Her own temporary quarters were fourteen stories below ground level, and she'd been astounded by the number of people who seemed to spend most of their time termite-swarming around the interiors of Cochrane's vast, buried structures.

She still didn't understand where they'd all come from, not given the Cadre's constitutionally mandated numerical limitations. Either there was something seriously wrong with her math, or else the Cadre had a simply enormous logistical tail and very, very few shooters, which seemed a contradiction of everything she'd ever heard about its operations.

At least seventy-five percent of the people she'd seen so far were in civilian clothing, like Colonel Gresham, too. After spending the last two-plus standard years of her life surrounded by uniforms, Alicia found that a little disconcerting. But she was once again the newest kid on the block, and she'd made up her mind to possess her soul in patience until someone got around to explaining things to her.

Which, she thought as she turned a final corner and saw the numbered door of the office which was her destination, is about to begin now, hopefully.

She slowed as she approached the door, but before she could knock, it slid silently open in front of her. She quirked an eyebrow and stepped through the opening.

There was an anteroom on the other side, with pleasant pastel-colored walls and a viewscreen set to window mode. The view of almost horizontal, wind-driven snow was scarcely homey, but the illusion that she was looking out an actual window was almost perfect. There were several comfortable chairs, but no sign of any other living human.

"Please be seated, Staff Sergeant DeVries," a voice said. It was obviously a computer's voice, and Alicia wondered whether it was a full cyber-synth AI. "Major Androniko will be with you shortly."

"Thank you," Alicia replied. She managed to keep her tone conversational, although the truth was that cyber-synths made her more than a little nervous. She didn't have the sort of phobia where they were concerned which the neo-Luddites treasured, and her own ability to sustain a synth-link made her quite comfortable about claiming a computer without an AI as an extension of her own merely human capabilities. But she also knew that a cyber-synth personality was exactly what it was called: an artificial intelligence. And one that wasn't all that tightly wrapped, by human standards.

She'd met several aliens in her life-more than most people her age, probably, given her father's position in the Foreign Ministry-and none of them had ever bothered her the way AIs did. She didn't know why. Perhaps it was just that the intelligence behind those alien eyes had at least evolved the same way hers had, rather than being whipped up to order from scratch in a cybernetics lab somewhere. Or perhaps it was the … eccentricities and well-known instability the cybernetics types still hadn't been able to remove from the cyber-synth equation.

She pushed that thought aside, selected a chair, and leaned back comfortably, watching the blizzard.

The delay, as promised, was brief.

"Major Androniko will see you now, Staff Sergeant," the same computer voice said, and another door opened, this one in the inner wall of the anteroom.

"Thank you," Alicia said once more, and stepped through the door.

The office on the other side was large and efficiently laid out. At first glance, it seemed like an awful lot of space for the single, tallish, dark-haired woman sitting behind the outsized desk which faced the door. But a second glance made it clear that the office's occupant actually had very little available free space. Alicia had seldom seen so many chip files in one place. The hard data storage stacks in the Emperor's New College main library had been bigger and more extensive, but she couldn't remember any place else of which that had been true. And arranged among the chip file cabinets and the standard data terminals were even bigger, clunkier storage cabinets-the sort that actual hardcopy documents might be tucked away inside of.

Unlike many of the people Alicia had seen here at Camp Cochrane, Major Androniko was in uniform. Not in the black tunic and green trousers of Alicia's Marine uniform, but in the green-on-green of the Imperial Cadre, with the starship and harp insignia of the House of Murphy on her collar.

"Staff Sergeant DeVries, reporting as instructed, Ma'am," Alicia said, coming to attention, and Androniko cocked her head to one side as if to see her better.

"Stand easy, Sergeant," the major said after a moment. "In fact," she pointed at one of the two chairs in front of her desk, "why don't you go ahead and sit down? This is in the nature of an entry interview, and it's probably going to take a while, so I believe we can probably afford to dispense with military formality for the moment."

"Thank you, Ma'am," Alicia said, although to be honest, she wasn't positive she wanted to abandon the comforting familiarity of proper military conduct. Androniko smiled faintly, as though she knew exactly what Alicia was thinking, and waited while her visitor settled herself into one of the chairs and its powered surface adjusted to the contours of her body.

"Now then, Sergeant," Androniko said then, "I'm sure you have a lot of questions. People always do at this point. So why don't I give you the quick ten-credit virtual tour, and then we can address any questions that remain unanswered?"

She arched one eyebrow, and Alicia nodded.

"Very well." Androniko tipped back in her own chair, propping her elbows on the armrests and steepling her fingers in front of her.

"First, as it says right here -" she unsteepled her hands long enough to point at the nameplate on her desk "-I'm Major Aleka Androniko. For my sins, I am also Brigadier Karpov 's executive officer, which makes me Camp Cochrane's second-in-command."

Alicia managed not to gawk at her, but it wasn't easy. The thought that a facility is important as Camp Cochrane could have someone as junior as a mere brigadier commanding it seemed bizarre. For that matter, the number of people she'd already encountered, assuming her experience so far represented anything like an average density for the entire base, seemed awfully high for any brigadier's command she'd ever heard of. And a major wasn't usually a brigadier's XO, either.

Or, she admonished herself, not in the Corps, anyway.

"No doubt," Androniko continued, "you've noticed what appear to be rather a large number of cadremen and cadrewomen about the place, given the statutory limitation on our total manpower. Actually, those people represent a certain amount of Senate-approved cribbing on our part. Most of them-all of the ones in civilian dress-are technically civilian contractors, not cadremen. In fact, virtually all of our senior 'civilian contractors' are, like Colonel Gresham, retired cadremen and cadrewomen. Many of them were invalided into early retirement, but their own time in the Cadre gives them invaluable experience and skills which we badly need. The Senate has decided we can put them on retainer as civilians to provide the trained manpower we need, especially here at Cochrane and our other central command and control nodes.

"Despite that … accommodation on the Senate's part, however," the major continued, "the sad truth is that the Cadre is always short of personnel. We have a far lower ratio of tail to teeth then any of the other services, including the Marines. In fact, we don't have all of the logistical capability we actually need to support our shooters out of our own resources, which is why we call on the Marines and the Fleet for support for many of our operations.

"The reason we're always shorthanded has less to do with any sort of constitutionally-mandated limitations than it does with the fact that the supply of suitable manpower is, frankly, severely limited. Finding and recruiting Cadre-quality men and women is a constant challenge, Staff Sergeant. The popular view that the Cadre consists of supermen and women isn't just a matter of the 'Cadre mystique,' I'm afraid. We're not really superhuman, of course, but drop commandos-and over eighty percent of our personnel are drop commandos-require certain very specific physical and mental qualities. Some of those are similar to those required by Marine Raiders and Recon, which is one reason we tend to use those duty assignments as a filtering system. Others are qualities which no standard Marine specialization requires. And others, quite frankly, have more to do with motivation, attitude, and loyalty which go far beyond any purely physical capabilities."

Androniko paused, as if to permit Alicia to digest what she'd already said. After a moment, she resumed.

"I'm not going to go into a great deal of detail about those 'specific physical and mental qualities' just now, Sergeant. To be totally honest, until we've completed your medical and you've been processed through the standard testing regimen, we can't be absolutely positive you possess them in the combination the Cadre requires. Our screening process has been steadily improved over the years, but there's simply no way to make it perfect, and we still lose about eight percent of all of our prospects at this stage. I don't expect that to happen in your case, however, because our pre-recruitment dossier on you was exceptionally thorough."

"It was, Ma'am?" Surprise startled the question out of Alicia, and Androniko smiled slightly.

"I think you might say that, yes," she said. "You first came to our attention when you were only fourteen. The standard battery of tests given to all students in their final form of high school often picks up potential Cadre recruits, and yours were … fairly outstanding, I think I might say. And you have an interesting personal pedigree, even for a Cadre recruit."

Alicia frowned, and Androniko smiled again.

"Oh, but you do! Take your mother's family-New Dubliners for over three hundred years. Loyalty to the House of Murphy's practically a planetary fetish for New Dublin, and then there's your grandfather -the most highly decorated Marine on active duty, I believe. Or your Uncle David, one of the youngest Fleet commodores in imperial history when he was killed. And your mother, Chief of Thoracic Surgery at Johns Hopkins/Bethesda of Charlotte, and very highly thought of in her field.

"And that's only the O'Shaughnessy side. Your father is just as 'ineresting,' isn't he? A farm boy from Silverado, and an Ujvбri, to boot, with three doctoral degrees, and G-20 rank over at the Foreign Ministry. One of the top three or four people in the Ministry's permanent policy formulation staff."

Alicia suppressed another, deeper frown, surprised even now by Androniko's familiarity with her family history, and the major shrugged.

"We do a thorough background when we get test results like yours, Sergeant. It only makes sense to eliminate as many potentials as we can as early as we can, so we can concentrate on the ones who're going to make good prospects. And we tend to take the long view when the indications are good. We have to, because of how stringent our standards are and the limitations on how we can recruit.

"We're legally prohibited from actively recruiting anyone, regardless of test results, before they're at least eighteen standard years old, and the Cadre's policy is that we won't accept anyone who hasn't completed at least one combat tour in either the Marines or Fleet. We've made a few exceptions to that policy, primarily when we've seen someone with qualities we need in Cadre staff officers, given how we're always starved on the support side, but the age requirement is set by law and can't be set aside. However, when someone's test results are sufficient to pop through our filters, we generally flag that individual for future consideration. When, as in your case, they eventually join the military, we keep an eye on them and occasionally intervene to … customize their career tracks."

Alicia blinked. Was that why she'd received the Recon assignment she requested out of Camp Mackenzie? Sergeant Major Hill had warned her she probably wouldn't get it-were her high school test results the reason he'd been wrong?

"One thing you have to understand, Sergeant DeVries," Androniko said, "is that all of your life, like every man or woman who ever joins the Cadre, you've been one of the 'one-percenters.' You've always been in that rarefied top one percent of the people doing whatever you were doing at any given moment in your life. But here in the Cadre, that level of capability and performance is the norm. You may or may not continue to stand out from those around you, but if you do, you'll find that doing so just got much more difficult. The Cadre comes as close as any organization in the history of mankind to being a true elite. The scores we require for our enlisted personnel are higher, by a very considerable margin, than those required for admission to the Fleet Academy on New Annapolis or the Marine Academy on New Dublin. There isn't a single cadreman or cadrewoman who doesn't have the inherent capability and talent to be a Fleet admiral or Commandant of the Corps. Indeed, one of the regular service branches' most persistent-and, in many ways, best taken-complaints about the Cadre is the way in which we skim off their own potential officers for our own use.

"I'm telling you this not to give you an inflated opinion of your own capabilities-one of the mental qualities we require is a certain resistance to delusions of grandeur-but to warn you. If you pass the medicals, you will find yourself working, quite possibly for the first time in your life, with people who are every bit as capable, self-motivated, and accustomed to succeeding as you are yourself."

She paused again, then chuckled.

"One reason why I tend to emphasize that point during these little interviews is that it was one I had trouble with, myself. I regarded myself as an extraordinarily capable human being before the Cadre put the arm on me, and I suppose I was. But it was a well-deserved humbling experience to discover that in this group, my level of capability was taken for granted, not marveled at.

"And now, let's move on to some of the nuts and bolts. First, among the physical qualities I mentioned before are synth-link capability and the ability to multitask at a very high-level, even under conditions of maximum stress. In addition to that -"

Chapter Fifteen

"Any time you're ready," Dr. Hyde said.

The civilian (these days) physician sat comfortably tipped back in the chair behind his desk, wearing his synth-link headset as he watched Alicia. With his eyes, that was; the diagnostic hardware tied into his synth-link, she knew, was busy doing the same thing, in considerably more detail, from the inside out.

Frankly, Alicia was getting just a little bit tired of the whole hospital bit.

She'd faced the battery of tests Major Androniko had warned her of and completed them with flying colors just in time to become an official Cadre recruit for her nineteenth birthday present. She got the impression that that was unusually young for admission to the Cadre-not too surprisingly, she supposed, given that the Cadre routinely required completion of a combat tour before it even considered a potential candidate. Any feelings of superiority that early selection might have engendered, however, had been quite handily quashed over the course of the next four months.

She'd spent all four of those months basically where she was right now-in the hands of the Cadre's medical staff. Dr. Hyde, who'd reached the rank of major during his own active-duty Cadre days (and carried the civil-service equivalent of a full colonel's rank as a civilian contractor these days), was reassuringly brisk, professional, and competent, but he was totally untainted by any trace of a tendency to coddle his patients. Which, Alicia admitted to herself, was the way she preferred things, actually. It was just that she hadn't realized how much surgery was going to be involved.

Thanks to the quick-heal therapies, she'd recovered quickly from the physical effects of the profound changes which had been made to her original Marine augmentation package. In fact, her recovery time from each round of surgery had been considerably better than it had been at Camp Mackenzie. The problem was that there'd been a lot more surgery this time … and she'd had more trouble adjusting to some of the changes.

When Major Androniko had warned her that the ability to multitask was an important Cadre qualification, she hadn't been joking. Alicia had never had the sort of difficulty some of her fellow Marine recruits had experienced in adjusting to her neural receptors, but at that point, she'd only had one synth-link to worry about at a time. Now she had three, and her instructors insisted that she learn to use all three of them simultaneously. She'd done it, but also as Androniko had warned her, she was no longer leaving fellow recruits in her dust. She'd finally been tapped for something that was genuinely hard for her, and the people around her were disinclined to show much sympathy, since they'd had to do exactly the same things. It wasn't that anyone had given her a hard time about it, but she simply wasn't accustomed to laboring this hard to accomplish her goals.

That was the bad news. The good news was that-just as she had at Mackenzie, when she'd been unable to match the PT scores of the people who had turfed her out of the lead in that category-she'd found herself responding to the challenge by embracing it. It hadn't been as much fun as some of the Mackenzie challenges, but it had been even more deeply satisfying.

The basic augmentation for sight and sound had also been replaced with even better enhancement. Indeed, the augmentation she had now was powerful enough to be illegal on the civilian market, and they'd added tactile enhancement, as well. That was an expensive refinement the Marines had passed on because of cost-effectiveness considerations.

The implantation of the neural web which the doctors assured her would actually provide significant protection against neural disrupter fire had been more straightforward, although the recovery time from the necessary surgery had actually been greater than that involved in the additional synth-links. And the new processors installed in her basic augmentation had presented problems of their own. There'd been a glitch in the hardware the first time around, and the escape and evasion package built into them had activated when the techs initiated the test protocols. Finding her own body moving under the control of a computer package expressly designed to kill anything between her and escape in the event that her conscious mind was taken out of the circuit had been … unpleasant. And if the techs involved in the testing program hadn't been prepared for hardware hiccups along the way, it could have been considerably worse than that … for them.

That little misadventure had required a return to surgery to replace the malfunctioning unit. Everyone had assured her that things like that practically never happened and that everything would be just peachy the second time around. By that point, she'd cherished some dark suspicions about their breezy assurances, but aside from the time required to heal, this time they'd actually been right.

# There'd been some other changes, of course, the biggest of which was undoubtedly her new pharmacope. Her perfectly good Marine-issue personal pharmacopeia had been surgically removed and replaced with a new, larger implant whose reservoirs contained everything the original had, plus a few additions all the Cadre's own.

One or two of those additions had given her more than a few qualms when they were explained to her, and imperial law had required that at least one of them had had to be explained-in some detail-before she could be allowed to officially join the Cadre. That was the bit about the suicide protocols built into her shiny new augmentation.

Alicia hadn't liked that thought one little bit. In fact, she'd actually seriously considered declining the Cadre's invitation when she heard about it. The idea that her own pharmacope contained a neurotoxin which would automatically kill her, even under the most carefully defined and limited of circumstances, had not been reassuring. But, in the end, it hadn't stopped her, either. Mostly because she'd considered what was likely to happen to any Cadre drop commando who found herself in the hands of the Empire's enemies. The chance of long-term survival in those circumstances was small, at best, and she understood exactly why the Empire needed to make certain that someone who knew everything any member of the Cadre would have to know could never be wrung dry by someone like the Rish. Then too, she was forced to admit in her more honest moments, part of the reason she'd accepted it was probably that somewhere deep down inside, despite all she'd seen and experienced since joining the Corps, there was a part of her which believed that she was so good, so smart and competent, that however much the possibility of being captured might bother other people, it wasn't something that would ever arise in her case.

And to be totally honest, she'd decided, it was actually reassuring, in a bleak sort of way, to know that she would always possess the means for a final escape, no matter what else happened.

Yet in some respects, the other totally classified addition to her pharmacope was almost more disturbing than the suicide package. Not because of the threat it represented, but because of the temptation it offered. When they'd first explained the effects of the drug the Cadre called "the tick," she hadn't fully grasped everything that explanation implied. In fact, she doubted that she fully appreciated all of the tick's ramifications even now, but she could certainly understand why the drug-it was actually half a dozen different drugs, all working together in minute, individually designed dosages for each drop commando's specific physiology-was on the Official Secrets List.

Now she looked back at Dr. Hyde, smiling slightly at his expression of exaggerated patience, and cautiously initiated the proper pharmacope command sequence.

Nothing at all seemed to happen for a moment. And then, so quickly and smoothly the transition appeared almost instantaneous, the universe about her abruptly slowed down.

Alicia sat very still in the chair in front of Hyde's desk, watching him, and her augmented vision zoomed in on the large vein at the base of his throat. She watched it pulsing ever so slightly to the beat of his heart, and she counted his pulse rate. She had plenty of time for counting, because that was what "the tick" did. It bought the person using it the most precious combat commodity there was-time.

The tick enhanced Alicia's physical reaction speed only slightly. She moved a bit faster, a little more quickly, but it didn't magically allow her to move at superhuman rates, or let her snatch speeding bullets out of the air with her bare hand. What it did do was to accelerate her mental processes enormously. She might not have superhuman reaction speed, but she had all the time in the world to think about possibilities and threats, about actions and reactions, before she actually took them.

She turned her head-slowly, so slowly it seemed-looking around Dr. Hyde's office through the crystal-clear armorplast of the tick's syrupy time stream. It seemed to her as if it took at least a full minute to turn her head all the way to the right, but she knew better. She'd seen holovids of people riding the tick. Indeed, she'd seen holovids of herself moving under its influence. She'd seen the way that heads turned and limbs moved in a fashion which defied easy description but which could never be mistaken for anything else by anyone who ever saw it.

Dr. Maxwell Hyde certainly recognized it, and he didn't need his diagnostics, either. He saw the absolutely smooth, almost mechanical, way her head turned. It swiveled, with the micrometrically metered precision of a computer-controlled gun turret, snapping to the exact angle she'd chosen in a movement which amalgamated viperish speed and something very like … serenity.

Over the years, Hyde had tried repeatedly to find the right way to describe the tick to himself or to his colleagues. He'd never been truly satisfied with his efforts, but the best analogy he'd been able to come up with was actually the first one which had ever suggested itself to him. It was like watching a slow-motion holovid of a striking rattlesnake or cobra in real-time, contradictory though that sounded.

Now he closed his eyes, concentrating on his diagnostics. DeVries was doing well, he thought. Mastering the complexities of the Cadre augmentation package was the real make-or-break point for any potential drop commando. All the motivation, determination, and basic abilities in the universe couldn't make anyone a drop commando if they couldn't handle the sensory augmentation, the multiple synth-links, and the tick. The rest of the training, the other aspects of the augmentation package itself, were all frosting on the cake, in Maxwell Hyde's opinion, and he was pleased by DeVries' tolerance for the tick. There was no sign of any of the toxicity reactions they very occasionally encountered. And, perhaps even more importantly, there were no indications of any tendency towards dependency on her part.

"Let's take it through an alpha sequence," he said now, never opening his eyes as he "watched" her.

"All right," Alicia agreed, deliberately slowing her enunciation to something approximating the doctor's slow, dragging speech, and stood.

She was more cautious about it than she'd been the first time. Despite all the warnings, all the effort Dr. Hyde and his staff had put into explaining to her what was going to happen, she hadn't really been prepared for the actuality of the tick that first day. She'd been sitting down that day, too, and she'd stood up at their request, exactly the same way she'd done it all her life. Except that this time, what should have brought her smoothly and naturally to her feet had turned into an explosive leap. One which had carried her forward, actually over-balanced her. She'd almost fallen-had, in fact, started to topple forward-and she'd flailed her arms for balance.

To her tick-enhanced time sense, her arms had seemed to move with almost grotesque, floating slowness. They'd trailed behind her mental commands, lagged on their way to their intended destinations. And despite that, they'd shot past were she'd meant to stop them, traveling with a speed and quickness she'd never before managed.

She'd learned to adjust, eventually, and now, as Dr. Hyde had requested, she moved away from her chair and fell into a "rest" position in the center of his spacious office. She stood that way for a moment, hands at her sides, and then fell into a guard position.

Alicia had grown to love espada del mano, the Corps' chosen hand-to-hand combat technique. Espada del mano had been developed about two hundred years before in the Granada System, and it was a primarily "hard" style which emphasized weaponless techniques and a go-for-broke aggressiveness. It did include some weaponed techniques, especially with edged steel (and its higher-tech equivalents), and it wasn't something a modern Marine actually required all that often. But the need still arose occasionally, and the Corps was right about the way in which it combined physical conditioning, mental discipline, and the "warrior mentality." Besides, the sheer exuberance of a one-on-one, full-contact training bout was hard to beat.

The Cadre, unlike the Marines, preferred deillseag тrd, also known as "the slap hammer." Despite its name, deillseag тrd was actually a "softer" style than espada del mano. Or probably it would be more accurate to say that it was a more … balanced, comprehensive style. Deillseag тrd had been developed in the Dublin System, and it was a synthesis of at least two or three dozen other martial arts. It included a much broader spectrum of weaponed techniques than the espada did, and it also included quite a lot more "soft style" elements.

Alicia had only begun to explore deilleag тrd, and the time she'd been stuck in the hospital hadn't left her much opportunity for training in it. She suspected that she was going to prefer it, once she'd had the opportunity to begin mastering it, but for now, it was better to stick to what she knew, and she began an espada training ejercicio, bringing herself totally to bear on the focus it required.

Hyde opened his eyes again. He continued "watching" her through his synth-link, but this was something he never tired of seeing with his own eyes. Something he'd always deeply treasured about his own period of active duty with the Cadre.

Alicia DeVries was the personification of the old clichй "poetry in motion," he thought. She moved with blinding speed, yet at the same time every motion seemed floating, almost slow. It was the perfection of each individual move, he told himself. The fact that there was literally no hesitation, no uncertainty. DeVries' total familiarity with the ejercicio was obvious, but there was more to what she was doing than practice. More even than the drilled-in muscle memory of the true martial artist. Every move she made, every shift of balance, was deliberate and conscious. Even as her hands flickered and flashed, she was thinking through each movement. Every single one of them was textbook perfect because, thanks to the tick, she had time to make them that way.

He remembered doing that himself. He suspected, if he was going to be honest, that he'd never been as good, even with the tick, as she was. The tick enhanced its users' natural aptitudes and talents. It didn't magically bestow the same plateau of ability-of speed, reflexes, balance-on all of them, and her starting point was simply better than his had been. And she was adjusting to the tick's vagaries faster than he had, too, he decided.

Well, fair's fair. She may be settling down to Old Speedy faster than I did, but I bounced back from the surgery a lot faster than she did.

He let her continue for another two or three minutes, which he knew seemed far longer than that to her, then nodded.

"All right, Alley. I think we've got all the data we need."

"Sure," she said with the odd tone everyone who spent any time working with drop commandos came to recognize. It was obvious that she thought she was speaking very slowly, enunciating her words carefully. For those stuck in a non-tick time stream, though, those words still came out quick, clipped-completely clear and unslurred, yet so fast that it sounded as if they ought to be garbled.

She floated back across the floor on those tick-inspired dancer's feet and settled gracefully, gracefully back into her chair with a smile.

"Yes," he said after a moment, completing his study of the diagnostics' recordings. "I think we're done for today. The preliminary data looks good. Unless we turn something up after the complete analysis, I think we can consider this aspect of your augmentation successfully completed and send you off to ACTS."

"I'm glad to hear it," she said in that tick-user's voice.

"And now, I'm afraid," he said with a sympathetic smile, "it's time for you to come down."

Alicia grimaced. This was the one part of the tick that she absolutely hated. Letting go of that sense of enhanced capability, that time-slowing near-godhood, was bad enough, but the tick's side effect made it even worse.

She sent the command to her pharmacope, reached for the basin sitting in the chair beside her, and sat back, waiting resignedly. The carefully measured dosage of the counteragent trickled into her bloodstream, and her senses and perceptions seemed to decelerate. It didn't happen as quickly as they had initially accelerated, but it still took only seconds. Seconds in which the rest of the universe seemed to speed up enormously even as her own movements and thoughts slowed to a crawl. The transition back into a world in which things moved-and she thought-at their accustomed rate left her with the feeling of suddenly diminished horizons and capabilities.

But she didn't have much time to reflect on that before the tearing spasms of nausea began.

It was just as violent this time as the first time. Dr. Hyde assured her, and she believed him, that there were no long-term deleterious effects to the use of tick. The only real danger that tick posed was dependency-addiction, really-and one of the mental qualities Major Androniko had been referring to in her interview with Alicia was a high resistance to addictive behaviors. But if there were no lasting side effects, the immediate short-term effect was enough to leave someone feeling as if her stomach had been turned inside out. Personally, Alicia wondered if the nausea had been deliberately enhanced as a means to make overindulgence in the tick even less attractive.

If it had been, no one was admitting it, she thought as she finished vomiting into the basin. Of course, she thought, wiping her mouth with the tissue Dr. Hyde courteously extended to her, if they have deliberately juiced up the nausea, they wouldn't be about to admit it, now would they?

"Done?" Hyde asked.

"Yes, Sir." She closed the cover on the basin before the odor could encourage her stomach to spasm again, then set it back down on the chair beside her with a shudder.

"That's … really unpleasant," she said after a moment.

"I see you're a woman of commendable understatement," Dr. Hyde replied with a smile. "Although, and you may not believe this, you actually have a much less severe reaction to it than quite a few of our people do."

"You're joking." She looked at him suspiciously, and he shook his head.

"Nope. You appear to have an unusual tolerance. I'm wondering if it has anything to do with the fact that your father is an Ujvбri." Alicia looked at him in surprise, and he shrugged. "We've been looking at tolerance factors where the tick is concerned for quite a long time," he said, "and there do seem to be certain specific genetic 'packages' which handle it better than others. For obvious reasons, we haven't had very many Ujvбris in the Cadre-in fact, I don't think we've ever had a full Ujvбri-so we don't have anything like reliable base data on response curves. I'm not really a geneticist, either, but from what I've been able to pick up about the Ujvбri mutation, that extreme stability apparently results at least in part from changes in the brain and blood chemistry of people who have it. And while you're scarcely a 'typical' Ujvбri-probably because of your mother's side of your genotype-you do express some of the chemical differentiation of the full-scale mutation. It's fascinating, really, if you don't mind my saying so."

"I don't mind," Alicia said, wondering even as she did whether or not she was being completely honest with either of them.

"Actually," Hyde continued, leaning back in his chair once more, "you're fairly fascinating in a lot of ways. By the nature of things, the Cadre attracts people who are way outside the norms, and every one of us is different. That's one reason we don't use the same sort of training techniques the Marine use-or, rather, why we go beyond those techniques. I suppose it would be more accurate to say that we specifically design and tailor each individual cadreman's training techniques to him. Because of our differences, that's the only way we can absolutely maximize the performance of every single member of the Cadre. I've seen other cadremen who could match or even exceed your physical dexterity, your stamina, your hand-eye coordination, your IQ. I don't know that I've seen very many of them who could match all of those qualities, but none of them are completely off the scale. Not for the Cadre, at least.

"But I've never seen anyone who matches your … for want of a better term, your levelheadedness. There's a basic stability at the core of your personality-probably a combination of your genetic inheritance and the way you were raised-that's really quite remarkable. It doesn't appear to get in the way of any of your other qualities, but it underpins all of them."

He paused, as if considering what he'd said, then shrugged.

"It's going to be interesting to see exactly how you slot into the Cadre's matrix. None of us fit in in exactly the same way, and I'm inclined to think that that's going to be especially true in your case."

Chapter Sixteen

"So, what do you think of your new brother?" Fiona DeVries asked with a smile.

"He's gorgeous." Alicia tried not to sound too dubious, and her mother laughed. "Uh, does he sleep all the time?" Alicia asked after a moment.

"I wish," her sister Clarissa said, rolling her eyes.

"Hey, it wasn't that long ago that you were doing all of the crying," Alicia said, pulling her sister's long braid teasingly. "I personally remember what a pain you were for the first couple of years, Shortstuff!"

"Oh, yeah?" Clarissa's gray eyes, as much like their father's as Alicia's were like their mother's, glinted up at her. There was laughter in them, and also just a touch of the semi-awe the twelve-year-old had experienced when her tall, older sister-magnificent in the green-on-green uniform of the Imperial Cadre, with the Emperor's own starship and harp insignia-walked through the concourse arrivals gate.

"Yeah," Alicia told her with a grin. "And, I'll bet you've at least got your own room. That was more than I ever had when you were the squirmy new kid on the block."

"Sure, sure. Back in the days when you had to walk to school, through the snow, in the broiling heat, uphill both ways, barefoot, carrying your clay tablet and a sharp stylus, and -"

"We get the point, Clarissa," Collum DeVries told his middle child, then put an arm around his wife and smiled down at the newest addition to the family. "And as for you, Alicia Dierdre DeVries, I'll have you know that he is gorgeous. I have it on the best of authority that that lobster-red coloration will fade quite soon. Before his fifteenth birthday, at the very latest."

His wife's free elbow smacked soundly into his ribs, and he "oofed" obediently.

"Seriously, Alley," Fiona said, her voice softer, "I'm really, really glad that you got leave in time for the christening. Knowing you were right here on Old Earth for the last four months has been wonderful, in a lot of ways, but it's been … frustrating, too."

"I'm sorry, Mom," Alicia said. "I wish I could have gotten home sooner. It's just -"

"I know exactly what it was, Alley." Fiona smiled. "I was raised on New Dublin, you know. And even if I hadn't been inclined to figure it out for myself, your grandfather would have made certain that I understood it wasn't your idea. And that the Cadre wasn't doing it to us on purpose. I'm not complaining, exactly. And the fact that you've got three whole glorious weeks before you have to report back is pretty fair compensation, I suppose. But," her smile wavered very slightly, "we've all missed you, you know."

"I do know that," Alicia said quietly, and looked into her father's eyes. "Grandpa told me that one of your reservations about my decision to enlist in the first place was the time with all of you that it would cost me. And I think that's probably the thing I truly do regret about it."

"Every decision has its price, Alley," he told her, returning her level gaze steadily. "If you'd chosen not to join the Marines, you would have regretted that, as well. It's not given to anyone to have no regrets; only to decide, through the choices we make, which regrets we'll have. And, as your mother says, at least you're home for the christening and at least we'll have you for the next three weeks. Both of those are well worth celebrating, so I've made reservations at Giuseppe's for this evening. Let's get your baggage and get you squared away."

"It's good to see you looking so fit," Collum DeVries said, his hands resting on his older daughter's shoulders as he held her at arms' length and looked deep into her eyes. They stood in the small, well-stocked library attached to his home office, and as she looked back at him, one eyebrow quirked, he smiled. "You'd be amazed at the stories making the rounds of office gossip at the Ministry where the Cadre is concerned, Alley. Mind you, I never believed any of the wilder ones, but where there's smoke -"

He shrugged, and she chuckled.

"I imagine the gossip dwells with loving attention to detail on all of the nonexistent superduper bits and pieces of hardware they tuck away inside us. Well, I'd like to give you all of the classified details on what we really do get, Daddy. But if I did, I'd have to kill you, and that would really upset Mom. Especially if I did it before supper."

"I see that the military has continued to sharpen your basic sense of good tactics," he said dryly.

"They've tried," she said. "They've tried."

"I know they have," he said, much more quietly. He looked into her eyes for another moment, then drew her close and hugged her tightly. Tall as she was, the top of her head came only to his chin, and she pressed her cheek into his chest as she'd done when she was much, much younger. And, as he had done when she'd been much, much younger, his hand very gently stroked her sunrise-colored hair.

She knew why her mother and her sister had carted her baggage-and Stevie-away in a quiet conspiracy to give her this time alone with her father, and she hugged him back.

Collum felt the strength of those arms, the supple muscularity of his daughter's hard physical training, and tried to parse his own emotions. It was an effort he'd made before, and deep inside, he felt he was no closer to success now than he'd been the very first time.

He eased the pressure of his own embrace and stood back, then waved at the facing chairs flanking the study's genuine picture window. She looked out the window at the soaring mega-towers of downtown Charlotte and smiled again, a bit crookedly, then obeyed the silent invitation. He took the facing chair, leaned back while it adjusted, and inhaled deeply.

"Your mother spoke for all three of us about how happy we are to finally see you home, however briefly," he told her finally. She cocked her head to one side, and he smiled. "That's not a complaint. Your grandfather and I really have discussed it quite a bit since you volunteered for the Cadre. He's been able to give me some idea about what you've been through in the past few months. And he tells me that the next three months are going to be even more interesting?"

"You could probably put it that way … if you were given to understatement," Alicia said dryly.

Her present leave was the breathing spell between her initial Cadre augmentation, familiarization, and basic training and ACTS-the dreaded Advanced Cadre Training School. That was where she would be issued her new Cadre powered armor and put through the Cadre's version of realistic combat training. More than one cadreman had washed out in ACTS, despite all of the rigorous preselection, evaluation, and training which had already gone into him. ACTS was designed to squeeze all of the functions of Camp Mackenzie, Recon School, and Raider School, plus the Cadre's own highly specialized requirements, into a three-month endurance contest guaranteed to make all of those other training experiences positively soporific by comparison.

"The good thing about what they're going to have me doing next," she told her father with a wry grin, "is that since that which does not kill me makes me stronger, I ought to be ready for the next All-Empire Marathon. Heck, I'm already halfway there!"

"You do look fit, Alley," he acknowledged. "And much though I would have resisted telling you this a few years back, the uniform looks good on you. Of course, I thought you looked good as a Marine, too."

"I know it isn't what you wanted me to do," she began, but he interrupted her.

"No," he said. "That's not really accurate."

She stopped, looking at him in surprise, and he snorted.

"Well, maybe it is, but usually when someone says 'it's not what you wanted' what they really mean is 'I went out and did something that pissed you off' or 'what I did must've been a disappointment to you.' Or something along those lines. And I was never angry with you, and I've never been 'disappointed' by the choices you've made."

"Really?" It was her turn to lean back, and she watched his expression carefully. "I never really felt you were angry with me, but I have to admit that there've been times I felt that you were … if not disappointed, at least unhappy that I chose the military."

"Alicia, you're my daughter. I love you very much, just as I love your sister and your brother. And because I do, I'd obviously be happier in a lot of ways if you were in a nice, sedentary occupation. One where the worst I'd have to worry about would be the occasional paper cut or spilled cup of coffee."

The last sentence came out along with a smile so droll that Alicia chuckled. Then his expression grew serious once more.

"Your grandfather and I had a lot of conversations about the same general topic. I'm not sure he ever fully understood my feelings on the matter, either, though he certainly tried. But the bottom line is that I've never had any patience at all with the attitude of a certain segment of the Core Worlds' so-called 'intellectual elite' where the military is concerned. I wish we didn't need a military. I wish there were no people out there willing to resort to violence to achieve their ends, and that there was no need for other people to use violence to stop them. I wish no one ever had to be killed, no cities ever needed to be turned into battlefields.

"But however much I might wish all of those things, I'm not going to get them. And that means we do need people to stand between civilization and the barbarians. We need people like your grandfather. And we need people like you.

"I may be monumentally unsuited to undertake that sort of job myself. Frankly, I'd be terrible at it, for a lot of reasons. And, to be completely honest, I'm not at all confident that I have the intestinal and moral fortitude to do the things that sort of job would require me to do. But that doesn't keep me from being monumentally grateful to the people who can-and do-undertake the task I never could. I would have vastly preferred for the daughter I love to have avoided paying the sort of price I know you've already paid. But it was a price you chose to pay, and however much I may worry about you, I'm also very, very proud of you."

"You are?" Alicia felt her smile tremble ever so slightly. "I never doubted that you loved me, and that you accepted my decision. But I was always afraid that -"

"That deep down inside somewhere, I still felt you'd 'thrown your life and your talents away' on a merely military career," he finished for her. Protest flickered in her eyes, and he shook his head. "I realize that's probably putting it a lot more strongly than you ever would have, but it's also probably reaching in the right direction. And I'm sure someone with your inherent ability could have earned a great deal more money in a civilian career. And, for that matter, that you would have excelled at any occupation you might have chosen. But the truth is, Alley, that you truly are your grandfather's granddaughter. The uniform you're wearing right this minute tells me just how well your superiors feel you've done in the career you've actually chosen. More importantly, I can see that you made the right choice. And God knows how badly the Empire needs people for whom it is the right choice."

She looked deeply into his eyes and realized he meant every word of it. Her father had never lied to her, but she'd always been secretly afraid that he'd … tailored his comments where her desire for a military career was concerned. Now she knew she'd done him a disservice.

"I'll be honest," she said quietly, "there are times I understand exactly why anyone would be worried by the thought of someone paying the 'price' of a military career. But the truth is, Daddy, this is what I was born to do. Sometimes it's … pretty horrible, but it's still what I was born to do."

"I know," he said, equally quietly, and shadows fluttered behind his gray eyes. "I used my Ministry access to review the internal reports about what happened on Gyangtse, Alley. I know why they gave you the Silver Star. I know exactly what you did to earn it."

"And that doesn't … bother you?"

"Of course it does. I saw the way it had changed you when you came home on leave between tours. I hadn't seen the reports, then, but I figured-accurately, as it turned out-that I had a pretty shrewd notion of what you'd done. It was a pretty damned brutal way for a seventeen-year-old to grow up, Alley. In fact, it was a lot rougher than anything I'd envisioned, even in my nightmares. But you survived it, and you were still you. And that-that was the proof that you'd been right. Or, at least, that you hadn't been wrong when you made your decision."

"And this?" She touched the harp and starship on the collar of her green uniform. "The Cadre?"

"It scares me," he said frankly. "What the Marine get dropped into is bad enough; what the Cadre sometimes has to deal with can make Gyangtse look like a pillow fight. Trust me, I know. And, to be honest, the Cadre's casualty rates are more than a little frightening. They're probably fantastically low, given the sorts of jobs the Cadre gets handed, but cadremen get sent out again and again. The price for being the Empire's elite is getting handed the hardest, most dangerous, costliest assignments, and I don't want to get what your grandfather calls 'The Letter,' even if now it's going to be coming from the Emperor himself, and not the Minister of War.

"But I honestly believe that it's the right challenge for you. As you say, this is what you were born to do. I'd have been much happier, in a lot of ways, if you'd been born to be a concert violinist, but you weren't. So if you're going to run around risking your life for the Empire, you might as well do it with the very best. After all, you're one of that 'very best' yourself, aren't you?"

"I'd like to think so," she said, her tone deliberately lighter, and he chuckled obediently.

"But that's probably enough deep and serious stuff," he said. "So let's talk about something a bit less weighty. For example, have you had a letter from your grandfather lately?"

"I got one about three weeks ago."

"Did he mention his retirement plans to you?"

"Retirement? Grandpa? I don't know if they'd even let him! He's practically an institution in the Corps, you know."

"He's also getting a bit long in the tooth," her father pointed out. "They're beginning to make quiet noises to him about how he's done his share, and how it's time to let someone else carry the load."

"Oh, I bet he just loved hearing that!"

"I believe I did overhear the occasional sulfurous comment," Collum allowed with a grin. "On the other hand, they do have a point. Oh, not that he's getting too old for it, but he has done his share, and a bit more. I think it's time he got the opportunity to settle down and enjoy some of the peace he's given up for so long."

"He won't last six months playing mahjongg or shuffleboard!"

"The mind boggles at the very thought of your grandfather shuffling mahjongg tiles." Collum shuddered. "And it wouldn't be him that didn't last six months; it would be everyone else in his vicinity. So that isn't what he's going to do."

"Well that's a relief! But I'm assuming that you're about to tell me just what it is he does plan on doing?"

"Actually, we're all planning on doing it with him."

"Doing what with him?"

"Tell me," her father said, "have you ever heard of Mathison's World?"

"No," she said, regarding him narrowly.

"I'm not surprised." He shrugged. "It's a very nice planet, though. Out near the frontier, beyond Franconia. The climate is on the cool side, especially during the winter, but it's got absolutely gorgeous scenery. More to the point, I happen to know that Out-World Affairs is planning to organize a new Crown Sector out that way. It's not going to happen overnight, but in five or six years, they're going to open Mathison to general colonization and begin offering incentive credits to get people out there."

"But isn't Franconia an awful long way from anywhere important?" Alicia asked, frowning as she tried to dredge up a better mental feel for the astrography involved.

"Oh, it certainly is, at the moment, at least!" Collum chuckled. "On the other hand, I grew up on a world a lot like Mathison, you know, and your grandfather isn't exactly going to be comfortable surrounded by cityfied real estate. And the system itself is strategically located. It's got not just one, but two asteroid belts, which is going to make it a natural site for heavy industry, eventually. And it's going to turn into a logical site for a major freight transshipment point, too, once the borders start expanding in the region. Speaking as a Foreign Ministry weenie, I'm surprised, in some ways, that that hasn't already happened. I understand the logic, more or less, but we really ought to have gotten a new Crown Sector organized out there years ago. Once we finally do, though, the Crown is going to put a lot of horsepower into the effort, and things are going to happen fast, compared to most colonization waves. Give it another fifteen or twenty years, and Mathison is going to be the sort of colony that has to beat off applicants with a stick. Which is why your mother and I have decided to put our names on the preliminary list."

Alicia blinked at him. She knew he'd grown up on a farming world, but somehow she'd always thought of him right here, on Old Earth-or else jaunting about the galaxy on the business of the Foreign Ministry. The one word she'd always associated with him most strongly was undoubtedly 'cosmopolitan,' and somehow it was a bit difficult to see him on some rustic, barely settled planet on the very fringe of the Empire.

But only for a few moments. Then she began to see how well it would truly suit him.

"Well, this is certainly sudden," she said, sparring for time while she adjusted to the entire concept.

"Not really." He shook his head. "Your mother and I have always planned on retiring someplace a bit less hectic than Old Earth. And while my own current profession isn't one that provides a lot of skills a colony world would find useful, I did grow up in a saddle, riding herd on megabison back on Silverado. And your mom can probably write her own ticket anywhere-colony worlds always need first-rate doctors. It's true that we hadn't planned on relocating this soon, but we've certainly accrued enough retirement credits we can convert to colonization credits. We've decided it makes sense to go ahead and use them while we're still young enough to build entirely new lives for ourselves, and given the probability of your grandfather's retirement-and the amount of lead time we're talking about-it makes sense to go ahead and get started."

"It sounds nice," she said, just a bit wistfully.

"Oh, believe me, it'll have its drawbacks." He chuckled. "It won't be like some of the horror stories from the original colonization waves, but it's going to be decades before Mathison has the sort of technical and industrial infrastructure most Incorporated Worlds take for granted. But the fact that it's a virgin planet, without any old League odds and ends, means we won't have any of the sort of liveliness places like Gyangtse have experienced. We may have to get used to riding horses for local transport for a few years, but at least it should be fairly peaceful. And of course," he smiled, "given the size of the spreads original colonizers get to claim, we ought to have plenty of dirt available when it comes time for you to retire, too."

Chapter Seventeen

"So, welcome to Guadalupe Inйz Juanita Melйndez y Redondo de Castillo Blasquita Capital City Spaceport," the corporal in Cadre uniform said with a smile.

"You're putting me on," Alicia said.

"Oh no I'm not," the other woman assured her. The nameplate on the breast of her undress uniform tunic read "Cateau, Tannis," and she was considerably shorter than Alicia. Then again, most women were. Cateau, however, also had the stockiness of a heavy-worlder. "In fact," she continued, "the entire planet's official name is Guadalupe Inйz Juanita Melйndez y Redondo de Castillo Blasquita. The original survey captain was some high muckety-muck from Granada who chose to name it for his mother."

"Then he must have held a gun on the rest of his crew while he did it," Alicia said tartly. "Nobody would use a mouthful like that every time they refer to a planet!"

"I don't know about guns," Cateau said with a shrug, "but you're right about it's being just a tad long for a comfortable name. The colonists never bothered to change the official name, but they did shorten it to 'Guadalupe' in common usage, and that's what pretty much everyone's called it since."

"Well, by all means, let's honor the tradition," Alicia said, extending her hand. "Alicia DeVries," she added.

"Tannis Cateau," the other woman said. She gripped the offered hand firmly but with a certain degree of care, confirming Alicia's suspicion that she'd been born and raised in a considerably heavier gravity than that of Old Earth's and had the muscles to go with it.

"Given the fact that you and I are the only people in this entire concourse in Cadre uniform, it leaps to my powerful intellect that someone sent you to collect me," Alicia said.

"I'm awed by your keen deductive ability," Cateau agreed with a grin. "Let's go get your gear."

"Lead the way, O local guide," Alicia said.

"Glad to see you, DeVries," Captain Madison Alwyn said as First Sergeant Pamela Yussuf walked Alicia into his office.

The commander of Charlie Company, Third Battalion, Second Regiment, Fifth Brigade, Imperial Cadre, was at least fifteen centimeters taller than Alicia, which made him very nearly two full meters in height. He was also very, very black. Alicia couldn't place his accent, but humanity had settled a great many worlds over the past seven or eight centuries, and most of them had evolved their own local accents and dialects. That same plethora of planetary habitats had preserved, and in some cases actually intensified, the human race's variations in skin pigmentation and other environment-controlled physical differentiation. It had added its own variations on the theme, too, of course, like Corporal Cateau's impressive physique. From Captain Alwyn's complexion, for example, it was obvious that his ancestors hadn't settled in the middle of a frozen tundra somewhere.

"Thank you, Sir," she replied as he stood behind his desk and reached out to shake her hand.

"I know you've had a long voyage out from Old Earth," Alwyn continued, "and I know you just finished ACTS. Bearing all of that in mind, I'd really like to give you a couple of nice, quiet weeks or so to get settled in."

He paused, still holding her hand, and she felt one of her eyebrows rise.

"But -?" she said after a moment or two.

"But I don't think that's what's going to happen," he replied with a tight smile. He released her hand, and sat back down behind his desk, looking back and forth between her and Yussuf.

"There's always a little bit of awkwardness when we start fitting a new peg into its neat little hole here in the Cadre," he continued. "It gets a bit more complicated sometimes because all of our people keep their rank when they transfer in. Given the sorts of people we tend to recruit, that means we get a lot of junior noncoms. The most junior cadreman you're going to meet is going to be a corporal, and E-5s are, frankly, a centicredit a dozen. So our squad organization tends to look a little strange. Instead of corporals running our fire teams, they're usually run by sergeants, with staff sergeants running the squads. Sometimes we've got staff sergeants running the fire teams and an SFC running the squad."

Alicia nodded. She'd already observed the situation he was describing, and it was probably inevitable. Nor, she was sure, did the Cadre's senior officers think it was a bad thing. The Cadre found itself handling all manner of peculiar assignments, including the occasional need to raise, train, and lead local military units. Having some extra rank seldom hurt in a situation like that. Of course, any cadreman or cadrewoman was officially one rank senior to his nominal counterparts in the regular military, which meant he or she was two ranks senior to anyone in a planetary militia. As someone who'd been a Marine less than nine months earlier, Alicia wasn't too sure she approved of that sort of rank inflation, but she understood the logic behind it.

Whatever doubts she might have cherished about that particular policy, however, she heartily approved of the Cadre's ironbound tradition that all Cadre officers had to have served in the Cadre's enlisted ranks before they were commissioned. There had actually been a handful of commissioned Marine officers or Fleet officers, some of them (including at least one Fleet officer who'd reached flag rank) who were graduates of their respective service academies, who had resigned their commissions in order to accept a sergeant's rank in the Cadre in order to satisfy that requirement. Alicia suspected that ex-officers like that got fast-tracked through the Cadre to get them back into commissioned status as quickly as possible, but they still had to spend their time in the trenches first.

"Like all Cadre units," Alwyn went on, "we're always understrength and under-establishment. Which means, in this case, that I have a squad which needs a leader, and you happen to be an E-6, which means, logically, that it should be yours. And, under normal circumstances, I'd simply have First Sergeant Yussuf march you over there and introduce you to your new squad. However, we've already received alert orders for an operation, probably to be mounted within the next seventy-two standard hours.

"I've read your dossier. I know you've been over the river and through the woods, and that you did damned well in that business on Gyangtse. And I've also read your training scores from Camp Cochrane and ACTS. I know you can do the job, and I have no qualms at all about your age." His lips quirked in a smile. "In your place, I'd probably wonder about that. Don't. You wouldn't be here unless everyone was convinced you could cut it, however young you happen to be.

"But I'm not prepared to destabilize my existing command relationships this close to mounting a full-scale, company-level op. My people have been actively prepping for it for almost two weeks now, and we actually started training for it over two months before that. It would be unfair to you to expect you to walk in cold and run an entire squad of people you don't know through an operation they've spent literally months training for and you haven't. You with me so far?"

"Yes, Sir." Alicia nodded.

"Good. Now, after this operation is over, once the dust's had a chance to settle a bit, I do have a squad with your name on it. At the moment, Master Sergeant Onassis is wearing two hats over in First Platoon. Lieutenant Strassmann has the platoon; Onassis is his platoon sergeant, and he's also running First Squad. He's good at his job, but he's a little stretched thin. What I'm thinking is that, from your record, you're too valuable to just leave sitting on the sidelines while this operation goes down, and First Squad is going to be yours as soon as the shooting's over, anyway. So, I'm going to go ahead and assign you to First Platoon, and to First Squad, but I'm not giving it to you yet. You're going to be functioning as Onassis' number two for the squad. He'll probably delegate quite a bit to you, but he's got the last word until he-or I-tell you different. Clear?"

"Yes, Sir," Alicia said again.

"Good. It's possible this operation is going to be scrubbed at the last minute-it already has been, twice. I don't think that's going to happen a third time, though. If it does, we'll go ahead and slot you into First Squad as its leader, with all the usual settling in time. The fact that I'm not handing it over to you all on your own immediately has nothing at all to do with my confidence in you. It's purely and simply a matter of timing."

"I understand, Sir."

"Which may or may not be exactly the same thing as saying you approve," Alwyn observed with a grin, then waved a hand before Alicia could respond.

"Doesn't matter. The main thing is that you do understand, and that we get the most out of you that we can if-when-this op goes down."

He gazed at her for another moment, then looked at Yussuf.

"Got someone to run her over to Onassis, Pam?"

"I hung onto Cateau."

"Good." He looked back at Alicia. "Corporal Cateau will get you over to First Platoon. She's in 'your' squad, anyway. I take it none of your gear got lost in transit?"

"No, Sir."

"In that case, as soon as you and Onassis get squared away with each other, run your armor over to the Morgue. Have the Armorer check it out, then get it down to the range and shoot it in for qualification."

"Yes, Sir."

"I'm sorry about the rush," Alwyn said, standing and reaching out his hand again. "We're all glad to see you, really. We always are glad to see another warm body. But if you're going to the party with us, we've got to get you in and up to speed ASAP. Welcome aboard, Staff Sergeant."

"Thank you, Sir. I'll try not to hold up the festivities."

"So that's the plan," Master Sergeant Adolfo Onassis said nine hours later. He stood back from the display table, arms folded, and looked at Alicia. "What do you think?" he asked.

Alicia took her time about responding. There wasn't anything particularly truculent about the short, stocky, swarthy master sergeant's attitude, but there was an edge of … challenge. Or, no, not that, precisely. It was more a matter of testing, she thought.

She studied the terrain displayed on the table. That part, she thought, was fairly straightforward, even simple. But as Clausewitz had said, in war, even simple things were difficult, and it had the potential to turn into a massive cluster fuck. Which, she acknowledged, gave added point to Captain Alwyn's earlier explanation. But, if she was going to be honest with herself, it was the political ramifications which concerned her most.

Of course, the political ramifications aren't exactly the thing I'm supposed to be worrying about, she thought. I suppose I'm just too much my father's daughter to leave it alone. Or maybe the trick Jongdomba tried to pull on Gyangtse is still causing me to look at shadows.

That last thought was almost amusing, in away, since Guadalupe was only about four weeks' flight from Gyangtse.

Might almost say it's my old stomping grounds, she told herself wryly.

"I think, given the constraints, it looks pretty good," she said aloud after several moments. "I guess I'm most worried about the approach. And, after that, about target identification."

"The approach is the Fleet's problem, not ours," Onassis said. "Of course, having said that, I have to admit I've spent the odd sleepless night worrying about it myself." He showed his teeth in a tight grin. "And target identification is always a bitch on an op like this one. But they don't give us the assignments because they're easy."

Alicia nodded soberly and crossed her own arms with a thoughtful frown.

The area shown on the display table was a mountain valley on the planet of Chengchou. Like Gyangtse, Chengchou was a former League World; unlike Gyangtse, Chengchou was not claimed by the Empire. It was one of the Rogue World buffer systems between the Empire and the Rishathan Sphere. It lay on the Empire's side of the nominally independent zone between the two star nations, and it was one of four equally independent star systems currently involved in what were euphemistically called "multilateral collective security negotiations" with the Foreign Ministry.

What that really meant was that the star systems in question were (in the Empire's opinion, at least) being used as sanctuaries and staging bases by various "liberation organizations" dedicated to lifting the "imperial yoke from the shoulders of our enslaved brothers and sisters." The Empire didn't much care for that, and it was in the process of doing something about it.

In the eyes of the Empire, the "liberation organizations" were terrorists, pure and simple, and as far as Alicia was concerned, the label was accurate. Given the tremendous disparity between the military power of the Empire and their own strictly limited resources, the liberation organizations could never have fought a conventional war, whatever they might have preferred. They were stuck with a classic case of asymmetric warfare, and as usually happened in cases like that, the weaker side operated outside the approved "rules of war" established star nations tried to enforce. That much was as inevitable as anything in war could possibly be. But so far as Alicia could tell, the liberation organizations were perfectly happy with the terrorist strategies their lack of resources imposed. In fact, they seemed to like them, and they were never shy about embracing the classic terrorist tactic of the deliberate atrocity.

In the eyes of the citizens of many Rogue Worlds, however, and a not insignificant portion of the populations of various Crown Worlds (like Gyangtse, for example), they were patriots. Worse, they were convenient tools for people who wished the Empire ill. The Rish, for example, were notoriously fond of covertly funding and supporting them, and so were some of the more powerful Rogue Worlds.

Any Rogue World had to be very cautious about supporting organizations the Empire had labeled "terrorist," given the long-standing imperial policy of treating its enemies' friends as enemies in their own right. A terrorist act was an act of war, as far as the Empire was concerned, and anyone who supported an act of war was equally guilty of that act in the Empire's eyes. Which was why no Rogue World could afford to be definitely linked to a terrorist attack on imperial citizens or territory-not unless it liked entertaining visits from Fleet dreadnoughts and large numbers of extraordinarily unpleasant Marines.

But as long as its tracks could be safely hidden (or at least plausibly denied), many an independent Rogue World, worried by the rate of the Empire's expansion in its direction, had found the notion of slowing that expansion by supporting any "liberation movements" in the vicinity quite attractive. Which didn't even consider the instances in which that Rogue World's government, like its citizens, might genuinely approve of the liberation effort.

At the moment, Chengchou and its neighbors-Cotterpin, Onyx, and Hwan-ku-had come under increasing pressure from the Empire to rein in the various armed groups operating out of their territory and the other minor star systems in the region. The four of them, under Onyx's general leadership, had been less than enthralled by the process. It was pretty clear that they deeply resented the Empire's intrusion into their vicinity, but their governments had to know that eventually they were going to have to give in to imperial demands for action. If they didn't, then, sooner or later, the Empire would take unilateral action. They knew that, too, and it only made them even more resentful.

Negotiations had already dragged out longer than Alicia would have expected. It was obvious to her that the imperial negotiators had tried to keep the locals' resentment from escalating still further. Unfortunately, Onyx's foreign minister, as the spokesman for the Group of Four (as the four Rogue Worlds in question had been labeled), had taken the position that there was no proof that any organization proscribed by the Empire was operating from their territories. The Empire, he argued, was being grossly unfair in requiring them to assume responsibility for the half-dozen or so other, smaller Rogue World polities in their sector. While he was prepared to concede that some of those Rogue Worlds might be being used as bases, it was unreasonable to expect the Group of Four to exert some sort of interstellar police authority over them. Not only would their neighbors understandably resent such high-handed intrusiveness on their part, but the expense would not be trivial. Nor was it reasonable to hold them responsible for someone else's misdeeds.

"Is this 'Group of Four' really as stubborn as they seem?" Alicia asked after a moment.

"Who can say?" Onassis shrugged. "They could just be talking a good fight on the theory that as long as they're talking, they don't have to do anything else. But they can't be very happy about the thought of the Fleet patrolling their sector. Of course," he smiled without humor, "we aren't very happy about that particular thought, either. The Fleet's like us in at least one respect-it never have enough units to be everywhere it really needs to be. It'd be a lot more convenient for us if the Group of Four would just handle this. Nobody expects to them to completely cut off all the terrorist organizations operating out here. We'd love it if they did, but that would be pretty unrealistic. All we want is to make sure that they're out of the terrorist-supporting business and that they at least make it a little difficult for the independent systems they claim are actually acting as sanctuaries."

"But if they do that, then their own voters are going to regard it as collaboration with the Empire," Alicia said sourly, and Onassis nodded.

"You've got it. And that overlooks the fact that they are acting as sanctuaries. They've cut back since the negotiations really started turning up the heat, but our intel's pretty good. This -" he indicated the display table between them "-is the hardest data we've got, but there's fairly conclusive evidence that Cotterpin and Hwan-ku are still providing very quiet sanctuary to at least three separate 'liberation groups,' as well."

"What about Onyx? Is it possible that Onyx really believes that the others aren't supporting the terrorists? Actively, I mean," she added, when Onassis looked at her sharply. "I'm sure Onyx knows about their history, but you say they've been cutting back. Is it possible that they're telling Onyx they've cut back more than they actually have, and that Onyx doesn't know any better?"

"Anything is possible," Onassis conceded. "Likely? Not very. That's exactly what their official position's been, both on and off the record, for the last standard year and half, but I don't see any way Onyx could be buying it. Not that that's prevented Foreign Minister Mueller from lying to us about it with a straight face. Which is the entire point of our little soirйe on Chengchou, of course."

"Of course." Alicia nodded. If the Cadre took down a terrorist base camp on the territory of one of the Group of Four's charter members-and documented the fact-it would be impossible for Onyx's foreign minister to continue to argue that none of them were supporting those nasty old terrorists.

And, she thought grimly, it will also serve as a pointed warning of what can happen if they don't get on the stick and do something about the terrorists themselves.

"The big problem," Onassis admitted, "is that our intelligence has a limited lifespan. This -" he tapped the display table again "-comes and goes. Most of the time, it's just another mountain valley with a couple of villages in it. Then the camp facilities here and here," he indicated two points on the display, near the largest of the valley's permanent towns, "get spun up. They run about a two-month training cycle each time, then shut down again until the next batch comes along, and they activate on a pretty irregular basis. It looks to us like the Freedom Alliance is providing the training cadres, and they're cycling a lot of people through these camps-more than any single 'liberation' group ought to need-but apparently it's strictly an as-needed sort of process. So if we're going to do anything about it, we have to do it during one of the active phases. And we've got to get our people in and on the ground before the people we want simply run away and fade into the general population."

"And if the Chengchou government is really actively conniving with these people, then it's going to warn them we're coming … if it knows we are," Alicia murmured.

"Exactly."

Alicia nodded, then looked back up at Onassis.

"I can see why Captain Alwyn isn't too happy about the thought of integrating a brand new squad leader into this kind of operation on such short notice," she said.

"Glad to hear that." Onassis gave her the first unrestrained smile she'd seen from him. "Since you're just joining the family this afternoon, as it were, though, I'm giving you an experienced guide for your wing." Alicia raised a quizzical eyebrow, and he chuckled. "You've met her-Cateau. She's the squad medic, among other things, but she knows her way around the sharp end just fine, she's thoroughly briefed in, and she's been through all of the previous rehearsals."

Alicia cocked her head to one side, considering, then nodded again in approval. By the standards of the Corps, Cadre units were considerably over strength. Whereas a Marine squad consisted of thirteen people arranged into two fire teams, a Cadre squad consisted of eighteen people, and it was divided into nine two-person fire teams. The members of each team were assigned permanently to one another and known as "wingmen," or, more commonly, simply as "wings." Each squad was divided into a Alpha and a Bravo section, each composed of four pairs of wings, while the squad leader and his or her wing formed the ninth pair.

Alicia, having been thoroughly grounded in Marine tactical doctrine had nourished doubts at first about the soundness of Cadre practice. But that was at least partly because she hadn't realized just how flexible Cadre training and equipment actually was. Whereas all Marine squads, from straight line units, to Recon, to Raiders, were built around a heavy fire element supported by a rifle-armed maneuver element, all Cadre troopers were expected to be equally proficient with both heavy weapons and their individual rifles. In addition, the much more lavishly equipped Cadre routinely configured its units for specific missions. For the planned incursion into Chengchou, for example, Charlie Company would be operating in "light" configuration-almost all of its troopers would be armed with rifles, with only a single pair of wings in each squad carrying heavy weapons. Had they anticipated heavier resistance, they might have configured their weapons loads for heavy assault mode, in which case there would have been only a single pair of rifle-armed wings in each squad, while all of the other wings carried plasma rifles, calliopes, or heavy grenade or HVW launchers.

It was a far more flexible posture, which was made possible only by the combination of Cadre training and the lavish funding available to it. It was also one about which Alicia no longer cherished any doubts at all, and from what she'd seen so far of Tannis Cateau, she was inclined to believe that Onassis had made an excellent choice for her own wing.

"How comfortable are we with the intelligence on this one?" she asked, as thoughts of weapons configurations flipped through the back of her mind. Onassis looked at her, and she shrugged. "We're going in mighty light," she pointed out. "Assuming that Intelligence's estimate of the op force is accurate, that ought to be plenty. But if they haven't gotten their sums right, it could get a little dicey without more heavy stuff along."

"Fair enough question," Onassis said after a moment. "The best answer I can give you is that according to Captain Watts-he's the Wasp 'spook' Battalion's attached to Charlie Company for this one-this is alpha-grade material. I don't think he's prepared to grade it Alpha-One, but he's obviously pretty damned comfortable with it, and he's got a good rep for knowing his stuff. We managed to confirm most of our intel assumptions from other sources following the last scrub, too." It was his turn to shrug. "No intelligence is ever perfect, but I think it'll hold up. And if it doesn't," he grinned suddenly, "at least the range scores you turned in this afternoon indicate you'll be an asset when it all hits the fan. Assuming, of course, that we actually get the go order this time, after all."

"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. That 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 Paбl Бgoston'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 Paбl'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 Paбl's people came down in the middle of a frigging swamp."

Alicia felt her eyebrows rise. Murphy-and not a member of the imperial house-could be counted upon to put in an appearance on any operation. A swamp landing, even for drop commandos with Cadre armor, was guaranteed to screw up any tactical plan. Combat armor didn't exactly touch down lightly, and swamp mud made an efficient substitute for glue if you hit hard enough and drove deep enough. But how in heaven's name had the pre-attack intelligence managed to miss a little thing like a swamp smack in the middle of their planned axis of attack?

"It wasn't there the last time we looked," Onassis continued. "Remember that pond just downstream from Beech Tree One? Seems like the dam must have broken, or else they decided to drain the damned thing, and all that nice, flat dry ground north of our objective turns out to be a floodplain."

Alicia grimaced.

"Anyway," Onassis said, "that means Third Platoon's not going to be in position to back us up on Beech Tree Two for at least another twenty minutes, and we can't wait that long without letting the birds we want out of the net. So your assignment just changed. Instead of covering Gilroy's flank, you're going to have to sub for Paбl's people and come in at Alpha-Five."

A bright icon danced in her HUD, indicating the point at which a dry stream bed-and at least it's still dry, she thought wryly-intersected the perimeter of the training facility codenamed Beech Tree Two.

"Now," Onassis went on, his voice deepening just a bit, "I'm going to be a bit busier than anyone counted on, given this little change in plans. In fact, I'm not going to be able to go in with you the way we'd planned. What I'm saying is that the squad is yours after all. Understood?"

"Understood," she said, and she was pleased at how level her voice sounded. And she also sounded just a little bit distracted, she felt pretty sure, because her mind was already busy, grappling with the suddenly altered situation with all of the tick's flashing speed.

"One last thing." Onassis' voice was a bit flatter. "Lieutenant Masolle has positively confirmed the presence of children and apparent noncombatants in Beech Tree One. Rules of engagement Delta are in effect as of now."

"I copy ROE Delta," Alicia confirmed in an equally flat voice.

"In that case, good hunting," Onassis said with what she privately suspected was a much more cheerful confidence than he actually felt. "Clear."

The icon which had indicated they were speaking privately disappeared, and Alicia's mental command shifted her com into the dedicated First Squad net.

"All Winchesters," she said, "Winchester-One. There's been a change of plans, people. Lieutenant Paбl's people aren't going to make the opening on time, so we're going to have to do a little improvisation. Winchester-Alpha-Seven, hold where you are," she continued, studying the icons of her squad's personnel as they glowed on the detailed topographical projection.

Corporal Michael Doorn's icon stopped moving instantly, and the icon of his wingman, Corporal Йdouard Bonrepaux, took only two more jumps before it, too, froze, perfectly positioned to cover Doorn's flank.

"All other Alphas will form on this line," Alicia went on, even as she changed her own course, with Cateau bounding along in perfect formation through the rugged terrain. She used her synth-link to draw a green line across the HUD's terrain map. "Alpha-Seven will anchor one end; Alpha-Three will anchor the other. Alpha One, I want you in the center to coordinate Alpha's advance to contact."

"Winchester-One, Winchester-Alpha-One copies," Sergeant McGwire acknowledged. He and his wing, Corporal Chul Byung Cha, went bounding towards the indicated position. Winchester-Alpha-Three, Corporal Erik Andersson, didn't respond verbally, but his icon blinked in the two-two-one pattern which indicated that he understood, and he and Corporal Vartkes Kalachian, his wing, went slashing towards their own assigned positions.

"Winchester-Bravo-One," Alicia continued, turning her attention to Sergeant Abernathy's team. "We're not going to be able to leave a proper reserve-we were the Platoon's reserve-but I want you and your people in overwatch for the initial break-in. Put yourself and your heavy wing right here." She dropped another icon onto the tactical map, directly on top of a small hill just to the east of the point at which the stream bed crossed Beech Tree Two's perimeter. It was high enough to give Abernathy a clear direct line of sight along the streambed and well into the camp itself.

"Use your own judgment placing the rest of your wings," she told him. "I need you watching Alpha's back until they're in. Then I want you to come in along roughly this axis here."

She drew another line, this one with a bright arrowhead at one end. It crossed the perimeter east of the streambed and headed south, directly towards a block of barracks designated Rathole One on the map. Under the original ops plan, one of Lieutenant Paбl's squads had been tasked to deal with Rathole One. Onassis hadn't specifically told her that those barracks were now her responsibility, but he had told her she would be "subbing" for Paбl's missing squad. Besides, the streambed at Alpha-Five was the closest entry point for any of First Platoon's units.

"Remember," she said, blessing the hours she'd spent studying the ops plan she'd never had the opportunity to rehearse with the people who had suddenly become hers, "Rathole One is where their permanent training cadre bunks and messes. If anybody's going to have her head out of her ass by the time we go in, it's going to be someone over there. So watch yourselves. And if we get too much fire out of Rathole, go to ground somewhere along here -" a bright amber line in the HUD circled a rocky ravine which ought to provide pretty fair cover against fire from the barracks "- and wait instead of wading straight in. I'll bring Alpha in to support you ASAP."

"Bravo-One copies, Winchester-One," Abernathy replied, and she was pleased by his tone. His voice was clipped, businesslike and focused, but she heard the confidence in it. Confidence in her, in the evidence that the newbie giving his people orders really had done her homework.

"All Winchesters," she said, hoping that she wasn't about to knock that confidence on its head, "there's one more thing. Tiger-One has confirmed the presence of children and noncombatants-repeat, children and noncombatants-in Beech Tree One. Rules of engagement Delta are in effect. Confirm copy."

There was an instant of silence, despite the tick, as her people adjusted to that unpleasant news. Then the cascade of confirming responses came back to her, and she nodded. None of them sounded particularly happy, but that was fair enough-she wasn't particularly happy about it herself.

"All right, Winchesters," she said after the final confirmation had come in, "let's get to it."

It took less than five minutes for First Squad to shift to its hastily redesignated jumpoff point. To Alicia, riding the tick, it seemed more like five hours, but she knew better, and she made herself stifle her impatience. That was one of the major drawbacks to the tick; things frequently seemed to be taking far too long, and one had to remind oneself that it didn't look that way to the rest of the universe.

"Rifle-Two, Winchester-One," she reported finally, "Winchester is in position at Alpha-Five."

"Winchester-One," Onassis came back almost instantly. "Copy. Hold position for Weatherby."

"Rifle-Two, Winchester-One copies, hold position until Weatherby is in place."

She settled back very slightly, allowing herself a modest gleam of satisfaction. First Squad had had farther to go than either of First Platoon's other squads, but it had gotten there before Staff Sergeant Gilroy's people had reached their new jumpoff point.

She spent the brief delay scrutinizing the objective.

Beech Tree Two was an untidy gaggle of structures clustered around an unkempt looking "parade ground." Most of them had been identified by function, with a fair degree of confidence, on her HUD. One or two were question marks, and one of those-designated B13 on the tac overlay-lay squarely in front of First Squad.

There was movement on the camp's grounds. It had been slow to start, she thought, given the fact that the attack on Beech Tree One, which had been supposed to go in simultaneously with the attack on Beech Tree Two, had actually gone in almost eight minutes ago. She hated the thought of giving the camp's inhabitants any additional time to get themselves organized, start to cope with the paralyzing surprise of a totally unanticipated attack out of the darkness, but that wasn't up to her. Besides, Lieutenant Strassmann-or, more likely, Captain Alwyn-was probably right. Taking the time to get themselves properly reorganized after such a major change in plans was almost certainly worth more to Charlie Company than a handful more of minutes could be to the people inside that camp.

"All Rifles," Lieutenant Strassmann's voice said suddenly, "Rifle-One. Go. I say again, go!"

"Winchester-Alpha-One, Winchester-One," Alicia said sharply. "Go!"

Corporal Vartkes Kalachian, call sign Winchester-Alpha-Five, was the first member of Alicia's squad to actually cross the wire around Beech Tree Two, and he did it with panache.

His armor's sensors had probed the ground between his jumpoff position and the camp's perimeter, and its sonar-imaging capability had picked up the "low signature" anti-personnel landmines which had been planted to protect the perimeter wire. It was unlikely that any less sophisticated sensors would have been able to "see" the mines, and Alicia had frowned as their icons had appeared on her HUD, cross-relayed from Kalachian's sonar. She'd wondered, as she passed the warning up the line to Onassis, where a bunch of terrorists had gotten their hands on them. The mines' composite cases contained no metallic alloys, and instead of the low-tech, chemical bursting charge she would have expected to find protecting a facility like this one, they used small, powerful, superconductor capacitor-fed gravitic fields. Which meant that there was nothing to alert chemical "sniffers" to the presence of their nonexistent explosive compounds.

Kalachian, however, knew exactly what was out there now, and he hit his jump gear hard. The sudden surge lifted him over the minefield and across the razor wire, and his armored body tucked and rolled neatly as he hit the ground inside the camp. Clearing the mines and the wire in a single jump had required a higher trajectory than The Book really liked. Had anyone been waiting for him at the moment that he topped out, he would have made an excellent target. But no one was waiting. Despite how long it had seemed take, to Alicia's tick-accelerated thoughts, for the platoon to get into position, and despite how the tick translated Kalachian's eighty kilometer-per-hour jump into floating slow motion, the denizens of Beech Tree Two were still trying to figure out what was happening when he touched down.

The rest of Alpha Team-with Alicia and Tannis Cateau attached-was on his heels. Alicia and Cateau were actually the last wing in. Alicia's job was to control and coordinate, to impose order, not to get bogged down in the fighting itself unless she absolutely had to. And Cateau's job was to keep any ill-intentioned individuals off Alicia's back while she went about managing the squad.

They might have gotten across the wire without taking any defensive fire, but that wasn't the same thing as crossing it without getting any response. Alicia's armor picked up the infrared sensors guarding the camp's wire as she broke one of the beams, and once again the sophistication of the defenses surprised her. The camp's powerful perimeter lights must have been directly coupled to the sensor net, because they switched on even as her people hit the ground.

The multi-million candlepower lights glared out of the darkness like suddenly ignited suns. There was no warning-only that instantaneous, stunning burst of brilliance, directly into any attackers' eyes, with what ought to have been equally instant, blinding disorientation. But Alicia's people were the Cadre. The enhancement of their vision let them decrease its sensitivity, as well as increase it, and they'd spent endless hours mastering their augmented capabilities. More than that, every one of them was riding the tick, and their vision compensated almost as quickly as the lights came on.

There was still a brief, fleeting instant before they adjusted, but that didn't matter, either. Every one of them was synth-link-capable, and every one of them was literally fused with his or her armor's systems. And those sensor systems didn't rely on anything as easily befuddled as the human optic nerve.

Alicia's rifle snapped into firing position. It wasn't like her Marine-issue M-97 had been. Instead, it was an integral part of her armor, mounted in a power-driven housing that brought its muzzle to bear on the nearest of the camp's spotlights with viperish speed. There was no trigger, no sights. A crosshair simply appeared, floating in her field of vision, and she moved it by thinking it into position. The "rifle" followed the crosshair, and her armor's onboard computers evaluated temperature, air pressure, local gravity, windage, and the ballistic performance of the three-millimeter caseless ammunition in the tank behind her shoulders and automatically corrected the crosshair for exact point of impact at any effective range. It happened with blinding speed, and yet the crosshair seemed to float slowly, so slowly to someone riding the tick, towards her chosen target. But then it was where she wanted it, and another flickering thought squeezed the "trigger."

A crisp, precise three-round burst ripped from her rifle. The needle-slim penetrators, formed of an artificial alloy considerably heavier and harder than tungsten, screamed across the sixty meters between her and her target at well over fifteen hundred meters per second. At that velocity they would have slammed through the breastplate of Marine powered armor like white-hot awls through butter. The unarmored spotlight offered exactly zero resistance to their passage, and its brilliance died in a spectacular flash.

Every single one of the other lights in their immediate front died within the space of less than two seconds as the even-numbered half of each wing of cadremen opened fire with the same blinding speed and deadly accuracy. The odd-numbered half of each pair continued forward, slicing straight towards their objectives.

Alicia's rifle muzzle snapped back up into "safe" position as Cateau loped past her. The corporal was no longer riding her jump gear; she wanted her feet firmly on the ground if she needed her own rifle.

"Alpha-Two, one o'clock!" Alicia snapped as six or seven figures suddenly appeared around the side of one of the barracks. She detected weapons on all of them, and they were headed directly towards Corporal Chul.

Chul didn't respond. She probably hadn't needed Alicia's warning, either, but that was all right with Alicia. She'd rather be considered a worrier than take any chances. Nor was Chul Byung Cha in any mood to take chances. Her own rifle swept into firing position and spat perfectly-targeted death. Three of the camp's defenders were dead before the others even realized they were under fire. Two more died before Sergeant McGwire, Chul's wingman, could target them. The last pair died almost simultaneously, even as they tried desperately to fling themselves flat on the ground, as McGwire and Chul switched their attention to them.

"Winchester-One has Bravo-One-Three," she announced, changing course slightly to make for the building whose function the Intelligence weenies had been unable to determine. That had been Chul's and McGwire's objective before they were delayed to deal with the counterattack, or whatever that had been. She probably should have left it to someone else, Alicia reflected, remembering her own earlier thoughts. But she and Cateau were closest to it, and she wanted the rest of the Alpha wings moving forward, not slowing down and diverting to clear a building whose purpose they didn't even know.

Cateau, she noticed, didn't say a word. Which wasn't necessarily the same thing as approving of her decision, of course.

There were more figures moving out there now, and it was obvious to Alicia that the camp's inhabitants still didn't realize what was happening. Those figures were moving towards her people, reacting defensively-possibly even instinctively, without conscious thought-and they wouldn't have been doing that if they realized they faced the Cadre. Heading away from the Cadre, as rapidly as possible, would have been a vastly more prudent response.

On the other hand, panicked people did stupid things-especially inexperienced panicked people.

"All Winchesters, remember the rules of engagement!" she said sharply. It was probably totally unnecessary, but it was also her responsibility, and she continued to move forward, heading for the building designated Bravo-One-Three.

She was only about thirty meters from it when the door slammed open and a figure stumbled out of it.

The crosshair reappeared in Alicia's HUD, floating slowly across it as her rifle flashed into firing position with blinding speed. It settled on the figure's chest, but she didn't fire. As she'd just reminded all of her people, ROE Delta was in effect, and she held her fire while her sensors probed the target.

Male, adult, height one hundred and seventy-one centimeters, they reported. No shirt, despite the cool night air. A red outline highlighted the short, broad bladed knife in the sheath on his right hip, but there was no sign of a rifle or pistol.

She swore silently to herself and let her rifle swing away from him. The odds were overwhelming, whether he carried a firearm or not, that he was one of the terrorists they'd come to kill or capture. But at this particular moment, he didn't have any weapon on his person which could threaten her or any of her people, and the rules of engagement were clear in that case.

But if she couldn't kill him, that didn't mean she necessarily had to be gentle. Nor was she about to take any chances that he might find himself a proper weapon after her back was turned.

"Mine!" she snapped over her dedicated link to Cateau, and charged him.

Her hapless target probably never saw her coming at all. The glare of the surviving perimeter lights and the blinding, stroboscopic eruptions of muzzle flashes-including the blind fire some of the camp's defenders were beginning to hose uselessly in every conceivable direction-had to be playing havoc with his vision. And despite how long it seemed to Alicia that the attack had been underway, little more than fifteen seconds had actually elapsed since Lieutenant Strassmann's order to move in. His confusion must have been as close to total as it was possible to come, and the chameleon surface of Alicia's armor would have made her all but invisible even without the blinding effect of so much gunfire.

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 Йdouard 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 the 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 Paбl 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, Paбl , 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 Paбl 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.

"Uncle Arthur?" he invited.

"Thank you, Madison," Keita rumbled in his deep, thick-chested voice, and Alicia felt herself leaning towards him. Calling Alwyn by his first name wasn't the sort of affectation it might have been in another officer of Keita's seniority-assuming that there'd been another Cadre officer of his seniority, that was.

General Arbatov might be the Cadre's official commanding officer, but Sir Arthur Keita was the Cadre. He'd joined it over seventy years before, and he was well past the mandatory retirement age. An astonishing number of the Cadre's field grade officers had served under him at one time or another, and he'd displayed an uncanny talent for nurturing and training outstanding unit COs.

Not only that, but it was common knowledge that he'd refused promotion above his present rank not just once, but several times. And he'd gotten away with that because he was, quite simply, the man Seamus II and, before him, Empress Maire, had absolutely and completely trusted. He was the Cadre's field commander, and he would be that until the day he died or he chose to give it up.

People like Alwyn called him "Uncle Arthur" for a reason, and he enjoyed the same fierce loyalty from the men and women under his command as he himself gave to his Emperor.

"As I'm sure all of you have already figured out," he continued now, "we have what we refer to as a 'situation.' " He smiled thinly. "In this instance, it has the potential to be particularly ugly, and I'm afraid that it's going to fall squarely into Charlie Company's hands. I was on my way to Tamerlane, with a stopover on Gyangtse, when the balloon went up. Given the nature of the problem, Old Earth starcommed orders for me to drop everything else and personally attend to our little problem."

He paused, as if to give all of them a moment to absorb that much. Then he folded his hands on the conference table in front of him and leaned slightly forward over them.

"Five weeks ago, HMS Star Roamer, a transport chartered by the Ministry of Out-Worlds, departed the Raintree System for Old Earth. As some of you may be aware, if you've been following the news over the last several months, Raintree's voters have just approved the system's Incorporation referendum. Star Roamer was assigned to transport Raintree's official Incorporation delegation to Old Earth to lay the results of the referendum before the Senate and formally request Incorporation from His Majesty.

"Unfortunately, there was a slight hitch. While Star Roamer was in the process of accelerating towards supralight, she was hijacked."

Alicia felt herself twitch in her chair. Every so often, someone managed to hijack a merchant ship. In fact, one of the more successful pirate tactics was to put a clutch of hijackers aboard a ship under the guise of legitimate passengers. But despite a handful of attempts over the centuries, no one had ever managed to hijack a personnel transport with such a high-profile official passenger list.

"I'm sure there's going to be an exhaustive inquiry into exactly how the hijackers managed to get aboard in the first place," Keita said flatly. "All we know so far is that they managed it somehow. The ship diverted from its planned flight profile just before it wormholed out of Raintree, so the local authorities knew something was up and suspected what it might be. They immediately contacted Old Earth, and that was the point at which General Arbatov starcommed my new instructions to Gyangtse to await my arrival. At the time, that was all anyone knew, however, and it stared that way until Star Roamer turned up in the Fuller System two weeks ago."

Well, Alicia thought, that explains why he's talking to us about it.

Fuller was less than a week and a half's supralight flight from Guadalupe, squarely in Charlie Company's area of responsibility. The Cadre's small size-there were only ten Cadre brigades in the entire Empire-meant that the largest tactical unit it normally fielded was a company. Third Battalion was Charlie Company's "parent" primarily for administrative and support purposes, but the battalion's three companies were deployed into three entirely different star systems, each strategically located to cover as many potential trouble spots as possible. The Marines would no doubt have used entire battalions, as they had on Gyangtse, but the Cadre had embraced a slight paraphrase of an ancient pre-space law-enforcement organization. Its philosophy was "One crisis, one company." Alicia could have counted the number of times that the Cadre had found it necessary to deploy entire battalions on her fingers and toes … without taking off both boots.

"Excuse me, Uncle Arthur," Lieutenant Masolle said, "but why in the world would somebody hijack an Out-World transport and then go to someplace like Fuller with it?"

"I'll let Captain Watts explain what we think is going on in a moment, Lieutenant," Keita said. "Let me just finish setting the general framework first."

"Of course, Sir." Masolle sat back, but her brow was furrowed with what were almost certainly the same questions flowing through Alicia's mind.

"The short version is that the hijackers, when they arrived in Fuller, identified themselves as members of the Freedom Alliance and announced that they intend to hold the Raintree delegation, and Star Roamer's ship's company, as hostages until 'our legitimate demands for the freedom and liberation of our brothers and sisters in bondage are met by the imperialistic warmongers of the so-called Terran Empire.' "

Keita's voice was totally expressionless for his last sentence, but Alicia's heart sank. Like all of Charlie Company's personnel, she was familiar with the intelligence briefings on the Freedom Alliance.

Philosophically and conceptually, the umbrella organization for at least a half-dozen so-called planetary liberation organizations had a lot in common with the hapless wannabe terrorists the company had picked off in the Chengchou raid. Indeed, post-strike intel had pretty throughly confirmed that some of the Chengchou training cadre had, indeed, been FALA. Whether that was actually true or not, the Alliance was probably the most proficient-and dangerous-batch of terrorists currently operating against the Empire. Although imperial Intelligence had penetrated one or two of the Freedom Alliance's member organizations, the parent organization was a much tougher proposition. Its members were tightly disciplined and obviously security conscious, and they were also fiendishly well-financed. All indications were that most of its financial support came from a well organized fundraising net operating on at least a couple of dozen independent Rogue Worlds, and it also clearly had well developed contacts with various gunrunners and shady arms dealers, because its "Freedom Alliance Liberation Army" was much better armed than most of the "liberation" organizations.

Worse, the Freedom Alliance had demonstrated its willingness to shed blood-lots of blood, including that of its own people-in pursuit of its goals, despite the fact that anyone with a functional brain had to realize its fundamental objectives were ultimately unobtainable.

"As for what they're doing in Fuller, Francesca," Keita continued, "that's unfortunately clear. As you know, Fuller is not an imperial star system and it is a member of the Langford Association. The Association isn't exactly on the best of terms with the Empire, but our relations with its member worlds are still a lot better than our relations with many of the Rogue Worlds out this way. Apparently, the Freedom Alliance would like to see those relations take a turn for the worse, and it also seems likely they calculated that we'd be less likely to launch some sort of military operation on one of the Association's member planets.

"At any rate, they demanded sanctuary on Fuller while they 'negotiate' with the Empire. Needless to say, the Fuller planetary government is well aware of the Empire's standing policy where negotiations with terrorist organizations are concerned. King Hayden told them that it was out of the question, and his Parliament backed him up.

"At that point, the hijackers murdered Star Roamer's captain, first officer, and purser and jettisoned their bodies. Then they repeated their demands. King Hayden refused a second time. So they murdered the ship's astrogator, three of its enlisted crew members, a member of the ministry clerical pool, and the personal secretary of one of the Incorporation delegation's members. They pointed out that that was twice the number of hostages they'd 'executed in the people's name' the first time their demands were rejected, and informed King Hayden that the next time around, they would double the 'penalty' yet again.

"According to the passenger manifest Raintree starcommed to us, there are at least six hundred more civilians, including the remaining members of Star Roamer's crew, aboard the ship. They'd already killed nine people that we know of-there may have been other fatalities when they actually seized the ship-and King Hayden and his government had every reason to believe they would carry out their threat, even if it meant eventually killing all of their hostages.

"Despite that, the King and Parliament were prepared to reject their demands yet again when the Duke of Shallingsport unilaterally offered to allow the terrorists to land the hostages in his duchy."

"In defiance of his own planetary government, Sir?" Lieutenant Paбl asked in obvious surprise.

"Not … quite," Keita said. "Shallingsport is an independent duchy. I don't have all of the details and nuances of the Fuller political system at my fingertips, but as I currently understand it, Shallingsport is the largest, wealthiest, and most populous of several relatively small territorial units on Fuller which are at least nominally politically independent. The Duke of Shallingsport owes some sort of personal fealty to King Hayden, but not as the King of Fuller. Whatever the exact political relationship, the Duke-Duke Geoffrey-is a head of state in his own right, not legally bound by the decisions of Parliament. And in his role as head of state, he apparently decided that the only way to keep the terrorists from executing all of their hostages was to give them what they wanted.

"At the same time, he's obviously well aware of the Empire's policy where terrorists and planets which offer them sanctuary are concerned. Although he's permitted the hijackers to land themselves and their captives in his duchy and to take over a warehouse complex belonging to an off-world consortium as their local base of operations, he hasn't given them any formal promises of protection. So what he's done, according to the back channel messages he's passed to us, is to put the terrorists and the hostages into a contained situation. Since they've gotten the 'sanctuary' they demanded, they aren't going to take themselves, their hostages, and Star Roamer somewhere else. Which means they're going to be sitting exactly where they landed if-when-we come calling. In the meantime, he's informed them that while he's willing to give them sanctuary in order to prevent the loss of additional lives, he has no authority to negotiate on behalf of the Fuller planetary government, or of the Empire. He has, however, officially-and very publicly-requested that the Empire dispatch a negotiating team to Shallingsport. What he's telling us is that he's prepared to delay them, play for time, until we decide exactly what we're going to do."

He paused again, looking around the conference table, then shrugged the massive shoulders which had borne up under the weight of duty for so many decades.

"So that's why I'm here, people. We've decided what we're going to do … and you're the people who are going to do it."

Chapter Twenty

"Sir Arthur, Captain Alwyn, people," Captain Wadislaw Watts nodded to his audience as Brigadier Keita handed the briefing over to him. The Marine's expression was that of a competent professional who was fully aware of the gravity of the situation facing them, and he reached out through his neural headset to dim the cubicle's lighting still further.

The holo display above the conference table simultaneously came to life, showing the blue-and-white-swirled marble of a habitable world. As the image grew in the display, Alicia saw that it had a bit more water and slightly smaller ice caps than Old Earth. The nightside also showed far sparser concentrations of artificial light, indicating either an extremely low tech base or a smallish, widely dispersed planetary population.

"The planet of Fuller, in the star system of the same name," Watts said out of the semi-darkness. "The dominant political unit is the Kingdom of Fuller, which claims sovereignty over approximately seventy-three percent of the total planetary surface, and about ninety-two percent of the total planetary population. The kingdom is an odd hybrid, an absolute monarchy in the course of transition into a constitutional monarchy. The head of state, who's also the official head of government under the current political setup, is King Hayden the Fourth. He was educated in the Empire, and unlike most of the other planetary heads of state in the Langford Association, he's always been favorably inclined-for a Rogue World potentate, at least-towards the Empire. The fact that he's always been a voice of moderation in terms of the Association's relations with us may be one of the reasons the terrorists picked his planet. They probably figured that whatever decision he made was going to place a significant strain on his relations with us … or with his fellow Association heads of state.

"This," he continued, as the planet disappeared, replaced by a far larger scale map of a portion of its surface, "is the Duchy of Shallingsport." A bright amber line traced what were obviously the borders of an irregularly shaped territorial unit on a broad tongue of tangled, heavily forested mountains thrusting out into an ocean. "As you can see, Shallingsport claims virtually all of this peninsula extending into the Tannenbaum Sea. It takes its name from its capital and single major city, here." An icon flashed, indicating the coastal location of the city in question.

"The city of Shallingsport is also the site of the duchy's spaceport, which also doubles as its primary hub for purely atmospheric travel, as well. In the last couple of decades, the present duke-Duke Geoffrey-and his father have begun attracting some significant industry to Shallingsport. Most of that is also located around the capital, although there's also an industrial preserve here, in the Barony of Green Haven, which is called-not very imaginatively-the Green Haven Industrial Park."

Another icon blinked, this one at least two hundred kilometers from the duchy's capital.

"In fact, Duke Geoffrey's been doing his best to get as much as possible of the Shallingsport industry relocated to Green Haven in order to reduce congestion in the capital. He's been offering some very attractive financial incentives and tax breaks to get people to relocate, and to put new industry into the Green Haven area as it arrives from off planet. In addition, he's established a freight-handling spaceport facility with King Hayden's approval. Because of the way the planetary government is set up, the Green Haven port is going to cost Geoffrey a pretty credit in import duties once it goes officially on-line, which it's supposed to do sometime in the next local month or so. But Hayden's been looking the other way and letting it handle cargos 'unofficially' for the better part of a year, without imposing the legally mandated import duties, in order to help facilitate development in the area.

"I'm sure," Alicia's augmented vision easily saw Watts' tight grin, despite the lighting (or lack thereof), "that you're wondering just why I'm giving you all this information about industrial development in Shallingsport. Well, there's a reason.

"After Duke Geoffrey agreed to grant the terrorists holding Star Roamer 'sanctuary,' there was a fair amount of negotiation between him and the terrorists concerning the best location. The terrorists wanted to be as secure against potential ground attack as they could be, and Duke Geoffrey wanted them as far from his capital as he could get them, in case there was a ground attack and it got out of hand. The compromise solution, which was proposed by the terrorists, was that they take over the Green Haven Industrial Park. Duke Geoffrey pointed out that the entire industrial park would be rather large for their needs, and they responded by suggesting that they take over a single facility. They insisted, however, that the facility in question had to be large enough to permit them to keep themselves and all of their hostages under cover and to make aerial and orbital reconnaissance difficult.

"After quite a bit of hemming and hawing, the terrorists finely suggested that they take over the Shallingsport facilities of something called the Jason Corporation. It's a sort of wildcat operation headquartered on Trilateral, another of the Langford Association's members. It's also one of the newer arrivals in Shallingsport-a specialist in heavy construction which intends to play a major role in Geoffrey's Green Haven project. Because it's so new, its facility-which is a very large structure, in order to incorporate the necessary maintenance and service facilities for its heavy equipment-wasn't yet fully occupied. The relatively low number of staff Jason had on-planet could be evacuated fairly easily, the facility itself is well outside the area of Green Haven's main existing development, and the existence of the freight spaceport simplified the transfer of the terrorists and hostages from Star Roamer to the planetary surface.

"Which means that this facility here," the map of the Shallingsport peninsula vanished, replaced by a detailed aerial shot of a cluster of three smaller structures around a single very large one, "is going to be your objective."

Alicia frowned. Not only were the buildings themselves large enough to allow the terrorists a lot of flexibility in how they positioned their sentries, but the entire facility was set atop a fairly steep-sided hill that rose out of the peninsula's otherwise dense, green forest on the very fringe of Duke Geoffrey's "industrial park." The bad guys were going to have a commanding lookout post, and the buildings were, indeed, big enough, and solidly enough constructed, to severely limit what overhead passive reconnaissance could pick up.

"Now," Watts continued, "here's what we know about the opposition force.

"First, as Sir Arthur has already said, we don't know how they got aboard Star Roamer in the first place. We also don't have any positive IDs on any of the people involved in the hijacking. They've identified themselves as members of the Freedom Alliance Liberation Army, and the Freedom Alliance issued an official communique claiming responsibility for the operation before news of the hijacking became public. On that basis, it seems likely we are, indeed, dealing with the FALA. We just don't know who the individuals involved are. We believe our background efforts to penetrate the Alliance have positively identified a couple of dozen leadership figures, but so far we haven't placed any of them aboard Star Roamer. Frankly, they're being very careful in their contacts with the Fuller authorities and with Duke Geoffrey to prevent us from IDing any of them, as well.

"We also don't know exactly what weapons they may have. We do know that their transit time from Raintree to Fuller indicates they made a least-time flight. They simply didn't have time to divert anywhere else along the way to collect heavier weapons, and there's no indication that they did so once they arrived in the Fuller System, either. So, whatever weapons they have, have to be the ones that they managed to get aboard Star Roamer in the first place, which strongly suggests that they can't have anything nastier than some fairly light small arms. In addition, they used only locally-provided personnel shuttles, not cargo shuttles, when they actually landed on Fuller. That's a further indication that they don't have any significant number of heavy weapons with them.

"We also know, from the number of shuttle flights required to get their ground party down from Star Roamer, that assuming they moved all of the hostages dirt-side in the same flights, there can't be more than somewhere between a hundred and fifty and two hundred terrorists. All the indications so far are that even those numbers are probably too high. Obviously, there's no way to be certain, but Battalion's best estimate is that there probably aren't more than seventy-five actual bad guys, maximum."

"Excuse me, Wadislaw," Paбl Бgoston said, "but how, exactly, did Battalion arrive at that estimate?"

"Mainly by considering the fact that whoever these people are, they had to get aboard Star Roamer. There were some passengers aboard who weren't part of the official Incorporation delegation. There weren't that many of them, though, and even though Star Roamer is a passenger ship, with the higher number of service personnel aboard that implies, the crew wasn't exactly enormous, either. So they didn't have that many seats or slots into which they could insert their hijackers. They wouldn't have needed much more than a couple of dozen to actually seize the ship, assuming they managed to take the crew by surprise, which they obviously did. That sets the lower limit on their possible manpower. The upper limit is set by the sheer difficulty of getting really large numbers of people aboard the ship without setting off security alarms. So the consensus at Battalion is that even seventy-five is probably high. The current belief is that they probably set some of those landing shuttles down empty, or all but empty, for the express purpose of keeping us guessing about their actual strength. Despite that, all of our thinking so far has been built around the maximum possible strength-the two hundred number I mentioned earlier-just to be on the safe side."

Paбl nodded thoughtfully and sat back in his chair again.

"All right," Watts said, "that's their estimated ground strength. In addition, they still have at least a few people aboard Star Roamer. They've positioned the ship to keep an eye on the planet in general, and on Shallingsport in particular, and we believe that they've deployed at least two, more probably three, remote sensor arrays."

"Sensor arrays?" This time the question came from Tobias Strassmann. "Where the hell did these people get their hands on sensor arrays?"

"It's been apparent for some time, Lieutenant," Watts replied, "that the Freedom Alliance's resources and capabilities have been steadily expanding. I know your routine intelligence digests from Battalion have pointed out that the Alliance's fundraising net is apparently doing box office business. We've also seen increasingly sophisticated equipment in other FALA operations, including quite a few of the heavy weapons they thankfully don't have here. It's obvious that they've made a very useful contact somewhere in the mil-tech black-market, and the arrays they've deployed probably came from there."

"And they got these things aboard a passenger ship somehow?"

"Apparently," Watts acknowledged. "And, no, we don't know how they did it. In that respect, I'd have to say that as much as I loathe and despise the 'Freedom Alliance' and its tactics, they've demonstrated a capacity for planning and executing imaginative operations in the past. The fact that they managed to get hijackers aboard Star Roamer is another indication that however lunatic their ultimate objectives may be, they're obviously capable of rational, effective planning for their actual operations."

"But still," Strassmann said, shaking his head. "Something about this doesn't quite add up for me. It might have been possible to smuggle small arms aboard in personal luggage containers, but a deep-space sensor array is a hell of a lot bigger and harder to conceal than that."

"There are some indications," Watts said reluctantly, "or, perhaps, I should say there's been some speculation, that this was an inside job. Well, obviously, that's a probability in any hijack scenario. In this instance, however, there's been a specific suggestion that the purser may have been in on it."

"Didn't you say that they'd killed the purser when their original demand for sanctuary was rejected by the planetary government?"

"Yes, I did, Lieutenant Strassmann. The bodies were recovered, however. And while all of the others had been shot in the head with a neural disrupter, the purser's throat had been cut. In addition, there's the distinct possibility that he was actually killed somewhat earlier than the other victims. So the competing theories supporting his possible complicity are that he was killed by the hijackers because he might have been able to identify the people he'd been doing business with afterward, or that someone from the ship's crew or among its passengers may have attempted to retake the ship and that the turncoat-assuming that they'd figured it out-got his throat cut in the process. After which the terrorists decided to kick his body out the airlock along with the others as a way to keep from using up another of their 'bargaining chips' who was still alive."

Strassmann's expression didn't look exactly satisfied by the explanation, but he nodded anyway. And, as Alicia knew, there was always something about any op that didn't quite seem to make sense.

"At any rate," Watts continued, "the fact that they're using Star Roamer as an orbital observation post complicates any insertion scenario. The fact that we know they have sensor arrays out, and that those sensor arrays' capabilities are unknown to us, makes those complications even more constraining. They've announced that at the first sign of a warship-Imperial Fleet, or anyone else's-they will execute half of their hostages. They will also execute half of their hostages if any attempt is made to retake the ship. And, just for good measure, they've rigged suicide charges aboard Star Roamer, and they've explained that they're perfectly willing to blow themselves up rather than be captured. Given their past track record, plus the fact that every one of them is now liable to the death penalty, Battalion is inclined to take them at their word.

"We don't know how long we have to mount a rescue operation. At the moment, we're dealing with fairly predictable, stock demands. They want the release of prisoners being held on at least a dozen planets for complicity in operations by several of the 'liberation' organizations which come under their umbrella. They want concessions from the Empire, and also from five or six specific planetary governments, both Rogue World and imperial. They want a sizable ransom, and they want 'prize money' for returning Star Roamer to us. And, of course, they want another, faster ship provided for their eventual escape from Fuller."

"They obviously know they aren't going to get all of that," Captain Alwyn rumbled in his deep voice, his black face hard and set in the backwash of illumination from the floating holograph.

"Of course they aren't," Watts agreed. "The majority opinion at Battalion is that most of what they're demanding at this point is in the nature of a bargaining ploy. They don't expect to get it. They're simply setting forth demands-fairly outrageous ones-which they fully intend to give up in order to get what they really want. Of course, even assuming that that's true, we don't know what they really want at this point."

"You said that was the 'majority opinion,' " Alwyn observed. "I take it that that indicates there's a minority opinion, as well?"

"Yes, there is, Captain. It's been suggested that in reality this entire maneuver is basically a psy-op. They don't really have any specific, long-term, strategic demands as such. What they're after is to give the Empire a black eye. To make the point that they've forced the Empire to abandon its 'no negotiation' policy and actually talk to them-to 'dance to their tune,' if you will. Assuming that there's any validity to this theory, the true object is to enhearten their supporters-and, just incidentally, their financial contributors-and to discourage their opponents. Don't forget, most of the terrorist organizations out here, and the 'Freedom Alliance' is no exception, are operating from Rogue World bases, not bases in imperial territory. The people they're actually talking to, collecting money from, recruiting shooters from, are almost all Rogue Worlders. That means Rogue World perceptions of what's happening in their operations, and of the Empire's response to them, are critical to their ability to continue to collect funds and to operate, and the Rogue Worlds' view of this little episode isn't going to be the same as the Empire's, whatever happens. Mind you, they wouldn't mind a bit if they managed to push imperial public opinion in the direction they want it to go, too, of course.

"So if the 'minority opinion,' as you put it, Captain, is correct, then what they really want to do is simply to stretch out the confrontation as long as possible, probably hoping that the newsies will get hold of it and turn it into a 'crisis' for the public's consumption. At the end, they probably hope to settle for releasing their hostages-or, at least, the surviving ones-in return for the ability to leave the Fuller System aboard a new vessel or aboard Star Roamer. They'd probably prefer a new vessel, even if it was smaller, because the fact that they 'made' the Empire give it to them would give them even greater juju in the eyes of their supporters."

"Um." Alwyn scratched his right eyebrow, frowning thoughtfully, then grimaced. "At this point, I suppose, speculation is all we've got. But I have to admit, even after all these years, I still find it difficult to believe these people are thinking at all, sometimes, much less thinking rationally."

"From our perspective, they aren't thinking rationally, Madison," Keita said. "But that's the important qualifier, isn't it? As Captain Watts says, they aren't us, and their thinking and planning begins from a radically different set of assumptions and values. I think it's fair to say that there has to be at least a little of the fanatic in anyone who's going to embrace something like the Freedom Alliance's platform. That goes without saying. But if you accept the basic assumptions involved in their analysis of their confrontation with us and its possible outcomes, they do think rationally. At least in the sense that if we can only figure out what they're really after, there's an underlying logic to the way they go about trying to get it."

"You're right, of course, Uncle Arthur." Alwyn nodded. "It's just-Never mind." He shook his head. "This is something to toss around over cold beers in a bull session, not something to distract ourselves over right now." He looked back at Watts. "You were saying, Captain?"

"I've really pretty much completed my initial brief," Watts admitted. "I've assembled additional background data-things like climatology for Shallingsport, more detailed terrain maps, information on the local political set up, things like that-for operational planning, but that's basically the bare-bones of what we know. And of what we don't know."

"Captain Watts is right about that," Sir Arthur said, reclaiming control of the briefing with a courteous nod to the Marine. "There are a lot of things we don't know about their ultimate intentions and plans. But what we do know is where they are right now, what their apparent strength is, and what sorts of physical constraints we're up against in getting at them. In that regard, we owe Duke Geoffrey our thanks."

"Agreed, Uncle Arthur," Alwyn said. "I'm surprised he even talked to them, frankly. Getting involved in the middle of something like this must be awfully politically risky for someone in his position."

"Yes and no, Captain," Watts put in. "Yes, there are risks, but the fact that he's not actually negotiating with them at all isolates him from the consequences of the Empire's official no-negotiation policy. And, frankly, although he has shown considerable moral courage, the original idea of offering them a place to land in Shallingsport didn't come from him. The director of his Office of Industrial Development is an imperial subject he brought in to run the Green Haven project for him, and my understanding is that it was Director Jokuri who actually suggested the idea to him. I don't want to appear cynical, or to downplay Geoffrey's own genuine concern with saving lives, but I suspect that Jokuri had to do some fast talking to sell him on the notion that we'd be too grateful for his help to worry about whacking him for talking to terrorists in the first place."

"In that case, we owe Jokuri a vote of thanks," Keita observed. "But whoever suggested what to whom, we also know we can't afford to let this thing be drawn out. Assuming the 'minority opinion,' as Captain Watts describes it, is correct, that would be exactly what the bad guys want. Assuming the minority opinion isn't correct, there's still the fact that the longer this thing stretches out, the more likely we are to begin losing additional hostages.

"I can also inform you that the decision has already been made that we will go in. Any official negotiation isn't going to happen, except as a delaying tactic while we mount the rescue."

Heads nodded grimly around the conference table. Not a one of the men and women sitting at it was surprised by Keita's announcement.

"Obviously, the detailed planning is going to be up to you people, since you're the ones who are going to have to mount the operation. The Fleet is redeploying units towards Fuller, but because of Star Roamer and those sensor arrays Captain Watts has mentioned, none of those units are going to be able to get in close enough to the planet to do much good. It looks to us like this is going to be another job for the Marguerite Johnsen. We've already determined that a freighter of her approximate size is due in Fuller sometime in the next few days, and Fleet has starcommed orders to her immediately previous port of call to hold her there. We have to assume the terrorists have access to Fuller's shipping movements-it's not as if arrival and departure schedules were classified data, anyway-but shortstopping the ship everyone is expecting should create a hole into which we can insert Marguerite Johnsen without sounding any alarms until you're close enough to the planet for a drop.

"There may still be hostages aboard Star Roamer. There aren't supposed to be any, and the terrorists' spokesman swears that all of them were transported down to Shallingsport. Despite that, we have to assume there are still some aboard. Unfortunately, we also have to assume that the suicide charges they've told us about are also aboard and armed. I'll want to see some contingency planning for a seizure of the ship, but, I'll tell you now that in all honesty I don't anticipate your being able to put together an option that I'll sign off on. It may be possible to talk the people aboard that ship into surrendering, if we take out their groundside buddies, but I'm not prepared to throw away the lives of cadremen in a fundamentally hopeless effort to capture an orbiting bomb with a suicide switch.

"As far as the Shallingsport/Green Haven situation is concerned, it looks to me as if the best option is probably going to be a straightforward drop and a high-speed break-in. We're not going to have anything like decent intelligence on what's going on inside that facility. We do know that Duke Geoffrey has ordered the complete evacuation of Green Haven, which presumably means that anyone we encounter there will probably be on the terrorists' side. Unfortunately, at this moment we don't even have anything in place to confirm that the evacuation has been carried out."

"If I may, Sir Arthur?" Watts said diffidently.

"Certainly you may, Captain."

"I agree with everything you've said, Sir. And, like you, I wish we had a lot better intelligence on the situation in and around Green Haven. However, Old Earth has pulled together-and starcommed to us-visual imagery on every known member of Star Roamer's crew, all of the Incorporation delegates, and all of the delegation's support staff. We'll be able to download that to your people's armor's computers. We also know that the opposition force can't have much, if anything, in the way of heavy weapons, and that they can't be very numerous."

He paused, and Keita nodded.

"Your point, Captain?" the Cadre brigadier asked.

"I suppose my point is that your cadremen are actually more capable than you and they sometimes believe they are, Sir. I don't say this is going to be a neat and pretty situation, whatever we do. However, bearing in mind your own statement that we need to wind up this op quickly, I'm afraid that it looks to me as if Captain Alwyn's people are going to have to go in quick and dirty. Given the visual imagery we can provide, and bearing in mind the Cadre's demonstrated capabilities, it ought to be possible to avoid, or at least minimize, friendly-fire casualties among the hostages."

"I'm not particularly enthralled by the notion of any 'friendly-fire casualties,' " Alwyn said a bit frostily.

"I'm not suggesting that you should be, Captain," Watts said unflinchingly. "I'm only suggesting that these people have already demonstrated their own total willingness to murder hostages as a mere bargaining ploy. In the long run, if we don't go in, we'll almost certainly lose more hostages then we would with a bunch as capable as your people mounting the rescue attempt. I'm not trying to buff up your halo, but let's face it. You people are the Cadre. This is what you do, and no one in the galaxy does it better than you do. I realize I'm only an Intelligence puke, a staff weenie from Battalion, but if it were my call, there's no one in the universe I'd rather have covering my bets than you people."

"I'm forced to concur with Captain Watts," Keita said quietly. "We'll see if we can't assemble some backup from the Wasps aboard the Fleet units diverting to the Fuller area. Whether or not you'll be able to use them is another matter, of course, but we'll try to see to it that they're at least available as an option. And we'll try our damnedest to improve your operational intelligence, Madison. You know we will. But I want you to start immediate planning on the basis of the information we have now-what Captain Watts has given you in his briefing, and in the other data he brought with him-and the availability of only your own people and resources. Is that understood?"

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 Paбl said, "but I just don't like it."

"I'm not too crazy about it, either, Бgoston," 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," Paбl 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 Paбl.

"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," Paбl 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," Paбl 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 on 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 Paбl.

"Бgoston, 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 them!"

"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."

"Captain Watts?" Alicia asked in a tone of mild surprise.

"Sure." Kalachian grimaced. "I knew Watts years ago, before I ever got tapped for the Cadre. I was a Wasp, too, you know, and I caught guard duty for our embassy on Rishatha Prime back about, oh, five, six years ago. He was there, too, as a brand new butter-bar, back before they turned him into an Intelligence puke-or, hell, maybe he was already in training for intel, now that I think about it. Anyway, he pulled a hitch with the Foreign Minstry as a gopher for the military attachй. He was there over a year, I think-until after I got selected for the Cadre, at any rate. And maybe he really was already working on the whole spy thing, at that, because I heard later that they'd PNGed him."

Alicia blinked. The Rishathan Sphere had officially declared Watts persona non grata? That was a cachet which didn't find its way into very many serving Marines' resumes!

"Maybe I will have talk with him," she said after a moment. "Might be interesting to get his perspective on them. Thanks, Vartkes."

"De nada." Kalachian shrugged and returned his attention to his battle armor.

Alicia did the same. Lieutenant Strassmann and Lieutenant Paбl had completed the planning Captain Alwyn had requested, and unless something had changed radically between their last intelligence briefing and their arrival in the Fuller System in about seventeen standard hours, they were indeed going to drop in light configuration on Watts' suggested LZ. Alicia preferred going in light herself, rather than lugging around the plasma gun-more like a plasma cannon, for anyone not in battle armor-which was her normally assigned weapon when the company went in heavy. A plasma gun wasn't really a precision weapon, especially not the Cadre version, which could have doubled as main armament on an assault shuttle. It was a pretty much all or nothing proposition which left very little in the way of potential prisoners, and she preferred something a little more flexible than that, especially when she might be shooting at terrorists in close proximity to hostages she was trying to keep alive. And Paбl had been right about the kind of terrain they had to get through. The lighter they were, the quicker they could reach their objective.

At the same time, she had to admit that a part of her would have preferred having a little more heavy firepower along. Michael Doorn and Obaseki Osayaba would have the plasma guns she didn't, and their wings, Йdouard Bonrepaux and Shai Hau-zhi, would have calliopes this time, instead of the grenade launchers they usually drew. But that was going to be all of the really heavy weapons her squad would have along, and she hoped it would be enough.

She completed her suit diagnostics and shut down her synth-link. All systems were green, and she frowned to herself as she reconsidered her backup weapon and equipment harness.

The Book required all cadremen to carry sidearms for backup, although Alicia couldn't remember the last time she'd heard about any Cadre trooper actually using one. Normally, she carried a Colt-Heckler amp; Koch three-millimeter, a selective-fire machine pistol capable of taking out just about anything short of battle armor with its two-millimeter subcaliber penetrators. This time, she'd opted for a neural disrupter, instead, and she wasn't sure she was comfortable with the selection. There was always a potential over-penetration problem with the CHK, whereas a disrupter on tight focus stopped dead when it hit its target. But she'd always hated disrupters, which struck her as a particularly nasty way for someone to die. Of course, she had to admit if pressed that she'd yet to find a good way, and she knew that what bothered her more were the people who weren't quite killed by a disrupter hit. Even with modern medicine, the consequences were pretty gruesome.

Then again, she thought grimly, the people we're going after are terrorists who've already murdered helpless prisoners just to make a "negotiating" point. I can probably live with a little gruesome where they're concerned.

She snorted at her own thoughts, and ran quickly through the rest of the equipment list. The force blade might be more useful than usual this time, she reflected, given the heavily forested terrain through which they would be moving. The thirty-five-centimeter battle steel blade that went into its scabbard had an edge little more than a couple of molecules across. That made it a formidable slicer and dicer in its own right, yet its real function was mainly to form the basic matrix for the tool's force field and give the force blade balance and some heft. When it was activated, the length of the "blade" suddenly expanded to almost seventy centimeters, and the cutting surface of the force field it projected was much, much sharper than the alloy blade. She'd yet to encounter any sort of vegetation (or, for that matter, anything else) which could stand up to that, especially when the arm swinging it had the advantage of battle armor "muscles."

She considered switching back to the CHK one more time, then gave herself a mental shake.

Why do you do this every time? she asked herself. This is your form of dithering, isn't it? Well, stop it. You've checked everything at least twice now, and it's time you went and got yourself some extra shuteye before the drop.

"Well, that's that," she said, suiting action to the thought and stripping off her headset. "I'm going to grab myself some rack time while the grabbing is good. The rest of you should consider doing the same thing."

Most of the others nodded, waved, or grunted in basic agreement, but she knew some of them had no intention of taking her advice. Benjamin Dubois, Astrid Nordbш, and Thomas Kiely would undoubtedly drag in a fourth-probably Malachai Perlman-and wile away the time playing cutthroat spades. And Brian Oselli and Erik Andersson would almost certainly haul out their chessboard, while Chul Byung Cha would most probably wander down to Marguerite Johnsen's range and shoot her way through a couple of hundred rounds of pistol ammunition.

They all had their own ways of dealing with pre-drop tension, and by now, Alicia knew all of them. Just as she knew there was absolutely no point in trying to change any of them. So she only smiled, shook her head fondly at them, and headed for her waiting bunk.

Chapter Twenty-Two

"Saddle up, people," First Sergeant Yussuf said over the platoon net. The first sergeant's voice was calm, almost conversational, but Alicia was confident that Yussuf had her own share of abdominal butterflies.

"All right, you heard the lady," Alicia said in turn, and the men and women of First Squad headed for the drop tubes.

Alicia and her two team leaders checked each trooper's readouts carefully before they followed them through the hatches and settled into their own drop harnesses.

This drop wasn't going to be like the Chengchou drop in a lot of ways, Alicia reflected as the drop harness enveloped her torso and the umbilicals and tractor locks mated with her armor. For one thing, Chengchou had been a cakewalk compared to this operation. She might have gone into her first drop with Charlie Company without the opportunity to share in the pre-drop rehearsals, and she might not have known her people yet, and there might have been noncombatants mixed in among the targets. But the opposition on Chengchou hadn't had any reason to expect that they were coming. And there'd been no hostages involved.

This time there were six hundred imperial citizens' lives riding on how well they did their jobs, and that made a difference. A huge difference. But at least this time she was no longer the new kid, the unknown quantity, either. She and her squad had made a half-dozen combat drops, two or three times that many live training drops, and more simulated drops than she could count, over the last year and a half. They'd been over the river and through the woods together, and they were a close-knit, intimately fused unit.

More even than any of the Marines with whom she had served, the men and women of Charlie Company-and of First Squad in particular-had become her family. Like any family, they didn't live in perfect harmony. Everyone knew about Lieutenant Masolle's hot temper, and that Lieutenant Paбl was the company pessimist. First Sergeant Yussuf wasn't particularly fond of Denise Cronkite, Second Platoon's platoon sergeant. Within First Squad, Chul Byung Cha and Astrid Nordbш had a long-standing feud (which, as near as Alicia could figure out, went back to a confrontation over some jerk who'd turned out to be married to someone else at the time, anyway). And Йdouard Bonrepaux and Flannan O'Clery were constantly sniping at one another over one imagined fault or another.

But none of that mattered. They were family, and they knew and trusted one another with absolute certainty. However much grief they might give one another between drops, whatever practical jokes they might pull, whatever quarrels might arise, none of it mattered once the drop tube hatch closed behind them.

They were the Cadre, the Empire's chosen samurai, the Emperor's sword, and one way or another, they would get the job done.

"Drop in five minutes," Marguerite Johnsen's AI announced in her mastoid, and she lay back, waiting.

Marguerite Johnsen, masquerading as the Rogue World-registry freighter Anzhelika Nikolaevna Dubrovskiy, swept around toward the dark side of the planet Fuller in her parking orbit.

The Shallingsport Peninsula was well up into Fuller's northern hemisphere, much too far above the equator for Star Roamer to maintain a geostationary orbit over it, and the transport had never been designed to handle remote sensor arrays. The terrorists still aboard her had clearly attempted to place their stolen starship to give themselves the best coverage of near-planet traffic they could, bearing in mind the limitations of their civilian-grade communications links to their deployed sensor arrays. Despite that, their major concern was clearly to watch for the arrival of Fleet units, not to monitor the movements of ships which they "knew" were civilian freighters. And the fact that they couldn't maintain a fixed position over Shallingsport provided windows in each orbit during which it was impossible for them to directly observe what was going on there.

Lieutenant Strassmann and Marguerite Johnsen's astrogator had very carefully worked out an approach to the planet which "just happened" to lead the ship into a "routine" parking orbit which would carry her across Shallingsport during one of those windows which also happened to fall just after local midnight in the Green Haven Industrial Park.

Strassmann had also planned the drop not for the first night-hour window, or even the second. He'd given the terrorists still aboard Star Roamer no less than three unobserved nighttime overflights on "Anzhelika Nikolaevna Dubrovskiy's" part to get accustomed to the "freighter's" harmlessness.

Meanwhile, the battlecruiser HMS Ctesiphon, which had rendezvoused with Marguerite Johnsen and two Fleet heavy cruisers well short of Fuller, had followed the Cadre transport the rest of the way to Fuller, timing her arrival to coincide with Charlie Company's drop. At the moment, the battlecruiser was headed in-system, squawking the transponder of yet another merchant ship and using her electronic warfare systems to disguise her emission signature. She couldn't fool a competent sensor array if she got too close to it, but as long as she kept her distance, she'd look harmless enough, and she had no intention of approaching the planet until after the Cadremen had reached their objective. Ctesiphon had the equivalent of a short battalion of Marines, made up from her own detachment and transfers from the cruisers, in the assault shuttles riding her exterior racks, but even at their maximum acceleration, it would take those shuttles at least another four hours to reach Fuller orbit. On the other hand, her business wasn't with Shallingsport; it was with Star Roamer. One way or another, the passenger liner would not be leaving the Fuller System under its current management.

Now Marguerite Johnsen's drop tubes began deploying Charlie Company's drop commandos very, very stealthily.

Alicia had always enjoyed covert drops in training. Unlike the Chengchou drop, which had been intended to put Charlie Company on the ground as quickly as possible, a covert drop was intended to put drop commandos on the ground as unobtrusively as possible. They launched without the massive acceleration-and painfully evident electromagnetic signature from the tube catapults-of a standard drop profile, and they entered atmosphere on a much shallower profile at far lower velocity. They also dispensed with the protective force field bubble a drop harness provided for a higher-velocity, steeper reentry profile. It wasn't needed for what one of Alicia's instructors had called "planet-diving"-basically an exercise in old-fashioned skydiving or hang-gliding which simply started outside the planet's atmosphere. And without the electronic emissions of the force field bubble and the thermal signature of a high-velocity reentry, a drop commando fluttering down from a night sky with her powered armor's stealth systems on-line was the next best thing to completely invisible. Which meant Charlie Company ought to reach its LZ unobserved, undetected, and-most importantly of all-unexpected.

A covert drop took a lot longer than a standard, high-speed insertion. That was one reason covert profiles were nonstandard. If, by some misfortune, an opponent guessed a covert insertion was coming and his sensors managed to detect it at all, he'd have far longer to track the incoming drop commandos. Against Cadre armor's stealth capabilities, his chance of detecting and tracking the attackers would be considerably little better than even, even if he'd been able to predict the landing zone's exact position. But the possibility always existed, which was one of the reasons The Book specified high-speed drops for hot LZs.

Spotting Cadre armor would be a nontrivial challenge, even under ideal circumstances, for first-line tactical sensor arrays, however. In this case, with the terrorists restricted to what they could have landed in personnel shuttles and Charlie Company coming in with all of its own active emitters locked down tight, they couldn't possibly have the sort of sensors needed to do the job.

That, at least, was the theory.

For the moment, though, Alicia actually managed to put that thought aside and surrender to the sheer delight of inserting herself into an endless ocean of air like a thought of God. She slanted down into that airy envelope, and her drop harness' airfoil wings configured outward. She controlled them directly through her synth-link-they were her wings, not the harness'-and she felt them stretch even as the tick began to slow the universe about her.

No wonder the medical types worried about tick dependency, she thought as the time-slowing drug stretched out the sensual delight of her flight. She was a huge night bird, slashing across the Tannenbaum Sea towards Shallingsport, yet despite her speed, the flight seemed slow, dreamy as she watched her mental HUD and her descent vector projected itself towards the mountain valley LZ.

That same HUD showed the icons of the rest of Charlie Company's men and women as they arrowed downward with her. There were two hundred and seventy-four other green dots, riding two hundred and seventy-four other descent vector projections, all about her, and she smiled wolfishly as they fell towards their prey.

The digital time readout in the corner of Alicia's mental HUD spun downward. They were less than two minutes from the ground now, and she felt herself tightening internally, reaching out mentally to the next phase of the operation. It was only -

She stiffened as her armor's passive sensors picked up the impossible. She could "taste" the sudden lash of radar from directly ahead-from directly on top of the landing zone!

"Zulu! Zulu!" Captain Alwyn said suddenly, sharply, over the all-hands net. "Active sensors on the LZ! Hot LZ! Hot LZ! Go to Zu-"

His voice cut off with instant, ax-blow brutality as heavy weapons fire stabbed upward out of the blackness below. Plasma bolts streaked up from the valley rim in lightning strobes of fury, ripping through the moonless night like brimstone darts, and green icons began vanishing with hideous speed from Alicia's HUD.

Sir Arthur Keita jerked up out of his comfortable chair in Marguerite Johnsen's intelligence center as the first incredible tactical data came streaming in from Charlie Company.

"Jesus Christ!" someone blurted. "What the f-?"

The speaker chopped himself off, but Keita never even noticed. His eyes were tightly closed as he concentrated on his own neural link to Marguerite Johnsen's computers and watched what was supposed to have been a smooth, undetected insertion transform itself into bloody chaos.

Alicia DeVries had never experienced anything like it. She'd run training exercises which assumed ambush scenarios, but they'd been only training exercises, however realistic.

This was no exercise, and horror hovered in the back of her mind as Captain Alwyn's green icon turned scarlet and he went off the air. Lieutenant Strassmann's followed in almost the same instant, and so did Lieutenant Paбl's, and still those eye-tearing plasma blasts sleeted upward.

Not even the Cadre could take that kind of damage to its command structure so quickly without losing cohesion. Alicia's armor's AI tried to keep track of who had command, but the hurricane of fire pouring up from their intended landing zone was killing people too quickly. A corner of Alicia's attention watched the golden command designation ring flashing madly about her HUD, trying to settle around a single icon. But those icons kept turning red before it could settle, and this time the time-stretching effect of the tick only made the shock worse.

But if there was chaos, there was very little panic. The Cadre's ruthless testing and merciless training saw to that. The people who qualified for the Cadre weren't the sort who panicked, and the endless hours of training asserted themselves as responses trained into Charlie Company's personnel at the level of instinct took over.

Alicia hit the release on her drop harness while she was still sixty meters from the ground. She dropped instantly, vertically, while the harness continued forward and, obedient to her final command, brought its built-in drive systems online in a frantic evasion pattern. The sensors which might have detected Alicia locked onto the harness' larger, far stronger emissions signature, instead, and a ball-lightning burst of plasma fire blew it out of Fuller's night sky.

Alicia plummeted into the treetops, her armored body automatically orienting itself so that she hit the branches feetfirst. She felt the shock of impact, despite the armor's built-in inertia damping, and then she was crashing through the limbs like a battering ram in a canonnade of splintering wood.

She hit the ground with a force which would have shattered any human body not protected by battle armor. But she was armored, and she scarcely even noticed the impact.

More icons were still vanishing from her mental HUD. Adolfo Onassis was gone. So was Sergeant Brookman, and she felt a wrenching spasm of loss as Chul Byung Cha's icon turned scarlet, followed by Imogene Hartwell's and Malachai Perlman's.

Another armored body plummeted through the tree cover behind her.

"Got your six, Sarge!" an intensely welcome soprano said in her mastoid as Tannis Cateau hit the ground. How Tannis had managed to stay glued to her wing was more than Alicia was prepared even to guess, but she'd done it.

"Good," Alicia replied over their dedicated circuit even as she released one of her tactical remotes and its counter-grav boosted it back up through the trees.

The drop had been scattered all to hell as people hit the ground as quickly as they could, wherever they could. First Platoon's Second Squad was clear over on the eastern flank, half-way across the LZ from its intended drop zone, and Staff Sergeant Gilroy, the squad leader, was one of the scarlet icons. Five of his eighteen troopers were also gone, yet even that was better than what had happened to Third Platoon. Lieutenat Paбl was gone, and his three squads' fifty-four troopers were down to only eighteen.

At least they were out of the field of fire of the fixed weapons which had slaughtered them on their way in-the weapons which hadn't been supposed to be there. Unfortunately, they weren't the only things which weren't supposed to be there, and even through the intense focus of her training and the cocoon of the tick, Alicia felt an icy dagger as her remote reported back.

"My God," she heard Tannis whisper as she shared the tactical data feed.

They knew, Alicia thought. They knew we were coming, and somehow they figured out where we'd land. But where the hell did all these weapons come from?

"All Winchesters, Winchester-One," she began, but another voice came up over the company net.

"All units, Tiger-One," Francesca Masolle said. "Zulu! Break for Alpha-One-Bravo and reform there. Repeat, break for Alpha-O-"

Her voice chopped off with brutal suddenness as her icon, too, flashed from green to crimson, and Alicia's nostrils flared as she realized not a single one of Charlie Company's officers was still alive.

"All units, Striker," First Sergeant Yussuf's voice took over almost instantly. "Confirm Alpha-One-Bravo! Let's go, people!"

Alicia and Tannis were already in motion. No one in their worst nightmare had anticipated something like this, but there was always a contingency plan. Lieutenant Strassmann might never have contemplated the possibility that it would really be needed when he laid out the drop, but that hadn't kept him from planning for it with all of his usual meticulous care. Now the company's survivors moved to execute the response plan one dead lieutenant had laid out and another dead lieutenant had ordered them to obey.

The badly scattered men and women of Charlie Company coalesced, crashing through the trees with reckless speed, relying on their armor to batter a way through. The plasma fire which had plucked so many of them from the air had come from a dozen infantry support cannon emplaced along the valley's southern wall. Those cannon could no longer bear on them now that they were on the ground, and especially not because Alpha-Bravo-One was the southernmost of the Case Zulu rally points Strassmann had laid out. Heading for it carried the cadremen still further under the plasma guns' maximum depression, exactly as Masolle had hoped it would.

But whoever had planned the ambush had allowed for that, too. The bright orange icons of enemies suddenly spangled Alicia's HUD as her hovering remote saw the battle armored infantry dug in on the slope above them.

And picked up the emissions signatures of four incoming aircraft which had "military" written all over them.

"All units, Striker." Yussuf's voice was impossibly calm sounding, smoothed by the tick and buttressed by her own years of experience and training, as she shared the take from Alicia's remote. "There're a hell of a lot more of them than there ought to be, and God only knows what else they've got. But we can't let them pin us until they get sting ships in to hammer us, and the only way out is through them. Come on!"

It wasn't the most detailed tactical directive Alicia had ever heard, but it didn't need to be. There weren't very many options, and her HUD showed her exactly what Yussuf had in mind.

The first sergeant had touched down on the southern periphery of the LZ, while Alicia's squad had landed well to Yussuf's north. That meant Alicia and her surviving people were still well behind Yussuf, despite their best efforts to catch up. And Yussuf wasn't waiting for them. Under the original drop plan, Lieutenant Masolle's Second Platoon had been assigned responsibility for the south side of the valley, which had also happened to drop it closest to the waiting cannon. Masolle was dead now, as were two-thirds of her platoon, but Yussuf had most of what remained of the lieutenant's platoon, although all three of its original squads would barely have made a single full strength one.

Now she led what she had into a head-on assault.

By The Book, it was exactly the wrong thing to do. She should have established a base of fire, analyzed the enemy's dispositions and deployed her maneuver units to exploit their weaknesses. But she didn't have time for that, not with those impossible sting ships coming in from the west and no way of knowing how many more aircraft, or what fresh nightmare surprise, might be coming in their wake.

There were seventy-five men dug in along that steep valley wall. Seventy-five men in prepared positions, with battle armor they shouldn't have had, and armed with the heavy weapons Charlie Company had left aboard Marguerite Johnsen, and Pamela Yussuf had only the eighteen surviving members of Francesca Masolle's platoon. Plasma bolts ripped downward, splitting the darkness like demonic lightning bolts, turning the river valley's towering conifer-like trees into roaring torches. It was a holocaust, and Yussuf's men and women charged straight into it.

Alicia saw it all through her floating remote, but she also saw the four sting ships accelerating, dropping their noses while their fire control systems reached out towards Yussuf's attack.

"Target!" she snapped over the squad net, dropping sighting circles into the tactical display. She didn't give any additional orders; there was no need, and even as she and the rest of First Squad hurtled after Yussuf, the icons representing Doorn and Osayaba slammed instantly to a halt. The two plasma gunners and their wings wheeled to face the incoming sting ships, and the inexperience of the pilots of those sting ships showed as they came in virtually wingtip-to-wingtip.

Plasma streaked up to meet them, and two of them vanished in cataclysmic eruptions. A third was too close to one of the leaders. It flew directly into the explosion, then howled down out of the heavens, stricken and out of control, as its turbines ingested chunks of its consort's shattered fuselage. Flame streaked its starboard side, billowing from the engine nacelle, and then it tipped onto its back and plowed into the trees below in a rending fan of fresh fire and secondary explosions.

The fourth pulled up frantically, toggling a pair of cluster bombs as it clawed for altitude. It twisted into an evasion maneuver, but too late. Obaseki Osayaba's second plasma bolt struck it full in the belly and spat its flaming fragments across the night … just as one of its cluster bombs spewed its submunitions across Йdouard Bonrepaux's position. Doorn's wingman hit his jump gear in a desperate effort to evade the bomblets, but he didn't have enough time. The submunitions exploded, and they were anti-armor weapons, not antipersonnel, designed to take out heavy armored units. Not even Cadre battle armor could stand up to that, and Bonrepaux simply disintegrated.

Alicia watched it all in the tick's slow motion, and her heart twisted as she lost yet another of her people. But at least the immediate air threat had been neutralized, and she and the rest of First Squad's survivors plunged up the valley slope on Yussuf's heels.

That slope was the anteroom of Hell. Outnumbered four-to-one or not, Charlie Company's Second Platoon tore into the ambushers' positions like an old-fashioned chainsaw. They came up the slope, battle rifles spitting sub-caliber penetrators, and Corporal Mayfield, Second Platoon's sole surviving plasma gunner, laced the steep mountainside with concussive fists of lightning as she covered their counterattack.

Storms of plasma streaked back at Mayfield as the dug-in infantry's armor sensors back-plotted her fire. The cadrewoman danced and spun at the heart of a forest fire inferno, evading bolt after bolt while she fired back with the deadly precision of a Cadre trooper riding the tick.

But no evasion pattern could avoid those scores of plasma bolts for long. Mayfield killed nineteen of the ambushers, but in the end, there was one bolt too many, and her green icon turned abruptly crimson.

Yet before she died, she'd opened a hole in the middle of the enemy's line, and Yussuf and her people slammed into it. Fire ripped back and forth, battle rifle penetrators crossing with the fusion-spawned fury of plasma. The men who'd set out to slaughter Charlie Company found themselves suddenly face-to-face with the most deadly combat troops in the history of mankind. Taken completely by surprise, outgunned and disorganized by their savage initial losses, charging dug-in positions in a headlong, uphill assault, and outnumbered four times over, Pamela Yussuf's people hit their enemies like the wrath of God incarnate.

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 attempted," 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 twenty 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.

Alicia would have liked to believe they could be stupid enough to bring those lorries where she could get a shot at them, but while whoever had set this up might be crazy, she didn't appear to be stupid. No. They were going to use those lorries to pull troops from other positions and drop them somewhere in front of her. Somewhere safely out of the reach of her line-of-sight heavy weapons at the moment they set down. And if the enemy CO was as smart as Alicia suspected she was, she wouldn't panic. She'd take the time to collect as many as possible of the armored infantry she'd initially stationed along the river valley and combine them before she went up against the company again.

And in the meantime, Alicia thought, continuing to crash ahead through dense, low-hanging tree branches, she'll do everything she can to slow us up and give herself time to make her own preparations.

"Mauser-One, Winchester-One," she said over her new private com link to Hillman.

"Go, Alley," Hillman replied rather more informally, and Alicia smiled tightly.

"I've just been thinking about what I'd to if I were in charge on the other side," she said. "They're going to try to slow us up-they have to. And they're going to do it with those air-cav mounts."

There were nine of the aircraft icons swarming around now, just beyond plasma gun range of the moving cadremen. Their active sensor systems lashed at the Cadre troopers, obviously tracking them and reporting back to their own HQ.

"Roger that," Hillman said flatly. "I've been thinking the same thing and wondering why they haven't already done it."

"Because they're afraid of what it's going to cost them." There was a certain grim satisfaction in Alicia's reply as she remembered what Michael Doorn and Obaseki Osayaba had done to four larger and much more capable sting ships. "But that isn't going to hold them off much longer. So, here's what I'm thinking -"

Another five minutes passed-five minutes in which Charlie Company's survivors made good another three kilometers towards their objective. The sensor emissions from the air cavalry mounts intensified as they entered a rocky, more sparsely-forested ravine, and Alicia's lips skinned back from her teeth. She'd picked this particular bit of ground from her storage terrain maps as the most likely spot, and the stronger sensor emissions suggested she'd been right.

Cadre battle armor was a hellishly hard target for sensors to lock up at extended ranges, even in open country. The people in those air-cav mounts were undoubtedly getting enough back to know where the company was, but there was no way they could be keeping track of individual targets with any degree of confidence. The fact that they were driving their sensor systems harder now that her people were in less concealing terrain told her they were trying to rectify that, and that suggested that they were just about to -

"Incoming!" she snapped over the all-units net, and her people responded instantly.

The brutally truncated company column exploded, unraveling into two-man knots as its individual wings scattered. They bounded off into the trees and boulders, splitting up to deny the air-cav a concentrated target, and Alicia and Tannis did the same.

"Here!" Tannis barked over their private link, and Alicia automatically slammed to halt. Tannis had been concentrating on their individual tactical situation while Alicia rode herd on everyone else, and Alicia had total faith in her wing's judgment. Now, as she focused her own attention on the spot Tannis had selected, she nodded in sharp approval. They had a hillside covering one flank and a couple of huge boulders covering another, and the overhead tree cover was sparse enough to give their battle rifles decent coverage.

Alicia didn't waste time approving Tannis' selection; she simply dropped into her normal position, covering their right flank while Tannis covered the left. She reached out through her armor sensors, sweeping her area of responsibility, but even as she did that, another part of her attention watched the icons of her other troopers, and yet another part was focused on the take from the tactical remotes hovering above the company.

The remotes watching half a dozen air-cav mounts bank sharply, drop their noses, and come streaking in at just under mach one.

The good news, a corner of her brain reflected with the detached precision of the tick, was that the enemy didn't appear to have any indirect fire weapons. There'd been no mortar or artillery rounds dropping on their heads, and the air-cav hadn't been dropping any precision-guided weapons on them. Nor had they been using hyper-velocity weapons, which was even better.

The bad news was that there were at least two types of air-cav mounts above them. One, she didn't recognize, but it appeared to be a relatively light craft, with a maximum crew of two, and without the size and power plant emissions to support plasma cannon. But the other, the larger one, she did recognize. Like the battle armor and the Groundhog-Three surveillance array they'd already destroyed, it was an Imperial Marine design-one of the old Sabre Bats. The Sabre Bats hadn't been first-line Marine equipment in at least thirty years, but they were still capable platforms. And unlike the lighter mounts she couldn't identify, the Sabre Bat did carry a pair of plasma cannon.

The six attackers howled in on the scattering cadremen in a column of twos. Both of the leaders were Sabre Bats, coming right down the middle, followed by four of the lighter types, and fresh, even heavier gouts of plasma flashed across the night. Trees vaporized, boulders shattered, and yet more forest fires roared to life at the kiss of the plasma's thermal bloom.

Another green icon turned crimson as Corporal William Tchaikovsky took a direct hit. His wing, Corporal Helena Chu went down, as well, her icon circled by the strobing red band which indicated major damage to her armor. The two lighter mounts directly behind the Sabre Bats opened fire, spraying heavy-caliber penetrators from their nose-mounted calliopes, and three more of Alicia's troopers' icons switched from green to lurid crimson.

But then more plasma bolts screeched through the night, not raining down from the heavens, but streaking up from below. Celestine Hillman and the three plasma gunners Alicia had detached from the main body opened fire from well behind the rest of the company, still hidden from the aircraft's sensors by the heavy trees and their own armor's stealth systems. The strafers' attention had been on their targets; they hadn't realized someone else was targeting them, as well.

Hillman's people had zero-deflection shots from directly astern at targets headed directly away from them, and both Sabre Bats disintegrated in the same instant. One of the lighter types exploded even more spectacularly, and then the three survivors were jinking and weaving wildly in a frantic effort to evade the same fate.

One of them managed to dodge two plasma bolts, but a third bolt impacted on its turbine. It was only a glancing hit, almost a clear miss, but the turbine's housing shattered, and the mount's hydrogen reservoir exploded in a brilliant blue flash.

The other two aircraft evaded the plasma fire, but while they were doing that, they swept through the air space directly above their intended victims, and Alicia's rifle snapped into firing position. She ripped off an extended twelve-round burst, and fifty other rifles, and a pair of calliopes, were doing the same thing. The distracted air-cav pilots were too busy worrying about the plasma gunners who'd suddenly appeared behind them like evil genies to think about ground fire from the rest of the cadremen, and neither of them had the chance to realize that they should have been looking in both directions. Their aircraft carried light armor, but not enough in the face of that hurricane of penetrators, and both of them plummeted out of the heavens, trailing comet tails of flame that smashed, crackling, into the resinous trees.

"All units, Winchester-One," Alicia said. "Reform on me."

She and Tannis made their way out of their positions, heading for Corporal Chu, while the other troopers filtered back out of the flaming forest and Hillman and her people came up from behind. The three remaining air-cav mounts stayed where they were, hovering with what Alicia devoutly hoped was shocked caution, outside effective plasma range.

She looked around at the raging fires, grimly satisfied with the destruction of two-thirds of the enemy's remaining air power. Well, she corrected herself, two-thirds of the air power we know about, anyway. But her satisfaction was bitter on the tongue as she counted the cost. It could have been far, far worse; she knew that. But that didn't make the loss of four more of her people-her family-any less agonizing.

A distant corner of her mind knew what was waiting for her when she finally had time to stop concentrating on the business of survival, on the unremitting drive to accomplish what had become an impossible mission. For the moment, the need to focus everything on getting her surviving people out shoved all other thoughts, all other concerns, into the background. But when that was no longer true, when she could finally allow herself to face the wrenching brutality of Charlie Company's destruction … .

She closed the door on that corner of her mind once again as she went to one armored knee beside Helena Chu, and her green eyes were bleak.

"How you doing, Helena?" she asked quietly.

"Not so good, Alley." The wounded trooper's voice was harsh, strained, despite all the painkillers in her pharmacope could do. The plasma bolt which had knocked out her armor hadn't killed her outright, but she'd lost her left leg just below the hip, and the entire left side of her armor was a smoking ruin. Her battle rifle had been destroyed, and her vital signs flickered unsteadily on Alicia's monitors. Alicia looked up at Tanis' face through the visor of her armor, and her wing shook her head silently.

"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 managed 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.

"Then finish them off!" the operation's overall commander shouted back from his Green Haven communications center. "Finish them this time, damn it!"

"We will!" the XO promised, and turned his attention to doing just that.

He wasn't as comfortable or well trained as Burkhart had been when it came to interpreting his battle armor sensors' reports, but it didn't take a genius to know the Cadre bastards were screwed. He'd never really believed they'd be stupid enough to hit the action group's positions head-on this way, but they had. Oh, they'd hurt the FALA fighters with that initial deadly volley, and whoever those bastards behind the plasma guns on the other side were, they were a hell of a lot better than his cannoneers. He admitted that, but they weren't enough better. The sheer weight of his own cannons' suppressive fire had driven them to ground-they weren't even shooting back at all, now, assuming they were still alive-and the entire crazy assault had bogged down almost instantly.

He squatted in the cramped CP and glared at the holographic HUD projected before his eyes. He couldn't sort out the details any longer, and he switched to a direct visual. The schematic's confusing iconology disappeared, and he smiled viciously as he watched the muzzle flashes and lightning bolt-streaks of plasma flay the darkness with an ugly, lethal beauty. The sheer volume of death and destruction his people were pouring out filled him with almost erotic pleasure, and he didn't need any frigging HUD details to know the cadremen were being hammered into dog meat.

Alicia crouched a little lower as a plasma bolt streaked past the boulder she was using for cover. The plasma impacted on one of the local conifers, and a five-meter chunk of the thirty-centimeter tree trunk vaporized. The upper two thirds of the tree plummeted downward, already flaming, and crashed half across Alicia's position. The main trunk missed her, and her armor protected her against the branches which did slam down across her, but it still felt as if a giant hand had just slapped her against the earth like a pesky bug.

"Sarge!"

"I'm okay, Tannis!" she replied quickly, and she was-for the moment. But the flames roaring around her as the rest of the tree caught fire would be a problem if she stayed where she was very long. If nothing else, the ammo for the CHK she'd appropriated from a Second Platoon trooper who no longer needed it would start cooking off. But for now, her armor was handling it easily, and she drew her vibro blade one-handed. The force field lopped through the thirty-centimeter trunk effortlessly, and she cut her way clear of the tangle, then deactivated the blade, hit her jump gear, and vaulted over to join Tannis.

A heavy-caliber penetrator from one of the terrorist calliopes spanged off her left pauldron just before she hit the ground again. It hit too obliquely to penetrate, but the impact slammed her down, and despite the armor's anti-kinetic systems, she grunted as she landed.

She hardly even noticed. Her attention was on her HUD, where eighteen fresh green icons, led by Celestine Hillman's, had suddenly erupted into the blocking position's rear.

The new FALA commander never realized just how badly he'd misread the situation. His CP was, indeed, exactly where The Book said it should be. Which, unfortunately, meant Celestine Hillman knew exactly where to look for it when she emerged from the fold in the ground Cornelius Burkhart had overlooked.

Perhaps it would have been unfair to expect Burkhart to have noticed it. It wasn't much of a terrain feature, after all-only the meandering ravine of a dry, seasonal streambed, nowhere more than a couple of meters deep. Besides, it hadn't really been inside Burkhart's perimeter. It was between his position and the action group which formed the easternmost anchor of the blocking line, and it was supposed to be covered by fire from both sides.

Except for the minor fact that neither position had actually had a line of fire into the streambed … or realized that it needed one.

The first plasma bolt from Hillman's scratch-built squad impacted directly on the CP, obliterating Burkhart's successor and simultaneously destroying the position's primary sensor array. The defenders were thrown back on their armor's individual sensors, and-like their obliterated XO-they simply weren't as good as the Cadre at interpreting them.

They were still trying to figure out what was happening when Hillman's people swarmed over them from behind, shooting and grenading as they came. Some of the FALA infantry turned in their positions just in time to meet deadly bursts of battle rifle fire. Others never got even that far.

"Go, go, go!" Alicia barked as the enemy's fire faltered suddenly. It stuttered uncertainly for another moment, and then died almost entirely as the people behind it suddenly realized they'd been flanked.

Panic set in, exactly as Alicia had hoped, and as the terrorists wavered, she and the rest of the company came charging up the slope directly into them behind the deadly muzzle flashes of their rifles.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Sir Arthur Keita watched the repeater plot as HMS Ctesiphon decelerated towards Fuller orbit. The battlecruiser still wore her freighter's electronic mask, although he had no way of knowing whether or not the terrorists aboard Star Roamer were still buying the deception.

Of course, I don't know whether or not they ever really bought it in the first place, either, he thought, and looked back at the holograph of the Shallingsport Peninsula on the main display in Marguerite Johnsen's intelligence center.

That holograph was nowhere near as detailed as he wished it were. The icon which was supposed to indicate the position of Charlie Company-or its survivors, he thought grimly-strobed to indicate that it was only an estimate. They still had communications with DeVries, but they'd become increasingly sporadic, and they'd lost virtually all tactical telemetry channels even during the windows when the transport's orbit took her directly over Shallingsport.

Keita felt his belly muscles tightening once again. God, how he wished he knew what was happening down there! Not that knowing would have done him any good at the moment. He realized that only too well, however little he wanted to admit it. Never before in his entire Cadre career had he felt as helpless as he felt at this instant, and guilt hammered in the back of his brain. It was irrational, he knew, but that made it no less real. He was the one who'd ordered Madison Alwyn's men and women into this holocaust, and now he sat safe and sound aboard Marguerite Johnsen while they died beyond his reach. While he couldn't even be down there with them. While -

He cut that thought off and made himself push it down once again. He couldn't do anything about that, and he made himself reconsider what he did know.

At least if DeVries was right-and she probably was, he thought-the terrorists were probably even more uncertain of her position than he was stuck here in Marguerite Johnsen.

The Cadre brigadier shook his head and thanked God for Sergeant First Class Alicia DeVries. He'd lived through enough cluster fucks in his own career, if none quite this bad, to appreciate the magnitude of her accomplishments. Of course, Charlie Company was the Cadre, composed of the most rigorously selected and trained soldiers in the galaxy, but not even the Cadre could train people to take situations like this one in stride. Without her to hold them together, keep them moving … .

His last message from DeVries was almost thirty minutes old. She'd reported the assault on the FALA blocking position in a terse, matter-of-fact tone which had fooled no one aboard Marguerite Johnsen. The disguised Fleet transport had worked with Charlie Company for over three standard years. Her crew had become part of the Charlie Company family, and Keita could feel their shock and grief all about him. But there'd been no trace of that shock or grief in DeVries' voice-only the clipped cadences the tick induced.

Keita would have been tempted to hate her, if he'd thought she truly were as unmoved, as machinelike, as that voice had sounded. But he knew better than that, because his own voice had sounded like that once or twice during his career. Because he knew all about locking down the pain until there was time to face it and taste it to the full.

"We're down to thirty-two effectives," she'd said. "We lost nine breaking through the saddle. We've lost five more since then, including Sergeant Hillman, when their air-cav came in to strafe, but they aren't doing that anymore. I think we've finally convinced them it's a losing proposition; they seem to be down to only two aircraft, and they're staying at extreme range."

She'd stopped speaking for what would have been a very brief pause for someone Keita hadn't known was riding the tick, then resumed.

"I think we've shaken them off, Uncle Arthur. We're not getting any more active sensor hits from their air-cav, and the two mounts they have left seem to be running a search pattern well behind us. I think they let us break contact after we nailed that last pair of strafers, and they haven't found us again."

"What's your ammunition state?" he'd asked, and hated himself for asking.

"Low," she'd replied. "We're down to an average of thirty-seven rounds per rifle. We're almost entirely out of of grenades, and we've got less than fifteen hundred rounds for the calliopes. We're down to only three plasma rifles-we lost Corporal Doorn and his weapon on the last strafing run-and we've only got a couple of dozen hydrogen pellets for the three we've got left."

"Understood," he'd said, then paused and drawn a deep breath. "What are your intentions?" he'd asked then.

"Unchanged," she'd said flatly. He'd opened his mouth to protest, but she'd continued before he could.

"We're most of the way to the objective, and I don't think they know where we are-not accurately, at any rate. Even if they've got a better idea where we are than I think they do, the only place anyone could get in here, whether with assault shuttles or recovery boats, is Green Haven itself, and our intel on that sucks. I haven't been able to get a good look at the spaceport there yet, but if they've got the kind of firepower and weapons we've seen out here in the mountains, they've got even more of it covering Green Haven, and you need to know how much when you start considering options. That means we've got to get in close enough to eyeball the situation there for you, at the very least, and we're almost out of sensor remotes. These people have demonstrated that they're pretty good at picking them off, too, so I've got all but one of the five we have left tied down until we get close enough for them to do us some good. I'll contact you again when we have. Winchester-One, clear."

That had been-he looked at the time display-twenty-eight minutes ago, and he hadn't heard a word from her since.

Where are you, DeVries-Alley? he worried. He longed to contact her, demand an updated situation report, but he suppressed the temptation sternly. If she was right, if she had managed to break contact contact, the less communication between them the better. And in the meantime -

"Sir Arthur?"

Keita turned quickly to find himself facing Marguerite Johnsen communications officer.

"What, Lieutenant Smithson?" he asked the Fleet officer.

"Sir Arthur, we've just received a communications request," Smithson said in an odd tone, then grimaced. "He says he's the terrorists' commander, Sir."

Keita's expression went more granite-like than ever, but his eyes narrowed slightly. He gazed at the lieutenant for perhaps three seconds, then shrugged.

"Put it through," he said.

"Yes, Sir." Smithson entered a command through his own neural headset, then nodded to Keita, indicating a live mike.

"This is Sir Arthur Keita," Keita said flatly. "What do you want?"

"Sir Arthur Keita? 'The Emperor's Bulldog' himself?" a voice replied, and its owner laughed mockingly. "I am honored! Of course, calling someone a bulldog is just another way of calling him a son-of-a-bitch, isn't it?"

"You're the one who asked to speak to me," Keita said, his voice still flat as hammered steel. "Was there something you wanted to say, or do you prefer simply asking rhetorical questions?"

"My, aren't we testy?"

"Com me back when you've got something to say," Keita said, and started to gesture to Smithson.

"You might want to remember that I've got six hundred Empies down here," the voice said, suddenly harsher and colder. "Cut this connection, and I'll send fifty of them back to you in body bags."

"You can do that any time you want to, regardless of whether or not I talk to you," Keita said unflinchingly. "Of course, doing that would constitute a different sort of escalation, wouldn't it? I really don't think you'd like what will happen if I decide you're going to kill the hostages anyway."

"Do you really think we're stupid enough to believe you wouldn't kill every one of us the instant you thought you could, whatever we do here?" the man on the other end of the com link sneered. "We don't have anything at all to lose from that perspective, Sir Arthur!"

"Except that if I believe you're going to start killing hostages for no better reason than the fact that I've hurt your feelings, then I'll decide there's no point in trying to get them out alive, anyway," Keita said levelly. "And in that case, I'll solve the entire problem very simply with an HVW strike."

There was silence for several seconds.

"You're bluffing," the FALA spokesman said finally.

"Maybe," Keita acknowledged. "And maybe not. Remember, you've given me a lot of reasons to want to see you dead. The only thing keeping you alive right now are those hostages. You convince me they aren't coming out alive, anyway, and I don't have any reason to keep you alive, do I? So suppose we both stop threatening one another and you tell me why you commed?"

"All right, I will. You say you don't have any reason to keep me alive if you think the hostages are going to be killed. Well, I don't have any reason to keep the hostages alive if I think my people are all going to be killed, either. Which is why Star Roamer had better not see any assault shuttles heading for the planet from that battlecruiser-you know, the one pretending to be a freighter-when it joins you in orbit up there."

So much for whether or not Ctesiphon's EW has them fooled, Keita thought.

"Before you waste any time lying to me about it," the terrorist continued, "I should tell you that Star Roamer's sensor arrays have been watching your precious battlecruiser ever since she arrived. Just as they were watching you, Sir Arthur. The Marguerite Johnsen might be able to fool some people, but we did our homework a little bit better than that. We knew who you were from the moment you arrived, and we were expecting your drop. Just as we've been expecting the arrival of reinforcements. I'm sure you have quite a few Marines aboard that battlecruiser, but I'd strongly recommend that you keep them there."

"And I'm sure you can hardly wait to tell me why I should take your recommendation to heart," Keita said when the other voice paused.

"Actually there are several reasons," the other man said, "but two big ones come immediately to mind. First, as I'm sure you've already realized, we have a lot more military capability down here than you assumed we did. In addition to what you've already discovered, we have ground-to-space defenses dug in around Green Haven. We can't stop an all-out assault, I'm sure, but we can kill all the assault shuttles you can pack aboard a single battlecruiser. So if you really want to send your Marines in and see them all as dead as your precious cadremen, I'm sure we could oblige you.

"Now, it's possible you're thinking that I'm bluffing, or maybe you're thinking I'm overconfident about what our defenses can do. I'm not bluffing, but it is possible I'm overestimating our capabilities … the same way you overestimated yours when you decided to land Charlie Company. Which brings me to my second reason you shouldn't try dropping Marines on our heads; if you do, and if it turns out we can't stop them after all, we will kill the hostages. We won't have any reason not to."

"I see."

"I imagine you do," the FALA spokesman said mockingly. "And while we're on the subject, if you try to land Marines somewhere else, outside our defensive perimeter, Star Roamer will inform us. And the instant she does, we'll kill three hundred hostages. Please note that I'm not threatening to kill them out of hand, or as a bargaining ploy, or even in a fit of pique. We won't kill them unless you try to get fancy, so you've still got six hundred-well, three hundred-reasons to keep me alive, don't you?"

"To what final end?" Keita asked. "It's obvious your original demands were nothing but a way to pass the time while you waited to ambush our people. Surely you don't think the Empire is going to leave you or your organization alive in the long run after something like this?"

"We've all been on your proscribed list for years," the other man said. "You can't kill any of us more than once, however much you'd like to. And just this minute, I think you should be worried more about who we might kill. We'll tell you what our final demands are when we're good and ready. In the meantime, keep your Marines the hell off this planet. Is that understood, Sir Arthur?"

"It is," Keita grated. "And if I do, what happens to my people on Fuller?"

"Why, they die, Sir Arthur," the terrorist spokesman jeered. "That was the whole point of our little visit here-or one of them, at any rate. They've butchered enough of our friends over the years, after all, so it's only fair we get a little of our own back, and we're looking forward to it. We've already killed most of them; in the end, we'll kill them all, and enjoy doing it. Unless, of course, you're prepared to commit to a major assault to save the handful of them who are still alive knowing all your precious civilians will die before the first Marine boot hits the Green Haven ceramacrete. Somehow, I don't think it would look very good in the Empire media if word got out that twenty or thirty cadremen were more important to you than six hundred of your Emperor's loving subjects, now would it?"

Keita said nothing, and the terrorist laughed.

"That's what I thought, too," he said. "Don't go away, Sir Arthur. I'm sure I'll have something else to say to you … eventually."

"Well, you were right, Sarge," Tannis Cateau said softly.

Alicia made an equally soft sound of agreement. She and Tannis lay side-by-side along the crest of a ridge overlooking the Jason Corporation facility and the not yet officially open Green Haven spaceport. Their armor's active sensors were shut completely down, and their passives' resolution wasn't all that great at this range, but what they could see was bad enough.

It was about one hour until local dawn, and Fuller's moon had set long since, which meant it was darker than the pit. The freedom Alliance terrorists had extinguished most of the exterior lights when they took over the industrial site, but even under those conditions, Alicia could make out the angular shape of heavy plasma cannon-the kind that could destroy heavy tanks or knock down even the most heavily armored sting ships. There were three cannon positions, each with four of the heavy weapons, spaced evenly around the Jason Corporation buildings, and she was almost certain she saw at least two hyper-velocity missile launchers, as well.

Her mouth tightened as she took in the weaponry so clearly on display. The terrorists had had the better part of three standard weeks since arriving here to prepare their defenses, but everything she'd seen so far shouted that the FALA had actually started the process long before that. They'd had to get the weapons and the personnel to man them on to the planet well in advance of Star Roamer's arrival, and it looked to her as if the air-defense cannon's positions had actually been ceramacreted at the same time as the parking apron around the Jason buildings. They'd certainly been graded out of the slopes of the hill under the building, almost like terraces set a little below the level of the rest of the parking apron. No doubt the architect's plans had shown some perfectly reasonable justification for them, but Alicia was grimly certain that their real reason for being was the purpose they were serving now.

Which means the "Jason Corporation" is going to get a very close examination from imperial Intelligence in the very near future, she told herself coldly. Not that that helps us a great deal right this moment.

"So what do we do now?" Tannis asked quietly.

"First, I send in my remote," Alicia replied, and sent the mental command to the small robotic scout riding her equipment harness. They'd lost two more of them since her last report to Sir Arthur, and a tiny part of her wanted to stroke the remote, as if it were some faithful, treasured hunting hawk, before she launched it on its way.

But she didn't. Instead, she closed her eyes and concentrated on steering her flying viewpoint as stealthily as she could.

There were active sensors covering the terrorists' central position. She tasted them through the remote's senses, and she felt her way cautiously towards them. They rose in an almost unbroken barrier in front of her, but it was only almost unbroken, and their primary concern was with a direct assault landing. She hovered with her remote, a disembodied presence just outside the electronic fence, cautiously tasting its emissions for what the tick made seem a very long time, and then she nodded very slightly.

There was a gap. It wasn't much of one-certainly much too small for anything the size of an assault shuttle or a recovery boat to get through-but it was there, and she edged carefully, carefully into it. The remote carried a single detachable relay transceiver, and she guided the probe to the roof of the building and instructed it to detach the relay link. She positioned it very carefully, with the whisker laser directed back through the keyhole the remote had crept through. There was no guarantee that something or someone wouldn't stray into the transmission path and detect it anyway, but she could at least avoid the known detection threats.

Once the relay was in place, she lifted the remote higher, hovering directly above the central building. Its active sensors, like those of her armor, were locked down, but its passive sensors had a much closer look at the antiair defenses, and she grimaced. Her original impression had been correct, except that there were three multi-rail HVW launchers, one paired with each of the plasma cannon emplacements.

She studied them for several seconds even as she recorded every detail of the take from the remote, then sent her small henchman drifting silently along the building's eaves, looking for a way in. After a couple of minutes, she found one. The remote hovered under the roof's overhang, tiny cutting laser slicing quietly through the mesh-like grill covering the opening, and then floated very slowly through the ventilation intake.

The interior of the building looked much as Alicia had expected. A portion of it was cut up into office space and what looked like a cafeteria, but at least eighty percent of the vast structure was a single, open cavern dotted with maintenance workstations for the heavy construction equipment which should have filled it. There was a second-floor catwalk around the large, central area, and additional office space on that level, but her remote's passives were more than adequate at such close range to confirm that only two or three of those offices had anyone in them.

Not that there weren't plenty of other people in the building.

The hostages huddled in the middle of the open space, most of them sitting on what appeared to be foam sleeping mats. There were portable toilets parked along the holding area's walls, and the remote's visual sensors showed her canisters of drinking water and what looked like standard Marine field ration packs. All of the captives were dirty and unwashed looking, and most of them sat folded in on themselves, with the body language of people who wanted to withdraw to some inner place, safely away from the terror which had enveloped them for two standard months.

On the other hand, there were actually fewer terrorists inside the building than she'd expected, and she smiled humorlessly at the realization.

We've seen so many of them out here that I've gotten into the habit of thinking they must have an inexhaustible supply of manpower, she thought. Well, obviously they don't.

Under the circumstances, though, they might be excused for believing they had enough inside guards, she reflected. There were four heavy calliopes mounted on the catwalk, positioned to cover every square centimeter of floorspace. Any one of them could spit out over five thousand rounds per minute; the four of them together could turn the maintenance area into an abattoir in moments. Nor where they the only security measure the terrorists had taken. An infantry plasma cannon-lighter than the ones in the air-defense positions but considerably heavier than anything Alicia still had-was positioned far enough inside the building to cover all three of the vehicle entrances in its western wall.

Only the crew of the plasma cannon were in battle armor. The remainder of the eighteen armed personnel backing up the calliope crews and the cannoneers were either completely unarmored or wore only unpowered body armor. All of them, however, she noticed, wore combat helmets. She couldn't make out enough details to be certain, but they looked like more Marine surplus equipment, in which case they would provide their wearers with at least semi-decent sensors and a free-flow tactical link.

She rotated the remote, giving herself one last good look, then lifted it up and landed it quietly on an exposed support beam just under the building's roof. She positioned it to give herself the best field of view she could, then switched it to standby and sat up.

"I take it you followed all of that?" she said to Tannis.

"Yep." Tannis climbed to her own feet, and the two of them moved down the back side of their ridge to join the other Charlie Company survivors.

There aren't very many of them, Alicia thought as she their icons gathered around hers.

Thirty-one other men and women stood around her, eleven percent of the company which had made the drop. Only seven of the original eighteen troopers of her own squad were still on their feet … which still made First Squad her strongest surviving unit.

Every suit of armor bore its own proof of what its wearer had been through to get this far. The reactive chameleon features built into Cadre armor wasn't doing much good at the moment-not for armor whose smart surfaces had been liberally smeared with resinous sap as it crashed through the dense branches of the native conifers. The forest fires which so much plasma fire left in their wake-the fires whose lurid light still painted the skies above the tangled mountains behind them-had added their own share to the surviving cadremen's battered and bedamned appearance. Cinders, ash, and unburned twigs and needle-like leaves were glued to the sap-coated armor, and most of the armored figures she could see showed the same sort of dents and gouges her own armor did.

She looked around at them, and her heart twisted within her as she thought about what she was about to ask of them.

"You've all seen what we're up against out there," she said finally. "I don't see any way to get recovery boats-or assault shuttles, for that matter-down against those sorts of defenses. Not without using suppressive fire that would kill all the hostages, anyway. So the way I see it, that only leaves one option."

She paused, then opened her mouth again, but before she could speak, Astrid Nordbш spoke for her. The dark-haired, blue-eyed corporal had run out of ammunition for her battle rifle and replaced it with Shai Hau-zhi's calliope when Obaseki Osayaba's wing stopped a heavy-caliber calliope round from one of the air-cav mounts. Now she chuckled mirthlessly over the com.

"What the hell, Sarge," she said. "We've come this far, and it's been so much fun. We might as well stay to the end of the ride."

Chapter Twenty-Six

"Skycap, Winchester-One."

Sir Arthur Keita twitched upright in his comfortable chair as the tick-clipped, husky contralto spoke.

"Winchester-One, Skycap," he said quickly. "Go."

"We've got that eyeball of the objective for you, Uncle Arthur," the voice said. "It doesn't look especially good. They've got air-defense plasma cannon-they look like Marine Mark Eighteens-positioned around the central facility, with HVW launchers to back them up. They've also got a hundred and eighty-I say again, one-eight-zero-more infantry dug in around the base of the hill. We've gotten a remote inside the objective, and they've got all of the hostages in a single location covered by calliopes and infantry support cannon. We have a hard count of thirty-three hostiles inside the building, including weapons crews, but only three in battle armor. I've confirmed active air-defense radar and lidar, and they have a radar fence around the building itself at ground level. They do not-I repeat, do not-have a fence around the base of the hill. Some of their infantry seems to be moving around a good bit, and I'd guess they figured their own people would keep triggering alarms if they covered the hill itself."

Keita's expression had tightened further with every word, and he rubbed his face wearily at the end of Alicia's summary.

"Winchester-One," he said when she paused. "Alley. The FALA's been in contact with us. They say they'll kill half the hostages if we try to land Marines from Ctesiphon-and all of them if it looks like we might manage to actually get the Wasps down through their defenses. And," his jaw tightened, but he made himself continue levelly, "they say they won't let us withdraw you. They want to finish you off, make a clean sweep. Although," he admitted bleakly, "I think they might actually be happier in some ways if we tried to extract you anyway and all the hostages were killed."

"That's about how I'd already read the situation, Uncle Arthur," Alicia said calmly. "But none of us down here are inclined to let these people get away with it."

Keita's eyebrows rose, but she continued steadily before he could speak.

"I think we can get into the objective," she told him. "I believe we can take out the air defense positions and hold the main facility until you get the Wasps down to relieve us."

Keita turned to stare at Wadislaw Watts. The Marine intelligence specialist stared back at him in obvious disbelief, and Keita shook his head sharply.

"Alley," he said, "I'm sorry, but I don't think you can do it."

"Then you're wrong, Uncle Arthur," she replied flatly. "My people can do it. We will do it."

"But -"

"They don't know we're here," she continued, overriding his protest. "If they did, they'd sure as hell be doing something about it. We've got good cover and concealment up to within less than three hundred meters of their outer infantry positions on the north side of the hill. I've got three plasma guns left, and there are three anti-air sites. We move most of our people in as close as we can get on the north side. Then the plasma gunners take out the air defenses to clear the way for the Wasps. While they do that, the rest of us break through their outer ring position, charge the building, cut our way through the outer wall-it's only prefab plastic-with our vibro blades, and take out the interior terrorists before they know we're coming. Then all we have to do is hold the central building until the Wasps get there."

Keita closed his eyes and clenched his fists so tightly that they hurt, then shook his head again, hard.

"Alley, that's a suicide mission," he said, and his powerful voice was frayed ever so slightly about the edge. "You're low on ammo, you'd have to cover-what? five hundred meters? six?-to reach the building. And even assuming you managed that, and managed to take out the inside guards, there'd still be almost two hundred people in battle armor coming in behind you. People who wouldn't give a good goddamn how many of the hostages they kill."

"Uncle Arthur, they're going to kill all of them-or most of them-anyway," Alicia said even more flatly. "That may not be their game plan, but it's what's going to happen, and you know it as well as I do. They can't talk their way out of this one whatever they do, and when they start to figure that out, they're going to get desperate and begin killing people to try to force concessions you xan't give them. And when they do that, you're going to have to come in anyway. And when that happens, everyone dies. This way we can get at least some of them-most of them, I believe-out alive."

"But we don't have to do it right now," Keita said almost desperately. "If they don't know where you are, you can break off, evade. Maybe we can get a resupply drop to you without them realizing it. For God's sake, Alley, at least let us get more ammunition to you first!"

"We do have to do it now," she replied. "Right now. They don't know we're here at the moment, but they're still looking for us. Eventually, they'll find us. And even if that weren't true, even if we could withdraw, resupply, we'd never get this close again without being spotted on the way in. It's now or never, Uncle Arthur, and we've lost too many of our people to settle for never. Charlie Company is going in. Now, are you going to support us with a Marine drop, or not?"

"I can't believe we're doing this," Captain Wadislaw Watts said quietly. Keita gave him a sharp look, and the Marine shook his head quickly. "That wasn't a criticism, Sir Arthur. It was … amazement. I'm just trying to understand how even the Cadre can insist on going in after what's already happened to Charlie Company."

"Put that way, I have to agree with you," Keita said after a moment. "And a part of me wishes to hell they weren't. But DeVries is the one on the ground down there. She's the one who's gotten them this far despite everything those bastards could do to stop them, she's the one who's actually seen the site, and she's the commander on the spot. That makes it her call, and, God help me, I think it's the right call, too."

"You really believe they can pull it off, Sir?" Watts asked. Keita gazed at him for several seconds, then sighed.

"No, Captain," he said softly. "I don't, not deep down inside. But I wouldn't have believed they could get as far as they have, either. If they can do that, maybe they've got one more miracle left in them. And even if they don't, DeVries is right about what's going to happen eventually. We'll try like hell to get the hostages out alive, but we won't. Not in the end. So she's right about its being time to roll the dice, too."

He turned away from the Marine, gazing into the depths of a visual display, unfocused eyes resting upon the pinprick stars gleaming in the endless, velvet blackness. Then he drew a deep breath and looked at Lieutenant Smithson.

"Get me a link to Ctesiphon, please, Lieutenant. I need to speak to Major Bennett."

"Are you serious, Sir?" Captain Broderick Lewinsky said, staring at Major Alexander Bennett, the commanding officer of Ctesiphon's reinforced Marine detachment. The briefing compartment would have been relatively spacious for the officers of the battlecruiser's normal detachment, but it was badly crowded by the number of people crammed into it at the moment. The fact that all of them were already in battle armor only put an even greater squeeze on the available space. But none of them had helmeted up yet, and Lewinsky wasn't the only officer in the compartment who looked as if he was having trouble believing what the major had just told them.

"Yes, I am serious," Bennett said flatly. "We're going in."

"But, Sir," Lieutenant Jurgensen said, "I thought Brigadier Keita told us the LZ was covered by antiair weapons."

"It is." If Bennett's voice had been flat before, it was grim now, and he looked the youthful lieutenant in the eye. "As a matter of fact, they say they've got Mark Eighteens dug in around the facility, with HVW launchers backing them up. And using Ctesiphon to provide suppressive fire has already been ruled out."

The officers in the compartment stared at him in horror, and he smiled thinly.

"According to Sir Arthur Keita, the survivors of the Cadre company are going to take out the emplacements for us before we enter atmosphere. Then they're going to seize the facility from the terrorists, and hold it against counterattack until we can get down to relieve them."

The compartment was completely silent for several seconds, then Lewinsky cleared his throat.

"Major, I know the Cadre's good. And God knows, just from the bits and pieces we've already heard, these people have kicked ass and taken names, especially after hitting a hot LZ. But how many of them can be left?"

"According to Sir Arthur, thirty-two effectives," Bennett said quietly.

"Thirty-two?" someone blurted. "My God, Sir-they went in with a company!"

"Which doesn't have a single officer left," Bennett said with a nod.

"And they're going to take out dug-in plasma cannon and HVW launchers, then seize and hold the facility until we hit dirt?" Captain Sigmund Boniface, Bravo Company's CO, said carefully.

"That's what they say, Siggy," the major told him. "I don't know if they honestly believe they can do it, but they're sure as hell going to try. And if they've got the guts to put it all on the line this way after what they've already been through, people, then we are going to support them. Is that perfectly clear?"

His expression was half a glare as he looked around the compartment, and the men and women gathered in it with him looked back steadily. The traditional rivalry between the Marines and the Cadre-the Wasps' resentment of all the publicity and media hype the Cadre routinely received, the Cadre's higher budget priorities, their frustration with the Cadre's habit of raiding the Corps' best personnel for its own recruits-none of that mattered. Not now, not in this compartment. These people understood what Charlie Company had already done … and what its battered and broken remnants were offering to do now.

"Of course it is, Sir," Boniface, as the senior company commander present replied. "I just don't believe even the Cadre can do it."

"According to Sir Arthur, this Sergeant DeVries does believe it," Bennett said. "And she's the one down there, not us."

"Excuse me, Sir," Delta Company's commander said, "but did you say DeVries? Alicia DeVries?"

"Sir Arthur didn't mention her first name," Bennett replied, looking sharply at the youthful captain with the Recon patch on the shoulder of her armor. "But the last name was certainly DeVries. Sergeant First Class DeVries. Why, Captain?"

"Because it sounds like you're talking about Alicia DeVries," the captain replied. "And if you are, she's Sebastian O'Shaughnessy's granddaughter."

"Sergeant Major O'Shaughnessy?" Bennett said sharply, and the captain nodded.

"Yes, Sir. And in her case, blood is definitely thicker than water."

"You know this sergeant? Know her personally, I mean?"

"Oh, yes, Sir," Captain Kuramochi Chiyeko said softly. "I believe you could say that. And if Alley DeVries says her people can do this, then I'm damned well not going to bet against it."

"I see." Bennett looked around the compartment one last time, and his lips quirked in a quick, brief smile. "Well, there you have it, people. We'll go with the original Green Haven assault landing plan. So get your people loaded up. I want the shuttles ready to separate from the racks fifteen minutes from now.

"Winchester-One, Skycap."

"Skycap, Winchester-One. Go, Uncle Arthur."

"Ctesiphon's launched her shuttles," Keita said. "At the moment, they're sticking close to the ship, so hopefully the bastards in Star Roamer won't realize they've separated. From the moment you give the insertion signal, they'll need twenty-five-I say again, two-five-minutes to hit the LZ. That's how long you'll have to hold."

"Understood, Skycap," Alicia said steadily.

Far, far above her, in Marguerite Johnsen's intelligence center, Sir Arthur Keita fought down the temptation to ask her one more time if she was certain about this.

"In that case, Winchester-One," he said instead, "the ball is in your hands."

"Understood," Alicia said again. "We will commence our attack in five minutes from … now."

A digital time display began ticking down in the corner of the mental HUD Keita's synth-link displayed for him, and his jaw set hard.

"Good hunting," he managed to say almost normally. "Skycap, clear."

Alicia studied her own HUD one final time.

Obaseki Osayaba, Alec Howard, and Serena DuPuy had the company's surviving plasma guns. Every one of them had lost his or her original wing on the nightmare journey to this point, and she'd paired them with Astrid Nordbш, Jackson Keller, and Ingrid Chernienko. Astrid, Jackson, and Ingrid had three of the four remaining calliopes, and she'd handed all of the remaining calliope ammunition to them and ditched the fourth calliope completely. The heavy-caliber, rapidfire weapons would have been of limited utility breaking into a facility crowded with civilian noncombatants.

"All units, Winchester-One," she said. "Plasma teams, remember-hit the air-defense positions and your assigned secondary targets, then get the hell out of it. The rest of us go the instant Obaseki and Serena take out the center positions on our slope."

There was no real need for her to tell them that yet again, but that was all right with her. She wasn't worried that they were going to think she didn't trust them to get it right, but she couldn't tell them what she really wanted to. Couldn't tell them how much each and every one of them meant to her, especially now, when they were the only Cadre family she had left. When she was the one who had decided for them that they were going to throw themselves into the furnace.

When so many of them were about to die.

No, she couldn't tell them that … but they heard it anyway. She knew they did, and that was enough.

"We go in three minutes," she said quietly. "God bless."

Section Leader Shwang Shau-pang of the Freedom Alliance Liberation Army hated battle armor. He'd never liked it, despite all the things it could do for him, because he'd never been able to completely overcome the claustrophobia which had plagued him since childhood. That was the main reason he preferred to leave his helmet visor open whenever he could, and he inhaled a deep breath of Green Haven's cool, late-night air.

Like most of the FALA "regulars" assigned to the operation, Shwang was himself ex-military. Unlike most of the others, however, he'd actually put in his time in the Imperial Marines. The long and tangled chain of events which had led him to where he was today would never have occurred to the long ago, long distant self who'd volunteered to be a Wasp, but the training remained. That was why he'd been tapped for this operation-the FALA didn't have all that many personnel who'd spent almost five standard years manning and maintaining Mark 18 plasma cannon.

And just between himself and the cool, breezy night, Shwang Shau-pang was grateful his experience had landed him here and not out with the screening infantry. He hated the Cadre as much as any other member of the Freedom Alliance, and he was coldly, viciously pleased by the losses the Emperor's personal storm troopers had taken this night. But he was a practical man, was Shwang Shau-pang, and he was perfectly content to let someone else do the killing.

Especially when the bastards have been so good at killing us right back, he thought with a twisted grin.

On the other hand, Comrade Omicron-even among their most trusted subordinates, the members of the Command Council went only by their code names-had finally begun letting the Empies know what the Alliance really had in mind. Shwang rather doubted that even Omicron was quite as confident they'd be able to walk away from this one as he was careful to project. Personally, Shwang figured there was no more than a forty percent chance the Empire would back off, hostages or no hostages. But every man and woman assigned to this operation had understood from the moment they took up arms against the might of the Terran Empire that the odds against their ultimate survival were steep. And if they succeeded in their actual objectives even half as well as it looked like they were going to, it would all be worth it in the end.

Not that I wouldn't like to walk away alive, he admitted to himself. It's always nicer to live to enjoy your successes, after all.

He smiled again and turned to look back towards the central building where the hostages were being held.

Which was why he was looking in exactly the opposite direction when the first plasma bolt exploded directly on top of his number three cannon and vaporized it, its crew, the central data processing unit for the battery, and one Shwang Shau-pang, who died without even knowing that he had.

Alicia watched Obaseki Osayaba's plasma bolt take out the central cannon of the northernmost emplacement. Secondary explosions and blast had probably done for the others, as well, but Osayaba was taking no chances. He fired again, and again, as rapidly as his plasma rifle's firing chamber lasers could induce fusion in the hydrogen pellets. The plasma bolts screamed out of the night, obliterating the Mark 18 cannon and the missile launcher paired with them.

Surprise was total. As she had told Keita, if the FALA infantry had suspected even for a moment that Charlie Company's survivors were anywhere near Green Haven, they would have been trying to do something about it. And, as she had also hoped, the sheer shock of the sudden, totally unexpected attack, induced a momentary paralysis.

Osayaba finished eliminating his assigned antiair weapons and retargeted. His plasma bolts shrieked over Alicia's head, shredding the night, impacting on the defensive FALA perimeter around the northern side of the hill. He continued to fire as rapidly as he could … and just as accurately. Individual armored infantrymen took direct hits, torsos vaporizing, heads simply disappearing, and a hole opened in the center of their line.

"Go!" she barked, and twenty-six cadremen and women came out of the night-wrapped woods in the prodigious bounds of battle armor being pushed to its maximum capability.

Nobody even noticed them for a heartbeat or two. Then the first plasma bolts and calliope rounds began sizzling in their direction, but there weren't very many of them, and Alicia's heart twisted within her as she realized why.

"Two o'clock!" Astrid Nordbш said sharply.

"I see it," Obaseki Osayaba replied, and he did. Not that there was very much he could do about it at the moment.

He tracked steadily to his left, working his way along the line of dug-in terrorist infantry in front of Alicia and her charging troopers. He really ought to be withdrawing into the woods by now, according to Alicia's instructions, but he and Astrid had known they wouldn't be. They were the only fire team in position to cover Alicia's mad charge, and that meant that, orders or no, that was what they were going to do.

Return fire shrieked, sizzled, and howled around Osayaba's position. He and Astrid were bellied down behind the shallow earth berms they'd thrown up for cover, and a superheated fog of vaporized soil hung in the air around them. Someone down there was using his armor sensors to back-plot Osayaba's fire, but he wasn't as good at it as the bastards who'd set up the ambush at the LZ.

Even without his armor, it would have been impossible for Osayaba to sort any individual sound out of the insane bedlam screaming about him, but he knew Astrid was firing back with her calliope. She had less than five hundred rounds, and she was expending them in short, tight bursts as FALA infantry, unable to get clear shots at them, came charging in from either flank.

Osayaba saw them coming, knew they were hurtling through the night almost as rapidly as Alicia and her troopers on the hillside, even if the tick did make them seem to float slowly towards him. And he knew Astrid wasn't going to be able to stop them all. She simply didn't have enough ammunition, and neither did he. And since he couldn't stop them, he ignored them, continuing to pick off individual targets as battle armored terrorists around the base of the hill tried to bring their weapons to bear on Alicia's attack.

He fired one more time, and the digital display of rounds remaining dropped to zero in the corner of his HUD.

"I'm dry," he told Astrid in a voice which sounded impossibly calm to his own ears.

"Me … too," she said, as she fired the final burst from her calliope.

"Then I guess it's time," he replied, and used his synth-link to command his armor to jettison his useless plasma gun. It fell away, and he rose out of his improvised firing position, drawing his force blade with his right hand and bringing it alive while he drew his CHK with his left. The pistol couldn't penetrate battle armor anywhere except the visor, and even there only with a lucky hit, but he figured he was owed at least a little luck.

He "saw" Astrid beside him through his sensors. Saw her toss away the calliope, draw her own sidearm and force blade. She wasn't Shai Hau-zhi, the woman who'd been Osayaba's wing for over two standard years, but then, he wasn't Flannan O'Clery, the laughing Irishman who'd been Astrid's wing even longer. And that didn't matter, either. Not tonight.

"Let's kick some ass," he told her, and they charged to meet the oncoming terrorists.

Alicia saw Osayaba's and Nordbш's icons start to move-not away from the objective and into the woods, but towards it. She knew exactly what they were doing, and why, and there was nothing-nothing in the universe-she could do to stop them.

The two green icons leapt towards the wave of armored infantry sweeping down upon Osayaba's firing position. She saw one of the glaring orange enemy icons go down, then another. A third. And then Obaseki and Astrid were in among the orange icons, completely enveloped. Two more orange icons fell, and then Astrid's green dot turned suddenly crimson.

An instant later, there were only orange icons.

Corporal Alec Howard saw the same thing on his own HUD and swore viciously. But there was nothing he could do about it, and he clenched his jaw.

The southernmost antiair position, which had been his assigned target, was a wrecked, flaming ruin. He'd killed at least another thirty or forty FALA terrorists taking it out, but he'd exhausted his fusion pellets in the process. His assigned wing, Jackson Keller, had exactly eighteen rounds left for his calliope. They'd done everything they could possibly do, and he knew it, yet his instincts cried out for him to do something else. Something more.

Only there was nothing more, and a wave of orange icons was frothing up the slope towards his own position.

"Time to go, Jackson," he grated. Maybe they could at least suck a few of the bastards into chasing them instead of going after Alley, and the two of them went bounding back into the forest while the crescendo of battle roared behind them.

"Time to go, Serena!" Ingrid Chernienko said, squeezing off another short, sharp burst from her calliope.

"Roger that!" Serena DuPuy replied, giving her armor the jettison command as she fired her own last round. Like Osayaba and Howard, she'd turned her assigned target into a flaming torch, but someone on her side of the perimeter was obviously better at using his armor's sensors than the ones who'd tried to back-plot Osayaba's fire. Three plasma bolts had blasted smoking, fused-glass craters into the earth within less than five meters of her position, and it was definitely time to go.

She bounded up out of her firing position and turned towards the woods … just as a round from an enemy calliope slammed into the back of her right leg.

It was a direct hit, one not even Cadre battle armor could stop, and the impact smashed her back into the ground. Her right thigh shattered, and the tourniquet built into her armor locked down as her femoral artery began to spurt and agony roared through her. Her pharmacope sent its painkillers racing after the stormfront of pain and drove a burst of adrenaline into her system to combat shock, but nothing could blunt that moment of transcendent anguish.

"Hold on, Serena!" Chernienko shouted.

"No!" DuPuy screamed back, forcing herself up into a sitting position, pistol in both armored hands as the first battle armored terrorist vaulted up the last few meters of slope with his battle rifle already swinging towards her.

"Get the hell out of here!" she barked at Chernienko, and squeezed off the first pistol round. It struck the terrorist's visor, but at an angle, and whined off harmlessly. She fired again, and again, and the FALA infantryman flinched at each shot. But he kept coming, too-until a burst of calliope fire turned him into so much armored dead meat almost at her feet.

"Come on!" Chernienko barked, tossing away her now-empty calliope.

"I told you to get out of here!" DuPuy snarled.

"Shut the fuck up and give me your hand!" Chernienko snarled back, and bent over the other woman. Her armor's exoskeletal muscles whined as she snatched DuPuy up into a fireman's carry and turned back towards the woods.

She made one leap before the plasma bolt came shrieking in, struck DuPuy squarely in the back, and killed both of them instantly.

Alicia saw two more green icons turn crimson as she and her remaining troopers crossed the steaming, smoking wreckage which had been the FALA perimeter until Obaseki Osayaba turned it into a slaughter ground.

Here and there single armored infantrymen, or pairs of them, survived. They were shocked, stunned by the totally unexpected carnage, but a handful of them were managing to shoot back. Her battle rifle tracked onto one of them and she fired in midair. The sub-caliber penetrators ripped through the breastplate of his armor and he went down hard. The rifle's servos traversed with snake-like speed, and she fired again, and again. Another terrorist went down with each short burst, and she saw others tumbling aside as someone else took them down.

But they weren't going alone.

Osayaba had broken the back of the position directly in front of Alicia's charge, but the defensive line's ends were still intact, however shaken they might have been, and flanking fire ripped into her charge. Corporal Ramji seemed to trip in midair. His armor shattered as the plasma bolt slammed into it from the right, and his icon, too, turned blood-red. Corporal Teng Rwun-yin died an instant later, and Corporal Ulujuk went down, life signs flickering, as a heavy-caliber calliope penetrator ripped through his belly.

And then they were past the defensive position's ruined foxholes and racing up the hill towards the buildings they'd come so far, and paid so high a price, to reach.

Twenty-six Cadre troopers had started up that hill. Seventeen of them reached the top, leaving the slope behind them strewn with the shattered, smoking bodies of their enemies.

Alicia drew her force blade as the exterior wall of their objective loomed before her. She brought it slashing across, opening the tough composite "plastic" of the wall as if it were spun spider silk. She crashed into the opening she'd created an instant later, smashing it bigger, exploding into the building in a shower of splinters.

She didn't even slow down. Other armored figures came crashing through the same wall a half-breath behind her, and they, like her, knew exactly where to find the terrorists inside the structure. They were tied into the remote she'd parked on the crossbeam so far above, and Alicia's flashing thoughts reached out through her synth-link, designating targets.

She hit her own jump gear in a full-power jump that sent her rocketing across the huge room while hostages screamed in terror below her. She hit the second-story catwalk barely three meters from one of the calliopes, and the un-armored terrorist behind it screamed in terror of her own as the catwalk trembled under the crashing impact of Alicia's arrival. The FALA gunner tried frantically to bring her weapon to bear, but Alicia was too close. She didn't bother with her battle rifle, or her pistol. She simply swept the force blade still in her hand in a flat, vicious stroke that caught the other woman just below armpit level and sliced clear through her body in a shocking geyser of blood.

The terrorist thudded to the catwalk in two separate pieces, and Alicia whirled, reaching out to catch the calliope before it tipped over the catwalk rail to the floor below.

A burst of heavy penetrators blasted a line of holes through the wall above her as one of the other FALA gunners fired at her. But the burst was high, and before the terrorist could fire a second time, Tannis Cateau's deadly accurate battle rifle sent two rounds through his brain.

Alicia got control of the calliope beside her and turned back towards the floor below, but she'd taken just a fraction of a second too long.

Corporal Brian Oselli had come through the outer wall half a meter behind Alicia. The First Squad trooper had exhausted the last of his rifle ammunition on his way up the hill, but his CHK was in his right hand, and his force blade was in his left.

Another terrorist loomed up in front of him, this one in unpowered body armor and armed with a Marine M-97 combat rifle. The terrorist tried frantically to bring it to bear, but Oselli's pistol punched three penetrators through the other man's breastplate, and he vaulted the corpse, bounding towards the plasma cannon covering the vehicle entrances.

The plasma cannon's crew had been as surprised as everyone else by the sudden, unexpected ferocity of the Cadre's attack. They weren't supposed to have to worry about deadly enemies suddenly appearing behind them, and one of them panicked and started backing away as Oselli charged towards them. But the other two didn't. They swung their weapon around rapidly, bringing it to bear on the charging cadreman, and Oselli bellowed in primordial rage. When that weapon fired, he would die … and so would dozens, possibly hundreds, of the hostages behind him.

He fired as he came, again and again. The pistol's penetrators smashed into the plasma gunner, screaming and wailing as they ricocheted off his breastplate. He staggered back, but only for a moment, and Oselli could feel his matching hate as he reached for the cannon's firing grips again.

But Oselli's unwavering charge had delayed him just long enough. The Cadre corporal saw the moment the terrorist's hands reached the grips, and his own right arm drew back and then flashed forward. His force blade went slicing through the air, even as he deliberately flung himself straight down the muzzle of the cannon.

The gunner squeezed the trigger. The plasma bolt hit Oselli less than two meters in front of the cannon. And the force blade continued its flight and sliced effortlessly through the gunner's armor to completely decapitate him.

Oselli simply vanished. Only his left leg continued forward, skittering across the ceramacrete floor. But he'd been close enough, centered enough, to take the full brunt of the plasma. Seventeen hostages were killed behind him. Another six were badly wounded. But that was all, from a shot which could have killed half the unarmored people in that room.

Alicia saw Oselli go down. Back blast from the plasma bolt slammed into the gunner's assistant, staggering him, and then Alicia brought her captured calliope to bear. Her eyes were merciless emerald ice as a shrieking burst of penetrators swept the terrorist away. Then she was swinging the weapon again, piling a dozen FALA terrorists in a single shredded line of corpses as they came charging out of a hallway from one of the office blocks.

Erik Andersson had another of the calliopes, and his fire slammed down, joining hers, raking the terrified terrorists who ten seconds before had been so certain they were in control of the situation.

And then the firing suddenly died, and there were no living terrorists left inside all that cavernous structure.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

"What the fuck happened?" Group Leader Rivera demanded, staring in stunned disbelief at the shattered, blazing ruins of the antiair defenses.

"Why the hell ask me?" Group Leader Abruzzi snarled back. "It had to be the fucking Cadre-that's all I know!"

Rivera throttled a raging desire to peel Lloyd Abruzzi out of his battle armor and strangle him with his bare hands. Not that the other group leader was any more to blame than Rivera himself.

And not that there's time to be worrying about who's at fault, he told himself grimly.

"I can't raise Omicron," Abruzzi continued. "Or Star Roamer."

"They must've taken out the com center," Rivera replied.

"Then we don't know whether or not the Wasps are on the way." There was a note Rivera didn't much care for in Abruzzi's voice. Not panic, really, but something else. Something … .

He pushed that thought aside, too, and shook his head.

"They'll be on the way soon enough," he said grimly. "We've got to assume these people -" he swept one armored arm at the huge building above them, oblivious to the fact that Abruzzi couldn't actually see him from his own position on the far side of the hill "-told Keita when they planned to attack. For that matter, they're probably in communication with him right now."

"Shit," Abruzzi muttered.

Rivera couldn't argue with that. He turned where he stood, sweeping his eyes one more time across the blazing carnage the Cadre assault had left in its wake. Then his jaw tightened as he made up his mind.

"We don't have time to stand here talking about it, Lloyd," he said harshly. "My group's in better shape than yours. I'll take the assault."

"Assault?" Abruzzi repeated. "What assault?"

Jaime Rivera blinked in astonishment.

"We've got maybe thirty minutes before we've got Wasps all over us," he said, his voice flat. "That's our window to retake the hostages if we're going to have any bargaining chips at all."

"Screw bargaining chips!" Abruzzi growled. "We said we'd waste their precious hostages if they attacked us. Well, they've frigging well attacked us!"

"Goddamn it, don't you screw around with me on this one," Rivera grated. "There can't be more than a dozen of them left, and I've got fifty men. We can still retake the place, and if we do, we've got at least a chance to get the rest of our people off this planet. If Keita won't talk to us, we can still kill them all then."

"I say -" Abruzzi started, but Rivera cut him off savagely.

"I don't really care what you say!" he snarled. "I'm senior. We do it my way. We've got them by four-to-one odds, and unlike us, they're going to be handicapped trying to keep the hostages alive. We don't care if there's a little breakage on the way in, and that gives us another edge."

"We've had 'another edge' where these bastards were concerned all goddamned night," Abruzzi pointed out angrily. "Who's to say they won't screw you over all over again if you go in after them?"

"Well, if that happens, you'll be in command. At which point, you can do whatever the hell you want to do. You've still got most of your people's plasma rifles-you think you can't take down that entire building and kill everything in it if you really want to?"

Abruzzi was silent for a moment, and Rivera tossed his head angrily inside his helmet.

"Look," he said, "I'm taking my people, and we're going in. We're losing time standing here talking about it, and we don't have much time before the Wasps get here. These people must've told them the air defenses are down and that they've got the hostages. The Marines are going to begin their drop the instant they've got confirmation of those two things, so just shut the hell up and stay out of my way!"

"All right," Abruzzi said, manifestly unhappily. "Go ahead. But I warn you, we're taking that building down the instant I see a Wasp down here, and if you're still inside … ."

"Fine," Rivera said shortly, and began snapping orders.

"Look at this, Sarge!" Tannis said, and Alicia glanced at her mental HUD as her wing dropped a wire diagram of the building into it.

"What is that?" she asked after a moment, and Tannis laughed with what actually sounded like genuine humor.

"It's a basement, Sarge! A great big, beautiful, deep basement, right under us! I figure we can get at least three or four hundred people into it, if we pack 'em in tight."

"All right!" Alicia said with sudden, matching delight, then grinned. "You found it, so packing them in is your job. Get them moving."

"Gee, thanks," Tannis replied, and an instant later Alicia's exterior pickups brought her the sound of Tannis' armor-amplified voice shouting orders.

Alicia left that up to her wing. If anyone could get a bunch of terrified, exhausted hostages moving in a hurry, it was Tannis. In the meantime, Alicia had other things to worry about, and her fleeting grin disappeared as she wiped the building diagram from her HUD and reconfigured it to tactical mode.

She didn't much care for what it showed her.

There were only eleven green icons left, including hers and Tannis'. That wasn't enough-not to hold something this size against as many battle armored attackers as she knew were still waiting out there on the slopes of the hill. Still, if Tannis could get a significant proportion of the hostages down into the basement she'd found, it would be an enormous help. Not a big enough one, maybe, but still a help.

"Erik," she said, no longer bothering with call signs.

"Yeah, Sarge," Erik Andersson replied.

"You're in charge of the calliopes. I want yours and Samantha's on the west wall. Put the other two where you think best."

"On it," Andersson acknowledged laconically, and Alicia looked over to where Thomas Kiley was examining the plasma cannon Oselli had knocked out.

"Can you get it back up, Tom?" she asked.

"I think so, but it's not gonna be pretty. Brian got so close the back blast smashed hell out of the cup generators."

Kiley pointed, and Alicia grimaced. The cannon was a considerably more powerful weapon than the plasma rifles the Cadre normally carried. In fact, it was powerful enough for thermal bloom to be a significant threat to nearby friendly personnel whenever it fired. So, like all such weapons, it projected a hollow conical force field-the "cup"-for a dozen meters or so in front of it. The force field protected anything to the cannon's immediate flanks and rear when it fired, which was exactly what Oselli had counted upon when he sacrificed himself to save the hostages. The plasma bolt's electromagnetic containment field had ruptured the instant it hit his armor, releasing the bolt's energy in a stupendous explosion. But it had been so close to the cannon that the cup had contained almost all of its fury. It had blown the cannoneer's assistant gunner off his feet, and the portion of the blast which had gotten past Oselli's disintegrating body had been enough to kill every hostage within twenty meters and burn anyone within another ten meters or so horribly. But had he not done what he had, at least half the hostages in that huge room would have died.

"How bad is it?" she asked.

"I can't tell without running a full diagnostic, and we don't have time for that," Kiely told her. "Best guess? We bring the cup up and it unbalances the driver field and screws accuracy all to hell and gone."

"And if we don't bring the cup up, it incinerates everything in front of it for twenty-five meters in every direction," she pointed out.

"So?" Alicia could almost feel Kiely's wolfish grin. "We're a little thin on the ground already, Sarge. I don't think I really mind the notion of covering my own flanks with the biggest damned scattergun I can find."

"Something to that," she agreed, and he actually chuckled over the com as he drew his force blade once again. He brought it down in a crisp, clean arc that sliced the damaged generator assembly off the end of the cannon barrel.

"Since it was my idea, I'll take it," he said, and Alicia nodded.

"All right. This wall," she pointed at the one in front of them, "is where they're most likely to come at us."

"Even knowing they had it covered with this thing?"

"Their outside forces may or may not know that. For that matter, they may figure we took the cannon completely out ourselves-God knows Brian almost did exactly that. Anyway, whatever they may or may not 'know,' the remote I left outside says that's where they're assembling."

"Idiots," Kiely muttered.

"Take what you can get," Alicia recommended, then shrugged. "Actually, they may not have much choice. That's where their biggest group of troops was dug in, and they don't have time to get fancy and try redeploying. Anyway, I don't want you out where they can see you, and I don't want you out where they can snipe you. So pull back another thirty meters. Without the cup, you'll take out the entire center span of that wall with your first shot, so I'm not that worried about your field of fire. Clear?"

"Thirty meters is a long way back, Sarge. What about the hostages?"

"Look," Alicia said, and pointed behind him. Kiely obeyed her, turning to look in the indicated direction, and she heard his low whistle across the com.

She didn't blame him. Hostages were flowing steadily towards the two broad flights of stairs Tannis had discovered, and it looked like at least a hundred of them were already down into the basement. It was nowhere near deep enough to protect them against a direct hit with modern weapons, but it would get them out of the way of near-misses and well below the direct line of fire.

"Howdy, Sarge." Alicia looked up as Tannis suddenly appeared at her shoulder.

"How'd you get them moving so quickly?" she asked.

"I put Star Roamer's crew in charge of it," Tannis replied simply. "I figured they'd probably been trying to do what they could for their passengers all along. Looks like I was right-at least there's still some cohesion there."

"Good call." Alicia rested one hand on her wing's armored shoulder, then drew a deep breath.

"You and I are the roving reinforcements, Tannis," she said.

"Check." If Tannis was worried, her calm voice gave very little indication of it. "How you fixed for ammo, Sarge?"

"I'm almost dry," Alicia admitted. "Three rounds, as a matter of fact."

"Not much of a roving reserve," Tannis noted. "I, on the other hand, have forty-one."

"Showoff," Alicia said with a tired laugh. Tannis Cateau was the only person who could make Alicia DeVries feel inadequate on a rifle range. Tannis simply didn't miss … ever. And not just on the range. She actually got more accurate, more economical in the expenditure of her ammunition, under combat conditions.

"I thought you were probably pretty close to dry," Tannis continued, "so I brought you this."

Alicia took the M-97 Tannis had liberated from one of the dead terrorists and checked the magazine while Kiely picked up the plasma cannon and moved it to its new position. At least her new rifle was loaded with heavy penetrators that would have a fair chance of penetrating Marine battle armor at the sort of point blank range this fight was going to be, she thought. It was a pretty poor replacement for the battle rifle built into her armor, but it was a lot better than nothing, and Tannis had scrounged up a half-dozen extra magazines.

"Didn't think I'd see one of these again," Alicia said as she sent her armor the command to jettison the battle rifle which had served her so well. She followed that command up with one which reset the governors on her battle armor's gauntlets-it wouldn't do to absent-mindedly crush her new rifle-and ordered her armor's computer to find the interface with the M-97's onboard systems.

"Beggars can't be -" Tannis began.

"They're coming in!" Andersson announced sharply.

"Kill the bastards!" Jaime Rivera shouted, and his action group charged up the slope.

There wasn't much finesse to it. The tactical situation was brutally simple, and it had taken him longer than he'd anticipated to get his people turned around. That meant his time window was probably even narrower than he'd thought. The Empies wouldn't have dared to start their assault shuttles moving until they knew the Cadre troopers had neutralized the defensive batteries and secured the facility. That gave him at least a few extra minutes, but not enough to waste any of them trying to get fancy. He was going to lose more people going in fast and dirty instead of organizing properly, but that was better than losing all of them, which was what was going to happen if they didn't get the hostages back.

He bounded along, holding his place in the center of the second rank, and he felt almost relieved as his entire world focused down into the narrow imperatives of combat.

"Let them get close," Alicia said as she and Tannis bounded to a central position between the hostages and the threatened wall. Star Roamer's crew was still hurrying people down the stairs, and it looked like Tannis' original estimate of the basement's capacity had actually been low. But there were still well over a hundred civilians on the main floor when the building's end wall began to disintegrate under the punching of low-powered plasma bolts.

Alicia heard screams from behind her as the explosive effect of the plasma's transfer energy- even a "low-powered" bolt packed a brutal punch-blasted splinters loose from the wall panels. Some of those "splinters" were fifteen and twenty centimeters long, and the force of the plasma strikes sent them hissing further into the building. Three of them hit her armor and shattered, but others, obviously, had found unarmored targets, and she tried not to think about the kinds of damage those knife-edged projectiles could inflict.

She checked her HUD. Andersson had taken her at her word, and completely repositioned the captured calliopes. He'd moved them down from the catwalk level and placed two at the extreme corners of the western wall. He and Samantha Moyano had also pulled the heavy weapons off of the tripod mounts their original terrorist crews, with their unpowered armor, had required and used force blades to cut small, unobtrusive firing slits right at floor level. Now Andersson lay prone at the northern corner, using his battle armor "muscles" to handle the massive weapon as if it were a simple combat rifle, while Corporal Ewan MacEntee from First Platoon's Second Squad-Andersson's third wing of the night-crouched close enough to cover him and also watch for possible flank attacks. Moyano, a corporal from Second Platoon, had the southern corner with Corporal James Krуl, from First Platoon's Third Squad as her wing.

Alexandra Filipov had the third calliope on the building's northern wall, with Corporal Adam Skogen as her wing, while Digory Beckett had the fourth calliope on the southern wall, with Karin de Nijs as his wing.

Kiely had no wing, and Alicia and Tannis were the only original wing pair still alive. So far, at least.

Eleven men and women, exhausted, battered, and armed with captured weapons, against fifty battle-armored foes desperate to kill them. Every one of those eleven knew exactly what their odds of living through the next three minutes were, but it didn't matter. They were all that stood between six hundred civilians and cold-blooded murder, and Alicia's green eyes were hard as she watched the gaps being punched through the western wall.

"Make it count, people," she said, almost conversationally.

Rivera felt his confidence soar as his assault thundered up the hill. Not a shot had been fired against them-not one! Maybe he'd given the Cadre bastards too much credit. Maybe they were crouching in hiding somewhere, too terrified to show themselves. Or-more likely, he thought, even now-they were simply out of ammunition. Or maybe they'd all been killed breaking in. Or -

Erik Andersson opened fire as the first battle armored terrorist came within a hundred meters. The heavy calliope's feed mechanism howled as the disintegrating link ammo belt blurred into the feed chute, and the penetrators shrieked downrange.

Battle armor shattered, and FALA terrorists screamed in agony, but the charge kept coming.

Samantha Moyano opened up from the other corner of the wall, swinging her weapon to scythe down the attackers. More armored bodies crashed to the ground, but the second wave of the attack back-plotted the fire killing their companions, and plasma bolts came howling back.

The entire building shuddered in agony as dozens of plasma bolts-these fired at full power, like brimstone buzz saws-sliced through the wall which had already begun to disintegrate. Andersson seemed to flatten into the ceramacrete floor, spreading out in an impossibly thin layer, while he continued to pour back a torrent of fire. But one of those plasma bolts slammed directly through the opening Moyano had cut for her weapon and killed her instantly.

"Right!" Rivera shouted as the southern calliope suddenly stopped firing. "Bear right!"

His men obeyed, curling away from the calliope still flaying their ranks from their left flank.

"Now go right through them!" he bellowed.

Alicia saw Moyano's icon flicker crimson. An instant later, Ewan MacEntee's followed suit as a plasma bolt streaked in through a gaping hole and impacted with freakish accuracy on his armor.

"They're coming through, Tom!" she snapped.

"Oh, no, they're not," Kiely said flatly.

"Keep going! Keep going!" Rivera screamed. He'd lost a quarter of his plasma gun-armed troops coming up the hill, and his fifteen remaining plasma gunners were at the point of his charge. Now they lowered their heads, hit their jump gear, and smashed straight through the riddled, weakened wall.

Corporal Thomas Kiely squeezed the firing grips, and a massive blast of plasma enveloped the center of the terrorists' charge. Most of the building's western wall-the part of it that hadn't already been blown to bits, at least-disappeared. Three of the fifteen men who'd smashed their way through it lived long enough to shriek in agony; the rest died too quickly even for that.

It staggered Rivera's action group. It ought to have broken their charge, stopped the attack cold, but Kiely hadn't had time to run a diagnostic on the weapon. Which meant he didn't know the firing chamber's containment field had been damaged.

The back blast from the disintegrating weapon killed him instantly, despite his armor, and bowled Alicia off her feet.

Rivera flinched as the entire end of the building exploded in eye-tearing brilliance and took a third of his men-and all of his remaining plasma rifles-with it.

For just an instant he wondered what additional horrendous surprises the Cadre might have rigged, but then he realized what that had to have been.

"Follow me!" he howled, bounding straight ahead through the charging infantry who'd faltered as their companions were killed. "Follow me!"

Alicia bounced back upright, her mind clear and cold even as grief hammered at its corners. Three of her eleven defenders were already down, and the orange icons which had hesitated when Kiely fired came flooding forward once again.

She brought up the M-97 and opened fire as the first FALA battle armor came through the flaming wreckage which had once been the wall of the building.

Rifle fire blasted Rivera's battle armor, but his breastplate held. The three men directly behind him were less fortunate, and his own rifle snapped into firing position.

Alicia dropped one of the attackers while Tannis' fire-as deadly accurate as ever-took down two more with perfect helmet hits. Alicia swung her manual rifle towards another target, but the terrorist fired first, and Alicia staggered as penetrators slammed into her. Her Cadre armor-tougher and lighter than Marine-issue equipment-held, but at least one of the heavy rounds smashed into her borrowed M-97, transforming it abruptly into so much shattered, useless wreckage.

She dropped it instantly, and her hands swept down. Her CHK seemed to materialize in her left hand, her force blade in the other, and she heard someone else using her voice to shriek a Valkyrie's war cry as she lunged forward.

Jaime Rivera gaped in disbelief as the cadreman took at least five direct hits and didn't go down. And then the trooper who should have been dead was coming straight at him, pistol in one hand and some sort of sword in the other.

The pistol came up, and Rivera recoiled as the first penetrator spalled his visor. It didn't punch through, but the incredible impact, less than ten centimeters in front of his eyes half-stunned him. It was only for an instant, no more than a single heartbeat, but that was long enough.

His vision had just begun to refocus when the force blade in Alicia DeVries' right hand decapitated him in a fountain of blood.

Chaos overwhelmed Alicia's ability to multitask at last.

Blood exploded over her, obscuring her visor, as she cut down the terrorist who'd smashed her rifle, but her armor sensors were still up, and some fragment of her concentration saw Adam Skogen's icon charge towards the breakthrough. He came bounding to meet it, battle rifle flaming as he burned through his remaining ammunition in a handful of seconds, and then he, too, went down. James Krуl was down on one knee making every round count, firing steadily, accurately into the armored terrorists charging past him. Most of them didn't even realize he was there, and he dropped at least five of them before two more spotted him and turned to engage him. One of them went down, as well, and then Krуl was down, badly wounded, his armor critically damaged, and more terrorists flooded past him.

Alicia slashed down another terrorist. Her pistol came up-by instinct, not conscious thought-and she slammed the muzzle into direct contact with another enemy's visor. She squeezed the trigger, and the terrorist flew backward as the light-caliber penetrators smashed through the only part of his armor they could have hoped to defeat.

She heard Tannis screaming a warning and whirled towards the fresh threat, then staggered as another burst of penetrators shrieked off her armor. The sudden impact threw her off-balance as a trio of terrorists came at her, still firing. More penetrators whined and crashed off of her armor, hammering her backward. She went to one knee and the terrorists closed for the kill, but then Tannis was there, battle rifle flaming in full auto.

Alicia's attackers tumbled away, awkward in death, but even as they fell, she heard Tannis' scream over their dedicated link. Her wing went down, life signs flashing luridly on Alicia's monitor, and Alicia shrieked herself-in rage and fury, not pain-as she lunged back upright over her friend's body. Her force blade sliced effortlessly through the terrorist who'd just shot Tannis, and Alicia DeVries charged.

The men who had followed Jaime Rivera up the hill, through the tornado of calliope fire, through the devastating blast of plasma which had killed a third of their entire action group, wavered as their leader went down. And then, coming at them through the flame and the smoke and the thunder of a man-made hell, they saw a single figure in filthy, blood-splashed, battered and gouged battle armor. It didn't even have a rifle-just a pistol in one hand and a force blade in the other-but it came straight at them. Penetrators hit it again and again, but it was moving too quickly, the impacts were too oblique to penetrate, and then that dreadful force blade was among them, slicing through their armor as if it didn't even exist.

A head flew, someone else howled in agony as the force blade slashed straight through his armor and lopped off his right arm at the elbow. Another armored figure went down, shrieking, gauntleted hands clutching uselessly at the blood-spouting wound where the force blade had punched straight through his armor and the belly under it.

It was too much. They'd come up that hill with fifty-two men; now the five survivors turned and ran as that terrifying figure came at them. And as they fled back down the hill, Erik Andersson's calliope was waiting.

Group Leader Lloyd Abruzzi stared in disbelief as five men-only five-from Rivera's action group fell back.

For all his argument with the other group leader, Abruzzi would never have believed a handful of exhausted infantry-even Cadre infantry-could have held against Rivera's assault. But they had held, and even as he watched, the five fleeing survivors went down one by one, picked off by murderously accurate bursts of calliope fire.

Those bastards, he thought venomously. Those fucking bastards!

All the hatred Lloyd Abruzzi had ever felt for the Terran Empire and the Imperial Cadre flamed up within him, and his lips drew back from his teeth in an ugly snarl.

So we do it my way after all, he told himself, and punched into his own action group's command frequency.

"Plasma gunners! I want that fucking building flattened! Open -"

Lloyd Abruzzi never had time to realize Rivera had been wrong.

Sir Arthur Keita and Major Alexander Bennett hadn't waited for the Cadre to confirm the destruction of the antiair defenses around the objective. Alicia DeVries had told them her people would neutralize them, and they'd begun their assault insertion the instant Charlie Company's survivors launched their attack. Abruzzi had thought he had at least ten or fifteen more minutes to complete the destruction of the fire-wracked building on top of his hill, but he, too, had been wrong.

The precisely targeted pattern of hyper-velocity weapons came down out of the Shallingsport night like solid bars of light, far, far ahead of the sound of their passage, and the glaring fireballs wiped Abruzzi's action group away like the fists of an angry deity.

Alicia's sensor remote saw the shuttles coming in, saw the explosions, saw the handful of surviving terrorists turning to race desperately for the illusory sanctuary of the mountains even as three of the shuttles banked after them, heavy cannon thundering mercilessly. She saw it all, but she had no time for it. She was on her knees beside Tannis, desperately accessing her friend's med panel while Tannis' flickering vital signs dimmed towards extinction.

"DeVries! Sergeant DeVries!" someone was shouting over the company command circuit.

"Medic!" she shouted back. "I need a medic right now!"

"Over there!" she heard, and then Marines in battle armor were all around her, impossibly neat and clean amid the chaos and destruction, the filth and the blood and the bodies.

"Medic!" she screamed yet again as Tannis' heart suddenly stopped. She hammered at the med panel with both hands, but other hands reached down for her-battle armored hands, whose strength was a match for her own, hauling her to her feet, pulling her away from Tannis.

She fought madly, but there were too many of them. It took four Marines to hold her, but they pinned her, held her, pulled her back.

"Alley!" a fresh voice shouted as another armored Marine went to her knees beside Tannis. "Alley!"

There was something about that voice. Something familiar, and Alicia's eyes widened.

"Lieutenant?" she heard the disbelief in her own ragged voice. "Lieutenant Kuramochi?"

"It's me, Alley," Captain Kuramochi said. "The medics are here. Do you hear me-the medics are here." Two more gauntleted hands reached out, settling on either side of Alicia's helmet, holding it motionless while Kuramochi Chiyeko leaned towards her. Their visors touched, and Kuramochi spoke slowly, distinctly, looking directly into Alicia's exhausted eyes. "The medics are here, Sergeant. You've got to let them help her. Do you understand, Alley?"

"Yes," Alicia whispered, sagging inside her armor at last. "Yes."

"Then let's get you both out of here," Kuramochi said softly, tears sliding down her own cheeks. "Let's get you home."

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Lieutenant Alicia DeVries marched through the cavernous arch in Sligo Palace's inner wall. It was October, and autumn's paintbrush had been busy. The magnificently landscaped grounds of the immense Court of Heroes spread out before her, its autumn-splashed trees and gardens, its fountains and reflecting pools, all arranged to lead the eye inevitably to the Cenotaph at its center. The square, flower bed-defined courtyard around the Cenotaph's plain, polished marble shaft was large enough to parade an entire battalion and paved in oddly mottled-looking stone, not ceramacrete.

There was a reason for that courtyard's odd texture and coloration; every individual block of stone in it was from a different planet or inhabited moon of the Terran Empire.

Alicia still felt odd in the uniform of a Cadre lieutenant, but it was legally hers, even though she had yet to attend the OCS course which went with it, as she marched steadily, slowly down the long, straight pathway leading from the arch to the Cenotaph. That pathway was lined with simple battle steel plaques, each engraved with the names, branches of service, and serial numbers of men and women who had died in the service of the Terran Empire.

It seemed to take forever to reach the Cenotaph, and she kept her eyes fixed straight ahead, focused on the four individuals standing all alone on that plain of stone in the obelisk's shadow. There were others present, of course, seated in the reviewing stand along the southern edge of the Cenotaph courtyard, but there weren't that many. Not physically present, at least.

She crossed the edge of the stone paving, her boot heels sounding suddenly crisp and clear on its surface, and more boots sounded behind her. They hit the stone in perfect unison, their sounds echoes of her own, and she felt them at her back.

There weren't very many of them.

Tannis Cateau was there, finally released from hospital care two days earlier. And so were Erik Andersson, Alec Howard, Jackson Keller, Alexandra Filipov, Digory Beckett, James Krуl, whose hospital stay had ended one day before Tannis', and Karin de Nijs.

Nine men and women, including Alicia. The only survivors of Company C, Third Battalion, Second Regiment, Fifth Brigade, Imperial Cadre.

They marched steadily across the stone pavement, turned sharply to their left, then wheeled back to their right. Their left heels struck the stone in a single perfectly coordinated instant, and they snapped to attention facing the four men who had awaited them.

The only sounds were the cool October wind in the trees, the sharp popping of the flags atop their poles around the Cenotaph, the splash of water in the fountains at its base, the almost inaudible hum of the HD cameras hovering on their counter-grav floaters, and the distant cry of birds.

"Charlie Company, Third Battalion, reports as ordered, Sir!" Alicia said crisply, and her hand flashed up in salute.

General Dugald Arbatov, the Cadre's commanding general, returned the salute. Then he looked at the man standing beside him.

"Call the role, if you please, Brigadier," he said.

"Yes, Sir!" Sir Arthur Keita replied. Then he raised the old-fashioned, anachronistic clipboard he'd had tucked under his left arm and turned to face the nine men and women standing at attention before him in that space which would have held a battalion.

"Alwyn, Madison!" he said, not even glancing at the neatly printed columns of names on the clipboard he held.

"Present," Alicia replied, her voice firm and clear.

"Andersson, Erik!"

"Present," Andersson responded.

"Arun, Namrata!"

"Present," Tannis Cateau replied.

"Ashmead, Jeremy!"

"Present!" Alec Howard barked.

The names and responses rang out in slow, clear cadence in the quiet, quiet afternoon. Two hundred and seventy-five names Keita called out, and two hundred and seventy-five times the response "Present" answered.

"Yrjц, Rauha!" Keita called the final name.

"Present!" Alicia answered for the last name, as for the first, and her voice was just as firm, just as clear, despite the tears shining in her eyes.

Keita nodded, tucked the clipboard back up under his left arm, turned to face Arbatov, and saluted sharply.

"Charlie Company, Third Battalion, Second Regiment, Fifth Brigade, all present and accounted for, Sir!"

"Thank you, Brigadier," Arbatov replied quietly, returning his salute, and turned to the third man present.

The third man wasn't especially tall. He was fair-haired and blue-eyed, on the young side of fifty, and he wore a green-on-green uniform very like the one Alicia wore. But his uniform carried no rank badges or unit insignia, and a simple golden circlet rested on his head.

"Your Majesty," Arbatov said with a deep bow, "I beg to report that Charlie Company, Third Battalion, Second Regiment, Fifth Brigade, of your Cadre is all present and accounted for."

"Thank you, General," His Majesty Seamus II, Emperor and Prince Protector of Humanity, replied in a beautifully trained tenor voice, then turned to face Alicia and her eight fellows directly.

"For four centuries," he said, after a moment, "the Imperial Cadre has served Our house and Our empire with a courage and a devotion seldom if ever matched in human history. The Imperial Marine Corps, and the Imperial Fleet, have fought and died with supreme gallantry. We and the Emperors and Empresses who have come before Us have been humbled again and again by the sacrifices of the men and women of the Empire's regular armed forces. We are deeply and humbly cognizant of all they have accomplished, and of the price they have all too often paid in the Empire's service. But it has been Our Cadre which has carried Our personal banner and served as Our personal sword, Our paladins and Our champions.

"In all those four centuries," he continued, and Alicia felt the eyes from the review stand, the cameras beaming the ceremony live to every planet, moon, asteroid, and space station in the Sol System and recording it for every other planet of the Terran Empire, "the Cadre has never failed Our trust. It has not always achieved victory, for even Cadremen are mortal. At times, far more often than We could wish, they have died, but even in defeat, they have died striving for victory. The Cadre has never tarnished its honor, never failed to rise to the challenge of its own standards. It may have been defeated, may have died, but it has never surrendered.

"You and your comrades who are present today only in spirit," he said, looking each of the nine survivors in front of him in the eye, "have upheld not simply the finest traditions, but also the honor and the courage of Our Cadre. By your service, by your sacrifice, by your accomplishments, you have brought to Our house and to Our throne an honor and a devotion which no man, no Emperor, could possibly have demanded. An honor and a devotion which fills Us with pride, with sorrow, and with a gratitude no words, actions, or rewards can ever truly express. We thank you, we thank your comrades who have died in battle, not simply as Emperor, but also in Our own person. We are humbled by what you have done, and we ask you to accept Our profound gratitude and acknowledgment of the debt which We owe to you and can never adequately repay."

He stepped forward, and Alicia DeVries found herself shaking the hand of the most powerful single individual in the history of the human race. It was a strong hand, firm, and he looked directly into her green eyes for a moment before he released her hand and moved down the line to shake Tannis Cateau's.

He shook all of them by the hand, one by one, and then stepped back to his position. He resumed it, and Arbatov cleared his throat and turned to the final man present-the only one in the uniform of the Imperial Marines, and not the Cadre.

"Sergeant Major!" he said.

"Sir!"

"The formation is yours."

"Yes, Sir!"

The Marine stepped forward and faced Alicia and the others.

"Charlie Company, attention to orders!" he snapped, and the cadremen snapped back to rigid attention, staring straight ahead, as he opened an official-looking binder.

"Corporal Tannis Cateau, front and center," he said, and Tannis took one crisp, precise step forward, turned to her right, and marched to the center of the abbreviated line. Then she whipped back to her left, facing him, and snapped back to attention.

"By order of, and on behalf of, His Imperial Majesty Seamus, of his House the seventeenth and of his name the second," the Marine read from the first citation in his binder, "your gallantry and actions far above and beyond the call of duty on July 23, 2952, Standard Reckoning, on the Planet of Fuller, are hereby gratefully recognized.

"On that date and planet, you and your comrades, displaying the utmost determination, devotion to duty, and courage against impossible odds, nevertheless persevered in your mission. Despite the death in battle of ninety-six percent of your total strength, you and the other members of Charlie Company, Third Battalion, Second Regiment, Fifth Brigade, Imperial Cadre, continued with your mission, stormed a heavily defended terrorist strongpoint, disabled and destroyed its ground-to-space defenses, and held your position against overwhelming attack until relieved by the Imperial Marines whose assault shuttle landing you had made possible. Although yourself critically wounded, you and your fellows defeated the final, desperate assault of four times your own number of heavily armed, well-equipped terrorists, as a consequence of which five hundred and ninety-three imperial subjects were saved from near certain death. Your actions upheld-and exceeded-the finest traditions of the Imperial Cadre. For your devotion, valor, and sacrifice, His Majesty directs and decrees that you be awarded the Solarian Grand Cross for actions above and beyond the call of duty."

Tannis saluted sharply, and Sir Arthur Keita stepped forward and personally draped the midnight blue ribbon of the Terran Empire's second highest award for valor about her neck. She exchanged salutes with Keita, then turned and marched smartly back into her place in the short, short line of cadremen with the same perfect precision. She resumed her position, and the Marine's eyes moved to the man standing to her immediate right.

"Corporal Erik Andersson, front and center," he said, and Andersson stepped forward in turn.

"By order of, and on behalf of, His Imperial Majesty Seamus," the Marine began again.

Eight times, with minor variations, he repeated the citation. Eight times the dark blue ribbon supporting the glittering gold cross went about a waiting neck. And then he looked up and called one final name.

"Lieutenant Alicia DeVries, front and center."

Alicia stepped forward, marched down the length of the line to face him, and saluted sharply. The Marine returned her salute.

"By order of, and on behalf of, His Imperial Majesty Seamus, of his House the seventeenth and of his name the second," he said, "your gallantry and actions far above and beyond the call of duty on July 23, 2952, Standard Reckoning, on the Planet of Fuller, are hereby gratefully recognized.

"On that date and planet, subsequent to the deaths of every officer and senior noncommissioned officer of your company, you assumed command of Charlie Company, Third Battalion, Second Regiment, Fifth Brigade, Imperial Cadre. Despite the loss of some eighty percent of your company's total numbers immediately upon reaching the planet in an ambush by enemies present in overwhelming strength, you maintained your unit's cohesion and effectiveness. Under the most adverse circumstances possible, you continued against overwhelming odds with the mission your unit had been assigned. In the face of additional heavy and grievous losses, in the full knowledge that you faced insurmountable odds, you and the surviving men and women under your command nonetheless fought your way to your objective in the face of almost continuous attack. Upon reaching that objective, you assaulted a prepared, well dug-in, formidably armed force almost nine times your own strength. Despite the odds against you, and despite further grievous losses, the surviving members of Charlie Company, under your leadership, successfully took the objective, cleared the way for a Marine landing, and held their position against a massive counter attack, fighting hand-to-hand after exhausting their ammunition, until relieved, at which time only five men and women of your entire Company remained in action. By your actions, leadership, courage, skill, and devotion you upheld the highest traditions of the Imperial Cadre and of the Terran Empire and saved the lives of ninety-seven percent of the hostages seized by the terrorists opposed to you. In recognition of your accomplishment, His Majesty directs and decrees that you be awarded the Banner of Terra for actions far above and beyond the call of duty."

There was an audible murmur from the reviewing stand behind them. The Banner of Terra was the Empire's highest decoration. Like the Solarian Grand Cross it could be won only on the field of battle, and, unlike even the SGC, it entitled its wearer to take a salute from any member of the Empire's armed forces, regardless of relative rank, who had not himself earned it. It was almost always awarded posthumously, and in four centuries, less than three hundred men and women had ever received it. In fact, at the moment, there were only two other living recipients in the entire Empire, but the tradition was that it must be awarded by someone else who had earned it, if that was at all possible. And so the Empire had recalled Sergeant Major Sebastian O'Shaughnessy to Old Earth for this ceremony.

Alicia DeVries looked into her grandfather's eyes as he handed his binder of citations to General Arbatov and accepted the blood-red ribbon and the golden starburst radiating from the exquisitely rendered representation of mankind's ancient birth world from Sir Arthur Keita. She bent her head slightly as he draped the ribbon about her neck, and the weight of the medal settled against her collarbone.

For the first time in history, that medal was worn simultaneously by two members of the same family, and the sergeant major straightened it carefully, then stepped back and saluted her sharply.

She returned the salute, then stepped back into her own position, and Arbatov turned to Keita.

"Brigadier, dismiss the formation," he said, and Keita saluted.

"Yes, Sir!" He turned back to face the short line, and all the other members of Charlie Company, standing invisibly at their backs.

"Company," he said sharply, "dismissed!"

"You wanted to see me, Sir Arthur?"

"Yes, yes I did." Sir Arthur Keita stood behind his desk with a smile, and waved for Alicia to enter his office. She obeyed the gesture, acutely aware of the new blood-red ribbon nestled amid the "fruit salad" on the breast of her dress uniform tunic. He pointed at a chair, and she settled into it, and eyed him steadily.

"I realize your family is waiting for you, Alley," Keita said after a moment, "and I promise I won't keep you long. But I thought you'd like to know that the initial Shallingsport analysis has been wrapped up." He sat back down behind the desk, tipping back in his powered chair. "I'm quite sure that this doesn't begin to represent the final word on the operation, but I think it's about the best summary we're going to be able to put together until and unless we manage to break some additional intelligence information loose. I felt that as Charlie Company's senior officer, you should be informed, in general terms at least, of the report's conclusions."

Alicia sat up a bit more straightly, watching his expression intensely, and he inhaled deeply.

"Essentially, the report-which Captain Watts and I have both endorsed-concludes that there was a massive intelligence failure at all levels. Effectively, we allowed the Freedom Alliance to manipulate us into sending Charlie Company into a deliberately arranged ambush. The entire operation was specifically intended to draw in a Cadre unit-in fact, to draw in Charlie Company-and either destroy it outright or else create conditions under which we would 'provoke' the massacre of all six hundred-plus hostages trying to save it.

"In the first case, the successful destruction of your company, the operation would demonstrate that the Cadre isn't, in fact invincible, and that the FALA was capable of going toe-to-toe with the Emperor's personal corps d'elite and decisively defeating it.

"In the second case, the deaths of so many civilians would be spun as proof that the Empire sets the value it places upon the lives of its military personnel higher than it does the value of the civilians those military personnel are supposed to protect.

"In addition, it appears that they did, indeed, intend to press additional demands, some of which they may actually have believed they could get, given the unprecedented number and nature of the hostages they'd managed to take. Exactly what those other demands might have been is more problematical, since, unfortunately-from an intelligence viewpoint, at any rate-none of their leadership cadre on Fuller were taken alive.

"So far as we can determine, the actual number of armed FALA on the planet was just over three thousand, of whom approximately twenty-three hundred were equipped with battle armor, relatively modern infantry weapons, sting ships, and heavy weapons. I suppose we should count ourselves lucky that they didn't bring along heavy armored units, as well."

He paused, shaking his head in obvious disgust, and Alicia frowned.

"I knew there were a lot of them, Sir," she said, when he didn't resume immediately. "I didn't realize there were quite that many, though. Have we determined how they managed to get them onto the planet in the first place?"

"Not as … definitively as I'd like," Keita said. "In fact, nowhere near as definitively as I'd like. We did manage to take a few of them alive, and to interrogate them, which gave us some additional information. As nearly as we've been able to determine at this point, Jason Corporation, the outfit which built the Green Haven facility, has actually been a Freedom Alliance front for at least ten standard years. By the time we figured that out, unfortunately, 'Jason Corporation' had shut down all operations in what was clearly a preplanned, well-orchestrated business liquidation. Its accounts had been drained and closed, none of its senior personnel could be found, and as far as we can tell, all of the Jason employees we've been able to identify and locate were innocent dupes, unaware that they were actually working for a terrorist-financed corporation.

"At any rate, the Freedom Alliance, when it began planning this operation-apparently quite some time ago-used Jason Corporation to set up the groundwork on Fuller. It built the facility in which the hostages were ultimately held, and apparently used the 'heavy construction equipment' cover to bring in the combat equipment it required for its intended operation.

"For your personal information, and not for the official record, I'm not personally quite as convinced as the analysts who prepared this report that Duke Geoffrey wasn't directly involved in setting all of this up."

Alicia cocked her head to one side, and Keita snorted.

"There's no direct evidence of his complicity-trust me, if there were, we'd be … discussing it with him quite firmly. His Majesty genuinely is as furious over this as he's appeared in public. If we had proof, or even strongly suggestive evidence, that Duke Geoffrey had been knowingly involved, the Emperor would have formally demanded his head from King Hayden. And if he hadn't gotten it, the Marines and Fleet would be moving on Fuller to collect it.

"There is considerable evidence that Duke Geoffrey's director of industrial development, one Jokuri Asaro'o Lowai, knew exactly what was going on. We thought at first that Jokuri might have been a false identity, but we managed to trace him right back to Old Earth, and the Jokuri on Fuller was definitely the genuine article. However, he also wasn't anywhere among the dead or the prisoners we took on Fuller. In short, although we don't believe that anyone managed to get off-world after Marguerite Johnsen entered orbit, he somehow effectively disappeared. The fact that we can't find Jokuri anywhere may indicate that we're wrong about that, but the current consensus appears to be that he was working for the Freedom Alliance and that, as soon as it could dispense with his services, the Alliance eliminated him and disposed of the body. Assuming that the theory has merit, they probably got rid of him because he knew too much and wasn't one of their own inner circle-they couldn't rely on him to keep his mouth shut if we got our hands on him and he found himself facing the death penalty."

He paused again, frowning, clearly not entirely happy with what he'd just said, then shrugged.

"I don't have any better theory than that, but somehow it doesn't quite feel right. I'm not saying that it's wrong, but I've just got this feeling that there's more to it. Certainly it's a neat hypothesis. Jokuri was in a position to handle all of the details on the Fuller side of the pre-op preparations. He was the Shallingsport official Jason Corporation had to clear all of its operations and shipments with. They couldn't have pulled it off without his active complicity; that much is abundantly clear. I suppose I just can't quite shake the suspicion that it could be extremely … convenient for Duke Geoffrey for us to have such a clearly identifiable-and obviously dead-FALA accomplice. According to Duke Geoffrey, it was Jokuri who first suggested to him that granting the terrorists 'sanctuary' in Shallingsport offered the best chance of keeping them alive. There's no independent corroboration of that, however, and I suppose I just find it a little difficult to accept that whoever planned this would have relied upon a mere industrial development expert to convince a head of state to get involved in something like this. And they had to be completely confident that they'd be offered a site in Shallingsport, since that was where they built their base of operations."

He paused once more, his frown deeper, then shook himself.

"At any rate," he continued more briskly, "however they planned it and however they managed to get all of their equipment groundside, the entire operation was intended from the beginning as a giant mousetrap, an ambush. And our Intelligence people never saw it coming. We dropped you and your company right into the middle of it, Alley, and for that I sincerely and personally apologize."

He looked at her very levelly, and it was Alicia's turn to shake her head a bit uncomfortably.

"From what you've already said, Uncle Arthur, it's obvious that they planned this thing very carefully and put all of the pieces into place long before they actually grabbed the hostages. Given the amount of time that Intelligence had to figure out what was happening, I don't think anyone can blame Battalion or anyone else for not realizing that even a terrorist organization like the FALA could be crazy enough to deliberately confront the Cadre this way."

"Possibly not, once we went into emergency response mode," Keita conceded. "But looking ahead, trying to spot things like this coming, is one of the things Intelligence people are supposed to do. And however it happened, no one did that this time around."

He gave his head a little toss and let his chair come back fully upright.

"There are still quite a few unanswered questions, and the nature of the beast in a case like this is that we probably never will get answers for all of them. That doesn't mean we won't keep trying, of course. In particular, the sheer amount of money and resources that the Freedom Alliance invested in this operation is pretty staggering. It might represent pocket change for the Empire, but it came to quite a few million credits. That's a lot, even for an organization like the FALA. And there's also the little matter of our inability-to date, at least-to even begin to identify the arms dealer-or dealers-who sold them their hardware. As you suspected at the time, it was virtually all of imperial manufacture. We did find a little bit of equipment from one Rogue World or another, but almost all of it was Marine surplus, and so far we've been unable to trace how it came into their hands. We've run the serial numbers, of course, and most of it was officially declared surplus to requirements and destroyed several years back. We're trying to come at it by figuring out who was in a position to falsify the record of its destruction, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for us to get to the bottom of it.

"As I say, I don't think anyone has any intention of of letting matters rest where they are right now. When the Emperor himself demands answers, people try very hard to come up with them, and His Majesty really, really wants those answers in this case."

He paused again, as if inviting Alicia to ask any additional questions which had occurred to her. She didn't have any, however. Or, rather, she had a great many of them, but it was obvious from what he'd already told her that no one had the hard data to answer them for her, anyway.

"At any rate," Keita said after a few moments, "that's what we know-and don't know-about what happened. It's not the only thing I wanted to discuss with you, however."

"It isn't?" Alicia asked just a bit cautiously when he paused yet again.

"I'm not planning on springing any nasty surprises on you, Alley," he told her with a smile. "The thing is, there aren't that many holders of the Banner of Terra, as I'm sure you realized, growing up with a grandfather who already had it. Did the Sergeant Major ever discuss with you why he never accepted a commission?"

"He said, Sir," Alicia replied with a small smile of her own, "that he was a 'working stiff' who preferred being in a position to get his hands dirty to getting stuck in a management position. Personally, I've always suspected that he just loves what he does right now too much to give it up."

"I'm sure you're right. But I think, perhaps, I failed to phrase my question correctly. What I meant was did your grandfather ever discuss with you how he avoided accepting commission?"

"Well, no, Sir. Not in so many words, anyway. I just always put it down to the fact that he knows everyone in the Corps-most of them by first name-and that he knew how to work the system too well for anyone to push him into a commission if he didn't want one."

"Having met your grandfather, there's probably something to that," Keita allowed with a slight chuckle. "However, trust me, it isn't easy for someone who's managed to win the Banner to avoid getting turned into an officer. In fact, a commission-or, at least, the offer of one-usually goes with it. In your case, the Cadre -" he meant himself, Alicia knew perfectly well, although he would never come right out and admit it "-had already decided you'd earned a battlefield promotion before the Emperor decided to award the Banner. But there's always a lot of pressure to get anyone who's won it commissioned, because you don't pick up the Banner if you're not exactly what we're looking for in an officer."

Alicia felt her cheeks heat very slightly, but she kept her expression only politely attentive, and Keita suppressed a grin.

"The problem is that you can't really twist the arm of someone who holds the Empire's highest award for valor. In your grandfather's case, I strongly suspect that he used the Banner as a club to beat off any threat of a commission. In your case, obviously, that's not happening-of course, you were a lot younger and more innocent when you won it than he was."

This time the grin broke free, at least partly, and Alicia smiled back at him. Then he sobered slightly.

"What I'm trying to say, Alley, is that your commission came before the Banner was ever awarded. Now that you've received it, though, the tradition is that you get to pick-within reason, of course-where you go next."

He made an inviting gesture, and Alicia frowned.

"I appreciate that, Sir," she said finally. "But I'm not sure where I want to go. Except -"

She paused, obviously hesitating, and Keita cocked his head to one side.

"Spit it out, Alley," he said. "At the moment, you've got pretty much a blank check for anything you want to ask."

"Well, in that case, Sir," she said quickly, almost as if she was pushing herself to get it out quickly, "I've heard that the Company is going to be disbanded. Is that true?"

"Where did you hear that?" Keita asked.

"I'd rather not say, Sir. But, is it true?" She stared at him appealingly.

"Why specifically do you ask?" he asked in reply.

"Because it would be wrong, Sir," she said with a fierceness which surprised even her just a bit. "The Company deserves better than that. It deserves better."

"Alley, at the moment Charlie Company consists of the exactly nine people," Keita pointed out gently. "We'd have to reconstitute it from scratch. It's not just a case of transferring in a few replacements-we'd have to literally rebuild it, as if it were a completely new company."

"We've still got the support staff at Guadalupe, Sir," Alicia said, her tone diffident, but stubborn.

"None of whom are active-duty Cadre," Keita countered.

"But -" Alicia began, then stopped herself. She looked at him, her expression more stubborn than ever, and he chuckled softly.

"Relax, Alley," he said, his tone and expression both serious. "No one's going to disband Charlie Company. Mind you, we're not going to be able to put it back into the field for a while. I meant it when I said we'd have to reconstitute from scratch, and, as you know, the Cadre is never oversupplied with qualified personnel. However, I have it directly from the Emperor's own lips that Charlie Company, and its battle honors, are not to be allowed to disappear. In fact, that's where I was headed a few minutes ago."

"Sir?" Alicia sounded puzzled, although her enormous relief that the company was not going to be written off was obvious.

"You're a brand new lieutenant," Keita pointed out. "You and I both know you've still got to get OCS out of the way, but we both also know you can handle the job. In fact, I'm confident that you'll be as successful as an officer as you were as a noncom, which is pretty high praise, I suppose.

"But, it's going to be a while before we start thinking about additional promotions on your part. Even the Banner isn't going to convince the Cadre to move you up any faster than your experience, seasoning, and confidence justifies. However," he looked at her intently, "there's the little question of where the brand new lieutenant gets assigned when she reports back for duty from OCS. That's what I wanted to discuss with you. Where would you like to go?"

"I … hadn't really thought about it, Sir," she replied, and to her own surprise, it was true. "I guess I've just been worried enough about the possibility that the Company would be disbanded that it never occurred to me to think about going anywhere else. I just wanted to go back to the Company. But I can't, can I? I mean, it isn't there, anymore. And, as you say, it won't be there again for a while."

"Neither of those last two statements is completely accurate, Alley," Keita said quietly, almost gently.

She looked at him, eyebrows rising, and he waved one hand.

"Charlie Company still exists," he told her. "It has nine personnel on its roster. You're one of those nine people. As for your second statement, I didn't say Charlie Company 'isn't there' anymore; I said we're not going to be able to put it back into the field for a while. But what I was going to suggest to you is that if you want to exercise the traditional prerogative of the Banner and request a specific assignment, the one I had in mind was command of First Platoon, Charlie Company, Third Battalion, Second Regiment, Fifth Brigade."

Alicia stared at him, and he smiled.

"If you want it, it's yours," he told her simply. "It's probably going to take us the entire time you're off at OCS to get the rest of the new table of organization filled. But I can pencil in one assignment right now, if it's the one you want."

Alicia discovered that she couldn't speak, and he laughed gently.

"Should I take that as a yes?" he asked.