In Fury Born

Chapter Twenty-Nine

"Look, I don't give a rat's ass what 'headquarters' says about it!" Major Samuel Truman, Imperial Marines, snarled. "I'm taking casualties, and the fucking Lizards are sitting still where I can get at them!"

"Sir," Lieutenant Hunter said, almost desperately, "I'm only telling you what they told me. They want us to hold here. Right here, they said."

"God damn it!"

Had Major Truman been able to do so, he would have snatched off his cap, thrown it on the ground, and stamped on it with both feet. Since he happened to be in battle armor at the moment, that wasn't very practical, which only added to his sense of frustration.

He counted to fifty very slowly-he didn't have the patience to make it all the way to a hundred-and then exhaled a deep breath.

"And did it happen, Lieutenant," he said very carefully, "that HQ gave you a reason for us to stay 'right here'?"

"Sir, they just said to hold position and that someone was on his way out here to explain things."

"Oh, I see," Truman said with exquisite irony. "Explain things."

Another cluster of Rishathan mortar rounds came whistling in from the far side of the ridge, and the Marines' automated air-defense cannon swivelled like striking snakes. Plasma bolts streaked upward, and the incoming mortar fire exploded well short of its intended targets. The steady, snarling crackle of "small arms" fire also came from the far side of the ridge, where Truman's forward units were exchanging rifle fire with the forward Rish pickets. The Marines' battle rifles would have been called auto cannon, had they been employed by unarmored infantry, and the Rishathan weapons replying to them were heavier still.

Truman listened to the thunder of battle, then shook his head.

"Why can I still be surprised by the idiocy REMFs can get up to?" he inquired rhetorically. Hunter, wisely, made no response, and the major sighed.

"All right, Vincent," he said to the lieutenant in a milder voice, "fire up your com and inform HQ that Second Battalion is holding its positions awaiting further orders."

"Yes, Sir!" Hunter managed to suppress most of the relief he felt, but Truman heard it anyway, and smiled with a trace of genuine humor. Then he turned away, studying his projected HUD once again, while he wondered what fresh lunacy was about to descend upon him.

The intensity of the fire being exchanged between Second Battalion and the dug-in Rish had faded into sporadic shots by the time the promised minion from headquarters reached Truman's CP. The major's initial fury at the order to halt his advance had also faded-a little, at any rate-and he was prepared to at least listen to whatever his … visitor had to say.

It had better be good, though, he told himself grimly.

Second Battalion had already taken over a hundred casualties, twenty-three of them fatal, and he'd finally been gaining a little momentum in his drive against the Rishathan lines. It was going to cost him more people to regain that momentum now that they'd stopped him in his tracks.

He growled again, jaw tightening at the thought. He hated actions like this one. The planet of Louvain wasn't even an imperial world-it was a Rogue World which had been so bent on retaining its independent status that it had rejected a defensive alliance with the Empire. Apparently, its government had believed that refusing to sign any formal agreements with either side would somehow convince both of them to leave its world alone.

Which might have worked with the Empire, but not with the Rishathan Sphere. Although, to be fair, Louvain hadn't officially been invaded by the Sphere. Technically speaking, the Rishathan troops currently ensconced on the planet represented an old-fashioned filibustering expedition. The Theryian Clan had launched the invasion purely as a private enterprise effort to extend its own clan holdings, and anyone could believe as much of that as he wanted to.

Unfortunately for Clan Theryian-or for the Sphere, depending on exactly how one wanted to interpret what was going on-Imperial Intelligence had gotten wind of the operation in time to deploy reinforcements to the neighboring Tiberian Sector. Which meant that when the Louvain Republic finally woke up, smelled the coffee, and realized it was about to be invaded, there were imperial troops available to respond to its raucous screams for help. Unfortunately, those troops hadn't been able to get there until after the Rish invasion force.

The Imperial Fleet had quickly and efficiently destroyed or dispersed the naval units which had transported and supported the Lizard assault force, but that didn't do much about the ground forces already in place. A human commander in the same predicament probably would have seriously considered surrender, or at least a negotiated withdrawal. Rish, unfortunately, didn't think that way, and Major Truman and the rest of his battalion's regiment had been dealing with the consequences of Lizard stubbornness for the better part of three standard weeks now.

Which was why he wasn't very happy about the notion of halting his advance when he'd finally found a soft spot in the Rish's final perimeter. In fact -

"Uh, Major?"

Truman looked up, his eyebrows rising in surprise at Lieutenant Hunter's tone. The younger officer stood in the CP entrance, looking-and sounding-astonished, almost tentative, and Truman frowned.

"What is it, Vincent?" he asked.

"That … representative from Headquarters is here, Sir."

Truman's frown deepened, but he only tossed his head inside his helmet-the battle-armored equivalent of a shrug.

"Well, send him on in," he said brusquely.

"Yes, Sir!" Hunter turned in the entryway, speaking to someone Truman couldn't see. "This way, Ma'am," he said.

Truman watched his com specialist stepping aside to make room for the visitor, and then the major's already elevated eyebrows did their best to disappear entirely into his hairline. The last thing he'd expected to see was someone in Cadre battle armor!

The newcomer's armor carried the rank insignia of a captain, which made its wearer effectively equal in rank to Truman himself. That was not a particularly welcome thought. Not that Samuel Truman had anything but respect for the Cadre; he wasn't an idiot, after all. But however much he might respect it, he was the fellow who'd been the officer on the ground for the last three weeks, and the thought of being ordered about buy some newcomer, who didn't know his ass from his elbow in terms of the local situation, was unpalatable, to say the very least.

The Cadre officer stepped fully into the cramped command post and saluted.

"Major Truman?" a pleasant, almost furry-sounding contralto inquired.

"I'm Truman," the major acknowledged, returning the salute and then holding out one gauntleted hand. "And you are?"

The question came out a bit more brusquely than he'd intended to, but the newcomer didn't seem to notice.

"DeVries," she said. "Captain Alicia DeVries, Imperial Cadre."

For a moment, Truman only nodded. Then he stiffened as the name registered.

"Did you say DeVries?" he said.

"Yes," she said simply, and Truman found himself shaking her armored hand rather more fervently than he'd intended to

"I'd welcome you to Louvain, Captain," he heard himself saying, "except that it's not exactly the sort of vacation spot I'd wish on a friend."

"Oh, I don't know, Major." There was something suspiciously like a chuckle in the captain's voice. "Until the present visitors arrived, it was a nice enough planet. Or so I understand."

"I've been told it was," Truman acknowledged. "Unfortunately, I've been a bit too busy being shot at to play tourist."

"Actually, that's why I'm here," DeVries told him, and smiled at him through her armor's visor. She was a remarkably attractive-and young-woman, Truman realized. Which was almost a surprise, given her … formidable reputation.

"I understand you Wasps have the Lizards pretty well contained," she continued, "but now that you've got them pushed back into their final perimeter, it's going to get nothing but uglier."

"Maybe," Truman said a bit more stiffly. "I think, though, Captain, that Second Battalion's found a weak spot. Assuming, of course, that we're ever allowed to exploit it," he added pointedly.

"My, my, you are pissed off." There was no doubt about the chuckle this time, and Truman felt his temper stir once again. DeVries obviously realized it, and she smiled again, quickly.

"I don't blame you if you are pissed," she told him. "Obviously, if you've found a weakness, you want to punch in hard and fast. Unfortunately, Major, you haven't found one yet."

"I beg your pardon?" Truman didn't care who she was, or what medals she'd won. Not when she came waltzing in and told him he didn't know how to read a tactical situation.

"Sorry," she said calmly. "I don't want to rain on your parade, Major Truman, but I've got access to some background intelligence that wasn't available to your own intel people. We developed it after you'd already deployed for the operation, which is why my company was sent along behind you."

"What kind of 'background intelligence?' " Truman asked suspiciously.

"According to a source which Cadre Intelligence considers reliable," she told him, "when Clan Theryian headed out for Louvain, it came prepared for a full-court mysorthayak."

Truman blinked. He was scarcely what he'd consider an expert on Rishathan psychology, but he'd heard the term mysorthayak before. Every Marine had.

"Jesus Christ," he said. "What the hell makes Louvain important enough for something like that?"

"We're not really positive," DeVries admitted. "There are conflicting views on that particular question. There always are, aren't there?" She gave him a crooked grin-the sort the shooters at the sharp end always gave one another. "All we can say for sure is that our source is pretty insistent. Personally, I don't think their real objective is the conquest of Louvain, at all. I think the Sphere's simply decided it's time for another test of our resolve and picked Clan Theryian to carry it out. But I think you'll agree that if they are thinking in terms of a mysorthayak, you might want to be just a bit cautious about exploiting any 'weaknesses' you find."

"You can say that again, Captain," Truman said fervently.

The Rishatha had found the technological gap between their military capabilities and those of their human-specifically, of their imperial human-opponents growing steadily wider ever since the old League Wars. In particular, the fact that no Rish could use neural receptors placed them at a huge disadvantage, especially when it came to naval warfare. Their basic weapons were as good as humanity's, as was their equivalent of the Fasset Drive, but humans' ability to link directly with their military hardware gave them an enormous advantage.

That advantage was most pronounced where the Fleet was concerned. A Rish admiral really required at least a three-to-one advantage in weight of metal if she wanted just to hold her own against a Fleet task force, which was one reason the Rishathan ships supporting this invasion had scuttled out of the system as soon as the Fleet turned up. But when it came to ground combat, the traditional human advantages got a bit thinner.

For one thing, Rish were big. At a height of almost three meters-and squat for their height, compared to homo sapiens-a fully mature Rishathan matriarch massed up to about four hundred kilos, all of it muscle and solid bone. No human could hope to match a Rish in hand-to-hand combat without battle armor, and the Rish built their own battle armor on the same scale nature had used when she built them. Their unarmored infantry routinely carried weapons which not even human battle armor could support, and a fully armored Rish infantryman (although any self-respecting Rishathan matriarch would have ripped out the lungs of anyone who applied a masculine gendered pronoun to her), was tougher than most human light battle tanks.

They still couldn't match the flexibility and "situational awareness" of human troops equipped with neural receptors, but they'd worked hard to develop ways to compensate for that. In the assault, they eschewed anything like finesse, relying on sheer mass and weight of fire to bull their way through any opposition. On the defensive, they deployed tactical remotes profusely, dug their troops in deeply with overlapping fields of fire, backed them with as large and powerful a mobile reserve as they could, and tied in multiply redundant layers of air defense and fire support from heavy weapons. Blasting a way through a prepared Rishathan infantry position was always a costly affair.

Which only got worse when they were thinking in terms of mysorthayak. Truman wasn't sure exactly how to translate the term, but he supposed the closest human concept would have been jihad, although that had overtones he knew weren't really applicable. Jihad hadn't been a very popular term for humanity for the past several centuries, and it had resonances which didn't fit very well in this case. Mysothayak was all about clan honor, honor debts, and Rish bloody-mindedness, with only a small religious component, but the Rishathan honor code was twisty enough and hard-edged enough to make "jihad" the closest convenient human analogue. Once they committed to mysorthayak, Rishathan matriarchs didn't give ground. They fought and died where they stood, and if they had the resources available, they seeded their positions with nuclear demolition charges in order to take as many of their enemies with them as possible.

"So what you're saying," Truman said after a moment, "is that if I'd bulled on ahead, they'd have waited until my people and I were well stuck into their position, then blown us all to hell along with themselves?"

"I'm saying that's a strong possibility," DeVries corrected meticulously. "I can't say it's any more than that without better tactical info. But whether that's what they've got in mind right here in front of you or not, it's something we're going to run into somewhere before this op is over. Unless, of course, we do something about it."

"Meaning what?" Truman asked, regarding her through narrowed eyes.

"Meaning that the one way to avoid the sort of casualties mysorthayak usually inflicts is to decapitate the Lizard command structure."

"Decapitate it?" Truman frowned. "What do you mean?"

"It just happens, Major Truman," DeVries told him with a tart smile, "that I hold a doctoral degree equivalent in xenopsych, with a specialty in Rishathan psychology. Which is undoubtedly the reason Brigadier Keita picked my company for this little adventure. Think of it as a reward for my diligent efforts to understand the enemy."

Despite himself, Truman snorted in amusement at her dust-dry tone.

"At any rate," she continued more seriously, "the best way to beat a mysorthayak defense is to 'turn it off' at the source. There's no real human equivalent for some of the Rishathan honor code concepts, but the matriarchs understand the ideas of individual combat and of honorable surrender to a worthy adversary. And if the war mother in command of this little incursion of theirs orders her troops to surrender, they will, mysorthayak or not. So, the way to avoid having to kill every single Rish on the planet-and losing a lot of our own people along the way-is to … ."

She let her voice trail off, and Truman's eyes widened.

"You're going to hit their planetary HQ?" He shook his head. "Are you out up your mind?!"

"I wasn't the last time I looked," she told him. "Of course, I suppose that's subject to change. In the meantime, however, that's exactly what we've got in mind. So I'd appreciate the opportunity to go over your own reports and recorded tac data. I want to develop a better feel for their actual weapons mix and tactics while our own Intelligence people are figuring out exactly where their HQ is."

Chapter Thirty

"So that's about the size of it, Uncle Arthur." Alicia leaned back in her chair across the tactical table in Marguerite Johnsen's intelligence center from Sir Arthur Keita. "I think Truman was right-the Lizards are just about ready to crack in his area-but if they really are in mysorthayak mode, letting him push would be the worst thing we could possibly do."

"Maybe it would be," Keita said. "In fact, you're almost certainly right. But I'm not too sure that what you're proposing isn't the next to worst thing we could possibly do."

Alicia gazed at Keita with a sort of fond exasperation. In the five and a half standard years since Keita had sent her off to OCS, she'd come to know "the Emperor's Bulldog" far better than even most cadremen ever did. He spent a lot of time-as much of it as he could-in the field, moving about from one hot spot to another, and Charlie Company had mounted three more operations under his personal direction since Shallingsport. None of them, thankfully, remotely like that nightmare experience.

But she'd seen more of him than just that. Every member of the cadre was important to Sir Arthur Keita, but Alicia DeVries had become one of his personal protйgйs. She knew that, and, despite her powerful distaste for anything which smacked of favoritism, it didn't bother her very much. Uncle Arthur might take particular pains to nourish the careers of cadremen who'd demonstrated special promise in his eyes, but no one in the Cadre could believe for a moment that he'd allow favoritism to substitute for demonstrated ability … or to excuse its absence.

But one of the things she'd learned about him, something he went to great lengths to disguise, was that for all his decades of military service, all of his hard-won experience, Sir Arthur Keita was a worrier. Not about his own duty or responsibilities, but where the men and women under his command were concerned. He had to send them out again and again, sometimes into situations almost as bad as Shallingsport, and he did, unflinchingly. But he hated it, and the avoidance of any unnecessary casualties was an obsession with him.

Especially where his "protйgйs" are concerned, she reminded herself.

"Uncle Arthur," she said, with the assurance of her own experience, "we can do this. It may be a little tricky to set up, but the Company can do it. And if we pull it off, we save a lot of lives-not all of them human."

"Alley, I appreciate what you're saying, but I think Sir Arthur may have a point," another voice said.

Alicia turned her head and gazed thoughtfully at Colonel Wadislaw Watts. The Marine intelligence specialist's career-like Alicia's own, she supposed-had survived Shallingsport. She suspected that it might have cost him earlier promotion to his present rank, but his superiors had generally recognized that the major intelligence failures of that operation had occurred at a level considerably higher than Watts'.

She'd worked with him a couple of times since Shallingsport, as well, although he'd recently been returned to regular service with the Marines, instead of continuing to support the Cadre, and she couldn't complain about his performance either time. But she still didn't like him very much, although she sometimes thought that was probably because deep down inside somewhere, on some subconscious level, she blamed him for Shallingsport. The illogic of that attitude left her feeling angry with herself, which was why she made a deliberate effort to be pleasant and courteous to him.

Even if it does irritate the hell out of me when he insists on calling me by my first name, she thought wryly. Of course, he is a colonel, and I'm only a captain, even if I am Cadre and he's "only" a Wasp.

Now she simply raised one eyebrow, inviting him to continue, and he shrugged.

"I realize I'm here as Brigadier Sampson's representative," he said, "but I've worked with the Cadre enough to feel confident you could get in and almost certainly take all of your objectives. Personally, I think you're underestimating your probable casualties, but you and Sir Arthur have a lot more actual combat experience than I do, so I'm more than willing to defer to your judgment in that respect. The problem I have with what you're proposing is that for it to work, you've got to take the Rish's senior war mother alive, and then you've got to convince her to do what you want."

He paused and shook his head, then continued.

"First of all, given the probable response of any Rishathan war mother to the sudden arrival of armed enemies in her headquarters, I think your odds of taking her alive are less than even. Second, even if you manage to pull that off, a Rish of her probable seniority, especially one who's in a mysorthayak mindset already, is more likely to tell you to go to hell then to order her troops to stand down."

"That's exactly what I'm worried about, Alley," Sir Arthur said, nodding sharply. "And if she does tell you to go to hell, there you'll be, with an entire company trapped in the middle of their fortified zone. If they do have the area mined, they'll probably set the charges off, which would kill all of you. But even if they don't do that, they'll certainly have enough firepower available in the immediate vicinity to eventually overwhelm you."

"And," Watts pointed out, "if the operation fails, Brigadier Sampson has already instructed his staff and his Fleet support elements to begin planning for HVW strikes to take out the Lizards' positions. He's lost over a hundred and thirty dead since his brigade went in, and he's got a lot of nonfatal casualties; he's not prepared to lose any more people fighting his way centimeter-by-centimeter through fortified mysorthayak positions. I don't like to think about Charlie Company sitting right on top of one of his bull's-eyes in a worst-case scenario."

"Uncle Arthur-Colonel," Alicia said after a moment, "I appreciate what you're saying. But we have to look at the consequences if the Company doesn't go in. And, with all due respect, Colonel, whatever Brigadier Sampson may want to do, I strongly doubt that the use of HVW is going to be a politically acceptable option."

Watts bristled slightly, but Alicia looked him straight in the eye.

"Undersecretary Abrams has the ultimate responsibility, Colonel," she reminded him.

The Honorable Jesse Abrams was the permanent assistant undersecretary the Foreign Ministry had assigned to coordinate with the Louvain planetary government. So far, he'd been willing to allow the military more or less free rein, which spoke well for his basic intelligence. But the ultimate responsibility-and authority-were his.

"The Brigadier would have to clear any strikes at that level with him," Alicia continued, "and the fact that Louvain is a Rogue World squarely in the middle of the frontier zone between the Empire and the Sphere has to be a major factor in his thinking." She moved her gaze to Keita. "Uncle Arthur, do you really think Abrams is going to authorize kinetic strikes on Louvain, given the present situation down there?"

Keita gazed back at her for a moment, then sighed.

"No," he admitted. "No, I doubt very much that he will." The brigadier smiled tartly. "That's your father's viewpoint speaking, isn't it, Alley?"

"No, Sir." She smiled back. "It's only common sense when the Lizards have two small cities and half a dozen towns inside their perimeter."

"Our targeting is good enough to miss them," Watts protested.

"And HVW are 'clean' weapons," Alicia acknowledged. "But what Abrams is going to be worrying about is that if there's major civilian loss of life-even if the casualties are inflicted by the Rish, not us-and we've used orbital HVW strikes in a populated region of the planet, the Empire's enemies are all going to spin the story their way. Which means there'll be scads of stories all over the 'faxes recounting, in loving detail, how we inflicted all those losses. The fact that there won't be a scrap of truth in any of those stories won't slow the propaganda mills down a bit, will it?"

Watts looked rebellious, but he clamped his jaw tight and, manifestly against his will, shook his head.

"So, if we don't go in, Brigadier Sampson's people are going to have to fight their way in on the ground, after all. In which case, their casualties are going to be much worse than those they've already suffered. Not to mention the fact," she moved her eyes back to Keita again, "that the longer the fighting drags out, especially if they do have charges in place and begin detonating them, the more likely we are to get heavy civilian casualties. We can't let that happen if there's any way we can avoid it. First, because it would be morally wrong, and, second, because it could be politically disastrous when the propagandists go to work."

"But -" Keita began, then stopped. He glared at her for a moment, and then shrugged unhappily.

"You win, Alley," he said. "I don't like it, but I'm afraid you're right, at least about the consequences of trying to do it any other way. I just -"

He broke off again and shook his head angrily, and Alicia's smile went crooked.

This isn't Shallingsport, she wanted to tell him. This time we've got our own eyes-on intelligence and tac data.

But she couldn't say it, of course. Not any more than he could admit his own fear that it would be another Shallingsport.

"In that case," she said instead, "let's get my people in here and let them start explaining the ops plan we've already put together."

"Ready to go, Skipper?" First Sergeant James Krуl asked over her armor's dedicated command circuit.

Alicia looked up to see Charlie Company's senior noncom standing beside Sergeant Ludovic Thцnes. Krуl, one of the other three Shallingsport survivors still with the company, had inherited Pamela Yussuf's old job eleven months ago, while Thцnes doubled as the senior company clerk and Alicia's wing. He'd been with her for a bit over three standard years-ever since Alicia had been promoted to company commander. Tannis had been promoted to lieutenant at the same time, and offered Second Platoon, but she'd opted to head back to Old Earth to complete her medical training as a full-fledged doctor, and she was currently assigned to Johns Hopkins/Bethesda of Charlotte, the same hospital where Fiona DeVries was currently Chief of Surgery.

Alicia missed Tannis badly, but they'd stayed in close touch, and Tannis had become a close friend of her mother's. In fact, she'd gotten to know all of Alicia's family well and become almost a third daughter. It also hadn't hurt Tannis' career prospects one bit, either. The Cadre was always chronically short of its own medical staff, and Tannis had been assigned to JHB as part of a concious plan to groom her for bigger and better things.

But Tannis' decision to pursue her medical career was how Lieutenant Angelique Jefferson had gotten the platoon, instead. Alicia regretted the loss of Tannis' coolheaded tactical insight almost as much as she missed having her watching her back. But Jefferson had done the platoon proud, and Alicia and Thцnes had become a smoothly integrated team.

"And what might make you question my preparedness, First Sergeant?" she asked severely now.

"Well, far be it from me to suggest that you can sometimes be just a little bit slow, Skipper," Krуl replied with a grin. "Something about 'late to your own funeral' I believe Tannis said, wasn't it?"

"That was one time," Alicia said with dignity, "and it was only a training mission, and that glitch in my battle armor wasn't my fault to begin with."

"Whatever you say, Skipper," Krуl said soothingly, and all three of them chuckled.

"Seriously, Skipper," the first sergeant continued after a moment, "we're ready to enter tubes."

"Then I suppose we'd better saddle up and get to it," Alicia said, and switched to the all-units circuit.

"All units, Ramrod," she said. "Let's go, people-it's time to dance."

Marguerite Johnsen swept steadily around the planet of Louvain in her parking orbit. The Rish on the planetary surface were amply supplied with antiair weapons which could reach up to and just beyond the edge of atmosphere, but the Cadre transport was well outside their range. That was about to change for the individual cadremen in her tubes, however, and Alicia felt her own stomach muscles tightening as she lay in the number one launch position.

Don't be such a nervous bitch, she scolded herself. You're the one who came up with this brilliant plan in the first place, aren't you?

She chuckled, if a bit tensely, and decided that it was just as well no one else could read her medical telltales at this particular moment.

"All units, stand by for launch in five minutes," Marguerite Johnsen's cyber synth said, and Alicia drew a deep breath.

The five minutes in question seemed to take forever to ooze past, and then the audio tone of the thirty-second warning sounded. As always, she considered some final word of encouragement. And, also as always, she decided against it. Her people didn't need to listen to her voicing her confidence in them as a way to relieve her own nervousness.

And then the catapult grabbed her harness and hurled her out of the tube.

She watched her mental display as the rest of the company spat from the transport's tubes with the rapidity of an old-fashioned machine gun. The pattern was perfect, as she'd known it would be, and she watched the planet hurtling towards her.

Louvain's atmosphere began to blossom with tears of flame, streaking down towards the planetary surface. There were dozens-hundreds-of them, and Alicia smiled nastily. Brigadier Sampson's reaction to her "request" for a diversionary drop had been … testy. He hadn't really been able to say no, not when the person who'd authorized Alicia's request was none other than Brigadier Sir Arthur Keita. That hadn't made him particularly happy to expend forty-two percent of his total drop harnesses on dummy insertions, however. In fact, he'd rather pointedly suggested that since this was a Cadre operation, perhaps Marguerite Johnsen should supply the diversionary drops. But Keita had pointed out in return that a Cadre drop harness cost about three times what a Marine harness cost, at which point Sampson had submitted (as graciously as he could bring himself to) to the inevitable.

Now the Rishathan defenders found their sensors saturated with scores of absolutely genuine drop signatures. Unfortunately for them, there was no way for them to discriminate between the drop harnesses which contained live human enemies and those which didn't. And just to make their problems complete, all of the drop patterns, not just Charlie Company's, were liberally seeded with EW platforms and penetration aids.

From the Rishathan perspective, it had to look like a full brigade drop, an all-out effort by the Marines to put a decisive amount of human firepower inside their outer perimeter. Alicia and her platoon commanders had deliberately targeted the diversionary drops on exactly the sorts of positions the Wasps would have gone after if that was what it had actually been. They'd also set up a handful of drops for targets which clearly made no military sense at all to encourage the Rish to regard them as feints. Which-they all hoped-would also encourage them to assume that the company's actual drop was only another diversion from the"real" targets. After all, the planetary invasion force's command post was the most heavily dug-in piece of real estate on the entire planet. It was also in the center of their spacehead, which meant any force trying to break in and link up with drop commandos landing on top of it would have to fight its way through over two hundred kilometers of fortified positions.

All in all, it was hardly the sort of target a Marine brigadier would commit his troops to, and Alicia devoutly hoped that the Theryian command staff would draw the appropriate conclusions.

Unfortunately, there was only one way to find out, and she bared her teeth as she entered Louvain's atmosphere and became another of those plunging tears of flame.

"Striker, Ramrod. Talk to me, James!"

"Ramrod, Striker," First Sergeant Krуl acknowledged calmly. "We had a little scatter, Skipper. No sweat. I'm rounding up the strays now."

Alicia snorted. "A little scatter" wasn't exactly the way she would have phrased it … although, she acknowledged, she might have put it that way back when she'd been a sergeant, now that she thought about it. After all, one of a sergeant's jobs was to keep the officers from fretting over the little stuff.

"All right, Striker," she said, still loping along in the ground-covering bounds of battle armor. "Round them up and bring them along. I'm heading for the Tiger RP."

"Copy that, Boss. See you in a few."

"See that you do," Alicia said, and turned her attention back to her HUD.

Actually, Krуl's description was right about on the money, she told herself. The company had made it down without losing a single trooper, which had to mean the Lizards had bought the diversionary plan. They'd written the actual drop off as an obvious feint and declined to waste any of their defensive firepower on it.

Now that Charlie Company was on the ground, however, the Rish were doing their best to rectify their initial oversight. Heavy fire came at the cadremen from every direction, but the pre-drop recon had been spot-on. Unlike the Shallingsport debacle, the company knew exactly where their enemies' prepared positions were, and each strong point which could bear upon the LZ had been assigned to a specific wing.

One or two of those wings had landed too far from their intended positions to immediately engage them, but that was why Alicia and her platoon commanders had arranged backup assignments. Now Charlie Company's men and women moved purposefully through the flying dirt and smoke of incoming mortar rounds and the scream of heavy-caliber penetrators. They closed in on their primary or backup assignments, and Alicia had dropped in heavy configuration. Six of each squad's nine wings were armed with plasma rifles and HVW launchers, and as the green icons on Alicia's HUD swarmed towards the glaring orange icons of dug-in Rishathan heavy weapons and infantry, those orange icons began to disappear.

The Rish were past masters-or mistresses-at field fortification. They dug their weapons in deep, with excellent fields of fire, but Charlie Company had brought along the firepower equivalent of an old pre-space division-at least. Each of the HVW launchers had only three rounds, but each of those rounds produced a kiloton-range fireball when it impacted. Even the best-bunkered weapons couldn't survive that kind of treatment. Not, at least, if they were exposed enough to have a field of fire of their own.

The plasma gunners left the most heavily dug-in positions up to their HVW-armed wings. They were busy taking out the surface positions, the infantry pickets covering the flanks of the heavy weapons. And here and there, a Cadre plasma gunner sent a bolt screaming straight in through a firing slit to turn the bunker on the other side into a fusion-fired crematorium.

"Medic! Medic!" she heard, and muttered a curse as Corporal Sosa, one of Lieutenant Akama Alves' Third Platoon troopers, went down. His icon strobed rapidly, indicating heavy damage to his armor, and his life signs monitor blipped the emergency transponder code of a life-threatening injury.

Sosa's wing, Corporal Frederica Stone, was already there, dragging him into the lee of a furiously burning Rishathan bunker, and Alicia noted the caduceus icon of the Third Platoon medic bounding towards them.

Another green icon went down, and she swore again, more viciously. This time, the icon didn't strobe; it turned the bloody red of death instantly as Corporal Harold Madsen took a Rishathan plasma bolt center of mass.

That shouldn't have happened, a corner of Alicia's brain told her. That strong point was supposed to've already been taken out by-oh.

The strong point had been taken out, and, so-almost before Madsen's shattered armor hit the ground-had the single Rish trooper who'd popped up out of nowhere to take the shot. It was just one of those things. Just Murphy's way of reminding people that no matter how carefully they planned, he always had the final word.

"Tiger-One, Ramrod," she said, shaking that thought aside. "I'm approaching your rally point from eight o'clock."

"Ramrod, Tiger-One," Lieutenant Jefferson's soprano replied. "I've got you and Ludovic on the HUD, Skipper."

"Glad to hear it," Alicia said dryly as she and Thцnes loped along the trail of wrecked, shattered, burning Rishathan strong points Jefferson's people had left in their wake. It would have been embarrassing, to say the least, to be picked off by one of her own people over a case of mistaken identity.

She and Thцnes covered the last dozen meters in a single bound, and Lieutenant Jefferson waved one armored arm at her company commander.

"Over here, Skipper!"

Alicia strode over and slapped the lieutenant's shoulder.

"Mind if Ludovic and I come along for the ride, Angelique?" she asked.

"Course not, Boss," Jefferson assured her. Not, Alicia reflected, that she'd ever been likely to say no, but there were formalities to observe, even in the middle of a battlefield like this one.

"Erik has your left flank," she said now, leaning close enough to Jefferson that they could see one another's features through their armored visors as she highlighted First Platoon's icons on the lieutenant's HUD.

"He'll have that last calliope position knocked out in another ninety seconds, max," Alicia continued, "and Akama and his people have already secured this entire arc on your right."

"Good enough," Jefferson said, nodding in satisfaction, then looked up at Alicia with a wolfish smile. "We kind of cleared everything that might have come at us from behind on the way in, Skipper."

"So I noticed," Alicia replied.

"Well, as soon as Erik takes out that calliope, we'll go," Jefferson said, looking back up to where the calliope in question was flaying the approaches to a particularly substantial-looking bunker with penetrators that could have knocked out an assault APC, not just battle armor. "I don't want to -"

Alicia's visor polarized as a searing explosion obliterated the calliope's position. The thermal pulse and blast front from the HVW strike rolled over her and Jefferson like a fiery fist, and her armor's automatic stabilizing systems whined in protest as they kept her on her feet.

"So much for that," Jefferson observed, and punched into her platoon's all-hands circuit.

"All Tigers," she said. "That was First Platoon taking out some rather unpleasant Lizards who might have objected to our presence. Now that Lieutenant Andersson and his people have attended to that minor detail for us," she smiled at Alicia, "let's dance, people."

As a company commander, Alicia no longer had any business in the forefront of a firefight like this one. She knew that, and under most circumstances, she would have stayed out of it, whether she liked it or not. But this time, she couldn't. Not only were she and Ludovic Thцnes one of the minority of rifle-armed wings, but she was the company's Rish expert.

She did let Jefferson and her people effect the initial break-in into the Rishathan command bunker. They executed the breaching operation flawlessly, and at such close quarters the heavier weapons Rish infantry normally carried lost a lot of their advantage. Rish battle armor was more ponderous than human armor, which also meant it was considerably tougher than standard Marine equipment. In fact, it was tougher than the Cadre's armor, but at close enough range, the Cadre battle rifle was quite capable of punching its penetrators even through Rish armor. And the fact that the attacking humans were fused directly into their sensor systems and required no physical input interface for their armor's and weapons' onboard computers gave them a deadly advantage in a dogfight like this one. Coupled with the tick, the cadremen's enormously greater "situational awareness" simply meant they reacted faster, and far more accurately, than the Rish possibly could.

Second Platoon didn't have it all its own way, of course. Jefferson's squads took seven more casualties on the way in-none of them, thankfully, immediately fatal, although Alicia didn't much care for the look of Corporal Inglewood's vitals on her medical monitor. But once the platoon had broken into the command bunker, it actually outnumbered the Rishathan defenders by almost two-to-one. The fight was short, vicious, and ugly … as fights tended to be when the combatants engaged one another with plasma rifles at ranges as low as three meters.

"Pandora!" one of Jefferson's troopers announced. "I have Pandora!"

"All Tigers," Jefferson said instantly. "Pandora. I say again, Pandora! Let's watch those plasma bolts, people!"

Acknowledgment came back, and the tempo of the combat shifted abruptly. Jefferson's Third Squad, tasked to cover the other two squads' backs as they fought their way into the bunker, was still furiously engaged with Rish infantry trying to fight their way in behind the attacking humans. Between them and the platoon's point, the flaming, shattered passages through which the fighting inside the bunker had already passed were relatively quiet. Now the furious tempo at the head of the column suddenly seemed to hesitate as the plasma gunners who had been leading the assault slowed abruptly to let their rifle-armed colleagues past them.

Alicia and Thцnes squirmed through the halted ranks of the heavy weapon-armed troopers and joined the platoon's six wings of riflemen.

"Skipper," Jefferson began over the dedicated command circuit in a last-ditch, spinal-reflex argument, "you really don't -"

"Just stick to the ops plan, Angelique," Alicia scolded with a tight smile. "You know why."

"Yes, Ma'am," Jefferson sighed in the tone of a gradeschool student promising to do her homework this time. "In that case, when you're ready, Skipper," she added over the general circuit, and Alicia chuckled.

"All right, people. It's dance time," she said.

The final break-in was actually almost something of an anticlimax. Alicia had more than half anticipated a fanatical, backs-to-the-wall stand by mysorthayak-charged matriarchs. She'd been prepared to shoot her way through them, but she'd expected to take casualties of her own in the process of stacking the defenders like cordwood. Only it didn't work out that way.

A single pair of armored Rish infantry loomed up out of the big, dimly lit chamber at the very heart of the command bunker. They opened fire the instant the cadremen came around the defensive dogleg in the final approach corridor. But they were armed with calliopes, not plasma guns, because they couldn't afford to let the backblast from their own weapons turn this room into the sort of flaming shambles Second Platoon had left behind it on the way in.

The heavy penetrators would have killed or wounded cadreman they hit, but unfortunately for the Rish, Jefferson's troopers had already known they were there. The tactical remotes the humans had tossed around the dogleg showed them exactly where the defending Rish had positioned themselves, and if they could shoot at the Cadre, then the Cadre could shoot at them.

As Alicia had once demonstrated on a planet called Gyangtse, a rifleman who could draw a bead on his target with his eyes closed had a significant advantage. In fact, the advancing Cadre riflemen had their weapons aimed and steadily tracking their targets while there was still a thick, solid wall between them and the Rish. They were positioned to fire the moment their rifle muzzles cleared the dogleg, which meant they actually fired before the defenders.

Both armored Rish went down as battle rifle penetrators shattered their helmets and the skulls inside them. One of them sprayed hundreds of rounds from her calliope as her hand death-locked on the firing grip. One penetrator actually managed to hit Corporal Carlotta Mastroianni's right leg. The armor held, but Mastroianni went down anyway as the shock of the massive penetrator's impact knocked out her armor's "leg muscles."

Alicia was delighted that the damage to her cadrewoman was so minor, but she cringed as the other penetrators went shrieking and screaming around the command chamber. Computers, communications consoles, and tactical repeaters exploded in sparks, flying wreckage, and electrical fires. Worse, at least a dozen Rish officers and technicians went with them.

"Go!" Alicia shouted, and the other rifle-armed wings charged into the chaos and smoke with her. At least their sensors let them "see" with crystal clarity, which was more than most of the unarmored Rish could say.

Too bad we can't just shoot the bloody-minded bitches out of hand, Alicia thought viciously as she made her way through the stumbling, half-blinded matriarchs. Unfortunately, they couldn't. Not yet.

Alicia let her battle rifle snap back up into the "safe" position and drew her force blade.

"Watch my back!"

"Got it, Skip," Thцnes replied laconically, and Alicia hurled herself directly into the midst of the surviving Rish.

One of the matriarchs, in unpowered body armor, saw or sensed her approach. A "pistol" the size of a sawed-off human combat rifle thrust in her direction, and Alicia grabbed the weapon. Her battle armor was stronger than any Rish, but the matriarch out-massed her, armor and all, and Alicia felt herself sliding forward as the Rish fought to regain control of her weapon.

Enough of that! she thought, and the force blade slashed down on the Rish's forearm.

The matriarch stumbled backward, spouting blood from the stump of her arm, and Alicia stepped into the gap. Her armored elbow slammed into the spine of another matriarch, shattering it despite everything Rishathan toughness could do, and her force blade cut down a third.

It'd be an awful lot simpler, she thought, peering at the gaudy breastplate patterns which only she had the training to read, if only these people-there!

"Queen!" she barked over the platoon com net. "Queen!"

She charged forward, bulling through the towering matriarchs. At least one of them must have realized who her target was, for the Rish-a fairly senior war mother, by the markings on her armor-hurled herself at Alicia, arms spread to grapple in a suicidal attack. She met the force blade on her way in, and the headless corpse slid across the floor while Alicia vaulted over it in a headlong bound that ended in a hurtling tackle.

She and the matriarch who'd stood behind the other Rish went down in a crashing impact. The matriarch lost her personal weapon as they hit, and they rolled across the floor, the Rish writhing madly in Alicia's grip, trying frantically to throw the human attacker off. They came upright, then slammed into one of the chamber's walls, with the Rish hurling her full, massive weight backwards. But Alicia's armor absorbed the impact easily, and her grip only tightened. She switched off the force blade and slammed the flat of its heavy alloy core against the side of the Rish's skull. The matriarch staggered, her struggles fading, and Alicia smacked her again.

Damn it, how tough is a Rishathan skull?! she thought. If I hit her too hard -

The Rish's knees buckled with the second blow, and Alicia activated her armor's speakers.

"I have your line-mother!" she shouted, her armor's AI automatically translating into High Rish. The amplified, squeaky snarls and ripples filled the chamber like some sort of falsetto thunder, and every Rish in it froze.

"Her life is mine, not yours!" Alicia continued. "Yield, or I claim my prize!"

Her amplified voice crashed through the underground chamber … and every matriarch in it dropped instantly to her knees.

"My God, Skipper," Angelique Jefferson said quietly over the command circuit, "I really wasn't sure you knew what you were talking about this time."

"Oh, ye of little faith," Alicia replied, still standing behind the slumped bulk of her captive, razor-sharp alloy blade poised, while she watched Jefferson's troopers systematically collect the weapons the Rish had discarded. The matriarchs appeared totally stunned. They were passive, almost apathetic, as their human captors chivied them into the far end of the big, body-littered command room.

"I've just never heard of the Lizards just … packing it in this way," Jefferson said, half-apologetically.

"It's the way they're wired," Alicia said. "We don't call them 'matriarchs' for nothing."

Alicia waited another few minutes, until she was certain her people had the situation well in hand. Two-thirds of the command bunker's interior had already been taken; now wings of plasma-armed cadremen filtered outward to secure the rest of it. With the main prize safely secured, they no longer had to restrict their firepower or tactics to avoid killing the wrong Rish, and Alicia was confident the entire bunker would be in Charlie Company's hands shortly.

Which meant she could move to the next stage of her plan.

The stunned Rish was beginning to stir, and Alicia leaned over her. Even sitting on the floor, little more than half-conscious, the top of the matriarch's crested skull rose chest-high on Alicia, and she suspected that she looked fairly ridiculous with her left arm-battle armor or no-wrapped around that tree-trunk neck. Still … .

"Your life is mine," Alicia told her through the armor AI. "Your line-daughters have yielded to preserve it. Yield now, to preserve theirs."

The groggy Rish stirred again-not really trying to escape, just trying to get her brain back online-and Alicia tightened her left arm and pressed the flat of the blade against the right side of the Rish's neck.

"You have not yielded," she said flatly, and the Rish froze. There was silence for a moment, then a lunatic bagpipe skirl of High Rish.

"I yield," the AI translated for Alicia. "Spare my daughters."

"Their lives for yours," Alicia agreed, and released her captive.

More than one of the cadremen shifted uneasily as the towering matriarch climbed back to her feet. Alicia didn't. She simply stood there, waiting until the Rish turned back to face her and bowed her head in formal token of submission.

"Then I am your captive," the matriarch said. "Do with me as you will."

"I do not will to slay you," Alicia told her. The Rish stared at her, golden eyes-beautiful eyes, Alicia thought, even now, and all the more beautiful for the hideous saurian mask in which they were set-wide.

"Then what would you?" the Rish demanded.

"I would spare you, and your line-daughters and your war-daughters," Alicia told her. "I would have them live and return home in honor, rather than see my line-sisters and they kill one another when there is no need."

"And so you have fought your way into the heart of this, my sphere, and bested me, hand-to-hand, to win life from death," the Rish said.

"Is that not how those of the Sphere have dealt, one with another, from the day of the First Egg?" Alicia riposted.

"Indeed," the Rish replied after a moment. "But only one with another. You are not of the People."

"Yet I hold your life in the hollow of my hand. It is mine, fairly won in honorable combat."

"Indeed," the Rish repeated, and bowed deeply. "Yet there are prizes, and there are prizes, War Mother."

Alicia felt a flicker of relief as the Rish bestowed the Rishathan honorific upon her, but something about the matriarch's body language made her uneasy.

"My name," the Rish said, "is Shernsiya niha Theryian, farthi chir Theryian. I cannot give you what you seek."

Alicia stared at her in shock. She'd expected a senior war mother of Clan Theryian, but not the clan's farthi chir! Her mind raced, trying to cope with this totally unexpected development.

"Skipper?" Lieutenant Jefferson said after a moment. Alicia looked at the platoon commander. "What's going on, Skipper?" Jefferson asked over their private, dedicated channel.

"It's -" Alicia turned back to Shernsiya, staring into those golden eyes once again. "I just didn't count on … this," she said softly.

"On what, Skipper? I'm not a Rish expert like you."

Those eyes were bigger than ever, Alicia thought. They were fixed on her own face, gazing at her while Shernsiya's scarlet cranial frills folded themselves close. It was almost as if the Rish were trying to tell her something, she thought.

And then she knew what it was.

"You are a war mother of war mothers, Shernsiya niha Theryian, farthi chir Theryian," she said quietly.

She met the towering Rish's eyes a moment longer, and bowed, ever so slightly … then drew her pistol and shot the matriarch three times through the torso.

Chapter Thirty-One

"Skipper!"

Angelique Jefferson stared at Alicia in shocked, horrified disbelief as Shernsiya shuddered under the impact of the pistol rounds and then crashed to the floor.

The lieutenant whirled to face the other Rishathan prisoners, her weapon snapping up into the firing position in anticipation of their berserk charge.

But there was no charge. Instead, there was a wailing burst of high-pitched Rishathan, and the kneeling prisoners bent to press their faces to the floor.

Jefferson allowed her plasma rifle to return to the "safe" position and turned slowly back towards Alicia. But Alicia wasn't even looking at her lieutenant. She was kneeling on the floor beside Shernsiya, and as Jefferson watched, she reached out and laid one hand on the Rish's massive, heaving chest.

"My thanks … War Mother," the mortally wounded matriarch got out.

"It was your choice, farthi chir," Alicia said quietly.

"Indeed." The Rish managed a snarling chuckle. "But I could not tell you. I am honored that you guessed."

She and Alicia looked at one another for a moment, and then the Rish waved one hand at the other prisoners.

"I must speak to my eldest daughter," she said, panting with the pain of her wounds, and Alicia nodded.

Shernsiya raised her voice, calling a name, and Alicia looked up quickly.

"Let her pass!" she said sharply to Jefferson, and the lieutenant nodded. It was a nod of obedience, not of understanding, and Alicia smiled mirthlessly.

A shadow loomed over her as another Rish appeared at her side. The newcomer went to one knee beside Shernsiya, reaching out to lay a clawed hand on the dying matriarch's chest beside Alicia's.

"I am here, Mother of Mothers," she said.

"Good, Rethmeryk," Shernsiya said. Her own hand moved again, indicating Alicia.

"This war mother of the humans has given you life, Eldest Daughter. You will take it, and all of my daughters with you. You will give the order I cannot and lead them from this place, return them to their own sphere. The clan's honor is clean once more with my death. I name you farthi chir in my place, and I command you to remember with honor this war mother who has given our clan back its life."

"As you bid, so shall it be, Mother of Mothers," Rethmeryk said, and turned to Alicia.

"How shall we name you in the annals of Clan Theryian, War Mother?" she asked.

"My name is DeVries-Alicia DeVries," Alicia said, and Rethmeryk jerked as if she'd been struck. She started to open her mouth again, then stopped and looked down at Shernsiya.

The dying matriarch seemed as stunned as her line-daughter. She stared at Alicia, then looked back at Rethmeryk.

"Go, Eldest Daughter," she said softly. "I see here the hand of the Greatest Mother. Symmetry must be served."

"Yes, Mother of Mothers," Rethmeryk agreed. She looked back at Alicia. "War Mother, may I use our communication equipment?"

"You may," Alicia agreed, her own eyes on Shernsiya's face.

"Skipper?" Jefferson sounded totally out of her depth, and Alicia smiled without humor.

"Let her use the com, Angelique," she said. "She needs to pass the surrender order."

"Just like that?" Jefferson waved at the dying matriarch. "They're just going to surrender after that?"

"Especially after 'that,' " Alicia said.

Jefferson looked at her, then drew a deep breath and nodded.

"Whatever you say, Skipper," she said, and beckoned for Rethmeryk to accompany her towards an intact communications console.

"War Mother Alicia," Shernsiya said, "this is not the first time we have fought, you and I, though you knew it not, and we did not meet then hand-to-hand. Nor were you to know. But the Greatest Mother orders the universe as She would have it, and I would not have fallen into your hand, nor would you have spared my line-daughters, had She not willed it.

"Symmetry must be served-a gift for a gift, War Mother. And as your gift to me, so mine to you will have two edges. I do not think you will thank me for it, but by the steel in your soul, by the honor in your hand, by the truth in your mouth, so shall you have it, and I think you will count the having worth the pain."

Alicia knelt very still, her gaze fixed on those glorious golden eyes.

"Bid your war daughters stand back, War Mother Alicia," Shernsiya said. "My gift is for you alone."

"Give us some space here, Angelique," Alicia said without looking up. "You, too, Ludovic," she told Thцnes.

Her wingman looked briefly rebellious, but after a heartbeat of hesitation, he followed Jefferson across the room.

"Thank you, War Mother," Shernsiya said. "Now listen well; my time is brief."

"That was something else, Captain DeVries!" the Marine major said jubilantly as Alicia stepped through the inner hatch of the transport/command ship HMS MacArthur.

"Man," the major continued, "I've never heard of Lizards just rolling over this way!"

"I'm glad it worked out," Alicia told him, and her own voice was flat, her tone almost absent-minded. The Marine didn't seem to notice, nor did he notice the clipped-off syllables of the tick.

"So am I," he said. "And a lot of other Wasps aboard this bucket are going to want to buy you drinks!"

"I'm sure we can work something out." Alicia smiled briefly, and the major chuckled.

"I hope you've got gills," he said. "But, in the meantime, what can I do for you?"

"I need to talk to Colonel Watts. That's why I jumped one of your recovery boats instead of waiting for Marguerite Johnsen's."

"Not a problem, Captain. Uh, if you don't mind leaving your armor in our Morgue, that is."

"I can do that."

"In that case, Captain, step this way."

Alicia walked down the passage towards the portion of MacArthur set aside for the Expeditionary Force CO's staff. The talkative major who'd welcomed her aboard had insisted on escorting her personally, and she felt more than a few curious gazes as she walked along behind him in the utilitarian catsuit she'd worn under her armor. Most of the people behind those gazes seemed to know who she was, but they were giving her space, and a distant, frozen corner of her brain was grateful.

"Here we are, Captain DeVries," the major said. Two other Marines with the brassards of ship's police stood outside the intelligence center door, and the Marine officer nodded to them.

"Captain DeVries to see Colonel Watts," he said.

"Yes, Sir," the senior of the two sentries acknowledged, and Alicia stepped past them.

"Alley!" Watts looked up with a smile as she entered the compartment. "Wonderful job-just wonderful!" he congratulated her. "I know I had my doubts, but you and Charlie Company have pulled it off again."

"Thanks," Alicia said, and wondered how she kept from screaming.

"What can I do for you?" Watts asked her, and her mouth moved in someone else's smile.

"I need to talk to you," she said, glancing around the compartment. "Privately." She half-smiled apologetically at the other Marine's present. "I'm afraid this is pretty much need-to-know stuff."

Watts looked at her for a moment, his eyes hooded somehow, then shrugged.

"No problem," he said. "Step into my office."

He gestured at a side passage, and Alicia followed him down it to a much smaller compartment. He waved her through the door, then followed her in, stepped past her, and seated himself behind the desk.

"Have a seat," he invited, pointing at one of the two chairs in front of his desk.

"No, thank you," she said. "I've got too much post-op adrenaline still pumping."

"Not too surprising, I suppose," Watts said as she began to pace back and forth across the cramped space. He watched her for several seconds, then cleared his throat.

"You said you needed to talk to me," he reminded her.

"Yes. Yes, I did."

Alicia paused in her pacing and stood facing him across his desk.

"Tell me, Colonel-Wadislaw," she said after a moment, "how long have you been in Intelligence?"

"Excuse me?" Watts looked puzzled, and her lips twitched another smile.

"Trust me, it's relevant. How long?"

"Just about since the Academy," he said slowly. "I caught the Office of Military Intelligence's eye in my junior or senior year. Why?"

"Back before Shallingsport, Vartkes Kalachian-you remember him? He was one of the guys in my squad? No?" She shrugged at his look of polite incomprehension. "No reason you should, I guess. But he was assigned to our embassy on Rishatha Prime, one of the embassy guards. He said he remembered you-probably because of the way the Lizards PNGed you."

"Kalachian? Kalachian." Watts pursed his lips, then shook his head. "No, sorry, Alley. I don't remember him. And I'm afraid I still don't see where you're going with this."

"Well, I know you've spent a lot of time since then working with the Cadre, as well as with Marine Intelligence. And I know Brigadier Sampson specifically requested you when he was alerted for Louvain. I hadn't realized until very recently, though, that you were one of the Corps' leading authorities on the Sphere."

"I wouldn't put it quite that way myself," Watts said slowly. "I've put in my time studying the Rish-I understand you have, too. And I've had a few successes against them. But I'd hardly call me a 'leading authority' on them."

"Really?" She tilted her head to one side. "I'm surprised to hear that."

"Why?" He was beginning to sound a little less relaxed, she noticed, watching him from inside the tick's time-slowing cocoon.

"You knew, of course, that Clan Theryian was responsible for the Louvain attack," she said, and his eyes narrowed at the apparent non sequitur.

"We all did," he said slowly, tipping back in his chair and opening the top drawer of his desk to withdraw a stylus with his left hand. He left the drawer open as he drummed absentmindedly on the desktop with the end of the stylus, obviously thinking hard.

"Of course, I doubt it was ever Theryian's idea," he continued. "Somebody on the Great Council of War Mothers with a grudge obviously engineered this 'honor' for them." He shrugged. "The Sphere is such a catfight that somebody always has a dagger out for somebody else."

"That's true," Alicia agreed. "On the other hand, when the Sphere has one of the clans 'volunteer' for something like this, they don't usually push it all of the way to mysorthayak. That's actually one of the things that bothered me about this operation from the beginning. Did it bother you?"

"Not especially." He shrugged. "I agree, it was unusual. But I was more concerned with the practical consequences than with wondering why it happened."

"Oh, I'm sure you were," she said softly, and his eyes widened.

"What are you trying to say?" he demanded, his voice harsher.

"You must really have been in two minds when you heard about this one," she said. "Clan Theryian, and mysorthayak-and there you were, Brigadier Sampson's specifically requested Intelligence officer. Tell me, how did it feel when they told you where you were going?"

The stylus stopped drumming. He sat very still behind the desk, his eyes fixed on her face, and her smile would have frozen the heart of a star.

"You knew, didn't you?" she said, even more softly. "You knew why Theryian drew Louvain. The Lizards aren't like humans in a lot of ways … including how long they wait, sometimes, for vengeance. Over six years in this case, wasn't it?"

"I … don't know what you mean," he said hoarsely.

"Oh, yes, you do. It was Theryian who served as the Sphere's conduit to the Freedom Alliance. Theryian was in charge of the entire Shallingsport operation."

"That's … insane! Shallingsport wasn't a Rishathan operation!"

"Yes it was," she said. "I doubt that very many of the FALA rank and file ever knew it, but it explains a lot, doesn't it? Like the Alliance's 'fundraising' ability. And the connection to surplus military hardware no one's ever been able to nail down. They didn't have any connection to nail down; it came direct through the Sphere, courtesy of Clan Theryian."

"For what conceivable reason?" Watts demanded. He was perspiring now, she noticed.

"For exactly the reason everyone assumed-to destroy a Cadre Company and, hopefully, provoke a bloodbath. To blacken the Cadre's reputation, weaken the Empire's prestige, provoke a shift in Rogue World public opinion, and, of course, do what the Sphere does constantly-test the Empire's resolve. And Theryian got the assignment because its Mother of Mothers was one of the Sphere's best intelligence analysts and planners … and something of a specialist in corrupting and manipulating human agents.

"But the operation went south on them, didn't it?" Watts sat silently, staring at her. "Charlie Company wasn't wiped out-not completely. And only a handful of the hostages died, and none of the FALA troops got off the planet alive. So what was supposed to be a total defeat for the Cadre, turned into something else. Instead of dying, like we were supposed to, we got the hostages out. We turned all of the things they wanted to accomplish around, because … we … didn't … all … die."

Her voice was deathly soft, and Watts' hands began to move nervously on his desk top.

"But the Sphere's never been very patient with its own, has it? And, like you just said, it's always a catfight between the clans, there's always someone looking for an opportunity to cripple a rival. And that's what happened to Theryian. When the Louvain operation came up, Theryian was given a chance to 'atone' for its failure at Shallingsport. It was sent in to do the testing this time, but the clan's enemies weren't willing to settle for seeing Theryian's fighting strength reduced, costing it hundreds of its war daughters, or even its best war mothers. Oh, no. Not this time. Instead, they sent the clan's farthi chir-its Mother of Mothers. They sent her in, and they ordered her to hold Louvain at all costs, even a mysorthayak defense. And she couldn't refuse, because she owed an honor debt to the Great Council because of the Shallingsport failure. She had to go, and because she was here, because her honor now demanded that the clan hold Louvain at all costs, not one of her line-daughters could surrender as long as she was alive. And she couldn't order them to surrender, because of her honor debt.

"Louvain was supposed to be Clan Theryian's grave just as surely as a Shallingsport was supposed to be the Company's."

The silence in the small compartment was total, and Alicia's eyes were emerald ice.

"And here you were," she said. "You knew who that was down there, and you really are an 'expert' on the Rish. So you knew why she was down there, too. You must have been terrified."

"I don't -" Watts swallowed hard. "Why should I have been anything of the sort?" he demanded.

"Because you couldn't be certain. You couldn't know which of her senior line-daughters might have known, might have been captured and given up the information under interrogation. Not even a mysorthayak defense can be guaranteed to kill everyone involved, can it? But you had an answer for that, too, didn't you?"

She showed her teeth and flowed closer to his desk.

"I checked, Wadislaw," she half-crooned. "You said Brigadier Sampson had instructed his fire support ships to begin planning for HVW strikes. But what you didn't say, when you were talking with Uncle Arthur and me, was that you were the one who suggested that option to the Brigadier in the first place."

"I … I … "

Watts shrank back in his chair.

"It would have worked, too, if not for my own little brainstorm," she told him, and her voice was completely calm now, almost conversational. "The HVW would have gone down, and every single Rish down there would have been dead, and so there wouldn't have been any prisoners, anyone to tell us which human intelligence specialist has been a double agent, working for the Sphere ever since his initial assignment to Rishatha Prime. Or to explain to us why that double agent's assignment to Fifth Battalion was the decisive factor in choosing Shallingsport and Charlie Company. Or to tell us how that double agent was supposed to control the operational briefing and make certain no one looked closely enough at Shallingsport to realize what we were actually walking into. Make certain we picked the right LZ for their ambush."

Wadislaw Watts looked into those frozen eyes and Death looked back at him.

He lunged forward, his right hand darting into the opened top drawer of his desk. His fingers closed on the butt of the CHK in it, and his eyes widened in astonishment and the beginning of hope as he actually got the drawer open, got the pistol out of it, while Alicia only watched.

But Alicia was riding the tick.

She watched him, watched his hand moving slowly, so slowly. She watched his hand start forward, watched it touch the pistol. She saw him pick it up, saw his thumb disengage the safety, and only then did she move.

Watts cried out in shock as her left hand flashed across the desk like a striking cobra. Its bladed edge slammed into his wrist in the fairche leagadh, the mallet's fall, of the deillseag тrd, and his cry of shock became a scream of pain as that wrist broke. The pistol went off, sending a three-shot burst into the top of his desk, and the recoil threw it from his suddenly strengthless grip.

The penetrators punched neat, splinter-feathered holes through the desk's heavy extruded plastic, and the thunder of the pistol's discharge was deafening, but Wadislaw Watts scarcely noticed. He was too busy screaming in terror as Alicia DeVries' right hand reached out and pulled him effortlessly across the desk towards her.

He was at least a centimeter taller than she was, and he kept himself fit, but it didn't matter. His left hand hammered at her right wrist, and her left hand drove the tips of her fingers into the inside of his elbow joint like a splitting wedge in the corraigh bruideadh [finger stab: check Gaelic]. He screamed again, and she released her grip on him. Her knee drove the desk back, out of the way, and her right hand slammed into his rib cage. Bone splintered, and he shrieked as her left hand slammed up into his groin like a hammer.

He folded up around the agony, and her right kneecap came up to meet him. It crunched into his jaw, and his head snapped back up as more bone shattered. Her left hand caught his hair, wrenching his head back, and the edge of her right hand shattered his left cheekbone. Then it arced back and crushed his other cheekbone. Blood fountained from his crushed nose and mouth, and her left knee came up into his ribs-not once, but again, again, and again.

He was no longer screaming. He sounds were those of a trapped animal, desperate for the agony to end, and she pulled his head back again, baring his throat for the death blow.

And that was when the hands closed on her from behind.

Watts flew back away from her, thudding heavily across the desk, and she turned her head-slowly, slowly-as the two Marines seized her. They'd responded more quickly than she'd expected, a corner of her brain noted. Had it been the pistol shots? Or had Watts' screams been their first warning?

She twisted, throwing one of them off, and reached for Watts again. But the second Marine still had a grip on her, and he heaved backward desperately. Her left leg flexed, maintaining her balance, but he'd slowed her just enough for the first Marine to lunge back to his feet between her and Watts.

She gazed at the face in front of her. The face of a young man who didn't understand what was happening, who only knew that his own superior officer was under attack. Who didn't want to hurt Alicia, but who was reaching for his holstered sidearm.

He didn't even guess, she thought almost pityingly. Didn't have a clue what he truly faced. If she chose, his hand would never reach that pistol. She was riding the tick, and his throat was open, his solar plexus … the entire front of his body was wide open to her attack. She could have killed him three different ways before he touched that gun.

But she knew the look in his eyes. The only way she could get to Watts was through him, and she couldn't do that. She couldn't kill him, however much Wadislaw Watts deserved to die.

And so she allowed the Marine behind her to pull her back. Let the two of them tackle her, drive her to the decksole. And as she hit, she watched Wadislaw Watts ooze off his desk and slither bonelessly to the deck with her.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Sir Arthur Keita turned from the windows as the door opened.

Alicia DeVries stepped through it, her head high, and pain twisted in his heart as he saw the two uniformed cadremen who'd "escorted" her to this meeting. Behind him, outside his palace office's windows, summer sunlight spilled down over the Court of Heroes and the towering spire of the Cenotaph. He'd always treasured that view as one of the perquisites of his rank, but now his jaw clenched as he remembered the last time he and Alicia had visited Sligo Palace together.

Sir Arthur Keita had never married; he had no children, for he had invested his entire life in the service of his Emperor and the Terran Empire. Yet if he had no children of his own, he'd had hundreds-thousands-of sons and daughters. Sons and daughters who had worn the same green uniform he had. Who had served proudly, well. Too many of whom had died in the serving. His pride in them had been too deep, too powerful, to ever be shaped into mere words, and in all those years, he had never been prouder of any of them than he was of the daughter who faced him now, green eyes calm, head unbowed.

The daughter he had failed.

"Alicia," he said quietly.

"Uncle Arthur."

She stood regarding him calmly, her hands at her sides, and he inhaled deeply.

"Please, sit," he said, waving his right hand at the comfortable chairs around the coffee-table that floated on the sea of dark imperial green carpet.

She cocked her head. For a moment, he thought she was going to refuse. But then she shrugged ever so slightly, crossed to the indicated chair, and settled herself into it.

He seated himself in another one, facing her across the table, and for just a moment, he looked every year of his advanced age. He scrubbed his face with his palms, then lowered his hands.

"General Arbatov and I have just come from a meeting with Baron Yuroba and Minister of Justice Canaris," he said. "The subject of that meeting was Wadislaw Watts."

Her lips tightened ever so slightly, but no other expression crossed her face, and her green eyes looked back at him steadily.

He would almost have preferred some more visible sign of emotion, even if the emotion were rage or fury. But she'd shown very little emotion, of any sort, since the MacArthur Marines had pulled her off of Watts.

Keita knew, although he doubted the Marines had realized it, that she'd let them pull her off. And would she have let them if she'd guessed where this was all going? he wondered. But even as he did, he knew the answer.

Yet even as she let them subdue her, handcuff her, she hadn't said a word to explain what she'd done, or why. Brigadier Sampson hadn't had a clue what to do with her, but he'd known she'd assaulted a superior officer who was barely alive after the savage beating she'd delivered. The fact that the officer in question had produced a weapon he wasn't supposed to have in his office and put three rounds from it through his desktop suggested that her actions might at least have begun as self-defense. But even if they had, they'd obviously gone far, far beyond what would have been required to disarm him, and her refusal to speak had left the brigadier little choice but to slap her into one of MacArthur's brig cells.

And then Sampson had personally played back the recording from the hidden unit his investigators had found in the bottom drawer of Watts' desk.

At least he'd had the good sense to immediately com Keita, and Sir Arthur's face had twisted in furious anguish as he listened to the recording of Alicia's indictment. There'd been no question in his mind-or Sampson's-that every single word of it had been accurate, but neither had there been any corroborating evidence. The Rish matriarch who'd told Alicia was dead, Watts was unconscious-the surgeons had given him only a slightly better than even chance of ever regaining consciousness-and Alicia was in a cell.

Keita had gone down to talk to her, and it had been like talking to a statue. Whatever had carried her from the surface of Louvain into Wadislaw Watts' office had abandoned her in the aftermath. He'd never seen her like that, never seen her so closed-in, never seen her close out the rest of the universe. But he'd recognized what he was seeing. She was mourning her dead all over again, seeing them once more, seeing the courage which had carried them to certain death in the service of their Emperor while the traitor who'd pretended to be a friend sent them off to die … and smiled.

And then Keita had made the decision for which, he knew now, he would never forgive himself. At the time, it had seemed only logical, but if he'd guessed, if he'd even suspected -

He gave himself a mental shake and looked her squarely in the eye. It was the least he could do.

"They're not going to shoot him, Alley," he said flatly, and for the first time, those green eyes showed emotion. They went bleak and cold, and he flinched from the betrayal in their depths.

"It's my fault," he said bitterly. "If I hadn't put it all under a security blanket, hadn't kept it quiet, they couldn't do this. But I swear, Alley, I never thought this would happen. I just thought if we could keep it quiet long enough to get word back to Old Earth, to act on what you'd discovered before the Rish got wind of it, then maybe -"

He cut himself off. No. She deserved better than excuses from him, however true those excuses might be.

"What are they going to do?" she asked finally, and he looked away for a moment before he found the courage to face her once more.

"Baron Yuroba doesn't want anything to 'tarnish' Shallingsport-or what you accomplished at Louvain, for that matter. He doesn't want a huge court-martial, doesn't want any media-circus treason trials … doesn't want to admit a Marine officer could betray his oath this way. And Canaris wants to use Watts. She knows the Rish have no way of knowing what Shernsiya told you-that even if Rethmeryk knows exactly what her farthi chi said, her own honor would preclude her from ever telling the Sphere. So if we keep it quiet, we can use what he knows to roll up every Rish intelligence op he was involved with."

Alicia's face had grown tighter, her eyes bleaker, with every word, and he shook his head.

"General Arbatov and I both protested."

In fact, Keita had pushed his "protest" so furiously that Yoruba had finally threatened him with a court-martial.

"I think, maybe, they would have listened," he continued, "if Watts hadn't set up an insurance policy."

"What insurance policy?" Alicia's voice was frozen.

"He has evidence-proof, he claims-of the involvement of at least three Senators in Rishathan intelligence operations. Not members of their staffs, Alicia-the Senators themselves. He claims that with the information he can give us, we can turn the Senators-leave them in place, but use them to feed the Rish what we want them to know. And he's got other information stashed away, information we might never find on our own-information on Rishathan operations, the identities and aliases of probably half of the Freedom Alliance's leadership cadre, black-market arms dealers who have been supplying the FALA-and corrupt Marine and Fleet supply officers who have been surreptitiously dumping weapons to them. That's his insurance policy-twenty years of evidence of treason that he won't hand over unless he gets a deal."

"And that deal is?"

"They're going to amnesty him for Shallingsport." Keita closed his eyes at last, his face wrung with pain. "He's going to be kept on active duty-officially, and for a while, at least," he continued from behind his closed eyelids. "Not for long, and his actual authority will be nonexistent. In effect, he'll be a prisoner, under constant surveillance, taking the orders of Justice's Counter-Intelligence people, and if he fails to cooperate in any way, he forfeits his amnesty.

"Eventually, in a year or two, they're going to arrange something-a fake air car accident, an illness, something like that-to let them invalid him out. Then he'll 'retire' to a very carefully supervised life somewhere. They'll keep an eye on him-a close one-and he'll remain available as a 'resource' on Rishathan intelligence techniques."

"That's it?" Alicia said flatly. "That's the justice the Company gets?"

"No, Alley." He opened his eyes and looked at her once more. "It's not justice. It's not even close. But Canaris has been aware for years that we've been hemorrhaging sensitive information to the Sphere, and she's suspected that there were Senators involved. I know she thinks Gennady, or somebody on his staff, is one of the leaks, but she's never been able to prove it. Now she sees this as her chance to finally shut that flow off. And, she says, as her chance to avoid future Shallingsports." His mouth twisted. "She pointed out that no one can undo what happened to Charlie Company, and that nothing Watts can tell us will make our dead-your dead-any less heroes. But her duty is to the living, and she can't justify not gaining access to the information Watts claims to possess. And, she says, if he doesn't have the information he says he does, she'll cheerfully try him for treason after all."

"And Baron Yuroba?"

"Baron Yuroba is an idiot," Keita said harshly. "He could care less about intelligence maneuvers. He's just determined to avoid any 'scandals' on his watch. But, idiot or not, he's still the Minister of War, and he's got powerful senatorial support."

"You're saying the Prime Minister can't fire him," Alicia said.

"I'm saying the Prime Minister won't fire him over something like this, especially not when Canaris is coming up with all of her arguments for why doing it is a good thing."

"Uncle Arthur, I can't let this stand. You know I can't." Alicia looked him in the eye. "I don't care about Baron Yuroba, and I don't care about Canaris' intelligence strategies. Not this time. My company-my people-never asked much from our Empire and our Emperor. We were proud to serve, and we went in with our eyes open, and we by God did the job. And now, when our own Minister of War knows what happened, that we were set up, that we were sent knowingly to the slaughter by one of our own intelligence officers, he's too concerned about scandals to give our dead justice? No, Uncle Arthur. I can't let that happen."

"You have no choice, Alley. And neither do I."

Her head snapped up, her jaw tight, and he shook his head.

"I told Yoruba the same thing," he said. "I told him I'd go to the Emperor himself. And that's when Yoruba told me the Prime Minister has already discussed it with His Majesty. I don't think for a moment that the Prime Minister just happened to have that discussion before General Arbatov and I found out what he, Yuroba, and Canaris had already decided. But it doesn't matter. The Emperor isn't happy about it-Yuroba admitted that much, and I know His Majesty well enough to know that 'not happy' doesn't begin to sum up his feelings. But however much I may hate this, Canaris does have a point. This offers us the potential for the sort of intelligence coup that comes along maybe once in fifty years, the sort that could save hundreds or even thousands of additional lives, and she does have a responsibility to recognize that. I happen to think the advantages it offers will be transitory and a lot less effective than that-that's the nature of intelligence strategies-but the Emperor has a duty to listen to her arguments. And in the face of the unanimous agreement of the relevant members of the Cabinet and the Prime Minister, he feels he has no choice but to acquiesce. And since the entire purpose of Canaris' strategy depends upon the Rish not discovering that we know about Watts, I've been personally ordered by Yuroba, speaking for the Emperor, to expunge all record of what happened aboard MacArthur."

"Uncle Arthur -" Alicia began, her expression stricken at last, and he shook his head again, slowly, sadly.

"It has to be that way, Alley, if it's going to work. That's the bottom line, and our legal command authority has ordered us to keep our mouths shut to make sure it does work."

"And if I choose not to obey that order, Sir?" she asked coldly.

"I've been instructed by Baron Yuroba to inform you," Keita said in a voice like crumbling granite, "that you are charged, on your oath as a cadrewoman in the personal service of the Emperor, to keep silent forever on this matter. If you fail to do so, if you go public with what Shernsiya told you, you'll be court-martialed. The charge will be assaulting a superior officer, the Empire then being in a state of emergency, and the sentence, if you are found guilty, will be death."

Alicia stared at him, and something died in her eyes. Something which had always been in them before disappeared, and grief washed over Keita as he realized what it was.

"Alley," he said, "I don't -"

He broke off, his jaw tight, and stared out the windows on the far side of his office for a long moment. He could just see the spire of the Cenotaph, and all that it stood for, all that the young woman sitting across the coffee-table from him and the members of her company had given in such unstinting measure, thundered through his soul.

"Alley," he said, looking back at her, "don't."

"Don't what?" Her voice was flat, rusty-sounding, as if something had broken inside it.

"Don't let it stand," he told her, and leaned across the table towards her. "Go public. Tell the entire Empire what that godforsaken bastard did! Yuroba doesn't want a scandal? Well, give him the mother of all scandals! Let him explain to the media-and the Cadre, by God!-why he's court-martialing one of the three living holders of the Banner of Terra! He'll never do it-he doesn't have the balls for it. And if he does, no court-martial he could empanel would ever convict."

"Would you go public, if it were you, Uncle Arthur?" she asked him softly. "If His Majesty himself had ordered you not to, would you do it anyway?"

"Damned straight I -"

He froze as he realized what she'd actually asked. Not "would you face a court-martial" but "would you disobey the Emperor's command." Because that was what it really came down to, wasn't it? Not to Yuroba's spineless idiocy. Not to the Prime Minister's concession to political expediency. Not even to Canaris' completely valid desire to use the intelligence windfall which had landed in her lap.

No. It came down to the fact that he, Sir Arthur Keita, was the Emperor of Humanity's personal liegeman. That he had given his oath to Emperor Seamus II, and before him to Empress Maire, to be his servant "of life, limb, and duty, until my Emperor release me or death take me."

"No, Alley," he said finally, softly. "I wouldn't. I can't."

"And neither can I," she said. "Not now. If it were only Yuroba, only Canaris, yes. But not now. Not now that the Emperor himself has spoken. I can't break faith with him … even if he has broken faith with me."

Keita flinched from the bottomless pain of her last eight words.

"Alley, he didn't -"

"Yes, he did, Uncle Arthur," she contradicted flatly. "He made a choice. Maybe it's even the right one. Maybe Canaris is right, and she can use Watts, make at least something good come out of it. But that doesn't change the fact that Canaris, and Yuroba, and, yes, His Majesty, have broken faith with the Company. With its dead. With my dead."

Tears sparkled in her green eyes at last, and she shook her head slowly, sadly, a mother mourning the death of her child.

"I'll obey his order," she said. "This one, this last time. But no more, Uncle Arthur. No more."

She reached up and unpinned the harp and starship from the collar of her uniform. The harp and starship of the House of Murphy. They gleamed in her palm, and she looked down at them for a moment through the haze of her tears, then reached out and laid them on the coffee-table between her and Keita.

"I can't serve an Empire which puts expediency before my dead." Her voice trembled at last, and she shook her head again-sharply, this time, almost viciously. "And I can't-won't-serve an Emperor who lets that happen," she said hoarsely. "Maybe it's all justified, but I can't do this anymore … not without betraying the Company. And if everyone else in the goddamned universe is going to betray my dead," she looked him in the eye, her lips trembling, "then they're going to do it without me."

She touched the harp and starship one last time-gently, like a lover-then rose, tall, slim, and proud against the windows and the Cenotaph's obelisk, her eyes glistening with tears. She looked down once more at the insignia on the coffee-table, and then she looked back at Sir Arthur Keita.

"Goodbye, Uncle Arthur," Alicia Dierdre DeVries said softly, and she turned without a backward glance and walked out of that place forever.