"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 Kiely 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."
Kiely 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 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 absentmindedly 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 Król, 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 glowing 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 Król 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 Król 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 shuttle-launched hypervelocity 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."