The darkness shuddered.
An icy breeze sighed through the heart of its warmth, and she shuddered. She tasted fire and slaughter, the sweet copper of blood, and the heady harshness of smoke, and almost—almost—she awoke.
It was there, her sleeping thought knew. It was coming closer. The echo she had sensed twice before was stronger than ever, sure in the strength of its self-knowledge, of its discipline . . . of its deadliness. And the branchings of its futures narrowed, narrowed, narrowed . . .
The constellations of potentialities were disappearing, folding in on themselves, resolving. The choices became starker as they became fewer, the alternatives more wrapped in pain.
And yet still the echo knew nothing, sensed nothing, of what awaited it. With all the dauntless courage of mortal kind, it advanced into that unknown void, prepared to accept whatever was.
But would it have been so brave if it had been as she was? Able to sense the dwindling futures which lay before it?
The time will come, she thought at it from her sleep. The time will come, Little One, when you must choose. And what will your choice be then? Will you give yourself to me? Make your purpose and mine one? And how much pain will you embrace in the name of choice?
But the void returned no answer, and the icy breeze sighed away once more into stillness.
Not yet, her sleepy thought murmured. Not yet.
But soon.
"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—instead, 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, and 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?"
"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 by 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?"
"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 'volunteered' 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 Rish 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 only a human in 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, toughness, 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, either, of course. Mysorthayak 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 of 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."