"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 protégés. 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 "protégés" 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 considerably 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 than 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's 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 and info boards 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 Król asked over her armor's dedicated command circuit.
Alicia looked up to see Charlie Company's senior noncom standing beside Sergeant Ludovic Thönes. Król, one of the other three Shallingsport survivors still with the company, had inherited Pamela Yussuf's old job eleven months ago, while Thönes 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 conscious 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 Thönes 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," Król 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," Król 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 Król 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, Król'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 wingmen. 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 Thönes 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 Thönes 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 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 Thönes 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 Thönes 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 any 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," Thönes 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 human's sawed-off 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."
"O 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 them 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.