"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.