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.