"Understand?" Alicia's voice cracked. She swallowed, but she couldn't stop. Despite all Tisiphone could do, an old, old agony drove her. "If you do, then how can you ask this of me? We went in with a company, Sir-a company!-and came out with half a squad!"
"I know."
"Yes, and you know why, too, Sir! You know why that son-of-a-bitch screwed our mission brief to hell, and you know what came of it, and you still want me to talk to a spook?!"
Her eyes were hard, harder than Sir Arthur Kieta had ever seen them, and she half-crouched forward in her chair, hands like talons on its armrests as she glared at him.
"Alley. Alley!" Alicia's augmentation crackled with prep signals as emotion jangled through her, and Tannis' hands massaged her shoulders, trying to relax her tension. "They did their best, Sarge." Tannis' voice was soft. "Intelligence screws up sometimes. It happens, Alley."
"Not like this," Alicia grated. "Not like this time, does it, Uncle Arthur?"
Her eyes were green flint, challenging his, and he inhaled deeply.
"No, Captain. Not like this," he said at last, quietly, and looked over her head at Tannis. "Did Alley ever discuss this with you, Major?"
"No, Sir." Tannis sounded confused, Alicia thought, and no wonder.
"No, of course not," he sighed, and turned his eyes back to Alicia. "Forgive me. You promised you wouldn't, didn't you?"
She stared back, face like marble, and he pursed his lips in thought, then nodded slowly.
"Perhaps it's time someone did, Tannis." He gestured at the chair beside Alicia and waited until the cadrewoman sat. "All right. You heard there was an, um, flap when Alicia resigned?" Tannis nodded. "Did you happen to know the nature of that 'flap'?"
"No, Sir." Tannis looked at Alicia for a moment. "I always wondered. There were all kinds of rumors, of course, but none of them ever made sense to me. There was talk that she'd resigned to avoid a court-martial, but I knew that was bogus. I couldn't imagine Alley doing anything that would draw a court! The whole idea was ridiculous! But I never heard anything else that did make sense, and … she wasn't talking to us anymore." She looked at Alicia again, her eyes glistening. "I don't think anyone in the Cadre ever knew what really happened."
"I'll be damned. I never thought the cover-up would hold."
Keita pinched the bridge of his nose again, shaking his head wearily, then continued in a flat, level voice.
"Alley assaulted a superior officer, Tannis." Tannis' brown eyes widened in disbelief, and he nodded, meeting her eyes, not Alicia's. "That officer was Colonel Wadislaw Watts," he continued, "and she didn't just 'strike' him. She hospitalized him in critical condition. In fact, it was, by her own subsequent admission, her intent to kill him, and she damned nearly did."
Tannis gasped and turned to stare at her friend, but Alicia looked straight ahead, eyes stony, showing her only her profile, while Keita continued in that same flat, steady voice.
"Precisely. You and I know, Tannis, that the Cadre isn't perfect, whatever the Empire as a whole may believe. We make mistakes. Not often, perhaps, but we make them, and when we do, they can have … major consequences. Like Shallingsport."
"Mistakes!" Alicia hissed like a curse, then caught herself and pressed her lips together. Keita didn't even frown. He simply went on speaking to Tannis as if they were the only people in the room.
"Alley's right," he told her. "It wasn't a mistake that killed ninety-seven percent of your company at Shallingsport. It was a crime, because those casualties-" he laid his palms on the tabletop, as if for balance "-were completely avoidable. Captain Watts knew exactly what was waiting for you down there, Tannis. The rest of us didn't, but he did."
Cateau's face was white, twisted with disbelief and anguish, and Keita folded his hands together and frowned down at them.
"He deliberately sent you into that ambush … and he thought he could get away with it, hide it," he said softly. "In fact, he very nearly did."
"But … but why, Sir?"
"For money. And, in Shallingsport's case, out of fear, too, I suppose. The … foreign power actually behind the Shallingsport terrorists had suborned him on his very first deployment out of the Academy. He'd been feeding them information for years before the raid, and he'd been very, very clever. He'd been through several routine security checks and two regular five-year close scrutinies, and we'd never even suspected that they'd turned him. But his employers had kept records of every payment they never made him, and when Shallingsport came up, they informed him that he could either cook his intelligence analysis to guarantee a blood bath that ended in failure, or be exposed by them."
"You're saying one of our own people set us up?" Tannis whispered.
"That's exactly what I'm saying," Keita said bluntly, "and only two things kept Watts from succeeding: the courage and determination of your company … and the leadership of Staff Sergeant Alicia DeVries."
Alicia glared at him, hands like claws in her lap under the table edge, and horror boiled behind her eyes as the scars she'd spent five years building were ripped away and she saw it all again. Captain Alwyn and Lieutenant Strassman dead in the drop. Lieutenant Masolle dying even as she ordered the break-out from the LZ. Pamela Yussuf and her people buying that break-out with their lives. And then that endless, nightmare cross-country journey, while people-friends-were picked off, blown apart, incinerated in gouts of plasma or shattered by tungsten penetrators. The wounded they had no choice but to abandon.
And then the break-in to the hostages. Obaseki Osayaba and Astrid Nordbш's icons vanishing from her HUD. Brian Oselli, throwing himself in front of the plasma cannon. Samantha Moyano firing, firing, until the plasma bolt incinerated her. Thomas Kiely breaking the counter attack's back with his own death. Tannis screaming her warning and shooting the terrorists off Alicia's back even as point-blank small arms battered her own armor and she took two white-hot tungsten penetrators. The terror and blood and smoke and stink as somehow they held they held they held until the Marine shuttles came down like the hands of God to pluck them out of Hell while she and Kuromachi Chiyeko ripped at Tannis' armor and the medic restarted her heart twice … .
It was impossible. She knew that now. They couldn't have done it-no one could have done it-but they had. They'd done it because they were the best. Because they were the Cadre, the chosen samurai of the Empire. Because it was their duty. Because she'd been, by God, too stupid to know they couldn't … and because they'd been were all that stood between six hundred civilians and death.
"The plan failed," Keita's quiet voice cut through the surreal flashes of hideous memory, "because of you people, but we didn't know how the intelligence had gone so horribly wrong. We looked-I assure you we looked-but we never found the answers. And then, five years later, on Louvain, Captain DeVries captured a dying Rishathan War Mother. And because she was dying and Alley had spared her line-daughters' lives, she repaid her honor debt."
More memories wracked Alicia, and Tisiphone rushed to harvest their rage, gathering it up and storing its fiery strength as Alicia remembered the dying Rish. Remembered the beautiful golden eyes blazing in that hideous face as Shernsiya discovered she was that DeVries and bestowed the priceless, poisonous gift in the name of honor.
"There was no proof, no record, only the word of a dying Rish, but Alley knew it was true. And because she had no proof, she returned to the command ship, found Colonel Wadislaw Watts, and challenged him with what she'd learned. He panicked and tried to kill her, confirming his guilt, and she shattered his skull, his jaw, both cheekbones, his ribs, his wrist, and his elbow, ruptured his spleen, crushed both testicles, broke three vertebra, seriously damaged the left ventricle of his heart, and punctured his right lung in four places with bone fragments before they could pull her off him."