It was a pointed lesson in cost-versus-quantity. There were a maximum of only forty thousand cadremen, as opposed to quite literally millions of Imperial Marines. Which was probably a very good thing for the Treasury, since each suit of Cadre battle armor cost rather more than a Leopard-class assault shuttle capable of landing thirty-one fully armored Marines plus the cost of all of the external ordinance and fuel that same shuttle would require to provide fire support for its Marines once they were on the ground.
Not even the Terran Empire could conceivably have afforded to spend that much equipping every one of its Marines, even assuming all of those Marines had been synth-link-capable in the first place. But it could afford to equip the Cadre on that scale, which helped to explain just what it was which placed the combat power of the Imperial Cadre of Seamus II on a completely different plane from any other military unit.
"Prepare for drop," the voice of Marguerite Johnsen's cyber-synth AI said emotionlessly in Alicia's mastoid, breaking into her reverie. "Drop in sixty seconds." She felt herself tightening internally in anticipation of the coming shock. "Fifty. Forty. Thirty. Twenty. Ten … nine … eight … seven … six … five … four … three … two … one … drop."
A particularly foul-tempered mule kicked her squarely between the shoulders.
That was what it felt like, anyway. She'd made her eight required qualification drops, and another twenty live training drops (and over thirty simulated drops) during ACTS. In a lot of ways, this was just one more-an explosive grunt as the tube catapult suddenly drove the drop harness tractor-locked to her armor down the exact center of the tube's gleaming bore under one hundred and sixty gravities of acceleration. The harness took her with it, and its counter-gravity and inertial sump reduced the apparent acceleration to "only" about fifteen gravities. Which, in Alicia's considered opinion, was more than enough to be getting on with. She never blacked out-her "feet-first" launch posture and the pressure suit lining built into her armor's anti-kinetic systems helped stave off blood drain away from the brain-but she'd decided on her very first drop that the experience gave her a cannonball's-eye view of the universe.
By the time she cleared the two-kilometer electromagnetic extension of the tube catapult, two endless seconds later, she was traveling at over seven hundred kilometers per hour and headed straight into Chengchou's atmosphere.
Not even her armor would have been enough to protect her through such a steep reentry (although, technically, since she'd never left Chengchou she could hardly be said to be reentering its atmosphere, she supposed), but that was where the drop harness came in. Not even it could make a drop pleasant, but it could make it survivable. The harness's tractor/presser field reached out, forming an immaterial and yet immensely strong aerodynamically-shaped bubble around her. Heat, light, and turbulence bellowed and howled on the bubble's surface as she bulleted down into the heart of Chengchou's deep envelope of air, and if it wasn't pleasant, it was immensely exciting, like riding inside the heart of a star. The sort of experience no civilian would ever know.
She watched her blazing corona, protected by her bubble and the armor within it, and felt the universe begin to slow as the first trickle of tick slid into her bloodstream.
Charlie Company screamed down towards Chengchou's Muztagh Ata Mountains like a flight of homesick meteors, and the finest stealth systems in the galaxy could not have concealed the visual and thermal signatures of its coming.
But, of course, by the time anyone looked up into the night sky to see them coming, it was far too late to do anything about it.
Alicia didn't even turn her head as Tannis Cateau fell into position on her left flank. If Cateau had any misgivings about going into combat with a wing with whom she'd never even been through a simulated exercise, she'd concealed them well. Alicia appreciated that, the more so because she'd found time to study Cateau's file. Whatever else the medic corporal might be, she was also a highly experienced close-combat warrior. Every drop commando fought-even the chaplains-and Cateau had done more than her fair share of that. Which meant she knew exactly what she was getting into with a newbie wing and that her silence on the subject didn't spring from the overconfidence of inexperienced ignorance.
Alicia's attention was on her HUD. Lieutenant Francesca Masolle's Second Platoon had been assigned responsibility for the northernmost, and smaller, of the two training camps, the one code-named Beech Tree One. Lieutenant Strassmann's First Platoon had primary responsibility for Beech Tree Two, the larger of the camps. Lieutenant Paбl Бgoston's Third Platoon was supposed to drop between the two camps. Two of his three squads would serve as the company reserve, while the third would assist First Platoon in taking out Beech Tree Two.
Alicia's own squad had been tasked as an immediate tactical reserve, assigned to cover Gilroy's Second Squad as it advanced and to join hands with Third Platoon's reserve once Paбl's people linked up with First Platoon. Originally, First and Second Squads' roles had been reversed, but the sudden arrival of a brand new squad leader had convinced Strassmann to flip their assignments. No doubt so that Master Sergeant Onassis could keep a closer eye on the fledgling, Alicia thought.
That was the plan, anyway, but it looked t as if there were about to be a few glitches.
First Platoon had experienced a little scatter-even the best trained, most experienced people were almost certain to do that on a full-bore atmospheric-insertion drop-but each squad's pairs of wings had already found one another. Now, as she watched, her own squad's people were moving into their assigned positions in the ground-devouring, low-trajectory jumps their battle armor made possible. A part of Alicia was tempted to say something, if only to let them know the new kid was staying on top of things, but she knew better than that. And so, she kept her mouth shut, watching patiently while people who obviously knew what they were supposed to be doing did it. They were moving quickly and smoothly, even if the time-slowing effect of the tick stretched out the duration of each individual jump improbably.
But if First Platoon's people were getting themselves sorted out, Third Platoon wasn't. Its icons were about as scattered as First Platoon had been, but they were moving towards a semblance of order much more slowly. Some of them, in fact, weren't moving at all, she noticed.
"Winchester-One, Rifle-Two," Onassis' voice sounded in her mastoid as she and Cateau moved forward behind the advancing skirmish line of her Alpha Team, and a green data code in her HUD indicated that he was speaking to her on a dedicated circuit.
"Rifle-Two, Winchester-One," she acknowledged.
"Lieutenant Masolle's people have made contact with Beech Tree One," Onassis told her. "Looks like she caught them with their pants down. Her point is already inside their outer perimeter. That's the good news. The bad news is that Lieutenant Paбl's people came down in the middle of a frigging swamp."
Alicia felt her eyebrows rise. Murphy-and not a member of the imperial house-could be counted upon to put in an appearance on any operation. A swamp landing, even for drop commandos with Cadre armor, was guaranteed to screw up any tactical plan. Combat armor didn't exactly touch down lightly, and swamp mud made an efficient substitute for glue if you hit hard enough and drove deep enough. But how in heaven's name had the pre-attack intelligence managed to miss a little thing like a swamp smack in the middle of their planned axis of attack?
"It wasn't there the last time we looked," Onassis continued. "Remember that pond just downstream from Beech Tree One? Seems like the dam must have broken, or else they decided to drain the damned thing, and all that nice, flat dry ground north of our objective turns out to be a floodplain."