She completed her suit diagnostics and shut down her synth-link. All systems were green, and she frowned to herself as she reconsidered her backup weapon and equipment harness.
The Book required all cadremen to carry sidearms for backup, although Alicia couldn't remember the last time she'd heard about any Cadre trooper actually using one. Normally, she carried a Colt-Heckler amp; Koch three-millimeter, a selective-fire machine pistol capable of taking out just about anything short of battle armor with its two-millimeter subcaliber penetrators. This time, she'd opted for a neural disrupter, instead, and she wasn't sure she was comfortable with the selection. There was always a potential over-penetration problem with the CHK, whereas a disrupter on tight focus stopped dead when it hit its target. But she'd always hated disrupters, which struck her as a particularly nasty way for someone to die. Of course, she had to admit if pressed that she'd yet to find a good way, and she knew that what bothered her more were the people who weren't quite killed by a disrupter hit. Even with modern medicine, the consequences were pretty gruesome.
Then again, she thought grimly, the people we're going after are terrorists who've already murdered helpless prisoners just to make a "negotiating" point. I can probably live with a little gruesome where they're concerned.
She snorted at her own thoughts, and ran quickly through the rest of the equipment list. The force blade might be more useful than usual this time, she reflected, given the heavily forested terrain through which they would be moving. The thirty-five-centimeter battle steel blade that went into its scabbard had an edge little more than a couple of molecules across. That made it a formidable slicer and dicer in its own right, yet its real function was mainly to form the basic matrix for the tool's force field and give the force blade balance and some heft. When it was activated, the length of the "blade" suddenly expanded to almost seventy centimeters, and the cutting surface of the force field it projected was much, much sharper than the alloy blade. She'd yet to encounter any sort of vegetation (or, for that matter, anything else) which could stand up to that, especially when the arm swinging it had the advantage of battle armor "muscles."
She considered switching back to the CHK one more time, then gave herself a mental shake.
Why do you do this every time? she asked herself. This is your form of dithering, isn't it? Well, stop it. You've checked everything at least twice now, and it's time you went and got yourself some extra shuteye before the drop.
"Well, that's that," she said, suiting action to the thought and stripping off her headset. "I'm going to grab myself some rack time while the grabbing is good. The rest of you should consider doing the same thing."
Most of the others nodded, waved, or grunted in basic agreement, but she knew some of them had no intention of taking her advice. Benjamin Dubois, Astrid Nordbш, and Thomas Kiely would undoubtedly drag in a fourth-probably Malachai Perlman-and wile away the time playing cutthroat spades. And Brian Oselli and Erik Andersson would almost certainly haul out their chessboard, while Chul Byung Cha would most probably wander down to Marguerite Johnsen's range and shoot her way through a couple of hundred rounds of pistol ammunition.
They all had their own ways of dealing with pre-drop tension, and by now, Alicia knew all of them. Just as she knew there was absolutely no point in trying to change any of them. So she only smiled, shook her head fondly at them, and headed for her waiting bunk.
Chapter Twenty-Two
"Saddle up, people," First Sergeant Yussuf said over the platoon net. The first sergeant's voice was calm, almost conversational, but Alicia was confident that Yussuf had her own share of abdominal butterflies.
"All right, you heard the lady," Alicia said in turn, and the men and women of First Squad headed for the drop tubes.
Alicia and her two team leaders checked each trooper's readouts carefully before they followed them through the hatches and settled into their own drop harnesses.
This drop wasn't going to be like the Chengchou drop in a lot of ways, Alicia reflected as the drop harness enveloped her torso and the umbilicals and tractor locks mated with her armor. For one thing, Chengchou had been a cakewalk compared to this operation. She might have gone into her first drop with Charlie Company without the opportunity to share in the pre-drop rehearsals, and she might not have known her people yet, and there might have been noncombatants mixed in among the targets. But the opposition on Chengchou hadn't had any reason to expect that they were coming. And there'd been no hostages involved.
This time there were six hundred imperial citizens' lives riding on how well they did their jobs, and that made a difference. A huge difference. But at least this time she was no longer the new kid, the unknown quantity, either. She and her squad had made a half-dozen combat drops, two or three times that many live training drops, and more simulated drops than she could count, over the last year and a half. They'd been over the river and through the woods together, and they were a close-knit, intimately fused unit.
More even than any of the Marines with whom she had served, the men and women of Charlie Company-and of First Squad in particular-had become her family. Like any family, they didn't live in perfect harmony. Everyone knew about Lieutenant Masolle's hot temper, and that Lieutenant Paбl was the company pessimist. First Sergeant Yussuf wasn't particularly fond of Denise Cronkite, Second Platoon's platoon sergeant. Within First Squad, Chul Byung Cha and Astrid Nordbш had a long-standing feud (which, as near as Alicia could figure out, went back to a confrontation over some jerk who'd turned out to be married to someone else at the time, anyway). And Йdouard Bonrepaux and Flannan O'Clery were constantly sniping at one another over one imagined fault or another.
But none of that mattered. They were family, and they knew and trusted one another with absolute certainty. However much grief they might give one another between drops, whatever practical jokes they might pull, whatever quarrels might arise, none of it mattered once the drop tube hatch closed behind them.
They were the Cadre, the Empire's chosen samurai, the Emperor's sword, and one way or another, they would get the job done.
"Drop in five minutes," Marguerite Johnsen's AI announced in her mastoid, and she lay back, waiting.
Marguerite Johnsen, masquerading as the Rogue World-registry freighter Anzhelika Nikolaevna Dubrovskiy, swept around toward the dark side of the planet Fuller in her parking orbit.
The Shallingsport Peninsula was well up into Fuller's northern hemisphere, much too far above the equator for Star Roamer to maintain a geostationary orbit over it, and the transport had never been designed to handle remote sensor arrays. The terrorists still aboard her had clearly attempted to place their stolen starship to give themselves the best coverage of near-planet traffic they could, bearing in mind the limitations of their civilian-grade communications links to their deployed sensor arrays. Despite that, their major concern was clearly to watch for the arrival of Fleet units, not to monitor the movements of ships which they "knew" were civilian freighters. And the fact that they couldn't maintain a fixed position over Shallingsport provided windows in each orbit during which it was impossible for them to directly observe what was going on there.