Alicia hit the release on her drop harness while she was still sixty meters from the ground. She dropped instantly, vertically, while the harness continued forward and, obedient to her final command, brought its built-in drive systems online in a frantic evasion pattern. The sensors which might have detected Alicia locked onto the harness' larger, far stronger emissions signature, instead, and a ball-lightning burst of plasma fire blew it out of Fuller's night sky.
Alicia plummeted into the treetops, her armored body automatically orienting itself so that she hit the branches feetfirst. She felt the shock of impact, despite the armor's built-in inertia damping, and then she was crashing through the limbs like a battering ram in a canonnade of splintering wood.
She hit the ground with a force which would have shattered any human body not protected by battle armor. But she was armored, and she scarcely even noticed the impact.
More icons were still vanishing from her mental HUD. Adolfo Onassis was gone. So was Sergeant Brookman, and she felt a wrenching spasm of loss as Chul Byung Cha's icon turned scarlet, followed by Imogene Hartwell's and Malachai Perlman's.
Another armored body plummeted through the tree cover behind her.
"Got your six, Sarge!" an intensely welcome soprano said in her mastoid as Tannis Cateau hit the ground. How Tannis had managed to stay glued to her wing was more than Alicia was prepared even to guess, but she'd done it.
"Good," Alicia replied over their dedicated circuit even as she released one of her tactical remotes and its counter-grav boosted it back up through the trees.
The drop had been scattered all to hell as people hit the ground as quickly as they could, wherever they could. First Platoon's Second Squad was clear over on the eastern flank, half-way across the LZ from its intended drop zone, and Staff Sergeant Gilroy, the squad leader, was one of the scarlet icons. Five of his eighteen troopers were also gone, yet even that was better than what had happened to Third Platoon. Lieutenat Paбl was gone, and his three squads' fifty-four troopers were down to only eighteen.
At least they were out of the field of fire of the fixed weapons which had slaughtered them on their way in-the weapons which hadn't been supposed to be there. Unfortunately, they weren't the only things which weren't supposed to be there, and even through the intense focus of her training and the cocoon of the tick, Alicia felt an icy dagger as her remote reported back.
"My God," she heard Tannis whisper as she shared the tactical data feed.
They knew, Alicia thought. They knew we were coming, and somehow they figured out where we'd land. But where the hell did all these weapons come from?
"All Winchesters, Winchester-One," she began, but another voice came up over the company net.
"All units, Tiger-One," Francesca Masolle said. "Zulu! Break for Alpha-One-Bravo and reform there. Repeat, break for Alpha-O-"
Her voice chopped off with brutal suddenness as her icon, too, flashed from green to crimson, and Alicia's nostrils flared as she realized not a single one of Charlie Company's officers was still alive.
"All units, Striker," First Sergeant Yussuf's voice took over almost instantly. "Confirm Alpha-One-Bravo! Let's go, people!"
Alicia and Tannis were already in motion. No one in their worst nightmare had anticipated something like this, but there was always a contingency plan. Lieutenant Strassmann might never have contemplated the possibility that it would really be needed when he laid out the drop, but that hadn't kept him from planning for it with all of his usual meticulous care. Now the company's survivors moved to execute the response plan one dead lieutenant had laid out and another dead lieutenant had ordered them to obey.
The badly scattered men and women of Charlie Company coalesced, crashing through the trees with reckless speed, relying on their armor to batter a way through. The plasma fire which had plucked so many of them from the air had come from a dozen infantry support cannon emplaced along the valley's southern wall. Those cannon could no longer bear on them now that they were on the ground, and especially not because Alpha-Bravo-One was the southernmost of the Case Zulu rally points Strassmann had laid out. Heading for it carried the cadremen still further under the plasma guns' maximum depression, exactly as Masolle had hoped it would.
But whoever had planned the ambush had allowed for that, too. The bright orange icons of enemies suddenly spangled Alicia's HUD as her hovering remote saw the battle armored infantry dug in on the slope above them.
And picked up the emissions signatures of four incoming aircraft which had "military" written all over them.
"All units, Striker." Yussuf's voice was impossibly calm sounding, smoothed by the tick and buttressed by her own years of experience and training, as she shared the take from Alicia's remote. "There're a hell of a lot more of them than there ought to be, and God only knows what else they've got. But we can't let them pin us until they get sting ships in to hammer us, and the only way out is through them. Come on!"
It wasn't the most detailed tactical directive Alicia had ever heard, but it didn't need to be. There weren't very many options, and her HUD showed her exactly what Yussuf had in mind.
The first sergeant had touched down on the southern periphery of the LZ, while Alicia's squad had landed well to Yussuf's north. That meant Alicia and her surviving people were still well behind Yussuf, despite their best efforts to catch up. And Yussuf wasn't waiting for them. Under the original drop plan, Lieutenant Masolle's Second Platoon had been assigned responsibility for the south side of the valley, which had also happened to drop it closest to the waiting cannon. Masolle was dead now, as were two-thirds of her platoon, but Yussuf had most of what remained of the lieutenant's platoon, although all three of its original squads would barely have made a single full strength one.
Now she led what she had into a head-on assault.
By The Book, it was exactly the wrong thing to do. She should have established a base of fire, analyzed the enemy's dispositions and deployed her maneuver units to exploit their weaknesses. But she didn't have time for that, not with those impossible sting ships coming in from the west and no way of knowing how many more aircraft, or what fresh nightmare surprise, might be coming in their wake.
There were seventy-five men dug in along that steep valley wall. Seventy-five men in prepared positions, with battle armor they shouldn't have had, and armed with the heavy weapons Charlie Company had left aboard Marguerite Johnsen, and Pamela Yussuf had only the eighteen surviving members of Francesca Masolle's platoon. Plasma bolts ripped downward, splitting the darkness like demonic lightning bolts, turning the river valley's towering conifer-like trees into roaring torches. It was a holocaust, and Yussuf's men and women charged straight into it.
Alicia saw it all through her floating remote, but she also saw the four sting ships accelerating, dropping their noses while their fire control systems reached out towards Yussuf's attack.
"Target!" she snapped over the squad net, dropping sighting circles into the tactical display. She didn't give any additional orders; there was no need, and even as she and the rest of First Squad hurtled after Yussuf, the icons representing Doorn and Osayaba slammed instantly to a halt. The two plasma gunners and their wings wheeled to face the incoming sting ships, and the inexperience of the pilots of those sting ships showed as they came in virtually wingtip-to-wingtip.
Plasma streaked up to meet them, and two of them vanished in cataclysmic eruptions. A third was too close to one of the leaders. It flew directly into the explosion, then howled down out of the heavens, stricken and out of control, as its turbines ingested chunks of its consort's shattered fuselage. Flame streaked its starboard side, billowing from the engine nacelle, and then it tipped onto its back and plowed into the trees below in a rending fan of fresh fire and secondary explosions.