"I don't know," Watts admitted. "We just don't have enough information at this point to tell. On the one hand, it almost had to be Geoffrey. He's the Duke of Shallingsport, he's the one who agreed to give the terrorists sanctuary, and he's the one who handed them Green Haven. But that's insane, Sir Arthur! He'd have to know the galaxy isn't big enough for someone who helped set up something like this to hide from the Empire."
"I know," Keita growled. "But maybe he is crazy enough to think he could get away with it. Or maybe it was what's-his-name-Jokuri, his industrial development guy."
"That could be," Watts said slowly, his expression intent. "For them to get this stuff down there, it must have come in through the Green Haven spaceport, and Green Haven is one of Jokuri's pet projects. And Jokuri's been in charge of whatever customs inspections there may have been. But even if it was Jokuri, why did he do it? Why did the Freedom Alliance do it? I think you're right, Sir Arthur-this entire operation was set up specifically to mousetrap the response force we sent in. And given the nature of the provocation-the hijacking and the identity of the hostages-they almost certainly meant to suck in the Cadre, specifically, because that's who they must have known what catch the assignment." He shook his head again. "For all intents and purposes, this is a declaration of war against the Cadre."
"I think that's exactly what it is." Keita stood and began pacing angrily around Marguerite Johnsen's intelligence center. "You said it yourself-this is a psychological warfare operation from their perspective. They've just demonstrated that they can ambush a Cadre company and inflict massive casualties. I don't think any Cadre unit has ever taken losses like this, certainly not in a 'routine' operation against a batch of hostagetaking terrorists!"
"But it's a suicide operation for everyone involved," Watts said. "It has to be. There's no way we're ever going to let them off this planet. We'll call in the Fleet to blockade the entire star system, if that's what it takes to keep them pinned down. And eventually, we'll go down there in assault shuttles, or in a heavy-configuration drop, and kill or capture every single one of them. His Majesty will send in an entire Marine brigade, if that's what it takes, Sir Arthur. You know that, I know that-anyone capable of setting this up must know it!"
"Maybe," Keita said almost absently, pacing faster. "Maybe."
"What about Ctesiphon?" Watts said after a moment. "She's got the equivalent of an entire Marine battalion on board."
"But she still four hours out, minimum," Keita replied. He shook his head like an irritated horse plagued by flies. "I've already had the com center alert her and instruct her to expedite her arrival." He tapped his headset to indicate how he'd passed the orders. "Major Bennett already has his people working on alternate plans to send an assault dirt-side when she gets here, assuming the opportunity presents. I'm sure Ctesiphon and Bennett's people will do anything humanly possible, but whatever's going to happen down there are on Fuller, it's almost certainly going to be long over by the time they can get here."
For the first fifteen or twenty minutes, Alicia's decision to strike out directly towards Green Haven seemed to have taken the other side by surprise. She'd been right-all of the heavily dug-in infantry positions the surviving cadremen's sensor remotes could find were in the river valley or along its rim. That didn't mean there weren't more of them somewhere else, of course, and she had half a dozen of their twenty-three surviving sensor remotes sweeping the mountain forests ahead of them.
So far, those remotes had found nothing but trees, rocks, and mountain streams, but she didn't expect that to last. They had forty air-kilometers to go; in this terrain, that would be more like fifty or even sixty of actual ground travel. Even with Cadre battle armor, the best speed they were going to make through the heavy tree cover would be no more than forty kilometers per hour in an all-out sprint-half that, if they moved with a modicum of tactical caution-but the enemy undoubtedly had transportation available. Since they'd taken over an industrial park, they had to at least have gotten their hands on substantial numbers of air lorries.
Alicia would have liked to believe they could be stupid enough to bring those lorries where she could get a shot at them, but while whoever had set this up might be crazy, she didn't appear to be stupid. No. They were going to use those lorries to pull troops from other positions and drop them somewhere in front of her. Somewhere safely out of the reach of her line-of-sight heavy weapons at the moment they set down. And if the enemy CO was as smart as Alicia suspected she was, she wouldn't panic. She'd take the time to collect as many as possible of the armored infantry she'd initially stationed along the river valley and combine them before she went up against the company again.
And in the meantime, Alicia thought, continuing to crash ahead through dense, low-hanging tree branches, she'll do everything she can to slow us up and give herself time to make her own preparations.
"Mauser-One, Winchester-One," she said over her new private com link to Hillman.
"Go, Alley," Hillman replied rather more informally, and Alicia smiled tightly.
"I've just been thinking about what I'd to if I were in charge on the other side," she said. "They're going to try to slow us up-they have to. And they're going to do it with those air-cav mounts."
There were nine of the aircraft icons swarming around now, just beyond plasma gun range of the moving cadremen. Their active sensor systems lashed at the Cadre troopers, obviously tracking them and reporting back to their own HQ.
"Roger that," Hillman said flatly. "I've been thinking the same thing and wondering why they haven't already done it."
"Because they're afraid of what it's going to cost them." There was a certain grim satisfaction in Alicia's reply as she remembered what Michael Doorn and Obaseki Osayaba had done to four larger and much more capable sting ships. "But that isn't going to hold them off much longer. So, here's what I'm thinking -"
Another five minutes passed-five minutes in which Charlie Company's survivors made good another three kilometers towards their objective. The sensor emissions from the air cavalry mounts intensified as they entered a rocky, more sparsely-forested ravine, and Alicia's lips skinned back from her teeth. She'd picked this particular bit of ground from her storage terrain maps as the most likely spot, and the stronger sensor emissions suggested she'd been right.
Cadre battle armor was a hellishly hard target for sensors to lock up at extended ranges, even in open country. The people in those air-cav mounts were undoubtedly getting enough back to know where the company was, but there was no way they could be keeping track of individual targets with any degree of confidence. The fact that they were driving their sensor systems harder now that her people were in less concealing terrain told her they were trying to rectify that, and that suggested that they were just about to -
"Incoming!" she snapped over the all-units net, and her people responded instantly.
The brutally truncated company column exploded, unraveling into two-man knots as its individual wings scattered. They bounded off into the trees and boulders, splitting up to deny the air-cav a concentrated target, and Alicia and Tannis did the same.
"Here!" Tannis barked over their private link, and Alicia automatically slammed to halt. Tannis had been concentrating on their individual tactical situation while Alicia rode herd on everyone else, and Alicia had total faith in her wing's judgment. Now, as she focused her own attention on the spot Tannis had selected, she nodded in sharp approval. They had a hillside covering one flank and a couple of huge boulders covering another, and the overhead tree cover was sparse enough to give their battle rifles decent coverage.