Alicia didn't waste time approving Tannis' selection; she simply dropped into her normal position, covering their right flank while Tannis covered the left. She reached out through her armor sensors, sweeping her area of responsibility, but even as she did that, another part of her attention watched the icons of her other troopers, and yet another part was focused on the take from the tactical remotes hovering above the company.
The remotes watching half a dozen air-cav mounts bank sharply, drop their noses, and come streaking in at just under mach one.
The good news, a corner of her brain reflected with the detached precision of the tick, was that the enemy didn't appear to have any indirect fire weapons. There'd been no mortar or artillery rounds dropping on their heads, and the air-cav hadn't been dropping any precision-guided weapons on them. Nor had they been using hyper-velocity weapons, which was even better.
The bad news was that there were at least two types of air-cav mounts above them. One, she didn't recognize, but it appeared to be a relatively light craft, with a maximum crew of two, and without the size and power plant emissions to support plasma cannon. But the other, the larger one, she did recognize. Like the battle armor and the Groundhog-Three surveillance array they'd already destroyed, it was an Imperial Marine design-one of the old Sabre Bats. The Sabre Bats hadn't been first-line Marine equipment in at least thirty years, but they were still capable platforms. And unlike the lighter mounts she couldn't identify, the Sabre Bat did carry a pair of plasma cannon.
The six attackers howled in on the scattering cadremen in a column of twos. Both of the leaders were Sabre Bats, coming right down the middle, followed by four of the lighter types, and fresh, even heavier gouts of plasma flashed across the night. Trees vaporized, boulders shattered, and yet more forest fires roared to life at the kiss of the plasma's thermal bloom.
Another green icon turned crimson as Corporal William Tchaikovsky took a direct hit. His wing, Corporal Helena Chu went down, as well, her icon circled by the strobing red band which indicated major damage to her armor. The two lighter mounts directly behind the Sabre Bats opened fire, spraying heavy-caliber penetrators from their nose-mounted calliopes, and three more of Alicia's troopers' icons switched from green to lurid crimson.
But then more plasma bolts screeched through the night, not raining down from the heavens, but streaking up from below. Celestine Hillman and the three plasma gunners Alicia had detached from the main body opened fire from well behind the rest of the company, still hidden from the aircraft's sensors by the heavy trees and their own armor's stealth systems. The strafers' attention had been on their targets; they hadn't realized someone else was targeting them, as well.
Hillman's people had zero-deflection shots from directly astern at targets headed directly away from them, and both Sabre Bats disintegrated in the same instant. One of the lighter types exploded even more spectacularly, and then the three survivors were jinking and weaving wildly in a frantic effort to evade the same fate.
One of them managed to dodge two plasma bolts, but a third bolt impacted on its turbine. It was only a glancing hit, almost a clear miss, but the turbine's housing shattered, and the mount's hydrogen reservoir exploded in a brilliant blue flash.
The other two aircraft evaded the plasma fire, but while they were doing that, they swept through the air space directly above their intended victims, and Alicia's rifle snapped into firing position. She ripped off an extended twelve-round burst, and fifty other rifles, and a pair of calliopes, were doing the same thing. The distracted air-cav pilots were too busy worrying about the plasma gunners who'd suddenly appeared behind them like evil genies to think about ground fire from the rest of the cadremen, and neither of them had the chance to realize that they should have been looking in both directions. Their aircraft carried light armor, but not enough in the face of that hurricane of penetrators, and both of them plummeted out of the heavens, trailing comet tails of flame that smashed, crackling, into the resinous trees.
"All units, Winchester-One," Alicia said. "Reform on me."
She and Tannis made their way out of their positions, heading for Corporal Chu, while the other troopers filtered back out of the flaming forest and Hillman and her people came up from behind. The three remaining air-cav mounts stayed where they were, hovering with what Alicia devoutly hoped was shocked caution, outside effective plasma range.
She looked around at the raging fires, grimly satisfied with the destruction of two-thirds of the enemy's remaining air power. Well, she corrected herself, two-thirds of the air power we know about, anyway. But her satisfaction was bitter on the tongue as she counted the cost. It could have been far, far worse; she knew that. But that didn't make the loss of four more of her people-her family-any less agonizing.
A distant corner of her mind knew what was waiting for her when she finally had time to stop concentrating on the business of survival, on the unremitting drive to accomplish what had become an impossible mission. For the moment, the need to focus everything on getting her surviving people out shoved all other thoughts, all other concerns, into the background. But when that was no longer true, when she could finally allow herself to face the wrenching brutality of Charlie Company's destruction … .
She closed the door on that corner of her mind once again as she went to one armored knee beside Helena Chu, and her green eyes were bleak.
"How you doing, Helena?" she asked quietly.
"Not so good, Alley." The wounded trooper's voice was harsh, strained, despite all the painkillers in her pharmacope could do. The plasma bolt which had knocked out her armor hadn't killed her outright, but she'd lost her left leg just below the hip, and the entire left side of her armor was a smoking ruin. Her battle rifle had been destroyed, and her vital signs flickered unsteadily on Alicia's monitors. Alicia looked up at Tanis' face through the visor of her armor, and her wing shook her head silently.
"We -" Alicia began, but Chu cut her off.
"I already figured it out, Alley," she said.
"I figured you had," Alicia said softly, and laid her armored hand on Chu's right shoulder. She knelt there for a few silent heartbeats, then straightened her spine.
"You guys need to get moving," Chu said. She reached down and drew her sidearm-a CHK three-millimeter, identical to the one Alicia normally carried. "I'll just wait here with Bill," the crippled corporal said, nodding to where her wingman had already died.
Alicia gazed down at her, longing for something-anything-to say. Some comforting lie, like "I'm sure the bad guys will be too busy concentrating on us to send in a follow-up sweep," or "Hang on, and we'll get a med team out here as soon as we've polished off Green Haven." But Chu knew the odds as well as Alicia did, and she could read her own life sign monitors. She knew how little time she had left unless the med team arrived almost instantly, that only her pharmacope and augmentation were keeping her alive even now, and Alicia owed her people something better than a lie.
"God bless, Helena," she said, very quietly, instead, then turned to lead the fifty-eight surviving effectives of Charlie Company, Third Battalion, Second Regiment, Fifth Brigade, Imperial Cadre back into motion.
Chapter Twenty-Four
"Winchester-One, Winchester-Alpha-Three. We've got a problem."
"All units, Winchester-One," Alicia said instantly. "Hold position."
The other surviving forty-six members of Charlie Company stopped instantly, freezing in place, while she and Tannis continued moving forwards.