"My, that was careless of them, wasn't it?" she said.
"That's one way to put it," Alicia agreed, gazing at the HUD's contour lines herself. Then she switched channels.
"Mauser-One, Winchester-One. Move your people to this point -" she dropped a location icon into Celestine Hillman's HUD "-and meet me there. Lion-Alpha-Three," she continued, "move your people up to this point."
She dropped yet another icon into the HUD, and waited until acknowledgments came back from Hillman and Hennessey. Then she slapped Andersson on his armored shoulder.
"Good work, Erik," she told him. "Now stay here and keep an eye on them until we're ready."
"You got it, Sarge," he replied, and she went bounding back along the column towards Hillman.
"Winchester-One, Mauser-One," the voice in Alicia's mastoid said ten minutes later. "We're in position, Alley."
"Mauser-One, Winchester-One copies," Alicia replied. Celestine sounded confident, she thought-or, at least, like someone trying to project confidence. She smiled humorlessly at the thought, and drew a deep breath.
"All right, people," she said over the all-units net. "It's time to dance."
Group Leader Burkhart, the man in command of the action group holding the center of the three Freedom Alliance Liberation Army blocking positions, stood gazing out into the darkness. His command post was exactly where The Book said it should be, on the reverse slope of the shallow ridge line running across the mountain saddle at an angle. But Cornelius Burkhart felt cramped, confined, sitting in its protection. So he'd left his second-in-command there and come here, where he could stand in one of his forward plasma cannon positions and glare out across the moonless night.
Burkhart did a lot of glaring, because he was an angry man, one who used his anger to fuel his purpose and fire his passion. He'd been that way for a long time, and if he'd never been completely satisfied with the plan for this operation, that was all right. He understood the plan's objectives and approved them fiercely, and so far, at least, it seemed to be working. His faith in its ultimate success-and his own survival-might be qualified, but that didn't mean he wasn't determined to drive it through to success if it could be driven, because he hated the Terran Empire with a pure and burning passion.
His family had been prominent in its opposition to the Incorporation of his homeworld, and they'd paid the price. Perhaps the Empire hadn't been directly implicated in the attack which had killed his father, mother, and older brother, but someone had tossed the homemade bomb during the anti-Incorporation rally.
The planetary government had insisted it had come from among the protesters, thrown-or possibly dropped-by one of the violent fringe elements in the protest movement. The rally's organizers had blamed government provocateurs and fiercely rejected the so-called "investigation" the government had conducted. Even the "investigation" hadn't been able to (or had been ordered not to) identify the hand which actually threw the bomb, of course. And in the absence of any other clearly identifiable guilty party, Burkhart and his two surviving brothers had assigned the blood guilt where it ultimately belonged, the hands of Empress Maire, Seamus II's mother, and set out to do something about it.
They'd taken their vengeance where they could find it, and Cornelius Burkhart had lost track long ago of how many Empies and Empie collaborators they'd killed over the past twenty-three standard years. All three of them had joined the Freedom Alliance's Liberation Army six years ago, and they'd been able to kill even more of their enemies with the FALA's support structure behind them. But however many they'd killed, it hadn't been enough. It would never be enough, and it had come with its own price tag. He was the only surviving member of his family, now, thanks to the Cadre raid on Chengchou, and the knowledge that the company which had killed his brothers would almost inevitably be assigned to this operation explained why he'd volunteered so promptly for it.
He smiled thinly, staring out into the night, wondering where the Cadre survivors were. There couldn't be more than fifty of them left-less than twenty percent-and that was sweet, sweet on his tongue. He'd made a study of the Cadre and its operations over the past quarter-decade, and because of that, he knew just how great the Alliance's accomplishment here on Fuller was.
The Cadre was more than simply another branch of the imperial military. It was the Empire, the personification of the House of Murphy. For the subjects of Seamus II, its members were the standardbearers, the guardians-the Emperor's paladins and the shining heroes who stood against the enemies of all they held dear. But Cornelius Burkhart was one of those enemies. For him, too, the Cadre was the personification of the House of Murphy … and he hated the Cadre even more than he hated the Emperor. But it wasn't a blind hate, and that was why he'd lavished such attention upon his enemies, studying their strengths as well as their weaknesses. And it was also why he knew that in its entire history, the Cadre had never suffered losses like the ones it had already suffered here. An eighty-plus percent casualty rate was horrendous for any unit, under any circumstances, but it would be far worse for the Cadre, those arrogant pricks with their aura of invincibility, their pride in their reputation and their unbroken record of successes.
Well, their record's broken now, he thought viciously. And if he continued to cherish doubts about the extraction plan, that was all right, too. There was no one waiting for him, no one worrying about him. Not anymore. The Empire and the Cadre had seen to that. His enemies themselves had freed him, and in the final analysis, whether or not this operation ultimately led where the Freedom Alliance command council imagined that it would was unimportant. It was only a matter of time until -
Cornelius Burkhart's thought were interrupted with sudden finality as the sub-caliber penetrator from Corporal Thomas Kiely's battle rifle struck a quarter centimeter below the exact center of his battle armor's visor. It punched through the incredibly tough, transparent composite on an upward trajectory, like an incandescent spike. It made only a tiny hole as it drilled through, but when it struck Burkhart, just under the arch of his left eye socket, the top of the group leader's skull exploded into his helmet liner.
"Go!" Alicia snapped, and her people moved forward.
It was obvious that the first volley had taken the enemy completely by surprise. Battle armor had defeated at least a few of the Cadre penetrators, but her HUD showed eleven hard kills and three probables.
They should've stayed further down in those nice deep holes, after they went to all the trouble of digging them, she thought grimly as twenty-six of Charlie Company's surviving forty-six troopers moved forward with her and Tannis.
Plasma roared over their heads as Doorn and Osayaba laced the infantry support cannon opposite them with fire. The terrible blinding flashes walked along the crest of the enemy's position, ripping and tearing. But those positions really were well dug in, and answering fire began hammering back at the cadremen as their own fire proclaimed their locations to their enemies.
Another Cadre icon turned crimson, and deep at the core of her, Alicia felt a fresh stab of pain as Corporal Allen Shidahari died. An instant later, Corporal Manfred Branigan, the Third Platoon trooper she'd paired with Erik Andersson after Vartkes Kalachian was killed, went down, as well. Benjamin Dubois, Lawrence Abernathy's wing, who'd been paired with Michael Doorn after they both lost their own wingmen, killed three more of the defenders. He fired steadily, carefully, as if he were on a target range somewhere, and scored three helmet hits in a row-then went flying backwards, his breastplate and torso vaporized by the plasma bolt which took him almost exactly center of mass.