"And I'm sure you can hardly wait to tell me why I should take your recommendation to heart," Keita said when the other voice paused.
"Actually there are several reasons," the other man said, "but two big ones come immediately to mind. First, as I'm sure you've already realized, we have a lot more military capability down here than you assumed we did. In addition to what you've already discovered, we have ground-to-space defenses dug in around Green Haven. We can't stop an all-out assault, I'm sure, but we can kill all the assault shuttles you can pack aboard a single battlecruiser. So if you really want to send your Marines in and see them all as dead as your precious cadremen, I'm sure we could oblige you.
"Now, it's possible you're thinking that I'm bluffing, or maybe you're thinking I'm overconfident about what our defenses can do. I'm not bluffing, but it is possible I'm overestimating our capabilities … the same way you overestimated yours when you decided to land Charlie Company. Which brings me to my second reason you shouldn't try dropping Marines on our heads; if you do, and if it turns out we can't stop them after all, we will kill the hostages. We won't have any reason not to."
"I see."
"I imagine you do," the FALA spokesman said mockingly. "And while we're on the subject, if you try to land Marines somewhere else, outside our defensive perimeter, Star Roamer will inform us. And the instant she does, we'll kill three hundred hostages. Please note that I'm not threatening to kill them out of hand, or as a bargaining ploy, or even in a fit of pique. We won't kill them unless you try to get fancy, so you've still got six hundred-well, three hundred-reasons to keep me alive, don't you?"
"To what final end?" Keita asked. "It's obvious your original demands were nothing but a way to pass the time while you waited to ambush our people. Surely you don't think the Empire is going to leave you or your organization alive in the long run after something like this?"
"We've all been on your proscribed list for years," the other man said. "You can't kill any of us more than once, however much you'd like to. And just this minute, I think you should be worried more about who we might kill. We'll tell you what our final demands are when we're good and ready. In the meantime, keep your Marines the hell off this planet. Is that understood, Sir Arthur?"
"It is," Keita grated. "And if I do, what happens to my people on Fuller?"
"Why, they die, Sir Arthur," the terrorist spokesman jeered. "That was the whole point of our little visit here-or one of them, at any rate. They've butchered enough of our friends over the years, after all, so it's only fair we get a little of our own back, and we're looking forward to it. We've already killed most of them; in the end, we'll kill them all, and enjoy doing it. Unless, of course, you're prepared to commit to a major assault to save the handful of them who are still alive knowing all your precious civilians will die before the first Marine boot hits the Green Haven ceramacrete. Somehow, I don't think it would look very good in the Empire media if word got out that twenty or thirty cadremen were more important to you than six hundred of your Emperor's loving subjects, now would it?"
Keita said nothing, and the terrorist laughed.
"That's what I thought, too," he said. "Don't go away, Sir Arthur. I'm sure I'll have something else to say to you … eventually."
"Well, you were right, Sarge," Tannis Cateau said softly.
Alicia made an equally soft sound of agreement. She and Tannis lay side-by-side along the crest of a ridge overlooking the Jason Corporation facility and the not yet officially open Green Haven spaceport. Their armor's active sensors were shut completely down, and their passives' resolution wasn't all that great at this range, but what they could see was bad enough.
It was about one hour until local dawn, and Fuller's moon had set long since, which meant it was darker than the pit. The freedom Alliance terrorists had extinguished most of the exterior lights when they took over the industrial site, but even under those conditions, Alicia could make out the angular shape of heavy plasma cannon-the kind that could destroy heavy tanks or knock down even the most heavily armored sting ships. There were three cannon positions, each with four of the heavy weapons, spaced evenly around the Jason Corporation buildings, and she was almost certain she saw at least two hyper-velocity missile launchers, as well.
Her mouth tightened as she took in the weaponry so clearly on display. The terrorists had had the better part of three standard weeks since arriving here to prepare their defenses, but everything she'd seen so far shouted that the FALA had actually started the process long before that. They'd had to get the weapons and the personnel to man them on to the planet well in advance of Star Roamer's arrival, and it looked to her as if the air-defense cannon's positions had actually been ceramacreted at the same time as the parking apron around the Jason buildings. They'd certainly been graded out of the slopes of the hill under the building, almost like terraces set a little below the level of the rest of the parking apron. No doubt the architect's plans had shown some perfectly reasonable justification for them, but Alicia was grimly certain that their real reason for being was the purpose they were serving now.
Which means the "Jason Corporation" is going to get a very close examination from imperial Intelligence in the very near future, she told herself coldly. Not that that helps us a great deal right this moment.
"So what do we do now?" Tannis asked quietly.
"First, I send in my remote," Alicia replied, and sent the mental command to the small robotic scout riding her equipment harness. They'd lost two more of them since her last report to Sir Arthur, and a tiny part of her wanted to stroke the remote, as if it were some faithful, treasured hunting hawk, before she launched it on its way.
But she didn't. Instead, she closed her eyes and concentrated on steering her flying viewpoint as stealthily as she could.
There were active sensors covering the terrorists' central position. She tasted them through the remote's senses, and she felt her way cautiously towards them. They rose in an almost unbroken barrier in front of her, but it was only almost unbroken, and their primary concern was with a direct assault landing. She hovered with her remote, a disembodied presence just outside the electronic fence, cautiously tasting its emissions for what the tick made seem a very long time, and then she nodded very slightly.
There was a gap. It wasn't much of one-certainly much too small for anything the size of an assault shuttle or a recovery boat to get through-but it was there, and she edged carefully, carefully into it. The remote carried a single detachable relay transceiver, and she guided the probe to the roof of the building and instructed it to detach the relay link. She positioned it very carefully, with the whisker laser directed back through the keyhole the remote had crept through. There was no guarantee that something or someone wouldn't stray into the transmission path and detect it anyway, but she could at least avoid the known detection threats.
Once the relay was in place, she lifted the remote higher, hovering directly above the central building. Its active sensors, like those of her armor, were locked down, but its passive sensors had a much closer look at the antiair defenses, and she grimaced. Her original impression had been correct, except that there were three multi-rail HVW launchers, one paired with each of the plasma cannon emplacements.