She studied them for several seconds even as she recorded every detail of the take from the remote, then sent her small henchman drifting silently along the building's eaves, looking for a way in. After a couple of minutes, she found one. The remote hovered under the roof's overhang, tiny cutting laser slicing quietly through the mesh-like grill covering the opening, and then floated very slowly through the ventilation intake.
The interior of the building looked much as Alicia had expected. A portion of it was cut up into office space and what looked like a cafeteria, but at least eighty percent of the vast structure was a single, open cavern dotted with maintenance workstations for the heavy construction equipment which should have filled it. There was a second-floor catwalk around the large, central area, and additional office space on that level, but her remote's passives were more than adequate at such close range to confirm that only two or three of those offices had anyone in them.
Not that there weren't plenty of other people in the building.
The hostages huddled in the middle of the open space, most of them sitting on what appeared to be foam sleeping mats. There were portable toilets parked along the holding area's walls, and the remote's visual sensors showed her canisters of drinking water and what looked like standard Marine field ration packs. All of the captives were dirty and unwashed looking, and most of them sat folded in on themselves, with the body language of people who wanted to withdraw to some inner place, safely away from the terror which had enveloped them for two standard months.
On the other hand, there were actually fewer terrorists inside the building than she'd expected, and she smiled humorlessly at the realization.
We've seen so many of them out here that I've gotten into the habit of thinking they must have an inexhaustible supply of manpower, she thought. Well, obviously they don't.
Under the circumstances, though, they might be excused for believing they had enough inside guards, she reflected. There were four heavy calliopes mounted on the catwalk, positioned to cover every square centimeter of floorspace. Any one of them could spit out over five thousand rounds per minute; the four of them together could turn the maintenance area into an abattoir in moments. Nor where they the only security measure the terrorists had taken. An infantry plasma cannon-lighter than the ones in the air-defense positions but considerably heavier than anything Alicia still had-was positioned far enough inside the building to cover all three of the vehicle entrances in its western wall.
Only the crew of the plasma cannon were in battle armor. The remainder of the eighteen armed personnel backing up the calliope crews and the cannoneers were either completely unarmored or wore only unpowered body armor. All of them, however, she noticed, wore combat helmets. She couldn't make out enough details to be certain, but they looked like more Marine surplus equipment, in which case they would provide their wearers with at least semi-decent sensors and a free-flow tactical link.
She rotated the remote, giving herself one last good look, then lifted it up and landed it quietly on an exposed support beam just under the building's roof. She positioned it to give herself the best field of view she could, then switched it to standby and sat up.
"I take it you followed all of that?" she said to Tannis.
"Yep." Tannis climbed to her own feet, and the two of them moved down the back side of their ridge to join the other Charlie Company survivors.
There aren't very many of them, Alicia thought as she their icons gathered around hers.
Thirty-one other men and women stood around her, eleven percent of the company which had made the drop. Only seven of the original eighteen troopers of her own squad were still on their feet … which still made First Squad her strongest surviving unit.
Every suit of armor bore its own proof of what its wearer had been through to get this far. The reactive chameleon features built into Cadre armor wasn't doing much good at the moment-not for armor whose smart surfaces had been liberally smeared with resinous sap as it crashed through the dense branches of the native conifers. The forest fires which so much plasma fire left in their wake-the fires whose lurid light still painted the skies above the tangled mountains behind them-had added their own share to the surviving cadremen's battered and bedamned appearance. Cinders, ash, and unburned twigs and needle-like leaves were glued to the sap-coated armor, and most of the armored figures she could see showed the same sort of dents and gouges her own armor did.
She looked around at them, and her heart twisted within her as she thought about what she was about to ask of them.
"You've all seen what we're up against out there," she said finally. "I don't see any way to get recovery boats-or assault shuttles, for that matter-down against those sorts of defenses. Not without using suppressive fire that would kill all the hostages, anyway. So the way I see it, that only leaves one option."
She paused, then opened her mouth again, but before she could speak, Astrid Nordbш spoke for her. The dark-haired, blue-eyed corporal had run out of ammunition for her battle rifle and replaced it with Shai Hau-zhi's calliope when Obaseki Osayaba's wing stopped a heavy-caliber calliope round from one of the air-cav mounts. Now she chuckled mirthlessly over the com.
"What the hell, Sarge," she said. "We've come this far, and it's been so much fun. We might as well stay to the end of the ride."
Chapter Twenty-Six
"Skycap, Winchester-One."
Sir Arthur Keita twitched upright in his comfortable chair as the tick-clipped, husky contralto spoke.
"Winchester-One, Skycap," he said quickly. "Go."
"We've got that eyeball of the objective for you, Uncle Arthur," the voice said. "It doesn't look especially good. They've got air-defense plasma cannon-they look like Marine Mark Eighteens-positioned around the central facility, with HVW launchers to back them up. They've also got a hundred and eighty-I say again, one-eight-zero-more infantry dug in around the base of the hill. We've gotten a remote inside the objective, and they've got all of the hostages in a single location covered by calliopes and infantry support cannon. We have a hard count of thirty-three hostiles inside the building, including weapons crews, but only three in battle armor. I've confirmed active air-defense radar and lidar, and they have a radar fence around the building itself at ground level. They do not-I repeat, do not-have a fence around the base of the hill. Some of their infantry seems to be moving around a good bit, and I'd guess they figured their own people would keep triggering alarms if they covered the hill itself."
Keita's expression had tightened further with every word, and he rubbed his face wearily at the end of Alicia's summary.
"Winchester-One," he said when she paused. "Alley. The FALA's been in contact with us. They say they'll kill half the hostages if we try to land Marines from Ctesiphon-and all of them if it looks like we might manage to actually get the Wasps down through their defenses. And," his jaw tightened, but he made himself continue levelly, "they say they won't let us withdraw you. They want to finish you off, make a clean sweep. Although," he admitted bleakly, "I think they might actually be happier in some ways if we tried to extract you anyway and all the hostages were killed."
"That's about how I'd already read the situation, Uncle Arthur," Alicia said calmly. "But none of us down here are inclined to let these people get away with it."
Keita's eyebrows rose, but she continued steadily before he could speak.
"I think we can get into the objective," she told him. "I believe we can take out the air defense positions and hold the main facility until you get the Wasps down to relieve us."