She didn't blame him. Hostages were flowing steadily towards the two broad flights of stairs Tannis had discovered, and it looked like at least a hundred of them were already down into the basement. It was nowhere near deep enough to protect them against a direct hit with modern weapons, but it would get them out of the way of near-misses and well below the direct line of fire.
"Howdy, Sarge." Alicia looked up as Tannis suddenly appeared at her shoulder.
"How'd you get them moving so quickly?" she asked.
"I put Star Roamer's crew in charge of it," Tannis replied simply. "I figured they'd probably been trying to do what they could for their passengers all along. Looks like I was right-at least there's still some cohesion there."
"Good call." Alicia rested one hand on her wing's armored shoulder, then drew a deep breath.
"You and I are the roving reinforcements, Tannis," she said.
"Check." If Tannis was worried, her calm voice gave very little indication of it. "How you fixed for ammo, Sarge?"
"I'm almost dry," Alicia admitted. "Three rounds, as a matter of fact."
"Not much of a roving reserve," Tannis noted. "I, on the other hand, have forty-one."
"Showoff," Alicia said with a tired laugh. Tannis Cateau was the only person who could make Alicia DeVries feel inadequate on a rifle range. Tannis simply didn't miss … ever. And not just on the range. She actually got more accurate, more economical in the expenditure of her ammunition, under combat conditions.
"I thought you were probably pretty close to dry," Tannis continued, "so I brought you this."
Alicia took the M-97 Tannis had liberated from one of the dead terrorists and checked the magazine while Kiely picked up the plasma cannon and moved it to its new position. At least her new rifle was loaded with heavy penetrators that would have a fair chance of penetrating Marine battle armor at the sort of point blank range this fight was going to be, she thought. It was a pretty poor replacement for the battle rifle built into her armor, but it was a lot better than nothing, and Tannis had scrounged up a half-dozen extra magazines.
"Didn't think I'd see one of these again," Alicia said as she sent her armor the command to jettison the battle rifle which had served her so well. She followed that command up with one which reset the governors on her battle armor's gauntlets-it wouldn't do to absent-mindedly crush her new rifle-and ordered her armor's computer to find the interface with the M-97's onboard systems.
"Beggars can't be -" Tannis began.
"They're coming in!" Andersson announced sharply.
"Kill the bastards!" Jaime Rivera shouted, and his action group charged up the slope.
There wasn't much finesse to it. The tactical situation was brutally simple, and it had taken him longer than he'd anticipated to get his people turned around. That meant his time window was probably even narrower than he'd thought. The Empies wouldn't have dared to start their assault shuttles moving until they knew the Cadre troopers had neutralized the defensive batteries and secured the facility. That gave him at least a few extra minutes, but not enough to waste any of them trying to get fancy. He was going to lose more people going in fast and dirty instead of organizing properly, but that was better than losing all of them, which was what was going to happen if they didn't get the hostages back.
He bounded along, holding his place in the center of the second rank, and he felt almost relieved as his entire world focused down into the narrow imperatives of combat.
"Let them get close," Alicia said as she and Tannis bounded to a central position between the hostages and the threatened wall. Star Roamer's crew was still hurrying people down the stairs, and it looked like Tannis' original estimate of the basement's capacity had actually been low. But there were still well over a hundred civilians on the main floor when the building's end wall began to disintegrate under the punching of low-powered plasma bolts.
Alicia heard screams from behind her as the explosive effect of the plasma's transfer energy- even a "low-powered" bolt packed a brutal punch-blasted splinters loose from the wall panels. Some of those "splinters" were fifteen and twenty centimeters long, and the force of the plasma strikes sent them hissing further into the building. Three of them hit her armor and shattered, but others, obviously, had found unarmored targets, and she tried not to think about the kinds of damage those knife-edged projectiles could inflict.
She checked her HUD. Andersson had taken her at her word, and completely repositioned the captured calliopes. He'd moved them down from the catwalk level and placed two at the extreme corners of the western wall. He and Samantha Moyano had also pulled the heavy weapons off of the tripod mounts their original terrorist crews, with their unpowered armor, had required and used force blades to cut small, unobtrusive firing slits right at floor level. Now Andersson lay prone at the northern corner, using his battle armor "muscles" to handle the massive weapon as if it were a simple combat rifle, while Corporal Ewan MacEntee from First Platoon's Second Squad-Andersson's third wing of the night-crouched close enough to cover him and also watch for possible flank attacks. Moyano, a corporal from Second Platoon, had the southern corner with Corporal James Krуl, from First Platoon's Third Squad as her wing.
Alexandra Filipov had the third calliope on the building's northern wall, with Corporal Adam Skogen as her wing, while Digory Beckett had the fourth calliope on the southern wall, with Karin de Nijs as his wing.
Kiely had no wing, and Alicia and Tannis were the only original wing pair still alive. So far, at least.
Eleven men and women, exhausted, battered, and armed with captured weapons, against fifty battle-armored foes desperate to kill them. Every one of those eleven knew exactly what their odds of living through the next three minutes were, but it didn't matter. They were all that stood between six hundred civilians and cold-blooded murder, and Alicia's green eyes were hard as she watched the gaps being punched through the western wall.
"Make it count, people," she said, almost conversationally.
Rivera felt his confidence soar as his assault thundered up the hill. Not a shot had been fired against them-not one! Maybe he'd given the Cadre bastards too much credit. Maybe they were crouching in hiding somewhere, too terrified to show themselves. Or-more likely, he thought, even now-they were simply out of ammunition. Or maybe they'd all been killed breaking in. Or -
Erik Andersson opened fire as the first battle armored terrorist came within a hundred meters. The heavy calliope's feed mechanism howled as the disintegrating link ammo belt blurred into the feed chute, and the penetrators shrieked downrange.
Battle armor shattered, and FALA terrorists screamed in agony, but the charge kept coming.
Samantha Moyano opened up from the other corner of the wall, swinging her weapon to scythe down the attackers. More armored bodies crashed to the ground, but the second wave of the attack back-plotted the fire killing their companions, and plasma bolts came howling back.
The entire building shuddered in agony as dozens of plasma bolts-these fired at full power, like brimstone buzz saws-sliced through the wall which had already begun to disintegrate. Andersson seemed to flatten into the ceramacrete floor, spreading out in an impossibly thin layer, while he continued to pour back a torrent of fire. But one of those plasma bolts slammed directly through the opening Moyano had cut for her weapon and killed her instantly.