"Not from the last remote overflight," the lieutenant said. "That's about thirty minutes old, though; we've been concentrating our assets on covering Downtown and the approaches to our perimeter. I can schedule another sweep of that area immediately, if you want, Ma'am. Take about five minutes to set up, and another fifteen for the sweep itself."
"Do it," she said. "I want the hardest numbers and the best locations you can give me on everything between us and the hotel, between us and the Mall, and between the hotel and the Mall. Map them and drop it onto my display here. And see to it that Lieutenant Ryan gets the same info."
"Yes, Ma'am." Beregovoi started to turn back to his panel, but Palacios stopped him with a raised forefinger. "Ma'am?" he asked.
"I want you to do something else for me, too, Boris. I want a birdseye of the Mall. In particular, I want your best estimate of how many civilians are still there-and who they are."
"Excuse me, Ma'am?" Beregovoi looked puzzled, and Palacios grimaced.
"Brigadier Jongdomba wants us to come rescue the members of the planetary government. I want to know how many junior officials, bureaucrats, secretaries, file clerks, and janitors are caught inside the Mall with them."
"Yes, Ma'am." Beregovoi still looked a little confused, but he nodded and this time Palacios let him turn back to his Intelligence section to get on with it. Then she looked up and met Sergeant Major Winfield's eyes.
"Skipper, I'm not sure I like what I think you're thinking," he said quietly.
"You mean the fact that I'm getting ready to call on Ryan's services, Sar'Major?" she asked.
Ryan commanded the heavy weapons platoon which had been attached to the Battalion when it was sent to Gyangtse, and his single mortar squad's two tubes were the only indirect fire support weapons they had. That might not sound like a lot, in a situation like this one, but the sophistication of the rapid-firing weapons' munitions made it far more impressive than it might seem to an uninformed layman.
"Ma'am, I'd be just as happy as you are to not kill any more people than we have to," Wheaton told her, "but you and I both know we're not going to get any of our people into the Mall without somebody getting seriously dead. I'll be sorry as hell if that happens to a batch of poor, ragged-ass rioters who get caught in a mortar concentration, but not as sorry as I'd be if it happened to some of us. That's not what I meant, and you know it."
"Yes, I suppose I do," she acknowledged, then shook her head, her expression briefly sad. "Why do some people insist on fishing in troubled waters, Sar'Major?"
"Because they're frigging idiots," Wheaton said bluntly, and she snorted in bitter amusement.
"I suppose you've got a point, even if that is pretty damned cynical of you. In the meantime, though, we may have a small additional problem here."
"Yes, Ma'am."
"All right. Inform Captain Becker that I need to speak to her and to... Lieutenant Kuramochi, I think. She's levelheaded, and she's a hell of a lot tougher than she looks. Tell Becker I want to see her and Kuramochi here in the CP, personally."
"Yes, Ma'am!"
Winfield turned away to obey her instructions without another word, and Palacios smiled thinly. Becker's Bravo Company held the northernmost, least threatened arc of the spaceport perimeter. Palacios hated to thin that perimeter any, but her only other choice would have been to weaken some more seriously threatened part of it or call on Captain Schapiro, whose Delta Company formed the Battalion reserve-and which had already given up one of its platoons to hold the capital's power station and the water and sewage plant. And, frankly, it would be better for Becker to hold her part of the perimeter with two platoons, instead of three, than to fritter away Palacios' tactical reserve by slicing off still more detachments.
And if what she was beginning to suspect about Lobsang Phurba Jongdomba happened to be true, she was going to need someone with Kuramochi's qualities on the ground.
But that's not something you tell someone over the com, Serafina Palacios thought. The least you can do when you send someone out into a shitstorm like this one is look them in the eye when you do it.
Chapter Nine
"Sniper! Eleven o'clock, tenth floor!"
Alicia DeVries flung herself sideways, plastering her back to a wall of old-fashioned brick, as Corporal Sandusky's barked warning came over the com net and a sudden, crimson threat icon flared at the corner of the immaterial, helmet-driven heads-up display her neural feed projected into her mental vision. Sandusky's Alpha Team had the overwatch as Bravo leapfrogged past them up the city street, and she heard the distinctive whickering "snarl-CRACK" of a plasma rifle.
The packet of plasma smashed into the fa‡ade of a building perhaps a hundred meters further west with an ear-stunning blast of sound. Brick and mortar half-vaporized and half-shattered as the energy bolt hit. The second plasma strike slammed home an instant later, and flames and smoke poured from the demolished stretch of wall as thermal bloom ignited the building's contents. Then, slowly, the entire tenth and eleventh floors crumbled, spilling out into the street below in a stony avalanche of dust and debris.
"Clear," Sandusky announced, and Alicia's helmet computer obediently erased the threat from her mental HUD.
"Acknowledge," Lieutenant Kuramochi said. "All right, people. Back to the salt mines."
Alicia was astonished at how reassuring she found the lieutenant's matter-of-fact tone. Intellectually, she was confident that Kuramochi didn't know much more about the immediate tactical situation than she did, but at least the platoon commander sounded like she did.
The thought was distant, little more than a flicker far below the surface of Alicia's conscious mind as she kept her eyes glued to Gregory Hilton's back. Third Squad was Second Platoon's point, and at the moment, that meant that Gregory Hilton, personally, was the entire recon battalion's point as they advanced towards the Presidential Mansion.
The older rifleman seemed much calmer about that than Alicia could have been in his place, but no one would ever have confused "calm" with "relaxed." Hilton moved warily, cautiously, head swiveling. Like all Marines who were Recon-qualified, he was (like Alicia) one of the sixty-plus percent of the human race who could tolerate and use a direct neural computer feed. And, also like Alicia, his surgically implanted receptor was currently locked into the computer built into his combat helmet. It linked him to the helmet's built-in sensors, drove the HUD which it kept centered in his mental field of view, managed the free-flow com link, and connected him to his M-97's onboard computer. In his case, it wasn't a full-scale synth-link, the ability to actually interface directly with a computer. It still had to work through the specially designed and integrated interfaces, but the effect was to provide him with continuous access to all of his equipment. That gave him a huge "situational awareness" advantage over any non-augmented foe, and after so many years of experience, all of that extra reach was as much a part of him as his heart and lungs... which didn't keep him from using his own booster-augmented vision and hearing to supplement his other senses.
Alicia, on the other hand, was synth-link-capable. Only about twenty percent of all humans fell into that category, but that was enough to give the Empire a tremendous advantage over its Rishathan opponents, none of whom could handle neural receptors, at all. Even Alicia had never been qualified for a cyber-synth-link, however, and she was just as happy about that. Fully developed AIs were... unstable, and best, and any unfortunate soul in a cyber-synth-link with an AI when it crashed normally went with it. That struck her as an unreasonable price to pay, even if the fusion of human and computer would have given her a subordinate of quite literally inhuman capability.
Because she was synth-link-qualified, though, she had an even greater "natural" situational awareness and Hilton did. At the moment, she had every bit of those capabilities on line, searching for power sources, weapons signatures, com transmissions, or movement to the flanks or rear, but three-quarters of her attention was focused on Hilton, watching for his reactions, lo
oking for hand signals.
"Keep one eye on me all the time, Alley," he'd told her quietly when they started out. "You've got my back; I'll worry about what's in front of us. Clear?"
"Clear," she'd said, happy that she'd been able to keep any obvious tremor out of her voice. Not that "keeping an eye on him" was the easiest thing in the world to do. Like her, Hilton wore reactive chameleon camouflage. It wasn't as good as the more sophisticated system built into powered combat armor could produce. Then again, powered armor radiated a much fiercer emissions signature, which made any sort of purely optical camouflage useless against front-line military grade sensors.
The fabric of Hilton's uniform and the surface of his helmet and body armor-his entire equipment harness, for that matter-was covered in smart fabric which produced an illusion of semi-transparency. The sensors in his helmet maintained a continuous 360ø scan, transmitting the results to his uniform, whose fabric then duplicated that same imagery across its surface, merging him visually with his background. The result was rather like looking at a humanoid figure made of absolutely clear water, with everything beyond it sharply visible, yet subtly distorted.
The effect wasn't perfect, and in good visibility, any movement tended to give away the wearer's position. But even under optimum conditions of visibility, the reactive camouflage made someone virtually invisible, as long as he held still. In the sort of smoke and dust hovering in Zhikotse's air at the current moment, it was far more effective. Except for the other members of the platoon, that was. Their helmet computers kept track of what their fellows' camouflage was doing and effectively erased it from their vision through their neural links.
Which meant Alicia could, in fact, keep her eyes focused on him, and that was precisely what she was doing. Gladly, as a matter of fact, because she realized that she needed as much of the benefit of his experience as she could get.
Her current position, she knew, was at least partly a sign that the rest of her squad recognized her newbie status. C‚sar Bergerat, with his own far greater store of experience, was in charge of keeping a protective watch over Frinkelo Zigair and Leo Medrano as they followed along behind her with the team's heavy weapons. But in another way, Hilton's attitude was a testimonial to his confidence in her. After all, she was the one he was trusting to keep him alive. Of course, he might figure he might as well appear confident in her, whether he was or not, since he was stuck with her anyway. Still -
Her M-97 snapped up to her shoulder without any conscious thought on her part. The muzzle tracked slightly to the left, then steadied, and the sensor built into the combat rifle's laser designator popped a crimson crosshair into her HUD. The crosshair moved slightly as her synth-link dropped a command into the combat rifle's simpleminded computer, selecting grenade, and the helmet computer adjusted for the grenade's different ballistics. She compensated for the change automatically, holding the crosshair on target. And then she squeezed the trigger.
The grenade launched with a mule-kick blow to her shoulder. The rifle-launched weapon was slightly less powerful than those in Zigair's grenade bandoliers, but its advanced chemical explosives were far more potent than anything pre-space Terra might have boasted. The instant it cleared its safety perimeter, its tiny, powerful rocket kicked in, and it went screaming down range. Its exhaust drew a fire-bright line across her vision as it streaked across the street to drop dead center through a window on the fifth floor of an office building.
My God, did I -?
The question ripped through Alicia's brain even as she rode the M-97's recoil. It had happened so quickly, so suddenly, that her conscious mind hadn't had time to sort it all out.
Then the heavy concussion grenade exploded in the room where she'd seen the movement. The flat, percussive thunderclap was muffled by the structure, less noisy than the plasma fire had been, but the targeted window and a good-sized chunk of wall to either side of it, blew back out in a fan-shaped pattern of debris.
She was still staring up at the explosion, wondering half-sickly if she'd just allowed herself to kill a civilian bystander, when a rifle tumbled out of the dust cloud. It fell through the air, spinning slowly end over end until it smashed on the sidewalk below.
Militia-issue, her mind identified it as her augmented vision zoomed in on the plunging weapon. But while the rifle might have come from a militia armory, no militiaman would have been surreptitiously drawing a bead on the back of an Imperial Marine point man.
"Nice one, Alley," Hilton said after a moment. "Next time, though, give a guy a little warning, huh? Scared me out of at least a year's growth."
"S-" Alicia cleared her throat. "Sure," she got out the second time around, sounding almost natural and hoping he couldn't hear how indescribably grateful she was for his calm, every-day tone of voice.
Something suspiciously like a chuckle sounded over the net, and Alicia swallowed again, hard. She had no doubt at all that she'd just killed at least one human being, and she'd discovered in the process that her grandfather had been completely correct when he told her that no matter how hard she might try to prepare herself for that moment ahead of time, she would fail.
No choice, the small voice in the back of her brain told her as her rock-steady hands reloaded the single-shot grenade launcher without her eyes and helmet sensors ever stopping their constant sweep for fresh threats. You didn't put anyone up there with a rifle, that same voice told her as she moved forward behind Hilton again, watching him as he glided onward, moving from parked car to parked car, using them for cover. Besides, the voice told her almost brutally, it's what you volunteered for, isn't it?
It was. And even now, she sensed that she'd been right-it was something she could do, when she had to. And something she could live with afterwards, as well. But she also knew she'd just taken the critical step into a world the vast majority of the Empire's subjects would never visit.
She was a killer now.
She could never change that, even if she wanted to. It was like a loss of virginity, something which would mark her forever. And the fact that she'd known it would happen, that it was the inevitable consequence of the vocation she'd chosen, did nothing to cushion her awareness of how hugely her personal universe had just changed.
But there was no time to think about that now, and she felt herself moving from car to car in Hilton's wake, almost as smoothly as he'd moved.
***
Captain Chiawa leaned back against the wall in the small, empty apartment, muscles sagging around his bones, and breathed heavily.
He and his small party had managed to break contact with the rioters. He didn't know how. It was all a blur, a confused memory of staccato orders, frantic movement, running and hiding. In the process, they'd gotten turned completely around, though, and they were headed directly away from the spaceport they'd been trying to reach. By now, they were almost half way across Zhikotse from the Marine perimeter. That was the bad news. The good news was that they had broken contact... and no one seemed to be trying to kill them at the moment, which made a pleasant change.
He opened his eyes and looked at the other militiamen.
"How are we fixed for ammo?"
The other men looked as exhausted as he felt. Their adrenaline-sharpened tension had eased off a bit as they settled down in their temporary haven, and it seemed to take them a few seconds to grasp what he'd asked.
Then Corporal Munming ran his fingers over his grenade bandolier without even glancing down, letting his fingertips read the Braille-like coding on the grenade bodies.
"Five flechette, two concussion, two incendiary, two smoke, and three HE, Sir," he said, then chuckled wearily and patted the compact machine pistol holstered at his right hip as his backup weapon. "And, of course, three mags for this."
"Of course," Chiawa agreed with a tired grin, and looked at his three riflemen.
"And you guys?"
"Two full mags, plus one partial," Private Mende said with a slight shrug. "I've got one smoke grenade, one
gas grenade, and one frag to go with it."
"Four magazines, Sir," Private Paldorje said. "I'm out of grenades, though."
"Only one mag," Private Khambadze said. "But I've still got two rifle grenades, both anti-personnel."
"And I've got -" Chiawa patted the ammunition carrier pouch at his hip "-three magazines." He smiled without very much humor. "Not a lot of firepower, is it?"
"Sir," Munming said frankly, "at the moment, I'm sort of thinking firepower's going to be a lot less useful than just staying the hell out of sight."
"I'm afraid you've got that one right," Chiawa agreed. He took off his helmet and set it on the floor beside him while he dragged out his map board and turned it back on. He wished-not for the first time-that he had the sort of modern information systems the Marines were issued. In their absence, he'd just have to do the best he could with the obsolete militia-issue equivalents.
He pressed the locator button, and the board's GPS system obediently paged to the correct window of the small-scale city map and dropped the position icon onto the display. He spun the adjustment wheel, zooming in on the icon and enlarging the map's detail, then frowned thoughtfully.