When so many of them were about to die.
No, she couldn't tell them that... but they heard it anyway. She knew they did, and that was enough.
"We go in three minutes," she said quietly. "God bless."
***
Section Leader Shwang Shau-pang of the Freedom Alliance Liberation Army hated battle armor. He'd never liked it, despite all the things it could do for him, because he'd never been able to completely overcome the claustrophobia which had plagued him since childhood. That was the main reason he preferred to leave his helmet visor open whenever he could, and he inhaled a deep breath of Green Haven's cool, late-night air.
Like most of the FALA "regulars" assigned to the operation, Shwang was himself ex-military. Unlike most of the others, however, he'd actually put in his time in the Imperial Marines. The long and tangled chain of events which had led him to where he was today would never have occurred to the long ago, long distant self who'd volunteered to be a Wasp, but the training remained. That was why he'd been tapped for this operation-the FALA didn't have all that many personnel who'd spent almost five standard years manning and maintaining Mark 18 plasma cannon.
And just between himself and the cool, breezy night, Shwang Shau-pang was grateful his experience had landed him here and not out with the screening infantry. He hated the Cadre as much as any other member of the Freedom Alliance, and he was coldly, viciously pleased by the losses the Emperor's personal storm troopers had taken this night. But he was a practical man, was Shwang Shau-pang, and he was perfectly content to let someone else do the killing.
Especially when the bastards have been so good at killing us right back, he thought with a twisted grin.
On the other hand, Comrade Omicron-even among their most trusted subordinates, the members of the Command Council went only by their code names-had finally begun letting the Empies know what the Alliance really had in mind. Shwang rather doubted that even Omicron was quite as confident they'd be able to walk away from this one as he was careful to project. Personally, Shwang figured there was no more than a forty percent chance the Empire would back off, hostages or no hostages. But every man and woman assigned to this operation had understood from the moment they took up arms against the might of the Terran Empire that the odds against their ultimate survival were steep. And if they succeeded in their actual objectives even half as well as it looked like they were going to, it would all be worth it in the end.
Not that I wouldn't like to walk away alive, he admitted to himself. It's always nicer to live to enjoy your successes, after all.
He smiled again and turned to look back towards the central building where the hostages were being held.
Which was why he was looking in exactly the opposite direction when the first plasma bolt exploded directly on top of his number three cannon and vaporized it, its crew, the central data processing unit for the battery, and one Shwang Shau-pang, who died without even knowing that he had.
***
Alicia watched Obaseki Osayaba's plasma bolt take out the central cannon of the northernmost emplacement. Secondary explosions and blast had probably done for the others, as well, but Osayaba was taking no chances. He fired again, and again, as rapidly as his plasma rifle's firing chamber lasers could induce fusion in the hydrogen pellets. The plasma bolts screamed out of the night, obliterating the Mark 18 cannon and the missile launcher paired with them.
Surprise was total. As she had told Keita, if the FALA infantry had suspected even for a moment that Charlie Company's survivors were anywhere near Green Haven, they would have been trying to do something about it. And, as she had also hoped, the sheer shock of the sudden, totally unexpected attack, induced a momentary paralysis.
Osayaba finished eliminating his assigned antiair weapons and retargeted. His plasma bolts shrieked over Alicia's head, shredding the night, impacting on the defensive FALA perimeter around the northern side of the hill. He continued to fire as rapidly as he could... and just as accurately. Individual armored infantrymen took direct hits, torsos vaporizing, heads simply disappearing, and a hole opened in the center of their line.
"Go!" she barked, and twenty-six cadremen and women came out of the night-wrapped woods in the prodigious bounds of battle armor being pushed to its maximum capability.
Nobody even noticed them for a heartbeat or two. Then the first plasma bolts and calliope rounds began sizzling in their direction, but there weren't very many of them, and Alicia's heart twisted within her as she realized why.
***
"Two o'clock!" Astrid Nordbo said sharply.
"I see it," Obaseki Osayaba replied, and he did. Not that there was very much he could do about it at the moment.
He tracked steadily to his left, working his way along the line of dug-in terrorist infantry in front of Alicia and her charging troopers. He really ought to be withdrawing into the woods by now, according to Alicia's instructions, but he and Astrid had known they wouldn't be. They were the only fire team in position to cover Alicia's mad charge, and that meant that, orders or no, that was what they were going to do.
Return fire shrieked, sizzled, and howled around Osayaba's position. He and Astrid were bellied down behind the shallow earth berms they'd thrown up for cover, and a superheated fog of vaporized soil hung in the air around them. Someone down there was using his armor sensors to back-plot Osayaba's fire, but he wasn't as good at it as the bastards who'd set up the ambush at the LZ.
Even without his armor, it would have been impossible for Osayaba to sort any individual sound out of the insane bedlam screaming about him, but he knew Astrid was firing back with her calliope. She had less than five hundred rounds, and she was expending them in short, tight bursts as FALA infantry, unable to get clear shots at them, came charging in from either flank.
Osayaba saw them coming, knew they were hurtling through the night almost as rapidly as Alicia and her troopers on the hillside, even if the tick did make them seem to float slowly towards him. And he knew Astrid wasn't going to be able to stop them all. She simply didn't have enough ammunition, and neither did he. And since he couldn't stop them, he ignored them, continuing to pick off individual targets as battle armored terrorists around the base of the hill tried to bring their weapons to bear on Alicia's attack.
He fired one more time, and the digital display of rounds remaining dropped to zero in the corner of his HUD.
"I'm dry," he told Astrid in a voice which sounded impossibly calm to his own ears.
"Me... too," she said, as she fired the final burst from her calliope.
"Then I guess it's time," he replied, and used his synth-link to command his armor to jettison his useless plasma gun. It fell away, and he rose out of his improvised firing position, drawing his force blade with his right hand and bringing it alive while he drew his CHK with his left. The pistol couldn't penetrate battle armor anywhere except the visor, and even there only with a lucky hit, but he figured he was owed at least a little luck.
He "saw" Astrid beside him through his sensors. Saw her toss away the calliope, draw her own sidearm and force blade. She wasn't Shai Hau-zhi, the woman who'd been Osayaba's wing for over two standard years, but then, he wasn't Flannan O'Clery, the laughing Irishman who'd been Astrid's wing even longer. And that didn't matter, either. Not tonight.
"Let's kick some ass," he told her, and they charged to meet the oncoming terrorists.
***
Alicia saw Osayaba's and Nordbo's icons start to move-not away from the objective and into the woods, but towards it. She knew exactly what they were doing, and why, and there was nothing-nothing in the universe-she could do to stop them.
The two green icons leapt towards the wave of armored infantry sweeping down upon Osayaba's firing position. She saw one of the glaring orange enemy icons go down, then another. A third. And then Obaseki and Astrid were in among the orange icons, completely enveloped. Two more orange icons fell, and then Astrid's green dot turned suddenly crimson.
An instan
t later, there were only orange icons.
***
Corporal Alec Howard saw the same thing on his own HUD and swore viciously. But there was nothing he could do about it, and he clenched his jaw.
The southernmost antiair position, which had been his assigned target, was a wrecked, flaming ruin. He'd killed at least another thirty or forty FALA terrorists taking it out, but he'd exhausted his fusion pellets in the process. His assigned wing, Jackson Keller, had exactly eighteen rounds left for his calliope. They'd done everything they could possibly do, and he knew it, yet his instincts cried out for him to do something else. Something more.
Only there was nothing more, and a wave of orange icons was frothing up the slope towards his own position.
"Time to go, Jackson," he grated. Maybe they could at least suck a few of the bastards into chasing them instead of going after Alley, and the two of them went bounding back into the forest while the crescendo of battle roared behind them.
***
"Time to go, Serena!" Ingrid Chernienko said, squeezing off another short, sharp burst from her calliope.
"Roger that!" Serena DuPuy replied, giving her armor the jettison command as she fired her own last round. Like Osayaba and Howard, she'd turned her assigned target into a flaming torch, but someone on her side of the perimeter was obviously better at using his armor's sensors than the ones who'd tried to back-plot Osayaba's fire. Three plasma bolts had blasted smoking, fused-glass craters into the earth within less than five meters of her position, and it was definitely time to go.
She bounded up out of her firing position and turned towards the woods... just as a round from an enemy calliope slammed into the back of her right leg.
It was a direct hit, one not even Cadre battle armor could stop, and the impact smashed her back into the ground. Her right thigh shattered, and the tourniquet built into her armor locked down as her femoral artery began to spurt and agony roared through her. Her pharmacope sent its painkillers racing after the stormfront of pain and drove a burst of adrenaline into her system to combat shock, but nothing could blunt that moment of transcendent anguish.
"Hold on, Serena!" Chernienko shouted.
"No!" DuPuy screamed back, forcing herself up into a sitting position, pistol in both armored hands as the first battle armored terrorist vaulted up the last few meters of slope with his battle rifle already swinging towards her.
"Get the hell out of here!" she barked at Chernienko, and squeezed off the first pistol round. It struck the terrorist's visor, but at an angle, and whined off harmlessly. She fired again, and again, and the FALA infantryman flinched at each shot. But he kept coming, too-until a burst of calliope fire turned him into so much armored dead meat almost at her feet.
"Come on!" Chernienko barked, tossing away her now-empty calliope.
"I told you to get out of here!" DuPuy snarled.
"Shut the fuck up and give me your hand!" Chernienko snarled back, and bent over the other woman. Her armor's exoskeletal muscles whined as she snatched DuPuy up into a fireman's carry and turned back towards the woods.
She made one leap before the plasma bolt came shrieking in, struck DuPuy squarely in the back, and killed both of them instantly.
***
Alicia saw two more green icons turn crimson as she and her remaining troopers crossed the steaming, smoking wreckage which had been the FALA perimeter until Obaseki Osayaba turned it into a slaughter ground.
Here and there single armored infantrymen, or pairs of them, survived. They were shocked, stunned by the totally unexpected carnage, but a handful of them were managing to shoot back. Her battle rifle tracked onto one of them and she fired in midair. The sub-caliber penetrators ripped through the breastplate of his armor and he went down hard. The rifle's servos traversed with snake-like speed, and she fired again, and again. Another terrorist went down with each short burst, and she saw others tumbling aside as someone else took them down.
But they weren't going alone.
Osayaba had broken the back of the position directly in front of Alicia's charge, but the defensive line's ends were still intact, however shaken they might have been, and flanking fire ripped into her charge. Corporal Ramji seemed to trip in midair. His armor shattered as the plasma bolt slammed into it from the right, and his icon, too, turned blood-red. Corporal Teng Rwun-yin died an instant later, and Corporal Ulujuk went down, life signs flickering, as a heavy-caliber calliope penetrator ripped through his belly.
And then they were past the defensive position's ruined foxholes and racing up the hill towards the buildings they'd come so far, and paid so high a price, to reach.
Twenty-six Cadre troopers had started up that hill. Seventeen of them reached the top, leaving the slope behind them strewn with the shattered, smoking bodies of their enemies.
Alicia drew her force blade as the exterior wall of their objective loomed before her. She brought it slashing across, opening the tough composite "plastic" of the wall as if it were spun spider silk. She crashed into the opening she'd created an instant later, smashing it bigger, exploding into the building in a shower of splinters.
She didn't even slow down. Other armored figures came crashing through the same wall a half-breath behind her, and they, like her, knew exactly where to find the terrorists inside the structure. They were tied into the remote she'd parked on the crossbeam so far above, and Alicia's flashing thoughts reached out through her synth-link, designating targets.
She hit her own jump gear in a full-power jump that sent her rocketing across the huge room while hostages screamed in terror below her. She hit the second-story catwalk barely three meters from one of the calliopes, and the un-armored terrorist behind it screamed in terror of her own as the catwalk trembled under the crashing impact of Alicia's arrival. The FALA gunner tried frantically to bring her weapon to bear, but Alicia was too close. She didn't bother with her battle rifle, or her pistol. She simply swept the force blade still in her hand in a flat, vicious stroke that caught the other woman just below armpit level and sliced clear through her body in a shocking geyser of blood.
The terrorist thudded to the catwalk in two separate pieces, and Alicia whirled, reaching out to catch the calliope before it tipped over the catwalk rail to the floor below.
A burst of heavy penetrators blasted a line of holes through the wall above her as one of the other FALA gunners fired at her. But the burst was high, and before the terrorist could fire a second time, Tannis Cateau's deadly accurate battle rifle sent two rounds through his brain.
Alicia got control of the calliope beside her and turned back towards the floor below, but she'd taken just a fraction of a second too long.
***
Corporal Brian Oselli had come through the outer wall half a meter behind Alicia. The First Squad trooper had exhausted the last of his rifle ammunition on his way up the hill, but his CHK was in his right hand, and his force blade was in his left.
Another terrorist loomed up in front of him, this one in unpowered body armor and armed with a Marine M-97 combat rifle. The terrorist tried frantically to bring it to bear, but Oselli's pistol punched three penetrators through the other man's breastplate, and he vaulted the corpse, bounding towards the plasma cannon covering the vehicle entrances.
The plasma cannon's crew had been as surprised as everyone else by the sudden, unexpected ferocity of the Cadre's attack. They weren't supposed to have to worry about deadly enemies suddenly appearing behind them, and one of them panicked and started backing away as Oselli charged towards them. But the other two didn't. They swung their weapon around rapidly, bringing it to bear on the charging cadreman, and Oselli bellowed in primordial rage. When that weapon fired, he would die... and so would dozens, possibly hundreds, of the hostages behind him.
He fired as he came, again and again. The pistol's penetrators smashed into the plasma gunner, screaming and wailing as they ricocheted off his breastplate. He staggered back, but only for a moment, and Oselli could feel his matching
hate as he reached for the cannon's firing grips again.
But Oselli's unwavering charge had delayed him just long enough. The Cadre corporal saw the moment the terrorist's hands reached the grips, and his own right arm drew back and then flashed forward. His force blade went slicing through the air, even as he deliberately flung himself straight down the muzzle of the cannon.
The gunner squeezed the trigger. The plasma bolt hit Oselli less than two meters in front of the cannon. And the force blade continued its flight and sliced effortlessly through the gunner's armor to completely decapitate him.
Oselli simply vanished. Only his left leg continued forward, skittering across the ceramacrete floor. But he'd been close enough, centered enough, to take the full brunt of the plasma. Seventeen hostages were killed behind him. Another six were badly wounded. But that was all, from a shot which could have killed half the unarmored people in that room.
***