Profiteer

Until now, standing in front of the eight other team members, she’d been deep-down convinced that this whole idea was hypothetical. Something to mark time while she or Dom thought of some way to get out from under the Confed guns.

 

They weren’t marking time, it wasn’t hypothetical, and it was probably the only way to get a defensible position. Dom—damn the diabolical logic of all this—needed a corporate base to defend himself and “his people.” It was that or everyone whom Dom even breathed on would have to dig a hole and hide until the TEC decided to leave the planet.

 

A vain hope when she had no idea why they were here in the first place.

 

She manipulated the holo and started reviewing the whole plan for the first time, all the while expecting the inevitable, “You’re kidding,” or, “That’ll never work.” It took an extreme effort on her part—especially with Ivor there—to avoid showing the nerves that tied her gut in a knot.

 

She consciously imitated Dom’s control.

 

“First,” she told the eight others as she called up a holo image of the current layout of the GA&A complex, “Here’s the nut we’re going to crack.”

 

She zoomed in on each detail as she described it. “The complex is surrounded by a two-hundred-fifty-meter diameter circle of twenty perimeter towers. Each is—was— fifty meters of diamondwire-reinforced concrete, sensors, antiaircraft, and Emerson field generators.”

 

She moved the pointer to the west side of the complex. “Here’s the good news—half got scragged by TEC missile fire. The entire ass-end of the residence tower—the tall building west of the quad—is hanging out over Godwin. Ditto what’s left of the old security HQ, and the extreme north end of the office building.

 

“The TEC is trying to fill the gap with their own equipment. The scragged perimeter towers, most have been chopped off at twenty meters for them to mount their own weapons and sensors. They’re more twitchy about a ground assault than an air attack. There’s enough computer-aimed hardware on the Blood-Tide to take out a decent airborne assault without waking their command. Their problem’s that the Blood-Tide is useless versus ground-pounders. So the nests on top of those ten scragged towers carry plasma cannons. MacMillan-Schmitt HD350, I think—”

 

Shane nodded and some of Tetsami’s audience whistled in appreciation.

 

“Again,” Tetsami continued, “we got good news. They only have the ship’s computers, and those are overloaded. They have warm bodies manning the plasma cannons, and they don’t have enough marines to man the perimeter and patrol the interior.”

 

Tetsami nodded at Shane. Shane elaborated for her, “There’s a one-hundred-twenty-marine complement in there, and the HD350 requires a gunner and a tech to run. That’s half the active-duty personnel at any one time.”

 

Tetsami nodded. “Add to that the minimum of five people stationed aboard the Blood-Tide, and another ten marines lost to injury or misadventure since this began, there’ll be ten marines on generic security as long as GA&A isn’t on some sort of alert—”

 

“At which point an extra seventy marines land on us,” muttered Zanzibar.

 

“—so with the exception of the perimeter and ship itself, we’re dealing with civilian security.”

 

“Until the alarm sounds,” Zanzibar said.

 

“I hope to avoid that.” Tetsami adjusted the focus of the holo so that everyone was looking at the central portion of the complex. She moved the pointer about, highlighting the buildings in turn, describing GA&A’s layout, until she focused on the central landing quad, where the hundred-meter-long Blood-Tide barely fit. “Now, I want to get back to the TEC ship. Flower?” Tetsami prompted.

 

The birdlike alien scratched its long neck with one foot as it gestured at the holo with its three-fingered hands. The three joints made its arms move with a liquid grace. “The Blood-Tide is a class of ship that was first designed as a fast troop-carrier. He is as large as a cargo ship. He deceives with that. The original model was extremely overengineered. His design incorporates a tach-drive, conventional maneuvering drives, and a contragrav generator. A quantum extraction contragrav, not the slower, safer, catalytic injection drive. Because of the multiple systems his original model could never move more than five hundred troops—”