Lee and her platoon did a standard drop from high altitude at night with cloaking on; they were inside the administration and broadcast buildings before the rebels knew they had even landed on the roof. The fight was brief and lopsided; the rebels had only a few good fighters with them, the ones they had put out in front when the local police had gone at them. The rest of the rebels were recruited from the ranks of the young and excitable and had rather more enthusiasm than skill. The genuinely skilled rebel fighters engaged the CDF and were quickly subdued or killed, being no match for trained Colonial soldiers with superior physical and tactical skills; the rest surrendered without too much resistance.

Two rebel vehicles outside the administration offices opened fire at the building and were turned into glowing piles of slag by the Tubingen, which had targeted them from orbit. The hostages, kept in a basement-level wing filled with conference rooms, were dirty and tired but generally unharmed. The entire event took less than thirty minutes, with no casualties on the CDF side.

Their work done, the CDF soldiers asked for and received shore leave in Zhoushan, where they were welcomed enthusiastically, or so it seemed, by the locals, although that might have also been because the Colonial Union was known to pick up the tab for Colonial Defense Forces on shore leave, encouraging the soldiers to spend foolishly and the local shops and vendors to charge exorbitantly. If there were any rebel sympathizers among the burghers of Zhoushan, they kept their mouths shut and took the CDF’s money.

The last thing Lee remembered prior to waking up in the room she was in now, she, Jefferson and Private Kiana Hughes were having dinner in a hofbräuhaus (Zhong Guo, despite its Chinese naming conventions, had mostly middle and southern Europeans, an irony that Lee, with Chinese ancestry on her father’s side, found somewhat amusing). She recalled the three of them getting more than a little drunk, which in retrospect should have been a warning, since thanks to CDF soldiers’ genetically-engineered physiology, it was almost impossible for them to actually get smashed. At the time, however, it just seemed like a pleasant buzz. She remembered piling out of the hofbräuhaus very late local time, wandering toward the hotel at which they had been booked and then nothing else until now.

Lee ruefully revised her assessment of the state of enthusiasm of the locals for the CDF’s work. Clearly, not everyone was pleased.