On Silver Wings (20 page)

Running guerrilla operations was long hard work, at the best of times. Having to run training for a bunch of field academics didn’t make it much easier. That said, thankfully more than a few of them were also practical engineers and knew their way around hand tools and explosives. If they’d been desk jockeys Sorilla probably would have cried.

She didn’t bother drying off as she stepped out of the shower, instead just flopped down on the cot she called her own and lay there. The jungle heat would replace the shower water with sweat in no time anyway, so she just pulled her pillow close and curled up on top of the light blankets and dropped back off in a few seconds.

She woke up again just after dusk, mostly recovered from the exhaustion of the mission. Her scratches and scrapes were scabbed over and itching, which was luckily the worst she’d endured this time around. She shrugged into a pair of pants and her vest before heading out and taking a walk over to the command tent across from her hut.

“Sergent Aida.” Samuel nodded as she walked in. “Good to see you up, sleep well?”

Sorilla nodded, grabbing a steaming kettle from the cook stove in the corner. “Yeah. What’s Rod’s prognosis?”

“Tara thinks he’ll make it.” Samuel said, “Did you locate Mathew?”

She nodded, frowning deeply, “He didn’t make it. Too close to the nuke flast. We found him with third degree burns over most of his body and a branch from a blasted tree sticking out of his back.”

Samuel winced.

She sighed, finishing brewing her coffee from one of the Emergency Field Meals (EFM) as she sat down across from Sam. “He and Rod were rear guard on this run, they must have lagged further behind than they had to. Make sure you make the point to the others that you can’t stay in range of enemy dead, Sam.”

“I will.” He said seriously. “You?”

“I’ll tell them too, but they listen to you.” She said.

Samuel Becker nodded in acceptance of that, “Right. The mission, though? Did it go well?”

“Other than that, yeah. We blasted another section of that white road, whatever it is.” She responded, leaning forward to run her finger along the map. “Right around here. They’ll have to backtrack and clear out a lot of this section to repair it.”

“That’s good, I assume.”

Sorilla shrugged, “Right now, Sam, all we can do is make them pay for every day they sit here on Hayden. We don’t have the forces to push them off.”

He nodded, understanding what she was saying. When you couldn’t go for a direct victory, you had to try something else. The goal of a Guerilla wasn’t to somehow eject the invading army, but rather to make it too damned expensive for them to stay.

Cost them enough money, material, and lives and you could make any enemy decide that it simply wasn’t worth the effort to hang around.

“How long?”

“Mmmm?” Sorilla murmured as she took a deep breath from the coffee steam coming off her black carbon fiber cup, “How long what?”

“Before it becomes too costly for them to stay?”

“No idea.” She shrugged, “It’s impossible to tell. A lot of it depends on what they have to spend, really, but it also comes down to how much support they have back home… wherever home is.”

“Lovely.” He sighed.

She shook her head, “Just too many factors, Sam. How many resources they have is a big one, for sure, but what kind of government they have is just as big. A dictatorship can spend a far larger chunk of their resources on something like this than, say, a representative democracy. A republic, like the US back home, is somewhere in the middle. It also depends on what kind of people they are, and how much the public is told about what’s going on out here.”

She shrugged again, “Honestly the only thing I can tell you for sure, Sam, is that we’ve not yet scratched the surface of what it’s going to take to send them packing. I don’t think we’ve even really annoyed them yet.”

She smirked wryly at him, waving her hand idly.

“That’s not what I wanted to hear.” He admitted tiredly.

“Putting out a strong invading force is a long game, Sam.” She told him, “You can ask the Afghans back home about that. They had to eject two world superpowers from their country in less than half a century, despite being completely outmatched both times. It took years, blood, sweat, and toil. In the end I think more money was poured into Afghanistan than any other country on the planet in the twentieth or twenty first century, all to leave it the same windblown hell hole it was when they started.”

She sighed, “Hayden will be here when we’re done, more or less unchanged Sam… but if we do our job right, we’ll force them to invest the equivalent of several dozen
trillion
US Dollars back home. Most of it into things we’ll blow right the hell up as soon as we can. At some point the idea is to make their politicians, or whatever they have in that role, declare victory and go home.”

He shot her an odd look.

“What? Politicians never admit defeat unless you ride a tank down to their capital building,” She snorted, “Let them call it what they want, Sam, as long as they call it a day and get the fuck out of here.”

He could agree to that, Sam supposed. He lifted his mug in a salute.

“Amen.”

*****

Just Inside Mars Orbit,

Sol System

Admiral Nadine Brooke floated across her Flag deck, looping her arm into one of the restraint straps built into her command bolster. She swung herself around by that strap and slid her other arm into its match on the other side, then proceeded to strap in carefully.

“Captain Roberts reports all ships in formation, Admiral.”

“Very good, Denise. Thank you.” Nadine said, nodding to her attaché. “Anything else?”

“Admiral Shepard took Task Force Three out to Jump Point Gamma at Oh Three Hundred, Ma’am.” Denise Milan said quietly. “They executed a combat formation jump at Oh Three Thirty.”

“Hayden then.” Nadine said thoughtfully before nodding. “Well good luck to them.”

She considered that mission for a moment, almost wishing she was going along. Her task force, however, wasn’t remotely ready. The Cheyenne and Longbow class ships were the most advanced ships built in the Sol system, generations ahead of anything else ever built in fact. They would replace the eighty year old Los Angeles class ships once they were fully rolled out, but it would be another couple months before even the last of her Task Force were completed.

They’d be in Hayden in a little over half that time, if her calculations were correct.

“Well, nothing to be done for them now.” She said, “Patch me into the fleet wide, please.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

Nadine fit the pair of over-ear headphones on and settled back, listening to the chatter for a few minutes as the ships drifted in formation.

“HMS Hood, adjust course four by eight, mark to the negative twelve. You’re drifting into the Cheyenne’s sky.”

That was Captain Roberts, she recognized his voice as he spoke.

“Roger, Cheyenne.” The voice of the HMS Hood’s navigator came back. “We’re working on an instrumentation glitch, our navigational systems are currently down.”

“Understood, Hood. Cheyenne Out.” Roberts answered before switching over to the shipwide, “Goss, keep an eye on them will you? I swear, half the crap they stuffed into these things should have been junked out by quality control.”

“Unfortunately, Captain,” Nadine said, switching them both over to a private channel, “We are quality control.”

“Admiral…” Roberts came back, shocked, “I’m sorry Ma’am...”

“Don’t be sorry, just keep doing your job.” She told him, “I want my task force combat ready by the time we get our last ships from the Alamo.”

“Yes Ma’am. We’ll be ready.”

“Very good, Captain. As you were.”

“Aye Ma’am.”

She signed off the channel, leaving the Captain to his duties before she turned back to her own. The Flag deck of the USS Cheyenne was small, tight and crowded despite the fact that there were only two people in the entire place. She sighed, calling up the latest status reports on her fleet.

Eight more Cheyenne Class ships had arrived overnight, bringing her total up to sixteen, along with two Longbow to supplement the three she already had. Along with the logistics ships she’d be picking up off Mars when they finished shaking down, her Task Force Four would have forty ships of war with over half that number again in support vessels.

The fact that every single one of her combat ships were fresh off the Alamo was going to make her job a living nightmare, unfortunately.

“Send me the latest status reports on division one, please Denise.”

“Already on your panel, Ma’am.”

“Thank you, Denise.” She smirked, calling up the data. Honestly, she should have known better than to ask. It seemed that Denise was always two steps ahead of her anyway. She would have to remember to just check first, next time, and see if what she wanted was waiting.

There was a lot of work to do, and while the time seemed interminable at the moment, Nadine was quite certain it would run out like water through her fingers soon enough.

*****

Hayden

Keeping her last conversation with Samuel in mind, Sorilla led several more sorties over the next month. Destroying everything they found, forcing the enemy to chase them for days through the jungle, and killing anything that moved that wasn’t of Hayden or Earth.

Between the crude traps they’d set, the high explosives she’d use, or even the enemies own gravetic induced fission attacks they had managed to effectively bring all enemy construction on Hayden to a standstill.

Sorilla was worried, however.

They were holding the line in the here and now, and Sorilla was relatively certain that with the help of her team there was little chance that the enemy could find, or take, their positions in the jungle. There were signs now, however, that they were establishing a second base on another continent.

That was outside her reach at the moment, and if they finished the base there then her ability to make them pay for every second they breathed Hayden air would be severely limited. If they abandoned the central colony site, the biggest part of her little guerrilla war was over.

The writing was on the wall, however, she could tell.

Barring a miracle, she and her little band of geeks turned warriors were about to be dealt out of this war.

USV Socrates

Hayden Jump Point Gamma

“Clearing jump point, advance squadrons are moving ahead.”

Alexi grunted, not looking up from his personal display. He knew what the plan was, and didn’t care for the details as long as they were proceeding according to it. He was focusing on the initial system scans, sharp eyes looking for the leviathans that hunted here.

In the six months since he’d been recalled to command the Soc, Alexi had run his crew through every hellish training scenario in the military books, plus several he devised on his own. Better to sweat blood than leak it, but he was one of the few people in the fleet that truly understood the situation they were flying into.

Finishing his calculations, Alexi looked up, his eyes finding Richard Ashley where the Commander was staring into a triad of displays with the intensity of a man possessed.

“Any red flags, Commander?”

“Negative. All quiet on the western front.” Ashley replied softly, using the code phrase the USN had determined to use for the Hayden System.

Alexi nodded, “Alright. By the numbers. I want the cargo crews to start prepping the load, in case we have to drop it and run like hell.”

“Aye Sir.”

“The Admiral’s launching the drones, Captain.” Andrezj Simone said from the LIDAR station.

“Show me.”

*****

“Decoys accelerating to ten gravities, Admiral.”

“Understood.” Admiral Shepard answered, schooling his voice to a calm level despite the heart pounding in her chest. “Signals?”

“Nothing yet.”

He nodded to his flag captain in thanks, and turned back to the system charts.

“System is quiet Sir.” his aide said from the other side of the repeater display.

“I’m sure Jorgen’s people told him the same thing when they arrived.” Shepard responded, her voice cool.

The aide nodded jerkily, swallowing. “Yes Sir. Sorry.”

“Decoys are squawking, Sir!”

“very good, Captain. Take the fleet in, approach Alpha.”

“Aye Sir, Approach Alpha!”

The ships began to rumble as they slowly climbed to one gravity of acceleration and began making a best speed approach for the planet Hayden.

“Hit the satellite over Hayden with a tight beam as soon as we’re in range.”

“Aye Ma’am!”

*****

Guerrilla Camp

Hayden

An urgent tone woke Sorilla from a deep slumber, she rolled over and kicked the light blanket from her body before reaching across the bed and snagging her vest from the bedside stand and pulling it over her form.

‘
Proc.
’ She subvocalized as she reached for her pants, ‘
Alerts.
’

One Alert.

‘Display,’ She told the system, reading the data as it scrolled across her eyeballs. A few minutes later she strode out of her tent, buckling her belt as she went and grabbing her pistol belt on the way out.

Outside, the sun was still a few hours from rising, but she paid the dark little mind as she made her way to the Osh Kosh truck she’d strung a tent off to create a command center.

“Hey Sarge, what’s got you up?”

“Hey Shorty,” She nodded to the guard, “Get Reed, Sam, and wake up anyone with good knowledge of the planet.”

“Sarge?”

“Do it.” She ordered curtly. “Daylight’s wasting, and the Fleet’s coming.”

He gaped for a moment, then stiffened and ran for Reed’s tent. She watched him go for a moment, then climbed into tent beside the large truck and pulled the flap closed behind her.

*****

By the time Samuel stumbled into the makeshift command center he found Reed and Sorilla already pouring over maps.