On Silver Wings (8 page)

Things were likely to get messy now.

She briefly reviewed the data, then deactivated her ocular displays and shifted until she was comfortable. She might as well, after all, she was here on Hayden’s world for the long haul now.

*****

The morning light was filtering through the jungle canopy when Samuel looked up as the shadow fell across his table, nodding to Sorilla as she pulled up the roughhewn bench and straddled it with a serious look on her face.

“Problems?” He asked, sighing as he pushed his work aside.

“Maybe.” She said, not giving much away, “Tell me something Samuel.”

“If I can,” he replied laying down the old fashioned stylus.

She looked down at the ground for a moment, then back at him, “You’ve got how many people here in camp?”

Samuel frowned, looking at her, “Why do you ask?”

“It’s pretty basic intel. My processor estimates between four and five hundred. Is that right?”

He nodded, “Yes. We have a current population of four hundred and twenty eight... we had four hundred and thirty before...”

Sorilla nodded, knowing that they had lost two men to retrieve the supplies and locate the bodies of the two members of her team. She pushed that aside for a moment, and moved on to more important things for the present.

“What was the population of the colony?”

Another moment of silence hung between them, but Samuel finally spoke up, “Just over five thousand at the main site. The rest of the planetary population is spread out among the continental masses.”

She nodded, and spoke succinctly. “Where are the rest of the people from the main camp?”

Samuel sighed, “A lot of them, we just don’t know. We were scattered when the colony was hit. Some of the ranchers and their people refused to leave their homes, maybe some of the others are with them.”

Sorilla nodded, having expected as much. “The situation’s changed, we’re going to need to contact them.”

Samuel shook his head as he leaned back in his roughhewn chair, “What’s going on, Sergeant?”

“I need to contact everyone I can, locate all the people possible.”

“That doesn’t answer the question,” Samuel said, “I thought you said that you were scouting places for a relief landing.”

“There’s not going to be a landing,” Sorilla replied flatly, “Not any time soon.”

Samuel stared for a moment, “What happened?”

“I’ve been ordered to shift to long term planning, Mr. Becker. I don’t know all the details, but it’s fair to say that things have escalated somewhere.”

“My God,” he muttered, shaking his head. “How long? I mean... We don’t have the supplies here to last long.”

Sorilla nodded, she’d been briefed on the world before insertion. Hayden’s World was a lush jungle, but almost none of its plant or animal life was edible to humans. Even now the people here were living on ration packs and hoarded food stuffs they’d managed to save from the colony site as they were run out. Neither of those would last long, however, and when they ran out they’d starve to death, even if they tried to eat whatever wasn’t toxic to human body chemistry in the local jungle.

Starving to death, even on a full stomach, wasn’t a pleasant way to go.

“The ranchers were growing edible crops, right?” She asked.

Samuel nodded, but his expression was pained. “Some of them, yes... but for their own table mostly, our food production is in the aeroponics bays we established in orbit. Production there was far higher than we could possibly have hoped to maintain Hayden side.”

She nodded in understanding, “Well that’s going to have to change. Call your best trackers and pathfinders, Mr. Becker. We’ve got a month, maybe, before we’re in trouble here,other places may be even tighter. That’s not much time to work with, let’s make the most of it.”

He pushed his hair back along his forehead, nodding slowly, “I... I’ll gather them.”

“Thank you,” she said, standing up and walking to the door of the shelter.

Outside she paused, drawing a bundle of green cloth from her vest and carefully unfolding it before setting the beret over her head.

There was a war to fight now, not just a scout recon. All she had were the colonists as backup, but there was a reason why they sent her and her team. The silver wings she wore on her vest weren’t for show, and these people were certainly the oppressed. They’d just have to learn to help her, help them.

De Oppresso Liber
.

No one said it would be easy.

USV Los Angeles

On Station, Outer Hayden System

Vice Admiral Jorgen Sweet looked out on the distant world, its reflected light little more than that of a star, and wrapped his hands around the railing bolted to the observation room walls until his knuckles whitened. At fifty-three years of age, Sweet had never grown used to the waiting that was a primary responsibility of a man in uniform, and when he knew the waiting was coming to an end the time just seemed to drag even more.

The half hiss, half grind of a deck door sliding open caused the Admiral to turn his head as Captain Richardson twisted through the door and pushed off the wall. The Captain glided over to him, hooking a grip a few feet away, and swung into an orientation that roughly matched the Admirals.

Jorgen suppressed a smile, working in zero gravity had an interesting effect on rank and rank courtesy. Most officers and enlisted on the Los Angeles didn’t take the time to reorient with each other, the free fall environment had become second nature and they simply went on with their jobs. When reporting to the Admiral, however, Jorgen had noticed that he never had to strain his neck or his mind to talk to someone who was floating around upside down.

“Yes Captain?” Sweet asked, turning fully away from the observation area and using the hand grips to firmly plant his feet on the ‘floor’. “You have a report?”

“Yes Admiral,” Kay Richardson nodded briefly, her short cropped hair flowing almost as if she were under water. “We’ve downloaded the contents of the message box in Hayden’s lunar orbit.”

At his age, Jorgen was long past most things that could make his heart rush. A beautiful woman could still make it happen, but surprisingly little else. Those words, however, combined with the look on Kay’s face, set his heart thumping powerfully.

“Was there...?” He had to ask, licking his lips as they suddenly dried out.

“Aye Sir.” She confirmed it, nodding. Her face wasn’t as eager as he would have expected, however, so there was bad news too. “We lost most of the team.”

He winced, looking away for a moment, then back, “How many survivors?”

“One known. Sergeant Sorilla Aida.” Kay replied, handing him a folder.

He took it, flipping the plastic folder open, his mind wrapped up in the idea that only one of their SF team had survived. There wasn’t a radar or detection grid on Earth, not even in the United States or China, that could pick up a SOCOM team on an Orbital approach. They were easy enough to pick up on entry itself, but they looked like every other little piece of rock burning up in the atmosphere. No one would waste energy trying to pick off shooting stars, there were hundreds on any given day.

Not to mention hitting something moving that fast was an exercise in frustration, and once they were low enough to be slowing down, they were invisible again. Not even a LIDAR system could pick them up a few seconds after they’d burned off their ablative armor.

He sighed, pushing the frustrated tension down, and focused on the open folder. On the inside cover was an image of the Sergeant in question, along with her name, serial number, and basic medical information along the opposite side. He thumbed the page flipper, letting the picture fade away as a detailed service record replaced it, and read briefly.

“Good woman.”

“Aye Sir,” Kay nodded.

“What was in her report?”

Kay shook her head slightly, “Not as much as we could have asked for, but maybe more than we’d hoped for.”

That was more along the lines of what the Admiral wanted to hear. “Explain.”

“The tether cable to their orbital counterweight was snapped. Not cut or burned, snapped by pure force. That means we can calculate the precise force applied from the counterweight’s current orbit and the reports from the local survivors.” Kay said, “Though, for the record, they already did it for us. It’s in Aida’s report.”

The Admiral let out a strangled chuckle and shook his head, “Did they do anything else for us?”

“A lot, including some brainstorming for possible causes,” Kay replied grimly, handing over another folder. “This is the one that they, and Liz, believe is most likely.”

He took the folder with a sense of trepidation, uncertain if he really wanted to know, but he just flipped it open and read. After several long moments he looked up at his Flag Captain and raised an eyebrow, “You understand this?”

“Most of it, yes Sir.”

He wasn’t surprised, not really. There were a few ways to get a Command in the Space ‘fleet’, such as it was. He’d come up one way, serving with the United States Navy in various military posts until he’d requested a transfer to the Colonial and Home System Fleet. His own education was generally in electronics, tactics, and strategies. Kay Parker had come up a second way, like Commander Elizabeth Shay, she’d entered from the academic route and studied for her command rank as a secondary priority.

Most of the information in the folder in front of him was a fair bit over Jorgen’s head, but he suspected very little of it confused his Flag Captain. That was a good thing, since he understood enough of it to know that it had very serious implications.

“Who’s seen this data?”

“You, me, Liz, and the Commo who decoded it.” She replied instantly.

He nodded, “Has Commander Shay compared it to the drive readings we’ve been pulling off the silhouettes we’ve been stalking?”

“Aye Sir,” Kay replied, “They match... in theory.”

He noted the qualifier, but didn’t respond to it. They weren’t at the point just yet when hard decisions had to be made, so she was just making certain that they kept an open mind and not trying to play ‘cover your ass’ with the Admiral.

Since arriving in the system, Fleet Task Force Two had been hit with one unknown after another, so keeping an open mind was starting to feel more like having one’s mind blown open with copious amounts of high explosive. He sighed, looking back to the receding light of Hayden’s World before glancing back to Captain Richardson.

“Captain, inform me when we’re clear to jump.”

“Aye Sir,” Richardson said.

“Leave the files, I’ll look them over while we’re heading outsystem.”

She saluted, then let go of the rail and kicked off the wall, sailing toward the door. He watched her go for a moment, then thumbed open the folder again and began to read the long detailed explanations he’d only skimmed before.

He was still reading the intricacies of multidimensional theory and their effect on gravitation when the general quarters alarm sounded, causing Jorgen to swing around and instinctively kick off the wall as he shot for the door. He caught a handgrip as the door swung open automatically, swung out and up, and pushed off again, heading for the Flag Deck.

*****

“Report!” Captain Kay Parker growled as she looped her arms into the five point restraints, slapping the catch shut over her chest even as she reached down between her legs for the crotch strap and snapped it into place as well.

“Three Bogeys coming at us right out of the star! They must have been hiding around one of the inner giants, Ma’am.”

Kay grimaced, shaking her head. The Hayden system wasn’t setup even remotely like Sol, the first three inner planets were gas giants, practically proto-stars in their own right. Part of the reason the colony even existed on Hayden was to observe their consumption by the local primary, or their eventual birth as newborn stellar furnaces.

Scientifically, it was an invaluable process to observe. From a military aspect, the gravity fluctuations and increased radiation from those three planets in addition to the star itself made spotting anything as small as a ship a task worthy of Hercules himself. Coming out of the sun was a time honored tradition for fighter pilots, and it looked like it was working for these ships as well.

“Give me a track!” She growled just as a light lit up on her right hand command screen. She flipped a switch open and turned to it, “Hello again, Admiral. We’ve picked up three unidentified craft approaching from the cover of the star.”

Admiral Sweet nodded, “Understood Captain. Increase acceleration, I don’t believe getting caught would be in our best interests just now.”

She nodded, though it was counter to previous orders. They’d been trying to get closer to these puppies for days, playing cat and mouse with them in the shadows of the Hayden Primary. Now that they had some real intel on board, of course it was the time the puppies would decide to play wolf.

She opened a ship wide comm, “All hands, this is the Captain. Prepare for acceleration, One Gee. I say again, prepare for acceleration, One Gee.”

“Helm, engage one gee acceleration in two minutes. Tactical, where’s my track!?”

“On screen!”

She looked over to the left hand screen built into her console and frowned. The three unidentified ships were coming up behind them, and they had the speed advantage for the moment, but they were pouring on the acceleration.

“Are these numbers right!?”

“Aye Ma’am!” Ensign Soru yelled from the tactical station. “Triple checked. One hundred Gees, Ma’am.”

Kay swallowed, her lips suddenly dry. One hundred gravities of acceleration would knock most of her crew out, maintaining it over any real period of time would kill them. She licked her lips, suddenly shaking her head. “Great. We’re being chased by a science fiction nightmare.”

Luckily no one heard her or responded if they did.

“Helm, Belay last order. Prepare for emergency acceleration.” She called out, slapping open the ship wide again. “All hands, all hands, prepare for emergency acceleration. I say again, emergency acceleration. Check that all loose items are battened down, you have three minutes.”