The Valhalla Call (Warrior's Wings) (14 page)

Seconds passed, the Canada now turning to match her cohort, and the Terra completed its maneuver. Drives pointed to the rear as she suddenly poured on full flank power, literally tossing everything they had into reversing course.

On a world with atmosphere, there would have been an eerie silence then, a period in which everything seemed to stand still, but in space nothing changed until, suddenly, everything changed.

A plasma wave rushed over them first, catching the Canada across its side as the big ship foundered briefly, its engines unable to cope with the massive shift in power and pressure around it. The Terra’s drives flared brighter, stray anti-protons not yet annihilated in the drive getting caught in the backwash that slammed into the ship from the rear.

The VASIMR drive, however, acted much like the Van Allen Belt around the Earth. It pushed back against the blast pressure of the explosion and shunted much of it aside. The Canada, however, was not nearly so fortunate.

Searing radiation tore through the hull with ease, penetrating deeper than anything should have been able to, and irradiated the inside of the ship. In seconds she was hotter than the interior of a fission plant, and the only consolation for the crew was that it wouldn’t be long.

It was shorter than they realized.

Following on the plasma wave, rocky shards of the planet that hadn’t been completely destroyed roared through. In those terms, even a ship the size of the Canada was a tiny, tiny, target, but in the end it only took one.

A piece of the planet roughly the size of Mount Everest slammed into the Canada in a direct broadside and wiped the ship from the face of the Universe in a single instant of carnage and destruction. Just a few dozen kilometers away, the Terra was being battered by chunks of the planet as well, but the big engines of the big ship were burning many of them up before they could strike.

The whole event took only minutes, but felt like an eternity as the blast wave moved on past and annihilated the interceptor ships following the Ghoulie vessels. The big gravity-powered ships themselves didn’t get off entirely unscathed, large gaping holes were dug out of their hulls by chunks of the planet, radiation penetrated through their damaged hulls and killed crew by the score, but they had been prepared for what they unleashed and both ships stood and weathered the storm.

After it passed, space managed to seem just a little more silent than it ever had before, impossible though that may have been.

Alamo Shipyards,

Sol Trojan point

There was something decidedly unnatural, Sorilla felt, about being trapped in a 35-foot-tall bipedal behemoth while every voluntary muscle in her body was paralyzed by an induced form of REM atonia. She could fight through it, of course, there was no way she’d let anyone lock her into a beast like this if she couldn’t pop the hatch and be mobile on her own two feet in about ten seconds, but that would defeat the point of the exercise.

With several of her key neurotransmitters being blocked by the induction of what was, in effect, sleep paralysis, she found that her motion sickness had gone away, so that was an upside. The reason, unfortunately, was that she was now somewhat cut off from the implants in her extremities. What she was wired into, however, was the semi-autonomous robot she was piloting.

The Behemoth had a quantum core processor that put the one in her primary implant to shame, capable of solving thousands of mathematical problems at once while her own could maybe handle a few dozen. It needed every atom of that processing power, however, because the machine it was running was a brute in every sense of the word.

“Alright, Lieutenant, walk toward me.”

Sorilla looked around, finding the source of the voice using the optics of the mecha. The speaker was Raymond Hearse, a rather abrasive civilian contractor who had designed and built the machine she was piloting. He was an ass, but he knew his stuff, and while she had the chance, she intended to bleed him dry of whatever information she could.

Her first steps in the beast were hesitant, like a toddler stumbling away from its mother. Thankfully, unlike the toddler, however, she had a whole array of autonomous software backing her up and keeping her from falling on her ass in front of God and everyone.

Sorilla found that walking was surprisingly easy, as long as she stayed calm and didn’t fight past the paralysis. One foot in front of the other, balance dictated by signals from her own inner ear as well as the accelerometer in the bot itself. Piece of cake, as long as she had a few minutes in advance to work out how she intended to eat the cake.

Need to be faster. Instinctive. Damn it all, why did they tap me for this? A tanker would have been better than me. I’m a fucking operator for Christ’s sake.

For all her mental bitching, Sorilla made her way across the room with what might be charitably called a casual amble.

“Stop bitching to yourself about the assignment and focus on the job,” Hearse snapped at her, shaking Sorilla out of her reverie.

“How the fuck do you know what I’m thinking?” the eight-ton war machine snarled in a vaguely female voice that almost sounded entirely unlike Sorilla’s own.

Hearse rolled his eyes and looked her right in the primary optics. “Because you walked across the room like a pissed off woman who wants her boyfriend to know he did something wrong but won’t tell him what it was.”

The macha unconsciously cracked its knuckles, obviously sizing him up for a coffin, but Hearse only nodded and smiled.

“Better. You’re interfacing almost on an instinctive level now.”

Sorilla rolled her eyes as she rested in the chest of the big machine, about the only muscles she had full voluntary control over. Her mind and body were such a mishmash of conflicting emotions that she couldn’t get a handle on all of them, much to her irritation.

Worst of all, not that she’d tell this asshole, but she literally as horny as she’d ever been.

This contraption blows.

At least she didn’t have to endure that sensation and wonder if she was actually attracted to the prick. The sensation of sexual arousal was a side effect of the paralysis, which of course meant that she didn’t have to tell him shit because he designed the system and knew damned well what it did.

She was really starting to despise this assignment.

“Catch!”

Sorilla looked up in time to see a barrel flying in her direction, one of the big ones used to pack food for, like, fifty people. She twisted around and dove for cover automatically, hitting the deck in a rolling slide that brought her up on the other side of the room, her rifle appearing in her hand almost by magic.

It was only then that she looked around and saw about fifty-odd people cowering behind whatever cover they could, staring at her incredulously, and she remembered that she wasn’t just wearing her power armor at the moment.

“Not quite what I was aiming for,” Hearse admitted as he walked across the room in her direction, “but impressive maneuvering all the same. I think I have your baseline scans now. Park your machine so I can see if you scuffed the paint.”

Sorilla scowled at him as she slung her rifle over her shoulder, then flipped him the bird as she got to her feet again.

“Ah, better and better. Excellent manual dexterity,” he said cheerfully, turning his back on her and walking away.

Sorilla haloed him briefly with her targeting software, but eventually just walked over to the gantry park and settled the machine back into place. Once it was locked down, she popped the hatch and gritted her teeth as she pushed through the paralysis and pulled herself out the back hatch of the big machine.

“For the record,” she said, “this thing blows.”

No one paid her much mind.

*****

Nadine looked at the orders she’d just received and read them again.

It was the eighth time she’d done that, and they still hadn’t changed.

Damn reality.

A courier had come back from Hayden with news, and not one bit of it was good. Not really, at least. She supposed that the probable success of the new gravetic pulse devices might be considered good news, but since no one knew how long they would last once deployed, she’d leave that for history to decide.

The Terra and the Canada were missing in action, and it looked like Fairbairn wanted to go haring off after them, despite not having enough ships to cover Hayden. Of course, that meant that SOLCOM was going to drop the problem in her lap and expect that she take care of it.

Never mind that they’d only delivered her last ship, the Banshee, two days earlier. She didn’t even have full crews for TF-V yet and they wanted her deployed!

She could feel a migraine coming on, and all she’d done was open the damn orders.

Task Force Five was to report on station at Hayden before embarking on their assigned mission to attempt capture of an Alpha alien starship. During the course of that mission, they were to watch for any activity that might indicate alien movement toward Hayden and, if possible, curtail it where found.

Easier said than done.

All things considered, they were orders she actually agreed with and wanted to pursue, but the timing…the timing was no good. She was supposed to have two more weeks before they even began assembling the crews, damn it.

Her ships weren’t ready, her crews weren’t ready, and even her operator team wasn’t ready.

Command has to be out of their ever-loving minds on this one. Aida is good, but she needs more training time than this. Hell, her team hasn’t even been checked and certified yet. This is going to be such a goddamned nightmare.

The enemy was
so
inconsiderate.

“Terrance.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the steward asked from the doorway where he’d appeared almost instantly.

Honestly, sometimes she thought he slept there, other times she suspected that he teleported when called. Either way, he was too damned good to let out from her command anytime in the next hundred years or so.

“Call up my staff,” she said. “We need to have a planning session.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

His vocabulary left a little to be desired though. Always made her feel so damned old.

*****

Sorilla felt stiff as she made her way back to the testing facility, somewhat puzzled by the crowd she was working her way through to get there.

“Damn, what is going on with all these people?” she mumbled under her breath when she finally made it to the facility and stepped into the cavernous room.

It was a dry dock used for maintaining civilian ships, huge but not remotely large enough for the current generation ships of the line. That was why it had been relegated to a testing facility for her squad, as soon as she got them at any rate.

Sorilla was somewhat put out to discover that the crowd had apparently beat her to the facility and, more than that, were literally
crawling
over everything in it. Including her ‘bot.

“Hey, what hell?” she complained, glaring at the men who were loading the bot onto a shipping platform and strapping it down.

They couldn’t hear her, of course, so they just ignored her as she waved angrily at them and went about their business.

“Orders came through, Lieutenant.”

Sorilla twisted around, eyes on the speaker. She stiffened and saluted quickly when she saw his oak leaf.

“At ease,” he said, eyes on the big machine behind her. “I’m Commander Sear. I’ll be showing you to your berth on the Legendary.”

“I was told we weren’t shipping out for over a month,” Sorilla said as she stood there.

“We weren’t, now we are. Situation has changed, Lieutenant, time to adapt.”

“What happened?” Sorilla asked, concerned for the people she still knew on Hayden.

“Attempted assault on Hayden. It’s been stopped for now, but the threat remains,” Sear told her. “We’ll have to do the rest of your training on the move.”

She was about to complain that that was impossible, then she recalled that the Legendary had gravity and some areas almost as large as the space she was in. Okay, not really, but almost half the size. Maybe.

Should be enough, but they haven’t even given me my team yet!

“My team, sir?”

“They’re being mobilized on Earth now, should be here within 48 hours.”

Crap. They’re really moving us on this one.

“Understood.”

“Come with me, Lieutenant,” he said, gesturing back the way she’d come. “Time to board the Legendary.”

“Yes, sir,” Sorilla answered, moving to fall into step with him.

Sear paused, then glanced back. “Officially the admiral will convey this to you, but as of this morning, the papers came through. Here.”

Sorilla reached out and took what he was offering her, then blinked at it in surprise. It was a set of steel bars to replace the gold ones on her lapel.

“Can’t have a junior lieutenant commanding a mission of this import, Senior Lieutenant Aida,” he said. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Now, shall we?”

Sorilla nodded and the two left the former dry dock.

*****

Task Force Five consisted of fifteen second-generation Terra Class ships, unofficially called the Legendary Class everywhere but on their official papers. The USV Legendary was the first of the modified class, a ship that utilized third-generation gravity manipulation units and incremental improvements on everything they’d been able to learn from the reverse engineered technology they’d taken from the alien wrecks.

It was clear to the brass, however, that they were reaching the end of what they could learn from what they had, which was why they’d authorized the primary assignment of TF-V and assigned two special support ships to the order of battle.

It was tricky, building support ships for Terra Class ships. They had to be able to move damned near as fast as the ships they supported, but there wasn’t much time and they were critically short of available hulls. So SOLCOM leaned back on an old standby: They retrofitted a pair of older hulls that belonged to the Russian Federation. Not enough to give them the full 800-plus gravities of acceleration that a Terra or Legendary Class ship might reach, of course, but more than enough to give them the speed and power they’d need to do their jobs.