The Valhalla Call (Warrior's Wings) (20 page)

They had three solid blips on their gravity detection system, points in space-time that were warped when they shouldn’t be, and those marked the enemy ships as bright as the sun itself.

Their own approach couldn’t be masked long either, however, since the new sensors the Terra Class ships sported had been stolen from the very same class of Ghoulie ships that they were now stalking. Three Ghoulie ships lit off their drives before the humans got within five AUs of their position.

*****

“They see us coming.”

“Good,” Green said coldly. “That will make this all the more painful for them.”

The telemetry showed the two groups on an intercept course, locking horns at knife range in less than ten minutes, but Green had no intention of running a fair fight. He tapped in a new course and speed, one that would increase their approach from a 100-gravity acceleration to just under 800 as they closed to engage the enemy. It would push up the interception point by over seven minutes.

“Sending course corrections. Engage on my mark,” he ordered.

“Aye, sir. Corrections received.”

“Mark.”

“Course engaged!”

The three ships leapt forward, bolts of lightning through the black, and Green was determined to deliver the death blows from the hands of an angry thunder god himself.

“Make the Hammers ready to fire.”

“Hammers ready, sir!”

“All ships,” Green called over the squad-wide com, “fire.”

*****

The diving ships opened fire from just over a half an AU out, using gravity assist and EM kinetic launchers to put their weapons into space at a rate just over 0.6c relative to the enemy. The Hammers were flung true, going terminal only seconds after launch as they entered into a ballistic trajectory and crossed the 75 million kilometers that would take fifteen minutes.

The ships were still accelerating, however, and while the Hammers were certainly going faster, the closing speed of the two groups was going to be blindingly fast as it was.

*****

“Two minutes to impact.”

Green nodded, eyes on the plot. Wondering if the enemy ships would see the kinetic strike coming. They should, he decided, it didn’t seem likely that a simple hit like that would escape notice, but it would be telling if it did.

I wonder just how many of the speculations were accurate and how much was just blowing smoke?

“One minute.”

Green leaned forward, intent on finding out.

“Ten. Nine…”

The countdown proceeded as everyone watched, then passed, and they still watched.

Damn time delay.

Finally a splash of light erupted on their screen.

“Direct hit!”

Green slumped back in the seat, just a little grimer than he had been a moment ago.

Too easy. Looks like the speculations were right, these aren’t military-trained crews. No way one of my ships would get so damned blindered at inbound ships that they would miss a kinetic strike that obvious.

The trio of human ships fired again on close approach, destroying two of the three ships and crippling the other as they arced out of the system.

“Third target still moving, sir.”

“What acceleration?”

“ Eighty-three gravities.”

“Leave them,” Green grunted. “They’ll slow down anyone who stops to help them.”

“Aye, sir.”

*****

Major Washington stepped over a knee knocker and into the compartment, holding onto the doorframe to keep his extra-sized body from bouncing off the walls. The new acceleration on the Terra Class ships was plenty impressive, but he’d learned the hard way that there was a brief delay between when the America stepped on the gas and when the counter-gravity stepped in to keep him from being turned to jelly on the far wall.

Sometimes the delay went the other direction, which completely messed him up, and he was half convinced that the designers did it just to fuck with people’s heads.

That wasn’t his problem just then, however.

“Jack,” he said, nodding to the officer in charge of the shipboard Marines, Major Jack Kinney. “I hear you put the word out for me?”

“I did, Ton.” Jack gestured to a chair across from his desk. “Take a load off, you have got to get tired lugging around a body that big.”

Ton just grinned, white teeth shining against black skin. “I’m used to it.”

He took the seat, though, making the steel-frame chair groan as he settled his weight to it.

“I’ll bet. Looks like we’re going to have work for your team, Ton.”

“We’re ready.”

“No doubt. There is a reported outpost in the next system. Scouts located it weeks ago, but we never had the forces to dispatch it properly,” Jack said. “Boss wants your team to correct the oversight.”

“Don’t want to take it out with kinetic strikes?” Ton asked, mostly just curious. Time was of the essence, from what he could tell.

“We could do that, but you know how effective the Valve can be defending terrestrial targets,” Jack said.

Ton nodded. Valves installed on planets seemed to have greater range and power than the shipboard ones they’d encountered to date. No one was clear why, but it seemed likely a power issue, for which Ton figured everyone should just be damned grateful.

“More to the point, we don’t want it wiped out.”

“You don’t?” Ton asked, frowning.

“No. Take out the Valve, blow the holy hell out of most of the rest, but try and leave them with a transmitter working.”

Ton nodded, understanding. “You want to bleed off the enemy ships, get them dispatched out to help.”

“Exactly,” Jack confirmed. “The America will peel off from the rest, we’ll take a separate jump to the new target and insert you, then jump to this system here.”

Ton glanced at the star map, but he was only slightly literate when it came to stellar cartography. “Leaving us on-world?”

“For a short time. We want to hammer another suspect site while we have the chance. The main group will stay on course to the most likely place to pick up sign of the enemy, but we’re peeling ships off for small missions like this to try and sow some chaos and confusion in the enemy ranks.”

“Roger that.” Ton nodded. “Two of my favorite things.”

“The America will sweep back on a three-jump tour, pick you up, and then we’ll hightail it for a rendezvous with the task group here, where we expect the enemy ships to be,” Jack told him. “Clear?”

“Clear, and wilco. My team is ready.”

“Glad to hear it. Go brief them, I’ll send you a heads up before we jump.”

Ton nodded and got up.

“Ton.”

“Yeah, Jack?” the big man asked, turning back from the door.

“Good luck.”

Ton grinned. “Thanks.”

*****

USV Terra

Parath walked the corridors of the ship his people had captured, eyes noting the lines carefully as he compared it to his own.

The ship, the alien ship that it was, had many familiar notes.

It was familiar in many places, the aliens were surprisingly close to Parithalian standards, though they were somewhat shorter and stockier. Not so much as the Lucians, but noticeably so, and of course instead of the bluish color to the skin they were reddish or darker. One could see the glow of their life fluid under their skin, which was interesting, he found. Parithalians kept their fluids deeper for safety and camouflage from predators of the far past.

The engines, however—they stood out.

Parithalian ships had engines that were less than a quarter the size of the ones he was seeing. It had taken significant time for them to recognize that they
were
in fact engines. The engines in this ship stretched almost the entire length of the vessel, and it was
not
a small vessel.

He was reasonably knowledgeable in the mechanics of most common propulsion systems in use in the Alliance, but the one the aliens used was both antiquated and quite sophisticated. No Alliance species used anything similar, or had for hundreds of intervals at least. It bore some similarities to a few obsolete systems he knew, but the level of sophistication involved here was far beyond anything he’d ever studied.

“Master.”

Parath paused, glancing back. “Yes?”

“We have basic translations of their text now, the computers just finished pattern recognition on the alien computer systems.”

“Good. Anything of interest yet?”

“No, Master. Their remaining systems have large sections that are completely random.”

Parath snorted, unsurprised. “Remaining systems?”

“We’ve identified some of the destroyed equipment as computer cores. They are unrecoverable.”

“Very well done indeed,” Parath laughed as he complimented his counterpart.

“Master?”

“These are not fools, and they are not to be underestimated,” Parath said easily. “Have you enough to begin translating the lettering we see around the ship?”

“Yes, Master. We’ve identified the name of the ship as the…” The young officer looked down at the reader. “The United Solari Vessel Terra.”

Parath frowned. “I know what united means, and I know what vessel means, but what does Solari and Terra mean?”

“Terra seems to be a variant of the word for dirt, possibly in a separate language. We haven’t identified the word Solari yet.”

“They named the ship
dirt
?”

Parath had seen ships named sillier names in the past, but never a warship. He shook his head. “If you’re sure you have the translation correct?”

“We believe so.”

“Very well, send me a copy of the translation codes. I would like to read some of these postings, they appear to be important.”

“Yes, Master.”

USV Socrates

Outer Sol System

Alexi Petronov stood at the outer command deck, staring out over the looming maw of the Socrates’s hold.

One upon a time the ship had been massively compartmented; large spaces were actually something of a hated and dangerous thing to have on a starship. He was an old enough hand to cringe at the knowledge that the entire hold could, in fact, be pressurized. The idea of how much atmosphere they would lose if the ship were to be breached in that gaping area made him sick to his stomach.

Air wasn’t as valuable as it once was, however. They had the capacity now to save most of the atmosphere even in the event of a large breach. All they had to do was turn up the gravity, actually, a three- or four-gravity pull would make things hard on the crew, but it would keep the atmosphere close enough to be mostly recovered as well.

What was lost could be easily be replenished from the ice that was plentiful in practically every system that humans were interested in.

It still went against his nature, however, to have that much space open on his ship.

Deep down, a hundred meters below him, was another thing that he wasn’t particularly pleased about. Alexi was a pacifist at heart, though he didn’t take the philosophy as far as some extremists, so the idea of a weapons system being tested on his ship made him cringe in more ways than the obvious.

It was a very interesting system, though, that he would admit.

Bipedal robots had been done, they were commonplace in Japan now, serving in many buildings as guides, helpers, and various other things. Most other places hadn’t adopted them to that degree, though he understood that some places in America had taken to them quite hotly. In Russia, if you saw one, it was usually with a tourist, in his experience.

Those were human-sized, however, not this monstrosity.

What made it stand out—actually made his skin crawl as he watched it through the magnified screen projected on the thick transluminum bulkhead in front of him—was how smoothly it moved. It was like a living thing, only clearly not.

I believe they call it the…what is it? Uncanny Valley Effect, yes
, Alexi thought as he watched the lieutenant put herself and her new squad through their paces. The squad, they were clumsy, blocky, as he expected of a robot. They did not bother him.

It was her.

She moved with a fluid grace that could only be a living thing, but did it in a machine that clearly was anything but. It reached deep into him, he found, and plucked at some ancient fear of revenants and mystical golems that could not be controlled.

It was creepy, there was no other word for it, and he’d given up looking and chosen to be content with that word alone.

Creepy.

It suited.

*****

Sorilla had parked her bot, mech, whatever it was they wanted to call it. Perched on its shoulder, she watched the members of her “team” work on getting their acts together in their own machines. The thirty-five-foot beasts made for a fascinating recreating of the Three Stooges when put under the control of several of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine’s best, much to her visible disgust and private amusement. No international force this time, which was curious given the nature of the people usually sent to SOLCOM, but it turned out that no one had any men to spare at the moment so they at least gave her people who had experience working together.

She had three of each, much to her everlasting joy, she supposed, or rather, she hoped. Navy SEALs, Detachment One, Parajumpers, and Army Rangers. Their jackets were all good, but they were operators in name only as far as she was concerned. This was their first op in deep space, though they’d all done the training, thankfully. She didn’t want to go through a mission like this with total greenhorns, but she did wish that the brass had seen fit to give her a few deep space hands to walk on other side of the children until they learned how to be good war elephants.

Unfortunately, experienced spacers were few and far between at the moment; most of them died early on in the war and, honestly, there had never been all that many to begin with. So that left her babysitting the children until they learned to walk without bumping into each other and winding up sprawled across the ground.

Sorilla sighed.
It’s a good thing that I am a teacher, or I’d have shot them already.

Her eyes flicked down and to the right as her HUD blinked and caught her eye, leading her to give an exasperated sound as she dropped off the shoulder of the bot and walked across the floor.