The Valhalla Call (Warrior's Wings) (22 page)

Sorilla’s smile went away, but she nodded.

“Sorry, I was not thinking,” he said.

Sorilla held up a hand. “Don’t apologize. I remember them because they mattered to me. Every time someone brings them up, I’m grateful for the reminder.”

“Da, still, I should have been more circumspect. I know better,” Alexi said, “or I should at least. I am captain, my job is to know better.”

Sorilla laughed softly. “Yes well, we’re none of us perfect.”

“Da. Is true.”

The two didn’t speak again after that, both just looking out the transluminum barrier at the great vertical gardens beyond, and sat in companionable silence until the captain’s wrist com chimed and he had to leave.

*****

Problems resolved, the ships of Task Force Five made one last holding-pattern-based turn around the jump point, maneuvered tightly into their final formation, and then accelerated into the point and jumped to FTL and out of the Sol System.

*****

Aion Facility

Admiral Mathew watched as the ships on his plot reached the jump point and vanished in a burst of signal-scrambling energy. It took a few seconds for the telemetry feed to settle, and he turned away from the plot and back to his desk, where a face was waiting on the screen.

“They’ve jumped,” he said.

“Good,” the answer came back tiredly over the short-range FTL com.

“I still think we should have told her everything.”

“There is too much at risk, Admiral. You know that as well as I, that was one thing we could not tell Admiral Brooke.”

Mathew sighed, but nodded. “Yes, sir, Mr. President.”

“We have another month, two at the outside. Prepare your plans to shut down Aion.”

“Yes, sir.”

The tired-looking man on the screen stared off into the distance for a long moment, then spoke again. “We do things in the name of the greater good that can be called nothing short of evil. I wonder if it is really so bad to choose the right thing once in a while?”

“Sir?”

“Nothing, Admiral. You have your orders.”

“Yes, sir.”

The screen went black.

OPCOM Squad, On Planetary Approach, unnamed world

“Spread formation, radio silence from this point on.”

Washington’s team responded without further communication as they entered the atmosphere of the planet below, feeling the first slight buffets of real turbulence through their armor with over 150 kilometers left to fall.

The fourth planet of the system had no name besides the letter “d” tacked onto the number and letter identification of the star it orbited, but it was a surprisingly hospitable system by human standards. Long-range analysis registered a higher oxygen content than Hayden, which was higher again than Earth, and a gravity rating of about 1.4, Earth standard, but that was well within the range that SOLCOM would consider as a prime location for a colony.

The fact that it was three jumps deep into what was now disputed territory was a black mark against it, of course, but more importantly was the fact that the Ghoulies had put a Valve installation just like the one on Hayden smack dab in the middle of the major northern continental mass.

Time to remove one of those black marks,
Washington thought to himself as he kicked up and nosed into a deeper dive, aiming to keep his speed as long as he could.
I really hope the eggheads are right about how these bastards track us.

They were riding the coattails of a meteor shower, literally falling through the burning tail streaks as they began to hit the thicker atmosphere on the way down. Pebbles and debris were bouncing off his armor as Ton angled in to follow one of the smaller ones down. He had to be careful; some of those chunks of rock could go up like a pocket nuke when they hit lower atmo, and it would be better for him not to be too close when that happened.

His HUD was silent, running on passives as he cut into the deeper atmosphere and snapped his arms and legs out. He slowed fast, leaving the meteor trail as the big rock continued down. At eighty miles up, he disengaged his reentry armor, blowing the excess material off and deploying airfoils.

Ton banked left, putting himself on a perpendicular course from the meteor shower, now sacrificing speed for lateral travel.

He’d been moving for less than five minutes when a white flash from behind him lit up the sky. He didn’t have to count off many seconds for the shockwave to slam into him either.

Cut that too damned close.

Meteors that made it to deeper atmo, like the ones they’d followed in, were rare on Earth but less so here. This system still had big chunks of rock floating around and huge debris fields in the outer system because there hadn’t been any big gas giants here to fly around sweeping up the mess from the early chaos of solar development.

The fact that there was a world with life on it was almost shocking, but for the odd orbit the world followed. It turned around its parent sun on an eccentric path, well off the system elliptic, and was only exposed to the hazards of the majority of the system twice per orbit.

It was still a shooting gallery, but usually only small stuff from what the Fleet projections could tell.

With the meteor show now beyond him, Ton gave up altitude for speed as he dove for the deck with legs and arms tucked in tight. He broke the sound barrier thirty seconds in, but his measly sonic boom wouldn’t be noticed after that thunderclap, and below him he could now make out some of the landscape he was diving into.

Another flash behind him lit the sky. Ton didn’t look back. He just had to hope there wouldn’t be any that came closer.

Get low, get fast. The enemy Valves can only track so quickly in this close, even if they do see me.

Tracking a fast-moving target became exponentially harder as the range decreased, since you had less time to react and target. But by the same token, he was moving a lot slower in atmosphere than a ship in space would be, so he wanted to get below their detection threshold as quickly as possible.

Without active scans from his armor and HUD, he could only hope that his team was doing the same. They knew their job, though; he’d trained them as best he could. Time to let them get a move on without training wheels.

He could make out the trees on a nearby mountain as the spire of rock came rushing up at, and then past, him. Ton snapped out his arms and legs to inflate the airfoils, turning speed into lateral movement again as he rocketed down a mountain valley at just over the local speed of sound.

Proc!
he subvocalized.
Go active!

His HUD lit up as the LIDAR mount on his armor painted the valley he was racing through, plotting his course for him. Banking hard to the left, he cut a sharp turn and kicked up a puff of snow as he cleared a tight outcropping.

He was almost on autopilot now, his course being dynamically mapped by the computer. It knew where he had to go, so he was counting on it getting him close enough to meet up with the squad, otherwise it would be one hell of a long walk home when it was all over.

There was a brief buffet as he dropped below the speed of sound, his remaining sonic boom starting an avalanche in his wake as he left the snow behind and began to follow a mountain stream down to the river delta they’d chosen as their meeting place.

So far, so good. Should be below their detection threshold now.

The big Marine took a couple slow breaths, intentionally willing his heart to slow a bit. He hadn’t been looking forward to being squished into a singularity, extruded through the tidal vortex, and then blasted across the face of the planet as his component atoms were converted into energy.

That just sounded like all kinds of unpleasant.

*****

USV America

While the Major and his team were infiltrating the planetary target, the America had another mission in mind. It was a dead end system, so called because the local jump points connected only to one star, so ships could only enter and leave the system through that single point in space-time.

In theory, at least. Admiral Fairbairn was well aware that the alien technology allowed them to negotiate jump points that humans still considered incredibly risky or even impossible. There was no way to know for sure if the aliens might be able to come in from another direction, but for the moment that was really quite irrelevant.

A previous scout had reported the existence of a small local base in the system, but SOLCOM hadn’t had the ships to spare for an assault, particularly not for a system that humans had little interest in. Fairbairn rather felt that things had changed now, though he wasn’t looking to capture the system. No, not at all. He had something rather different in mind.

“We’ve located a gravity anomaly on the second planet. It is consistent with the reports from the scouts and our profile on enemy forward bases.”

Fairbairn nodded. “Tell the captain that Olympus is a go.”

“Aye, Admiral. Olympus is a go.”

*****

“Captain, message from flag. Olympus is a go.”

Pete Green nodded absently, having expected that since they’d arrived in system. He finished making a few last second calculations then sent the numbers to his weapons officer.

“Chuck, could you run those and make sure they’re good?” he asked. “If they check out, shoot them over to the Germany.”

“Aye aye, Skipper.”

He’d been trying to put together a firing pattern that would both saturate the enemy defenses and also use up a minimum of their onboard munitions. They weren’t going to waste Hammers on a planetary target, though it seemed counterintuitive that targets in an atmosphere didn’t need the same level of punch as a starship.

Within an atmosphere,
close
counted when you were talking ship-to-ship and ship-to-surface weapons. In space, however, without something to transmit the shockwave, not so much.

“Looks good, Skipper,” Charles Grimm said a moment later. “Sending to the Germany.”

That only took a few seconds before a confirmation tone sounded, letting them know that their cohort was prepared.

“Initiate Firing Pattern Olympus.”

“Firing pattern initiated.”

Iron spikes launched from the main tubes didn’t have the same punch as the more advanced Hammers, but at significant fractions of light speed they would do a hell of a job on anything they hit. The America and the Germany put twenty apiece into space, staggering their rate of fire so that no single shot from the enemy Valve would stand a chance of taking out more than a couple of them.

They had limited data on how well the enemy technology handled rapid-fire engagements, but so far as they’d been able to determine there were distinct limits to how quickly a Valve could target and warp space-time in a given timeframe.

Time to put that to the test.

Green eyed the plot for a moment before he stood up. “Call the relief watch and get everyone some grub or coffee.”

“Aye, sir, relief watch.”

He watched the men and women swap places smoothly before he excused himself from the bridge and headed across the hall for a cup himself. They’d launched their staggered burst from hours out; it would be almost three hours before the burst struck and almost another hour on top of that before the light got back to them to tell the story of the hit.

The so called “Rods from God” strike, or bolts from Olympus in this case, was a standoff tactic that wouldn’t work particularly well against a prepared military installation. He knew that human stations would track and terminate each spike before they got within three light seconds of a valuable asset.

The aliens, however, didn’t appear to be military, if the theory was correct, and so far he had to admit that it seemed to be holding up. They were, most likely, an advance recon or even civilian installation. Probably government-backed, to be sure, and certainly combatants by humans standards…

Using WMDs puts them right the hell in the category of priority targets, that’s for damned sure.

However, they seemed to primarily be equipped for defense against natural events, not coordinated military strikes.

That was a psychological and tactical blind spot that Green fully intended to leverage to his maximum advantage for as long as he possibly could, because he knew without the shadow of a doubt that the Ghoulies had to have real military out there somewhere, and when they finally showed up, the game was going to change.

Again.

*****

USV Terra

Master of ships Parath stood over the clear floor of the observation and command deck, the length of the alien ship falling away beneath him into the distant darkness of space. He rather appreciated this particular aspect of the alien design, though he was also noting it as a likely target of opportunity in further engagements.

I expect that they likely seal this off during battle, however; it may be a waste of munitions.

Clearly it wasn’t the battle command station of the ship—they’d located that quite quickly once resistance had been put down.

It was, however, a majestic location from which to command the normal operations of a star vessel.

“Master?”

“Hmm?” Parath half turned, only slightly focusing on the voice.

“We’ve completed the first round of translations. The computers now have the aliens’ language encoded.”

“Ah, excellent.” Parath nodded. “And the command structure?”

“Their Master of Ships is known as a Captain.” The man said the unfamiliar word. “On this ship, that would be Captain Pierce Richmond. We do not yet know which of the prisoners this Pierce Richmond is. His data files were among those destroyed by enemy sabotage when we took over.”

“Of course they were.”

“Oh, and you wished to know about the lighter colored uniforms, Master?”

“Yes?”

“Those are what the aliens term ‘Marines’.”

“Marines? An aquatic species?” Parath asked, confused.

“No, it appears to be a traditional title. From an ocean-based military force,” the aide said simply. “They are, as you guessed, ship’s security and the primary assault force during ground missions.”