The Valhalla Call (Warrior's Wings) (32 page)

She hesitated again, checking the map again. The problem was she knew that her map was faulty, and there were just too many ambush points. She honestly wasn’t sure why they hadn’t come at her team harder already. They came heavy, fielding the Titans specifically because they expected heavy resistance.

The halls were so quiet, it was downright eerie. The single Ghoulie she’d stomped was hardly what she’d call an effective defense force.

The squad continued forward, pausing at branching corridors and clearing them deliberately before moving on.

One more branch and we’re there. Where the hell are they?

They slowed to a crawl, putting their focus on every scanner they had as they moved. Sorilla led the team, reaching the next corridor branch, leading with her gun. She paused, signaled back to the others to provide cover, then stepped out and pivoted to sweep the corridor.

That was when the ceiling opened up and a thirty-foot Golem dropped through right on top of her head.

On approach to USV Terra

The hull of the Terra came out of nowhere. One moment nothing but open space, and the next, Ton caught a glimpse of the white ceramic tiles that lined the ship’s hull. Then there was an instant of crushing pain, blackness, and a mad moment of pure chaos before he could even begin thinking again.

When it all passed, Ton moved gingerly as his HUD rebooted and he felt his armor come back online. The massive acceleration had blown out all of his calibrations, and he watched it reboot and slowly bring his armor, optics, and computing capabilities back online.

As soon as he had movement and visual capability again, Ton found himself struggling out of a mass of synthetic sheets like a parachute. The fabric had made up the air bag used to keep him from splattering on the Terra’s hull, and he was glad it worked, but it was a pain to untangle himself from.

Unbelievable. It actually worked.

He hadn’t bounced, thankfully. Not only would that probably have killed him, but it would have put him farther away from the Terra if he hadn’t. Instead he found himself within a few feet of the hull, drifting in south along the ship as the gravity of the core tugged him down. Kicking away the last of the fabric, Ton retrieved a grappler from his kit and aimed it at the ship, firing it as soon as the system gave him the green light.

The material on the grappler was designed to work in a vacuum, and it slapped onto the ceramic and vacuum welded itself to the material in an instant. Ton just had to reel the big ship in or, more accurately, reel himself into the big ship.

I went fishing one time and a caught a fish
this
big
, Ton snickered at the thought.

Once on the hull, he adjusted the line from the gun and let it pay out as he began to rappel down the length of the ship toward the shuttle bay near the prow.

This is officially the strangest thing I’ve ever done,
Ton thought as he pushed off from the hull and let the gravity draw of the ship’s core pull him down.
Whoever heard of rappelling in space?

He was about halfway to the shuttle bay when the first IFF icons began to appear green on his HUD, showing that he wasn’t the only member of the team on time and on mission.

*****

USV America

“Send the signal to the Terra.”

“Aye, Captain, signal sent.”

Captain Green nodded, refocusing his attention on the tactical situation at hand. The enemy mostly consisted of Delta ships, and he knew that they were fighters but they didn’t have gravity Valves, which would mean a fast and furious but largely conventional engagement. The armor on his ship would take a beating, but it was designed to defeat weapons that were largely like those the Delta used, in effect if not in form.

“How long to zero/zero turnover?”

“Three more minutes, Captain. We’re burning delta-V at over eight hundred Gees, but it takes time to burn off that kind of speed.”

Green nodded. He knew that.

“Lock weapons onto the enemy ships and stand by to fire when we have tactical firing solutions.”

“Aye, sir, weapons locked.”

In their glancing pass, they’d raked the big Delta ships with Hammers, but had in turn been torn up by plasma blasts. Almost every ship of his force had missing armor panels, blown out in an effort to defeat the plasma blasts. They’d done their job, but now those ships had holes in their armor, chinks through which they could be hurt.

But so do our enemies. Let’s see who finds the chinks in their opponents’ armor first.

*****

USV Terra

Captain Richmond opened his eyes, a signal lighting them up with a green glow. “It’s time.”

He sent a return signal and then began to coordinate with the other programmers among his little network of hacker prisoners. They had control over a tiny fraction of the ship’s systems, but what they did have was enough to put a serious crimp in the enemy’s day, especially if they weren’t acting alone.

They had to be subtle, which was going to be a challenge in some cases. It was hard to be subtle when you didn’t have all the fine control you might wish for, and it was almost impossible when some of your best coders were Marines, but they’d manage.

Locked in cells, the crew of the Terra set the digital dogs on their captors as they prepared to seize their moment when it came.

*****

Ton came to a stop by the closed shuttle bay doors, hanging on the long line he’d hooked to his waist, and logged into the local systems through his implants. It didn’t take him long to notice the damage the captain and crew had done to their central systems, but he’d expected that and brought along a supply of scripts for the job.

A motion caught his attention from the corner of his eyes, and he glanced over to see a suited figure running in his direction along the hull of the Terra, moving along the arc of a pendulum described by the length of his own line. His IFF was quickly read and identified as Crow, so Ton turned back to his job as the former SEAL grabbed a maintenance handgrip near him and retied himself there.

“What’s the sitrep, boss?” Crow asked, reaching over to touch his shoulder so he could use an inductive com.

“We’re on schedule, as long as everyone turns up.”

“I’ve got IFF hits on everyone except Korman,” Crow answered. “He’s still off the grid.”

“Damn,” Ton muttered. “I hope we can find him when this is over.”

“Let’s hope we’re still here to look when this is over,” Crow suggested. “Team is closing on us. We good to go?”

Ton glanced around to see others dropping in from above or running around the ship the way Crow had and nodded. “Yes. I’ve cracked the door codes. Just waiting for confirmation from the inside. Get the others ready.”

“Right.” Crow dropped away from him, swinging over to the closest of the team to share the news.

Ton stayed focused. He knew that it was going to be a rough one when those doors opened. They couldn’t bring heavy weapons, so they were going to have to try and get to one of the assault shuttles and hope that the onboard armory was intact, otherwise it was going to be one quick boarding party.

His HUD pinged as he got a response from the system, and Ton smiled under his helm. He looked around, noting that his team was close and paying attention, so he hit them with a short-range pulse.

“Stay clear of the doors and hold on,” he ordered. “Time to crack this sucker open.”

*****

Sentinel Prime Kris walked the halls of the alien ship as he had been doing for some time. It was a chance to get a real insight into how the enemy really thought. You could learn a great deal just by how someone designed a military ship.

The Ross were very flat, in his mind. It was amusing to him that a species that many supposed experienced the universe in so vastly different a way would build their ships according to a bland design that felt more like something one might see from a particularly boring private business.

Perhaps they experience the design differently, only the Ross know.

The Pari liked open spaces. Their ships had large open areas that were a distinct weakness in the event of battle, but other than that, they designed tight and well. Their ships were known for being among the fastest and most maneuverable in the Alliance, if not the most heavily armed.

His own species, Lucians, held that particular distinction. However, Lucians didn’t build large ships as a rule. While there was a small fleet, normally assigned to defending Luc, by and large Lucians went out into the galaxy on the ships of other species. Space flight was not a comfortable thing for Lucians, and few sought it out except from necessity or duty.

This species, these…humans…they were different again.

He’d been on many ships from many Alliance species but had never encountered a ship quite like this “Dirt.” It was armored, thick and layered, even inside. Constructed largely of cheap iron and steel, likely acquired from mineral resources floating in space near the construction slip, if he were to guess. It was an inexpensive way to build a ship, using materials considered obsolete by most Alliance species, but it had the virtue of pure mass behind it.

There was something to be argued for having armor thicker than most ground-based
bunkers
he’d ever encountered, even if it wasn’t the most advanced material around. Cheap, thick, and almost impossible to destroy with any single weapon, barring the Ross super weapons, he supposed. The only problem he could imagine was that pushing that much sheer mass around would require immense power, but apparently they’d solved that.

Honestly, Kris had wanted to flee the ship when he got an answer to that question.

Most species built reaction-based thrust devices at some point in their history. However, it was largely uncommon in Alliance space because the reaction mass required was usually too extreme to be practical. There was also the fact that you were sitting on a bomb that you were praying would only explode in the direction you wanted it to. Kris knew explosives, and while he knew them well enough not to fear them, he also knew them well enough to respect the forces involved.

The use of
negative
matter to actually propel a starship? That was almost as insane as the Ross and their world-destroying weapons.

Thankfully the Pari engineers had worked out quickly that the ship didn’t
store
negative matter, it generated particles on command.

Kris shook his head as he stepped onto a personnel lift and hit the command for the lower deck where he was to inspect next.

The species was paranoid and fearless, exactly the sort of combination one preferred not to have on your enemies’ side. They’d proven that already, fighting far superior technology to a bitter standstill, and Kris had to respect them for it.

He actually expected that in a few dozen full intervals they would likely be considered for Alliance membership. The war couldn’t last forever, after all, and he’d seen it happen many times before. The alliance absorbed what it couldn’t force to submit, political will being stronger than military might. If they were not annexed this time, they would be approached diplomatically and a long process of trust-building would happen.

Repairing the damage done by the war would require work, but it was straightforward as well. Time would handle most of it, few species had generational memories. Depending on how long-lived these people were, two generations should do it before an official approach with an Alliance membership offer was made. In the meantime, occasional offers of help to ships and people caught in bad spots would be made, and an effort to open trade.

It was all rather dirty to his mind, he preferred a straight fight, but it would work well enough.

After that…well, then they would slowly be bent to the Alliance until the species really didn’t know any other way.

He had seen it before, and would again.

The lift slid to a stop and the doors began to open, pulling him from his thoughts as Kris took a step toward the opening. The large open deck beyond was lined with ships, and he could see his Sentinels milling near some of them. Kris would have to beat some discipline back into them, he decided as he spotted that.

His arm and leg were through the partially opened door when the heavy slabs of steel abruptly reversed direction with startling speed. Kris threw himself back with as much force as he could and slammed into the back wall as the big doors slammed shut with a clank that shook the air.

What in the name of the abyss?

He accessed his commlink. “This is Prime. What happened to the doors around the lower ship deck?”

He waited but aside from some confused mumbling got nothing out of the people on the other side of the link.

“Damn fools,” he muttered, punching the commands into the alien system again, trying to get the doors open himself.

Nothing happened, of course, but then, he hadn’t really been expecting anything.

Now why would the doors seal automatically like that?

Kris stiffened, an ugly thought occurring to him, and he keyed into the commlink instantly. “This is Prime. Are the other doors around the ship bay sealed as well…? Well, find out!”

Seconds ticked by interminably before the answer came back and his cool blood chilled even further.

“All sentinels, this is Prime Kris! Prepare for assault! If you’re in the ship bay, get into cover! Get into cover!”

A burst of noise blanked out his com, but not before Kris heard a whistling sound rush over it.

*****

The rush of air and debris roared past them as the shuttle bay explosively depressurized. Ton spotted a few kicking bodies blown past into the black and winced under his armor.

Better a bullet than that.

He didn’t have time to think about it, however, because as soon as the rush died out, he nodded to the team and they kicked off the ship and let out their lines. Because of the peculiarities of the gravity system used in the Terra, they were pulled down but also
in
to the bay because the core was located just below that point and so they experienced the gradient much stronger than on upper decks.