The Valhalla Call (Warrior's Wings) (34 page)

“You got it, boss.”

They continued to fall back until they reached the spot Sorilla had been calculating on and came to a stop.

“This is the place. Carson, you and me are going for a walk. Everyone else, hold this position!” Sorilla ordered.

“Roger that.”

Sorilla dropped her bot to a kneeling position and hit the hatch release, air hissing around her as the pressure equalized. She pulled herself up out of the bot, pulling rifle and pistols from their slots, and dropped to the ground just as Chief Carson landed a few dozen feet away.

They looked to the slightly smaller-than-human door about thirty meters away and nodded silently as they broke from cover, racing through the feet of giants toward the door that would hopefully take them to the Land of Lilliputians.

*****

USV Legendary

A cheer went up as one of the alien ships finally gave up the ghost, unable to survive the constant hammering from the Valkyrie ships. Roberts shut it down fast, however, as they had to keep moving to try and avoid the alien particle-beam weapon.

It wasn’t an easy thing to do; the beam was a light-speed weapon but highly lethal. You couldn’t detect it coming until it struck, by all available data, and that was too damned late. Just the coronal radiation was enough to raise levels inside their armor to dangerous heights. The Legendary’s medics had been handing out iodine pills like they were candy, and the maintenance crew had a high priority request to clean the outside of the hull in the hopes of washing some of the residual radiation away.

Like I’m going to let anyone go outside while we’re in a frigging battle,
Roberts scowled darkly. Of course, he was well aware that another near hit like the blast that took out the Olympus and he may not have a choice.

There were still two of the warships active, including the one they
weren’t
allowed to shoot at, plus several of the smaller escorts. Luckily only the larger warships seemed to be equipped with the weapon they had tentatively classified as a manufactured gamma ray burster, otherwise Valkyrie were all too likely to be summoned by that last Valhalla Call right here and now.

As it stood, light-speed weapons of this nature had one devastating flaw when fighting at significant stellar distances. More than a light second or so and you had to not only be precise with your attack, you also had to be
precognitive
. Ships moving at the speeds the Valkyrie were capable of could be thousands of kilometers away in the span of a second, often more than that. Granted, their maneuvering variance was much smaller, but even hundreds of kilometers made for a difficult target to hit with a weapon that simply
had
to be focused to remain lethal.

That was why every ship humans used to date always had guided weapons on board—originally the missiles of the old Los Angeles and Cheyenne Class ships, and now the Hammers themselves. Granted, they didn’t offer a
massive
level of course correction, but even a couple degrees or so could be the difference between success and ultimate failure.

It almost made him wonder by the enemy didn’t use such weapons, but the truth was he just had to look at the Legendary’s magazine stores to know the answer to that.

If we don’t end this soon, ammo could become a serious issue.

Unlimited ammo concealed many a flaw in a weapon system, in his opinion.

“Reverse our course, circle back the other way with a fifteen degree up tilt,” he said walking over to the helm. “Keep them guessing.”

“Aye, Captain, vectoring back around, fifteen degrees up.”

Of course “up” meant little in space, so SOLCOM had established “up” to be anything that brought a ship unto a path that moved along the Z axis of the Galactic plane. The command brought the big vectored thrusters of the VASIMR drive into play, powerful magnetic fields twisting and manipulating the ship’s main engine power as it, in turn, twisted and turned in space to come about.

Valkyrie followed their lead, but each ship put a variation in their course, throwing some more spanners into the enemy’s targeting works. So far they’d managed to keep the enemy from turning the Gravity Valves into weapons, and mostly managed to avoid the enemy beam weapon, but Roberts knew that was just a matter of time. They needed to end this fight, and fast.

Lieutenant, get it done or get the hell off that ship. We can’t keep playing cat and mouse with these things. We’re not the damn cats in this equation!

*****

The door was solid for the thickness of the material they’d used, but few things stood up to a breaching charge. The shaped explosives blew a man-sized hole in the door, leaving Sorilla plenty impressed that it was still hanging on its brackets as she stepped through with her rifle leading the way.

“This is the strangest ship design I’ve ever seen,” she said as she covered the smaller corridor while Carson followed suit.

“Been in a lot of alien ships, have we?”

Sorilla snorted. “You damn well know what I mean. Who builds a damn ship designed for thirty-foot-tall rock men and four-foot-tall Ghoulies?”

Carson shrugged, the SEAL following her as they made their way up the corridor toward what should be the command deck. “Maybe the Golems are more than we thought?”

“Have an idea on that?” Sorilla asked, eyes forward as she put her rifle to her shoulder and nudged the power all the way up. The little Ghoulies themselves were soft targets, but it was entirely possible that the smaller Goblin-type machines could be crawling through these corridors.

“Well, it just seems to me that we’ve been thinking that they’re machines, right?” Carson asked as he followed, turning often to get a good scan of the path from which they come.

“Yes, so?”

“So maybe they’re not. What if they’re another species? Species Gamma, if you will?”

Sorilla considered it, shaking her head. “People have torn those things apart. We don’t even know how they move, there’s no sign of anything anyone could point to as living.”

“More things on heaven and Earth, ma’am. I’m just saying, everything about this ship looks like a partnership,” Carson said as the reached the end of the corridor and both stopped in shock.

Beyond them was an immense space, far larger than they’d seen the estimates for. Their suits’ telemetry was going insane as they tried to take it in, and Sorilla felt her stomach curling up and trying
die
in her belly.

“Oh my lord,” Carson mumbled.

The entire space
crawled
with Ghoulies, Golems, and Goblins, but that wasn’t the shock. It was the fact that it had to be larger than the size of the
ship
itself! They felt like they were standing on the edge of eternity, staring into the abyss.

And the abyss was, indeed, staring back.

*****

Space and time are two dimensions of the same single universal truth.

Or, perhaps, it is more accurate to say that they are as many as six dimensions of the same truth, depending on how you calculate such things.

One can move up and down, left and right, forward and backward through space. So it is of little surprise, to those who take a moment to ponder such things, that all of those dimensions exist in time as well. Forward and backward, left and right, these are easy enough concepts for a human to understand. Time travel and alternate realities are simple enough to ponder, if rather difficult to achieve or even prove.

Up and down, however, those are confusing dimensions when applied to time.

For those such as the Ross’El, however, and their allies…their
true
allies, those dimensions were as simple as primary colors and shapes to a child. If anything, it had become clear to many of the Ross that they were in fact losing touch with the dimensional understanding of the more limited species. What motivated those often proved bewildering and totally incomprehensible to the Ross’El and their partners.

That this was so was considered a minor loss at best for those who plumbed secrets of the Universe beyond the ken of more limited species.

At times this was a minor conceit, an appellation of little note, but there were times when the Ross…if pressed, would admit that it was a major blind spot in their social vision.

The trouble with blind spots was the fact that, by definition, you never saw them coming.

*****

“
Madre de Dios
,” Sorilla swore under her breath as she stood on the edge of an infinite impossibility and tried to figure out what she was seeing and how in the name of all that existed she was supposed to deal with it.

“Tesseract,” Carson muttered in turn. “I never thought I’d see the day…”

Tesseract. She knew the word. Anyone who calculated high level math was at least slightly familiar with the concept. A space larger on the inside than on the out.

What she didn’t know was how the hell she was going to find and disable the main command systems in this impossibly large space, not in the time she had available. She shook her head, so stunned that, had the enemy tried to kill them then, she doubted that she would be able to do much about it.

“It’s too big. We’ll never find it in time,” she mumbled, shock lacing her every breath and word.

Carson was silent for a time, eyeing the mass of people or things he was seeing. “Are you calling an abort, Lieutenant?”

That shocked her from her reverie. Sorilla blinked and considered. It was her first mission in command; to abort was unthinkable! And yet…this was certainly a reason to do the unthinkable, if any such reason were to be found. They were facing an overwhelming force. She could see thousands of enemies just from where she was standing…

Sorilla stopped, her mind blanking for a second.

Why aren’t they attacking? They don’t even seem to see us? What is going
on
here?

“No,” she said slowly. “No abort.”

“What’s the plan, ma’am?”

“Hold your position,” she ordered. “Give me a moment.”

“Ma’am?”

“Just hold.”

Carson didn’t say anything more as Sorilla broke from position and began to move deeper into the tesseract. He blinked when she vanished from sight and started forward, but her voice came clearly over his suit.

“I said
hold.
” Her hand came down on his shoulder.

Carson damn near jumped out of his skin, suit and all, as he spun about only to find that she was nowhere in sight. “L…lieutenant?”

“I see it, Carson,” she said, her voice sounding…light and amused. “No. Not see. I feel it. Can’t you feel it?”

“Feel what, ma’am?”

“The Universe, Carson. The Universe itself.”

For the Navy man that he was, Carson knew when he was well out of his depth, and now was the time. “Lieutenant, you’re sounding a little crazy, ma’am.”

Her laugh filled his com. “Oh, Carson, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Watch
this
.”

“Ma’am? Ma’am!” Carson started to panic.
Nothing
good was going to come from his boss laughing and saying the equivalent of, “Hey, y’all, watch this.”

Too bad for the SEAL, he didn’t get a say.

*****

Sorilla was walking through a labyrinth she couldn’t see. She could
feel
it, however. The changes in the fabric of space-time resulted in subtle, and occasionally not-so-subtle, changes in the gradient of local gravity, and her implants were designed specifically to pick those up.

Her computer might have been able to map them, eventually, but she didn’t have time for that, so Sorilla blanked her optical sensors and walked. Her HUD showed motion, threats, all manner of augmented information, but not the light that would lie to her. She stepped around a curve in the continuum and out a hole carved in space and then around the circumference of a globe not much more in diameter than she was tall.

It was utterly illogical, but through it all she made her way to the center where the gradients peeked and the tidal force of gravity was strongest, and then she stopped and once more used her optics to look around.

Sneaky. The command center was here all the time. Was that really a tesseract? Or just a mask? Is there more here than I thought, or less than anyone realizes?

It didn’t matter. She made sure everything was logged as she drew out the shaped charges from her satchel and placed them on the console as she checked around. Thousands of Ghoulies, Goblins, and Golems wandered around her, and none of them looked her direction at all. She didn’t know what to make of it, couldn’t decide if it was reality or illusion she was seeing.

Sorilla stepped back from the console that intel said was the primary control, reaching minimum safe distance in just a few steps. Shaped charges were efficient—they didn’t waste energy away from the target—and so when they blew, she barely registered the shockwave.

The tesseract around her, however, registered it plenty. It folded and twisted, warping reality in ways she imagined being on LSD might do, and then it seemed to implode on itself as it exploded around her all at the same time. Sorilla staggered as the gradients in her area suddenly equalized and she found herself standing in a large, though not shockingly so, room with Chief Carson standing just back by the door.

Sorilla’s eyes widened as her computer core fed her more information, clarifying what she had been feeling with hard math.

“Lieutenant! Are you all right?” Carson took a couple hesitant steps in her direction. “What happened? What happened to the tesseract?”

Sorilla smiled, not one of humor, but one of understanding.

“It was never here, Chief,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t think that was a tesseract.”

“Then what the hell was it?”

“A wormhole. I think we were seeing their homeworld, Chief,” she said seriously. “Their version of SOLCOM.”

“But…” Carson felt his mouth go dry. “That’s…”

“That’s for later,” Sorilla said. “We have to get back to business.”

“Right. Right.” Carson nodded. “We have to get to the others and make sure that team two has taken out engineering.”

“I don’t think we need to worry much about them,” Sorilla said as they began to run back down the hall. “I think that there are much fewer troops stationed on this ship than we ever thought possible!”