Valkyrie Burning (Warrior's Wings Book Three) (17 page)

This would be so much easier if those bastards would use rad-comms like any civilized people,
she griped, knowing that all she needed was even a brief pulse to lock on. Unfortunately, the enemy used something different for their communications systems, as she knew well from experience.

That didn’t mean they entirely avoided EM radiation transmissions, however. Almost any even remotely electronic device gave off
some
electromagnetic signals, and all it took was the briefest of pulses for her to get a signal. She got it a few seconds into her search, just a
bare
instant before another vibration shook the whole car, this time threatening to dislodge her.

They’re getting closer to the tether,
she thought, gritting her teeth as she zoomed in on the area the signal came from.

It was almost entirely covered by jungle canopy, thick and impenetrable. Beyond the single EM pulse from the area, it looked exactly like every other patch of Hayden jungle below her. Sorilla didn’t have a lot of options. She centered on the source of the signal, jacked her rifle to maximum power, and opened fire.

*****

Hayden Jungle

“Are you truly having this much trouble hitting a stationary target?” Kris asked dryly as another shot appeared to have no lasting effect on the distant thread.

“Would you care to try, Prime?” the Lucian manning the weapon challenged sarcastically. “The damn thing is so small…”

“It reaches to high orbit!”

“It’s less than three Quar lengths wide, and you damn well know it!”

Kris sighed. That much was true, and he did know how hard it was to strike at this range without the aid of target finders.

“The worst of it is that I could swear I’d hit it already, more than once,” the Lucian sighed, frustrated.

“Truly?” Kris asked, disbelieving. There were few things that could take the force of a singularity strike, even from a portable model such as they were using.

“Truly.”

Kris glowered at the distant thread but shook his head. “No. Perhaps you struck close, but you could not have hit it directly. Continue.”

“Targeting,” the Lucian droned. He was about to report that he was engaging when a roar tore through the jungle about them and slammed into the nearby ground, exploding with a force not to be believed.

“They found us!”

Several more strikes exploded around them, throwing dirt, debris, and shrapnel in all direction. As the assault continued, the Lucians threw themselves to cover as best they could.

Kris flung himself into a crater, hoping that the random nature of the strike was hiding a pattern. Most coordinated attacks wouldn’t target the same spot twice. He felt, more than heard, his gunner hit the ground nearby and looked up just in time to see their Second take a hit that almost literally caused him to explode.

His left arm blew off in a shower of blood and gore, and as Kris watched, his torso bubbled and deformed even as more gore exploded out between his legs and a new crater exploded at his feet. It took Kris dozens of times longer to process what had happened than it took to happen, but he realized the attack had come from directly above them.

“Air forces! Scan the skies!”

Kris followed his own orders, grabbing his personal combat lenses and turning them skyward.

Nothing. How can it be?

He knew that indirect artillery wouldn’t have the force to do what had been done, not with pure kinetic force. Something had driven those rounds right into them.

A drone?
He shook his head, it didn’t matter.

“Abandon position!”

He and his Third gathered up all the kit they could while on the move and bolted into the jungle. Somewhere above them, there was an enemy that could, if not see them directly, at least detect some hint of their location.

How? They didn’t fire immediately, but they must have tracked the singularity pulse…
Kris grunted, thinking as he ran with his arms full of gear.

When they were a reasonably safe distance from their previous location, he signaled a halt.

“Set it up again,” he ordered.

“Prime?” the other Sentinel looked at him as if he were insane, but Kris merely showed his teeth.

“We’ll fire it from a remote,” he said. “I want you to ensure that the rest of our gear is tracking incoming fire.”

The Lucian slowly showed his own teeth. “As you say, Prime!”

Opening moves to you,
Kris mentally complimented his unseen enemy.
But the game isn’t finished just yet.

*****

Rooftop, Tether Car, ANGELS One Eighty over Hayden

Sorilla waited after emptying her mag into the target location, watching for another pulse, anticipating another shudder through the tether or, worse, a sudden freefall. Neither came as she knelt there looking through her rifle optics at the jungle so very far below.

Did I get him?
she wondered, letting her gaze float over the target zone again for a moment before she keyed into her comm.

“Station command, Aida.”

“Aida, go for station command,” a calm voice came back.

“Sending target location for probable enemy fire base,” Aida said as she uploaded the coordinates, images, and video of her actions. “Now descending to ANGELS One Seventy, requesting update on ground combat situation.”

“Roger, checking now…” There was a long pause, then the voice came back marginally less calmly. “Holy shit, Aida. Are you standing on
top
of the tether car!?”

“Affirmative. You want a live feed?” she asked dryly.

“No thanks, Sergeant. I get woozy looking at the planet from up here, where it’s kind of unreal. Crap, Sarge, you’re nuts.”

“So I’ve been told. What’s the status on the fighting?” she reminded him.

“Combatants struck at the beams but faded back into the jungle immediately after. Looks like a diversion. Consensus is that they’re trying to distract us, Sarge.”

“Some distraction,” Sorilla growled. “They took potshots at the tether, twanged us like a rock guitar string played by a lunatic.”

“Is there any other kind?”

“Cute,” she said. “I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you that if they pop the cable, you and the station take a flyer?”

“Roger that. Command has men in the jungle hunting them down. We’ve already dispatched a team to the location you listed.”

“Right, well, let me know what’s going on,” she said. “I’m going to wait here and hope I nailed the bastards.”

“Better you than me.”

“Hey, at least I’ve got one hell of a view,” she laughed, propping her rifle on her thigh as she looked out over the green curve of the distant horizon. “Aida out.”

*****

Hayden Jungles

“It’s in place, Prime.”

Kris nodded. “Fall back into the jungle, I’ll finish up.”

The Lucian saluted roughly and faded back into the foliage about them as Kris attached the remote to the weapon and ran quick diagnostics before being satisfied.

Lucians generally considered remote work to be a poor second place to eyes and hands on site, but there were times when even the hardest Sentinels would admit that it would be poorer form to get yourself killed as opposed to using a remote. Kris was very much an adherent of the older philosophy, but he was not fool enough to ignore the tactical benefits of automated systems.

Once the remote was established and locked into place, he fell back with the control in hand to where his Third was waiting. Neither spoke as he made the last connections and handed the device over to the long gunner.

“Fire when ready.”

“As you say, Prime,” the Sentinel replied evenly.

Kris looked up to the sky, his eyes sharper than most Alliance species…Parithalians aside…but saw no threat in that blue-green expanse despite the certain knowledge that something up there was most certainly threatening.

“Targeting.”

Kris forced himself to focus on the distant thread that split the sky, willing his man’s shot to be on target.

“Firing.”

In the distance, the singularity weapon hummed almost silently and sent a pulse of a gravity collapse field off into the distance.

*****

Tether Car Rooftop, Descending to ANGELS 150 over Hayden

The tooth-rattling vibration took her by surprise after several long minutes of relative peace, insofar as one could find peace while sitting at over a hundred fifty thousand feet with no restraints or airfoil. Sorilla hissed, climbing to a crouch as she grabbed for her shoulder pouch again to lift a small handful of the portable accelerometers out.

The small devices were intended to be scattered around Hayden’s jungles, or any world where an enemy gravity valve might be in use, as a method of GDF (Gravity Direction Finding). She was liberally tossing them over the edge now, like water from a pipe, but couldn’t bring herself to be sorry for the waste. If they kept her alive, along with her pathfinders, then they had done their job.

Scattered to the winds around the tether cable, the small devices freefell toward the planet while constantly analyzing the flow of acceleration. With billions of calculations made every second, the computers easily filtered out the noise of wind currents affecting the fall and then eliminated the steady pull of Hayden itself, so that when a foreign gravity surge affected them they lit up like the proverbial Christmas tree with arrows right back to the source.

Sorilla shifted only slightly this time, already on the right side of the car to target the source, and brought her weapon to her shoulder as she activated the HARD gear.

It took a few seconds, but when the next pulse shivered through the tether, she locked onto its location and held the trigger back until her weapon was empty.

Die you bastards.

*****

Hayden Jungles

Kris and his Third,
Second now I suppose,
flinched away from the rolling thunder that engulfed the remote weapon point, turning the entire area to a series of craters and settling dust.

“Definitely came in from on high,” the Lucian gunner grunted. “You’re right about that. That was a direct trajectory strike, not indirect artillery.”

“You have it backtracked?”

“Yes, Prime. Sent to your scopes.”

Kris lifted the military scopes to his eyes and followed the user friendly arrow until it centered on an empty stretch of sky above them. He grunted, not seeing anything at first, but then frowned as he thought that maybe he could see a dark spot up there somewhere.

He hit the image zoom, increasing magnification until he could make out an oddly shaped object floating there, apparently in midair. It was only because he’d already seen it before that Kris was able to recognize it and realize that he was looking at the vehicle that travelled up and down along the thread.

Damn that’s up high.

He closed the focus again, then blinked in mild disbelief before focusing once more to a closer zoom.

“Prime,” his Third said from beside him. “Is that someone standing on top of that thing?”

“More than someone.” Kris bared his teeth, grinning more in feral anticipation than amusement. “That’s their Sentinel. I recognize the armor.”

“He’s a brave one, I’ll give him that,” the Third said. “I wouldn’t want to be standing up there, armor or no. I see no flight kit, you?”

“No. Doesn’t mean that he has none, however.”

“Too right. Orders?”

Kris pondered that for a moment, knowing that their singularity projector was little more than scrap. “Signal team two, have them target the vehicle.”

“At that range, Prime?” The Lucian was skeptical. “Our portable systems don’t focus well that far out.”

“I know, but we’re having little enough luck hitting the thread. Besides,” Kris went on, “it’s within range.”

“Just.”

“So have Team Three do the same then.” Kris shrugged. “In the meantime, we should make our way over to Team Two. Nothing more we can do from here.”

“As you say, Prime.”

*****

Tether Car, Descending to ANGELS 130 over Hayden

Pretty sure I got a hit that time.
Sorrilla was kneeling on the edge of the roof surface, rifle still to her shoulder as she examined the region before her with the HARD sensors.

The rifle’s HARD gear had registered an EM spike when her rounds slammed into the jungle below, which seemed to coincide with a capacitor cell being blown out. If she were reading it right, she’d fragged some equipment at least, but there was no way to tell if she’d got it all or if she’d nailed any enemy soldiers at the same time.

Firing blind into the jungle was fun, but also frustrating, and she wasn’t exactly sitting on an ammo dump, so she really hoped that she’d nailed the bastard.

Four more mags for the rifle. Should have packed more, but who the hell could predict that I’d need to fight a prolonged firefight somewhere between the station and the anchor?

There were few ways to FUBAR a situation that could quite match up to the current situation in her mind, and Sorilla was thinking fondly of those times she’d been required to merely jump from orbit and directly enter a firefight on landing.

Can’t this stupid thing go any faster!?

Unfortunately, she knew even without asking that the answer was a resounding ‘no.’ Oh, physically, the car could descend faster…up to terminal velocity if you wanted to be a smartass about things, but the limiters built into the system were hard locked for good reason. Wear and tear on the tether ribbon were the least of issues that could be encountered by running faster than the optimal descent rate.

Too fast and you’d risk blowing out the climbing motors in a hurry, as they, like every other piece of the car, were built as lightweight as possible. Getting anything resembling practical weight loads into orbit meant cutting corners where you could, and the engines were the victims of several such cuts.

Dozens of other things could go wrong as well, but every single one of them ended with the same result.

A crater at the anchor point.