Valkyrie Burning (Warrior's Wings Book Three) (19 page)

The sudden howling wind tore past her as she leaned away from the force, feeling the sudden pull of gravity change directions. Sorilla was moving before her computers issued the directional warning, her own sense telling her what direction the assault had erupted from as her mind hijacked the signals sent by the accelerometers implanted in her body.

She took a knee, bringing her rifle up to her shoulder and powering the HARD gear to full strength in an attempt to get a reading. Before she did, though, a second gravity surge spun her world around like she was sitting on the universe’s craziest amusement ride. Fighting the urge to throw up in her helm, which would have been a bad idea of epic proportions, Sorilla greyed out as she felt a sudden pressure against the inside of her skull.

She felt like she was moving down a tunnel for an instant, then a sudden snap and blinding pain broke her free to find that she was at the limit of her emergency tether, pulled up and clear of the rooftop by a valve singularity.

Sorilla reached forward, painfully grasping the line as she started to pull herself back down to the tether car. She was about halfway there when another jerk yanked at her and her eyes widened in disbelief as her line snapped.

That line was ten-thousand-pound test!
she wailed internally as she arced away from the tether car, mind gibbering in both disbelief and fear as she entered free fall.
That’s just not fucking FAIR!

The fear only lasted a moment, however, before she stomped down on it with cleats. With seventy thousand feet between herself and a very nasty meeting with the planet below, she didn’t have time to panic. She closed her legs and arms to her side, flipping backward into a dive as she mentally booted her HUD into dive mode.

No matter how she figured this, only one thing was certain in her mind.

Whatever was coming was going to
suck
.

*****

Inside the tether car, chaos reigned. The whole world seemed to shake as the occupants had little else to do
but
scream and panic. They were strapped down, for the most part, when the world went insane, and every single one of them just wished that they were back in their jungle as the hull walls of the tether car cracked open and a tearing wind plucked at their clothing, their hair, and their bodies.

Dean, the only one who wasn’t strapped in, only had seconds to recognize what was happening. He realized that whatever had been assaulting the tether was now turning on them, and the young man didn’t really spare time to think about what he was to do. He threw himself bodily over one of the few people who’d cared for him and the others like no one else he could remember.

As he clutched himself tightly to Tara’s seat and braces, the wall of the car exploded with a whirlwind fury and everything went red, and then black.

*****

Proc,
Sorilla subvocalized as she realized that she wasn’t holding her rifle and didn’t remember losing it,
locate rifle.

Rifle located, location on HUD.

The weapon was above her, oddly enough, also in free fall now. She figured that it must have been yanked loose when she greyed out. Sorilla threw out her legs and arms, going spread eagle to slow her fall as she shifted her angle to glide over under the falling weapon.

Her HUD let her know in its annoyingly calm way that she was passing ANGELS Sixty and accelerating. She could almost forget that she didn’t have any descent gear if she tried really hard to ignore the sheer terror forming in the pit of her stomach, but that only lasted until she realized that she was still speeding up as she went down.

As the rifle caught up to her, Sorilla snapped around in a fast spin. Her arm snaked out, grabbing the weapon out of the air above her. The change in weight distribution caused her to spin out, flailing a little before she got it back under control and brought herself and her weapon to bear on the ground below.

The rifle’s HARD gear was already fully online and scanning, so she just pointed it downward as she tried to stay as steady as she could. It didn’t take long to register a small pulse, so she HALO’d the location and squeezed off the magazine without bothering with pinpoint aiming. The smart rounds in the weapon would make up for any sloppiness at this range, and, frankly, she had other things to worry about as she hit the magazine ejector and reached for a reload.

The empty mag fluttered up and past her as the roaring wind caught it, but Sorilla ignored it as she seated the next one in place and hammered it home. She only had three full mags left, and if she were going to splatter herself across the surface, she wanted to make sure that her bullets got there first.

By ANGELS Fifty, Sorilla had only one magazine remaining and it was already locked, loaded, and waiting for a target from HARD. Her HUD was registering the zones she already unloaded on, but she didn’t have time to check them. Either she hit or she missed; there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it just then, as they were both inside the no-strike range as defined by the proximity to the tether. There was just no way to call in a rod from God strike on those locations with the satellite network being re-tasked to engage incoming ships.

Funny how falling to your death simplifies matters,
she considered, recognizing that she was
way
too calm, even as she was grateful for it.

ANGELS Forty tore by, with her HUD announcing that she was now at terminal velocity.

Where are you, you pricks? I’ve got one more mag left and only a couple more minutes before I go splat. Show some common fucking decency and pop your head out so I can blow it off.

*****

Hayden Jungles

“Second squad, report. Second squad? Trel! Report!” Kris growled into his comm, frustrated by the sudden loss of communication.

The portable singularity projectors they were using weren’t powerful enough to cause the snapping of atomic bonds the way shipboard models could, but they were more than enough to snap chemical bonds. So when at least one of the shots struck the descending vehicle, he had initially been enormously satisfied to see an explosion of debris erupt from the target. That satisfaction vanished shortly after when he lost contact with his third team and then was abruptly cut off from his second squad in midst of giving them orders to re-engage.

Kris threw down his comm, irritated. “We lost two teams?”

“So it appears, Prime.”

“How?”

“I believe I may have located the answer, Prime. Check my beacon,” the sub-altern said, pointing upward.

Kris grabbed his optics and linked with his subordinate’s device, searching the sky above. With the help of his spotter, he quickly located the object in question.

“Crushed World,” he swore, looking at the figure descending in free fall. “Is he still active?”

Quairu, his subordinate, nodded grimly. “I witnessed him fire just before we lost contact with Two, Prime.”

Kris swore again. “Unreal. That is a Sentinel, there is no doubt.”

“One about to end his career by ramming a planet with his face, Prime.”

Kris snarled, “And yet he
still
eliminated two of our teams before he did so!”

The Sentinel Prime of this mission wanted to swear one hell of a lot more as he watched the plummeting figure in his optics. The Lucians with him on this run were mostly younger Sentinels, and far more arrogant than he’d have preferred on a mission of this nature. Unfortunately, as he’d learned early on, there was more to this particular species than some random pocket empire on the fringes.

The original brief had clearly downplayed the situation this far out, both in terms of capacity and capability, and his team simply wasn’t qualified for the mission rating. Instead of the simple Peta class mission he’d been expecting, it was clear that the Alliance should have issued a full Quera rating at the very least.

“Can we engage him?” Kris asked, though he knew the answer.

His Second shook his head. “No chance, Prime. At the rate he’s descending, he’ll crater before we calculate the intersect.”

Kris just grunted in response, but mentally admitted that his Second was right.

“Pity,” he said aloud. “That’s no way for a Sentinel to end.”

He blinked in his optics as a roar of flames erupted from the falling figure, aiming downward, and for a brief instant he believed that the figure had some sort of rocket propulsion.

That was a belief that was quickly put to rest when his Second hesitatingly spoke up.

“Team Four is offline, Prime.”

Kris grimaced. “Then again, he’s eliminated more Sentinels in his last action than any single person I’ve ever heard of. Perhaps it isn’t such a bad way to go out.”

Descending past ANGELS 30 over Hayden

Well, that’s the end of my ammo.

Sorilla pushed her rifle aside with a disdainfully casual motion, letting it tumble away from her as she took stock of her situation. With thirty thousand feet remaining, she was just starting to enter into the range in which most para-divers would normally consider for their maximum jump altitude. That meant that she still had a long time before she hit the ground, relatively speaking, but at the moment all she could think to do with that time was panic.

Luckily, or unluckily perhaps, that was the one thing she wouldn’t be doing. Every stage of her training, and every subsequent stage of her career afterwards, had been focused on expressly
not
panicking in a crisis. So, with that drilled into her from the very beginning, Sorilla almost literally didn’t have the luxury of simply losing it on the way down.

It felt like cold comfort, however, since if there was ever a time to panic, it was when you couldn’t do a damn thing else that would improve your odds of survival. Right then, the only thing she could do was aim to hit outside the colony site in the hopes of not killing anyone when she cratered into Hayden.

Wait…what if?

The thought struck her out of the blue, or perhaps it was more out of the green since Hayden’s skies were a little more green shifted than Earth, as she spun slowly in midair. The orbital tether entered her field of vision, and a wild thought struck her as she remembered a few idiots on Earth who had actually
free climbed
the local tethers as high as they could in order to base jump off them.

This is either going to look so awesome…or I’m about to go down as making one of the most epic fails in military history,
Sorilla sighed as a plan began to form.

She spread eagled again, shifting her balance to angle in toward the tether. It was a thin target, just over a foot wide and only an inch thick, making it difficult to see with the unaided eye at the rate she was travelling. Luckily, Sorilla’s eye was anything but unaided.

The HUD HALO’d the tether on her command, lighting it up as she dipped her head and flashed through the thickening atmosphere like a raptor diving. The tether seemed to get closer only slowly at first, but its relative approach was an illusion that almost ended her. As she got closer to her target, the relative speed looked to climb exponentially, to the point that she misjudged her intercept.

Sorilla snapped up, arms and legs spread out as she tried to bleed off speed, but she made the move an instant too late and slammed her shoulder into the tether with enough force to have broken every bone along the length of her body had she been unarmored. As it was, the force was enough to shock the wind out of her lungs as she was rapidly decelerated and slammed into a spin.

Her HUD calmly lit off the numbers as she tumbled, showing her passing ANGELS Twenty and accelerating again as she lost her spread eagle position of maximum wind resistance.

I have to get this under control.
Sorilla’s thoughts bordered on desperation as she took short, painful, gasps of air through clenched teeth. Her jump training had amounted to thousands of hours, however, and even as she was struggling to regain her breath, her body was moving on instinct and muscle memory.

Her fall stabilized as she got back into a spread eagle position, slowing her descent slightly once more, and Sorilla looked around to get her bearings.

She was now only a few dozen meters from the tether, but had only about fifteen thousand feet left to fall and the numbers were dropping fast. Sorilla slowly spun herself in midair, aligning for her second and surely last shot.

Deliberate motions are mistake free motions,
she told herself as she angled in toward the tether.
Mistake free motions are speed. Speed is life.

She closed with the tether, still hitting it hard enough to jerk her around, but this time her arm hooked around the black carbon line and didn’t come loose. Sorilla quickly got a grip on it with her left hand, heat spiking almost instantly in her gauntlets as she clamped down and used that friction to get her boots planted on either side.

There was no smoke rising from either her armor or the tether, both were rated for far higher temperatures than she could possibly produce through friction, but Sorilla could see wisps of dust being blown away as she continued downward.

Going to need maintenance for both my armor and this tether when this is over,
she thought grimly.

Hopefully she wouldn’t actually snap the damn thing.

She didn’t think that was remotely likely, but then again, for as strong as the tether was, its strength was primarily tensile in nature. That meant that it could take immense pulling forces, but not necessarily much in the way of sheering force, or other strains. In reality, however, the carbon nano-fiber was about as tough a material as you found. It should be able to handle a little friction, since the damn things regularly survived sandstorms and other natural threats.

As she descended past ANGELS Ten, Sorilla checked her descent rate and began to relax. It was still fast, but now it was survivable.

A glance above her was enough to confirm that the tether car was still there, but she couldn’t tell if it had taken much damage in the attack that had sucked her clear of the car in the first place. Her HUD spotted and tracked some falling debris around her that wasn’t part of her own kit, so she had to assume that they’d taken some kind of hit.