Valkyrie Burning (Warrior's Wings Book Three) (2 page)

Sorilla just nodded. “Two hundred klicks in a day...and the last two hundred meters in the next day or so. Plenty of time.”

“Precisely, Top,” Crow said with a confident smile. “Let’s ruck up and un-ass this place.”

****

The march inland wasn’t to be mistaken for a walk in the park, but the defenses of the world they were on were all aimed outward, and now that they had penetrated within those defenses, there seemed to be very little focus on patrolling the planet itself.

They moved fast, pushing through the jungles and the equatorial heat by virtue of experience, training, and equipment. Their armor kept them moving solidly through the first day and night; the small group were eyes on after twenty hours of solid, fast marching. The target was over two hundred kilometers inland, located in a river valley carved out of the surrounding ground over thousands of years.

They stopped just over twenty klicks from the enemy base, eyes carefully noting the well-lit area as they dug into the side of the mountain.

“What do you think, Top?”

Sorilla Aida glanced over as Lieutenant Crow crawled into position beside her. His face was masked, as was hers, by the ominous black helm of their carbon nano-mesh powered armor. They relied entirely on the external sensors of the armor to see and hear; their dangerously fragile senses were entirely shielded and filtered by the sophisticated equipment that surrounded them.

“It’s going to be a tough nut to crack,” Sorilla replied, turning back to the base in the distance, her parallax ranging systems giving her a readout to the centimeter. “This is much more sophisticated than what the Ghoulies installed on Hayden.”

Crow nodded, the exaggerated head and chest movement of a power-armored soldier. “See anything you recognize?”

Sorilla zoomed in on the scene until she felt so close she could reach out and touch the Ghoulie guards as they occasionally appeared from the base buildings or walked the perimeter. There weren’t as many on perimeter duty as she’d expect to find on a human base, but then, by all indications, there weren’t the same cultural and national schisms in the Ghoulies as there were in human society.

It was possible that somewhere, out in the depths of the galaxy, there were Ghoulie systems under different governing bodies, but so far every contact had proved to be solidly under the control of one central government. Like the Ghoulies, human intelligence officers had not yet had any luck locating the enemy homeworld.

After five years, no one had figured out so much as how to talk to the mouthless bastards, and as far as anyone knew, they hadn’t figured out how to talk to human prisoners either. A situation which led to extremely good operational security on missions, but absolutely no chance of a negotiated peace. Someone would have to crack that puzzle eventually, Sorilla figured, or the results were going to be beyond ugly, but that job wasn’t hers and it wasn’t now.

“A few things,” she said, still looking over the base in close zoom. “Ghoulies don’t use tethers, the grav-valves give them access to space from any point...but they do have valve emplacements they use as mass drivers and weapons. I count five from here.”

“Five?” Crow didn’t sound happy, not that she blamed him.

One of the things had successfully interdicted over eighty percent of attempts to penetrate their beachhead on Hayden and had wiped out Sorilla’s entire Green Beret insertion team. Unlike conventional weapons emplacements, the gravity valves didn’t have blind spots. They could shoot right through the planet if they chose, blowing a ship out of orbit on the far side without affecting the world in the slightest.

“You got it, L.T.,” Sorilla sighed. “They’re built into the valley walls around the base, probably as far out as they can be put and still feed off the base generator.”

“We’ll have to take them out,” Crow said grimly.

“Let’s take the reactor instead, sir,” Sorilla suggested, “blow it if we have to.”

Crow grimaced under his helm, “Was intel...?”

“Yes, sir.” Sorilla highlighted an image from her scan and shot it over to his armor computer.

Crow looked at the playback, watching the building as the picture zoomed in on a window that was more of a slit until all he could see was black. Then the computer enhanced the image, drawing vector lines through the shadows and lightening the image until, finally, it finished and he found himself staring at a human face.

“PUCs.” He sighed, nodding. “Well, we knew they were taking prisoners.”

Sorilla sighed along with him, both glad to see the face and wishing it hadn’t been there. PUC, the military terminology for Person Under Control, was the modern term for what used to be called a Prisoner of War. Suffice to say, being ‘Pucked’ wasn’t a good term in the modern military.

Fleeters had found evidence that the Ghoulies were taking prisoners years earlier, bodies missing from ship hulks, evidence of colonists taken from Ares, a Mars-type world that had been destroyed by Ghoulie bombardment when discovered. Some infantry teams had found bodies of prisoners in captured bases much like the one they were now overlooking, all apparently killed within mere hours or less of the base being overrun by human troops.

The Ghoulies didn’t believe in giving up their prisoners, not alive at any rate.

Fleet intel had let drop that this world, its official human designation some insanely long-winded array of numbers and letters, was a central clearing house for human PUCs. If they were right, there could be upwards of a couple hundred human prisoners in the valley below them, or more, and that was what brought the newly assembled SARD Rock Riders team there.

In two days, the Fleet was going to jump in with their gun tubes blazing, and when that happened, the lives of those boys and girls down there weren’t going to be worth a damn if they were still ‘Under Control.’ So the team had gambled their lives to get into place to stop just that, betting that the Ghoulies wouldn’t just turn their rock into a momentary singularity under its own full weight, if only because the resulting radiation from the gravity-induced fission explosion would have contaminated the entire continent.

They’d won that bet, and the time was coming to raise the ante or fold the game.

“Get some sleep, Top,” Crow said. “We’re moving in when the sun sets.”

Sorilla nodded, crawling back into the little ditch she’d hallowed out, her assault carbine nestled at her side as she closed down the suit Heads Up Display (HUD) and closed her eyes.

Ante up
, she thought,
and deal out the cards
.

*****

The mixed evening light from the distant white dwarf primary and its larger orange binary were fading when Crow nudged Sorilla awake. She shifted instantly, calling up her HUD as she blinked the sleep from her eyes.

Mackenzie and Able were cleaning their rifles, not that the rugged weapons needed a lot of cleaning. The super conducting carbon fiber barrels that acted as magnetic accelerators didn’t leave residue like the gunpowder cartridges of old, but there were still a few contact leads and the like that should be checked before a fight, just to be safe. A barrel short would ruin a shooter’s day just as surely as a feed jam would have once upon a time.

Both men were superb shooters as well, long gunners from old traditions. Mackenzie claimed he could trace his lineage back to the original Gillie hunters, and Able had been a Force Recon sniper before being tapped for Detachment One and, eventually, SARD. And while the weapons had changed, both men understood the art and profession of the long gun. Sorilla was glad to have them at her back, especially with the heavy firepower of the M-900 ‘rifles’ they carried. The technicality of them being rifles was actually debated in some circles, since the 900s made old-school sniper rifles look like pea shooters at the best of times, but like everything else in this person’s military, they had changed with the times.

Sorilla climbed to her knees as Jardiens slid into position behind her, handfuls of local foliage in his hands. She held still while he stuffed them into straps on her armor left there for that purpose, turning her slick and svelte profile into a ragged and unwieldy one. When he was done, he patted her on the shoulder and she turned around to do the same to him.

The natural Gillies finished, the four members of the door kicker team moved out, leaving their sniper backup in the hills at their back as they began the long approach to the enemy base.

*****

The Ghoulies’ base was something of a mess to her, its angles all wrong, jutting out at strange intervals that made no symmetric sense to the human eye. As she inched closer, though, Sorilla could tell that they had left no real hiding places in the outer perimeter to shelter an encroaching enemy. Floodlights swept the terrain, their frequency leaning heavily into the UV spectrum, and she could make out both mobile and immobile sensor pods dotting the perimeter like buds on a blooming flower.

The place was the equivalent of a modern day fortress, there was no doubt of that.

So, naturally, she found herself belly-down in the mud and the brambles as she crawled up on that fortress, wondering somewhere in the back of her mind where the other members of the team were. Normally they would exist as icons on her HUD, their positions marked clearly for her to see at just a glance, but now they were all running in stealth mode, which meant no radiated emissions, as they pushed their way toward the perimeter on their bellies one inch at a time.

The final approach of just over two hundred meters had taken more than two thirds of the total time since Sorilla and the others had left their camp in the hills. Moving so slowly that their motion would appear to be nothing more than a trick of the wind was a talent and a skill, something one could learn through patience, but it helped to be naturally inclined. She would inch her toes up a bit, then dig them into the soft ground and straighten out, pushing her entire armored body along by those muscles alone, the nano-musculature strings in her armor not actually being built into the toes.

It was long, exhausting, and tension-ridden work. When she spotted a guard on her passive HUD, she froze, focusing on being part of the ground itself, waiting and watching until they passed. The tangle of local branches and leaves jammed into the straps of her armor made her literally part of the ground, hiding her from even the keenest eye if she held still. Sorilla never looked straight at them either, knowing that humans, at least, had an eerie ability to recognize when they were being watched. No one really knew how, whether it was some rudimentary form of telepathy or some way that an observer would give themselves away if they could see their targets, but she wasn’t taking a chance that the Ghoulies wouldn’t be able to do the same thing.

After a guard passed, she would inch forward again, moving that little bit before pausing to take a calming breath and reexamine the area yet again. And then on again, one inch of movement, then a pause to breathe and check the area. Over and over again Sorilla repeated the cycle until she arrived within just a few meters of the perimeter fence, really just a series of sensor posts dug into the ground at ten-meter intervals.

So far
, she thought,
so good
.

She was even ahead of schedule by a couple hours. Sorilla sighed and settled in to wait, not moving a muscle as she formed her own little lump of ground in the open space that had been cut for over two hundred meters all around the base. Patience was a virtue of Special Operations soldiers.

*****

Gilford ‘Gil’ Able, formerly of Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children, kept a close eye on his HUD’s countdown timer as it approached zero hour. He and the Scott had settled nicely into their nests, the long barrels of their M900 rifles the only thing showing out past the cover they’d built up, about fifty meters apart with good converging angles on the base.

Long gun work had evolved continuously since the early days of warfare, to the point where a sniper in the modern forces had to wear more hats than just a concealment specialist and marksman. Like everything else, computers had become integral to the work of the true long gun specialist. At ranges of twenty kilometers, one simply didn’t calculate the ballistics trajectories by eye any longer.

Marksman records for unaided shots were still just under five kilometers, despite superbly accurate and powerful rifles. Able had taken that record himself, just over three years earlier in an international match, and it hadn’t been in any danger of being broken at any time since. Using the liquid lenses that let their scopes be truly compact, built into their armor and rifles both, the two snipers had surveyed the camp almost nonstop during the door kickers’ entire approach.

They’d singled out targets, both mobile and immobile, highlighting them on a shared combat HUD, and proceeded to divide up the targets between them. They split the Ghoulies evenly between them, as much as they could with the little guys moving around and occasionally vanishing inside the base and such. The computers kept track of the movement as much as possible, following mobile targets around so that they didn’t get them mixed up and re-designated as new targets.

As the clock wound down, though, the decisions had all been made, and it was all about the waiting.

“Ten seconds,” Mack said over the tactical network.

Able just tipped his head slightly in the armor, relaying a simple confirmation that he hadn’t dozed off, and watched the clock wind down to the last second. As it reached three, he flipped the safety off his rifle, letting the capacitor charge the weapon to combat readiness. At one, he flipped the fire selector to full automatic, priming the entire magazine as he let out a breath he’d been holding and tightened his finger around the trigger.

The air between Able and Mack was rent by the roar of supersonic explosions as both rifles spat out thirty rounds apiece as fast as they could cycle the action, each heavy slug departing the weapon at Mach four. The weapons slammed back into the snipers’ shoulders, but in their armor they barely felt the mule-like kicks of each round, and within three seconds both their magazines were empty.