Valkyrie Burning (Warrior's Wings Book Three) (21 page)

Two dozen incoming blasts of alien energy were met by near-two-hundred-ten-kilogram iron bars accelerated to 0.6c, and that section of space erupted in a dazzling display of light and destructive energy.

*****

Tether Counterweight Station Liberation

“Incoming!”

Brigadier Kane didn’t bother saying anything, though he felt like he should.

It was pointless, since by the time the warning had even been called, the automated systems had begun their response. On the computer plots he could see the projected intercepts, and though it took a few more moments, he clearly saw the results.

Kane let out a breath of quiet relief.

“So,” he said finally, “this type uses more conventional weapons after all.”

He hadn’t been confident of the reports from TFV concerning their last dealings with this type of ship, but it appeared that they had been right. That didn’t rule out the possibilities of them having a gravity valve, of course, but it seemed that some of their older established procedures just might be useful.

“All incoming rounds have been intercepted.”

“Re-task one quarter of our satellites,” he ordered. “Plot a firing solution on the lead enemy elements.”

“Yes, sir.”

It’s time to show them that we bite back.

*****

Parithalian Alliance Ship
Noble Venture

“That was hardly the overwhelming show of force I’d hoped for,” Reethan said dryly as he watched the interception on the displays.

Impressive response time. Must be automated, there are few living beings who can think and react that quickly, unless they have hyper-communications? Even then, it’s unlikely.

He flipped through his displays, looking for signs of enemy communications, but found nothing on any of the hyperbands used by the Alliance or the Outer Empires. So far as he was concerned, the Ros’El had a lot to answer for when it came to the sheer lack of intelligence work done for this section of space.

A clearly interstellar empire of some sort, with no ideas as to how they communicated, what their language was, hell even their basic physiology data was missing from his files. They had been fighting an open war for enough time now to have compiled almost complete historical files on them!

If it weren’t for the fact that the Ros’El were considered to be…
unstable
allies at best, he would put in an official complaint when he brought the flotilla back to Alliance space.

Reethan blinked, back stiffening.

When did I stop thinking of this region as Alliance space?

He pushed that thought firmly aside, now was hardly the time or place to be debating Alliance expansion policies. Instead he leaned forward, looking to the displays again as he began to formulate his next move.

“Adjust our formation to…” Reethan considered for a moment before looking amused. “Talon Three.”

He may as well have uttered profanities to the depths of space and back for the reactions he got. At every station around the command center he could see shocked and utterly horrified looks directed in his direction.

“Master Parath,” his apprentice stammered out, “the Talon series is—”

“Antiquated, yes, I am aware,” he cut the younger Pari off. “And proscribed by modern protocols.”

“But, then why, Master?”

“Modern protocols were instituted after the Ros War,” he said, patiently explaining something that he felt his apprentice needed to learn. They were not yet in battle, and he had the time. “Specifically, they proscribed many tactics divined to be not only poorly imagined, but even lethal against a Gravity Singularity Device.”

“Yes, Master, I know this…”

“Do you believe that these people
have
such a device?” he asked mildly.

The apprentice seemed surprised, but finally gestured a negative.

“Precisely. Issue orders for Talon Three,” he said again, relaxing back. “Bring our ships close enough to provide for a common defense against the enemy weapons… Then prepare for closing battles.”

There was a pause that he could almost take as insubordination, if he so chose, and then his apprentice nodded.

“As you order, Master of Ships.”

*****

USS Cheyenne, Low orbit of Hayden’s second moon

Nadine Brookes leaned forward as she watched the enemy ships change formation and increase relative velocity as they began to vector into an intercept aimed at Liberation.

“Damn,” she whispered softly, shaking her head slowly.

“Admiral?”

“Sorry, Captain, I didn’t realize you were monitoring this channel.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Roberts said quietly. “Is something wrong?”

“The enemy tightened their formation,” she said. “I was hoping to catch them far enough apart that they couldn’t reinforce one another’s point defense.”

“Yes, pity,” Roberts agreed. “I suppose we can’t count on enemy stupidity, Admiral.”

“No,” she said, “but it would have been a nice surprise. Prepare your crew, Captain. We attack in…eight minutes.”

“Eight minutes, aye, ma’am.”

She changed over to another display, tuning out the sound of the captain coming over the ship-wide with the call to general quarters. They had been in a low alert state, all but minimum crews stood down to grab food and coffee before the crap hit the AC. The ship began to reverberate slightly as she worked, the powerful engines beginning to spin up as they prepared for anti-matter injection.

Soon the whine would be replaced by a distant rumble, muffled by more than a dozen meters of armor plate, insulating material, and meteoric iron that sat between the core and the people stationed about it. Once that happened, Nadine was well aware that Task Force Valkyrie would once more be committed to battle.

When will this be over?

It didn’t matter, not just then, and she pushed the thought from her mind and returned to confirming the status of the ships in her taskforce. Her crews needed an admiral whose mind was in the coming battle, not drifting away to an uncertain future.

“All ships, this is Admiral Brookes,” she said, opening the Fleet-wide. “Standby for combat acceleration.”

****

Orbital Tether Station Liberation

“Shit.” Kane swore as he recognized what the new enemy formation would permit. He was no Fleet commander, but he was aware that once the ships were in range of each other, they could share point defense duties and vastly increase the potency of their defenses.

“Do we have a firing solution?” he asked, looking over to where he had people working on controlling the extensive satellite network under his command.

“Yes, sir.”

“Strike probability?”

“Barring active defenses, we’re looking at better than eighty-five percent.”

Kane snorted. The chances that there would be no active defenses were laughably low in his mind.

“Understood. Standby offensive birds, I want strike launch when we have ninety percent.”

“Yes, sir!”

His options were pretty strictly limited, unfortunately. His command was immobile, his defensive assets were entirely composed of drone satellites that were effectively immobile, and he felt like he had a huge bull’s-eye painted across his rear end. None of those things were particularly well-suited to making him feel particularly good about the coming battle.

Especially the image of me with a bull’s-eye painted across my backside,
Kane thought ruefully, unable to eject the imagery now that it was entrenched in his head.

“Valkyrie is winding up for combat maneuvering, sir.”

Kane looked over the plots, nodding. “Good. Belay launch commands. Let’s time this a little better.”

“Sir?”

“Hold fire on offensive birds until I give the order.”

“Yes, sir.”

He watched, attention split as he kept an eye on the separate plots for the enemy ships and the telemetry from Valkyrie. Hayden’s second moon was smaller than Earth’s Luna and sat in a lower orbit as well. That put Valkyrie about ten minutes from engagement range from the moment they lit off their drives, assuming they used full military acceleration.

“Valkyrie just lit off their drives! Damn, they’re moving fast.”

Kane looked over to the plot, eyes widening slightly as he reevaluated his time estimates.

More like seven minutes.

“Weapons free, all offensive birds!” he called. “Fire one salvo in…T-minus thirty seconds from my mark… Mark!”

****

Parithalian Alliance Ship
Noble Venture

The salvo from the enemy weapons were hardly a surprise for Ship’s Master Reethan Parath when it came. In fact, the only thing that did surprise him was that it was not nearly so thick as he’d expected.

They likely are holding back for defensive purposes.

“Engage enemy weapons as they enter defensive perimeter.”

“Yes, Ship’s Master.”

The tight formation of Parithalian combat ships continued into the enemy range, undeterred by the fast-moving chunks of metal flying their direction. They waited for them to enter within the outer defensive perimeter of the fleet, then engaged with short-range singularity projectors.

Unlike the Ros, few Parithalian ships were equipped with planet-crushing, or even ship-crushing, projectors. Lower powered versions, however, were an integral part of the close defensive network on any medium to heavy class combat ship of the Pari navy.

Since the incoming weapons were not powered, they couldn’t maneuver and were easily imploded by the gravity projections well clear of the Parithalian ships.

Spheres of nuclear fire erupted all around them as they closed with the planet, but the Parithalian ships merely drove through them without pause. On the other side of the explosive net, they emerged unscathed and undeterred.

“All cannons, spread fire,” Reethan ordered. “Target the weaponized drones and fire as you may.”

“Yes, Ship’s Master.”

A moment later, the staccato pulse of the weapons was faintly echoing through the ship as first the
Noble Venture
, and then the rest of the flotilla, opened fire.

****

Parithalian weapons were more straightforward than those used by the Ros’El. After all, bending time and space to create a point where an object’s own gravity crushed it was both technically sophisticated and fraught with potential complications.

Charged negative particles, held in position by a powerful magnetic field and launched toward a target at almost eighty percent of light speed were actually far safer. Alright, it was safer for the local space-time at least. Risks of losing containment meant that pulse weapons were a potential hazard to the ship mounting them, but there were few Parithalians that would duck that risk in exchange for the possibility of creating a stable singularity and flushing an entire solar system on one shot.

The ships of the Parithalian flotilla opened fire with the pulse weapons, sending a steady stream of negatively charged pulses across space as they continued their charge to the planet. In response, the satellites in orbit of Hayden twisted in place and responded in kind with continuous launches that quickly threatened to cause the platform’s orbits to decay.

Thrusters flared, holding them in place, and within seconds, the space between the inbound ships and the planet erupted with a kaleidoscopic display of destructive energies that blinded every scanner looking in that direction.

*****

USS Cheyenne, Hayden High Orbit

Task Force Valkyrie exploded from behind the second moon of Hayden, every ship accelerating well beyond what the book considered ‘maximum safe acceleration,’ looking for all the universe like a chain of diamonds and pearls about the moon as they vectored in on their target.

With her flight suit plugged in and actually massaging the blood through her body, Nadine still had to grunt hard through clenched teeth in order to breathe and keep from greying out. The hard acceleration was necessary, however, if they didn’t want to give the enemy more time than necessary to adapt to the second threat coming in from the direction of the moon.

Before giving the order to accelerate, Nadine had set a dozen preset commands on her screens and hoped that they would be enough to cover what she found on the other side of the celestial body, because giving orders while accelerating at twenty times gravity was a tricky proposition at best. The sheer blast of energy given off by the enemy ships as they fired on the station, and the station and satellites fired back, was enough to give her pause as she reevaluated the situation on the fly. But the taskforce was most certainly committed now, and the only way out of this fight was through it.

With it taking almost every erg of mental and physical energy to do so, Nadine lifted her hand against the force of the acceleration and painfully reached out to key the first pre-arranged command. The taskforce fell into pairs, each cohort already assigned their targets, and lanced across space at their enemy like arrows from a bow. An analogy that Nadine personally thought suited them all the more, given the Cheyenne and the Hood were leading the charge.

“Hold…fire…” she ordered, painfully clenching her stomach to force air up from the diaphragm. “Close the gap, hit them in the teeth with our first salvo.”

“Aye aye, Admiral.”

Roberts didn’t sound much better, though that was probably wishful thinking on her part. While no member of the Solari Fleet, either science track or any other, was permitted to be out of shape, she knew well that her captain was one of those who treated workouts with the fervor of near religious devotion. By comparison, her slighter frame was clearly in need of more workouts.

I’ll have to have Gwen put it on my schedule,
she thought, rather inanely she supposed,
tomorrow.

In space, even orbital space, distances are rarely measured in less than hundreds of kilometers. In this case, they were already moving over a hundred thousand kilometers an hour, and it would be several minutes before they crossed plots with the enemy flotilla. There was just something about those numbers that felt totally unreal to her as she watched them form on her displays.