Valkyrie Rising (Warrior's Wings Book Two) (12 page)

He kept from sighing too loudly and lifted his fist, stopping the march in place as the lieutenant in charge of the platoon stepped up to him.

“We’ll camp here,” Jerry told him. “Make base camp tomorrow afternoon. No sense in stumbling around the jungle at night. Nothing out there can digest us, but nothing out there is smart enough to know that, either.”

“All right.” The man, Lieutenant Brecker nodded. He wasn’t happy about it, but pushing on through an unknown jungle after dark wasn’t really a good idea in anyone’s book, so he didn’t complain. In the months they’d been on-world, he’d learned enough to recognize that there were some significantly different risks on Hayden compared to Earth. “I’ll post sentries and get the men bivouacked for the night.”

“Remind ‘em to have their rifles set to supersonic,” Jerry said. “No point hiding out here, and a shot won’t scare the bigger beasties off if they can’t hear it.”

“Right, I remember,” Brecker said, waving idly as he wandered off.

Jerry set his rifle against a large tree and settled into a crook of the old hardwood’s gnarled roots. “I miss the Sarge.”

Dean chuckled. “Lady was here for the better part of two years and you didn’t make a move, man. Showing some regrets?”

“Dean, kid, let me give you a hint… You never hit on someone called Sarge.” Jerry chuckled. “They hit on you, or you risk them just plain hitting you.”

Dean made a face, rolling his eyes. “Never stopped you before.”

“Never knew a woman who could break my neck as an afterthought before.”

Dean shook his head. “Whatever you say, man.”

Jerry just shook his head. “Look, go back and make sure that the grunts aren’t pissing on the plants. They didn’t listen to me the last time and we spent all night chasing off the scavengers sniffing after the acid.”

“Right, got it.” Dean nodded, getting up. “Still think you missed the bus, though, Jer.”

“Get out of here.”

Dean laughed at him but got going, leaving Jerry to watch the sky darkening as the orange glow faded to the west. Dean was probably right, he supposed. It was weird, honestly. He’d spent most of his life mucking about the jungle, had a few flings in his day, but if someone…someone other than the Sarge…put a gun to his head, he’d probably admit that he spent more time thinking about her than he had any other lady he’d met.

Which doesn’t mean I’m dumb enough to get my neck broken
, he thought wryly, standing up to stretch out a bit. It had been a long day, and with night falling, Jerry was looking forward to some rest before the hike back to camp.

*****

It was the middle of the night. Hayden’s moon was full and casting deep shadows through the jungle when a low rumble woke Jerry from where he was bivouacked. He half turned, cracking his eyes open slightly.

“What the hell?” He crawled out of the bag, shaking himself awake as he crawled up and hooked a lower limb of the tree he was hunkered under. He looked around, trying to place the source of the sound. It wasn’t anything natural to Hayden, which was why he woke up so quickly. After a few years, you got used to the normal sounds and tuned them out, unless you knew it was a threat.

Ever since the night of ghosts, when the aliens had taken their home, anything they couldn’t identify was considered a threat by Hayden colonists.

“You hear that, Jer?”

“No, I slept so much yesterday that I couldn’t catch a wink tonight,” Jerry replied sarcastically as Dean crawled up behind him.

“That wasn’t no animal.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

Dean rolled his eyes. “You’re in a mood tonight.”

“I just got woken up in the middle of the night by something I can’t identify. I can’t imagine why I’d be in a mood.”

“What do you think it was?” Dean asked, ignoring Jerry’s tone.

“I don’t know. Wasn’t a nuke.” Jerry shook his head. “Never heard anything like it.”

“Same here.”

Jerry frowned, thinking about it, then nudged Dean. “Go wake the soldier boy, would you? I want to see what their armor computers think about this.”

“Right. Be right back.”

Jerry kept his eyes on the jungle, climbing up a little so he could see out over the hill and to the jungle beyond. 
No sign of blade wings in the air, but it’s so dark I could be missing them.

Hayden blade wings were the apex aerial predator on the planet, and while not normally nocturnal, they could get pretty riled up by anything intruding on their sleep. He was waiting impatiently when Brecker arrived, blurry-eyed and lugging his helmet along.

“What is it?” the lieutenant mumbled.

“Check your recorders. They were on, right?”

“Yeah, they’re never off,” Brecker replied, rubbing his eyes. “Why? What happened?”

“Just check what they recorded about eight minutes ago.”

“Right, ‘kay. One sec…” the lieutenant said as he pulled on his helmet and adjusted the HUD visor carefully.

Unlike the armor Sorilla had worn occasionally on Hayden, the soldiers wore modular kit that was considerably bulkier and didn’t seem to do near as much, from what Jerry could tell. On the other hand, they could only take the helmet with them if that’s all they needed, unlike Sorilla’s kit that was basically fully integrated and you either had it or you didn’t. Brecker took a moment to access the rollover memory and run it through the time stamp Jerry asked for.

“Whoa.”

That’s a pretty useless comment.
Jerry rolled his eyes. “A little more detail than ‘whoa’ would be nice.”

“Don’t have much. Weird signal, though,” Brecker said, sounding a lot more awake.

“Yeah, I figured that much on my own.”

“It’s low-frequency. A lot of it is way below human hearing. Not an explosion, doesn’t fit any known natural causes of ultralow frequency sounds.” Brecker went on, probably not having even heard Jerry’s sarcasm. “I think this is one of theirs.”

“Theirs?” Jerry shot him a sharp look, again something that went totally over the soldier’s head, as he was focused entirely on his computer display. “You mean the aliens?”

“Yeah. Sergeant Aida reported that they used ULF sound to cause panic,” Brecker said, “probably aimed at animals more than humans, but it’s enough to freak us out too if we don’t know the cause. This isn’t a perfect match for their signals, as far as the sergeant’s recordings give, but it’s close.”

“Can you tell where it came from?”

Brecker shook his head, pulling his helmet off. “No. ULF is pretty much omnidirectional. It’s really tough to get a good fix on its source, especially in this kind of environment.”

“Nothing? Nothing at all?”

“Maybe a general direction. It looks…northerly. More or less.”

Jerry turned to face the north, eyes flicking as he examined the stars above, and mentally called up their current location.

“You mean around the old colony site,” he said finally.

“Generally…” Brecker said, clearly not liking being pinned down on the subject. “Could be there, or not. I really can’t say.”

“Right.” Jerry frowned. “Check it out?”

Now it was the lieutenant’s turn to frown as he considered.

“No,” he said finally. “We’re half a day from base camp. Let’s go back and report in. We’ll tell the general what we picked up, maybe take the rest of the day to analyze the signal. With some time and better computers, maybe we can figure out what it was or where it came from. Worst case, we only lose a day and we can come back out or send another squad.”

Jerry nodded slowly. “Right. Ok, I’m up for the night now, but you may as well crash.”

“Yeah, ‘kay. Thanks.” Brecker crawled back down from the crook of the tree Jerry was camped in, heading back to where he was bivouacked with his squad.

Jerry listened to him leave but remained focused on the distant skyline. Against the moon and stars he could just make out the horizon where the black of the jungle tried to get lost in the black of the night sky. He couldn’t help but think back to the night of ghosts, that terror-filled night of madness that had sent everyone he knew running for the jungles around the colony, even when they all knew that they’d starve to death with no Terran food to eat. Sorilla had told him about the ultralow frequency sound, and now this lieutenant said as much himself, but knowing what caused it just couldn’t blot out the terror he remembered from that night.

Jerry shivered against the warmth of the jungle, part of him screaming that the ghosts weren’t as banished as he’d hoped.

*****

To the northeast

The jungle world was a dark place for the Lucian Sentinels, but dark was good. They left the lander buried in the local mud and set out on foot toward the original landing site. Things were well and truly buried in something deeper and less pleasant than mud if the Sentinels had been summoned to a planet, but even in his experience, Squadron Deice Kriss had to admit that he’d rarely seen things quite this bad.

The forward development corporation of the Alliance was, more often than not, the poor dumb fools the Sentinels were tasked with pulling out of a stellar mass, but this time they’d stepped in something especially pungent.

Forgetting for the moment the loss of at least six starships, a matter well beyond Kriss’s purview, the Lucian couldn’t believe that they’d lost two dimensional singularity devices. One of which to orbital bombardment, no less! A DSD on full automation could take out multiple targets from any approach, even shooting through the planet if needs be. Kriss figured that someone had to have completely stuck their
targlia
where it didn’t belong on that one.

The internal assault was the one of interest to Deice Kriss, however. Surviving records indicated one combatant took out the entire base, actually being so completely
insane
as to actually use explosive charges on the DSD core itself! It gave Kriss shivers even thinking about it.

Oh, certainly, the safety procedures and implementations on the DSDs were such that there was no official risk of imploding the device into a stable singularity, but he’d not risk that on any world
he
was currently occupying.

Which meant that the combatant involved was either ignorant of the technology, or one stone-cold
targlian
.

Kriss was really quite curious to work out which it was. As a Sentinel, he and his were more often underused on these clearing missions. He, personally, was getting tired of being called in to deal with random vermin that were killing off the idiot guards assigned to DSD installations. Because the installations were supposed to be so well-defended, no one in the Alliance bothered to assign real troopers to them. The forward development corporation that was assigned to this frontier hired Porra guards. The Porra were big and looked fierce to most Alliance species, but there wasn’t a decent trooper in the whole race.

They’d have been better off with the Parthalians.

Kriss put a fist up, stopping his squad in place. Ahead of them, they could see the recorded location of the DSD, noting that the crater left behind by the destroyed installation was clearly visible, even in the distance.

That was one hell of a blast.
Kris admired the work, leaning his squat form against one of the local trees. The best he could tell from the distance was that someone used some pretty effective explosives to open the facility like a sealed lunch pack. Honestly, Kriss was more impressed that it had been accomplished by one agent. That spoke of some pretty compact explosives, which told the experienced Sentinel that they were dealing with a highly proficient military culture.

That wasn’t as common as he personally would have expected, but it wasn’t unknown on the frontier, either.

Idiot DevCorp probably doesn’t even have the proper authorization forms to occupy this world,
Kriss figured. 
Not as is, at least
. He was pretty sure that the correct forms were certified and on file back in the core, but he’d be honestly shocked if they included a militarized population already in residence, to say nothing of an interstellar one.

That wasn’t his concern, however. His orders had come down through the chain; he harbored no doubts as to their authenticity. Six ships and now two DSD facilities had been destroyed by a non-aligned species, so he and his squad were to reconnoiter and eliminate the local threat, or report back if such proved impractical.

For that to be accomplished, he had to locate the locals, but there was no sign anywhere of anything more than local predators. They’d already had to pop off a couple low-band rumblers to scare off the larger predators in the area. Not something they’d normally do, but the predators were getting persistent, and the rumblers were less noticeable than opening fire.

If the opposition is living in these jungles, I’m impressed.
Kriss had seen worse jungles, had survived worse even, but things were always a lot more complicated when you had a group. One man could avoid predators easily enough, but even a squad tended to attract more than could easily be avoided. For any significant force to be living in these jungles and still have enough energy left after survival to start kicking the DevCorp around spoke either of some tough people, or a hidden technical base.

In either case, he and his squad had to find them first.

Kriss flicked his hand twice, gesturing his squad to move to the south, circling around the former location of the primary DSD. It was clear that the location was now deserted. The entire area was clearly radiating at the same level as the rest of the jungle, so while it was a good starting point for their search, he wasn’t going to take his squad anywhere near it. Compared to the thick, local jungle, getting caught like fools in an artificial environment would be as bad as having your own DSD facility blown out from under you by a single trooper.

He and his were Lucians; they didn’t do stupid.

*****

USF underground base

Outside the base, the sun was high in the sky when Lieutenant Brecker brought his squad in, and Kayne was waiting by the time they’d been fully checked in.