Valkyrie Rising (Warrior's Wings Book Two) (13 page)

“You’re late,” Kayne said when the lieutenant was standing on the packed dirt of his office floor.

“Jungle ruck took longer than I figured.”

Kayne nodded almost imperceptibly. He’d expected as much when the schedule was filled out but had let it pass to give the younger officer a bit of a lesson.

“Next time, listen to your NCO,” he advised. “I remember Burke told you that the men weren’t up to the pace you expected.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That said, I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow.” Kayne shrugged, looking up to smirk at the surprised look on the kid’s face.

“Sir?” Brecker blinked.

“I expect you to make mistakes, Lieutenant,” Kayne told him. “I also expect you to learn from them. Next time, listen to the sergeant, and when you sign off on a schedule…you better be able to keep it. I’ll forgive delays for reasons you can’t control, but your initial report indicates nothing of the sort. We run the schedules so we can properly deploy squads and know when they’re overdue. If I can’t tell when you’re supposed to be back, I can’t tell when I should be sending out search and rescue. Get it right in the future.”

“Sir!” The lieutenant nodded, standing straight at attention.

“Now, stand at ease and tell me about last night.”

Brecker nodded, shifting his stance as he described the incident of the night before.

“You have it recorded?” Kayne asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Get your team squared away, then grab some chow and take a day. Once I get the word back from the tech boys, I’ll probably have another assignment for your squad,” Kayne told him. “You heard it, you’ve got dibs on the investigation if you want it.”

“Yes, sir, my team wants it.”

“Good. I’ll let you know. Go see to your squad.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

*****

Jerry tossed his pack down, the heavy kit thudding as it landed on the packed dirt beside his bunk. A two-week patrol with the soldiers was tiring, mentally more than physically. Pretty much none of them had any real experience in the jungle, and for those that had some, it was all Terran jungle experience. Hayden was a little different from Earth, and keeping everyone from making rookie mistakes took a lot of focus and concentration.

The worst of it was that Hayden wasn’t visually all that strange. The trees looked like trees, the insects looked like insects, and by and large the animals looked like you’d expect. The theory behind that was called parallel evolution, and basically it came down to the idea that since evolution was largely in response to environment, if you had fairly close environments, you were probably going to get pretty close evolutionary development. Since the big attraction of Hayden was how very close it was to Earth, well, things got eerily familiar by times.

Hell, while there were no local examples, Jerry was fully aware that there were some very close simian analogues on a couple of the other continents.

The problem was that the sense of familiarity Hayden bred also bred carelessness. Soldiers with experience in Panama or other jungles on Earth tended to react to animals and plants the way they would back there. That was a pain, especially for Jerry and his pathfinders, because there were a few Hayden insects and animals that looked very much like harmless Terran beasties, although they were anything but.

He really knew he shouldn’t be comparing these guys to the Sarge, but even when she didn’t know what she was dealing with, Sorilla wasn’t a rookie. Being a newbie like this was a state of mind; you didn’t have to know everything to be an old hand in the jungle, you just needed to know that you didn’t know everything. Rookies always knew everything, which was what got them in trouble.

He slumped into his bunk and leaned over his knees, rubbing the back of his neck.

“Lord save me from people who know everything,” he mumbled as he tried to stretch out some of his muscles.

“Speaking as a nurse, I feel your pain,” Tara said, smirking as she walked up to him. “As I recall, someone in this room has a habit of telling me how to treat an infection from a wulve bite.”

“Oh spare me,” Jerry grumbled. “I knew more about local biology than you do.”

“As long as you don’t count human biology as ‘local,’ sure.” She nodded in agreement.

He shot her a scowl but only shook his head and refused to be baited any further. Tara chuckled at him and dropped a bag on the bunk beside him.

“What’s this?”

“Chicken nuggets,” she said. “Got ‘em fresh out of the tank this morning. Figured you might like some.”

“Thanks,” he said, honestly grateful.

Protein cultures had always supplied the bulk of the colony’s meat, but the vats had all been lost when the counterweight was ripped away from the anchor. What few had been located on-world were now in the old colony site and pretty much off limits. Jerry had read that you couldn’t mimic a lot of the texture of real meat with vat-grown, but he grew up on chicken nuggets and hamburgers, so who cared what the texture was? It was all getting ground up anyway, and like most colonists, he couldn’t imagine killing some poor beastie for food.

As he slowly chewed the nuggets and savored the taste, which was a nice step up from the fresh salads and vac-packed military meals that he had been eating, Jerry started to ease back into his bunk. “I love these jungles, Tara, but I’m telling you, I’d kill for access to the tether and a shipping catalog.”

She nodded, taking a seat by him. “What did you want to order?”

“Honestly? I miss my subscriptions,” he admitted.

“
Playboy
?” she asked, smile on her lips.

He shot her a scowl, but there was no heat behind it. “I was thinking about the scientific journals, actually.”

She smirked but nodded.

“I always scammed my porn off some pals anyway,” he laughed.

She rolled her eyes. “The image of you lot skulking around the dark corridors of the colony, swapping porn files, is one I wish was harder to believe.”

He grinned, shaking his head. “Seriously, though, I miss my job.”

She laughed openly at him.

Jerry rolled his eyes. “At least you’re still nursing. I’m playing scoutmaster to a bunch of rookie jungle bunnies that can’t learn from their own mistakes, let alone others’.”

“And that’s different from research students, how exactly?”

“I don’t have to worry about research students shooting me with military-grade ordnance,” he countered darkly.

“They can’t be that bad.”

Jerry sighed. “No, not mostly, but I swear one of the buck privates almost shot me a couple weeks ago. Me! Thought I was some alien badass sneaking up to slit his throat while he took a leak or something. At least with students I can ride them about gun safety.”

Tara winced, knowing that this was one area that Jerry and Sorilla had always clashed on. Jerry and the colonists were strongly passionate about gun safety, including the use of gun locks, biometrics, and what was generally considered common sense safety procedures, like leaving the gun unloaded. Sorilla, on the other hand, refused to let them do any of that. It wasn’t that she felt that safety wasn’t important, just that she believed it was more important to have the weapon on hand, loaded, and ready in the very second you needed it.

“Good rules for a hunter with kids in the house were very bad rules for a soldier in a warzone” was a common quote from Sorilla, something she hammered into them every day they trained, and many of the days they spent in the field.

Tara wondered, sometimes, how hard it was going to be to get people back into the proper habits of firearm safety when this was all over and done. And not just that, but all the little parts of their lives that just wouldn’t fit back into a peacetime world. She’d never given any thought to it in the past; war was something for the ARVids, not a serious part of her life, but there were a thousand and one little things that she did and expected every day now that she could never have imagined just three years earlier.

Tara desperately wanted it all to be done and life to go back to normal, but she was also terrified by the prospect.

And that just didn’t seem right.

*****

The incongruence of the room full of high-end electronics, supercomputers, displays, and the like all placed on a packed dirt floor with tree roots growing out of the walls and ceiling struck Kayne every time he stepped into the analysis center.

They didn’t have a lot of options when it came to building their base of operations, particularly not given the technical sophistication of the enemy. In the end, they had to count on the fact that scanning through dense jungle and meters of packed dirt, plants, and animal life was basically impossible. It didn’t matter what kind of tech you had. That sort of cover was pretty much bullet proof…and, if it wasn’t, well, you were in so much more trouble than you knew, anyway.

So they wound up in situations where they had computers packed into dirty holes dug deep in the side of hills, praying that the dirt and jungle above them would hide the inevitable heat and electronic signature. More often than not, it was sweltering inside, even though they were using river water as coolant, just from the electronic waste heat. Once you figured in the body temperature of the people, well, they said war is hell… What no one seemed to realize was that if the blood and guts of battle were hell, then the waiting and preparations were surely purgatory.

“Have you got anything on that recording yet?” he asked, walking over cables that had been spiked down to the floor.

“Sir, I didn’t see you come in…”

“As you were, Darla,” he told the specialist. “I just need to know what you’ve learned.”

“Yes, sir,” she told him, shaking her head. “It’s definitely alien in origin, fits what we have from the colonists’ records of the invasion and what Sergeant Aida picked up. ULF sonic pattern, very complex. Reads almost as if it were coming from a natural source, and that’s probably intentional. But the specific pattern is too even and repetitive for that, even if there were any local sources it could be mistaken for.”

“Can you pin down where it came from?”

“No.” She shook her head. “ULF isn’t very directional, so without better distance between the pickups than we have, I can’t say.”

“Well, we know they’re back on this continent now, at least,” he said.

“Yes, sir. Judging by this…” She hesitated, considering. “I’d say they’re certainly within three hundred klicks.”

“Right in the range of the old colony site.”

Specialist Darla Kinds nodded. “That’s about right, yes, sir.”

“All right, thank you.”

“Doing my job, General Kayne.” She shrugged.

He just nodded as he turned and walked back out.

They were back on the local continent, which changed the shape of the playing field once again. Kayne knew that he needed to figure out what they were up to, especially whether they were planning on rebuilding the base at the old colony site now that Fleet had slammed the hell out of their fallback. He couldn’t let them set up another one of those valves, especially not in his backyard.

That meant putting more patrols into the field, probably a lot more.

Kayne headed over to the planning room, calling up a map on the table they’d put in the center. In order to get decent coverage of the area, he’d have to field at least a half dozen teams, and the farther afield he needed information on, the higher that number was going to get. They had some communications capability, but Kayne had ordered a large-scale coms blackout as a precaution. As long as the enemy showed any capacity for radio direction finding, he was planning on erring on the side of caution.

It was going to make organizing patrols a living hell, both in the field and from the command bunker, but that was just the hand he was dealt. The next thing he had to do was figure out who he could spare for deeper patrols and who he needed to keep closer to base.

Kayne had to admit, this assignment was one for the books. In some ways he was fighting a modern war, but in others he was being forced to step back as much as three centuries in time. Cut off from regular resupply and tied down to some pretty heavy movement and communications restrictions, they were certainly playing by a new rulebook this time out.

“Sheila.”

“Yes, sir?” his aide said immediately as she appeared at the door that led off to his office.

“Get me Rivers and Colonel Silver in here in an hour,” he said after a moment’s thought.

“Very well, General. Anything else?”

“Make sure we’ve got coffee and some food. It’s going to be a long night.”

“Yes, sir.”

*****

Hayden Jungle

Northeast of USF basecamp

The Lucians didn’t know nearly enough about the local fauna for Kriss’s comfort, making establishing a decent camp a difficult matter. That was the problem with frontier worlds, especially the ones DevCorps took an interest in. They were always full of complex life forms, most of which were generally hostile.

If DevCorps would expedite the surveyor data, it wouldn’t be so bad, but that never happened.

Which was the reason the Lucian Sentinels drew duties of this nature. Lucians had a well-deserved reputation for being among the toughest and deadliest species in the Alliance. Most of that reputation was built on the shoulders of the Sentinels as the elite of the Alliance military. That didn’t mean they were invincible, however, and there were a lot of very big predators on this world with teeth plenty sharp enough to get through even thick Lucian hides.

Kriss casually slipped his
lisk
blade from the arm sheathe and drove it into the body of a multi-limbed pest that was creeping up on him, holding the wildly wriggling beast up by the blade as he eyed it critically.

He didn’t know if the pest’s poison sacks were filled with anything that would have an effect on a Lucian, but it looked nasty enough. He flicked the blade, cleaving the rest of it in two, and let it flop to the ground, where it continued to wriggle around.

Too simple to know it’s dead.
He grunted, stomping it to its final rest as he moved back to camp.