Valkyrie Rising (Warrior's Wings Book Two) (27 page)

As the alien was wounded and running, she quickly spotted his trail and settled in to track him back to his own base camp. Taking them by surprise had given her an advantage that she’d used effectively, but there were elements of the fight that concerned her.

She’d hit the first one hard enough to put a rhino face first in the dirt, yet he’d held his balance and taken her full, armored weight from a twenty-meter drop as if it were another day at the park. Then she nailed the second one with a heel strike that would have utterly shattered a human’s collar bone. Basically no effect.

It wasn’t until she brought out the artillery that she started getting real, confirmed kills, and without the surprise of the attack and the distractions of the other soldiers, as well as the flash bangs, there was a very real chance that she wouldn’t have gotten the chance to do that much.

These boys were fast, tough, and disciplined.

That was such a bad combination from where she was standing. Sorilla took a chance with the spread spectrum transmitter and sent a pulsed update to her team, letting them know what had happened and her current vector and plan. Shortly after she sent that out, another pulse came back from Lt. Crow advising that he and Simmons were 400 meters ahead of her, already tracking the fleeing target.

I do love working with professionals.

Now that they’d baited in the tiger, they just had to run it down.

*****

“Move!” Kriss snarled, shoving one of his men along as he joined them.

What the hell had gone wrong with the mission he had no idea, but they only had a few minutes now to get ready for the company the survivor of the strike was leading in their direction. The idea that one of these people, one
single
enemy soldier, had eliminated four Sentinels in the space of a few bare marks was…unreal.

He’d called in all the Sentinels he had in the immediate area, barely a twelve’s worth, and they were hurriedly setting up an ambush to greet the pursuers coming on the tail of the running Sentinel.

That one thought it was real cute, putting a scare into my Sentinel. Too cute. Good enough with a bolter to shoot the weapon from someone’s hand, then missing with a dozen shots after? Unlikely.

It was a move he’d used himself in the past: put a fear into a surviving soldier so he wasn’t as careful as he might be, then follow him back to his troop.

It was effective against normal troops, but not against a Sentinel.

He settled into his place, eyeing the area to see if he could spot the locations of the other Sentinels from where he was. When he couldn’t, he nodded in satisfaction.

If they were hidden to his eyes, then they were more than likely hidden from anyone else.

*****

Newly minted Lt. Joshua Crow had a hard time believing how life turned out sometimes. He’d just passed BUD/S class 1023, hadn’t even gotten a chance to pin his BUD, when he was called in to the admiral’s office and offered a shot at something else entirely.

Much of his life, from shortly after adolescence onward, all he could think about was becoming a SEAL. His father had been Navy and tried out for the Teams but never quite made it. Even so, Crow had heard nothing but respect for the Navy Special Forces and set his sights early. So when he was offered a place in Fleet, he turned it down with a polite but firm, “No thank you.”

He’d never been one of the Fleet fanboys; going into space wasn’t something he dreamed about as a kid. He knew that most kids had that dream by times, but for him it was always the Navy when he was younger and the SEAL Teams when he grew a little.

Very little, as his mother and girlfriends of the past would agree and point out. And, oh boy, would they point it out. Often. And with great enthusiasm.

That aside, he was standing there in the admiral’s office, on the cusp of achieving his first major life goal, and some brass in Fleet wanted him to become some sort of fricking Space Ranger?

No, thank you.

Sir.

That was when Admiral Jacek, the man in charge of Coronado’s training facilities, laid it on him.

Aliens. Real, honest to freaking god, aliens.

And they were picking a fight.

Today, as the dawn slowly began to make itself known in the sky over the alien jungle he was running through, Crow could admit that he’d been played like a cheap fiddle. Oh, certainly the admiral hadn’t said a word of lie to him, but it was clear that the Teams wanted to handpick who they were sending to the Fleet teams, and for whatever reason Crow made the list. Since putting him in a spacesuit was on the Navy’s agenda, the admiral didn’t slack any when it came to making it happen. Three and a half minutes after his polite but firm, “No, thank you…sir,” Crow was shaking the Fleet admiral’s hand and thanking him for the assignment to Fleet SOCOM.

He spent the better part of the next two days staring into a mug of beer that kept emptying and refilling somehow, wondering how the hell that had happened. Later, once he’d sobered up, he had been willing to admit that he’d probably been drinking from it, but at the time he really didn’t think that far into the situation.

He would have to thank Jacek when he saw the old bastard again, though. Tracking an alien operator through dense jungle at damned near a dead run, well, it was what he’d been born for.

The little bastard he was chasing was canny, though, he’d given it that much. Considering how fast he was moving, he was hiding his trail with surprising skill, but there was just no way to cover the occasional broken branches while maintaining the speed he was keeping. Crow was pumped, his adrenaline and other hormones releasing well above any normal human and several degrees above those of a professional athlete due to his implants, so he had no trouble keeping up. He passed off the lead position to Simmons as he paused to check the trail, his armor HUD in full combat tracking mode, spotting broken branches, footprints, and even the anomalous chemical trail that Crow had tentatively labeled as alien blood.

Top really did a number on these buggers.

If they hadn’t picked the fight, Crow would probably feel a little sorry for them, to be honest. That said, her quick notes on the fight made it clear that they shouldn’t underestimate these buggers. Tough, fast, and disciplined.

That was a dangerous combination in any soldier, and if they’d been trained and equipped to match their physical and mental skills, then the admiral had been right when he said that these were probably the enemy’s varsity.

That thought was sticking in his mind when he chased his prey into a small ravine gully just a few steps behind Corporal Simmons, and the sound of a branch snapping to his left was suddenly haloed in his peripheral HUD.

Oh, fuck me.
Crow was already throwing himself down as he snapped out an order to Simmons, “Ambush! Hit the deck!”

He hit the creek bed, rolling through the shallow water as the enemy fire tore through the air over his head, his armor tracking and triangulating the sounds as best it could while he just tried to avoid getting himself killed by the near perfect ambush that had closed around him.

Near
perfect. One of them got a little overeager, stepped on something he shouldn’t have. Against anyone else, it wouldn’t have been noticed, but SOCOM operators were walking, talking, supercomputers. Everything around them was analyzed in real time; it had to be since their lives were so often on the line.

Now, though, he was still in the middle of a sprung trap, and the jaws were closing too fast and too well for him to see any way clear. Crow threw himself under one of the bank overhangs, blocking shots from half the positions around him as he brought his rifle up and returned fire with short bursts into likely positions of origin.

Since he’d already been spotted, he didn’t worry about stealth, and before his finger stroked the trigger the first time, he simply accessed his gun’s controls and turned every option as far up as it would go, using override codes he’d been issued when he qualified for SOCOM.

The gully exploded as heavy, depleted uranium slugs tore the air apart at such high velocities that the air itself ignited in their wake. His normally silent and stealthy rifle was spitting flames that extended the entire distance from the muzzle to the target in the close quarters he was dealing with, the slugs themselves tearing the opposite bank to shreds with both kinetic energy and their QTex explosive cores.

With his immediate reaction over, Crow spared a moment to cast about for Simmons, only to find the man sprawled face down in the stream, his blood coloring the running water. Crow smothered a curse a pinged the armor.

Damn.

Nothing from his medical link, at all.

‘
Proc,’
he subvocalized as his finger stroked the trigger, almost gently despite the violent bucking of the weapon in his hands, ‘
send ambush beacon.’

*****

Kriss involuntarily hit the ground, backside first, when the bank he was using as cover exploded in his face.

Breaker! What was that?

The air itself was burning, the local temperature rising several degrees in an instant just from being in the same range as the enemy weapon. The brief glimpse he’d had of the weapon in the soldier’s hands was enough for him to assume it was the same as the others they’d seen so far, but no one had fired on them like
that
before.

He quickly signaled to the Sentinels on the other side of the ambush to move in, close the door as quickly as they could, and eliminate the target. They’d apparently only managed to ensnare one of the enemy, which made it possible that there was only one of this new type in the area. Possible, but not likely, in his mind. Soldiers worked best in teams, with two being the smallest team he’d ever heard fielded as a general rule, and that was rare. Sentinels preferred teams of five or more as the rule, and smaller teams were only considered for specific missions.

That meant that the odds were very good that this little soldier had allies of his own in the area, probably already closing in. They’d probably entrapped the forward reconnaissance element in the ambush, which meant that the bulk of the enemy would be closing on them if they didn’t get this target eliminated in a hurry.

He made a decision quickly then signaled the heavy element of his force forward and clenched his grip tightly for them to see.

*****

Captain Isaiah Washington could kill Crow, if the little twerp weren’t about to beat him to it. Running dead on into an ambush like an amateur was the sort of thing that got people killed, case in point. When his ambush alert went off, Washington called his team in fast, circling the wagons as they took stock of the situation and prepared to pull the lieutenant out of the mess he’d got himself and his partner in.

“Top, you’re with me. We’re going to close and pull his arse out of the fire,” he told Sorilla as soon as her near field icon came online, showing that they were within fifty meters of each other.

“Got it.”

“Mack, Korman, you two are on overwatch. Find a place with a line on the action and cover us as best you can.”

“Aye, you’ve got it, boss,” Corporal Mackenzie, late of Her Majesty’s Special Air Service drawled easily, grabbing Corporal Korman by the shoulder and turning immediately away from the group.

Sorilla landed easily by Ton as the two took a few seconds to review the data retrieved from Crow’s SOS pulse.

“They’re good,” Sorilla said tersely.

“They are that. Circle left, hit them at point beta,” Ton ordered, highlighting the section he was talking about on their shared map. “I’ll come in from alpha over here. The trees look thick enough to cover you as you approach.”

“What about you?” she asked, eyes flickering over the area he was talking about. He’d be coming right up the gully with no hard cover to speak of.

“Have to get Crow’s arse out of that pincer,” Ton growled. “Then decide if I want to perforate it myself. Once you hit beta, I’ll come down like lightning from Olympus itself. Grab Crow on the way through, and keep on belting out through your position while you cover us.”

“What about Simmons?”

“We get the living out first,” Ton said in clipped, harsh tones, “Then we worry about the dead.”

“Got it.” Sorilla nodded, swallowing.

“Good. Go.”

Sorilla jumped away, her armor plotting a least time trajectory through the trees, which involved a lot of dodging branches and trunks as she hooked and swung her way through the brush. Just before she lost NFC contact with Washington, she called out one last message. “Watch your ass, Ton. As big as you are, they’re not going to miss easily.”

Her NFC icon blinked out before he could respond.

“That lady is such a smartass,” he grumbled, jumping off to head for his own destination.

*****

Crow was starting to feel a little unappreciated.

His impromptu dance of flames and thunder had certainly given him some breathing room from across the gully, but if he moved from where he was covering (not cowering, just to be clear), then he’d be turned to a fine red mist by the enemy above his position. He couldn’t open fire on them since he’d have to shoot through the dirt embankment to do that, and that would be the equivalent of calling an artillery strike down on his own position.

Effective, perhaps, but only if survival wasn’t a priority.

Besides, that would blow away the overhang along the edge of the gully, and that was the only thing currently giving him any cover from the aliens moving around above him.

He ejected the magazine from his rifle, idly kicking the metal box before it hit the ground, and slapped its replacement in position before the first clattered to the creek bed below his position. He’d blown out the last one in what was practically one long burst of local Armageddon, leaving the barrel of the weapon smoking in the aftermath. The manual said that you couldn’t do that to an assault rifle, not without warping the barrel and potentially cooking off rounds sitting in the receiver. The latter was unlikely, since Qtex was about as stable an explosive as could exist. Heat, no matter the amount, wouldn’t set it off. Only the electronic detonator buried in its core could do that. The first problem, however, was a little more significant. It wasn’t as bad as they told grunts and regulars, since the brass had learned the hard way that you didn’t trust your average soldier with the
expected
capability of their weapon. It was just so much safer to let them think that it was only capable of about seventy or eighty percent of what it could really do. That way, when they tried to push their luck, they were rewarded with a rifle that worked every time instead of one that blew up in their face or jammed when it had been pushed just that smidge too far.