Valkyrie Rising (Warrior's Wings Book Two) (32 page)

Sorilla carefully cleared out the dirt from the line, digging it up before she pulled her knife and a small box from her kit. A swipe of the blade severed the link, then she stripped the protective covering before inserting both ends into the box and reburying it.

“I’m in,” she said a moment later, connecting to the USF network. “Transmitting coordinates…done. We’re clear.”

She quickly buried the box and line, dusting the area and laying some leaves and brush over it before standing up.

“We’ve got maybe fifteen minutes, Mack. Where was that last patrol we passed?”

Mack nodded. “I like the way you think, Top. Back about a half a klick, heading around to the east.”

“Let’s go pay them a visit, right?”

“Right you are, Top.”

Job done, they doubled back, paying less attention to stealth this time as they quickly picked up the enemy’s trail and tracked them back around. They wanted to be in position when the strikes came down; it would hide their own actions effectively in the larger chaos of the assault. With the clock now running on its own time, they focused on maximizing the bang they got for their buck.

*****

FOB Hayden

Kayne examined the changes in the tactical board as they came in. The new coordinates from the operator team showed clearly against the map of the old colony site. He looked over at the real time imagery he was getting from the fiber cable sensors, along with the overlay, and nodded with some satisfaction.

“Are the Cougars and Excaliburs in position?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Launch the Raptors,” he ordered, taking a little satisfaction in the order. The skies had been a no fly zone almost the entire time he was on Hayden, and it chafed at him. Fighting under an unfriendly sky went very much against his training and everything he’d ever experienced. At worst, a US Army officer learned to fight under a neutral sky, with short, hostile periods. On Earth there were no nations that could hold the skies against the stealth and air superiority of first world air forces, and there hadn’t been for two centuries.

Oh, some second world nations, and the occasional third world nation had the anti-air capability to make air operations chancy, but there were none that could hold the sky against a concerted effort of first world air forces.

Here on Hayden, however, things had flipped on him. He was hiding underground, half afraid to pop his head up for fear of nuclear retaliation. The sky, while not overtly hostile because the aliens didn’t seem to care enough to secure it for themselves, was far from a friendly place. They’d launched stealth drones early on, but they’d all been annihilated when the second gravity valve came online, and since then Kayne had been hesitant to waste what he had left.

Now, however, there seemed no point to hold anything back.

When they lost the orbitals, fighting on the ground would become far more dirty and dangerous. It wasn’t going to be a war he was trained to fight, Kayne knew. He fought wars from high ground, positions of power. In the dirt, the way it was going to be, was beyond his experience.

Honestly, he wasn’t certain he could fight and win that kind of war. So he was going to start it off with as big a bang as he possibly could.

“Raptors in the air.”

“Slave them to the firing solution. Put them at the disposal of the operator teams.”

“Yes, sir, General.”

On his board, the Raptors’ icons went live as they climbed to 50,000 meters and circled in toward the area of operation.

The clock on the screen was now counting down from three minutes.

*****

Unlike the Cougars, the heavier Excalibur units weren’t entirely automated. The big tracked platforms housed three-man crews, who were generally charged with emergency tasking and rearming the beasts they rode, as well as the general command and control of the automated Cougars that often rode escort.

For the first time since they’d landed their big beasts on Hayden, those crews had them out in the open and out from under the camo netting. They’d surveyed ideal firing positions when they arrived and now had moved their Excalibur and Cougar units into those positions, aligned with the lines to the old colony site.

Two of the big Excaliburs, their heavy power generators already rumbling as they charged the multiple redundant capacitors of the rail cannons, were sitting in the center of fifteen automated cougars. All the cannons were pointed very nearly vertical, the angle all but invisible to the naked eye as they waited for the final fire order.

With just over two minutes to the strike time, their firing light went green, and the first hypersonic blasts roared from seventeen high-powered rail cannons. The ground on the big hill shook, dirt and dust being blown into the air by the shockwave, and for a moment everything was blown away from them.

Then the rails lowered their angle just slightly, and the world rocked again.

The sound was heard for kilometers, the shockwave uprooted smaller trees for almost two hundred meters, and a moment later, the rails dropped again and once more they roared.

Time and again, the rails would drop their angle just slightly, while the crews monitored the charges of the rails, and they would fire again. The first shots were actually peaking just in sub-orbital space as the rails dropped to forty-five degrees and fired their twenty-fourth shot. The smart rounds slowed their ascent and started to fall back to Hayden’s surface, actually catching up with the second rounds fired as they built speed back up.

Then the first and second rounds started to catch up to the third, and then they all caught up to the fourth, and it continued in such manner. Finally, almost two minutes after the first shots had been fired, more than forty salvoes were crowded in the same airspace as they slammed into the old Hayden colony site at the same time.

At the plateau chosen for the Hayden colony, the whole world exploded.

The strike was simultaneous. The last rounds fired from the Cougar and Excalibur units had been over-the-horizon shots that barely arced at all before they slammed into their targets, while the first were effectively orbit-to-surface kinetic strikes. The positions spotted and chosen by the operator team were annihilated in the same instant, the alien ship holed through as if it were made of paper.

The shockwave threw everyone present who hadn’t been killed to the ground, scattering them like debris in a windstorm.

Kriss, a veteran of many Sentinel campaigns, recognized the strike for what it was even before he hit the ground, but he was also aware that the knowledge was completely useless.

Breaker, there were
no
indications they had weapons this heavy on-world!

He covered up, rolling under a concrete partition, and hugged it against the flying debris and shrapnel hurtling above him. For them to have timed their assault so precisely, he knew beyond a doubt that they had seen the Fleet coming and decided to hit hard while they could.

A tearing sound screeched above him, and he risked a look up in time to see the Ross Ell ship tilt dangerously to one side and then slip away as its drive lost stability. He had to admire the audacity of the assault and its carefully played timing, but damned if it wasn’t going to look bad on his record.

Of course, the Ross Ell ignoring his warnings would offset that with the Alliance itself, but Kriss was under no illusions that the Lucian Overseers would see it kindly. They didn’t much care for excuses, and the Overseers were all former Sentinels who had pretty much zero tolerance for failure.

After the rolling thunder of the initial strike, Kriss began to get to his feet, only to be thrown down again when a single, sharp crack tore the air asunder and another strike slammed into the ship as it went down. Kriss kept low as another supersonic explosion tore through the area, eyes on the skies as he realized that the strikes were coming in damned near horizontal from over the horizon to the south.

“Move!” he snarled. “They can’t hit us from that angle!”

He rose up himself, rallying the Sentinels around him. “Watch for ground forces! They’re firing from over the horizon, they must have local observation!”

He knew that to be true; they’d swept all the satellites from orbit in the original landing by the records he’d seen, and he’d confirmed that there were none when he brought his unit in. That meant someone or something on the ground with a line of sight.

Unfortunately, with all that cover,
he scowled at the jungle pressing in around them from all sides,
they could be almost anywhere.
One thing he hated was being tied down to the defensive role. That was something for regular military; the Sentinels were bred to attack. Yet he found himself forced now to try and protect the damn fool Ross Ell, while his enemies roamed freely and struck as they would.

“Did any of the patrols report any sightings at all?” he demanded as he slid into a sheltered area with two of his sub-alterns.

“No, Deice! No reports.”

“Damn!”

Kriss reached out for a comm, “Get me a link to the fleet! We’re going to need fire support!”

Chapter Eleven

The rumble of thunder in the distance, shaking the ground and rattling the trees, those were the signs Sorilla and Mack were waiting for as they shadowed the alien patrol. While the three aliens were looking around in shock, they ghosted from the jungle and simply leveled their rifles as they stroked the triggers.

Set to full military power, select fire, the rail guns roared as a hypersonic gout of flame temporarily connected the two operators with their targets and simply vaporized large chunks of the aliens’ center mass. Unlike previous engagements, Sorilla and Mack elected to forgo control for power this time and ignored the suggestions of the weapons’ manual. The result was fast, messy, and lethal.

In less than two seconds, the three enemy soldiers were on the ground, only one of them in what was mostly one piece. The two veteran special operations soldiers exchanged brief glances before they stepped over the bodies and vanished again into the jungle, already on the hunt for more targets.

Despite the incredibly loud nature of the brief clash of violence, the sound of their rifles firing had been totally lost in the general roar of the artillery strike on the old colony site.

*****

The rolling thunder of the artillery barrage was a signal to Crow as well, but for him it was time to take a knee while Korman covered him. He loaded up a pulsed message and shot it out, hoping that the enemy counter signals would be distracted by the commotion. Once it was sent, he got up and nodded to his partner.

“Let’s move.”

The two quickly put some distance between themselves and the transmission point, not wanting to be around if the enemy still had valve capability.

“You think anyone got that?”

Crow shrugged as they ran. “If they didn’t, they didn’t. Nothing we can do about it now.”

As the thunder of the artillery strike rolled over the Hayden jungle, however, they needn’t have worried about others taking notice. Bravo Team was almost fifty klicks away, and after they’d figured out the direction it had come from and finished cursing, they immediately set out to investigate. Crow’s pulse signal just quickened their pace, as the operators of SOCOM Team Bravo really didn’t want to miss the party.

Charlie Team was only a few kilometers away on the other hand. They’d heard the rumble in the distance but were unable to pin down the direction until the strikes hit home. The loud cracks drove them to take a knee and evaluate whether they were under attack until Crow’s signal hit their coms.

“Damn. Alpha’s kicking off a major party. Think we can get there before there’s nothing left but cleanup, boss?”

The team leader, a British Navy commander by the name of Simon Conroy, considered their position against the time he had available. Crow’s data download included information on the inbound fleet and the military outlook once they took up their orbital positions. Despite that bleak set of projections, his job remained unchanged.

“All right, we turn our arses around,” he decided. “Even if the party’s over before we get there, that’s where the players are.”

Charlie Team nodded, changing direction quickly as they redirected to the old colony site to join their comrades and meet the enemy where they stood.

*****

FOB Hayden

Kayne eyed the screens arrayed around him with a critical eye, knowing what was coming and hating it all the same. Still, there was no rule that said he had to like his job, just that he had to do it.

“All right, get the Cougars and Excaliburs under cover. Time’s up,” he said finally.

His people sent the orders out without question, just entered the new status into their computers and seconds later the Cougar and Excalibur units were tucking their rails down in the locked position as they prepared to move out.

He would also have ordered the forward spotters back, but the operator teams had their own mission, and while they were under his command, they also had a lot more leeway concerning the interpretation of their orders compared to the regulars he controlled. Also, while he could give them orders, technically, he did not have the authority to change their overall mission.

So the operators would continue on their own authority, and he’d leave them to it. His responsibility was now to his own people and the colonists. They had to pull their heads in under some cover, and preferably pull everything that might show a hint of their position in along with them.

With the orbitals soon to be under the control of the enemy, his mission was about to go from securing the planet for the USF to disrupting the enemy’s attempt to do the same for their own purposes.

Not the job I was sent to do, but needs must when the devil drives,
he thought tiredly, eyes on the screens around him. 
And the devil’s got the pedal to the metal now, that’s for sure.

*****