On Silver Wings (22 page)

In full armor, her helm cradled against her hip, Sargent Sorilla Aida looked over the assembled group with a critical eye.

“Fleet’s back.” She said simply, “Sam and his group are in charge of prepping a landing area while Reed draws the enemy’s attention.”

“What are you going to be doing?”

She smirked, “I’m going to try to locate and eliminate as many critical assets as I can, starting with whatever they’re protecting at the Colony site.”

“You need backup.” Reed objected.

“Jer,” She shook her head, “Without armor you’d just slow me down, and speed will likely mean life on this run. Just do your jobs, I’ll do mine, and we’ll see each other when the dust settles.”

“You’d better be there.”

She smiled in his direction, but didn’t answer as she stepped up to the front of the assembled people. “Alright, listen up!”

They shut up, all attention focusing on the armored woman addressing them.

“Fleet is inbound, ETA is 9 hours.” She told them, “That assumes they don’t run into any interference on their way down. If they do, I’m sure they’ve got a plan to deal with it, so we’re not going to worry about that. What we need to do is keep the enemy we can reach as busy as possible, while preparing to receive the Fleet.”

“Are we going to be evacuated?”

“Probably not.” She told them flat out.

When some cries of objection called out, Sorilla held up her hands for quiet and eventually got it.

“Fleet doesn’t have that kind of lift, and most of you should know that.” She told them sternly. “If possible I’ll try to arrange emergency evac for anyone seriously injured, or those unable to fight. Children, mothers, some of the elderly at most. Beyond that, until we re-establish the Tether, there just is no way we can even lift more than a few dozen people at a time. Probably a lot less than that, alright?”

She could see a few holdouts still grumbling, but the majority were too aware of how vital the orbital tether was to space access.

“Alright.” She said with finality. “We know our jobs, we’ve got people depending on us to do them, both here on Hayden and out there in the Fleet. We are
not
going to let them down. Got me?”

There was a long silence, then Reed nodded.

“Damn right.”

That was the moment the others were waiting for, slowly one after another nodded or spoke up in agreement until they were shouting their readiness to execute the planned action. Sorilla nodded, walking through the group as they patted her on her armor or wished her luck until she arrived beside Reed and Sam.

“I’m heading out now,” She told them, “I’ll scout out what I can find, but won’t hit any targets until Oh Seven Fifteen. That’s one hour before Fleet makes planetfall, copy?”

“Right,” Sam nodded.

“Should we do the same?” Reed asked.

“No, I want you to get your men out there, double time. The closest construction area is reported to be what? Six hours from here?” She asked.

“About that.”

“Hit it hard, hit it fast.” Sorilla told him, “get in, get out, don’t get dead. That will pull some forces away from their central location, maybe clear a little resistance from my path, if I’m lucky.”

“Got it. Can do Sarge.” Reed flipped her a sloppy wave that was probably his attempt at a salute, all the while grinning boyishly at her.

Sorilla rolled her eyes, but smirked back, “Alright. Good luck, then.”

The two men nodded, “Good luck to you as well.”

“To us all,” Samuel added to Reed’s rejoinder. “I suspect we are going to need it.”

“No doubt, Sam.” Sorilla said as she flipped the clamshell helm over her head and let it snap into place. Her voice came over the speaker a moment later, “Hayden Hurrah!”

Reed smirked back, recognizing the call of the militia, and pumped his fist into the air. “Hayden Hurrah!”

Behind Sorilla over thirty men and women heard Reed’s call and responded in kind.

“Hayden Hurrah!!”

It was amidst the resonance of all those voices that Sergeant Sorilla Aida stepped out into the Jungle air and broke into an easy loping jog that led her out of the small makeshift village and into the dark heart of the jungle night.

CZM 98 Break Alpha powered armor, often referred to as ‘Grunt Suits’, were the mainstay of most all First World Nations back on earth. That is, those nations who allied with the United States against the Soviet Union during the cold war of the twentieth century. The term had been twisted around a little over the decades, but some things remained loosely affiliated along those lines even after more than a century and a half.

Unlike the Second World nations, those allied with the Soviet Union, a lot of the old alliances remained strong in the First World nations well into the twenty second century. Military technology was one of the key elements, particularly cutting edge tech like Sorilla’s Grunt Suit, that tended to follow along those old alliances.

The Grunt Suit let its wearer stretch their capabilities well beyond the human range, giving them incredible speed, strength, and tactical capacity. In ideal circumstances the record holder for the hundred mile sprint ran a sustained seventy miles an hour along the open track, and ended the run barely winded.

Sorilla was not currently running in ideal circumstances.

She had less than three hours to run a hundred miles through uneven terrain and sometimes dense jungle, the lives of her militia, and those troops on the fleet landers, depending on her. Seventy miles an hour was outside her range, but with her suit’s advanced mapping systems turned on full she was loping through the Hayden Jundle at just a hair over thirty five, with occasional boosts to forty five or fifty.

The forward looking sensors mapped the jungle ahead with binocular rangefinders along every frequency from X-Ray to RADAR. In the few seconds it had before she overrun it’s range, the suit’s combat computer tandem cored with the minicomp implanted in her chest to plot the fastest path through the jungle, and made micro-adjustments to her motions to keep her from planting face first into a tree while she ran.

Sorilla blew through the jungle faster than the fastest Hayden land animal, a tornado instead of the soft breeze she normally emulated, focused entirely on getting to her goal as quickly as possible. Fifteen miles from camp she exploded out of the jungle, planting a foot on a large granite boulder, and propelled herself off a cliff face.

While not as capable as the heavier capacity versions of the CZM Series power armor, the Break Alpha model was still able to absorb impacts up to forty percent of terminal velocity into the elasto-polymer musculature built into the legs and arms of the armor. Sorilla flipped over in mid air as she fell, aligning to take the impact from the eighty foot descent, and hit the ground in a crouch that just barely tapped the suit’s power reserves.

As her legs folded up under her, the kinetic energy of the fall was directed straight into the musculature of the armor, then released back as she kicked off again and continued her breakneck run through the Hayden wilderness.

The passive nature of the polymer muscles meant that she could maintain an incredible rate of travel with little to no power draw on the armor, barring the use of its advanced sensing grid.

Twenty miles down, eighty to go.

*****

In the opposite direction of Sorilla’s run, Samuel Becker was riding a MULE at the front of a bizarre column of people and equipment. His mission, like Sorilla’s, was to prepare for Fleet’s landing but unlike her he wasn’t going to try and see to it that they could land in one piece. Instead, Sam and his group were going to make sure that the fleet at somewhere to land when they arrived.

They took the old logging road toward a river delta about four hundred and twenty miles from the Colony site. It had been considered as an alternate site for many of the reasons cultures often built in such places on earth, including easy access to the water, rich soils, and a more moderate climate.

In the end, though, the inland site won out because it was built on a plateau almost two thousand feet above sea level almost directly on the planets equator. For a variety of reasons that made it a far more attractive location to anchor the planetary Tether.

Sam’s main concern at the moment, however was that making a four hundred plus mile trip in nine hours was daunting on its own. Through the Hayden jungle, without the existence of the old road it would be impossible.

The Mules shook and rattled as they roared along the old dirt road, damn near shaking the teeth out of his old skull every few feet along the road. Despite being strapped into the squat military vehicle, Sam held on tight to the dash in front of him with one hand as he kept his other tightly pressed to the hat on his head.

“You know we’ll never get there in time, right?”

Samuel shot a glare over at Silver, “We’ll have an hour to work before the Fleet arrives in orbit.”

“A whole hour, really?” Silver mocked him, rolling his eyes as he too held on to the side of the rocking Mule. “Why didn’t you say so? It’s obviously in the bag then.”

“Oh grow up, Silver. For a man who arrived on the Appleseed itself, you act like a petulant child.” Sam growled.

There was no love lost between the two, Silver and he had a long history of butting heads over priorities of the Colony, and it seemed that proud tradition was to continue as an ongoing affair.

Silver snorted, eyes on the road even though the Mule handled its own navigation. “Coming from you that’s a laugh! I can’t count how many times I’ve had to break up slap fights between your academic wimps out in the bush where they should know better…”

“Would you two SHUT UP!?” Bethany snapped in their ears as she leaned forward from her precarious perch atop the gear packed in the Mule behind them, “God it’s like being looked in a room with Dean and his friends, only without the intelligent conversation!”

The two older men glanced at each other, then glared back at the younger woman who was holding on for dear life as she scowled right back at them as the makeshift military convoy roared down the old dirt road that snaked through the Hayden jungle.

*****

Sorilla eased to a slower lope as she came closer to the edge of the jungle that surrounded the Colony site. A quick glance at the clock app in her corneal implant told her she’d made excellent time, leaving her over an hour before Reed was scheduled to kick things off on his end of the operation.

Perfect. Now, let’s see if I can get in unnoticed this time.

That was probably going to be a bit more of a trick that it sounded at first blush, she had to admit. The last time she’d come through this area, she had been spotted somehow and Sorilla still hadn’t worked out the detection method.

It was possible that she’d just been seen. Eyeball mark one, or whatever the alien version of such was, was still one of the most effective methods of spotting an infiltrator around. While meta material science had made invisibility possible, the art was damned near impossible to nail down perfectly. Mix in a moving target, and even an invisible woman could be spotted by the naked eye of an observant spotter. There was just something about the motion blur that triggered every danger sense the human mind had.

Of course, all that was academic since she didn’t have a system capable of tactical invisibility in her armor. The meta-materials in question wouldn’t survive the severe environmental stress she put her armor under, which is why it didn’t even have basic chroma-key capability like her flak vest.

What it could do, however, was absorb most frequencies of the EM spectrum as well as do active ‘contrast’ matching along many of those same frequencies. Contrast matching would let her armor appear to be roughly the same brightness as the background, especially in frequencies like infrared.

It wasn’t invisibility, but it was the next best thing, and so with those stealth systems running Sorilla slowed to a halt at the edge of the jungle and took a few minutes to observe the Colony site with the far more powerful computer and spotting gear integrated into her armor.

It only took a few minutes to actually spot several things she’d missed her last run through, including a very powerful infrasonic hum that was permeating the area.

Oh, so that’s how they did it.

Sorilla almost kicked herself, it was actually an old trick, one the military back home had stopped using in the twenty first century because countermeasures were reasonably simple. Infrasound, sonic vibrations below twenty hertz, could make a human panic, become paranoid, even see ghosts under the right conditions for a variety of reasons.

First, at around eleven hertz, it triggered the fight or flight mechanism the same as a tiger’s roar upon pouncing, or the grinding of the Earth in a quake. Some frequencies could even impart physical symptoms, including headaches, nausea, and other less savory aches and pains.

It wasn’t normally as reliable as the colonists had reported, and her own experiences suggested, however, so Sorilla directed her armor to analyze the signal. It quickly located several carrier waves and patterns in the signal that weren’t in her database. Possibly nothing, her portable system packed a ton of information, but it wasn’t comprehensive.

She filed the information aside for the moment, set her armor to isolate and redact the frequencies from her hearing, and then moved on to the next subject of interest.

Her armor’s internal gyroscopic system had instantly noted a shift in planetary gravity as she approached the colony site, but actually buried the information deep down in the alerts as ‘unimportant’. Sorilla quickly struck that line of code from her active pattern recognition system and recoded it as ‘highest priority’ intelligence.

Gravity sensors were generally used to determine spacial orientation of an object, so that the armor would know if it were right side up or not, and how orientation would affect its user. Pretty standard stuff, actually, in use for several centuries at least in one form or another, but Sorilla quickly found that her software couldn’t quite keep up with what the hardware was telling it.