The Valhalla Call (Warrior's Wings) (25 page)

Not merely an absence of particulate, as most conceive of a vacuum, the warping of space and time had to actually create a total null point, a place where space and time no longer
existed
.

In theory this could be accomplished anywhere, from the uncharted depths of interstellar space to the crushing core of a galactic singularity. In practice…well, things were a little more difficult than that.

You had to fight space and time if you wanted to eliminate them, and the stronger either was in a given region, the harder it would be to create a jump point. The solution was to seek out points where gravity waves crossed one another, cancelling each other out, and use that natural weakening in space-time as a jumping-off point.

There, you punched through into nothingness, and a ship could leap into the abyss and cross vast distances in a very short time. Time, as always, was a relative thing, however. For those on board the ship in question, it passed in a blink of an eye no matter what distance was crossed. For those on the outside, the period was often measured in days or weeks.

No human ship had ever made a jump that would take longer than about a week or so, galactic time.

Until the Legendary issued orders to Task Force Valkyrie and they began to calculate for a journey that would just top ten days of near literal non-existence.

After all, breaking all the rules was just what legends did.

*****

USV Socrates

“Captain.”

Alexi looked up at the voice, smiling. “Lieutenant.”

“May I?” Sorilla asked, gesturing to the seat across from him.

“Please.”

She took a seat, setting down the tray laden with food she’d been balancing in one hand, and popped the cap off a bottle of enhanced water. Taking a deep draught, Sorilla grimaced at the taste but went on to finish the rest before setting the empty bottle aside and reaching for a small carton of milk.

“You do know we only stock those for emergency use, correct?” Alexi asked, mildly amused and disturbed by the scene.

Enhanced water was nutrient rich, fortified with vitamins, proteins, carbs, and fiber. It was an all-in-one survival food for when you might be caught in a suit and not be able to eat solids. Sure, it was stocked in just about every ship commissary because it was a high energy meal for people on the move, but he didn’t know anyone who actually
liked
the stuff.

“Acquired taste, I suppose,” Sorilla admitted with a chuckle.

“You need an upgrade on your taste buds,” Alexi said with a roll of his eyes.

“Tastes fine going down, it’s the aftertaste I have to wash out,” Sorilla told him, taking a sip of her milk.

Now that the pre-meal was done with, she quickly turned to the mound of fruits and vegetables, devouring them with a certain brutal efficiency that Alexi had to admit he found fascinating. He supposed it came from her choice of professions—he knew that his own eating habits often disturbed his family on Earth—but when you weren’t sure when you’d have time to eat next, you downed what you could as fast as you could.

“Heavy day?” he asked mildly, trying not to stare.

“Not too bad,” she told him. “Oddly exhausting, given that I technically slept through most of it.”

Alexi frowned, curious. “Oh?”

Sorilla shrugged, considering her words for a moment. “Do you have clearance for the new interface?”

“Partially,” Alexi admitted. “I know it has to do with neural feedback through your implants.”

Sorilla nodded, guessing that he’d been issued to the quasi-public version of the briefing pack.

“Right, well, we have to induce a form of sleep paralysis, otherwise we’d be kicking and punching the hell out of the cockpit while piloting the damn things,” she said. “So we literally just sort of hang there all day, but after a couple hours it takes more and more focus to keep from ‘waking up,’ so to speak. It’s exhausting to maintain.”

Alexi nodded, not sure that he understood, but that wasn’t a big surprise. There were many things in life that you just didn’t get until you did it yourself. Not moving didn’t sound exhausting, but he’d spent many long days and weeks sitting at his command station and doing nothing but math in his head and each of those nights were spent in some of the deepest sleeps he’d ever experienced.

“I have been watching your maneuvers,” he told her.

“You and the rest of the crew,” Sorilla answered with a wry grin. “We’re the greatest show off Earth at the moment, if you judge by our audience.”

Alexi laughed. “Possibly correct. You, especially, move well.”

“Oh, been watching me especially, have you?” Sorilla grinned a little wider.

Alexi, had he been a few years younger, might have fallen for the jibe and even blushed, but he was well past that now, so he merely shrugged and admitted it.

“Yes, actually. You are graceful in your machine,” he told her. “It is odd to see a machine meant for war almost dance across the deck.”

Now it was Sorilla’s turn to consider that. Were she just a bit younger, he may have gotten the reaction he had aimed for. She’d been complimented on many things in her life, but her grace wasn’t one of them, as a general rule.

“It’s an eighty-ton war machine, Captain,” she told him with a gentle snort of amusement. “Grace isn’t what it was built for.”

“Call me Alexi,” he said, “and remember, I am Russian. We still have choreographed dance displays using T-90 tanks maintained from the Great War.”

Sorilla chuckled. She’d actually seen one such display while on leave and travelling. It had been impressive, to say the least, especially when they actually
jumped
said tanks over ramps in synch with music and each other. Russians were all crazy, but most of it was a good kind of crazy.

She was about to say something more, but a chime sounded from the captain’s com and it was followed quickly by a silent buzz from her own. They both faded away slightly, their expressions growing vacant as they focused on their implants.

Sorilla came back first, taking a deep breath and hissing slightly in annoyance.

“Sorry, Alexi. I’ve been recalled, my team will be shipping back to the Legendary immediately.”

“Da.” Alexi Petronov nodded, standing up. “The Socrates has been ordered away from the fleet. We will be jumping in the path of TF-7 in six hours. You follow a different route.”

Sorilla nodded, extending her hand. “It’s been good to talk, Alexi. I’ll catch you on the other side of the void.”

He took her hand, but didn’t shake it as she expected. Instead he bowed low over it and kissed the back lightly.

“Da. We will meet again, Lieutenant. On the other side of eternity, or before.”

“Alexi.” She stopped him as he started to leave.

“Da?”

“Call me Seour,” she said, winking. “Until later.”

The two split up, one heading north and the other south, ship terms, each to their own destiny.

Unnamed planet

Three jumps past Hayden

The door didn’t come off the hinges as he kicked it; instead, the heavy stone shattered under the power of Ton’s power-assisted mule-kick, clearing the way for Merkur to step into the room and open up with his weapon on full auto.

The roar of the gun was enough to shatter glass, but the aliens didn’t much take to glass or wood in their construction. They seemed to prefer megalithic materials, stones and crystals that could take any beating you’d care to name. That was good because it meant that Merkur’s blast of full-auto fire didn’t blow through the walls and destroy anything unintentionally.

The intentional destruction was good enough.

The aliens in the room, the ones that survived the barrage, which was most of them, were too busy kissing the ground to cause much trouble as Ton led his somewhat diminished team into the command center.

People had a misconception about automatic weapons, that they could be used as a sword and just swish swish around until you cut your enemy in half. Truth was, full auto wasn’t very good for killing people. That wasn’t what it was designed for. It was designed to scare the hell out of people, make them keep their head down while you and your squad took ground. For that, it was reasonably effective.

They cleared the room quickly, kicking the enemy weapons aside and leaving the living, wounded, and dead where they were. They’d learned from experience that however the Ghoulies communicated, it wasn’t speech, so they didn’t waste time chatting. That wasn’t the point of the mission.

“Main controls are that way,” Merkur growled.

Ton nodded, turning to Crow. “I’ve got them. You take Scott down and blow the core. I’ll power down the system.”

“Right.” The duo ducked out at a fast jog.

“Everyone else, keep these bastards covered but try not to hurt them too bad,” Ton ordered as he walked out. “We need someone here to call for help when we’re gone.”

*****

The control room was standard, as was most of the Ghoulie equipment. They’d learned a lot about the aliens just from the shattered hulks of the destroyed ships, but it was the rare occasion of capturing a facility intact that yielded the true gold mines.

Ton made his way over to the main control panel, ignoring most everything in the room. Ghoulie tech was mostly indecipherable on this level, they’d discovered, likely using some form of neural link to control much of it. No one was sure. They’d not been able to find any implants in the bodies captured, but that was the best guess anyone had.

There were manual controls, however, particularly shut down and initiation controls, as a rule.

Ton located those easily and walked himself through the shutdown sequence according to the intel in his files, then waited for a confirmation from the second team that he’d succeeded.

“Core deactivated, planting charges now,” Merkur came back over the com a moment later.

“Roger. Meet back at the prisoners when done.”

“Wilco.”

Ton stepped back, surveying the room one last time, then unloaded his mag into everything in a single long burst. Smoke was rising from the holes as he walked back to where they’d secured the prisoners.

A dull crump in the distance told him that the core of the alien Valve had been blown, so he tripped his beacon and set it to green as he rejoined the others.

“All clear, boss?”

“Looks that way,” Ton nodded. “We’ll know in a few minutes if the America is back in town. If she’s on schedule, we’ll meet up with a shuttle in a few hours and blow this pop stand.”

“Too bad it ain’t literally this time,” Korman grumbled, menacingly looming over the prisoners.

“Leave em be, Smith,” Ton ordered. “We want them alive and screaming for help from anyone who’ll listen.”

“I know, boss. Just not happy about it.”

“You don’t have to be happy, you have to follow orders.”

“Roger that.”

*****

USV America

Pete Green looked over the signals intercept and nodded, satisfied. “Admiral?”

“Yes, Captain?” Fairbairn asked.

“We have a green signal from the planet.”

Fairbairn smiled, letting out a breath he’d been holding since they arrived back in system. “Good. Launch a shuttle for dust off. Let’s not hang around any longer than we must.”

“Aye, sir.”

Green sent out the orders quickly—the shuttle had been on standby for over six hours already—so in only minutes the telemetry feed showed it heading out ahead of the ship as they ducked back in toward the planet.

*****

Like the Cheyenne Class ships, the Terra Class weren’t designed to land on the surface of a planet. Similarly, the shuttles still weren’t really capable of reaching orbit from space either, so they had to send the shuttle on ahead and then pick it up in high atmosphere after it had retrieved their men on the surface.

It was an expensive proposition, and a tricky bit of flying, but far more practical than trying to load a shuttle up with all the fuel it would need to reach orbit from the surface.

The Nevada—all of the America’s shuttles were named after States of the Union—accelerated out from the ship and began its drop toward the orbit of the target world. They’d had time to scout the system fairly well, so the pilots knew that unless the OPCOM team had missed something, they were in the clear, but it was still a tense drop for all that.

The enemy weapons were just too terrible to be completely calm around, even when you were pretty sure they’d been taken out.

“Picking up gravity flux,” the co-pilot said, sounding a little nervous.

“Keep your pants dry,” the pilot said. “Nothing out of the ordinary for a two-moon system. We’re entering into local Cis-Lunar space. There’s going to be a few bumps in the road.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Stand by to retro.”

The shuttle twisted about in space, turning on its gyros, and put its main engine’s face onto the approaching planet as they fired. The retro burn slowed the craft down as they approached, and they continued until they were almost to the upper atmosphere of the planet.

The pilot them flipped back around and put the heat-shielded nose into the first hints of a thickening atmosphere as she flipped a few switches.

“Entering atmo,” she said. “Watch for turbulence as we get deeper.”

“Aye, ma’am. LIDAR and Doppler activated.”

A fiery trail began to plume behind them as the shuttle bit deep into the atmosphere of the alien world, carving its path toward the surface.

*****

On the surface, Ton stepped out of the alien facility and looked up. He couldn’t see the shuttle yet, but it was squawking loud and clear on the IFF frequency, so he knew that their time on world was coming to an end.

“Get everyone outside,” Ton ordered, shouldering his rifle. “I want eyes on those bastards until we’re out of here.”

“Yes, sir.”

They shuffled the prisoners outside while Ton watched the skies. It didn’t take long before he made out the smoke trail of the inbound shuttle, so Ton lit off his armor signal to confirm the green LZ. The smoke trail turned toward him shortly after, and he was able to make out the shuttle in just moments.