Valkyrie Rising (Warrior's Wings Book Two) (18 page)

A five-core system this time, I think.
Five cores would be able to cover all approaches to the system, with enough range to take out any ships before they could get close enough to get accurate targeting data on the planet, let alone plot a strike.

“Do you have the medical scans finished yet?”

The Sentinel scanning the body on the ground nodded. “Yes, Deice.”

“Good. When you’re done, string the body up with the others,” Kriss ordered, walking away.

He looked back to where the other bodies of this particular unit were being strung up to a copse of trees at the crossroads of three well-travelled paths. They’d drop monitor drones here before they left but wouldn’t engage the first group or so that tripped them. They’d taken a couple prisoners already, but language work was proving more difficult than he’d expected. Kriss supposed he should have known better, since most every successful use of translation systems had involved at least one willing person on each side.

Whatever else they are, they are soldiers,
he thought grimly,
and they have no interest in talking to the enemy. Better now to let them run back to their nest and spook the rest of the pests.

*****

Atlantis System

Admiral Nadine Brookes looked out through the large, transparent, aluminum bulkheads that permitted her to watch over the ship with her own eyes. It was a design compromise in some ways, but like the designers, Nadine couldn’t quite imagine being completely restricted to repeater displays.

The entire observation deck could be sealed off in emergencies, along with the entire island that sat along the rear of the Cheyenne class hull. She wasn’t alone on the deck; it was a popular place whenever there was anything worth looking at in the immediate environs, and this time there certainly was something worth looking at.

Their colliers had arrived in-system several days after the battle had ended, and they were now parked all around the damaged alien warship. Their crews were swarming all over the imposing bulk of the ship, tearing it down with laser cutters as they sliced the big ship into pieces small enough for the squadron to haul back to Earth.

By the time anyone had gotten to Hayden to check on the last ships destroyed by Earth vessels, they’d actually been nowhere to be found. Given the extreme speeds they’d been travelling at when they were finally destroyed, it seemed likely that the hulls were either speeding off into the galaxy at large or were caught in an extremely long orbit of Hayden’s star.

This time, Nadine had sent most of her squadron to anchor the ship and pull it to a stop. A messy and dangerous business, they’d still managed to bring it to a rest, relative to the local star, and now Earth had a shot at a real, good look at the guts of an alien ship.

All depending on how much of it survived the nuclear weapons detonating inside its armor.

Still, even pictures of destroyed technology might yield clues for the researchers back in Earth Space, so no matter how badly the interior was torn up, Nadine wasn’t about to pass up this chance.

Still, the sheer size of the alien ships necessitated taking their time and cutting it up. When they had it down to manageable-sized chunks, they’d chain them to the hulls of the Hood and Cheyenne class warships and jump them home using the more powerful reactors on those ships. For the moment, however, it was up to the colliers and support ships and crews to get in and see the job done.

“Admiral.”

“Captain,” she returned without looking away from the vista beyond the bulkhead.

“I’ve finished speaking with the colony administrators,” Patrick said, his tone clearly relieved.

“And did they finally accept that we don’t have remotely enough lift to evacuate them?”

“I think so,” he replied, sighing. “Though I expect that the USF is going to be getting a request for significant transport over the next few months.”

She nodded, accepting that. “Might be for the best. We just don’t have enough ships to protect all the colonies and outposts.”

“True, but we can’t abandon the investments we’ve put into these colonies, Admiral”

“Patrick, if we can’t protect it, we’ve effectively already lost it.”

Patrick didn’t know about that, but he decided it wasn’t the time to argue the point with his admiral either. He could see her point, but if they just packed it up and ran home with their tails between their legs, then what had all the work done over the last century been for?

No, he couldn’t see just packing it up and running home. These worlds had been under human control for decades with no signs of any alien civilization showing up until the assault on Hayden. While there was a time to cut your losses, Patrick didn’t think they’d reached that point yet. Not when their losses would be uncountable trillions of dollars in investments, untold years of labor, and innumerable lives sacrificed to bring each world to its own unique place in the Solarian Civilization.

If they want it, they’ll have to damned well take it.

Chapter Six

USF forward operating base

Hayden

The first thing Jerry saw when he opened his eyes was the blinking lights of the monitoring electronics hovering over him. He blinked once, then again, and shifted painfully. Beside his bed, Tara was asleep in what looked to be an insanely uncomfortable position. Jerry painfully shifted as he rolled over on something. He flopped his hand around until he felt it and pulled out a summoning buzzer.

He stared at it, both surprised and confused for a moment. He’d not seen one of those in use since before the invasion forced them out of the colony. Jerry found himself just staring at it for a long time.

“It doesn’t turn on by neuro-link.”

Jerry started then winced painfully in reaction before turning with deliberate slowness to look to where Tara was now awake and looking at him.

“Hey.”

“Hey yourself.” She scowled at him. “I don’t suppose you’d care to explain how your own knife wound up in your belly?”

“I don’t suppose you’d buy it I said I tripped while showing off?”

“Actually, yes, I think I might believe that,” she told him sourly. “Or I would if you hadn’t come back alone.”

He winced. “I’m the only one left of my squad.”

“Yours isn’t the only one.”

Jerry sat up, about to demand more information, but his breath and his voice died in his throat as pain tore through his gut. He screamed, almost silently, as Tara bolted up from her chair and helped him settle back down.

“Stupid, thick headed, ignorant…” She cursed him liberally while thumbing the buzzer and checking around his wound. “I may have been forced to put up with this when dealing with Sorilla, but you’re not some military superman. I should insist on having you stitched up with actual thread and left to heal naturally.”

He paled, swallowing hard as he looked down at his wound. Jerry let out a breath when he saw that he’d already been glued shut, and from the healing he could see that Tara hadn’t been the one to make the treatment call. He slumped his head back as a nurse came into the room, looking surprised.

“Oh, he’s awake.”

Tara rolled her eyes but nodded. “Yes. Let the doctor know, please.”

“The general will want to be informed as well.”

“The general can damned well wait,” Tara snarled.

“No.”

The two looked down to where Jerry was weakly shaking his head. “I need to talk to him.”

“Fine.” Tara glowered. “Call him too.”

Jerry snickered softly, earning him another glare from Tara.

“Don’t you start or I’ll strap you down to this thing and program it to drive into the river,” she snapped again.

Jerry just lay back as far away from the scary nurse as he could and nodded. “Yes’m.”

While Tara fussed around him, the military nurse made her retreat, apparently intending to call in reinforcements. He didn’t blame her. He was already plotting to hack the automated field ambulance, if only to secure its code from tampering by a certain redhead.

*****

General Kayne stomped through the medical wing, eyes on the goal as the doctors and nurses parted like the sea before Moses. He stopped outside the room he was heading for and grabbed the closest doctor, pulling him to one side.

“How is he?”

“He’ll live,” the doctor replied. “The blade missed most of his internal organs, just nicking his intestines. A little deeper and he’d probably be dead of sepsis now. He’s a damned lucky man.”

“Given that none of the squad I sent out with him came back, I’ll decide how lucky he was when I hear his story,” Kayne growled, pushing the door aside and walking into the room with the downed pathfinder.

Jerry looked up as he walked in, and Kayne could see a darkness falling across the man’s face in that moment. He’d seen the look before, too many times.

“Lay it out for me, son,” he said after a long moment.

Jerry nodded slowly and started to talk.

*****

Later, Kayne found himself sitting alone in his office pondering the story.

These don’t sound like the aliens Aida described. More and more it’s looking like she guessed right when she said we’re not dealing with a single species. It has to be a federation or empire or something.

The only thing Jerry’s aliens had in common with either of those reported by Sorilla was the fact that they were grey-skinned. What hit Jerry wasn’t some fragile, big-headed probe wielder. He didn’t need Jerry to tell him that, though. While they hadn’t been able to locate Brecker’s unit, some of the returning patrols brought back imagery of what was left of some of the others.

They’d been strung up, their weapons torn down, but whoever they were missed the internal implants. Downloads of those were mostly useless. Whoever this group was, they were good. They left little to no trace, even after wiping out a platoon. The action records were the stuff of ghost stories, which was one of the reasons Kayne was in a seriously bad mood.

The only hard data they had came from after the men were killed. If the enemy had figured on them having implants and records, they apparently didn’t know that the implants continued to work after the men died. Unfortunately, the imagers were implanted in the corneas, and a lot of the imagery was badly fogged by the dying eyes of the fallen.

Kayne called up the one piece of clear data they had, a single image through the eyes of a man who was dying when the data was captured but still alive enough and in control of his implants. The slightly off focused image showed a dark grey shadow, carrying the heavy rifles that Jerry had described.

And another player in the mix. How many more are out there, then?
he wondered, examining the weapon in the alien’s hands.

The recorded damage was shocking, especially considering that they hadn’t located any trace of projectiles. Flesh, bone, even armor was nothing to it. Kayne had redirected some of his Cougars and DOGs to cover the holes in the patrol routes, but he wasn’t certain that the heavier drone armor was going hold up any better than the soldiers’ had.

We need to capture some of those weapons. Would have been a lot better if Aida had managed to snag one on her way out of the valve.

Unfortunately, there was nothing to be gained by crying over spilt milk, so Kayne abruptly slapped off the computer image and determined to get his ass back to work.

If the enemy had brought in heavier reinforcements, it was time to let the USF know about it. He keyed open a file and began filling out a report. When he finished it, he appended the relevant data recordings and the conversation with Jerry before queuing it to be lasered up to the SatCom in lunar orbit.

The USF SatCom in lunar orbit over Hayden’s World was one of the smallest and stealthiest of its kind ever developed by men. Massing no more than a few dozen pounds, the powerful device was able to store enough data to manage two wars and a peacekeeping mission and had the tasking capacity to shift orbit and perform as a spy bird in a pinch.

For General Kayne, at the moment its most important capability was about to come into play. When the new message arrived, the stealth bird noted immediately that the priority was the single highest it had ever received. While that didn’t precisely impress it in anyway, it did trip a series of prearranged responses.

The SatCom turned on gyro-guidance as it cleared the dark side of the Hayden moon and pointed its powerful com laser toward the Alpha Point far out-system. A brief, coded pulse later and its most important of jobs was complete, leaving the bird to swing back into position to continue its mission as planned.

The laser pulse, meanwhile, began its several-hour trip out of the system to where it was finally intercepted by a much larger unit. The automated picket drone processed the information, then detached from its receiver unit and turned away from Hayden. It was the first automated jump-capable drone built by Earth, and less than twelve hours after the general had sent his report, it was screaming toward the closest USF-controlled star at a relative velocity that exceeded a hundred times light.

*****

Beta Point starbase

Sol System

The jump point starbases were really little more than a series of standard shipping containers vacuum welded together then bolted to a collection of heavy launch tubes, rail guns, and every sensing system known to man.

Thrown together in a hurry, they weren’t remotely cutting edge in anyway, but they were among the heaviest armed and most far seeing installations in human space. They were not, however, known for creature comforts.

Floating in as close to zero gravity as you found without punching out of the known universe, the only comfort you found in the cramped and cluttered interiors was floating in one of the rare corners that had enough room to fit a person trying to sleep.

That was where Lieutenant Sinj was when the alarms went off, startling her into jerking around and slamming her arm into a computer.