Valkyrie Rising (Warrior's Wings Book Two) (26 page)

Sonic anomaly.

Sorilla raised an eyebrow, subvocalizing her next order. 
‘Locate source.’

Unable to comply. Insufficient directional data.

No shit.
Sorilla resisted the urge to roll her eyes. In the jungle, it was next to impossible to get decent directional vectors, but she figured she’d give it a shot.

‘
Proc, play anomaly.
’

Sorilla listened to the sound, eyes half lidded. It was pretty much as described, which was anomalous. It wasn’t natural, though, she was pretty sure of that. There was a distinct hint of metal on metal toward the end of the noise, and she wasn’t aware of anything natural on Earth or Hayden that did that.

It was also close.

She quietly shifted her position and re-clipped the strap to her waist this time, then inverted and slowly lowered herself down until her head was just penetrating the canopy. Twisting about silently, Sorilla scanned the immediate area around her but found nothing that jumped out at her.

Which was good, really, since anything so close that it jumped out at her would likely
really
jump out at her.

With the area cleared, Sorilla withdrew back into the canopy and unclipped from the tree again while she considered her options. If the sound was one of the enemy operators, then they’d be zeroing in on the patrol camp.

Which way?
She brought up an overlay of the area below her on the HUD. 
Not direct. They’ll come in from better cover than that route provides.

Unslinging her rifle as she balanced on the thick branch, Sorilla began to pace off from the central trunk, feet carefully coming down on the intertwined branches of neighboring trees as she slowly inched her way from one to the next, her rifle to her shoulder as she examined the area through the canopy through thermal enhancement.

Come on, Marvin. Where are you hiding?

One foot in front of the other, test the strength of the branches, examine the area below the canopy through thermal, then and only then shift her weight. Pause a moment, again check the area under the canopy, and repeat.

Each step was deliberate, made with machine-like precision, but fluid as a panther prowling. She proceeded through the jungle canopy, moving faster than you might expect, given her precarious position so far above the floor. Every time she spotted a heat source, which was often, she had to pause to confirm that it was a local beast, and every time, that was precisely what it turned out to be.

As she neared the camp’s position, Sorilla was beginning to think that it had been a false alarm.

Then the world exploded beneath her.

*****

Richard Devon awoke in the jungle darkness, blinking in confusion.

What woke me up?

He sat up, stripping the jungle netting down from around his position and frowning as he got to his knees and cast about in the dark.

“What’s wrong?”

He recognized the bleary voice as belonging to the lieutenant.

“I don’t know,” he said, looking around. “Something’s wrong.”

“What?”

“I don’t
know,
” Richard hissed.

“All right, I’m waking the platoon,” Chisholm decided, pushing himself up and grabbing his helmet.

Chisholm was strapping his helmet and HUD on when Devon’s mind caught up to his jungle sense.

“The crickets. They’re quiet.”

“What?”

“We call them crickets,” he told the lieutenant. “Same thing as on earth, really. Noisy bastards, but I don’t hear them.”

Devon frowned, looking around as he realized the man was right. He’d gotten so used to them that he’d tuned them out, but now that it had been pointed out, the silence was, as they said, deafening.

“Right,” he decided. “Everyone up!”

As he crouched down to retrieve his rifle, a crack of sound erupted above him, and the tree near where he’d slept exploded to splinters. Chisholm threw himself across the ground. “Alert! Fucking alert! We’re under attack!”

He couldn’t see a damned thing other than the members of the platoon struggling to their feet, couldn’t tell where the guards were or what the hell was going on, but Chisholm had heard the strange hum-crack sound of the enemy weapons before. Granted, never this damned close, but he knew them when he heard them.

His HUD was lit up as he twisted around on the ground, aiming his rifle one way and then the other, but nothing was showing up.

“Where the
fuck
are they?” he snarled into the darkness.

The whole area was lit up in the thermal scanner, aside from the obvious soldiers he was seeing. It took him a moment to realize what was causing the trees and ground to glow so obviously warm compared to the rest.

Blood. The whole place is coated in fucking blood.

The jungle fell silent, and crawling itches started to move along his back as he cast about for any sign of the attackers. A sound above him started Chisholm’s motion to roll over, but before he could finish it, a weight slammed into his back and drove his face into the soil. In the reverse imager of his HUD, he could see the strange form, barely distinguishable from the jungle, and the glint of a blade against the blackness.

As he was about to die, all he could think of was the taste of the dirt in his mouth. It reminded him oddly of chocolate, with a hint of coffee.

Chapter Nine

“Fuck me,” Sorilla said in shock.

The entire initial attack was over in seconds, and she still didn’t have eyes on the targets. The camp below her was completely in disarray, and several of the soldiers had been spread across a couple dozen square meters of Hayden jungle by the enemy weapons. Sorilla was about to expand her search area in hopes of finding just one of them when a commotion below caught her eye.

A solid form was looming over one of the downed soldiers, only really visible because it was blocking the human’s body heat from reaching Sorilla.

Thermally neutral. Can’t be natural. They must be using similar tech to my armor. Damn.

She could feel the slices of time counting off as other blank spaces began to show in the camp, grabbing soldiers and obviously preparing to finish the job they started. She wondered briefly why they’d get in so close to do that, but really, it didn’t matter a lot. Hubris maybe, perhaps it was part of their psychwar tactics, it didn’t matter.

She set her rifle aside, knowing that, amid all the friendly IFF signals in such close range, it would be useless unless she disabled the recognition systems. If she did that, in such close quarters with a military rail gun and explosive munitions, well, she’d inflict more damage on allied troops than the aliens had. The heavy assault weapon just wasn’t designed for the sort of duty she was about to demand.

Sorilla palmed a flash bang and a flare in each hand then jumped up, picked her spot, and punched through the canopy. She thumbed the activators on the devices in her hand on the way down, throwing them out to the side as she fell below the canopy. They exploded in the clearing, bathing the area in blinding light and sound, all of which her armor conveniently edited out in real time.

She landed on the shoulders of the figure below her, falling into a squat as she grabbed his head and then kicking off with a flip and a twist.

He’s not wearing armor. Interesting.

She felt and heard the bones in what passed for the alien’s neck splinter into shards as she wrenched it around. Sorilla brought her leg down in a heel strike against the next closest target, hitting with enough force to shatter concrete, but was surprised when she felt her heel bounce without seeming to cause much damage.

Great. Tough bastards to take a hit like that without a flinch. Best not take chances.

She reached down and pulled her blade with her left hand, thumbing the molecular edge to full power before driving it back into the alien she’d just half-twisted the head off of. It sank in to the hilt, so she adjusted her grip without looking back and simply wrenched the blade up to gut the target where he stood.

As her blade cleared, Sorilla spun around and slashed the throat of the closest alien before it could finish the charge it was obviously preparing to make, then drew her M-Tac with her right hand and extended the weapon out to her side at another of the aliens that had noticed her entrance.

The heavy caliber Metalstorm weapon barked twice, so quickly that it sounded like one shot, and put two heavy explosive rounds in the creature’s center mass. When he kept coming, Sorilla switched to auto-fire and emptied another dozen rounds into him, stepping back a pace to let the body slide in front of her when it hit the ground.

Three down, two left in sight.

She stepped over the body at her feet, put two rounds in the one whose throat she’d slit, then focused on the next.

They’d recovered from the flash bangs quicker than un-augmented humans could have, despite having no sign of armor or head and ear protection. Assuming, of course, the flaps she saw on their skulls were ears. She noted it distantly but didn’t have time to worry too much about it at the moment.

The last two had their shit together, she would certainly give them that. They grabbed for cover before she could draw a bead on them, already abandoning their little psywar games with the close quarters and grabbing for heavier artillery. She didn’t feel like testing her armor against their pop guns, however, so she went for a powered leap that brought her to one of the lower branches of a nearby tree. About fifteen meters up, Sorilla cleared the cover they had ducked behind and put half her remaining rounds into the closest.

He was rocked back, thrown to the ground as explosive spurts of grey fluid and matter exploded from his body. His comrade began backpedalling, bringing his weapon up to spray the trees.

Sorilla dropped under the blasts, landing in a crouch, and rolled forward to bring her M-Tac back into play. She had to reevaluate on the fly when he adjusted faster than expected and threw herself to the side as his weapon chewed up the ground around her.

Fast. Tough. Disciplined. Most would be running in terror by now.
She analyzed the situation in the back of her mind, even as her body continued on autopilot.

She hit the ground in a shoulder roll, coming up behind a tree, and snapped her hand out to put a burst downrange in his direction. The smart rounds fired from her pistol had nothing to track on as they exploded around the target, but the detonating munitions forced him back a pace as he continued to fire.

Sorilla flinched as the tree itself shook at her back, the three-meter-thick Hayden hardwood trunk being torn apart by the alien weapon. Sorilla leaned over just far enough for her armor’s cameras to find the alien then extended her gun out slightly farther as she zeroed in on his weapon and fired another burst.

The hard-hitting rounds tore the gun from his grip, and Sorilla was moving before it could hit the jungle floor. Her M-Tac snarled, winging the dodging alien at least three times as he gave up the fight and bolted for the jungle. She continued to fire after him as he ran but intentionally led her fire short and wide to spur him along.

PsyOps work two ways, you fucker
, she thought grimly as he vanished into the jungle as fast as he could run, presumably, at any rate. Her pistol went red in her HUD, signifying that it was empty, just after the target vanished.

Sorilla cracked the pistol open with a flick of her wrist and thumb then lifted it up over her shoulder. The barrel assembly slid out of the forward casing, bouncing off her shoulder on its way to the ground, and Sorilla calmly replaced it with a fresh dual barrel assembly from her thigh pouch before snapping the weapon shut.

She turned as she holstered her sidearm, retrieved her knife from where she’d dropped it, and then sheathed that, as well. Finally, she turned to the soldiers who were not
quite
aiming their weapons at her.

“Go back to base. Your patrol is over,” she told them, walking back to where she’d made her entrance.

“Who the fuck are you?” one of them stammered out.

“Shut your mouth, Jace,” the lieutenant snapped as he wiped grey fluid from his face. “She’s obviously one of the operator team we were briefed on.”

“Not bad, L.T.,” Sorilla said as she reached his position. “You chew gum and walk at the same time?”

“Only if a noncom is around to tell me how,” the man countered dryly. “Right, Sergeant?”

“He does listen most of the time,” a squat man with sergeant’s rockers on his sleeve said as he walked up.

“Better than most then,” she said calmly before repeating herself. “Pack up and head back. These boys are ours now. You can take the corpses, though. Someone will want to study them, I’m sure.”

“S…Sarge?”

Sorilla half turned to look at where Richard Devon was hesitantly approaching. “Hey, Rich. Tell Sil and Sam I’ll see them when I get into base, all right? Oh, and give Tare and Jerry my best.”

“You got it,.” Richard nodded quickly. “Hey, uh…it’s good to have you back on-world, Sarge.”

“Always glad to be in an honest jungle, Rich. I’ll catch you later,” she said, tossing a half salute to the lieutenant before she crouched down and leapt up to the lowest tier of the canopy, quickly vanishing into the foliage above.

“That was Aida?” Sergeant Jeremy Craig asked, sounding surprised. “I heard she was a school teacher.”

Lt. Chisholm peered up at the flickering canopy above them and then looked over the bodies around him. “Yeah. That’s what I heard, too.”

“If I had teachers like that back in the day, I would have been too damned scared to drop out and join the Army.”

“Oh man,” Richard was grinning ear to ear. “Wait until I tell the rest of the pathfinders that the Sarge is back on Hayden. Hua!”

*****

After recovering her rifle, Sorilla headed off in the direction the alien had taken. She stayed in the canopy until she was far enough out from the camp then dropped back to the floor to check the trail.