Valkyrie Rising (Warrior's Wings Book Two) (3 page)

One thing that the USF was, now, was people poor.

They’d lost better than eighty percent of their experienced military personnel in the opening rounds of the war. Between Jorgen and Shepherd alone, Givens could almost despair for the future of the planet. Those two had been among the finest men he’d ever known, and combined, they had held more than fifty percent of the Fleet’s strategic command experience. Their crews had held over eighty percent the Fleet’s practical spacer experience, and the captains lost in each taskforce had shattered the Fleet’s tactical experience.

That wasn’t to say that Nadine Brookes was anything but competent, Givens immediately corrected himself. However, she was one of the many science-oriented commanders in the Fleet for whom the military tactics and strategy classes were little more than an abstract game to be played.

Another thing that bothered him, not that he’d say it aloud anywhere a member of the fairer sex might hear him, was that a side effect of the losses they’d suffered had left more than seventy percent of their captains of the female persuasion. Now, Givens wasn’t one to discriminate intentionally, but it came back to what had been bothering him earlier. Most of their military captains had been men, and most of their science track captains were women.

Without intending any offense to the ladies, Givens was desperate for more military experience.

With that always strongly in mind, he gave an increased priority to applicants with command experience from active military positions. That gave a slant to men, but there was nothing to be done about that. Givens wanted captains with proven mettle in command of the new Cheyenne class ships he was getting from the Alamo over the next year.

The next taskforce the USF put together wouldn’t be slyly referred to in the back corridors of the Solari Organization as “Taskforce Valkyrie.”

*****

Fort Bragg, Carolina

Sorilla waited in the medical division’s offices, having taken a bullet train from New Mexico to Carolina at the request of the brass. Normally, she could have done anything they wanted from the USF offices in New Mexico, but apparently someone wanted her up to Bragg in person.

“Sergeant Aida?”

She looked up to see a woman in army uniform approaching and nodded. “That’s right.”

“Doctor Prescott will see you now.”

“Thank you,” she said, getting to her feet.

Time to see what this was all about.

Prescott was a big man, and not in the good meaning of the word, she supposed. Probably fifty kilos overweight and balding, but he completely lacked the stereotypical cheer you tended to associate with a chubby figure. Instead, he seemed as stern and disciplined as anyone she’d met, which seemed an odd dichotomy to her.

“Sergeant,” he said, not looking up as she entered, “take a seat.”

She considered standing, but this whole situation had the air of something that would probably take a while, so she sat and waited. Finally, he closed the file he was reading and looked up at her.

“I’m sure you’re curious about the summons.”

“Somewhat, sir,” she admitted.

He crooked his lips into a half smile, one that held no real humor, just an acknowledgement of the situation, for whatever it was worth. “After you were recalled from Hayden, your file came under review. Probably wouldn’t have been sent here at all under normal circumstances, but the war changed some procedures.”

“Oh?”

“Basically, your implants are due to be upgraded in two years, correct?”

Sorilla nodded. Computer core implants, and the other little enhancements that made up the differences between one of the elite SOCOM teams and army grunts were rated in decades, if possible, but often only in years. The army tried to hedge its bets by implanting bleeding-edge technology, often years ahead of the curve, and performing software updates to keep the gear competitive. As a strategy it was marginally successful, but regular surgery was still required to keep implanted electronics from becoming obsolete.

“It was noted that there was every chance that you’d be deployed at the time your next upgrade session was scheduled, and given the nature of your likely deployments,” he told her evenly, “it was decided that we may want to move your upgrades forward.”

She had to cover a grimace at that, though it was far from bad news. The idea of them cutting into her eyes again just really tweaked every flight instinct she had. Not that it hurt, honestly; with the local anesthetics and nerve blockers she didn’t feel a thing during the session, but since the doctors needed her cooperation to ensure that the devices were properly calibrated before they closed up the incisions, she had to be awake for the whole process. Being awake and watching someone slap chop a razor blade across your eyeball so they could open up a flap to get into the cornea was
not
a pleasant experience, pain or no.

If he noticed her discomfort, Prescott didn’t seem to care. He just thumbed open another file on his pad and continued talking.

“We have a new computer core for you, along with some gene work that’s recently been cleared for human trials. Since surgery for those will put you down for a month, it’s been suggested that we may as well do the job right the first time. Technically, you’ve already agreed to all of this when you were passed into the SF, but as many of the proposed additions are still classified as experimental, we wanted to walk you through them with extra care.”

Oh joy.
She groaned as quietly as she could. Technology was a vital piece of any battlefield, she knew, but sometimes it felt that the brass wouldn’t be happy until they’d turned her into some kind of remotely-operated drone soldier that they could steer by keyboard from their offices.

“Recovery and training would normally prevent us from doing this, given the need for people at the moment, but you’re scheduled to be debriefed for that long and more, so we have a window,” Prescott said idly, flipping through a few more digital pages. “So, shall we begin the briefing?”

Masking a scowl, Sorilla nodded in a clipped motion. “Yes, sir.”

“Excellent.”

*****

USF Cheyenne

High orbitals, Ares

“The captain of the Prometheus reports that they’re tethered and rotating normally, Captain.”

Patrick nodded, not looking up from the notations he was making. “Good news, Lieutenant. How long until they can test the tether?”

“Another few hours, sir.”

“All right, I’ll pass the report along to the admiral. Thank you.”

“Sir.”

He finished the notes he was taking and then turned his focus to the status of the Prometheus. Like most of the older class survey ships, the USV Prometheus had been built with an eye to being used as a tether counterweight if needed. The ship would park itself in orbit over a world, VASIMR thrust ports pointed down to the planet, then it would drop one of the 120,000-kilometer tethers down to where ground crews were waiting to anchor the ship in place.

Once that was accomplished, the tether kept the ship from being flung out into space by centripetal force while providing an efficient and effective method of orbit access from the ground. The Prometheus design even allowed the counterweight crew to launch ballistic packages using the planet’s rotation, useful for a mining facility, to say the least.

But a sitting duck as far as defense goes,
Patrick thought grimly.

Oh, they’d loaded it with enough ordnance to fight a couple dozen terrestrial wars, and would soon load it with even more now that it wasn’t carrying better than a 100,000 klicks of carbon ribbon. Everything from nukes to Kinetic Kill, or Kilo Kilo launchers, but the damned thing still couldn’t maneuver. Worse, more than half the approach avenues to the planet were covered by the planet itself. If the enemy ships came in from behind Ares, the counterweight station’s weapons wouldn’t be able to target it until it was far too late.

There were some plans to deal with that, a satellite network would be the first step, but by and large, until R&D found something to defend against the enemy gravity valve technology, there just wasn’t much that could stand. Normally, Patrick would say abandon the world. Get the survivors off, or resupply them and tell them to go to ground, but putting another tether in place was just lunacy. Unfortunately, the mineral wealth of Ares was such that the UNF couldn’t lose this system.

So they’d retrofitted the Prometheus with more weapons than the old hull could actually fire and manufactured a custom cable specifically for this job. Most carbon tethers were capable of conducting enough power to run the tether car, provide emergency backup to the counterweight from the surface, or vice versa. This one, however, was a little different.

The carbon molecules that made up the core of the super-strong ribbon cable had been painstakingly aligned, a process that alone had taken months and billions of dollars of man and machine hours. The perfect alignment of atomic bonds gave the cable a near superconductive core, which, when combined with the large military reactor they were prepared to install on the surface, would give the counterweight all the power it needed for the electricity-hungry magnetic accelerators that powered the Kilo Kilos.

He sighed, unstrapping from his station, and keyed in the command to save his data. Then he pushed off and glided across the bridge to the access tube that would take him up to the admiral’s command deck. When he pulled himself out of the tube by the ladder for use while under acceleration, Patrick noted that the admiral was strapped into her station, likely doing pad work while her aide was free floating at the far end of the room, checking a repeater display.

“Ahem.” He cleared his throat slightly, just to be noticed.

Admiral Brookes half turned her head, catching sight of him in the corner of her eye. “As you were, Captain.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He relaxed. “Permission to enter, ma’am?”

“Granted.” She tapped her pad closed and slapped the straps free with the quick release, floating clear of the station and turning around to watch him approach. “What brings you here, Captain?”

“Prometheus reports that they’ll be testing the tether in a few hours, ma’am. Combined with all other reports, we’re running two days ahead of schedule.”

“Excellent. I know the system is important, but I’ll be glad to be clear of it,” she said. “TF5 has more important tasks to be doing at the moment. They’re not coming back here, not soon anyway.”

“Ma’am?” Patrick didn’t exactly disagree, but he was curious as to what she was thinking.

“They’re searching for us, for Earth,” she said, shaking her head, “and we know they don’t have an unlimited fleet to throw at us. If they did, we’d never have regained a foothold in Hayden. No, they’re not going to waste resources on a system they’ve already hit and apparently have little interest in.”

He nodded, more or less agreeing with her statement. The enemy obviously was working on a budget, otherwise they’d have seen more ships already. The USF had posted pickets across over a dozen systems between Hayden and Ares, and only a few reported seeing any enemy ships. Of those, they were never spotted in groups of more than three or less than two.

Most likely they were dealing with a forward scout element, the alien’s version of destroyers, or maybe cruisers. No battleships yet, was his guess, and certainly nothing like an aircraft carrier had popped its head out of the black. Whether the enemy had units that paralleled those was a subject of much debate, but Patrick felt it was reasonably likely that they had something heavier that hadn’t been seen yet.

Of course, given the nature of the enemy weapons, it was also possible that he was completely wrong. The mind boggled at what might constitute a heavier weapon than a big, bloody gravity cannon. Still, the ships themselves could be larger, better-equipped with point defense, and maybe have longer range on their primary weapons.

Any or, worse, all of those elements would make engaging even one enemy ship very nearly impossible for anything short of a full taskforce.

“Most likely correct, ma’am,” he said finally, “but Ares is a vital resource point for our supply chain. If they’d known how vital, they would never have left in the first place.”

Nadine sighed. “I know, but after what happened to TF3, I want them in my sights, Captain.”

Patrick masked a frown. 
Did she know someone in Shepherd’s battlegroup?

He mentally berated himself almost instantly for the thought, however. 
Of course she knew someone. We all did, the USF isn’t that big. But this sounds deeper, personal. I hope she’s not on some vengeance kick. That’s bad juju for a Fleet commander.

Something in his face must have tipped her off, however, because she smirked at him tiredly.

“Don’t worry, Captain, I’m not going to take the fleet haring off on some idiotic mission of revenge. We’ll get them in our sights soon enough, I have no doubt. They won’t let us avoid it, even should we want to,” Nadine said. “Honestly, as frustrated as I am, I’m glad of every second we get. We have to hope that research figures out that damned gravity gun of theirs, otherwise this is going to be a short, little war that probably won’t even make a footnote in their histories.”

Patrick nodded, wishing he could disagree. “You want a chapter to ourselves then?”

Nadine smiled then, a nasty, feral look crossing her face. “If we have to go down as a species, Patrick, I want books, movies, and ballads. I will not settle for less.”

*****

Aida Family Hacienda

Cassius Aida carried a tray into his daughter’s room, momentarily flashing back to old memories as he crossed through the door. It had been many years since he’d done this for her, and the last time was for nothing more than a simple flu, but it felt good all the same.

“Dinner for you, Hija,” he called softly.

Sorilla groaned a little, shifting in bed so that she was sitting up. The doctors had locked out her spinal shunt to prevent her from injuring herself; long experience told them that people who signed up for the sorts of things she did weren’t likely to lay around voluntarily, so the choice had been stay in the hospital for the duration of her recovery or have the shunt locked down. Sorilla despised hospitals far more than she did pain.