Valkyrie Rising (Warrior's Wings Book Two) (30 page)

The rest of the team, three men and a woman, hopped clear and landed easily on the bank without bothering to use the extended plank. The uniform action almost made him roll his eyes. He’d seen it before; operator teams liked to make a show of acting as one, and their armor network let them do it with seemingly supernatural aplomb.

They said it was to condition themselves for teamwork in battle, but he always saw it as plain showing off.

He kept his emotions off his face as the foursome stepped up to his position and stopped in unison, saluting with their helms under their left arms, waiting just an instant longer than normal before he snapped a return salute and they shifted to at ease positions.

“Debrief in the base planning room,” he said curtly. “Take time to get out of those suits and clean up.”

They didn’t say anything for a moment, but he’d have been surprised if they had, then one stepped forward.

“Sir. We’ll be heading back out shortly, no reason to shuck the shells, sir.”

“Fine. Fifteen minutes,” Kayne responded.

“Yes, sir,” the spokesman said, stepping back into line.

Kayne turned and walked away, heading back to the FOB.

“Nice guy,” Korman said dryly.

“He’s brass, what do you want?” MacKenzie responded in kind.

“All right, belay the noise,” Crow said tiredly. “Let’s grab some real chow, if they’ve got anything hot.”

“You heard the lieutenant,” Sorilla seconded the order. “Head for the FOB. I’ll grab a guide and meet you there.”

“Right on, Top.”

Crow led the two men away while Sorilla turned back to the river and approached Jerry. He smiled as she approached, accepting her help to carry a box up the bank from the boat.

“How have things been?”

“Rough,” he admitted. “Smooth for a while after you left, but then they put another one of those damn gravity things on the other continent and things went to shit. After Fleet took that one out from orbit, well, next thing we know, we’re dealing with those guys you fought.”

“Yeah, they were operators, sure as shit,” she said casually as they walked toward the FOB. “Tough as hell, seemed smart and well trained, and they were disciplined, too.”

“You took them on and kicked their ass,” Jerry countered, a little annoyed.

“We got ‘em by surprise,” Sorilla retorted. “They didn’t expect us, and even then they got their licks in.”

“That should be your goddamned motto, Sarge,” Jerry told her ruefully. “You ain’t gonna see
me
coming.”

She chuckled easily, shrugging. “Sounds good, but I always liked the motto of the SF. De oppresso liber.”

“To free the oppressed,” Jerry nodded. “That how you see us?”

“They’re trying,” she said as they walked past the sentries and into the base. “But when I left, they hadn’t managed to oppress you yet, no.”

He nodded, and they walked in silence as he guided her to the commissary. Just before they walked in, he stopped her. “Thanks for that, Sarge.”

“Keep fighting, Jer,” she responded before she headed over to where her team was sitting.

“Hayden hua, Sarge.”

*****

USF Cheyenne

On Hayden approach

The ship was quiet, no one wanting to breathe loudly, as if their quarry might be able to hear them through the hull and millions of kilometers of vacuum that separated them. Even Captain Patrick Roberts could feel it, the tension rising with every passing minute that flung them ever closer to the inevitable confrontation.

“Midway, sir.”

“Thank you, Commander.” He nodded to his XO, Commander Ashley Sear. Like many of the command officers of the Fifth, Sear was a woman who had come up through the science track to starship command.

Now, Patrick wasn’t one to discriminate based on anything other than hands on personal experience, but he’d originally been more than a little apprehensive when he’d seen the makeup of the command ranks on Taskforce Five. Not so much because of the women, at least he hoped that had been his reason, but because of the lack of military experience. They’d lost almost all their experienced military spacers in the first two disastrous encounters with the aliens, leaving the fleet a choice between putting non-military track officers in command or promoting inexperienced military captains ahead of them.

The debate had been furious among the civilian and Fleet politicians and officers, with both sides marshaling strong and compelling arguments. The fact that a majority of the science track officers had been female hadn’t become part of the official debate, but he’d heard enough of the backroom arguments to know it provided a very strong subtext to the entire thing. Patrick himself hadn’t been able to decide which he thought was the right way, but luckily no one asked him, either.

Since then, he’d come to believe that what may have been lacking in experience was made up for in brains and competence. In choosing to go with experienced spacers over experienced military, he thought that they’d made the right call.

There were so few comparisons between a fleet battle and a planet-side conflict that he now felt the experience in space far outweighed combat experience as a whole. He’d still rather have had both, but with it presented as an either-or, he’d take Admiral Brookes over some hopped up blue Navy admiral.

He unstrapped from his station, gesturing to Ashley to have her take over, and kicked off for the access tube to the admiral’s deck. He glided easily through and swung around as he arrived, waiting to be noticed.

“Captain,” Nadine said, not looking up from what she was working on. “Welcome.”

“Ma’am,” he said before pushing further in. “We’ve reached point midway. Interception in six hours.”

Nadine nodded, looking up at the large repeater screens. “Any signs they see us?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Let’s hope it holds.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he agreed fervently.

“You’ve been a military man your whole career, right, Captain?”

“That’s right, ma’am.”

“What do you think of our chances here?”

Patrick frowned. Honestly, he’d rather have been asked that before they committed themselves, but he understood the admiral’s reasoning behind the decision.

“If they don’t see us coming, we’ll maul them pretty badly,” he said finally. “With our MRV nukes and rail cannons, we should be able to destroy or cripple most, if not all, of the enemy ships.”

“And Taskforce Five?”

He grimaced. “If everything goes perfectly? Minimal losses.”

Minimal losses. Those words stuck in his throat, since even the most minimal losses in a battle like this would be at least one ship and all hands.

“And if things don’t go perfectly?”

“You know the answer to that one, ma’am.”

Nadine nodded but slowly turned to look right at him. When she spoke, it was quiet; he doubted anyone could have heard her if they were even just a little farther than he was.

“Is this the right move?”

He hesitated, uncertain, and finally admitted as much. “I don’t know.”

The admiral nodded slowly, sighing as she turned away.

“I do know we had to make a choice, and we had to make it then,” he told her. “Not making a choice was the same as choosing to retreat. You chose to advance. It’s a gamble, ma’am, but a lot of military decisions over the centuries have been gambles. One thing every great commander has had in common is that they don’t shirk from risking it all, if that’s what it takes to bring the enemy down.”

“And the not-so-great commanders?” she asked, her voice light, but he could see a dark undercurrent in her body language and face.

“If they went down in flames, they shared the same trait mostly,” he admitted with a smile. “But commanders who didn’t risk always lost everything anyway. You just don’t read about them in the history books because when they went down it was with a whimper, not a bang, ma’am.”

“Well, Captain, we aren’t going down with a whimper.”

“No, ma’am. That we most certainly are not.”

*****

Conference room

FOB Hayden

“Take a sea—” Kayne started to say but then recalled that everyone he’d ever met in full powered armor tended to prefer to stand. “Sit, stand, whatever.”

The four in armor stood.

“What were you able to learn about our latest adversaries here on Hayden, then?” he asked, straight to the point.

They glanced at each other then Sorilla stepped forward.

“They’re operators, sir. No doubt,” she told him simply. “Strong, tough, fast thinkers. Disciplined as hell, and they knew their way around the jungle. They’re not unbeatable, but I’ve seen them get up from hits that would take me out in armor.”

Brigadier Kayne turned to Crow. “Lieutenant?”

“Concur with Top, sir,” he said, grimacing. “I got careless chasing one. The guy was wounded, and he had to be freaked out by the show Top put on for him, but he still held pace and led me right into an ambush. If they knew our armor’s capabilities, I’d be dead.”

“You say they’ve taken hits that would put you down in armor, Sergeant… We’ve never taken one of their bodies wearing any armor.”

“They don’t fight with it, sir. That’s not really a surprise, however.” Sorilla said.

“Explain.”

“Armor falls out of fashion, sir, depending on weapon capability. They’re using some sort of mini version of the gravity valve as a hand gun.” She shrugged. “Near as I can say at least. We’ll have to have them taken apart to be sure. What I do know is that the odds are a direct hit from those weapons probably crushes any armor you can build, so they don’t use it.”

She paused a moment. “They’re not as soft and squishy as a human either, sir. Tough doesn’t begin to cover it. I put rounds in them, multiple times, and some of them got up afterwards. Who gets up after taking a hit from an explosive round?”

Kayne grimaced. That was more information than he’d gotten from his own troops, but it wasn’t a surprise. They’d managed a kill or two themselves, after all, and the base medical staff had already commented on how bloody tough the aliens were. Literally tough, they’d snapped several scalpels in the process of autopsying them and finally resorted to molecular-charged blades.

“We’ve been reviewing our mission recordings,” Crow stepped in, “and near as we can tell, anything less than the book’s full power to the rails isn’t going to penetrate their hides. If the round explodes outside the body, it’ll hurt them, but not lethally…and possibly not crippling, either.”

“We suspect that we’d be able to tear them to bloody chunks with full military power to the rails,” Sorilla added. “But it’s so damned hard to control your rifle when it’s bucking like that, even in powered armor. We’ve only used it to make them duck to this point.”

“Understood,” Kayne said, face a mask. “That brings me to a problem I have. We have.”

“Sir?”

“Over the last few months, we’ve not exactly been sitting around on Sergeant Aida’s laurels,” the general said dryly. “While working to secure this continent, we also laid several thousand kilometers of fiber, tens of thousands, actually. Along with those, we’ve placed secure sensor nodes at key areas, one of which was the old colony site.”

He stepped aside, bringing up an image on the screen behind him. “They recorded this just two hours ago.”

The screen showed the old colony site, now looking noticeably overgrown with Hayden plant life, but above it there was a ship slowly dropping down into the crater Sorilla had blown open on her last visit.

“They’re moving back in,” she blurted, shocked by what she was seeing. “They can’t be that confident that they’ve secured the area, can they?”

“We asked the same question,” Kayne growled, nodding as the screen changed again. “This is a live view from out lunar orbit satcom.”

At first it just seemed to be stars, but after a moment, it became clear that some of the lights were all wrong. They were moving against the background, but the computer imagery was also showing them as heavily blueshifted.

“Ships,” Crow ground out. “A lot of them.”

“Almost twenty is our best guess at the moment. They’ll be here in six hours.”

“Holy shit,” Sorilla mumbled, glad for her armor as her knees suddenly felt like they wanted to go out on her.

Just three of those things had torn the ever-living hell out of Taskforce Three, and while TF4 had given them a better fight, they still came out on top. If Fleet hadn’t armed the hell out of the civilian vessels sent along to help resupply the colony, the survivor would have been more than enough to reestablish orbital superiority over Hayden. Twenty of the goddamned things was a living nightmare.

“If we let them get entrenched again, there’s no way their security will be so lax as to allow what Sergeant Aida did happen again,” Brigadier Kayne said flatly. “However, it seems like even if we send forces against the old colony site, we’ll be hammered from orbit anyway. From where I’m standing, this is a force majeure. Once those ships hit orbit, we can’t pop our heads up without having everything for three klicks blown to hell.”

“Then let’s do some damage before they make orbit, sir,” Sorilla suggested.

“You think you can?”

She looked over at the others, then slowly back to Crow. “Lieutenant?”

Crow considered for a moment. “Give us a lift upriver to the edge of the secure zone. We can hump in and be onsite…five hours?”

“Four if we risk the logging road,” Sorilla said. “That runs right up to the river.”

“Four, then. No sense playing if we’re not willing to go all in,” Crow nodded. “Right. General, can you move some Cougars into range of the colony site?”

Kayne considered then nodded. “We can do that. We also have two Excaliburs I’d be willing to risk, and I’ll up our fleet of Raptor drones at your disposal.”

“Really?” Korman blurted, shocked into speaking in front of the Brigadier.

“Once those ships hit orbit, they’re just scrap plastic,” Kayne said sourly. “Nothing that flies will be of any value to us then. If you can use them now, let’s use them before we lose ‘em.”

“Yes, sir.” Crow nodded. “All right. We can do this.”