Valkyrie Rising (Warrior's Wings Book Two) (8 page)

“I understand, sir.”

“I don’t like losing you, Sergeant,” he told her, “but most of our actions in the foreseeable future will be coordinated through Fleet SOCOM. If you want to be on the sharp end, this is the position that will put you there. Flipside, you take this job, you will be on the sharp end of a lot of nasty missions. Think on it, Sarge. You’ve got a little time, they’re still hunting down those ships that came in through Hayden and nailed the Ares Colony. Probably no need for our like until they hammer them back a step or two anyway.”

“Yes, sir. I will, sir,” she said.

“Good. Dismissed.”

*****

USF Cheyenne

Jump Point Alpha, S9X-53P

The system was barren by human standards, one of very few they’d encountered that never developed even the most rudimentary forms of life. Most systems had an ice moon somewhere that had bacteria living in some crack or crevice, or an old planet with fossils to track. They’d even found a couple planets that were filled with oil fields the likes of which the richest oil barons of the twentieth and twenty-first century could never even dream.

Not this place, though. S9X-53P was a wasteland; the system had never really had a chance, as at some point in its early development, the large gas giants that formed in the outer system had destabilized in their orbits and began to spiral inwardly at incredible rates, effectively bulldozing the entire system clean of anything that might support life in the process.

Given the system’s limited value, even scientifically, when the couriers’ emergency contact hit their FTL receivers, the members of TF5 were understandably taken off guard. That didn’t prevent them from rallying quickly as the situation was uncovered, and their new orders delivered.

“We’re three jumps from Atlantis, ma’am. No chance we get there in time.” Vincent McDermott was the captain of the Shilo Warrior, and while Nadine Brookes didn’t much like his opinion on the matter, she couldn’t find a way to refute it.

“Fine. That means we probably get there a day late and a dollar short,” she said grimly, shaking her head. “Well. Good news is that any survivors probably won’t tax our life support.”

Which was about as cold a comfort as she could imagine, but it literally the only good news about the whole situation.

“We can do it one jump.”

All eyes snapped to focus on the screen occupied by Jane Mackay, captain of the HMS Hood.

“Impossible,” several voices opined.

“Explain.” Nadine cut them down with her tone.

“Cheyenne and Longbow class ships have a lot more power than the Los Angeles and older classes,” MacKay said calmly. “We can supercharge the drive as we jump, get between two and three times the range and speed. Getting there isn’t the problem. If we slip up our entry coordinates, however, we could punch through space-time inside the heliopause.”

Several hissed at that, and Nadine understood why. For a brief moment, when a ship punched through space-time to return to the gravitational influence of the “real” universe, it was actually still traveling much faster than light, relative to the space it was entering. The duration of this period was infinitesimal, but the destruction potential of slamming into solar winds at those speeds was…incalculable.

“If we do that,” MacKay said, “we all know what happens. We’d have a better chance running a shuttle through a sandstorm at Mach Five, but the navigation problem isn’t insoluble.”

Nadine frowned thoughtfully, trying to make a decision. Unfortunately, while her specialties included gravitational physics, specifically jump point dynamics, she knew just enough about navigation to know that if they missed it wouldn’t be pretty. She leaned back from the screens for a moment and looked over to where Patrick was sitting.

“Thoughts?”

He muted his display with a flick of his finger and shrugged. “Risky. She’s right, though. We’ve got the power to launch clear of space-time long enough, and fast enough, to make it to Atlantis in one jump. Problem is, accuracy at that range is going to be spotty. Safest option would be to aim for a jump point well outside the system. There’s usually one or two caused by rogue planetoids beyond the heliosphere. Problem with that idea is that it’ll take us almost as long to get deep enough in-system to do any good as if we took the long way round.”

Nadine nodded. “Right. Well, you have any opinions?”

“On whether we try or not?” he shrugged. “Go for it. Last I checked, there were four million people on Atlantis.”

Nadine nodded grimly, shifting back into view of her screens.

“We’re already en route for the Beta Jump Point. Is this the same point you think we can make a single hop run to Atlantis with, Captain Mackay?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. Calculate your navigation numbers,” Nadine ordered. “If you can convince me we’ve got a reasonable chance of not ripping the ceramics from our hulls on arrival, I’ll give the order to try your idea. Otherwise, we’ll proceed as quickly as we can through normal routes.”

“Aye aye, ma’am,” Jane MacKay replied seriously.

*****

HMS Hood

Jane MacKay had come up the ranks through the science and research ladder, as had most of the people she worked with now. She’d spent years working under Alexi Petronov, one of the finest captains and men she’d known, and had been afforded many opportunities in his command to push the limits of jump space physics research.

Most people who were partially familiar with jump points tended to assume they were like wormholes that interconnected star systems. In many ways, they were the precise opposite, however. Instead of direct roads from one point to another, a jump point was a point in space-time where the fabric of universal gravity was particularly…thin, for lack of a better term. A ship could punch through, like a fish jumping out of the water, and for as long as the ship stayed outside the effects of universal gravity, it wasn’t precisely contained by the laws of space-time.

This gave ships an unparalleled ability to travel at FTL velocities
relative to the known universe
. Some of the mathematical concepts actually stated it as the ship holding still while the universe moved around it. It was a simplistic concept, but not entirely incorrect. It was more true to say that the ship moved one way while the universe moved another, and the two created a combined relative velocity that exceeded light by several times…something that couldn’t happen within the normal rules of space-time.

Now, to return to the jumping fish analogy: what MacKay was trying to do was calculate the exact speed the taskforce needed to have, along with the precise angle of departure, in order for them to land back at a point of their choosing. In theory, it wasn’t a lot more complicated to work out than the simple ballistics trajectory of the aforementioned fish. In practice, again like the fish, the farther you were jumping, the more small factors came into play. Like making a sniper shot at better than three kilometers from a ballistic rifle, you had to factor in things that seemed infinitesimally small. Air temperature, gravity, wind speed, the rotation of the earth under the bullet…and so on. In this case, she was trying to land her bullets…the ships of Taskforce Five…on a point of space that roughly equated to getting that perfect headshot at five kilometers, or the proverbial fish jumping the length of two football fields and landing in a glass of water.

And it had to be done right, the first time. Every time.

Luckily, she had some advantages that fish and ballistic snipers didn’t have. For one, she knew to the kilo what the mass of each ship in the squadron was. Every piece of gear, every crewmember, even the waste products produced were carefully tallied and updated as needed. They didn’t keep track of what everyone onboard weighed, or anything that ludicrous, but it didn’t matter, either. What mattered was that she knew what they massed when they arrived onboard, and she knew precisely the mass of every item that had since left the ship…barring some escaping atmosphere that seeped through the hull as part of normal operations, and even that she had a good estimate of.

Coupled with the precision control the VASIMR system provided over thrust, MacKay was confident she could meet the admiral’s requirements. There was no reason why it couldn’t be done. After all, the math was reasonably straightforward. It was just that no one had the power on tap until now, nor the specific need to take the chance.

With the Cheyenne and Longbow class destroyers, and this current situation, they had both.

She ran the numbers through the system, adjusting for all the variables she could find, and then told the computer to run the numbers twice to confirm the results. When they came back, she stared at the results for a few minutes, then keyed open the squadron data-link and forwarded the results to the public folders with a high priority request for confirmation.

*****

USF Cheyenne

“Captain Mackay submitted navigation data to the ship’s cloud for confirmation,” Denise Milan said as she stepped carefully across the flag deck of the Cheyenne.

They were under two gravity acceleration, heading for the Beta Jump Point as quickly as they could without undue stress on the systems and crew, which made movement a pain, but it was still possible to do the needed preparation work to get ready for the jump when they arrived.

“Have you looked it over?” Nadine asked seriously. While she might not know much about navigation, at least not at the level of intricacies involved in this case, she knew that Denise did.

“I have. It looks good,” Denise said as she collapsed painfully into her bolster. “Computer agrees, says it should work.”

Nadine grimaced. “I want to hear ‘will work,’ Denise, not ‘should’.”

“No one has ever jumped this far before, Admiral.” Denise shook her head. “It’s a risk. The math says it’s good, and I don’t see any variables missing from the plot.”

Nadine nodded. “All right. Shoot it to the squadron, command channels this time. Let the captains see it officially, if any haven’t already peeked.”

Denise snorted softly. She’d checked the access logs. Everyone had looked, not just squadron captains. “Yes, ma’am.”

“If no one has any substantive objections, we’ll follow MacKay’s nav calcs,” Nadine said simply. “Inform the resupply and refueling ships to continue on to Atlantis by conventional routing. As I understand it, they don’t have the power to make this jump?”

“That’s correct, Admiral. Our logistics ships are based on older hulls,” Denise answered. “They can keep up with us in normal space because of the limits of acceleration force, but they don’t have the reactor power for a jump like this.”

“Ok, well, make sure everyone is topped off before we part ways,” she ordered. “We’ll rendezvous with them in the Atlantis System.”

“Aye, ma’am.”

*****

SF Shoot House

Fort Bragg, Carolina

The rifle slammed back into her shoulder as Sorilla stroked the trigger, unloading a trio of rounds into the target at point blank range. It went back, hitting the ground with a solid clang, but she was already moving on. The Special Force Shoot House was one of the most fun places on Earth for her; it was the greatest game every conceived.

Constantly changing, with targets that could fire back, the Shoot House absolutely destroyed every other training sim she’d ever dealt with. Normal Army used video sims, three dimensional projections, dummy guns, the works. They were decent for what they did, introducing the shooter to the madness of combat, but they didn’t have a patch on the Shoot House.

She cleared the room, moving on to the next, and was startled when the door slammed shut on her just as she stepped through. She half turned back on it then corrected to bring her rifle to bear on the open door across the room as it, too, began to slide downward. A hiss caught her attention, leading Sorilla to glance up to the vents in the walls.

Her implants were on full combat processing, the computer feeding intel to her according to its programing. Part of the training was to teach her implants to respond better to her personal habits and to display information she was likely to consider relevant. With the valve wide open, anyone would be overwhelmed by information overload, leading to indecision, hesitation, and likely death for an operator.

Those limits on the data feed didn’t even think to stop her implants from displaying the results of the hyper-spectral scan they automatically took of the air coming in from the vents.

VX? Shit!
Sorilla blanched white as paste, her body moving on automatic even as her mind boggled at the deadly gas leaking into the room. 
Are they
insane
? They never use worse than CS!

VX was a known nerve agent, outdated by and large but still in use by some terrorist states and organizations. Just a small amount was lethal without immediate attention, and it could be spread across an insanely large area. Just what it was doing in the Shoot House was something she was going to beat out of someone in short order, if she lived.

She hit the floor, sliding as the door on the far wall slid down, jammed her rifle into the space, and crawled the rest of the way through as the polymer frame of her assault weapon cracked. Sorilla rolled to her feet, pulling her newly issued sidearm as she automatically moved on with the scenario despite the fact that someone had just tried to kill her.

The lights shifted, brightening as a voice came down from the ceiling.

“Scenario paused. Holster and secure firearms. Scenario paused. Holster and secure firearms.”

Sorilla automatically lowered then slid her sidearm into the thigh holster and waited as a door opened and a man walked in.

“Excellent score, Sergeant,” he told her, not looking up from the pad he was reading. “Not sure about using the rifle to jam the door, mind you, that’s a little pricey. You should have been able to make it without getting so flashy.”