The Valhalla Call (Warrior's Wings) (17 page)

“Medic!”

A corpsman rushed over, hand on the Marine’s throat as he pressed hard to stem the bleeding. “Give me some help here! We need to get his suit off!”

Caldwell let them to it, stomping his way back to the next communications post. “And tell them to get me some real battle armor up here, god damn it! These guys are
not
playing around, they’re using that damned alien shit on us!”

“Yes, sir!”

*****

Kris grunted in annoyance as he came upon yet another sealed door.

The interior of the alien ship was a maze of corridors, and if that wasn’t bad enough, it seemed like it could be sealed off in extremely small sections. The doors they were dealing with were strong enough that blasting them wasn’t practical, so they had to stop every time and bring up a cutter to melt the material to slag.

It was taking an annoyingly long period to make any headway through the ship, which, he was sure, was part and parcel of the defense plans. The resistance they were encountering was fierce but mostly ineffective; it was the interior design that was making the whole progression of the assault such a challenge.

“Bring up the cutter!”

“Yes, Prime!”

*****

The battle for the Terra was progressing all across the big ship, furiously fought for every inch, but the invaders were slowly gaining ground everywhere they had found purchase.

Pierce glowered at the schematics that showed red corridors slowly extending into the blue areas as the enemy took his ship section by section.

“Marines have requested heavy weapons in sections 80, 93, and 98!”

“Expedite the request. Give them whatever they need. I want those things off my
ship!
”

“Yes, sir!”

That was wishful thinking, Pierce supposed, but one had to keep up the image right to the bitter end.

And it is going to be a bitter end, I can taste it coming already.

His executive officer reappeared on the bridge, looking like he’d been running a fair bit. Sweat and some dirt ruined his perfect officer look, but Pierce was hardly going to hold that against him.

“Is it done?”

“Yes, sir. I’ve rigged the cores, and we have scrubbers removing data from our computers as we speak.”

Pierce nodded. “Good.”

“How is the fighting going?”

“They’re going to control the top decks soon, and then it’ll all be over except for the shooting,” Pierce said.

There was no response needed to that. They both knew that the bridge and all command functions were in the top decks. The lower decks were mostly stowage, vehicles, crew quarters, and other such things. Lots of open space, relatively speaking, and very little to hold back a force intent on taking ground.

“Give me the controls to the charges you’ve rigged.”

“Here you are, Captain,”

Pierce accepted the detonators. For form’s sake, if nothing else, he would hold off until it was necessary, but it would take a miracle now.

*****

Caldwell swore over the sound of his rifle but never stopped firing.

“Hold them back! Hold the bastards back!”

His squad was down by three and low on ammo, no word on when they would get any more, but they were done giving ground. All that was behind them now was the bridge, command and control sections, and medical. Lose those and the ship was gone.

His assault rifle roared. He’d given up on single shots and was now muscling the big gun around on full automatic. It blew through ammo like no one’s business, but the aliens’ armor was enough that single rounds weren’t doing the job.

That was cold comfort when his weapon slammed back on an empty chamber, and he didn’t have to reach down to know that he was out. Major Caldwell tossed the lightweight ceramic gun to the deck, disgusted that it wasn’t even heavy enough to use as a club, and pulled the knife from his thigh sheath.

Its carbon edge glowed as his hand wrapped around the hilt, giving him some real comfort as he prepared for one last charge.

The explosive discharge of a weapon behind him was accompanied by a whine of rounds flying by his head, causing Caldwell to twist as a squad of Marines in full armor exploded out from a lift and charged past him.

“Hey there, Major, miss us?”

“Where the hell have you slackers been?” Caldwell snarled through his relief.

“We had to look spiffy for our guests, Major. Wouldn’t be right to show them the ship looking like a cut rate operation. We’re Marines, Major. Show some pride.”

“Semper fi, Corporal. Now go get ‘em.”

“Right you are, sir. Oh, by the way.” The armored Marine glanced back. “We left you some party favors in the lift.”

“Oorah.” Caldwell sheathed the knife and patted his squad on the shoulder, pulling them back to the left to rearm.

This fight wasn’t over yet.

SOLCOM Research Facility

Code Name : Aion

“Welcome aboard, Admiral.”

Admiral Brooke looked around the facility she hadn’t even been aware existed; not even a rumor of it had reached her in the months she’d been working around top secret facilities in Sol System.

The Aion facility was large enough on a human scale, she supposed, but where it had been positioned there was no active jump point remotely nearby so she could easily see how it would remain hidden from normal traffic. Hiding it from the informed officers of the Solarian Navy, however, was another matter.

Given all the high value intelligence that passed through her desk, she was shocked that anyone could have hidden the facility so perfectly.

“Thank you,” she answered finally, turning to focus on the man who had greeted her. “Admiral.”

Admiral Mathew Ruger nodded. “Welcome aboard Aion, Admiral.”

“Please, call me Nadine. Otherwise we’ll be up to our ears in admiral this, admiral that, in short order.”

“Agreed.” He smiled. “Call me Mathew.”

“Well, Mathew, I was sent her for a briefing,” Brooke said, eyes still moving around as she looked for any sign of what she was to be briefed on. “I suppose we should be about it.”

“Yes, I understand that you’re on a schedule. Come with me, I’ll show you the only thing of interest in the entire facility.”

“One thing? Surely not?” Brooke chuckled. “It was a large place from what I could tell.”

“Larger than you realize, Nadine,” Mathew assured her. “Far larger, but only a very small portion of that is intended for habitation by people. Come on, I’ll show you.”

Brooke tipped her head and followed as he lead her deeper into the station, through several security checkpoints, and finally to a simple-looking computer lab. She looked around it, eyebrow cocked, but saw nothing of any interest.

“This is Aion, Nadine,” Mathew said, taking a seat and gesturing to a large screen on the far wall.

“I’m not certain I understand…”

“Good, if you did you’d be practically the only one,” Mathew chuckled. “Even the people who built this station barely understand it. Aion began as a research facility intended to reverse engineer the alien gravity technology. We believed that they were using singularities to warp space and time, and that was the concept behind their technology.”

“I remember, I was part of the initial discussions along those lines, before I was assigned to Task Force Five.”

“Yes, you were, weren’t you? Good, that will help you understand,” Mathew said. “What we found, our first great breakthrough, was that they were doing
nothing
of the sort.”

“Pardon? I thought…”

He held up a hand, silencing her. “I know. We’ve released some misinformation on the subject because we didn’t want anyone tinkering with this technology without proper clearances. They don’t create singularities to warp space-time, Admiral. They warp it
directly
. The aliens’ technology treats space-time the way we would treat…dress fabric, or steel, or whatever else we build with. They actually interact with space-time directly, something that no one ever really thought possible.”

“That’s impressive, I’m sure, but I don’t believe I understand what this has to do with my current mission.”

“I’ll get to that, but honestly, I believe that you’ll beat me there once we get going,” Mathew said with a smile. “It’s important to understand that space and time aren’t exactly what we thought, and neither is gravity. In fact, they’re all the same thing.”

“Yes, I’m familiar with that concept.”

“Right, well gravity is just the effect of space-time being twisted by mass. Mass can affect the structure of our universe, actually changing the laws of physics. As you gain more and more mass, those laws change in one way, but just as importantly, as you shed mass and move more and more toward true emptiness, the laws change another way. We rarely see this because we live constantly in a field of gravity. Even in space we’re entangled in the effect. The Earth, the Sun, the Galaxy, the Universe. It’s all part of a single immense system of space and time; there are only very small points in the universe where the twisting of all that mass actually balances out.”

“Jump points, yes, I know.”

“Right, in those points at specific times.” Mathew gestured with his hands. “You can do things that appear to violate the laws of physics, like jump past the speed of light.”

“This is nothing new.”

“No, but here is what is new,” Mathew said, tapping a command to bring up a schematic.

It showed a massive toroidal design with what looked to her like the Aion facility sitting in one tiny edge of it all. Brooke looked at the design, her mind trying to wrap itself around the design, but she was quickly stumped. It seemed to look like the atom smashers used by starships to generate the antimatter used for fuel, but it was too large.

“A particle collider?”

“No,” Mathew shook his head, “not at all. It’s a region of space-time we twisted using the alien technology. Over a full astronomical unit in diameter, we’ve custom designed our own…universe, you might call it. Inside, the laws of physics are quite different.”

“For what?” Brooke leaned forward, eyes trying to take it all in.

“To study space-time, Nadine,” he said softly. “But it’s not what we built it for that you need to be concerned with. It’s what came
out
of it when we turned it on.”

Brooke turned to look at him, frowning. “What do you mean by that?”

“When we activated Aion, not that we called it that back then,” he smiled, laughing at a joke only he seemed to understand, “we were using it to master the technology you’d brought back from the battles over Hayden. However, as soon as we turned it on, almost to the
nanosecond
, we began receiving a
signal
from within the very section of space we’d just created.

“The signal had a SOLCOM encryption tag, and it was dated six months from the day we received it,” he said with a smug smile. “Six months into the future, Admiral. We sent ourselves a note, and six
months
’ worth of scientific research, to prove its validity. Since then, Admiral, Aion has been the most secret facility in the history of the planet.”

Nadine stared at the screen in silence. Honestly, no words came to mind.

*****

USV Legendary

Sorilla growled in annoyance.

All right, she didn’t growl exactly. Her vocal chords were temporarily paralyzed, so growling wasn’t in the book. What she did was subvocalize the growl, which was a really weird sensation, then the computer took that, compressed and morphed it, and played it back over the speakers of the bot in a synthesized voice that almost sounded entirely unlike her.

Three men who were nearby started and nearly pissed their pants, deciding at that point that they had elsewhere to be. Given that they were the only three that had been brave, or stupid, enough to hang around the storage room once she started stomping around in a thirty-five-foot robot, Sorilla took that as a sign that maybe she needed to cool down a bit.

The bot slumped as she broke the paralysis and popped the rear hatch so she could pull herself out. The system was designed so she could—actually had to—wear her full armor inside the bot, so this really did nothing at all to make her feel like she was free of her frustrations except to let her physically move again.

“What is it this time?”

“Hearse, if you come at me with that smug attitude right now I’ll break your jaw,” Sorilla warned, popping her helmet seals and pulling it off so she could breathe air that hadn’t recently been cycled through her own lungs a thousand times. Sure, fresh was a matter of perspective when you were onboard a starship, but anything was fresher than suit air.

“There’s no reason to be hostile.” The civilian contractor held up his hands in surrender. He knew well enough that she could break him in half given the opportunity, and she’d already made it clear that she didn’t lack the motivation. “I was just pointing out that we are behind schedule.”

“We’re never going to catch up to the schedule, Hearse, even you should know that. My squad isn’t even here yet and we’re prepping to move out in a few hours,” Sorilla gritted out as she stretched her limbs, feeling the satisfaction of a pop in her shoulder as she rotated it. “We’re going to be playing catch-up on the schedule right up until we launch the op.”

“That’s hardly a reason to slack off.”

“Hearse,” she growled, turning to look him in the eyes, “shut the fuck up. I’m not slacking, I’m just taking a break because trying to maneuver that behemoth around this tiny ass room without breaking something, or
someone
, is nerve wracking and I need to stretch out.”

The way she looked at him when she said
someone
must have convinced Hearse to back off in a hurry because he threw up his hands and literally backed away. Sorilla snorted, amused that he didn’t want to show his back to her.

If I wanted to kick your ass, you prick, I wouldn’t have to hit you from behind.

While Hearse was a jackass by times, she knew he was right about the timing. The schedule was getting more cramped by the hour, and the amount of work wasn’t dropping off at all. The mechanical monster they’d brought her was easy enough to operate—the issue wasn’t in basic operation, it was in making every action
instinctive
. She’d seen flashes of what it could do, and Sorilla was as eager as anyone else to bring those flashes to operational reality. It was just turning into a long road to get there, and she doubted they had the time.