The Valhalla Call (Warrior's Wings) (24 page)

If we can cut through to that system using our improved control over the gravity systems, we might just be able to cut TF-7 off at the pass and provide them with some much needed backup.

She didn’t know what Fairbairn was thinking, haring off that like.

No, actually she knew just what the man was thinking.

Foolish, damned, stupid, gutsy son of a bitch.

He’d try to bleed the enemy of every ship that he could, make them split their forces again and again, all in the hopes that when they finally came up against Valkyrie there would be at least a chance of victory.

It wouldn’t work.

He didn’t have enough ships, not from the scout reports.

He had to have known that, and yet he went anyway. As did they all.

Now she had to try and find a way to save all their arses, not because she felt for one instant that she
had
a chance in hell of doing that, but because she had try.

Out beyond her observation deck, the lights of trillions of distant stars all peered back on her, unblinking. She found herself detesting war more so with every mission she undertook, and those stars were beginning to feel like judges watching her and weighing her. Brooke had always been a science track officer; she wasn’t out here for the adventure, she was here for the unanswered questions.

Now, though, while she hated war, she found herself reveling in being a warrior. The test, the challenge, finding ways to make her enemy boggle and her allies roar. It was addictive, she realized, despite the horrors of it all. The loss of so many good people.

Brooke thought briefly of Jane Mackay, one of the most brilliant minds she’d ever known, and again the horror overwhelmed the rush she felt. Were it not for the horror, Brooke knew that she would grow to love her new job in a way that no one should every feel about actions as despicable as those she had ordered, and would order again.

There had been a time when Brooke felt herself righteous in her stance against war and violence, and now she felt sick inside as she contemplated the horror she would wreak on those who had attacked her people. It was a strange dichotomy, a hypocrisy that she found comforting, something that she was slowly integrating into her soul in a way that left her feeling both powerful and unclean. She longed for the feeling of purity she had once known, but knew that would never come again.

Brooke looked out on the stars and smiled softly.
Let the stars judge the righteous, I will settle for burying the guilty.

*****

USV Socrates

Sorilla looked over her team as they put their bots through the paces.

They were starting to look like soldiers, men she could serve with without worrying about who was going to watch her back in a fight. She still wished for some experienced spacers, but as far as soldiers went, they would do.

She dropped into the back of her own bot, nudging the hatch closed above her. It was dark as space inside, her only stars the random flashes of neural activity sending lights across her visual cortex until she fired up her HUDs and lit off the bot.

Sorilla stilled, slipping into the induced sleep paralysis her implants pushed across her body. It was a disturbing sensation, the loss of muscle control, the sudden inability to move or speak. She sank into it with the focus of someone settling into a bath that had the water temperature just a little too hot. Slowly, deliberately, and with equal distaste.

Her implants swapped over to the second level then, however, and she felt the biofeedback of the bot itself replace her limbs and senses. It had taken weeks of practice to get this deep, and she now found herself reveling in the hot soak of the bot’s sensor feeds as they were run back through her own nervous system.

I wonder, is this what I’m supposed to feel? The manual didn’t say anything about it, but it was probably written by armchair grunts with more time in classrooms than the field.

It wasn’t like being herself, of course. The visual acuity was better than human, as was the hearing. She could feel heat and cold in a general sense, but nothing really localized. Tactile senses were effectively blank, except for her fingers. They’d put special resistance units there so she could get a feel for the pressure she was exerting on whatever she grabbed.

The whole rig was a mixed bag like that—some things more than she was used to, some completely absent. For all that, it was a rush to be jacked into the few sensors that were amped up past human limits. She brought up the visual controls, sweeping the bay and locking onto her team.

They were handling their drill admirably, some better than others.

Francis “Frank and Beans” Bean was doing better, which was good, because Sorilla didn’t have a lot of confidence in her ability to perform surgery and have the patient survive. The PJ had gotten used to the soft paralysis drip and was moving his bot around competently, if not with much flair.

The Air Force pajama boys were the smoothest in their bots. Not surprising, she supposed. They were also qualified pilots and they’d spent a chunk of their careers qualifying on exotic equipment. Unlike her, they lived in their armor while on duty and were used to patching into UAVs, aircraft, and other equipment through their implants.

The SEALs were used to operating as a strike team, so they, too, were more used to armor operations than she’d ever been. Rangers relied on the gear a little less, but not much. Ironically, Sorilla noted with a certain degree of chagrin and annoyance, she was the least experienced person in the room when it came to operating machinery via implants.

Green Berets didn’t rely on that BS; they had to serve behind the lines for long period where their only assets were their brains and the local populace. That made her a very dangerous person, all round, but right now she was starting to feel a little self-conscious about how fast her team was picking up on the interface. They seemed to be on a faster track than she was, which meant that she’d have to work twice as hard to stay ahead of them if she wanted to keep her position of strength

Well, what else is new?

She let herself relax, the tensions and uncertainty floating away as she sank deeper down. Her implants shifted subtly but noticeably as theta and alpha waves spiked across her mind. Meditating with her eyes open had taken a lot of practice, but when she hit the sweet spot, it felt like time had slowed.

The bot moved out smoothly as she stepped as lightly as was possible in an eighty-ton war machine, the floor of the starship vibrating with each step. She stopped in front of the rest and subvocalized her next words. The computers captured the words, converted them to digital format, and then broadcast them in a voice that was almost entirely, but not quite, unlike her own.

“Form up.”

The squad turned, her spoken word reverberating off the walls even as her budge to their IFF and HUDs made certain that they couldn’t mistake her. They fell in, a veritable mountain of an army standing two deep by six wide. Sorilla looked them all over, using the bot’s cameras to check each in turn without moving, then gestured casually with her right arm.

“PT drills,” she said simply. “From now on we do PT every morning, first without armor, then with, and finally in the mechs. I want every one of you to run these things like you were
born
in them. Clear?”

“Ma’am! Clear! Ma’am!”

Impressive. They managed to get the computers to evoke emotional tones.

“Afternoons will be for combat practice. Targeting, mech to mech, and obstacle courses. Captain Petronav would not be pleased to have to polish out dents in his newly refitted ship, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t
fuck up
while you’re running around in eighty-ton machines. Am I clear?”

“Ma’am! Clear! Ma’am!”

“Do this right and I’ll even overlook you dumb fucks answering me like I’m some dipshit drill instructor,” she told them, her own mechanical tones managing to convey the threat she wanted them to hear before she continued in a whisper that rasped out of the speakers. “Am. I. Clear?”

They were silent for a moment, and she could see them sneaking looks at each other through the cameras on the heads of the mechs.

Finally, one of the PJs, piloting the Zero Five Unit, took a half step forward. “Yes, ma’am.”

Sorilla looked them over silently for a long moment before nodding the cameras of her bot. “Better. Break for now, get something to eat. We’ll be living off suit sauce soon enough, eat fresh while you can,” Sorilla ordered. “Dismissed!”

*****

Alexi watched the hulking machines as they marched back to their gantry docks, impressed despite himself by the maneuvers the military machines had been capable of.

He’d seen bipedal mechs in use before, usually used in certain narrow construction scenarios. His own Socrates had once carried a pair of the big machines, intended to be used in the deployment of the orbital tether the ship could carry. They had some other uses, being particularly useful in a microgravity environment since you could magnetize the large feet, something that was far more difficult with tires or tracks, but in general there were better designs.

These new military models, however, were something quite different.

He’d idly watched them work through their training, clearly moving the machines through maneuvers that required not only precise motor control but also a certain degree of on-the-spot spontaneity. Advance control systems could do the first, he was well aware, but they tended to be less-than-exemplary at the second.

“Impressive machines, aren’t they, sir?”

“Indeed they are, Commander,” Alexi said without turning around to look at his first officer.

Commander Ryan “Mack” Mackenzie was a recent addition to the Socrates, but a welcome one. Mack was an experienced spacer, something that had been in short supply since the beginning of the war, and not a military liaison. The shortage of hulls in the Solari Organization was working in his favor, for as long as it lasted. Alexi planned to enjoy the luxury while he could.

“I wonder how long until they start putting that control technology into our machines,” Mack mused idly.

Alexi snorted. “Sometime after I retire and not one instant sooner. I’ll not have them cut me open and start playing with my neurons, Commander. Bad enough the metal and plastic I already have in my body, I have no need of anything more.”

Mack chuckled softly, catching Alexi’s attention more thoroughly as he turned to look at the younger officer.

“Amusing?”

“Somewhat,” Mack cheerfully confessed. “I’m sure that Captain Hayden himself said something similar about the implants that took over toward the end of his time, and I’m just wondering what I’ll be complaining about when my time comes.”

Alexi snorted. “Watch yourself, you young pup, I’ve got more than enough years left on me than you could have a wait ahead of you.”

“No doubt, sir. No doubt at all,” Mack answered honestly.

The truth was that while Alexi Petronov was pushing sixty, he’d probably stay right where he was for another twenty years or more. Life extension treatments were in their infancy, but every year or two it seemed like someone figured out a way to improve them just ever so slightly. In many ways, it was like a replay of the Moore’s Law period of electronic development that defined the century between the early twentieth to early twenty-first century.

A true golden age, possibly, which was one reason why finding funding for extra-solar colonies was relatively easy. Earth’s population had now topped fifteen billion people and, in those areas that hadn’t planned for the increase, things were more than a little uncomfortable. Thankfully, no one needed massive petroleum-based transport networks anymore, but just the press of humanity itself left the world feeling like a dystopian culture in places.

All they needed to do was end this blasted war and get back to the real business of expanding out into the galaxy to change all that.

Of course, out beyond human-controlled stars, it was now clear that it wasn’t exactly a wide open and empty galaxy they were spreading into. That was going to affect some calculations.

“Mack,” Alexi said, “you have the bridge.”

“Aye, sir,” Mack smirked. “I have the bridge. Captain?”

Alexi paused, glancing back from where he was walking toward the exit. “Yes?”

“Good luck.”

Captain Petronov didn’t dignify the comment with any further response, silently turning and walking off the bridge.

*****

USV Legendary

“Marginal, Admiral.”

Brooke nodded. “Yes, Captain, I agree. However, if we can make this star system here…” She looked over the star map being projected between them, pointing to a star some distance from their current position. “Then we would be able to jump here in two hops,” she said, pointing, “and that should let us cut off TF-7 cleanly, hopefully before they run themselves into the grinder.”

“You’re assuming they haven’t already.”

“No.” Brooke shook her head. “They haven’t had time. Transit times, including periods spent sublight while moving from jump point to jump point…unless the enemy has been hiding something huge from us to now, they won’t have had time for that. We can catch them.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She could hear the distinct tone of unhappiness in her captain’s voice and really couldn’t blame him all that much. It was not a great solution, there was no elegance or glory to it, it was just what needed to be done.

Roberts didn’t say anything more, however. He knew his duty and wasn’t one to shirk from it.

“Deploy a messenger drone to inform command or our intentions, then secure the squadron for an extended jump,” she ordered.

“Aye aye, ma’am.”

*****

Plotting a course through what humans referred to as “jump space” was more complicated than even most navigators knew. For one thing, there was literally no such thing as “jump space.” It was a term for something that humans barely had concepts for. The manipulations of space and time that allowed for FTL travel were based in the creation of a total vacuum, something that was anathema to natural science.