Valkyrie Rising (Warrior's Wings Book Two) (2 page)

The squadron of Cheyenne and Longbow class ships powered their VASIMR drives to one gravity and made for the jump point at a leisurely pace. By the time TF1 got organized and underway, Nadine expected to have been waiting at least another day, but that was fine, too. Despite the extended shakedown period, there were still a near constant trickle of new bugs to be found every time they altered their procedures even slightly. Both ship classes were among the heaviest and most powerful starships ever built by man, but they’d been rushed through the construction process and it showed.

The time spent at one gravity acceleration would make it easier on the inspection crews anyway. While moving around in microgravity was both fast and fun, working in it was another matter.

*****

On the bridge of the USF Cheyenne, Captain Patrick Roberts was overseeing the seemingly endless list of checks and rechecks that had come with his new command. Life before the war had been dull, but at least he hadn’t felt like a damned clerk. Such was his punishment for competently executing his duty, he supposed as he thumbed open a com line to engineering.

“Engineering here.”

“Captain Roberts here,” he said. “Is the chief available?”

“He’s trying to hammer down a flux in the Tok, sir.”

Roberts grimaced. The irregular readings from the system that generated their antimatter was one of the things he wanted to talk with the chief about. “Does he know what’s going on there?”

“Yes, sir, we pinned down the cause a while back. Right now it’s a matter of just confirming with eyes on what the math is already telling us.”

“All right, tell the chief I need to talk as soon as he’s free.”

“Wilco, Cap.”

“Roberts out.”

He sighed, trying not to pay too much attention to the shivers running down his spine as he thought about what an out of control Tokamak could do to his ship.

This is going to be
such
a fun-filled mission
.

*****

Aida Family Hacienda

Outside Ciudad Jaurez

Sorilla slung her duffel as she stepped over the broken cobbles that littered the front of the long drive up to her family home.

Nothing changes around here.
She smiled inwardly as she started to walk up the road, the searing, dry heat of the Mexican sun warming her bones in a way that the muggy heat in Hayden’s jungles never had.

The barking of the dog almost startled her, despite her knowing it was coming. Sorilla turned in time to catch the mongrel as it jumped at her, letting her duffle hit the ground as she swung the dog into her arms.

“Good to see you too, mutt,” she laughed, the dog’s barks changing to yelps as she swung him in her arms. When she dropped him to the ground, he ran around her legs as she retrieved her duffle and continued up to the house.

“Hello!” she called, nudging the door open with her feet. “Dad? You in here?”

With no answer, she tossed her duffle down by the kitchen table and walked through the house to the side door and headed out into the garage, where she could hear tool work as she approached.

“Dad!” she called from the door, knowing better than to get too close to a man with an angle grinder. “Dad! Turn around, you old coot!”

The hunched over figure paused, looking up curiously, as if wondering if he’d really heard someone, and then finally looked behind him. The angle grinder hit the floor, tossed casually aside as Cassius Aida grinned widely and strode over to his daughter.

Much as she’d done to the dog, Sorilla found herself picked up and flung around wildly as her father tossed her around like a ragdoll.

“Put me down, you crazy coot!”

Cassius laughed, a deep, booming sound that reverberated through the shop as he set her down. “Now, why didn’t you tell me you were back?”

“Just off the tether this morning,” she told him, smiling warmly. “It’s good to see you.”

“And you, kiddo,” he said, glancing out past her. “You alone this time?”

“Yeah.” She nodded, lips pursing as she remembered that, the last time she’d been home, half her squad had been with her.

Cassius Aida was no man’s fool, and he’d served his time in the army before retiring to Mexico to spend his time with his wife and daughter. He knew the look on her face, had seen it in the mirror, and grimaced slightly as he shook his head.

“How bad was it, Hija?” he asked after a time, walking across the shop to put his tools away. Anything to keep his hands busy so she wouldn’t see him clawing at the air as he thought about what she did for a living.

“It was bad,” she confirmed quietly, leaning back against a stool.

“Yeah, I can see that in your eyes,” he told her, ironically with his back to her as he did. “How many?”

“Everyone.”

A hammer hit the cement floor, bouncing under the car he’d been working on. Cassius Aida ignored it.

Everyone.

He looked up at the ceiling, eyes searching for something that even he knew wasn’t there. “Accident?”

“No. No, Papa,” she said, calling him papa for the first time in a couple decades as she crouched by the car and picked up the hammer. “It was no accident.”

He nodded slowly, accepting the tool from her when she passed it to him. “You get the people who did it?”

She laughed bitterly. “If I missed any, they’re still running.”

“Good. You able to talk details?”

“Not if you don’t know about it already.” She sighed.

“All right,” he said, wiping his hands clean with a rag from the counter. “Supper’s in an hour. You need anything?”

“I need a civie pad, one with telecom access.”

He nodded, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. “Fab’s in the corner, same as last time. New model, but the OS is pretty much the same. You know the code to my net.”

“Thanks.”

“I’ll see you for supper?”

Sorilla nodded, smiling soberly. “You bet.”

He spared a long look in her direction then nodded again and headed out. Sorilla knew her father, knew he wasn’t one for words, but sometimes the way he shut down in emotional situations hurt. Of course, she was just as often glad of the space he offered, so Sorilla tried to put it out of mind as she walked over to the fab in the corner, already linking her implants into the household network and skating through the global web for popular pad designs.

She wasn’t looking for anything complicated or stylish; it wouldn’t leave her pocket since she could use her implants to access the device, so it only took a few minutes to find a model that would suit her. Once it was downloaded to her implants, Sorilla just shot it over to the fab and waited while the machine printed out the device for her.

She wished she could just use her implants, but the military frowned on hacking directly into civilian communications channels with military hardware. Both because it was lousy discipline and because of the risk of picking up a virus from the network. Patching into the home network was skirting the rules a little, but she didn’t feel like pushing her luck with the high-band civilian frequencies. She took the device from the fab, checked the battery to be sure it had been printed with a full charge, and dropped it in her pocket after linking it to her implants.

Then she walked back into the house as she called up her mail, waving to her father as she went through the kitchen.

“Going for siesta, Dad,” she called. “Let me know when supper is ready.”

He waved in her direction, not speaking much as he took some rice from the big pot and scooped it over into the pan next to it, along with a large serving of beans and some pork strips. “You can eat when you’re hungry, Hija. It’ll be ready when you are.”

“Thanks, Dad,” she said, letting herself into her room and tossing herself on the bed.

Sorilla closed her eyes as she lay there with raw data flowing along her corneal implants, checking her mail and looking over the social pages for anything of interest, mostly just trying to forget again, really. She hadn’t thought of her lost team in over a year, closing on two. Getting lost in that hell would have been a bad idea on Hayden, and since she’d been recalled, she’d been active pretty much every waking hour, answering questions or preparing reports to answer questions no one had thought to ask just yet.

After shooting off some replies to friends and updating her status on the social pages from “off-world” to “home,” she told her computer to prioritize the rest of her backlog, and then she shut down the HUD so she could sleep for a time.

Chapter One

Five days later –USF Cheyenne

Jump Point Beta, Ares System

“Element Alpha,” Nadine ordered, “assume point. Beta will provide cover while Gamma remains in close support of the convoy.”

The commanders of the taskforce elements acknowledged, Alpha’s group already flaring its drives to four gravities as it moved out ahead of the relief column while Beta took a little more time to fill in the cover position. The Cheyenne held back with its escorts, taking the drag position of the formation, covering the column directly while Admiral Brookes settled in to wait for the results of long-range sensing systems.

The Ares System was so named because the closest thing in the entire godforsaken place to a habitable planet was Mars’s long-lost twin brother. Someone took a look at that and decided to get cute with the mythology and give the Greek god of war his own planet to match his Roman counterpart’s back in Sol. Were that all it had to recommend it, the name probably would have been the only thing worthy noting about the system.

Initial surveys, however, had thrown the astro-mining companies back home for a loop when they reported absolutely insane densities of both transuranic and so-called “rare earth” minerals. The whole planet was made of the stuff, to the point that had it been back on Earth, all a prospector would need to strike it rich would be a shovel and a jeep. Even when you accounted for shipping costs, living expenses, and all the associated insanity of living and working off-world, Ares was still profitable enough to break several monopolies of material back on Earth and completely shake up the balance of economic power.

There are a few nations back home that aren’t shedding any tears over the loss of these facilities,
Nadine thought to herself as she began examining the data that was starting to filter in from deeper in-system.

Things looked quiet on the passive scanners, nothing throwing up red flags around Ares or its moons. Knowing the enemy’s penchant for hiding in the glare of the sun, however, that gave her cold comfort.

The gravity sensors were reading exactly as predicted, no unusual accelerations that might indicate someone playing with the fabric of space-time. Nadine finally forced herself to relax a bit, keeping a close eye on the system’s primary but otherwise turning her focus to deploying her ships and getting the relief column to its destination in good time.

The convoy took two days after arriving in-system to make planetary orbit of Ares, keeping to a leisurely pace that permitted the lead elements to coordinate on a full system scan. Not that she expected to find anything, but it was nice to have an up-to-date scan for stellar cartography to file. The space of even a relatively small system like Ares was so impossibly vast that, unless you knew what you were looking for and roughly where it was, you were highly unlikely to find it.

In Sol System, they were still finding
planet
-sized objects, even after more than a century of interplanetary space travel. Nothing close in-system, of course, but there were plenty of planetary objects floating around within the orbit of Pluto that just happened to be off the normal orbital plane. Several had been found, and claimed, by various nations, who set up deep-space research bases and mining facilities on them.

And those were
planets.
A ship, even a big ship, could hide almost literally anywhere.

With that in mind, Nadine redirected her military units to covering the orbitals and likely approach vectors with an eye to ships hiding near the sun or the system gas giants. With that done, her job was pretty much superfluous as the relief column took over.

She watched as they sent down shuttles, containing both relief supplies and the construction material needed to anchor the new tether. Installation would take days, at best, assuming any of the old fallback sites were still intact. Weeks if they had to survey for a new one before they could begin construction, but for her and her taskforce crews, it was now a waiting, and watching, game.

*****

USF Fleet Offices

Spaceport America, New Mexico

What once had been one of the sleepiest offices in the entire city was now constantly buzzing with activity. The United Solarian Fleet had operated on a shoestring budget for so long, they’d had to cannibalize most of their shoes. Now, however, even with the Americans and British taking the lead in Fleet operations, their budget had increased a hundredfold, leaving the beleaguered administration of the USF with what might be termed an embarrassment of riches.

Admiral John Givens had long been the voice of the USF’s frustration and anger at the way the organization that manned, maintained, and generally kept over eighty percent of space travel running had been marginalized. And now, for his sins, he was in charge of the newly expanded budget and found that there weren’t enough hours in the day to spend it all.

Oh, it wasn’t like they had too much money. No such thing, especially in a time of war. The problem was that, in the sleepy peacetime leading up to the invasion of Hayden, many of the infrastructures that they now desperately needed had either degraded or simply were never built in the first place. As a result, he was swamped in grant applications, contract bids, and new personnel applications. The grant requests he tossed down the line, letting his aides filter through those to look for anything that might be interesting. Contract bids got sent over to the spending committee; he was the chairperson, but he’d let the rest of them shoulder that weight for a while. Givens kept the personnel applications, however.