Valkyrie Rising (Warrior's Wings Book Two) (20 page)

“Careful, Captain,” she told him in a slightly acerbic yet mocking tone. “Captains who act too much the smartass with admirals often find themselves regretting it sooner than later.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, Admiral. I’ll keep that in mind.”

“See that you do.” She snorted softly. “Now, if you don’t mind, I want to check up on the status of my squadron.”

“Aye, ma’am.”

Nadine kicked off from where she had been drifting and headed back to the corridor access, hanging a graceful right turn, and drifted up the hall to the facility command deck. Admiral Pat Gates was there, as he’d been all day, every day she’d been on-station at the Alamo. He glanced up in the direction and nodded.

“Nadine.”

“Pat,” she returned, nodding to the repeater screen behind him. “I’m sure you can guess why I’m here.”

“We have about half the junk unloaded from your squadron,” he said, not looking over his shoulder at the screens. “Another few days for the rest. You’ve about tripled our work load here, you realize.”

She snorted. “I can take it back and dump it where I found it, if you prefer.”

“Thanks, but no,” he said dryly. “I think we’d both rather not be court martialed for treason. Your squadron was the first to kill one of these suckers and still have enough ships left over to retrieve the hulk. I suspect that every man and woman on your crews is up for medals for this alone.”

“They deserve it,” she said simply.

“I won’t be disagreeing,” Gates agreed. “We’ve already started to get an idea on some of the gravity tech, just from the materials they used. Originally, we’d wondered if they’d tamed a singularity, but there’s no evidence of anything in there that could manage containment on something like that.”

Nadine shuddered. “I don’t know if I’m happy to hear that or chilled that I might have been hauling a black hole in potentially damaged containment through jump space.”

“Yeah, better you than me on that one,” Gates smirked. “But in all seriousness, there’s no indication of anything we’d equate with that kind of containment system.”

“We could have blown it apart back there. We did use nukes…many of them,” she reminded him.

“Yes, but if you’d done that, there would have been a runaway black hole sitting in the center of the ship,” he countered. “In which case, I doubt you’d have managed to bring back as much as you did.”

She considered that and finally nodded. “Fair point.”

“Which brings us to one of the earlier theories that’s been under fire for being a little too far out,” Gates said. “We’re hoping to confirm or disprove with what you’ve brought us.”

“And that is?”

“Basically, it’s what gave the ‘gravity valve’ its name,” Gates said. “The idea of a higher level dimensional collapse, projected into a target. If we can prove that, it’ll go a long way to solidify a lot of high-energy, quantum theories.”

“As long as that translates into something we can use in the black, I’m all for it,” she said soberly. “The acceleration on those monsters is just unreal.”

“Yes, I’ve seen the chips with battle recordings.”

“Until you see the plots in real time, you can’t understand how it really hits you, deep down,” she said with a shake of her head. “We need something to cut that advantage down. Otherwise it’s just a matter of time before we run out of tricks and they bulldoze right over us.”

“Right,” he agreed. “Well, one thing I can tell you is that they build lighter than we do. Stronger, too, at least on a per weight basis. We’ve already started analyzing the armor shell we took off your ships. A lot of elements you wouldn’t expect in a ship, given the relative rarity of the material. We could never round up that much titanium, even mining the belts, the cost would just be prohibitive. Some synthetics I don’t recognize, but we’ll soon have it tested and then sent to some Earth-side labs to be replicated if it’s of any value. We also found one group of components that our people recognized on sight, interestingly enough.”

“Oh, and that was?”

“Radio and tracking equipment,” he told her. “If this was a representative of their radio tech, I can tell you why that sergeant on Hayden was never tracked and valved when she used her suit com on-planet.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, our radio tech is at least five decades ahead of this. This ship just didn’t have the capability to detect our spread spectrum encrypted signals, let alone track them,” he said. “I’ll be able to tell you more for sure once we’ve had time to sift through the remains here, but it looks like they barely use the EM spectrum, and probably not at all for communications.”

“Yet obviously they seem aware of its potential in that area, otherwise why target strong signals?”

“Well, everything we’re finding out about these people, aliens, whatever…” He shook his head, frowning for a moment, then went on. “As I was saying, everything we’re learning seems to indicate some sort of multi-species empire. I’d say that they’ve encountered other species that use the EM spectrum in the past, but they likely use some sort of FTL com themselves. I’m just guessing there, but it seems a safe bet.”

“Indeed,” Nadine agreed, nodding.

“In the meantime, Admiral,” Gates said, gesturing to his computer, “I have work to do. I’ll keep you apprized.”

“Thank you, Admiral,” she replied, pushing off from the terminal and drifting back out of the command center.

*****

Level Two ballistic range

New Mexico tether counterweight

This will do,
Sorilla thought as she cracked the pistol open and casually lifted her hand to let the barrel/magazine assembly eject out over her shoulder. She already had a replacement in hand and was reloading the weapon before the assembly hit the ground.

She could see the range master wince in the corner of her eye and knew he was a little miffed by the mistreatment of the range’s barrel assemblies. She knew that they were a little expensive, particularly given that these were specially-loaded dummy assemblies that had been machined by hand instead of the field issue, mass produced models.

Well, stuff him,
she thought irately. 
If I’m going to carry this sucker, I want to see how it handles in field conditions.

So far, she was impressed, and everything she knew about guns told her that the design should be about as mechanically perfect as was possible. There was no action to let in dirt, dust, or even liquids, so that was one point of failure that had been eliminated. The hundred-round magazine was entirely contained and about as simply perfect as anything she’d ever seen. Packed nose to tail inside the barrels of the gun, the heavy caliber rounds weren’t triggered by a firing pin like her revolver or the colonists’ hunting rifles. Instead, these rounds were fired by a receiving chip built into the round itself in response to a near field radio transmitter set off by the trigger stud. With no action to slow the weapon, the rounds could be fired off in rapid succession, ripping through targets like a buzz saw.

So far, she’d put it through every test she could think of, including deliberately inducing failures to see how the weapon reacted, and Sorilla was impressed. Even when one of the bullets “failed” to fire, the gun cleared itself by firing the next round in order. The very thought sent shivers down her spine, but the iridium-enforced barrel handled the pressure with no issues, as one bullet pushed the next out of the barrel and the gun was instantly back in field effective form.

The gun looked like something out of a bad animation that came out of Japan, and she wasn’t the only one who thought that, though she was one of the few who added the word “bad” to the description. The barrel was long, and the lack of a magazine in the grip made the rear of the weapon look off-sized, smallish in comparison.

To someone who’d spent a fair bit of her formative years in and around the New Mexican culture of space exploration and Wild West legends, the M-Tac Model 50 felt like a science fiction version of the colt peacemaker.

She had to admit, she really liked the feel.

It felt… right. Like it fit her hand better than anything she’d ever used before. Sorilla knew that if it performed on par with her old 500 Smith, she’d found a new standard weapon, no matter what the military decided. As a SOCOM operator, she had enough leeway in her gear choice to make that decision for herself.

She linked to the computer in the gun, tying her implants to the weapon through near field communications. The computers in weapons were generally fairly simple as far as such things went. Built more for durability than intelligence, they were more than enough to manage the functions of the weapon, sending trajectory modification orders to the smart rounds, and could even calculate ballistics. They weren’t able to handle targeting, however, or any of a myriad of advanced weapon functions that skilled operators loved to bring into play when possible.

“Going hot,” she called out.

She tagged the targets downrange in her implants, sending the data to the gun, then mentally toggled the weapon from “safe” to “hot” as she brought the weapon up and swept it across her field of vision in a single smooth motion.

The M-Tac roared in rapid fire as the computer opened fire automatically, emptying the weapon in under a second. She winced as the heavy kick of the weapon pushed her arm up, pointing the barrel to the ceiling, but kept it under control as the roar echoed through the range and finally died out.

“Weapon secure,” she said casually, cracking the weapon open again with a flick of her wrist and ejecting the barrel assembly out over her shoulder.

The range master grimaced again but said nothing as she just smirked without looking in his direction. Sorilla set her weapon down on the table in front of her.

“Range clear,” he intoned. “Targets coming back.”

The range wheeled in, bringing the targets back up to where Sorilla was standing. She watched them approach but didn’t bother waiting. Instead, she zoomed in with her implants, the liquid lenses on her eyes focusing on the yellow marks of her rounds’ impact points.

Perfect score.

Sorilla snapped her weapon shut, leaving it empty, slid it into the holster on her hip, and started to leave without waiting for the targets to arrive.

“See you later, Sarge.”

Sorilla nodded to the range master on her way out. “Have a good one, Ray.”

“You too, Sarge.”

*****

USF offices, Level Two

New Mexican tether counterweight

“Sir, we just picked up an alert from the Beta Point fortress.”

Admiral Sawyer stiffened at that report and couldn’t help but wonder if that was it. 
Did they find us?

“Let me have it, Sarah.”

“Jump picket out of Hayden, sir.”

He sighed, relieved then rubbed his face for a moment. “Right. What does General Kayne have to say?”

“Encrypted, sir,” she told him. “The file is on your station.”

“Thank you,” he said, rolling his chair over to the station, where he called up the file and hammered in the decrypt key.

The file took a few moments to fully open. The encryption key was immensely complex, and even his powerful work station took time to decode it. Once it was complete, he settled in and glanced over the file briefly. When he was finished with that, he began to read it in detail, noting the new developments on-planet.

That makes at least three confirmed species on the other side of this little war.
Sawyer didn’t like the sound of that to say the least.

Statistics alone said that, for three species to be part of the same empire, the area of space it encompassed almost had to be inconceivable. Certainly humans had never encountered another intelligent species across their region of space, which spanned more than a hundred light-years. So for this alien…empire, for lack of a better term, to have at least three, the odds were in favor of them having expanded to cover a significantly larger section of space than humans had.

That, in turn, indicated that they’d been spacefaring for a comparatively longer time. Certainly their technology seemed to imply that they had advanced well beyond the levels humans were at, though more and more there were some oddities showing up that indicated that, in some areas at least, they weren’t quite as advanced as they appeared.

It was a puzzle, and one that he didn’t think would soon be resolved. Certainly not until they’d managed to start talking to these people, things, whatever they were…or, barring that, started investigating the remains of conquered planets and colonies.

He really hoped it didn’t come to that, if only because the odds weren’t strongly in favor of humans being the ones doing the investigations, in his opinion.

For the moment, the crux of the war was Hayden. The planet was hardly one of the most valuable worlds in human controlled space, for all its Earthlike nature, but for some reason, the aliens seemed incredibly focused on it. Which, in turn, meant it was worth more to Earth than it had been previously, as well.

If only as a choke point to keep the alien resources tied up and away from Earth.

Sawyer closed the file and checked his schedule. He was going to need to talk to the admiralty and oversight committees again and most likely get more reinforcements assigned to Hayden.

We’ll send them a few SOCOM units this time, as well, see if we can’t get a better measure of this new species. From the reports, it sounds like these guys know their way around field craft.

Chapter Seven

USF Level Three

New Mexico tether counterweight

Pushups done under one-and-a-half-gravity acceleration were an exercise in frustration and pain management, as was pretty much everything else, if Sorilla were to be honest with herself. That said, this was most certainly the sort of pain that signified weakness leaving the body, so she pushed through the aches and burning that enveloped her arms as she completed ten pushups in just under twenty seconds and moved on to the next part of her workout.