Valkyrie Rising (Warrior's Wings Book Two) (29 page)

Several Lucians were sporting wet wounds, including deep shrapnel penetration, but one of the things that made a Lucian a Lucian was the deeply ingrained redundancy of their natural systems, so few had more than moderate injuries on that count.

The worst of the injuries in this battle were from Roark, Kriss noted as he covered the last movements and ghosted into the jungle. The blade had cleaved his foot in two, eliminating him from the active duty roster. Healing that would take months at best, and he would never fully regain mobility without an Alliance regen facility.

Kriss made a note to see if they’d captured any of the enemy blades, because that scale of injury would tax even a Lucian blade. He wanted to see how it had been done and whether he could prevent it in the future…or, more likely, if it would be possible to improve their own blades to such a degree.

The silence was pervasive as they ghosted the jungle, Kriss signaling the others to move on ahead while he and two more stayed behind to ensure they were not followed. They needed time to regroup and determine new tactics for the current situation. What worked against conventional troop was suicide against fellow Sentinels.

*****

“They’re breaking off,” Sorilla announced over her NFC link. “You all right, boss?”

She waited a moment, covering the jungle the aliens had vanished into, but when a reply didn’t come immediately she got a little concerned. A quick ping of the implants in the local area showed that Ton and Crow were just ahead of her, buried under a whole crap ton of shredded jungle that had dropped on them when the aliens opened fire to cover their retreat.

She cautiously made her way over to them, shifting from the command channel to the squad frequency. “Crow, you alive there?”

A groan greeted her, so the answer to the question was yes, but his exact state was yet to be determined. Sorilla linked into Ton and Crow’s armor as she worked to dig them out and found that Crow was intact but had apparently been banged around a fair bit. Ton, however, was showing several warning lights on his med readouts, including a drop in blood pressure.

“Damn it. Crow! Wake the hell up, L.T!” She snarled, picking up chunks of trees the size of compact cars and tossing them to one side with grunts of effort augmented by her armor.

“Wha happened?”

“The world fell on you,” she replied sarcastically as she finally managed to dig enough to reveal the dull, dark metal and carbon of her teammate’s armor.

“That explains the headache.”

She found Ton lying on top of Crow, the back of his armor blown open and a fair spread of blood seeping through the shattered pieces.

Damn.
She’d not seen damage like this short of being
way
to close to an IED detonation. His armor’s automatic systems wouldn’t be able to compensate for the injuries, not with that level of damage across that much of the shell.

Sorilla pulled a cable from her armor at about the center of her abdomen, where a belt would normally be buckled, and snapped it onto Ton’s armor at the shoulder. Then she physically dragged him clear of the mess and out onto firmer ground.

“Hey! What about me?” Crow whined.

“Dig yourself out. The cap’s hurt.”

“What? How?”

“Probably when the world crashed down on you, idiot,” Sorilla muttered as she surveyed the damage and picked pieces of shattered carbon plate out of his wounds.

She slapped a couple emergency compress pads onto the captain’s back then sprayed the whole section shut with oxygenated foam from her emergency supplies. By the time she finished that, Crow had dug himself out and Mac had arrived with Korman in tow.

“Two carry, two cover point and drag,” she ordered, ignoring that Crow outranked her. “We swap every six hours. The lieutenant and I will carry him first. Let’s go.”

“What about Simmons?” Crow looked back to the contested gully they’d fought over just moments earlier.

Sorilla grimaced in her armor, “Tag the location. We’ll retrieve the body later.”

“But…”

“We can’t carry both and provide security as well.”

Crow was silent for a long time, eyes remaining on the gully. “We can’t leave him there, face down in the water.”

Sorilla hesitated, then finally nodded. He was right about that much, at least.

“Ok, we’ll wire him up above the canopy.” She decided finally, “This is Hayden, not Earth, there’s nothing here that’s going to eat human carrion, but that’ll keep the enemy from finding him if they come back.”

Crow winced, but finally nodded. “I’ll do it.”

Sorilla nodded, and they waited while Crow retrieved Simmon’s body and pulled it back to the jungle. He set the lines, looped them over a thick branch, and pulled the shattered remains of armor and man up above the jungle canopy where he secured it in place.

“Where?” Crow finally asked as he landed back on the ground, eyes still on the spot where his partner had died.

“Fleet FOB on the coast,” she replied curtly as she reeled in the line linked to Washington’s armor, lifting him up enough for Crow to link a similar line to his other shoulder. Between them, with the captain’s armor holding him stiff, they had a makeshift litter to drag as they made their way south and west.

*****

“They’re not following.”

Kriss nodded, but he privately wondered why. He would have pressed the advantage in their place, though possibly they were wary of walking into another ambush despite their relative success in escaping this one.

“All right,” he said finally, waving his Sentinels back. “Fall back to the base camp. We’ll review the engagement there and decide on new tactics.”

He and his men turned and headed into the jungle, taking their time now and being sure to clear their trail as they went. For Kriss, he focused on what had just happened and tried to get an idea of what he was dealing with based on what he knew of the new soldiers’ tactics.

They didn’t work in tight groups but remained close enough to support each other. Sentinels preferred closer groups, pairs at least, teams of five in a sector being the lowest normally seen. This group seemed to spread out more, working alone to cover more ground but staying close enough to provide quick support.

Fast, tough, and disciplined.

They weren’t Lucians, Kriss could smell the armor on them. Lucians didn’t bother with heavy armor, particularly since there was pretty much none made that could stand up to a bolter. Armor was something regulars wore, generally to protect themselves against explosive shrapnel or incompetence.

That said, they were certainly this species’ closest equivalent to Sentinels. Small squad, hit fast and hard, then vanish into the smoke of the battlefield like a specter. They showed all the qualities of a Sentinel-level force. Obviously superb training, conditioning, and equipment coupled with what had to be extraordinary examples of their species, though he had to admit that he was judging that by an extremely limited personal experience.

So the problem he was now facing was the fact that their presence made his duties far more complicated. Tying up the local military had been easy to this point; they were vulnerable to fast strikes that crippled their patrols and forced them to pull back to tighter and tighter zones. By keeping them contained like this, Sentinels could simply lessen their attacks and make the enemy feel powerful within their controlled area and weak beyond it. In this way, they easily controlled them until more forces could be dispatched to secure the planet and system.

Unfortunately, with the arrival of enemy Sentinels, that equation was no longer operable.

There was no way to tie down the regular soldiers if they also had to contend with unconventional forces engaging them at random intervals, even deep within territory they controlled. Were they engaging on an Alliance planet, Kriss would raise local forces as part of his plan. However, this wasn’t an Alliance planet, and his resources were too limited for that.

Kriss marched back into his camp, still thinking about the problem before him, only to be greeted by one of his sub-alterns, who was looking far too pleased with himself considering the fact that one of their teams just got reamed on a mission.

“Deice, message from the Alliance.”

Kriss snapped the data reader from the man, examining it quickly before he smiled slowly, showing his teeth.

Well, that solves that problem. With the Alliance here, reinforcements will enable us to mop up the regulars with minimal troubles, even considering the new Sentinel-level forces.

*****

“Send it again.”

Jerry Reed was in no mood to argue, so when the military officer turned to respond, he just glared at the man. Since their arrival on Hayden, Jerry had learned that most of the soldiers were nothing like the Sarge. He’d never have had the guts to try that bullshit with her, but the kid captaining the river patrol boat they were on was just that, a kid. He folded under the glare and ducked back inside to send out another compressed com pulse.

Jerry, in the meantime, was scanning the bank of the wide river with military issue lenses. He’d learned his lessons from Sorilla, and the model he’d swiped from stores was a passive information gathering set that used parallax to determine range, along with a whole host of other things. Like most of the gear he’d
borrowed
from the military, it was bulky and over-designed, but did its job with reasonable reliability.

When Devon made it back to base with the bleeding remnants of the squad he’d left with, spewing news right and left about the Sarge being back on-world, Jerry managed to bully his way onto the next patrol up river.

They still controlled a fair bit inland. The enemy didn’t want to push too far into the areas secured by the Terran soldiers. So as long as they didn’t stray too far beyond that Earth-controlled sector, it was reasonably safe. He wasn’t sure if the Sarge would be heading in or pushing further out, but he wanted to be there if it was the former. Convincing the kid in charge of the boat to send recognition signals took some doing, but dammit, Sorilla was one of theirs. If she needed them, Jerry intended to damn well see that she got what she needed.

“What’s that over there?”

Jerry glanced back to see the man at the rear gun pointing and swiveled to bring his lens to bear. He didn’t see anything for a moment, and then a glint caught his eye. He waited and was rewarded when it repeated. After several flashes, he lowered his lens and smiled.

“Head for the bank over there.” He pointed.

“You sure?”

“That’s the Sarge,” Jerry nodded confidently. “No one else would be using our signal code out here.”

“Alright,” the lieutenant said, spinning the wheel.

The electric motors whined softly as the river patrol boat turned in toward the bank, slowly edging under the cover of the jungle overhang. As they nudged up against the river bottom, Jerry saw a familiar armor appear from the jungle. He stepped over to the side of the boat and waved casually. “You need a ride?”

The armored form stepped down, looking one side and then the other. “Wouldn’t turn it down if it’s secure.”

“As it can be,” Jerry replied. “We control the river up to about fifty kilometers inland from here. Beyond that, it’s pretty much no man’s land…or water.”

“Right,” the figure said, waving a hand.

Three more appeared from the jungle, or rather four more. One was being carried, and Jerry frowned quickly.

“How bad?”

“Bad enough,” the figure said, jumping aboard.

They all quickly helped pull the injured man onboard, and the lieutenant reversed the engines. The boat pulled back out into the current, turning around, and headed back downriver.

Sorilla Aida popped her helm as she took a seat on a bench with her back to the cabin and smiled at Jerry. “So, Jer, you come out this way often?”

Jerry grinned wide. “Only when I have to rescue damsels in distress, Sarge.”

“Fall out of the sky one time,” she said, shaking her head.

He laughed. “Good to see you and have you back on-world, Sarge.”

She took her first real deep breath of unfiltered air since leaving Earth and smiled back at him with a hint less enthusiasm in her eyes than he’d sent her way. “Good to be back.”

Chapter Ten

Brigadier Kayne was far from a happy man.

Another of his teams had been mauled while on patrol, which was always guaranteed to put his good mood in a tailspin, and by their own accounts only got out of it by the intervention of a SOCOM operator. Normally, this wouldn’t bother him exactly, but it was more than a little galling to have one woman carve up an enemy that had been giving him so much trouble. More irksome was the fact that she’d obviously been using them as bait, something he never liked but often had to accept.

He’d never gone the operator route himself and had been used as bait more than once by the arrogant pricks. They may get jobs done, but frankly, he never figured they made for much overall effect on a war. When it came down to it, it was the steady pressure of an organized, regular force that won wars.

That said, as much as he didn’t like dealing with them, he liked to think that he wasn’t a stupid man. If the operator teams could give his men the slack they needed to start pushing outward again, to gain control of this continent, then so be it. He just wasn’t convinced that they were the answer this time.

In his experience, when you fought fire with fire, you just got burned twice as bad.

So as he watched the river patrol pull back into the rough dock they’d built just inland of the delta, he forced his personal feelings down and waved the medical teams forward. By all accounts, the team had at least managed to severely maul the alien teams that had been harassing his men. That, at least, earned them some professional courtesy from him, no matter how little he thought of their methods.

They pulled the injured off the boat, face down on a stretcher, and Kayne had to mask his surprise that the man was still breathing. The entire back of his armor had obviously been replaced by spray-on coagulating foam, and the level of force it took to crack powered armor at all usually killed the soldier inside flat out.