Valkyrie Rising (Warrior's Wings Book Two) (4 page)

“Thanks, Da,” she mumbled, slurring her words a little against the painkillers fuzzing up her brain.

Doctors were strange, to be honest. The nice, clean neural block was a no-no, but apparently getting shot full of morphine or whatever the synthetic version was called these days was perfectly fine.

Probably has something to do with the fact that I can’t fucking walk with this crap in me,
Sorilla thought, disgustedly.

Her father set the tray across her body and helped her into position, grimacing as she groaned again.

“You all right?”

“I’ll live,” she told him with a wan smile.

He sighed, shaking his head. “In my day, we kept our gear outside our bodies, where it belongs. Spent a goodly amount of time working very hard to keep people from sticking things in us, one way or the other, I’d like to add.”

She snorted softly. “Pull the other one, Dad. You’ve got as many implants as I do.”

“Only because I wasn’t very good at keeping people from sticking unwanted things into my body,” he replied sourly. “I’m not referring to medical implants, and you know it.”

“Times change,” Sorilla sighed theatrically, forcing herself to eat some. “I guess the army got tired of you old codgers
losing
all the gear you didn’t keep inside your body.”

Cassius smirked in response. “Must be. I see you’re feeling a little more fit, though. Enough to fight your old man in a battle of wits.”

“Baiting me with an obvious opening for a comment about beating up on unarmed opponents isn’t going to distract me from the soreness,” she responded dryly.

“And aware enough to spot an intentional opening in your opponent’s defenses,” he chuckled, rising up as he patted the bed. “You’ll be fine in a few more days.”

“Two weeks,” she mourned. “Two weeks before they’ll let me start working back up again.”

“You’ll live,” he responded, rolling his eyes at her sulky expression.

As a former Ranger, Cassius was well aware of how it felt to be lying in bed while your conditioning seeped away. The frustration for someone who defined her life by her active style was palpable, but he also knew that there were times you fought through the pain and times you surrendered to it. This time, his lovely daughter would simply have to learn that surrendering simply meant preserving herself for a fight on another day.

Sorilla watched him go for a moment then continued eating distractedly while looking through her corneal implants at an augmented world. The new OLED screens were light-years past her old second gen version, which had been limited to green and red colors and very limited graphics. The new ones were in full color, with almost life-scale definition to the overlay. As she looked at the food she was eating, her computer core watched alongside her and offered up its opinion of the meal in real time.

Amusingly, her computer wasn’t impressed with her father’s cooking.

Capable of hyper-spectral analysis, the new lenses in her eyes were able to break down chemicals in substances by the color of the light they reflected. It wasn’t exactly new technology, Sorilla had worked with handheld units before, but this was the first time she’d even heard whispers of it having been compacted to this degree.

The downside of it all was that, after a few moments of reading the analysis, Sorilla turned off the display and tried to eat her meal in peace. She really hadn’t needed to know all the trace elements in her food; despite being knowledgeable enough to know that it was neither uncommon nor truly harmful, it was nearly enough to put her off her meal. Her new implants were several generations ahead of the latest civilian tech, which was an uncommon situation, to be frank. Normally, the military was issued tech a generation or two behind the curve, for various reasons that ranged from older tech being generally more durable and reliable to the fact that it took years to pass through government testing to be cleared for issue. Some units, like herself, were designated for advanced testing, however, so she’d field the latest stable release and come back and tell them what needed to be fixed before they shoved it into some grunt’s innards.

The multi-core processor in her chest was one thing, but Sorilla could swear that the ones implanted through her neural and endocrine systems were itching every time she thought of them. The last time, they hadn’t had to cut open her head, and the idea of it was just creeping her the hell out.

The military had considered various combat-oriented drug programs for years, even to the point of implanting them in some soldiers as part of the combat set, but the negative factors of such setups had always kept them from doing it on a large scale. Sorilla now found herself the proud owner of the Army’s alternative program to such things, a series of tiny processor implants designed to trigger her own glands’ production of chemicals used in fight-or-flight situations.

A little more adrenal production here, a little dopamine to smooth out the shakes and anxiety, and so on until they got the effect they wanted. The whole cocktail list was several pages long, but they were all produced by the human body and weren’t subject to being used up. Given time, her body would be able to replenish the implants reserves, which was a real asset for someone whose job description included living off nature’s land along with mixing things up hand to hand.

All of which was great, but she was going to be another month in rehab, just getting her body back into proper conditioning, and then at least two more months in training to learn to optimize her use of the implants. At least three months before she was back on active duty, and the worst of all of it was the fact that she was going to be spending nearly all of that time answering whatever inane questions the brass came up with about her encounters on Hayden!

Training she could hack. Hell, even the pain of rehab wasn’t anything but weakness leaving the body. But she joined the Green Berets to get the hell out of offices and conference rooms!

Next time I hide in the bush until the fucking shuttles leave,
she thought sourly.

*****

USF Cheyenne

Ares, high orbitals

“Tether checks out, Admiral,” Commander Elize Vasquez said from the screen she was on, “and we’ve completed full transfer of weapon stores and supplies.”

Nadine nodded thoughtfully. “Very good, Commander. We won’t be staying much longer, so you’ll be on your own soon.”

“Understood, ma’am.”

“Now, you’re going to have a couple refitted destroyers under your command, but take my advice on this, Elize,” Nadine said, leaning forward. “Keep your head down. Observe radio silence, police any and all transmissions, including lightband, and just try very hard not to be noticed. If you have to use those weapons, you’ve already half failed your assignment.”

“Aye aye, ma’am.”

Nadine fell silent, trying not to let her grim mood show on her face. The young woman across the screen didn’t need that weighing on her now, of all times. It had been a long two months, getting the tether in place, setting up the new facilities planet-side, and making the place ready for war… Productive as well, but long.

Now it was time for TF5 to move on. They were scheduled to do a sweep of the Hayden System before patrolling a series of stars that the enemy was likely to pass through in the next few weeks and months if they were following a logarithmic search pattern as the intelligence people predicted.

With so much strategic depth, the human worlds would be difficult to find, but the flipside was that it was damned near impossible to track the enemy ships. No one had ever bothered setting up pickets through empty star systems, there had never been a need until now. And while the UNF was rushing to make up for that oversight, it was still almost impossible to locate two or three starships in a sphere of space measured in hundreds of light-years.

She sighed. There was so much work to do, and they were working against a clock no one could see.

Nadine focused on the screen again. “Commander. Good luck with your new assignment.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” Elize saluted.

Nadine returned the salute then shut the com link down before keying into the inter-ship com and contacting the main bridge. “Status, Captain.”

“We’re primed to move on your orders, ma’am. The squadron shows all green on all boards,” Patrick returned confidently. “We are ready, ma’am.”

“Very good, then, make for Jump Point Alpha. One gravity acceleration.”

“Aye, ma’am. Jump Point Alpha, one-g.”

The ships of the squadron rumbled to life, their VASIMR drives warming from standby to full operation. She watched with satisfaction on the screens as the ships broke orbit in formation, starting to build speed as they adjusted their trajectory to intercept Alpha Jump Point. She checked her numbers quickly, a recheck really, to ensure that they would catch the point on time, but wasn’t really concerned about it.

Jump points waxed and waned according to a complicated set of interactions that still puzzled researchers after several decades. Partly it was the gravetic interactions of a complex system, particularly ones with several large gas giants in the outer orbits, but gravity tides alone only explained part of the mystery that was the jump points. The rest of the numbers were believed to be split among distant pulsar interaction, uncharted singularities, so-called dark matter, and god alone knew what else.

The only positive side, from the point of view of ship handlers, was that the waxing and waning was predictable. They had two days to catch the peak gravity tide at Ares’s Jump Point Alpha, which would give them best speed to Hayden. From Hayden, the squadron would circle back towards Earth Space, along the west galactic edge of the explored systems, where the aliens were expected to be searching if they followed the pattern the few bits of available data suggested they would.

*****

Hayden

Jump Point Alpha

The squadron punched through the fabric of space-time, bleeding speed unnaturally as it roared into Hayden’s gravity well and its systems rebooted.

“Screens up!”

“Report,” Patrick ordered from where he was strapped into his station.

“Local zone, all clear.”

“Long-range data compiling now. We’ll have eyes on in twenty seconds.”

“We’ve got telemetry incoming from the picket drones.”

“Put it on my screens,” Patrick ordered.

“Aye, Captain.”

He examined the incoming code then opened the inter-ship com to the admiral’s flag deck. “Admiral, recon data from the picket drones indicates that, while Hayden itself is still being contested, there are no enemy ships in-system. Close range scans concur. We’re waiting on long-range resolution to clear up.”

“Understood, Captain. Have the squadron stand down from battle stations, but remain at general quarters.”

“Aye, ma’am,” he replied then switched to the squadron frequency. “All ships, stand down from battle stations, but remain at general quarters until further notice. I say again, all ships are to stand down from battle stations but remain at general quarters.”

“We’ve got long-range visuals now, Captain. System looks quiet.”

“Yeah, let’s not count on that,” he replied, flipping on the squadron channel again. “Spread out, Formation Gamma Delta. I say again, Gamma Delta.”

Formation Gamma Delta was specifically designed to maximize the effectiveness of the gravity detectors on each ship. Using a matrix of highly sensitive accelerometers, the squadron began to map the vagaries of the local space-time fabric. The trick was figuring out what was supposed to be there and what, precisely, was not. Planets, the local star, and larger planetoids such as moons, asteroids, and the like were easy enough to map into the system. The issue came from smaller debris, chunks of rock and iron a quarter the size of the Earth’s moon, that might be floating unnoticed nearby. Such flotsam was nearly invisible to passive sensors, only showing up if you happened to catch it obscuring a star, and, depending on the composition, could even present surprisingly small profiles to conventional sensors. They all showed up on the gravity traps, however, and that made differentiating between them and an enemy ship a tricky bit of business.

“Captain, priority mail from the pickets!”

Patrick shifted his attention away from the gravity trap sensors. “Send it to my station.”

“Aye, sir.”

The message showed up in his inbox a couple seconds later, and he quickly opened it and read through the brief.

Well, that’s a fine mess,
he thought a moment later, hand reaching for the com. “Admiral, priority message from the detachment on Hayden. They say do not approach the planet, the aliens have brought another gravity valve online. They’re trying to locate it, but it’s on a separate continent, and that’s making things…difficult.”

“Understood,” Nadine replied a moment later. “The intel from the operator on Hayden was apparently correct, then. We’ll do a flyby just the same. Plot a trajectory to keep us out of reach but close enough to get a good scan of the entire planet. Let’s see if we can’t find that valve for them.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

*****

USF forward operating base

Hayden

Lt. Commander Jean-Paul Rivers ducked his head under a thick tree root as he stepped into the cut out room that served as a planning chamber for the Hayden ground command. He’d just gotten back from a field op to the far side of the continent, a bit of a dirty run but only because the local fauna had taken a liking to his group in a decidedly unwelcome manner. It figured, in his opinion, that the enemy would pack it up to another continent just before he arrived.

That Sergeant Aida must have been something else, the way they seem to have showed their heels around here,
he thought with a certain grim admiration. It was mucking pure hell with his deployments, though, since the aliens had managed to fall back to a secondary position and activate a new gravity valve.