Valkyrie Rising (Warrior's Wings Book Two) (5 page)

With their weapon active, the aliens ruled Hayden’s skies with a gravity-clad fist, and the bulk of human forces were half a planet away.

“Commander. Good to see you back.”

“General!” Rivers stiffened to salute. “Sir.”

“At ease, before you break something,” General Isaac Kayne growled, eyes focused down on the situation table and its computer display. “We’ve got company.”

“Sir?”

“USF squadron punched through into Hayden space about twelve hours ago,” Kayne said. “We warned them off, but they’re pulling a flyby anyway in hopes of getting some intel on the location of that damned valve. You find anything out there?”

“No, sir. West coast seems clear, no signs of the enemy.”

“Well, didn’t expect it,” Kayne mumbled, disappointed all the same. He reached out to zoom out of the frame, bringing the local continent on the display out to a view of Hayden from orbit, then swept his hand idly to rotate the planetary view to show a different continent. “We’ve cleared this continent with patrols and low-flying drones. Took us more than two months to do it, but we did it. We’ve also made solid inroads around neighbors here, here, and here…”

The general tapped three smaller continental masses that were relatively close, their displays dimming slightly. “Given what we know about the aliens and their requirements, that places their most likely position on one of these two continental masses.”

Rivers eyed the map, grimacing as he recognized two of the largest and more remote continents on Hayden. 
Just bloody lovely. Had to chase them all the way to the other side of the be-damned planet, didn’t ya, Aida?

Then he slowly frowned, leaning closer to the display table. “Is this…real time?”

“Not quite, but closer than we’ve had since we landed,” Kayne told him. “These are computer-enhanced images streaming from the TF5 Squadron. About twenty minutes old now.”

“Well hallelujah,” Rivers said, planting his hands on the edge of the table. “Maybe we can find those bastards now.”

“We find ‘em fast enough,” the general told him, “and the nice lady-admiral in charge up there tells me she can do us a favor and drop some heavy objects on their heads.”

“How long have we got?”

“Squadron is on a reciprocal orbit, so they’ll pass by again in a little less than a day. If we’ve got a compelling reason, she says she can delay their departure, but they’re on a schedule they can’t mess up without cause.”

“All right,” Rivers said. “Let’s parcel this imagery out to every man and woman we’ve got and get them looking. More eyes on this, the better.”

Kayne shook his head, grinning a little. “Lord, boy, if the brass back home heard that idea, they’d either stick you in the lowest pit they had or promote you. Maybe both. It’s a good plan, though, let’s do just that.”

*****

“Ok, folks.” Old Man Silver clapped his hands as he walked through the gathered people. “The military boys have a job for us.”

“We going back out in the field, Sil?” Jerry asked, rising up from where he’d been slumped, a certain eagerness gleaming in his eyes.

“You want to take a walk any time, you go ahead, but that’s not the job.” Silver shook his head, tapping something on his pad. “I’ve just sent each of you a piece of imagery taken less than an hour ago of Hayden from beyond orbit. We need to find the enemy base, wherever they’re hiding, since the Sarge chased their butts off the old colony site. If we can do it in the next twenty-two hours, the USF squadron that took those shots will be available to hammer them for us… Take longer than that, and we do it the old-fashioned way. I don’t know about you lot, but since the Sarge ain’t here, I’d rather not do things by hand this time around. Fair?”

Several people laughed openly, most grinned, and a few answered him.

“Fair, Sil. Fair.”

“All right. Get to work. You can let me know if you find anything, I’ll pass the word up the chain,” he told them before he opened his own section of real estate on his pad and began painstakingly examining the imagery section by section.

Things had been quiet for the refugees since the Sarge left. Mostly, that came down to two big factors. First, the new soldier boys didn’t really trust the militia a whole lot, though they did use the pathfinders regularly. More importantly, however, with the beating the Sarge had given them, the aliens didn’t seem interested in tangling with the colonists, or even mucking about on their continent anymore.

If they’d come down with that attitude in the first place, we could’ve avoided this whole mess,
Silver thought darkly as he zoomed in on a section of the map for a closer look then decided that it was a natural rock outcropping and zoomed back out.

As he looked, Silver wondered what the big picture looked like from back home. He was pretty sure that the governments would be keeping it as quiet as they could, but equally obvious was the fact that they couldn’t keep it entirely under wraps. You don’t lose two squadrons of Los Angeles class cruisers and sweep it under the rug, nor do you easily explain the kind of military building programs that had to have been spun up in the aftermath of the invasion here on Hayden.

From a purely military point of view, though, Sil pitied the guys in charge of planning this little war. Unknown enemy, unknown weapons, unknown supply chains. It had to be a freaking nightmare, and that was being nice and polite about things. Still, someone had something on the ball, he supposed. There was a nice and helpful squadron up there, waiting for a target to smash, and that wasn’t a bad place to start from, in his opinion.

Of course, first, they had to find something for the Fleet boys to hammer.

*****

With dozens of eyes going over every individual section of the imagery, finding the location of the enemy installation actually took about five and a half hours. Forty minutes of that was dedicated to confirmation by intelligence analysts after a thirteen-year-old girl beat them to the initial observation.

Snide comments aside, it was something of a miracle that it had been found as quickly as it had. While the aliens hadn’t gone to extreme levels to hide their new facility, it was at least as well hidden as the original had been, and that was pretty impressive on its own. In the end, it had been the lack of a human settlement to hide under that had given it away; they simply hadn’t been able to disguise their construction in a more natural area and were given away by that alone.

With all that complete, the mood in the hastily dug underground base was buoyed by the knowledge that Fleet would soon be raining hell down on the invaders that had come into their world and disrupted their lives to such an incredible degree.

The military hierarchy quickly analyzed the location, cross referenced it with old survey maps of the planet, and put as many notes as they could into building a fire plan for the squadron that was still rounding the local star and out of communication for the moment. Shortly after that was done, there was really nothing left for them to do but wait.

The hours that had begun flashing by so fast when they had a job to do now slowed to an interminable crawl that left even the most patient Hayden citizen or military man ready to crawl up the walls and across the ceiling out of pure frustration.

As the countdown clock hit three hours, however, they got their next message from the inbound squadron and quickly sent off the compressed and encrypted intelligence.

Then it was time to wait again.

*****

USF Cheyenne

Hayden approach

“We just received a priority tasking request from the Hayden ground command.”

Patrick Roberts nodded. “Excellent. We won’t have to reschedule our departure then. Send the coordinates to my station.”

“Already there, sir.”

Patrick nodded in response and walked over to his station, swinging himself easily down into the chair. He didn’t bother with the straps, they were under one gravity acceleration as they pulled away from the star, making things much simpler across the board when compared to microgravity conditions. He called up the targeting data and checked it quickly before shooting it off to the weapons stations so they could plot a solution.

“I’ll be on the flag bridge,” he then told the others in the command bridge.

“Aye, sir.”

Patrick made his way over to the access tube and hooked the ladder casually, not bothering with the rungs, as he just grabbed the sides and then tucked his feet around the metal and dropped. The flag bridge was aft of the main bridge, meaning he could drop in on the admiral but would have to crawl back up when he was done.

All right, so not everything was better with gravity.

He found the admiral and her aides pouring over a projection of Hayden’s surface, approach vector calculations littering the screen.

“Ma’am,” Patrick said as he saluted.

“As you were,” Nadine Brookes told him, not looking up. “Did we get the targeting data we needed?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, approaching. “I have tactical working up a targeting solution now.”

“Good. The sooner we can do this and move on, the better,” she said calmly. “There’s still no sign that they’ve come back to this system, despite the fact that it seems to be an important one to them. I’m starting to wonder if we’ve overestimated their shipping capacity.”

“More likely, ma’am, that they haven’t shifted significant numbers over to this side of their frontier,” Patrick offered. “We are at the back end of a galactic arm, ma’am. Might be they have a ways to travel to shift gear and ships along their supply line.”

“More power to us, if that’s the case,” Nadine said coolly. “Though that doesn’t help us with the ships gallivanting around within our borders as is.”

“No, ma’am.”

Nadine nodded, wiping the board with a wave of her hand that sent the work into a folder for later. “All right. First thing first, get that solution plotted and passed around the squadron. We’ll swing close enough to hammer that valve then move on to the next system on our patrol schedule.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Patrick left, leaving Nadine examining Hayden thoughtfully while her aides cleared up the work they’d been finishing before he came in. She didn’t know what to think about the enemy’s strange behavior. Some of their actions were textbook military, and then others were haphazard and almost casually negligent. Hayden had to be considered a valuable piece of real estate to them, but if so, why hadn’t they sent more ships?

Did they simply run out, as Patrick seemed believe? Fleet had taken four of their cruisers out in this system; maybe they simply didn’t have any more available when you worked in the ones that raided Ares and were now running through human space like rampaging bulls. A long supply chain might explain that, but then why stretch themselves out so badly?

She called up what little data they had on the aliens’ activities, most of it sourced right back to one woman. From Sergeant Aida, brought back by Commodore Petrov’s convoy. Her personal notes made for interesting reading, with similar speculations concerning their ground forces to what Nadine herself was questioning concerning the enemy ship deployment.

It’s like there’s some weird split personality at work. Maybe tactical command is at odds with the strategic deployments?

Unfortunately, without a lot more information, Nadine didn’t think that they’d be working that little puzzle out anytime soon. For the moment, she focused on the immediate future, calling up the survey maps they’d overlaid the latest imagery on so she could examine the target while the solution was being plotted.

They had set up near the equator again, causing her to wonder if that was a necessary part of their gravity tech. Nothing she knew about the theories behind the manipulation of space-time seemed to indicate that the location on a planet would make the slightest bit of difference. Perhaps in some certain, extremely sensitive applications, but then she’d expect the location to favor areas that were, or weren’t, rich in heavy elements that might throw off local gravity slightly.

She zoomed out a bit, examining the jungle around their new location. It didn’t take long to spot their construction efforts, now that she knew where to look.

They’re building that strange “collector” again. Why? What does it do?
She refrained from actually growling at the screens, but the frustration was clear on her face when Denise approached her.

“Are you all right, Admiral?”

“Fine, Denise,” she said, shaking her head slowly. After a moment, she nodded to the screen. “What do you make of this?”

Denise examined the imagery closely, face shutting down in the way it did when she became intent on something. “They’re building it again. It’s further along this time, but it looks like they’ve taken some pains to hide it.”

“Yes, but what
is
it?”

“I don’t know.” Denise shook her head. “There’s nothing in any of the theories of space-time manipulation that includes anything like that.”

“There’s precious little about turning ships into flying singularities either,” Nadine countered, frustrated by the lack of information.

“That’s true enough.” Denise shrugged. “All I can say is that it seems important to them.”

“Right. Ok, contact tactical and tell them to budget some of our Kilo Kilos to take it out…” Nadine grimaced. “Whatever the hell it is. If they want it, I don’t want them to have it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

*****

Taskforce Five, known by the oft whispered yet rarely acknowledged name “Taskforce Valkyre,” cut acceleration as they approached Hayden. The targeting solution for the planet was sent across the squadron’s combat network, the job efficiently split across each of the ships as the taskforce auxiliary ships dropped back and left the warships to their work.

The Cheyenne and Longbow class ships continued on ballistic, their crews double- and triple-checking the strike solution as they approached launch point.

“All right, we’re on automatic now, sir.”

Patrick Roberts nodded. “Very good. Signal the Fleet, send fire control over to their computers. We’ll make this as effective and total as we can.”