Valkyrie Burning (Warrior's Wings Book Three) (10 page)

He doubted it, but it was possible.

Kris sighed, sliding the alien knife back into his belt as he turned his back to the dark line that cut the sky behind him.

“Prepare the Sentinels,” he ordered. “We’ll test their perimeter, quietly.”

He glared around at the Lucians, knowing that they wanted to do more than quiet testing of the perimeter.

“Do
not
get caught. I want to be ready to make a big move once those ships leave orbit,” he said. “So do nothing to alert them in the meantime.”

The Lucian Sentinels nodded, understanding the order. They all intimately knew the difference between doing nothing and doing the least possible in order to set up a future act.

*****

The next morning, station time, Sorilla made her way into the military section of the counterweight station. She’d checked the directory and found a few names she was familiar with there, and a couple she counted as friends, and so she wanted to check in with them as a matter of courtesy and maybe get a few questions asked in the meantime.

Security was reasonably tight, though she had to look hard to spot it as she walked through the corridors and past guards who didn’t even bother to look up in her direction. Biometrics examined her body, face, and walking pace as she approached, and she could feel her implants being riffed like an itch in the back of her neck.

That was another new development in the next gen implants they’d sliced into her nervous system. More and more she could feel activity from them that she’d never known to be noticeable before. They drew on power from her body, communicated with each other along her neural pathways, and as her brain rewired itself around the new signals it was parsing along previously unused paths, it began to report them to her in varying ways.

She assumed that the security checks all passed since no one stepped forward to stop her, so she hung a right at the next intersection and made her way down to the administration offices. She found the small, half-sized office she was looking for and smirked as she spotted the young man inside hammering away at his keyboard. A lot of people used the older input technology for serious data entry, because while intuitive and adaptive interface design was great at streamlining language, for example, by predicting the word you wanted from the letters you began with and the context of the available text, when it came to things like number strings and code phrase documents, you just couldn’t beat an old-style keyboard.

“Hit that thing any harder and you’ll break it,” she said dryly as she leaned on the hatch that opened into the small room.

The man jerked around, clearly startled by the unexpected voice until he recognized both the sound and the figure of the person speaking to him.

“God! Jesus, Sor, are you trying to kill me?”

She snorted softly. “If I wanted you dead, Jace, your corpse would be burning up in Hayden’s atmo right about now.”

Jason Gibson cringed. “Do you really have to put it that way?”

“You asked.”

“Most girls I talk to don’t take rhetorical questions as an invitation to plan out body drops,” he countered, rolling his eyes.

“Jace, you’re a web addict, most girls you talk too are guys.”

He sighed. “You do remember I outrank you, right?”

“Different chain of command, spanky,” she told him with a grin. “I’m in OPCOM, remember?”

“How could I forget?” he asked. “What do you want this time?”

“Aww, is that really how you want to start our visit?”

“No, but you kicked it off by reminding me that not only could you kick my ass, you also know all the override codes for the airlocks, so I’m assuming you have a reason.”

She grinned as she ducked into the room, ignoring the chair in front of the desk in favor of sliding herself onto the desk itself. That pushed a pack of data tablets aside, sending a few clattering to the floor, but she ignored them to instead grin at his wince. Gibson was a bit OCD when it came to neatness, and she had a laugh riot every time she ran into him because he was so non-confrontational that she was half convinced that if she really had been here to kill him he’d have offered to walk her to the airlock to make things easier on them both.

Pushing his buttons was fun as hell, and she actually had bank on when he’d finally snap and do something about it. She’d been playing this game with him since they met in Bragg almost ten years earlier, and, honestly, she’d lost her bet a long time ago. For all his quiet demeanor, however, Jason Gibbons was one of the better administrators around and knew computer systems better than half the techs hired to maintain them.

There were few things secret from him, and she knew that she could pry anything short of classified intel out of him with a little work.

“Alright then, since you’re so uptight about it,” she smirked, “I was speaking with some of my friends from Hayden-side and wanted to get your take on the situation down there.”

“Situation is nominal as far as I know,” Jason shrugged.

“What about patrols beyond the beams?”

“There are none, not out farther than five klicks,” he answered honestly. “Why would we? There’s nothing on Hayden we want other than the colony site and maybe the secondary valve location. The aliens are welcome to the rest of it. Other than some interesting pharmaceuticals, the planet is basically a non-producing territory.”

“I know that,” she admitted, “but I’m not sold that it’s a good idea to leave a guerilla force on our back door when we might be facing down a significant problem from space at any time.”

Jason flushed a little at her tone, but to his credit she could see him thinking before he responded.

“I’m sure that’s been considered. Besides, what trouble could they really cause?” he asked. “I read your reports, Sor. They can’t have more than a couple hundred actives at most, no reports of anything but small arms…”

“That’s a relative term when talking about Ghoulie guns and beam weapons,” she countered dryly.

“Well, be that as it may, the current stance of the command here is that the forces on the ground are not a threat.”

“And that, Jace, is a problem,” Sorilla grunted.

“Ours is not to reason why, Sergeant,” he told her.

“Yeah, I know the saying, Jace. You left out the second part, and that bit is a real bitch,” Sorilla replied, getting off the desk. “I’ll catch you later.”

He looked back to her as she walked out, a sense of alarm growing as he rose up out of his chair. “Sergeant! What are you going to do? Sergeant! Damn it, Sor! Answer me!”

By the time he got untangled from his workstation and around the desk to the still-open hatch, however, she was long gone. Jason Gibbons groaned and leaned his head against the metal, resisting the urge to bang it like he was in some stupid comedy.

“Please, God, don’t let her kill anyone,” he moaned. “At least not any superior officers.”

*****

Sorilla whistled tunelessly as she navigated the military decks, knowing her way around by heart. She’d been assigned to more than one Discoverer class ship turned tether station, and the layout was always identical.

The chat with Jace had been enough to give her an idea of the current attitude that was prevailing in the military circles here in Hayden. That didn’t mean that everyone felt that way, probably even the local commander didn’t feel that way, but that was the way the wind was blowing from Solari Command and specifically from the United States and Great Britain member nations of the Solari Organization.

Sorilla knew that she had something of a personal investment in the situation, her time on Hayden had left an impression on her. She liked the people, enjoyed the jungle more than most, and felt a bit of a kinship to the idea of Hayden. A frontier world was a romantic illusion in reality, but Hayden was as close as you got as the farthest colony from Earth, located quite close to where the Orion arm rejoined the central galactic cluster.

By nature, jump points trended to follow higher density regions of the galaxy, so moving from Hayden out into the galaxy resulted in a sudden logarithmic increase in jump point lanes. Going the other direction from Earth was the opposite. There were several large clusters of stars that were probably entirely cut off from the rest of the galaxy because the intervening stellar density was too low to provide a jump lane to any star within the cluster.

That meant that Earth’s presence had expanded more toward the inner galactic core than back along the Orion arm, right until here at Hayden. Beyond Hayden, Sorilla knew that there had been quite a few scout runs, but there were few enough worlds of immediate interest and so many star lanes to choose from that humanity had settled into a consolidation phase after its brief but exciting expansion push into the stars.

None of that mattered at the moment, of course, not to her at least. Certainly to some high level strategist it was probably part and parcel of their plotting, but Sorilla was more concerned with Hayden itself. She knew the station commander personally—he’d been in charge of the ground forces on Hayden when she returned with Valkyrie two years past—and wasn’t surprised by his adoption of the current ‘turtle’ strategy.

Brigadier Kane wasn’t particularly fond of Operators; he was a tank commander from way back and part of the army that didn’t want to admit that tanks were obsolete and had been for longer than he’d been alive. In fact, in her own opinion, tanks stopped being significant after the killing fields of World War II finally fell silent, though there was a certain weight to the argument that they served as additional deterrence during the Cold War.

Certainly, tanks could smash through enemy defenses with ease, but the world had moved past that. Small arms ruled the world, shotguns and rifles and pistols. Tanks couldn’t go where men could, and you had to follow the men if you wanted to really control the territory you were holding. In the end, controlling territory could only be accomplished with the consent of those who lived there. If you didn’t get face to face with them, you had no chance at all.

Now they’d given up Hayden’s jungles to the aliens, which meant that they were, for all practical purposes, the locals.

Sorilla unconsciously cracked her knuckles as she made her way through the halls. Getting face to face with people was what she did, after all, and she was eager to have another crack at the alien operators she had only briefly engaged previously.

First, though,
she thought as she stepped into the command offices and walked over to the secretary sitting behind the desk there,
I need to get Kane with the program, and that could be a challenge.

“Master Sergeant Aida to see Brigadier Kane.”

****

Brigadier Samuel Kane liked to think of himself as a man who didn’t suffer fools easily, or quietly, or at all, by preference. He also really didn’t much care for Operators. Oh, he couldn’t deny that they were effective, nor did he refuse to make use of their skills, but he found them distasteful to deal with as a general rule. If he were being honest, his biggest issue with them was the fact that they generally answered to an entirely different chain of command and, often as not could, and often did, tell him to go to hell on his own base.

Oh, not in those words, of course. They used words like ‘classified,’ ‘need to know,’ and occasionally even ‘over your pay grade.’ It set his teeth on edge to have some junior officer or, worse still, a non-com look him in the eye and tell him any of those things with a straight face. The hell of it was that it was often true, and they really didn’t mean any disrespect. Which wasn’t the same as not enjoying the hell of out spouting that crap to a general, of course.

He’d seen Aida’s name on his appointment list when he checked it during his morning briefing and only wished that he’d been surprised by it. When Valkyrie put into Hayden Station, he’d started a mental countdown on how long before he had to deal with her, though he was somewhat surprised that she’d come to him directly. He’d expected the approach to be made by Lt. Crow, or possibly the captain of the Cheyenne, depending on just how serious she was.

Aida had grown attached to the locals here on Hayden, something that happened often enough for him to be familiar with it. Mostly it wasn’t too much of a hassle, though it always resulted in more annoyances than benefits in his experience. Soldiers in a foreign nation were like houseguests and fish, rarely welcome more than three days and only welcome that long under duress as a rule.

Still, he knew what she was here to speak on, and Kane didn’t disagree.

So, when his secretary announced her presence, Kane just thumbed the comm switch. “Send her in.”

The master sergeant looked different out of armor, he noted as she stepped in and came to attention. Her Solari white dress looked good on her, the uniform was even competently tailored, which was something that didn’t happen every time, in his experience. She stood a hair under five foot nine in her boots, dark eyes focused on the wall behind and above him as he sized the woman up from his seat.

“At ease,” Kane told her, nodding briefly before turning his attention to the deskwork in front of him.

He felt more than saw her stance widen as she clasped her hands behind her but generally didn’t pay any more attention than that as he signed off on a requisition form and started filling out personnel reports. She didn’t so much as twitch a hair while he worked, which was as it should be. Finally he signed his name again and looked up to where the master sergeant was still waiting.

“Well, Master Sergeant,” he said. “Why don’t you wow me, then?”

“Your pardon, sir?” She blinked, obviously surprised and confused.

“Your reasons for stirring up the hornets’ nest on the world below,” he expounded. “Why should I send an Operator team into Hayden’s jungle while things have obviously quieted down?”

“Sir…I…”

He smiled thinly at having put the woman back on her heels. “Come now, Sergeant, I’ll thank you not to take me for a fool. There is no other reason for you to be here, yet if you had orders from OPCOM, you’d have presented them. Hell, if you had any sort of support, I’d be speaking with Lt. Crow now, I suspect.”