Valkyrie Burning (Warrior's Wings Book Three) (25 page)

“Captain, begin damage control?”

“Belay that!” she called, thumbing open the ship-wide. “All hands, stand by for deceleration maneuvers. I need emergency checks on our heat shields, ASAP.”

While her crew rushed to do that, McKay was crunching numbers on her own.

The only way to do a really fast deceleration, without killing her crew, was to use the gravity of Hayden. The problem was that, to get enough force to slow them significantly, they were going to have to duck into the atmosphere. She just hoped that they hadn’t taken too many hits so as to prevent that.

A last stuttering hammer was felt through the ship and then the computer chimed, signifying that the enemy was finally out of range.

“Heat shields check! Good to go!”

“Prepare for atmospheric braking!” McKay called. “This is going to be a rough orbit…”

They were running through the last checks when her command channel chimed, bringing her head around in time to see Admiral Brookes appear on the screen.

“Admiral,” McKay nodded.

“Belay the deceleration orbit, Captain,” Brookes told her. “I’m detaching half the squadron for that, but we have another job.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

It didn’t matter what the job was, she wasn’t going to question it in this situation.

“We’re going to have to search the damaged ships and pick up any survivors,” she said. “Match speed and acceleration with them, please.”

“Yes, ma’am,” McKay said, looking to the plot.

She keyed open the ship-wide again. “All hands, belay previous orders. Stand by for microgravity while we conduct search and rescue operations. Shuttle pilots, EVA crews, report to your duty stations.”

That was going to be one hell of a dirty job, if she weren’t completely off the mark, but there was no doubt that it had to be done.

*****

USS Cheyenne

You could practically hear the sighs of relief as the crushing force of acceleration lifted, leaving the crew of the Cheyenne in microgravity. More than one person who’d held on through the worst the big ship had inflicted on them passed out, not from pain or misplaced blood flow but from sheer relief.

Captain Roberts could feel the endorphins pumping through his system even as he tapped out commands into his system but fought the relaxation threatening to send him to dreamland just as hard as he’d fought the force of acceleration.

“EVA crews, proceed to your shuttles. We need emergency search and rescue for the Sioux burning vacuum in five minutes!”

The crippled ships were slowly twisting in space, following the course they’d been moving when the enemy fire triggered emergency shutdown of their engines. Luckily, none of them had been on a collision course with Hayden, and they were all moving more than fast enough to achieve escape velocity and make it into planetary space.

Things were empty enough once you got out of orbital space that they had time to affect a thorough rescue.

Assuming they keep on running.

He spared a glance at the track that was following the enemy ships, and so far they were doing just that. He wasn’t fool enough to believe that this fight was quite done with, however, but at the least it seemed that they’d reached an intermission. The alien force was still moving away from Hayden, not heading toward any particularly useful objects, so they’d have to telegraph their intentions long before they could become a threat to Hayden again.

Looks like we have time. Thank God.

The EVA shuttles launched in just under four minutes, immediately flaring their drives and heading for the crippled USS Sioux. He could see the Hood launching shuttles as it matched speed with the twisting HMS Devonshire, and other ships were also moving with dispatch. With luck, and a little fate on their side, they shouldn’t lose too many men and women to asphyxiation or decompression.

There wasn’t much they could do for those already lost to direct enemy fire, but that was the way of war. First duty was to the living; the dead would understand and be patient. They would not be forgotten by their comrades.

*****

Parithalian Alliance Ship
Noble Venture

Master of Ships Reethan Parath silently looked over the loss tables, seething underneath his calm exterior.

There were no survivors to recover. In the passing engagement, his ships had either sustained minor damage or had been completely and utterly destroyed. True, it was mostly the former, but there was enough of the later to infuriate him.

Now, however, he had to think forward to the next engagement. He had to be smarter next time, less foolish.

They have a mobile force, and they clearly like to hide and strike in ambush,
Reethan supposed. Actually, he was impressed that they’d successfully managed that, though a fair portion of it was due to the initial engagement between his ships and the defense network around the planet.

Another large part of it concerned him, however.

Their ships run incredibly cool. We would have detected any Alliance ship the instant they passed the moon’s terminator. It must be those drives of theirs, the heat shed is entirely behind them and directed away.

That was making things difficult. While he was aware of some outer empires that made use of roughly similar technology, they were never considered a threat to Alliance ships. In theory, the drives were simply too slow to be a significant danger to the faster and, generally, better armed Alliance vessels.

It was probably true even here, in a conventional engagement, if he were being brutally honest. Reethan was well aware that he’d let them pull him in and then trap him between two hostile forces in his foolish enthusiasm. That, combined with their use of nuclear force weapons that were capable of penetrating armor and detonating
within
a ship, well, the results spoke for themselves.

I should withdraw and bring back Fifth Fleet,
he thought grimly.
A show of force to end this nonsense with as little essence lost as possible.

The trouble was that Fifth was at least twenty jumps from this world, and several of them were long ones indeed. No, he wasn’t quite willing to give up on things just yet.

“Handlers,” Reethan called, straightening up.

“Yes, Master of Ships.”

“Make course for the eighth world in this system. We have preparations to make.”

*****

Orbital Tether Station Liberation

Brigadier General Kane glared at the screens, feeling impotent as he watched the enemy fly freely around
his
system. He longed to maneuver a few brigades around the screen, box the bastards in, and then destroy them entail. Unfortunately, the size of the battlefield he was looking at made everything he’d ever experienced in his career look like a sandbox, and quite frankly he didn’t have the first clue how to move troops around that kind of field.

So, while it galled him to leave those movements to the Navy…with a jumped up scientist in command, no less, he had no choice at the moment but to leave mobile defense to Valkyrie and see to his own affairs.

Speaking of which,
Kane grumbled to himself. “I want those weapon satellites rearmed ASAP, straight away! How are our stores?”

“Eighty percent, sir,” a lieutenant said, saluting as she stepped over. “We’ll have more shipped up from Hayden as soon as we run a maintenance bot over the tether.”

“Any signs of damage to it?” he asked, genuinely concerned.

The tether was, literally and figuratively, their lifeline. With it they had access to metal deposits in the mines near the Hayden colony, the smelters and other infrastructure that the alien occupiers hadn’t bothered to destroy, not to mention, of course, a steady stream of oxygen and other expendable resources.

Without it, they were a stone flung from a sling. The station would reach escape velocity and probably wind up somewhere out in planetary space between Hayden and the third world in the system. Decommissioning the old engines in the station would be possible, but it would take weeks of work to clear the annihilation tubes of the tether fasteners.

No matter what, they needed that tether.

“Nothing major, sir. However, the enemy was firing on it, and there was damage done to the car,” she told him, not quite successfully hiding a grimace.

“What is it, Lieutenant?”

“Reports from ground stations say that Sergeant Aida slid down the tether, sir.”

“She did
what
?” He remembered vaguely that she’d apparently jumped from the car, but this was news to him.

“Like, and I quote,” the lieutenant said, “‘she was sliding down a damned fireman’s pole’.”

Kane groaned softly, rubbing his face. “Unbelievable.”

“We’re consulting with some specialists now to see if that would cause noticeable wear.”

He nodded, understanding. Carbon nano-fiber was incredibly strong material, but its key strength was tensile. That is, it was incredibly strong when you pulled on it. It did, however, cut and chafe just as easily as most materials as flexible as it was. Atmospheric wear had to be constantly fixed by maintenance bots, so he really didn’t want to think about what a hundred-fifty-kilogram soldier in armor would do to it by
sliding
down the length of the tether like some damned circus act!

Kane sighed. “Well, we’re still attached to the planet, so she didn’t cause anything catastrophic at least. Let me know when we have an update from the bots.”

“Yes, sir.”

*****

Hayden Colony Site

Lieutenant Commander Eric Simon Grange silently examined the armored woman who was sitting just outside the command and control center. The master sergeant had removed her helm and was sitting slumped over against the wall, clearly trying to subdue an attack of the shakes. He didn’t blame her for that, given that she’d just free fallen farther than most people ever even fly to and barely escaped with her life.

Her right hand was clenched tightly in a fist as she gripped her wrist with her left, but even through armor he could see her arm twitch. Her feet were practically dancing in place as well, tempting him to send her to medical care for the night, just to make sure she didn’t do something stupid in the immediate future.

Unfortunately, something stupid may just be what was on order.

Since that fleet started kicking up a fuss in orbit, the jungle had been crawling with enemy combatants. A day earlier and he would have sworn that they didn’t have enough fighters
left
to mount a decent offensive, but it was pretty clear now that they’d been waiting for the right time.

We’re just lucky that their man portable weapons don’t have the kick of the full size gravity valves, otherwise this last offensive would have had a far different result.

For all his available resources, he just didn’t have enough men to scour the jungle clear of them, and that was a fact. Further, he’d already lost too many good men by sending them out to jobs they weren’t trained for. Good forward observers and jungle scouts were rare, and the few he had weren’t specifically Hayden-trained. Other than a few pathfinders, who barely made minimum military training requirements to qualify as competent
irregular
forces, he was tapped out for some extremely vital skillsets.

The shaking woman waiting outside his command center might just be his best bet of getting some traction in this ground war and forcing the aliens clear off the planet.

Assuming the ones in space don’t finish it all for us.

That was outside his purview, however, so he turned his focus to what he could do. Grange turned away from the woman sitting outside and walked back into his command center, flagging down a passing secretary.

“Get me the telemetry codes for the sergeant’s armor,” he said, “and bring me a data screen.”

“Yes, sir.” The young corporal nodded, hurrying off.

It didn’t take long to hunt down the second part of that, but Grange was unsurprised when it turned out that the codes he asked after were locked down. He used his own access biometrics to get in but was initially refused until he pointed out to the computer that she had been assigned to his command.

He whistled silently when he saw her readings, shaking his head.

Her heart rate is through the roof, and I’ve never seen neurological readings like this.

Most of the readings were familiar, however. Post-Combat Stress, more or less classic in nature. Adrenaline production was at the top of the scale, not even accounting for what her implants had pumped into her system during the fall. Similarly, the whole suite of fight-or-flight chemicals were spiking through her system, such that he considered it a mark of magnificent discipline that she was sitting in one place at all.

Thankfully, he wasn’t seeing anything that would force him to put her on a chemical treatment plan. Which was to say, she was fit for duty, even if a bit jumpy at the moment.

Good. I need her and her pathfinders in the field.

He dropped the screen on a table and walked out of the command center, coming to a stop in front of the twitching woman. She instantly stopped fidgeting, coming to attention, and saluted.

“Sir. Master Sergeant Aida reporting as ordered.”

*****

Tether Car, Anchor Point

The doors to the tether car had to be pried open using a hydraulic pincer, permitting the rescue workers to clamber in over the debris that littered the entire interior. They found men and women, still strapped into their seats and with oxygen masks wrapped around their heads, unconscious, injured, or dead within.

There were fewer extreme casualties than they had expected upon seeing the outside of the car, which looked like an explosive had detonated inside, blowing out an entire wall. Inside, the damage was contained to that one side of the car, and most of the injuries seemed to be from acceleration damage and overpressure. Luckily for those in the car, the pressure created by an explosion at that altitude was markedly lower than one where the atmosphere was thicker and better able to conduct the blast.