Valkyrie Burning (Warrior's Wings Book Three) (26 page)

Emergency crews were triaging the victims of the assault when Jerry Reed scrambled into the car through the massive hole blown out of the side wall.

“Tara! Dean! Come on, someone talk to me!”

He stumbled as he saw Dean’s bloodied form being pulled away from others, the young man’s back studded with shrapnel. On one knee, Jerry looked up almost blindly as the body was carried out of the way so that the rescue workers could do something for the living. He stared at the body as it was moved, unable to look away until he saw Tara being carried right past his face and was suddenly galvanized back to his feet.

“Tara!” he yelled, surging in her direction, only to be caught by a man in military uniform.

“Back off, Reed! Let them do their jobs!”

“Is she all right?”

“She’s breathing. That’s a fair shot better than some in here,” the soldier said, pushing him back and away from the emergency response workers. “Get the hell out of here, Reed. These people have jobs to do.”

Jerry cast around, eyes wild. “What about the sarge? She was on this car!”

“Jesus, you didn’t hear?”

“Hear what?”

“Look, I don’t know what the hell happened,” the soldier said, “but Sergeant Aida took a swan dive from the car almost an hour ago. Probably when this happened, but I dunno. She slid down the freaking tether, told the guards to have emergency crews standing by, and headed for the command center. She’s still up there, I think.”

Jerry stumbled back from him, shaking his head. “Slid down the…? What?”

“Lots of guys would love know that too. If you find out, let us know,” the soldier said with a snort. “Now get the hell out of here before I toss you out that damned hole.”

He gave Jerry a rough push, not enough to send the pathfinder sprawling but more than enough to make him grab the wall for support and get the idea that more questions wouldn’t be met with cheerful helpfulness. Reed stumbled away, opting to follow Tara’s body as it was carried out of the wrecked tether car.

*****

Sorilla spotted Reed as he exited the tether station and loped easily over to him, only to spot Tara as she was loaded onto a military mobile ambulance.

“Oh God,” she mumbled, sliding to a stop.

Jerry spotted her as he turned, eyes wide. “What happened?”

“We were struck by valve weapons as we descended,” she told him. “Multiple attackers, hidden in the jungle. I got at least some of them, but when they nailed the car, I was sucked up in the gravity sink and thrown clear.”

“Dean’s dead,” Jerry muttered, his voice flat.

“Oh shit.” Sorilla slumped, her helmet hanging limply from her left hand as she shook her head. “Damn it.”

After a moment she looked to the ambulance. “What about Tara?”

“They won’t say.”

Sorilla’s eyes narrowed, but she didn’t say anything for a moment. Instead she sent out an RIF pulse to the local electronics around her, using an OPCOM override to take a peek at the telemetry coming from the automated systems in the ambulance. Tara’s vitals were steady, but she’d lost some blood and had acceleration bruising over most of her body.

Jerry pulled back a bit when Sorilla looked at him, the red glow in her eyes startling him until he recognized that she was accessing her implants.

“She’s stable. Going to be sore as hell when she wakes up,” Sorilla said, “but unless I’m missing something, she will be waking up.”

“You’re sure?”

“No,” Sorilla told him flatly. “I’m not a doc. But there’s nothing on the monitors that looks like it’ll kill her. Let the docs handle it, Jerry. We’ve got a job.”

“A job? A
job
?
” Jerry stared at her. “What possible
job
could you have for me at a time like this?”

Sorilla let him growl and snarl at her until he was done.

“Payback,” she said. “It’s time we cleaned this little infestation right off the surface of Hayden.”

He paused, throwing a stricken look over his shoulder as the ambulance pulled away, then looked back at her. For a moment he wavered, then slowly he straightened up and nodded.

“It’s about damned time,” he told her finally. “Hell, Sarge, it’s two years
past
time. I’m in.”

“Good. Come on, time to go to work.”

*****

Hayden Jungles

Sentinel Prime Kris glared out at the thread that bisected the sky in the distance, despising everything it stood for. They’d hit it with everything they had short of shipboard weapons, and, honestly, their assault lander didn’t carry much heavier weapons than the portable singularity devices.

Through all of that it held steady, apparently immune to everything they had.

Worse, that damned alien Sentinel had easily decimated their attack force. Granted, he suspected most of those were practically accidental kills, as the targets seemed to be the singularity weapons each time. They were now down to only two of the portable devices, the rest having been turned to shrapnel by long-range fire from the skies.

Most of the Lucians were still combat ready, and they had their personal weapons, but between the equipment losses and the withdrawal of the Parithalian force in the skies above, well, they had been in better shape, to be sure.

He wasn’t even certain that they’d inflicted any real damage, since the thread had held strong against their best attempts. It was frustrating to say the least, but as it stood, he didn’t think there was anything else they could do without orbital support or, at least, a major resupply.

Kris stepped back into the shelter of their hidden transport, making his way to the communications station.

The latest information from the Parithalian flotilla was better than it had been, but he wasn’t certain that he’d qualify it as ‘good.’

Mass movers. Almost as bad as a planet-crushing singularity device, especially when I have to be sitting at the bottom of the gravity sinkhole they’re throwing the damned things down.

The Paries had advised him that they were preparing to strike at the immobile station and satellite network before making another attempt on the world he was standing on. That in itself didn’t surprise him, it was the normal procedure. The flotilla had only approached as close as it had because the Paries needed detailed information on the planet’s defenses, and there was no other way to get it in this case.

Bet those skinny blues wish they’d had some good solid intel this time around
, Kris thought grimly.

Normally a mission of this nature would take months of planning and preparation, with thousands of man hours just from the intelligence division alone. Coming in blind as they did was sometimes a military necessity, but Kris knew that it was a terribly risky thing to do for reasons they’d just been faced with. Now the Parithalian force was going to have to lick their wounds and try to finish the mission despite the damage inflicted by these aliens.

Unfortunately for Kris and his Sentinels, they were about to be at ground zero of an interplanetary war, and that sucked like open space no matter what way you worked the numbers.

*****

USS Cheyenne

Search and rescue operations took less time than Nadine had feared, and hoped. Feared, because she didn’t want to be tied up on a predictable orbit while pulling men from the stricken ships, and hoped because she had truly been praying that they’d find more men alive than they had.

Transfers were completed in a few hours, however, and they were now under one gravity acceleration back to Hayden’s orbital path. It would be another couple days to get there at current rates, but there was no rush for the moment and they still had damage control to complete on the Cheyenne, Hood, and other ships. The other half of the squadron was now resting in Hayden’s orbit again, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The alien ships were still on their screens, though the information was now over eight minutes out of date and growing older with each passing minute. It was clear, however, that the aliens had no intention of handing in the towel just yet. They were decelerating, obviously intending to remain in the system now, but just what, she couldn’t be sure of.

It won’t be good for us, though, that much I’ll take bets on.

“Damage control reports, Admiral. Us and the Hood for now, the light speed delay is going to delay reports on the rest of the squadron.”

“Understood,” Nadine said. “What’s the brief?”

“We’re still combat ready, ma’am. Some damage to our ceramic plates, but we’ll need a few hours to make repairs to those.”

Nadine nodded, understanding. Replacing one of the ceramic plates was a relatively simple task, but not something to be done in deep space unless you really had no choice. They’d done it before, and like as not would do it again, but it wasn’t an order she would give lightly. The results of being forced to maneuver, should the enemy attack, while men were in EVA…

Nadine shuddered.

No, not an order to be given lightly at all.

*****

Parithalian Alliance Ship
Noble Venture

“We’ve almost finished accumulating the necessary elements, Master of Ships.”

Reethan Parath nodded. “Thank you, Reethan.”

He was standing in the observation dome, with the blast shields withdrawn so he could experience the wonder of space for a time. Soon it would be back to the horrors of battle, the blast doors would be retracted, and he would experience space only through his scanner displays once more.

He’d sent his surviving ships out to gather in appropriate munitions for the next phase of their operations in this system. Parithalian ships didn’t carry weapons for planetary bombardment, it was considered uncivilized in the extreme and largely pointless. A fleet that controlled the orbitals, specifically the null zones in the local gravity well, controlled the world below.

While only a fool would believe that meant the world was entirely pacified, it did mean that all macro-resistance was pointless and subject to terminal prejudice. Micro-resistance was the purview of Sentinels, not fleet.

For the odd time that a bombardment was required, Parithalians had an alternate methodology.

Any star system was filled with debris. Ranging from sand particles barely a few molecules in mass to rocks the size of a small planet, they were a potential hazard to shipping in theory, but in practice, space was large enough that the odds of hitting anything even when flying blind were literally astronomical. For their purposes, Parithalian methodology called for chunks of rock roughly one hundredth the mass of a starship. Accelerate them into an orbital track that coincides with the target you want destroyed and then sit back and wait.

At better than two-thirds the speed of light, there was nothing built that could survive an impact like that.

Aside from perhaps a Ros’El starship,
Reethan thought sourly.

To a Parithalian, the Ros’El were practically the ultimate insult. They knew nothing of ship handling but were such incredible masters of gravity itself that it hardly mattered. For a species born for flight, such as the Parithalians, the Ros’El were like watching a stone that could outmaneuver them in the skies.

For all that, however, he had to remind himself that the Ros’El had their own problems with this species. Even with all the power the Ros’El commanded, they’d been badly savaged by this species, using weapons that had never seemed to cause them all that much issue in the past.

He had believed it to be a joke when he was first briefed on this species, that or bad intelligence in the extreme. Now, however, Reethan could see that there was more here than he’d thought or been informed of.

Antiquated weapons, but more effective than most who use similar tactics. They have intelligence about them as well,
he had to admit.
And so much as I despise admitting it, even to myself…these people, they are more than decent ship handlers, and unless I greatly mistake the situation, they are also a match for the best tacticians in the Alliance. What have the Ros’El thrown us into this time?

Given what he knew so far, Reethan was growing greatly concerned this was no border skirmish. Whatever the Ros’El had brought them this time, he knew for a fact that it was no minor exchange of hostilities. Unless something was done very quickly, this could well prove to be a very long, and very costly, war.

Why?

That was the thing that really bothered Reethan. The world they were contesting wasn’t worth this. It was a life-bearing world, to be sure, but there were thousands of those deeper in toward the galactic core, and that was just inside Alliance territory. It was only out in the arms, where the systems were sparse, that life seemed rare.

So what was so bedamned special about this world, and this outer empire?

The Ros’El rarely spoke to anyone, and when they did it was in riddles, but Reethan was certain of only one thing. In his opinion, they were more trouble than they were worth.

We should never have compromised with them. They murdered
planets
during the wars. I have no care for them or their wants. They are a blight on the universe itself, yet here I am about to do their bidding. And for what? A ball of dirt and water like any of ten
thousand
others within range of their homeworld. They do not experience the universe as we do, and I have never been happier of that fact. I do not want to see what they see, nor do I ever want another Parithalian to do so. Perhaps it was their seeing into the abyss of space-time that turned them into such beasts, perhaps they were created thusly. I find that I no longer care as I once did.

Unfortunately, he had his orders, and they were quite specific. For whatever reason, Alliance Command continued to be in support of the Ros’El and their wishes.

“As soon as we have the munitions, have the handlers make course for our optimal launch point,” he said finally, nodding to his apprentice.

“Yes, Ships Master.”

*****

Hayden Colony Site