Valkyrie Burning (Warrior's Wings Book Three) (5 page)

Sorilla surged up, recognizing the sound of long-range artillery fire from an M900, and just reached down to grab the strap on Crow’s armor before she turned and ran while the Ghoulies were still shocked by the sudden mass death fed to them.

Jardiens and Korman covered her retreat, laying down heavy fire as she sprinted past their position, the run being pretty rough on the lieutenant, then striding backwards in pace with her as they made for the treeline amidst heavy fire.

Once into the trees, though, the fire quickly dropped off. The Ghoulies’ weapons were no better at engaging through trees than the humans’ were, and the aim of the infantry wasn’t remotely up to the standards of the Operators. Sorilla had to carry Crow, which slowed her down, but since few of the former prisoners were in any shape to run, and none of them had powered armor, it wasn’t appreciable.

The three active Operators had to goad their charges on through a forced march up the size of the old rolling mountain. They followed the contours, but it was still tough going and a lot of the starving people fell in their tracks, unable to keep moving.

Jardiens and Korman took up the stretchers, making them pile people four and five high or more, stacking bodies like cordwood. They couldn’t leave them there, but there was no stopping either. Sorilla did her part as well, slinging Crow across her back as she took up a third stretcher loaded with people.

The healthy helped the infirm, and the three armored warriors served as pack mules for those who couldn’t move another step, and in that way the odd procession climbed the alien hills into the night.

*****

Hours later, there had been no immediate pursuit, and they were stopped near the top of one of the rolling hills. Mack had rejoined them about two hours into their escape, with the news that Corporal Able had bought it in the gravetic retaliation strike after their first shot. The loss hit them pretty hard, coming off the mission high as they were, so the four conscious and breathing Operators leaned back against the rock face where they and their charges had taken cover.

The clock ran down, and almost on cue, they saw the first flashes of nuclear fire in the night sky. Spherical balls of light erupted above them, and they knew that the Fleet had arrived.

“They’re even on time,” Sorilla said, smiling tightly.

The others returned the smile, though wanly, as they watched the fireworks tear through the starry sky.

A screaming sound tore through their ears as the first Kilo Kilo, or kinetic kill, weapon screamed down along the locator beam Korman had placed and tore apart the base even as the scrambling Ghoulies tried to get their control systems repaired. Several more shrieking strikes tore up the very ground around it as the Fleet destroyed the gravity valves, a prelude to a full planetary assault.

The tide of war was shifting, Sorilla thought, a thin ray of optimism burning inside her. Five years of fighting on the defensive, and they were about to take one of the enemy’s worlds for their own. It wasn’t a vital world, she supposed, but it would be the first they took from the Ghoulies, and there would be others after it.

The war wasn’t over, and final victory wasn’t yet written for either side, but the cakewalk was over for the Ghoulies. From now on, they were going to pay dearly for anything they took, and more besides.

“Outstanding work, gentlemen,” Sorilla said, the light of the distant kinetic strikes highlighting her face. “We rode the rock, we found the enemy, and we kicked his ass.”

“Rock Riders,” they said together. “Hua.”

USS Cheyenne

Orbit, Planet S93X5

Admiral Nadine Brooke surveyed the holo of the planet below, carefully noting the damage done during the kinetic strike even as her eyes looked for further evidence of enemy installations. Thankfully, it looked like they cratered the primary site down to the bedrock, and from experience she knew that secondary sites were unlikely in normally uncontested systems.

It had taken a ground-based guerrilla campaign to force the enemy to create a secondary site on Hayden’s World, and that was the only world they’d yet found that apparently warranted that sort of effort. The enemy’s gravity valve technology was so effective that one installation was normally sufficient to interdict a planet with very little problem.

In fact, the only ways they’d ever been breached, in human experience, was by what most people would consider extreme and entirely insane methods. In the first case, a heavily stealthed Special Operations force attempted insertion via ballistic approach from well outside the planet’s orbit. Only One operator survived to make landfall.

The next successful penetration involved plowing an entire convoy of starships through the planet’s atmosphere at speeds that nearly caused the ships to burn up and break apart from the friction. Considering that those ships were composed of solid nickel-iron hulls, several meters thick, and plated with heat-resistant ceramic tiles, that was considered something of an accomplishment.

The third and last time was under her own command and might have been considered the most
standard
operation of the three. Even then, however, it took pinpoint knowledge of the enemy’s location, as determined by men on the ground, and during the assault she’d come close to losing half her command when it turned out the enemy had a longer reach than anyone had previously believed possible.

Since those early days on Hayden, they’d managed to work out the enemy patterns a bit better, gaming the system as best they could to predict behavior and protocol. It wasn’t easy, the aliens didn’t think the way humans did in some ways, but when one looked at a military organization, there were always some things that could be counted on. Whether insect, human, or entirely alien, a military bureaucracy had some things set in stone.

In this case, they’d managed to determine the protocols for using the gravity valve against inbound meteorites. It wasn’t a trick that would work often, probably not again for some time, just in case they got wise, but it had worked this time and now they had one of the enemy worlds under human control.

“Deploy ground forces to the remaining enemy installations,” she ordered. “Have the Hood and the Marion drop shuttles and pick up the SARD unit along with their former PUCs.”

“Aye, ma’am.”

“And for God’s sake, put those men and women under quarantine!” she snapped. “Sooner or later these things are going to find some other use for prisoners than just starving them to death.”

As her people dispatched her order, Nadine settled back into the command console at the center of her flag deck and turned her attention back to the operations at hand. The Hood and Marion, both Longbow class ships, broke from formation upon receiving her orders and proceeded deeper into the planetary well.

Unlike Alexi Petronov and his relief column during the second battle of Hayden, Jane MacKay led her Hood and the Marion in at a somewhat saner velocity. The fire flared along the front of their bows as they penetrated the atmosphere, trailing flame as the pair entered into a ballistic free-fall arc that would take them on an ever tightening orbit of the world below.

“The gravity valve in the insertion rig worked, obviously.”

Nadine half turned and nodded to her attaché. “Yes. Pity it’s a one-time use device, we need that technology.”

“That sort of gravity is hard on the circuitry,” Lt Ammends replied. “The energy pulse that has to be run through the capacitors is even worse.”

She just nodded. He wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t know, she just didn’t like it. Her ships were limited to accelerations of maybe twenty gravities, unless she wanted to kill her crew. Crush them into mangled paste against the aft walls, the way the crew of the Majesty had died so many years earlier.

Against an enemy that could do better than ten times that, she and her crews were in a bad way. Since she had led the mission that brought back the first wreckage from one of the alien starships, Solari research and development had been spending every waking moment trying to crack the alien technology.

They’d had some limited success the last time she’d received updates from FLTCOM, such as the rudimentary valve installed in the faux asteroid used by the Operator team during the recent mission, but most of those successes were more in the realm of theory than practical application. Tactically, they’d managed to adapt their procedures to give human ships a fighting chance against the alien technology, since the Ghoul type aliens tended to rely entirely on their gravity technology.

As formidable as it was, there were holes in the tactical application of the technology. Its limited range and light-speed propagation meant that Terran-built missiles could be fired from outside the technology’s range and, if their guidance systems were good enough, hammer the alien ships from a distance.

In theory
.

In practice, the actual results were less than optimal, but it was the best tactical solution they had to date. With luck, as she herself had proven during the third battle of Hayden, it could even work to expectations. If it didn’t work, however, the ships that engaged the aliens in combat would be torn to shreds when they found themselves completely unable to disengage from the much higher accelerating enemy ships.

Basically it turned every battle into a lethal game of rock, paper, scissors, and whichever side lost the first throw didn’t get a chance at a second.

“Any peep on the long range systems?” she asked, floating over to where the repeater screens were showing what the bridge crew were monitoring in real time.

“Nothing, ma’am,” the lieutenant at the station replied. “No sign of gravity acceleration anywhere beyond the expected models for this system.”

“Good, but don’t forget to watch out for any Deltas at the same time.”

“No, ma’am.”

The military had adapted an official designation of phonetic lettering to classify alien species they were dealing with. The Alpha aliens were also known as ‘Ghouls’ by soldiers in the field who had dealt with them up close. They resembled the so called ‘Roswell Greys’ in Earth mythology and were the ones most likely connected to the gravity valve tech.

Bravo aliens were a species they had no clue about but were recorded as having feline attributes and seemed to be acting as security for the Alpha types.

Charlies were the first aliens they’d encountered that seemed to react the way they would expect professional soldiers to act. They were tough, tenacious, and lethal. A small handful were still vying with the Terran military for control of Hayden, despite having basically no outside support for more than a year.

Deltas, the last type they’d classified, were something of a mystery. They’d only encountered them a few times, and always in space, so it was possible that they might actually be a different class of one of the other species. Solari commanders had given them their own classification because Delta ships operated far differently than any of the other known species had shown so far. Unlike the Ghouls, the Deltas were ship handlers; they knew how to fly and they knew how to fight. They also used weapons and technology that were much closer to what humans considered ‘conventional,’ though far more powerful than their human counterparts.

Since they didn’t use the same gravity drive of their apparent allies, the Ghouls, they were harder to detect at long range, which was why she was reminding her people of things they already knew. As deep as Valkyrie had now penetrated into presumed enemy territory, they had to be on the lookout for everything.

“Shuttles are departing the surface, ma’am. They’ll be back on board the Hood shortly.”

“Good. Let’s get this wrapped up and move on before our luck runs out.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

*****

Sorilla held on as the shuttle jerked, slamming her and everyone else forward into their acceleration bolsters with enough force to wind them. She grimaced at what that must have done to their wounded and the weaker of the PUCs, but there was no other real way to get off-world. Modern shuttles just couldn’t carry enough fuel to make orbit on their own and retain tactical maneuvering while in atmo, so they were picked up by ships ducking down from orbit with their much more powerful pulse drives.

It wasn’t a gentle way to travel, but it got the job done on worlds that didn’t have orbital tethers. The lights stayed red, telling them to stay locked into their seats while the shuttle was pulled up into the belly of the beast that had picked them up, then finally shifted to yellow as a loud booming sound signified that the ship’s airlock had sealed and they were secured.

Gravity was skewed for a while as the still-accelerating HMS Hood pulled out of the atmosphere, so the only people who moved under the yellow light were medical response teams. They crawled over the seats with their kits and generally just made sure that no one was in critical condition while the ship reached orbit again and the lights changed to green.

Sorilla and her team waited in place while the bird was cleared. Save for Crow and, of course, the KIA Able, they were uninjured and could wait. As soon as the bird was emptied, though, they got up and bolted for the doors, each and every one. Just because they could wait didn’t mean any of them wanted to.

“All hands, this is Captain MacKay speaking,” Jane MacKay’s voice came in the clear over the ship’s intercom system. “We have been directed to quit the system via the most expedient route and will be proceeding to the jump point at one-G. Transit time is expected to be two days. Maintenance crews have priority access to all areas. Everyone else, enjoy the standard-G environment while you. MacKay out.”

Sorilla and her team were met by a decontamination team as they dropped out of the shuttle to the deck below.

“Take the right,” the chief in charge told her with a jerk of her thumb. “We’ve got the PUCs in the others, and they’re in quarantine.”

“Right.” Sorilla nodded, turning right without question.

They were a little cramped in the room, but not so badly as all that. It would have handled their whole team, but with two men down they could swing their arms just a bit. As the team settled in, the lock door sealed behind them and they could see faces through the glass on the other side of the room.