Valkyrie Burning (Warrior's Wings Book Three) (6 page)

“Stand by for decontamination.”

No one bothered to respond. They knew the procedure, and so they weren’t remotely surprised when gouts of hot steam erupted from around them at all angles to hose down their suits. With high heat and pressure, the steam literally scoured their suits down to the bare finish. It was powerful enough to even clean off baked-in ablative carbon residue after an orbital jump. Save for a few extremophile species known to obscure researchers, there wasn’t much that could survive the heat alone, and the force would wash anything else off and into the drains.

“Remove your armor and place it in the areas provided.”

Several large closet-like doors opened, and Sorilla popped the magnetic seals on her armor, immediately pulling the helm off and following it with the chest piece. The oxygenated gel that coated her skin caused it to suck against her skin as she pulled it clear, leaving her feeling fresh air for the first time in weeks.

“Oh man, that feels good,” Korman muttered, taking a deep breath.

Everyone just murmured their agreement, mostly grunting if you wanted to be honest, so intent they were on getting the second skin peeled away and stored. In moments the team was standing or sitting naked, covered in blue gel and laughing as they took deep breaths of shipboard air that had been recycled so many times it was practically an abomination that they considered it ‘fresh.’

Sorilla batted Jardiens’s arm out of her face as the big guy splayed himself out completely and leaned back against the wall with an exaggerated moan. “I’ve got enough of my own filth on me, Dion, I don’t need yours.”

“Sorry, Top.” The Canadian chuckled a little, rubbing his head. “Just had to stretch, you know?”

She did know, in fact, which was why she only knocked his arm out of her face and didn’t at least threaten to break it. Armor units were fully articulated, of course, and you could stretch in them all you wanted, but it never felt quite the same as that first glorious strain you managed when the armor was finally shucked.

She’d wait for her own stretch, however. It wasn’t that she was a prude, or even remotely shy, but splaying herself out for her fellows just wasn’t going to happen. Nudity was part of the job, intentionally flashing the room was a completely different thing.

Instead she just leaned back, casually crossing her legs as she waited for the UV portion of the decontamination sequence to wrap up. In the meanwhile, she took the time to reboot her electronics, clearing the memory cache and generally setting everything back to its initial state. Like all Operators, Sorilla was equipped with enough implanted technology to be officially considered a cyborg by some Earth standards, and that level of gear required basic maintenance that wasn’t always practicable while on a mission. Her own implants were more extensive than any of her fellows’, in fact, since the army had taken the opportunity of her last time Earth-side to update everything buried inside her flesh to the latest generation equipment out of the labs.

That put Sorilla several generations ahead of the others, since they were using the latest production generation from several years earlier. After more than a year of trying, she was just learning the full limits of her kit and found herself really enjoying the advantages it offered. Unlike her fellows, for example, Sorilla had full color optical implants that permitted her to access network databases with video and images instead of just text.

She took advantage of that as soon as her systems came back online, checking her shipboard messages and the Fleet social screens to see what was going on over the next couple days.

“There’s a dance on B deck tonight,” she said idly, not opening her eyes.

“Oh yeah? You’re on the boards?”

“You’re not?”

“Yeah, but you know our procs take longer to navigate through that mess,” Jardiens bitched. “What’s for lunch?”

“Burgers and rings.”

“Cool. Hey!” Jardiens leaned over and thumped on the glass. “You want to hurry this up? I haven’t had solid food in weeks, dude!”

“We’re almost done, relax,” the technician replied from the other side.

“Relax he says,” Jardiens grumped. “I’d love to see how he handles eating paste even for one week.”

“Didn’t you live on paste back in grade school, Dion?” Sorilla asked with half a smirk. “Should have been just like home.”

“Oh, you’re a laugh riot, Top.” The Canadian rolled his eyes. “Come on, you can’t say you don’t want to chow down on a real burger, right? That paste crap isn’t eating.”

“It’s more than I, or a lot of folk, had on Hayden, Dion,” she told him with a hint of a smirk to show she wasn’t really annoyed. “Remember who you’re talking to, kid.”

“Bloody snake eaters,” Jardiens muttered, shaking his head. “I swear they burn the taste buds out of all of you in boot camp.”

“No, they do it during SERE,” she answered, eyes still closed. “I thought you JTF boys went through the same thing the Brits put their SAS through?”

“Yeah, but I’m from Quebec,” he answered. “They figured they could skip the taste bud thing for me once they took a look at what passes as cuisine in Montreal.”

“I spent most of my youth on the south side of the Mexican border,” she told him with a smile. “Do you really want to start a war using food culture as your weapons?”

“Cheese curds, gravy, and French fries,” he told her simply.

“Right, you win,” Sorilla replied dryly.

“I know.” He sighed, not sounding particularly triumphant.

Everyone chuckled a bit, the conversation being an old but reliable bit of banter within the team. Before they had time to do or say anything more, a buzzer sounded and the airlock popped, causing them to have to work their jaws to equalize the minor difference between the ship proper and the lock they were in.

“About time,” Korman said, getting up and walking to the lock door. “The last place I want to be talking about cheese with you guys is a locked room where I don’t have my own private air supply.”

More laughter echoed off the bulkheads as they walked out of the decontamination lock and grabbed some utility coveralls from the racks before they headed for their quarters on the HMS Hood.

****

Captain Jane MacKay looked over the reports from the medical labs as well as the reports filed from those who had been on the surface, trying to puzzle out the meaning of the enemy actions. They’d been able to track this world down by working out the most likely jump points from Hayden, since that world seemed like the one the aliens were most interested in. So far, however, all they’d been able to find were, at best, minor outposts like this one.

The enemy frontier has to be at least as deep as our own. They’re looking to expand themselves. They must be.

It was really the only thing that made much sense, otherwise they’d have located more facilities than just the single defensive points. There was nothing else in any system they’d surveyed, however, not colonies, not true bases, not even the sorts of survey and research ships Earth would have put out into newly opened star systems.

To her it seemed possible that the enemy had an even deeper frontier than Earth and that they were maybe even operating far in advance of anything humans had yet attempted, opening up systems for exploitation decades or more in the future. In that case, the aliens’ actions made a lot more sense, particularly if their frontier was several hundred light-years deep or more.

There is even a good chance that we’ve not yet dealt with any of their real military units,
she supposed with a frown.
These might be their versions of the East India Company from the Age of Sail on Earth.

That was a terrifying and sobering thought, because it meant that whatever military force they had was probably considerably better trained, equipped, and likely existed in larger numbers. Humans were holding their own against the forces arrayed against them so far, but every report said the same thing. There was a wide variance in the enemy capabilities, a variance that didn’t make sense by the standards of modern human military standards.

MacKay walked over to the main viewer and keyed it back to the planet they were just leaving, eyes on blue-green orb for a moment before she reached down and re-keyed the system to look out at the stars.

She knew that somewhere out there was a large and powerful economy, if not an empire. Powerful enough to be thinking decades or more in advance, but if she were right, then it seemed that it was spread far enough so as to make central control a tricky issue. Human penetration of the galaxy was no more than a hundred light-years at its deepest point. Hayden was the outermost colony, and it was a lot closer than that.

With Casimir transmitters, they were able to breach that range with limited FTL signal ability, but assuming the enemy didn’t have massively superior technology, MacKay suspected that managing a far-flung empire wouldn’t be a simple matter. She was betting that, once more was known about the alien culture, they’d find that regional governors likely had a lot of autonomy.

Like the Romans or later empires up until the development of radio technology on Earth.

Her pet theory was one she’d been working on for some time but had only recently begun to draw interest from her peers as a possible explanation for the aliens’ mentality. Most command personnel and higher still had a hard time wrapping their minds around a government that couldn’t just pick up a phone and talk to anyone, anywhere, as needed. Even with Hayden and the other colony worlds being only tenuously in range, the majority of the political and military power of Earth was centered
on
Earth, and those people really didn’t have a good grasp of just how big the galaxy really was.

The admiral and many of the other deep-space captains were starting to think as she did, that they were dealing with a political entity that might possibly only now be fully understanding what was going on out at its furthest reaches. That left them with some problems, though, if only because none of them had enough experience with anything remotely like what they were seeing and so they couldn’t make any predictions.

She made some more notes and put a request into the system to have the senior officer from the infiltration team meet with her once they’d gotten themselves settled.

That done, she found herself looking back out to the stars, wondering just how far away the enemy was at that point. How far away, and how long until they came knocking in real force.

*****

Parithalian Alliance Ship
Noble Venture

Ship’s Master Reethan Parath looked out over the system they had just shifted into, mostly just admiring the eternal beauty of the starways, while he waited for the return signals to come back to the tactical stations.

“No danger signs from deep system, Master Parath.”

“Thank you, SeQuin.” Reethan nodded, turning from the vista. “Order the flotilla forward, one quarter acceleration. Best caution.”

“As you say, Master.”

The small Parithalian flotilla, a dozen ships strong, had been assigned deeper into the third galactic arm in response to losses reported by the local development group. It was unusual, to be sure, given that this branch of the galaxy was largely controlled by the Ros’El and they generally didn’t play well with others. For them to have requested support from the Alliance was unusual enough for him to be careful, but he’d already received reports from the first Parithalian scouts that had escorted a Ros’El convoy through to one of their development worlds.

Whatever the hell the Ros’El had wallowed in out here managed to utterly ravage one of their squadrons, as well as tear up half the scout patrol. Worse, the reports on the battle were pretty unclear, with very few details on the enemy weapon systems or defenses. They knew that the enemy wasn’t invulnerable, they’d destroyed several of their ships in the engagement, but Reethan hadn’t been able to locate any information on precisely how they’d gotten that close to the convoy without being detected.

The flotilla was still three shifts from the development world that was causing all the trouble, but when they arrived in this system, the lack of a Ros’El signal sent up alarms that caused Reethan to order the flotilla to pause in their travels.

Records clearly showed that there was a Ros’El survey outpost here, put in place just over forty standard intervals past. There should have been a clear signal announcing it as their territory as soon as the flotilla shifted into the solar space of the local star. Reethan rose from his position and made his way across to the command station, intent on checking the latest information for himself.

Like practically all Parithalians, Reethan was a slender soul whose personal height topped that of the average biped in the Alliance by more than half again. Parth was a low-gravity world by any standard, so existing in microgravity was as close to home as he and others of his kind got when traveling the galaxy. There were no other species in the alliance that had developed on a world even comparable, most of the several dozen species having evolved on mid- to heavy-gravity worlds.

His fingers were slender enough to deftly operate the consoles his people designed for use by the entire Alliance, a sort of home field advantage when it came to a Parithalian applying for fleet service, so he quickly had the world in question called up on the small display used by the command station.

It was a world of the type preferred by the Ros’El, mid-gravity, with significant supplies of oxygen-rich air and immense water reserves. Neither were particularly rare as far as it went, but there were few enough worlds that held that specific combination. More importantly was the type of life that flourished, however, as he was aware.

It wasn’t widely spread around, but the upper echelon of the Alliance civilian structure and a fair slice of their military knew that the Ros were fascinated with any world that had developed life that was based on the same building blocks as themselves. Unlike most Alliance species, the Ros were chemically built on an extremely complex double helix structure, using carbon as the chief binder. No one was quite sure why, but the Ros were very nearly obsessive about locating and controlling worlds dominated by similar building blocks.