Valkyrie Burning (Warrior's Wings Book Three) (8 page)

“Anything new I should know about in the reports, Admiral?”

Nadine shrugged. “We’re scheduled for refit.”

“Begging your pardon, Admiral, but it’s about damned time.” Roberts grinned. “We haven’t seen a yard since before our last mix-up here in Hayden, and that blew damned near every armor panel we had clear off the hull.”

“Flying her through an enemy ship will do that to you,” Nadine countered dryly. “We were lucky they were able to ship replacement panels out this far. It would have been a long way home without them.”

Roberts nodded soberly, knowing that was more than the truth. Despite the fact that the ship had still been space-worthy after their accidental trip through an enemy starship, there was a difference between space-worthy and jump-worthy. Without the ceramic panels, the ship would never have been able to maintain high, relativistic velocities, which would have limited their jump speed to only a few points over light-speed.

Since Hayden was more than fifty light-years out, well, it would have been an epic voyage.

“Any word on how complete a refit, ma’am?” he asked curiously.

“No.” She shook her head. “Just orders to report for refit.”

“Well, it’ll be good to have a slip and some engineers who can check our fittings,” he admitted. “Not that I don’t trust our men, but those slabs are tricky to install by hand.”

Nadine snorted softly, smiling. “Tricky is an interesting euphemism, Captain. I believe I would have said
impossible
until I watched them do it.”

“I wouldn’t have gone quite that far,” Roberts said with a shrug. “The book says it can be done, it’s just that no one ever thought a crew would have to do it for practically every plate at the same time.”

“Well at least we made the history books, I suppose.”

“Being the first ship to ever flying
through
another starship should have been enough to secure that particular honor,” Roberts chuckled dryly.

“True.” Nadine felt her cheeks flush just a bit, and she hoped it wasn’t visible. While tactical maneuvering was the auspices of the captain and his ship handlers, she was well aware that it was her strategic decisions that had placed them in that particular situation and there had been no way to redirect the sheer mass of the ship once the enemy had turned directly into their path.

Her finest hour it wasn’t, not in her opinion at least. Her crew, on the other hand, took it as a bizarre badge of honor and considered surviving the blatant inanity of the situation to be an accomplishment.

She was just glad they’d survived the incident in order to brag about it later.

Better lucky than good, I suppose.

“When do we break orbit for home then, Admiral?”

“Few days, Captain,” she said, considering. “We need to top off our tankage, that’ll take at least three days.”

“Four,” he corrected, nodding. “They’ve got the facilities here, but they’re not up to tanking a full squadron in a hurry yet.”

“I understand that will be changing soon,” Nadine said. “I saw a note in the dispatches about a second tether being shipped out as soon as it cleared the slips back home. Looks like Hayden is going to become our first major resupply point.”

“No shock there, we’ve been working out of Hayden for over a year now,” Roberts answered.

“Yeah,” Nadine mused. “Hayden is probably going to be the most important port we have next to Earth itself.”

“I don’t know, Ares is making a play for their own yards.”

“Granted,” she conceded, “but they’re a lot closer to Earth, out nearer the rim. Hayden has a lot more stars within jump range, and it’s closer to the main body of the galaxy. I wouldn’t put a slip yard here, but a major military installation is a given.”

“I can see that. It’ll take a lot of ships and stations to cover this system properly, though.”

“Hayden sits at a choke point with the alien territory, as best we can tell.” Nadine shrugged. “Better to stop them here than try where the star density is higher.”

Roberts just nodded; there was nothing to say about that really. Over the past year they’d tracked down half a dozen star systems with traces of the alien forces in them, and all of them were linked closely to Hayden. There were paths to take around Hayden, to be sure…especially when the enemy seemed to have better jump drives than they did, but those paths were circuitous and highly inefficient. To get to Earth, practically all direct paths ran through Hayden.

“Well, it’s not our concern just yet,” Nadine went on, setting aside the slate with the dispatches. “Do you have the roster for who’s going planet-side?”

“Yes.” He produced another slate, handing it to her. “We’ll be cycling people over to the station starting in an hour or so.”

“Good. Be sure to remind them that leaving the colony site is strictly forbidden,” she warned.

“Wilco,” he replied. “Everyone knows anyway, but it never hurts to hammer it home.”

“I’ll like this system a lot better once they get the issue in the jungle settled,” Nadine grumbled. “Feels wrong to control the orbitals and yet basically have ceded the planet itself to an enemy force.”

“You’ll get no arguments from me on that one.”

*****

“Heading ashore, Top?”

Sorilla looked up to see Korman standing in the hatchway and nodded as she shouldered her day kit. “Yeah. After I check up on Crow, I figured I’d see how some of the pathfinders are faring now.”

He nodded.

“You not going planet-side?”

“What for?” Korman shrugged. “We’d either be restricted to the station or the colony anyway.”

Sorilla smiled. “What would you do if you weren’t? It’s a jungle world, K. Not exactly anything much there for R&R beyond the colony anyway.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” he told her, lip curled up in a half grin. “If I’m going to be locked up, I may as well be locked up here as there.”

“Right. Well, I’ll see you when I get back on board.”

“Cool,” he said. “You taking your leave on Earth then?”

Sorilla shrugged. “Figured I may as well. We get time on Hayden pretty regularly, and I have family back home.”

“Right, well, I’ll catch you later then, Top,” he told her before stepping back and into the hall.

“Later.” Sorilla followed him out, sealing the hatch behind her.

Korman headed back to the common areas while she turned left and headed for the medical labs. The med labs on the Hood were located near the center core, in the most heavily protected section of the ship. With the ship standing at station for the moment, Sorilla skipped the electric lifts and used the glide tubes to shift decks, arriving at the labs in seconds rather than minutes.

The lieutenant was tied down to an acceleration bed, still on life support from what she could see.

Sorilla snagged a nurse who was drifting in her direction, redirecting the woman so they didn’t collide. “How is he?”

“Stable,” was the best answer she’d gotten yet. “We’ll have to transfer him off to the medical labs in the New Mexico Counterweight as soon as we get home. The damage is just too extensive for us to treat here.”

Sorilla nodded, lips twisting up a bit. The enemy hand weapons weren’t as lethally effective as their artillery response capability, but they were bad enough. Armor wasn’t much use against them, except to sometimes prolong how long it would take you to die if you took a glancing blow. Crow was lucky enough to have had access to immediate medical aid, both from his armor systems and from the shuttle that picked them up.

For all that, from what she’d seen of the damage, Sorilla figured that his soldiering days were done.

“Thank you,” she said, hooking a hand into a grip and pulling herself out of the way.

She drifted over to the bed, looking down at the man who was barely visible under all the rigging, blankets, and medical paraphernalia taped, tied, or otherwise attached to him. He hadn’t been so bad for a butterbar, in her opinion, started off a little rocky to be sure but stepped up to clean up his own mess and get the job done. She hoped they could do something for him back on Earth, figured that they probably could, really. Medical science seemed to be a couple shakes away from beating the old adage that there were only two things unavoidable in life…death and taxes.

Sorilla figured that the government wanted more taxes, which was why the medics were so close to beating death.

“Well, L.T., that last mission could have gone off a little smoother,” she said, looking down. “You always where too stupid to duck, but at least you didn’t let them tag you until we were done. Get your dumb ass well, L.T., or a few of us might just come around to kick it when this is all over.”

Sighing, Sorilla pushed off the bed and drifted out of the room. She had a few days off, and she supposed she may as well get the best use of them she could. Getting from the med labs to the docking lock was actually a lot easier than from some places much closer since the design of the ship included a straight line corridor large enough to accommodate emergency vehicles for quick patient transfers.

From the docking lock, she just cycled through and found a seat on the next transfer pod to Liberation Station.

Now there’s a name that could have used a little more thought,
she chuckled to herself as the pod approached the tether counterweight.

Like almost every counterweight, Liberation Station had begun its life as a ship. In this case, she figured it was likely one of the old Discoverer class exploration ships. Originally unarmed except for very light lasers and a couple standard torpedo launchers, the Discoverer class ships were big, heavy duty, and generally built to withstand anything short of a supernova.

Or a gravity valve.

People were expected to live on Discoverer class ships for years, if not decades, so they had been built with enough room to stash pretty much all the amenities one might hope for. That size, as well as their impressive list of facilities and luxuries, made them one of the best candidates for recycling as tether counterweights once their lifespan as active-duty ships was done.

Only the fact that they had been built so well and most were still in active service kept all counterweights from being former Discoverer class hulls.

Someone pulled some strings, or Hayden lucked out to get one,
Sorilla supposed as her pod docked on automatic controls and she was cycled through the airlock into the main bay.

All it took was a glance around the bay to tell her that Hayden had both lucked out
and
someone had been pulling strings. The entire bay was in the best shape of any Discoverer class ship she’d ever been on, enough that she would almost believe that it was a new construct if it weren’t for the fact that there hadn’t been a new hull in the class for well over five decades.

While admiring the state of the station’s interior, Sorilla idly shouldered her day kit and stepped off the pod when the doors were cleared. Straightening from having to duck through the hatch, she paused a moment to secure her beret properly on her head before making her way deeper into the station.

Sorilla paused at the first terminal access point she found and silently linked it to her implants so she could browse the system quicker. It took a few moments to locate the names she was looking for, and she was surprised to find that two of them were on the station at the time. She loaded the directions into her implants and set off with a guide map floating in her corneal HUD.

The station was bustling with activity, the number of off-duty military personnel easily matching the civilians she could see and in most cases outnumbering them. Sorilla was aware that Valkyrie wasn’t the only Solari group in orbit of Hayden, though most of the others were transports, scouts, and other various types of vessels. The Cheyenne and Longbow class ships of Task Force Valkyrie were the only real weight of combat metal in orbit aside from the refitted Liberation Station.

With her HUD guiding her through the corridors of the station, Sorilla quickly got precisely where she wanted to be and found herself standing outside the medical labs. She shouldn’t have been surprised, but she was to a small degree, at least since she’d only asked for directions to Tara’s location and not for the layered details of the particular section involved.

A tap on the wall, followed by her softly clearing her throat, brought the nurse’s attention up from the desk she was working at. Tara beamed in recognition and made short work of crossing over to where Sorilla, with only a little discomfort, caught the enthusiastic redhead’s hug and returned it. Her father had never been the most demonstrative sort, so hugs weren’t really something Sorilla grew up with, which was why she was a little uncomfortable with Tara’s easy application of physical affection. Even so, she’d learned to cope.

It was odd to think it, but Sorilla owed her training in the Green Berets for patching up a lot of the deficiencies in her social behavior. She’d grown up more tomboy than anything, more likely to slug someone in the arm than hug them, but that was something that wasn’t tolerated by her trainers in world societies. The Special Forces needed women who could integrate themselves with the society they were entering in order to teach both men and women. To do that, you had to make everyone around you comfortable with you, make them trust you. That sometimes meant hugging people, kissing cheeks, whatever it took to get them to accept you in the role you were undertaking.

Most of her missions involved sitting in a rugged classroom, generally trying very hard not to look like she could beat the ever living crap out of the men she was teaching. After all, if they believed she could do that, they’d be too preoccupied trying to resolve the threat she posed to their manhood to learn what she was teaching.

So she hugged Tara back, smiled to match the nurse’s own gleeful look, and didn’t even cringe when the redhead squealed in her ear.

“Sorilla, how have you been?” Tara gushed, really in a better mood than she’d been the entire time Sorilla had known her.

It didn’t take a genius to work out why, of course. Just one look at the gleaming medical lab behind the redhead was a perfect explanation for her good mood. When Sorilla had first met her, Tara had been working out of a hut built of scrap lumber and local materials with a packed dirt floor. Even after the military established a presence on Hayden, she’d been working out of tunnels cut hurriedly into the hills on the coast, better than the hut, but only in so much as a broken leg is better than an amputation.