Valkyrie Burning (Warrior's Wings Book Three) (9 page)

“I’ve been good,” Sorilla said cheerfully. “Working, as usual. They’ve got me running hard.”

“Fighting, you mean.” Tara stepped back, giving her a cool once-over appraisal that in most parts of the civilized galaxy would have indicated sexual interest. “You aren’t missing anything, I see. Haven’t fallen out of any other skies?”

“One or two,” Sorilla admitted with a smile, “but it was on purpose those times.”

The nurse rolled her eyes but smiled as she visibly relaxed. “Well, if it was on purpose…”

They laughed and Sorilla nodded to the desk across the room. “How long are you on duty?”

“Another couple hours. Are you here for long?”

“I’ve got a few days, three anyway,” Sorilla confirmed.

“Good, I’ll call up some of the others,” Tara said. “I know that Jerry is station-side at the moment. I’ll see who else is on this end of the tether.”

“Excellent, thank you,” Sorilla said. “It’ll be great to touch base with the pathfinders and others from Hayden-side again.”

“They’ll be glad to see you too,
Sarge
,” Tara told her with a fond smile. “I’ll see you in, say, two and a half?”

“Works.” Sorilla nodded. “I’ll see if there’s anything interesting playing in the theatres, maybe get myself a room.”

“Alright, I’ll comm you when I’m free,” Tara said, stepping back.

“Works,” Sorilla said again. “See ya.”

“And you.”

Sorilla waved again and stepped out of the medical bay, pausing only briefly to link back into the station’s network and get a guide to the entertainment decks. As she headed that way, she also took a moment to secure a room for herself in the visitors’ section.

The available entertainment was crap, so she just watched the news from Earth until Tara contacted her. There was nothing in it directly related to the war, which didn’t surprise her much. Sorilla was aware that the US Government and other Solari signatories had released information about the aliens some time ago, but aside from an initial flare of interest, the general civilian response was surprisingly blasé. Apparently it seemed that in the absence of real-time video of battles and bug-eyed monsters, most people just turned the channel to reality TV and decided that it was all someone else’s problem.

Honestly, it would have bothered Sorilla except for the fact that she’d signed on with the army as much to get away from people like that as any other reason. She wanted to know what was going on, more than that she wanted to be out there trying to fix it when things went wrong.

So, while feeling a little put out by the lack of interest in the war back home, Sorilla was still in a pretty good mood when she got up and headed to where Tara’s directions guided her. She stepped onto one of the large recreation decks just a short walk from where she’d been watching the news and immediately spotted Tara waving in her direction.

Sorilla smiled as she recognized the man with the redhead, nodding to him as he got up to greet her. Clasped hands turned quickly into a fast embrace, and they were sitting down moments later.

“Hey, Sarge.” Jerry grinned practically ear to ear. “Good to see you.”

“And you.” She nodded across the table as he slid a plastic glass across to her. She lifted it, took a sniff of the amber liquid, and smiled. “Better than we had back in camp.”

“Yeah,” he conceded, looking around the recreation deck with some slight disdain. “But I liked the scenery there better.”

Tara snorted softly. “Don’t let him fool you. That’s not the jungle nostalgia of an outdoorsman talking, he just liked all the women walking around in sweat-soaked t-shirts.”

Sorilla chuckled as Jerry sputtered slightly, glaring at the nurse.

“I liked you better when you were just ordering me to drop my pants,” he growled in her direction.

“You mean last night?” she countered, smirking.

Sorilla grinned at Jerry’s sputtering as he stumbled over his response.

“So you two got together?” she asked after a moment.

“He finally got around to making a move last year,” Tara confirmed, shrugging. “He’s not much, but he’s been worth the effort so far.”

“’ Grats then,” Sorilla nodded, lifting her glass.

They responded to her toast, smiling at each other. Sorilla mimed gagging, but was more than amused that neither of them noticed her actions. She let them smile goofily at one another for another stretch of time, then cleared her throat to jump them out of the proc lock.

They looked at her, startled briefly, then both flushed a little.

“Sorry, still in the honeymoon phase.”

“I noticed,” Sorilla said with dry amusement. “Other than that, how have things been?”

“Other than being locked up in here?” Jerry asked, glancing around. “Dandy.”

“Hush, Jer. How can you possibly complain about this when we spent so long huddling in huts out in the jungle?” Tara rolled her eyes at him.

“Exactly. Out. We could move around, breathe air that wasn’t canned, radiated, pre-processed, post-processed…” He ranted, drawing more amused smiles from his audience.

Sorilla got the idea that this wasn’t a new rant, not that she disagreed with him, to be honest. She was an outdoor girl herself and wouldn’t find fault with anyone who didn’t enjoy being locked up in a tin can, no matter how gilded it was. That said, she didn’t have any trouble understanding Tara’s position either. There were some things that just went without saying, and one of those was that being comfortable, fed, and cared for was better than worrying whether you’d first be shot, starved, or eaten by a local animal.

She’d take the jungle nine times out of ten, but Sorilla had long ago admitted that she was an oddball.

Still, it did bring up a point that she was interested in.

“So they’ve locked down the civilians?” she asked.

Jerry snorted. “You could say that. The colony plateau has been turned into an armed camp, and no one goes outside the beam. Not even the soldiers, for the most part.”

Sorilla was puzzled by that, at least somewhat. Locking down the colony made sense, at least to a point. Hayden itself was of extremely limited value. If not for the alien artifacts left on the surface, she had little doubt that there would be a powerful push to get everyone off the planet and move civilians back to Earth or one of the more secured colonies. As it was, the presence of relatively large quantities of slightly battered alien technology was enough to create an increase in the local population as more scientists and support staff moved in.

It seemed to her that leaving the Charlie type aliens running around loose was a bad idea, however. They’d proven to be formidable, lethal, and mobile in their earlier encounters. The very worst sort of thing to have floating around beyond the beam, no matter how tight your defenses were.

“No patrols to flush them out?” she asked, looking over to Jerry.

As one of the most experienced of Hayden’s pathfinders, she figured that he’d be the go-to guy the military would call in to guide the teams. She was honestly surprised when he shook his head.

“They had a few at first, but mostly they got cut down fast,” Jerry admitted. “The aliens didn’t make any moves against the colony defenses, but anyone who stepped foot out beyond the beams got slaughtered. They were like ghosts, Sarge, and they just kept getting better.”

She whistled softly, nodding her understanding. She saw the base commander’s point of view, but Sorilla was also canny enough to see what the enemy was up to. They’d forced the base personnel to give up their mobility and initiative, permitting themselves full reign of the world’s jungles.

It was a good strategy, tried and true, in fact. One of the things that made it so good was that even when you knew exactly what they were doing, it was so damned hard not to play right into their hands anyway. The problem she saw with it, however, was also one of the things that made it work so well.

Human forces really didn’t give a damn about the jungles of Hayden right now. So long as the enemy was limited to small arms, relatively speaking, and could be held off at a reasonable distance from the tether…they could do whatever the hell they wanted as far as the local military was concerned. They weren’t a factor.

She understood that line of thinking, but at the same time, Sorilla considered it potentially very dangerous as well. They were ignoring a possible second front in any future conflict, and for what? Sure it would be costly to end the alien force, but the facts were that the aliens had
limited
numbers and were not able to replenish those forces. It was a onetime cost to go and clean them out, and it would have to be done sooner or later. Paying upfront was better than being slapped with a surprise bill later when you might just need every available asset for other purposes.

Unfortunately, that sort of thinking could only be learned from experience, it seemed. You could read about the facts in books, but they remained abstracts until the butcher’s bill was actually extracted. Few people made that mistake more than once, thankfully, but it always took that personal experience to hammer the point home.

That was why, in the early twenty-first century, America invaded nations like Afghanistan and Iraq, even though every single military mind involved
knew
that previous adventurism of that nature had been monumental failures. Vietnam, for the Americans, Afghanistan itself for the Soviet Empire, and many times many others.

You could fool yourself into thinking that it would be different
this
time. You’d be smarter, your enemies would be dumber, your technology would overwhelm them, or, even that, you’d be able to get the people on
your
side. It was all bullshit, though, because no matter how advanced your technology, or how oppressed the people were before you got there, you were still an occupying army, and people would do
anything
to take back their home.

She and the pathfinders had proven that here on Hayden already.

Hayden Jungle

“No question, Prime,” the squat grey Lucian said, nodding in the distance. “They’ve brought more ships in-system. We can see a small flotilla drifting around the station on the other end of
that
.”

Kris grunted, nodding to acknowledge the report as he looked over at the construction his man was referring to.

It was a thin thread at this range, but he knew that the line was half an arm’s breadth wide and built like a ribbon. Their best guess was that it reached to orbital space, but their range finders were of limited use at those distances and through the disruption of the thick atmosphere above them.

Whatever else these people are, they are masters of material sciences,
he thought as he gazed on the dark line that bisected the sky.

There were no materials in common use within Alliance worlds that he could even imagine bearing the sort of load this ribbon obviously handled. They couldn’t get a measurement on the mass of the station at the far end, but if it were, as it seemed, being held in place by the centrifugal force of the planet’s rotation, then the sheer load strength of the line was beyond his ken.

Idly he drew a black knife from his belt, turning it over to examine it carefully. It was a war prize, captured from one of the many kills he’d made since arriving on world. Similar to the ribbon in the distance, it was like nothing he’d ever seen in Alliance worlds.

The first time he’d encountered it, Kris had believed the blade to be an energy cutter. Those existed, even a few species in the Alliance used them as military tools, but this would have been the most compact one he’d ever seen if that was what it was. It wasn’t. Instead, they had apparently built the blade out of a fibrous mass of a carbon allotrope. It was a tough, strong material, very lightweight, and Kris knew that it would hold an edge reasonably well. What made this blade impressive was that when power was applied, the molecules along the edge would align into a
crystalline
allotrope of carbon with an edge practically a single atom in thickness.

It was simple, brilliant, and could slice through damned near anything you put the edge to while still being just short of indestructible. If you nicked the edge, just reapply power and it would self-repair with some type of automatic molecular realignment.

In summation, the perfect military blade.

No, these weren’t some random barbarian tribes building an empire on the Alliance’s frontiers. They were masters of material science, reasonably skilled soldiers on average, and proven ship handlers that were not to be underestimated.

And none of that accounts for the Sentinels we encountered.

That event still bothered Kris, actually. Since they’d been forced to retreat into the jungle after that battle, they’d not encountered the enemy Sentinels again. It made him wonder if they’d actually been there originally after all. Perhaps chance played a role in those events, maybe his pride caused him to read more into the enemy than was there.

Certainly many of his men seemed to hold that belief.

But then, why have we never seen that armor configuration again?

Since that night, Kris had specifically tailored his strategies to draw out any forces of Sentinel-level skill. Striking only at patrols, pushing the enemy back into the confines of their base, these things should have caused them to put their best soldiers into the field to eliminate Kris’s Sentinels. Instead they happily curled up and just left the jungle to him and his, as if it mattered nothing to them.

The species baffled Kris entirely. He couldn’t get a handle on them no matter what he tried, and he was running low on time to do the job. After a full cycle of the local star, he and his forces were running low on nutritional supplements, so they wouldn’t be able to play games much longer.

His Sentinels could eat and get by on some of the local resources, but the Porra he had with them were more restricted, and, honestly, he had no clue what state the Ros’El were in. They seemed fine, but he couldn’t ever remember seeing a sick or ill member of that species, so who knew? Without their ships and technology, the Ros seemed listless and unmotivated to his eye, but again no one he knew could read them with any success, so for all he knew they were working madly on some plan to do…something.