The Valhalla Call (Warrior's Wings) (27 page)

His private screen flickered for a moment, then coalesced into the image of the bridge of the Exploding Star, with the Master of Fleets seated in his place.

“Parath.”

“Master.”

“You are not where you were scheduled to be. Explain.”

“Master, if you check your charts, I believe you will find that this system is one planet short of what it should be…”

The Master of Fleets grimaced. “The aliens or the Ross?”

“The Ross, thankfully.”

It was a terrible thing to be grateful for in the light of such destruction, but it was far better that it be the Ross who initiated it than the aliens. At least the Ross were, nominally, on the side of the Alliance.

“I decided that if these aliens were enough to drive the Ross to such extremes in the light of our alliance and the terms of such, it may be more important than ever to gather intelligence on them,” Parath offered.

“You captured the ship and crew intact?”

“Mostly. They scrubbed their computers, and the fight to take the ship was costly, but yes, it is largely intact.”

“I see, and what have you learned so far?”

“Nothing of immediate value, a great deal about their language however, and details about the world they come from originally. So far they’ve kept from revealing anything overtly valuable.”

The Master of Fleets considered that, lightly rubbing his fingertips along his palms as he thought.

“Very well. Remain on task,” he decided finally. “I will take some of your ships into my fleet and move along ahead. You will remain in real time contact with us for as long as possible, I believe we may do so right to the enemy nexus world?”

“Yes, Master. It is within range of our real time transmissions.”

“Excellent. We will send back information on our actions. You send any useable information you gain here.”

“Yes, Master.”

The Master of Fleets considered for a long moment. “Do you believe you will need, or can keep control of, the Ross ships that travel with you?”

“Need? Most likely not, and I would honestly prefer that they were removed from the vicinity of the prisoners,” Parath admitted. “They were…oddly emotional about the aliens, Master.”

“Yes.” The Master of Fleet’s eyes flickered to the side. “Destroying a planet to stop two escaping ships…there’s something wrong there, to be sure. Very well, I will take them with me.”

“As you decide, Master.”

*****

On the Terra, Pierce finished recoding the local processor node and rebooted it.

All officers and enlisted in range of this pulse, log in and report. Command staff, make reports to the appropriate forums.

He worked his jaw, irritated by the focus needed to subvocalize. It was a skillset he’d never had a lot of use for in the past.

Once he’d finished recording the message, he posted it to a public forum he’d created to handle the responses and sent it on an open pulse. There wouldn’t be much range, not in the iron- and steel-heavy structure of the Terra, but he figured that it should cover much of the section he was in and maybe one above and one below his level as well.

Beyond that…well, if he got any responses, the others would have to slap his new software onto the local nodes near them to act as range repeaters. It would take time, but if there were enough of his people in range, they should be able to extend their communication range to cover a significant portion of the ship.

He smiled slowly as, one by one, names and messages began to appear on the impromptu network forum he’d coded.

Vacation’s over. Time to get back on the job.

*****

The systems on the Terra were designed to be primarily centralized, just for ease of coordination if for no other reason. Signals were intended to run to the main systems, overseen by the command computer, then relayed back out to where needed. It was a heavily controlled system that sacrificed some speed for the precision needed to run a battleship.

That didn’t mean that the designers had completely slaved the ship to the main core, of course. For redundancy if nothing else, each node was linked with alternate paths it could take, and those were designed based on what was, by this point, a very old and proven concept.

The Internet.

Designed in part by DARPA in the United States, the digital entity that became known as the Internet was originally intended as a communications tool that was hardy enough to provide military grade signals even in the event of a nuclear war. Should one part of the system be destroyed by, for example, the city it was located in being flattened by a nuclear weapon, the network was inherently designed to route around the lost servers and get the message where it needed to be.

Now, on the Terra, Captain Richmond and those of his crew he could contact were bent to reconfiguring the internal electronics into their own version of a military-grade Internet.

They bounced signals down one side of the ship, around the inner halls, and then back up the other as they slowly began to pull more and more people into the group. It was long work, recoding sometimes taking hours when a system needed some special twist to make it work right, but they had the time, they had the skills, and they certainly had the desire.

All it would take would be for the right opening to appear, and then they would have the Terra too.

USV Legendary

Lieutenant Sorilla Aida fell to her knees, her lunch and whatever other fluids she’d been fighting to keep down splattering across the deck as the ship came out of jump space. She slumped to one side, just being able to keep from lying in her own vomit, and rolled as far away from the smell as she could, curling into a ball as she took steady, even breaths.

That sucked. That sucked so much worse than a normal translation from jump. Oh fuck.

She’d never felt so damned miserable in her life, not that she could remember, at least. The moment of disorientation had been so extreme, she felt like she was going to die right then and there. Now she was just trying to snort back the chunks of vomit that had been packed up into her nasal passages when she threw up without replaying the scene.

She was still lying there, miserable and sick, when a rap on the metal of her door forced her to move. She got to her feet, physically making her body do things it really didn’t want to do, and spit into the sink before walking to the door and unlatching it.

“Lieutenant, message from comma…” The ensign stopped, staring at the mess on the floor, then up at Aida, and fell silent and wide-eyed.

“Implants make jump sickness worse,” Sorilla said, forcing her voice to sound casual. “Don’t worry about it. What’s the message?”

“You and your team are on alert, ma’am.”

“Understood,” Sorilla said, nodding. “Message delivered. You can go.”

“Uh…yes, ma’am.”

The young officer, still wide-eyed and uncertain, stepped back and let the door swing shut, where it clanged and locked again. Sorilla sighed, looking at herself in the mirror. She was pale and clammy, but the motion sickness was passing, thankfully.

You look like shit, girl,
she told her reflection silently.
Should have picked a job that gave sick days.

Sorilla tossed towels down on the mess, along with a douse of cleaner, and wiped it up as quickly as she could. Unlike most people, the smell wasn’t enough to induce another bout of vomiting with her, she’d smelled much worse in her time, but for all that it was a far from pleasant job.

She tossed the towels in a laundry bag and sealed it up, then slung the whole thing out the door and hit the room with an air freshener before she left. She’d drop the bag off on the way to the flight deck and didn’t particularly care what happened to the towels. They could burn them so far as she cared, just as long as they weren’t in her room.

*****

The flight deck was buzzing when Sorilla stepped off the lift and into the cavernous interior of the deck and headed for the section where her team had been told to stow their kit. There was a ton of movement around that area, so it was clear that she wasn’t the only person called in. Men and women were crawling over the machines, and she could smell paint in the air as she approached.

“What’s with the paint?” she demanded as she stopped in front of Sergeant Zimm, one of her operators with a Ranger background.

“Brass finally decided to name the squad,” Mike Zimm said coolly, nodding to her. “I guess the maintenance boys wanted to tag the machines.”

Sorilla raised an eyebrow, mildly disconcerted by the idea of someone tagging her machine. Something on her face must have given her thoughts away, because Francis Bean partially stepped in front of her with a hand raised.

“Leave ‘em be, Lieutenant. Those are their machines as much as ours,” the Air Force parajumper told her. “It’s a matter of pride for them.”

Sorilla checked her motion, glancing at him, perplexed.

He just smiled. “You’ve never been a pilot, El-Tee, trust me. Us and them, we’re a team. A good crew keeps us alive in the field. They’ve earned the right to take a little pride in our bots and our accomplishments.”

She briefly considered pushing past him anyway, but the memory of dealing with annoying lieutenants who knew everything and didn’t listen stopped her and she considered what the Air Force puke was telling her. She usually handled her own kit, even her suit. She had to be able to do basic maintenance, repairs, coding, basically everything needed to keep it running because she was often hundreds of miles from a repair depot and if she didn’t do it, it wouldn’t get done.

Bean was a pilot and a parajumper, however, and he came from a different culture, so she decided to take the advice she’d given to every lieutenant she’d considered worth a nickel.

Listen to your sergeants.

She put a stopper in her kneejerk reaction to kick people the hell of her equipment, admitting to herself that she really
didn’t
know how to maintain the bots to the same degree as her armor, and nodded to Bean.

“All right,” she said. “So what name did we get saddled with, since no one’s seen fit to run it past me?”

Bean snorted. “I suspect it was the civvie, Hearse, who came up with it.”

“Oh crap.”

“It’s not bad, ma’am,” Mike laughed. “You now command the Titans, El-Tee. The Zero One Unit is yours.”

Titans.

Sorilla considered it, rolled around for a bit, then nodded. “It’ll do.”

*****

Captain Roberts eyed the telemetry readings carefully, doing mental calculations to ensure that what he was coming up with was roughly in the same ballpark as what he was reading.

Close enough.

“Admiral.”

“Yes, Captain.” Brooke turned in the direction of the open com between the bridge and the admiralty deck.

“Ma’am, I think we have light enemy force in system.”

“Oh? That could be very good for us,” Brooke said. “Confirmation?”

“Working on it, but there is certainly an anomalous gravity signature in system, ma’am. Fits what we’d expect to see from a pair of Ghoulies,” Roberts confirmed.

“Excellent. Locate them, adjust our course, let’s get our mission accomplished early.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Roberts issued the orders and linked in the rest of Valkyrie to the plan. The task force of fifteen of the latest Terra Class ships shifted course as they began to move in on the location of the anomalous gravity sources.

“Contact Lieutenant Aida, have her team on standby.”

“Yes, sir.”

*****

The system was a normally quiet one, a white dwarf star putting out far too much radiation to be of interest to either humans or, apparently, their alien counterparts. The inner worlds here were gas giants, the closest baking so long in the heat of the star that it was within a hair’s breadth of igniting and possibly becoming a proto-star itself.

The outer system was barren, aside from a few rocks and the occasional plutoid floating on a different plane from the gas giants, making it clear that early in its development as a system the gas giants had formed in the outer system but were unstable. Something had shaken them loose from their orbit—possibly they simply didn’t have the velocity to maintain a stable position or possibly something had actually destabilized their orbit. It hardly mattered.

The results were clear: The gas giants had spiraled inward like colossal bulldozers and demolished everything in their path.

Behind them they left an open field of battle for Task Force Five as they burned their VASIMR drives on full combat power and dove inward toward the anomalies they had detected.

Their own presence had not gone unnoticed. In fact the alien ships had detected them almost the moment they entered the system, and the species humans knew as “Ghoulies” were, for once, spoiling for a fight.

Both battle groups accelerated on intersect courses as they primed their weapons and prepared their strategies.

The war had come to a barren patch of sky that neither side had a name for, yet both were now prepared to bleed on.

*****

Sorilla swung herself up into the cockpit of her Titan, dropping her armored body into the body-conforming seat as the deck alarm sang out the call to general quarters.

“All right, Titans,” she said with a trace of a smile on her lips. “You know the drill. We’re on standby for scramble from here on out. Lock in, but don’t lock up. Stay mobile and use the OS to handle movements until we get into combat range. I don’t want anyone fatigued before the fighting starts.”

Her team acknowledged the order, settling into their own Titans easily as the crews cleared the deck of debris and maintenance gear. If they were going into a fight, they’d know it shortly. Sorilla left her cockpit open, not so much because she needed the air—she was in her armor, after all—but more because she didn’t want to feel cramped just then. The after effects of the jump were still plaguing her, and a slight touch of claustrophobia was the last thing she needed to be dealing with.

Puking in her room had shaken her up, more than she wanted to believe, even as she forced herself to be introspectively honest if nothing else. She’d never been susceptible to motion sickness before and she wasn’t happy about being so now, not in the least. That said, it had been a particularly bad translation from jump space. If that was the only time she lost control like that, well, she could deal with it.