The Valhalla Call (Warrior's Wings) (30 page)

“Come about, forty degrees relative up bubble.”

“Aye, sir. Forty degrees, relative up. Coming about.”

The Terra twisted in space, on gyros and thrusters, bringing its launchers around to the appropriate firing position.

“Computer has the helm!”

No man liked giving up control of his ship to the computer, even for the shortest of times, but there were calculations that humans just couldn’t make on the fly like this. The ship adjusted, aiming its launchers just right as it charged them for a fifty-gravity launch, and all that happened to show that anything had just occurred was a set of lights changing from red to green.

“All operators away! Coming back about!”

“Get our magazines reloaded, stand by to continue firing,” Green ordered.

“Aye, sir.”

*****

In the black of the capsule, the only warning Ton and his team had was a red light turning yellow and then a flash of green before the entire world went red and then white, and then black. At fifty gravities, none of them avoided passing out, and for a brief moment they floated in a white haze, moving through a tunnel toward voices of people they knew.

It ended abruptly, however, blackness overtaking the white tunnel, and then the unblinking starlight of space as they woke up and looked around.

Mostly they couldn’t see anything but the stars—even the Cherenkov blue glow of the VASIMR drives was too dim to be visible—but Ton spotted a shadow of another operator maybe a kilometer away from him. Hard to tell, he could only see the man when he eclipsed a star, but Ton was pretty sure that it was one of his team. Maybe it was debris, but he’d assume that it wasn’t.

They had hours to travel now, and a rough landing on the far side.

The things I do for my corps and my comrades. Oo-Rah.

Deep Space

Unnamed System

This is where things get tricky,
Sorilla thought grimly as she watched the numbers fall.

They were moving fast, on a terminal ballistics course, which meant that if the enemy moved they wouldn’t be able to adjust and that was just no good. That was the reason why the Titans all had gravity cores—small ones certainly, but they were relatively light machines compared to most things in space. Using captured technology, reverse engineered software, and a lot of luck, humanity had, in fact, unlocked some of the enemy drive technology.

Enough that they could use gravity drives to a small degree, but not enough for them to be remotely effective on a million-ton starship. An eighty-ton Titan, however, was a different story. With their gravity cores, the Titans could maneuver at speeds that made the old Cheyenne Class ships look like slugs but were really a tenth the speed of a proper VASIMR drive starship.

Roughly eighty gravities of acceleration was respectable, but it wouldn’t let them catch up to an enemy ship that was actively trying to evade them. Of course, if the enemy saw them coming, they were more likely to just pop the Titans with a singularity and be done with it.

That was where the next phase of the assault plan came into play.

“Titans, stand by for deployment of GPDs.”

They didn’t respond—the squadron was following radio silence after all—but every member of the Titans shuddered at least slightly.

Gravity Pulse Devices were the weaponized version of a gravity core, basically a shell with enough computing power to manage a core and programming to scare the shit out of any sane man.

Or woman.

Sorilla had gotten a glimpse of the code herself and compared it very carefully to the source code that was currently running her Titan. She had been gratified to find that there was none of the suicidal tendencies in her bot, not even buried in deep. She wasn’t sure what she’d have done if she found any sign that her machinery might decide to implode with her in it, but whatever it was, she was quite sure that there was a coder somewhere on Earth, or within the Solar Gravity Well, who would not have enjoyed her response.

“Deploying.”

Somewhere behind her, Sorilla knew that the Legendary and the rest of Valkyrie were firing the GPD weapons in a rapid-fire pattern that should both keep them clear of her squadron while providing the last, and possibly most critical, element of the operation. Her HUD immediately showed the telemetry feeds from the shells as they blasted past her team and into the contested space between the two warring battle groups.

It was just a matter of counting off the seconds before sparkles of light erupted ahead and every space-time sensor she had on board went completely insane.

Looks like the devices have done their job. Our turn.

Sorilla manually targeted her squadron with com lasers, ensuring secure communications. “Re-initiate gravity cores.”

She flipped open the secure safety, returning control of her core to herself, and felt the system hum back to life as green lights lit up across her tactical board, showing that her team was following suit.

“We should be covered by the disruptions the GPDs have caused across space-time,” she said, hands falling to grip the control sticks. “But let’s not put it to the test. No one redline your drives, minimal thrust
only
.”

The Titans confirmed her orders, and the team continued to plummet through space as they fell toward their target.

*****

Admiral Brooke looked out over the battle space from the observation and command deck of the USV Legendary. Behind her, her staff was packing up the few things they’d need to take down to the primary combat control center. The observation deck was a lovely place, with gorgeous views of the ship and the space around it, but it was somewhat too vulnerable to risk in a heavy fight.

“We’re ready, ma’am.”

“I’m coming.” Brooke said, half turning.

She paused, looking back on the space ahead of them. She couldn’t see it, but she knew that space had been distorted and warped beyond all recognition directly ahead of them. The GPDs were nasty little beasties: They reached out, grabbed the very fabric of the universe, and started tying it in knots.

And we still have to fly through that. Lord, I hope nobody forgot to carry the one.

The warps themselves were harmless, more or less. What the Legendary had to worry about was entering into multiple warps where the tidal forces were pulling different parts of the ship in opposing directions. Enough force could dislocate something vital inside the ship or even start to tear the ship itself apart.

All the calculations said that the warps were low enough in intensity that the heavily reinforced Legendary and the rest of Valkyrie would be fine, but there was theory and there was practice.

Time to put the theory to practice.

Nadine Brooke turned around and followed her staff off the observation and command center, heading deeper into the protected hull of the USV Legendary.

*****

“The GPD should disrupt enemy fire, but it’s also going to play all holy hell with our targeting,” Roberts said as he walked across the bridge and took a closer look at the gravity scanners.

“Aye, sir, that’s a fact,” Commander Mathews said from where she was trying to map the damage they’d done to local space-time when their GPD deployment.

“Can we fire through that?”

“Not if you want to hit anything, Captain,” she told him, shaking her head. “As it stands, we’d as likely splash our Operators as the enemy.”

“Let’s not do that.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Captain Roberts shook his head, straightening up. “All right then, we go through the chop! All flank!”

“All flank, aye, sir!”

The Legendary surged ahead, followed shortly by her compatriots as Task Force Valkyrie powered through the mess they’d turned space into, the odd twists in space-time making the ship feel like it was rocking under their feet.

“Check fire until we’re through!” Roberts ordered, taking his seat and grabbing a belt to strap in. “Let
them
waste their ammo.”

*****

Running through the deformed section of space-time was easier for the Titans than it would be for the Legendary, Sorilla knew. The smaller war machines were less susceptible to tidal effects due to their size, most of time even fitting entirely into a deformed patch so that it just felt like regular microgravity.

For most of her crew, that was.

For her it was a ride through pure hell.

Sorilla came within a hair’s breadth of puking in her helmet, something that likely wouldn’t be fatal because OPCOM armor was designed to deal with such things, but it would be
highly
unpleasant. In desperation, Sorilla threw up an augmented map of the distortions they were hitting across her implants. She felt the difference almost immediately as her eyes and implants began to agree on what was happening to her, and she managed to fight back the urge to color the inside of her helmet with the contents of her stomach.

They burst out of the distortion field in just a few interminable minutes, however, and Sorilla put her focus back on the task as the hull of the target began to grow rapidly in their HUDs. She hit her team with com lasers but, irrationally, spoke in a soft whisper when the link opened.

“Softly. Don’t hit the gravetics unless you have to.”

Part of her almost didn’t believe it as the hull of the alien ship loomed over her, casting a shadow across her mech as it eclipsed the local star. Sorilla had, in all honesty, half expected to be spotted long before she got this close.

Behind her, the rest of the Titans were tightening formation as they made the last-minute course adjustments using thrusters only. This close to a Ghoulie ship, she didn’t want to chance being picked up by their gravetics, even with all the massive levels of distortion being flung around space and time in the local region. There was a point where you were just asking for trouble.

The access point was where her schematics indicated, a large circular port along the hull, one of hundreds that dotted the ship’s flanks. She guided her bot in, landing with a clang that set her teeth on edge inside the war machine even as she steadied herself and took a moment to look around.

She was standing on the hull of the Ghoulie ship, and it had gravity as the brief indicated. That let her take a moment to get her bearings and look out and around at the battle waging beyond her.

The lights were not bright, but she could see the distant sparkles of exchanged fire as Valkyrie pressed their opponents in order to disguise the fact that the entire attack was really just a distraction. Thankfully, Task Force Seven had unwittingly done their part by bleeding off the enemy forces, making them put out brushfires and answer emergency calls all across the galaxy, it seemed.

That gave her team the chance they needed.

Sorilla turned back to the job at hand, pointing to the closest Titan and then down to the hull. The pilot of the Zero Five unit, Staff Sergeant Ryan Cress, lifted his fist and moved into position as she knelt down and got a grip on the edge of the access point.

The enemy hulls used a lightweight, but incredibly strong, silicate-based ceramic. Pound for pound the material was far stronger than steel, but like most similar materials, it didn’t have the flex that steel and iron had. Once you reached the breaking point, the material wouldn’t deform, it would simply shatter. She and the sergeant maxed out their Titans’ servo hydraulics as they put the material under some extreme stress.

It wouldn’t be enough, of course—nothing built by the Ghoulies was likely to crumble under even the strength of a pair of milspec hydraulic presses—but the others of the team were moving into place automatically. They put a series of shaped explosive charges according to the schematic they’d been given, then got out of the way.

The dull thuds of the explosives going off could be felt through the hull of the ship and into the legs of the Titans as they continued to stress the material. As the explosive holes were bored deep by the shaped charges, the breaking point of the armor was reached and it shattered along the constructed fracture, blowing out as both the power of the Titans and the force of the air inside tore the circular section of armor right off the ship.

“Move it! They’ll be coming now!” Sorilla hit her squad with the com laser, waving them in as she stumbled back, steadying herself.

The Titans flared their drives, diving into the ship until they entangled themselves with the gravity well, and then dropped as they twisted around to land hard on the deck inside. Sorilla waved Cress in ahead of her, taking one last moment to examine the war that was playing out on her electronic HUD.

She glanced back in the direction they’d come from and switched to her UWB transmitter.

“The Titans have landed.”

Then she jumped in after her team.

*****

“I’m seeing it, but I do not believe it.”

Roberts shot the speaker a light scowl but didn’t say anything because he was having trouble believing what he was seeing himself. The Titans had landed on the target, completing the first stage of their mission, and honestly, he’d had his doubts about it since he’d been briefed. It was practically a hail Mary to his mind; the idea of dropping an assault team on an enemy ship and having them
break
in was just insane.

That said, if they could pull it off, it would be the coup of the war, so he was willing to try if they were.

Watching through several dozen seconds of delay at maximum magnification, he and the rest of the bridge watched the Titans bust open the access port they’d identified and drop through.

Phase one complete. Good hunting, Lieutenant.

“All right, they’re doing their jobs, it’s time for us to do ours!” he called. “Start calculating firing solutions. We’ll be coming out of this chop in just a few seconds. Let’s come out fighting!”

“Aye aye, sir!”

*****

“Move your asses!” Sorilla called as she led the charge down the evacuating corridor. The ship was oddly silent, other than the whistling wind of atmo tearing past them and hemorrhaging out into space through the hole they’d torn open.