The Valhalla Call (Warrior's Wings) (31 page)

She ignored the bodies, some still kicking, of the Alpha aliens getting sucked past her. They weren’t her concern and, moreover, they were enemy combatants. Still, deep down Sorilla felt a twisted part of her gut rebelling against the death. Not because they were going to die, no, but because of
how
.

That’s just no way to go.

The team was in full sprint, bolting as fast as the eighty-ton war machines could run. Sorilla saw the big bulkhead door lowering down ahead of her and leaned into the run, pumping the hydraulic and pneumatics of her machine just a little harder. She threw herself into a slide and caught the big door as it dropped, her machine’s mechanics whining and groaning under the sudden weight.

“Get through!” she growled, getting the knees of the mech under her as she shoved the bulkhead door up a foot.

The team bolted through, rifles leading the way as she held the door. When they were all through, Sorilla shifted her mech inside and dropped the door. It slammed shut with a resounding thud that could be felt even in their insulated bots.

The rush of wind had stopped and they could tell that they were now in a pressurized section. There was no sign of any movement, so they took a moment to get their shit together. Sorilla got fully back to the feet of her mech, unslinging her rifle as she brought up the schematic of the ship she’d been issued. The map was reasonably detailed, but as it was compiled from hulls that had been blown to hell by nuclear bunker busters, there were some missing chunks that she and her team would have to fill in on their own.

“Intel puts the command deck just ahead, but we’re three decks above main engineering and we need to secure both,” she said. “Lieutenant.”

“Ma’am?” Second Lt. Marshal Stern spoke up.

“Take your squad, secure engineering,” Sorilla ordered the SEAL officer. “Alpha is with me, we’ll take the command deck. Try not to blow the core, Lieutenant. I’d like to live through this.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the Navy sailor replied. “Bravo, fall out.”

Bravo team split off, stalking down the hall while Sorilla took quick stock of her team’s location. “All right. Let’s go.”

“Why the hell are their corridors this big? The damn Ghoulies are smaller than we are,” Bean growled as they started toward the predicted area of the command deck.

“You know as well as I do, Beans,” Sorilla told him. “So keep your gear wired and your eyes peeled. There are Golems walking these halls.”

That quieted “Frank and Beans” down, and no one else felt a need to make any more comments as they unslung their primary weapons and started stomping down the hall. The floor, the walls, everything was a heavy ceramic that they didn’t recognize, but it absorbed sound and vibrations well enough that while they certainly weren’t silent. The eighty-ton machines weren’t rocking the house down the way they had back on the Legendary and the Socrates.

Sorilla fought down the uneasy feeling that had plagued her practically since she had been given this mission, forcing her mind to stay on task. She hated the feeling of being out of her depth, but that was the nagging doubt that wouldn’t leave the back of her mind. She was Special Forces, a proud member of the Green Berets, but her specialty wasn’t assault. She was a trainer, cultural expert, language expert, and a great many other things, but leading an assault on a ship was a Marine’s job.

Ton would love this.

The times were changing, however, that much was clear. The Solari Organization didn’t have room, not yet at least, for specialties quite like hers. They needed people who could adapt to the new state of affairs, and she wasn’t going to be left behind.

The squad hit a branching corridor just a few dozen meters down, and they paused as they checked their map.

“This ain’t on the map,” Frank said, unnecessarily. “Which direction, El-Tee?”

Sorilla looked down both branches of the Y-shaped corridor, mapping them with LIDAR and overlaying the new data across her intel-issued maps.

“Left hand side,” she decided, “curves back in the direction we want to go about fifty meters up. Move.”

They moved out again, Bean taking point while Corporal Shu took up the drag position. Sorilla stayed in the middle of the pack, eyes on the map and her HUD. With the intelligence being
imperfect
, the job had just become quite a bit more difficult, but she supposed that was what they were paid for.

Only a few meters along their new path, they found just how right they were.

“Golems!” Sorilla called, her rifle sweeping up and firing as the lumbering form entered view.

The heavy cannon boomed as she took a knee, clearing room for Bean to step up behind her and open fire over her head. Sorilla’s hairs stood on end as she felt the attack before she saw it, throwing herself and her machine forward onto its belly as she continued to fire. Above her a ripple warped the air, light, and all as a gravity pulse flashed past.

The enemy blast missed Bean, slamming into the machine beside him and throwing the eighty ton Titan back to the ground. He and Sorilla redoubled their fire, shots raining down from both sides as the engagement turned into a mad minute.

“Cover me!” She sent, dropping her rifled cannon over her shoulder before slapping both steel shod hands of her Titan down hard onto the floor.

The machine leapt to her command, surging up from the prone position and getting its feet braced under it. Sorilla didn’t even realize she was tapping the internal gravity core as she lunged, sending the Titan surging forward at eighty gravities of acceleration. The Titan’s metal shod feet dragged, lighting sparks in her trail as she slammed into the enemy group.

She threw her feet forward, sliding into their legs, and kicked hard enough to shatter the Golem’s legs. As it topped, she drew her Titan’s molecular blade and stabbed up into the falling body, finishing the Golem as she twisted it around and rolled on top.

Shots were raining down around her position, mostly friendly fire, but Sorilla didn’t have time to be overly concerned. She got her machine back to its feet, well inside her enemies comfortable fighting range with their pulse weapons. She twisted, slamming her shoulder into the shoulder of the closest Golem and used the impact of the two massive forces to dislodge its weapon.

As the gravity weapons clattered to the ground she casually shoulder the next one into a wall and pinned it there as a rain of depleted uranium slugs tore through the rest, her team running up to catch her. Sorilla swiftly stabbed the blade on her Titan’s hand three times into the one she had pinned, and then stepped aside to let it crumble to the floor.

“Jesus, El Tee,” Bean growled, skidding to a stop, “Save some for us next time!”

“Squad check,” She said, not bothering to respond.

Her HUD answered for her, the telemetry on Scott’s Titan and armor gone completely red. Taking the enemy ship had just incurred its first casualty.

She knew that it was unlikely to be the last.

*****

USV Legendary

“We’re detecting gravity events all around us, sir.”

Roberts grimaced. “Well at least we know that the GPDs are effective at disrupting their Valve.”

“We’re approaching the end of the GPD warp field, Captain. They’ll have a clear shot at us in twenty seconds.”

“And we’ll have a clear shot at them,” Roberts said. “Lock firing solutions.”

“Firing solutions locked.”

“Send to all ships,” he ordered. “Fire as we exit the field, load the rest of our GPDs, and stand by to launch chaff.”

“Aye, sir. Signal sent…all ships confirm.”

“Then open fire.”

“Aye aye, Captain, firing as she bears!”

*****

Sorilla’s Titan paused, fist coming up to signal the stop.

It was an automatic gesture, one used to stealth when you didn’t want to talk and one that was more than a little silly when you were piloting an eighty-ton war machine. Still, it was automatic and it got the point across. The team stopped behind her as she gripped the big rifle, actually
feeling
the trigger under her finger as she leveled it on the turn ahead of her.

“What is it, El-Tee?”

“Hold on,” Sorilla answered. “Not sure. I felt something.”

The two Titans behind her fanned out, clearing their fields of fire as she edged forward. Behind them, the others turned to cover the rear. She reached out with the off hand of the Titan, gently touching the wall.

The construction design seemed intended specifically to dampen vibrations and limit sound, but she could feel a tingle run up her arm through the circuits of the Titan. Sorilla checked the audio feeds, then secured her grip on the rifle and began moving forward again.

“Stay sharp,” she ordered. “I don’t know what it is, but something is making the ship shudder.”

“Hammers from Valkyrie, El-Tee?”

“Maybe,” Sorilla answered. “Didn’t think they’d fire that close. Doesn’t matter, we need to get to the bridge. Move.”

The team moved.

Thirty-five-foot-tall, eighty-ton war machines didn’t move quietly, but they did move with authority. Sorilla led her team in around the curve in the corridor and got them back on track according to the intel map they were working from. The command deck, best as anyone had been able to determine, was just another two hundred meters ahead of them, and the corridor was heading straight for it.

Sorilla threw her machine into the wall an instant before the gravity alarm sounded, barely avoiding a pulse blast that continued up and exploded against the ceiling.

She tracked the blast faster than her computer did, and realizing that it came from near her feet, she reacted without thinking. She reacted much as she would when dealing with a nasty dog that had gotten in under her guard and too close to use a gun on: She reared back and then
stomped
the threat into the ground. That move complete, Sorilla twisted and stepped back, clearing the range as she brought her rifle to bear on the smeared deck.

Only then did she notice that she had something she didn’t really want to think about stuck to the boot of her Titan. She took a few seconds, scraped it off with her rifle butt, then looked back at her others and did her damnedest to ignore the roiling in her gut.

“Squishy,” she said laconically, gesturing ahead. “Move out.”

The squad followed her without a word, each purposely ignoring the crushed body of the Ghoulie she had flicked aside.

“Don’t mess with the El-Tee,” was a fair approximation of what each were thinking as they trooped down the corridor and got back on mission.

*****

“Gravity event!”

“Deploy countermeasures! Hard to port!”

“Aye, Captain! Coming to port!”

“Countermeasures deployed!”

Roberts looked over the tactical display, leaning into the table it was mounted on. The enemy ships were pressing forward, but their Valves had been temporarily neutralized and so far the aliens hadn’t shown much beyond that super weapon in their arsenal.

That didn’t mean they had no arrows left in the quiver, however, so the squadron was taking a high-aggression stance and firing almost without pause.

The first of their Hammers had already slammed into the enemy line, but the Ghoulie ships were almost impossibly tough. The high relativistic projectiles slammed into the enemy ships, holing right through them with gravity lens effects to magnify the strikes, but the enemy just kept right on coming.

“Radiation climbing! Gamma radiation, neutron particles! We’re redlining our armor!”

“Is it directional?” Roberts demanded.

“No, sir, ambient field! I don’t know where it’s coming from…” the scanner technician said. “Holy hell! The Olympus, sir!”

“Shift screen!” Roberts ordered. The screen flickered and showed the USV Olympus.

For a moment everything looked normal, and he was about to ask what she’d yelled about, then he saw it. The ceramic plates on the Olympus’s nose were glowing red, and the depression at the front of her prow was lit up with a light that was unnatural.

“Get the Olympus on coms! Tell them to maneuver!” he ordered.

“No response! Nothing on the network either, sir! We’re completely cut off from them.”

The ship on the screen began to explode. At first it seemed to be from an external attack, but Roberts recognized quickly that it was her reactive armor plates detonating. Behind those blasts, the metal hull of the Olympus was bubbling, turning molten again, and that was when he realized that everyone on board was long since gone.

“My god, what the hell?” he whispered in shock.

“Some kind of particle beam, Captain, it has to be!” Lt. Commander Bridger snapped. “We’re just picking up the backwash of it, and it’s almost overwhelming our armor!”

So this is what they’ve been holding back? Their real weapon, not just the construction tool they use the Valve as.

Unfortunately, recognition did not impart any inspiration on how to handle the weapon, and with the admiral’s orders unchanged, there was only one response he could make.

“All ahead flank! Begin evasive maneuvering patterns! Continue firing for effect!”

*****

On the alien ship, Sorilla paused again, lifting the big hand of the Titan again.

“Anyone feel that?” she asked aloud, eyes flicking side to side as she tried to spot whatever it was that was bothering her.

“Yeah, I think so, El-Tee. Felt almost seismic.”

Sorilla nodded, policing her rifle as she looked around. “Anyone have directional readings on that?”

“Negative, El-Tee. Omnidirectional, low frequency.”

“Damn it,” Sorilla hissed. “Same here.” She considered for a moment, then shook herself, lowering her weapon to the ready. “All right, keep moving.”

She took point again, moving forward.

The plans assembled by intelligence indicated that they were almost to the command deck, she just couldn’t shake the feeling that she as being watched.

Of
course
we’re being watched. If we were on the Legendary, they’d have full body scans of all of us by now. There’s no way they don’t know we’re coming. So, where are they going to hit us?