The Valhalla Call (Warrior's Wings) (4 page)

Every man, woman, and child on the planet could literally have vanished at that point and it wouldn’t have mattered. The Earth was on a rollercoaster ride to the hot place, with the most pessimistic views stating that eventually it would be no more than a second Venus in the solar system.

That was when governments finally admitted that there as a problem and it had to be resolved. It cost a particularly large fortune, but the price paid had paved the way for the future in ways no one expected. In order to reverse the warming trend, it was necessary to undertake an
active
attempt to cool the planet. They had been so far beyond merely passive attempts to stop causing harm that it wasn’t funny by that point.

It was a second great space race, one that dwarfed the Apollo project. Eleven nations all cooperating on the first stage of Earth’s weather control network. Stage one was a series of satellites in geo-sync orbit with massive reflectors, intended to direct some of the sunlight away from key areas. They started at the poles, keeping solar energy from melting the ice that remained and encouraging the formation of more. That alone dropped the average temperature by over a full degree in just five years.

Cleaning up the mess on Earth itself took a lot longer, but in the end, they’d managed to pull it off. Most nations had built up deep undercurrents of trust and community in the process, and it wasn’t long before the Solarian Organization formed. Every space-capable nation on Earth, except for the Chinese, were members, as were a great many of those who weren’t space-capable.

The Solarian Organization went far beyond “United Nations in Space.” It was in many ways a nation unto itself. It oversaw colonies once they reached a point of self-sustainability and requested membership, provided for the common defense, and many other functions besides.

Of course, that was what brought them to the point they found themselves at now.

Moving out into the Universe—well, the local parts of the Galaxy, in truth—they eventually ran flat into another group that was expanding in the opposite direction. A lot of people wondered if war was in the nature of humanity, but Sorilla didn’t. She knew that war was in the nature of life.

All living things waged war all the time, with every breath and every motion.

Plants gobbled up resources, strangling out their competition, while insects arrayed themselves in battles with a truly mind boggling variety of weapons. Animals hunted each other, many killed even for sport or pure pleasure, while some species even raped others not of their own kind. The natural world was bloody in tooth and claw, and humans were the top of the heap.

Until now, perhaps.

Out there, they’d perhaps finally met their match.

The unstoppable force of humanity
not
coming up against an immovable object, but rather another unstoppable force. One of them would have to give. It was her job, hers and Ton’s, and many others, to make sure that it wasn’t humanity that gave.

“So watch out for the stocky grey guys,” she said seriously. “They’re not to be underestimated. They don’t use WMDs as far as we know, but they are skilled and they are
precise
.”

Ton nodded. “Don’t worry, Sister, I know this. They nailed us fair and square on Hayden the first time. Won’t give them a chance to do that again.”

“Good,” she said. “The Ghoulies, they’re nasty but only because of the sheer firepower they have. Keep that always in the back of your mind and you’ll be okay. They’re predictable: When they encounter a problem, they use their tech like a hammer.”

“Right.” Ton nodded. “And every problem looks like a nail.”

“Bingo.”

“What about the Deltas?” Ton asked.

“Don’t know much about them, never seen them myself.” Sorilla shrugged.

“Yeah, but you’ve read every contact report, haven’t you?” He smiled as he asked.

Sorilla shrugged but conceded the point.

“Honestly, you’re better off asking Fleet there. They’re the ones who’ve contacted those, but they feel like regular army to me. Maybe Navy, something like that,” she said. “They’re competent, obviously trained well, skilled flyers, and disciplined. Those are the sort that win wars, Ton. The Delta’s are the most dangerous of the bunch.”

“Really?” he asked, surprised.

“Hell yes. Operators are scalpels. We are precision instruments that are best used to eliminate very finite targets. The Deltas?” Sorilla shook her head. “My read is that they’re regular army. Those are the guys who take land and control it.”

“Fair enough,” Ton said, nodding. “I can see that.”

“What we don’t know, and what we really need to find out,” Sorilla said, “is just how long the enemy supply chain is. If they’re working a conventional force into this equation, then we’re going to have to figure out what kind of logistics challenges they’re facing, because
those
are the points we need to hit.”

Ton smiled. “And they have you taking classes with cadets.”

“They also have me teaching classes to Colonels, Ton,” Sorilla grinned back. “This is one of the things I know. Granted, I usually work on a smaller scale than this.”

“Sister, we
all
usually work on a smaller scale than this,” Ton told her flatly.

She snorted, amused by his tone more than his words. He was right, of course. The sheer logistics of maintaining any sort of war at distances measured in hundreds of light years was staggering. She’d actually gone looking for any treatise written on the subject, in the theoretical realms of course, and found a few. Most were of the general opinion that it wasn’t really possible.

So far as Sorilla was concerned, they’d been proven wrong, but some of their points were very well made.

Supply lines were all but impossible to secure, even if you controlled every jump point right up to the last one, because no matter what, you were still going to have to transport all your material, soldiers, and whatever else, across an intervening space that light itself took significant time to cross. Ambushes were incredibly easy to set up, especially as you got closer and closer to the enemy homeworld. Your supply difficulties would increase geometrically, while the enemy’s would decrease by the same degree.

At some point, no matter how much more technology you had over your enemy, you would lose. Even sticks and stones could eventually wear down a force armed with automatic weapons and ships. Transporting even light armor across the stars was a mind boggling task, and when you got it to where you were going, there was no guarantee that it would operate effectively in the environment you had to fight in. The Cougars and other armored units on Hayden were a perfect example of that; the otherwise quite competent light-armored units were bogged down to inutility by the terrain rather than their opposing numbers.

Taking a world was easy. Destroying it? Childs play. Holding it, however, was a promethean task if there was an indigenous people in place willing to die for their freedoms.

There were ample points in Earth’s own history to show it. Afghanistan, Vietnam, Iraq, France, and many others just in modern history. In fact, she was only really aware of one true example where the territory taken by the superior force was permanently
held
, and that was the United States of America.

That one was a cheat, however, because that battle was won before it truly began. Before the first settlers arrived on American shores, a massive plague, or series of plagues, had essentially annihilated the indigenous peoples. They were all but extinct, and even then they put up a fight that lasted well into the twentieth century before it was finally ended. Had the Native American peoples maintained the numbers they existed in just a couple decades before the European settlers arrived, they would most certainly have sent the invaders packing in short order.

That was what worried her most, Sorilla realized.

There was historical evidence there that if you wanted to hold land for your own nation, you almost
had
to commit genocide to do it. Anything less, and sooner or later you’d lose your grip.

It was one lesson she fervently hoped that the enemy hadn’t learned from their own history.

“Well,” Ton shrugged, “I hope those colonels are listening when you talk, Ell Tee.”

Sorilla smiled wanly. Sometimes she wondered.

“A few of them do,” she sighed. “There’s one prick who I swear is watching porn on his implants.”

Ton laughed. “There’s always one in the room doing that.”

“I’m just glad that none of them have processors like mine,” Sorilla admitted. “Otherwise they’d be watching me teach naked. Not that I have a lot of hang-ups, you know, but there’s a big difference between on-mission and some jackass recording me for future private viewings.”

“Your gear is that good?” Ton asked, skeptical.

She just nodded. “Yeah. The proc is amazing, never had anything like it before, not in my head or on my desk.”

“Damn,” Ton rumbled.

“It’s a quantum processor, able to work on multiple problems at once,” she told him. “Not sure when they’ll clear them for general use, but one look at someone with my implants and the software they jacked into my skull breaks down everything you’re wearing, carrying, or hiding and gives me a heads up. It’s distracting as hell here on Earth too. Since I have access to military and civilian databases, the damn thing keeps trying to do facial recognition searches. I keep it running in the background most of the time, but the AI still flags anyone important and alerts me.”

Ton snorted into his drink. “That doesn’t sound so useful, you realize?”

“Yeah, well, I’m pretty sure that I got a lot of alpha software,” Sorilla bitched mildly. “I have access to recode, thankfully, and a full SDK for it all, but it takes months of work just to wade through the crap code they put together in the first place.”

“You’re checked out to mess with your own implants?” Ton asked, both surprised and impressed. Few people were code-qualified for basic stuff, let alone tinkering with their own shit while was in their bodies. “Damn, girl, you’ve got some real skills.”

Sorilla waved it off casually. “Think about it for a second, Ton. Would you honestly let them sink alpha-tested hardware and software into your head and
not
get admin access to it?”

Ton cringed, but nodded. “Fair ‘nuff.”

“There’s a reason why I was selected for the new implants too,” she said, “beyond the fact that I was laid up in the hospital at the time and was due for an upgrade anyway. I trained with the first gen stuff years ago and helped devise the requirements for SF people in the field. I know the infrastructure like the back of my hand, and I’ve waded through that particular jungle more than once already.”

“Any tricks in there that would be useful to me?”

Sorilla shrugged. “Not as much as you might think, unfortunately. Most of the software is still heavily orientated around human enemies, so the estimates and projections you’d get would be way off. Some of the alpha software is incredible, but it really only works through advanced statistical models and a really deep database. We don’t have enough on the aliens to do that for them yet.”

“Too bad,” Ton said as he sliced off a bit of steak and chewed thoughtfully. “What can you get out of it when you look at me?”

Sorilla smirked, her eyes glowing faintly as she brought her HUD fully online. It only took her a second before she started to speak.

“You went out last night, night on the town with the boys,” she said, tilting her head slightly as her expression grew quizzical. “To a club, I think. Yeah, must have been, but it was a private club. Strippers were involved. You spent…”

“Whoa!” Ton threw up his hand, palm out to stop her. “Enough. How in the hell?”

Sorilla grinned, her implants automatically scanning his hand, prints, and bone configurations while she shrugged and answered. “You drank three shots, probably rum from the composition of the chemicals in your sweat. It was watered down booze, though, something I’ve never known a Marine to do at home. You and your friends were smoking cigars last night, which means it had to be a private club. No public place in the country will let you light up a stogy, not even a Havana.”

He glared sourly at her. “And the strippers?”

“You’ve got significant cocaine traces on your fingers,” she answered, “but no signs of use in your eyes, exhaled breath, and such. Best guess is you were handling a lot of low denomination dollar bills.”

“Jesus,” he swore, pushing back from the table. “You got all that at a glance?”

“The raw scans, yeah. It all has to put it together though, so it really comes down to the user,” she answered. “Novice users would be hit with a massive information overload. It’s one of the big reasons why this kit isn’t standard issue. There’s not many people with the education and data processing mentality needed to make use of it.”

“I’ll bet,” he said sourly, shaking his head. “Didn’t know I was sitting across the table from a damned Sherlock Holmes.”

“Holmes did it without a database helping out,” Sorilla smiled.

“So it told you about the strippers?” Ton asked skeptically. “Or just listed the coke trace?”

“Listed the cocaine trace,” Sorilla admitted.

“Yeah, like I said,
Holmes
,” he grinned. “You’re one scary lady.”

“You best keep that in mind before you try embarrassing me in front of the kiddies again, Ton,” she told him with a mildly sour expression.

“Tell you what, shoot me your code revisions for the basic implant set and we’ll call it a deal,” he offered with a grin.

“Done,” she accepted instantly.

They both grinned, knowing that she’d have given him the coding freely anyway, but it gave them a nice excuse for establishing some boundaries.

*****

USV Barry Sadler

Alder and Bitte stared at the screens in the darkened cockpit of the Courier Class starship; they’d killed every power source they could. There was very little data on the enemy’s electromagnetic scanning capability, but now wasn’t the time to take any chances.