Prologue

The rock screamed like a freight train as it entered the atmosphere of the planet, lighting a trail of fire through the skies that could been seen for thousands of kilometers in all directions. The sensor network around the planet didn’t detect it until then and were in a state of near panic as they tracked and analyzed the object, seeking to identify it and gauge its threat to the world below.

It was less than twenty meters in diameter, a chunk of rock with an iron core. Impervious to conventional defensive measures. Those manning the sensors determined in seconds that it would shrug off all but a gravetic compression wave. That was considered, but as the final trajectory came in, the option was shelved.

It tore through the atmosphere, slamming into the ocean water, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest community. The wave it kicked up would be troublesome but less so than dealing with the fallout of detonating it with a compression singularity. The crash site was logged and an observation craft dispatched to determine that nothing untoward had hitched a ride with the falling star, but more attention was placed into determining how it had escaped early warning systems and whether any of its friends might be coming on its trail.

In the ocean water, a hundred meters down and sinking rapidly, the cooling rock was boiling the water away from the sheer heat of its surface, a trail of bubbles leading from it to the eruption it had left on the surface. It struck with the force of a nuclear weapon, yet so far from any targets of interest that even the commanders of the war division soon put it out of mind, turning their focus to other matters.

As those thoughts were first filtering through paranoid minds, however, the rock was reaching one thousand meters below the surface of the ocean, and it was changing. It cracked wide open from the rapid cooling, spilling a green fluid into the waters as movement could be seen within the now clearly hollow sphere.

Six figures emerged from the crack, pulling equipment after them as they paused and looked around. They were in black armor, all but invisible in the deep water, with no lights to attract enemy or predator of the ocean’s depths. They didn’t have much time, so they went immediately to work, pulling material from the darkness of the hole they had emerged from, each passing second dragging them deeper into the ocean depths.

Finally, after several minutes of work in the inky darkness of the ocean, they had retrieved the sealed boxes of gear and, perhaps more importantly, the UNAVS (Underwater NAVigation Systems) they were going to need to get to their target.

After a moment of orientation, they turned in unison and kicked off into the inky darkness, the UNAVS whirring slowly and silently on stored power as they pulled miniature supply trains behind them.

They didn’t surface for several hours and over two hundred kilometers. Finally coming upon a coral reef, or what was determined to be as close to coral as there was on this alien world, they paused to confirm intelligence reports on the land mass. When they found the beach ahead of them was indeed empty, the six figures anchored their supplies to the coral reef then rose from the sea. Water cascaded from their armor, beading on the slick surface as they walked from the depths like monsters of legend, swinging their infantry assault weapons across the beach, covering the light jungle beyond in case something had slipped past their sensors.

Clearing the beach took several minutes, then they collapsed just inside the jungle line and the first of them pulled off the armored helm he wore.

“That sucked,” he pronounced, not for the first time, taking a breath of unrecycled air for the first time in several weeks.

Corporal Jardiens was a big man, probably six-three, even without the armor. With it, he towered over the rest of the squad at almost seven feet tall.

A smaller figure pulled the helm off as he spoke and shook her head, glaring at him. “Can it, Jardiens.”

The big guy looked down at the five-foot-eleven—in armor—figure and ducked his head. “Sorry, Top.”

Master Sergeant Sorilla Aida shook her head, trying to work a kink out of her neck muscles as she looked around the jungle. It looked like any jungle she’d been in during her career, across a total of three worlds and seven continents. At almost forty, Sorilla was the Old Woman of the team, both by virtue of age and experience. In a culture of rejuvenation and life extension treatments, however, she was barely considered out of diapers by some standards.

It was funny how your age was relative to the work you did.

Dion Jardiens was a nineteen-year-old Canadian trooper who’d been slated for recruitment into Joint Task Force Two until the Allied Fleet picked his name out of the proverbial hat and pulled him for SARD (Solari Advanced Reconnaissance Detachment) training and duty. The opposite end of the spectrum and, as far as Sorilla was concerned, in serious need of wet naps and a fulltime nanny. The other four weren’t much older, for that matter.

Lieutenant Joshua Crow, Sorilla’s latest CO, was a United States Navy SEAL, or had been until he was tapped for advanced training in the SARD units like the rest of them. She’d served with him for a while, now, though and was satisfied that he knew his work. Not that he had always known it, but Crow was a man who owned up to mistakes and didn’t repeat them. He pulled his helm off as well, nodding to Sorilla as he ran a hand through his soaked hair. “Some ride, huh?”

The men chuckled, and Sorilla grunted in grim amusement. “I’ve had worse.”

Yeah, they all knew that she’d had worse.

Corporal Mackenzie, standing six-three in armor, dropped his helm to the ground along with the others, breathing deep droughts of fresh air as he lost the smile briefly. He was a former member of His Majesty’s Special Air Service, drawn from active service for SARD training along with the rest only six months earlier. “Didn’t hit near as hard as the simulations.”

They nodded as the last two dropped their helms in the dirt, each taking the requisite deep breaths of the first free air they’d had in days. Corporals Able and Korman were former members of the United States Marine Detachment One and Israel’s Shaytet-13, respectively.

“The gravity valve worked precisely as planned,” Korman said, taking deep and even breaths. “Or well within optimal parameters, at least.”

The small wiry man, his head and neck looking out of place in the relatively bulky suit he wore, smiled wryly. “Congratulations. We rode the rock and survived.”

Another soft round of chuckles passed between them as Lieutenant Crow tapped his hands lightly together, catching their attention. “Korman, confirm that we’re on target. Top, take Jardiens and do a quick recon while the rest of us drag the gear up.”

“Right.” Sorilla nodded, clapping the larger man beside her on the shoulder. “Come on, kid, let’s make sure there’s nothing out here looking to eat us.”

The big Canadian chuckled as they picked up their helms and took one more breath of fresh air before sealing themselves back in their protective cocoons. “Anything out here tries to eat me better be ready for a belly ache, Top.”

Sorilla laughed dryly. “If it can get its jaws open wide enough to swallow that fat head of yours, I think its belly will be the least of our worries.”

She checked her M190, a compact variant of the standard-issue M112 assault rifle, making sure that the magazine had a full charge and that there was a round in the chamber, then nodded to the jungle. “Let’s go, kid.”

****

The area was clear, and by the time they got back, the gear they were going to need for their mission was spread out on the ground just inside the edge of the jungle, waiting for them.

Crow glanced up as Sorilla and Jardiens appeared from the jungle. “Anything?”

Sorilla shook her head briefly, walking forward to where the lieutenant was looking over a digital ink display with the map they’d been issued for the mission.

“We’re on target,” he said, not looking up again. “Came in right here, and it looks like we’re about here.” He pointed to a small island chain near one of the planet’s large continental landmasses. “Give or take.”

Sorilla heard the distaste in his voice and couldn’t help but smile slightly. She knew why it was there, of course. Modern military units were used to knowing precisely where they were at all times. All human worlds had a network of positioning satellites that could pinpoint a person to within a couple inches on three axes. This wasn’t, however, a human-controlled world. It belonged to the Ghoulies, the first alien race humanity had happened to encounter in its almost three hundred years of space faring.

Sorilla was the first human to come face to face with a Ghoulie, and she’d been the one to name them from the human side of things. They were similar in many ways to the legendary ‘Greys’ of Earth culture, though not nearly as spindly and fragile-looking as those were reported to be. Some people even thought that they were the source of the grey legend, but that was highly unlikely in Sorilla’s considered opinion, since the Ghoulies would have taken Earth in a heartbeat if they’d found it three hundred years ago.

Not that the little bastards knew where Earth was now.

They’d come close, too close in fact. The war had opened five years earlier with the destruction of the colony on Hayden’s world and a total decimation of its population. Sorilla had been inserted there just after the initial attack and found only a few thousand survivors of the planet’s pre-invasion populace of nearly eighty grand.

Since then, the Ghoulies had pushed the war hard, destroying one human world outright when they found it wasn’t to their personal liking. They had the advantage of superior technology and numbers, ripping through the few armed human ships like snarling beasts through a flock of butterflies.

Humanity had a few advantages of its own, however. The first was strategic depth. From the outer worlds to Earth, there were over thirty light-years, which couldn’t be easily crossed, even with the Ghoulies’ technology. The fact that Earth was hidden amongst several hundred other stars within the sixty-light-year sphere also kept the war from ending abruptly in the first year.

Earth had some pretty nasty little minds as well, however, and occasionally even a little luck. New ships were being turned out within eight months of the loss of Task Force Two over Hayden, a record in anyone’s book as far as Sorilla knew, and thanks to a real Sierra Hotel Captain, they even captured some of the key enemy tech.

Especially their gravity manipulation stuff, which was the only way the Rock Rider team had been able to survive insertion via the equivalent of a nuclear detonation. The carefully constructed meteor they’d rode in had a gravity valve engineered into it, the first application of the captured technology to be used tactically so far, which had allowed the team to survive the explosive crash into the water.

“We’ve got three days to get eyes on,” Sorilla said, glancing at the map pensively. “Then the Fleet is going to jump in and start hammering this hole.”

Crow drew a line across the map to their target location. “This is where recon probes say the target is. We should be able to hump it over there in a day…day and a half. Final approach is going to be the pain.”

Sorilla just nodded. “Two hundred klicks in a day…and the last two hundred meters in the next day or so. Plenty of time.”

“Precisely, Top,” Crow said with a confident smile. “Let’s ruck up and un-ass this place.”

****

The march inland wasn’t to be mistaken for a walk in the park, but the defenses of the world they were on were all aimed outward, and now that they had penetrated within those defenses, there seemed to be very little focus on patrolling the planet itself.

They moved fast, pushing through the jungles and the equatorial heat by virtue of experience, training, and equipment. Their armor kept them moving solidly through the first day and night; the small group were eyes on after twenty hours of solid, fast marching. The target was over two hundred kilometers inland, located in a river valley carved out of the surrounding ground over thousands of years.

They stopped just over twenty klicks from the enemy base, eyes carefully noting the well-lit area as they dug into the side of the mountain.

“What do you think, Top?”

Sorilla Aida glanced over as Lieutenant Crow crawled into position beside her. His face was masked, as was hers, by the ominous black helm of their carbon nano-mesh powered armor. They relied entirely on the external sensors of the armor to see and hear; their dangerously fragile senses were entirely shielded and filtered by the sophisticated equipment that surrounded them.

“It’s going to be a tough nut to crack,” Sorilla replied, turning back to the base in the distance, her parallax ranging systems giving her a readout to the centimeter. “This is much more sophisticated than what the Ghoulies installed on Hayden.”

Crow nodded, the exaggerated head and chest movement of a power-armored soldier. “See anything you recognize?”

Sorilla zoomed in on the scene until she felt so close she could reach out and touch the Ghoulie guards as they occasionally appeared from the base buildings or walked the perimeter. There weren’t as many on perimeter duty as she’d expect to find on a human base, but then, by all indications, there weren’t the same cultural and national schisms in the Ghoulies as there were in human society.

It was possible that somewhere, out in the depths of the galaxy, there were Ghoulie systems under different governing bodies, but so far every contact had proved to be solidly under the control of one central government. Like the Ghoulies, human intelligence officers had not yet had any luck locating the enemy homeworld.

After five years, no one had figured out so much as how to talk to the mouthless bastards, and as far as anyone knew, they hadn’t figured out how to talk to human prisoners either. A situation which led to extremely good operational security on missions, but absolutely no chance of a negotiated peace. Someone would have to crack that puzzle eventually, Sorilla figured, or the results were going to be beyond ugly, but that job wasn’t hers and it wasn’t now.

“A few things,” she said, still looking over the base in close zoom. “Ghoulies don’t use tethers, the grav-valves give them access to space from any point…but they do have valve emplacements they use as mass drivers and weapons. I count five from here.”

“Five?” Crow didn’t sound happy, not that she blamed him.

One of the things had successfully interdicted over eighty percent of attempts to penetrate their beachhead on Hayden and had wiped out Sorilla’s entire Green Beret insertion team. Unlike conventional weapons emplacements, the gravity valves didn’t have blind spots. They could shoot right through the planet if they chose, blowing a ship out of orbit on the far side without affecting the world in the slightest.

“You got it, L.T.,” Sorilla sighed. “They’re built into the valley walls around the base, probably as far out as they can be put and still feed off the base generator.”

“We’ll have to take them out,” Crow said grimly.

“Let’s take the reactor instead, sir,” Sorilla suggested, “blow it if we have to.”

Crow grimaced under his helm, “Was intel…?”

“Yes, sir.” Sorilla highlighted an image from her scan and shot it over to his armor computer.

Crow looked at the playback, watching the building as the picture zoomed in on a window that was more of a slit until all he could see was black. Then the computer enhanced the image, drawing vector lines through the shadows and lightening the image until, finally, it finished and he found himself staring at a human face.

“PUCs.” He sighed, nodding. “Well, we knew they were taking prisoners.”

Sorilla sighed along with him, both glad to see the face and wishing it hadn’t been there. PUC, the military terminology for Person Under Control, was the modern term for what used to be called a Prisoner of War. Suffice to say, being ‘Pucked’ wasn’t a good term in the modern military.

Fleeters had found evidence that the Ghoulies were taking prisoners years earlier, bodies missing from ship hulks, evidence of colonists taken from Ares, a Mars-type world that had been destroyed by Ghoulie bombardment when discovered. Some infantry teams had found bodies of prisoners in captured bases much like the one they were now overlooking, all apparently killed within mere hours or less of the base being overrun by human troops.

The Ghoulies didn’t believe in giving up their prisoners, not alive at any rate.

Fleet intel had let drop that this world, its official human designation some insanely long-winded array of numbers and letters, was a central clearing house for human PUCs. If they were right, there could be upwards of a couple hundred human prisoners in the valley below them, or more, and that was what brought the newly assembled SARD Rock Riders team there.

In two days, the Fleet was going to jump in with their gun tubes blazing, and when that happened, the lives of those boys and girls down there weren’t going to be worth a damn if they were still ‘Under Control.’ So the team had gambled their lives to get into place to stop just that, betting that the Ghoulies wouldn’t just turn their rock into a momentary singularity under its own full weight, if only because the resulting radiation from the gravity-induced fission explosion would have contaminated the entire continent.

They’d won that bet, and the time was coming to raise the ante or fold the game.

“Get some sleep, Top,” Crow said. “We’re moving in when the sun sets.”

Sorilla nodded, crawling back into the little ditch she’d hallowed out, her assault carbine nestled at her side as she closed down the suit Heads Up Display (HUD) and closed her eyes.

Ante up, she thought, and deal out the cards.

*****

The mixed evening light from the distant white dwarf primary and its larger orange binary were fading when Crow nudged Sorilla awake. She shifted instantly, calling up her HUD as she blinked the sleep from her eyes.

Mackenzie and Able were cleaning their rifles, not that the rugged weapons needed a lot of cleaning. The super conducting carbon fiber barrels that acted as magnetic accelerators didn’t leave residue like the gunpowder cartridges of old, but there were still a few contact leads and the like that should be checked before a fight, just to be safe. A barrel short would ruin a shooter’s day just as surely as a feed jam would have once upon a time.

Both men were superb shooters as well, long gunners from old traditions. Mackenzie claimed he could trace his lineage back to the original Gillie hunters, and Able had been a Force Recon sniper before being tapped for Detachment One and, eventually, SARD. And while the weapons had changed, both men understood the art and profession of the long gun. Sorilla was glad to have them at her back, especially with the heavy firepower of the M-900 ‘rifles’ they carried. The technicality of them being rifles was actually debated in some circles, since the 900s made old-school sniper rifles look like pea shooters at the best of times, but like everything else in this person’s military, they had changed with the times.

Sorilla climbed to her knees as Jardiens slid into position behind her, handfuls of local foliage in his hands. She held still while he stuffed them into straps on her armor left there for that purpose, turning her slick and svelte profile into a ragged and unwieldy one. When he was done, he patted her on the shoulder and she turned around to do the same to him.

The natural Gillies finished, the four members of the door kicker team moved out, leaving their sniper backup in the hills at their back as they began the long approach to the enemy base.

*****

The Ghoulies’ base was something of a mess to her, its angles all wrong, jutting out at strange intervals that made no symmetric sense to the human eye. As she inched closer, though, Sorilla could tell that they had left no real hiding places in the outer perimeter to shelter an encroaching enemy. Floodlights swept the terrain, their frequency leaning heavily into the UV spectrum, and she could make out both mobile and immobile sensor pods dotting the perimeter like buds on a blooming flower.

The place was the equivalent of a modern day fortress, there was no doubt of that.

So, naturally, she found herself belly-down in the mud and the brambles as she crawled up on that fortress, wondering somewhere in the back of her mind where the other members of the team were. Normally they would exist as icons on her HUD, their positions marked clearly for her to see at just a glance, but now they were all running in stealth mode, which meant no radiated emissions, as they pushed their way toward the perimeter on their bellies one inch at a time.

The final approach of just over two hundred meters had taken more than two thirds of the total time since Sorilla and the others had left their camp in the hills. Moving so slowly that their motion would appear to be nothing more than a trick of the wind was a talent and a skill, something one could learn through patience, but it helped to be naturally inclined. She would inch her toes up a bit, then dig them into the soft ground and straighten out, pushing her entire armored body along by those muscles alone, the nano-musculature strings in her armor not actually being built into the toes.

It was long, exhausting, and tension-ridden work. When she spotted a guard on her passive HUD, she froze, focusing on being part of the ground itself, waiting and watching until they passed. The tangle of local branches and leaves jammed into the straps of her armor made her literally part of the ground, hiding her from even the keenest eye if she held still. Sorilla never looked straight at them either, knowing that humans, at least, had an eerie ability to recognize when they were being watched. No one really knew how, whether it was some rudimentary form of telepathy or some way that an observer would give themselves away if they could see their targets, but she wasn’t taking a chance that the Ghoulies wouldn’t be able to do the same thing.

After a guard passed, she would inch forward again, moving that little bit before pausing to take a calming breath and reexamine the area yet again. And then on again, one inch of movement, then a pause to breathe and check the area. Over and over again Sorilla repeated the cycle until she arrived within just a few meters of the perimeter fence, really just a series of sensor posts dug into the ground at ten-meter intervals.

So far, she thought, so good.

She was even ahead of schedule by a couple hours. Sorilla sighed and settled in to wait, not moving a muscle as she formed her own little lump of ground in the open space that had been cut for over two hundred meters all around the base. Patience was a virtue of Special Operations soldiers.

*****

Gilford ‘Gil’ Able, formerly of Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children, kept a close eye on his HUD’s countdown timer as it approached zero hour. He and the Scott had settled nicely into their nests, the long barrels of their M900 rifles the only thing showing out past the cover they’d built up, about fifty meters apart with good converging angles on the base.

Long gun work had evolved continuously since the early days of warfare, to the point where a sniper in the modern forces had to wear more hats than just a concealment specialist and marksman. Like everything else, computers had become integral to the work of the true long gun specialist. At ranges of twenty kilometers, one simply didn’t calculate the ballistics trajectories by eye any longer.

Marksman records for unaided shots were still just under five kilometers, despite superbly accurate and powerful rifles. Able had taken that record himself, just over three years earlier in an international match, and it hadn’t been in any danger of being broken at any time since. Using the liquid lenses that let their scopes be truly compact, built into their armor and rifles both, the two snipers had surveyed the camp almost nonstop during the door kickers’ entire approach.

They’d singled out targets, both mobile and immobile, highlighting them on a shared combat HUD, and proceeded to divide up the targets between them. They split the Ghoulies evenly between them, as much as they could with the little guys moving around and occasionally vanishing inside the base and such. The computers kept track of the movement as much as possible, following mobile targets around so that they didn’t get them mixed up and re-designated as new targets.

As the clock wound down, though, the decisions had all been made, and it was all about the waiting.

“Ten seconds,” Mack said over the tactical network.

Able just tipped his head slightly in the armor, relaying a simple confirmation that he hadn’t dozed off, and watched the clock wind down to the last second. As it reached three, he flipped the safety off his rifle, letting the capacitor charge the weapon to combat readiness. At one, he flipped the fire selector to full automatic, priming the entire magazine as he let out a breath he’d been holding and tightened his finger around the trigger.

The air between Able and Mack was rent by the roar of supersonic explosions as both rifles spat out thirty rounds apiece as fast as they could cycle the action, each heavy slug departing the weapon at Mach four. The weapons slammed back into the snipers’ shoulders, but in their armor they barely felt the mule-like kicks of each round, and within three seconds both their magazines were empty.

They rolled clear of their nests, coming to their knees as one person, the carbon barrels smoking as dust burned off the superheated material. Then they leapt away, vanishing into the treeline even before their bullets had finished crossing the divide.

*****

The twenty-five-millimeter rounds fired from the heavy warfare sniper rifles screamed through the air, guidance fins deploying just moments after they had erupted from the barrels while each kinetic kill round looked ahead with its dedicated sensors for its own preprogrammed target.

The swarm adjusted in midflight, turning and spreading out as they flew true to their targets, and they struck almost five seconds before the sound of their launching reached the base, eighteen enemy soldiers falling in silent deaths as forty-two sensor masts, recon probes, and automated weapon turrets were destroyed in the same moment.

Those few that survived calculated the direction the attack had come from automatically, and the command came down instantly from the control center to respond in kind.

Twenty kilometers away, and halfway up a mountain face, twin explosions roared as the Ghoulies’ gravity valves opened up the full force of gravity on two pockets of dirt barely thirty centimeters in diameter. The resulting nuclear inferno lit up the valley from end to end as four armored figures vaulted the perimeter fence and charged into the base.

The sharp crack of the sonic booms echoed around the valley, joined by the rolling thunder of the nuclear fire just seconds later, but by then no one in the base was listening to the far off sounds at all.

*****

Sorilla landed on her tiptoes, her armor powered to full combat levels as the other three members of the team appeared clearly on her HUD, their IFF transponders lighting up as they moved.

“Top, get the prisoners,” Crow called out. “Take Jardiens. Korman, you’re with me.”

Acknowledgment lights blinked off, their names shifting from red to green on the HUD as each of them acknowledged the orders. Sorilla and Jardiens sprinted across the paved deck of the base, the sheer chaos of the assault keeping the Ghoulies so surprised that the team didn’t even have to fire a single shot before they reached the buildings and pressed up close to the cover.

“Got your six, Top,” Jardiens said coolly as they strode along the edge of the wall, heading for the prisoners’ ‘housing.’

Sorilla didn’t respond. She knew he was there, she could even tell what direction he was pointing as they hit the corner and she paused. She pushed her gun around the corner, watching the window appear on her HUD as the rifle camera lit up and gave her a muzzle-eye-view of the situation.

The rifle bucked lightly, twice, firing subsonic rounds into a pair of Ghoulies who’d come charging hard out of the prisoners’ housing, dropping them in their tracks.

“Two up, two down,” Sorilla said softly. “Clear. Move out.”

Then she moved around the corner, Jardiens tight behind her as they sprinted in long loping strides across the open area to the next building, throwing themselves roughly up against the wall.

“Give me a shot of the inside, Jardiens,” Sorilla told the big Canadian as she reached the door.

Like most Ghoulie construction, the passage was shorter than was comfortable for a human, but Sorilla wasn’t quite tall enough to make it a serious problem. She’d have to duck through it, but not by too much, she could tell as she pressed herself by the passageway and waited.

“One sec, Top,” Jardiens said, putting the flat of his left hand up against the wall.

The Ultra-Wide Band (UWB) transceiver in his suit pulsed once, bouncing radio frequency radiation through the building, quickly compiling a three-dimensional view of the interior while other sensors compared that against information filtering in through passive sound and heat sensors. In just under three seconds, a fuzzy map of the interior of the building, complete with probable prisoner and enemy locations, lit up across Sorilla’s HUD.

She pushed off the wall and slammed a powered foot into the metal shod door, blowing the Ghoulie prison door off its hinges and into the interior. She lowered her carbine, stroking off two shots that holed the single guard inside, then flipped the weapon over to HALO mode, held the trigger down, and ducked inside.

“On the floor, now!” she snarled even as her armor was screaming out over Radio Identification Frequencies (RIF) for an immediate report from any implant technology in the room. As an implant responded, a HALO would pop up around the person the implant belonged to, letting her, and her rifle, know he was one of the ‘Angels.’ Blue HALOs erupted into being throughout her HUD as she swept the rifle through the room, the weapon firing on automatic as it detected motion across its path that wasn’t covered by a HALO.

The subsonic rounds tore into the three remaining Ghoulies inside the prison area before they had even finished turning in her direction, dropping them to the ground as the grey ichor that passed for Ghoulie blood spattered the walls behind them. Sorilla stepped to one side as Jardiens appeared on her HUD from behind, letting him sweep into the room.

“Clear,” she said mechanically, looking to where the uniformed prisoners were hugging the ground.

“Clear,” Jardiens repeated, moving forward. “Next room!”

She swung in behind him as he moved to a door farther in, barely glancing at the men and women on the ground now.

“Stay down,” she told them. “We’ll be back.”

*****

Crow hit the wall of what had to be the command bunker just behind Kormon, lightly rapping the Israeli commando on the shoulder, then pointing to the closest hatch in the building. The Shaytet-13 naval commando nodded, his assault carbine to his shoulder as he strode quickly along the curving surface of the wall to the hatch and tested it quickly with one hand.

“Sealed, sir,” Korman growled.

The former SEAL nodded, tapping Korman on the back. “One side.”

Kormon nodded, pivoting out of the way as Crow moved in, his weapon whispering almost silently as he spotted a mobile recon probe floating around the corner of a building. The subsonic rounds from the assault carbine tore through the lightweight armor of the floater, ripping it apart in a flash as they destroyed its energy cell.

It was still fluttering in pieces to the ground as the Israeli moved on, seeking other targets as the nuclear mushrooms rose up in the distance, grey shadows against the almost black sky. Korman spared a second to wonder if Able and Mackenzie had gotten clear before the retaliation, but then shook it off and kept his focus tight on the present.

“Fire in the hole,” Crow said, causing Korman to jerk around, then dart to one side as the SEAL ducked and covered.

The explosion was soft, almost quiet as the shaped charge went off, cutting the armor of the hatch with a plume of superheated gas. The door buckled in noticeably, then suddenly blasted open and out as the plume cut through the sealant and acted like a jet engine on the hatch itself. The smoke hadn’t even started to clear when Kormon ducked through the squat hatch, weapon firing as he moved.

Crow followed him, pushing through the smoke and into the corridor beyond, noting the grey slime on the walls and the four Ghoulies lying splayed out in their dying positions along the length of the hall.

“This way, sir,” Korman said quietly. “Strong EMF right down the hall. Probably command and control.”

“Lead the way, Corporal,” Crow said, stepping over a grey alien corpse. “I’m right behind you.”

The Israeli commando nodded curtly, his carbine sweeping back up to his shoulder as he advanced down the corridor. It wasn’t strictly required to move in that way. The interface between the armor he wore and the weapon he carried would let him accurately aim the rifle from nearly any position; even firing from the hip was fiendishly accurate when combined with the HALO system and the armor’s HUD. For most soldiers, though, especially those who trained through elite counter-terrorist and special warfare units, proper positioning of their weapon was drilled constantly, with or without armor.

They’d all been in situations where the tactical network was buggy, jammed, or just not available for some reason. Proper motions, even when they weren’t required, were the way the men and women of the Special Operations teams stayed alive when their fancy toys broke down.

They had four sealed hatches to clear before they could even look in the direction of the EMF sources, which posed the two Operators with a problem. Working in a warzone without significant backup gave Lieutenant Crow his operational parameters, so he flipped the hatches open as they passed them and tossed a frag in each before sealing it shut and moving on.

The muffled crumps of the grenades going off cleared the rooms as they passed, permanently and terminally.

The final hatch started to open just as Crow closed the fourth one, one of the thick grey limbs appearing from the other side as the grenade went off. The Ghoulie hissed audibly, though how it managed that without a mouth neither Crow nor Korman had the slightest clue. Just as the hatch opened to its widest point, Korman triggered off a three-round burst from the twelve-millimeter carbine, the silent rounds stitching the alien along its squat torso, kicking it back through the door. Korman followed the alien before it even hit the ground, shouldering the hatch open roughly as he swung the rifle in low, seeking targets through the rifle camera as it wrapped around the heavy armored hatch.

Crow heard the weapon chuff softly, air pushed out of the way of the subsonic round as it exited the barrel, and came in low as Korman twisted out of the hatch, his own carbine seeking out motion in the large room they’d found.

The Ghoulies were devils in space, their ships had torn through the human Fleet with such contemptuous ease that it hadn’t even been a contest. Few Ghoulie ships had been lost, even in situations where the aliens were massively outnumbered, but here, on the ground, they were playing out of their element.

The small-scale assault by Operators had thrown the base into confusion. Their responses were aimed outward, at an army that simply did not exist, and now the central command center belonged to Lieutenant Crow.

“Check the valve status!” he snapped, motioning Korman to the equipment as he took in the large, mostly circular room.

There were Ghoulie corpses sprawled over the gear, their greyish blood pooling already into the squat, heavy chairs they preferred. While Crow finished securing the room, closing the hatch and barring it solidly, Kormon shoved one of the bodies out of its chair and sat down in the greyish muck.

“Looks like their fleet controls, L.T.,” the Israeli said, gingerly manipulating some of the controls. “Some of the display is in the UV spectrum, same as their ships…There’s also the same missing pieces, if I’m reading this right.”

“Can you figure it out?”

“It’s like putting a puzzle together with about ten percent of the pieces missing, sir,” Korman said as he worked. “I may not get all the details, but we should have a fair picture.”

“Good man,” Crow said, switching tactical channels. “Top, you still with me?”

*****

Sorilla paused as the lieutenant’s voice came over her tactical channel, then continued back down the ramp that had led up to the upper floors of the building. “Roger, L.T. Puckers are secured, but the Ghoulies are getting wild out in the courtyard.”

She glanced out one of the narrow windows, watching the alien guards rush around, some of them shooting at shadows. They were just waking up, if the Ghoulies slept, and were confused and downright excited. It wouldn’t take too long before one of them thought to check the prison pen, and when that happened, things were going to get interesting.

“Outstanding, Top, and Roger on the wildcats. We have command and control. Stand by for Exodus.”

“Understood, L.T.,” Sorilla replied, coming up behind Jardiens as the big trooper eyed the metal grating holding the captured Fleet squibs in. “Standing by.”

The channel closed and she tapped the Canadian on the shoulder. “Stop screwing around, Canuck. Get them out of there. L.T.’s got CnC, so we’re gonna be moving soon.”

“Right, Top,” Jardiens replied, wrapping his armored hands into the grate. “One get-out-of-jail-free card, coming up.”

The already strong soldier heaved on the grate, the enhanced nano-musculature chains in his armor adding to his own power, and the metal groaned in audible pain as it tore apart rather than pull out of the Ghoulie foundation. Jardiens looked in, his black and faceless helm looking out at the weary squibs from the brambles and branches he had sticking out of every available opening.

“Rise and shine,” he said cheerfully. “It’s another fine day in the army.”

One of the Fleet guys, a full commander from the rank insignia still clinging to his tattered uniform, gave him a sour look. “Figures you army guys would be too dumb to tell day from night.”

Jardiens looked down on the guy, then over at Sorilla. “Can I throw this one back, Top? He looks a bit scrawny.”

Sorilla shook her head, sighing into her helm at the antics. Jardiens was right, though. They all looked pretty damned scrawny. Their uniforms were just hanging off of their bones, and under the tough cloth she had the impression they’d be looking at very little but skin and bones.

“Ghoulies don’t know much about human physiology,” the commander said tiredly as he limped out of the cell. “Not sure if they eat, actually…couldn’t figure out a way to tell them we were starving.”

Sorilla shook her head, her lips tightening under the helm she wore. She had long memories of starvation from her months on Hayden at the start of the war. The people there depended on the orbital aeroponics bays built into their orbital tether’s counterweight, which had been one of the first targets the Ghoulies cut them off from. The rest of the world, despite being a lush jungle world, wasn’t compatible with human bio-chemistry.

Yet even they had looked better than the people in the cells they were popping open.

Sorilla gritted her teeth as they pulled the grating off another cell. “How many did you lose, Commander?”

The emaciated man shrugged, shaking his head. “I lost count after a while…few dozen. Most in the last week.”

Sweet Jesus , Sorilla thought involuntarily. That meant that the only prisoners they were getting out alive were those who had been recently captured. No more than a few weeks ago at most, probably less.

“Alright,” she said aloud, forcing her voice to be still. “Start spreading the news, we’re leaving today.”

They grinned in return, many of them recognizing the phrasing. Some of them moved off, already humming the tune, and Sorilla heard them continue on.

“…I want to be a part of it…” the leaders sung softly, smiling as they started pulling people up and helping them out.

Sorilla left them to it, moving around to the Ghoulie bodies and recovering their weapons. The aliens’ hand weapons were energy-based, short little ray guns that made no sound when fired but sure as hell made a nice hole in anything they were pointed at. She grabbed the commander as he half carried a young-looking ensign to the front.

“You know how this works?”

He looked at the weapon, eyes gleaming. “Aye, ma’am. Was briefed just a month ago on captured Ghoulie tech.”

“Alright, you’re drafted,” Sorilla said, ignoring the ma’am comment. Operators didn’t carry rank insignia, for this very reason as much as anything else. He wouldn’t know that he outranked her until they were long off this rock. “Take this and keep an eye by the door. Don’t get trigger-happy on me, Commander. Lots of time for shooting when we break out of here.”

“Aye aye,” he said, taking the weapon carefully.

Like most of the Ghoulie tech they’d found, it was both fairly simple to figure out and pretty damned near impossible. The triggering mechanism was obvious, it wasn’t a lever or anything, but it was a simple blue touch pad against the gray weapon. Run your thumb over it and it would fire. What they could never figure out was how to change the weapon’s settings.

When a human picked up a ray gun taken from a Ghoulie, it could be set anywhere from ‘painful’ to ‘vaporize,’ with a capital ‘VAPOR.’ The Ghoulies easily changed settings on the fly, according to all intel, but there were no other visible controls on the damn things, so captured weapons were stuck on whatever settings they’d been taken on.

Sorilla figured they interfaced with their weapons the way she did with most of her equipment, through the implants she had crammed into various free spaces in her body, but they hadn’t yet found anything in the alien autopsies to indicate any sort of implants.

The commander handed out the few alien weapons they had to a few of his fellows, and they took up space by the door while Sorilla and Jardiens checked the weakest members of their growing troop.

“Not good, Top,” Jardiens told her as she approached. “Severe malnutrition…probably can’t walk, and there’s more here than we can carry.”

Sorilla nodded, raising her voice as she looked around. “Stronger help the weaker. When we move, there won’t be time to play around. We’ll have to get to the treeline quick, then we can slow down a bit, but we have to be out of this valley by…oh-four-thirty this morning, because the Fleet is dropping into town, and they’re delivering some heavy Kilo Kilos right down on this place. Got me!?”

They nodded, those who could, knowing that they didn’t want to be anywhere within fifty kilometers of a Fleet kinetic kill strike.

“Find some shit to make stretchers,” Sorilla said, pointing to the torn chunks of metallic mesh. “Start with that. Jardiens, rip this place apart until we’ve got enough for everyone.”

“You got it, Top.”

“Top,” Lt. Crow’s voice came over her radio again. “Time to un-ass this OA.”

“We need five minutes, sir,” Sorilla replied, grabbing a metal grating and twisting some of it into handles by hand. “Lots of Puckers in pretty bad shape.”

“Expedite, Top. We’ve got incoming, and they don’t look happy.”

“Understood. Expediting,” Sorilla replied quickly, then switched over to the armor’s PA. “Time to move it, boys and girls. We’ve overstayed our welcome and our hosts are coming with the bill. Let’s not be here to pay it!”

The emaciated Fleeters moved quicker, the song swelling slightly as they sang softly to themselves while they worked. Sorilla shouldered her carbine, moving to check the door again as the words to ‘New York, New York’ filled in the background.

*****

“I don’t mean to rush you, Korman, but now would be the time…” Crow growled, looking out the windows of the control center to where enemy flyers were visible in the distance. Across the base he could see the Ghoulie infantry getting their act together too, and he really didn’t want to hang around and try to go toe to toe with a regiment.

“This isn’t easy, sir,” Korman gritted out. “I’ve got two of them for sure, but there are things in the display that just don’t make sense. Missing stuff…missing pieces…”

“Got it, fuck it,” Crow decided, rapping the corporal on the shoulder. “We’re hauling ass in two minutes.”

The Israeli growled in frustration but nodded as he pushed himself off the console and pulled a device from a pouch on his thigh. He turned it over, idly punching in numbers on the small keypad, then tossed it down into a corner as he reached back and pulled his small pack off.

“Locator’s set,” the commando replied, pulling chunks of high explosives from the pack. “I’ll have demo ready in one minute.”

“Good, ‘cause that’s about all we’ve got,” Crow hissed, checking the approaching enemy again. He keyed over to a more powerful frequency. “Able, Mack, come in.”

There was no response, leaving only an unnaturally loud hissing on the channel.

“Able, Mack. Come in,” he called again, looking out toward the edge of the valley where the nuclear mushrooms had collapsed, smoke still rolling down the mountainside. “Able. Mack.”

Finally he gave up, swearing softly to himself before switching back over to the tactical channel.

“One minute.”

Korman nodded, pushing a detonator into the explosive material then keying it open and setting the timer. “Done. Let’s move.”

“Top, we’re moving out,” Crow called as he and Korman headed for the hatch.

*****

“That’s it,” Sorilla called. “Let’s get it in gear!”

The prisoners, even the stronger ones, were weak and moved slowly, but they didn’t have time to be coddling them, unfortunately. Sitting in the middle of an enemy military base wasn’t a naturally safe habitat, and things were about to get a lot hotter, judging from the fiery red icons lighting up Sorilla’s HUD, echoed to her from Crow.

Jardiens helped them shift the last of the immobile prisoners onto the makeshift stretchers, moving them more gently than the impressive armored bulk would indicate he was capable of, then they were dragging the metal grates along the floor while Jardiens and Sorilla paused at the door.

They checked their magazines on reflex, though the onboard computers had already fed them the numbers.

“You good, kid?” Sorilla asked, not unkindly, noting that Simmon’s left foot was twitching slightly.

“Yeah, I’m okay, Top. Wound a little tight is all.”

“Don’t unwind on me until we’re out of here,” she told him, half a smile on her voice.

“You don’t have to worry about me.”

“Top,” Lt. Crow’s voice called over the team-wide network, “we’re getting ready to break out.”

“Wilco. We’ll need to make lots of noise, L.T., we’ve got lots of Puckers here looking to get un-Pucked.”

“Roger that. Noisy and messy. I think we can stoop to that,” the lieutenant’s voice replied, a hint of humor making it through the encryption. “Moving on three.”

Sorilla acknowledged, turning back as she noticed Jardiens tense, and addressed the commander. “We’re breaking out. Don’t follow us, just head for the perimeter and into the trees.”

He nodded, but Sorilla was already turning back, Jardiens wrenching the door open as she ducked through it and leapt out into the base commons. She flipped her rifle’s power controls all the way up to maximum as she flew, landing in a skid as she swept the carbine around to find the closest grouping of Ghoulies.

The weapon bucked heavily in her armor-shod hands as the rounds roared out of the barrel, well past supersonic, and the crack of the sound barrier being broken tore the air around her. The heavy slugs reached out, briefly connecting her to her targets, and slapped into the stunned aliens even as they were turning toward the motion.

They died before the sound washed over them, but where they fell, others moved to close the breach.

Yelling and screaming erupted behind her as the prisoners rushed out behind Jardiens, but they were drowned out by the echoing cracks of his carbine as it roared in conjunction with hers. The duet became a trio as the lieutenant opened up from across the courtyard, his own weapon barking its righteous anger, and then a quartet sounded as Korman joined in the fight.

They fired short bursts as they dodged in and around the buildings, conserving ammunition as they mostly tried to attract attention away from the fleeing prisoners. In that they succeeded brilliantly, but in short order it was obvious that ‘brilliant’ was a relative term when you were actively trying to draw fire from the enemy.

The Ghoulie infantry, having gotten their act together, returned fire. The silent weapons they carried gave no sound, nor any flash of light to betray their position, but when they struck something, it vaporized with a brief flash of light and concussion as the newly created plasma vented from the hole.

Sorilla was forced undercover in short order, barely escaping a blast that took out almost a square meter of building material just behind her head. She returned fire, but whether she was even aiming at the same Ghoulie that shot at her was an impossible question to answer.

The enemy had the numbers, and within seconds they were bracketing the dodging troopers enough that even their augmented speed and interlocked firing tactics weren’t enough to keep up with the responding fire.

“Fall back!” Crow’s voice called over the tactical channel. “Cover the prisoners!”

They leapfrogged back, pelting the advancing formation of infantry with covering fire two at a time while the other two would jump back a few dozen meters in two or three hops. A whine tearing through the air announced the arrival of an air unit, one of the enemy flyers flashing past them overhead, ignoring them to head straight for the fleeing prisoners.

Sorilla palmed a seeker from her belt, keying it open with a flip of her thumb, then tossed the ball-shaped device underhanded up into the air. It flew up about ten meters under the powered toss, then paused at the apex of its arc as the powerful ducted fan inside it whirred to life. Then, in a flash, it whipped off after the flyer, slamming into the back of the alien bird and detonating its small shaped charge in an explosive lightshow.

As the flyer came crashing down in flames, Sorilla rolled clear of it and came up to one knee to shoot over the ruined vehicle, using the flames and wreckage for cover.

Crow was sprinting toward her, firing back over his shoulder in short bursts, aiming with his rifle cam on the run. His accuracy wouldn’t be worth much, except that with the guidance fins and the seeker heads on each round, he’d probably hit as much as one out of three shots. Especially at the tightly packed formation that was charging along behind him.

The prisoners had spent the entire two minutes since they’d broken out running as best they could for the treeline and were halfway there or more. Sorilla made sure they weren’t being threatened overtly then continued to fire into the enemy ranks as Crow sprinted for cover. Her rifle clicked empty, and she dropped the mag in a smooth motion, slamming a fresh one home just instants later.

As she leveled the weapon again, she caught a flash of light erupt from Crow as he ran, an enemy weapon tearing into his armor at the shoulder. It converted the carbon fiber, and a good chunk of his flesh and bone, into a plasma jet that roared back out the hole it had created, pitching him forward off his feet and into a spin.

Sorilla was moving even before he hit the ground, yelling into the tactical network. “L.T. is down! Cover me!”

The booms of her companions’ weapons rose in crescendo as she dove for Crow’s position, grabbing his good arm as she clawed for purchase and started pulling him backwards away from the enemy. She flipped her rifle over to full guidance mode, without any IFF restrictions, and opened up while struggling to run backwards with the lieutenant’s flopping weight trying to unbalance her.

Her weapon went dry then, and she heard Jardiens curse as his own followed suit. Korman kept shooting, but he had to be running low on that mag too. She let the rifle drop in its sling, struggling to pull the wire line from her belt, then snapped it onto the bolt in the back of Crow’s armor.

The ground beside her roared with flame and concussion as a shot came far too close, causing her to jerk backwards again as she fumbled with her hanging rifle, trying to get a fresh mag into place. The distraction of trying to reload on the run while dragging the lieutenant finally got the best of her as Sorilla’s foot found a loose stone that rolled right out from under her.

She went down hard, dragging the lieutenant’s immobile form up halfway on top of her, and she cursed as she rolled him off and struggled back up to her knees. One glance told the story as the ragged remains of the Ghoulie regiment regrouped, charging her position. They weren’t firing at her, as best she could tell, probably hoping to take her alive. Explosions of superheated plasma erupted around her, though, and certainly drove both Jardiens and Korman back as they were forced to take cover in shallow ditches while they continued to fire back desperately.

Sorilla clawed at the ground, grabbing the magazine she’d dropped, and fed it to her rifle finally. But one look at the host coming down on her told her she wasn’t going to get them all before they got her. She gritted her teeth, leveling the weapon as she prepared to make sure the others did get out, only to hear a sudden whistling sound rip past her ears just before the entire front rank of the Ghoulie line were thrown back into their fellows, spraying grey ichor to the wind.

Sorilla surged up, recognizing the sound of long-range artillery fire from an M900, and just reached down to grab the strap on Crow’s armor before she turned and ran while the Ghoulies were still shocked by the sudden mass death fed to them.

Jardiens and Korman covered her retreat, laying down heavy fire as she sprinted past their position, the run being pretty rough on the lieutenant, then striding backwards in pace with her as they made for the treeline amidst heavy fire.

Once into the trees, though, the fire quickly dropped off. The Ghoulies’ weapons were no better at engaging through trees than the humans’ were, and the aim of the infantry wasn’t remotely up to the standards of the Operators. Sorilla had to carry Crow, which slowed her down, but since few of the former prisoners were in any shape to run, and none of them had powered armor, it wasn’t appreciable.

The three active Operators had to goad their charges on through a forced march up the size of the old rolling mountain. They followed the contours, but it was still tough going and a lot of the starving people fell in their tracks, unable to keep moving.

Jardiens and Korman took up the stretchers, making them pile people four and five high or more, stacking bodies like cordwood. They couldn’t leave them there, but there was no stopping either. Sorilla did her part as well, slinging Crow across her back as she took up a third stretcher loaded with people.

The healthy helped the infirm, and the three armored warriors served as pack mules for those who couldn’t move another step, and in that way the odd procession climbed the alien hills into the night.

*****

Hours later, there had been no immediate pursuit, and they were stopped near the top of one of the rolling hills. Mack had rejoined them about two hours into their escape, with the news that Corporal Able had bought it in the gravetic retaliation strike after their first shot. The loss hit them pretty hard, coming off the mission high as they were, so the four conscious and breathing Operators leaned back against the rock face where they and their charges had taken cover.

The clock ran down, and almost on cue, they saw the first flashes of nuclear fire in the night sky. Spherical balls of light erupted above them, and they knew that the Fleet had arrived.

“They’re even on time,” Sorilla said, smiling tightly.

The others returned the smile, though wanly, as they watched the fireworks tear through the starry sky.

A screaming sound tore through their ears as the first Kilo Kilo, or kinetic kill, weapon screamed down along the locator beam Korman had placed and tore apart the base even as the scrambling Ghoulies tried to get their control systems repaired. Several more shrieking strikes tore up the very ground around it as the Fleet destroyed the gravity valves, a prelude to a full planetary assault.

The tide of war was shifting, Sorilla thought, a thin ray of optimism burning inside her. Five years of fighting on the defensive, and they were about to take one of the enemy’s worlds for their own. It wasn’t a vital world, she supposed, but it would be the first they took from the Ghoulies, and there would be others after it.

The war wasn’t over, and final victory wasn’t yet written for either side, but the cakewalk was over for the Ghoulies. From now on, they were going to pay dearly for anything they took, and more besides.

“Outstanding work, gentlemen,” Sorilla said, the light of the distant kinetic strikes highlighting her face. “We rode the rock, we found the enemy, and we kicked his ass.”

“Rock Riders,” they said together. “Hua.”

Chapter One

USS Cheyenne

Orbit, Planet S93X5

Admiral Nadine Brooke surveyed the holo of the planet below, carefully noting the damage done during the kinetic strike even as her eyes looked for further evidence of enemy installations. Thankfully, it looked like they cratered the primary site down to the bedrock, and from experience she knew that secondary sites were unlikely in normally uncontested systems.

It had taken a ground-based guerrilla campaign to force the enemy to create a secondary site on Hayden’s World, and that was the only world they’d yet found that apparently warranted that sort of effort. The enemy’s gravity valve technology was so effective that one installation was normally sufficient to interdict a planet with very little problem.

In fact, the only ways they’d ever been breached, in human experience, was by what most people would consider extreme and entirely insane methods. In the first case, a heavily stealthed Special Operations force attempted insertion via ballistic approach from well outside the planet’s orbit. Only One operator survived to make landfall.

The next successful penetration involved plowing an entire convoy of starships through the planet’s atmosphere at speeds that nearly caused the ships to burn up and break apart from the friction. Considering that those ships were composed of solid nickel-iron hulls, several meters thick, and plated with heat-resistant ceramic tiles, that was considered something of an accomplishment.

The third and last time was under her own command and might have been considered the most standard operation of the three. Even then, however, it took pinpoint knowledge of the enemy’s location, as determined by men on the ground, and during the assault she’d come close to losing half her command when it turned out the enemy had a longer reach than anyone had previously believed possible.

Since those early days on Hayden, they’d managed to work out the enemy patterns a bit better, gaming the system as best they could to predict behavior and protocol. It wasn’t easy, the aliens didn’t think the way humans did in some ways, but when one looked at a military organization, there were always some things that could be counted on. Whether insect, human, or entirely alien, a military bureaucracy had some things set in stone.

In this case, they’d managed to determine the protocols for using the gravity valve against inbound meteorites. It wasn’t a trick that would work often, probably not again for some time, just in case they got wise, but it had worked this time and now they had one of the enemy worlds under human control.

“Deploy ground forces to the remaining enemy installations,” she ordered. “Have the Hood and the Marion drop shuttles and pick up the SARD unit along with their former PUCs.”

“Aye, ma’am.”

“And for God’s sake, put those men and women under quarantine!” she snapped. “Sooner or later these things are going to find some other use for prisoners than just starving them to death.”

As her people dispatched her order, Nadine settled back into the command console at the center of her flag deck and turned her attention back to the operations at hand. The Hood and Marion, both Longbow class ships, broke from formation upon receiving her orders and proceeded deeper into the planetary well.

Unlike Alexi Petronov and his relief column during the second battle of Hayden, Jane MacKay led her Hood and the Marion in at a somewhat saner velocity. The fire flared along the front of their bows as they penetrated the atmosphere, trailing flame as the pair entered into a ballistic freefall arc that would take them on an ever tightening orbit of the world below.

“The gravity valve in the insertion rig worked, obviously.”

Nadine half turned and nodded to her attaché. “Yes. Pity it’s a onetime use device, we need that technology.”

“That sort of gravity is hard on the circuitry,” Lt Ammends replied. “The energy pulse that has to be run through the capacitors is even worse.”

She just nodded. He wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t know, she just didn’t like it. Her ships were limited to accelerations of maybe twenty gravities, unless she wanted to kill her crew. Crush them into mangled paste against the aft walls, the way the crew of the Majesty had died so many years earlier.

Against an enemy that could do better than ten times that, she and her crews were in a bad way. Since she had led the mission that brought back the first wreckage from one of the alien starships, Solari research and development had been spending every waking moment trying to crack the alien technology.

They’d had some limited success the last time she’d received updates from FLTCOM, such as the rudimentary valve installed in the faux asteroid used by the Operator team during the recent mission, but most of those successes were more in the realm of theory than practical application. Tactically, they’d managed to adapt their procedures to give human ships a fighting chance against the alien technology, since the Ghoul type aliens tended to rely entirely on their gravity technology.

As formidable as it was, there were holes in the tactical application of the technology. Its limited range and light-speed propagation meant that Terran-built missiles could be fired from outside the technology’s range and, if their guidance systems were good enough, hammer the alien ships from a distance.

In theory.

In practice, the actual results were less than optimal, but it was the best tactical solution they had to date. With luck, as she herself had proven during the third battle of Hayden, it could even work to expectations. If it didn’t work, however, the ships that engaged the aliens in combat would be torn to shreds when they found themselves completely unable to disengage from the much higher accelerating enemy ships.

Basically it turned every battle into a lethal game of rock, paper, scissors, and whichever side lost the first throw didn’t get a chance at a second.

“Any peep on the long range systems?” she asked, floating over to where the repeater screens were showing what the bridge crew were monitoring in real time.

“Nothing, ma’am,” the lieutenant at the station replied. “No sign of gravity acceleration anywhere beyond the expected models for this system.”

“Good, but don’t forget to watch out for any Deltas at the same time.”

“No, ma’am.”

The military had adapted an official designation of phonetic lettering to classify alien species they were dealing with. The Alpha aliens were also known as ‘Ghouls’ by soldiers in the field who had dealt with them up close. They resembled the so called ‘Roswell Greys’ in Earth mythology and were the ones most likely connected to the gravity valve tech.

Bravo aliens were a species they had no clue about but were recorded as having feline attributes and seemed to be acting as security for the Alpha types.

Charlies were the first aliens they’d encountered that seemed to react the way they would expect professional soldiers to act. They were tough, tenacious, and lethal. A small handful were still vying with the Terran military for control of Hayden, despite having basically no outside support for more than a year.

Deltas, the last type they’d classified, were something of a mystery. They’d only encountered them a few times, and always in space, so it was possible that they might actually be a different class of one of the other species. Solari commanders had given them their own classification because Delta ships operated far differently than any of the other known species had shown so far. Unlike the Ghouls, the Deltas were ship handlers; they knew how to fly and they knew how to fight. They also used weapons and technology that were much closer to what humans considered ‘conventional,’ though far more powerful than their human counterparts.

Since they didn’t use the same gravity drive of their apparent allies, the Ghouls, they were harder to detect at long range, which was why she was reminding her people of things they already knew. As deep as Valkyrie had now penetrated into presumed enemy territory, they had to be on the lookout for everything.

“Shuttles are departing the surface, ma’am. They’ll be back on board the Hood shortly.”

“Good. Let’s get this wrapped up and move on before our luck runs out.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

*****

Sorilla held on as the shuttle jerked, slamming her and everyone else forward into their acceleration bolsters with enough force to wind them. She grimaced at what that must have done to their wounded and the weaker of the PUCs, but there was no other real way to get off-world. Modern shuttles just couldn’t carry enough fuel to make orbit on their own and retain tactical maneuvering while in atmo, so they were picked up by ships ducking down from orbit with their much more powerful pulse drives.

It wasn’t a gentle way to travel, but it got the job done on worlds that didn’t have orbital tethers. The lights stayed red, telling them to stay locked into their seats while the shuttle was pulled up into the belly of the beast that had picked them up, then finally shifted to yellow as a loud booming sound signified that the ship’s airlock had sealed and they were secured.

Gravity was skewed for a while as the still-accelerating HMS Hood pulled out of the atmosphere, so the only people who moved under the yellow light were medical response teams. They crawled over the seats with their kits and generally just made sure that no one was in critical condition while the ship reached orbit again and the lights changed to green.

Sorilla and her team waited in place while the bird was cleared. Save for Crow and, of course, the KIA Able, they were uninjured and could wait. As soon as the bird was emptied, though, they got up and bolted for the doors, each and every one. Just because they could wait didn’t mean any of them wanted to.

“All hands, this is Captain MacKay speaking,” Jane MacKay’s voice came in the clear over the ship’s intercom system. “We have been directed to quit the system via the most expedient route and will be proceeding to the jump point at one-G. Transit time is expected to be two days. Maintenance crews have priority access to all areas. Everyone else, enjoy the standard-G environment while you. MacKay out.”

Sorilla and her team were met by a decontamination team as they dropped out of the shuttle to the deck below.

“Take the right,” the chief in charge told her with a jerk of her thumb. “We’ve got the PUCs in the others, and they’re in quarantine.”

“Right.” Sorilla nodded, turning right without question.

They were a little cramped in the room, but not so badly as all that. It would have handled their whole team, but with two men down they could swing their arms just a bit. As the team settled in, the lock door sealed behind them and they could see faces through the glass on the other side of the room.

“Stand by for decontamination.”

No one bothered to respond. They knew the procedure, and so they weren’t remotely surprised when gouts of hot steam erupted from around them at all angles to hose down their suits. With high heat and pressure, the steam literally scoured their suits down to the bare finish. It was powerful enough to even clean off baked-in ablative carbon residue after an orbital jump. Save for a few extremophile species known to obscure researchers, there wasn’t much that could survive the heat alone, and the force would wash anything else off and into the drains.

“Remove your armor and place it in the areas provided.”

Several large closet-like doors opened, and Sorilla popped the magnetic seals on her armor, immediately pulling the helm off and following it with the chest piece. The oxygenated gel that coated her skin caused it to suck against her skin as she pulled it clear, leaving her feeling fresh air for the first time in weeks.

“Oh man, that feels good,” Korman muttered, taking a deep breath.

Everyone just murmured their agreement, mostly grunting if you wanted to be honest, so intent they were on getting the second skin peeled away and stored. In moments the team was standing or sitting naked, covered in blue gel and laughing as they took deep breaths of shipboard air that had been recycled so many times it was practically an abomination that they considered it ‘fresh.’

Sorilla batted Jardiens’s arm out of her face as the big guy splayed himself out completely and leaned back against the wall with an exaggerated moan. “I’ve got enough of my own filth on me, Dion, I don’t need yours.”

“Sorry, Top.” The Canadian chuckled a little, rubbing his head. “Just had to stretch, you know?”

She did know, in fact, which was why she only knocked his arm out of her face and didn’t at least threaten to break it. Armor units were fully articulated, of course, and you could stretch in them all you wanted, but it never felt quite the same as that first glorious strain you managed when the armor was finally shucked.

She’d wait for her own stretch, however. It wasn’t that she was a prude, or even remotely shy, but splaying herself out for her fellows just wasn’t going to happen. Nudity was part of the job, intentionally flashing the room was a completely different thing.

Instead she just leaned back, casually crossing her legs as she waited for the UV portion of the decontamination sequence to wrap up. In the meanwhile, she took the time to reboot her electronics, clearing the memory cache and generally setting everything back to its initial state. Like all Operators, Sorilla was equipped with enough implanted technology to be officially considered a cyborg by some Earth standards, and that level of gear required basic maintenance that wasn’t always practicable while on a mission. Her own implants were more extensive than any of her fellows’, in fact, since the army had taken the opportunity of her last time Earth-side to update everything buried inside her flesh to the latest generation equipment out of the labs.

That put Sorilla several generations ahead of the others, since they were using the latest production generation from several years earlier. After more than a year of trying, she was just learning the full limits of her kit and found herself really enjoying the advantages it offered. Unlike her fellows, for example, Sorilla had full color optical implants that permitted her to access network databases with video and images instead of just text.

She took advantage of that as soon as her systems came back online, checking her shipboard messages and the Fleet social screens to see what was going on over the next couple days.

“There’s a dance on B deck tonight,” she said idly, not opening her eyes.

“Oh yeah? You’re on the boards?”

“You’re not?”

“Yeah, but you know our procs take longer to navigate through that mess,” Jardiens bitched. “What’s for lunch?”

“Burgers and rings.”

“Cool. Hey!” Jardiens leaned over and thumped on the glass. “You want to hurry this up? I haven’t had solid food in weeks, dude!”

“We’re almost done, relax,” the technician replied from the other side.

“Relax he says,” Jardiens grumped. “I’d love to see how he handles eating paste even for one week.”

“Didn’t you live on paste back in grade school, Dion?” Sorilla asked with half a smirk. “Should have been just like home.”

“Oh, you’re a laugh riot, Top.” The Canadian rolled his eyes. “Come on, you can’t say you don’t want to chow down on a real burger, right? That paste crap isn’t eating.”

“It’s more than I, or a lot of folk, had on Hayden, Dion,” she told him with a hint of a smirk to show she wasn’t really annoyed. “Remember who you’re talking to, kid.”

“Bloody snake eaters,” Jardiens muttered, shaking his head. “I swear they burn the taste buds out of all of you in boot camp.”

“No, they do it during SERE,” she answered, eyes still closed. “I thought you JTF boys went through the same thing the Brits put their SAS through?”

“Yeah, but I’m from Quebec,” he answered. “They figured they could skip the taste bud thing for me once they took a look at what passes as cuisine in Montreal.”

“I spent most of my youth on the south side of the Mexican border,” she told him with a smile. “Do you really want to start a war using food culture as your weapons?”

“Cheese curds, gravy, and French fries,” he told her simply.

“Right, you win,” Sorilla replied dryly.

“I know.” He sighed, not sounding particularly triumphant.

Everyone chuckled a bit, the conversation being an old but reliable bit of banter within the team. Before they had time to do or say anything more, a buzzer sounded and the airlock popped, causing them to have to work their jaws to equalize the minor difference between the ship proper and the lock they were in.

“About time,” Korman said, getting up and walking to the lock door. “The last place I want to be talking about cheese with you guys is a locked room where I don’t have my own private air supply.”

More laughter echoed off the bulkheads as they walked out of the decontamination lock and grabbed some utility coveralls from the racks before they headed for their quarters on the HMS Hood.

****

Captain Jane MacKay looked over the reports from the medical labs as well as the reports filed from those who had been on the surface, trying to puzzle out the meaning of the enemy actions. They’d been able to track this world down by working out the most likely jump points from Hayden, since that world seemed like the one the aliens were most interested in. So far, however, all they’d been able to find were, at best, minor outposts like this one.

The enemy frontier has to be at least as deep as our own. They’re looking to expand themselves. They must be.

It was really the only thing that made much sense, otherwise they’d have located more facilities than just the single defensive points. There was nothing else in any system they’d surveyed, however, not colonies, not true bases, not even the sorts of survey and research ships Earth would have put out into newly opened star systems.

To her it seemed possible that the enemy had an even deeper frontier than Earth and that they were maybe even operating far in advance of anything humans had yet attempted, opening up systems for exploitation decades or more in the future. In that case, the aliens’ actions made a lot more sense, particularly if their frontier was several hundred light-years deep or more.

There is even a good chance that we’ve not yet dealt with any of their real military units, she supposed with a frown. These might be their versions of the East India Company from the Age of Sail on Earth.

That was a terrifying and sobering thought, because it meant that whatever military force they had was probably considerably better trained, equipped, and likely existed in larger numbers. Humans were holding their own against the forces arrayed against them so far, but every report said the same thing. There was a wide variance in the enemy capabilities, a variance that didn’t make sense by the standards of modern human military standards.

MacKay walked over to the main viewer and keyed it back to the planet they were just leaving, eyes on blue-green orb for a moment before she reached down and re-keyed the system to look out at the stars.

She knew that somewhere out there was a large and powerful economy, if not an empire. Powerful enough to be thinking decades or more in advance, but if she were right, then it seemed that it was spread far enough so as to make central control a tricky issue. Human penetration of the galaxy was no more than a hundred light-years at its deepest point. Hayden was the outermost colony, and it was a lot closer than that.

With Casimir transmitters, they were able to breach that range with limited FTL signal ability, but assuming the enemy didn’t have massively superior technology, MacKay suspected that managing a far-flung empire wouldn’t be a simple matter. She was betting that, once more was known about the alien culture, they’d find that regional governors likely had a lot of autonomy.

Like the Romans or later empires up until the development of radio technology on Earth.

Her pet theory was one she’d been working on for some time but had only recently begun to draw interest from her peers as a possible explanation for the aliens’ mentality. Most command personnel and higher still had a hard time wrapping their minds around a government that couldn’t just pick up a phone and talk to anyone, anywhere, as needed. Even with Hayden and the other colony worlds being only tenuously in range, the majority of the political and military power of Earth was centered on Earth, and those people really didn’t have a good grasp of just how big the galaxy really was.

The admiral and many of the other deep-space captains were starting to think as she did, that they were dealing with a political entity that might possibly only now be fully understanding what was going on out at its furthest reaches. That left them with some problems, though, if only because none of them had enough experience with anything remotely like what they were seeing and so they couldn’t make any predictions.

She made some more notes and put a request into the system to have the senior officer from the infiltration team meet with her once they’d gotten themselves settled.

That done, she found herself looking back out to the stars, wondering just how far away the enemy was at that point. How far away, and how long until they came knocking in real force.

*****

Parithalian Alliance Ship Noble Venture

Ship’s Master Reethan Parath looked out over the system they had just shifted into, mostly just admiring the eternal beauty of the starways, while he waited for the return signals to come back to the tactical stations.

“No danger signs from deep system, Master Parath.”

“Thank you, SeQuin.” Reethan nodded, turning from the vista. “Order the flotilla forward, one quarter acceleration. Best caution.”

“As you say, Master.”

The small Parithalian flotilla, a dozen ships strong, had been assigned deeper into the third galactic arm in response to losses reported by the local development group. It was unusual, to be sure, given that this branch of the galaxy was largely controlled by the Ros’El and they generally didn’t play well with others. For them to have requested support from the Alliance was unusual enough for him to be careful, but he’d already received reports from the first Parithalian scouts that had escorted a Ros’El convoy through to one of their development worlds.

Whatever the hell the Ros’El had wallowed in out here managed to utterly ravage one of their squadrons, as well as tear up half the scout patrol. Worse, the reports on the battle were pretty unclear, with very few details on the enemy weapon systems or defenses. They knew that the enemy wasn’t invulnerable, they’d destroyed several of their ships in the engagement, but Reethan hadn’t been able to locate any information on precisely how they’d gotten that close to the convoy without being detected.

The flotilla was still three shifts from the development world that was causing all the trouble, but when they arrived in this system, the lack of a Ros’El signal sent up alarms that caused Reethan to order the flotilla to pause in their travels.

Records clearly showed that there was a Ros’El survey outpost here, put in place just over forty standard intervals past. There should have been a clear signal announcing it as their territory as soon as the flotilla shifted into the solar space of the local star. Reethan rose from his position and made his way across to the command station, intent on checking the latest information for himself.

Like practically all Parithalians, Reethan was a slender soul whose personal height topped that of the average biped in the Alliance by more than half again. Parth was a low-gravity world by any standard, so existing in microgravity was as close to home as he and others of his kind got when traveling the galaxy. There were no other species in the alliance that had developed on a world even comparable, most of the several dozen species having evolved on mid-to heavy-gravity worlds.

His fingers were slender enough to deftly operate the consoles his people designed for use by the entire Alliance, a sort of home field advantage when it came to a Parithalian applying for fleet service, so he quickly had the world in question called up on the small display used by the command station.

It was a world of the type preferred by the Ros’El, mid-gravity, with significant supplies of oxygen-rich air and immense water reserves. Neither were particularly rare as far as it went, but there were few enough worlds that held that specific combination. More importantly was the type of life that flourished, however, as he was aware.

It wasn’t widely spread around, but the upper echelon of the Alliance civilian structure and a fair slice of their military knew that the Ros were fascinated with any world that had developed life that was based on the same building blocks as themselves. Unlike most Alliance species, the Ros were chemically built on an extremely complex double helix structure, using carbon as the chief binder. No one was quite sure why, but the Ros were very nearly obsessive about locating and controlling worlds dominated by similar building blocks.

The Parths used a silicate binder, as did a few others in the Alliance, including the Lucians. The rest mostly used other chemical binders with no clear dominating type.

The world they were approaching had all the hallmarks of a Ros’El world, from the orbital distance to the chemical traces in the atmosphere. What it didn’t have, and Reethan was well aware that it should, was a Ros’El beacon letting approaching ships know that they were encroaching on Ros territory.

He let out a low keening sound when he saw the reason why.

Where the records indicated that there should be a Ros facility there was nothing but several very deep craters.

“Sensing station,” he called out. “Are there any chemical or atomic markers?”

“No, sir. Other than dust in the atmosphere, the world is clean.”

Reethan shook his head slowly. “Straight velocity weapons then. Antiquated, but effective.”

“But, Master, how would anyone have gotten velocity weapons through a Ros’ Dimensional Collapse System?”

“That is a very good question,” Reethan admitted, eyes on the screen. “Any signs of Alliance signals from the surface?”

“None, sir.”

“Then we can assume that all the Ros’El were killed in the strike,” he sighed. “Very well. Plot us a course to the next shift point.”

“Course is plotted and on displays, Master.”

“Excellent. Very well,” he said, settling into the ship master’s station. “Let us be on our way, best acceleration.”

“Yes, sir, best acceleration.”

The flotilla turned lazily away from the world they had been examining and began to accelerate toward deep space. Behind them, the dust from the high-velocity strikes was settling into the upper atmosphere. The global temperatures would be dropping soon, Reethan expected, likely the world would experience a micro ice age over the next twenty or so standard intervals.

An impressive display of power, he supposed, but at that it was the least one might expect of an interspecies war. If they didn’t get things under control soon, the Ros’El would likely begin collapsing entire worlds under their own gravity.

The last thing we need is for that sort of mess to start making the rounds of the civilian councilors or, the universe forbid, reach the ears of any spies for the outer empires.

The political fallout of several new planetary singularities floating around the galaxy would be a nightmare enough, but the Alliance really didn’t need to deal with any more propaganda from the outer worlds stirring things up among the civilian population. The Ros’El were unpopular enough, since pretty much no one could understand a damned thing they were saying unless you spoke advanced hyper-math.

No, this war had to be brought to a halt in a hurry before the Ros’El decided that they were being pressed sufficiently to actually bring out their singularity ships.

Leave it to the Ros to wallow in something this deep out in the back end of the furthest reaches of Alliance space.

*****

Hayden

Exiting jump space was always a little jarring, but for Sorilla it had been much worse since she’d fully integrated with her implants. Unlike most of the people on the ships of TFV, her implants were better than latest gen and they had been designed with some thought as to the enemy humans were facing. The good side of this was that she could feel the building influence of a gravity valve as it began to collapse dimensional walls in her area. However, the bad side of it was that she was particularly susceptible to the motion sickness rarely associated with a gravity jump.

It was the result of mixed signals to the brain, in her case enhanced acceleration awareness that had taken her months just to realize existed. The implants fed their acceleration data directly into her brain, originally intended by the designers to be picked up by her neural system and relayed directly to her corneal HUD via the most direct route possible. What even the doctors hadn’t been able to predict was that Sorilla’s brain had immediately begun rewiring itself to make use of the new data directly.

Her sense of balance, something that had always been finely tuned, had since become something only the most talented of gymnasts could hope to approach. She could identify that the ship was now accelerating at one-twelfth gravity even before her CPU finished making the calculations, and her stomach felt like it was turning inside out.

The use of the neural system as part of the implant communication track had been a radical departure from the secure wireless system her old implants used, implemented to increase security and decrease power requirements, but since Sorilla had been used as a test case, they’d stopped all field use of the new implants while observing her to see how she reacted in the mid to long term.

While she often sarcastically commented on how special that made her feel, Sorilla did admit to a certain conceit over being the only field soldier to receive the full suite of next generation implants. The trouble with them was also the benefit, however, in that her nervous system was also hardwired into her brain, and as it turned out, her brain was anything but shy when it came to taking advantage of the new data.

It took months before the first signs showed up, however, and so most of the tech geeks who helped maintain her implants were understandably perturbed by her terribly messy wetware integrating itself in unexpected ways with their clean and pure hardware.

Honestly, she wasn’t really over-enthused about it herself, but so far the good had outweighed the bad. Even if she did feel like hurling every time they dropped out of jump space.

“We’re out of jump space,” she said. “Engines are winding up, we’ll be under power in a couple minutes.”

“That’s creepy, Top,” Jardiens mumbled, shaking his head. “I hate it when you do that.”

“Don’t hear you complaining when I let you know the Ghoulies are about to drop a planet on us.” She smirked.

“Still creepy even then, Top.”

The Hood’s VASIMR engines kicked in then, and gravity returned in full force as the big ship began to accelerate down into the system’s gravity well toward Hayden’s orbit. Since the last major engagement in Hayden, the Solari Fleet, or rather the forward assigned elements of it…aka Task Force Five, had been using the system as their main deployment center.

Fleet had finally brought in a new orbital tether about a year earlier, and with that began arming both the planet and the system itself with a defense system second only to Earth’s own. Some of the native-born Haydenites had elected to leave the planet as soon as the tether was reestablished, but most had chosen to stay on despite some ongoing problems with the remains of the invaders waging an ongoing guerilla campaign.

For the most part, there wasn’t a lot they could do, since the majority of the planet was of little to no interest to Earth forces. In fact, in all honesty, had the planet itself been the Earth’s primary concern, they probably would have ordered a full evacuation a long time past and just left it to the invaders.

The system, however, was very valuable, if only as a potential choke point that they could use to focus future enemy assaults on. The reasoning was that it was better to fight them here in Hayden space than to permit them to make it to Earth before putting up any sort of resistance.

The effect of this was to basically cede Hayden to the enemy ground forces while locking down certain key areas such as the tether base station, which had been established at the old colony base so as to allow military and civilian researchers to sift through the debris Sorilla had left during her initial face-to-face several years prior.

Beyond that, the old farms, logging roads, and other varia of Hayden’s former research locations were now strictly off limits due to the threat of encountering the alien guerrillas haunting the jungles. The last time Sorilla had found time to check, she had been both impressed and disturbed by how well the aliens had managed to adapt to Hayden’s ecosystem. Were they actually fighting a force that wanted to occupy the world, she was certain that they’d have done far more damage to the human forces than Earth could have willingly shouldered.

At some point they’d have to be wiped out or, failing that, repatriated back to their own people, or she was betting they’d still be finding alien commandos in the jungle in fifty years, refusing to believe that the war had ended. Assuming, of course, that it did end before that time.

It had better. We’ll bankrupt every Western economy within another ten at this rate, she thought sourly as they hurtled onward to the jungle world ahead.

*****

Liberation Tether Counterweight, Hayden Orbit

Jerry Reed stepped onto the observation deck of the main tier, strolling casually to where he spotted a red flash of hair. The Earth-normal gravity provided by the centrifugal force of the counterweight wasn’t as fun as the zero gravity of the lower tier, but it was certainly a lot more practical.

“Tara, hey,” he said as he stepped over beside where the nurse stood at one of the observation windows. “I hear Valkyrie is coming in.”

She nodded, giving him a peck on the cheek. “Yes, they jumped in about thirty-six hours ago. Where have you been?”

“Patrol,” he said, returning the kiss. “Clearing out traps and IEDs in the interdiction zone beyond the colony. We’ve given them the jungle, but they want the planet.”

Tara sighed, nodding.

“I just want this to be over,” she said after a long pause.

“It will be, but not until we’ve pushed them off our world for good,” he told her, eyes flickering up to a star that was moving against the background. “Is that them?”

Tara looked where he was nodding as others joined the first. “That’s the heat off their engines as they decelerate toward us. They’re about another twelve hours out, I guess.”

“It’ll be good to see the Sarge again,” Jerry said. “She’s on board, right?”

“Yes, I checked when they registered with Hayden control. She’s listed as active duty, leave pending,” the nurse said. “So she’s alive and uninjured. I’m not sure if she’ll be getting off here for her leave or heading back to Earth.”

“We’re not exactly a vacation spot these days,” Jerry scowled.

“No, but it’ll depend on where TFV is heading next,” she said. “They’ve been out here a long time now, they have to be due for refit.”

“Probably. Still, hopefully she’ll have time to pay a visit, right?” He smiled, poking Tara lightly in the ribs.

It worked. She smiled in turn. “Yeah. Hopefully.”

“Come on, let’s get something to eat,” he said. “Burgers on me.”

“Can we at least make it burger steak?” she asked, rolling her eyes. “I want to eat with a fork and knife for once.”

He chuckled. “For you, I’ll even sweet talk some mushrooms out of the basement.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” she said, hooking her arm in his and letting him lead her away.

*****

USS Cheyenne, Hayden High Orbitals

Admiral Nadine Brookes looked over the latest dispatches downloaded from Hayden OPCOM, noting that the squadron had finally been tagged for refit and downtime.

Task Force Seven must be back to full strength, she mused idly, wondering how long it had taken to get that done.

TF6 had been assigned to bolster the defense of the inner colonies while TFs Five and Seven had been directed to patrol and push back at the enemy beyond the currently accepted borders of ‘human controlled space.’ She’d heard that Seven had been battered in an engagement with the Alpha, or Ghoulie, type aliens and Valkyrie had been assigned to shoulder their weight while they were refitted.

Now, it seemed, it was Valkyrie’s turn.

She felt that her command was in reasonable shape, though she was far from objecting to the orders. Her crews could use the break, and there was always some piece of maintenance that couldn’t be done short of a proper dock slip and there was only one place in the universe that had any of those at the moment.

Though that will be changing if they get their way at Ares, I’m sure.

As far as humanity’s presence in space, this whole war was likely a blessing in disguise. Despite the original destruction caused by the invaders’ rampage across human territory, the resulting rebuilding and investment in space forces had increased the Solari presence in space by at least ten times.

That didn’t even count the Chinese government’s renewed investments. After decades of leaving the vast majority of their forces in Earth orbit as a not-so-subtle reminder of their strength, even they had finally begun putting ships around their own colonies. There were rumors that they’d lost a colony or two themselves, but no one had managed to get any confirmation on that. The Solari organization and its national partners were too busy elsewhere now to respond to emergency requests from non-aligned worlds…assuming they even had ships in range, which was another longshot.

If we manage to end this war without it burning everything to ashes, we’ll probably be in a much stronger position than we started.

Of course, it was the second part of that little scenario that was the stickler. Nadine was well aware of the growing acceptance for Jane Makay’s theories and what it would mean for humanity if the captain of the HMS Hood were right. They already knew well that they were up against a multi-world empire of some sort, with no less than three species, most likely more than that, in fact.

Since Earth was the only real source of industrial strength in human-controlled space at this time, it was a fair assessment to say that they were operating at a serious disadvantage. She could only hope that they would have enough time and population to give the aliens a good run for their money.

It was bad enough that they were on the wrong side of a technical disadvantage, but to be working from an industrial disadvantage as large as it was beginning to appear they were dealing with…well, that could be a killer.

Literally.

“Cheyenne is in a stable orbit, Admiral.”

She half turned, nodding as Captain Roberts floated into position beside her. “Thank you, Captain.”

“Anything new I should know about in the reports, Admiral?”

Nadine shrugged. “We’re scheduled for refit.”

“Begging your pardon, Admiral, but it’s about damned time.” Roberts grinned. “We haven’t seen a yard since before our last mix-up here in Hayden, and that blew damned near every armor panel we had clear off the hull.”

“Flying her through an enemy ship will do that to you,” Nadine countered dryly. “We were lucky they were able to ship replacement panels out this far. It would have been a long way home without them.”

Roberts nodded soberly, knowing that was more than the truth. Despite the fact that the ship had still been space-worthy after their accidental trip through an enemy starship, there was a difference between space-worthy and jump-worthy. Without the ceramic panels, the ship would never have been able to maintain high, relativistic velocities, which would have limited their jump speed to only a few points over light-speed.

Since Hayden was more than fifty light-years out, well, it would have been an epic voyage.

“Any word on how complete a refit, ma’am?” he asked curiously.

“No.” She shook her head. “Just orders to report for refit.”

“Well, it’ll be good to have a slip and some engineers who can check our fittings,” he admitted. “Not that I don’t trust our men, but those slabs are tricky to install by hand.”

Nadine snorted softly, smiling. “Tricky is an interesting euphemism, Captain. I believe I would have said impossible until I watched them do it.”

“I wouldn’t have gone quite that far,” Roberts said with a shrug. “The book says it can be done, it’s just that no one ever thought a crew would have to do it for practically every plate at the same time.”

“Well at least we made the history books, I suppose.”

“Being the first ship to ever flying through another starship should have been enough to secure that particular honor,” Roberts chuckled dryly.

“True.” Nadine felt her cheeks flush just a bit, and she hoped it wasn’t visible. While tactical maneuvering was the auspices of the captain and his ship handlers, she was well aware that it was her strategic decisions that had placed them in that particular situation and there had been no way to redirect the sheer mass of the ship once the enemy had turned directly into their path.

Her finest hour it wasn’t, not in her opinion at least. Her crew, on the other hand, took it as a bizarre badge of honor and considered surviving the blatant inanity of the situation to be an accomplishment.

She was just glad they’d survived the incident in order to brag about it later.

Better lucky than good, I suppose.

“When do we break orbit for home then, Admiral?”

“Few days, Captain,” she said, considering. “We need to top off our tankage, that’ll take at least three days.”

“Four,” he corrected, nodding. “They’ve got the facilities here, but they’re not up to tanking a full squadron in a hurry yet.”

“I understand that will be changing soon,” Nadine said. “I saw a note in the dispatches about a second tether being shipped out as soon as it cleared the slips back home. Looks like Hayden is going to become our first major resupply point.”

“No shock there, we’ve been working out of Hayden for over a year now,” Roberts answered.

“Yeah,” Nadine mused. “Hayden is probably going to be the most important port we have next to Earth itself.”

“I don’t know, Ares is making a play for their own yards.”

“Granted,” she conceded, “but they’re a lot closer to Earth, out nearer the rim. Hayden has a lot more stars within jump range, and it’s closer to the main body of the galaxy. I wouldn’t put a slip yard here, but a major military installation is a given.”

“I can see that. It’ll take a lot of ships and stations to cover this system properly, though.”

“Hayden sits at a choke point with the alien territory, as best we can tell.” Nadine shrugged. “Better to stop them here than try where the star density is higher.”

Roberts just nodded; there was nothing to say about that really. Over the past year they’d tracked down half a dozen star systems with traces of the alien forces in them, and all of them were linked closely to Hayden. There were paths to take around Hayden, to be sure…especially when the enemy seemed to have better jump drives than they did, but those paths were circuitous and highly inefficient. To get to Earth, practically all direct paths ran through Hayden.

“Well, it’s not our concern just yet,” Nadine went on, setting aside the slate with the dispatches. “Do you have the roster for who’s going planet-side?”

“Yes.” He produced another slate, handing it to her. “We’ll be cycling people over to the station starting in an hour or so.”

“Good. Be sure to remind them that leaving the colony site is strictly forbidden,” she warned.

“Wilco,” he replied. “Everyone knows anyway, but it never hurts to hammer it home.”

“I’ll like this system a lot better once they get the issue in the jungle settled,” Nadine grumbled. “Feels wrong to control the orbitals and yet basically have ceded the planet itself to an enemy force.”

“You’ll get no arguments from me on that one.”

*****

“Heading ashore, Top?”

Sorilla looked up to see Korman standing in the hatchway and nodded as she shouldered her day kit. “Yeah. After I check up on Crow, I figured I’d see how some of the pathfinders are faring now.”

He nodded.

“You not going planet-side?”

“What for?” Korman shrugged. “We’d either be restricted to the station or the colony anyway.”

Sorilla smiled. “What would you do if you weren’t? It’s a jungle world, K. Not exactly anything much there for R&R beyond the colony anyway.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” he told her, lip curled up in a half grin. “If I’m going to be locked up, I may as well be locked up here as there.”

“Right. Well, I’ll see you when I get back on board.”

“Cool,” he said. “You taking your leave on Earth then?”

Sorilla shrugged. “Figured I may as well. We get time on Hayden pretty regularly, and I have family back home.”

“Right, well, I’ll catch you later then, Top,” he told her before stepping back and into the hall.

“Later.” Sorilla followed him out, sealing the hatch behind her.

Korman headed back to the common areas while she turned left and headed for the medical labs. The med labs on the Hood were located near the center core, in the most heavily protected section of the ship. With the ship standing at station for the moment, Sorilla skipped the electric lifts and used the glide tubes to shift decks, arriving at the labs in seconds rather than minutes.

The lieutenant was tied down to an acceleration bed, still on life support from what she could see.

Sorilla snagged a nurse who was drifting in her direction, redirecting the woman so they didn’t collide. “How is he?”

“Stable,” was the best answer she’d gotten yet. “We’ll have to transfer him off to the medical labs in the New Mexico Counterweight as soon as we get home. The damage is just too extensive for us to treat here.”

Sorilla nodded, lips twisting up a bit. The enemy hand weapons weren’t as lethally effective as their artillery response capability, but they were bad enough. Armor wasn’t much use against them, except to sometimes prolong how long it would take you to die if you took a glancing blow. Crow was lucky enough to have had access to immediate medical aid, both from his armor systems and from the shuttle that picked them up.

For all that, from what she’d seen of the damage, Sorilla figured that his soldiering days were done.

“Thank you,” she said, hooking a hand into a grip and pulling herself out of the way.

She drifted over to the bed, looking down at the man who was barely visible under all the rigging, blankets, and medical paraphernalia taped, tied, or otherwise attached to him. He hadn’t been so bad for a butterbar, in her opinion, started off a little rocky to be sure but stepped up to clean up his own mess and get the job done. She hoped they could do something for him back on Earth, figured that they probably could, really. Medical science seemed to be a couple shakes away from beating the old adage that there were only two things unavoidable in life…death and taxes.

Sorilla figured that the government wanted more taxes, which was why the medics were so close to beating death.

“Well, L.T., that last mission could have gone off a little smoother,” she said, looking down. “You always where too stupid to duck, but at least you didn’t let them tag you until we were done. Get your dumb ass well, L.T., or a few of us might just come around to kick it when this is all over.”

Sighing, Sorilla pushed off the bed and drifted out of the room. She had a few days off, and she supposed she may as well get the best use of them she could. Getting from the med labs to the docking lock was actually a lot easier than from some places much closer since the design of the ship included a straight line corridor large enough to accommodate emergency vehicles for quick patient transfers.

From the docking lock, she just cycled through and found a seat on the next transfer pod to Liberation Station.

Now there’s a name that could have used a little more thought, she chuckled to herself as the pod approached the tether counterweight.

Like almost every counterweight, Liberation Station had begun its life as a ship. In this case, she figured it was likely one of the old Discoverer class exploration ships. Originally unarmed except for very light lasers and a couple standard torpedo launchers, the Discoverer class ships were big, heavy duty, and generally built to withstand anything short of a supernova.

Or a gravity valve.

People were expected to live on Discoverer class ships for years, if not decades, so they had been built with enough room to stash pretty much all the amenities one might hope for. That size, as well as their impressive list of facilities and luxuries, made them one of the best candidates for recycling as tether counterweights once their lifespan as active-duty ships was done.

Only the fact that they had been built so well and most were still in active service kept all counterweights from being former Discoverer class hulls.

Someone pulled some strings, or Hayden lucked out to get one, Sorilla supposed as her pod docked on automatic controls and she was cycled through the airlock into the main bay.

All it took was a glance around the bay to tell her that Hayden had both lucked out and someone had been pulling strings. The entire bay was in the best shape of any Discoverer class ship she’d ever been on, enough that she would almost believe that it was a new construct if it weren’t for the fact that there hadn’t been a new hull in the class for well over five decades.

While admiring the state of the station’s interior, Sorilla idly shouldered her day kit and stepped off the pod when the doors were cleared. Straightening from having to duck through the hatch, she paused a moment to secure her beret properly on her head before making her way deeper into the station.

Sorilla paused at the first terminal access point she found and silently linked it to her implants so she could browse the system quicker. It took a few moments to locate the names she was looking for, and she was surprised to find that two of them were on the station at the time. She loaded the directions into her implants and set off with a guide map floating in her corneal HUD.

The station was bustling with activity, the number of off-duty military personnel easily matching the civilians she could see and in most cases outnumbering them. Sorilla was aware that Valkyrie wasn’t the only Solari group in orbit of Hayden, though most of the others were transports, scouts, and other various types of vessels. The Cheyenne and Longbow class ships of Task Force Valkyrie were the only real weight of combat metal in orbit aside from the refitted Liberation Station.

With her HUD guiding her through the corridors of the station, Sorilla quickly got precisely where she wanted to be and found herself standing outside the medical labs. She shouldn’t have been surprised, but she was to a small degree, at least since she’d only asked for directions to Tara’s location and not for the layered details of the particular section involved.

A tap on the wall, followed by her softly clearing her throat, brought the nurse’s attention up from the desk she was working at. Tara beamed in recognition and made short work of crossing over to where Sorilla, with only a little discomfort, caught the enthusiastic redhead’s hug and returned it. Her father had never been the most demonstrative sort, so hugs weren’t really something Sorilla grew up with, which was why she was a little uncomfortable with Tara’s easy application of physical affection. Even so, she’d learned to cope.

It was odd to think it, but Sorilla owed her training in the Green Berets for patching up a lot of the deficiencies in her social behavior. She’d grown up more tomboy than anything, more likely to slug someone in the arm than hug them, but that was something that wasn’t tolerated by her trainers in world societies. The Special Forces needed women who could integrate themselves with the society they were entering in order to teach both men and women. To do that, you had to make everyone around you comfortable with you, make them trust you. That sometimes meant hugging people, kissing cheeks, whatever it took to get them to accept you in the role you were undertaking.

Most of her missions involved sitting in a rugged classroom, generally trying very hard not to look like she could beat the ever living crap out of the men she was teaching. After all, if they believed she could do that, they’d be too preoccupied trying to resolve the threat she posed to their manhood to learn what she was teaching.

So she hugged Tara back, smiled to match the nurse’s own gleeful look, and didn’t even cringe when the redhead squealed in her ear.

“Sorilla, how have you been?” Tara gushed, really in a better mood than she’d been the entire time Sorilla had known her.

It didn’t take a genius to work out why, of course. Just one look at the gleaming medical lab behind the redhead was a perfect explanation for her good mood. When Sorilla had first met her, Tara had been working out of a hut built of scrap lumber and local materials with a packed dirt floor. Even after the military established a presence on Hayden, she’d been working out of tunnels cut hurriedly into the hills on the coast, better than the hut, but only in so much as a broken leg is better than an amputation.

“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.

Chapter Two

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.

He doubted it, but it was possible.

Kris sighed, sliding the alien knife back into his belt as he turned his back to the dark line that cut the sky behind him.

“Prepare the Sentinels,” he ordered. “We’ll test their perimeter, quietly.”

He glared around at the Lucians, knowing that they wanted to do more than quiet testing of the perimeter.

“Do not get caught. I want to be ready to make a big move once those ships leave orbit,” he said. “So do nothing to alert them in the meantime.”

The Lucian Sentinels nodded, understanding the order. They all intimately knew the difference between doing nothing and doing the least possible in order to set up a future act.

*****

The next morning, station time, Sorilla made her way into the military section of the counterweight station. She’d checked the directory and found a few names she was familiar with there, and a couple she counted as friends, and so she wanted to check in with them as a matter of courtesy and maybe get a few questions asked in the meantime.

Security was reasonably tight, though she had to look hard to spot it as she walked through the corridors and past guards who didn’t even bother to look up in her direction. Biometrics examined her body, face, and walking pace as she approached, and she could feel her implants being riffed like an itch in the back of her neck.

That was another new development in the next gen implants they’d sliced into her nervous system. More and more she could feel activity from them that she’d never known to be noticeable before. They drew on power from her body, communicated with each other along her neural pathways, and as her brain rewired itself around the new signals it was parsing along previously unused paths, it began to report them to her in varying ways.

She assumed that the security checks all passed since no one stepped forward to stop her, so she hung a right at the next intersection and made her way down to the administration offices. She found the small, half-sized office she was looking for and smirked as she spotted the young man inside hammering away at his keyboard. A lot of people used the older input technology for serious data entry, because while intuitive and adaptive interface design was great at streamlining language, for example, by predicting the word you wanted from the letters you began with and the context of the available text, when it came to things like number strings and code phrase documents, you just couldn’t beat an old-style keyboard.

“Hit that thing any harder and you’ll break it,” she said dryly as she leaned on the hatch that opened into the small room.

The man jerked around, clearly startled by the unexpected voice until he recognized both the sound and the figure of the person speaking to him.

“God! Jesus, Sor, are you trying to kill me?”

She snorted softly. “If I wanted you dead, Jace, your corpse would be burning up in Hayden’s atmo right about now.”

Jason Gibson cringed. “Do you really have to put it that way?”

“You asked.”

“Most girls I talk to don’t take rhetorical questions as an invitation to plan out body drops,” he countered, rolling his eyes.

“Jace, you’re a web addict, most girls you talk too are guys.”

He sighed. “You do remember I outrank you, right?”

“Different chain of command, spanky,” she told him with a grin. “I’m in OPCOM, remember?”

“How could I forget?” he asked. “What do you want this time?”

“Aww, is that really how you want to start our visit?”

“No, but you kicked it off by reminding me that not only could you kick my ass, you also know all the override codes for the airlocks, so I’m assuming you have a reason.”

She grinned as she ducked into the room, ignoring the chair in front of the desk in favor of sliding herself onto the desk itself. That pushed a pack of data tablets aside, sending a few clattering to the floor, but she ignored them to instead grin at his wince. Gibson was a bit OCD when it came to neatness, and she had a laugh riot every time she ran into him because he was so non-confrontational that she was half convinced that if she really had been here to kill him he’d have offered to walk her to the airlock to make things easier on them both.

Pushing his buttons was fun as hell, and she actually had bank on when he’d finally snap and do something about it. She’d been playing this game with him since they met in Bragg almost ten years earlier, and, honestly, she’d lost her bet a long time ago. For all his quiet demeanor, however, Jason Gibbons was one of the better administrators around and knew computer systems better than half the techs hired to maintain them.

There were few things secret from him, and she knew that she could pry anything short of classified intel out of him with a little work.

“Alright then, since you’re so uptight about it,” she smirked, “I was speaking with some of my friends from Hayden-side and wanted to get your take on the situation down there.”

“Situation is nominal as far as I know,” Jason shrugged.

“What about patrols beyond the beams?”

“There are none, not out farther than five klicks,” he answered honestly. “Why would we? There’s nothing on Hayden we want other than the colony site and maybe the secondary valve location. The aliens are welcome to the rest of it. Other than some interesting pharmaceuticals, the planet is basically a non-producing territory.”

“I know that,” she admitted, “but I’m not sold that it’s a good idea to leave a guerilla force on our back door when we might be facing down a significant problem from space at any time.”

Jason flushed a little at her tone, but to his credit she could see him thinking before he responded.

“I’m sure that’s been considered. Besides, what trouble could they really cause?” he asked. “I read your reports, Sor. They can’t have more than a couple hundred actives at most, no reports of anything but small arms…”

“That’s a relative term when talking about Ghoulie guns and beam weapons,” she countered dryly.

“Well, be that as it may, the current stance of the command here is that the forces on the ground are not a threat.”

“And that, Jace, is a problem,” Sorilla grunted.

“Ours is not to reason why, Sergeant,” he told her.

“Yeah, I know the saying, Jace. You left out the second part, and that bit is a real bitch,” Sorilla replied, getting off the desk. “I’ll catch you later.”

He looked back to her as she walked out, a sense of alarm growing as he rose up out of his chair. “Sergeant! What are you going to do? Sergeant! Damn it, Sor! Answer me!”

By the time he got untangled from his workstation and around the desk to the still-open hatch, however, she was long gone. Jason Gibbons groaned and leaned his head against the metal, resisting the urge to bang it like he was in some stupid comedy.

“Please, God, don’t let her kill anyone,” he moaned. “At least not any superior officers.”

*****

Sorilla whistled tunelessly as she navigated the military decks, knowing her way around by heart. She’d been assigned to more than one Discoverer class ship turned tether station, and the layout was always identical.

The chat with Jace had been enough to give her an idea of the current attitude that was prevailing in the military circles here in Hayden. That didn’t mean that everyone felt that way, probably even the local commander didn’t feel that way, but that was the way the wind was blowing from Solari Command and specifically from the United States and Great Britain member nations of the Solari Organization.

Sorilla knew that she had something of a personal investment in the situation, her time on Hayden had left an impression on her. She liked the people, enjoyed the jungle more than most, and felt a bit of a kinship to the idea of Hayden. A frontier world was a romantic illusion in reality, but Hayden was as close as you got as the farthest colony from Earth, located quite close to where the Orion arm rejoined the central galactic cluster.

By nature, jump points trended to follow higher density regions of the galaxy, so moving from Hayden out into the galaxy resulted in a sudden logarithmic increase in jump point lanes. Going the other direction from Earth was the opposite. There were several large clusters of stars that were probably entirely cut off from the rest of the galaxy because the intervening stellar density was too low to provide a jump lane to any star within the cluster.

That meant that Earth’s presence had expanded more toward the inner galactic core than back along the Orion arm, right until here at Hayden. Beyond Hayden, Sorilla knew that there had been quite a few scout runs, but there were few enough worlds of immediate interest and so many star lanes to choose from that humanity had settled into a consolidation phase after its brief but exciting expansion push into the stars.

None of that mattered at the moment, of course, not to her at least. Certainly to some high level strategist it was probably part and parcel of their plotting, but Sorilla was more concerned with Hayden itself. She knew the station commander personally—he’d been in charge of the ground forces on Hayden when she returned with Valkyrie two years past—and wasn’t surprised by his adoption of the current ‘turtle’ strategy.

Brigadier Kane wasn’t particularly fond of Operators; he was a tank commander from way back and part of the army that didn’t want to admit that tanks were obsolete and had been for longer than he’d been alive. In fact, in her own opinion, tanks stopped being significant after the killing fields of World War II finally fell silent, though there was a certain weight to the argument that they served as additional deterrence during the Cold War.

Certainly, tanks could smash through enemy defenses with ease, but the world had moved past that. Small arms ruled the world, shotguns and rifles and pistols. Tanks couldn’t go where men could, and you had to follow the men if you wanted to really control the territory you were holding. In the end, controlling territory could only be accomplished with the consent of those who lived there. If you didn’t get face to face with them, you had no chance at all.

Now they’d given up Hayden’s jungles to the aliens, which meant that they were, for all practical purposes, the locals.

Sorilla unconsciously cracked her knuckles as she made her way through the halls. Getting face to face with people was what she did, after all, and she was eager to have another crack at the alien operators she had only briefly engaged previously.

First, though, she thought as she stepped into the command offices and walked over to the secretary sitting behind the desk there, I need to get Kane with the program, and that could be a challenge.

“Master Sergeant Aida to see Brigadier Kane.”

****

Brigadier Samuel Kane liked to think of himself as a man who didn’t suffer fools easily, or quietly, or at all, by preference. He also really didn’t much care for Operators. Oh, he couldn’t deny that they were effective, nor did he refuse to make use of their skills, but he found them distasteful to deal with as a general rule. If he were being honest, his biggest issue with them was the fact that they generally answered to an entirely different chain of command and, often as not could, and often did, tell him to go to hell on his own base.

Oh, not in those words, of course. They used words like ‘classified,’ ‘need to know,’ and occasionally even ‘over your pay grade.’ It set his teeth on edge to have some junior officer or, worse still, a non-com look him in the eye and tell him any of those things with a straight face. The hell of it was that it was often true, and they really didn’t mean any disrespect. Which wasn’t the same as not enjoying the hell of out spouting that crap to a general, of course.

He’d seen Aida’s name on his appointment list when he checked it during his morning briefing and only wished that he’d been surprised by it. When Valkyrie put into Hayden Station, he’d started a mental countdown on how long before he had to deal with her, though he was somewhat surprised that she’d come to him directly. He’d expected the approach to be made by Lt. Crow, or possibly the captain of the Cheyenne, depending on just how serious she was.

Aida had grown attached to the locals here on Hayden, something that happened often enough for him to be familiar with it. Mostly it wasn’t too much of a hassle, though it always resulted in more annoyances than benefits in his experience. Soldiers in a foreign nation were like houseguests and fish, rarely welcome more than three days and only welcome that long under duress as a rule.

Still, he knew what she was here to speak on, and Kane didn’t disagree.

So, when his secretary announced her presence, Kane just thumbed the comm switch. “Send her in.”

The master sergeant looked different out of armor, he noted as she stepped in and came to attention. Her Solari white dress looked good on her, the uniform was even competently tailored, which was something that didn’t happen every time, in his experience. She stood a hair under five foot nine in her boots, dark eyes focused on the wall behind and above him as he sized the woman up from his seat.

“At ease,” Kane told her, nodding briefly before turning his attention to the deskwork in front of him.

He felt more than saw her stance widen as she clasped her hands behind her but generally didn’t pay any more attention than that as he signed off on a requisition form and started filling out personnel reports. She didn’t so much as twitch a hair while he worked, which was as it should be. Finally he signed his name again and looked up to where the master sergeant was still waiting.

“Well, Master Sergeant,” he said. “Why don’t you wow me, then?”

“Your pardon, sir?” She blinked, obviously surprised and confused.

“Your reasons for stirring up the hornets’ nest on the world below,” he expounded. “Why should I send an Operator team into Hayden’s jungle while things have obviously quieted down?”

“Sir…I…”

He smiled thinly at having put the woman back on her heels. “Come now, Sergeant, I’ll thank you not to take me for a fool. There is no other reason for you to be here, yet if you had orders from OPCOM, you’d have presented them. Hell, if you had any sort of support, I’d be speaking with Lt. Crow now, I suspect.”

“The lieutenant is in the Hood’s medical lab, sir,” she said woodenly. “His injuries likely won’t permit his return to service.”

Kane stopped for a moment, his face carved from stone. “I see. On your last mission?”

“Yes, sir.”

The general nodded quietly, then shook his head slightly. “Well, I would have preferred better news there. Crow handled himself well on Hayden during the last push.”

“He did at that, sir,” Sorilla confirmed.

“Still, my reasoning stands,” Kane said after a moment. “If you had support for what you’re so obviously here about, I would be speaking with an officer. So, Sergeant, wow me.”

“General, sir, you know as well as I do that if we leave them be, they’ll be a gun at our back when the enemy fleet returns,” she said, clearly not feeling any need to sugarcoat things. “Leaving a dangerous guerilla force on-world is reckless at best, suicidal at worst.”

“We don’t have the forces to dig them out, Sergeant. They’ve already showed that,” he said evenly. “We lost most of our patrols until we pulled them back within the beams. The fact is that the enemy has better jungle fighters than we do.”

“Not than Hayden’s pathfinders and I, sir,” she said, her tone vehement. “Give me Reed, a spotter, and artillery support, and we’ll weed them out.”

“Funny, Sergeant, you don’t look like John Wayne,” Kane told her dryly. “And even the Duke knew enough to take a team.”

“My team is due to stand down,” she said stiffly, “and they need the time. This isn’t a combat mission, sir. What we need on Hayden are forward observers, calling in fire from the heavens, not a strike team.”

“Your team aren’t the only ones due to stand down, Sergeant,” Kane told her. Honestly he liked the idea, and it played well into his own sensibilities, but he wasn’t about to make it easy on her now. Especially not since she’d jumped the chain of command in bringing it directly to him, but since she was assigned to OPCOM, the distinction was a technicality as her position was outside his direct chain of command.

Just as well for the master sergeant, he supposed. He would have had her on report and tossed in the brig for a couple days if she had tried it while under his command.

That said, OPCOM was not only a separate chain of command, but in many ways those within it held higher authority than their ranks would indicate.

“I’ll consider it,” he said finally, eyes flicking to the door. “Dismissed.”

“Sir!” She went to attention again, saluting perfectly before pivoting on her heel and marching out.

****

Sorilla left the office with mixed feelings.

On the one hand, she hadn’t gotten the permission she’d been seeking, but honestly she knew that had been a longshot at best. In reality, she supposed she had achieved the best case scenario in that he had promised to consider the request. Decisions at that level took time, and hopefully this one would come down in her favor.

She left a message for Tara, putting off the get-together they’d planned for later that day. Instead, Sorilla hitched a ride on the next transfer capsule to the Hood and immediately made her way to the armory.

Her armor was powered down, the power systems tended to degrade over time when kept at a combat charge, and she knew that she would also need to re-flash the suit’s system memory with the latest operating system code. Again, leaving a suit’s software running over long periods tended to result in trash building up in the oddest of places, eventually compromising the armor’s effectiveness.

It had been wiped after the last mission, and so she started the power-up sequence and began re-flashing the systems one by one while the suit charged from ship’s stores. She was preparing, just in case, to be sure, but on the assumption that she’d be receiving new orders shortly.

Bringing OPCOM powered armor to operational levels from storage was an involved process, precisely for those reasons. Like her weapons and kit, her life could…no, would depend entirely on the suit. In fact, it would likely depend continuously on the armor for prolonged periods. If something she had was going to fail, she’d much prefer it be anything…literally anything other than her armor. She could fight with her hands if need be, but she’d be hard pressed to breathe in space through her rifle.

Technically there were people assigned specifically to the task she was doing, but Sorilla didn’t know an Operator still breathing who let someone else secure and prep their gear.

****

There were few places Nadine Brookes enjoyed more than the observation deck of the USF Cheyenne when it wasn’t locked down for combat. The blast shields were pulled back, and beyond the foredeck of the big ship she could see Hayden floating there, a crescent of green and blue against the black of space. The other ships of the squadron, a few dozen kilometers away from the Cheyenne, were barely visible in the distance. Only their running lights gave them away as they drifted in a loose formation around the station counterweight.

It was a scene only a scant few tens of thousands could claim to have ever seen in all of human history. Probably less, in all honesty, since most of the early interstellar ships couldn’t exactly claim much in the way of a decent view. They’d been built for durability, almost as much as the Cheyenne, but back during the first generation of forge-cast ships, the technology wasn’t remotely as sophisticated as it had since become.

Ten thousand years of warfare, she thought as she looked out on the serenity of creation, and we can’t even escape it when we leave the Earth a hundred light-years in our rearview cameras. It’s a good thing that we are so very damned good at it.

The current war was unlike anything anyone had fought on Earth in centuries, however. The more she learned, either through research, analytical thought, or experience under fire, all made it feel like something an admiral during the Age of Empires might have been more comfortable with.

Valkyrie had been on assignment for over two years. That was two years away from home port and hundreds of years away from communications by any traditional method. Jump drones could carry FTL messages home, but the only way Earth could respond was if they knew where the taskforce would be, and there was no way they could stay still while in contested territory.

That placed ship captains and people like herself in positions of power that hadn’t even existed for centuries. She had to make decisions that could change the direction of the entire planet’s future. Some days she wanted anything but that responsibility, but in the darkest part of her heart, Nadine found a deep thrill in the knowledge that she held a power that hadn’t been in human hands since the Age of Empires.

Of course, one thing that hadn’t changed much since those days was the paperwork. Why it was still called that she didn’t know, but it was the bane of her existence. Every morning she opened her in-folder and found several pages of files waiting her attention. Most were only in need of a glance through before being sent off to the department they were intended for, but she had to sign off on everything above a certain level and check over several levels below that.

It was generally a grueling couple hours that took up most mornings, unless the taskforce was in a port of call…such as Hayden, for example, and then it took up most of her day.

Every day.

Today, however, she found a single short file in the electronic box that piqued her attention. It was flagged to her, not from one of the shipboard departments of Valkyrie, but from the station they were currently orbiting with.

From the offices of Brigadier Kane. Now what does he want?

As she read the file, she was both unsurprised and slightly piqued, though Nadine had to admit that she wasn’t sure who she was annoyed with. Kane for requesting the services of one of her OPCOM team who was clearly due for leave, not another deployment, or the master sergeant whose fingerprints she could read all over the request.

Nadine had never been face to face with Sergeant Aida; there had been no need of it and she preferred to leave such matters in the hands of the direct commanders of the units. In this case, that was generally Captain MacKay since the OPCOM team deployed from the HMS Hood. She was, however, aware of the master sergeant’s record and, honestly, was more annoyed with herself for not having expected this and had Aida restricted from the station until they got back from Earth-space.

She sighed, calling up the leave records, and found that Aida had indeed shipped out to the station on the first wave of pods. She didn’t bother querying the station concerning Aida’s activities there, those were obvious. Now she had to decide what to do about it, which was patently absurd. Admirals weren’t supposed to bother with sergeants directly, not even those assigned to OPCOM. But, then again, neither were brigadier generals, and apparently Kane had, so who was she to question it?

Besides, she’d wanted to meet the woman for some time, in all honesty, but had been too busy and had no real excuse to do so. Contrary to common opinion, being an admiral didn’t mean she got to do whatever she wanted in her fleet. She had to think of the effect her actions would have on everyone she dealt with, and the brass didn’t associate with noncoms for good reason.

I suppose this will do for an excuse , she thought, keying open a comm. “Captain, I’ll need a shuttle pod prepped for my use.”

“Of course, Admiral. Heading to the station?”

“No, I want to visit the Hood.”

Rogers paused briefly before coming back. “Aye, ma’am, I’ll have Captain MacKay apprised?”

Nadine smiled slightly. “Of course, Captain.”

“Yes, ma’am. It’ll be ready shortly.”

Nadine stood up and kicked her way into a trajectory that would bring her to the access hatch that led from her offices to her quarters. She’d keep the meeting as low profile as was possible, but spacer whites were a requirement since she was going to have to meet with Jane MacKay at least briefly before seeing Aida. Not that meeting with MacKay was a chore, the woman was one of her finest analysts, but she just wasn’t the subject this time around.

*****

Parithalian Alliance Ship Noble Venture

The background noise of space may seem silent to ears that only heard atmospheric vibrations, but not every species ‘listened’ in the same way. The Parithalian evolved on a set of worlds that encouraged alternate threat detection methodologies, and to the ship’s master of the Noble Venture, the open screens of the ship permitted the entry of an almost soothing background cavalcade of ‘sounds.’ The pop of a distant pulsar merely punctuated the local crackle of the nearby star, its distinct sound echoing off various planets and filtering back to the ship.

‘ Hearing’ the electromagnetic spectrum was one of the traits that made the Parths some of the best ship handlers in Alliance space, but at the moment it gave the master of the small flotilla cold comfort indeed.

Nothing is as it should be in these systems.

The Ros had detailed charts of the area, indicating standard navigation beacons at all the proscribed distances as well as signal boosters to maintain contact with Alliance space, but none of that was anywhere to be found. So, unless the Ros’El had fabricated their charts and developmental reports, it seemed that the aliens had wiped the systems clean of anything they encountered that wasn’t naturally supposed to be there.

As much as I might wish it otherwise, it’s highly unlikely that the Ros submitted false reports. He sighed, shaking his head as he stepped back from the open viewing dome and tripped the signal to close the blast shields.

Now, it was certain that none of the things in question were hidden to any great degree. However, it spoke of a determined and meticulous people to go out and clean star system after star system of every piece of Alliance tech floating about. The deeper he brought his taskforce into disputed space, the more he was concerned by those very traits, more so than he was by the enemy capabilities themselves.

The flotilla was now only a single shift away from the system that had kicked off the whole mess, and he could feel the tensions rising among his crews just as much as they were climbing in his own self.

“SeQuin, how long until we reach the shift point?”

“Ninety path cycles, Master.”

Master of Ships Reethan Parath nodded absently as he made his way out of the observation bubble and headed back to his offices with the young adjutant in pursuit.

When they shifted into the disputed system, he expected a lot of the questions they had been gathering to be answered, most in ways he no doubt would not much appreciate.

“Order the handlers to ready their ships,” he told his adjutant, “and secure the flotilla for combat.”

“Yes, Master.”

They would have to shift in nearly blind, but that was in the nature of his duty. Serving in the Parth Navy meant that you were generally the first in and the last out of any conflict that shook the Alliance.

Reethan, for one, wouldn’t have it any other way.

*****

HMS Hood

Sorilla laid her rifle beside the rest of the kit, having just finished checking every piece, processor, and relay line in the device. No word yet, but she would be ready if the orders she was hoping for came through.

Her pistol took only a few seconds to check and set aside. The metalstorm weapon only had fifty moving parts, and those were the bullets. All she had to do was run a wireless diagnostic check on the rounds in each of the magazines and she knew the gun was good to go.

The rest of her kit wasn’t nearly so easy to prep, however. Her armor was still running through electronic diagnostics, and when that was done, she’d have to visually inspect the material for damage from her last mission. The maintenance crews had already done that, but it wasn’t their life on the line and she had the time anyway.

Oddly, waiting had never been her strong suit, and now Sorilla had to almost physically restrain herself from checking the time constantly or, worse, actually calling the station to see if there were any messages. She knew that she’d find out when she found out and not before, but sitting around a base was never something she found palatable.

In the field she could be patient. Enemy actions happened on the enemy’s schedule unless you were very, very good or very, very lucky. She’d long since assimilated that fact into her mentality and could sit in the jungle and just wait with the best of them.

Unless the best of them include snipers, those guys are freaks.

That said, she knew that she had never managed to get her head wrapped around the fact that, sometimes, the brass were the enemy. Sure, they didn’t shoot at you, unless you’d really screwed up, but in many ways the upper brass acted very much like an enemy faction that you had to account for if you wanted to get your mission done right.

Still, hurrying up to wait for orders was one skill she’d never mastered, and Sorilla could just feel every tick of the clock on the wall as the seconds moved by. Or, rather, should have felt them as if there were a clock on the wall that had a second hand.

I’m with my dad on this, digital clocks just have no soul.

Sorilla sighed, returning her distracted mind to the task at hand, and went on with the physical check of her armor.

*****

“Admiral on deck!”

The whistle announcing her arrival echoed off the walls of the cargo bay. As large as they were, neither the Longbow nor Cheyenne class vessels had dedicated shuttle bays, so as she kicked out of the small shuttle pod used to ferry people between ships and stations, Admiral Nadine Brookes floated between the imposing bulk of an orbiter shuttle on one side and stacks of supply containers on the other.

People were lined up on the decks, feet locked to the floor by light magnetic heels. She glanced them over, mostly out of the corner of her eyes, but nodded appreciatively at the professional state of affairs. Not that she had expected any less, of course, this was the standard for greeting a visiting admiral.

Ahead of her, as she drifted freely down the bay, the captain of the Hood was waiting to greet her.

Jane MacKay was one of her most reliable officers, someone Nadine had learned to lean on and trust in a clinch. The British woman was a former science track officer, much like herself, and had come up through the ranks in the early days of the USF. The opening days of the war had torn the ever living hell out of the military ranks of the Fleet, leaving mostly science track officers to take up the slack while Earth’s militaries scrambled to provide new officers with battle experience for training.

She’d be glad enough for the help, was glad of what had already arrived even, but Nadine would take officers like MacKay over all the wet Navy battle experience in the universe.

Jane saluted as she drifted into position, two men with magnetic heels catching her arms and bringing Nadine down to the floor.

“Admiral,” Captain MacKay said crisply. “It’s an honor to have you aboard.”

“The honor is mine, Captain. As always, the Hood does not fail to impress.”

Jane smiled genuinely, clearly pleased by that statement. “The crew and I do try to please.”

“And you always succeed, in battle and without,” Nadine said. “Now, however, I was hoping to speak with you privately.”

“Of course.” MacKay gestured to the hatch behind her. “This way, Admiral.”

The hatch led to the main serviceways of the ship. They ringed the ship and were built so that people could move about during acceleration, so moving up toward the ‘bow’ of the ship was easily managed by pulling themselves along the ladders placed there to let climb in one-G. MacKay led them to the flag deck, and a few minutes later, Nadine found herself looking out over the lights that were Task Force Valkyrie from a very different perspective.

She couldn’t help but find the lights that belonged to the Cheyenne and studied them for a long moment while Jane MacKay waited quietly.

Finally, Nadine twisted about enough to settle her gaze on MacKay.

“I have to confess, I didn’t come over for a chat,” she said with a quirk of her lips. “Not with you at least.”

MacKay seemed puzzled, leaning forward slightly. “Pardon? Who did you come to speak with then?”

Nadine paused, considering her next words. “What do you know of Sergeant Aida?”

MacKay blinked, she hadn’t been expecting that. “American Special Forces, trainer specialist. She’s on our strike forces because no one has as much experience with the aliens as she does, given her time on Hayden. One of the best noncoms I have under my command, Admiral.”

“I received a request from Brigadier Kane to have her transferred back to Hayden,” Nadine said mildly, watching MacKay’s expression.

She wasn’t disappointed.

MacKay’s eyes widened first, then the British officer almost instantly scowled. “The sergeant and her team are due for a well-deserved leave, Admiral. I would like to officially note a protest against any such request.”

Nadine held her hand up, amused. “I’d hold off on that in your place.”

“Admiral, that team spent almost two weeks eating nothing but paste while on approach to the last world we took,” MacKay said. “After that, they humped through several hundred klicks of alien forests, jungle, and god alone knows what else…and then they assaulted a Ghoulie stronghold and rescued almost sixty PUCs. If anyone has a break coming—”

“Peace, Captain. I agree with you,” Nadine chuckled softly, holding her hand up.

MacKay let out a breath she’d be gathering to continue her protest. “Then why are you here, ma’am?”

“I’m here because I rather suspect that the sergeant herself is behind this little transfer request.”

MacKay started to say something, but paused and slowly closed her mouth as she considered that. Finally she scowled, looking more exasperated than angry this time. “Well, that just figures. Sounds like something she’d pull.”

“About what I suspected,” Nadine nodded. “I thought that it fit Aida’s psych profile.”

“It does,” MacKay confirmed. “She’s as stubborn as they come, and I know she considers Hayden to be unfinished business.”

Nadine nodded, having expected as much. “Before I make any decisions on the general’s transfer request, I want to speak with her.”

“Off the record?”

“At first,” the admiral said. “The fact that she went outside the chain of command is a problem, but I don’t want to put a black mark on her record if it can be avoided, and clearly the general agrees on that point or he wouldn’t have forwarded the request the way he did.”

MacKay nodded, understanding. “Should I inform her we’re coming, or would you prefer to make it a surprise inspection?”

Nadine smiled slightly. “Let’s do the surprise idea, shall we?”

*****

“Admiral on deck!”

Sorrilla didn’t, quite, drop her tools when the call sounded, but it was a close thing. She threw herself up, shoulders coming back automatically as she drew herself to attention, and was uncomfortably aware of the fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra and the room was kept quite cold to preserve the electronics within.

Out of the corner of her eye, she recognized the captain as she kicked off the doorframe and drifted into the center of the room, followed closely by Admiral Brookes, and took absolutely no comfort in the fact that it was two women approaching her. She’d long since assimilated the discomfort of being nude, or sometimes worse, in the presence of men. They, especially her squadmates, were known and comfortable quantities for her. Having the captain and the admiral, neither of whom she knew particularly well, seeing her in less-than-total professionalism was another matter.

The last thing she wanted was to be judged by them while in any state short of perfect.

That said, none of those thoughts or wishes affected reality, nor did they affect her posture or salute as she stood, ramrod straight, with her toes hooked into the base of the worktable while she waited for the two officers to right themselves in front of her.

“At ease,” Captain MacKay said as the admiral settled into place, eyes sternly glaring at Sorilla across the workbench.

Sorilla dropped the salute, clasping her hands behind her, and let her right foot slip from its literal toehold so she could send it questing out to find another brace that would let her assume the militarily correct posture. It took a few seconds, but finally she braced in with her feet about shoulder width apart, hands clasped behind her back, and shoulder still thrown back despite the effect it had on her breasts in the cool temperature of the armory work room.

Captain MacKay looked her over coolly for a long moment before turning back to the admiral.

“Admiral,” she said, tipping her head in Sorilla’s direction, “Sergeant Sorilla Aida, United States Special Forces.”

“So I see,” the statuesque woman in admiral’s whites said, pulling herself down to the level of the workbench as she aligned herself with Sorilla’s position.

Sorilla was mildly grateful that the admiral wasn’t playing games. She’d dealt with several officers who would intentionally align themselves with the walls or ceiling just to make their subordinates jump through hoops to be in the correct posture. It was a common trick used during training, normally by drill sergeants, mostly to acclimatize new troops to the idea that up was in whatever direction you needed it to be unless you were under acceleration.

Officers who pulled the same crap on seasoned personnel, however, really pissed her off.

Oblivious to her thoughts, Admiral Brookes seemed to take a moment to simply stare before speaking.

“Well, Sergeant,” she said finally, “I was wondering if you might have an explanation for a certain transfer request that was shot to my inbox this morning?”

Sorilla’s face twitched, mostly around the eyes, as she processed that.

The general made the request, finally! she thought, almost gleefully until another thought struck her. Oh crap. The bastard must have mentioned that I bypassed Fleet command. Shit.

The admiral’s eyes stayed locked on her face, but Sorilla could see her lips twitch upward in the corners and knew that she’d seen something she was looking for.

“Ma’am, yes, ma’am,” Sorilla said, running on automatic. She wasn’t going to lie to an admiral unless she was pretty damned sure she could get away with it, and that wasn’t about to happen, apparently.

Admiral Brookes lifted an eyebrow, mildly surprised at the immediate admission. She’d half expected a standard OPCOM ‘deny, deny, deny’ tactic and was both glad, and mildly impressed, that the sergeant was smart enough to recognize that it would be futile.

“Would you care to explain why you felt that going outside your chain of command was necessary, Sergeant?” she asked, voice cold.

“Ma’am, it was the quickest way to achieve the objective.”

Admiral Brookes had a pained expression when she heard that. Special Forces. It’s a good thing that they’re so very good at what they do, otherwise they’d be impossible to live with.

“Sergeant,” she said with a tone that made it clear that she was talking to someone infinitely lower on the evolutionary ladder than herself, “that line of reasoning is questionable even when under fire, and you know it. Cross that line again while you’re under my command and I’ll have you tossed out on your backside so fast you’ll make it to Earth on your own momentum, and you’ll be lucky to be teaching grade school gym classes when I’m through, am I quite clear?”

“Ma’am! Yes, ma’am!”

“You can shitcan the boot camp crap while you’re at it,” Brookes told her dryly, drawing a surprised look from the non-com. “As you just figured out, this conversation is off the record. General Kane didn’t mention you at all, but the very fact that he’s asking for OPCOM troops was enough to tell me that something was fishy. Thank’s for the confirmation, incidentally.”

Sorilla winced. “You’re welcome, ma’am.”

“Now that the requisite ass chewing is out of the way,” Brookes said simply, “as you were, Sergeant. Let’s have a little chat.”

Sorilla hesitated briefly, then relaxed her posture. “Yes, ma’am. May I ask about what?”

“Let’s start with why you’re so intent on getting back to Hayden’s World, Sergeant.”

Sorilla paused, but finally nodded. “Right. There’s lots of reasons, Admiral. Unfinished business is one of them, so is the fact that I trained the pathfinders, ma’am. I want to see the mission through.”

“You did your part, Sergeant,” Nadine said. “The planet is under control now, there’s no reason to go back.”

Sorilla shook her head. “As long as the enemy controls ground on Hayden, they’re a threat, ma’am. We do not want to be caught between the high orbitals and a disciplined sabotage force on the ground.”

The Admiral recognized the argument and decided to simply avoid getting mired into the details of it. She wasn’t certain that she agreed. If a force took the high orbitals, then it didn’t really make any difference what was on the ground, in her mind. Once you lost high ground on a planetary scale, it was pretty much game over and you’d lost the match. Certainly there were things you could do, as both the sergeant herself and the aliens now on Hayden had, and were, proving but in a very real way the war was over at that point.

The flipside of the argument, and one not lost on her, was the fact that it could be a very large deal to people on-world and in the orbital tether if their defenders were distracted by fighting in orbit and let a ground strike through. A strategic blow? Probably not, in her mind, but certainly a very large problem for the people involved all the same.

She gazed evenly at the shorter, yet almost infinitely tougher and harder built woman sitting across the table, letting the silence draw out for a long moment.

“Fine,” Brookes said finally. “I’ll authorize a temporary detachment for you to Hayden command under Brigadier Kane. I won’t order anyone else to go with you, Sergeant.”

“Didn’t ask, Admiral.”

“Don’t try that John Wayne baloney with me, Aida,” Brookes scowled. “You don’t have the figure for it.” She pushed away from the workbench, drifting back to where Captain MacKay was waiting. “Remember what I said about the chain of command, Sergeant. You won’t get another warning.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Sorilla nodded.

Brookes kicked off and drifted to the door, the captain following behind. She caught the edge of the hatchway, looked back briefly, and spoke again. “Get your kit ready for your new assignment, Sergeant. You’ll be transferring to HACOM as soon as I speak with the general.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

Admiral Brookes vanished out the door, leaving Captain MacKay to pause for a brief moment. “Sergeant?”

“Captain?” Sorilla answered, looking over.

“Pull what you need from stores,” MacKay said. “We’re due for refit and resupply when we get back to Sol space. I’ll clear the requisition.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Sorilla almost stammered a little. “Thank you, ma’am.”

“You can thank me by not getting dead,” Captain MacKay replied. “You’ve done good work for Valkyrie, I’d like to see you do more.”

Sorilla nodded. “Yes, ma’am, I’ll do my best.”

MacKay nodded curtly, then she, too, was gone from the armory room.

Sorilla stared at the hatch for a moment, then abruptly shifted back to her bench and went back to work, now moving with more intent. She had a mission now, though it was one she considered merely an extension of her early forays onto Hayden, and so it was one that she intended to finally finish once and for all.

*****

Nadine elected to remain on the Hood for a time, visiting with one of her captains and the crew of the ship that served as the Cheyenne’s cohort during mission maneuvers. She didn’t get a lot of chances to speak in person with her captains while the taskforce was in motion, though modern conferencing systems made that almost a moot point, she supposed. In the end, however, there was always something to be said about true face-to-face contact.

With the HMS Hood resting in orbit over Hayden, the microgravity made entertaining a bit of a trial, but Jane MacKay certainly gave it her best as she broke out food and drink for the admiral as they settled in to an nice little, unofficial working lunch.

“So, Admiral, if you don’t mind me asking,” MacKay said as Nadine took a sip of coffee from a squeeze bottle. “You didn’t come over here just for that, did you?”

Nadine smiled slightly. “I don’t mind at all, Captain. But actually, yes, I did. I wanted to speak with the sergeant in person, been meaning to for a while really.”

MacKay frowned pensively, a little confused by that. “I’m sorry, I just can’t figure out why. Aida is an impressive non-com, and she gets the job done, but why the personal interest?”

“This isn’t for general dissemination, Captain,” Nadine said, setting her coffee down in a lock-tight holder.

“Of course, Admiral.”

“The sergeant is on the shortlist for a Mustang slot,” Nadine said with a casual shrug. “Not sure how this particular stunt is going to affect that, but had she kept quiet and not stuck her neck out, she would probably have been directed to West Point when we got back.”

MacKay grimaced. “I suppose that’s why you gave her the assignment she wanted then? Punishment for going outside the chain of command?”

“Hardly,” Nadine said before taking a bite of a sandwich. She chewed thoughtfully for a few seconds, then swallowed. “No, if I’d wanted to punish that woman, I suspect that giving her over to West Point might have been a better move. Neither the general nor myself have made any official record of her actions. Some people will see through the official story to what really happened, but as far as the army, or the Solarian Navy, is concerned she was requested by a brigadier for her expertise and was temporarily detached to his command. No harm, no foul. Unless she screws up by the numbers, I suspect that this will clinch her new assignment.”

MacKay nodded. “I may be biased, as she’s been working out of my ship for so many months now, but I’m glad. She’s a good non-com, handles her squad better than the lieutenant when he’s not around, not that you heard that from me.”

Nadine smiled. “Of course not.”

Captain MacKay returned the smile and the two shifted their conversation to other topics, enjoying the quiet interlude and conversation between colleagues.

*****

Outer Hayden System

Gravity was one of the least well-known universal forces in human sciences. It was one of many examples of quantum mechanics where the math didn’t agree with what people experienced in real life, leading to often ever more complex theories that attempted to explain how and why the two were seemingly at odds.

As Newtonian theories had to be revised when Einstein postulated his theory of special relativity, and even his theories were quickly revised by quantum mechanics, so too did those theories get completely revised when humans had a chance to begin performing experimental tests in deep space away from the gravity well of the sun.

It wasn’t until decades after the Sol system had become a well-traveled backyard for the denizens of Earth that the first jump point was discovered, mostly accidentally. Albert Einstein had, early on, postulated that gravity propagated in wave patterns as part of his theory of special relativity. Evidence of that had been building since the mid and late twentieth century, but it wasn’t until a distant pulsar interacted with a gravity experiment beyond the orbit of Pluto that the full connotations of the event came together for researchers.

In orbit and in deep space, people often referred to the environment as ‘zero gravity,’ but that was a misnomer. It was technically better known as ‘microgravity,’ since everything in the universe was connected by the space-time fabric of which gravity was an integral part. Even in deep space, you were constantly under the acceleration of gravity toward…something. You just didn’t feel it because everything around you was also under the same acceleration force.

When that distant pulsar intersected with a point in space that was similar to a Lagrange point, however, space-time…for want of a better word, simply vanished. For an instant that correlated with the pulsar’s frequency of interaction, a point in space approximately two kilometers in diameter became disentangled from universal space-time. It was no longer part of the universe as humans understood it, and within that sphere, the laws of physics became indefinable for just a few seconds.

For humanity, those few seconds redefined everything.

Within a decade, the first jump-capable ships had made it to the closest stars, in several cases skipping well ahead of colony ships that had been sent out before jump points were known. A few seconds was all it took to trip off an entirely new era of exploration and discovery, all because of an unplanned experiment that had been interrupted by an uncharted pulsar.

Since those days, humans had learned to better detect the wavering sections of space that were known as jump points and even manipulate them to a certain degree. Since the points were often hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of kilometers in diameter, it could be tricky at best to determine when a point was becoming viable if the change was localized to a small section of it.

In order to counter this, the Solari Fleet had peppered the known points around Hayden with micro-sats. The small ion-engine drones swarmed the jump points, waiting and watching for any change in local space-time with the hope of catching an early warning if anything came through. As they waited and watched, the drones’ moment was upon them; however, a warp in space-time caused their accelerometers to go haywire as local gravity went into flux.

The drones instantly signaled back, transmitting their findings even as the first smoothly curved hulls cut back into the local space-time and shifted fully into Hayden’s space.

It would take just over ten hours before those signals reached a living human receiver.

*****

Parithalian Alliance Ship Noble Venture

The tension in the air was palpable. Everyone was fully aware that there was no longer a question of if they were going to encounter the alien forces, but now it was a matter of when . For Ship’s Master Reethan Parath, his eyes were only interested in the detection apparatus and the connected displays. He wanted nothing more than to know what he was facing, even though it was unlikely that they’d pick much up with the initial sweeps.

The finest resolution devices in the fleet were all limited by light speed, so if the aliens were deep in the system, it would be hours before they gathered enough signal data to properly compile a useful image. If they were hiding close to the system primary, as the Ros’El were wont to do, getting useful image data may even be impossible.

“Deploy defensive systems, prepare the flotilla to penetrate the system,” he ordered from where he was standing, overlooking the command stations.

“Yes, Ship’s Master. Deploying short-range weapons, launching automatons now.”

The ship shivered slightly as the weaponized automatons were launched and maneuvered with dispatch into a tactical net around the ship and its companions. Other ships quickly did the same, filling the space around them with the small but armed robots.

“Proximity detection!”

“Identify!” Reethan ordered instantly, turning toward the automaton control stations.

“They look like automatons, Master. Small ones, low powered, but they’re transmitting signals in-system.”

Reethan nodded. “Then they know we’re here.”

“They will in time, Ship’s Master,” the young officer corrected. “Light speed signals.”

“Oh? Interesting. Very well, silence them,” Reethan ordered. “Set a course for the disputed world.”

“Yes, Ship’s Master.”

“Course already prepared, Ship’s Master.”

The small flotilla of starships came about smoothly, flickers of light erupting around the only sign of dozens of weapon discharges, and began to accelerate down the long deep hill that was the gravity well of the system.

****

HMS Hood

Sorilla tossed the large duffle into the shuttle pod, swinging in after it and strapping it into place so it would float around while she checked the rest of her kit. As she pulled herself back out of the transport vehicle, she spotted Korman drifting outside the pod, arms looped through a set of braces.

“Going somewhere, Sarge?” the corporal asked, his tone mild to the point of near ludicrousness.

“Just over to the station.”

“That’s not what the orders said.”

Sorilla looked to the other side, nodding to where Jardiens was drifting with his arms crossed over his chest.

“You wouldn’t be ditching us, would you, Sarge?” Mack asked from above her position, making her crane her neck to look up at him and Jardiens.

“Just finishing up some old business, guys.” Sorilla sighed, mentally damning Jardiens as she spoke.

He’s the only fool out of this bunch good enough to slip a tripline into the system set to warn him about deployment orders.

“And you’re not inviting us along? That hurts, Sarge.” Mack smiled a particularly unhappy looking smile.

“I didn’t invite you because it’s my old business, not yours.” She scowled at them. “You lot have leave coming, and I damned well expect you to make the best of it. There’s no telling how long this war is going to last, or how hot a hell it’s going to become before it’s over, so go home, take some time off, get it stuck in if you still can, and don’t worry about me. I can handle my own affairs.”

“That’s not how things work, Sarge,” Mack growled.

“Things work the way I damned well say they work,” she countered, glaring up at him. “And if you think otherwise, I can always come up there and break your legs to prove it to you.”

The well-over-six-foot tall former SAS trooper held up his hands in surrender, shaking his head. Even if she wasn’t serious, the last thing he wanted to do was cross the old lady while he was floating around in microgravity. She could probably do exactly what she was threatening, and unless he managed to get a lot better leverage than he thought he was likely to find, there wouldn’t be too damned much he could do about it.

“Hayden is a spotter’s job anyway,” she went on once she was satisfied that he wasn’t going to take her up on the offer. “I know the terrain better than any of you, and I’ll have my pathfinders as backup, not to mention pretty much unrestricted access to the tether station’s Kilo Kilo launchers. This is my job, boys. Go home, have fun. I’ll see you on the way back out.”

The team grumbled as she turned away from them to direct the crate holding her armor, weapons, and kit to the pod. She’d requisitioned a bit more than her normal kit, and it showed as a second crate appeared in the tow of a loading bot. The team noted it, but other than some curious glances said nothing. Korman finally untangled himself from the wall and kicked over to the shuttle pod’s hatch.

“Sarge, are you sure about this?” he asked pointedly. “Couple hours, we can be ready to move.”

“Don’t even daydream about it, Corporal,” she told him evenly. “This one’s mine.”

The Israeli commando frowned but had little more to say. “This isn’t a single-player game, Sarge, and you don’t get points for playing cowboy, as you Americans say.”

“I’m not going to Rambo this, Corporal, relax,” she said, exasperated, both by the continued pressure and by the Israeli’s choice of analogies. Luckily, she knew how to speak the lingo as clearly as he did. “Not playing story mode here, just changing guilds.”

Korman half smiled, then chuckled before he pushed back and nodded. “Clear, Sarge. We’ll see you back here on the way out, yeah then?”

“You’re damn right you will,” she said. “Now go on, get! All of you. I’ve got a pod to catch.”

They pushed away from the shuttle pod, nodding to her as they drifted away. Sorilla returned the gestures as she floated back into the pod. She waited for them to be well clear before hitting the hatch seal and pulling herself back to her acceleration bolster to strap in.

Once she was secured, the lights changed in the pod to let her know that everything was clear and she’d launch as soon as the bay was secured.

Once more, she thought, eyes closed as she pictured the jungles below at the back of her mind. Let’s see how well you’ve learned past lessons, then, shall we?

The warning alarms chimed a few seconds in advance, and then Sorilla felt herself being pushed against the restraints as the pod was ejected from the Hood. Rockets flared a moment later, sending the drone pod on its way to the tether station and her to the world below.

Ready or not…here I come.

*****

Hayden Jungle

Kris stared blankly at the instrument panel of the assault lander for a long moment, considering what he’d just learned.

A Parithalian flotilla. Well, the Alliance is taking things a bit more seriously now, at least.

The signal had outpaced the arrival of the inbound flotilla by over twenty split cycles, giving him a fair amount of time to prepare. With the Parries up top keeping the alien fleet busy, Kris figured that would be their best opportunity to take the fight right back to the enemy’s stronghold.

They’d been fading the enemy perimeter off and on for the past couple days already, mapping out a plan to cause the most chaos they could with a single strike. It was their best hope of getting back off-world once the enemy fleet left orbit again, since the assault lander didn’t have much in the way of standoff weapons to fight any serious kind of fleet-scale battle.

With the Ros’El on board, Kris was hopeful that they’d have at least even odds of shifting out of the system. No one knew gravetic sciences better than the Ros’El, and he’d heard of them shifting smaller ships than the lander.

With a flotilla inbound, however, that plan was pushed back in priority. They’d distract the enemy as best they could, timed to coincide with the arrival of the flotilla. If things worked out, retaking the planet would be a possibility, and that took priority over escaping the system.

Kris reached out and flipped open a secure channel to his Sentinels.

“All Sentinels, prepare to move on the primary target in twenty split cycles, I want all personnel ready to move in two. Prime out.”

*****

Parithalian Alliance Vessel Noble Venture

“No further resistance on approach, Master.”

“Nothing on our scans?” Reethan asked curiously.

“No, unless they have better shadow technology than we can illuminate, the way is clear.”

The ship’s master scowled. “Don’t assume they don’t. We still aren’t certain how they snuck up on the Ros’El task group in this very system.”

“Yes, Ship’s Master.”

In all truth, one thing Reethan wasn’t worried about was running into the enemy on approach. Certainly, it was possible to hide in the vast empty reaches of space-time, but there was a practical limit on how well one could predict an approach path across the same reaches. In order to even begin plotting his least-time path between the shift zones and the planet ahead, an enemy would need almost intimate knowledge of his entire fleet.

Without knowing acceleration potential, cruise velocities, and a host of other factors, there was just no way to determine information of that sort. And that assumed that he used a least-time approach, which he did not.

No, they wouldn’t be seeing the enemy this far out.

What did bother him was the fact that there were no pickets. Few species, in his experience, really understood the nature of space combat. Even most Alliance species preferred to maintain a reasonably dense system picket, just as a security blanket of sorts. It was mostly pointless, except occasionally for rescue purposes, but they felt better with it in place and so didn’t care that it was a waste of resources.

What Reethan dearly would like to know was whether he was up against a species that understood space the way Parithalians did, or were they simply so low on resources that they couldn’t spare any ships for a security blanket?

Knowing the answer to that question could very well determine the outcome of the coming battle, to say nothing of this nasty little war they’d found themselves locked in. Unfortunately, the universe had no answers for him today.

Not yet anyway.

*****

Brigadier Kane’s Office,

Liberation Tether Counterweight , Hayden Orbit

“At ease,” Kane said to the woman standing in front of him.

The last time she’d been in that spot, he’d been irritated with her for jumping the chain of command. This time he was irritated with her for convincing him to do precisely what she wanted him to do in the first place.

There ought to be a law that women can’t be Special Forces, he though, grumbling to himself. They’re bloody well dangerous enough as it is.

In the end, though, she had been right. Well, mostly right. He still wasn’t convinced that there was a pressing need to clear out the jungles around the tether’s anchor, but the flipside of it was that he was far from convinced that there wasn’t a pressing need to do so. And since there was no downside to having the Hayden jungles clear of enemy soldiers, he was willing to err on the side of the argument that removed the potential of a threat.

That, of course, assumed that the sergeant in front of him could do what she intended. She was probably one of the few people in the service who could, by virtue of her training, experience, and field time on planet. He had some good scouts in his battalion, some of the best, but even he knew that his best didn’t match up to the Hayden pathfinders that the sergeant had trained.

Unfortunately, he had no use for irregular forces like those men and women; they only got in the way of his soldiers. Having Sergeant Aida back on Hayden served another purpose in that it would let him get those few pathfinders that kept pushing for a more active role in the war out of his hair.

“Since the largest part of this assignment was your own idea, Sergeant, do you have any questions?” he asked after the silence between them had stretched out long enough.

“I just need to know who I can tap as part of my team, General, sir.”

Kane snorted, but tossed a digital folder across to her. The sergeant caught it easily, barely breaking her posture as she flipped the electronic paper folder open. It was biometrically secured, but a pass of her thumb cleared that. Low level security, didn’t even require a retinal print. The names formed on the folder, along with links to their files. She didn’t need the links, she knew every name on the list.

“You’ll have priority access to the Kilo Kilo launchers,” Kane went on, “as well as our complement of combat drones, unless something major changes.”

“Thank you, sir.” Sorilla nodded, eyes flicking across the dossier as she called up the overhead maps of the area around the old colony site.

The maps on file were real-time, direct god’s eye view of the continent. She zoomed in and examined the area around the site with interest, though for all their brilliant clarity, the imagery was basically worthless. Like the aliens learned when they invaded Hayden originally, there was nothing better than a jungle to hide just about anything.

The Cheyenne could be sitting down in that mess and she’d never see it from up here.

She looked up. “Is there any more information I need, General, sir?”

He almost glared for a minute but finally shook his head. “Yes, I’ve assigned an officer to oversee your operations.”

He took some satisfaction in seeing her twitch at that, even knowing that she had to have expected it.

“He’ll meet you planet-side. Your ride to the surface leaves in three hours. Dismissed.”

Sorilla saluted, then pivoted on her heel and marched out of the office without a glance backward. Brigadier Kane watched her go and deliberately took several deep breaths. For some reason, he always got his backup in the presence of SOCOM and OPCOM soldiers, they just rode on his nerves no matter how polite they seemed.

He’d be so much happier if they weren’t needed, but of all the things he personally fancied himself, a fool wasn’t one. The kind of terrain below was a nightmare for regular forces, practically tailor-made for the sort of fighting that OPCOM people were best at. If he sent his men into the jungles on Hayden, even with every bit of hardware available to him, they’d likely take out the enemy, but Kane wouldn’t want to see the casualty lists when it was done.

Whether the sergeant and her little band of merry men would be able to make any real changes in the situation on the surface was almost superfluous to him in the end. It was doing something at least and would look good on reports back to the World. Sitting barricaded inside the beams of their perimeter was still, in his considered opinion, the best option currently available, but it wouldn’t look good if it got trotted out in public hearings.

She wanted a job he wasn’t stupid enough to send his men to do, so he was all too happy to grant her wish.

That said, he hoped she got it done. That would look even better in the reports back home.

*****

Sorilla checked the register via her implants as soon as she left the office, noting that Jerry was listed as being on the surface already, so that was one name down. She quickly sent out messages to Dean, Tara, and a half dozen others listed as being on the station, notifying them of her return.

She had a lot to do, but, unfortunately, most of it couldn’t be done until she was Hayden-side. What she could do was drop in on the officers and techs who were manning the fire control rooms, communications rooms, and supply depots and make sure that they had their copy of the orders and had a face to go along with the name on the files.

It wasn’t strictly necessary; lord knew she had placed her life in the hands of faceless entities before. That was the nature of the military. Everyone had to do it sometimes, and because of that you grew to treat people you’d never met as brothers and sisters. Still, she’d learned that when there was a face attached, even the most dedicated military officer would react just that hair quicker to provide support.

Once she was on Hayden, their reaction times might well be the only thing that separated victory from death.

*****

USS Cheyenne

Admiral Nadine Brookes’s mind drifted wistfully to thoughts of home, or even the station orbiting just a few hundred meters away from her position, as she carefully sponged soap and water across her skin. Showers, to say nothing of baths, were luxuries on board a ship. Impossibilities if they weren’t under acceleration, but even when moving, there was a distinct rush to get clean and get back in your flight suit just in case.

Floating in orbit of a planet, the best you could do was a sponge bath, and even with that you had to be extremely careful. Water floating around the ship was a nuisance, soapy water was a downright pain.

She was almost done of this ritual when the comm from the next room chimed, drawing an irritated groan from her.

Nadine packed the sponge away in a sealable plastic bag, scrubbed her wet skin down roughly with a towel, and yanked the flight suit back on before pulling herself out into the main rooms and to her computer and comm.

“Admiral Brookes here.”

“Admiral.” Captain Roberts’s voice was tense. “We have contacts, inbound.”

“I’ll be on the admiralty deck in five minutes,” she said.

“Take your time, Admiral,” he countered. “They’re at least three hours out.”

“Understood. Keep gathering intelligence, then. I’ll expect a full report in thirty minutes.”

“Aye aye, ma’am.”

Nadine hissed after the comm was shut down. She was intimately familiar with the supply schedule, as well as all patrols scheduled in the region, and there was nothing from Earth on the docket. It might be something unannounced, but the tension in Roberts’s voice told her that he didn’t believe that any more than she did.

They finally came back for another round.

She almost headed straight for the admiral’s flag deck, but stopped herself. There was nothing she could do there just yet, and something very important she could do in her rooms. Reluctantly, Nadine went back to the small room that served as a bathroom, unpacked the sponge, and went about completing her bath.

*****

She arrived on the flag deck just over twenty minutes later, wearing a fresh new flight suit and feeling like maybe she didn’t stink quite as badly as she had before.

“Report,” she ordered, dropping into her acceleration bolster and pulling displays in around her.

“No communications from inbound contacts, ma’am. They did not use a least-time course to Hayden.”

That raised an eyebrow as Nadine looked over the information. Her ensign was correct, of course. The contacts were moving toward Hayden on a pretty roundabout path, but they were booting it. The speed they’d gathered made it pretty clear that they weren’t human ships, though she was surprised that their velocity was so low if they were alien.

“What do we have from the perimeter picket drones?” Nadine asked as she digested that bit of information.

“Nothing much, Admiral. They reported gravitational anomalies from the jump point, but the information was extremely light on the details. Just enough that the captain ordered us to start looking for anything odd.”

“I see.” She pulled up the direct view of the contacts, as seen through their long-range detection systems, and saw quickly how the ships had been spotted.

The alien ships ran hot, really hot, and with the sun on the other side of the Cheyenne and Task Force Valkyrie’s systems, they stood out like a flare in the darkness. She was surprised, in fact, by just how hot they were running. If she hadn’t known better from the Doppler shift and the fact that the aliens didn’t use VASIMR drives, she would have believed them to be arse to Hayden, burning everything they had to decelerate.

They’d registered the heat of the alien ships in the past, but this was interestingly one of the few times she had the time, and the inclination, to ponder it.

It does explain their fondness for hiding in the glare of the system’s star, however. It’s one of the only things that could hide that thermal signature.

Cheyenne and Longbow class ships both ran hot as well, but most of the extreme heat was radiated out the rear thrust vents. There was a low level heat loss across the whole ship, but the ceramic plates were excellent insulators, and liquid coolant systems transported the heat into the center of the ships, where the VASIMR drive was. There, excess heat was either radiated away or reclaimed in power generation. The ships only radiated a few degrees above the background temperature of the galaxy, unlike their alien counterparts, which looked like miniature stars.

What drives you little buggers? she thought, glaring at the points on the screen, not for the first time.

That would have to wait for another time, however. For the moment, she and her people had a job to do.

“Captain,” she said, keying open the command channel. “I want the Valkyries to put the moons of Hayden between us and those ships. Coordinate with the tether station, we’ll use their sensors to keep an eye on things.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Roberts returned. “I assume you want us to move out quietly?”

“You assume correctly, Captain,” she said casually. “Make it happen.”

“Aye aye, Admiral.”

*****

Tether Station, Hayden Orbit

“General Kane, we have incoming contacts.”

Kane looked up, the nervous-looking junior officer making up his mind quickly. He cleared his desktop with a sweep of his hand, vanishing the forms and folders in an instant and replacing them with the digitally re-mastered woodgrain that matched the rest of his office.

“I’ll be in the war room shortly.”

“Uh, yes, sir.”

Kane took only a second to straighten his shirt and tie before sweeping on his jacket and rushing out of the office. He bustled past his secretary, barely glancing in the man’s direction. “Cancel my appointments for the day.”

“Yes, sir.”

Still straightening his uniform jacket, Kane quickly crossed the hall and slipped into the war room, taking a few seconds to observe the people within before saying anything.

The room was dark and cool, both light and temperature set to keep people alert and focused on the task set in front of them. Only a few people were standing watch at the moment, and most of those were congregated by the machines that monitored the tactical network linking the stations with all mobile units in the system. Kane quietly made his way over and focused on the large display that held the most interesting current data.

There were eight contacts, all blazing suns on the infrared detectors, and all blue shifted according to the analysis.

Well. I’ve been expecting this, dreading this, and anticipating it all at the same time, he thought grimly. I guess we get to see if any of our preparations are worth the carbon their circuits are made of.

“Bring all our defenses up from standby mode,” he ordered, startling several people who hadn’t noticed him. “I want full diagnostics run on everything we’ve got, and I want it all done before those bandits get here.”

They all stared at him for a moment, just long enough for Kane to sneer in their general direction.

“Move!”

They moved.

Chapter Three

Parithalian Alliance Ship Noble Venture

“Ship’s Master.”

Master Reethan Parath turned to the junior apprentice and gestured sharply. “Yes, Seng Van?”

“We’ve begun to assemble detailed imagery of the planet in question, Master,” the younger Parth said. “There is an anomaly.”

“Show me,” Reethan said, getting up from his command station.

“Yes, Master.”

The junior apprentice gestured to a large display showing the planet ahead in detailed relief, nothing of which seemed out of place to Reethan. He waited patiently, however, knowing that they still had time and that the apprentice wouldn’t have brought whatever it was to his attention if it was anything obvious.

“This point here,” Seng Van pointed, enlarging and focusing the display, “it appears to be an artificial satellite.”

“Yes, I see it. Not uncommon, what is the issue?”

“It is not under power according to any scans we make, Master, but look to its orbit.”

Reethan focused, looking at the numbers, and then did a quick double check. “That is bizarre.”

For an object showing no signs of propulsion, it was holding an entirely impossible orbital path. It wasn’t at the right altitude to be in sync with the rotation of the planet, and yet it seemed to be just that. He couldn’t help it, he checked the numbers again.

What am I looking at here?

Reethan palmed a communication panel, opening a link to the ship’s handlers.

“This is the ship’s master,” he said in a calm and even tone. “All ships, reduce acceleration to one half, prepare to receive tactical data.”

The handlers of each ship acknowledged, and he could feel the thrum of the engines change as the power was redirected from their main engines. He didn’t know what that thing was, but he wanted a little more time to examine it before they closed to engagement ranges. If it wasn’t under power, it couldn’t be sitting where it was, but if it was under power, it was using a propulsion system completely alien to every data system he had access to.

Surprises like this, I do not need.

Whoever these aliens were, whatever culture they came from, it was becoming increasingly more obvious that the Ros’El had well and truly got their heads caught where they were not wanted, and likely had no business being.

Reethan sighed. Sometimes he thought that the alliance with the Ros’El was far more trouble than it was worth. Then he remembered that they liked to destroy entire planets when pressed too hard in battle, and the less said about that the better.

Better to keep them where we can see them, I suppose. I would dearly love to know what idiot in the development corps handed them authority over their own section though.

*****

Hayden Jungles, Outside the Beams

Prime Kris checked the timer on his comm gear then nodded to the closest Lucian.

“Tell the others to initiate the strike plan,” he ordered. “No changes at this time.”

“Right, Prime,” the Lucian grunted before fading into the jungle.

The Parathalian flotilla should be approaching the planet shortly, so Kris knew that he had to move now if he was to maximize the effect of his actions and take advantage of the actions of both his enemies and his allies.

Their first target was to be the thread of material that held the massive station above from flying off into space. Taking that out should prevent more soldiers and material from easily reaching the surface, and if the station above didn’t have maneuvering capability, it should also severely limit its usefulness in the coming battle.

The trick was going to be targeting it, as they could barely get close enough to see the damn thing as it split the skies. The thread was so thin that visual targeting was a chancy thing at best and, worse yet, the material was practically invisible to every targeting beam they had on hand. Even the Ros’El didn’t seem to have an answer to that one, as best he could tell.

He’d finally settled on assigning the task to several of his better long-range specialists and hoped that one of them would pull it off.

Battle is come again, Kris thought as he took a deep breath of the moist jungle air. Regular as the heartbeat of a star and the final knell for all those who have not prepared.

Lucians themselves weren’t a particularly warlike race, tough though they were. Even among his people, Kris and the sort who joined the Sentinels were a breed apart. He literally lived for the moment just before the first shot was fired, when every sense in his being was on fire and expecting the inevitable end that came for everyone.

His only disappointment at the moment was that he had not again encountered the enemy Sentinels. The results of their last encounter left a bitter taste in his mouth. Though it had not been entirely one-sided, he had to admit that his own had taken the worst end of the blade.

Were you real? he wondered as he moved his own team into position. Or the fevered imaginings of a soldier too foolish to think he could be defeated by ‘normal’ soldiers?

Kris doubted he’d ever know, not if the coming battle went according to plan. Even should it not follow the plan, he’d likely never know, as in that case he would be dead and decomposing on an alien world…like so many of his comrades before him.

Come out, come out, Kris thought as he gazed at the narrow black thread that bisected the sky ahead, just barely visible through the foliage of the jungle. I’m waiting for you.

*****

Tether Station, Elevator Lobby

“Sarge.”

“Dean,” Sorilla nodded back, a crooked half smile on her face to match the broad-faced grin on his.

“Damn good to see you,” he told her as they clasped hands, then forearms, in a practiced gesture. “Back to the jungles then?”

She nodded. “That’s the plan. You in?”

“Fuck yes,” Dean said seriously. “Wanted to get back out there for months. Hell, ever since you left, practically. Soldier boys went and locked us all in, like prisoners, damn it. That’s our world down there.”

“Well, now you get a chance to take it back,” she told him.

“Hayden Hua,” Dean answered with a feral look. “You ask Jerry?”

“Sent him a message. He’s Hayden-side.”

“Cool,” the young man said, satisfied.

Sorilla nodded to Tara as she walked over. “Wasn’t sure you’d be coming.”

“You’re going to be down there, Dean, Jerry…” The redhead rolled her eyes. “You’re going to need all the medical care you can get.”

“Oi!” Dean objected, drawing laughs from the other pathfinders who’d shown up.

Sorilla was about to respond but was cut off when her implants literally buzzed in her ears. She threw up a hand, silencing the laughter, and focused inwardly.

“Sergeant Aida speaking.”

“Sergeant, this is Kane.”

Aida stiffened automatically, though there was no way the general could see here. Unless he’s watching on a security feed…

That thought kept her at attention, but she drew the line at saluting a camera.

“General, sir.”

“We have inbound contacts, Sergeant. Doubtful that they’re friendlies,” the general said. “I’ve put a descent lift at your disposal, but if you’re going to the planet, you’re leaving right now .”

“Yes, sir. We’re moving out immediately, General.”

“Good luck, Sergeant.”

“Thank you, sir,” she replied. “Aida out.”

The link severed as the general closed it from his side, and Sorilla turned on the pathfinders, who were watching her, waiting.

“We’re leaving,” she said, her whole tone and attitude now screaming ‘business.’

They fell into step behind her, picking up bags and guns as they walked.

“What’s up, Sarge?” Dean asked from behind her left shoulder.

“Ships dropping on our ass,” she said. “General doesn’t think they’re friendly. We get on the planet now, or we don’t get down there at all.”

The men swore as they walked, but everyone stepped up the pace as the group double-time marched down the corridor to where the tether car was waiting.

The war had finally come back to Hayden.

*****

USS Cheyenne

Captain Roberts was no big fan of waiting, but he’d been a career officer long enough that he’d learned the art of hurrying up and waiting many years before. The admiral had put the taskforce behind the second moon of Hayden, a small chunk of rock about a third the size of Earth’s moon, and now they were both out of sight and hopefully out of mind.

They had the enemy on their relay from the Station, and with luck their departure from Hayden’s orbit had gone unnoticed. Tactically, he could wish for more advantages, but if the admiral managed to pull ‘surprise’ out of the bag one more time, he wasn’t going to complain.

“Bandit contacts have reduced acceleration, Captain.”

“Damn it,” Roberts growled. “I knew I shouldn’t have thought that so loud.”

“Excuse me, sir?”

Roberts shook his head. “Never mind, Lieutenant.”

Silently cursing his taunting of Murphy, Roberts called up the sensor data being relayed from the station. Did they see us move? They haven’t changed course, just stopped accelerating. What the hell are they thinking over there?

He shook his head, glaring at the enemy icons on his screens, and opened a comm channel to the admiral.

“Ma’am, the enemy have stopped accelerating.”

“I’m looking at the data now, Captain. Ideas?”

“Not many, unfortunately,” Roberts answered reluctantly. “We don’t know why they’ve cut power. They may have spotted us, or this could be standard procedure and they’re simply coming up on turnaround.”

“Agreed,” Brookes answered tersely. “Continue as planned, but let’s keep a close eye on them as they make their final approach.”

“Aye aye, ma’am,” Roberts said, thumbing the comm channel from the admiral’s private link over to the squadron channel. “All ships, all ships. Deploy according to ambush plan Delta.”

The ships of the taskforce acknowledged and they broke up, moving around the moon in their paired cohorts. The ships of Task Force Valkyrie deployed around the shelter of the celestial body, burning their retro thrusters hard to keep stationary in low orbit as they waited for their moment.

*****

Parithalian Alliance Vessel Noble Venture

There were few places in the known stretches of the galaxy that contained things completely beyond Ship’s Master Reethan Parath’s ken, but he was unashamed to admit that here was one of those places and one of those things.

“Oblivion’s Dark Soul,” he swore softly. “Is that thing actually tied to the planet?”

“It would appear so, Master,” his junior said, just as softly. “How it can hold that much force is just…”

“I know. Perhaps they’re using a singularity sink to lessen the force?” the handler of the Noble Venture suggested quietly.

“No.” Reethan shook his head. “No. If they had that technology, they would use it to maintain position. The material strength of that cable line must be absolutely amazing.”

“There is nothing of this technology in the Ros’Els’ original reports, Master Parath,” the junior apprentice said, frowning as he examined the backlog of reports. “They do list a station here in orbit, but it’s practically buried in the report, took me four searches to turn up even that.”

“Blasted arrogance. What have they gotten us into?” Reethan ground out.

The worst of it was that it didn’t matter. His directives were clear: This sector had to be cleared of the alien intrusion and returned to the Ros’El for development. Even if he wanted to do something else, there had been no hint of communication on any known channels with the aliens, and it was unlikely that they could get a dialogue going in any reasonable period of time.

“Master Parath?”

The ship’s master looked over to the young female manning the communications station. “Yes, Beccai?”

“Contact from the planet ahead,” she said. “Lucians, Master.”

He grunted, unsurprised. Lucian Sentinels were like Hord Bugs, almost impossible to wipe out no matter what you tried. “What do they have for us?”

“They’re on low power, sir,” she answered. “Short burst transmission, for stealth and power economy reasons. They advise that they will time a strike from the surface to match our arrival, then go on to request either retrieval or resupply, as dictated by mission objectives.”

Reethan clicked in amusement. One thing the Sentinels were was to the point and dedicated to their mission. Still, that decided his next action.

“Very well,” he said, opening a channel to the flotilla. “All ship handlers, prepare for engagement of hostiles. Cargo handlers, prepare to dispatch resupply drones to ground forces in case we’re forced to withdraw.”

“Master?”

He looked over at the junior apprentice, who was clearly surprised by the order that implied they might have to pull back before accomplishing the task.

“Never underestimate the enemy, Apprentice,” he said calmly. “They are called the enemy for a reason. They will do anything they can to make our lives harder, and an intelligent enemy will never show his full strength until it is too late for you to react.”

“Yes, Master.”

Reethan opened the comm channel again. “All ship handlers…we go.”

*****

Jungles outside the Beams, Hayden

“That’s time then,” Kris said. “Begin mission.”

The Sentinel Prime had split his squad into three-man teams, each with their own mission, and by sending that signal he had unleashed them on the enemy.

Five three-man teams against an army did not seem like much, on the surface of things, but if they accomplished their individual tasks, Kris was well aware that the cumulative effect would be far beyond their individual tasks.

From where he and his team were preparing for their own task, he could hear the first explosions in the distance that sounded the opening shots in the latest battle for the world on which they stood.

That will be the enemy energy fences going down. With fortune, that should distract them while the other teams focus on the real target.

The thick jungle that surrounded the fortress that sheltered the anchor point of that impossible sky thread was the perfect cover, a lesson he hadn’t needed but one that both the Ros’El and these aliens seemed determined to forget.

Still, even with that protection, Kris and his team were loath to close any more on the defenses ahead of them. Being undetected was a simple matter when you were merely observing the enemy, but they were about to do far, far, more than just observe.

“Are you ready?” he asked the Sentinel setting up the weapon.

“As ready as I’m likely to be, Prime,” the other Lucian said, frustration in his voice. “That thread is all but invisible to optical gear, and completely undetectable by everything else. Even the active scans can’t see the damndable thing!”

“Just do what you can.”

“Always, Prime.”

Kris glowered, not at his Sentinel, but at the distant thread. “Engage when ready.”

“Engaging.”

A thumb brushed an activation stud and the weapon hummed from its supports, charging. A few instants later, it pulsed, a silent action that nonetheless kicked up dust and sent a thrill of power down the bones of those standing around.

Traveling at nearly the speed of light, affected only by the density of the planet’s atmosphere, the pulse reached its target almost instantly and detonated in the air over the enemy base. At the range they were standing, they saw no visible effect on the thread.

“Adjusting,” the Sentinel droned automatically as he tracked the target as best he could on pure optics.

“Engaging.”

*****

Tether Car, Descending Over Hayden

They were just entering the atmosphere when the occupants of the tether car heard, and felt, the single more horrific sound any of them had ever encountered. It began low, deep in their bones, and quickly climbed to a tooth-rattling whine that had them cupping their ears and cringing in a futile attempt to block out the sound.

“What the hell was that!?” Dean yelled over the sound as it finally faded.

Sorilla automatically unlocked the restraints holding her in the seat and kicked off, sending herself to the back of the car. “No idea! Stay put!”

Tether cars were generally fully automated, except for a few on Earth that provided for the comfort VIPs expected even for the few hours needed to safely ascend or descend a tether. This one was a military model that Sorilla was marginally familiar with, since it used the same high efficiency electric motor as just about everything else.

She reached the terminal ports and logged in quickly, breathing a sigh of relief when everything checked out as working perfectly.

Being trapped in a failing tether car was one of the most terrifying things she could imagine. She’d voluntarily jumped and fell from orbit more than once, but doing so in a vehicle that had zero chance of surviving the impact with the ground scared her like nothing else.

“We’re fine!” she said over her shoulder. “I don’t know what that was but—”

Whatever it was hit them again, causing the pathfinders to pitch over while holding their ears. Sorilla cast around, her implants filtering out the sound as she touched a hand to the wall.

“Everything is vibrating!” she called. “The whole cart! The motors are fine, that just leaves…”

Sorilla paled, mouth suddenly going dry.

“The tether…”

She dove across the car, plastering herself to the viewport, looking up and down, but saw nothing, of course.

“Station Liberation, Aida,” she commed.

“Go for Liberation, Aida.”

“What the hell is going on? The tether just made like a piano wire. Is the station under attack?”

“Negative, Sergeant. The attack is groundside.”

Sorilla swore. “Status of forces Hayden-side?”

“Security is putting down the attacks on the beams.”

“What about the attack on the tether!?”

“Unknown location. We’re looking into it,” the voice said calmly.

Looking into it? We’re on this damn merry-go-round!

Sorilla took a breath, “Understood, Liberation. Keep me apprized.”

“Affirmative, Sergeant.”

She scowled, thinking hard for a moment.

Like hell.

“Dean!”

“Yeah, Sarge?” the young man asked, twisting in his seat.

“Front and center, pathfinder,” she growled. “I need a pair of hands.”

Dean struggled to get clear of his restraints. “Be right there, Sarge!”

By the time he got loose and made his way over to her in the low gravity environment of the descending car, she was already pulling a large crate clear from the cargo strapping. He grabbed a handle and helped her pull it into the clear, the weight of it not being so much a problem as the mass. Together they got the crate centered on the floor and he held it in place as best he could while she unsnapped the lid and flipped it open.

“We’re in deep shit, aren’t we, Sarge?” he asked as he recognized the OPCOM armor nestled within the case.

“Not yet,” she said as she pulled her shirt off and tossed it aside. “But we will be if someone doesn’t take out those bastards shooting at the tether.”

Dean’s eyes bulged with emotion that had nothing to do with the rather fit woman stripping down to her naked glory a meter away from him. The idea of what would happen if the tether was snapped sent shivers down his spine the likes of which he’d never felt before.

Best case, in that event, was the car falling to a terminal velocity and plowing into the planet below. At least that way they’d die fast and relatively painlessly. If they got pulled up into orbit by the station and couldn’t get the car back on board somehow, death would be a lot slower in coming, but it would be just as final.

Those thoughts running through his mind, Dean barely noticed when Sorilla tossed her panties aside and pulled the armor out of the case, piece by piece. She put it on in order, from boots moving up, snapping it into place with magnetic seals, until she finished sealing the armor on her arms and clad her hands with the gauntlets.

“Go get yourself strapped in,” she told Dean as she picked up the helm. “I’ll get this secured.”

He nodded but glanced back at her. “What are you going to do?”

Sorilla picked up her rifle and slung it over her shoulder before answering, “Going to practice my long shot.”

Dean gulped, eyes wide, but nodded as he dove back for his seat. She quickly manhandled the crate back into the cargo straps, using the increased strength provided by the armor, and secured it tightly.

That done, Sorilla pulled her helm on and let it seal against her head. The HUD lit up, the armor automatically checking all seals and systems as it booted from its dormant state. As all systems checked out green, Sorilla mentally initiated final activation orders and shuddered as the armor was filled with cold oxygenated gel, ensuring that all gaps were filled by the thick fluid that served both as protection against being battered around inside the armor and as a first defense against injury and infection should anything perforate the armor, and herself, of course.

A few moments later, with the gel already warming to body temperature, Sorilla slid her pistol into the thigh holster and made her way over to the emergency door.

“We’re in the atmosphere,” she told the others over the armor comm, “but it’s not thick enough to breathe. When I pop this door, the oxygen masks will drop. Put them on, breathe calmly, and hang tight. Once the atmo is blown out, one of you is going to have to unhitch and shut the lock, I’ll be a little busy.”

“Jesus, Sarge!” Dean swore at her. “Put on a chute or something!”

Sorilla paused to glance back, then shook her head. “We didn’t pack any.”

With that, she popped the door and held fast against the decompression of the car. Behind her she heard the faint sound of alarms and the masks falling but gave it little thought as she climbed out of the car and pulled herself up to the roof.

After she was out of sight, and the wind stopped roaring through the depressurized car, Dean took a last gulp of oxygen from his mask and unstrapped himself. Staggering to the door took only seconds, but the terror made it feel like hours as his lungs began to burn and his eyes felt like they were going to pop from his skull. He wrenched the door shut, not daring to look out at the surreal landscape below, and collapsed on the floor as the air pressure began to slowly build once again.

Glancing up above him, he spared the Sarge a thought and a wish good luck, but that was all he had time for as he crawled back to his feet and went to check on the others.

*****

The curvature of the planet was clearly visible as she propped up one knee to rest her rifle against and leaned back against the motor housing on the top of the car. Above her was nothing but black sky; no stars could be seen due to light from below making it look even deeper and more terrifying than one might expect. Sorilla wasn’t afraid of heights, of course, though she had known one or two fellow Operators who had been. What she did have was a healthy respect for what happened to a body that impacted anything at terminal velocity, especially since it had once happened to her…or close enough.

That first visit to Hayden had been a miraculous event, as one normally didn’t walk away from that sort of fall…not even in OPCOM armor. Oh, possibly ‘miracle’ was pushing it. People had lived after falls of that nature even without the protection of armor, though those events were certainly miracles. In armor, statistics gave her about one chance in eight of living. The fact that there were statistics for that gave her shivers every time she thought about it, but those were the numbers.

She’d had a drogue chute part of the way down, which slowed her descent, and then crashed through the canopy and into pretty soft ground. That was about the best case scenario for a survivable impact and not something she could reasonably expect to reproduce. Particularly not when she was sitting at ANGELS Two Hundred over a bedrock plateau with no chute of any sort, drogue or otherwise, to count on.

Sorilla carefully opened the shoulder bag she’d pulled from her supplies and reached in to draw out a handful of plastic spheres. They were about the size of golf balls, even had the dimples in them, but they weren’t used for any type of game. She activated them with a short-range RIF pulse and casually tossed the handful over before reaching into the bag and repeating the actions.

The portable accelerometers lit up on her HUD as they began falling toward Hayden, clearly showing the presence of Hayden’s gravity well on her HUD. Sorilla ignored that, she knew the planet was there and that it sucked quite firmly. She was more interested in what else down there was generating a noticeable gravity well.

The little sensors were already hundreds of feet below her and falling fast, leaving her to wait as the seconds counted down. Another deep twang sounded through the tether even as she was thinking that, and Sorilla watched as the sensors reacted to the draw. She clambered across the rooftop of the car as it continued to descend, kneeling on the northwest corner as she brought her rifle to her shoulder and activated the targeting optics.

From almost two hundred thousand feet, the precision of the accelerometer sensors left a lot to be desired, but she got a vector that tracked the gravity pulse and gave her enough to start looking. Her rifle included HARD, Handheld Anti-Radiation Device, capacity that let the rifle’s computer track and zero in on electromagnetic emissions, so she activated the system and boosted it to maximum power as she scanned the terrain below through the optics.

This would be so much easier if those bastards would use rad-comms like any civilized people, she griped, knowing that all she needed was even a brief pulse to lock on. Unfortunately, the enemy used something different for their communications systems, as she knew well from experience.

That didn’t mean they entirely avoided EM radiation transmissions, however. Almost any even remotely electronic device gave off some electromagnetic signals, and all it took was the briefest of pulses for her to get a signal. She got it a few seconds into her search, just a bare instant before another vibration shook the whole car, this time threatening to dislodge her.

They’re getting closer to the tether, she thought, gritting her teeth as she zoomed in on the area the signal came from.

It was almost entirely covered by jungle canopy, thick and impenetrable. Beyond the single EM pulse from the area, it looked exactly like every other patch of Hayden jungle below her. Sorilla didn’t have a lot of options. She centered on the source of the signal, jacked her rifle to maximum power, and opened fire.

*****

Hayden Jungle

“Are you truly having this much trouble hitting a stationary target?” Kris asked dryly as another shot appeared to have no lasting effect on the distant thread.

“Would you care to try, Prime?” the Lucian manning the weapon challenged sarcastically. “The damn thing is so small…”

“It reaches to high orbit!”

“It’s less than three Quar lengths wide, and you damn well know it!”

Kris sighed. That much was true, and he did know how hard it was to strike at this range without the aid of target finders.

“The worst of it is that I could swear I’d hit it already, more than once,” the Lucian sighed, frustrated.

“Truly?” Kris asked, disbelieving. There were few things that could take the force of a singularity strike, even from a portable model such as they were using.

“Truly.”

Kris glowered at the distant thread but shook his head. “No. Perhaps you struck close, but you could not have hit it directly. Continue.”

“Targeting,” the Lucian droned. He was about to report that he was engaging when a roar tore through the jungle about them and slammed into the nearby ground, exploding with a force not to be believed.

“They found us!”

Several more strikes exploded around them, throwing dirt, debris, and shrapnel in all direction. As the assault continued, the Lucians threw themselves to cover as best they could.

Kris flung himself into a crater, hoping that the random nature of the strike was hiding a pattern. Most coordinated attacks wouldn’t target the same spot twice. He felt, more than heard, his gunner hit the ground nearby and looked up just in time to see their Second take a hit that almost literally caused him to explode.

His left arm blew off in a shower of blood and gore, and as Kris watched, his torso bubbled and deformed even as more gore exploded out between his legs and a new crater exploded at his feet. It took Kris dozens of times longer to process what had happened than it took to happen, but he realized the attack had come from directly above them.

“Air forces! Scan the skies!”

Kris followed his own orders, grabbing his personal combat lenses and turning them skyward.

Nothing. How can it be?

He knew that indirect artillery wouldn’t have the force to do what had been done, not with pure kinetic force. Something had driven those rounds right into them.

A drone? He shook his head, it didn’t matter.

“Abandon position!”

He and his Third gathered up all the kit they could while on the move and bolted into the jungle. Somewhere above them, there was an enemy that could, if not see them directly, at least detect some hint of their location.

How? They didn’t fire immediately, but they must have tracked the singularity pulse… Kris grunted, thinking as he ran with his arms full of gear.

When they were a reasonably safe distance from their previous location, he signaled a halt.

“Set it up again,” he ordered.

“Prime?” the other Sentinel looked at him as if he were insane, but Kris merely showed his teeth.

“We’ll fire it from a remote,” he said. “I want you to ensure that the rest of our gear is tracking incoming fire.”

The Lucian slowly showed his own teeth. “As you say, Prime!”

Opening moves to you, Kris mentally complimented his unseen enemy. But the game isn’t finished just yet.

*****

Rooftop, Tether Car, ANGELS One Eighty over Hayden

Sorilla waited after emptying her mag into the target location, watching for another pulse, anticipating another shudder through the tether or, worse, a sudden freefall. Neither came as she knelt there looking through her rifle optics at the jungle so very far below.

Did I get him? she wondered, letting her gaze float over the target zone again for a moment before she keyed into her comm.

“Station command, Aida.”

“Aida, go for station command,” a calm voice came back.

“Sending target location for probable enemy fire base,” Aida said as she uploaded the coordinates, images, and video of her actions. “Now descending to ANGELS One Seventy, requesting update on ground combat situation.”

“Roger, checking now…” There was a long pause, then the voice came back marginally less calmly. “Holy shit, Aida. Are you standing on top of the tether car!?”

“Affirmative. You want a live feed?” she asked dryly.

“No thanks, Sergeant. I get woozy looking at the planet from up here, where it’s kind of unreal. Crap, Sarge, you’re nuts.”

“So I’ve been told. What’s the status on the fighting?” she reminded him.

“Combatants struck at the beams but faded back into the jungle immediately after. Looks like a diversion. Consensus is that they’re trying to distract us, Sarge.”

“Some distraction,” Sorilla growled. “They took potshots at the tether, twanged us like a rock guitar string played by a lunatic.”

“Is there any other kind?”

“Cute,” she said. “I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you that if they pop the cable, you and the station take a flyer?”

“Roger that. Command has men in the jungle hunting them down. We’ve already dispatched a team to the location you listed.”

“Right, well, let me know what’s going on,” she said. “I’m going to wait here and hope I nailed the bastards.”

“Better you than me.”

“Hey, at least I’ve got one hell of a view,” she laughed, propping her rifle on her thigh as she looked out over the green curve of the distant horizon. “Aida out.”

*****

Hayden Jungles

“It’s in place, Prime.”

Kris nodded. “Fall back into the jungle, I’ll finish up.”

The Lucian saluted roughly and faded back into the foliage about them as Kris attached the remote to the weapon and ran quick diagnostics before being satisfied.

Lucians generally considered remote work to be a poor second place to eyes and hands on site, but there were times when even the hardest Sentinels would admit that it would be poorer form to get yourself killed as opposed to using a remote. Kris was very much an adherent of the older philosophy, but he was not fool enough to ignore the tactical benefits of automated systems.

Once the remote was established and locked into place, he fell back with the control in hand to where his Third was waiting. Neither spoke as he made the last connections and handed the device over to the long gunner.

“Fire when ready.”

“As you say, Prime,” the Sentinel replied evenly.

Kris looked up to the sky, his eyes sharper than most Alliance species…Parithalians aside…but saw no threat in that blue-green expanse despite the certain knowledge that something up there was most certainly threatening.

“Targeting.”

Kris forced himself to focus on the distant thread that split the sky, willing his man’s shot to be on target.

“Firing.”

In the distance, the singularity weapon hummed almost silently and sent a pulse of a gravity collapse field off into the distance.

*****

Tether Car Rooftop, Descending to ANGELS 150 over Hayden

The tooth-rattling vibration took her by surprise after several long minutes of relative peace, insofar as one could find peace while sitting at over a hundred fifty thousand feet with no restraints or airfoil. Sorilla hissed, climbing to a crouch as she grabbed for her shoulder pouch again to lift a small handful of the portable accelerometers out.

The small devices were intended to be scattered around Hayden’s jungles, or any world where an enemy gravity valve might be in use, as a method of GDF (Gravity Direction Finding). She was liberally tossing them over the edge now, like water from a pipe, but couldn’t bring herself to be sorry for the waste. If they kept her alive, along with her pathfinders, then they had done their job.

Scattered to the winds around the tether cable, the small devices freefell toward the planet while constantly analyzing the flow of acceleration. With billions of calculations made every second, the computers easily filtered out the noise of wind currents affecting the fall and then eliminated the steady pull of Hayden itself, so that when a foreign gravity surge affected them they lit up like the proverbial Christmas tree with arrows right back to the source.

Sorilla shifted only slightly this time, already on the right side of the car to target the source, and brought her weapon to her shoulder as she activated the HARD gear.

It took a few seconds, but when the next pulse shivered through the tether, she locked onto its location and held the trigger back until her weapon was empty.

Die you bastards.

*****

Hayden Jungles

Kris and his Third, Second now I suppose, flinched away from the rolling thunder that engulfed the remote weapon point, turning the entire area to a series of craters and settling dust.

“Definitely came in from on high,” the Lucian gunner grunted. “You’re right about that. That was a direct trajectory strike, not indirect artillery.”

“You have it backtracked?”

“Yes, Prime. Sent to your scopes.”

Kris lifted the military scopes to his eyes and followed the user friendly arrow until it centered on an empty stretch of sky above them. He grunted, not seeing anything at first, but then frowned as he thought that maybe he could see a dark spot up there somewhere.

He hit the image zoom, increasing magnification until he could make out an oddly shaped object floating there, apparently in midair. It was only because he’d already seen it before that Kris was able to recognize it and realize that he was looking at the vehicle that travelled up and down along the thread.

Damn that’s up high.

He closed the focus again, then blinked in mild disbelief before focusing once more to a closer zoom.

“Prime,” his Third said from beside him. “Is that someone standing on top of that thing?”

“More than someone.” Kris bared his teeth, grinning more in feral anticipation than amusement. “That’s their Sentinel. I recognize the armor.”

“He’s a brave one, I’ll give him that,” the Third said. “I wouldn’t want to be standing up there, armor or no. I see no flight kit, you?”

“No. Doesn’t mean that he has none, however.”

“Too right. Orders?”

Kris pondered that for a moment, knowing that their singularity projector was little more than scrap. “Signal team two, have them target the vehicle.”

“At that range, Prime?” The Lucian was skeptical. “Our portable systems don’t focus well that far out.”

“I know, but we’re having little enough luck hitting the thread. Besides,” Kris went on, “it’s within range.”

“Just.”

“So have Team Three do the same then.” Kris shrugged. “In the meantime, we should make our way over to Team Two. Nothing more we can do from here.”

“As you say, Prime.”

*****

Tether Car, Descending to ANGELS 130 over Hayden

Pretty sure I got a hit that time. Sorrilla was kneeling on the edge of the roof surface, rifle still to her shoulder as she examined the region before her with the HARD sensors.

The rifle’s HARD gear had registered an EM spike when her rounds slammed into the jungle below, which seemed to coincide with a capacitor cell being blown out. If she were reading it right, she’d fragged some equipment at least, but there was no way to tell if she’d got it all or if she’d nailed any enemy soldiers at the same time.

Firing blind into the jungle was fun, but also frustrating, and she wasn’t exactly sitting on an ammo dump, so she really hoped that she’d nailed the bastard.

Four more mags for the rifle. Should have packed more, but who the hell could predict that I’d need to fight a prolonged firefight somewhere between the station and the anchor?

There were few ways to FUBAR a situation that could quite match up to the current situation in her mind, and Sorilla was thinking fondly of those times she’d been required to merely jump from orbit and directly enter a firefight on landing.

Can’t this stupid thing go any faster!?

Unfortunately, she knew even without asking that the answer was a resounding ‘no.’ Oh, physically, the car could descend faster…up to terminal velocity if you wanted to be a smartass about things, but the limiters built into the system were hard locked for good reason. Wear and tear on the tether ribbon were the least of issues that could be encountered by running faster than the optimal descent rate.

Too fast and you’d risk blowing out the climbing motors in a hurry, as they, like every other piece of the car, were built as lightweight as possible. Getting anything resembling practical weight loads into orbit meant cutting corners where you could, and the engines were the victims of several such cuts.

Dozens of other things could go wrong as well, but every single one of them ended with the same result.

A crater at the anchor point.

Since that was precisely the end she was hoping to avoid to begin with, Sorilla grudgingly supposed that faster wasn’t exactly better in this case. It didn’t stop her from wishing for an assault lander, though.

*****

Hayden Jungles

The leader of the second Sentinel team considered his orders, signaling a stop. Targeting an object that far away wasn’t so difficult, but the singularity point created by the projector would be less than perfect at that range. The portable projectors the Sentinels were issued were simply designed for relatively close-range combat, not so close as the handheld models used in close combat but certainly not on par with ship-mounted devices.

He locked onto the descending target, zooming in as tightly as he could with his scopes, and clicked softly in both surprise and, yes, even a little shock.

There actually is someone standing on the top of that thing. Do these people do this as standard procedure? Wouldn’t automated weapons be more effective?

He racked his mind, trying to remember if anyone had reported people standing on those vehicles in the past, but couldn’t recall. Whatever. Hardly matters.

“Set up here,” he ordered, examining their trail for a moment while his Second and Third set up the projector.

They’d lost the enemy counterforce some ways back, but he didn’t want to be snuck up on just because he was careless.

“Take your time,” he said when he was certain they weren’t being tailed. “Do it right, no mistakes.”

The two grunted more than spoke, but that was fine. He knew that they heard him and were taking it seriously. He turned his focus on the descending vehicle, using his scope to find the range and determine its descent rate.

“Fire when ready,” he ordered, having sent the information to his men.

“Targeting…”

“Firing.”

*****

Tether Car Roof, Descending to ANGELS 110 over Hayden

The next attack took her by surprise.

It was silent, for one, but far more importantly, it struck above the tether car. Sorilla dropped her rifle, leaving it to clatter across the metal roof of the tether car, and clawed at air as she was pulled upwards by a gravity suck, only to be dropped a second later to smash face first into the rooftop.

Ow.

Okay, that thought was purely out of reflex. Her armor kept her from breaking anything, but being dropped on your face sucks no matter how you figure it. Worse, she had to scramble hard to keep from slipping off and going for the high dive to end all high dives.

Her internal accelerometer registered that strike, however, and, far more importantly, it also registered the brief directional vector that preceded it.

Growling, Sorilla gripped her weapon again as she struggled to her feet and staggered over to the edge of the car again. This shot had come from another sector, far enough that she knew for certain that it wasn’t the same shooter. She shouldered the stock of her rifle, activating the HARD electronics again as she glared down over the precipice to the lush jungle below.

She and her pathfinders were sitting ducks, no doubt about that, but she had an answer to that problem. She had been hesitant to use it initially, particularly since it seemed that her rifle could settle the issue, but that was then.

And this is now. Sorilla gritted her teeth before opening a comm channel. “Kilo Kilo Charlie, Hawkeye.”

“Go for Kilo Kilo Charlie, Hawkeye.”

“Have a tasking. Coordinates transmitted, please expedite.”

“Roger. Expediting,” the voice on the other end replied. “Hawkeye, that’s close to the beams.”

“Roger,” she answered. “Unknown gravity valve in area.”

“Understood. Area is clear of friendlies. Tasking expedited.”

A roaring sound tore through the thin atmosphere around her, causing Sorilla to look up in time to see a trail of fire tear vertically down from the skies above and slam into the jungle before. Unlike the small rounds from her rifle, the kinetic kill launchers in the station above fired one-hundred-kilogram projectiles fast enough to leave hundred-meter-wide craters in the ground below.

The mushroom cloud below looked like rolling fire from where she was watching, but Sorilla just grinned nastily under her helm.

We hold high ground this time, how do you like them apples?

*****

Hayden Jungles

The shockwave was receding and the dust cloud rolling over his position when Kris lifted himself off the ground, blinking dirt and debris from his eyes as he stared in shock at the ruined scene ahead of him.

He and his Second had been moving to join Team Two’s position when the blast lifted them from their feet and threw them back into the jungle’s growth like children’s toys in a storm. He recognized the effect almost before he was able to think about it, though he was still somewhat in shock at seeing a mass mover impact at such a close range.

The Alliance didn’t use such weapons anymore, mostly because the singularity technology was more powerful by far and didn’t require physical ammunition, but there was no questioning the efficacy of a mass mover in practice. This one hadn’t even been particularly large or high velocity, if he were to judge, but for all that it had certainly been enough to annihilate Team Two before they managed to get off more than a couple shots on the distant and descending vehicle.

This is something I could have done without.

“What do we do, Prime?”

“Warn Team Three,” he snarled, opening a comm to the last remaining team that had taken part in the strike mission. “Team Three, abort and withdraw!” he called, already running. “The enemy has mass movers with precision targeting.”

There was a long moment before a response was forthcoming, enough to start Kris worrying, but finally he got the signal he was hoping for.

“Third team, move back to alternative strike position and prepare for remote firing,” Kris ordered before swapping channels. “All units, move in to Brakka positions. I want that thread cut! ”

*****

Tether Car, Descending to ANGELS 90 over Hayden

The dust below them was still settling, but for the last twenty thousand feet things had been quiet. Quiet enough that Sorilla was just starting to feel the first edges of paranoia entering into the brief bliss of victory rush. She swayed with the slight motion of the descending car, the winds now starting to become such that they were noticeable, and kept her rifle’s HARD gear sweeping the jungles below.

As much as she wanted to believe it, Sorilla doubted that she’d nailed the last of them by calling in rods from God. They had already proven to be tougher and smarter than that, so she wasn’t writing their epitaph just yet.

Come on, I know you haven’t played your last card yet. Where are you?

There was no way she’d even entertain the idea of relaxing, not until they kissed dirt on Hayden, and that was ninety thousand feet straight down.

“Hawkeye, KilCom.”

“Go for Hawkeye, KilCom.” Sorilla acknowledged the chirp from Kilo Command, the section of the station in charge of the planet’s kinetic weapons launchers.

“We’ve analyzed the target zone, before and after strike. Confirmed enemy presence just before impact. Good strike.”

No shit, Sherlock. Sorilla couldn’t help but shake her head. I don’t call down the fire on empty TZs.

“Roger, KilCom,” she said aloud. “Any sign of other bandits?”

“Negative, Hawkeye.”

“Understood. ETA for enemy starships?” she asked, almost not wanting to hear the answer. Having a ship-mounted gravity valve targeting the tether or, worse, the counterweight before they hit the ground would be a major suck.

“Seventy-two minutes.”

Sorilla ran the numbers quickly but was relieved to realize that the car would be on the ground just before the enemy was in range…either safely, or in pieces, depending on how much of a say the enemy ground forces had in the descent.

Either way, she didn’t have to worry about being blown to her component atoms by a shipboard weapon.

Just the ground-based systems. Joy, my life is so easy.

“Roger, thanks KilCom.”

“No problem, Hawkeye. Just a heads up, though, you’re about to lose some of our satellite-based launchers. We’re re-tasking to target inbound ships. From here on out, you have priority call on the station’s fixed launchers only.”

“Roger that,” Sorilla responded, having expected that. It wasn’t really a significant loss of firepower, if she were right about the nature of the enemy forces on the surface.

The station launchers were fixed, but their firing arc was more than enough to cover her expected AO. They were limited to how close they could fire to the tether, however, which meant that she was about to lose the ability to call down close support fire around the beams.

With a little luck, they’ll be too concerned about that last strike to push in close until we’re on the ground anyway.

*****

Hayden Jungles

Coordinating through this infinitely blasted jungle is a pain !

Kris couldn’t do more than grit his teeth as he worked, however, as the job was a necessity. The enemy had shown both the capacity and the capability to use mass movers in frighteningly close proximity to their own lines of control, which meant that whatever he and his people did would have to be done carefully, cleverly, and above all…quickly.

One of the biggest problems he’d encountered was that the local plant life was rich in several elements that tended to disrupt the standard comms he had available. It made long-distance coordination tricky, particularly since many of those in his ‘command’ were not Sentinels.

That said, they managed adequately, perhaps even admirably, in his opinion.

We don’t have enough of the man portable projectors heavy enough to constitute a serious threat to a structure of this size. He hated to admit it, but the materials involved in the construction of the thread were even tougher than he’d previously calculated. I s hould have expected that Engineers of this quality would have padded their needs in the material design.

There was no way they had enough power with one of the heavy man portable units to snap the thread, which was the second reason he wanted to take out the descending car. The first reason, of course, was because he wanted to return a little pain to the enemy Sentinel forces, and he was convinced that was what he was looking at.

“Prime! We’re ready to fire, but they will locate as quickly once we do.”

Kris looked over to the approaching Sentinel, but nodded. “Granted. One pulse only, per unit. Stagger the first three, save the remaining three for my orders.”

“Yes, Prime!”

Kris returned his calculations, wishing that he had more accurate weapons for the task at hand. Unfortunately, at best, the singularity pulse weapons were a blunt instrument, and at the ranges they were currently working at, it was a difficult task indeed.

He considered letting the vehicle descend the thread more, bringing it into closer range, but the fact that the enemy was using mass movers made that a chancy proposition indeed. All it would take was one mistake, perhaps not even that, and their life patterns would be sitting in a flaming crater wondering what happened to their bodies.

****

Tether Car, Descending to ANGELS 70 over Hayden

The atmosphere was starting to thicken up as they approached seventy thousand feet over the colony site, making things harder for Sorilla as she moved around the roof of the tether car and tried to scout out the areas below. Finally, between the now buffeting wind and the possibility of another gravity assault throwing her off the car, she pulled the rescue line from her belt and awkwardly looped it around the center pylon, clipping it off on itself so she could still move without being tossed clear.

Things had again calmed down after the last attack, but she wasn’t counting on that to hold. The enemy was skilled, patient, and motivated if they had any idea about the incoming fleet…and, given the timing of the attack, she had no doubt that they did.

That said, there were no signs of them on her HARD gear, and as the car continued to descend into more and more optimal ranges for engagement, that made her nervous. She was fairly confident that they hadn’t seen the tail of this assault just yet; she wasn’t that lucky.

The station above her was scanning the surrounding area with high intensity and higher resolution imagery, throwing the raw data through pattern recognition software as quickly as the onboard computers could process it, but even with the computers throwing out millions of images that showed nothing, she could see that the possible detection matches were swamping the human operators above her.

Seconds ticked by, becoming minutes as the car descended past ANGELS Seventy and made its way to ANGELS Sixty. They were almost down to the point at which commercial flights would travel, were they on Earth, only another twenty or thirty thousand feet.

Just another hour or so and we’ll be on the ground, she thought grimly. Assuming we survive that long.

Tether cars couldn’t drop quite as quickly as a free flying craft, unfortunately, both to preserve the tether and the passengers within. Normally that was a minor nuisance at best, but to her knowledge, there had never been a military battle surrounding a tether in history until Hayden.

The fat, slow-moving target presented by the car was redefining the phrase ‘sitting duck’ in her mind at this point, and Sorilla wished she’d had the forethought to request a shuttle for a combat drop. They probably would have turned her down, but at least she wouldn’t be kicking her own backside just then for not having thought of it.

She barely had time to register the warning her accelerometers gave before the maelstrom struck.

The sudden howling wind tore past her as she leaned away from the force, feeling the sudden pull of gravity change directions. Sorilla was moving before her computers issued the directional warning, her own sense telling her what direction the assault had erupted from as her mind hijacked the signals sent by the accelerometers implanted in her body.

She took a knee, bringing her rifle up to her shoulder and powering the HARD gear to full strength in an attempt to get a reading. Before she did, though, a second gravity surge spun her world around like she was sitting on the universe’s craziest amusement ride. Fighting the urge to throw up in her helm, which would have been a bad idea of epic proportions, Sorilla greyed out as she felt a sudden pressure against the inside of her skull.

She felt like she was moving down a tunnel for an instant, then a sudden snap and blinding pain broke her free to find that she was at the limit of her emergency tether, pulled up and clear of the rooftop by a valve singularity.

Sorilla reached forward, painfully grasping the line as she started to pull herself back down to the tether car. She was about halfway there when another jerk yanked at her and her eyes widened in disbelief as her line snapped.

That line was ten-thousand-pound test! she wailed internally as she arced away from the tether car, mind gibbering in both disbelief and fear as she entered free fall. That’s just not fucking FAIR!

The fear only lasted a moment, however, before she stomped down on it with cleats. With seventy thousand feet between herself and a very nasty meeting with the planet below, she didn’t have time to panic. She closed her legs and arms to her side, flipping backward into a dive as she mentally booted her HUD into dive mode.

No matter how she figured this, only one thing was certain in her mind.

Whatever was coming was going to suck.

*****

Inside the tether car, chaos reigned. The whole world seemed to shake as the occupants had little else to do but scream and panic. They were strapped down, for the most part, when the world went insane, and every single one of them just wished that they were back in their jungle as the hull walls of the tether car cracked open and a tearing wind plucked at their clothing, their hair, and their bodies.

Dean, the only one who wasn’t strapped in, only had seconds to recognize what was happening. He realized that whatever had been assaulting the tether was now turning on them, and the young man didn’t really spare time to think about what he was to do. He threw himself bodily over one of the few people who’d cared for him and the others like no one else he could remember.

As he clutched himself tightly to Tara’s seat and braces, the wall of the car exploded with a whirlwind fury and everything went red, and then black.

*****

Proc, Sorilla subvocalized as she realized that she wasn’t holding her rifle and didn’t remember losing it, locate rifle.

Rifle located, location on HUD.

The weapon was above her, oddly enough, also in free fall now. She figured that it must have been yanked loose when she greyed out. Sorilla threw out her legs and arms, going spread eagle to slow her fall as she shifted her angle to glide over under the falling weapon.

Her HUD let her know in its annoyingly calm way that she was passing ANGELS Sixty and accelerating. She could almost forget that she didn’t have any descent gear if she tried really hard to ignore the sheer terror forming in the pit of her stomach, but that only lasted until she realized that she was still speeding up as she went down.

As the rifle caught up to her, Sorilla snapped around in a fast spin. Her arm snaked out, grabbing the weapon out of the air above her. The change in weight distribution caused her to spin out, flailing a little before she got it back under control and brought herself and her weapon to bear on the ground below.

The rifle’s HARD gear was already fully online and scanning, so she just pointed it downward as she tried to stay as steady as she could. It didn’t take long to register a small pulse, so she HALO’d the location and squeezed off the magazine without bothering with pinpoint aiming. The smart rounds in the weapon would make up for any sloppiness at this range, and, frankly, she had other things to worry about as she hit the magazine ejector and reached for a reload.

The empty mag fluttered up and past her as the roaring wind caught it, but Sorilla ignored it as she seated the next one in place and hammered it home. She only had three full mags left, and if she were going to splatter herself across the surface, she wanted to make sure that her bullets got there first.

By ANGELS Fifty, Sorilla had only one magazine remaining and it was already locked, loaded, and waiting for a target from HARD. Her HUD was registering the zones she already unloaded on, but she didn’t have time to check them. Either she hit or she missed; there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it just then, as they were both inside the no-strike range as defined by the proximity to the tether. There was just no way to call in a rod from God strike on those locations with the satellite network being re-tasked to engage incoming ships.

Funny how falling to your death simplifies matters, she considered, recognizing that she was way too calm, even as she was grateful for it.

ANGELS Forty tore by, with her HUD announcing that she was now at terminal velocity.

Where are you, you pricks? I’ve got one more mag left and only a couple more minutes before I go splat. Show some common fucking decency and pop your head out so I can blow it off.

*****

Hayden Jungles

“Second squad, report. Second squad? Trel! Report!” Kris growled into his comm, frustrated by the sudden loss of communication.

The portable singularity projectors they were using weren’t powerful enough to cause the snapping of atomic bonds the way shipboard models could, but they were more than enough to snap chemical bonds. So when at least one of the shots struck the descending vehicle, he had initially been enormously satisfied to see an explosion of debris erupt from the target. That satisfaction vanished shortly after when he lost contact with his third team and then was abruptly cut off from his second squad in midst of giving them orders to reengage.

Kris threw down his comm, irritated. “We lost two teams?”

“So it appears, Prime.”

“How?”

“I believe I may have located the answer, Prime. Check my beacon,” the sub-altern said, pointing upward.

Kris grabbed his optics and linked with his subordinate’s device, searching the sky above. With the help of his spotter, he quickly located the object in question.

“Crushed World,” he swore, looking at the figure descending in free fall. “Is he still active?”

Quairu, his subordinate, nodded grimly. “I witnessed him fire just before we lost contact with Two, Prime.”

Kris swore again. “Unreal. That is a Sentinel, there is no doubt.”

“One about to end his career by ramming a planet with his face, Prime.”

Kris snarled, “And yet he still eliminated two of our teams before he did so!”

The Sentinel Prime of this mission wanted to swear one hell of a lot more as he watched the plummeting figure in his optics. The Lucians with him on this run were mostly younger Sentinels, and far more arrogant than he’d have preferred on a mission of this nature. Unfortunately, as he’d learned early on, there was more to this particular species than some random pocket empire on the fringes.

The original brief had clearly downplayed the situation this far out, both in terms of capacity and capability, and his team simply wasn’t qualified for the mission rating. Instead of the simple Peta class mission he’d been expecting, it was clear that the Alliance should have issued a full Quera rating at the very least.

“Can we engage him?” Kris asked, though he knew the answer.

His Second shook his head. “No chance, Prime. At the rate he’s descending, he’ll crater before we calculate the intersect.”

Kris just grunted in response, but mentally admitted that his Second was right.

“Pity,” he said aloud. “That’s no way for a Sentinel to end.”

He blinked in his optics as a roar of flames erupted from the falling figure, aiming downward, and for a brief instant he believed that the figure had some sort of rocket propulsion.

That was a belief that was quickly put to rest when his Second hesitatingly spoke up.

“Team Four is offline, Prime.”

Kris grimaced. “Then again, he’s eliminated more Sentinels in his last action than any single person I’ve ever heard of. Perhaps it isn’t such a bad way to go out.”

Chapter Four

Descending past ANGELS 30 over Hayden

Well, that’s the end of my ammo.

Sorilla pushed her rifle aside with a disdainfully casual motion, letting it tumble away from her as she took stock of her situation. With thirty thousand feet remaining, she was just starting to enter into the range in which most para-divers would normally consider for their maximum jump altitude. That meant that she still had a long time before she hit the ground, relatively speaking, but at the moment all she could think to do with that time was panic.

Luckily, or unluckily perhaps, that was the one thing she wouldn’t be doing. Every stage of her training, and every subsequent stage of her career afterwards, had been focused on expressly not panicking in a crisis. So, with that drilled into her from the very beginning, Sorilla almost literally didn’t have the luxury of simply losing it on the way down.

It felt like cold comfort, however, since if there was ever a time to panic, it was when you couldn’t do a damn thing else that would improve your odds of survival. Right then, the only thing she could do was aim to hit outside the colony site in the hopes of not killing anyone when she cratered into Hayden.

Wait…what if?

The thought struck her out of the blue, or perhaps it was more out of the green since Hayden’s skies were a little more green shifted than Earth, as she spun slowly in midair. The orbital tether entered her field of vision, and a wild thought struck her as she remembered a few idiots on Earth who had actually free climbed the local tethers as high as they could in order to base jump off them.

This is either going to look so awesome…or I’m about to go down as making one of the most epic fails in military history, Sorilla sighed as a plan began to form.

She spread eagled again, shifting her balance to angle in toward the tether. It was a thin target, just over a foot wide and only an inch thick, making it difficult to see with the unaided eye at the rate she was travelling. Luckily, Sorilla’s eye was anything but unaided.

The HUD HALO’d the tether on her command, lighting it up as she dipped her head and flashed through the thickening atmosphere like a raptor diving. The tether seemed to get closer only slowly at first, but its relative approach was an illusion that almost ended her. As she got closer to her target, the relative speed looked to climb exponentially, to the point that she misjudged her intercept.

Sorilla snapped up, arms and legs spread out as she tried to bleed off speed, but she made the move an instant too late and slammed her shoulder into the tether with enough force to have broken every bone along the length of her body had she been unarmored. As it was, the force was enough to shock the wind out of her lungs as she was rapidly decelerated and slammed into a spin.

Her HUD calmly lit off the numbers as she tumbled, showing her passing ANGELS Twenty and accelerating again as she lost her spread eagle position of maximum wind resistance.

I have to get this under control. Sorilla’s thoughts bordered on desperation as she took short, painful, gasps of air through clenched teeth. Her jump training had amounted to thousands of hours, however, and even as she was struggling to regain her breath, her body was moving on instinct and muscle memory.

Her fall stabilized as she got back into a spread eagle position, slowing her descent slightly once more, and Sorilla looked around to get her bearings.

She was now only a few dozen meters from the tether, but had only about fifteen thousand feet left to fall and the numbers were dropping fast. Sorilla slowly spun herself in midair, aligning for her second and surely last shot.

Deliberate motions are mistake free motions, she told herself as she angled in toward the tether. Mistake free motions are speed. Speed is life.

She closed with the tether, still hitting it hard enough to jerk her around, but this time her arm hooked around the black carbon line and didn’t come loose. Sorilla quickly got a grip on it with her left hand, heat spiking almost instantly in her gauntlets as she clamped down and used that friction to get her boots planted on either side.

There was no smoke rising from either her armor or the tether, both were rated for far higher temperatures than she could possibly produce through friction, but Sorilla could see wisps of dust being blown away as she continued downward.

Going to need maintenance for both my armor and this tether when this is over, she thought grimly.

Hopefully she wouldn’t actually snap the damn thing.

She didn’t think that was remotely likely, but then again, for as strong as the tether was, its strength was primarily tensile in nature. That meant that it could take immense pulling forces, but not necessarily much in the way of sheering force, or other strains. In reality, however, the carbon nano-fiber was about as tough a material as you found. It should be able to handle a little friction, since the damn things regularly survived sandstorms and other natural threats.

As she descended past ANGELS Ten, Sorilla checked her descent rate and began to relax. It was still fast, but now it was survivable.

A glance above her was enough to confirm that the tether car was still there, but she couldn’t tell if it had taken much damage in the attack that had sucked her clear of the car in the first place. Her HUD spotted and tracked some falling debris around her that wasn’t part of her own kit, so she had to assume that they’d taken some kind of hit.

I just hope everyone’s all right.

*****

Hayden Jungles

“Unbelievable.”

Kris didn’t bother to say anything in response to his Third, though he too was more than a little shocked by the display. A Lucian would have minimal odds of surviving a fall of that nature, but the sheer friction heat involved in stopping one’s descent in that manner would burn clear through even a Lucian’s silicate flesh.

He knew for a fact that this species couldn’t take near so much damage or heat as a Lucian, so he chalked it up to the armor, but in many ways that just showed how very dangerous this species was. Overcoming natural disadvantages was a key trait in any successful species, of course, but it was actually dangerous to be so successful at it.

More than one species in the history of the Alliance had leaned so hard on technological crutches that they eventually bred every erg of strong genetics from their bodies, becoming jokes of their former selves. Currently, many in the Alliance believed that the Ros’El were well on their way to doing just that as well, though it was an unsubstantiated theory at this point in time since no one had any reliable data on what they used to look like.

One thing such species had in common, however, was that they all became very dangerous as their control over technology increased and their physical competence decreased. More and more arrogant, willing to destroy just for the sake of destruction…warlike for the sake of war.

Kris hoped that he wasn’t witnessing the appearance of another race of that type, they were always far more trouble than their worth to the galaxy.

“Pack up our gear,” he ordered. “We’ll scout out the others, pick up survivors, and fall back to the regroup point.”

“Prime? We haven’t accomplished our mission…”

“They hold high ground, have mass movers, and would be more than willing to flatten this entire region if they knew we were here,” Kris growled. “We’ll fall back to the regroup point and wait for the fleet to engage from orbit. After that we’ll chance another strike.”

His tone, more than his words, ended the conversation. They packed up the observation and comm gear before fading into the jungle.

****

Tether Anchor Point, Hayden Colony Site

When Sorilla’s foot touched down on the ceramic concrete anchor, she let go of the tether and hopped lightly to the ground, ignoring the stares from those who had witnessed the last part of her descent.

She climbed out of the shallow pit that housed some of the maintenance sections of the tether and pushed open the security bars that would let her into the reception facility. Two guards were staring, open mouthed at her as she walked past them. Sorilla couldn’t help it, she grinned under her helm and keyed open the external speaker.

“I was in a rush, the car was too damn slow,” she told them. “Where do I find the OIC?”

Only one of the two had the presence of mind to point off in the appropriate direction, even as he stammered a response.

“H…he’ll be in the c-command center. It’s right down that r-road.”

“Thanks. When the car gets down, you want to tell them I’m in a briefing?” she asked, jerking her thumb skyward. “Oh, and get medical personnel here just in case. It was a rough trip.”

They didn’t answer, so she grabbed the more coherent of the pair by the ear with her armored grip. He yelped instantly as his earlobe sizzled slightly, causing her to let him go.

“Oops, sorry about that,” she said, not feeling particularly sorry at all, though she really should have remembered to check the external temperature of her armor. “But if you don’t want worse, you’ll acknowledge that you heard me, private.”

“Owww!” he whined, holding his ear. “I heard you! I heard you, damn it. Medical personnel, rough ride. I got it, they’ll be here.”

“Good,” Sorilla said, walking away from him even as she had her armor project her voice behind her. “Don’t forget. I’ll be talking with the brass. Tell them I’ll check in with them ASAP afterward.”

“Got it. Jesus,” the private ground out, watching until she was gone. “What a fucking bitch.”

His partner was still staring up the tether line, shaking his head in total disbelief. “The car is still over forty thousand feet up. Who the hell is in that kind of a hurry?”

The private scowled, took two steps over, and smacked his partner on the back of the head.

“Ow! What the fuck, man!?”

“Snap out of it. You call for the medics, I’m going to call command.”

“What? Why?”

“Because if the lieutenant commander doesn’t get a heads up that she’s coming his way, a burnt ear is the least of my worries. Go on, call the medics!” he growled as he keyed into the command channel himself.

He didn’t have the faintest clue how he was going to explain this one to the brass.

*****

Once she was out of sight of the two men, Sorilla looked around and leaned tiredly into a wall. It was mostly hidden under her armor, but she could feel her hand shaking as she lifted it up and twisted her forearm about.

Finally, she clenched her fist tightly and pushed off the wall.

There was work to be done, she didn’t have time to go to pot now.

*****

Tether Counterweight Station Liberty, Hayden Orbit

“General,” a young ensign spoke softly as she appeared near the brigadier’s side.

“Yes, Marlee, what is it?” Kane asked, not looking up.

“Sergeant Aida has reported in from the surface.”

Kane frowned, confused. “I didn’t think the car would be down there for another half hour?”

“Forty minutes, sir. It’s a little confused right now, but one of the guards on the tether car facility said something about her telling him that she was in a rush and didn’t feel like waiting?” the ensign said, sounding more than a little confused, not that he blamed her. “He also recommended that we send a maintenance crawler down the line?”

Kane rubbed his temples. He could feel an ‘Operator migraine’ coming on.

“I see. Find out what the hell happened, Marlee,” he said, sighing deeply. “As much of a smartass as that lady is, she isn’t stupid enough to jump out of a tether car without good reason.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh, and send down a crawler.” Kane shook his head.

“Had one on queue anyway, General. We can’t be sure what kind of damage may have been done by the enemy assault.”

“Good. I’m a little busy at the moment, but could you send a message to Lieutenant Commander Grange for me?”

“Of course, sir.”

“Just tell him that she is all his now,” Kane said, “and all the luck in the system to him. He’s likely to need it.”

“Sir?” Ensign Marlee Devon asked uncertainly.

“He’ll understand.”

“Yes, sir.”

As the ensign walked away, Kane returned his attention to the plot maps that filled the station’s operations room. The enemy taskforce was now decelerating, likely to bring themselves to an engagement velocity since it was clear that they weren’t aiming for a zero relative velocity with the planet. They had spread out, keeping almost a light-second between each ship as they closed, which was going to make targeting a little trickier, but only marginally.

It was his opinion, and that of Admiral Brookes, that it was most likely a tactical SOP on the aliens’ part. When they had to consider weapons like the gravity valves as a possibility, it was best not to group up too much. That was a lesson human forces learned the hard way during the first and second battles of Hayden.

A glance at the plots told him that they had another ten minutes before the enemy reached maximum estimated engagement range.

Likely the battle wouldn’t begin then. Few commanders worth their salt would open up at the maximum range in the situation they were looking at. No, they’d close a little more, firm up their target locks, and loose the dogs when they had a better chance of critical strikes. The problem was that, against immobile targets like a tether station and a satellite network, that range wasn’t going to be as close as he’d prefer them to be.

He wanted to move his units into position, but they were immobile. He wanted to shout orders, prepare his soldiers for battle, but they were already prepared. In the end, there wasn’t a damned thing he could do but sit here in a sitting duck the size of a small city and wait for the enemy to come to him.

I miss battle tanks and field warfare.

*****

Shadow of Hayden’s second moon

Nadine sucked a drink of coffee from the thermal sippy cup, refusing to submit to the urge to throw the damned undignified thing across the room in a childish pique of frustration. There were times she despised the space service, and sitting in zero gravity with catheter chafing at her urethra while she tried to look calm and commanding with an infant’s drinking vessel in her hand was one of those times.

There were many things about microgravity that she loved, but unfortunately every single one of them had worn off the shine years earlier and all that was left was a powerful urge to never travel anywhere at less than two-thirds gravity acceleration. Sitting still, be it in orbit or in deep space, was a trial to be endured, not something to be enjoyed.

If she must endure, however, at least she had a reason worth enduring all those minor indignities for.

The alien taskforce was closing on Hayden, their plots beaming nice and clear across her board. She was surprised at how clearly, in fact. They were showing more and more radiated heat, well beyond what she’d expected, even given their previous encounters.

It must have to do with these ships being from the other class of design.

Unlike the first ships encountered, these were sleeker and had a silhouette that made her wonder if they were intended to be capable of atmospheric entry. The delta shape of the vessels seemed to indicate that was a possibility, at least. The ghoulie vessels were bulbous, horrifically un-aerodynamic, structures that would likely tear themselves apart on reentry, barring a technological marvel in their design that she was unaware of. Even so, both designs clearly used the same drive mechanism as her sensor techs could testify.

The best guess anyone had was that the enemy used a variant of the Alcubierre warp drive. That accounted for their acceleration and the excess heat they pumped out, and would certainly be feasible within the limits of the enemy technology as near as anyone could tell. The only reason no one was certain it was, in fact, an Alcubierre drive was because in theory they should be far, far, faster than they actually were.

Thank God for small miracles.

Of course, that ignored all the other problems with the Alcubierre design, including the potential buildup of gamma ray particles to be released when the drive was disengaged. If that had happened, the enemy wouldn’t need a singularity valve to destroy human targets. Their own engines would have done the job for them.

Whatever the enemy was using as a drive, however, did provide a very specific metric to use in identifying them. Higher than expected heat radiation was just the first of many signatures, and for that she supposed she should be at least somewhat grateful. There could be no mistaking an arriving ship for anything other than the enemy. What was coming there was decidedly hostile, of that Nadine was confident, and so her job was set.

All they had to do now was accomplish the job and live to tell about it.

The second part alone will be a trick and a half, She thought cynically as she looked at the telemetry tracks. The first part may just require a miracle.

Task Force Valkyrie was floating in a decidedly unstable lunar orbit, their engines on standby as they waited for the enemy to make their move. Nadine wouldn’t give the order to break from their positions until the enemy was committed, but with every passing moment it was harder to keep from giving those orders.

If they were human ships, they’d already been within the no-escape envelope, but they weren’t human-designed ships. She only had estimates of their acceleration potential, but she knew enough to be quite certain that there was every chance that if she jumped the gun on this trap, they’d not only be able to escape it, they may well be able to tear her fleet out from under her in the process.

Given that, Nadine wanted to ensure that at least one of those two scenarios didn’t happen. If they could take TFV in a straight fight, so be it, the battle was already lost. If they couldn’t, however, she wasn’t going to let them get away to try again later.

Just another five minutes, and then we see just how tough you are.

*****

Parithalian Alliance Ship, Noble Venture

“We’ve scouted motion in the lower orbits, Master.”

Reethan nodded, eyes on the displays. He could see them as well as his apprentice, but there was no point in saying that.

“Weaponized platforms, I presume,” he said after a moment. “Is the station in range yet?”

“Yes, Master.”

“Bracket it,” he ordered. “All ships, fire to show our intentions. Do not strike the station until I give the orders.”

“Yes, Master, orders dispatched. Firing in two marks.”

The moments passed before the ships of the flotilla all opened fire as one being, blazing charges erupting into space and tearing through local space-time at near light speed.

Reethan settled back at his station, eyes on the display, as he wondered just what the response would be.

*****

The energy of the weapons was tracked the instant it entered into the range of the planetary defense satellites. As fast as the weapon pulses were, they weren’t quite light speed, but the defensive installations did communicate at the speed of light.

With no time to consult people, the weapon emplacements made the decisions themselves without even wasting the time it would have taken to request instructions from the station computers. They made micro adjustments to their orbit, calculated intercept velocities, and opened fire.

Two dozen incoming blasts of alien energy were met by near-two-hundred-ten-kilogram iron bars accelerated to 0.6c, and that section of space erupted in a dazzling display of light and destructive energy.

*****

Tether Counterweight Station Liberation

“Incoming!”

Brigadier Kane didn’t bother saying anything, though he felt like he should.

It was pointless, since by the time the warning had even been called, the automated systems had begun their response. On the computer plots he could see the projected intercepts, and though it took a few more moments, he clearly saw the results.

Kane let out a breath of quiet relief.

“So,” he said finally, “this type uses more conventional weapons after all.”

He hadn’t been confident of the reports from TFV concerning their last dealings with this type of ship, but it appeared that they had been right. That didn’t rule out the possibilities of them having a gravity valve, of course, but it seemed that some of their older established procedures just might be useful.

“All incoming rounds have been intercepted.”

“Re-task one quarter of our satellites,” he ordered. “Plot a firing solution on the lead enemy elements.”

“Yes, sir.”

It’s time to show them that we bite back.

*****

Parithalian Alliance Ship Noble Venture

“That was hardly the overwhelming show of force I’d hoped for,” Reethan said dryly as he watched the interception on the displays.

Impressive response time. Must be automated, there are few living beings who can think and react that quickly, unless they have hyper-communications? Even then, it’s unlikely.

He flipped through his displays, looking for signs of enemy communications, but found nothing on any of the hyperbands used by the Alliance or the Outer Empires. So far as he was concerned, the Ros’El had a lot to answer for when it came to the sheer lack of intelligence work done for this section of space.

A clearly interstellar empire of some sort, with no ideas as to how they communicated, what their language was, hell even their basic physiology data was missing from his files. They had been fighting an open war for enough time now to have compiled almost complete historical files on them!

If it weren’t for the fact that the Ros’El were considered to be… unstable allies at best, he would put in an official complaint when he brought the flotilla back to Alliance space.

Reethan blinked, back stiffening.

When did I stop thinking of this region as Alliance space?

He pushed that thought firmly aside, now was hardly the time or place to be debating Alliance expansion policies. Instead he leaned forward, looking to the displays again as he began to formulate his next move.

“Adjust our formation to…” Reethan considered for a moment before looking amused. “Talon Three.”

He may as well have uttered profanities to the depths of space and back for the reactions he got. At every station around the command center he could see shocked and utterly horrified looks directed in his direction.

“Master Parath,” his apprentice stammered out, “the Talon series is—”

“Antiquated, yes, I am aware,” he cut the younger Pari off. “And proscribed by modern protocols.”

“But, then why, Master?”

“Modern protocols were instituted after the Ros War,” he said, patiently explaining something that he felt his apprentice needed to learn. They were not yet in battle, and he had the time. “Specifically, they proscribed many tactics divined to be not only poorly imagined, but even lethal against a Gravity Singularity Device.”

“Yes, Master, I know this…”

“Do you believe that these people have such a device?” he asked mildly.

The apprentice seemed surprised, but finally gestured a negative.

“Precisely. Issue orders for Talon Three,” he said again, relaxing back. “Bring our ships close enough to provide for a common defense against the enemy weapons… Then prepare for closing battles.”

There was a pause that he could almost take as insubordination, if he so chose, and then his apprentice nodded.

“As you order, Master of Ships.”

*****

USS Cheyenne, Low orbit of Hayden’s second moon

Nadine Brookes leaned forward as she watched the enemy ships change formation and increase relative velocity as they began to vector into an intercept aimed at Liberation.

“Damn,” she whispered softly, shaking her head slowly.

“Admiral?”

“Sorry, Captain, I didn’t realize you were monitoring this channel.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Roberts said quietly. “Is something wrong?”

“The enemy tightened their formation,” she said. “I was hoping to catch them far enough apart that they couldn’t reinforce one another’s point defense.”

“Yes, pity,” Roberts agreed. “I suppose we can’t count on enemy stupidity, Admiral.”

“No,” she said, “but it would have been a nice surprise. Prepare your crew, Captain. We attack in…eight minutes.”

“Eight minutes, aye, ma’am.”

She changed over to another display, tuning out the sound of the captain coming over the ship-wide with the call to general quarters. They had been in a low alert state, all but minimum crews stood down to grab food and coffee before the crap hit the AC. The ship began to reverberate slightly as she worked, the powerful engines beginning to spin up as they prepared for antimatter injection.

Soon the whine would be replaced by a distant rumble, muffled by more than a dozen meters of armor plate, insulating material, and meteoric iron that sat between the core and the people stationed about it. Once that happened, Nadine was well aware that Task Force Valkyrie would once more be committed to battle.

When will this be over?

It didn’t matter, not just then, and she pushed the thought from her mind and returned to confirming the status of the ships in her taskforce. Her crews needed an admiral whose mind was in the coming battle, not drifting away to an uncertain future.

“All ships, this is Admiral Brookes,” she said, opening the Fleet-wide. “Standby for combat acceleration.”

****

Orbital Tether Station Liberation

“Shit.” Kane swore as he recognized what the new enemy formation would permit. He was no Fleet commander, but he was aware that once the ships were in range of each other, they could share point defense duties and vastly increase the potency of their defenses.

“Do we have a firing solution?” he asked, looking over to where he had people working on controlling the extensive satellite network under his command.

“Yes, sir.”

“Strike probability?”

“Barring active defenses, we’re looking at better than eighty-five percent.”

Kane snorted. The chances that there would be no active defenses were laughably low in his mind.

“Understood. Standby offensive birds, I want strike launch when we have ninety percent.”

“Yes, sir!”

His options were pretty strictly limited, unfortunately. His command was immobile, his defensive assets were entirely composed of drone satellites that were effectively immobile, and he felt like he had a huge bull’s-eye painted across his rear end. None of those things were particularly well-suited to making him feel particularly good about the coming battle.

Especially the image of me with a bull’s-eye painted across my backside, Kane thought ruefully, unable to eject the imagery now that it was entrenched in his head.

“Valkyrie is winding up for combat maneuvering, sir.”

Kane looked over the plots, nodding. “Good. Belay launch commands. Let’s time this a little better.”

“Sir?”

“Hold fire on offensive birds until I give the order.”

“Yes, sir.”

He watched, attention split as he kept an eye on the separate plots for the enemy ships and the telemetry from Valkyrie. Hayden’s second moon was smaller than Earth’s Luna and sat in a lower orbit as well. That put Valkyrie about ten minutes from engagement range from the moment they lit off their drives, assuming they used full military acceleration.

“Valkyrie just lit off their drives! Damn, they’re moving fast.”

Kane looked over to the plot, eyes widening slightly as he reevaluated his time estimates.

More like seven minutes.

“Weapons free, all offensive birds!” he called. “Fire one salvo in…T-minus thirty seconds from my mark… Mark!”

****

Parithalian Alliance Ship Noble Venture

The salvo from the enemy weapons were hardly a surprise for Ship’s Master Reethan Parath when it came. In fact, the only thing that did surprise him was that it was not nearly so thick as he’d expected.

They likely are holding back for defensive purposes.

“Engage enemy weapons as they enter defensive perimeter.”

“Yes, Ship’s Master.”

The tight formation of Parithalian combat ships continued into the enemy range, undeterred by the fast-moving chunks of metal flying their direction. They waited for them to enter within the outer defensive perimeter of the fleet, then engaged with short-range singularity projectors.

Unlike the Ros, few Parithalian ships were equipped with planet-crushing, or even ship-crushing, projectors. Lower powered versions, however, were an integral part of the close defensive network on any medium to heavy class combat ship of the Pari navy.

Since the incoming weapons were not powered, they couldn’t maneuver and were easily imploded by the gravity projections well clear of the Parithalian ships.

Spheres of nuclear fire erupted all around them as they closed with the planet, but the Parithalian ships merely drove through them without pause. On the other side of the explosive net, they emerged unscathed and undeterred.

“All cannons, spread fire,” Reethan ordered. “Target the weaponized drones and fire as you may.”

“Yes, Ship’s Master.”

A moment later, the staccato pulse of the weapons was faintly echoing through the ship as first the Noble Venture , and then the rest of the flotilla, opened fire.

****

Parithalian weapons were more straightforward than those used by the Ros’El. After all, bending time and space to create a point where an object’s own gravity crushed it was both technically sophisticated and fraught with potential complications.

Charged negative particles, held in position by a powerful magnetic field and launched toward a target at almost eighty percent of light speed were actually far safer. Alright, it was safer for the local space-time at least. Risks of losing containment meant that pulse weapons were a potential hazard to the ship mounting them, but there were few Parithalians that would duck that risk in exchange for the possibility of creating a stable singularity and flushing an entire solar system on one shot.

The ships of the Parithalian flotilla opened fire with the pulse weapons, sending a steady stream of negatively charged pulses across space as they continued their charge to the planet. In response, the satellites in orbit of Hayden twisted in place and responded in kind with continuous launches that quickly threatened to cause the platform’s orbits to decay.

Thrusters flared, holding them in place, and within seconds, the space between the inbound ships and the planet erupted with a kaleidoscopic display of destructive energies that blinded every scanner looking in that direction.

*****

USS Cheyenne, Hayden High Orbit

Task Force Valkyrie exploded from behind the second moon of Hayden, every ship accelerating well beyond what the book considered ‘maximum safe acceleration,’ looking for all the universe like a chain of diamonds and pearls about the moon as they vectored in on their target.

With her flight suit plugged in and actually massaging the blood through her body, Nadine still had to grunt hard through clenched teeth in order to breathe and keep from greying out. The hard acceleration was necessary, however, if they didn’t want to give the enemy more time than necessary to adapt to the second threat coming in from the direction of the moon.

Before giving the order to accelerate, Nadine had set a dozen preset commands on her screens and hoped that they would be enough to cover what she found on the other side of the celestial body, because giving orders while accelerating at twenty times gravity was a tricky proposition at best. The sheer blast of energy given off by the enemy ships as they fired on the station, and the station and satellites fired back, was enough to give her pause as she reevaluated the situation on the fly. But the taskforce was most certainly committed now, and the only way out of this fight was through it.

With it taking almost every erg of mental and physical energy to do so, Nadine lifted her hand against the force of the acceleration and painfully reached out to key the first pre-arranged command. The taskforce fell into pairs, each cohort already assigned their targets, and lanced across space at their enemy like arrows from a bow. An analogy that Nadine personally thought suited them all the more, given the Cheyenne and the Hood were leading the charge.

“Hold…fire…” she ordered, painfully clenching her stomach to force air up from the diaphragm. “Close the gap, hit them in the teeth with our first salvo.”

“Aye aye, Admiral.”

Roberts didn’t sound much better, though that was probably wishful thinking on her part. While no member of the Solari Fleet, either science track or any other, was permitted to be out of shape, she knew well that her captain was one of those who treated workouts with the fervor of near religious devotion. By comparison, her slighter frame was clearly in need of more workouts.

I’ll have to have Gwen put it on my schedule, she thought, rather inanely she supposed, tomorrow.

In space, even orbital space, distances are rarely measured in less than hundreds of kilometers. In this case, they were already moving over a hundred thousand kilometers an hour, and it would be several minutes before they crossed plots with the enemy flotilla. There was just something about those numbers that felt totally unreal to her as she watched them form on her displays.

The Hood and the Cheyenne were on the main feed, closing just ahead of the rest of the taskforce by virtue of having just a couple more seconds’ warning on the countdown, she supposed. Vectoring in from other angles, the rest of the force was keeping itself well spread out just in case the enemy was holding back a gravity valve or two. It would be nicer to have a little more close-in fire support for point defense, but they would have to make do with the PD capabilities of two ships.

The conflagration ahead was lighting up every sensor pointed even in its general direction, forcing them to turn down the sensitivity to avoid damaging the optics. Basically rendering every array pointed in that direction worthless.

Lovely.

Half blind, operating on data that was now minutes old and possibly dozens, if not hundreds, of kilometers off, the fleet continued to plunge forward. They could read that the enemy assault on the defenses in Hayden orbit was slowly increasing, as were the response fire from those same defenses. That much was evident just from the number of explosions erupting in the black of space that was now a contested no-man’s-land between Hayden and the enemy squadron.

She and likely every eye not doing critical tasks were staring at those screens intently as they tried to spot anything that might indicate that they themselves were about to come under fire.

Considering the crushing weight of the acceleration, and how very nearly impossible it was just to breathe, she’d be surprised if anyone saw more than the spots in front of their eyes.

*****

Parithalian Alliance Ship Noble Venture

“They mount an aggressive defense, Ship’s Master.”

Reethan conceded the point with a wave of his hand. “Not so much as they could, I believe.”

“You think they’re still holding back?”

Reethan was certain of it, in fact, and didn’t mind saying so.

“Without doubt. We have seen none of their explosives yet, merely mass moving devices. They’re waiting to engage us in closer. It is not an unwise stratagem,” he said. “We know that they used nuclear force weapons against the Ros’El, Ke?”

That wasn’t a pleasant reminder, not even for someone confident in Parithalian Fleet superiority. His apprentice grimaced but had to concede the point nonetheless.

“That will be…aggravating, once we close the range.”

“We aren’t going to close the range.”

“Excuse me, Master? Then why did we come in so close to begin with?”

“I wanted to see their defensive system, and now I have,” he said. “Arrange a course to curve us about the larger moon and take us into deeper space.”

“Uh…yes, Ship’s Master. As you say.”

Reethan watched his apprentice work, slightly amused but mostly pensive as he considered what he knew about the current situation.

The enemy certainly had effective defenses for conventional assault. However, against a Ros’El singularity device, none of them would prove to be worth a cometary fragment in the corona of a star. Luckily, or perhaps not, for them, he didn’t have a ship class SD on hand so he was going to have to be a little more creative.

The close pass told him everything he needed to know about the local defenses, and that was that they were effectively immobile. No matter how impressive the strength of that material holding the large station in place, it was holding the large station in place . Since the only other defenses they showed to the pressed assault were from an immobile orbital network, the best course of action was to engage them from well beyond their range.

A few kinetic strikes against the station should eliminate it with little problem, the orbital paths will be child’s play to calculate.

He was already well underway to making those calculations when his apprentice let out a shout and turned an unhealthy shade of blue-green.

Reethan rose from his station, knowing when to get a look at a situation with his own eyes, and swore under his breath when he saw the display that caused the reaction.

So, they had a mobile force waiting behind the smaller moon. Clever.

“Too late to back down now!” he called out, his voice echoing powerfully around the command center. “Stand prepared to engage the enemy ships, increase acceleration to full power, hold current course!”

They were going to be caught between the two forces for several passing moments, but he wasn’t too worried about the immobile defenses. Not yet at least, since they were at an innate disadvantage given their relative immobility. A short passing engagement was all the flotilla would have to endure with them before they were clear and moving too quickly for their relatively slow weapons to have much value.

The enemy ships, those could be a different issue, but only marginally so if the intelligence was accurate. While he certainly didn’t want to slug it out at close range with an enemy that used nuclear force weapons, he was also aware that their relative acceleration was a fraction of his own. A passing engagement would be measured in fractions of a momentary cycle, and then they would be clear and able to reevaluate the local situation.

Unfortunately, it looks to be an exciting few fractions indeed.

“Watch for guided weapons! Here they come!”

*****

United Solari Fleet’s Task Force Five, more commonly called Task Force Valkyrie, had taken a beating since it had originally commissioned. They’d begun with an even dozen Cheyenne class cruisers, and half that again in Longbow class vessels. By the time Hayden had been retaken from its alien occupation, they’d lost several of their number, but over the years since that battle, there had been more losses and, indeed, more reinforcements. Now, Valkyrie stood as the most powerful human fleet outside of Earth Space. With fifteen Cheyenne class cruisers and nine of the Longbow class, they were a force to be reckoned with by almost any standard.

They were beaten, battered even, after years of battle, but their crews knew their jobs and the repairs had been completed competently and with dispatch. The ships now flinging themselves into combat were every bit as dangerous as they had been when they floated clear of their docks.

The crews who manned them?

Now they had done nothing but get more and more dangerous as the years went by. In human terms, there were likely no men and women anywhere more competent at their jobs, more driven to do them, and more willing to sacrifice for their victory.

So even as the alien ships increased their acceleration, Admiral Nadine Brookes and her crews had already given, and acted on, the orders to open fire.

Valkyrie didn’t lead with their rail guns, they went straight to the main course of the coming conflict, and over one hundred fifty high-yield warheads surged into space on antimatter-powered plumes of flame.

****

USS Cheyenne

The ship rocked with each launch, the powerful shock of the missiles firing felt through the entire ship even while they were under acceleration.

Captain Roberts strained under the extreme acceleration, eyes on the plots. He could see the enemy ships increasing their speed and knew that they’d been spotted.

“Admiral, they’ve seen us.”

“Understood,” Brookes said, sounding pained.

He felt for her, under the extreme acceleration they were pulling it hurt to breathe, let alone to talk. Even the best acceleration suits, with their hydraulic pressure massage, were a poor salve for a tortured body.

“Drop to one gravity, stand by for maneuvering orders.”

“Roger.”

He reached out painfully, keying the command that sent the signal to the helm. It was all automated, causing the drives to cut as the signal was sent across the fleet. Instantly the stress lifted, almost magically. He had to fight an instant sensation of peace and a desire to sleep as his muscles relaxed, his breathing eased, and his body conspired against him now that the pain and stress were gone.

“Stand by for maneuvering orders!” he called out, forcing himself to lean forward and keep his muscles working.

“Aye, sir, helm standing by!”

“Plotter! Missile track to main display!”

“Track to main display, aye.”

The forward display of the command center lit up with the plot, compiled from data gathered from every sensor unit in the area. The missiles were running straight, hot, and on target, while the enemy ships were clearly trying to accelerate through the kill zone as quickly as they could make it.

Smart move. They know they can’t turn and run, not even with their acceleration. Faster through is quicker done.

“Captain,” Admiral Brookes spoke over the command channel. “New track data, coming through.”

“Aye, ma’am,” he said, examining the new course data.

The admiral wants to play. Very well, then, let’s play.

“All hands, this is Captain Roberts. Stand by for combat maneuvers,” he said over the ship-wide. “The enemy has already decided to break through our field of fire and bolt for open space. The admiral would like to dissuade them of that notion. We will not disappoint.”

He closed the comm, sending the orders to the helm.

“Helm, you have your orders. Engage when ready.”

“Aye aye, sir! Engaging new course and acceleration…now!”

****

Redirecting the thrust of a VASIMR drive was no easy matter. In centuries past, ships would use vectored thrust panels to deflect the force of the drive to one side or another, thus turning the vessel. With a VASIMR drive, however, the output of the system was far too energetic to be deflected by any physical system.

For a system as powerful as the Cheyenne and Longbow class VASIMR drives, the only way to vector the thrust was by bending it electromagnetically as it exited the main drive tube. With full power to the containment, the Cheyenne’s engineers turned the thrust particles as they exited the blast tube and turned the whole massive ship on the proverbial dime.

With her, the rest of Valkyrie turned in formation, the taskforce no longer heading for where their enemy was…but now aiming at where they would be.

*****

Parithalian Alliance Ship Noble Venture

“Target the incoming weapons, fire as you may.”

The Noble Venture continued to accelerate, not quite into the teeth of the coming assault, but closer than Master of Ships Reethan Parath would prefer. His preferences weren’t taken into consideration by the universe, as a general rule, and so it was this time too. Sometimes, for a better future, one had to accept a painful present.

“All Parithalians, stand prepared for collisions.”

The first of the missiles exploded under fire, almost too easily. Too easily indeed, he noted a moment later as the remaining weapons began to take evasive actions. The next few instants slipped by as the defensive guns missed, lagging behind as they took a few precious moments to recognize the issue and recalculate new strike points.

More weapons exploded then, but the last few were so close.

Are they designed to detonate on impact, or…?

Three nuclear-force weapons detonated off the flotilla’s bows, and in that moment, every screen they had went white and then black as armor slammed into place to prevent the sensors from burning out.

Odd…

Reethan was confused, a sensation he had no love for at the best of time. In battle, he loathed the feeling indeed.

The reports said that they used penetration weapons, not space burst designs…

“We’ve lost contact with the Impervious Mantle !”

Master of Ships Parath rose from his station, knowing what had happened deep inside though he had yet to look at the data on the screens.

“All ships, evasive maneuvers! They blinded us from the true attack!”

The ships began to turn in space even before he finished speaking, but on the screens he watched the data feeds from three other ships go dead.

Clever little monsters, he seethed, admiring the guile just enough to keep from cursing them to the void. You’ll not do that to a Parithalian flotilla again, on my life you won’t!

*****

USS Cheyenne

The crew, those who had access to external displays at least, roared with satisfaction as the first of the enemy ships went up. The modified bunker busters had blasted through the nuclear fire, tearing into the enemy ships’ armor, and detonated deep inside the alien cruisers. Unlike the class one aliens, these ships weren’t so well armored or so large as to take an internal nuclear detonation with anything resembling ease.

Even Admiral Brookes wasn’t immune to the surge of adrenaline that followed the strike. Knowing that they’d landed a telling blow without resorting to insane measures felt good , but she was well aware that this battle wasn’t over yet.

They were accelerating again, this time at only ten gravities, so the enthusiasm was short-lived. No one had the energy for more than their jobs at the moment, and no one dared not give their jobs everything they had.

The two opposing forces were now flying almost parallel, with Valkyrie holding the outside line and keeping the alien ships sandwiched between them and the planet’s defenses. TFV’s arc would bring them within a light-second of the enemy force, give or take a half million kilometers, which Nadine knew would practically be slugging range for both sides.

This is going to hurt.

“Captain,” she hissed through clenched teeth while panting for air, “go weapons free on the cannons.”

“Aye, ma’am. Rail guns, weapons free!” Roberts called a moment later. “Fire at will!”

“Aye aye, Captain,” the weapons officer replied. “All rail guns, firing at will!”

Acquiring a firing solution for the fixed electromagnetic rail guns was a tricky issue given their current heading, given that the rail lines were aligned with the ship, front to back. That said, Valkyrie was just barely aiming in to intercept the enemy ships, and they had the gravity of the planet on their side. It was a math problem slightly complicated by the position of Hayden’s two moons, but in the end, it was far from insoluble.

The mass of the projectiles, the speed of the ships and launchers, factored by the total variation of local gravity, would be enough to put them on target. Assuming no unknown variants were entered into the game board, contact was a certainty.

In battle, of course, the one constant was the unknown variables.

Despite that adage, however, every ship in Valkyrie went to rapid fire on their EM launchers, putting a wall of steel into space as they continued their headlong rush into the oncoming gauntlet.

“All hands, red alert,” Roberts said, oddly calm and natural given the pressure they were all under. “We’re about to come into their range. Stand by all damage control teams, secure all blast doors.”

Nadine thought that it was somewhat of a redundant order, since most of those things were assumed to have been done before they came out from behind Hayden’s second moon, but it was better to be redundant than sorry, she supposed.

A buzzer caught her attention, and she glanced to one side in time to see a signal light for a blast door as it changed from yellow to red.

Definitely better to be repetitive.

*****

Tether Counterweight Station Liberation

“Enemy ships are going to cross our beam at less than half a light-second, sir,” Commander William Clarke said, eyes not leaving the displays arrayed around the room. “That’s point blank range, General. Valkyrie’s got them pinned between us, they can’t get out without running the gauntlet.”

“Let’s not waste the opportunity,” Kane growled, eyes on the command displays that distilled the available data down to the most likely pieces of information he might need. “I want three quarters of our satellite network re-tasked to offensive, but check fire. I want them dead in our sights when we open up.”

“Yes, sir, re-tasking in process.”

“Make our missiles hot,” Kane ordered after a brief hesitation.

The men and women in the room all glanced sharply at him, though they’d know that the order was most certainly coming. Priming a nuclear weapon wasn’t something you did lightly, especially not when they were sitting as close to a civilian population as Liberation was.

The station was about as well-armored as could be expected, but it wasn’t a military hull. Without the ceramic plates and other defensive systems hard-lined into hulls like the Cheyenne class, radiation from a new range burst of a nuclear device was a potential threat. At the very least it was going to mean extra shifts for the people who specialized in clearing the accumulated solar radiation from the station; at worst things were going to get real hot in a very short time.

“I want firing solutions on those ships updated in real time! Valkyrie set the trap, now it’s time to bring the hammer down on these bastards!”

*****

Parithalian Alliance Ship Noble Venture

Master of Ships Parath was not in what one might charitably call a good mood.

Three of ours are gone, but we’ve adjusted our defensive stratagems; that will not happen again. Now, however, I find that I have left myself to be trapped between the Mirrum and the Gola. Will the first tear me asunder, or the other swallow me whole?

He should have been more cautious, perhaps, but he hadn’t taken his own advice in choosing his maneuvers this time around. The lives of his lost crews would have to serve as a very expensive lesson for him, one he should never have required.

The decks were quiet as he overlooked the situation.

He knew that he couldn’t leave that as it was. They needed to pull together and return themselves to the present or those three ships would not rest in this system alone.

“Even the cannons,” he ordered. “Watch for a redoubled assault from the station.”

“Master, we’re picking up fade signals from the fleet.”

“Can you get a better definition?” he demanded, moving over to the sensor station. “I need more information than a fade signal .”

“No, Master.” The crewman shook his head. “There’s far too much interference.”

“Blast.” Reethan turned away before speaking and pitched his voice as low as he could, considering his frustrations. Now what are they up to?

Unfortunately, one of the things he didn’t have at the moment was the luxury of time to consider that question. He didn’t put it out of his mind, but he did shift it to the back while he focused on more pressing matters.

“All ships, this is Master Parath,” he said over the open channels. “Prepare yourselves for maneuvering. New orders are imminent.”

Reethan closed the channels as he refocused on the tracks displayed all over the command deck. The enemy had timed their assault well. Despite the relative sluggishness of their acceleration, it was clear that they had managed to lock his force into a far longer engagement period than he would prefer against a force of superior numbers.

They are respectable ship handlers, to be quite honest. Better than most in the Alliance. He would have enjoyed the challenge if they hadn’t cost him the lives of over a thousand crewmembers already.

“Master of Ships! More fade contacts, I can’t explain it.”

“Show me,” Reethan ordered, looking to the screen.

The new contacts were anywhere near the enemy ships, and his first instinct was the write it off as debris. Most space-faring populations tended to wind up with a fair amount of detritus in orbit of their worlds; it was an occupational hazard of thinking beings doing unthinking things, as they were wont to do. Something about the location of the fade contacts rang a bell, or perhaps sounded a whistle, for him, however.

“Show me a tracker, from this fade contact to the last,” he ordered, puzzling over the scan.

A line appeared, linking the two signals together, running back closer to where the enemy ships were, but not exactly. It felt off, however, so he went on. “Calculate speed for an object to travel from the first point to the second, adjust for local space-time, and show me where it’s going.” A new set of lines crossed the space on the screen, and now his eyes widened. “Does that plot cross ours at the same point in space-time?”

“Yes, in fact it will cross in…”

He’d already crunched the numbers in his own mind and slammed his hand down on his station, opening the command channel. “All ships! Spread maneuver immediately! Ros’El Formation One!”

Of all orders he could have given, that was one that Ships Master Reethan Parath was well aware would be obeyed, instantly, and without question. When fighting the Ros’El, you didn’t get many chances, and if you wasted one, you were normally quite dead before another came along.

The ships spread instantly, giving up the close proximity reinforcement of their defensive network in exchange for distance from each other in case of a singularity device assault. It wasn’t a device that Reethan was concerned about, however, but something far cruder.

The first of the mass mover objects slammed into the flotilla’s ships as they were spreading, holing through armor like blades through undefended flesh. The Noble Venture shook as it, too, was struck, at least three of the steel projectiles perforating their armor, but even as warning whistles sounded, Reethan was already thinking ahead.

It would take more than a few mass accelerated projectiles to take down a Parithalian cruiser. Certainly ones this small couldn’t do it, but he was fed up with playing the target in this little shooting match.

A host of options floating in his mind, Reethan made a snap decision and entered the new commands into his station before opening the flotilla command channels.

“New orders are at your stations, ready yourselves. It is our turn now.”

*****

As the ranges closed, the tempo of the battle increased exponentially. From a relaxed, or at least extended tension, environment where people could take time to eat, drink, or even close their eyes for a period, things had by this point deteriorated to a heart-pounding race to annihilation.

Passive detection systems were now close enough to real time so as to make no difference, given the efficacy of the supercomputers available to every side in the conflict. Shots from even relatively slow weapon systems would cross the intervening space with near instantaneous speed, rendering many advantages of energy weapons null and void.

For all that, however, it was also clear that this compressed period of urgency and tension would only last minutes at most before the effect began to work in reverse. For the alien flotilla, that reversal of fortune would work to their advantage, and they were very much aware of it, but the humans on board the ships of Task Force Valkyrie knew that they had to strike while they were in knife range.

They surged forward, increasing their relative acceleration while using the gravity field of Hayden itself to maximize the maneuver. The crews of Valkyrie had no intention of letting the aliens walk through one of their systems as easily as some had in the past, but for all that they knew deep down that the alien crews most certain had similar intentions themselves.

This fight was perhaps coming rapidly to a finish, but even with only minutes left, they all knew it was ages from being over.

Chapter Five

USS Cheyenne

Admiral Brookes swore under her breath as the enemy ships broke at almost literally the last possible second, managing to avoid the greatest part of the steel fusillade aimed in their direction.

They have good sensors, or better techs, she conceded sourly. I doubt we’d have seen those in time.

She could hear Roberts calling out new tactical orders, but for herself, Nadine was more focused on what the enemy was about to do instead of what her own ships were doing. Tactics were the realm of her captains, strategy was hers, but in this battle the strategies were almost all determined from the onset of the maneuvers.

With only minutes of engagement left, at the very most, the time for strategies was all but gone. Now was a time for getting down and dirty and, as she had been told in the past, admirals didn’t get down and dirty. It was bad for morale.

For all that, she found herself staring up at the displays floating over her eyes and trying to get in the mind of the enemy commander. So far their actions hadn’t been difficult to predict, and she could almost imagine what her opposite number was thinking at every step.

He came in on a scouting run, didn’t see us when he entered the system. Once we sprang the trap, he didn’t have a choice but to run the gauntlet we’d laid out for them. This maneuver is the first thing they’ve done that I couldn’t have called in advance, but even this shows more their technical capacity than their intelligence.

She knew that wasn’t any sort of indicator of what her opposite number was thinking, however. Space combat was so limited that even ships with acceleration numbers as high as the enemy had only had so many things they could do in response to enemy action. It was a function of how very much distance affected maneuvers, and in the, end space war strategy often simply reduced to relatively simple equations.

Statistically, a computer can fight a space battle better than we can, she supposed darkly as she glared at the displays. As close as we are now, though, things are about to get a little too dirty for a nice clean equation.

*****

On the primary command deck of the USS Cheyenne, Captain Roberts was doing his own fair share of glaring at the displays resting above his eyes. The fact that the enemy ships had avoided most of their kinetic strike was frustrating, but he didn’t have time to brood over lost opportunities.

The enemy had incredible point defense; they’d been hammering everything fired at them so far with incredible ferocity. The weapon satellites around Hayden were throwing literally mega-tons of steel directly into the teeth of the enemy point defense, and it didn’t even seem to faze them.

In the end, however, there was only so much even the very best point defense system could take. Numbers would overwhelm it eventually, no matter how good it was. The problem was that they didn’t have until ‘eventually.’ By his count, in another forty-three seconds the enemy fleet would have opened the range enough to take the worst of the heat off the system, and then it would be all over except for the obligatory useless pursuit.

At least these aren’t the Ghoulies, he grunted in annoyance. They’d have already imploded at least a couple of our ships and probably the station as well.

Roberts didn’t know what he was expecting as he thought that, but it wasn’t what suddenly erupted in his primary displays.

The enemy formation exploded in his face under ten thousand magnification, forcing him to zoom out rapidly or lose track of some of the enemy ships.

What the hell are they…?

Roberts’s eyes widened as he slapped open the ship-wide. “All hands, stand by for emergency maneuvers! Helm, hard to starboard!”

“Hard to starboard, aye!”

The Cheyenne twisted in space as a sudden barrage of energy blasts tore through space-time in its direction. The HMS Hood, despite the brief moment of startled hesitation on the part of Captain MacKay, heeled over hard in response as she struggled to remain with her cohort leader, and behind them both, the rest of the formation began to break apart as others reacted at various rates to the onslaught of enemy fire.

The lead pulses smashed into the Hood as she showed her flanks to the assault, the reactive armor plates exploding as they were impacted, sending plumes of plasma out to disrupt the attack. Behind them more shots came on, missing the Hood and Cheyenne, but the USS Sioux, HMS Marion, and HMS Bodkin were caught in the center of the onrushing storm.

Their reactive armor turned away blast after blast, but some strikes invariably came down on already damaged sections of the ship and punched through. All three vessels were thrown around, bleeding atmosphere and men as they began to fall out of the shattered formation. As the ships of TFV struggled to regain their coordination, one thing was abundantly clear to all.

The enemy was through playing the game by Valkyrie’s rules.

“All thrusters, all rudders, full port!” Roberts ordered, having no time to worry about the other ships in the squadron.

The Cheyenne had avoided the attack, true, but they were now showing their flank to the enemy, and that wasn’t a situation calculated to set him at ease.

Having been thrown to one side as the ship twisted out of the way, the crew was now thrown hard in the opposite direction as she turned back. The sideways acceleration was lighter than the crushing force of the main drives, but their acceleration suits weren’t as well-suited to alleviating pressures from that direction either.

Fighting off spots dancing in their vision and bruises forming on both sides, the crew of the USS Cheyenne found themselves staring down the teeth of the remaining enemy ships coming right down their throat.

“Oh shit.”

*****

Tether Counterweight Station Liberation

“Nukes are hot, General.”

“Thank you, stand by for launch,” Kane ordered, stepping away from his station to look over the shoulder of his sensor tech. “How is the firing solution?”

“We’re solid, sir,” the Navy petty officer said. “At this range, we have near enough to a real time as to make no difference.”

“Excellent. Wind the launchers up,” Kane said. “Let’s see how they like a few giga-tons down their throats.”

“Yes, sir.”

With the appearance of Task Force Valkyrie, the weight had been lifted from Liberation’s defensive network. The enemy just couldn’t focus the attention on both targets at once, and it was clear that they considered the mobile enemy to be the greater threat.

Time to disabuse them of that notion, Kane thought, almost sneering at the screen. “Fire on my command…”

“Enemy fleet is maneuvering!”

Kane snapped his head up, eyes to the plot as he looked for the new motion.

The enemy fleet had just suddenly, and with effectively no warning, thrown themselves at almost right angles to their previous course. Granted, even at full acceleration for the alien drives on those ships, a right angle turn was impossible, but they were making a damned fine effort of it. What was even better was the fact that—Kane couldn’t believe his luck—they were basically giving him an ideal shot right up their backsides as they struggled to change course.

“Fi-!” Kane began to say, only to be cut off.

“General! Check the plot!”

He swirled, glaring at the lieutenant commander who’d interrupted him, but saw the man pointing to the main plot and bit down on his words until he at least checked for himself. It took a second for him to see what his officer had spotted, but when he saw it he swore up a storm.

The enemy’s new track was bringing them right into close contact with Valkyrie. Given the launch and travel time of his nukes, he couldn’t risk the shot. By the time they arrived on target, the two fleets would be interpenetrated and he’d just as likely take out Valkyrie as the enemy.

He glared at the plot for a long, interminable-feeling moment, then finally shook his head in disgust.

“Stand down the nukes.”

*****

In the depths and sheer expanse of space, even ‘sharp’ maneuvers were, in reality, astoundingly large curves. For the Parithalian fleet to change their course as abruptly as they did required levels of acceleration that would have crushed humans in their padded acceleration seats, turning the entire crew to little more than a smear of red ichor on the rear-side bulkheads.

Nevertheless, humans had become somewhat inured to seeing their enemy violate the laws of physics over the last few years of warfare. As fast as they were, as impossibly fast as they were, the crews of Task Force Cheyenne had already taken the possibility to account, and they weren’t aiming to go quietly into the night.

*****

USS Cheyenne

“Bring us about! Put the nose into the charge!” Roberts ordered, trying not to grunt and gasp as he did, even if everyone else was doing it.

The Cheyenne was literally using every system in her maneuvering suite to twist, turn, kick, and buck through space as the enemy continued to fire in their direction. Bow thrusters shoved the ships to one side, and then the other, as bolts of alien energy weapon fire tore past her. The immense gyroscopes buried around the hull of the ship supplemented the vectored thrust systems in addition to banking her out of the path of incoming blasts, and all of it was wreaking all holy hell with the crew’s health and wellbeing.

Bruises were the least of the issues, as some people blacked out from lack of blood to the brain, others had certainly experienced ‘red-out’ as the exact opposite happened and blood rushed to their heads with such force that men and women were bleeding from the eyes, nose, and ears as they struggled to maintain their stations.

The issue was slightly less for Captain Roberts and other essential stations that had been equipped with bulky, but incredibly useful, full motion acceleration couches. Since the ship’s computers always knew what direction the thrusters were going to fire next, those same computers told his chair what direction to turn so he could take the least dangerous amount of G-force.

Which mean that so far he only had some bruises and maybe a couple cracked ribs, judging from the pain he experienced with every gasping breath.

This better be our last fight for a few weeks, he thought as he glared into the display that showed him the incoming enemy plots. ‘ Cause I’m going to be no good to anyone when the adrenaline wears off.

“Forward guns! Fire as she bears!” he called, keying in a command as he spoke.

The Command Operating System (COS) was something even a playschool child could operate, mostly because it had to be. Big pictures for the most part, bright and cheerfully colored, practically obscene when one considered what those pretty pictures set in motion. When you were being slammed around at better than ten-G’s, however, you didn’t have time to be looking in confusion at a row of buttons that were all the same color while your entire world tunneled around you.

One touch sent orders through the whole ship, shifting defense priorities and sending the rail guns from offensive to point defense. The launchers went into rapid fire as soon as the first firing solution was spit out of the computer, firing smaller but faster moving rounds into the oncoming onslaught of fire.

With the Hood only instants behind them in changing to point defense, the space ahead of them was filled with steel and alien weapons’ fire, both of which were clawing for supremacy. Roberts could only hope that the steel would, if not win, at least drive the game to a draw.

With point defense initiated, Roberts tapped another cheery picture on the display by his fingers, and somewhere deep in the Cheyenne, automated systems rewired their onboard nuclear arsenal for penetration detonation.

This little war is about to go supernova right in our faces.

*****

Parithalian Alliance Ship Noble Venture

Essence of your lives for that of ours, Reethan thought grimly as he watched three alien ships bleed atmosphere, debris, and lives into the blackness.

The flotilla was in full assault mode now, firing furiously into the enemy as the enemy seemed to be caught by surprise. It didn’t last long, however, as explosions of energy erupted between the two groups to show that the enemy defenses were still in fine working order.

The surprise charge had bought them time, but only instants at best, and as close as they were going to pass, Reethan had no doubt that his ships and their crews were going to be badly mauled in the passing. In exchange, however, he would ensure that each drop of Parithalian essence would be paid for in full.

“Rear weapons to point defense only,” he said calmly. “Cover us from the station and their satellites. All forward weapons, assault priority. Annihilate them.”

“Yes, Master of Ships.”

*****

The two groups of ships interpenetrated, moving at near relativistic speeds, and continued to tear into one another as they passed.

First the Devonshire lost her forward ceramic plates, opening the ships to direct damage on her nickel-iron hull. The alien weapons punched through that meters-thick section of hull and tore into the interior of the ship without concern for what, or who, was in its path. The ‘Shire lost positive control, bleeding atmosphere and men as she twisted in space, the damage having somehow destroyed communication between the bridge and the maneuvering control rooms.

The human fleet struck back with nuclear fire, so close to the same time as to require computers to divine which came first. A bunker buster punched through the alien armor of an onrushing ship, blowing through four decks before the penetrative fuse decided enough was enough and fired the implosive charge.

The Parithalian ships weren’t as tough as their Ros’El counterparts, or even as thickly built as the human Longbow and Cheyenne class. An internal nuclear blast tore the Preserver to its component parts and sprayed them through the flotilla like shrapnel.

Still, while more lightly armored than the Ros, and certainly less heavily built than the human ships, the Parithalian armor was dozens of times stronger, weight for weight, than anything either of the other species was able to field. Their ships shrugged off the hits and kept firing as they blew through the enemy formation.

*****

HMS Hood

The ship rocked, a violent and unnerving sensation while under acceleration. For those ‘below decks,’ with little or no information about what was happening, many could only gasp for breath and pray for the fighting to be over while the ship was still mostly in one piece. Loud noises weren’t supposed to be heard on a ship as heavily built as a Longbow class, so when something hit her hard enough for people to hear buried all the way inside, those same people jumped.

Or at least tried.

“Fuck!” Jardiens swore through his gasps and grunts. “What the fuck was that?”

“Will you just please shut up?”

Mack was certainly no happier with the sounds and jostling than his unit comrade, but the constant, vocal swearing was getting on his last nerve. He had enough to worry about without Jardiens pointing out every damn clank and bang for him.

“I’m just saying, ships shouldn’t make noises like that!”

“We know !”

“Should have gone with the sarge,” Korman said grimly from where he was strapped in. “At least on Hayden we’d be more than luggage .”

That was one point they were all in agreement on, the sarge was the lucky one this time around. They didn’t know what she was up to, but it had to be better than being strapped down to the craziest thrill ride in history and praying that nothing popped out of the darkness to blow them to their component atoms.

*****

The bridge situation was both better and worse.

Jane MacKay at least knew what was coming at them, even if she half wished she didn’t. Not that ignorance was an option, of course. It would be bad form indeed for a captain to not at least have some idea of what was happening on, in, and around her ship.

With their forward sensors being all but blinded by the sheer volume of enemy fire, and the knowledge that the enemy ships were certainly within a few hundred kilometers of her own, she almost wished she didn’t know what the ship’s computers saw. At least then she could cherish her illusions that someone had to have some kind of idea of what was going on.

She wanted to shout orders, gallantly stand up and spew forth some rousing bullshit to inspire those under her command. Truth was, though, at this point all she could do was hold on and hope that when the ride came to an end she still had a crew to inspire.

The ships shuddered as another salvo of missiles launched.

The last salvo, if she were remembering correctly. She couldn’t be sure, there had been so many noises and bad sounds that maybe she miscounted.

The fight was on computer control now. They’d put in their instructions, told the computers what to do and under what circumstances to do it, and now she was just like everyone else on the Hood.

Cargo.

It was over in the blink of an eye. Literally, one moment she was staring at the onrushing icons that showed the enemy, and then she blinked sweat from her eyes and they were gone. If she were in an atmospheric fighter, she’d have given herself whiplash while twisting around to track the enemy ships.

“Bring our nose about! Pivot on the axis!”

Now she’d just give everyone on board one more set of acceleration bruises.

Huge gyroscopes buried deep in the hull were twisted against their will, and in response the entire ship turned even as powerful retro-thrusters fired to speed the process along. Around them, the rest of Valkyrie did the same, bringing their bows about to once more face the enemy.

It wasn’t about giving chase, there was no chance in hell of that. Even if Valkyrie lit their drives off with enough force to turn their crews to paste, there was no chance they’d be able to catch the alien ships. There was simply too large a disparity between their relative velocities. It would take magic, pure and simple, to catch them now.

They wanted their bows to the enemy for more realistic reasons. First, they weren’t quite through with the shooting and, more importantly, neither was the enemy. Point defense was still firing nearly constantly, the deep shudders running through the decks a familiar and comforting sensation for everyone on board.

As long as the computers determined that their missiles could actually catch up to the enemy, the computers would continue firing those as well, but no one took comfort in the hammering sound of a nuke being launched from its tube.

“Kill the acceleration! Bring us to one gravity!” she called, ignoring the enemy now.

There was nothing she could do about them; the computers would be a better judge of whether it was time to shoot or time to shut up. Now she had to worry about her crew and, preferably, not slamming them into anything particularly large, like, for example, Hayden itself. There was no immediate risk of that, of course, they didn’t make a habit of plotting courses into planets after all. But they couldn’t just stay on their current course either. It would carry them far out of Hayden orbit and potentially away from the assets they were there to protect.

“Captain, begin damage control?”

“Belay that!” she called, thumbing open the ship-wide. “All hands, stand by for deceleration maneuvers. I need emergency checks on our heat shields, ASAP.”

While her crew rushed to do that, McKay was crunching numbers on her own.

The only way to do a really fast deceleration, without killing her crew, was to use the gravity of Hayden. The problem was that, to get enough force to slow them significantly, they were going to have to duck into the atmosphere. She just hoped that they hadn’t taken too many hits so as to prevent that.

A last stuttering hammer was felt through the ship and then the computer chimed, signifying that the enemy was finally out of range.

“Heat shields check! Good to go!”

“Prepare for atmospheric braking!” McKay called. “This is going to be a rough orbit…”

They were running through the last checks when her command channel chimed, bringing her head around in time to see Admiral Brookes appear on the screen.

“Admiral,” McKay nodded.

“Belay the deceleration orbit, Captain,” Brookes told her. “I’m detaching half the squadron for that, but we have another job.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

It didn’t matter what the job was, she wasn’t going to question it in this situation.

“We’re going to have to search the damaged ships and pick up any survivors,” she said. “Match speed and acceleration with them, please.”

“Yes, ma’am,” McKay said, looking to the plot.

She keyed open the ship-wide again. “All hands, belay previous orders. Stand by for microgravity while we conduct search and rescue operations. Shuttle pilots, EVA crews, report to your duty stations.”

That was going to be one hell of a dirty job, if she weren’t completely off the mark, but there was no doubt that it had to be done.

*****

USS Cheyenne

You could practically hear the sighs of relief as the crushing force of acceleration lifted, leaving the crew of the Cheyenne in microgravity. More than one person who’d held on through the worst the big ship had inflicted on them passed out, not from pain or misplaced blood flow but from sheer relief.

Captain Roberts could feel the endorphins pumping through his system even as he tapped out commands into his system but fought the relaxation threatening to send him to dreamland just as hard as he’d fought the force of acceleration.

“EVA crews, proceed to your shuttles. We need emergency search and rescue for the Sioux burning vacuum in five minutes!”

The crippled ships were slowly twisting in space, following the course they’d been moving when the enemy fire triggered emergency shutdown of their engines. Luckily, none of them had been on a collision course with Hayden, and they were all moving more than fast enough to achieve escape velocity and make it into planetary space.

Things were empty enough once you got out of orbital space that they had time to affect a thorough rescue.

Assuming they keep on running.

He spared a glance at the track that was following the enemy ships, and so far they were doing just that. He wasn’t fool enough to believe that this fight was quite done with, however, but at the least it seemed that they’d reached an intermission. The alien force was still moving away from Hayden, not heading toward any particularly useful objects, so they’d have to telegraph their intentions long before they could become a threat to Hayden again.

Looks like we have time. Thank God.

The EVA shuttles launched in just under four minutes, immediately flaring their drives and heading for the crippled USS Sioux. He could see the Hood launching shuttles as it matched speed with the twisting HMS Devonshire, and other ships were also moving with dispatch. With luck, and a little fate on their side, they shouldn’t lose too many men and women to asphyxiation or decompression.

There wasn’t much they could do for those already lost to direct enemy fire, but that was the way of war. First duty was to the living; the dead would understand and be patient. They would not be forgotten by their comrades.

*****

Parithalian Alliance Ship Noble Venture

Master of Ships Reethan Parath silently looked over the loss tables, seething underneath his calm exterior.

There were no survivors to recover. In the passing engagement, his ships had either sustained minor damage or had been completely and utterly destroyed. True, it was mostly the former, but there was enough of the later to infuriate him.

Now, however, he had to think forward to the next engagement. He had to be smarter next time, less foolish.

They have a mobile force, and they clearly like to hide and strike in ambush, Reethan supposed. Actually, he was impressed that they’d successfully managed that, though a fair portion of it was due to the initial engagement between his ships and the defense network around the planet.

Another large part of it concerned him, however.

Their ships run incredibly cool. We would have detected any Alliance ship the instant they passed the moon’s terminator. It must be those drives of theirs, the heat shed is entirely behind them and directed away.

That was making things difficult. While he was aware of some outer empires that made use of roughly similar technology, they were never considered a threat to Alliance ships. In theory, the drives were simply too slow to be a significant danger to the faster and, generally, better armed Alliance vessels.

It was probably true even here, in a conventional engagement, if he were being brutally honest. Reethan was well aware that he’d let them pull him in and then trap him between two hostile forces in his foolish enthusiasm. That, combined with their use of nuclear force weapons that were capable of penetrating armor and detonating within a ship, well, the results spoke for themselves.

I should withdraw and bring back Fifth Fleet, he thought grimly. A show of force to end this nonsense with as little essence lost as possible.

The trouble was that Fifth was at least twenty jumps from this world, and several of them were long ones indeed. No, he wasn’t quite willing to give up on things just yet.

“Handlers,” Reethan called, straightening up.

“Yes, Master of Ships.”

“Make course for the eighth world in this system. We have preparations to make.”

*****

Orbital Tether Station Liberation

Brigadier General Kane glared at the screens, feeling impotent as he watched the enemy fly freely around his system. He longed to maneuver a few brigades around the screen, box the bastards in, and then destroy them entail. Unfortunately, the size of the battlefield he was looking at made everything he’d ever experienced in his career look like a sandbox, and quite frankly he didn’t have the first clue how to move troops around that kind of field.

So, while it galled him to leave those movements to the Navy…with a jumped up scientist in command, no less, he had no choice at the moment but to leave mobile defense to Valkyrie and see to his own affairs.

Speaking of which, Kane grumbled to himself. “I want those weapon satellites rearmed ASAP, straight away! How are our stores?”

“Eighty percent, sir,” a lieutenant said, saluting as she stepped over. “We’ll have more shipped up from Hayden as soon as we run a maintenance bot over the tether.”

“Any signs of damage to it?” he asked, genuinely concerned.

The tether was, literally and figuratively, their lifeline. With it they had access to metal deposits in the mines near the Hayden colony, the smelters and other infrastructure that the alien occupiers hadn’t bothered to destroy, not to mention, of course, a steady stream of oxygen and other expendable resources.

Without it, they were a stone flung from a sling. The station would reach escape velocity and probably wind up somewhere out in planetary space between Hayden and the third world in the system. Decommissioning the old engines in the station would be possible, but it would take weeks of work to clear the annihilation tubes of the tether fasteners.

No matter what, they needed that tether.

“Nothing major, sir. However, the enemy was firing on it, and there was damage done to the car,” she told him, not quite successfully hiding a grimace.

“What is it, Lieutenant?”

“Reports from ground stations say that Sergeant Aida slid down the tether, sir.”

“She did what ?” He remembered vaguely that she’d apparently jumped from the car, but this was news to him.

“Like, and I quote,” the lieutenant said, “‘she was sliding down a damned fireman’s pole’.”

Kane groaned softly, rubbing his face. “Unbelievable.”

“We’re consulting with some specialists now to see if that would cause noticeable wear.”

He nodded, understanding. Carbon nano-fiber was incredibly strong material, but its key strength was tensile. That is, it was incredibly strong when you pulled on it. It did, however, cut and chafe just as easily as most materials as flexible as it was. Atmospheric wear had to be constantly fixed by maintenance bots, so he really didn’t want to think about what a hundred-fifty-kilogram soldier in armor would do to it by sliding down the length of the tether like some damned circus act!

Kane sighed. “Well, we’re still attached to the planet, so she didn’t cause anything catastrophic at least. Let me know when we have an update from the bots.”

“Yes, sir.”

*****

Hayden Colony Site

Lieutenant Commander Eric Simon Grange silently examined the armored woman who was sitting just outside the command and control center. The master sergeant had removed her helm and was sitting slumped over against the wall, clearly trying to subdue an attack of the shakes. He didn’t blame her for that, given that she’d just free fallen farther than most people ever even fly to and barely escaped with her life.

Her right hand was clenched tightly in a fist as she gripped her wrist with her left, but even through armor he could see her arm twitch. Her feet were practically dancing in place as well, tempting him to send her to medical care for the night, just to make sure she didn’t do something stupid in the immediate future.

Unfortunately, something stupid may just be what was on order.

Since that fleet started kicking up a fuss in orbit, the jungle had been crawling with enemy combatants. A day earlier and he would have sworn that they didn’t have enough fighters left to mount a decent offensive, but it was pretty clear now that they’d been waiting for the right time.

We’re just lucky that their man portable weapons don’t have the kick of the full size gravity valves, otherwise this last offensive would have had a far different result.

For all his available resources, he just didn’t have enough men to scour the jungle clear of them, and that was a fact. Further, he’d already lost too many good men by sending them out to jobs they weren’t trained for. Good forward observers and jungle scouts were rare, and the few he had weren’t specifically Hayden-trained. Other than a few pathfinders, who barely made minimum military training requirements to qualify as competent irregular forces, he was tapped out for some extremely vital skillsets.

The shaking woman waiting outside his command center might just be his best bet of getting some traction in this ground war and forcing the aliens clear off the planet.

Assuming the ones in space don’t finish it all for us.

That was outside his purview, however, so he turned his focus to what he could do. Grange turned away from the woman sitting outside and walked back into his command center, flagging down a passing secretary.

“Get me the telemetry codes for the sergeant’s armor,” he said, “and bring me a data screen.”

“Yes, sir.” The young corporal nodded, hurrying off.

It didn’t take long to hunt down the second part of that, but Grange was unsurprised when it turned out that the codes he asked after were locked down. He used his own access biometrics to get in but was initially refused until he pointed out to the computer that she had been assigned to his command.

He whistled silently when he saw her readings, shaking his head.

Her heart rate is through the roof, and I’ve never seen neurological readings like this.

Most of the readings were familiar, however. Post-Combat Stress, more or less classic in nature. Adrenaline production was at the top of the scale, not even accounting for what her implants had pumped into her system during the fall. Similarly, the whole suite of fight-or-flight chemicals were spiking through her system, such that he considered it a mark of magnificent discipline that she was sitting in one place at all.

Thankfully, he wasn’t seeing anything that would force him to put her on a chemical treatment plan. Which was to say, she was fit for duty, even if a bit jumpy at the moment.

Good. I need her and her pathfinders in the field.

He dropped the screen on a table and walked out of the command center, coming to a stop in front of the twitching woman. She instantly stopped fidgeting, coming to attention, and saluted.

“Sir. Master Sergeant Aida reporting as ordered.”

*****

Tether Car, Anchor Point

The doors to the tether car had to be pried open using a hydraulic pincer, permitting the rescue workers to clamber in over the debris that littered the entire interior. They found men and women, still strapped into their seats and with oxygen masks wrapped around their heads, unconscious, injured, or dead within.

There were fewer extreme casualties than they had expected upon seeing the outside of the car, which looked like an explosive had detonated inside, blowing out an entire wall. Inside, the damage was contained to that one side of the car, and most of the injuries seemed to be from acceleration damage and overpressure. Luckily for those in the car, the pressure created by an explosion at that altitude was markedly lower than one where the atmosphere was thicker and better able to conduct the blast.

Emergency crews were triaging the victims of the assault when Jerry Reed scrambled into the car through the massive hole blown out of the side wall.

“Tara! Dean! Come on, someone talk to me!”

He stumbled as he saw Dean’s bloodied form being pulled away from others, the young man’s back studded with shrapnel. On one knee, Jerry looked up almost blindly as the body was carried out of the way so that the rescue workers could do something for the living. He stared at the body as it was moved, unable to look away until he saw Tara being carried right past his face and was suddenly galvanized back to his feet.

“Tara!” he yelled, surging in her direction, only to be caught by a man in military uniform.

“Back off, Reed! Let them do their jobs!”

“Is she all right?”

“She’s breathing. That’s a fair shot better than some in here,” the soldier said, pushing him back and away from the emergency response workers. “Get the hell out of here, Reed. These people have jobs to do.”

Jerry cast around, eyes wild. “What about the sarge? She was on this car!”

“Jesus, you didn’t hear?”

“Hear what?”

“Look, I don’t know what the hell happened,” the soldier said, “but Sergeant Aida took a swan dive from the car almost an hour ago. Probably when this happened, but I dunno. She slid down the freaking tether, told the guards to have emergency crews standing by, and headed for the command center. She’s still up there, I think.”

Jerry stumbled back from him, shaking his head. “Slid down the…? What?”

“Lots of guys would love know that too. If you find out, let us know,” the soldier said with a snort. “Now get the hell out of here before I toss you out that damned hole.”

He gave Jerry a rough push, not enough to send the pathfinder sprawling but more than enough to make him grab the wall for support and get the idea that more questions wouldn’t be met with cheerful helpfulness. Reed stumbled away, opting to follow Tara’s body as it was carried out of the wrecked tether car.

*****

Sorilla spotted Reed as he exited the tether station and loped easily over to him, only to spot Tara as she was loaded onto a military mobile ambulance.

“Oh God,” she mumbled, sliding to a stop.

Jerry spotted her as he turned, eyes wide. “What happened?”

“We were struck by valve weapons as we descended,” she told him. “Multiple attackers, hidden in the jungle. I got at least some of them, but when they nailed the car, I was sucked up in the gravity sink and thrown clear.”

“Dean’s dead,” Jerry muttered, his voice flat.

“Oh shit.” Sorilla slumped, her helmet hanging limply from her left hand as she shook her head. “Damn it.”

After a moment she looked to the ambulance. “What about Tara?”

“They won’t say.”

Sorilla’s eyes narrowed, but she didn’t say anything for a moment. Instead she sent out an RIF pulse to the local electronics around her, using an OPCOM override to take a peek at the telemetry coming from the automated systems in the ambulance. Tara’s vitals were steady, but she’d lost some blood and had acceleration bruising over most of her body.

Jerry pulled back a bit when Sorilla looked at him, the red glow in her eyes startling him until he recognized that she was accessing her implants.

“She’s stable. Going to be sore as hell when she wakes up,” Sorilla said, “but unless I’m missing something, she will be waking up.”

“You’re sure?”

“No,” Sorilla told him flatly. “I’m not a doc. But there’s nothing on the monitors that looks like it’ll kill her. Let the docs handle it, Jerry. We’ve got a job.”

“A job? A job ? ” Jerry stared at her. “What possible job could you have for me at a time like this?”

Sorilla let him growl and snarl at her until he was done.

“Payback,” she said. “It’s time we cleaned this little infestation right off the surface of Hayden.”

He paused, throwing a stricken look over his shoulder as the ambulance pulled away, then looked back at her. For a moment he wavered, then slowly he straightened up and nodded.

“It’s about damned time,” he told her finally. “Hell, Sarge, it’s two years past time. I’m in.”

“Good. Come on, time to go to work.”

*****

Hayden Jungles

Sentinel Prime Kris glared out at the thread that bisected the sky in the distance, despising everything it stood for. They’d hit it with everything they had short of shipboard weapons, and, honestly, their assault lander didn’t carry much heavier weapons than the portable singularity devices.

Through all of that it held steady, apparently immune to everything they had.

Worse, that damned alien Sentinel had easily decimated their attack force. Granted, he suspected most of those were practically accidental kills, as the targets seemed to be the singularity weapons each time. They were now down to only two of the portable devices, the rest having been turned to shrapnel by long-range fire from the skies.

Most of the Lucians were still combat ready, and they had their personal weapons, but between the equipment losses and the withdrawal of the Parithalian force in the skies above, well, they had been in better shape, to be sure.

He wasn’t even certain that they’d inflicted any real damage, since the thread had held strong against their best attempts. It was frustrating to say the least, but as it stood, he didn’t think there was anything else they could do without orbital support or, at least, a major resupply.

Kris stepped back into the shelter of their hidden transport, making his way to the communications station.

The latest information from the Parithalian flotilla was better than it had been, but he wasn’t certain that he’d qualify it as ‘good.’

Mass movers. Almost as bad as a planet-crushing singularity device, especially when I have to be sitting at the bottom of the gravity sinkhole they’re throwing the damned things down.

The Paries had advised him that they were preparing to strike at the immobile station and satellite network before making another attempt on the world he was standing on. That in itself didn’t surprise him, it was the normal procedure. The flotilla had only approached as close as it had because the Paries needed detailed information on the planet’s defenses, and there was no other way to get it in this case.

Bet those skinny blues wish they’d had some good solid intel this time around , Kris thought grimly.

Normally a mission of this nature would take months of planning and preparation, with thousands of man hours just from the intelligence division alone. Coming in blind as they did was sometimes a military necessity, but Kris knew that it was a terribly risky thing to do for reasons they’d just been faced with. Now the Parithalian force was going to have to lick their wounds and try to finish the mission despite the damage inflicted by these aliens.

Unfortunately for Kris and his Sentinels, they were about to be at ground zero of an interplanetary war, and that sucked like open space no matter what way you worked the numbers.

*****

USS Cheyenne

Search and rescue operations took less time than Nadine had feared, and hoped. Feared, because she didn’t want to be tied up on a predictable orbit while pulling men from the stricken ships, and hoped because she had truly been praying that they’d find more men alive than they had.

Transfers were completed in a few hours, however, and they were now under one gravity acceleration back to Hayden’s orbital path. It would be another couple days to get there at current rates, but there was no rush for the moment and they still had damage control to complete on the Cheyenne, Hood, and other ships. The other half of the squadron was now resting in Hayden’s orbit again, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The alien ships were still on their screens, though the information was now over eight minutes out of date and growing older with each passing minute. It was clear, however, that the aliens had no intention of handing in the towel just yet. They were decelerating, obviously intending to remain in the system now, but just what, she couldn’t be sure of.

It won’t be good for us, though, that much I’ll take bets on.

“Damage control reports, Admiral. Us and the Hood for now, the light speed delay is going to delay reports on the rest of the squadron.”

“Understood,” Nadine said. “What’s the brief?”

“We’re still combat ready, ma’am. Some damage to our ceramic plates, but we’ll need a few hours to make repairs to those.”

Nadine nodded, understanding. Replacing one of the ceramic plates was a relatively simple task, but not something to be done in deep space unless you really had no choice. They’d done it before, and like as not would do it again, but it wasn’t an order she would give lightly. The results of being forced to maneuver, should the enemy attack, while men were in EVA…

Nadine shuddered.

No, not an order to be given lightly at all.

*****

Parithalian Alliance Ship Noble Venture

“We’ve almost finished accumulating the necessary elements, Master of Ships.”

Reethan Parath nodded. “Thank you, Reethan.”

He was standing in the observation dome, with the blast shields withdrawn so he could experience the wonder of space for a time. Soon it would be back to the horrors of battle, the blast doors would be retracted, and he would experience space only through his scanner displays once more.

He’d sent his surviving ships out to gather in appropriate munitions for the next phase of their operations in this system. Parithalian ships didn’t carry weapons for planetary bombardment, it was considered uncivilized in the extreme and largely pointless. A fleet that controlled the orbitals, specifically the null zones in the local gravity well, controlled the world below.

While only a fool would believe that meant the world was entirely pacified, it did mean that all macro-resistance was pointless and subject to terminal prejudice. Micro-resistance was the purview of Sentinels, not fleet.

For the odd time that a bombardment was required, Parithalians had an alternate methodology.

Any star system was filled with debris. Ranging from sand particles barely a few molecules in mass to rocks the size of a small planet, they were a potential hazard to shipping in theory, but in practice, space was large enough that the odds of hitting anything even when flying blind were literally astronomical. For their purposes, Parithalian methodology called for chunks of rock roughly one hundredth the mass of a starship. Accelerate them into an orbital track that coincides with the target you want destroyed and then sit back and wait.

At better than two-thirds the speed of light, there was nothing built that could survive an impact like that.

Aside from perhaps a Ros’El starship, Reethan thought sourly.

To a Parithalian, the Ros’El were practically the ultimate insult. They knew nothing of ship handling but were such incredible masters of gravity itself that it hardly mattered. For a species born for flight, such as the Parithalians, the Ros’El were like watching a stone that could outmaneuver them in the skies.

For all that, however, he had to remind himself that the Ros’El had their own problems with this species. Even with all the power the Ros’El commanded, they’d been badly savaged by this species, using weapons that had never seemed to cause them all that much issue in the past.

He had believed it to be a joke when he was first briefed on this species, that or bad intelligence in the extreme. Now, however, Reethan could see that there was more here than he’d thought or been informed of.

Antiquated weapons, but more effective than most who use similar tactics. They have intelligence about them as well, he had to admit. And so much as I despise admitting it, even to myself…these people, they are more than decent ship handlers, and unless I greatly mistake the situation, they are also a match for the best tacticians in the Alliance. What have the Ros’El thrown us into this time?

Given what he knew so far, Reethan was growing greatly concerned this was no border skirmish. Whatever the Ros’El had brought them this time, he knew for a fact that it was no minor exchange of hostilities. Unless something was done very quickly, this could well prove to be a very long, and very costly, war.

Why?

That was the thing that really bothered Reethan. The world they were contesting wasn’t worth this. It was a life-bearing world, to be sure, but there were thousands of those deeper in toward the galactic core, and that was just inside Alliance territory. It was only out in the arms, where the systems were sparse, that life seemed rare.

So what was so bedamned special about this world, and this outer empire?

The Ros’El rarely spoke to anyone, and when they did it was in riddles, but Reethan was certain of only one thing. In his opinion, they were more trouble than they were worth.

We should never have compromised with them. They murdered planets during the wars. I have no care for them or their wants. They are a blight on the universe itself, yet here I am about to do their bidding. And for what? A ball of dirt and water like any of ten thousand others within range of their homeworld. They do not experience the universe as we do, and I have never been happier of that fact. I do not want to see what they see, nor do I ever want another Parithalian to do so. Perhaps it was their seeing into the abyss of space-time that turned them into such beasts, perhaps they were created thusly. I find that I no longer care as I once did.

Unfortunately, he had his orders, and they were quite specific. For whatever reason, Alliance Command continued to be in support of the Ros’El and their wishes.

“As soon as we have the munitions, have the handlers make course for our optimal launch point,” he said finally, nodding to his apprentice.

“Yes, Ships Master.”

*****

Hayden Colony Site

The ground fell away from the plateau like the end of the world. A cloudbank had moved in, and Sorilla could imagine that she was standing on a city in the sky. The jungle below and around them was hidden from sight, thousands of square kilometers of green death vanished so very easily by the vagaries of the weather.

It was an illusion, though. She knew what was hiding out there, beyond the fluffy white clouds and beyond even the dangers of the jungle itself. Out there, deep in the clouds, covered by the jungle, they were waiting.

A glance to one side showed that Jerry was just as taken in by the view as she was, though what he thought of it was hidden behind a dark expression that she’d seen too many times. She just hoped that he got a handle on it. She needed him and his knowledge of the local terrain too badly to leave him behind, but mistakes out there could get them both killed.

“You okay?” she asked aloud.

“I’ll be fine.”

She clapped an armored hand on his shoulder, twisting him around to stare into the blank face of her helm.

“‘ I’ll be fine’ translates into, ‘Why, no, I’m not okay and I’m going to do something so stupid it’ll get us all killed ’,” she growled. “So next time I ask if you’re okay, you tell me the truth or I leave you behind.”

“Fine,” he gritted out.

“Now, you okay?” she asked again.

“No, I’m not,” he snapped. “Tara’s still out, so we’re without a medic, and Dean is dead. He was our best jungle man, Sarge.”

“Second best.”

He shot her an exasperated look. “Half our team is down. You won’t bring anyone else into it, why the hell not?”

“A two-man team is worlds ahead of a four-man fuckup,” she told him calmly. “We’re forward scouts, not a fire team. We ghost in, tag these fuckers, and call in rods from God. We don’t engage them ourselves, that’s not our job.”

Jerry nodded sullenly.

She grabbed him again, making him look her in the armor-plated face. “I said that’s not our job. Got me?”

“Yes, Sarge, I got you.”

“Good.” She nodded to where they were heading, the main path off the plateau. Beyond that, the beams, and then the alien jungle. “You’re the tracker, Jer. Track.”

Jerry nodded, walking forward as he awkwardly slung his military sniper rifle. His eyes were set now, less sullen but as focused as she’d ever seen him.

Sorilla smiled beneath her helm.

Ready or not, here we come.

*****

Hayden Jungles

“Prime.”

Kris half twisted at the voice in his head. “I hear.”

“Two soldiers just left the perimeter of the alien fortification.”

Kris scowled, confused. “Only two?”

“One in Sentinel-type armor.”

“And the other?”

“Unarmored, at least so far as I can see.”

Kris considered it before coming to a conclusion. “A Sentinel and a tracker. They’re looking for us.”

“Sir.”

He could hear the disbelief in his subordinate’s tone and smiled. It did seem absurd on the surface of things, two soldiers looking for an entire squad of Sentinels on their own? He didn’t care how good they were, it was suicide.

Except for those mass movers.

They didn’t need to engage his forces, just find them and mark them, and it was all over.

“Sentinels!” he bellowed. “To me.”

The Lucians in his camp appeared on demand, some from the jungle and others from the ship or outbuildings.

“We’re breaking camp,” he told them. “These two are a direct threat. Until we neutralize it, I want no sign that there is anything here beyond the normal. Are you all in understanding of this?”

Several looked confused but didn’t say anything.

Kris sighed. “The enemy has sent out spotters. Until we find and eliminate them, I want no chance taken that they will call in a mass mover strike on our only possible method of leaving this world. You have ten fractionals. Clean this area to the jungle, leave no trace of our presence. Then we move out.”

The Lucians broke, moving to eliminate any trace of their presence. Debris was secured, loose dirt raked over any trace they couldn’t make vanish in the time they had. Broken foliage was rubbed with dirt, making the breaks look older and more natural. Everything was returned to the natural state, or as close as they possibly could, leaving only the ship itself behind.

The lander had an active camouflage, making it near invisible from anything more than point blank range. With the thick jungle around, Kris knew it would take nothing less than a misfortune of epic scale to reveal it.

Maybe he was taking things too far, but he’d learned the hard way so far that he shouldn’t underestimate this Sentinel.

“Yir, Prime here,” he said over the comm. “Do not lose sight of the Sentinel. Do you understand me?”

“Prime. Understood…” There was a hesitation. “But Prime…”

“What is it, Yir?”

“This jungle, Prime. There is no way—”

“Just do what you can!” he snapped. “Close with them if you must, but do not lose them!”

“Yes, Prime.”

*****

The feel of the jungle was different this time, compared to when she’d walked these paths before. There was more sound, like a real place instead of a ghost world. Sorilla couldn’t help but comment on it.

“The animals came back,” Jerry said. “Most of them fled like we did, but once you took out the aliens there on the plateau, they started to come back. It’s taken years, but it’s close to how it used to be. Quieter than usual today, though.”

Sorilla glanced around, overlaying a map on her HUD. “Probably the kinetic strikes I called in earlier.”

“Yeah, that would do it.”

“Still feels more alive than it ever did before,” she said.

“Yeah, well, that just means you need to watch it,” he told her. “There’s not much on Hayden that hunts humans, but mistaken identity is a bitch.”

She snorted. “I hear you.”

They were moving into the jungle now, and she could already feel the hairs on the back of her head standing on end.

They were being watched.

“They’re here,” she said calmly, her tone almost bored.

Jerry swallowed. “You sure?”

“Yeah. Probably just a scout, but they’re here alright.”

He shivered, his spine now itching as he looked around. He didn’t see anything, but he didn’t think she was wrong either.

“Don’t bother, you won’t see them,” she said. “They’re holding back.”

“Why?”

“Waiting for backup.”

“Great.”

Sorilla smiled, though her partner could not see it. “Relax. This works out better than I’d hoped.”

“Better than you’d hoped?” he objected. “Hello, Sarge? I’d rather like to avoid having large chunks of my flesh torn from my body by any alien gravity guns, if that’s alright with you?”

“You could have taken the armor when it was offered.”

Jerry snorted. “That crap won’t stop one of their guns, and you know it. I move easier without it.”

Sorilla shrugged. “But I move faster and hit harder with it.”

“Best hope you move fast enough to hit them first, then.”

“That,” she told him evenly, “is precisely the plan. Stay on the planned route.”

“What? Where are you going to—?” he asked, turning just in time to see her armor change colors to a dark, mottled green as she vaulted up into the crook of a thick tree, paused for just a moment, and then leapt off into the thick of the jungle.

Women and soldiers. They’re both insufferable, they both have hair triggers, and damned if they don’t both think they know best, he bitched mentally as he slogged on. Just my luck, I’m stuck teaming up with someone who’s the worst of both worlds all in one.

*****

Sorilla moved quickly, sometimes along the ground and sometimes leaping from one enormous Hayden hardwood to another, spiraling outward from her first position as she looked for her target.

Her HUD lit up, tracking every source of movement and sound that didn’t belong to her, the computer eliminating most hits before she got involved. Of the rest, most belonged to local animals, including some really large spider things that would have given her shudders if she weren’t too busy for that sort of thing.

She had widened her spiral three times before the computer reported something that caused her to slow to a stop. A flash of light from a metallic object glinted in her HUD, bringing her to a stop as she latched one enormous tree limb in mid-leap and swung herself up above the lowest level of foliage. A quick hyper-spectral analysis of the reflected light broke down the metallurgy for her, and her computer ran a database scan only to find no matches in any common or military devices.

Got you.

She glued herself to the tree, trying to pick up the source of the glint. Only after staring at the area it had come from for several long moments in full magnification did she move again, slowly sliding to the ground, where she dropped into a crouch and slung her rifle.

Speed was now forgotten, she kept low and close to the foliage as she crept forward with a conscious aim to emulate the movement of a glacier. Slowly, inexorably, and with absolute determination. One foot moved forward, coming down lightly at first as she tested the ground, then a deliberate shift of her weight as she prepared to bring forth the other.

The scout would be tracking them, probably from indirect cues. The jungle was too thick to allow him to stay eyes on, she was certain of that. His tracking would keep him focused, hopefully enough for her to get close, as one could easily lose themselves in the tunnel vision of an important task. She leaned on her computers to keep from falling into that trap herself, letting them continue to track and report on possible contacts in the periphery of her focus, while she stayed on target.

A moment passed, then another as she moved, one second flowing into the next as she crept along the ground. A snail could match her pace, a turtle blow it away, but all that mattered to Sorilla was finding just the right spot to make the acquaintance of her quarry. She grasped the hilt of her blade in her left hand as she reached a place that looked about right, drawing it from the sheath with a slow and smooth motion.

*****

Yir had been a Sentinel for less than three planetary cycles, but in that time he’d seen action on four worlds. Sentinels were not ones to sit idle. They either fought or they trained to fight, and that was the way things were and the way they liked it. It was the reason they, he, became Sentinels in the first place.

This mission was different than most, though only due to the sheer distance from Alliance center as far as he was concerned. Most times they served an expedition on worlds that actually mattered , as opposed to some nowhere planet out in the literal back arms of the galaxy.

Other than that, a jungle was a jungle, in his opinion.

For this reason, it was perhaps forgivable that he froze momentarily when, as he was following his fellow scout through his simple jungle, he saw a shadow drop from above and drive the other Lucian to the dirt. The lapse only lasted an instant, but it was an instant in which both the shadow and his fellow Sentinel were out of site, hidden from him by the jungle foliage. When he passed, Yir surged forward with his weapon at the ready, only to find a dead Lucian on the ground and not a single hint of what killed him.

He stood over the body, weapon ready as he scanned the jungle about him, but found nothing.

“Prime.” He spoke softly, almost surprised that there wasn’t a quaver in his voice.

“Report.”

“Kiran is down. I saw it happen and I still don’t know what hit him.”

“The alien Sentinel spotted you. Watch yourself, we’re coming in on your position as quickly as we can move now.”

“The one without armor is still up ahead,” Yir offered.

There was a brief pause as Prime considered that, then he came back.

“Close on that one. Stay ahead of the armored Sentinel, we’ll converge on your position and close the jaws on him.”

“Understood.”

He heard the click of the channel closing and stepped back from his fallen comrade, eyes still scanning the jungle. He’d actually witnessed the attack but still couldn’t piece together what had happened. He was certain that it was a soldier in camouflage, he’d seen enough for that, but the speed of the attack was startling and even blurred in his memory.

Somewhere, in this jungle with him, was a predator of the highest order.

*****

Sorilla was braced against a thick tree trunk, her armor adapted to blend with the shadows and colors of the bark. The active camouflage built into the armor was a powerful tool, but it was slower and more fragile than she’d prefer. The last couple times she’d been on Hayden, her armor had more carbon baked in by atmospheric entry than a whole crate load of coal. While it didn’t damage the system exactly, it did cover it up, which rendered the color shift ability rather moot, and the only way to clean baked in carbon off was to blast the whole thing and refinish.

The alien soldier walked by her position, his gravity rifle sweeping past her as he looked around, obviously trying to find her. She watched and listened as he said something, noting that her armor was detecting subharmonics well below human hearing range in his voice. She had the computer log everything, knowing that the intel boys would be screaming for every second of data she could get on the alien language.

The Ghoulies didn’t speak, near as they could tell, but it seemed that this species did. At least it was a place to start, that was something she knew the intel division had been hoping for ever since this war began.

After a moment, while she watched and waited, he moved on and vanished off into the jungle.

“Jer.” She recorded a message into her pulse transceiver. “One down. Second is following you. Stay on our agreed course, I’ll eliminate him and catch up shortly.”

She toggled the send command, letting her armor’s communication suite compress the message into a burst pulse before sending it on. She didn’t know if the aliens had their EMF tracking gear active, but it was better to be safe than sorry in this kind of situation.

With the message sent, Sorilla pulled her weapon from behind her, rose from her position, and started to move in the direction the alien had vanished in.

*****

Hayden Colony Site, MILCOMCEN

Lt. Commander Grange looked up from his desk when a communications officer stepped into the office.

“Yes, what is it, Sam?”

“You wanted to be kept in the loop concerning Sergeant Aida’s activities, sir?”

He nodded. “I did. What do you have?”

“We just picked up a pulse transmission from her, sent to Pathfinder Reed,” the young lieutenant said. “It indicates that she took out an enemy scout tracking them and was in pursuit of another.”

“Do we know where she is?”

“Negative.” Lt Samantha Greer shook her head. “The transmission was pulse coded, and OPCOM armor…”

“Yes, I know. Can’t be tracked, not even by us.” He sighed, he already knew that. OPCOM armor was, by design, about as impossible to track as anything built. If he could track the armor, then it was just possible that someone else could as well, and that was a definite no go considering some of the operations an OPCOM Operator might be involved with.

It did make things a real pain when you were tasked with handling one of the bastards.

“Very well,” he sighed. “Let me know if she surfaces again.”

“Yes, sir.”

Grange cleared his desk with a gesture, calling up his troop placement files. He didn’t have permission to take more than token patrols outside the beams without significant cause, but he could make a few creative ‘defensive’ allocations in the meantime.

If her record is anything to go by, things are likely to get hot here soon enough. Her past performance would indicate that my near future is going to be filled with caffeine, bullets, and bombs.

Chapter Six

Parithalian Alliance Ship Noble Venture

“Munitions away, Ships Master.”

Reethan nodded. “Very good. Signal the Lucians with the estimated impact time.”

“Yes, Master.”

The Master of Ships for the Parithalian flotilla looked out on deep space, the planet he’d just sent several dozen kinetic weapons flying towards was not even visible from where he stood.

Thankfully the planet is mostly uninhabited.

Though they had good equations for their targets, with high-speed/high-mass objects like this, over penetration wasn’t a risk…it was a fact.

Once this was confirmed, they’d reengage the enemy fleet before shifting back out of the system and reporting back to Alliance Command. The damage they’d taken so far, combined with what he expected to take against the remaining enemy ships, would prevent him from doing any more.

We’ll need to come back with a full fleet to ensure that this enemy withdraws from the void.

*****

USS Cheyenne

Captain Roberts frowned as he looked over the reports coming to his station. They had ships spread across half the star system at the moment, or so it seemed, and the light speed delay was driving him up the wall when it came to getting reports and intelligence.

At least we have eyes on the enemy ships, even if the visuals are eight minutes out of date.

It wasn’t the reports on the enemy ships that were currently giving him trouble, however, it was from the Hayden system accelerometer network.

They were getting odd pulses in space-time, all across the network. Pulses that didn’t match an enemy drive unit, and sure as hell didn’t match a valve weapon or a jump point. It had been flagged as unusual enough to come across his system, but he couldn’t decide what the hell he was supposed to do with it.

Finally, Roberts sighed and decided to push it up the ladder.

The admiral is science track, she might have an idea.

*****

“Admiral Brookes.”

Nadine set her coffee mug down beside her station, luxuriating in the simple action that was only possible on a ship that was under way at one gravity, then turned toward the sound of the voice. “Yes, Captain?”

“We have some odd gravity waves on the system accelerometers, ma’am. Honestly, I’m not sure what to make of them,” Roberts admitted, looking more than a little shamefaced. “I was going to shoot them back down to sciences but thought you might want to take a look.”

“Send them along, Captain,” she said, intrigued. “Given the enemy, we can’t afford to overlook anything to do with gravity at the moment.”

“Yes, ma’am. They’re on your station.”

“Thank you.”

It only took her a few moments to realize that the captain was right about one thing. Odd was the word. The pulses were small, discrete, and almost certainly not natural. Only pulsars generated anything remotely like them, and there weren’t any of those for better than sixty parsecs. Not that a pulsar would generate waves this small and discrete.

Nadine puzzled over them for a moment, then glanced at the deployment charts. The HMS Hood was the only ship within real-time communications range, but that was just fine. She needed a word with one of the few people in her squadron who had a good handle on jump research and, by extension, the basics of how the alien technology works.

A flick of her finger opened the line to the Hood, directly patched into the command channel.

“Admiral, what can I do for you?”

“Is the captain available, Commander Leary?”

“One moment, ma’am.”

Nadine returned her focus to the data until Jane Mackay’s face appeared on the comm display.

“Admiral, you wanted me?”

“Yes, Captain, I sent you some intel from the accelerometer network that I’m trying to figure out,” she told the captain of the Hood. “I’m all but certain that it’s enemy action, Jane. I need you to tell me what kind.”

“Yes, ma’am, I’ll get back to you as quickly as I can.”

“Thank you,” Nadine said, nodding curtly as the screen blanked and she was left alone with her work again.

I could almost forget we’re fighting a war sometimes, she mused as she pored over the data, her mind already treating it like a scientific puzzle. Hopefully I’ll be able to get back to doing this full time again soon. Tactical maneuvers are an occasionally interesting distraction, but I joined Solari to study the universe, not kill those who live in it.

*****

Hayden Jungle

Sorilla’s legs pumped as she ran through the thick jungle. She had a zero on her target now and wasn’t worrying about him hearing her. The alien had moved faster than she expected, getting far enough ahead that she was worried he might be a threat to Jerry.

How did he get that far ahead of me?

“Watch your ass, Reed,” she called as she ran. “Number two got away from me, and he’s coming up on your six. I’m closing in fast.”

The pulse message went out a second after she finished speaking, but she didn’t pay any attention to the confirmation chime. Either he got it or he didn’t, she had something more pressing to worry about.

His reply was a simple tone signal, sent by holding down the transmit button on his comm. She smiled, glad to know that he hadn’t forgotten what she had taught him.

Good boy, Jer. Stay quiet, go to ground. I’m coming.

She shouldered through a thick tangle of branches, planted her foot on a half-buried boulder, and vaulted up to a crook in the trunk of a nearby tree. Halting herself with one hand, Sorilla scanned the area ahead quickly, sweeping her rifle across the jungle without seeing anything out of the ordinary.

Growling, she kicked off the tree and landed on a clearer spot ahead, legs pumping without hesitation.

He’s got to be just ahead.

*****

Kris checked the location of his forward scout again, signaling his men to converge. He had to time this right, and that was going to be the trickiest part of the operation. If he closed too quickly, they’d alert the quarry to their presence and maybe let him get away. Too late, and the Lucian they had playing the bait role would wind up the way more bait does in the end.

Chewed up, spit out.

With every Lucian available closing on the area, Kris was certain that this was the end for the pair of alien soldiers he was currently focused on. He dearly wanted a close look at the alien Sentinel, and a chance to pick their armor and equipment apart, so he wasn’t going to let this chance escape.

They didn’t have time to completely envelop the enemy, however. The best he’d been able to do was get his Sentinels to close in a semi-circle as they moved.

“Stand prepared,” he signaled. “The enemy is in motion. Close only on my signal.”

His Lucians replied with their confirmations, everyone almost literally leaning in the direction of the enemy as they waited for the order.

Just lead him in a little closer, Yir. Just a little closer.

*****

God damn it! Just a little closer… Sorilla thumbed the power setting on her rifle to full. Screw stealth. If this prick hasn’t reported in on his location, they’re too damn stupid to be a threat anyway. Seriously, how the hell did he move this fast?

It was like the soldier she was chasing had just completely given up on any sense of stealth, which didn’t make any frigging sense at all. She had run through snapped branches, stones and dirt torn up and sent scattering, no attempt at staying hidden. It would make sense if he were running from her, but it couldn’t be chance that he decided to run straight at Jerry either.

Hostage gambit?

It didn’t seem likely, not after their experience with the Goulies, but anything was possible when dealing with aliens.

She ran faster.

When she exploded out of the jungle foliage, spotting the alien ahead of her, she was momentarily puzzled by the fact that he didn’t seem to be looking for Jerry. He was standing in place, facing her instead of looking to where she knew Jerry was.

She didn’t have time to puzzle that out, however, as she brought her weapon up to level it at the target. The whole motion took a little under a quarter of second from where she had spotted him to where she leveled the weapon, and yet before she could stroke the trigger, a sharp call with the distinct air of command tore through the air.

“Sarge! Hit the dirt!”

Sorilla’s arms flicked up to see Jerry standing beyond the alien, on a rise in the terrain, with his rifle to his shoulder. She was already dropping, her knees buckling on instinct as she entrusted her fate to her comrade.

The M900 roared, bucking against Jerry’s shoulder with enough force to make him grimace and stumble back. The big gun wasn’t meant to be fired from standing position, and on full power, as he seemed to have it set, it could break a collarbone in the uninitiated.

Time slowed, she hit her knees, sliding as she leaned back and risked a glance behind her. The shockwave of the heavy sniper round tearing through the air above her was easily visible in her HUD, and she just followed it back to where another of the grey aliens was seemingly floating in midair, greyish liquid fountaining from his back as he flew back into the jungle.

Then it all snapped back to real time and Sorilla continued to slide toward the alien she had been targeting. Her momentum was going to bring her right past him, so she shifted enough to bring one leg out from under her as she reached him and snapped out with a kick between his legs.

It didn’t matter if he kept his genitals in the same place as humans, not with as hard as she struck him. Any creature of flesh and blood was going to feel that pain, and she felt something crackle under her boot as he was lifted clear off the ground. Before she slid to a stop, however, Sorilla managed to bring her rifle to bear and stroked off a three-round burst that lit the air on fire as the bullets perforated the poor bastard vertically through his body.

She rolled to one side as he hit the ground beside her. Sorilla took a moment to roll back before she started looking for targets, resting her rifle on the alien body as she used the corpse as cover.

Ambush! Fuck!

The jungle crawled , and even before she consciously had time to realize it, the world exploded around her.

*****

HMS Hood

Jane MacKay had been a jump drive specialist long before she took officer training and started climbing the ranks. Her first love had been gravity research, answering some of the nearly impossible questions that seemed to inexorably orbit one of the most common forces humans ever experienced. There were so many unanswered questions, even to this day, about gravitational forces that she’d once thought she would go mad just trying to get to them all.

Thankfully, she grew out of that obsessive phase, at least to a degree, otherwise she’d not have had half the chances she enjoyed throughout her career. Still, in the back of her mind, that awkward teenage girl was still giddily poring over reams of numbers that made little sense, even to her.

This time, however, she felt a chill run down her spine as the numbers crystalized in her mind’s eye and for a brief moment in time…it all made sense.

McKay lunged for her command station, swinging into position as she pulled the five-point harness down and plugged her acceleration suit into the ship’s hydraulics.

“All hands, all hands, this is the captain speaking,” she called over the ship-wide. “Stand by for full military acceleration. I say again, standby for full military acceleration. Secure all loose items and assume your stations, we are about to engage the main drive.”

The echoes of that announcement were still fading as she turned to her helmsman. “I want a best-time solution to bring us back to Hayden orbit, ASAP.”

“Yes, ma’am!”

“Captain…what’s going—?”

She held up a hand, cutting off her first officer in mid-question, opting to open a channel back to the Cheyenne.

“Captain Roberts, Captain MacKay. I have intel for you. Advise you go to general quarters and plot for Hayden orbit before reading.”

Roberts didn’t answer, but she could see the USS Cheyenne’s telemetry go from green to yellow across the board. When that was done, he came on the channel.

“What’s going on, Captain?”

“If I’m right, the aliens launched an attack on Hayden over ten minutes ago,” she said. “Given their range, we have less than ten minutes to get to Hayden and plot an intercept.”

“Jane, we still have eyes on the alien ships,” Roberts countered.

“They launched ballistics, Pat,” she countered, queuing up a file and sending it across the command channel with flags for the Cheyenne and Liberation. “I managed to backtrack and triangulate those pulses the admiral asked me about.”

Patrick Roberts swore over the comm but didn’t ask any more questions.

“All stations report go for acceleration!”

“Helm, take us to full military acceleration,” McKay ordered, girding herself for the pain that was about to come her way. “Engage for Hayden when ready.”

“Aye, ma’am! Full military acceleration in three…two…one!”

The powerful antimatter drive of the HMS Hood roared to life, slamming her occupants back against their acceleration bolsters with the force of vehicular collision, only infinitely more sustained. They sucked up the pain, however, and focused on their jobs because that was the only thing they could do.

Behind them, the USS Cheyenne lit off her drives a few handful of seconds later, and the two ships of Valkyrie’s first cohort threw themselves across the night and once more until the path of danger.

*****

Tether Counterweight Station Liberation

“General, emergency message from the Hood.”

“What is it, Lieutenant?” Kane asked as he walked over to the station.

The young woman frowned, reading quickly before answering. Her eyes widened as she paled. “They say we have incoming Kilo Kilos, sir!”

Kane snapped around, eyes flying to the plots, but he didn’t see a damned thing.

“Are they sure?” he asked, half turning back.

“Probable cause, not certainty, General. The alien ships were playing with gravity, and Captain MacKay believes she worked out what they were doing.”

“Fine,” he said, frowning for a moment.

Kane didn’t know Captain MacKay, but that didn’t matter. She’d called wolf, so he had to believe that they were baying at the door.

“All stations, go full active,” he ordered. “Maximum power on every beam. I don’t want an inch of space to go uncooked! Everyone else, man the passive screens! Report anything! ”

“Yes, sir! RADAR and LIDAR stations to full power! Accelerometer discrimination to lowest setting!”

Kane winced, knowing just how much data that last bit would flood his people with, but there was nothing to be done about it. At the lowest discrimination setting, the accelerometer would detect every chunk of rock larger than a hundred kilograms, which was one hell of a lot of chunks of rock. The people scanning those screens would have to get lucky to spot an incoming Kilo Kilo, but at least they had the chance to get lucky.

The problem was, any respectable kinetic kill weapon was going to be coming at them at one horrendous speed. Not light speed, sure, but up there in the significant percentages of it. What made that a real problem was that their best detection systems only functioned at light speed.

What this mean was that, between the time it took for a detection pulse to go out, hit the target, and bounce back…well, their light speed detection device had to travel twice the distance that the enemy weapon did. If it was moving even close to one half the speed of light, and was already close enough, they wouldn’t even see it coming.

*****

Hayden Jungle

This is some fucking scouting mission ! Sorilla swore as the jungle was torn apart around her.

The enemy weapons were too familiar to her, having been on the wrong end of the portable valve weapons enough times to wake up with night chills more than once in the past couple years. Not remotely as powerful as the shipboard weapons, the small arms version was still enough to tear chunks out of most materials, including OPCOM armor, as a few of her late comrades could attest.

Her assault rifle stuttered against her shoulder, barely registering in her armor, as she fired back into the jungle. The enemy had the drop on her, but best she could tell, they had not been able to completely close the snare.

Jer saved my ass.

There hadn’t been another shot from his position, however, and she was more than a little worried about that. With all the compression pulses flying around her head, tearing up the dirt and the jungle with equanimity, she figured she had cause to be concerned.

Unfortunately, the enemy did have her pinned down, and things weren’t looking all that great from her position. Her right hand on her gun, tracking and firing at anything that even looked like it might move, Sorilla grasped about with her left to secure the enemy’s weapon. She didn’t need to check it to know two things about it. First, it wasn’t a Ghoulie gun, so there would be controls she could change, and second, it would already be set to ‘high.’

The big grey dudes didn’t fuck around.

They had weird ergonomics, but a trigger was a trigger, and she wrapped her hand around the weapon with some difficulty as she clambered to her feet. With her assault rifle in one hand and the alien gravity weapon in the other, Sorilla began to fall back with both implements of death spitting furiously into the living jungle about her.

She stayed as low as she could, practically duckwalking backwards as she made her way to where she’d last had sign of her erstwhile companion. Sorilla found herself in the unenviable position of having to move fast while trying to keep her head as low as possible, and, as she would be more than willing to testify, the two were mutually incompatible actions.

“Jerry!” she growled, not looking back or bothering with the compression pulse transmitter. She transmitted live, knowing that the enemy already had her position. “Jerry! Damn it, man! Answer!”

The one good thing she could say about her situation was that Hayden hardwood trunks were both massive and quite able to absorb a few strikes from even the alien small arms. She ducked behind one as a fusillade of gravity pulses tore into the far side. She felt the tree shake and shudder as large chunks were literally blown apart, molecular bond by molecular bond.

When she heard a low groan, followed by a distinctive creak, Sorilla knew that it was time to abandon her position.

The sound of the huge jungle tree slowly shifting until its center of gravity reached the tipping point was enough to drown out the roar of her gun and the explosions of the enemy’s strikes. She ignored it all as she ran, still backwards, with guns blazing until her assault rifle dry fired.

Half empty, Sorilla turned and made her break. She turned and bolted, leaning hard into her run as she made her armor-powered legs push like they’d never pushed before. Enemy fire exploded around her as she dove, rolling as she hit, and sliding to a stop beside Jerry’s body.

“Jerry!” Sorilla cast her rifle aside, still firing the alien gravity weapon as she reached out and shook him with her now free hand.

When he didn’t react, she keyed open her armor ports and tore his light armor from his chest so she could lay her hand on his skin.

Thank God, he’s still alive.Blood loss, possible concussion, and various other nasty sundries, but he’s still alive.

She only then took in the state of his injuries and realized that his right hand was gone, pieces of his shattered rifle embedded in what remained, as well as his right side.

She swore, barely looking in the direction of the enemy as she continued to fire one-handed into the jungle. With Jerry in risk of bleeding out, Sorilla yanked his small medical pouch, first hitting what was left of his forearm with an auto-injector filled with a powerful coagulant and then wrapping him up as best should could one-handed.

Well this is a fine mess I’ve walked us into.

Sorilla cast about, more than a little desperation starting to seep into her soul as the world continued to explode violently around her.

Outnumbered and outgunned, Sorilla didn’t think she was going to be walking out of her own power.

Not this time. She glanced about for a moment, then shielded Jerry with her own body and turned the alien gun on the ground a short distance away before triggering a series of pulses that showered them both with dirt and rocks.

“Sorry ‘bout this, Jer,” she said as she dragged him over to the hole she’d just blown open, dropping him in as gently as she could. Which was to say, not terribly. “Walked you into a trap. My fault. Should have known better, didn’t think they’d bring down their whole force on us though.”

She was working as she rambled, talking to herself more than to her unconscious comrade. More shots went into the jungle, just to keep the enemy guessing, and she climbed into the hole herself. Sorilla curled Jerry into a ball, putting him in fetal position as she covered him with her body and clapped her hands over his ears.

“Liberation, Aida.”

“Go for Liberation, Sergeant.”

“Code Alamo.”

“Say again, Sergeant?”

“Alamo. Alamo! ALAMO!”

*****

Kris bared his teeth as he pushed forward.

The target had been all he could have asked for, had the Sentinel been under his command, but it was clearly the end for the alien soldier. The return fire now was light, undirected, and basically ineffective.

He ceased fire, signaling his troops to do the same.

They spread out, closing on the enemy in an encircling maneuver now. They had his position, and it was nothing but a matter of time.

“Easy,” he ordered quietly. “I’d like this one intact, if we can.”

“Yes, Prime.”

Slowly, they approached through the jungle, almost within reach now, and then a distant rumble of thunder caused him to pause. Kris glanced up, barely able to believe what his instincts were screaming.

“Oh, very well played.”

The world exploded.

*****

Tether Station Liberation

“Say again, Sergeant?”

The weapons technician could hardly believe what he’d just heard. He’d had to look up the order in his HUD just to verify that it really was what he thought it was.

“Alamo,” the sergeant replied, her voice tense. “Alamo! ALAMO!”

He swallowed hard, hand reaching for the controls. They started shaking before he could key in the command, and he abruptly yanked them back as he squeaked out a call. “Sir!”

“What is it, Corporal?” Lt. Commander Sear asked, walking over.

Corporal Kinzie, the weapons technician, swallowed hard. “Code Alamo from the surface, sir.”

“What?” Sear leaned in. “Are you certain?”

“Yes, sir.”

Sear was pale now as he straightened and turned around. “General!”

Kane growled, looking over. The last thing he wanted was to be distracted right at this moment, but in the end, he wasn’t certain he had anything he could do with their main crisis so why not a new one?

“What is it?”

“Sergeant Aida has called in Code Alamo!”

The entire room went silent, those who weren’t absolutely focused on their duties looking up and between them.

Kane heard it, but almost didn’t believe it. He surged over. “Play back that request.”

He listened to the recording, then nodded.

“Code Alamo authorized.”

“Sir…”

“Do it!”

“Yes, sir,” Kinzie said, still stricken pale as he entered the coordinate pattern, but his hand shook again as he reached for the final command.

Kane had no patience for the delay, however, and pushed him out of the way.

“Best journeys, Sergeant,” he whispered and then pressed the touch screen command.

It was wrong, he thought, that there was no sign, nor sound, of the thing he had just done. He had just likely killed his own soldier, there should have at least been a sign it had happened.

“General! Inbound tracks on the screens!”

No time for morbidity, Kane spun away from the kinetic launch controls and turned to face the scanner displays.

From the dealer of death, he thought as he looked at the dozen incoming tracks showing high velocity kinetic weapons aimed at his command, to its recipient.

*****

USS Cheyenne

Nadine Brookes found herself little more than a passenger on her own ship, in her own squadron even. When the captain called the general quarters alarm, she barely had time to get herself strapped in before the drives lit off, and while she’d been a little miffed by it, she could hardly blame either Patrick or Jane for the decision.

The Cheyenne was tearing after the Hood, seconds from rollover to enter Hayden orbit, and she knew that this was going to be one frightfully unfriendly maneuver.

“All hands, stand by for roll over.”

Nadine closed her eyes, there wasn’t really anything else she could do anyway.

The omnipresent thrum of the ship’s drive vanished, along with the crushing acceleration force, but only for a few paltry seconds. Bow and stern thrusters roared, supplementing the big gyros that flipped the ship end for end, and then the drives lit off again and she was being crushed into her bolster as they started emergency deceleration into Hayden.

They had tracks now, ballistic inbounds showing on the displays. A dozen rocks, iron core as best they could detect, and each of them a hundred times the mass of a kinetic slug launched from human ship or station.

“Firing solution ready, Captain.”

The voice of the tactical station’s man was steady, even under the pressure they were all crushed by.

“Fire as she bears,” Patrick Roberts ordered, his own voice only just barely showing the strain of acceleration pressure. “All tubes. Rapid fire.”

As the hundred-kilo slugs erupted from the Cheyenne, ahead of them the HMS Hood also went to rapid fire on all tubes. Beyond Valkyrie’s first cohort, Nadine could see other ships and Liberation station doing the same.

The only problem was, she’d already done the math.

It was going to take a miracle to stop those inbound rocks, and firing hundred-kilo slugs at them wasn’t going to qualify.

*****

Steel slugs meeting iron and rock at high percentages of light speed make for spectacular viewing, whether you had the finest scanning suite or just good old eyeball mark one. Material vaporizes in the first few instants, iron sublimates directly from solid to vapor, and extraneous material is blown clear away. As the force lessens, the softer iron begins to liquefy instead, and it reacts precisely like water in a pond as a stone is thrown in.

A ripple pattern forms in the larger object, hardening into a crater as the steel slams to a halt deep inside the larger object. A ripple frozen in place for eternity, until some other outside object acts on it.

In this case, the next outside object slams into the rock before it can harden from the first strike. More material sublimates away into vapor, more iron is liquefied, and more material is blown clear.

First the one, then the second, and then a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth. The strikes keep coming as the magnetic accelerators of Task Force Valkyrie and Liberation station throw a seemingly endless stream of steel in a desperate attempt to throw up a wall of defense around the planet.

The incoming rocks were too fast, too massive, and too set in their path, however. They wouldn’t be stopped so easily.

*****

HMS Hood

“Stand by to roll the ship!”

McKay was struggling to breathe, think, give orders, and calculate high-energy physics problems in her head all at the same time and, honestly, it wasn’t working out so well for her. She had, in fact, decided that now was not the time to be certain.

She would take a chance on instinct for once in her life.

Her instinct was saying that now was not the time to half-ass anything.

“Bring us about using vector thrust!”

That order got her some odd looks, but the helmsman just nodded.

“Aye aye, ma’am.”

By bringing the ship around on vectored thrust, they were committed to a spiral rather than the clean rotation a standard maneuver offered, but they were also turning fast.

“Weapons!”

“Aye, ma’am!” the chief grunted automatically.

“Arm the nukes.”

There was a brief hesitation, but the chief obeyed without comment. One by one the Hood’s nuclear arsenal was armed, five tubes flashing green.

“Plot me a firing solution to hit those bastards off center, Chief.”

“Off center, ma’am?”

“I want to give them a nudge, Chief. Away from the station.”

“Aye, ma’am, that is the trick isn’t it?” the man mumbled as he struggled against the acceleration to obey. It took him less time than she’d expected to come back with the response she wanted. “Solution plotted, ma’am.”

“Fire as bears, Chief.”

“Missiles away!”

*****

Tether Station Liberation

“She’s insane. Nukes won’t do a damned thing against those.”

Kane only grunted, though he certainly didn’t deny the statement. Firing explosives, even nuclear bombs, against something as large, massive, and fast-moving as those targets was futile and even he knew it. The shockwave would blow out and around the rock, wasting the energy on vacuum for the most part.

He wouldn’t have said that the captain of the Hood was insane, however. Desperate? Yes. Insane? No.

“Our nukes would be worthless, but hers are coming in from the side.”

Kane half turned, frowning. “What?”

Lt. Commander Sear flushed slightly but nodded to the plot. “She’s not hoping to destroy them, General. She’s trying to give them a push.”

Kane frowned. “Will it work?”

“Probably not.”

The brigadier general nodded, unsurprised. He considered calling for a general quarters and collision alert, but, frankly, it wouldn’t do any good. One of those things would turn the station into scrap metal.

No sense scaring the hell out of people for no reason.

“Keep firing,” he said. “Hell, arm the nukes and fire them too.”

“Sir?”

Kane glanced over. “What are we saving them for? The afterlife? Fire the nukes.”

“Yes, sir.”

*****

Space burned with nuclear fire, a kaleidoscopic display of destruction and devastation that to most would have been most impressive indeed. For the rocks rushing onward to their target, they were but a momentary warmth to salve the surface from the cold of space. Fired soon enough, perhaps they may have had an effect.

In the last crazy seconds of the terminal fall to destruction?

There was no hope.

Oh, here one rock was turned aside enough to miss the station, and there another was actually pulverized into gravel that, like as not, wouldn’t destroy anything vital when it holed through the armor of the tether counterweight.

For the most part, however?

The changes to their course were minute and of no consequence.

Everyone saw it, everyone knew it, yet no one was willing to admit the inevitable.

For humanity, sometimes that was the difference between survival and extinction. A total fool’s heart and stubborn ignorance in the face of fate and destiny.

And then, just sometimes, it was destiny that would blink.

*****

“General!”

“What is, Sear?” Kane asked tiredly as he refused to turn away from the plot.

“The tether!”

“What?” Kane glanced aside, irritably and irrationally annoyed at being distracted from his death.

“Sir, the tether. We can cut it,” Sear said, gesturing with a slashing motion across his throat. “The station will fly off due to angular momentum. We can cut the tether!”

It took a second to filter in, a second Kane suddenly realized that he didn’t have. He stiffened, as is galvanized and nodded.

“Do it!” he called. “Get someone to cut it free!”

The orders were given in a flurry of confusion, and through it all Kane couldn’t help but watch the numbers fall on the plots.

We’re under a minute now. Will it be enough? It has to be.

*****

While the theory of severing a tether was certainly sound—the station was nothing more than a weight at the end of a very long, very rapidly spinning string, after all—the reality was that it wasn’t designed to be ‘cut.’ That was something that took the chief engineer only about two seconds to relate back to the lieutenant commander when he got his orders.

“Chief, these are you orders.”

“Stuff the orders, with all due respect, sir!” the chief snarled back over the comm. “It can’t be done in the time you want, and if it would, it would be a man’s life to be caught outside when this beast started moving!”

There was no way in hell he was sending any of his boys out EVA with a hacksaw, even if they could do the job from inside the drive tube of the onetime starship. It was still EVA, and it would take too long besides.

The chief might have reconsidered had he realized that his next words would be taken seriously.

“If you want the damn thing cut, just shoot it with one of your fancy satellites!”

The channel went dead, leaving Lt. Commander Sear seething, but with a new path in mind. “Tactical!”

It was probably best that computers, for all their artificially intelligent capabilities, didn’t question orders. If they did, the systems that controlled the single weapon satellite that abruptly pivoted about in space to aim at another device of its creators might have pondered on their sanity.

Of course, it wouldn’t have been the first decision they had made that would prompt a question of that nature.

The satellite fired, a single round into the taught tether that held the orbiting station tied down to the planet. The carbon tether was one of the strongest materials ever devised by men, and among the strongest ever devised, period, but its strength was all focused on tensile toughness. When faced with the instant shearing force of a high-velocity kinetic weapon, the material parted like silk before a blade and then, slowly…so very slowly, the station began to drift upward as the tether slowly fell away.

The clock now listed impact of the enemy weapons with the station in less than forty seconds.

“All hands, all stations, all civilian personnel…stand by for microgravity.”

The shocking announcement might have had more useful effect had it come before things began floating free on Liberation station, though given the utterly bizarre nature of the warning, it very well may not have.

*****

HMS Hood

“Holy shit.”

There were no words that described the sense of shock on the command deck quite so well, in Jane MacKay’s mind, though she herself was too shocked to say anything. The station, once exploration starship, was moving relative to the planet. What’s more, it was clearly an attempt by the command center of the station to evade incoming fire.

She wasn’t certain if it was brilliantly insane, or just insane.

I suppose we’ll have to decide which after we see if it works or not.

Whichever it was it was certainly desperate as well.

She literally cringed at the idea of the sheer chaos that now had to exist within the hull of the former Discovery class ship. While it had once been designed to work in microgravity, she was certain that the refit had put an end to that particular feature set.

That wasn’t her concern at the moment, however, and she instead set her mind to things that were.

One of those was the inbound tracks of enemy ballistic missiles, if you could call big chunks of rock ‘missiles.’ Immediately she saw that many were no longer on the red tracks, showing a direct and certain impact with the station. Some were even showing on green tracks now, which indicated that they’d miss everything, including the planet itself, but most were yellow tracks.

Hayden is going to take a beating this time around.

Unfortunately, not all the tracks were yellow and green.

“They don’t have the speed,” her helmsman announced, unnecessarily. “Twenty seconds to impact!”

McKay leaned forward, impossibly against the straps and acceleration she was crushed by. “Put us the path of that missile!”

“Ma’am!?”

She ignored the incredulous tone. “There are civilians on that station! Do it!”

They were already close, but the sudden crushing acceleration needed to push the ship into the path of the incoming rock was enough to black McKay and most of the crew out as they topped fifty gravities and were thrown about against their restraints and literally managed to overload the pressure suits they wore.

On automatic, however, it didn’t matter. The computers made the last instant corrections and brought the HMS Hood onto a flight path that intersected with the inbound rock in a near perfect strike directly amidships.

*****

USS Cheyenne

One could imagine that the sudden hissing intake of breath across the command deck of the Cheyenne would be enough to lower the ambient air pressure by a marked degree as the HMS Hood threw itself into the path of the last ballistic missile.

“Match their course!” Roberts growled, keying open a channel to the lower decks. “Search and rescue crews, stand by for deployment!”

He didn’t know if an impact such as he was about to witness would leave any survivors, but damned if he would waste a single second if he could avoid it.

“Impact! They did it!”

*****

Reactive armor had its origins shortly after the second world war of Earth’s twentieth century, born from the earlier discovery of shaped explosives. It was a counterintuitive concept in many ways, since normally the last thing you would think to use as armor was high explosives.

The then-Soviet Union, however, thought otherwise.

They sandwiched a high explosive charge between two armor plates and bolted the resulting mess to their tanks in massive numbers. When a light anti-tank weapon was fired at the vehicle, the plasma jet generated by the rocket would penetrate the outer armor plate and, as a result, detonate the high explosives buried within. The shaped charge of those explosives would then send out a counter-jet of plasma that disrupted the attacking blast, thus saving those within the vehicle.

The ceramic armor plates built for and installed on the Cheyenne and Longbow class vessels were designed in much the same way.

When an outer attack cracked the first ceramic plate, it triggered an instantaneous detonation of the high-yield explosives within, sending a massive plasma jet out into the oncoming attack.

Normally, this defense would be enough to defeat anything a ship might encounter that had the capacity of cracking the ceramic armor plates. However, the obvious limitation of the system was that the reactive jet had to be more powerful than the incoming attack. Most times that wasn’t a problem. A tank, or ship, could carry far more explosive mass than most weapons could match.

Being struck amidships by a ten-thousand-kilo rock moving a significant percent of light speed was not a normal attack.

The impact cracked the ceramic plate, resulting in a massive shaped charge detonating directly in its proverbial face. The plasma jet cored it out like an apple, carving a hole through the rock with astounding ease, but only managed to negate a portion of the mass striking the big ship.

What was left hammered into the Hood with the force of an angry god, actually folding the ship nearly in half before the hull tore on the other side and exposed a dozen sections to hard vacuum. What was left of the rock broke through but was slowed enough that the station had flown clear by the time it passed.

In its trail it left utter devastation as plumes of ice, gas, and explosions continued to rock the HMS Hood.

*****

Hayden Jungle

The dust was still drifting in the air when Sorilla realized that she wasn’t dead.

Survival had been a possibility, obviously, or she wouldn’t have bothered preparing even the minimal shelter she’d carved out with the enemy weapon, but, honestly, even with her armor she’d known it was a longshot.

The overpressure wave was the least of her worries in this scenario, though the most dangerous to Jerry.

Jerry.

Sorilla forced her eyes to open, only to be greeted by blackness. She grunted and tried to toggle her HUD to active state, but it wouldn’t respond. A request for diagnostics resulted in a similar lack of results.

She tried to move, found that she could manage that much at least, and slowly reached up to pop the seal on her helm. When it broke easily, she knew that she was in for some trouble. The magnetic seals would only open automatically like that when the armor was completely without power. It was a safety measure so that you couldn’t be locked inside an unpowered suit. She had been quite careful to check the charge before she left the plateau, however, which meant that her systems were torn up pretty badly.

She grunted, pulling the helm off her head, and looked around as she blinked and tried to keep the dust out of her face and eyes.

Whoa.

Calling a kinetic strike down on her position seemed like a good plan at the time. Well, to be fair, it seemed like the only plan at the time, but now she was wondering if maybe she shouldn’t have thought a little harder.

The jungle was all but leveled around her. Trees toppled around and on her position like a Native American teepee, the strikes having hit all around her position with pinpoint accuracy. In the air there was so much dust that it reminded her of a Haboob that had once washed over her in the middle east.

Pained, she looked down and cleared the dust and debris from where Jerry was still curled up. She didn’t have her armor systems to tell her his state, but an eye to his chest showed movement, so he’d survived the overpressure of the strikes.

Not as insane as it sounded on the surface, she knew. Any kind of barrier to baffle and slow the wave would reduce the effect significantly, and they had massive trees and a dirt wall between them and the strikes. She patted his shoulder as she pushed herself up to her knees, looking around at the devastation.

If we lived, maybe some of them did too.

Sorilla didn’t see her rifle, or even the alien weapon, so she drew her OPCOM MS-50 from its holster and then reached down and pulled Jerry’s from his body as well before climbing to her feet and starting to survey the area.

Damn, I hope we got them all this time.

Without power, her armor was weighing her down, and she felt every motion like she was moving through water or molasses.

Should have packed a change of clothes, she thought dryly as she forced herself to move. Thank god this stuff is built as lightly as it is, or I’d be a frigging park statue.

“Liberation, Aida,” she said tiredly, using her implants instead of her armor systems.

There was a brief pause before a voice came back, sounding oddly distracted.

“Aida, Liberation. Liberation is unable to interact. Contact Hayden COMCEN.”

The signal cut off rather rudely in her opinion.

“Whatever,” she mumbled, shaking her head. “Hayden COMCEN, this is Aida.”

“Aida? Go for COMCEN.”

“Need medical evac for Pathfinder Reed and myself.”

“Roger. What is your sitrep?”

“Local area is quiet, will begin survey to ensure it stays that way.”

“Roger. Medical teams will be dispatched as soon as we deal with a priority crisis.”

Sorilla groaned but didn’t snap at the voice. She didn’t have the energy, “Roger. Please expedite. Pathfinder Reed needs medical care, ASAP.”

“Understood.”

Another channel went dead in a hurry, leaving her to wonder what else was going on that she wasn’t aware of. It didn’t matter for the moment, however, so she put it out of her thoughts. The area seemed quiet, in that eerie way that things always were after a storm or an explosion. Nothing was moving, no insects, no birds, nothing but her and the slowly falling dust.

She looked over her shoulder to where Reed was curled up.

“Hold tight for a bit longer, Jer. Help is coming,” she said, not knowing if he could hear her.

Her steps were sluggish as she moved through the fallen trees and flattened foliage of this particular corner of Hayden’s jungle. She imagined that she was moving like a knight of old, though her armor was hardly shining at the best of times. With a pistol in each hand, Sorilla surveyed the area until she felt her tensions calm.

Unlikely any of them survived. More of a miracle that we did than I’d like to guess.

She shook her head, freeing her hair from under the collar of her armor, and took a deep breath.

“You know, Jer,” she said as she walked back to her fallen comrade, “one day I’d like to visit Hayden without free falling to the surface and fighting a few desperate battles. I’m starting to think that this place doesn’t have any peace to be found for love or money.”

She planted a boot on a toppled trunk and leaned into it, taking another deep breath. Moving around in unpowered armor was going to wear her out in a hurry. Below her, Jerry hadn’t moved, but she could still see painful breaths lifting and lowering his chest. It seemed as strong as when she’d woken, but without her armor and its scanner suite she had no way to be sure.

She hoped the medical crews got out there in a hurry, otherwise there’s be no reason for them to come at all.

Her eyes were scanning the skies from where she was standing when a hammer blow struck her between the shoulder blades, driving her to the ground with a violence as bone-jarring as it was unexpected.

*****

Hayden COMCEN

“What do you mean there’s slack in the tether?” Grange demanded, rather too loudly he realized a moment after he said it. The lieutenant commander turned away from the staring eyes of his senior officers and noncoms, hurriedly rushing outside to look up at the sky above him.

The black thread to the skies looked normal, best he could tell.

“It looks fine from here,” he said over the comm. “Alright, fine. I’ll be right there.”

Making his way down to the anchor point took only a couple minutes, but even before he got there he thought he was seeing a faint bow in the thread.

Have to be imagining it.

He hoped that was the case.

Once he got in close enough to see the tether at the anchor point, however, he knew that he wasn’t. Slack was one word to describe it, another would be to say that the tether was beginning to pool on the anchor like a string whose balloon had just been popped.

Oh lord. The station!

“I see it,” he growled. “Grange out.”

A tap on his comm linked him into the command channels. “Liberation! Liberation! This is Lt. Commander Grange.”

“We’re a little busy here, Commander.”

“Thank god you’re still there! Is the station dropping in orbit?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well what exactly?” he demanded. “We’re seeing a frightening change in the tether down here.”

“We’re moving to a higher orbit, Grange. The tether has been cut,” General Kane’s voice cut in over the system. “Now, see to your own affairs and leave my people alone. You have no clue the chaos we’re dealing with up here.”

The line cut, leaving Grange standing in the middle of the street, staring up at the sky and wondering what the ever living hell was going on.

Chapter Seven

Hayden Jungle

He didn’t know how it came to pass that he’d survived.

The mass movers had torn the planet apart around him, but it seemed that they’d been targeted around the enemy’s location and not directly down on his head. Kris knew he’d been closer to the enemy than any of his Lucians, but even so, it was a miracle that anything had survived the bombardment.

When he managed to crawl out of the tangle of trees and dirt that had all but buried him, he’d been honestly appalled to find the enemy Sentinel standing there like nothing had seemingly occurred.

The infernal piece of work had even the gall to remove his helmet, standing at ease over the annihilation of the Lucian force. A rage burnt inside him, one Kris had never felt and never believed he could feel. As a Lucian and a Sentinel, he’d learned to control his anger a long time past, and he knew that he was losing it on one level, but he didn’t care.

He charged, having lost his weapon in the strike, and struck the alien to the ground from behind. He stood over the soldier, glaring down at him.

“You didn’t get us all!” he snarled. “You can’t turn your back on a Lucian until you know he’s dead!”

*****

The ringing in her ears was noticeably worse now.

Sorilla groaned, twisting painfully and slowly as she turned to see one of the tough grey bastards standing over her. He was grunting and growling something, presumably yelling at her she supposed, though it was possible he was just in a crap load of pain.

Yeah, not buying that one.

She shook her head, then twisted her upper body as quickly as she could to bring her guns to bear.

Apparently he was waiting for that, however, and was upon her like a bolt of lightning. A foot slammed her right hand to the ground while another kicked Jerry’s pistol from her left. The growling and grunting, followed by what might possibly have been a laugh, continued as he pinned her hand to the ground and snarled down at her.

“You’re so damn lucky my armor is dead, you grey prick,” she spat up at him.

He may not have understood what she said, but Sorilla suspected that he got the tone when he leaned down and hammered a fist into her midsection. The armor, though dead, absorbed the biggest part of the force, but for all that she still felt it and had to struggle to keep the air in her lungs.

She briefly wondered if he’d targeted her diaphragm intentionally, with the plan to knock the air from her. If so, they knew a lot more about human physiology than she was happy with at that juncture.

Fuck it. Question for another time.

Sorilla lunged up, grabbing his uniform with her left hand as she pulled herself up closer to him.

“Oh, guess what?” she grinned, blood tracing a red line across her teeth. “I don’t need my armor to kick your ass!”

She swept his feet, using him as leverage. Despite being sluggish in unpowered armor, once she got moving, the armor provided more than enough mass to make the move effective, and with her holding him in place, the alien’s feet came out from under him as she twisted and pulled.

The shift jerked the alien off its feet and she rolled over on top, fighting to break her right hand free even as he clearly showed no intention of letting her gain control over her metalstorm pistol. Frustrated, Sorilla drove her knee into his midsection with as much force as she could muster, but was disappointed to find it had little effect.

He swung at her face, forcing her to let his uniform go and block the blow on her forearm. Instinct took over and Sorilla slammed her head into his face, forgetting for the moment that she wasn’t wearing her helm.

“Ohhh…bad idea,” she groaned, eyes crossing slightly as she pulled back.

Thankfully she’d remembered her technique and didn’t just try slamming her face into his, as without her helm that would have ended far worse for her, she suspected. As it stood, there was a trickle of what she assumed was the alien’s blood running down its face, though, again, she didn’t perceive any real effect by his actions.

His teeth were really white, but had a dullness to them that a portion of her brain fixated on until he hammered another blow in against her blocking arm and lunged over in a roll that brought him on top of her.

I think I might have a concussion.

She yanked in the direction of the roll and sent the two of them tumbling down the small hill, away from Reed’s position. They bounced off rocks and tree trunks as they rolled, hammering each other with knees and fists as they went. Sorilla lost the metalstorm pistol with a clatter as her hand smashed into a tree, but managed to wrench herself loose in the same impact and curl her legs up between herself and the alien.

She kicked out with all her strength as the tumble brought the alien on top, screaming with exertion as she fought his mass and the dead weight of her own armor, and managed to send him on a short flight that ended with an ugly impact on a toppled tree. Sorilla rolled to her feet from there, sliding until she steadied herself on another trunk and found that he had already recovered his own footing.

They faced each other across a strewn field of shattered and fallen logs, dirt, and dust. Sorilla slowly lifted her arm, wiping her face on the hard textured surface of her armor-covered arm. She could see the dark stain of blood on her armor, but ignored it. She wasn’t hurt bad enough to slow her half as much as the armor itself already was, so she had other things to worry about. The armor was a serious problem, however. With it slowing her down she had no speed and no strength behind her blows. Unfortunately, there was only one way around that, and it wasn’t going to be pleasant.

Too bad he’s not human, I’d get a psychological edge for this for sure, she thought dryly as she brought her hand down to her shoulder and broke the magnetic seals on her armor. A shrug dropped her chest and back plate away, the gel inside sucking at her skin as the armor slowly fell off and hit the ground with an audible thud. Losing the armor was a gamble, sacrificing protection for speed, but it was one she was willing to take.

Feeling lighter already, Sorilla broke the seals on the armor of her upper left arm and shucked that off as well but was forestalled doing more when the alien moved. He was fast, she had to give him that, his hand ducking behind his back as he came at her.

Sorilla tensed, dropping into a ready position as she tried to decide what she’d have to do next. Meet the assault or dive for cover? The gleam of light along a dull black blade told her what she was facing, though her mind didn’t quite believe it for a moment. Her body, however, knew the drill too well to be fooled.

Her hand dropped to her own combat knife as she shifted her body side on and pulled the carbon fiber blade from its sheathe. The edge of her blade gleamed to match that of her enemy’s, a diamond filament only a few molecules thick making the weapon one of the most dangerous close-in weapons ever devised by men.

How the hell did he get one? Sorilla grimaced as she thought that. He took it from a dead soldier, of course.

She swung her blade up to meet the hack of his, meeting edge with edge and reflexively blinking her eyes at the clash. Diamond shards pelted her face as the two weapons bit into one another, but she ignored the small cuts and ground her blade against his to deflect them both to one side, then hammered her still-armor-covered fist into his face.

Without power, the blow didn’t have the force it might once have. However, she was freed of the confines of the armor that slowed her upper body and arm motions. The armor on her lower arm and hands just provided some extra mass to drive into her enemy, and she fully planned to take advantage of just that.

He fell back as she repeatedly hammered her fist into his face, or what she supposed passed for a face. A human would have little more than a bloody pulp where his nose and cheekbones were by this point, but all she could see different on the alien was some dirt that had transferred from her knuckles.

It was downright depressing.

His counterattack came so fast that she just barely had time to blow all the air out of her lungs voluntarily before he did it for her. Her muscles tightened in her midsection, but his blow was still enough to fold her in half and lift her feet from the ground.

No question, she though, pained. He’s stronger than any human I’ve ever fought.

From her curled up position, half leaning on the opponent to keep from falling over, Sorilla spit out a gob of blood and saliva that spattered over the alien’s boots. He didn’t seem to notice as he grabbed her knife hand and lifted her upright. He grunted and snarled at her some more, but she ignored him as she drew in air to replace that which she’d lost and tried to steady herself.

*****

“You are a stubborn little being, I will grant you that much respect,” Kris growled at the surprisingly frail alien.

Without the armor helping him, Kris was surprised both by how weak the alien actually was and by how very much tenacity it held all the same. Using leverage, skill, and determination, it had drawn out this fight far longer than Kris would have expected.

Still, as long as he was able to control the alien’s blade hand, there was little it could do. Even the barrage of strikes it made earlier had been only slightly more than annoying. Drawing the alien up so he could get a better look at it, Kris frowned somewhat.

Odd. This one seems to be differently configured than the others. Different species? Or a gender difference?

He shrugged, it didn’t really make any difference to him. It would be nice to know at some point, if only so he could recognize which gender of the species was obviously the more lethal, but that was for another time.

The alien glared at him, an expression that seemed almost universal by his reckoning, and spat its body essence in his face. He grimaced, but didn’t wipe it away. Unlikely that any bacteria or diseases would have any effect on him anyway.

“That won’t help you,” he started, only to be startled when the alien exploded into action again.

*****

Sorilla screamed, planting her foot into the side of his knee joint and kicking as hard as she could. The leg buckled, and as he began to topple, she kicked down and then planted her other leg in his midsection and twisted her body into a flip. As she used the momentum to wrench her hand free, Sorilla kicked the alien in the face on the way by and then landed in a crouch as he continued to fall.

Guess going for the joints works no matter what planet the scumsucker calls home.

She had to brace her hand on the ground to keep from falling over, however, and a pain in her chest told her that she at least had some bruised ribs. That, combined with the blood she was spitting out, told her that the damn alien she was facing was likely to do what the kinetic strike didn’t.

Sorilla shifted her grip on the blade in her hand and tensed.

If I’m dying here, it won’t be alone.

She lunged into him, aiming to gut him with the diamond blade.

Off balance though he might have been, the alien still moved faster than she’d expected. Her knife was deflected to one side as he countered with a low thrust of his own. She twisted around it, planting a foot on a tree trunk as the blade skirted past her abdomen and kicked off to drive her shoulder into him before he regained balance.

The force drove them both to the ground, rolling and scrambling for purchase, leverage, and an opening. As they grappled, the two continued to roll and tumble about, knees driving into any place they could find and generally just doing anything they could to inflict pain on the other.

Sorilla hated to admit it, but it was clear by the second tumble in the dirt that she was getting the wrong end of that particular stick. While she was able to effectively keep his blade out of the fight, the alien had strength and speed. But his knife fighting skills weren’t on the same level at all; he was hammering through her defense with his free hand, and she could feel broken bones rubbing against each other with almost every move she made.

Knowing that she had to end the fight then and there, or lose it for certain, Sorilla marshaled what was left of her energy for a last attack only to fall back in shock as an explosion shook the world around them again.

The alien was no less startled, and both of them cast about to see fireball tearing through the upper atmosphere, heading for the horizon, thankfully. Behind them, a mushroom cloud was climbing from the ground, and Sorilla had to admit that it was a hell of a lot bigger than you got from a fleet Kilo Kilo.

“Holy shit. What the hell?”

Her opponent seemed similarly perturbed, though that could be wishful thinking on her part. Between the blood in her eyes, the pain all over her body, and the concussion she was pretty certain she had, Sorilla expected that hallucinations were eminently possible at the moment. She looked between her opponent and the fireballs that punctuated the rolling mushroom cloud, honestly wondering if that mean her side was winning…or his?

Crap.

Fireballs on the world her side controlled almost never meant her side was winning.

Sorilla tensed, ready to make her last stand, but was again stalled when another familiar sound began to echo off the ground and terrain around them. She glanced in the direction of the colony site and could see a pair of rapidly growing dots in the sky.

She smiled, blood dripping from her teeth as she shifted the grip on her knife.

“Winning…losing,” she said with an edge to her voice. “I’m the one with backup on the way.”

Understanding her or not, the alien seemed to recognize the situation. He stood, obviously undecided for a long moment, then finally vaulted a fallen tree trunk and vanished into the strewn field and beyond that into the jungle itself. Sorilla watched him go for a long moment, eyes searching for any sign of his return, and then she collapsed where she had been standing.

“I got nothing left,” she whispered, mentally toggling her transponder. “I hope they brought blankets. I think I’m getting cold.”

*****

Kris wanted nothing more than to curse the fates, but the situation was clear. He’d tarried too long, played too many games. The alien was skilled, determined, and clearly didn’t know how to quit.

Sentinel, indeed.

That the alien was also relatively weak made little difference. These people were dangerous.

At the moment, however, he had other concerns.

Most of his Lucians were now dead, those few who weren’t would be shortly if the planet was under serious bombardment. He had to get to the assault transport and find out what was going on.

“All Lucians, Prime speaking. Return to the ship,” he ordered in Sentinel code before switching to Alliance spoken. “All personnel, return to the ship.”

*****

USS Cheyenne

While Captain Roberts was directing search and rescue efforts for the Hood, Admiral Brookes was desperately trying to regroup her squadron.

With the Hood down, and some of the ships still out of Hayden orbit because of earlier search and rescue efforts, she was down to maybe half her squadron effective for current deployment. She got them more or less pointing in the direction before distracting Captain Roberts.

“Patrick,” she said tiredly, painfully, and regretfully. “I need you to detach the search and rescue units to Liberation control.”

“Ma’am, there are survivors on the Hood.”

“I know that, Liberation will see to them,” she said. “If we don’t keep those bastards on the move, they’ll hit us again. Detach your people to Liberation. That’s an order, Patrick. We’re moving out.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Nadine could hear the anger and reproach in his voice, but that was his job. He had to think about the crews; she had to think about the system. Nadine opened a link to the remaining ships in the squadron. “New flight plans are on your stations. Engage when ready, adjust acceleration to match squadron formation Gamma Nine.”

A minute passed, then another, and finally the Cheyenne’s drives lit off and she was slammed down into the acceleration bolster as the flagship of Task Force Valkyrie led the remnants of the squadron out of Hayden orbit.

*****

Parithalian Alliance Ship Noble Venture

“They survived the impacts.”

Reethan nodded, impressed despite himself. “I would not have guessed that they could disconnect that station from the thread. Foolish of me, I suppose.”

His apprentice shrugged. “Pardon my disagreement, Master, but I don’t believe that ‘foolish’ would be correct. We’ve never seen such things before, there was no reason to expect them to disconnect like that.”

“Perhaps,” Reethan said, noncommittally. “In this case, it matters little.”

“They’re coming out after the flotilla,” the apprentice offered up.

“Of course they are,” the ships master said. “They have no real choice, do they? If they remain there, we would hammer them from here until there was nothing remaining in orbit of that world but the dust of their hulls.”

He considered for a moment, then nodded. “We’ll meet them. They no longer have the numbers, nor the station and moon to use as tactical tools. Eliminate the mobile force, then take care of the station at leisure.

“Yes, Master.”

A few moments later, he could feel the slight gravity shift as the ship’s drives powered up and knew that they were under way to meet the enemy.

He felt for these aliens, in an odd way. They were decent ship handlers, and any Parithalian had to respect that, but they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Whatever it was that drew the Ros’El and Alliance leadership’s attention to them, it was certainly a bad omen for their little pocket empire in this corner of the galaxy.

“Master of Ships!”

Parath looked over sharply, not liking that particular sound. “What is it?”

“Gravitational shift in the outer system.”

“Put scanners on it!”

The displays blinked, showing the outer system and the origin of the shift. Reethan stared for a long moment, then slowly shook his head.

“Scan and record. Every detail. Ship handler!”

“Master!”

“Make course for the reciprocal outer system.”

“Master?”

Reethan sighed, eyes going to the display that showed the small band of ships coming out to do futile battle with his flotilla. He was a military man, but not a murderer. There was no point now. Destroying those ships would be nothing less than murder and, at worst, might just leave him and his flotilla exposed to the newcomers.

On the main screen, coming in from the outer system, were ships of a class he’d never scanned before. They were certainly not Alliance ships, and they outnumbered his force by twice again in numbers.

More importantly, the oddly shaped ships were all accelerating into the system at ninety percent his ship’s maximum.

“Get us out of here, ship handler. Make course for Alliance space,” he ordered, tiredly.

We’re going to have to come back with a fleet if we want to burn these people out of this system. What a waste.

*****

USS Cheyenne

“Hailing signal, Captain.”

Roberts looked up sharply, confused. Who?

“Identifies as the USS Terra!”

“Confirm IFF!”

“Aye, sir. Codes accepted, she’s one of ours.”

Roberts was silent for a long moment, rather shocked, to be honest. They’d been expecting relief, to be sure, but he’d never heard of the Terra. Hadn’t even heard whispers of it in the traffic from home.

“Accept the signal. What do they have to say?”

“Advises that we break off, sir. They say that they’ll take on the enemy ships.”

Roberts considered, but really there was only one response he could make.

“Admiral?”

“Break off, Captain. Turn us around, we’ll continue with search and rescue efforts,” Nadine Brookes said, no small amount of relief in her voice.

“Yes, ma’am. Helm, turn us around.”

“Yes, sir.”

They were rolling the ship when another gasp was heard from the sensor station.

“What is it now?” Roberts asked with a fair degree of trepidation.

“The Terra, sir, and her fleet!”

“What about them?”

“They’re accelerating in system, sir.”

Roberts rolled his eyes, he’d rather expected that much.

“Making three hundred gravities and climbing.”

The captain of the USS Cheyenne swallowed. He’d not expected to hear anything like that.

*****

Medical Center, Hayden COMCEN

Sorilla was awake as they wheeled her into the long medical wing of the military base, but between her implants stimulating production of dopamine and endorphins and the natural reaction to coming down off a combat high, she wasn’t really seeing much of anything. Her mind was still back in the dirt, watching the alien run off. She remembered tensing for one last attack, knowing that it really was going to be her last, and then the explosions and distractions bought her enough time for the evac lifters to show up.

What galled was that, no matter what she’d managed to make it look like…and Sorilla wasn’t fool enough to think she was good enough an actress to fool another experienced soldier…she was at the end of her rope. He just had to end her and be done with it.

It almost felt like she hadn’t been worth killing.

Sorilla looked out the window of the medical center, eyes on the sky beyond. They were deep orange, the sunlight now filtering through billions of tons of dust and ash from the kinetic strikes.

She’d lay a year’s pay that Hayden was going to be experiencing a miniature ice age over the next few decades.

“Sorilla?”

Sorilla lolled her head to the other side and recognized Tara as the nurse stood over her. She smiled, “Hey. Didn’t know you were walking around.”

“Dean protected me.” Tara looked down. “I wasn’t hurt badly.”

“He was a good man.”

Tara nodded, face tight and concerned.

“Hey…Jerry?”

The redhead sighed, “He’ll live. We’ll have to import some prosthetics from Earth for his arm, but he’ll live.”

Sorilla nodded. “Good. This one was about par for the course for Hayden.”

“Excuse me?” Tara raised an eyebrow.

“Can’t set foot on this crazy planet without free falling practically from orbit,” Sorilla snorted. “Don’t know what kind of planet you people think you’re running here, but that’s no way to treat visitors.”

“I see that your sense of humor has improved from the first time we met,” Tara replied dryly. “I didn’t know you had one back then.”

“Only SF trainer for an entire planet, humor would have just got me in trouble. ‘Sides,” Sorilla shrugged in her bed, “I’m on such a high right now.”

“Yes, I know.” Tara’s voice now lacked even the dry humor it held earlier. “We can’t give you painkillers. Your implants are doing things they weren’t designed to do, Sorilla.”

“Yeah. I know.” Sorilla smiled dreamily. “Not the implants, not ‘zactly.”

“What?”

“They wired the implants into my neural system, Tare,” Sorilla mumbled, beginning to lose her coherence.

“Yes, I read the specs they allowed me to see,” Tara said. “What about it?”

“Human brain is pretty cool shit,” Sorilla told her. “Took a few months, but I’m pretty sure my brain decoded the implant’s signals…or recognized patterns, or something like that.”

Tara watched as Sorilla drifted off, mind racing as she considered what her friend had said.

Is that even possible?

Actually, she knew it was. In fact, she wondered why no one had mentioned the possibility in the literature. The human mind was very adept at pattern recognition, so it stood to reason that if the implants were using Sorilla’s nervous system as their communications route, even signals not normally used by the body would be noted and then compared to situations. If the brain saw a pattern, it would start to use it.

She just wished that she knew what it meant, especially for her friend’s future.

A glance at Sorilla’s chart told her that she was due to be transferred to one of the outbound ships as soon as they got the tether reconnected. She just hoped that someone back on Earth had a better idea about the implants than she or the people here did.

Get well, Sorilla. I hope someday you can visit Hayden without fighting.

*****

USS Cheyenne

Admiral Brookes looked out over Hayden, the observation deck open for all off-duty crewmembers now. A steady trickle was coming through, just to stare for the most part, now that the post-combat tensions were wearing off. She was just as interested in the distant silhouette of the USS Terra, where it was working on recovering the tether before it dropped too far, however, and the changes it represented.

Obviously part of a top secret construction job, the Terra and her sister ships were half again the size of the Cheyenne. The basic design was similar, however, except for a bulge at the bow that looked like a bizarre cross between an overinflated balloon and the hammer head of a shark. Unlike the Cheyenne and Longbow class, the Terra had a larger ‘conning tower’ about a third of the way from the stern. The tower was all strange angles too, leaning forward for some reason she didn’t understand.

She supposed that she would soon enough.

Her new orders had come in, requiring that she bring Valkyrie in for decommissioning and reassignment. That tore at her guts a little. The Cheyenne had been her home now for more than two years, and she didn’t much like the idea of seeing it sent for recycling.

From the looks of the Terra class ships, however, it was clear as day that the age of the Cheyenne had ended.

This battle over Hayden had been the most expensive since the loss of Admiral Sweet and his taskforce during the original encounter with the aliens. They’d lost ships that they probably didn’t need anymore, granted, but, along with that, so many good people.

Jane MacKay was gone.

While rescue teams had pulled most of her crew off more or less intact, the command center of the Longbow class ships was similarly designed to the Cheyenne. Roughly in the center of the ship, at the heaviest and most protected area. All that defense was of little use against a ten-thousand-kilogram projectile travelling a fair portion of light speed, unfortunately. The command deck had been obliterated in the assault, along with everything on that deck and several decks above and below.

Those in the extremities of the ship were smashed around, but most survived. A few broken necks from whiplash, more with injuries that would never fully heal, but most would serve on.

Losing Jane, however, felt like losing her left arm. If Roberts was her strong right arm, Jane had been the surprisingly dexterous left. Smart, free thinking, and incredibly intuitive.

Nadine closed her eyes, controlling her breathing. It would do no one any good to see tears in their admiral’s eyes.

Goodbye, Jane.

*****

Parithalian Alliance Ship Noble Venture

Well, we’ve learned a great deal. I wish I could be certain that it was worth the cost, but it will be valuable.

There was no way a small flotilla would be enough, however, that was eminently clear.

He sighed as he looked out at the black expanse of shift space, lost in considerations.

No, we’ll need to bring in a fleet at least. Perhaps the Twelfth? They should be within range, as I recall, and certainly have the expertise. If not them, then it would have to be the Eighty-Second, I suppose, though I would wish for a few backup flotillas if they are assigned the task.

No matter how he cut it, however, Reethan could see a long and bloody war coming.

And something else was clear now.

The intel concerning the enemy ships’ speed was now obsolete. He didn’t know what had happened, but that advantage was gone.

But how? Their drives aren’t remotely advanced enough, I’ve seen that for myself. Even the new ships used similar drive technology according to our scanners. The heat dissipation readings were almost identical. They cannot be using rebuilt or reverse engineered Ros’El drives, those would flare far hotter.

He didn’t like puzzles, and this species was becoming a most irritating one indeed.

Damn the Ros’El for involving us in this mess.

END

The Hayden War Saga will conclude in The Valhalla Call, coming 2013.