Zeus said in a reverent tone, “By the wheel of time.”
I nodded and said with pride, “And she is but one.”
The enemy lost five craft that time, Kitty taking two of those kills. And more and more stormbridges had activated. There had to be dozens of Halflings on the ground now.
As if that thought had conjured it, the coms crackled to life, “Lance Flight One. We are taking fire. Ground troops have crippled our vessel. Engaging!”
I was on coms instantly as I ran for the door, Inatra, Intark, Dite, and Thea on my heels, “Negative! Do not engage! Let the Asgard engage first! Repeat, let the Asgard engage first. The Jotunn sidearms are too dangerous. The Valklopt will disarm them. Only then are you to engage!”
All I got was static in return. Tych!
Thea moved swiftly over to where Arina was calibrating shield harmonics. They needed to get that shield operational before any ground troops made it to the Citadel. It would be far more effective than the limited protection our coherent photon projection could afford.
We dove into a transport, Talia saw us coming and joined us. Then we were in the air, rocketing toward the battle. I was on with Leto and Apollo a moment later. “We'll need ground troops, but have them stay clear until the Halfling's sidearms are dealt with by the Asgard.”
They replied in dubious tones in the affirmative.
We know what their sidearms can do, but I have seen it firsthand as it desiccated living flesh in a instant, killing those without lattice in a flash. Our armor and cloaks are designed to ablate the effect, but it was untested except with weapons we take off the hybrids on Olympus. I didn't wish our women to prove it out in battle.
The Asgard sidearms could reduce the Jotunn ones to slag. Then we could engage. I had done it on countless occasions while clearing Ragnarok of Hybrids with the Valkyrie.
I kept an eye on the battle on the screens as I flew us to aid our people.
Chapter 12
Retreat
When we arrived where Lance Flight One had landed, a pitched battle was in progress. I almost wretched as I saw two desiccated corpses with Olympian armor on the fringe of the battle. Why hadn't the women listened?
Everyone was piling out of the vessel before I had come to a complete halt. I looked at Aphrodite and said, “Move the transport back, we'll send our people your way.” I wanted her clear of the Jotunn sidearms.
She nodded, looking angry at me with her red streaked black hair. “Fine!” Then the transport was air born the moment I stepped out.
I looked up, to a small break in the canopy, where a stormbridge transport beam had made a hole as it destroyed everything in its path, and could see the dogfight high above, ships darting in and out of visibility as they stung at the enemy over and over. I cursed silently, there weren't as many as there should be. Both sides were losing ships with every pass.
I caught snippets of chatter on coms as I surveyed the situation on the ground. Two Halfling ships broke from the combat to fly low, skimming the treetops, making a beeline toward the Citadel. A lone Hornet veered off in pursuit. Apollo was pinging the Hornet, asking why they did not shoot.
I replied for them, “The Asgard vessels have no armament except the mag lance, brother.” I caught his surprised, exasperated grunt, and I defended, “The Asgard look at combat far differently than us. They go out of their way to avoid violence, so when they build something for that purpose, it usually has a single function. They have their Valkyrie for all else.”
It was such a strange concept for me to wrap my own mind around so very long ago. My thought was interrupted by a female voice I knew I should recognize on coms, “Hornet Flight Six, splash one!” I heard a cheer in the control room. Then my eyes widened. It was Saelli! When had she become a Valkfela and joined the ranks of the Valklopts? So more than just Valhalla's Hornets were scrambled?
Saelli was the adopted daughter of Freya herself. Her mother was perhaps the bravest Ragnarok I had ever witnessed. Kenatar, Fist of the Heavens, commander of the generational transport, the Shatra. She had made a suicide run against the Frost Giant flagship, the Ginnungagap. She had struck the Star Killer at fractional C speeds, leaving a quarter mile deep crater in the Mithreal armor if its hull. That strike created a tiny weakness that Kara had used to disable the engines with the Power of Thor.
Kena had wanted Saelli safe. To never know war. But here she was joining the battle to keep my people safe. I smiled sadly, Kena's wishes were not enough to prevent her daughter from acting on the bravery and valor infused in her bloodline.
I drew Wrath and charged with the others to the line the Valklopt pilots were making to protect the Olympian crews from the desiccating energy weapons of the Halflings, nano-lattices flaring.
Zeus' balls! The enemy were all wearing smaller versions of the Jotunn battle armor. They may not be as big as the Frost Giants, but these suits would make them virtually invulnerable to physical attacks with their kinetic mirroring circuitry. The armor itself would render all but magnetic force weapons of the Asgard, useless. Our vibro weapons would have limited effect.
The only positive was that we knew how to fight them. Once there was no danger from their sidearms, then the Humans and Ragnarok had shown us that old-fashioned violence was the answer. The Jotunn and Titan kinetic mirroring circuitry could only take so much. So if we concentrate on one enemy at a time, we could overheat their power supplies, and then the force field protecting their heads would fail, leaving an open target for us.
The downside was that that attack cost thousands of lives of the many races of the Uniting on Folkvanger. We... didn't have thousands. And there were dozens of Halflings approaching. Valhalla had only faced ten Frost Giants in this armor before.
The best option we had here was retreat, but with the battle raging above, more allies would need our help until the air battle was over, so we didn't have the luxury of retreat yet. So I yelled out the one command the Asgard did, and did well, “Hold the line!”
A roar went up from the valiant women protecting the few Olympians behind them. Inatra moved ahead to take command of their people. “Sidearms!”
Intark and I stayed behind the line, between them and my people.
Intark wouldn't survive a blast from the Halfling sidearms, as he had only standard Asgard nanites, with no nano-lattice. We still didn't know if my armor and cloak could survive a blast. I looked over at the two corpses. Their cloaks hadn't been enough, but they didn't have the ablative armor I wore beneath.
Saelli roared through my coms, over the commotion the gunners on our wall were making as their concentrated fire was harassing the incoming vessel and slowing it for Saelli's hornet to catch it, “Hornet Flight Six, splash two!”
The Valklopt, at Inatra's command, pulled their sidearms, which were essentially magnetic force projection weapons that were charged by the women's personal nanites, so were just an extension of them. Whereas the Halflings themselves may be protected by Mithreal, their sidearms were not.
The women stood in a line, shoulder to shoulder, massively outnumbered by the advancing enemy, nano-lattices flaring as they were struck again and again, but not one wavered. They all took aim, and as Inatra fired her's the others followed suit.
Halfling weapons were reduced to slag with each shot. They got wise and started forming overlapping groups to protect the weapons as the Valklopt faded from view, I followed suit. I glanced skyward, to the canopy when I caught motion. Inatra made a mighty leap, arcing twenty feet into the air with Talia following suit as I watched Kitty gliding down behind the enemy. I called out unnecessarily to the rest, “Hold the line!”
More downed Valklopt pilots joined us. How many Hornets had we lost? I counted twelve Valklopt now with the newcomers.
I watched as the three female projectiles landed in the middle of the advancing enemy, they shimmered between visible and cloaked as their sidearms fired, again and again, turning more Halfling weapons to slag. I winced as Kitty went tumbling b
ack to slam into the trunk of a huge tree, splintering it, when a Halfling got in a lucky swing in as she spun away.
She shook it off and stood, her damaged armor repairing itself, and her nanites attacked her own injuries. She was charging right back in without a thought.
Talia was something to behold. She had been a formidable fighter back when she fought alongside Freya. She had no nanites back then, it was just her own ferocity and the abilities the chameleon shroud regenerative armor devised by Freya that she relied upon to face the hoards of Ragnarok who threatened Heildfine.
But now that her strength had increased and she was afforded the nano-lattice of the Valkyrie, she was a force unto herself. Her sidearm had been knocked away, but she was already diving on a Halfling, prying his weapon from his armored fingers as she twisted away, flinging the sidearm into the jungle.
She was gone before he could grab at her. Flipping back in an aerial display as she landed on the shoulders of another, her mag-spear drawn from her back as she slammed it down on the almost invisible shoulder seam of his armor. There was a sizzling and sparking as the magnetic blade sank slowly through the armor as the Halfling grasped over his shoulder at her.
He roared out in pain as her blade slowly made it through his armor, and his shoulder. Then he grasped her ankle and threw her with bone-jarring force onto the ground. He slammed a fist down, but she was already gone, rolling away as I grinned. She anticipated just that, and with him bent over like that, his arm overextended, he exposed the melted and sizzling hole in his armor to me.
I loosed an arrow. The angle was right and the arrowhead sliced through the ragged hole and through downward through his ribcage. He was already dead by the time his armor finished the pre-programmed strike. Then he simply fell over face first.
Inatra, the Fox, well... she was the only Valkyrie besides Kate the Raging Storm, who could almost keep up with the destructive ability of Kara. I shook my head as I watched her spinning through the gathering enemy, nano-lattice claws extended as she hissed over the din of battle.
She had lost her sidearm, but her lattice claws more than made up for it as she sliced through weapons, slashed at power supplies, leaving long sizzling cuts in the armor. And she slammed her fist forward, blades extended into the chest of one Halfling. The man only had a second to smirk at her, thinking his force mirroring circuitry would absorb the impact and nullify it. What he didn't count on was that her nano-lattice absorbed part of the feedback to convert into stored energy, and she had a twenty-one hundred joule punch. Second only to Kara.
After a second delay as all the forces tried to balance each other, the man went tumbling into two of his allies, taking all three to the ground.
Inatra was already rolling past, destroying their sidearms, and she leapt away and onto the shoulders of a fourth. Whereas Jotunn were all around eight feet tall, the Halflings varied between six and a half to seven feet tall like most Ragnarok.
My vicious sister here was small for a Ragnarok, right around six feet. They would see her as tiny. But she still massed enough that the Halfling would have had a hard time staying upright with her on his back if not for his armor.
As I fired at the weak spot on one Halfling's hip where she left a gouge in his armor over his power pack, she started slashing at his face force field with her claws. They sank though like they were going through molasses, but it was enough for the man to go into a blind panic as the claws sizzled into his cheek. I heard a loud crack of bones snapping as he finally made contact with her. Her claws dragged across his face, bisecting his skull as she was thrown off.
It took three shots, but my arrows were finally able to penetrate deep enough, and my target seemed to burst into a hail of shrapnel that damaged the armor of four of his comrades.
I looked back to see Inatra tumbling through the air, her armor sparking and her cloak not working. She was snatched out of the air by a leaping Kitty, who spun with her as she tossed her over the enemy line toward us. Talia was there to catch the injured Ina, and she tossed her over our lines to tumble along the ground.
I smiled at their training. A few broken ribs wouldn't slow Inatra down for more than a few seconds as her nanites handled the damage, but they were affording her those few seconds with their actions.
More Halfings were joining the fray, and the Valklopt were down to just a handful of sidearms that hadn't been destroyed. We were fighting a losing battle, even with the few kills we have made.
I found myself spinning to the ground, feeling as if my entire being was on fire when a glancing blow from a Halfling sidearm had made it between the Valklopt at the line. My cloak was sizzling and shorting, and Intark was tossing it away from me as my armor sizzled on my skin. I couldn't see as my vision blurred and my the skin of my face bubbled.
He roared, sounding almost like the recordings of what Kate had called a grizzly bear from Earth. And he pulled that ungodly huge projectile weapon, Buttercup, from the sheath on his back. It was deafening as it belched out a stream of Mithreal laced projectiles through the gap between women as he stood protectively over me.
Alone each shot wouldn't do much damage at all to the enemy, but the weapon spit out hundreds of rounds per second. I heard Halflings yelling and diving away as my vision dimmed more.
Inatra was yelling, “All our pilots are now down, withdraw to the citadel! Regroup there!”
All our pilots were down? Did that mean they were all taken out or had all the enemy ships been taken out and the woman who had to eject were here?
I felt myself hoisted onto Inatra's shoulder, pain shot through my body, and through my blurry vision saw the women all retreating back toward the transport, a Hornet came screaming down through the canopy. I could hear Saelli on coms, roaring out Kenatar's battle cry. She had returned for us! The mag-lance was active on the vessel as she swooped through the pursuing Haflings, literally making halflings of some of them as she sliced through their ranks.
There was screaming and chaos from the enemy as the Hornet slammed into the tampus trees just past them. Saelli was already diving out of the wreckage as it dissolved into base proteins. I closed my eyes, letting the pain take me as I whispered, “Good on you, Saelli... good on you.”
Chapter 13
Recovery
I awoke to pain lancing through my body as armor was pried off of me, taking the skin that had fused to it along for the ride. I hissed up at Hestia as she tore away a large piece of armor from my thigh.
She blinked down at me and smiled. “Good, you're awake. Well, maybe not so good. This is going to be painful.”
I asked, “Going to be?” as she squinted an eye and tugged on another piece as I watched the skin regrowing slowly on the area she had just cleared. I squawked, “Ow, tych it woman, just do it or don't.”
She stopped and looked almost petulant as she crossed her arms over her chest. “Do you want this armor off or not? You've always been such a touraon about injuries, you whining firstborn.” She smirked.
I stared incredulously at her, “Touraon? I'm no crybaby, you evil wench, I'm... OW!”
She yanked the armor off the back of my leg in my distraction. She giggled, and I narrowed an eye at her for being so opportunistic. The honey haired bioengineer was short for an Olympian and was the closest thing we had to a healer. Her bubbly personality and her penchant for trickery and playfulness has always made the frighteningly intelligent secondborn seem like a perpetual mischievous teen to me.
She started picking at the last piece on my calf, and I whined, “Ow, ow, ow.”
She stopped and cocked an eyebrow at me as I looked at my naked body, my skin mangled and bubbled but slowly healing. I was glad my eyesight was back to normal. A vision impaired archer is pretty much useless.
She sighed. “Would you like someone to hold your widdle hand? Or I can sedate you if you prefer. You didn't whine as much when you were unconscious.”
I saw the concern and worry in her eyes when she said that. How bad
had it been when I was brought in?
I muttered, “At least you could distract me again or something as you torture me.”
She looked up at me and then grabbed a scalpel from the instruments on the tray beside her, and without hesitation, she jammed it into my other leg.
I hissed out, “Ow!” Then she tore off the last piece of armor from my leg as I pulled the blade from my other, “Ow! Hera's tits, woman!”
She looked up as I watched the wound left by the scalpel stitch itself back together. Maybe a little faster than it should have. “You said to distract you. That distracted you, touraon.”
I glared at her, then a voice growled out from behind a white curtain beside the bed I was in, “Odin's beard, Artemis. Can you keep it down over there? You sound like Tiny when she has a tummy ache.”
Tiny was Arina's pet dinosaur. I kid you not, the little one had a huge triceratops Frost Giant hybrid as a pet. She rescued it from us when we battled it at the gates of Valhalla. Showing us that without the cybernetic control nodule behind it's bony skull, it was a sweet docile creature.
I grinned widely and reached over to tug the curtain away on its track. Inatra was in a bed like mine, and I could see Kitty batting instruments away from another technician, saying, “I'm fully healed, I don't need...”
The man told her, “For the love of Hera, woman, hold still!”
The appreciative look Ina was giving me made me remember I was in a state of undress. But I was so glad to see the two impulsive women were ok. I'm sure they were already fully healed unlike me, as their Valkyrie nanites were much more efficient than my natural healing abilities.
I was about to pull the curtain back when the sense of urgency I had in the back of my brain came forward. I looked up at her and blurted, “Status? How long had I been out?”
Before Inatra could say anything, a voice pulled my eyes to the far corner of my curtained off partition, causing my heart to skip. Aphrodite, her brown hair streaked red and blue with worry said as she stood to move to my side, “You've been out for about twenty minutes. Long enough for your torturer to get you out of the remains of your ablative armor.” She shrugged like she didn't know how to act. “Aries and Hephaestus will be happy to know their design works.”
Tales From Olympus: Gods Reunited Page 14