Valkyrie (Expeditionary Force Book 9)

by Craig Alanson

  Crap. When plans went wrong, why couldn’t they go wrong in a way we were equipped to deal with?

  “Uh oh, Joe,” Skippy whispered. “You know the mechanical problem you asked me to fake with that second Stork, before it landed at the resort?”

  “Yeah, why?” Those Storks were supposed to carry Smythe’s team out to Objective Dixie, that’s why we hadn’t used fragmentation rounds to take out the pilots. We needed those aircraft intact. Smythe had his people patching the holes, with a sketchy-looking glue that Skippy assured us would hold just fine. Of course, Skippy would not be flying aboard the glued-together aircraft, so I was less than fully confident.

  “That second Stork really does have a major potential problem, one of the turbine rotors has a crack. Pilots have noted intermittent vibrations and overheating on their squawk list for two months, but it hasn’t been fixed.”

  “The vibration is only intermittent?” I asked hopefully. “Why hasn’t it been fixed?”

  “It hasn’t been fixed, because the repair crews only spun up the turbines on the ground, and they didn’t experience a problem. That is because the rotor mostly vibrates when the engines are transitioning from horizontal to vertical flight, or the other way. Joe, when that Stork came in, the rotor was shaking badly. That’s why the pilots brought it straight in, rather than flying the approved approach pattern.”

  “Well, shit. We only need it to make a one-way trip to that island.”

  “I wouldn’t trust it not to splash into the ocean,” he warned. “Remember, Joe, safety first.”

  “Oh hell, Skippy. We’re the Merry Band of Pirates. Safety is, like, fourth on the list. Are there any spare parts available?”

  “There is a hangar queen at the military base.” He meant an aircraft that is stripped for parts to keep other aircraft flying. “But, to pull a turbine off the hangar queen, and install it on the Stork with the busted rotor, would take all day. I would have to talk Smythe’s team through the whole process. Not all the tools are available, we would have to jury-rig some of the tools. Plus there is the problem of lizards at that base. They aren’t going to let Smythe’s team fly in and take whatever they want.”

  “We don’t have all day. We don’t even have the rest of today. Crap! Seriously, you don’t think that ship can make it to the Objective Dixie island?”

  “Frankly, no. Part of the problem is that, because you monkeys killed the pilots, they weren’t able to initiate the proper shut-down procedure for the turbine. That rotor is supposed to be cooled down gradually. Instead, it got cooked. Dude, you should not trust a single monkey’s life to that thing.”

  That was a show-stopper. Even our aggressive and daring STAR team commander didn’t want to trust any of his people to a bird with a busted wing, and going in with only one ship made taking out all the lizard guards at Dixie a risky proposition. Fabron suggested flying one of the Storks he had captured to the mainland for refueling, because it didn’t have enough fuel to fly all the way from the island to Dixie. Both Smythe and I rejected that idea, we simply didn’t have time to wait until one of Fabron’s aircraft got to the resort.

  We were stuck, until Simms came to the rescue with an idea so obvious, none of us near the planet had considered it.

  Because Skippy could fly a Stork remotely, we didn’t need to risk anyone’s life in the cockpit. Smythe’s team located old fuel pods in a building at the resort, some of them had holes or were corroded from age, but four were serviceable. It would have been great to attach the fuel pods to a dropship, but the brackets were different and we didn’t have time to screw around trying to get the brackets to work. So, Skippy quickly talked Smythe’s people through the process of hanging four fuel pods under the wings of the busted Stork, and they filled the pods. With the STARs taking cover in case the fuel-laden Stork crashed and burned, Skippy got it in the air and headed back toward the ocean.

  The whole point of turning the wonky Stork into a flying gas station was to rendezvous with one of the Storks that Fabron had captured. A dropship copilot volunteered to fly that Stork, which did not actually have its Check Engine light on, to an island in the middle of nowhere so it could be refueled, and some of Smythe’s people could transfer to the other ship.

  “Uh oh, Joe,” Skippy said as he guided the flying gas station in its descent toward the remote island. “The vibration is getting really bad. I don’t think I can transition to vertical flight without tearing apart the turbine.”

  “Shit.” None of the islands in the area had runways, the Stork had to land like a helicopter.

  Or did it?

  “Skippy, show me a close-up of that island.” He did. It was small, mostly covered in palm trees and shrub brush, and the shore was rock with half-moon-shaped beaches scattered here and there. One of the beaches had a gentle slope, and it was in the lee of the island, with the water there showing only ripples and low, flat ocean swells. “Can you bring it in on its belly? Splash-land in the water and get it up onto the beach?”

  “Whoo-hoo,” he groaned. “That would be tough, Joe.”

  “Hey, shithead. You are always talking about how crappy my flying skills are. Let’s see you do something impressive.”

  “I’m working with a one-second time lag here, knucklehead. By the time I get data from the cockpit and make an adjustment, the situation will have changed.”

  “Yeah, well, then you will just have to be extra awesome.”

  “I hate you, Joe.”

  “If you can’t do it-”

  “I didn’t say I couldn’t do it. Prepare to be amazed. Unless this crazy scheme fails due to no fault of my own, in which case, prepare to accept the blame.”

  He was right, it was a tricky maneuver. The Stork came in low and slow, just above stall speed. It hit the water closer to the beach than I would have aimed for, too late for me to say anything. The aircraft’s nose dug into a swell and a huge fan of water splashed up, tearing one fuel pod off its bracket. Unbalanced, the Stork careened up the beach, slewing sideways and coming to a stop when one wing hit a palm tree.

  “Ta-DA!” Skippy crowed. “In your face, Joe.”

  “You lost a fuel tank,” I noted, as I watched the ruptured pod bobbing in the surf.

  “We didn’t need all those tanks. You’re just jealous because you couldn’t have done that.”

  “You are correct about all of that.”

  “What?”

  “We don’t need all four tanks, I could not have landed that Stork on the beach, and I am jealous of your mad skills, Dude.”

  “Oh. Um, hmm.” He was so instinctively arrogant, he didn’t know how to handle it when someone else was being humble. “Thank you?”

  “Thank you.” Only a couple of the tank’s internal bladders could have been breached, as not much fuel was leaking out. Thick globs of the fuel were rolling in the waves, sinking slowly. Those tar-like globs were going to cause a chemical mess on the ocean floor and I did feel bad about that. Maybe Smythe’s team could have brought the lost pod onto the beach and unloaded the rest of the fuel, if we had time and if we needed it. We didn’t have time and there was plenty of fuel in the other three pods. “Smythe,” I called the STAR team leader. “It’s your show now.”

  “Captain Frey,” Skippy called. “I do not wish to alarm you, but the three enemy soldiers to your southeast are now advancing on your position.”

  “I see it,” she replied curtly. The data referred to by the AI was available in her visor. They were running out of options. They were running out of running, the places they could go shrinking with every forward stride. Forward was the only place they could go. To the west was the ocean that stretched for thousands of kilometers. North was the hospital they had fled from, with eight enemy soldiers following and cutting off any possibility of retreat. East was a jungle swamp, deep water and mud that was over five kilometers wide.

  The original plan had been to go northeast after leaving the hospital, moving along what had been a road when the are
a was prosperous. Skippy’s false orders were supposed to have diverted most of the soldiers away from the base, and a recon vehicle did drive away, but it only carried three lizards. Though Skippy was jamming their communications, that recon truck had been recalled by flares that could not be interfered with. The enemy was smart. They knew options were limited for the force they were pursuing. The recon truck had raced away in a curve to the east, following roads around the great swamp, and now those three mech-suited soldiers were advancing through the thick jungle ahead of her. They were trapped, with the enemy closing in from two sides, and no way to go east or west. She called a halt, and knelt down on one knee so Grudzien could get a break from being bounced around as she ran. The suit had helped cushion the shock on Grudzien and the two children carried by Durand, with sensors scanning the ground in front and adjusting footfalls to minimize stumbling in the cluttered jungle floor. Frey had set her suit on semi-automatic mode, providing guidance but allowing the suit’s computer to pick its way through the jungle. At first, Durand had hesitated to surrender control to her own suit, having experienced uneven results with semi-automatic operation of Ruhar skinsuits. Seeing she was falling behind and how badly the children were being jostled, she had reluctantly tried letting the hardshell armor handle the running, and was pleasantly surprised at the result.

  Setting the suits on semi-auto had provided just enough of an advantage to keep ahead of the soldiers tracking them. Or so it had seemed at first. Now Frey knew the pursuers had not been in a hurry because they were waiting until the recon team was in position ahead. Immediately after the recon team got out of their vehicle and sent a flare high into the sky, the soldiers behind the group of humans had increased their pace. Both groups of soldiers had regularly sent up small flares, of various colors to signal- what? Their location? The location of their quarry? It didn’t matter.

  “Can we get a balloon up through this tree cover?” Durand peered upward.

  Frey shook her head, exaggerating the motion so it could be understood. “The tree canopy isn’t the problem,” she patted her belt, where a set of explosive charges were attached. They could use the explosives to fell two or three trees, creating a clearing large enough to launch their balloons one at a time. Trees were not the problem. The closeness of the enemy was preventing a Dragon from coming in to pick them up. Even with stealth engaged, dropships made a lot of noise and created a turbulent wake as they flew through an atmosphere. Assuming the enemy was equipped with portable anti-aircraft missiles, a Dragon had at best a fifty-fifty chance of survival while flying low and slow enough to hook the balloon tethers. “We need to create separation. Bishop is not sending in a Dragon unless we can get more space between us and the enemy.”

  “What are we going to do, then?”

  Grudzien grunted. “Leave me here as a decoy. I’ll make noise to draw them away while-”

  “For the last time,” Frey snapped. “I don’t want to hear any more of that hero shit. We are all getting out of here.”

  “How?” Durand asked.

  “I don’t know,” Frey admitted. “Time to call in the cavalry. Colonel Bishop?”

  “Frey?” I replied anxiously. There was no need to ask for a Sitrep, I had feeds from the suits of her and Durand. They were in trouble and I knew it. So did they. While they ran, I had considered our options. If we didn’t have to worry about a Thuranin ship lurking over our heads, I might have used a missile to blast a landing zone in the jungle, so a Dragon could race in and pick up the team. Other missiles or maser cannons could have taken out the enemy soldiers, providing a safe air corridor for the Dragon.

  Unfortunately, we mostly likely did have a Thuranin ship in the area, and we couldn’t do anything to attract the attention of those little green cyborgs.

  “Sir, I’d appreciate one of your crazy ideas right now.”

  As Skippy had observed, many of my best ideas involved using deception to get the enemy to do what we wanted. That wasn’t going to work to get Frey’s team out of the jungle, the Kristang knew someone was screwing with their comms and would not listen to whatever line of bullshit Skippy gave them. We were damned lucky that military base had been abandoned for a long time, so the lizards there didn’t have any pop-up communications rockets. If they had been equipped with that gear, they could have sent a simple solid-propulsion rocket high in the sky, to transmit a signal by line-of-sight using masers that not even Skippy could screw with. The effort to provide medical treatment to the three sick humans at the hospital had been a shoestring operation, done quick and dirty, and that was why Frey’s team was still alive. “Stand by, Frey.” I took a breath and called Smythe. He was in a Stork flying toward Objective Dixie and couldn’t do anything to assist Frey. What I needed was his advice.

  Of course, he had been monitoring Frey’s situation on the command channel. “Colonel,” he said quietly after I explained what I was struggling with. “I can’t recommend sending in a Dragon until enemy air defenses have been confirmed suppressed.”

  Of the two Dragons that extracted the kidnapped people from the seaside resort, most had been crammed into one ship, with the other Dragon having only twelve kidnap victims and three soldiers aboard. Plus two pilots, of course. The Dragon with the fewest people aboard was tasked with picking up Frey’s team, and was slowly flying circles eighty kilometers south of her position, while the overloaded ship was climbing out of the atmosphere.

  Should I risk a Dragon with seventeen souls, to pick up five on the ground?

  Normally, we would rely on stand-off weapons in a SEAD role, that is the acronym for Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses. In the situation on Rikers, we could not cause a large explosion without notifying the Thuranin that something was very wrong on the planet.

  “What can you recommend?” I asked, knowing I just wanted to delay making a decision.

  “That whatever you decide, do it quickly. Sir. Captain Frey is running out of time.”

  You might think Smythe was being harsh with me, bordering on disrespect. That wasn’t true. He was being blunt because he did respect me. “Understood, Smythe. I’ll give you as much time as I can.” Smashing a button with a thumb, I ended the call abruptly.

  Seventeen lives against five. Seventeen lives aboard the Dragon, versus five on the ground. Seventeen minus five equals twelve more lives that could be saved.

  If we couldn’t pull Frey’s team out of the jungle, we had to assure they would not be captured and interrogated, or our secret would be exposed. Our cover story explained why human troops were on Rikers. Still, we could not risk any of our people being taken alive. They all knew that.

  Frey and her team knew that.

  More than once, I had been ready to sacrifice myself for the mission. That had been difficult, I still had occasional nightmares about falling into a gas giant planet or drowning in a sunken dropship.

  I had offered to give my life for the team, for the good of humanity.

  Could I sacrifice the lives of others, for the good of humanity?

  I knew what to do.

  The only thing I could do.

  “Skippy, prep one of that Dragon’s missiles. I’ll,” my throat tightened. “I’ll give launch authority to the pilots.”

  Katie Frey’s breathing was ragged, though her powered armor suit was doing most of the work for her. What made her breathless and sent her heart rate soaring was not just exertion, but fear. She had bolted off through the jungle as soon as Bishop spoke to her, screaming for Durand to follow. On her back, Grudzien grunted and gasped and hung on as he was jostled and battered by her headlong run through the jungle. She knew that all he could do was hang on, try not to interfere with her, and try not to bash his skull into her helmet. Her visor showed that Durand was twenty meters behind, the French soldier’s progress slowed by having to carry two people. The near-catatonic state of the children was both a concern and a help; they did not object or even seem to notice being strapped to a power armor suit and being roughly bounce
d around in a race through the jungle.

  It was a race. Frey wasn’t only running for her life, she was running to save four other lives. A missile was coming, Bishop had been decent enough to warn her and so they were doing the only thing they could do; run.

  A missile threat warning popped up in her visor, showing an icon of a rapidly approaching weapon, coming right behind her. With her heart in her throat, she leapt over a log, slipped in mud, pushed off a tree and kept running.

  Missile warning red, the visor flashed across her vision.

  She could hear it now, having set her acoustic sensors to seek a particular sound. The whine of a miniature turbine engine, operating at subsonic speed. It was high-pitched and faint, the sound muffled by baffles and sound-cancelling waves projected from the missile’s nosecone. If she had not known what to listen for, she might not have heard it until it was too late.

  It was too late.

  The whining sound grew louder, wavering as the missile dodged trees on its deadly flight.

  Missile strike imminent, the visor flashed.

  “Durand!” Frey shouted as she dropped to her knees and flattened to the ground as best she could. “Down! Now!”

  The missile knew exactly what to do and where to go, having its flight course programmed by Skippy. From accessing data from the two mech suits he knew every feature of the jungle; every tree, every hanging vine, every splash of tall ferns across the flight path . Dropping out of the Dragon, the missile had not engaged its motor, relying instead on deploying its wings to glide stealthily toward its target. As its belly was skimming the treetops, the wings folded and it dropped through the canopy, battering its way down through leaves and branches until it was six meters from the ground, where its wings shot out halfway and the air-breathing turbine motor quietly came to life. It took only a microsecond for the missile to determine where it was, comparing the terrain map in its databanks to the jungle around it.