Valkyrie (Expeditionary Force Book 9)

by Craig Alanson

  “Yes,” he confirmed. “You encountered that type of aircraft on Newark. Back then, you called it a ‘Luzzard’, because it is similar to the Buzzard flown by the Ruhar. UNEF-HQ on Paradise has designated that type as a ‘Stork’.”

  “A stork?”

  “It is ugly and flies poorly,” he explained.

  “Ok, we’ll use the standard designation, then.” It had been a while since I was inside a Buzzard, I tried to remember what the cabin looked like. “They crammed thirty people into each one of them?”

  “I don’t have an exact count yet,” he told me patiently. “It is a long overwater flight, so the pilots requested permission to decrease their load. Between the four Storks, they are carrying all seventy-three humans from the northern camp. There are two pilots and two Kristang soldiers in each Stork, I do know that for certain.”

  “It looks like the second pair lifted off, what, an hour ago?”

  “One hour and sixteen minutes. Why?”

  It was tempting to do the navigation math myself, just to show Skippy that monkeys weren’t helpless. “How long until that second pair reaches landfall?”

  “The flight plan they filed has them going feet dry,” using military terminology made him feel like one of the cool kids. “In five hours and twenty-one minutes. They are battling a headwind that is stronger than expected, so that could be delayed. The first pair is one hour and thirty-four minutes ahead.”

  “Interesting. Connect me with Smythe.”

  “Colonel Bishop?” Smythe answered immediately. “You see the problem?”

  “I see one problem, and maybe one opportunity.”

  “Opportunity, Sir?”

  Before I decided whether we really had an opportunity or not, I needed more info. “If we move your team around, how many do you need to secure the southern camp?”

  “Against six guards?” Smythe asked. All of our planning assumed the camps would be unguarded, because that was the intel we had at the time. Now, we had armed opposition. The whole reason we brought aboard Fabron’s team was in case the operation did not go as planned, because of course it wouldn’t. “Sir, they have the advantage of being on the defense. The tricky part is that the enemy will not worry about causing collateral damage. We can’t go into a firefight without the risk of hitting the people we’re trying to rescue.”

  “Colonel?” Fabron spoke. “I had extensive contact with lizards on Fresno. They won’t hesitate to shoot the prisoners, or use them as hostages. We have to hit them by surprise, or there won’t be anyone left for us to rescue.”

  “Shiiiiiit,” I groaned. “Any way you can infiltrate?”

  Smythe answered. “I do not see that as an option, Sir. That island is surrounded by nothing but ocean, that’s why it was chosen for the camp. Even if we employ stealth, the guards will hear our engines coming.” That was one major problem with using dropships for ground assault operations in an atmosphere. They were a compromise design, intended for use in air and in the vacuum of space. Their stubby wings meant they had to use turbines for lift when they flew slowly, and at any speed, they left a wake of turbulent air behind them. Skippy could hack any networked sensors around the planet, because instead of taking over each sensor, he simply told their network to ignore the inputs. Hacking into the squad-level tactical sensors typically carried by Kristang soldiers was tricky business, those devices were so simple and rugged and just plain dumb that they were resistant to hacking. “Skippy, what do you think? Can we get dropships onto that island without the lizards noticing?”

  “Ah, hmm, I wouldn’t try it, Joe. If they come in low over water, their turbines will kick up spray and there is no way to hide that. Same problem with coming in high and attempting to land, they would kick up a lot of dust. The lizards would all have to be sleeping to miss that.”

  “HALO jump?” I suggested. Parachuting down from high altitude, and popping the balloons at the last moment. could allow a team to land on the island.

  Fabron grunted. “My team has not practiced that type of jump,” he admitted.

  Smythe shot down my idea. “We didn’t bring enough of the proper gear with us, Sir. Those portable stealth generators are bulky, we needed the space in the cabins for the people we’re pulling off the surface.”

  “All right,” I admitted defeat. “We have to take them by surprise. That means we need to land in Storks instead of dropships.”

  Smythe responded with dry British humor. “May I remind you that we don’t have Stork aircraft?”

  “We don’t have any of them now,” I explained.

  “Ah. We will again resort to piracy?”

  “It’s kind of our thing, you know?”

  Fabron broke into the conversation. “Colonel, you mentioned an opportunity? I see only difficulties.”

  “Me too, mon ami,” Skippy sighed. “But, the mush in Joe’s monkey skull sees something that I don’t see, so let him talk. At worst, it will be amusing.”

  “The people from the northern camp Yankee are all loaded aboard aircraft,” I noted. “That is our opportunity.”

  Fabron took a moment to contemplate that thought. “I do not understand how-”

  “Commandant, if you want something at a store, you have two options, right? You can go to the store to pick it up.”

  “Yes,” the French soldier said slowly.

  “Or,” I figured by that time Smythe knew what I was thinking. “You can have it delivered.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

  We threw a plan together literally on the fly, as our Dragons were coasting toward the planet. Actually, the other dropships were coasting, I had mine rocketing ahead so Skippy could get better intel ASAP. As a result, we got into orbit ahead of the trailing dropships, and Skippy hacked into the planet’s rudimentary defense network, so we wouldn’t be detected. “This is less than perfect, Joe,” he complained.

  “What is the problem? The lizards don’t have a full SD network up here, just some old satellites. You have snuck us through more advanced sensors before.”

  “That’s the problem. This network is so crappy and patched together, I am having trouble getting it to work properly. Every time I take control of it, the damned thing glitches, and I have to scramble to prevent real data from being fed to the command center.”

  “Hell. That’s no good. Can those sensors really see us?”

  “The short answer is no. They might detect a normal Dragon, but I modified the stealth systems aboard these lizard pieces of crap. The danger of detection will come when Smythe’s ships are entering the atmosphere.”

  “Are we a ‘Go’, or should we reconsider?”

  “We’re a ‘Go’, I think. The good news is the satellite sensor network is so bad, it is constantly glitching and giving false data to the command center. The lizards down there are used to getting bogus alerts. If they did see us, they might think that data is a glitch, but we can’t take that risk. The real risk is some over-eager lizard monitoring sensors down there might be trying to win the coveted Employee of the Month award.”

  “Ha!” I relaxed a bit. “As if.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t joking about that. The command center recently had a new duty officer assigned, and this Larry is a real pain-in-the-ass eager beaver. His crew hates him, because he makes them log and investigate every sensor contact.

  My brain shorted out. Not from hearing that we had yet another problem, but because of something totally unexpected. “This lizard’s name is Larry?”

  “It’s something like ‘Lar-bar Buh-bar Buh-bar’, Joe. You know what lizard names are like. I shortened it for you.”

  “Got it. Is this Larry the Lizard going to be a problem for us?”

  “That depends. He is currently in an elevator, descending from the thirty-ninth floor of his apartment building. That jerk is on the way into the office.”

  That gave me an idea. “Hey, is that jerk currently alone?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “Because, if that elevator
were to suffer a fatally unfortunate malfunction, I would not lose sleep over it. If you know what I mean.”

  “Ah. Gotcha. You know, Joe, you should never skimp on elevator maintenance.”

  “I will make a note of it.”

  “Three, two, one, wow. Well, good thing I don’t have to clean up that mess. There’s a Larry-sized stain on the bottom of the elevator shaft. Yuck. Ok, well, now we have another decision to make.”

  The last thing I wanted right then was yet another problem. “What?”

  “Do we send flowers of condolence, or a fruit basket, to Larry’s family?”

  “How about we do neither, and imagine we did? It’s the thought that counts.”

  “True. Besides, Larry’s family hated him too.”

  After the tragic death of Larry the Unloved, I waited while Skippy merrily ransacked every database on the planet and beyond. “Um,” he said after I spent an anxious eight minutes imagining various ways the op could go sideways even before we got started. “Oopsy.”

  “Oopsy?”

  “Well, heh heh, we have a complication. It looks like the lizards down there are not the only beings who fear someone might try to steal their human hostages. The Thuranin don’t want to risk dealing with a third party. They are sending a starship, it should be here in a few days. It could have been here two days ago.”

  “Oh shit.” The blood drained from my face. “We could have a ship full of little green MFers jumping in on our heads at any moment?”

  “Apparently, yes. My guess is the LGMFs told the lizards an optimistic arrival date, to keep them honest. But, it is true that a ship could jump into orbit at any second.”

  “Freakin’ wonderful!” I threw up my hands.

  “If it helps, the ship they are sending is just a frigate, Joe. The Dutchman could take it in a fair fight.”

  “I am not a big fan of fair fights, Skippy. Alert Chang and Simms. Tell them I do not want them tangling with the Thuranin unless I give the order.”

  “Done. Hey, this might not be the best time to deliver bad news-”

  “That was not the bad news?”

  “There is another complication. Three of the humans are quite ill, and the lizards are concerned about protecting their investment. One adult and two children are in a Kristang hospital on the mainland.”

  Squeezing my fists for a count of ten helped me calm down. “Show me what you know.”

  It was bad news. It was not catastrophic news. The hospital was not in a densely populated city, it was not in a city at all. It was a small, almost abandoned building in an almost abandoned town, on the seacoast of the western ocean. My guess was, the lizards looked for the hospital that was closest to the camp where the humans had been held, and found a place where the locals would not protest too much about having filthy, disease-ridden aliens dumped in their laps. The town’s original reason for being was to support a military base that was now closed, so the hospital had specialized isolation gear for dealing with bioweapon risks. That gear was not guaranteed to be in functional condition, but the local clan leaders could claim they had taken measures to protect their people, bah blah blah. We had a depleted and traumatized STAR team, Commandos without enough time with their new and unfamiliar Kristang gear, and the entire team did not have enough time to train and prepare for an operation that had been thrown into disarray before it began. Now we had three widely-scattered objectives, four if you considered the two flights of Storks to be separate targets. “Do you know if the prisoners at the hospital are able to be moved? If they are real sick, the rescue might kill them.”

  “You should not count on them being able to walk far,” Skippy answered. “But they aren’t in immediate danger of dying. The info I have is a bit out of date, it’s the best I can do, Joe.”

  “Oh, what the hell. Connect me with Smythe. He loves a challenge, right?”

  There was an uncomfortable silence after I told our STAR team leader the good news. “Smythe?” I prompted him.

  “Sir, if you are giving me an extra challenge for my birthday-”

  “Can we handle this?” I asked. “It will have to happen simultaneously with the other ops.”

  “I would prefer to take on the hospital last, it has the fewest number of people.” He was conducting triage not from callousness, but from sheer professionalism. People like Smythe could not afford to be sentimental, or people died needlessly. We could not risk the rescue of almost two hundred people, just to pick up three.

  “Not possible. We don’t have the time. Skippy just learned the Thuranin might arrive here any minute, to crash the party.”

  Another silence, this time broken by Fabron. “Colonel Bishop, is this your idea of a typical Tuesday?”

  “Ha,” I laughed without humor. “Something like that. I sent the details. Let me know what you think.”

  What they thought was that adding the hospital to the list of objectives could be done, if nothing major went wrong with that or any of the other operations. By ‘they’, I meant Smythe, Kapoor and Fabron. My main concern was Fabron and his team. They were unknowns, untested. Sure, the Commandos had gone into action on Fresno, and been training intensively with the Ruhar and Verd-Kris since then, but they had not experienced combat with the Merry Band of Pirates. None of their training included the need to conceal the fact that they existed. This op was a good place to start, because our cover story did not require us to avoid leaving human DNA behind. If the people from Paradise left DNA behind and the Kristang were somehow able to trace it back to a particular person, that would actually help sell the cover story of the raid being conducted by UNEF. The lizards would never believe the Ruhar had not authorized and enabled the raid, and I didn’t care. Still, I worried that the Commandos did not have an instinct to conceal their connection to the Merry Band of Pirates. Someone might do something without thinking, and blow our secret out in the open.

  Smythe was in charge of the ground forces, I only interfered if he proposed something that would jeopardize the overall operation. That only happened when I knew something he didn’t, and that only happened when I forgot to tell him something important. Or when Skippy just mentioned something he forgot to tell me about. Smythe was right about the hospital op being at the bottom of the priority list. If we didn’t have to worry about a Thuranin frigate jumping in on top of our heads at any moment, I would have agreed to conduct the hospital rescue after we got everyone else. Since we couldn’t change the facts, Smythe reluctantly assigned three people to the hospital retrieval, we were limited to three because that is how many sets of HALO parachutes we had aboard the dropships. Frey and Grudzien would bring with them the only Commando soldier who had experience with HALO jumps, Capitaine Camille Durand. As we didn’t have enough dropships to assign one to the hospital, the three soldiers would need to parachute in, infiltrate the hospital, extract the three humans and exfiltrate to someplace where a Dragon could retrieve them. Uh, ‘exfiltrate’ is a military term for sneaking away from a place you snuck into. Depending on the size and nature of the opposition, Frey’s team might have to make a lot of noise, so the ‘sneaking’ part would be Overcome By Events. At that point, they would have to conduct a retreat under fire to get picked up. Frey was smart, she knew we would not bring a Dragon full of people into a hot landing zone, so she needed to be sure the LZ, ingress and egress flight paths were clear. That could require a lengthy retreat and delay the retrieval.

  Having decided how to extract people from the hospital, we had the issue that Capitaine Durand was not in the same dropship as Frey and Grudzien, nor was Durand’s dropship equipped with parachute gear. The two Dragons had to maneuver close enough for Durant to transfer from one to the other, pulling herself hand over hand along a thin line because we hadn’t brought any jetpacks with us. With that anxiety-inducing complication out of the way, all the pieces were on the chess board. Now all we had to do was execute a flawless operation, and hope the Thuranin didn’t arrive early to spoil the party. Easy.
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  Frey and Grudzien helped Durand get her parachute gear attached in the rear cabin of the Dragon. “This Kristang gear works pretty similarly to the hamster parachutes you have trained with,” Frey assured the other woman.

  “You have done a HALO jump with Ruhar gear?” Durand asked, checking the latches on the front of her mech suit. She had briefly worn Kristang powered armor during Legion training, to get her familiar with the capabilities of enemy equipment and their strengths and weaknesses. The hardshell armor was stiff and uncomfortable and heavier than the flexible Ruhar skinsuit she was used to, but the suit assigned to her had advanced capabilities provided by the alien AI. She could not believe that the team were trusting their lives to a beer-can-shaped ancient intelligence named ‘Skippy’, but the STAR team trusted the prickly alien, and she really didn’t have any choice in the matter.

  “No,” Frey admitted. “That’s Skippy’s analysis.”

  Durand looked the team leader in the eyes. “Has Skippy jumped with either set of gear?”

  “You know the answer to that,” Frey flashed a smile, and tugged Durand’s parachute straps tighter, without any need to. The straps adjusted themselves. “Trust your equipment, it will set you down safely. Follow my lead if you get into trouble.”

  Durand wriggled her shoulders to get comfortable in the suit, and checked Frey’s parachute pack when the Canadian woman turned her back. “Looks good. The equipment I trust. Kristang gear is rugged and simple, it works fine if it’s properly maintained.”

  “See? Nothing to worry about.” Frey gestured for Grudzien to have his pack checked.

  “Do you,” Durand lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Trust the AI?”

  “Hey!” Skippy’s voice echoed in the Dragon’s rear compartment. “I can hear you. Of course Captain Frey trusts me, for I am the very model of trustworthiness.”

  Grudzien couldn’t miss the opportunity to set the record straight. “Except when you forget something.”