Valkyrie (Expeditionary Force Book 9)

by Craig Alanson

  “Ugh,” Skippy sighed. “Joe, one of the lizard pilots is bitching about landing inside the compound. He says there is not enough clearance for a last-minute emergency go-around if necessary, that the landing zone violates safety regulations. He is right about that.”

  I stared at the display. Since when did Kristang warriors care about safety regs? “Tell him that landing in the compound is an order, damn it.”

  “I already did that, you numbskull. He is demanding to land at an alternate site over the hill inland, it is about twenty kilometers away.”

  “Shit. Ok, well, tell him we can’t assure that alternate LZ is secure, and if he runs into trouble there and loses his passengers, it will be his responsibility.”

  He was silent for a minute, presumably while he pretended to be the voice of the local commander and argued with the troublesome pilot. “That did it, Joe. He insisted if there is a crash while landing in the compound, that I take responsibility. Ha! Like that’s ever going to happen. The warrior caste never accepts blame when something bad happens.”

  The Storks continued their descent, with the second aircraft hanging back to give the first plenty of time to set down carefully inside the walled compound. The lead pilot was genuinely reluctant to land in the designated spot, he circled the compound three times, and I was growing worried he might see something that wasn’t right. Finally, he skillfully hovered and lowered his aircraft with its tail tucked into a corner, leaving plenty of room for the second Stork.

  So the second aircraft didn’t have an opportunity to waste time, I asked Skippy to cause a power surge in one engine. Before he could do that, the pilots of that Stork declared they actually were experiencing a problem, and they came right in without any delay. That aircraft set down in a cloud of dust, and once it settled on its landing skids and the turbine began to spool down, control of the operation passed to Smythe on the ground.

  Timing was going to be tricky. The first Stork kept its doors closed until the second aircraft’s engine had powered down, and then for a decent interval to let the swirling dust in the compound be cleared by the constant breeze coming from the sea. During that time, it was reasonable that Smythe’s team be taking cover rather than standing out in the open. After that, the first Stork’s door popped open and one of the guards stepped out, squinting in the bright sunlight, looking around for the clan military team that was supposed to there to provide security.

  At that point, Smythe could not keep his people concealed any longer, or the lizards aboard the aircraft would get suspicious. “Kapoor, you’re up,” the STAR team leader said quietly into his helmet microphone.

  Major Kapoor and another soldier stepped out on a balcony overlooking the compound’s expansive courtyard. Because of the railing and the angle, it could not be seen from the courtyard below that the two mech-suited humans were standing on a platform to make them appear taller. Kapoor cradled the rifle in his right hand and waved with his left, using the Kristang gesture of keeping his palm facing toward himself.

  Through the translator, Smythe spoke. “Move the humans into the bunker, quickly. Through the double doors and down the steps. Move! We are covering you, but you are exposed out there.”

  The situation was odd, and the Kristang might have questioned the order coming from someone they didn’t know, but the powered armor was a convincing display. Hardshell armor with faceplates down set to opaque flat black was a sign that trouble could be imminent, and that spurred the aircraft crews into moving. The side doors of both Storks swung open wide and guards stepped out, urging the humans out.

  “That’s all four guards,” Smythe muttered to himself. “Skippy, you have eyes inside both cockpits?”

  “Affirmative,” the arsehole AI confirmed. “Targeting data has been transferred to sniper teams.”

  At that moment, four icons on the left side of Smythe’s visor lit up green, indicating the four snipers had solid locks on their targets. The four guards out in the open, were not a problem. The four pilots in the cockpits of both aircraft, were a problem. He waited a moment while a woman, a human woman, tumbled down the steps of the second Stork and for a moment, one guard was obscured behind a child as he clubbed the woman with the butt of his rifle. Stunned, she lay on the stones of the compound’s courtyard, holding up a hand in a futile attempt to ward off her attacker.

  The lizard guard took a step forward to kick to woman, and Smythe saw the target was no longer obscured. “Tally-ho,” he said in a calm and clear voice.

  The four guards jerked as they were stuck by reduced-power explosive-tipped rounds, intended to minimize blood splatter while assuring the targets dropped instantly dead. Those ordinary Kristang rifles fired ordinary ammunition, and the people who operated the rifles were not designated as snipers.

  The people tagged as snipers used rifles that were modified only slightly, to fire a special guided round that was longer than standard ammunition. With the four pilots inside the aircraft and the windows tuned to black to keep out the hot sunlight, the snipers could not actually see their designated targets, not even with infrared sensors. Instead, they relied on targeting guidance provided by Skippy, who conveniently had a view by hacking into flight recorder cameras on the rear bulkhead of each cockpit.

  To hit those particular targets, each rifle fired a pair of rounds with a single gentle pressure on the trigger. The first round had a shaped-charge tip, designed to burn a hole clear through from the outer skin of the aircraft to the inner liner of the cockpit. Those first rounds flew a subsonic, curving path designed to avoid the tough structural frames of the aircraft, and clear a hole in a thin part of the Stork’s skin. The four lead rounds did their jobs flawlessly, and the pilots were stunned by the sudden surge of air pressure as the ammunition punched through the fuselage. Following only twelve meters behind and also moving at subsonic speed, the second round from each rifle flew the same curving path and found a clear hole where tough composite skin used to be. All four rounds struck their targets and mushroomed, the soft noses of the ammunition flattening and pieces spalling off to cause additional damage. Four pilots were hit and four pilots ceased to exist, their bodies torn apart by kinetic energy. Only one fragment went all the way through a pilot and out the other side to splat against a console, where it bounced off to harmlessly rattle to a stop on the floor.

  “Four kills,” Skippy announced without his usual boastfulness. “No collateral damage in the cockpit. The aircraft are operational.”

  “Thank you for the assist,” Smythe knew that feeding the AI’s ego was always a good idea. “Team, move in.”

  Captain Frey kept driving the truck, through rain that alternated between a steady drizzle to sudden downpours, until they were eight kilometers from the hospital. “Katie,” Skippy whispered in her ear while she was trying to maneuver the awkward vehicle across a low spot in the road. The culvert under the road had become clogged with debris, causing the stream to back up and flow half a foot deep across the road. The water itself was not a problem, she was worried the rushing water might have undermined the roadway. When the AI called, she had slowed and was about to send Durand out to test whether the road could hold the truck’s weight.

  “That is Captain Frey, please,” she clenched her teeth and let the truck coast to halt, its wheels sticking in the mud. Joking around with Skippy aboard the ship was tolerable, sometimes it could even be fun. And like every one of the Pirates, she didn’t really have a choice, Skippy so constantly sought and demanded attention, it was impossible to ignore him.

  But inappropriate familiarity during a potential combat situation was unacceptable.

  “Sorry,” he sounded more hurt than apologetic.

  “What is it?” She demanded.

  “You had best ditch the truck. There is a cluster of buildings about two kilometers ahead of you. I am not seeing any heat signatures or lights, but sensor coverage of the area is spotty, sorry about that. The road ahead goes through the town before you get to the hosp
ital, it is mostly abandoned, however there have been reports of lizards who refused to go when the area was evacuated. A patrol scouted the town before the hospital was re-opened, they saw signs of recent habitation, nothing to worry about.”

  “Nothing for them to worry about. We can’t risk being seen. Do you have sensor coverage inside the hospital?”

  “Partially. Again, I am sorry. There just isn’t much for me to work with down there, and the satellite network is an obsolete piece of junk. The good news is, I found a route up a back stairway and through a corridor in a section of the hospital building that was condemned. It will bring you within twenty meters of the isolation rooms where the three humans are being kept. You can-”

  “Can we go back a bit? What do you mean ‘condemned’?”

  “That part of the structure is considered unsound. There was an earthquake about- Hmm, maybe the term should be ‘groundquake’. Although of course the ground was shaking, if the air was shaking you would just call it ‘wind’. There should be a word for-”

  To her right, Durand was staring at her with increasing alarm at the AI’s absent-minded babbling. “Skippy,” Frey interrupted. “Get to the point. The building’s structure is unsound?”

  “Oh, sure. I got distracted. There’s a lot going on, as you know. I am currently talking with Smythe, Fabron, Joe, Simms, Chang, and Nagatha, plus I am intercepting all-”

  “Talk to me.”

  “Ok! The groundquake cracked that part of the building, and it wasn’t repaired. They put up signs and locked some of the doors, after two lizard boys were playing around in there and got injured when part of the ceiling fell on them.”

  She took a calming breath and nodded to Durand. The nod was intended to mean ‘This is nothing unusual’. “How are we supposed to use the condemned part of the building?”

  “Um, by being careful?”

  “Skippy, we are wearing mech suits. They are heavy.”

  “Ooh. Good point. In that case, you should be very careful.”

  “The bug says it’s marginal,” Frey whispered instinctively, though sealed up in the powered armor suit, she could have shouted and no one outside would have heard her. The bug she referred to was a scout drone, a bit of Thuranin technology enhanced by Skippy. Guided by her eye movements as tracked by her suit’s visor, she had sent the little machine to crawl along the route Skippy had suggested. Immediately after the bug entered the building, she had seen a problem. The ceiling there was collapsed in piles of rubble, because the whole second floor above had fallen in. Twice, she had to direct the bug to backtrack, until it found a route up where they needed to go. The little machine had scanned the floor and found cracks both large and small. She was more concerned about the small cracks that were hard to see. “There are weak spots in the floor we will need to avoid. Coordinates have been sent to your suits.”

  “Skippy?” Grudzien asked as he crouched in overgrown bushes at the edge of the forest, fifty meters from the back door of the hospital building. The rain had slackened to a fitful drizzle, stirred by gusty winds. Within six minutes, Skippy predicted, another downpour would sweep over the area, providing cover for them to race across the open area between the tree line and the nearest wall of the building. Across that fifty meters was a muddy drainage ditch, a roadway that was cracked with patches of grass seeking sunlight, and then a swath of weeds and neglected shrubs that grew one or two meters high. Their objective was a broken window rather than a door. The door, even if not locked, could make noise when they opened it, and the doorframe might be bent. The window they had selected as their entry point had a bent frame with half the composite ‘glass’ missing. In their powered armor, it would be easy to bend the frame out of the way and gain entry. That window led to the ground floor that should be relatively stable, even for people in heavy mech suits. To rescue the humans, they had to climb to the third floor, treading along surfaces that the scout drone had scanned and noted weak areas. “Can you program our suits, to walk precisely enough so we avoid stepping on any weak spots?”

  “I could do that, but it would be a bad idea. That floor is bound to shift while you’re walking, you will need to use your suit sensors in active scan mode to avoid trouble.”

  That did not sound like a particularly wise idea to Justin Grudzien. “Will an active scan be detected?”

  “No,” Skippy scoffed. “The electrical equipment in that part of the hospital is so old and worn out, it is generating enough noise that even I am having trouble getting an accurate picture of what’s in there.”

  “We go one at a time,” Frey declared. “The structure close to the wall we need to breach is stable, we can gather there.”

  “I will take point,” Durand volunteered.

  “Negative,” Frey did not take her eyes off the building. Something was moving around in the condemned portion, she had a brief moment of alarm before her thermal image resolved the blob into some type of local rodent. The animal scurried along a cable hanging from the broken ceiling, then out of sight. “I want Grudzien up front.”

  “I weigh less than him,” Durand insisted.

  Frey hesitated. That was true, although in powered armor, the weight of the soldier inside was not a major difference. The real question was whether she trusted the commando, who she had not served with before.

  “She has a point, Ma’am,” Grudzien conceded. “If my fat ass falls through the floor, this will be over before it starts.”

  “All right, Durand. You go first,” Frey almost asked if the other woman remembered how to activate her suit’s scanner. If needed, Frey could turn on the device remotely.

  The heavy rain squall swept in as Skippy predicted, and the three darted in single-file across the gap. Durand reached the broken window first and lifted the frame out of the way for the other two to squeeze through, then she rolled in feet-first. The floor was covered in the clear broken ceramic material that had been the window, and she slipped before someone steadied her by grabbing an ankle.

  “Durand,” Frey whispered. “Go.”

  With the synthetic vision of her visor, Camille Durand did not need to turn on her suit’s external lights to see ahead of her, and the weak spots found by the scout probe were highlighted. Stepping as gingerly as she could in the hardshell suit, she climbed stairs that were slick with mud, algae and a local type of moss, plus some kind of yellowish goo dripping down from the ceiling. Halfway across the second floor, a crack widened in front of her, and she reached out to hold onto a piece of metal sticking out of a wall as the floor swayed. Her visor was flashing orange lights, then red. “This is not going to work,” she advised while inching carefully backward, watching the crack in front of her grow wider.

  “Durand,” Frey was watching the sensor feed from the other woman’s suit. The original weak spots were now joined by a cross-crossing patchwork of lines representing cracks. “Come back down here. Looks like we’ll need to go in through the front door.”

  “Captain Frey?” Grudzien called from the south side of the ground floor. “I might have another way up.”

  “There is no other way to the third floor,” Skippy insisted. “You think I missed-”

  “You are not thinking like a monkey,” he pointed above him, where the second and third floors were missing, along with part of the building’s roof. Rain dripped down on him, repelled by the field covering his faceplate.

  “What?” The AI laughed. “You plan to fly?”

  “Yes,” Grudzien patted the toolbelt on the outside of his suit. “Like Batman.”

  “Ok,” Skippy admitted, when all three had used their nanofiber lines and belt winches to pull themselves silently up to the third floor, where the structure was relatively stable. “That was pretty clever. Sometimes you monkeys can be-”

  “What do you see in there?” Frey ignored the AI’s need for constant chatter.

  “The three human prisoners. Um, they are not in good condition. You should not expect any of them to walk far on the
ir own. They are alone in the isolation room right now. In the sort of open office area beyond that door are two medical personnel, it looks like they are asleep, they haven’t moved at all in the past ten minutes. Plus the two security guards I told you about. I am feeding a schematic to you now.”

  “Security guards are not wearing armor?” Frey asked for confirmation after she glanced at the schematic. She would have preferred to send a sensor bug into the occupied section of the hospital, but Skippy warned the windows and doorways might have scanning devices that could detect drones and she didn’t want to risk alerting the lizards that someone was watching them.

  “Based on their heat signatures, no. They may be wearing some type of body armor panels, I can’t tell. There is a bunch of other equipment in there generating heat, and a lot of electrical interference. Sorry, that’s all I can tell you from up here.”

  “Breaching charges are ready,” Durand announced. She and Grudzien had placed a flexible cord in a broad oval on the wall, it adhered in place with microscopic fibers that dug into the wall. The cord would turn into plasma and burn a neat hole through the wall, a microsecond later a shaped charge in the center of the oval would blow the section of wall inward.

  “On my mark,” Frey held up three fingers of her left hand, right hand cradling her rifle. Both safeties, she confirmed with a downward glance, were off. Ammo selection was for non-explosive rounds, they could not risk hitting the prisoners. For the same reason, they would not be using grenades or rockets. Breach the wall to gain access to the occupied part of the hospital. Eliminate opposition in the immediate area, then Grudzien would cover the stairway and elevators, while the Canadian and French Army captains secured the three people to be rescued. Retreat would be accomplished by going out the third-story windows and rappelling down lines to the ground, with Grudzien getting to the ground first and providing covering fire for the retreat. Based on sketchy personnel records, Skippy thought there might be four other guards, plus a half-dozen medical staff somewhere around the hospital complex. The primitive and glitch-prone nature of the local sensor infrastructure had the AI frustrated that he couldn’t pinpoint the location of every possible hazard.