Valkyrie 4 Read online

  VALKYRIE 4

  By Todd Shryock

  Copyright 2015

  “So what do you think?” said the man standing behind the command console. He was tall, pushing at least a half-dozen inches past six feet, and the gold starbursts on the collar of his dark blue navy uniform put his rank at admiral.

  “I think it’s junk,” replied the man at the controls, his eyes scanning the readout screens supplying him with a continuous data flow on the ship’s engines and weapon systems. His uniform was similar, but the light-blue piping around the collar signified he was militia, not regular fleet, but after a decade of war, there was hardly any difference. Good captains, regardless of where they got their start, were still alive. Bad captains had long since been weeded out by the incessant fighting.

  “Nothing works right,” the captain lamented. “It’s not even close to ready.” His hair was dark brown with gray starting to show at the temples, and it was overdue to be cut to stay within regulations. He wasn’t physically imposing, having the athletic build of a distance runner, and his intelligence tests weren’t setting any records, but this was the one captain in the fleet who knew how to get results no matter what the odds. And right now, the fleet needed every advantage it could muster.

  “Captain Parks, this ship is more than ready,” the admiral said. “The engineers are working night and day on all the issues you see. They are minor, at best.”

  The captain snorted. “With all due respect, admiral, you won’t be on her when she breaks down in battle.”

  The admiral gritted his teeth. He wouldn’t normally tolerate such surliness from a captain, especially one not from the regular fleet, but this was Captain Parks, the hero of Gladius 9, the greatest victory of the war against the Kull -- a victory that turned a steady string of defeats into a stalemate and bought the fleet enough time to get more ships on the line. The media had made him into a hero, and rightly so. Parks was one of them -- a regular guy who answered the call of duty and quickly progressed through the ranks until he outpaced even the best regular fleet officers. He succeeded where so many other captains had failed, never mind the fact that half the task force was wrecked in the process. A victory was a victory and the public needed its heroes, and the navy needed its best captain at the helm of the ship that would win the war and end the carnage among the stars.

  “The engineers are working on the issues,” the admiral repeated. “She’ll work, Thomas, trust me.”

  Parks looked at the readouts and shook his head, then spun his chair to face the other man. “Admiral Stevens,” he said, choosing to stay formal, even though the admiral had opened the door by using his first name, “when I was a lieutenant, my captain told me to never trust an admiral.”

  Stevens raised an eyebrow. “Do you remember his name?” he asked, only half jokingly.

  “He’s dead, so he won’t be giving anyone any trouble,” Parks answered. “His cruiser was destroyed a few years ago while fighting along the Layhan Reach.”

  The admiral knowingly nodded. The Layhan Reach was a cluster of moons and asteroids orbiting a red dwarf star in a solar system that both sides coveted for its resources. Neither side could gain the upper hand, and it devolved into a series of small actions between light cruisers and destroyers, the only ships small enough to maneuver through all the rocky debris long enough to actually fight. Known as the black coffin assignment, most ships that were assigned there never came back.

  “The reason I bring that up is that there are so many problems with this ship, I don’t even know where to start,” Parks said, slightly shaking his head. “I understand the pressure you must be under to get this ship under way, but it won’t do us any good if she defeats herself in battle.”

  The admiral did his best to look concerned. The captain had no idea yet of what was at stake, and ready or not, the Valkyrie was going into action sooner rather than later. “Look,” Stevens said, “why don’t you make a priority list, and I’ll have the engineers work on those first. You’ll be in control of the process instead of some fleet knuckledragger who has his own sense of priorities.”

  Parks started to respond, but paused as a repair spider came clattering across the metal floor from an access tube, climbed up on the control panel and began scanning one of the narrow access panels. It extended a magnetic bit, placed it against the plastic shield several inches away from the bolt and began spinning the bit, tearing up bits of the plastic shell. After a moment, it stopped, beeped twice, then clattered back down onto the floor and into the access tube.

  “Even the repair bots don’t work,” Parks pointed out. “It doesn’t get much more basic than that.”

  A man wearing overalls and several belts full of electronic parts and testers stepped onto the bridge and froze when he saw the admiral.

  “Uh, excuse me, uh, sir,” he glanced at the captain and nodded once. “Did a spider happen to come this way?”

  Parks snorted. “Just left,” he said, thumbing toward the access tube.

  “Oh,” the engineer said.

  The admiral walked over and pointed to the spot where the spider drilled into the plastic. “A little off on the schematics?”

  The engineer looked at the scuffed plastic and frowned, scratching his bald head. “This ship is built on the hull of a Virginia-class cruiser and the bots are still acting like it’s a Virginia class boat, even though they have been programmed with the new schematic.” He paused and glanced toward the access tube. “Old habits are hard to break, even for bots, I guess.”

  Parks looked at the admiral.

  “The captain here has doubts this ship is space worthy and ready for her trials,” Stevens said to the engineer.

  The engineer contorted his face as he looked down at his scanning tool. “Well, we are short … ” he looked up and saw the admiral’s icy stare and stopped. “Uh, I mean we are shorthanded, but you know, everyone is shorthanded, but, uh, we are working hard and I think she’ll be ready in time.”

  “You think?” Parks said, incredulous.

  “Uh, yeah, we’ll be ready. Or at least we should be.”

  Parks shook his head.

  “You can leave now,” Steven told the engineer.

  “Oh, yes, sir,” he said, glancing up at the admiral then looking back down to the floor as he walked out.

  Parks sat in silence until he was sure the engineer was out of earshot. “That’s what I’m talking about. This whole ship is cobbled together and not ready.”

  Stevens walked over and leaned against the engineering control panel, partially sitting. “Thomas, I know this ship isn’t up to normal specifications,” he said, his voice serious. “Everything was rushed, that’s true, but we have no choice. This ship is our best hope, and we are simply out of time. She has to launch.”

  Parks shook his head and threw up his hands. “I know you want to get this weapon into action, but rushing it just puts it at risk. If you take another month and get everything settled in and working, it will be unstoppable.”

  The admiral touched a key on the digital pad and the door slid shut, locking them into the small bridge. He took a moment to gather his thoughts before speaking.

  “We don’t have a month. We may not even have a week.”

  Parks squinted, trying to see what the admiral was keeping from him. “What do you mean? I thought the tide was shifting to our favor -- and this ship will clinch it.”

  Stevens ran a hand through his closely shorn gray hair and looked out the simulated view port at the front of the bridge, watching the computer track the tugs and supply vessels running errands. Hundreds of tiny ships and self-propelled work platforms zipped through the giant steel skeleton of the Genesis ship-building station currently holding the Valkyrie in place. The small rocky moon, its mineral resources long since stripped, hung just below them, partially blocking the view of planet Navis and its swirl of blue and green lakes hidden beneath wispy white clouds.

  “Our intel says the Kull have their own secret ship,” Stevens said, pursing his lips. “We lost three scout ships and a stealth bat before they moved it and we lost track of it. Analysis shows that it’s most likely biologically based, probably capable of self-replication and repair.”

  “Biologic? Didn’t we look into that?”

  The admiral nodded. “Yeah, but it never went anywhere. We could get it to work on a molecular level, but nothing beyond assembling some basic shapes and as soon as we put it in a vacuum, the whole thing died. After that, we stuck with our proven designs and worked on the shielding and the weapons.”

  “The Valkyrie series,” Parks said.

  The admiral nodded. “Valkyrie 1 and 2 never made it past the simulator stage. Valkyrie 3 was built on the hull of a Mars-class destroyer, but the frame was barely done when the weapons people needed more thrust to carry the weapons payload and the shield generators, so we upgraded to this.” He patted the control panel for emphasis.

  “And this payload -- there’s one weapon you haven’t told me anything about it, and it doesn’t appear in any of the briefings,” he said, studying the admiral’s face.

  “You weren’t supposed to be told anything -- at least not until we were closer to the target -- but I don’t think that’s really fair,” he said. He glanced at the viewport, then back to the captain. “It’s called the P-34-G in the labs, but we call it the ball buster. It’s a chain reaction device that starts with a simple atomic explosion, then acts as a self-contained perpetuating catalyst as it continues to split apart the atoms of anything around it, which in turn is conve
rted into a catalyst for the next explosion. It yanks apart the connections at a molecular level, ripping apart all the matter around it in explosions of every shape and size.”

  “Until there is nothing left,” Parks said. He had enough of a science background to understand what the end result would be. “It’s a planet killer.”

  The admiral nodded. “Dropped on the Kull homeworld, the war is over. We win.”

  Parks chewed on his bottom lip. “You know the location of the alien homeworld?”

  The admiral looked away. “We are narrowing it down. I think as their casualties have mounted, they have more inexperienced captains than before, and they are making sloppy mistakes. Our best scouts are working the possibilities even as we speak. We’ll find it eventually.”

  “And when we do, this ship delivers the goods?”

  Nodding, the admiral laid out the rest of the details. “The new plasma shell shields will stop any weaponry the conventional alien fleet has. This ship is virtually invulnerable to conventional enemy fire, at least from a ship-based system. The technology on this ship signals the dawn of a new age of ships. Everything built before her will quickly become obsolete. Once we have the location of the home planet, you will fly to it, smash your way through whatever defenses they have, drop the ball buster on them and end this war by torching every one of those bastards.”

  Parks took a deep breath and tried to take in everything the admiral had just told him. Half the systems on this ship were more theory than practice, but if they worked, what the admiral said was true. The war could be ended. But by destroying an entire alien culture?

  “You seem troubled,” the admiral said.

  Parks leaned onto his knees and rubbed his fingers together. “Can’t we just threaten them with it? Force them to surrender? Do we really have to destroy the entire planet and its civilization?”

  The admiral stood up and threw a hand in the air exasperated. “Jesus, Tom, are you going soft on me? You picked a hell of a time to become a liberal.”

  “Destroying an entire civilization seems cruel and perhaps a bit immoral. They are the only other intelligent species we’ve ever encountered in all of our exploration of the galaxy, so it seems a shame we have to destroy their planet.”

  “Tell that to the dead,” Stevens said. “Or their families,” he added, wishing he had a qualified captain from the regular fleet for this assignment. These militia-types tended to think too much and lacked a truly killer instinct, though Parks had proven the exception in the past.

  Parks felt the verbal jab. “We’ve all lost friends,” he said quietly.

  “Some more than others,” the admiral said, his eyes boring into him. “Look, if you aren’t up to this mission … ”

  Parks eyes met the admiral’s. “I’m up for it, sir.”

  The admiral gave him a bit of a scowl. “There can’t be any question in your mind. Are you sure you are up for this?”

  Parks thought for a moment. An entire planet? A civilization stretching back probably thousands of years, gone in an instant? Am I really up for this?

  The admiral spoke again. “In case your judgment gets cloudy, I’ll leave this.” He tapped a button and a rapidly scrolling list of names rolled across the viewscreen so rapidly he couldn’t make any of them out.

  “What is it?” Parks asked.

  “Our war dead,” he said, his eyes fixed on the screen, a solemn look on his face. “All twenty-six million of them.”

  Parks watched the screen for a moment more. He knew that somewhere on that list were the admiral’s two sons and a daughter, all KIA. As he looked up at the admiral, who was still staring at the screen lost in thought, all his doubts vanished. The damn Kull had started the war, and had it not been for the heroic actions of the sons and daughters of millions of families, Earth might be gone, suffering the same fate as some of the outer colonies and countless bases and outposts. The Kull had no mercy.

  “Admiral,” he said, waiting until the other man snapped out of his reverie to look at him again. “I’m your man. I can do this. I will do this.” He looked up at the rapidly scrolling names and nodded. “For them.”

  The admiral gave him a slight smile. “I knew I picked the right captain for this job.” He walked over to him and placed his hand on his shoulder, giving it a rough squeeze. “Avenge them all,” he whispered.

  The admiral turned to leave the bridge.

  “Oh, admiral, one more thing,” Parks said, causing Stevens to hesitate. “When does the rest of the crew get here? The briefing I read said there would be seven others.”

  A wry smile crossed the admiral’s face. “Change in plans. Another upgrade that will keep you in space longer.” He crossed to the control panel and entered several commands. A three-dimensional cloud of pixels appeared, along with a distorted voice. “Hold on,” he said. “A few minor adjustments.” He punched several virtual keys on the control console until the pixels were replaced with the image of a human lieutenant in his mid-thirties, his uniform impeccably pressed and his brown hair shorn close to his head in the traditional fleet style, leaving his dark eyes as his most distinguishable feature.

  “Lieutenant Connor reporting for duty, sir,” the hologram said, saluting the admiral.

  “AI?” Parks complained. “That’s great as a supplement, but not for an entire crew.”

  “But this is new tech,” the admiral said. “Connor is some genius’ acronym for something, but all I can remember is that the C stands for command. Regardless, Connor here replaces your crew, doesn’t use any air, food or water. He also never fails to do what’s ordered and doesn’t feel fear.”

  Parks snorted. “Then why not just send Connor on the mission alone?”

  The admiral laughed out loud. “Technology only gets you so far. If the mission were just to fly the ship to a planet and drop a bomb, old digital Dick here could do just fine. But what happens when the alien biological supership drops in out of nowhere with its guns blazing?”

  “I’m fully programmed to learn from enemy tendencies,” Connor said, sounding hurt by the accusations.

  Parks ignored the hologram, speaking to the admiral. “If the alien biological superweapon shows up, I’m probably not going to have any idea of what to do other than shoot it.”

  “A logical, if obvious, solution,” Connor said.

  The admiral looked at the hologram, then to Parks, laughing. “Looks like they programmed it with some attitude. You might have your hands full with this one.” He turned to leave.

  “When are the trials?” Parks yelled after the admiral as the door slid open.

  “Right now,” he said over his shoulder, just before the door shut.

  Parks looked at the hologram, which stared at him with the intensity that only a lifelong navy spacer can muster. Whoever Connor was programmed to resemble, the guy took his job very seriously. “Shall I start the ignition sequence, sir?”

  “First, don’t insult me in front of the admiral,” Parks said.

  Connor nodded. “Sorry, sir.”

  “Second, know that I’m not a big fan of independent-thinking AI programs.”

  Connor nodded again. “Noted, sir.”

  “Third, the first time you screw something up, I’m tossing your data card out the airlock and press ganging the first freighter crew I can find to replace you. Understood?”

  “I will do my best to not screw anything up, captain.”

  Parks leaned back in the command chair. “Good. Now start the ignition sequence.”

  ***

  “I said fire the port thrusters!” Parks barked.

  Connor, sitting in the chair to his right, worked his virtual hands across the command console. “It’s not me sir, they aren’t responding.”

  “Warning, collision course,” a computer’s feminine voice said in a monotone that downplayed the seriousness of the giant cargo bin they were about to plow into. “Suggested course of action: Fire port thrusters.”

  “No shit, Betty!” Parks said as he worked to reroute power to the other thrusters.

  Next to him, Connor shook his head. “All power modules have failed to activate the thrusters. It must be the thrusters themselves.”

  “Warning,” the computer started again.

  “Shut up, computer!”