Valkyrie Rising (Warrior's Wings Book Two) Read Online Free PDF Page B

transmissions, including lightband, and just try very hard not to be noticed. If you have to use those weapons, you’ve already half failed your assignment.”
    “Aye aye, ma’am.”
    Nadine fell silent, trying not to let her grim mood show on her face. The young woman across the screen didn’t need that weighing on her now, of all times. It had been a long two months, getting the tether in place, setting up the new facilities planet-side, and making the place ready for war… Productive as well, but long.
    Now it was time for TF5 to move on. They were scheduled to do a sweep of the Hayden System before patrolling a series of stars that the enemy was likely to pass through in the next few weeks and months if they were following a logarithmic search pattern as the intelligence people predicted.
    With so much strategic depth, the human worlds would be difficult to find, but the flipside was that it was damned near impossible to track the enemy ships. No one had ever bothered setting up pickets through empty star systems, there had never been a need until now. And while the UNF was rushing to make up for that oversight, it was still almost impossible to locate two or three starships in a sphere of space measured in hundreds of light-years.
    She sighed. There was so much work to do, and they were working against a clock no one could see.
    Nadine focused on the screen again. “Commander. Good luck with your new assignment.”
    “Thank you, ma’am.” Elize saluted.
    Nadine returned the salute then shut the com link down before keying into the inter-ship com and contacting the main bridge. “Status, Captain.”
    “We’re primed to move on your orders, ma’am. The squadron shows all green on all boards,” Patrick returned confidently. “We are ready, ma’am.”
    “Very good, then, make for Jump Point Alpha. One gravity acceleration.”
    “Aye, ma’am. Jump Point Alpha, one-g.”
    The ships of the squadron rumbled to life, their VASIMR drives warming from standby to full operation. She watched with satisfaction on the screens as the ships broke orbit in formation, starting to build speed as they adjusted their trajectory to intercept Alpha Jump Point. She checked her numbers quickly, a recheck really, to ensure that they would catch the point on time, but wasn’t really concerned about it.
    Jump points waxed and waned according to a complicated set of interactions that still puzzled researchers after several decades. Partly it was the gravetic interactions of a complex system, particularly ones with several large gas giants in the outer orbits, but gravity tides alone only explained part of the mystery that was the jump points. The rest of the numbers were believed to be split among distant pulsar interaction, uncharted singularities, so-called dark matter, and god alone knew what else.
    The only positive side, from the point of view of ship handlers, was that the waxing and waning was predictable. They had two days to catch the peak gravity tide at Ares’s Jump Point Alpha, which would give them best speed to Hayden. From Hayden, the squadron would circle back towards Earth Space, along the west galactic edge of the explored systems, where the aliens were expected to be searching if they followed the pattern the few bits of available data suggested they would.
    *****
     
    Hayden
    Jump Point Alpha
     
    The squadron punched through the fabric of space-time, bleeding speed unnaturally as it roared into Hayden’s gravity well and its systems rebooted.
    “Screens up!”
    “Report,” Patrick ordered from where he was strapped into his station.
    “Local zone, all clear.”
    “Long-range data compiling now. We’ll have eyes on in twenty seconds.”
    “We’ve got telemetry incoming from the picket drones.”
    “Put it on my screens,” Patrick ordered.
    “Aye, Captain.”
    He examined the incoming code then opened the inter-ship com to the admiral’s flag deck. “Admiral, recon data from the picket drones