The Banshee’s blacked out dropship landed in a wide valley among the foothills that separated the Lanstead plain from the Sentry mountains. Kayla and the rest of her platoon, dressed in civilian gear and sporting night vision headsets, grabbed their packs and hustled off the transport as quickly as possible. Outside, thick clouds obscured the stars, leaving the valley in near total darkness.
The Rangers didn’t wait for the following drops bringing the rest of Bravo company. While their craft climbed away into the night, they shouldered packs and began the long march towards the distant farms and Valkyrie’s newest base on Caldera.
The capture of the ghost fortress from Rayker had handed a challenging problem to the organization. An incredible new Jotnar installation was open to exploration and study, with its distant sites spread out over the whole planet, connected by a powerful teleportation network. The downside was that, as far as anybody could guess, Rayker knew where all of them were.
Even from the beginning of colonization, League satellites had been placed in orbit around the planet to help map the surface. With the arrival of VennZech, hundreds of sophisticated communication and monitoring stations had been launched to a variety of inclinations, allowing them to cover Caldera’s entire surface. Rayker would certainly be able to access, if not outright control, any of these, and would be able to watch the Ghost Fortresses’ surface access points at will.
The first teams of researchers from Valkyrie’s Research and Development Collective had made do with a year’s worth of long storage rations. The food was tasteless, but sufficient to keep them alive beneath the surface until they could complete their mission. Though the scientists and engineers had grumbled about the conditions, they worked hard. Beneath the Sentry mountains, they studied the base’s teleportation device, mastered its technology and operation, then dismantled it.
The machine was broken down into portable packages. While Mountain Rangers from Alpha company covered the mountains in small patrols, the Collective team left the base in pairs. They moved only at night, using thermal insulation suits to make them nearly invisible to infra-red. With the satellites distracted by the conspicuous Ranger teams, the engineers were able to carry their cargo down into the foothills, dozens of miles from anywhere Rayker would have thought to look.
With Jack Fenway’s former smuggling skills, they had excavation drones moved covertly through Lanstead to create a new underground base; much smaller and simpler than the first. The teleporter was reassembled, reconnected to the network, and Valkyrie had its hidden entrance on Caldera, through which personnel and supplies could be fed into a growing foothold.
Working under an alias, Jack established a trucking company at the location. It was closer to the farms, but not too close. Smugglers plied their trade on Caldera every day, and an isolated location for a transport business was a believable cover. While he hired local drivers for real contracts, most of the activity on the base was done at night. Hundreds of specialists from the Collective were able to move into the ghost fortress and begin the real work of studying its secrets, so they could put together the missing pieces of the Jotnar story.
After hours of marching through the darkness, Kayla and the rest of her platoon arrived at the new site, known informally as the burrow. A thick temperate forest covered the gentle valley and surrounding hills, allowing the Rangers a relaxing afternoon walk on the final stretch. Once in the compound, they were directed through to the company building’s secure basement. They passed in groups through the teleportation system, and found themselves standing in the corridors of the Rackeye site. The place was bustling with activity, and the battalion’s advance team welcomed the platoon, and quickly showed them to their adapted quarters.
While they waited for a briefing, Kayla, Thandi and Bibi wandered around the facility. It was huge, and seemed to be destined mostly for housing personnel. The research teams had set up makeshift bunks in big halls, while some rooms had extensive plumbing for no other purpose, apparently, than washing or cleaning.
The girls followed hallways and corridors up to a group of luxurious offices, where the Collective’s senior researchers had set themselves up. Kayla was happy to find her old bootcamp lecturer Doctor Gilah, who happily welcomed them into her working space.
“Do you even have a window?” Kayla asked, gawping at the brightly lit, though clouded, pane of glass.
“Not really,” explained Gilah. “There are crevasses in the hillside that hide mirrors, and the sunlight bounces down here for a few hours of the day. It’s a nice touch though.”
Thandi crashed into an upholstered couch. “This is really nice,” she exclaimed. “I guess the Jotnar worked in style.”
“Oh er… no,” Gilah, said as she blushed. “I had it made and delivered from site four. Most of us have gotten a few luxuries, since we’ll be here for a few years.”
“Site four?” Kayla asked.
“Well, it’s a huge manufacturing plant,” Gilah explained. “Sort of like what we have on Tyr. Other sites extract basic materials from the planet and send them there, and it’s capable of producing anything you upload into the system. Quite incredible really. Synthetic leather, obviously.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Kayla narrowed her eyes. “So… you’re hollowing out my home world to make yourself a nice office?”
Thandi chuckled. “Come on Kayla, whatever they’re extracting would be tiny compared to the whole planet. How would it be any different from a colonist mine?”
“Oh well… of course,” Kayla, said, suddenly looking embarrassed. “But you should be supporting local businesses, all the same,” she finished lamely.
“Which would draw unacceptable attention to your dad’s cover,” Bibi chided her. “Don’t listen to her, Doctor Gilah, she’s overused her few brain cells for the day.”
Kayla scowled and slumped onto the couch. Thandi put an arm around her and smiled sympathetically.
“Well, we certainly don’t spoil ourselves,” Gilah said. “Besides, we don’t have time for much else beyond work. There’s so much to learn about this place.”
“Was it really built for war?” Bibi asked.
“It appears so. Site four’s schematic database contains dozens of weapon systems already known to Valkyrie. This site and some of the others were obviously meant to house soldiers. But we just can’t crack the final enigma—the last site, which remains impossible to access.”
“The Omega site?” Bibi asked keenly. “Our platoon has a few dozen guesses. Everything from Jotnar stasis machines to a DNA library.”
“The Collective pool favorite is a machine that contains uploaded Jotnar consciousnesses,” Gilah said with a smile. “But whatever it is, it’s drawing enormous power from the generator site. It must be something very special.”
“It’s for sure the reason Rayker is here,” Kayla said. “If you were an interstellar empire reduced to a few hundred survivors, you wouldn’t just want a place to hide out. You’d be looking for a base from which you could rebuild your forces.”
“But they didn’t,” Thandi pointed out. “The place is empty. Ergo, there is no force to rebuild. Even Rayker had to start making her army from scratch.”
“Or maybe it’s a superweapon, like a giant laser cannon,” Kayla said, then smirked. “I could live with that being in the hands of Caldera’s colonists.”
“No way, you’re kidding right?” Bibi said with a nervous smile.
“But hold on,” Thandi said as her brow creased. “I don’t understand how the power generation site could be transmitting to this mystery site without letting you know the teleporter co-ordinates.”
“Because they don’t use co-ordinates,” Gilah explained. “The system relies on micro-wormholes created between singularities. When our teleporter activates, it creates a fantastically complex set of initial field conditions based on an original pair of entangled particles. To reduce it to everyday parlance, both ends of the wormhole started off in the same place, then were moved to their final locations. That process was repeated for each possible connection, except the one we need. It’s true that the link between the Omega site and the generator site was created this way, but it’s a kind of… well it’s only capable of sending energy, so it doesn’t help.”
“So, maybe nobody was meant to access it?” Kayla asked.
“Or there’s a lock that doesn’t exist until the key shows up. Obviously, some of our mathematicians are trying to see if they can reverse engineer a bridge from theoretical calculations, but they’re probably a few thousand years away.”
“It has to be the god-emperor’s throne room,” Kayla said with a sigh. “It’s a small club and humanity ‘aint in it.”
Thandi smiled mischievously. “All of which means that Valkyrie is becoming more entangled with civilization. Right?” She looked around with a grin. “Because of the particles? Do you get it?”
“Haha,” said Kayla with a bright smile. “Yeah, I get it.” She punched her disappointed friend gently on the shoulder. “But seriously, Doc, whatever happens, don’t be trying to get inside that place without a Ranger unit to back you up. No telling what dangers are waiting for you.”
“Oh, of course,” Gilah said and laughed. “Nobody in the Collective wants to play action hero.”
Kayla looked confused. “Wait, not even a little bit? You all did a Ranger battalion, didn’t you?”
Gilah looked embarrassed again. “That was more than a decade ago, and… well… I didn’t get much experience.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was never actually in combat.”
Kayla’s jaw dropped. “Five years in a Ranger battalion and you never did anything?”
“Oh, we deployed a few times,” Gilah said. “And there were one or two flair ups, but it always happened to the other platoons.”
“Forest battalion?” Bibi asked, then waved a dismissive hand as Thandi and Kayla started to smirk. “That doesn’t surprise me. Forests usually mean colonizable worlds and the ones we care about were cleared centuries ago. Plus, I have a sneaking suspicion that they push bright girls into the quieter battalions, because… well, why wouldn’t they?”
“Aw,” Kayla said with mock glumness. “She’s staying we’re stoopid.”
Thandi nodded wisely. “I completely agree. You have to be as stupid as we are to deliberately risk getting yourself shot or blown up.”
Gilah smiled. “But all I care about is helping the real Valkyrie do their jobs better, so you can count on me for that.”
Kayla shook her head vehemently. “Don’t say that—I don’t like to hear that kind of talk. Everyone’s a real Valkyrie. You signed up, you consented to exposing yourself to risk—whatever happens or doesn’t happen isn’t up to you.”
“In God’s hands alone,” Thandi said. “But also, combat is kind of awful. I’m glad you didn’t have to experience it. Nobody should.”
“Seconded,” Bibi added.
Gilah smiled gratefully at them.
“Anyway, look at it this way,” Kayla said thoughtfully. “Rayker might win and kill us all horribly by the end of the week.”
This statement was met with a contemplative silence.
Bibi cleared her throat. “So anyway, Christie sent me a message...”
Kayla sat upright. “Oh yeah, Doc. That’s what I wanted to ask you about. Right at the start of boot camp I asked you if there was ever any evidence of a Jotnar presence on Earth, remember?”
“Oh yes,” Gilah said. “I explained that there wasn’t.”
“But you were wrong!” Kayla said triumphantly. “We’ve managed to prove that there were totally aliens messing around with Earth’s history, and I wanted to see if I could get someone smart to send it up the chain—maybe get us a few more answers.”
Gilah smiled nervously. “Gosh. Well, that sounds fascinating! I’m all ears.”
“No worries, Doctor Gilah,” Bibi cut in. “I’m not personally that well read on the subject, but our friend Christie Stirling has sent me her notes, and I will be very happy to explain it all.”
“Yes, I remember Christie,” Gilah said happily. “Such a bright young woman. What did she end up doing?”
“Oh, you know,” Kayla said cautiously. “Intelligence stuff.”
“This and that,” Thandi mumbled.
“Gosh, how wonderful for her,” Gilah said.