Rise of a Valkyrie

Part 63

Buy the book now at your preferred store: https://books2read.com/u/bM2Nna

***********************************

Kayla packed her thoughts away into a little disturbed corner of her mind marked 'Later', and headed for the briefing. She entered the main hall of the workshop, caught a nod from Urtiga, and went to stand at the back of the crowd of soldiers.

The expansive monitors showed camera feeds of smartly uniformed women; including, from her unique uniform, the Captain of the Banshee, a few senior generals Kayla didn't recognize, and the Commanding Officer of the Mountain Ranger Battalion. Information was whispered back and forth around the room as they waited to hear what would happen next.

Kayla found Christie, flashed her an excited smile, and gave her arm a squeeze. She was far out of her depth in the operation, and it was nice to have company.

"Is everyone present?" A woman by the monitors said.

She looked older, in her sixties or seventies, and was a head shorter than most of the others present. Kayla didn't recognize her, but when she studied the name tag, she realized with a shiver that she was looking at Chieftain-General Symrna.

This was a human being who, if the rumors were true, had lived longer than entire civilizations. As far as Kayla was concerned, she had lived alongside the remnants of the creators of the very technology the task force was trying to destroy.

Her uniform was blank, with no medals or identification beyond the tag, and a small badge Kayla hadn't seen before in the organization. She squinted as she tried to make out the shape, which seemed to be a pair of wings, with pinions that stabbed downward like spears.

Smyrna spoke again, with a thick accent that Kayla couldn't place, and from the look on her face, she didn't tolerate fools easily.

"I have only one thing to say before I let you begin," she said in a cold voice. "Scientists from the Collective have completed their analysis of the remains you gathered. There is nothing else like it in our records—the sophistication of this creature surpasses anything we have previously taken from the Jotnar. But this is a colonized world, cleared more than a century ago. Who will explain to me how this kind of technology was shrouded from our scans?"

She turned to Jiao Zhang, who stood nearby, looking particularly ill at ease.

"Well, ah...General," Zhang said, "as you know, we run high fidelity scans of all potential colony worlds before any humans attempt a landing. We look for any anomalous signals, uh... of any kind, really. Caldera was scanned in depth, and we have that historical data. There were no readings anywhere on the planet we would have wanted to investigate further.

"The Banshee," Zhang continued, "has imaged every inch of the mountain range and come up with nothing unusual, so it seems logical to conclude that this base is underground, possibly built into a natural cave system. Right now, the crew are throwing every kind of undetectable scan we can think of at those mountains to try and get a return."

"This soldier," Smyrna nodded to an impassive Urtiga, "claims we must be dealing with an installation far more advanced than any Jotnar site yet encountered. They have already stayed hidden for so long—what gives you faith that our scans are 'undetectable'?"

Zhang went white and turned to the monitor that showed the Banshee's Captain as she drew her hand across her neck. Orders were quickly given. Someone in the main hall chuckled.

"I expect better from all of you," said Smyrna, with an unwaveringly calm expression. "I see two of you I remember from centuries past. I see none of the old guard. The laughing soldier here is amused, is she?" She pointed directly at the offender, who looked down at her boots. "The joke is that the enemy might even now be alerted, I gather? And tomorrow kill more of our comrades?"