Read On Silver Wings for Free Online

on the regular light of the colony’s streets. Beyond a couple meters the gleam of the OLED light was invisible, but within that range she looked like a supernatural demon on the prowl.

    The result from her point of view was a multicolor spectacular that showed the buildings and world around her according to their heat dissipation levels in the night air. The concrete was a steady, even yellow while the metal was already dropping from the dull pink to a cooler blue as the material shed its heat quicker.

    Nothing alive, however. Just the predictable heat decay of a ghost town in the dark jungle night.

    She moved around a corner, rifle to her shoulder, leading the way with its muzzle, and swept the next street and buildings with smooth, economical, motions. Still nothing, though. Just a silence that felt even more unnatural after the constant life that existed in the jungles. She moved through the streets quickly, making her way to the first signs of damage from the attack.

    It had been a microwave transmission tower, she could tell. The metal structure was twisted and bent, crumpled in on itself like it had been caught up in some giant’s grip and simply crushed. She quickly lost count of all the things that didn’t make sense about the scene. The debris pattern, the damage itself, hell almost none of it was what she’d come to expect.

    This wasn’t a bomb...
She blinked away the thermal overlay, moving through the twisted metal of the tower, idly kicking over the microwave dish.
Strange.

    She moved on, heading to the center of the colony, where the next item on her list had been located.

    The orbital tether had occupied the town square, though it was actually more of a town circle, a centerpiece and probably the most vital part of the colony’s community. The tether was their link to space, to home. It had been connected to a pre-fabricated orbital habitat that had once housed the colonists while they were en-route to Hayden’s World.

    While the colonists would have been preparing themselves for planetfall, the command crew would set the ‘anchor’. The three inch thick, three foot wide carbon nano-mesh tether would have been lowered in a rather dangerous procedure, and then anchored deep into the center of the chosen colony site. Once that was done, the command module’s engines were shut down and the rotation of the planet took over the job of keeping it in orbit, like a counterweight swinging on the end of a string.

    She located the tether site easily enough, and much of the tether as well. The material had fallen down around the site, and was lying like cable strewn around where it had fallen. She frowned, shaking her head. There wasn’t remotely enough tether lying around to account for the entire hundred and sixty thousand kilometer length.

    ‘
Proc, analyze and locate the end of the tether
.’

    The image of the tether was suddenly highlighted in blue as the computer in her chest began by tracing the entire length of the tether in its attempt to comply. After a few moments of this playing in the background while she continued to move through the town square the computer chirped its victory in her ear and highlighted a section of the town.

    She made her way in that direction, still keeping to the shadows despite the total lack of life so far.

    The end of the tether was somewhat more spectacular than she’d expected, given that even miles of the cable weighed only a few hundred pounds. The end was located in a crater that had once been someone’s house, unless she was seriously mistaken. The crater had been caused by the tether car, a self-powered and autonomous vehicle that ascended and descended the carbon highway to heaven.

    The car was also constructed of superstrong and ultralight materials, mostly the same carbon fiber and nano-mesh construction as the cable itself, but even so it weighed as much as ninety five miles of the cable due to its power systems and climbing motors. Weight which