Read On Silver Wings for Free Online Page B

at her to fly. Run. Bolt for her life. There was no enemy here to fight, so she must flee.

    She held her ground, digging deeper into the crevice, and refusing to give up her position. Patience was her mantra, wait the enemy out. Minutes, hours, days, and weeks. Whatever it took, wait the enemy out.

    That changed when an earsplitting crack ripped the air near her and something moved in the corner of her eye.

    MOVE!

    She shoved off her concrete perch, out and into the air on instinct along, just scant instants ahead of a huge chunk of stone that slammed right into where she had been, pulverizing the locally mixed concrete back into the dust from which it came.

    “Ah!” She yelped as she misjudged her landing, twisting her ankle against the uneven ground, then scrambled back into motion as she barely dodged another, smaller, stone.

    Her rifle swung up as she hit the ground rolling, tracking as a piece of the crater wall shifted then exploded as another chunk of rock flashed out at her. Her finger brushed the trigger of the chunky weapon, its coils of superconducting monofilament pulsing once in response. The hundred gram chunk of depleted uranium erupting from the muzzle at barely eight hundred feet per second, hissing softly through the atmosphere as it was propelled on its way.

    The round’s scramjet motor didn’t have a chance to ignite, its guidance fins only barely deployed, before it slammed into the chunk of rock and exploded in a chemical flash. Sorilla threw up her arm as she was showered with slivers of stone and washed over by the smell of chemicals from the round’s fuel and shaped charge.

    She spun, rifle seeking out another target as her eyes flashed slightly brighter as her implants made the final step up into full blown combat mode.

    Ultra-fine filaments deep in her brain matter intercepted sensory inputs she didn’t even realize she was hearing and seeing, and threw the numbers down to the processor in her chest for crunching. Others sent electrical signals instead of intercepting them, regulating the adrenal response to a sustainable level as she dropped the rifle butt to her hip and rested it there as she turned slowly around.

    That feeling was still there, that pressure on her chest, making her feeling panicky and tense. The rumble was there too, in the background her implants could still detect it, and she could hear occasional cracks from around, and even below her.

    Time to pull out,
She thought, twisted quickly as she slung her rifle and sprinted for the crater wall.
Caught in enemy territory, alone
,
my location blown wide open, under fire with no targets in sight. This is what the term ‘advancing to the rear’ was invented for!

    She scrambled up the concrete debris, rifle banging against her back as her ankle screamed at her, intent on getting the hell out of the deathtrap prison that the crater had become. Almost to the top, another crack of sound startled her into half turning. The motion saved her life as she caught a fist sized piece of stone in her right shoulder, instead of the back of her neck. She went down, losing ground as she started to slide back down the crater wall. She screamed out in pain as she snapped her left arm out, snagging the lip of the crater ridge, and hung on.

    Another rock slammed into her leg as she forced her right hand to join the left, pulling another scream from her throat.

    “God damn it!” She ground up, pulling herself up and over the lip to sprawl out into the streets of the colony proper. “PROC! Enable Spinal Shunt!”

    She hadn’t subvocalized the command, but her implanted pico-processor caught it anyway, and in an instant all the screaming sources of pain from her lower body vanished as she rolled over to her stomach and pushed up off the ground, instantly breaking into a sprint as she headed for the jungle line.

    She hadn’t gone more than ten meters when the rumble became audible, and the buildings around her began to visibly