Read Valkyrie Burning (Warrior's Wings Book Three) for Free Online Page B

effort. The enemy’s gravity valve technology was so effective that one installation was normally sufficient to interdict a planet with very little problem.
    In fact, the only ways they’d ever been breached, in human experience, was by what most people would consider extreme and entirely insane methods. In the first case, a heavily stealthed Special Operations force attempted insertion via ballistic approach from well outside the planet’s orbit. Only One operator survived to make landfall.
    The next successful penetration involved plowing an entire convoy of starships through the planet’s atmosphere at speeds that nearly caused the ships to burn up and break apart from the friction. Considering that those ships were composed of solid nickel-iron hulls, several meters thick, and plated with heat-resistant ceramic tiles, that was considered something of an accomplishment.
    The third and last time was under her own command and might have been considered the most
standard
operation of the three. Even then, however, it took pinpoint knowledge of the enemy’s location, as determined by men on the ground, and during the assault she’d come close to losing half her command when it turned out the enemy had a longer reach than anyone had previously believed possible.
    Since those early days on Hayden, they’d managed to work out the enemy patterns a bit better, gaming the system as best they could to predict behavior and protocol. It wasn’t easy, the aliens didn’t think the way humans did in some ways, but when one looked at a military organization, there were always some things that could be counted on. Whether insect, human, or entirely alien, a military bureaucracy had some things set in stone.
    In this case, they’d managed to determine the protocols for using the gravity valve against inbound meteorites. It wasn’t a trick that would work often, probably not again for some time, just in case they got wise, but it had worked this time and now they had one of the enemy worlds under human control.
    “Deploy ground forces to the remaining enemy installations,” she ordered. “Have the Hood and the Marion drop shuttles and pick up the SARD unit along with their former PUCs.”
    “Aye, ma’am.”
    “And for God’s sake, put those men and women under quarantine!” she snapped. “Sooner or later these things are going to find some other use for prisoners than just starving them to death.”
    As her people dispatched her order, Nadine settled back into the command console at the center of her flag deck and turned her attention back to the operations at hand. The Hood and Marion, both Longbow class ships, broke from formation upon receiving her orders and proceeded deeper into the planetary well.
    Unlike Alexi Petronov and his relief column during the second battle of Hayden, Jane MacKay led her Hood and the Marion in at a somewhat saner velocity. The fire flared along the front of their bows as they penetrated the atmosphere, trailing flame as the pair entered into a ballistic free-fall arc that would take them on an ever tightening orbit of the world below.
    “The gravity valve in the insertion rig worked, obviously.”
    Nadine half turned and nodded to her attaché. “Yes. Pity it’s a one-time use device, we need that technology.”
    “That sort of gravity is hard on the circuitry,” Lt Ammends replied. “The energy pulse that has to be run through the capacitors is even worse.”
    She just nodded. He wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t know, she just didn’t like it. Her ships were limited to accelerations of maybe twenty gravities, unless she wanted to kill her crew. Crush them into mangled paste against the aft walls, the way the crew of the Majesty had died so many years earlier.
    Against an enemy that could do better than ten times that, she and her crews were in a bad way. Since she had led the mission that brought back the first wreckage from one of the alien starships, Solari research and