Valkyrie Burning (Warrior's Wings Book Three) Read Free

on a window that was more of a slit until all he could see was black. Then the computer enhanced the image, drawing vector lines through the shadows and lightening the image until, finally, it finished and he found himself staring at a human face.
    “PUCs.” He sighed, nodding. “Well, we knew they were taking prisoners.”
    Sorilla sighed along with him, both glad to see the face and wishing it hadn’t been there. PUC, the military terminology for Person Under Control, was the modern term for what used to be called a Prisoner of War. Suffice to say, being ‘Pucked’ wasn’t a good term in the modern military.
    Fleeters had found evidence that the Ghoulies were taking prisoners years earlier, bodies missing from ship hulks, evidence of colonists taken from Ares, a Mars-type world that had been destroyed by Ghoulie bombardment when discovered. Some infantry teams had found bodies of prisoners in captured bases much like the one they were now overlooking, all apparently killed within mere hours or less of the base being overrun by human troops.
    The Ghoulies didn’t believe in giving up their prisoners, not alive at any rate.
    Fleet intel had let drop that this world, its official human designation some insanely long-winded array of numbers and letters, was a central clearing house for human PUCs. If they were right, there could be upwards of a couple hundred human prisoners in the valley below them, or more, and that was what brought the newly assembled SARD Rock Riders team there.
    In two days, the Fleet was going to jump in with their gun tubes blazing, and when that happened, the lives of those boys and girls down there weren’t going to be worth a damn if they were still ‘Under Control.’ So the team had gambled their lives to get into place to stop just that, betting that the Ghoulies wouldn’t just turn their rock into a momentary singularity under its own full weight, if only because the resulting radiation from the gravity-induced fission explosion would have contaminated the entire continent.
    They’d won that bet, and the time was coming to raise the ante or fold the game.
    “Get some sleep, Top,” Crow said. “We’re moving in when the sun sets.”
    Sorilla nodded, crawling back into the little ditch she’d hallowed out, her assault carbine nestled at her side as she closed down the suit Heads Up Display (HUD) and closed her eyes.
    Ante up
, she thought,
and deal out the cards
.
    *****
    The mixed evening light from the distant white dwarf primary and its larger orange binary were fading when Crow nudged Sorilla awake. She shifted instantly, calling up her HUD as she blinked the sleep from her eyes.
    Mackenzie and Able were cleaning their rifles, not that the rugged weapons needed a lot of cleaning. The super conducting carbon fiber barrels that acted as magnetic accelerators didn’t leave residue like the gunpowder cartridges of old, but there were still a few contact leads and the like that should be checked before a fight, just to be safe. A barrel short would ruin a shooter’s day just as surely as a feed jam would have once upon a time.
    Both men were superb shooters as well, long gunners from old traditions. Mackenzie claimed he could trace his lineage back to the original Gillie hunters, and Able had been a Force Recon sniper before being tapped for Detachment One and, eventually, SARD. And while the weapons had changed, both men understood the art and profession of the long gun. Sorilla was glad to have them at her back, especially with the heavy firepower of the M-900 ‘rifles’ they carried. The technicality of them being rifles was actually debated in some circles, since the 900s made old-school sniper rifles look like pea shooters at the best of times, but like everything else in this person’s military, they had changed with the times.
    Sorilla climbed to her knees as Jardiens slid into position behind her, handfuls of local foliage in his hands. She held still while he stuffed