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

them into straps on her armor left there for that purpose, turning her slick and svelte profile into a ragged and unwieldy one. When he was done, he patted her on the shoulder and she turned around to do the same to him.
    The natural Gillies finished, the four members of the door kicker team moved out, leaving their sniper backup in the hills at their back as they began the long approach to the enemy base.
    *****
    The Ghoulies’ base was something of a mess to her, its angles all wrong, jutting out at strange intervals that made no symmetric sense to the human eye. As she inched closer, though, Sorilla could tell that they had left no real hiding places in the outer perimeter to shelter an encroaching enemy. Floodlights swept the terrain, their frequency leaning heavily into the UV spectrum, and she could make out both mobile and immobile sensor pods dotting the perimeter like buds on a blooming flower.
    The place was the equivalent of a modern day fortress, there was no doubt of that.
    So, naturally, she found herself belly-down in the mud and the brambles as she crawled up on that fortress, wondering somewhere in the back of her mind where the other members of the team were. Normally they would exist as icons on her HUD, their positions marked clearly for her to see at just a glance, but now they were all running in stealth mode, which meant no radiated emissions, as they pushed their way toward the perimeter on their bellies one inch at a time.
    The final approach of just over two hundred meters had taken more than two thirds of the total time since Sorilla and the others had left their camp in the hills. Moving so slowly that their motion would appear to be nothing more than a trick of the wind was a talent and a skill, something one could learn through patience, but it helped to be naturally inclined. She would inch her toes up a bit, then dig them into the soft ground and straighten out, pushing her entire armored body along by those muscles alone, the nano-musculature strings in her armor not actually being built into the toes.
    It was long, exhausting, and tension-ridden work. When she spotted a guard on her passive HUD, she froze, focusing on being part of the ground itself, waiting and watching until they passed. The tangle of local branches and leaves jammed into the straps of her armor made her literally part of the ground, hiding her from even the keenest eye if she held still. Sorilla never looked straight at them either, knowing that humans, at least, had an eerie ability to recognize when they were being watched. No one really knew how, whether it was some rudimentary form of telepathy or some way that an observer would give themselves away if they could see their targets, but she wasn’t taking a chance that the Ghoulies wouldn’t be able to do the same thing.
    After a guard passed, she would inch forward again, moving that little bit before pausing to take a calming breath and reexamine the area yet again. And then on again, one inch of movement, then a pause to breathe and check the area. Over and over again Sorilla repeated the cycle until she arrived within just a few meters of the perimeter fence, really just a series of sensor posts dug into the ground at ten-meter intervals.
    So far
, she thought,
so good
.
    She was even ahead of schedule by a couple hours. Sorilla sighed and settled in to wait, not moving a muscle as she formed her own little lump of ground in the open space that had been cut for over two hundred meters all around the base. Patience was a virtue of Special Operations soldiers.
    *****
    Gilford ‘Gil’ Able, formerly of Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children, kept a close eye on his HUD’s countdown timer as it approached zero hour. He and the Scott had settled nicely into their nests, the long barrels of their M900 rifles the only thing showing out past the cover they’d built up, about fifty meters apart with good converging angles on the base.
    Long gun work had evolved continuously