On Silver Wings Read Online Free PDF Page B

weren’t humans, they were ghosts.”

    Sorilla didn’t respond as she continued examining the colony from a distance. There was no such thing as ghosts, she knew. If there were, she would have seen them by now. Some of the things she seen and done would have sent them back to haunt her.

    Just the same, as she looked at the apparently abandoned colony site through the intense magnification afforded her by the liquid drops her implants had drawn up in a bubble over each eye, she had to admit something.

    The Hayden Capital looked a lot like a ghost town.

    In the sweltering heat of the jungle sun, Sorilla shivered a bit, but put the thought aside and moved on.

    “Wait here.”

    “What? Where are you going??”

    “I’m going in closer.” She told her guide. “If I’m not back by morning, head back to camp. I can find my own way back now.”

    Jerry glared at her, “Like hell! This is breeding season, dammit! You step in the wrong pond out here and you’ll be eaten alive before the Kyraoptis realize you aren’t digestible!”

    “I was briefed on the local fauna, I’ll avoid the water,” she promised. “Just wait here.”

    Then she simply turned and stepped off the mound they were on, gliding easily down into the trees and vanishing into the jungle. Jerry watched with grudging respect, knowing that he could have matched the move, but probably with less grace.

    “Damn it,” He muttered, shaking his head. “All the way out here, right in sight of home... and now I’m supposed to wait.”

    *****

    Even the persistent headache she was battling with didn’t keep Sorilla from making the six kilometer hike to the edge of the colony in a little under thirty minutes. She paused before she would have lost the cover of the jungle and found a place to rest as the sun continued its drop toward the horizon.

    She and Jerry had made the hundred klick hike out in two days, actually just a little more than one, but as they’d neared the colony they had continually slowed their pace. Now, with the buildings only a stone’s throw away, Sorilla slowed to a halt and hunkered down. The active camouflage built into her vest and pants were now a dark blue green to match the color of the large, fuzzy leaves of the alien jungle she was waiting in, and the heat began to climb as the material she wore absorbed more and more of the incoming wavelengths.

    First rule of warfare after staying alive was keeping your head down. An old way to say keep out of sight, and the best way she knew to do that was to send nothing back to where someone might notice it. No light, no sound, nothing at all if it could be helped. The sun baked her in the shade of the jungle canopy, but Sergeant Sorilla Aida waited it out. She wished she hadn’t had to leave her suit back in camp to trickle charge off its solar cells, however. Its environmental control systems had spoiled her.

    She smirked slightly into the wavy shimmer of the heat baked jungle air and squirmed a little tighter into the tree she’d picked out, making herself that much smaller and, hopefully, harder to tell apart from the alien plant. Too much comfort in her life, she supposed, if she were already whining about a little heat and sweat.

    She watched the shadows lengthen until the time for waiting was over and then pushed off the tree and dropped easily to the ground. Before setting out, she swallowed a pair of analgesic tablets, hoping to push the ache in her skull a little further into the background, and then she began to move forward into the colony as the sounds of the jungle night began to come alive around her.

    Approaching the colony, Sorilla shifted her grip on her assault weapon, moving slowly along the side of a building and keeping to the shadows as she looked slowly around. Her eyes had the faint green glow that indicated her OLED heads up displays were operating, their molecular thin film filtering the light spectrum as it passed, overlaying infrared heat emanations