Valkyrie Rising (Warrior's Wings Book Two) (16 page)

The PLA groups were the opposing forces in a lot of the more serious operations Sorilla had been on in the past. Oh, she and they had never
intentionally
exchanged fire, but they’d both sure as hell trained people who’d then gone out to kill one another. More than once Sorilla had picked a Chinese 4mm round out of her armor, or her flesh, and she was pretty sure that one or two of theirs had done the same with her 6mm rounds.

The tensions between the American and Chinese forces were nothing compared to those that soon ratcheted up between the PLA and Spetznaz, though. Breaking up those fistfights became fulltime jobs for the officers, especially since even light roughhousing was likely to break bones in one-point-five-g.

Thank god no one was stupid enough to bring any Egyptian or Saudi guys up here.

Tensions in the Middle East hadn’t dropped any since the bottom fell out of the oil market. Apparently, despite all the complaints they’d made over the years, the people there found that they didn’t much like it when no one on the planet really gave a damn about what they did any more than they liked every one poking their noses in. With oil only being useful for making plastics and a few other esoteric items, the remaining reserves in Canada and the US were enough to provide for pretty much all the world’s needs unto the next millennium with ease, so no one save the Israelis really gave a damn what anyone in those countries did.

The loss of the world’s attention seemed to hit them in the breadbasket even more than the loss of oil revenues did, and a whole new terrorist movement had grown up from the idiots who missed seeing themselves on the news every night. Luckily, they mostly couldn’t afford to do much more than blow up their own backyards…well, luckily for the rest of the world.

It sort of sucked for anyone living within driving distance, mind, which included the Israelis. Poor training and poor mental conditioning probably kept them out of this program, so at least there probably wouldn’t be any improvised explosives hidden in the private quarters this time around.

For the most part, the operators’ community wasn’t as small or as hidden as most people tended to believe. In the world as it had existed over the last century and a half, it was common for people to casually visit even hostile nations for various reasons that had nothing to do with the job, and while someone like Sorilla would certainly be watched if she flew into Beijing for vacation, she’d most likely not be approached or interfered with unless someone got it into their head she was on the job at the time. Similarly, she’d actually run into people she’d normally be shooting at on the beaches along the Pacific coast while she was surfing.

It was always a little awkward but generally didn’t end in anything worse than some thinly veiled threats spouted with half a smile over a mug of beer.

War had become almost civil in a very odd way, at least among first and second world nations. Not that they’d be so quick to chug a brew if they met in a warzone, but with the world growing as small as it had, those operators who spent their lives fighting covert battles had to learn where the lines were drawn and how to keep work separate from their civilian lives.

It was an odd dichotomy, but it was also what allowed members of the PLA SOF to sit across the table from Russian Spetsnaz and share a drink with only a few humor-veiled death threats bouncing back and forth. For Sorilla, things were a bit more laid back. As a member of the USSF, she didn’t actually come into direct conflict with the PLA forces, even in disputed territories. At most, some of the people she had trained scuffed up some of the people they had trained, or vice versa.

She did recognize a face or two that she knew from official briefings, though. Men she’d faced off against across the figurative game board, and judging from the occasional glance in her direction, they knew her much the same way.

It’s a brave new world,
Sorilla supposed, smiling tersely as she wrapped up her workout.

The real trick to working out in one-point-five-g was not causing yourself injury. Even a slight misstep could break an ankle; a fall could break any number of bones. Even on the more prosaic side, the level of work needed to stay active more than doubled the need for hydration.

She grabbed a towel from a rack as she passed, each step made with deliberate forethought and follow through, wiping down the perspiration from her face and throat. She tossed it into a bin near a drink machine and slapped a button to get it dispensing her preferred energy drink. Stuffed with nutrients and electrolytes, the taste wasn’t much to write home about, but it went down smoothly and was cold, so it was better than she was used to.

“You’re Aida, right?”

It wasn’t a question, more of a semi-polite statement, but that wasn’t what piqued her attention. It was more the fact that the voice was coming from over her head, and a lot closer than she expected. Sorilla leaned back, craning her head to look up and just
slightly
behind her. The gleaming teeth of the big black face were the first things that stuck in her mind, but really, it was the sheer size of the man that startled her.

Sorilla wasn’t short. That wasn’t a statement meant to be used with the words “for a woman” attached, either. She wasn’t short, period. This man dressed in USMC digicams, however, was a freaking monster.

He had to be near a foot taller than her own five eleven stature, six one in boots, putting the crown of that fat head she was looking at well over seven feet. Now, she’d seen taller, believe it or not, in the service and without…but this particular Frankenstein monster had apparently
snuck
up on her in
one-point-five-g
.
That was seriously not on. She must have been distracted, that was the only damned way something that big could move around that quietly in this high of gravity.

Right?

“How the frigging hell did you fit on a tether car?” she demanded, half turning so she could crane her neck the other way to look up at him.

“Funny.” He smirked down at her, obviously less than amused but equally more than willing to humor her attempt at hiding her discomfort.

He probably gets a lot of practice at that,
she thought as she looked him over a little more thoroughly.

A lot of very tall men are gangly, all legs and arms, nothing in between. This guy was most assuredly anything but. He was a slab of meat from head to toe, and a 150 kilos if he weighed an ounce, and that was in normal g. She noted the Detachment One pin on his uniform, along with a slew of ribbon code that told her he’d been under fire in at least the last six major operations, Earth-side.

“The name is Washington,” he told her, extending a hand. “Friends just call me Ton.”

“I wonder how they came up with that?” Sorilla asked dryly as she shook hands with him.

Her hand vanished into his giant mitts, but there wasn’t a thing she could do about that. There weren’t too many people who’d ever call her “dainty,” and none of them would do it to her face, but this was one of those guys that made Sorilla feel more like the little girl she’d never really been than just about anything else in the galaxy.

“No idea,” he grinned toothily at her. “You are Aida, right?”

“That’s me.” She nodded, not really surprised that he’d guessed as much. While the ground force’s exclusion regs had been lifted decades earlier concerning women in front line positions, the percentage of women who chose to take on such roles was still extremely small. That said, the percentage of women in elite units like Sorilla herself was three times the normal average. Women who wanted to fight also tended to be uncommonly good at it.

Still, even for all that, she only knew of three other women among the operators invited to the USF’s playpen this time around. Two were USAF PJs and the other was a Shayetet 13 commando from Israel. So picking her out wasn’t exactly a monumental achievement.

“You looking for me for a reason?” she went on to ask.

“A few of us have been doing our homework,” Ton told her after she took her hand back. “We read the brief on the Hayden job.”

“Good for you.”

He snorted lightly. “Wanted to pick your brains, if you’re amenable.”

Sorilla’s eyebrow rose slightly at his vocabulary. 
Obviously not one of those guys who gets by on his brawn alone
. Of course, from his general posture and sentence construction, she thought he was used to hiding his brain behind the meat.

She shrugged after a bit. “There’s not really a lot more that wasn’t in the briefs. I know, I wrote ‘em.”

“Figured that. They read like an operator put them together,” Ton nodded. “Still would appreciate the time.”

Sorilla considered then nodded. “Sure.”

“We’re camped out in the commissary. I figure you can work out which table is ours,” Ton chuckled. “See you there.”

I’d have to be blind and stupid to miss any table you’re sitting at, buddy.
Sorilla just waved as she took another deep draw on the energy drink. “See you.”

This time, she was listening when the big man walked away, and Sorilla was disturbed to find that he really did move as quietly as she initially suspected.

How do you do that in combat boots?

She shook off the question and took another long pull of the bottle, emptying the drink quickly, then headed for the showers. It was an exercise in futility, honestly; a shower would only clear the sweat off her for ten or twenty minutes, but it just felt good, so she took her luxuries where she could. Odds were she’d soon be off somewhere where a shower was something she might score once ever few weeks, on average.

Unlike some of the places she’d trained, the showers here weren’t co-ed. The USF had enough women coming through Level Three for conditioning that there was no way they’d get away with completely communal showers. She didn’t care all that much. Her early training had pretty much eliminated what few elements of personal modesty she had left after growing up spending more time in the wilderness than at home, but there was a level of relaxation that came from being secure in multiple ways, and again she luxuriated in that while she could.

When she’d cleaned up and dried off, she dressed in USF fatigues and headed for the commissary. Unlike the aptly named Ton, she didn’t feel the need to wear her SF uniform, dress or otherwise, though she did pin her space wings and rank to the blue fatigues. She was here, she was jump qualified by the USF, and that was all anyone in this place needed to know. Particularly since the USF was specifically a space-based organization, if they certified you as jump capable, well, there really wasn’t any higher qualification…in every sense of the word “higher.”

A USF jump master was qualified to do everything from straight up EVA to orbital drops to the more mundane skills of HALO and HAHO. Combined with the complexity of armor operations and the paraglide packs they favored, Sorilla was qualified to do everything from fly pretty much anything one person could fly, to all the exceedingly complex tasks of extra-vehicular activities for whatever the mission called for. USF jump qualifications were basically the most sought after badge in the solar system, and there wasn’t a man or woman on Level Three who wouldn’t recognize it…and desperately want it for their own if they didn’t have it themselves. You just couldn’t qualify for it unless you were serving with the USF, and until very recently, Fleet just couldn’t afford to train or payroll that many people.

Perfect.

In the commissary, Sorilla had no trouble picking out Ton’s table. Despite being filled with an entire group of big guys, it was the one that looked that it was going to tip over on the side the marine was sitting on. She glanced them up and down but didn’t go over right away. Instead, she headed to the food and stocked up. While she was pretty close to being back in form, Sorilla knew that she had a ways to go before her physical form was solid through to the bone.

Despite common misconceptions, protein wasn’t the key to building muscle, so there were no protein shakes or the like. She grabbed a plate of enhanced chicken nuggets, then topped off some assorted engineered greens, and finished the plate with some fries. Pretty much everything on the list had been molecularly altered, crammed with trace nutrients, vitamins, and the research scientists alone knew what else.

Her dad was old school, liked to grow his own food from heritage seeds, kept his own chickens, and so forth. For herself, well, she’d grown up on one side of the argument but had been eating military-enhanced food most of her adult life and never felt any ill effects, so she ate what was available and didn’t worry too badly about it either way.

With the plate filled, and another fortified energy drink on the tray, Sorilla finally turned to the nearly full table at the other end of the room. They’d left one seat open, in the center of the long side of the table, so she figured that was where she was going to sit.

She set the tray down before maneuvering around the chair and into place, always the extra half gravity at the forefront of her mind. One mistake would end with all her food on the floor, likely with her face first in it and nursing one or more broken bones. In one-point-five-g, everything was training. Even getting ready to eat lunch after a workout.

“Sarge.” Ton nodded in her direction, his eyes flicking over the deep blue of her jumpsuit and falling, as she knew they would, on the space wings pinned to the left breast.

“Ton.” She returned the gesture, though she’d already checked out his pins, so she glanced quickly about to take in the others.

Mostly American unit pins and patches, though there were a couple Canadian JTF2 as well as SAS, SBS, and Israeli all positioned around the table.

“I take it you all know each other?” she asked, recognizing a couple faces, but no one she’d worked with.

That wasn’t as surprising as it might have been, since Sorilla had been assigned to the USF for several years. She hadn’t worked Earth-side since that assignment began, and honestly, even in a world with as many life extension processes as Earth now had, special operations was a young person’s game. She probably would have retired by this point if the USF hadn’t taken her on; there were only so many years any sane person could take of getting shot at.