Free Valkyrie Burning (Warrior's Wings Book Three) by Evan Currie Page B

get the job done. She hoped they could do something for him back on Earth, figured that they probably could, really. Medical science seemed to be a couple shakes away from beating the old adage that there were only two things unavoidable in life…death and taxes.
    Sorilla figured that the government wanted more taxes, which was why the medics were so close to beating death.
    “Well, L.T., that last mission could have gone off a little smoother,” she said, looking down. “You always where too stupid to duck, but at least you didn’t let them tag you until we were done. Get your dumb ass well, L.T., or a few of us might just come around to kick it when this is all over.”
    Sighing, Sorilla pushed off the bed and drifted out of the room. She had a few days off, and she supposed she may as well get the best use of them she could. Getting from the med labs to the docking lock was actually a lot easier than from some places much closer since the design of the ship included a straight line corridor large enough to accommodate emergency vehicles for quick patient transfers.
    From the docking lock, she just cycled through and found a seat on the next transfer pod to Liberation Station.
    Now there’s a name that could have used a little more thought,
she chuckled to herself as the pod approached the tether counterweight.
    Like almost every counterweight, Liberation Station had begun its life as a ship. In this case, she figured it was likely one of the old Discoverer class exploration ships. Originally unarmed except for very light lasers and a couple standard torpedo launchers, the Discoverer class ships were big, heavy duty, and generally built to withstand anything short of a supernova.
    Or a gravity valve.
    People were expected to live on Discoverer class ships for years, if not decades, so they had been built with enough room to stash pretty much all the amenities one might hope for. That size, as well as their impressive list of facilities and luxuries, made them one of the best candidates for recycling as tether counterweights once their lifespan as active-duty ships was done.
    Only the fact that they had been built so well and most were still in active service kept all counterweights from being former Discoverer class hulls.
    Someone pulled some strings, or Hayden lucked out to get one,
Sorilla supposed as her pod docked on automatic controls and she was cycled through the airlock into the main bay.
    All it took was a glance around the bay to tell her that Hayden had both lucked out
and
someone had been pulling strings. The entire bay was in the best shape of any Discoverer class ship she’d ever been on, enough that she would almost believe that it was a new construct if it weren’t for the fact that there hadn’t been a new hull in the class for well over five decades.
    While admiring the state of the station’s interior, Sorilla idly shouldered her day kit and stepped off the pod when the doors were cleared. Straightening from having to duck through the hatch, she paused a moment to secure her beret properly on her head before making her way deeper into the station.
    Sorilla paused at the first terminal access point she found and silently linked it to her implants so she could browse the system quicker. It took a few moments to locate the names she was looking for, and she was surprised to find that two of them were on the station at the time. She loaded the directions into her implants and set off with a guide map floating in her corneal HUD.
    The station was bustling with activity, the number of off-duty military personnel easily matching the civilians she could see and in most cases outnumbering them. Sorilla was aware that Valkyrie wasn’t the only Solari group in orbit of Hayden, though most of the others were transports, scouts, and other various types of vessels. The Cheyenne and Longbow class ships of Task Force Valkyrie were the only real weight of combat metal in orbit aside from the refitted Liberation