Free On Silver Wings by Evan Currie Page A

had become second nature and they simply went on with their jobs. When reporting to the Admiral, however, Jorgen had noticed that he never had to strain his neck or his mind to talk to someone who was floating around upside down.

    “Yes Captain?” Sweet asked, turning fully away from the observation area and using the hand grips to firmly plant his feet on the ‘floor’. “You have a report?”

    “Yes Admiral,” Kay Richardson nodded briefly, her short cropped hair flowing almost as if she were under water. “We’ve downloaded the contents of the message box in Hayden’s lunar orbit.”

    At his age, Jorgen was long past most things that could make his heart rush. A beautiful woman could still make it happen, but surprisingly little else. Those words, however, combined with the look on Kay’s face, set his heart thumping powerfully.

    “Was there...?” He had to ask, licking his lips as they suddenly dried out.

    “Aye Sir.” She confirmed it, nodding. Her face wasn’t as eager as he would have expected, however, so there was bad news too. “We lost most of the team.”

    He winced, looking away for a moment, then back, “How many survivors?”

    “One known. Sergeant Sorilla Aida.” Kay replied, handing him a folder.

    He took it, flipping the plastic folder open, his mind wrapped up in the idea that only one of their SF team had survived. There wasn’t a radar or detection grid on Earth, not even in the United States or China, that could pick up a SOCOM team on an Orbital approach. They were easy enough to pick up on entry itself, but they looked like every other little piece of rock burning up in the atmosphere. No one would waste energy trying to pick off shooting stars, there were hundreds on any given day.

    Not to mention hitting something moving that fast was an exercise in frustration, and once they were low enough to be slowing down, they were invisible again. Not even a LIDAR system could pick them up a few seconds after they’d burned off their ablative armor.

    He sighed, pushing the frustrated tension down, and focused on the open folder. On the inside cover was an image of the Sergeant in question, along with her name, serial number, and basic medical information along the opposite side. He thumbed the page flipper, letting the picture fade away as a detailed service record replaced it, and read briefly.

    “Good woman.”

    “Aye Sir,” Kay nodded.

    “What was in her report?”

    Kay shook her head slightly, “Not as much as we could have asked for, but maybe more than we’d hoped for.”

    That was more along the lines of what the Admiral wanted to hear. “Explain.”

    “The tether cable to their orbital counterweight was snapped. Not cut or burned, snapped by pure force. That means we can calculate the precise force applied from the counterweight’s current orbit and the reports from the local survivors.” Kay said, “Though, for the record, they already did it for us. It’s in Aida’s report.”

    The Admiral let out a strangled chuckle and shook his head, “Did they do anything else for us?”

    “A lot, including some brainstorming for possible causes,” Kay replied grimly, handing over another folder. “This is the one that they, and Liz, believe is most likely.”

    He took the folder with a sense of trepidation, uncertain if he really wanted to know, but he just flipped it open and read. After several long moments he looked up at his Flag Captain and raised an eyebrow, “You understand this?”

    “Most of it, yes Sir.”

    He wasn’t surprised, not really. There were a few ways to get a Command in the Space ‘fleet’, such as it was. He’d come up one way, serving with the United States Navy in various military posts until he’d requested a transfer to the Colonial and Home System Fleet. His own education was generally in electronics, tactics, and strategies. Kay Parker had come up a second way, like Commander Elizabeth Shay, she’d entered from the