On Silver Wings (Warrior's Wings) by Currie Evan

Author:Currie, Evan [Currie, Evan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-09-28T04:00:00+00:00

Ghosts of the Jungle

Chapter 1

In times gone by, the training of a soldier was an endeavor of a lifetime. To teach a man to wield sword and stave was such work that only the richest could afford to have it done, and the job never ended until the man retired or died on the battlefield.

Luckily for Sorilla and the survivors of Hayden, those times had come and gone with the invention of the firearm. A moderately fit human could become a competent fighter in as little as a couple weeks, assuming you didn’t need him to do anything fancier than hit what he was aiming at.

When it came about in history, the modern firearm utterly destroyed the old way of doing things. Monarchies, once the only groups that could maintain a standing army, were suddenly displaced by groups of peasants who could learn to be effective militias in a matter of weeks. Without the modern firearm, empires could be ruled by a single family, sometimes a single person. With it, the United States of America declared and held its independence from the preeminent empire of its day.

Today, Sorilla was about to put that theory to the test.

The colonists were, by and large, quite fit, and even more importantly, they were motivated. After Sorilla had pulled the discriminator chips from the rifles, in effect unlocking the weapons to use by people without the coded implants given to military personnel, she’d only needed a week to get the first group of militia trainees familiarized with the weapons and their incidental gear.

She left the job of day-to-day management of the village in Samuel’s hands, as he’d shown an aptitude for the task but wouldn’t be going into the field with them, and handpicked a dozen of the best for “on the job” training. Between him and Silver, who Jerry had basically force-marched into camp a few days earlier, Sorilla figured they had the administration aspect of the militia covered.

Old Man Silver, as most of the colonists referred to him, was a taskmaster the likes of which Sorilla remembered from her own early days in the military, and she was glad to have him and his group joined up with them. It had taken Jerry and herself the better part of two days to get him to agree to work with them, but from what she’d seen since, she suspected the man to be former military himself.

With those aspects of management handled, she turned her focus to where the metal was going to be meeting the road.

Until Fleet gets back, my job is fairly straightforward, Sorilla reflected.

She was to organize resistance to the invaders while gathering what intelligence she could on their activities. The first wasn’t so hard. However, the second was giving her problems.

The key one being that she didn’t know anything about the invaders in order to determine a place to begin. They hadn’t been able to locate any kind of base camp, not even the pathfinders who’d gone on long treks around the area, sometimes taking weeks before they came back.

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