Phoenix Rising (Book Two of The Icarus Trilogy) Read Online Free Page B

one, but from her experience the Viper was going to dodge both.  She slammed the shells back into the gun and thought about the situation.  After a moment, the warrior woman shrugged and popped out of cover into probable death.
    The Viper had trained his gun on her position and spewed bullets over the hood of the transport.  Abrams didn’t even have time to raise her weapon before she fell back down to the ground.  There was no point in trying to fire past a hail of bullets.  She looked at her grenade belt and found it empty.  She cursed as she remembered that she had used both the chaff and the frag grenades in an encounter with a Viper carrying a minigun.  Templeton had been useless there, too. 
    Abrams looked down at her revolver and thought about how she was going to get out of this.  She thought about how many games she would have to survive before she could see her sister.  As always it was too much.  Abrams didn’t regret selling her freedom so that her sister could survive her illness, but it bothered her that she had to keep putting off her return because of her deaths and debts.  Jessica Abrams resolved that this time she wasn’t going to die; just like every other time.
    She rolled to the other end of the transport and popped up over the trunk with her revolver arm already extended.  The Viper adjusted his aim but not before Abrams pulled the trigger.  The round sailed past his head.  She didn’t bother to curse and squeezed the trigger again.  Again it flew past the man harmlessly.  She fell back down below cover and started slamming the ground with clenched fists.
    “GODDAMNIT!”  She rained down her fists and yelled expletive after expletive.  All she had was a knife and he had a gun with however many bullets, every one of which could kill her.  She was inconsolable and continued to strike the asteroid long after her hands started to ache.
    She sat there for a moment after finishing her tantrum.  The man hadn’t fired any bullets and hadn’t thrown any grenades to her position.  So, she reasoned, he was probably low on ammo and didn’t have any explosives.  These were good assumptions for the soldier, especially if she had to resort to using her knife against the man.  Abrams decided that she could risk it and prepared herself for the coming assault.  She set her hands against the transport and crouched down on her heels, ready to activate the kinetic motivators and launch herself at her opponent.  She breathed in deeply and let it flow back out of her.  Then the warrior woman brought up her gaze and breathed out.
    Abrams leapt up two meters into the air over the transport and scanned the battlefield in front of her.  The Viper had abandoned his cover and started to creep towards her, but he was still too far away for it to be easy.  The soldier started to fire at her as she sailed through the air, but luckily he hadn’t anticipated her flight.  She landed and quickly started to run in a zigzag pattern towards the soldier.  He continued to fire his weapon but couldn’t deal with the woman’s agility and constant juking.  Abrams closed the gap and slipped her knife out of its sheath.  She flipped up the blade and dived at the soldier’s left.  Abrams leapt backwards over his weapon and brought her left hand holding the knife across the man’s throat, just under his helmet.  The man kept firing for a moment, but nowhere near the woman who had killed him.  He dropped the weapon and fell to the ground clutching his throat.
    Abrams walked over to the man’s weapon and picked it up.  She sighed and then pulled the trigger, filling the man’s visor with rounds and ending the man’s life early.  She looked at the man and saw that he had plenty of ammo and a full grenade belt.  Abrams was shocked when she realized what the man had assumed.
    “The greedy fucker thought I was going to be easy.”  She narrowed her eyes and looked at the man, stunned, but soon she