Valkyrie Rising (Warrior's Wings Book Two) by Evan Currie

her mind boggled at the deadly gas leaking into the room.  Are they insane ? They never use worse than CS!
    VX was a known nerve agent, outdated by and large but still in use by some terrorist states and organizations. Just a small amount was lethal without immediate attention, and it could be spread across an insanely large area. Just what it was doing in the Shoot House was something she was going to beat out of someone in short order, if she lived.
    She hit the floor, sliding as the door on the far wall slid down, jammed her rifle into the space, and crawled the rest of the way through as the polymer frame of her assault weapon cracked. Sorilla rolled to her feet, pulling her newly issued sidearm as she automatically moved on with the scenario despite the fact that someone had just tried to kill her.
    The lights shifted, brightening as a voice came down from the ceiling.
    “Scenario paused. Holster and secure firearms. Scenario paused. Holster and secure firearms.”
    Sorilla automatically lowered then slid her sidearm into the thigh holster and waited as a door opened and a man walked in.
    “Excellent score, Sergeant,” he told her, not looking up from the pad he was reading. “Not sure about using the rifle to jam the door, mind you, that’s a little pricey. You should have been able to make it without getting so flashy.”
    “Screw that!” she snarled, pointing back in the room. “What’s with the nerve agent?”
    “Relax. It was CS, we just hacked your implants.”
    Sorilla froze, staring in total shock as her mouth went dry. She barely managed to rasp out a response. “You can do that?”
    “Of course,” he said, as if it were obvious.
    “You little shit!” She picked him up bodily, sending his pad clattering across the floor. “If you can do it, so can the enemy! I wasn’t briefed on that! My old implants were designed specifically to outright refuse outside access for a good, goddamned reason!”
    The man, a lieutenant by his bars, struggled awkwardly in her grip. He was taller than she was but built like a paper pusher and really didn’t stand a chance as she shook him wildly.
    “Calm down, Sarge.”
    Sorilla looked behind her to see Brigadier Graves step into the room. “Did you know about this shit, sir?”
    “Drop the louie, Sarge, he’s just a clerk recording your results,” Graves ordered, rolling his eyes.
    She looked back at the young man, who was now turning a little blue, and let him go. As he fell to the floor, she turned back to Graves. “Sir? Did you know?”
    “Yes, I knew. And you can relax, you weren’t hacked.” Graves said as he looked at the kid on the floor and snorted, annoyed. “It was an incredibly poor choice of words.”
    She glared down at the man but quickly turned her focus back to the General. “You still had my implants feed me false information, sir.”
    “That we did, but you let us do it.”
    “Excuse me?” she snarled, knowing she was bordering on insubordination but really not caring in the least. Having large parts of her reality being defined by her implants made Sorilla really quite touchy about hackers in general.
    “When you put everything into training and diagnostic mode, Sergeant,” he told her calmly, “a hardware connection was automatically made that lets us access your systems. Come out of training mode and your system defaults to no external access and you can’t be hacked…well, not without an axe or something similar, anyway.”
    She grimaced at that imagery but didn’t comment.
    Graves walked around her, glancing down at the fallen man. “You all right, Lieutenant?”
    “Yes, sir,” the young officer croaked from the floor.
    The general looked back over to Sorilla. “You do realize I should have you up on charges, right?”
    “Sir.”
    “Oh, don’t give me that boot camp shit, Sergeant. I’m neither that stupid nor that old,” he growled. “You’re lucky that this is Bragg and we somewhat expect our officers to get