The Dead Ship (Firehawk Squadron Book 1) Read online

  Firehawk Squadron: The Dead Ship

  Episode One

  Jonathan Schlosser

  1

  The destroyer fell into realspace, venting and burning in the blackness, a hull of twisted metal and raging fire. Those flames ripping through the steel plating as ammunition and atmosphere burned, only to be snuffed out almost instantly by the harsh cold of vacuum. Behind the crippled warship nothing at all but the fading blue flare of the faster-than-light drive, then a hanging void where even the nearest stars looked an impossible distance away. Below the white sphere of Riccana encrusted in snow and ice. Dark ridges of mountains and the great sweeping whiteness of the ice sea. All in sharp counterpoint to the brief inferno above as the starship died.

  Reid Colson was moving before the FTL flare faded, reaching above to lock in his shields and feeling the engines shift on the outside of the strike fighter as the ship switched from the cruising configuration to combat. The heavy click as the wings flexed forward and locked. The flashing of the yellow HUD display lighting up on his visor, washing his helmet and the white shell of the fighter in a sickly light. The burning destroyer lit up on the display and his viewscreen alike.

  “The hell is that, Nine?” The voice clear in his helmet comm, the other bone-white strike fighter hanging just off his port wingtip. He couldn't see Kiena through the stark black canopy but she was projected on the lower right of his screen. Helmeted, of course.

  “Looks like a line ship,” Colson said. His scopes were running a scan and beeping something at him. He keyed it and the ID transponder came up. “The Terriadon.”

  “She's burning like a son of a bitch. You think she's dead?”

  “She's not on comms.”

  “So at least half dead.”

  “Half's generous, Eight.”

  The burning destroyer wasn't coming in flat, but was slowly spinning, rotating on a hard axis line. She was about twenty-five degrees over relative to how she'd fallen in now. Colson fought the temptation to flip the fighter to match, pairing up the perspectives. In space, anything could be up or down or sideways or any damn thing you wanted until you got in atmo. But he needed to know everything he could and the fact that she was spinning was something.

  “What do you think, Nine?”

  “Hold off a second. Let's watch her and see if anyone else comes out of FTL. Give it thirty, then we'll do a surface run and see what we can see.”

  “Gonna see a lot of fire and a broken hull.”

  “Got that from here, Eight.” He toggled the comm over to the ground. The snowswept Harriet Station on Riccana's surface. Technically a military installation with a squadron and one company of Marines, but usually little more than a dead quiet scientific research station. Riccana was tearing herself apart, after all, the planet's core as hot and unstable as the surface was frozen and barren. He waited a moment and the channel locked and he said:

  “Just checking in, ground. Making sure you've got this.”

  A little static this time. “We've got it. You see anything we can't?”

  “Not yet. Giving any trailers a second, then we're going in for a look.”

  “Let us know what you see.”

  “Will do. Any idea why a line ship is way out here?”

  “We're looking into it. Nothing yet. She's not answering our hails.”

  “That's what I love to hear.”

  “Watch yourself, just in case.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They hung then in space, the fighters—called skeletons, or “skelts” in pilot jargon, for their bone-white color and the quad cannons under the combat wings, short and thin like broken fingers—slowly drifting in toward the destroyer. Its long bulk twisting in space, the deep tapered hull below and the wide, flat deck on top, bristling with gun emplacements and approach strips for its own fighters. The curved talons of her bow. Blue interior lights still bright along half of the hull, the rest dark and venting smoke.

  He couldn't see the engines with the ship in front of them, but she wasn't moving under any power of her own. Just falling like some imploding comet into Riccana's gravity well. The automatic decelerator slowing her out of FTL, but the planet grabbing hold instantly.

  He knew they could let her go. There was little down there on the surface and most of her would burn up on the way down. Whatever didn't would bury itself in the ice, melting a tunnel that would freeze almost instantly around her. The storms twisting and sweeping over the surface would fill the channels and they'd never see her again. In a week it would be as if she never existed.

  But he didn't know if she was dead or not. He keyed in on those blue lights, some flashing and some steady. An undamaged destroyer was a daunting sight, a hulking ship with crystal blue lights in long lines against the darkness of space, the twin talons of the bow arching out and forward like they grasped for all who dared rise against her. The flashing red beacons on the control towers, the flickering lights of the landing strips. The heavy gun emplacements lethal and watchful. A ship of incredible power that could with a single salvo rip another ship along her beam and leave her venting oxygen and crew into vacuum, that could pulverize his starfighter so there was nothing left but dust. A line ship was a deadly, horrifying weapon, both regal and domineering, the figure it cut making it look as if nothing could stand in its way.

  Now she was a rent and ruined thing, but those lights were still a remnant of what she'd been. They meant power and that meant perhaps oxygen and that meant maybe someone still alive. He'd let a ship burn up and bury herself in the ice, but he wouldn't let her crew go to the same fate.

  “Flyby, Nine?”

  He nodded to himself, reached up to shift the shield to the fore. “Let's go. Hold formation and keep your eyes open. You see an FTL signature, you tell me and run.”

  “Will do.”

  Careful on the stick, he pushed the fighter's nose down, the stars swinging in front of him. The gravity compensator pushed him into his seat but it didn't change the vacuum outside, and it always felt as if everything else was just moving around the fighter, the ship itself stationary and fixed. The burning destroyer swinging up slightly in front of the fighter's matte black nose, still spinning herself, slowly growing in the viewscreen as the small ship ate up the kilometers between them.

  He cut the engines back as they came down and Kiena matched him flawlessly, the product of countless hours of practice. In atmosphere their engines together would be shrieking like banshees being torn apart; out here they were silent and nearly surreal, ripping through the fabric of space effortlessly, with just the faint glow of the burn behind.

  As they came in toward the destroyer's port bow talon he could see long tears in her hull, blackened and twisted on the outside. Some of the torn metal curved outward, the product of interior explosions—an ammo cache that had gone up or a generator overloaded and destroyed. But most of it was sheered away toward the interior, as if some impossible beast had raked its claws down her hull. Only heavy laser fire could have done that, battering her shields and then vaporizing the hull as the guns held expertly to their lines.

  “Looks like she ran into another capital ship,” Kiena said. “Maybe a Strandorn cruiser?”

  “That or a carrier. Something that outgunned her.”

  “But out here?”

  “I know.”

  The ship grew quickly and then they were screaming down along the hull, that metal flashing by underneath so fast even at half throttle that he couldn't make it out unless he looked well ahead of the fighter. Line after line of charred, blackened hull. Fire spouting now and again where she still burned, but most of the ship dark now as the oxygen burned
off.

  “They just raked the shit out of her. Look at these lines.”

  “Either an ambush or she stood against something she had no chance of taking down.”

  “How'd she make FTL?”

  “Hell if I know.”

  They came along to the command towers and they were jagged and shattered. The destroyer usually had eight towers, all protruding outward and ringing the ship, each tower connected with a transparent walkway where the captain and his command staff stood as if balanced in hard vacuum. Standing there like gods in this technological marvel of Man's creation, driven by the raw desire to prove their mastery of the universe itself, down to the very atoms. The ability at the captain's command to lay waste to planets or venture to the farthest reaches of unknown space, striving long among the constellations to worlds never before seen by the naked eye. Ruby stars and swirling mists and planets with creatures and races uncharted and both wondrous and horrible.

  Those walkways now hung ruined in space, the transparent steel and hull alike torn to pieces, each tower sheered off. The steel melted in places. Wires trailing darkly or sparking in the emptiness. The shattered remains of this conquerer of worlds. He watched as the destroyer rolled and it was the same all the way around, one stunted tower after the next, utterly wrecked nearly beyond recognition.

  “Had to be more than one,” he said. “One ship couldn't do that. She had them on all sides, and they just pounded the ring. Knocked the shields out and then took it all down.”

  “They crippled her,” Kiena said. “Then lit her up.”

  “That's my guess.”

  “Had to be Coalition, then. No one else has the firepower for that type of task force.”

  “You don't have to convince me. Anything alive on scans?”

  “Not here. Engine check?”

  “Let's do it.”

  They swung low along that silver and gray hull, shredded and torn, and he thought for one flashing second that he saw a body against the hull. Hanging in true vacuum, sucked from the ship without a suit, crushed in nothing and his breath torn away. Wrapped now in electrical wires, trapped and trailing behind, this dead soldier and the dead ship. The flesh pale and shriveled, perhaps burned where any charge still flowed through those wires.

  How long had he been hanging there, Reid thought. How damned long had he been snared and hanging in this vast grave that could swallow more than they could ever send to it?

  And then they were out behind the ship, the twisting bulk falling away behind them, the mammoth engines taking over the viewscreen as they swung the fighters around in a shallow curve, and he blinked the dead body from his mind. Reaching up to activate his scans and watching through the canopy at the same time. Yellow and red lines playing through the bottom of the HUD.

  “Untouched,” Kiena said. Breathed. As if she couldn't believe it herself.

  “They had to be to make FTL.”

  “I know, but still.”

  “Some kind of ambush.”

  “Poor planning?”

  “You saw those towers. You think that's poor planning? That was methodical. Perfectly executed. Probably ripped through the shields with a torp volley and then tore them down with the guns. Nothing like I've ever seen.”

  “And how do you plan that and forget about the engines?”

  Colson scowled and glanced to the side to check the main cannons. Knowing they were charged but checking anyway. His eyes flicking over the scans to see what else might come falling out of FTL, screaming after its prey in fury and desperation, driving down on them and this quiet and forgotten outpost with the same savagery that had ripped from space the most powerful destroyer ever created.

  “You don't,” he said.

  2

  They swung around those engines, still intact but now as dead and silent as the vacuum around them. The ship was still rolling and they corkscrewed with her above the frozen plant, coming around to where they could see the port hull with its dark fighter bays and two broken gun turrets and a missile tube sitting useless with no power and no crew to man her.

  “Want to run another scan, Colson?”

  He grinned. “Comms, Eight.”

  The scowl on her face was clear through his helmet speakers. “Want to run another scan, Nine.”

  “Of course. Run bio and I'll go for infra. Not going to find much, though.”

  “Never know.”

  “Agreed. Run it.”

  Neither infra nor bio would tell them a lot. The scanners on starfighters were good for checking a freighter on a smuggling run or an inbound flight of other fighters, but they weren't going to get much on a capital ship. It was just too much mass. Plus, with the way it had been torn to pieces, there was bound to be plenty of interference.

  But he keyed it up anyway as they ran with her, watching the colors play over his HUD. The blinking tracking bar flashing light from left to right. Results running by on the bottom in lines of text, continually replacing themselves. He'd been sitting in a pilot's seat for nearly a decade now, if you counted the sims, and he could draw what he needed from all of this information in a split second, but it still felt like a lot.

  He glanced out at the gracefully turning wreckage of the destroyer, the system's sun far off and pale behind, and wondered if anyone was looking back out those viewports at him. Screaming in some primal way at the viewport, as if he could hear them, banging on it with a fist. Crouching in some smoke-filled compartment, sealed off from the hard vacuum flooding the ship. Or of it was just a cask of bodies, a floating graveyard driving on toward its final resting place in that barren wasteland below.

  The scan finished and he keyed his comm. “Infra's a mess, Eight. Lot of patches of heat and a lot of dark. Low heat on the engines and in deep, so we have reactor power. Compartments dotted all over the place. No way to tell if it's crew or just atmosphere in there.”

  “Hang on,” Kiena said.

  He sat up straight. Two years of flying with her in this emptiness, running drills and doing nearly nothing. That's what a banishment detail was for, after all. Keeping you off the front lines and out of the fight. And now there was something in her voice that he hadn't heard before, in all that time.

  And he waited. Checked the positioning of the destroyer and the starfighters instinctively, visually. Never one to rely only on scans. Watched the counter scroll for the time to impact with Riccana's surface.

  “I have something,” Kiena said at last.

  “What is it?”

  “I don't know. It's faint. Deep. But I'm getting at least one life signature on that ship.”

  “Run it again.”

  “I already ran it twice, Nine.”

  He whistled. So it wasn't dead. Or it was very newly dead and the scanners didn't know for sure. There could be electrical interference or any other damn thing playing with the system. Bio scanners were hardly the most reliable devices.

  But it was still one signature. That one person in the dark and the smoke, hurdling on toward their end, pounding their first against the wall.

  “What do you want to do?” she said.

  “Lieutenant Colson, this is ground.” The call cut into the comm channel abruptly. A different voice from before. “We ran the trajectory numbers. She won't hit the base. Let her fall and burn up.”

  He looked down at the planet below. They were close enough now to make out the biggest features, but most of it was still a pristine ball of ice, sunlight flashing back where in darkness the temperatures would fall far enough that they'd kill you instantly. You could live in a vacsuit, but anything less and this was a world that ate you whole. With a core that was just as surely eating itself.

  “You get that last transmission, ground?”

  “We got it, Lieutenant.”

  “Then you know there's someone on there.”

  “We don't know anything for sure. Could have been interference. And there's nothing we can do anyway.”

  “Still a half an hour until impac
t.”

  “Nothing we can do,” the voice said again. “Come back to base. It's no threat to us.”

  Again, he watched the ship turn in the void. Something beautiful in those gently spiraling flares of light, in the sleek lines of the destroyer that were still intact. A tragic beauty, perhaps, with the shattered command towers and the ruined walkway, but even that twisting serenely in the star-strewn sky. Not the chaos of a battle, the flashes of terror and light and the madness of it all, but a slow and somehow more noble death.

  Not a death he'd be all that against himself, if he was being honest.

  He pursed his lips, reached up and switched his comm over to the squadron channel, the one he shared with no one but Kiena right now. No ground, no open broadcast. Just the two of them.

  “Go back to base if you want,” he said. “It's the brig if you don't.”

  “Colson.”

  “I won't hold it against you.”

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  He looked once more at the hull outside his canopy, at those dark open squares that had once been landing bays, ringed in blue light. The landing strips on the top deck were now impossible to get to, but those bays were open, unshielded, and – at least at the moment – no longer on fire. He reached up to touch his helmet's neckline and make sure it was bonded properly to his flight suit, then keyed the comm again.

  “I'm going to land on her,” he said.

  3

  The starfighter shuttered as he closed with the burning, twisting destroyer. The dead ship swelling in his canopy until he couldn't see anything else. This leviathan of deep space, blotting out suns and star systems in its wretched agony. The fighter dwarfed as he came in toward the bay, carefully pushing the stick to match the ship's twisting. Both of them dancing in the void in tandem.

  “Twenty-eight minutes, Nine.” Kiena's voice in his helmet.

  “Last chance.”

  “Save it. I'm your eyes.”

  Watching from outside the ship, she could let him know if anything went to hell. If the ship started breaking up or some other damned ship fell out of FTL on top of them. That sort of thing.