The Dead Ship: Episode Two (Firehawk Squadron Book 2) Read online

  Firehawk Squadron: The Dead Ship

  Episode Two

  Jonathan Schlosser

  1

  Kiena pushed the scout mech hard over the snowswept plain, the view of Riccana's dead surface jolting sickly in her helmet, the scream of the servomotors as the metal skeleton tore through the ice with each step and then wrenched itself free like some outcast god furiously trying to outrun its fate in this cursed world that sought only to pull it down and devour. The teeth of the planet itself. That ice shell and below the unstable and violent heart of fire.

  The wind roaring across the plains ripped through the mech's mics. Here in the metal shell, everything was enclosed. A mech built for war, even a small scout mech just twice the size of its pilot, had no need for an open hatch or even a face shield. Everything was fed in by sensors, splashed back out across her helmet's visor.

  But the mech was still humanoid. At this size, it was essentially a metal exoskeleton in its headlong flight, her legs and arms actually moving within the appendages. In the true war mechs, hulking behemoths a dozen meters tall, the pilot did move, but she was contained within a stable compartment – a casket, they often called it – in the mech's chest.

  Those mechs, they didn't have here.

  Kiena turned her head, looking back over her shoulder without slowing. All in front of her was empty for another five hundred meters, until a spire of black stone thrust its way through the snow's crust. A single dark finger grasping from the grave. Behind her, she could see the long spine of the mountains rising into the thin clouds. The darkness falling all around them as the planet spun, but the moons rising bright and washing this twilight hemisphere in silver.

  High above her and wheeling in the sky, the skelt with its light cannons still spinning from its last attack run. Projectile cannons mounted for this run, hammering out their thunder as the 25mm shells buried themselves in sprays of snow and ice.

  “Four,” she gasped into the comm. “Aimes, you alive?”

  Four – Jannis Aimes – was silent. The wind the only sound in her ears, and the far-off screech of the skelt's engines in atmo, tearing through the air.

  Her own feet, plunging endlessly into that ice and snow, ripping back out. Hoping with every step not to find some buried crevasse or a trench thinly roofed with ice. The soft jolt and then the whole thing shattering under her weight, the shards of ice glinting in the moonlight as the mech tumbled headlong into the dark and the cold and the encasing tomb of this forlorn world.

  The skelt had found them in the mountains, not two miles from the waypoint. All that time in silence and running only on close-range comms. Picking their way from one snowcovered hill to the next in their white armor. Sensors off to run in silence, ghosts on this planet, the constant snowfall washing out their tracks.

  Only to have it find them with sheer luck, just flying a patrol pattern as they moved over an ice bridge. Her already across and waiting, Aimes halfway there. The skelt coming unseen and hurdling up over the mountains like some night terror, her screaming in the comm for Aimes to run even as he tried to bring his rockets up and on target. No time at all, the skelt flipping up and over expertly in that crisp air. Falling in a hail of cannonfire, the bridge shattering, the mech's chest ripping in half as all of it – the mech, the bridge, and the snubfighter – dropped out of her view.

  And she ran. She didn't even yell for Aimes again, just turned and ran flat out. Down the slope and out of the mountains and for that waypoint she knew she could never reach in time. Not with the skelt's speed, even in atmosphere, and the open plain. But she ran because sometimes all you could do was run and none of it meant a damned thing if you didn't.

  “One,” she said into the comm, looking back ahead and watching the skelt on the scans. Active radar up and running now, comms silence long gone. When things went to hell the rules went out and it was always just a race to see who lived and who died and then those who lived decided how they'd done it and wrote history for everyone else.

  “I see you, Three.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Coming. Won't make it. Too damned far. We can throw some rocks at him and see if he slows or pulls off but if he knows his shit he'll just run right at them and rip us apart.”

  She swore. “He knows his shit.”

  “Can you make the spire?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Gonna be tight.”

  She didn't respond and pushed the stick. Still driving the mech like a fighter but sweat running hard down her back and face as she moved with it. The anti-fog system on her visor running hot to keep it clear so she could see the HUD.

  Her own rockets wouldn't save her. The skelt was way too fast, the scout mechs never designed to go up against snubfighters. He'd be close enough to lay into her with the cannons before he hit range and she got a lock. And her out here in this wasteland with armor meant to stop carbine fire. The mech would be a smoking and mangled mess is seconds, steam rising around its wrecked body as it melted into the ice.

  Maybe she'd get to hear the targeting lock chime as it died. Small satisfaction in that.

  So it was the spire and that was it. A small bit of cover that might buy her time. Then maybe One and Two could get in range and light him up or maybe she could figure something out or maybe it'd turn out that Aimes got in one dying shot as that bridge went out and the skelt would finally tear itself apart in the atmosphere and die unceremoniously, a cartwheel of fire and shrapnel on the snow fields in front of her.

  Two many maybes, she thought. That many maybes and the only sure thing is that you're dead.

  2

  Colson often fell asleep early and she got up and pulled on her flightsuit's undershirt and stood at the glass wall in the soft glow of the LEDs and looked out past the balcony and the metal street winding below and the magtrain running silently at all hours and she could see this spire far off in the frozen world before her, the shattered peak and the black stone walls in the moonlight and the blasphemy of it standing tall and persistent in this plain that was so flat and pristine all the way to the mountains.

  She didn't know what she was looking at then and it was probably nothing at all and maybe that was the whole point. Closing her mind to what had been and living only in what now was. Shunting aside the past and its torturous existence for something new where the sight of a rock formation above the ice was calming and soothing.

  Or perhaps it was the difference that she loved, that blasphemy itself. The rebellion of this dagger of stone that refused to fall. But now as she raced toward it in the scout mech with the snubfighter leveling off behind her and beginning to fall like a bird of prey in precision and yet barely contained recklessness, she blinked and she could see it as she did on those nights when she thought that perhaps it saved her.

  And she hoped it would again.

  The shells started hammering the ground three hundred meters from the spire. He was firing at maximum effective range and couldn't hit her and might not take her down if he did, but the snow exploded before the mech, rising in sudden fury and then hanging and falling slowly in the frozen air. Chips of ice rattling off the mech's armor. They weren't exploding rounds and there was no fire, just the abrupt and violent upheaval of the frozen tundra, splinters and powder erupting into the still air.

  She fought the urge to turn. It was why he was firing. If she broke off her run she'd never make it to the spire and there was nothing else out here. She'd just be running, aimless and exposed, until he came back around one more time and dropped a salvo through the mech's chest and left it smoking and twisted on the ice.
r />   Ahead of her, two streams of rockets launched into the air. So very far away, rising in complete and utter silence on tails of smoke. Little glinting jets of fire. One and Two both firing out four rockets each from their shoulder mounts, though they'd all self-destruct long before they closed with the skelt. The destruction system kicking in when the fuel ran dry so they didn't fall on houses and civies. Not that there were any of those on Riccana, but the rocket systems were the same everywhere under Imperial control.

  She checked the plot. The skelt didn't waiver in the slightest. The guns humming and spinning for a moment on the wings as he took his finger off the trigger, let them cool, and then hammered it down again.

  Two hundred meters. The shells were much closer now and she had to fight the urge to duck as they roared over the mech. Thinking of Aimes for a fleeting moment, falling with the bridge and those same cannons.

  One hundred. Fifty.

  A shell took the mech in the left ankle. The board all at once flaring up in nothing but red, her visor flashing, an alarm screaming in her helmet. The mech stumbling to the side as she fought the stick. She glanced down at the display, quickly toggled an exterior cam for the side of her HUD.

  The foot was completely gone. Even as the mech took its next lurching stride, Kiena watched it step with a leg that was sheered off, the metal bent and ruined, wires hanging loose. Running on a stub that she could feel as she nearly fell. Righted herself. Almost fell again.

  She cursed under her breath. The next barrage of cannon rounds flew by on the right even as the mech canted to the left, hammering into the base of the spire. Sparks and chips of stone and shrapnel from the spent shells flying in all directions. The stone fragments washing a dark patch over the snow.

  There was no other way. As the mech righted itself and then took another step with the amputated foot, Kiena twisted the stick to swing its bulk across. The shoulders and waist twisting, the arms swinging, the heavy rocket tubes on the shoulders shifting. And, as all the weight went to that already unbalanced side, the scout mech went down.

  Rolling hard in a tangle of metal limbs. The thunder of the cannons as the skelt went by not two hundred meters over her head, chewing up the ground where the mech should have been. Ice and snow and the quick flare of the cannons and then the engines. The heavy thud of the backblast as the snubfighter tore past and out into the empty sky, engines already screaming as it started to come around again.

  Kiena reached with one hand and turned off all of the alarms. Knowing better than the machine what the situation was. Sitting in stark and sudden silence, pushing the mech back up in the shadow of the spire.

  There would be no more running. Not on that leg and in this desolation. But that didn't mean she couldn't move.

  Reaching up the stone face of the spire, she began to climb. Three hundred feet of black rock above her, draped in ice and spiraling slightly to the south as it twisted toward the sky. Pinning the spire directly between her and the wheeling fighter, a blanket of cover until he came around again to see if he'd hit her.

  “What the hell?” One said softly over the comm. Evidently watching her helmet feed even as he ran toward her, a distance they both knew he'd never cross in time.

  “Just wait,” Kiena said.

  The mech was tall and that gave it terrific reach and she climbed without the legs. Jamming one hand into a crack in the stone. Pulling the mech up with the motors straining, clawing for a grip on a ledge. Getting the other hand up over a shelf and then scrambling for a second on the rock and then getting both hands on it. Hefting the mech up.

  Looking down once at the drop below her. A sickening fall with the spire curving away under her feet, making it look as if she was just hanging in midair. Tearing her eyes away, checking the plot for the fighter, then reaching again. Finding a wide crack this time and getting one foot and a hand in, propelling herself higher.

  A lurch once as a shelf broke and she fell and her heart in her chest and then just before she came away from the spire entirely and was in empty air, another handhold in a small pitted cave. Pulling herself forward and slamming the mech's chest so hard against the stone she could feel it rattle her own bones through the armor plating and the webbed pilot's chair.

  And then, two lunges later, she was at the top. Standing there and turning, the whole ice planet far away below her as if she stood now in some new world of her own discovery, a place no one had ever stood before. Or would likely ever stand again. As she turned to find the fighter, she could see the lights of Harriet Station – a research station, but a ground installation – glinting blue and cold on the horizon.

  Far out and flashing in the moonlight, she saw it. The fighter through its turn and coming on hard and fast toward the spot where she'd fallen. She crouched into the shadow of the stones, hoping they'd hide the signal long enough, but she could tell he was running on visual feeds. Thinking he knew where she'd gone down and knowing one more pass would kill her. Maybe with his sensors trained on the other two mechs from the fire team as they sprinted across the snow, making sure they didn't get into rocket range.

  She had no idea how to time it. Knew that the rockets would never lock quickly enough, not this close and this fast. Didn't know if they had what it took to punch through the shields even if they locked, those rockets designed to take down infantry troops and light enemy armor, not starfighters.

  So she did what she'd done since she was a girl. She looked at it for a moment, closed her eyes, felt it, and then threw herself from the top of the spire.

  It was too far to fall directly into the fighter's path, as it screamed through just thirty meters below her. But she reached as she fell, reaching for a blur of metal and light and kinetic energy, and for just a fraction of a fraction of a second, they met. Fighter and mech in the air, these two war machines bred for battle and intertwined in a dance that could only end in death.

  She clenched and there was no way to know if she got the mech's hands around the wing or not, but there was a sudden impact like all the world had been ripped off its axis. Nothing but red lights on the HUD, all her visuals gone. She could feel herself spinning and falling at once, a sickening drop that seemed to happen in an instant and also seemed to take her entire life.

  Somewhere in that drop, before the ruined mech slammed for a final time into the ice sheet below, she looked at the display. She knew the mech's arms were entirely gone because she could feel it, but she looked in that fleeting second at the scope trained on the skelt.

  It was burning like a comet as it streaked out over the snow, spinning madly in a corkscrew, one wing sheered entirely off and the side of the fighter ripped open and roaring with fire and smoke. A cacophonous death as it fell to tumble headlong across the wasteland, ripping itself apart until nothing but fragments remained, fuel burning in a long gash in the snow.

  And then the mech hit the ice and everything went dark.

  3

  She popped the hood on the simulator and climbed out, stretching as she stood up into the light. Still feeling that final roll, if not the impact. The simulators took the edge off, but they still put you through hell if you did something stupid. Like jumping off of a three hundred-foot stone spire to kill a skelt and commit suicide just to make sure neither of you won the mission.

  Kiena looked over and smiled at him as Colson stood out of his own simulator, at once looking like he was going to scream and punch the wall and fall to his knees in laughter. She winked at him, raised her chin.

  “You like that?”

  He opened his mouth, closed it. Shook his head. Looked at her again. “You're a maniac. You know that?”

  “I thought that's what you loved about me.”

  “You're a damned maniac.” He climbed down and stood on the deck. They both wore their normal flightsuits, regardless of machine, a sleek military design that was mostly a deep olive drab and a gray so dark it was almost black. Neither had their gun belts, which hung near the door. The sims came with bu
ilt-in helmets, his brown hair dark and soaked in sweat.

  “You know you didn't win, right? You had to get the payload to the last waypoint without getting it destroyed. You blew it all to hell with the mech.”

  She shrugged. “Neither did you.”

  “Neither did I? No one did. No one won.”

  “I guess that all depends.”

  “Depends on what?”

  She smirked and shrugged as she climbed down. “I feel like I won. Do you?”

  He looked at her for a long moment, his mouth hanging slightly open. Behind him, Aimes was sitting on top of his simulator, watching with his orange eyes bright and the room's lights pooling in skin like an oil slick, at once deeply black and with sheens of green and blue rolling in it as he moved and his muscles flexed. One and Two no doubt still in the program and shutting the software down.

  Kiena looked up at him. “What do you think?”

  “Me?” Aimes grinned with his sharp teeth and nodded. “Oh yeah. We won.”

  “We?” Colson stammered. “We? You went down with the first bridge you found. Stood there and died without doing a damned thing. And you think you won.”

  Aimes feigned a hurt look and touched his chest over his heart. “I did what I had to do for the team. Led you off like a fool while I bought enough time for Laskoff there to run.”

  Kiena walked across and past Colson, toward the door of the sim room. “Come on. Aimes. Let's eat. He'll get there eventually.”

  She could hear Aimes climbing down as she went out the door, and Colson was saying something very quickly and loudly, but she didn't bother to listen to what it was as the door slid open ahead of her.

  Harriet Station was only fifty years old, one of the youngest research hubs out this far. A labyrinth of metal and grav tracks and LED lights. The outside edge of the station was a perfect circle, a track all the way out on the edge where the magtrain circled. Inside everything moving toward the core in spokes. That core a hulking steel and glass pyramid rising up toward the weak sun, the antennas and data collection systems bolted on the peak and glinting in the light.