The Dead Ship (Firehawk Squadron Book 1) Read online

  Not that she could do much about it, he thought wryly. But she could at least tell him he was about to die so he'd know. He wasn't sure if that was better or not, but it was something.

  The landing bay drew closer through the skelt's canopy. The blue lights were out, as was the shield that held the atmosphere in while letting fighters and shuttles pass through. It was going to be nothing but cold vacuum in that bay. Probably the whole ship. But it was physically intact and he could see plenty of space on the landing floor, so he could get the skelt down. His vacsuit would give him a few hours even without life support, and the maglock boots meant he could move without the risk of falling out to space himself.

  Of course, the collision with the plant would kill him long before his vacsuit ran out, if he was still on the ship when it hit. Maybe they could dig him out of the ice. Probably not, though. A waste of resources for one snubfighter pilot who disobeyed orders and got himself killed.

  “Anything else on that scan?” he said as he closed the last of the distance.

  “Same as it was. Faint signature. Consistent, at least.”

  “So it's not just interference.”

  “Or it's consistent interference.”

  “Always the optimist.”

  “Twenty-seven minutes.”

  He swore in Crallian and pushed the stick slightly. Feeling the little nudge from the engines. He wanted to put her down and fly in hot, but that was a good way to die. Better in and alive with twenty-six minutes left than a smoldering crater on the bay floor with twenty-seven.

  But he was already thinking it was going to be a hell of a time to get to anyone and back to the ship. And even if he could, he still didn't know what he was going to do. The skelt was a one-man fighter and a tight one at that. Built for speed and agility in a dogfight, not shuttling people around. They could maybe cram themselves into the cockpit, but he'd never done it.

  “Never stopped me before,” he said under his breath.

  “What?”

  “About to touch down, Eight. Stay on the squad channel.”

  “I have to. Someone is screaming at us on the main channel. Can't get a word in.”

  He shook his head. There'd be a lot more where that came from if he got back alive. “Here we go,” he said.

  The bay came up way too fast in that last split second, but he knew it would and hammered the throttle back to nothing as the fighter went in through what had once been the shield. Reaching over to hit the maglifts even as the fighter slowed, the nose plowing up just slightly. The ship still turning around him, but the fighter now turning with it as the maglifts locked with the bay floor and drew the fighter down. And then, heart hammering in his chest, he was on board.

  He reached up and opened the canopy. The latches giving way with a click, the hiss of the hydraulics bringing it up. Unhooking his harness with one hand and dragging it over his head, the straps catching for a moment on his helmet before he grabbed them with both hands and forced them past. His breathing heavy in his ears now as the atmosphere in the fighter was lost and the vacsuit really took over.

  “I'm down. Give me something.”

  “Hurry,” Kiena said. “Looks like second or third level. Right near the center of the ship. What's that on a destroyer? Aux generator?”

  “Should be. Probably the only place with power.”

  “Makes sense.”

  The bay was dark, a cavern stretching around him, conspicuous in its silence. Not even a flashing red warning light still going. Empty now, any wreckage long since sucked out when the shield failed and the bay decompressed and became vacuum itself. But long blackened furrows dug into the far wall where the heavy guns had reached through the opening and hit it broadside. Capital guns that just ripped into anything without three feet of armor plating. Deadly even then.

  He took two steps down the skelt's nose and then jumped lightly to the floor, bending his knees to take the impact. The floor held, the magboots locked, but the metal decking was bent and the gray paint blistered. Off near the wall, a pair of bodies burned black and fused to the bulkhead.

  For at least a minute, this place had been an inferno.

  He went across and the far door was open, leading deeper into the ship. It should have locked down automatically when the shield breached and he wondered what had gone wrong until he saw it. What had gone wrong was that half the damn door was missing and the other half was bend inward. It had tried to close and there were deep gouges along the metal surface where the motors had pushed until they burned out. He stepped through, half expecting it to finally give way and cut him in two, but it was silent and dead.

  Like everything else, he thought.

  The first passage was empty. Everything had been sucked out into the bay. Nothing had breached it past the door but anything not bolted down was long done, lost in space before the ship even hit FTL. Some other system littered with debris and body parts. He ran down the long passageway with just the light from his helmet bouncing pale blue ice off the walls. Here and there the blistered paint where a fire had raged so briefly within the walls. Gutting this thing as it died.

  A hundred yards on he found the first bank of lifts. He hammered the buttons with his fist but didn't wait. None of the lights came on and there was no sound of motors within the ship.

  If someone was alive near the axillary generator, it meant part of the ship was unbreached. That was, of course, common. All of the bulkhead doors were designed to slam down and lock when there was a breach, keeping it to the compartments near the ship's skin. The inside should be full of air and heat, even just residually with the power wrecked.

  But he hoped it was more than that. If the generator was still going, perhaps some of the lifts still had power. If he could find one that did, he could take it down a few levels and get closer.

  Without that, he'd never make it. At best, he'd backtrack to the fighter and jump out of the bar doors at the last second.

  At worst, he'd just run aimlessly until he was lost in the dark, twisting passageways, listening to Kiena screaming in his helmet as the ship drove into the planet's surface, crumpling and burning and burying itself in the ice.

  4

  “Twenty-one minutes,” Kiena was saying when he finally found the lift that worked. Standing in a desolate, uniform corridor like all the rest, past an emergency airlock that had locked down and still worked; it had taken just seconds to get through, but it felt like an excruciatingly long time.

  A body lying against the wall. A female sailor, he thought, but it was hard to tell. Her hair tied up to adhere to Navy regulations. Her face an utter ruin where she'd slammed it against the wall. Probably as the ship took the first salvo against the outer hull. What was left of her face was completely covered in blood, her nose virtually buried in her own skull. He looked once and tried not to look again as the lift doors opened.

  It wasn't the first body he'd found past the airlock, but a lot of the others had just strangled and frozen when the life support went out. At least here. He imagined there were a lot of others who had died more painfully and horribly near the command ring and the gun emplacements and all along the outside edge of the ship, but he would never see them. And once the ship hit Riccana, no one ever would again.

  He stepped into the lift, the doors hissing shut behind him. The sickly red glow of the emergency lights. The control panel dark, but the buttons functional. He reached out and keyed it and waited.

  “Any change?” he said as the lift began to move.

  “Nothing,” Kiena said. “Still getting the signature. If they're really alive, they can't move. You'll need another vacsuit.”

  “I know.”

  “You have a plan for that?”

  “I'm in a dead ship that's about to crash into the planet's surface and you're asking if I have a plan for that? I don't have a plan for any of this.”

  “You better get one.”

  “I'll get one.”

  The lift doors opened. The hallway
beyond stretching away in both directions, pristine metal without a scar on it. Soft lights running down the floor and ceiling. Rubber-coated traction tiles on the floor, barely worn with use. This had been a new warship, probably coming out of the Skallian shipyards in the last three years, and this hallway showed no signs of the battle that had ravaged the hull.

  And yet it was empty. Starkly empty, a tomb of a corridor.

  He knew, from Kiena's scans, that this ship was dead. A dark and contorted ghost in hard vacuum, a husk of what she'd been, raked with heavy lasers and splintered from bow to stern. But he hadn't expected her to be this empty. This ship had a crew that numbered in the hundreds. Even if it was running on a skeleton crew, there should have been more people here. Dead people, but there should at least have been bodies. More than the few he'd found.

  Dead husks within the other.

  But so far, he could count on one hand the amount of dead he'd seen. A ship shattered in battle and torn apart in what appeared to be minutes. The dead should have been everywhere. Perhaps some had run for the escape pods, others for the shuttles. Maybe the pilots had launched their snubfighters from those dark fighter bays even as the ship plunged headlong into FTL, a dead thing throwing itself with a last gasp past the barriers of light.

  But everyone? Hundreds?

  “This is a damned ghost town,” he said quietly. His voice still feeling very loud in his helmet.

  “You don't sound like you're running,” Kiena said.

  “Do you have me on the scan?”

  “Just barely. Go left. About four hundred yards. There's a short utility lift there. It'll drop you at the aux generator. Take it and you'll just have enough time to do this all again before that thing goes atmo.”

  “Surface?”

  “Still yelling. I'm still not listening.”

  “Good.”

  He took one last look to the right; far down the hall, the lights flickered and shorted out for just a moment, plunging it into darkness before they flared back to life. Some deep part of his brain half expected to see something in that wash of light, some black creature with glowering eyes and its lips peeled back over fangs and blood dripping lightly to the decking from deformed, mutilated claws. But it was still nothing, just an empty passageway under lights that were finally shorting in this battered warship on its way to a grave of ice.

  And then he turned and ran for the lift. Boots thundering on the decking in the small passageway, the lights above blinking and here and there the red flare of the emergency lighting. Somewhere far off he could hear a klaxon screaming out its call, but it was dead in most of this ship. A soft computerized voice speaking in between the tearing bells of the alarm, instructing everyone in an unnerving calm to head for the escape pods.

  So someone had pulled it. Someone had lived at least long enough to order them to abandon ship.

  He needed more time, time he'd never have. To find out if anything was left of the bridge in that shattered glass walkway. To pull the last files from the warship's brain, the logs of what had happened. Exterior shots from the hull cameras. Interior scan files.

  But he didn't have it. Maybe some of it would live through the atmospheric burn and the impact on the surface below. Maybe they could trek out across the vast frozen sea and cut their way through the hull, the arc torch burning hot against that frozen backdrop, and work their way down through a ship with metal walls now covered in ice until they found the bridge.

  Or maybe it would burn up and come down in pieces and then a storm would fill the holes those pieces melted in the ice. And they'd never find any of it before Riccana tore herself in half and they lost it all.

  He blinked as he reached the second lift, pushing it all aside. There was no time. He was facing a court martial for doing what he was doing now, and he'd be dead with everyone else if he went for the bridge. If she burned, she burned. He couldn't stop it, but he could find out who was sitting in by the last vestiges of power and waiting to die. And maybe, just maybe, he could pull them out before they did.

  The lift doors hissed open and he stepped inside, slamming his palm against the controls and watching the doors reverse their course with a painful slowness. In his helmet, Kiena was giving him the time again, but he'd stopped listening.

  5

  The doors opened and the room was heaped with the dead. They were piled against the walls and stacked to the center of the room, one over the other, some face down and others up and others so torn apart he couldn't tell which way they'd faced or what they'd been. Officers and enlisted, soldiers and sailors and pilots, men and women. Now soaking in blood and carnage and all one and the same in that death, in that endless brutality.

  He stood looking and the smell of the room everywhere, even through the helmet filter. Unable to step inside the door as it hung open on the hydraulic lifts, waiting for him to move. In the center of the room the twin auxiliary generators standing tall and surrounded in scaffolding and blinking blue and red lights. Humming softly to themselves as though they were not some alloy mausoleum in these piled dead.

  One step in. The hiss of the door closing behind him. Kiena speaking in his helmet again, this time unable to hear her.

  It wasn't everyone. It couldn't be. The room wasn't that large. But it was half the crew maybe, slaughtered here. Or brought here, more accurately. Slaughtered all over the ship. Some of the bodies burned and faceless from the heavy lasers or the fires that raged through the ship in their wake. Here a man cut to ribbons by shrapnel, his skin ragged and hanging. Near him a woman sliced nearly in half by something he did not know what. Perhaps a door malfunctioning and falling, perhaps a piece of the hull thrown inward by an explosion on the ship's surface. Or perhaps she'd been on the command bridge when it was shattered from one tower to the next, the whole glass ring blown to pieces.

  But no, he thought as he took another slow step into the room. That couldn't be it. Because those sailors were gone. Wind a raging torrent as the ring shattered, even with the doors coming down to stop it from venting. Men and women sucked silent and screaming into space as each bridge was destroyed. Perhaps someone there had been cut in half like that, as well, but both pieces were now swirling in the dark in some other system, lightyears away where this ship had begun her long death.

  “Nine. Dammit it, Nine.” Kiena again. “Are you there?”

  He opened his mouth. Closed it again. Finally said: “I'm here.”

  She knew him far too well and there was instantly an edge in her voice. “What is it?”

  “They're dead, Kiena.” He felt how feeble it sounded. She knew they were dead. They both knew it was a dead ship when he landed on it.

  They just hadn't known it was like this.

  He looked around and the bodies began to fade into one another. In any other place, a man with his throat ripped out a horror. Here, a mercy. Something meek and not nearly as bad as it could have been. Not when others looked like they'd been boiled alive and some in the

  (slaughterhouse)

  room had been flash frozen and others had been crushed as decompression threw them against auto-sealing airlock doors and others were just pieces and he didn't know how much was there or how much was missing.

  He tried not to think about the rest of it. He was wearing his sidearm but he didn't think that would matter a lot. He'd either live or he was already dead and that was decided independent of the pistol, no matter how good he was with it or if he set it for projectiles or beams. The weight of it still a comfort, somehow, as it always was. The body unused to such details, unused to a situation in which firearms didn't matter.

  “Nine, talk to me.” Kiena was swearing now and again he didn't know how long she'd been talking in his helmet comm. Maybe it had been twenty minutes. Maybe they were burning up in atmosphere.

  Maybe it had been four seconds. He didn't know.

  “They're dead,” he said again. “The room is full of them.”

  “Is there anyone alive?”

&nbs
p; A pointedness in her voice. She felt that it was bad, his wingman from how many hundreds of flights he didn't know. She was trying to direct him, distract him, keep him on task. And he loved her for it but there were so damned many of them.

  “I don't know.”

  “Look. Nine, you look right now. I'm getting two signatures. One has to be you, so someone else is in there. You've got about four minutes to find them or you're going back alone.”

  Colson closed his eyes. He'd seen the dead before. Killed before. But it was different in a dogfight. Pull back on the stick, snaproll and dive, come up with your cannons already firing and watch the other ship get torn apart in debris and gouts of flame. Move on to the next.

  An impersonal way to kill, perhaps. Or to die.

  Not this.

  He opened his eyes again. She was talking and he didn't listen to her, but her voice at last centered him. They were dead, but he'd known. Hadn't expected to see them, but had known they were dead. The mission was the same. All the same.

  Four minutes.

  He looked out again. Wondering how anyone could be alive in this. Nothing was moving. The emergency lights in the room were on and his headlamp flashed off the metal hull. The towering generators. The rail fencing around them, the rising scaffold.

  Slowly, he began making his way around, moving to his right to circle the generators, but always facing them. Watching the other doors lit with emergency beacons and trying to keep an eye on the lift doors where he'd come in. Still nothing moving, all of those doors locked down and silent. The red lights flashing along the floor to tell him they were sealed. Probably not against vacuum this deep in – though there could have been a deep breach, the way the outside was ripped to shreds – but still sealed.

  “There are a lot of bodies,” he said. Not saying anything but needing to talk. “I don't see anyone moving. Can you get a vitality level on the scan?” Wondering, belatedly, if it was just some sailor missing half his skull and barely clinging to some life that was not life at all, his lungs expanding and heart faintly beating. In reality just as dead as the bodies around him but still holding to some bare humanity in this carnage.