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

  Five hundred people. A lot packed into this place; virtually nothing anywhere else. The Marine contingent, the fighter pilots, a handful of civilian pilots for the shuttles. Everyone else either a tech or a scientist. The hall as they walked filled with white coats and the soft beeps of personal comms. Metal doors rising and falling in near silence from research labs awash in bright, sterile light.

  The station had its own gravity to keep things regulated, but Riccana's wasn't all that different than Noxim or Crall or the core worlds. The floor below them a soft rubberized patchwork of black tiles, broken up with power ports and ducts. Cushioning their footfalls so they walked without a sound, even in combat boots.

  Kiena looked outside as she walked, through the glass walls rising on both sides of this spoke of the station, and could see all the way to the track with the magtrain moving slowly and then the frozen world beyond. That stone spire standing far off, always seeming to draw her eyes back to itself. The result of something she didn't know. Some movement of magma and pressure below the surface a million years ago or a rolling glacier in some unfathomable past when the whole planet wasn't itself a sheet of ice or the pressing of tectonic plates in an earthquake powerful enough to rip this station in half and kill them all in frigid and cataclysmic violence.

  She looked at it until they were past the window and the wall was metal again, yet another lab on the far side.

  Aimes glided up beside her with long strides. “Colson says they have you scheduled for today.”

  She shook her head. “The bastards.”

  “What do you think they'll do?”

  “Nothing.” She shrugged. “They already sent us to the edge of nowhere. Stuck us on a dying planet that, as a bonus, is cold as hell. Then I disobey one little order about stopping another pilot from landing on a dead warship and suddenly they've got something else up their sleeves? I don't think so.”

  “So they'll just let it slide.”

  “I mean, Garrington is going to yell for a bit and say some damned thing about authority or representing the Empire or I don't what all. And we'll sit there and nod like good little soldiers and when he gets done he'll tell us not to do it again. As if we'd have that chance.”

  “Colson says he thinks they'll give you a week in the brig.”

  “I don't give a damn what Colson says.”

  “Plus, you didn't land on it.”

  She looked back as they came to the metal door to the chow hall. Colson was walking slowly behind them, his comm in his hand, scrolling through something on the screen with one finger. He'd strapped his pistol back on his hip and for a second she could see it out and in his hand as he stood in the half-dark, surround by piles of the dead, the laser sight blinking off the wall as a pale girl dropped her own handgun from the bloody ruin that was left of her skull. And then she blinked and it was gone and it was just the pleasantly warm, temp-controlled passageway, flooded in natural light and silent from the rubberized flooring.

  “No,” she said. “No, I didn't.”

  4

  He'd told her about it when they got back. After the military police got done with them and took away the dead girl's hand and some intel captain came and told them through gritted teeth that they'd get a message later about the debriefing and to watch their comms. They'd both been quiet and the few times she'd looked at Colson it had been like he wasn't there at all. Just looking blankly at the wall and his eyes somewhere else that she'd never seen.

  But then they'd gotten back to the apartment and he'd taken off his flightsuit and sat back against that glass wall in his underclothes, with the darkness and the five-story drop behind him down the side of the pyramid, the lights of the station blinking and the stars above in that raw darkness where the burning ship had died. A glass half full of bourbon in one hand without any ice. Drinking it slowly for ten minutes without saying anything and then running a hand through his hair and then, when she sat next to him with her shoulder and leg pressed against his and her own drink in her hand, he'd told about all of it.

  It wasn't the dead, she didn't think. He'd seen the dead. On Crall during the War of Teeth, if nowhere else. She knew the hell that war had been and the purge at the beginning and he talked about the dead in the streets and digging through the rubble and the way the city of Haldas burned to the ground and the three destroyers raining a bombardment down on it after the defense stations fell.

  Digging through that muddy countryside for months after the planet fell, he'd seen a lot worse than that ship, and she knew it. He knew it.

  But there was something else there. The girl whose hand he'd cut off. His voice and eyes every time he'd talked about her and tried to explain what she'd done. And finally she'd figured out what the problems was. Why it was deeper than perhaps some rooted flashback to Crall and the carnage there.

  It was because he didn't know what that girl was.

  She'd tried to dance around it, there in the dark as they slowly emptied the entire bottle into the glasses, one drink at a time. Trying to get him to tell her more about it, or asking what he'd seen behind her, or getting him to repeat what she'd said to him. And that was the hole he'd dug himself into with this thing, that dead girl on the dead ship, shooting herself when she could have shot him. But nothing he could tell her really hit the heart of it, and she could feel it. There was something he didn't want to

  (couldn't)

  tell her about it. But she could feel in everything else he said the way that it was all twisted and warped, something very deep and inherently wrong, some ghastly bastardization of what it should have been.

  In the end they'd gone to bed and she'd lain in the dark listening to him breathe and playing it over in her head the way he'd told it and she could feel a little bit of what he felt, but she knew it could never be everything. That it was out of reach and perhaps no way existed to bring it closer.

  But Colson was nothing if not bullheaded and she loved and hated it. That confidence a pilot had to have and especially one as good as he was, but that also destroyed him over and over and pushed him to places no one should ever go and that night she could feel him clutching at it because every time his eyes weren't with her, they were on that ship and she knew he was clawing for a way to get back even as he told her what a horror it had been and she felt in it a deep depravity, something wicked and vile and twisted against the inherent fabric of existence, something even beyond the mutilated bodies of the dead.

  5

  They stood in the hall outside the door and she watched the guard at his station fifty yards from them as Colson kept flipping though his comm. She'd asked him what he was looking for and he'd distractedly said something that wasn't much of an answer and she'd let it go. Leading the way up a lift and down the hall to Garrington's office. A colonel with the army and not part of the navy at all, but still their de facto commander since he ran the installation. A tall man but one whose lean build was far behind him, he'd been behind a desk for so long.

  It'd been a quarter of an hour now standing here and waiting. She kept glancing at the guard and knew he'd relayed the message when they came down the passageway, but they'd been early and were now late and she didn't like it. If he didn't need them yet, he should have called them later. There were ten million better things she could do with her time than stand in a silent hallway and watch her feet and wait to see if Colson was going to say anything or act like he even knew they were about to get screamed at and probably put on ground duty for a month.

  At last, the door hissed open. There was a soft chime from inside. She took two steps forward, relieved and just happy to be going toward it, but Colson didn't follow. Standing with his shoulder leaning against the wall and scrolling his comm screen with one hand.

  “I think that's us, Nine.”

  He didn't even look up. “I'll be there.”

  “You trying to make this worse for us?”

  “Two seconds.”

  She shook her head and stepped into the room. It w
as a wide office the size of their whole apartment, all open with the far wall entirely made of glass. Soft lights in banks on the wall and a desk to her left that looked like it was made out of real wood, though she doubted it. Hell of a job, either way. Two chairs on this side, facing the desk, and one high-backed chair behind it.

  The man in that chair was not Garrington. He was standing back against the wall with his arms folded over his chest, but the man sitting in his chair was slender, with a thin and weathered face and dark hair cut close to this head. He wore a black uniform without any rank patches at all. He was leaning forward with his elbows on the desk and his fingers laced together in front of him. He didn't appear to be armed but she got the feeling that he was. Probably a pistol in a shoulder holster under his coat. Maybe tucked down at the small of his back.

  She stood looking at him for a long moment and he just looked back. Garrington didn't move. Then the man nodded at her slowly.

  “Sit down,” he said. His voice soft, controlled, educated. A man here who probably came from the core and had spent very little time on a backwater like Riccana.

  “Colonel,” she said to Garrington. He said nothing.

  “You can talk to me,” the man at the desk said. “The colonel here needs to be present for now, but the conversation we're about to have is between us.”

  She cocked her head to the side. “And you are?” She thought about adding a sir at the end, but didn't. It would probably have come off as condescending and anyway he was the one who chose not to wear a rank badge.

  “Why don't you sit down?”

  “Why don't you answer my question.”

  He sighed. Pressed his lips together into a flat, bloodless line. “I don't have a rank.”

  “Then why should I listen to you?”

  She thought for a moment that he was going to stand, but he just leaned back in the chair. The slight creak as it tipped. The barest hint of a smile on the corner of his lips, but his eyes cold. “The rank structure may matter to you in the navy, Laskoff, but it's not everything. For what I do, there are no ranks. I'm above the entire system. You could be a five-star fleet admiral and if I told you to sit, you'd sit, and if I asked you a question you'd damned well answer it or you'd be on the next bucket home and I'd be melting your stars down to make a drink coaster. Do you understand?”

  When she was fifteen and in what felt like another life Kiena had once had an instructor at school talk to her the way he was talking now and she'd said something smart that she couldn't remember and he'd reached out to grab her shoulder and she'd broken his arm. One step to the side, a grab and twist with both hands, and the grinding snap of the bone. It'd been her last day at that school or any school at all before the navy.

  And in that, she'd learned perhaps more about herself and the world than she had in every classroom in the decade before, and so now she closed her eyes and thought of nothing for a heartbeat and then opened them again. Mirroring his little smile that was nowhere to be found in her eyes. And she walked across to the chair and sat.

  “Thank you,” he said, and then looked at the door. “Weren't there supposed to be two of you?”

  And then Colson walked in. Still holding his comm but finally not looking at it. He glanced quickly at Garrington, Kiena, and the man behind the desk as he walked over, but he barely slowed down. Sat quickly and lightly, tossed his comm casually onto the desk. Leaned back and crossed one leg over his opposite knee.

  “Let's get this over with,” he said.

  6

  Outside the wind shrieking along the face of the wall, a torrent whipping against this glass and steel structure like it wanted to tear it to pieces. Some abomination here on the surface of the wild, a place Man was never intended to thrive. The storm coming down on them in fury and without warning, as they often fell on this wasteland of a planet. Hail pelting them from above and snow swirling in the wind and everything so cold it would turn your bones to ice and they could find you in a thousand years just as you were today, but you'd snap apart in their hands like brittle glass.

  The man spoke softly and yet she could hear every word he said over the storm. Something in his voice that commanded the room. Perhaps the very softness of it. Perhaps something else entirely, this man so sure of his station and secure in that knowledge.

  She'd come here expecting Garrington and his anger and she'd seen it all before. But this was something else entirely. He never raised his voice and not a hint of anger in it. As if the orders they'd ignored meant as little to him as rank. A man perhaps for whom rules also did not apply. Somehow outside of the entire system that most lived within their entire lives, looking down on that system and picking and choosing what parts of it he wanted to use to his own ends.

  “What did she say to you?” he asked Colson. He'd asked it before and Colson had told him every step of his run through the dead ship at least twice, but he circled back to it again. As if hoping there was something else there and digging for it.

  “Nothing,” Colson said. “Just that I wasn't supposed to be there. That no one was.”

  “And then she shot herself.”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn't shoot her?”

  Colson glared. “I told you what happened. You think I'm a liar, you check the gun. The last time I fired it was on the range two days before that ship.”

  The man: “I believe you.”

  “Then quit asking.”

  He was silent for a moment. He'd taken out his own comm unit during the interview and was writing something on it. Taking notes, Kiena thought. Or sending information to someone else, though how he could possibly transmit off world, she had no idea. So likely taking notes he could later beam from his ship or relay in person or whatever the hell he decided to do with them.

  “You'll have to forgive me,” he said, looking up. Not sounding like he meant it at all. “But you're the only person who has been inside one.”

  “One?” Kiena said. The wind howling and throwing itself against the windows. “There's been more than one?”

  He nodded, looking back at the comm. “This is the third one in the last standard year. All on the outskirts. No one came close to the other two. The second was ballistic toward a city and an orbital defense station blew it to pieces before it hit atmosphere. The first one actually transmitted some sort of distress call on the way in, but it was above Marinx Five. Nothing there but a gas harvester. They watched it tear itself apart. Call only lasted a few seconds.”

  “They both fall out of FTL?” Colson asked.

  “Not both. Second came in sublight. Passing three kilometers from the ODS. But both of them had their engines. Dead and burning and shot to hell. Like you saw. But engines hot.” He looked up, nodded at Colson. “We were just lucky here to have fighters already up when it came out. You saw how fast they fall. You were on the other side of the planet or the ground and you'd never have gotten there in time.”

  He kept typing. Kiena looked at Colson for a second and he was just watching him. His comm forgotten now on Garrington's desk. “Then what the hell are they?” she asked.

  The man looked up. Slid his comm off the edge of the table and pocketed it with one smooth movement. “We have no idea.”

  “None.”

  “We didn't even know if anyone was on them. Distress call could have been faked. Other one didn't make a sound. We have no idea what killed them or why. You've easily doubled what we know now, assuming they really were all the same.”

  “By all the same, you mean one person slaughtered the whole crew and drove the ship into a planet.”

  “It appears that way.”

  Kiena scowled, started to stand, then sat again.

  “So,” the man said. “I'm not here to punish you. I don't give a shit that you ignored orders. I'm here to offer you a job.” Then he looked back at Garrington, standing quietly against the wall of his own office, and he said: “Get the hell out of here.”

  7

  Garrington
had a bottle of whiskey on the side table by the window, the storm thrashing and rolling behind it, the harsh light flashing through the glass as the man poured three drinks into the small tumblers and brought them over and set them on the desk and pushed them one in front of each. The moisture sparkling on their sides. No ice. A silence heavy in the room and just the sound of the glasses sliding over that polished wood.

  “Talk to me,” Colson said.

  He raised his glass and took a sip and set it back down in front of him. Something so effortless and practiced in that motion, a thing done so many times before that she felt he must on occasion sit alone and practice it without drinking. Picking up that empty glass and setting it down and picking it up again. For a man like him image was everything and most of any image was in the smallest details. For all men were pretenders and every image constructed and the only thing that changed which was viewed as real and which as false was the smallest of details.

  “We're forming a unit,” he said. “A squadron. Black ops. None of it exists and neither do you. A combination of fighter ops and ground. Everyone has to be a commando and a pilot.” He looked at Colson. “And I want you to lead it.”

  Colson just looked at him. Kiena raised her drink and sipped and it was as smooth as she'd expected and she thought Garrington must have paid more than a month of her wages to get it here. She lowered it and then shrugged and drank again. Maybe they could empty the bottle for him, get those wages back. She knew he wouldn't say anything, not with the way he'd crawled out of his own office.

  “You're hunting them,” Colson said finally.

  “It's the only goal. We track these down. We find out what they are and who's behind them, and we kill them. As straightforward as it gets. Coalition, Haxil Alliance, or something else entirely. Even Imperial. It doesn't matter. We can't risk a strike over a settlement. One of these falls on a core world and you have ten thousand dead in five seconds. We hit hard and fast and we shut this down now.”