“Nothing that I can see. An empty compartment.” A pause. “Eight meters.”
“When we get inside, see if we can find somewhere to stand. Clear the room.”
“Clear the room,” Grange said.
“I know. Just do it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then we figure out what made it through all that hell and we decide where to go from there.”
What they found dictated the rest of the mission. If it was the armory, a weapons check could tell them what arms were given out and what alert status the ship was on, if any. If it was the secondary bridge, they could pull sensor records and see where they'd been, when the initial attack started, when they lost the main bridge.
It was probably a damned supply closet, Colson thought as Shy'lkn called out four meters. They could check for cleaners and solvents and see if they'd dusted the recycled air vents in the last week.
And then they were at it. The hole just twisted metal where the bit had eaten through it. Covered in the hardpacked snow all about and not recognizable as any part of a starship.
Colson nodded to both of them and swung out over the hole as the cable let out, dropped down into the inky darkness. Feeling for just a moment as his feet went through that he was lowering himself into some other dimension and would come out into a world of beasts or lost souls or nothing at all, just some lasting night where everything was dead and far off you could hear always the grinding of teeth like some great gears of the world, devouring all and leaving nothing behind and reminding any who heard that toward this end they all marched.
Instead he came through and found his headlamp flashing off of battered metal and rubberized flooring tiles on the ceiling over his head. The dead lines of the LED lights.
“It's a passageway,” he said into the comm. Dropping down until his feet rested on what had been the ceiling, running away below him at a slight angle. Unclipping the hook from his belt and letting it go, the cable swinging, and waiting as the other two dropped down behind him. Each unhooking and sweeping their guns up and down the hallway, checking it though they knew nothing could have survived the fire and the impact and all that time in the ice.
But Colson had seen that girl in her thin white dress and the gore on her arms and he reached down and pulled out his own pistol. Again, the heavy metal and polymer a comfort as the laser sight bounced off the walls.
“H-7,” Shy'lkn said, pointing with her own sight. The black number stenciled on the wall.
“Shit,” Grange said.
The passageways were numbered up and down by their deck numbers. Starting with the sub-decks at the bottom and running up with each level. Across they were lettered from port to starboard, starting with A and running as far as they needed to. Perhaps just a passage or two on a corvette. All the way into the triple letters on a supercarrier, a ship the size of a city with corvettes instead of snubfighters in its docking bays.
H-7 meant they were in the middle of the destroyer, slightly to starboard. And that meant the battle and fire and atmosphere and impact had ripped away layer after layer, peeling the ship back and burning in toward the core. They'd known it had broken apart but now they knew just how much the ship's death had consumed it.
“Anyone know what's close to here?” he asked.
“Bunks,” Shy'lkn said. “Both sides. I was on one of these at Kirelu.”
He looked at her. “You were at Kirelu?”
“The ship didn't come back.”
“No kidding.”
She nodded down the passage to where a heavy door hung locked and sealed. The automatic security door, blocking decompression and now held fast for eternity. “That way is a local control hub. It's the only place in here that will give us anything.”
“What if we go deeper?”
She shrugged. “There's isn't enough here. If we're in the bunks now, with how little we have below us, you're not getting out of them.”
“So we go through the door.”
Grange pulled the cutting torch off his belt and flicked the trigger. The blue flame flashing in the dark, hissing and flickering off the walls. “I'll just need a minute,” he said.
4
The center of the door fell away, a jagged hole ripped by the torch, the edges glowing and the air in the passage lightly filled with smoke. It took way too long to be useful during a ship-to-ship assault or a boarding, but you could do it if you had the time. In that dark world of shadows and dead, all they had was time.
Grange stepped back, nodded to Colson. “After you, boss.”
He went through slowly, stooping to fit and stretching with one leg into the unknown and again that sense that he could be stepping into anything at all and the unseen more horrific than the reality could ever be and then he was through and standing in the next section of the passageway. His headlamp bouncing harshly. Stepping deeper slowly as they came through behind him, Grange swearing as his suit hung up on the edge of the hole.
There was blood smeared all down the floor, over their heads. His father had been a hunter when he was young and Colson had seen what it looked like when you pulled game across the floor and the streak of blood it always left behind and that's what was on the floor here. Not the pooled blood of some body lying after death or the splash from some violent and untold death, but a wide streak running down the passageway to another door and going through and the door closed firmly over it.
Shy'lkn nodded toward that far door, standing with one hand on her holstered pistol. “That's your other side, according to the scans. A little bit of a mess out there, but nothing we can climb through. This compartment is all that's left. A bit to port and starboard. Nothing deeper.”
“It's almost nothing at all.”
“You saw it come down.”
He nodded. “Where's that hub?”
“Halfway down on your left.”
They went down with the blood trail over them and he didn't say anything but none of them reached to touch it. Here wearing gloves and a suit that could keep them alive in hard vacuum or the acid rains of Karik L'annul, but not touching that blood. Some things you didn't do and some you did
(wading through the bodies)
and this was one of the ones you didn't. Walking down with the doors to the bunk rooms going by slowly and then stepping up to the door for the control hub. Standing a foot open at the top – what had been the bottom – and torn off the track by the impact with the planet or the initial assault or the burning up in atmosphere or all of the hell it had been through.
He looked at it and closed his eyes and opened them again. Swore to himself, not on comms. Then reached up and grabbed the lip and began to haul himself up through the opening. The light from their headlamps cut off as his helmet went through and only his single beam in the darkness, flashing off the flooring. They grabbed his feet behind him and lifted. That lifeline to the outside.
It was different this way. The only thing he knew for sure what lay in front of him. All too conscious of the fact that he couldn't get out in a hurry, the door pressing into his stomach. If he looked and she was standing there with half of her face gone and the gun in her hand, he'd die just trying to swing his arms around and get at his own pistol. Gasping and screaming in his helmet.
But there was nothing as he pulled himself through and dropped down. Just a small room with the ubiquitous metal bulkheads, the floor sloping slightly downward. A bank of computers against one wall where they'd fallen and a control board and dark lights in the floor. A glass window still intact and showing another room beyond that looked identical, this one blocked off by a door between the two.
No bodies. Blood on the overhead flooring and what looked like impacts both from projectiles and beams on the walls. The heavy divots and black scorch marks. But no bodies. He walked slowly to the far window and looked inside and the second room was also empty and dark, silent in a terrifying way that spoke only of its quick abandonment.
Shy'lkn came through while Gr
ange waited back in the main passageway. Dropping into a crouch and then standing up into the light of his headlamp and quickly swinging her own lamp around the room and then walking over to the computers against the far wall. “If there's anything, it's here.”
“Not a chance in hell those work.”
“They don't have to work.” She reached down and began twisting the manual screws on the frame, unhooking the box from the fallen rack. Working quickly and unhooking one side with each hand and letting the screws fall to the decking and then sliding the box out. Slowly at first and then reaching back to yank the bundle of cables out all at once. Handing the box back to him with one hand and starting on the second.
“What do you think they have?” he said.
“No idea. But you came here for something and now you have it.” Sliding the second box out. “Hopefully security footage. Alert statuses. Messages sent and received.”
“Just for this area?”
“It's a local hub. They have these all over the ship and they tie into the main.” She held the second box up and waved a hand around at nothing, the dead shell around them and the layers of ice and snow and the frozen world. “Ain't a lot of that left. But the local files should have stayed intact unless there was a surge or they were destroyed on purpose. You want to go bunk to bunk, we can do that too.”
“Think we'll find anything?”
“Find a lot of bunks.” She walked over to the door between the two rooms, scowled, and turned back to the main door. “Get that torch from Grange. Two more in there.”
5
There in shrouded darkness and the glaring headlamp a body lying near the bunk. The head twisted to the side unnaturally and the limbs smashed or wrenched around and the whole thing loose in its suit as if all the bones were pulverized within and were now just dust in a sea of blood. All the skin they could see red like the whole body was one blood blister and the face turned away so he couldn't see the ruin he knew it was.
They'd opened all the bunks they could because they weren't coming back down into this buried darkness and anything they were going to do had to be done now. Nearly every room empty. Some coated in gore and one burned and some of the walls rent and ruined. But here the only body. Blood on every wall as it had been flung like a doll during the ship's falling and burning and then with the impact. The sailor himself long dead.
“We check him?” Grange asked.
Colson shook his head. “Leave him.”
“May have a dog tag.”
“I know.”
“Your call, Lieutenant.”
He closed the door slowly and stood in the hall feeling for just a moment as if everything around him was floating upward. Perhaps Riccana coming apart at last and with no warning and he didn't know who had won the bet as the red clock ticked down but it was the end and they'd die in ice and fire like so many before them.
And then it was still and Shy'lkn was saying something and he blinked once and looked at her and she said again:
“Unless you want to try to work our way down, I say we get out of here.”
And then he felt something deep below them and he knew the sense of motion was not all in his head and he nodded. The ship hung up on something, the rock of the caldera or something else they knew not what nor how strong it was nor if the ship here in the snow and ice could shift and fall. A deep grating sound in the earth, the tremors moving through the steel.
“Let's go.” Picking up one of the computers. Of the four the last had been burned and fused into the rack and they'd left it in that back room and each taken one under their arms. Perhaps everything on those drives and perhaps nothing at all and no way to know until they were back at the top.
They went up through the cuts in the doors and worked back and twice more he felt that grinding below the ship and waited for it to fall and it did not. Stumbling in the metal passageway, his hand out to balance himself. Moving on in this dark they pierced, these living things where nothing alive still persisted. He felt as though they were in some deep abyss under the ice sea in the black and cold water and all about them lurking in the nothing those unseen monsters and horrors of the depths and slowly the collar of his suit breaking and water running hard and cold down over his neck and face and knowing that the surface was too far off, so far the light was lost as everything turned to black.
And then they were at the cables again and he blinked away the thought and hooked his cable to his belt and watched as they did also. Nodded at Grange, who made the call to the surface. A moment of nothing and then the click and the vibration as the winch began to pull them back to the surface.
He'd been a pilot his whole life, he thought as they rose. When he was a kid and sticking his head into some cave on Crall and everyone telling him go in, go in. Unable to fly then but already a pilot without knowing what he was. When he was older and walking at night through a tunnel in Sherriel City, that winding city of glass and steel and lights and everything twenty stories high before you even reached the street. The feeling in that tunnel of something crawling up the back of his neck, hurrying his steps until he was outside and the magcars again circling and high above the shuttles coming down with their blinking lights from orbit.
He felt it again as they went up that tunnel they'd cut into the heart of this ice sheet. Trusting the cable and the winch and feeling himself rise, but at the same time longing to push off the sides of that throat and wrench himself upward. The light from the headlamps now sickly and weak. Wanting nothing but the sunlight, even on this planet where it was so dim and far and that sun a pale thing.
But it was not just the sun he wanted, or the space around him. The wide open snow planes and the empty sky all the way up to the black. More than that he wanted the snubfighter, crouched there on the ice and running endlessly the scan for FTL signatures. Waiting for him to climb back up and strap himself in and feel the hum of those engines and only then would that pressing, closing darkness not be able to crush down on him. A freedom and mastery in the starfighter, where he was better than himself.
He'd been a pilot his entire life, he thought, and there was nothing but that and death.
6
The squadron ran out of a dark and dusty landing bay in the basement of the pyramid. One hundred meters square on each side and a third as high, steel girders and concrete blocks and lights and wires strung and flickering across the ceiling. A cluster of tables they'd thrown up against one wall where they ate and sat and cursed at each other. A square tapped off for sparing with their padded gloves or no gloves if they both agreed to it, old blood on the floor where it'd dried.
Colson stepped out of the elevator where it opened directly into the room. On the far side two large overhead doors in the wall that led into the room with the Firehawk, the only ship they had so far. The same bay where Praetus had taken them. A long chute leading out to the surface where the ship rose on a belt and then launched from an exterior pad. A long and pointless way to launch a fighter, he thought, but it kept it safe and hidden and it wasn't as if they were getting assault alerts and launching in a hurry against a wing of sevs.
Not yet.
Shy'lkn was sitting on top of one of the tables, looking at her comm and eating something. Probably a ration bar. Next to her was Lana Kalliensky, whose short, slight frame made everyone wonder how she'd ever gotten into the military until she took them in the ring and beat them into a bloody pulp. She was from Ranx, a military colony world, where both of her parents had been commandos for the Empire since before the War of Teeth, and they'd taught her more about hand-to-hand combat than Colson thought he'd ever know.
She also hated the name Lana with an utter passion and so everyone just called her Kallie. And if they didn't, she took them into the ring and beat the shit out of them and then they called her Kallie.
Shy'lkn saw him come in and pushed herself up off the table, jumping lightly down to the concrete and walking over. She threw him a half-assed salute, just barely brushing her t
emple below her bristled scalp, and he returned it.
“You want to see it?” she said.
“So you have something?”
“Of course I have something.”
“Care to tell me?”
“Our glorious leader hates the suspense,” she said, rolling her eyes and walking toward the wall across from the tables, where they'd set up a haphazard bank of computers. “It's surveillance tape. Nothing huge, just local hub stuff. But there's one bit you're going to want to see.”
“How much do you have?”
“In total?”
“Sure.”
She shook her head again, distain in every motion. “Three years, two months and sixteen days. Navy apparently doesn't rewrite this stuff often.”
“You watched three years' worth of tape.”
“Not a chance.” She sat down in front of the computer and the screen noticed her and flipped on as he pulled a chair around backward next to her and sat with his arms folded over the back. Behind them someone else came into the hanger and he could hear them talking to Kallie but with her thick accent at this distance he had no idea what she was saying in return.
“Well?”
“Just ran it to the end. Watched about 15 minutes before they got jumped and then everything after they went into FTL.”
“How long were they in?”
“Not long.” She brought the screen up, minimized it, double-checked the feed, and brought it back. “A few hours.”
The feed started. Two cameras, one in the hallway outside of the command hub and the other in the first of the two rooms, facing the glass wall between them.
At first it was just controlled chaos from a ship under attack. People walking hurriedly under flashing emergency lights. No sound, but he could imagine the warning klaxons blaring everywhere. Soldiers trotting through with carbines, officers in their pressed uniforms, support staff jogging down the hallway. Most of them moving away from the bunk area and toward the main levels of the ship.
The Dead Ship: Episode Three (Firehawk Squadron Book 3) Page 2
