The Dead Ship: Episode Three (Firehawk Squadron Book 3)

by Jonathan Schlosser

  He shivered, watching it. Not that long ago, all these people on a world-eating warship, tearing through space with tens of thousands of tons of mass around them. FTL engines at full power, shields up, ammo caches stacked with enough warheads and torpedoes to rip another task force into scrap metal and expanding gas. And all those people, running though doorways and passages to other parts of a ship that no longer existed. Now just this tiny metal casket buried in the ice, everything else gone. Every life, every room, everything.

  “No Coalition troops.”

  “You expecting some?”

  He wasn't. He'd been in the ship before it burned and hadn't seen a single black and red uniform. Not a single dead Coalition soldier. But someone had been on that ship to kill everyone in obvious close-range combat. Even if the initial assault and hull breach had killed half the crew, the command ring blown away and twisting in that vast blackness of relentless void, all of the troops in the feed were still alive. And they'd been slaughtered.

  “Watch this,” Shy'lkn said.

  And then the girl stalked into the screen. Wearing her white, loose-fitting dress. On the feed her hair so white it was lost in that fabric. She walked slowly and calmly, the handgun she'd eventually use to shoot herself in the side of the head hooked into her belt at the small of her back. She had her hands

  (claws)

  out and she was running each one along the metal walls of the passageway, lightly, just the fingertips.

  Three soldiers came into the passage on the far side of the feed. They stopped and one held up a hand, but the girl didn't slow. Just walked toward them, moving lightly as if all around her nothing was real, this a world she inhabited alone and nothing in it that could touch her, not life or death and certainly not these three here as the lead soldier brought his carbine up and yelled something.

  And then he could barely see her, she was so fast. A hand reaching out, grabbing the end of the carbine. Twisting it to the side as the soldier fired, the shot blowing off the kneecap of the man next to him. Blood suddenly all over the floor and the wall and the man falling. The girl still holding the carbine and taking a quick step up the wall. Like nothing he'd ever seen. Barefoot and stepping up and turning sideways in the air as she twisted her body. Pushing off the wall with that one foot and flipping and then both feet coming down right on the neck of the third soldier. He could just see the way the man's spine snapped as he fell and then she was somehow standing again and now the carbine in her hands alone.

  That last soldier just staring at her for a brief second, all time frozen, just those two and the carnage about them. Her face as still and emotionless as always. And then she pulled the trigger and three rounds took the soldier in the chest and ripped through his light armor and washed the wall behind him in gore. He stood looking at her as she dropped the carbine and his life already torn from him and then he fell heavily onto the deck.

  The girl did not look back, but just raised her arms again, lightly grazing her fingertips along each wall, and walked out of the frame.

  Behind her, the blood ran slowly down the passageway in the flickering light.

  7

  He sat at the desk with the glass of bourbon in one hand, looking out at the frozen landscape in the weak light and tasting the bourbon moving hot down through him and hearing the slight sound of the ice against the side of the glass as the wind tore at the pyramid and on the other side of the desk, Praetus swore and rewound the feed and swore again.

  Colson didn't look, but raised the glass and drank again and then set it down. “So, tell me what they found.”

  Praetus pushed the computer screen aside on its boom and it swung back to the wall and he reached over for the bottle and poured himself another drink. They were both off the clock and would be until the morning but there were some things that you did no matter the time.

  “It's the same girl?” he asked. Again.

  “Yes.”

  “And when you saw her, all you had was your sidearm. But instead of tearing you in half, she shot herself.”

  “Look, we can hash over it a hundred times and it's going to be the same damn thing. Unless she had an identical twin on there, that's the girl I saw. And she killed herself.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “About her killing herself?”

  Praetus drank. “About the whole thing.”

  Colson thought for a moment. He'd been turning it since Shy'lkn showed him the tape and he'd known what his gut told him instantly and if he wasn't lying to himself, what it had been telling him since he waded into that aux generator room piled with the dead. And it was the same now as it had been and still made as little sense but he couldn't shake it and he'd trusted his gut enough times and lived to know when it was right, no matter what it sounded like to say it aloud.

  “I think she killed everyone on that ship. Then I think she piled the bodies up in the aux generator room, dropped the ship out of FTL, and aimed it at the planet.”

  Praetus didn't say anything. Looking past Colson toward the window. Slowly spinning the glass in his hand.

  “I know how it sounds.”

  “A lot of people died in the ambush,” Praetus said. “The entire bridge crew. Docking bays, gun emplacements, more near the outer hull. You saw it.” Leaning forward, still not looking at Colson. Almost as if he were talking to himself. “But there still had to be what, a hundred alive? Two hundred?”

  “It's impossible to know.”

  “But roughly.”

  “I said I know how it sounds.”

  Finally looking at him. Raising the glass and drinking the rest of it and setting it aside. “I think you're right.”

  “Just one girl.”

  “Don't try to talk yourself out of it.”

  “Not trying,” Colson said. “Just saying that's where we are. One girl can do all that, then who the hell was she?”

  “Not who,” Praetus said. Standing up then and nodding to him and Colson following suit. The sun beyond that glass wall fading into orange and blackness and the night coming on. Another day and this spiraling nightmare descending. Praetus holding out an order file, two printouts and a data storage device. The red light blinking silently. “What the hell was she?”

  8

  He sat in the makeshift office, an old supply closet off the main hanger bay. A beat-up metal desk in front of him and an old chair with a canvas seat that squeaked whenever he moved. A flickering bank of lights over his head. In front of him the stack of papers and a computer screen with the data stick plugged into the side and across from him in their flight suits Kallie and Aimes. Coming off the sims when he'd called them.

  They'd been standing in silence for thirty seconds and he read the end of the page one more time and then leaned back and nodded and looked up at them.

  “Firehawk Squadron has its first off-world mission.”

  Aimes cocked his head to the side. “Same amount of missions as we've got ships.”

  “Not by tonight,” Colson said, tapping the paper. “Two more coming in at 2200.”

  “Heard that before.”

  “You let me worry about the damn ships.” Praetus had told them all sorts of timetables. Colson never knew where the holdup was, but they did technically only have one ship sitting out in that hanger and he had no idea when the pocket carrier was coming. Typical military efficiency. “You just get ready to fly them.”

  “We go where?” Kallie said. “Kill who with new ships?”

  “Hopefully no one,” Colson said. Touching the screen and bringing up a map. “When I was on the destroyer, I cut off that girl's hand. They ran her chip. It says her name was Krysten Allaman, from Yunis Ren. You heard of it?”

  Both pilots shook their heads.

  “Neither have I,” Colson said. “But it's about a eight-hour FTL jump from here. One redirect. Just a single habitable planet by a gas giant. Little astroid ring around it. Not Coalition or Empire. Runs itself. Just farming, maybe a million people on
the entire planet. Some mining in the mountains. No standing army, but they have a small defense force with a few gunboats and two squadrons of Talon X-13s.”

  “X-13 much too old,” Kallie said. “Could kill all myself with one ship we have.”

  Colson laughed. “I'll admit, I didn't think anyone was still using them. I know some collectors that have a few, and I've read about what they did during the Tarnisah Uprising, but that was 100 years ago. But the point here isn't to kill them. We're just going in to do some poking around, see if we can find out a bit more about this girl. Have you seen the footage?”

  Aimes nodded. “Shy'lkn showed us. Insane.”

  “Obviously she wasn't a farmer, but it's what we have.”

  He panned the map around, drew it out to show them the little green planet hanging in space, the gas giant purple and blue on the edge of the screen and the gray astroid ring wrapping around the equator. Then zoomed it in so that the planet itself ate up the screen, bringing it all the way down to a valley. A short mountain rolling away up one side, black rocks breaking the thin green grass, then a long blue lake in the middle. A town in the flat plane on the edge of that lake, dirt roads and wooden buildings. Far off across the water another taller mountain rising and peaking just high enough for the snow to gather, that frozen point bright in the sun.

  “If she's really Krysten Allaman, this is where she's from. Twenty-two years old. Family ran a machine shop, working on farming equipment. We're just going to come in, make contact, see what we can get and where it points us.”

  “In other words, our first mission is boring as hell,” Aimes said. “It's pretty, but we're a black opts squadron with the best snubfighter in the galaxy. And they're sending us to meet with some farmers and watch the sunset over the lake.”

  “Yes,” Colson said. “I'll take boring as hell as opposed to getting shot to pieces.”

  Aimes flashed his pointed teeth in a grin. “I'll take shooting something else to pieces over both of those.” Beside him, Kallie was nodding and staring at the village as if looking for something she could kill.

  Colson sighed. “I know what it is and I get it. But we're not taking this down if we don't know where to look. We have only one lead and we have to play it out as far as it will take us.”

  “What's the plan on the ground?”

  “Tell me,” Colson said.

  “You have no plan?” Kallie shook her head. Looked at Aimes. “Very good commander we have.”

  “I want to know what you think.”

  Aimes looked at the map. “Here's the thing. Small place like that, everyone knows everyone and everything. They're going to notice strangers instantly. This isn't a disguise and walk in job.” He reached over and touched his own arm, that skin like oil with pools of shifting color. “They're damn sure going to notice me. So we have two options.”

  “We hide,” Kallie said. “Or let them see.”

  “Exactly. We either embrace this, land on the edge of town like we own the place, and hope these ships and flight suits make people talk. We come in fast, we have fear on our side, and we work them over for everything we can get.”

  Colson nodded. “Or?”

  “Or we put down on the other side of that mountain. Come in low and watch for those X-13s. No one knows we're there. I stay with the ships to watch them, run scans, and direct traffic. The two of you go in under cover of night, scope the place. Get intel. Find her family. Then we wait. The next night, you go back in, hit the house when everyone's asleep, and get them to talk without waking up the neighbors.” He looked at Colson. “I'm guessing we're not killing them?”

  “Not if we can help it.”

  “All right, then they're going to talk after we leave. Can't help that. But we can be long gone by then and it never matters. Unless, gods help us all, they're actually the ones that killed that destroyer. With some weapon or battle group we don't know about. But if this is just the girl's harmless family and she was working with someone else, we don't care what they say the next morning. We have what we need, no one gets hurt, and we move on.”

  “Real black ops,” Kallie said.

  Colson looked at the map, running distances in his head. The height of the mountain, the length of the main road through town. The spaces between the houses. Finally, he nodded one last time and sat back in his chair.

  “That's what we do,” he said. “Get your kit together. Scanners and infil gear. Carbines and hand weapons. The ships get here tonight, we let the techs look them over, then we head out tomorrow. With any luck, we're back in a few days, and then we have a better idea of who we're supposed to kill.”

  Kallie grinned, or at least he thought she did. Something deep and menacing in it, a hardness in her eyes and also a wild glee, beautiful and terrifying, twisting what she appeared to be into what she was.

  “Always better when knowing who to kill,” she said.

  9

  He lay in bed that night with one arm wrapped around Kiena and her facing away from him under the cool sheet, her head under his chin and back against his chest, both of them quietly watching the storm sweeping across the snow plains through the glass wall. The snow and ice rolling in the air, far off and silent lightning dancing through those clouds and snaking blue and white and burning to the ground below. The storm too far away to be felt here but twisting and turning now as they'd watched for a half an hour out over the wasteland.

  He pulled her tight against him, leaned down and kissed her neck, her shoulder.

  “Don't even think about it,” she said. “You still didn't pick me.”

  Colson laughed quietly. “Still mad about that.”

  “First real mission in a new ship. First time off world in two years. I've been sleeping with you for half of that, and you take Aimes and Kallie. I'm going to be mad about that for a long damn time.”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “You've said a lot of things.”

  “I had to take them,” he said. Tracing a finger along her side. Watching as the lightning forked white hot and bright, lancing across the horizon. “Aimes is still our best pilot in any ship. And Kallie's a commando. It's basically a ground mission, in and out, all at night. She's a natural. You won't miss anything except a few hours sitting in a cockpit in FTL. We get there, all we're doing is putting down and getting out.”

  “Better than sitting here without a ship and this crew you've left me.”

  “So drag Grange into the ring and take it out on him.”

  She was silent. He knew she was mad but not that mad and they both knew his reasoning made sense. She would have made the same call had their roles been reversed. Finally she said:

  “What have you been looking for?”

  “Looking for?”

  “I've seen you on your comm all the time. Started before we met with Praetus that first time. Any spare second you have, you're on it.”

  He watched the storm again. He didn't lie to her often and he hoped she didn't lie to him that much either, but he didn't know. The clouds were moving off to his left and receding, but he didn't think the storm was lessening. He thought it was swelling, growing, just moving off to devastate some other part of this forsaken world.

  “She looked familiar,” he said at last. “That's all it is.”

  Kiena twisted away from the storm, rolling to face him. Pulling her head back just slightly to meet his eyes, the pale blue of the night LEDs on her skin. “From where? Crall?”

  “I don't know,” he said. “I can't place it.”

  “But you've been trying to.”

  “Thing like this, I think I have to.”

  She was quiet, just looking at him, then nodded. “Even with the name, it doesn't help?”

  “Not much on her.” Too little, he didn't add.

  “You'll know more when you get back. Maybe it'll click.”

  On the edge of the world the lightning broke one last time, this one branching as it fell, splitting and arcing out to the side, then
striking down again. For a second the entire horizon covered in fire, rending the air, the atoms and electrons ripping apart. All in that ghostly silence, too far for thunder and the pyramid insulated besides. Here in their temp-controlled cocoon just the soft hum of the air and the quiet peace of the dim lighting. Heated flooring and the bed soft and warm and the world forever held at bay.

  But out there the rabid ferocity of life, this storm violent and without forgiveness, a world so ravaged by itself that it was a dead and listless thing. All that stood between them that wall of glass and steel supports and perhaps everything not so firm as they always felt and only in that last second when that insecurity became clear and all of life became real and deadly and horrifying would they understand where the power actually resided and what little it thought of them. Their sheer insignificance.

  So he leaned in and kissed her and felt her hands slide up to his neck as he pulled her close and he hoped she'd forget what she'd asked him and what he'd said and maybe a little of everything that they were, that they had become.

  10

  The roar of the engines tearing themselves free of Riccana's atmosphere, the fire lancing out behind the three Hawks climbing into deep blue and then black and rising on those jets of flame until all bonds were thrown off and they accelerated away from the small white planet spinning there in the void.

  Colson checked his camera feeds and couldn't shake the excitement in his chest, watching those two fighters trail him to port and starboard, barely visible even at pointblank range with their matte black finish. Even the wash of the engines hidden. Not an external positioning light visible, the darkened canopy concealing all of the console glow from inside.

  Three ghosts in space, unreal fighters that would be on their foes in silence and ferocity, ripping them apart and then disappearing back into the nothingness they'd appeared from. Those picking up the pieces never knowing what had happened or if it could again or when that day of sudden fire and destruction would come calling for them.