Damage Control (Valiant Knox)

by Jess Anastasi

  Eyes streaming from the stinging smoke, Mia couldn’t see past the small space where she crouched between a row of seats and a bulkhead. The ship had jolted a few moments ago.

  Please, let us be landing. But the hatch hadn’t opened, and no one seemed to be trying to escape.

  She held the mask against Penny’s face as long as she could stand holding her breath and then had to shove it against her own mouth to gasp in another breath. Two this time. Dizziness started blurring the edges of her mind. But for every gulp of air she took, Penny breathed the toxic smoke without even realizing. She’d been knocked unconscious in the initial impact. And when Mia had taken cover, she’d dragged Penny to the safety of the corner with her, as far from the steadily spreading flames as they could get.

  Somewhere off to her right, a shaft of bright light cut through the gloom and flickering orange lights. A waft of cool, fresh air brushed across her face, making her exhale in relief. Yet by the time she went to inhale again, the smoke seemed to have thickened. She coughed, slapping the mask back on her face. Sorry, Penny. Another three breaths and she held on again.

  Several people rose nearby, stumbling toward the hazy light. Her legs tensed beneath her, wanting to flee the suffocating sensation in her chest. But no way would she leave Penny. And since her limbs felt like rubber, she wouldn’t be able to drag her friend out. She steeled herself, heart spasming. No matter that the swaying dizziness got worse every second and blackness ate away the edges of her vision. She had to stay. Make sure Penny got enough oxygen.

  She hunkered down closer to her friend so she didn’t have to reach as far to share the oxygen mask. Seconds and minutes dragged by, but no help came.

  Had she imagined the hatch opening? Maybe the smoke made her hallucinate. She wanted to check, but her limbs felt oddly heavy and clumsy, like they belonged to someone else. Logic told her the fumes were probably starting to affect her, sending a sharp lance of head-clearing panic through her. She pushed the near overwhelming dread back down. Someone would come.

  She just had to stay awake and make sure Penny got enough clean air until then.

  Voices echoed, sharpening her attention. Calm, authoritarian words ordered people out of the shuttle and set others to help with the rescue. She brought her head up, relief spilling through her like in a cool surge.

  “Over here.” Her voice came out so hoarse the words were barely audible. She took another breath from the oxygen mask and then forced her uncooperative limbs to get herself upright, though only made it as far as her knees. As she shuffled to the end of the seating row, a tall figure passed by. She reached out and snatched at the sleeve.

  More smoke cleared and she got a glimpse of a tall, dark-haired man wearing a fighter pilot’s jacket, his face obscured by the gray T-shirt he had over his mouth and nose. He wrapped an arm around her and pulled her up to her feet, but she resisted, pointing behind her.

  “Come on. I’ll get you out of here.” His deep voice had a roughened quality to it, as though he’d been breathing the fumes for too long as well.

  “No. My friend. She’s injured.” Her words rasped out at a near whisper.

  He shook his head and then ducked down until their faces were less than an inch apart. “Repeat the last, recruit.”

  She swallowed, the order helping to ground her. “There’s a wounded recruit down here.”

  He straightened and let her go, squeezing by her to crouch down next to Penny. He tilted his head, murmuring into the comm attached to his jacket. A moment later, another soldier appeared. She stooped down to pick up the discarded oxygen mask while the two men lifted Penny out of the corner.

  She moved back as the second soldier took Penny’s weight by himself. Relief flooded her in a dizzying rush, compounding her unsteadiness. The blackness she’d been fighting swamped her. She stumbled, coming up against a solid body. The pilot swore, his arms wrapping around her.

  Safe. She was safe.

  “Let’s get you out of here.” His words sounded like they were coming from a lot farther away than the few inches separating them.

  With someone else to hold her up, she gave into the vortex sucking her downward.

  Chapter Two

  Leigh swore, catching the slight weight of the recruit as she went down. He pried the oxygen mask out of her hand and grabbed a clean breath of air. Once his lungs didn’t ache as much, he swung her up into his arms and headed for the shaft of light from the open hatchway.

  At the emergency exit, he avoided a couple of masked medicos heading into the shuttle. He cleared the short wing and carried the recruit over to where a deck triage had been set up.

  His entire body hurt as he lowered the girl onto a gurney. Bren appeared at his side and handed him a small, disposable oxygen breather and a bottle of water. “Couldn’t follow orders, huh?”

  He glared at her over the breather and then got attacked by a fit of coughing as clean air hit his throat.

  Sub-Doctor Archie Moore stopped by them and bent over the recruit laid out on the cot. After a cursory check of the girl, Ace turned to him. Leigh gulped some of the water, trying to stem the coughing.

  “Couldn’t even get a mask on for your suicide attempt, Alpha? Man, you have a serious hero complex.”

  “Screw you, Ace.” Forcing the words out only made him cough more.

  “Get your ass on that gurney before you fall down, Captain.” Ace fished a vial of yellow liquid out of his coat pocket and measured out a small quantity into a plastic dispenser.

  “I’m fine,” he forced out. Except a simple shift in his weight from one foot to the other sent him stumbling into the edge of the girl’s gurney.

  Bren swore, catching his shoulder and helping him upright. “Clearly you’re not fine.”

  “There are people worse off than me.”

  The look Bren sent him in return would have sent a lesser man running. Knowing he’d be hard-pressed to win an argument with his XO when she had that hard gleam in her eyes, he gave up resisting and let her lead him over to the next gurney.

  “Here, this’ll fix your throat up. And breathe more oxygen or I’ll go over your head to bench you.” Ace handed over the medicine and slipped the vial away again, then turned back to the recruit Leigh had pulled out of the ship.

  Sitting on the edge of the gurney, he knocked back the medicine and followed it with a mouthful of water, studying the unconscious girl. She had shining gold hair worked into two slick braids. Although ash and soot streaked her face, her skin looked smooth, with a smattering of freckles covering her nose, while her pink lips were full, the bottom one a little plumper. A strand of her hair had fallen across her cheek, and the urge to reach out and smooth it back jolted his clearly smoke-damaged brain with the absolute inappropriateness of even having the thought.

  “What’s her condition?” he asked Ace, who straightened once he finished checking her over.

  “Unconscious from smoke inhalation. I’ll get her on a breather to repair her lungs and airways. She should be fine in a few hours.”

  He nodded and shifted closer to the cot, reaching across the space between the gurneys and into the collar of her uniform to pull out her tags. Mia Wolfe.

  She’d stayed behind at peril to her own safety to help another recruit. No matter what kind of training most soldiers had, teaching selfless bravery like that could be next to impossible. Yet it had come naturally to Recruit Wolfe.

  “Your turn,” Ace said matter-of-factly, stepping closer to him. Leigh dropped the recruit’s tags.

  He cooperated while his buddy checked him over, particularly his forearms where he’d braced them against the hot metal of the hatchway to get into the cockpit.

  “You’re damn lucky, Alpha. Your jacket protected you for the most part, so the burns are superficial. With some nano gel and a compression bandage, they’ll be healed in a matter of hours. And your throat might feel raw, but you weren’t breathing the fumes long enough to do any real damage.”

  “Wh
at about his head?” Bren asked.

  Ace ran a gaze over his face. “Did you hit your head?”

  “No.” He shot an impatient glance at Bren. “My head is fine.”

  Her eyebrows lowered, her expression practically fuming. “Clearly not. Otherwise he wouldn’t have run into a burning ship when the flight control team had already decided to vent the deck.”

  He crossed his arms and then winced when he abraded his tender forearms. “I had to try something, Bren. Did you really want everyone in that shuttle to die?”

  For the first time, some of the anger in her expression gave way to the fear she’d obviously been trying to hide. “No, I didn’t. But I also didn’t want to watch my CO get himself killed trying something so idiotic. Usually Seb is the one taking moronic risks.”

  “I was quite capable of making stupid choices long before Seb came along.”

  “Maybe when you were a hotheaded rookie. You’re the CAFF, Alpha, in case you’ve forgotten. You’re supposed to know when to make the hard calls to protect the Knox and everyone on board.”

  She was right, goddamn it. And Commander Yang was going to take him to task over this. “I’m sorry, Bren. I just couldn’t let those people die.”

  She pressed her lips together for a moment, her next inhale catching slightly.

  “I know you couldn’t. But damn it to hell, I would have had to become CAFF if you’d been killed, and no offense, that’s the last thing I want.”

  He reached out and caught her hand, giving her fingers a quick squeeze. His XO had built a tough-chick exterior around herself, but the few people she let in, she cared deeply for. He hated that he’d scared her, but he hadn’t seen any other choice besides getting to that cockpit, even if he’d ended up sacrificing his own life.

  Bren didn’t say anything else as he shrugged out of his ruined jacket. The three of them were silent as Ace applied the nano gel and the pressure bandages to his arms.

  Lawler approached, coughing and eyes red-rimmed from smoke. Ace offered him the same medicine and breather.

  “Reports are starting to come in on the wounded,” Lawler said once he’d stopped coughing.

  “Any casualties?” The medicine had soothed his throat, thank God. At least he could talk and breathe now without feeling as if he might choke at any second.

  “Only six, so far. With any luck, we won’t lose any more.”

  Leigh stood, clenching his muscles against a head-aching shot of dizziness.

  “Get me a clean shirt, we’ll need to brief Commander Yang and reschedule the meet-and-greet for twenty-four hours from now,” he said, directing the order at his XO.

  “I’ll see to it,” Bren confirmed.

  “Make sure the recruits who aren’t seriously injured are recovered enough by then, Ace.”

  Ace nodded. “I’ll pass the order onto the doctor heading up triage.”

  “Come on, Bren, we’d better get to the ready room and start postmission debriefing. Lawler, I need you and Seb to oversee things up here until this mess is cleaned up.”

  Lawler sent him a sharp nod and headed across the deck to where Seb stood directing the recruits who’d been evaced out of the transport, but weren’t seriously wounded.

  Leigh shot one more look at the recruit. Her eyelids fluttered and then opened. Velvet-brown eyes caught his and held. His heart pounded, once, twice. A rush of sparking sensation jolted him, like a livewire shocking his system.

  Commander Yang’s voice came through on his comm. “Captain Alphin, drop whatever you’re doing and report to ready room oh one on squadron level.”

  “On my way, sir,” he replied into the comm. He thanked Bren as she returned with a new shirt for him. She spun on her heel, clasping her hands behind her back as she headed across the chaos of the deck. He sliced one more look at the recruit, still staring at him with those rich brown eyes, and then he turned to follow his XO, shrugging into the clean shirt as he walked.

  “Yang is going to be up in arms about this latest attack,” he said as he fell into step beside Bren. “As if blowing up our main base of operations on Ilari and putting a double agent on our ship wasn’t enough, now they suddenly have enough balls to fly right in between the Knox and the Farr Zero to intercept an unarmed transport.”

  “The better question is, was this a random attack, or did they know exactly what they were targeting? If we’d lost that entire shuttle of troops, it would have been months before we could ship in any more to make up the numbers, and in that time, who knows what the CSS forces could have done? Probably overrun our undermanned base for a start.”

  Yeah, the implications of that was the stuff of nightmares and left a ripple of cold uneasiness echoing through him.

  In recent months, the CSS had switched up their tactics, actually gone on the offensive and changed the way the war was being fought on Ilari. Those in charge of the United Earth Force were still scrambling to catch up with this turn in events, and it didn’t help that many of the casualties from the base explosion a few weeks ago had included a number of higher-ranking officers.

  He and Bren arrived at the ready room to find Commander Yang and Colonel Cameron McAllister waiting for them, along with a guy called Stanton, one of the senior Command Intelligence agents onboard the Knox.

  “Sir,” he greeted as he fell into parade stance, Bren next to him.

  “Captain Alphin, clearly you and I need to have a conversation about following protocol.” Yang’s expression was set into severe, grim lines. “But it’ll have to wait. We have reason to believe that the CSS knew exactly what they were targeting when they opened fire on the transport.”

  Leigh clenched his jaw, clamping down on the urge to swear. Not many people had known the exact time or trajectory the transporter had been due to come in on. “How could they get their hands on that type of information?”

  “That’s what we intend to find out.” Yang motioned to the Command Intelligence agent. “After the explosion on Ilari, Stanton put together a specialized team of intelligence agents to find out if there were any other moles in our ranks and if so, how deep the infiltration goes. It seems the CSS have dug deep claws into every facet of our organization. Including here, on the Knox. We could have as many as a dozen moles on board.”

  That little piece of intelligence made the rippling cold under his skin intensify, spearing right into his guts like sharp icicles. “How are we going to combat something like that?”

  Fire fights in a jet he could do, while battle strategy and commanding men were ingrained into his very cells. But this shadowy espionage stuff? He had no clue, and although he didn’t scare easily, the thought that people he knew, people he worked and socialized with on a daily basis, might actually be CSS double agents planning his demise, along with the pilots he commanded, scared the bejesus out of him.

  “It’s not going to be easy.” Cam crossed his arms, expression drawn and pensive. Out of them all, he’d lost the most men to this new front the CSS had engaged them on. “This battle won’t be waged on the front lines or the cities down on the ground. It’s going to be here, in our homes. Psychologically, that’s a whole different ball game.”

  “And if the CSS find out we’re on to them,” Stanton continued, “then they’ll enact whatever endgame this whole thing is leading up to. Which is why the fewer people who know about this, the better.”

  Stanton shot Yang an annoyed look, which Yang pointedly ignored. Had Stanton considered Leigh one of the people who didn’t need to know, and Yang had overruled him?

  “Alpha, there’s one more thing.” Yang’s voice had lowered with a foreboding tone that made his insides churn. But what could possibly be worse than the things they’d already told him?

  “Yes, sir?”

  “We have reason to believe that someone in the fighter-pilot squadron is one of those dozen moles. That’s why I felt you needed to hear all of this.”

  Every muscle in his body clenched as the shock of those words crashed throu
gh him. One of his own men was CSS? Impossible. They’d all worked their asses off to get into his FP squadron—

  But that would be the point—put a mole in a close-knit team like his and God only knew what kind of damage the bastard could do.

  “Are you sure?”

  Yang shook his head. “No, we’re not. But if there’s even the slightest possibility that it is, I knew you would want to be informed. I’m sorry, Alpha. I know what every single one of those pilots mean to you.”

  He sent Yang a stiff nod of respect. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Now, I believe you’ve got some new recruits to train?”

  “Yes, we need to reschedule the meet-and-greet to tomorrow, since the incident with the shuttle has thrown us off track. If you’ll excuse us, sir?”

  Yang dismissed them and they nodded, before he returned the gesture. Once they were out in the passageway, Leigh blew out a long breath, muttering a couple of curses.

  “I can think of a few other words I’d like to add to that,” Bren said, her features now showing her sense of betrayal.

  “You heard Yang. They’re not even sure the intel is solid. This could just be the CSS attempting to undermined us, make us see shadows where there are none.”

  She shot him a sideways glance, heavy with disbelief. “You don’t really think that, do you?”

  He scrubbed a hand over his short hair. “No, I’m too smart to be so naive.”

  “What are we supposed to do about this, Alpha? I can’t believe that one of our own—”

  “Is a traitor? I don’t want to believe it either. And right now, we can’t do anything. You heard Stanton. They don’t want the CSS to know we’re on to them. If we start acting like we’ve got something to hide—”

  “Then it might tip off the traitor.” Bren’s expression became troubled. “But sitting back and not doing anything just seems wrong.”

  “I know. But we can keep our eyes and ears alert and keep the lines of communication between us open. If anything seems even the tiniest bit weird or suspicious to you, let me know, and I’ll do the same.”