A Hero for the Empire: The Dragon's Bidding, Book 1

by Christina Westcott

  If the ship answered her, it was lost in the tumult of metal screaming. The wail climbed in pitch and volume until it cut off sharply with a bang that ripped through her enhanced hearing, overloading it. Fitz screamed in the pain.

  The freighter abruptly rolled to the right. Red lights rippled across the control panel. Alarms wailed. With a thruster out, the Loki series glided like a block of plexisteel dropped in a bathtub. Their angle of descent steepened precipitously. Wolf managed to bring the ship out of the roll and feathered the throttle on the remaining engine to keep them level.

  When her hearing returned, she could hardly understand him through the ringing in her ears. “Ship, give me a revised course to the bloody landing site. Can we make it there?”

  Lizzy’s answer was obvious as the plot recalibrated on the tactical display. Their new course passed directly over the city toward the mountains. It ended abruptly about half way up one of the peaks. “I’m afraid not, Colonel.”

  “Find me a pass or valley or something to fly this piece of shit through. Otherwise, we’re going to have to put down on this side of that range. The only place that looks good to me right now is the ocean, and I’m not keen on going swimming today.”

  “There.” Fitz pointed out a break in the line of peaks just before Lizzy put the new course up on the display. “Can we make it through there?”

  “Perhaps,” the ship answered. “If we can maintain this altitude. Colonel, change your heading to three-five-zero.”

  As Wolf eased the nose around to the new heading, Fitz eyeballed the slender defile ahead of them. This far out, it looked impossibly narrow with a tangle of trees crowding the gap between two vertical rock faces. Half way through, the passage doglegged to the right. She wouldn’t want to fly through that in a perfectly good shuttle, let alone a crippled freighter.

  “Jumper. Box,” Wolf snapped. For once, the cat didn’t argue. His claws scrabbled on the deck plates, and the door to his carrier slammed.

  “Fitz, activate your crash web.” He fought with the controls, not waiting to see if she obeyed him.

  Cocooned inside the restraints she would be unable to do more than watch. “Not yet. You’re going to need my help with the ship.”

  “I don’t need your help. I need you safe. Activate the web.”

  At her touch on the button, the restraints boiled out of the edges of her seat, enveloping her and contracting. She felt trapped in a vat of thick cold pudding. A clear shield covered her face, sparing her a sense of suffocation and allowing her to communicate.

  “What about you?”

  He shook his head. “Someone has to fly this shit box.”

  As much as she’d rather see him safely ensconced in the crash web’s embrace, she knew only he could take the ship through that defile. A coldly logical computer, Lizzy would never have considered such an unlikely course. It took a slightly mad and very ballsy human pilot to pull this off.

  He rolled the ship into a turn, lining up on the gap and taking them through like a racing shuttle pilot. Wide at the outside, then diving in at the apex of the turn and letting centrifugal force carry them back out. The muscles of Fitz’s butt clinched. The tops of trees scraped and shattered against Lizzy’s belly.

  Then they were through. The screens revealed a wide valley sloping away on the other side, giant trees standing shoulder to shoulder for as far as she could see.

  “There,” said Lizzy. The focus of her monitor swung around to the right, revealing a brownish rectangle cut out of the forest, perhaps a farmer’s field hacked from the wilderness. From here, it looked microscopic. Tactical read it as less than three klicks long. Hardly enough to set down twelve hundred tons of hurtling freighter, but it was all they were going to get.

  The question now became how to loose altitude and air speed so as not to overshoot what little space they had. She felt Wolf pull the ship’s nose up, flying at the edge of a stall. They clipped the top of the trees at the end of the field. The stall warning buzzed, and the ship began to sink. Wolf slumped back in his seat and activated the crash restraints. From this point on, he was only a passenger.

  The drop took forever. Her stomach crawled up her throat. Then they hit. Hard. Bounced airborne and hit again. This time the freighter stayed down, plowing a furrow through rows of vine draped poles. From the vantage of one of the outside pickups, Fitz saw branches, vegetation and pieces of fuselage tumbling in their wake.

  The drag of earth against the hull decelerated them and, for a moment, Fitz thought they’d slide to a halt before the end of the field. As their speed dropped off, the ship dipped to the left. A thruster dug into the ground and slewed them around. There was only time to notice a low stone wall, before Lizzy plowed through it and into the thick stand of trees beyond. Trunks snapped and slammed down around ship. The overhead monitors went dark as the branches sheared off the external pickups. The restraints clinched around her as the ship crashed to a halt. There was one last thud of something heavy falling on the hull and it was over.

  The crash web retracted, leaving her skin damp and cold. Sweat stuck her hair to the side of her face. The alarms silenced one by one as Wolf shut down the board.

  “Lizzy, report,” she said. As the seconds stretched out, broken only by the popping of the cooling hull and her own harsh breathing, Fitz wondered if their situation could get much worse. If they lost Lizzy…

  “I’m sorry, Commander, but I was attempting to ascertain the full extent of my damage. There is no breach of containment on the reactor. The hull is relatively intact. I have lost almost all external sensors, and communications are somewhat impaired. There were no fires, and the single hydraulic leak was contained. That’s the good news. Unfortunately, the port atmospheric thruster was sheared completely off.”

  Fitz puffed out the breath lodged in her throat, the news hitting her like the death of a friend. One engine gone and the other imploded. Without a salvage crew, her ship would never move from this spot again.

  Wolf ran fingers through his sweaty hair and turned a rueful smile in her direction.

  “Welcome to Baldark.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Fitz turned up the collar of her jacket and hugged her chest, slipping her fingers under her arms to warm them. Despite the wan sunshine, the frigid air cut through her nostrils like knives and made her ears ache.

  A hundred meters away, beside the crash-gouged furrow in the field, the battered remains of Lizzy’s thruster lay half buried in the dirt and snarled with vines.

  “Ready to argue with a farmer about destroying his crop?” she called to Wolf, her words a cloud of vapor in the sharp air.

  He looked up from where he squatted at the base of one of the surviving plants, studying the soil. “I don’t think anyone has tended this vineyard in a long time.” He dusted off his hands as he rose and brushed the wiry needles of a seedling growing between the vines. The young tree was nearly his height. “Without knowing the growth rate of these, it’s impossible to tell exactly how long, but I’d say it’s been quite a number of years.”

  “Could it be this cold weather?” She pulled up her files and thought-clicked on the one labeled climate. “According to Deva-Lorza’s observations, the planet goes through what she termed mega-seasons. In addition to the normal seasonal fluctuations, there’s a twenty-six planetary-year cycle that swings from severe winters and short summers to mild winters and long rainy summers. Could we be in one of these colder cycles?”

  “So it would seem.” He scrambled over the scattered stones of the destroyed fence and joined her on the loading ramp. Their only way in or out of the ship now was through the cargo hold since half a dozen fallen trees blocked the main entrance—the same trees that scrapped off all the external pick-ups, antennas and sensors, blinding Lizzy.

  By unspoken agreement, neither of them had addressed their predicament, but Fitz couldn’t con
tinue to push that to the back of her thoughts. They had no way off the planet, no way to get a message out, and not a single sentient being knew where they were. She’d rushed to save Ari Ransahov, but now they were the ones needing rescue. Her enthusiasm for the mission and the need for secrecy had destroyed her objectivity, overshadowing the most important fact in covert operations. Always have a backup.

  Her teeth worried her lower lip. “This is all my fault.”

  Wolf cocked his head at her, blond eyebrow arching in question.

  “I should have kept Maks apprised of my plans. Maybe even arranged to meet up here instead of at IAS-23 or brought a couple of other ships with me…”

  “Fitz, stop it. You didn’t even know the coordinates of this system until I told you and by that time, Kiernan was already on the run.”

  “But I could have waited, gotten a message to him…”

  “You did the best you could with the information you had. Don’t beat yourself up over it.”

  “But I didn’t put a backup plan in place.”

  “I did.”

  “Y-you did?” Her pulse rate accelerated as she stammered out the words. But something was wrong. If he’d managed to pull their collective butts out of the fire, he’d at least look mildly amused or give her one of his smug I’m way ahead of you grins. Instead, she saw only sorrow in his eyes.

  “Yeah, I told Fen Donkenny to show up here in two weeks with Bifrost and a squad of Gold Dragons.”

  For just a second, Fitz thought they’d be able to survive for two weeks, but then she remembered the image of that fireball consuming Ishtok Base. Major Donkenny was dead. The Gold Dragons were gone. No one would be coming to save them.

  “Wolf, I’m so sorry.” She slipped her arms around him, and he returned her embrace.

  He whispered into her hair. “I keep thinking that maybe a handful of my people made it out of that inferno alive. And if one person knew where I was going. And if they were able to make it to Rainey Prime Station. And sneak Bifrost out of an Imperial-occupied system.” His chuckle held no trace of humor. “My people are damn good, but I’m afraid even the bloody Gold Dragons aren’t that good. I hate like hell to admit it, but it looks like we’re on our own.”

  He held her for a long time, then stepped back. He pointed to the far end of the clearing. “The ship’s last scan showed the research station is about eight klicks in that direction. Care to join me for a stroll?”

  “I don’t seem to have anything else on my busy social schedule at the moment, so why not?” She started back up the ramp. Wolf fell in behind her.

  “Jumper, come inside,” he called.

  The cat bounded out of the undergrowth, his thick fur puffed out and tangled with burrs and dead grass. Jumper dropped a small broken body at the foot of the ramp, and Fitz was glad he didn’t present it for closer inspection.

  “If you don’t mind, Boss, I’m going to stay outside for a while. This is a hunter’s paradise. So much to see; so many things to kill.”

  “So many large predators to eat tasty, foolish cats,” Wolf reminded him.

  “I’m not scared.” Jumper’s gaze darted around and he dashed up the ramp, beating both of them inside the ship.

  Wolf sealed the lock behind them. “Warm clothes and arm yourself. Not swords, energy weapons. With the abysmal run of luck we’re having, I’m more concerned about being able to face down the next threat than offending the sensibilities of the locals.”

  In her quarters, Fitz slipped into the shoulder rig he’d given her at the hotel and checked the Acton’s power core. Returning to the common room, she found Wolf stuffing a backpack with sandwiches, ration bars and a thermal bottle.

  He shrugged into the pack. “Jumper, I need you to stay here. Until the repair-bots get the external antennas replaced, you’re the only connection we have with the ship. If anything comes up, contact me, and keep the hatches sealed. I don’t want any nasty surprises waiting for us when we return.”

  Jumper looked up from his plate of liver and creamed gravy. “You got it, Boss.”

  The road at the end of the clearing confirmed their belief that the fields were long abandoned. Frost-killed weeds scraped against their knees as they walked, and the forest pressed in on both sides of the trail, eager to reclaim the land man had stolen.

  After an hour, they came to a dead tree down across the path. Fitz sat next to Wolf as they devoured the sandwiches, the cold sharpening her appetite. The thermal bottle contained coffee, strong and liberally dosed with milk and sweeteners. Not the way she usually took it, but the combination of caffeine and sugar jazzed her for the second half of their trek.

  As they set out again, she checked her inhead display for the signal from Ransahov’s spike, the source only a few klicks away now. It had not moved, not a centimeter, since they’d spotted it from orbit. A dozen explanations for that immobility drifted through her mind, none of them comforting.

  Fitz heard the stream before it came into view. The torrent stumbled over ice-rimed rocks and surged around the piers of a ramshackle stone bridge. Patches of moss peeped from every crevice, and the wooden lantern posts at either side sagged. Beyond it, the overgrown path curved around a stand of trees and into a village.

  The first buildings were little more than charred stumps with broken roof tiles strewn about the wreckage. Only a single pole remained standing at another—a tavern from the broken crockery and puddles of melted glass in the debris. The metal sign, faded beyond legibility, swung crookedly from the crosspiece, twisting and screeching in the indifferent wind. A vine, its leaves withered by frost, draped across everything, softening the bleakness. Time and the seasons had carried away the scent of death and ashes.

  Wolf’s face hardened as he walked through the desolation. In his line of work, this might be a common sight. Warfare, for a mercenary, could be sharp, brutal and personal.

  Her battles had all been antiseptic. She’d had her share of field operations, quick one-on-one skirmishes, even killed, cleanly and quickly, when forced to but the few large operations she’d participated in had been executed from the deck of a flagship, standing at Maks Kiernan’s shoulder. Destruction had never been this intimate for her.

  “The research station was located in an old farmhouse over that way.” Wolf pointed in the direction her display pinpointed as the source of the signal. Her mouth went dry and the bitter wind made her nose run and her eyes tear.

  As they exited the village, the old stone house came into view, one side looking like an ice cream treat that had gone a couple of rounds with a welding torch and lost. Its blocks were cracked and melted, flowing and congealing into fingers of frozen lava. Only one thing could cause that kind of devastation.

  “Directed energy beams,” Wolf said, scanning the sky as if he expected an assault shuttle to materialize. “It seems the Empire has already been here. And more than a few years ago.”

  The breath clotted in Fitz’s lungs. The signal she’d been following came from directly ahead, inside the ruin. She compelled herself to breathe, her feet to move, hardly aware of Wolf following her. Another bridge over a tributary of the stream creaked underfoot, forcing her to edge her way across the rotten planks.

  Only a tangle of stubborn plants and dead flowers remained of a garden at the front of the house. A pungent herbal smell rose as she pushed her way through it to the porch. She paused at the gaping door, afraid to enter.

  Wolf caught her arm, pulled her back and stepped in front of her, slug thrower in hand. For once, she didn’t complain, but followed him inside. All that remained of the room’s contents were unidentifiable hunks of melted metal and charred wood, covered by a thick layer of ash that smelled of animal droppings. Beams of sunlight slanted down through holes in the roof. Stirred by their footsteps, the fine particles hung in the air, dancing in the bars of light and clinging to her face and clothing.
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br />   People had died here but please, not Ransahov…

  A flurry of wings erupted from the shadows above her head as dark creatures whirled around the room and streamed out the door, their high frequency echolocation painful to Fitz’s enhanced hearing.

  Wolf scanned the darkness at the back of the building. “The office was this way, a standard research station safe-room with armored walls to keep the locals out.”

  Any wooden door that might have disguised the entrance had burned away, exposing a plexisteel hatch twisted outward, hanging by a single hinge.

  “Standard Imperial urban pacification techniques. Lob a couple of grenades in, slam the door and take cover.” His voice was flat, emotionless.

  Fitz identified square shapes against the wall that might have been consoles housing computers and communication gear, but little else. Twisted strips of metal littered the floor, poking up out of an ankle deep layer of ash. She refused to speculate on the composition of that residue. The tracker on her display continued to beep—oblivious and uncaring—reading the source of the signal at less than a meter in front of her.

  Spikes were virtually indestructible. Each contained a unique identification code and when the damage was catastrophic, they were often the only way to identify the victim.

  All that remained of Ari Ransahov—and all of Fitz’s hopes and schemes and prayers—was a few centimeters of plexisteel and circuitry. She and Kiernan’s conspirators had never stood a chance. The Empire had been ahead of them the entire time, since before their plan had even been set in motion. If Ashcraft had any inkling of what they’d been up to, he was undoubtedly laughing his ass off right now.

  Fitz stepped through the door, but Wolf blocked her way. “What are you doing?”

  “I should retrieve her spike.”

  “No. Leave her alone. To the rest of humanity, she’s been dead for decades. Let it stay that way. Give her some peace. She bloody well didn’t have much while she was alive.”