“But you have to know something,” Kiena said. “We know what ship that was. Run it back. Where'd you lose it?”
“We do.” He raised his glass, set it back down. “I can tell you the system and I can also tell you there's nothing there. We launch as soon as a ship goes dark. But it's always ships on their own. No one takes on a strike force to get one ship. They hit something by itself and by the time we show up, there's nothing left. Dark systems without settlements. Jump points for FTL, usually. Then the ship shows back up and we lose it instantly and so there's no record. Just a swath of expanding debris in two systems.”
“All destroyers?”
He shook his head. “This was the first. The other two were freighters. That's the damn problem. If it was military we'd have a jump on it. Or we could pair everyone up, never send a ship out alone to start with. Damned expensive, but not as expensive as losing ships.” Something hardening in his eyes. “But the other two just went dark on their own. Closest military lightyears away. That happens on the outskirts or in the Belt and it could be days before someone notices and calls it in. By that time, that ship is anywhere in the galaxy.”
“But they're clearly scaling up.”
“That's what we think.”
Colson stood up then and went to the window and stood with his hand against the glass. That wasteland beyond shrouded in blowing powder, where somewhere out there the Terriadon lay covered in snow and ice of its own creation. Kiena watched him and thought of him saying they're all dead over the comm and then he turned and reached down and picked up the bottle and came back. Filled his own drink to the top and set the bottle down. Standing now and leaning with both hands on the desk.
“Why me?”
“I told you, you're the expert. No one knows as much as you. Plus, with what you pulled up there, we know you can do it. I've seen your file.”
“Then you know why I'm here.”
The man stood suddenly. Taller than Colson and his back so straight he could have been standing at attention before the empress herself. “And that makes you just as perfect for this job as anything else,” he said. “We both know it.” Looking over at Kiena. “Both of you test out easily on the ground and behind the stick. That's exactly what we need. The rest is a bonus.”
She thought for a second that Colson was going to hit him and she didn't move to stop it. His body barely moved, but the muscles taut in his neck and a strange tenseness she could see through the flightsuit and he closed his eyes just briefly. A touch longer than a blink.
And then it was gone.
“What are we flying?” she said, breaking into that silence before it cracked and they hauled Colson off to the brig after all. “Skelts?”
“So you'll do it?”
“I didn't say that.” She finished her drink, set the glass aside. Feeling the warmth of it moving in her. “I just need to know what we're talking about here.”
“Fair enough,” the man said, shifting toward the door.
He'd barely touched his own drink and Kiena looked at it and the half-empty bottle and thought even in that there was some sort of power play, forging out those details. Not only taking whiskey that had cost Garrington thousands of credits, but then neglecting to even drink it. Forcing the colonel to either pour it out or drink it out of his own glass.
“Come with me,” he said.
8
They went down together in the lift and she felt the familiar little lurch as it started and then it was like they weren't moving at all. Standing there in the dim lights. He said nothing and didn't look at either of them. She glanced over at Colson and he was watching him and finally, feeling the whiskey more than ever now, she said:
“Tell me your name.”
He didn't speak for a moment and she thought he was going to ignore her entirely and then, without turning, he said:
“Praetus. My name is Nikolai Praetus.”
It meant nothing to her. She didn't know what she had expected from a man who was a ghost, who'd lived in this world and let it devour him, but it meant nothing at all.
The doors opened and they stepped out into the hall beyond. No windows this far down, at least three stories below the surface. Just rows of lights running along in the middle of the ceiling and the soft lights on the floor. Nothing announcing their location and no one else as far as she could see.
Praetus stepped out and turned to the left and walked and they both followed down that passageway and Kiena felt for just a brief second as if she were walking down the dragon's throat. Far below, the core of the planet churning and preparing to rip itself from the galaxy, an apocalyptic end if this had been an inhabited world. Now just a scientific footnote as the world died.
Ten minutes and two turns later and they stood before a tall metal blast door. Locked and sealed and the lights glowing red along the bottom. The metal polished to perfection, just the faintest scratch along the face where it rubbed in the track as it rose. A keypad glowing on the right-hand side. Praetus raised his hand and touched it without looking and the door began to open.
Behind it sat a snubfighter like none she'd ever seen before. She ducked slightly as the door came up and watched as Colson did the same, stepping under and into the room. Saying something under his breath that was probably a curse in Crallian, but not one she'd ever heard before. Praetus waiting ramrod straight between them until that heavy door clicked into its housing and then following them in without a word.
The ship was about the size of a skelt, but looked nothing like one. The bow split into two forward prongs, similar to a destroyer, but each with hard lines and tapered back toward a central cockpit, not the grasping, curved talons of the capital ship. The canopy stark black, but blending into the rest of the ship, because every inch of the metal hull was a matte black that faded into the shadows. No wings, but two revolving turrets hanging on port and starboard, similar to the skelt's but heavier and with twice as many barrels. The back end slanting into a huge engine that could only be an FTL drive.
Colson turned, met her eyes for just a moment, and then looked back at Praetus. “What the hell is this? I'm qualified on everything in the fleet smaller than a corvette, and I've never seen this in my life.”
Praetus nodded once, a slight smirk tugging at the corners of his lips. “This is a Firehawk. And, like your squadron, it doesn't exist.”
“You built us a damned ship.”
“It's been in the line for two years now. Before the first dead ship dropped into atmosphere. But this is exactly the type of mission it was designed for.” He walked forward and reached up to put a hand on the underside of the port bow talon. “Fully stealth. Won't show up on any radar in the Empire or the Coalition. Has an FTL drive, so you can go places no other snubfighter can touch. Incredible range. Just as nimble as a skelt in a dogfight, but about a third faster at sublight. You could torch an entire squadron of sevs in this thing and leave them picking up the pieces and wondering what hit them as you jumped out of the system.”
Kiena whistled and slowly circled the sleek black hammer of a ship. The matte color making it look lethal, something about its lines causing it to crane slightly forward, as if aching to leap out of the docking bay and burn through the atmosphere, screaming for deep space. The XS-7, or “sev”, was the Coalition's main snubfighter, a lightning fast needle of a ship with three repeating cannons and twin torpedo tubes, deadly against other starfighters and ground forces, and Preatus was right – the Firehawk looked like it could cut an entire squadron to shreds without breaking a sweat.
As she walked around to the back and ran her fingers along the smooth edge of the engine housing – easily twice as big as the engines on the skelt combined – Colson stopped at the front. Took two steps back and swore again. This time she had no problem hearing what he said.
“Tell me those aren't what I think they are.”
She looked over at Praetus standing there with the faint red light from the door locks playing over the side of hi
s face while he turned. He was looking at the starfighter as if he'd designed and built it here himself, like some benevolent god eyeing his own creation and the destruction it would rip into the world.
“They are,” he said. “Twin heavy cannons in the bow talons. The whole ship is built around them.”
Kiena jogged to the front and looked up. The muzzle didn't protrude more than six inches from the housing, but it was as big around as her arm, the dark center running back like some portal to a world of perpetual night, a deep and ominous blackness that underscored the fury and heat within as those guns kicked out beams that would vaporize half a platoon without even leaving the dog tags behind. On capital ships, each heavy gun was a twin-barreled turret. Here, they'd simply split the turret in half and put each barrel in one side of the bow.
“You strapped an FTL drive to a heavy cannon and coated it in stealth armor,” she said quietly. “You people are insane.”
“It's the perfect ship for this job,” Praetus said. “You get the firepower you need for everything but an orbital bombardment. You can stand against a flight of sevs or a line ship. Get in atmosphere and you can strafe a ground installation to death before they know you're on them. Small enough to land on a ship that's already been taken and powerful enough to tear it end to end before it goes atmo.”
“How many are there?” Colson said. Not moving from where he stood staring down the pair of barrels as if searching there for some answer to a question only he knew.
“Twelve,” Praetus said. “Your squadron will have the same makeup as any other. Six pairings or four flights of three, whichever way you want to run it. Just try not to lose any. It could be a while before we send you another one.” He folded his hands in front of him. “We're also building you a pocket carrier. For now you operate off of Riccana. When the carrier is done, you're a mobile unit, able to strike anywhere in known space and a damned long way beyond if you have to. That's about six months out, but we have to get this running early. When we saw that they took a destroyer, we couldn't wait any longer.”
Kiena looked at him. “This has to violate the Yualinka Treaty. Capital guns on stealth ships.”
This time she was sure Preatus smiled. Something horribly predatory in it, the way his upper lip peeled back from his teeth. She thought maybe it was the whiskey twisting it for her, but the ice running down her spine said it was much more than that.
“How can something violate a treaty,” he said, “when it doesn't exist?”
9
She sat on the couch facing the window, feet curled under her. The sun setting over the snow plain, washing it in color from the edge of the horizon. A sort of steel-edged red, the star burning down through the lower reaches of the atmosphere. The storm well retreated now and the world looking frozen and pristine, the air clear and the only thing remaining of that snowfall the piles of it packed into the corners of the windows. All the rest just more snow upon endless meters of it, the new falling seamlessly into the old.
It was warm in the apartment despite the frigid temperatures outside and she had a lamp lit and glowing softly beside the couch and she was holding a hot mug of coffee in both hands. She drank so much of it as a pilot that now she could drink it whenever she wanted and it did almost nothing and she'd many times finished off a cup right before bed and fallen asleep instantly all the same.
But today it wasn't about the caffeine or warmth or any of that. It was just about giving her hands something to do so she'd stop balling them into fists.
She could see it out there in the snow, that rising stone spire. If she told Reid how it haunted her dreams he'd think she was insane and she wasn't so sure herself that it wasn't true. The rocks protruding from the ravaged, frozen land. The way she found herself in those dreams standing on top of it with all the world in front of her and turning slowly in a circle and taking it all in and when she woke she could remember the dream but couldn't remember what it was she'd seen out there in that other world.
Just the feeling of the dream remaining. A thing hulking and towering, the size of a glacier and moving with that same deceptive slowness, all that crushing weight of ice and years and whole planets buried under it. How sometimes she woke sweating and sat up in bed and blinked there in the dark with her pulse hammering at her temples until it went away and she could again lie and stare at the ceiling and wait endlessly for the day.
She closed her eyes, opened them again. Drank the coffee now cooling despite the warmth. Tried not to think of Praetus and the way he'd smiled and his teeth when he'd done it.
The door opened and she didn't turn and knew it was him from the sound of his boots as he walked and as he pulled them off. Came slowly across the room toward her and then sat looking out at Riccana's tortured surface.
“What do you think?” he said.
“I don't like him.”
“Of course you don't. Neither do I.”
“Well.”
“Well what do you think?”
She raised the cup and drank and then shifted toward him. Watching his face as he watched the sunset. “Do you want to do it?”
He was quiet. Then: “Yes.”
She'd known it all along, but it was one thing to know it and another to hear him say it. He was born for this and it was in his blood and it was who he was. From the moment he'd seen that starfighter he'd been thinking of how he could sit in it and let it rip him free of gravity and atmosphere and life itself, giving him something else that went beyond what most people would ever know. The rush of the acceleration, the g-force in a hard turn, even the sheer terror as the sevs swarmed toward you or a line ship fell out of FTL on top of you. Screaming into the comm and locking in the shields and feeling the guns go hot under your fingertips.
And now this. A ship no one else flew, a black mission that wasn't sanctioned. Something that was all his and only his. His blood drawn to that as it always had been and would be and if that also meant he was drawn to his own death, then she knew he'd take that as part of the deal and gladly.
“That's it,” she said.
He looked at her finally. “I don't have to like him to fly for him. And he's not wrong. I saw that destroyer, the girl who shot herself. If they scale it up to a carrier and dump it in the core, a lot of people are going to die. We can stop that.”
“Always the hero.”
He smiled. “Don't give me that. You saw that ship. Tell me you don't want to fly her.”
“Of course I want to fly her.”
“Well.”
“Doesn't mean I like it.” She finished the coffee, set the cup aside. The sun now burning in radiant fire as it went down, the last flare before it was gone and the lethal darkness swept across Riccana for ten hours. “Man like that, he'll sell you in a second. You know it. One thing goes wrong or it's his career on the line and you're gone.”
“I know what he is.”
“And you don't care.”
He smiled, reached out with one arm and pulled her close. Her head against his chest. “I don't care,” he said. “I'll just make sure nothing goes wrong.”
She was angry with him but she let him hold her and wished they had the rest of Garrington's whiskey. It had been a hell of a day; could be a hell of a night, too. And maybe that would take just enough of the edge off so that she could stop feeling like something was very wrong on Riccana. Something beyond a dead ship falling into orbit or Praetus arriving out of nowhere with a black ops offer and a ship she'd never heard of. Something far deeper and churning like the planet's molten heart.
At last, as the sun finally dipped below the horizon and the day died, she said: “So, you still need a wingman?”
10
“Good,” Praetus said softly. “I knew this wasn't a mistake.”
They were sitting in Garrington's office, the colonel nowhere to be found and doubtless trying to think even now how he'd spin this when Praetus was gone and he ventured back out of his apartment. Kiena looked over to where the bottle of wh
iskey sat in the sunlight on the side table and it was still half full, untouched since the day before. That light glinting through it as she moved.
“Do I pick my pilots?” Colson asked.
“No. I have some handpicked already. They'll ship out here now that I know you want the command.” He nodded toward Kiena without actually looking at her. “The two of you, of course. Ten more en route.”
Colson shook his head sharply. “I want Aimes.”
Praetus was silent for a moment, steepling his fingers and regarding Colson over them. In his eyes Kiena saw many things and for just a moment understood all he'd done even if she didn't know it, things that no one would ever know, a past stringing darkly behind him that would be buried with him in his grave and perhaps at times the bones would be unburied and turned and examined and no one would know whose they were and then they'd be buried again and eventually forgotten.
“Jannis Aimes,” he said. “A halfbreed.”
Kiena started to stand and something in her chest flaring hot and violent and Colson reached out a hand to steady her and she stopped. “Yes,” he said.
“Why?”
“He's the best skelt pilot I've ever met. Better than both of us. Pure skill you can't teach.”
“And yet it was you who landed on the Terriadon.”
“I was already in flight. Plus, he's smarter than me. Never would have done it. But, if he had to, he could do it in half the time and twice as easily.”
“But you say yourself that he wouldn't have done it. I need pilots who would. That's precisely why I chose you. These are black missions. You don't have outside oversight or support and you have complete control. You have to act instinctively and take risks and accomplish the mission. I need the type of initiative that puts a pilot on a ship that's burning up in atmosphere. That gets him to cut off a dead girl's hand with a combat knife.”
The Dead Ship: Episode Two (Firehawk Squadron Book 2) Page 3