“He has it,” Colson said. “He'd just find an even better way to do it. I can bull my way through just about anything, but he'd be three steps ahead.”
“And if you run into the Kzavdran?”
“That won't be a problem.”
“Easy to say.”
“We're running dark in stealth ships. Unless they're the ones behind all this, we won't see them. Lot of other ways for us to die, but not that.”
Praetus was quiet again, then finally nodded. “All right. The two of you and Aimes. I'll put in the transfer orders and you'll be officially out. Swing three new pilots in to replace you for the base squadron. They can run light for a few days while it happens. The first of your pilots for Firehawk Squadron will be here tomorrow. I'll cancel one and you'll have all nine in three days.”
“Firehawk Squadron.”
“Unless you want to name it something else.”
Kiena leaned forward. “Hawk Two has a nice ring to it.”
Colson nodded, then stood. Sliding his comm into his pocket and adjusting his gun belt. Kiena followed his lead and they took two steps toward the door before Colson stopped and looked back. Praetus was just sitting, watching them go, his fingers still steepled on the desk before him.
“If we're off the base squadron,” Colson asked, “do we answer directly to you?”
Praetus lowered his hands, folding them in his lap. That look in his eyes again that Kiena could almost read, a look that told her everything and nothing at once, that underscored some violent and perfidious past, a man who alone held the secrets of that life and clutched them deep within himself as the galaxy moved around him.
“You've always answered to me,” he said. “You just didn't know it until now.”
11
She walked slowly in the powdered snow, it billowing around the mech's legs and the wind whipping across the field before her. So cold in the early morning air that the snow was brittle chips of ice and the rising sun caught it as it turned in the wind, swirling over the edge of a drift and racing off toward the ice sea. The whole world bright in the new day and bitter and beautiful at once.
A beauty she knew could not last, not with the slow destruction of the world's core. That would eventually rise to meet the surface as the plates shifted and magma rushed up through the broken seams and the rocks shattered and the entire planet was rent into ravaged pieces of what it had been. A world of ice turned briefly to a world of fire. As perhaps all things consumed one another when given the time to do so. Men and worlds alike.
But today it was beautiful and they'd taken her off of the flight rotation and so she walked in that harsh world with the mech's heaters and engines running on full, the glass and steel station falling away behind her. For now everything forgotten, pushed aside. Praetus and Garrington, the dead ships and the shuttle burning through the atmosphere with the first of the new pilots. The Firehawk crouched in that deep hidden bay and waiting to scorch the sky. All of it behind her and now just her and this wasteland alone.
A type of peace in that.
But as with beauty, she knew the half-life of peace and its fragility. For rising before her again was that black stone spire and she pushed on toward things she could not forget nor understand, that nagging feeling that there was something she was overlooking, something so close to her consciousness. Ever since the first time she'd been to the spire, walking past it then in a night patrol, the mech's searchlight sweeping over it in a broad arc, lingering there for a moment. Then filing past and looking back once and following Aimes into the night.
Turning again to look.
There were some things you could forget and some you could not and she knew it might be nothing at all. A faceless stone structure, the result of some planetary event forgotten now for a million years, the violent and slow way that planets changed and formed and lived and died. A thing that would one day crumble and shatter itself and disappear into nothing.
But she also knew that she wouldn't sleep well enough until she saw it again and so she walked on in that blistering white landscape, a place wild and silent at once, the mech's white armor swapped for gunmetal and catching that same sun as the snow swirled about her and the ice danced in air so cold and clear it felt you could reach out and grasp it and snap the very air in half to peer at whatever it was that waited on the other side.
The Dead Ship: Episode Two (Firehawk Squadron Book 2) Page 4