Firehawk Squadron: The Dead Ship
Episode Three
Jonathan Schlosser
1
The crystal valley flashing below him and the scream of the Firehawk's engines in atmosphere. The snowcovered wasteland tearing by as he pushed the starfighter lower, the black stone walls of the canyon rising on both sides, draped in frost and the deep scars of events long forgotten. The forging of a river or the roaring impact of a meteorite or the great gouging of the ice sheets. Deep in the heart of the valley a frozen river cascading down into a waterfall of ice, the bright sun flashing back up into the clear sky.
Colson closed his eyes, breathing deeply and unable to fight off a grin. Feeling something in him that he hadn't felt for a long time. Perhaps since the first time he ever got on the stick in a skelt's cockpit, maybe even before that. Flying a little RansCorp Sprite out over the fields of Crall, the small ship just barely able to make orbit and flying at not a tenth of the speed of the Firehawk. But he'd been a kid then and he remembered the freedom and the speed that felt almost reckless and the vibration through his gloved hand and the way the whole world seemed open and new.
“Rein it in there a bit, Leader. Convoy's falling behind.”
He looked over and checked the plot, and Aimes was right. The four red dots of the convoy strung out far behind at the valley's entrance, where the towering walls stood sheered off like the grand entrance to some lost kingdom of the dead, a place where heroes whose bones were now dirt and ash had forged out legacies and lands and stood against one another in battle on this frozen landscape, fighting for control of things they would all lose in time.
“Sorry, Three.” He slowed the fighter and pulled up out of the valley, watching the land sink away below before swinging the ship back in a graceful, arcing turn. The ship so smooth and responsive, a beautiful machine that barely needed any urging to do everything required of it and more. “I'll circle back, but you're clear on scans for a hundred kilometers in every direction.”
“Including straight up?”
“The only way that really matters.”
It'd been two weeks since the dead ship burned through the atmosphere and they'd spent it all waiting for some follow-up FTL signature. The sinister black bulk of a Axeblade-class strike cruiser or a carrier hanging just on the edge of the system and launching sevs to swarm the planet and turn anything metal to scrap and anything alive to ash and carbon. But nothing had come plunging after the Terriadon and Riccana was as silent and still as ever. A blue-white ball of ice hurdling around that far-off sun and in the heart of the pyramid that was Harriet Station, a red clock counting slowly the revolutions until her projected death in fire and chaos.
Not that they could know, really. The clock a guess and little more. The pilots had placed bets on top of bets about how close or far off it'd be, with some swearing they'd be the richest people in the Empire with just a little luck and the violent death of a planet.
Colson ran the scan again as the fighter slowed and swept around, and it was clear. Nothing out there but them. Two scout mechs, a tracked troop carrier crawling in the snow, and the heavy drill with its built-in generator and bits that could chew through the ice and sheet rock itself for hundreds of meters.
He came up and around and saw them traipsing through the valley, the snow up to the knees of the scout mechs, Kiena and Aimes plodding along. The troop carrier, a heavy wedge of a vehicle with a revolving turret on top and a door that opened down into a ramp, plowing up snow in front of it. The drill, rolling on six wheels taller than a man – or even Aimes – and following in the path scraped out before it.
“I don't know why you don't let me just burn a hole down to her with the cannons,” Colson said into the comm. “I'd be done with this job by now and we'd all be drinking coffee and bourbon in the crew lounge.
“The hell you would,” Kiena said.
“You two are like a damned anchor.”
“All right, flyboy. We'll trade for the run home.”
He grinned. “Not a chance.”
He swung around behind the convoy and brought the ship in low over the nearby mountains. The iced ridge running up so high it pushed into the clouds. Flecks of hail skipping off the canopy. He dropped the fighter a bit lower to get out of it and flew over the peak and out into the flat plain on the far side. Running away in drifting white to the ice sea.
Keyed the comm. “Can't fly slow enough, Two.”
Aimes didn't reply for a moment. Colson thought of him sweating in the cramped scout mech and glaring up at the sky. Grinned and keyed the comm to mention it, but then Aimes came back on.
“You see her up there?”
He checked the plot. “Doesn't look like she's moved.”
“You're hilarious. Why don't you swing around, do a flyby. Get a feel for it that the sat couldn't give. If it looks all right, try setting down. Eyes on the ground won't hurt.”
“Confident in the scan?”
“Anything else was going to come out of FTL, it'd be here by now.”
“I'll keep her hot just in case.”
“Always.”
The doomed starship had come down hard, but she wasn't nearly as deep as she should have been. At least according to the satellite readings. They'd run two passes overhead when they found the wreckage and some tech had decided she was hung up on a rock sheet or an outcropping from the mountain or something, but the truth was that they didn't know what. Just that she was only about a hundred meters down and entombed in ice where she'd melted her way down and then the blizzard had fallen.
The convoy was about a half hour out and the Firehawk could cover that in seconds and Colson brought up the waypoint marker on his plot and pushed the throttle. Intentionally dropping low as he shot over the top to billow snow all across the tracked vehicles and the mechs laboring their way across the ice. The curses from Kiena and Aimes as he went over and the gray-white bank of clouds swelling up before him and the ship streaking along to crest the stone cliff and tear alone over a frozen forest of rocks standing in the sunlight.
He closed his eyes again. Felt the ship's smooth and controlled power. So far beyond a skelt, beyond anything he'd ever flown.
Perhaps the last thing he'd expected for himself when he'd been pulled off of Crall, covered in earth and blood, half his teeth knocked out and his ears still ringing and the Marines screaming at him as they strapped him down in the medvac jumpjet, asking did he know what had happened to the admiral. Some wretched reply he couldn't even remember now. Leaning over the side of the cot to puke onto the floor. A Marine captain grabbing his hair with one hand and lifting his eyes up to meet him and asking him again about the admiral before the world went black.
He opened his eyes. That a place he often went at night and in the dark and lying next to Kiena shaking and trying to wake himself up. But not here. Not while he had this ship under his control and all the galaxy at his fingertips.
Ten seconds later the clearing opened up and he found an old caldera where once a volcano had raged its magma and fury into the world and now all that remained was the sweeping curve of the ridge. An empty white sheet in the middle, pristine and untouched. The cliff wrapping around and rising a hundred feet into the air on all sides but one, where it had collapsed and fallen at some unknown time, a sheet of ice now folding itself through the gap.
And there, on the top of the far ridge, was the Terriadon.
At least, that's where the marker said she was. The satellite's feed automatically updated the ship's computers. His ship in turn talking to the mechs and the crane and the troop carrier comi
ng along behind. All of their charts updating so that one unit expanded immediately the tactical view of all of the others. In a combat situation, that plot full of green dots and markers for friendly units, red for enemy units, and orange for unknowns.
Today, just five green markers and one in slate gray. The dead ship. Its projected location in the ice on the edge of the ridge.
He ran the Firehawk around once and watched the plot and visuals at the same time. On the far side of the caldera nothing but a sheet of ice running away for ten kilometers. Far off a black river pushing through in its winding path, this one strong enough for just the barest movement during the day, the surface covered in a flotilla of ice, crushed along the banks. A few hills in the distance but nothing like the mountains. As always on Riccana, nothing alive.
When he was satisfied he dropped the fighter lower and cut the speed and came in on a flat descent for the top of the ridge. Those black stones rising and everything seeming as always to go so slowly and then incredibly fast. Keying in the maglifts as he came down; they worked best in a warship's landing bay, but they could put him down anywhere he chose. A shuddering and jolting sort of fall until the support struts flipped out and the ship settled down in the drifting snow, the struts burying down to the ice and stone beneath.
“I'm down,” he said. “Going to get out and take a look around unless anyone objects.”
“Think you're gonna find anything?” Aimes asked.
“Can't know unless I try.”
“I'd stay in the heated cockpit, but that's just me.”
“Keep dreaming of this cockpit.” Colson flipped the Firehawk into standby so the scan would stay hot, reached down to unclip the harness, and popped the canopy. There was a soft click and then it rose almost silently on the hydraulics.
He stood up and felt the cold wind instantly slam against him, reaching down to put a hand on the edge of the cockpit to steady himself. The flightsuit that they got with the Firehawk was also a vacsuit, able to keep them alive in vacuum or incredibly harsh climates for at least a short time. As long as the helmet was sealed. He reached up and touched it to make sure.
The uniforms were new and came with the ship and they were nothing at all. Shrouds perhaps for the unnamed dead. Not a rank or unit marking on them. This vacsuit a slick black and the helmet matte like the ship. The only marking a fire-orange hawk's eye painted on the lefthand side of the helmet. Each uniform identical regardless of rank.
They didn't even wear dog tags. Those metal tags they stripped from the dead. That more than anything else telling Colson that he was already numbered among the dead and doing little more in this squadron than waiting for the moment that his heart caught up with everything else and stopped beating.
He ignored the ladder on the side of the ship and walked as he always did with the skelts down the nose of the fighter. This time on the ship's starboard talon. All too conscious that what he was walking on was half of a capital gun that could rip his atoms apart and leave nothing but a finely spreading red mist and carbon scarring on anything behind him. Then he flexed his hands in the flight gloves already growing cold and leapt softly down into the blowing snow, a dead man moving toward a dead ship and what little remained of her entombed inhabitants.
2
He went to the edge of the cliff and could see where she'd gone down. A huge depression in the snow. Covered now and blanketed in white but he stood all the same on the edge and wondered how fast he'd fall through that loose snow were he to step onto it. Knowing he'd never make it to the ship but would still plunge far over his head before it compacted enough and held him like a man buried in an avalanche with all that pressing weight and screaming into the dark.
Scanning and turning, he cycled through the views on the helmet. The computer running green grid lines over the visor and mapping the rock under the snow. Separating stone from ice from snow from metal. The caldera clearly laid out, heavy and thick old volcanic rock. Stepping back and playing it over the depression from the ship and the far edge where the stone curved away from him.
“It's this rock,” he said into the comm. “Came down right on the ridge. Went through the ice and snow easily enough but couldn't punch through it.”
“How much?”
He panned the helmet scan over the area marked as metal. Letting the computer run the numbers and running them in his head at the same time. “Not a lot. Five percent, maybe.”
The ship had been tearing herself apart when he was on her, before she even hit atmosphere. Not to mention the mass lost in the initial attack when whatever battlegroup took her down tore those towers to pieces and ripped sheets of armor from the hull. By the time she got done burning and breaking up, there was virtually nothing left. This the biggest piece, with smaller debris scattered all over the planet that they'd never find. Smoke and ash in the atmosphere. The atoms of men and women and the starship alike all ripped apart.
“The hundred yards were right?”
“Looks close. Suit scan says one oh five. That's the close edge.”
“Can't be more than a compartment or two.”
“If that. How far out are you?”
“Twenty minutes if we don't run into any snags.”
Colson stood there with the loose snow blowing around him, looking back at the Firehawk like some forgotten demon on this lost world. The Terriadon's grave before him.
He didn't know what they hoped to find but it was the mission they'd been given and they'd find what they would. If nothing then at least that knowledge alone. That the ship was truly lost and everything they had was what they had.
And yet still some part of him thought it would be the auxiliary generator room, the hull and walls sheered off. The dead still piled on the floor and around the scaffold. Somehow their torn bodies not lost to the fire or the impact or any of it. Still lying there inexplicably the body of the dead girl with the side of her head a ruin, her one remaining eye blinking as she looked up at him and reached out with that amputated arm.
It couldn't be. She and the others were gone and her hand all that remained of what she had been. All of life so quickly reduced. This once a child and then a girl who had perhaps seen many things. People and planets and life. She had laughed and learned and grown and now in minutes all of that erased as if she had never been. And how vastly small in that were they all.
He shook his head and went to stand by the starfighter and looked off and saw the convoy coming toward him. Small and flashing in the sun. The helmet could enhance it but he didn't and instead watched them move up toward him as small and far as they were. Flipping over once to connect with the ship and check the scan and finding it clear as it always was clear and then watching again as they came on.
The drill would reach the ship in minutes. A thing meant for boring far deeper and through much more than just the packed snow. There were cables and a winch and they would go down, two or three of them, and the others at the top, and they'd find what it was that lay below. The drill able to cut through the hull if there was any left. Grinding a hole there in the metal so that they could step into whatever hell had fallen out of the sky and find in it what the living had left behind. Picking through it with their headlamps like some thieves in the night come to take from those who no longer needed anything and had died still clutching what they had and perhaps in it all a perverse desire to find out how they themselves would die and what they would look like to the thieves who found them.
But as he watched the convoy plowing closer and the mechs treading in the heavy snow he didn't think they were all that different here on this planet and he put a hand on that matte black hull of the starfighter as if to remind himself that here in this humming ship was a waiting power that could rip him out of all of it and throw the stars into long lines as it tore past the speed of light itself and in that eternally a sense of freedom waiting just on the fringes, even as they both sat here on the sheet of ice.
3
They went down in the tw
isting dark with the cables stretching above them and the bored ice all around and the slight vibration of the crane's winch as it lowered them. The lights from their three headlamps bouncing off the bluewhite ice and flashing over their visors. Spread out equal distance from one another so there was no chance the lines would tangle and dropping slowly toward where the bit had punched through the hull of the buried destroyer.
Colson watched them both as he slowly worked his boots down along the wall. Beside him to the right Destrie Shy'lkn, fierce and nimble and with blue tattoos tracing back from the corners of her eyes like wings sweeping back across her temples, her shaved head. All covered now but the smallest flash of blue if she raised her visor. On the other side a man nearly her opposite, six and a half feet tall and twice Colson's weight. His shoulders and arms and chest a web of muscle so that he could barely fit into the cockpit of the Firehawk. His heavy beard pressed into his helmet and hiding a perpetual scowl. He'd introduced himself as Grange and given no other name or told them if that was his real name or some nickname and Colson damn well hadn't asked.
Hawks Four and Five. Kiena and Aimes still in the mechs at the top and the others watching their descent on the screens inside the troop carrier. Another, Harrick Brandrea, sitting in the Firehawk's cockpit to watch the scans. Harrick looked the least like a pilot out of all of them, thin and quiet and never found in the squad gym with the rest. But there was something ruthless deep in him that Colson could feel and he'd never made a single mistake, no matter the task he was given. Efficient and productive and always giving off the sense that he knew everything they were going to do long before they did it and was four steps ahead, if not more. Perhaps just letting them see those four steps because he chose to.
If anything came out of FTL, he'd see it.
“Ten meters,” Shy'lkn said.
“Anything inside?” Colson had run the scan himself but wanted confirmation.
The Dead Ship: Episode Three (Firehawk Squadron Book 3) Page 1