Bluebird by Ciel Pierlot

Author:Ciel Pierlot
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857669674
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2022-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

INTERLUDE

The Others

Spirit X-74 and Thrush-Seven are not often called in for clean-up missions; but it does, on occasion, happen.

No matter how infallible the galaxy believes Windshadow to be, those in the field are still people, and still susceptible to error – a lesson X-74 has learned before. So occasionally a rookie breaks their cover, a vital piece of intel gets overlooked, a target taken out before an exit strategy has been secured. It’s rare, but it happens.

X-74 slits the last enemy’s throat with a golden knife that shatters as soon as the body hits the ground.

She grabs the man’s sleeve and pushes it back to reveal a bird tattoo on his wrist. Of course. What a pain. These Nightbirds are getting too close to Windshadow territory every year, even though it seems they’re trying to keep to Pyrite space.

Her blood-soaked boots squish when she walks back to where Thrush-Seven is hacking into a wall-mounted console, erasing all evidence of their presence here. They’d been dispatched to clean up the mess caused by a team of six. Of those six, none remain. X-74 steps over more corpses than just those of the enemy as she returns to her Handler’s side.

“There’s a scrub team on the way,” he tells her. A hard light screen hovers over his eye, the tiny reticule it displays moving about and contracting as it focuses on different aspects of the wall console’s projected holographic screen. His link connecting him to the console, to its system, to the netspace as a whole. “Five minutes out. I’m redirecting skifftrains around this part of the city so that our transport can get in without difficulty.” He sighs. “I really dislike clean-up work.”

“Why do you think we got sent out here, anyway?”

“Because we botched that assassination on Kanin,” he reluctantly admits. “And then there was the info retrieval job from our contact in the Praetor System…”

The Nightbirds have been forcing Pyrite’s hold to weaken in the Praetor System. Good for Ossuary. In theory. “Those birds ran circles around us and ended up stealing our supplies as well as Pyrite’s. Our eyes weren’t sharp enough to catch them. I remember.”

“Did you know that Pyrite bombed Dash Moon?”

“Seriously?”

“Fifty Kashrini settlements there. I imagine that Pyrite assumed one Nightbird spoils the bunch… or something like that.” Seven huffs. “It’s stupid, if you ask me. Pyrite doesn’t seem to realize that a solid third of their population is Kashrini. The Nightbirds are making them panic, but if they keep indiscriminately bombing port towns, they’re going to wipe out a large chunk of the workers that keep their gears running.”

“Spectacular for us, isn’t it?”

“Exactly.”

She stares down at her bloody boots. “And yet we still managed to fuck it up.”

Tensions are rising in the Praetor System now, and even though she knows the war has been shifting in that direction for some time, she can’t help but feel as though their failure weakened Ossuary control in the region, in the long run. This clean-up mission clearly indicates that their superiors believe the same.

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