The Dead Ship (Firehawk Squadron Book 1) by Schlosser Jonathan

Author:Schlosser, Jonathan [Schlosser, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2017-03-05T16:00:00+00:00

5

The doors opened and the room was heaped with the dead. They were piled against the walls and stacked to the center of the room, one over the other, some face down and others up and others so torn apart he couldn't tell which way they'd faced or what they'd been. Officers and enlisted, soldiers and sailors and pilots, men and women. Now soaking in blood and carnage and all one and the same in that death, in that endless brutality.

He stood looking and the smell of the room everywhere, even through the helmet filter. Unable to step inside the door as it hung open on the hydraulic lifts, waiting for him to move. In the center of the room the twin auxiliary generators standing tall and surrounded in scaffolding and blinking blue and red lights. Humming softly to themselves as though they were not some alloy mausoleum in these piled dead.

One step in. The hiss of the door closing behind him. Kiena speaking in his helmet again, this time unable to hear her.

It wasn't everyone. It couldn't be. The room wasn't that large. But it was half the crew maybe, slaughtered here. Or brought here, more accurately. Slaughtered all over the ship. Some of the bodies burned and faceless from the heavy lasers or the fires that raged through the ship in their wake. Here a man cut to ribbons by shrapnel, his skin ragged and hanging. Near him a woman sliced nearly in half by something he did not know what. Perhaps a door malfunctioning and falling, perhaps a piece of the hull thrown inward by an explosion on the ship's surface. Or perhaps she'd been on the command bridge when it was shattered from one tower to the next, the whole glass ring blown to pieces.

But no, he thought as he took another slow step into the room. That couldn't be it. Because those sailors were gone. Wind a raging torrent as the ring shattered, even with the doors coming down to stop it from venting. Men and women sucked silent and screaming into space as each bridge was destroyed. Perhaps someone there had been cut in half like that, as well, but both pieces were now swirling in the dark in some other system, lightyears away where this ship had begun her long death.

“Nine. Dammit it, Nine.” Kiena again. “Are you there?”

He opened his mouth. Closed it again. Finally said: “I'm here.”

She knew him far too well and there was instantly an edge in her voice. “What is it?”

“They're dead, Kiena.” He felt how feeble it sounded. She knew they were dead. They both knew it was a dead ship when he landed on it.

They just hadn't known it was like this.

He looked around and the bodies began to fade into one another. In any other place, a man with his throat ripped out a horror. Here, a mercy. Something meek and not nearly as bad as it could have been. Not when others looked like

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