The Dead Ship: Episode Two (Firehawk Squadron Book 2) by Jonathan Schlosser

Author:Jonathan Schlosser [Schlosser, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Published: 2017-03-29T06:00:00+00:00

6

Outside the wind shrieking along the face of the wall, a torrent whipping against this glass and steel structure like it wanted to tear it to pieces. Some abomination here on the surface of the wild, a place Man was never intended to thrive. The storm coming down on them in fury and without warning, as they often fell on this wasteland of a planet. Hail pelting them from above and snow swirling in the wind and everything so cold it would turn your bones to ice and they could find you in a thousand years just as you were today, but you'd snap apart in their hands like brittle glass.

The man spoke softly and yet she could hear every word he said over the storm. Something in his voice that commanded the room. Perhaps the very softness of it. Perhaps something else entirely, this man so sure of his station and secure in that knowledge.

She'd come here expecting Garrington and his anger and she'd seen it all before. But this was something else entirely. He never raised his voice and not a hint of anger in it. As if the orders they'd ignored meant as little to him as rank. A man perhaps for whom rules also did not apply. Somehow outside of the entire system that most lived within their entire lives, looking down on that system and picking and choosing what parts of it he wanted to use to his own ends.

“What did she say to you?” he asked Colson. He'd asked it before and Colson had told him every step of his run through the dead ship at least twice, but he circled back to it again. As if hoping there was something else there and digging for it.

“Nothing,” Colson said. “Just that I wasn't supposed to be there. That no one was.”

“And then she shot herself.”

“Yes.”

“You didn't shoot her?”

Colson glared. “I told you what happened. You think I'm a liar, you check the gun. The last time I fired it was on the range two days before that ship.”

The man: “I believe you.”

“Then quit asking.”

He was silent for a moment. He'd taken out his own comm unit during the interview and was writing something on it. Taking notes, Kiena thought. Or sending information to someone else, though how he could possibly transmit off world, she had no idea. So likely taking notes he could later beam from his ship or relay in person or whatever the hell he decided to do with them.

“You'll have to forgive me,” he said, looking up. Not sounding like he meant it at all. “But you're the only person who has been inside one.”

“One?” Kiena said. The wind howling and throwing itself against the windows. “There's been more than one?”

He nodded, looking back at the comm. “This is the third one in the last standard year. All on the outskirts. No one came close to the other two. The second was ballistic toward a city and an orbital defense station blew it to pieces before it hit atmosphere.

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