Perdition by Scott McKay

Author:Scott McKay [McKay, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-04-12T22:00:00+00:00

NINE

Barley Point, Tenthmonth Fourteenth, 1843rd Year Supernal

It was a little before dawn, and an exhausted Sebastian straggled to the front door of his new Barley Point home. Of course, he didn’t feel like he ought to call it that, since he’d spent scant little time there since buying the place a few days earlier. Most of his waking moments, and even his sleeping moments, had been spent at his command hut at the military base a mile or so north of this tree-lined neighborhood a few blocks from the river Tweade. Cross had planned on using the house as the primary office of the new Ardenian Air Force, which had been a misjudgement.

It’s like that old saying goes, he thought. Everybody has a plan until the fighting starts.

Sebastian’s plan was to catch a few winks in his own bed, then clean himself up and make a trip down to Fort Stuart by noon in order to have a final conversation with Latham about the air base and what it would look like. Sebastian knew they’d be getting a lot more airships than just the two they had, so the base would need to be large enough to accommodate them. That meant hangars upon hangars for the giant vehicles, and likely several more buildings to house the coming fleet of airfighters he was eventually going to bring on.

But what he needed was a bare minimum of three hours of shuteye, because he was groggy and couldn’t think straight anymore.

He was also getting a little depressed that he was climbing into bed alone, as that was something Sebastian hadn’t experienced much of in his previous life as a civilian airline CEO. It appeared that military life and a sex life weren’t as compatible as he’d hoped.

Maybe if the war stabilized some, he’d be able to have a go at the Barley Point social scene. Such as that was.

Sebastian scolded himself for letting his mind stray and knew that his lack of focus was the product of exhaustion. He stomped up the stairs to the master bedroom, noted the spartan furnishings, made a mental work order to get the place dressed up a bit when he had time, stripped down to his union suit, and then finally, after all of that, crashed onto the mattress. He was barely able to insert himself under the covers before sleep took him.

But after what seemed like no time at all, Sebastian awoke to the sound of someone pounding on the front door. He leapt out of bed, threw on a bathrobe and stuck his feet into a pair of boots, and hustled downstairs to answer the door. A sharp-looking fortyish man in a gray wool suit with a black waistcoat and a top hat was on the landing.

“Can I help you?” Sebastian asked. He noted that it was well past dawn. At least I got my three hours of sleep, he thought, before whatever emergency this is turned up.

“Major Cross, I take it?” asked the man.

“In the flesh, though not in my usual resplendent attire,” Sebastian cracked.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.