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

Kiena pushed the scout mech hard over the snowswept plain, the view of Riccana's dead surface jolting sickly in her helmet, the scream of the servomotors as the metal skeleton tore through the ice with each step and then wrenched itself free like some outcast god furiously trying to outrun its fate in this cursed world that sought only to pull it down and devour. The teeth of the planet itself. That ice shell and below the unstable and violent heart of fire.

The wind roaring across the plains ripped through the mech's mics. Here in the metal shell, everything was enclosed. A mech built for war, even a small scout mech just twice the size of its pilot, had no need for an open hatch or even a face shield. Everything was fed in by sensors, splashed back out across her helmet's visor.

But the mech was still humanoid. At this size, it was essentially a metal exoskeleton in its headlong flight, her legs and arms actually moving within the appendages. In the true war mechs, hulking behemoths a dozen meters tall, the pilot did move, but she was contained within a stable compartment – a casket, they often called it – in the mech's chest.

Those mechs, they didn't have here.

Kiena turned her head, looking back over her shoulder without slowing. All in front of her was empty for another five hundred meters, until a spire of black stone thrust its way through the snow's crust. A single dark finger grasping from the grave. Behind her, she could see the long spine of the mountains rising into the thin clouds. The darkness falling all around them as the planet spun, but the moons rising bright and washing this twilight hemisphere in silver.

High above her and wheeling in the sky, the skelt with its light cannons still spinning from its last attack run. Projectile cannons mounted for this run, hammering out their thunder as the 25mm shells buried themselves in sprays of snow and ice.

“Four,” she gasped into the comm. “Aimes, you alive?”