Scout's Honour

  ***

  The trip back to the cockpit was a nightmare. There were small broken bodies lining the dim passages of the ship. Bullet holes, broken glass and swathes of blood smeared the hellish scene. Jayson pulled himself up to the cockpit passage, where he had left over twenty children as a last resort guard against access to the ship’s controls. They had been shoved aside, creating crude piles of corpses lining Jayson’s journey. He didn’t want to know what was inside the cockpit, but forced himself to walk the deathly procession. There was nowhere else to go.

  He saw the faces of Matt and Zoe in the children’s dead forms. The reminder of his indecision and ambivalence multiplied ten times over. He choked on the stench of death and battle, unable to escape it.

  Jayson was in no shape to help anyone. He was no leader, he’d done too little too late, and the battle had caught up with him. The marks of his mistakes stared back at him from their mangled positions on the floor, their silent accusations drowning him.

  Jayson approached the cockpit door. It was bent on its hinges, so he pushed it inward. There were two Fletcher assassins inside, dead and draped over the pilot and navigator chairs. He saw their throats had been slit open. He pushed them away to clear a space for him to sit.

  Julie was slumped in the copilot’s seat, still gripping the yoke with one hand. In the other she held a bloody length of copper wire.

  ‘Clever girl,’ said Jayson.

  Her breath came in ragged gasps and her body was a pulpy mess. Her fine blonde hair was matted with blood from a gaping hole in her skull. Jayson put his hand on hers and he kept his eyes locked on her face. A trickle of blood escaped from her mouth as she looked over to him.

  ‘I always wanted to fly,’ she smiled, and breathed her last gurgling breath.

  Jayson tilted his head back on the seat and stared at the ceiling. ‘Me too,’ he said. Tears rolled down his face.

  A small red warning light blinked at him from above. He wiped his face and checked the readout on the control console. There were more incoming signatures. Seven small blips closed on his position. Drones. Jayson made a weak attempt to dodge them, but they spread out around his ship and latched on like leeches. He felt his weight shift as they dragged the gravitational pull out from under him.

  A gigantic ship blasted from hypersonic speed down through the upper atmosphere. It dwarfed the Machaera. The drones were pulling him towards it. A fly caught in a trap. Jayson’s stomach fell. He had no fight left in him. He’d lost.

  Drones. He closed his eyes to keep them at bay for a moment longer. They were never far away. Who was controlling them? How much control did they really have?

  Someone was in charge of the assassins too. Some contemptuous, disgraceful excuse of a human being. Fletcher. Jayson wanted to meet him.

  He promised himself, that before he joined Julie and the other students in whatever afterlife awaited them, he would find a way to help the Academy. He would regain his honour.

  ***

  Note from the Author

  Wait, what? That’s it? Come on! What happens to Jayson? What’s that huge ship bearing down on him?

  Well you may remember from the preface I mentioned this story is a bridge between the novels. So here’s a special treat just for you: A sneak preview, Chapter 1 from the sequel to The Covert Academy, is over the page... enjoy!

  -Peter