Assassins flight a sci f.., p.1
Assassin's Flight: A Sci-Fi Assassin Thriller, page 1
ASSASSIN'S FLIGHT
A STAR NATION IN PERIL
BOOK 2
SKYLER RAMIREZ
Copyright © 2025 by House of Valencia Inc. DBA Persephone Entertainment Inc.
All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
eBook ISBN: 978-1-964457-08-6
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-964457-34-5
Printed in the United States of America
Published by Persephone Entertainment Inc.
Texas, USA
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CONTENTS
Prologue
I. On the Run
1. Burn Notice
2. Hunter and Hunted
3. Explosive Decompression
4. Garage Band Dropout
5. Sir Reginald
6. I Yield
7. A Friend
8. The Chase
9. Native World
10. Collateral Damage
11. Pirates
12. Numb
13. An Unlikely Partnership
II. Okala
14. Target Acquired
15. A Game of Dukes
16. On the Trail
17. A Decent Man
18. A New Wrinkle
19. Trust
20. Tomcats
21. A Difficult Foe
22. The Noodle Shop
23. The Day That Changed Everything
III. The Plan
24. The Engineer
25. The Hacker
26. The Honey Trap
27. Slobbering Fool
28. The Muscle
29. The Crew
30. Clinton
31. The Doctor
32. The Acrobat
33. The Inside Man
34. The Bar Fight
35. Another Date
IV. Trouble
36. A Narrow Escape
37. Fight-or-Flight
38. Stomach Issues
39. Plates in the Air
40. NSX Campus
41. Second Thoughts
42. The Bathroom
43. Reconciliation
44. A New Job
45. Plans Within Plans
46. This Mission Must Not Fail
V. The Heist
47. The Day Of
48. Little Sister
49. The Barracks
50. Overwatch
51. Spotted
52. The New Guy
53. An Invitation to the Party
54. The Mess
55. Tight Spaces
56. The Waiting Game
57. Cold Comfort
58. An Awkward Encounter
59. Labor Unbefitting His Station
60. Unwanted Reunion
61. The Bomb
62. More Waiting
63. Delayed Gratification
64. The Next Phase
65. The Hack
66. Murphy’s Law
67. Discovery
68. Help!
69. Bad Timing
70. The Hammer
71. Overwatch Redux
72. Leap of Faith
73. Angels
74. Flight
75. Fighter
76. Taking the Shot
77. Rally Point
78. Free Fall
79. Money
80. Garbage
81. A Familiar Face
VI. Betrayal
82. Debrief
83. Sneak Attack
84. Watching From a Distance
85. Remorse and Reckoning
VII. Rescue
86. Mop-Haired Idiot
87. Ride of Their Lives
88. Insanity
89. Whiplash
90. The Devil Herself
91. Separated
92. Flummoxed
93. First Kills
94. The King’s Cross
95. Carnage
96. Traffic Stop
97. It’s Only Business
98. Dominica
99. Crazy Pilot
VIII. A Warrior's Ending
100. The Crew Reunited
101. Of Kings and Princesses
102. Epilogue – Stick
Books by Skyler Ramirez
About the Author
PROLOGUE
The three agents fanned out across the rooftop, their pistols pointed at Heather. Her own weapon was somewhere down on the street, ten stories below. Behind her, the city lights twinkled against the chill night air, and the red and blue flashing lights of emergency vehicles reflected against the façades of nearby buildings.
She’d done her best to convince them—to sway them to her way of thinking. She’d given them all the proof she’d gathered, but it hadn’t been enough. They weren’t satisfied, especially the agent on the right, Dominica Reyes. She’d always hated Heather, and the feeling had long been mutual.
Then, amidst cries of surprise and horror, Dominica turned her gun on her two companions, dropping them where they stood. Heather could only watch, stunned into inaction, as the woman smiled, turning the weapon back on her.
"I've waited a long time for this, Kilgore," Dominica said, still grinning as she pulled the trigger.
In that moment, Heather Kilgore knew she was going to die. Her only hope, as the bullet knocked her backward off the ten-story roof, was that she’d maybe done enough to stop the deaths of so many others.
The guilty would die so that the innocent might live.
PART ONE
ON THE RUN
CHAPTER 1
BURN NOTICE
EIGHT WEEKS EARLIER
Heather Kilgore stared at the blank viewscreen after watching the message that ended her life. She fought to control her breathing and the wave of rage building inside her chest. Her late mentor, Tabitha Lowry, had often chided her for her tendency to lose her temper, and this was no time to—
She slammed her fist into the console, part of her dismayed at her sudden loss of control, but her anger grew as she saw a single crack form on the screen. Again and again, she punched that same spot, hot tears rushing to her eyes as she struck the console until her hand ached and the viewscreen became little more than a spiderweb pattern of cracks.
With one last wave of anger, hatred, and rage, she slammed both fists down, screaming an invective at the top of her lungs, though there was no one else on the little ship to hear. She screamed it and others until her throat started to hurt, and then she fell back into the thinly padded pilot’s chair, weeping. The fight went abruptly out of her, leaving nothing but a shell of loss behind.
Heather’s life was over. The message she’d just watched had made that clear. Sir Reginald Weathersby—known to most Prometheans as a low-level advisor to King Charles but known to only a few as the head of the Order of the King’s Cross—had just proclaimed her death sentence.
Not that it surprised her, despite her theatrics in the skiff’s cockpit. She hadn’t really expected Sir Reginald to believe her without question, but she’d hoped that the proof she’d collected from Duke Fuller of Serravo would be enough to sway him to consider the truth: that the duke and the former Koratan president had been conspiring with an interstellar weapons manufacture, NSX Arms, to start a costly war between Prometheus and Koratas. And that they’d been using King Charles’s vulnerability and fractured mental state since Crown Prince Gerald’s terminal cancer diagnosis to make the monarch a willing pawn in their war profiteering.
Unfortunately, based on the terse nature of his message, Sir Reginald wasn’t even going to consider that his lord and master, the King, was not in his right mind. Because Reginald Weathersby was nothing if not unfailingly loyal to the Crown.
“Come back to headquarters immediately, Agent Kilgore,” his message had relayed, the words issuing forth from behind his typical stern expression that seemed to carry more solemnity than usual. “Come home, and I promise you will get a fair hearing.”
Heather knew what those words meant. She had disobeyed orders. When sent to Koratas to kill the wife and daughter of their enemy’s president, she had instead killed President Francisco Ignacio Juarez himself, sparing his family. She hadn’t completed her mission. She’d gone off book.
To Sir Reginald, that was a cardinal sin. It didn’t matter that she had her reasons for doing so. It didn’t make a difference that she had proof that the King had been manipulated into ordering those assassinations by his cousin, Duke Fuller, all with the aim of giving President Ignacio Juarez a reason to declare war against Prometheus. It didn’t matter that, had Heather killed the Koratan first lady and her daughter as ordered, the war that would have resulted between the two Fringe superpowers would likely have killed billions. None of that mattered.
She’d gone against the Order, and the Order didn’t forgive and forget. Her ‘fair hearing’ would be a bullet to the back of her head or a knife across her t
Heather screamed again, pounding at the console until a chunk of the cracked screen broke free and sliced the meaty part of her palm. The pain stopped her, like flipping a switch in her brain, bringing her back to herself. She sat there in the pilot’s seat, heaving slow breaths to calm her racing heart, feeling the blood rush to her face again, but in embarrassment instead of rage. Her father hadn’t raised her this way, nor had the Order.
But did that matter now? Both of her families were gone: one dead to her, and the other declaring her dead to them.
The burn notice on her had probably gone out from King’s Cross headquarters before Sir Reginald had even sent his message. They’d be hunting her now, not waiting for her to come to them. The Order didn’t take chances; they covered every angle. Heather now represented a loose end they needed to tie up. Because she hadn’t just disobeyed her orders, she’d threatened a duke of the Realm, and she had information in her possession that would be catastrophically embarrassing to the Crown if it ever saw the light of day.
Such a risk out in the wild would be unacceptable to Sir Reginald. Heather only wondered which of her friends—colleagues, really—he would send to remove that risk.
CHAPTER 2
HUNTER AND HUNTED
Heather had parked her little stolen skiff around a small rocky planet in a system designated only by a series of letters and numbers. So far as she knew, she was the only human within a dozen light years. Unfortunately, being isolated like this wouldn’t save her from what was coming. The Order would eventually trace her here, probably before she ran out of food, water, and fuel for the reactor. Though she’d disabled the ship’s transponder and trackers after she’d stolen it off Serravo, they would still find her. Once the Order started hunting someone, they never failed to take their target down. She’d been on the other side of that equation enough times to know.
If she was going to buy herself time, then she had to keep moving. She had to keep one step ahead of them. But where would she go?
The first thing she did after her tirade in the cockpit was to force herself to eat something. Her body was still trembling from her outburst, and she knew that eating a meal—as little appetite as she had right then—would help her recover enough of her mental faculties to approach the problem fresh. As she heated the meal pack and then sat down at the small galley table, she tried very hard not to think about the elite cadre of assassins who now wanted her dead. She tried very hard not to think about anything, in fact, focusing all her mental energy on simply breathing, eating, and being.
It was a trick the Order’s training officers had taught her, but it wasn’t unique to the King’s Cross. Mindfulness had been preached as a vital tool by human psychologists probably from before mankind ever left Earth. Heather had never been much good at it, but she had to admit that focusing on the here and now allowed her to stave off the panic of what came next… at least for a few minutes.
Meal over and feeling at least partially human once again, she bandaged her wounded hand. Then she changed out of her blood-spotted shipsuit into a simple black skinsuit, brushing out her auburn hair and examining her puffy eyes in the mirror with a sort of clinical detachment. After a few minutes of that, she returned, reluctantly, to the cockpit, sitting at the copilot’s station and its undamaged console and using it to examine the star charts.
The uninhabited system she was in now was on its way to nowhere; it didn’t even sit on any commonly used trade routes. And Heather, who knew all about secret military, pirate, and smuggler routes through this sector of the Fringe, didn’t believe any of those used this system as a waypoint either. It was too far out of the way; even pirates needed to worry about fuel.
With what was left in the skiff’s reserves, she could get to three different inhabited systems, only one of which was part of the Federated Systems of Prometheus. Not that it really mattered. The Order would ignore borders in their pursuit of her. But stepping foot on a Promethean planet or station would hasten her capture; every AI security and watchdog system in the Federation would have already received secret coded instructions to watch for her and alert the King’s Cross immediately to any sightings. They would do the same with bordering systems and star nations as well, but the process would be slower.
Which left her, really, with two options. One was the Carmine system, a small, independent, single-planet polity with strong trade ties to both Prometheus and Koratas. It sat to the galactic east of the Harper Line, the three adjacent systems that bordered both Fringe superpowers and were, in fact, claimed by both as well.
The other was the Malarcha system, which purportedly had something approaching a government of its own but was widely known as a lawless place without any habitable planets. Instead, its citizens eked out their existence aboard several orbital and deep space stations supporting a lively asteroid mining industry. It sat along the eastern border of the Koratan Confederacy, almost directly to the galactic north from Heather’s current position.
Malarcha was the obvious choice. She could probably sell the stolen skiff there—no registration or ownership papers needed—and then steal another ship to throw off pursuit. She might even be able to hide on one of the hundreds of asteroids in the system, using one of her many fake identities to take a mining job and disappear in the crowds.
But that, she knew, was foolishness. The Order would eventually find her.
Still, Malarcha was an attractive option except for one thing. She focused the console’s chart again on the Carmine system. The system itself was a terrible choice—far too cozy with Promethean interests—but its location to the east, close to the border between the Fringe and the Outer Rim, made her linger on it. From Carmine, she could head toward the Jefferson Republic, where NSX Arms made its headquarters.
She sat back, putting both hands to her scalp and blowing out hard through pursed lips. “Do I dare?” she asked the empty cockpit out loud. “Should I dare?”
It was a variation of a question she’d asked herself dozens of times in the last week since fleeing Serravo with evidence of Duke Fuller’s collaboration with NSX Arms. When she’d confronted Fuller in his dining chamber, she’d told the duke plainly that she was going after the weapons manufacturer. At the time, it had felt like the right thing to say to force his cooperation—he’d been more afraid of NSX than he’d been of her. But she’d also said it with real intent. She wanted to go after the company; she needed to do it. Otherwise, they would keep trying over and over again to start the war that Heather had already stopped twice in just the last three months, first at Hudson and again on Koratas.
Could she let them do that? No. Someone needed to stop them.
Of course, when she’d promised Fuller that she’d take the fight to NSX, she was vainly hoping that Sir Reginald and the Order would join her or at least support her in her quest. She’d known, deep down, that they might not—they’d already been hunting her for her violation of orders on Koratas—but she hadn’t even allowed herself to contemplate going after the Inner Rim interstellar corporation on her own.
