Hybrid (Tales of the Acheron Book 2)

by Rick Partlow

  He could see her begin to lunge forward to close the hatch behind them, but before she could, something flew past her, through the pod’s hatch, to impact on the padded curve of the acceleration couch that ran the circumference of the capsule. Ash jumped, reaching for his pistol again, sure it was the creature coming in after them, but instead he saw immediately that it was Singh. Ash wasn’t sure if he’d jumped through the hatch or been thrown, but he seemed unconscious and maybe dead and his weapon was somewhere back in the service bay.

  The hatch slammed shut with a powerful yank of Fontenot’s hand and then Ash felt a sharp jolt as the explosive bolts blew and kicked them out the side of the cruiser into space.

  “Strap in,” Fontenot told him, following her own orders over on the other side of the pod.

  Trying to ignore the red-hot knives in his back, Ash did as he was told and slipped into one of the six sets of restraint harnesses, cinching them down tight. The pod’s main rockets would be firing in seconds to take them down through the moon’s atmosphere, and when they did, it wasn’t going to be a pleasant ride.

  “What about him?” Ash wondered, nodding at Singh’s insensate, motionless form, still slumped against the far bulkhead.

  “The hell with him,” Fontenot snapped. “If he lives through this,” she waved a hand around them demonstratively, “we’ll worry about him then.”

  ***

  Del Grant was trying very hard to remind himself that he was a La Sombra pilot used to danger, trying very hard not to scream and piss himself, but it seemed like a losing battle. The minute he’d seen that…Jesus, that thing, whatever the hell it is…he’d thrown down his gun and ran for the shuttle’s cockpit, forgetting even to close the airlock until he’d reached the cockpit. He’d abandoned anyone else who might have been alive on that old piece of Space Fleet junk and yanked his bird off the service lock without bothering to retract the docking umbilical.

  The shuttle’s utility lock was ruined but he didn’t give a shit; he didn’t have a ship to dock with, anyway. They’d blown up the Gitano and his only hope was to get down to that moon. They’d said it was habitable, or some small part of it was, barely, and hell, anything was better than staying on that ship.

  He felt his breathing slowly creeping back to normal the farther he got from it, felt his heart rate coming down as he realized that he’d actually lived through it. Everyone else had died, but Del Grant was still alive, by God! Now he just had to come up with a plan to stay that way. Getting back to La Hondonada, that was going to be harder, but staying alive was the first step. He thought he’d spotted a place down there on the southern continent where there could be a settlement of some kind, and that’s where he was going to head.

  Taking the shuttle down through the atmosphere was a comforting routine, years of training and experience washing away the fear and panic and sheer awe-struck disbelief. He always heard George’s voice when he got scared. George Klein had been flying for the cartel for decades and he’d become Jordi Abdullah’s informal flight instructor for new pilots. He’d had to clean the old man’s house and chauffeur him around town and basically be his servant for nearly three months before George had agreed to teach him how to fly.

  The old man would drone on and on in the cockpit, sitting beside you in the trainer’s seat, his voice low and monotone, and you had to strain to hear what he was saying. But being still and quiet made you calm, made you focus on his words and on what you were doing, like hypnosis.

  “Don’t worry about the ship getting blown up,” he imagined George intoning, “don’t worry about the monster killing everyone, just concentrate on flying the bird.”

  The swollen clouds finally parted a thousand meters or so above the icy, glacial plains and he could see the valley ahead, as green as anything got on this world, glowing gently in the morning light. At the foot of a mountain pass, it was free of the pack ice that covered so much of the moon, and he’d bet from what he’d seen on other planets that it was fed by underground hot springs or maybe even an underground river. He’d noticed it while they were orbiting the moon, noticed the anomalous thermal readings and thought for sure there had to be a human settlement down there.

  The landing was textbook, even though he’d never read one; George would have been proud. He cut the belly jets the second the treads kissed the ground and the landing gear settled in without a single bounce. George hated pilots that bounced the gear.

  Del had heard that corporate types back in the Core colonies let their computers land the birds for them, let them fly them too, most of the time. He didn’t know how they could even call themselves pilots; they were just along for the ride. He flew with his hands and his eyes, not even using implant jacks. He was a real pilot.

  He powered back his acceleration couch and unstrapped, flexing his knees experimentally as he stood; the gravity here was on the light side, maybe half standard. Now that he was down, he had decisions to make. Should he go to the settlement and ask for help, hat in hand, or should he try bluffing them? The shuttle had a Gatling laser turret and not much else in the way of armament, but maybe he could get them to believe he had air-to-ground nukes? Then he could see if they had a way to get a message out of the system and see if there was any way at all he could get home.

  Del was still turning the idea over in his mind when he stepped out of the cockpit and jerked to a halt like a column of stone, Lot’s wife regarding Sodom. Black eyes froze him in place, set in a mask of featureless black, still as a statue. Then the mask split in two amid rows of black, sickled-shaped teeth and a rush of hot, rancid breath and he couldn’t think, couldn’t move, couldn’t even control the whimper that escaped his throat involuntarily.

  He didn’t see the thing’s arm move, just felt the sledgehammer-blow across his chest and then he was flying across the compartment and slamming into the bulkhead. He heard the bones snapping in his shoulder and back but the pain washed over his whole body, refusing to be localized. He slid to the deck, unable to move, his head propped up by the bulkhead. His eyes swam in and out of focus and he caught a glimpse of white bone protruding from his chest. He should have felt afraid, should have felt sick, but before he could process the data, that image blurred away and he saw the creature again.

  It was by the utility lock, clawing at something on the bulkhead. Through the fog of agony and confusion that had settled over him, Del could only stare at the thing, uncomprehending. Then he heard a grinding hiss and felt a rush of chill wind, and some small part of his mind that was still capable of rational thought realized that the creature had managed to open the utility airlock. It paused and looked back at him, tilting that featureless face to the side, and there was something so very familiar about the motion, something not at all inhuman.

  The last thing that Del Grant saw before blood loss and shock claimed him was the creature stepping out of the airlock and into the light of day.

  Chapter Nine

  “Huh,” Sandi grunted, her voice muffled by the heavy scarf over her face. She leaned close to Kan-Ten and shouted over the thunderous wind gusts playing across the snow-covered hills. “Doesn’t look as bad as I thought.”

  “Is it flyable, then?” The Tahni was almost unrecognizable under layers of cold-weather gear and poorly-fitting goggles; his people preferred a warmer climate.

  Well, so do I, usually.

  She had been able to manage with goggles, a scarf and a hooded jacket with internal heating circuits, but each gust of wind seemed to blast right through any gap in her clothing and pierce to her core. She’d thought about putting on a vacuum suit, but it would have been hard to get a good look at the underside of the ship with a helmet on.

  “In space, sure,” she answered Kan-Ten’s question. “In the atmosphere…” She sighed heavily. “Not so much. The vectored thrust nozzles are pretty much fucked.”

  You could see it with the naked eye, the charred, cracked metal, pieces broken and lost to the storm on their way down. It was her fault,
but it wasn’t as if they’d had a choice. She’d overheated the belly jets on their wild descent and between the frigid cold and the overload of pressure, all four had ruptured. They’d been damn lucky that the jets had lasted long enough to get the Acheron most of the way to the ground first.

  Most of the way. The cutter had dropped like a stone from a distance of three or four meters, and one of the landing treads was buried in its suspension. It probably wouldn’t retract even if they could have taken off. If she was being honest with herself, when she’d been stunned into brief unconsciousness by the impact, she hadn’t expected to wake up again.

  “Can we fix it?” It was a reasonable question, and she knew that she was not the best at reading Tahni intonations, but she could have sworn she heard an almost-human skepticism in Kan-Ten’s voice.

  Packed snow crunched under her boots as she walked around, getting another view of the portside jets. The ship was in a meter-deep crater that the landing thrusters had burned through the snow, but the pack beneath that was still just as solid and still not down to the soil below.

  “Theoretically. We have a small fabricator in the hold, and enough raw material to turn out new nozzles.” It was one of the things they’d wasted Captain Fox’s money on, and she would have probably forgotten it was there if she hadn’t spent most of an otherwise-boring day in T-space arguing with Ash about whether it was worth the space it took up.

  She ran a quick calculation in her head, staring at the ruined vectored thrust jets.

  “It’s going to take days. Maybe two or three. At least five or six production runs for each assembly, times four. And that’s not counting sleep, which I’ll need eventually.”

  “Could I not help?” Kan-Ten wondered.

  “Sure,” she said easily. “You start studying up on avionics and stress tolerances and get back to me when you’re done. Shouldn’t take more than a month or so.”

  “I sense you’re not being serious.”

  “Then you’re better at reading humans than I am at reading Tahni.” She felt a gust of frigid air find a new and even more uncomfortable gap in her jacket and she clutched her arms to herself, shivering. The hills around them were uninterrupted rolling mounds of pure-white snow gleaming in the morning light, and the sky was a brilliant blue. She hoped to hell no major storms rolled in, because that would make this whole procedure a million times harder.

  “I’m going to go get started programming the fabricator,” she told Kan-Ten, turning and stepping back onto the belly ramp. “You keep trying to contact Ash and Korri.”

  “There is no sign of the cruiser in orbit,” Kan-Ten pointed out. “Do you believe they made it off?”

  “Yes,” she said without hesitation, almost stepping on his last words. She stopped on the ramp and turned back to face him as he was stepping up behind her. She yanked off her goggles despite the bitter cold and fixed him with a hard glare. “Yes, I do believe it, and until I find out different, I’m going to go on the assumption that they did. And so are you.”

  She stamped back up the ramp, barely hearing his reply.

  “Aye, ma’am.”

  ***

  Light streamed through the single porthole in the life pod’s hatch; Ash tried to raise his head up from the padded acceleration couch to get a look outside, but he tasted blood in his mouth and reconsidered. Every square centimeter of his body hurt, starting with the wound in his back and spreading out from there, and movement seemed like a bad idea.

  He decided that the escape capsule had landed askew, tilted maybe thirty or forty degrees to starboard and tilting him backwards at that same angle, which made raising himself up even harder and staying in place an even more comfortable proposition. Fontenot was hanging canted off to her left in her harness, looking decidedly less comfortable and not very happy about it, while Singh was bruised and bleeding and slumped against the hatch, but at least he was unconscious so he wasn’t complaining about it.

  “Are you okay?” Fontenot asked him.

  Without waiting for his reply, she yanked at the quick release of her restraints and grabbed at the straps to keep herself from falling off to the side when they cut her loose. The harness brought her up short and she lowered herself to the seat next to Ash. He felt the life pod shift with her movement and he had a moment’s panic that they were about to tumble off a cliff, but it settled back down into a slowly diminishing rocking motion.

  “I’m great,” Ash sighed. “Let’s go on that ride again, Mommy.”

  Fontenot snorted with amusement, pulling his restraints free. He tried not to cry out as she maneuvered his arms out of the harness, then leaned him forward against her, checking his injury. He felt her yanking at something on his shoulder, jerking him painfully backward, and this time he grunted as agony shot through his back.

  “Jesus, Korri,” he said, trying to yell it but only managing a gasp.

  He was about to demand what she was doing, but then he saw her lowering the life support pack from his vacuum suit to the floor of the capsule, having disconnected it from his back. There was a hole the width of a stylus burned through it where it had covered his right shoulder, probably from the warhead of a rocket carbine.

  “You got lucky, Carpenter,” she told him, probing at the wound and eliciting another gasp. “The backpack took most of the hit. You’ve got a nasty burn where the plasma penetrated it, but it’s not deep, just painful.”

  “Yeah,” he moaned as she set him back against the seat. “I noticed.” Knowing the wound wasn’t serious, he began working his shoulder to loosen it up, gritting his teeth against the movement of the burned flesh.

  “Where the hell did we land, anyway?” he wanted to know. “How far are we from the thermal signature I saw?”

  “I tried to steer us close to it,” Fontenot said, gesturing contemptuously at the center console and the rudimentary joystick mounted there that was the only attitude control the pod had. “This thing ain’t exactly an assault shuttle, though. I think we’re somewhere within a few kilometers.” She shrugged. “We can get out, take a look around, see if we can see any sign of habitation.”

  “Yeah,” Ash agreed, forcing himself up and getting his feet underneath him, then pausing to get his breath back and compartmentalize the pain. “I’ll get right on that.” He motioned down at Singh. “Is he alive?”

  Fontenot lowered herself down beside the bounty hunter, rolling him over on his back and frisking him thoroughly before she bothered to check his vitals. She found a backup gun tucked into a pocket of his chest armor and tossed it up to Ash, who examined it carefully. It was a slugshooter, primitive and long-obsolete but no less deadly for that. He tucked it in a thigh pocket, then watched as she also produced a monomolecular-edged knife, a vibroshiv and a monowire whip, jamming the weapons into pockets of her own vacc suit.

  Finally satisfied that Singh was disarmed, she touched a control on her suit’s sleeve display and held her left hand over the bounty hunter’s neck, letting the medical diagnostics read his heart rate, respiration and body temperature. When the sleeve display blinked, she withdrew her hand and held the device up so she could read it.

  “He’s alive.” She sounded disappointed. “Pulse is strong, breathing is regular if a bit shallow. He probably has a serious concussion, so maybe there’s a brain bleed that’ll kill him.” She sniffed disdainfully. “If we wait that long.”

  Her right hand balled into a fist, and Ash lunged forward, extending a hand.

  “No, wait.”

  She scowled at him.

  “What, you suddenly have warm feelings for this piece of shit? He’s been trying to kill us for months now, in case the hard landing scrambled your brains.”

  “I know,” he insisted, tripping over his own thoughts as he tried to sort them out and put them into words. “It just…” He shook his head. “It feels wrong.”

  “And you’re all of a sudden Saint Ashton?” she demanded, her voice and expression incredulous. “You decide in the las
t month that you’re a pacifist or something? Hell, you killed the guy’s wife; finish off the family and put him out of his misery!”

  He winced at the words, knowing it was brutal truth. So why didn’t he want her to finish off Singh? They’d have to kill him eventually, or let him kill them. The bounty hunter wasn’t going to give up, not after his wife had died in the ship-to-ship fight with Ash; it had driven him over the edge, and the edge hadn’t been that far away to begin with.

  “I can’t explain it, Korri,” he admitted. “Maybe it feels like…” He shook his head helplessly, not liking the phrase but lacking anything more appropriate. “…bad karma.”

  Fontenot rolled her eyes, the bionic one following the motion of the natural one.

  “All right, all right.” She raised her hands in surrender. “But I’m not dragging him over the fucking snow while we look for this mythical settlement of yours. If he freezes to death, it wasn’t me.”

  She stood from the motionless form of the bounty hunter, spitting on the man’s back as she slapped the hatch control. The round mass of metal popped its seal with a hiss of escaping air and it wasn’t open a centimeter before Ash felt the knife-edged cold of the wind sweeping into the pod, making him wish he still had his helmet. It had burned up along with the Metaurus, and he felt a horrifying hangover fear from a career as a Fleet officer that someone was going to try to make him pay the government back for their billion-dollar cruiser.

  They’ll have to catch me first.

  Light flooded the inside of the pod through the open hatchway and he could see patches of deep blue sky above them, crowded on all sides by grey, dismal clouds. He grabbed the back of the acceleration couch and steadied himself against the rocking Fontenot had caused when she climbed out of the hatch. With the pendulum swing of the capsule, the blue skies and grey clouds wobbled downward with tantalizing hints of rugged, snow-capped peaks in the distance before hiding them again behind the edges of the hatchway.