Last Flight of the Acheron

by Rick Partlow

  I felt the first half-second of the six-g burn I’d initiated when something slammed into me like the fist of an angry god and everything went dark.

  Chapter Four

  It took me nearly a full minute to figure out that I wasn’t dead. The data feed from my ‘face jacks had gone out in a surge of incoherent static, and the feedback hadn’t quite knocked me unconscious, but it had been a lot like pulling a rubber band until it snapped, only I was the rubber band. I wanted to rub my eyes clear but my hand hit the visor of my helmet and I abruptly remembered what had happened.

  The helmet’s external lights popped on automatically and I saw that I was exactly where I had been, strapped into the pilot’s seat of the assault shuttle, but the cockpit displays had gone dead. I twisted around in my seat and looked back over my shoulder and I immediately saw why: about three meters aft of the cockpit, there was nothing left but ragged strips of torn metal and I was staring into the hard vacuum. Stars were streaking by just past the last row of ripped and shredded passenger seats, and then a brief flash of the battle still raging across the darkened face of Mars, and then more stars as what was left of the shuttle spun lazily along its new course.

  I tried to remember, tried to figure which direction the ship had been facing when I’d hit the drive to try to escape the debris from the Midway, but it wouldn’t come to me. All I could picture was the way the big cruiser had rippled with destruction, coming apart like a cheap firework. All I could think about was Mom, somewhere inside all of it, staying at her post, directing the fight and then going down with her ship like an ocean-going Captain of old, because how else would Mom die?

  Mom is dead. Mom’s dead…

  My gut cramped up and my breath caught in my throat and I felt like I was going to throw up despite the anti-nausea drugs the helmet had pumped into me. Mom couldn’t be dead. She could be a pain in the ass, a worthless excuse for a mother, but she couldn’t be dead…

  I shook my head violently, trying to shake my thoughts clear, and felt the ‘face jacks tugging at my temples.

  Shit. Forgot.

  I reached down to the pilot’s control console and yanked the jacks out of the dead connections there, letting them retract back to the external spools in my helmet. With the connection broken, the Heads-Up Display in my helmet flickered to life and I could see the readouts from the suit’s life support system and external sensors.

  The good news was, my suit was intact and I was uninjured. The bad news was, I had about two hours’ worth of on-board air. That could have been supplemented by an exterior EVA pack from the equipment locker, if it weren’t for the inconvenient fact that the equipment locker was gone, along with the rest of the rear half of the shuttle.

  I touched a control on my wrist to activate the helmet’s communications link.

  “Mayday, mayday,” I broadcast. “This is Assault One out of Deimos Base declaring an emergency. My shuttle has taken major structural damage and has no propulsion systems. I am stranded in the cockpit on an unknown heading with limited oxygen supply, and I need immediate assistance. Over.”

  I repeated the transmission, knowing I was probably wasting my time. Without the shuttle’s transmission antenna, my call was only going out short-range over the suit radio, and anyone around here would be too busy fighting the Tahni to help me out. By the time they got around to it…well, two hours wasn’t very long.

  Of course, there was always the possibility the Tahni might find me. I cursed aloud inside my helmet, realizing I hadn’t taken the time to grab a gun from the equipment locker when I’d suited up. I didn’t have any illusions that I could have done much with it, since the only time I’d ever fired one had been on the qualification range at flight school, but I didn’t want the Tahni to take me alive.

  I unstrapped from the pilot’s seat and swung out of it, keeping my right hand tangled up in the harness out of an unreasoning fear of being thrown free of the ship by its rotation, even though I knew that wasn’t how the physics worked. What was left of the ship wasn’t much protection, and I wouldn’t be much worse outside of it than in, but it was the only security blanket I had, and I wasn’t ready to let go of it.

  Remembering the one lesson we’d had in flight school about emergency procedures when adrift in space, I activated my suit’s beacon and saw the visible-light portion of it flashing green against the overhead of the cockpit. The more important half was the radio signal it was sending out, though neither was going to attract much attention with me hunkered inside the wreckage.

  You need to get outside, I thought at myself, trying to overcome the panic I was feeling every time I looked out at the eternal blackness passing by outside the shuttle. No one’s going to see your beacon through the damned hull.

  I pried my hand off the harness to the seat, then realized that the spin of the wreckage was turning the nose of the shuttle into “down” for me and I was going to have to actually climb up the fuselage of the shuttle to get out of it.

  “Are we sure this is a good idea?” I murmured aloud in the privacy of my helmet. But no other, better plans came to mind, and Mom had always told me that doing something was better than doing nothing, so I did it.

  I used the back of my acceleration couch as a platform, standing on it and stretching out to catch my balance on the first row of seats behind the cockpit. The centripetal force back towards the nose was minimal, but that somehow made me feel less stable instead of more. It was like rock-climbing, but rock-climbing on Deimos or Ceres, and in a vacuum. And blindfolded. I hadn’t heard of anyone doing that for recreation, but I was sure someone had tried it, because people are stupid.

  I nearly put a hand out on the ragged edge of the hull, then hesitated when I saw the razor-sharp surface I was about to touch. I winced and put a palm flat against the interior bulkhead, steadying myself as I got both feet beneath me on the back of the passengers’ seat. I stood there for a long moment, taking in and letting out several deep breaths, trying to get my heart-rate and respiration under control. You didn’t want to be hyperventilating inside a space suit, particularly not when you had less than two hours of air left.

  The hull vibrated against my palm, violently enough that I knew it would have rung like a bell if there’d been any air to carry the noise. I drew my hand back instinctively and nearly slipped off the back of the seat. For a panicked moment, I was sure the Tahni had found me and were coming to get me, to haul me back to their homeworld and experiment on me. Then I had an equally ludicrous but also elated second where I was sure that my own people were about to rescue me.

  Another, smaller vibration, then a third, smaller yet, gave me a more realistic idea of what was happening: the shuttle was passing through a cloud of debris. There must have been hundreds of them floating around out here from destroyed ships and intercepted missiles, travelling in every direction. If I’d been outside when this one had passed, I’d likely have taken a piece of steel shrapnel right through my suit.

  Shit, shit, shit.

  I waited, my palm on the side of the bulkhead, waiting for more impacts, but there was nothing. I looked around at the fuselage, torn with indecision. Staying inside meant less chance of detection. Leaving meant nothing to protect me from the debris…but did that really matter when I had so little air?

  A burst of static answered my question. I glanced around like I could see its origin, but I knew what it meant: someone was transmitting from close by. I crept closer to the edge of the hull, waiting, and then the static repeated, but this time with words interspersed in it, barely intelligible.

  “…you there? Sandi?”

  Without thinking, I pushed myself up and out of the fuselage, into open space. Mars stretched out in a barely-visible arc of darkness, the terminator just over the curve of the planet, lit up from the sun on the other side of the arc. The aftermath of the battle glowed a dim red in the darkness, even more threatening and foreboding since I knew the invisible danger it held. Behind it all, making me almost fo
rget the death and the loss and the hazards, was a backdrop of millions of stars, breathtakingly magnificent.

  But more magnificent still was the silhouette that stood out against them only a few hundred meters away, swept wing and curved, dagger nose. A maneuvering thruster lit up the matte-gray hull along the port side and I saw carbon scoring from a near miss. The black shape grew larger as it drifted towards me.

  “Jesus Christ, Sandi, is that you?”

  “Ash,” I breathed the word out in a sigh, “you are one beautiful son of a bitch. Get me the hell out of here.”

  “Take it easy, Ensign.” That was Farrier, sounding gruff and fatherly. At least I assumed he was trying to sound fatherly; I’d never had much of a father to compare him to. “We’re as close as we can get without overshooting you, but I’m coming out to get you.”

  “Take your time, Chief,” I muttered, not caring whether he heard the sarcasm in my voice or not. “I’m just enjoying the view.”

  I heard his chuckle about the same time that I saw a sliver of light as the utility airlock slid open on the port side of the shuttle’s hull. I was glad someone appreciated my sense of humor.

  A maneuvering thruster spoke again as they tried to match my orbit more exactly, which couldn’t have been easy, and then Chief Farrier was floating sedately out of the open lock, trailing the reflective tail of an anchor cable, a portable maneuvering unit grasped in his right hand. It was basically a gas gun, fed by twin tanks of reactive chemicals. It wasn’t as powerful as an EVA pack, but it was a lot smaller and you could grab it quick in an emergency without taking fifteen minutes to get someone else to help you pull on a jet pack. At the moment, I appreciated quick.

  “Hang on,” he said inanely as he triggered a puff of coldgas and began drifting slowly my way, the headlamps of his helmet bobbing slightly with the acceleration.

  What the hell else do you expect me to do? I thought but didn’t say. No use antagonizing him.

  He was less than a hundred meters away, and I looked away instinctively as his headlamps shined in my eyes, my gaze drifting over to the wicked lines of the assault shuttle. I wondered how close she was to bingo fuel; I know mine had been damn close near the end.

  Farrier was maybe thirty meters away. I thought I saw something on the shuttle’s hull, something like a pockmark in the armor where there hadn’t been one before, and I felt the hair standing up on the back of my neck. There, another one…I knew it hadn’t been there before!

  “Get back inside!” Ash was yelling over my headphones. “It’s a debris field!”

  Farrier squeezed another burst out of the gas gun, going faster now, almost to me. I could see the outline of his face through his visor, even with the lights reflecting off it. Then the visor just wasn’t there anymore.

  I didn’t see the micrometeorite that hit it; it was going too fast. I didn’t even see it shatter; one second it was there, and the next it was ragged and broken bits of transplas and there was black blood crystallizing out of where Farrier’s face used to be. He was still heading right for me and I grabbed him instinctively, clutching at his right arm, and then having to force myself not to let it go in revulsion. His skull had been crushed, the insides liquefied, and it was bubbling out of his helmet, boiling into a vapor.

  The anchor line had played out its full length, and Farrier’s body jerked to a halt and nearly shook me off, but I held fast. He was dead, beyond resuscitation, but that cable represented life, and it was attached to him. I used him for a brace and lunged for it, catching it just beyond the spool attached to his harness. It vibrated wildly and my fingers clutched it so hard they began to cramp, but I wouldn’t let go.

  “Sandi!” Ash called, the beginnings of panic in his voice. “Chief Farrier! What’s going on?”

  I wondered if he’d been monitoring Farrier’s vitals from the suit telemetry; if he had, he knew what had happened. Either way, I couldn’t spare the breath to tell him; I was still holding on to Farrier’s body with one hand and the cable with the other, trying to pull myself and what was left of him towards the airlock. It was only about thirty meters from me, so close I imagined I could feel the warmth inside the ship. I tried not to think what would happen if one of the micrometeorites hit me before I could get inside…

  …and I sure as hell hadn’t thought about what would happen if one of the flying pieces of shrapnel hit the cable. It parted ten meters from the attachment inside the lock, sliced as neatly as if it had been cut by a laser, just as I was yanking myself forward. The motion sent me tumbling and I cursed loudly and heatedly, ignoring Ash’s repeated transmissions.

  The gas gun, I thought, and the idea cut through my desperation.

  I pulled myself along Farrier’s shoulder and down his right arm, clawing at the maneuvering unit. Thank God his fingers hadn’t spasmed when he’d died, or we would have wound up flying off into nothing. I pried it out of his hand, wincing when I felt the bones in his fingers crack as I bent them away from the handle, but not stopping. The shuttle was getting farther away, fifty meters now at least.

  Then the gas gun was free and I aimed it behind me and held on with both hands as I squeezed the trigger. The thrust began slowly, but built up in seconds and I felt the muscles in my forearms straining to keep control of it. I was coming up fast on the shuttle and I adjusted the angle of the thrust to keep in line with the airlock. I knew, somewhere in the rational part of my brain, that I should have been trying to decelerate, that I was coming in too fast, but that part also realized that the longer I was outside, the better the chance I had of getting nailed by a debris field.

  The airlock was rushing up on me now and I let the gas gun go and curled up into a ball. When I hit the inner bulkhead, I heard a snap and felt intense pain all up through my right arm and shoulder and a scream escaped through clenched teeth. I went limp, in shock, and I saw through a haze of agony that I had bounced off the lock and was about to head back out into space again. I forced myself to move, catching each side of the lock with the magnetic soles of my boots and shuddering as I finally came to a halt.

  I was fading in and out of consciousness, and I didn’t realize that the outer door had shut, or that the lock had cycled until I felt Ash’s hands around my waist, pulling me inside. I think I screamed again from the feeling of the broken, jagged edges of the bones of my upper arm and shoulder scraping around against my muscles and tendons, but then something sharp pricked my left arm and I began to feel a warmth spreading outward through my body, displacing the agony.

  It was hard to keep my eyes open, but I thought I saw Ash putting the injector back into the medical kit before he pulled me along into the cockpit. He was saying something; I could see his mouth moving inside the visor of his helmet, but the words seemed garbled and unclear.

  “You’re going to be okay, Sandi,” he said and I finally understood it, his tone soothing and much calmer than I would have been without the drugs. “You’re okay, it’s going to be okay.”

  He was strapping me into the copilot’s seat, being ever so careful yet I still felt the tug in my shoulder as he slipped the harness over my arm and I think I blacked out this time. When I opened my eyes again, everything was hazy, but there was a weight pressing against my chest.

  Acceleration, I thought. We’re moving.

  “Mayday, mayday, mayday!” Ash’s voice was insistent and just a centimeter shy of desperate. “This is Assault Shuttle Two out of Deimos. We are inserting into Martian orbit, but we don’t have enough fuel to land on Mars and the Deimos docking bay is unusable. Any available ship with intact docking facilities, please respond.”

  I don’t know if he repeated the transmission or if I was just imagining I heard it again, but I had the sense that some amount of time had passed before the response came.

  “Assault Two,” a woman’s contralto answered, “this is the Jutland. You’re cleared to dock with us, please follow the beacon in. And watch for debris.”

  “Wilco, Jutland, Assault Tw
o out.”

  I swallowed hard and forced myself to speak.

  “The Jutland,” I said, hearing the slur in my words from the painkillers. “She’s still there.”

  “She’s still around,” he agreed, his voice ragged with exhaustion. “I wonder how many others are.” He sighed, flexing his fingers and starting to reach up like he was going to run a hand over his face, but stopping when he realized he still had his helmet on. “I wonder if it’s over.”

  I laughed. I couldn’t stop myself, I giggled helplessly, feeling the pain it caused in my shoulder like it was happening to someone else, someone far away. I could see Ash staring at me, could just make out his eyes through the visor of his helmet and saw their confusion.

  “Of course it’s not over,” I told him, trying to explain. I laughed again, then coughed and winced.

  “It’s just beginning.”

  Chapter Five

  TCN Instell NewsNet Report, 12 August, 2263

  As reports continue to be declassified, a tale begins to grow of selfless heroism in the face of a terrifying and unexpected enemy surprise attack. Though several ships and thousands of lives were tragically lost in the Battle for Mars, individual devotion to duty above safety led Space Fleet personnel stationed at Deimos and the Martian shipyards to launch a valiant counter-attack which saved the cruiser Jutland and several others from destruction.

  Shown here is footage of the award ceremony for Ensigns Sandrine Hollande and Ashton Carpenter, both awarded the Commonwealth Medal of Valor, the highest military award. Straight out of training and waiting on Deimos for their first assignment, they nevertheless boarded a pair of assault shuttles which had survived the initial attack on the moon base there and…

  “Turn that shit off,” I snapped, not looking up from my drink.

  It was vodka instead of tequila. For some reason, tequila was in short supply in the bars in Lowell, so I’d nurtured a taste in vodka for the three weeks Ash and I had been stuck here. At this point, I didn’t know why I’d ever wanted to visit Mars in the first place. Life inside the domes felt even more claustrophobic than the caves on Deimos, and everyone down here was too tall and too skinny and had a huge stick up their ass.