Last Flight of the Acheron

by Rick Partlow

  Their dance clubs were generic and boring, their bars were cheap imitations of Earth and I was bored out of my skull. The Jutland had left for patrol while they’d been putting on that dog and pony show with Ash and me, giving us medals for the incredible job we’d done failing to keep the Tahni from destroying Mom’s ship. The two of us were stuck here, told that our assignments were “pending,” and I was about ready to shoot someone.

  “Don’t you think you’ve had enough for tonight, Lieutenant?” The bartender’s tone was mild and friendly, but the “Lieutenant” part was a reminder that, even though I was wearing civilian clothes, he knew who I was and who to report me to if I got out of hand. To say that the bartender was a tall, gangly man would have been redundant; all of the damn Martians were tall and gangly, the ones born here anyway. They could have reversed that with a little genetic surgery, but it was like an ethnic pride thing now.

  It felt weird, being called “Lieutenant.” Ash and I had both been bumped up to Lieutenant-junior grade with the medals, months ahead of schedule, which also seemed like part of the show.

  “No,” I answered the bartender’s question, then knocked back the rest of the glass demonstratively. “Turn off the news and get me another drink.”

  The tall man shook his head disapprovingly, but he switched the holotank’s feed to entertainment, then went to get a bottle. At least they poured the booze out of real glass here in Lowell. If there was anything that was cheap on Mars, it was silicon.

  “You’re the girl in that story,” the guy next to me at the bar said.

  I glanced over at him. He was a civilian, with the look of an engineer or a technician, someone who didn’t care much about his looks or presentation and didn’t have much in the way of people skills. From the way he was squinting in the dim light of the bar, he either had an eye injury or his blood alcohol level was somewhere north of mine. He hunched over his drink, leaning forward onto the polished rock of the bar, fingers splayed out around the shot glass.

  “You’re the one who got the medal,” he elaborated.

  “What about it?” I demanded. I usually denied it, but we were nearly the only ones in the place tonight, so what the hell?

  “Congratulations,” he said, with a grudging politeness, like he thought it was the right thing to say, but didn’t really mean it.

  “Yeah,” I responded without enthusiasm, determined to ignore him.

  For a second, I thought he was through and I could go back to the business of getting drunk, but then he spoke again, this time with less self-conscious politeness.

  “They make it sound like we won.” He snorted like that was hilarious. “We got our asses kicked.”

  “What do you know about it?” I wondered, curious because I knew he was right.

  “I was a contractor, helping to finish off the Midway,” he explained. “I was on the dry-dock when the Tahni attacked.” He grimaced, his pale, doughy face getting even paler. “I was lucky, managed to get on one of the life-pods.” He shook himself, as if he could get rid of the memory.

  “It was a disaster,” he whispered huskily. He looked at me and I saw the fear turn to sympathy. “I heard in the story that your mom was on the Midway. Sorry.”

  I nodded, not wanting to talk about it. There’d been a lot of people saying they were sorry in the last few weeks, and I’d gotten tired of hearing it.

  “I been thinking about dying, since, you know…what happened,” he went on. “I’m older than I look, you know? I’m like a hundred and ten.” He laughed again, with a little bitterness. “I think. I don’t feel like looking it up.”

  I blinked, reassessing the man. That was much older than I’d thought.

  “I can remember when everyone died of old age, basically,” he said, eyes clouding over. “My grandpa died when he was just a little older than what I am now. His father died when he was ninety. Now…” He trailed off, smiling wanly. “Now, no one dies of anything unless something kills them. But y’see, I don’t think most people realize it yet. We all still think our lives are short. Someday though, maybe fifty years, maybe a hundred years down the road…someday we’re all gonna’ realize it.”

  He turned and looked at me and suddenly his eyes were blue and clear and sober.

  “What’s gonna’ happen then? Who’s gonna’ want to go take the risk of colonizing a new planet, or scouting an unexplored system or,” he waved up at where the news had been playing in the holotank a minute ago, “fighting a damned war, when they know they can just sit around on their ass and live a thousand years?”

  “I don’t think it’ll come to that,” I said, drinking down a swallow from a fresh glass of vodka. “We’ll fuck it up, somehow. It’s what we do.”

  “And what about kids?” He went on as if he hadn’t heard me respond. He was staring straight ahead now, lost in his own head. “I got three, and they’re all in their sixties or seventies now, with kids and grandkids and…hell, I don’t even know them anymore. Who’s gonna’ want to have kids if you can live forever?”

  “Sandi!”

  I turned at Ash’s voice, ready to yell at him for trying to scold me out of drinking too much or into seeing a grief counsellor, but then I realized he sounded excited. He was grinning as he stepped in through the bar’s swinging door.

  “Got news,” he announced, sliding onto the stool next to me.

  He didn’t ask if I’d heard it already, because he knew I wasn’t reading, watching or listening to anything.

  “Admiral Shan got shit-canned,” he told me, waving for the bartender’s attention.

  I felt a dull sense of surprise that quickly faded. We’d been caught with our pants around our ankles, and someone had to pay the price. President Jameson wasn’t going to resign, so that left the head of Space Fleet.

  “What dumb shit did they get to replace him?” I wondered.

  “Admiral Sato.” He was grinning again, like the cat that ate the canary. This time I was actually taken aback. “Give me whatever beer you have on tap,” Ash told the bartender.

  “Sato,” I repeated. “He’s the one who’s been making all that noise about how we’re not taking full advantage of the Transition Drive, how we’re still fighting the war like everything has to go through the wormhole Jumpgates.”

  The Jumpgates had given us the stars, back when we’d stumbled on the gate in the Belt that led to Proxima, to the habitable planet Hermes that orbited it, and to the map carved into a slab of metal in the Edge Mountains there. The Jumpgates had been left behind by a race we called the Predecessors, but they’d vanished at least ten or twenty thousand years ago, and the map on Hermes was the only artifact we’d ever been able to find to prove they existed.

  That had been the cause of the first war with the Tahni, the fact that there were only so many habitable systems you could reach through the Jumpgates, and they’d been there first and claimed all of them, even ones where they’d never established any sort of presence. To bust through the defenses around a gate, you needed huge, over-armored cruisers and lots of them.

  Just a few decades ago, Teller and Fox had invented their warp unit, and everything had been turned on its ear. Now, you could make your own wormhole into the otherness of Transition Space, connected by the gravito-inertial lines between stellar masses. You could come out almost anywhere in a system, not just at a fixed Jumpgate, and you could access systems that didn’t have Jumpgates. That had opened up a lot of habitable worlds, and people hadn’t been willing to wait for the Commonwealth government to approve them, so they’d set up squatter colonies without clearance. And some of those colonies were in systems already claimed by the Tahni.

  That’s how the long Cold War had suddenly gotten very hot again. The Tahni had fusion bombed those colonies and killed half a million humans. President Jameson hadn’t wanted to be the man to get us back into a shooting war, but 500,000 dead people were more than even a political hack like him could ignore.

  “That’s the other news.” A
sh took a swallow of the dark ale the Martian had placed in front of him. “The shipyards are going to get rebuilt, but they’re being retooled. Instead of turning out more cruisers, Sato has an idea for something he calls a ‘missile cutter.’ It’s about the size of an assault shuttle, but it’s got a Transition drive, and a weapons bay big enough to carry a couple Ship-Busters.” He took another drink, longer this time, and let out a breath at the end of it. “We’re going to do unto them the way they just did unto us, but we’re going to do it faster and better.”

  “Anyone got a mock-up of what these things are supposed to look like?” I wondered, very curious now.

  He pulled out his ‘link and after scrolling through a couple screens, turned it around to show me. My eyes widened. The ship in the video didn’t look like a mock-up, it looked like a production model. It was about a hundred meters long and half that wide, a bit larger in overall measurements than an assault shuttle, but much bulkier and more massive. Where an assault shuttle was sleek and built for fighting in an atmosphere, this was a starship. It was a solid, wedge-shaped, delta-winged craft that looked like it might fly in an atmosphere by the grace of the fusion reactor in its guts but not by aerodynamics.

  The plasma drive coils were the smallest I’d ever seen on a ship, and I imagined she couldn’t do much in the way of acceleration, but then she wouldn’t have to; that was what the Teller-Fox warp unit was for. I was in awe. She looked like a blunt instrument compared to the dagger of an assault shuttle, but a blunt instrument that I wanted very much to wield.

  “They’re organizing strike wings into something that Sato’s calling the ‘Attack Command,’” Ash went on. “They’re looking for volunteers.” He cocked an eyebrow. “And assault shuttle pilots get priority assignment.”

  “No shit?” I blurted, jumping up from the stool abruptly. “Can we do it now? Do we have to do it in person? Who do we contact?” A small part of me realized I was volunteering him for it too, in my head and with my assumptions.

  “Relax, Sandi,” he told me, spreading his hands, palms towards me in a quelling motion. “It’s taken care of.” He smirked. “Being a Medal of Valor winner does have some perks, after all. We are both assigned as pilots in First Squadron, Strike Wing Alpha, First Attack Command Group, the very first one in the history of the Fleet. We report to the Fleet Training Center on Inferno in 300 hours.”

  I jumped into his arms and kissed him so hard I almost knocked him off his feet. I was laughing, excited, forgetting everything I’d been ruminating over for the last three weeks and the last few minutes.

  “Ash, you’re a damned genius!” I crowed, earning an amused look from the bartender.

  “We have to catch a shuttle to our transport in twenty hours,” Ash told me, arms around my waist, hands edging lower than that.

  “Twenty hours is a long time,” I acknowledged in what almost felt like a purr, running my tongue over my teeth. I kissed him again, slower this time and full of promise, and I could feel the heat inside my stomach as something stirred for the first time in weeks.

  We hadn’t been together since Deimos, and Ash hadn’t complained or said anything, and I guess he thought it was because of my mother. Maybe it was, but it was also partly because I’d been so conflicted about it last time. Now…for some reason, I didn’t feel any hesitation at all. This seemed right, like everything was coming together, like this was how things were supposed to be.

  I almost didn’t notice the old guy, the engineer. He was still looking at me, and there was something in his face, in the pale shadows of it, that reminded me of a skull. Then he tried to smile and waved a polite goodbye and the illusion faded.

  “Good luck,” he said.

  I attempted a smile back as Ash and I headed out the door, but it didn’t quite make it to the rest of my face. I felt a slight chill on the back of my neck at the sight of him. He was just a sad, old man I knew, just dealing with loss and pain the way we all were, except he had a century of it built up.

  But to me, he looked like death.

  Chapter Six

  I stood at attention and tried to stare at Captain Damian Keating without moving my eyes. He stalked between the rows of pilots formed up on the genetically engineered grass in the quad of Attack Command, Strike Wing Alpha. It sounded grand, but it was just a cluster of ugly, hastily-constructed buildings, still grey and drab with their bare buildfoam walls baking in the afternoon heat of 82 Eridani.

  In that respect, it was just like Captain Keating. He was a grey, drab man who sounded much grander than he was. His blue Fleet utility fatigues were limp and baggy, like the flesh under his black, fish-like eyes. He wasn’t what I’d expected…but then, none of this had been so far, starting with the course we’d gone through at Training Command over the last three months.

  It had been nearly ninety straight days of Virtual Reality simulations, and not once the whole time had we as much as been in the same hangar as one of the missile cutters we were assigned to fly. It had been explained to us that the spacecraft were still in the process of final testing and would be there when we reported to our units. There’d also been supplemental physics training to teach us as much as they knew about the Transition Drive. Most of it had been more detailed versions of what we’d learned in our Academy science classes, but I suppose everyone needed a refresher.

  At least it had been less restrictive and structured than Flight School had been, and no one had seemed to care that Ash and I shared a room. It wasn’t against regulations, not technically, since we were both the same rank and not in each other’s chain of command. I still wasn’t sure if it had been a good decision to get involved with him, but it was made now. Maybe it would work out and maybe it wouldn’t, but you couldn’t un-screw that pooch…and since Mars, I didn’t like thinking about the long term anyway. We could all be dead in a week, or tomorrow.

  “I know,” Keating said, still keeping all of us at attention as he spoke, “that all of you think you’re here because you’re hot-shot pilots, the best of the best.” His voice was grating, like metal scraping on metal. I’d already decided he was an asshole. Anyone who kept a full wing of officers at attention outside, on a summer afternoon on Inferno while he lectured them was an asshole.

  “Let me be the first to disabuse you of that notion. You’re here because we’re desperate and you’re what was available.” Well, at least he was honest. I had to give him that.

  “Do not think you’re invulnerable, despite what you’ve survived before. Do not think your shit doesn’t stink because someone pinned a medal on your chest.”

  Oof. That was aimed at Ash and I, right between the eyes. We hadn’t even met the guy yet and he was already taking shots at us.

  Keating stepped back out in front of the formation, hands dramatically placed on his hips.

  “Our boats will be armed, fueled and prepped on the South Landing Field at the Tartarus Spaceport in twelve hours. Your crew chiefs will be waiting with the boats; you’ll meet them then. You’ll have in your ‘links the details of our first mission; I suggest you get with your squadron leaders, get in the simulators and start going over it. Don’t worry about sleeping, you’ll have time for that in Transition space.”

  Only long-engrained habit kept my mouth from dropping open in shock.

  Twelve fucking hours? We’d just got out of the Training Center yesterday! I hadn’t even had time to unpack!

  Keating came to attention.

  “Squadron leaders, take charge of your people.”

  He did a sloppy about-face and stomped off towards the Headquarters Building and I shot an expression of disbelief at Ash, who was beside me in the formation, then came back to attention as our Squadron Leader stepped in front of us.

  “At ease,” she said immediately and I breathed an involuntary sigh of relief, finally able to move my shoulders again. Commander Anjelica Gomez was a small woman, petit to the point of being elfin, with dark hair that fell to the bottom of her neck and nearly hid h
er ‘face jacks, and features that hinted at Asian ancestry despite her name.

  I heard a gabble of attempted command voices from the five other squadron leaders, but tuned them out with practiced ease. I concentrated on the woman in front of us and the ten other pilots lined up around me…and on not getting heat stroke. 82 Eridani has two habitable planets, and there’s a reason this one was named Inferno and the other one was named Eden. There was also a reason the military owns Inferno: no one else wanted it.

  “I know none of us have even had a chance to meet yet, much less train together,” Gomez said. She was right…I only knew her name at all because I’d studied the roster on my ‘link last night when they’d uploaded our assignment details. “But we’re going out anyway, because this mission is important and we’re the only ones who can do it.”

  She had a good speaking voice, I thought, particularly for someone so tiny.

  “We’re going to be…,” she began, then stopped abruptly, squinting up at the glare of 82 Eridani and wiping sweat from her forehead. “Fuck it, we’re going inside. Follow me.”

  There were grins and a couple of laughs at that, and we ambled in a big shambolic cluster into the headquarters building. I felt a rush of relief as we hit the air conditioning, all the sweat running down the back of my fatigues suddenly drying. We passed through a half-finished central reception area and past a netdiver plugged into a holographic computer system who wasn’t looking at anything in our world. There were signs leading to our Squadron area, and we walked by a couple of offices before we entered a small break room stocked with a couple of cheap, plastic couches, two tables and maybe six chairs.