Last Flight of the Acheron

by Rick Partlow

  “Transition lag,” Gomez responded, not bothering to chew Weisz out.

  I cursed under my breath, remembering that part of our physics refresher course. Time didn’t work quite the same in Transition space as it did in realspace and unless you left simultaneously with another ship and from the same entry point into T-space, there would be slippage. The rest of the boats had left a couple minutes after us, but they might be as much as a half hour late Transitioning into the system or they might even conceivably have arrived before us, though that hadn’t happened.

  Basically, it meant we were on our own and at the mercies of hyperdimensional physics.

  “Shit,” I said aloud.

  The word barely had time to echo in the cockpit before I had a new reason to say it. Sensors showed a flight of four Tahni corvettes leaving orbit around the small moon and heading our way. I wanted to curse again, but I didn’t want to repeat myself.

  “I assume everyone sees those,” Ash drawled in dry understatement.

  It wasn’t a shock, exactly. We hadn’t known if they’d have space assets, but the corvettes were cheap and easy to manufacture and it wouldn’t be a burden for the Tahni to leave a few here, just in case.

  “Split wide with your wingmen,” Gomez instructed us, still close enough that there wasn’t any lightspeed lag. “I’ll try to draw one to me, but if they gang up on two of you, I’ll head over and pitch in.”

  “Stay on my wing, Ash,” I said, using the belly jets and the maneuvering thrusters to kick the Huntress onto a new heading before I re-ignited the plasma drive.

  “Always,” he replied simply, yet with enough meaning that I smiled.

  Two g’s kicked me in the pants and I sensed him following, then saw that the squadron of corvettes was splitting up to come after us.

  “You might want to release the Gatling laser to my control,” Chief Burke said quietly from beside me and I nearly jumped at the unexpected declaration.

  Honestly, I had almost forgotten she was there. I’d thought that we’d get to know each other better on the days-long trip through T-space, for good or ill, but she’d made it clear from minute one that we were splitting watches so we’d both get some sleep. In the few minutes per sleep cycle that we’d both been awake, she’d been absorbed in auditing a virtual tech class and I hadn’t gotten more than a half-dozen words out of her the whole flight.

  “Not just yet, Chief,” I said, focusing the ship’s sensors on the corvettes and waiting. “I’m thinking that they’re going to…”

  “We have missile launch,” Ash announced at about the same time as I saw the thermal signature of the weapons separating from the pods on the corvettes who’d split off to follow us.

  “I noticed,” I replied, trying not to snap the words. We were both seeing the same data, but Ash liked to talk. “I think now would be a good time to launch the rest of our own. Set for intercept and hope for the best.”

  It was kind of a desperation move, throwing out all our remaining missiles to try to stop theirs, but I knew I’d used up most of my countermeasures already, and the Gatling laser only had a few thousand rounds in its reservoir. I gave the command and the ship seemed to leap ahead as the rest of the missiles fell away from the launch bay, spinning with their maneuvering jets before they ignited and rocketed back towards the incoming fire.

  “Sorry, Chief,” I added to Burke. “Just want to keep the Gatling in reserve in case any of them make it through.”

  “Don’t apologize, ma’am,” she chided me. “It’s your ship.”

  The corvettes were really cutting loose, the two chasing us riding a six-g burn that was going to put them within effective gun range in minutes. Our missiles were already catching up to theirs and I saw the first of them blow, the white globes of their detonation much smaller than the fusion blasts from earlier. They were effective though; my scans showed half of the incoming weapons drifting off course and not trying to correct. That meant that the maneuvering thrusters or the guidance circuits had been knocked out, or both.

  Of course, that was only half. I counted at least ten still accelerating, and five of those had my name on them. The Gatling opened fire on its own when the first of them came in range. I could just barely sense the vibration through the hull of the hyperexplosive cartridges in the ignition chamber, pulsing their heat energy through the multiple lasing tubes, and the laser pulses themselves were, of course, invisible in a vacuum. The tactical systems helpfully simulated the line of pressure pulses spraying out from the turret, connecting the underside of the wing with one of the incoming missiles for just a half a second.

  There was a flare of heat energy from just behind the missile’s warhead and it began to shift slightly off course from the jet of vaporized metal the laser had created. That was one down, but they were getting closer and I didn’t think the Gatling could take them all out.

  “Ash, we need to do an Immelman,” I decided.

  “We’re in a vacuum,” he pointed out reasonably. An Immelman was an aerobatic maneuver for reversing direction that we’d both learned how to do in assault shuttles in training, and it wouldn’t work without an atmosphere, and probably wouldn’t work too well in a missile cutter either way.

  “Modified Immelman,” I said, grinning. “Just follow my lead.”

  I had very limited experience with this boat, and no idea whatsoever if she was structurally designed to take what I was about to do to her. I hoped Chief Burke wouldn’t shoot me. I cut the fusion drive and felt my stomach flip as the apparent gravity of acceleration fell away, then I hit the maneuvering thrusters and spun the ship end for end to face our pursuers before I fed a jolt of power and a squirt of reaction mass to the belly jets.

  The Huntress shot upward relative to the corvettes, although it was more complicated than that because of the orbital mechanics---we were orbiting both the gas giant and its moon at this point, but I left the math to the ship’s computer, and then I triggered a six-g burn on the fusion drive. Deceleration slammed Burke and I into our couches and the approaching Tahni warships seemed to get very close very fast.

  Their missiles were following, but eventually, we were going to get close enough that…yes, they began to veer off, their drives shutting down, as the Tahni gunners realized we were getting within a few kilometers and it might not be that smart to set a fusion warhead off up their own asses. That only left one problem: the corvette nearest to me was rolling on its axis with a flash of maneuvering thrusters, bringing its laser emitter around.

  I cut the drive back to one gravity and an elephant slowly rolled off my chest.

  “Gatling is yours, Chief,” I said. Then I triggered the proton cannon, draining one of the ship’s twin capacitors.

  The alignment wasn’t perfect; you couldn’t aim the proton emitter without “aiming” the whole ship, and our nose was pointed too far aft on the corvette, but those lasers weren’t going to wait for me to change our attitude. The blast from our spinal mount hit somewhere back around the corvette’s drive bell and the Tahni ship’s deflectors lit up as they tried feverishly to dissipate the energy.

  Their laser fired anyway, right through their electromagnetic deflectors, but I was already spinning the Huntress end-for-end and the high-energy pulse passed through where our nose had been only a fraction of a second before. I hit the drives again and a wave of plasma lit up the Tahni’s deflector shield, enclosing their whole ship in a blinding, white globe for just a moment as we accelerated away from them. I could “feel” Chief Burke firing tight, controlled bursts from the Gatling laser at them as we pulled away, for just a few seconds until we were out of its effective range.

  I saw that the capacitor banks were both charged up and I cut thrust again and spun us around. Doctrine, if you can call something thrown together in a few weeks’ time without the benefit of any practical experience “doctrine,” was to always keep one capacitor charged in case you needed to make a jump to T-space. But we were too close to the gas giant’s gravity
well to do that now, anyway. Instead, I double-charged the shot, draining both capacitors and risking an overload, and taking a shot from their laser to do it.

  The forward optics washed out before our proton cannon shot hit, and I began to receive multiple damage alarms from the ship’s systems. I spun us around again, and when the rear cameras came into line, they showed the corvette venting burning atmosphere from the center of its hull, just behind the nose. The enemy ship was nearly sliced in two and her drive was dark and dead.

  “Auxiliary optical feeds online,” Burke reported, her voice nearly mechanical in its precision. “We have an outer hull breach on the portside wing. Port missile bay is damaged, but it was empty anyway. Nothing that affects atmospheric seals.” Which was good in the long run, since I didn’t want to spend a week wearing a pressure suit and helmet, but irrelevant right now.

  I dialed back the plasma drive and maneuvered the Huntress around again, searching urgently for Ash and his ship. I hadn’t been able to keep track of him with all the electromagnetic interference from the corvette’s deflector, but now I could see his IFF transponder still lit up in my sensor feed. Ash was about a thousand kilometers away, already turning to decelerate, and the Tahni corvette he’d been up against was a glowing cloud of ionized gas spreading across thousands of kilometers of space and still moving forward with the momentum the ship had acquired before it exploded.

  “You still in one piece?” I asked him, trying to keep the concern I’d been feeling out of my voice.

  “Mostly,” he answered after a second’s hesitation. “What about the others?”

  I did a quick scan of the sensor data picture being painted inside my head by the ship’s systems and saw Warner’s IFF transponder lighting up several light seconds away, in a higher orbit. I ran a search for Weisz and Gomez’ signals but didn’t immediately see them; they might be out of range. I also didn’t pick up anything from the other two Tahni corvettes.

  What the hell?

  “Warner,” I transmitted, “gimme’ a sit-rep.”

  Nothing. I tried again.

  “Warner, I need a situation report. Where are Gomez and Weisz? What’s the status of the enemy vessels?”

  “They’re…,” he began, then trailed off, as if his mouth had gone dry and he’d had to start again. “They’re gone. That is…,” I could hear his accent getting stronger than usual. “My cutter is damaged. All my portside maneuvering thrusters are out. Both Tahni ships went after Weisz, and Commander Gomez was trying to help her, but she was too late. I couldn’t see what happened, but there was a fusion explosion a few hundred kilometers towards the moon and then…”

  The words seemed to come from farther away than a half a million kilometers; they seemed to come down a black tunnel light-years long. Gomez and Weisz. I’d only known them for half a day, but Weisz was competent and Gomez seemed to really give a shit about her pilots, and now they were dead, just like that.

  “Damn.” The voice was Burke’s. She’d been listening in on the transmission.

  I pulled my concentration out of the interface and looked over at her. Through the visor, I could see her eyes narrow, her face pinched. I wondered what she was seeing in my eyes…

  “First Squadron, do you read? This is Captain Keating, do you copy?”

  The transmission jolted me out of the fugue I was slipping into, bringing me back into the interface. There were a dozen missile cutters just there, suddenly, at the Transition point where we’d entered the system. They’d finally arrived, after what had to have been at least a half hour of time slippage. I wanted to yell at Keating, to demand where the hell he’d been, but Ash was already answering, his voice subdued but still professional.

  “This is Lt. Carpenter,” he replied. “We’ve lost Commander Gomez and Lt. Weisz, but the enemy defenses are down.”

  “How the hell…?” Keating’s tone was disbelieving, and I wondered just how much jump physics the man actually knew.

  “Transition lag,” I cut in. “We’ve been in-system over thirty minutes.” I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my voice. It shouldn’t have happened this way. “You can launch your missiles now.”

  I cut off my transmission before I said something that might get me court-martialed. Some tiny part of my consciousness was aware of the multiple Ship-Busters boosting away from the formation of missile cutters, heading for the gas mine. It was overkill; they’d only needed one.

  “Let’s get to the Transition point,” Ash said in my ear, his tone sullen. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  I took the Huntress to one gravity and followed his ship from a thousand kilometers out, his drive a miniature sun on the screens. Somewhere far behind us, a pinpoint of light glowed in the atmosphere of the gas giant. A huge mining facility that probably took years and the equivalent of billions of Commonwealth dollars to construct was turned to atoms in seconds.

  Mom had warned me, I thought as I stared at that tiny speck of light, that driving assault shuttles would get me killed. I wondered what she would have thought about this.

  “Ash,” I said, my mouth feeling dry. I took a drink from my helmet reservoir while I waited for him to respond.

  “Yeah?” We weren’t following communications protocol, but it was a private, ship-to-ship frequency and, at the moment, I didn’t give a shit.

  “Have you named your boat?” I wondered inanely. I wanted to say something deep, something meaningful, but those thoughts wouldn’t come.

  He was silent for a long time, and I thought maybe he was ignoring me, that he thought it was a stupid question. Then he answered.

  “Yeah, I think I have,” he said softly. “I’m going to call her the Acheron.”

  “Acheron? What does that mean?” I felt my brows furling as I wracked my memory, thinking I’d heard the name before.

  “It’s from Greek myth. It’s one of the rivers leading to Hades.” He laughed humorlessly. “It carries the dead to Hell.”

  Chapter Eight

  I picked at the pita bread sandwich with little enthusiasm. The “bread” was processed algae, the “meat” processed soy, and none of it had been processed well enough to make me forget it. I stared at the empty chair across from Ash and me in the break room, remembering that Commander Gomez had been sitting in it just a couple weeks ago, giving us our briefing.

  I wasn’t the only one thinking it. There were nine of us in the break room, and six were squeezed onto the two couches; none of us wanted to sit in her chair. I didn’t want to be there at all. We’d landed at the Tartarus spaceport late last night and I’d wanted to go get a drink and a nice steak and then to take Ash to bed, but Keating had ordered us all to get to our quarters, get some sleep and report to the Headquarters building first thing in the morning. So I’d slept alone and now I was forcing down this shitty breakfast and waiting for Keating to call us one by one into his office. Warner had been first and he’d been in with the Captain for ten minutes. God knew how long it would take.

  I saw several of the others staring at Ash and me and I looked back down at my sandwich, forcing myself to take a bite.

  “You guys were with Commander Gomez, right?” He was a painfully skinny little guy, too short to have the excuse of being raised in low gravity, pale and unhealthy looking and I wondered if he was from one of the outer colonies where pre-birth genetic engineering wasn’t as widespread. “Carpenter and Hollande?”

  “Yeah,” Ash replied, which was good because I hadn’t been planning on it. “I’m Ash and this is Sandi. You’re Collazo?”

  “Vinnie,” the little man volunteered. “What happened out there?” The question was plaintive, almost whining. “None of us have seen the recordings, Captain Keating had them compartmentalized, his eyes only.”

  “Of course he did,” I murmured. I took a sip from the bottle of water on the table, trying to wash the taste of the soy product out of my mouth. I finally looked up at Vinnie, and at the others. “We got there thirty-three minutes befo
re you did, because someone forgot about the possibility of Transition lag.” Between the two of us, Ash and I sketched out what had happened.

  “We were too far away to see what happened to Weisz or Commander Gomez,” Ash said, shaking his head. “Warner would know, I guess. That’s probably why he went in first.”

  “Shit,” the woman next to Vinnie spat, rubbing at her eyes.

  There was a knock on the door frame of the break room and I looked over and saw Chief Burke and a broad-shouldered NCO with a face that could have been carved out of a granite cliff. I recognized him as Ash’s Crew Chief, a man named Ngata.

  “Mind if we come in?” Burke asked.

  “Please,” Ash assented, waving them both into the room. “Did Captain Keating call you two in for an interview?”

  “Not exactly,” Ngata said. His voice was surprisingly mild for such a big man. He and Burke moved in front of us and I fought a wince as Burke sat down in the empty chair. “We wanted to run a couple things by you officers.”

  “Normally,” Burke clarified, “we would talk about this with Command Master Chief Sherman, but she doesn’t fly anymore, and I don’t know that she’d grasp the situation like you will.”

  “It’s about our…tactics, if you can call them that.” Ngata’s face twisted in a deep frown. “I understand this was our first mission using a new spacecraft and some adjustments will undoubtedly be made, but we were hoping you might be able to present some ideas to Captain Keating, maybe kickstart things until official doctrine filters down from the brass.”

  “What kind of ideas?” I asked, looking at Burke. She’d struck me as a no-nonsense type, by the book and traditional; so if she was here, then this mission must have really bothered her.

  “We need to stop imitating enemy tactics and come up with our own,” Burke insisted, leaning forward over the table, thumping it with her palm hard enough to make the plate with what was left of my breakfast jump. “Their corvettes are not the equivalent of our missile cutters, they’re much more basic and limited.”