Last Flight of the Acheron

by Rick Partlow

  “This might be worse than last time,” I warned Chief Burke over the helmet comms. “This is a habitable, and the Tahni have always been more possessive about those. The Intelligence types think it’s a religious thing.”

  “I’ve kept up on the reports, ma’am,” she said, as politely as an NCO can when they’re telling an officer to stick it. Then she added, “That’s probably why they reacted so violently to the squatter colonies to begin with, I suppose. They don’t really need them, but if God Himself says all the living worlds belong to you, then that would make anyone who says different a blasphemer.”

  “How the hell did a society that primitive ever last this long?” I muttered, shaking my head.

  “Cause we’re experts going off our grand total of two examples of intelligent species.” Burke’s tone was sardonic and I glanced at her, grinning.

  “Touché, Chief,” I acknowledged.

  “Still, I get where you’re coming from, ma’am. Some people think they got a little help from the Predecessors.”

  “And some people see the damned Predecessors behind every rock,” I countered. “Don’t get me started on that.”

  “Thirty seconds to Transition,” Burke said, abruptly turning serious now that we were on the clock. “Good luck, ma’am.”

  She sounded pretty fatalistic about the whole thing, which didn’t raise my spirits any.

  We were suddenly somewhere else, and I immersed myself in the interface and let it all wash over me, not focusing on any one detail but letting the big picture piece itself together. The first piece was us: the Strike Wing, winking into existence almost as one, falling back into the globular formation we’d occupied when we’d left the 82 Eridani system. My squadron was near the forward edge of the globe and ready to split off at the order from Keating.

  The next layer of data was the system itself. The star was small, and white, and hot; and the terrestrial planet closer in was a cinder, burned black and useless. The next world out was similar to Venus, both in size and character, a sizzling wasteland with an acidic, crushing atmosphere.

  We’d Transitioned just outside the orbit of a gas giant about the mass of Saturn, with a similar orange and brown and red coloring, though lacking the elaborate ring system. It had seven moons in all, but five of them were captured asteroids and one was so close that the gravitational pressure had turned it into an unstable, volcanic hellscape. The last one was larger than Ganymede, the largest moon in the Solar System, nearly the size of Mars, and it showed the unmistakable greens and blues of a living world. It also showed the unmistakable thermal signatures of habitation. The base was visible through the ship’s optical telescope on the day side of the moon, but I couldn’t see the space station yet.

  What I could see, barely visible on sensors and scanners in a high, synchronous orbit around the moon, was something oblong and irregular and five hundred meters long and two hundred across, bulging with armor and bristling with weapons and looking a lot like one, gigantic death sentence. I felt my gut clench and wanted very badly to panic.

  “Alpha One actual,” I transmitted to Captain Keating, who was near the center of the formation, “we have a Tahni destroyer in orbit.”

  There was a long pause that my imagination filled with images of Keating dithering and asking his Crew Chief what he should do. After ten seconds, I was fairly certain he was going to order us to retreat. I wish I’d been right.

  “Strike Wing Alpha, this is Alpha One,” Captain Keating’s voice came over the unit frequency, loud and with an undertone of fear that he couldn’t disguise by the volume. “We’re going to…ah, go ahead with the operation, but we’re going to make that destroyer our primary target. We’re not changing the pattern. Strike squadrons, fly in by wingmen and launch one missile, then jump back out beyond the asteroid belt, while the suppression squadron ties up the point defenses on the ship. Then, ah…then, when it’s destroyed, we’ll shift to the orbital station and do another missile run. Is everyone clear on that?”

  “Clear sir,” I echoed with everyone else, biting the words off.

  “Oh, goodness,” Burke mumbled on a private line between us, “I don’t know that I like this plan.”

  “No use arguing now,” I pointed out, though I agreed wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, it was also the only practical alternative to retreating at this point.

  “First Squadron,” Commander Hideyo called. “We’re heading in. Form up with your wingmen and follow me.”

  “He’s seen us.” That was Ash, broadcasting on the wide band. “He’s launching fighters.”

  He was right, I could see the sensor blips separating from the mass of the big ship, solidifying into the parasite craft we loosely called “fighters.” The Tahni carried them on their larger ships and at some space stations and they carried out part of the role we assigned to assault shuttles, but were incapable of atmospheric flight.

  I couldn’t see any details yet, but I knew what they looked like from intelligence briefings: an oval shaped armored pod that held the pilot at its center, surrounded by cylindrical fuel tanks, separated by a radiation shield from the on-board reactor and the drives. Weapons pods were arrayed all around the fuel tanks and the thing looked like nothing so much as a pop-art conception of a pine cone, but a pine cone fifty meters long and thirty meters across. Thermal blooms lit up on the sensor display as their drives ignited and they began boosting toward us.

  Hideyo and his wingman were already leading us in, so there was nothing to do but fall into formation. Ash moved beside me in the Acheron like he’d practiced a thousand times in simulators and in assault shuttles, and we took our place behind the first two boats, accelerating at three gravities toward the destroyer. Behind us, the others were arraying themselves and starting their own run for missile launch. Technically, they could have launched them already; the Ship-Busters had enough fuel to reach the enemy ship and could accelerate a lot faster than we could, since we’d wind up passing out somewhere around ten g’s even with the flight suits. But the more fuel they used up getting there would mean less that they had to maneuver when they got there, and the destroyer wasn’t going to sit still for them.

  “First squadron,” Hideyo ordered, sounding remarkably calm for someone I’d pegged as the nervous type, “target the fighters and launch missiles.”

  Ours weren’t Ship-Busters; they lacked any sort of armor and the smaller warheads they carried wouldn’t be large enough to disable a destroyer, but they’d do nasty things to those fighters, and we carried a lot of them. I felt the ship shudder slightly as our missiles dropped out of the weapons bays and shot away from the Huntress at near twenty g’s, one after another until they were expended.

  They rushed ahead of us, silent ambassadors, practicing the only sort of diplomacy that had ever worked with the Tahni. And the Tahni fighters sent the same sort of diplomacy back at us, smaller and lighter and not as fast, but still deadly; they’d reach us before we reached the fighters.

  “Re-task one third of missiles to interdiction,” Hideyo instructed us, but a second too late, since I’d already started. I’d have gone with half, but he was the boss.

  In the near distance, I could see the fighters now in the optical scopes, more than thirty of them, matte-grey smudges against the whites and yellows and oranges of the face of the gas giant. I could see their missiles as well, black pinpricks against the halo of their engine exhaust. And farther back, lounging like a giant watching ants go to war, the destroyer was lurching into motion, its antiproton drives boosting it out of lunar orbit on a screaming tail of pure, white annihilation.

  The enemy missiles were much closer, but that destroyer scared the shit out of me. I had to wrench my attention away from it, focusing it on the nearer threat. The missiles I’d redirected to interdiction reached the enemy projectiles in less than a minute, their fusion warheads expanding in globes of self-destruction and took swathes of incoming Tahni weapons with them. A field of white spheres erupted all across the st
arscape ahead of us, as the other ships in the squadron erected a wall of fusion fire to shield us, and one alien missile after another disappeared in a fury of star-like flame.

  When the white glare cleared, only a few of the Tahni missiles still kept their course, and the ship’s Gatling laser opened up on the ones closest to us once they came within range, moving with reflexes faster than ours. The computer was more reserved and frugal than I would have been, firing short, controlled bursts, as if the per-round costs were being taken out of its personal account. The smaller missiles were almost unarmored, though, and the laser pulses penetrated their warheads easily; I could see the flashes of vaporized metal as it hit each one. They kept boosting, but their communications circuits to the fighters were destroyed and they would simply go straight ahead until their fuel was expended and they fell into whatever orbit their course had taken them.

  Now it was our turn. I couldn’t see them from this far away, but I knew their own anti-missile defenses would be fighting their war of attrition on our warheads as they closed. They had respectable Electronic Counter-Measures and a pod full of short-ranged rockets that would spread filaments of charged superconductive threads like a spider-web to intercept incoming missiles and short out their guidance systems. Some of our missiles were taken out; I couldn’t tell for sure how many, but it wasn’t all of them. White spheres of destruction began to sprout where Tahni parasite fighters had been a moment before, our own private fireworks show, like it was Establishment Day in Capital City.

  Now there were fourteen fighters, and they were spread out between the twelve of us in First Squadron. They were our problem and it was our job to keep them that way until the others started launching their Ship-Busters.

  Which you can start anytime, you miserable bastards, I yelled at them mentally.

  They were still nearly a hundred thousand kilometers away from the destroyer though, even after…Jesus, had it already been almost an hour and a half? Forty minutes of that at six g’s, and whatever acceleration the destroyer was putting on to come to us. Time started to lose coherence when I was jacked in, and I don’t think I’d fully appreciated that until now. I guess it was a good thing, since I figured Chief Burke must be bored out of her skull. In the Academy, one of our instructors had said that combat was hours of boredom punctuated by seconds of sheer terror, but to me it seemed like the hours and the minutes ran together into a long “now.”

  The fighters were closer though, close enough that they were already beginning to turn around and decelerate to give themselves more time-on-target. I knew they had lasers and coil-guns, but I also knew they figured the rounds from the coil-guns would be diverted by our electromagnetic deflectors so I expected laser fire at extreme range. And the extreme range of their lasers was still farther than we could manage with our proton cannons; we’d just have to ride that out.

  And there it was; over the interface, I could feel the heat of the laser like it was physically burning my skin, and when I flinched away, I took the ship with me, jinking with the maneuvering thrusters and then putting the ship into a spin to keep the laser from focusing on one point for any length of time. The spin didn’t affect me much, plugged in as I was, but I hoped Burke had a strong stomach. The laser had shifted and I gave a burst to the belly jets to kick us slightly aside, forcing them to re-align it every few seconds and the damned computer was making me feel like I’d gone out to the beach with no sun protection.

  Then something nudged me, more a feeling than a light or a sound, and I knew we were at the maximum effective range of the proton cannons. When I fired, it was with the sensation of swatting at a mosquito, and with much the same effect; the annoying buzz of the laser went away, and with it both weapons pods on the port side of the fighter, their struts vaporizing in a flash of sublimated metal that kicked the pods free and sent them drifting off lazily. The fighter spun around on its axis to bring the starboard pods to bear, and I broke regulations again and used my second capacitor bank to fire a second time immediately.

  Decelerating as he was, the cockpit was facing away from me and his drive bell would take a lot of damage before it failed, so I had targeted the other weapons pod. This one exploded in a spectacular corona of burning gas that sent the fighter spinning on its axis. There was a puff of maneuvering jets as he tried to stop the spin, and I could see the flare of his drive wink out. I knew he was going to turn end-for-end and try to accelerate after us, but I put him out of my mind immediately. He still had a drive but I’d defanged him, and I knew he didn’t have the fuel or the power to use the drive or the ship as a weapon on any of us; there was no way he could accelerate fast enough.

  The next one was in range now, and he’d focused his laser on Ash’s boat. We fired within seconds of each other, both of our shots hitting just forward of his drive bell. There was a globular burst of light and I figured we must have penetrated far enough to rupture his fuel feed, because when the explosion died away, his drive was dark and he was headed out into deep space, unable to decelerate.

  Something teased at the corner of my awareness and with a slight shift of concentration I knew what it was: the first of our boats had launched at the destroyer. The Ship-Buster was huge, nearly the length of the cutter that carried it, and it had a fusion drive of its own that ignited a miniature sun in the darkness and leapt across the space at twenty gravities. The cutter jumped forward itself for just a fraction of a second before the drive compensated for the lack of mass…and then a hole opened up in the fabric of spacetime and swallowed the boat up into the otherness of Transition space.

  She was back at the edge of the system now, a spectator watching us fight, and while the part of me that was terrified of dying envied her crew, another, less savory part wanted to blow up some more Tahni ships. The rest of the Strike Wing launched one at a time, a solid stream of massive Ship-Busters swarming towards the destroyer, and each of the boats vanished into T-space in turn, their cargo delivered. And we stayed.

  “Deceleration at nine g’s on my mark,” Hideyo told us and I spun the ship and obeyed, trying not to think about how much it was going to hurt. “Ignition.”

  The crash couch flattened beneath my sudden, oppressive mass and I could feel every molecule of my flight suit cutting into my skin like microscopic knives, could feel my breasts crushed against my ribs and my arms immobile at my sides. This was when you had to have the interface, when you had to have the jacks, because there was no way to physically control the ship, no way to even speak. Only the drugs our flight suits were feeding us were keeping me conscious, and I couldn’t have sworn that Burke wasn’t passed out already.

  There were stray bits of data, things that I sensed and knew but didn’t quite register because all my concentration was focused on staying conscious. I saw the flare of the destroyer’s main laser batteries firing and a fragment of my mind that could still pay attention considered that if that weapon scored a direct hit on any of us, we were dead. But it wasn’t aiming at us, and I realized that it must be using its main weaponry to target the Ship-Busters.

  The minutes crawled by and I couldn’t be sure I wasn’t hallucinating when I saw the Tahni destroyer in a braking burn as well. But no, it was real…we were all spending a shitload of energy and enduring a lot of pain just to be in a better position to try to kill each other.

  There was a soundless signal from the Squadron Leader’s boat and I gratefully cut the drive and spun us back around to face front. We were only a few thousand kilometers away from the destroyer now, its monolithic bulk filling the view of every sensor display. I checked for the Ship-Busters and saw only four of them still inbound, the four farthest out; the destroyer’s lasers had taken out the rest.

  “First Squadron,” Commander Hideyo transmitted, his words grave and weighted, as if he were handing down a sentence, “form on me and engage.”

  Chapter Ten

  It felt like shooting at a mountain, except the mountain could shoot back.

  The squa
dron had shaped up into an arrowhead formation and our proton cannons volleyed nearly as one, all of us targeting the portside dorsal point-defense batteries on the monstrous starship. Proton fire hammered into the deflectors there and charge bled away in a scintillating yellow halo that spread in an arc around the width of the ship, except for a pinpoint line of crackling energy that overloaded the field and sliced into the skin of the ship. A line of rocket launch pods erupted in flame as the propellant exploded, and charred fragments of hull fountained outward.

  I wanted to cheer, but a sober reality reined that impulse in: we were a distraction, to let the Ship-Busters get through. That meant, to keep the destroyer from firing on them, we’d have to make it fire on us instead. There were multiple flares of rocket engines igniting along one of the ship’s weapons bays and sixteen missiles shot out, splaying like fingers and heading toward our formation.

  “Evasive maneuvers,” Hideyo snapped. “Split up and spread wide.”

  Ash and I banked to starboard, firing off long bursts from our belly jets and then cutting off on a new course that ran parallel to the hull of the destroyer, just a bit more than two hundred kilometers away now and burning at three gravities. The closest of the Ship-Busters was running a line perpendicular to ours, heading straight for the section of hull we’d left undefended, only a hundred kilometers from ending this. The aft end of the destroyer began to swing around, probably seeming painfully slow to the crew on board but far too fast for me.

  “Shit,” I hissed, knowing she was trying to bring around her laser emitter ports.

  The weapon was fed directly from the destroyer’s fusion reactor, and all the optics were buried deep and safe inside the armored hull, directed by a series of internal mirrors through ports that ringed the ship’s bow.