Last Flight of the Acheron

by Rick Partlow

  “First Squadron,” I said to my boys and girls, forcing an upbeat and confident demeanor into my voice, “you’ve trained for this, you know what to do. Make me proud.”

  Shit, I thought ruefully, I sound like Frasier now.

  Then we jumped.

  The Fleet shipyards at Mars had been constructed there mostly for political reasons; the Martian colony had been pushing for independence from Earth, and putting the Fleet construction base there had both created a shitload of income for Mars and made sure there was a sizable Commonwealth military presence there just to keep anyone from getting ideas. The Tahni shipyards had been built more with practicality in mind. Everything was grouped together in one, easy-to-access spot: construction shells, living space for work crews, power, raw materials and, perhaps most importantly, fuel.

  The tattered edges of Transition Space flapped around me like a ragged flag in the wind before the nothingness closed up, sealing itself against the reality that couldn’t coexist with it. On this side of the warp was a gas giant, a huge one, maybe even a little bigger than Jupiter; and clustered around it were the finely meshing gears of the Tahni military industrial complex.

  I let the interface piece the picture together for me: closest were the twinkling reflections of the system’s class B primary, only two Astronomical Units away, off of the construction shells orbiting the largest moon; the mining installations on that moon digging up raw materials and sending them to orbit with a mass driver while other mineral resources were brought in via automated freighters hauling in whole asteroids. With the optical scopes magnification turned up to the maximum, I could actually see the outline of the deuterium/tritium mining facilities floating in the upper atmosphere of the gas giant, rotating slowly across the red and orange face.

  And then there was the holy grail, the goose that kept producing their golden eggs, stretching kilometers long and kilometers wide. It was a massive particle accelerator powered by an equally massive fusion reactor, fed a steady stream of deuterium and tritium from the atmosphere mines in its tireless task of producing the lifeblood of the Tahni space fleet, antimatter. It powered their ships, it powered their giant mecha---the anthropomorphic tanks they used for ground combat, and it gave them a distinct advantage over us. If we took this production facility out, we’d cripple them.

  Which explained the heavily-fortified defense base floating in high orbit above the gas giant, a nightmare covered in meters of nickel-iron armor and bristling with weapons and fighter bays. The last link in the logistics chain was currently visible, and I barely gave it a thought even though the interface showed it to me on the display: the one habitable moon of the gas giant, where the work crews and maintenance staff for all the different bases rotated in and out of dirtside quarters. It was hot and humid and thick with jungle, from the intelligence reports, but it wasn’t a target and I doubted I’d even see it.

  Honestly, I doubted I’d live long enough to see it; this was looking like a suicide mission.

  “Squadrons deploy,” Osceola ordered calmly, not sounding at all like she was about to shit her pants. Was it just me that felt this way?

  “First Squadron, follow me,” I said, imitating her tone. “Six-gravity burn, initiate now.”

  At least the acceleration made it too uncomfortable to concentrate on worrying. And there was plenty to worry about; they’d detected us. The launches were flares of thermal energy on the scopes, thousands of them, missiles and fighters and corvettes curving outward from the Tahni defense station, all sent out to meet us and all pissed off. The missiles were a frightening mass of fusion, but they didn’t worry me as much; they wouldn’t be able to decelerate, so they’d only have one pass at us before they ran out of fuel. Fuel wouldn’t be a problem for us, because we weren’t going to be firing a deceleration burn. That was part of the plan.

  I was feeling grateful that the dozen destroyers under construction in the shipyard weren’t battle-ready yet, and that the huge amount of Tahni traffic in the area meant they wouldn’t be using kinetic energy weapons, and that they probably wouldn’t be using ground-based lasers for the same reason. And mostly I was grateful that dealing with the damned defense base wasn’t our part of the mission, because not even a Ship-Buster would take that thing out, if you were lucky enough to penetrate its missile defenses in the first place. No, our target was the antimatter factory, and it was looming ahead in the sensor display, three hundred thousand kilometers away and in a higher orbit than the defense station or the shipyards.

  I could see the IFF markers of First and Second Squadrons of Strike Wing Alpha splitting off from the others and making course for the factory, and I could also see a good number of the missiles and enemy ships heading our way to try to intercept us. The missiles would make their pass first, in about twenty minutes at the rate we were barreling towards each other. We’d have to run that gauntlet before we launched the Ship-Busters; otherwise, they’d target our missiles instead and we’d lose too many. As absurd as it sounded, we needed them shooting at us.

  I buried myself in the interface to make the time go by faster, trying to absorb every detail. There was Ash, in the center of Third Squadron, in formation with us and the rest of the Strike Wing, wheels within wheels. There was Strike Wing Charlie, bearing down on the shipyards, and then Delta running straight at the atmosphere mines, while poor Bravo had to take on the defense base. All of us seemed to hang there in space, us on one side, them on the other, like waves about to crash on the beach, like one last moment of pregnant silence before the storm hit.

  And when it did, the data came in a deluge and washed over me so fiercely that I could barely keep track of anything beyond the globular cluster of my own squadron formation. Gatling lasers stuttered out interlocking fields of anti-missile fire and enemy boosters exploded in blasts of igniting propellant or spiraled off out of control or simply kept going blindly, their guidance hardware destroyed. Others simply missed, the living controllers attempting to guide them remotely from a distance unable to maintain the lock in the spaghetti-track of weaving signals and blinding thermal flares.

  But some didn’t miss, and didn’t get intercepted. Fusion explosions lit up their own little areas of space, tiny suns shining for just an instant, each a marker for two graves. IFF transponders winked out and I grunted when I saw that one of them was Goddard’s ship. Just like that, she was gone and her Crew Chief too, erased from the world in a ball of ionized gas.

  And then the missiles were past, the ships that launched them still a light-second farther back, and I barely heard the order to end the burn, performing the action anyway out of instinct and training. The oppressive hand of acceleration lifted off of me and breath gasped back into my lungs. I didn’t hear the next order either, but I saw it flash across my vision via an alert from the interface: weapons free.

  “First Squadron,” I spoke, the first words I’d uttered in a half an hour, and they came in a dry rasp, “launch all missiles!”

  I could feel the lurch of the weapons separating from the Artemis, the physical sensation drawing me out of the interface. I was back in the cockpit, feeling the soreness from the high-g burn, seeing Nguyen still strapped into his seat, motionless and silent, a gargoyle monitoring the health of the systems from his helmet HUD and not deigning to become involved unless he was needed.

  “Transferring control of the Gatling to you, Chief,” I offered, just to say something.

  “Acknowledged, ma’am,” was his laconic response.

  The Ship-Busters were roaring forward, hell-bent on destruction, and we trailed behind, still running headlong into the antimatter factory, with not nearly enough room or time to decelerate. I wondered if the Tahni thought we were crazy or stupid, or if they already had an idea what we were going to do. It had been done before, of course, by individual pilots, myself among them. But as far as I knew, this was the first time a whole Strike Wing was going to try it as a mass maneuver.

  “Alpha,” Osceola chimed in right
on cue, “prepare for Transition, minimum possible duration.”

  A long pause, and the corvettes behind us were closing faster now; they’d be in laser range soon.

  “Execute.”

  A familiar, almost welcome shredding of reality once, and then twice; and suddenly, all of us were drifting as near motionless as to make no matter, only a couple hundred thousand kilometers on the far side of the antimatter factory, towards the gas giant, its imposing bulk a silhouette against the stars. Our momentum had been stolen and dumped into another dimension, and I felt a surge of pride that I’d been the one who’d suggested the tactic. And we were also, abruptly, about twenty thousand kilometers behind the wave of Tahni corvettes.

  “Four g burn.” Captain Osceola’s tone was as calm and unflappable as always. “Engage enemy ships. Squadrons, you are free for individual maneuver.”

  “First squadron,” I ordered, “split by wingmen and engage.”

  The corvettes were turning end-for-end and decelerating; they had no choice, other than jumping, and they’d so far shown no inclination to do that when they were on the defense. The intelligence types had a wild-ass guess that their commanders thought it would encourage running from the enemy, but I had my doubts about that. The Tahni didn’t strike me as the type to run from a fight.

  That put somewhere around two dozen of them caught between us and the factory they were defending, basically shielding us from the installations defense lasers, while the Ship-Busters were coming in hot behind us at twenty gravities. We couldn’t have scripted that better.

  “With me, Grimaldi,” I said to my second in command, the last words I spoke before I clenched my stomach muscles and hit the boost again.

  Acceleration was abruptly having its way with me and it definitely liked to be on top. I retreated away from the g-forces pushing me mercilessly into my crash couch and dove into the interface, cutting loose of exterior stimuli and seizing onto the data stream. There they were, the enemy arrayed in a diamond formation straight ahead of us. I targeted the closest corvette and fired the proton cannon, the energy from the beam dissipating across the enemy ship’s nose in a halo of iridescence; but Grimaldi followed my shot with his own at the same spot, close enough that it overloaded the deflectors and sliced through the crew compartment.

  I was already jinking the ship starboard to avoid the return fire I’d expected, but I needn’t have bothered; the corvette’s engines had cut out, the emergency interlocks shutting down power since the computers that controlled them had been fried along with the crew. I hoped the damned thing wound up smashing right into the factory, though I didn’t expect it would do that much damage to a structure so huge.

  Two dozen other dogfights were unfolding around Grimaldi and me, and more flares from the drives of spaceships and missiles and the globular flash of fusion explosions twinkled in the dark silence, lives ending without a sound. I couldn’t follow them all, couldn’t even follow my own squadron except for a vague sense of who lived and who died, so I concentrated on the battle I was fighting. Not even the whole battle, just the flashes of it that were all I could keep up with consciously.

  Another corvette, its laser slashing out at me; the vague nausea penetrating the interface as the Artemis spun to shed the focused energy. Simulated flashes from our Gatling laser in the display, where Nguyen had managed to get off a long burst, and the Tahni laser cutting out with a spark of vaporized metal as the emitter fragmented from the hit. Firing the proton cannon at where the computer predicted a corvette would be, seeing the yellow halo of its deflectors and firing off the other capacitor bank at the same spot and wanting to yell in triumph at the clouds of ionized gas billowing out of the gap in its hull.

  Ash’s Acheron taking a hit from an enemy laser hard enough to cause a thermal flare that caught my sensors’ attention and my own. I cursed out loud and my heart was in my throat for a moment as I watched his IFF transponder expectantly, but it didn’t fade and he stayed on course, and I let out a relieved breath…or as much of one as I could under four gravities of acceleration.

  And then the Ship-Busters were past us, the ones that hadn’t been taken out by the factory’s own defense lasers, and I could see the parasite fighters coming within missile range and launching. The weapons were tiny and pathetic compared to the dreadnought-destroyers we’d fired at the factory, but if one of them hit, we’d still be just as dead. I let my attention swing back and forth between their approaching missiles and ours and was about to order my squadron to jump whether Osceola did first or not.

  “Strike Wing Alpha,” she said as if she’d read my mind, “Transition, minimum distance.”

  It was spotty; some of us had drained both capacitor banks in the fight and had to wait for one to recharge to make the jump. Like a school of fish reacting a bit at a time to a threat, our cutters darted out of realspace and then back into it. When the Artemis emerged, it was a light second towards the night side of the gas giant and I could see the habitable moon on the scope, edging towards the day side in its orbit, but never in total darkness from the glow of its godlike all-father. Greens wreathed a huge swathe of the continent facing us, surrounded by the deep blues of oceans, and I knew from our briefing that the Tahni base was on the other side of the moon, on a large island.

  Too bad, I thought. They won’t see the show.

  The Ship-Busters hit all along the length of the antimatter factory, fourteen of them, and wrapped the huge structure in cocoons of star-fire, absorbing it and transforming it into something made of pure energy. Antimatter storage containers failed as the fusion reactors went offline and when the mirror image particles touched regular materials, fourteen smaller spheres were dwarfed by a globular burst of white larger than a moon, large enough to swallow the remaining corvettes and fighters and leave them as nothing more than their component atoms.

  “Holy shit,” I heard Grimaldi mutter over our ship-to-ship net. “That blowed up real good.”

  I chuckled for a moment, until I noticed again the butcher’s bill: I’d lost three ships, including Goddard. Yount and Tuska hadn’t made it through the missiles, and try as I might, I couldn’t remember anything about either of them except their names and faces.

  Damn it.

  I had a sense something was wrong. I don’t know if it was the interface whispering to me or just intuition, but I knew before I looked what I was going to find. Ash. I didn’t see Ash’s transponder in the formation.

  “Wing Commander,” I called. “Where’s Third Squadron Leader?”

  She didn’t have to answer. I got the transmission at the same time she did. It was an emergency beacon, and the only time a cutter’s pilot would launch one was if they were going down in enemy-held territory and didn’t dare make a direct link.

  “This is Lt. Carpenter,” Ash’s voice said from far away. “The Acheron took damage and I had a power surge when I Transitioned…we misjumped. The engines are down, Chief Ngata has been killed, and I’m in a decaying orbit around the Tahni colony moon. I’m taking her down with the atmospheric jets here on the night side. If I can get down safely, I’ll stay as close to the Acheron as I can for as long as I can.”

  There was a long pause and I thought that was it.

  “Sandi.” The word startled me and I jerked against my seat harness. “If you can hear this, I want you to know that I love you, and I’m sorry.”

  And then there was nothing but silence and darkness.

  “Strike Wing Alpha.” Osceola’s voice was cold and robotic. “Transition back to the Implacable to re-arm and re-fit. This isn’t over yet.”

  “Captain,” I blurted, my voice cracking helplessly, “let me take a couple boats and…”

  “Negative, First Squadron Leader,” she cut me off, and I thought maybe this time I heard a hint of sympathy. “Get your people back to the carrier. This is Search and Rescue’s job. And we still have a battle to fight.” Then her voice hardened again. “That’s an order.”

  I didn’t
say anything for a long moment, and I thought maybe I wouldn’t. I thought maybe I’d just head off for that moon anyway, and to hell with everyone else.

  “First Squadron,” I said instead. “We’re jumping back to the carrier. Follow me.”

  I stroked a control with my mind and nothingness expanded to swallow me up.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I didn’t run through the corridors of the starboard saucer; that would have been unbecoming a Squadron Leader and counterproductive anyway, since there was a steady stream of pilots and maintenance crews going on and off duty to re-arm and refit the waves of incoming cutters. I did walk briskly and used a generous combination of elbows and hip-checks to force my way through the crowd, ignoring pained exclamations and resentful glares and embarrassed apologies. Their faces looked blank to me, like the faces of people you passed by in a dream, unfocussed, unreal.

  None of this seemed real.

  I reached the imaginatively named “Conference Room 4” and pushed the ID plate with my palm. The door slid aside and I dodged through before it was fully open, finding Captain Osceola huddled over a holographic display with Commander Linton, her XO. She looked up as I entered and said something quietly to Linton, who nodded and left the room. I was practically fidgeting with impatience as I waited for the door to close behind him.

  “Ma’am,” I said urgently, “do you have any…”

  “Have a seat, Lieutenant,” she told me, gesturing at the chair beside her.

  Goddamn it, I fumed inwardly, do we have to go through this piddly shit?

  “Ma’am,” I pleaded, “just tell me.”

  Her face was the definition of grim and I felt my stomach drop at the thought that Ash was dead and she knew it.

  “Lt. Carpenter’s boat crash-landed somewhere on the unoccupied continent of the Tahni colony moon,” she said bluntly. “We don’t know his current status, and we don’t have any communications with him.”