Last Flight of the Acheron

by Rick Partlow

  I took a knee beside Ash, grabbing him by the front of his flight suit and pulling him upright. I grunted as I loaded him across my back; it was only half the gravity here, but Ash was all dead weight and it was still an effort to get him over my shoulder. I clenched my stomach muscles and pushed up to my feet, wishing I’d done more squats instead of spending all that time on the heavy bag.

  “Let’s move out,” Conrad urged, waving me forward while he glanced back and forth, up and down the trail.

  I followed him back out onto the path, my boots sinking centimeters into the mud with each step, and we slowly and carefully headed back the way we’d come. I kept trying to figure out the helmet’s sensor display, mostly to distract me from the load on my shoulder, and because I wanted to be able to keep a watch behind us without turning around. I was beginning to appreciate the complexity of the systems built into the thing; it was like a miniature version of the sensor suite in a cutter or an assault shuttle, but everything was displayed visually. It did the best it could to simplify that display, but it probably took training to get really good at reading it.

  Tiny red spikes jumped at the right corner of my vision and I’d figured out that meant that there were unidentified sounds coming from behind me, but not necessarily enemy. This was a living world, after all. It could have been one of those herd animals, or whatever they’d brought along that preyed on them, or even wind rustling the thorn trees.

  Or it could be a squad of Tahni soldiers about to shoot me in the back, I thought with dull fatalism. Damn it, Ash, why’d you have to get shot down on this alien jungle shithole?

  He wouldn’t have had an answer even if he’d been awake. I kept jogging a few steps behind Conrad, falling into a regular pattern of picking my feet up out of the mud and putting them back down, trying to hypnotize myself into not feeling the weight on my shoulder, trying not to think about asking Conrad if we could stop so I could shift Ash to the other side.

  More noises, more spikes of color in the lower right-hand corner of the HUD, larger this time. Then a flash of red and the image of a two-legged figure---two, three figures, coming up the path somewhere twenty or thirty meters away.

  “They’re behind us,” I said tightly to Conrad.

  “They’re in front of us, too,” he told me, slowing to a walk and looking past me.

  Wordlessly, he shifted my rifle off of his back and tucked one of them under each arm, bracing himself with feet planted wide. He aimed them both back into the twisted thorn trees and opened fire. The Gauss rifles took a half-second or so to recharge the capacitor after each shot, so he alternated left-right-left, the low-pitched hum of the electromagnets discharging contrasting with the thundercrack of the heavy, tungsten slugs going supersonic. The rounds tore into the foliage, sending fragments flying like shrapnel and he kept it up, putting twenty rounds back down the trail in ten seconds.

  “Run,” he suggested, slinging the extra rifle and then taking off the way we’d been travelling.

  “Did you hit anything?” I wondered breathlessly.

  “God knows,” he snapped back. “This way,” he amended, leading me off to the right at an angle on another path, beginning to draw away from me. “Faster, Sandi.”

  “Easy…for…you…to…say,” I grunted, my hips and knees straining at the pounding, running pace. The trail to the right went uphill, and my quads began to burn, but at least the ground dried up some and I was able to run without slipping every other step.

  We crested the top of a small hill but I couldn’t see any better from up there; there was nothing visible but the trees, and some taller hills, small mountains really, in the distance. And the face of the gas giant, where it peaked through the clouds. That was always visible, a constant reminder of where we were and how far it was from home.

  Conrad cut left again on another trail and we followed it for about fifty meters before it became too narrow to navigate and we were forced to head back the way we’d come. He was cursing as we turned back, but I held my profanity inside; I couldn’t spare the breath. As near as I could figure, we’d already covered three kilometers, and according to the mapping software in the helmet, the Artemis was still another two kilometers away as the crow flies. And we weren’t crows.

  We’d gone another few hundred meters on the trail heading straight, still looking for a way to cut back to the left, when I finally had to stop.

  “Give me a second,” I rasped, setting Ash down as gently as I could, then taking a knee beside him.

  It was all I could do not to collapse. I felt sweat soaking the small of my back and collecting in my boots despite the best efforts of the armor’s cooling systems, and the muscles in my back and legs were starting to spasm and cramp. I found the drinking nipple inside the helmet and sucked down a few mouthfuls of water; it tasted sweeter than any wine I’d ever sampled.

  “Okay, we need to switch out,” Conrad decided. “I’ll carry him for a while.”

  “Fuck that,” I said, the effect ruined by the cough that welled up from water going down the wrong way. “Can this suit give me a stimulant? Because I can make myself carry Ash all the way to the ship, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to turn into a Recon Marine between here and there.”

  “I’m not a damned Marine,” Conrad shot back. “I have an IQ above room temperature. Pick up your boyfriend and let’s go.”

  “I thought you were my boyfriend,” I reminded him, groaning as I ducked under Ash’s arm and lifted him off the ground again.

  “I’m just a handsome face,” he said, heading back out at a slightly slower pace. “A very handsome face,” he amended.

  “Don’t forget humble,” I suggested between strained breaths. God, my back was killing me. Didn’t this damn suit have painkillers built into it?

  “I’m not the guy you threw away your career to rescue his ass from an enemy-held world all by yourself.”

  I wanted to keep arguing the point, but then we turned on another trail to the left, this one heading downward at a fairly steep angle, and it was all I could do to keep from sliding down the hill as the dirt turned to mud again. I dug my heels in and kicked rocks and clods of soil down in a miniature mudslide that skittered around Conrad’s feet and probably announced our presence to anyone in a kilometer radius.

  I just kept hoping and wishing that this trail wouldn’t turn out to be a dead end like the last one, because there was no way I would be able to haul Ash back up that hill. As it turned out, I didn’t have to; the path narrowed slightly at the bottom of the hill, but it stayed wide enough for us to squeeze through. I saw large piles of marble-sized shit at the edges of it and I guessed it had come from the big herbivore we’d seen; it looked similar to elk poop on Earth, and I wondered if there were some sort of convergent or parallel evolution concept that could explain that.

  Then I kicked myself mentally for wasting time thinking about the evolution of shit and started trying to pay more attention to the sensors. There was a red spike on them, but this time it was coming from the upper right corner of the display, and I wasn’t sure what that meant; I hadn’t heard the sound yet myself.

  “You getting that?” I asked Conrad. He hadn’t stopped or turned, so I wasn’t sure if I was seeing something innocuous.

  “Yeah. It’s their aircraft coming back,” he told me matter-of-factly, still not turning around. “Hurry.”

  You keep saying “hurry,” asshole, I thought but didn’t have the breath to say, like I’m not already going as fast as I can…

  He picked up the pace anyway, and somehow, I kept up with him. It was only a couple minutes later when I heard the whining roar of a turbojet somewhere overhead; it had to be the Tahni flyer. It wasn’t a shuttle or a dual-environment fighter, at least. Those would have the sensors and weapons to detect the three of us and take us out from kilometers away, and the helmet’s systems would have warned me if the sonic signature had matched. At least, I hoped they would.

  I tried to read the HUD’
s analysis of the sound and I thought it was telling me that this was probably a civilian aircraft---well, as close to a civilian anything as the Tahni had. It was a transport for their colony here, maybe not even armed, though the soldiers it had carried were. And it might be bringing more of them, and it was definitely going to spot the Artemis and probably call for support from whatever ships were within hailing range.

  Yeah, I guess Conrad was right, we’d better hurry.

  We were lucky; the trail he’d found was a Godsend, and, according to the mapping systems, it was leading us right to the landing site. The knowledge that the ship was only a few minutes’ walk seemed to give me a second wind and I dug in, going from a fast walk to a jog. Just another few hundred meters and I could see the reflected light of the gas giant flooding onto the path from where it opened up into the clearing.

  We were almost to the opening when Conrad stopped abruptly and I nearly collided with him.

  “Down!” He hissed, his voice hushed instinctively even though the helmet would have kept the sound inside.

  I sank to my knees, shrugging Ash off of me and setting him down a little harder than I’d intended, not that he’d feel it. His eyes were closed, but his chest still rose and fell regularly. Conrad was down on his belly, and I imitated the position, scooting up through the mud and patches of the local grass analog to pull up beside him.

  He was staring out the end of the trail, into the clearing, and I could see immediately why he’d stopped. The Tahni flyer was pudgy and stub-winged, colored a dull, matte grey with markings in their chicken-scratch of a language stenciled on its side. Its only armament was a small, remotely-operated gun turret under the nose, hanging downward unpowered, but its boarding ramp was down and even as I watched, armored Tahni soldiers were tromping down it. Their armor was grey and black and patterned in a way that I guess was camouflage to their eyes, though it didn’t seem like it to mine, and they seemed even bulkier and more imposing in the armor than they already did without it.

  There were eighteen of them in the clearing now, all carrying what I guessed were the same KE guns that had been fired at us earlier: bulbous, rounded weapons with a cylindrical cooling jacket around the barrel, fed by something like a drum magazine. Most of the troopers were spreading out in a perimeter around the Artemis, one or two monkeying with the lockplate on her belly next to the ramp. The closest of them was only about fifty meters from us, though none seemed to be looking our way.

  “Shit,” I said, feeling the bottom falling out of the world. “What the hell do we do now?”

  Conrad didn’t respond at first, and I wondered if he thought it was a rhetorical question, because it sure as hell was not. I was still waiting for him to answer when the ramp on the Tahni flyer folded inward and its engines began spinning up, the turbines building from a low hum to a screaming whine as dust and bits of grass began circling around the variable thrust nozzles like a tornado. In seconds, the jets were lifting it up off the ground and carrying it over the clearing, leaving a wake of smoking foliage behind it. I followed it as it disappeared into the low clouds, leaving the platoon of troops behind.

  “You stay here,” he said, finally, not looking back at me. It was odd hearing him in my headphones like he was standing just behind me, whispering in my ear, at the same time I was staring at the back of his helmet; it was like it wasn’t really Conrad in the armor beside me but some stranger.

  “There’s a side-trail about a hundred meters back that way,” he went on, motioning behind us, “that goes off to the right. I’m going to circle around behind the wreck of the Acheron and get their attention, try to draw them off the Artemis. When I do, when you think it’s safe and they’re far enough away, grab Ash and run for the boat.”

  “There’s like twenty of them out there!” I protested. “They’ll kill you!”

  “Hopefully not,” he responded drily, and I imagined I could see him cocking an eyebrow at me. “Once you’re on board, you can use the Gatling laser to clear them out, then swing back and pick me up.”

  “What if they don’t all leave the ship?” I wanted to know.

  His answer to that was to unsling my rifle and offer it to me one-handed.

  “Wonderful,” I muttered, snatching it from him.

  He took a moment to reload the partially spent magazine in his weapon and I did the same, remembering he’d shot both of them, one in each hand like some kind of movie action hero. He made sure I’d seated the fresh magazine correctly before he took one more scan of the clearing. The Tahni soldiers were still milling around in a defensive perimeter, none of them heading our way.

  “If they spot you before I’m in position,” he instructed, “lay down a full magazine at them, then fall back and I’ll come help. But don’t get spotted, because this is really our only chance.”

  “You should be a motivational speaker.”

  He chuckled at that as he snaked away from the trailhead on his belly, not coming up to his knees before he was a good twenty meters back. Then he was sprinting back towards the side trail, moving a lot faster since he didn’t have to drag me along. And I was alone. Well, Ash was there, but he wasn’t too talkative. I pushed him back as far into the shelter of the trees as I could without the thorns tearing into him, then laid down at the edge of the trail, shielding him as best I could. I was armored and he wasn’t, and I hadn’t dragged him all this way just to let him get shot.

  “Just as well you’re unconscious,” I murmured to him, knowing he couldn’t hear me. “You’d get all protective.”

  I shook my head. “Why’d you have to go and say you loved me?” I demanded, feeling suddenly and irrationally angry at him. “Now what the hell am I supposed to do?”

  Another question he wouldn’t have an answer to. I shoved it aside and concentrated on getting a feel for how the sighting system worked. When I touched my thumb to a plate beside the trigger, a targeting reticle lit up on the HUD, showing me exactly where the rounds would hit. I settled it onto one of the Tahni soldiers and tried to steady my breathing so that it didn’t waver too much.

  The safety was off. Just a touch on the trigger pad and the gun would fire. I’d never killed any of them up close like this, but I didn’t think it would be too hard. Their darkened visors hid their features, just like ours did. We went to war like robots, and the only reason we didn’t send robots to fight for us was their religion and our laws forbade it. I thought I understood why; if we let the AIs kill people for us, who was responsible? Who was to blame when mistakes were made and things went wrong and people got killed who shouldn’t have died? A computer? An Artificial Intelligence subroutine? The man or woman who programmed it? The factory that built it?

  A thinking, living person had to make a choice. If not, we gave up our humanity and there was nothing left to fight for.

  And that sounded very nice and pretty in my head, but I really wished there was some robot holding the rifle instead of me, and some AI flying the cutter instead of Ash, and some machine trying to flank the enemy instead of Conrad, and that no one was about to die.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I’d known it was coming, but I still jumped at the sharp, hypersonic crack.

  There was a flash of ionized air and one of the Tahni soldiers on my side of the perimeter, maybe fifty meters away from the trailhead, pitched forward with a hole the size of my thumb through the armor over his chest. The others didn’t seem to comprehend it at first, a couple staring at him in disbelief, until the trooper five meters from him spun to the ground with his neck blown out in a spray of arterial red.

  Then they moved, scattering for cover, seeming silent and mechanical to me but probably yelling commands and curses and prayers to their god-emperor inside the privacy of their helmets. I tried to track them, tried to keep the rifle pointed at one in case I had to use it, but they were moving too fast, rushing for cover…unfortunately, the cover they were rushing for was the Artemis.

  I saw a helmet blow apart as o
ne of them tried to make a rush at the Acheron, but the others clustered around the Artemis’ landing gear and poured KE-gun fire into the surrounding foliage, ripping it to shreds of wood and pulp fragments. Green fungus sprayed like a halo around the destroyed clusters of twisting vines, like it had been waiting there for this battle to pollinate it into the clearing and fill the gap left by some forest fire years ago. Conrad was back there somewhere; he’d started out behind the wreck of the Acheron, but I knew he wouldn’t stay there. He’d told me more than once that the key to surviving a firefight was to keep moving.

  And here I was, sitting in the mud like an idiot. We had to get the bastards away from the ship. I looked down at Ash and cursed. I didn’t want to chance leaving him alone and helpless, but if we didn’t get to the boat, he was dead anyway. I wanted to tell Conrad what I was doing, but we’d turned off the microwave frequency transmitters before we left the Artemis; we’d been using laser line-of-sight communications to talk, since it was secure from detection by their aircraft, but he wasn’t in my line of sight anymore. I’d just have to hope he was smart enough to understand what I was doing.

  Working quickly, almost frantically, I shoved as much mud and dirt as I could on top of Ash, turning his head away from the trail and tucking in his hands to conceal him as much as possible, all the while running over and over in my head what I should do. To the left, the bulk of the Artemis stretched across the width of the clearing, its nose pointed towards the wreck of the Acheron, and I could clearly see the Tahni taking shelter behind the landing treads or lying prone in her shadow, aiming their weapons off to the right, just past Ash’s boat. I could have shot them from the trailhead, but that would have brought fire in that direction and cut Ash and I off from the clearing. I had to get behind them and drive them off, make them break cover.