Last Flight of the Acheron

by Rick Partlow

  "Just remember," Deke told me, "this is an intelligence mission, Cal. We go in, inject the virus program and get out."

  I turned and looked him in the eye. He was my antithesis in many ways. I was short, plain and stocky, a farmer by nature and appearance. Deke had a movie star's face: lean and handsome, with naturally curly dark-brown hair, swept back in the latest Earth fashion. He was a few centimeters taller than my meter-eight, and a bit leaner and narrower---Canaan, my home planet, has a bit higher gravity than Earth. We'd been friends since our first year in the Academy, and we were closer than family. He knew some of what I'm feeling, I thought. I didn't know if that helped or not.

  "I remember," I replied quietly. "I remember everything."

  ***

  We came out of T-space at the minimum safe distance from the planet, disguising the gamma burst by Transitioning in a direct line with the primary star---it didn't have a name, just a number in the catalogues. The planet was nothing but a strategically-placed ball of mud, but the Tahni considered it the ideal place for a staging area. Space stations had been way too vulnerable to our attack wings, so the Tahni had started basing their operations planetside. Big mistake. The Boys couldn't have penetrated a space station this easy.

  We rode our pre-jump velocity toward the dark side, our systems unpowered to avoid detection, then fell into the thick, turbulent atmosphere, counting on the stealthy design of our ship to stay off their sensor screens. It was a rough ride through the soup, using only coldjets to nudge us in the right direction. I was linked with the ship, of course: trying to work the controls manually in that kind of goo would have been suicide.

  Lightning flashed to our right as we came through the really thick stuff, and I could feel the ionized air shake us like a toy airplane. Deke didn't say a word. I knew he hated this. He loved space, but he hated flying in the soup. Me, I loved flying anywhere...usually.

  I brought the Raven down low over the great equatorial swamp, our landing zone mapped out weeks before by a Scout team, bless 'em---one small island of terra-firma in that giant mud-puddle. They had even put down a defoliant pod to clear out the heavy vegetation for us.

  We bled off airspeed, not too difficult with air that thick, and headed for the island. A strong updraft hit us, and I had to fight to keep it level. If we'd gone out of control, I'd have had to hit the main drives, which would have not only advertised our presence to several batteries of surface-to-air missiles but quite possibly caused a backwash of plasma that could have burned through the cockpit and killed us both. That would have been what our Academy trainers called "sub-optimal."

  Next came the tricky part. I had to bring the ship in low and slow enough to hit the landing jets without setting off the satellite sensors. If I was too low, we'd catch a tree in the belly. If I was too slow, we'd do a nose-in.

  As always, I was just right. The landing jets kicked in at about thirty meters up and I walked the stilts down to the muddy ground. We settled with a gentle bump on five sets of tracked landing gear, and I activated the ship's camouflage with a touch of my thoughts. Gas-propelled netting sprang from pop-open compartments in the ship’s hull and from orbit, it looked like a lump of rotting vegetation, thanks to the lasers projecting that image off of the reflectors in the netting. Sometimes it boggled my mind how much our little ride cost---until I remembered how much money the government sank into us.

  I powered the ship down, and gradually withdrew my mind from the ship's systems.

  "Showtime," I muttered, unstrapping and powering back my acceleration couch. Deke took a deep breath and slowly let it out. It was the only hint he gave that the flight keyed him up.

  Ducking out of the cockpit, I paused by the weapons' locker. We didn't really need heavy weapons for this job. It was supposed to be a quick, quiet, in-and-out sabotage mission. If we did it right, they weren't even supposed to know we'd been there.

  Yeah. And, according to the records, I was supposed to be dead.

  I popped open the cabinet, surveying the array of high-tech armaments available to us. Pulling out Deke's favored weapon---a developmental, man-portable electron beamer---I tossed it to him, hardly feeling its thirty-five kilos. Then I grabbed my own choice.

  Like Deke's, mine was an experimental design, procured specifically for the Glory Boys---Special Operations Group Omega. But that was where the similarities ended. Deke's weapon was a subatomic scalpel, designed to slice through heavy armor; mine was a damned sledgehammer.

  A bit longer than my arm, it was a boxy, angular weapon with a massive magazine housing behind the pistol grip and targeting optics, and it weighed a good fifty kilos. The developmental, personal version of the larger weapon mounted on mecha and Marine battlesuits, it fired self-contained cartridges which contained a large, precharged superconductor capacitor coil, a capsule of liquid hydrogen, and a lining filled with concentrated liquid nitrogen. When the weapon was fired, the superconductors powered the gun's integral semiconductor laser, which fired through a port in the cartridge and heated up the liquid hydrogen to a plasma state. In the milliseconds after the hydrogen was heated up, the laser fired through it, using the plasma to refocus it, and burned an evacuated hole in the atmosphere. The remaining charge from the cartridge simultaneously powered an electromagnetic field, which both contained the plasma and expelled it from the weapon at speeds in excess of 8,000 meters per second. After the cartridge was fired, the lining would break open, cooling the spent casing with the liquid nitrogen, and the cartridge could be ejected.

  It wasn't as energy-efficient as a laser or a Gauss gun, it didn't have near the range of Deke's beamer, and it was as heavy as hell; but within fifty meters or so, a plasma gun had the punch of an artillery piece and it'd blast through almost anything. Deke didn't think it was stealthy enough, but it suited me just fine.

  "You really think these are necessary, bud?" He asked me, hefting his beamer questioningly.

  "Remember four months ago?" I looked him in the eye. "On Girru?"

  "Yeah." He grinned sheepishly. "Guess you're right."

  I reached into an equipment pouch and tugged out my face hood, pulling it over my head and sealing it at my neck.

  Time to go, I transmitted over my neurolink.

  You first, I could see Deke's grin disappear under his hood.

  It was strange, communicating over the neurolink. You started to feel a bit schizophrenic, like maybe you were only imagining you were talking to someone else.

  I lowered the ship's belly ramp and we slowly stepped down it. It was night on this side of the planet, so my headcomp activated the passive infrared function of my corneal implants, and everything was suddenly lit up with a pale, green glow. The lenses had a thermal imaging option, too, but the input was too confusing for just walking around, so I instructed my control systems to monitor thermal and enhance the image when necessary.

  I stepped off the ramp, feeling my boots sink into several centimeters of mud. The air was thick here, and it smelled like death.

  "Hell of a place for a mission," Deke said, his voice muffled by his hood.

  "Hell of a place to die," I muttered softly in counterpoint.

  We plunged into the swamp and started walking.

  ***

  I appreciated the night. It was a night I could lose myself in. I could let this miserable, dense, steaming jungle swallow me up, concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other to keep the images out of my head, not think anymore. The thinking was making me lose focus, driving me crazy. I tried to open my senses up and wallow in the misery of it, let it drown everything else out.

  I could hear things out there in the swamp: strange sounds, like nothing I'd ever heard back home on Canaan; low moaning like something not quite human crying out in dull agony...like me. It was probably some insect, or a little reptile looking for a mate. The really dangerous animals don't make any sound at all until they kill something.

  It took us a good two hours of wading through that miserable sh
it before the swamp started to clear. We were getting closer to the ocean---and the base. We had to stop at a tide pool and clean off our Reflex suits: if their sensors were covered with mud, they wouldn't be able to detect laser sights or incoming projectiles.

  We hugged the edge of the jungle as we jogged swiftly around the promontory, the ocean lapping softly against the rocks on our right. I could see the lights of the base through the trees, which meant we were probably within their sensor nets. We would know soon if they'd detected us---we'd be barbecued.

  We came around the horn of the promontory and we could finally see the base. It was an ugly, prefab thing; boxy and lacking permanence, and spread out over a good five acres. The biggest structure was the reactor complex, and its flanks were guarded by electromagnetic field generators that could knock down missiles or projectiles and jam the guidance signals for armed drones. Circling those buildings were the planetside sensor arrays and the satellite tracking dishes, and on the outer edges were the air defense emplacements. Primary planetary defenses were in orbit. Filling in the gaps were the storage buildings and the troop barracks. There shouldn't have been more than thirty or forty personnel onplanet: that was the standard complement for these minor staging bases. I knew that because we'd had to kill every single one of them, at times.

  There were no live sentries outside; and apparently, we hadn't been detected by the automated ones, so we just walked straight up the promontory, trying to stay on the hard rock to avoid pressure sensors. This was supposed to be easy. We just needed to find an open computer terminal and feed it the virus program we carried in the modules on our belts. Then, if the Tahni used this place for a staging area, every single ship that accessed the central system here would suddenly find itself targeting and firing all its weapons at the nearest Tahni vessel.

  Neat trick, huh? A bit too impersonal for me, though. I wanted them to see me when I killed them; I wanted to look into their eyes and hear them spend their last breaths screaming in fear, like they'd done to her.

  We approached the base near the shield generators, sticking near their electromagnetic field in hopes it would give us an extra measure of concealment. Someday, if the war dragged out much longer, I thought they might figure this shit out.

  But not this time. This time we made it to the satellite control room without being detected.

  I'll go in, I told Deke. Nodding wordlessly, he turned to keep watch.

  I jerked open the door and stuck my plasma gun in, but there was no one in the outer control room, so I closed the door and checked out the rest of the building. There was nothing and no one---not so much as a ration wrapper. But there was a computer input console and here was my insertion module.

  It was easy...too damned easy, a paranoid part of my mind whispered. Something's wrong.

  Just on a hunch, I ran a thermal scan of the console. Uh-huh. That was some computer terminal. None of the controls had any connections, except the input jack: it was hooked up by a power cord to a small, hot blob connected to something cool and dark. A quick chemical analysis with my implant sensors detected a faint trace of hyperexplosives.

  Shit.

  Cal, Deke called suddenly. I'm getting some heat sources out at the edge of the jungle. Lots and lots of heat sources.

  Want a weather forecast, pal? I asked, pulling a small contact bomb off my belt and attaching it to the side of the fake terminal.

  A what? I "heard" the confusion in his voice. Grinning, I hit the control to start the charge's thirty-second timer. It was built to blow doors, but I thought it would work pretty well as a detonator.

  Batten down the hatches, I burst through the door, my chameleon camo shifting to blend in with the darkness. A shitstorm's about to hit!

  And, without further commentary, we started running.

  Where? Deke asked, following close behind me.

  The beach, I told him, another part of my mind contacting the Raven.

  Yes, Captain Mitchell, the ship's AI replied dispassionately.

  Take off with minimum thermal signature, I transmitted. Meet us about a hundred meters off the horn of the promontory. Come to a hover as close to the water as you can, and if attacked, defend.

  Yes, sir.

  We were only about thirty meters from the building when they dropped in almost on top of us: at least ten High Guard troops coming down on jets of isotope-heated steam in their bulky, powered battlesuits---they must have wanted us really bad. My suit "felt" the laser sights on it and Deke and I dove for cover behind a maintenance tractor. Crackling electron beams arced out of the darkness to blow divots out of the mud in gouts of steam; and tantalum needles gouged shallow craters in the side of the tractor with rhythmic pings of metal on metal.

  Damn. This was a trap from the word go. They must have known exactly the sort of target the Boys go after and set this place up as bait. They probably didn't know when we'd be here, but they knew we'd come. Strangely, I wasn't afraid. The prospect of death didn't bother me anymore. I was a bit pissed. I'd always thought I'd die in some kind of significant manner, not like a damn rabbit in a snare.

  Fuck this.

  I took off, Deke following despite probably thinking I'd gone nuts, and I took the time to trigger a couple of blasts from my plasma gun at the sources of the laser sights that brushed me. The blasts seemed to rip at the fabric of reality, tearing the night apart with their ionizing fury and detonating at the edge of the jungle with a burst of liberated plasma energy. The battlesuits were armored with about three centimeters of tungsten alloy, but the multi megawatt pulses from my assault gun blew through it like it was plastic, dropping two of the troopers in their tracks, their torsos burning.

  We were running in the dark across that rocky, uneven ground at something better than sixty klicks an hour in a zigzag route, and they were still coming too damn close with those electron beamers. I could see them out of the corner of my eye; looked like about two dozen armored shock troops coming out of the woods, closing in on us. We were over a hundred meters from the High Guard troopers, but if they could zero on us, they'd jet in on top of us in seconds, and there were some regular infantry moving up behind them. But on the bright side...

  "...twenty-nine, thirty!" I pulled Deke to the ground just as one of the loudest explosions I'd ever heard in my life went off behind us. The big pile of chemical hyperexplosives produced a shock wave like a micro-nuke, consuming a few of our pursuers in its gigantic fireball and knocking the rest off their feet. The wave of heat passed over Deke and me, cooking us a little through our suits, but not seriously harming us.

  Scrambling back to my feet, the blast still ringing in my ears and flaming debris raining down everywhere, I started running again, trusting Deke to keep up. There were no shots at our heels this time, with our attackers still trying to recover from the blast. Their thermal sights, at least, would useless now---the promontory was covered with burning shit, bathing everything in its flickering glow. They couldn't use surveillance drones, either; their own electromagnetic defenses prevented it.

  We had to get out of here fast, or they were going to call in air support; there was nothing in orbit, but if this had been a setup, they were bound to have at least ground support fighters hidden somewhere nearby.

  Raven, I called the ship's AI. Any aircraft in sensor range?

  I'm picking up fighter-sized aircraft approaching from due east at twenty klicks, Captain.

  Launch a spread of missiles, I instructed Raven, then jink into an anti-sensor avoidance course.

  Launching now, Captain.

  The Raven carried twelve antispacecraft missiles, specially designed for the team. Launched by an electromagnetic catapult, they shot out even further on compressed-gas jets before their main engines cut in; that kept the enemy's SAM sights from tracing them back to the ship. Linked to the ship's sensors, I saw the glowing darts that represented our missiles impact the sensor blobs that were their fighters, then watched the blobs flare up and disappear. That was one
problem down, literally. If we could only make it to the beach...

  Then my augment sensors picked up the missile streaking out of the forest.

  "Down!" I screamed, diving as far forward as I could.

  I hit on my chest, nearly knocking the wind out of me, and then the night lit up and a shockwave lifted me up again and deposited me a good five meters farther on. I landed on my back this time, feeling the rocks digging into my shoulder blades. If I'd still been a normal human, I'd have been dead right then, with my back broken by that fall; but my laminate-hardened spine and augment muscles saved me from that fate, and my Reflex armor hardened to deflect most of the warhead's shrapnel. The few of the tantalum needles that did penetrate peppered my left thigh and buttock, but I was running high on endorphins, and I hardly felt them.

  What I did feel, as I struggled back to my feet, was a nagging insistence that something was very, very wrong. I spun around and saw Deke lying motionless behind me, his left leg blown off at the knee.

  Jenna’s face seemed to float before my eyes, a vision of her from the picture, superimposed on the mangled body of my best friend. An inhuman howl came from somewhere far off and I only gradually realized that it was coming from me. I tried to talk, tried to move, but I felt like darkness was closing in on me and I couldn't outrun it anymore.

  Then I saw the machine breaking through the tree line to the north. It was twelve-and-a-half meters tall and bipedal, powered by an anti-proton reactor and protected by electromagnetic deflectors and fifteen centimeters of molecularly-bonded armor. It was packing a proton accelerator, Gauss autocannons and a lot of missiles like the one that took off Deke's leg. It was a damned walking starship bearing down on us from the north while the remnants of the battlesuit troops were gaining from the west.

  And me...I don't know what I was thinking. It was like there was this haze of red over my vision and all I wanted to do was kill. Part of me was standing there to the side, thinking all this through logically, knowing I should pick up Deke and run for the beach; that if I didn't, we'd die. But my headcomp was telling me a different story. Apparently, though I didn't remember doing it, I'd somehow picked up Deke's rifle, and I was standing there like a fucking moron, triggering electron beams and plasma fireballs at the oncoming Tahni troopers.