by Rick Partlow
Tales of the Acheron:
Prodigal
by
Rick Partlow
Copyright 2017
By Rick Partlow
Chapter One
Sandi worked the old shuttle’s balky interface expertly, hanging on for dear life and daring it to buck her off. The air was thick and hot and it buffeted the lander spitefully, the breath of some vengeful god who knew why they were coming; but she only felt the vibration distantly, like it was happening to someone else.
Hold together, girl. She gave the controls a wispy caress with the slightest touch of her thoughts and the character of the turbulence changed in a way that no one else in the bird would have noticed, with the grain instead of against it. Just a little further…
“Jesus Christ, Hollande, I thought you said you could fly this thing.”
The words, and the annoying, nasal whine that accompanied them, brought her out of the interface for a moment. She glanced beside her, careful to move just her eyes---she didn’t like the way the cables tugged at the sockets implanted in her temples when she turned her head.
The round-faced, pudgy older man stuffed into the copilot’s seat glared at her with dour disapproval. His brown jacket was worn glossy in spots along the sleeves, where his tactical vest had polished it over years of use. The butt of the old but serviceable handgun sticking up from the shoulder holster on that vest reminded her who she was dealing with, and she stopped herself from snapping out the first response that had come to her lips.
“Captain, if you have anyone else with the input jacks and the experience to land this brick with wings in this soup,” Sandrine Hollande said quietly, almost a murmur, “then they’re certainly welcome to try.”
Deruda grumbled under his breath, but didn’t respond. She wrestled down the grin that tried to fight its way onto her face. He was an asshole, but he was also her boss, and she needed this job.
She submerged again into the interface, absorbing the combination of the feeds from the exterior cameras, the lidar and radar and the instruments in a way that defied description to anyone who lacked the sockets. It wasn’t like having extra senses in that she didn’t actively perceive each bit of input; she just knew, the same way she knew where her own body was and where her next step would land. The shuttle, obsolete pile of junk though it might be, was her body, and guiding it down to the roughly-graded gravel landing field in the utter darkness of the storm-shrouded night was no different than surfing a Pacific wave on the California coast.
The jolt of the landing gear settling into their housings brought her back out of the interface and she began unstrapping her harness with rote motions while she powered back the acceleration couch. Deruda was still trying to pry his bulk out of his seat when she ducked out of the cockpit and through the short passage into the cargo hold. The “Captain” was as much of a fat piece of shit as the cargo bird and it seemed ludicrous to grant him the title, but it was due him as the master of a starship. The fact that the starship was a ragged, patched-together freighter a half a century old didn’t change that.
“Trucks are already out there, Ms. Hollande,” Frankie said, mashing the button to open the cargo doors.
“You can just call me Sandi,” she reminded him again, but the comment was lost in the grinding rattle of the ancient motors as the plastrons in the shuttle’s belly swung slowly open.
She shook her head. Frankie was an old-timer, his face lined and craggy and weathered from a life lived far enough away from the Commonwealth core systems that anti-aging treatments were unheard of. His manners were as old as his appearance, and she wondered how the hell he’d wound up working for La Sombra.
Then again, she thought ruefully, how the hell did I wind up working for them?
There was a flare of headlights that lit up the rainy darkness outside the cargo doors and the honk of a horn that signaled the crews outside were ready for the load. Frankie yanked downward on the lever set into the bulky metal gantry surrounding the cargo elevator and it began lowering with a shudder that vibrated through the shuttle’s hull and forced Sandi to catch her balance on the bulkhead.
“Damn it, Frankie!” Deruda stalked up behind the slender, long-limbed older man, his perpetual frown deepening. He’d stopped by the utility locker and was carrying a light carbine tucked under his arm and a spare pistol in the other hand. “I’ve told you a million times to wait until I make sure it’s our people before you drop the cargo!”
“Aye, Captain,” Frankie answered cheerfully. With an agility that was impressive for his age, the cargo-handler hopped out onto one of the plastic crates on the lowering freight elevator and grabbed a cable for support. “I’ll check on ‘em and if it’s not our crew, I’ll tell ‘em to go back home.”
Deruda looked like he wanted to yell at the man again, but Frankie’s Cheshire-cat grin disappeared along with the pallets of cargo and the Captain just growled deep in his throat.
“Come on, Hollande,” he snapped at Sandi, waving for her to follow as he headed for the ladder that had extended downward along with the belly doors.
“Come on where?” She wondered, following him. “Can’t they unload it by themselves?”
A cold, damp blast of rain-sodden wind hit her as she clambered down behind the rotund man, dropping to the ground with a crunch of her boots on the gravel. She fastened her flight jacket up the front, her fingers automatically tracing the blank spots where her rank and the Commonwealth Space Fleet patch used to be.
The crew of a half-dozen locals were already hand-loading the crates into the backs of the two cargo trucks they’d brought, alcohol-fueled antiques probably slapped together from spare parts. An armored car of some sort was parked facing the trucks and the interplay of the headlights threw ominous shadows against the light grey of the belly plastrons and hid the men’s faces from her view.
“We’re escorting this load into town,” Deruda answered her question, slipping a knit cap on over his unruly, red mane. “I need to have a talk with the local crew boss.”
“Why do I have to come?” Sandi objected, following him around to the passenger door of the armored car. He rounded on her with narrowed eyes.
“Because I said so,” he told her flatly. “And because there might be trouble.”
He shoved the pistol he’d taken out of the utility locker at her and she took it without thinking, automatically running through a safety check. It was loaded, a round chambered, safety on.
“You know I’m a pilot, right?” She asked him, gesturing at the pistol with her off-hand but keeping it pointed at the ground. “Not a Marine.”
“You’re whatever we need you to be,” he snapped. He jerked a thumb at the rear truck. “You’re riding back there.”
Sandi looked at the pistol, then at Deruda’s back as the man squeezed himself into the cab of the armored car, and very carefully did not point it at him. Though it made a nice fantasy... She hissed out a breath and headed back to the truck.
***
“This your first time on Asiento?”
The truck driver grinned too widely, and his demeanor was entirely too cheerful for Sandi’s mood. She grunted as the ancient vehicle lurched over another pothole, throwing her against her safety harness again. Rain beat against the cracked and stained windshield, and the wipers were barely able to keep pace with it, but even with their best efforts and three sets of headlights, she could barely see both edges of the narrow, gravel road and the ass end of the truck in front of her. For all she could tell, there could be a thousand-meter cliff or a raging ocean on either side of them.
“Yeah,” she replied. “But if I’d known it was this scenic, I’d have
dropped in ages ago.”
The driver brayed like a scalded mule at that, and she was glad the cab was dark enough that she couldn’t see his teeth.
“Funny and pretty!” He enthused, pounding a palm against the faded plastic of the dashboard. “Cap’n Deruda ain’t never brought a female pilot with him before!”
“They do have females here, right?” She asked dubiously. “I mean, you’ve talked to one before?” She was beginning to think she might need that gun.
“Honestly,” he lamented, “the pickings in Hasiera are pretty slim. The locals don’t much care for any of the La Sombra crew, and the prostitutes are dead ugly.” He smiled again, determined to be positive. “I’m Marcus,” he introduced himself.
“Is Hasiera the town we’re heading to?” She asked, avoiding giving him her name.
“Oh, yeah, it’s the main settlement here.” He shrugged. “Really the only place worth calling a city on this whole shithole of a planet, and it’s only got like ten thousand people.”
“What the hell does Abdullah want with this place?” She wondered.
“I ain’t never met Mr. Abdullah,” Marcus admitted, “but he’s gotta’ be a pretty smart guy to run La Sombra. I guess habitable planets aren’t that common out here in the Worlds. Maybe he’s thinking long-term.”
She gave a noncommittal shrug, then leaned forward and squinted at lights in the distance, barely visible through the sheets of rain.
“Is that the town?”
“Yeah, that’s it,” Marcus confirmed. “You can’t really see it, but we’re already passing by some of the houses near the outskirts. Lots of people don’t want to live by the extraction works ‘cause of the smell.”
“Extraction works?” Sandi repeated.
“Where they recycle old electronics,” he explained. “Not like they can import new stuff out here all the time, so they use a chemical bath to extract the biochips from old processing systems here and sell them to us.” He shrugged. “To the other cartels too, I guess.”
“They do that on a habitable planet?” Sandi asked, horrified. “In the middle of town?”
“I guess it’d be too expensive to do it in orbit,” Marcus reasoned. “And the closer it is to town, the closer it is to the landing field.”
Sandi shook her head, wanting more than anything to be done with this and back on the shuttle. Ahead, she could begin to make out the shapes of buildings under the misty halos of streetlights. The road curved just before it ran into the edge of the city proper, and she spotted the armored car at the head of their column.
She was looking straight at it when it exploded.
“Jesus!” The word burst from her lips of its own accord as she saw a fireball erupt from beneath the car’s front wheels and flip it over in mid-air.
Deruda’s vehicle landed on its roof and skidded off the road, wreathed in steam and gouts of black smoke. The sound and shockwave hit a half-second after, and she felt the truck skidding as Marcus tried to keep it on the road.
“Shit!” He cursed, the word like a prayer as he wrestled with the wheel.
Sandi braced herself against the dash and gritted her teeth, expecting the truck to run off the road and wind up on its side, but Marcus was a better driver than he was a ladies’ man, and he managed to bring the big vehicle to a halt. The lead truck driver apparently wasn’t quite as talented; he fishtailed and lost control and the front wheels of the cab bottomed out in the ditch on the right-hand side of the road.
Marcus desperately shifted into reverse and jammed the accelerator to the floor, throwing Sandi forward as the truck shot backwards blindly into the darkness.
“What the hell are you doing?” She yelled, bracing herself. “We’re going to wreck!”
“That was a bomb!” Marcus snapped, eyes flickering from the backup camera to the side-view mirrors. “It’s those Rif fuckers!”
“Who?”
The word was barely out of her mouth when something bright and loud and gut-wrenchingly hard slammed low into the driver’s side of the vehicle. A shrill whine filled Sandi’s ears and a fog settled over her perceptions; the truck seemed to spin in slow motion, the view through the splintered windshield a kaleidoscope of headlights flashing across rain and mud and the vague, shadowy figures standing out in the field by the road. Time caught up with both her and the vehicle when the left rear wheels caught the ditch and suddenly they were tumbling sideways off the road.
Pain crashed into Sandi’s back and chest and shoulders as the safety harness bit into her, and she gritted her teeth, flinching involuntarily as the truck groaned and shifted and threatened to roll over onto its roof before it settled onto the driver’s side with one final lurch. Blackness crawled in through the cracked plastic of the windows and into her brain, and she felt consciousness slipping away.
“Sandi!”
Whose voice was that? It sounded so far away…
“Sandi, Goddammit, wake up!”
“Ash?” She murmured, squeezing her eyes shut and shaking her head to clear it.
“We got to get out of here!”
It was Marcus. She was in the truck, on Asiento, with Marcus. She could see his ugly, scarred face fitfully by the sparking, shorting lights of the dashboard console display, could see the glare of flashlights outside and hear the hiss-crack of gunshots from somewhere far ahead of them.
“Yeah, okay,” she acknowledged.
She yanked at the door handle, pushing it outward and letting it swing open with a hollow crash of metal on metal. Grabbing the edge of the frame, she pulled the quick-release on her safety restraint and caught herself before she could fall on top of Marcus.
“Come on,” she urged, holding a hand down to him. “I’ll help you up.”
“Damn release is jammed,” he told her, jerking the strap demonstratively. “I can’t get out. You got a knife?”
“Back on the shuttle,” she admitted, sticking her head out the window and trying to get a look around.
There were pin-point flashes of red streaking across between the fields beside the road and the armored car a hundred meters ahead of them, and the beams of hand-held lights bouncing flickering this way and that, but she couldn’t see if there was anyone close to their truck.
“I got one,” Marcus said, straining as he tried to get a hand into a hip pocket blocked by his seat restraints. “If I can just…”
Something punched through the windshield, trailed by the whoosh of miniature rocket engines and the crack of warheads breaking the sound barrier, and Marcus thrashed for a moment, hands going to his chest. Then he slumped, his eyes still open, staring into eternity.
Sandi jerked away from him, giving into the desperation she’d been fighting to contain and levering herself out of the passenger’s side door with a grunt of exertion, then throwing herself down into the darkness. She landed awkwardly on her side, but the muddy ground gave way underneath her, cushioning the fall, and she clawed at the yielding, paste-like mud to pull herself to her feet.
She ran blindly, terrified of heading for anywhere with light, terrified of being spotted, sure that she was only seconds from feeling a slug in her back that would end everything. The mud sucked at her ankle-high boots, threatening to pull them right off her feet with each step, and she could feel it squishing inside the shoes as well, thick and disgusting. The firefight echoed back and forth, up and down the line of wrecked vehicles, and each crack of rolling thunder spurred a flash of memory.
She was back in a humid, steaming jungle, a Tahni outpost in some unnamed system, with their troops spread out through the game trails, their flyers buzzing overhead, hunting for her while she searched desperately for Ash. One of them loomed ahead of her in the darkness, faceless behind the mirrored visor of his armored helmet…
The gun was in her hand. It had been in her jacket pocket and she didn’t remember pulling it out, certainly didn’t remember switching off the safety or aiming, but her right forefinger retained the physical sensation of tou
ching the trigger, of jamming it down. She’d fired three rounds before she managed to let go of the trigger pad, each kicking free of the barrel with a hissing whoosh of igniting mini-rocket motors. The explosive warheads punched into the chest of the dark, menacing figure who’d stepped into her path and he pitched backwards with a gurgling scream.
It was a man, not a Tahni, she realized somewhere beneath the glaze of panic that had settled over her perceptions. It was one of the attackers, one of the Rif, whoever they were. She’d just killed a man. She’d killed hundreds, maybe thousands of Tahni during the war, but never a human, not till now.
She was too scared to care. She kept running, sidestepping the body, not knowing where she was going or what corner could offer safety. She didn’t see the small cottage until she’d nearly stumbled over its front stoop, catching herself against a support post of the overhanging porch. She found the door by touch, grabbing the handle and yanking at it; it was locked. She put the barrel of the pistol over where she thought the bolt went into the jamb and pulled the trigger, holding a hand across her face.
Light flared and she felt a spray of wooden splinters against her jacket that didn’t quite penetrate, and then the door was swinging open with a creak of poorly-fitted, hand-made hinges. She banged into it with her shoulder, barging inside and then pushing it shut behind her and sinking to the floor with her back against the thick, rough wood of the door.
There was a light on in another room and it illuminated the interior enough for her to see that she was in a small mud room, sitting on a woven matt next to neatly aligned rows of shoes…and some of them were awfully small.
“Shit,” she breathed, realizing that, in her panic, she’d just broken into someone’s home.
A flashlight shone from somewhere down the short entrance hall, not really that bright but glaring and blinding compared to the utter darkness outside, and she held a hand over her eyes to shield them from it.
“Get the hell out of here!” A man’s voice shouted, gruff and gravelly. “Get out now or I’ll shoot you!”
