Prodigal (Tales of the Acheron Book 1)

by Rick Partlow

  He saw out of the corner of his eyes that the guards were falling back from them as he and Sandi approached the group, probably heading back out to their posts in front of the hangar. He didn’t envy them spending the night outside in a climate like this, even with the balaclavas and scarves and hoods that turned them into faceless snowmen.

  “And here they are,” Brunner was saying cheerfully, “with that wonderful military punctuality.”

  “You can’t afford a heater for this place?” Sandi remarked caustically, hands stuffed in her jacket pockets.

  “It’s easier to deal with when you grow up here,” Brunner allowed. She was wearing warm clothing, of course, but her head was bare and she didn’t seem affected by the cold.

  “I grew up in a climate-conditioned apartment block,” Ash commented, “and I didn’t see the sky till I was eight years old. This shit’s cold.”

  Brunner laughed at that, and so did a couple of the people gathered there with her, but with less bonhomie to their cackles and more schadenfreude. There were five of them with her, and their common defining characteristic, besides various levels of insulated clothing, seemed to be size. There wasn’t a one of them that didn’t look like they outweighed him by at least ten kilos, and he wasn’t a small man. The one in front, the one who’d laughed the loudest, was about Ash’s height but thicker through the chest---and the gut. His shoulders were massive, his biceps were about as big around as Ash’s calves, and he had one of those faces that wasn’t intrinsically ugly but was made unpleasant by the character visible through it. His eyes were narrowed, as if squinting suspiciously was his default expression and he wore his light brown hair cut to the shoulder.

  “Damn Fleet pussies,” he scoffed, his voice surprisingly high-pitched for a man his size. “If one of you ever got into a fight without a ship around you, you’d shit your pants.”

  Ash glanced over at Sandi, a grin tugging at the side of his face. She’d gone down to that Tahni colony and hauled his sorry ass out, despite the fact that she’d never fired a gun before except at a Fleet practice range.

  “This is Javin Donnelly,” Brunner told them. “Formerly of the Recon Marines, and now the leader of the ground team for this job. Once boots hit the ground, he’s in command.”

  “Understood,” Ash said. Sandi didn’t say anything, eyeing the big man dubiously. “What is the mission, Ms. Brunner?”

  “One of our inside sources tells us that La Sombra schedules deliveries of military-grade proton cannons to their buyers on a rotating basis at a series of regularly shifting locations,” the woman explained. “We haven’t been able to take advantage of it because we didn’t want to risk the few ships we had on what might turn out to be a trap.”

  Brutally honest of her, Ash thought drily. But then, she warned us.

  What did that say about the others, though? Either they were suicidal or she had them over a barrel and they didn’t dare say no.

  “And we can pull off a raid like that with just one ship and seven people?” Sandi wondered.

  Ash let his eyes drift to the others, only half-listening to Brunner’s reply. The one next to Donnelly was a shorter, stockier man with the squat, compact build of someone born and raised in higher-than-standard gravity, which meant he was probably pretty strong. He had hair cut short enough that Ash couldn’t tell if it was brown or blond, and a sad, hang-dog face, his mouth turned down in a perpetual grimace.

  Beside him was a woman, her hood pulled up, shadowing half her face. She was very thickly-built for a female, bigger than Brunner even, with deep lines running down beside her small mouth and a wisp of silver hair hanging down over her brow. Then she shifted her stance slightly and the hood fell back a few centimeters. The left half of her face was metal, bare and silvery, without even the attempt at synthskin to disguise it, the eye on that side a glowing red prosthetic.

  Ash fought back a grunt of surprise. He knew there were people in the Pirate Worlds who used bionic prosthetics because of the lack of medical facilities out here, but to see it was another thing entirely. He wondered what had happened to her.

  He let his eyes wander away from her, trying not to stare. The next one in the group was a normal-looking cartel tough, dangerous-looking with a goatee shaved into twin forks and a line of scar tissue running down from his right eye to his chin and skin the color of aged amber.

  The last one…the last one was a Tahni.

  He knew he shouldn’t have been shocked; since the war and the death of their god-emperor, a lot of disaffected Tahni who’d served in their military had made their way out to settle on human-controlled colonies, and some had obviously pushed out further, to the Pirate Worlds. But he hadn’t seen a Tahni face-to-face since he’d worked occupation duty on one of their captured bases years ago, and the sight of the ridged brows shadowing black, sunken eyes, the flattened nose and ears and the shovel-like jaws froze him in his tracks. The Tahni was staring right back at him, and he realized he had no idea what the expression on the alien’s face signified.

  “Ash?” Sandi was saying his name, and he realized that it wasn’t the first time she’d spoken to him.

  “Uh, yeah, sorry,” he stuttered, forcing himself to look away from the Tahni. “What?”

  “I said,” Brunner told him, sounding annoyed at having to repeat herself, “I’m having weapons and armor loaded into your cutter, along with food supplies to accommodate the extra passengers. You’ll be stocked and ready to launch in less than an hour. The times and places are all on this.”

  She handed him a crystalline data spike, dropping it into his hand. It felt cold against his skin and he slipped it into his jacket pocket.

  “You’re sure riding a lot on a couple of drifters you didn’t know until a few hours ago, ma’am,” Donnelly commented, arms crossed over his chest, frowning at Ash in obvious disapproval.

  “On the contrary, Mr. Donnelly,” Brunner replied sharply, not bothering to look at him. “Given that you’re a mindlessly violent, low-life piece of shit rapist who can’t seem to keep it in his pants; that Ms. Fontenot here,” she was looking at the cyborg, “has managed to get into death duels with three separate suppliers for Chambre Verte’s pleasure girls; that Tomlinson,” this time she was glaring at the heavy-worlder, “won’t cease proselytizing anyone unfortunate enough to come within earshot; and that Kan-Ten,” the Tahni this time, “refuses to eat unless he can spend three hours keening for his ancestors afterwards, I don’t feel as if I’m risking much at all.”

  She turned on him then, face as hard as a naked atomic pile. “In fact, it’s a plus for me whether you live or die.” With a dismissive snort, she turned away, face transforming into a pleasant smile at Ash. “Bring me those proton cannons, and you both have a place here. If you don’t get them, don’t bother coming back.”

  She stalked out the hangar doors, her guards falling into place behind her. Ash whistled softly, watching her go, then turned back to the others. He thought Donnelly looked angry at the slight, but it was hard to tell, since the man had looked angry from the beginning. The others didn’t seem bothered by what Brunner had said, or honestly by much of anything at all, except the heavy-worlder, who seemed bothered by everything.

  “What about you?” Ash said to the one with the scar, the only one who Brunner hadn’t mentioned. “What did you do to get on her shit list?”

  “I volunteered,” the man said, his voice heavily accented with what Ash thought might have been Russian. He shrugged heavily and waved a hand around at the hangar. “It’s boring here. We never do anything.”

  “Shut up, Yuri,” Donnelly snapped. “If any of you need anything, go get it now and get on board the boat. Anyone’s late, you get left behind and you can answer to Brunner.”

  The former Marine pulled the hood up on his jacket and walked out into the frigid night, and the others headed out behind him, scattering to attend to whatever unfinished business they had. Ash let out a long, slow breath, staring after them.


  “I’d say it’s about even odds,” Sandi mused.

  “What?” Ash asked her. “Whether we pull it off?”

  She snorted.

  “No, whether La Sombra kills us or those idiots do.”

  Chapter Eight

  “Why the hell did they pick this shithole?” Sandi muttered, eyeing the ice-ball moon balefully on the cockpit display.

  “They had to have it someplace out of the Pirate Worlds,” Ash guessed, “so none of the other cartels would hear about it, but far enough away from the core colonies that the Patrol wouldn’t stumble across it either.”

  “Yeah, but why not just do it out in free space somewhere?” She insisted. “Or on an airless rock no one wants? This place has just enough of a habitable zone that someone might just be squatting there.” She indicated the tiny slivers of green and blue scattered around the moon’s equator. The moon and the gas giant it orbited were close to the outer edge of the system’s “Goldilocks” zone, where habitable worlds were possible.

  “You’re a pilot,” a deep, but unmistakably female voice said from behind her. Sandi looked around, startled, and saw Fontenot, the cyborg, anchored just inside the cockpit, her natural and bionic eyes both fixed on the image in the display screen. She hadn’t been there a moment ago, when they’d Transitioned into the system. “You know how hard it is to have a rendezvous in deep space. You have to use a broadband beacon, right?”

  “Yeah,” she admitted, nodding ruefully. “And I guess they wouldn’t want to advertise their position. But why not an airless moon?”

  “These are Pirate World cartels selling to outlaw raiders,” Fontenot pointed out. “They’re both paranoid as all hell, and they want to see each other face-to-face. Anyone can be anyone inside a space suit.”

  Sandi saw Ash trying not to stare at the woman, and he knew she made him uncomfortable, almost as uncomfortable as the Tahni did. Dressed in ship-wear shorts and a T-shirt, her bionics were blatantly obvious; her arms and legs were naked, silver metal, and Sandi knew she had to have spinal reinforcements to handle that sort of leverage, and an implanted isotope reactor to power it.

  “You seem to know the Pirate Worlds pretty well,” Ash said. “How long have you been out there?”

  “I was there first,” Fontenot answered curtly. Then she pushed off, floating back out of the cockpit in the microgravity.

  Sandi shook her head, but Ash just kept staring after her, curiosity obvious on his face.

  Sandi leaned forward and hit the ship’s intercom.

  “Everyone strap in,” she said. “We’re heading in, one-g acceleration.”

  “Feels weird just burning in right out in the open,” Ash said, his eyes glazing over slightly as he merged into the interface.

  The fusion drive ignited and Sandi felt her Earth-normal weight pushing her back into her seat. The view from the exterior cameras began to shift as they burned in towards the moon, trying to match its orbit around the sullen yellow and white face of the gas giant.

  “We’re supposed to be early,” she reminded him. “If either side of this deal is already here, then we’re screwed.” She stewed in silence as they descended into the moon’s atmosphere, not wanting to distract him from the interface; but this was one of the few chances they’d had to talk privately, and eventually, she blurted out the question she’d been holding. “Did you find out anything about any of those jokers during the trip?”

  They’d been in Transition space for over a hundred hours, but the closest she’d come to a conversation with any of the ground force was when Donnelly had complimented her on her ass.

  “Oh yeah,” Ash said, the corner of his mouth curling sarcastically. “I found out that Fontenot’s first name is ‘Korri,’ that Ezra Tomlinson’s from Canaan and used to be part of some weird, pacifist cult there before he was excommunicated for killing a man in a fight, that Donnelly got kicked out of the Marines before the end of the war for attempted sexual assault of a female officer, and that the Tahni version of snoring sounds like a hopper fan with bad bearings.”

  Sandi chuckled.

  “With that sort of deductive ability, you should have been in Fleet Intelligence.”

  “Only reason I got even that far was that Yuri got talkative over a liquid lunch a couple days ago. Then Donnelly came out of the cabin and he shut up immediately.” Ash shrugged. “They’re all scared of him, I think…except maybe Fontenot, who doesn’t seem scared of anything.”

  “That’s it,” Sandi interrupted, pointing at one of the larger habitable zones as the Acheron traversed the moon’s equator.

  All of the “green zones” were clustered around volcanic hot springs, and this one was huge, a ragged valley maybe twenty kilometers across, ringed by snow-covered hills, with a buckshot pattern of thermal pools at the center, as large as lakes. Steam poured off the pools, visible from kilometers up in the warm, twilight glow of the gas giant. The magnification wasn’t great enough in the display for her to see the details of whatever sort of flora was growing there, so she wasn’t sure if the place had been seeded with Terran grass and plants and trees at some point, or if it had its own ecology evolved from whatever green slime had grown in the volcanic vents.

  “The map on the dataspike said the meet-up’s supposed to be in the clearing next to the largest of the thermal springs,” she said, tracing a line on the control panel touch pad that was represented as a red circle on the display around the perimeter of the clearing.

  “There’s a canyon there,” he said, and a red star appeared on the map at a gap in the hills; she knew Ash had drawn it there with a mental command over the interface jacks. It looked to be about five kilometers from the clearing. “That’d be a good place to settle in and wait.”

  He withdrew his attention into the jacks and she fell silent and let him concentrate on piloting the ship. The fusion drive cut off as the atmosphere thickened, and its thunderous roar was replaced by the whine of the turbojets, sucking in air and running it through the reactor to heat it to supersonic speeds before expelling it out the variable thrust nozzles. She knew the cutter wasn’t exactly graceful in an atmosphere, working more on the principle that you could make a brick fly if you had enough power to waste, and she sure as hell didn’t want to distract him.

  He brought the cutter around in an arc that traced the perimeter of the clearing, and she longed for the view he was getting over the interface; it was like being the ship rather than just piloting it, and made the camera display she was watching on the main screens seem anemic by comparison. She saw the jagged, snow-covered hills passing only a few hundred meters beneath them, slower and slower as he cut back on the throttle, and then the roar of the belly jets vibrated through the ship as he brought her to a hover.

  Sandi scrolled the display screen to a view from the belly cameras and saw the canyon rising up beneath them, nothing left of the river that had cut it in eons past but a flattened, rocky floor. Dust and steam began to obscure the view as the belly jets kicked up a cloud beneath them and she could feel the heat waves reflecting off the canyon floor and walls buffeting the ship. The whine of the turbines began to change in tone as Ash throttled her back and the cutter settled down gently on its landing treads, clouds of steam billowing out from beneath it as snow melted to water and then boiled away.

  Sandi pulled the quick release on her safety harness, powering her acceleration couch around while Ash disconnected from the interface cables, letting them retract into the reel built into the pilot’s console. She’d just pushed herself up and was heading out of the cockpit when Donnelly blocked her way, already dressed in thick, heavy body armor, a helmet tucked under his arm and a carbine slung over his shoulder.

  “Oh, hey,” Sandi said, taking an uncomfortable step back. “I was just coming back to brief you guys and…”

  “I want one of you to come with us,” the big man cut in, something darkly suspicious behind his eyes.

  Sandi blinked.

  “What?” She demanded.
“Why?”

  “The deal was,” Ash said, rising from his seat, “we land you here, you go take out the raider and cartel crews, then we fly in and load it up. No one said anything about either of us playing soldier with you.”

  “Yeah, well, the deal’s changed,” Donnelly declared flatly, the fingers of his right hand brushing against the butt of the handgun holstered across his chest. “It occurs to me that there’s nothing stopping you two from taking off if you sniff trouble, leaving our asses out there hanging in the wind. That doesn’t sit right with me, ya’ know what I mean?”

  “Forget it,” Sandi snarled at him, perhaps trying just a bit too hard to prove she wasn’t intimidated. “Your paranoia isn’t enough reason for either of us to try doing a job we’re not qualified for. We’re pilots, not foot-soldiers.”

  “You didn’t catch what Brunner said?” Donnelly asked her, a hint of a quite nasty smile playing across his face. “Once we’re on the ground, I call the shots. This is the shot I’m calling. And since I ain’t got a job back on Tangier unless we pull this off, you will do as I say.” He shook his head. “You don’t want to see what happens when I ain’t got nothing to lose.”

  Sandi realized she wasn’t wearing her gun. It was back in the utility locker; she’d foolishly thought she wouldn’t need it on the ship. Not that she could have out-drawn the man even if she had it. Despite having fired a few shots in anger in her life, she hadn’t been lying about not being a foot-soldier, and she was certainly no sort of gunfighter.

  “Fine,” she ground out. “I’ll get geared up.”

  “No,” Ash said quickly, stepping in front of her. “I’m going.”

  She scowled at him, half-convinced he was trying to be protective and half-convinced he didn’t think she could handle it, and resenting either possibility.