Prodigal (Tales of the Acheron Book 1)

by Rick Partlow

  “Why?”

  “You always were a better pilot,” he admitted with a shrug. “If we need support, I want you behind the controls.”

  “Damn it, Ash,” she sighed. He’d given the one answer she didn’t have an argument to counter. She rubbed a hand over her face, knowing she couldn’t stop him from doing this and wanting to try anyway. “What are you thinking? You’ve only ever shot anyone with a proton cannon from a missile cutter.”

  He nodded agreement. “I know.” The look on his face was fatalistic. “But there’s a first time for everything.”

  ***

  Ash wished like hell he hadn’t let Donnelly talk him into wearing the helmet; it shrank his field of view to the narrow strip of its faceplate and killed his peripheral vision, which made him even more claustrophobic and paranoid than he would have already. The Heads-Up Display projected across the faceplate didn’t ameliorate the situation either, since he wasn’t practiced with it and didn’t really know how to read it. It distracted him even more from his actual surroundings and he wished he could turn it off, but he couldn’t figure out the armor’s wrist-mounted control plate…hell, he could barely see it, and every time he tried to mess with it, he wound up nearly losing his grip on the gun.

  The carbine felt heavy and awkward and cheaply-made. It fired unguided rocket rounds with theoretically armor-piercing warheads and it had been obsolete in military and law enforcement since before the invention of the Transition drive. It had undoubtedly been fabricated from decades-old design specs in some ramshackle warehouse in Tangier and then passed around for the last ten years, and he had even less confidence in its reliability and accuracy than he did in his own ability to hit anything with it.

  He stumbled again and nearly went down, splashing up to his shin in the sodden marsh-grass. It looked like something that might have been imported from Earth, much like the stunted trees he could see growing around the distant hot springs, and he wondered who might have bothered to transplant them on a remote, God-forsaken ice-ball like this. Had there been some aborted attempt at a colony here, decades ago? It was hard to keep track and he thought it must be a nightmare for biological researchers trying to maintain a record of alien ecosystems.

  All he knew was that his feet were going numb from splashing through the near-freezing water, despite the insulated boots, and he constantly felt like he wasn’t getting enough air from the helmet filters and he didn’t know how the hell anyone was supposed to fight in all this shit.

  “The trees,” he heard a voice over his helmet radio, and he was sure there was a readout that told him who had spoken, but he couldn’t find it. “We should set up in the trees by that thermal. The heat and gasses will screw up their sensors.”

  That was Fontenot, he realized, by sound rather than the transponder signal. She was ahead of him and off to the right, if he remembered their order correctly. It was hard to tell by size, since she and Tomlinson were about the same height, and her bionics made her nearly as bulky as the Canaanite. The only one he could really pick out of the crew was Kan-Ten, since he was a few centimeters taller than any of the humans and walked with a distinctive gait on legs subtly different in the joints.

  “I don’t know,” a voice that might have been Tomlinson’s commented, “that’s awfully far from where the exchange is supposed to happen. We’d have to cover about a hundred meters of open ground.”

  “You’d rather stand out in the open so they can shoot you from orbit?” There was no mistaking that accent: it was Yuri.

  “Head for the trees,” Donnelly ordered in a tone that would brook no argument. Kan-Ten hadn’t commented, either not caring or not understanding enough English to follow the conversation, and Ash honestly couldn’t spare the breath or the attention to talk.

  I thought I was in good shape, he mused. I guess I’m not in infantry shape. He shook his head slightly, knowing no one could see it. Why the hell did I volunteer for this again?

  “Fontenot,” Donnelly growled, “take the Fleet pussy and the alien and head off to the right side of that stand of trees.” Ash guessed he was pointing, but it was out of his line of sight, so he couldn’t see where. “I’ve got the left with Tomlinson and Yuri.”

  The cyborg didn’t respond to their squadleader but he saw her and Kan-Ten beginning to veer off to his right and he followed them about ten paces back. He’d noticed that Fontenot didn’t like talking to Donnelly, and he didn’t blame her, not if what he’d been told about the man was accurate. He’d seen the type before, and he had a feeling that Donnelly’s background probably wasn’t too different from his own, except that Ash had volunteered for the military where Donnelly had probably been forced into it to avoid a lengthy stay in the reformery.

  He’d seen the way Donnelly looked at Sandi, and if he was being honest with himself, that was why he’d volunteered in place of her. It was stupid and parochial and presumptive, but what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

  The trees looked even more Earth-like close-up, and he thought they reminded him of wizened, stunted versions of the poplars and elms and birch he’d seen on other colony worlds. The ground was higher and dryer around them, at least, up on a slight rise from the steaming, bubbling mineral blue of the lake-size thermal pools.

  “Here,” Fontenot told him, pointing at a spot between a cluster of four of the trees, behind a growth of scrub grass.

  He took a knee, feeling the cold solidity of the ground beneath him, then squirmed down onto his belly.

  “Your field of fire,” she told him, “is as far as you can swing the barrel between the trunks of these two trees.” She tapped the two front tree trunks with the barrel of her own carbine, a distance of about a meter that described an arc of around ninety degrees. “The sight is rudimentary, but it should work fine. Caress the firing stud like a lover, don’t push it like a button. Take the safety off when you see the enemy, but don’t fire until someone else shoots first.”

  “Aye aye, ma’am,” he said, wiggling into what felt like a comfortable firing position, trying to snug the stock of the carbine into his shoulder. It seemed unnatural against his armored vest.

  “If I say go,” she went on, brusquely professional, “get yourself at about my ten o’clock and follow me at a distance of ten meters, and keep your fucking weapon pointed away from me. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  She moved on, and Ash felt somewhat comforted at the thought that at least one person seemed to know what they were doing. It shouldn’t be that hard, he told himself. Between the raiders and the La Sombra cargo shuttle, there shouldn’t be more than a handful of opposition, and neither trusted the other enough to allow them to be wearing armor or carrying heavy weapons. All they had to do was wait until the cargo was unloaded, then open up on them. Both sides would probably run like hell and they could just load the cannons on the Acheron and scoot.

  “I’m picking up incoming ships.” That was Sandi, back on the cutter. “ETA ten minutes.”

  “Radio silence until I say otherwise,” Donnelly snapped.

  Which made sense; you didn’t want to risk any of the opposition picking up the transmission and figuring out there was someone else here. Even he knew that much. But alone inside his borrowed helmet, he wished for someone to talk to.

  He’d expected some sort of aiming reticle inside the helmet, but the carbine’s sights weren’t that sophisticated, apparently. The reticle was projected inside a self-contained metal tube mounted on a rail atop the weapon’s receiver and it activated automatically when the webbing of his right hand touched the gun’s pistol grip. It was a red circle with a pair of crosshairs centered inside of it, and when he kept both eyes open, it seemed to float over the aimpoint. As Fontenot had said, it was rudimentary, but it should work.

  Ten minutes, Sandi had said, but it felt like ten hours lying in the freezing mud, listening to the sound of his own breath before he finally picked up the distant scream of turbojets. He was trying to figure out which
direction they were coming from, and had just decided it was from his right when he realized that it was coming from both directions. In the middle distance, he could see the utilitarian lines of a cargo shuttle off to his left, lit up with a golden glow by the system primary as it peeked out around the edge of the gas giant. Off to the right, emerging from the perpetual twilight that never quite got to night thanks to the reflection off the giant planet, was something farther away and a bit larger, a dull grey smudge.

  The shuttle drew his attention, coming in fast and sluggish, powering its way down too quickly on columns of shimmering steam from the belly jets. The pilot was reckless, probably not military trained he guessed, or else trained so long ago the lessons had been unlearned. The boat disappeared into a cloud of roiling steam and debris as the jets vaporized the groundwater and set fire to the grass, and then the steam began to clear as the turbines whined to a halt and the bird sank in on its landing gear suspension, nearly bottoming out before it rebounded upwards and settled in.

  The dual bay doors began to open with a hum of poorly-maintained servos that he could hear nearly a hundred meters away, and his attention was so wrapped up in the cargo elevator descending that he almost missed the other ship landing. It was, he saw with a bit of a start, a missile cutter not dissimilar to the Acheron in design. It must have been pirated, he thought, or else bought on the black market, because he knew no raiders or cartel buyers could have passed the background checks and screenings he’d gone through to buy his boat, not even with faked identification files.

  However they’d obtained it, whoever they were, they brought the boat down lightly and lithely only fifty meters away from the shuttle, and by the time the billowing cloud of smoke and water vapor and particulates fell away, he couldn’t even see a sway in the delta shaped fuselage or a motion on the landing suspension. The belly ramp lowered and, as it did, he saw three figures step out from the shuttle’s cargo elevator. Their clothes were utilitarian work wear under their jackets, tough and serviceable and dark enough to hide stains they’d never attempt to clean. All three had sidearms but no long guns, just as Donnelly had predicted, but he couldn’t tell anything else about them from this distance; they were bundled up in hats and scarves.

  The two men who tromped down the ramp of the cutter were less ragged than the shuttle crew, dressed in matching khaki fatigues and brown jackets; Ash remembered the uniforms Jordi had made his security wear and made the connection that these two must be La Sombra, which made the shuttle crew the raiders. That made sense, but it didn’t help him to decide which ones he should be more worried about.

  The cutter pilots shouted something to the shuttle crew, something they were too far away for Ash to hear, and one of the raiders waved in return. Someone else came down the cutter’s ramp behind the first two, hauling a cargo jack affixed to a wheeled pallet as wide as the ramp and nearly as long as the cutter’s cargo bay, what used to be the missile batteries. A brown tarp covered the load, but it seemed big enough for the pair of proton cannons they were expecting.

  Ash felt his mouth set in a grim line and he moved the carbine’s barrel, setting the aiming reticle over the chest of one of the raiders. He didn’t even consider whether he had the capability to pull the trigger; there was no difference philosophically from shooting one man with one bullet and blowing apart a Tahni destroyer with a fusion warhead and killing two hundred sentient humanoids. It was just less efficient.

  That was all a load of horseshit, of course, but he wasn’t going to think about it, because thinking about it would make it even harder. He could do it if he didn’t think about it.

  He nearly jumped out of his skin when the first shot went off, a whoosh-crack of a mini-rocket igniting and breaking the sound barrier and then smacking into the chest of one of the shuttle crew with a flare of an armor-piercing warhead turning to plasma. The crewman spun around, keeling sideways and, before he hit the ground, Ash’s finger jerked against the trigger pad reflexively, ignoring Fontenot’s advice.

  There was a gentle thump against his shoulder from the separator charge kicking the round free of the barrel, then the winking red flash of a rocket motor streaking across the distance between the tree line and the cutter’s ramp. He’d jerked the trigger and missed, and he’d almost known he would; the round impacted one of the ramp stanchions in a spray of vaporized metal, and by then the remaining pair from the shuttle were throwing themselves to the ground while the cutter crew ducked behind the pallet.

  “Go! Go! Go!” He couldn’t tell if it was Donnelly or Fontenot yelling, or maybe it was both at once.

  He didn’t remember deciding to move, but suddenly he was scrambling out of his position between the trees, running, boots splashing wildly through the mud, and he could see Fontenot off to his right. He put himself ten meters away from her and kept his rifle barrel pointed outward, and it seemed like everything was going exactly to their plan.

  That was when he noticed the armored troops dropping down out of the shuttle’s cargo elevator: four, six, shit! A dozen of them! They were carrying assault guns, drum-fed and gimbal-mounted, and Ash dove to the ground as dozens of rounds began to snap through the air where he’d been a moment before. He hit hard, the breath going out of him, and as his head turned to the right he saw the others going down as well, and couldn’t tell whether they were hit or just hugging the dirt to get out of the line of fire.

  There was a confused and unintelligible squawk of cross-talk on his helmet radio, but he ignored it, pawing desperately at the control on his left wrist to switch frequencies.

  “Sandi!” He yelled into his helmet mic. “Sandi, get the boat in the air!”

  He yanked his carbine around and began pouring fire back at the oncoming troops, not knowing if he was hitting anything, just pointing in their general direction and holding down the trigger.

  “It’s a trap!”

  Chapter Nine

  It had been years since Sandi had flown a missile cutter, and there was something qualitatively different about it from the landers and cargo shuttles she’d piloted working for La Sombra. Something feral and unfettered growled deep inside the heart of the Acheron as it ripped through the camouflage net they’d strung up over the canyon, leaving it shredded and smoking where the belly jets had touched it. The boat pounced into the sky, turbojets screaming, and Sandi felt the machine’s power burning inside her, the fusion reactor her own beating heart.

  Information flowed over her, camera views and lidar and radar and thermal all building a picture around her, a three-dimensional landscape of knowledge. A trap, Ash had said, and she could see it unfolding a microsecond at a time, slowed down enough by the interface that it seemed frozen in place. Troops were pouring out of the cargo shuttle, armored and armed well enough that she knew they weren’t raiders and this wasn’t some double-cross that they’d just happened to interrupt. The La Sombra cutter’s turbines were blowing up dust-devils and the ramp was beginning to close with the cargo jack and pallet still on it, the crew running back up inside her. Ash needed her help and she had to get over there.

  But there was that whole part where it was a trap.

  There were suddenly three bogies on her sensor display, burning over the horizon at supersonic speeds, coming straight for her. The net was closing, and she felt an overwhelming urge to run, to get clear of it before it snared her. She might have done it, if it had just been Donnelly and his people, but Ash was out there… and she suddenly had the thought that maybe the piece of shit rapist Donnelly wasn’t stupid, for all his being a piece of shit rapist.

  The bogies had the signature of shuttles, and she had to assume they were at least armed landers if not assault shuttles, but they were thirty seconds out and the cutter and the troops were right here. She had to take a little pressure off of Ash. Sandi banked off to the left, the cloud of steam and debris falling away beneath the Acheron as she rose, and then fed power to the forward jets. The cutter rocketed forward out of the gap in the hills
, in towards the clearing; through the filter of the interface, she had a vague, distant sensation of being pushed into her acceleration couch.

  She targeted the cargo shuttle and squeezed a mental trigger, hoping Ash was far enough away from it. A scintillating spear of man-made lightning connected the two spacecraft for the space of an eyeblink and then the shuttle was gone, replaced by a globe of white fire that enveloped everything for a hundred meters on a side, transforming into a dark mushroom of smoke and debris. She felt the turbulence ram into the Acheron and she powered through it with a burst from the belly jets, trying to watch the other cutter.

  It had been in the process of lifting off when she’d hit the cargo boat, and it had just cleared the blast area; she could see it jerking back and forth in a desperate bid for stability a kilometer away and only a hundred meters off the deck. Sandi tried to slew the Acheron around, tried to bring the proton cannon to bear on it before it could target her, but time had run out and she could feel more than see the shuttles closing in. A thermal bloom scalded her through the interface and she knew that one of the shuttles had opened up with a Gatling laser, scoring a graze across the upper hull.

  Instincts took over, from training and experience years old and wetware that would never go away, and the cutter moved like her own body twisting away from the pain, weaving and dodging like a boxer. Fusion-fueled turbojets screamed with raw power; the hull groaned with the strain, and acceleration slammed Sandi against her safety harness. She tried to keep her concentration inside the interface, tried not to let the sensations of her physical body distract her from her mechanical one. That was harder, a discipline not an instinct, and one she hadn’t practiced recently.

  She took the ship into a steep climb, spinning her in a barrel roll to minimize her surface area to opposition weapons, putting the Acheron in-between the shuttles and the La Sombra cutter on the theory that they might not want to shoot at each other. That turned out not to be the case: the cutter was armed with her own Gatling laser and she opened fire the minute she had her nose pointed in the Acheron’s general direction. The burst passed only meters from the portside wing and clipped the lead shuttle across the nose, sending it spinning out of control.