Prodigal (Tales of the Acheron Book 1)

by Rick Partlow

  Then he smiled at her, a covert flash of a grin, and she couldn’t help but return it. A warmth flooded her chest in spite of everything.

  “Our netdivers have been working on the file you gave us through the night,” Borges was saying, oblivious to her inner monologue, “and though there’s a lot they haven’t figured out yet, one thing stuck out as so important that they called me the minute they found it.”

  Brunner stepped up to one of the large displays on the wall and pointed to a Fleet inventory number.

  “Do either of you know what the significance of this item is?” She asked them, her pale blue eyes flashing between Ash and Sandi. Sandi shook her head helplessly. She’d spent as little time as possible doing inventory bookkeeping when she’d been a Fleet squadron leader.

  “I don’t recall that one,” Ash admitted, which made her feel better. He’d done the job a lot longer than she had.

  “GHC100439,” Brunner read off, then looked back from the screen to the two of them. “It’s a high-yield multimegaton MIRV fusion warhead. I think you Fleet types call it a ‘Planet-Killer.’ And from what our people have found in this file, Admiral Krieger is in the process of acquiring two of them for Jordi Abdullah.”

  Sandi saw Ash going pale, his eyes widening with horror as he stared at the screen.

  “What?” She asked him. “So it’s a fusion missile. It’s not like anyone couldn’t build a fusion warhead out here and put it on a rocket. Any halfway-decent planetary defense battery should be able to take down a missile fired from orbit.”

  “You never dealt with Planet-Killers,” Ash told her, shaking his head grimly. “Hell, we never used one in the war. No one wanted to unleash that sort of destruction on worlds we might want to occupy later on.”

  “Commander Carpenter understands,” Borges intoned, hands flat on the table, the wood creaking under his bulk. “If La Sombra gains possession of these weapons, they will control every business interest in the Pirate Worlds without firing a shot.” He grimaced. “Well, perhaps firing one shot as a demonstration.”

  “And guess where he’ll fire it,” Brunner mumbled, shaking her head, her tone halfway between disgust and fear.

  Sandi frowned, feeling confusion wrinkling her brow. “I guess I’m just stupid. How is this any more of a threat than someone throwing a rock at you out of the asteroid belts?”

  Neither Borges nor his daughter seemed in the mood to explain it, and Sandi thought for a moment they were going to ignore her, but at last Ash broke the silence.

  “It takes time and energy to move an asteroid,” he explained patiently. “If anyone tried it out here or in any of the cartel systems, they’d get spotted and taken out before they had the chance to pull it off. A Planet-Killer is basically an unmanned starship, with an on-board fusion reactor, electromagnetic deflectors, point defense turrets and enough armor to shrug off a hit from a rail gun. If you put one of them on a cargo ship, you could drop out of T-space, launch it from minimum Transition distance and hop back out, and there wouldn’t be a damned thing anyone could do to stop it.”

  He sighed, leaning against the table. “If it was Earth, or one of the major colonies, they’d have enough orbital defenses to take one out, but out here?” He shook his head. “Not a chance. And with Multiple Integrated Reentry Vehicles, that’s half a dozen fusion warheads inside the armored shell. It could take out every city on any one of the Pirate World settlements and still have a couple warheads left over to shift the rubble.”

  “Shit,” Sandi muttered, the gravity of the situation finally hitting her. “How the hell is Krieger going to sneak one of those out? They have to be nearly as large as your boat, Ash.”

  “Slowly and carefully,” Brunner answered. “According to the bills of lading and transfer orders, there were a dozen of them sitting in a storage facility on one of the moons of Inferno, waiting on the paperwork to come through for their destruction.”

  “The Fleet is phasing them out,” Ash put in by way of explanation. “No one wants to admit to having them in our armories.”

  “He had two of them transferred to an old logistics depot out on the periphery, on Peboan,” Brunner went on, glancing at Ash with annoyance for the interruption. “There won’t be much security out there, which will make this Jordi’s best chance to grab them.”

  “He undoubtedly has at least some of the Fleet personnel there on his payroll,” her father said, sounding more envious than angry. “Jordi rarely leaves anything to chance.”

  Ash’s eyes were staring at something far away for a moment, maybe at logistics classes and lectures from the Academy, she thought. Then something clicked behind his face and he looked excited.

  “He’ll had to have de-orbited them,” he declared. “That’s SOP for weapons like that, they don’t want them in orbit because they’d be too easy to steal. There’s no way he could get around that, it would draw too much attention.”

  “Which gives us our chance to get the missiles before he does.” Borges banged a fist on the table, startling Sandi. She’d been so caught up in the threat the missiles posed, she hadn’t considered that Borges had brought them in to steal them for him.

  “It’s too large to fit into your cutter,” Brunner said. “You’ll have to take our lighter and cargo shuttle, with the Acheron for cover. I want you flying the shuttle, Hollande.”

  Sandi raised an eyebrow. A lighter, she knew from her time with La Sombra, was an up-armored cargo ship retrofitted with weapons pods and an upgraded sensor suite and computer systems. She was surprised that an outfit as shoestring as the Rif could afford one. It was probably, she guessed, more of a beat-up tramp freighter with a few Gatling lasers bolted onto it, something that wouldn’t last a second in a real fight. Otherwise they wouldn’t need the Acheron.

  “There’s a problem,” Ash announced and the father and daughter both turned toward him. “La Sombra may have people on the inside to let them in, but we don’t. And all arms depots have anything nuclear locked down with DNA coding; only flag officers can access them.”

  Borges shared a wolfish smile with his daughter.

  “That’s not going to be an issue,” he said. “Admiral Krieger is a flag officer.”

  “You have Admiral Krieger?” Sandi asked, feigning confusion. She knew where they were going, but they couldn’t know she knew.

  “We have his son, Adam,” Brunner told her. “We’ll be taking him with us.”

  “I’m not sure if that’ll work.” Ash was frowning, and she knew that the expression was less his concern for their plan and more in a conscious effort to avoid giving away too much. “The coding is pretty exact; a child probably won’t work.”

  “He’s not just Krieger’s son.” Borges snorted derisively. “The Admiral’s a bit more egotistical than that. He had himself cloned. Their genetic signature will be identical.”

  “You’re shitting me,” Sandi blurted. “People still do that?”

  She’d heard of it, of course. It was a staple of the Virtual Reality immersive VirDramas: the rich man’s clone, engineered from the same DNA who somehow manages to be his own man and rebel against the destiny his father had tried to force him into. But it was a cliché because no one did it anymore; why would you copy yourself when you could program a perfect genetic code and make sure your offspring was an ubermensch?

  “Fortunately for us,” Brunner said. “I’ll be leading the mission, and you’ll be on the lighter with me, Ms. Hollande. Commander Carpenter, I’ll send you the navigational data and you’ll convoy with us. We’re going to be taking two squads along with us for the assault.” She cocked her head, regarding them. “Can I assume you’d like to include the survivors from your last operation?”

  “Yes,” Sandi answered immediately. She didn’t give a shit about the others, but she wanted Korri Fontenot along, especially if Ash wasn’t going to be there.

  “Then go get them. All of you report to the landing field in three hours, ready to ship out.”

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nbsp; It was a clear dismissal, and Brunner reinforced it by stepping over to her father, speaking to him in quiet, private tones. Ash waved a hand at her, jerking his head toward the exit, seeming eager to get out of the place.

  Once they cleared the mansion gates, Ash started to turn toward her, eyes full of panic, mouth opening, but she held up a hand to silence him and kept walking quickly and purposefully. She waited until they’d turned a corner, concealed by the anachronistic red brick façade of a utilitarian storefront, the blinking yellow and orange lights of its colorful sign advertising cold weather clothing fabricated to your specs; then she paused and looked back, waiting until she was sure they weren’t being followed. The only people present were spacers shivering as they walked into the shop or sighing with warmth and resignation as they walked out, their spending accounts lighter but their core temperature warmer. None of them gave either of the pilots a glance.

  “What the fuck are we going to do?” Ash wondered when she’d turned back to him. “We can’t let Borges get his hands on fucking Planet-Killers, Sandi!” He was being too loud, his voice high-pitched and frantic. She quieted him with a quelling gesture and he cursed, looking around instinctively even though no one was near.

  “We sure as hell can’t let Jordi get it either!” She shot back in a low hiss, squaring off with him. “And if we leave them at the depot, that’s exactly what’s going to happen! Borges is a ruthless son of a bitch, but he’s a saint compared to Jordi.”

  “Shit,” Ash moaned, rubbing his hands over his face, the righteous anger seeming to go out of him replaced by horrified resignation. “We can’t do this. We can’t steal Planet-Killers for a cartel, it’s fucking nuts! If they use this on a colony world…”

  “If you have a better idea, I’m all ears.” She stared at him expectantly, waiting until he finally shook his head.

  “You’re right,” he admitted, waving a hand helplessly. “You’re right, there’s nothing else we can do from here. The military and the Patrol wouldn’t listen to us; we’re both wanted criminals. But Jesus Christ, Sandi, if anything goes wrong, we could be talking about tens of thousands of people dying.”

  “If we don’t do anything,” she pointed out, “they’re going to die for sure. And it won’t just be the people who deserve it, the ones who have it coming like Jordi or Borges or men like Donnelly. It’ll be the laborers and the shop-owners, and their families, their children.” She thought of that little, frightened girl on Asiento and something squeezed at her chest.

  She took Ash’s hand in hers, the touch of his warm skin against hers comforting. He pulled her head against his shoulder and she felt him sigh, as if her being there was enough to make things right.

  Jesus, how the hell can I live up to that?

  “We just have to make sure Jordi doesn’t get them, then…” She shrugged. “We’ll be buying time. We can figure out the rest when it happens.”

  “Yeah,” he sighed. “That’s starting to sound like the story of my life.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Adam Krieger picked unenthusiastically at his pita sandwich, staring at the table with dead eyes. The galley wasn’t large, even on a converted cargo vessel like the Rif lighter, but it seemed cavernous and deserted around him, like a cell.

  Sandi glanced carefully back down the passageway; there was no one in sight all the way back to the last junction, and only one guard at the open hatchway to the galley. The guard, as she’d already known, was Korri Fontenot. The cyborg nodded to her.

  “Be quick,” she cautioned.

  Sandi stepped past her, her shadow falling across Adam’s neglected lunch. He looked up, his eyes dull and listless.

  “Who’re you?” His tone was petulant, the timbre of his voice still that of a teenager despite the fact she knew he was in his early twenties. She swung the chair across from her out and slid into it.

  “My name’s Sandi,” she told him, trying not to let the annoyance she felt for him leak into her expression. “I’m a shuttle pilot.”

  “Yeah, well, you can tell that bitch Brunner that I don’t have anything more to say to you than I did to her.” He looked back at the soy and pita sandwich in his hand, then made a face and tossed it down on the plastic plate. It hit with an unappetizing plop.

  “I think Ms. Brunner wouldn’t be too happy if she knew I was here,” Sandi admitted.

  “Then why are you here?” He demanded.

  “Because you look lonely and miserable. And I’ve been there.”

  That brought his eyes up, though they narrowed with suspicion.

  “You’ve been fucking kidnaped by a Pirate World cartel because your dad’s an asshole?”

  The words were harsh, but the tone behind them was less angry than scared, and all at once, she forgave him for being an annoying little shit.

  “No,” she admitted, “but I was forced into attending the Academy because my Mom wanted me to be a miniature copy of her. I didn’t run away, though…I didn’t have the stones for it. You did.”

  “And look how well that’s worked out for me.” He scratched absently at his patchy, scraggly beard. “I should have just done what he wanted. The way I always do.” The words were full of bitterness, but Sandi recognized a fear in them as well, a fear that maybe his father had been right and that admitting it would be a worse fate than the one already upon him.

  “You can’t let other people live your life for you, Adam.” She hesitated. There was a point of no return, and she was about to cross it. “Tell me something, if you had the chance to get out of here, would you take it?” He frowned at her as if she’d said something incredibly stupid. “Even though you might get killed in the process?”

  That sunk home. He let out a whoosh of breath and seemed to collapse in on himself. She waited, and for a second she thought she’d gone too far, that the kid was going to panic, but then he swallowed and nodded firmly.

  “This place sucks,” he snarled. “They keep me locked up inside all day long; I can’t even take a shit without a guard. I can’t live this way.” His eyes went bright. “Can you do it? Can you get me out of here?”

  “I’m going to try,” she promised. “It won’t be till we get back to Tangier. Until then, you need to keep your mouth shut and your head down. You understand?”

  Another nod, this time a bobbing of his head that was almost frantic. She felt a stab of guilt, wondering if she was giving the kid false hope.

  “Eat your food,” she told him, gesturing at the pita.

  He laughed at that, which was a good sign. Maybe he could keep his head, after all.

  She pushed herself up and gave him a smile on her way out.

  “Thanks,” she said softly, close by Korri’s shoulder as she paused by the hatchway.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” the cyborg murmured. “I’ve lived a long time, but that doesn’t mean I want to get it over with.”

  “Do you really think we can trust Kan-Ten?”

  Fontenot tossed her head in what passed for a shrug.

  “He’s a fucking alien, Sandi. I could be reading him totally wrong. But I know we can’t do it ourselves.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  Sandi’s head snapped around at the words, and a twist of fear tightened inside her stomach as she saw Brunner striding down the corridor, amazingly silent for someone so large.

  “I gave orders that no one was to be in here with him,” Brunner said, staring at Fontenot with ice in her cerulean gaze.

  “I just came to talk to Fontenot,” Sandi explained, trying not to let the shivering inside her gut reach her voice. “I’m going down with the assault team and…” She shrugged, trying to act embarrassed. “Honestly, I don’t have much experience with small unit tactics, and I know she does. I was just hoping she could give me some tips.”

  Brunner blew out a slow breath as she seemed to consider that. Finally, she nodded.

  “All right,” she said, her tone milder, almost approving. “Wh
en she gets off her guard shift, the rest of us will meet down in the cargo hold and we’ll do some training.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.” Sandi tried to sound grateful, which she was…that she’d thought of a plausible excuse that quickly. She caught Fontenot’s eye. “See you later, Korri.”

  She didn’t look at Adam, and she hoped he had the sense not to look at her.

  ***

  The cockpit of the cargo shuttle was dark and cramped; every spare centimeter of the aerospacecraft was devoted to the payload, and it would still be barely big enough to fit two Planet-Killers. Sandi felt claustrophobic, jammed into the small space with the metallic bulk of Fontenot and Kan-Ten’s two-meter-tall frame, but it was the safest and most private place available to conspire.

  The lighter, christened the Amador, was just as beat up and jury-rigged as Sandi had imagined it, and after they’d bolted clunky nickel-iron armor to her and jammed coil guns and Gatling lasers into any space where they’d fit, her interior was as cramped and clunky as her exterior, cluttered with naked power feeds and bypasses and ugly with exposed relays and missing bulkhead panels. Besides the galley, which was always crowded when Adam wasn’t there, the shuttle was the only place left with the room for more than two people.

  She looked into the dark, doll’s eyes of the Tahni, searching them carefully…

  For what? She thought. How the hell am I supposed to read the body language of something that evolved on another planet?

  “You know why we’re going on this job, Kan-Ten,” she said. “You know what Borges and Brunner are trying to get.”

  If it were a human, Sandi would have expected a nod or a grunt or some sign of confirmation. Kan-Ten stood slightly hunched over, his face blank as far as she could tell.

  “You do know, don’t you?” She asked after a pause, beginning to doubt it herself.

  “Yes.”

  “Kan-Ten,” Fontenot interjected in an admonishing tone. “You know what she’s asking, and I know you understand English well enough to know full well how you’re supposed to respond.”