Prodigal (Tales of the Acheron Book 1)

by Rick Partlow

  There.

  Out from behind the cover of the artificial hill, around the perimeter just a few degrees, and the turret there was already traversing towards the cargo shuttle. It couldn’t swing back around in time and the capacitor was back into green and he triggered the weapon with his thoughts.

  The cargo shuttle passed in the shadow of the roiling cloud of smoke, its powerful jets whining in protest as it came in low and slow, swinging around to touch down. Ash brought the Acheron to a hover twenty meters off the road, steam and debris billowing around him in the wake of the variable thrust nozzles, and swung the nose of the ship to face the cargo doors.

  “Want to be a gentleman and get the door for me?” Sandi asked, her voice light and casual enough that he was sure she was putting an effort into it.

  “Give me a second,” he murmured, watching the other capacitor coil charge back up. Then, “Might want to cover your eyes.”

  White energy seemed to rip at the fabric of reality, dust-devils twisting upward while static electricity crackled downward. The centimeters-thick duralloy cargo doors vanished in a ball of fire as metal sublimated and air caught fire, and thunder rolled out across the plain along the road, thermal blooms fueling updrafts that swatted at the Acheron and nearly sent her rolling away out of control. Ash gritted his teeth and sent power to the port belly jets, bringing the boat back level.

  The door was huge, thick and well-armored, and he thought for a moment that he’d have to fire another shot just to break through it. But when the smoke and dust cleared, he could see the whole bottom two-thirds of the structure had collapsed into charred rubble.

  “Okay, Sandi,” he transmitted. “I’ll stay up here for overhead cover. It’s your show.”

  ***

  Sandi scrambled out of the cockpit of the shuttle, tightening the fastenings of her armored vest. She felt Brunner’s eyes on her as she retrieved her gunbelt from a utility locker and strapped it around her waist.

  “What?” She demanded, grabbing a pair of clunky, decades-obsolete night vision goggles off a shelf above the gun racks.

  “You know you don’t have to come in with us,” Brunner said, the corner of her mouth turning up in what might have been mockery, or perhaps admiration. She pulled a carbine out of the locker and slung it over her shoulder. “You can stay with the bird.”

  “You ever operate a military cargo handling system?” Sandi asked her, sliding the goggles over her eyes and adjusting the strap. “How long do you think you’d have to stand there scrolling through inventory numbers and trying to figure out how to get those missiles on the loading gantry?”

  “You think you’re ready to shoot military personnel?” Brunner asked her. “Even crooked ones?”

  “They’re not going to come anywhere near us. They’ll huddle in their emergency bunker and figure anything worth stealing takes a DNA code.” Her eyes flickered over to where Brunner’s people were walking Adam down towards the shuttle’s open belly ramp. He was swaddled in a winter jacket and hat and didn’t seem very happy about the whole thing. She looked away quickly. “When they find out we have one, they’ll figure we really do work for Krieger and they’ll stay down there because they’ll be sure they fucked up.”

  Brunner seemed to accept it, turning her attention back to the support squads.

  “Fontenot,” she called to the old soldier, who was standing at the top of the ramp, cradling an improbably large and heavy assault gun like it was a carbine. “Take first squad down and make sure the area around the cargo door is secure. The rest of you follow me and keep our little key-master safe.” She glanced back at Sandi, who was wrapping a scarf around her face under the hood of her jacket. “I guess you can stick with my squad, so they can keep you safe along with him. Besides not knowing how to access a military inventory system, I also admit to not being able to pilot a cargo shuttle.”

  “Damn good thing you brought me along, then.”

  A brisk wind was blowing across the plain, and Sandi could feel the damp chill of it even through her heated jacket, could feel her fingers tingling with the cold inside her thin, pilot’s gloves as she stepped off the ramp. She felt exposed out on the open plain in broad daylight, a bug on a plate. Fontenot, Kan-Ten and Tomlinson and the rest of First Squad were thirty or forty meters ahead of them, already entering through the blasted-out doors, and behind them one of Brunner’s techs was guiding a pair of heavy mules they’d brought along to haul the cargo out once they acquired it. One followed the other, each about the size of an Indian elephant now that they were fully assembled, and the servomotors in their articulated legs whined plaintively as rounded footpads scraped across the packed, frosted earth of the dirt road. For all that they were moving quickly and purposefully, it still seemed to her that it took forever for the motley caravan of gunmen and robots to cross the hundred meters between the shuttle and the remains of the door.

  Bits of melted and charred duralloy were scattered around it, and chunks the size of a human lay across the open entrance, propped against each other like a child’s building blocks. They weaved through them, out of the distant glow of the rising primary and into the dim shadows thrown by the emergency lights inside the security lock. Kan-Ten was just inside the doorway, watching outward past the shuttle with his weapon at the ready, his face as unreadable as always. He wore no armor, not because he didn’t want to, but because they had none that would fit him.

  Fontenot met them inside, waving around at the bare metal walls stretching ten meters above them in an arched cathedral ceiling.

  “No opposition in here, ma’am,” she told Brunner. “Not much of anything, really, except that one panel.”

  She was pointing a dull-grey metal finger at a flat screen display set in the opposite wall, next to what might have been the edge of an interior door. It displayed a Fleet logo but nothing else. Brunner nodded to Sandi.

  “You said you could do it, Ms. Hollande.”

  Sandi stripped the thin, pliable pilot’s glove off of her right hand and touched the surface of the screen. It was ice-cold, and she nearly flinched away when it flashed a series of menus at her. It was text only, not so much as a virtual guide to lead her through it, and she felt a flare of panic as she tried to remember a short class in military inventory control that she’d had in the Academy. She spotted the search icon she recalled from repeated, frustrating attempts to try to con the Academy food services into delivering alcohol to her room, and pulled it up with a slide of her finger, then typed in the inventory number for the missiles.

  The screen went red and yellow and informed her that data was classified and required a DNA scan. She turned back to Brunner and waved for her to bring Adam forward. The boy looked cold and scared, and she didn’t blame him on either count.

  “Take off your glove,” she instructed him, “and put your hand up against here.” She jerked a thumb at the screen, where a red circle had appeared beneath the request for DNA confirmation.

  Adam eyed her doubtfully, hesitating long enough that Sandi noticed Brunner edging forward, palm poised to push him forward. But then he shook his head, his expression resigned to the inevitable, and stepped up to the display. The circle flashed yellow when his palm touched it, alerting them that it was analyzing the DNA signature and that he shouldn’t move his hand until it was complete.

  Doubt gnawed at the corners of Sandi’s mind, doubt that this would work, whether the genetic signature of a clone would work on the identity scan, and even if it did, whether there’d be some additional layer of security they hadn’t anticipated. What would they do if there was? She knew what Brunner would want to do: shoot their way into wherever the Fleet officers who ran the base were hunkered down, grab them and slice pieces off of them until they gave her what she wanted. Not even considering the moral problems she’d have with that plan, it also meant a hell of a lot more time on the ground.

  She began to imagine scenarios that would wind up with all of them dead, and blinked back to real
ity with a start when the display console turned green and chimed the notification that they’d been granted clearance. The inner lock, nearly as tall and broad as the shattered outer doors, ground aside with all the speed and power of glaciers scraping the land clean a centimeter at a time, and she had to wait until the deafening rumble had ceased and the doors had come to rest in their recesses inside the walls before she turned to Brunner to report.

  “The Planet-Killers are on sub-level six,” she told the Rif enforcer, reading off the stream of data scrolling across the screen. “I can load it on a cargo lift from here, but we’re going to have to haul it out from the loading gantry on the mules.” She stabbed a finger at the map projected in a corner of the display. “It’s straight down the main corridor, on the other side of the dome.”

  “Angelo,” Brunner called to the tech, who was just outside the entranceway, fiddling with the gait controls on one of the four-legged robotic mules. “Bring them inside. Everyone make room.”

  It looked a bit absurd, Sandi thought, the two squads of rough-looking men and women, armored and armed to the teeth, squeezing awkwardly against the walls to let the ponderous, brainless machines shamble through in their slow but sure-footed gait. She put a hand against Adam’s back as he was crowded into her, and he turned around quickly, reflexively, like a dog kicked one too many times.

  “It’s okay,” she said to him quietly. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

  That was when she heard the whine of the Acheron’s turbojets shift up an octave, heard the roar of the cutter’s exhaust echo off the walls as she climbed out of the valley.

  “Sandi!” Ash’s voice in her ‘link’s ear bud wasn’t quite frantic, but it was close enough that she felt her gut clench in response. “We have incoming spacecraft deorbiting! Three sensor signatures…and one of them is that fucking bounty hunter.”

  Shit.

  “Brunner!” She yelled over the scream of the engines. She grabbed the woman by the arm and turned her around, and Brunner snarled, drawing back in reflex and reaching for her carbine. “We have enemy ships inbound! It’s La Sombra! They know we’re here!”

  Brunner’s expression changed from outrage to fear in a tenth of a second, then hardened into what Sandi thought was either anger or resolve, or perhaps a mixture of the two.

  “Fontenot!” She said to the cyborg. “Take your squad and get those missiles loaded up. Hollande,” she eyed Sandi with maybe a hint of doubt, “keep working on bringing the weapons up to the loading gantry. And keep an eye on Adam; I’m holding you responsible if anything happens to him.” She looked around at the others, unslinging her carbine.

  “The rest of you,” she declared, waving them forward as she stepped out from cover and into the daylight, “follow me.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ash fought to stay conscious as acceleration slammed him back and up and sideways nearly simultaneously. Flares of ionized air lit up the sky around him, and the white ship dogged his heels tirelessly.

  Doesn’t he feel the g-forces? He wondered, grunting as another banking turn nearly pulled his mind out of the interface. Whoever was flying the bounty hunter boat was riding his ass through every turn, every maneuver, pulling them tighter than he could, despite pulling what had to be at least twelve gravities.

  He’d seen them coming and he’d gone after the cutter without hesitation; it was hard to mistake the white delta shape for any other ship. Yet the other pilot had latched onto his tail and he hadn’t been able to shake them loose and they were already halfway around the planet from where they’d started. He’d flown into darkness, climbing up to 3,500 meters and through a bank of roiling clouds fat with snow and crackling with lightning and still hadn’t been able to get free. He cursed, knowing that the landers he’d seen coming in would be full of troops, and also knowing that he wasn’t going to be able to get there in time to help Sandi.

  She should be up here, and I should be down there, he thought, and not just because he was worried about her. She was the better pilot; he’d meant that when he’d told her before. So, what the hell would she do? He grinned, lips skinning off his teeth. Something crazy, he decided.

  He nosed the Acheron into a dive, feeding power to the jets and accelerating straight down towards the planet’s equatorial ocean, ink-black on a moonless night. The jets screamed and his stomach tried to climb out through his mouth, and the flat, featureless surface of the sea returned each radar and lidar signal faster and faster with each passing second. Laser-fire crept toward him as burst after burst chopped across the night, the bounty hunter spacecraft clinging to his six and getting closer with each shot.

  Ash stared black death in the face and bared his teeth at it in a snarl.

  One thousand meters.

  This isn’t going to work, he was screaming inside his head, silent only because the pressure wouldn’t let him take a full breath. It’s suicide.

  Five hundred meters. He cut power to the jets, their hollow whine dying out and leaving nothing but the roaring rush of the air shaking the cutter in its teeth like a dog worrying a bone.

  The ship’s going to rip apart and I’m going to die.

  Three hundred meters.

  The Acheron was a dual-environment boat, with control surfaces for use in atmosphere and maneuvering thrusters for a vacuum and neither was designed for what Ash did next. Trying to pull up with the control surfaces, going this fast, this low, would have ripped the wings off the cutter or sent her into an uncontrollable spin until she hit the ocean. Using the belly jets to try to bring the nose up would have cracked the hull. There was absolutely no way to bring the nose up, so instead, Ash hit the port bow maneuvering rockets and spun her longitudinally end for end.

  It would still have been suicide, would still have thrown them into an unrecoverable spin; the turbojets wouldn’t work with the Acheron hurtling downward and the air streaming over the wings and away from the intakes. Instead, Ash ignited the ship’s plasma drive and fusion flame lit up a new sun less than a hundred meters over the frigid sea.

  He had seconds, fractions of a second, as blackness squeezed his vision into a tunnel and g-forces forced the blood away from his brain, and with every ounce of will he had left, he steadied the nose until the targeting reticle hovered over the bow of the white delta screaming in towards him.

  The proton cannon fired and the sky was filled with scintillating white fury for just the blink of an eye before everything went dark.

  ***

  Sandi cursed as she hit the wrong icon again and had to cancel out her request and go back to the previous screen. Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking, flinching with every crack of gunfire from outside. Adam was crouched beside her, shuddering like a cornered rat that can’t decide whether to run or fight, except it was worse for him because he knew he couldn’t win this fight and he knew there was nowhere to run. His fear seemed to be infecting her; she forced herself to take a deep, calming breath and tried one more time to guide the loading crane to the storage bay with the Planet-Killer missiles.

  There was an explosion, far too close, and dust silted down from the ceiling, but this time she was able to keep her hands steady enough to drag the crane’s loading icon on top of them and drop it. She was rewarded by a green halo over both weapons and a promise that the crane would lift them both onto the loading gantry for transport to the surface, and she let out the breath she’d been holding and turned back to the entranceway.

  She remembered her sidearm and finally took the time to pull it out of its holster, checking that a round was chambered and the safety was off. It felt heavy and comforting, even if it wasn’t much against what was out there. She slapped Adam on the arm and he looked up at her furtively.

  “Get back inside the doorway,” she gestured behind her, towards the entrance where Fontenot and the others had gone to load up the cargo. It was dark and foreboding inside, but at least it offered some shelter from any stray shots.

  The kid nodded and stumb
led through the debris-littered entrance lock, trying to keep low as he moved. She followed him, keeping her eyes turned out to where the gunfire had drawn even closer to their position. Was Brunner still alive out there? The Rif enforcer wasn’t exactly a friend, but how long would they last here if she was dead?

  She backed across the threshold of the interior lock, still watching behind them. When she turned around to face the direction she was going, she found herself staring into the crystalline emitter of a pulse pistol. It was shaking slightly, and so was the hand holding it. The woman was dressed in blue Space Fleet utilities marked with the bars of a Lieutenant-junior grade and if anything, seemed too young for the rank. Her auburn hair was tied back in a ponytail and a spray of freckles marched a curving path over her snub nose. She looked more like a freshman at the Academy than a staff officer at a storage depot, and there was something close to panic in her hazel eyes.

  “Drop the gun!” She shrieked at Sandi. She had Adam by the scruff of his jacket and was switching her aim between the two of them every couple of seconds. “Drop it now or I’ll shoot you!”

  “You don’t want to do that,” Sandi assured her, holding her pistol to point upward, finger off the trigger. “You should get back to the emergency bunker and stay there; up here, you’re going to be caught in the crossfire and both sides are going to want to kill you.”

  “Shut up and drop the gun,” the Fleet officer repeated, her voice seeming to firm up. “Last warning!”

  Sandi hesitated for just a beat, wondering if she could take the woman down without hurting her or getting herself killed, but decided it wasn’t worth the risk to either of them.