Prodigal (Tales of the Acheron Book 1)

by Rick Partlow

  “I took out three of the La Sombra shuttles,” she told Brunner, hoping to get in front of any suspicions the woman might have. “One of them got away, but he’s probably still running. Did they land any ground troops?”

  “No,” Brunner declared in a tone that was as full of bitterness and recrimination as it was anger. “They didn’t need to.” She waved around them with her free hand, too disciplined to point her loaded handgun anywhere she wasn’t willing to fire it. “This, the missiles we stole…it was all a fucking set-up.”

  “Tomlinson was a mole,” Kan-Ten supplied. His voice didn’t sound stressed or pained for someone who had a nasty wound, but then she didn’t really know what a stressed Tahni sounded like. “He set the warhead to blow.”

  “It would have taken out all of us,” Brunner interjected, still sounding almost embarrassed. “The whole fucking city---hell, probably the next few towns over, too.”

  “He set it for a timer,” Kan-Ten went on. “He was going to force Ash to fly him out, meet their starship in orbit. Fontenot killed him, then she and Ash loaded the missile on the cargo shuttle and…”

  The Tahni trailed off, motioning at the open sky outside the entrance.

  “The shuttle hadn’t been refueled,” Brunner said, her expression hopeless. “Even if they had the time to jettison the bomb, they won’t be able to make it back.”

  “I can get them,” Sandi insisted, taking a step back towards the Acheron.

  Brunner stopped her in her tracks, aiming the barrel of her pistol at the pilot’s head.

  “Where’s Adam Krieger?” She asked, voice calm in a way that belied the threat of the raised handgun. “I know you took him; I saw the security camera feed. Are you working for Jordi?”

  “I’m not taking Adam to Jordi,” Sandi told her honestly. “I’m taking him home. He’s just a kid; he doesn’t deserve this.”

  “Since when do any of us get what we deserve, girl?” The tone scoffed, but the barrel of the gun wavered slightly, then lowered. Brunner glanced over at Kan-Ten. “Are you with her?”

  “She is my friend,” the Tahni replied without hesitation.

  Sandi watched Brunner’s eyes, wondering where this was going.

  “Get him on your ship,” the tall woman gestured at Kan-Ten, turning away from Sandi and holstering her pistol. “Get the hell out of here before I change my mind.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The rumbling of the engines cut off and the oppressive weight dropped away from Ash’s chest in what should have been a relief, but wasn’t. The view from the main display showed the strange stars of Tangier frosted over the arcing curve of the snow-covered world…but it showed that world still far too close below them. A stray scrap of a ration bar wrapper floated in front of the image, spoiling the grandeur.

  “We are bingo fuel,” Ash announced, glancing over at Fontenot. She was strapped into the copilot’s acceleration couch and had shown no sign of discomfort at the hellish boost that had taken them out of the atmosphere and nearly, so very nearly into orbit.

  “Tomlinson thought we had enough fuel to make high orbit,” she commented with clinical detachment. “I suppose he wasn’t figuring that for the added weight of the missile.”

  “No, he wasn’t.” Ash checked a readout, did a quick calculation in his head. “The good news is, we’ll be dead from the warhead going off before we get a chance to burn up on reentry.”

  “You are the optimist, Carpenter,” Fontenot said with a harsh chuckle. “I can see why Sandi can’t bring herself to let you go.” Her biological eye narrowed. “I am curious, though…why can’t you let her go?”

  Ash goggled at her in disbelief.

  “This seems,” he finally said, “like an odd conversation to be having right now.”

  “I’ve already thought about every course of action we could take under the circumstances,” she responded with a half-shrug. “We don’t have the tools to disarm the missile. If we jettisoned it, it would still de-orbit close enough to kill us before we could re-enter the atmosphere, even assuming we could manage to glide in. I suppose if we had it hooked up to a hard-point on the shuttle and synched with the on-board computer, we could launch it away from us; but we don’t, and we certainly don’t have time to figure out how.”

  She eyed him with amusement. “What else would you care to talk about?”

  Ash was about to make a smart-ass remark when he noticed the sensor return and sighed.

  “Well, we could talk about that La Sombra lighter coming around from the day-side,” he suggested, pointing at it.

  “They’re looking for their agent,” Fontenot surmised. “He must have contacted them that he’d be coming.”

  “Having met Jordi, I’m surprised he wouldn’t just leave Tomlinson to burn.”

  “You don’t get a position with that kind of power,” the cyborg pointed out reasonably, “without being loyal to your friends and allies, at least most of the time. If everyone thinks you’ll fuck them over, no one will want to work for you.”

  It was a perceptive answer, he thought, but he shouldn’t have been surprised; Fontenot had been out in the Pirate Worlds probably as long as Borges.

  “Cargo shuttle, this is Captain Deruda of the La Sombra starship Gitano, do you read?”

  The voice coming over the shuttle’s cockpit speakers was nasal and whiny and gratingly annoying. Ash shot a questioning look at Fontenot.

  “He’s looking for Tomlinson,” she reminded him. “But he might not ever have met him.” She grinned savagely. “Maybe you could pretend to be him and draw their ship in close enough to share in the nuclear joy.”

  Ash thought about it for a single, morose second, but shook it off.

  “No,” he decided, maybe a bit more reluctantly than he’d hoped, “I think I’d rather the last thing I do be saving people instead of killing them.” He reached over to the commo board and opened up a channel to the Gitano.

  “Captain Deruda,” he broadcast, “this is Commander Carpenter on board the cargo shuttle. We don’t have your man Tomlinson on board, but we do have the Planet-Killer fusion missile, and Tomlinson set it to go off in about twenty minutes. You need to get out of here unless you want to get caught in the blast.”

  “Wussy,” Fontenot murmured, frowning in disapproval.

  There was no reply from the cartel lighter. Ash felt vaguely disappointed, but he wasn’t sure what he’d expected. A thank-you? An offer of rescue? Neither seemed likely. What he didn’t expect was the missile that streaked out of the lighter’s portside weapons pod. He stared at it, speechless and defenseless, as it veered off a few kilometers to their starboard and another few kilometers aft before it exploded in a fireball directed forward by the shaped-charge. The fragments of the warhead travelled forward as well and the glowing cloud of burning vapor faded quickly.

  “Carpenter, I know you have Tomlinson. Set him loose and put him on the comms or the next missile will target your engines, and we’ll take our chances boarding you.”

  Ash laughed. He couldn’t help it; Deruda was a moron.

  “Go ahead and board us, shithead!” He yelled at the man. “All you’ll be doing is killing yourself and anyone you send over here. This ship is going to blow, and if we could have disabled the timer, we already would have. You do whatever the hell you feel like doing, but don’t say I didn’t try to warn you.”

  Deruda started to bluster something, but Ash cut off the transmission with a touch on the commo panel.

  “Dumbass,” he muttered.

  “We should suit up,” Fontenot said abruptly, cutting loose her restraints.

  “Why?” Ash wondered, following her anyway, pushing out of his seat and floating back towards the cargo hold.

  “If they do intend to board us,” she explained, halting herself at the pressure suit locker, “we could conceivably take their ship and get off before the warhead goes.”

  “We’re not armed,” he pointed out, pulling on the vacc suit anyway, mos
tly because he had nothing better to do. “There’s no guns on this ship.”

  “It’s a better chance than no chance.”

  Unable to argue with that logic, he began fastening his suit, then grabbed a helmet and kicked off back toward the cockpit. The lighter was only a hundred kilometers away now, matching velocities with the shuttle before it launched its own lander to dock with them.

  There’s no way this is going to work, he thought, but it’s as good a way to go out as any.

  He’d been zoomed into the display of the lighter approaching from a higher orbit, ignoring the view from planetside, so it caught him completely by surprise when a blast of charged particles slammed into the lighter’s port weapons pod, throwing off an aurora in the thin atmosphere as it passed. A flare of vaporized metal surrounded the pod so briefly Ash’s eyes almost didn’t register it before the propellant of the missiles inside the launcher ignited and swallowed the whole side of the ship in flame and ionized gas. The explosion rocked the vessel, throwing it off its course towards the cargo shuttle, and Ash could see burning atmosphere streaming out of the hull where the weapons pod had been attached.

  He sketched a line on the control panel and the image zoomed out, revealing a silver delta rising into the upper atmosphere on glowing streams of plasma.

  “Deruda, you piece of shit!” Sandi’s voice sounded powerful and commanding over the channel they’d been using to communicate with the Gitano. “Get your ragged-ass rust bucket out of here while it still has a fucking engine! If you aren’t boosting towards a jump point in ten seconds, I put a shot through the bridge!”

  “Jordi will kill you for this, Hollande,” Deruda was trying to sound threatening but the perpetual whine in his voice ruined the effect.

  “Then he’ll have to send better than you.”

  The Gitano fired off maneuvering thrusters to stop her spin, and then her main drive ignited with a sunburst of fusing hydrogen and she limped away, heading out of orbit.

  “And that,” Ash said, grinning broadly at Fontenot as she anchored herself to the copilot’s seat beside him, “is why I don’t let her go.”

  “Ash, are you there?” Sandi called. “I’m moving up to dock with you.”

  “No time,” he warned her. “We have maybe ten minutes left before the warhead blows, and getting a good docking seal would take that long by itself.” He hesitated. “Maybe you should just get out of here, Sandi.”

  “Don’t waste time on self-sacrificing bullshit, Ash Carpenter. Do you have any suits on that bird?”

  “We’re both suited up,” he confirmed, surrendering to the inevitable. “Open the exterior hatch of the service lock and we’ll come to you.”

  “Matching velocities now,” she confirmed, and he could see the ship in the optical display, her aft facing them, glowing with a ferocious plasma flame as she decelerated. “Get the hell out of there Ash. If you get yourself killed,” she added, her voice strained from the boost, “I’ll kick your ass.”

  Before he could reply, she’d cut the connection. He pulled on his helmet and motioned Fontenot to head back the way they’d come.

  The warhead rested mutely in the cargo bay of the shuttle, mocking them with its impenetrable solidity. Tomlinson had left no countdown, no visible timer, and for all they knew, it could blow at any time; Ash had just been estimating when he’d told Sandi ten minutes. He tried not to look at it as he yanked the hand-held emergency maneuvering unit out of the shuttle’s utility locker.

  It looked like a large, ungainly pistol, and the fuel tank in front of its handgrip had a very limited range, even in microgravity, but it was all they had.

  “You have any experience using that thing?” Fontenot asked him over the helmet radio, punching the control to open the interior airlock. It slid aside and through the tiny porthole in the outer hatch, he could see the glow of Tangier below them.

  “A couple classes back in the Academy.”

  He tried to aim himself over to where she waited by the lock, then squeezed off a short, experimental burst. His shoulder slammed into the bulkhead centimeters from the open airlock hatch and he wheezed painfully, grabbing a hand-hold before he could bounce back away from it.

  “Maybe you should let me hold onto that,” Fontenot commented dryly, holding out a hand as he pulled himself into the lock.

  He waited until he’d closed the interior hatch then set the lock to cycle before he sheepishly handed over the compressed gas pistol. He could hear the fans in the deck and overhead of the lock whirring as they sucked the air out, evacuating to match the pressures outside.

  “When was the last time you used one?” He wondered, watching her look the thing over.

  “When did Teller and Fox invent the Transition Drive?” She asked him, voice a bit distant as she examined the controls on the pistol grip.

  “I don’t remember,” he admitted.

  “Well, it was like ten years before that.”

  Then the outer lock slid aside, she grabbed his arm in the unyielding grip of her bionic hand, and they were flushed out into space.

  Ash had been a pilot for his entire adult life, with nothing but a few centimeters of BiPhase Carbide separating him from the vacuum, but falling free with the glowing arc of daylight coming around the terminator of the planet below him and the vastness of interplanetary space above him, he found he’d come to greatly appreciate those few centimeters. He found himself beginning to feel nauseous, which shocked him; he’d never been space-sick once in his whole life. But this was too much, too broad, too vast…he needed something to focus on.

  And there she was, floating before him with the illusion of a stationary position caused by their matching velocities, a beautiful silver wedge reflecting the rising sun. She was an anchor, a focus, something he could feel connected to, and he wasn’t sure if he was thinking of the Acheron or Sandi…or both. There was a patch of darkness, a shadow on her hull where the auxiliary airlock had opened its outer hatch; suddenly, they were flying towards it with alarming speed and Ash cringed, sure they’d smack right against the hull with bone-crushing velocity. But then Fontenot’s hand stretched out in front of them, pointing the gas pistol like a weapon, and he could feel the jerk of abrupt deceleration that whipped his legs forward; his arm remained trapped in her vise-like grip.

  The old woman really did know how to operate the maneuvering unit; they drifted into the airlock like leaves blowing on an autumn breeze. Fontenot tossed the thing aside, imparting just enough momentum to fetch Ash’s shoulder up against the inner bulkhead, and he slapped at the control to close the outer hatch.

  “We’re inside!” He transmitted over his helmet radio. “Go!”

  Acceleration pushed him back against the interior of the lock with twice his normal weight and he grunted at the pressure and tried to keep from tumbling into Fontenot, who was standing next to him, both of them oriented with the tail of the ship as “down,” which made the lock off kilter sideways. He hit the control to cycle the lock and air began flowing in from the vents, slowly equalizing the pressure.

  Are we going fast enough? He wondered. Are we going to be far enough away in time?

  He scrolled through the helmet controls on the suit’s wrist panel and tapped into the visual feed from the ship’s exterior cameras; the image popped up on the helmet’s Heads-Up Display like a miniature screen projected just in front of his right eye. The sun-flare of the ship’s drive nearly washed out the view of the planet’s dark side as they rose far too slowly into a higher orbit, leaving the dull grey shape of the cargo shuttle behind.

  Not far enough, he fretted, but kept the doubts to himself.

  The warhead detonated. Ash flinched, starting to brace himself before he realized that it would be futile; there wasn’t enough atmosphere to perpetuate a shock wave. Unless the actual blast itself got them…and as the globe of white fire expanded, growing larger than the curve of the planet in the view from the outside cameras, he began to think it might. But the all-d
evouring white nothingness began to shrink as the Acheron moved away, still burning a two-gravity boost, and he felt himself letting loose a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

  The boost continued for another minute, and no one spoke, either because of the pressure of twice their mass pushing down on their chests or perhaps out of some superstitious fear that speaking would break the spell that sustained them, and the nova-like second star in the Tangier sky would reach out and swallow them up.

  Like their fear, however, the boost faded gradually, and Ash found himself floating free of the bulkhead. It was only then he realized that the pressure had equalized and the indicator lights were flashing green. He opened the inner hatch and pushed off into the utility bay, working the fastenings of his helmet and pulling it off, relief flooding him along with the cool air of the ship’s interior.

  Adam was strapped into a seat back there, looking like he’d seen better days; his face was drawn and slack, like he’d boxed twelve rounds while riding a roller coaster, and there were some nasty stains on his jacket.

  “Are you okay?” Ash asked the kid. Adam responded with a weak nod and a slight wave of his right hand.

  “I’m never flying again,” he declared, his voice strained, and Ash laughed.

  “I don’t blame you,” he told the younger man. “In fact…”

  He trailed off as Sandi pulled herself into the bay through the main passageway. She was smiling, as broad and happy a smile as Ash could remember seeing on her face perhaps in the entire time he’d known her. She gave herself a shove that ended with her arms around his neck and her lips pressed to his, and he was grinning as well, he couldn’t help it.

  “Holy shit that was close,” she murmured in his ear, still holding him.