Exile (Tales of the Acheron Book 3)

by Rick Partlow

  Kan-Ten felt the concussion inside his chest, then felt the seat restraints yank at him as the driver slammed on the brakes. Stars filled his vision from the flash of the explosion and the violence of their abrupt halt, but he could see well enough to spot the humans running out of the thicket of cottonwood, pistols and carbines in their hands, the vehicles pulling out from behind the trees and advancing across the open plain.

  This was a trap. They were after the weapons.

  “No!” he yelled at the driver, grabbing his shoulder and pointing down at the wadi. “Head down there! Get us out of here now!”

  “But the others…,” the male protested.

  “If we stay here, they,” Kan-Ten pointed at the oncoming humans, “will concentrate their fire here! We need to spread them out! We need to get the Matriarch to safety! Get us out of here!”

  The driver shifted the truck into a lower gear, jammed on the accelerator and twisted the wheel to the right. The truck shuddered and there were banging sounds from the cargo compartment as the boxes shifted in the back. Kan-Ten was tossed against his restraints again by the wheels leaving the road, but he pushed himself up and grabbed the KE-gun from the floorboards. He hit the seat belt release and threw open the door, stepping out onto the running board, holding the KE-gun against his left hip as he held onto the safety handle with his right hand. The surface of the wadi was hard and smooth except for a few stretches of mud, and once they were down in it, the jolts and shudders settled enough for him to keep his balance.

  The Matriarch’s rover was following them, but she wasn’t going to make it off the road before the humans reached her. Already they were firing at his truck and at her vehicle, the meteor trails of mini-rockets streaking through the night, their warheads splashing against the stone of the bridge as they went wide of their targets. Kan-Ten aimed the KE-gun in the general direction of the approaching vehicles and held down the trigger. The weapon bucked in his hands despite the weight of it, spitting out hundreds of tantalum needles at thousands of meters per second.

  He couldn’t tell if he’d hit anything, but he did see some of the vehicles swerve and the others slow, a few of the runners throw themselves down. The Matriarch’s rover nearly flipped on its side when it went over the bank of the wadi at top speed, but the wheels slammed back to the ground in a spray of sand and mud, and it was quickly accelerating after the truck, sheltered from enemy fire by the banks. Back on the bridge, there were the flares of exploding warheads from the mini-rockets, and Kan-Ten thought he saw one of the cargo handlers go down under the enemy fire before they were too far away to make out details.

  Kan-Ten swung back into the cab and yanked the door shut, closing out the rush of the wind and the rumble of the engine. The driver’s face was tense, with the look of one trying to keep his concentration on what he was doing, despite the fear and panic doing its best to distract him. The wheels were sliding back and forth on the slick surface of the wadi, one or another spinning wildly when it hit a muddy spot.

  “The Matriarch is following us,” he assured the young male, trying to remember how he’d spoken to young warriors during the war. “You’ve done well.”

  “Kan-Ten!”

  It was one of the cargo handlers in the back of the truck calling him over his ‘link. He touched a control to answer.

  “Are you all right up there?” Kan-Ten asked.

  “The vehicles are moving to cut us off,” the male told him, his tone urgent and desperate. They had a higher viewpoint up on the cargo bed than he did in the cab, he realized. “The banks of this river bed get lower up ahead; they’re going to reach it before us!”

  “Get weapons from the crates if you can. Get ready to fight.”

  Kan-Ten clutched at the driver’s shoulder, getting his attention.

  “You have to go faster.”

  “We’ll go out of control,” he protested. Then his face seemed to firm up, along with his resolve. “I’ll try.”

  He pushed the accelerator down and the engine grumbled with the effort, surging as he shifted gears. Kan-Ten checked the digital readout of the KE-gun and realized that he’d emptied most of the drum. He bent down to retrieve the spare he’d taken from Vala-Kel inside the underground cache, had to steady himself against the dash when the truck began to slide again. He needed to put his seat harness back on, he thought, grabbing the reload and ejecting the nearly spent magazine. The fresh one seated home with practiced ease, rote memories learned from long hours of repetition as a young recruit.

  He’d just begun to reach for the seatbelt when the driver blurted a half-formed warning and the truck went from thirty-five kilometers per hour to zero in less than a second, slamming Kan-Ten against the dash hard enough to stun him. The engine roared and the wheels whined as they spun up, throwing thick gouts of mud into the air, some splattering against the side windows.

  “Get us out of this!” He tried to shout the words, but the breath had been knocked out of him, and he barely gasped them.

  “I’m trying, sir!” the young male said, shifting the truck manually into a lower gear and hitting the accelerator again. More roaring, more spinning, more mud, but no motion.

  By the time the driver had shifted them into reverse, Kan-Ten was back in his seat. The entire length of the cargo hauler jerked backwards as the wheels spun the other direction, but it was stuck fast.

  “Stop,” Kan-Ten instructed, throwing open his door and dropping to the ground.

  His legs sank half a meter into the mud and he nearly went face-first into the muck before he caught the edge of the door and steadied himself. The truck, he could see immediately, wasn’t going anywhere. All of the wheels, from stem to stern, were buried half their height into the thick, soupy mud and it would be an hour’s work to free them…and they had seconds.

  “Are we stuck?” That was Tran-Coh, one of the cargo handlers, leaning over the railing of the truck bed, staring down at him.

  “Do you have a weapon?” he asked the male by way of response.

  Tran-Coh blanched at that, but held up the KE-gun he’d salvaged from their cargo. The other male in the back---Kan-Ten couldn’t recall his name---held his own rifle up as well, looking more confident than his fellow.

  “Go protect the Matriarch,” Kan-Ten directed them, waving back at the rover, still twenty meters behind them.

  She was out of her vehicle now, and the younger female was beside her, a compact slug-shooter in her hand and a resolute fearlessness in the set of her shoulders. That one would have made the mother of great warriors, he decided, had she not dedicated her life to the path of a Matriarch. Even this far away, he could feel urges pulling at him, his animal brain screaming at him to drop his weapon and run to mate with her…he could see it on the faces of the males in the back of the truck as well.

  “They’re coming for the weapons,” he told the females. “You two should move along the river bed and find a place to wait them out while we hold them off.”

  “I brought this on us,” the Matriarch declared. “I will see it through.”

  “Honored Female,” Kan-Ten said respectfully, “your presence will distract us from the fight. Go now, while there is time.”

  “Listen to him, Mother,” the protégé urged. “Your life is more important than these weapons…or proving a point.”

  She didn’t seem happy with the idea, but the Matriarch was, by definition, the wisest of them, and she saw the wisdom in this argument. Kan-Ten turned and made his way through the mud back to the truck, climbing into the back with the cargo handlers.

  The driver was leaning out the door, looking over the edge of the banks of the wadi, watching the vehicles approach. They’d figured out that the cargo truck wasn’t moving and they’d abandoned their attempt to cut them off, turning back to head directly for their position.

  “What about the battlesuit?” the driver asked him, gesturing to the bulky machine, still bowed forward as if it was genuflecting to them, bright red loading straps
crisscrossing the length of it, securing it to tie-downs set in the cargo bed.

  “It would take too long to unstrap it and restart the reactor,” he said with a motion of negation. “Longer than we have.”

  Was that true? Could he have done it if he’d thought of it immediately when they’d stopped? Or had he not because he still resisted the idea of walking the thing into battle?

  Humans had a curious notion of how to dispose of the dead. Well, some of them did; their beliefs and customs differed alarmingly from one group to another. But he’d met those who insisted on burying the dead in the ground in a box called a coffin, which had always struck him as a morbid and wasteful practice. The battlesuit, though, reminded him of one of those coffins, reminded him of death and waste.

  He shook the thought off; the vehicles were less than a hundred meters away now, the cloud of dust from their wheels rising over the plain, shining in the bright moonlight. The dismounted troops were another hundred yards or so behind them, too far to aim without computer assistance, which none of them had.

  “Target the vehicles,” he told the others, leaning the cooling jacket of the KE-gun against the railing and lining up the electronic sight with the grill of a passenger van.

  It had been slapped together from parts fabricated on patterns decades old; newer patterns would cost more if you acquired them legally, and out here, it was easier to run your own alcohol still for fuel than to pay for high-end capacitor banks, and then to pay again to replace them if they failed. Power was cheap, of course, with the colony’s ubiquitous public fusion reactors, but ways to store it were not. Not out here.

  That made the targeting easier; he aligned the sighting reticle with the grill, knowing that if he could take out the cooling or fuel lines, he could take out the vehicle.

  “Shoot them,” he ordered, touching the trigger button.

  The stock pushed against his shoulder insistently, and a hundred tantalum slivers blasted out across the flat plain beyond the river bank, the crack of their passage trailing the sight of their impact on the front of the van. He sent most of the burst into the grill before rising his point of aim to the windshield; steam and smoke poured out of the engine and the vehicle ground to a halt, skidding sideways, its plastic windshield in tatters. The rear double-doors flew open and panic-stricken humans began piling out; he hosed them down without a thought, except, perhaps, the reflection that it did seem just like old times. One after another jerked and fell, the light armor they wore no match for a military-grade weapon such as his.

  The warning light flashed in his optical sight, helpfully letting him know that the drum was empty. It was only then he noticed the incoming gunfire, though he was sure it had been ongoing for several seconds. Swarms of mini-rockets trailed fiery red exhaust plumes over their heads and Kan-Ten ducked down instinctively. Tran-Coh’s body was sprawled out beside the stacked crates, blood from the gaping wound in his throat pooling beneath him, his KE-gun nowhere to be seen; Kan-Ten guessed it had fallen over the side panel of the cargo bed. The other male, the one whose name he still couldn’t recall, was huddled beside his friend, the KE-gun cradled against him, the halo of the reload warning light blinking against his chest.

  As far as he could tell, neither one of them had hit a thing, but a quick glance over the bank showed him that the enemy advance had slowed with his destruction of the van full of troops. The vehicles had pulled up short and the remainder were concentrating on pouring fire at him. He ducked back down. This was less than half of the force he’d seen back at the bridge, which meant the rest had stayed with Vala-Kel’s truck, and his friend was most likely dead.

  I suppose he wasn’t the True Emperor after all.

  Kan-Ten crouched low and moved over to the tied-down crates, checking to see if he could find a reload for his rifle, knowing even as he did that the enemy would likely be on him in seconds.

  When he heard the whining hum overhead, he thought at first his ears were playing tricks on him, battered by the near-constant eruption of mini-rocket warheads all around. But it only got louder, closer, and then he could see it coming in low against the stars, glinting in the moonlight: a hopper. The ducted-fan helicopter was old, battered, a patchwork quilt of spare parts; he could hear the pitch of the fans vary every few seconds. If it was Jordi’s men in it, though, his life expectancy had grown even shorter than he thought.

  “Kan-Ten.” The call on his ‘link was barely audible from the shoulder pocket where he’d stowed it. He pulled it out, trying to hold it closer to his ear to offset the gunshots, and the whine of the hopper, and the grumbling alcohol engines all around him.

  “Kan-Ten,” the voice went on insistently. It was Korri Fontenot. “If you can hear me, stay in the river bed and keep your head down.”

  Fontenot… He glanced up again at the hopper and realized that it must be her. But how had she known? And why hadn’t he told her? He pushed that thought off for later.

  The hopper banked low over the vehicles, then shuddered in mid-air as one of the doors popped open and a stocky, black-clad figure leaned out, one hand filled with a weapon of some kind. Ionized air flashed white, turned to plasma by the energy of the laser pulses from the carbine, and the bursts began to chop across the front of one of the remaining passenger vans. Sparks and flames shot from the hood of the vehicle as the laser pulses pierced its engine compartment, and it caught fire.

  Kan-Ten turned away from the battle, ripping through the storage boxes tied down in the bed, throwing one after another open until he finally found one packed with loaded ammo drums for the KE-guns. He grabbed one and tossed it at the male who still sat crouched on the floor by the body of his friend. The drum hit him hard in the chest, and he glanced up in confusion and anger.

  “Reload that weapon,” Kan-Ten growled at him in a voice that had made new recruits wish for their mothers not so long ago. “Get back into the fight.”

  He ejected the spent drum from his own rifle and replaced it with a fresh one, then threw himself up on the left-side panel of the open cargo bed. The hopper was circling now, bobbing up and down and trying to make itself a harder target as the troops on the ground had begun to fire up at it. Kan-Ten aimed at the biggest clump of them; they were poorly disciplined, and tended to group together instead of spreading out properly. That was the trouble with most hired guns; if they were competent, they wouldn’t have to hire out to someone like the cartel.

  The KE-gun spat a stream of hypersonic needles at the mercenaries, slicing through them as if they weren’t there, and passing on through. One after another of them toppled, some dead and silent, some wounded and screaming. Humans had such odd screams, he thought. Nothing like a Tahni sounded, not even a female…maybe a child. He’d heard females and children die before; the humans hadn’t been targeting them, but things happened in war, and missiles intended for point-defense turrets sometimes hit the people those turrets were defending.

  The cargo handler was beside him now, he could see it out of the corner of his vision. He propped his weapon across the next panel over and opened fire; Kan-Ten wouldn’t have been willing to bet his life on the male’s accuracy, but he didn’t need to hit anyone, just let those hired guns know someone was shooting at them. He could see them falling back now, some trying to shoot as they retreated, the others simply running. Fontenot was shooting again from the hopper, and the combination was too much for the mercenaries; the vehicles began to reverse, to turn around and head back to the bridge, to the other cargo truck.

  The hopper was descending now, coming down right next to the bank. Kan-Ten lowered his weapon, reaching down to where he’d left another loaded drum at his feet, swapping them out and leaning the rifle against the side panel of the truck. The cargo handler was staring at him, his weapon empty and held limply at his side.

  “These are allies,” he told the male, motioning toward the hopper. “Don’t make them shoot you.”

  Fontenot jumped out of the hopper before it had even touched g
round, landing heavily in a crouch and running towards them. She vaulted the bank of the wadi and landed in the truck bed with the tone of a massive gong being struck with a clapper. The cargo handler jerked backwards, fumbling for his gun before Kan-Ten slapped it out of his hands and sent it tumbling across the bed.

  The driver finally reappeared from where he’d been hiding inside the cab, glancing around in awe. Kan-Ten wanted to be angry with him, but he knew the young male hadn’t had a weapon and had never been in combat before.

  “I appreciate your superb timing, as always,” Kan-Ten told Fontenot. “How did you find us?”

  “I had some help,” she pointed back at the hopper. “The real question is, why didn’t you call me?”

  He knew her as well as he knew any human, and he thought he could read her facial expressions after all this time. She wasn’t happy, and he couldn’t blame her.

  “I was under observation,” he said, and wasn’t sure if it was true.

  She eyed him sidelong, but finally nodded.

  “I saw a couple of Tahni on foot heading down the wadi,” she told him, gesturing in the direction they’d been traveling. “I assume those are friends of yours.”

  “If you could go retrieve them, I will get to work on freeing this vehicle from the mud. Jordi Abdullah already has half our weapons. We can’t wait around for him to return for the other half.” He stared back in the direction of the bridge. “I believe we’re going to need them.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “Lander two-zero-four, you are cleared for launch.”

  The last word was still ringing in Sandi’s ears when the Warlock’s mooring clamps released and the shuttle’s belly jets kicked her free of the docking bay. The bare metal womb of the bay dropped away and she was swallowed up in darkness, the dull greys and whites of the ice giant below them only visible due to the computer interpolation of the views from the external cameras. The moon was a smaller circle passing across the larger arc of its parent world, shadowy and indistinct, hiding its mysteries under layers of nitrogen clouds. Yet it had already given up one of those secrets to Ash Carpenter and the Acheron…