by Rick Partlow
“Prep for boost,” she warned the Savage/Slaughter mercenary platoon arrayed behind her in the rows of acceleration couches. She thought she saw Lt. Benitez scowling at her through the faceplate of his pressure suit’s helmet from the right-hand chair. Oh well, she would have been mad, too, if she’d been kicked out of the pilot’s seat for a stranger.
The main engine flared behind her and four gravities pushed her back into her seat with sudden brutality; she retreated into the interface, trying to shut out the discomfort and distraction, concentrating on the bird, on the flow of power through her body and the flow of data into her mind. She could see the traces of the raider base now, just hints on thermal through the clouds of the moon as it rotated beneath her…and she could see the fusion burns coming up through that atmosphere, two of them rising quickly to meet her.
It was the pirate cutters. It couldn’t be helped, they’d had to Transition at the minimum safe distance, then burn in on the Warlock’s fusion drive until they’d been close enough to launch the lander. It was too long, too far; they’d all known the enemy would see their warp corona, see the thermal signature of their drive and have time to scramble the cutters. They could shoot her down before she brought her human cargo to the ground, which was worrisome of course, but they could also just run the hell away. That they couldn’t allow, because then they’d just come back at their leisure, in two weeks or a month, or three months.
This had to end today. And Ash was going to end it.
“They’re on their way up,” she told him, forcing herself back into her body long enough to speak. “Take them out.”
She could see his drive flare burning around the terminator from the other side of the moon, and she had to smile. He always said she was the better pilot, but when he was jacked into the Acheron, he was truly alive, and she couldn’t imagine him ever doing anything else.
His reply came in a moment later after a second’s delay at the mercy of the speed of light.
“I got ‘em.”
***
Ash felt his lips skinning back from his teeth against the boost of nine gravities, the pain and pressure forcing their way past even the separation of the interface. It was almost a relief, after nearly fifty hours spent in zero gravity, alone, waiting in a depowered ship for the orbit around the gas giant that would give him a view of the moon. He was beginning to think that Sandi had volunteered to pilot the shuttle just so she wouldn’t have to do the scout mission. At least the waiting was over…now he got to go let some nutcases try to kill him.
Unless I can kill them first. The thought still bothered him sometimes, despite everything he’d been through, despite the war. On the other hand… If they didn’t want to get killed, they should have picked another line of work.
The atmosphere of the moon was thicker than usual for a body this small and this cold; the external cameras of the Acheron showed nothing but an endless field of grey clouds, and the sensors didn’t show much more. The thermal flares of the two cutters ascending through the upper atmosphere were beacons, torches in the mist, but they seemed to hang just out of reach, and he was beginning to imagine the crushing boost would never end. Then, as if by magic, they were leaping ahead at him and he cut his acceleration to a more manageable two g’s, bringing the proton cannon online and slaving the Gatling laser turret to the ship’s computer for point-defense use.
They were going to spot him any second now…
And there it was; the ships split off from each other, breaking their ascent trajectory and beginning opposing arcs back toward him. They weren’t total amateurs; he knew that already, from their last encounter. They had balls and skill and he’d had to think way outside the box to beat them.
Don’t think too much, he warned himself, remembering the words of his flight instructors. Just do.
He lowered his consciousness beneath the interface, the feel of the acceleration couch and the view from inside the cockpit fading away, replaced by a different sort of awareness that he could never adequately describe to someone who’d never experienced it. The Acheron was his body, an extension of his thoughts; its fusion reactor was his heart, its engine his lungs. Banking away into a new trajectory wasn’t a matter of math and applied physics and firing maneuvering rockets; it was as simple as shifting his weight and turning a corner. Jacked into the interface, he wasn’t a pilot, he was the ship.
They were trying to trap him in a pincer, limit his avenue of retreat and catch him in their firing arc. He didn’t believe they carried missiles; they’d yet to use them against the barges, and he had to figure it was because railguns were cheaper. They might have lasers as well, but probably not military-class Gatling lasers; more likely a jury-rigged mining laser, something they could steal and plug into their reactor. Either way, it wouldn’t cut through the Acheron’s hide quickly enough to be a threat, so his main worry would be the railguns; and to use those, they’d have to angle the nose of their ships for a head-on shot.
It’s practically a propeller-age dogfight, he thought ruefully. What I wouldn’t give for some heat-seekers…
He couldn’t go down because then he’d be giving them the chance to get away, get to Minimum Transition Distance before he could catch up; instead, he lifted the nose and headed out of the atmosphere, trying to put a hard ceiling on their ascent vector. The push of the extra g’s added to the sensation of sprinting uphill, squeezing his chest with the effort, the view from the ship’s cameras tilting and shifting as grey gave way to star-crusted blackness. Through the pressure and the disorientation and the thinning atmosphere, he still retained a knowledge of where the enemy was, the data from the sensors simply there in his perception the same way you knew where your arms and legs were without looking.
They were matching his move, angling up for suborbital space again, trying to line up for a shot. The warning wasn’t a computerized voice, wasn’t a flashing light in his vision, he just knew the shot was coming the way you knew when you saw an arm cocking back to throw a punch. He dodged, as natural as sliding a foot to the side and shifting his weight, even though it involved cutting thrust to the main engine and hitting the belly jets and the fore and aft port maneuvering thrusters for a long second before reignition of the drive.
Acceleration hammered at him along with a wash of microgravity, the battering his inner ear took nearly dragging him out of the interface, but when the railgun fired, the round passed ten meters from his port wingtip. He cut the main drive again, firing both aft belly jets and spinning the Acheron end for end, far enough up now and in a thin enough layer of the atmosphere that the move didn’t send the ship out of control. The opposing thrust from the bow belly jets cut the spin short and left his nose lined up with the cutter that had fired on him.
Pale white lightning, barely visible in the thin layer of atmospheric nitrogen, crackled across kilometers and struck the pirate boat amidships. Their deflectors lit up in a coruscating globe of fire, yellow and purple and white like an aurora, and he could see a flare where the shields yielded to a point-overload, star-hot plasma arcing through the portside delta wing. Vaporized metal and flaming atmosphere shot out in an impromptu maneuvering jet and the ship went into a spin, the combination of uncoordinated thrust sending her banking back away from him, trailing glowing clouds of thruster fuel and escaping air.
Ash didn’t try to follow the wounded ship’s track with his full attention; he knew the other boat would be maneuvering, cold-bloodedly taking advantage of his distraction with the shot to line up his own main weapon, because that was exactly what he’d do. He flipped the Acheron end for end, punching the main drive and the starboard belly jets at the same time, banking away from the undamaged cutter’s trajectory but staying above him. Wind caught at his virtual wings though there wasn’t enough atmosphere to produce it, a simulation of the ship’s motion in a way his instincts could grasp without thought.
The world was a network of patterns, of angles and trajectories and velocities in tangled li
nes, and the data washed over his brain through the interface, transforming into movement and hunch and guesswork. He remembered watching old movies, reading old novels about how a brain-computer interface might work, stories written before it had become reality, and they’d never approached the actual experience. The computer wasn’t a personality, because time and experimentation had shown that computers with personalities were unreliable, unstable; they were artificial intelligence, but they weren’t artificial human intelligence, and treating them as if they were had driven them insane. They didn’t speak in words because words took too long to communicate data, slowing down the decision-making process.
No, when the interface had finally worked, it worked because thinking wasn’t necessary, because talking was ineffcient, because communication was redundant. The patterns of the sensors and the mathematics of the vectors and angles and probabilities all became motion, filtered through the greatest computer in the history of biological evolution: the human brain. Only conscious thought could slow it down, so the split-second decisions were often made unconsciously, which was why experience and repetition and training were so crucial.
These guys had the experience, he could tell that, and undoubtedly some training, but they hadn’t been where he’d been, hadn’t been squadron leaders who ran simulations twelve hours a day until they were ready to send down to the rest of the flight crews. So, when the opportunity came, his subconscious mind saw it and took it long before his opponents even recognized that it was happening.
It was just a slight change of angles, a small mistake that would take seconds to recognize and correct; he couldn’t have pinpointed it to someone watching, couldn’t have explained it later. But in the space of two heartbeats, the Acheron was rocketing straight to starboard and for just an instant, the undamaged enemy cutter was passing through the targeting reticle of his boat’s proton cannon at a distance of barely three kilometers. The weapon fired with a caress of his thoughts and speared the pirate cutter through the portside of the control deck, burning through the deflector shields like they weren’t there at this range.
Atmosphere flared and burning metal flashed and people died, vaporized without a trace they’d ever been. Most of the nose of the ship was gone, yet it kept accelerating, the drives frozen in ignition. They’d run until the reactor fuel went dry, and by then the ship would be heading for interstellar space, a cold and dark memorial.
He felt the Acheron’s plasma drive punch him back into his acceleration couch and didn’t know why for just an instant until the data reached his thinking mind. The damaged ship had returned, and a railgun projectile, twenty kilograms of solid tungsten, had screamed less than a meter from the stern of the Acheron, a nanosecond from turning the ship into an incoherent cloud of plasma.
He banked starboard again, diving back into the atmosphere, but the ship was still on him, not badly damaged enough to keep it from matching his nine-gravity descent. The maneuvering thrusters were sledgehammers beating against the wings of the ship, flinging the massive delta shape port and starboard in an erratic course. Another railgun shot, this one nearly as close, and the atmosphere was thick enough now that the friction ionized it into a fiery meteor.
Shit, he had the time to think. At least Sandi has a ride home.
That was when he saw the shuttle. It was burning in on his starboard side, rising on a fiery torch of exhaust, and its Gatling laser was firing even as he watched. A perforated line of flaring white pulses shot from the weapons multiple emitters, focused by the central crystal, and the rear cameras showed them striking home on the nose of the enemy ship, ignoring the electromagnetic deflectors.
The bow maneuvering thruster fuel tank burst in a glowing white globe of fire, and the raider ship nosed downward, spinning seemingly out of control. Ash didn’t take a chance this time; the pilot had already burned him once. He pulled the nose of the Acheron up, the maneuvering thrusters pushing against the bottom of his acceleration couch, and the rapidly descending cutter filled his gunsights. The proton accelerator struck like Zeus’ thunderbolt through the thickening atmosphere, and the pirate boat vanished in a plasma plume hundreds of meters across.
Ash felt the Acheron shudder as shockwaves traveled upward, and he banked away urgently, feeling the static electricity crackling around the ship.
“Thanks,” he called to Sandi, rasping, his mouth full of cotton.
“I can’t take you anywhere,” she chided playfully, her laugh hoarse and somehow incredibly provocative. “Cover my descent; they might have anti-aircraft defenses down there.”
“Aye, ma’am,” he said, feeling a grin spreading across his face just at the sound of her voice. “I got you covered.”
***
“I take it all back,” Benitez said quietly over their command net.
Sandi glanced sideways at him, keeping just a small section of her consciousness submerged in the interface to watch for rising missiles. The younger man was staring at her through the visor of her helmet again, but not with a scowl this time; it was more like a sour smile.
“What?” she wondered.
“Everything I’ve been thinking since they put you in the left seat,” the copilot clarified. “You deserve to be there. Hell, both of you are better pilots than I ever will be. I don’t care what either of you say, you both got that Medal for a reason.”
Sandi grunted, but she smiled inside her helmet.
“Let’s see if you feel that way after my landing.”
The lander was a goony-bird compared to a Fleet assault shuttle, but it seemed about as agile as the Acheron here in the soup, and Sandi felt herself slipping into the length and breadth of it, her consciousness spreading out through its wings and control surfaces. There was a weight to the bird, a solidity that she could appreciate, and it had as much boost as any other shuttle. The boost pushed against her with a welcome pressure, the body of a lover descending upon her, and the mists parted as the wings split them.
Razor-edged mountains of ice reached up at her, menacing in their beauty, lifeless and brutal. She followed the edge of them, staying as low as she dared, hunting for the thermal signature Ash had detected, the launching point for the now-destroyed cutters. The track led her to a pass through the mountains, and she could almost feel the cold off the surrounding peaks as the lander roared through it.
She could see it then, the sensor readouts of it, the thermal signature, the lidar return. It wasn’t huge and it wasn’t fancy, but it was sizable for a place like this, for an operation like this. It could be that the base was automated, that the cutter crews had been the only personnel on the world, but she doubted it. Automation cost money, both to buy and to transport and to maintain. It wasn’t something you saw much in the Periphery, rarely in the Pirate Worlds, and never among two-bit raiders like these.
There was at least a maintenance crew down there and likely hired guns as well, she could feel it as much as she felt the lift of the atmosphere on the shuttle’s wings. When the Gauss cannon opened up on her, she wasn’t surprised, not by the ground fire or the choice of weapons; electromagnetic slug-shooters were cheap to make and cheap to feed. She shoved the nose down, burning in nearly vertical, feeling the turbulence in the wind around her from the passage of the slugs, seeing the streaks of fire where their sheer speed ionized the atmosphere around them.
“Ash,” she bit off through teeth clenched against the acceleration.
“Got it,” he replied tightly.
It was too many seconds later for her peace of mind, but a raging streak of furious energy fell out of the sky and lanced into the canyon of ice where she knew the flat section of ground held a landing field and three dome-shaped buildings. A half-globe of white fire arced static electricity, and a dark and roiling cloud followed it upward into the death-grey sky.
“You’re clear,” he said, sounding satisfied at having returned her favor.
She was three hundred meters up when she began firing the belly jets, throttling down
the main drives and levelling out the shuttle’s descent. She kept a close eye on the sensors, but there was no more incoming fire; the Gauss cannon had been their only point defense. There were tiny figures pouring out of one of the dome buildings, growing larger as the shuttle powered in nearly on top of them. They were in armored vacuum suits, camouflaged grey and white against the snow and ice, firing up at the lander with hand-held weapons. It was desperation, but they had reason to be desperate; they had nowhere to run that wouldn’t kill them in hours, and the only transportation out of here had just been turned to atoms. They might have a cargo ship scheduled to come pick them up at some point, but it wouldn’t be anytime soon.
“Take them out, Benitez,” she said, her voice even and businesslike.
The Savage/Slaughter pilot had the controls for the Gatling laser turret slaved to his station, and he played the weapon across the gaggle of armed pirates, razors of coherent light slicing through them. Gouts of steam rose from flash-heated ice instantly sublimated to a gas, and three of the armored figures were chopped to pieces before the others retreated back into the white, buildfoam dome beside the landing pad
“Poor fuckers,” Benitez murmured, as if he was unaware his mic was still live.
“They’d do the same to us, and laugh about it,” Sandi reminded him. She switched her mic to the general platoon frequency and addressed the men and women strapped into the back of the lander. “Prepare to un-ass the vehicle. We’re down in ten seconds.”
It felt like less; she brought the shuttle in fast, trying to avoid any further last-ditch attacks, the belly jets screaming in protest. The landing gear barely had time to lock before they were slammed into their seats and she came up short as her straps locked into place.