Exile (Tales of the Acheron Book 3)

by Rick Partlow

  There was a ringing in his ears that was more a whistling, and when he tried to suck in a desperate breath, there didn’t seem to be anything but smoke and fire in his lungs, but he knew he had to move. He had a dim realization, not so much from what he could see, since he couldn’t see anything but smoke and flame and blinking purple after-images, but from a general sense of where he’d been and where the shot had gone, that the office didn’t exist anymore. He didn’t know if Jordi had targeted it, or it had just been collateral damage from trying to hit Fontenot and the Constable, but where the office had been was nothing but a flaming pile of wreckage.

  He couldn’t see any of the others, and couldn’t afford the time to find out if they’d survived. He had to move, and there was only one direction worth moving. He scrambled to his feet, ignoring the dull ache that seemed to come from everywhere, ignoring the burning in his lungs, and sprinting across the debris-littered floor to the second battlesuit.

  He’d chosen it rather than the first because it had more concealment and potential cover with the other suit and the cargo truck between it and Jordi’s position, assuming the man was still there. Kan-Ten was sure he saw KE-gun needles punch into the side of one of the hoppers as he ran past it, but he still couldn’t hear anything, even his own labored breathing. Just one of the needles in the right place, just one and his long journey would be over right here, and would that be so bad? How had he wanted it to end? This would be as good a way to finish it as any.

  But it didn’t end before he reached the suit. The smooth, polished surface of it was cold even in the heat the electron blast had left behind, yet it held a life, a warmth to it that wasn’t obvious to anyone who’d never been inside. He touched a control and the chest plastron began its slide downward, agonizingly slow; he crouched down behind the massive legs and chanted a calming mantra as he watched something traveling thousands of meters per second smack into the back shoulder armor of the suit and careen away faster than he could follow.

  His hearing was starting to return, and there was the distant clamor of shouts, and the distinctive hum-snap of electromagnetic slug shooters, and the whoosh-crack that could only be the Constable’s revolver firing. At least one of them was still alive, then. The plastron stopped in its descent and Kan-Ten wriggled into it with a twisting motion that seemed childishly easy now; it had taken him months to perfect it in training, and he’d been the fastest for three cycles running by the time he’d earned his own platoon.

  He thrust his hands into the arms of the suit and grasped the finger controls; at his touch, the plastron pulled inward toward him automatically, folding him into its embrace like the arms of death herself. Interior lights flickered to life, the Heads-Up Display cutting through the smoke and haze and showing him the roller door just ten meters ahead. Warnings flashed, not in the humans’ choice of colors but in something more sensible, more meaningful, letting him know he was being targeted by incoming fire.

  “I am aware of that,” he said softly, powering up the isotope reactor.

  Talking to himself was another bad habit he’d learned from humans. His own people would think him possessed by evil spirits if they’d heard it, but they were the least of his problems. If Jordi’s weapon recharged before he got this battlesuit working, that beamer would tear right through its armor at this range.

  He checked the display, saw the heat sources scattered around the room, barely distinguishable from the fires still burning in the office, but the computer put the slight heat differences together with sonic input to paint him a picture. At least a couple of the others were still alive, and firing at Jordi and his troops. More and more of those troops were flooding into the corridor entrance, though, and they, perhaps, had even less time than he did.

  The thermal signature of the assault beamer was distinctive, and the computer knew it; he could see from the threat readout in the HUD that the weapon was fully recharged. If Jordi Abdullah had any sort of tactical sense, he would ignore the distraction of Fontenot and the others, would take whatever chance he had to in order to take out the battlesuit before it powered up. It would be a spear of white heat and then he’d be flash-roasted in half a second.

  The isotope reactor came online without warning, nearly surprising him, and the servos whined to life as he lunged forward instinctively. The High Guard battlesuit was a big target, a power hog which demanded a logistics train that, perhaps, far outweighed its worth; but in combat it was a marvelous machine in ways that made him forgive its shortcomings. Both the suits they’d found lacked any major weaponry; they had been stored without missiles or KE-gun ammo and the electron beamers built into the left arm, of each were dead-lined, long ago stripped for parts to make another suit work. But it still had the vibro-cutters extending from each wrist and they hummed to life with a clench of his fingers on the right controls. And it still massed 500 kilograms, and worked very well as a battering ram.

  Kan-Ten thought about running, let those muscles flex---and the battlesuit ran. Long, loping strides, deceptively fast and then he leaned forward and jumped and thought about jumping hard. Intakes at the top of the suit’s “backpack,” the armored housing for the reactor, sucked in air through miniature turbines and fed it through the vents surrounding the isotope power pack, heating it and expelling it through jets at the bottom.

  He wasn’t sure how fast he was going when he hit the door, but he felt it buckle, felt it bow outward, heard the wrenching squeal of metal even through the armor. He brought both arms up, vibro-cutters extended, and sliced downward. Stressed metal parted like wet parchment, shrieking in agony, and the blades came free, leaving gaping rents in the battered and bent surface. He took two steps back then slammed into the three-meter-wide stretch between the two slices.

  Behind him, the electron beamer fired again and there was a white flare of raw energy, and a clap of thunder, and a flash of breathtaking heat, but the steel of the door gave way with one last scrape of metal talons on armored shoulders, and he was through…

  Chapter Seventeen

  Boost. His whole world was boost, acceleration, high gravity pushing him, battering him, punishing him. It felt as if it had been the entirety of his experience for as long as he could remember. Ash took comfort from it at times, at the pure, unbridled power it represented, power under his control, a part of his body. But after too long, after too much acceleration at too many gravities for minutes that dragged like hours, he just wanted to breathe again, and he wasn’t sure when that would happen.

  The Acheron rumbled and roared and shrieked and groaned and vibrated around him and he felt every strain, every gram of stress, every bank and loop and dive as if her skin was his, her effort his own. The night sky over Gennich was a cloudless mass of stars, the kind of sky that could disorient you, get you turned around, but the interface kept him focused. He knew where he was instinctively, knew where the shuttles were, knew where the surface was.

  The La Sombra birds were trying to get away from him, trying to get to the Savage/Slaughter landers, now that they’d noticed them. The cartel aerospacecraft were fast and slippery, sliding through his targeting lock, silver, metal fish wriggling out of his fingers. They were too low, too close to the city, too close to Sandi’s LZ, and he had to draw them away, force them to target him.

  His problem was his training, he decided. A shot from a proton cannon took the full charge of one of the ship’s two capacitor banks; doctrine, pounded into pilots and crews from day one, was never to waste a shot, because once those banks were drained, it took a long time---up to thirty seconds, forever in combat---to recharge them. But he was in atmosphere, and a proton blast didn’t have to hit to get their attention.

  He angled the Acheron into a dive, following them down, trying to get his targeting reticle centered on the portside of the pair, watching the bird dance back and forth. The pilot might not have had military training, but he had plenty of experience shaking bogies off his tail in gunfights in the soup. Ash only needed him to
be within a few dozen meters, though…

  He’d fired before he realized it, lashing out with the cutter’s main weapon, the shot ripping apart the atmosphere, seeming to tear at the fabric of reality with a lance of pure white energy as powerful as any lightning bolt. The air around the blast superheated, and the expanding cylinder of plasma sent shockwaves of turbulence outward from it, slamming into the shuttle and sending it tumbling into a wild spin, angling down over the high desert outside town. Ash banked after the out-of-control craft, intent not so much on finishing it, although he would if he could, but on making the other shuttle pilot believe he was about to finish it.

  It worked. The rounded wings of the tumbling shuttle were beginning to slow in their rotation as the pilot began to power out of the spin, but he was still seconds away from getting a target lock on the bird when he sensed the second shuttle burning hard upward, coming in at his nine o’clock. Ash tried to hold his course just a few seconds longer, thinking maybe he could scratch one of them now and be able to concentrate on the other, but the incoming bogie wasn’t taking “no” for an answer. Narrow flares of heat bloomed on thermal as the flight of four missiles streaked from the shuttle’s weapons bay, tendrils of white smoke glowing incandescent in the moonlight, seeking him out.

  Had Ash been forced to think through his actions and implement them manually, he might have died in the next instant; but the interface coupled with years of training and experience allowed him to act without conscious thought, without intention. He fired the proton cannon again, even though it was degrees away from being aligned correctly, just another shove to keep that shuttle off balance. The blast of charged particles had barely left the ship’s accelerator before Ash spun the cutter end for end with a kick of maneuvering thrusters and boosted out of the path of the missiles. The Acheron seemed to moan with the strain, the jet engines roaring in protest.

  It was risky using the maneuvering jets in the atmosphere; the Acheron wasn’t fresh off the production lines, and there was always the danger that the stress would rip the wings right off of her.

  Not this time, Ash thought ruefully, clenching his stomach muscles against the sudden rush of g-forces. The interface kept him conscious and focused, but it was a close thing.

  The missiles were struggling to make the turn, lighter and able to take greater g-forces than a manned ship, but not nearly as powerful or maneuverable. They weren’t military-grade; again, like the weapons the lighter had launched, they were fabricated in the Pirate Worlds for use by amateurs against amateurs. Ash climbed away from them, his fuel only limited by the reactor, his reaction mass superheated air sucked through the intakes and out through the engine exhaust. The missiles had onboard chemical propellant tanks and it would only last them just so long, particularly trying to maneuver in the atmosphere.

  The shuttle followed him from a careful distance, not wanting to get caught in the explosion of its own warheads, but he felt its presence through the interface as if by some sixth sense. The other one was kilometers farther back, finally out of its wild spin and climbing again, and he cursed as he saw it going back after the landers, as persistent as a dog with a bone. He sank further into the interface, opening himself up to all the data it was feeding him, felt the distance from the missiles, felt their speed and velocity and how long it would take them to catch up to him. He didn’t have to think about it or calculate it, he knew it like the way he understood when he threw a baseball how far it would go and where it would hit.

  He pulled an Immelman turn, a maneuver not designed for a starship one hundred meters long, but still effective, cutting his thrust and letting the boat drop back downward, steering into the dive and then shifting power back to the jets again. The missiles lunged at him with renewed vigor, as if they somehow realized they had a chance to reach him now, and the Gatling laser turret in the cutter’s wing hummed to life on its own accord, guided by the ship’s computer. He knew there couldn’t be much ammunition left in the Gatling’s hopper, not after the fight with the lighter, but he didn’t interfere; it wasn’t as if he could turn what was left in for a refund.

  There was an explosion off to his two o’clock, then another further back as the laser pulses sought out and dispatched two of the heat-seekers, red and white eruptions in the darkness. Two left…and then a red warning flashed in the perimeter of his vision, letting him know that the Gatling laser had, as they used to say back in the military, gone Winchester; it was totally dry on ammunition.

  “Fuck,” he muttered, more inside his head than out loud.

  Only one thing to do; he throttled up the jets, feeling nine g’s-plus stomping him into the seat. The lower of the two La Sombra shuttles was just a few kilometers ahead of him now, and less than three hundred meters below his altitude. Blackness tunneled in on his awareness, threatening to send him over the edge into unconsciousness, but he fought it, knowing it meant death. The ship’s flight systems would pull him out of the dive automatically, but that left the pesky missiles, and they wouldn’t play fair and let him take a time-out.

  The missiles were less than a kilometer away and closing; they’d detonate automatically at a hundred meters, firing off a shotgun-blast of penetrators aimed at his engines. The Acheron was armored, but each sub-munition would have its own quick-burnout rocket motor and a plasma warhead designed to burn right through BiPhase Carbide. If they’d been black market military hardware, they wouldn’t just be heat-seeking, they’d be capable of tracking his lidar and thermal signature and he never would have been able to pull this off. He didn’t have time to line up the proton accelerator with the shuttle trying to target Sandi’s lander, but he didn’t have to use the proton cannon; the cartel pilot had given him another weapon.

  Two kilometers from the shuttle now, nearly even with its altitude, and only a thousand meters from the deck. The missiles were about 300 meters out and descending at a shallower angle, cutting off his avenue of escape upward. This was one of those moves that would have horrified his trainers, but then, he’d never met a military trainer that really appreciated what was possible with the interface. Just a combination of the angle of the flaps, the vector of the exhaust, a slight nudge from the belly jets, not planned or thought through but felt in his gut and expressed as a motion of the ship-as-his-body…and suddenly the Acheron was standing on its nose, sliding forward, nearly scraping wings with the shuttle.

  And the missiles were a hundred meters away. They both detonated as one, and suddenly the shuttle was bombarded by a hail of molten metal, spears of plasma that sliced through its skin and into the fuel tanks. The explosion was a hammer-blow that nearly knocked the Acheron out of the sky, and Ash was struggling with her now, pushed out of the interface by the blast wave and the shock that tossed the ship, and him, into a spin. He dove again, submerging his mind and subsuming it back into his meld with the ship, powering out of the spin with the belly jets and climbing again.

  The other shuttle was waiting for him up there, and he knew now that he had the pilot’s undivided attention. Below him, Sandi was taking the lander into the teeth of the enemy, but he’d done what he could for her.

  “You don’t get to die,” he reminded her softly, then he climbed to meet his enemy in the black sky.

  ***

  Sandi caught the explosion out of the edge of her perception and knew immediately that it was one of the enemy shuttles, not Ash. If the Acheron blew up, it would have been a fusion blast that blotted out the sky and possibly killed them all; this was the explosion from solid rocket fuel going up. She hissed out the breath she’d been holding and concentrated on the landing zone.

  There was already anti-aircraft fire rising from the corners of the fortress, streams of electromagnetically launched tantalum slivers crossing back and forth, hosing down the sky around her. She jinked the shuttle in an irregular, choppy pattern, but she knew the only reason she and the other lander hadn’t been shot down was the lack of computer control for the weapons. They were Tahni weapo
ns and the targeting was manual, the readouts in a non-human language and she knew the operators were firing by guess and by God…and it was still coming too damned close.

  “Get ready,” she murmured to Jacobson. “Gonna’ get rough.” Then she switched to the frequency for the other lander’s pilot, a short, disagreeable man with regulation-length hair that was nonetheless purple and in corn rows. “Filipe,” she said. “I’m going in and drawing their attention. Slip on by to the fusion reactor while I have them distracted.”

  “Roger.” His reply was curt and laconic, just like everything else he’d said to her over the last two days.

  You’re fucking welcome, she thought at him sourly.

  Then she threw the lander into a barrel roll, and past the layer of unreality that the interface provided, she thought she heard Jacobson puking into his helmet. Her own dinner stayed firmly in place, but the g-forces jerked her forcefully against her seat restraints as she took the aerospacecraft down over the fortress in a steep, tight spiral. The lander had a Gatling laser turret in the wing and she cut loose with it as she descended, trying to put fire on the air defense turrets as best she could. She wasn’t sure if she’d hit anything; the aerospacecraft was going too fast and her attention was too focused on bringing it down as close as she could to the garage entrance.