Hybrid (Tales of the Acheron Book 2)

by Rick Partlow

  Seven of them in here, six of them ship’s security, armored and toting pulse carbines much like his own, not that either the armor or the weapons had done them any good. Something had torn right through their armor, peeled them like bananas and then torn apart the soft, chewy insides. The last corpse was the ship’s Captain, a man named Cornelius Schofield according to the records that Fox had given them. His face was intact, as well as the name tape on the shoulder of his fatigues. He’d been armed with a pulse pistol…at least Ash assumed that was his arm, spinning sedately with the gun still in its hand. Since Schofield was short one, it seemed logical.

  “Jesus Christ, Ash,” Sandi said over his helmet radio, her tone sounding reverent rather than blasphemous. “What the hell have we walked into here?”

  She and Kan-Ten had seen it all through the video pickup in his helmet, just as he could monitor what Fontenot was seeing in the docking bay.

  “We got one shuttle gone in here,” she reported, redundantly he thought since he could see the image of the empty niche where the lander had once nestled, a transplas tube that led through the hull and into vacuum. “And the other…”

  Her helmet swung around, and with it the view, and he could see what remained of the other shuttle. It still sat snugly in its launch enclosure, the airlock and docking umbilical still intact…but the engine bell was cracked and blackened, hanging off the rear of the bird loosely, as if the lack of gravity was the only thing keeping it from smashing to the deck. There’d been an internal explosion somewhere near the fuel feed, and Ash couldn’t help but think it had to have been intentional. Someone wanted to make sure no one else got off the ship.

  “Several bodies down here, too,” she added, panning to where the corpses floated, spinning slowly in the air currents. They were dressed like Marines---not the battle-suited behemoths that were dropped from troop carriers, but Recon Marines like the ones you might find stationed as the Reaction Force on a ship like the Metaurus. “I think whatever did this was either trying to get out on a shuttle or trying to stop the ones who did.”

  “That tracks with what the engineering board is telling me,” Ash confirmed grimly. “The Transition Drive isn’t just shut down, someone physically severed the power trunk to the Teller-Fox warp unit. Someone didn’t want this ship leaving this system and they didn’t want that shuttle leaving the ship, either.”

  “Shit,” Fontenot muttered. She sounded worried, and Ash couldn’t remember the last time she’d sounded that way. “That either means someone was so suicidal that they wanted to take everyone on this ship with them, or else there was something the officers on the Metaurus were so afraid of that they couldn’t let it get away.”

  “Ash,” Sandi said, some of that same trepidation creeping into her voice, “you guys need to get off that ship.”

  “Yeah, I think you’re right,” he acknowledged. There was a cold feeling in his gut, and he tried not to let it freeze into a full panic. He pulled the dataspike Fox had given them out of a utility pouch on his pistol belt. “I have the computer systems back up; it shouldn’t take me more than ten minutes to download the log. Korri, I’ll meet you at the lock in a half an hour and we’ll head back to the Acheron.”

  “I’ll have the ship in position,” Sandi promised.

  Ash nodded and signed off, then quickly got to work manipulating the data systems…and keeping one eye on the blood.

  ***

  The first sensation she’d experienced in six years was warmth.

  Through that hazy borderland between sleep and wakefulness, she realized it had also been that long since she’d been warm. Her last memory was the creeping cold, the lethargy that had come with it as systems beyond her control had buried her in protective sleep. But now the temperatures were rising slowly, passing the freezing point of water as the air around her thickened.

  She was in a tight space, a place she’d crawled into from instinct, the last warmth and energy she’d sensed before things had gone dark. With the warmth, feeling came back to her body, and with it came the pain. She’d almost forgotten the pain. It had been a constant before, a background noise she’d almost learned to ignore, but now it seemed new again and freshly intolerable. It was impossible to localize it, impossible to even categorize it as an ache or a sharp pain or a feeling of sickness. Instead, the pain was a part of her being, a field that bound together her molecules and existed in every atom of her every element.

  The pain was almost enough to make her hate the warmth, to blame it for her suffering, but as the warmth and the pain returned, the memories also returned. And she remembered who was to blame for her pain. It was the man. The man had caused her pain, and he was somewhere else, somewhere far from her. Part of her wanted to get to him, but instincts were pulling her in different directions. She felt confusion, the same confusion she remembered from before she’d slept, because two overwhelming urges tugged at her, leading her down disparate paths.

  Part of her wanted more than anything to go home. She could see home in her mind’s eye, green and warm and welcoming, and she thought she knew how to get there, but when she’d tried, things had gone badly. The others had tried to stop her, and when she couldn’t go home, she did what the other voices were yelling at her to do: she killed. The other voices, the ones that didn’t care about her home or her pain, wanted her to kill and they wanted her to find the womb and reproduce others like her.

  The womb, that was what she thought of when they put the feeling in her head, but that wasn’t the word the voices were saying. They were calling it something else, something she couldn’t visualize except perhaps as a seed pod. Maybe seed pod was a better word, but she would keep thinking of it as the womb, because it felt right.

  If she couldn’t get home, maybe there was a way she could get to the womb…and the man was there, too, she remembered. The man had caused her pain, and killing him would feel just and satisfying. She had to move.

  She uncurled from her darkened nook beside the air vent, stretching out to her full length. Someone, one of the others, they had to have turned the warmth and the air back on. They were here, on this ship, and they had to have come in one of their own. She would kill them and take it. Killing felt right. Killing would quiet the voices nagging at her, would quiet the pain. She reached out with senses that she couldn’t understand and wouldn’t have been able to describe, and she found them.

  She skittered away, hugging the darkness, embracing the shadows as she embraced her purpose.

  ***

  Fox had told them to download the log; he hadn’t said to listen to it. Ash’s hand hovered over the control, finger tracing the line between the “Download” indicator and the “Download and play” selection, wondering if there was any way the Intelligence officer would know.

  “What the hell?” he murmured to himself, and hit “play.”

  The holographic image showed just the head and shoulders of the ship’s commander, projected above the communications console at about one third life size. Captain Schofield was a handsome man when he wasn’t dead and mummified, Ash decided. He had one of those faces that you saw on advertising videos, ruggedly good looking but also sympathetic and understanding, a cross between a movie star and the idealized version of a dad he’d seen on ViRdramas and nowhere else in his life.

  “Mission log 10469-A,” Schofield intoned, his voice as stern and serious as his demeanor but with an edge of exasperation, like this was just another routine he’d grown tired of performing. “Commonwealth Space Fleet cruiser Metaurus, Captain Cornelius Schofield commanding. The ship was refueling and resupplying at Andalusia when we received a coded message on the Instell ComSat addressed to the first Fleet starship to make it insystem. It was a priority mission with an authorization that came straight from President Jameson, tasking us to travel immediately to a system out way past anywhere I’ve ever been before to provide transportation for items vital to the war effort.”

  Schofield couldn’t keep the skepticism of
f his face. “We’re 160 hours into the trip and the orders don’t make any more sense now than they did then.” He shrugged, abandoning the thread. “The latest engineering tests show that…”

  Ash paused the playback and scrolled past what he estimated the travel time between Andalusia and this system would be, then restarted it. He blinked when the image of Schofield reappeared. It looked like a completely different man, his eyes haunted, his formerly ruddy cheeks now ashen and hollow; he looked like a man who’d stared death in the face.

  “We’ve thrown everything we had at it,” he intoned, his powerful voice now a dry rasp. He was in microgravity, you could tell by the way he moved, yet he still seemed as if something stronger than the mass of a world was weighing him down. “Everything we could do short of destroying the ship, and now it may come to that. I’ve sent teams to sabotage the Teller-Fox unit, to keep it from using this ship to get elsewhere. I wouldn’t have thought it had the intelligence for that, but from what Dr. Nagle tells me, it most assuredly does.”

  He sucked in a breath of air, coughing at the end of it, wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’ve…” He trailed off, staring past the video pickup for a moment, mind trapped into recalling images he was trying to forget. “I’ve lost most of the crew. We’re trying to lure it to the bridge to give Commander Busick a chance to get everyone else who’s left into one of the landers and take them down to Nagle’s research base. It’s nasty down there, barely habitable, but inside the tunnels, they should be able to make it.”

  His expression firmed with resolve. “Several members of what remains of the ship’s security complement have volunteered to try to keep the thing occupied while the others escape. If we can’t kill it, then I’m prepared to shut down the reactor, shut down all life support. If that doesn’t kill it, well…at least it’ll be trapped in here, with us dead, and it won’t be able to hurt anyone else.”

  Someone called his name off-projection and he turned. His eyes closed for just a moment, then opened again with a look that might have been acceptance.

  “It’s coming.” He paused. “Tell my wife and daughter that I love them.”

  The recording ended and the image faded into the projector with a snap.

  “Shit,” Ash hissed. “What the hell is ‘it?’”

  He started to run the message back before that segment, but the notification pinged to let him know that the log file had been backed up. He cursed and yanked the dataspike out of the socket, tucking it safely away into his belt and moving over to the Tactical station. He activated the console and started running sensor scans of the moon below them.

  There was a base down there, Schofield had said. It had been six years, but maybe…

  There.

  The clear thermal signature of a small fusion reactor, barely the size of the one on the Acheron but big enough for a small outpost. He couldn’t tell much else about the place, and he imagined most of it was probably underground, but he had a location.

  “Sandi,” he called into his helmet pickup. He hadn’t taken his suit or even his helmet off despite the life support returning, because he hadn’t been sure if there might have been any problems with atmospheric production in the last six years the ship had been floating here. “Sandi, you paying attention? Kan-Ten?”

  “I’m here, Ash,” Sandi responded. “What’s up? You done in there yet?”

  “I got the files,” he told her, “but there’s a base down there on that moon, one with an active fusion reactor. I think there are survivors down there.”

  “Damn,” she said, sounding awed and slightly annoyed. “This is getting a lot more complicated than it sounded when Fox handed it to us.”

  “Yeah,” Fontenot piped up. “A lost Fleet ship on a secret mission out in the ass-end of nowhere, that sounded simple as hell. Who could have predicted it would get this complicated?”

  “Maybe I liked you better when you were aloof and standoffish,” Sandi shot back, but he could hear the grin in her voice. “What are you thinking, Ash? Should we head down there and check it out?”

  “Let me see if I can raise them,” Ash decided, scraping across the floor with the magnetic soles of his boots, moving toward the Communications console. “If there’s anyone down there, we probably don’t want to surprise them.”

  He hadn’t made it more than two steps before he heard the beeping of the alarm from the Tactical display. His head snapped around automatically, and he cursed as he remembered to turn his whole body so he could see anything besides the interior of his own helmet. There was a new icon on the threat display, glowing red as it accelerated at six gravities, the rainbow halo behind it representing a warp corona.

  “We got a ship Transitioning!” he shouted it into the helmet pickup, heedless of the feedback it caused in his own speakers. “What the hell?”

  “Who the fuck else would be out here?” Fontenot demanded. “Especially now? Did Fox put someone else on this? Is it military?”

  “Ash, get the fuck out of there!” Sandi exclaimed. “Get out now!”

  “What? What is it?” He peered at the icon, at what seemed to be a normal-looking cargo ship. “Do you recognize it?”

  “He followed us out here,” she said, sounding desperate and scared. “Jesus Christ, he followed us…”

  “Who followed us?” Ash wanted to know. “How could anyone follow us in T-space?”

  “It’s the Gitano,” Sandi told him, and on the screen, he saw the cargo ship heading on an intercept course towards her, saw a flight of missiles separating from the Gitano and streaking out away from her weapons pods. Heading for Sandi.

  “It’s Singh!”

  Chapter Seven

  “Strap in!” Sandi yelled back to Kan-Ten.

  She didn’t wait to make sure the Tahni had heeded her warning; she was already jacked into the pilot’s control station, and with an act of will she dove into the interface and ignited the Acheron’s drive. From zero to seven g’s just as fast as the ship would accelerate, the raging flare of plasma from the ship’s drive smashed her into the liquid cushion of the acceleration couch with bruising force, and it still wouldn’t be enough against missiles that could boost at over twice that.

  Another few hundred thousand kilometers farther away from the moon, farther out of the gravity well of the gas giant, and she could have Transitioned, just a micro-jump out an Astronomical Unit or so. She could have run rings around that old piece of shit converted freighter that Jordi Abdullah called a warship. But gravity constrained her, enslaved her, and those damned missiles were going to fly right up her ass if she didn’t shake them.

  The moon. If she could get down into its atmosphere, she could lose the missiles; they were space-to-space, she could tell by their sensor signature, not designed for flying in the soup. Using the ship’s belly jets and maneuvering thrusters, she banked away from the bulk of the Metaurus and burned downward, surrendering to the gravity well. Re-entry at this speed was dangerous as hell; the thickening air buffeted the ship and the view from the exterior cameras burned white with friction flame. Only the ship’s electromagnetic deflectors kept the star-hot plasma away from her skin and kept the interior temperature anything near survivable.

  Sandi could still feel the wash of nearly unbearable heat baking the inside of the Acheron, distracting enough that it nearly drew her out of the interface at a moment when the slightest inattention could leave little bits of them descending like fairy dust all over the planet. There was a narrow corridor she had to follow, and deviating from it would put them on a steep enough trajectory that not even the interface could keep her conscious against those sorts of g-forces, and not even the deflectors could save them from the fury of the fire.

  She felt the inferno of their reckless descent against the hull, more real than the sweltering air inside the ship, felt the air passing over her own skin, her arms and legs the control surfaces, as close to skydiving as she ever wanted to get. And nagging at the back of her mind, neve
r quite forgotten, were the missiles. They were catching up to her despite the best speeds she could manage without losing control, still boosting, not quite out of fuel yet. But there was that heat, heat so great the chemical bonds of the diatomic molecules of air were broken, heat so intense that the air was ionized into plasma…and the missiles didn’t have deflectors.

  Sandi nearly cheered when she saw the first of them fall away, pin-wheeling in a spray of fire and then disintegrating, scattering itself across a continent; but the others kept going. She gritted her teeth and made the decision to go lower, knowing that meant she was going to have to decelerate, knowing how much velocity she’d lose when she switched over from the fusion drive to the turbojets. But she needed the thicker air to shake the other missiles and she didn’t have much time left.

  The flames engulfing the skin of the cutter began to die down as she levelled the ship off and throttled back the drive, sinking through the upper layers of the atmosphere, through sheaths of grey clouds a kilometer deep. There was a heart-skipping moment between the second the fusion drive cut off and the turbojets kicked in, just an angstrom of doubt as the pressing fist of acceleration ceased and breath rushed back into her lungs. But the jets roared to life and she was pressed back again into her seat with their comforting power.

  Dropping out of the clouds, she could see that the missiles had gained on her, but at a price; another was down, spinning wildly out of control and heading for the depths of a frozen sea. The remaining two were ten kilometers away, and just had to be nearly bingo fuel by now. There was no way they couldn’t be. She kept telling herself that, praying it, wishing it, projecting it like a weapon at them.

  Eight kilometers…

  There. There it was, and she nearly jumped out of her seat when she saw it, saw both of the weapons sputtering, slowing, beginning to nose in.

  And detonating.