by Rick Partlow
The Acheron had drawn away by a few more kilometers when the missiles’ drives had died, and the added distance was the only thing that saved them from being incinerated in the fireball of fusion energy spreading like an exploding star expanding to paint the roiling clouds with the fires of creation. Sandi screamed at the wave of static that pushed her out of the interface and the wall of superheated air that slammed into the cutter and sent her tumbling across the sky, spinning over the sea and half an ice-bound continent before she began the long fall.
The interface was rebooting, blocking her every attempt to reenter it, and there just wasn’t time to wait for it. G-forces were trying their best to pin her back into her seat and the spin was about a half a second from forcing her to black out. Summoning all the strength she could pull out of the deepest places in herself, she forced her hands back to the flight station and grabbed at the physical control stick, latching onto it like it was her last lifeline.
It was hard to think, hard to stay conscious, and she acted on instincts honed from years of training and experience and tried to power out of the spin. If she’d had more altitude, she might have done it; the cutter was about as aerodynamic as a brick, but even a brick can fly with a fusion reactor powering it. But she’d tumbled out of the sky in the seconds it had taken her to reach the controls, and the ice pack of the massive glacier covering most of the moon’s northern hemisphere was rushing up at her; she couldn’t see it, could barely focus her eyes enough to work the controls, but she knew it was coming.
Desperate with a sense that she had seconds to live, Sandi shifted power to the belly jets and felt herself crushed into the bottom of the acceleration couch and praying to a God she’d never been sure she actually believed in that the Acheron wouldn’t break in half…
Something slammed into her with the weight of a world and blackness swallowed her up.
***
“It’s Singh!”
Sandi’s warning was still echoing around in his helmet but Ash was already in motion, cutting loose the magnets in his boots and pushing off toward the Tactical Officer’s station, punching desperately at the controls even as he arrested his motion. He had to bring the ship’s proton cannons online, had to target those missiles, and then he could take out the Gitano.
He cursed, and slammed a fist into the console. There was a fault, a short in the power trunk where it split between the weapons and the Teller Fox warp unit, and he knew exactly what it was: when the crew of the Metaurus had sabotaged the Transition Drive, they’d damaged the power trunk. He could bypass it, but not from here…
“Korri!” he yelled. “Get to engineering fast! I need you to do a manual bypass on the main power trunk to the ship’s weapons control systems and I need it done five minutes ago!”
“On it,” Fontenot assured him, refreshingly not questioning his orders for once. Then she added, “The engines still work, don’t they?”
He grinned savagely. “You’re damn right they do. Prepare for one gee acceleration.”
Maybe they couldn’t take out the missiles yet, but they could keep the lighter busy. He pushed back over to the Helm control station and jammed a thumb down on the control to ignite the plasma drive, then traced the power level up to one gravity. The metal mountain of a ship rumbled up and down the length of her, a volcano erupting into space, and he felt the faux gravity of acceleration begin to push him back down to the deck as the Metaurus moved under her own power for the first time in six years. Around him, blood that had been floating since before the war with the Tahni had ended began splattering across the deck and the control stations and the acceleration couches, and bodies suspended for just as long hit the metal grating of the deckplates with the unforgettable sound of dried bones snapping.
A course. He needed to set a course; right now, they were just accelerating into a higher orbit. He needed to know where the lighter was, which way she was going. He trotted back to the Tactical station, cursing, wishing he’d brought Kan-Ten along; it was impossible to run a ship this size with just one person, even if he’d been jacked in, which he couldn’t in a suit not built to accommodate the interface cables. And the damned vacc suit must have weighed twenty-five kilograms; it felt like a lead weight between his shoulder blades.
He spotted the Gitano immediately, boosting away from the path of the cruiser, trying to get to a lower orbit that would give them some separation from the Metaurus and her weapons. And he also spotted something else on the threat monitor: a shuttle had forced a docking with the service airlock, latched on with a universal umbilical that melded itself to the hull magnetically. That wouldn’t get them through the lock, but it would hold them in place while they cut through the hatch, and there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it from the bridge.
“Korri,” he called to Fontenot. “We have company. Singh’s crew has a shuttle docked at the lock we used, and it won’t take them more than a few minutes to break through.”
“I got it.” She sounded way too calm. “One emergency at a time, Ash.”
He grunted a humorless laugh, then stepped back to the Helm control and began swinging the ship’s course around gradually, trying to get closer to the Gitano. He shifted his carbine off his back and held it against his right hip, waiting, wondering which weapon he’d get to fire first.
***
Korri Fontenot ran down the passageways of the Metaurus, dodging the desiccated lumps of what had once been humans and wondering just how the hell she’d wound up here. When she’d volunteered for the Commonwealth Marine Corps over a century ago, she’d fully expected to die fighting the Tahni…and she very nearly had. Most of her had. After that, after the cease-fire to a war that never ended, she’d gone just as far away from anyone she’d ever known as she possibly could. She’d worked hard to not stay in any one place long enough to make friends or put down roots, trying to find a meaningful way to finish what the Tahni had started.
And then, just like that, she’d let these people pull her into their circle and into their lives and, at the time, she’d finally just decided hell, why not?
No, be honest, she adjured herself. She’d done it because Sandi had reminded her of herself, her younger self. And if she hadn’t been able to save that girl, back when death seemed like the better alternative, then maybe she could save this one. And somehow, that idiotic impulse had led to her running through the corpse-littered hulk of a ghost ship, fighting pirates and wondering if some mysterious killing machine wasn’t going to get her first.
Fucking serves me right, she mused.
There was Engineering, right where they’d left it, except the bodies were on the deck instead of floating at eye level and she decided she liked them better that way. She sprinted to the power trunk that grew like a tree out of the center of the deck, extending upward from the shielding over the fusion reactor and stretching above into the overhead, disappearing into a maintenance tunnel just wide enough to allow the one-person sled up to service it. And that was just where she needed to go. She twisted her helmet off, knowing she wouldn’t be able to look up while she was wearing it, and set it on the deck beside the lift before she boarded. The air was cold, and clammy, and smelled like dust, and she hoped there wasn’t some biohazard floating around in it, but there wasn’t time to worry about it.
The controls were simple, just a lever that you pushed up or down, which she thought was awfully thoughtful of the Fleet design techs; they usually made even a toilet so complicated that you needed a manual and a two-week course to qualify with it. She pushed upward, and felt the sled lurch into motion, taking her up into the dimly-lit recesses of the access tunnel. The next section up from Engineering was the warp unit, and it was sealed off, far too complicated to repair en route with the tools you could carry on a cruiser.
Not too sealed off to blow the shit out of it, though.
They’d used HyperExplosives, most likely, and you could see the damage it had done even down at the base of the thing. It had don
e more than take out the Transition Drive, though; it had damaged the port side of the power trunk. She saw the connection for the weapons pods glowing red in the computer-enhanced image projected on her Heads-Up Display; it was a sealed superconductive cable as thick as her arm, plugged into an armored socket set in the side of the trunk.
The socket hung loose, its housing charred and cracked from the explosion; and when she tried to twist the cable’s plug to disconnect it the way it was designed, the socket broke off the trunk completely. She muttered a curse and took the cable’s plug in one hand and what was left of the socket in the other, squeezed down with as much force as her bionics allowed, and twisted. The plug popped out and the socket shattered and she blurted the curse out loud this time, realizing that the jagged metal shards had sliced through her suit’s glove. Not that it mattered here with the life support running, but it was the principle of the thing; you took care of your equipment.
Trying to ignore the ragged hole in the palm of her glove, she yanked the power cable around to the other side of the trunk, the one unaffected by the blast, and found an open socket. She jammed the plug into it, twisting it to the right and hoping it wasn’t too damaged to lock in place. It gave a satisfying click, and the indicator above the socket lit up green.
“You’re good,” she called to Ash over her ‘link’s ear bud. “You should have power!”
“You’re the best, Korri,” his response was tight, distracted, as if he were already targeting the weapons. “Get out of there and hold up somewhere safe until I contact you again.”
She was already bringing the maintenance sled downward, the metal half-cage rattling and grinding its way down the track, out of the half-lit dusk of the service tunnel and back into the harsh, clinical brightness of the Engineering compartment.
Hope I got it done in time, she fretted, tapping a gloved finger against the control lever, willing the sled to move faster. Where the hell does he think is safe on this ship? I need to be out hunting down those assholes instead of hiding…
She had to let her carbine hang at her side to fit into the cage, which was the only reason she didn’t open fire reflexively the second the sled stopped. There were seven of them, dressed in the khaki fatigues and body armor of La Sombra, Jordi Abdullah’s soldiers, all of them armed with identical mini-rocket carbines, all of them levelled at her chest. Standing in the midst of them, a snarl twisting his mouth, was Jagmeet Singh.
“Hello, Ms. Fontenot,” he said, gesturing with his Gauss machine pistol for her to toss down her carbine. “I love what you’ve done with your face.”
***
Power surged into the Metaurus’ weapons systems with a cheerful line of green indicators, and Ash hunted desperately in the tracking screen for the flight of missiles that had been on Sandi’s tail. He found them, faint pinpricks of red tracing a reentry path through the atmosphere…and then disappearing from the scope as they rounded the terminator of the moon toward the day side.
He wanted to rage, wanted to pound at the console in futility, but he forced himself to be calm, to trust Sandi’s ability to fly her way out of the jam the way she had so many times before. And in the meantime, there was still one other target he could take out his frustrations on. The Gitano was trying to run, trying to chase down the Acheron and get clear of the cruiser’s firing arc, but Ash wasn’t going to let that happen. The targeting lock he’d put over the cartel lighter flashed red in the Tactical display and his thumb hovered over the firing control.
“Carpenter.” The voice was familiar by now, like a stray piece of food caught in your teeth that your tongue kept seeking out until it was raw and sore. “I know you’re probably getting ready to do something stupid, so let me show you why it’s a bad idea.”
A 2-D visual transmission popped up on his helmet’s HUD, and through the video pickup of a hand-held ‘link, he could see Korri Fontenot, her helmet off, her weapons taken, standing under the guns of two of Singh’s troops. Her gaze was narrow and her expression annoyed; if he had come to know her at all as well as he thought, the scowl was probably because she’d let them get the drop on her.
The video’s field of view changed as the ‘link swung around to show Singh’s bifurcated face.
“Give yourself up and meet us in Engineering within the next ten minutes, or she’s dead.”
Ash glanced back at the Gitano beginning to pass clear of the targeting reticle on the tactical screen, and he scowled.
“Sure,” he replied easily. “No problem, be right there.”
He jammed his thumb into the firing control almost spitefully, just before the cartel ship slipped out of the firing arc of the proton cannon. The weapon had no signature in the near-vacuum, but the computer simulated its passage with a glowing white line of energy not very dissimilar to how it would have appeared in the atmosphere, and that streak of fusion-fed charged particles sliced through the cartel ship’s portside weapons pod.
Another second, another dozen meters, and it would have missed entirely; instead, the whole portside of the lighter was swallowed in a globular flare of burning gas from igniting missile propellant and onboard oxygen stores and vaporized metal. The ship began to spin with a quarter of its mass converted to an uncontrollable maneuvering rocket, but Ash was already lunging away from the Tactical station and back over to Helm.
The picture from the cartel was still being broadcast to a corner of his HUD, and he could see Singh’s expression change, his eye clouding over with the look of concentration that people got when they were hearing a transmission in their ear bud or an implant mastoid communicator. A snarl began to form on the natural side of his face, but Ash was at the Helm control and he grabbed hold of the restraint harness of the acceleration couch there before he fired the aft starboard maneuvering thrusters at full power.
Lateral g’s tried to throw him towards the right bridge bulkhead and he felt his arm nearly yank from its socket as he stopped himself with the seat restraints. The view from the ‘link pinwheeled as the device flew out of the hand of whoever had been holding it and tumbled across the compartment. He gritted his teeth and pulled himself back to the control board and cut the lateral thrust, his feet coming back down to the deck.
He fought an urge to run to the lift station and help Fontenot, knowing it would take him at least five minutes to make it down to that level and that things would be over by then. Instead, he sprinted over to the Security station, calling up the holographic video feeds from the different compartments and scrolling through them until he found Engineering, then enlarging it with an expansive motion of his fingers until he could see the details.
The La Sombra soldiers were sprawled out on the deck, some trying to get to their feet, some still flat on their backs; the only people standing were Fontenot and Singh. Fontenot was moving, moving fast; it was easy to forget how quickly she could move at full power. She swept her carbine and pistol off the floor where she’d discarded them, and kept running, putting the main power trunk and the control consoles around it between her and the cartel troops.
Singh was fast, too, faster than Ash would have imagined, though not quite as fast as Fontenot because she had decades of experience on him. He was shooting, his Gauss machine pistol held stiff-armed in line with his body like an old duelist, but the rounds were spalling off the power trunk in showers of sparks, keeping Fontenot’s head down but not coming anywhere near her.
Unfortunately, that might be enough, Ash worried. If the others recovered while she was suppressed, they could outgun her, outflank her, and end her in short order.
“Shit,” he murmured.
Security had to have some sort of systems to take down boarders or mutineers or some such crap. He looked at the control station helplessly, realizing he had no idea. He’d been a pilot on a cutter for nearly his whole career and never once served on a cruiser. Some controls were universal, like the warp unit or the reactor or the drive, but they didn’t put stun-field generators or sonic disruptors o
n a ship built for a crew of two.
Maybe he could use the drives and thrusters again to distract them? The thought was still bouncing from one side of his head to the other when he saw it…or rather didn’t quite see it.
It was big, he could tell that by seeing how it towered over the cartel soldiers, and it was dark and it was fast and it was…fuzzy? It seemed as if the optical pickups didn’t want to focus on it, like they didn’t believe it was there. What he could see of it was a blur, and that blur slammed into the La Sombra gunman closest to the door; and when it did, the man disappeared in a spray of blood that seemed to explode out of him.
Before the first body had hit the ground in a tangle of exposed bone and ripped flesh, the next had already died, and then the gunfire erupted in a panicked paroxysm that filled the whole compartment with the angry fireflies of minirockets, streaking everywhere and hitting nothing. Except the power trunk and the engineering controls.
Something exploded in an electrical arc that whited out the camera pickup, and then the holograph faded with a snap and every control panel went suddenly and irrevocably dark. Ash was left staring at nothing, eyes wide, mouth agape.
“What the fuck was that?” he muttered reflexively. But he knew what it was before he asked the question. It was what had killed the crew. It had survived the cold and the vacuum and six years on this ship.
And it was in here with them.
Chapter Eight
Korri Fontenot couldn’t remember the last time she’d been scared. Momentarily alarmed, sure. Startled, of course. But not bone-deep, hind-brain, gut-level scared. She’d been close to death so many times, seen so many people die around her, some horribly, that the fear of death didn’t hold sway over her.
This thing scared the shit out of her. She could barely see it with her natural eye, and what was even scarier was that she couldn’t see it with her bionic ocular. It was a blur, a fuzziness in space that wasn’t quite there. It threatened to freeze her in place with panic, and when the gunfire began she nearly joined it. But she’d been around a long time, and it had taught her that there were some fights she couldn’t win.