Last Flight of the Acheron

by Rick Partlow

  There was a large man in a pressure suit punching an access code into the airlock security pad when we arrived, and I thought for a second that one of the assigned pilots had made it; I wasn’t sure whether I was disappointed or relieved about that. But when he turned at our approach, I saw the insignia on his issued vacuum suit and noted that it read “Farrier, Allan, Chief Petty Officer, Crew Chief.” Not a pilot then, but still useful.

  “Who are you two?” He demanded over his helmet’s external speakers. Through the visor, I could see a craggy, weathered face with piercing blue eyes. “Why aren’t you in the damned shelters?”

  “Ensigns Hollande and Carpenter,” I told him breathlessly, both from the rush to get here and the thinning atmosphere. “Assault shuttle pilots. We thought we might be able to get a couple of the birds out of here before another missile strike blows the shit out of this place.”

  “Fresh meat from the Academy, huh?” He grunted skeptically. “Well, I doubt the assigned pilots are going to make it, so you might as well give it a shot.”

  He opened the outer hatch for the boarding umbilical and waved at us impatiently.

  “One of you in here,” he told us. “The other one with me.”

  I grabbed Ash by the arm and impulsively pulled him into a quick kiss, then jogged down through the narrow walkway of the docking tunnel and into the open side hatch of the assault shuttle. I thought he said something behind me, but it was lost in the acoustics of the umbilical, and then I was closing the lock and I was incredibly alone.

  The interior layout of the shuttle was identical to the mockups I’d sweated and sworn in for endless hours in the simulator, and to the trainer birds I wished I’d had more time to fly. A small utility bay just inside the airlock held a set of lockers for pressure suits, and I yanked one open, quickly pulling on a flight suit and tightening the adjustment straps down before I grabbed a helmet and carried it with me up toward the cockpit. There were a half-dozen passenger seats arrayed on either side of the central aisle, only half as many as you’d find on a dedicated lander that could hold two full infantry squads. I jogged between them and squeezed into the cockpit, pulling myself into the pilot’s seat, securing the safety harness with rote motions.

  I set the helmet in my lap and unspooled the four interface connection cords from inside then carefully plugged them into my implant jacks, two on either side of my head just back of my temples. It was ingrained habit by now, and didn’t freak me out nearly as much as it had the first time, just after the surgery. I still didn’t like them, but they were the price you had to pay to be a combat pilot. The fraction of a second they saved over an interface halo was frequently the difference between life or death; and without some sort of neural interface, you couldn’t control a ship at high-g acceleration. I settled the helmet on my neck yoke and sealed it, then played out the exterior jack cables and plugged them into the receptacles on the pilot’s station.

  I’ve seen in the movies and ViRdramas how they try to show what it looks like when someone jacks in, but they never get it right. It’s not a Heads-Up Display projecting data; if it were, what would the point be of getting the implants? You could have a HUD in your flight helmet or a contact lens or even the front view-screen. It’s nothing visual at all, nothing you can really put into words accurately.

  It’s like another sense, like you’re smelling or tasting or touching something, but in a way you can’t describe because no one else has that sense. But that sense told me everything I needed to know about this boat, from the reaction mass tank level to ammunition stores, and as I sensed it, the ship’s computer sensed me back. It knew that I wanted the docking umbilical detached and retracted, and the reactor warmed up and the targeting systems activated and the weapons systems armed and it did all that without me having to touch a control.

  I tried to connect with the station’s traffic control computer system, but either it had been destroyed or the blast had taken out the signal repeaters. I was on my own.

  “Assault One, this is Assault Two, over.” The voice was Ash’s.

  “Reading you five by five, Assault Two,” I replied, grinning. Not totally on my own, then. “Systems up and ready for launch. Over.”

  “Go, Assault One.” That was CPO Farrier and his tone was impatient. “Unless you’d rather wait for another missile.”

  I fed the belly jets a slow, gentle burst of power that pushed me off the polished regolith of the docking bay floor, swinging the boat around with maneuvering thrusters, sharp bangs against the dull roar of the lifters. The images from the exterior cameras merged with lidar and radar and formed a 360-degree image that I could see without turning my head, sense in a way that I could sense the position of my own body, and I suddenly knew every detail of the wreckage of the bay.

  The entrance to the hangar was half its usual size, reduced by mounds of collapsed regolith, molten and re-solidified in the wake of the fusion blast. Of the ships that had once occupied that half of the hangar, there was nothing left. The hit had to have come against the surface of the entrance instead of deep inside, or there’d be nothing left of the bay at all. A haze of dust still hung swirling across the mouth of the hangar, and it, along with residual radiation and thermal blooming, obscured what was outside. There was only one way to find out.

  I activated the main drive, far too close for normal traffic procedures here, and felt the acceleration push me back into my cushioned seat. The shuttle rocketed through the cloud of dust and debris and into all hell.

  The bulk of Deimos, even as damaged and battered as it was, had been a security blanket, a cave I could hide in. Outside, Mars hung like a blood-red backdrop to utter disaster. The Martian shipyards were a loosely-connected series of orbital construction and maintenance frameworks that could be used to build or refurbish a ship or to provide routine maintenance, and between the Fleet, the Patrol and the Scouts, they were busy more or less constantly. Hundreds of the dry-docks were spread out in a loose pattern more or less in the orbit of Deimos, with a steady stream of automated supply barges coming in from the asteroid belt and the Jovian atmosphere mines with processed ore, water and reaction mass.

  I didn’t know what ships had been in for repair and maintenance other than my mother’s new ship, the Midway, and our first assignment, the Jutland, and the military communications net was down so I couldn’t look it up. What I did know from my sensors was that the huge, glowing spheres of ionized gas that filled up a good part of the arc of the forward cameras were all that was left of at least ten of the dry-docks and the ships they were servicing.

  I felt a cold, empty pit in my stomach as I thought of Mom.

  She’s okay, I assured myself. She’s a survivor.

  Smaller balls of gas marked the deaths of orbital transfer vehicles and in-system gunboats, and for a long moment, I thought maybe we’d missed the fight entirely and the enemy was gone. Then I saw the ship burning in towards Deimos on a flare of plasma, probably just minutes out of Transition space. The shuttle’s files identified her, but I didn’t need their help; I’d seen her like in enemy warship identification briefings in the Academy and pilot training. Her design was different from anything human in subtle ways, choices of aesthetics rather than function, but the basics were universal in their utility: fusion drive bell in the rear, armor at the rounded nose, weapons pods jutting out menacingly from the flanks. We called her a corvette after a class of ancient ocean-going vessels, a name that was inexact and ill-fitting, but you had to call them something and it sounded better than “generic alien warship.”

  She was less than a hundred kilometers from my boat and closing, and I thought I knew her intentions. The corvettes were fairly small attack boats, as small as the Tahni built their starships, and each could probably only hold one or two missiles large enough to do the damage that I’d seen in the hangar bay. One had started the job and now the next was coming in to apply the coup de grace.

  “Take that fucker out!” I yelled to Ash, but did
n’t wait for him.

  I reached out through the interface, feeling the shuttle’s weapons as if I were wriggling my fingers and then making a fist. There was no time for missiles; by the time they arrived, he would have already launched his and the damage would be done. I thought a command and the proton cannon that ran the length of the assault shuttle’s belly sucked the charge of the ship’s main capacitor out in one giant pull of energy. Man-made lightning crossed the kilometers between me and the corvette and her electromagnetic deflectors lit up like a Christmas-tree ornament, dispersing some of the hit but not all of it.

  There was a flash of incandescent vapor as layers of her hull armor sublimated violently, and the ship went into a slow roll in the direction the jet of gas had propelled her, but corrected with a burst of maneuvering thrusters and spun end for end, aligning her primary weapons port with my shuttle. She was trying to use her Gauss cannon instead of launching missiles, which told me I’d been right about her weapons load; she probably had one or two Ship-Busters in her external pods.

  The rail gun ran the length of the corvette’s hull and she had to turn completely around to line it up with me, which took time…unfortunately, re-charging the main capacitor bank took a few seconds, too. I cut the main drive and sent the belly jets a burst just as the corvette fired. The ship groaned in protest and I wondered if I was pushing it too far, but I was more worried about the tungsten slug heading my way than the stress load. It passed only meters beneath the belly of the shuttle and I reignited the drives, trying to get closer before he could fire the mass-driver again.

  At twenty kilometers away, I saw a green flash out of the corner of my perception that told me the capacitors were charged and I triggered the proton cannon. At this range, the deflectors couldn’t shunt enough of the blast to make a difference; the corvette’s portside weapons pod separated with a flare of plasma and a glowing cloud of burning oxygen where the explosion had pierced the hull. She went out of control again, and this time she didn’t have the chance to re-correct: a missile took her just behind the nose and she disappeared in a glowing ball of nuclear fire.

  I shifted my course away from the explosion, seeing Ash’s boat coming up on my starboard flank, his drive bell glowing as he boosted.

  “That was a little close for a fusion missile,” I said clinically, knowing I was far enough away to avoid radiation damage but still not liking it.

  “We don’t have time to fuck around,” Farrier chided me. “I just picked up a signal from the Midway…she’s in trouble. Form up on our port wing and follow us in.”

  “Roger,” I replied, relaying the navigational data to the flight computer.

  The Midway…it was in trouble, but at least it was still around.

  Damn it, Mom. You’re going to make me rescue you, aren’t you?

  Ash and Farrier were pushing it to four g’s, pushing me into my acceleration couch like an elephant sitting on my chest, but the discomfort didn’t bother me as much as the knowledge that neither of us was carrying enough fuel to keep that up for more than a few minutes, not if we wanted to have anything left to fight with when we got there. Of course, that wouldn’t much matter if there was no there there when we got there. I breathed easier when we dialed the burn back to one gravity, though I felt no relief.

  But the Midway was only a few thousand kilometers away, and it was only a matter of minutes before I could see what was happening to her. She hadn’t been ready yet; her drives were inoperable and she couldn’t maneuver. She was heavily armed and heavily armored, but she was a stationary target. Even as sensor range turned into visual range, I could see the Tahni corvettes winking into existence just outside the point where the Martian gravity would keep a wormhole from stabilizing, then launching their Ship-buster missiles and jumping back out. The flares from the missiles’ fusion drives were torches in the night as our orbit slid into the night side of the planet, too many of them and coming in way too steadily.

  The Commonwealth flagship was taking them out, two and three at a time with point defense turrets and missiles and even the proton batteries at one point, and it seemed as if they wouldn’t be able to land a hit. But then more corvettes poured in, not launching Ship-busters, not trying for a quick kill; these were targeting the point defense systems, firing volley after volley with their railguns or their lasers, and frequently dying as those turrets took them out…but not quickly enough.

  We didn’t have to talk; there was nothing to say, we knew what we had to do. I launched every missile the bird was carrying, each programmed in flight to target the Tahni corvettes’ drive signatures, then forgot about them. From this point on, the shuttle was a fighter as primitive in its method of attack as the ones flown by the graduates of the old Air Force Academy hundreds of years ago. I was down to the spinal proton cannon and a dorsal Gatling laser turret, both comparatively short-ranged and only one useful against the corvettes or the Ship-Busters.

  I decided to let the Midway deal with the missiles; I had a better chance of distracting the corvettes. One of the bulbous, ungainly starships flashed across the bow of my shuttle only ten kilometers away, heading for an attack run on the cruiser and seemingly not even noticing me. I blasted her with the proton cannon and the particle beam penetrated just aft of her armored fuel tanks, spearing through the feed line to the drive bell. She disappeared in a globe of star-fire that kept moving with her previous momentum, headed for a descent into the thin Martian atmosphere.

  And that was it. That was the first time I ever killed anyone. I knew from our intelligence briefings that the corvettes had a crew of ten, and I’d just killed them all. I didn’t think about it much at the time, didn’t dwell on it, just felt a slight flush of heat in my chest that might have been satisfaction or might have been anger or fear or a dozen other things I didn’t have time to process.

  I saw on my sensor feed that there were other assault shuttles out there besides Ash and me, at least three of them. I could tell by their Identification Friend-or-Foe transponders that they were part of the twelve assigned as the Midway’s complement. I wondered if the rest had already been destroyed. Missiles were crisscrossing between the cruiser and the shuttles and the corvettes, twisting and turning and maneuvering as they sought out their targets and tried to avoid countermeasures. It reminded me of the time Mom had dragged me to a zero-gravity ballet at McAuliffe Station, except it wasn’t nearly as boring.

  Explosions rippled like a wave that washed up and down along the length of the cruiser, the flares lighting up the armored hull where the shadows of night had swallowed it up. Most of them had conventional warheads, packed with a hundred kilograms of hyperexplosives behind an armor piercing warhead that sent a spear of plasma into the hull when it detonated. Here and there, though, a fusion blast lit up the sky briefly like a secondary star, and when those weapons touched off, a corvette or a Planet-Buster missile would vanish into a cloud of ionized gas.

  I waded into the middle of it, putting the ship into a random evasive course between specific targeting points where the ship’s tactical routines had calculated that I’d have both a shot and the capacitor charge to take it. Acceleration battered at me from one angle or another and the flight helmet dosed me with anti-nausea drugs and muscle relaxants to compensate, but the ‘face link to the computer was the only thing that kept me focused when the ship locked onto a target.

  I whispered the word and mystic lightning lashed out from the half-human, half-machine thing that I’d become and a Tahni ship already damaged by a missile strike took the hit from the proton cannon right through its weakened nose armor. Atmosphere vented and caught fire as it did, and bodies tumbled out into the vacuum. I imagined I could see their faces from kilometers distant, the ridged brows and the flattened noses and the shovel-like jaws so close to human and yet ever so far away.

  More buffeting, more nausea and then another shot, never missing because they weren’t even trying to evade, totally focused on destroying the cruiser. This one
cut the fuel feed to a main drive and the Tahni ship kept going on its course, already with enough velocity to escape orbit and head into interplanetary space. She could use her Transition Drive there and escape the battle, and that didn’t seem fair; I wanted to change course and chase her down, finish her off, but I couldn’t.

  Another shot, this one partially diffused by the corvette’s deflectors but still sublimating a ton of armor and sending the enemy ship into a spin, and then a missile took it through the nose and killed the bridge and the spin turned into an uncontrolled descent out of orbit that would end somewhere on the surface of the planet.

  An IFF transponder went black; one of the Midway’s birds, just gone like it had never been. I didn’t even see what got it, and didn’t have the time to check the sensor recordings. I kept the pattern going, the jinking and the deking and the shooting, but a small part of me was facing certain stark realities: the shuttle was very nearly out of fuel, there were too many of the enemy left, and we weren’t going to win this fight.

  Shit. I figured I’d go out fighting, but I thought I’d at least make it to my first deployment.

  I giggled out loud at the thought that, just a couple hours ago, my biggest concern had been that I’d screwed up by having sex with Ash. I was glad of it now. One of those things you didn’t want to die leaving undone.

  I’d just fired again when the first Ship-Buster made it through.

  It hit near the fusion drive bell and my bird was about fifty kilometers fore of the bow or else the fireball would have swallowed me up with it. The Midway was big enough and solid enough that the blast didn’t consume the whole ship, but ripples of shock twisted the BiPhase Carbide of its hull, traveling forward and tearing the rest of the ship apart and sending a shotgun blast of shrapnel across a swathe of space that included me.