Last Flight of the Acheron

by Rick Partlow

  I felt my gut clench at the idea, but forced the doubt and fear down, concentrating on the facts, the data. The data was fearless, clean, incorruptible. We were near the Goldilocks Zone of a G-type star, just outside the gravity well of a terrestrial planet just a hair larger than Earth but with a lighter composition that gave it a slightly lower gravity. It shone in the light of the primary, green and blue and brown and white and inviting, a crown jewel in the collection of Tahni colony worlds.

  This wasn’t a military target. It wasn’t a base, it wasn’t a shipyard or a refueling station or a staging area or even a Transition Line hub. It was a psychological target, a morale target, and I didn’t know if I was totally comfortable with that, but at this point we needed a clear-cut win. Two more colonies had fallen to the Tahni in just the few weeks we’d spent training and equipping the rest of Attack Command First Group, and unless we made that too expensive for them, they’d just roll us up until our heels were back against the Solar System.

  Just because it wasn’t a military target didn’t mean it was undefended, though. The Tahni had a heavily armed base on the planet’s moon, and regularly rotated destroyers through the system on established patrol runs. The moon base was our primary target this time, with the secondary targets being any spacecraft that happened to be in-system at the time. I searched the sensor scans from my ship and the others within communications range and thought for a second that we’d caught them between patrols…until I saw the unmistakable signal of a Tahni destroyer coming around from the night-side of the planet.

  “First Squadron,” Osceola said in my ear, “shift target to the destroyer.”

  “Aye, ma’am,” I acknowledged before shifting to the squadron net. “We’re going after the destroyer, boys and girls. Standard ship-to-ship engagement formation. Priority targets are the engines and weapons pods, launch at a hundred thousand kilometers and lead the weapons in.”

  There was a chorus of “Aye, ma’am,” and it took me the barest of seconds to realize they were talking to me. It felt strange to let someone else lead the formation, but that was part of being in command, a part I wasn’t crazy about. And it felt even stranger to go into battle without Ash at my wing. He always had my back, but now he had his own squadron to command, and they’d be attacking the lunar base.

  “You brooding over the loneliness of command, ma’am?” Chief Burke asked me, amusement rich in her voice. At least she was still around.

  “Maybe,” I admitted in a distracted tone, most of my attention still on the data feed. “You’d better start thinking more about our acceleration than my brooding, Chief. Six g’s in ten seconds.”

  The first of my squadron’s wingmen pairs were boosting toward the destroyer, and my turn would be coming.

  “Oh, marvelous,” Burke muttered. “Nothing I love better than a damned elephant sitting on my chest.”

  She’d barely got the words out before I ignited the Huntress’ fusion drive; I could see the computer-generated image that represented my ship lurch forward to take its spot near the center of our globular formation. On the corners of the display, I saw Ash’s squadron heading for the planet’s moon, their formation slightly different as they prepared for their part in the assault on the base there. Most of the Group would head there; the defenses would take a lot to overwhelm, and losses weren’t a possibility but a certainty. I wasn’t sure what bothered me more, the idea of Ash dying today or the thought that it could happen without me there, fighting beside him.

  The acceleration went on for unbearably long minutes, but the destroyer was helping out by heading our way, doing her duty and putting herself between us and the colony, advancing on the raw power of mutually annihilating matter and antimatter. We could have matched those drives, at least in our larger ships, but producing antimatter was a power-intensive affair and required a huge infrastructure…which was inherently vulnerable. Eventually, I thought, that could be their downfall. Fusion was less efficient, but the fuel was a hell of a lot easier to get, and more importantly, a hell of a lot safer to store in bulk.

  Not that I would have minded an antiproton drive in my own ship about then, but they’d designed the missile cutter because it was cheap and easy to build quickly. I sighed with resignation and cut the drive, sucking in my first full breath in way too long, and maneuvered us into a skew flip.

  “Decelerating,” I announced, just to give Burke the time for one last lungful before the drive kicked in once again, braking us to a practical velocity from which to engage.

  The destroyer was doing the same, but she wasn’t as patient. Missiles streaked out of her weapons pods and headed for us and I clucked my tongue in disapproval. That was a waste of resources; the captain of the ship probably wasn’t a combat veteran, then. That wasn’t surprising; there’d been few large-scale space battles between the Tahni and us so far, and there probably weren’t any of their military commanders alive from the last war. From the intelligence reports, the Tahni had a religious prohibition against the sort of anti-aging treatments and genetic adjustments that had become a matter of course for more developed human worlds. They lived eighty or ninety years, on average, before dying from organ failures that an Earth lab would have prevented with the work of an afternoon.

  The reason I could tell the master of this ship wasn’t a veteran was that he’d launched before he’d decelerated. Now, the missiles would have to use their own engines and on-board fuel supply to decelerate to match our velocity if they missed on their first pass. True, they could decelerate much more rapidly than we could on a crewed vessel, but these weren’t their version of our Ship-Busters, with a shitload of fuel and armor; they were smaller, lightly armored and carrying simple fusion warheads with yields of a megaton or so. They wouldn’t be able to maneuver much once they’d used most of their fuel for deceleration.

  I didn’t have to give orders on how to respond to the missiles; we’d practiced it often enough. We let them come, wave by wave, dozens of them all closing with us, multiple missiles for each member of our squadron. We let them get within a hundred kilometers, some of us pushing it to a few dozen---I’d have to have a little talk with those pilots, I decided, noting the names---and then we all Transitioned.

  The wrenching displacement didn’t make me quite as disoriented or nauseous as it used to; that seemed to fade with experience and repeated exposure. But there was still a slight lag between the time I found myself back in realspace, hanging only ten thousand kilometers off the portside of the still-decelerating destroyer, and the time I was able to force my mind to react to it and launch both of the Huntress’ Ship-Buster missiles.

  The whole boat seemed to shudder violently as the huge weapons separated themselves from our missile bays, emptying us of hundreds of tons of mass in seconds. Their fusion drives ignited like miniature stars and they streaked off towards the Tahni warship at an acceleration that would have killed a human. They joined twenty-two others, two from each cutter in my squadron, and the dance began in earnest.

  Anti-missile defenses poured out of the destroyer in a gush that made the ship seem like she was in the process of exploding, and in the midst of the flares of hundreds of launches and the flash of lasers, the enemy vessel was doing a skew flip. She had decelerated enough to engage us and now that lack of momentum was going to hurt her, because it gave the Ship-Busters more maneuvering room to engage her, so she was going for another burn, moving out towards open space.

  “Target the missile defenses,” I ordered tightly, probably redundantly but there was always someone who forgot the training when the real bullets were flying. “Get in close and avoid her lasers.”

  We were boosting again, squeezing my sinuses, my temples, my chest, sweat and urine pooling inside my flight suit. Sometimes I dreamed about being trapped on a ship accelerating out of control, with a fuel supply that couldn’t run out, unable to shut down the engines, nightmares that lasted forever and left me exhausted and in sore need of a drink.

  Unli
ke the ones in my nightmares, this boost didn’t last forever; we had to decelerate again and then we were facing the enemy and finally in range. He launched his parasite fighters then, later than I thought but it was the next step in the checklist and even an inexperienced captain knew it. The thermal signatures of the little ships separating from their armored cradles in the hull were nearly lost in the psychedelic collage of lights and colors and vectors and angles that squeezed through the interface and into my conscious thought.

  “Fighters out,” I cautioned my people. “Prepare for evasive and engage as close as possible.”

  I targeted the missile launch rail on the destroyer’s starboard bow weapons pod and fired, trying to get in a few shots before I became tangled with the fighters. The blast hit just as another flight was launching, penetrating the deflectors just enough to pierce the skin of one of those missiles; and while the warheads weren’t going to blow just from being shot, the rocket fuel sure as hell did. A dome of red flame erupted from the weapons pod and the bulbous, armored shell around it fractured from within, jets of hot gas blowing outward from each fissure.

  I’d barely had time to enjoy the explosion before I received the warning from the sensors that a flight of missiles was heading our way from one of the parasite fighters. I checked the charge on the capacitors and debated whether I could get off another shot from the proton cannon, but decided against it.

  “Transitioning,” I warned Burke just before I sent the burst of energy to the Teller-Fox warp unit.

  Then we were two hundred thousand kilometers away and the battle was the twinkling of a distant star barely visible in the glare of the light reflecting off the planet. I fought back against a whiplash effect that left my mind reeling, plugging in the coordinates for the return jump and waiting for the capacitors to recharge. By the time we were back in range, the enemy missiles would have either been redirected by the fighter crew or self-destructed.

  I saw my wingman, Lt. Shayk, pop out of a warp corona a hundred kilometers away, maneuvering around to face back the way we’d come.

  “Everything good, ma’am?” He asked me, sounding almost doting. I felt a flare of resentment; he was less than six months younger than me, the little shit.

  “Stay close, youngster,” I snapped. “Jump when I jump.”

  This was our tactic, Ash and me, our main contribution to the new doctrine. Previous gospel on Transitions had built-in safety buffers, based on the idea that you didn’t want to lose a multibillion-dollar cruiser with 300 people on board because some hotshot captain cut it too close and tried to jump too near to a gravity well. In typical military fashion, safe+1000 kilometers became safe+10,000 kilometers and then safe+100,000 kilometers.

  In reality, the boundary area where a wormhole would safely form was fluid and shifted constantly with the orbits of not only the planets around the sun but the moons around the planets. In one system at one time, you could safely jump only a hundred thousand kilometers from a planetary gravity well, where in another system with three gas giants instead of two and all of them on the same side of the sun, you might not be able to safely Transition even 200,000 kilometers away. I had my own theory that you could even make a safe jump from a LaGrangian point, where the gravity of the moon and the planet cancelled each other out, but they wouldn’t let me test it; something about how I was a pilot, not a physicist.

  “Dibs on the Gatling when we jump back in,” Burke said, a grin in her voice.

  She was leaning against her safety harness, like a sprinter at the chocks, ready to head back into the fight. I hadn’t known her long, but Burke seemed like a new woman since Keating had been relieved. I didn’t think it was because she thought things would be safer without him as much as the fact that his incompetence had offended her sensibilities as a career NCO.

  “It’s all yours, Chief,” I assured her. I saw the charge indicator and shot her a thumbs-up. “Hold onto your lunch. Shayk, on my six. Let’s go.”

  And then the destroyer was there, just a few hundred kilometers off of our starboard, and we were back in a web of corkscrewing missiles and proton beams and lasers and point defense turrets launching charged superconducting filaments. The tracks of IFF transponders led me to where my boats were engaging the fighters or strafing the destroyer’s weapons pods, and even as I watched, two of them winked out. I felt my stomach clench at the thought that they’d been blown away, but then they popped back onto the screen on the far side of the destroyer, three hundred thousand kilometers away.

  I let out the breath I’d been holding, spreading my awareness out across the breadth of my sensor display and firing the Huntress’ proton cannon almost as an afterthought. The Tahni parasite fighter that had been trying to latch onto the tail of one of my boats spewed a stream of burning gas as its port maneuvering thruster ruptured and sent it spiraling away off its course. It might have brought itself back under control, but a second shot from another cutter in my squadron penetrated the nose of the fighter and it ceased all attempts at correcting its course, its crew vaporized.

  Fifteen of the Ship-Busters were still inbound and still taking up the destroyer’s attention and the bulk of her fire. Another absorbed a hit from the laser as I watched and blew apart, the pieces still heading for the enemy ship but unlikely to do much damage. Fourteen. Damn it.

  I fired again at a fighter, wishing to hell we could get rid of them and get back to targeting the destroyer. The shot penetrated one of the fighter’s weapons pods and it blew apart with an explosion of missile propellant, sending the little ship spinning wildly. Two more cutters jumped out and the missiles chasing them headed off into open space, lacking the fuel to decelerate and reverse course. Another Ship-Buster disappeared in a globe of fire. Thirteen.

  It was a landscape of chaos, of dozens of individual battles, and my limited human mind struggled to arrange it in some sort of understandable pattern. The ship’s computer helped, simplifying what it could, but there was just too much raw data coming in to sort through it all. Chief Burke was shooting at something with the Gatling, but I couldn’t tell what. Off in the distance, so far away that I could only follow it through the Group telemetry network, dozens of cutters were engaging the moon base and some were dying, and I couldn’t even take the time to try to figure out if Ash was still alive. I wanted to scream and rage, but I didn’t have that luxury.

  Lt. Shayk jumped, seconds ahead of a trio of missiles, and I jumped with him because even Squadron Leaders have to stick by their wingmen, no matter how inconvenient it was. And the missiles jumped with us, because the little dumbass waited two seconds too long and they were inside his warp bubble…

  I knew it immediately, but the fog of the Transition kept me from forming a coherent enough thought to do anything about it before one of them hit his cutter and blew it straight to hell. Every display I was hooked into went white and then a jolt of agony went through my head and I blacked out.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I woke up to someone shaking me and calling my name; at first, I thought it was Ash, but the voice was wrong. I forced my eyes open and saw the lined, weathered face of Chief Burke through the visor of her flight helmet, a concerned set to her eyes.

  “Are you okay, ma’am?” She asked me again, but this time it sank in.

  “Are we alive?” I responded, gritting my teeth against the blinding pain in my temples.

  “Near as I can tell,” she answered, “we caught debris from Shayk’s cutter when the missiles took him out.” She grimaced. “I think it penetrated pretty far and took out the power feed to the ship’s computer core…didn’t just cut it, though. It caused a major surge and fried the interface.”

  “Fuck,” I hissed, straightening in my acceleration couch.

  We were in zero g and only my harness was holding me down, and nothing was holding my stomach down. I reached out and yanked out the interface cables, letting them retract into my suit. Once they were disconnected, the manual displays lit up with an announce
ment that the system had rebooted, so we still had control over the Huntress, and her computer core was intact and powered, apparently; it was just the neural interface that was down.

  Just the system that lets one person fly the damn boat, I amended to myself.

  “Can you fix it, Chief?” I asked her, trying not to get my hopes up.

  “Sure,” she said, turning her palms up. “But I’ll have to crawl into the maintenance bay and physically reroute the feeds. That’s going to take hours, not minutes.”

  “We don’t have hours,” I mused. I shook my head without thinking, then winced at the pain that hadn’t quite receded yet. “We might not have minutes.”

  I’d been complaining about the mass of data overwhelming me, but now the data was gone; or, rather, the data was a step farther away. I reached into the haptic hologram projected over the control board and plotted a jump back to the battle.

  “Chief,” I said, “this is gonna’ be a stone bitch, but I’m going to have to fly her manual, so I’ll need to let the computer control the Gatling and you’re going to have to be my gunner on the proton cannon, which means you also have override on the maneuvering thrusters. Can you handle that?”

  I heard the hiss of breath as the reality of what we were about to try hit her, but she closed her eyes and nodded.

  “Got you covered, ma’am,” she promised, trying to sound confident as she pulled up the targeting controls at her station.

  I thought about transmitting my situation to the rest of the squadron, but shook it off. There was nothing they could do about it anyway; they had their hands full with their own shit.

  “Transitioning,” I announced, and swiped the control.

  Without the interface, the jump was even more jarring than usual and I felt sorry for Burke having to go through that every time. We were back in the thick of the fight and it was a hundred times harder to keep track of it without the neural display. We were down to eight Ship-Busters, and I could see in the HUD of my helmet that we were missing two cutters from the IFF display. There were still three of the parasite fighters, but their missiles were still swarming around, looking for an opening.