Last Flight of the Acheron

by Rick Partlow

  There. I spotted it with the help of the helmet’s enhanced optics, a gap in the tree clusters over behind the Artemis. I didn’t know how far back it went, but I just needed a bit of concealment for a few seconds.

  I left Ash with a last touch of my hand on his shoulder, and took off into a sprint. My feet nearly slid out from beneath me in the deceptively solid-looking mud, and I caught myself on the butt of the rifle, feeling my teeth click together. I swore under my breath and pushed up again with the rifle, setting off at a more stable pace with smaller steps.

  I cut left from the trailhead and ran along the edge of the clearing, as close as I could to the thorn trees, feeling them catching at the armor on my left arm. The hum-snap discharge of electromagnetic weapons was near-constant now, and I tried to keep my eyes on the enemy, but I had to divert my attention to my feet to keep from tripping on the spiral roots that stuck up from the ground at odd intervals. Every time I looked away, I was sure that was the second when one of them would spot me, that I’d never see the shot that killed me.

  But the shot didn’t come and I was suddenly at the gap in the trees before I realized it, and I knew there was no way I’d be able to slow down without going head-over-heels. I’d played baseball in high school and I threw myself into a feet-first slide into home plate, winding up splayed belly-down on the ground, my helmet’s visor covered in mud. The sensors still worked and I could see a computer-graphics representation of the scene around me despite the mud, but I scraped a hand across the visor and wiped it away out of instinct, needing to see.

  There they were. It felt like it had been an hour since Conrad had opened fire, but the chronometer built into the HUD told me less than two minutes had passed, and I could see a few of the Tahni trying to reload their KE guns, having burned through a full drum. Others were starting to low-crawl forward, trying to get to the Acheron and use it as cover to flank Conrad. I shook mud off my Gauss rifle and settled the stock into my shoulder, trying to remember what I’d been taught in the single familiarization class I’d taken in the Academy: fifteen minutes and we hadn’t even got to shoot the damn things.

  I put the aiming reticle over the Tahni soldier nearest to me, only about thirty meters away, and touched the trigger pad. The gun kicked hard against my shoulder, but I was ready for it this time and I saw the armored figure stumble out from behind the portside aft landing tread with his left arm dangling useless, a ragged hole blown through his shoulder. I shifted the barrel over just a centimeter and fired again; this time the round went straight through his chest and he went down.

  I felt a surge of bloodthirsty joy, and totally forgot that lesson that Conrad had tried to pass onto me in moments of post-coital introspection. I didn’t move. The only reason I didn’t die was that the idiot shooting at me was as scared and adrenalin-rattled as I was; instead of blowing my head off, the burst of tantalum needles hit the twisted cluster of thorn trees beside me. It exploded like a grenade had gone off inside it and fragments thumped painfully against my side, though they didn’t penetrate the armor there.

  I rolled away from the explosion instinctively and another burst kicked up gouts of mud where I’d been just a half-second before. I hadn’t thought I could be more scared than I already was, but I was constantly surprising myself. I was firing again before I even stopped rolling, trying to wrangle the bouncing aiming reticle onto the Tahni who was shooting at me. Sparks sprayed off the metal of the landing gear and the soldier flinched away, giving me enough time to bring the rifle under control.

  I fired three times in as many seconds, then skittered backwards on my belly and angled back into the trees on the left side of the trail, not waiting around to watch the enemy fall. This time, though, no one was standing and firing aimed bursts; the others had finally noticed that they were taking fire from behind, and most of them were making a run for the wreck of the Acheron, the ones trying to return fire merely spraying full-auto in my general direction at hip level.

  I saw two more fall to Conrad’s rifle and then I was running. I had to get to the ship, get the weapons up and take out the enemy, then I could go back for Ash. It had been a mistake to think we could sneak him past all those soldiers, I thought. There were too many of them and too few of us.

  It was less than fifty meters to the ship, and at half a g, I was running pretty fast, but it still seemed to take forever to reach it, like one of those dreams where the distance in front of you keeps stretching out and you run but can’t ever get anywhere. But then it rushed up at me and I slammed my hand into the lock plate and the ramp began to lower with infuriating slowness.

  I heard a loud, pinging ricochet and realized they were still shooting at me from over at the wreckage; I ducked behind the belly gear and emptied the magazine of the Gauss rifle at them, not sure if I actually hit anything. Then the ramp was down and I dropped the rifle and scrambled out and sprinted up it, hitting the control to close it behind me before I flew through to the cockpit.

  I was ripping off my helmet and tossing it away carelessly, throwing myself over the back of the pilot’s acceleration couch and grabbing the interface cables from their spools, jamming them into my jacks with fingers made clumsy by haste and caked mud. I noticed a sharp, rancid odor I hadn’t been able to smell with the helmet on, maybe something in the soil or something I’d rolled in; and then the cockpit and the smell and everything faded and I was back in the interface.

  I fired up the reactor at the same time as I spun the Gatling turret around and targeted the Tahni soldiers huddled in the lee of the Acheron. They tried to run, tried to scatter like bugs when you turned over a rock and let the sunshine in, but I caught four or five with the short burst I sent out before they could get away. I’d never fired the Gatling in an atmosphere before, and the flare of the laser pulses turning the air around them into superhot plasma as they passed startled me. Not as much as it startled the Tahni it blew into shreds, of course.

  The others were trying to get away from the firing arc of the laser, but now the turbines were spinning up and I fed power to them recklessly, nearly throwing myself out of the seat as the boat jumped up on columns of fire. I spun her around like a dervish, hanging onto the acceleration couch with numb fingers and trying not to lose my concentration as I swept the Tahni soldiers with a long burst. When a pulse from the laser struck, it vaporized everything around it in an explosion of superheated bodily fluids that their armor couldn’t contain and six or seven more popped like balloons before I’d emptied the weapon’s hopper of ammunition.

  Another fell as I watched, the round from Conrad’s rifle seeming tame and anticlimactic by contrast, and the rest didn’t stop running when they hit gaps in the trees, disappearing from view in seconds. I grinned savagely, feeling a feral satisfaction at their terror, but I thought of Ash and forced myself back to practicalities. I swung the nose of the Artemis in line with the trail where I’d left Ash, then took the ship down just as close to it as I could, smashing a small clump of thorn trees under the edge of the starboard wing.

  As soon as the gear touched, I gave a final command for the ship’s systems to open the belly ramp, then I yanked my jacks and ran back for the utility bay. I felt out of breath, exhausted, but I couldn’t leave this for Conrad; I’d left Ash out there, I had to get him myself.

  I didn’t remember that I’d taken off my helmet until I was halfway down the ramp, breathing in the humid, pungent air and wondering if it smelled as bad to the Tahni as it did to us. I should have been more cautious, but nothing seemed to matter as much as getting to Ash and getting him on the boat. I jumped off the end of the ramp and my boots sank three centimeters into the mud and nearly sent me sprawling backwards before I regained my balance and loped towards the trailhead.

  There was someone standing there in the trail, and for a half-second I thought Conrad had beat me to it somehow. Then for another half-second, I thought that Ash had woken up and managed to stand…and then things came into focus and I realized it was a
Tahni soldier, and he was poking at Ash’s half-buried form with the muzzle of his KE gun and I felt a scream rising in my throat.

  I’d dropped the rifle somewhere before I’d boarded the Artemis, but I was still wearing the gunbelt I’d snagged earlier and I clawed at the pulse pistol desperately. There was no helmet targeting system, just a pop-up holographic sight that I don’t even remember seeing. I pointed the gun at him and held the trigger down, the flashes of ionized air not as impressive as the fireworks show that the Gatling laser had put on, but much, much closer. There was a series of high-pitched cracks as air rushed to fill the vacuum the laser had left, and the noise nearly drowned out the explosions of liberated water vapor that the pulses made when they hit the trees behind the soldier.

  I emptied the magazine into him, the last hyperexplosive charge pulsing through only a second after the first, and I could see the sparks and flashes as at least six or seven of the shots scored blackened craters in the armor over his chest…and didn’t penetrate. That’s why they wear the damn armor in the first place, I guess.

  I kept running at him, hoping I could get to him before he raised his gun but more hoping I could keep him busy killing me long enough for Conrad to get there and save Ash. I was five meters away and the KE gun muzzle was nearly in line with my head and I knew I wasn’t going to make it in time.

  “Get down!”

  The voice was Conrad’s but I barely registered that, I just acted, going into the baseball slide I’d already used once that day. I didn’t hear the shot, but I saw the result: the Tahni trooper jerked and spasmed as three ragged holes drilled their way through his chest armor and another shattered his faceplate. His blood sprayed out and I covered my head with my arms but still tasted the salty, coppery liquid in my mouth and spat it out reflexively. The Tahni collapsed into the trail and I ignored his corpse, lunging over towards Ash.

  I rolled him back over, pushing away the mud I’d covered him with earlier. I put a hand on his shoulder and I could feel his chest rise and fall slightly with each breath. Conrad tromped up beside me, his heavy footsteps spattering mud onto my shoulder.

  “Is he okay?” He asked me over the external speakers of his helmet, his rifle barrel swiveling back and forth as he kept a watch up and down the trail.

  “He’s not any worse than he was before,” I said, grabbing him and working his arm around my shoulder.

  “I thought I told you to stay put while I drew them away,” he chided me as I lifted Ash up one more time, beginning to feel a little hope that I’d live to feel the back pain this was going to cause later.

  “Your plan wasn’t working,” I said, my voice strained with effort as I took a step back towards the open ramp of the Artemis. It seemed a lot further away than it had when I was running over here, or maybe my adrenalin had finally just run dry. “I had to improvise.”

  “Fuck,” he muttered, and I thought it was a commentary on what I’d said, till I heard the jets in the distance. “It’s the damned flyer again. Here, let me carry…”

  Whatever he’d been about to say, he never got the chance to finish it. There was no sound except a metallic slapping, so it seemed to me at first as if Conrad had slipped in the mud and stumbled down to a knee. Then the ripping thundercracks of the tantalum slugs breaking the sound barrier echoed down the trail and he slumped onto his face. That was when I saw that the back of his helmet had been sheared off clean, along with the rear of his skull.

  The flyer screamed by only fifty or sixty meters up, its chin turret still firing, the rounds gouging divots in the armor on the starboard wing of the Artemis. I took a step toward Conrad and felt bile rising in my throat when I saw what was left of him. I couldn’t grieve for him yet, though; there wasn’t time. I had maybe ten or fifteen seconds before the flyer looped around for another pass. I shifted Ash into a fireman’s carry and ran.

  Pain jarred through my back and legs and shoulders, and exhaustion dragged at me, but I kept running because there wasn’t any other choice and I decided I could ignore the pain for the rest of my life. The whine of the jets had grown more distant as it passed over us, but now it was getting louder again and I knew it was making its turn.

  I was ten meters from the end of the ramp.

  The whine turned into a roar, and I knew it was coming around the arc of its curve; it would be clear of the ship in seconds and then it would have a clear shot at us. I didn’t look up; I couldn’t, I had Ash’s weight pushing my chin down into my chest.

  Five meters.

  Is this the way you saw me going, Mom? On some alien moon, cut down just short of safety?

  I heard the impact of the slugs on the dirt and mud behind me before the sound of their passage caught up with them, so damned close…

  One meter…

  My boot slammed into the metal of the foot of the ramp with a metallic thump, and I heard the ringing of KE gun rounds off the hull of the ship above me as I threw myself forward. Ash slumped forward off my shoulder and I dug my toes in, rushing the final few meters up into the boat and hitting the control to raise the ramp. Ash raised with it and I grabbed him under the arms and dragged him as I walked backwards, breath chuffing like one of the steam engines I’d seen in museums.

  There was a fold-down medical cot in the utility bay and I yanked it into place and hauled Ash onto it with one last burst of strength, strapping him down tightly. I lowered the medical analysis unit over his head and chest and activated it, then staggered up the passageway, steadying myself against the bulkhead. I still wasn’t thinking, still wasn’t feeling anything except a dull sense of disbelief that I was still alive.

  I wished I’d had time to put on a flight suit and a helmet, wished I’d had time to get Ash into one, but if I gave the flyer any more time to shoot at us, it might eventually find a weak spot. I’d left the reactor hot and the turbines idling, so when I plugged into the computer, it only took seconds to spin the jets back up. The Artemis lurched into the air and I found the flyer with a single sweep of the sensors; the pilot knew he wasn’t going to be able to take me on and he was running as fast as his little turbojets could take him.

  Mine were powered by a fusion reactor.

  I should have let him go. I should have headed for space and got us both out of here as quickly as I could. But he’d killed Conrad, and I wasn’t going to let him get away with it. The boat leaped forward, pushing me back into my seat with an abrupt surge of power, and I was within range in less than a second. The Artemis struck the Tahni plane down with the divine lightning of an angry god and the smaller craft ceased to exist.

  I felt no satisfaction, no closure, just a bitter emptiness that only seemed to grow as I took the cutter out of the atmosphere. I scanned the sensors by rote and was unsurprised when I saw the corvettes Transitioning in at the edge of the gravity well. They’d reacted about as fast as I thought they would, in the wake of their losses in the battle, but I was sure they’d be happy to take their frustrations out on a lone human vessel cut off from help.

  I nearly gave a spoken high-g acceleration warning until I realized there was no one left to hear it. Nine gravities would put me out, especially since I wasn’t wearing a flight suit, so I instructed the ship’s computer to take us to what I figured would be minimum safe distance and then to jump back out to where the carrier had been and might still be.

  The corvettes launched missiles about a second before the burn began, and I didn’t have time to have the computer calculate if we’d hit the jump point before the weapons intercepted us.

  At least if they kill me, I had time to think, I won’t have to be awake for it.

  Then the world pressed down on my chest and everything went black.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I stared at the wall and wondered again if it would have been better if I hadn’t woken up. Not just this morning, but ever. It had been nearly two months since I’d snapped awake and found myself and Ash and the Artemis floating bingo fuel only 300 kilometers off th
e portside saucer of the Implacable, and that had been the very last time I’d had control of my own destiny.

  Now I was back on Inferno, but it could have still been the carrier, or Earth or a dozen other places, because one holding cell looked very much like another. The bed was uncomfortable, the food was barely edible, and my uniform was a pair of orange utility fatigues that were changed out every other day, when I was escorted to the showers. The last time anyone had talked to me other than the guards was when the Implacable had arrived in orbit around Inferno.

  When the door slid aside, I assumed it was my personal guard troop doing a random check on me; they did that every once in a while, usually when I’d just managed to fall asleep, the sorry fuckers. This time, though, it was someone else, someone tall and improbably handsome in a perfectly tailored uniform with an admiral’s rank.

  I snapped to my feet and came to attention, but Jason Aviles waved it away with an annoyed glance behind him. I saw Sgt. Conner scowl as she hit the control to close the door; the old, beat-up Marine bitch never once smiled in her whole life.

  “Lieutenant,” Aviles said, staring at me as I still stood at attention, “at ease, rest, do whatever the hell you need to do to stop acting like this is the fucking Academy parade ground.”

  “Aye, sir,” I said, relaxing, my hands still clasped behind my back. For some reason, I was suddenly self-conscious that my hair hadn’t been cut in three months and it was far past regulation, not to mention wild and unkempt.

  “Hollande,” he muttered, shaking his head. “What the hell have you done to yourself?”

  “First time I met you, sir,” I said, my voice sounding tired in my ears, “you told me I wasn’t a prisoner and wasn’t charged with anything. I guess I am now.”

  He barked a humorless laugh.

  “I suppose so.” He walked over to the soft, shapeless chair that was the only piece of furniture I was allowed except the bed, and sat down on it. I followed his gesture and seated myself opposite him, on the edge of my bed. “Has anyone talked to you since you were arrested?”