Prodigal (Tales of the Acheron Book 1)

by Rick Partlow

  She didn’t wait to see whether the shuttle pilot recovered, just pressed her sudden advantage and headed straight at the other cutter. The La Sombra pilot hesitated just for a moment, probably thinking he’d wind up shooting down the other shuttle, and it was long enough to center the targeting reticle for just a millisecond and fire. The burst of protons tore through the cutter’s spine and blew her in half just aft of the cockpit, in a blast of vaporizing metal. The shockwave tossed the Acheron wildly even a kilometer away and once again, Sandi was fighting for control.

  The last shuttle in the air couldn’t manage it; she saw it spinning end for end and breaking up before it hit the surface of one of the hot springs. A geyser of superheated water shot hundreds of meters up and the pool flowed out over its banks, flooding the packed dirt around it for a dozen meters on a side.

  Desperation gnawing at her insides, Sandi searched for the other shuttle, the one that had taken the hit from friendly fire, trying to get a fix on it with half her attention while the remainder concentrated on pulling her ship out of a flat spin. Gentle bursts from her maneuvering thrusters combined with full power to the main jets straightened the Acheron only twenty meters off the ground and the belly jets bought her altitude as she soared forward over the clearing and the pools, just clearing the trees.

  There. She could see it now, a column of black smoke rising from the tree line, near where she’d been hiding in wait with the cutter. Pieces of smoldering wreckage littered the light powder of snow there, and flames consumed the forests as they climbed the hills into the ice. The shuttle had never made it out of the dive; all of the enemy ships were down.

  There had to be at least one other in orbit, she knew, the larger starship that had launched the cargo lander and the shuttles; but she couldn’t detect it and anyway, it wouldn’t have the sort of pinpoint-accurate orbital bombardment capabilities that could target an individual ship on the ground. Even La Sombra couldn’t afford that sort of military-level precision hardware.

  She took the cutter around in a gentle arc and set her down as close to the blazing hulk of the cargo shuttle as she could. She left the reactor powered up and the turbines spinning in a slow idle, yanking the interface cables and jogging back to the utility bay, slapping the control to lower the belly ramp. It seemed to take forever to lower, and she barely remembered to pull her pistol from its holster before she ran down, her ship boots clomping off the end of the hollow metal to sink centimeters into the damp grass.

  Smoke and flame and steam rose all around her, obscuring the surrounding trees and the more distant hills and making it hard to see anything, even up close. She strained her eyes against the fog and mist and scanned back and forth, hesitant to move too far from the end of the ramp in case there were more threats from the air.

  “Ash,” she called into her ‘link pickup. She cursed herself for not thinking to use it before, but the interface had swallowed her up, taken all her thought. That was why missile cutters in the war had crews of two. “Ash, are you there?”

  She saw the grey-armored figures rising out of the tall grass and she took an instinctive step backwards, bringing up her pistol, fumbling for the safety.

  “Ash?”

  There was a burst of static, then another, then a garbled voice that finally cleared up.

  “Yeah, I’m here,” Ash said. “Sorry, my helmet radio got screwed up in the explosion. We’ll be right there.”

  She sagged with relief, stepping back and leaning against the support stanchion for the belly ramp, remembering to put the safety back on before she reholstered her weapon. She began shivering as she finally felt the damp, penetrating chill, the adrenalin streaming out of her and leaving her drained and exhausted. She could see Ash now, could make out his build and stride among the others, even with the helmets and armor. He was limping slightly, and she could see a scorched black strip across his left shoulder and side. The others looked beat up as well, and two of them carried a third between them, his leg soaked with blood.

  As they approached closer, she could tell that the two doing the carrying were Kan-Ten and Fontenot, and the wounded man was Tomlinson. Donnelly trailed a few meters behind, taut frustration clear in the clenched tightness of his shoulders and hands even before he ripped off his helmet and revealed a face florid with rage. She flinched as he threw the helmet past her, bouncing it off the inside bulkhead of the utility bay, the sound hollow and booming as it impacted.

  “Somebody’s gonna fucking die for this,” he growled.

  “We were set up,” Tomlinson agreed, shrugging free of the Tahni and the cyborg and limping over to sit down on the ramp heavily. “They knew just when we were coming.”

  “Where’s Yuri?” Sandi wondered, stepping past Donnelly and looking around for the Russian.

  “Dead,” Ash told her, and she could hear him swallowing hard. “He took a round from an assault gun right through the faceplate.”

  “We should bring him with us,” Tomlinson declared. “We need to give him a proper burial, speak to God before we inter him.”

  “We need to get the hell out of here!” Sandi insisted hotly, pointing upward. “They’ve gotta have a ship up there! I mean, maybe they won’t throw good money after bad, but maybe they will, and I don’t want to be sitting around waiting when they send one last shuttle to finish us off!”

  “What fucking difference does it make?” Donnelly bellowed. “We don’t have anywhere else to go! You heard what that bitch Brunner said! We can either come back with the cargo or not come back at all!” He sneered at Sandi and Ash. “Maybe you two can go find a job flying for someone else, but I ain’t got a ship for hire and I’ve burned all my other bridges.”

  “Maybe you wouldn’t be so damned desperate,” Fontenot commented quietly, “if you wouldn’t keep sticking your dick where it wasn’t wanted.”

  “Shut up, you iron-assed bitch!” Donnelly took a step toward her, his carbine still clutched in his hand, the barrel coming up slightly.

  “You think you can get me before I get to you, motherfucker?” Fontenot stood her ground, her helmet in her hand, her weapon slung over her shoulder. The look in her natural eye was just as cold and deadly as her bionic one.

  “Hold on a second,” Sandi said, stepping between them, hands raised. “We need to bring back a shipment of proton cannons, right?” At their curious glances, she went on. “But I don’t think Brunner cares where we got them.”

  “What?” Donnelly demanded, his pig-ugly face wrinkling in confusion. “You know anywhere else we can get them?”

  Ash had pulled off his helmet and he was frowning at her, uncomprehending.

  “Yeah,” she admitted. “I think I just might.”

  ***

  “Where the hell did you hide this?” Ash asked, shaking his head as he stared at the streams of data on the cockpit display. He couldn’t understand all of it, but some of it was spatial coordinates paired with times, and he thought he recognized military procurement and logistics inventory codes in another column. “Didn’t Jordi check for any copies you’d made before he let us leave?”

  He glanced at the cockpit hatch reflexively, but it was shut and sealed, though he was sure the others were probably clustered around it, waiting for them to come out and announce their destination. They were in Transition Space, for safety more than anything, making a short jump to the next system on the closest Transition Line that wouldn’t take more than a few hours. Nothing could touch them there, and no one could track them.

  “Of course he did,” Sandi said, a hint of a smile passing across her face. “I loaded it into my wetware.”

  Ash felt a surge of distaste that he knew was irrational. After all, the Fleet techs had loaded the initial programming into their interface systems when they’d undergone the implantation procedure.

  “Can we do that?” He asked inanely…after all, she had done it. “I thought they installed some pretty heavy security in the system to keep anyone from messing with it. It�
�s all read-only, isn’t it?”

  “Theoretically,” she agreed. “But it has a maintenance file they used for status checks that’s rewritable to allow for accountability for the medical staff.” She shrugged. “It’s tiny, but so is this.” She waved at the display demonstratively.

  “You don’t think they’ll change the pickup times for the weapons now that you stole the information?” Ash wondered.

  “Why should they? They made pretty damn sure no one would believe me, and it’s got to be a pain in the ass to arrange this ahead of time without direct contact. And they can’t afford to contact Krieger directly without incriminating him.” She shrugged. “They might be able to bury third-hand evidence like this, but if someone tracked a transmission from a known cartel operative to the Admiral, he’d be toast.”

  He sighed in dolorous acceptance, knowing he wouldn’t be able to argue her out of it and also knowing he didn’t really want to. Just like the others, if they didn’t bring back those proton cannons, they had nowhere else to go.

  “Jordi did say everything would be forgiven, as long as we did the job,” he mused.

  “We should go tell them,” Sandi suggested, glancing at the hatch.

  Ash nodded and hit the control to unseal it. The servomotor ground loudly as the heavy, metal circle rose upward into its niche in the overhead, and Sandi winced at the sound.

  “Sorry,” Ash said, embarrassed. “I bought the hatch motor surplus and didn’t bother rebuilding it; I never figured I’d have to seal off the cockpit.”

  They were all waiting squeezed in around the tiny ship’s galley, Tomlinson sitting at the table with his injured leg propped up against the opposite wall, swaddled in a smart bandage, his long face morose. Donnelly had the opposite seat, leaning forward heavily on crossed arms, eyes hooded, while Kan-Ten and Fontenot stood like bookends, faces impassive and unreadable for very different reasons.

  “What are you two on about in there?” Donnelly demanded, pushing up from the table. “Where are these weapons we’re supposed to hijack?”

  “Andalusia,” Sandi told him. “It’s about a seventy-hour Transition from here, on the edge of the Periphery. The La Sombra cartel is getting a shipment out there from a supplier in about ninety hours, so we aren’t going to have a lot of time for prep. But they also won’t have much in the way of security because they don’t want to draw attention to the exchange.”

  “Yeah,” Tomlinson interjected glumly, “just like there wasn’t supposed to be much security at this last deal.”

  “That was Brunner’s intell,” Sandi countered. “This is mine.”

  “And where the hell did you get it?” Donnelly wanted to know. “How did a couple of drifters get a hold of this kind of data?”

  Ash glanced at Sandi and answered for her, with the response they’d rehearsed.

  “We stole it from a Fleet Intelligence data net where I worked. It’s why we wound up on the run in the first place. We thought we could sell the data to the cartels, but La Sombra found out we’d taken it and put a price on our head. Now, we’re afraid to let anyone else know we have it.”

  “Why do you tell us, then?” Kan-Ten spoke for the first time since he’d come on the boat and Ash blinked at his melodic, sing-song accent and the strange enunciation of the words. It wasn’t how he’d thought the Tahni would sound, but then he’d never heard one speak English before.

  “Because at this point,” Sandi answered, “what have we got to lose?”

  “There is that,” Fontenot acknowledged. “I’m in.”

  “I shall go as well,” Kan-Ten agreed with a motion of hands that might have been his equivalent of a nod or a shrug.

  “Yes, okay,” Tomlinson sighed. “Assuming my leg is good to go by the time we get there.” He groaned softly. “If God wants me dead, one place is as good as another.”

  He and the others all turned and looked to Donnelly.

  “If this is another fucking trick…,” the big man began, but Sandi cut him off.

  “Who the hell do you think got you out of that situation, Donnelly?” She snapped at him. “Do you think I set myself and Ash up so we could almost get killed just to get you to go after some score that we’re going to do what with exactly?” She waved a hand expansively. “Who the hell are we going to sell the shit to if we don’t take it back to Brunner? Not a one of us has those kinds of connections.”

  “We’re trying to give us all a way out of this,” Ash told him. “Now, are you in, or do you want us to drop you off at the next system?”

  Donnelly scowled at him, and then glanced toward Sandi with just the hint of a look that Ash couldn’t quite identify but didn’t like at all.

  “All right,” he said grudgingly. “We’ll do it your way.” He snorted. “No use threatening you: if this goes bad, you’ll be just as dead as the rest of us.”

  Chapter Ten

  Sandi fought to keep from fidgeting, forced herself not to radio Ash again to ask if he could see anything. It was fairly obvious that he couldn’t see any more from his position than she could from hers, which was nothing but the dilapidated remains of what had once been a row of poured-concrete buildings dating from back before the first war with the Tahni, back when the only way to reach the stars was the wormhole jumpgates left behind by the Predecessors.

  Back then, any halfway-habitable world in one of the linked systems was settled because it was what you had, what you could reach. When the Transition drive had opened up thousands of new systems and dozens more habitable worlds, places that had once been key military bases against the Tahni were abandoned and overgrown, the colonies shrunken, unless the system provided some key Transition Line hub or was rich in resources or had simply acquired a cache with tourists. Andalusia had none of that, and what had once been a thriving colony with multiple military bases, and the businesses that supported them, had become a place for squatters and back-to-nature types who didn’t want any part of the more settled worlds.

  It had also become an ideal place for less-than-legal dealings, since the only law enforcement was local to the half-dozen small cities on-planet---and they were getting smaller all the time. She could see the signs of it here in the ruins of the old military base: the graffiti on the walls of the abandoned buildings, the scorch-marks where there’d been fires from people waiting for deliveries or pickups. She hugged the chilled and barren side of what had once been a storage shed and shifted her pistol from one hand to another, working fingers gone stiff in the dropping temperatures of late afternoon on an autumn day.

  She knew the schedule for the drop-off, and knew what to look for, but that didn’t make the waiting any easier, particularly alone. There were only six of them now, with Yuri gone, and they’d had to spread themselves out around the perimeter to watch every avenue of approach. A gust of wind blew a spray of dust across the overgrown road and she blinked as it stung her eyes. She wore an armored vest but had rejected the helmet that Fontenot had tried to get her to wear, as well as the carbine; she had no training with either one, and thought it best to stick with the gear she was comfortable using.

  “We got a truck coming in.” That was Tomlinson; there was no mistaking his dour, despondent voice. “West road, heading east at twenty klicks an hour. Coming your way, Kan-Ten.”

  “Carpenter, Hollande, Fontenot,” Donnelly ordered, “move in on the west-east road and prepare to back up Kan-Ten.”

  The asshole really is a good squad leader, she mused. She guessed he would have to be or else Brunner would just have had him killed instead of giving him this chance.

  She stood and broke into a jog down the old road, watching the placement of her feet carefully as she danced over the cracked pavement. She could hear the rumble of the old, alcohol-fueled engine in the distance, the scratch of tires on the dirt and gravel, and she was struck with a sudden, renewed worry that the schedule had been changed or that this was another trap. If this didn’t work, there was no backup plan.

  “The vehi
cle is fifty meters from my position,” Kan-Ten intoned. “Should I engage?”

  “I’m coming up behind it and to the west,” Donnelly reported. “A hundred meters away. Give me ten seconds, then target the driver.”

  Sandi ran harder, less cautiously despite her fear, wanting to get there and make sure nothing went wrong. There was a whoosh-crack of a rocket carbine discharging, echoing off the cyclopean walls of an old warehouse, and she took the corner around the edge of it and then she could see the truck. It was old, like everything on this world, old and obsolete with polymer tires and a combustion engine and a fluttering plastic tarp covering the cargo bed. It wasn’t self-driving, it lacked any sort of computer or satellite guidance, and it could have driven out of a road two hundred years ago, but it was cheap and easy to fabricate and repair.

  The truck was skewing across the old road, throwing up dust and gravel and bits of broken concrete as the driver tried desperately to turn. She saw the afternoon sun winking off splintered, spider-webbed holes blown through the windshield and another mini-rocket punched through as she watched, lighting up the cab with a flare of its warhead exploding. She was twenty meters away when the passenger’s side door was flung open and a man in khaki coveralls dove out, tumbling awkwardly on the pavement then getting up and trying to run, the gun in his hand seemingly forgotten.

  He was coming Sandi’s way, and she brought up her pistol unconsciously, as if her hand was moving on its own. She could see his face, skinny and rounded with a knobby chin, could see the wild fear in his eyes, and her finger was touching the trigger pad, waiting for the sights to line up. Before she could fire, a pair of smoke trails intersected the man’s chest and he pitched forward, his own weapon clattering to the ground as he collapsed. Sandi glanced around, startled, and saw Fontenot moving her way, not running but walking so fast she might as well have been.