Prodigal (Tales of the Acheron Book 1)

by Rick Partlow

  Stretched out beneath the wing on the opposite side of the missile from Ash was Fontenot, lying motionless, blood pooled around her and an ugly, jagged hole through the right side of her chest. Ash surged forward in alarm, mouth opening to call her name…and then he froze, as the rest of the scene came into view. Kan-Ten was leaning heavily against the portside landing tread of the shuttle, hands squeezing shut a wound on his upper leg that had soaked his odd, cloth-wrapping trousers with blood, his mouth hanging open in an expression Ash couldn’t fathom.

  Ezra Tomlinson stood over the Tahni expatriate, pointing a handgun at him, his usually hang-dog face harder and less sympathetic than Ash remembered.

  “I figured you’d show up,” Tomlinson said, glancing at Ash out of the corner of his eye. “Glad I didn’t have to wait too long.”

  “Tomlinson?” Ash shook his head, uncomprehending. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “He works for La Sombra,” Kan-Ten said, his accent stronger, possibly with emotion; Ash could barely understand his pronunciation of the Spanish words. “He’s their other mole.”

  Ash’s eyes went wide and he started to back up, towards the entrance.

  “That’s far enough, Carptenter,” Tomlinson warned him, “unless you’d like me to put a round through Kan-Ten’s head.”

  Ash debated for a moment whether he cared; despite the fact that Kan-Ten was an ally for the moment, he was also a former Tahni warrior and they probably would have been doing their best to kill each other just a few years ago. Surprisingly, he discovered that he did care, and he wasn’t certain if it was because he didn’t want to be the kind of person who’d abandon an ally or if he’d actually come to appreciate having the alien around.

  “You can’t be the mole,” Ash protested, still trying to wrap his head around the idea. “You were the one who betrayed Garces! Why would you get your own man killed?”

  “You know a better way to get Borges and Brunner to trust me?” The heavy-worlder laughed sharply. “Garces was expendable; that was Jordi’s plan all along, although he obviously didn’t share the details with our late, lamented friend.” His face went serious again and he eyed Ash balefully. “Now move on over here, slowly, unless you want me to shoot the both of you.”

  “You’re just going to kill us all anyway,” Ash muttered, trying to buy time. “Or turn us over to Jordi, which amounts to the same thing.”

  “I’d rather not kill either of you, if I have a choice,” Tomlinson told him, so matter-of-factly that Ash felt inclined to believe him. “I’ve actually come to enjoy your company. I wouldn’t have killed Fontenot if she hadn’t been so fucking dangerous. So why don’t you help Kan-Ten here up into the shuttle and fly us out of here before it’s too late.”

  “Too late for what?” Ash wondered, now even more confused. “Aren’t your people going to land and take this thing?”

  “Oh, no, Carpenter,” Tomlinson corrected him with a laugh that still seemed incongruous coming from his usually dour, overly sincere face. “That would be far too costly; that was never the plan.”

  Kan-Ten pushed himself upward, grunting at the pain in his leg.

  “He’s set the warhead to explode,” the Tahni told Ash. “He’s going to take out everyone and everything within a hundred kilometers of this place.”

  Ash felt the wind go out of him like he’d been kicked in the gut, imagining the multiple fusion bombs inside the warhead all going off at once, right here, scrubbing Tangier free of human life. But when he inhaled again, it was with a warm, easy sense of peace. There was no uncertainty now; before, he’d been considering going along, flying Tomlinson and Kan-Ten out just to look for a chance to get away, but that was no longer an option. He was going to make a rush at Tomlinson, whether or not it got him killed.

  And it probably would, considering the other man was about twice as strong as him and an experienced gunfighter.

  “It’s the simple things in life that make it worth living,” Tomlinson said with a sigh of satisfaction. “Getting this weapon was so important to that fat old fuck Borges that he never thought twice about landing a Goddamned Planet-Killer fusion missile right in the middle of his own fucking city. Once I told Jordi what was going on, he about shit himself laughing.”

  “You don’t sound much like a Canaanite neo-Quaker anymore,” Ash reflected, sizing the man up, looking for any edge he could get. “Was any of that story true?”

  “Most of it.” Tomlinson shrugged. “There was a rape, there was a fight, there was a death.” His lip quirked. “I only lied about which guy died.”

  Another explosion hit, this one closer, shaking the structure of the hangar and sending an industrial exoskeleton swaying in its charging carriage against the far wall. Outside, engines roared in counterpoint to the blast, climbing away.

  The Canaanite scowled. “Now, stop stalling and get on the shuttle. We have less than an hour till this thing goes up, and while that should be plenty of time, I’d rather not take the chance.” He spared the cargo boat an evaluative glance. “They didn’t bother to refuel this thing yet, but there should be enough to get us into a high orbit for a rendezvous with Jordi’s lighter. Consider yourself lucky that I need a pilot.”

  He needs me alive, Ash thought, seizing on a scrap of hope. That might give him a chance.

  “Come on, Kan-Ten,” Ash said, stepping forward as if he was going to help the Tahni up.

  Just two steps from Tomlinson, which was about as close as he was going to get. He’d racked his brains for anything he could remember from unarmed combat classes back in training, and just about the only lesson he could recall was from a bandy-legged little Recon Marine who’d advised him to “go for the knees.”

  He leaned over, hand out to take Kan-Ten’s, then just dropped, catching himself on his palms, feeling the pain in his wrists as he landed, then pistoning his legs out towards Tomlinson. The Canaanite was a solid man, probably a good 120 kilos and built blocky and low to the ground, but all that weight had to rest somewhere. That somewhere was his knees, and the heels of Ash’s boots slammed into them with a sound like an axe striking a tree.

  Tomlinson grunted hoarsely, toppling forward, hands going out to stop his fall, and Ash grabbed at the one holding the gun, trying to twist it away from his body. The big man hit the concrete with a solid, meaty thump and the added leverage let Ash wrench the gun from his hand, but not hold onto it; the pistol went skidding across the floor away from them. Ash made the mistake of following it with his eyes, which took his attention off of Tomlinson just long enough for the Canaanite to catch him with a short backhand across the face.

  It was a weak blow from a weak position, but Tomlinson was a very strong man and Ash felt as if he’d been coldcocked with a baseball bat. Ash saw stars floating across his vision and suddenly he was rolling across the floor, a meter away from the Canaanite, dimly aware that Tomlinson was back on his feet. The big man was limping, but not badly; his bones were more solid than someone born in normal gravity. He was shaking his head, a pained grimace on his long face.

  “Fucking stupid hero shit, Carpenter,” he snapped, hobbling over towards the gun. “Now I kill the Tahni and you still fly me out.”

  A dark shape was behind Tomlinson, hazy in the backlight from the security floodlamps outside the front entrance. The Canaanite seemed to sense it and tried to turn, but it was too late. A metal fist crashed down on his right shoulder blade and snapped it with an audible crack that made Ash wince. Tomlinson fell to his knees, screaming with shock and pain and looking up into the impassive gaze of Korri Fontenot.

  “Should have finished me off, you cocky little fuck,” she muttered.

  Her next hammer-blow caved in his skull. Blood sprayed across the concrete floor, and when what had recently been Tomlinson slumped face-first, more of it splashed at his impact. Fontenot shook some of it off her right fist, then turned back to Ash and Kan-Ten.

  “I thought you were dead,” the Tahni spoke first, in what might hav
e been a reproving tone if a human had said it.

  “This metal,” the cyborg gestured at the hole in her chest, “goes deeper than you think.”

  “The missile,” Ash said, clambering to his feet. “Do you think you can disarm it? Shut down whatever Tomlinson did to it?”

  “He burned out the control panel,” Kan-Ten told them. “There’s no way to shut it down short of physically disassembling it, and we don’t have the tools for that here.”

  Ash’s eyes flickered to the shuttle, then to the industrial exoskeleton. He jerked a thumb at it and eyed Fontenot.

  “You know how to operate that thing?”

  ***

  Sandi was alone. It could be truthfully said that any pilot jacked into the interface was alone, floating in a solitary plane of information, but beyond that was the knowledge that Adam was back in the utility bay, probably unconscious from the acceleration, and Ash was somewhere down there where the bombs were going off and it was just her in the cockpit and the enemy outside. After so many years on her own, watching her own back, sleeping with one eye open, she should have been used to it; but after just a few weeks back together with Ash, with Fontenot and even Kan-Ten, it suddenly seemed intolerable, infuriating.

  Snap out of it, you dumb bitch! She screamed at herself, shaking off the semi-conscious stupor of ten g’s of acceleration as the Acheron closed the loop and circled down around to the six o’clock of the La Sombra shuttle.

  The missiles the enemy bird had launched continued skyward, their target lock lost, and she watched with grim satisfaction as the wedge-shaped aerospacecraft floated into the aiming reticle projected inside her mind. With a thought, she fired and coruscating energy connected the two vessels in a frozen strand of time before the shuttle disappeared in an expanding ball of gas that lit up the night sky, reflecting off the constricting clouds like a light show.

  Two down.

  The first one had been easy; they hadn’t expected the cutter to be in the air. They’d gone down in the space of a heartbeat, as long as it took to target them. This one had seen her shoot down the first shuttle and honed in on her before she could break high; he’d been surprisingly talented for a cartel pilot and had stuck on her ass for nearly thirty seconds. She could see the last two crossing one in front of the other on her sensor display, ten kilometers away at the edge of the mountains, banking to catch her in a pincer.

  The winds were rough this low, but the higher she climbed, the easier the missiles would find her. She banked into a gentle turn, setting a head-on course for the shuttle coming in from her portside just as both of the aerospacecraft launched a pair of heat-seekers.

  Rookie move, she thought with a professional’s disdain.

  Experienced combat pilots wouldn’t have both launched simultaneously while they were on a course right for each other; at this range, they were both taking the chance of shooting the other bird down. Unfortunately, she couldn’t wait around for that, since there was too good a chance she’d take one up the tailpipe herself in the process. Instead, she accelerated into the oncoming flight of missiles, keeping them in a tight formation directly in front of her, lined them up with the targeting reticle and fired the proton cannon.

  The blast didn’t even have to hit them; as tightly as they were flying, the thermal bloom was as hot as the core of a nuclear reactor and it ignited the fifty kilos of chemical HyperExplosives in twin globes of fire that filled the sky in front of the cutter. She flew through it fearlessly, only a second and a half in front of the trailing missiles; the BiPhase Carbide of the Acheron’s hull was unfazed, but the heatseekers ignited on contact with the fireballs and suddenly the sky was clear except for her and the two shuttles.

  Sandi felt herself flattened by the boost but she fed it power, up to ten g’s again, only the interface keeping her conscious and focused. The shuttle coming at her tried a burst from the Gatling laser turret at its nose, but she was past it before the rounds came anywhere near her, then banking into a hard turn to starboard, using a kiss from the belly jets to add more sharpness to the maneuver than the enemy birds could manage without jacked pilots. The trailing shuttle tried another missile launch, two more heatseekers, and she knew that had to be his whole complement. The missiles accelerated at twenty g’s, streaking across the night sky and inexorably gaining on her, but she was already twisting onto the tail of the second shuttle, the one who’d fired the lasers.

  The shuttle wasn’t a military bird, just a civilian lander with hard-points for missile launchers and laser turrets, and it couldn’t match the engines of the cutter…or its pilot. Sandi almost felt guilty at how easy it was, but only almost. The Acheron’s capacitor coils were recharged and ready to power another shot from the proton cannon, but she held off firing. Instead, she closed the distance with the shuttle as the enemy bird climbed another thousand meters trying to shake her, watching the sensor readout numbers shrink till she was barely a half a kilometer behind. The missiles were nearly on her, two seconds from ramming into the rear of the cutter and turning it to so much scrap metal scattered over the snow.

  Sandi cut power to the rear engines and the boat fell like a stone, so much colder than the shuttle she’d been tailing, with its turbojets screaming power and heat right until the missiles impacted. The cartel bird cartwheeled across the sky riding gouts of flame, plowing out of control into the ground and spreading burning bits of itself over the rolling hills outside Cape Spartel.

  Sandi poured a boost into the belly jets and the cutter’s descent slowed, bringing up her nose until the rear engines could power back up, moving her forward with the slow, deliberate motion of a stalking predator. It was too much for the crew of the last La Sombra shuttle; the bird screamed upward as fast as their engines and bodies could handle, climbing back towards orbit, tail between its legs. Sandi debated chasing the boat down, but she had to check on the missile…and on Ash.

  Cape Spartel was on fire. She could see the conflagration from kilometers away, an ominous, otherworldly glow that hung over the walls and reflected off the surface of the inland sea. The flames licked high over the wreckage of hangars and warehouses and fab centers and the cartel administrative buildings, and black smoke climbed to unite with the low clouds; it was difficult to tell where one ended and the other began. A shoulder-fired missile corkscrewed into the night from somewhere in-between the buildings and she jerked the boat hard to port to avoid it. Whoever had fired it didn’t know how to guide it properly, because it continued on into the clouds, lost in the hazy blackness.

  Sandi bit off an exclamation and took the Acheron down as quickly as she could, aiming for the open stretch of pavement in front of the Rif hangar near Borges’ mansion. The lot was barely long and wide enough to fit the cutter, but she had to get out of the air before some jumpy idiot got lucky with a golden BB and did some real damage. The belly jets charred the ground, the sudden deceleration a gut-punch that squashed her into her seat; she rebounded along with the Acheron as the boat rose on the suspension of her landing treads and settled in. She noted with dark amusement that the edge of the cutter’s port wing had crushed the roof of a groundcar parked near the edge of the pavement, settling heavily on top of it until the entire cab had collapsed like an accordion.

  Hope he’s insured.

  She yanked the interface cords out of her sockets and pulled the quick-release on her harness, scrambling out of the cockpit with a desperate speed that ignored the pain in her muscles from the aerial dogfight. She felt like someone had worked her over with a club, but there just wasn’t time for whining or wallowing. She found Adam slumped heavily in his seat in the utility bay, moaning softly, the front of his jacket covered with vomit, and she winced in empathy.

  “Hey, are you all right?” She demanded, leaning over to look him in the eye.

  “Jesus,” he gasped, his head still lolling and his eyes not quite focused. “I never want to do that again.”

  “Pull it together, kid,” she insisted, unfastening
his seat restraints and jerking him unmercifully to his feet. “Go get in one of the cabins,” she ordered him, giving him a shove in the right direction. “Lock the door and don’t make a sound; don’t open it for anyone but me. You got it?”

  He made a barely-coherent assent as he stumbled down the passageway, catching his balance against the bulkhead. Sandi took a moment to look over her shoulder and make sure he’d actually found the cabin as she hit the control to lower the belly ramp. She saw the hatch to the cabin slam shut behind him and could only hope he’d figure out how the lock worked.

  The ramp was only about halfway down, but she wasn’t willing to wait any longer; she ducked under the edge of the hull and jumped off the end of it, feeling a twinge in her knees as she landed heavily and stumbled forward to keep her balance. The hangar’s aircraft door was yawning open, but the lights inside were out and smoke was drifting across it from the fires at Borges’ mansion. She’d jogged to within thirty meters of the entrance before she realized that the shuttle and the Planet-Killer missile were both gone, that the hangar was empty.

  It took her another ten meters before she saw Lena Brunner and a half-dozen of her guards standing just inside the doorway, all of them armed and looking very pissed off. Kan-Ten was sitting on the floor, and a medic was wrapping a bandage around what looked to be a gunshot wound on his leg. Tomlinson…well, she knew from the body shape that it was Tomlinson, even though the head was crushed and unrecognizable…what was left of him sprawled in a pool of blood a couple meters from where Kan-Ten was sitting. Of Ash and Fontenot, there was no sign.