Exile (Tales of the Acheron Book 3)

  Tales of the Acheron

  Book 3:

  EXILE

  by

  Rick Partlow

  Copyright 2018

  by Rick Partlow

  Also by Rick Partlow:

  Glory Boy: https://www.amazon.com/Glory-Boy-Birthright-Book-0-ebook/dp/B01N6DXM8C

  The Birthright Trilogy: https://www.amazon.com/Birthright-Complete-Trilogy-Rick-Partlow-ebook/dp/B01LY3T1YT

  The Duty, Honor, Planet Trilogy: https://www.amazon.com/Duty-Honor-Planet-Complete-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B00LDZFS3U

  Prologue:

  Han-Kan-Ten-L’ral hadn’t felt the air on his face in days. The skin-tight control suit was plastered to him with sweat and the oils produced by his body, and the itching threatened to drive him insane at times, but what really ate at his psyche was the claustrophobic confines of his battlesuit’s helmet. He’d never thought of it as tight or restrictive previously, but that was before he’d come to the world that the humans called Andalusia. Spending ten of the local days stuck inside his armor, on the move constantly, sleeping on his feet for an hour or two when they happened to stop, had made him hate the helmet.

  He hated this place, too, this valley. It might have been beautiful once, with the rolling, green hills climbing out of it up to the white-capped mountains…and it might be beautiful again, someday. It was a wasteland now, burned and scraped flat by high explosives and energy weapons and kinetic-kill projectiles, and wiped clean of anything worth fighting for. The smoke and haze mixed with the morning fog and the low clouds and hung like a shroud over them, blotting out the sky and giving everything a look of devastated sameness.

  The humans had chased them here, out of their base near the city and into this valley of death, chased them with their orbital strikes and assault shuttles and their Marines and their Emperor-cursed commandos, clad in shadows and killing swiftly and horribly. The humans had carved at them and hammered at them and ground them down until all that was left was the pitiful force arrayed into the defensive perimeter around the edges of the clearing. There was no natural cover here, but they’d dug fighting positions as best they could.

  “We are all going to die here.”

  The words slipped out, and he checked quickly to see if his transceiver was active. It was, but he was still on a private channel to the one male among them who he trusted with the truth.

  “Indeed we are, my brother,” Shin-Tan-Vala-Kel responded with no fear in his voice. “It is the Emperor’s will, it seems.”

  Kan-Ten looked at the face of Vala-Kel, visible despite the opaque faceplates of their exoskeletal armor thanks to the computer projection on his Heads-Up Display. His oldest and closest friend was the very image of a Tahni warrior, as if the God-Emperor had molded him that way, his features sharp and jagged like the mountains west of the sea back home. He refocused his eyes and suddenly he could see the exterior of Vala-Kel’s battlesuit, and the perfection vanished. The suit was battered and scored, caked with mud and dirt and carbon, its armored chest-plate splintered and cracked in places where enemy shots had nearly penetrated. Their unit crest was obliterated, seared away by the war, along with their reasons for being here.

  “I fear we may have sinned too greatly,” Kan-Ten admitted. His breath felt labored, as if his battlesuit’s servomotors had frozen and he had to support the massive weight of the thing himself. “His favor has abandoned us.”

  “Commander!” The voice was strident, edged with panic. Kan-Ten turned ponderously, the circular footpads of his battlesuit scraping grass away from the moist, brown soil.

  He didn’t remember the male’s name; he was just one of a hundred lightly-armored ground troops who’d fled the city with them. He didn’t even have the same communications net as the battlesuit troopers, and was yelling to be heard. It was unnecessary; Kan-Ten’s helmet had exterior pickups that amplified and clarified.

  “It’s the humans, sir,” the soldier said breathlessly, his face flush with exertion from the run back from the outposts. He was an older male, put out to pasture on this conquered world to guard the human slaves, and long past his prime years as a warrior. His armor was faded and dented and poorly-maintained, and his weapon was held with an awkward discomfort that probably reflected a lack of familiarity with it.

  “They’re coming?” Kan-Ten frowned; he should have received warnings from the drones they’d left along the way. “Armor? Assault shuttles?” He looked upward automatically but his suit’s sensors showed nothing.

  “No, Commander.” The older male tossed his head, his ill-fitting helmet flopping around loosely. “It is one human. I don’t know how he got so close without triggering the sensors, but he speaks our language…he says he wants to talk to you, that he guarantees you won’t be harmed.”

  “One man?” Vala-Kel demanded with the typical disdain of a combat trooper for a rear-echelon soldier. “Why didn’t you kill him?”

  “We can’t see him, Vice Commander.” The male made a gesture of helplessness. “We hear his voice somewhere in the surrounding trees, but he is invisible on thermal or infrared…”

  “If he’s there,” Kan-Ten interrupted, “then they know where we are and it is pointless to fire blindly into the trees. I will go.”

  Kan-Ten left the old soldier and his friend’s objections behind with long, swift strides powered by servomotors and an isotope reactor buried deep in his armor’s backpack. The other battlesuit troopers were scattered at key positions around the perimeter, but there were far too few of them left, and it hurt him to number them. Each was a treasured comrade, more of a brother than the blood he’d left behind on Tahn-Skyyiah so many years ago, and he’d seen so many of them fall in those years.

  And for what? he wondered. The Imperium is dead, though it still walks. No one will admit it even to themselves, yet we all know. The humans will win this war in months, and this time they won’t leave us to threaten them again. They’ll occupy our worlds and grind us under their boots.

  The southern edge of the perimeter looked out across a hundred meters of open plain to the towering trees that the humans called a “pine,” something they’d imported from their world to this colony over a century ago. Kan-Ten found them oddly dark and menacing, far too tall and slender compared to the flora of his own homeworld, which made them well suited to conceal the dark, shadowy figure threatening them. There were no battlesuits at this section of the line, else they would have radioed him about the situation instead of sending a runner. The rear-guard troops were huddled fearfully in their fighting positions, eyes rarely topping the edges of the hastily-dug holes.

  Kan-Ten walked through them without hesitation, past them a good twenty meters before standing defiantly in the open, holding the massive arms of his battlesuit casually at his sides. He keyed his external address system and set it for maximum volume.

  “You wished to speak to me,” he challenged, hearing his own, amplified voice echoing back at him. “Show yourself. You have my word that we won’t fire on you unless you fire first.”

  He blinked. It was as if the figure had appeared out of the air at the edge of the trees, clad in gray shadows. His armor, if armor it indeed was, for it looked skin-tight, seemed to shift with the patterns of the background, and it showed on thermal imaging not at all. The human’s face was covered with a hood, but as he approached he pulled it off, revealing a close-cut matt of light brown hair and a face that was probably natural for one of them, but seemed far too thin and skeletal for the aesthetic of a Tahni. He had a sidearm holstered at his waist, but carried no other visible weapons.

  “Are you the commander of the ground forces?” A human’s voice box was poorly suited for the Tahni languag
e, but the man’s words were understandable for all that.

  “What’s left of them,” Kan-Ten replied, unable to keep the bitterness he felt out of his tone, though he didn’t know if a human would be able to pick it up.

  “I’m Captain Savage of Commonwealth Fleet Intelligence.” The word “Captain” probably didn’t mean quite the same thing in their tongue as it did in Tahni, but Kan-Ten got the idea that the human was a middle-grade officer of some sort. “I’ve come to offer you a chance to surrender.”

  Kan-Ten knew that this word had a different meaning. In Tahni, the term referred to the formal ending of an internal dispute for the throne, when one side would acknowledge the superiority of the other’s claim to be a more suitable physical host for the Spirit Emperor and pledge itself to restoring harmony and unity. The Tahni didn’t have the human concept of giving up and throwing themselves at the mercy of a conqueror…because the Tahni had never before been conquered.

  Yet he had heard the term. There had been a communique from the garrison priests warning that anyone who attempted to surrender to the humans would be executed.

  “What will happen to my warriors if I agree to this?”

  He spoke the words, yet doubted his own mind as he did. It seemed to him as if someone spoke through him, an ancestor’s spirit perhaps.

  “They’ll be housed, and fed, and treated well,” Captain Savage assured him. “They’ll be taken to camps for Tahni prisoners for the time being, but we hope that when this war is finally over, they’ll be allowed to return home.”

  “You are that sure that you will beat us.” He wasn’t arguing the point. He was fairly certain of it himself, yet the casual confidence the human’s words implied was staggering.

  “If I wasn’t sure,” the human responded, “I wouldn’t bother talking to you.” He motioned up with an expansive gesture. “You don’t think we have orbital assets that could kill every last one of you without risking a single one of our soldiers? Your picket ships are gone, and we control the laser defenses. This world is ours again.”

  “Then why do you let us live?” Kan-Ten was genuinely curious. He knew that he would not have offered the same courtesy if the situation had been reversed.

  “Because when this war is over, we’re going to make sure we never have to fight you and your kind again. We could do this by wiping you from existence, but most of us don’t believe that to be ethical or moral. So, we need individuals we can study, to figure out how to make a new government for you after all this is over and you go back home again.”

  Kan-Ten made a gesture of assent, though the human couldn’t see it and might not have recognized it in any case. The man was brutally honest, not inclined to couch his words in any conciliatory tone.

  “What would you have me do?” Again, that sensation of someone else speaking through him. Was he actually saying this? Was he actually considering it?

  “Order your troops to disarm. Those in battlesuits,” he motioned to Kan-Ten’s powered armor, “will need to crack them open and climb out. Then you’ll leave the weapons in the clearing and march everyone up to the edge of the trees and wait for our vehicles. If anyone refuses, I’m going to run,” he motioned behind him, “that way as fast as I can, and the guys upstairs are going to start dropping big, heavy rocks on top of you all.”

  “I will give the order. I do not know if everyone will follow it.”

  The human slipped his face hood back on and disappeared into the shadowed wood so quickly that Kan-Ten could almost believe he was a death spirit, sent by the Emperor to punish them. He shook the thought off and turned back to his own lines. Vala-Kel was waiting for him there, silent and motionless, a scarred and weathered statue, a monument to this war and their own foolishness.

  “What have you done, brother?” The tone was not accusatory, not angry, not even sad. Instead, there was a sense of exhaustion in his old friend’s words, of the acceptance of a fate he was too tired to fight. Kan-Ten knew the feeling well.

  “Our war is over,” he said. “Our lives need not be.”

  He touched a control inside his glove, inputting the correct sequence and then confirming it when the suit’s systems asked if he was really sure that was what he wanted to do. The front plastron of his suit swung ponderously open with a hiss of escaping air, and with its support removed, Kan-Ten nearly collapsed. His muscles were cramped and weak and he felt the sudden pain of aches and bruises and abrasions hidden from him by the suit’s medical systems over the last few days. He grabbed at a support handle affixed to the interior of the chest-plate and pulled his lower body out of the battlesuit, finding purchase for his feet on the steps of the open plastron.

  When he lowered himself down out of the suit’s helmet, the chill morning air slapped him in the face, as if he’d stepped out of one reality and into another. He staggered when his feet touched the ground, feeling the cold leeching up through the thin boots he’d worn inside the battlesuit. Kan-Ten sucked in a deep breath of air, savoring it despite the touch of frost that made his chest hurt.

  “If you do this, brother,” Vala-Kel told him, his voice sounding odd and mechanical through the exterior speakers of his suit, “there will be no going home for you. You’ll have no family, no place in the worship feasts, no prayers from our ancestors. You’ll be an exile.”

  “Let the sin be on my head,” Kan-Ten whispered, the steam of his breath taking the words away as if to the very ears of the spirits, “and not on these.” He stared upward into the faceless helm that hid his friend. “Live, brother. Live, and I shall bear this burden.”

  Kan-Ten turned and found the closest of the rear-guard soldiers, still cowering in his hole, his mouth agape.

  “Tell the others,” he instructed the male. “Lay down your weapons and gather beyond the lines. We are surrendering.”

  Chapter One

  “Get ready,” Ashton Carpenter warned. “We’re on the ground in five.”

  Sandrine Hollande felt the acceleration pushing her back into the liquid cushion of the copilot’s seat, somehow more real and urgent than when she was sitting in the left-hand chair and plugged into the ship’s neural interface. The armor she wore felt bulky and unnatural, and her palms were sweating inside her tactical gloves where they held tightly to the receiver of her pulse carbine. She was a pilot, not a gunfighter; but in their business, she had to be both. And it was her turn.

  “Wish you were in this chair?” Ash asked her, eyes focusing for just a moment as his concentration shifted from the interface to her, a crooked grin on his open, square-jawed face. He still kept his hair cut regulation-short even though he’d left the military over two years ago now, and he still looked like he’d stepped right out of a recruiting ad for Space Fleet. His appearance certainly didn’t give any clue that he’d fought his way out of one of the roughest slums in Trans-Angeles, or that he was wanted by the military for desertion and by the Patrol Service for murder.

  At least the murder charge is false.

  “Keep your eyes on the road,” she shot back, nodding towards the main view screens.

  They were nearly a kilometer above the surface of Grand Terre and fifty kilometers out from the planet’s only real city and everything was roiling, burning chaos. Lasers turned swathes of superheated atmosphere into plasma as they speared upward from the city, and proton cannons answered them like scintillating lightning bolts out of the dark, low-hanging thunderheads. And all around their ship, the exhaust flares of rocket engines and fusion-powered turbojets lit up the night like a swarm of malevolent fireflies, their course jerky and erratic as a dozen assault shuttles, landers and converted military cutters like their own tried to avoid the lasers and missiles from the ground defenses.

  “I still don’t know how the hell the Sung Brothers cobbled together this bunch.” The voice was scratchy and hoarse and immediately identifiable, but she turned her head toward it instinctively anyway.

  Strapped into the Navigator’s station between and just behind
her and Ash, Korri Fontenot was wearing the same sort of matte-grey body armor as Sandi, but on her it looked natural, comfortable, as if she’d been born to it. Born a long, long time ago to it, Sandi amended silently. Fontenot’s hair was silver and cut nearly as short as Ash’s, and half her face was lined and weathered from a century spent out in the wilds of the Periphery and the Pirate Worlds. The other half seemed unnaturally smooth, with a sort of blocky, unbalanced look to it that came from concealing the metal cybernetics that had replaced half her skull under a layer of synthskin. That concealment was a concession to their status as wanted criminals, an effort to be less conspicuous, but Sandi liked to think it was also Fontenot’s attempt to try to be more human.

  “They smell blood,” Sandi answered her question. “They know the La Sombra cartel is losing their grip on the outposts and they’re pouncing on them like a pack of wolves.”

  “Still must have cost them a fortune to hire out this many mercs,” Fontenot scowled with a frugality learned from decades on her own, living hand to mouth. “Can’t be worth it just to get control of the markets on a shithole like this.”

  “Two minutes,” Ash interrupted.

  Fontenot sighed and slipped on a battle helmet, sealing it to the collar of her chest armor, and Sandi did the same. The Heads-Up Display flickered to life in front of her eyes, a rush of information streaming up the corner of her vision, telling her what her current elevation, speed and geographic position was. When she focused on the tiny map in the right-hand corner of the display, it expanded to show her the city only twenty kilometers ahead, squatting in a river valley on the planet’s only continent, more a large island on a large world of mostly water.

  It wasn’t what she would have called a city when she’d lived on Earth, wasn’t even the size of a housing district in one of the megalopolises like Trans-Angeles or Capital City. Life in the colonies was harder and rougher, and usually shorter, and the populations were still small. Even the oldest Core colonies like Hermes or Eden barely boasted a half a billion people, compared to the nearly thirty billion jammed into the megacities of Earth. Out here in the Pirate Worlds, the illegal squatter colonies controlled by the cartels, populations were in the tens or hundreds of thousands, crammed into the tiny habitable zones of planets not well suited to human life.