Prodigal (Tales of the Acheron Book 1) Read online

  She knew he was as exposed and vulnerable as a bare nerve ending, and she’d hurt him before.

  What the hell am I doing? She wondered, laying back and covering her face with her hands. This hadn’t been part of the plan. Just get what she needed and then leave. It was supposed to be simple.

  If it’s so damned simple, how did I wind up in bed with him?

  Because it had felt right, it had felt natural. And it had been so long since she’d been with anyone she could trust…

  No. She couldn’t do this to him, couldn’t let him get involved with this. It wouldn’t be right. She slipped silently out of the bed and grabbed her clothes off the chair in the corner, dressing in the glow of the chemical ghostlight burning perpetually along the baseboard by the door. Once she had her boots fastened, she stood motionless, eyes flickering around the room as she licked her lips thoughtfully.

  She tried the nightstand first, and didn’t have to look any further. The metallic card was sitting atop an old, physical printout of a photo. She remembered the day they’d had the picture taken, the day they’d graduated from flight training. They were in uniform, arms interlinked and broad smiles on their faces. They both looked happy.

  Had it been the last time? She couldn’t remember being happy again after.

  She picked up the key card; it was cold and hard in her fingers, the edges sharp and unyielding. Ash had left it sitting in the drawer, unsecured, because he hadn’t thought anyone would be trying to take it from him. He hadn’t expected a theft, a betrayal. Most people didn’t.

  She slipped it into her vest pocket and padded out of the room. Her gunbelt was hanging from a hook near the front door, and when she grabbed it and buckled it on, she noticed a set of keys that were on the next hook. They were old-fashioned, crystal spikes with an embedded, coded lattice, and long obsolete. Modern vehicles were keyed to the ‘links of the owners or operators, generally; with ignition codes that could be shared electronically. She knew the keys weren’t for his car because she hadn’t seen him use them last night when they’d driven from the landing field to the bar, and then to his apartment.

  Impulsively, she grabbed them and ducked out of the door, pulling it shut softly and carefully behind her. His apartment was on the second floor of the complex, and from the head of the stairs she could see that the sky was still a dull, slate-grey in the early morning hour just before dawn. She took the steps down to the ground floor two at a time, pausing at the bottom and looking around, the keys in her hand.

  Ash’s car was parked under the overhang that covered the complex’s small lot, just another curved box in row after row of them, all simple and cheap and easily fabricated. And then, in a corner of the structure, she saw the motorcycle. She blinked at the sight of it, convinced on first glance that it was an antique, at least a century old…until she realized that it was most likely built on a fabricator out of a pattern a century old, which was something much more in line with Ash’s budget.

  It looked like it ran on liquid fuel, from the shape of the tank, and she had to guess it was alcohol since that would be the easiest to brew on local equipment. Other than that, it could have jumped right out of a photo in the history books, or a remastered movie from the Twenty-First Century. She grinned, fingering the keys, and swung a leg over the machine.

  She’d ridden one before, as a young teenager, on a visit to her father’s ranch back before her father had decided that putting up with her mother wasn’t a price he’d been willing to pay to be part of her life. She remembered every second she’d spent with her father, including how to operate a motorcycle. She shoved the crystalline key into a slot next to the start button and saw it light up green, then pressed it and was rewarded with a low, grumbling growl and a vibration that shuddered through her torso.

  A twist on the accelerator and a touch of her foot on the clutch and the machine jumped into gear and shot out of the parking space with a roar of power. It was a temperate night here on the northern continent of Anansi, on the outskirts of the capital city of Toliara, and the wind that whipped at her face was only moderately cold. She squinted into it, wishing she had goggles, but it was only a few kilometers to the field and she could endure until then.

  The road was deserted at this hour; even the Fleet base was asleep, though she could see a cargo shuttle lifting off from the civilian field in the distance, its jet engines glowing red. Spacers had their own hours, not dependent on any time zone on any world, and she always seemed to be taking off or landing deep in the night or early in the morning. Maybe after this, she could make her own schedule.

  She drove through the open gate of the wire fence that surrounded the field, and wondered for a moment why they’d bothered to fence it if they weren’t going to have security at the gate.

  Probably to keep locals from taking their rovers off-roading, she mused cynically. That’s probably the biggest worry the city constabulary has, besides parking infractions.

  She felt her eyes beginning to tear up from the wind across the open plain of the field, and she slowed the bike down to forty kilometers an hour. The glint of false dawn was visible over the mountains in the distance, and she could see the swollen shapes of the cargo lifters lining the road, looming in their pragmatic ugliness. Here and there, a lander squatted low to the ground, sleek only by comparison with its bigger brothers. But there was no mistaking the lines of the Acheron.

  She could see it a kilometer away, even in the gray light of dawn, a wedge of burnished silver reflecting the first glints of the rising primary star. She was rough and hard-edged and somehow beautiful in her own, utilitarian way and Sandi felt a stab of guilt at the thought of taking her away from Ash. If there was any other way…

  “Goddamnit,” she muttered, squeezing the brakes of the motorcycle and skidding to an abrupt halt in the loose gravel in front of the converted missile cutter.

  There was no other way. If there had been, she wouldn’t have come here in the first place. She kickstanded the bike and stepped over to the Acheron’s ID plate, mounted near the nose gear. It was calibrated to Ash’s DNA, but the key card was a fail-safe, something you could give to the new owner when you sold the ship to use until he could enter his biometric data. A touch of the metal card to the plate lit it green and she could hear the servos whining as the belly ramp began to lower.

  A light came on automatically inside the utility bay and she followed it up the ramp, jogging quickly, feeling an urgency to get the ship off the ground and out of orbit, and not just because she was worried about Ash waking up and finding out she was gone. It was dangerous for her to stay in one place for too long, particularly a place they could track her.

  Walking down the central passage of the cutter was like stepping through the halls of a childhood home, familiar and yet somehow not hers anymore. She shrugged the feeling off and squeezed into the cockpit, falling into the pilot’s chair with a motion as natural as breathing. The interface cables were rolled into spools recessed into the control panel; she played them out and plugged the jacks into the sockets set into her temples but received no data input. She hadn’t expected it. The console would be locked, just as the ramp had been, but luckily, she had the key.

  She placed the metallic card on the security scanner set in the console beside the manual steering yoke, and was surprised when, instead of lighting up green, it flashed yellow.

  “Security interlock activated,” an automated voice said inside her head, carried over the interface cables directly into her brain. “Additional clearance necessary. Please enter the password.”

  A physical keyboard was set in the console, alphanumeric and terribly old-tech, and she knew that Ash had added it himself since there’d been nothing like it on the cutters they’d piloted during the war.

  Damn. Maybe he was more paranoid than she thought.

  She chewed her lip, trying to think of what he might use for a password. She tried his birthday, but that was rejected and she cursed herself for thinking
it would be that obvious. She was also informed she had four tries left before the system locked her out and she would have to return with someone who had DNA certification to access the ship’s controls.

  That makes things more interesting, she mused. Time to get serious.

  His graduation date from the Academy didn’t work either. Three chances left. Sandi rubbed her hands over her face, leaning her elbows on the control panel. She could still smell Ash on her skin and it was distracting her. Cursing, she quickly tried Ash’s wartime call sign, and it was just as quickly declined.

  Two tries left before she was locked out.

  What was Ash’s middle name? Something weird, she remembered, something that made her wonder where his mom had gotten it.

  “Covington,” she mumbled, typing the word into the keyboard. Then, “Damn it!”

  One chance. She only had one chance remaining. She unplugged the jacks and stood, pacing around the small cockpit, hands clenching into fists. She could go back, she thought. She could go back and pretend to go along with his idea, then force him off the ship before they took off.

  No, she realized with rare personal insight, I can’t.

  If she had to look him in the eye, she couldn’t do it.

  Wait, what was that girl’s name? The one he’d been in love with back in Trans-Angeles before he went in the Academy, the one who’d dumped him for his brother?

  Carmen. That had to be it. She typed it in confidently, finger hesitating for just a heartbeat before she hit the Enter key.

  The whole control panel flashed red and the main display board announced in large letters that she was locked out of the system and would have to unlock it with someone who had a DNA match for the officially recognized operator.

  “You have to be fucking kidding me!” She raged, squeezing her eyes shut against the alarm buzz that was sounding.

  “The password has to have at least one number and a special character.”

  She spun around at the voice and saw Ash standing in the hatchway to the cockpit, the look on his face neither angry nor hurt, just…disappointed, she decided. Disappointed that he was right.

  She collapsed tiredly against the console and tossed the key card back to him. He caught it against his chest, sliding it down towards the pocket of his flight jacket. He wore civilian clothes underneath it, thrown on hastily and in the dark by the looks of them, and his short-cut hair looked spikey in places from sleep.

  “I didn’t want to get you involved in this,” she said, voice resigned, knowing her words wouldn’t make any difference. “If I’d had any other choice, I wouldn’t have.”

  “What could scare you so bad that you’d think stealing my ship is the only option?”

  The question surprised her. She’d figured that, if he didn’t just have her arrested outright, that the best she could hope for was an invitation to start running.

  “I can’t tell you,” she insisted stubbornly.

  “Why not?” He demanded, finally seeming to lose his temper, eyes flaring as he leaned towards her. “You were going to take basically everything I own, everything I’ve worked the last ten years for, so why can’t you tell me the reason?”

  “I saved your life,” she blurted, throwing up her hands helplessly.

  “So you think I owe you, is that it? You think you saved my life, so I should just give you everything I have?”

  “No, damn it!” She snapped back at him, getting right in his face. “I saved your life, so I’m not going to get you killed now, after all this time, by involving you in this shit!”

  His face screwed up in confusion and he took a step back from her.

  “Where the hell have you been the last three years?”

  She didn’t want to answer him, but looking into his eyes, she had to. She could never lie to Ash.

  “The only place I could get a job as a pilot,” Sandi admitted, warmth in her face from a flush of shame she hadn’t thought she could still feel. “The Pirate Worlds. I’ve been flying cargo shuttles for La Sombra.”

  “The cartel?” Ash’s voice rose in surprise and a bit of alarm, his eyes widening. “Holy shit, is that why you’re so scared? But you’re out now; this isn’t the Pirate Worlds. Why would you think they could hurt you here?”

  She licked her lips, tasting a sheen of sweat. It was stuffy on board the cutter with the air circulation systems not yet activated.

  “I took something from them.”

  “Hey Ash, you there?” Sandi nearly jumped at the transmission crackling over the cockpit speakers, tried to steady her breathing as Ash walked past her to the communications board.

  “Yeah, Al, I’m on board the Acheron,” he confirmed, touching a control to activate the audio pickups in the cockpit. “What’s up?”

  “I was just getting the shop ready for a bird we got coming in,” the old mechanic explained, “when I picked up something from the civil traffic control net. We got a strange signal coming in over the civilian port and it’s not showing a registration or sending a navigational beacon, so they tried to contact the Fleet base, ‘cause it looks like a Fleet missile cutter. But the base ain’t talking, won’t answer their inquiries. You have any idea what’s going on with that? Is there some kind of drill scheduled?”

  Sandi felt her mouth go dry, a cold clamminess creeping over her skin as she realized what the report could mean.

  “Ash, start the boat up now,” she said, hearing the quaver in her voice. “Get us out of here.”

  “Why?” He shook his head. “What’s wrong?”

  She surged toward him, grabbing his jacket by the collar and shoving him at the pilot’s seat. He squawked in alarm, stumbling and toppling awkwardly into the acceleration couch, staring at her in confusion.

  “Get us out of here now!” She yelled desperately.

  He stared at her for just a moment, perplexed and starting to look angry, but then he shrugged and put a bare palm against the ID plate on the control panel, then typed the code into the keyboard. The display lit up with a status screen showing the ship’s systems and a pass of his hands across touch pads started the fusion reactor blinking yellow as it began to warm up.

  “Fine,” he muttered, pulling at the interface cables, spooling out enough slack to plug them in to his implant sockets. “Go close the belly hatch.”

  Sandi ran back to the utility bay and slapped a hand on the switch to raise the ramp, not waiting there to watch it ascend but heading straight back to the cockpit. She could feel the ship beginning to rumble with the vibration of the turbines spinning to life and she whispered encouragement to the engines, wondering how much time they had, and how close the incoming ship was. Maybe she was wrong about who it was, maybe she was overreacting…

  “What the hell?” Ash was murmuring as she reached the cockpit.

  She didn’t bother to power the acceleration couch around, just clambered over it into the copilot’s seat and slipped her arms into the straps automatically, eyes glued to the sensor display. The aerospacecraft was coming straight for them, descending through the atmosphere like a flaming arrow fired from orbit and breaking all sorts of traffic control and safety regulations just to get to the field as quickly as possible.

  “It’s a starship,” Ash announced redundantly; she could see the display just as clearly as he could. “It’s a reconditioned cutter, I think, like this one.”

  “Not exactly like this one,” she cautioned him, fingers clawed into the armrests. “Does this thing have any weapons?”

  “What?” He glanced aside at her, eyes wide. “No, of course not! Why would I need weapons?”

  “Because that thing has a fucking Gatling laser,” she bit off, eyes flickering between him and the display. “Can we take off yet?”

  “Ten seconds,” he said tautly, over the climbing whine of the turbojets. He reached across the console and hit the communications board. “Fleet Control, this is Commander Carpenter, we have an incoming threat. Fleet Control, do you read?”
/>   There was no reply and he swore softly.

  “Could that ship be jamming us?” He asked Sandi.

  “He’s not jamming,” she replied with dolorous certainty. “They’re just not answering.”

  “What?” He asked again in stunned counterpoint.

  “Get us out of here!” She yelled at him, loud enough to echo off the cockpit bulkhead.

  Finally shocked out of his stupor, he plugged into the interface and not two seconds later, the cutter leapt into the air like a scalded cat on fiery columns of superheated air out of the variable thrust nozzles in her belly. Acceleration slammed Sandi into her seat and she fought to keep from passing out, her lips skinning away from her teeth. She forced her eyes open, and through a dark tunnel that was all the vision she had left, she could see the approaching ship on the display screen, a conglomerate of the Acheron’s exterior cameras, radar, lidar and satellite all combined by the ship’s computer into a three-dimensional image.

  It was an angry, sharp-edged delta, gleaming white in the morning glow over the mountains. It was to the Acheron as a golden eagle was to a heron, the same genus but an entirely different species, predator to prey. Flares of plasma sliced through the misty morning air, the laser pulses ionizing the atmosphere in their wake as the multibarrelled weapon opened up on them, pulsing hundreds of kilojoules of heat energy through rotating semiconductor rods in succession from the combustion of hyperexplosive cartridges.

  The Acheron sprinted away just ahead of the fire, juking and deking as she rose gradually and far too slowly for Sandi’s liking. Laser pulses pocked holes meters across in the gravel road that passed through the landing field and dust devils rose on columns of superheated air in their wake, and then they were passing over the hills north of the port, accelerating at eight gravities. An elephant was sitting on her chest, pressing the air from her lungs and she clenched her stomach muscles and fought for a breath, just a hair’s breadth away from unconsciousness.