Last Flight of the Acheron by Rick Partlow

Author:Rick Partlow [Partlow, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Published: 2017-09-23T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

I woke up to someone shaking me and calling my name; at first, I thought it was Ash, but the voice was wrong. I forced my eyes open and saw the lined, weathered face of Chief Burke through the visor of her flight helmet, a concerned set to her eyes.

“Are you okay, ma’am?” She asked me again, but this time it sank in.

“Are we alive?” I responded, gritting my teeth against the blinding pain in my temples.

“Near as I can tell,” she answered, “we caught debris from Shayk’s cutter when the missiles took him out.” She grimaced. “I think it penetrated pretty far and took out the power feed to the ship’s computer core…didn’t just cut it, though. It caused a major surge and fried the interface.”

“Fuck,” I hissed, straightening in my acceleration couch.

We were in zero g and only my harness was holding me down, and nothing was holding my stomach down. I reached out and yanked out the interface cables, letting them retract into my suit. Once they were disconnected, the manual displays lit up with an announcement that the system had rebooted, so we still had control over the Huntress, and her computer core was intact and powered, apparently; it was just the neural interface that was down.

Just the system that lets one person fly the damn boat, I amended to myself.

“Can you fix it, Chief?” I asked her, trying not to get my hopes up.

“Sure,” she said, turning her palms up. “But I’ll have to crawl into the maintenance bay and physically reroute the feeds. That’s going to take hours, not minutes.”

“We don’t have hours,” I mused. I shook my head without thinking, then winced at the pain that hadn’t quite receded yet. “We might not have minutes.”

I’d been complaining about the mass of data overwhelming me, but now the data was gone; or, rather, the data was a step farther away. I reached into the haptic hologram projected over the control board and plotted a jump back to the battle.

“Chief,” I said, “this is gonna’ be a stone bitch, but I’m going to have to fly her manual, so I’ll need to let the computer control the Gatling and you’re going to have to be my gunner on the proton cannon, which means you also have override on the maneuvering thrusters. Can you handle that?”

I heard the hiss of breath as the reality of what we were about to try hit her, but she closed her eyes and nodded.

“Got you covered, ma’am,” she promised, trying to sound confident as she pulled up the targeting controls at her station.

I thought about transmitting my situation to the rest of the squadron, but shook it off. There was nothing they could do about it anyway; they had their hands full with their own shit.

“Transitioning,” I announced, and swiped the control.

Without the interface, the jump was even more jarring than usual and I felt sorry for Burke having to go through that every time. We were back in

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