by Nick Cole
Jacobson shrugged and removed her blaster from her waterproof ruck. She strapped it to her thigh. “I’m going to the top to get a better look. Here—you can dry your weapon with this.” She pulled a T-shirt from her ruck and tossed it to him.
Rechs caught it and nodded his thanks. He disconnected the upper and lower receivers of the N-4 and quickly dried the parts. With Jacobson gone, he heard only his own breath in the silence of Shangri-La, and he felt more and more with each passing second that there should have been, within the soundscape, some lonely and forlorn cry, perhaps from a bird haunting the vine-draped jungle’s depths.
But there was nothing.
Jacobson returned with the same observation. “Ghost town,” she whispered breathily, crouching down next to Rechs. She pulled out nutrition bars and water, and shared what she had.
They ate and drank in silence, the sound of their chewing and swallowing seeming obnoxiously loud. Both paused as the lake let loose a distant, explosive hiss. It had swallowed the last of Shurrigan’s Goose with a great gusty slop.
“There goes Shurrigan,” Jacobson said, watching as the main engine housing slunk beneath the water. “Down into Davy Jones’s locker.”
“Heh,” Rechs replied, surprised at himself for laughing. He appreciated the old archaic phrases. Even when those uttering them didn’t understand what they meant. Especially then.
The lake had returned to its still, mirrored bliss by the time the two were done with their refueling.
“This place is a temple,” said Jacobson. “Definitely Sinasian.”
“Who else would it be?”
“The Ancients?”
Rechs shrugged and took the last swig of water from Jacobson’s canteen before refilling it by the lake. The canteen would be able to filter the water into something safe to drink by the time they needed it next.
“It’s got all the signs of Sinasian architecture,” Jacobson said. “Dragons, big dogs with their tongues out. Gray stone. Village beyond. Incense burning.”
“Thought you said it was a ghost town.”
“It is now. But someone was here recently.” Jacobson scanned the mists. “Maybe a few days ago. Or maybe a few hours. Hard to say. This place has that kind of feel like… something sudden can happen.”
Rechs put the finishing touches on the N-4 and did a systems check. A small green light indicated that the weapon would fire if the trigger was pulled. But again… who knew?
“Well then,” Jacobson said, “what next?”
Rechs thought about that as he gathered himself up, staring at the serene waters. He didn’t answer right away, preferring to think and put all the pieces together in the same slow, relentless way he did when running down bounties.
“Something big was going down on Taijing,” he began. It always helped him to hash out what intel was known. “But Shangri-La is where the Sinasian tribes will gather, because it’s where the Republic can’t find them.”
Jacobson was bent over, tying her boots. “If the House of Reason knew about this place, they’d order the Navy to nuke it from orbit.”
Rechs nodded. “If the Dragon made the case, back at Chung’s Pit, to be the Sinasians’ new khan and war leader, then this is where he gets to do it. He needs a place to arm, organize, and launch from. If we’re going to stop him before things get out of hand… then it has to be here.”
Jacobson looked up at Rechs sharply. “Is that what we’re here to do? Stop him?”
Rechs said nothing, checking his knife, fraggers, and charge packs instead.
Jacobson grew heated. “Because I came here to save him. And I thought you did too, General. Or are you just pure bounty hunter now?”
Rechs hoisted his N-4 and rested it on his shoulder. “Ready to go?”
“No. I’m not. And since we’re on the subject of who you were, General, and what you’ve become, Tyrus Rechs… what was the Phoenix Project?”
Rechs turned and began to head up the wide stone steps into the temple proper.
Jacobson followed. So did her questions.
“Because I’ve seen the files. Read between the lines on the redacted sections. Your name is never brought up except right at the beginning, but clearly the project is about you somehow. How?”
The temple was square, open on all four sides, and here at the top of the steps, Rechs could see the strange mecha idol within and the abandoned village beyond. Small joss sticks still whispered and slithered within the darkness like eyes of a thousand predators in the dark of night, their smoldering stubs nearly extinguished.
“You’ve had no problem pressing me for intel,” Jacobson said, “but now that I ask, you’ve got nothing to say?”
Rechs didn’t. And he wasn’t about to begin. But the shadow he saw moving quickly between buildings made that moot.
Jacobson continued on, apparently unaware that they were surrounded and being watched. “Unbelievable. Fine. Play the tough guy silent type. Or just admit that you’re out of your element and you have no idea what—”
Rechs tuned the Nether Ops captain out as he considered his next move. They needed intel, and getting his hands on whoever these shadows were might lead him straight to the Dragon. Should he alert Jacobson? He decided against it. The shadows might vanish if they noticed her noticing them.
Rechs crossed through the temple dark, smelling the thick and heady scent of jasmine burning on the small two-legged central pod mecha the village had deified.
Jacobson followed. “He’s had this life forced on him, Rechs. At the end of the day, that’s all that should matter.”
Rechs exited from the other side of the temple and started down toward the silent village, walking right into the trap only he could see forming all about them. For a Nether Ops operative, Jacobson wasn’t picking up on much. Maybe her emotions were blinding her. Maybe…
“So that’s it then, is it?” she practically shouted at him, following Rechs down a small narrow lane between old wooden huts. “You’re just gonna kill him after I got you all the way out here. A planet no one else can find. It’s really all about the bounty, isn’t it? You’re—”
Rechs pushed her hard into the darkness of one of the huts. He’d seen a blur of motion; something was flying at them incredibly fast. Something that became a swarm of small, shining, metallic objects spreading out to catch them like the cone of a silent shotgun blast.
With Jacobson tumbling into the cover of the hut, the old bounty hunter threw himself to the hard-packed dirt of the lane, smelling the fertile dark loam in the split second before he sprang back up and brought his blaster to bear.
“Ambush!” he shouted, pulling the trigger of his N-4 as a black-hooded figure charged at him, pulling two swords from sheaths crisscrossed on his back. Some minor angel of avenging death come for his next victim.
The N-4 shorted its charge pack, causing thin tendrils of smoke to rise from its barrel. Rechs cycled the pack, aimed for center mass, and pulled again.
He’d drop this ninja.
Ninja.
That was a word Rechs hadn’t heard for an extremely long time.
Jacobson would probably have been happy to shoot Rechs after the argument and his shoving her. But seeing the danger, she fired her blaster pistol at the closing figure. Three bursts of fire—one from her and two from Rechs—and the figure broke off his attack with a sudden, cartwheeling change of direction.
Rechs was dazzled by the maneuver. It was like seeing the fabric of the universe open and close.
“More of them!” he shouted. He drew his knife and reversed it into a carry position as he discarded the N-4. It wasn’t sighted correctly, and he didn’t have time to fix it now. He pulled his remaining blaster pistol, ready to deal out damage.
A noose dropped around his neck from above and constricted almost instantly. Rechs fought the instinct to move away from it
and thereby accelerate his strangulation. Instead he reversed his direction with a roundhouse kick, bringing his booted foot down hard on the light rope. The man who held it failed to let go of it in time, and was pulled down from the roof. He landed on his feet next to Rechs.
The bounty hunter wasted precious little time. He took a swipe at this second ninja’s chest with his combat knife. The hooded figure danced lightly back and then threw his weight into a fancy backflip that further removed him from Rechs’s reach.
But Tyrus Rechs still had his blaster. He aimed and pulled the trigger in one practiced motion, sending a blue bolt into the ninja’s chest, knocking him to the ground dead. The green mists seemed to greedily consume him as he lay in the mud.
A blur of motion came from every corner of the village. Up until that point Rechs hadn’t been sure how many he was dealing with. Now it seemed there were far too many.
Jacobson was sending more blaster fire down the lane, giving Rechs an opportunity to scramble for cover. He rushed into the same hut he’d thrown her into, joining the captain inside. Return fire smashed into the hut’s wall, snapping ancient boards in sudden dry explosions that left flaming holes in their wake.
“I guess only the first two relied on swords,” Jacobson said almost indignantly as she shifted to her knees, and fired at someone beyond the door.
Between blaster reports Rechs listened for the sound of movement. Stuck inside the hut, they were practically blind—and without his armor, the bounty hunter didn’t feel like risking a peek from any of the windows. There was probably a sniper with eyes on the hut, and Rechs wasn’t going to give him an easy kill.
So instead he started popping fraggers and tossing them out the hut’s door and windows.
Explosions rocked the nearby dwellings, sending shards of wood and shrapnel to rattle against the hut they’d chosen to cover in.
“Last one,” Rechs announced. “Then we go out shooting. Take the left. I’ll take the right. It’s our best chance.”
The dysfunction of their relationship in the moments right before the battle was gone. Jacobson nodded in quick agreement, and Rechs tossed the last grenade—the banger—out into the now-burning village.
Then they went out shooting.
Flames from the fraggers and errant blaster bolts quickly consumed the dry sides of the old wooden huts and ignited thatched roofs. Gray smoke intermingled with the mist.
But that was all there was to see. Everything else was gone. No attackers. No bodies left behind.
It was as if they’d been fighting ghosts.
30
Rechs bent low, beneath the drifting smoke, and made his way farther into the village, Jacobson on his six.
“What is going on?” the captain asked no one in particular.
Among the last huts, Rechs found a trail of dark blood spray. Someone was badly hurt. Rechs guessed perhaps it was an artery slashed by debris, given the color and sheer volume of blood. A comrade carried away from the carnage of the battle amid Rechs’s fragger bombardment.
Jacobson didn’t speak a word as they followed the trail of blood out of the village and into the rainforest. But there was another sound on this planet of misty silence: rushing water. Rapids. A dull, steady hum of water throwing itself against rocks in furiously roaring abandon.
As the blood began to thin and the trail grew more difficult to track, Rechs found himself wishing it hadn’t been an artery that was bleeding. The victim was running out. And the trail of the man carrying the victim was also hard to follow—even for a bounty hunter whose life was built on following trails of one sort or another.
Whoever they were following, this person knew what they were doing.
What Rechs needed most of all right now—aside from his armor or a reliable weapons suite—was a hypercomm. There hadn’t been time to use one back on Shurrigan’s Goose, and given the damage the craft’s onboard systems had suffered in the fall, the ship’s hypercomm was probably non-operational long before it sank to the bottom of the lake.
But with a hypercomm, Rechs could get the Crow here. Finding one, however, was going to be a real trick. Shangri-La didn’t officially exist, and you didn’t stay hidden by setting up comm stations. This was a comm-dark world.
Which means, thought Rechs as he worked the trail, the only way out of here involves hijacking another ship.
Given his paucity of weapons, stealthily stealing a ship was probably the easier option.
The blood trail was now little more than a few droplets spattered along moist leaves. They were hard to spot without his bucket, and Rechs began to realize just how much he’d come to rely on that suit.
They reached the thundering river. Water crashed among large gray tumbled stones, dense green moss and bamboo, and the jade mist. And on the opposite bank was movement.
Rechs and Jacobson got low and crawled to the edge of the trees, water-saturated moss squelching beneath them, soaking their knees and elbows like wet sponges.
“Is that a ship?” whispered Jacobson, peering across the river.
Despite being right next to her, Rechs barely heard her over the water’s roar. “No. Speeder. Old one.”
It was a Tadashuo ATS—an all-terrain speeder. Like the Samurai mech on Taijing, this was a thing from the Sinasian past. A vehicle that wasn’t supposed to exist any longer, much like the world it now prepared to speed through.
One of the shrouded and hooded fingers was gingerly placing the body of the most likely dead man in the passenger seat with a sort of protective reverence. That his clothing was dry despite crossing the river spoke to the person’s capabilities. The rocks jutting out of those rapids were not closely spaced, and they looked wet and slick. That must have been quite a series of jumps from one bank to the other, particularly while carrying a body.
There were no other attackers—just these two. The ninjas at the village had probably approached the crash site on separate speeders in two-man teams. Maybe this was Shangri-La’s version of a quick reaction force following up on the crash after the interceptors shot the freighter down.
“We need him alive,” Rechs whispered. He pointed a finger down to indicate that Jacobson should wait where they were, ready to disable the speeder with her blaster if it attempted to escape.
Rechs slithered through the underbrush at the river’s edge, un-nesting a family of water spiders, each the size of a family pet. They scurried into the trees that hung above the river, and Rechs slipped into the rapids, the swirling waters betraying no trace of his passage.
To stay beneath the water that tried to push him downstream, Rechs pulled himself along the slimy, rocky bed, moving from handhold to handhold, his feet caught in the current so that his body was parallel with the river’s flow. Each new handhold required a fight against the current and a blind search that threatened to use up all his oxygen and force him to surface. And that would be disastrous.
But his lungs held out, and soon he emerged on the opposite riverbank, wallowing in mud. Well below the speeder’s line of sight, Rechs risked poking his head upward.
The survivor was mounting the speeder and reaching for the controls.
Jacobson should be acting soon.
The old-model repulsors fired up, making a noise that rivaled that of the river. Refusing to risk the speeder’s escape, Rechs made a snap decision to charge. He sprang up from the bank, lunged forward, and flung himself at the speeder, jumping on just behind the driver. His knife was out and at the man’s throat.
“You make this bike move a centimeter and I’ll start carving you up so bad that every leaf in this forest will wear your blood.”
The repulsors shut down.
Jacobson stood up from the other side of the river. Something in her face let Rechs know that she was less than happy with the way he’d thrown out the plan by jumping into her line of fire. But scoring the survivor a
nd the speeder was worth the risk.
While Jacobson tried to find a crossing, Rechs pulled the ninja off the sled. He removed the man’s mask, only to find him frantically working his tongue inside his mouth.
“No you don’t!” Rechs clamped down on the man’s jaw with an iron grip, holding his knife out as if he was going to use it to pry his teeth open.
Forcing open the man’s mouth, Rechs fished inside with his muddy fingers and found a pill—no doubt some kind of necrotic suicide caplet. He flicked the blue suicide caplet onto the ground and crushed it with his boot.
The ninja took the opportunity to bite down viciously on Rechs’s pinky finger, which had lingered too close to the ninja’s mouth.
With a low growl of rage, Rechs sent a knee into the guy’s stomach, doubling him over. He followed up his gut shot with a swift punch to the back of the captive’s head, sending him sprawling onto his stomach.
Jacobson arrived—surprisingly quickly. Perhaps the crossing wasn’t as difficult as Rechs had imagined. Then again, one of her pant legs was soaked to well above the knee. “What’s going on?” she said.
“Nothing.”
Jacobson pulled netting off the back of the speeder and tied the captive down. “Watch him,” she said to Rechs. She took off her ruck and extracted a small clamshell case. It popped open with a pneumatic hiss, and she took out a gleaming injector. “This’ll make him talk,” she said in a business-like tone. A tone that revealed just how deep into Nether Ops she really was. “And it might kill him too.”
Rechs nodded. They were running out of time. And with the way his finger throbbed from the bite, he didn’t much care if the bastard lived or died.
The man struggled, but Rechs pinned him down as the Nether Ops captain knelt and deployed the injector into the ninja’s neck. She tossed the spent needle and cartridge into the jungle. The man’s eyelids fluttered, and he promptly passed out.
“Takes about twenty minutes to work,” Jacobson said. “He’ll go into a deep sleep that will lower his defenses to suggestion. When he comes out, he’ll think he’s having a nightmare. He’ll tell us everything. We’ll be the embodiment of his worst fears.”
