Chasing the Dragon (Tyrus Rechs

by Nick Cole

  “This is something you’ve done before, I take it.”

  “And had done to me. It’s a trip.”

  Rechs moved to search the speeder for weapons. Some of the ninjas from the village had had blasters. But apparently not these two. He found nothing more advanced than the swords each man carried.

  Jacobson came over, arms folded. He already knew what she was going to say. He’d ignored her questions back in the village. But they hadn’t gone away.

  “I need to know where your head’s at in this, Rechs. And I need to know now before I can go any further with you. Are we working together, or am I working against you?”

  Rechs pushed the dead ninja—it was a laceration across his throat that had done him in—off the speeder with an unceremonious thump in order to get at some drinking water. He wiped the sweat off his face and sighed.

  There was still some time before the other guy came out of whatever dreamland Nether Ops had put him into. So Rechs was going to have to deal with this now.

  He took a drink first.

  “For about two years I was dead.”

  The hard stare Jacobson had been giving him turned to a look of confusion, then to something else. A willingness to listen, perhaps. To maybe hear the whole story.

  “The Savages found a strange world in an uncharted area of space way out beyond the frontier. What we call the edge today. It wasn’t really a world, though.”

  “What was it?”

  “A gateway. A gateway to another dimension.”

  He took another drink, giving that outlandish statement—one he wouldn’t have believed if he hadn’t lived it—time to sink in. When Jacobson didn’t protest, he continued.

  “We called it Diablo’s Durance. Actually, it was some navigator on a scout frigate who came up with the name and recorded it in his journal. That’s the only reason we knew about it in the first place. We found that frigate drifting in Repub space after being lost for a couple of years. Crew wasn’t dead… more like puppets. The Savages liked to experiment.”

  Jacobson didn’t say anything. But Rechs could tell that she was starting to view him as a crazy old man. A legend, maybe, but a crazy one.

  Still, she was listening.

  “So they sent me in with a task force to investigate this ‘Durance.’ And… we got wiped out.”

  Rechs let that hang like it was the entire story. Even though in his mind he was seeing every battle, the entire campaign, and then the two years he’d spent in that… other place. That other hell.

  Or maybe it was the real deal.

  “How did you…?”

  “Escape?” Rechs shook his head. “That’s not the story I’m trying to tell. Not trying to relive my glory days. That’s just the, uh, what do they call it? The backstory. To the Phoenix Project. How it came about.”

  Jacobson knelt down and checked the ninja’s pulse. “Still a few more minutes.”

  Rechs knelt next to her, wanting to be ready for when their source of intel woke up. And wanting to look Jacobson in the eye.

  “We were losing on all fronts in those years. And I wasn’t the first to go into the Durance. We’d lost two expeditionary teams before that. A pair of naval strike forces made up of several ships from a fleet that couldn’t spare them. We weren’t about to lose a third, but we couldn’t leave it alone, either. So in went a brigade of the Legion’s best, supported by assault carriers… the works.”

  Rechs looked away, lost in a gripping and horrible haze of war from long ago. “Lost a lot of men. Seventy percent just in the initial invasion. Just to get a foothold.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. The House of Reason was called the House of Justice back then. And they didn’t want me to go on what they considered a suicide mission. Said I was too important to the war. But I couldn’t keep sending men to die there without seeing it myself. So I threatened to resign. And I got my way.”

  Rechs realized he was rambling. But there was a part of him that felt… relieved to tell someone about the long-ago times. “The part that concerns us right now, is what came after. Project Phoenix.”

  Rechs sighed. He didn’t know if what was coming next made him feel embarrassed or ashamed. It made him feel uncomfortable, if nothing else.

  “Some scientists wanted to clone me and raise a group of… children under the same set of circumstances I was raised under. Like back on Earth when I was their age. Except this would be controlled and, according to them, improved upon.”

  Now Jacobson definitely thought he was a crazy old man. “Earth, General?”

  “I’m very, very old. Most people today—Nether Ops and the House of Reason included—have no idea. But back then, some people did. Because everything was on the table. All the secrets. Defeating the Savages required it.

  “Anyway, if I didn’t make it back from the Durance, this was going to be the final line of defense, or perhaps a recovery option, should the Republic be overrun. If the Legion were broken.”

  Rechs looked earnestly at Jacobson. “At the time, that seemed like a real possibility.”

  “That’s what I’ve always heard.”

  “So every human culture, along with some compatible non-human ones, had someone raised with my DNA. Someone who could, supposedly, survive despite the odds. That was the Phoenix Project.”

  Jacobson stared at him with her mouth slightly open. “But the Savages were defeated. So what happened to these… children?”

  “I’m not…” Rechs paused. “I don’t know. According to the Republic, for about two years, I died on Durance. And when I came back I was… let’s just say my bell had been pretty thoroughly rung. It took years for my mind to recall the project again. And when at last I did, and I tried to gain access to it, everyone involved felt that I would be a corrupting influence on the test subjects. I’d violate the purity of data by introducing myself to, for all intents and purposes… myself.”

  Test subjects.

  Ball.

  “So I had to forget about them.”

  “And did you?”

  Rechs nodded. He was still struggling with that fact. He forced himself not to look away, even though he knew his shame was written all over his face.

  “You’re his… father?” Jacobson asked.

  For a long moment Rechs didn’t answer. He finally shook his head. “No. We have the same DNA, but that doesn’t make me his father. But maybe… maybe I’m all he’s got right now. Maybe he needs me and doesn’t know it. So I’m here. And you’re right. We need to try and get him out of this. If we can. If that’s possible.”

  31

  The ninja, or whatever he was, came around. Jacobson had implanted a biometric nanite in his wrist and laid out more syringes. She didn’t need them. The first dose had been more than enough.

  He thought he was talking to two demons from what he called “the underworld of a thousand hells.” He blubbered like a little boy. Said he was sorry for all the wrongs he’d done. Especially the murders. He named several he’d committed.

  Jacobson encouraged him to focus on his more immediate sins, and from there he told them everything of what he knew.

  For hundreds of years, Shangri-La had chosen to live according to the old ways, reflecting the time before the rise of the Republic as a galactic culture. But then the Divine Hand, the secretive group behind Sinasia’s latest independence movement, took control of the planet. It was the Divine Hand who brought back the old Sinasian tech from the Savage Wars, found by their agents—like the ninja—throughout the galaxy and smuggled in by carefully vetted freighter pilots and crew.

  This was something Jacobson confessed Nether Ops had no idea about.

  For years, the elders of Shangri-La—monks living in a retreat on a mountain farther up the river, a mountain whose Sinasian name translated to White Plum—insisted that the Sinasians re
turn to their old customs. Content to be blissfully lost among the stellar dark.

  The Divine Hand, through assassination and intimidation, annihilated the monks. And now they had built a formidable base beneath White Plum, along with the arsenal necessary to reclaim Sinasia.

  As the ninja continued to talk, his mental state deteriorated rapidly. He wailed as if he were being consumed eternally by living fire. Through gritted teeth he choked out: “The Guy-Wu has done this to us. I see the end now. All is fire. And death for those who have chosen to follow Guy-Wu.”

  He released a screeching, panicked scream, the desperate cry of a man descending into madness. And then he froze in place—and keeled over. Stone dead, just like that. Heart attack. Or maybe a stroke.

  “Galaxy’s a better place,” Rechs remarked when the biometric nanite read back a flat line.

  But the Nether Ops captain seemed to have already forgotten the ninja. “Who is Guy-Wu?”

  Rechs could tell she wasn’t asking him.

  Jacobson pulled out her datapad and tapped a few screens. “Okay. Here we are.” She showed it to Rechs. On screen was what looked to be a transcript of the interrogation, and Jacobson was running it through a translator app. “Most likely he used the word… Guàiwù. It means… Ogre.”

  ***

  White Plum was thirty kilometers away, but the old speeder made the trek a manageable one. Like everything else on the old vehicle, its navigational software was slow and outdated, designed to rely on satellite mapping, and since Shangri-La had no satellites in orbit, its screen was a blank canvas. Until Rechs pulled up a folder containing past routes. Red lines appeared, showing the last thirty routes the speeder had taken.

  It had been to the mountain frequently.

  Rechs didn’t follow any of the routes directly, preferring instead to forge a new route to the same destination. It was safer, though it required dodging more rocks and trees.

  After the speeder jumped a brook and scraped bottom in a thicket, he turned to Jacobson. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. But there goes the trade-in value.”

  White Plum wasn’t so much a mountain as a massive rock wedged in the middle of a depression teeming with greenery. Rechs figured it was likely some asteroid that had smashed into the primordial landscape and stuck there centuries before.

  A narrow staircase had been cut into the rock, climbing three thousand feet to a temple at the top. The former home of the monks. The bottom of the mountain was shrouded in mist, but they knew it provided access to the Divine Hand’s subterranean bunkers. That was where their tortured captive had told them the “Samurais slept.”

  It hadn’t escaped Rechs’s or Jacobson’s notice that a plural was used.

  Samurais.

  It made sense. How else to take back Sinasia?

  The Samurais carried a variety of weapons systems that could decimate ground troops at division strength as easily as they could take out low-orbit capital ships.

  Rechs had no armor, one working blaster, a few charge packs, and a knife.

  Even for the bounty hunter, those odds were not to be dismissed.

  “How do we know he’s there?” Jacobson asked. She sounded almost desperate. The odds seemed to be weighing against her better instincts, too.

  “We don’t,” Rechs replied. “Not until we get visual on him. But I think this is the big game. And I think whoever this Ogre is… he’s the one driving the Dragon. The one who’s put all the pieces in play. This isn’t the Dragon’s show. It’s his.”

  “Ajax.”

  Rechs nodded as he drove the speeder.

  “Okay,” she said after a long moment. “Then how do we get in?”

  Rechs had been thinking about that. He wanted to barge in right through the front door. Once inside, he’d try to get his hands on some decent weapons. Then he’d kill his way all the way to the Dragon. Odds be damned.

  He liked that approach. It was his specialty.

  And it gave him the best chance of getting his hands on a hypercomm. If the Sinasians had been smuggling tech the size of Samurais onto Shangri-La, then they’d have to be using at least a few big ships. Heavy freighters with room to haul the mech’s larger assemblies. No way were they running an operation like this on a planet that was comm-dark. They had hypercomms. Rechs just had to find out where.

  Then he could call Lyra, get her to dust off from Taijing and jump the Crow to him at full speed. Hopefully she could avoid the interceptors better than Shurrigan had. If she violated all the safety parameters… the Crow could be here in thirty minutes. And once he got into his armor—which should be in much better shape now, thanks to its repair nanites, plus whatever the bots were able to accomplish—the odds might shift enough to effect a rescue of the Dragon.

  That plan would settle the issue quickly, one way or another. Either he and Jacobson would do a lot of quick killing, or they would quickly be killed themselves.

  But as much as Rechs liked that plan, he opted for an alternate approach. One he figured had a higher chance of success in the long run.

  “I’ll climb the stairs up the side of the mountain, to the temple at the top. With all the monks slaughtered, chances are the temple will either be abandoned or repurposed.”

  “And what about me?” asked Jacobson.

  “Try the front door if you don’t hear from me in six hours. Try to sneak into the hangar and find a hypercomm to call in your pals in Nether Ops and tell them to take out the base. Kill the Dragon if they have to. Otherwise it’s war.”

  “So you’re back to that?” she said angrily.

  “Captain,” Rechs began, then stopped. “Wendy. Ask yourself: is one person worth all the dead a war with the Republic will cost? If we can’t save him… that’s the price the rest of the galaxy will have to pay. The galaxy has seen enough war. It shouldn’t have to foot that bill again.”

  ***

  A peaceful stream encircled the massive, oblong granite that was White Plum. From this vantage, the uppermost regions of the rock were swallowed up by the mist, but the base came into view between patches of green fog.

  “There’s the main blast doors,” Jacobson said, pointing. A small army of sentries patrolled the powerful doors, which were cut right into the mountain. Defensive towers rose up from the mist, guarding the pathway to the door every forty meters.

  “Six hours,” said Rechs. “And then you know what you have to do. Take my blaster and charge packs. My way is stealth… yours will probably require a fight.”

  Jacobson didn’t respond, and Rechs left not knowing if she would do what it took—what the galaxy needed—if it came down to it.

  The only way this wasn’t going to end badly was if Rechs could get to the Dragon with the Crow already inbound for an extraction. Then, either he would convince the kid to spare the galaxy another conflict that would kill millions if not billions, or he’d try to subdue him long enough to get him on the ship and off the grid until the kid’s mind was right. The Dragon had been conditioned to behave the way he was behaving now. Rechs felt like, given time, he could decondition him.

  Or you could just kill him, said that other voice. Because you know that has to be an option. If you can’t reason with him or take him alive… then you know you have to.

  Rechs waded through the stream and crept out on its far side beneath the shadow of White Plum. The mist was coming in stronger now, fighting to remove even the limited visibility that Rechs had enjoyed just minutes before. It looked as though a blanket were being draped over the mountain, swallowing the mountain’s stone pathway, hiding rickety-looking bridges that crossed over cracks and fissures. Covering the sheer faces where no visible path could be observed. But Rechs could still see the base of the steps, carved into the stone not far from where he stood.

  I must focus on this, he told himself, pushing out thoughts about the Dragon. H
e didn’t know how long it had been since the monks had been purged, or if anyone had stepped up to maintain the trails after they were gone. It wasn’t a large mountain, but what he’d seen of the path didn’t inspire confidence. And it was certainly tall enough for a fall to be fatal.

  He climbed, his body adapting to the air while protesting the exertion. It had been a rough few days for Tyrus Rechs, and he needed more rest than he’d gotten. He reached a curve in the cleft where the stairs turned almost vertical, forcing him to hug the rock with barely any room to stand on. But it afforded him the chance to scan the rainforest to see how Jacobson was holding up.

  His eyesight was excellent. Always had been. Even before the Savages experimented on him. At first he thought the mists were too dense, and he was about to move on. But then he spotted her. She’d moved from their initial observation point and was crouched at the base of a tree, hidden from the main blast doors but not from Rechs.

  She was talking on a device that looked to Rechs a lot like a mobile hypercomm.

  She’s sold you out.

  32

  Lyra called out for G232 from within the confined and empty vastness of a silent Obsidian Crow. It was just a freighter, but without Rechs around, quiet as he was, it felt to the AI like a country unto itself.

  “I am here, miss,” answered the admin and protocol bot. It was seated next to the nav computer, where it had been conversing with the system about minutiae regarding anomalies of certain celestial bodies where the ruins of the Ancients had been found.

  In Digita, of course.

  Lyra wanted to run something by the bot, ostensibly to get its opinion, but primarily to have someone to talk to. “My passive sensors are detecting the super-destroyer is powering up her main jump reactor. Do you calculate they are leaving soon?”

  G232 had been monitoring the comm traffic ever since the master’s escape. The Republic seemed intent on finding the location of that smuggler’s freighter. They had assessed—correctly, so far as G232 knew—that the master was on the trail of an individual known as the Dragon. Thus finding Tyrus Rechs was supposed to lead the Republic to the Dragon, or so most of the commanders involved in the operation surmised.