Recon Book Four: A Fight to the Death

by Rick Partlow

  Recon Book Four:

  A Fight to the Death

  By Rick Partlow

  Copyright 2017

  By Rick Partlow

  Chapter One

  I jumped into the darkness between the buildings without a thought, knowing that if he could make it, then I could too. Two meters of empty space felt like the Grand Canyon to me, but I was airborne for less than two seconds. Corrugated aluminum vibrated beneath the soles of my boots as I impacted the gentle slope of the tenement’s roof, scrambling forward a step to keep my feet before I started running again.

  The guy I was chasing was only about ten meters ahead of me, over the slight rise in the center of the roof and about to jump to the next in the line of three-story row-houses that were jammed together on this street. I didn’t know his name, but I knew he could run. He was tall and skinny, with long legs that ate up the meters, and dark, loose clothing that seemed to flap in the breeze like raven’s wings when he made the leap to the next rooftop.

  From up here, I could see the gentle, muted lights of Sanctuary just a few kilometers away, stark in its contrast with the harsh glares and deep shadows of Overtown. The sudden flares of security floodlights and cheap neon from the bars and brothels scattered between the apartment blocks made it hard to make out details in the darkness, even with the enhanced optics of my contact lens. I held my breath as I jumped again, following the man in black without being able to see where I was going to land.

  This time it was bare, gnarled buildfoam shaped into a dome, which meant this had been one of the first buildings constructed for the refugees from the occupied colonies during the war. Those were all simple, unadorned pours of raw buildfoam from automated dispensers, though in the years since, they’d been covered up by cheap, colorful plastics in a vain attempt to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Others had filled in the gaps gradually, unauthorized and unregulated, slapped together from aluminum and plastic scraps and wood taken illegally from the surrounding forests. No one had bothered to stop them because there’d been a war on, and they were refugees, and people had felt bad for them.

  When the war had ended, most found themselves without a home to go back to, so Overtown had stayed and grown, and had attracted gangs and drugs and crime like a rotting corpse drew in scavengers. At some point, it had become impossible to fix. To deal with it would have required an expenditure of good will and political capital in quantities that no local politician had been willing to pay, so far. The constabulary on Hermes didn’t even patrol the place; as long as the violence didn’t spill out into Sanctuary or any of the other cities on the planet, no one cared. That’s what made it a good place to hide out when you were wanted in connection with a murder investigation, like this guy was. The cops wouldn’t chase him in Overtown, but I wasn’t a cop.

  Another rooftop, and I cursed as my shin smashed through a hand-made wooden railing, sending me tumbling forward into a clumsy shoulder roll. I pushed myself back to my feet and froze for a moment as I realized that there was someone sitting just a meter away. It was a child, dressed in worn and ragged clothing that had probably been fabricated in Sanctuary and given away by some charity. She was maybe eleven or twelve, with long, dark hair in dirty, twisted dreadlocks, and she stared at me with eyes wide and white with fear.

  I wanted to tell her that I wasn’t going to hurt her, that she didn’t have to be afraid, but I didn’t have time so I did the next best thing and got the hell away from her. My right leg was throbbing and I was lucky I hadn’t broken it, but I limped to the other end of the roof as quickly as I could, trying to spot the guy. There he was, on the next building over, glancing around like he was looking for something, like maybe a way down.

  I kicked through the railing on that side, feeling the brittle, dry crunch of it through my boot, then backed up far enough to get a running start. The target was looking back at me now, hearing the sound of the breaking wood, and I could see him take off for the next housetop. I threw myself across the gap, nearly three meters this time, and barely caught the edge with the toe of my lead boot. I felt myself starting to slip off and lurched forward, desperately trying to get my center of gravity over solid rooftop. The spiked soles of my boot dug in to the asphalt shingles someone had laid down over the wood there and I scraped my gloved fingertips across it until I could feel my knees touch against the rough surface.

  “Shit,” I hissed, pulling myself up and heading back after him.

  I stood just in time to see him hit the next roof over…and then bust right through it and disappear from sight. I wanted to curse again, but I didn’t like to repeat myself. I ignored the nagging pulses of pain still radiating from my right shin and sprinted into one last jump, trying to land off to the side of where he’d broken through. The wood was rotten on this roof and it splintered under the soles of my boots when I hit, but I cat-footed off the weak area far enough to get my balance, then carefully made my way back to the hole the other guy had made.

  I reached under my jacket and pulled my pistol out of its shoulder holster, holding the weapon at low-ready as I edged close enough to the opening to look down into it. Old chemical strip-lighting, well past its expiration date, lined the floor of the hallway beneath the gap, casting a faint, green glow that barely illuminated enough to give the infrared filters in my contact lens something to work with. Insulation, plaster and chunks of rotten wood from the roof still clustered in a small pile beneath the hole, surrounded by a cloud of dust that had yet to settle, but of the fugitive there was no sign.

  I kept my arms tight to my side and my hands against my chest and dropped through the jagged opening, landing with a hollow, echoing thump on the cheap wood floor and falling into a crouch. I pivoted on my forward knee, pushing my pistol out in front of me as I checked both directions in the dust-shrouded hallway. Nothing, not so much as a footprint.

  Damn.

  I couldn’t just assume he’d gone to the street; if I charged downstairs, he could be waiting to ambush me.

  “This is Munroe,” I subvocalized into my mastoid implant mic. “I’ve lost the target. Any sign of him on the insect drones?”

  “Negative.” The voice had a nasal, slightly annoying accent but I’d gotten used to it over the last couple years, especially since Vilberg had taken over our command coordination after Kane’s death. He was all the way over at the Sanctuary spaceport, monitoring the drone feed from the cockpit of our ship. “The rooftops are all clear and I don’t see him near any of the known residences.”

  That was the trouble with drones: even if we’d had enough to cover all of Overtown, which we most assuredly didn’t, and even if we’d had a recognition algorithm sophisticated enough to pick him up just by his facial characteristics from that far away, which we also didn’t, he could just pull a hood or scarf over his face and he’d be invisible as far as our computers knew. And there were only so many feeds one human could scan at a time.

  “I see him.” That was Bobbi, hoarse and raspy and sounding like she had a throat full of gravel. “He’s down on the street just below you, north side of the building.”

  “Bobbi, you and Sanders cut him off,” I ordered, standing and running down the hall towards the stairwell. “Everyone else hold your positions, I’m heading down.”

  “You want me and Thiong’o to move up?” Another voice, higher pitched and smoother, asked me.

  “Negative, Nemeroff,” I told him impatiently. “I said hold your positions and that’s what I meant.”

  The stairs were dark and narrow and looked like they’d split apart if you stared at them hard, but I took them three at a time anyway. I thought I heard a couple of them crack beneath my weig
ht, but I was able to keep my balance anyway, skidding to a halt on the second-floor landing. Three men sat there in the dim light, huddled into a corner, sharing hits of something illegal from a plastic pipe. The smoke was sour and smelled of chemicals and might have been Zed or something more conventional like Ice or Split. They barely reacted to my presence, and I only regarded them long enough to make sure they didn’t have any weapons; I’d been to shittier places than this, and seen people do much worse things to themselves. I kept moving.

  The ground floor landing opened up on the building’s lobby, such as it was. I guess it wasn’t bad for a place thrown together in a couple weeks by refugee labor and charity volunteers with construction experience. However it had started, the intervening years had coated it with a layer of dirt and dust and smoke and I couldn’t have told you what color the walls had been originally. One of the doors on the ground floor was open and I could hear a couple screaming at each other in Chinese inside the little apartment. Across the hall, someone laughed, maybe at the arguing couple.

  The outside door was propped open and a cool breeze was coming in, drying my sweat but carrying with it the stale smell of beer and alcohol and smoke from tobacco and marijuana and other things less pleasant. There were half a dozen people sitting on the steps outside, sharing a bottle into plastic cups and mixing it with fruit juice, and they all looked around as I came out, my gun in my hand.

  “You looking for that guy?” One of them asked me, cocking an eyebrow.

  I reached into my hip pocket with my left hand and pulled out a twenty-dollar Tradenote, holding it out to him.

  “That way,” he told me, gesturing to the left with his cup.

  I handed him the bill, then took off at a jog. I was a good ways behind him now, but I wasn’t worried because I wasn’t alone.

  “Do you still have eyes on him, Bobbi?” I asked, eyes scanning back and forth along the street.

  It was early yet and there were a lot of people out, a lot of people gathered on the steps of their buildings. I didn’t think he could get away with just heading into one of the row-houses to hide out; he’d be worried they’d sell him out, like the drinker back there had done.

  “Affirmative,” she grunted. “He’s about twenty meters ahead of me and Sanders. Want us to take him down?”

  “Is he still heading for the crossroads?” I asked her. This strip of apartment buildings ended in a cross street with a row of bars, minor-league casinos and brothels, places he might think he could lose himself. He couldn’t go left; that way went straight out of Overtown and put him out into the open. I didn’t think he’d want to go right, because the next section over was gang territory; it was a dangerous place to be at night.

  “Yeah.”

  “Then just follow. That’s where we want him to go.” That was where the rest of the squad was waiting, the place I’d been trying to chase him towards, although I have to admit, I’d been trying to catch him first just out of stubborn pride.

  I could see the end of the street now, shining in colored neon and harsh white, could hear the music blaring in a dozen different songs from at least three different genres. There were people moving toward it in ones and twos and larger groups, making it hard to pick out our man. I could see Eli Sanders and Bobbi Taylor just fine, though, their Identification-Friend-or-Foe transponders glowing like red halos in my contact lens.

  “I’m twenty meters behind you,” I told Bobbi. “Where’s he at?”

  “Twenty-five meters at our three o’clock,” she responded tightly, and I knew she was having to struggle to keep him under observation in the crowd.

  Far enough away that he wouldn’t spot me running to catch up, not at this time of night. I stuffed my handgun back into its holster and picked up my pace, going from a steady jog to a sprint, eating up the distance between Bobbi and me in a few seconds. Some of the ambling crowd heading for the entertainment strip stared at me in dull curiosity, but no one here was likely to call the cops, so I ignored them. I slowed down again to a jog when I spotted him, a black, man-shaped hole in the lights of the street ahead, and I glanced around to see that Bobbi and Sanders were about even with me and maybe ten meters to my right.

  My jog turned into a brisk walk; this was just how I wanted us arrayed, making sure he couldn’t double back if he spotted the others. And he just might spot them; Victor and Kurt were hard to miss, at two meters tall and about 120 kilos of nearly identical blond, bearded muscle. The other two…well, I wasn’t sure about their ability to blend into a crowd because neither had been around the team that long. I’d recruited four new people to replace the troops we’d lost a couple years ago, both on Peboan and then on some unnamed, unknown rock dozens of light years from anywhere. Then, after another couple missions, I’d had to recruit four more to replace those. Two had died and the other two had quit. Good help was hard to find.

  “We’re ready for him,” Victor assured me. “We’re spread out across the intersection; he’s not getting past us.”

  I don’t know what tipped him off. Maybe he’d seen one of them seeing him, maybe it was just instinct or training or something, but the man in black went from a fast walk to a run and cut straight off to the right, towards one of the few alleys that went all the way through to the next street over. The moron was heading straight into what the locals referred to as the DMZ…

  “Shit!” I blurted, taking off after him. The gangs might kill him, but I needed him alive. “Victor, Kurt, he’s breaking to your left! Get after him!”

  This was bad. The reason I hadn’t put any of our people down that way was because I was fairly sure they’d end up in a gunfight before they had a chance to catch our target. If we wound up having to chase him through the DMZ, there was going to be enough of a body count to draw attention. I had to get to him before it came to that.

  I slipped past and between and around the crowd walking up the street, hearing the scritching of my spiked soles on the gravel road and the indignant exclamations of the people I was brushing past, but mostly hearing the chuff of my own breath. I knew I was faster than this guy, because I was faster than almost anyone who wasn’t artificially augmented; I’d been engineered to be faster, stronger and smarter by a mother who could afford the best and wouldn’t settle for less. But I’d given him too big of a head-start and I could tell already that I wasn’t going to catch him before he made it to the next street. Maybe if I got in before the rest of them and took him down quickly, we could get out before…

  There was a sound that was more than a sound, a screeching, warbling, thrumming siren that went above and below what a human could hear, and then a scream that cut off abruptly just before I entered the alley. The other end of the passage between the two apartment blocks was cloaked in shadows, but the enhanced optics in my contact showed me a dark, human-shaped lump on the gravel almost to the other end, unmoving. Standing over him was a tall, broad-shouldered figure dressed in dark clothing and featureless even on infrared. Something large and metallic and oddly shaped was in the man’s right hand and I made the connection with the noise I’d heard before, realizing that it was a sonic stunner.

  My pistol was in my hand and on its way up before he spoke and I paused in mid-motion.

  “Do I have to do your job for you now, Munroe?”

  The big man stepped forward and I could finally see the face that matched that rough-edged voice. Alberto Calderon had the looks of a movie star, with high, sharp cheekbones and a cleft chin and dark eyes that Bobbi described as “smoldering.” The looks were pure camouflage, though, because what was inside was plain ugly.

  “How’d you know he’d go this way?” I asked Calderon, holstering my pistol and sucking down a few deep breaths as my heart-rate began to slow. Sweat was trickling down the small of my back and dripping into my eyes out of my close-cropped hair.

  “I didn’t know,” he corrected me, tucking the sonic weapon into a pouch inside his dark brown jacket while I fished a neural restraint web from m
y pocket and fastened it on the unconscious man. “But I knew where you had your people, and I knew that this was the only other place he could go.”

  “It didn’t make any sense for him to run this way,” I insisted, lifting the target up and throwing his inert form over my shoulder. He was tall, but light and skinny, and I was pretty strong for my size. “He had to know the gangs wouldn’t let him get through this way.”

  “He was desperate,” Calderon said with a sniff of disdain. His dark eyes were nearly lost in the shadows. “Desperate men do desperate things. Come on,” he said, waving at me to follow. “We need to get him back to the safe house.”

  I followed him with a deep sigh that I didn’t make the effort to try to conceal. How the hell had I wound up working for fucking Calderon?

  Chapter Two

  I’d been asleep when the call came through. My ‘link was set to hibernate at that time of night, except for emergencies…or a message from Cowboy. This had been the latter. It had been received at the system’s Instell ComSat by the automated message carrier, then re-broadcast to the Demeter satellite communications network and then straight to my ‘link. No one else could have heard it; it was encoded to my ‘link and, more specifically, to my implanted receiver.

  I sat up straight in bed at the tone sounding inside my skull and forced myself not to reach for the pistol on the night-stand table. I glanced over at Sophia and saw her still sleeping, her long, dark hair fallen over the curve of her chin, her face peaceful and content…more content than she was in waking life, I was sure. The comforter had fallen off her bare shoulder; I reached over and tucked it back in against the winter chill, then I gave the command to play the message.

  “There’s a job.” Cowboy was terse, jumping right in without any prologue of “aw-shucks” bullshit this time. That wasn’t like him. “You need to meet the others on Hermes, at the safe-house in Sanctuary in 300 hours. Calderon will have the details.”