by Rick Partlow
Recon:
The Complete Series
by Rick Partlow
Also by Rick Partlow:
Glory Boy: https://www.amazon.com/Glory-Boy-Birthright-Book-0-ebook/dp/B01N6DXM8C
The Birthright Trilogy: https://www.amazon.com/Birthright-Complete-Trilogy-Rick-Partlow-ebook/dp/B01LY3T1YT
The Duty, Honor, Planet Trilogy: https://www.amazon.com/Duty-Honor-Planet-Complete-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B00LDZFS3U
Last Flight of the Acheron: https://www.amazon.com/Last-Flight-Acheron-Rick-Partlow-ebook/dp/B075W74R57
Tales of the Acheron Book 1: Prodigal: https://www.amazon.com/Prodigal-Tales-Acheron-Book-1-ebook/dp/B077NZ3TPF
Copyright 2017
by Rick Partlow
Recon:
A War to the Knife
Chapter One
Everything was pain and darkness and all I could hear was the hollow sound of my own breath against the inside of my helmet. I tried to remember where I was and how I’d got here, but my thoughts seemed to be hazy and random, just flashes of faces I didn’t recognize in settings I couldn’t identify.
The woods, dark and wet, dead twigs and detritus crunching under my boots as I maintained my interval, keeping ten meters between me and the next Marine in line. Scanning the dark with my helmet sensors, infrared and thermal, keeping my Gauss rifle pointed out of the formation.
No warning, just light and fire and screaming in my ears in the headphones of my helmet. Something big and hot on thermal coming in from overhead and I was shooting at it, knowing I couldn’t scratch it even with the tungsten slugs out of my rifle. And then a bright flash and suddenly I was here, and didn’t know where here was.
I decided to start with something simple: my name.
Randall Munroe , the thought struggled out as if my tortured mind were giving birth to it. My name’s Randall Munroe and I’m a Recon Marine .
Flashes of images in my head: looking in a mirror, seeing a narrow, sharp-edged face with slate-grey eyes and sandy brown hair cut short. I knew it was my face, but it looked…wrong . How could my own face be wrong? I had a concussion. That must be it, I was out of my head; I had to be concussed, or maybe it was blood loss.
But that wasn’t it; there was another face in my memories, another face in another mirror. This one was less sharp, more rounded, more soft, with dark eyes and long, dark hair. And it went by another name; not Randall, but Tyler.
Tyler Callas. That’s who I was …
“Tyler.”
I blinked and looked away from the brilliant star field above me, back to the older man still staking down the tent in the dim glow of a chemical ghostlight hanging from the branch of a gnarled tree overhead. The high desert sandstone was brick-hard, but his big, gnarled hands pushed the stakes into it effortlessly.
“Are you going to star-gaze all night long?” Cesar Torres, my great-grandfather, went on, smiling crookedly. “Or are you going to help me set up camp?”
“Sorry, Gramps,” I said, feeling my ears burning a little with embarrassment as I moved back into the circle of light and picked up a tent-stake from the pile. “It’s really beautiful tonight. You can’t see any of these stars from Trans-Angeles.”
“That’s why I spend as little time as possible there,” Gramps said, his cracked and weathered face twisting into a scowl. “Well, it’s one reason among many.”
I fell silent for a moment, concentrating on stretching the tent’s rain-fly over it, then connecting its hooks to the stakes. I snuck another glance around at the high desert night, seeing the outline of a sandstone arch against the frosting of stars. It was so empty out here.
“We never see anyone else out here,” I mused. “Why don’t more people spend time away from the cities?”
Gramps shot me a look, and I imagined it was the same look he’d given a recruit who’d asked a dumbass question back when he’d been in the Marine Corps of the old United States over a century ago.
“Because it’s too damn expensive, boy,” he said as if I should know it. “There aren’t any roads out here anymore, not since the Big One.” The Big One. That was what he called the Sino-Russian War. “And renting a hopper isn’t cheap. Most people never leave the city their whole lives.”
Our own hopper squatted silently about fifty meters away from the campsite, its ducted fans still and motionless. We didn’t rent it, though, it was a company vehicle assigned to our family.
“But there are a lot of people who work for the Corporate Council,” I tried again. “Mom’s friends are always taking shuttles up to the orbitals, or visiting the Martian shipyards. Surely they could afford it.”
“Yeah, I suppose they could,” Gramps allowed with a shrug. His sour expression didn’t change, though. “But most of them don’t strike me as the outdoors type. Fact is, there’re damn few people who have both the desire and the money to enjoy nature anymore.” His face softened a bit, with what I thought was nostalgia crossing it. “Which is a damn shame, considering that we’ve finally started taking good care of it.”
I’d heard that trip down memory lane before, and although I loved hearing Gramps talk about his time in the Marines, hearing him wax poetic about how we saved the polar bears and gorillas wasn’t in my top ten conversation topics.
“Do we have time to practice infiltration techniques?” I asked him, trying not to sound too kid-eager. I was eighteen now, after all. About to turn nineteen.
“Tomorrow,” he promised. “Tonight, I want to get a fire going.”
I fought back a sigh, not just because we weren’t going to be training tonight but also because a fire meant he wanted to talk about serious, adult stuff. But we didn’t get to camp out as often as we used to when I was younger, and I didn’t want to ruin it by whining, so I went ahead and helped him make the fire with the wood we’d collected. It was a chilly night anyway; early spring in western Utah could get pretty damn cold. I was dressed for it, but a fire would feel good.
“Ty,” he said as he sat down on one of the rocks we’d pulled up around the fire ring. He was the only one who called me “Ty.” My mom didn’t like it, so everyone who worked for her, including my tutors and the teachers in the Corporate school I attended, called me Tyler. Even my girlfriend did, which bothered me sometimes.
“You’re about to graduate from Primary Education,” Gramps went on, dark eyes regarding me with the look that he had when he was about to give advice. “You’ve got a decision to make.”
“You mean college,” I said, hissing out a frustrated breath as I felt anger from days before return unabated. “I’ve been talking to Mom about it. I told her I wanted to apply to the Service Academy, but she said I’ve already been accepted to the Commonwealth Institute of Corporate Administration and I shouldn’t throw away that kind of opportunity.”
“Your mother has the rest of your life planned out for you, Ty,” Gramps told me. “The question is, do you have plans of your own?”
I was silent for a moment, hearing nothing but the crackling of the fire and letting it draw my gaze into its red glow.
“I want to go to the Academy,” I told him. “I want to be a Marine officer.”
“Then apply,” he urged me, a bit of impatience creeping into his voice. “You don’t need her permission. You’re a legally emancipated adult now: you can vote, you can marry, and you can join the military.”
I nodded. He was right. The choice was mine to make.
“Thing is,” I said, holding my hands palms-up, “I want to serve in the military, but I wouldn’t mind working for the Corporate Council someday . I wish she could understand that. I feel like she thinks I’m betraying her if I go to the Academy.”
“Patrice is someone used to ma
king decisions,” Gramps said diplomatically, and I snorted at the euphemism.
“Mom’s a control freak and you know it,” I corrected him, “even if she is your granddaughter.”
Gramps had to chuckle at that, and I saw a bit of the old twinkle in his eyes.
“All right, but she’s still your mother and she loves you. She wants the best for you, but she wants her version of the best.” He shrugged. “And she’s a very intelligent woman, or she wouldn’t be Executive Vice President of the Corporate Council. Don’t underestimate her, Ty.”
I felt my eyes narrow at the way he’d said that; it sounded more like a warning and less like a compliment.
“So,” I said carefully, not wanting to misjudge his tone, “you think I should apply to the Academy without telling her?”
Gramps cocked his head a certain way that told me he wasn’t going to answer that question.
“As an adult,” he replied, “you have to make decisions such as that for yourself. I will say this, though: the Tahni Imperium slaughtered half a million humans on the Disputed Worlds just two years ago, and ninety percent of the population of the Solar System barely knows we’re at war. The only reason your mother is aware of it is that the increased military orders have been good for the bottom line.”
“What do you mean?” I asked him. “You think we need to be more involved with what’s happening to people in the colonies?”
“Nothing so esoteric,” he said darkly. “What I mean, Ty, is that if we don’t get more involved, it won’t be happening in the colonies. It’ll be right here, on our doorstep; and then, it may be too late.”
***
I watched the footage over and over, running the news segment again and again in the holotank. It had been caught by a security monitor at the Martian shipyards and transmitted to the archives on the surface before the camera and the patrol orbiter that had held it had been destroyed. It was a beautiful, panning shot of the Midway , the latest battle cruiser in the Commonwealth Space Fleet. She was an angry, angular wedge of power and death, constrained by the construction scaffolding still surrounding her, swarmed with workers in maneuverable pods like ants crawling around the carcass of a beetle out in the Utah desert.
There was no warning at all, just a white flash expanding into a sun-bright globe of fire that swallowed the Midway and everything for a kilometer around her. It had been a ship-killer missile, a weapon the size of a starship with its own antiproton drive and defense shields. The Tahni ship that had launched it wasn’t visible in the shot, but I knew it had to have been one of their missile boats, a specialized ship that basically provided the ship-killers with a ride through Transition Space to their target. It would have been more efficient to just put a Transition drive on the missile itself, but the Tahni religion didn’t allow for either Artificial Intelligence or armed drones, and I guess they weren’t big on suicide either.
I’d gotten all that from Gramps. I’d called him the minute the news had come in about the Tahni attack on the Martian shipyard, what they were calling “The Battle for Mars.” President Jameson had made a speech, made it sound like a victory that we’d taken out several of the attacking squadron and hadn’t let them destroy the shipyards, but Gramps had known better. We’d lost the Midway and three cruisers in for routine maintenance, which represented a pretty big chunk of our fleet.
Gramps had sounded pissed and a little scared. It was the first time I’d heard him sound scared. I turned the holotank off. There was no new footage; my ‘link would let me know if anything popped up on the ‘nets, and I’d seen enough of this. It was making my stomach twist up.
I walked out of the theater room, the lights in the hallway outside of it gradually rising as I stepped through. By the time I’d reached the solarium, my eyes had adjusted enough for the windows to ease their polarization and let more of the afternoon sun into the penthouse apartment. I stared out at the view from the trans-plas windows that made up most of the north wall of the solarium, feeling like I was seeing it for the first time. Trans-Angeles stretched out before me, beneath me really since this was one of the tallest buildings in the megalopolis, out past the horizon. Capital City was the oldest of the hyper-cities, built only a few years after the founding of the Commonwealth, but Trans-Angeles was the largest, its interconnected structure sprawled out over a full twenty kilometers on a side. The Corporate Council-owned Damiani Tower topped by our apartment was the tallest point at four hundred meters up, while the deepest was the same distance underground.
Fifty million people lived inside its confines, more than half the population of the province of Pacifica. Gramps had told me that this one hyper-city held as many people as used to live in the entire state of old California, back before the Sino-Russian War. I wasn’t a kid anymore; I knew not everyone got to live the way Mom and I did. But even the chawners on the dole, living off the free soy and algae paste in an underground apartment the size of our bathroom, went to sleep at night believing they were safe, that the Commonwealth would protect them.
Would they still believe that after seeing the Battle for Mars? I wasn’t sure I did. I looked at the jagged lines of the city and imagined it disappearing beneath a glowing mushroom of unleashed star-fire, imagined millions dying in seconds. The Tahni wouldn’t be able to penetrate the Earth-Moon defenses as easily as they had the Martian system; and even at Mars they’d lost over half their ships. To overwhelm the defense satellites and the lasers on Earth and the Lunar surface, they’d have to have hundreds of ships and be willing to lose most of them. The question was, how fanatical were they? How badly did they want us dead?
“I thought you’d be out with Anna.”
I started at the words, so lost in my thoughts that I hadn’t noticed her come in. I turned and saw her walking up to me, immaculate in a Dominique Cherval business suit grown in one piece in a nanite bath, her hair always looking as if it was naturally perfect thanks to an invisible microfilament web that controlled every strand. Patrice Damiani could have been my older sister rather than my Mother if you went by looks, which bespoke not entirely comfortable things both about how closely Mom had been involved in arranging my genes before my implantation and about how little of my father she’d left in there.
“She’s recording the personal interview portion of her college application,” I said, stepping forward to give her a hug. “She’ll be stopping by later for dinner.”
Mom was solid; you wouldn’t think so, looking at her. She was as thin as a rail but it was all muscle, and she’d never been willing to tell me how much of that is honest physical activity and how much is bodysculpt. I’d certainly never actually seen her exercising.
“You should be taking advantage of the Summer,” she told me, kissing me on the cheek before she let me go and fell into a couch by the windows. She didn’t look at the view; she never did, like it didn’t mean anything to her. “Pretty soon, you’ll both be so involved with college, you won’t have time for anything else.”
“Yeah, about that…” I began, figuring now would be as good a time as any to bring up the Academy, and the fact that I’d submitted my application three weeks ago.
“If you’re going to spring the news about you trying to go behind my back and apply to the Service Academy,” she said drily, preempting my announcement, “don’t bother.” Her expression wasn’t anger or even disappointment, just a hint of irritation as if she were tired of talking about the subject. “The system flagged your name and contacted me automatically.”
I felt the hackles raise on my neck.
“What?” I blurted hotly. “Why the hell would it flag my name?”
She cocked her head slightly as she looked at me, this time showing a little disappointment at how thick I was being.
“Because you’re my son,” she snapped impatiently. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what that means.” She leaned back and crossed her legs, her impatience fading as she regarded me with cool deliberation. “Tyler, you aren’t just some
nobody chawner living in the Underground. People like us don’t join the military.”
“This isn’t a feudal kingdom,” I said, realizing that I was in a squared-off, combative stance and trying to relax. “We don’t have a class system.”
She laughed at that, deep and genuine, and I felt myself getting angry again.
“Tyler, they may teach you that bullshit in school,” she said with her usual bluntness, “but there has never been a time when more than two humans lived in the same general area that there wasn’t a class system.”
“There are still laws,” I insisted. “You can’t stop me from going to the Academy.”
“Of course I can.” She waved a hand as if it were less than nothing. “It was a matter of a sentence, a sentence fragment .”
I felt a buzzing in my ears, an abandonment of reason that experience whispered, like a little voice in my ear, was going to lead to me saying things I’d regret. I turned away from her, concentrating on my breathing, trying not to let her get under my skin, which was just what she was trying to do.
“So, the news doesn’t bother you then?” I asked, still staring away from her, out at the city. “You’re not worried?”
“On the contrary, I’m very worried,” she confessed. I turned, surprised to hear her being so normal, but her expression was still casual. “Consolidated Engineering has hundreds of millions in Corporate scrip tied up in the construction of capital ships. I’ve been given the word that President Jameson is putting Admiral Sato in charge of Space Fleet, and his pet cause has always been to transform our strategy from large, easy to target cruisers to squadrons of missile cutters to take better advantage of the Transition Drive.” She shook her head. “We have to get ahead of this if we’re going to have time to reconfigure our manufacturing equipment quickly enough to avoid losing investor confidence. Stock in Consolidated is down two points as of this morning.”
