Recon- the Complete Series

by Rick Partlow

  Or they could be launched fire-and-forget, programmed to detonate the minute they hit something solid; that’s what this one did. Only two things kept us all from dying in the next second: one, the warhead was anti-armor, designed to project a spear of plasma forward followed by a blast wave directed into the hole that plasma made; and two, the first solid thing it hit was the far wall of the loading dock, fifty meters away.

  I didn’t know any of this at the time, of course; it was all deduced in retrospect. All I knew right then was that there was maybe the loudest sound I’d ever heard, followed by a shock wave that slammed me up against the wall hard enough to knock the breath out of me even through my armor. My head hit the floor and stars swam in front of my vision as a blast of air washed over me, so hot I felt as if the skin on my face was blistering.

  I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t see, I couldn’t even think. My rifle wasn’t in my hands and I was too stunned to use it if it had been; and I couldn’t assume any of the others were better off, if they were alive at all. That Shock-Trooper would be making his way to the ramp, slowly and carefully if he was an older vet or maybe rushing headlong in a rage for revenge if he was a young warrior. He’d be on us in seconds, and I had to shake this off; I had to move!

  I shook my head, trying to clear it, and it hurt but at least the pain penetrated the fog. I knew my rifle was still connected to me by its sling, and I finally felt it where it had retracted back low across my chest. Magazine. Had to switch out the magazine. I could assemble and disassemble the damn thing blindfolded, so ejecting the spent mag was no issue. I reached for one of the full ones stored in my tactical vest and pulled it out, cursing when a corner caught on the fabric of the pouch. Line it up, slide it in, slam it home till I felt the solid click.

  My vision was starting to clear, the flashes of color receding, but it was dark now; the interior lights had been blown out by the explosion and the air was clouded with smoke, dust and debris. I saw a figure walking up the ramp, silhouetted by the exterior floodlights, and I brought the Gauss rifle up to my shoulder.

  “Please don’t shoot me, Sgt. Munroe,” Robert Chang’s plaintive voice said, and I raised my head above the sight, saw the skinny little man limping into the dock, his leg dripping blood as he walked, a Gauss rifle cradled in his arm. “I’ve had a shitty day and dying would just make it worse.”

  “There’s a Tahni right out…” I began, but he waved it away.

  “He’s been taken care of,” Chang told me. “Unfortunately, Agent Kibaki was killed and the back-up plan is a no-go. I hope those two freaks do their jobs.”

  It took me a second to realize he was talking about Kel and Cowboy. I shook that off, shoving down the thought that Kibaki was gone---I’d kind of liked her---and painfully levered myself to my feet. Ortiz, I saw immediately, was dead. He’d taken a fairly large piece of jagged, metal shrapnel right through the neck, and it had severed his spinal cord; his head hung at an unnatural angle, his face drained and ghost-white.

  He’d had a wife, I recalled, who’d been killed in the invasion. Two kids, a daughter in the military off-planet, and a son just into his teens, too young to fight, who was living in one of the settlements. He was a good man.

  The Simak brothers, the ones I’d called the Viking brothers before I’d learned their names, were alive, but Victor was lolling and probably concussed and Kurt had a thin metal shard sticking about four centimeters out of his upper right shoulder blade right through his back armor, and was writhing in pain. I fished a packet of clotting powder and a bandage out of my thigh pocket---there were no Smart Bandages left, so sterilized first-aid gauze and cloth was the best we could do---and yanked the shard out.

  Kurt bit off a scream as blood began streaming from the wound but I ignored it, tossing aside the seven-centimeter metal shrapnel and pouring in the clotting powder. The wound began to bubble and then the flow of blood stopped and I began wrapping the bandage around his shoulder. Ideally, I should have left the shrapnel in place for the medics to extract, but I didn’t know if we would wind up with any medics left alive and he might have to get out of here on his own.

  “Take care of your brother,” I told him, making sure he met my eyes and understood what I was saying. “I’m going back out.”

  Kurt nodded, gritting his teeth against the pain in his back but clutching his KE gun to him.

  “Don’t let any of the Tahni in here,” I said, getting up and heading for the ramp.

  “I suppose you expect me to follow you out there and make some pointless sacrifice,” Chang said with a sigh.

  “Go find the Glory Boys,” I told him. “Make sure they shut this place down or this is all for nothing.”

  “You realize you can’t give me orders, right?” The question was snarky, but the tone was…playful, maybe, like he knew he was going to do it, and he knew I knew.

  “Don’t make me kick your ass, Chang,” I said, not having to feign the tired exasperation that made it a joke. “You’re wounded and I just know you’ll use that as an excuse.”

  He chuckled at that, as I knew he would. “Good luck out there, Munroe.”

  ***

  It felt like the battle had been dragging on for hours, and I was half surprised when I got outside and still heard intense gunfire coming from the fence-line. Then I realized that we’d crashed through the gate only about five minutes ago.

  I rounded the corner of the loading dock and from there, I could see the next guard bunker. With the bunker nearest the gate down, that was the last one that could bring fire to bear on the force in the woods---Sophia’s command. Someone had shot out the floodlights at this section of the fence and shadows wavered menacingly in the gap between the glows, flaring to full brightness when the ionized flare from a laser impacted on the metal shield of the bunker or the exhaust of a grenade’s propulsion rocket ignited heading outward.

  There were a couple Shock-Troops lying dead around the bunker and the rate of fire from the heavy KE gun had slowed as it heated up. You could see the glow from its liquid nitrogen-filled cooling jacket inside the darkened recess, and I knew even the Shock-Troops wanted to edge away from it, as hot as it must be, but they didn’t dare abandon cover.

  I took a knee in the middle of the dirt and gravel about halfway between the fence and the reactor complex, brought my rifle to my shoulder and sighted on the gunner. The gun bucked against my shoulder, but I kept it on target and put three rounds into him as fast as I could fire. He dropped out of my sights and I saw the others in the bunker spinning around. The gun went silent as they forgot it in their haste to face the new threat.

  I dropped to the prone, knowing I should get to cover but also knowing there was no cover that would have given me a clear shot at them. There were four of them inside the bunker and I’d never get all of them before they got me. It was okay. This was why I was here.

  I lined up on the closest, ignoring the others and putting the reticle of the sight over his center of mass. I touched the trigger and kept it pressed down until I’d felt the double-kick of two rounds launching, then I rolled to the left another meter. KE-gun rounds dug up the earth where I’d been a second before, and I wasn’t quite sure if I’d live long enough to fire another shot…but, as it turned out, I didn’t have to. Converging streams of tantalum needles, tungsten slugs and laser pulses from two different directions tore into the remaining troopers and in the space of a breath, they were down.

  I looked around, blinking in confusion, and abruptly realized that Sophia’s people had taken advantage of the respite from the crew-served KE gun to breach the fence. They were running past me from the wreckage of the gate, heading to clear the other bunkers along the fence-line. I watched them in disbelief, coming up to a crouch and trying to keep myself from hyperventilating as my heart beat like a trip-hammer from the delayed stress.

  The air felt frigid against my face, more because I was overheated than because it was that cold…well, maybe also because
it felt so strange to be out there without my helmet. I got to my feet slowly and gingerly, beginning to feel the bruises from where the grenade explosion had thrown me against the wall, and wondered what the hell I should be doing now.

  My head was throbbing and I knew I was forgetting something but I couldn’t remember what it was.

  “Munroe, what happened to your helmet?” Sophia’s voice startled me out of the fugue I had been slipping into and I spun around to see her standing there, her clothes and armor stained with dirt and soot and a KE gun in the crook of her arm. I pulled her into a brief, fierce hug, desperately relieved to see her alive.

  “Are you okay?” She frowned as she looked at me, probably seeing what I imagined was the slightly glazed expression on my face.

  “Better than Annalise and Ortiz,” I told her, my stomach twisting as I actually had to say the words. “They didn’t make it.”

  “Sophia!” Carl Braun was yelling as he ran up to us through the hole blown in the fence just past the bunker. “Munroe! We’ve got incoming!”

  He skidded to a halt next to us, gasping for breath, his eyes wide and wild.

  “What are you talking about, Carl?” She asked him.

  “Gary sent a runner from his observation post!” Braun said between pants. “They tried to radio us, and I tried to call you, but there’s a broad-spectrum jam…” He shook his head. “The High Guard, the battlesuits, his look-outs spotted them between here and the city.” His face was pale. “They’re coming.”

  “Get to cover!” Sophia yelled without a moment’s hesitation, running down the fence-line, waving her arms, with Braun and me following after her. “Everyone get to cover! Get the special team up here now!”

  It was too late. The three-meter-tall battlesuits came roaring down on incandescent jets of steam, four of them spreading out around the dome just inside the fence-line, launching missiles at the forces on the other side of it as they descended like the judgment of some ill-tempered god. I yanked Sophia into the cover of the bunker I’d cleared just before the first of the missiles hit.

  A wave of heat washed over us and the durasteel shielding rang like a hand-bell choir as shrapnel smacked into it. I covered her body with mine, but nothing penetrated the shielding. Beside me, I could hear a fervent stream of curses and I realized that Braun had made it into the shelter with us and was letting out a torrent of profanity, probably as an alternative to screaming like a baby. Outside, bodies littered the ground; I could see a dozen casualties, torn apart by shrapnel. Somewhere, people were screaming, and there was a High Guard battlesuit only twenty meters from us, lumbering our way.

  “We have to get the special weapons in here!” Sophia said, grabbing my arm. “The teams are out there, I need to go get them.”

  “You go,” I told her, waving at the blasted section of fence-line just beyond the bunker. “I’ll keep them busy.”

  “Both of you go,” Braun yelled. “I’ve got this!”

  I was about to argue with him but he sprinted out from cover, running nearly under the nose of the Tahni battlesuit, and I saw it begin to pivot after him.

  “Shit!” I swore, grabbing Sophia’s hand and rushing out through the hole. If he was going to kill himself, I at least wasn’t going to waste it. Behind us, I heard the crackling roar of an electron beamer firing, and I wondered if the thing had finally given Braun what he wanted.

  I was exhausted, my adrenalin spent in one near-death experience after another, but I pushed myself to keep up with Sophia, matching her stride for stride across the fifty meters of open ground. People were running ahead of us and beside us as we sprinted headlong across the clearing into the woods, no one even giving a thought to facing Tahni battlesuits with our KE guns and lasers. Until we hit the tree-line and I saw a squad of people moving towards the danger, not quite running because they were weighed down with heavy, fat tubes made of pure tungsten, their only adornments a simple electronic sight and a pistol grip with a trigger. Kel and Cowboy had dropped them in a cargo capsule when they’d come down in their stealth drop pod; not many, just a half dozen. They’d have to be enough. The people carrying them had extra-heavy armor as well, and wore visors on their helmets to shield their eyes from the discharge.

  “This way!” Sophia waved them towards the reactor complex. “Hurry, damn it! Concentrate your fire, take them one at a time!”

  Artificial lightning ripped through the night as we ran back into the battle, electron beams fed by isotope reactors turning everything they touched into explosive vapor, turning trees into flechette mines that filled the air with wooden shrapnel. I jogged through it next to the gunners, hand over my face, not entirely sure what I was doing but with a conviction that this was where a leader should be.

  The closest of the High Guard troopers, the one Braun had distracted, was lumbering towards us with massive, sledgehammer steps. It tore through the fence without breaking stride, bearing straight for us only thirty meters away, probably seeing the approaching force on its sensors. The gunner in the lead, a burly, older man with coffee-colored skin and tightly-curled hair that barely fit under his helmet, stopped and took a knee, nearly tripping the man behind him and making the rest of us split off on either side to avoid colliding with him.

  “Down!” Sophia yelled, raising a fist over her head. “Get down!”

  “Clear!” the big man yelled, not waiting to see if everyone was out of the way. Then he fired.

  I tried to close my eyes and shield them with my hand, but the plasma blast was bright enough that it still felt like staring into the sun. The guns were single-shot, specially built for infantry and not widely issued because they were expensive as hell. I’d never held one before I’d unloaded one of the cases back at the Research Facility, but I knew from Cowboy’s briefing that they used a ring of lasers to ignite a capsule of liquid hydrogen to a plasma, then expelled it with an electromagnetic field, just like the bigger, much heavier and incredibly much more expensive experimental repeaters the Glory Boys carried.

  The ball of superheated gas hit the battlesuit square in the chest; I could tell that when I opened my eyes because of the charred and smoking crater in the heavy armor there. Unfortunately, that was where their armor was the thickest; the battlesuit stumbled back but didn’t go down, its wearer hosing his electron beamer back and forth in desperation.

  Three of the squad vanished in steam explosions as the particle beam vaporized the fluids in their bodies and I did the only thing I could think to do: fired my rifle at the thing in utter desperation, aiming right at the center of that blackened crater in its chest. The tungsten slugs from my weapon normally wouldn’t have put a dent in that armor, but it was badly attenuated by the plasma blast and they punched past what was left and straight through the Tahni soldier inside. The battlesuit didn’t fall, but the upper body slumped forward at the shoulders, like it had suddenly given up on the fight. Smoke drifted across the tree-line and time felt frozen for just a moment, like we’d killed a god. Then the sounds of the battle penetrated; they’d been there all along, but I’d been too stunned to hear them.

  “They’ll be coming this way,” Sophia warned, getting to her feet. “They’ll have caught that thermal signature! Spread out! Grab a launcher and spread out, damn it!”

  We had three people and five weapons left now. I found one in the grass, charred and coated with cooked blood, but still intact. I slung it across my shoulder, grunting involuntarily at the weight of the thing, and loped off to the right, wanting to sprint but lacking the energy. Sophia was right, the rest of them would be coming this way, and someone had to draw them off before we were all slaughtered.

  There was a firefight going on somewhere behind the dome, towards the belt of trees that lined the river, and two of the battlesuits were back there, their electron beamers lighting up the night like a far-off summer storm. I didn’t head for that fight, aiming instead for the closer threat, the High Guard trooper who was stamping up the ramp toward the loading dock.
I told myself that was because I didn’t know if the reactor had been flushed yet and I had to give Kel and Cowboy more time, but the honest, selfish reason was that he was closer to Sophia.

  The gravel outside the reactor complex was blackened and burned wherever the Tahni beam weapons had touched it, and stained red with the blood of their victims. Pieces of them littered the ground and I prayed to a God I wasn’t sure I believed in that I wouldn’t step on one as I jogged towards the loading dock ramp. I couldn’t look down to watch where I was stepping because I needed to keep an eye on the battlesuit, to make sure he wasn’t about to…

  He finally spotted me, the suit’s upper body twisting around, trying to bring the electron accelerator across its torso to bear on me. I stopped, not bothering to duck or crouch because it wouldn’t have done a damn bit of good, and raised the plasma projector to my shoulder, lining up its electronic sight. I tried to aim for the neck, remembering how the center-of-mass shot hadn’t penetrated all the way, but it was an upward shot and the torso was twisted around, showing me the shoulder.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and looked away just as I pulled the trigger.

  The gun kicked harder than I thought it would, sending me staggering backwards as my vision washed out in a sea of afterimages. I dropped the now-useless weapon and unslung my Gauss rifle, moving despite the fact I couldn’t really see, running farther to the right. I blinked away the flashes and began to see that the battlesuit was still standing, staggering off balance. I’d hit it in the left shoulder and the arm on that side was hanging by a single, metallic cable. I didn’t know if the arm of the Tahni soldier inside the suit had been severed, or burned, or if he’d gotten stone lucky, but he wasn’t down and he wasn’t out. He shuffled his wide, disc-like foot pads, turning and firing as he went, the coruscating electron beam missing a meter off to my left as I kept moving to the right. I fired my Gauss rifle from the hip as I ran, just on the off chance I might put a round somewhere magical, but the slugs hit concrete and dirt and not much else and that fucking electron beam was getting so close that I felt the hair burning off the back of my neck.