Recon- the Complete Series

by Rick Partlow

  “You got one pissed off mother, kid,” he said, chuckling. “Glad my mom is about ten light years away most of the time.”

  I didn’t reply, but the relaxed attitude seemed to spread; the one to my right raised her visor as well. She was as old as the guy on the left, if paler.

  “You’re a Recon Marine?” She asked me curiously. “I was in Recon for a couple years before the DSI recruited me. You drop anywhere?”

  “Demeter,” I told her, taking advantage of the distraction to slide my right hand into the thigh pocket of my fatigues.

  “Demeter?” The man on my left repeated, frowning. “Didn’t the military just drop there like a couple weeks ago? How could you be back so soon?”

  Beneath the hopper, I could see the Fleet HQ sliding away as we headed for the spaceport. Up ahead, through the windscreen, I made out in the near distance the huge, paired buildings on both side of the street, known to sailor and soldier and Marine alike as MilPerCen: the Military Personnel Center, where records were kept, adjusted, requested, and otherwise handled. A covered pedestrian walkway stretched over the street between the buildings at the second story to ease traffic congestion, since that was the busiest road in the city.

  The timing would be very, very tricky; but it was all I could think of.

  “I went down the first time we dropped on Demeter, a year ago,” I told them. “It was a total fuck-up, my whole platoon got killed and I was stranded there until they dropped on it again a few weeks ago.”

  “You spent a fuckin’ year on a Tahni-occupied world?” The woman asked me, mouth agape. “Holy shit, boy!”

  “Shit, I’d be fucked up after living through that,” the man declared.

  “There’ve been a few after-effects,” I admitted, keeping my voice conversational, keeping them at ease. “It made me a bit paranoid.”

  “Yeah?” The guy grunted. “How so?”

  “Well,” I said, looking over to meet his eyes, keeping them off my hands, “for instance, I’m uncomfortable going anywhere without a weapon…”

  Then I buried the ceramic blade of my hold-out knife in his groin. His scream was still forming when I lashed out with a hammer-fist that smashed flat the nose of the woman seated next to me. The two in the seat in front were just starting to look around when I hit the button to open the left-side door of the craft.

  Wind screamed into the cabin, competing with the screams of the two guards I’d attacked and the shouts of the pilot. I could feel the hopper descending and slowing as the pilot tried to set us down, fighting against the turbulence from the open hatch. We’d been just above the street, above the top floor level of the twin MilPerCen buildings, and now we were coming down directly between them.

  I clambered over the one I’d stabbed, elbowing him in the face and pulling the knife from his body as one of the guards in the next seat up tried to grab for me. His forearm was armored, but his wrist was not, for flexibility. I stabbed the knife through his wrist and into the seat cushion, then jumped out the open hatch into a blur of building and street.

  I felt my stomach trying to eject via my mouth as I hit free fall for just about two seconds, and then the white polymer of the walkway cover rushed up to meet me. I’d been taught how to fall in Recon training: balls of the feet, heels, thigh, ass and shoulder. I still hit hard and my head still banged against the tough plastic with enough force to make me see stars, and then I was rolling towards the edge, out of control.

  I yelled a wordless shout of pure fright and dug my fingernails in until I hit a ridge in the plastic that ran the length of the walkway and I stopped tumbling. I grunted as I pulled myself to my feet and saw the hopper still trying to come down to street level, its hatch still yawning open. I looked down at the street and saw a cargo truck passing beneath the walkway, and without thinking too much or too well, I jumped for it.

  It wasn’t as far as the leap from the hopper, nor was the truck moving as fast, but I’d just been body-slammed once and this was adding insult to injury. I hit on the same side as the first time and I felt a wave of dull pain through my shoulder and into my chest, knocking the wind out of me. I couldn’t rest, though; those CSF mercs would be calling for help, and I doubted they’d be as gentle or good-natured about it this time.

  The truck was slowing down, probably because the driver had heard the sound of me slamming into the cargo box, or maybe because the automated driving AI had detected it; military trucks had human drivers for the most part, while civilian contractors used computerized ones. I didn’t stick around to find out, just ran to the back and lowered myself down from the rim of the box, then hit the street running.

  People were staring, some pointing, but no MPs had come after me yet and I needed to keep it that way. I cut into an alley between the MilPerCen building on the west side of the road and the storage warehouse next door and started sprinting. Marine HQ was this way, and, honestly, it was the only place I could think to go.

  ***

  “What in the living hell have you gotten yourself into, Munroe?” Captain Yassa demanded, almost before she’d opened the door.

  I glanced out into the hallway behind her but didn’t see anything as she stepped through into the barracks room and shut it behind her. I’d picked this place to meet because I knew it was empty; there’d been a water leak, and, military efficiency being what it was, they’d shut down the whole corner of the building for a week while they waited for a work order. Everything had been stripped from the room down to the bed frames and I’d been squatting on the floor against the far wall, waiting; waiting for Yassa or a squad of MPs if she’d decided to call them.

  “What have they told you?” I asked her, coming to my feet.

  “Not a damn thing,” she snapped, hands planted on her hips. “The DSI issued an alert that you were to be arrested immediately, on sight, and turned over to them ‘for questioning.’ What the hell did you do to piss off the DSI?”

  “It’s not the DSI that’s pissed at me,” I told her. “It’s my mother.”

  “Your mother?” She repeated, eyes narrowing. “What the hell does your mother have to do with this?”

  “Captain…” I trailed off, wondering what I should tell her.

  Fuck it, tell her everything. If you can’t trust her, then you might as well just turn yourself in.

  So I did. I left nothing out, from Anna to killing Konrad to Gramps. Yassa listened intently, eyes wider as the story went along, and only interrupted once.

  “Wait a second,” she held up a hand. “You’re telling me that your great-grandfather is Cesar Torres? The Master Gunnery Sgt. Cesar Torres?”

  I frowned in confusion. “You know Gramps?” I wondered.

  “If you’d managed to get into the Academy, Munroe,” she told me, shaking her head, “you’d know that Cesar Torres is one of the most highly decorated Marines in the history of the Corps.” She chuckled softly and leaned back against the wall of the dimly-lit barracks. “No wonder you’re a natural at this. You had Gunny Torres basically raising you.” She waved her hand. “But go on, get to the part where the DSI wants to arrest you.”

  “Apparently,” I said, raising my hands in a helpless shrug, “when the Tarawa picked me up from Demeter and gave me a physical exam in the ship’s med bay, they did a standard DNA test, and whatever procedure the Street Surgeon in Vegas did to me had worn off. My DNA was flagged by the DSI and they called Mom. She was waiting for me at the DSI field office and she had her team of Corporate Security Force goons ready to take me to the spaceport...”

  When I’d finished the story, ending with the ‘link I’d “confiscated” from a private to message her to meet me, she whistled softly and leaned her head back against the wall.

  “Jumped out of a moving hopper onto the MilPerCen pedestrian bridge, huh?” She laughed, a full-throated chuckle. “Damn, I wish I’d seen that.”

  “I can’t stay here,” I said, not quite as amused as her. “The DSI will track me eventually, even without m
y ID transponder.” I waved at the T shirt I was wearing; I’d left my transponder-equipped top stuffed in a trash container.

  “We need to get you off-planet ASAP,” she agreed, eyes narrowing as she seemed to seriously consider the matter. “I’m sending an advance team up to the Belleau Wood to get things ready for the company to ship out. The team is scheduled to leave tomorrow morning, but I think I can get that pushed up to tonight without ruffling too many feathers.”

  “That’s great,” I said, “but the second I show up on the manifest of a shuttle at the port, the DSI is going to pull me off it and lock me up.”

  “Gunny Prochaska boarding that shuttle won’t set off any alarms,” she told me, a mischievous glint in her eye. “He’s supposed to be in charge of the team.” She grinned lopsidedly. “I’m assuming you’ve been in the Corps long enough to fake being a Gunny for a couple days?”

  “You think that’ll really work?” I asked her, finally feeling a surge of hope and trying not to let it blind me to reality. “Won’t they know I’m not him once I get on board the Belleau Wood?”

  “By then it won’t matter,” she assured me. “They don’t report their manifest to the port until they’re ready to leave orbit.” She shrugged. “When you get to the ship, just report to Chief Dillon and tell him I said Gunny Prochaska had to get a medical procedure done and couldn’t make it.” She moved back to the door. “You wait here, and I’ll go get one of the Gunny’s tops with his ID chip in it, then grab your armor and weapons from the armory. Then you can just walk right out of here in full armor with your helmet on and no one’ll know the difference.”

  “Captain,” I said, stopping her just as she was about leave. “Thank you.”

  I wanted to ask her why she was going this far, taking this big of a risk to help me, but I was scared I’d make her change her mind.

  “You’re one of mine, Munroe,” she said, answering the question I was afraid to ask. “I take care of mine.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “It’s really fucking cold out here, Sarge,” Sanders said, stripping off his parachute and slipping on his backpack.

  “Keep the comms clear,” I snapped at him, but I definitely agreed. It had to be negative ten or so, and even the insulation in our skinsuits and armor wasn’t cutting it.

  Loki was barely habitable, and I didn’t know why the hell either we or the Tahni wanted it. Well, actually, I did know: Loki was the only habitable world in the Asgard system, and it was the moon of a gas giant, which made it a logical choice to locate the food production facilities and rotating crew quarters for the deuterium/tritium mines in the atmosphere of the planet.

  It also had the honor of being the very last human colony left occupied by the Tahni, mostly because we hadn’t gotten around to it until now and the Tahni didn’t have the ships to evacuate it anymore. But there were still human prisoners here, and expensive atmosphere mining equipment in orbit around the gas giant, so here we were.

  “Snap to it, First Squad!” I said, watching the last of them bury their chutes and shoulder their packs. We were still getting our shit together faster than the rest of the platoon, but I wasn’t going to let them know that.

  I scanned around the mountain pass where we’d dropped, a wide swathe of flat ground cut through the high and rugged peaks west of Jotunheim, the biggest and pretty much only city on the moon. You could see the city---well, the town, really---from up here, the only glowing lights in the darkness of the late spring snowstorm that closed in around us, peeking out from between thirty-meter-tall imported pines genetically engineered to survive the winters here. Jumping in this shit, and in the mountains, had been damned tricky, and I was starting to wish we’d been the platoon detailed to back up the “Intelligence assets” who were attacking the mining platform.

  I knew what that meant: my old friends in the Glory Boys. The moon colony wasn’t even important enough to rate their involvement, so Recon got to do this one all by ourselves. I wasn’t unhappy about that, either; this was what we were trained to do and part of me rebelled at the thought of being back-up to anyone, even some super-commando out of the R&D boys at Fleet.

  “Third squad’s up, Gunny,” I reported to Prochaska just as soon as all my boys and girls were in their security perimeter, facing outwards with their rifles at the ready.

  “What took you so long, Munroe?” The Gunny asked, with a sarcastic tone I’d gotten use to during the flight over from Inferno. He’d given me some shit about taking his spot in the prep team, but he’d seen how serious I’d been about the squad and getting to know everyone’s strengths and weaknesses. “Come on, First and Second, the new kid’s making you look bad!”

  It only took another thirty seconds for the other two squads to get themselves squared away; and once we were all in a perimeter that covered 360 degrees, Lt. Medupe huddled briefly on a private channel with the Gunny, then turned and gave us the signal to follow.

  “Move out, Third,” the young officer ordered in his gently accented voice, smooth enough to be a singer and not at all what I had expected when I first saw him. He was a massive individual, a full head taller than me, with hands big enough to engulf mine.

  My squad took point, with Lance Corporal Sanders in the lead, moving carefully down the mountain road, watching for any indication of sensor pods. Even though I didn’t really expect much in the way of electronic security because of how isolated this place was, we still had to check for it. We had to move cautiously but not slowly; Captain Yassa and First Platoon were going to be hitting the Tahni barracks at the same time as we were scheduled to hit the detention facilities. Any delay increased the chances one or the other force would be detected.

  It was a five kilometer hike down the mountain road, and it took us a good two and a half hours to complete it, between moving tactically, watching for sensor traps and walking through the ten-centimeter-deep snow. It was well after midnight local time when we reached the outskirts of Jotunheim, and we could only discern the beginnings of the town by the presence of an empty snow tractor parked in a gap between the trees.

  No one was outside, not Tahni nor human, no one apart from us. There were no High Guard troops here, and of the lone light company of Shock-Troops stationed on Loki, only a platoon would be on duty at the detention center. We’d scouted the place out with drones from three weeks ago right up to this morning and there wouldn’t be any surprises waiting for us. If the place were crewed by humans rather than Tahni, I’d say they’d surrender rather than fight, but most Tahni minds didn’t work that way.

  Except Colonel Renn-Tann; his cynical betrayal was almost human. I wondered what had happened to him.

  We cut into the trees just a hundred meters or so from the first buildings we could see, skirting the circumference of the town’s roughly oval shape until we reached the raw-white buildfoam dome that had once been a winter barn for the cross-gene cattle they raised here, part bison and part musk-ox. Now, and for the last few months, it functioned as a prison for what was left of the civilian government, plus any of the bigger ranch-owners deemed too independent and dangerous to be allowed to walk free to work for their new masters…or, in some cases, the families of those people.

  There’d been over a thousand put into the place after it had been converted; God knew how many were still alive. The sort of simple mesh fence the Tahni favored surrounded the place, along with security floodlights on towers at intervals, but no exterior guards. They probably monitored the place with cameras and considered that enough. The whole planet had a population of under 10,000 people, and more than half lived out in the ranches. The Tahni hadn’t bothered to occupy the ranches or imprison most of the people who worked on them. They’d simply made sure they weren’t armed, then sent out patrols every few weeks to collect milk and meat for the captives and workers in town.

  The Tahni didn’t eat the meat, of course; their rations came from the algae and soy farms out by the fusion reactor. I wasn’t sure if they knew that
most of the locals didn’t usually eat the steaks either; they were the moon’s chief export, delicacies sold to the upper-crust, to people like my mother.

  But they hadn’t been bothering to collect the meat these last three weeks, since the last recorded message had come through their communications satellite from the nearest wormhole jumpgate. That had been the message that had told them the Commonwealth military had seized the next system along the jumpgate path, and there would be no further orders from the Imperium. They hadn’t been told there wouldn’t be any relief from Transition Drive ships either, but you’d think they’d have guessed it by now.

  Sanders halted a few dozen meters from the fence, as close as we could approach without leaving the tree-line. I held up a fist and everyone behind us sank to the prone. I felt the frigid dampness of the snow enveloping me as I sank into it, keeping just my head and my rifle above it. Behind me, Lt. Medupe high-crawled up to our position with deceptive stealth for someone his size, his rifle cradled in his arms. He touched helmets with me rather than using the radios this close to their detection equipment.

  “We’re set,” he told me. “Launch the jammer.”

  I gave him a thumbs-up, then reached over and slapped Lance Corporal Hohenthaner on the boot. She looked around and I gestured towards the fence. She knew what I was signaling for; we’d rehearsed it on the boat over at least a hundred times. Hohenthaner slipped a grenade out of her tactical vest and quickly and dexterously loaded it into her under-barrel launcher. The round was a new addition for this mission, developed for the DSI and Fleet Intelligence and filtering down to us now, when the war was winding down and it was almost too late to use it. Typical.

  She aimed the round at the nearest of the security towers, near where it tied in with the fence, then pulled the trigger. The round left the launcher on a puff of coldgas, then the rocket motor ignited for just a moment, giving it just enough momentum to carry it across the distance to the fence. It was about a half meter from the tower when the warhead burst in a puff of electrostatically charged gas and a crackling, sizzling arc of electricity travelled up and down the security tower, dimming the floodlight for a half a second.