Recon- the Complete Series

by Rick Partlow

  “Go!” Medupe yelled, but we were already moving.

  It wouldn’t take the Tahni long to realize their cameras and fence sensors were down, and we had to be through it before they did. I had the power-cutters out of my belt pouch already, and I let my rifle retract on its sling into my chest as I ran, keeping it steady with my left hand while we sprinted the sixty meters to the fence. The snow sucked my boots down and made each step an effort, but I knew I couldn’t let myself be slower than the people I was leading.

  The helmet’s warming filters couldn’t keep up with the amount of air I was sucking in and I felt the chill of the night burning in my chest and that short run seemed to take hours. Then the fence rushed up on me and I nearly ran into it, falling to my knees and wedging the power cutters into the wires. They sliced through the tough metal wire like it wasn’t there, and in just a few seconds, I’d opened up a hole nearly a meter wide and half that high, and Sanders was already squeezing through before I finished. I let him and Hohenthaner by before I crawled through myself, stowing the cutters and pulling my rifle back to a ready position.

  I knelt by the fence and waited for the rest of my squad to move through, slapping each on the arm and pointing them to the side of the building where the others were setting up security. Once the last had passed, Lt. Medupe squeezed through, the edges of his broad, armored shoulders scraping against the severed ends of the fence. He came up into a crouch beside me and touched helmets again.

  “We’re going in with your squad,” he said, repeating the op plan I’d already heard on the ship a dozen times. “Gunny Prochaska will keep First squad in the tree-line for over-watch while Second pulls security outside the building.”

  “Roger that, sir,” I said, then jogged to the wall where the rest of the squad was huddled, watching outward with Gauss rifle muzzles bristling. Between the bare white wall, the snow and their chameleon camouflage, it was hard to even see them.

  I found Sanders and got his attention, signaling for him to move out. He kept a shoulder against the rough, featureless buildfoam of the outer wall and began loping around the circumference of the dome. I let the rest of his fire team go ahead of me, then jumped in between them and the other team and followed Sanders’ group to the side entrance. A rolling shutter door stood there, half buried in snow, broad enough to drive cattle through it in better days. It would have been difficult and noisy to open, but luckily there was a service entrance beside it, still fitted with its pre-invasion palm plate.

  Hohenthaner had the door-cracker and she held it up in front of the plate, looking back at me for the go signal. I glanced back and saw Lt. Medupe at the rear of the squad; he shot me a thumbs-up and I relayed the gesture to Hohenthaner. She was the squad’s official electronic warfare “expert,” which in practice meant she got to carry a lot of extra tech shit and better her than me.

  She touched the cracking module to the plate and I saw a subdued red light on the back of the compact cube turn green; the door popped open a few centimeters, letting a dim sliver of light through into the snowy dark. Sanders didn’t need to be told; he slipped past Hohenthaner and through the door as quickly and quietly as possible, with the next two Marines on his heels.

  I butted ahead of Hohenthaner and found myself on a short, concrete walkway on the other side of the railing that delineated a plastic-lined cattle chute. The chute ran just a couple dozen yards, under the shadow of a walkway and into a corral lined with sand. The first three Marines in the lead fire team were crouched at the edge of the chute, just inside the shadows, with their weapons pointed up and out. There was a dim glow coming from chemical ghostlights lining the interior walls; no other lights were turned on in the big chamber.

  I paused for a moment just beside Sanders, taking a knee and examining the output from my helmet sensors on my HUD. There was movement up ahead, and the thermal signatures and heartbeat patterns of several humanoids, but no electrical readings like there would have been from the servos or the batteries of a Shock-Trooper’s exoskeleton. I turned back to Lt. Medupe and gestured that I was going to take a look. He flashed me the okay and I descended to my belly and began high-crawling over the thin cover of sand, grateful that my armor would keep it away from my skin. I’d had my fill of sand inside my clothes in Boot Camp.

  There was a slight uphill slant to the ramp, and as I neared the peak of it, I could see that a metal-railed fence stretched across the corral, with a gate in the middle. Standing just this side of it were two unarmored Tahni, the sort of older, tired-out and broken-down soldiers they used for work like guarding civilian prisoners they didn’t consider dangerous. That made sense; they wouldn’t keep anyone with any ideas of breaking out this close to a flimsy door with little security. They were carrying laser carbines, and had the stance I’d seen before, on Demeter, the disinterested slouch of someone who knew they were doing something pointless in a lost cause. I edged closer and finally saw the prisoners they were guarding.

  There were at least two hundred of them, and most were children between about six or seven and maybe ten or eleven at the oldest. No toddlers, no teenagers. The few adults were hugely pregnant women, something I’d never seen among Mom’s social circle back home; people in that economic niche didn’t carry babies to term, they had them transferred to an artificial womb, or a surrogate if you were old-fashioned. There were a couple dozen of the women and they shared one trait with the children: they were all stick-thin, like they’d been on starvation rations for at least a couple weeks now. Most of the children were asleep, huddled under scraps of cloth or old jackets they were using for blankets, pressed together in groups of three or four or five for warmth, but a few of the women were still awake, holding their arms around themselves and shivering visibly in the raw cold of the holding area.

  I felt a rage burning in my gut that had built up over the course of a year. I forced it down long enough to check the other side of the chamber and see that it was demarcated by a line of troughs where cattle brought in for the winter could be fed or watered. After that was a blank wall with double doors built into it, but there were no more guards. They must have figured that two was enough for a bunch of kids and pregnant women.

  Both the guards were facing away from me. I knew what I should do: I should edge backwards to the LT and signal to him what I’d seen, then send Sanders and one of his team to take these guys out. That was what I should have done.

  Instead, I slowly and silently unclipped my Gauss rifle from its sling, letting it settle onto the soft sand, then I slipped my combat knife from its thigh sheath. In one, smooth motion I was up and charging at the back of the one on the right. He never turned around and I buried the ten-centimeter blade into his spine at the base of his neck. He gasped wordlessly and stiffened, beginning to topple forward, but by then I was moving again, my attention on the second guard.

  I was close enough to see the silver strands in the queue wrapped around his neck, close enough to see his oddly-pointed teeth as he opened his mouth to shout a warning, would have been close enough to smell his breath if my helmet hadn’t blocked it out. He tried to bring around his laser carbine, but I slammed my armored left forearm down and punched it out of his hands, and then my right arm was wrapping around his neck as I slid behind him.

  He tried to land an elbow strike, but the armor plating over my torso made the blow even more ineffectual than it would have been anyway. I was cutting off his airway already, stifling the shout of warning he’d been about to give, and when I added the pressure of my other arm he started to asphyxiate. I could feel his desperation and I knew he might try to grab at a sidearm or knife, so I twisted around, taking him off his feet, then slammed him into the ground beneath me.

  I heard the choked grunt, felt the air try to rush out of him, felt him shudder as the last dregs of consciousness left him. Once he was out, I let him loose and clambered to my feet. I picked my Gauss rifle off the ground where I’d left it, reversed it, and slammed the stock into the si
de of his head. The crack of his skull fracturing was loud enough to be audible, and one of the women looked around, her eyes drawn by the motion. Those eyes went wide when she saw me, and I mimed an exaggerated shushing motion. She nodded, mouth open in disbelief.

  I grabbed the Tahni I’d clubbed to death by the ankle and dragged him back towards the shadows, his blood smeared across sand that soaked it up thirstily. Sanders jumped up without being told and took the one I’d knifed, pulling him back as well. Lt. Medupe walked up next to me and touched helmets.

  “That was impressive, Sgt. Munroe,” he said, and I could see his eyes flashing beneath his visor. “Don’t ever fucking do it again.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” I said readily. “Sorry, sir.”

  I heard a skeptical snort at that, but he just shook his head in resignation. “Leave one man here to watch over the civilians, then move out. There are more humans being held in this place and we need to get them secured.”

  The Lieutenant was right, I decided as I went to convey the orders to my squad. I wasn’t sorry at all.

  ***

  The rising system primary, Asgard, was a faint, hazy glow that barely lightened the grey shroud over the Jotunheim spaceport. Spaceport was too lofty a name for the bare, black plain of the fusion-form landing field a kilometer outside the city, but it was all we had. I sat on an empty ammo shipping case tossed aside when our attached platoon of battlesuit troopers had landed much earlier this morning, hours before dawn.

  The grey titans patrolled the city now, watching for any Tahni holdouts and guarding the Fleet medical techs who had set up a temporary clinic back in the dome where the civilian captives had been held. There were about eight hundred of them, all told. There’d been over a thousand three weeks ago. We’d found the shallow pit dug into the frozen soil just outside the city limits where they’d disposed of the ones who hadn’t survived. There were an awful lot off small bodies being pulled out of that pit.

  Lt. Medupe had detailed Second squad to work with the medics getting food supplies from the Belleau Wood’s cargo shuttles transported to the civilians, and Third to run a quick sweep through the buildings of the city to check for more civilians or Tahni hold-outs. First had been given a break, probably half because the LT was afraid I’d run off and try to find more Tahni to kill if I had to deal with the freed prisoners. They were all in pretty bad shape, the adults even worse than the children.

  We hadn’t encountered any Shock-Troops at all in the storage building where the civilians had been kept. According to Captain Yassa, who’d been with the platoon who’d assaulted the barracks, most of the exoskeletons had broken down from the cold and they’d taken the place with no friendly casualties. She’d sounded disappointed that there hadn’t been much opposition.

  I was only disappointed there hadn’t been more of them to kill. I’d been brooding here at the edge of the tarmac for about an hour while the rest of the squad went through a line for hot chow inside a heated tent that the Fleet boys had set up fifty meters farther down. I could keep an eye on them from here without having to talk to them. Before I’d wandered over here, Sanders and a couple others had kept enthusing how I was such a “badass” for killing the two Tahni guards and I really didn’t want to hear it.

  What bothered me the most, though, was the fact that I couldn’t stay on the run forever. We were scheduled to make the hop back to Inferno in a couple days and I’d be picked up the minute we touched down on-planet, maybe even when we docked with the space station. Captain Yassa had promised me she’d try to figure out a way to hide me until we got down to Inferno, but I wasn’t hopeful. This was the DSI and the Corporate Security Force we were talking about, and they had some major resources between them. I’d bought a little time, but that was it.

  I had my helmet off; even with the cold, I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to breath in fresh air, not recycled shipboard crap. That’s why I didn’t register the ship coming in until it nearly landed on top of me. It was quiet for a ship the size of an Attack Command missile cutter, maybe a hundred meters long and half that wide, but this was no missile boat. It was flat black with mind-bending curves and no markings at all, and I’d only seen the like of it once before; it belonged to the Glory Boys.

  I rose from my seat and watched as it touched down on the tarmac, its landing jets whining and sending out the hot breath of a dragon that was a relief from the cold, until its treads hit and it settled into their suspension. The whining roar died away along with the hot wind, and a ramp opened up from the ship’s belly, just behind her cockpit. The man who walked down it was tall and rangy and wearing utility fatigues instead of the camouflaged combat suit I was used to seeing.

  Cowboy met me halfway between his stealth ship and my improvised chair and offered a hand. I shook it warily; I respected the hell out of what this guy could do, but I didn’t know if I would have considered him an acquaintance, much less a friend.

  “Hey, Cowboy,” I said. “Where’s Kel?”

  “He had things to do at the gas mine,” the Fleet Intelligence agent told me, waving in the general direction of the gas giant, invisible behind the grey cloud cover. “But I saw on the Fleet manifests that you were over here on Loki and thought I’d stop by.”

  I raised an eyebrow. That was a not-insignificant waste of time and fuel. “Well thanks for thinking of me, but that seems like a long way to go to just say hello.”

  He crossed his arms and regarded me silently for a moment with a flat, neutral stare that made me feel like an exhibit on display.

  “It would have been a long way to go just to say hello to Staff Sgt Randall Munroe,” he admitted. “But it’s not that far at all to apprehend Tyler Callas.”

  I felt my breath quicken unconsciously and I tried to keep it under control. A mad desperation made me think about going for my pistol, but I knew that was a waste of time. Cowboy could disarm and incapacitate me before my hand twitched. This was it. There was nowhere left to run and no way to fight. Mother would win the way she always did.

  “I didn’t know you were working for the Corporate Council,” I said bitterly, trying to keep my hands away from my weapons.

  He laughed at that, a long, slow chuckle that sounded genuinely amused.

  “Mr. Callas, we all work for the Corporate Council one way or another,” he told me. “But I’m not here to arrest you.”

  “Then why are you here?” I asked him.

  “You gotta’ know by now,” he said in a Texas twang, “that you can’t run like this forever. They will catch up to you, probably sooner than later. Unless you have someone running interference for you…someone with a few more connections than your Company Commander.”

  “Why would you do that for me?” I felt a slight lightening of the blackness closing in around me. I didn’t want to give into that feeling because I still wasn’t sure if this was a trick.

  “Two reasons, Mr. Callas,” he said, and I noticed his stance relaxing, as if he’d decided he wasn’t worried about me pulling a gun on him anymore. “For one thing, despite what your mother thinks, you aren’t ready to step up and take a Council position. It’s not who you are now, but I think you might be in a place where you’ll want to do it one of these days, after you get the chance to live your own life for a while. And maybe I want a Corporate Council Executive who owes me one.”

  I wanted to laugh at that notion, but I kept my face as stony as I could, nodding to encourage him to keep going.

  “Second,” he went on, “you’re too valuable an asset to stick away somewhere locked up while they scramble your brains.”

  “An asset?” I repeated, cocking my eyebrow. “For who?”

  “Right now, for the Marines,” he said, gesturing around at the military aircraft. “I know the Corporate Council leadership doesn’t consider the Tahni to be a major threat to their interests, but I respectfully disagree. Maybe that’s because I’m closer to the problem.” He smiled, a genuine smile. “Anyway, we can use ever
y level head and straight shot we can get right now. But I was thinking more after the war.” He shrugged. “I expect to have a position of responsibility by then, a position that might require, let’s say, independent contractors to do work for me from time to time.”

  “What kind of work?” I wanted to know.

  “Just the occasional favor,” he said, his tone minimizing words that seemed pretty ominous to me. “Nothing that’ll interfere with whatever life you choose to lead. And I swear…” He pronounced it “aah sware.” “…your mother will not find out where you are. You don’t have to deal with her until and unless you decide you’re ready to.”

  I faced away from him, staring out into the grey gloom, feeling the snow flurries that were all that was left of last night’s storm teasing coldly at my neck.

  “This feels a lot like making a deal with the Devil.”

  “It may be,” he admitted readily enough. “But as devils go, am I better or worse of one than Patrice Damiani?”

  I realized that there was no point in debating this. I had the choice between immediate punishment or some odious duty in a hazy, distant future. At twenty-one, the future seemed pretty far away. I turned back and nodded in fatalistic acceptance.

  “All right, Cowboy. You’ve got a deal.” I snorted humorlessly. “Do we sign it in our blood?”

  He laughed at that, and despite the fact that it sounded genuine and homey, it was a chilling sound.

  “Deals like these,” he said, “always get signed in other people’s blood.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three