Recon- the Complete Series

by Rick Partlow

  I suddenly had a digital layout of the palace in my HUD, one I assumed Cowboy had just sent to me somehow, without having to get an okay from my helmet computer to link up. I didn’t know where he’d gotten it, but it was fully translated.

  “Hold up,” I told Sanders. “Security halt for thirty seconds.”

  Sanders took a spot by the far wall, and the others positioned themselves behind cover while I took a knee and examined the plans for the complex. We were in something labelled the North Atrium, and the passages leading out of it would take us all around the palace, but the only ones I was interested in were the far right corridor which led to what the interpreters had called The Throne Room, and the central one that would take us to the Emperor’s Private Chambers. He’d be one of those two places, and so would most of the opposition.

  I tried to think of how Renn-Tan had behaved on Demeter, tried to step into a Tahni head. If he’d given up, if he didn’t think he could fight his way out this, he’d be in his Private Chambers, because that’s where his altar would be and he’d want to be talking to his god. If he was going to fight, if he couldn’t or wouldn’t give up, then he’d be in the Throne Room, trying to coordinate the resistance. Renn-Tan had given up, because he’d spent too much time studying the enemy, studying us. I didn’t get that read from the Emperor based on how he was running this war.

  I pointed to the far-right passageway.

  “We want the Throne Room,” I told Cowboy.

  “Then that’s where we’ll go,” he said, walking casually in that direction, again acting like this was all no big deal to him.

  I stood to follow him, and was motioning for Sanders to move out when several things happened at once. I don’t remember if I heard Cowboy’s call of “Contact left!” first or whether it was the warning tone from my helmet sensors telling me they’d detected the thermal signatures of Tahni Shock-Troop armor, or maybe it was the tantalum needles smacking into the stylized base behind me. All three happened so close together they might have been simultaneous.

  I threw myself into the prone, not even feeling the impact as I hit the rough, stone surface of the floor, just concentrating on lining up my Gauss rifle with the corridor terminus where the squad of Shock-Troops was running at us, firing on full-auto. I could see an IFF transponder go yellow behind me and I couldn’t even focus on the HUD enough to tell who it was.

  The targeting reticle seemed to be dancing all over my HUD, so I thought, fuck it, and launched a grenade. I managed to get a lock on one of the Tahni soldiers in the front rank just in time to put the round right through his visor. The warhead burst in a searing flash of plasma spears that burned through his helmet from the inside and actually penetrated the neck of the trooper to his right, sending him stumbling forward. They crashed to the ground less than a meter apart and the soldiers running behind them skidded to either side trying not to trip over their bodies.

  I was yelling something, I don’t remember what. It was something deeply ingrained by training and probably totally redundant, but it didn’t matter. The grenade had killed two of the eight and, more importantly, it had broken their momentum. Tungsten slugs from our rifles began ripping into them, only to be quickly overwhelmed by a star-bright flare of plasma as Cowboy cut loose a devastating blast right into the middle of the Shock-Troops.

  By the time I’d gotten my breathing steady enough to keep on a target, all of them were down. And so was Hohenthaner. Her IFF reading was blinking yellow by the time I got to her. Sanders was already there, kneeling over her, one hand on her shoulder, just sitting there, not applying any first aid. I was ready to chew his head off till I moved around him and immediately saw why. She’d been hit through her faceplate; it was cracked and shattered by multiple rounds and there wasn’t much left of her face beneath it. Her legs drummed a single, galvanic beat and then her IFF avatar went black.

  I felt an odd numbness in my chest as I realized that I’d just lost my first Marine.

  “Come on,” I urged Sanders, grabbing his arm and pulling him up. “There’ll be more of them. We have to move.”

  “She just applied to Officer’s Candidate School,” Sanders said quietly. But he ejected his magazine and pulled a fresh one from Hohenthaner’s tactical vest, seating it with a slap. “She would’ve been a good officer, Sarge.”

  “I know she would, Sanders,” I said. I suddenly realized I couldn’t remember Hohenthaner’s first name. Hell, I barely remembered my own.

  There were no other casualties, and the remaining seven of us---eight if you included Cowboy---moved at a double-time down the corridor towards the Throne Room, putting speed ahead of stealth. They already knew we were here. The corridors were wide, the doors that opened up on them even wider, and there was just no way to clear every room, so we scanned as we went and I hoped to hell that Cowboy would trigger an attack before we did.

  Two things struck me as we ran: one, this was the Imperial Palace, but it wasn’t something that any human would have called opulent. Instead, it seemed spartanly decorated, and what art and furniture there was appeared so odd to me that it almost slid off my eye at first glance. Twisted and turning interior hallways formed Moebius strips going nowhere, and pits and platforms built into the floor seemed to be scattered at random in large, empty rooms. What passed for furniture was little more than garishly-colored cushions on top of concrete shelves.

  The second thing was, I still wasn’t seeing any civilians. I figured there must be thousands of civilian workers in a place this big, and I hadn’t seen a one. Where the hell were they all?

  “Hold up,” Cowboy said, his easy, loping jog slowing down to a walk about twenty meters ahead of our point-man. He pulled up his hood and stared into a chamber off to the right, as if there was something there he needed to see with his naked eyes in order to believe it. “Munroe, get up here.”

  The room through the broad, open, oval doorway looked like it had been one of those combined cafeteria/worship centers the Tahni favored, with the same combination of oval pits with cushion-chairs and platforms with burning gas flames on vaguely star-shaped candlesticks. This one was huge, though, larger than any I’d seen on Demeter or Loki or any other Tahni base I’d visited. It was big enough to hold over a thousand civilians, priests, workers, and government officials. And it did.

  They were all dead. They’d been executed, herded together and shot with KE gunfire. Their blood stained the multicolored strips wrapped around their bodies in their equivalent of non-military clothes; it pooled around them and filled the hollows in the floor and reflected the flickering glow of the candles.

  “That,” Cowboy said with more feeling than I’d ever heard from him, “is some shit.”

  “What in the living fuck?” Sanders murmured from just behind me.

  “Get back to your position, Sanders,” I said automatically, my voice sounding flat and unemotional to my own ears. I shook my head, trying to clear the image out of my eyes but it remained.

  “Why do you think they did that shit, Munroe?” Cowboy asked, looking at me like I should know. For once, he seemed totally nonplused.

  “They’re aliens, Cowboy,” I told him. “We keep making the mistake of assuming they think like we do. They don’t. That’s why people like my mother fucked up so bad not letting us finish them off after the First War. The Corporate Council thought they could predict what the Tahni would do, but they’re not humans.” I shook my head. “I have no fucking idea why they did this. Let’s get this shit over with.”

  The big man pulled the hood back over his face and jogged off again, and we followed, searching for the end of this corridor, the end of this mission, the end of this war.

  The corridor curved in on itself again and again, turning a half a kilometer distance into a kilometer and a half and wearing my nerves down to a finely-honed edge. The dead-reckoning projection on the map of the palace in my HUD said we were nearly on top of the Throne Room, but the way the Tahni had built the place, it could take us
another half hour to get there.

  Cowboy seemed more impatient than any of us, and he’d ranged ahead even farther, maybe forty or fifty meters in front of Sanders and out of sight most of the time. From somewhere up ahead, I heard a sound echoing back, a roar of thunder and a flare of sunlight that I’d heard once before, and I skidded to a halt almost without intention. I was calling for Sanders to stop when I saw Cowboy sprinting back towards us so fast he seemed like a blur…but not as fast as the missile that slammed into the wall only ten meters away from him. The concussion knocked me backwards off my feet and sent Sanders and his fire team rolling back down the corridor like the tumbleweeds Gramps and I used to watch in the high desert.

  Cowboy had disappeared in a roiling billow of black smoke, but I could see the thermal signature of his just-fired plasma gun glowing like a little star in the darkness and I bolted for it. I knew what had fired that missile and I knew that plasma gun was the only weapon we had that could touch it.

  I slid in beside the gun where it lay on the floor, kicking bits of shattered concrete block out of the way where it had been blown out of the wall. I slung my Gauss rifle around behind my back and hefted the plasma gun up like I was going to power-clean a barbell. I grunted with the effort; the thing weighed maybe fifty kilos and I wasn’t going to be running anywhere with it. He’d fired it already, but I didn’t know if he’d loaded a new round. It was pump action like some of the antique shotguns I’d had the chance to shoot when I was a kid, and I jerked the thick, polymer pump handle back towards me, ejecting the steaming cylinder of the spent round, then pushed it forward to chamber a new one.

  Then the smoke began to clear and I heard the metallic clomp of gigantic feet echoing down the corridor. It was a High Guard battlesuit, stalking towards me through the billowing clouds, its silvery face like the leering visage of death itself. How they’d got it down here I had no idea, but it barely cleared the ceiling of the hallway and it took up more than half its width. Its arm-mounted electron beamer was tracking towards me when I braced the plasma gun against the wall behind me and fired.

  The gun bucked hard and nearly tore itself from my grasp as blistering heat baked me even through my armor and my helmet visor blacked out automatically, polarizing against the glare. I saw an image projected in my HUD of the plasmoid splashing against the thing’s right arm at the shoulder and flaring as power feeds were ruptured. I was desperately working the pump action gun when my visor lightened and I saw the thing swaying there like a redwood in a windstorm, its right arm and the electron beamer attached to it lying on the floor and the shoulder partially melted.

  It had stopped moving, and I took a risk that the Tahni inside of it was in shock or dead, dropping the plasma gun and pulling my Gauss rifle back around to the front.

  “Third squad!” I yelled, hoping some of them were still on their feet. “With me now!”

  Then I charged forward, gritting my teeth at what might be coming through the smoke at me. Past the battered, statue-like sentinel of the dying High Guard soldier, I saw the Throne Room we’d been searching for. It was smaller than I thought it would be, maybe forty meters across, with a ceiling almost that high, lit like a night sky by hundreds of individual lamps set in it; on the far wall was a bank of monitors, flat and two-dimensional, some meters across and all of them displaying different parts of the city. I glimpsed Marine battlesuits firing on Tahni forces and assault shuttles making strafing runs, and at least one tactical display showing ships in orbit.

  At the center was one of the cushion-lined indentations in the floor that the Tahni used for seating at formal gatherings, but this one had what looked like a curved, winding wall around it in a half-circle with strips of multicolored cloth draped over it. A single Tahni was inside that wall, but I couldn’t see more than the top of his head, and most of my attention was on the cluster of over a dozen Shock-Troopers running our way from across the chamber. I figured they’d been watching that line of approach, trusting the battlesuit to guard this one. I was 2-0 against battlesuits now, I thought inanely.

  The Shock-Troopers weren’t firing yet, probably because they didn’t want to hit whoever was in that central command post, but I didn’t have any such compunction. I fired off a grenade at the Shock-Troopers from the hip, then ran straight for that cushioned hollow in the floor, thinking it would make a great firing position. The Tahni officer inside it was wearing some sort of ceremonial armor, but the only weapon he had was a sidearm, so I shot him through the chest, then jumped in feet first and knocked his body out of the way.

  I propped my Gauss rifle on top of the low wall and began laying down fire on the armored Tahni soldiers still coming after the grenade blast. I put one down with a slug through the neck, then shifted to take a second through the chest. Before I could fire again, the others opened up, apparently past caring about hitting their own man with friendly fire since I’d already killed him. Tantalum needles pinged musically off whatever metal that wall was made of, and one of them managed to slice through my right forearm and into the receiver of my rifle.

  I cursed and fell backwards, losing my grip on my weapon, losing my footing and sprawling on top of the Tahni I’d killed. My arm was in agony and it took everything I had not to curl into a fetal position and scream, but I made myself get up. I cradled my right arm against my chest and pushed myself up with my left, then pulled my rifle away from me on its sling and tried to bring it up one-handed, knowing I had seconds before they overran me.

  I got my rifle over the wall just in time to see the handful of soldiers left going down in a hail of tungsten slugs. I twisted around and saw the rest of my squad coming up behind me, rifles shouldered as they stepped into the Throne Room, scanning for threats.

  “Clear on the right!” I heard the Bravo Team leader, Sanchez call.

  “Clear on the left!” That was Sanders.

  “You okay, Sarge?” Sanders asked me, running up to where I leaned against the wall of the command post, trying to get my breathing under control. I felt a sting at my neck and knew my helmet was injecting me with painkillers. I waited until I could feel the warm numbness spreading out to my shattered arm before I trusted myself to reply.

  “I’ll be okay,” I told him. “Any casualties?”

  “I think I got a separated shoulder,” Sanders said, and I noticed his left arm hanging limp. “And Eberhard probably has a concussion, but nothing fatal.”

  “What about Cowboy?” I asked him, then remembered he might not have ever heard that name. “The Intelligence officer who was with us,” I amended. “Did anyone check on him?”

  Sanders looked back at the entrance to the room. A haze of smoke still rose from the hallway, gathering against the fake stars in the ceiling like an early morning mist.

  “Shit,” Sanders blurted and I saw his eyes go wide inside his visor. “When you told us to follow you, I kind of forgot about him.”

  “Detail a couple people to go…” I started to say.

  “No need for that,” I heard Cowboy’s voice before I saw him. He limped out of the haze from the corridor, moving stiffly and dragging his plasma gun along one-handed. I didn’t see any visible wounds, which seemed impossible.

  “How the hell are you still alive?” I wondered aloud, shaking my head.

  “I ain’t that easy to kill,” he said, pulling off his hood and running a hand through his hair. There was a nasty cut over his right eye, and blood ran down his face, but the flow was slowing even as I watched. I had an uncanny feeling that, if I watched for a few minutes longer, I’d see the wound begin to heal. “But trust me, partner, I’d trade hurts with you.” He looked around, pain and exhaustion dragging at him. “What’s the situation in here?”

  “Well, we cleared out the Tahni,” I told him, starting to feel a little loopy from the pain meds. I blinked hard and tried to focus. “But I don’t know where the hell the Emperor is. Hope one of the other groups found him.”

  Then he looked past me and a smile
spread across his face. His mouth had a trickle of blood coming out of it and two of his teeth were broken off. He began to laugh and I wondered for a second if he’d been concussed by the blast from the missile.

  “Who killed that fella’ there?” He asked me, pointing at the Tahni I’d shot inside the command center, curled up at the bottom of the pit behind me.

  “He’s just some officer,” I said with a shrug. “I shot him so I could use this hole for cover.”

  He laughed longer and louder and Sanders and a couple of the other Marines close by stared at him.

  “What the hell is it, Cowboy?” I demanded. “What’s so damned funny?”

  He was bent over now, one hand propping him up on his thigh as he choked out a final laugh, then coughed and spit out a glob of blood that spattered on the polished tile of the floor.

  “That officer you shot,” he said, his voice hoarse and rasping. “That’s the fucking Tahni Emperor.” He laughed again, just a chuckle. “You killed him so you could take his damned hole…”

  I stared at the corpse again, wishing I could call up the Priority Target photos from my mission brief on my HUD. I couldn’t operate the controls on my left forearm though because I couldn’t move the fingers on my right hand at the moment.

  “Shit,” I muttered, feeling the wooziness take hold again. “They all look alike to me.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I picked my way carefully along the gravel path, trying not to step into the mud that filled every pothole. It wasn’t raining at the moment, but it had just hours before. You could feel it in the wind, smell the tang of ozone from the thunderstorms that had just passed. There was a heaviness to the air, an oppressive humidity that trapped the summer heat of the primary star under the thick cloud cover.

  It would have been nicer to come back in spring, but the Tahni had their own sense of timing. Tahn-Skyyiah had fallen only two months ago, the war ending with the surrender of their top generals and ministers shortly after the death of the Emperor.