by Rick Partlow
Shortly after you killed the Emperor, I reminded myself.
I’d tried hard not to let that story spread around. I’d let everyone think he’d been killed in the exchange of gunfire in the Throne Room and no one knew who’d fired the shot. I’d even had Cowboy use his Intelligence toys to monkey with the recording from my helmet camera. I didn’t want the fame and notoriety that would come with being a part of history. In fact, I wanted to get out of there as quickly and quietly as possible.
I’d applied for separation just as soon as I’d arrived back on Inferno. Recon was my home, the Corps was my life, but I couldn’t stay there with the threat of my mother hanging over me. Even with Cowboy’s assurances, I didn’t believe I’d be safe from her. I’d taken the first flight out to Belial, the big commercial station in the Alpha Centauri system, then converted most of my pay to Corporate Scrip and used that to pay for passage on a freighter. Another few bucks had gone for the hopper flight out here from the city, and they still couldn’t drop me any closer than this because the road was too narrow to land on way out here.
Everything I owned was hanging from shoulder straps on my back, and it wasn’t that heavy.
I could see the herd of elk out near the horizon, dozens of cows and their three-month-old calves, with yearlings mixed in, awkward and coltish. They were restless, shifting from one hillside to another. Something had them spooked. I paused between one step and the next as I saw the outline of that something at the crest of the hill closest to the road, backlit by the afternoon sun.
It was a saber-tooth. All the time I’d spent on Demeter and I hadn’t seen one, but there it was, squat and powerful and absolutely deadly. That had to be some sort of omen, I figured. I let out the breath I’d been holding and took the next step directly into a puddle that submerged my shoe up to my ankle.
“Shit,” I said with feeling. These weren’t Marine-issue boots, they were the best and only hiking shoes I owned now.
“You been away so long you forgot how to walk, Munroe?”
She’d stepped out of a bog at the side of the road, pulling herself up with the help of a sapling and sticking a tablet in a pocket of her vest. Her hip waders were coated with mud; her brown hair, grown long now, was tied into a ponytail and bristling with a few stray strands of grass that had stuck to it, and her work shirt was matted with sweat. It was Sophia, and she was beautiful.
“They told me back in Amity that you’d be out here,” I said inanely, feeling a grin spreading across my face.
“That cat,” she jerked a thumb back at the hillside, “has a transponder and I’ve been keeping tabs on her, recording her kills and cataloguing her scat. She has a litter of kittens up there.” She motioned at her waders. “It’s dirty work, but there’s no one else to do it yet. I heard the University is going to send some people out next month, but who knows? The war’s over, but everything is still messed up.”
“Yes, it is,” I agreed. “The city looks better, though.” I waved back towards Amity. The damage done by the Tahni and the further damage done rooting them out had mostly been repaired, or sometimes totally replaced. I’d also noted on the flight over that the algae farm had been rebuilt.
“Space Fleet Corps of Engineers took care of us.”
She paused and took a step closer to me, and I sensed a hesitation in her that made me want to curl up and die inside.
“Munroe,” she finally asked, blinking at something in her eye, “are you here to visit or to stay?” She rushed through the next few words before I could reply. “Because if you’re just here to visit, that’s fine too, we can have some fun and I know you love being a Marine, but I have to…”
I stopped her by pulling her into a kiss, suddenly not caring that I was getting the best clothes I owned covered in mud.
“I love you,” I told her, pulling my mouth away from hers just a centimeter, our cheeks still touching. “And I’m here for as long as you’ll have me, Sophie.”
“You’re not going to get bored living out here in the sticks?” She asked me, her breath teasing at my ear. There was a catch in her voice that belied the lightness of her words. “Cataloguing cat poo with me?”
“Maybe,” I admitted with a shrug. “And maybe you’ll get tired of me when there’s no adrenalin rush, nobody shooting at us. But I’m willing to give it a shot for a while and find out.”
“A while?” She repeated, raising an eyebrow.
“Yeah, I was thinking ten, maybe fifteen years?” I suggested. “Just for a start.”
“Good idea,” she laughed softly, throatily. “Don’t want to screw things up by planning too long-term.”
She kissed me this time and we stopped talking.
I had things I’d have to tell her, secrets I’d have to reveal, but all that could wait. Whatever Cowboy wanted from me could wait, too. Right now, for the first time in what seemed like ever, I didn’t feel a million years old with the weight of the world on my shoulders.
For now, I was twenty-two and had a million years ahead of me.
Recon, Book Two:
A Wolf in the Fold
Chapter One
The wet grass at the crest of the high hill coiled beneath us, a carpet of discomfort that soaked through my shirt in the chill dampness of the autumn morning. I tried to ignore it, tried to keep the camera steady as I panned across the breadth of the massive herd of elk. They covered the rolling hills below us, shifting this way and that at the insistent bugling of their horned lord, the brawny bull with a fire in his eyes and wickedly curved antlers arching over his shoulders like sabers.
“You think we’re far enough away?” I asked Sophia, not whispering but speaking in a normal, low tone that carried much less distance. “He looks crazy with the rut.”
“We’re just under a hundred meters,” she responded in the same tone, shrugging slightly, not looking away from the binoculars. “He won’t notice us.”
Sophia’s dark brown hair was pulled back into a long ponytail, gathered away from the soft curves of her high cheekbones except for a few strands that had escaped and clung tenaciously to her ears. I caught the corner of her mouth turning up slightly. “Besides, he’s going to have other things to worry about in a couple minutes.”
She tapped me on the arm and pointed off to the left, where the trees skirted the river. I turned the small camera in that direction, just now noticing the black, white and grey shapes slinking up between the trees.
“Four greys, a white and three blacks,” Sophia listed off, almost in a mnemonic chant. “That’s the Twisted Creek pack. They had twelve until this last winter, when the Round Hills killed their old Alpha Male and three of the females went over to the White Crest pack.”
“You know,” I said, not for the first time, “you could have the drones take footage of this instead of making me run the camera.”
“I sure could, sweetie,” she agreed, smile broadening. “But then I wouldn’t have an excuse for bringing you along, would I?”
“Good point,” I acknowledged, leaning over to kiss her on the cheek. “Between your job and mine, we don’t get much downtime, do we?”
“No one said you had to go work for the planetary constabulary, love,” she reminded me. “I know the Demeter Ecological Survey would have let me hire you as a strong back. It’s been almost three years since the war ended and we’re still understaffed.”
“What I know about genetics, zoology, and ecological engineering could fit in a pamphlet,” I said. “Carrying a gun and being intimidating, that I know how to do.”
“Shhh,” she hushed me, lowering her binoculars, and pointing again. “Here they come.”
The wolves went straight for a calf only a few months old, born in the late spring. The mother tried to run them off, but their packmates circled back around to corner the young animal while the other elk edged away like a school of fish scattering before a shark. I looked over the top of the camera’s display screen, wanting to see it through my own eyes and not thro
ugh the filter of the device. This was too real, too raw for that. This was why I loved living here. The Revenant Forest on Demeter was like stepping back in time tens of thousands of years and watching an Earth before humans built their cities.
Here, animals that had been extinct for millennia, mastodons and saber-tooth cats and megatherium and dozens more, stalked and grazed and lived alongside wolves and elk and deer, all of them engineered and incubated here for the Revenant Project. Demeter was one of the oldest colonies in the Commonwealth, and when we’d found it, it had very little in the way of complex life. There was enough of an ecology of fungi and lichen to keep the atmosphere breathable, but not much more. It had been the perfect place to introduce Earth life without worrying about destroying an existing ecosystem, and it had been the perfect place to start the Revenant Project.
DNA samples had been harvested decades before and preserved and later duplicated; and here, they’d come to life. The Revenant Forest had been the first area they’d been reintroduced, and was still the densest concentration on the planet, but the ecosystem had been spreading across the temperate zones of this world for decades now, and there had been other introductions in the polar zones. If we didn’t screw it up and the Tahni didn’t invade again and force us to eat a bunch of the herd animals again, this place would be even cooler in a century or so.
And it was all playing out in front of me. The bull elk was rushing in now, but three or four wolves were snapping at him, trying to keep him distracted while the others finished off the calf. The poor thing was bleating in terror, blood running down its flanks from the wolves hanging off its haunches, sinking in their teeth. It was ugly and brutal and depressing, but I’d seen worse. I’d done worse.
In the year I’d been trapped here during the Tahni occupation, I’d done a lot worse. Left for dead in a failed attempt to take the colony back from the enemy, the rest of my Marine Force Recon platoon ambushed and slaughtered, I’d joined up with Sophia and what was left of the human resistance and did what I could to fight the Tahni with what we had. By the time the Commonwealth military had come back into the fight and given us hope we could win this thing, I’d developed an affinity for those wolves and the merciless efficiency they showed towards their prey.
“You ever see this before,” Sophia asked me softly, leaning into my arm and settling in to watch, “back on Earth, before the war?”
“I saw wolves a few times with Gramps,” I told her, eyes still locked on the sight of the cow and the bull trying to chase off the pack, wearing themselves out as the wolves dodged away nimbly. “In the Canadian Rockies, and again in Arizona. Different sub-species in Arizona, the Mexican wolf. I was never around when they made a kill, though.”
“Gramps?” Sophia repeated. “That was your great-grandfather, right?”
I nodded, realizing I hadn’t thought about him, or any other part of my former life, for most of the last three years. “Master Gunnery Sergeant Cesar Torres,” I said proudly, “old United States Marine Corps, back when there was a United States.”
“Jeez, how old was he?” She blurted, actually looking away from the kill.
“He’ll be 203 in a month,” I said, “if he’s still alive.” I shrugged. “Mom seemed to think he was.”
“You haven’t heard from him since you joined the Marines?”
I snorted at the understatement. “I haven’t seen him since the night my mother sent an assassin after her own grandfather,” I corrected her, “and I killed the guy, then changed my identity and went on the run to the Marine Corps.”
“I was trying to be judicious,” she said. Then she frowned, her eyes narrowing. “Do you ever miss that life? I mean, your mom was at the top of the Corporate Council totem pole. You guys were on top of the world, almost literally. This,” she waved around us, “seems like a pretty big comedown.”
Down in the river valley between the hills, the calf was kicking fitfully as the life ran out of it, the wolves hanging on patiently.
“No,” I said flatly. “I don’t miss it at all.”
After the feeding began, we started making our way back to the rover; we’d been there to capture the hunt. The road back to the main research facility was muddy and treacherous this time of year, but the utility vehicle was built for it and Sophia had driven these trails since before I met her. I didn’t even look up when the wheels lost traction for a heartbeat or I felt the rear end slide.
It was getting late in the morning and my stomach was growling; I was digging in the center console for a protein bar when my ‘link chimed for attention from my jacket pocket with the tone I’d assigned to my boss, Constable Nunez.
“Shit,” I muttered, fishing for my ear piece and pushing it into place. “This is supposed to be my day off.”
“Maybe Amity’s being hit by yet another crime wave,” Sophia murmured sarcastically. The tourist town was just getting back on its feet as the post-war recovery began to make its way out to the colonies little by little, and street crime wasn’t a major problem.
“Munroe,” I answered tersely.
“Munroe,” I heard Nunez’ deep bass rumble vibrate in my ear, “we got a…situation here.” He paused as if he wasn’t sure how to say it.
“What’s up, boss?” I asked him, frowning curiously.
“We had a registered bounty hunter land at the port,” he told me. “Big guy named Roger West, landed in his own private ship. Got all his clearances from the Patrol and everything.”
I felt the corner of my mouth curl into a sneer. Bounty hunters were a nasty reality of our interstellar civilization. There were too many jurisdictions, too many places to hide, and too few Patrol ships to keep track of all the criminals. The only way to ensure that people didn’t kill someone or steal a ship in one system and run to another with impunity was to allow licensed bounty hunters to bring them in for profit. No cop I knew liked it too much, though.
“What’s he want here?” I asked. Did we have a fugitive hiding out in town?
“You,” Nunez said and I felt my blood run cold. “He wants to talk to you.”
***
I fidgeted, tightening the chest fastenings of my uniform vest and checking the looseness of my pistol in its chest holster over and over as I watched the muddy road slide underneath the wheels of the rover. The pistol was comforting; it was the same model I’d carried in the war as a secondary weapon. We’d stopped at our house---Sophia’s house, really, the one the Ecological Survey provided---and picked the gear up on the way into town.
“Are you sure you’re not overreacting, Munroe?” Sophia asked me, eyes darting away from the road to watch me play with my weapons and armor yet again. “It might be nothing.”
“And it might be that my mother has put a bounty out on my head and this guy tracked me down,” I said, more harshly than I’d intended. I sighed, reaching out a hand to squeeze hers where it was tight on the wheel. “Either way, the uniform reminds him that I’m local law enforcement, and maybe the armor and the gun will keep him from trying anything.”
“I’m going in with you,” she said.
“I’ve got the Constable with me and…”
“I’m going in with you,” she cut me off with a look that many a Tahni soldier had seen just before he died, and I stopped objecting.
“Did you bring a gun?” I asked her instead.
She shot me an annoyed glance. “Of course I brought a gun. Why the hell would I go in with you if I wasn’t armed?”
I couldn’t help it; I laughed. She chuckled too, the tension broken for just a moment.
“We’ll get through this, Munroe,” she said.
Some of our friends thought it was funny that she called me by my last name, but the false identity the street surgeon in Vegas had picked for me all those years ago was Randall Munroe. I’d gone into the Marines immediately after and nearly everyone there, including your friends, called you by your last name. I sure as hell didn’t want anyone calling me “Randy,” so Munroe it st
ayed.
Amity came into view once we’d cleared the Revenant Forest. The city had been rebuilt since the war, and it had grown past its original boundaries as new hotels and restaurants had opened up to cater to the reinvigorated tourist industry. They were growing a little too fast in my opinion, and I’d begun to worry about the new resorts and vacation villas eating into the preserve’s land.
I let my eye wander to the sonic fences designed to keep wildlife out of the city, noting they were almost a kilometer farther out than they’d been when I arrived here, on that ill-fated mission four years ago. Just past them, a small herd of deer wandered, grazing on the lush grass and taking advantage of the greater discomfort the sonic barrier caused for predators.
There wasn’t much traffic this morning; it was a holiday, technically, Founders’ Day. It was a century and change on this day, local time, since the first Commonwealth Survey ships had passed through the wormhole jumpgate into the Cronus system and landed on the one habitable, Demeter. The resorts were still open because tourists didn’t take holidays from their vacations, but government offices were closed, other than emergency services. The Constabulary was an emergency service, of course, but I’d had the day off anyway since I had seniority over the rest of the deputies by all of three weeks.
The Constabulary was near the center of town, across the street from the offices of the Colonial Governor. Those had been rebuilt since the war; there’d been too much blood spilled in and around the old offices. I knew, because I’d been responsible for much of it. I was of the opinion that the new offices had less character than the old ones and tried too hard to look anachronistic, but Sophia assured me that was just me being prematurely curmudgeonly. The Constabulary was a utilitarian building that didn’t pretend to be anything but a police station, boxy and plain with a garage for a half dozen rovers and a couple ducted-fan hoppers. We really needed a flyer, but VTOL jets were still pretty expensive out in the colonies and Constable Nunez hadn’t been able to convince the Governor to approve it.
