Recon- the Complete Series

by Rick Partlow

  Sophia parked the rover just inside the Constabulary garage, in a space for visitors. She pulled a compact handgun out of the center console and tucked it into the pocket of her jacket before she slid out the driver’s side door. I steeled myself with a deep breath and got out of the car.

  Mother knew about this identity. She’d found me at the military base on Inferno when I’d returned from Demeter after the Fleet and the Marines had freed it, and it had only been some very quick thinking by my Company Commander, Captain Yassa, that had kept me from a quick flight home to Earth. It wasn’t at all unlikely that she had people looking for me still, despite the deal I’d made.

  I took Sophia in through the employee entrance to avoid the weapons detectors at the front door, walking through a narrow hallway that led up through the break room and into the offices. The station wasn’t fully staffed today, but there were a couple other deputies in the break room when we passed by and they mumbled hellos, barely looking up from the administrative work they were doing on issue tablets. Sophia was a regular fixture around here, and neither of the deputies was paying enough attention to notice I was strapped.

  Constable Nunez was sitting on the edge of my desk in the main office, dressed in our everyday blue utility fatigues, with his rank on his sleeve and the Constabulary seal on his breast pocket. He was a short, thickly-built man probably twenty years older than me, with forearms as thick around as my calves. No one fucked around with Esteban Nunez twice, which came in handy in our line of work.

  He looked me up and down, his bushy, black eyebrows shooting up at my load-out.

  “There something you want to tell me, Munroe?” He asked, deadpan, not getting up.

  I glanced around the room, seeing that all of the other desks were empty and we were alone. I wondered if that was on purpose.

  “Boss,” I said, trying to work up some moisture in my mouth, “there’s a possibility this guy might be after me.”

  “Are you telling me you’re a fugitive from justice, Deputy?” He was half joking, but I could see a hint of concern in his dark, hooded eyes.

  “Not from justice,” I clarified. I hesitated, wondering how best to say it. “It’s a family thing. I left on pretty bad terms, and my mother has enough connections to maybe set someone like this bounty hunter on me.” That was honest enough to not make me feel bad about lying to Nunez.

  “You want me in there for backup?” He stood from the desk, hand going automatically to the spot on his belt where his gun would be if he’d been carrying it.

  “I got his back,” Sophia said, hands in her jacket pockets. Nunez grinned at her, but with respect. He was a post-war immigrant, but everyone knew what Sophia had done with the Resistance during the war.

  “He’s in interrogation,” he told us, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the door leading out of the offices. “He was strapped, but I made him store it in a locker.”

  “Thanks, Boss.”

  I clapped him on the shoulder as I passed.

  “What if I have to run?” I asked Sophia very quietly as we passed into the broad corridor that led out of the offices, past the interrogation room and the holding cells and up to the lobby. “What if she’s found me and I have to leave?”

  “I always wanted to travel,” she said, grabbing my hand and squeezing it tight for just a moment before she let it go.

  Then we were at the interrogation room. I thought for just a moment about slipping into the adjoining observation room for a second and observing this Roger West on video before I confronted him, but I shook the idea off. Might as well get it over with. I put my right hand over the grip of my pistol, then palmed the ID plate of the door and stepped through.

  The bounty hunter was sitting on the table, arms crossed. He was a big man, tall and rangy, wearing vat-grown leathers and heavy spacer’s boots. He had shaggy, light brown hair and a drooping mustache and gunmetal grey eyes with faint lines at their edges that showed the weathering of a life spent outdoors. He grinned at me and saluted casually with two fingers.

  “Nice to see you again, Munroe,” he drawled with a strong Southwest accent.

  “Shit,” Sophia breathed softly, her eyes going wide.

  I let my hand drop away from the gun; it wouldn’t do any good against him.

  I nodded to him, shutting the door behind us.

  “Hi Cowboy.”

  Chapter Two

  Three and a half years ago, on Loki:

  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 Corpora
te 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 every 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.”

  Now:

  Cowboy was the only name I’d known him by. He was…he had been a commando in a top-secret unit working for Fleet Intelligence during the war. He had also been a sleeper agent for the Corporate Council. He had landed on Demeter along with his partner, Kel, and we’d worked together to prepare the planet for the Fleet offensive that retook it. That was when he’d met Sophia. She hadn’t been around for the deal we’d made on Loki, months later, but I’d told her about it since, and she didn’t look any happier to see him than I was.

  “So,” I said, feeling a sense of fatalistic acceptance settling deep in my chest, “is Roger West your real name?”

  “Close enough,” he replied with a shrug.

  “It sounds fake,” Sophia said sharply. “And if you’re a bounty hunter, I’m a fucking hairdresser.”

  He chuckled, as seemingly unconcerned with her angry disapproval as he was with the gun I carried.

  “Being a hunter’s a good cover for sticking my nose in some odd places.” He cocked his head, eyeing me with an amused self-satisfaction. “I told you I expected to have a position after the war, and I do. I take care of problems for someone…very significant in the Corporate Council. Someone even more significant than your mother.”

  “That’s a short list,” I said, a bit impressed. “What problem are you taking care of currently?”

  “What do you know about the Predecessors, Mr. Callas?” He asked me. I frowned, feeling my fingers flex of their own accord, as if they wanted to go for the pistol.

  “My name’s Munroe,” I reminded him, trying not to grind the words out.

  “Of course it is,” he said drily. “So, Deputy Constable Munroe, what do you know about the Predecessors?”

  “What everyone knows, I suppose,” I said with a shrug, trying to relax. I moved over to the table and pulled out a chair, falling into it easily, as if his presence here didn’t concern me. I felt more than saw Sophia moving behind me, her hands on the back of the chair. “They were around sometime tens of thousands of years ago, and they left us the map in the Edge Mountains on Hermes of the wormhole jumpgate network.” I paused and went on. “Some people think they actually created the network, and I guess they might have. I don’t know enough about physics to say for sure. And some people think that most of the habitable planets we’ve found were engineered to be that way tens or even hundreds of thousands of years ago by the Predecessors.”

  “But nobody knows,” Cowboy agreed. He pushed himself off the table and pulled out a chair opposite mine, sitting down with a lithe agility that belied his height. “But we want to know. The Corporate Council Executive Board has had its eye out for any possible remnant of Predecessor technology pretty much since they formed back during the First War with the Tahni. They examine every archaeological report, they chase down every rumor and they don’t fuck around. Anyone who got their hands on Predecessor technology could destabilize the economy and maybe even challenge the Commonwealth military.”

  “So, you’re chasing a rumor?” Sophia asked from somewhere above me. “What do you need Munroe for?”

  “This particular rumor,” Cowboy said, his hands flat on the table, “is out of the Pirate Worlds, on a planet called Thunderhead.”

  I didn’t have to ask where he meant. The Pirate Worlds, inhospitable and barely habitable planets out at the edge of Commonwealth space, had been settled by criminals and anti-government types right after the Teller-Fox Transition Drive had gone on the market and opened up dozens of new systems that weren’t connected via the Jumpgate Network. It was technically illegal, but by the time anyone thought to try to stop them, we were at war with the Tahni again. Now, the Pirate Worlds were the headquarters of a half dozen criminal syndicates and the fodder for every action movie and ViRdrama that had come out for years now.

  “How would someone out in the Pirate Worlds get their hands on a Predecessor artifact?” I asked him.

  “And what do you need Munroe for?” Sophia repeated. “Why can’t you check on this rumor yourself?”

  “If I knew how, I wouldn’t need to investigate it,” Cowboy said with obviously strained patience, eyes flashing between the two of us. “I just know that Abuelo has been hiring any scientist with ties to Predecessor research who’ll take his money.”

  “Abuelo?” I repeated, squinting in confusion.

  “That’s the man who runs Freeport, the largest city on Thunderhead,” Cowboy supplied. “No one knows much about him before he arrived on the planet sometime during the war. They say he killed the old boss, a miserable bastard named Crowley, and took over his syndicate…and the fairly extensive anti-spacecraft defense system that allows him complete control over planetary orbital traffic.” He looked up at Sophia, who was still standing just behind me. “And I need Munroe because there are people on Thunderhead who know who I am. If they saw me nosing around, they’d warn Abuelo and he’d dig himself a hole and pull it in after him.”

  I laughed and shook my head. “What the hell do you think I’m going to be able to do that you can’t? I don’t know shit about the Pirate Worlds, and I’ll stick out like a whore in church trying to ask questions about Predecessor artifacts on Thunderhead.”

  “What I expect you to do, Munroe,” Cowboy said, pointing a single, gloved finger at me, “is recruit yourself a squad, people who can handle themselves in a fight, people who served in the war with the Marines, preferably, and take it to Freeport. Abuelo is always looking to hire veterans with combat experience. You’re going to go to work for him, and then you’re going to find out where he has this Predecessor artifact.” He smiled broadly, in a look that would have seemed friendly on a real person.

  “Then you’re going to steal it for me.”

  ***

  “I’m going,” Sophi
a declared flatly, in a tone that would brook no argument.

  And yet I had to argue, and I had to do it well.

  I rested my hands on the hood of the rover, letting my head hang for a moment as I tried to collect my thoughts. Cowboy had headed back to the spaceport, giving me instructions to meet him at his ship in three hours, and I’d gone to Nunez and let him know I was going to need an emergency leave of absence for a few weeks. I’d told him it was to deal with family problems, which I guess was true, in a way.

  Sophia had barely been able to contain herself while I talked to Nunez, and she’d confronted me the moment we were outside in the parking garage. I looked around carefully, checking to make sure there was no one else around to overhear us.

  “No. For three reasons,” I went on before she could break in with an objection. “First, there’s no one else who can do your job, not yet. If you leave here for weeks, what do you think’s going to happen to the research? What are the glorified janitors you hired out of Amity going to do if the sonic fences break down and a fucking mastodon needs to be herded back into the reserve? Or a saber-tooth? Is Nunez going to bother to hunt down a stunner from your locker at the facility, or is he just going to shoot it?”

  I could see the cracks in her resolve, but she wasn’t even close to giving up.

  “You’re more important to me than the Revenants,” she said, slamming a fist into the side of the car. It felt good to hear, because the Revenant Forest Preserve was her whole life.

  “Reason number two,” I went on, grateful that I’d actually managed to think up a reason number two, because neither one nor three would have done it alone. “What about your family? If anything happens to me, the only person I care about knowing it is you, and I think I can count on Cowboy to come and tell you. But if we both wind up getting killed, your parents will never know where you went or why you never came back. Do you really want to do that to them?”