by Rick Partlow
He grabbed me by the shoulder and propelled me beside him as his magnetic boot soles kept him on the deck. I let myself be pulled along without a word, numb and drifting, literally and figuratively. I should be furious with him, I knew. I should be raging; he’d known that Gramps was Abuelo, he’d recruited Yassa to…
I blinked. Recruited her to what? Cowboy was a lot of things, but stupid wasn’t one of them. He’d have known that Yassa wouldn’t betray me, even with the drugs. He’d brought her in to…
“You brought her in so you could tell her the things you couldn’t tell me,” I said, my voice muted and unemotional. “So that it would come from someone I trusted.”
“Even strung out and half-delirious,” he said, shaking his head, “you’re smarter than ninety percent of the Corporate Council Executive Board.” He eyed me sidelong, an appraising look. “Ruthless, too. Not squeamish at all about doing what has to be done. I completely understand why your mother wants you back so badly…and why Andre Damiani would rather you stay gone, for now.”
I vaguely realized we were heading for the other side of the hangar bay, to where his ship was docked.
“If Uncle Andre wants me out of the way,” I asked him, “why doesn’t he just have you kill me?”
We were paused outside the lock to Cowboy’s cutter, its curved, delta shape visible in the display screen, and he peeled off a glove and touched the ID plate.
“Because Monsieur Damiani didn’t get to be the Director of the Council’s Executive Board by wasting resources.” The lock slid aside and West pushed me into the ship’s utility bay. “He just doesn’t want you being a resource for his pain in the ass sister.”
I caught myself against the padded bulkhead next to a storage locker and stared at him, curiosity warring against resentment, and both fighting a losing battle with fatigue.
“What’s the real reason you didn’t do this yourself?” I wanted to know.
“I wasn’t lying to you,” Cowboy insisted, closing the lock behind us. “There’s a man down there who knows me. You met him too, once, back on Demeter at the end. He’s one of the Glory Boys, so if he decided to pick a fight with me, it’s not certain who’d win.”
“You told me one lie,” I asserted. “You said it was a Predecessor artifact. That damned thing didn’t come from the Predecessors.”
“No, it didn’t,” he admitted with a shrug. “But that was information I couldn’t admit, or I’d have had to tell you about your Great-grandfather…and then, you might not have done it.”
“Just one last thing, Cowboy.” I felt like I was slurring my words a little and I concentrated harder, trying to make sure I stayed sharp, because this was an important question. “Did you really want that pod intact?”
“Oh, sure, if you could have pulled it off,” he told me readily. “We’d have studied it in a contained lab with a lot of safeguards, just like we have the others.”
I nodded, forgetting I was in microgravity, feeling the motion send me drifting. So, the Corporate Council had a bunch of those things stored in labs somewhere, each a little time bomb that could probably take down our whole civilization if we didn’t contain them in time. Just one more thing to keep me up at night.
“Why am I here?” I wondered, looking around the ship.
“Come here,” he said, waving me towards the other end of the bay.
Tucked in by the bulkhead there was what looked like an auto-doc: a transparent polymer cylinder lined with medical scanners and connected to spherical tanks of nanite-infused biotic fluid that could repair almost anything short of an amputation or major brain damage, given enough time. I pushed off from the storage locker and floated over to it, catching myself against the smooth, curved surface of the thing.
“Why couldn’t I use the one in the lighter’s medical bay?” I asked, starting to strip off my fatigue top.
“Because this isn’t a normal auto-doc,” Cowboy told me. I paused with my shirt halfway off, looking back at the thing again, more cautiously.
“This,” he continued, walking around the cylinder in the stiffly awkward manner that ship boots forced on you, “is a…” He shrugged. “…an investment by Monsieur Damiani. You’re already a nearly perfect physical specimen thanks to your mother’s genetic intervention. This is something to make sure you stay that way.”
“Can you be less specific?” I murmured, pulling off my shirt and tossing it away. It was soaked with sweat and stiff with blood and it rotated slowly away before slapping against the far bulkhead.
“One of the things that makes me and the other Glory Boys what we are,” Cowboy elaborated, “is a highly-specialized nanite suite tailored to our DNA, self-sustaining, self-replicating and powering itself from our own blood sugar. It can repair most injuries in hours, assuming you have the raw materials available in the form of body fat or undigested food. It can basically do almost anything an auto-doc can do, but it’s inside us.”
“Holy shit,” I said, suddenly alert, my eyes opening wide. “Is that even possible?”
“Oh, it’s possible,” he assured me. “But it’s really fuckin’ expensive. So expensive that only ten people have ever had the treatment.” He nodded towards the auto-doc. “Until now.”
I felt my face twist into a mask of disbelief.
“Why?” I restrained myself from shrugging, knowing it would send me floating off again. “Why me?”
“Because you’re his damn nephew,” Cowboy said in a tone like it was incredibly obvious. “And he put you in a position where you might get killed.”
The other shoe dropped inside my head.
“And he’s going to do it again.”
Cowboy smiled, touching a control and opening the auto-doc chamber with a pneumatic hiss.
“Like I said, you’re a smart kid, Munroe.”
I felt myself sag. I’m sorry, Sophia.
I pulled myself inside the chamber and closed my eyes.
“Let’s get it over with.”
Chapter Twenty-One
The house was dark when I stepped inside. It was after midnight local time in Amity, and Sophia was always asleep by ten; she had to get up early on work days. I didn’t have to turn on any lights, since I still had my contact lens in place. I didn’t have any luggage to unpack; everything I’d taken with me had been destroyed either on the Wanderer or in the ranch house. The clothes I was wearing had been fabricated on board the Medellin while I was in Cowboy’s auto-doc.
I found myself experiencing déjà vu for when I’d come back to the Marine base on Inferno after the Fleet had finally liberated Demeter. I’d stepped off the shuttle in Tartarus owning nothing but the dress uniform they’d given me on the troop ship.
And look how well that turned out, I thought acerbically.
But no, that wasn’t fair and it wasn’t true. I hadn’t been left with nothing then or now. I’d left everything that was important to me here on Demeter, and it was all still here.
Sophia was in bed when I pushed open the door to our room, but she wasn’t asleep.
“Hi, Munroe,” she said, and I could see her smile as she rose up on her elbow. She was wearing the same long T-shirt she always slept in.
“Hey Sophie,” I said, sitting down on the edge of the bed and kissing her. I pulled her against me, clinging to her with a desperation like there was a hole in my chest that only she could fill. “You shouldn’t have waited up for me,” I chided her gently. “You have to get up early.”
I’d sent her an Instell Comsat message from Hermes when we’d dropped off Sanders, Kane and Bobbi Taylor there, letting her know I was all right and would be back in a few days. Victor and Kurt had returned to Demeter with me to visit their family. I’d offered them jobs at the Constabulary and I thought they’d take me up on it.
“I’m the boss, Munroe,” she reminded me, chuckling as she ran a hand through my hair. It was a little longer than when I’d left. “I can come in late.”
She pulled me into the bed and I
barely had time to kick off my boots before she was stripping away my clothes, leaning down to kiss me more seriously. We didn’t say anything coherent for a while after that, and we didn’t need to.
Forever later, I rested with my arm around her shoulder, her head laying against my chest, the rhythm of her breathing slowly coming back to normal, and we both spoke at once.
“It isn’t over, Sophie…” I was saying at the very same moment she said: “Munroe, I want to have children.”
I felt my jaw drop open at the unexpected declaration, and saw the shock on her face as well.
“What do you mean?” She demanded, pushing herself up to look into my eyes.
I shook my head, trying to organize my thoughts enough to answer her. “This thing with Cowboy. They’re not done with me, Sophie. This is just the first installment of what I owe them, not hardly the last.”
“Oh,” her voice was small, her eyes narrowing at the thought. “Shit.”
“You want kids?” I blurted, still feeling like I’d been kicked in the head. “When did you decide that?”
“A while ago,” she admitted, laying her head back down. “I just figured there was plenty of time to talk about it. Then all this shit happened, and maybe…I don’t know, maybe there isn’t. What do you think?”
I started to answer, stopped, started again.
“Do you think I’d be a good father?” I waved a hand helplessly. “I mean, I had a pretty fucked up childhood.”
“You had Gramps,” she reminded me. I tried not to wince. I hadn’t told her about that, yet. I’d have to, eventually, but that was for the morning.
“Yeah, I did. I guess a kid could do a lot worse for a father.” I paused, trying not to think about having to explain to her everything that had happened. “Do you want to get married?”
Back on Earth, with the crowd Mom ran with, marriage wasn’t a thing. It was considered beneath our station, something the proles did, like religion and sports. The controlling class did things more logically, signing cohabitation contracts, or reproduction contracts detailing when each biological parent would have custody, who would decide education, philosophy, discipline, finances… But I knew attitudes were different about a lot of things in the colonies, and most people who wanted to have a family got married first.
Sophia took my hand in hers, interlacing the fingers and squeezing it tightly.
“I’d like that,” she said softly.
“What about me working for West? It’s going to be dangerous.”
“It sucks,” she said flatly. “I hate it, and I hate the idea of you leaving again and me not knowing if you’re ever coming back. If you want to run, you know I’ll run with you. I always told you I would.”
“How long can we run?” The question was rhetorical. I knew the answer: you couldn’t run at all from someone with a reach as long as Andre Damiani. “No, I think I’d rather fight than run.”
“Do you really think we can fight them?” I could tell by her tone that she didn’t.
“Not yet,” I said.
She still held my right hand tightly, but I lifted my left in front of my face and flexed it, almost believing I could feel the nanites Cowboy had given me coursing through my blood.
“They think they’re making me their weapon,” I told her. “That’s the thing about weapons, though; they can be pointed at anyone.”
Recon, Book Three:
A Battle for the Gods
Chapter One
I took a step out into the darkness and felt solidity fall away beneath me. The drop was over ten meters and every instinct bred into my brain from evolution and experience screamed at me that it was too far, that I was going to die. But I hung in the air for what seemed an unnaturally long time, and my conscious mind locked down on my fear with the knowledge that the gravity here was less than half Earth normal.
Everything was the muted color that night vision turned the world even with the best software, but I could see that the stone rising up beneath my feet was shaded a deep red, powdered with sand and refreshingly free of any large, ankle-breaking rocks. I winced involuntarily when the balls of my feet struck the surface, but I felt nothing more painful than a slight twinge in my knees as I stumbled forward, digging in my heels to arrest my momentum.
Behind me, the whine of the ship’s turbo-jets changed in tone and it screamed upward, the boarding ramp closing as the matte-grey delta shape climbed, having left its human cargo behind like a bird shitting before it launched. There were seven others lined up behind me, a light squad in identical armor, their faces hidden behind visored helmets. IFF transponders displayed their names like a halo in my Heads-Up Display, but I didn’t need them; I could spot them by their height, the set of their shoulders, the length of their stride.
They spread into what my instructors in the Marines had called a “Ranger file,” ten meters between us, rifles at low ready as they followed me and I followed the map coordinates projected in my helmet’s HUD. Without it, I’d have been wandering endlessly: the plateau was barren except for a kind of bacterial growth that wasn’t much more than a film of algae clinging to the rock, identical in structure to the rafts of it that floated in the moon’s seas, working as hard as they could to maintain an atmosphere just this side of breathable.
The gas giant it orbited described a glowing orange arc in the night sky, brooding and godlike in its dominance, blotting out the stars and trying its best to distract me from my purpose. I’d seen the like before, of course, both during the war and in the six years since. I’d traveled to more star systems than most people had heard of, seen wonderful and exotic things, met interesting people. And killed them.
We’d only gone a kilometer before we came to the canyon. It had been dug by a river when this moon was younger, but there hadn’t been any free-flowing water down in it for millennia. Somewhere down there, below the surface, there might be an underground stream, but it was hardly worth tapping into on a place this distant and desolate.
I waved Kurt forward and he slipped out of his backpack, yanking it open and pulling out a double-handful of self-setting pitons, then passing one out to each of us. I took mine far enough down to make room for the others, found a likely rock outcropping and jammed it into position, letting the chemical agent in the base bond with the rock for a moment before I let go. It stood in place another few seconds, then shuddered as it sank its telescoping anchor bolt deep into the rock.
I played rappelling line out from the spool attached to my tactical harness, then clipped the end to the bracket on the piton, giving it an experimental yank. It felt nice and solid, and at this point in what I might laughably refer to as my career, that was good enough. I barely hesitated as I threw myself face-first off the side of the cliff.
Again, that sensation of not falling quite fast enough teased at the edges of my thought, warring against the fluttering of atavistic, hind-brain fear of the looming impact. Both were wiped away as the motor inside the cable spool spun to life and began arresting my fall, lowering me to the ground forty meters below at just under the maximum safe speed for my mass and the local gravity. I grunted softly as I hit, bending my knees to absorb the impact, then touching and holding a control on the side of the spool to detach it from my harness and toss it into the sand of the old river bed. The cable dangled above it, grey and thin and nearly invisible in the gloom of the canyon. Even with the helmet’s night vision filters and imaging software, I could barely make out the rappelling lines of the others stretched out above them as I watched them free themselves from their hook-ups.
Down at the end of the formation, I could see one of them struggling with the spool attachment, trying futilely to yank it off the side of his harness.
“Problem, O’Neill?” I asked him, getting ready to jog back to the man.
“Damn quick-release is jammed,” the tall, lanky former Marine enlisted man muttered distractedly, still absorbed in his struggle with the equipment. “Sorry, Boss,” he added.
“I’ll take care of it, Munroe,” Bobbi Taylor told me.
I could see her moving back from her spot near the middle of the formation, a broad-shouldered, powerful figure with an impatient stride that matched her tone. She didn’t mess with the controls on the spool; she just pulled out her combat knife and sliced through the rappelling cable right at the dispenser. The cable was very strong for all that it was as thin as a twisted strand of hair, but the blade was a molecule wide at the edge and it parted the line like it wasn’t there. Bobbi slammed the knife into its sheath carelessly, despite its lethality, and unslung her rifle as she moved back to her position.
“Anyone else need their diaper changed?” She cracked.
“We’re fine, Mother,” Victor returned with a deep chuckle, echoed identically by Kurt a moment later.
I didn’t say anything, just waved them forward and headed down the canyon. It was seventy or eighty meters across and had once been deeper before the river had dried up and it had begun to fill with sand. Maybe water still flowed here in the rainy season, but I wasn’t planning on sticking around long enough to find out. Right now, it was a perfect place to hide a starship.
“How the hell does Divya even know these guys are here?” The voice was Bobbi’s, and I saw on the display that she’d asked it on our private command channel. She took her role as my Executive Officer seriously and didn’t question things like that in front of the others.
“How does she always know?” I countered, speaking low and casual not because anyone could overhear but more because it still allowed me to concentrate on keeping my eyes open for threats. “Cowboy gives her the intelligence. I don’t know where he gets it and I don’t need to.”
“Why the hell does a Corporate Council stooge care about one group of half-assed pirates raiding one another anyway?” She just wouldn’t shut up. I frowned. This wasn’t like her; but then again, we’d done three of these same sorts of operations in the last six months. “Don’t those damned stuffed-shirt Council executives have anything more important to worry about?”
