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Recon- the Complete Series

Page 62

by Rick Partlow


  “We didn’t know if they got you, too, sir,” Sato said, sighing out a breath. “Gurley and I were out servicing a glitching security sensor when the shuttles hit. We took cover in the woods and waited it out.” She looked around uneasily. “There’ve been enemy patrols sweeping through at intervals, but we managed to avoid them. We waited till they passed by before we started looking for survivors.”

  “Did you find anyone else?” Calderon asked, his voice taut with what seemed like real anxiety. Well, at least he cared about his people, even if he didn’t give a shit about the civilians.

  “No, sir,” Sato admitted. “If anyone else made it, they scattered and they haven’t come back. And with the jamming, we can’t read their IFF or contact them on their ‘links.”

  “Shit.” I could barely hear his voice as he looked down at the ground. I heard him suck in a breath and try to compose himself. “All right, we can’t wait around here with the Cult sending in patrols.” He looked at me, not seeming too happy about it. “Our lighter is still on its supply run and isn’t scheduled back for days. Can we get to your ship?”

  “We sent it off to the nearest Instell ComSat,” I admitted, feeling a bit idiotic. “To get further instructions from higher,” I amended only half-truthfully. Reporting Calderon to the military didn’t seem so important anymore. “It should be back in maybe twenty hours. We have to find someplace to hold up till then.”

  “What about Koji?”

  I looked around at Bobbi’s question and saw her and Kurt walking up from the wood line. I wanted to snap at her for not staying back like I’d ordered, but she could see as well as I could that it wasn’t a trap.

  “That cockroach has to have a bolt-hole somewhere,” she went on. “He owes Damiani, so maybe he’ll let us get in there with him.”

  “Koji?” Calderon asked me, face wrinkling in thought. “I’ve heard that name before.”

  “He’s an arms dealer,” I explained. “A go-between, a broker. He has a warehouse in town.”

  “The Cult is going to be all over Shakak,” the officer pointed out. It wasn’t a vigorous objection, just a warning; probably because he didn’t have any better ideas.

  “Freeze in the woods or take our chances in the city,” I countered. I smiled at him thinly. “I’m a Trans-Angeles boy; I don’t like the cold.” I waved a hand towards town. “Let’s go.”

  ***

  Shakak had already been a city under siege; now it had become a full-blown battlefield. We’d come in from the river to avoid their patrols, but it had taken nearly an hour, and now the system’s primary was just below the horizon and rising, and the dawn was cold and grey and hideously bright. Everything about Shakak looked uglier in the light of day, with the black scars of the damage naked and yawning like the death wounds on a rotting corpse.

  The riverside district of the city had once been almost scenic, from the photos in Divya’s intelligence report, something you might have expected from one of the smaller, tourist cities on Earth or one of the larger colonies. Restaurants and clubs and the villas of the larger business owners had crowded the banks of the Nigamo River, and even the criminal class that ruled this world had enjoyed an illusion of normalcy there.

  Now, those buildings were smoking rubble that choked the streets around them, serving only as cover for the two armies skirmishing across the city. I could hear the report of their weapons over the rush of the river, see the flashes of pulse lasers and the high-pitched crack of rocket rifles, punctuated by the explosions of grenades or IEDs. Billows of black smoke met the low clouds a few hundred meters over the city, more of the sooty columns sprouting up every minute.

  The combatants were dark silhouettes in the shadowed grey light, with the occasional glint of a reflection off polished metal prosthetics the only clue as to who might be fighting. Turbines screamed overhead as a shuttle hunted infestations, cleansing them with the holy fire of a proton cannon. The Skingangers had no aircraft, and what ground vehicles they used didn’t last long; I had seen two destroyed by the shuttle in just the few minutes it took us to get to the foot bridge.

  “Jesus,” Corporal Gurley hissed, his voice wavering. “We’re going into that?”

  I looked back and saw Sgt. Sato glaring at him.

  “When you signed on,” she muttered, “did you think there wouldn’t be any danger involved? I’m sure it’s right there in the fucking job description.”

  “Shut up and keep moving,” Calderon ordered them, saving me the trouble.

  We were too bunched up for my liking, but there was nothing to be done about it. Marquette was an incoherent mess who could hardly walk on his own, and the two junior NCOs from Savage/Slaughter were unarmored and only lightly armed. They all needed their damned hands held and it was exactly the kind of detail I hated, more so because they weren’t even strictly part of my job.

  The bridge was a choke-point, even though I didn’t see any of the Cultists or the Skingangers close by, so I sent Bobbi across first with Waugh, Sanders and Victor to secure the far side. I crouched behind the stone wall that lined the far bank of the river, with Marquette slumped between me and Victor, and waited for Bobbi’s signal to cross.

  “I was a fucking idiot.”

  I started, not recognizing the voice, then abruptly understood it was Marquette. His voice was higher pitched than I’d thought it would be, breaking slightly as he shivered inside the borrowed jacket. His face was long and horsey and lined with stress and years on his own without access to all but basic medical care. He was probably only twenty years older than me, but he looked decades beyond that.

  “I saw all that shit, all the Predecessor tech,” he mumbled, eyes downcast as if he were talking to himself, “and all I thought about was how much I could sell it for.” He shook his head slightly. “I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.”

  “Well, you probably shouldn’t have tried to sell it to a bunch of cultist nutcases,” I allowed quietly, “using a couple of criminal opportunists as go-betweens. But I’ll give you a pass since this is probably the first treasure trove of ancient alien technology you’ve found, right?”

  He looked at me sharply, like he’d just realized he’d been talking out loud.

  “Who the hell are you?” He demanded, some semblance of rational thought returning to his eyes.

  “I’m Randall Munroe,” I told him. “I’m also the reason you’re not sitting drugged in the Sung Brothers’ cell or being hauled away by Predecessor Cultists right now.”

  He seemed to consider that for a second, then nodded.

  “Thanks.”

  “Much as I’d like to claim it’s because I’m a humanitarian,” I admitted, “it’s more that I don’t want to hand magic weapons over to a bunch of criminals or fanatics.”

  “Yeah?” He eyed me suspiciously. “And who do you want to hand them over to?”

  I was saved from having to answer that by Bobbi waving to signal for the rest of us to cross over. I nodded to Calderon and let him and his NCOs lead us over the footbridge at a quick trot, mostly so I could keep an eye on them. Next, I sent Kurt forward with Marquette, then Vilberg and I brought up the rear. Vilberg walked backwards, I noted with approval, keeping an eye out on the dirt road that ran along the riverside behind us. He seemed well-trained, whether by Fleet Search-and-Rescue or the Savage/Slaughter mercenary unit I didn’t know.

  We plunged into the carnage, and it reminded me of nothing so much as dropping into the Tahni capital city during the invasion of their homeworld at the end of the war. Confusion and fire and wreckage and gunfire and the sounds of battle from every direction, and you quickly reached the point where you just couldn’t keep track of it all and you got tunnel vision. I tried to fight it, but it was even harder without my helmet’s Heads-Up Display to feed me sensor information and build a more complete picture of the battlefield.

  I could tell, at least, that the fight had moved out of what was left of Shakak’s entertainment district. I gestured t
o Bobbi with a fist-pumping motion to move out double-time, not wanting to wait for the next wave to crash into the area. Marquette struggled to keep up with the quick trot, and I noticed Kurt’s left hand on his back, half supporting the older man and half pushing him forward.

  Just another couple kilometers, old man, I urged him silently.

  We’d made it to the edge of the industrial district when Bobbi suddenly stopped and motioned for everyone to get to cover. I joined Kurt and Marquette behind a retaining wall surrounding the storage area of one of the smaller bars, pulling the older man down when he tried to stick his head up and look around. Someone was coming; I could hear their heavy footsteps in the alley between the warehouses across the street, pounding with urgent desperation as they fled from whatever was on the next block over. I stretched my Gauss rifle over the top of the wall and waited.

  There were two of them, Skingangers, both hairless and dressed alike in sleeveless, armored vests and baggy shorts that left their bionics visible. Looking at them, almost identical, I was reminded of my great-grandfather’s sarcastic remark about the fashion trends of my generation: “They want to be different, just like everyone else.” Whatever their motivation for becoming cyborgs, their motive for running through that alley was fairly obvious; they were being chased by what looked like a whole squad of Predecessor Cultists. I could see them coming from the next block over, but we couldn’t fire on them without hitting the running Skingangers.

  Then that wasn’t a problem anymore: a coruscating lightning storm of laser pulses ripped through the alley and tore the Skingangers apart in a spray of blood and sparks and vaporized flesh.

  Go back the way you came, I thought hard at the Cultists who’d been hunting them. They’re dead, you can just turn back around and go back the way you came…

  They didn’t. I could see they wouldn’t. They didn’t even slow down, just rushed down the alleyway, heading straight for us. They’d probably seen us on thermal even before they’d opened fire on the Skingangers, and they weren’t well trained enough to back off and try to flank us.

  “Fire!” I yelled, already sighted in and pressing the trigger.

  The Cultists were wearing military-grade armor, so the tungsten slugs didn’t cut down three of them at a time, the way they might have with the pirate raiders. The first rank of three fighters fell, each hit multiple times, but that gave the ones behind time to throw themselves down and use their comrades’ corpses as cover…and to return fire.

  Their field of fire was limited by the walls on either side of them, but I was directly in front of the mouth of the alley and I ducked down instinctively just as laser pulses began to hit on the other side of the stone wall. Rocks charred and cracked and split apart as the lasers superheated them and I knew we couldn’t stay there.

  “Break contact!” I yelled the command even though I didn’t need to; Bobbi and the others would get it over their helmet receivers from my ‘link and Calderon and his people wouldn’t be able to hear me over the gunfire. I just hoped they had the sense to follow us.

  Victor grabbed Marquette by the back of his jacket’s collar and dragged him back across the ground, below the level of the wall, and I followed them as they crawled out of the cone of fire. Lasers were cutting through the wall, near the top, passing just over our heads in sprays of hot gas and molten rock and I bit off a curse as a speck of the white-hot material grazed the back of my neck. I wished for about the hundredth time that I had my helmet back, but that ship had sailed, so I just kept high-crawling and resisted the urge to rub my neck.

  “Munroe,” Bobbi’s voice sounded in my ear bud. “Go!”

  I heard Gauss rifles discharging and I knew that meant that Bobbi’s team had made it out of the enemy’s cone of fire and were laying down a covering barrage for us. Kurt was already pulling Marquette to his feet, and I saw Vilberg running across from the decorative fountain where he’d sheltered. I jogged way too slow, staying behind Marquette to watch Kurt’s back and imagining I could feel the lasers slicing the air centimeters behind me.

  Nothing hit us, though, and in seconds we were running around the far side of one of the two warehouses, trying to put distance between us and the Cultists. There were bodies and pieces of bodies littering the next street over, strewn about like trash thrown into the street. Their blood stained the pavement, and steam rose off still-warm corpses into the cold morning air. Some were Cultists, but most were Skingangers, unarmored except for their bionics and those had proven inadequate protection against military-grade lasers.

  I tried not to look at them, but I couldn’t help myself; there was no way to avoid it if I wanted to avoid stepping on them. The flesh was burned away from the cybernetics, and in death, they seemed even more machine than human. Calderon paused by one of the bodies, picking up a rocket carbine that had fallen beside the cyborg, and pocketing a couple spare magazines.

  “Gurley,” he ordered the corporal, who only had a sidearm, “find a weapon.”

  The corporal nodded, shoving his pulse pistol into its holster and bending down to try to take a carbine off a Skinganger with a bloody, ragged hole through the right side of his chest. He nearly had it clear when a metal hand seized his wrist and he yelled in shock. I swung my Gauss rifle around, but the wounded cyborg wasn’t attacking, just holding him in place. The Skinganger raised his head, all organic except for one bionic eye that glowed green. His mouth was twisted into a grimace of pain and hopelessness and he licked uselessly at dry lips.

  “Don’t…” He tried to talk, wheezing and gurgling with one lung filling with blood and the other burned away. “Don’t want to die…”

  I grunted softly. I’d figured these guys wouldn’t care much about living or dying, but I guess that was one bit of humanity they couldn’t replace.

  “Flesh…” the cyborg rasped his last breath. “Too soft…”

  His hand slipped off of Gurley’s and the man jerked away reflexively, taking the carbine. He looked down and gingerly pulled a few spare magazines from the dead cyborg’s chest pouch, then quickly stepped away, muttering curses under his breath.

  “We’re less than a kilometer from Koji’s warehouse,” Bobbi said over her external speakers. “Keep moving.”

  I scanned the streets behind us carefully, watching for threats and also, curious, watching for any sign of civilians. I hadn’t noticed any among the dead; maybe by now, they knew enough to keep their heads down. I didn’t see any of them out, and hadn’t noticed any sign of habitation in the few houses crammed into the gaps in the industrial and entertainment districts---the ones that weren’t already destroyed, anyway. If they were home, they were hunkered down.

  “What the hell’s that noise?” It was Vilberg talking, and he was wearing a helmet, so he heard the sounds over its augmented sensors before I did. “This HUD is saying it’s maybe a hopper, but who’d be dumb enough to fly one right now?”

  Shit.

  “Get to cover!” I yelled, and I realized Bobbi was saying the same thing over my ‘link.

  I pushed Kurt and Marquette towards the open doorway of a workshop that had half collapsed, but it was too late. I could see it now, coming in low over the rooftops, the grey of its skin blending in with the low clouds.

  It was a drop pod, like the ones Savage/Slaughter had used on that moon, and it was heading straight for us, its chin turret already turning our way. This building wouldn’t be any cover at all for the weapons it would be carrying unless we could find a basement, and we didn’t have time for that. We had seconds left to live.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Kurt,” I yelled at the big man, who was guiding Marquette by the scruff of the neck, “take him and run! Vilberg, help me shoot this fucking thing down!”

  I crouched down more from instinct than anything else, knowing it wouldn’t do a damned bit of good, and I opened fire as soon as the lightly-armored ducted-fan hovercraft appeared in the Gauss rifle’s sights. The buttstock of the rifle punched at my shoul
der with bruising force as I fired off ten rounds on full-auto; I saw the drop pod jink right out of the sighting camera and I knew I must have hit it. I looked up over the weapon’s sight and tried to get a bead on the thing, but it was dancing across the sky with more agility than I could follow using what the Marines had called the MK-I eyeball.

  Vilberg tried to shoot at it, but I knew he missed because I knew I would miss and I was pretty damned confident I was the better shot of the two of us. Maybe if we could keep it trying to outmaneuver us, though, it wouldn’t have time to target us. Then I saw the puff of light smoke from its chin cannon and I dove away from the front of the shop doorway, hands covering my head as I hit the pavement.

  The abandoned shop exploded outward in a shower of wood, buildfoam and cement, and a concussive wave slammed into me hard enough to roll me across the pavement. The breath went out of me and I gasped it back into my lungs as I dug a hand into the gravel and got my feet underneath me. I ran, not knowing if Vilberg was following me or even alive, not knowing which direction the others had gone. More explosions rattled the walls of the buildings around me, shifting rubble and starting new fires to char what was already burned.

  I wasn’t in a panic, but I was damned close. I knew splitting up was the only way to keep that drop pod from getting us all with one volley, and I’d made myself a target to keep the others safe, but on the other hand, Shit, I’d made myself a target…

  I wasn’t quite running blind. I had a good idea of which direction we’d been heading, and I was trying really hard with every turn I made to stay on a general course for Koji’s warehouse while still staying out of the pod’s targeting systems. It wasn’t easy; he was alternating between chasing me down every street at below rooftop level, or hopping over buildings and dropping bursts of grenade cannon fire down on top of me.

 

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