Recon- the Complete Series

by Rick Partlow

  Then the others were piling out of the back of the truck, shooting as they came and sending the Cult fighters scrambling for cover and not paying much attention to how accurately they were returning fire. They were back on their heels, not ready to fight, but it wasn’t them I wanted to fight.

  I saw Israfil running for the closest shuttle, dragging Marquette by an arm while three of his bodyguards interposed themselves between them and us. The shuttle had just settled down on its landing carriage and the belly hatch was lowering slowly; I could still get to them in time. I was pumping tungsten slugs into the bodyguards when I noticed that the other shuttle hadn’t quite landed…and it was spinning around on the hot wash of steam from its belly jets, pointing its nose towards us.

  “Down!” I screamed, higher pitched than I’d intended and filled with sheer panic.

  I took my own advice, throwing myself to the dirt and covering my head with my hands just before the shuttle fired its proton cannon. A second sun erupted from less than a hundred meters away, washing out my vision even with my eyes closed and my face buried in the dirt. There were stars in my eyes and a deafening roaring in my ears that wouldn’t go away for several seconds, and the ground was shaking and I was screaming with my eyes closed and my hands jammed over my ears.

  And then there was silence.

  When I opened my eyes, the shuttles were kilometers away and everything around me was on fire. The proton blast had blown right through our stolen truck and both the rental vehicles next to it, heating everything in them thousands of degrees in a microsecond and vaporizing them in fireballs of alcohol or methane fuel. I felt the flash exposure like a sunburn on the skin of my neck on those patches my hands hadn’t been able to cover, still felt the stifling hot waves washing off the fiercely burning wreckage of the last truck, which had exploded from the heat of the blast. I was a hundred meters from where the vehicles had been, and the intensity of the inferno was still enough to make it nearly impossible to breath.

  The crazy, fanatic fucks had shot that cannon at us even with a couple dozen of their own people in the line of fire. They’d been willing to sacrifice them all just to make sure they got away with Marquette.

  I tried to blink the starbursts out of my eyes as I pushed myself to my feet, but I was afraid of what I would see if I did. No one could have lived through that…

  I saw movement, and I raised my rifle to my shoulder, worried it was one of the Cultist fighters, but I saw immediately that the pattern of the armor was one of ours. It was Bobbi, and she didn’t have a scratch on her, nor a burn mark on her armor.

  How the hell does she do that?

  She wasn’t even stumbling or limping, just walking through the smoke as if it were just another day at work.

  “Are you okay, Munroe?” She asked me over her public-address speakers.

  I had to cough and spit out a mouthful of dirt before I answered, and it still came out in a croak. “I’ll live. Find the rest.”

  My stomach was roiling with the bitter taste of failure. I’d let them take Marquette and I felt an intense, itching urgency to get after them, to hunt them down and get him back before they could squeeze the secrets out of him. But I had no ship. The Cultists had made sure no one had a ship that could follow them: there’d been two starships on that landing field, battered and patched-together but operable, before, but now both were smoking, charred husks, destroyed hours ago by the assault shuttles.

  I forced those thoughts down, forced myself to think about the here and now, and taking care of my people. There was another armored shape rolling on the ground a few meters away, and I could tell it was either Kurt or Victor just from the size. Whichever one it was, he’d taken a fairly large piece of shrapnel in his left calf, and it had torn through the armor and out the other side. Blood had pooled on the ground beside him, but the armor was already injecting him with pain killers and coagulants and the flow from the wound had slowed to a trickle even as I walked up to him. I knew the leg had to be broken, though, and he’d need an auto-doc.

  “Victor?” I asked over my ‘link as I knelt beside him.

  “Kurt,” he corrected me, slurring the word slightly. “Victor was behind me…”

  “Stay down,” I rasped, patting him on the shoulder and then moving past him.

  I missed a step as the smoke cleared, blown by a stray gust of chill wind, and I saw Calderon’s two NCOs, Sgt. Sato and Corporal Gurley. They’d always stayed too close together, and now they’d died together. They hadn’t seen the blast coming, hadn’t taken cover or hit the dirt. The shrapnel and the fire had competed to see what could kill them first, and only a diagnostic scanner could have decided which won that battle. What was left of them was charred black and unrecognizable but for the height and build and the uniforms they’d been wearing.

  I shook my head. They hadn’t been very good soldiers, but then, maybe I hadn’t caught them at their best. Another movement caught my eye and I looked over to my right. It was a Cult fighter this time, struggling to rise. He’d had his helmet off and had been close enough to one of the explosions that it had burned away half of his face. Bare bone and charred muscle glistened wetly and I clenched my teeth to keep the bile in my throat from making its way out. He’d be dead of shock in minutes, he just wasn’t feeling the pain yet.

  I pulled my pistol out of its chest holster and put a round through his forehead from five meters away. He slumped forward, shivering once in a last firing of nerves, then falling still.

  I had a sudden thought I should check in with Bobbi. I couldn’t see her through the smoke drifting across the field, though at least the wind was clearing it up enough that I could breathe.

  “Found Kurt,” I reported to my second in command. “Got a broken leg, but he’ll be okay. Calderon’s people are both dead.”

  “I’ve got Sanders over here,” Bobbi answered. “Minor burns and a shrapnel wound.”

  “I’m okay, Boss.” I heard the tightly controlled pain in Sanders’ voice.

  “Roger that,” I acknowledged. “Watch for Cultist survivors. Some were in full armor.”

  Two more shapes on the ground, charred and blasted by debris. They hadn’t seen it coming either, hadn’t seen the betrayal by their holy man. Cultists, both of them, and their armor hadn’t been able to save them. Their bodies were on the edge of the proton beam’s thermal track, a broad, scorched crater across the dirt, still smoking and steaming, that led right into the vaporized middle section of our cargo truck. Anyone who’d been standing in the path of that blast would be gone like they’d never existed, and we’d never find a trace of them without a forensic scanner.

  The bodies closest to the track were lumps of coal, blackened and flaking and not even looking human anymore; but farther away, there were others who seemed barely touched. One of those was Victor. He was flat on his back maybe forty meters from the trucks, arms at his sides and his rifle still next to him. I could see through his faceplate that his eyes were wide open, and I felt a low moan deep in my chest.

  I knelt beside him and touched the medical diagnostics bar on his wrist-mounted control panel…and saw that he had a pulse. I felt a relieved breath gush out of me. According to the readout, he probably had a concussion but no broken bones, no internal bleeding.

  “Victor’s alive,” I said over my ‘link, mostly for Kurt’s benefit. I saw him blink, squeezing his eyes shut then shaking his head and wincing as he regretted it.

  “What the fuck?” He muttered, trying to push himself up. “What hit me?”

  “Proton cannon from a shuttle,” I told him. He chuckled and I knew he was thinking how much mileage he would get out of that story when he was trying to impress girls in the bars at home. “Get over there,” I nodded back to the left, “and look after Kurt. He’s got a leg wound.”

  He grunted in response and staggered unsteadily off towards his brother. I kept looking. Four more out there somewhere, unless they’d been vaporized, though only two I really cared abou
t finding. The wind was picking up off the mountains, sweeping over the valley in a blast cold enough to make my nose run, and the smoke began to clear.

  The upper half of Marjorie Waugh, Staff Sergeant, First Force Recon Marines, retired, was sprawled partly underneath a large, heavy section of truck transmission ten meters away from where the cargo hauler had hit the rental vehicle. Her lower half was gone, seared clean away by a burst of energy powerful enough to cauterize her across the upper thighs. That, in and of itself, might have been survivable if we could have got her to an auto-doc. But the heat had cooked her inside the armor and the interior of her faceplate was coated black with burnt blood.

  Damn. I’d liked her. She’d done her job and hadn’t complained or argued, and she’d been smart enough to know that the rest of us would take a while to accept her and hadn’t complained about that, either. She had a family, I remembered: a father still alive, mom dead in the war, and a brother who was a terraforming researcher working on Mars. I was going to have to notify them, assuming I lived through this. At least she didn’t have any kids; none she’d mentioned, anyway.

  I saw the movement out of the corner of my eye, coming from the direction of the last rise we’d come over in the truck, and I stopped myself just short of firing off a round before I saw that it was Calderon. He had a cut on his forehead that was trickling blood into his face, and he was covered in dirt, but otherwise looked little the worse for wear.

  “I got thrown off the damned truck,” he explained ruefully, jerking a thumb behind him at the rise in the road. Vilberg had hit it hard; too hard for Calderon to hang on.

  “You were lucky,” I assured him grimly. He looked around and nodded.

  “Where are Sato and…,” he began, but I interrupted him.

  “Dead. My troop Waugh, too.”

  I saw motion to my right and looked over. An armored Cult fighter had clawed her way out of a huge mound of dirt that had been thrown up from the proton blast, and solidified into a clay-like consistency from the heat. She had her helmet on but I could tell her gender by her size; all the males were bodysculpted to be the same height, which was about five centimeters taller than the women. She had lost her pulse carbine in the explosion and she was looking around, dazed and confused, as if she couldn’t believe that her High Priest had deserted her.

  I thought about shooting her, but she didn’t seem like much of a threat and I honestly couldn’t summon the mental and emotional energy for it. There was an explosion of dirt behind her that made me jump, and then something else was emerging from that mound: something big and metal and pissed off. Anatoly grabbed her by the helmet with both of his powerful, bionic arms and twisted ruthlessly. There was a sickening green-stick snap and the Cultist went limp. The Skinganger let her drop and turned towards me, the flesh parts of his face covered in blood and dirt and harsh, red burns.

  “Should have known,” I mumbled to myself. The two I didn’t give a shit about had both made it.

  Anatoly grinned at me through his horror mask of blood and dirt and began dusting himself off as he walked over to us. I kept looking, but there was no sign of Vilberg, and I began to morosely accept that he’d never made it out of the truck and had been vaporized in the blast.

  “Munroe,” Bobbi’s voice reached me over my ‘link. “Over here.”

  She was nearly a hundred meters away, out towards where the one shuttle had landed to pick up Israfil and Marquette. She was down on one knee beside what I thought, at first, was a burned and smoking body. As I got closer, I saw that it was just the armor he wore that was charred, and most of that was just surface burns, not from the star-like heat of the proton cannon.

  Bobbi was wrenching at the man’s helmet, and I was only a few steps behind her when she twisted it off and Braden Vilberg gasped in a deep and desperate breath. His eyes were wide and his face was red and covered in sweat.

  “Shit, that sucked,” he moaned, rolling over onto his side.

  “What the hell happened to you, Vilberg?” I wondered, happier to find him alive than I thought I’d be.

  “I was trying to get to the Cult priest guy,” he said, his voice dry and cracked. I pulled a canteen off my harness and handed it to him. He took it gratefully and downed a few mouthfuls of water before he went on. “The fucking shuttle took off before I could get to him, though, and I got my ass kicked by the belly jets.”

  “Well, you got closer to him than I did,” I said by way of comfort.

  I offered him a hand and he let me pull him to his feet, then grabbed my arm to steady himself when he almost fell over. I let him hold onto my shoulder and we headed back over to where Kurt and Sanders sat next to each other on the packed dirt, the others standing around them. Everyone’s eyes went to me.

  “What now, Boss?” Sanders asked, his helmet sitting in his lap. It was scored black and the faceplate was cracked, and I saw the raw, red weal on his neck where a jet of hot gas had burned through his gasket. Half his beard was burned away and his face looked lopsided.

  We were all beat to shit, and the only thing I could think to do was order them to help me steal one of the cargo shuttles left sitting on the landing field and use it to try to chase the Cultists back to their starship and somehow find a way to board it before they could shoot us down or jump to Transition Space. That was suicide, but the alternative almost made it palatable.

  “Munroe, do you read me?”

  I hadn’t realized until that instant that the jamming was gone. I guess it made sense, since the Cultists had been producing it and they were either dead or off-planet now, that they’d either turned it off or taken the jammers with them. But I knew it was gone because the voice coming over my ‘link was Divya’s, and there was only one place she could be calling from.

  “Go ahead, Divya,” I told her, feeling a surge of excitement and just a little sliver of hope. “Are you back in-system?”

  “We’ve de-orbited,” she said. “We’ll be at the extraction point in just a few minutes.” There was a pause and I imagined it was accompanied by the arching of an eyebrow. “Has anything happened while we’ve been gone?”

  “There have been a few developments,” I replied, “but I’ll tell you all about it in the air. For now, belay the extraction point and pick us up at the spaceport.”

  “Looking forward to hearing this,” she told me, signing off.

  I noticed Calderon and Anatoly staring at me, unable to hear the other end of the conversation.

  “Our ship is back,” I informed them. I focused on Anatoly. “I can’t give you the ride I promised just yet, though,” I said to him. “We’ve got work to do first.”

  “You’re going after the Cultists,” Calderon assumed. His lip twisted in a frown that was almost a snarl. “You’ll never catch them before they Transition, though.”

  “No, I won’t,” I agreed. “But I don’t need to.”

  “Marquette told you,” Anatoly said, shrewd and insightful for someone who was half a machine. “He told you where it was.”

  “He did,” I admitted. And I’d erased the damned recording quite thoroughly before I’d left the hide-out.

  “I know we’ve all done a lot more than we signed on for this trip,” I told my guys. “And we’re running short-handed and beat up. But I’m heading to the Predecessor outpost and I won’t have time for side-trips. If you don’t want to go with me, you’ll have to stay here and get a ride with Captain Calderon’s people when his lighter gets back.”

  “Who the hell you think you’re talking to, Munroe?” Victor snorted, sounding offended. “Kurt and I have been with you since the beginning. Where the hell else would we go?”

  “You know I’m in, Boss,” Sanders declared, trying to hide the pain behind a tight smile. “As long as I can use the auto-doc before we do any more fighting.”

  “You’re the captain,” Bobbi told me, her tone serious for once, “even if you were just a sergeant. I follow you.”

  I looked at Vilberg, who was wor
king his right shoulder painfully. He grinned in spite of it.

  “You promised me a job, jarhead,” he reminded me. “I’m holding you to it.”

  I nodded in satisfaction. Overhead, I could hear the roar of the Nomad’s turbojets as she descended out of the clouds.

  “Anatoly,” I said to the cyborg, “if you want to wait here for us, you have my word that I’ll come back for you. If you come with us, I can’t promise we’ll survive to get you to Canaan.”

  “Are you kidding, Munroe?” That eerie grin split his face again. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Holy shit, Munroe,” Divya nearly gasped the words, disbelief strong in her voice. “How the hell did you fuck everything up this badly?”

  I paused in stowing my armor in the locker in the Nomad’s utility bay to shoot her a scowl. The whole ship was a beehive of activity as everyone struggled to get the wounded treated, get their gear stowed and get everyone assigned a berth and an acceleration couch before we lifted off, but Divya had cornered me while I changed into fresh clothes and forced me to brief her on what had happened after she and Kane had left.

  “It’s not as if I could have predicted the Predecessor Cult would be here,” I grumbled, feeling a bit on the defensive, “or that they’d be preparing to attack the city. Things…precipitated.”

  “Would they have precipitated if you hadn’t decided to negotiate with the Sungs for the Predecessor tech right in front of the Cult High Priest?” She pointed out, almost yelling by now. “Jesus Christ, Marine, I knew you had more balls than brains, but could you at least try to use your head for something other than a helmet rest?”