Recon- the Complete Series

by Rick Partlow

  “I didn’t have you around to do the talking, Divya.” I grinned self-deprecatingly. “We each have our strengths: you’re the schemer and the negotiator and I concentrate on shooting people and blowing shit up.”

  “This isn’t fucking funny, Munroe,” she insisted, her face red with frustration. She looked like she wanted to hit me, her hands clenching and unclenching almost unconsciously. “You know what instructions I received from Mr. West? He told me to either come back with the location of that Predecessor cache or don’t come back at all, so I don’t find anything about this situation amusing.”

  My grin faded along with my conciliatory mood, though not for the same reasons that were stressing Divya out. West---and, I assumed, Andre Damiani---wanted the Predecessor tech very badly; but I didn’t particularly want them to have it. That hadn’t seemed like a problem before I’d lost Marquette…though, in retrospect, it had probably been something I should have thought about much earlier. I hadn’t been kidding when I said Divya was the thinker and the schemer.

  And now, much against my desires and my better judgement, I knew where the Predecessor outpost was, a priceless treasure trove of lost Ancient technology, and I had no choice but to take us there.

  Maybe she was right though, and it was time to start using my head.

  “I can’t promise you we’ll find the Predecessor technology,” I said to her, “but I’ll do what I can to get Marquette back before the Cult can get their hands on it.”

  “Oh, really?” She asked, eyeing me doubtfully. “And how do you plan on doing that?”

  “Do me a favor,” I said to her, “and go check on Anatoly. I don’t particularly trust him and I don’t want him left alone.” I shut the locker and headed for the cockpit. “And tell everyone to get strapped in. We take off in five.”

  Kane was alone in the cockpit, interfaced with the computer system, and he didn’t look up when I arrived, lost in some task he and the ship were performing. I slapped my palm on the little-used control behind the navigation console and a thick, BiPhase Carbide hatch swung down from the overhead outside the cockpit and sealed us both in with a solid thump of metal on metal.

  He did turn around then, looking at me with curiosity in his biological eye.

  “What?” He wondered.

  “I need you to set up a self-erasing navigation program,” I said without preamble. “I’m going to enter it and I want it to be totally sealed off from the rest of the computer system. I don’t want anyone able to access it, not even me. It needs to get us to the system I point it at, then back to Belial station, and then it needs to be gone without a trace. Can you do that?”

  The green eye closed for a few seconds and when it reopened, it focused on me.

  “Already did it,” he said simply. He nodded towards a haptic input hologram that was projected over the navigation console. “Input the coordinates and we’re done.”

  I interposed myself between him and the navigation console, hesitating as my hand hovered over the input. Kane could still see what I was typing, if he wanted. He could have lied to me, could have left himself a way to access the data.

  I either trusted my people or I didn’t. I hissed out a breath and entered the coordinates. The haptic input projection faded as if it had never been.

  “Where we going?” Kane wondered.

  Good question, I thought. All I had was a bunch of numbers from some half-crazy old coot who might or might not have been lying.

  “We’ll find out when we get there.”

  ***

  I stared at the still image of Sophia and Cesar projecting from my ‘link screen and wondered if I was going to be able to get to sleep. We’d been in T-space for hours, and I’d thought I’d take advantage of the normal gravity and the fact that with everyone shuffled around because of our casualties, I currently had a cabin to myself to get some rest. If nothing else, sleeping would be a good excuse to avoid Divya; she’d been badgering me constantly about where we were going and how I knew to go there and she wouldn’t take the vague reassurances I’d been giving her for a satisfactory answer.

  But sleep wouldn’t come; my brain wouldn’t shut down and I couldn’t stop running through one scenario after another about what would happen when we caught up to the Cultists at the Predecessor outpost. None of those mental simulations ended well. Even if we stopped Israfil from getting away with the technology, I couldn’t think of any way I could keep the discovery of the place a secret from Cowboy. So, I’d stopped trying to think and pulled up photos of Sophia and Cesar instead.

  The photo of my wife and son was a still from a video I’d taken of them both a few weeks ago on a family camping trip. Cesar was smiling broadly through a face smeared with dirt, his mop of dark hair tangled and matted, with a dead leaf and a piece of dried grass caught in it. Sophia looked at him with an expression that was a mixture of exasperation and unconditional love, which I hoped and imagined was pretty much how she felt about me, as well. There was a lot of Sophia in Cesar’s lean, tan face and dark eyes, and perhaps a lot of Tyler Callas as well. The changes the street surgeon in Vegas had made to my looks so many years ago were only cosmetic, not genetic. My son was blessed with the excellent genes my mother had engineered for me, and perhaps cursed with the features of the perfect child she’d created as her protégé.

  I couldn’t seem to get away from that little boy I used to be, no matter how far I ran.

  My stomach rumbled and I decided to let hunger drive me out of my hiding place. I could have just forced down one of the ration bars I kept in my cabin, but even shipboard food was better than that, for all that it was just soy and spirulina powder reconstituted and reshaped and made up to look like meat and pasta and rice and whatever by the processors. I thought longingly of the dinner at the Sung Brothers’ mansion and wished there were any practical way to bring fresh meat and vegetables along on a ship this size.

  It was good timing; the cabin doors were closed and it seemed like everyone else had decided it was a great time to catch up on some sleep; but they were apparently more successful at it than I was, or at least more patient. The only one in the small galley was Sanders, looking a lot better since his burns had been treated. He’d gotten rid of the other half of his beard and I thought its absence made him look younger and more innocent.

  “Hey, Boss,” he said around a mouthful of soy and algae disguised as chicken and rice. “Get any sleep?”

  “Not really,” I admitted, checking the food processor’s hoppers and seeing he’d left them partially filled. I left it set for what he was having and started the cycle, then sat down across from him at the flimsy, fold-down table. “You look better. How you feeling?”

  “Like a fucking proton cannon shot at me,” he admitted, shrugging. “Naw, seriously, I’m fine. Kurt got it worse; he’s still in the auto-doc. Bobbi said he had a ruptured spleen and a lacerated kidney and it’ll take a while to get him fixed up.”

  “Eli,” I said to him, and I saw his eyebrow raise, since I rarely used his first name. “Tell me something. You ever think about what you want to do when we’re done with this?” I waved at the ship around us.

  “Sometimes,” he answered readily, like it was a conversation he’d had with himself at some point. He paused and took a drink from a bulb of hot coffee. “I mean, unless I get killed doing this shit, I’ll probably live a long time. There are people who’re like two hundred now? I think?”

  “Yeah,” I confirmed. I’d known some of them when I lived with Mom. “Some even a bit older than that, but not by much.”

  A little over two hundred years ago was when a lot of the anti-aging breakthroughs had been made. They’d taken quite a while to filter down to the average citizen, and a lot of lower-class people and frontier settlers still didn’t get the full treatment, but it was starting to look like most people would live almost indefinitely, barring violence or accidental death. That fact didn’t seem to have sunk in with many people or most institutions though, wit
h the exception of far-sighted individuals like my mother.

  “I figure I won’t be doing any one thing my whole life,” Sanders reasoned. “I think maybe, when I give up on this, I might go back to my parents’ construction firm, if they’ll still have me. Maybe I’ll find a girl, settle down, have a kid or two and live that life for twenty years or so.” He grinned. “Then I’ll do something else.”

  The processor chimed at me and I got up and dispensed its output onto a plate, grabbed a bulb of orange juice from the fridge and sat down again, digging into food that was at least hot, if not honest. I downed a few mouthfuls before I continued.

  “Does it ever bother you, risking your life doing this stuff when you might be able to live that long?”

  “They don’t pay people like me big bucks to sit on my ass and not take chances, Boss,” he replied with a laugh. “If I’m gonna’ live a long time, I’m gonna’ need some cash.”

  I nodded, thinking that Sanders probably had the healthiest attitude about it all of any of us.

  “What about you, though?” He asked. “I mean, all of us can quit any time we want, but you have to do this until your uncle decides you don’t.” He frowned. “Are you worried about handing over this Predecessor technology to him? I know it would bug the hell out of me, if I were the one making the decisions.”

  I grunted at the banal understatement. “I’m not sure I have any real choice.”

  “You could run,” he suggested.

  “Somewhere like Peboan?” I asked. “Or Thunderhead? Run by criminals, where I’d have to worry about my family being mowed down in the middle of someone else’s power struggle? That’s the only kind of place I could get away from the Corporate Council even temporarily.”

  He shrugged assent and I trailed off. I looked at what was left on my plate. Suddenly, it looked even less appetizing than it usually did, but I shoveled it down, anyway, out of dutiful habit. In the sudden silence, I heard the heavy, clomping footsteps on the deck. I expected Kane, but instead it was Anatoly. He’d had the wounds to his biological parts treated and looked more like he had when I’d first met him in Shakak…though, somehow, smaller here, on board the ship.

  “If you’ll forgive me,” he said, stepping over to the table and locking himself in place, “I don’t mean to intrude, but I was in the cockpit. It’s a small ship and my hearing is, well…” He gestured to the audio input discs where his ears should have been. “…enhanced.”

  I felt a surge of annoyance and I didn’t bother to try to keep it from reaching my face.

  “Anatoly…,” I began, but he raised a hand to forestall my objection.

  “I understand it’s a social faux pas shipboard to eavesdrop, but I feel I have experience that may be instructive in your situations.”

  “What?” Sanders cracked, leaning back into his seat and eyeing the cyborg dubiously. “You think we should both get rid of our human parts and we’ll feel much better about life?”

  “It’s not a decision for everyone,” he admitted. “And if there were no Norms around, then who would we be different from?” The corner of his mouth turned up slightly and I chuckled despite my irritation. Either he was used to the frequent criticism or he was the most self-aware Skinganger I’d ever met.

  He shrugged, regarding Sanders. “Though, as you say, Mr. Sanders, you may live a very long life. Who knows what decisions you’ll make in another century or two?” Sanders made a face at that, but didn’t bother arguing with the Russian.

  “So, what’s your sage advice, Anatoly?” I prompted, hoping to get this over quickly.

  “I have been in several situations in my admittedly short life,” he told me, “where my options seemed limited, where I apparently had no way out. When I felt trapped in my brother’s shadow, frustrated by his unwillingness to fight for what he’d built; when my body was crushed between cargo containers in the hold of an independent freighter I’d signed on with as a spacer to work my way out of the Pirate Worlds; when I found myself an outsider on Aphrodite, looked down upon by others who saw my cybernetics as a weakness; when my new family, the Skingangers of Kennedy City, were threatened by the rising power of the Predecessor Cult; and now here, when everything I had built was destroyed in a day.”

  He paused, taking a breath, and for a moment, I thought I saw a very human pain in the set of his eyes. But then the part of him that didn’t want to be human anymore regained control. “But each of these opened up a new opportunity for me,” he went on, seemingly back in control and serene once again. “They transformed me into something stronger, better, harder…something more equipped to fight back against every obstacle the universe puts in our way. This time will be no different. And this is what I say to you two gentlemen: be transformed.” He grinned. “Perhaps not into a more perfect body, but into whoever you need to become to deal with the problems you face.”

  “I have a little experience in becoming a new person,” I said, perhaps a bit dryly, though he couldn’t know the why of it. “But doing that means leaving behind everyone who loved the old one, and I don’t know that I’m ready to do that.”

  “You will do it, though,” he assured me. “Or it will be done to you. There’s a poem I read a long time ago, in another life, which said ‘if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.’ Allowing things to happen to you changes you as surely as if you’d changed to keep them from happening. I’ve seen that, as well.”

  I couldn’t argue with that, so I didn’t try. I hid behind taking a drink from the bulb, the orange juice not as sour as the truth of Anatoly’s words.

  “So, what would you do, Mr. Transformer?” Sanders asked him irreverently, missing the change in my mood. “If you were the one who had to make the call? Would you tell your bosses about the Predecessor tech and fuck everyone else in the Commonwealth, or would you risk them coming after you for holding out on them?”

  “If it were me,” Anatoly answered readily, “there would be no issue. I have no loyalty to your society or your government. I would take the technology for myself and kill anyone who might give away my secret, then I would use it first to take back Peboan, then to forge a power base for the Evolutionist movement among the Norms.”

  I laughed quietly at the brutal honesty of his answer. I had to admit, it had its appeal: seize the Predecessor cache for myself, then use it to set up my own little fiefdom on one of the Pirate Worlds. I’d told Sanders it would suck being the pawn in someone else’s power struggle, but if I were the one taking power… I could bring Sophia and Cesar out there, where the Corporate Council couldn’t touch me, finally be free from Mother and Uncle Andre. That had been my great grandfather’s dream.

  “There’s only one problem with that idea, Anatoly,” I said to him, carrying my tray to the recycler.

  “And what is that, Mr. Munroe?”

  “When you take that kind of power,” I said, leaning back against the storage bins and regarding him coolly, “you attract the attention of the wrong kind of people. People who see everyone and everything as either a threat or an asset to be used. And those people send guys like me to take care of threats.”

  “And when ‘guys like you’ are the threat?” He wondered.

  “No matter how big you are,” I quoted to him, “there’s always someone bigger. No matter how much of a badass you think you are, there’s always someone badder. These people have the money and the resources to find someone bigger and badder.”

  “Then you’ve lost already?” It was a taunt, though it was couched as an interested question.

  I smiled and quoted at him again, this time from a book by Ferdinand Foch that Gramps had made me read. “A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.”

  “If you know your enemy and know yourself,” he rattled off Sun Tzu in reply, “you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” He cocked an eyebrow at me. “So how will you win this battle?”

  “You like quotes, Anatoly,” I said, shrugging. “I heard one, once
, from an ancient warrior named Bruce Lee. ‘You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend.’”

  Sanders laughed at that, throwing his head back.

  “What that means,” he translated for Anatoly, “is that he’s making it up as he goes along.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  One of the tricky things about travelling through Transition Space was that time didn’t work exactly the way the way it did in realspace. I wasn’t even a pilot, much less a hyperdimensional physicist, so I couldn’t tell you the why of it or if there was a formula that explained how it worked. But I did know that, unless you were travelling in the same drive bubble as another ship, time wouldn’t pass for you at exactly the same rate as it did for them. It wasn’t a huge difference, which was why convoys and mass attacks were still possible, but the greater the difference in the time and place from which you entered Transition Space, the more slippage there was.

  The upshot was, even though we’d hit the gravito-inertial Transition line only hours behind the Cultist’s lighter, and were probably heading to the same spatial coordinates, and were only going to be in T-space for a couple days subjectively, there was every possibility that we could arrive days later, or simultaneously, or even days before they got there. I was hoping for the latter, but we had to be ready for the other two possibilities.

  That was why we were doing our initial Transition into the system at the farthest entry point on its line, out near what the gravimetic sensors told us was an ice giant about thirty Astronomical Units from its primary. We’d hide our warp corona behind its mass, then orbit around the other side of it and sneak a look at our target before we made a shorter jump farther in-system.

  Kane swore it would work, that he’d done it before during the war. I found the whole business akin to black magic and just about as comprehensible, so I had to trust his judgement. I still felt nervous strapped into the copilot’s couch in the cockpit, beside Kane. Divya and Bobbi were behind us, while everyone else was either strapped into a bunk in the cabin or one of the spare couches in the utility bay.