Recon- the Complete Series

by Rick Partlow

  “What are the odds the bad guys know about this trick?” I asked Kane as the computer counted down the seconds to our entry to realspace. “And that they left a drone here to watch for it? Or a mine?”

  “If this was a Fleet ship,” he allowed, more talkative than usual as he considered the problem, “even chance. These guys…” A derisive snort. “Wannabes.”

  “Some of these ‘wannabes’ are former military, Mr. Kane” Divya informed him, her voice tenser than usual. She was still pissed at me for not telling her everything. I hadn’t even mentioned where we were going until a few hours ago, and when she found out the safeguards I’d put in place to mask the location of the system, she’d thrown a shit-fit that had lasted nearly until we’d strapped in for the jump.

  I’d even gone back to Kane and had him write a program to scramble the constellations in the main view screen just in case she tried to ID the system’s location by their position.

  “Ten seconds,” the computer’s automated voice droned. “Nine, eight, seven…”

  I tried to clench my stomach muscles, but it didn’t do any good; it never did. Transition wasn’t a purely physical event, for reasons that had sent philosophers and theologians and psychologists scrambling for decades now. No one had won their Nobel Prize off it, though, and I doubted anyone would. Some things were just meant to remain mysteries.

  The ice giant was a dull, brooding grey ball that filled up half the forward screens, blocking out the inaccurate stars and the secrets of the inner system with its bulk. Kane made no announcement and asked for no permissions; he just engaged the Teller-Fox warp unit and sent us cruising out of the huge planet’s shadow, revealing the treasures it guarded.

  The system’s primary was a red giant that had swallowed up most of its planets in the nova that had formed it, leaving only three: the ice giant farthest out, a crispy cinder about the size of Earth’s moon closest in, and right in the middle, the place we were heading. The innermost planet was on the other side of the star when we cleared the ice giant, but the middle one, the terrestrial leftover, was visible on our optical telescope and I brought the image up on the main viewscreen.

  It was largely brown, but with an incongruous amount of blue and green mixed in.

  “How the hell is there life on that rockball?” Bobbi wondered, sounding scandalized. “When the star went nova, it should have wiped everything out.”

  “I guess the Predecessors and their terraformers arrived after things had settled down,” I speculated, chuckling in involuntary amusement at how readily we accepted things like that.

  “Yes,” Divya said softly, nodding agreement. Her eyes were fixed on the world, filled with an almost sexual hunger that had apparently made her forget how pissed she was at me. “That kind of power…”

  “Detecting a ship in orbit,” Kane announced, and a red avatar appeared over the image of the planet, high in a geosynchronous orbit over the world’s equator. “Right size for a cargo ship, or a lighter.”

  “Damn it,” Bobbi hissed and I shared the sentiment. So much for hyperdimensional physics and time slippage helping us out.

  “What about on the surface?” Divya demanded sharply, not looking away from the vision on the screen. “Have they landed a shuttle?”

  “Too far away,” Kane said. “Atmosphere’s masking any heat signature if they have.”

  “You can bet your ass they have,” Bobbi said. “The question is, how long have they been here?”

  I hit the intercom control, synching it to my implanted ‘link audio.

  “Everyone up to the cockpit,” I ordered.

  Time to get down to business.

  ***

  “The way I see it,” I announced, gesturing at the image of the planet still hanging in the blackness on the cockpit viewscreen, “we have two targets: the lighter, and whatever forces they have on the ground already.”

  “You have a military-grade proton cannon in this boat, right?” Vilberg asked me. “Would that be enough to take out the lighter?”

  He was crammed in beside Victor and Sanders just inside the cockpit hatch. We were in zero gravity, of course, but everyone was jammed in shoulder to shoulder, bulkhead to bulkhead, so no one was floating around with the air currents. Even with Kurt still in the auto-doc, it got damned crowded on a ship this small.

  “Maybe,” Kane answered the question for me, still strapped into the pilot’s acceleration couch but spun around to face the hatchway. “Depends on their armor and shielding.”

  “It’s a lighter,” I pointed out, “a converted freighter like the one you Savage/Slaughter people have making supply runs to Peboan. It has as much armor as they could afford to have retrofitted to it without compromising hull integrity and your guess is as good as mine as to how much that is. I also have no idea how well armed it is, but I imagine they’ve crammed as much of that stolen Sung Brothers weaponry as they could onto it.”

  “And they have at least two assault shuttles,” Sanders reminded me, “and those have proton cannons, too.” He seemed sanguine about the whole thing, as if listing off the enemy’s capabilities was somehow comforting.

  “And we don’t know if both shuttles are on the ground or they kept one on the lighter in reserve,” Victor put in.

  “We could fill a book with what we don’t know,” I interjected. “Let’s try to figure out how to use what we have. We can’t just blow the lighter out of orbit, even if their armor sucks. Marquette might still be on board. We need to insert a team and take control of the ship.” I sucked in a deep breath and grabbed at the edge of the console to keep from floating up into the overhead. “And we have to be flexible. If the shuttles have already landed, we need to get a team down there to make sure they don’t find anything to use against us.”

  “We’re awfully thin on personnel to pull off something like that, Boss,” Victor said, shaking his head, “especially with Kurt still in the fridge.”

  I nodded, wishing we had the other Simak brother back in action. The auto-doc was busy growing him a new spleen, which was taking a while.

  “Can’t believe I’m saying it,” Victor muttered sourly, “but I’m kind of sorry we left Calderon on Peboan.” The mercenary officer had told us he had to check for any more survivors from his company and wait for the resupply ship to come back.

  “I realize I’m not part of your unit, Mr. Munroe,” Anatoly spoke up from where the magnets in the bottoms of his bionic legs anchored him to the deck by the hatchway, “but I would like to volunteer to help in whatever capacity you need me on this operation.”

  I thought about that for a moment. I’d been a bit nervous about the idea of leaving him on the ship with just Kane and Divya, but did I really trust him to be down on the planet? On the lighter, fighting Cultists, though…

  “Okay,” I told him. “You’ll be in the boarding party. Actually,” I amended as the plan came to me in a flush of inspiration, “we’ll all board the lighter, first. That’ll be our initial target. We’ll jump in as close as we can, take out their communications and any point defense systems we can reach, then we’ll do an EVA into their docking bay and force our way in through one of the airlocks. We’ve got cracking modules that should be able to break into their security system, but we’ll bring breaching charges if it comes to that.”

  I rubbed my chin, seeing the pieces come together as if they were projected in front of me.

  “That’s when we’ll have to be like water,” I mused. Sanders snorted in amusement but the others just seemed confused. “If they haven’t landed yet, then no problem; we’ll take out the ones shipboard, and Kane will patrol outside the ship and make sure no one tries to sneak off in a shuttle.”

  “And if they have?” Bobbi prompted with a tone that spoke of strained patience.

  “Then you stay on the ship with Anatoly and Vilberg and secure it,” I went on, “while me and Sanders and Victor head down to the planet and take out whoever they have down there. Kane, you and Divya will sta
y on the Nomad and coordinate communications and provide air cover, and if there are any of their shuttles already launched, you’ll have to take them out.”

  I looked around, making sure to meet everyone’s eyes. “Any questions, suggestions, objections? Now’s the time, don’t hold back.”

  “How are we going to approach close enough without them seeing us steaming in?” Vilberg wondered.

  “Ship’s in a geosynchronous orbit,” Kane answered for me. “Jump in while it’s on the opposite side of the planet, insert into a lower energy orbit, then goose it. Simple.”

  “It won’t work if they’ve dropped surveillance drones or have the shuttles patrolling,” I warned, “but that’s another bridge we’ll have to cross when we come to it.”

  “I got a question,” Sanders said and I nodded to him to go on. “How’re we getting down to the planet? I mean, the Nomad ain’t gonna fit in that lighter’s docking bay, and it’ll take a lot of time to EVA back out to the ship, even assuming she’s not busy duking it out with a shuttle.”

  “If we can,” I said, “if one’s docked and available, we take one of their shuttles. If not, we improvise.” I shrugged, smiling. “Ship that size has to have emergency life-pods.”

  “Ah,” he acknowledged, rolling his eyes slightly. “Sorry I asked.”

  I waited a moment longer, but no one spoke.

  “Okay, if that’s it, then go get prepped. We have another four hours until the Cult ship is out of visual contact, and that’s when we’re going to jump in. At that point, everyone needs to be armored up, gunned up, helmets sealed and strapped in. Bobbi,” I said, turning to my second-in-command, “get Anatoly fitted with armor and vacuum gear, then issue him a rifle and ammo.”

  “Got it.” She nodded to the cyborg. “Come on, Tin Man,” she said, gesturing back down towards the utility bay, “let’s go see what size suit you wear.”

  The others began to trickle away back down the passage until it was just Divya, Kane and me in the cockpit.

  “Kane,” Divya said, her eyes fixed on me and the expression in them not at all pleasant, “give us the room.”

  “On a ship,” he grunted, unstrapping and locking his magnetics to the deck plating, “it’s a ‘compartment.’”

  Divya didn’t respond, just waited until he’d loudly and slowly clomped out through the hatch, then hit the control to close it.

  “I thought you were smart, Munroe,” she said with a cold disdain, “but now I see you just think you’re smart.”

  “Can you be more specific?” I asked her, trying to keep my face and voice bland despite my growing impatience with her shtick.

  “You think you’re going to shut me out of this by keeping me on the ship,” she snapped. Her eyes were laser sights boring into my head and she was nearly shaking with anger. “But if you think you can keep something like this quiet, you’re a fucking idiot. This is bigger than blood, bigger than family. Monsieur Damiani has been searching for this his whole life; he won’t let you get away with keeping it from him, whether you’re his nephew or the President of the fucking Commonwealth or Jesus Christ, Mohammed and the Buddha rolled into one.”

  “I’m not leaving you on the ship to keep you away from anything except getting your damn head blown off,” I fired back, leaning forward until only a few centimeters separated my nose from hers. “I don’t have enough people to make them waste their time keeping you alive in a close-quarters combat situation. You’re staying here because you’re not a Marine, you’re not a combat troop and I don’t need a fucking negotiator out there getting shot at!”

  I was practically bellowing by the last sentence, but I didn’t care; with the hatch closed, the cockpit was soundproofed. I leaned back and let out a breath, still glaring at her.

  “I understand you’re angry because I haven’t shared this system’s location with you,” I went on, keeping my voice more controlled, “but you’re forgetting something. I don’t work for you. You’re a liaison between me and Cowboy. I’m not trusting you with the coordinates because I don’t know that Cowboy would want me to.”

  I raised my hands in front of me, almost in a pleading gesture. “This is shit that could change everything, Divya, that could bring down governments and trash whole economies. When we get back, I’ll hand the coordinates over to him, and only him, and only in person.” I shook my head. “Until then, it stays in one place.” I tapped a finger against my temple. “If this shit gets out, Uncle Andre’s going to know it wasn’t me that let it get out.”

  She eyed me doubtfully, but finally, slowly, she nodded.

  “All right,” she said with a hissed sigh. “I still don’t like it, but I can understand your position. I don’t suppose Mr. West will mind an added layer of security, as long as I deliver you to him and you deliver the location.”

  She smiled and there was something akin to admiration in it.

  “Perhaps you are as smart as you think, Munroe.”

  Then she turned and hit the control to release the hatch. The heavy portal swung upward with a hum of laboring motors and she left without another word.

  I sucked in a breath, finally letting my poker face slip.

  I hoped she was right about me being smart. Because I’d been lying my ass off.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The planet didn’t have a name, just a series of letters and numbers that had some scientific significance but meant nothing to me. I was just thinking of it as “the Planet,” because right now, no other planet mattered. It passed by alarmingly close in the main viewscreens in unremarkable swathes of brown and green and blue, barely habitable. Down there, we’d need the extra air from the tanks built into our armor to keep from going hypoxic, and the heating coils to keep from going hypothermic.

  “You sure they won’t spot us before we hit the drives?” I asked Kane again. I was getting nervous, and it was only exacerbated by the fact that I was jammed so tight into the acceleration couch that I could barely move. Armor, weapons, ammo and vacuum gear thickened in layers around me like the shell of some ridiculous, humanoid turtle; and even at full extension, the seat restraints were so tight I could barely turn my head.

  “Not sure,” he admitted, not trying to be comforting. “They look right at us, maybe they see us. But they’d have to look. We’re running cold, should blend into the background radiation. It’s the dark side right now, too, so no reflections. Once we hit the drives, they’ll see us.” He angled his head in a shrug. “But then we’ll be shooting.”

  I nodded inside my helmet, not caring that he couldn’t see it. Divya looked at me sidelong from the copilot’s seat, her expression slightly amused at how awkward Bobbi and I looked strapped into our couches.

  “Passing the terminator,” Kane announced on the ship-wide band as we orbited smoothly from the light of the system’s primary into the starry blackness of the Planet’s shadow. “Ten minutes to ignition.”

  “Everyone stay strapped in until I give the word,” I warned. It probably wasn’t necessary for my people, but Vilberg and Anatoly might need the reminder. “We’re going to have some pretty hard maneuvering.”

  I wanted to blather, to fill the dead time with words so I wouldn’t just sit there thinking about the various ways we could all die, but I forced myself to stay quiet. If they thought I was nervous, they’d get nervous. I gritted my teeth and ran scenarios through my head, making sure I had a plan for each of them and wouldn’t waste time trying to improvise on the spot.

  There were so many things that could wrong, so many ways this could all end badly. We didn’t have enough people, two of the people we did have hadn’t gone through any training or rehearsal with my troops, and we had no idea how many fighters the opposition had on their side. How the hell had I gotten us into this idiotic situation, anyway?

  You got us into it when you snuck out of the Zocalo eight years ago to get away from your mom’s security, I reminded myself.

  All the shit that had happened to me since then,
all the effects the things I’d done had on the people around me, and it had all spread like waves from a pebble into a pond from that one, spur-of-the-moment decision. I remembered a physics class I’d audited during NCO training in the Marines where they’d talked about the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum physics, the idea that every time the quantum state of probabilities collapsed into one result, another universe popped into existence where things had gone the other way. We still didn’t know for sure it was the right interpretation, even though we treated our practical physics as if it was, but I wondered if there was a reality out there where I had just gone along with what my mom wanted and hadn’t gotten into the fight with her security chief and accidentally killed him.

  In that reality, I was a young Corporate Council executive, shaving away my conscience a millimeter at a time, and Sophia and Victor and Kurt were dead, and Cesar had never been born. And Gramps was still alive, living out his days on his ranch instead of dying on Thunderhead in a suicidal last stand to make up for the desperate decisions he’d made after he’d helped me run away. But would he have wanted to watch me follow the same path as his grand-daughter, selling my soul to the Corporate Council?

  No, I’d made the right decision that day. I hoped I was making the right decision today.

  “There it is,” Kane said flatly.

  The Cult lighter would have been just another star hanging over the blacked-out circle of the planet if the computer hadn’t been enhancing it with a bright red halo. It seemed incredibly far away, but I knew on an intellectual level that it was frighteningly close.

  “There’s a shuttle on the ground right below it,” he rattled off, in tactical mode now and not sparing the syllables. “It’s on a plateau in a pass through the mountains. Don’t see the other one.”

  “Any indication they’ve spotted us?” I wanted to know.