Recon Book Three: A Battle for the Gods

by Rick Partlow

  Recon, Book Three:

  A Battle for the Gods

  By

  Rick Partlow

  Copyright 2017

  By Rick Partlow

  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 could hear the exasperated sigh clearly over the squad net, and I knew who it belonged to without even having to look.

  “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?”

  “There are at least two people pulling security around this next curve, maybe fifty meters,” I informed her, looking at the readout from my helmet’s audio and thermal sensors. “So, can we talk about this later?”

  She shut up for a moment and I raised a fist in the air, signaling the others to stop and take a knee.

  “Me and who else?” She asked. The corner of my mouth quirked upward.

  “Not this time,” I decided. “Sanders, take Waugh and Prouty. Make it silent and quick and don’t let them call for help.”

  “Roger that, Boss,” Eli Sanders said, rising up and waving the other two forward.

  I could feel Bobbi’s eyes on me even if I couldn’t see them.

  “What?” I asked her on our private chan
nel.

  “Sanders is a good man in a fight,” she allowed grudgingly, and I knew it had taken her most of the last two and a half years to come to that conclusion, “but I don’t trust the new guys yet.”

  “The ‘new guys’ have been working with us for nearly a year,” I reminded her. We’d gone through quite a few candidates to replace Carmen Ibanez and Captain Yassa, and none had stuck until these three. “Anyway, we have to be able to count on them or we have to know we can’t.”

  “You’re the boss, Boss,” she grumbled.

  I ignored her and concentrated on following Eli Sanders, Marjorie Waugh and Channing Prouty as they crept closer to the bend in the canyon, going from a jog to a cautious, crouching walk to a high crawl as they rounded it. Then they were out of sight, and off my sensors as well. Normally, I could have accessed their helmet cams on my HUD, but the raiders we were hunting had full-spectrum jamming laid down in this canyon, low enough beneath the deck that no one would notice it from orbit but effective in preventing AI driven or remotely piloted drones from being able to stumble on them. That limited our comms and our magnetic sensors to line-of-sight.

  I knew how Bobbi felt; I wanted to be up there myself, not because I enjoyed sentry removal but because I knew I could do it better than any of them, including her. But I wasn’t just a Joe, I was the commander of this little band of misfits and I had to learn to trust them. So, I crouched in the dark and I waited, feeling the tension and impatience of the others behind me as palpably as I felt my own.

  It was nearly five minutes before Sanders appeared around the corner and waved us forward. I jumped to my feet, stomping the pins and needles out of my legs, and jogged around the bend in the ancient river. The thick sand sucked the soles of my armored boots into it and it took a concerted effort to keep my balance as it tried to throw me off.

  Beyond the bend, the canyon widened out even more, nearly a hundred meters across at its widest, and tucked into that bulge about half a kilometer down was a starship. It wasn’t much of a starship, a battered and patched surplus missile cutter, one of the earliest designs, probably pirated or slapped together from stolen parts. It squatted in utilitarian ugliness under the cover of a camouflage net pitoned into the rock walls to either side and nearly blocking the width of the canyon.

  A couple hundred meters this side of the ship were two men in dark-colored utility fatigues and armored tactical vests. One was flat on his back in the dark sand, his eyes wide and white, his face death-pale. His throat had been ripped out, his head all but severed by a combat knife, and his chest was soaked in his own blood. He was thin, almost gaunt, his face lined from a life lived hard. The other man was face-down and I couldn’t see the wound that had killed him. Their weapons were tossed to the side, long-obsolete rocket rifles that could be fabricated locally; they were a favorite out here in the Pirate Worlds, away from the centralized manufacturing in the Commonwealth.

  Prouty and Waugh were crouched next to them, faceless statues in the sand, their Gauss rifles held at the ready. There was blood spattered across the sleeves of Waugh’s armor and the backs of her gloves, but I didn’t see any shake in her hands or any unsteadiness in her stance.

  “Any movement at the ship?” I asked them.

  “Nothing so far,” Prouty told me, just the slightest hint of a break in his voice. “It’s cold and dark, nothing on thermal.”

  “Move the bodies off to the side and cover them up,” I told him. “Disable the weapons.”

  “Yes, sir,” he acknowledged, coming to his feet and grabbing one of the raider corpses by an ankle to drag it off.

  “Victor,” I said, seeing the big man coming around the corner, his Gauss rifle held like a toy in his massive hands. “Break out the charges. Bobbi, you and Sanders place them. Kurt, take the others and set up security on the other side of the ship. I’d rather the first time these assholes knew we were here was when this boat blows up, but if you see anyone coming down the canyon, kill them.”

  I didn’t stand around and watch them; I ducked under the drooping edge of the camouflage netting and headed up the open ramp under the nose of the cutter. It was dark inside the ship’s utility bay, without even the chemical strip-lights you would usually find in any military or commercial vessel; that probably meant they---or someone---had cobbled the thing together out of surplus parts auctioned off after the war.

  As I entered the bay, I let my rifle hang across my chest on its retractable sling and transitioned to my pistol in the closer quarters of the ship. The bay wasn’t occupied, but it wasn’t empty, either; a dozen heavy, polymer lockers were strapped to D-rings set in the deck and bulkhead. They had the nearly universal look of weapons storage cases, though they lacked any government or commercial identification markings or any RFID chips that my helmet sensors could detect. According to Divya’s briefings, the guns had been stolen from off-world caches belonging to the Sung Brothers; their home turf was Peboan, this system’s largest habitable.

  Why she or the people for whom she worked cared about the Sung Brothers or their weapons was something she’d declined to share. Maybe she didn’t even know. I was just glad I didn’t have to carry the shit off the boat and haul it out of here; my instructions were just to make sure it was on board…and check the ship’s logs to see if I could find out who was paying them to steal it.

  I cat-footed through the passageway up from the utility bay towards the cockpit, pausing as I passed by the cheap, plastic hatches of the small cabins. Three of them were ajar, the tiny compartments empty, their cots folded into the wall among faded mold stains. The last was shut, and I sighed out a breath, stopping with my shoulder against the bulkhead next to it.

  Why couldn’t they have just slept in their encampment? Someone always wanted to sleep in the ship, despite how humid and stuffy it got inside without the power on. Probably their boss, or captain or commander, or whatever the hell he called himself.

  I shifted my rifle around to the back, raised my pistol to the high ready, then positioned myself across the passageway from the hatch and lunged forward, kicking it in. It wasn’t military quality, wasn’t even commercial quality; it was the cheapest fabricator-made piece of plastic shit they could find and it busted inward beneath the sole of my boot like it wasn’t there. Inside the darkened room, sprawled out on the fold-down cot, was a fat man in loose-fitting sleep-wear, a russet mustache drooping over his florid face. He bolted upward at the noise of the hatch bursting inward, and I saw his hand snatching for a pistol he’d left on the shelf beside the cot.

  I shot him through the forehead at near point-blank range. The rocket motor of the handgun round barely had time to ignite before the bullet struck him, but this close, the coldgas launching charge was enough. His skull popped like a fresh egg and the warhead sent a narrow jet of plasma through his brain; he collapsed backwards without making a sound. The cabin wasn’t even as big as my bathroom back home and the blood spray coated every surface.

  “Shit,” I muttered, wiping blood spatter off my right arm.

  I stepped inside and grabbed his handgun, then headed up to the cockpit. The main power was shut down, but the computer system was running off the battery backups. It was decades obsolete, with physical input rather than haptic holograms, and it lacked even the most rudimentary data security. Which was all very convenient for me. I pulled up the ship’s navigation systems and transferred the data to my helmet computer via a blissfully unsecured wireless link.

  I didn’t waste time reading it, just de-assed the boat as quick as I could. Something itched between my shoulder blades, maybe a feeling I’d been in there too long…or maybe just drying sweat. Bobbi was heading up the ramp as I was heading down.

  “Charges are in place,” she said. “Timers are set; we have five minutes.”

  “Get everyone moving. We need to be assaulting through the objective by the time this thing blows.”

  She turned and began yelling on the team net, but I blocked it out, holstering m
y pistol before stripping the ammunition out of the one I’d picked up on the ship then tossing it away. By the time I’d transitioned back to my Gauss rifle, I’d reached the other side of the cutter and could see Bobbi leading the team forward in a wedge formation. I jogged to take my place behind her at the center of the wedge, then fell into a quick-step, half tactical and half “let’s get the hell out of here before the charges blow.”

  The gas giant filled the sky above the canyon, a constant reminder of how small we were and how little all this meant, yet somehow, we couldn’t stop killing each other over this petty shit. The thought was there, but it washed over my back like water and was gone. Philosophy was fine, but this was the here and now and this was the job. If I wanted to get home to Sophie and Cesar, I needed to concentrate on the job.

  It was less than a kilometer before I could see it, could see the light leaking out from doors cracked open and the thermal signature of the power cells and the EM jammers they ran. They were poly-canvas huts, quick to set up and compact when collapsed; an electric current turned them from malleable to board-solid in seconds. They were perfect for a temporary camp you could strike in minutes, and the raiders had set them up between the gaps in a rock-fall to give themselves cover and a measure of concealment. They didn’t intend to stay here for longer than it would take to get the location of their next raid against the Sung Brothers, that was clear.

  How the hell had Divya known where they’d be and when to attack?

  Later, damn it.

  I couldn’t see the people inside the tents on thermal; the tent material was insulated against that, military grade. But if our intell was right, there were about a dozen of them, and we’d already killed three. They were probably all asleep, but probably was a slippery word that could wriggle right out of your fingers.

  “Get to cover and get yourself a good field of fire,” I told them when we were about thirty meters from the closest of the tents.