Recon: A Wolf in the Fold

by Rick Partlow

  “It’s a weapon. And I’m pretty sure I know how to activate it.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “This thing,” Brandy Yassa said softly, turning her glass round and round in her hands, staring at it like it held the mysteries of the universe, “they’re sure it’s a weapon?”

  “That’s what they think.” I looked around the room again, having to remind myself where I was. It was nearly identical to the den from Gramps’ ranch-house in southern Utah, back on Earth. He’d loved that place and it seemed like he’d done his best to recreate it here. “According to this Dr. Erenreich, the thing dates to much later than the wormhole map on Hermes or the message on Mars, maybe as little as ten thousand years ago, which can’t be too long before the Predecessors left the Cluster to go…” I shrugged. “…wherever they went to.”

  “Why does that mean it’s a weapon?” She demanded, setting her drink down on the bar. A painting hung behind it, done locally but of a scene that came from Earth, from a place I knew very well. A sandstone arch, blood red in the rays of dusk, with mountains visible through it in the distance.

  “Dr. Erenreich’s of the school who believe the Predecessors left the Cluster because they were under attack,” I explained. “She thinks this is left over from the conflict, mostly because of where it was found, in an impact crater on an asteroid. She says the data the mineral scout recorded when he found it makes it look like the rock is the remains of what used to be a planet in the star’s habitable zone.”

  “That’s a little weak,” Yassa muttered.

  “She’s in the Pirate Worlds working for a cabal boss with a bunch of other outcasts,” I reminded her. “I wouldn’t count on her for rigorous scientific objectivity.” I sat down on one of the barstools, hands clenched in front of me. “Anyway, since she’s been studying the thing, they’ve started bombarding it with photons, protons, neutrons, and whatever else they could manage because, hey,” I waved a hand, sarcasm heavy in my voice, “when you’re dealing with a possible alien planet-destroyer, why not just throw anything you can think of at it and hope for the best?”

  “Did anything happen?” Yassa wanted to know, her face turning paler behind her freckles.

  “They’ve begun to detect some kind of activity inside whenever they hit it with modulated microwaves. It doesn’t last too long, but it’s regular. She thinks if they increase the power, it’ll make the thing…” I shook my head. “…do whatever it does.”

  She glanced at me sharply. “And your ‘Gramps’…I mean, Gunny Torres was okay with you telling me this?”

  I sighed, looking down at the polished wood grain of the bar. The one in Utah was over two hundred years old and worth a fortune by itself.

  “No,” I admitted. “He pretty specifically told me not to share this with any of you. But you’re my XO, Cap.”

  She didn’t respond to that, just closed her eyes and planted her hands flat on the bar as if she was steadying herself.

  “You never asked me why I overdosed that day, back in Overtown.” Her voice was so soft I could barely hear it over the whisper of the ceiling fan. “Why that day in particular.”

  I felt my eyes narrowing at the non-sequitur. “I figured if you wanted to tell me, you would.”

  “I don’t want to tell you, Munroe,” she laughed bitterly, without humor. “But I’m going to. I wasn’t suicidal…yet,” she amended with a shrug. “It might have come to that. But I kept thinking if I could just get high one more time, maybe I could get my head around things, get everything figured out. I hadn’t given up just yet.”

  “Did you ever try to contact your family?”

  “My mother ran out on us when I was eight,” she said with brutal matter-of-factness. “My father was a Section Chief on the Midway.”

  I felt like I’d been gut-punched. The Midway had been destroyed in the Battle for Mars, before I’d even joined the Marines.

  “Sorry,” I stammered.

  “It was a long time ago.” She shook her head dismissively. “Shut up and let me finish. I was in a bad way, but I wasn’t suicidal. Then I had a visitor. Someone I’d run into once before, when I was leading the assault on the atmosphere mines of Surtur, the gas giant Loki orbits. We’d been told he was Fleet Intelligence, but I knew he was some kind of black ops commando.”

  There was a cold numbness in my chest as she spoke, as I began to understand what exactly she was saying.

  “He said his name was Roger West,” she went on, staring at the adobe walls. “He said you’d be coming to me for help, and he wanted me to keep an eye on you. He said he’d pay me a hundred thousand in Corporate Scrip if I took the job. He never seemed to ask whether I would or not, just took it for granted.”

  Fucking Cowboy. I should have known he wouldn’t leave anything to chance.

  “And I knew I’d do it,” she went on, and I heard a break in her voice. “I knew that, if you came, I’d go with you, because of all the drugs I could buy with that kind of money. So, I made sure that I couldn’t.”

  “Jesus, Cap,” I said in an involuntary hiss.

  “That’s why I was so furious when you saved me. I didn’t want to have to face the choice and now I did. I wasn’t going to tell you, but now I have to.”

  “Why?” I blurted.

  “Because West told me some things…he left information for me on a ‘link, in that box you brought from my room. I wasn’t sure I believed any of it, till now. You can’t let Torres fuck with this thing, Munroe. It’s a weapon, all right, but it’s not the kind he can control.”

  “What is it? What do you know about it?” My tone was harsher than I’d intended, and I found myself leaning towards her slightly, but the anger was for Cowboy, not her. Rumor my ass, he’d known exactly what I’d find here…

  “I need to talk to Torres,” she insisted, slipping off her stool and facing me. “Get me to see him and I’ll tell him everything.”

  I debated for a moment whether I should force her to tell me first, then wondered if I had it in me to do that to someone I’d considered a friend. I decided I’d rather not find out. I grunted something barely intelligible and headed out of the room, too enraged and hurt to care if she followed.

  Should I be? I wondered, somewhere above the emotion. Did I have a right to be?

  Cowboy wasn’t my friend, and he didn’t owe me anything when it came right down to it. We’d made a deal, and this was how he’d chosen to collect. If he didn’t trust me with everything, well, I didn’t trust him for shit, either.

  The Captain, though… I guess I didn’t feel betrayed as much as I felt gullible. More than one person, Yassa included, had asked me whether I was right to trust her. Maybe I should have asked myself the same question one more time.

  I was heading for Gramps’ office, the last place I’d seen him before I’d gone to get Yassa from the bunkhouse where the rest of the team was staying, when I nearly collided with Constantine heading up the hallway. He didn’t look happy to be here, and I wondered if Gramps had gone against my inclination and advice and told him off instead of waiting and killing him later.

  “It’s quite the coincidence,” he said, stopping and eyeing me sidelong, only centimeters separating us in the passageway, “you being related to the Boss.”

  I looked him up and down. He wasn’t armed, but then, he didn’t need to be.

  “What makes you think it was a coincidence?” I asked him, keeping my voice carefully neutral. “We needed a job, I knew he’d give me work.” I shrugged. “I didn’t know how to contact him myself, and we’d already pissed you off.”

  “You learn how to pull that stunt at the reactor while you were in the Marines?” He asked me, grinning with one side of his mouth. The other side didn’t seem to move right and I wondered if he had nerve damage from whatever had taken the arm on that half his body.

  “I learned everything I needed to know on Demeter,” I told him, and immediately wished I’d kept my mouth shut. It had been my anger talking, the fru
stration I was feeling, and I’d knew I’d said too fucking much.

  His head tilted back slightly and I saw him regard me carefully for a moment.

  “No shit,” he muttered. “You’re that Randall Munroe.”

  He’d been DSI during the war. Of course he’d known what had happened on Demeter.

  “You know,” he went on, eyes narrowing, “I seem to recall there being an arrest order out for you when I was on Inferno. It seemed odd to me that a man who’d just been awarded a Silver Star for valor would have an arrest warrant out on him. And that the Corporate Security Force would be all up in the situation the way they were.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m out here, doing this, right?” I pointed out to him. “None of us are here because we were angels back in the world.”

  He nodded slowly, with that half-smile.

  “No, we certainly aren’t.”

  “Excuse us,” Yassa said, pushing me forward past him. “We have to speak to the Boss.”

  I didn’t look back, but I could sense the man still standing there, watching me.

  “You talk too much,” Yassa hissed at me as we moved out of earshot.

  “I know.”

  The door to Gramps’ office was hand-carved wood, and it was closed. I knocked on it and my knuckles thumped into the solidity of it. Not hollow, it was at least four centimeters thick.

  “Come.”

  The knob was brass and felt cold in my hand as I turned it. The office was large, and currently lit only by a single lamp on the desk. It was also wood. If Gramps could have smuggled all the damned wood in this house back to Earth, he could have sold it on the black market and bought another ranch.

  The man himself was seated behind the massive desk, watching a video report on a two-dimensional flat-screen mounted on the desktop. He paused the playback as we entered, eyebrow raising at Yassa’s presence.

  “What is it, Munroe?” He asked me, his voice somehow twisting around the name distastefully.

  “Sir,” I said, pushing the door shut behind me, “Captain Yassa has something she needs to tell you.”

  “Captain Yassa,” Gramps repeated. “You were my son’s Company Commander, were you not?”

  “Yes, Master Gunny Torres,” she said, respectfully. “And you were part of our curriculum in the Military Academy.”

  “The man I told you about,” I interjected, “Roger West, the one who sent me on this job, he approached Captain Yassa before he came to me.”

  “I was a fail-safe,” she told him. “West knew who you were and he knew you’d let Munroe into your confidence.” She looked down at the floor for a second before her eyes flicked back up and she went on. “I was supposed to make sure he still did the job.”

  “And how were you supposed to do that?” Gramps asked her, seeming genuinely curious.

  Yassa shrugged. “That was left to my judgment. I suppose I would have had to kill you.”

  Gramps laughed at that, a harsh, rough-edged sound. “Are you sure you weren’t an NCO, young lady?”

  “I was given some information about the artifact, Gunny,” she pressed on, “things that Munroe wasn’t told because it would have revealed how much West already knew about what was going on.” She licked her lip, the first sign she’d given that she was nervous. “It’s not a Predecessor artifact. Your Dr. Erenreich has the right idea; the Predecessors didn’t leave the Cluster because they wanted to, they were chased out by an enemy. This is one of the weapons of that enemy.”

  Gramps had pushed himself up from his seat now, and was circling around the desk. I felt myself tensing, half-expecting him to attack her, but he stopped with his face a few centimeters from hers.

  “And how does West know this?” Gramps demanded.

  “He didn’t say,” Yassa admitted. “I have to think it’s because the Corporate Council has found more of these things that they haven’t told anyone about.”

  “They’re that scared of this thing, are they?” His arms were crossed, his face thoughtful.

  “The Predecessors created living worlds,” Yassa pointed out. “These things, whatever they were, chased them somewhere so far away we can’t reach it. You should be scared, too. That’s the reason I came out and told you about this, you need to destroy this thing. It’s not something you can control.”

  “What about you, Munroe?” There was that emphasis on my name again. “What do you think?”

  “Gramps,” I said, feeling like things were getting out of control, “I don’t know if Cowboy was telling her the truth or not, but I believe she’s telling the truth about what he told her. Maybe it is a weapon, and maybe they’re afraid you’ll use it against them. But this…” I trailed off, waving a hand around us. “This isn’t exactly a government research station off in the outer planets somewhere. If you get this thing to work and can’t control it...”

  “That’s why it’s this far from the city,” he countered. “It’s also pretty far underground.”

  “It was found on an asteroid that used to be a planet. How far out of town do you think is safe enough?”

  His eyes bored in on me and I wondered if I’d been a bit too flippant and disrespectful with that question. I could see deliberation behind his dark eyes, and then decision.

  “Very well,” he said with an almost imperceptible sigh. “Come with me, then.”

  I shared a hopeful look with Yassa as we followed him out of the office, through the ranch-house’s spacious living room and out the large double doors in the front. It was pitch black outside, past midnight local time I judged, and there was a gentle patter of rain on the brick walkway in the courtyard. I felt it dripping cold on the back of my neck and pulled the collar of my jacket tighter.

  I wondered for a second if Gramps was taking us back to the cavern where Erenreich was studying the artifact, but instead he led us across the courtyard to a tan, stucco outbuilding between the barns and the bunkhouses. It was smaller, about the size of a storage shed with a heavy, solid metal door and what looked like a sturdy if unsophisticated throw-bolt lock, and I wondered what he had locked away out here.

  Then I noticed Constantine and a half dozen of his people had walked out of the house behind us, all of them armed, and they were slowly spreading out across the courtyard. I looked sharply at Gramps, distrust and disbelief warring inside me. He yanked the bolt back and pulled the heavy door open with a grunt. Inside, thrown into shadows in the dim, indirect lighting within the shed, I could see the rest of the team, laid out on a bed of straw, unmoving, unconscious or dead.

  I acted on instinct, without thinking for even a second.

  Gramps was between me and the only unguarded route out of the courtyard and I push-kicked him in the chest with the flat of my boot, sending him sprawling across the rain-slick bricks. And then I was running.

  I didn’t look back, didn’t wait to see if Yassa was following, I just sprinted as fast I possibly could. I was genetically engineered to be as fast, as strong, as agile as a human could be without artificial augmentation, and I’d kept myself in top shape back on Demeter, so as fast as I could was pretty damned fast.

  I heard a shot, then another, and angry shouts, but I didn’t stop, just cut around the side of the ranch-house, passing by the back door just as one of the guards stepped through it, gun in his hand, visible to me through the night vision filters in my contact lens despite the darkness of the night. I lashed out with my left hand and caught him across the throat with my forearm, sending him crashing backwards through the door. I didn’t stop then, either, not even to grab his weapon. Speed was life, distance was freedom.

  I was past the house, past the bunkhouses. I considered for just the space of a heartbeat whether I should try to steal one of the vehicles, but I rejected it; it would take too long and it would be chancy whether they had some sort of ID lock or key card. In the same breath, I rejected a run up the wadi because it would be one long straightaway for kilometers and they’d know exactly where to look for me.


  Instead, I headed for a path I’d noticed as we’d driven up: a steep, winding packed-dirt path that was the only way I’d seen out of this canyon on foot. It began about a hundred meters from the house, through the thick grass and I felt as if I were a bug on a plate as I crossed the broad, open space. The horses weren’t out there at night; the hands must have put them in the barn, or else they went there on their own once the sun went down. Either way, I was alone and I heard no pursuit, just the sound of my own steady footsteps ripping chunks of dirt and grass with every stride.

  I reached the path and the nightmare of endless running turned into a nightmare of endless climbing. It was slippery going where the sand and dirt had washed off the slick rock, and I felt as if I was losing a centimeter for every two I climbed. The fatigue hit me then. I hadn’t slept for two days now and I’d been working on a massive dose of adrenaline that was starting to run low. My thighs burned with the effort and I had to lean forward and use my hands at some parts of the climb.

  Did they know I was here? I wondered, but I couldn’t look around to find out. It would slow me down, and in the end, what did it matter? I had the choice to fight, run or give up. I felt a twinge of guilt at making that decision without regard for Captain Yassa, but it hadn’t been made on a conscious level and it was too late to change it now.

  They couldn’t have drones, I knew, not with all the EM interference. That was something. They’d have to send human eyes to find me, and I was betting I was better at this than any of them. I just had to keep going, get far enough away, find a place to hold up through the night, and then I could take the time to think about my next move.

  In minutes, I could see the top, could feel the wind picking up as it swept down across the plains over the lip of the box canyon. I gritted my teeth and dug in with hands and feet, just for a few more meters. And I was there, standing above the canyon, looking down into the depths of it at the glowing lights of the ranch. No one was following me. That was strange, unless…

  I looked around and had just noticed the glint of the lights from below on a line of metal stakes sticking out of the ground when something was screaming inside my head in a banshee wail of pain and confusion, and everything went black.