Chasing the Dragon (Tyrus Rechs

by Nick Cole

  She could no doubt hear the whine and ricochet of close blaster fire across the comm. “I have no other bounty hunters in the area for assist, Rechs. Dammit… you’re on your own.” Her voice was peeved and coldly matter-of-fact. Like she was mad at him for being in this situation. “I wish you would’ve…”

  Her voice trailed off. She wasn’t mad at him. She was mad at herself that she couldn’t help.

  “It’s not your fault, Gabriella. Gotta go!”

  And then Rechs was moving along the dark street where neon holograms offering food and sex swirled out and away from grimly lit stores where music thumped and thundered.

  The rain was beginning to fall in earnest as Rechs pulled his hand cannon, firing to keep the legionnaires back and their heads down. He didn’t like killing them. In some weird way they were still his children. It was he, Tyrus Rechs, or whatever similar name he’d gone by at the time, who had formed the Legion over fifteen hundred years before. Not that any of them knew that. Or cared. And these were probably legionnaires sucked into the decay that was Nether Ops. Not the most loyal, or filled with esprit de corps.

  But they were still killers. Just like every legionnaire.

  Just a few feet away, Rechs saw the scantily clad slitherne crouched next to a dumpster that had been rolled out into the street and set on fire. The look in her almond-shaped alien eyes was pure horror at the sudden hurricane of insanity. The squad of legionnaires was advancing down the street toward Rechs—and thus toward her—at a trot, shooting anyone who got in their way. Those who could scatter bolted into the run-down buildings and dark alleys that fed the main thoroughfare of the favela. Those who couldn’t, or who didn’t want to chance the horror of those places, ran along with Rechs. Surged around him like a river. Hoping the fight would stick somewhere behind them.

  “Stay down,” Rechs told the slitherne. “They’re after me. Play dead if you have to.”

  But she was too frightened. She stood and ran, her goods bouncing and her curves undulating seductively even by the hellish light of the burning dumpster.

  One of the legionnaires targeted her and pulled. She went down with a blaster bolt smoking in the center of her back.

  That confirmed it. Nether Ops kill team. Bad guys who liked to kill for the sake of it.

  Rechs stood and fired back with the hand cannon on full auto, catching one of them on a five-second dash for cover. The hand cannon spat six rounds that smacked into the scumbag’s armor and left great, big, fifty-caliber smoking holes. The legionnaire staggered into a pile of garbage, mortally wounded.

  In return Rechs got a volley of blaster fire that was close and accurate. And it all would’ve hit if he’d stayed where they wanted him to. But he was already low-crawling for the far side of the dumpster, which suddenly exploded after one of the Nether Ops members tossed a fragger into it. Fire and burning debris, including a few shards of white-hot metal, spread out across the night. Screams went up, and local gang members began to fire with their junkie blasters, tricked and dangerous, at the intrusive legionnaires.

  Big mistake for those guys, thought Rechs.

  Kill team members might be bad guys in Rechs’s galaxy-view, but Nether Ops didn’t pull them into a team unless they’d been more than proficient in the business of killing.

  The squad hunkered down, returned fire, and sent an anti-armor missile, that had most likely been brought along to take down Rechs, against the building the gang members were firing from. The smoking round collapsed the whole facade, sending debris sliding out and across the street even as a secondary explosion gutted the building.

  Overhead the dropships were circling below the storm. Throwing hot searchlights across the walls, alleys, and fleeing people.

  Rechs hoped the two factions—the private security and Nether Ops—would fight it out. But more likely, they’d team up on him. That seemed to be his luck of late.

  A gunner from a cargo door of one of the dropships opened up on the street Rechs moved down, already dodging kill team fire and keeping abandoned sleds and kiosks between him and his pursuers. The gunner’s high-powered heavy blaster fire tore up everything, including the fleeing aliens and a bot jabbering in arcane Plutonica. And the pursuing kill team was not afraid to burn through charge packs, filling every conceivable space with fire.

  Rechs was chased into a blind alley, just barely getting out of the line of fire. He hugged wall and fired back at a soldier preparing to pop a fragger. The guy spun away and dropped behind cover, wounded.

  Rechs ran through his comm descrambler, pulling up their scrambled feeds. Nether Ops didn’t use the L-comm; they had their own thing. Not as good, but good enough that Rechs’s algo couldn’t hack in. He’d need to get ahold of one of them and run a hard decrypt with fiber-wire. But in this situation—a running firefight with all of them pairing up while shooting and moving—pulling that hack looked extremely unlikely… at best.

  03

  Captain Hess swung away from over the shoulder of the door gunner pumping out blasts into the streets below. He had all his elements tagged, and they were closing in on Tyrus Rechs. But they weren’t alone. The sky was crowded with private security trying to get their own angle on the bounty hunter.

  “Tell those other birds to get out of here or they’ll be shot down!” Hess yelled to his pilot.

  He gripped the overhead handhold inside the dropship’s cargo compartment and uplinked with the commander of the two Republic Navy destroyers on station in the space above Minaron.

  Nether Ops, and really Captain Hess, who’d become a sort of true believer high priest in the Cult of Killing Rechs—a cult that possessed the inner sanctums of some of the most secret chambers of the House of Reason—had bet the bounty hunter would surface here on Minaron. Even they knew the tech mogul who’d just thrown himself off the tower was unfinished business for Tyrus Rechs.

  It was foolish of the bounty hunter to have come above ground so soon.

  “We have the target pinned on the streets, Commander,” shouted Hess. “But I’m not taking any chances. Get your fighters up. If he reaches his ship, we’ll need to cut him off before he makes the jump to light speed. I’ve dealt with this one before.”

  The other door gunner opened up afresh on Rechs below. The fleeing civilians who were mixed in and among the action below were only so much collateral damage.

  At the thought of his last encounter with Tyrus Rechs on Cassio Royale six months ago, Hess’s eye hurt. Or rather… where his eye should have been.

  He’d been hit in the firefight in Grand Central Square on the now-dead station. Taken a shot from someone right in the bucket not long after launching a Dragon X missile in an attempt to save his own life. The high-powered blast had taken off the bucket in pieces and melted others onto his face. His left eye had been destroyed. An abundance of skinpacks had been needed.

  His dreams of one day sitting in the House of Reason had gone up in smoke. Not with the way his face looked. Not now. There was no amount of plastic surgery that could make right what Tyrus Rechs had ruined. He would always be just a little… off. You could always tell. And that was enough when you were up against the galaxy.

  Hess leaned forward, watching the battle play out on the streets below. Half hoping they’d capture Rechs. Half hoping they’d kill him. If it came to it, he was willing to call in an orbital strike on the entire port just to get the man he’d sworn would pay.

  That would be messy.

  But the House was getting nervous. Extreme measures had been authorized.

  As a last resort, of course.

  ***

  Rechs sensed the rush coming.

  One of the kill team carrying a heavy repeater opened up with suppressive fire at max output. A streak of blue blaster fire tore up the duracrete all around Rechs, along with several abandoned vehicles. A small meat-on-the-street kiosk exploded; some gas tan
k used for cooking must’ve taken a hit. The Nether Ops B team rushed in from Rechs’s left flank, moving fast but not firing, hoping to get close under the cover their comrades were laying down.

  So Rechs charged.

  Straight into the line, firing for all he was worth. The hand cannon rang out in concussive staccato bursts of dumb slug fire. He dropped three legionnaires and possibly punctured another hugging for cover behind an abandoned taxi sled. Then he was in and among them. Mixed right in their line and firing point blank as he crossed through.

  He ran straight into the hulk of a massive legionnaire. The man tried to bring his N-4 to bear, but Rechs moved too quickly, and the weapon crashed against Rechs’s armor, its butt shattering. Still, the sheer force of the blow stopped Rechs’s forward rush, and he was sent reeling.

  One of the dropships overhead spun hard on her reversers, trying to take up a new engagement track, but for the moment denying the door gunner a target.

  The big leej came after Rechs, faster than the bounty hunter was able to check him. Rechs saw stars when the armored gauntlet the man used for a fist smashed hard into his bucket.

  A tossed fragger rolled right into the space Rechs and the Nether Ops soldier were fighting in. It bounced off an old sign that advertised cheap stim, landed in front of a parted-out old taxi sled, and skittered toward them.

  Rechs grabbed the big leej’s head and yanked it down to meet his incoming knee. Then he pushed the helpless man down onto the fragger and leapt over the taxi.

  The explosion sent steel needles into the hapless legionnaire.

  The taxi shifted as Rechs went over, but it still blocked the part of the blast the big leej’s body hadn’t.

  Then Rechs was scrambling to his feet and engaging more of the assault team’s hunkered operatives. Firing when he had a shot. Spending brass to keep them low when he didn’t.

  The dropship made a close, screaming pass, shooting up everything with little discrimination. Sooner or later, that thing would tag him. Rechs decided to break contact and run.

  He raced to the far sidewalk, smashed into a door at a dead sprint, and tumbled inside a ramshackle structure leaning at the edge of the port. Already he could hear the descrambled comm transmissions of the legionnaires shouting orders to follow. Shouting for the dropship to stop firing so they, too, could cross the street without getting dusted.

  Now it was a chase.

  There was no time to turn and shoot as blaster fire pursued him into the darkness of the old building. It looked to be some kind of abandoned apartment complex that had probably never been anyone’s first choice of living quarters. The sort of place you ended up in only because it was better than sleeping on the streets. Barely.

  Dark shadows were the most illuminated part of the room; utter blackness took the rest. Rechs switched over to thermal and saw dozens of squatters huddled in alcoves and along the walls, their sleep interrupted by the firefight that the House of Reason had brought to their slum.

  Rechs ran for the far wall where a deep darkness lay; some chunk in the wall had been torn out and now lay open like the mouth of an urban cave. As he sprinted toward it, the first elements of the kill team were already entering the room and taking wild shots. That brightened the room, revealing broken furniture and shattered light fixtures hanging from the ceiling.

  As Rechs flung himself through the hole into the darkness of the inner structure, he switched from thermal to low-light imaging—the tunnel he was moving through was instantly revealed in blue starlight lines—and looked to his HUD for an idea of what was happening outside.

  His drone telemetry fritzed out, and for a moment the real-time tactical analysis of the location surrounding his hit went out. It came back, then went out again—this time completely. A message appeared in his HUD.

  Drone destroyed.

  So much for that.

  Overhead the dropships could be heard swimming through the skies or hovering above the building.

  Rechs dashed through the midnight catacombs of the gutted building, weaving through a labyrinth of rooms, past smashed and dirty windows occasionally illuminated by bone-white searchlights.

  His pursuers weren’t letting up. They were perhaps a room behind him.

  They’re legionnaires, Rechs told himself. Even though they’d gone over to the dark side of Nether Ops for whatever reason, they were still the one percent of the one percent of the one percent the galaxy had to offer. They were the ultimate killing machines. The line that could never be broken if the Republic was to survive.

  And they weren’t just pacing Rechs… they were closing in for the kill.

  Sudden red-hot blaster shots crossed the darkness, illuminating the dingy walls and ancient graffiti like comets streaking down the long-abandoned halls of the universe.

  The one thing Rechs feared at this point was hitting a dead end and having to put his back to the wall and kill as many of them as he could before they killed him. Or before they called in air support to shoot up the block and level the building. An orbital strike against the whole city only to kill one man.

  But it wasn’t a dead end that Rechs reached.

  It was a cliff.

  He came to the rear of the massive sprawl and found that the back of the building was just… gone. The creaking floor came to an end, its crumbling edge hovering over the desiccated levels below. Rechs stood at the blown-up back of the building on an elevated cliff, and from here, he could see the entire city below.

  The main level of the city had been constructed as a central hub that connected to the glittering tower islands off shore. All around the outer edges of that hub had been the favela that Rechs had been racing through. A place where all the hopeless flotsam the galaxy created washed to shore, hoping that, by some extreme stroke of unreasonably good luck, it might one day be elevated out of crushing poverty.

  And Rechs stood at its end. In view of the impenetrable fortress towers where the rich hid and played. Elites who left only when they chose to.

  Like the guy who threw himself off when he heard you were coming for him.

  Somewhere, way down there, was the docking port where the Obsidian Crow and all the other vagabond freighters waited to leap away and be free of this oppressive world of playgrounds and slums.

  Of haves and have-nots.

  Rechs merely had to get there without being shot to death.

  04

  Rechs ran across the last room of the crumbling old building on the edge of Minaron’s upper deck as blaster fire careened behind him. Legionnaires were swarming onto the wide, uppermost level of the ruin, shooting red-hot blaster bolts out of the shadowy darkness. They looked to Rechs like angry demons in their charcoal-dusted leej armor. Demons come from the outer dark to take the infamous bounty hunter once and for all.

  So many others had tried. All had failed.

  Rechs activated the jump jets on his ancient Mark I armor, lifting him off the battered and debris-strewn duracrete floor in a whirlwind of blast and grit. The pursuing Nether Ops kill team fired into the sky after him, bolts sizzling against the storm as Rechs rocketed off into the night.

  He cut his burst short and bounded down onto the next level like an insect hopping through a forest. All in a downward flight to reach his ship and leave this painful payback contract behind him for good.

  He was able to clear three levels this way before the dropships swarmed in from above, departing from their search and engagement patterns over the top of glittering Minaron. It would just be Rechs and the ships now—the kill teams had been left behind. Modern Legion armor, including the upgraded stuff the kill teams were rocking, wasn’t jump-capable. It was cheaper for the Legion to employ the Republic’s many sleds and shuttles; this wasn’t the Savage Wars anymore, where credits didn’t matter so much as basic survival.

  The dropships dove in like raptors, angling in on Re
chs’s bounding leaps from rooftop to rooftop as he descended the city’s vast step-levels. Gunners opened up disciplined burst fire whenever a momentary targeting window opened up. The shots all missed Rechs, who was moving like a ball of lightning—but the exposed civilians down below weren’t as lucky. Rechs thought it a shame that they were dying because he had come here to finish off the man on the ledge—more accurately they were dying simply because he was on planet, regardless of his reasons—but Tyrus Rechs wasn’t the one doing the shooting. He would sleep just fine.

  Rechs expended more jump juice to streak past open docking bays and along the sides of raw cargo refineries. He rocketed over hanging dwellings that swayed and sighed like tortured prisoners in the gusts of the storm and the cobalt night.

  Finally, he crashed onto a rain-slick catwalk between two ramshackle comm stations and ran, the dropships hovering as the pilots tried to figure out which way to follow. The comms towers would give him cover for a moment.

  “Three-Two!” shouted Rechs over his bucket’s comm. “Three-Two, this is an emergency. I need you to warm up the omni-cannon and switch on the Nubarian bot.”

  A dropship came in close to the towers, dangerously close, and the gunner opened up from the swing-mounted N-50 inside the cabin. Heavy automatic blaster fire struck the railings and power conduits around Rechs, sending a light show of sparks showering out into the storm-tossed night.

  “Three—”

  “I am here, master—er, I mean, Captain. That is what you want me to call you, correct? I would advise against booting up that little bot. He seems rather psychotic. Need I remind—”

  “Three-Two!” Rechs shouted. “Do it now!”

  He leapt out into the void at the end of the comm tower catwalk, twenty stories up the sloping side of Minaron. Jump juice was low, so he made the effort with only brute strength and some servo-assist, flying out across the dark chasm and smashing through the flimsy wall of some tumbledown apartment tower that would never pass core-world building code.