Chasing the Dragon (Tyrus Rechs

by Nick Cole

  The comm went silent.

  Rechs could see a Legion patrol pointing at him from the beach. They were doing a sweep. And no doubt calling in a sitrep. A firefight. A fleeing boat. And those on the street mentioning the name “Tyrus Rechs.”

  “Roger,” Jacobson finally responded. “He’s open to trying it. But he wants credits. A lot of them.”

  “Not a problem,” said Rechs as he yanked the boat hard to port and rounded the point.

  But still nagging him was why this Sinasian smuggler who knew the location of a planet without a confirmed existence, a fabled rumor, would be willing to give it up for the promise of mere credits. More likely, he was stalling.

  Rechs made for the entrance of the lagoon where the city of ten thousand lily pads floated before the Taijing docks. It was the only way back now. If the smuggler’s ship was in the docking bays, then Rechs was going to need to get back into the main lagoon, through the lily pads, and onto the mountainside tram.

  It wouldn’t be easy.

  Nothing ever was.

  “Ship got a name?”

  “Shurrigan’s Goose,” Jacobson replied. “Bay two twenty-one.”

  Not easy, but not impossible, thought Rechs. Second level. Low down the mountainside.

  “I’ll meet you there. Have the engines fired up.”

  Overhead, a dropship exited the super-destroyer. Rechs watched its course and speed. They were definitely coming in toward the now-burning bar.

  They were coming for him.

  Rechs throttled up and entered the lagoon at full speed.

  24

  The jet-powered hoverboat handled light and fast. She had to if she was going to outrun Republic interdictors on the high seas that surrounded Taijing.

  But—and this was surprising to Rechs—she didn’t have any weapons. And all Rechs had were the rounds left in his hand cannon, a blaster with two charge packs, and a knife.

  He aimed the howling boat at a flotsam-filled waterway that led into the canals that surrounded the central hub of the city. He kept the throttle at full forward and held on to the wheel, the near-entirety of his focus on keeping the speeding boat off the ramshackle walls of the canal.

  The dropship had changed course. Someone must have fed it intel that Rechs was no longer at the burning bar, but on the speeding watercraft. But it didn’t immediately open up its guns, even as it got low and close. Rechs chanced a look over his shoulder during a straightaway through a small waterside market that seemed to be doing a brisk business in fish and vegetables despite the detonation of the mech yesterday.

  He saw leejes in charcoal-dusted gray armor, legs hanging over the edges of the fat ship. The pilot rapidly dropped altitude and began to crab the ship, craning his neck to see below as the aircraft flew a straight line, diagonally oriented toward the ground. This brought the door gunner into view and offered an excellent opportunity for the swing-mounted N-50 to open up.

  But at just that moment, through no planning of Rechs’s, the boat crossed under a series of narrow bridges. The gunner was either told to hold fire or hesitated on his own accord as the speeding boat disappeared underneath walkways laden with people and market goods.

  Looking to lose the dropship, Rechs scanned for any alternate routes along the intersections of waterways. He spotted an extremely narrow canal that seemed dark enough to go nowhere but a dead end.

  But maybe not.

  Without thinking too much about it, he jerked the speedboat into a sharp turn and launched its pointy bow, riding high and arrogantly in the brackish green water, into the tight press of buildings. As he disappeared down the shadowy stretch, he again looked behind him.

  The dropship banked hard to follow, and the gunner sent a burst from the N-50. High-powered blaster shots in rapid succession chewed up the water in front of the hoverboat, soaking Rechs as the plumes came crashing down inside the speeding vessel. The old bounty hunter weaved the boat back and forth, trying to make it harder for them to range and hit him.

  Ahead, the dead end he’d feared loomed. Or so it seemed at first. As he streaked toward what looked like a solid wall that was the edge of the old astrodrome, Rechs saw that the channel dog-legged hard right to run parallel with the wall.

  Easing back off the throttle and throwing on the reversers, Rechs barely made the turn. And not without eating some of the wall. He was jolted, struggling to keep his footing as he heard a wicked scrape followed by an ominous hull thump. If that wasn’t the hull cracking apart, Rechs didn’t know what it was.

  Except the boat didn’t begin to sink. Yet. Its repulsors kept the thing above the water line.

  The dropship’s door gunner opened up afresh. Blaster fire smashed down into the astrodrome walls, sending duracrete in every direction. Rechs flinched as the dusty spray smashed into the tiny windshield that protected the controls where he stood. More plumes of water erupted like sudden geysers in front of the speeding boat as the gunner found his range.

  Rechs throttled up, and the hoverboat surged forward, racing through the pillars of water. He hoped that his change in speed would make the gunner have to readjust his sight picture to lead the ship.

  Within seconds the canal ran out—a docking ramp marked the end of the line. Rechs had no choice but to take it.

  The boat surged out of the water and up the ramp, launching itself into the air like a daredevil jumping a desert canyon. The craft landed hard, its repulsors unable to keep the bottom from slamming hard into the street before scraping through a crowded central square filled with market stalls selling everything from bootlegged holo-chits to roasted reptiles.

  For a moment, Rechs considered rolling out from the boat and losing himself in the crowd. But the chances were that he was being pursued by a kill team that would have facial recognition IDs. They could scan the crowd and pick him out in short order until Rechs had the chance to turn loose another worm in their system to destroy any captured data—a trick he’d been pulling for some time to remain anonymous.

  “Bad news, General,” said Jacobson in a small voice over the comm. “The docks are crawling with legionnaires.”

  Rechs could hear another voice in the background talking about getting out of there fast. Probably the pilot.

  “What’s your ETA?” Jacobson asked. “We can make it to the ship in about ten.”

  The dropship came in low and off to the side of the still-speeding boat. Rechs found that he could still steer the thing, but not as tightly as when they were in the water. He smashed into kiosks and brushed against shops of all kinds as everyone on the ground ran pell-mell to get away from the speeding craft and the thundering dropship dripping with deadly Republican legionnaires.

  The dropship’s gunner swiveled his N-50, and the legionnaires hanging out the cargo door likewise raised their weapons to engage.

  Rechs stomped on the rudder and yanked the wheel hard over in their direction. The speeding boat shot straight at the level dropship. The legionnaires’ blaster fire went high and wide. The pilot pulled back hard on the stick and added thrust as the dropship climbed to avoid Rechs’s desperate kamikaze attack.

  Then the boat flew off the edge of the lily pad trade market built beside the repurposed astrodrome. Rechs hovered like a seabird and watched the waters come up to greet him.

  The weight of the boat, even with the repulsors engaged to full hover, pushed it down into the choppy water. One engine flamed out as the craft bobbed up from the wallow of sloshing foam and floating garbage before shooting forth once more.

  “Rechs, are you there?” asked Jacobson. “What’s your ETA? We can’t sit here forever.”

  “I’m coming. Hang on.”

  Rechs had wanted to make it back to the Crow before boarding the smuggler’s ship. He needed the Mark I armor—broken or not, it was better than running around in his civvies. And he could use some additional w
eapons and charge packs. There was no telling what he’d find on Shangri-La. Other than the Dragon. Plus, he’d dropped a request for Chappy and Doc to tell him what, if anything, they knew about Captain Jacobson.

  But getting back to the Crow wasn’t going to be an option. He’d be going to Shangri-La aboard another ship with few weapons and no armor.

  And that kid, the Dragon, had been better than all of the weapons that had been used against him so far. Which included several dropships and squads of legionnaires.

  And you.

  Rechs tapped the ignition switch for the failed engine, hoping to bring it back to life. He was rewarded with a half-hearted whump. Like some fire had caught and blown itself out in the same instant. The hoverboat raced over the waves of a small manmade lagoon within the center of the city. High above, the dropship was circling, looking for a new angle of attack.

  Rechs tapped his comm. “Nine minutes. Fire up the engines. I’ve got company!”

  He spun the wheel, throwing up a great rooster tail of water. The boat sped into a series of stilt houses built along the water’s edge. There was no finesse in what Rechs planned next. This was a bull-in-a-china-shop maneuver.

  The speeding hoverboat snaked between the long-legged stilts, its stern slapping against the rotting wood like a great fish whipping its tail around. Some of the stilts collapsed, causing the newly unsupported houses to tumble with their occupants into the lagoon.

  The dropship opened up with everything it had. Auto-blaster pods hanging off the stubby wings of the craft spooled to life and spat fire across the landscape, ripping the water and stilt houses to shreds. Shacks were holed and exploded. The side gunners added to the mayhem by sending short bursts into the rooster tail that marked Rechs’s destructive wake.

  ***

  Captain Hess watched as the wake of the speedboat carrying Tyrus Rechs ceased. The boat was down there, under the stilt houses, but it had stopped moving, and a plume of smoke was rolling out. They’d got him.

  The dropship shot overhead.

  “I want visual confirmation of a kill right-damn-now!” he screamed.

  “Can’t confirm visuals, Captain,” responded the door gunner. “Sorry.”

  “Captain Hess,” called out one of his leejes. “Let us toss some fraggers down. That’ll take care of it.”

  His kill team were a grim lot.

  The dropship orbited the wreck of the hoverboat in tight circles, searching for some sign of Tyrus Rechs.

  “Yeah,” chimed in another legionnaire. “Best case, they get a kill or wound him if he’s below the surface. Worst case, we dust some fish or Sins.” Sinasians—Sins to the legionnaires—were considered acceptable losses.

  But Hess was convinced that either Rechs was dead at the bottom of the lagoon or, more likely, he was making his way through the warren of passages within the stilt houses.

  “I want teams of two dropped in a radius that covers every access point to and from this area!” Hess barked into the dropship comm. “He’s out there, without armor, and we’re going to finish the bastard.”

  Tyrus Rechs. No armor, no gear. This encounter was the first time Hess hadn’t seen the bounty hunter open fire at his men. He was operating without a plan and on the run. It was exactly how Hess had always imagined—fantasized about, really—Rechs’s final moments.

  Desperate and totally at Hess’s mercy.

  25

  “Captain Hess, what if he went deep?” asked a Nether Ops kill team member after twenty minutes of fruitless searching.

  Hess heard the comment on the channel, but didn’t bother to respond. He was too busy attempting to get more assets in the area. And the super-destroyer’s captain was fighting with him over it. They were there to get the Dragon, full stop. It didn’t matter who else might be here. The Dragon was everything.

  At least until Hess mentioned his connections to some of the more powerful members of the House of Reason. Until he mentioned how, in Nether Ops, he had the freedom to check up on the family members and backgrounds of those unwilling to help in the Republic’s larger efforts against traitors.

  When he mentioned those things, available marines were quickly found and reallocated to Hess’s search.

  “Been thinkin’ the same thing,” said Sergeant Brian Schmidt, the senior NCO in charge of the kill team. He had shadowed Hess in an element performing a grid search through the area they thought was the most likely one Rechs would have fled into.

  The high-powered hoverboat the bounty hunter had stolen had sunk. Two legionnaires had gone down to the bottom to check the craft. No body.

  “Will you two shut up and let me think?” Hess realized with growing horror, one he was not willing to admit to anyone, that Rechs had slipped the leash.

  ***

  Schmidt silently questioned yet again his decision to leave the Legion for Nether Ops. For all the recruitment bluster about it being a place where things got done, in reality it involved a thousand competing fiefdoms all doing what they decided was best and with no regard for the consequences. He should have hung in there and waited for an invitation to Dark Ops.

  For now, he was cleaning up Hess’s sloppy search and destroy. Which wasn’t typical. Hess knew what he was doing, but something about this target, Tyrus Rechs, made him distracted. The captain had exposed his men to whatever the bounty hunter might have left in his flight—IEDs, auto-turrets, you name it. And it was up to Schmidt to make sure none of his boys ended up dusted because of it.

  And then he saw it: two of his boys’ vitals suddenly went offline, causing his HUD to flash an alert.

  ***

  “Captain Hess, what if he went deep?”

  Just as Rechs surfaced, he heard the Dark Ops leej utter the prophetic words. The bounty hunter quietly climbed up a small dock and approached the legionnaire from behind. He thrust his combat knife into the leej’s kidney while simultaneously darting his hand between the helmet and chest plate to crush the man’s windpipe.

  The legionnaire was bleeding out and choking at the same moment as Rechs rushed his buddy, curling his arm around his throat and pulling him down into the water. The bounty hunter plunged the knife into every gap in the armor he knew, sending the blade up and down like a piston. In the hurl and toss of the water, he struck armor a few times, chipping off the tip of his knife, but he scored more hits than misses, and the water snaked red with blood until Rechs released his victim and plunged the blade into the man’s throat. The legionnaire sank fast, drowning through the new opening in his neck.

  Rechs swam through the pink water and climbed back onto the dock. He stripped the bucket off the dead legionnaire still topside, then pulled out the comm. More would be coming soon. More than he could handle at the moment.

  He took the kid’s N-4 and as many charge packs, bangers, and fraggers as he could stuff in his cargo pockets.

  Rechs had ditched his jacket back when he first bailed from his boat after it caught fire beneath the stilts. The remaining good engine had exploded after being hit, and the craft no doubt sank quickly after that. But by then Rechs was beneath the water in the dark stilt forest.

  He surfaced for air only briefly and sporadically in small, dark pockets beneath the stilt houses. He’d suck in a lungful, then dive right back down into the dark water and swim for the next protected pocket, never really sure where he might find it. He’d made it to the outer edge of the security cordon when he spotted the two leejes on the narrow little dock above him. He could have bypassed them and swam on, but he needed a weapon.

  And now he also had a comm synced to the Nether Ops kill team, for however long it lasted before they did a frequency switch.

  Rechs kept the N-4 down along his dripping pant leg and threw himself into a crowd. He put the leej’s comm piece in his other ear and listened in on the kill team’s channel.

  The commander’s ta
g was Cobra Six. The guy seemed like a real petulant piece of work who led through bullying, intimidation, and humiliation. He spoke with a nasal whine. As Rechs cycled through the other comms, it didn’t take him long to figure out that this Cobra Six was a captain named Hess.

  They knew he’d iced the two legionnaires, but no one seemed all that broken up about it. Tyrus Rechs expected nothing else from Nether Ops.

  He quickened his pace.

  Ahead was a makeshift pontoon bridge Republic engineers had thrown out from the port to the city of ten thousand lily pads. Republic marines, sent down from the big super-destroyer no doubt, guarded the bridge from small, modular bunkers and amphibious assault sleds.

  “Jacobson,” said Rechs, careful to be sure he was speaking into the correct comm. “What’s your status and location?”

  The reply was a little slow in coming.

  “We’re aboard the pilot’s ship. There’s more to this than I thought.”

  “Like what?”

  Rechs hurried to catch up with a large group of refugees making their way across the bridge, hoping to blend in. Sinasian faces cast bitter glances at him as he fell into their midst. That seemed to be the most they were inclined to do about his presence, though.

  “The good news is it’s a short trip,” Jacobson said. “A half-hour jump. Bad news is it’s a blind jump based on a secret hypercomm channel beacon. That’s why no one ever found the planet by accident. It’s hidden inside the Suwaru Nebula.”

  “There in five,” Rechs grunted.

  He kept his head down and his rifle as concealed and close to his wet clothes as he could. But he had that sixth sense that told him when someone was watching him—always had—and right now he felt it. Sure enough, when he looked up, he saw someone staring right at him. The mounted gun operator of an amphib assault vehicle at the far end of the bridge. Though the gunner’s weapon was pointed off into the sky.