Recon Book Three: A Battle for the Gods

by Rick Partlow

  And what I saw was a bulbous, ugly insectoid shape hovering only thirty or forty meters away, the grenade cannon in its chin turret tracking towards me almost spitefully. It disappeared in a flare of light and for just a fraction of a second I believed it had fired and I was dead and I was panicking at the thought that there was, indeed, an afterlife and I was about to be judged for all the bad things I’d done. Then I saw the flaming remnants of the pod raining down like a meteor shower and I realized that something had blown it apart quite spectacularly.

  My helmet’s speakers were out, so it took a second for me to realize that the roaring in my ears wasn’t a concussion, it was the Nomad. She was hovering above the canyon, her Gatling laser emitters still glowing red in their wing turret. I was glad, in retrospect, that he’d used the laser instead of the ship’s proton cannon; the blast from that could have had some nasty collateral damage inside the canyon. The ship coasted forward, its belly jets kicking up a swirling tornado of dust and sand, and the multi-emitter laser opened up again, firing at targets beyond the burning tents, targets I couldn’t see.

  Cleaning up the ground troops, I figured.

  Flashes of ionized air hammered towards the ground for several seconds, then the weapon spun down and darkened and the Nomad advanced slowly and steadily up the canyon. After hovering again for a few seconds, Kane landed her exactly where she’d been just minutes before. I forced myself to roll onto my side, ignoring the waves of pain the move engendered, and began crawling towards Divya and O’Neill. They were half-buried in rubble and I could barely see them through the cracks in my faceplate, and my comms were as wrecked as the HUD, so I wrenched my helmet off and tossed it aside.

  Former Marine Lance Corporal Alberto O’Neill was dead. He’d shielded Divya with his body, and had taken the brunt of the blast, his armor torn in a dozen places by shrapnel, but the decisive fragment was the one that had nearly severed his head. Divya was unconscious, probably from the concussion of the blast because I didn’t see any new wounds on her.

  Bad trade, I reflected cynically, but pushed the thought down. I had to get her to the ship.

  I tested each of my limbs and didn’t notice any sharp, tearing pain that would indicate a break. Then I took a deep breath and there were a couple flares of discomfort in my chest, but nothing bad enough to mean broken ribs. The worst hurts were starting to fade anyway, as the auxiliary pharmacy organ I’d had implanted a couple years ago finally began to dose me with the painkillers its nanites manufactured on demand. I still had my rifle; it was attached to my harness by the sling. I used it to lever myself to my feet and stood there, unsteady, for just a moment before I leaned over and picked Divya back up, throwing her over my shoulder once again.

  There were a half-dozen more fires burning now; small, smoldering, glowing spots where the mega-joule laser pulses had struck down the enemy soldiers. Not much was left of them and what was there wasn’t pretty. I tried not to look at the remains as I picked my way across the sand towards the lowering boarding ramp of our ship.

  Kane met me halfway there, walking with deceptively casual strides that still carried him along at a pace I could only achieve running flat-out. He didn’t try to hide his bionic limbs; his ship-wear shorts and sleeveless shirt accentuated them instead, and he eschewed faux skin tones in favor of bare, silvery metal. The same bare metal crawled up his neck and took over the left half of his skull and most of that side of his face; a red, unblinking eye stared out from the metal that had replaced his left orbital socket. What was left on the right side showed he’d been handsome, once, with a square jaw and a piercing green eye.

  “Sorry,” he said, taking Divya off my shoulder and turning to carry her back towards the ship. “Took out the shuttle quick, but had to check for orbital cover.”

  I was a bit loopy, still, but I understood his abbreviated explanation. An assault shuttle wasn’t a starship; it had to come from somewhere fairly close, and Kane had taken an orbit to determine if there was a picket ship waiting out there to send another shuttle to finish us off.

  “Anything out there?” I asked, stumbling beside him. I knew I needed to go back and get O’Neill, but I had to make sure of our tactical situation first.

  “There’s a lighter at the edge of sensor range,” he told me, grimacing a bit as he was forced to use more words than he was comfortable with, “but it’s burning for Peboan.”

  “Did you get all the attack pods?”

  He nodded brusquely. “There were two.”

  I followed him up the ramp into the utility bay and paused to grab a spare helmet from an equipment locker while he took Divya over to the ship’s lone auto-doc. She’d lost a lot of blood and probably had a concussion, but she’d be all right after a few hours in the biotic fluid. I fastened the new helmet in place and watched the HUD boot up and mate itself to the sensors in my armor. It began flashing red with a laundry list of my various injuries, but I ignored that and brought up the comms instead, even before the IFF system booted up.

  “Bobbi,” I called, leaning against the bulkhead and trying to fight down the light-headedness the drugs were giving me. “Situation report.”

  “I’m right behind you.” I heard her voice simultaneously over the helmet radio and the external pickup and I nearly jumped out of my skin as I realized she’d walked right up the ramp and got to within a few meters of me and I hadn’t even noticed. The damn painkillers were doing a number on me.

  Bobbi didn’t look any the worse for wear, not so much as a burn on her armor. I didn’t know how the hell she did it. We’d been running missions every few months for nearly three years and she hadn’t once been wounded, despite being balls-to-the-wall aggressive in battle. The rest of us weren’t usually so lucky, and we certainly hadn’t been today.

  Behind her on the belly ramp, Kurt was half-carrying Victor, one of his brother’s arms around his shoulders. Victor’s right thigh had a deep burn across it that was stained with blood, though it wasn’t bleeding at the moment, probably thanks to the armor’s first aid systems injecting the wound with a coagulant. Kurt didn’t look wounded, but his armor was scraped and burned and pitted all over his chest, and his tactical harness was shredded by grenade fragments.

  “Divya’s in the auto-doc,” I told them. “Kurt, take Victor to one of the cabins and get him on a cot, then get the medical kit and patch up his leg.”

  As the two of them moved off, I turned back to Bobbi. “O’Neill’s dead,” I told her. “Have you heard from Sanders, Waugh or Prouty?”

  “Sanders and Waugh are heading in,” she told me, unlatching her helmet and pulling it off. Her face was coated with sweat, her short, blond hair matted down. “They went up a side canyon and they’re about five minutes out, but they’re both okay.” She blew out a breath. “Prouty bought it. Took a grenade right in the back. Not much left of him.”

  “Fuck.” I sagged against the bulkhead. Two people dead, on a meaningless milk run of an op like this. I hadn’t known either of them that well, honestly, but I knew that O’Neill’s parents lived on Eden and that Prouty had a grown daughter studying at the University on Hermes.

  “Boss, do you read?” It was Sander’s voice, and he sounded excited.

  “Yeah, I’m here, Sanders,” I told him, pushing off the bulkhead and stepping towards the ramp as if I could see him out of it. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, we’re good; we’ll be there in a second. But we’ve got one of them, Boss.”

  “Got one of what?” I was a bit slow on the uptake.

  “One of the guys that attacked us,” Sanders explained. I switched to the feed from his helmet cam and saw a figure in the dark, shifting camouflage of the Stealth armor the enemy soldiers had worn being pushed in front of Waugh, his hands secured with a zip tie, her Gauss rifle muzzle pushing against the middle of his back. “Stupid fucker fell off a cliff and knocked the wind out of himself and we grabbed him. We’re bringing him to you.”

  “Good work, Eli,” I said.
“Get here ASAP and shoot him in the leg if he tries to run.”

  I pulled off my helmet and turned to Bobbi, feeling the expression on my face turn hard and cold. “Get one of the medical tables here into the bay and get it ready to strap him down. Time to find out just who these assholes are, and who sent them.”

  Chapter Three

  His name was Corporal Braden Vilberg and he was very, very sorry. That much became clear almost from the moment we stripped off his helmet.

  “Oh, my God, I’m so sorry,” he repeated again, sweat pouring down his pale, doughy face. His hair was dark and matted and his eyes were wide and white around dark brown and flitting back and forth like a bird’s, trying to stare at Kane, Kurt, Bobbi and me, as if he couldn’t determine who he should be most afraid of. “Really, we didn’t know who you were, we thought you were with the raiders!”

  “Yeah,” Bobbi grunted, yanking open the front of his Stealth armor and pulling the sleeves down his arms, “and who the hell is ‘we,’ asshole?”

  He was wearing some sort of dark blue uniform fatigues under his armor and the patch on the arm answered the question before he could. It was some sort of unit logo, with a stylized lion rampant on a hill of red rock and a roman numeral ten across it. Beneath the image were the words: Savage/Slaughter LLC.

  “Savage Slaughter?” I repeated, jabbing his shoulder hard with my finger and sending him flinching backwards. “What the hell is that, some kind of joke?”

  His answer was delayed by Kurt and Bobbi hauling him backwards to the cot Bobbi had fastened to the deck in the utility bay. His breath went out in a labored chuff as he fell into the cot then had Kurt put a knee into his chest while Bobbi fastened the restraint straps across his chest and legs.

  “N…no,” he wheezed, shaking his head and jerking against the restraints. “We’re contractors, just like you! We work off of Highland, got our own land there, our own base. We were hired by the Sung Brothers Cartel to take out whoever’s been ripping off their weapons shipments!” He looked at me pleadingly. “They never told us they’d hired another crew for the same job!”

  “We’re not contractors,” I corrected him, maybe being a little hair-splitting in my definition, “and we don’t work for the Sung Brothers.” I saw incomprehension in his eyes and decided I sucked at interrogation. I was supposed to be getting information, not giving it away. “If the Sung Brothers knew the raiders were here, why didn’t they send their own people instead of hiring you?”

  “I don’t know much,” he admitted. “I’m just a grunt; I only got hired a couple months ago. But I don’t think the Sung Brothers found this outpost, I think Captain Calderon did.”

  “Who’s Captain Calderon? Your CO?” That was Bobbi, her voice sharp and demanding. She’d probably be better at this than I was, if I was any judge of character.

  “He’s the ground commander for this op,” Vilberg volunteered. “He’s the CO of Charlie Company; I think he was a platoon leader in the Marines during the war.”

  “And how did ‘Captain’ Calderon find out about this place?” I wanted to know.

  “Like I said, I’m just a grunt,” he insisted, then shrugged diffidently. “But we got this ‘advisor’ along on this operation, this woman named Cameron.” He snorted. “No last name, you know? Just Cameron.” He smirked conspiratorially, like we were all battle buddies sharing rumors over chow. “I think she’s a spook. DSI, you know?”

  “Shit,” Kurt muttered. I didn’t comment but felt a solid, silent agreement. If the Department of Security and Intelligence was involved in this, then things were much more complicated than I’d hoped. I’d had dealings with them during the war, and those hadn’t always been entirely pleasant. The last I’d heard, they were a wholly owned unofficial subsidiary of my mother’s portion of the Corporate Council.

  “Who does this Cameron believe is hiring the raiders?” I asked him. That was something Divya hadn’t been able to tell us.

  “Everybody knows that,” Vilberg spluttered as if I’d asked him whether Santa Claus was real. “It’s the bratva, of course.”

  ***

  “Okay,” I said, propped up against the control panel, leaning back on the deactivated main viewscreen in the Nomad’s cockpit, “here’s the situation.”

  All seven of us, minus Divya who was still in the auto-doc, were crammed into the cockpit because Vilberg was still trussed up in the utility bay and I didn’t feel like moving him for this little planning session. Victor was leaning against the back of an acceleration couch, his injured leg swaddled in a smart bandage. Kane sat in the pilot’s station and said nothing; his biological eye was unfocused and I wondered if he even cared enough to listen.

  “The second planet out from this system’s primary is Peboan, which is one of the less inhospitable Pirate Worlds, for those of you who didn’t pay attention to the mission brief. It’s still only got one big city, Shakak, and not one but two criminal gangs that are trying to control it.”

  I paused, taking a drink out of a squeeze bulb of fruit juice. I’d shoved down a few protein bars before we convened and I could feel the empty pit in my stomach starting to fill and the light-headedness beginning to fade. It was the effects of the nanites starting to heal me; you had to give them fuel to work with or they’d cannibalize your blood sugar and muscle protein.

  “Shakak was run by the Novya Moscva bratva for years, a bunch of immigrants from what was left of Russia on Earth, which wasn’t much after the Sino-Russian War. They got complacent, though, and a new outfit moved in. They call themselves the Sung Brothers, though God only knows if they’re brothers or if their actual name is Sung. They’ve basically taken over the bratva’s arms operation, stolen their business right out from under them by offering a better deal to the black-market connections that can provide stolen or illegally manufactured military grade weapons.” I shrugged expressively.

  “Of course, the Russians aren’t too happy about this, and whenever the Sung Brothers try to cache their weapons on Peboan, they do their best to steal them and put a crimp in the competition. So, the Sung Brothers have taken to storing them off-world, on junked insystem freighters or moons or asteroids. That way, they can retrieve them when they have a buyer. Now, these raiders like the ones we hit today have started hitting the off-world stashes and stealing those.”

  “Why don’t the Sungs just have the weapons shipped directly from the people they’re buying them from to the ones they’re selling them to?” Sanders wondered.

  I looked over at him, sprawled out over the navigation station’s couch, and realized with something of a start just how much he’d changed since the first time we’d worked together, and not just because of the short, close-cropped beard he’d grown. You tended not to notice, working with someone day to day, but for some reason it just struck me right then. He’d sharpened and leaned out in the last couple years from the soft-around-the-edges construction manager I’d found on Hermes. His former lover, Carmen Ibanez, had been on our original team and had died on our first mission on Thunderhead. It had hardened him, and sometimes I wondered if that was a good thing.

  “They could,” I answered his question, “but that would reduce their profits and increase lead times. Guys who sneak proton cannons out of a Commonwealth military warehouse can’t just do it to order; it takes preparations. If the bratva can deliver the weapons quicker at a slightly higher price, they’ll force the Sung Brothers out of the business, and that’s the idea.”

  “The Sungs hired these Savage/Slaughter assholes?” Waugh asked, a vein throbbing in her temple. Her skin was too dark to see it, but I could tell she was flushed with anger. She and Prouty had been close. “These mercenaries?”

  “Contractors,” Bobbi corrected with quiet sarcasm.

  “Yeah,” I confirmed, nodding. “But apparently there’s some involvement by the DSI in all this, too. I don’t know what the hell that means, but it isn’t good.” I spread my hands. “Here’s why I brought you all together. We lost
a couple friends tonight. It’s a kick in the balls, and I know everyone would like some payback. But the mercs that actually killed them are dead, and as far as I can tell, the people who sent them were hunting the same raiders we were and just thought we were them.”

  “Fog of war,” Sanders muttered.

  “So, we just go home?” Waugh asked, righteous indignation practically dripping off her tone. “Pretend they didn’t kill Prouty and O’Neill?”

  “Believe me,” I said, holding onto patience with both hands, “I’d like nothing better than to kick the guy’s ass who sent them in here half-cocked, but we’d be submerging ourselves into a world of shit; and without orders from Divya or some other higher authority, we wouldn’t be getting paid for it.”

  “I don’t like getting shot,” Victor said, face sour as he looked at his leg. “I’d like to make someone hurt for that.”

  “Fuckin’ A,” Kurt put in, slapping his brother on the arm. I fought back a snort. Thunder was more likely to abandon lightning than Kurt Simak was to go against his brother.

  “You know what I like less than getting shot?” Bobbi Taylor remarked acerbically, eyeing the gargantuan twins with a baleful glare. “Getting shot when I’m not getting paid for it.”

  “Well, you won’t have to worry about that, Sgt. Taylor.”

  I blinked as I looked past my collected team and saw Divya climbing up the short steps into the cockpit. She was standing as straight and strong as if she hadn’t been shot in the gut and blown up just a few hours ago, not a hair out of place and even her suit perfect. I knew the auto-doc was responsible for healing her body, but I had to think the suit was some kind of ultra-expensive, self-repairing nano-material. Unless she had a whole collection just like it stowed away in the cabin she shared in shifts with Bobbi and Waugh.