Recon Book Three: A Battle for the Gods

by Rick Partlow

  They both looked down, wearing matching expressions of desperate, churning thoughtfulness.

  “Mr. Sung…,” Van Stry began, but they each held up a hand to stop her.

  “Shut up,” he said. There was a pause for maybe two or three very long and uncomfortable seconds before they looked up and the speaker spoke again. “I want the artifact back, then we can start talking.”

  “You are making,” Israfil finally interjected, his tone dark and grim, “an unenlightened decision.”

  “You’ll get what you paid for.” Sung waved a hand dismissively, clearly happy to have an excuse to cut ties with the man. “I never promised you anything beyond the one artifact.”

  “Sirs,” Caesar stepped up, hand instinctively going to the ear bud for his ‘link, his face showing alarm. “We have incoming bogies…”

  There was a change in the air, a shift in the stance of everyone standing there in the entrance hall, and I just knew.

  “Bobbi!” I yelled, giving up all pretense. “Get him out of there now!”

  I’d barely got the words out of my mouth when something hit me in the chest like a sledgehammer and I was lying on the polished, wooden floor on my back with stars floating in my vision and clouds of pain and confusion swimming inside my head.

  At first, I couldn’t hear anything but a dull roar and I was sure my eardrums had been ruptured, but then there was a buzzing in my ear that turned into Bobbi’s voice.

  “Munroe! Are you there? We have assault shuttles strafing the compound! You need to get the hell out!”

  I raised my head up and saw that the front door had blown inward; glass, cement blocks and burning wood were littered across the entrance hall, along with what was left of the bodies of the guards outside, and a haze of smoke was drifting through the sitting room, lit sporadically by the flickering of smashed light panels in the ceiling. The whine of turbojets penetrated the muffling gauze of trauma and I saw a flash brighter than lightning, heard a crack of thunder that shook the foundations of the mansion as a proton cannon struck a target outside.

  I shook my head clear and rolled over onto my side, not feeling anything broken and not seeing any blood. If any shrapnel had hit me, the armor must have stopped it. I got up to my knees and tried to get a look around as best I could through the smoke. I saw Calderon pushing himself to his feet, seemingly uninjured except for a freely-bleeding cut on his scalp, but obviously shaken and staggering, with a dozen scuff-marks on his black armor where fragmented glass or wood or cement had struck him to no effect. Van Stry hadn’t been so lucky: she had a jagged, ten-centimeter-long shard of glass right through her throat. Blood was gushing out around her as she convulsed, trying to draw her last breaths but unable to get them past her torn-out trachea.

  Caesar was on the floor, moaning softly, the jacket he wore over his armored vest singed and smoking, and a dozen cuts on his hands, upper arms and face but nothing that looked fatal. His bosses, the Sung Brothers, didn’t look so identical anymore. One of them had a bloody gash across his left cheek and a deep cut in his right side that was turning his expensively tailored tunic from pink to dark red; the other seemed unmarked, though he was flat on his back, eyes closed, moaning softly.

  Israfil was nowhere in sight. He’d moved fast, but then, he’d known what was coming. Those were his assault shuttles out there, using the weapons he’d stolen from the Sungs. And he’d be coming for Marquette. I’d barely had the thought when another blast shook the building, farther away, someplace at the other end of the wing.

  “Bobbi!” I yelled, staggering over to where Caesar still lay insensate. He had my pistol tucked into the pocket of his jacket and I grabbed and holstered it, then began working loose the sling of his pulse carbine. “It’s the Predecessor Cult! They’re here and they’re trying to get to Marquette! Get him out before they find him!”

  Nothing. Not even static. We were being jammed again, by the same people who’d been responsible for the jamming in Shakak. Both sides had assumed it was the other…

  I stripped the extra magazines out of Caesar’s chest pouches and shoved them into the pockets built into the armor plates on my legs, then jogged towards the rear exit of the sitting room. I knew approximately where Bobbi had been when she’d called me; my ‘link had displayed it on my contact lens. There was a stairway back here, or an elevator…

  I heard footsteps and turned to see Calderon limping to follow me, his pulse pistol in his hand, a look of determination on his face. I tensed and started to raise the pulse carbine I’d appropriated, but he waved at me to keep going.

  “I saw him,” he snapped. “That Cult priest…he ran before the explosion.”

  I hesitated for just a second, finally deciding that my only choices were to trust him or kill him, and not quite ready to kill him, yet. I headed off and let him either follow or shoot me in the back.

  The hallway was dim and filled with smoke, and I nearly collided with a young woman running headlong from one end to the other, fleeing from poorly understood danger to imagined safety. She was dressed formally, in colorful, flowing robes, and I thought she might have been a hired servant. The Sungs were the kind of people who I figured would have servants.

  I let her pass by, then headed off to the right, the way she’d come, deeper into the interior of the mansion. The power was off in some rooms, the lights flickering in others and it had gotten colder; the central heating was probably damaged. Here and there, I could make out shouting and screaming, and twice more there were blasts from what had to be proton cannons hitting the structure.

  “This fucking place is going to fall down around our ears!” Calderon exclaimed after the second one, and I glanced back in surprise at how close he was, just a half meter behind me.

  “Let’s maintain our interval, Captain,” I bit off dryly and he fell back a step, looking a bit sheepish.

  There was the door. It didn’t have a sign, obviously, no holographic designator advertising “secret dungeon this way, watch your step.” But I knew how the building looked from the outside and I knew that there were only certain areas that could support a staircase built out of local materials. It did have a lock, but not an expensive electromagnetic one with biometric sensors; it was just a simple and cheap physical bolt operated by a key card or RFID.

  I blasted the locking mechanism with the pulse carbine and it blew apart in a small steam explosion from the moisture in the wooden frame and a splash of molten metal from the bolt. The door swung open with a creak of inadequately lubricated hinges, revealing a deep and unrelieved darkness heading downward. I had enhanced night vision optics in my contact lens, but even that didn’t make the lightless depths below any easier to fathom.

  I glanced down at the pulse carbine to determine how to activate its built-in infrared weapons light and nearly died for my trouble. I had no idea where the shots came from, just a corner-of-my-eye realization that something had hit the wall behind me, sending a shower of plaster and wood spraying across the hallway, then training and instinct sent me diving forward through the darkened opening, from known danger to unknown.

  The unknown involved stairs…lots of them. I hit them shoulder-first and was automatically trying to roll onto my side when I realized I wasn’t stopping. My armor cushioned the blow somewhat, but I tumbled helplessly head over heels down the concrete stairs, trying to shield my head with my arms. I hit the first landing and finally managed to stop before I slid down the next set of steps. Something was rushing down at me and I scrambled to grab the pulse carbine from where it had fallen next to me, nearly opening fire before I realized it was Calderon.

  “Go!” He urged me, pushing against my shoulder. “There’re four of them out there and they’re heading this way!”

  I assumed he meant Cultists, but I guess he could have meant Sung Enforcers as well; each group was as likely to be shooting at us at this point. I found the light switch for the carbine and activated its infrared weapons light and suddenly I could make out
details with my contact lens again, including the stairs in front of me. I took them two at a time, trading caution for speed, hitting two more landings before I reached the bottom and a narrow, cement-block hallway with an unfinished look to it.

  There were intermittent dashes of chemical strip-lighting glowing a soft green at intervals, each above a doorway. The first one Calderon and I came up on had no door mounted in it and the room inside was bare block set in a grey, cement foundation. If anyone had ever been held in it, there was no sign of them. The next three rooms were the same and I began to wonder, as we followed the corridor around the perimeter of the mansion, if they were all still under construction.

  Then we came upon one that was finished, and had been in use. The door was metal, crudely made but heavy. Its physical lock had been blown out by what looked like a Gauss rifle shot, and whoever had been locked inside was gone, leaving behind a cheap, flimsy cot, a chemical toilet and two dead guards. They’d been the Sung Brothers’ men by the looks of them, and each had taken a Gauss round to center mass. It had probably killed them instantly, and they’d certainly never had the chance to fire a round from the rocket carbines lying next to them on the blood-soaked floor.

  “Who was down here?” Calderon asked, eyeing the dead men dispassionately.

  “Somebody named Marquette,” I told him, stepping out of the cell. “He’s the one the Cultists are looking for. Come on, there’s another way out of here.”

  Koji had told us about it; he’d gotten the plans for the place from the construction workers the Sungs had brought in when they’d had it built. He hadn’t been able to get us anything else, but this had been enough.

  I led Calderon farther down the curving hallway, past a few more chambers, some that looked like cells, others like storage rooms. I knew we’d found what we were looking for when we came to another curve where the foundation of the house turned to the right, but an open doorway, narrow and short and oval-shaped, offered a passage straight through that foundation. I was about to duck through the door when the Cultists who’d been chasing us upstairs finally caught up with us.

  I heard the scrape of rough-soled sandals on the floor an instant before the micro-rocket struck the wall centimeters from my head, throwing bits of shrapnel hard enough for a piece to sink into the back of my neck. I bit back a gasp of pain and opened up on them. There were four, running single file in the narrow hall, and the burst of laser fire from my pulse carbine only hit the one in the lead.

  Before he had the chance to fall, I was diving through the doorway with Calderon only a half second behind; and then we were running as fast as we could, crouching over in the claustrophobic confines of the tunnel. It led upward at a fairly sharp angle and the return fire from behind us expended itself uselessly into the rocky floor. I knew they’d be coming after us in seconds, so I didn’t waste time on shots that would have been just as ineffectual, concentrating on getting through, up and out as quickly as possible.

  The slope turned into stairs, still making their way inexorably upward, and my quads burned with the effort of taking them two at a time. I counted my steps in unconscious habit as I climbed: I’d hit thirty already and sweat was pouring down into my face and I could feel the surge of adrenalin from the fight-or-flight response starting to give out and my pace starting to slow down. Calderon was falling back already, at least three or four meters behind me and losing ground.

  Did I care? He’d picked the right side of this particular fight, but he was still responsible for God knew how many civilian deaths and Prouty and O’Neil. Maybe getting himself killed holding off the Cultists would make up for it. I had no problem at all leaving him behind if it came to that.

  I was spared having to make the decision because I nearly ran face-first into the exit hatch. It was a solid chunk of heavy metal with a simple but heavy-duty physical latch that had been left unlocked by Bobbi and the others when they’d passed through it. I braced myself against the top step and pushed it open with my shoulder, hearing the squeal of the rusted hinges.

  The cold, night air rushed in through the opening, slapping into my face, and I shoved the pulse carbine out ahead of me. We emerged out of the side of the hill past the tree-line on the other side of the wall; I looked back the way we’d come and saw the flickering, faceted glow of the mansion burning, heard the far-away whine of the assault shuttles’ turbines as they circled. Ahead of us, a barely-visible trail was etched out of the grass and dirt and a dusting of fresh snow, leading down the bare, rocky hillside and into the trees at its base.

  I couldn’t see anything through the thick trees, but I could hear gunshots: the distinctive sounds of pulse lasers and Gauss rifles, less than a hundred meters away, and I knew the only people around here who’d be using Gauss rifles…

  I heard the hatch begin to creep open behind us and I glanced at Calderon.

  “Got any grenades?”

  He shook his head, patting at his tactical vest helplessly.

  “Goddamn officers,” I muttered, grabbing a spare magazine for my pistol from my chest pouch. “Never any use at all.”

  I stood to the edge of the hatchway and watched the door swing outward a few centimeters, then I tossed the magazine through the gap and yelled: “Grenade!”

  There was yelling and screaming and scrambling and the door began to slam shut, but I caught it before it could, then stuck the muzzle of the laser carbine inside the gap and pulled the trigger. Light and heat and screaming leaked out from behind the hatch and I let it slam. If any of them were still alive and interested in coming after me, I figured at least that would make them take their damn time about it.

  “Come on if you’re coming,” I snapped at Calderon, then sprinted towards the shooting.

  Running downhill without tumbling forward head over heels was almost as hard as running up those stairs, and I could hear the mercenary officer’s boot soles scraping against the dirt as he tried to keep his balance. The ground evened out as we hit the tree line and I began to see flashes of light through the tightly-packed pines. That meant pulse lasers, and if those were Cultists, they’d probably stolen them from the Sungs. And I was rushing into it headlong, like an idiot.

  “Stay behind me!” I told Calderon. I didn’t bother to explain why; I assumed he’d know it was so my people didn’t shoot him on sight.

  The trees thinned out after fifty meters, and I had about ten seconds to figure out where my guys and the Cultists were before the Captain and I were in the middle of it. The laser pulses were coming from my left, and there were at least a dozen of them. They were sheltered only by trees, and I knew that our Gauss rifles could cut through them if my people had the time and opportunity to get out from under the suppressive fire flashing in a coruscating light show of ionized air between them. I could see the IFF signals coming off of their armor here at line-of-sight distances, and my IR lens could make out the bulk of our mules with their legs folded beneath them, acting as cover.

  I paused, digging my heels in and sliding to a halt on the trail and trying to catch my breath as I grabbed a spare magazine for the carbine from my leg pouch and held it alongside the receiver with my left hand.

  “Don’t stop running till I do,” I cautioned Calderon.

  I didn’t wait to make sure he heard me, just sprinted downwards into the chaos; I angled behind the line of Predecessor Cult fighters and held down the trigger pad, yelling at the top of my lungs. I didn’t have the time or luxury to aim; that would have required slowing down too much, which would have made it likely that I would be exposed to friendly fire once my stupid plan worked. I just hosed the area as I ran by it, keeping my steps high to avoid tripping over a root or rock. Everything was a blur of polychromatic after-images and a cacophony of shouts and screams and the high-pitched thunder-cracks of pulse guns discharging.

  I didn’t remember swapping out the magazines, but I knew I had. I emptied the new one too, the last round flashing out as the warning vibration coursed up my arm fro
m the pistol grip, and then I was around the other side of the enemy lines and yelling at the top of my lungs.

  “It’s Munroe! Open fire now!”

  I could hear the deep thrum and hard crack of the Gauss rifles discharging, all of them firing in antiphonal chorus like a never-ending echo. Beneath the sound of the discharging weapons was a higher, sharper snapping bang that I knew was the splintering of the trees that the Cultists were using for cover. I threw myself down behind a deadfall log, and I could feel Calderon hit the ground beside me, though I couldn’t hear it over the din of the battle. The electromagnetic slug-shooters kept firing through what had to have been a mag-dump by everyone on the team, and when they stopped, there was no reply by the lasers.

  “Clear!” I could hear Bobbi yelling into the sudden silence.

  I pushed to my feet, feeling my hand sinking into the cold, clinging mud as I did. I could see Bobbi and the others coming out from behind the mules, rifles held at a cautious low port.

  “We didn’t know if you’d got out of there in time, Boss,” Sanders said, waving towards the conflagration back at the Sung compound. You could just barely see the glow of the flames from here, and even the whine of the jets from the shuttles was distant.

  “What the hell is he doing here?” Victor growled, levelling his rife at Calderon.

  The mercenary officer took a step back, about to bring up his pulse pistol before I moved between the two of them.

  “Take it easy, Victor,” I said, holding my hand up to restrain him. “He’s on our side, for now. Let’s not spoil things by killing him, yet.”

  The big man grumbled, but his rifle barrel went back to low ready.

  “Where’s Marquette?” I asked, turning to Bobbi. She was wearing a helmet, of course, but I could see her IFF transponder on my contact lens. Even without it, she was the shortest of us here.

  “Kurt,” she ordered, “bring him out.”