Recon Book Three: A Battle for the Gods

by Rick Partlow

  I thought about shooting her, but she didn’t seem like much of a threat and I honestly couldn’t summon the mental and emotional energy for it. There was an explosion of dirt behind her that made me jump, and then something else was emerging from that mound: something big and metal and pissed off. Anatoly grabbed her by the helmet with both of his powerful, bionic arms and twisted ruthlessly. There was a sickening green-stick snap and the Cultist went limp. The Skinganger let her drop and turned towards me, the flesh parts of his face covered in blood and dirt and harsh, red burns.

  “Should have known,” I mumbled to myself. The two I didn’t give a shit about had both made it.

  Anatoly grinned at me through his horror mask of blood and dirt and began dusting himself off as he walked over to us. I kept looking, but there was no sign of Vilberg, and I began to morosely accept that he’d never made it out of the truck and had been vaporized in the blast.

  “Munroe,” Bobbi’s voice reached me over my ‘link. “Over here.”

  She was nearly a hundred meters away, out towards where the one shuttle had landed to pick up Israfil and Marquette. She was down on one knee beside what I thought, at first, was a burned and smoking body. As I got closer, I saw that it was just the armor he wore that was charred, and most of that was just surface burns, not from the star-like heat of the proton cannon.

  Bobbi was wrenching at the man’s helmet, and I was only a few steps behind her when she twisted it off and Braden Vilberg gasped in a deep and desperate breath. His eyes were wide and his face was red and covered in sweat.

  “Shit, that sucked,” he moaned, rolling over onto his side.

  “What the hell happened to you, Vilberg?” I wondered, happier to find him alive than I thought I’d be.

  “I was trying to get to the Cult priest guy,” he said, his voice dry and cracked. I pulled a canteen off my harness and handed it to him. He took it gratefully and downed a few mouthfuls of water before he went on. “The fucking shuttle took off before I could get to him, though, and I got my ass kicked by the belly jets.”

  “Well, you got closer to him than I did,” I said by way of comfort.

  I offered him a hand and he let me pull him to his feet, then grabbed my arm to steady himself when he almost fell over. I let him hold onto my shoulder and we headed back over to where Kurt and Sanders sat next to each other on the packed dirt, the others standing around them. Everyone’s eyes went to me.

  “What now, Boss?” Sanders asked, his helmet sitting in his lap. It was scored black and the faceplate was cracked, and I saw the raw, red weal on his neck where a jet of hot gas had burned through his gasket. Half his beard was burned away and his face looked lopsided.

  We were all beat to shit, and the only thing I could think to do was order them to help me steal one of the cargo shuttles left sitting on the landing field and use it to try to chase the Cultists back to their starship and somehow find a way to board it before they could shoot us down or jump to Transition Space. That was suicide, but the alternative almost made it palatable.

  “Munroe, do you read me?”

  I hadn’t realized until that instant that the jamming was gone. I guess it made sense, since the Cultists had been producing it and they were either dead or off-planet now, that they’d either turned it off or taken the jammers with them. But I knew it was gone because the voice coming over my ‘link was Divya’s, and there was only one place she could be calling from.

  “Go ahead, Divya,” I told her, feeling a surge of excitement and just a little sliver of hope. “Are you back in-system?”

  “We’ve de-orbited,” she said. “We’ll be at the extraction point in just a few minutes.” There was a pause and I imagined it was accompanied by the arching of an eyebrow. “Has anything happened while we’ve been gone?”

  “There have been a few developments,” I replied, “but I’ll tell you all about it in the air. For now, belay the extraction point and pick us up at the spaceport.”

  “Looking forward to hearing this,” she told me, signing off.

  I noticed Calderon and Anatoly staring at me, unable to hear the other end of the conversation.

  “Our ship is back,” I informed them. I focused on Anatoly. “I can’t give you the ride I promised just yet, though,” I said to him. “We’ve got work to do first.”

  “You’re going after the Cultists,” Calderon assumed. His lip twisted in a frown that was almost a snarl. “You’ll never catch them before they Transition, though.”

  “No, I won’t,” I agreed. “But I don’t need to.”

  “Marquette told you,” Anatoly said, shrewd and insightful for someone who was half a machine. “He told you where it was.”

  “He did,” I admitted. And I’d erased the damned recording quite thoroughly before I’d left the hide-out.

  “I know we’ve all done a lot more than we signed on for this trip,” I told my guys. “And we’re running short-handed and beat up. But I’m heading to the Predecessor outpost and I won’t have time for side-trips. If you don’t want to go with me, you’ll have to stay here and get a ride with Captain Calderon’s people when his lighter gets back.”

  “Who the hell you think you’re talking to, Munroe?” Victor snorted, sounding offended. “Kurt and I have been with you since the beginning. Where the hell else would we go?”

  “You know I’m in, Boss,” Sanders declared, trying to hide the pain behind a tight smile. “As long as I can use the auto-doc before we do any more fighting.”

  “You’re the captain,” Bobbi told me, her tone serious for once, “even if you were just a sergeant. I follow you.”

  I looked at Vilberg, who was working his right shoulder painfully. He grinned in spite of it.

  “You promised me a job, jarhead,” he reminded me. “I’m holding you to it.”

  I nodded in satisfaction. Overhead, I could hear the roar of the Nomad’s turbojets as she descended out of the clouds.

  “Anatoly,” I said to the cyborg, “if you want to wait here for us, you have my word that I’ll come back for you. If you come with us, I can’t promise we’ll survive to get you to Canaan.”

  “Are you kidding, Munroe?” That eerie grin split his face again. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Holy shit, Munroe,” Divya nearly gasped the words, disbelief strong in her voice. “How the hell did you fuck everything up this badly?”

  I paused in stowing my armor in the locker in the Nomad’s utility bay to shoot her a scowl. The whole ship was a beehive of activity as everyone struggled to get the wounded treated, get their gear stowed and get everyone assigned a berth and an acceleration couch before we lifted off, but Divya had cornered me while I changed into fresh clothes and forced me to brief her on what had happened after she and Kane had left.

  “It’s not as if I could have predicted the Predecessor Cult would be here,” I grumbled, feeling a bit on the defensive, “or that they’d be preparing to attack the city. Things…precipitated.”

  “Would they have precipitated if you hadn’t decided to negotiate with the Sungs for the Predecessor tech right in front of the Cult High Priest?” She pointed out, almost yelling by now. “Jesus Christ, Marine, I knew you had more balls than brains, but could you at least try to use your head for something other than a helmet rest?”

  “I didn’t have you around to do the talking, Divya.” I grinned self-deprecatingly. “We each have our strengths: you’re the schemer and the negotiator and I concentrate on shooting people and blowing shit up.”

  “This isn’t fucking funny, Munroe,” she insisted, her face red with frustration. She looked like she wanted to hit me, her hands clenching and unclenching almost unconsciously. “You know what instructions I received from Mr. West? He told me to either come back with the location of that Predecessor cache or don’t come back at all, so I don’t find anything about this situation amusing.”

  My grin faded along with my conciliatory m
ood, though not for the same reasons that were stressing Divya out. West---and, I assumed, Andre Damiani---wanted the Predecessor tech very badly; but I didn’t particularly want them to have it. That hadn’t seemed like a problem before I’d lost Marquette…though, in retrospect, it had probably been something I should have thought about much earlier. I hadn’t been kidding when I said Divya was the thinker and the schemer.

  And now, much against my desires and my better judgement, I knew where the Predecessor outpost was, a priceless treasure trove of lost Ancient technology, and I had no choice but to take us there.

  Maybe she was right though, and it was time to start using my head.

  “I can’t promise you we’ll find the Predecessor technology,” I said to her, “but I’ll do what I can to get Marquette back before the Cult can get their hands on it.”

  “Oh, really?” She asked, eyeing me doubtfully. “And how do you plan on doing that?”

  “Do me a favor,” I said to her, “and go check on Anatoly. I don’t particularly trust him and I don’t want him left alone.” I shut the locker and headed for the cockpit. “And tell everyone to get strapped in. We take off in five.”

  Kane was alone in the cockpit, interfaced with the computer system, and he didn’t look up when I arrived, lost in some task he and the ship were performing. I slapped my palm on the little-used control behind the navigation console and a thick, BiPhase Carbide hatch swung down from the overhead outside the cockpit and sealed us both in with a solid thump of metal on metal.

  He did turn around then, looking at me with curiosity in his biological eye.

  “What?” He wondered.

  “I need you to set up a self-erasing navigation program,” I said without preamble. “I’m going to enter it and I want it to be totally sealed off from the rest of the computer system. I don’t want anyone able to access it, not even me. It needs to get us to the system I point it at, then back to Belial station, and then it needs to be gone without a trace. Can you do that?”

  The green eye closed for a few seconds and when it reopened, it focused on me.

  “Already did it,” he said simply. He nodded towards a haptic input hologram that was projected over the navigation console. “Input the coordinates and we’re done.”

  I interposed myself between him and the navigation console, hesitating as my hand hovered over the input. Kane could still see what I was typing, if he wanted. He could have lied to me, could have left himself a way to access the data.

  I either trusted my people or I didn’t. I hissed out a breath and entered the coordinates. The haptic input projection faded as if it had never been.

  “Where we going?” Kane wondered.

  Good question, I thought. All I had was a bunch of numbers from some half-crazy old coot who might or might not have been lying.

  “We’ll find out when we get there.”

  ***

  I stared at the still image of Sophia and Cesar projecting from my ‘link screen and wondered if I was going to be able to get to sleep. We’d been in T-space for hours, and I’d thought I’d take advantage of the normal gravity and the fact that with everyone shuffled around because of our casualties, I currently had a cabin to myself to get some rest. If nothing else, sleeping would be a good excuse to avoid Divya; she’d been badgering me constantly about where we were going and how I knew to go there and she wouldn’t take the vague reassurances I’d been giving her for a satisfactory answer.

  But sleep wouldn’t come; my brain wouldn’t shut down and I couldn’t stop running through one scenario after another about what would happen when we caught up to the Cultists at the Predecessor outpost. None of those mental simulations ended well. Even if we stopped Israfil from getting away with the technology, I couldn’t think of any way I could keep the discovery of the place a secret from Cowboy. So, I’d stopped trying to think and pulled up photos of Sophia and Cesar instead.

  The photo of my wife and son was a still from a video I’d taken of them both a few weeks ago on a family camping trip. Cesar was smiling broadly through a face smeared with dirt, his mop of dark hair tangled and matted, with a dead leaf and a piece of dried grass caught in it. Sophia looked at him with an expression that was a mixture of exasperation and unconditional love, which I hoped and imagined was pretty much how she felt about me, as well. There was a lot of Sophia in Cesar’s lean, tan face and dark eyes, and perhaps a lot of Tyler Callas as well. The changes the street surgeon in Vegas had made to my looks so many years ago were only cosmetic, not genetic. My son was blessed with the excellent genes my mother had engineered for me, and perhaps cursed with the features of the perfect child she’d created as her protégé.

  I couldn’t seem to get away from that little boy I used to be, no matter how far I ran.

  My stomach rumbled and I decided to let hunger drive me out of my hiding place. I could have just forced down one of the ration bars I kept in my cabin, but even shipboard food was better than that, for all that it was just soy and spirulina powder reconstituted and reshaped and made up to look like meat and pasta and rice and whatever by the processors. I thought longingly of the dinner at the Sung Brothers’ mansion and wished there were any practical way to bring fresh meat and vegetables along on a ship this size.

  It was good timing; the cabin doors were closed and it seemed like everyone else had decided it was a great time to catch up on some sleep; but they were apparently more successful at it than I was, or at least more patient. The only one in the small galley was Sanders, looking a lot better since his burns had been treated. He’d gotten rid of the other half of his beard and I thought its absence made him look younger and more innocent.

  “Hey, Boss,” he said around a mouthful of soy and algae disguised as chicken and rice. “Get any sleep?”

  “Not really,” I admitted, checking the food processor’s hoppers and seeing he’d left them partially filled. I left it set for what he was having and started the cycle, then sat down across from him at the flimsy, fold-down table. “You look better. How you feeling?”

  “Like a fucking proton cannon shot at me,” he admitted, shrugging. “Naw, seriously, I’m fine. Kurt got it worse; he’s still in the auto-doc. Bobbi said he had a ruptured spleen and a lacerated kidney and it’ll take a while to get him fixed up.”

  “Eli,” I said to him, and I saw his eyebrow raise, since I rarely used his first name. “Tell me something. You ever think about what you want to do when we’re done with this?” I waved at the ship around us.

  “Sometimes,” he answered readily, like it was a conversation he’d had with himself at some point. He paused and took a drink from a bulb of hot coffee. “I mean, unless I get killed doing this shit, I’ll probably live a long time. There are people who’re like two hundred now? I think?”

  “Yeah,” I confirmed. I’d known some of them when I lived with Mom. “Some even a bit older than that, but not by much.”

  A little over two hundred years ago was when a lot of the anti-aging breakthroughs had been made. They’d taken quite a while to filter down to the average citizen, and a lot of lower-class people and frontier settlers still didn’t get the full treatment, but it was starting to look like most people would live almost indefinitely, barring violence or accidental death. That fact didn’t seem to have sunk in with many people or most institutions though, with the exception of far-sighted individuals like my mother.

  “I figure I won’t be doing any one thing my whole life,” Sanders reasoned. “I think maybe, when I give up on this, I might go back to my parents’ construction firm, if they’ll still have me. Maybe I’ll find a girl, settle down, have a kid or two and live that life for twenty years or so.” He grinned. “Then I’ll do something else.”

  The processor chimed at me and I got up and dispensed its output onto a plate, grabbed a bulb of orange juice from the fridge and sat down again, digging into food that was at least hot, if not honest. I downed a few mouthfuls before I continued.

  “Doe
s it ever bother you, risking your life doing this stuff when you might be able to live that long?”

  “They don’t pay people like me big bucks to sit on my ass and not take chances, Boss,” he replied with a laugh. “If I’m gonna’ live a long time, I’m gonna’ need some cash.”

  I nodded, thinking that Sanders probably had the healthiest attitude about it all of any of us.

  “What about you, though?” He asked. “I mean, all of us can quit any time we want, but you have to do this until your uncle decides you don’t.” He frowned. “Are you worried about handing over this Predecessor technology to him? I know it would bug the hell out of me, if I were the one making the decisions.”

  I grunted at the banal understatement. “I’m not sure I have any real choice.”

  “You could run,” he suggested.

  “Somewhere like Peboan?” I asked. “Or Thunderhead? Run by criminals, where I’d have to worry about my family being mowed down in the middle of someone else’s power struggle? That’s the only kind of place I could get away from the Corporate Council even temporarily.”

  He shrugged assent and I trailed off. I looked at what was left on my plate. Suddenly, it looked even less appetizing than it usually did, but I shoveled it down, anyway, out of dutiful habit. In the sudden silence, I heard the heavy, clomping footsteps on the deck. I expected Kane, but instead it was Anatoly. He’d had the wounds to his biological parts treated and looked more like he had when I’d first met him in Shakak…though, somehow, smaller here, on board the ship.

  “If you’ll forgive me,” he said, stepping over to the table and locking himself in place, “I don’t mean to intrude, but I was in the cockpit. It’s a small ship and my hearing is, well…” He gestured to the audio input discs where his ears should have been. “…enhanced.”

  I felt a surge of annoyance and I didn’t bother to try to keep it from reaching my face.

  “Anatoly…,” I began, but he raised a hand to forestall my objection.