Recon Book Three: A Battle for the Gods

by Rick Partlow

  I saw a faint, white glow off to my left that didn’t come from my weapons light; it was in the visible spectrum, and I didn’t understand why I hadn’t detected it before. I edged toward it, remembering to check my threat display but seeing nothing except for a blank square of pale green; something down here was shutting out every sensor in my helmet. Even the audio analyzers were unreliable; the sounds down here were dampened somehow, like there was nothing solid off which they could echo.

  The glow was like the sound; it didn’t reflect off of anything else and it didn’t seem to share its faint light beyond itself, as if it didn’t exist in the same reality. But I could see, as I drew closer, that it came from a wall of what looked like glass, shimmering and opaque, but somehow growing clearer and more transparent as I approached, as if it knew I was here.

  Inside, frozen in time, preserved since an age long dead, was another of the things that Anatoly had shown us in his vault. Looming a good head over me, it was bipedal and basically humanoid in shape, but definitely not human. A long, angular face, cut with dark striations that I wasn't sure were natural, stared at me with large, liquid eyes that seemed to seek mine out. A spiky, swept-back mane of what might have been hair stretched back from the oversized cranium, adding to the creature's already-considerable height.

  It was a Predecessor. If I hadn’t been sure before, I was now. It was the holy grail, the thing so many people had sought for so long…and as I stared at it, unable to look away, I wondered if it would be satisfying to true believers like Israfil. Was this God big enough for them? Because to me, it seemed somehow…familiar. It wasn’t human; it was barely humanoid, and the things of its making were not things that could ever come from a human mind, or even be totally comprehended by one.

  But it also wasn’t totally beyond the realm of experience. It wasn’t an energy field, or a gas cloud or a giant amoeba, or even something as simultaneously strange and yet cliched as an evolved cephalopod. No, this was something I swore I could identify, something that didn’t come from some other galaxy or from a planet where the air froze or the oceans boiled; it came from somewhere very much like Earth. It didn’t seem right somehow, didn’t seem like a coincidence that could happen on its own.

  The Tahni were very much like us, but we had evidence now that their evolution had been tampered with at some point, somewhere deep in their past, five hundred thousand years ago or more. Sophia subscribed to the school of scholarly thought that believed the Tahni had been modified to be more like us, and that it hadn’t worked out well. But these things, these Predecessors, they’d presumably evolved somewhere on their own, without interference. Somewhere close enough to Earth conditions that they started terraforming every planet they came across to be more like Earth.

  The only post-secondary schooling I’d had was the required NCO learning annexes in the Corps, but I’d been married to an evolutionary biologist for years, and some of that had rubbed off. Feathers that had become hair, eyes that had evolved to sense light in a spectrum which humans could see, a body that had evolved for something close to our gravity, those all pointed to one conclusion.

  I was pretty sure I knew where the Predecessors came from. There was only one world I knew of that met all those criteria and showed no evidence at all of genetic tampering in its evolutionary cycle, the only world in the Cluster which had evolved humanoid, intelligent life on its own at least once before. That world was Earth.

  Then somebody shot me.

  Chapter Twenty

  The blast came from almost point-blank range, the flash blacked out my visor and a burning flare of pain sent me stumbling backwards, slipping on the glassy floor. The infrared light blinked out as my rifle slipped from my fingers and my back hit the floor, and I could see the shadowy figure of the Cult fighter looming over me just two meters away and my training and instincts took over. I didn’t try to grab the rifle, not at this range, just swept my pistol out of its shoulder holster and pointed it instinctively without trying to use the sights, squeezing off four rounds as fast as I could press the trigger.

  I didn’t wait to see the effects, didn’t even bother to check my display to see how badly I was hurt; I just rolled to my left and scrambled away from the area. I couldn’t see where I was going, couldn’t see much of anything without the weapons light, but I ran anyway and ignored the pain. Whatever didn’t kill me wasn’t worth thinking about.

  Another flash of laser fire exploded somewhere off to my right and I ducked in that direction, defying the shooter’s expectations and driving straight into him, firing off the rest of the magazine ahead of me. I rammed straight into the Cult fighter, my shoulder impacting his chest and knocking him backwards. I dropped the pistol and grabbed my rifle by the receiver, slamming the stock down over and over into the man’s helmet and neck. I couldn’t see his face, just an indistinct outline on thermal, but I felt the crunch of the visor shattering and then the bones of the face beneath it splintering under the impacts.

  Another shot, from behind me, and a searing agony in my right side. I rolled off the body, biting down on the pain and swinging around the Gauss rifle. I fired into the source of the laser flashes, spraying the tungsten slugs across from left to right, and the automatic laser fire jerked upward, arcing into the endless black above and yet still not seeming to light it up.

  There was silence. I grabbed at my side and cursed between clenched teeth, limping over to where the Cult fighter had fallen. I flashed my rifle’s light on him and saw that he’d taken two slugs in the chest and his blood was pooling across the dark floor. I kicked the laser carbine away from him, then put a round through his faceplate just to be sure.

  My shoulders sagged and I drew in a painful breath, finally taking a glance at the medical scan in my HUD. The armor had absorbed a lot of the lasers’ energy, but enough had gotten through to leave me with a couple nasty burn-throughs and some serious soft tissue damage in my chest and side. No major organs hit, and I wasn’t bleeding out, thanks to the armor’s coagulants and my pharmacy organ; but I did have two cracked ribs, which meant any movement of my upper body was going to come packaged with a lot of pain after the drugs wore off. At least the armor meant I didn’t have to see the wounds. I got a little queasy at the sight of my own blood.

  I had to find Israfil and the rest of his people fast, before the nanites drained me too much trying to heal me. I swapped out magazines in my rifle, retrieved my handgun and reloaded and re-holstered it, then took a moment to shine my infrared weapons light around. One direction looked as confusing and promising as the other.

  The anti-gravity tube thing had dumped me out back off to the right of my current position. I shrugged and headed left, shaking off a wave of fatigue that was washing away my adrenalin high. I wanted more than anything to sit down in some corner and rest, to let the painkillers and the nanites do their thing. I considered for just a moment heading back to the lift device and seeing if it would take me back up to where Victor and Sanders were, so I could bring them down here for backup. I rejected the idea because I didn’t know if Israfil knew I was down here yet. If he decided to go to ground in here, it could take us a long while to find him, and God knew what he might get his hands on in the meantime.

  Imagined hints of motion teased at the edges of my vision, outside the cone of infrared illumination my weapons light provided, and I had to make myself stop jumping and turning at each of them. Finally, though, after another ten minutes of start-and-stop walking, I noticed that it was beginning to get lighter. It made no sense, because I couldn’t see any source for it: no chemical strips, no light panels, no fluorescent algae, not so much as a flickering torch soaked in hundred-thousand-year-old pitch. But it was brighter, about the glow of the sky just before sunrise.

  There were…things on the vast and seemingly boundless floor of the chamber, things that were oddly twisted and patterned in ways that shed my attempts at comprehension. They rose up like trees in some nightmare forest, and if the light had
been coming from some singular source, or even a group of singular sources, they would have been throwing eerie shadows. The fact that they had no shadows, that nothing did down here, seemed even more eerie.

  Like all forests, this one eventually came to a clearing, an open space that must have been over two kilometers across. In the center of it were four huge, circular platforms, each hundreds of meters in diameter and maybe ten meters high, looking as if they were carved out of rock---smooth, grey rock and not the sandstone native to these mountains. Hovering motionless over the platforms, suspended on nothing, were four identical cylinders, each at least a couple hundred meters long by maybe fifty meters wide. They were as smooth as glass and each of them seemed to glow from within, a fluorescent, unworldly green, and I knew they were starships the way I knew that the preserved corpse was a Predecessor.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?”

  The voice was Israfil’s, its timbre and mellifluous tone unmistakable, but because of the uncanny acoustics of the endless chamber, the shouted words seemed to come from everywhere at once. I took a knee and scanned for him with the helmet’s sensors, but detected nothing.

  “These ships have waited for us here for tens of thousands of years,” he went on, now seeming to be off to my right. “Maybe hundreds of thousands. What kind of power does it take to keep them floating there for that long? What sort of incredible power must each of these vessels wield?”

  I thought I saw motion somewhere off to my left, just at the edge of the open space, slithering between the tree-like structures. I raised my Gauss rifle and tried to get a bead on whatever it was I had seen. Before I could touch the trigger, glaring white fire splashed over my faceplate and melted droplets of metal from the receiver of my rifle burned miniature craters in the armored plates protecting my forearms.

  I threw myself down and tried to trigger off an answering volley…and instead received a flashing red warning in my HUD that the Gauss rifle was inoperable. I cursed and began scrambling backwards in a low crawl towards cover, yanking at the quick-release for my rifle sling and letting the useless weapon clatter to the floor. Laser pulses impacted around me but all I could see of them was a distorted glare, and I realized that my faceplate had been damaged along with the rifle. If the sensors had worked down here, it still could have displayed their output and put together a computer-enhanced picture for me; but they didn’t, and I couldn’t see a damn thing.

  I tried to raise the faceplate, but the sealing mechanism had been melted shut by the blast, and I finally just jerked the neck yoke seals free and twisted the helmet off my head completely. Now I could see, and what I could see was two of the Cult fighters in full armor running across the open space towards me, firing their laser carbines from the hip to keep my head down. Their shots spalled off the twisted machinery/sculpture/whatever that made up the alien forest without seeming to do them any damage, but I knew from experience that I wasn’t quite as durable.

  My pistol was in my hand, though I didn’t recall drawing it, and I could see the aiming reticle hovering over my vision from my contact lens. I aimed carefully at the faceplate of the nearer of the two troopers and touched the trigger once. Time seemed to slow down and I felt like I could see the rocket engine igniting as the round streaked towards the target it had locked on to, could see the flare of the warhead’s charge turning a metal penetrator rod into superheated plasma as it hit. The Cultist fell in slow motion, at least compared to the speed at which I transferred my aim to the next target.

  This one was shooting at me from the shoulder now, his blasts of light and ionized air coming way too close, sparking off the floor only centimeters from me, close enough that I could feel the hairs on that side of my head smoking. I didn’t flinch, though, just lined up the shot and took it, and watched him tumble head over heels, his armor clattering against the rock floor.

  I waited in silence, trying to listen, trying to look without looking, my eyes slightly unfocussed and hunting for motion. There was nothing. I moved forward and stripped the pulse carbine from the dead Cultist, then shoved spare magazines into pouches designed for Gauss rifle reloads.

  “It’s you, Munroe, isn’t it?” Israfil said, now sounding as if he were way off to my left. I was sure it was a trick of the acoustics; he hadn’t had time to move that far. “Captain Marquette told us he’d given you the coordinates. He told us everything, before long; the Church of the Ancients is quite sophisticated when it comes to hypnoprobes, you know.”

  “He didn’t tell you everything,” I yelled back, figuring my location would be just as hard to detect as his was. “He probably didn’t mention that you’re a pretentious douchebag, and I’m sure he didn’t let you know that I’d be killing you.”

  “How can you see all this and still not believe?” Israfil demanded, his tone sincere in its wonder. “Is this not exactly as the Church has said it would be? Do you not see the handiwork of the very gods in this holy place?”

  Was he trying to distract me, I wondered, or was he really just this much of a windbag? Either way, I needed to move. The pain drugs were beginning to wear off already, or maybe I just needed another dose, and every motion drove daggers into my chest and side. My helmet was gone, along with its medical scanners and injectors, but I could have ordered up a shot of painkillers from my pharmacy organ. I didn’t do it; I needed a clear head, and if pain was the price of that, so be it.

  I got to my feet, but stayed low and wound through the edge of the forest of machines, scanning the open area and the spaces between the huge landing pads, trying to catch a glimpse of Israfil. It was hundreds of meters across, though, and he could be in the cover of any one of the docking platforms for the Predecessor ships, and I was beginning to think it was hopeless.

  “Munroe!” It was Marquette, his voice weak and thready but still audible thanks to the weird way sounds carried in here. “Look for the flash!”

  No sooner had he yelled the words than I saw it: the discharge of a pulse laser, straight up towards the far-away roof, originating maybe fifty yards from me, in the lee of the closest platform. I sprinted for it, wishing I could afford the luxury of dosing myself with stimulants but not wanting to risk the internal bleeding it could cause when I already had a couple holes blown in me.

  There was shouting ahead, and the sounds of a struggle, then the unmistakable smack of a fist into flesh…and another gunshot. The cry of pain that followed was close, and it was Marquette’s. I put on one last burst of speed, hugging the smooth, grey surface of the docking platform and following its curve around, the laser’s stock tucked into my shoulder.

  I got one glimpse of Captain Marquette laid out on his side, writhing in agony, clutching at his chest, before something hit me hard and slammed me to the ground. The rock floor smacked me hard in the back of the head and my vision filled with stars, but my body acted on its own without having to wait for orders from my fogged brain. I threw my arms over my face in time to block the punch I knew was coming, and by the time it had impacted against my forearms, the flashes of light had faded enough to see that it was Israfil himself mounted on top of me, his usually beatific face twisted in a determined rage.

  The laser carbine was gone in the fall, but I wouldn’t have had the time or space to use it even if it hadn’t been. Israfil was a berserker, pounding one punch after another at my head with all the superhuman strength his cloned muscle tissue implants had given him, and it was all I could do to block them. I tried to thrash him off of me using just my legs, but he had a good twenty kilos on me and probably some training on how to use it, and that was a losing battle. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, but I couldn’t get a shot at his head because he had the reach on me, so I tried a hook into his ribs and caught a glancing blow of his fist across my right cheek for my trouble.

  He grunted slightly at the punch to his floating ribs, but I could feel that he was wearing body armor under his loose, white robes and I wasn’t going to beat him with torso shots. I went for my shoulder hol
ster and he threw his weight into pinning my right wrist to my chest, which left my off hand free and his disgustingly perfect face close enough to hit. I didn’t have a shitload of leverage pinned down like that, but my gloves did have armored knuckles, and there was a sharp crack of what could have been breaking teeth when they impacted his jaw. Blood sprayed out of his mouth in dark droplets as his head jerked aside.

  He tumbled off of me and my pistol came free of its holster, but his hands still gripped my wrist and he was able to yank the gun away and send it skittering across the stone floor. His fingers slipped off and he tumbled to the side, and I rolled in the opposite direction and made a dive for the pulse laser pistol that laid beyond Marquette’s motionless form. I could tell I wasn’t going to be fast enough, though, and Israfil was charging me again before I could get to the gun.

  He tried for another take down, coming in low for my hips, with his head to the side and arms wide in perfect form, but I’d had that same training. I pushed down on his shoulders, splaying my legs wide to keep my balance, and took him to the floor, his fingers slipping off as he tried and failed to grab at my equipment belt. He surged upward, pushing off the ground, but I threw my weight onto his back and slipped an arm over his neck, trying to dig in and cut off his carotid flow.

  It reminded me of the time Gramps had talked me into trying to break a wild horse on his ranch in Utah---Israfil was as strong as hell and keeping him from getting his legs underneath him was almost impossible. He lifted me straight up off the ground like he was squatting a barbell, but I kept the hold around his neck, still trying for a choke-out and not wanting to let him throw me far enough away that he could go for a gun.

  I could feel the desperation as he struggled and I knew he was starting to feel the lack of blood flow to his brain, and he did the only thing he could: he slammed me straight down to the ground, trying to break my hold. The wind went out of me and a wall of blinding pain surged through my chest as my cracked ribs broke, but I clenched my teeth and said the hell with it and gave myself a dose of stimulants. Red filters seemed to fall down over my eyes and the pain took on an almost transcendental quality, radiating from my body with each pulse-beat, but I kept that choke hold stuck into Israfil’s neck.