Recon: A Wolf in the Fold

by Rick Partlow

  Then Bobbi stepped onto the last flight of stairs and the head did spin towards her, and a figure dressed in black fatigues stood up beside it, eyes wide and white on a dark face. I snapped my pistol up, aimed at the top of the window, just above their heads, and fired off three quick shots. Red flares speared across the ten meters between me and the window, then the warheads hit and detonated with a spray of liquid metal that melted through the light panels in the compartment’s ceiling.

  Both heads went down abruptly as the lights inside flickered and flared, and then Bobbi was smashing her shoulder through the door and yelling in a loud, braying voice for everyone to get on the floor. I was a few step behind her, nearly tripping on the high step up into the room, my eyes dancing around from the three technicians huddled on the floor, hands covering their heads, to the last security guard, flat on his butt, hand straying near his holstered pistol.

  “Put your fucking hands on your head!” Bobbi was bellowing, her weapon trained on him, feet planted wide in a stable stance that nearly trampled on one of the prone engineers. “Don’t be stupid!”

  “I made a promise,” I said softly, and his eyes flickered toward me and the gun in my right hand. He was young, like the other one, too young to know better. “I promised I wouldn’t kill these civilians.” I gestured with my left hand at the two men and a woman on the floor, cowering and in one case, crying. “I didn’t make any promises about you. I’ve killed people who’d done less to deserve it than you.”

  He looked at me for a long moment, breathing hard, and I could see that he believed me. That was smart; I was telling the truth. His hands went behind his head and Bobbi darted forward to grab his weapon from its holster.

  “I should start a fucking collection of these,” she mused, looking at the same model of polished, silvery slug-shooter that the others had carried.

  “Kane!” I yelled behind me, holstering my pistol and quickly tying the guard up. “Get in here!”

  The cyborg clomped inside, his footsteps heavy and hollow on the metal. He’d worn a long-sleeved jacket, gloves and fatigue pants on this mission as a concession to the need to stay inconspicuous, and the audible evidence of his mass seemed incongruous somehow. He didn’t give the engineers or the guard a second glance, just moved to the main reactor control panel. It was decades old and showed it, all the displays two-dimensional flat-screens reporting the reactor core status, the turbine speed, and a dozen other pieces of data I didn’t have the training to understand.

  Kane fished an interface connection from his pocket, plugging into a receptacle on the console and into the jack on his left temple. He stood motionless there for a moment, his biological eye flickering back and forth as if he were surveying a landscape I couldn’t see. Then it closed and his mouth moved almost in a prayer. And every display on the control panel went dead, followed by the lights winking out together. Red emergency lighting popped on immediately, powered by backup batteries; and the guard and the engineers gaped at us in horror.

  I’d almost gotten used to the whine of the turbines, and it took me a moment to realize that it was gone. There were no alarms, no indicator lights, nothing; but by the time Kane unplugged from that console, the reactor had flushed its core and every business in Freeport that depended on it for power was dark and dead. As was the laser defense system.

  “You can’t do this!” One of the engineers, the woman, implored us, her eyes wide, her face pale. “People will die without power!”

  “The reactor systems,” I told her, “are infected by a self-consuming net-worm. It will run itself out in one rotation of Thunderhead, and then you’ll have control back of the system.”

  “But…” She shook her head helplessly. “Why? Why would you bother to do all this just to shut it down for a day?”

  I gave my answer to the security guard, who was watching me with hate in his gaze.

  “Tell Abuelo that Randall Munroe wants to talk to him.” I motioned for the others to head down the stairs and began backing out to follow them. “Tell him I’ll be waiting.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “So,” Sanders asked, lying flat on one of the beds and staring up at the plain, white ceiling, “how long have we been waiting now?”

  “About a half hour longer than the last time you asked,” Bobbi replied, trying unsuccessfully to hide her annoyance. She didn’t look up though, just kept playing the game her ‘link was projecting to the hotel room’s entertainment tank. From what I could see, it had something to do with lizards and mushrooms.

  “Power’s been on for a full day now,” Ibanez commented. She was on the floor next to the bed in a full split. She’d been “stretching” for over an hour and I was beginning to think it was compulsive behavior.

  Over in the suite’s small dining room, I could see Victor and Kurt arm wrestling on the table, sweat beading on their foreheads as neither was able to make much headway against the other. I’d been timing it in my head, and they’d been deadlocked that way for over a solid minute. Kane hadn’t spoken or moved from where he stood in a corner of the room for six hours, and I was pretty sure he was sleeping.

  “Abuelo is off wherever, out of town,” Captain Yassa reasoned. She was stretched out on the other bed, opposite the one Sanders had claimed, her boots off but her pistol still at her waist. “It’s going to take a while before they get word to him and then he can get word back and then they contact the address we left on the message server at the Lucky Bastard. Just take advantage of the down time.”

  “We’re lucky Mr. Amador got us a room,” I said. I was sitting at the small desk the hotel provided almost as an afterthought in an establishment that didn’t exactly cater to business travelers, staring at my ‘link and wishing for it to chime. It was connected to the hotel’s hardline datanet, so as soon as the message came through, I’d see it. “We could still be stuck in his shed, sleeping on sacks of algae flour.”

  “I’m not complaining about the room,” Sanders assured me. “Just feels…weird somehow.”

  “I still think,” Bobbi spoke again, sounding no less annoyed, “that we should have taken advantage of the air defenses being down and took the ship on a recon run. We could have spotted his hideout from the air and called that orbital strike down on it.”

  “And then not known whether or not he actually had a Predecessor artifact,” Ibanez pointed out. “Isn’t that the mission?”

  “We could have landed afterward and done a bomb damage assessment.” Bobbi’s response was half-hearted. She knew she was wrong but she was antsy and frustrated and I sympathized. I wasn’t going to bother to argue with her because I’d had the same thought myself.

  “When’s the food supposed to get here?” Victor asked from the dining room, rubbing his right arm. Kurt was shaking his out, and I realized I hadn’t seen who’d won.

  Damn.

  The door chime sounded and eight heads snapped around, Kane’s included, and Yassa and Bobbi both drew their guns. I stood and stepped quickly over to the panel next to the door, pushing the speaker control.

  “Who is it?” I asked, my hand resting on the butt of my weapon.

  “It’s Arjun,” a young, slightly high-pitched voice answered. “I brought your dinners.”

  I let out a breath. Arjun was the son of Dev Modi, the owner of the hotel; we’d been introduced two days ago, when Milton Amador had brought us to this place to hold up. Arjun was a young teenager, but he did a lot of gopher work for his father, including delivering meals for room service.

  “Put the guns away guys,” I said. “Don’t want to freak the kid out.”

  I hit another control on the door panel and it opened with an audible click of the lock releasing. The door swung aside and Arjun pushed a wheeled cart into the room, loaded down with covered plastic trays; I felt heat coming off of it from the warming elements.

  “Thanks, little dude,” Victor said, grinning. “I’m starving.”

  Arjun smiled, a little nervously. “There shou
ld be plenty for all of you. I’ll come back for the cart.”

  He backed away, and I was about to close the door behind him when Victor picked the lid off the largest of the trays and the world exploded.

  There was light so bright that it burned out all sight, and sound so loud that it hit like a blow, like I’d been smashed in the face with a brick, and I felt the floor against my back. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t feel and the only thought that penetrated the dull, hollow ache between my eyes was that we were all dead.

  But the dull ache didn’t fade into darkness and the feeling started to return in waves of discomfort, and as the light flashing in front of my eyes began to settle into a blurry normality, I realized exactly what had happened. Concussion grenade.

  Rough hands yanked my pistol out of its holster and patted me down for other weapons, finding the polymer knife I kept in my thigh pocket and taking my ‘link as well. Then they backed off and I laid there motionless, waiting for what I was sure would be the kill shot. I tried to scoot backwards as a tall, slim form loomed over me, but I couldn’t quite move yet.

  “Relax.” The voice was deep and gravelly, reminding me of my Drill Instructors in boot camp. “You wanted my attention…well, you got it.”

  That voice…it reminded me of something else besides my DI’s from Boot. It reminded me of someone else. I gathered my strength and pushed myself upright, blinking to try to clear my eyes. The dark blob solidified, cohering into a lined, weathered face with close-cropped dark hair and piercing dark eyes.

  My jaw dropped open and I sat there, transfixed, unable to form an intelligent thought.

  “It’s been a long time, Ty,” Master Gunnery Sergeant Cesar Torres, United States Marine Corps (Retired) said to me, smiling as broadly as I had ever seen him.

  All I could do was gape in utter disbelief and finally mumble one word.

  “Gramps?”

  ***

  I downed the tequila in one gulp, shuddering slightly as it burned in my chest and clenching my fingers against the grain of the wooden table, feeling the rough spots where it had been inexpertly sanded by whoever had made it.

  “Go easy on that,” Gramps cautioned. “You’re still woozy from that flash-bang.” But he grabbed the bottle and refilled my drink anyway, topping off his own as well.

  My head swam for a moment in support of his warning and I waited till the feeling passed before I took a second, more cautious sip.

  “You’re the one that gave me my first drink of this shit,” I reminded him, saluting with the glass.

  He laughed at that, a look of nostalgia passing across his harsh, craggy face.

  “On that trip to Baja for your sixteenth birthday,” he recalled. “Your mother was not happy when she found out about that.”

  I took another sip and glanced around the luxury suite to make sure we were alone. He’d dismissed his guards when he’d brought me in here, leaving the others recovering in our room, but I was feeling a bit paranoid and slightly guilty for not explaining things to them before he’d hustled me out.

  “You know,” he went on, face clouding with memory, “when I was a boy, before the anti-aging treatments and the nanite injections, most people never lived to know their great-grandchildren. It’s still so new, the idea that there’s a generation that was born two hundred years ago that hasn’t died yet. I wonder if anyone has thought of the implications…”

  “Gramps,” I interrupted him, “how the hell did you wind up here?”

  He leaned back in his chair and took a breath as he directed his thoughts back to the present. I’d seen it before; it was something a lot of older people had to do. Their brains were crowded with memories, and sometimes it took them a while to sort through them.

  “With Patrice and the weight of the Corporate Council after me,” he explained, “there weren’t too many places in the Commonwealth that would be safe for me. The night you killed Konrad and I dropped you in Vegas with the street surgeon who changed your face, I caught a private shuttle to McAuliffe Station and bought a spot on a transport to Belial.”

  He smiled grimly, then swallowed a sip of his drink before he went on. “I had a good deal of money stashed away in case of emergency. It cost nearly every bit of it to buy passage on a freighter heading for the Pirate Worlds. I landed here with a few hundred in Tradenotes, a single suitcase and an utter lack of any plan.”

  “You went to work for Crowley,” I presumed. I’d heard that much.

  “Cesar Torres was dead,” he confirmed, “and I had no desire to spread that name around even out here. I gave Crowley a fake name, but he always called me ‘Abuelo,’ grandpa. So Abuelo I became.” Gramps looked down into the dregs of his drink. “I was desperate, out of options. I…did things that made it hard to look at myself in the mirror.”

  “Been there,” I muttered, feeling so much older than twenty-five.

  “Finally, I’d built up enough support among the townspeople, and among many of Crowley’s subordinates, that I was able to convince them that we’d all be better off without him.”

  “Was Constantine part of that deal?” I wondered.

  He nodded grimly. “He commanded the loyalty of quite a percentage of Crowley’s enforcers. It was necessary to promise him a position in my regime in order to secure his support for my little coup.” He looked uncomfortable, so different than the incredibly self-assured, larger-than-life figure who’d been the closest thing to a father that I’d been allowed to have. “I was hopeful that I could keep a close eye on him and make sure he didn’t indulge in the brutality I’d seen in him.”

  “That hasn’t worked out so well,” I informed him drily.

  “That’s what Dev Modi told me when I tracked you here. I’ll deal with Constantine,” he promised. “I think the rebellion among the business owners in town will be enough leverage to pry his supporters loose of him. They may not give a damn about morality, but they understand the bottom line well enough.”

  I had so many things I needed to talk to him about, so much I needed to ask, but suddenly, I couldn’t think about any of that. It was being squeezed out by emotions I’d pushed down seven years ago and never let back out.

  “I’ve missed you, Gramps,” I said, feeling tears welling up in my eyes and not quite believing that I could still cry after everything I’d seen.

  He pushed himself up from the table and walking around to me, pulling me into a hug. I did cry then, unabashedly, feeling my shoulders shake as tears poured down my cheeks, not just because I’d missed Gramps but for all that had happened in-between. I cried for Konrad, for the innocence I’d lost when I killed him, cried for Johnny and Captain Kapoor and everyone who’d died while I survived, for the innocent people who’d died on Demeter, and for Captain Yassa and the others who’d come back but never truly came home.

  “It’s okay, son,” Gramps said, patting me gently on the back the way he had when I was eight and my first dog had died. “It’s okay. I know.”

  “Sorry,” I said, shaking my head and wiping my eyes as I slowly pulled away from him. “Sorry, it’s just…a lot has happened.”

  “I heard about Demeter,” he told me. “I’ve tried to keep tabs on you when I could.”

  “I live there now.” I laughed at the absurdity of it. “Crazy, right? I spent the worst times of my life there, but it’s the closest thing I have to a home.”

  “Not crazy at all.” Gramps poured another shot. “You asked me why I was here, Ty. Now I have to ask you the same thing. You came looking for me, but you didn’t know it was me you were looking for.” He locked eyes with me. “So why did you want to find Abuelo?”

  “Someone from the Corporate Council found me,” I replied, not even considering lying to him. “They’re blackmailing me into working for them or they’ll tell Mom where I am.”

  “Hijo de puta,” he mumbled, looking away as the implications of what I was saying sunk in. He stepped backwards, coming up against the table and resting against it for balanc
e. “They know.”

  “How did you find it?” I wondered.

  “I didn’t,” he said absently, face still clouded in shock. “Crowley had it; he’d had it stuck away in warehouse for years, didn’t have any idea what it was or what it was worth. I stumbled across it after I killed him.”

  He said that so casually, I thought, like it didn’t mean anything, like it was the most natural thing in the world. But who was I to judge?

  “Gramps,” I asked, “what the hell are you going to do with a Predecessor artifact?”

  “Exactly what they’re afraid I’m going to do with it.” His voice was harsh with anger, though I was sure it wasn’t directed at me. He stood straight again, looking intimidating in his black fatigues, a large handgun holstered on his belt.

  “The Corporate Council has been running the Commonwealth like a shadow government for decades now, since the time of the First War with the Tahni. No one’s been able to do a damned thing about it because no one could ever put together a force powerful enough to threaten their control. Until now.”

  “That sounds…a bit ominous.”

  “They’re above the law, Ty,” he said. “You know that better than anyone. They have moles in the military, in the intelligence community, in the Patrol…”

  “Yeah,” I admitted ruefully, thinking of Cowboy. “I have some experience with that.”

  “The only way to stop them is to build a force they can’t reach and can’t interfere with. That’s what I’m going to do out here, in the one place they don’t control.”

  “You think you can do that out here?” I asked, not trying to hide the disbelief in my voice. “What is this thing anyway? What do you think it can do?”

  “I’ve brought in every researcher I could buy for love or money.” His lip curled in a derisive smile. “Some I had to smuggle out of Corporate labs. But as near as they can tell, it’s some kind of weapon. And I think they’re pretty close to figuring out how to make it work.”