Recon: A Wolf in the Fold

by Rick Partlow

  “One of the things that makes me and the other Glory Boys what we are,” Cowboy elaborated, “is a highly-specialized nanite suite tailored to our DNA, self-sustaining, self-replicating and powering itself from our own blood sugar. It can repair most injuries in hours, assuming you have the raw materials available in the form of body fat or undigested food. It can basically do almost anything an auto-doc can do, but it’s inside us.”

  “Holy shit,” I said, suddenly alert, my eyes opening wide. “Is that even possible?”

  “Oh, it’s possible,” he assured me. “But it’s really fuckin’ expensive. So expensive that only ten people have ever had the treatment.” He nodded towards the auto-doc. “Until now.”

  I felt my face twist into a mask of disbelief.

  “Why?” I restrained myself from shrugging, knowing it would send me floating off again. “Why me?”

  “Because you’re his damn nephew,” Cowboy said in a tone like it was incredibly obvious. “And he put you in a position where you might get killed.”

  The other shoe dropped inside my head.

  “And he’s going to do it again.”

  Cowboy smiled, touching a control and opening the auto-doc chamber with a pneumatic hiss.

  “Like I said, you’re a smart kid, Munroe.”

  I felt myself sag. I’m sorry, Sophia.

  I pulled myself inside the chamber and closed my eyes.

  “Let’s get it over with.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The house was dark when I stepped inside. It was after midnight local time in Amity, and Sophia was always asleep by ten; she had to get up early on work days. I didn’t have to turn on any lights, since I still had my contact lens in place. I didn’t have any luggage to unpack; everything I’d taken with me had been destroyed either on the Wanderer or in the ranch house. The clothes I was wearing had been fabricated on board the Medellin while I was in Cowboy’s auto-doc.

  I found myself experiencing déjà vu for when I’d come back to the Marine base on Inferno after the Fleet had finally liberated Demeter. I’d stepped off the shuttle in Tartarus owning nothing but the dress uniform they’d given me on the troop ship.

  And look how well that turned out, I thought acerbically.

  But no, that wasn’t fair and it wasn’t true. I hadn’t been left with nothing then or now. I’d left everything that was important to me here on Demeter, and it was all still here.

  Sophia was in bed when I pushed open the door to our room, but she wasn’t asleep.

  “Hi, Munroe,” she said, and I could see her smile as she rose up on her elbow. She was wearing the same long T-shirt she always slept in.

  “Hey Sophie,” I said, sitting down on the edge of the bed and kissing her. I pulled her against me, clinging to her with a desperation like there was a hole in my chest that only she could fill. “You shouldn’t have waited up for me,” I chided her gently. “You have to get up early.”

  I’d sent her an Instell Comsat message from Hermes when we’d dropped off Sanders, Kane and Bobbi Taylor there, letting her know I was all right and would be back in a few days. Victor and Kurt had returned to Demeter with me to visit their family. I’d offered them jobs at the Constabulary and I thought they’d take me up on it.

  “I’m the boss, Munroe,” she reminded me, chuckling as she ran a hand through my hair. It was a little longer than when I’d left. “I can come in late.”

  She pulled me into the bed and I barely had time to kick off my boots before she was stripping away my clothes, leaning down to kiss me more seriously. We didn’t say anything coherent for a while after that, and we didn’t need to.

  Forever later, I rested with my arm around her shoulder, her head laying against my chest, the rhythm of her breathing slowly coming back to normal, and we both spoke at once.

  “It isn’t over, Sophie…” I was saying at the very same moment she said: “Munroe, I want to have children.”

  I felt my jaw drop open at the unexpected declaration, and saw the shock on her face as well.

  “What do you mean?” She demanded, pushing herself up to look into my eyes.

  I shook my head, trying to organize my thoughts enough to answer her. “This thing with Cowboy. They’re not done with me, Sophie. This is just the first installment of what I owe them, not hardly the last.”

  “Oh,” her voice was small, her eyes narrowing at the thought. “Shit.”

  “You want kids?” I blurted, still feeling like I’d been kicked in the head. “When did you decide that?”

  “A while ago,” she admitted, laying her head back down. “I just figured there was plenty of time to talk about it. Then all this shit happened, and maybe…I don’t know, maybe there isn’t. What do you think?”

  I started to answer, stopped, started again.

  “Do you think I’d be a good father?” I waved a hand helplessly. “I mean, I had a pretty fucked up childhood.”

  “You had Gramps,” she reminded me. I tried not to wince. I hadn’t told her about that, yet. I’d have to, eventually, but that was for the morning.

  “Yeah, I did. I guess a kid could do a lot worse for a father.” I paused, trying not to think about having to explain to her everything that had happened. “Do you want to get married?”

  Back on Earth, with the crowd Mom ran with, marriage wasn’t a thing. It was considered beneath our station, something the proles did, like religion and sports. The controlling class did things more logically, signing cohabitation contracts, or reproduction contracts detailing when each biological parent would have custody, who would decide education, philosophy, discipline, finances… But I knew attitudes were different about a lot of things in the colonies, and most people who wanted to have a family got married first.

  Sophia took my hand in hers, interlacing the fingers and squeezing it tightly.

  “I’d like that,” she said softly.

  “What about me working for West? It’s going to be dangerous.”

  “It sucks,” she said flatly. “I hate it, and I hate the idea of you leaving again and me not knowing if you’re ever coming back. If you want to run, you know I’ll run with you. I always told you I would.”

  “How long can we run?” The question was rhetorical. I knew the answer: you couldn’t run at all from someone with a reach as long as Andre Damiani. “No, I think I’d rather fight than run.”

  “Do you really think we can fight them?” I could tell by her tone that she didn’t.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  She still held my right hand tightly, but I lifted my left in front of my face and flexed it, almost believing I could feel the nanites Cowboy had given me coursing through my blood.

  “They think they’re making me their weapon,” I told her. “That’s the thing about weapons, though; they can be pointed at anyone.”

  Look for the next volume in the Recon series coming soon!

  If you’ve enjoyed Recon: A Wolf in the Fold, there are more tales of this universe in the Birthright trilogy. The following is a sample chapter of the first volume, Birthright:

  Birthright

  By

  Rick Partlow

  Chapter One

  TCN News Instell Report, Dateline: 12 November, 2,215, Commonwealth Standard.

  Reports continue to trickle in from the Aphrodite colony of an armed uprising by the so-called Predecessor Cultists, who profess to be preparing humanity for the return of the Predecessors, or Ancients: the mysterious race whom many believe is responsible for the construction of the Martian Face and whose relics have been found at sites on a handful of worlds throughout the Cluster. Speculation on the nature of the Ancients has continued since the discovery in the early Twenty-First Century of the map of the wormhole jumplinks carved into the side of the Edge Mountain on Hermes, which spurred the initial phase of interstellar colonization. Though no physical remains or pictorial representations of the Predecessors have been discovered, these cults insist that they were humanoids who
were responsible for genetically engineering and "seeding" the races of our cluster, who created the jumplinks for our use as a kind of birthright and who will someday return from their self-imposed exile to judge the progress of us, their "children."

  Cultists on Aphrodite have reportedly armed themselves with military weapons and attempted to take over communication facilities, just the latest in a chain of violence which has included riots on Earth in Capital City and New Bombay. On dozens of Commonwealth colonies, however, and on Earth itself, the Predecessor Cults continue to grow in popularity, particularly among young adults and disaffected veterans of the War with the Tahni. Though Commonwealth sources refuse to comment, it is rumored that the Criminal Investigations Division of the Patrol Service is working in conjunction with planetary constabularies to crack down on the cultists...

  "The Ancients shall return! Repent your arrogance, oh humanity, and seek their wisdom!" I saw the spittle fly from the woman's lips as she yelled her message out at the passers-by on Harristown's main street. She wore the polychromatic robes of a priestess in the Predecessor Cult, and, from the amplification of her voice, she either had surgically augmented her vocal chords or was wearing some kind of concealed public-address hardware.

  Her acolytes---a pair of heavily-altered males, their muscles augmented with cloned tissue almost to the point of absurdity---stood naked behind her, arms raised toward the sky. They were chanting some kind of mantra, but I couldn't quite make out the words. I didn't particularly care except that they'd interrupted the newsfeed I'd been auditing over my neurolink.

  I brushed past them, only noticing them at all to be sure they didn't notice me. Today it was my job to not be noticed, which was not too hard in Harristown at Night---not anymore. I remember back when I was a kid, back before the war, when Canaan was nothing more than a quiet, religious agrocolony. Back then, you could walk down Penn Avenue and not see one person you didn't know, or any buildings more than two stories tall.

  Now...now it was built up so high you couldn't see the stars, and the population in the city had swollen to nearly a million. It wasn't home anymore; not to me.

  I shook my head. No time for that now. I had a job to do.

  There was a cold rain falling, and I fastened up the front of my jacket to keep it from dripping down my collar. The weather was always bad this time of year, but nowhere near as bad as it used to be. Canaan has a rotation period of 125 Standard Days, and the temperature differential that slow turn created used to make the Night a hellish period of huge storms and cold, hurricane-force winds. But the Corporate Council changed all that with the reflectors they put in orbit after the war.

  Now the Long Night was a series of little nights, interspersed with twelve-hour periods of unnatural neon "days." It made things run more efficiently at the new iridium mines, and most of the influx of postwar colonists liked it. Of course, it was slowly killing the planet's native ecology, but what did that matter to Corporate executives twenty light-years away? The imported, genetically-engineered flora and fauna were doing fine.

  Stop it! I snarled at myself. You get distracted, you could wind up as extinct as any of those native plants, Mitchell.

  The tiny, prewar sector of Harristown quickly gave way before me, replaced by the boxy multistory Corporate Housing Projects, where the mineworkers and those who preyed on them lived. The prefab structures had started out as shiny and new as any other metal toy, but had gone downhill about an hour after the migrants moved into them. Now they were shitholes, infested with drug dealers and drug users, ViR addicts, skingangers, rippergangs, and various other manifestations of human refuse. Wise places to avoid if you had a choice, but I'd made mine a few years ago.

  Finally, there was the place I wanted. It looked much like any other project building, but for the Skinners lounging on the front steps, flaunting the bionic streetware that gave the gangs their name. It wasn't bad enough that the sick, soulless bastards actually had their own limbs amputated and sold them to the underground organ banks. No, they financed their little rebellion against organic life by Ripjacking: kidnaping transients and migrants, slicing them into their most valuable pieces and selling them off. It didn't matter that cloning technology had made organ banks obsolete---not everyone could afford to have a replacement limb or organ assembled from cloned tissue. So the market was there and these were the suppliers. None of them carried any obvious weapons, but that meant nothing with all the cybernetics crammed into their bodies.

  I started up the steps but, predictably, one of them rose to block my way. He wasn't particularly big, and I was sure he was an Offworlder---the 1.65 Gravities on Canaan tends to produce big people---but that didn't make him less dangerous. His arms were bare metal bionics, not even concealed with synthskin, and his head was shaven, revealing the input jacks set behind each ear and at the base of his skull. The sockets had become de rigueur for most technical work in the last few decades, but most of the skingangers used them to feed their addiction to black market Virtual Reality programs, or to illegally penetrate central data systems---or just to look tough.

  "Wrong place, Norm," the Skinner scowled, the ruby oculars of his eye replacements gleaming with menace. Norm...short for Normal Human. It had recently become an insult.

  "I want to see Cutter," I told him quietly. Act too timid and he'll waste my time taunting me. Act too cocky and I'll waste my time killing him.

  "Maybe Cutter not want see, Norm," he cackled in the abbreviated idiom popular with the Skinners.

  "Maybe Cutter want see this." I pulled a credit spike from my sleeve pocket, tossing it at the jackhead.

  Snatching the spike out of the air, he plugged it into the socket behind his right ear. His natural eye widened at the five K in corporate scrip the plastic-encased crystal lattice represented. He slowly pulled the spike out and began tossing it up and down appreciatively in his palm.

  "Dangerous carrying here, Norm," he warned me. "Man get killed."

  I snatched the spike from the air above his hand, and, while he was still blinking in disbelief, I stepped past him up the stairs to the door. He grabbed my right wrist in a bone-crushing, servo-assisted grip, and must have been very surprised when it didn't break. Enough of this. I spun into a back kick that caught him in the solar plexus, throwing him off the stairs a good five meters out into the street. He tumbled head over heels, finally coming to a stop on his back, wheezing.

  The other Skinners gaped at me, the ones equipped with thermal vision scanning me for bionics, but not finding any. I turned and stepped through the door, rubbing at the red marks on my wrist. The inside of the project was no improvement on its exterior. Canaan wasn't a very urban colony, not like Eden or Aphrodite; but this place was at least a century out of date, and it looked like it hadn't been cleaned since it was built. The hallways were littered with trash, splattered with urine and feces, and crowded with jackheads high on Kick---synthetic endorphins---and hooked into ViR streetware that directly stimulated the pleasure centers of the brain. I was as out of place there as I would have been in a Corporate Council board meeting, but no one tried to stop me. I knew where I was going, and that's usually half of not being questioned.

  Down the main hallway, right turn into a narrower side corridor, down a short set of stairs to a heavy, reinforced door. I thumbed the doorbell, and a scanner lowered from the ceiling to look me over. I half-expected a trapdoor to fall open beneath my feet and swallow me up, but instead the heavy portal unlatched with an audible "click," silently swinging open.

  It revealed another short, dark passage which led into a large, dimly-lit room, filled with operating tables, surgical equipment, diagnostic computers and various medical scanners. Standing in the middle of it all was a tall, thin...well, I guess you could still call him human.

  His cranium had been expanded to handle the cloned brain tissue implants, and the superchargers that provided that extra tissue with the needed oxygen protruded from the sides of his neck. One of his eyes was cy
bernetic, built for microsurgery, and its housing extended to the bionic ear on that side: a flat, metal amplification disc. There was the standard trio of input jacks, plus one on each wrist...and then there were his hands. They were such a combination of flesh and cybernetics that I wasn't sure what was natural and what wasn't. The fingers were unnaturally long and slender, even for an Offworlder, and inlaid cybernerves crisscrossed them, augmenting his sense of touch. The forefingers looked to be removable, probably to mount surgical instruments.

  What the hell kind of a sex life did this guy have?

  "Mr. Mitchell, I presume," he giggled, his voice high-pitched and annoyingly squeaky. "Or should I say, 'Constable Mitchell?'"

  "Say whatever you like, Cutter," I told him. "As long as you get around to telling me why you called me here."

  "That was some little show you put on outside," Cutter went on, shuffling from his theatrical center-stage position to a new one in front of a bank of scanners. "As I could not detect any bionics through the thermal scanners out front, I took the liberty of running an MRI on you as you entered the building." He grinned, a truly horrible sight. "Would you like to see it?"

  "I didn't come here to play games. Do you have the information or should I just take my spike and leave?"

  "Oh, we'll conduct our business, Constable," he said, wagging his head. "You'll have your dreary little arrest. But this..." He hit a control and a hologram sprang to life above the machine. "This is truly fascinating."

  The hologram was a full body shot of me, taken as I walked in the entrance corridor---nothing too prepossessing. Short-cut sandy hair and blue-grey eyes on a broad, square-jawed face, panning down to a thick neck and wide upper torso with arms just a bit disproportionately large. Center of gravity was low, with thick legs and a compact build overall at about a meter-seven. A typical Canaanite male, on the outside.