Recon: A Wolf in the Fold

by Rick Partlow

  Then the Magnetic Resonance Imaging melted away the holo's skin, revealing the computer-enhanced muscle, bone and organs within, layer by layer, and the illusion of normality ended.

  "Forget the bone laminates and the muscle augments, and even the subdermal armor," Cutter said with a dismissive wave of his hand, "even though they're all made of something my scanners can't identify except that it's alive. Never mind the fact that all of your vital organs are about half-again as large as they should be, and let's not even mention those extra organs. Even though all of those combined might raise a few eyebrows, I suppose that someone, somehow might bring together the millions of credits and the team of Corporate surgeons and geneticists it would take to install that kind of wetware.

  "No, the really incredible stuff is all in your head." He giggled at the play on words. "Not the sonar system in your ear canals, or the thermal-imaging lens implants behind your corneas, or even the pressure equalization device in your sinus cavity. No, the truly amazing thing is that you have what I can only describe as the most sophisticated implant computer I've ever encountered." He jabbed a metal finger at the noticeable lump wrapped around my brainstem in the holographic display. "We're talking about biological microprocessors with more storage capacity than a human brain, hooked up through a neurolink with an encrypted microwave transceiver that looks like it could bounce a signal off of a satellite."

  He steepled his fingers thoughtfully. "Now, I realize that this planet isn't exactly the scientific hub of the Commonwealth, but I haven't seen anything like this in a decade of street surgery; and I don't think the Office of the Planetary Constabulary has pockets deep enough to foot the bill for something so sophisticated that Military Intelligence has probably never heard of it."

  "Enough of the anatomy lesson," I snapped, my patience wearing thin. "Look, Cutter, we could just as easily have conducted our business through the Net, like we usually do. Why did I have to bring the money here in person?"

  Cutter seemed to consider his words carefully, leaning up against the scanner.

  "Forgive me, Constable," he said, actually seeming contrite, "but sometimes information is more valuable to a man in my position than money. Let's make a new arrangement. You want the location of the weapons transfer, I'll give it to you---names, places, everything." He retrieved a plastic data spike from a pocket in his loose grey shirt and tossed it to me. "Gratis. You may keep your department's precious funds. What I want is...you."

  "Beg pardon?" I squinted at him dubiously.

  "I've heard rumors about you, Constable Mitchell," he said. "Rumors about things you did in the war...about something called 'Omega Group.'"

  I didn't let the surprise show on my face, but it was there, and palpable, and he knew it. It was no secret with the Locals what I'd been during the war, but there weren't too many people alive that knew the Omega codename. If he'd said "the Glory Boys," I might've had to kill him right there.

  I saw amusement in Cutter's natural eye as he gauged my reaction. I wondered just where he'd managed to dig up that name.

  "And?" I said.

  "You probably picture me as some kind of sociopath, a megalomaniac misanthrope who wishes to lose his humanity like those cretins in the outer hall." Yeah, I reflected. That was about the size of it.

  "I know," he continued, "it would be hard for you to imagine such a pitiful creature having normal human attachments, but even one in my particular business finds himself owing debts to others which can't be repaid through a simple transfer of funds. I owe such a debt for a favor done long ago."

  "There's a point to this, right?" I sighed, beginning to get very uncomfortable with the whole situation.

  "An old...acquaintance has returned to call in my debt," Cutter explained. "And I find myself unable to repay it alone. Perhaps it would be easier if she explained it herself." Cutter fell silent for a moment, his eye hazing over, and I guessed he was contacting someone over an implanted communicator.

  It wasn't half a minute before a hidden door opened on a side wall, and a tall, long-legged human female strode through. I noticed three things immediately. The first thing was that she looked pretty damn dangerous. A black, leather flight jacket curled around her like an armored shell, in somber harmony with the grey fatigues and thick spacer's boots; and a heavy pulse pistol rode low on her right hip, counterweighted by a wide-bladed knife strapped to her left thigh. She was about my height, but the long, thin shadow she cast across the room at me seemed to make her more imposing.

  The second was that she was very attractive, a slightly more difficult observation with all of the menacing trappings trying to conceal that fact. They couldn't, but by the attempt they accentuated the raw sexuality that wafted pheremonally from her. Short, dark hair framed a lean, tanned face inset with sparkling green eyes like some jeweled mask in a jungle temple. The athletic curve of her hips flowed into the armor of her jacket in a stark contrast that would have driven a classical sculptor mad.

  The third thing I noticed was that I was married.

  "Constable, this is Kara McIntire," Cutter said by way of introduction. "Captain Kara McIntire, of late a corporate mineral scout."

  "Expecting trouble, Captain?" I nodded at her gunbelt, not illegal here but kind of an unusual wardrobe item to wear to meet a cop.

  "Isn't everybody?" Her eyes pierced me like a neutron beam, her voice hard but smooth.

  "Kara," Cutter said, "has been the object of some unwanted attention recently."

  "I assume we're not talking disgruntled creditors."

  "Five attempts on my life in the past nine months," McIntire informed me tersely. "First one got my partner. Last one got my ship. I managed to get hired on a freighter that brought me here."

  "Why the attention?" I wanted to know. "You stumble onto a field of iridium asteroids?"

  "Nothing so common." She folded her arms, regarding me with a look of general disapproval.

  "So who's after you?" I shrugged. "And just what do you think I can do about it?" I jabbed a thumb at Cutter. "Whatever your friend may have heard about my past, I'm just a small-time colony cop now. Try the Patrol Service...or the Council Security Force, maybe. I've found them to be particularly helpful." I wiped away a bit of sarcasm that had dripped down my chin.

  "Oh, the Security Force has been very helpful all right," she said. "They're the ones who fragged my Goddamned ship!"

  Now, cynical as I was about the whole situation, I must admit that took me back a couple steps...and sparked my interest. The CSF had stomped on my toes more than once when it came to enforcing local laws on corporate property, and the thought of doing something that would piss them off appealed to me on an intestinal level.

  "Tell me more," I invited, leaning against a surgical table.

  "The first hitters were street trash---hired guns. They caught my partner by surprise, spread his brains all over a back alley in Hermes." I thought it interesting that the emotion evident in her voice when she told me about losing her ship was decidedly missing when she described the loss of her partner. "They weren't so lucky with me. I reported the whole thing to the local cops, but they wrote it off as a robbery attempt, or some kind of ripjack gang looking for a mark. I wasn't so sure---we were armed, and obviously spacers. Rippers usually try for easier targets. But they were dead, and there wasn't a hell of a lot I could do about it.

  "I moved on to Inferno, to see if I could find myself a new partner, and a pair of local hitters came after me outside my hotel. This time, one of them got snagged still breathing, and, after a little friendly persuasion, he told me there was a price on my head. The word he got through the Net was five hundred K, corporate scrip."

  I gaped at her in disbelief. "Jesus Christ," I blurted. "Who the hell would bankroll that kind of a price on a scout pilot?"

  "Well, that's the real question, isn't it, Constable," she cocked an eyebrow. "There aren't too many agencies or people who could. And all of them are powerful enough to have a pretty long reac
h. And that," she emphasized, "is what I want with you."

  "I think I get it." I had to smile in spite of myself. "You can trust me because no one would bother to buy me off."

  "Put bluntly," Cutter interjected with the answer, not seeming at all embarrassed over it.

  "So why are you a target?" I asked. "And where does the CSF come in?"

  "I have an idea of why." She scratched the back of her left hand unconsciously. "After I found out about the bounty, I contacted the Security Force. They promised to look into it, told me to go hole up someplace safe in the meantime, and to call and let them know where I was. And the local Investigator, he kept asking me if I had talked to anybody about a particular find my partner and I had made a few months back on the inner frontier."

  "A big mineral deposit?" I guessed.

  "More of an archaeological site. I thought it was a bit odd that he even knew about it...it was something pretty big, something the corporates would have kept quiet at first. But I had no reason to distrust him...then. So I found what I thought was a safe place, and called to let them know. Not thirty hours later, there was an attack on the place, this time by a professional hit team. I managed to get out, and got shot at again on the way to my ship. I got offplanet as fast as I could and contacted the Investigator. He told me that his comline had been tapped, that he would meet me at a place of my choosing and take me to a safehouse. I chose the main spaceport at Eden---nice, safe place, out in public. I berthed my ship, grabbed a rifle and hid in an access tunnel across from the landing bay. And watched a Goddamned CSF assault shuttle blow my ship to scrap right in the fucking spaceport. Must have killed a dozen people."

  "For an archaeological site?" I frowned. There was something I wasn't being told, something I didn't think she wanted to tell me. "We're obviously talking something more than clay pots and cave paintings here."

  "Something's wrong," Cutter announced suddenly, head snapping around. "I've lost my feed from the outer sensors."

  "Can you contact the Skinners on the porch?" I asked, sliding off the table. There was this familiar, queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach, a soft buzz in my head.

  He shook his head. "They're not answering."

  "We've got to get the hell out of here," Kara drew her pistol. She didn't get two steps toward the hidden exit before the room's heavy, reinforced door blew off its frame with a concussion of superheated air and deafening sound that threw me back off my feet. A white rush of heat, light and noise enveloped me and I hit the floor hard with a whoosh of expelled breath.

  I shook my head to clear the haze of brightness as several things began happening at once. Before my back hit the floor, my implant computer had shifted me into combat mode, powering up my muscle augments, sensor array and wired nerves, and hitting my system with several doses of natural and artificial stimulants. Everything seemed to slip into slow motion, the lights flickering eerily from the damage the blast had done, the smoke from the explosion billowing centimeter by centimeter away from the ruined door frame and across the debris-littered floor.

  As the air cleared, five hulking figures moved through the ruined doorway, dressed in what looked like honeycomb-ceramic hard armor, full visors covering their faces. Four of them were armed with compact, boxy pulse carbines, but the last one was lugging around the heavy tube of a single-shot plasma projector---an obsolete antiarmor weapon that I figured he'd used to blow the door. Before he could clear the entrance, I was up and in motion.

  I had a gun under my jacket, but they were right on top of me, and, at this range, I was a better weapon than any gun. With a thought, the plastalloy blades mounted on the bones in my forearms extended through the synthskin flaps over my middle knuckles, and I threw myself at the lead hitter, twin pairs of talons slicing out. The laser-honed blades ripped through the sandwich ceramic armor over the man's torso, opened up his chest like a rib-spreader, and filleted his heart and lungs in a spray of blood that nearly blinded me.

  He collapsed forward without a sound and I grabbed the laser carbine from his limp hands, swung his body around to use as a shield and opened fire at the others. The pulsegun's magazine fed hyperexplosive chemical cartridges into a combustion chamber and ignited them, pulsing each self-consuming shell's twenty kilojoules of heat energy through a semiconductor lasing rod at a rate of over 300 rounds per minute. The swath of laserpulses was clearly visible in the smoke-engulfed room as a flashing crimson line that caught one of the muscular gunmen square in the visor, blowing his helmet apart in an explosion of vaporized cephalic fluid.

  The surprise factor that had carried me that far ran out as the other two with pulseguns opened up in a panic, spooked by my sudden attack. Incandescent ruby flashes tore apart the corpse I held as a shield, a stray round catching me across the edge of my right thigh. I gave the smoldering body a one-handed toss towards the gunmen, falling forward as I cut across them with a long burst that drained the magazine.

  The point-blank shots chopped across one of the lasershooters and the plasma-gunner, penetrating their chest armor and sending them dancing backwards with fist-sized holes blown in their torsos. But the last guy would have gotten me---I was in his sights and his finger was on the trigger---if a pencil-thin spear of light hadn't intersected his left temple, exploding his brain out the other side of his helmet. He jerked, keeling over backwards and I glanced around to see Kara McIntire crouched on the other side of the room, laser pistol extended outward and gripped with both hands.

  What surprised me the most was how calm she was---my augment sensors, still in combat mode, told me her pulse, blood pressure, respiration and heart rate were still normal.

  "Thanks." I scrambled to my feet, nodding gratefully to her. I didn't look at the wound in my thigh---my headcomp had already told me it hadn't penetrated my subdermal armor, and I just hated the sight of my own blood.

  "Where's Cutter?" She picked herself up, looking around.

  Cutter, as it turned out, was sprawled out beneath an operating table with a twelve-centimeter shard of duralloy from the shredded door impaled through the center of his skull. I didn't need any of my implants to tell me he was dead.

  "Shit." The air seemed to go out of McIntire. "You poor, miserable bastard..."

  "I'm sorry..." I started to say, but I was interrupted by an explosion from somewhere above us that shook the walls, punctuated by shouts, screams and the unmistakable crack-snap of discharging pulseguns. "We've got to get out of here now," I declared, retracting my wrist talons back into their housings. I yanked an ammo belt off of one of the dead assassins and slung it over my shoulder. "There's a lot more of them in the building, and they're probably watching the exits. Is there another way out of here?"

  She nodded numbly. "This way."

  Deputy Chen, I took the time to transmit over my neurolink as she led me to the concealed door she'd entered through. Jason, this is Cal.

  I'm here, Cal, came his reply. Trouble?

  I'm hip-deep in shit, buddy. I'm in Cutter's chop-shop in Skintown and the place is full of Gomers with assault weapons. I need backup ASAP.

  Jesus, Cal. I could "hear" the concern in his voice. I'll send the nearest patrol cars over there until we can get a STAT team out to you. You try to get clear, okay?

  I'll do my best. See you soon.

  The secret door led to a narrow, darkened corridor---so dark I had to use my night vision to go on. McIntire seemed to be moving quickly without hesitation, which I found curious---until my thermal filters caught the glowing stars of isotope power packs dotting her body at various key locations. She was either augmented or carrying prosthetics, or maybe both. Her skin temperature was normal, so the dermal material was either natural or cloned. Interesting, but it wasn't the most important thing I had to think about at the time.

  The corridor went on for about fifty meters, twisting around a dozen corners, following a path between the walls, and the whole time we traversed it I could hear gunfire faintly echoing through the building. The in
vaders were being resisted by the Skinners, but I doubted they'd have much of a chance---most of them were stoned or lost in ViRspace. Maybe they could buy us some time.

  The passage terminated in another concealed door, and McIntire was moving to open it when I stopped her with a light touch on the arm.

  "What's on the other side?" I asked her quietly.

  "Rear entrance hallway," she whispered. "There's a door to the basement---we can get out through the maintenance hatch to the sewers."

  "Hold on." I concentrated my sensor net through the thin walls of the corridor, trying to discern if the hallway was occupied. They'd be covering the rear entrance---but from the inside or the out?

  Jason! I transmitted.

  I'm here, boss.

  What's the status on the patrol cars?

  Approaching the building now, he told me after a moment's hesitation.

  Tell them to do a fly-by of the rear exit, scan for Gomers around it. There was another long pause, and I began to hear my pulse pounding in my ears.

  God's nuts! I heard Jason curse. The cars are catching heavy groundfire, boss. They've got to veer off, but it looks like all exits are heavily covered.

  Thanks, Jase. Tell them to set down at a safe distance and set up observation for the moment.

  "Where's the basement door?" I asked McIntire.

  She tapped the exit door. "Straight across the hallway from this."

  "Here." I handed her the pulse carbine, pulling my Gauss pistol from its holster and checking its load. "I'm going to run for the door, draw any fire. You empty a clip, keep their heads down, then come after me."

  Jason, I transmitted. Do those patrol crews have a clear shot at the rear exit?

  Wait one, he told me. Yeah, they could---but there's too many for them to take alone.

  I need a diversion. Tell them to cut loose in five seconds and keep up a sustained covering fire for at least fifteen seconds.

  Roger that, Cal. In five.

  It was actually more like eight seconds before I heard the loud "bangs" of impacting laserpulses, along with the shouts, commotion, running steps and the crack-snap of return fire down the hallway from the passage exit. At ten seconds, I was in action.