Chasing the Dragon (Tyrus Rechs Read online

  He needed more information before he made his choice.

  And he knew of two guys that would have access to the intel he needed to make that call.

  “Lyra. Boot up the nav comp and set course for Breakers World.”

  Doc and Chappy were supposed to be running down a Hool hit man there. They always left him a sitrep on a digital dead drop in code.

  They’d know something.

  [redacted]

  Order of the Centurion Testimony from SFC Evan Kowalski

  Concerning the events during Operation [redacted]

  SFC Kowalski: We got the call about oh-two-hundred. Repub artillery up on [redacted] was getting hit hard by the Jumwara. No one expected that. This was [redacted]. All jungle fighting out along the islands. No one expected the sharks to get all up in there on the [redacted] where we had our battery overwatch and attack our fire support. Least of all the marines who were providing…

  Investigator’s Note: SFC Kowalski, though every inch the legionnaire, has a small tic above the right eye when we talk about the engagement and the events of Operation [redacted].

  SFC Kowalski: L-T Kong comes in and tells us to jock up. We headin’ up that way. Now remember, according to the sharks and the House of Reason, we ain’t even s’posed to be on [redacted]. That was part of the [redacted]—which I’d like to point out they never honored in the least. Like I said… we ain’t even s’posed to be on [redacted] when we get the oh-dark-hundred someone’s-in-trouble call. Fifteen and we’re on the pads ready to board the drop. That’s QRF duty, sir. No questions. Just go in and save someone’s bacon.

  Investigator’s Note: SFC Kowalski stubs out his third cigarette since the interview began. Recommend psych eval. Possible PTSD.

  SFC Kowalski: So we’re on Reaper Four-Two and the other half is on Four-Three. Plus we got two gunships ridin’ scatterblaster. And don’t you know it… it’s a trap. Sharks ain’t overrunnin’ the position like the marine commander on the ground was screamin’ at everybody. They’re shooting from the rocks across the valley. So Four-Three goes in to drop her leejes and gets hit by an anti-armor round fired from upslope of the base. Up in some rocks the other side of which is the sheer face of [redacted]. See, that was the trap. The sharks, which are supposed to be amphibians that stick close to the shores of that hellhole, well, they did the impossible and come up the side of [redacted] and attacked our guns from above. Except they waited until we showed up to go with the main attack. Until then they was just makin’ everyone mad. So, like I said… Four-Three is hit real bad and she goes in smokin’ and spinnin’ and puts down on a field of rocks near the gun batteries and not far from the marine bunkers.

  Investigator’s Note: SFC Kowalski stops the narrative at this point to light yet another cigarette. His hands are shaking. He notices that I notice.

  SFC Kowalski: Oh, that’s just ’cause my electrolytes are low. I need to drink more water.

  Investigator’s Note: We pause while he is brought a fresh glass.

  SFC Kowalski: You… you seen those sharks up close, sir? They’re not like in that movie where one of ’em chases all those teens around on that sailboat on that world… Deep Thunder or whatever. That one in the movie is big like a monster. They’re like… like us in real life. Which kinda makes ’em scarier. About as tall. More slender than I thought they’d be. But it’s that face. That shark face that’s just looking at you with beady, soulless eyes. And all them teeth. It’s like looking at a nightmare. ’Cept you’re wide awake. You ever see one, sir? Up close and all?

  Investigator: The only Jumwara I saw on Far Station were already deceased.

  SFC Kowalski: Well, that ain’t the same thing. But never mind all that. This ain’t about that. This is about L-T Kong. Listen. I always knew he was high-speed low-drag. Sinasian and all. Or at least half. He never said much about himself either way. But the L-T is squared away, and if this is about giving him the big medal, well, he deserves two.

  See… we wouldn’t’ve made it off that mountain if the lieutenant hadn’t ordered us to land. Gunships, they started workin’ the rocks them sharks were comin’ out of. And I mean by the hundreds. In seconds we realize this is the real deal. This ain’t no IED roadside ambush. This is a battle. And battles on [redacted] is few and far between. Real ones where you shoot until the other guy’s dead. Sharks’ll just drop back into the waters and go deep. Might even take your buddy with them. You know about that, right? They do that. Don’t listen to the reports. That really happens.

  Investigator’s Note: SFC Kowalski stares off into space for quite a while. Just smoking and seeing something he does not describe. I won’t hazard a guess. But it seems to have left an impact.

  SFC Kowalski: So we set down and pull the wounded off Four-Two while the gunships deal with the sharks. One gunship takes a hit, and that kills the gunner. They wave off and head back to base. In no time the other gunship is low on ammunition and making her last pass. The artillery base is under attack and the marines have gone into their bunkers. Problem is, Four-Two can only carry so many. So four of us, myself and the L-T, and Guntaar and Myrone, we stick right there on the rock field so that Four-Two can get the wounded back.

  It ain’t even dawn yet and it’s gonna be a long day. By six, just as the sun comes up, the sharks blow the wire and take down a gun tower. Then they’re inside the camp and goin’ to town on the marines. We interface with the on-site commander and he requests an evac from the Navy. Now mind you, we’re bein’ shot at from the other side of the valley, we’ve already lost two birds, and the sharks are inside the camp and they’ve got a base of fire in the rocks above us. And this is high-altitude stuff. This is above nine thousand feet. It’s cold. Air’s thin. Marines don’t have our armor so they strugglin’ and all.

  Anyhow… we can’t get the marine commander to stick. She wants off the hill, and she outranks us as an artillery company commander. Lieutenant Kong decides we gonna help ’em. Since I’m Pathfinder qual’d myself and Guntaar set up an L-Z that’s not under direct fire to get the marines’ birds in, L-T goes forward where the fighting is and takes the other gun tower. Did I mention there were two? First one got dropped by a suicide. Blew the wire and deactivated the minefield. That’s where they’re comin’ through. So the L-T and Myrone—he was new, by the way. So new you could smell it. They retake the other gun tower and they start dealing out death on the sharks.

  By noon we got the marines off the mountain, and bonus, we detonated the artillery they were just gonna leave behind. But Myrone was dead by then, and the L-T can’t get back through the base or the bunkers to reach the last dropship because it’s crawlin’ with sharks. They good with a blaster, but up close and personal they like to use the teeth. They’ll bite your arm clean off, leej armor and all.

  Investigator’s Note: SFC Kowalski holds out his arm and traces his fingers across the point in the armor between seams where the arm can be severed by a bite.

  SFC Kowalski: I try to get the pilot to go in close, but he won’t do it, and now, thinkin’ back about it, I don’t blame him. Those marine birds is thin-skinned. They’d-a shot us down and we’d all be dead.

  It’s things like that, remembering times when you were so convinced you were right, that bother me now, sir. ’Cause I wasn’t. I wasn’t right at all. Pilot was. L-T too. He tells us to dust off and clear the mountain.

  I say, “What you gonna do, L-T, if we leave you?” I said that, but there’s no answer. None. So we lift off on the last bird out of Dodge—wherever that place is—and we circling the base from a good distance with the door gunners just shootin’ up the sharks who are all over the place by then.

  That’s when I see L-T runnin’ for the bunkers. He’s runnin’ and shootin’ and killin’ every one of them monsters. He’s in and among them and movin’ like one of them ninja movies they used to make all those years ago. Back when I was a kid and I didn’t kn
ow nothin’ about nothin’.

  That’s when we get the clear-out order from the Navy. [redacted] is gonna hit the mountain with everything she got.

  I think…

  Investigator’s Note: SFC Kowalski, big, tattooed, the very definition of a man and a legionnaire, begins to weep. He tries to hide it. But the tears escape his massive hands.

  SFC Kowalski: I think I lost my mind a little at that point. They… they had to restrain me. Restrain me ’cause he was about to die down there all alone. And… and that just ain’t right. I’da thrown myself outta that bird so that young L-T, and he weren’t no point that’s for damn sure, but I’da thrown myself out just so he… so he didn’t have to… y’know. Go that way and all. Alone.

  They tranqed me. Last I saw was from a distance. Them main guns from [redacted] hitting the side of the mountain and just burning everything to high heaven.

  Investigator’s Note: SFC Kowalski wipes the tears from his eyes and lights his last cigarette. He’s calmer now. The twitch is gone. But this man definitely has PTSD and needs help. Referral for mental nanite reconditioning to follow this meeting.

  SFC Kowalski: So yeah, I know we weren’t supposed to be there. But Lieutenant Kong deserves the Order. That’s for sure. And that’s all I have to say about that. We wouldn’t-a got off that rock if he hadn’t held the gun tower long enough to get all the birds in. Then, when it was time to go, he stayed. And he didn’t give up. He kept killin’ ’em, and I know he was headed toward the marine bunkers. Tryna make it there and hunker ’cause it was him that called it in. That’s one thing marines do well… they can dig. If he made it there… he coulda lived. Y’know?

  Investigator’s Conclusion: This account has been verified at all levels. As ordered, I did not inform SFC Kowalski of Lieutenant Kong’s survival of [redacted] orbital strike on [redacted]. I did, however, inform the SFC that the award for the Order of the Centurion would, in all likelihood, not be awarded publicly, if at all, due to the sensitive nature of Operation [redacted]. I further informed SFC Kowalski that he was never to make mention of this interview or the events of that day.

  09

  Breakers World was one of those lawless places where everyone watched everything because everything was information that could be sold to someone else. It masqueraded as a scrap yard for all the old rusting ships the galaxy had ever seen crawl along its length and lanes, but in reality it was one of the darkest nests of low-down trash and outright psychopathy the galaxy had to offer those willing to make a buck.

  And Doc and Chappy, two Dark Ops operators who’d gone in there to ferret out a Hool mercenary who specialized in high-level military hits, were knee-deep in it somewhere. Most likely getting ready to pull a snatch and boogie.

  The word on the Breakers street was that the Hool had been offered a contract to get close to the Legion commander on Acheron in the hope of taking him out on behalf of the Mid-Core Rebellion, a new player who was just starting to get some juice in the galactic scheme. Dark Ops couldn’t let this happen, especially in-conflict. The death of a Legion commander didn’t look good for anyone. So Dark Ops made it abundantly clear that the Hool was target number one for the time being.

  Doc and Chappy were a rare two-man capture team. But they worked well together, and being the stuff of legends, they had pretty much earned the ability to do whatever they chose to do with the time they had left in the Legion. And what they’d chosen to do was track the Hool hit man all the way to the rock called Breakers World.

  Or at least… that’s what their most promising lead suggested. Whether the Hool was actually on Breakers World still needed confirmation.

  This was all information Rechs had pulled from his secret foray into Dark Ops dataspace. He didn’t care much about the Hool, or even the sector Legion commander whose life was in jeopardy. He cared about Doc and Chappy, though—and they would have the lowdown on the Dragon. They would have the information Rechs needed to decide whether to get involved.

  What do you mean, involved? asked that other voice inside Rechs’s head that sometimes threw out the hard questions. Whether Rechs liked it or not.

  Do you mean kill?

  Maybe, thought Rechs as he brought the Crow in low from the wastelands that ran for hundreds of kilometers around the main hub of Breakers World, both reasons are the same.

  Maybe.

  The question hung there, unanswered, and Rechs knew it wouldn’t go away. Such questions never did, despite the answers one gave. In the end, there would be only one choice. The one Tyrus Rechs felt was right. And that usually meant it would be the hardest path to follow.

  He drifted the Crow into an old route known as Heaven’s Highway. The name was a joke. It was the secret flight path into the main hub, affectionately known as Hell Supreme. That name was not a joke.

  The skies over the capitol of Breakers World were watched by almost every intelligence agency and criminal cartel within the galaxy. But drone and satellite coverage were difficult due to the constant screeching sandstorms creating low visibility on the surface. So the electronic eyes in the sky mostly watched the city, not the wastelands—and not the secret path that led through them.

  Spreading away from Hell Supreme in almost every direction were thousands of ships, many verging on the colossal, beached upon the red oxidized-iron sands. When the skies were clear, which wasn’t often, three tidally locked bone-white moons stared down on these fields of ancient destruction. And through these rusted behemoths lay the secret route into Hell Supreme.

  But the problem with Heaven’s Highway was…

  “Salvage pirates!” shouted Rechs over the comm at the little Nubarian bot, who for some reason had chosen not to charge up the omni-cannon. Probably because Rechs hadn’t told it to. But he was telling it now. “Shoot them!”

  There wasn’t much chance of hitting the pirates inside the twisting, turning, junk maze of old hulls and massive skeletons of ancient drive systems. The run started deep in the wastes of the Breakers, via a dune-covered entrance that was an old thrust nozzle from a massive Savage colony ship. Who knew how long ago that thing had been abandoned there for salvage?

  Rechs had taken the Crow into the old Savage ship hard, racing through the orange twilight of an approaching sandstorm visible through massive sections of missing hull plating that served as witness to a thousand years of dead ships. He’d followed marking lights left for those who aimed to run the ruin—the lights of Heaven’s Highway—before shooting out from underneath the bow of the massive ship and beginning the tortuous labyrinth through unused parts and sand-blasted destruction. Any element of which could have brought the Crow down hard in the sand if contact was made.

  G232 watched with interest from his place just inside the flight deck hatch. “This doesn’t seem like a designated approach for starships, Captain. Not that I’m in any way qualified to make such an observation.”

  Rechs was too busy flying the dangerous approach to respond. It was full reversers hard on the rudder and yoke to make a hairpin turn in a corridor that opened out onto a channel of ancient piping from some long-salvaged synth hauler from the early days of the robber baron boom. Before Herbeer had become a prison world.

  Rechs flew its dark length, switching on the Crow’s landing lights in the orange and shadowy dark rather than trust his sensors alone. He never let his speed drop.

  “The rate at which you are flying this vessel seems counter to safety and continued runtime. Just pointing that out, Captain Rechs.”

  “Noted,” said Rechs, not bothering to explain that time was of the essence. And perhaps wondering why the idea of explaining things to a bot even occurred to him. A major sandstorm was due in Hell Supreme within the hour, and if flying Heaven’s Highway was bad now, doing it in zero visibility with the sensors going haywire due to the incoming sand as gale-force winds pushed the Crow off her flight track… that would be tantamount
to suicide.

  No thanks.

  The freighter leapt away from ancient dark synth pipes and crossed a dead field where Maragni nomads had built an encampment within the salvage. Several of the hooded figures scattered at the sight of the speeding freighter, while others took potshots with long-barreled rifles.

  The Crow throttled back only slightly as it entered the humungous maintenance elevator section of an old first-gen Republic battle carrier. Victory class. It was here, just inside the massive hangar deck now gone as dark and deserted as a mausoleum at twilight on Hell’s Eve, that the salvage pirates finally showed themselves and jumped Rechs’s ship.

  Flying light, tri-hulled interceptors—fighters from some local navy long gone—they came at him from all directions at once, firing blaster shots to disable the Crow’s repulsors and force her to set down on some abandoned deck. There they would have the upper hand.

  The first series of shots ravaged the Crow’s general deflector array, forcing Rechs to back off the power, rerouting engines for defense.

  “Light the scum up!” Rechs told the little Nubarian.

  Rechs had always hated pirates. From way back. Few things in the galaxy bothered him as much as pirates did. They really were the bottom-feeders of the galaxy. Rarely did he pass up an opportunity to make life miserable for them, or just end their lives altogether.

  With the bot now filling the volume of the cathedral-like hangar with the omni-cannon’s bright blue fire, Rechs turned all his resources to finding a way out of the little trap set for him inside the massive hangar deck of the old Victory-class battle carrier.