Archangel ascending, p.1
Archangel: Ascending, page 1
ASCENDING
©2025 RICK PARTLOW
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ALSO IN SERIES
Archangel
The Fallen
Avenging
Ascending
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CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Thank you for reading Ascending
CHAPTER ONE
Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!
I probably didn’t need to repeat it three times, not with the implant commlink, but old training won out, and if I’d had a manual detonator for the breaching charge, it might have felt more gratifying to twist the trigger. But the neurosynth made things simpler and faster, if not more viscerally satisfying, and all it took was a thought to detonate the block of chemical hyperexplosives.
The thump of the shaped charge punched me in the chest, the crash of the door coming off its hinges an echo in a higher register, and before the roar had finished rolling across the darkened street, I was in motion. Smoke roiled out of the empty, ragged doorway, part of the jamb blasted away along with the door, and even the infrared and thermal filters implanted into my corneas by the Defense Ministry researchers couldn’t penetrate the dark, particulate haze.
I had other sensory augments, of course, and none of them were useful at the moment. Sonic analysis couldn’t tell me anything with the roar of the detonation, chemical detectors very helpfully informed me that explosive residue was present in the area, and the air pressure density scanner was worthless after the shockwave. I rushed in blind, because the alternative was wasting surprise and momentum and maybe letting this asshole get away… and I hadn’t come all this way for nothing.
Hecate was the ass-end of nowhere, at least as close to it as you could get inside the Coalition. Four days’ Interface away from anyplace, there was no good reason for us to be here other than Jaime Carnahan, and if we let him get away into the Tico City night, there’d be no time to hunt him down a second time. Which was why we’d risked a raid on him at his home instead of waiting to catch him when he went to the spaceport.
At least he didn’t live in an apartment. Tico City was as close as Hecate came to an urban area, though anyone from the Core Worlds would have laughed at even calling this shithole a town, much less a city. Fifty thousand permanent residents and maybe a thousand transients in Tico, and that was still the largest settlement on the planet by half. The original settlers hadn’t come here of their own free will, and if their children and grandchildren hadn’t left at their earliest opportunity, it was only because they’d been forced into economic servitude working the cattle ranches and mines and farms around Tico.
The city had grown up to handle the needs of the farmers and ranchers, and most of the workers at the shops and fabrication centers and offices lived in townhouses and apartment complexes because no one here had the money or the time initially to build a suburb. At least until the town started making more money than the mines or the farms and it had started to grow outward. We had suburban sprawl to thank for the neighborhood where Carnahan kept his home away from home… or, more accurately, his bolt hole.
If he’d been a resident, if he’d felt safe here, busting through his door wouldn’t have been necessary… and I definitely wouldn’t have had to throw myself to the side to avoid the burst of plasma streaking out through where the door had been. If it had been Yanto or Riva or any normal going through that door, they would have been dead right there unless they’d brought along a Havok battlesuit to protect them.
I couldn’t see shit, had no idea if there was anything resembling cover until he fired. Even then, I had no conscious knowledge of my surroundings, the Machine acting through me. Colonel Janus had hated when we called it that. The proper name, according to him, was the cognitive combat response system, designed to rapidly suggest or take over tactical responses to threats so we, the Archangels, wouldn’t have to rely on our limited human reaction time. I wasn’t particularly interested in Conrad Janus’ opinions, since I’d blown a hole through his chest a few months ago, but his cognitive combat response system had saved my life more times than I could count, and it did it again in the darkened, smoke-filled confines of Carnahan’s house.
The Machine acted faster than my thoughts, but it was nice enough to keep me filled in after the fact. The flash from the plasma discharge and the thunderclap of the rounds going off inside the house would have blinded and deafened a normal, but they provided invaluable data for the Machine, data we hadn’t had the luxury of gathering before the raid.
The house, the light, and the sound informed my enhanced senses; the house was laid out shotgun style, a single hallway running through every room, the mudroom first and the kitchen last. Mudrooms were a must here in Tico, where the rains fell for a solid month in the spring, but it was well into summer now, and Carnahan had given into the lazy man’s instinct of piling up spare gear in front of the rack for muddy boots.
In his case, that meant a custom milling machine for his hobby of making and selling illegal weapons. Not that I’d come here to enforce the Coalition firearms laws—that was the Patrol’s job, if they ever got around to it. I fully supported Mr. Carnahan’s illegal pursuits at the moment, because the heavy alloy construction of the machine was the only thing handy that could stop the bursts of plasma.
Even then, if he’d set his pistol for armor-piercing instead of anti-personnel, I would have been in a world of hurt. Being a weapons expert, he had the same sort of Medusa heavy Gauss pistol I’d brought along and could have fed it from the magazine of solid-core tungsten slugs. Probably would have if he’d known who—and what—I was. Instead, he’d figured I was one unarmored enemy and had chosen the other selection, sintered metal rounds ignited into plasma by a laser at the end of the muzzle, just past the electromagnetic coil.
Hypersonic plasma was incredibly effective against unarmored targets, but it splashed harmlessly against the far side of the milling machine, lighting up the house with a spray of incandescent sparks. I could have killed him right there, of course. I could already have killed him twice, and I’d only been in the house two seconds. But the object of the exercise wasn’t to assassinate our friend Jaime. That would have been too simple and fairly pointless. Jaime knew things, things other people wanted to keep secret. I needed him alive.
But not necessarily unharmed. Rolling to the side of the milling machine, I aimed low and fired off a swathe of plasma rounds around ankle level. Carnahan screamed and toppled sideways, firing a wild burst into the ceiling, flaming insulation and particle board raining down around him. The man was hit, probably in pain, but he was also a veteran Security and Intelligence Directorate field agent, so a little pain wasn’t going to stop him for long. I had about three seconds.
Luckily, that was plenty of time. I was up and over the machine in less than a second, flying across the ten meters between us in two bounds, the second one mostly to ensure I h ad enough momentum when I hit him. Not that he needed much hitting. Carnahan was already down, clutching at his lower leg, which was still in place despite my best efforts. A single round had gouged a divot out of his calf, and while that was probably painful as shit, it wasn’t debilitating enough to make him drop his gun.
He did look pissed, but I’d seen his file photos and he always looked disgruntled. His dark hair hung longer and stringier than it had when he’d worked personally for Phil Montanelli, doing his dirty work on places that were legendary even before the war—Heliconia, Verdant, Germania. And Kali.
He’d killed plenty of humans and Southwind and had kept his mouth shut about it for the last fifteen years, right up until he’d gotten tired of taking orders from someone else and had gone into business for himself. Jaime Carnahan had made serious money as a freelance, and in the process he’d become one of the most wanted fugitives in the Coalition, hunted by the Patrol, military CID, and every local law enforcement agency in every system. But no one had been able to bring him in because he had bolt holes like this one where he could disappear.
I would have been happy to leave him here, except for information I needed and time I didn’t have. Carnahan didn’t have time either, because it took him about half a second longer to bring the muzzle of his pistol back around than it took me to plant my boot in the center of his chest. He flew backward, the Medusa pistol staying behind, clattering straight to the floor while Carnahan slammed into the wall of his kitchen with a solid thump that made me wince in empathy.
Got him, I reported even before I had the neural restraint out of the pouch on my belt. We all clear out there?
There’s a couple people looking out their windows, Cas replied. Probably wondering what the hell that explosion was. But no law enforcement,
Not that we really expected them to show their faces, I pointed out, wrapping the mercenary’s arms in the restraints. If the cops here were serious about their jobs, this asshole wouldn’t have picked it for a hideout.
“I don’t know what they’re paying you,” Carnahan wheezed, still trying to catch his breath from the impact against the wall. He’d left a nice dent in the particle board there. “But I guarantee I can double it. I can double any reward you’ve been promised, get you your own ship.”
“I already have my own ship,” I said, cuffing him lightly on the back of the head. “What we want from you is worth more than money, and if you give it to us, you get to go back to smuggling weapons and offing your rivals and I don’t give a shit. Now shut up or I’ll stick a gag in your mouth.”
Coming out, I announced. Let Raph know we’re on the way.
Carnahan wasn’t a small man, just shy of a meter-nine and at least a hundred kilos, but I tossed him over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes, ignoring his pained grunt. He probably liked it even less when I kicked open his back door and hauled him out through it. The houses here were primitive and crude even by Periphery standards, as bad as the Rogue Worlds, most of them lacking any sort of electronic security and even the creature comforts of my little A-frame on Sylvanus. Not that I was complaining. A job like this would be a lot more complicated if…
Uh, Brent, Cas said just as I came out of the alley behind the house and into the street. We may have a problem.
Cas hugged the shadows of the wood-slat privacy fence around Carnahan’s tiny lot, and my first thought was that the next-door neighbor had come outside in nothing but their underwear and a wide-eyed snarl, carrying a sawed-off shotgun and looking for trouble. It was nothing that minor.
Two cargo trucks rumbled down the gravel road into Carnahan’s neighborhood, kicking up a cloud of dust in their wake, their speed and intention too clear to be anything but a threat.
Damn, I said in silent transmission to Castiel. Maybe this asshole had a security system after all. But I didn’t pick up a single EM transmission coming out of his house.
“You should have let me buy you out,” Carnahan said breathlessly, too self-satisfied to let the pain and discomfort get in the way of gloating. “And if you’re wondering, no, you didn’t miss my security system when you did a signal sweep of my house… because my security system is a fourteen-year-old kid with a direct line to some heavy hitters across town who I pay ten credits a day to keep an eye on me.”
“Oh, Jaime,” I told him, “you’re making it really hard to keep my word about letting you go.”
Spinning on my heel, I smacked his head into the corner of his house and he yelped, then slumped for a moment, stunned.
Raph, I transmitted, we’re gonna need a pickup.
You do know, he replied, sighing mentally, that if I do that, traffic control here is gonna ban me from ever returning. Eventually, we’re going to run out of places I can visit.
I’ll buy you a new registry, I assured him as I joined Cas at the edge of the fence. Just hurry.
“The cargo beds are filled with people,” Cas told me, not bothering to use the implant commlinks now that I was closer. “I’m thinking twenty of them, probably not carrying anything too sophisticated, not out here. They couldn’t afford military hardware, just whatever they could fabricate with local materials. Shotguns, maybe full-auto rifles but definitely nothing more sophisticated than needlers. That’s still a shitload of guns though and two of us… with a prisoner.”
His tone never wavered, as calm and steady as if this was a minor inconvenience. And normally, it might have been. The two of us had slaughtered dozens of Southwind in operations we’d pulled during the war and come out of it with nary a scratch. However, we’d done that in nano-armored cybersuits, carrying heavy weapons and able to call in orbital strikes when necessary. Then again, two dozen rednecks with shotguns wasn’t quite the same as a Southwind infantry company.
We could either take these guys out or get Carnahan clear, but not both. At least not together. I tossed the former spy to the ground at Castiel’s feet.
“Get him to the nearest LZ for the Orion,” I said, pulling my Medusa from its holster. “Wait for me there as long as it’s safe.”
“We can both take them on,” Cas objected, waving at the oncoming vehicles, only seconds away now.
“Just do it, Cas,” I ordered.
And hoped he’d listen. If he didn’t, there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it. We both knew I needed him with the Archangels, that we’d be screwed if he left, but we’d also be screwed if he decided he didn’t have to obey my orders.
“Fine,” he snapped, grabbing Carnahan. “But if you get yourself killed, don’t expect me to suddenly take command. I’ll steal Raph’s ship and go live out my days in the Rogue Worlds selling my gun to the highest bidder, because at least then someone’ll listen to me.”
He disappeared into the night, running at a full sprint with Carnahan’s limp form over his shoulder. And this was the whole thing that sucked about being a commander. I’d never had to deal with it during the war, never had to command anyone except myself. Now, I’d have to go back later and smooth things over.
At least I had a whole bunch of hired thugs to take my frustrations out on.
I did the very last thing they would expect and ran straight down the middle of the road, right at the lead truck, at fifty klicks an hour. Not quite top speed. My kinetex muscle augments could manage nearly sixty on smooth ground, but the gravel slowed me down. I still reached them in less than two seconds, enough time to switch the feed on my Medusa from sintered metal rounds to solid tungsten darts.
I could have fired it through the windshield, taken out the driver and probably one or two people in the cargo bed, but I had the burden of a functioning conscience, mostly thanks to Miriam, and even if these assholes were guns for hire, thugs and criminals, I still wasn’t at war with them. They weren’t the real enemy, and I didn’t particularly want to slaughter them.
Instead of shooting through the windshield, I jumped. Without the kinetex, counting just on the synthetic adrenaline running rampant through my veins, I might have been able to clear the engine compartment of the truck, maybe crash through the wind screen. With the kinetex, I cleared the roof and spun into a front flip. And pulled the trigger just as the muzzle of my heavy pistol swept across the hood.
