Sungrazer

by Jay Posey

  “You got something for me,” Lincoln asked, “or you just here to check in?”

  “Just making sure you hadn’t dozed off. Higher’s hot to trot on this one.”

  Lincoln checked the time. 0437. Barely even two hours since he’d gotten the materials to start work.

  “And I’m being sluggish?”

  “They’ve called me twice since I called you.”

  “Well,” Lincoln said, as he rubbed the corner of his eye with a finger. “Do they want it done fast, or do they want it done right?”

  “Both, of course,” the Colonel said. “You done putting everything together?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll go get the room set up.”

  “Sure. See you in a few.”

  The Colonel nodded and disappeared down the hall while Lincoln set about getting everything packaged up to present. Lincoln had spent years in special operations in various roles, and he couldn’t help but reflect on the mind-numbing hours he’d spent filing paperwork and preparing presentations. Strangely, none of the recruiters he’d ever talked to had thought to make mention of the desk work. In other units, he’d always felt like it had been such a waste of time. Since he’d joined the Outriders, though, it almost seemed like they’d overcorrected, getting by with the absolute bare minimum. And maybe even less. They certainly didn’t leave a lot of margin, anyway.

  “Hey boss,” said another voice from the doorway. Mike.

  “Morning Mikey,” Lincoln said. “You’re up early.”

  “Couldn’t sleep with you and Mom bumping around in here,” he replied. Mom was the team’s nickname for Colonel Almeida; Lincoln still hadn’t found the true origin story for that one. Not that he hadn’t heard plenty of theories. “We going out again?”

  “Looks like.”

  “Cool. What do you need from me?”

  “You want to go wake Sahil up?”

  “No, sir, I do not.”

  “Fair enough,” Lincoln said. “Do me a favor and toss a crash in his room on your way by.”

  Mike snorted. “Only if you swear to back me up when I tell him Thumper did it.”

  “Mike, when have you ever known me not to back you up?”

  “Pretty much any time I do something and I should’ve known better, sir.”

  Lincoln smiled. “Fine. I’ll get the team. You can make the coffee.”

  “Oh, negative, no deal. I’ll round up the troops.” Mike slid back away from the door, and then added, “Sugar, no cream.”

  “I promise you I don’t do anything different than anybody else,” Lincoln called after him. When he’d first joined the team, Lincoln had taken to making coffee for everyone, partially to show he wasn’t the sort of officer who thought doing so was beneath him, but mostly because he was the one who drank it the most. Based on the team’s reaction to it, it would have been easy to think he had been sneaking in gourmet beans when no one was looking. Maybe they all really did enjoy it. But Lincoln couldn’t help but suspect his teammates made such a fuss over his coffee just to keep from having to make it themselves.

  He made a final tweak to his briefing, and then closed it with a quick hand gesture. The holographic display winked out. He made his way down the hall to the planning facility’s claustrophobia-inducing briefing room. There were three rows of long tables in the room, each curving gently towards the front. Six chairs sat behind each table, packed together so tightly it gave Lincoln the impression of an elementary school. He couldn’t imagine trying to fit adults that close together. And he still hadn’t figured out why they had eighteen chairs in the room, when they had never needed more than six anyway.

  Colonel Almeida already had the projector warmed up, its little 3D corporate logo hovering over it, spinning neatly above a warning message that the lens was thirty days past due for replacement. Lincoln gestured at the projector, pulled up the first panel of his brief. In the back of the room, crammed tight in one corner, was the coffee machine. Lincoln crossed to it and started the preparations. Almeida chuckled.

  “Yeah, I know,” Lincoln said over his shoulder. “You want any while I’m at it?”

  “No thank you. I never drink it.”

  “Never?”

  “More of a tea guy, myself.”

  The machine whirred and clicked once. Lincoln set out five industrial-looking mugs, outsides yellowed from countless years in the service and insides tanned with untold numbers of cups served. On second thought, Lincoln put one of the mugs back. He’d become pretty accustomed to the caffeine, but a fourth cup was pushing it, even for him.

  “Tea, huh?” Lincoln said. “There’s an old saying about that, you know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, being a true American as I am… I like my coffee black, and my tea in the harbor.”

  “I’ve literally never heard that before.”

  “Yeah well… so maybe it’s not so old.”

  “Maybe it’s not a saying.”

  “Maybe,” Lincoln said with a smile. “Maybe could be, though.”

  A few moments later the machine chimed, and Lincoln poured out four mugs. Black for Sahil, cream and sugar for Thumper, way too much sugar for Wright. He started to put cream in Mike’s, and then remembered the change. Sugar, no cream. That hadn’t been the usual for Mike before they’d lost him. It was his new normal. A small thing, a shift in preference, but Lincoln couldn’t help but wonder if there were other things going through the Process changed about a person. Though, he couldn’t honestly even be sure whether it was related to the Process or not.

  “I recruited you because I knew you’d look after my kids,” the colonel said. “I had no idea you were going to pamper them.”

  “This early in the morning,” Lincoln answered, “I like to have a little peace offering on hand.”

  “I might be able to help with that,” Almeida replied. “Got a little gift for the team. You want me to give it before or after you brief them?”

  “After. If you give it first, no one will listen to anything I say.”

  “It’s not that kind of gift,” Almeida said. “And there’s no guarantee they’ll listen anyway.”

  “Thanks for that, sir. Big help.”

  Lincoln had just finished stirring the last mug as the team started to arrive. No surprise, Master Sergeant Wright was the first to enter, and she looked as squared away as she would’ve been in the middle of a normal work day. She snapped a smart salute to both officers as she strode in.

  “Colonel,” she said.

  “Good morning, Amira,” he replied.

  “Sergeant Wright,” Lincoln said, returning the salute. “Colonel Almeida has put forth a theory that you sleep in uniform, while standing up. Can you confirm?”

  Wright flashed him a look, but her flat expression didn’t change at all. Which was about all the response he could hope to get, and the only one he expected.

  Lincoln smiled at her. “Morning.”

  “Sir,” she replied. “One of those for me?”

  Lincoln pointed to the mug he’d prepared for her. “Hope this isn’t the one that finally gives you diabetes.”

  Wright raised the mug in a little gesture of thanks, then peered at him from over the rim while she blew the steam away. “It’d be worth it,” she said, before taking a sip. “Besides, I’d just get the lab to roll back one of my reps anyway.”

  She didn’t smile when she said it, but it was a joke, if a dark one. Replicas were technically only for recovery of personnel killed in action. Wright went to the center-most position of the second-row table, shoved the too-close chairs away with her foot, and took a seat in pretty much the exact middle of the room. Lincoln smiled to himself as he watched her. Everything the master sergeant did, she did with just a slightly elevated sense of purpose and intensity. Even something as trivial as choosing where to sit in a briefing. She always carried with her an air of vague disappointment in the state of the world; not an arrogance or disdain, just a sense that she’
d expected a little more professionalism out of everyone and everything. It was an edge that some people undoubtedly found difficult to deal with. Lincoln found it endearing.

  “Mornin’ Mom,” Sahil said, as he entered. Sergeant Nakarmi was only five four or so, but he was built like a sledgehammer. He had a way of walking that always made it look like he was on his way to a brawl. “Cap’n. We got a worthy one?”

  A “worthy one” was Almeida’s code for a mission actually worth the Outriders’ time; there weren’t many operations that genuinely required the 519th’s particular skill set, but when one did it was usually a matter of very serious proportions.

  “Apparently worth getting me out of bed at oh-two-hundred for, anyway,” Lincoln answered.

  Sahil made a face. “That don’t mean much other than somebody at Higher got an idea.” He gestured towards the coffee mugs; Lincoln pointed to the proper mug, which Sahil lifted from the small table.

  “Sounds like it might be a good one, at least,” Lincoln said.

  Mike and Thumper arrived shortly after Sahil. Thumper looked like she’d gotten less sleep than Lincoln had, and was ready to fight someone about it.

  “Morning, Thumper,” Lincoln said. “You all right?”

  “As soon as that sun comes up,” she answered, “I’m gonna punch it right in its stupid mouth.”

  “Splash some coffee on your face,” Mike said. “It’ll perk you right up.”

  “Perk you right up,” she mumbled, as she headed back towards the remaining mugs. Mike grabbed his coffee and plopped down on top of the table in the back, feet dangling.

  “Thumper” was actually Sergeant Avery Coleman, the resident tech genius. And she was truly a genius. Lincoln had never met anyone with a mind like Thumper’s. It would’ve been a mistake to assume that her technical bent made her a pushover physically, though. Lincoln had witnessed her sparring with Sahil on many occasions. And though Lincoln was no slouch when it came to hand-to-hand fighting, he still hadn’t worked up the courage to step on to the mat with her himself. She was tall and lean-muscled, wore her hair cropped short. Lincoln still hadn’t gotten the story on how she’d earned the nickname, but even people outside the team called her by it, so he figured it must have been a long-time attachment. Despite the cool weather, she was wearing a sleeveless compression top, her full-sleeve tattoos on wide display, dark words and figures textured on her dark skin.

  Once everyone was suitably coffee-ed and seated, Lincoln assumed his place at the front of the room. His nerves kicked up a notch. Briefings were routine, but for some reason standing in front of such a small number of people made him more self-conscious than usual. That, combined with the fact that his four subordinate teammates were all razor-sharp tacticians, also made him hyper-aware of how little time he’d had to put everything together. He was glad he hadn’t had that fourth cup of coffee after all.

  “All right everybody,” Lincoln said. “Here we go. Hot off the press, fresh out of the oven, whatever you want to call it.”

  He activated the holographic display in front of him, pulled up a three-dimensional image of a ship. It was long, heavier in the back than the front, smooth and rounded like some sort of cosmic seed. Sleekly aggressive. There was no real indication of its purpose in its silhouette, but it gave the distinct impression that whatever it was, you wouldn’t like it if it did it to you.

  Thumper let out a little whistle, to Lincoln’s surprise.

  “You recognize that?” he asked.

  “I hope not,” she replied. “Angel-class?”

  Lincoln swept his eyes over his other teammates, saw they were each waiting expectantly for him to continue. Good. He wasn’t the only one who’d never seen one of these before. In answer to Thumper, he nodded.

  “This is SUNGRAZER,” he said. He gestured at the projector, enlarging the image and advancing the briefing with a wave of his hand. Text appeared in sequence, detailing specifications, highlighting capabilities. “Sometime in the last seventy-two hours, she went missing.”

  Thumper made a little noise somewhere between a cough and a grunt of disgust.

  “What’s she do?” Mike asked.

  “She’s a deep maneuver asset,” Thumper answered. Deep maneuver. It was in-house terminology for anything that, once deployed, could spend years dormant or finding its way to a target; a piece of software, a genetically-targeted virus, an automated warship. SUNGRAZER was the latter.

  “That’s right,” Lincoln said. “Self-contained, self-directed. Sitting out there cold and quiet and for all practical purposes, completely impossible to detect. Two major functions. First: ultra-long range signals intelligence gathering. She’s basically a giant antenna, soaking up everything her target’s giving off. Stores, processes, analyzes, adapts accordingly. Every so often she bounces a packet back home, presumably to our friends in intelligence.

  “Second, and this is the real fun one… she’s a kinetic orbital strike vehicle.”

  The basic concept of a kinetic orbital strike wasn’t particularly impressive; it was pretty much just dropping something heavy from way up high on whatever it was you wanted to crush into oblivion. Where it got fancy was in all the math of making sure you dropped all that heavy on the right thing. And what made it scary were the facts that such a weapon could strike with very little warning and was nearly impossible to defend against. For added bonus, since the munitions had no launch signature, they left the source of their launch point virtually untraceable.

  “How many hits we talking?” Wright asked.

  “I’m not sure. Specs I was given listed capacity from fifteen to three hundred, so depends on loadout I guess.”

  “Quite a range,” Thumper said. It was true. The difference between surgically excavating a city block and wiping out the whole city entirely.

  “I get the impression the Powers That Be didn’t want to get too precise in the information they provided,” Lincoln replied.

  “That’s a whole lotta ship to lose track of for three whole days,” Mike said. “And gonna be hard to do the job if the Powers That Be are going to be stingy on the details.”

  “Just wait,” Lincoln said. “It gets better. SUNGRAZER’s her codename, of course, because she’s one of the Directorate’s assets.”

  “Since when’s NID runnin’ ships?” Sahil asked. The National Intelligence Directorate usually relied on the military to handle the logistics of anything on that scale.

  “Technically, she’s a joint-operation vessel. Command-and-control is shared between NID and the navy, but since she’s designed to go for long periods without direct contact, I’m not sure how much the navy’s really involved.”

  “Seems like a hassle to manage with the Federation,” Thumper said. “A lot of protocols to get through.”

  Lincoln nodded. “That’s probably why she’s not a UAF vessel. She’s strictly ours, made and operated out of right here in the good ol’ U S of A.” The United American Federation joined the American continents from tip to tail, pole to pole. Every member state maintained its sovereignty and own military forces, but most military actions were carried out under the auspice of the UAF banner, comprised of elements contributed by the various nations. Even though individual countries were free to carry out operations, command often overlapped between the UAF and the host nation, with roles and numbers determined through some Byzantine process. The knot got even more tangled when special operations forces were involved. Usually the Federation’s participation was more limited in those circumstances, with UAF personnel serving in observation or advisory roles. One of Lincoln’s early assignments had been as part of such a team, working in Honduras. The reporting structure and hierarchy had been confusing to him back then. He’d since spent most of his adult life in the midst of it, and still didn’t grasp it fully. “It’s not even clear at this stage that the UAF is aware of SUNGRAZER.”

  “I’m shocked,” Thumper said, with a tone that suggested she wasn’t.

  “Where’s she
stationed?” Wright asked. Lincoln didn’t know why he bothered to organize his presentations; his teammates always asked questions he’d answer later in the briefing, no matter how carefully he tried to stage them to get to the relevant facts as quickly as possible. He gestured at the projector again, skipping through the next four slides to pull up an image of SUNGRAZER’s general track. The scales were all off, like an elementary school picture of the solar system, but the image showed Mars, the asteroid belt, and a thick white line marking a short portion of SUNGRAZER’s path.

  “She’s shadowing Mars, from the Belt-side,” Lincoln said. “Or, at least, she was. As you can see, we’ve only got about ten days of historical data here to look at.”

  “Yeah,” Thumper said. “Why is that?”

  Lincoln smiled at the irony of the answer. “Clearance isn’t high enough.”

  “I’m sorry,” Wright said. “What?”

  “You’ve all been given a great privilege here,” Almeida said from his corner. “Just briefing you on this basically doubled the number of people who even know about SUNGRAZER.”

  “That’s probably a bit of an exaggeration,” Lincoln said, “but maybe not much of one. Operational control is highly-compartmentalized. Best I can tell from what they gave us, even some of the folks running remote maintenance on SUNGRAZER didn’t know exactly what she was working on.” He pointed at Thumper. “I want you to deep scan what they sent over, though. I’m sure you’ll find things I missed.”

  “Easy day,” Thumper said.

  “If it’s such a tight ship,” said Wright, “how’d we lose it?”

  “Good question,” Lincoln replied. “She’s supposed to have failsafes in place to prevent this exact scenario… emergency shut down protocols, self-destruct procedures, the whole bit. Whatever orders she received to divert her course didn’t trip any of those failsafes. Remote intrusion countermeasures didn’t even fire off or anything. From how it’s looking right now, those orders came through a legitimate command chain.”