by Jay Posey
About a minute or so later, Wright called back in. “Anvil’s on site, moving to stage now.”
“Anvil moving to stage,” Lincoln repeated. “Copy that.”
Sahil’s head appeared in the lower hatch of the airlock.
“We’re locked in, Cap’n,” he said as he clambered the rest of the way up. Lincoln and Thumper had to shuffle around to make room for him. “Holdin’ off at thirty meters.”
Thirty meters of open space between the Lamprey and the Ava Leyla. There wasn’t really any cause for concern. The two vessels were at matched velocity, and there was nothing out there to use as a reference point for the motion. For all intents and purposes, the traversal would be the same as if the ships were both at a dead stop.
But Lincoln hated open space. No matter how many times he’d operated in it, it felt unnatural to him to be surrounded by endless nothingness. The sense of complete and utter exposure was unnerving. To know he could literally fall forever and never hit bottom, in a place where even the idea of direction was meaningless. And it was impossible to avoid being confronted by his own absolute insignificance in the face of that vast emptiness that was yet so full of wonders beyond his comprehension.
“We set?” Thumper asked.
“Set,” Sahil responded.
Lincoln took a deep breath, let himself feel his feet planted firmly on the deck. It was just thirty meters. Anybody could do thirty meters.
“Good to go,” Lincoln said. “Pop it.”
“Venting,” Thumper said. She flipped switches on the control panel, starting the controlled depressurization of the airlock. Thirty seconds later, she said. “We’re stable. Popping the hatch.”
Thumper activated the outer hatch, which slid smoothly open to reveal the gap. The Coffin’s grav field extended a few feet outward from the vessel; Thumper climbed up the ladder and took position on top. Lincoln was up next. He clambered up next to her, craning his neck back to look at the target ship hanging there above him. Sahil had rolled the Lamprey over to put the Ava Leyla over their heads, though as with all things in space, up was relative. The pull of the grav field dissipated abruptly only a few feet from the craft; the difference between Lincoln’s feet and head was significant. It gave him a strange sense of something like vertigo, a feeling that his feet were too heavy, and his head too light.
Sahil joined the two of them on top of the Coffin.
“Anvil, Hammer’s ready to jump the gap,” Lincoln reported over the team channel.
“Copy, Hammer,” Wright responded, then after a brief pause added, “Don’t miss.”
She said it deadpan, but there was a trace of a smile behind the words. Wright knew how much he hated open space. Fortunately, the Ava Leyla was at least ten times longer than the Lamprey, and made a nice fat target to land on. And the gap was only thirty meters.
“We good?” Thumper asked.
“Let’s do it,” Lincoln said.
“Ladies first,” Thumper said, and without waiting for a response she leapt up into space and dropped away towards the cargo ship. Watching her go, Lincoln’s world instantly flipped and he was suddenly upside down, watching his teammate plummet headfirst towards the target. She hadn’t jumped up. She’d fallen off. It made his head swim.
“You can hold a grapple if you want,” Sahil said. Thin tethers ran from four points between the Lamprey and the cargo ship. Technically, it would have been perfectly reasonable for Lincoln to follow one of the lines down. And he would have looked about as cool as if he were crossing a swimming pool by holding on to the edge and following it all the way around to the other side. Sahil was looking at him with that blank faceplate, but Lincoln could picture the exact expression the other man had on his face; the left corner of his mouth pulled down in his version of a smile.
“Thanks dad, but I’m good,” Lincoln answered. Everybody was a comedian. He half expected Mike to chime in at some point.
Leaping out of gravity was always bizarre. There was no significant pop or snap; the tug was just there, and then it wasn’t. It didn’t even take a particularly forceful jump to break free. Lincoln swallowed the vertigo and kicked off, and then he too was rocketing headlong towards the freighter. Once again, the perspective shifted. There was no force dragging him downward towards the Ava Leyla; now he was crossing horizontally, flying between two vertical islands, with an infinite well below. He didn’t look down.
Freespacing was almost exactly the opposite of swimming. It required patience, tight body control, and minimal movement of the limbs. The suit’s gyros helped stabilize, firing jets in microbursts to counter tumble. Even so, the tolerances were strict to avoid accidentally overriding Lincoln’s intentional small adjustments, so balance and relaxed stillness were the keys to success.
Twenty meters. Fifteen.
Thumper had already touched down, and she was moving in a crouch towards their designated entry point.
Ten meters.
Lincoln’s training took over. He tucked and tipped himself backwards, started the slow roll that would enable him to decelerate and touch down with a light step as the cargo ship’s grav field drew him gently on deck.
At least, that’s how they made it sound like it would work during all the training.
In reality, Lincoln came in a little faster than he’d intended and hadn’t quite completed the smooth backwards roll when gravity kicked back in. He landed on his tiptoes, leaning too far forward. One hasty step, then another, and then he decided just to bail on the smooth landing. He tucked forward, executed a combat roll over his right shoulder, came up in a crouch, shouldered his short rifle, and tried his best to look like he had totally intended to do that. He quickly checked left and right for any sign of detection. No threats.
Thumper was ahead of him, already doing work to prepare the entry point. She hadn’t noticed his landing. Lincoln glanced back and saw Sahil dropping down a few steps away, landing as light and easy as a cat hopping off a window ledge. The little man hunched his shoulders and lowered his head as soon as he touched down, immediately brought his weapon up and scanned the surroundings. After a moment, he made his way over to Lincoln. He didn’t stop where Lincoln was crouched, just passed by and swatted Lincoln’s shoulder with the back of his hand.
“Nice save,” Sahil said with a chuckle.
“I’m a true professional,” Lincoln answered. He stood and followed Sahil up to Thumper’s position, reporting in as he went. “Anvil, Hammer has touched down. We’re prepping for entry.”
“Copy that,” Wright answered. “We’re in position and holding.”
Sahil and Lincoln flanked Thumper, one off each of her shoulders, crouching to keep a low profile while they provided security. It was of course highly unlikely that there would be anything on the exterior of the ship that would cause them any trouble. But even a one-in-a-million chance was a chance, and there was no room for slack on an op.
“Thumper, how’s it looking?” Lincoln asked.
She’d fitted a device to the hull of the Ava Leyla, and was busy working some holographic display only she could see. Their point of entry was a hatch to a service tunnel; Thumper was running scans to make sure it was clear.
“Weird,” she said. “Security’s a little more robust than I would’ve expected.”
“Care to elaborate?” Lincoln prompted after a moment.
“Gimme a sec.” Her voice had the faraway quality it took whenever her brain was busy elsewhere. Problem solving. After that, she worked in silence for a couple of minutes.
“Hammer, you all right?” Wright asked, checking in after the longer-than-expected delay.
“Yeah, stand by,” Lincoln replied. “Thumper’s spooked.”
“I’m not spooked,” Thumper said with a hint of offense. “Just being careful.”
“What are you seeing?” he asked, taking the opportunity to rephrase the question.
“It’s just weird,” she answered. “Picking up more sensor lines than I’d expect, even
accounting for people who are maybe up to no good.”
“So they’re paranoid?”
“Kinda. But in the wrong direction.”
“Spell it out, Thump,” he said after another silence.
“Yeah, sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s all wired up, lots of passageways and doors covered. But looks more like keeping people in than out.”
Lincoln didn’t quite know what to make of that assessment, but he knew he didn’t like it.
“Can you get Poke in there?” he asked.
“Sure thing,” Thumper replied. She reached up and plucked a long, matte-black rectangle off her back, laid it down on the hull in front of her. After a moment of fiddling, the rectangle reformed itself into something longer and thinner, and sort of sat up next to her. She patted it on the topmost part. “All right Pokey, let’s see what you can see.”
Thumper took another device off of her hip, this one flat and round, and placed that too on the hull. It made a gentle whirring sound. When it stopped, Poke slid forward and into the center of the device, and then disappeared inside it. The device was like a miniaturized version of the Lamprey’s breaching mechanism, a tiny drill and airlock all in one. Poke was the only one thin enough to use it, and that was because it could scale itself down to the diameter of a single component, which was roughly the size of Lincoln’s little finger.
“We looking for anything in particular?” Thumper asked.
“Bad news,” Lincoln said.
“Should be easy enough to find.”
Thumper went to work, establishing search parameters for Poke, adjusting them based on what she found. She wasn’t sharing the feed out to the team, though, so Lincoln had no way of knowing what she was finding.
“Anvil, we’ve got Poke doing some snooping,” Lincoln said over team comms. “Just hold tight until we know what we’re dealing with.”
“Roger,” Wright said, cool and professional.
After about twenty minutes of scouting, Thumper finally grunted.
“You got something?” Lincoln asked.
“I have a number in my head,” Thumper said. “Crew complement for a Type-43 is what?”
“Eight to twelve,” Lincoln said.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. You want to tell me why I’m picking up a whole lot more signatures than that?”
“How many more?”
“I’d say at least twenty.”
“We’re looking at thirty personnel?” Lincoln asked.
“If I haven’t missed anybody, yeah, somewhere around there.”
“Share it out,” he said.
A moment later, Lincoln’s suit received the data feed. He pulled up a three-dimensional wireframe schematic of the Ava Leyla on his internal display. Blue lines marked the internal structure of the ship, with the general locations of the personnel displayed as white heat throughout. The locational information wasn’t precise. Thumper was keeping Poke in between the inner and outer hulls of the cargo ship, so it wasn’t getting visual confirmation and couldn’t update them all in real-time. Instead of individual indicators for each member of the crew, Poke was providing a snapshot of concentration. If people were far enough apart and on their own, they showed as fuzzy grey dots. The more crew members there were in one area, the larger the cloud, and the brighter it was. The vessel’s bridge had a light grey, smoky splotch that Lincoln judged to indicate four or five. There were a few other dots here and there. But it was the lowest deck that was cause for concern. The cargo holds had a bright white smear; too many people, too close together to get a clear estimate.
Poke’s sensor suite was sophisticated enough to avoid double-counting. A quick scan roughly confirmed Thumper’s numbers.
Passengers? Hostages? Or were they armed hostiles?
Typically Lincoln liked to outnumber the bad guys by at least two-to-one. With a team as small as the Outriders, he’d had to get used to the idea of even numbers, or even being slightly outnumbered on occasion. Their suits usually tipped the balance in their favor anyway. But it didn’t matter how well-trained and -equipped his team was; six-to-one against was bad odds for anybody. Bad enough to consider impossible.
“What you wanna do, boss?” Sahil asked.
Scrub the mission. That was the right answer. The obvious one.
But this was their shot. Probably the only one they’d get. Aborting now would be the same as having refused the mission from the outset.
Worse. All those people back home were counting on them to get this done, to find a thread to pull on. The army and navy had both provided resources and support that could have gone elsewhere if Lincoln had turned it all down from the start.
But six-to-one against were really bad odds.
Unless the six never saw the one.
“Thumper, can you get what we need without taking the bridge?” Lincoln asked.
She turned back and looked at him over her shoulder, but didn’t reply right away. Thinking it through.
“I don’t think I can say for sure, sir,” she finally replied with a shake of her head. “Have to get a closer look at what we’re actually dealing with.”
“But it is possible.”
“Possible, yes sir. Easy, definitely not.”
“All right,” Lincoln said, then opened team comms. “Anvil, we’re making an adjustment. Infiltration and reconnaissance only. I want zero contact with ship personnel until we figure out what’s going on.”
“Understood,” Wright said. “You want us to hold outside?”
“Negative, I still want the coverage. And if we screw this up, I want to be able to rally fast,” he answered. It was the dichotomy of special operations; always stick to the plan, but be ready to adapt on the fly. But always stick to the plan… but adapt as necessary.
But the plan was always about the mission first. And the mission was information. If there was still a way to get it, then that’s what they’d do.
“OK, Anvil, continue with your planned entry. See if you can get a better idea of what we’re looking at below decks. But try to keep yourself in a blocking position. If we tip anybody off coming through, you’re going to make sure nobody makes it topside.”
“Roger,” she answered. “Call it when you’re ready for entry.”
“Stand by.” Lincoln switched channels back to his element. “Thumper, how we looking? Can we get in without making too much noise?”
She nodded. “Yeah we should be good. I’ve got a bypass on the hatch sensor. Just have to be careful of our route once we’re inside. We’ll either need to take it real slow, or real, real fast.”
“We’ll start slow. Let’s move.”
“Roger that.”
“Anvil,” Lincoln said over the team-wide channel, “we’re going in.”
“Hammer making entry, copy,” Wright responded.
Sahil swiveled smoothly around and aimed his weapon at the hatch, prepared to be the first one in, or to be the first to fire in case things went wrong. Lincoln signaled to Thumper. She nodded, worked her magic, and the service hatch retracted. As soon as he had room enough, Sahil tipped forward and swept the interior with his weapon.
“Clear,” he said a few moments later. He held position, providing cover while Thumper descended into the pitch black chamber.
“Set,” she reported, once she was down.
Lincoln followed after her. There was no ambient light for his visor to amplify, but the sensor suite provided a composite view of everything else it could detect, displayed in ghostly blues. He reached the bottom of the ladder; Thumper was down in a crouch, covering the internal hatch that led to the service tunnel.
Lincoln moved to the opposite side of the ladder and likewise raised his weapon to cover the hatch.
“Set,” he said.
Sahil moved down to join them, and sealed the external hatch. It took a few moments for the lock to repressurize. Once the cycle had completed, Thumper moved up to the internal hatch controls, and accessed them through s
ome non-physical means. She turned and gave a thumbs-up signal.
“Anvil,” Lincoln said. “Hammer’s moving into the service tunnel. You’re clear to make entry.”
“Copy that,” Wright said. “Anvil making entry.”
“Thumper,” he said. “Pop it.”
As soon as he’d said it, the internal hatch slid open, revealing a tight tube of a tunnel. He’d seen it before, during their training.
Six against one. Bad odds.
Lincoln moved forward and took point, first one in.
TEN
Elliot cut across the courtyard, keeping his stride as casual as he could. When he reached the far side he took a sharp right, and then a made a quick loop that doubled him back out to the front of the courtyard again. There were still a few minutes to kill before his contact was supposed to ping him the final coordinates for their meeting location, and he didn’t want to give anyone the impression he was waiting around for something. He also didn’t want to get trapped inside his own mind, and that was proving difficult.
When he’d tried to establish contact with his secret source for Kit, his credentials had failed. Somehow, when it had happened, he’d found he had almost expected it. A gut reaction he’d been trying to ignore. Most likely, a routine security change had gone through and knocked him off the list of authorized accessors. But Elliot had managed to navigate those before, and this one seemed different. Maybe someone finally figured out he didn’t belong on the list, and got him scrubbed. Maybe it was worse. And if it was worse, that meant it was much, much worse. Unfortunately, no matter how hard he tried to convince himself the loss of contact was routine, he couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t. The Directorate had asked him to track down some high-grade communications components a couple of weeks prior. Now, as unthinkable as it should have been, he couldn’t stop his brain from screaming that there was a connection. And worse, that it might all lead right to his doorstep.
Elliot couldn’t let his mind run down that course. Once it got started, the only possible end was sheer panic. And there was no need to try to deal with imaginary problems, when he had concrete ones right in front of him. Whatever the cause, the loss of access to such a rich source of intelligence was going to be a blow to his operations if he couldn’t get it sorted out. As usual, he’d managed to talk his way into a little extra time with Kit and scored the NID’s necessary introduction anyway. Kit knew he was good for the information. Now he just had to figure out how to get it without relying on his ace. Or, preferably, how to get his ace back.
