by Jay Posey
The compartment housed several tall steel sets of shelves running lengthwise from the front of the room to the back, with narrow aisles in between. The lights were off, except for the low-intensity always-on red bulbs that were placed throughout the ship. One near the back corner flickered sporadically, a sure sign that it needed replacement.
For once, the ship’s general disarray worked in the team’s favor. Various foodstuffs and supplies were haphazardly strewn all over the shelving, with no apparent order or plan. Sacks of rice and beans sat on the deck in one corner, alongside what looked like a pile of oil-stained mechanic’s coveralls. The likelihood of anyone noticing anything missing or having been rearranged was slim.
Which was good, as they’d had to move a number of items to make room for Thumper. At the moment, she was lying on her back on the very top of one of the shelves, her face maybe six inches away from the overhead, and her legs propped over a soft-sided container of emergency environment suits. She scooted backward a few inches; the movement caused the whole shelf to shake and wobble. Lincoln instinctively reached out to stabilize it, but Thumper didn’t seem the least bit fazed.
“How long?” Lincoln asked.
“Couple minutes to cut through,” she answered. “Couple minutes to close it back up. Unknown amount of time in the middle.”
He glanced up and saw she’d already begun the work. She traced thin lines in a silvery, metallic paint to form a rectangle on the overhead, a little wider than her shoulders, and starting from just above her head down to her midsection.
Lincoln went back to watching the door a few feet away. He took a deep breath, held it, exhaled slowly. There was something draining about this kind of operation. A slow-burn anxiety. At least in an assault, the training and muscle memory took over, clarity of action became razor sharp, and all that pent-up energy could be poured out. In an infiltration like this, there was nothing to react to, nothing to push against. It was all just waiting, waiting, waiting for that moment of sudden action, with no guarantee that it would come, but disastrous consequences if it came and caught you on your heels.
He’d placed a scanner on the door, but had dialed it in so he could still see the physical structure of the door as well as out into the passageway. If anyone showed up, he wanted to be able to quickly pull the device and didn’t want to lose time fumbling around for it. The early warning wouldn’t do all that much good if the scanner itself was still stuck to the back of the door for the bad guys to see. So far, they’d only seen one person in the passageway, a scruffy wastrel of a man who had hurried past without any sign of slowing.
“Burning now,” Thumper said.
Above her, the silvery line glowed white, star-brilliant for a half second. And then she was pushing the panel up, and sliding it into the hole she’d just made. Through the hole in the overhead, Lincoln could see a beam of the ship’s internal infrastructure, flanked on either side by pipes and masses of cabling. The idea that Thumper could sort through all of that in any sort of quick fashion seemed absurd.
“I’m going to have to get up in there a ways,” she said. “Let me know if I’m making too much noise.”
“Roger,” Lincoln answered. He looked up to check on her again, and saw that she was rolling into an awkward not-quite-seated position. She disappeared into the overhead from the shoulders up, her arms held above her head.
“Oh boy,” she said.
“Problem?”
“Not if I had all day,” she replied.
For the next fifteen minutes, Thumper punctuated the long spans of silence with the occasional grunt or curse. Lincoln had to resist the urge to ask her for updates; he knew she’d let him know whenever there was something to know. There would be no point in the request other than his temporary relief. It was like trying not to scratch an itch.
After about seventeen minutes of Thumper working, Lincoln got more of a distraction than he’d wanted.
People in the passageway. A man and a woman, with a little girl between them. The woman held the girl’s wrist in a controlling manner, which seemed unnecessary, as the girl offered no resistance whatsoever. The moment Lincoln saw them, his gut told him they were headed his way.
“Trouble,” Lincoln said. “We’ve got two inbound. There’s a kid with them.”
“What do you want me to do about it?” Thumper asked; not confrontational, despite her tone. A genuine question.
“How quickly can you get down?”
“Up would be easier.”
“Do it.”
There was no doubt about it. The man in the passageway was in the lead, and he slowed as he approached the storage compartment. Lincoln snatched the scanner off the door, slapped it back in place on his belt, and turned to find a hiding place. Above him, he saw Thumper’s feet disappear into the overhead. A moment later, the panel slid back over the hole she’d cut, angled slightly so it wouldn’t fall through. It wasn’t a perfect fit; to Lincoln’s eyes, the gaps at the corners seemed painfully obvious, a warning that would be impossible to miss. They would just have to hope that no one looked up.
Then again, if that was the thing the bad guys noticed, that would mean Lincoln had solved the biggest problem. Himself.
He quickly moved to the back corner of the storage room, furthest from the door, with the largest amount of stuff between it and him. There he crouched down in between a stack of several large water canisters and a pile of unmarked sacks made of some rough, unrefined cloth. The canisters were taller and provided better coverage, but the irregular lines and colors of the sacks made for easier blending with his suit’s reactive camouflage. The handle on the door clanked and light from the passageway sliced a narrow channel along the dark floor. But it didn’t immediately widen.
“Then just wait,” the man said, out in the passageway. He’d opened the door partway, but hadn’t entered yet. “Or don’t, I don’t care.”
At the last moment, Lincoln dragged one of the unmarked bags over in front of him, covering the lower portion of his body. He kept his weapon low but clear, in case he had to use it in a hurry.
The lights came on, and Lincoln felt as though he’d been caught in the open under a spotlight. He could just barely see the door through a gap in the water canisters and the shelves. The man moved through first, and was quickly lost from view. The woman shoved the little girl forward ahead of her, roughly.
“Stand over there,” the woman said in Mandarin. “And don’t touch anything!”
The little girl didn’t appear to understand any of the words, but there was no doubt she understood the general meaning. She stepped forward a few paces to a point where Lincoln could see her quite well through the shelves. She was seven or eight years old, he guessed, with dark hair, and skin deeply tanned. Though he couldn’t be sure of her ethnicity, Honduras leapt to mind. He had spent months operating in Honduras early in his career; he’d seen plenty of boys and girls her age, and she would have fit in right among them. She kept her hands at her waist, in front of her, the pointer finger of her left hand wrapped in the loose fist of her right. Eyes on the floor.
“Are you sure we even still have them?” the man said from near the front corner of the room.
“We should,” the woman snapped, “but I’m not the one who’s using them all the time.”
“Not like I do either,” the man answered, but he swallowed it, apparently not wanting to invite any more of the woman’s obviously substantial wrath. The sounds of rummaging came from his general direction. After a few moments, the woman sighed in irritation and walked over to join him.
“Move, just move out of the way.”
The rummaging became sharper, more violent. And the little girl, left alone and unguarded, did what children often do without supervision. She started exploring.
At first, she just reached out and touched the shelf in front of her, ran a finger along it. She glanced towards the front of the room where the adults were and, having earned no reproach, grew bolder. She stepp
ed closer to the shelf, touched some of the items on it, picked up a small box and examined it. After she set the box back on the shelf, she dared to leave her spot by the door, and started walking down the aisle. Towards the back of the compartment.
She disappeared from view for a span, but it wasn’t difficult to anticipate her trajectory. Sure enough, a moment later she reached the end of the shelf and paused. A stack of cans prevented him from seeing most of her, but he could see the top half of her legs through the shelving. She was still facing the shelves, investigating whatever those cans were, most likely.
Lincoln willed her to turn and go back to the door. If she did, there was still a chance no one would notice him. But if she decided to come around the end of the shelf, she would be standing in the aisle with an unobstructed view directly to Lincoln and his hiding place. There was no way to know how she’d react if she saw him. And there seemed vanishingly little hope that that wouldn’t happen.
The girl shifted, her legs turned back towards the door. But she didn’t move. Just stood there. Weighing her options, maybe. And then, to Lincoln’s disappointment, she turned the other way and crept around the aisle. She trailed a hand behind her, running it along the smooth end of the shelf. She didn’t seem to be searching for anything in particular. Looking around, taking it all in. It occurred to Lincoln that this might have been the first time she’d ever seen so many basic necessities all in one place. He noticed then that she wasn’t wearing any shoes.
And then her eyes fell on him.
They were deep brown, and made Lincoln think of rich earth, and open fields. At first, they passed over him, swept casually from the water canisters to the sacks without pause.
Still, still, still, Lincoln told himself. He held his breath, would have stopped his heart if he could have.
The girl looked up at the corner of the room, and then started a lazy turn around the end of the shelf, making her way back towards the door along a different aisle. But before she disappeared between the shelves, she stopped, and suddenly looked back, as if she’d caught something out of the corner of her eye. It was then that she saw him. She turned her body towards him, and stared, wide-eyed.
“We had six the last time I checked,” the woman said. “There should be at least three more.”
The rummaging sounds approached closer, as the woman widened her search. The little girl didn’t move. Her arms hung down straight at her sides, her hands clenched in tiny fists. Lincoln didn’t know what to do. She was looking at him, there was no doubt about it. But she didn’t seem to know what to do about it either. For maybe as much as a full minute, they sat there staring at one another. There was no fear in her eyes; just a careful attentiveness. Waiting.
“Here,” the woman said. “They’re right here! Four of them! Right here!”
“Well, that’s not where they were last time,” the man said. “Maybe you shouldn’t leave your stuff spread out everywhere.”
“I told you – I’m not the one using them all up!”
The woman was close now. A few steps away, just on the other side of the canisters. If the little girl screamed, or pointed, or even walked over for a closer look, there was nothing he’d be able to do about it. His action would have to be decisive in those next confused moments, his aim sure, if he had any hope of preventing the man and woman from raising an alarm.
But then, a sudden, unexpected thought occurred to him. It was foolish, probably. But the hope of escaping the storage compartment without being discovered seemed all but lost. He took the risk, and moved. Slowly, he brought his pointer finger to his lips, or to the place on his faceplate where his lips would be if there had been any face at all for the girl to see. In response, she blinked several times.
And then she backed away, slowly, a step at a time. She remained by the end of the shelf, at the far side of the compartment, silent, never taking her eyes off him.
“Girl,” the woman snapped, from farther away. Somewhere near the door. “Come here.”
The little girl looked at the woman. Then back at Lincoln.
Lincoln thought for certain his heart had stopped. Involuntarily, he tightened his grip on his weapon, tensed his legs, readying to spring out and drop both adults before they could react. The woman was by the door; he would target her first. Through the gap in the shelves. Then the man, somewhere to the right.
The woman started to take a step towards the girl, but the instant she moved, the little girl turned and obediently went to her. She didn’t look back.
A few moments later, the lights switched off, and the storage compartment was once more bathed in a red darkness.
Lincoln gave it a full minute before he spoke.
“We’re clear,” he said.
“I can put my feet back down?” Thumper asked.
“Yeah, you’re good. Just do it quietly.”
The panel slid back, and Thumper’s feet descended, touching down lightly on the top shelf.
“My abs are killing me,” she said.
“That was too close,” Lincoln said. “How much longer?”
“Almost got it. Already rerouted everything I need to, just got to safely disconnect now.”
“Soon’s good.”
Lincoln moved the sack out from in front of him, slipped forward out of his hiding place, and made his way over to the shelf at the far end, where the little girl had stood, maybe eight feet away. From there, he looked back at the corner where he’d been. The fact that she hadn’t given him away made it seem unlikely she would mention the strange, not-quite-invisible man sitting in the corner. But he couldn’t help but wonder what she had thought he was.
“Hey Thumper,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“While you’re in there… anything you can do to make them easier to find?” he asked.
She didn’t answer immediately, but when she did she seemed to understand his meaning. “I’ll see what I can work up.”
Exfiltration, for once, had gone smoothly. Thumper had found an exterior hatch on the same deck as the storage room, one that led out to a small loading bay on the starboard side of the vessel. She and Lincoln exited from the bay, and traversed the exterior of the ship to where the Lamprey was still tethered. From there, they made the leap across open space. Once they were all loaded in, Sahil punched out a command on the console. The Coffin vibrated slightly as the grapples released and retracted. Sahil activated the reverse thrusters, gradually slowing the vehicle and allowing an ever-widening gap to open between them and the freighter.
Sahil left the display up, so they could all watch the Ava Leyla as it receded from view, shrinking to a single point and finally vanishing in the great void.
“Spooky One Seven, this is Easy One,” Sahil said.
“We copy, Easy One,” Noah answered. “Good to hear from you. Will was starting to worry.”
“We got distance on the target, startin’ our burn to rally now,” Sahil responded. The directness of his words and the flatness of his delivery communicated everything Lincoln needed to know about Sahil’s feelings on the outcome of the op.
“Roger, Easy One, we’re en route to pick up. ETA is… forty-seven mikes.”
“Forty-seven minutes, understood. Easy One out.”
Lincoln glanced over at the device they’d recovered. Two conjoined cylinders, one narrower than the other. Smaller than a loaf of bread, and maybe two pounds total. And yet they were headed back home with a much heavier burden.
“You leave that on me,” Lincoln said. “I know it’s going to be tempting to question what we did back there. We’re all going to be thinking about what we could have done differently, or what we should have done. And I’ll tell you right now, what you should have done is exactly what you did. You followed orders, you got the job done. Anything beyond that, you let me carry.”
For a time, no one replied. But then Wright spoke up.
“Team’s a team, captain. Whatever we do, we all do.”
“It’s my jo
b to decide,” Lincoln answered. “And the consequences of those decisions are mine to bear. That’s my part. So you leave that on me.”
They rode the rest of the way in silence. Lincoln knew he didn’t want to second-guess himself the whole trip back, but there didn’t seem all that much else to do. It wasn’t that he doubted the call he’d made. There was no question it was the right one. On paper, out of the moment, detached from the emotion, there was no question. If it came down to trading the lives of a few kids here, no matter how desperate, for all those at risk if they didn’t recover SUNGRAZER, Lincoln had absolutely done the right thing.
But it wasn’t doubt that plagued him. It was the quiet fear that at some point on that long trip home, he was going to think of another way he could’ve done it. That the solution would present itself too late, when there was nothing he could do except regret he hadn’t thought of it sooner, faster. Like having the perfect snappy comeback, three minutes after the argument ended. He thought about that little girl, bravely enduring. And how much longer she’d have to continue to do so, because of the call he’d made.
TWELVE
“Three of a kind, eights,” Mike said, laying his cards down on the footlocker they were using as a table. Wright tossed her cards into the pile, face down.
“Beats me,” Lincoln said. He gathered the playing cards up off the table and started shuffling them, while Mike collected his meager winnings. They never played for much, but they always played for something.
This was one of the tough parts about their particular line of work. The whole team was restless. Playing poker was occasionally distracting, but in this particular case, no one’s heart seemed to be in it. After the intensity of planning for, and then executing, the hit on the Ava Leyla, the sudden lack of direction and focus made it hard to relax during down time. It wasn’t unusual for the team to get a little break after running an op. In this case, however, it wasn’t self-imposed. There was literally nothing any of them could do. Lincoln felt like the team had run full-tilt off the end of a long pier, only to find themselves lost at sea.
