Sungrazer

by Jay Posey

  Mike turned the datapad back towards himself, held it low almost in his lap, stared down at it while he spoke.

  “I told you I grew up hunting, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” Lincoln said.

  “My dad and I, we still get out there together when I’m home. It’s kind of our thing. But, well, after I was in for a while, got to be hunting felt a little too much like the day job, you know. Lost a little bit of the magic for me. It’s just sort of… especially after Balikpapan… hard for me to feel like it was fair, killing a thing that couldn’t shoot back and just wanted to be left alone.

  “But that was our thing, you know, so I tried not to let it get in the way too much. I guess my dad picked up on it anyway, because one night, before we were supposed to head out at like oh-three-hundred, he tells me he got me something new to shoot with, and takes me down to the basement where his gun vaults are. Which I figured was kind of weird, taking a new rifle out for a hunt without ever having tested it before. But when we get down there, he’s got all this camera gear laid out. Real nice stuff. Professional grade. Must have cost him a small fortune. And he just said, ‘If you can get ‘em with this, I reckon we’ll both know you could’ve gotten ‘em with the other.’

  “That was all he said about it. So we still hunt together, but…” Mike stopped and shook his head with a little chuckle. “This is stupid I know, but when I take those pictures, it kind of feels like I’m giving a life back. I know that sounds weird. But it helps me. And I tell you what, it’s a whole lot harder to get a good shot with a camera than it is with a gun. You ever hunted caribou before?”

  Lincoln shook his head. He actually hadn’t ever hunted anything in his life, unless you counted people, but he figured now wasn’t the time to mention that.

  “They’re ghosts, man. The way my dad and I do it, anyway. We don’t use any of the tracking gear, none of that touristy drone business. Just old-fashioned eyes and ears, and a mind for weather and terrain. Up in the high country, just getting around is more than most people can handle. And caribou have excellent hearing. If you’re bumping all over the rocks, they’ll spook before you ever had a chance to lay eyes on one. So you have to keep one eye on the wind, and one eye on the ground… Anyway I’m rambling, but the important thing is that a caribou, one that’s worth the trouble like this fella, will make you earn it. So when I get a shot like this one, there’s always a story goes with it…

  “Thing is, Lincoln… I don’t remember taking this picture,” he said, showing the image again. He pulled up another image; different composition, different caribou, but same masterful photographer’s touch. “Or this one.” He showed a couple of others. “These two I can tell you everything, time of day, what the temperature and humidity level was when I got those shots. Everything, crystal clear. But these others… just gone.

  “I can remember every detail of every single time I’ve ever had to put an enemy down,” Mike said after a moment’s silence. “Faces, expressions, clothes, situation. Every one of them. Used to be, I remembered my hunts the same. But ever since…” He stopped and shook his head.

  Lincoln made the connection for him.

  “Since you went through the Process?” Lincoln asked.

  Mike shrugged, and then gave a little nod, like he was admitting to an addiction and was ashamed of it. “It was little things at first. After the first time, I mean. Didn’t really notice it, but it’s been rougher since this last.”

  “More than pictures of caribou?”

  After a moment, Mike nodded.

  “Odds and ends. Every once in a while I get a face and can’t come up with a name, or the other way around. People I should know. That I’ve known for a long time. Some gaps from when I was a kid, or when I was home on leave. It’s weird…” He stopped, shook his head, took a settling breath. He was clearly struggling; relieved to be letting it out after who knew how long, uncertain how much was safe to share. “It isn’t like when you forget an appointment, or something that happened a long time ago that a friend reminds you of. It’s a hole. A blank spot. I know something should be there, but I don’t know what it is.”

  “You talk to medical?”

  “No, sir,” Mike answered. He looked up at Lincoln then, his eyes resolute. “And no sir, I won’t.”

  “Mike,” Lincoln said. “This isn’t something you can just ignore. If something’s going on, we need to know. We need to get it taken care of.”

  “I am taking care of it. You see me do anything yet to make you doubt whether or not I’m still up to the task?”

  “No,” Lincoln said carefully. “Not yet. Doesn’t mean it won’t happen. And what if it does, Mike? What then? You’re putting the whole team at risk.”

  “No, I’m not, Lincoln. Look, I can do the job. Same as always. That ship we took down, the one with the girl on it, before I got KIA? I can walk you through that whole op, minute by minute, moment by moment, right up until they scrubbed me.”

  The technicians always trimmed the last few minutes of memories leading up to a catastrophic event. Apparently in the early days of the Process, they’d left the memories intact all the way up to the moment of death, thinking that operators might be able to learn valuable lessons from whatever went wrong. Somehow they’d managed to underestimate the negative psychological impact of being able to remember the details of your own death. These days, they removed a safe buffer leading up to the event. And now it was starting to sound to Lincoln like they might be removing more than just that.

  “It’s nothing to do with the job,” Mike continued. “Planning, execution, all of it, I’m at the top of my game right now, I swear. It’s just… some of the outside stuff feels… I don’t know man. Thinner, somehow.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how else to describe it. Some of those memories are like… it’s like they’re just stories I heard from someone else.”

  He motioned to the picture of the caribou again.

  “And that…” he began, but he fell silent and didn’t continue.

  “You need to talk to medical,” Lincoln said. “If you don’t, I’ll have to.”

  Mike’s head snapped up, with an intense look. “No Lincoln, I’m good. Look, it doesn’t affect anything. I can do the job, no problem, you don’t have to worry about that. It’s just this other stuff…”

  “That ‘other stuff’ is who you are, Mikey.”

  “No, it isn’t. What I do is who I am. And this is what I do. If you talk to medical, they’re gonna freak out. They’ll pull me out of the team. And then I’ll have lost everything.”

  Lincoln wanted to reassure Mike that getting removed from the team wasn’t on the table, but he couldn’t bring himself to say the words. He knew all too well that it was a possibility. And recognizing that fact put him in check; what would the team do without Mike? He was their eyes and ears. And more often than not, their heart.

  “I had a buddy I served with, back in 3rd Group,” Mike said. “Seventeen years in, he broke his back in a jump, decided it was time to get out. After he recovered, he got a job in landscaping. Landscaping. Went from killing bad guys to spreading pine straw. And people treated him like a second-class citizen. After all he’d done. Can you imagine that? Going from serving your country to serving some country club, and getting looked down on by people who wouldn’t last five seconds out here in the real world? He was a hero, man.”

  The fact that Mike was referring to him in the past tense wasn’t lost on Lincoln. He didn’t want to ask what had happened. But he didn’t have to.

  “Died in a car accident six months after he got out. But he was our team driver, best I’ve ever seen except maybe Sahil, so…” Mike said. He looked back down at the datapad in his hand, shook his head. “I just… I don’t want to die not shooting back, Lincoln.”

  Lincoln didn’t know what to say. If he’d been in Mike’s place, would he have been doing anything differently? He couldn’t convince himself that he would, no matter how much sitting there as a commanding off
icer he wanted to believe there was a better choice. How many times had he ignored pain or lied about the severity of an injury, out of fear that he’d be forced to stay home while his teammates went into the field? Many. Too many, probably. If Mike said he could do the job, did anything else matter? As his team leader, the answer was probably no. But as his friend… well, as his friend, the answer wasn’t nearly as clear cut as Lincoln wanted it to be.

  “I’m good, sir,” Mike said. “I’m good to go.”

  “If you say you can do the job, I believe you Mikey. You know I don’t want to go out there without you,” Lincoln said. “But–”

  “That’s all you have to say.”

  “But…” Lincoln continued. “We need to figure this out. And we’ll figure it out together, OK? You and me. Together. Now that I know, there’s no point in you hiding anything from me. Not a thing. Understand?”

  “Understood,” Mike said. “You’re not gonna… you know?”

  “Tell the others?” Lincoln asked. Mike nodded, and after a moment’s consideration, Lincoln shook his head. “Not yet. Not until you’re ready. When we get back home, we’ll talk about it.”

  “When we get home,” Mike said. “So… what’s that mean for us now?”

  Lincoln drew a deep breath. And then he swiveled back around and laid down again.

  “It means you need to turn that pad off and get some sleep,” he said. “Big night coming up.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Lincoln slid into the narrow darkness alongside the first perimeter fence surrounding the Guo Components facility, and dropped to a knee. Thumper followed close behind, turning when she joined him to watch his back while he worked. Whoever had laid out the security perimeter for the facility had done a fair job; there were only a handful of gaps where the exterior lighting failed to overlap, and both inner and outer fences were latticed cable-fiber, strong and flexible enough to stop a heavy transport from plowing through. The sensor suites were typical of high-end corporate security, but had been more cleverly situated than most. Enough for Thumper to have commented on it, anyway. From her analysis, it appeared that Guo Components had made some improvements in the not-so-distant past, another point in favor of the theory that they had some connection to SUNGRAZER’s disappearance.

  “Dakota, this is Omaha,” Lincoln said. “Signal check?”

  “Dakota has good signal, Omaha,” Wright answered. “Go ahead.”

  “We’re on site at the entry point,” Lincoln continued. “Can you confirm?”

  “I have your beacons,” Wright replied. “I confirm your location and entry point. Looks good. Mike, you got visual on Omaha?”

  “That’s a roger,” Mike said. “I’m set up. Omaha has thirty meters clear, fence to fence.”

  “Sahil?” Wright said.

  “Good to go,” Sahil answered. “Routes in are clear.”

  “Dakota is set, Omaha. Enter when ready.”

  Thumper had a skeeter shadowing them, providing a bubble of disruption to hide them from the various security systems as they moved through. Even so, Lincoln felt like they were running naked. The job would have been almost effortless if they could have employed their suits. Operating in this environment, though, had required the opposite approach; they were all wearing street clothes, and apart from the skeeter, most of the gear they were carrying had been supplied by Elliot from local sources. Even their usual communications gear had been replaced with off-the-shelf dermal adhesives, modified by Thumper to run secure. Lincoln hadn’t used that sort of model for probably a decade; the strip behind his ear tugged at the skin. He hoped it wouldn’t leave a rash.

  “Roger, Omaha is making entry,” he said, as he drew from his back pocket a thin cylindrical tool with a smooth hook on one end. This he ran quickly down the cable-fibered fencing, starting from about a meter high, silently incising the lattice-work. The cable-fibers shivered as the severed ends retracted and curled inward like flame-withered tendrils. The resultant gap was no more than a half-inch in width, but Lincoln pushed and flexed the fence inward like a heavy curtain, making room for Thumper to crawl through. He followed after her and then together they crept forward in a low crouch, crossing the thirty-meter span to the second fence.

  “Omaha at the inner fence, ready to cut through,” he reported.

  “Roger, Omaha,” Wright answered. “You’re good to proceed.”

  The cable work of the fencing was too dense for Lincoln to get a clear view of what lay on the other side. Wright was holed up in a building across the street, spotting for them both with the skeeter and with good old old-fashioned optics. At Wright’s word, Lincoln repeated the same process to defeat the barrier, and then he and Thumper were inside, ready to do the fun part of the job.

  “Omaha’s inside, starting our approach to target,” Lincoln said.

  The facility was a small compound comprised of a mid-sized manufacturing building, a warehouse, and a squat office building towards the front of the lot. The complex wasn’t without its charm; patches of grass and trees broke up the paved pads and connecting roads and walkways. Based on their surveillance and a little system intrusion work, Thumper had identified an area on the third floor of manufacturing as the best place to start, where blueprints and schematics were archived.

  There were no armed guards on the premises, no security forces garrisoned within. The only real threat they faced was from the handful of drones floating lazy patrols in and around the buildings, but as long as Lincoln and Thumper were careful, the drones wouldn’t be more than a nuisance. Thumper had rigged the skeeter up with an alert system; it was set to chirp at them whenever a drone was heading their way, giving them enough time to reroute or find a place to hide until it passed.

  Lincoln led the way across the open ground from the inner fence to the nearest access into the manufacturing facility, making use of the thin trees whenever possible. It took Thumper about thirty seconds to override the lock on the door, using a small black device she’d pulled from her pocket. Once inside, Lincoln flicked on his low-intensity red-filtered light and took the lead again. The wide corridors were dark and eerily silent, his red light casting sinister shadows as they moved through. The silence of the halls felt heavy, as if the building itself were brooding and resented the disturbance. As quietly as they moved, their footsteps and even breathing sounded too loud in that almost malicious stillness.

  Occasionally they caught the buzzing hum of an unseen drone making its rounds somewhere down some other corridor. The way the sound bounced around made it almost impossible to gauge exactly where the noise was coming from, which made Lincoln even more grateful for the early-warning skeeter that was trailing along behind them. He couldn’t decide which was worse; the ominous sound of potential discovery, or the heavy silence that clung to them in its absence.

  For some reason, it was the stairwells that got to him the most. He couldn’t help but wonder if he’d started to get too reliant on his recon suit, with its vision-enhancing sensors and reactive camouflage. Maybe it was a good thing they’d had to do this the old-fashioned way. And an even better thing that the target was so soft.

  Fortunately, they only had to go up two flights, and then it was a short walk to the office Thumper had selected as their primary target. The room was only about half the size of how Lincoln had imagined it, based on Thumper’s description of what it held. He posted up by the door to keep watch while Thumper went to work on one of the terminals nearby.

  “Dakota, Omaha is at the target,” Lincoln reported over the team channel. “Starting our pull now.”

  “Roger, Omaha,” Wright answered. “Still quiet out here.”

  “Don’t get too curious,” Lincoln whispered to Thumper. “I don’t want to stay in here any longer than absolutely necessary.”

  “Darkness getting to you?” she whispered back.

  “Maybe.”

  “Well you’ll just have to suck it up, sweetheart. I’m going to pull everything I can get my hands on.�
��

  Lincoln hated this part of the job. There was literally nothing for him to do but wait and watch. And this particular situation felt a little too familiar; his mind kept wanting to bring up images from the storage room on the Ava Leyla.

  “Hold up,” Sahil said. “Hold up, y’all. I got some possible trouble here.”

  His tone wasn’t loud or urgent; it was the calm intensity that made it worrisome.

  “What’s going on, Sahil?” Wright asked.

  “Familiar face,” Sahil said. “Got a second look at a fella here I saw a little bit ago. Pretty sure he’s keeping tabs on me.”

  The idea that someone had made Sahil almost seemed ridiculous; he was farther out from the facility than anyone else, keeping an eye on the two main routes leading towards the complex. He was always careful to avoid attracting any attention. But he wasn’t the paranoid type. If he thought someone was watching him, regardless of the circumstances, someone was probably watching him.

  “You safe to move?” Wright asked. “Without tipping him off?”

  “Yeah, but it’ll put me out of position.”

  “Sahil,” Lincoln said, breaking in, “if you see something you don’t like, get moving.”

  “Roger that,” he answered. “Then I’m movin’.” That was a bad sign indeed.

  “What do you want to do, Omaha?” Wright asked.

  “We’re already in,” Lincoln said. “We’ll keep pulling what we can, but let me know if you get any other activity out there.”

  The words had hardly made it out of his mouth when Mike cut in.

  “I’ve got movement,” he said. “Office building… three, four… looks like six individuals coming out of the office building.”