Outriders

by Jay Posey

  Piper coded up a simple message; she’d been kidnapped and needed help. That was about all she knew anyway, and it was enough to get noticed. In minutes, she had a basic macro set up to cycle through the array’s effective range, blasting out thousands of messages a second to whoever might be out there. It was shamelessly brute force, with no guarantees. She had no way to know where in space she was, or what direction the nearest hop might be, but if she could let the cycle run long enough, there was a reasonable hope that her message would land somewhere. At least she told herself it was reasonable. Reasonable or not, it was the only hope she had.

  The array ran her routine for about three and a half minutes before it abruptly quit. It only took Piper half that time to figure out why. Someone on the ship had counteracted her override and locked the comm array down, killing her message and Piper’s hope along with it. All of that struggle, and planning, and effort. Three and a half minutes.

  Piper covered her face with her hands.

  * * *

  “THAT OUGHT to hold her just fine,” Kev said.

  “Permanently?” Vector asked.

  “Yeah, I shunted all her diagnostics off to the mainline, so we’re back in control again, and she’s locked out. She’s pretty clever, but she’s no wizard.”

  “Hey, Kid,” Vector said over his communications.

  “Yeah?” she responded.

  “What’s Royce got to say?”

  “He still thinks you ought to force launch and kill it.”

  “We’ve got her contained now,” Vector said. “She can’t hurt us as long as she’s on the tether.”

  “That’s fine, but his crew’s still got work to do. You want him wasting time on her?”

  “Only if it’s an easy fix.”

  “It’s not an easy fix.”

  “Then no. They can get back to it.”

  “I’ll let him know.”

  “Might actually be better for us anyway,” Kev said. “I kind of wish we’d just stuffed her in one of those in the first place. She’s got food, water, everything she needs in there for a couple of weeks at least. And we don’t have to deal with her.”

  “Unless she tries to come back out and run for another,” Vector said.

  “Now that I know what she was up to, I can set up an override on the rest of the pods so we don’t have to worry about it,” Kev replied. “And maybe later I’ll go down there and rig a motion sensor on the hatch just to be safe.”

  Vector tapped his fingers on the edge of the console, irritated that he was even having to think about this right now. But maybe Kev was right. If she really was contained, then the girl could stay in there all the way to Mars as far as he was concerned. He just couldn’t quite bring himself to believe she’d given up yet.

  * * *

  PIPER LAY CURLED on her side, her arms folded around herself, on one of the crash couches. Crying seemed like it might be an appropriate response given everything she’d been through, but she found it impossible to do so. She was too drained, too spent, to feel much of anything anymore. For a time, she lay there letting her mind run its wild course unheeded. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. She was still captive, yes, but the pod felt safer. She didn’t have to worry about people coming in and out without warning, at least. There were plenty of supplies, so she knew she wouldn’t starve to death. She’d be fine, as long as she could cope with the fact that she was all alone, lost somewhere in the middle of deep space.

  And then she realized that, too, was a problem she could do something about – the being lost part, anyway.

  She got up and went back to the command center, brought up the navigation interface. The display locked out course plotting, since the pod was still tethered to the main ship, but if nothing else, she could at least get some sense of where she was. Even though she couldn’t do anything else about it, just having some idea of where they’d taken her felt something like stealing back a little power for herself.

  After a few minutes of scanning through the star maps and other positional data, she saw that they’d taken her out further from YN-773 in the direction of Mars, trailing the planet’s orbit. And though she wasn’t particularly well trained or practiced at reading astronomical maps, from her best guess, it didn’t seem likely that her three-and-a-half-minute burst of calls for help found anyone. She scrolled the map around, zoomed in and out, changed the angle. There just wasn’t anyone out there. Piper knew space was vast and mostly empty, but even when she found Earth and scanned around, there weren’t nearly as many hops on the display as she had expected. It finally occurred to her that the navdata in the pod was out of date. From the look of it, it might have even still had the default data from however many decades ago the pod had been installed.

  Sloppy maintenance work in her opinion. Sure, there wasn’t much need for navigational data in a pod until it’d been launched, but it never hurt to be proactive. Piper had always kept the bubble’s pod on YN-773 updated with the latest from Veryn-Hakakuri’s central maps. Those maps used data regularly collected from all the company’s numerous hops and were available to any employee with access to the system. It was a simple process. She shook her head at other people’s laziness.

  And then a thought jolted her.

  The navigational computer.

  She sat up straighter, her energy renewed.

  * * *

  VECTOR HAD TOLD himself not to worry about the girl anymore. He had enough to keep him busy, and Kev had reassured him that there was nothing she could do to hurt them from in there. But he couldn’t help it. His gut wouldn’t let him leave it alone. And he couldn’t remember a time that he’d ever been glad he’d ignored his gut.

  He stopped back by the ship’s command station, just to check. Kev’s feed was still monitoring activity in the lifepod where the girl was, and as far as Vector could tell, everything was still fine. She was just fiddling around with the nav map. Bored, probably. And he couldn’t blame her, really. It had to be hard on her, not knowing where she was or what was happening. He turned to leave again, but stopped at the door. Went back to the display. It never hurt to double-check.

  “Hey Kev,” he said over comms.

  “Yeah?”

  “You got a sec?”

  “Not really. What’s up?”

  “The girl’s doing something with nav in the pod.”

  “OK. And?”

  “Nothing to be worried about?”

  “What’s the feed say?”

  “Looks like she’s trying to update the data on it, but it keeps failing.”

  There was a pause before he responded.

  “I’ll be there in a second.”

  It was a couple of minutes before Kev arrived, and he had grease on his hands, even though he’d obviously tried to wipe them before he sat down to look.

  “Well, that’s weird,” he said after he’d scrolled back through the log of activity. “You’re right, she’s trying to pull new maps in, but wherever she’s trying to connect is kicking her back out.”

  “Are we blocking it?”

  Kev shook his head. “Not on purpose. I think it’s something she’s doing.”

  He tapped out a few commands on the console, opened new windows on the display that meant nothing to Vector.

  “I’m just gonna track this back, see where she’s grabbing the data…” He trailed off, and then a few moments later cursed to himself.

  “What?” Vector asked.

  “She’s hitting Veryn-Hakakuri’s plot data,” Kev said, and the urgency in his voice made it sound worse than the words. “And failing the security check. Over and over again.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know exactly, but you can bet VH isn’t going to ignore that forever.”

  “Could they track the source?”

  “Eventually they might,” Kev said. And then his face changed. “She’s piggybacking off our relay.”

  “Shut it down,” Vector said.

  “I can
’t,” Kev said. “The pod’s nav system is totally independent, it’s not hooked into the mainline at all–”

  “No, shut it all down. The pod. Cut the power.”

  Kev looked up at him. “If I do that, everything goes.”

  “I know.”

  “She’ll die.”

  “Or she’ll come out. Her choice.”

  Kev hesitated only for a moment, and then nodded.

  * * *

  IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG before the cold took over. And Piper knew that was the thing that would kill her. At first, the complete darkness had thrown her, and after that she’d started worrying about oxygen levels. But once she’d thought it through, she realized that she had plenty of air in the pod to breathe comfortably for hours. More than enough time to freeze to death.

  She hadn’t really thought about it before. In her mind, the pods were all dormant until someone opened the hatch on one. But of course that wasn’t true. Of course they had to run on minimal power, to keep the temperature up and the oxygen fresh. None of that was happening now. And it was taking its toll.

  In the darkness, she’d managed to feel her way to a supply crate and rummaging through had produced a small light. With that, she’d located a pack of thermal blankets. But it hadn’t taken long for her to realize that even those were no match against the heat-draining power of deep space. And then she’d set her light down somewhere and lost it.

  She’d been shivering so badly that she could hardly keep the blankets pulled tight around her, but oddly in the past few minutes, the shivering had stopped. Piper wondered if maybe that meant they’d turned the power back on. Or at least the temperature regulator. But it was still dark. Was that normal? She couldn’t remember when she’d gone to sleep, but then remembered she wasn’t asleep, she was in a room and it was dark. No, not a room. A pod.

  It was so hard to think. Maybe she just needed to sleep. That seemed right. If she slept, when she woke up, it would be easier to think, and then maybe she could remember what she was supposed to do. The blankets were too tight, they made it hard to move and she couldn’t get comfortable. Piper unwrapped herself. She’d sleep first, and then she’d remember.

  But even as she was lying on the crash couch, some tiny part of her brain screamed not to sleep, that there was something else she had to do first, and no matter how hard she tried to ignore it, she found she couldn’t. There was something about the door, it told her. Something she was supposed to do with the door before she went to sleep.

  It was so hard to stand. It took so much energy to stand. And the door was somewhere over there, somewhere in the darkness. Was there even a door in space? But she wasn’t in space. She was in a room, and she had to open the door before she went to sleep.

  With leaden steps and dead hands, Piper forced herself around the outer edge of the pod, feeling for whatever it was she was supposed to find. Several times she stopped, thinking she might sit down for a few minutes before she continued the search, but always that part of her mind refused. After, it told her, after.

  And then, at last, there, it told her. There. Some kind of bar or ladder, maybe. Was she supposed to climb it? She couldn’t climb, not without her hands, and her hands were somewhere else, she couldn’t find them or remember where they were.

  But that screaming part of her brain wouldn’t relent, and she fumbled with the thing in front of her. She hooked her forearms over it and under it, pulled at it, pushed at it, but nothing happened. She wasn’t even sure what was supposed to happen. And she was tired, and dizzy, and she knew if she could just sleep for a few minutes, she would be able to remember what to do.

  And as she sank down to her knees, the bar shifted one direction, and there was a loud clank in the distance.

  Piper, having accomplished whatever it was she was supposed to have accomplished, let herself slip off towards her well-deserved rest. But something snatched at her. Rough hands. And though she couldn’t understand what was happening now, her main thought was that whoever those hands belonged to wasn’t happy.

  TWENTY

  “AFFIRMATIVE, Merciful Justice,” answered Paul, the dock’s controller. “Credentials are good, you are clear to approach. Proceed to bay Oh Three Seven, and observe station protocol while in proximity. Repeat, bay Oh Three Seven is your lock.”

  Paul sat back, casually keyed in the clearance information for the approaching hauler, and checked his contact list. It’d been a busy couple of hours, but traffic seemed to be getting settled.

  “Big plans for the weekend?” asked Joaquim, the other controller on shift.

  “Oh yeah, huge,” Paul said sarcastically. “Lisa and I are supposed to go out to Deimos on Sunday. With her parents.”

  Joaquim grunted, some combination of a chuckle and his condolences.

  “One of those fly-by moon cruise things, you know. You ever done one of those?”

  “Nah,” Joaquim answered. “Only time I been off-planet is twice for work, and that was two trips too many for me.”

  “Lisa found some deal, I guess,” Paul shrugged. It seemed like a lot of hassle just to spend a couple of hours flying around a big rock you could see just fine from the ground. “I don’t know though. We might have to postpone it until the CMA settles down.”

  He tried to sound disappointed, even though in reality he was glad to have a legitimate excuse to cancel the outing.

  “I don’t think they’re putting too much trouble on outgoing,” Joaquim said. “Just a hassle for incoming.”

  “Yeah, well, we gotta come back too, don’t we?” Paul replied. He was already working on the bullet points to make the same case to Lisa later.

  “Hey, what bay did you send that last tub to?” Joaquim asked.

  “Oh Three Seven,” Paul said.

  “Pilot seems a little janky,” said Joaquim, and he pointed at the display showing Merciful Justice’s approach vector. The ship was still on course, but it was riding right up against the safety zone. Paul tapped the console, brought up correction numbers.

  “Merciful Justice,” Paul said. “Correct course to one-nine, nine-seven zulu.”

  It wasn’t that unusual for pilots coming out of orbit to take a couple of minutes to get used to atmospheric flight again.

  “How about you?” Paul asked.

  “I’m pulling a double shift Saturday,” Joaquim said. “Probably just sleep all day Sunday.”

  “Lucky.”

  “I’ll trade Saturday with you if you want.”

  Paul chuckled. “It’s Sunday I need, buddy.”

  The pilot of Merciful Justice hadn’t responded to the message yet, and the ship still hadn’t corrected course. Maybe the pilot thought he knew better than the controllers.

  “Merciful Justice, we need you to correct course. Your current line is going to take you over bay Oh One Seven. Please correct to one-nine, nine-seven zulu, and confirm.”

  Paul waited fifteen seconds for the confirmation to come in. It didn’t.

  “Say again, Merciful Justice, correct your course to one-nine, nine-seven zulu, and confirm.”

  The ship’s position and its projected path were both off the mark, and getting worse by the second.

  “Merciful Justice, do you copy? You are in violation of station protocol and at risk on approach. Correct your course as directed, and verbally confirm!”

  “Are they accelerating?” Joaquim asked.

  “Maybe they’re in trouble,” Paul said. “Call down and tell Marni we might need a crash team on standby.”

  Joaquim wheeled his chair over to another console, while Paul tried one last time to reach the crew of the ship.

  “Merciful Justice, abort approach, abort approach! You’re too hot!”

  He flipped over to the emergency channel, called down to the dock chief.

  “Tanya, clear the decks, we got a burner coming in! And get a net up!”

  Through the window overlooking the floor thirty meters below, Paul saw the lights flare to red as emerge
ncy procedures kicked in. Workers scrambled to clear the deck. He glanced at the display showing Merciful Justice’s vector, then back down at the people in the docks. Some of them weren’t going to make it. A lot of them.

  “Merciful Justice,” Paul cried into the comms, “Abort, abort, abort!” He knew it was useless. But it was the only thing he could do.

  The roar of the craft shook the control tower. And then he saw it, hurtling towards them, through the massive gateway to the docks. Paul had just enough time to think how uncanny it was to see something that big moving that fast before the impact, and the fireball, and the blastwave threw him into darkness.

  TWENTY-ONE

  “WHAT DO you mean they didn’t stop it?” Lincoln said. Mike’s face was grim; seething anger tinged with grief and disgust.

  “Docks got hit, just like we said. Might as well not have told anybody anything.”

  Lincoln felt a cold shock pour down on him, as if the worst strain of the flu had decided to hit him all at once.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Mike said. “Somebody somewhere dropped the ball. Warning didn’t get to them in time, or they didn’t get the right info on what they were looking for.”

  “We gave them everything they needed! That was a lock!”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, man. Damage is done.”

  Lincoln looked down at the display blinking in front of him, waiting for him to put the final few slides together on his report on the Flashtown hit. He’d just spent the past three hours writing up why the mission had been a success, with actionable intelligence coming as a direct result.