Sungrazer

by Jay Posey

  They were silent for a few moments, and then Stewart propped himself up on an elbow, apparently not quite ready to commit to getting up off the floor after their harrowing escape.

  “They knew I was coming,” he said. “And they knew what I was here to do. I don’t know how, but they did. It all happened way too fast. And when I splashed down, I knew I would never get home. I didn’t think anyone knew where I was. I didn’t think anyone could know. How did you find me?”

  “It’s our job, sir,” Lincoln said. “That’s what we do.”

  “And uh… you mind telling me who you are?”

  Lincoln just smiled at the man.

  “Are you with… that unit?”

  Lincoln chuckled, knowing exactly which unit Stewart meant. The Legend. Lincoln had, in fact, made it all the way through Selection for that very unit, only to get plucked out of it at the last possible moment to serve as team lead for the Outriders instead.

  “No sir,” he said. “We’re in Information Support.”

  Stewart coughed a laugh, thinking Lincoln was joking. Then he just looked confused. “Wait, seriously?”

  Lincoln nodded.

  “You’re kidding me,” Stewart said, sitting up. “You guys are an intel outfit?”

  “Well,” Lincoln said, smiling again. “Applied intelligence.”

  Stewart’s confused expression didn’t change with the answer. Officially, Lincoln’s team was the 519th Applied Intelligence Group, part of the 301st Information Support Brigade. Unofficially, they were the Outriders. Generally speaking, no one had heard of them officially or unofficially. After a moment Stewart seemed to finally realize that was all he was going to get out of Lincoln, and he laid back down and draped his forearm over his eyes.

  “Guess I don’t rate quite as high as I thought,” he said, deadpan. Sahil chuckled at that.

  “You do all right, sir,” Sahil said. And then added, “For an aviator.”

  Stewart cracked a smile through his weariness, and Lincoln knew then the man they’d rescued was good to go. Lincoln glanced around, saw his teammates settling in for the ride home. Sahil had his head tipped back, eyes closed. Master Sergeant Wright was already checking something on a datapad; probably taking notes on all the things that the team could have done better on the op.

  Lincoln kissed his fingertips and pressed them to the flag on the ceiling, let them linger there a moment. He’d been all over the world and out beyond it. Somehow, no matter how much he thought he cherished his country, every time he was headed back home those stars and stripes seemed to mean even more than they had before he’d left.

  As he relaxed back into his seat as much as the tight quarters would allow, he caught Wright looking at him. If he hadn’t known her so well, he would have thought her expression was flat. But there was a tug at the left corner of her mouth; the barest trace of a smile, and one that hinted at something like approval. Without a word, she let her eyes drop back to the datapad. Lincoln allowed himself a moment to savor the double victory. Not only had they gotten the VIP out safely, he’d actually gained the master sergeant’s unspoken praise for something. As chaotic as things had been on the extraction, winning Wright’s undoubtedly temporary approval was probably the harder of the two. Lincoln smiled to himself, leaned his head back against the side of the aircraft, and let the post-op wave of exhaustion finally roll through him.

  THREE

  For almost ten years, she’d followed her designated path, synchronized to the orbit of Mars from ten million kilometers distant. Or, 9 years, 132 days, 15 hours, 37 minutes, 16 seconds, at an average range of 9,985,307 kilometers, with a maximum deviation of 293.77 meters, to be exact.

  And she was always exact. Precision was her design, and her purpose. All that time, she’d waited, as she’d been directed. Silent and invisible, ever-listening, ever-watching. Waiting. And that, too, was her purpose.

  Until now.

  A signal arrived. A burst of data as compact and dense as DNA, instructions no human could decipher beyond the most basic directives.

  REDCON GAMMA; ready/alert, mobilize, MINSIG approach to holdoff orbit. Target designation forthcoming.

  And with the message, SUNGRAZER woke.

  Dormant systems winked to life, a fluid cascade of technological petals unfurling, each as crisply responsive as on her first day of operation. These were new orders from a new source; a different encryption scheme, though with all the proper and familiar algorithms. A new position, an elevated ready condition. Her approach to holdoff orbit would be restrained, minimizing her signature, reducing her risk of detection to a statistically-insignificant fraction. From holdoff, she would be mere hours from strike distance; from strike distance, mere minutes from establishing a target vector and firing solution.

  For the first time in nearly a decade, SUNGRAZER redirected and set a new course.

  FOUR

  Lincoln stared at his own corpse. Himself, dead.

  Though, technically he wasn’t sure if the body lying in front of him could be dead since according to Medical it had never been alive in the first place. It was only his replica.

  Only. As if such a thing could be “only”.

  He scanned the row of three containers. Inside each, his face. His own face, on a different body. A body identical in every way to the one he’d been in for his entire life. Three replicas. Three backup bodies, ready to receive his consciousness if he should ever be killed in the line of duty. And, strangely enough, they were all property of the United States Government. What that meant for him if he ever had to inhabit one, he didn’t know exactly.

  When Lincoln had first joined the Outriders, they’d explained everything in painstaking detail. There were documents to sign, pamphlets to read, a consultation with a medical professional. But he’d been too tired to read the documents before he signed, and never read the pamphlets the army handed out anyway. And it wasn’t exactly the sort of thing your brain would absorb from literature, no matter how much of it you read.

  His teammates had all told him not to visit, that it was too eerie, too psychologically disturbing. Of course, most of them had done it themselves, which is how they knew. They were right. Lincoln didn’t even know a word to describe it. He was no stranger to death. He’d seen it from all sides, delivered it to others, had it visited upon his friends. He’d seen the human body disassembled and rearranged in the most horrific fashion. And yet here, lying in front of him as if asleep, in perfect health, was the most disturbing thing he’d ever seen.

  Lincoln couldn’t get his thoughts around it. But he couldn’t make himself leave, either. He’d told the technician who had let him in that he’d only need five minutes. That’d been almost an hour ago. He’d pulled up a chair and was now sitting next to the one closest to the door. Number One.

  In his hands, he held a magazine from his weapon, still topped off with ammunition. The one that had fallen out of its pouch. The one that had spared his life. He balanced it on his fingertips, rolled it over, felt the texture with his thumbs. The sensation kept him present in the moment against the tide of memories that threatened to draw him back into his own mind, into darker places than he had the strength to revisit now. Though he didn’t feel fully awake, either. He was in some strange, dissociative state, an in between place.

  Someone cleared a throat behind him. Lincoln glanced back over his shoulder to find his teammate Mike standing in the door. He hadn’t heard it open.

  “Hey boss,” Mike said, his words tiptoeing into the room.

  “Hey Mikey,” Lincoln answered. He felt like he should say more, but his mind couldn’t conjure any words.

  “Mind if I come in?”

  Lincoln shook his head. Mike hovered at the door.

  “Was that ‘no’ you don’t mind?” he said, “Or ‘no’, I can’t come in?”

  “Don’t mind,” Lincoln said. Mike slipped in, floated ghost-like into the room, to the foot of one of the replica containers. He was a big guy, six four, mayb
e 105 kilos, long-limbed and rangy. But he moved like a dancer, like he could stop at any point mid-motion and hold that position forever. Lincoln didn’t know if that was because he was the team’s sniper, or if that was why he was the team’s sniper.

  The two were silent for a time, Mike just standing there at the end of the container, and Lincoln fiddling with the magazine. It eventually became clear that Mike wasn’t going to be the first one to speak. And after a few moments of the big man’s steady presence, Lincoln found the darkness receding from his mind.

  “I thought you hated it down here,” Lincoln finally said.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say I hate it, sir,” Mike replied. “On account of having never actually done it before. More scared of it, I guess.” He chuckled to himself. “Well, I guess I have been down here before. Just wasn’t aware of it at the time.”

  Everything about Mike said he was exactly the same as when Lincoln had first met him. Even knowing the truth, it didn’t have any effect on Lincoln’s perception of the man. Mike had been killed in action during an operation on board a ship, an op under Lincoln’s command. Right in front of Lincoln, in fact. Lincoln had watched him die. So this Mike, the one standing in front of him, was a replica. Or, Mike was in a replica. Lincoln still wasn’t sure what the right way to think about it was. Maybe there was no right way. But for all the expansive philosophical playground offered, for all the mindbending questions raised, none of it seemed to reach quite as far as reality. Mike was just Mike, same as he ever was.

  “So, what’re you doing down here?” Mike asked after a moment.

  “I don’t know,” Lincoln said. “Thinking. Or trying not to.”

  Mike nodded.

  Lincoln held up the magazine in his hand.

  “This little guy saved my life,” Lincoln said.

  “That was thoughtful. Take a bullet for you?”

  Lincoln shook his head. “Fell out. If I hadn’t bent down to pick it up, that queller would’ve taken my head off.”

  Mike nodded. One thing Lincoln loved about the brotherhood amongst operators was that you never really had to say much. Sharing was efficient, and easy. The people who knew, knew.

  They were quiet for another moment, and then Mike started one of his stories.

  “One time, when I was back home on leave, my dad took me out for breakfast one morning. And we took his old truck. I mean old, like he was driving it himself, old. This was right after I’d gotten back from Balikpapan so… you know…” Mike gave a little half shrug, which encompassed all of the horror and carnage of a short, brutal brushfire war, now a decade-old and nearly forgotten by everyone but the men and women who’d shed blood there. “Anyway, we’re driving this long stretch of highway, and my dad’s telling me about how after thirty-five years of marriage Mom still can’t get his coffee right. He’s not really saying anything, you know, just filling the air because I think he was afraid of what might come up if he let me do any talking. And normally I wouldn’t care, I’d just let him talk, but it was such a stupid thing to be griping about. Just droning on and on and on. Like, after thirty-five years of marriage, he still hasn’t figured out how to make his own coffee, right?”

  Lincoln dropped his gaze back to the magazine in his hands, flipped it over. He had to suppress a smile, listening to Mike’s description of his dad going on and on about nothing. When Mike told a story, he usually had a point. Usually.

  “I’d only been back in the States a few days,” Mike continued, “and I was still pretty on edge. I shouldn’t have done it, but I got fed up and turned and told him if weak coffee was the biggest trouble of his days, he was living an awfully soft life and he ought to be grateful. And he shot me this look, like, I don’t know… like, I’d just slapped him and then told him I was a communist. I can still see it. I mean, my dad’s a rancher up in Montana, so you know… I don’t think anyone had ever accused him of being soft, exactly.” Mike shook his head. “Anyway, we just stared at each other for a few seconds, and then BLAM. We hit a moose.

  “And it was a big one. Tore us up pretty good. Dad was in the hospital for a couple of weeks… Still don’t know what it was doing out there. We figured it must’ve been sick or something, to be wandering across a highway like that.”

  Lincoln waited a bit to see if a reason for the story was forthcoming, but when he finally looked back at Mike, he saw Mike staring down at Lincoln’s replica in front of him, without really seeing it. Mike was Back There somewhere, remembering.

  “But your dad was all right?” Lincoln said, gently prompting his friend.

  “Well,” Mike said. “After that, Mom didn’t let him drive anymore.” He gave Lincoln his quick smile and then shook his head slightly, as if to clear it. “Anyway, yeah, all that to say, that right there,” he pointed at the magazine Lincoln was holding, “truth is, that can happen anywhere, brother. We like to pretend we’re in control. It’s easy to believe it when we’re in the routine, back home, where we expect things to just happen the way they’ve always happened. That’s not how it really is. Combat’s crazy, sure, but it’s not any more random than anywhere else in life. Little things change our fate every minute of every day, most of it we never even notice.

  “If I hadn’t said anything to my dad, chances are we would have cruised right on around that moose no problem. But then again if we hadn’t hit it, maybe somebody else would have, maybe a mom with a car full of kids.” He shrugged. “You try to pick apart every little moment and every decision you make, it’ll drive you nuts and still won’t make a difference. Just got to live the best you can, and be ready to go when you go.”

  The two men looked at each other for a long moment, and then Lincoln nodded.

  “Mikey,” he said.

  “Sir?”

  “We’ve got to work on your motivational speeches.”

  Mike smiled. “Yeah well, sir, if I got any better at it someone important might notice and make me an officer.”

  “God help us all.”

  “You gonna quit moping around now, or what?”

  Lincoln chuckled and looked down at the magazine in his hand, tapped it on his palm. Then he tossed it over to Mike and stood up.

  “Wright send you down here after me?” Lincoln asked.

  “Nah,” Mike answered. “I doubt she even noticed you were gone.”

  Lincoln put the chair back where he’d found it, turned and opened the door, then held out a hand in an after-you gesture. Mike remained where he was, his face unusually sober and earnest.

  “It’s not so bad, you know,” he said. “The Process… It doesn’t make so much difference as you can notice. Seems like it should be a bigger deal, I know. But it’s not. It’s actually harder to go through when it happens to your friends.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” Lincoln said.

  “I hope that’s all you ever have to do, sir.”

  They shared a look for a brief span, until Lincoln gave a nod.

  “And I don’t know what you think I’m going to do with this,” Mike said, tossing Lincoln’s magazine back to him. “You gotta police your own gear around here, buddy.”

  Lincoln nearly fumbled the catch, but managed to catch it at the cost of letting the door close again.

  “Smooth,” Mike said.

  “I’ve always been good with my hands,” Lincoln answered, reopening the door. He held it for Mike once more, and as Mike passed by, Lincoln kicked one of Mike’s heels and sent him stumbling into the hall. “At least, as good as you on your feet.”

  In the corridor, a medical technician gave them a scornful look, like they were schoolboys running loose in a sanctuary. Lincoln gave his customary nod of acknowledgment. Mike offered a salute so perfectly executed, the condescension was impossible to miss. And as the two men walked back to the team’s facility, the final shadows slipped from Lincoln’s mind and found their place amongst their kindred memories.

  FIVE

  Lincoln blew the steam from the top of his third cup o
f coffee, as he reviewed the briefing he’d put together in the early morning hours. Corrected a typo, took a sip. The coffee was pretty good. He wasn’t sure he could say the same about his brief.

  The call had come in just before 0200, a certain sign that somebody way up the chain of command was in a mood. Before Lincoln had gotten the details, he’d assumed it was going to be a standard hurry-up-and-wait op. Now that he’d pulled the basic info together, though, he wasn’t sure his team would have enough time to fully prep before they had to bounce off.

  “Sorry to be sending you back out so soon,” Colonel Almeida said, though the smile on his face said otherwise. He’d materialized in the doorway at some point, though Lincoln didn’t know when. For an old guy, the Colonel still moved like a cat. He was the officer in charge of the 519th Applied Intelligence Group and Lincoln’s direct commander, which meant he spent most of his days in an office. But there wasn’t any doubt he’d rather be out there in the field, or about how effective he could still be.

  “You’re doing me a favor,” Lincoln answered. “We go more than forty-eight hours without something to do, and Wright starts getting on at me about letting our skills deteriorate.”

  “She’s not wrong, you know,” Almeida said, deadpan.

  Lincoln chuckled. “I don’t suppose you two are related, by any chance?”

  “Same mother,” Almeida answered. He waited for Lincoln’s reaction, and then added, “War.”

  “Yeah, OK, tough guy,” Lincoln said. The Colonel grinned again, though only one side of his face really showed it. Many years prior, Almeida had lost an arm, a leg, and a fair amount of his face when his vehicle had taken a direct hit from an explosive charge in an ambush. Medical could have patched him right up, if he’d let them, but the Colonel had chosen to keep the scars, and took no measures to disguise his prosthetics. After he’d brought Lincoln on board, Almeida had hinted at his reasons; warfare had gotten too clean in his opinion, too easy to hide the mess. Now that he was out of the field and dealing with the rear-echelon types on a daily basis, he liked to make sure they had a regular reminder of the human cost to waging war.