by Jay Posey
Lincoln nodded. “Sure did.”
Mike shook his head. “I didn’t know they could do that.”
“Sure they can,” Thumper answered. “They can do anything people can do.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t know one of them would ever do something so stupid.”
Thumper shrugged. “Like I said. Just like people.”
Lincoln spun the conversation back to the beginning, had his team members run the op from the top in brief, each outlining their role, how they’d performed, what mistakes they made, and how they could have done better. It’d been their sixth rehearsal for the day. Everyone was professional about it, but Lincoln picked up on the fatigue around the edges of the words. They were used to running weary, but there was no need to push it too far before things went live.
Once they’d all had their say, he nodded, and raised his hands to remove his helmet. The seal around the neck of his armored suit released with a short hiss. He lifted the helmet off, wiped the sweat from his brow with the palm of his gloved hand. Even though his gauntlet protected his hands from any environmental threat and most small munitions, the sensory integration was so complete he would’ve sworn that he could feel the wetness through the suit. The rubberized material didn’t do a great job of absorbing the moisture, but at least it kept the beads from running into his eyes.
“I’m thinking maybe we should wrap haptics for the day,” he said. “Kind of nice to go out on a high note.”
“Hate to go out on an easy one,” Wright said.
“Better than going out on one where we all get killed,” said Mike.
There was such a thing as over-preparing. A danger that the rehearsal would lead to routine, routine to complacency. It wasn’t a question of professionalism. Lincoln had never been part of a team that was as consistently razor-sharp and on point as the Outriders were, and he’d served on some of the most highly-trained special operations teams in the world before his transfer. But it wasn’t a training thing, it was a people thing. The mind had a way of seeing first what it expected to see, rather than what truly was. In operations like these, there wasn’t time for second looks.
And as much as they knew about the layout of the target vessel, that was really all they knew about it. The team still didn’t know exactly what they were looking for, just that whatever it was, was out there on the Ava Leyla. Some hits required something more like muscle memory; good preparation and planning enabled an aggressive take down, where most of the high-level decisions had already been made and it was just a matter of making the right calls moment-to-moment. This one was different. Once they were aboard, the op was going to require a lot of real-time assessment and adaptation, and a fair amount of creative problem-solving. He needed every one of his teammates mentally sharp.
“We’ve all got plenty of homework to get through still,” Lincoln said. “And I’ve got some command-level bonus work on my plate. We’ll hit it again tomorrow. 0600.”
Wright tipped her head to one side briefly, a quick but clear sign she disagreed with the decision. But the fact that even Sahil didn’t put up any protest told Lincoln he’d made the right call.
The navy had been kind enough to take them aboard the cruiser USS Durham for the trip out to the edge of Blue Water, and had even gone as far as to clear out a storage compartment for them to make into a planning room. The compartment had sufficient space for them all, as long as three of them didn’t mind standing up the whole time. Thumper’s rig dominated the major portion of available table area; Veronica, she called it, though Lincoln wasn’t sure if Veronica was the rig, or just the helper AI that ran it. Then again, he wasn’t sure that there was any meaningful distinction between the two.
Regardless, Veronica was the sixth member of the team. The Outriders were a hard-working crew, but Veronica was the only one among them who truly never slept. She was constantly watching, drawing in data, tracking, listening, synthesizing. Thumper was her handler. And the two of them together were closer to magic than just about anything else Lincoln had ever seen.
For the time being, it was just Lincoln and Veronica in the planning room; Veronica silently chasing down whatever tasks Thumper had set her to, and Lincoln finalizing logistics on the upcoming transition from the Durham to the skiff that would take them out into open territory. Special operations naturally required the occasional jaunt into deep space. You had to go where the bad guys were, after all, and it turned out they tended to be everywhere. Still, Lincoln didn’t love it. He was a boots-on-the-ground kind of guy at heart. The idea of operating from a skiff for more than a few days filled him with a dull dread.
Not that the Durham was built with comfort in mind. Lincoln had never been on a single military vessel that had given him the impression that it had been designed for people first. But the cruiser at least had passageways wide enough for two sailors to pass by without brushing shoulders. The skiff was going to be a decidedly tighter squeeze.
Lincoln checked the time. 0137. If he could wrap it up now, he might be able to get four hours of sleep before they picked up another training run.
The hatch to the compartment opened, and Lincoln looked up from his work to see Mike stepping through with a troubled look on his face. The expression changed to surprise when he saw Lincoln, and then melted into a friendly, if not quite believable, smile.
“Whoa, sorry boss,” he said. “Wasn’t expecting you to still be awake.”
“Me neither,” Lincoln said. “What are you doing up and about?”
“Trying to find a quiet place to sit,” Mike answered, waggling the datapad in his hand. He pointed to the other empty chair. Lincoln nodded, and Mike flopped into it.
“You know, I wouldn’t mind being stuck on a boat for so long” he said, “if it weren’t for all the sailors.”
Lincoln chuckled. “Probably better get used to it.”
“Probably.” Mike cleared a little room on the table and propped his datapad up. “Don’t worry, I’ll shut up, sir.”
He was keeping things light, but his manner seemed to be requiring more effort than usual. And it was at odds with the look he’d had on his face when he’d first entered, before he’d noticed Lincoln.
“You doing all right, Mikey?” Lincoln asked.
Mike flicked his eyes up from his pad, gave a puzzled look, like Lincoln had asked him some obscure question of trivia. “Uh, sure, yeah. Doing fine.”
This was the second time now that Lincoln’s early morning work had given him cause to observe Mike’s sleep patterns. Maybe it was just coincidence.
“Getting enough sleep lately?”
Mike nodded, and went back to looking at the datapad. “Yep.”
“Seems like every time I’m up working, you’re up wandering around looking for something to do.”
“I can’t help it, sir,” Mike answered with a shrug, his eyes still on the tablet in front of him. “Guess I just sleep faster than everybody else.” He continued to scan whatever was on his pad for a few moments. Lincoln kept watching him, and Mike eventually glanced back up at him. When he caught Lincoln’s eye, he sighed, lowered the pad.
“I’m just antsy to get on with it, sir,” he said. “Hard to deal with the hurry-up-and-go-go-go pressure from Higher, when all I can do is sit around until we get there. Training helps a little, but you know how it is… the waiting’s always the worst.”
Lincoln nodded. He didn’t quite buy that that was all there was to it, but he didn’t want to push Mike. Every warrior had demons. Sometimes the quiet hours were the only time to wrestle them back into submission.
“If you think that,” Lincoln said, “you ought to try the paperwork.”
“Negative,” Mike said, returning to his pad. “Not without the hazard pay.”
The two sat in a long silence, Mike intent on his datapad, Lincoln finalizing the details on all the forms and reports necessary for their transfer to the skiff. Lincoln was just wrapping up when another team member stumbled through the door.
Thumper stepped in and stopped dead, swiveling her head back and forth between the two of them with a puzzled expression.
“Heya Thump,” Lincoln said. “Up late?”
“Early,” she said, rubbing one eye with the palm of her hand. “Veronica called.” She kicked Mike’s foot. “And you’re in my seat.”
“Didn’t see your name on it,” Mike said, as he got to his feet.
“Then you’re losing your eyesight, old man,” Thumper replied. She pointed at the chair. Lincoln hadn’t noticed it before, but there was a small piece of white gaffer tape stuck to the backrest, with THUMPER written in block letters. Mike snorted a chuckle. He backed up to one side while Thumper squeezed past in an awkward, shuffling sort of dance. She flopped into her seat, and gestured at her rig. Indicators lit up, and if he hadn’t known better, Lincoln would have sworn the console let out a contented little hum at Thumper’s touch.
“She get a catch?” Lincoln asked.
“Something,” Thumper said, her tone of voice suggesting she didn’t want to talk just yet. Lincoln glanced up at Mike, who gave a little shrug.
“Yeah, well. Reckon I better go catch some Zs while I can,” said Mike. “What do you think, Thump, you gonna give me at least twenty minutes?”
She grunted distractedly.
“Well said,” Mike answered, a suppressed smile creasing the corners of his mouth and wrinkling his eyes. He nodded to Lincoln. “Sir.”
“‘night Mikey. Sleep well.”
The thought of a pillow made Lincoln vaguely jealous. If Thumper had showed up five minutes later, he would have already been face down on his bed dead asleep, probably with his boots still on. But he couldn’t leave her sitting alone now, even if she told him that’s exactly what she wanted.
“You ought to get some sleep too, Link,” she said, as if reading his mind. She was still intent on whatever it was Veronica was showing her.
“I’m good,” he replied. “I slept a couple days ago.”
“Might be a while.”
“I still have a few things I need to wrap up myself,” he said. Technically not a lie, since there was always something he could be doing. But as much as Lincoln wanted to crash out, he knew it wouldn’t be long before Thumper pulled something up. And the thought of getting thirty minutes of sleep seemed worse than getting none at all.
“Well,” she said. “If you’re not going to sleep…” She gave him a sly look and a little knowing smile.
Lincoln shook his head. “I’m going to have to teach one of the Barton boys the art of the coffee maker.”
Thumper went back to scanning Veronica’s reports. “But then what we would have you for, sir?”
“My looks, I guess,” he answered, getting to his feet.
By the time Lincoln returned with two cups of coffee, Thumper already had the Look on her face. It was about eighty percent intense concentration with the remainder evenly split between delight and wonder; almost like a child working a difficult math problem, having realized the solution and now just carrying out the steps to produce the answer.
“That was fast,” Lincoln said. But Thumper didn’t hear him, or at least didn’t acknowledge that she had. He set her coffee down on the table next to her. She picked it up almost as soon as he’d released it, and took a sip without taking her unblinking eyes off the terminal. Ignoring him, then. He didn’t take it personally.
Lincoln returned to his seat and spent the next little while reviewing the plan for deploying from the Durham. When he couldn’t stand to stare at that anymore, he brought up the schematics for the Marushkin Type-43 again. They’d rehearsed as many scenarios as they could think of; hostile crew, cooperative crew, and everything in between. Staring at the layout probably wasn’t going to give him anything new to consider. But it probably wasn’t going to hurt, either.
He didn’t even notice that he was dreaming the schematic until Thumper spoke.
“Got it.”
Lincoln picked his chin up off his chest, rubbed his watering left eye, and then picked up his untouched coffee and took a sip. It was still hot. He hadn’t been out that long.
“You found the ship?” he asked.
“Huh?” Thumper said. “Oh, sure, yeah, I’ve been tracking that for a couple of days. I thought I told you. But no, that’s not the interesting stuff. I’ve been watching its feed since I found it. Most of the commo traffic looks pretty normal. But there was one little blip in there a few hours ago. Took us a little while to tease it out.”
By us, she meant her AI rig and herself.
“Give me the dumb-and-sleepy-guy version,” he said.
“Uhhhh… I’m not sure there is one.”
“Try.”
“OK, well… it’s like you’re listening in on a conversation with, I don’t know… say a couple of hillbillies sitting around, talking about their hunting dogs.”
“On the porch?” he asked.
“Uh, sure. They’re on the porch and–”
“Are they playing banjos?”
“What?” Thumper asked, confused. “What? No. They’re just talking.”
“About hunting dogs.”
“Sure. Or, I don’t know. Moonshine, or whatever.”
“Thumper, have you ever actually met a hillbilly?”
“Listen. You said dumb-and-sleepy. Do you want an explanation or not?”
Lincoln smiled and took another sip of his coffee. He knew it wasn’t a particularly nice habit, but tweaking the resident genius every once in a while made up for all those times that he had to sit there listening to her make him feel stupid.
“OK, so they’re sitting there talking, about what doesn’t matter,” she continued, “and then all of a sudden in the middle of the conversation, one of them quotes a passage from the Epic of Gilgamesh in perfect Akkadian.”
Lincoln sat there for a moment, feeling stupid.
“That’s the dumb-and-sleepy-guy version?”
Thumper sighed dramatically.
“The communications stream got super dense all of a sudden,” she said. “Just for a moment. And then it went back to baseline.”
“Back to Standard Hillbilly,” Lincoln said.
“Exactly.”
“Gotcha. No chance of tracking the receiving end, I guess?”
Thumper shook her head. “That would’ve been an easy one then, huh?”
“Had to ask, just in case. So they’re definitely talking to SUNGRAZER then.”
“Ehn, not necessarily. Encryption looks like military-grade quant stuff, so that’s a point in favor, for sure. But it’s not UAF standard. And looking at the pattern…” She paused and shook her head. “It doesn’t even look like the same family of algorithm. I don’t recognize any of it.”
If the encryption wasn’t standard to anything the United American Federation used, that wasn’t a good sign. As bad as it would have been if the whole thing was an inside job, that was looking less likely if even the method of encryption was unfamiliar.
“And this is weird too,” she continued. “Even if this crypto is super compressive, this burst is real short. Almost like a fragment. Maybe thirty to forty percent of what I’d expect. Comparing it to the traffic SUNGRAZER would normally receive, anyway.”
Lincoln flashed her a look; he knew for a fact that NID hadn’t provided any samples of communications with SUNGRAZER for Thumper to compare anything to. And on their first op together, Thumper had gained access to some highly-sensitive information through less-than-approved methods and channels. She saw his reaction, held up her hand, placating.
“I didn’t do anything I wasn’t supposed to,” she said. “One of the Directorate techs gave me some metadata, just to help me zero in on what we’re looking for. Helped me build a filter. Even so, this is a little outside the usual parameters. Veronica only picked up on it because she’s smart enough to know you never take anything NID gives you literally. But even so… yeah, I don’t know. I don’t think I buy it. Looks too much like
a bounce to me.”
“Somebody rerouting through?” Lincoln asked. The revelation of new information was burning off the fatigue.
“Could be. But…” She trailed off again, turned her attention back to the terminal for a few moments. “Hmmm, yeah. See… Yeah, that makes sense.”
Sometimes Thumper’s brain made the leaps so fast, the words never actually made it out of her mouth.
“What does?”
“Sorry, yeah. Um. Say you’re trying to steal control of a protected military asset, out in deep space. You aren’t sure you can pull it off, and you don’t want to make a lot of noise about it. So instead of trying for a direct long-range connection that might stick out to people who are paying attention, you stuff the signal into low-broadcast commerce traffic, and then bounce it. Harder to find that way. And, to do it right, you piggyback it on somebody who doesn’t even know they’re carrying your relay for you. And then if you’re really serious about it, you pick somebody who’s used to avoiding attention. Pirates, or smugglers, or something.”
Lincoln had looked at the mission package so much it didn’t take much effort for him to recall the relevant details on the Ava Leyla. Thumper’s breakdown of the situation fit the profile.
“So they might have just been a convenient pass-through,” Lincoln said.
“Don’t know about convenient, really. Level of encryption we’re talking here… that’s not something you could just push through a normal comm array. They’d have to have some special hardware on board. Could be something they rigged up themselves. Particularly if they’re black market folks, looking to protect buyers or trade routes or something. But this seems like overkill for that sort of business. Expensive. So, yeah, if we’re looking at foreign intelligence or something like that, it’s not too much of a stretch to think they could plant something on a not-so-innocent bystander. It’s definitely possible the crew of the Ava Leyla doesn’t even know they’re part of it.”
Lincoln was out of his depth when it came to the technical side of things, especially where Thumper was involved. But every once in a while pieces fell together in his brain in a way that surprised him. He didn’t feel like he could genuinely take credit for having thought of it necessarily, unless it turned out to be a stupid idea.