Sungrazer

by Jay Posey

  Of course, that might not have helped either. As soon as they’d entered the vessel, they’d both switched on the reactive camouflage of their recon suits. Combining input from its sensor suite and threat matrix, the suit evaluated the environment and adapted its surface to blend in from multiple viewpoints. Even though Wright had never understood the math behind it, she was intimately familiar with the end result. The algorithms weren’t good enough to make anyone invisible yet, but in the right situations they could be almost that good. And even in the wrong situations, it was usually enough to buy Wright those extra few seconds she needed to come out on top.

  Thus far, the compartments and passageways had all been clear from their entry point. They’d already checked the deck where they’d entered and two cargo holds, and were working their way down. But they’d been taking it slow. With so many unknowns on board, any contact was likely to lead to a mission abort. The delay on entry and the extra cautious pace once inside had already kept them on the target almost an hour. The whole op was supposed to have taken them less than two, and they hadn’t even really gotten started yet.

  “Anvil,” said Lincoln, over team comms. “Check in when you can.”

  Wright held up a hand, signaling for Mike to hold position. In situations like these, she didn’t like trying to talk while moving. She dropped down to a knee and kept her weapon up.

  “Hammer, Anvil. We’re wrapping up deck four, preparing to move to deck five. No sign of our extra personnel yet.”

  “Copy, Anvil. We’re at our access point in the service tunnel. Thumper’s doing her work.”

  “Roger.”

  “After you hit five, go ahead and move to delta. Hold there until you hear from me. Unless deck five gives you something.”

  “Understood.” Delta was her element’s position below the bridge. “Continuing to five.”

  “Anvil to five, copy.”

  Five was the lowest deck, and typically was the largest cargo hold on a Type-43. For the other decks, holds were placed along the exterior of the ship, arranged around a central passageway. Deck five had a large centrally-located bay that spanned the width of the vessel, since it could be loaded from either side or through the bottom of the ship. It was also where, according to Thumper’s earlier scans, most of the personnel was.

  Once the brief conversation was concluded, Wright eased back up to her feet and continued down the passageway. There was an eerie stillness to the vessel, made all the more unnerving by the amount of clutter and garbage scattered in pockets along the way. Clearly, there were a number of people aboard, and whoever they were they didn’t appear to be too concerned about keeping their ship tidy. The fact that they hadn’t heard or seen anyone yet was good for the op, but it made it all feel wrong; like walking through a house abandoned ahead of a sudden disaster that had struck without sign or warning.

  Wright led Mike a few more paces down the corridor, to a narrow compartment on their left. She passed by, but motioned for Mike to check the room while she stood guard.

  “On it,” Mike said in a whisper. Then, a few moments later, “Clear.”

  A door at the end of the passageway was marked as leading down to the lower deck. Once Mike had rejoined her, Wright pressed on to the door and then held there. Mike slid up to one side, looked to her for the signal. On her nod, he opened the door. Wright slipped through, quickly checked the upper landing for hostiles.

  Still no one.

  The landing was metal grating; looking down through it, Wright could see the tight skeletal staircase that doubled back on itself multiple times before reaching the lower deck far below. Wright hated clearing stairwells. No matter how many times she had done it, she still got a twinge of anxiety before stepping out onto that first step. And she had done it a lot. Too many angles, too easy to get cut off on both sides, trapped.

  According to the schematics, Five was twice the height of the other decks, to accommodate the larger freight. Staring down at all those steps, with all their corners and angles, made it seem twice again as far.

  “Hammer, Anvil’s on the stairs down to deck five,” she reported, more to help anchor herself than for any reasons of protocol.

  “Roger,” Lincoln answered.

  “Moving down,” she said, and started the descent. She kept her weapon up and out over the thin railing the whole way down, aimed at whatever next twisting angle posed the greatest risk of threat. Mike sidestepped his way along behind her, performing the same constantly-shifting dance to cover the landing above.

  It only took a minute or two to reach the lower deck, but it felt to Wright like twenty. Once there, they repeated their door-opening routine, with Wright leading the way. The door opened to a short passageway with two compartments on each side, and an intersecting passageway that cut through the middle of them. Wright moved forward to the corner of the intersection, while Mike checked the first two compartments.

  “Clear left,” he said. And then several seconds later, “Clear right.”

  Before he could rejoin her, though, a sharp, ringing clatter came from down the right-hand side of the intersecting passageway.

  “Hey, careful, those aren’t free!” a woman said loudly, in Mandarin. After so long without any contact, the sound of another human voice was almost startling to Wright.

  “Well maybe you should carry them all, then,” came an answer in English, tinged with a Martian dialect. A man, further away than the woman, but not by much.

  “I’m not cleaning that up!”

  “You never do!”

  Wright glanced over her shoulder, saw Mike standing halfway out of one of the compartments, covering the door back to the stairwell. After some shuffling sounds and muttered words she couldn’t make out came an unmistakable noise. Footsteps. Moving their way, and quickly.

  Two people, at least one of them carrying something metallic and possibly heavy. The question now was, where were they headed? To the upper decks? Across the hall? To one of the compartments Wright had just passed?

  She’d know the answer soon enough.

  Wright hissed sharply, to get Mike’s attention. When he looked, she motioned for him to move back into the compartment. He didn’t acknowledge her in any way, except to glide backwards and disappear from her view.

  She backpedaled slowly, then slid into the compartment. Once inside, she quickly glanced around. The compartment was narrow, deeper than it was wide, and had large pipes running from floor to ceiling. There wasn’t much room for the two of them. It was sufficient for the moment, but there was absolutely nowhere to hide. If that door opened, the only option they were going to have was to shoot first and hope no one else came along before they could move the bodies. At least it was mostly dark, lit only by a single low-intensity red light in the ceiling.

  The footsteps grew sharper, more distinct, and then fell silent as Wright pushed the door closed and it sealed. She felt as though she’d gone deaf and blind.

  There was a device on her belt designed exactly for this situation; when attached to a surface and paired with the sensor suite of her reconnaissance armor, it enabled her to see through walls. It would take her only a few seconds to set up, but she would need both hands to do it. And she would have to stand within arm’s length of the door. If the two individuals came through, she’d be caught between the wall and the door, wouldn’t be able to fire, wouldn’t be able to guarantee she could even get clear for Mike to take the shot. Wright made a split-second call, decided it wasn’t worth the risk. Better to be blind and hope. At least that way, they could keep two guns up.

  Mike had already moved as far towards the rear of the compartment as he could, standing his back against one of the pipes. Wright tucked in front of him, in a crouch at his feet, so he could shoot over her if it came to that. Both weapons trained on the door.

  “Hammer, Anvil’s got two unknowns moving through,” Wright reported. “Might be headed up.”

  “You at risk?”

  “Not if they don�
��t open this door.”

  “Take ‘em if you have to. But only if you have to.”

  “Understood.”

  Wright kept her eyes locked on the door handle, intent on catching the first sign of movement, a hawk waiting for the field mouse to twitch. Counted out the heavy seconds. Three. Five. Ten.

  After thirty, it seemed likely that the two crew members had passed by on their way to some other part of the vessel. That was a short-term blessing that could easily turn into a mid-term curse. On ops when the environment allowed for it, Thumper would stay behind at a command point and run surveillance to help the rest of the team mark and track hostiles. Wright was old-school and generally thought that too many people relied too heavily on the tech. To her, it was a crutch, and if you didn’t have the skills to do without it, you’d be in big trouble when it failed on you. Which it would.

  Even so, it was cases like these that made her admit sometimes it was really nice to have the help.

  She gave it another sixty seconds before she spoke.

  “I’ll check it, Mike,” she said. “Be ready.”

  “Yep,” he answered.

  Wright lowered her weapon and crept forward in her crouch, drew a device from her belt, placed it against the door. It attached and held itself in place while she activated it. After a moment, an electric-blue border radiated outward from the device, spreading like a ring of lightning rippling in slow motion across water’s surface. Wherever it spread, the door became translucent. Nothing in the physical world had changed, but through her visor the door appeared to have been rendered to mist.

  From her vantage point, the passageway looked clear in all directions. Unfortunately, the device didn’t let her see around corners. Wright deactivated the device and returned it to her belt.

  “Clear,” she said to Mike. “Ready to open.”

  “Open,” he answered.

  “Opening.”

  Wright reached up for the handle. Slowly applied pressure, gently, gently, until it started to move. She had to force herself consciously to keep the pressure steady, while the undisciplined lizard-brain part of her told her to do it all fast, fast, fast. When the handle reached its lowest point, she eased the door open, pulling it towards herself. She did the best she could, but there just wasn’t enough room to maneuver to put herself in any sort of tactically advantageous position. If anyone had come into the passageway in that brief span, Wright was going to have to count on the few seconds of surprise and confusion to get the work done.

  She opened the door until light from the corridor seeped in around the edges; she held it there, and leaned her head closer, straining to hear anything that might indicate where the two had gone. Even with the sensors on her suit dialed up, she couldn’t make out anything useful.

  Wright glanced back over her shoulder and said to Mike, “Coming up.” He raised the muzzle of his weapon towards the overhead in response. She stood, took a half step back from the door, and then opened it wide enough to get a clear view. The passageway remained empty and silent.

  “Hammer, Anvil’s clear,” she reported. “We’re continuing on towards the cargo holds now.”

  “Roger. Any sign of your people?”

  “Negative. Might have gone up, might still be roaming around down here with us.”

  “Copy that. Keep your head on a swivel.”

  “Yeah.”

  Wright stepped out into the passageway and held there for a few seconds listening before she motioned to Mike to follow her. They resumed their slow crawl of the ship. At the intersection, she turned right. The fact that people had come from there seemed to be as good an indication as any that maybe there was something that direction worth seeing.

  The passageway led to another door, this one marked as access to one of the vessel’s side cargo holds. On the floor just outside there was some sort of grey-white residue spattered along the deck and up one bulkhead. She crouched down to take a look, touched it with her middle finger and then rubbed the substance between fingertip and thumb. It was vaguely slimy, but with a gritty texture, like rice or oatmeal cooked too long in too much water.

  Some kind of cleaning solution, or fluid from a machine, maybe. Then again, judging from the general disarray of the other parts of the ship, she could probably rule out cleaning solution.

  She got back to her feet and moved up to the entrance of the cargo hold.

  “Ready Mike?”

  “Ready.”

  She opened the door, and pushed quickly through.

  From the instant she stepped in, Wright knew something was off. Her instincts detected it first, before she had any obvious indication of what it was. It wasn’t anything she could see. But it felt wrong. The main lights were off; the hold was lit only by low-power reds at wide intervals, casting the hold in ember-glow hues and pools of smoldering darkness. Wright’s visor automatically adjusted to compensate.

  On first glance, it looked like she had expected, given the state of the rest of the ship. Various containers were stacked in haphazard groups, separated by irregular aisles. It almost looked like the loaders had just dumped all the freight into the hold, and then pushed everything into piles at random. The arrangement was neither an efficient use of space, nor particularly convenient to navigate through. Typically haulers would try to maximize one or the other, and which one they prioritized could generally tell you something about the skipper’s personality. Tidy rows usually meant ease of access to cargo verification; a sign of order and concern for inventory. Cargo holds full to the brim indicated a prime interest in maximizing profits per haul. Based on the layout of this hold, the impression Wright got was that the Ava Leyla’s captain didn’t especially care about either.

  She held position for a few moments while Mike closed the door behind them, and they remained there in silence for several seconds afterward, listening. Here, too, it was still and quiet. The hold’s temperature was warmer than she would have normally anticipated. Not warm, certainly. It would have been too cool to be comfortable had she not been in the suit. But many cargo vessels kept their holds barely above freezing, unless they were shipping temperature-sensitive freight.

  “Mike, cover,” Wright said. “I want to double-check something, internal.”

  “Copy.”

  They moved a few paces deeper into the hold into an alcove formed by one stack of shipping containers, where they had some concealment. There, Wright activated her internal display while Mike kept watch. She pulled up the schematic of the ship, overlaid with the signatures Thumper had detected with Poke before the team had made entry. The imagery hadn’t been updated since the initial scan, but looking at the large, bright cloud on the lower deck of the ship, it seemed certain that Wright and Mike should have run into more people by now. And if she was reading it correctly, they ought to be standing pretty close to being right in the middle of that cloud.

  She switched the display off, and took another look at the surroundings. In doing so, her conscious mind finally caught up with her instincts. The reason the hold felt wrong was because it was too small. All the time she’d spent in the haptic sim had given Wright a good sense of the general structure of the vessel. Even with all the different layouts available, certain elements should have remained fixed.

  The bulkhead was too low. Or, maybe, the deck was too high. Either way, the cargo hold had been modified, there was no doubt about that.

  “Hammer, Anvil,” she said.

  “Whatcha got?” Lincoln answered over comms.

  “You guys using Poke right now?”

  “Yeah, Thumper’s got it assisting her. You need it?”

  “Possibly. Got a hunch, but I’m not sure how to confirm it just yet.”

  “Roger that, stand by.”

  Wright waited, and a few seconds later Thumper clicked in over the team channel.

  “Heya Mir,” she said. “I can work without Poke for a little bit, but I can’t run him for you right now. You want me to hand off?”

 
; “Yeah, if you can.”

  “No sweat. Passing control to you now,” said Thumper. And then added, “Don’t let it hurt itself.”

  Wright’s suit chimed as it acquired Poke’s control system. Poke was still in between the inner and outer hull of the ship, somewhere near Deck Two. She took over and started the work of navigating the team’s foldable to their current position.

  Lincoln resisted the urge to look back over his shoulder to check on Thumper. He was standing guard off her right shoulder, keeping an eye on the long service tunnel that stretched off and curved with the shape of the ship. She was crouched behind him with one of her tech kits out, working to get hooked in to the Ava Leyla’s system network. From what Lincoln could tell, it was part information technology, part neurosurgery. She’d been at it for almost half an hour.

  “Where are we at, Thump?” he asked.

  “Trying to make sure I don’t give anybody any reason to come up here and see why their comms are making funny noises, captain,” she answered. Thumper didn’t usually call him by his rank, unless she was annoyed with him.

  Lincoln knew better than to hassle her. Thumper never wasted time on an op. But standing in that narrow tunnel was starting to wear on his nerves. Everything was too close; floor, walls, ceiling, all of it felt compressed, almost as if the space had been intended for children. It gave him the same gradually expanding annoyance as having someone’s hand hovering an inch from his face, doing the whole I’m-not-touching-you thing. Which, by this time, had become almost irritating enough to make him want to go full-on assault mode, just to take it out on someone. Almost.