by Jay Posey
It’d been roughly sixty hours since they’d returned to the skiff, following the recovery of the module. Normally after a successful operation, the team had additional intelligence to comb through, further plans to make. But all they’d come home with this time was a black box of a device. And since Thumper was the only one who could do anything with it, the rest of them were left at loose ends. Lincoln wasn’t much of a techie, but for the first time he could remember he found himself envying her the role. It must have been comforting, in a way, to have something to focus her mind on. A problem to solve, a puzzle to untangle. Lincoln felt like he couldn’t get his brain to stick to any task for long.
The Ava Leyla op still clung to him. He’d put together a package and sent it on to the proper authorities, in the hopes that the next time the freighter pulled into port, they’d find a team of agents waiting for them. But there was no way to know for sure how that situation would resolve. After the team’s return, they’d debriefed, eaten, showered, slept. But none of them had bounced back yet, not fully. There was something subdued about his team; their conversations were fewer and shorter. Sahil had spent even more time than usual in the gym. He seemed to be taking it the hardest. To their credit, no one had come after Lincoln over his decision to leave the children behind. No one argued. But they all had to deal with it in their own way.
Even Colonel Almeida had left the situation largely unremarked upon, when Lincoln had updated him and filed his official report. In some ways, that almost made things worse. Being forced to defend his decision, or to justify it, or even to have a blowout argument with one of his subordinates would have given him an opportunity to process it, and to release some of the emotional energy that had built up, and seemed to be continuing to build. The one saving grace was that he still hadn’t thought of any other way to have handled the situation. It wasn’t much comfort.
They were still two days out from reconnecting with the USS Durham. He hoped they hadn’t just hit a dead end.
Lincoln dealt out another round of hands. Wright and Mike picked up their cards, reorganized them. Wright glanced at hers for maybe two seconds before she tossed in her ante.
“One time,” Mike said, out of the blue. “Back when I was still with Fifth, I was on overwatch for the Marines. This was outside of Osh, back before the unification and all that. We were supposed to just be providing support for the locals, doing stability and security work. You know, guarding bridges and marketplaces, that sort of thing. Peacekeeping. Anyway.” He threw in his ante. “I was keeping an eye out for a checkpoint on one of the main bridges. And things had been tense for a couple of days. Bad guys testing perimeters, skirmishing with the local security forces. So we’d had to close things up, put a curfew in place, restrict access to certain areas. And we all just had that feeling, you know. Today’s the day, kind of deal.
“Well, I see this car pulling onto the road, pretty casual. So I give the Marines a heads-up, and they make the stop. Turns out it’s two ladies, one about my age and I guess maybe her grandma. Old woman doesn’t talk at all. Trying to take a bunch of stuff to market, the younger one says. I’m watching all this go down through optics, right? And trying real hard not to think about the fact that maybe I’m going to have to smoke one of them. Because who knows what’s really in the car? Maybe it’s full of grenades. Or maybe they’re a distraction, while the bad guys come around the flank. So everyone’s on point now.
“Well they can’t use our bridge. Nobody’s going that way today. But there’s a little one-lane job about a hundred meters north. More like a footbridge, it wasn’t really meant for cars. But the woman asks if she can use that instead, and our officer says that’s fine. It’s obviously not really fine, but it makes it someone else’s problem, I guess. You know how it is, he’s got his boys out there, nobody knowing if this is a distraction or a car bomb or really just a couple of down-on-their-luck ladies trying to get some junk to a market. He doesn’t care where they go, as long as they don’t go down his bridge.
“Short version. You can guess. Car goes off the bridge. Plunk. Right into the water. Most of these folks? They aren’t swimmers. Locals start coming out, pointing at the car, yelling. A couple of them try to wade out into the river, but the current’s too strong. Pretty sure I saw at least one of them get pulled under, but maybe he made it back out, I still don’t know. Anyway, some of them start waving at us, trying to get our attention, calling for us to come help out. We’ve got twenty-something Marines and soldiers on that bridge. Any one of us could have jumped down there and tried to do something. Pulled the ladies out at least. But you know how it is. We never do anything on our own. If we send one, we have to send five, and as soon as we do that, as soon as one of us leaves our post, that’s when the bad guys are going to come. And it’s our boys gonna get killed then. And maybe a whole lot more than just us, if they get across that bridge.”
He paused, rubbed the underside of his chin with the back of his fingers. Switched the positions of two cards in his hand.
“So we held position,” he said. He sniffed loudly, and then reached over and took a chip from Lincoln’s stack, threw it in the pot as Lincoln’s ante. “Whatever the cards are, you gotta play.”
Lincoln hadn’t even looked at his hand yet, and he wasn’t exactly sure if Mike was talking about poker just then, or was actually making a philosophical statement. Both, maybe. Lincoln picked up his cards. Not even a pair.
“This one’s worse than most,” Lincoln said. And after the words came out, he realized he wasn’t sure if he was talking about poker either.
“Pretty much no matter what you do, someone’s always getting the short end.”
Wright tossed her cards down on the table.
“I fold,” she said. She’d already put money down, and play hadn’t even started yet.
“You want your ante back?” Mike asked.
She shook her head and got to her feet, her eyes lowered. “You need it more than I do.” She picked up her jacket, checked around for anything else that might belong to her, even though it was a team room and they all left their stuff lying around there all the time.
“You out?” Lincoln asked, even though it was obvious she was.
“Gonna hit the gym,” she answered, still without looking at him.
“Hey,” he said. Wright stopped then, held a moment, then finally glanced up and made eye contact. They each held the other’s gaze, unblinking for a span. There were no tears in her eyes, no obvious signs of emotion at risk of spilling over. Unless you knew what to look for. And Lincoln did. He saw it there too, reflected in her eyes. The struggle he felt. The frustration. The sadness. She had her own story, like Mike. Many stories, probably. They all did.
All the recruitment posters would have you believe serving in the military could make you a hero. No one mentioned you wouldn’t be a hero for everyone. Sometimes not even those who seemed to need it most.
But the master sergeant’s hard fire was still apparent. She wasn’t going to fall apart or have a break down. She probably just needed to go sling some weight around to keep herself from chewing through the hull.
“Try not to tear a hole in the ship, huh?” he said.
The left corner of her mouth pulled back in a twitch of a smile; a mild acknowledgment, with a trace of relief that Lincoln hadn’t made a big deal out of it. She gave him a nod, and started towards the door. It opened as she reached for it, and she had to stop to keep from bumping into Thumper, who had suddenly appeared, leaning into the compartment. Her obvious excitement helped clear away the gloom.
“I think somebody owes me a hundred bucks,” Thumper said.
“You cracked it?” Wright asked.
“Looks like,” Thumper replied. “Come see.”
Lincoln and Mike tossed their cards onto the foot locker, and they all followed her over to the compartment they’d cleared out for her to use as a workshop. It had previously served as crew quarters. Now, one set of bunks had been stripped o
f mattress and linens, and been converted into workbenches. Veronica was set up on the lower bunk, with the new addition of a twist of cabling that ran from the back of her terminal up to the top bunk. There, it attached to the device they’d recovered from the Ava Leyla, which itself was attached to some secondary box that Lincoln didn’t recognize. Thumper had rolled out a thinskin overlay on one of the walls, so she could display information for everyone to see. They all gathered around. Lincoln wondered briefly if he needed to go grab Sahil before Thumper got started. But then he thought about the outpouring of information Thumper was about to dump on them, and figured Sahil would very much appreciate just getting the highlights later.
“So this turned out to be a trickier bit of work than I anticipated,” Thumper said. “It’s probably a good thing we ended up pulling the device after all. Encryption’s nasty. We’d probably still be on board the Ava Leyla if I’d had to run it from there. Of course, unplugging it caused some issues too. I ended up having to trick this thing into talking to itself, just to get the ball rolling.”
“What do you mean?” Wright asked. “Talk to itself?”
“Loopback,” Thumper said, rapping the box Lincoln didn’t recognize with her knuckle. It was metal, and looked like something a high school kid might have put together in a garage. “Whatever’s on the other end of this guy,” here she pointed at the recovered device, “has some built-in activation protocol, also encrypted. So this module won’t do anything unless it’s got a live connection back to its partner. I just had to figure out a way to convince it that it had an open channel, and the only way I could figure out how to do that was to feed it some of its own old signal. I pulled that out of the transmission we picked up before we went out. Which I fed it through this loopback.”
“You made that?” Mike asked.
“Me? Nah, couple of the navy techs worked that up for me. I just gave them the list of parts and a rough schematic. Pretty sharp cookies,” she said. “For sailors.”
“Well, that explains the workmanship,” Mike said.
“I have no idea what you just said, Thump,” Lincoln said. “Do I need to understand any of that before you can tell me why it matters?”
Thumper looked disappointed. “No sir, I don’t guess so.”
“OK. Then just skip to the part where you tell me what it means.”
“You don’t want to know how I found it?”
“Not today. Over beers, maybe. Later.”
“Fine. We were right. Main signal was coming from a location on Mars, bouncing through the Ava Leyla, out to the final destination.”
“To SUNGRAZER,” Lincoln said.
“Or something that looks so suspiciously similar to SUNGRAZER, that no one would blame us for thinking it.”
“Which means we’re going to Mars,” Lincoln said.
“Which means,” Thumper said, turning to Mike, “you owe me a hundred bucks.”
“I’m pretty sure I only bet you fifty,” Mike said.
“That’s not my recollection,” Thumper answered. “And, I don’t like to brag, but I am pretty good with numbers.”
“Fine, you can deduct it from what you owe me.”
“Owe you for what?”
“All the times I’ve bailed you out.”
“That’s just called doing your job, Mikey.”
“Speaking of doing our jobs…” Lincoln interrupted.
“Yeah, OK,” Thumper said, getting back to her show-and-tell. “So here’s the thing. It looks like our bad guys are doubly smart. And maybe too clever by half.”
She gestured at Veronica. The terminal brought up an image on the thinskin of the upper third of Mars, with some quick additional icons labeled as the Ava Leyla and SUNGRAZER. It looked like a presentation put together by someone with access to satellite imagery and absolutely no trace of artistic talent.
“You make that yourself, Thump?” Lincoln asked.
“Shut up,” she said. “Point is, we’ve got a command signal coming out of here.” She waggled a finger, and a line appeared connecting a point near the northern Martian polar ice cap and the Ava Leyla.
“Presumably, I would say with about eighty-eight percent confidence, it bounces from here, and goes out to there.” Another gesture, another line connecting the comically bad icons for the freighter and SUNGRAZER. Eighty-eight percent confidence didn’t sound as high as Lincoln would have liked, but then he had to remind himself that statistically speaking, that was pretty high. And Thumper tended to underestimate her own brilliance.
“What’s there?” Lincoln asked, pointing to the ice cap.
“I’ll get there in a sec,” she said. “Now, here’s the fun part. Signal strength coming out of the alleged origin is a little fuzzy. Not quite as pure as I would expect, if it were an actual origin.”
It was impossible to deny that Thumper was a genius. It was also impossible to ignore the fact that she could never just skip straight to the point. She wasn’t showing off by any means. There wasn’t a prideful bone in her body, as far as Lincoln could tell. She just loved figuring out the pieces to the puzzle, and tended to assume that everyone else loved the process as much as she did.
“It’s a double pass-through,” Lincoln said, indulging her.
“A double pass-through, right. But more than that. I’ve had Veronica running signal analysis for me, and check this out.” She gestured again, and a third line appeared, connecting the point near the ice cap to a location on the map that marked the Martian People’s Collective Republic. “Based on the general communications traffic down there, I’m pretty sure that signal is coming out of the MPCR.”
“Pretty sure?” Lincoln asked.
Thumper cocked her head to one side, gave him a look. She wouldn’t have mentioned it if she hadn’t thought with absolute certainty that it was true.
“Yeah, OK,” Lincoln said.
That was probably the worst possible news of all the outcomes. Lincoln had of course known that Martian elements had to be considered as a potential source. But for the Martian People’s Collective Republic to be involved took things to a new level. Earth and Mars weren’t exactly on an open war footing any more, but the tension between the two planets remained high. The MPCR was one of the few settlements on Mars that was publicly pushing for de-escalation. That part wasn’t a surprise, exactly. The Collective Republic worked hard to portray itself as aggressively neutral. And though it was one of the smaller colonies on the red planet, it was an economic powerhouse with a level of commerce that put it on the same stage as some of the oldest nations on either world. It had influence and at least the illusion of moral standing. The idea that the Republic would be publicly advocating for peace while secretly working for war was almost too depressing to consider.
And also entirely too plausible to ignore.
“Can we localize it?”
“Not precisely. This is sort of a gross oversimplification,” Thumper said, gesturing at the images she’d thrown together. “We’re untangling a lot of sophisticated stuff here, and trying to do it in a way that no one’s going to notice. We could try to get NID in on it, but the more eyes we’ve got watching, the more likely it is that people on the other side are going to notice all of us noticing. I’m running pretty low profile here. So maybe if we sit here and watch long enough, we might be able to figure out the full route. But by then…” She shrugged.
“Bad guys might’ve already done what they’re going to do,” Lincoln said. She nodded.
“And we still don’t know what that is.”
“What about going out the other way?” Wright asked. “Can you use this science project of yours to find the ship?”
A good question. As tempting as it was to focus on the bad guys, Lincoln had to remind himself that their actual objective was securing SUNGRAZER. It was his natural inclination to go after bad actors. As much as it would irritate him to leave the important questions unanswered, in this particular case, it seemed like the easiest course of action w
ould simply be to locate SUNGRAZER and shut the whole thing down.
Thumper’s shoulders sagged at the mention.
“I’ve been trying,” she said. “But that thing is so sewn up, I can’t get a bead on it. I didn’t realize this until I started working on it, but I don’t think this guy is pushing commands to SUNGRAZER.” She pointed at the device on the top bunk again. “I think SUNGRAZER is pulling from it.”
Lincoln’s mind made the connection without any conscious effort from him.
“It’s a dead drop,” he said.
Everyone looked at him. Thumper thought for a moment, then nodded.
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good way to think about it,” she said. “Command pushes orders to a location, SUNGRAZER picks them up when she can. Another layer of security.”
It was an old spy term, from tradecraft. One spy could leave an item or a message somewhere, another could retrieve it later when it was safe to do so. Neither spy had to know the other, there was no direct contact between them that could be exploited, and it minimized the need for arranging meetings. Typically the thing being exchanged was disguised in such a way that anyone who came across it either wouldn’t notice it, or wouldn’t realize it was anything important. A simple tactic that mitigated a substantial risk of compromise.
“That sounds like a bad way to work,” Mike said. “Warship running around out there that maybe will follow your orders whenever it gets around to picking it up.”
“She’s a smart ship, Mikey. Whole point is that she can mostly operate without a lot of back-and-forth from command. I’m sure she’s got some kind of protocol about what she does when a new order comes in and she can’t retrieve it yet. But we’re also probably talking milliseconds here. Minutes at most, not like hours or anything.”
“Can you re-engineer this piece? Force feed SUNGRAZER some commands of our own? Or get her to call home?”
“No, I think I blew that part when I started monkeying with it. Pretty sure this one’s toast. Marked as compromised, at the very least.”