Sungrazer

by Jay Posey

  Conversation lapsed for a few minutes before Mike kicked it back up again.

  “You know I’ve served with a lot of different folks in my day,” he said. “Lot of really, really good people out there. Aussies especially. I did some long-range reconnaissance training with a couple of Aussies once, a full week in the field, and the two of them never spoke a single word. Hand signals the whole time. It was insane. And the Brits. Brits are solid too. But I gotta say, out of everyone I’ve ever served with, I think those Korean Marines are still some of the hardest folks I ever met.”

  “I know what you mean,” Lincoln said. “My granddad was one.”

  “Oh yeah? No kidding. Runs in the family then, huh?”

  “Well. Skipped a generation, but yeah.”

  “Uh oh,” said Mike.

  Lincoln chuckled and said, “Yeah.”

  “Old man disapprove of your life choices?”

  “Probably,” Lincoln said. “Last I checked he still wasn’t crazy about my choice of career. But, you know… that’s just standard op for dads and sons, isn’t it?”

  “I reckon,” Mike said. “Not for me, but I know I’m a lucky one.”

  “My dad’s first generation American, and after what his dad went through with the first war… I think he just feels like our family’s already done enough of that, maybe.”

  They were quiet for a span; long enough for Lincoln to start thinking about things he didn’t want to think about just then.

  “So,” Lincoln said, taking the conversation down a safer path, “from baby infantry. How’d you end up on this career track?”

  “Hamgyong, actually. We had some special operators attached to help us out up at Big Top. It got pretty rough up there at times, but you know… I really never got scared whenever I knew we had a couple of big, tough frogmen on the high ground. And I’d always been pretty handy on the long gun. Grew up hunting, so that was just part of life for me. But I never forgot what that meant to me, when I was down there on the ground, knowing somebody else was up high watching over me. So when we rotated back out, I put in for sniper school, and one thing sort of led to another. I was just always looking for ways to get better, do more work. Taking every opportunity I got. Eventually Mom came knocking.”

  “Glad he did.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  The conversation lagged again for a moment, and then Mike let out a little chuckle.

  “Hey,” he said. “At Big Top. Was a fella named Ben still hanging around when you got there?”

  “Ben…” said Lincoln, giving it a second to see if anyone came to mind. No one did. “I think you’re going to have to be a little more specific.”

  “You’d know him if you met him,” Mike said. “OK so one time…” he started, and then stopped himself. “I say that a lot, don’t I? ‘One time.’”

  Lincoln smiled. “Once in a while,” he said, wondering if after all these years, Mike was finally going to figure out why people called him One-Time.

  “Anyway,” Mike continued, apparently missing his moment for epiphany, “Big Top. We’d been there I guess about three weeks when we got hit hard. Real hard. Worst night of my whole tour. I think it was five or six hours of shells, nonstop. And I don’t know about you, but there’s nothing worse to me than mortar fire. I’d rather spend a whole day in a firefight than fifteen minutes taking mortars.

  “But anyway, when we’d gotten up to Big Top, we’d set up shop in a couple of old concrete buildings. It was in a group of eight or nine of them, all blasted out, not much to ‘em really. None of them more than three stories tall. But they had some walls, which was more than anything else around there had to offer, so that’s where we’d started. Well, that night, the Russians lit… us… up. So much that one of the buildings right across from us just came down, boom big ol’ pile, like they’d taken a wrecking ball through it.

  “The craziest thing about it all, is we only took a couple casualties. I don’t know if their aim was off or their intel told them we were in the other building or if we had the angels on our side or what, but couple of wounded, nobody got killed. Still can’t believe it.

  “Next morning, some brass showed up, which is like, oh great, how’s that gonna help, right? Just going to make a bunch of extra trouble for us at the worst possible time. But turns out the guy’s probably the best officer I ever met, except Mom,” he said. And then added, as an afterthought, “And you, of course.

  “Colonel Curtis J Nichols,” Mike continued, putting special emphasis on each part of the name, the way you might with some historical figure or legendary leader. “And he was full-bird, really had no reason to be up there at all. Plenty high enough rank to have been back in the ol’ rear-echelon drinking the good coffee, but there he was, first thing in the morning, kitted up, checking on us grunts. Looked like a real pipe-hitter too, like he was ready to round us up and lead us out himself to go get after it. But we weren’t supposed to be going outside the wire then, so we had to stick around. Lucky me, I got assigned to security for him while he’s on site, surveying the damage, seeing how many casualties we took, all that. So he’s getting the tour of the place, and our LT’s showing him around, doing his best, God bless him, to sound like he has any clue what he’s talking about.

  “Well, during the tour, we stop for a minute right next to that collapsed building. And LT isn’t exactly lying, but he’s giving us a lot more credit for quick thinking and decisive action than we deserve. And while he’s talking, I notice, I kid you not, an arm poking out of the rubble of that building. Like, just hanging out of the heap, from about the elbow down. And at that point, all our folks are accounted for, right? All our personnel, all the Korean Marines we were with, all the support staff. Nobody knows whose arm that is. And the colonel notices me noticing, and he stops LT, and looks right at me, points to the arm, and says, ‘What’s his story?’

  “Now, I wasn’t expecting him to talk to me at all, and I don’t really know what he means. I guess he was probably wondering who that was and why we hadn’t cleared him out yet, but I’m an idiot and I just say ‘He’s been crushed, sir.’

  “And he looks at me for a moment, and of course I figured he was about to chew me out, or that LT would step in and say something like ‘Sorry sir, he’s an idiot’, but instead, cool as can be, he just walks over and reaches up, without missing a beat, shakes the hand, and says ‘Pleasure to meet you, Ben.’”

  Mike laughed at the memory. “Cracked us all up. ‘Pleasure to meet you, Ben.’ And I guess it was just one of those moments, where we’re all laughing half because it was funny and half because we’re all just glad to be alive. But we all just lost it. And it became a thing, after that. Any time people passed by there, ‘Mornin’ Ben’, ‘How’s it hanging, Ben?’ We all did it. Handshakes, high fives, whatever.”

  Lincoln chuckled at the black image.

  “It was so freezing cold, and we didn’t have any heavy equipment to dig him out. So he was just there. A couple people tried to cover the arm back up with some rocks and dirt or whatever, but it never took,” Mike said. “He was still there when I left. Never did find out who it was.”

  Mike chuckled again, and then went quiet. After a moment, he added, “I told my girlfriend that story when I got back. For some reason she didn’t think it was all that funny.”

  “Yeah,” Lincoln said, knowing full well you had to have first seen the darkness before you could see the humor. Then he asked, “How long she stay after that?”

  “‘Bout three weeks.”

  “She gave it a pretty good shot, huh?”

  “Well. To be fair, I got a last-minute chance to take on some training after I’d been home for four days, so I shipped right out again… Can’t really blame her.”

  “I never do,” Lincoln said.

  They lapsed back into silence for a good twenty minutes or so, each back to their isolated worlds of observation and whatever memories the story had dredged up.

  “Oop,” Mike s
aid some time later. “There we go. Looks like we got somebody inbound. About nine o’clock. Southish.”

  This far north, just about everything was southish. Lincoln turned and looked off to his left, but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

  “I don’t see it,” he said.

  “Little dust cloud,” Mike said. “Right there.” A moment later, Lincoln’s visor chirped and brought up a small white icon in his view. Below it, now that he fixed his eyes on the spot, sure enough he could see a small cloud of red dust. How Mike spotted it was beyond him. Lincoln magnified the view until he could make out what was causing it.

  “Skimmer, looks like,” he said. A terrain-following vehicle, moving fast across the open space.

  “Yep,” said Mike. “Where you think it’s headed?”

  It was a joke, but Lincoln was already making the switch to pro mode, evaluating the threat and opportunity that was unfolding. He flicked his eyes to the side, selected the appropriate setting; a moment later when he looked back at the inbound vehicle, a range finder displayed the distance to it along with an estimated time of arrival at the research facility. About twenty minutes.

  “How long you think it’d take to cover the ground from here to the facility?” Lincoln asked.

  “Depends on how much you want to get looked at on the way,” Mike answered. “Couple of minutes if you’re hoofing it. A lot longer if you’re crawling.”

  Lincoln glanced at the horizon. The sun had already set, but the pink-hued darkening sky would stay light for another hour or two in the dusty Martian atmosphere. Not quite dark enough to make a run for it.

  “What’re you thinking?” asked Mike.

  “I’m thinking we hadn’t figured out a good way to get inside just yet,” Lincoln replied. “And that we might be looking at our opportunity.”

  Mike didn’t respond immediately, but his head turned back and forth a couple of times from vehicle to facility and back again. Judging the distance. From Lincoln’s estimation though, it was too close. There was only one entry point large enough for a vehicle, and it was on the other side of the facility from their current position. He could have made it at a trot no problem, but the chances of getting noticed were too high.

  “I could do it,” Mike said.

  “No,” Lincoln said. “Too risky. By the time we got over there, that skimmer’s going to be right on top of us. We’ll have to figure something else out.”

  “I didn’t say we, Link,” Mike said. “But if I’m going to do it, I better go now.”

  “I’m not sending you in there by yourself.”

  “Why not? I do it all the time. I’m going to do it.”

  “Mike.”

  “Captain. Relax. I’ll get in there, and I’ll lie low the whole time. No trouble. I’ll just hang around until everybody else gets here, then I’ll let you in.”

  Once again, Lincoln found himself with a tough call to make and no time to decide. It was against everything he’d been taught or experienced, to send a man off on his own. But the opportunity was unlikely to present itself again, and the payoff could be huge.

  “Sir?”

  “Go,” Lincoln said. “But if you see anything you don’t like, you back off. We’ll find another way.”

  “No sweat,” Mike said. “Trade with me.”

  Mike handed over his long rifle, and Lincoln gave him his shorter, automatic weapon in exchange. A moment afterward, Mike disengaged the support pack from his suit, and laid it to one side.

  “Call me when you’re ready,” Mike said. And then he was up in a crouch, and scrambling down the hillock towards the facility. At first, Lincoln was concerned with Mike’s speed. He was taking it way too fast. But once Mike reached the basin of the crater, he dropped into a sort of bear crawl, using his hands and feet. Between the suit’s reactive camouflage, the long shadows on the terrain, and the low profile Mike was keeping, Lincoln soon found he was having trouble visually tracking his teammate even knowing exactly where he was. After watching his progress for a couple of minutes, Lincoln realized Mike was taking advantage of the lower gravity, making little bounding movements that would have been impossible at a full G. That would change as he got within range of the facility’s grav field of course, but for now he was making good use of the environment. Lincoln still didn’t know how a man that big could move with such fluid grace. Soon enough the only way Lincoln could keep track of Mike’s progress was via the indicator in his visor that marked Mike’s position. He was already at the perimeter of the facility with ten minutes to spare before the vehicle arrived.

  Mike had been right. There was no way they both could have covered that ground. But Mike had most certainly done it on his own.

  Lincoln maneuvered the skeeter around to the front side of the facility and watched the skimmer’s approach. It was still about four minutes out when Mike made it into position near the entry. He’d gone to ground for the final hundred meters or so, a quick skimming belly crawl that, with the reactive camo blending in, made him look like he was tunneling shallowly, advancing just under the surface of the soil.

  “Heads up, Mike,” Lincoln said. “Getting close now.”

  “I see ‘em,” Mike answered, breathing hard from the effort. “This might’ve been a bad idea.”

  “Still time to bail out.”

  “Nah,” he said. “Came all this way. Hate for it to be for nothin’.”

  Through the skeeter’s feed, Lincoln watched from above as the skimmer closed the final distance to the entrance, and slowed to a halt. It was a light-duty hauler variety, with room in the cab for four and an external bed. Whatever it was carrying was concealed under a heavy-duty tarp. Lincoln brought the skeeter down lower and tried to get an angle on the cab, but the skimmer was full-plated with no way to see inside. It held outside the sealed gate for a minute or two. Lincoln got as much footage as he could with the skeeter, though he didn’t see anything in particular that looked useful. Thumper would feed the whole stream to Veronica, though, and there was no telling what she might be able to do with it.

  Finally the main entrance ground open, heavy gears worked the gate with the sound of aged mechanicals. From the noise, Lincoln guessed they probably didn’t come in and out a lot. If he’d been living in there forced to listen to that, he would have done something about it by now.

  The skimmer moved into the bay. It was double-gated, like an airlock, probably to keep the interior from filling up with dust during a storm. Lincoln had been expecting Mike to hop up on the back of the skimmer while it was stopped, or at least to follow it in when it moved. Instead, the indicator on Mike’s position showed him still in the exact location he’d been in when the vehicle had first pulled up. Maybe he’d seen something from down low that he didn’t like. Maybe he’d changed his mind.

  “Mike, you all right?” Lincoln asked. Mike didn’t answer.

  A moment later, the exterior gate started to close. Mike still hadn’t moved.

  “Mike?”

  The gate was about halfway to the ground when Mike shot up out of his hiding place. He covered the distance in a few quick bounds, and then slowed several paces outside. He’d waited too long. He wasn’t going to be able to make it in now.

  And then, Mike pulled off a move that looked gravity-defying, like a slow-motion fall. Somehow he went from his low crouch, to the ground, into a roll, and back up to a crouch again, all in such a fluid motion that Lincoln couldn’t quite replay it in his mind, even though he’d just seen it for himself. The gate touched down closed behind Mike, only three or four seconds after he’d passed through. He ended up tucked into a dark corner of the airlock, off the right-side rear of the skimmer.

  Once the outer gate was closed completely, the inner gate started its retraction. Mike didn’t wait this time. Lincoln couldn’t get a clear view of him through the skeeter, but he could see Mike’s indicator closing in on the skimmer. The two indicators met for a moment; the skimmer pulled forward into the complex, and the in
dicators separated again. Mike’s stopped moving just inside the gate, while the skimmer continued on to one of the outbuildings. The only outbuilding that wasn’t sunk into the ground, which Lincoln now realized must have been the garage.

  As best as he could tell, Mike had just hitched a short ride on the back of the skimmer, and then dropped off it once inside. He appeared to just be lying in the middle of the entrance.

  Lincoln repositioned the skeeter over the top of the facility, and got the best view of the garage as he could find. Three individuals emerged from it, all bundled up in similar gear to the other two people he’d seen earlier. And all three armed. They walked to the main building and entered. Only after it was all still and quiet again did Mike check in.

  “I’m in,” he said.

  “I see that,” Lincoln replied. “Cut it kind of close, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Had to make it look good,” Mike answered. “I’m going to do a little legwork while I’m in here, see what I can find.”

  His indicator started moving again, away from the entrance and towards the outer wall, slowly. At a crawl.

  “I’d feel better if you’d just find a nice, quiet place to hide,” Lincoln said. “And sit tight until the cavalry gets here.”

  “I need the exercise,” Mike said. “And I’m sure we’d all like a better idea of what we’re walking into. Don’t worry boss, I won’t blow it.”

  “Take it slow, Mike. I’m moving up to the perimeter. Before you go stalking too far off, skirt around the outside and find me a way in. Just in case.”

  “You got it.”

  Lincoln eased up from the ground and started off towards the facility, his pace much more cautious than the one Mike had displayed. Even so, whether he was moving or lying flat and still, he felt totally exposed. At least it’d be dark soon. Once he got within a hundred meters or so, he started to feel the grav field.

  “Thumper,” Lincoln called in. “I’ve got another feed for you. Three new arrivals, came in on a skimmer. All armed. Get me that weapon ID, and then suit up. We’re going in tonight.”