by Jay Posey
Near the middle of the room, Lincoln angled a cubicle wall and found a man lying face down.
“Stay down, stay on the ground!” he commanded, but as he stepped over to secure the man, he saw that was unnecessary. The man had been shot twice through the back of the head. Judging from the damage, it looked like it’d been at close range. There were no weapons nearby.
Lincoln held there, the discovery shocking him out of his near-automatic assault mode. Throughout the room, the rest of the team continued to clear, while he knelt by the man and took quick inventory. Judging from the attire, the physique, and the hands, Lincoln could tell this wasn’t a military man. He had to assume this was another civilian, like those they’d secured on the first floor. But those weren’t stray rounds that had taken the man’s life. They had been intentional, from short range.
The realization flashed a warning, but the intensity of the moment clouded it.
“Clear!” Wright called, and then. “Lincoln, what are we doing?”
“Push!” he said, getting back to his feet. “Sahil, switch with me!”
“Copy, I’m on Thumper,” Sahil answered. Lincoln was trailing the others by twenty-five feet or so. Thumper effortlessly stepped up to element lead, with Sahil supporting, while Lincoln moved to catch up. Wright and Mike didn’t wait around. They exited through the single door in the rear of the room and continued clearing.
When Lincoln made it to the corridor, he held position until Wright and Mike emerged from the first room on the left. Mike marked it clear, and Lincoln fell into the second-man position.
“Lincoln, we got an issue,” Thumper said.
“What is it?” he answered. She and Sahil were a little further down the corridor, each on either side, covering opposite angles at what looked like a T-intersection.
“Long hallway here, it’s not on the blueprints.”
“Which one?”
“To the left. Should be a wall, not a corridor.”
“How long?”
“Can’t say. Can’t see the end, it curves.”
“Hold there,” Lincoln said. Wright led the way and the team formed up, rejoining into a single unit. Lincoln did a quick scan. Sure enough, the hallway to the left looked like newer construction. Still years old, but undoubtedly a later addition. The rest of the facility had been relatively uniform and predictable. This hall stood out as an anomaly. Lincoln double-checked with Sahil, who motioned back that the section to the right was clear. Then Lincoln risked a peek down the suspect hallway. The corridor stretched and curved to the left; there were no doors on either side of it for as far as he could see.
“Any guess on where it goes?” he asked.
“Not off the top of my head,” Thumper answered.
“Towards the garage,” Mike said. “Bends back around towards the garage. Freight elevator or something maybe?”
There were still two individuals missing. And the executed civilian’s vague warning snapped into clarity.
They’d left five of them tied up upstairs. And the remaining hostiles had a back door.
“Back,” Lincoln said. “Back with me, double-time!”
He didn’t wait, and his teammates didn’t ask for an explanation. Like the alpha of a wolf pack, he raced off, and they followed on his heels.
Lincoln didn’t run, exactly, but he moved as fast as he could while back-clearing the space they’d just moved through. Back through the large room, back up the stairwell. And as he emerged on the first floor, two men were coming down the stairs at the opposite end. Both armed. Lincoln didn’t hesitate.
He snapped off two bursts. Wright’s weapon barked next to him on the second. The two men at the far end of the corridor fell to the ground under the assault; one motionless, the other fishing his legs around and making a terrible noise. By the time Lincoln reached him, he too had gone still and quiet.
“That’s thirteen,” Wright said, the adrenaline apparent in her voice, though her tone was matter-of-fact.
Lincoln nodded.
“Better clear it again, just to be sure,” he said.
“How’d you know they were trying to circle around behind us?” she asked.
“Don’t think they were,” Lincoln said. “Found a body downstairs, knew we hadn’t done it.”
It took a moment for the rest of the team to make the connection. Only Mike voiced it.
“You think they were coming up here to kill these people?” Mike asked.
“Yeah,” Lincoln answered. “That’d explain why the two upstairs were sneaking around. Or why she couldn’t go out with an armed escort.”
When he said it, he realized what it meant. The two men who’d been coming down the stairs obviously would have passed by the man and woman they’d left cuffed upstairs. A cold, sickly feeling hollowed him out.
“We should check upstairs,” Wright said.
Lincoln nodded.
“Sahil, take Thumper and Mike, clear it out again, as far down as you think you need to go,” he said. “Make sure we got everybody.”
“No sweat,” Sahil answered. He rolled off, with Thumper and Mike in tow, and not a single complaint about having to cover all the same ground yet again.
Lincoln double-checked to make sure the two men at the base of the stairs wouldn’t trouble them anymore. Wright took the men’s weapons, removed the ammunition and firing components, and tossed them into one of the empty rooms, just to be safe. Then together they ascended the stairs back to the main entrance.
To Lincoln’s dismay, what they found didn’t surprise him. The man that Sahil had rendered unconscious was still out cold. The woman, unfortunately, had been shot dead, just like the man he’d found on the lower floor.
“You think they knew?” Wright asked.
“The civilians?” Lincoln said. Wright nodded, and he shook his head. “I’d guess they just figured these men were here for their protection.”
“Guess we could go ask.”
“Don’t know if I’m up for that,” Lincoln said, looking at the poor, executed woman. He couldn’t help but wonder what her story was, what part she had played, what she’d done, and whether or not she’d had any idea what she’d gotten caught up in.
“Well,” Wright said. “At least we’ve got him.” She nodded towards the sleeping man.
“He didn’t seem real cooperative the first time around,” Lincoln said.
“Yeah, I don’t care about that. But he’s going to have a lot of explaining to do to the authorities when he wakes up. The real ones, I mean.”
Lincoln nodded, feeling his detachment from the situation starting to slip. He needed to get back on mission.
“We better get going on collection,” he said. “We’ve got a lot to cover, and we’re losing time.”
“Roger that,” Wright said.
They returned to the first floor, where they corralled the frightened civilians into one of the residential rooms. It’d be hard for them to get comfortable with their hands cuffed behind their backs, but at least they’d be warm and have access to bathroom facilities. Once the Outriders finished the collection, the plan was to alert the actual Outer Territorial Marshal Service to the situation. It’d be a long few hours for the civilians, but they’d be fine.
After Sahil’s element had finished re-checking the rest of the facility, they’d moved the bodies of the slain into cold storage, and taken scans of each for later identification. When that grim task was completed, Lincoln assigned Sahil to questioning the survivors. Despite his outer appearance of a hard-charging pipehitter, Sahil had a genuine gift for empathy. Whether he’d developed it during his medical training, or if it was the reason he’d trained medical, Lincoln wasn’t sure. Either way, the same bedside manner that made him an outstanding medical sergeant also made him effective at developing rapport with possible sources of intelligence. He’d even assisted the man in the boxers with getting on a pair of pants.
Apparently, they were all independent contractors, hired on from a nu
mber of different settlements. None of them came from the Martian People’s Collective Republic, and none had worked together before. Communications engineers, mostly. In general, they seemed to be willing to cooperate, but the details they provided were few. The story was that they thought they were helping set up preliminary infrastructure for a reopening of the facility; establishing deep-range communications. As far as they knew, the traffic they were passing around was just test data. Either they were well-trained liars, or their employers had done an exceptional job of keeping them in the dark as to their actual purpose. The fact that they provided so little information made it seem all the more terrible that the armed men had attempted to execute them. The only thing Lincoln could figure was that the bad guys had been concerned that their contractors might actively help dismantle whatever it was they’d built. They almost certainly weren’t counting on anyone as sophisticated as the Outriders.
Sahil didn’t tell them about their two fallen comrades until absolutely necessary. One of the women had asked about them repeatedly, and finally convinced the others not to answer any more questions until Sahil told them where they were. When he did, they weren’t able to answer too many more questions anyway.
While Sahil handled the civilians, Lincoln ran the rest of the team through collection on the remaining rooms. Wright was on hard surfaces; bookcases, furniture, floors. Mike handled the soft stuff, clothes, notebooks, bedding. Thumper, of course, took care of anything technical, while Lincoln ran the sketcher. It was his job to get a scan of each room’s layout, and track where each piece of potential intelligence came from. It was a tedious process, but together, if they did the job right, they could clear a room in just a few minutes, and the analysts back home would still be able to reconstruct a pretty good mock-up of the general environment to understand everything in context.
There wasn’t much useful on the first floor. It was primarily their living space, and from what Lincoln could tell they’d maintained solid security protocols about not letting their work spill over. The second floor was the treasure trove. But no one on the team was happy about what they found.
“Link,” Thumper said from one of the facility’s terminals.
Lincoln was in the middle of the work room, finishing up with the sketcher.
“One sec,” he said. “Almost done.”
“Might not need it, when you see this,” Thumper said. He took the ten seconds to finish the scan anyway, and then walked over to where she was.
She’d patched in to one of the workstations, not far from where Lincoln had found the first dead civilian worker. Whatever she’d hooked into wasn’t immediately apparent; she was monitoring something on her internal display.
“What’d you dig up?” Lincoln asked.
“I got an observer on their stream,” she said. “They’re being smart about it, trickling data, routing it through multiple sites. Same idea as what we found with the device we recovered. They could’ve been smarter about it, though. Key I picked up off the device from the Ava Leyla let me peek at where all of this was ending up.”
“Let me guess,” Lincoln said. “The Collective Republic.”
“Winner.”
“So, definitively, you can trace the connection back to the MPCR,” Lincoln said. “A hundred percent certain.”
Thumper nodded. “Pretty much right to the home address. Looks like they’re using the Manes-King array.”
Manes-King Quantum was a powerhouse secure communications corporation, based out of the Republic.
“Doesn’t seem like it should be that easy,” he said.
She looked at him; the blank faceplate was unreadable, but the tilt of her head clearly communicated this wasn’t the time.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s worse than that?”
“It’s worse than that. They’re not just sending command and control to SUNGRAZER,” she said. “They’re piping data back from her.”
“Back?” Lincoln said, before the implication fully settled on him. Thumper waited a moment, giving him the chance to catch up. She didn’t give him long, though.
“SUNGRAZER isn’t just a strike vehicle, Lincoln.”
Lincoln recalled the briefing, to everything he’d been told about SUNGRAZER and her capabilities. She was a deep maneuver asset, sure. Lying in wait for the order to attack. But for a decade she’d been a surveillance vessel first and foremost.
“They’re pulling our intel?” he asked.
“They’re pulling our intel,” Thumper said, nodding. “Not all of it, not all at once. The footprint for that would be enormous, easy for us to pinpoint. Looks to me like they’re bleeding it off, a little bit at a time.”
The rest of the team had paused their collection work, and were now gathered around.
“For how long?”
“Couple of months at least. Possibly more.”
“So before SUNGRAZER went missing then?”
“Well before.”
Lincoln wasn’t as deep into the world of intelligence and counterintelligence as his friends at the NID, but the implications weren’t lost on him. The strategic impact of such a compromise in security couldn’t be overstated. There was no telling what all the bad guys might be able to glean from rifling through everything SUNGRAZER had collected and transmitted back home for the past decade. Sources, methods of collection, what the US knew and what they didn’t. The potential to shift the balance of power was staggering. And that didn’t even take into account what would happen if that information was exposed to enemies closer to home. Or to the worlds at large.
And worse yet occurred to him.
“If they can pull data off,” he asked, “how much more capability would they need to put it on, too?”
Thumper nodded again. “Now you’re getting it. I don’t see a lot of evidence that they’re feeding us bad intel, but I wouldn’t necessarily expect to from here. Gonna have to put Veronica on it to do a deep scrub. Big question now, is why take it offline at all?”
“You don’t think it’s a pure intel grab?” Mike asked.
“No,” Thumper said. “They were doing that already without moving the ship. And it was cutting off contact that alerted us to it in the first place. Maybe something they found made them nervous.”
“Or maybe they found whatever they were looking for,” Lincoln added. “How long you estimate until they figure out we just wrecked their operation out here?”
“Might have already,” Thumper said. “If not, I wouldn’t think long.”
“We cut ‘em off here,” Sahil asked. “What happens to SUNGRAZER?”
Thumper shook her head. “All this is just smoke and mirrors, making it hard for us to pin them down. We could pull the plug, but nothing’s stopping them from directly connecting to her. Or from setting up another situation like they’ve got running here.”
It was an important piece of the puzzle, maybe, but for all the effort Lincoln still didn’t feel any closer to their objective. For every answer they’d uncovered, it seemed like they’d opened two new questions. And SUNGRAZER was still out there, on who knew what mission.
“I don’t know how NID’s going to handle the news that one of their automated assets got turned,” Lincoln said.
“Not well,” Wright answered.
He’d said it without thinking, but hearing his own words Lincoln felt the spark of an idea forming.
“Hey Thumper,” he said. “Now that you’re looking at their stream… how hard would it be to slip something into it yourself?”
She didn’t answer immediately. After a few moments of consideration, she shook her head.
“Possible, but not from here. I’d need Veronica’s help. That’s obviously off the table.”
“Why’s that?”
“Uh… because I didn’t bring her along for the hit, and I’d have to leave the connection live…?” Thumper said, with a tone that suggested it wasn’t a question she should’ve had to answer.
“And how bad would it be
to leave the connection live?” Lincoln asked.
“If we left it live, then I don’t see how we did anything useful at all here,” Thumper said. “Except add to the body count.”
“Just spit it out, sir,” Wright said, clearly picking up on the fact that Lincoln had at least the beginnings of a plan. “We’ll tell you if it’s stupid.”
“It’s probably stupid. But we have to assume the bad guys know we hit this facility. If not already, then soon. Killing the connection now might prevent them from pulling any more data, but most of the damage has probably already been done. Seems like the next best thing to me, then, is to make them doubt whether they can trust the data they’re getting. Better if we can make them doubt all of it.”
“You’re saying, we leave the stream intact, and hope they take that as a sign that we’re not concerned about them stealing it?” Thumper said.
“I told you it was probably stupid,” Lincoln said.
“It’s not,” Wright answered. And then added, “Not completely, anyway.”
“Aaaand… we inject something,” Thumper said, picking up the thread. “Something that looks good… maybe a little too good.”
Lincoln nodded. “Something that maybe they only notice because they get curious as to whether or not any of it’s trustworthy.”
“I don’t know, sounds pretty risky,” Thumper said.
“Doubt it’d be worth doin’ otherwise,” Sahil answered. “Boss is right. Can’t put the genie back in the bottle, might as well act like we don’t care it got out in the first place.”
“We’re talking master-level chess here,” Wright said. “Counts on them being a pretty sophisticated adversary. But I think all signs point to that being the case. I’m for trying, anyway.”
“I guess I might be able to piggyback a trace in there, while we’re at it,” Thumper said. “A ridealong, might eventually find its way to SUNGRAZER. If we don’t find her through other means first.”
“What’s your take, Mikey?” Lincoln asked.