Sungrazer

by Jay Posey

  “Oh, one more thing,” she said. They turned back to see her standing there with the skeeter pinched between her thumb and forefinger. A cold fear rolled through Lincoln. Was that the one from her office, or the one Thumper had been using? There was no way to tell. “The next time we meet, leave your surveillance toys at home.”

  But Elliot just laughed and plucked the device from her hand.

  “I told you it was just a demo,” he said.

  “And I would have been a fool to have believed you,” she said. Her demeanor had shifted back to predator. “What do you think I’ve had my people doing while I’ve been giving you a tour? And leaving a device like this sitting around in the chief of security’s office? Think what that could have done to my reputation.”

  From her office, then. Lincoln hoped the relief wasn’t obvious on his face. But his mind flashed back, and he couldn’t recall having seen her take the skeeter off the desk. Or when she would have handed it off… Ah, when she’d excused herself, with the claim that she needed to arrange for their impromptu tour. He wondered what exactly her people had been doing all that time.

  “I’d like the name of the supplier who gave you this,” she continued. “I’m afraid they’ve misled you as to its purpose.”

  The look on Elliot’s face was indistinguishable from genuine dismay.

  “Selah… I’m… I’m so sorry,” he said.

  “I don’t blame you, Elliot,” she said. “But you would make a terrible corporate spy.”

  “Good thing, I guess,” he said, looking at his feet.

  “You, on the other hand,” Selah said, turning her gaze to Thumper. For a moment the two women stood locked in silence, both unreadable. Then Selah added, “I don’t know what you really do, but you’re obviously exceptional at it.”

  Thumper held still, giving neither proclamation of innocence nor admission of guilt.

  Selah flicked her eyes back over to Elliot, drew closer, lowered her voice.

  “You’re a good man, Elliot. If I didn’t know that, if I didn’t know it…” she said, then cocked her head to one side briefly. Somehow in that simple motion, the full weight of her potential menace made itself known. “… so I’m giving you this one.”

  “Selah–” Elliot said, but she cut him off.

  “One, Elliot,” she said. “And only one.”

  For once, Elliot appeared to be at a loss for words. He opened his mouth, then closed it. Dropped his head to gather himself. Lincoln feared that even a blink might tip them over the edge into catastrophe, mere steps from triumph. For all intents, it seemed they hadn’t gotten away with anything at all. And though Elliot might escape her judgment, her eyes had not yet fallen upon Lincoln.

  “Let me make it up to you…” Elliot said. And then he looked up with a hint of a smile and impeccable timing, “Over dinner?”

  But Selah wasn’t amused. She held up her pointer finger an inch from his nose; punctuating her message, and maybe giving warning not to push her anymore today.

  Elliot pushed anyway.

  “Lunch?” he asked.

  Selah tipped her head back slightly, chin jutted… and then shook her head with a chuckling sigh, and Lincoln got the impression that somehow, by some miracle, they were going to walk out of there after all.

  “Goodbye, Elliot,” she answered. “Stay in touch. I’ve missed you.”

  It wasn’t until the three of them were riding away in the car, a good five kilometers from the Manes-King facility that Elliot let out a long exhale and a laugh, and rubbed his forehead with the palm of his hand.

  “You got what you needed?” he asked.

  “I got access,” Thumper said. “Going to have to wait to see what Veronica can do with it before we can be sure. But yeah, we got what we came for. You weren’t kidding about those protocols though. Took me twenty minutes just to figure out how they were tracking activity in the room she put me in, so I could circumvent.”

  “So they do track it?” Elliott asked.

  “Of course they do,” Thumper said. “I had to make up a whole batch of backend protocol nonsense on the spot, just to give them something to gnaw on.”

  She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose, then chuckled.

  “Gotta say, if I were actually working for Ready Vector, I’d feel pretty safe partnering with them.”

  “I can’t believe we got away with that,” Lincoln said. “Twice in that lobby, I thought we were dead.”

  “You and me both, brother,” Elliot replied.

  “Couldn’t have guessed it from your reaction,” Lincoln said. “I kind of thought you’d already had those contingencies planned for.”

  “Not exactly,” said Elliot, and he leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Lincoln knew that posture. He’d adopted it many times, during the adrenaline letdown after coming out of an op.

  “Is this the job you always wanted?” Thumper asked.

  “Me?” Elliot said, chuckling with his eyes still closed. He shook his head. “Me, no. I always wanted to run a pub.”

  “Well… you seem born for the work,” Thumper said. “I don’t know how you do it.”

  Elliot smiled with his response.

  “Helps to be a good dancer.”

  TWENTY

  They hadn’t spent much time celebrating their victory. As soon as they got back to the safehouse, Lincoln and his team got to work on the second piece of the puzzle, trying to determine how the bad guys were passing command-and-control signals to SUNGRAZER. The device they’d recovered from the Ava Leyla was a good starting point. Elliot was already out running his connections to see if he could track down any leads on where the components may have come from.

  Based on what they’d learned so far, Elliot had given them a hit list of six or seven places he thought could possibly have a connection. While Thumper worked with Veronica, the other four teammates had been out doing legwork, getting some initial reconnaissance on those sites. There was no need to sit around and wait. Maybe they’d get lucky again, and they’d already have a plan to pull off the shelf once they got confirmation. Worst case, it was good practice at operating in the MPCR they could put to use when they found the real targets.

  Mike and Sahil were scouting one potential site when Thumper got her first break. It wasn’t good news.

  “You cracked the encryption?” Wright asked.

  Thumper shook her head. “Not yet. Not even close. But I found something anyway.”

  She waved Lincoln and Wright back into the study.

  “You know how I said SUNGRAZER has all sorts of protocols that are supposed to make this whole hijacking thing impossible? Well, one of those safeguards is an encryption key test. Obviously you can’t expect that your codes are going to remain stable over the long haul, not when you’re talking about a deep maneuver asset that might be operating for ten, twenty years. You pretty much guarantee your ship’s going to get jacked if you don’t have some plan to rotate or refresh your encryption schemes. So NID put a lock in… the algorithm they use to encrypt command-and-control traffic is sort of a key itself. Whenever they update the encryption, SUNGRAZER does a comparison on the algorithm used to make sure it’s valid. It’s sort of clever, as long as no one gets hold of your algorithm.”

  “Guessing in this case, someone did,” Wright said.

  “Looks like. But it actually helps us anyway. The raw C&C traffic is unreadable to us obviously, because it’s a different encryption scheme, but with a similar algorithm, and here’s the key… sending the same traffic. NID shared some archived communications with me. I just have to figure out how the two relate.”

  “Do they know they shared it with you?” Lincoln said.

  “More or less,” Thumper said. And off of Lincoln’s look, she added, “Elliot helped me get it, so I assume that makes it legit. And anyway, I don’t see why it matters if it’s helping us get the job done. I can’t sit around waiting for somebody on a whole different planet to fill out whatever ridicul
ous paperwork has to be done for this sort of thing.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “point is… if I can find an identifiable chunk, that’ll give Veronica enough to work with to crack it, eventually. SUNGRAZER’s got some well-defined protocols for specific tasks. Good news is, just looking at the metadata, length of communication, data density, that sort of thing, I was able to pull up a match.”

  “Then why do you look like it’s bad news?” Lincoln asked.

  “Because the block I’m matching up here,” she said, “is from SUNGRAZER’s targeting routine.”

  Lincoln looked from Thumper to the data displayed on Veronica’s terminal. Then back at Thumper.

  “They’re going to use her for a strike, after all?” Lincoln asked.

  Thumper nodded. “Already did, once. See this?” She waved a hand and drew up a data visualization that was incomprehensible to Lincoln. Fortunately, she didn’t wait for him to parse it on his own. “Here’s the full routine, from the NID archive.” She pointed at each block in turn, naming them as she did. “Target selection, assessment, approach, lock, final confirmation, launch, post-strike evaluation.” She brought up a second screen alongside the first; stripped of their raw data and compared on the meta alone, the blocks aligned neatly.

  “When was that?”

  “Few days ago,” she answered. She collapsed the NID archived traffic, and brought up a third screen with the same visualization. The chain was similar, but considerably shorter. “Ignore this other stuff, I’m not sure what that is yet. But you want to guess what’s missing?”

  Lincoln counted in; target selection, assessment, approach…

  “No lock yet,” he said.

  Thumper nodded.

  “Which means she’s on approach,” Wright said.

  Thumper nodded again.

  “First strike was a test fire?” Lincoln said.

  “My guess, yeah,” Thumper said. “Verifying they had her under full control. Dress rehearsal. No telling how many attempts they had prior to the successful one.”

  “You think they launched in open space?” Wright asked “Just confirming they could fire?”

  “No, because here…” Thumper pointed at the final block in the chain. “Post-strike evaluation. She had a real target. No way to know what it was or if she was successful until I crack open the box, but they weren’t shooting at nothing.”

  Lincoln tried to put himself in the bad guys’ shoes, thought through the possibilities. Target would have to be large enough to judge effectiveness of fire… it wouldn’t be enough to get a hit with a kinetic weapon, they’d have to guarantee that it struck with sufficient force. Space station, maybe. But a live target would be too risky, and there weren’t exactly a lot of abandoned hops just floating around out there. Or…

  “Asteroid?” he said. “Where was she when NID lost contact?”

  “Veronica,” Thumper said, “give me the report on SUNGRAZER’s last known location.”

  A screen appeared, familiar from Lincoln’s briefing. Ten days of positional data, up to the vessel’s disappearance. SUNGRAZER had always kept towards the belt-side of Mars.

  “Take her out to the belt, pick a rock,” Wright said, nodding to herself.

  “Could be,” Thumper said. “Seems like a safe option, anyway. Minimal chances of discovery, plenty of opportunity to practice. If I had to roll the dice on it, yeah that’d be my safe bet.”

  “What’s your guess on travel time?” Lincoln asked.

  “Depends entirely on how hard they wanted to burn. Couple of days out, if they don’t care about getting noticed. More if they were patient.”

  “Let’s assume these are patient people who don’t want to get noticed,” he replied. “Check SUNGRAZER’s specs, and get us some good numbers on time table. Earliest possible launch window on a return.”

  “OK,” Thumper said. “On what target?”

  “Anywhere on Mars,” Lincoln answered.

  “Sure thing,” Thumper said. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking we better get the other half of our key real soon,” Lincoln said.

  Mike and Sahil returned around lunch time with a solid initial reconnaissance sweep of one of the facilities on Elliot’s hit list. Elliot reappeared shortly after, and rendered it all unnecessary.

  “Found it,” Elliot said as soon as he’d closed the door behind him. He had the look of a man who’d just come in out of a windstorm. “Guo Components. They have a manufacturing facility and a warehouse across town.”

  “Guo Components,” Wright repeated. She looked to Sahil. “We did a circuit on it already?”

  Sahil nodded.

  “Yeah, they were on my early guess list,” Elliot answered. “Glad you guys aren’t the sit-around type.”

  “We know what we’re looking for in there?” Lincoln said.

  Elliot shook his head. “I don’t, but that device you pulled off the Ava Leyla? Couple of the sensitive bits are Guo’s, for sure. Not on their official product line, but no doubt that’s where they came from, so I’m guessing that’s where the final assembly happened. I figured whatever else you might need, you’re going to find somewhere in there.”

  “And you’re sure of this because…” Wright said.

  Elliot smiled and flopped into a chair at the table. “I know a guy. Well, a guy who knows a guy. But it’s legit. I confirmed with secondary sources.”

  “We gotta do another pass to get the good stuff,” Sahil said. “But we got a quick peek at the site. Pretty tight security for corporate, but still civilian. Shouldn’t be much trouble.”

  “I’ll go back out and get a full workup,” Mike said.

  “Get some chow first,” Lincoln said. “Then I’ll ride with you. Thumper, what’s your take?”

  “Easy B&E sounds good to me,” Thumper said, unconcerned with the breaking-and-entering part of the job. “I don’t know that’s going to give us the exact pieces we’re missing, but I guess it can’t hurt to go look around. Particularly if it’s going to be a soft target. If I can get on site and do some snooping, then yeah, I think we should do it. Better than anything else we’ve got going on right now.”

  “What does a good result look like?” Wright asked.

  “Best case scenario,” Thumper said, “I dig up schematics, we build our own dead drop, and once Veronica finishes crunching that C&C traffic, we put the two together and send SUNGRAZER a new set of instructions. Take the keys back.”

  “That doesn’t give us the bad guys, though,” Wright said.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Thumper said.

  Wright grunted.

  “It’s all right, mas’sarnt,” Mike said, running her rank together into a single word, “I’m sure we can find some more people for you to shoot next time.”

  “I just don’t want to have to do this all over again in a couple of weeks,” she answered.

  “I think once we get all the pieces put together, we’ll find the vulnerability,” Thumper said. “We can make sure this doesn’t happen again. Or… at least that it doesn’t happen again the exact same way.”

  It wasn’t a sure bet, but nothing in this line of work ever was. And for once, it sounded like a relatively low-risk situation. If it was a bust, it wouldn’t cost them that much time or effort, and if their luck held, maybe they could sew this thing up and get themselves on the next flight home.

  “Let’s hit it,” Lincoln said. “Mikey and I will get down there and do a thorough walk-over. Wright, you and Sahil wide-net it… see if you can pick up any extra watchers looking for people like us. Thumper, pull what you can on the facility from existing sources, do as much prep work as you can from here. We’ll feed you more once we’re all on site.”

  “I still got time for chow?” Mike asked, as the rest of the team went into action.

  “Yeah,” Lincoln answered. “But shovel it.”

  “Always does,” Thumper said.

  “What do you want me to do?” Elliot asked.

>   “Keep doing whatever you’ve been doing,” Lincoln said, flashing a smile. “Seems to be working so far.”

  Lincoln’s eyes popped open, waking instantly alert from a deep sleep, as though he’d heard an unusual sound. He kept still, listening, but nothing stood out as the apparent cause. Nerves, maybe. It was just after midnight, still two hours before the team was supposed to gear up and roll out. After they’d returned from their site recon and pulled their plan together, Lincoln had ordered everyone to get some sleep. They’d been pushing it hard, and he knew a solid four hours of rest would be enough to sharpen everyone back up.

  He glanced over at the other bed where Mike was sleeping. Except Mike wasn’t sleeping. Again. He was sitting up in bed, staring at his datapad. Lincoln laid there, watched his teammate for a moment. It was obvious Mike was agitated about something. Whatever he was looking at on the datapad was giving him some sort of trouble. Finally, Lincoln couldn’t let it go anymore.

  “Mike,” Lincoln said.

  Mike started at the sound of his name, and made a quick attempt to play it off with a strained smile in the dim light of his pad’s display. He clutched his chest, feigning heart pain.

  “If you’re trying to kill me and make it look like an accident, that was a pretty good attempt, sir.”

  “Trouble sleeping again?”

  “Just excited about the big night coming up, I guess.”

  Lincoln sat up and turned on the bed, put his feet on the floor. This had gone on long enough.

  “Mike.”

  “Lincoln.”

  “I’m serious,” Lincoln said. “What’s going on, brother?”

  Mike shook his head, playing innocent. “I don’t know what you mean, sir. Everything’s right as rain. Just didn’t feel like sleeping much.”

  Lincoln didn’t say anything, just kept his eyes locked on Mike’s. Waited for a real answer.

  “Come on man,” Mike said after several seconds of Lincoln’s intent silence. “What do you want me to tell you?”

  “The truth, sergeant.”

  Mike shook his head again and held up a hand like he was at a loss, but for the first time since Lincoln had met him, a look came into Mike’s eyes that made him look lost, and a little scared. Finally, he held up the datapad towards Lincoln. On it was an image that could have come from a nature documentary. It showed a bull caribou, huge and majestic, silhouetted by a distant ridgeline, its massive antlers black against a winter sky. Lincoln looked at it, acknowledged it with a nod, then looked back up at Mike.