Sungrazer

by Jay Posey

  He leaned forward, lowered his voice. She mirrored his movement.

  “Sometimes… the people you want most to trust,” Lincoln said, watching her closely. “The ones you want to believe are on the same mission… they’re the ones you have to most closely guard against.” He said it like a confession, as if he was about to break, and flip on Elliot. But there was something else wrapped in the words, a hunch he was delicately exploring, a leading question he would hope she would answer without realizing. “Trying to serve your country…”

  “… or protect your people,” Mei added, almost to herself. She broke eye contact immediately after she said it, looked down, her eyes widening for a fraction of a second. Betraying her. She hadn’t meant to say it. She’d slipped. The familiarity she’d been so careful to cultivate had caught her in her own trap.

  He couldn’t prove it logically, not even to himself. But after that, Lincoln was convinced that Mei was clean, that she didn’t know about SUNGRAZER, that she wasn’t a part of the shadow war. And maybe, if he hadn’t misread her, just maybe she had already been concerned that her agency might have been compromised. She had just never considered her partner as a potential threat. But maybe she was now.

  “I want to help you,” he said. And then leaned back and added, “But I’m not an NID agent.”

  Mei coughed a single laugh, and fixed him with a sharp-eyed stare. Whatever exchange they had just had, he’d given her more to consider than she’d expected. As she searched his eyes, he could see the wheels turning in hers. Finally, she sat back, and then got to her feet.

  “I think we’re done for the day, Mr Kim,” she said. “But we’ll talk again. Soon.”

  “I look forward to it,” he said.

  She didn’t reply, but gave him a little look over her shoulder as she knocked on the door. He didn’t know what conclusions she’d reach, whether she’d think he was genuinely trying to help her or that this was all a disinformation play. But no matter what, he felt like he’d gained some insight for himself. At least he had something useful for his mind to chew on while he sat in his cell.

  Lincoln stared up at the stars on the ceiling that wasn’t there, wishing he had paid a little more attention when a navy girl he’d known had tried to teach him the Martian constellations. Watching Mars spin had lost its appeal, and his mind had enough to keep it occupied for a while longer. Now that he had a mission, the loss of the sense of time didn’t bother him as much.

  He’d won a small victory today. If it was indeed still today. Not that he knew what he’d do with the information. Use it during his next interrogation, if he could. Maybe he’d get a chance to share it while it still mattered. If not, at least he’d made it one more day without breaking. He was just beginning to wonder how many more he’d last, when something strange happened to one of the stars above him. It winked out. And then so did its neighbor.

  As Lincoln watched, the dead splotch in space grew wider, consuming more stars as it expanded. He could only assume this was some new stage of torment, one his captors reserved for the toughest cases. As disturbing as it was, he couldn’t stop watching the void progress; it even looked like it was bulging into the room now, as if space itself had somehow taken on substance and invaded.

  And then Lincoln heard a crackling sound, like a footstep on broken glass. It took a moment for him to realize he had heard a sound.

  Whatever was happening to the ceiling, it was definitely growing or getting worse; a dark, thick, rope-like substance oozed towards the floor, slow like tar. If Lincoln hadn’t already been pressed into the corner of the room, he would have backed away.

  But then it plunked to floor, dragging something bulky behind it. Lincoln’s first thought was that something had damaged the roof above his cell, and that some sort of structural component had broken through. But then the thing on the floor writhed around like a serpent made of swarming insects, and formed into a more familiar shape.

  Poke.

  It was the team’s little foldable. Lincoln knew he must have fallen asleep. Surely this was some sort of dream, or hallucination. Even so, he crawled on hands and knees over to Poke and whatever package it had brought along. When he approached, Poke flexed its back and sort of sat up, like a pup greeting him. That meant Thumper was on the other end. He indulged her and patted the uppermost part of the bot before he turned his attention to whatever it had dragged in.

  The bundle had been tightly compressed and sealed in a thinskinned material; when Lincoln picked it up, Poke helpfully reassembled itself and made an incision in the packaging. As soon as it did so, the contents blossomed, and Lincoln was able to tear away the rest of the outer container without any trouble. It wasn’t until he’d gotten the packet completely open that he realized what Poke had brought him. It was an emergency environmental suit, the flexible kind a ship’s crew might employ in case of a hull breach. This one was missing most of the larger components, though. They’d obviously stripped it down to the bare minimum to be able to get it inside. There were no instructions with it, but he didn’t need much prompting. He put the suit on as quickly as he could, all the while knowing he wouldn’t last more than a few minutes in open space.

  Once he’d sealed himself in, the suit automatically pressurized. The built-in comms activated at the same time.

  “Check check check,” Lincoln said.

  “We read you, Lincoln,” Wright answered. “Good to hear from you.”

  Tears welled at the sound of her voice.

  “Not as good as it is to hear from you, Amira,” Lincoln said. The joy, the relief, the surprise of it all threatened to burst his chest, but he knew there wasn’t time to let emotion overcome him. “What’s the plan?”

  “Thumper’s got the cameras rerouted,” Wright said. “But we don’t want to hang around. You sealed up?”

  “Roger that,” Lincoln said. All the indicators inside the suit were green. “Suit’s sealed and green.”

  “Then get against the wall, the one closest to the door,” Wright said. “Tuck yourself up as tight as you can. We’ll have you out in a second. Let me know when you’re set.”

  Lincoln didn’t love the sound of that, but he did as she instructed. He curled himself fetal at the base of the wall by the door.

  “I’m set,” he said.

  “Copy,” she answered. “Five seconds… might want to cover your ears.”

  “Don’t think that’s going to be necessary,” he said, but she was already counting down.

  When she got to zero, the wall opposite Lincoln imploded with a whump that he felt more than he heard. The image of space vanished and the room returned to its original appearance, but Lincoln barely had time to register it as he rocketed across the room and out into open space with the sudden depressurization of his cell. He tumbled helplessly, and quickly lost all sense of direction.

  A few moments later, he collided roughly with what he assumed was debris from the explosion; it folded around him, clung to him. Lincoln windmilled his arms to try to get free, but he was caught fast. Then, his wild tumble started to stabilize.

  “I gotcha,” Sahil said. “Quit your flailin’.”

  Lincoln looked down to find arms wrapped around his chest. Sahil, in his suit. Once Sahil got their spin under control, he started hooking a harness around Lincoln’s torso, strapping him in. As soon as Lincoln’s senses settled he could feel the acceleration, dragging them along a vector that was up, from their perspective. It was a steadily increasing pull, and it wasn’t long before they were moving much faster than Lincoln knew the suits could move on their own microthrusters.

  “Might get bumpy,” Sahil said. “We’re gonna hook it.”

  Lincoln looked up and saw the source of their acceleration. Spooled out on a tether a good twenty meters was a canister; they were essentially being towed through space by a rocket engine, with no ship attached. He couldn’t remember the official name for it, but mostly it was just called star-hooking. He’d never actually done it b
efore, though he’d heard about it. It was partially because he had heard about it that he had never done it.

  “There’s our ride,” Sahil said. “Comin’ in, about nine o’ clock.”

  Lincoln didn’t recognize the ship; it was small, sleek, and looked like it was built for speed. It was coming on at a good clip and at an angle. Or rather, he and Sahil were on line to intercept the ship; the vessel’s forward thrusters were firing, slowing its approach. Knowing what they were about to do, it didn’t seem to be slowing nearly enough.

  “All right, we see you, we’ve got you,” Wright said, “Hold on to your teeth.”

  Lincoln figured it was better not to watch what came next. He felt the shudder of the impact as the grapples on their freestanding engine found purchase on the passing ship, and in the next instant he and Sahil lurched forward, dragged along. The difference in velocity apparently hadn’t been quite enough to rip him in two, but Lincoln was pretty sure it hadn’t been too far off.

  As they were being reeled in, he finally had time to look around; a station was receding in the distance, small and unimpressive, looking like some half-forgotten outpost rather than the black interrogation site he knew it was. Glancing around he realized that the view they’d been projecting on his walls and ceiling and floor had actually been the same view he would have had if there had been no walls at all. He might have found it beautiful, if he hadn’t been tortured by it for some unknown amount of time.

  One of the indicator lights in Lincoln’s suit went amber, an early warning that the e-suit was running out of life support. Lincoln glanced up at the ship, gradually growing closer as the line they were attached to retracted. He’d make it with plenty of time to spare. He would make it. He had made it.

  And with the realization that his freedom had been made sure, that his imprisonment was over before they’d broken him, the emotions did overwhelm him, and Lincoln allowed the tears to fall without shame or restraint.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Lincoln’s welcome home was intense, but brief. After all the hugs, shoulder punches, and “I love you”s disguised in insults and cutting jokes, Sahil gave him the shortest medical once-over he’d ever experienced, while Wright gave him a shotgun blast of a briefing. When both were completed, they led him back towards the main compartment of the vessel. Before they got too far, Lincoln stopped and turned the opposite direction. The cockpit of the ship was at the top of a short, steep staircase; Lincoln jogged to it and called up.

  “Hey Will,” Lincoln said. “You ever pick anyone up without yanking them out of something else?”

  This was now the second time the Barton boys had towed Lincoln out of harm’s way.

  “Not if I can help it, Lincoln,” he answered with a laugh. “I can refer you to a good chiropractor when we get home.”

  “I think you did that work already, buddy,” Lincoln said.

  “We live to serve,” Will replied.

  “Heya up there, Noah,” Lincoln said.

  Noah leaned over and stretched his fist as far down as he could; Lincoln hopped up on the second step and bumped knuckles.

  “Good to have you back, Link,” Noah said. “Now quit walking around the boat and go get strapped in. We’ve got a hard burn coming up, and we’re all waiting on you.”

  “Roger that,” Lincoln said. “Thanks boys.”

  Lincoln hustled back down the length of the vessel to the main cabin, and rejoined his teammates. They were already strapping into crash couches. Sahil was still suited up, but he’d removed his helmet. The rest of them were wearing street clothes. None of them looked like they belonged in this ship.

  But it wasn’t until Lincoln plopped down and got himself hooked in that he really took notice of the surroundings. The compartment was luxurious to the point of bordering on extravagant.

  “Is that a wet bar?” Lincoln asked.

  “Yup,” Mike said with a chuckle. “Planning to break that open on the trip home.”

  “Where’d you guys get this ship?” Lincoln said.

  “Papa Charlie Bravo,” Wright answered.

  “Where’d they get it?”

  “Told us not to ask.”

  “Man,” Lincoln said. “I must have missed all kinds of fun.”

  “Nah,” Wright said. “Mostly just the bad stuff.”

  “You folks locked in?” Will said over the intercom.

  No one replied for a moment; Lincoln realized his teammates were all looking at him expectantly. He couldn’t help but smile.

  “Roger that,” Lincoln answered. “We’re good to go.”

  “Then settle back, and relax,” Will said. “We’re going to crush you for about half an hour.”

  The ship’s grav field automatically compensated for acceleration up to a certain point, but it could only do so much. From the g-forces Lincoln felt stacking on top of him over the next few minutes, he got a pretty good idea of just how little time they had left to get the job done.

  After Will’s promised half-hour crush began to subside, he cleared them to unstrap and get to business. The team moved out of the compartment to another one that Thumper had taken over. Whatever it had originally been designed for, it now looked like someone had set off a small bomb in a hardware store. Veronica was set up on a table at one end of the room, but that was the only easily identifiable thing around. Every other available flat surface had some jumble of parts on it, or devices Lincoln had never seen before, or things crammed together that seemed to be doing something, even though they looked like they shouldn’t be doing anything at all, except maybe smoking or spitting sparks.

  “All right,” Lincoln said. “So where are we at?”

  He and Wright followed Thumper in, but Mike and Sahil both hovered out in the passageway.

  “Veronica’s got the command-and-control encryption scheme cracked,” Thumper answered. “Enough that I should be able to abort the fire mission. And that’s the only good news we’ve got.”

  “Aw, that’s not true, Thump,” Mike said. “You found a way to track her, too.”

  “Sorta,” Thumper replied, sounding disappointed. “It’s still intermittent. We’re going to have to do some best guessing, and probably get a little lucky.”

  “If you got C&C cracked, does that mean you were able to decipher her target?” Lincoln asked.

  “Yeah, and her post-strike instructions,” Thumper said. “Looks like they’re trying to hit the MPCR.”

  “Makes a pretty strong case for them to forgo neutrality,” Wright said.

  “And the kicker,” Thumper said, “is what comes after. They want her to crash land. Put her down hard somewhere up north, but not so hard as to render her unidentifiable.”

  A deadly strike on a neutral colony, incontrovertible proof of US involvement, with an asset so secret not even the United American Federation knew of its existence. Lincoln couldn’t think of a much better way to guarantee immediate retaliation against the United States. And he was plenty aware of the Collective Republic’s outsized production capabilities. He could only guess what would happen if that entire populace mobilized for war.

  Lincoln looked over at one of Veronica’s many displays, and saw a pattern he thought he could almost decipher.

  “That’s her current trajectory?” he asked.

  Thumper nodded. “As far as we’ve been able to track her. White dots for when we were able to establish her actual position, orange for our calculated positions when we lost her.”

  “And the red?”

  “Those are the calculated positions that we got wrong,” Thumper said. There were more oranges than reds, but not by much. “See what I mean about getting lucky?”

  “I do,” Lincoln said. “She’s not moving in a straight line?”

  Thumper shook her head. “I wish. But no. What she’s doing… you gotta understand, Lincoln, the math involved, the variables she’s working with, adjusting to on the fly. It’s not just about getting into range; she’s got to take into account planet r
otation, position of the planet in its orbit, weather factors all the way down at the target site. She’s doing all of that in real-time. She’s really impressive.”

  “Keep in mind we’re trying to stop her, Thump.”

  “Yeah, of course,” Thumper said. “Doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate what she’s doing. But look… the adjustments she’s making, they might only be half a degree here or there, or a light tapping of the brakes… at the velocities and distances we’re talking, we could end up missing her by a few kilometers and never even see her. If she gets by us, it’s pretty much game over.”

  “I assume we’re trying to intercept,” Lincoln said.

  “Sort of,” Thumper said. She gestured at Veronica, and a second line appeared on the trajectory display. “We’ve got to come in line with her, try to match velocities. If we go straight out to meet her, we’ll lose her in the turn and never catch up. We’re swinging out wide, and cutting inside, then once we’re running in the same track, hopefully she’ll catch up with us, and we can match from there.”

  “Sounds complicated.”

  “It is,” she said. “I don’t envy the work Noah’s having to do up there to figure it all out.”

  “Pretty sure she’s got a crush on him,” Sahil said.

  “I don’t,” Thumper said, a little too quickly. And then a few moments later, “Just a little one, maybe.”

  “And the loss of contact?” Lincoln said. “We know what’s causing that yet?”

  “Sure do,” Thumper said. She waved her hand at all the gear around the room.

  “Basically,” Mike said, still standing in the doorframe, “… don’t touch anything.”

  “OK,” Lincoln said. “So we get in line, and then what?”

  “Well, I never could get this device put back together exactly, but a couple of the techs at NID really came through for us. We’ve got a way to rig ourselves up. We just have to get close enough to the ship to make it work.”

  “Apparently,” Wright chimed in, “the magic words were ‘hey we found your missing secret ship and need you to tell us how to stop it’.”