by Jay Posey
He sat there for a time, trying to will her back. Wondering what their final moments had been like. Had he said anything to her, anything meaningful? Had he done everything he could to save her? Or had he, in those last desperate moments, abandoned her to her fate to try to save himself? He’d mocked the eggheads before, forever believing that remembering your own final seconds of life could be anything but traumatic. But now, on this side of the Process, he saw the value in it for the first time. Every warrior wondered about how they would face death; for Lincoln, that question had been answered, but it had been hidden from him. And that was, in its own way, maddening.
A mentor of his had once told him that to really understand a thing, you had to watch it die. Lincoln had had his chance to understand himself in a way that practically no one else ever could, and he’d missed the moment.
He just hoped now that he wouldn’t have the opportunity to gain that understanding from his trusted teammate.
Lincoln had no idea how long he stayed there, knelt by her bedside. Long enough for his knees to ache, at least. She hadn’t moved since he’d taken her hand.
“Amira,” he said. “If you can hear me, I need you to come back. I need you to find your way back here. I’m trusting you to do it.”
He waited a few more minutes, just in case some miracle was underway, but nothing changed. Finally, he pressed her hand to his cheek, then to his lips. And he rose to rejoin the colonel in the hall.
When he touched the door handle, he heard a noise behind him.
“Cap’n.”
Lincoln snapped around, hoping he’d heard what he thought he heard, almost certain he’d imagined it. He held there by the door, trapped between hope and fear.
Then again, clearer this time.
“Captain,” Wright said. Her voice was raspy, barely more than an exhale. But it was her voice, for sure.
He practically leapt back to her side.
“Yeah, Amira, I’m here.”
She didn’t open her eyes.
“Sir,” she whispered. “Did you…” She paused, drew a deep breath. “Did you just… kiss my hand?”
Lincoln couldn’t help it; he laughed.
“Negative, master sergeant,” he replied. “It would be inappropriate for an officer to take such liberty with someone under his command.”
She cleared her throat. “I concur with that assessment.”
She opened her eyes and looked up at him. “Did we get it?”
“We got it.”
“Good,” she said. Then she closed her eyes again. Lincoln couldn’t tell if she’d gone back to sleep, or if she was slipping away again. Turned out to be neither.
“After all you put me through,” she said, “seems like you could at least give me a day off to relax.” She opened one eye again, and gave him a thin smile beneath her mask. Lincoln couldn’t think of a single smile he’d ever seen more beautiful.
“One day, master sergeant,” he said. “Don’t waste it lying around in a hospital bed.”
“Roger that,” Wright replied.
Lincoln left her to rest, and sent the colonel and a couple of doctors in to check on her. But he didn’t wait around for the report. He knew she was going to be just fine.
Lincoln touched base with the rest of the team as soon as he was allowed, to let them know the situation, but it was a few days before they all made it back on planet. Once they reunited on base there were reports to file, debriefings to give, general housekeeping to take care of. Lincoln got the full story on Elliot, at least as much as he could follow. In the end, he was happy to learn that certain details had been forgotten in the official report, and that Elliot had received a promotion that took him out of the MPCR. Lincoln wondered if the man was finally going to open his pub.
After all the formalities were handled, Lincoln arranged for them to have the traditional celebratory cookout, with ample steaks and plenty of beer to go around. He was a little discouraged by how it began; the whole team was more somber than usual. After some needling, he discovered that Thumper and Sahil were both wrestling with how everything had gone down with SUNGRAZER; Sahil, for having initiated the detonation sequence while two of his teammates were still on board, and Thumper, for not having found another way to solve the problem. Each saw the loss of life as their fault, and held the other blameless. And even after both Lincoln and Wright had talked with them about it, about how it had been the right call, and the only real choice, they still wanted to hang on to it. It was almost like a competition between them. So after they’d all had a couple of beers, Lincoln went to the team gym and dragged one of the wrestling mats outside, not far from the grill, and told them to fight it out. Winner got to keep the blame.
They both seemed to get the point after that. But they went at it anyway, in their mixed martial arts version of horseplay. Sahil had to get his eyebrow stitched up after it. He claimed victory anyway.
Mike on the other hand was more reserved than usual, a little less quick with the quips, a little more lost in thought. When Lincoln was able to catch a moment with him, the conversation was short and to the point.
“I know why you did what you did,” Mike said. “I don’t want it to happen again.”
“I understand,” Lincoln said. He still couldn’t decide whether he’d made the wrong choice or not. Mike was taller and stronger than Wright, there was no doubt. Maybe he could have covered the ground faster, and gotten those charges in place. But Wright was hard to the bone, and nimble. It was a close call, either way. But he knew he’d made the decision based on the wrong parameters, and he vowed to do better next time. “Won’t happen again, Mikey,” he said. “Promise.”
Mike warmed up after that, and at any rate his emotional state didn’t interfere with his appetite; Lincoln was pretty sure the man ate more steak than was healthy for any living being. Will and Noah got inducted into the ways of the Outriders with a couple of rituals that were special to the team; at least one of which involved getting dunked in a cooler full of ice water.
The cookout went on until well into dark, but as it was winding down Lincoln found himself sitting next to Wright, watching Mike regale the others with one of his legendary stories. He had half a steak in his hand, and he took the occasional bite from it whenever his storytelling allowed.
“I think Mikey’s probably half beef by now,” Lincoln said.
“Gross,” Wright said.
“Hey,” Lincoln said, turning to look at the master sergeant. He leaned towards her on the arm of his chair, and tipped a little farther forward than he intended to, sloshing his beer.
“Easy, tiger,” she said, with a chuckle.
“Mir,” he said, having an earnest moment. “I’m sorry I put you through that.”
“You didn’t, sir. Comes with the territory.”
“I guess,” he said. “Doesn’t mean I like it. Or that it’s right.”
“No, it doesn’t,” she said. “Don’t see how either of those matter much.”
Lincoln sat back in his chair, looked at the rest of their team. Their team. His and Wright’s.
“I don’t know… with all that went down… I’m not sure what it means, as a team leader.”
“Doesn’t change a thing, sir,” Wright said, clinking her beer against his. “Except now you’re really part of the club.”
EPILOGUE
“Lincoln,” a voice said in the darkness, waking him instantly. When Lincoln opened his eyes he saw Thumper’s silhouette in the doorframe, dim light from the hall spilling in behind her.
“Yeah, Thump,” Lincoln said. He really hoped she wasn’t waking him up to apologize again. She was still beating herself up for what had happened, and nothing he had said had done anything to assuage her guilt. He cleared his throat, “What is it?”
“I need you to come look at this.”
Lincoln checked the time. 0319. His body demanded that he roll over immediately, but the tone of Thumper’s voice had his mind arrested.
“OK,” he said. He stuck his bare feet in his boots and didn’t bother to tie them. Thumper led him down the hall to her workspace, and took a seat at Veronica.
“I had Veronica running through everything we pulled from Internal Security’s systems,” she said. “They had Elliot under surveillance for a couple of days before they picked him up.” On Veronica’s display, a blurred image sat frozen, video captured by a skeeter, paused mid-motion. Thumper gestured, and the feed played.
The footage showed Elliot meeting with someone in a low-traffic area, behind a building or in an alley, perhaps; the angle clearly indicated that Elliot was the subject. But at one point, the person he was with turned, and Thumper paused the feed again. It was a woman in profile. Though the fact that she had frozen the image there suggested the woman was important, nothing stood out to him immediately about her.
Until he saw her eyes. He knew those eyes.
“That can’t be…” he said, though his instincts told him of course it was.
“It is,” Thumper said. She gestured at Veronica again. Another image appeared, this one identified as Amanda Flood. Veronica helpfully highlighted the matches in the facial features. “Amanda Flood. Or whatever identity she’s taken now.”
The woman they’d hunted down on his first mission as an Outrider. The woman he had confronted in her compound in the Martian People’s Collective Republic. The woman who had killed herself right in front of him.
In quiet hours, the memory of her had nagged at him, like a riddle only partially solved. The obvious answer he had rejected outright; the capability for the Process was a closely-guarded secret, the cost to run the program obscene. But now that he saw her again, he knew the truth.
“She’s like us,” Lincoln said. “She’s deathproofed.”
He didn’t know how that was possible, but of course she was. It gave meaning to her last moments. Her great escape. He hadn’t believed it before because he hadn’t wanted to, not because it was impossible. If the US had the capability, there was no reason to believe they were the only ones. But if Amanda Flood had access to that technology, then that put her into an entirely different category of adversary.
“No,” Thumper said. “It’s something else. Something worse.”
She gestured, and Veronica produced another image. The hair was different, the clothing more expensive; facial features had been modified somewhat, but genetic markers were identical.
“This is from SUNGRAZER, footage from the Meridiani Administrative Region,” Thumper said. “NID was keeping tabs on the Minister of Finance. And here,” she pulled up another surveillance clip, “is something else from the Internal Service archive.”
“So she’s operating in multiple areas around Mars, not just the Collective Republic,” Lincoln said.
“Look at the time stamps, Lincoln.”
He compared the date and the time from each frozen image. He looked again. And a third time.
They were identical.
Amanda Flood was literally in two places at once.
“How…” he said, but trailed off. Shook his head. It was impossible.
But even as his conscious mind refused to answer the question, a memory bubbled up unbidden. An image he had wrestled with not long ago, when he’d gone to visit his replicas, seeing the three of them there together, each waiting to be imbued with his self.
Not replica. Replicas.
“Thumper,” he said. “Is it… With the Process, would it be possible… What would happen if you tried to put the same mind into multiple bodies?”
She turned and looked at him then, her eyes ablaze. It was the conclusion she had reached, and that he now had confirmed.
“I’ve never heard anything like that before,” she said, “but… theoretically, a branch…”
Thumper shook her head, and looked back at the images on Veronica’s display.
“Dear God.”
There was no obvious connection between the loss of SUNGRAZER and Amanda Flood. Nothing to indicate any of this was her doing. But ever since the Ava Leyla, the thought that this whole matter had been a continuation of a plan from before, one he’d thought they’d stopped, had been nagging at him. And now, here, at last, with the possibility raised, it seemed inescapable that her hand had been in it, somehow, some way.
There was no way to know for sure. But one thing Lincoln didn’t doubt: their paths were intertwined. And just as they had crossed before, so they were certain to cross again.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Every book has proven to be its own challenge, and it’s always taken a team of people to rally around and help see me through to the end. My heartfelt thanks to:
… Jesus, for second chances, and third, and fourth, and for all the grace I’ve required.
… My wife and children, for your everlasting patience and support, and for making every day the best day.
… Marc Gascoigne, Phil Jourdan, Mike Underwood, Penny Reeve, Nick Tyler, and all the various Robots for your continued trust and support.
… Sam Morgan, for your guidance and encouragement.
… Joshua Bilmes and everyone at JABberwocky for all your work and kindness.
… David Mooring, for your faithful friendship and steady support.
… Judge Braswell, for giving your precious time to pass on your wisdom and memories.
… Jocko Willink, Echo Charles, and Leif Babin for your instruction, encouragement, and for sharing your lives and wisdom.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jay Posey is a narrative designer, author, and screenwriter by trade. He started working in the video game industry in 1998, and has been writing professionally for over a decade. Currently employed as Senior Narrative Designer at Red Storm Entertainment, he’s spent around eight years writing and designing for Tom Clancy’s award-winning Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six franchises.
A contributing author to the book Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing, Jay has lectured at conferences, colleges, and universities, on topics ranging from basic creative writing skills to advanced material specific to the video game industry. His acclaimed Legends of the Duskwalker series is also published by Angry Robot.
jayposey.com • twitter.com/hijayposey