Outriders

by Jay Posey

  “Hello?” she said. Her voice sounded strange; dry, and thin. She cleared her throat once more and tried again, “Hello? Is anyone there?”

  She sat in silence for a few minutes, trapped between the idea of walking over to the door where she had a better chance of being heard and the impulse to lie down again and go back to sleep. Finally, the idea won out. She’d be able to rest better once she knew what had happened.

  Just about the time she’d gathered the courage to test her strength, a voice sounded in the room.

  “Lie down and face the wall,” it said. Piper jumped at the sound, and earned another stab of pain.

  “Hello?” she said, once she’d recovered. “Hello, can you hear me?”

  “Lie down, and face the wall,” the voice repeated. The voice came from overhead, somewhere in the top corner near the door. It had a compressed, processed quality, and not just from being transmitted through a speaker. Piper was fairly certain it was a man talking to her, but whoever he was, he apparently didn’t want his voice to be recognizable.

  Piper tried once more, “Please, can you tell me–”

  “Lie. Down,” the voice said again, cutting her off. “Face. The. Wall.”

  The man hadn’t raised his voice at all, but the tone made it perfectly clear that he expected to be obeyed. As Piper eased herself back down onto the cot, she made a mental note not to push her luck until she had a better idea of what her situation was. At least she’d learned one thing from the man’s interruption: he could hear her.

  Piper situated herself on her back, and then gingerly rolled onto her side to face the wall. That put her on her left side and, though it was uncomfortable, it wasn’t unbearable. Maybe her ribs were just bruised then, not broken. That’d be nice.

  “Place your hands behind your back,” the voice said.

  Piper did as she was told, and slid her hands around behind her so whoever was watching her could see them. It made her shoulders burn.

  “Good,” said the voice. “Now be still. Do not turn around.”

  A few moments later, the door clicked and whirred. Piper had to clench her jaw and squeeze her eyes shut to resist the urge to look back over her shoulder. She drew in on herself, instinctively tried to make herself small. There was no way to know the man’s intentions; for now she would do everything she could to seem compliant. That would make it easier to surprise him if he laid hands on her.

  Someone entered the room, footsteps muted by the hum of machinery and the squeak of rubberized wheels on the floor. A cartbot bringing something into the room, no doubt. Piper waited a tense minute, listened carefully for any sounds that might warn her of aggression or bad intent. All she could make out, though, were noises typical of someone unloading a bot. Something large scraped dully across the floor as it slid into place across from Piper, in the rear corner of the room.

  When it seemed clear that she wasn’t in any immediate danger, Piper allowed herself to relax out of the protective ball she’d curled into. The person in the room with her went quiet at her movement, and a moment later the voice spoke.

  “Keep your hands where I can see them,” it said, but not threateningly. More like a police officer. Firm, but polite.

  Piper nodded and pushed her hands a little farther out behind her back. The person in the room resumed his activities a few seconds later. Piper decided to risk it.

  “Can you please tell me what’s going on?” she said, keeping her voice low. “Please?”

  The person in the room didn’t even acknowledge that she’d spoken. Just kept busy with whatever he was doing.

  Piper took a different approach. “My name is María Alejandra Reyes,” she said, and then calmly offered a list of details. “I work for Veryn-Hakakuri. I’m a technical specialist. I was on Station YN-773. Something happened to the station. Something terrible.”

  The man in the room continued his work. Setting something up, maybe, or several things, from the sound of it.

  “How did you find me?” Piper asked.

  It sounded like the man was finishing up his work. The cartbot hummed and trundled its way out of the room. A plastic wrapper crackled as it was torn and crumpled. Then the footsteps started towards the door.

  Piper tried one last time, asked the one question that she needed the answer to more than any other.

  “What are you going to do with me?”

  The man paused, and Piper’s heart pounded with sudden anticipation.

  “You’re safe,” he answered, and to Piper’s surprise it was a woman’s voice. And with those two words, tears of relief sprang up and squeezed through Piper’s still-closed eyes. But before she could respond, the woman added, “For now. It’s up to you to stay that way.”

  A moment later the woman exited and the door whirred closed and clicked.

  “You can sit up again now,” the voice said from the ceiling.

  Piper pulled her hands out from behind her back and rolled over. Her left hand tingled and prickled from having been in such an awkward position for so long. She opened and closed it repeatedly to work the feeling back in while she levered herself up on the cot. There were a few new additions to her room. Against the wall across from her, a flimsy table with folding legs had appeared, with a chair of similar design pushed up under it. A tall, clear plastic canister filled with what looked like water sat on the table next to a simple dish. Some kind of meal steamed on the dish; a slab of protein, pale vegetables, a disk of flat bread. There were no utensils. Directly across from the head of her cot was a blue box-shaped device that she recognized as a portable waste recycler, for a toilet.

  Having taken all of that in, Piper covered her face with her hands and her tears of relief became something else. She wept then, quietly, with as much restraint as she could manage, but deeply.

  Whatever the room had been before, Piper knew what it had now become.

  Her prison cell.

  EIGHT

  LINCOLN SAT at one corner of the large, rectangular holoscreen table that dominated the middle of the isolation facility’s planning room. Sergeant Coleman sat diagonally across from him, to his left, poring over some deep-level technical specs that radiated an aura of mathematically induced headache at least six feet wide. Sahil and Wright were in quiet conference at the far end. Behind Lincoln, Pence was lying on the floor with one arm draped over his eyes. They’d been at it a good fourteen hours. Fortunately, the planning room was stocked with water, food, and, most importantly, coffee. A fresh pot was brewing, and though Lincoln hadn’t been out for fresh air in a while, he was pretty sure the aroma of the coffee was probably helping mask the funk of five people crammed in a planning room for over half a day.

  Colonel Almeida had told them that the National Intelligence Directorate and the 23rd had a few threads for Lincoln and his team to pull on; good starting points. Images representing each were displayed on one wall of the room, a virtual murder-board to build and break connections as the team talked through it all. On it were several organizations, some government and many not, as well as a number of shady characters. A few of those represented were the usual actors: Eastern Coalition counterintelligence agencies, known radical groups with a history of violence, a handful of Mars-based government entities. Others were new to Lincoln. But Almeida had been right when he’d said none of them stood out as particularly stronger candidates than any of the others. The team had already gone around a few times arguing about where to begin, taking a few off the list only to put them back again an hour or two later. Somewhere around the six-hour mark they’d all agreed that it seemed like they could pick any one of them at random and get the same result.

  At that point, Lincoln had flipped the process on its head.

  “Forget the starting points,” he’d told them. “Everybody pick a question that’s bugging you, and go find an answer. Maybe one of them will lead us back to some of our friends here. Or at least away from some of them.”

  They’d split off then, each to dig into
whatever caught their attention. For the moment, Lincoln had chosen to focus on Henry’s death. An array of projected panels hung in the air above the holotable, where Lincoln had spread all of the information that Lieutenant Davis and her team had been able to collect on the event, and Henry’s activities leading up to it. Field reports, clips of communications with his handlers and his contacts, surveillance video pulled from Elliston security, a deep background on Henry – it was all made directly available to Lincoln and his team.

  Intelligence had always been a critical part of planning, but in his previous units Lincoln had only been given a focused, curated packet of information. Davis had provided a package of what they had considered the most relevant data, but she’d also opened up the entire archive for them to explore as they saw fit. Lincoln had never had this kind of access to intelligence before.

  Davis had outlined several of the working theories under development by the 23rd, but she’d been hesitant to share any of the conclusions that she or any of her fellow analysts had reached. That, too, was different from how Lincoln was used to operating. In the past, he’d always been expected to take Intel Analysis as gospel, and to plan and act according to its every directive. This “tell me what you think” way of doing things added a tremendous amount of extra work to his plate, but after several hours of navigating his way through the data packets Davis had prepared, he found himself beginning to appreciate it.

  He expanded one of the panels with a motion of his hand, dragged it over directly in front of him, and skimmed the report on the contact that Henry had been meeting with at the time of the attack. That man was one Rado Dekker, a midlevel lieutenant in a small-time organized crime syndicate operating in and around northern and central Martian settlements. Smugglers, mostly, moving goods on- and off-planet, with some regional distribution. Though they seemed to be largely concerned with narcotics and other illicit materials, the group had been involved in at least two transfers of weapons that the 23rd knew about. It was possible that Henry was developing Dekker as an agent, to gain access to the inner workings of the syndicate.

  That wasn’t unusual for Henry’s line of work. By nature, his job required him to develop and maintain contact with all manner of people, most of whom were of the sort that could be convinced to betray the trust and confidence of someone close to them. Add to that the fact that Henry’s specific focus seemed to be on radicalized groups and terrorist cells, and it was clear that he was swimming neck-deep in some of the murkiest, bloodiest waters there were to be explored.

  But Dekker’s particular gang had no known ties to any such operations. They mostly seemed like kids playing at being tough guys, not the genuinely bad people that might blow up a mall or murder a bunch of women and children downtown to get their point across.

  And that was the tricky thing about NID’s undeclared officers. Even without the NID’s usual smokescreens and purposefully convoluted reporting structure, it was often difficult to determine whether or not undecs were working on official tasks or if they were off running their own operations on the side. If Henry had been using Dekker to make some extra money, he wouldn’t have been the first.

  Though Davis hadn’t shared any of the conclusions that her team had reached, she’d included summaries of analysis from several of her team members in the packets she’d prepared. Lincoln had read through all of them and, as far as Henry’s murder was concerned, the general consensus amongst the analysts of the 23rd seemed to fall along the lines of “wrong place, wrong time”. There was no question that it had been a hit, well planned and well executed. But as far as the analysts could tell, there just weren’t any signs that Henry had been targeted specifically, except perhaps as a tangential associate of Dekker. A target of opportunity, at best. If it hadn’t been for LOCKSTEP, it was doubtful anyone would have blinked at the loss of Henry Sann.

  Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, there was no direct video feed from the surveillance cameras in and around the hotel where Henry was killed. The attacking party had disrupted the coverage of the area about twenty minutes on either side of the event, as best as the 23rd could figure. That they’d had that level of sophistication elevated the hitters above common street-level, but was still consistent with the capabilities of a rival organization. Though a few eyewitness recordings had emerged, none of them had captured any useful material.

  The crime scene investigators did, however, have ample footage of the immediate aftermath, and Lincoln had spent a couple of hours scrubbing through the feed and slicing out still images of shots that caught his attention. He closed out the panel containing the report on Dekker and brought up the stack of images again. For many of the stills, Lincoln hadn’t been consciously aware of what had given him pause. At the time, it hadn’t mattered. Any time he found himself scrubbing back and forward through a section more than once, he clipped it. Now, having given his eyes a rest by focusing on something else, he cycled through the images one at a time.

  He’d seen enough of it up close and personal that the carnage didn’t affect him on an emotional level. And in a strange way, there was something pure and simple about the process of analyzing the scene of an attack. Violence always told a story, if you knew how to read it. When you saw it firsthand, there was no way to hide its truth, no obscuring its intent. And firsthand experience made it easier to read the aftermath, to recognize the patterns. But Lincoln kept coming back to a close shot of Henry’s body, curled on the ground with blood pooled by his head and a rivulet trailing away towards the eastern exit, as if it too sought to escape the brutality that had befallen the courtyard. He pulled that image off to one side and then flipped through the others until he found a similar image of Dekker’s body. Lincoln didn’t know why, but his gut told him the general consensus had it wrong. This hadn’t just been some inter-gang takedown.

  “Mike,” Lincoln said.

  “Yeah?” Pence answered from the floor, without taking his arm away from his eyes.

  “The hitters. How would you rate them in terms of professionalism?”

  “There’s no question they’re top-tier, sir,” Mike said. “I’d say ex-military or high-level personal protection. Ex-law enforcement, maybe, but I think that’s an outside chance.”

  “Why so sure?” Lincoln asked, even though he agreed.

  Sergeant Pence rolled up off the floor and came over to stand behind Lincoln. He held up a hand next to Lincoln’s stack of images.

  “You mind?” he said.

  “No, go ahead,” Lincoln said.

  Mike scrolled through the stack and slid one image out that Lincoln hadn’t given much attention. It was of a man in the hotel, up on the fourth floor, if Lincoln recalled the details correctly. He’d been shot once, through the chest. The flexiglass window had a spiderwebbed hole about a half-inch in diameter punched out of it. A compact rifle sat on a table near the window, set up on a bipod but off to one side, out of view of the window. Lincoln recognized it as a takedown rifle, one that could be easily disassembled to fit in a small case. Easier to transport, easier to conceal.

  Pence tapped the bullet hole in the window with his forefinger.

  “Counter-sniper,” he answered. “That’s hard work, even if you know to look for it.” He then tapped the rifle on the table, assembled but apparently otherwise untouched. “This guy up here on the fourth floor didn’t have much of a chance to do anything, which says to me that he’d been detected before it all went down. So you’re looking at an experienced crew here, not some gang-war spillover. And I don’t mean just experienced hit squad.”

  Lincoln nodded.

  “So we have primary shooter in the courtyard, with Henry, and then overwatch somewhere outside,” Lincoln said. “Two, minimum.”

  “And a driver for exfil,” Mike added. “Probably.”

  “Could have just used an on-demand,” Coleman said from across the table. She was still intent on whatever she was reviewing, but somehow managed to follow along with their conversation at the
same time. “Or preprogrammed one.”

  “Could have, sure,” Mike said. “But I don’t think so. I’m guessing a team that careful wouldn’t leave it to chance. If things went bad, security could lock the whole area down. I get the impression our friends here were the four-levels-deep kind of planners.”

  “You think military then,” Lincoln said.

  Mike nodded. “What’s your take?”

  “The same,” Lincoln said. “Looks sloppier than it actually was.” He pulled up three images of the courtyard with an overlay indicating where rounds had impacted. “Mid-morning in the cafe, all these extra rounds fired, and yet no collateral damage. They only hit the people they intended to. And, if you’ve got someone good enough to do that,” he pointed to the picture showing the sniper’s work, “no need to have a shooter in the target zone.”

  “So we have conscientious killers,” Mike said.

  “Like you said,” Lincoln said. “Top-tier professionals. So I think that pulls a couple of these folks off the list.” He returned to the images of suspects displayed on the wall and adjusted the transparency on the panels for two terrorist groups and one organized crime cartel, leaving just their ghosts behind. “I’m saying it’s not these guys. Anybody got problems with that?” Everyone took a moment to check out the changes, but no one offered any objections.

  “Not yet, anyway,” Wright said, returning to her work with Sahil.

  Lincoln likewise went back to his own analysis, and found himself once again focused on the image of Henry’s body. Something wasn’t sitting right, but he couldn’t put his finger on exactly what it was.